More on cycling, mostly links

Okay, maybe the hottest day of the year (so far) wasn’t the most opportune moment to start biking to work regularly. But I got my shiny new Capital Bikeshare key in the mail over the weekend and couldn’t resist trying it out. I’ve also finally found a route that’s both efficient and bike-friendly.

Anyway, I’ve been poking around the Internet a bit looking for articles and other resources on biking, and thought I’d share a few.

First, friend of the blog Russell Arben Fox has written about his biking experiences, accompanied by some of his his inimitable politico-philosophical reflections:

Cycling commuters, unite!

Cycling and the simple (socialist?) life

Russell’s posts led me to this site, and this post in particlar about cycling as a means of self-sufficiency and resistance to consumerism and “lifestyle marketing.” It also has links to a bunch of resources, advocacy sites, and cycling blogs. (In case you were wondering, there is a “slow bicycle” movement.)

Here are some other noteworthy links:

League of American Bicyclists

National Center for Bicycling and Walking

And some DC-specific links:

Commuter Connections: Bicycling

Washington Area Bicyclist Association

The Capital Bikeshare site also has some good resources on safety and exploring the area by bike.

The problem and necessity of eschatology

(See my previous post on Craig Hill’s In God’s Time.)

Hill goes on to identify some of the obstacles to a retrieval of eschatology for non-fundamentalist Christians. While he recognizes that significant work has been done in recent theology to put eschatology back at the center of the faith (he cites Moltmann and Pannenberg among others), he also notes the ongoing scholarly efforts to drive a wedge between the historical Jesus and the eschatological outlook of the New Testament. Hill also observes, “I have heard hundreds of Sunday-morning sermons in ‘mainline’ churches; I cannot recall one that dealt squarely with the subject of the future” (p. 7).

Nevertheless, the problem isn’t just academic fashion, embarrassment, or the fact that preachers have other favorite topics. There are real differences between us and the first few generations of Christians that make it difficult for us to inhabit New Testament eschatology in any straightforward way. These differences fall broadly under the umbrella of reconciling faith with science.

Early Christian hopes were expressed in ways that assumed that the earth was the center of a relatively small universe, that it had existed for at most a few thousand years, and that prior to “the fall” humanity and creation existed in a state of sinless harmony. Within this framework, it was relatively straightforward to imagine what “a new heaven and a new earth” meant. But many of us at least no longer share these views, and it’s unclear how or whether a belief in the triumph of God’s purposes can be re-expressed in ways more consistent with a contemporary world-view. Hill also cites the fact that many early Christians, including Paul, and possibly even Jesus himself believed–mistakenly as it turns out–that the world would end in their lifetime. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to jettison the whole idea?

The problem with that move is that eschatology is “basic” to Christian faith. To get rid of it would undermine the entire structure. He points out that Christianity without eschatology wouldn’t really be Christianity at all, since Jesus, if he was not raised, would not be the Christ, but at best an inspiring ethical teacher and social reformer. Moreover, Jesus’ ethic itself was eschatologically grounded and not obviously valid as a free-floating ethical system: “because the coming reign of God has a certain character and value, says Jesus, one would be sensible to respond to it in certain specific ways” (p. 8).

Instead of abandoning eschatology, we need to reevaluate it, starting with coming to grips with the history, purpose, and context of eschatological thought in the Bible. That’s the task Hill turns to next.

God wins

No, this isn’t a riff on Rob Bell’s latest book. The expression is Craig Hill’s two-word summary of what eschatology is all about in his book In God’s Time: The Bible and the Future (published in 2002). Hill is a professor of New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary, and his book is an attempt to counter the lurid fantasies of popular Left Behind-style apocalyptic thinking with a more biblically informed view.

Regarding the meaning of eschatology, Hill writes:

When all is said and done…the essential point of eschatology is quite simple. In two words: God wins. God’s purposes ultimately will succeed; God’s character finally will be vindicated. At heart, all eschatologies are responses if not quite answers to the problem of evil. Are injustice, suffering, and death the final realities in our world? Is human history, both individual and corporate, purposeful? Is all this talk about the goodness, love, and justice of God just pie in the sky? Eschatologies differ in how they conceptualize God’s triumph, but they are essentially alike in asserting God’s victory as the supreme reality against which all seemingly contrary realities are to be judged. (p. 4)

Echoing Karl Barth, Hill insists that Christianity is “irreducibly eschatological.” He is thus taking issue not only with the eschatological views of Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, and their ilk, but also with liberal Christians who downplay, or deny altogether, the eschatological significance of Jesus and his mission. (I suspect he has in mind here Jesus Seminar types.) We might also add theologians who qualify God’s power to such a degree that God’s victory is no longer assured.

Hill maintains that the heart of Christianity is eschatological because it is based on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

In his resurrection, the early Christians saw the vindication of Jesus, who despite crucifixion was shown to be God’s Messiah. Even more, they saw in his resurrection the vindication of God. All of this talk of future hope, of God’s final justice and triumph, really is true. They knew it would happen to them because they had already seen it happen to Jesus. (p. 5)

As we’ve recently seen, it’s easy for Christians of a more moderate or liberal bent join their secular friends in mocking Rapture believers and the like. But what’s not easy, as Hill shows, is to separate Christianity from eschatology altogether, even though there are many ways of conceptualizing it. Mainline Christians tend to be uncomfortable discussing things like the end of the world and life after death. these things are inseparable from what we believe God is like and whether God will “win” in the sense that the divine purposes will ultimately triumph over sin, suffering, and death.

Friday links

–Ta-Nehisi Coates on Moby-Dick.

–Amy-Jill Levine: “A Critique of Recent Christian Statements on Israel“

–From Jeremy at Don’t Be Hasty: Why the church can’t take the place of the welfare state.

–A discussion of “summer spirituality” with Fr. James Martin, S.J., author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything.

–A review of Keith Ward’s recent book More than Matter?

–Lady Gaga: “Iron Maiden changed my life.”

–Grist’s David Roberts has been writing a series on “great places” as a reorienting focus for progressive politics: see the first installments here, here, and here. Also see this reflection from Ned Resnikoff.

–Four different demo versions of Metallica’s early tune “Hit the Lights” (with some, ahem, interesting vocal experimentation by a young James Hetfield).

Friday Metal: Goes Cube, “The Homes Of”

Very interesting band.

The cycling life

Grist has a really good article on DC’s popular new(ish) bikeshare program, arguing that a “bikeshare system can make fundamental change happen in a city.” Also see this article: “The Real Reason Why Bicycles Are the Key to Better Cities.”

I used Capital Bikeshare for the first time the other day and thought it was great. Over the last 3-and-a-half years I’ve typically walked to work, but our new place is a bit farther from my office, requiring about a 45-minute jaunt. Using the bikeshare though, I can hop on a bike at a station one block from our house and be at work in under half an hour. I hadn’t been on a bike in nearly 10 years and had forgotten how much fun it is.

Peter Singer, utilitarianism, Christianity, and climate change

Here’s an interesting post from Mark Vernon, an English journalist and author (and former priest in the Church of England), reporting on a recent conference at Oxford University on the engagement of Christian ethics with the thought of Peter Singer. According to Vernon, Singer discussed problems that his brand of utilitarianism (“preference utilitarianism”–the view that the right action is the one which satisfies the most preferences) has in coming to grips with the problem of climate change.

Climate change is a challenge to utilitarianism on at least two accounts. First, the problem of reducing the carbon output of humanity is tied to the problem of rising human populations. The more people there are, the greater becomes the difficulty of tackling climate change. This fact sits uneasily for a preference utilitarian, who would be inclined to argue that the existence of more and more sentient beings enjoying their lives – realising their preferences – is a good thing. As Singer puts it in the new edition of his book, Practical Ethics: “I have found myself unable to maintain with any confidence that the position I took in the previous edition – based solely on preference utilitarianism – offers a satisfactory answer to these quandaries.”

Second, preference utilitarianism also runs into problems because climate change requires that we consider the preferences not only of existing human beings, but of those yet to come. And we can have no confidence about that, when it comes to generations far into the future. Perhaps they won’t much care about Earth because the consumptive delights of life on other planets will be even greater. Perhaps they won’t much care because a virtual life, with its brilliant fantasies, will seem far more preferable than a real one. What this adds up to is that preference utilitarianism can provide good arguments not to worry about climate change, as well as arguments to do so.

Christian ethics, Vernon suggest, may be more of a help here because, at least in most forms, it believes that the right and the good go beyond the satisfaction of preferences. For a Christian, the protection of creation can be seen as good in itself, without trying to calculate the balance of preference-satisfaction that would be involved. Or, to borrow the terminology of Andrew Linzey, we might say that God has rights in God’s creation–rights to the respectful treatment of that creation. Christian ethics generally doesn’t take preferences or desires that we happen to have as necessarily deserving fulfillment–those desires are all-too-often warped by self-seeking and self-preoccupation. The Christian moral life is as much about reshaping our desires as satisfying them.

Keith Ward on the sacrifice of Jesus

In his book What the Bible Really Teaches, Keith Ward spends a chapter on “the sacrifice of Jesus.” He wants to contest the popular view that Jesus had to die as a kind of blood sacrifice to appease or deflect God’s wrath–a view, Ward argues, that’s at odds with the biblical view of what sacrifice is.

According to Ward, sacrifices in the Old Testament are not inherently efficacious. That is, there’s nothing inherent in shedding animal blood or sending a goat into the wilderness that compels God to act or be disposed toward us in a particular way. To think this is to confuse religion with magic, and to adhere to a view of sacrifice that the Bible condemns as idolatry.

Instead, says Ward, the sacrificial rituals of the OT are divinely established means for renewing fellowship and communion between God and human beings. They “work” because–and only because–they are appointed by God for this purpose. The value of these sacrifices consists in our symbolic identification with what is sacrificed as a form of whole-hearted self-offering to God. The forms these take are, in a sense, irrelevant. Hence the prophets’ condemnation of punctilious observation of the ritual law when it is not animated by the spirit of justice and compassion.

These include sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving, as well as atonement for sin–and the latter are mainly concerned with unintentional infractions of the ritual law. There is no suggestion, Ward argues, of an atonement-sacrifice that can cancel out intentional sin. “Biblical sacrifices for sin do not pay the punishment due to sin, nor do they remove such a punishment” (p. 122).

If this is true, then how should we think about Jesus’ sacrifice? In line with the biblical view of sacrifice, Ward says, Jesus’ sacrifice should be understood as his total self-offering to God, a self-offering that is the divinely appointed means for uniting humanity to the divine life:

What Jesus offers [in his sacrifice] is not an animal-substitute, but himself. He expresses the heart of true sacrifice, the total offering of a life to God. This does not in itself entail that Jesus should die. But Jesus was prepared to face death as the price of his obedience to the divine will in a world that had turned from God. The death of the cross is the final, most complete expression of Jesus’ self-offering to God. It is not that the shedding of blood was necessary before humans could be united to God. That would be to revert to a magical transaction view of sacrifice. It is rather that his whole life, and his loyalty to his vocation even to death, was a full offering of humanity to God, so that God could unite humanity to the divine completely in him. (p. 124)

But Jesus was more than a martyr, and his life was more than a perfect act of self-offering to God. His obedience “has a double significance”:

It exposes the hostility of the “world” (the world which rejects God) to God. And it expresses the sharing by God of the suffering of that estranged world. Because the world rejects God, it rejects Jesus, the incarnation of God. The cross represents what the world does to God. Jesus, in freely accepting obedience to God’s will, becomes the expression of God’s suffering, accepted at the hands of disobedient humanity. Jesus’ obedience draws upon himself the disobedience of estranged humanity. In this sense, God does require that Jesus dies–but only because God knows that a complete obedience, in a disobedient world, will inevitably lead to rejection and death. (pp. 124-5)

Ward continues,

the death of Jesus is not the placation of an angry God. It is the opposite. It is the expression of the unrestricted love of God. It is the full expression of human obedience to the divine calling, and at the same time of the divine humility that shares the human condition. (p. 125)

In the death of Jesus, God bears the hostility of disobedient humanity, but in the resurrection God demonstrates that such hostility doesn’t have the final word. Jesus’ life of self-offering is a “perfect prayer” to which God responds with the resurrection and outpouring of the Spirit. This is the means, ordained by God, for restoring relationship between God and an estranged humanity.

I’m very sympathetic to this overall view, but I might make one slight qualification. Sometimes, maybe because of his desire to distinguish biblical sacrifice from “magical” notions, Ward almost seems to imply that it’s completely arbitrary what means God chooses to restore the human-divine relationship. In part, this is a salutary reminder that the Incarnation is rooted in God’s love and freedom; it’s not something that compels God to be merciful. But surely most Christians (including Professor Ward) would want to say that there’s something especially fitting about this restoration occurring by means of a human life that enacts, in history, the eternal love of God and the perfect human response to that love.

Friday Links

–Ludwig von Mises versus Christianity.

–20-plus years of Willie Nelson’s political endorsements.

–The media has stopped covering the unemployement crisis.

–The Stockholm Syndrome theory of long novels.

–An interview with Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City.

–Why universal salvation is an evangelical option.

–A debate over Intelligent Design ensares an academic journal of philosophy.

–Goodbye birtherism, hello “otherism“?

–Chain restaurants try to adapt to the classic-cocktail renaissance.

–Everything you need to know about the apocalypse.

Friday Metal: Graveyard, “Hisingen Blues”

It’s probably not accurate to call these guys metal–70s-influenced bluesy hard rock is more like it (although they do mention Lucifer!). Still, good stuff. The singer sounds like the love child of Robert Plant and Chris Cornell.