Big Government Conservatives, Libertarian Lefties, and Glenn Beck

So, Glenn Beck said some things about churches that preach social justice, and there was a big uproarious backlash. Now, Glenn Beck is shockingly powerful; he has a ton of faithful listeners who are never even going to hear the responses of organizations like Bread or Sojourners. There's no point in "reporting myself to Glenn Beck." But this is one of those situations where an extreme figure's comments might also be sparking a more interesting debate among moderates.

If my Facebook friends are any indication, people really do have widely varying opinions about the meaning of terms like "social justice" and "politics", and how their Christian discipleship interacts with those arenas. These are all Christians who find Beck to be pretty useless, but who also believe that Christian social responsibility is an individual matter, to be kept entirely distinct from government policy.

The fundamental disagreement has been the same since at least the Johnson administration: what is the proper role of the federal government? Interestingly, this question is developing into a rift on the political right, with old-guard evangelical leaders questioning the Tea Partiers' commitment to key social issues while the Tea Party leaders criticize the Religious Right's penchant for governmental intervention. Clearly, these are two competing conservative visions of the role of government.

What fascinates me is that there is a parallel rift among Christians on the political left: there are those, like Sojourners and Bread for the World, who take the Bible's call to social justice and translate it into advocacy for governmental policy changes. And then there are those who follow a more Anabaptist or Hauerwasian vision of justice embodied locally, in faithful Christian communities, and who do not rely on government at all. My friend Tim sifted through some of these questions in an outstanding piece for The Other Journal in 2008.

Glenn Beck couldn't comprehend these complexities if he wanted to (which he doesn't). But sometimes it takes a loudmouth who misstates your position to force you to clarify what you really mean. In this sense, Beck is extremely useful, because mischaracterizing nuanced ideologies appears to be one of his spiritual gifts.

Thomas Aquinas Explains Your Mortgage

Take a look at this snippet from St. Thomas:

"There are things the use of which does not consist in their consumption: thus to use a house is to dwell in it, not to destroy it. ... [A person] may grant [to another person] the use of the house, while retaining the ownership. For this reason a man may lawfully make a charge for the use of his house... The proper and principal use of money is its consumption or alienation whereby it is sunk in exchange. Hence it is by its very nature unlawful to take payment for the use of money lent, which payment is known as usury" (Summa, II.II 78.1).

He's drawing a distinction between those things whose use requires their consumption, and those which do not. Money belongs to the first category, but a house belongs to the second. Therefore, it is fair to charge a fee for the use of a house, even in the form of a mortgage, where the bank charges you interest in order to allow you to live in the house which they still 'own' until you've paid it off. You're getting some utility in exchange for your payment (namely, a place to live). On the other hand, it is not fair to charge interest for a monetary loan, because you never get to "use" what you borrow; you have to pay it all back.

As far as I can tell, by this logic, a mortgage is an appropriate agreement, but any derivative contract (such as the infamous credit default swap) is unjust. Such financial instruments are unjust because if you sell me a credit default swap, and someone defaults on the loan they owe to you, then you are obligated to pay me more than I paid you for the CDS. Ironically, that makes me the usurer; you, who constructed this financial instrument in the first place, are just a fool.

I suspect, though, that if you'd explained financial derivatives to Thomas, he wouldn't bother pointing out how purchasing credit default swaps is like usury. He'd probably just scratch his head, and wonder how people could be making money out of money, without having any real contact with the production or consumption of goods.

Newbigin paper: Finished!

Just finished a term paper for my course on Lesslie Newbigin. I present it here, courtesy of wordle.net.

Capital Punishment & the Shape of Christian Witness

I wrote an article about the anti-death penalty movement for Duke Divinity's nascent online journal, Confessio. You can read it here.

Who are these deformed people?

When I was delving into Christian practices of mission and travel over the summer, one of the most helpful resources for me was a Christianity Today interview with Fr. Emmanuel Katongole. In that interview, Emmanuel, who teaches at Duke and led our Pilgrimage to Uganda this summer, said something that really bowled me over: "People looking at Christians should be confused. Who are these people? Are they black? Are they white? Are they Americans? Are they Ugandans?" I'm very challenged by the idea that Christian fellowship ought to baffle onlookers. We're called to be different, not for difference's sake, but because Christ has truly inaugurated a new age in which the former distinctions crumble. In his person, we are all bound to God, and through God, we are bound to one another.

A lot of these thoughts emerge, in much more elegant form than I can render, in an article for The Other Journal by Brian Bantam. Professor Bantam recently finished his Ph.D. at Duke and is now at Seattle Pacific University.

Of course, the Apostle Paul admonishes us to not be of this world, but we cannot take this as a matter of simple obedience. It is a task of de-formation. The church cannot merely ask, "What is to be done?" We must begin by asking, "What in the world are we?" We must discern together how the patterns of this world have become a part of us, how they have made us reflect something very different from Christ. [...] Our vision of what must be done and who it must be done for is always bound to who we perceive as others and who we see as our people.

Although Bantam and Katongole both begin their discussions with racial difference, the language of "de-formation" and identity ("Who or what are these people?") draws my mind immediately back to L'Arche. By committing ourselves to holy friendship with those whom society considers "deformed," the church as a whole may come to be considered "deformed". That is, we will not be conforming to the patterns of this world, which confer personal worth based on physical and intellectual ability.

Sometimes L'Arche has trouble finding houses to occupy, because neighbors and zoning boards aren't always thrilled about having such group homes on otherwise quiet neighborhood streets. "Who are these deformed people?" If only we were faithful enough that onlookers viewed every local congregation with the same wariness.

Infants and the Grace of God

Although it has taken me a long time to stop thinking of blogs principally as a big joke or a passing fad, I have to acknowledge that I really enjoy having a group of friends who are deep thinkers, witty critics, and gifted writers, who are willing to share those gifts with others.

In that spirit, you should read Melissa's brief post on babies and original sin.

I was up in NJ this weekend for my nephew Liam's baptism. The Catholic rite is very clear about naming the cleansing of original sin as one of the primary effects of baptism. Augustine's thought has obviously been preserved through the liturgy and doctrine of this sacrament.

Melissa has identified beautiful imagery of Augustine's in order to point out that babies' theological "meaning" should not be confined strictly to their proving the doctrine of original sin. But what I like about her commentary is that it doesn't necessarily preclude or rebut the doctrine of original sin. In Augustine's thought, both images were true: the self-centered baby with the corrupt will, and the helpless, clinging, loving baby, nourished only by God.

In fact, it may be precisely because of the first image that the second image is so meaningful. If we were not thoroughly corrupted by original sin, then the helpless and dependent baby would not be a fitting metaphor for our spiritual state. If we were not corrupt in this way, we would not be utterly dependent on God's grace; we could save ourselves. So in a sense, the baby clinging to the mother can be seen as just as much of a refutation of Pelagius as is the baby who cries until its physical desires are met.

Nobody believes in hell anymore.

In recent weeks, the topic of universalism has come up with enough frequency to jar me out of my erstwhile glazed ham-induced haze of Christmas cheer. Though there may be a technical distinction that I'm missing, I assume Christian universalism to mean the belief that through/in Christ, all people are saved and will go to heaven; if there is a hell at all, it is empty.

A couple years ago, a good friend told me that he'd come to believe that hell is not real, but rather has been fabricated in literature and in church tradition. For my money, I tend not to dwell on the afterlife very much, because it is so thoroughly unknowable. That being said, I had (and have) a difficult time conceiving of the purpose of church or the life of faith if we are not judged for our actions and rewarded accordingly. On top of that, I'm inherently rather conservative when it comes to the church, and I viewed universalism as a jarring departure from orthodox theology.

This summer, someone gave me a copy of If Grace is True, by James Mulholland and Philip Gulley. This 2003 book is subtitled "Why God Will Save Every Person." Pretty straightforward, pretty bold. I have only read the introduction and the first two chapters, so I can't really engage with the text. When I find the time to finish it, I will, because I'm interested to see how the authors make their case. It looks like it will dive into Scripture, but it regards Scripture and church tradition as derivative of particular people's particular experiences with God; what we need to do is begin "trusting our experience with God." And while the church told these authors that God condemns people to hell, they have experienced a God who is loving.

Then, I was listening to a December episode of This American Life entitled "Heretics". It tells the story of Rev. Carlton Pearson, a prominent Pentecostal megachurch leader in Tulsa who lost most of his church, his friends, and his prestige when he began to consider the doctrine of hell, and found it incompatible with the God he knew and loved. His turning point, he says, came when he was watching televised coverage of the Rwandan genocide, and God told him that even though they did not know Christ (actually, Rwanda is overwhelmingly Christian), they would not go to hell: God would not condemn those who suffer on earth to suffer also in the afterlife.

So, the prevalence of Christian universalism in America has kind of crept up on me. It came into sharp relief with two Pew Forum surveys in 2008. It turns out that 52 percent of American Christians believe at least some non-Christian faiths can lead to heaven. To be clear, this is not universalism per se: they are just saying that they believe a "good" Jew, or Muslim, or Hindu, might show up in heaven. A New York Times opinion piece gave a decent overview of the later, more specific study. Over half of white mainliners and white Catholics (plus more than a quarter of white evangelicals) even believe that people with no religious faith can get into heaven. There are even hints in this theological direction in William P. Young's wildly popular The Shack. 

The reason I'm suspicious about this trend is that we shouldn't draw conclusions about what God must do based on who we think God is. In other words, we know God to be purely good and unfailingly loving. We know that in Jesus's incarnation and atoning sacrifice, redemption has been realized for both Jew and Gentile. We know that the magnitude of God's grace exceeds the magnitude of our rejection of God. But none of that leads necessarily to the conclusion that God wills for all to be saved, or that God needs all of us to be saved in order for God to be complete, or happy, or something like that. On the balance, I think the Bible discourages us from making that kind of leap.

The real challenge for our faith is to imagine that some people, and possibly we ourselves, will go to hell, and yet to maintain the confession that God is good, and just, and righteous, and loving.

To reiterate, I take this kind of stuff pretty lightly. We can't even say that we see through a glass darkly on this one. And I know, a lot of what we believe about hell today comes not from the early church, but from men like Milton, Dante, and Jonathan Edwards. Furthermore, some people I really respect, including Karl Barth and Sam Wells, could (arguably) be described as "hopeful universalists". But even they would acknowledge: when we talk about the afterlife, we're engaging in extreme speculation. It will always be a mystery, and I'm pretty glad for that.

Look not to your own interests...

From the Department of Tooting My Own Horn:

On Tuesday, I preached a sermon in preaching class on Philippians 2:1-13. I opened by talking about the present financial situation, and showed how in a sense, what we have is not a market malfunction but a natural product of the system we have. In a free market, we are all expected to be "rational, self-interested actors," and all the people who might've been at fault in causing this mess were being just that: they were trying to do what was in their own best interest. I then went on to contrast that sort of self-interest with the humility which Christ exhibited, and to which Paul exhorts the Philippians.

So I felt more than a little vindicated when I read that the Maestro himself, Alan Greenspan, backed up my reading of things when he testified with remarkable candor before Congress this afternoon.

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan said.

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”

Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

Can a Good Christian be a Good President?

Back at the beginning of the month, I attended a panel discussion that was put together by the Duke Pathways Program. They're the religious vocational discernment program at Duke, funded by the Lilly Endowment. The provocative title of the program was "Can a Good Christian be a Good President?" I missed the name of the panel's moderator (an English professor) as well as that of one of the panelists. The other four on the panel were Peter Feaver (evangelical; Political Science; served as an adviser to the Bush NSC from 2005-2007), J. Kameron Carter (National Baptist; Christian Theology; author of a new book), James Joseph (UCC; Public Policy; U.S. Ambassador to South Africa under Bill Clinton), and Sam Wells (Anglican; Christian Ethics; dean of Duke Chapel).

Because people from different academic disciplines speak in different languages, the panel seemed to have a bit of a difficult time engaging one another. Nevertheless, the individuals on the panel made a lot of interesting points. Ambassador Joseph spoke out of his experience as a civil servant, a liberal mainliner, and a Democrat. He also won the award for "Most Alarming and (Arguably) Least Christian Statement of the Night". When a student asked a question about the inherent compromise of voting as a Christian ("both candidates have policies that are diametrically opposed to what Jesus says..."), the Ambassador bristled. "Jesus lived in a very different time," he said, "and I don't know how you know what he would've said in these times ... I don't know that Jesus would comment on strategies." Ouch.

Dr. Feaver was, as usual, very engaging. He took a couple swings at Jim Wallis, lumping God's Politics along with the later Moral Majority platforms as "blasphemy".

I'll wrap up just by posting paraphrases of a couple of the things Sam Wells said, because they're worth relaying:

• "There is the presumption that politics is about how to deal with our problem of scarcity. Politicians are a type of theologian who deal with the hole we're in since God didn't do a good enough job of creating and redeeming us."
• "There are two broad strands in American religious history: one that seems to think of the Bible as a sort of constitution, and another that sees the Constitution as a sort of bible."
  

Seminary!

Remember how when I'm not reading political news, I go to seminary? Me too. Since being a student doesn't seem to lend itself to blog posts as well as working at a church does, I haven't really been posting as much this Fall.

I'm going to try to do a better job of spotting good nuggets that come up in reading or lectures, and pass them along. Today, from the first thing I've ever read out of Barth's Church Dogmatics:

"Be it noted that this determination of God, this content of predestination, is already grace, for God did not stand in need of any particular ways or works ad extra. He had no need of a creation. He might well have been satisfied with the inner glory of His threefold being, His freedom, and His love. The fact that He is not satisfied, but that His inner glory overflows and becomes outward, the fact that He wills the creation, and the man Jesus as the first-born of all creation, is grace, sovereign grace, a condescension inconceivably tender." (Church Dogmatics II/2:121)