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Nature’s God: An Interview with Nancey Murphy

One common way of thinking about the relation of religion and science is to say that these are two different kinds of investigations that talk about different things: science tells us how the world is, religion tells us why it is that way or what it means. Or: science tells us about creation, but not about God. Does this division make sense?

Separating religion and science into two noninteracting spheres has been a common strategy since the 18th century to avoid conflict between religion and science. While religion (or theology) and science do have different aims and employ different sorts of language, this strategy ultimately fails.

Consider, for example, the issue of human nature. Throughout much of their history Christians have understood humans dualistically -- as a combination of two parts, body and soul. Developments in the cognitive neurosciences are increasingly making it clear that the brain performs all the functions once attributed to the soul, so the division breaks down. If theologians attempt to maintain the division by saying only things that are immune from scientific investigation (saying, for example, that when we speak of the soul we only mean to emphasize the value or meaning of human life), then theology becomes uninteresting and irrelevant.

James Gustafson has suggested (in An Examined Faith) that theologians can 1) ignore scientific accounts of the world; 2) attack them on the basis of a more authoritative theological perspective; 3) interpret them from a theological perspective; or 4) revise their theology in light of scientific accounts -- or some combination thereof. Can you describe your own vocation in view of such options?

Attacking science is entirely inappropriate. However, much of what the general population regards as science is not science itself but scientists’ interpretations of science. It is very much the business of theologians to take issue with inappropriate interpretations. An obvious example is the claim that because science does not need to invoke God in its explanations this shows that God does not exist.

A more subtle issue is the way science draws upon the limited human linguistic resources of the culture in which it develops. Theologians, because they are aware of a long history of cultural-linguistic developments, are sometimes in a position to point out limitations in scientists’ assumptions, limitations due to their limited conceptual resources.

For example, modern physics assumes the self-sufficiency of matter, Christians (and people of other faiths) understand matter to be continuously dependent on the sustaining activity of God. In that perspective, which reflects a different concept of the nature of matter, scientific accounts of what happens are essentially incomplete, though valid within their own context.

Both of the above examples are instances of theological reinterpretation of science. Evolutionary biology per se does not need God, but theologians interpret the evolutionary process as a manifestation of divine creativity. Physicists assume the conservation of matter and energy, but theologians interpret this regularity as a manifestation of God’s faithfulness.

Theology does sometimes need to be revised in light of science. For example, cosmology, astronomy, geology and evolutionary biology have together called for rejecting the ancient idea of a Golden Age followed by a historic fall that changed the processes of nature.

The options you offer fail to note that both science and theology intersect with philosophy. Because I am a philosopher myself, most of my work is centered here. In fact, the examination of conceptual resources for understanding human nature or for understanding matter and so on is precisely the philosopher’s job. Nearly all of the traditional concerns of philosophy have a bearing on theology and science.

My work has focused on epistemology (how is theological knowledge like or different from scientific knowledge?), philosophy of language (do science and theology use the same kind of language?) and ethics (can science support ethical conclusions apart from a doctrine of God?).

Could you point to any aspect of modern science that has significantly altered your own way of thinking about God, the Christian story or the Christian life?

A current interest of mine is how a physicalist anthropology (that is, a nondualist account of human being) affects one’s understanding of spiritual practices. It has been fascinating for me to realize how much our relationship with God is a bodily affair: kneeling before God, for example, or being moved to tears.

I have also been working on the question of how a physicalist anthropology might affect the whole of systematic theology.

As you’ve pointed out, science has made it extremely hard to posit something like the soul that exists independent of the body, or a mind that exists independent of physical processes in the brain. Some would say the dualistic view was never a biblical view to begin with, though it has long been part of Christian tradition. Do you agree?

I follow New Testament scholar James Dunn in holding that the biblical authors were not interested in cataloguing the metaphysical parts of a human being -- body, soul, spirit, mind. Their interest was in relationships. The words that later Christians have translated with Greek philosophical terms and then understood as referring to parts of the self originally were used to designate aspects of human life. For example, spirit refers not to an immaterial something but to our capacity to be in relationship with God, to be moved by God’s Spirit.

It is widely agreed that the Hebrew Bible presents a holistic account of human nature, somewhat akin to contemporary physicalism. The New Testament authors certainly knew various theories of human nature, including dualism, but it was not their purpose to teach about this issue.

Soul language is often invoked when people contemplate the status of a human embryo or fetus, or speak about someone with Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a way of saying: there is something here that goes beyond physical reality and deserves respect. Do you think human dignity can be preserved without invoking soul language or something similar?

Much of Christian thinking about the preservation of human life takes a strange detour. We know that Jesus taught us to value all people. His ethic is unusual in the specific focus that he puts on two groups: our enemies and those we consider to be "least of these" (Matt. 25:46). So regarding the most vulnerable of people, we know as Christians that we need to protect them -- and then we invoke the concept of the soul to explain why. But why not just say "because Jesus commands it"?

There may have been a reason in the past to invoke the concept of soul for this purpose. In a culture that was not Christian but did accept dualism, soul language could be used apologetically to argue for protection of the vulnerable. The attempt to use it now for ethical arguments in the public arena simply adds another obstacle, since most secular folk do not believe we have souls (and some don’t even know what the word is supposed to mean).

"Because Jesus commands it" is very much an intra-Christian directive, and in that respect it might be said to constitute an obstacle in public argument. In general, do you think Christian ethics should understand itself in a community-oriented way, and not emphasize an "apologetic" dimension in making its claims?

I follow Stanley Hauerwas very closely here: we have to use the language and warrants specific to our own tradition in order to understand our own moral calling. But this does not mean that those outside the Christian tradition cannot understand what we say and see in our ideals a better way of life.

One hundred and fifty years after Darwin, his theory of evolution remains contested in American Christianity and in American public life. How do you assess this fact, and how would you respond to parents or educators who want creationism also taught in their schools?

When I first discovered that there are still Christians who reject evolutionary theory (having grown up in the Catholic school system, I did not encounter this as a child), I thought of it as a harmless expression of ignorance. More recently, though, I’ve come to see it as tragic. Vast numbers of young people are taught that evolution and Christianity can’t both be true. They get a good science education in college, recognize the truth of the evolutionary picture, and then believe that they have to reject their faith.

Another change in perspective for me was to recognize that antievolutionism is not always a product of ignorance, but can be a response to the ways evolutionary theory is taken to sponsor various forms of immorality, social disintegration and so forth. The "immorality" that current antievolutionists have in mind is a rejection of "traditional" family values. I’m not familiar with the arguments, but I believe that they involve claiming that if evolutionary theory is true, then we are nothing but animals.

In addressing parents who want creationism taught in the schools, I would first try to disabuse them of the idea that evolutionary theory is bad science, and then attempt the more subtle task of explaining the differences between a scientific account of origins and a theological account. On this point, the distinction between science and theology we discussed earlier is valid. Science tells us about series of physical events and the laws that explain why one thing happened rather than another. The doctrine of creation explains why the whole process takes place at all. In addition, it tells us what God’s purposes are for it and that it is essentially good. The details in the two creation stories are clues about the proper ordering of human life, such as our relation to the other animals.

The "intelligent design" movement, which points to organisms allegedly so complex they could not have arisen through the process of natural selection, has been part of the recent attack on Darwinism. How do you assess ID? Does it offer a significant critique of evolutionary theory? Does it have any significant theological implications?

The intelligent-design movement has the unfortunate effect of promoting the view that science and Christian teaching are incompatible. I leave it to the scientists to get into the details of why ID fails scientifically. The more significant failure is its misunderstanding of divine action.

Christians have traditionally understood God to act in at least two ways: by performing special acts (special providence, signs, miracles) and by constantly upholding all natural processes. The ID movement assumes that Cod works only in the first way. Therefore, to show that God has acted, the ID movement believes one has to identify an event in which no natural process is involved. This is their point in trying to argue that particular events in the evolutionary process cannot be explained scientifically.

The recent criticism of Darwin seems directed at some scientists’ inclination to extrapolate from the theory of evolution the conclusion that everything about humans must be shaped by an adaptive, evolutionary logic. Is such a criticism helpful? And is that part of what theology does -- critique overblown claims that may emerge from science?

Theologians certainly have a stake in criticizing overblown claims for evolutionary psychology, but so does everyone else. Sophisticated biologists recognize that culture is at least as significant as biology in shaping human behavior. The assumption that biology is the sole factor shaping human life is one instance of reductionism.

I think of the sciences as forming a hierarchy moving from physics at the bottom, through chemistry, biology, psychology, to the social sciences. Each science studies more complex organizations of matter: atoms, molecules, biochemicals, cells, tissues, organisms, societies. One striking assumption of the modern era has been that all causation is bottom-up -- that is, the behavior of the (simpler) parts entirely controls the behavior of the whole. This is true in some systems: a clock is designed so that its behavior is strictly governed by the behavior of its parts. But this is not true of most complex systems; in complex systems the whole has reciprocal effects on its parts.

Humans, at the level of whole organisms, are certainly affected by their biological parts, including their inherited DNA, but the whole organism also has effects on the parts (for example, learning something changes neural connections). In addition, the societies that humans live in have effects on individuals and in turn on their biology.

People with theological interests were in the forefront of the critiques of reductionism, but now scientists of all sorts and philosophers are also equally engaged.

Recent studies of the cosmos have led to the notion of an "anthropic principle" -- the notion that earth seems to have been fine-tuned to produce human life. Tiny changes in the power of gravity, say, or in the weight of neutrons would have rendered life impossible. Is all this theologically significant? Does it add anything to the 18th-century "argument from design," according to which, as the existence of a watch points to the existence of a watchmaker, the existence of a carefully designed world points to the existence of a designer God?

The apparent fine-tuning certainly raises the question of design, and it may turn out to be a more appropriate place to look for design than in the functionality of organisms and their parts (as in the design arguments of the 18th and 19th centuries).because it does not rely on finding gaps in the order of natural causes. The verdict is still out on whether it provides any evidence for God.

An alternative explanation is provided by the various "multiverse" hypotheses. In an effort to explain the Big Bang, some cosmologists argue that our universe formed somewhat like a bubble out of a vast universe of similar bubbles. If this is the case, each universe could have different fundamental constants. And in that case, eventually there would be one or more universes with the right numbers for life.

Although I have written about using the fine-tuning argument on behalf of a sort of design argument, I’m actually hoping that there is a multiverse. It seems so much more in keeping with our notions of God’s power and creativity to think that he would create all possible universes.

The existence of a multiverse with many universes would seem to raise to a yet higher dimension what we already sense is the lonely place humans have in the cosmos -- and the sense that human life is a kind of random occurrence amid God’s extravagant creative activity. Do you have that response at all? Does that reality have theological implications for understanding God and God’s relation to humans?

There’s a different way to look at it. If we find out that it takes an entire multiverse in order to produce intelligent life, then all the more can we say with the psalmist, "What are humans beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?" Of course, it is only from scripture that we know about our special place in God’s purposes; nature could never reveal this.

What are your goals in teaching people preparing for ministry, who are not going to be professional theologians engaged with science? What do you most want seminarians to know about the relation of religion and science?

Many of my students will be teachers and pastors in conservative Protestant churches, so I think it is important for them to know that they gain nothing and lose much by putting faith and science in opposition. I also want them to appreciate the way scientific knowledge amplifies our understanding of creation, and thereby our wonder and reverence for God.

This point has to be qualified, of course, by recognizing that the natural world is a source of pain as welt as beauty. So reflections on nature must always include the problem of suffering.

After the tsunami last year I read accounts reflecting on the likely responses to the event by adherents of different faiths. I was startled to see that all of the responses were anthropomorphic -- that is, they asked, "Why would God do this to us?" None reflected an appreciation of the fact that plain old natural processes were the cause.

A current project for me is the problem of suffering -- both animal pain and human suffering at the hands of nature. The issue of cosmological fine-tuning is quite relevant to this problem. The laws of nature had to be almost exactly as they are for us to exist, which means that for us to exist nature also had to have the capacity to inflict damage on our bodies.

I would also like seminarians to recognize the apologetic value of a faith that is well informed. It is common to expect pastors to be sophisticated with respect to literature and the arts. Scientific literacy is equally critical. The ability to provide a theological interpretation of science is as important for pastors as it is for academic theologians.

Are you saying that we couldn’t have the physical order we have in this world without also having the level of disorder we have (assuming the tsunami can be properly called "disorder")? Is this another way of saying what the Enlightenment philosophers once maintained -- that we live in "the best of all possible worlds"? Granting that the tsunami was caused by proximate causes, not directly by God, isn’t God still somewhere behind the proximate causes?

Yes, geologists can explain why a planet without this recycling of its crust could not support life as we know it. God does not (intentionally) cause tsunamis, but causes there to be a world in which the destruction of life is an unwanted but necessary by-product of the conditions that allow for human life.

One of the problematic scripture texts for many people living in a world of different religions and world-views is John 14:6, in which Jesus says, "No one comes to the Father except through me." How would you comment on that text? Does it have relevance to your professional work as a theologian who reflects on science?

Most of the scholars I know who work on theology and science are either mainline Protestants or Catholics. I belong to the Church of the Brethren, one of the heirs of the Radical Reformation, which puts primary emphasis on doing God’s work in this world.

In a book I wrote with George Ellis, an applied mathematician and Quaker activist (On the Moral Nature of the Universe), we began with the evidence for cosmological fine-tuning, and then argued that the best explanation for this fine-tuning is not a bare theism but rather a God understood in terms of the self-sacrifice of Jesus. This concept of God is needed to make sense of the fact that Jesus is "the way, the truth, and the life" in the sense that the salvation of the human race (in this eon) is dependent on taking up his all-inclusive, enemy-loving way of life. Only this response will stop the downward spiral of hatred, violence and oppression.

The emphasis on salvation in this life is not to deny the afterlife, but it should turn our focus away from speculation on who does and does not "make it in" at the end.

Are you suggesting that the natural world in some way reflects, in a demonstrable way, Jesus’ self-giving character, which reflects God’s self-giving character? Do you mean this in a roughly analogous way? It’s hard to know what, say, "enemy loving" looks like in the natural world.

You could never get directly from the natural world to Jesus’ ethic, but in light of Jesus we can look at the natural world and see analogies. One analogy is seen in the view -- held by most liberal theologians -- that God’s action does not violate the laws of nature. Actually, because I don’t give "laws" the ontological status that many do, I would speak not of violating the laws of nature but of violating the nature of creatures. God creates beings with their own powers and propensities, and does not violate their basic natures in interacting with them. That restraint by God is analogous to Jesus’ self-emptying.

Because that is how God relates to creatures, I would not take the story of God causing Balaam’s ass to speak (in Numbers 22) to have any historical content. It is a violation of the nature of a donkey to make it speak.

To take another example: Opponents of Christianity sometimes use the violence of predation to argue either that there is no God or else that God has created an unnecessarily cruel world. Science can tell us, though, that predation is necessary in order for us to be here. Then we can join with the 16th-century Anabaptists in seeing the suffering of beasts of burden and animals of prey as a participation in the drama of God’s creation and redemption. This was called "the gospel of all creatures."

If you were asked to preach a sermon and you could choose any biblical text, which would it be?

The first thing I would say is, "I don’t believe I have a calling to preach, so please ask someone else."

I have in fact hunted for texts that will support a theology-and-science sermon. What I have concluded is that what scripture has to say about the natural world is always said for the purpose of teaching right relations with God and with the community. Nature itself is not of much interest to the biblical writers. So sermons based on such texts may start with some reflections inspired by science, but if they are true to the text they are likely to end up speaking of the worship of God and of justice and of peace with our neighbors. For example, Isaiah writes: "For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it a chaos, he formed it to be inhabited!): I am the Lord, and there is no other" (45:18). The text offers room to reflect scientifically on God’s fashioning (fine-tuning) of the universe so that it would be a place to be lived in rather than a formless waste. But the main point, which Isaiah goes on to declare, is this: "There is no other God besides me, a righteous God and savior; there is no one besides me; turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other"

Liturgy as Politics: An Interview with William Cavanaugh

In his reflections on theology and politics, Catholic theologian William T Cavanaugh has focused attention on how Christian liturgical practices embody and inform -- or should embody and inform -- Christian political witness, His book Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ (Blackwell) is about the Roman Catholic Church’s responses to the rule of Augusto Pinochet in Chile during the 1970s. Cavanaugh, who teaches at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, has also written Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (T & T Clark) and coedited The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Blackwell). We spoke to him about liturgy, politics, the entertainment culture and Christian education.

You’ve suggested that Christians ought to draw on their own liturgical practices as they consider how to engage in politics. What do you have in mind?

I recently was asked to give a talk on "the social meaning of the Eucharist," and the first thing I said was, "You have to promise that if I tell you what the social meaning of the Eucharist is, you won’t stop going to mass." In other words, the liturgy cannot be reduced to a meaning. If it could be, why keep going to church once you’ve grasped the meaning? How many reminders do we need? Only those who are really thick would have to go every Sunday.

This is often our approach to liturgy and social life: we try to "read" the liturgy for symbols and meanings that we take out and apply in the "real world" -- the offering means we should give of our wealth, the kiss of peace means we should seek peace in international relations, and so on. This is fine, but it doesn’t address the liturgy as an action that forms a body, the body of Christ.

Henri de Lubac says, "The Eucharist makes the church," and the church is more than just a Moose Lodge for Christians. The church is a social space in its own right, an enactment of the politics of Jesus. This does not mean that the church should become a political party or interject party politics into the liturgy. It means the church should help create -- in collaboration with non-Christians too -- spaces of peace, charity and just economic exchange.

I think Voices in the Wilderness or the economic communities of the Focolare movement are good examples of the politics of Jesus. Far from being a sectarian or quietist withdrawal from the world, these movements are effective at producing change -- more so than movements that ask the state for peace and justice.

One of the assumptions of modem secular politics is that the state must be secular and religion private, lest we return to the wars of religion that devastated Europe in the 16th century Is there anything wrong with that assumption?

I don’t think there is any reason to want to restore the churches to political power, if by that one means coercive power. There is, however, good reason to question the myth of the secular state as peacemaker. The so-called wars of religion did not pit one religion against another, as in Catholics versus Protestants. They are more accurately described as wars between different theopolitical orders. This explains why, for example, Catholics killed Catholics. The second half of the Thirty Years’ War involved Hapsburgs fighting Bourbons -- two Catholic dynasties fighting each other.

Obviously, the church was not innocent of the bloodshed, entangled as it was with coercive power. But neither was the modern state an innocent bystander. The whole apparatus of the state arose to enable princes to wage war more effectively. As Charles Tilly has written, "War made the state, and the state made war." The modern nation-state is founded on violence. If the church is going to resist violence, it has to emerge from its privatization and have a political voice, one that seeks not to regain state power but to speak truthfully about it. Christians can atone for their complicity with violence in the past by refusing to be complicit with state violence now.

People who fear an alignment of religion and state often point to Taliban-style Muslim regimes as an example of the danger. Is that a legitimate worry?

Obviously, I’m not a fan of the Taliban. We should be concerned about any regime that abuses people. I worry, however, about the way that the great myth of religious violence serves to justify certain kinds of violence: "Those people over there are crazy religious fanatics; their violence is irrational, absolutist and divisive. We live in a democratic, secular state; our violence is rational, modest and unitive. They have not learned the lesson we learned: religion should be kept out of the public sphere. So we need to help them by bombing them into the higher rationality." This way of thinking is, I think, one of the subtexts of the Iraq war and of much of public discourse on terrorism. Both Republicans and Democrats assume it.

This myth helps us to think of ourselves as the most peace-loving nation on earth at the same time that our military budget exceeds those of all other nations combined. Our violence doesn’t count as violence, because we are just trying to spread democracy, rationality and peace. Wars by U.S. forces or by proxies -- resulting in the death of 50,000 Iraqi civilians, 2 million Vietnamese, 200,000 Guatemalan peasants -- don’t make a dent in our self-image as long as we make "religious violence" the bogeyman. I think we should denounce all kinds of violence, religious and secular.

You’ve studied church responses to the politically repressive regime of General Pinochet in Chile. Do you have any thoughts about whether churches should actively confront political power or work behind the scenes, as Chile’s Catholic bishops largely decided to do?

It would be presumptuous of me to say what ought to have been done. In my book on Chile, I was trying to hold up examples of what was in fact done, both by the bishops and by the grassroots church, to break the hold of the state on people’s imagination. People in the church came to realize -- some quicker than others -- that asking the state to do justice is sometimes a futile exercise. The church cannot rely on the state to do justice. The church must take itself seriously as a kind of public body, the body of Christ, that creates spaces of justice and peace in the world. It often must do so in resistance to the nation-state. In Chile, some bishops excommunicated those responsible for torture, and the grassroots church aided victims of the regime and carried out acts of civil disobedience. Change did not come quietly, as it usually doesn’t.

Torture was practiced by the government in Chile under Pinochet. Now torture is something the U.S. government seems to condone. Do churches in America have anything to learn from Chile’s experience of the use of torture?

President Bush is threatening to veto a bill for the first time in his five years in office, and his target is Senator John McCain’s amendment to ban torture by U.S. operatives. One thing we can learn from Chile is not to be too surprised at this. Chile was supposed to be exceptional: it had the longest tradition of democracy in Latin America, and everyone thought the military takeover would be brief and relatively benign. America too is supposed to be exceptional, a beacon of freedom to the world.

Exceptionalism works both ways: because America is regarded as exceptional, it is also regarded by many as above the law and able to employ exceptional measures. When a nation becomes an end in itself -- America is the "indispensable nation," Madeleine Albright said -- it will resort to whatever means are necessary to protect its vital interests, which are assumed to be the interests of all.

The other thing we can learn from Chile is that the church must do more than rely on the state to do justice. The churches must be clear that Christians should refuse to participate in unjust treatment of detainees. Furthermore, the churches must not defer to the president the decision on what constitutes a just war and what does not. If the church decides that a war is unjust, Christians should refuse to fight it. I think this is the most crucial issue facing the church in America today. If the just war theory is to mean anything at all, the church must not abdicate its just war decisions to the state.

You’ve written about Christian engagement with the entertainment industry, specifically with the Disney organization. Normally Christians’ two options in this area are either to look for signs of the gospel in popular entertainment or to shun it because of its immorality. What’s your approach?

I don’t think we have to choose between embracing and shunning popular entertainment as a whole. I think we can discern what’s good and what’s bad in it.

My critique of Disney is not so much concerned with the content of its films and other media, though the content is certainly open to criticism. My interest in Disney concerns its sheer power. Disney is an example of the way a few enormous corporations have the power to influence patterns of consumption and homogenize culture, even though the market is free. Millions of parents are stuck buying whatever Disney coughs up, because every other kid at school has Lion King or whatever other kind of merchandise.

How do people end up feeling coerced in a free market? Theoretically, in a free market every individual is free to choose what he or she regards as good. But in a culture without a sense of what is objectively good, all that remains is power. The will is moved not by attraction to the good, but by the sheer power of marketing to move the will. The growing power of huge transnational corporations produces a truncated kind of freedom.

Another concern of yours is the identity of church-related colleges. Do you think such institutions can retain a robust commitment to their theological grounding and also succeed in the competitive market of higher education?

The great irony of American higher education is that in pursuing diversity, colleges and universities have come to look more or less alike. I’m very much in favor of pursuing racial, gender and class diversity within colleges. Pursuing a diversity of mission, however, produces schools that don’t believe in anything in particular. Real diversity would mean diversity not just within colleges but among them. If a college is Baptist or Catholic or Methodist, it should not regard that identity as a liability. We are all enriched by places that are distinctively Baptist or Catholic or Methodist. Church-related schools will prosper if they are distinctive, if they give students a reason to choose them over generic schools with no particular identity.

This doesn’t mean that within church-based schools rigid standards of orthodoxy must be enforced on all. But there should be enough agreement among a significant proportion of administrators, faculty and students that a coherent conversation can go on. Many college students don’t take their education seriously because we train them in irony. We offer them a salad bar of different intellectual methods, positions and worldviews and tell them just to choose what they want -- it doesn’t really matter. Many modern universities are so intellectually incoherent that they tend to breed cynicism, not intellectual vitality.

How would you begin to address this incoherence?

I think hiring is the most pressing concern. A lot of church-related schools have ended up with a large proportion of faculty and administrators who are indifferent to or suspicious of the church affiliation of their school. Every school needs some outsiders; if I were teaching at a Catholic university in the 1950s, I’d want a few good Marxists on the faculty to stir things up a bit. But the pendulum has swung the other way. Now I would be happy with just a few faculty in each department who could articulate some kind of Catholic view on psychology, say, or economics.

This is a big issue for students. They sense instinctively that their education should be integrated across disciplines. Students don’t like it when they raise a question about Genesis in their biology class and the professor treats them as if they had just audibly broken wind. I don’t mean that church-related schools should hire only creationists, I mean they should hire people who are sympathetic and informed about the different ways that Christians integrate belief in God with the findings of science.

In a pluralistic culture like ours, Christians are often led to ponder John 14:6, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." How do you interpret it?

There is a lot that could be said about this verse. The first thing I think of is a quote from St. Catherine of Siena: "All the way to heaven is heaven, because he said I am the way."’ Catherine talks about Christ as the bridge between heaven and earth, divinity and humanity. The bridge between heaven and earth is already heaven, because it is Christ.

I love this quote because it breaks down the dichotomy between means and ends. The Christian life is not a means to heaven. War is not a means to peace, freedom is not a prerequisite for following Christ. The Christian life is about practicing heaven now, on earth, even if it gets you killed. It’s not about making our way to Christ in some far-off eschaton; Christ is the way.

If you were asked to preach on any topic in the coming weeks, what text would you choose, and how would you explore it?

Since Advent is approaching, I think I would choose one of the great readings from Isaiah that are in the lectionary for the season. These are some of my favorite readings of the whole year. They put forward a beautiful vision of longing and expectation for a transformed reality. I would perhaps choose Isaiah 11:1-9.

Woody Allen says, "The lion will lie down with the lamb, but the lamb won’t get much sleep." After pointing out that in fact the lamb gets together with the wolf in Isaiah, I would want to explore Allen’s comment as an example of what is called realism. Realism says, "Don’t be naive. In the real world, the lamb doesn’t stand a chance with the wolf. When God actually changes history, then we can relax. In the meantime, we have to carry a big stick."

In the Christian reading of Isaiah, however, God has already acted to redeem history. The shoot from the stump of Jesse has already sprouted. The longing of Advent is fulfilled in Christmas. People sometimes misunderstand the "not yet" of the kingdom of God to mean that God is holding back on us. But God has held nothing back; God has given us the Son, the Way. The "not yet" is because we are holding back. We carry on as if nothing has happened, waiting for God to realize the vision of Isaiah. But the good news is that God has acted. God has given us the Christ, in whom Isaiah’s vision of a transformed reality is fulfilled.

Church and State in China

In antiquity China acquired a beautiful name, Shen-zhou, which literally means "state of God." Unfortunately, the title probably was used as a political term meaning that God had given the elite the divine right to rule rather than that Yahweh claimed China as the chosen land and the Chinese as a chosen people. From its seventh-century beginnings, Chinese Christianity has never been able to detach itself from its political context.

The current state of indigenous Chinese Christianity is shaped largely by very recent developments, including the dark days of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when churches were closed by the government. It comes as something of a surprise, then, that in the past two and a half decades the number of Chinese Christians has grown from an estimated 1-2 million in 1979 to between 21 and 80 million, and the number of converts continues to increase staggeringly.

Over the past ten years I have made a number of trips to China, and I have been amazed at the religious and political freedom I have seen there. Still, China is ruled not by law but by people, and the degree of liberty varies from place to place. While religious freedom is guaranteed in the constitution, whether that guarantee is recognized depends on who is interpreting the law. The communist government still has absolute power to come up with new policies, and sometimes it restricts religious activities.

We can see the sociopolitical realities of Chinese Christianity by considering three enterprises: the Three-Self churches, the independent churches, and the institutes of Christian research.

Three-Self and the China Christian Council. In the years following World War II, Western powers dominated China in critical ways. After the communists came to power in 1949, Christian leader Wu Yao-tsung and the premier, Chou En-lai, prepared the Christian Manifesto, which called Chinese Christians to heighten their "vigilance against imperialism, to make known the clear political stand of Christians in New China, to hasten the building of a Chinese church whose affairs are managed by the Chinese themselves." It stated further that Christians should support the "common political platform under the leadership of the government." To this end, the government worked with Protestant leaders to establish the Three-Self (self-government, self-propagation, self-support) Patriotic Movement.

Now the TSPM, together with the China Christian Council, formed in the early 1980s, serves as official overseer of Protestant churches. (Catholic churches operate under the Catholic Patriotic Association. The government has prohibited Chinese Catholics from maintaining official ties with the Vatican.)

There are about 45,000 such Protestant churches in China, plus 200 "meeting points," places where Chinese Christians may gather, such as church buildings, homes, offices or universities. The meeting points are divided into two groups: those with 20 to 40 members and those with more than 40. Any gathering of believers with more than 40 people is required by law to register with the government, meaning the government can monitor and maintain social control of such gatherings.

The CCC also partners with the Amity Foundation to advance works of mercy and to oversee the publication and distribution of Bibles. Since the 1980s, Amity Press has printed more than 28 million Bibles. (By law, publications of the CCC are sold in its bookstores or churches, not in public book-stores.) The CCC also seeks to provide Bible translations for eight ethnic-minority groups. The Amity Foundation has a broad goal of "serving society and benefiting the people." The CCC and Amity conduct work in rural areas, where 60 percent of the people remain illiterate and impoverished. Other objectives of the Amity Foundation include improving health care, contributing to Christian modernization and development through education, better familiarizing Chinese with Christianity, and sharing ecumenical resources among churches.

Independent churches. Indigenous Chinese Christianity began primarily in churches founded in the early 20th century by Chinese, without foreign overseers, though some of its founders were educated in or had some contacts with the Christian West. The three main examples of early indigenous Chinese churches are the True Jesus Church, the Jesus Family and the Christian Assembly.

The True Jesus Church was founded by Barnabas Tung in 1909 as an outgrowth of revival meetings. The church emphasized evangelism, local church polity, spiritual gifts and communal living. Today, few True Jesus congregations support the TSPM; the majority remain independent.

The Jesus Family was founded by Jing Dianying, a converted Buddhist, in the village of Mazhaung at Shandong in 1921. The group was popular in northern and interior China. Its communal lifestyle and strict discipline made it very strong: members developed their agricultural skills and often gave a tenth of their harvest to the poor.

The Christian Assembly was founded by Watchman Nee in Fuzhon in 1922. Nee was a prolific author and a charismatic speaker. He preached the message of personal salvation and sanctification, a doctrine he expounded in his book The Spiritual Man (1928). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, his group sponsored congregations throughout the world, Taiwan being its strongest foreign base.

Another important indigenous church is the Christian Tabernacle, founded by Wang Ming-dao in Beijing in 1936. He emphasized spiritual regeneration and ultimate trust in God despite suffering and persecution. For two decades, Wang distributed a magazine, Spiritual Food Quarterly, to encourage Christians to be faithful to God in a communist land. He refused to join the TSPM.

The Chinese government does not allow unregistered churches to have church buildings. For this reason, many members of these churches congregate in their homes, forming "house churches." Many independent congregations today belong to unnamed churches, rather than to the founding indigenous churches described above. Most of these groups devote time to study of the eschatological and apocalyptic texts, from which they derive strength and faith in the midst of persecution. A high view of Christology also helps them to hold fast to their faith. The worship experiences and preaching of such groups are often charismatic.

The primary distinction in Chinese church life is that between registered and unregistered churches. The government wants all churches to register through the TSPM or the CCC. Many of the independent churches have declined to register, because they believe in the separation of church and state, of theology and politics. And, of course, because the government is officially atheist, they see it as naturally in conflict with religion.

No great theological chasm exists between registered churches and unregistered churches. Many Chinese Christians attend both. I have visited the official seminaries and Bible colleges of the Three-Self movement and have heard sermons preached in churches aligned with Three-Self their teaching and preaching are as biblical as any lectures and sermons of evangelical seminaries and churches in the U.S. And the great attention to biblical studies in the unregistered churches does not necessarily indicate high orthodoxy. There are many heresies and superstitions in these churches, especially in rural areas -- and it is in these locations that Chinese Christianity is growing by leaps and bounds.

However, there is a difference between registered and unregistered churches in political attitude. Most of the churches aligned with the TSPM and the CCC adhere to the theology of Romans 13:1, 4 ("let every person be subject to the governing authorities . . . [they are] God’s servant for your good") and 1 Peter 2:13 ("For the Lord’s sake accept the authority of every human institution"). They hope to be God’s agent of salvation within the political reality. In response to the communist view of religion -- and the TSPM has no illusions about communism’s atheist views -- the TSPM has been accommodating, finding ways to cooperate with the state’s mission.

The political attitude of the unregistered churches reflects the theology of the Book of Revelation. They assume that the Chinese government, being communist in ideology, is pagan and satanic -- similar to that of the Roman Empire, the beast and the dragon in Revelation. Most unregistered churches do not believe that Christianity should collaborate with a government that does not love or honor God. By and large, they don’t find the communist government a trustworthy partner or think that the state’s fallenness is redeemable. Many unregistered churches attempt to focus on theology and to be detached from politics.

Academic study of Christianity. Outside the church and seminary there is much academic interest in Christianity as the core of Western civilization. Surprisingly, the Chinese government has provided some funding to this research, which is being conducted mainly by scholars based at institutions dedicated to the humanities and social sciences (such as the People’s University in Beijing, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, Fudan University in Shanghai, Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou). The government believes that academic research on religions as philosophies or as cultural phenomena will benefit the modernization of China.

With the aid of government resources, many of these researchers are producing work that in quantity and quality exceeds that being done by Christian theologians in seminaries. Their work encompasses biblical studies, doctrine, history, aesthetics, theology and philosophy. Most of these scholars do not explicitly claim to be Christian, although some do. Some refer to themselves as cultural Christians, meaning that they became Christian not through the church (and therefore they will not necessarily be baptized or join a church) but through reading Western literature or studying theology. They study Christianity less as a theological discipline for the faith than as a cultural phenomenon and an academic discipline.

Perhaps the unpredictable nature of the Chinese government makes it necessary for these scholars to hide their faith identities. I recall that my lecture titles in Chinese universities were often changed from "theology" to "Christian thought" or "Christian philosophy." Still, at a recent conference on Chinese Christian theology, I noticed that a group of young lecturers from major Chinese universities all professed to be Christians. Additionally, all of them were affiliated with churches -- whether registered or unregistered. These young professors perceive Christianity as the impetus for the greatness of Western science, politics, economy and freedom. They are convinced that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the salvation of the Chinese and of China.

Boast Not (I Cor. 9:16-23)

Several decades ago, when I was filling out my application for seminary admission, I came to a question that asked me to provide biblical justification for my calling. I knew I wanted to attend seminary, but found it difficult to state why. Then I remembered my Wesley Foundation pastor preaching on 1 Corinthians 9:16b, and I wrote, "Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel." The text expressed the urgency I felt and even a tinge of divine necessity -- although I think I knew even then that I was going a bit too far. These days I read the context more carefully before quoting a verse or two.

Passages from Paul’s Corinthian correspondence are often scattered across the lectionary without regard to their contexts. Much of what Paul writes addresses problems and concerns in the Corinthian congregation, such as the problem of eating foods that have been offered to idols in sacrificial worship and are now offered by a host to an unsuspecting Christian guest, one who might be offended.

In the midst of his concern with the food issue, Paul uses a sometimes convoluted logic to apply his thinking to another concern: he proposes that he be paid a congregational stipend! Here context is key. If we read carefully, we see that Paul is actually denouncing stipends, and for the same reason given in the case of meat consumption -- that the strong should limit their freedom in order to avoid causing "scandal" for the weaker members.

Without the context, the reader will not realize that the principle on which Paul decides the issue is derived from the passage about eating food offered to idols (1 Cor. 8:1-13). The whole discussion about giving up one’s right has not been included in the lectionary selection.

That’s why the discussion about becoming all things to all people is almost unintelligible without its context: the logic of the argument is derived from Paul’s understanding of gospel liberty. (It even seems to include a dominical warrant supporting just what Paul rejects.) Grasping the full implications of his argument may be hard not only for strict biblicists but also for those who take the Bible seriously and study it critically. Paul challenges us to the core.

What is this gospel liberty that Paul invites us to mime? More than once he describes the Christian’s status by juxtaposing the words freedom and slavery. "For whoever was called in the Lord as a slave is a freed person belonging to the Lord, just as whoever was free when called is a slave of Christ" (1 Cor. 7:22). Paul expresses his slavery in the Lord both by renouncing any rights (exousia) he has and by sub-mitting himself to social and cultural conventions of those he hopes to win to Christ. So, in a rather strange statement, he says he became a Jew to win Jews. At times Paul boasts of his religious and ethnic heritage (2 Cor. 11:22ff.; Rom. 11:1; Phil. 3:4b-6); at other times, as here, he seems to be saying that this heritage has been superseded by being in Christ. Even being "under the law" has become secondary.

In fact, in several examples -- to both those "under" and those "outside" the law -- Paul declares that he is not without the law (anomos) and thereby lawless (perhaps like some in Corinth?); on the contrary, he is "in-lawed" (ennomos) to God through the law of Christ. Then he repeats and adds variations of "all" that underscore the universality of his actions.

A close reading of the penultimate verse, 1 Corinthians 9:22, catches us by surprise. For one thing, the grammar is different -- all three previous examples were introduced by the comparative Greek particle has, but here Paul says very directly, "To the weak I became weak." Surely this refers to his earlier remarks about refusing the usual stipend proffered to philosophers by the rich.

But Paul is doing more than making reference to what he has said earlier. This is Paul the theologian sharing a pastoral insight. To become weak -- not simply to appear weak -- is to adopt a cruciform pattern of existence. Quoting an ancient Christian hymn in Philippians 2:5-8, Paul describes Jesus’ mode of existence as a self-emptying and calls Christians to embrace this lifestyle. 1 Corinthians 9:22 attests to congruence between Paul’s words and lifestyle.

Here is the touchstone of Christian existence -- at least as explicated by Paul. Faith perceives the divinity of the man Jesus precisely in his humanness. The cruciform existence of Jesus’ living and dying contradicted both the traditional Jewish messianic expectation and the Greeks’ concept of a supernatural savior. It is only Jesus in his utter humanity as a real person who can empty himself and become nothing. So there are no grounds for boasting, for how could one who lives the life of the cross find anything to boast about?

Why do we boast? Is it not to secure our being in the world? Boasting is one way that we try to overcome the limits the world sets for us. But for those who live in the new age of death and resurrection, the one inaugurated by the cross, such boasting is not only excluded, it is not necessary. Old answers are no longer sufficient for the new age. Thus Paul’s repeated use of "all" is not as improbable as it might at first seem.

If we can hold to the question about who we are and what our destiny is -- perennial human questions -- and if we refuse to accept answers from the world, we will discover that the question is not one we ask, but one that is asked of us. That’s what preaching does; it puts us in question. We can answer only with our entire being, and that may mean shaping our lives to conform to the cross.

Spellbound (Deut. 18:15-20; Ps. 111; 1 Cor. 8:1-23; Mark 1:21-28)

In the days before every district superintendent carried a cell phone, driving the charge conference circuit was a great opportunity to listen to the radio. My favorite station was NPR. More than once I found myself totally enthralled by a broadcast story. Sometimes I would pull into my own driveway but be unable to get out of the car because I was a prisoner of a story. I sat on the edge of my seat, my hand ready to turn the car key, unable to move. Maybe it was the story about the little boy caught in a moral dilemma: he needed to tell his mother the truth about a neighborhood crime, but could not betray a confidence. What would he do? I had to hear the end of the story.

Maybe that’s the kind of rapt attention those first-century synagogue worshipers in Capernaum experienced as they listened to Jesus preach. The Greek word Mark uses here (Matthew and Luke use the same word) indicates that the listeners were both fascinated at what they were hearing and outraged. What was Jesus preaching?

Mark provides an answer. Although we cannot put too much trust in his order of historical events, this scene probably did occur close to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. In Mark 1:14 we have Mark’s summation of Jesus’ preaching -- the time is fulfilled and the reign of God is at hand, so repent and believe this good news. This scene may provide us with the context for understanding the response of the Capernaumian worshipers. They were fascinated because they had never heard such exciting words from any other synagogue preacher, while at the same time they were outraged because they knew that these words were challenging the status quo -- their status quo.

One day I was standing in the sun-drenched synagogue ruins at Capernaum, one of my favorite places in Israel. Although today the synagogue is in ruins, enough of the structure remains to convey an image of what was there 20 centuries ago. I let my mind take me back to the event Mark describes and tried to feel what the original hearers must have felt listening to Jesus’ spellbinding words. A little archaeological knowledge and a good guide book made the experiment possible.

There are several accounts of Jesus preaching in synagogues -- even in Nazareth -- and they often indicate a response of violent hostility and astonished amazement. My imagination began to work as I recalled some texts. What did Jesus preach that brought such an impassioned response?

Maybe, I thought, he told the parable about God being like a forgiving and welcoming father who had two very different kinds of sons: a younger son who "squandered his property in loose living" and an elder who worked the father’s fields. Might this story have been for some hearers a "driveway moment," one of those experiences that held them spellbound as they realized its parallel in their lives?

Maybe Jesus addressed their sense of injustice, their memories of torture at the hands of Roman soldiers, or their longing for peace and stability. Perhaps he declared that those who make peace would be blessed, and would even be called God’s children. Could this really be true?

Maybe he recruited disciples. According to Mark’s chronology, Jesus had recruited Andrew, Simon, James and John -- one-third of the Twelve -- just before he attended synagogue worship. He needed more recruits. Maybe for one or several of his listeners, this was a driveway moment.

Maybe someone questioned Jesus about the new age he described, and thought that this new rabbi was wrong to be destroying common assumptions. For example, what are the relationships in heaven like? Jesus shatters the perception that heaven is earth, only written larger and bolder. God is not God of the dead, but of the living! But what about the dead? Jesus’ hearers must have thought with indignation.

Maybe Jesus spoke the daring words, "Your sins are forgiven," and shocked the sensibilities of the literalists. Imagine the intensity of the moment if he spoke in response to a specific situation, a recognizable crisis in his listeners’ lives.

Some people, of course, did not hear Jesus because they could not or would not have attended Sabbath worship. Surely there were shepherds in town that day, some street women, perhaps even a tax collector or unlearned peasant farmers. What did they hear? Although they were not bold enough to walk into the synagogue, these persons probably knew something of Israel’s hope and consolation, and were probably aware of the promise of another prophet like Moses. They too were desperate for a sign from God, who would send redemption (Ps. 111).

We might think of this driveway moment as a synthesis of the events that had proceeded this particular moment. Each hearer of Jesus’ words was a concatenation of episodic experiences. The religious community attempted to define these experiences for the people. I can imagine how many of the people resented this, and rejected and ultimately fought against being defined by others. What alternative was available to them? How could they live otherwise?

Now they were hearing a word through which they were experiencing a new understanding of themselves. They were experiencing release. They were being redeemed!

In what seem like never-ending encounters with the scribes, Jesus denounces these men who were preoccupied with questions of what people ought or might do to be able to live faithfully before God. They were his enemy.

Jesus purges the scribal bedevilment that infects them and us, making us fear freedom and giving us a sense of nothingness and powerlessness. He tells us we can choose to live free and close to God. Jesus speaks the word of life. His living word from God bestows on us freedom to live as God intends.

Where Was God? An Interview with David Bentley Hart

David Hart’s 2003 book The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans) was widely touted as a theological tour de force. He offers in that book a powerful and deeply learned statement of Christian truth that draws on the Eastern Orthodox tradition while engaging modern and postmodern critics of Christianity. After the tsunami in 2004 he wrote several commentaries in response to what he regarded as unhelpful attempts to understand that catastrophe theologically. His reflections were expanded in a book, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans). Hart, who next year will be a visiting professor at Providence College, spoke with us about evil and its place in the world that God created and loves.

 

It’s often said that three claims of the Christian tradition -- "God is omnipotent," "God is love" and "Evil exists" -- present a logical contradiction. One of the claims has to be revised. Do you agree?

If by "evil exists" you mean that evil possesses a real substance of its own, and that it therefore exists in the way goodness exists (or, for that matter, a tree, a rabbit, an idea or a dream exists), in point of fact Christian tradition has usually denied this quite forcibly. Patristic and medieval thought (drawing, admittedly, on Platonic precedent) defined evil as a privation of the good: a purely parasitic and shadowy reality, a contamination or disease or absence, but not a real thing in itself. This, incidentally, is a logically necessary claim if one understands goodness and being as flowing alike from the very nature of God and coinciding in him as one infinite life.

That said, there surely is no contradiction between God’s omnipotent goodness and the reality of evil. It may seem somewhat trite to invoke the freedom of creation as part of the works and ends of divine love, or to argue that the highest good of the creature -- divinizing union with God in love -- requires a realm of "secondary causality" in which the rational wills of God’s creatures are at liberty; nonetheless, whether the traditional explanations of how sin and death have been set loose in the world satisfy one or not, they certainly render the claim that an omnipotent and good God would never allow unjust suffering simply vacuous. By what criterion could one render such a judgment? For Christians, one must look to the cross of Christ to take the measure of God’s love, and of its worth in comparison to the sufferings of a fallen world. And one must look to the risen Christ to grasp the glory for which we are intended, and take one’s understanding of the majesty and tragedy of creation’s freedom from that.

In Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov famously points to the brutal killing of children and proclaims that he refuses to believe in any God who has arranged the world in such a way that it entails such suffering -- regardless of what "meaning" can be attached to it. What does a Christian say to Karamazov’s protest?

Actually, what Ivan ultimately refuses is not belief but consent: he will not acknowledge that there is any justice, any glory, any truth that is worth the suffering of a child. If he were merely a truculent atheist, he would he a boring figure. Instead, he is a rebel against the divine order, and intends to remain a rebel even if that order should -- in some way transcending his finite understanding -- prove to be perfectly just. One might very well read his protest not as a brief for atheism, but as a kind of demythologized Gnostic manifesto, an accusation flung in the face of the demiurge.

Still, the pathos of his protest is, to my mind, exquisitely Christian -- though he himself seems not to be aware of this: a rage against explanation, a refusal to grant that the cruelty or brute natural misfortune or evil of any variety can ever be justified by some "happy ending" that males sense of all our misery and mischance.

In a sense the whole of The Doors of the Sea was a response to Ivan’s "rebellion" -- and indeed a kind of endorsement of it. What I would say here is that it is important to understand the terms of the argument clearly: Ivan assumes -- in good late-l9th-century fashion -- that the eschatological horizon of history and nature is, in a very direct way, the consummation of a process wherein all the apparent contingencies of history and nature have an indispensable part to play. For him, the Christian promise of the kingdom of God is the promise, as well, of a final justification not only of those who have suffered, hut of their suffering, and of the part suffering plays in bringing the final kingdom of love and knowledge to pass. This is what he finds intolerable: the notion that the suffering of children will prove to have been meaningful, to have had a purpose, to have been in some sense a good and necessary thing; for him, the suffering of children is an infinite scandal, and his conscience could never allow it to sink to the level of some provisional passage through darkness on the way to some radiant future.

My contention is that this places Ivan’s sensibility much nearer to the authentic vision of the New Testament than are many of the more pious and conventional forms of Christian conviction today The gospel of the ancient church was always one of rebellion against those principalities and powers -- death chief among them -- that enslave and torment creation; nowhere does the New Testament rationalize evil or accord it necessity or treat it as part of the necessary fabric of God’s world. All that Christian scripture asserts is that evil cannot defeat God’s purposes or thwart the coming of his kingdom. Divine providence, of course, will always bring about God’s good ends despite -- and in a sense through -- the evils of this world; but that is not the same thing as saying that evil has a necessary part to play in God’s plans, and that God required evil to bring about the kingdom. As the empty tomb of Christ above all reveals, the verdict of God that rescues and redeems creation also overturns the order of the fallen world, and shatters the powers of historical and natural necessity that the fallen world comprises.

Christians often try to distinguish between what God wills and what God permits or allows. But does this distinction really help? If God allows something, or creates a world in which evil is allowed, then in some sense isn’t it part of God’s will?

Unless one thinks that God’s act of creation is purely arbitrary -- and it would be incoherent to attribute arbitrariness of any kind to a God of infinite goodness (an argument for another time) -- then one must understand creation as a direct expression of God’s own Logos. God does not create like an omnipotent consumer choosing one world out of an infinity of possibilities that somehow stand outside of and apart from his own nature. Here’s one without cancer, there’s one without Bach, over there’s one with a higher infant mortality rate, and so on; this is the worst sort of anthropomorphism.

God creates the world of Jesus, the world conformed to his infinite love for his Son in the joy and light of the Spirit; he thereby also wills his goodness in all his creatures infinitely, which is to say he wills this world for eternal union with him in love, and he wills that we should become partakers of the divine nature.

There is no other world that God might have created, not because he is bound by necessity, but because he is infinitely free, and so nothing can hinder him from expressing his essential and infinite goodness perfectly, in and through the freedom of creatures created to be the fellows of his eternal Son.

That may seem obscurely phrased -- it is, I know -- but if one thinks through what it means to understand God as the transcendent source of all being, one must abandon the notion that God chooses to create in the way that I choose to buy blue drapes rather than red. God creates a realm of rational freedom that allows for a union between Creator and creature that is properly analogous to the Trinity’s eternal union of love; or, stated otherwise, God creates his own image in his creatures, with all that that may entail.

Followers of Calvin have been particularly concerned to defend God’s sovereignty. Do you think that tradition presents a particular problem for Christian thinking today?

Yes -- and not only today. I quite explicitly admit in my writing that I think the traditional Calvinist understanding of divine sovereignty to be deeply defective, and destructively so. One cannot, as with Luther, trace out a direct genealogy from late medieval voluntarism to the Calvinist understanding of divine freedom; nevertheless, the way in which Calvin himself describes divine sovereignty is profoundly modern: it frequently seems to require an element of pure arbitrariness, of pure spontaneity, and this alone separates it from more traditional (and I would say more coherent) understandings of freedom, whether divine or human.

This idea of a God who can be called omnipotent only if his will is the direct efficient cause of every aspect of created reality immediately makes all the inept cavils of the village atheist seem profound: one still should not ask if God could create a stone he could not lift, perhaps, but one might legitimately ask if a God of infinite voluntaristic sovereignty and power could create a creature free to resist the divine will. The question is no cruder than the conception of God it is meant to mock, and the paradox thus produced merely reflects the deficiencies of that conception.

Frankly, any understanding of divine sovereignty so unsubtle that it requires the theologian to assert (as Calvin did) that God foreordained the fall of humanity so that his glory might be revealed in the predestined damnation of the derelict is obviously problematic, and probably far more blasphemous than anything represented by the heresies that the ancient ecumenical councils confronted.

Is universal salvation a corollary of your view of the absurdity of evil?

Probably not; but Gregory of Nyssa would say otherwise. The preferred Eastern Orthodox understanding of hell, one with profound patristic pedigrees, defines hell as something self-imposed, a condition of the soul that freely refuses to open itself in love to God and neighbor, and that thereby seals itself against the deifying love of God, thereby experiencing divine glory as an external chastisement. That hell I believe in, inasmuch as all of us from time to time have tasted it in this world. The refusal of love makes love a torment to us.

Does your understanding of evil have implications for pastoral practice in the face of evil?

I honestly don’t know. I haven’t a pastoral bone in my body. But I would implore pastors never to utter banal consolations concerning God’s "greater plan" or the mystery of his will. The first proclamation of the gospel is that death is God’s ancient enemy, whom God has defeated and will ultimately destroy. I would hope that no Christian pastor would fail to recognize that that completely shameless triumphalism -- and with it an utterly sincere and unrestrained hatred of suffering and death -- is the surest foundation of Christian hope, and the proper Christian response to grief.

So where was God in the tsunami?

Where was God? In and beyond all things, nearer to the essence of every creature than that creature itself, and infinitely outside the grasp of all finite things.

Almost all the reviews of The Doors of the Sea that I have read have recognized that, at the heart of the book, is a resolute insistence upon and adoration of the imperishable goodness of creation, an almost willfully naive assertion that it is the beauty and peace of the created world that truly reveal its original and ultimate nature, while the suffering and alienation and horror of mortal existence are, in an ultimate sense, fictions of fallen time, chains and veils and shadows and distortions, but no part of God’s will for his creatures. This is why, at one point in the book, I grant the Gnostics of old the validity of their questions, though I go on to revile the answers at which they arrived.

To see the world in the Christian way -- which, as I say in the book, requires the eye of charity and a faith in Easter -- is in some sense to venture everything upon an absurd impracticality (I almost sound Kierkegaardian when I say it that way). But, as I was writing the book, I found myself thinking again and again of a photograph I had seen in the Baltimore Sun. The story concerned the Akhdam, the lowest social caste in Yemen, supposedly descended from Ethiopians left behind when the ancient Ethiopian empire was driven out of Arabia in the sixth century, who live in the most unimaginable squalor. In the background of the photo was a scattering of huts constructed from crates and shreds of canvas, and on all sides barren earth; but in the foreground was a little girl, extremely pretty, dressed in tatters, but with her arms outspread, a look of delight upon her face, dancing. To me that was a heartbreaking picture, of course, but it was also an image of something amazing and glorious: the sheer ecstasy of innocence, the happiness of a child who can dance amid despair and desolation because her joy came with her into the world and prompts her to dance as if she were in the midst of paradise.

She became for me the perfect image of the deep indwelling truth of creation, the divine Wisdom or Sophia who resides in the very heart of the world, the stainless image of God, the unfallen. I’m waxing quite Eastern here, I know, But that, I would say, is the nature of God’s presence in the fallen world: his image, his bride, the deep joy and longing of creation, called from nothingness to be joined to him. That child’s dance is nothing less than the eternal dance of divine Wisdom before God’s throne, the dance of David and the angels and saints before his glory; it is the true face of creation, which God came to restore and which he will not suffer to see corruption. .

Balance Sheet (Mat. 22:15-22)

"Then he said to them, ‘Whose head is this, and whose title?’ They answered, "The emperor’s.’ Then he said to them, ‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s’" (Matt. 15:20-21).

I was emphasizing to parents of confirmands that the young people should be with their families in worship as part of their preparation for membership. "I’m afraid we don’t have time for worship," one mother told me after the meeting. Her words were soothing and gentle, yet they sounded condescending, as if she were explaining something to a not-very-bright child. "We’ve committed to soccer and cheerleading for my youngest on Sunday mornings. We have a full plate. Maybe in a few years."

This same woman had been adamant that her children be baptized and confirmed. Although she and her family could fit in brief forays into religious rites, other activities were more important than a steady commitment to the church.

Jesus’ admonition to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s is a clever response, perhaps one that is appropriate for those of us who have trouble deciding what goes to Caesar and what to God. Rather than parceling out some money for Caesar and some for God, Jesus may have been making the point that nothing belongs to Caesar. Since everything ultimately belongs to God, he was saying that what we believe we own or is due us is actually only on loan to us. Caesar’s wealth was not his to keep, and neither is ours. Christians believe that we are accountable to God for the gift of love and the way we use that gift. We are asked not to keep God in some sort of equal balance with all the other demands on our lives but to make sure that God takes second place to nothing and no one else. This principle was stated in the Ten Commandments: "You shall have no other gods before me."

Busy, well-meaning Christians often complain about how hard it is to balance church activities with everything else. We want to do it all rather than select certain activities as top priority and let other activities go. We do not want to sacrifice "alone time," family time, travel time or shopping time for corporate worship. So we forego worship. We give God the balance left over when everything else has been accomplished.

God, however, does not belong on an equal par with work or recreation; God deserves to take first place in our lives. This may involve sacrifice, a seemingly harsh word that comfort-loving, convenience-seeking people do not like.

My nine-year-old daughter was invited to a Saturday afternoon birthday party which was to end at 4 p.m. Then plans changed, and the party was set to extend through Sunday morning.

"The girls won’t sleep all night, of course," the mother told me. My husband and I were left with a dilemma. Should we let our daughter spend the night, knowing we would need to pick her up before worship and she would be in a foul mood from lack of sleep? Should we let her spend the night and skip worship just this once? Or should we risk her displeasure with us and interrupt the fun by picking her up just before bedtime? In the end we decided to pick her up before bedtime. Ours wasn’t a monumental decision, yet our lives consist of small choices like these, choices that add up over time.

Thomas R. Kelly was a Quaker missionary, educator, speaker, writer and scholar. In A Testament of Devotion, he wrote:

We are trying to be several selves at once, without all our selves being organized by a single, mastering Life within us. Each of us tends to be, not a single self, but a whole committee of selves. . . . And each of our selves is in turn a rank individualist, not cooperative but shouting out his vote loudly for himself when the voting time comes. . . . It is as if we have a chairman of our committee of many selves within us who does not integrate the many into one but who merely counts the votes at each decision, and leaves disgruntled minorities. . . . We are not integrated. We are distraught. We feel honestly the pull of many obligations and try to fulfill them all. . . . Life is meant to be lived from a Center, a divine Center. . . . Most of us, I fear, have not surrendered all else, in order to attend to the Holy Within.

These words aptly describe our dilemma, but the solution -- surrendering all to God -- does not sit well with busy families, who appear to fear being involved in fewer activities than their neighbors. Many young parents seem to feel that their children must participate in many activities to be well-rounded. Such parents fail to understand that having a solid religious foundation is key to their child’s maturation.

Writing in the January 2005 issue of Interpretation magazine, Robert Sherman states that we need to order our "lives in such a way that the Lord’s time [becomes] sovereign," which could "become the means by which a gracious God liberates us from the tyranny of seemingly implacable and ultimately pointless time." Without allegiance to the Maker of time itself, we are at the mercy of every request. When we place our schedules in God’s hands, however, we are given one day in seven to hold as holy. How liberating it is to be able to say, "No, we can’t attend. We’ll be at church."

An Invitation (Phil. 4:1-9; Mat. 22:1-14)

"‘Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests" (Matt. 22:9-10).

"I cannot come to the banquet; don’t trouble me now. I have bought me a wife; I have married a cow." The guffaws and catcalls of the preadolescent boys as they improvised on a familiar song were designed to attract the attention of the girls at the religious retreat. We girls pretended annoyance as they sang. We knew that we should be insulted, but were secretly amused by their twist on the words. The song that they thought they were improving with their hilarious lyrics is based on Jesus’ parable of the marriage feast. In that parable, invitations to a special banquet go out to selected guests, but the invited ones make light of the loving gesture, and they make excuses for not attending. Stung by their rejection, the host invites strangers to partake of the banquet originally planned for the special guests.

Jesus’ audience may or may not have understood his veiled reference to the people who rejected him, but through the benefit of hindsight we know to whom he was referring. He was the banquet, the Bread of Life, but not everyone wanted to attend. So Jesus flung the gates open to anyone who was spiritually hungry. Anyone could now come to the banquet. Before, Jesus had been offered as a gift to a small segment of humankind; now he had become a gift for all.

Unfortunately, throughout history there have always been those who reject the gifts they’ve been offered. In the United States, sexuality, a good gift from God, has been denigrated by the purveyors of pornography, a multi-billion-dollar industry that distorts the self-giving of sexuality into the self-satisfaction of prurient appetites. Preying on the weak, its perpetrators pander to that which is basest and most evil in the human psyche. The admonition to "think only about whatsoever is pure and good" falls on deaf ears -- they’ve rejected the gift.

There have also always been those who make light of people with significant accomplishments. Whether from envy, the desire to deny power or the sin of neglect, the contributions of women and people of color have been devalued over the centuries. The apostle Paul praised the women who had worked with him, noting in Philippians 4 that they worked side by side with him. Unfortunately, later generations insisted that women were intended to remain in the private sphere. Until very recently history teachings have focused on the adventures of white males. It has taken many decades to come to the place where we recognize the efforts of females and minorities.

Our nations’ governments also make light of the gospel, sometimes using Christian rhetoric even as they deny its message by pandering to the rich and overlooking the needs of the poor. The Judeo-Christian ethic emphasizes the responsibility of the powerful to use their power to help those with no power. When we make light of that mandate and enjoy power for its own sake, or use it to reward those with influence, we are circumventing the channel God planned for helping the marginalized.

We Christians, wanting to fit into a secular culture, are often tempted to trivialize our commitment to God’s realm. Instead of being a light to the world, we sometimes make light of our responsibility toward the world in the name of God. We fail to bring to our daily round of activities the Christlike touch that would shine light in dark places. Even in our church activities we may behave more like nonbelievers than like Christians, worshiping in churches whose atmosphere is oppressive and repressive and neglecting to share Jesus’ concern for justice and freedom.

A few years ago I attended a concert featuring a folk-singing group whose songs celebrated inclusiveness and freedom. They sang about going to jail for justice, and tears sprang to my eyes -- I was overjoyed to hear their pleas for justice. They harmonized a tune about not picking on people, and their words suggested a welcome for gays and lesbians. My heartbeat quickened with joy. Here were the Christian values of justice and inclusiveness being named and shared by hundreds of people. I felt that there was more of Christ here in this secular arena than in my congregation, and that I had been hiding my feelings about the need for sexuality justice so that I could better fit into a congregation where exclusiveness, not inclusiveness, was the norm.

When we are Christian in name only, or when we adopt a stance we call Christian that overlooks justice and hospitality toward others, we are depriving the world of Christ’s influence through us. We are also depriving ourselves of the rigor that could change our lives. A culture of cynicism and emphasis on form rather than substance encourages light gestures rather than strong commitment. Jesus did not make light of people and their concerns, but poured out his life, both ultimately and on a daily basis, as he listened, healed, taught and loved people, both friends and strangers.

The people originally invited to the marriage feast declined the invitation. It was not a high priority for them, so others were invited to take their places. Christians are invited to take very seriously the invitation to divine intimacy and community with others. In doing so, we become light that shines in the darkness. We are to be like the rising sun, highlighting what had previously been obscured by darkness with the light of God’s grace and justice.

Myths and Metaphors

Janet Martin Soskice of Cambridge University has been at the forefront of a theological movement (largely inspired by Karl Barth) that asserts a renewed confidence in the intelligibility of theology. Her book Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford University Press) argues for taking biblical metaphors seriously and for not translating them into some other idiom. She is coeditor of Feminism and Theology (Oxford) and Medicine and Moral Reasoning (Cambridge University Press). She is working on a book about naming God.

 

I’d like to begin by asking about your early life.

I was raised a nominal Anglican in western Canada. We lived in a ski town, and most of my winter was taken up with skiing. My friends and I certainly didn’t make a dent in that to go to church on Sunday. I was nevertheless confirmed in the Anglican Church. The priest instructing me must have thought I had some disposition toward theology because he got me reading Tillich. I couldn’t make anything of it, other than to think that maybe there was something more to explore. But my puerile conclusion from all this was that if God was so great, so loving and wonderful, then God wouldn’t hold it against anyone who didn’t know if they believed in God -- and so what difference did it make?

Looking back on it, I had very condescending attitudes toward religious believers. I assumed that they were all people who needed some kind of emotional or social crutch and couldn’t manage on their own -- which is, of course, precisely true. What changes when you become religious is that you realize you’re one of those people, and that Promethean heroic autonomy is a bit of a flight of fancy.

I’m somewhat timid about saying this, but I am one of those people who then had quite a dramatic religious experience which led to conversion.

How would you describe this dramatic religious experience?

It was like being wrapped in an enormous loving mystery: I had a terrific sense of presence and of mystery, but a Presence to whom I could speak.

We have a notion -- we learn it from Bible stories in our children’s illustrated Bibles -- that God speaks to people, but what’s startling is feeling you’re in the presence of a God to whom you need to speak back. But it wasn’t with words. I didn’t hear words, I didn’t see anything

I don’t want to compare my experience to that of Moses, since I was only called to open my heart, but I find the scriptural account moving in that when Moses first notices the burning bush -- a moment we have come to think of as a great theophany -- the impression given by the text is more humdrum. Moses notices a bush that is burning and not consumed, and he is curious, rather like you might be when you see a cookery display at the end of the supermarket aisle. What’s going on? It’s only when Moses takes some steps forward and is addressed by name – "Moses, Moses. Take off your shoes. The place you are standing is holy ground" -- that things fall into place.

What happened during your university years?

I continued studying philosophy at Cornell. I started going regularly to services. At the Anglican chaplaincy there was great excitement about the fact that the congregation included the philosopher Norman Malcolm, one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s former students. So we all marveled over this, much as you might marvel over an elephant standing on a washbucket. Here was the greatest philosopher at the university, and he was a Christian. How did this work? The regnant assumption was that only idiots or the completely socially depraved believed in that sort of thing. His presence was naturally quite encouraging to me. I thought it vital at this stage to find intelligent people who were both Christian and literate: Christians who’d read Proust, that sort of thing. It sounds so awful now, but that’s the way it felt at the time.

I didn’t plan to be a theologian. I’d hardly heard of theologians, and I certainly didn’t think there were such things as women theologians. But having admitted to myself by this time that I was a Christian, I thought I should apply myself to theology.

You became a Roman Catholic at this time. Why was that?

To me it feels as though I discovered that I was a Catholic. I gradually began to see that Christianity is not about solitary seekers after truth who just get together once in a while for a chat: other people are very much part of the divine scheme of things -- even scripture has come down to us through the agency of other people. It was Catholic material that really inspired me -- the Metaphysical poets, C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce and the works of Gerald Vann, OP. Malcolm Muggeridge, a friend of our principal at the Plymouth Brethren college in Vancouver, visited and spoke about how he had become a Catholic. Some found this very shocking, but I did not. I picked up an old Everyman edition of John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua in a secondhand bookshop, and, reading it, discovered that there was a beautiful and spiritual rationale for Catholic sacramental theology.

What would you say to people who haven’t been privy to the special spiritual experience you’ve described?

I’ve met many better Christians than myself who’ve never had any such deep feeling or intuition. Part of me feels that this must be dispositional -- some are more given to this kind of phenomenon than others. Some who have this experience go no further with it. (Bertrand Russell apparently had some form of spiritual experience near the end of his life, but felt it was too late to change his mind about religion.) Some who have no such experience become great saints. Some of the greatest saints -- Teresa of Avila, for example -- have years of darkness with no feeling of the presence of God at all. Some grow up with a quiet faith which they never have cause to doubt.

What, then, of those whose way is different? I think my message would echo that of Pascal: read scripture, pray, go to church, become involved with this world of faith and with people who believe, and see if things don’t click into place. I do feel that it becomes possible to see the presence of the world and its orderliness in a new way when you believe it to be a gift -- literally gratuitous -- and a gift from a Giver.

You’re touching on a popular but questionable myth: that atheism provides the neutral, common-sense view of the world, while religion is pie in the sky. It would be truer to hold that the existence of the world poses awe-inspiring questions to atheists as well as to believers.

Atheism is neither obvious nor obviously true. The big question for which there is no answer by reason alone is, of course, why there is something rather than nothing. I was once invited to take part in a radio program about miracles and was asked whether I believed In them, "Yes, of course," I said. And the researcher replied that she had recruited a leading humanist to put the contrary case. "What would you say to him?" I answered, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" There followed a baffled silence at the other end of the line, and in the end they asked a priest in charge of the Shrine at Knock to engage with the humanist instead of me.

That’s still a big problem, and believe me cosmology hasn’t answered it, astrophysics hasn’t answered it. It isn’t any more logical to say, with Aristotle, that the universe has simply always existed than it is to say that there’s a Creator, Bertrand Russell’s reply to the Jesuit philosopher Frederick Copleston -- that there’s no answer to this question -- doesn’t seem terribly satisfactory either.

So theology is to some extent a well-kept secret?

Yes, and theologians are partly responsible for that. At the same time, there’s something perverse in the way the modern academy has sidelined theology. I’ve been told by colleagues in medieval languages, and even in Dante studies, that it is "not done" to be interested in theology. How can you study medieval texts without being informed by theology? Political theorists write gamely about natural law in the 16th century without feeling the need to inquire into its religious foundations. There seems to be an assumption that because we are wise and atheistic, anyone in the past whom we admire cannot have been too much affected by religion -- that their faith is just a cultural appurtenance of as little importance to understanding their thought as their hairstyle. This isn’t objectivity: it’s prejudice. The study of theology is immensely broadening -- bringing together ethics, politics, metaphysics, aesthetics -- even if you can’t serve up neat and tidy answers.

Can you summarize what you are saying in Metaphor and Religious Language?

I was interested in moving the arguments about the reasonableness of belief a step sideways, and arguing that a religious person is not someone who has a few bizarre beliefs tacked on to what normal people believe, but someone who is informed by certain symbols, who inhabits certain sacred texts and narratives.

My question was, How do metaphors and symbols work? Can they be referential? Can they be truth-bearing? I wanted to locate these questions within a realist philosophical perspective because the prevailing dogma was that metaphor is incidental, ornamental and insubstantial. This line had prevailed since Locke, who had aligned metaphor with rhetoric (in this context considered negatively) and put both on the side of the ornamental or incidental. Neither, then, was to be considered integral or substantive. If this was right, and metaphor could never be "load bearing" if not reducible at some level to literal speech, then religious rationality would have to be consigned to the dustheap.

You wanted to argue that this couldn’t be true, but not simply to respond with a kind of leaden literalism -- God really is in his heaven and really sits on a throne.

That’s right. On the contrary, the important thing was to open up a new and more imaginative way of being a religious realist. I was surprised and delighted that the book was a success with conservatives, but I hope their reaction amounted to more than just recognizing someone else who believes that God is real, end of story. At the same time, some wrote to me to say they were glad to have a way opened up in which you could say you really do believe in God and God’s presence in your life, and the disclosure of God to Israel, without feeling that this realism commits you to believing that everything is nailed down in precise terms. Faithful knowing must also be unknowing, for the wonder of God exceeds our frail brains.

It seems you’ve been campaigning on two fronts: against the limitations of secular reasoning, and against the unacknowledged secularity common in modern Christian thought.

I’m always somewhat dispirited by the tendency to answer criticisms about the coherence of religious belief with a sort of watertight defense of its rationality. It just doesn’t seem to do justice to the sort of evidence as to how people believe and why. Conversely, you can know all the reasons and still not believe.

As a graduate student I found it depressing to find people defending philosophical realism by saying that God causes the world to come into being in much the same way as I cause this pencil to drop onto the table. There’s this kind of argument: God causes the world to come into being -- with some modest provisos such as that God, unlike us, creates outside of space and outside of time. But these aren’t modest provisos. Once you’ve inserted those qualifications, then divine creation becomes something radically different. Philosophy of religion in the analytic tradition has been haunted by a deism in which God becomes a big thing, at the opposite end of the spectrum from a neutrino. But God can’t be like that. If you really take on board the idea that God created all that is, including space and time, God’s otherness must be absolute.

Now for the three major monotheistic traditions, the fascination of the otherness of God does not imply God’s total absence. No: it is the reason we can speak of God’s total presence to the world. This is a lesson I learned from Herbert McCabe and other Dominicans, like Fergus Kerr, who effected a kind of marriage between Wittgenstein and Aquinas during the second half of the 20th century.

The lesson goes back at least as far as Augustine’s Confessions. You’ll remember the sequence: in his early days his mother is a Christian, but he hasn’t yet been baptized. He reads her Bible and thinks that it’s not written in very good Latin. It’s not very morally edifying. And who are the Jews? They’re some provincial people no one’s really heard about, Yet when he accepts Christ in a mysterious moment in the Milan garden, he comes to see that this God of the Bible who is present to Israel need not be incompatible with the Neoplatonism which still attracts him. The Christian God is still eternal, as was Plato’s god, but that doesn’t mean that God has no place in time but is every place, so to speak, in time. God’s omnipresence doesn’t mean that God is nowhere; it means that God is everywhere -- nearer to you than anything can be. Two "things" can only be so near -- but God is not a thing. The non-thingness of God means, as Augustine says, that God can be nearer to me than I am to my own self. And it’s this combination of the ultimacy of God with the intimacy of God that undergirds a lot of my work at the moment.

Your writings also offer scope for tracing paths from psychology toward spirituality. You’ve suggested that "morality, religion and mysticism are of a piece."

To go back to Augustine again, I’ve long liked his comment on the dominical teaching: the sum of the law and the prophets is to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. Augustine observes that this doesn’t seem to give guidance on how you’re meant to love yourself, but you’re meant to love yourself as in the image of God. So we have to love God fully, but we can’t love God fully without loving our neighbor fully, and without loving ourselves in the image of God fully. Those things go together.

This is why I object to any account of God’s nature that leaves other people out of the picture. We are here together with other human beings, with all their virtues and foibles. We become ourselves, as infants, by learning to love and to speak, and we have language in particular as a gift from other people. None of us invents it for ourselves (this is true of sign language too, of course). With language we move into the social world, and with language we praise, pray and promise. We characteristically move in language -- we ask questions, we call out to people, we name things, we ask someone to pass us butter or bricks, we create metaphors, we make puns. This is why Wittgenstein is so important; he never lets us forget that language, whatever else it may be, is a practice.

Religion in many ways is a practice too: it’s intensely social. I believe that God has made us to be intensely social. We come from each other. We would not be, but for our parents. We’ve learned languages from one another. This is another great Augustinian theme. In De Doctrina Christiana he says that although God could have taught us all individually and immediately by means of angels, it was part of God’s good plan that we should learn from one another, that we are tied to one another by the ligatures of love. .

Trojan Horse (Mat. 25:14-39)

Clarence Jordan used to say that a parable from Jesus was like a Trojan horse. You let it in, and Bam! -- it’s got you. But this business about the "talents" has never quite "gotten" me. Yes, it has that marvelous, often-quoted line, "Well done, good and faithful servant." I’ve tried that in a funeral sermon or two, but its emotional impact on the congregation is soured for me, as a voice (St. Augustine? Laocoön warning me to look inside the horse?) whispers darkly, "You’re doing the works-righteousness scam.

It’s November. How many churches have used this Trojan horse of the talents in their fall stewardship campaigns? "God has blessed you, don’t be like the wicked servant, pledge to us, it’s an investment in the kingdom." So many schemes exploit this theme: time-talent surveys, spiritual-gifts inventories -- all good and worthy instruments. But I’m not sure this is what Jesus had in mind.

Many churches are snapping up boxfuls of a little book called The Kingdom Assignment, the story of pastor Denny Bellesi, who doled out $10,000 in $100 increments to church members one Sunday, with three requirements: The $100 belongs to God. You must invest it in God’s work. Report your results in 90 days. The reports were startling: people made money hand over fist to contribute to the church, creative ministries were hatched, lives were transformed, people wept for joy -- and it was all covered by NBC’s Dateline. So why did I shudder a little when a church member brought me the book and said, "Let’s do this"? It feels so American. In the culture, and now in church, we’re dealin’, we’re investing -- more is better, we think. Why should I give somebody $100 and say, "This belongs to God," implying that the other half million in his investment portfolio is his?

Jesus was talking about "talents," a most unfortunate translation of the Greek talanta. A "talent" isn’t a special ability I have, my passion in life or this little light of mine, and it certainly isn’t a mere $100. Jesus wasn’t saying, "Use what is in you, invest what you have for the kingdom." He was talking about a coin that was the largest denomination of currency in the first-world system. We should translate talanta as "a huge bucket full of solid gold" or "a bank CEO megabonus" or "winning the Ohio Lottery." Only the muscular could even pick up a talanton, which might weigh 50 or 75 pounds. Each was worth around 6,000 denarii, which today would be more than I’ve earned in my 25 years in the ministry, or 20 of those flasks of pure nard Mary used on the feet of Jesus.

This amount would stagger any recipient and send him into utterly uncharted territory. A Mediterranean laborer wouldn’t have any more of a clue about how to invest five talanta than the guy who bags my groceries would about $74 million (even if I and all my friends tried to advise him). Jesus (who had never personally seen that kind of money) used an outlandish hyperbole to symbolize the gospel. What value would Jesus attach to the gospel? It is the pearl of great price, it is like the Torah of old, "more precious than gold"; you sell all you have and don’t notice the door slamming behind you as you sprint after this Jesus.

And the servants are not individual believers. We get suckered into thinking of our autonomous life with God, God giving us talanta. But these servants are the church, a corporate body to whom the gospel has been entrusted. The rewards are not neat progress reports after 90 days, but the joy of the messianic banquet.

What about the dumb, wicked servant? In Jesus’ day, burying money was regarded as prudent, and the servant no doubt expected to be commended. But he got a verbal thrashing from the master. If this parable is Jesus’ intimation that an astonishingly ravishing gift has been unloaded upon an unsuspecting church that has not the faintest notion how to handle it, then might it be that the parable solicits from us not the offering up of our individual abilities, but rather the frank, embarrassing admission of our corporate inability? We populate church committees with the best people for the task at hand, and in meetings they confidently offer insights from their education and professional experience. But maybe what God needs is people who will huddle up, shake their heads and confess, "We just have no idea; the treasure is too big, too heavy." Maybe then, and only then, we can dare something for God. God gives the gospel not to me so my ability can be put to good use, but to us so our inability might be exposed and God thereby glorified.

This thought process could ruin a financial campaign. Or would it? As it is, we print up catchy mailings, we wheedle and cajole; pledges bump up by 7 percent, and we celebrate. Isn’t that the equivalent of the burial of the one talanton, and isn’t it the harbinger of the burial of the church? The gospel isn’t being unleashed if some percentage of church members start to think of an extra $100 or so as belonging to God, or even if the most clever stewardship campaign in history magically seduced a majority of mainline Protestants into tithing. The gospel is too big for such trifles. Surely it is only to the dumbfounded, to the clueless, to the overwhelmed, to those who are under no illusion that they have ever known quite what to do because of Jesus and don’t pretend it could ever be otherwise -- to those alone that this crafter of Trojan horses says, "Well done, good and faithful servant."