rain and the rhinoceros

If you are flabbergasted by the whole media debacle over Obama and his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, I highly recommend perusing D.W. Horstkoetter’s posts on the issue.

The McDonald’s hamburger is the first ‘universal’ food, but the people — be they from La Paz, Bombay, Cairo or Brisbane — who eat the McDonald’s hamburger also consume the American way of life with it. Equally, the adherents of the ‘world ecumenism’ canvassed by the religious ‘pluralists’ align themselves with a movement that is ‘universal’, but they too ‘consume’ a certain way of life. Not quite the American way of life itself (though it is no accident that Cantwell Smith, a Canadian, and Hick and Ninian Smart, both Englishmen, have largely based themselves in the United States), but a single, overarching way of life which has become so pervasive that ‘the American way of life’ is today simply its most prominent and developed manifestation; namely, the ‘life’ of a world administered by global media and information networks, international agencies and multi- national corporations. The dominant ideology of this new world reality declares that nations, cultures, religions, and so forth, are simply obsolete if they are maintained in their old forms as fixed and intractable ‘particularities’. It is this new world reality and its ideological concomitants (e.g. the ‘global gaze’) which both makes the McDonald’s hamburger into a ‘universal’ food and sustains the ‘world ecumenism’ advocated by the exponents of religious ‘pluralism’. It creates the episteme or ‘paradigm’ which renders both sets of phenomena intelligible.

Kenneth Surin, “A Certain ‘Politics of Speech’: ‘Religious Pluralism’ in the Age of the McDonald’s Hamburger,” Modern Theology 7:1 (October 1990) 96-98.

About a year ago a man walked up to me in the parking lot of a grocery store and asked me if I knew whether I was saved. I thought about it for a second and responded, “Well, no, I don’t think I really have much choice in the matter.” He, of course, reminded me that I do in fact have a choice in the matter, so he handed me a tract with a prayer on it. He informed me that if I say this prayer I will know that I will be saved from the pit of hell. I told him that I wasn’t so sure that we could decide such matters, and that it is more likely that God makes these decisions.

I find it saddening but also quite fascinating that the Anglican communion appears to be on the brink of total division, despite the fact that the present Archbishop of Canterbury is probably one of the greatest Christian leaders that has ever lived. How do we read this theologically?

I’ve been reading John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio today and came across this gem that I just had to post.

In believing, we entrust ourselves to the knowledge acquired by other people. This suggests an important tension. On the one hand, the knowledge acquired through belief can seem an imperfect form of knowledge, to be perfected gradually through personal accumulation of evidence; on the other hand, belief is often humanly richer than mere evidence, because it involves an interpersonal relationship and brings into play not only a person’s capacity to know but also the deeper capacity to entrust oneself to others, to enter into a relationship with them which is intimate and enduring.

It should be stressed that the truths sought in this interpersonal relationship are not primarily empirical or philosophical. Rather, what is sought is the truth of the person—what the person is and what the person reveals from deep within. Human perfection, then, consists not simply in acquiring an abstract knowledge of the truth, but in a dynamic relationship of faithful self- giving with others. It is in this faithful self-giving that a person finds a fullness of certainty and security. At the same time, however, knowledge through belief, grounded as it is on trust between persons, is linked to truth: in the act of believing, men and women entrust themselves to the truth which the other declares to them. Any number of examples could be found to demonstrate this; but I think immediately of the martyrs, who are the most authentic witnesses to the truth about existence. The martyrs know that they have found the truth about life in the encounter with Jesus Christ, and nothing and no-one could ever take this certainty from them. Neither suffering nor violent death could ever lead them to abandon the truth which they have discovered in the encounter with Christ. This is why to this day the witness of the martyrs continues to arouse such interest, to draw agreement, to win such a hearing and to invite emulation. This is why their word inspires such confidence: from the moment they speak to us of what we perceive deep down as the truth we have sought for so long, the martyrs provide evidence of a love that has no need of lengthy arguments in order to convince. The martyrs stir in us a profound trust because they give voice to what we already feel and they declare what we would like to have the strength to express.

In a recent address to the London School of Economics Rowan Williams argues for a more robust understanding of human rights distinctively shaped by Christian theological convictions. In typical form, Williams wonderfully recasts the terms of debate. You gotta love this man. Here is a brief excerpt:

The dignity accorded to the human other is not, then, a recognition that they may be better than they seem, but simply a recognition that what they have to say (welcome or unwelcome, intelligible or unintelligible, convergent or divergent) could in certain circumstances be the gift of God. Not every human other is a fellow-
member of the Body of Christ in the biblical sense; but the universal command to preach the gospel to all prohibits any conclusion that this or that person is incapable of ever hearing and answering God’s invitation, and therefore mandates an attitude of receptivity towards them. Not silencing the other or forcing their communication into your own agenda is part of remaining open to the communication of God – which may come even through the human other who is most repellent or opaque to sympathy. The recognition of a dignity that grounds the right to be heard is the recognition of my own need to receive as fully as I can what is being communicated to me by another being made by God. It compels that stepping back from control or manipulation of the other which we so often seek for our security, so as to hear what we cannot generate for ourselves. And it should be clear, incidentally, that this is an argument that also grounds whatever we might want to say about the ‘right’ of the non-human world to have an integrity not wholly at the mercy of human planning.

The following is an link index to my recent series on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Love Alone is Credible:

§ 1 Apologia and the credibility of love
§ 2 Theological aesthetic and perceiving truth
§ 3 The incarnation as the form of love
§ 4 Grace and perception
§ 5 Overcoming reductions and divisions

The turn to the subject in Kant and later in Schleiermacher to justify Christian belief, what von Balthasar calls the anthropological reduction, is precisely what Karl Barth reacted against. Von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics treads a path that appears to be both a departure from the cosmological and anthropological reductions. His approach places God’s self-revelation in Christ, a revelation that appears as love, at the center of his apologia. Of course, Karl Barth was both critical of both Schleiermacher on the one hand and the cosmological reduction on the other. The result for Barth was also a retrieval of a radically Christocentric theology that placed God’s Word at the heart of any presentation of the Christian faith to the world. There is no doubt that von Balthasar and Barth diverge on many points which cannot be overlooked. Nonetheless, it is immensely beneficial to see their convergence on perhaps some of the most important aspects of their work. Indeed, both argued that the form of God’s self-revelation in Christ is primary for theological reflection and shapes our understanding of humanity. Like Barth, von Balthasar does not advocate a “translation” of the truth of the gospel into more “neutral” philosophical terms. In other words, there is no appeal to “natural” reason in von Balthasar. For von Balthasar, the preaching (and embodying) of a particular form of love, that is, the love of the Son for the Father, appears to be more fundamental and persuasive than any form of natural reason. For these reasons both von Balthasar and Barth stand as correctives to elements of their respective traditions.
Von Balthasar’s “third way” attempts to carve out an apologia, a justification for the Christian faith that escapes both the reductionism of the older cosmological approach and the modern anthropological appeal to “consciousness” and “religious experience.” The result is a radically Christocentric approach to theological knowledge that seems to share striking affinities with the Reformed theologian Karl Barth. Of course, this should not be terribly surprising, for von Balthasar wrote extensively and favorably (though not uncritically) on the theology of Karl Barth. From an ecumenical perspective, however, Love Alone is Credible offers us an insightful and useful contribution to the Roman Catholic/Protestant divide about issues such as the relationship of nature and grace, creation and redemption, and the question of natural and revealed knowledge of God. Above all, perhaps, von Balthasar’s work is most useful for the preaching of the gospel today, as it presents a promising way of defending the credibility of the gospel in the face of the challenges posed by (post)modernity.

According to von Balthasar, in order for the revelation of the Creator’s love to be perceived by the creation, there must already be some “glimmer of this love” within humanity, for “love can be recognized only by love” (75). In von Balthasar’s view, the love of God, which is grace, “necessarily includes in itself its own conditions of recognizability” and so brings the possibility of perception with it (75). To be sure, von Balthasar wants to maintain that the human response to God’s love is always free. In other words, it is, in fact, the creature who responds to God by her “own nature” and “natural powers of love” (80). Still, this is only made possible by God’s free gift of grace. God’s self-revelation which is love comes to “meet” us and “invites” us, and indeed “elevates” us to “an inconceivable intimacy” (57).

As von Balthasar points out, the Reformation (and later Karl Barth) questioned the legitimacy of raising the question of the Word’s “credibility,” for such an attempt seemed to lower Christian truth to the terms of human reason (21). Von Balthasar rightly notes that nothing could have weakened the credibility of the Christian faith more than a hopelessly divided church (22). As a result of the division in the church, von Balthasar argues that the place of the “theological credibility” of Christianity took second place next to what became rigorous rationalism. Von Balthasar carefully charts the rise of so-called “natural religion” and the ever deepening division between nature and grace. He attributes to Herbert of Cherbury the “severing of knowledge and service of God from their Christian roots” (26). Indeed, because of the hardening divisions between nature and grace, after the collapse of Catholic Romantic theology and with the arrival of neoscholasticism, Christianity could no longer justify the credibility of the faith (30).

There is no doubt that talk about morality these days is stranger than it used to be. In discussions about sexuality we often hear Christians expressing worries about the so-called “slippery slope.” It is not at all uncommon to hear Christians vocalizing their concern about the erosion of the moral foundations of society and the all-pervasiveness of what is known as “moral relativism.” It is often remarked that if we allow homosexuals to get married, for instance, then surely “everything is up for grabs.” It is, however, not at all clear why “relativism” is so shocking to a people who believe their God was crucified. The reality of “relativism” in our society should hardly be surprising. The point that I am attempting to express here is quite simple: disciples of a crucified God should learn to expect to come into conflict with the world.