Announcement: Analytic Theology Fellowships & Grants for 2012-2013

The Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame, with support from the Templeton Foundation, announces the following fellowships and grants available for the 2012-2013 academic year:

Analytic Theology Cluster Grants

These grants fund interdisciplinary seminars or reading groups. Each funded seminar or group has two leaders – one theologian and one philosopher – and up to eight additional participants. The leaders must be faculty members. We will award up to five Grants with a maximum $15,000 budget per grant. For details visit the Analytic Theology Project website. To apply to be a leader send a 500 word letter of intent and budget to analytictheology.project-at-gmail-dot-com by February 15, 2012. Full proposals will be invited on a competitive basis. (Prospective participants apply to leaders after funding is secured.)

Analytic Theology Summer Stipends

These stipends provide $5,000 to fund summer research in analytic theology. Successful applicants in year one or two will automatically receive an award in year two or three if they meet the following two conditions: (a) they intend to research a project in analytic theology during the second summer, and (b) their previously funded project has been swiftly accepted for publication at a peer-reviewed journal. For further details visit the website. All materials must be received by February 1, 2012.

Analytic Theology Course Awards

These awards provide funding for the development and implementation of courses, or course segments, in analytic theology at divinity schools and departments of theology and religious studies. The project expects to award five applicants with $15,000 each: $5,000 for the applying faculty member, and $10,000 for the host institution. See the website for more information on the course award program. Applications are due March 15, 2012.

Analytic Theology Post-Doctoral Fellowships

These are one-year fellowships for the 2012-2013 academic year. They provide a funded leave of absence to be spent in residence at a center for research on philosophy of religion or philosophical theology. These fellowships are open to faculty who teach in theology, religion, or divinity programs. Applicants must outline a research program that leads to scholarly publications in analytic theology or to new programs of study. Fellows receive a $60,000 stipend plus $15,000 for expenses. For details, including sample topics and application requirements, see the theology fellowships overview on the website. All materials must be received by January 15, 2012.

The real impasse in the debate over Rob Bell

Mark Galli’s book, God Wins—a response, obviously, to Love Wins—was the topic of discussion last week. The book has been available on Kindle for a few weeks, though it doesn’t appear in print until August 1. In it, Galli explains why he thinks “love wins” is an insufficient understanding of the gospel, because it bypasses the question of God’s judgment and wrath. Hence, “God wins.” One almost wants to ask Galli whether he’s forgotten 1 John 4:8. But that’s a cheap shot. Since I haven’t read the book yet—and since I’ve already written a few thousand words on Galli in my series responding to his deeply misguided and misinformed review in Christianity Today—I defer to the recent blog posts by Roger Olson, a man I highly respect and deeply admire.

Olson, a friend of Galli, wrote about God Wins on July 7. There he made a number of ambiguous remarks that were clearly an attempt to praise the qualities of the man while criticizing the claims of the book. He begins by stating that “Mark is a serious evangelical scholar with an irenic approach to controversial material.” He then goes on to say, “I get the sense that Mark felt things that I did not feel and that I felt things Mark (and others) did not feel.” And later: “I think that may be because Mark is a member of a denomination struggling with rampant liberalism in which conservatives (by which here I mean people who value traditional, orthodox, biblical Christianity) feel embattled. I, on the other hand, have been beset by fundamentalists and aggressive neo-fundamentalist heresy-hunters.” The rest of the review is just filler: Mark is a great guy, but he’s approaching this book from a perspective I do not share. Translation: his criticisms of Love Wins are not really about Bell; they are instead about Galli’s own issues within his ecclesial context.

Olson followed up that review of God Wins with another post on “Why I defend Rob Bell’s Love Wins (and other controversial books).” In this fascinating post, Olson puts forward the claim that what is really driving a book like God Wins is the whole Calvinism-Arminianism debate. He then states:

I think SOME evangelical Calvinists are so allergic to both Arminianism and liberalism that they tend to lump them together and not see their differences.  There’s something in American evangelical Calvinisms’ DNA that makes it see a trajectory from Arminianism (or anything like it) to liberalism.  I deny that trajectory and, in fact, tend to think it is the other way around (if anything): Calvinism leads to liberalism.

Olson compares Love Wins to the books related to the open theism controversy. He observes that the attacks made against both by Calvinists are the very same arguments used by Calvinists against Arminianism. What happens in these debates is that the particularities of open theism and Bell’s “open eschatology” (if I may put it thus) are lost amidst polemics about divine sovereignty and human free will. In Olson’s words, “the crux of the debate has to do with two different interpretations of 1 Timothy 2:4,” and “the deep, inner logic of the attacks on Love Wins” are rooted in “Reformed assumptions about God rather than out of Arminian assumptions about God.” Olson then makes a very interesting comment that warrants further reflection:

Simply to respond that God Wins is to raise some questions from the Arminian side.  In what sense does God win?  Does God get everything he wanted?  Does God want hell–antecedently as well as consequently?  If you say no, then why does hell exist?  It has to be because of free will and that has to be because of God’s loving self-limitation.  If you say yes, then that raises a host of questions about God’s goodness.  There don’t seem to be alternatives.  Either God wanted hell antecedently, in which case God is a monster, or God only wants hell consequently (to the fall) and that means God doesn’t exactly “win” in every sense, right?  But love can still win IN THE SENSE that love wants free response and not coerced or programmed response.

There is much here worth examining in detail, but in the interests of brevity, I will summarize my thoughts with the following points. These are not meant to be exhaustive. They only hit on some of the key issues for the sake of further discussion.

1. The Calvinist-Arminian debate is an old one, but it seems blissfully unaware that there are serious alternatives to this rather stale binary opposition. It might seem a bit obvious, since it’s been suggested many times before, but a really compelling alternative is that of Karl Barth. Why? Well, it all comes down to understanding what we mean by freedom. The problem with both Calvinism and Arminianism is that freedom—whether the freedom of God or the freedom of the human being, respectively—has been defined in the abstract. The Calvinist freedom of God (i.e., the absolute sovereignty to determine the elect and the reprobate) and the Arminian freedom of humanity (i.e., the free will to determine one’s eternal identity in response to the gospel message) are both known prior to and apart from how God has actually exercised freedom in the person of Jesus. In other words, both are metaphysical conceptions of freedom. They are abstract notions not determined by the concrete particularity of God’s self-revelation. Now it may be that both sides simply don’t care; they like their metaphysics and cling to it tightly. That could very well be the case. But it’s important to point out just what is being assumed on both sides. In both cases, Christ is not definitive for what divine and human freedom means theologically.

2. Of course, to lift up Barth as a possible solution to the debate is not new, nor is it very persuasive to hard-core adherents of both positions. I suspect Calvinists and Arminians want their abstract conceptions of freedom, not because they care about the debates over metaphysics but because they are both deeply afraid of what it mean to go a different route. To put it directly, both Calvinists and Arminians are afraid of universalism. Calvinists need an abstract divine freedom (that is, an abstract decision of predestination) because their commitment to irresistible grace and the efficacy of God’s election means that a divine freedom determined by Christ’s reconciling promeity would result in the salvation of all people. Arminians need an abstract human freedom because their commitment to God’s universal desire for all to be saved (see Olson’s reference to 1 Tim. 2:4 above) would mean, again, that all humans would be saved were it not for our ability to thwart God’s will. But maybe—just maybe!—the problem is the presupposition by both sides that the salvation of all people is absolutely prohibited as a possible option in theology. Maybe our abstract commitments to a non-universalist eschatology and to certain notions of what freedom means for God and for human beings are at the root of the problem. Maybe we should let the reconciling mission of Christ determine what we can say about freedom and eschatological consummation.

3. In other words, the following claim by Olson is a false binary: “Either God wanted hell antecedently, in which case God is a monster, or God only wants hell consequently (to the fall) and that means God doesn’t exactly ‘win’ in every sense, right?” The answer is no and no. I agree with Olson that God would be a monster for willing hell in advance. The old doctrine of double predestination is indeed a diabolic position to hold. But the Arminian alternative fares no better. Is a God who sends people to hell really much worse than a God who is impotent in the end to save those who reject the gospel (or never hear it in the first place)? The former is a God who is sovereign but cruel; the latter is a God who is weak but loving. The former is protologically monstrous, while the latter is eschatologically monstrous. But it’s unacceptable either way. If all are not finally saved, then God cannot be said to have “won.” And a God who does not “win”—who does not fully and finally accomplish God’s own perfect will—is simply not the God attested in scripture.

4. We can put the problem another way: for both Calvinists and Arminians, love and justice have been defined in the abstract, i.e., apart from God’s concrete self-communication in Christ. Thus both pit love and justice in a competitive relationship. Calvinism grounds the competition in God’s eternal predestination—so that God determines where love will “win” and where justice will “win.” Arminianism grounds the competition in the conflict between a loving God and a sinful humanity: God loves everyone, but this loving divine will is overpowered by a human refusal of this love that, according to the rules of the game, forces God to exact justice. If we begin with Christ, however, it turns out that love and justice are non-competitively related, since it is precisely the love of God for all that God’s cruciform justice serves to accomplish. Justice is simply the form that God’s love takes in the event of the cross. The notions of love and justice are not theologically meaningful independent of and prior to the actualization of God’s just love in the concrete reality of Jesus Christ. The attempt to define them in advance and then figure out how they relate theologically results in this intractable debate.

5. This whole debate also seems to take for granted the notion that eschatology refers to something “beyond death,” that is, beyond each person’s individual perishing. Maybe that’s something we need to reconsider as well.

Some rather unanalytic thoughts on analytic theology: reflections on Logos 2011

I returned on Sunday from Logos 2011, a superb three-day conference at the University of Notre Dame, sponsored by the Center for Philosophy of Religion and under the specific auspices of the Analytic Theology Project. Let me begin by thanking Michael Rea and the other organizers of the conference for inviting me to participate in the conversation. It was an honor to be there and I greatly enjoyed my time at Notre Dame.

After writing a number of tweets (#logos2011) about it, I’ve naturally been asked to comment at length about the experience. I will do so now, though my assessment here is merely provisional in nature. Larger issues raised at the conference will have to be addressed at another time. This year’s topic on divine revelation, scripture, canon, and biblical authority is a central interest of my work, and for that reason, many of the most interesting theological insights from the conference will have to wait for a future occasion. Here I only want to raise some concerns that I have about the project of analytic theology more broadly, in light of the conversations I had at the conference.

But first, let me gush about the fantastic people I was so privileged to meet. I very much enjoyed conversing with Evan Fales (Iowa), whose paper was a favorite of mine at the conference, and whose use of Leach, Durkheim, Levi-Strauss to interpret scripture is immensely interesting to me. Getting to know Tamsin Jones (Harvard) was a highlight of my time. I was also happy to meet and interact with Andrew Dole (Amherst). It was a pleasure to interact with Oliver Crisp (formerly of Bristol, now at Fuller) and Michael Rea (Notre Dame); both graciously answered my questions and Crisp especially is a lot of fun at a bar. After years of reading his work, I finally met Kevin Vanhoozer (Wheaton) for the first time, as well as his family. More recently, I have taken a great interest in Kenton Sparks (Eastern), whose book God’s Word in Human Words is perhaps the best evangelical treatment of modern biblical scholarship—a work I cannot recommend too highly. Sadly, however, I had to miss the opening session with Peter Enns, a man I highly respect and admire. The reason for this is a little long, but suffice it to say, my luggage was lost during a layover at O’Hare airport. I received it the next day around noon at our hotel, but the last shuttle for the morning session left at 11 am. I also did not have a chance to talk personally with William Abraham (SMU), who provided what was for me the highlight of the trip (see below).

Second, let me also state the obvious: for a conference organized under the auspices of analytic theology, there were very few actually analytic theology or philosophy papers. Unlike previous Logos conferences (from what I’ve heard), this conference broadened the scope of participants considerably. They also chose scholars known for their work on this particular doctrinal topic, as opposed to picking analytic scholars to speak about the topic. The result was an excellent discussion about scripture, though perhaps not as satisfying on a philosophical level for those working in analytic philosophy of religion. Since I’m not interested in analytic theology myself, I found the papers very interesting and worthwhile. Some of the papers were even critical of analytic theology, whether implicitly (Paul Nimmo) or explicitly (Vanhoozer, Abraham).

In the rest of this post, I want to raise some concerns I have about the whole project of analytic theology. I raise these as part of a good faith effort to understand what the project is trying to do. If I have misconstrued anything, I do hope those in the analytic theology circles will correct me. I view myself as a friendly critic, an outsider interested in helping those “inside” do their work better.

My general critique is a classically “continental” one: viz. that I am concerned with the apparently ahistorical and non-social conception of reason with which the analytic people appear to be working. That is to say, there seems to be a sense that theological claims and concepts can be evaluated in abstraction from the historical, cultural, and political contexts within which such claims and concepts originate and develop. So we can evaluate someone like Schleiermacher or Barth by distilling a set of propositions and deciding whether the conclusions rationally follow from the premises. While this appears quite objective, it does not properly take into account both the inherently contextual nature of these theological texts but also the intrinsically social nature of reason itself. The former comes from the fact that these and other theologians are writing within a particular tradition, responding to developments within that tradition, and seeking to speak for this tradition within a new historical situation. The latter is a larger claim that goes back at least to Hegel (see Pinkard’s The Sociality of Reason), with whom I agree. But I cannot defend that tradition of thought here. That’s not to say analytic philosophy cannot take up this Hegelian line of thinking. People like Robert Brandom and John McDowell have done just that, within an analytic pragmatism or a particular reading of Wittgenstein that socializes our thinking, speaking, and doing in the world. (One could justifiably say that the analytic tradition is divided between two different readings of Wittgenstein. By and large, those I met at Logos don’t read him the way I do.)

I bring up this “continental” argument, because I think it illuminates a lot of the disagreements and misunderstandings that I overheard at the conference. I don’t just mean the dismissal of Barth I encountered, or the statements about Schleiermacher having a God who cannot act in the world and does not love humanity. These were certainly very bad and did not inspire confidence about the future, but these are not views unique to analytic theologians; many people hold such notions out of a general lack of knowledge of these theologians and an unwillingness to charitably engage them on their own terms. The problems I am referring to are things like the incredulous stares of some at the notion that I or another person are happy to get rid of inerrancy. While it wasn’t made entirely clear, I gathered that this is because the doctrine of inerrancy is a key premise in a syllogism regarding the authority of scripture. If one dispenses with this doctrine, one dispenses with the logical argument for scripture’s authority and meaningfulness. It became clear to me that many of these analytic grad students are simply ignorant of the entire theological tradition regarding this doctrine. They’ve never read the Protestant scholastics on verbal-plenary inspiration, never studied the writings of Hodge and Warfield in their historical context, never examined the arguments Barth gives for rejecting these doctrines or assessed the cultural and historical reasons for his claims. What these philosophers of religion want to know is: is this doctrine rational or irrational? is scripture authoritative or not? The idea that inerrancy could be a culturally-loaded term, with a complex web of historical relations that have to be entangled before it can be rightly evaluated, is viewed as either irrelevant or foreign or both.

This is why I think people like Enns and Sparks—both of whom, like Barth, make a very sharp distinction between the “humanity” of the text and the “divinity” of God’s word—provoked looks of puzzled astonishment, as if they’ve heard a new language for the very first time. The analytic crowd seemed to insist that unless we could directly predicate inspiration, revelation, and authority of the biblical text (qua text, i.e. words on the page), the whole Christian game would be up. The Barthian/actualistic position—that revelation is directly identified with the person of Christ himself, and that the word of God is a christic-pneumatic event in the encounter between text and reader—got no hearing at all at the conference. I’m not sure anyone in the analytic crowd knows what to do with it. An event resists any logical proposition. It is an existential disruption, not a syllogistic conclusion. Every analytic evaluation of Barth that I’ve read ends up greatly misunderstanding Barth’s christocentrism. They seem to forget that what distinguishes Barth from someone like Charles Hodge is not the various doctrinal propositions with which each agrees; it is rather the entire nature of what theology is as a discipline: its origin, ground, and telos. Between the systematic arrangement of discrete timeless, universal, propositional facts and the contextual-historical reflection on the faith and proclamation of a particular community—between scripture as the revelation of universal truths about God and Christ as the contingent actualization of God’s being that demands ever-new interpretation within new contingent situations—yawns a great chasm.

Returning to Enns for a moment: I think at the end of the day much of this conflict comes down to a christological disagreement regarding the very nature of incarnation. Enns and Sparks could both use some greater sophistication in their use of christological categories, but their essential insight is quite sound: scripture is a fundamentally and thoroughly human document, bearing all the marks of our finitude and fallenness. But precisely as a human document, God speaks in and through it in a way that remains truthful and normative. The incarnational analogy that Enns uses helps to illuminate this very point. Jesus is not God “in spite of” his human form, but precisely “as” a human, including everything that being human implies and demands (insofar as what is not assumed is not redeemed).

However, this is where we run into problems, because we have to clarify just what we mean by incarnation. The classical Chalcedonian tradition is both helpful and dangerous in this regard, because people like Cyril of Alexandria were quite willing to instrumentalize the human nature. The divine Logos was understood to be the sole active agent in the incarnation, while the flesh functioned passively like a garment worn by God in the world. So the incarnational analogy can easily support a very instrumentalist doctrine of inerrancy, even a full-blown theory of dictation (which a couple people at the conference came very close to accepting outright, and are at least sympathetic with). A better incarnational analogy requires a better christology, one that affirms the full human agency of Jesus. The way to do so, in my view, is through Barth, Jüngel, and McCormack—where Jesus is God precisely in his historical existence, where the “human nature” is not something appended onto the “divine nature” because the human existence is precisely where divinity is ontologically located (which to the analytics appears like a collapse of the natures).

I say all this because I think the lack of comprehension regarding incarnation and inerrancy is really indicative of a larger disagreement regarding the very nature of theological reasoning. This became clear at the after-dinner talk given by Billy Abraham (title: “Turning Philosophical Water into Theological Wine”!), in which he made it very clear that all Christian theology is a “spiritual enterprise,” which has spiritual formation as its rightful telos. Theology cannot escape things like diversity of tradition, historical and intellectual diversity, and the diversity of audiences. In short, the very idea of a universal rational discourse is, at least for theology, an illusion. He didn’t put it quite this way, but his point was that theology is about Christian discipleship, and discipleship involves concrete human beings within concrete historical contexts. It speaks from and for a particular group of believers, seeking to upbuild them in the faith and orient them toward love of God and neighbor. I do think most everyone in the room was on board with this, but there were some clear misgivings by some of the analytic types. The most telling moment occurred when one young man asked, “I really don’t understand why theology has to be concerned with spiritual formation at all. Why can’t it be just about logic and reason?” Abraham’s response was to the point: “Go do philosophy.” In other words, don’t call yourself a theologian, because you’re not doing theology. This particular man wasn’t the only person to raise this concern, and I suspect many people in the audience agreed with him.

So let me step back and assess what I take to be the general issue here. Is there such a thing as universal truth? Does theology trade in universally-valid propositions? Do we have access to timeless facts whose validity is universal in scope because not historically-conditioned? These are the kinds of questions that really divide the camps. I don’t want to get into how I would answer those questions here, since that would make this post even longer than it already is. For now, I’ll just say that even if there is universal truth, it’s not universal in the sense of being accessible to all—it is only truth for faith, i.e., within the context of the community of believers. The universality of truth is thus inseparable from the contingency and particularity of history.

My position thus stands in stark contrast to those in the analytic theology school, and I think there is a fairly obvious reason for this. Analytic theology is a subset of analytic philosophy of religion. According to proponents of analytic theology, this field is simply the systematic extension of the analytic philosophy of religion to every doctrinal locus. The aims of analytic theology are not fundamentally different from the aims of the philosophy of religion; there is a quantitative, rather than qualitative, difference between the two. Now the academic discipline of analytic philosophy understands its task to be the logical analysis of propositional arguments about various topics. Those who have not swallowed the Wittgensteinian, much less the Hegelian, pill—who still operate within the sphere of so-called universals—see themselves as capable of abstracting concepts from the historical contexts within which they are used; they can be analyzed apart from their concrete uses in particular situations for particular ends. A logically-justified claim has universal significance. Contrary to the “postmodern” continental tradition, everything is not hermeneutics.

For me, on the contrary, everything is hermeneutics. Every concept is culturally situated, every claim is determined by its location within history. There is no universally-valid ontology, no metaphysic that is not conditioned by a particular sociopolitical context. Now I think there are many ways of reaching this “continental” conclusion, but my reason is purely theological: Jesus Christ is the historicization of God, thus the historicization of theology. Speech about God is not speech about a universal concept of deity; it is contextual speech about the concrete reality of God in the world. This means that the very being of God is the ground for the hermeneutical nature of all theological discourse. There is no speech about God that is not essentially a matter of hermeneutical understanding. All talk of God is interpretation.

Is this an absolute divide? Are these two approaches to theology mutually exclusive? I’d like to think they aren’t, because I do want to engage these analytic theologians in constructive conversation that will be to our mutual benefit. But I am deeply skeptical. I am concerned that we have such radically different views of God, Christ, scripture, and revelation that we will never be able to move past prolegomena to actually do joint work in doctrinal reflection. I hope I am proved wrong and that my suspicions and worries are misguided. Based on the conference, however, I am left with decidedly mixed feelings.

Personally, I do not believe you can start with philosophy of religion and ever reach Christian theology. I am with Barth on this one. Or as Bultmann put it, “There is no alternative; [philosophy] must be either maid or mistress.” With Barth and Bultmann, I want the former (philosophy as maid). There are many at the conference that would probably agree with this, making theology the queen of the sciences. But exactly what they mean by this is often unclear. It seems that, in practice, philosophy is in fact the mistress—or, rather, they see no qualitative distinction between philosophy and theology, and whenever such a view is held, philosophy is inevitably the one in control.

I must reiterate again my deep gratitude for the invitation to attend Logos 2011. It was a pleasure to be there. I had some of the best conversations of the year (including some of the best drinks!). I met many incredible people, whom I look forward to seeing again in the future. I hope my misgivings are themselves misguided. I eagerly await future opportunities to discuss these important topics in more depth. In the meantime, consider me a friendly but critical outsider wishing the analytic theologians the best. There is still time to turn the philosophical water into theological wine.

Logos 2011: Revelation, Authority, and Canon

I leave on Wednesday for the University of Notre Dame as an invited participant in the 2011 Logos Workshop. This year’s theme is revelation and scripture, focusing on issues related to biblical inspiration, authority, and canon. The papers are by some of the leading scholars in the field, including Peter Enns, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Kenton Sparks. Other presenters include C. Stephen Evans, Eleonore Stump, and (to my great delight) Paul Nimmo. The papers I have read have been nothing short of excellent. I eagerly look forward to the conversation, and I’m honored to have been invited. I expect it to be a highlight of the year.

If you’ll be in the vicinity of South Bend next week and would like to meet up with me, send me an email. My evenings will be relatively free, and nothing is scheduled before 10:00 in the morning.

Christological Unity and Pneumatological Plurality: A Theological Reflection on the Church

Rachel Held Evans recently held her Rally to Restore Unity, a noble and much-needed effort to establish some healthy, humorous, and charitable dialogue among Christians. Consider this my modest and belated effort to contribute to that conversation.

What is the theological basis for Christian unity? What defines unity for Christian faith? The epistle to the Ephesians provides the best answer: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. … In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord” (Eph. 2:13-14, 21). It is the person and work of Christ—the one crucified for us and our salvation—that forms the “ontological” ground for Christian unity. The unity of the church is located “in him.” Ecumenical peace only exists “in him.” The christology of Ephesians 2 is thus the basis for the more famous passage on unity in Ephesians 4. And we see this in other NT letters. Probably the most succinct and famous passage is Gal. 3:28, which states that all are now “one” in Christ.

But what kind of unity is this? In what sense is a theological-christological unity supposed to be evident on the level of phenomenology? It is in moving in this direction that I think most people tend to go astray. The assumption is that an ontological unity in Christ necessitates some kind of concrete, phenomenal unity on the level of corporate practice, if not also doctrinal formulation. In one sense, this is true enough; the fact that we are unified in Christ ought to translate into the actual practice of unity, as Halden and Ry have correctly argued. We need to do away with the notion that unity is something we do by finding universally-acceptable confessions and doctrinal statements, or through practicing a common liturgy of word and sacrament. Unity is not a task that we must realize. It is instead an indicative before an imperative; and there is only the latter because of the former.

All of this is a much-needed correction of a certain pragmatic ecumenical logic. And yet, I am still concerned about the very definition of “unity” that seems to be presupposed by all sides. What exactly does it mean to be unified? How does the gospel inform what unity looks like? Here is where I think the christological ontology of unity has to be supplemented by—or, rather, is actually ontologically inseparable from—a complex pneumatological repetition. In order to illustrate what I mean, I suggest we look at the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. We all know what happens. Jews in Jerusalem “from every nation under heaven” heard the apostles “speaking in the native language of each” (Acts 2:5-6). Biblical and theological scholars often point out that Pentecost is the Christian reversal of Babel, but this insight is worthy of further exploration.

First, whereas the Tower of Babel involved the loss of a unified language and so the loss of communication, Pentecost involves the restoration of communication in and through the diversity of human languages. Let’s reflect on this for a moment. Notice that the reversal of Babel is not a complete reversal; if it were, the Spirit would establish one common language in place of the many languages. But this is not what happens. God speaks a single message in a multiplicity of tongues: one kerygma, many contexts. What this means is that, in a certain sense, Pentecost actually blesses Babel, i.e., it sanctifies the very diversity that is the cause of our cultural fragmentation and miscommunication. Second, it strikes me that in the contrast between Babel and Pentecost, we have a perfect illustration of two kinds of ecumenical unities. Babel represents the pragmatic-anthropocentric unity forged through doctrinal agreement and liturgical participation. Pentecost represents the theological-christocentric unity established in the flesh of Jesus as the crucified one who destroyed the walls dividing one person from another, one nation from another, one denomination from another.

Third, it is particularly significant that this sanctified reversal of Babel occurs in association with the Spirit. If Christ concretizes the reality of God in a particular historical location, the Spirit universalizes this singular concretization through its infinite repetition. What’s especially important is that this pentecostal repetition is not the mere reproduction of the same. It is instead a creative repetition of the gospel in which the kerygmatic word of the cross is translated into an infinity of cultural contexts and historical situations. The repetition that God enacts, and that is consonant with the reconciling work of Christ, takes the form of a cultural diversification, a complex dissemination of the kerygma in a multiplicity of contexts. This repetition does not add anything to the singularity of Christ as the event of reconciliation; it rather bursts it open from within, enabling it to tear down dividing walls that no one—not even Jesus himself—could have known or anticipated. The Spirit turns Christ’s death and resurrection into an infinitely transposable truth-event capable of revolutionizing any situation, because in a certain ontological sense, Christ has already revolutionized every situation.

What is the practical payoff of this dense theological reflection? There are many aspects that could be developed, such as the claims that “mission makes the church” and that the gospel is intrinsically translatable. I want to focus on the nature of Christian unity. If it is indeed the case that our unity in Christ is inseparable from our being bound up in a pneumatic event of cultural translation, then this has rather dramatic implications for what it means to be part of the body of Christ. We are not dealing with a stable, static body whose limbs are all clearly identifiable as part of a single historical organism. We are instead dealing with a diasporic body whose limbs and parts are scattered and broken in every corner of the earth. It is the very confusion of Babel that is sanctified by the Spirit, because the infinitely translatable Christ is present and active in the midst of this confusion as the one who binds all the scattered remains together in his singular person—but not in a way that could be made phenomenally observable or dogmatically objectifiable. The post-pentecostal Christ cannot be definitively located; he cannot be tied down to any particular church or creed. His future cannot be directly identified with the future of any worldly institution or historical entity.

This brings us to the punch line: we correctly understand our unity to Christ only when it becomes clear that this unity is in fact irreducibly plural in nature; the unity is itself a multiplicity. We are united with those whom we do not know, and with whom we do not agree. Put more pointedly, it is precisely those who claim to be “orthodox” over against the “heterodox” who actually betray the unity that is characteristic of the Christian gospel. Those who cling tightly to their orthodoxy—whether a “sacred deposit,” a confession (such as Westminster), or a doctrine (such as inerrancy)—fail to bear witness to the pneumatological plurality that is distinctive of Christian faith in Jesus Christ. True unity is marked instead by cultural multiplicity and missionary translatability.

On the new universalism: a response to James K. A. Smith

Thanks to the likes of Rachel Held Evans, Rob Bell, Gregory MacDonald/Robin Parry, and many others, the debate over universalism is all the rage today. In a recent blog post, Calvin professor James K. A. Smith has weighed in on this new development. He begins with the following promising description:

This ain't your Grandma's universalism (if your Grandma was, say, a Unitarian). The (relatively) old universalism was a liberal universalism of "many-roads-to-God-who-is-a-big-cuddly-Grandpa" (or, more recently, Grandma). Such a universalism was generally embarrassed by Christian particularity and any claims to the divinity of Christ. Instead, Jesus was a kindly teacher like so many others pointing us all to that great kumbaya-sing-along in the the "beyond." 

In contrast, the "new" universalism is an evangelical universalism, a Christocentric universalism. If all will be saved, they will be saved in Christ, because of the work of Christ as the Incarnate God who has triumphed over the power of sin and death (the new universalist Christ is a victor, not a redeemer).

We can let the overly simplistic typology slide for the moment. The notion that there are two universalisms—a liberal Unitarian version and an evangelical christocentric version—is historically dubious at best. I’ve been reading the new special edition of John A. T. Robinson’s 1950 classic, In the End, God . . . , and I’ve been struck by how evangelical this text really is. Robinson is (in)famous for his provocatively liberal work from 1963, Honest to God (which has gotten a far worse reputation than it deserves, in my opinion), which questions the traditional realist conception of God. But his earlier work is badly in need of new readers. It is a perfect example of how the liberal-evangelical binary is entirely unhelpful. Robinson really breaks those stereotypes, and Trevor Hart’s new introduction very helpfully shows why T. F. Torrance’s rejection of Robinson’s universalism was mistaken on basically every point. Robinson is just as christocentric—and in some ways, even more so—than the new evangelical universalist. I recommend this work highly. Nevertheless, Smith’s basic point is valid: the new universalism is centered in Christ in a way that pluralistic forms of universalism (such as that of John Hicks) never were. The particularity of Christ’s claim to be the way, the truth, and the life is firmly upheld. That much Smith gets right, and it’s a crucial observation.

But problems emerge already at this point, for what could Smith possibly mean by the statement that “the new universalist Christ is a victor, not a redeemer”? Is there an either-or here? Does Christ-as-redeemer require rejecting universalism? How is the triumph over sin and death not an act of redemption? This is the first of many theological problems with Smith’s post. The ambiguities and assumptions continue to mount from here. See what Smith writes next:

The question, then, is just what compels one to be an evangelical universalist? Some resort to prooftexting, operating with a naive, selective reading of Scripture. I'm going to do the evangelical universalist a favor and ignore such a strategy, only because I think it can be so easily refuted. (Many of these evangelical universalists would pounce on such selective prooftexting in other contexts.) 

No, the motivation for evangelical universalism is not really a close reading of the Bible's claims about eternity. Instead, it seems that the macro-motivation for evangelical universalism is less a text and more a hermeneutic, a kind of "sensibility" about the very nature of God as "love" (which includes its own implicit sensibility about the nature of love).

The problem with Smith’s emphasis on psychological motivation—and the implied notion that universalism is a pathological condition—has already been dissected by Halden. I want to raise the issue of Smith’s bifurcation between exegesis and hermeneutics. Notice that he says evangelical universalism is motivated by a “hermeneutic” rather than “a close reading” of biblical texts. This, of course, is naive at best. Every act of exegetical interpretation is itself already an exercise in hermeneutical understanding. The close reading of scripture is inseparable from a hermeneutic that guides this reading, even if it is never actually articulated or reflected upon by the exegete herself. What the evangelical universalists ought to “pounce on” is not the claim that they are proof-texting—which is frankly just silly and is not borne out by any of the representatives of the new universalism—but rather the even more egregious claim that their position is not grounded in the text at all but remains at a macro level of abstract analysis.

The truth is that the opponents of any kind of Christian universalism are more often than not the ones engaging in proof-texting. They tend to be the ones who point to Matthew 25 or (if they really aren’t paying attention) John 14:6 as if these are somehow knock-down arguments against all versions of universal reconciliation. The non-universalists are equally guilty, if not more so, of a “naive, selective reading of Scripture.” When you take into account works like The Inescapable Love of God and The Evangelical Universalist—as well as the collection, “All Shall Be Well,” to see that universalism has a long history in the church—it becomes plainly obvious that there is deep textual analysis going on, at a level that many of their opponents simply cannot match. So that whole charge is a moot point, and Smith should not have raised it in the first place. It’s a cheap shot that he then condescendingly leverages, by way of doing the universalist “a favor,” into rhetorical brownie points, in the form of an ironically supercilious ethical appeal (“I’m so magnanimous that I will overlook this flaw to make my opponent’s case appear stronger”).

In fact, not only are non-universalists often guilty of proof-texting passages about hell and eternal judgment—but Jamie Smith himself is guilty of such proof-texting a little later in his post. In the context of discussing why one’s personal hopes have to be governed by the authority of scripture, he relates a hypothetical situation regarding his hope for marriage in the afterlife. He then cites the following statement from Jesus, “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:30). Talk about proof-texting! Smith just quotes this passage and says that his hope has to be disciplined by the truth of scripture. But where’s the exegesis? Where is the careful analysis that contextualizes this passage? Where is the hermeneutical reflection to ground one’s interpretation? Answer: it’s non-existent. This is a perfect example of what I criticized Mark Galli for in his review of Rob Bell’s book in Christianity Today: shifting the goalposts. Like Galli, Smith seems to think that he is “above” such criticisms, that he can attack proof-texting when it leads to universalism (even though none of the universalists I know actually engage in such proof-texting), but he can freely do it himself because he is maintaining some “orthodox” position on salvation and damnation. This is a recurring problem among conservatives. They allow themselves more liberty because of what appears to be a misguided sense of moral and intellectual superiority, while those who propound “radical” views are placed within far stricter limits. (There’s an analogy here to various disparities within the American justice system, but that’s another topic for another time.) The delicious irony here is that many of the universalists already recognize these higher standards and freely place themselves within them in order to bolster their argument!

But we’re not done here. Look at how Smith uses the word “hermeneutic”: as a “sensibility.” This is a subtle instance of begging the question, in that he has loaded his description of the universalist position in such a way that his critique is already included within it. Where is the argument that the theological hermeneutic of the new universalists is merely a “sensibility” (which reads with an air of snobbish disdain) that God is by nature “love.” (Why the scare quotes on “love”? As if only sentimental, bleeding-heart liberal universalists make such silly statements, and not the author of 1 John?) Is there any proof that the new universalists do not have a robust theological hermeneutic? Is it really true that they do not have a consistent, clear way of understanding how competing passages ought to be interpreted? Is it really just a matter of personal feeling about who God is? If Smith’s outlandish claims are to be even remotely acceptable, he has to actually make some concrete arguments. Making abstract assertions about a general group of scholars and pastors, with no actual argumentation in sight, is irresponsible. One could more justifiably charge Smith with being guided by a “sensibility”—a sense that these universalists are just woolly-minded liberals with no real theological sophistication. It’s always a lot easier to attack inner feelings, motivations, and sensibilities than actual texts. With the former, there’s no way to disprove your statements. Of course, there’s no way to prove them either.

The rest of Smith’s post is full of more assertions about  “imagination” and “hope” as the two strategies or sensibilities determining the new evangelical universalism. One says that “I can’t imagine” so-and-so being in hell, while the other says that “I hope” this is how things turn out. Halden has already deconstructed the first notion as a bogus charge, since the implied converse—“I can’t imagine so-and-so being in heaven”—is “no less anthropocentric and Feuerbachian than the (imagined) argument it is designed to counter.” It’s also worth pointing out the strange path that Smith has taken in this post. He began by saying the new evangelical universalism is not like the old liberal universalism because it is “christocentric.” And yet now he is leveling the charge of being “Feuerbachian” at the new universalists. You can’t get much more liberal than that!

This further reinforces the oddness of the whole piece. Smith begins and ends by stating that the new universalism is not the old one. Fine. But I challenge anyone to lop off the beginning and the end and read only the main content of the post. I doubt there is anyone with any knowledge of the subject-matter who would not summarize the thesis as: the new universalism is exactly like the old one. It appears to me, rather, that the qualifications at the start and end of the post are more examples of a rhetorical posturing on the part of Smith in the attempt to win a favorable hearing among readers. But the whole thing is a sham, because he does not actually provide any material support for this qualification in the body of the post. In fact, he seeks instead to undermine it at every turn. So he draws the reader in by making this distinction between old and new, only to subtly tear that distinction down with no actual argumentation or textual analysis to back it up.

For example, he states up front that the evangelical universalists are christocentric: all are saved in Christ. That is true. But if that’s the case, then why is there absolutely no reflection on christology and soteriology anywhere in the post? Why does he then claim that certain personal sensibilities are what drive the new universalists? Does he think that their christocentric claims are disingenuous on their part? Does he think that all universalist claims are inevitably based on psychological motivations, regardless of what they may say about Christ and scripture? Or does he simply find the reference to Christ meaningless in itself, such that Smith is simply unable to understand what christocentrism even means in this case? One has to wonder where the pathology really lies here.

The other charge, regarding hope, is even more befuddling. First, has no one told Smith that to hope for everyone’s salvation is not actually universalism? This would seem to be a rather elementary point. The very definition of universalism is the knowledge that all will be saved. To not know is to not be a universalist. Would Smith accuse Hans Urs von Balthasar of being a universalist simply because he affirmed that we can indeed hope (but no more) for the salvation of all?

But the real error of Smith—what makes it clear that he has no grasp of what it means to be christocentric—is how he handles the nature of universalist hope. He writes:

I'm firmly committed to the particularity of Christ, the evangelical universalist will emphasize. I just hope that God's salvation is not so particular that he only saves some. And it is precisely God's love and mercy that make me hope in this way.

This betrays a fatal misunderstanding of the new evangelical universalism. Smith, putting words in the mouth of a universalist, sets up a completely erroneous competition between the particularity of Christ and the hope for universal salvation grounded in God’s love and mercy. It is precisely this kind of thinking—which places John 14:6 in conflict with Rom. 11:32—that the new universalism seeks to overturn. Only the old universalism could place hope for salvation in conflict with Christ’s particularity. The new universalism makes them coterminous: it is precisely Christ’s particularity that grounds our hope for all to be saved, because Jesus Christ himself, crucified and risen, is the love and mercy of God. He is the concrete actualization of God’s judgment against sin and God’s mercy and grace unto new life. In the same way that Christ does away with all competitive conceptions of love and justice—since the judgment of sin on the cross is the eternal love of God for the reconciliation of the world—so too does Christ abolish all competitive conceptions of particularity and universality. For the evangelical universalist, the universal hope that God is “making all things new” is posited not in spite of but rather only because of the particular claim that Jesus is the exclusive source of salvation. Jesus is the new reign of God irrupting into the world for the sake of its radical—and radically inclusive—transfiguration.

So when Smith says, “Let's stop making this just about passages that mention ‘hell;’ [sic] at issue here are all passages that discuss judgment,” I can only respond: Yes, let’s. It is the claim of Christian faith that all such judgment has to be understood in and through the particularity of Jesus as the once-for-all judgment of God for the reconciliation of the world. Jesus is himself the hermeneutical key for understanding the biblical texts about judgment and hell. To extract these texts from the larger canonical-messianic context is thus to engage in the kind of selective proof-texting that Smith rightly disparages. Understanding these texts christologically—i.e., christocentrically—is not to replace exegesis with a hermeneutic or sensibility; it is instead to read these texts rightly, that is, theologically, within the broader scriptural witness to God’s covenant action in Christ for the sake of the world. Because, to repeat my earlier point, there is no such thing as exegesis without a hermeneutic, no interpretation without a method (however implicit) for making sense of a text.

The question is not whether a person is submitting to the authority of scripture. That much, I think, we can all agree is essential. The question is rather: which hermeneutic is operative in one’s theological reflection and biblical interpretation? The evangelical universalists have a very clearly christocentric hermeneutic. It may be articulated in different (not always compatible) ways, and it may be employed for different (not always compatible) ends, but the basic hermeneutical conviction remains the same: Jesus Christ is the subject-matter of Christian faith, and we only know God’s love and God’s justice in him, in the particular event of his crucifixion and resurrection. Our knowledge of divine mercy and divine righteousness is grounded solely in the saving-event of Jesus Christ. All other sources for such knowledge have to be subordinated to this critical norm of our faith and mission. It is the reconciling self-disclosure of God in Christ that makes one a universalist—and that alone. No other reasons are finally determinative, and therefore no other reasons are worth addressing. Smith’s entire post is a distraction from the real conversation about universal salvation. He misses the point altogether, and the result is an abstract attack on “straw men” of his own fabrication.

Where is the meaty, substantial debate over atonement and the efficacy of Christ’s death? Where is the discussion of passages like Romans 5? Where is the historical-grammatical analysis of the Greek words for “hell” and “eternal”? Where is the hermeneutical debate over theological presuppositions? Where is the nuanced discussion of divine and human freedom? Where is conversation about the relation between christology and pneumatology? Where is the analysis of the logic of hell and damnation? Where is the theological reflection on the nature of God as attested in the canonical biblical witness and its relation to questions of eschatology? Where are any of the actual questions driving the dialogue about universal salvation today? When compared with the real issues in the debate, Smith’s post appears misinformed and superficial. It hovers in the realm of the hypothetical and fictional, and never actually touches the concrete conversation “on the ground.”

Here are suggestions for future critics of the new evangelical universalism:

1. Lay bare your hermeneutical presuppositions. When you confront the conflict between universalist and dualist texts in scripture, what drives your interpretive conclusions?
2. Explain the relation between Christ and salvation. Is there a difference between reconciliation, salvation, redemption, and other concepts? In what sense is Jesus our savior? What is the relation between past, present, and future? Is salvation finally realized in the cross and/or resurrection, in a pretemporal act of election, in the present-tense decision of faith, in some future eschatological act of God, or in some other way?
3. Get your terminology and distinctions correct. Christian universalism is different from pluralistic universalism, but evangelical universalism is not the only version of Christian universalism. There are various ways of articulating a Christian universal salvation, and the evangelical model is not the only “new universalism.” If this is news to you, then start to read up on the debate before you make pronouncements that might come back to hurt you.
4. Stop with the overly simplistic and superficial dichotomies—for example, exegesis vs. theology, text vs. hermeneutic, love vs. justice, particularity vs. universality, grace vs. judgment, etc. These are the theological equivalent of biblical proof-texting. They are a sign of, to borrow from Eberhard Jüngel, an “unwillingness to read and an inability to think.”
5. Recognize the distinction between the old and new universalisms—but don’t treat it as a meaningless distinction. Recognize that the differences are crucial, that the basis for the new universalist claims is not the same as before. But at the same time, open yourself to seeing ways in which even the older liberal universalists were a lot more biblically- and theologically-nuanced than perhaps you were led to believe. Not every liberal universalist is a Unitarian, in case that’s news to you.
6. Finally, for the love of God, please stop breaking out the old rusty hatchet that claims universalists are unwilling to be disciplined by scripture or that they do not recognize the authority of scripture. This is bogus and frankly offensive. It impugns the faith of brothers and sisters in Christ and shuts down any possibility of meaningful dialogue.

Living out of the future: a Lenten homily

Mark 10:13-16:
13 People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. 14 But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. 15 Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” 16 And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

Today’s passage is from the lectionary text for the Wednesday before Palm Sunday. It is a passage we all know very well. This is the Jesus captured in old Hollywood movies and low-quality watercolor paintings and heart-warming Hallmark cards. It’s the saccharine, sentimental Jesus of American religiosity, the anodyne Jesus that we love to embrace because he makes no demands of us. How ironic, then, that this pericope is located between two of the hardest, most challenging, passages in all of Mark’s Gospel. Directly above we read Jesus’ unequivocal rejection of divorce and remarriage, and directly below we read his challenge to the rich man, “Sell what you own, and give the money to the poor,” followed by: “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” In light of the fact that Jesus had just said that the kingdom belonged to children, it’s little wonder that the next verse reads: “the disciples were perplexed at these words.”

Not that our text for today lacks a challenge for us. It’s the well-known one: to receive the kingdom of God like a little child. What exactly does that mean for us? Again, we know the Hallmark version: we must have childlike trust in God, a humility and innocent naiveté when coming before God. That is at least the usual message. It’s not necessarily a bad one, but like many of Jesus’ sayings in the Gospels, it is either ignored out of a sense of its impossibility or forgotten because it has been sentimentalized.

I find an alternative possibility in the work of the German martyr and Lutheran theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In his habilitation thesis, one of his least read works, he reflects on what it means to be “in Christ.” He says there are two ways of being in Christ. One way is to always be concerned with trying to deal with the past. It is to be caught up in endless self-reflection. This is what Bonhoeffer calls the way of the conscience. In the pursuit of a “clear conscience” in the present, one is forever living in the past; the present thus eludes him or her. The other way is to be caught up, not by the past, but by the future, by what is “yet to come.” This is a life lived without endless self-reflection, without turning inward or backward. Bonhoeffer calls this the way of the child. “The child,” he says, “sees itself in the power of what ‘future things’ will bring, and for that reason alone, it can live in the present.” Those who are “mature,” he says, the adults “who desire to be defined by the present, fall subject to the past, to themselves, death and guilt. It is only out of the future that the present can be lived.”

So what exactly does this mean? What does it mean to say that the child lives from the future? I think we have a pretty good illustration of this in the notion of “fantasy” or “make believe.” Children are distinguished by their boundless imagination, their ability to envision an alternate reality and to live into this vision without restriction. They have none of the cynicism and “realism” to place a gap between themselves and their imaginations. They do not stand at a “healthy” (healthy only to adults) distance and consciously reflect on the way in which they are constructing this world of “make believe.” And remember: the categories of “true” and “false,” “real” and “fake,” are adult descriptions; they have no meaning in the world of the child. In the movie, The Little Princess, the main character is a girl who has apparently lost her father in the war. She and the other girls are stuck in an oppressive boarding school. Instead of getting lost in the past, they develop a community of imagination. Their social fantasy frees them from a present that is stuck in the past and allows them instead to live out of the future, and thus truly in the present.

By contrast, we all know the world of the adult, of the mature conscience. The adult is the one who is burdened by memories of past sins, past hurts, past achievements, past failures, past friends, past enemies—always the past. At the same time, the adult is always trying to live in the present. The adult tries to recompense for past wrongs, repay past debts, and restore old friendships. The adult tries to establish the future instead of living out of it. In this light, it is remarkably fitting that the story of Jesus and the children is bracketed by stories of marriage and money—for no other issues define us more as adults than these! In both examples, we are burdened by our past, struggling with the present, and desperately seeking to establish a better future. It is especially fitting that Monday is Tax Day. It symbolizes the adult reflection on the past (i.e., last year’s income) and the preparation for the future.

But Jesus says that we must come to him like little children. Only the child enters the kingdom of God, because only the child is free to enter into God’s imagination. The child is unencumbered by the past and unconcerned with trying to create a reasonable future. The child is uninterested in the adult separation between reality and fantasy. He or she simply lives from the freedom of the future that is entirely open to the new and unexpected.

We are called to be a church of little children. God asks us to freely live in God’s imagination, what Jesus calls the kingdom of God. This isn’t any message that Hollywood or Hallmark can provide. It is found only in the message of Easter that the future has come into our midst, that even death is part of the past from which God frees us.

Prince of Peace Lutheran Church

April 13, 2011