Greg Boyd's warfare theology part 5--open theism

As I said in my first post in this series, my knowledge of open theism before reading Boyd was primarily dependent on the work of John Sanders and William Hasker (also David Woodruff and Tom Oord). I respect Sanders' work very much but did not find his presuppositions with regard to open theism convincing. Hasker held my feet to the fire on a number of points of logic in very helpful and challenging ways, but again I found his understanding of God to be on the whole too anthropomorphic and not sufficiently open to mystery. I have been intrigued by Boyd for years precisely because he links open theism with a "warfare theology" that I find intriguing and appealing in principle. Hence my desire to read his work in more depth and understand just what he means by warfare theology and how it relates to his open theism. I have spent three posts laying out warfare theology without bringing in open theism precisely because open theism is, for me, the most clearly problematic aspect of Boyd's thought. If I can take his insights on warfare theology and leave the open theism, I'll be happy to do so.

I think the relationship between warfare theology and open theism in Boyd's thought is best described by analogy with Richard Dawkins' famous remark about atheism and evolution: that evolution does not require atheism or prove it but makes it possible to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist." In the same way, I think, open theism makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled warfare theologian. (And just as one can certainly be an evolutionist without being an atheist, so one can certainly be an open theist without being a warfare theologian. Hasker's theodicy, for instance, does not appeal to a warfare model.) One can, Boyd argues, hold to warfare theology without adopting open theism, but there are various awkward questions one has to answer. Open theism is the philosophical position best suited to warfare theology. Hence, if Boyd's description of the Bible's stance on God's war with evil is correct, open theism becomes more appealing.

Boyd, like other contemporary authors who have written about this issue, distinguishes between three basic explanations of God's "exhaustive foreknowledge" (i.e., knowledge of everything that has happened or will happen).

1. The Thomist (or Augustinian, or Calvinist) position that God knows things by causing them. Open theists tend to roll Thomism, Calvinism, and other forms of Augustinianism together. It's a bit more complicated than that. Thomists deny that God causes evil, because (like other traditional Christian theologians) they deny that evil is a thing. Evil is a privation--a lack of a good that ought to be in something God has created. Calvinism is really a theological position, not a philosophical one. Some Calvinists are more thoroughgoing determinists than Thomists are. Some are essentially Thomists. Some hold to some other slightly different way of reconciling God's sovereignty and human freedom. At least one prominent modern Calvinist philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, is a Molinist. At any rate, for the purposes of this discussion I'll use the term "Thomist" for the relatively more "deterministic" end of the spectrum (though of course Thomists deny that they are determinists). That is to say, Thomists explain how God knows things by saying that God knows everything as an imitation of his own infinite perfection. God knows possible things as possible reflections of his goodness, and he knows the specific things he creates by knowing the specific ways in which he eternally chooses to have those specific creatures reflect the divine perfection. Aquinas deals with the question of God's knowledge of free acts by saying that God knows things in the mode in which they exist. So if we choose freely, God knows us choosing freely. Later Thomists have tried to deal with the complexities of this, and I'm not very familiar with these discussions. But obviously open theists find this explanation, however nuanced, less than satisfactory, particularly when combined with the claim that God knows things precisely by virtue of causing them. If God knows my action by virtue of causing it, and knows it timelessly with absolute certainty (more on timeless knowledge in a minute), then what does it mean to assert that the action is free? Furthermore, for Boyd Thomism is a classic embodiment of "blueprint theology," and he clearly assumes that it is simply incompatible with a warfare perspective. Hence, Boyd does not deal with Thomism in much detail in Satan and the Problem of Evil. Rather, he focuses on the views that hold more potential for compatibility with warfare theology.

2. Chief among these is Molinism. This was proposed in the late sixteenth century by a Jesuit theologian, Luis de Molina, as an interpretation and development of Aquinas' thought. The Dominicans rejected Molina's view (and clearly he does disagree with Aquinas on some significant points), and formulated the developed "Thomist" position in opposition to it. Molina's innovation was to suggest that God knows not only what is possible and what actually exists, but also what would exist if certain other things came to be. (This is called "middle knowledge," because it's in between God's knowledge of what is and God's knowledge of what is merely possible.) The classic Biblical example cited by Molinists is 1 Samuel 23. David saves a city called Keilah from the Philistines, and Saul promptly gets an expedition together to attack the city and capture David. David asks God whether Saul will attack, to which God responds "yes." Then David asks whether the people of Keilah will hand David over, and again God responds "yes." Now in my opinion this isn't anything like a conclusive. It can be explained in terms of God's knowledge of the human heart--the people of Keilah actively intend to hand David over if Saul shows up, or perhaps they are simply people of such a character that God knows they will hand him over (this is Boyd's explanation). But it's a good example of what Molinists are talking about when they speak of middle knowledge. Since David skedaddles before Saul gets there, there is no "future" event for God to know. But at the same time, the betrayal of David by the people of Keilah isn't just one among many possibilities God sees--it is a fact about what would have happened.

Philosophically, the classic problem with Molinism is the so-called "grounding objection." At this point, we're getting into philosophical waters that are a bit deep for me, but as I understand it the grounding objection means that it's not clear just what it is God knows when God knows "what would have happened." The men of Keilah never actually chose to betray David. On Molinist principles, they wouldn't even have had to think about what they would do if Saul attacked for God to know that they would betray David under those circumstances. Indeed, according to Molinism God knows "what would have happened" from all eternity. His knowledge is logically prior (i.e., not dependent on) anything human beings do. So what is the basis for this knowledge? It isn't God's decree. It isn't a choice that a creature actually makes which God can see/foresee. What exactly, then, is God knowing?

A second objection, related to the first I think, is that Molinism actually is deterministic, though it's trying to avoid determinism. To say that there is a fact about what I would do under circumstances X seems (at least to me) to imply that my actions are determined by their circumstances. I do not have "libertarian freedom" with regard to possible circumstances if there is only one thing that I would do under those circumstances. But perhaps I just don't get it. The issues surrounding Molinism are extremely complex, and while I have become much more dubious about the theory than I used to be, I'm not in a position to have a firm view one way or the other.

3. The third and often least understood possibility is "simple foreknowledge." Now on the face of it this is apparently what a lot of people believe. People speak all the time about God knowing things or foreknowing them, whereas middle knowledge is a rather abstruse philosophical concept. But I think most theists are implicit Molinists--I certainly was. Once the concept of middle knowledge is explained, it makes intuitive sense. If God knows everything, wouldn't God know what "would have happened"? Only on a bit more thought do the problems with middle knowledge appear (and perhaps--or at least so say the partisans of middle knowledge--with a bit more thought they disappear again!). In simple foreknowledge, on the other hand, God only knows things that actually happen. Those are the only things there are to know. There is no truth or falsehood about the statement, "Edwin would accept a job at Harvard if it were offered to him" or the statement "Ted Cruz would start a nuclear war if elected president." There may be things about me or Ted Cruz that would make it likely or even morally certain that we would or wouldn't do these things, and in all the views I'm discussing (including open theism) God would know these things perfectly. But the only things God actually "sees" are the things that actually happen, at whatever point in the timeline of creation they happen.

Open theists tend to think that this view, like all the "exhaustive foreknowledge" positions, is incompatible with free will. But a further objection to this one is that it does nothing at all to explain divine providence. In middle knowledge, God might know that Herod will kill baby Jesus if God does not send an angel to tell Joseph to flee to Egypt. So God sends the angel. But under simple foreknowledge, God knows only that He will send the angel and that the Holy Family will flee. He knows eternally that this is what happens. Thus, this knowledge can't guide Him in knowing what needs to be done to prevent Herod from killing Jesus. I have been informed that there are responses to this objection, but I have not yet read them. At this point, it seems to me that simple foreknowledge is primarily about the nature of God and says little about how God actually exercises providence.

A fourth position really isn't an alternative to the previous three, but has traditionally been assumed by adherents of all of them. That is "timeless knowledge"--the view that God exists in an eternal "now" and thus knows everything that has been, is, or will be as if it were present. Many modern philosophers have abandoned this position while still arguing for some form of "exhaustive divine foreknowledge." Thus, open theists such as Boyd frequently seem to treat timeless knowledge as an extra add-on--a view that proponents of exhaustive foreknowledge may hold but which if so will put extra burdens on their position.

My own view, on the other hand, is that God's timelessness is the key issue. If God moves through time much as we do, then the open theist position is likely to be correct. I think that open theists have good arguments explaining why, setting God's timelessness aside, it is not necessary to believe that God knows the future exhaustively. Indeed, if God exists in time, it seems to me to follow almost necessarily that the future does not exist to be known. The only reason to believe the future is real is that God is, so to speak, already there.

Boyd's philosophical arguments for open theism rest on a reworking of Molinism. Boyd argues that just as God knows the truth of all statements about what is or is not (the basic definition of omniscience), and of all statements about what would or would not be (the Molinist "middle knowledge"), so God knows the truth of "might/might not" statements. In other words, some things exist, and God knows them as existing. Other things would exist if certain conditions were fulfilled, and God knows those things as conditionally real. But other things exist only as possibilities depending on the choices of free beings. God perfectly knows just how probable these things are, because that is all there is to know until the choice is made one way or the other. Again, if divine timelessness is untrue, then these arguments are quite convincing. And if divine timelessness is true, but "simple foreknowledge" best describes how God's knowledge relates to God's providence, then for all practical purposes the open theists are right about how Providence operates, even though they are wrong about the nature of God's knowledge.

One modern scientific theory that is sometimes invoked (by Larry Wood, for instance) to support the traditional view of God's timeless knowledge is Einstein's theory of relativity. Does it not appear to demonstrate that time is just a dimension of reality, and thus that the future is real? William Hasker's response to this is to argue that Einstein's theory requires total determinism--a "block theory of time" in which the future is unchangeable because it's just as real as the present. Hasker thus appeals to believe that Einstein is basically wrong about this, although I don't claim to understand either Hasker or Einstein very well. Certainly open theists have a natural affinity for quantum physics (I'll deal with that in the next post). Boyd, however, takes a different tack from Hasker, appealing to Einstein to support his position. Boyd argues that God has a "now" that includes the "now" of every creature, even though their "nows" may not entirely coincide with each other. I would argue, on the other hand, that God's "now" includes every moment of every creature's life, and that Boyd's use of Einstein actually works better to defend that position. (Though certainly we then run into Hasker's determinism objections. . . . )

Biblically, open theists generally seem to think they have a very strong case. Sanders rests his case very largely on the alleged more "Biblical" nature of open theism compared to the Greek philosophy underlying classical theism, and Boyd follows suit. Like Sanders, Boyd points to the many passages from the Bible speaking of God changing his mind or seeking to learn something he did not already know. One obvious, traditional objection to this reading is that this language is anthropomorphic. Boyd, like Sanders, leans heavily on evangelical worries about playing fast and loose with Scripture through non-literal readings. According to the open theists, Christians have been taught to read this language non-literally because of presuppositions borrowed from Greek philosophy. Sanders acknowledges that, in fact, all theological language about God is in some sense metaphorical. Boyd, on the other hand, seems to interpret the language in a more consistently literal way (perhaps I misunderstand him). For instance, while all open theists rest a lot of weight on passages such as Genesis 6:6 which say that God changed his mind, Boyd works this concept (and particularly Genesis 6:6) into his overall theodicy. Boyd seems to believe that God really did regret making humanity and really did initiate a horrific cataclysm that wiped out most of the world, allowing God to start over again. Similarly, as we've seen, Boyd argues that God may have done something similar before the creation of humans, in response to the fall of the demons (the "Gap Theory").

My objection to Sanders' appeal to a more "literal" reading of the God-changed-his-mind passages has always been that Sanders doesn't actually seem to want to take the context of these passages very seriously. Do open theists really want a picture of God in which God actually decides to wipe out the chosen people in his anger (Exodus 32:9-10, for instance) and then changes his mind because of Moses' intercession? It has seemed to me that open theists want to abstract the picture of "God changing his mind" from the actual instances in which God does so in Scripture, and that in fact the traditional understanding of the language as anthropomorphic metaphor is therefore a lot more defensible than the supposedly more "faithful" open theist interpretation.

Boyd, on the other hand, does seem to take the contexts for these passages very seriously. But I still wonder whether a "literal" reading of such language is actually sustainable. What does it mean to say that God really regretted having made humanity? Doesn't that, in fact, contradict Boyd's claim that God knows all the odds and is never taken by surprise (more on that later)? And what does it say about God's relationship to those of us who live after the Flood? Does he still think we shouldn't exist? Or has he changed his mind again?

In short, I remain unconvinced that this language should be read as indicating a real change of mind on God's part, and thus unconvinced that it makes a solid case for open theism.

Furthermore, it is striking that the passages Boyd relies on come (I believe exclusively) from the Old Testament. I think Boyd has become aware of this problem more recently, since in a tweet some months ago he appealed to Jesus' prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane to support open theism. If Jesus is God, and Jesus didn't know for sure if he had to go through with dying on the Cross, then that's an indication that the future is open for God. I don't think that this argument holds up Christologically (it seems to me quite clear that Jesus was there speaking as a human being, and I hold a fairly "kenotic" Christology), but it does represent a move toward finding more explicit NT support for the position.

I think that this point often goes without much notice because the most vehement opponents of open theism are Calvinists, who have a very robust view of the authority of the OT. But if, in fact, it's true (as I believe) that the NT does not support open theism in the ways that the OT often does, then I think that's a serious blow against the open theist case for two reasons. First because, according to most forms of historic Christianity, the NT has doctrinal priority over the Old and is the key to interpreting the Old. (I got into an argument about this recently in which a good friend who is an OT scholar accused me of Marcionism, and I hope to write a post sometime soon that defends against this accusation, but this isn't the place for that.) But furthermore, if your argument is that post-Biblical Christians came to believe in divine unchangeability and exhaustive divine foreknowledge because of the influence of Greek philosophy, you have to deal with the fact that the Greek-speaking authors of the NT appear already to have been "corrupted."

On the whole, I find Boyd's philosophical arguments more convincing than his Scriptural ones. Together with Sanders and Hasker, Boyd has convinced me, at least tentatively, that open theism can support a robust doctrine of providence. (More on that in the next two posts.) It does not seem to me that a non-determinist version of timeless knowledge actually provides any significant advantages in accounting for God's providential actions in the world. Indeed, Boyd argues persuasively throughout the two books that an "open" view of providence accounts best for the Scriptural descriptions of God fighting evil, and gives us more hope than does the view that God has everything under total control. However, I still find the open theist arguments too reductionistic and anthropomorphic. And I do not find Boyd's arguments from Scripture convincing for this reason, although it may well be that the Scriptural language about God changing his mind speaks to a powerful mystery that our traditional understanding of God fails to grasp.

The Two Messengers

Perhaps to the clear-eyed angel
There was nothing in the word he brought but glory:
Infinite splendor in a point of flesh,
Bursting, breaking through the veil of blood and mucus,
Passing through a narrow gate
To fill creation with redoubled light.

Only the old man, his rheumy eyes
Blurred with false hopes,
Back scarred by Roman rods,
Feet hard with trudging up the stony hill
To watch the heroes die,
Only he, perhaps, could taste in his body the sourness of the sweet word,
Could see the sword quivering in the stainless heart,
And know in what bitter way the glory comes.

Greg Boyd's warfare theology part 4--the "blueprint model"

Boyd's antagonist throughout his two volumes of "warfare theology" is something he calls the "blueprint model" or "the myth of the blueprint." This view of Divine providence, according to Boyd, became prominent with Augustine, replacing the "warfare model" which had prevailed in the first three centuries of the Church's history. In "blueprint theology," God ordains in some way everything that happens. This may take Calvinist or Arminian forms, may use the language of "permission" rather than saying that God directly causes everything. For Boyd (a point where he ironically agrees with Calvin) this doesn't make a lot of difference. If God's will is seen as the ultimate reason why everything (including evil) is the way it is, then we have "blueprint theology."

Boyd acknowledges the comfort this confidence that "God's is in charge" brings to believers. But he believes this comfort to be an illusion. He drives this point home in several places throughout the two books by means of harrowing examples. The first, from which Boyd names the first chapter of God at War, is the horrifying story of a girl named Zosia whose eyes were ripped out by Nazi soldiers. The second example is the story of a young woman who was raped as a child and who, as a college student, continued to struggle to find "God's purpose" in what had happened to her. The third is the story of a couple whose two children contracted a rare genetic disease that caused them to degenerate physically and mentally, eventually dying horribly and leaving the parents' marriage and faith utterly shattered.

Boyd argues that terrible things like this--and any of us could easily come up with dozens more examples--are not best explained by some hidden providential purpose of God. Their ultimate explanation--the only explanation possible or necessary for the specific event--is that fallen beings (human or demonic) abused their freedom in ways that led to these tragedies. God does use evil to bring forth good, but God does this by fighting against evil, not by choosing sovereignly to permit it to happen for a higher purpose. God's response to evil produces good, but the evil itself is not part of a "higher plan."

This distinction is, perhaps, just as subtle and tricky to make as the one Boyd rejects between God actively causing evil and choosing to permit it. Furthermore, God does still choose to permit evil in the sense that God chose to create a world of free creatures knowing every possibility and indeed every probability. (More on this in the next post, on open theism.) Boyd has to admit, then, that on his theory our universe has had some pretty bad "luck" in terms of the choices made by free creatures, choices God (in Boyd's view) hoped the creatures would not make. Thus, Boyd does not entirely "get God off the hook." Instead of a blueprint, Boyd paints a picture of a chaotic universe in which God allows millions of free agents to make free choices in ways that interact with each other (and with God's choices, and with the behavior of non-sentient creation) in a dance of infinite complexity. And yet, this chaotic universe still has a kind of pattern, a pattern willed by God, and for the sake of which God is willing to risk the very real possibility of horrific tragedy. In that sense, then, the differences between Boyd's view and the "blueprint" theory are somewhat less than Boyd admits.

Boyd argues that the "blueprint" has radically warped our understanding of God's relationship to evil. Instead of fighting evil, we seek to understand it as an intellectual "problem." Boyd points to hymns enjoining humble submission to God's loving providence as poisonous fruit of the "blueprint myth." He points, for instance, to William Cowper's "God moves in a mysterious way," with its famous lines

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,

But trust him for his grace;

Behind a frowning providence

He hides a smiling face.

 This is a particularly infelicitous example for Boyd's argument. William Cowper, who wrote it, was a passionate opponent of slavery and a close friend and colleague of John Newton, one of the major figures behind the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. And there are plenty more examples of Christians whose confidence in God's sovereignty and providential care empowered their efforts to change the world.

The narrative "Christians have made X theological mistake, which has led to all the problems of Christian history, but I will correct the mistake and then everything will be great" is a deeply tempting one. On this particular issue, I'm particularly tempted by it, because clearly Christians have a huge intellectual problem explaining evil in traditional terms. And clearly this problem is linked to the broader problem of how we understand power, how we think of God's power, and how we exercise power as Christians on earth in the service of righteousness. But the temptation to place our hopes for the future effectiveness and purity of the Christian faith in a particular theological "tweak" must, I think, be resisted. That is not to say that the tweak may not be a good and much-needed one. But we will probably find some way of compromising with the powers of the world no matter what our theology. We can only try to make it as hard for ourselves as possible.

Historically, is Boyd right to blame Augustine for the shift to "blueprint theology"? I expect that he will flesh out his argument more fully when he finally comes out with the third volume in his trilogy, The Myth of the Blueprint. Elaine Pagels makes a related argument in her Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. She contrasts pre-Augustinian theologians such as Justin Martyr, for whom Christianity was a message of freedom, with Augustine's conviction that human depravity needed continual repression and correction by coercive authorities in both church and state. Clearly there is a contrast between the theology of figures like Irenaeus and Justin Martyr and that of Augustine. How much of it is Greek/Latin and how much is due to Augustine's influence or other historical shifts within Western theology is open to debate, I think, since figures like Tertullian and Cyprian don't quite fit with either Augustine or with the Greeks. And far too much often gets blamed on Augustine (for instance, penal substitution is often linked to him even though his atonement theology is actually primarily "ransom"). But I think Boyd is on to something in arguing that the second-century apologists were much more willing to ascribe real agency to created beings, human and angelic/demonic, while Augustine's theology seeks to explain everything in terms of the divine will. However, Augustine does not in fact say that evil has its origin in the divine plan. For Augustine, God uses evil and sovereignly chooses to permit it, but Augustine explicitly ascribes the origins of evil to a defective will falling away from the divine goodness. William S. Babcock has argued ("Augustine on Sin and Moral Agency" in The Journal of Religious Ethics 1998, and "The Human and Angelic Fall" in Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian, 1992) that Augustine never managed to explain just how this defective will could originate. So perhaps rather than painting Augustine as straightforwardly ascribing the origin of evil to God, it would be better to say that even in Augustine there is a tension between a "blueprint" view and a more free-will-oriented approach. In short, I think Boyd's account could be more nuanced, and no doubt will be in the forthcoming volume. But I think he's right that Augustine contributed heavily to the development of an approach to evil that explains it primarily in terms of God's mysterious purposes, thus leaving the question of the origins of evil as a thorny if not insoluble problem.

But does Boyd in fact have a more satisfactory explanation of the origin of evil? Boyd leaves free will as a basic assumption for which no explanation is necessary. Free beings make the choices they make and there's an end of it. His glorification of the pre-Augustinian tradition clearly is due in part to the fact that they simply don't ask the difficult questions Augustine asks about the nature of free will. But once the genie is out of the bottle--once the Augustinian questions have been raised--I don't think we can simply return to the pre-Augustinian naivete just because it's convenient to do so. (I recognize that Boyd doesn't think it's naivete--he thinks it's a sensible recognition that free choices need no explanation beyond themselves.) Once again, my fundamental disagreement with Boyd and with open theists in general lies in their discomfort with paradox and mystery. On this issue, in particular, paradox and mystery are unavoidable.

That being said, I'm on board with Boyd's passionate denunciation of the way "blueprint" explanations make a mockery of the reality of evil and harm people who have suffered terrible evil. Clearly, whatever we say at the philosophical level, on the practical level "Satan and evil people have done terrible things to you, but God loves you and is fighting for you, and so am I" is a much better response to people who have been raped or abused than "God allowed this for a reason and you need to figure out the reason." And clearly there are philosophical questions that need to be asked if we are going to give the second answer and not the first. Boyd has done the Christian community a service in raising these questions.

But alas, I've heard very little discussion about these issues in the 13 years since Satan and the Problem of Evil came out, or the 17 years since God at War was published. No doubt some of this is due to the fact that Boyd's open theism has led to the subsuming of his powerful and provocative "warfare thesis" under the broader category of open theism. In the next post, I'm going to address Boyd's arguments for open theism and how they relate to his "warfare theology."

Greg Boyd's warfare theology part 3--Creation

Boyd's "warfare theology" rests on a doctrine of creation as an act whereby God gives radical freedom to His creatures. This means that, for Boyd, the ultimate explanation of the acts of free beings is to be found in their own choice, not in some further cause such as the providential purpose of God. The world is what it is not solely because of God's will, but because of the interplay of many wills, which may be acting against God. This doesn't undermine God's sovereignty, which is shown precisely in the fact that God can bring about His ultimate purposes through interacting with many free created wills. But it does mean that in the short run many things happen that God does not want. Hence, the creation of free beings involves the possibility of warfare, and this warfare is real, consisting of real opposition to God which God (within the limits He has set Himself) can only overcome through a lengthy struggle.

Boyd uses this "warfare theodicy" to explain not only moral evil but also natural evil. ("Theodicy"=a defense of the wisdom and justice of God's actions in the world in the face of the problem of evil; "moral evil"=the actions of free creatures that go against the moral law; "natural evil"=things that cause harm and suffering but are not in themselves moral actions, such as diseases, earthquakes, etc.) The standard Christian "free will defense" (evil exists because God creates free beings, which means that these beings may choose to act in evil ways) does not do much to explain natural evil. Why, for instance, is there an Ebola virus? Christians traditionally tend to say that natural evil results from the Fall. We get sick and die, natural disasters happen, etc., because the sin of Adam and Eve caused something to go awry in our relationship with the natural world, and indeed in the natural world's relationship to itself. The "groaning of creation" mentioned in Romans 8 would then be one of the consequences of the sin of Adam. Conservative Protestants generally hold this view in a more thoroughgoing way than do Catholics. Most of us who grew up in conservative evangelical contexts were taught that all animals were vegetarians before the Fall, for instance. Catholics, particularly those following the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas ("Thomists") are more likely to say that nature is "red in tooth and claw" because that's the way God made it. Without sentient beings, this isn't in itself an evil thing.  A triceratops being eaten by a tyrannosaur is experiencing some degree of suffering, but this is not, in the Thomistic view, incompatible with the goodness of creation. The Fall, in this view, is seen as the explanation for human evil and the suffering that flows from our evil choices. This would include human sickness and death, but not animal suffering. The most defensible version of this view would hold, as I understand it, that human beings were created in order to bring order to creation, which would include reducing animal suffering, the potential for natural disasters, etc. In other words, the evolutionary process, guided by God, produced human beings, whose task it was to rule creation with justice and mercy. But because humans messed up, creation has continued to be racked by natural evils, to which "moral evil" has been added.

Boyd, in contrast, believes that natural evils and moral evils have a single source: the activity of created wills which choose to rebel against God. This involves giving Satan and evil spirits generally a much more important role in salvation history than Western theology for the past millennium or so has given them. But Boyd's argument goes beyond simply suggesting that Satan is behind particular disasters. Creation itself, as we know it, is full of suffering and conflict. Boyd argues that this was not God's original plan. Thus, the world as we know it does not reflect God's purposes entirely, but is the result of a conflict between God and rebellious "gods," principally Satan. Animals may be carnivorous, he suggests, because of Satan's influence. Extremes of hot and cold may result from the same source.

A case can be made that this is perilously close to the ancient heresy of Manicheanism, which taught that certain kinds of animals and other aspects of the physical world were created by Satan and not by God. Of course, Boyd does not believe that Satan is an independent source of anything. I'm not sure that his view is heretical, but I'd like to see more discussion of it. To what extent does Boyd's theology allow us to say that a tiger, say, is good? If the tiger is only carnivorous because Satan has messed with creation, then how can we see the tiger as a reflection of God's glory? Isn't carnivorousness kind of essential to the nature of a tiger?

Another difficulty Boyd faces is that Genesis 1 seems to portray a "conflict-free" creation. God creates solely through speech, and finds creation "very good." This in contrast to other Near Eastern creation stories in which Marduk or some other god creates through defeating a monster of chaos. As Boyd notes, there are other passages in the OT that seem to refer to such a cosmic battle--but Genesis 1 doesn't appear to be one of them. Boyd deals with this difficulty by tentatively embracing a form of the "gap theory"--the view that v. 1 of Genesis describes an initial act of creation, followed by some kind of cosmic catastrophe resulting in "tohu vabohu" chaos. The rest of Gen. 1 would then describe the re-creation of the world following this catastrophe. The cosmic battle referred to cryptically in passages such as Isaiah 51:9 and Psalm 74:13-14 would then have taken place between v. 1 and v. 2. Boyd draws support from the work of Arthur Custance, a creationist author and probably the best-known proponent of the Gap Theory. This, I have to admit, was one of Boyd's most surprising moves for me, underlining how fundamentally conservative Boyd's approach to Scripture is (or was when these books were written). He has certainly made me take the gap theory seriously again for the first time in quite a while. At the same time, I'm not sure it does all the work Boyd wants it to do. Boyd seems to think (as other advocates do) that it reconciles a literal reading of Genesis 1 with the scientific record, whether one accepts evolution or not. But I don't see this. A literal 7-day "re-creation" is no more compatible with the scientific evidence as we have it than a literal 7-day creation. Boyd also suggests that the extinction of carnivorous dinosaurs was part of God's correction of a creation that had become hopelessly corrupted by satanic forces. Well, maybe. . . I'm still chewing on that one!

The bigger problem, I think, is that God's "very good" would apply neither to the original creation (corrupted by satanic forces before the seven-day narrative begins) nor to creation as we know it, but to something that only existed briefly. Perhaps I'm trying to take Boyd too literally here. Perhaps his point is simply that creation is a constant struggle between God and the forces seeking to corrupt creation. But he seems to think that his ideas constitute some kind of olive branch to conservative Christians who want a more literal reading of Gen. 1, and I don't really see it.

That being said, the fundamental issue with regard to Boyd's doctrine of creation is whether it is too "Manichean." And I think this feeds into the larger question of whether Boyd's theology as a whole does justice to the complex interplay between God's good purposes in creation and the rebellious wills of fallen beings. Boyd speaks of God bringing good out of evil, but because his main concern is to "rescue" God from being involved in responsibility for evil (including "natural evil"), he does not use this theme in as thorough-going a manner as I think he needs to do in order to have a coherent and orthodox position. With regard to the specific issue of "natural evil," any position that does not allow us to look at a tiger or an earthquake and see it as a reflection of God's glory is a flawed position. (OK, I grant that Ebola and tapeworms fit Boyd's theories better!) In the next post, I'll address this bigger question: how do Boyd's understanding of "God at war" and his doctrine of creation function to address questions of theodicy, and how does this theodicy compare to what Boyd calls the "blueprint model"?

Immanentizing the eschaton

Conservatives are fond of saying that one shouldn't "immanentize the eschaton." What else, I ask, is one to do with an eschaton?

What they mean by this, of course, is that we should not use violent means to bring about a utopian society. Of course we shouldn't. But the violent means used by Marxists and other secular seekers of the Eschaton are themselves decidedly means of "this age." Marxists justify totalitarianism precisely because the perfect classless society isn't here yet. When it is, coercion will be unnecessary. People will work joyfully and painlessly for a few hours every day and then sit around and make art, or whatever. But the road to this utopia is a winding one and leads through a grim and joyless land where party apparatchiks drive around in fancy cars while everyone else goes without. In the utopia, people will happily care for each other and everyone will be equal. But on the road to it, concentration camps and firing squads are a constant presence.

This is not, actually, treating the eschaton as immanent. It is trying to make it immanent. Of course the phrase "immanentizing the eschaton" can mean either of these things. But those who use the term scornfully don't make that distinction. They argue, in fact, for something that looks much more like the Marxist approach (we can't live, right now, by the values that will prevail when the utopia comes) in the name of rejecting Marxism and similar ideologies. They argue for supporting corrupt dictatorships, for waging ruthless war when necessary, for accepting inequality and social deprivation, in the name of a proper respect for the transcendence of the Eschaton. And if anyone suggests that may be we ought to be living more like citizens of the kingdom, they cry "Immanentizing the eschaton," and conjure up images of concentration camps. This is bogus.

To try to bring about by force the state of affairs we imagine to be characteristic of the Kingdom is indeed a demonic delusion. But that's precisely because force isn't a characteristic of the Kingdom in the first place. The Kingdom should be immanent in our practices. Se should strive to do the kinds of things that make the Kingdom present, while knowing that the Kingdom will never come in its fullness through our efforts.

Greg Boyd's warfare theology part 2--God at war in Scripture

The first of Boyd's two books on "warfare theology,"  God at War, focuses primarily on the Scriptural evidence for a God who fights evil. Boyd places this picture of God over against what he calls "blueprint theology" in which God stands above the fray, having ordained in detail everything that happens. Boyd argues that the "blueprint" view is both un-Scriptural and practically harmful, because it leads Christians to accept evil as part of God's plan rather than fighting against it. i'll say more about that in later posts. Hence, I am omitting consideration of chapter 1 of God at War, "Hearing Zosia," not because it is unimportant, but because it is so powerful and so important that it needs to be discussed separately, along with similar material in the second book.

Much of God at War outlines the Biblical evidence for "warfare theology," from Genesis to Revelation, with the first part of the book naturally dealing with the OT and the second with the NT.  Chapter 2, "Locking up the Raging Sea," draws a broad picture of the ancient Near Eastern world as one dominated by a consciousness of hostile, demonic forces. Chapter 3 speaks more specifically of the primordial monsters of chaos and their role in the creation story, chap. 4 deals with the "gods" and their relationship to YHWH, the God of Israel, and chap. 5 addresses Satan in particular.

Boyd argues that the Old Testament posits the existence of a number of superhuman beings, many of whom (the "gods") have genuine authority over human beings, particularly over individual nations and cities. The evidence, for this, is of course plentiful--there are a number of OT passages that speak of YHWH addressing a council of gods, or imply that other nations have their own gods which have given them territory, etc., or command Israelites not to worship other gods, with the implication that these gods are real. For many modern Christians, these passages are somewhat of an embarrassment. Many scholars have spoken of a development within the OT from "henotheism," the view that there are many gods but that YHWH is the one Israel worships, to true "monotheism," which holds that only one God is real. The former view is often spoken of as more primitive or obviously erroneous, and some conservative scholars are reluctant to admit that any of the canonical writers actually held it. Boyd bites the bullet: of course the OT speaks of other gods as real. Furthermore, Boyd does not argue--as many Christians do--that if real these "gods" are simply "demons" who are enemies of God and have no legitimate authority. Rather, picking up on Jewish and early Christian hints, Boyd argues that the "gods" were given genuine authority over creation by God, which they then misused.

This allows Boyd to portray Satan, in chap. 5, as the most powerful and malevolent of these "gods." Here he is in line with early Christian theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa, who believed that Satan was originally the angel in charge of our planet (a view picked up by Lewis in the Space Trilogy). However, there's a certain jarring shift between the earlier chapters, which draw richly on ancient Near Eastern mythology and take it seriously as a picture of the world, and chapter 5. After all, there is no "Satan" in ANE mythology. Nor is Satan mentioned in most of the OT. One can certainly think of explanations as to why both Israel's pagan neighbors and Israelites for most of their history would be unaware of this particularly powerful and evil "god." (Perhaps Satan works through minions, and the Israelites were aware only of the minions until late in their history, while their polytheistic neighbors had even less reason to look behind the "gods" they worshiped to see who was really pulling the strings.) But as Boyd treats the subject, it feels too much as if he is suddenly bringing in Satan because Scripture and Christian doctrine require him to.

A similar problem is that, as Boyd admits, the OT does not in fact have anywhere near as much to say about demons and evil spirits as other ANE sources do. The absence of such language, with a few exceptions, is a striking difference between Israel and its neighbors. Similarly, the Israelite creation story is free from the conflict that marks many other creation narratives from surrounding cultures. Whereas Babylonian and Canaanite myths involve a god battling a chaos monster to create the world, Genesis 1 describes a single almighty God speaking the universe into existence. Boyd mines the text for hints that in fact a cosmic battle does lie in the background of the Genesis 1 creation story. Also, following scholars such as Frank Moore Cross, Boyd points to other passages in the OT that speak of God "smiting the heads of the dragons in the waters" or "wounding Leviathan" as part of the work of creation. Cross and other historical-critical scholars see these passages as pointing to an earlier, "mythological" layer of Hebrew tradition, which has been heavily edited in the version we now have. Boyd's position is a bit more complex than this. He argues that the OT downplays the role of evil spirits as well as the "warfare" aspect of creation because the primary need in OT times was to stress God's sovereignty over creation and the qualitative difference between God and other superhuman beings. Thus, rather than a mythological layer that was buried by more monotheistic developments, Boyd sees a subtle, understated theme of conflict between God and the forces of chaos and evil, becoming more explicit in Daniel and in the NT.

Another common scholarly approach to the Old Testament which Boyd rejects is the "demonic-in-YHWH theory." In this view, the earlier texts of the OT portray God as in some sense morally ambiguous. Evil spirits, such as the one who afflicted Saul  or the one who deceived Ahab, are sent by YHWH and seem to act at his bidding. In 2 Samuel, YHWH tempts David to conduct a census, thus bringing YHWH's wrath on him (whereas the presumably later 1 Chronicles account ascribes the temptation to Satan). Even in Job, Satan is seen as a member of the heavenly court rather than an enemy of God. Boyd rejects this interpretation at every point. He argues that while God may use Satan and evil spirits to accomplish just judgment, and while God always seeks to bring good out of the evil they do, these spirits should always be seen as acting in conscious opposition to God's good purposes. 1 Chronicles and 2 Samuel describe two different agents behind the "tempting of David," because both God and Satan wanted it to happen, for very different reasons. Ironically, this sounds a lot like Calvin's view that Job's calamities were caused by God, Satan, and evil human beings at the same time, but that each agent was acting with a different motivation. The difference is that Calvin thinks this is _always_ the case, while Boyd thinks it just happened to be the case in specific instances. In his own comments on Job, Boyd argues that Satan is portrayed as God's antagonist, not God's servant. Boyd takes God's question "where have you come from" to mean something like "what are you doing here?" Supporters of the "Satan as member of the heavenly court" theory would take it to mean something more like "which of my subjects have you been spying on for me today?" But even if it doesn't mean that Satan was acting on God's orders, I don't see that it necessarily indicates surprise.

This is, to my mind, one of Boyd's less successful arguments in God at War. Nothing whatever in 1 Kings 22 indicates that the "lying spirit" was an enemy of YHWH. Boyd brings that assumption to the text. 1 Samuel 16:14 poses even more difficulties for Boyd, saying that "an evil spirit from YHWH" afflicted Saul. that sounds, on the face of it, as if evil spirits come from YHWH. Now the word "ra'," usually translated as "evil," doesn't have to mean moral evil. So "evil spirit" could be interpreted as "spirit causing harm." But that won't yield the "warfare" view of even natural evil that Boyd is after. Therefore, Boyd interprets all such passages as referring to occasional instances in which God and evil spirits are after the same thing.

I don't think the best way to describe these difficult passages is to speak of YHWH as "demonic." But it does seem that authors in the earlier strata of the OT thought about "evil" primarily in terms of harmful, destructive things, and they had no problem saying that God sent these evils in judgment, using "destructive spirits" to do so. After all, the surrounding pagan cultures did not (as far as I know) think of evil spirits in primarily moral terms either. An evil spirit was a destructive spirit. For the authors of passages such as 1 Samuel 16 and 2 Kings 22, what mattered was that YHWH was ultimately in control of events that appeared evil. Of course, this works against Boyd's overall theological argument, but it is quite possible to argue that with fuller revelation, it became clear that God was not directly causing or ordaining these harmful actions so much as using them for his own purposes. Still, these passages in themselves do seem to point toward a somewhat more complex view of divine causality in evil than Boyd wants to allow. Similarly, I think there's a strong case that Satan was first seen as an official in the heavenly court and came to be seen more as an adversary over time. Boyd's basic point that much of the OT rightly emphasizes God's sovereignty, with more emphasis on the demonic in the later parts of the OT and in the NT, would then still be correct. But Boyd's attempt to make all of the OT support this paradigm is not wholly convincing. In part, this is because of Boyd's very conservative reading of Scripture--he doesn't want to ascribe an imperfect understanding to the human authors, but rather sees each passage, in its historical context, as direct divine revelation. (More on this in the next post, on Boyd's understanding of creation.)

The NT poses fewer problems for Boyd's argument. The NT clearly does portray Jesus as being at war with the kingdom of Satan, and the casting out of demons is an important part of Jesus' ministry. I skip over this part of the book not because it is lacking in interest or value, but just because this post has already become very long and there aren't (in my view) a lot of complications or difficulties in this section. The NT clearly supports Boyd's "warfare worldview." (Whether it also supports his open theism is much more dubious--but more on that later.) That being the case, in a Christian paradigm in which the NT fulfills the OT, I don't think the difficulties posed by the OT "evil spirit from YHWH" passages are fatal to Boyd's thesis at all. They do, perhaps, point toward the value of a more paradoxical approach to the question. But overall, Boyd makes a thoroughly compelling argument that the Bible presents God as being genuinely "at war" with rebellious evil forces, and that the overcoming of that rebellion is a central part of Christ's work of redemption and of the Church's mission. Whatever qualifications we may want to make to his criticisms of the "blueprint model," any adequate understanding of God's purposes in the world must take the "warfare" theme seriously.

Thoughts on Isaiah, ISIS, and the Peaceable Kingdom

A few things that jump out at me from reading Isaiah in Hebrew (I'm on chap. 11 now):

1. The word that the NRSV translates as "argue it out" in 1:18 (Come now, let us argue it out, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow) is the same word that the NRSV translates as "arbitrate for" in 2:4 (He shall judge between the nations, and arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, etc.). In other words, the process of divine judgment and "disputation" applies to Israel and the nations. In Israel's case it results in forgiveness; in the nations' case it results in peace. I think this really strengthens N. T. Wright's point that forgiveness is a condition for Israel to be the blessing for the nations that God intends it to be.

2. Similarly, the word translated as "stream" in 2:2 ("all nations shall stream to it") is a verb with the same root as the noun for "river," almost always used of either the Euphrates or the Nile. As far as I know, it is never used of the Jordan. In other words, the apocalyptic event described here involves Jerusalem taking center stage and replacing the classical imperial centers of Mesopotamia and Egypt. In the present situation, Israel doesn't have its own "river." It is dependent politically on Mesopotamia and Egypt. But in the day that is coming, the nations will "stream" as a great river to Jerusalem.

3. The famous passage in chap. 11 about the shoot from the stump of Jesse follows on language in chap. 10 about God's judgment felling great forests. This is, in other words, the same metaphor as Daniel 4: God will cut down the great tree of imperial/national power, but out of the stump that is left will flower a branch, and that branch will bring in the Peaceable Kingdom.

4. The word for "wolf" (as in "the wolf shall live with the lamb") in 11:6 is "ze'eb." Oreb and Ze'eb ("Raven" and "Wolf") were Midianite bandit chiefs killed by Gideon in the book of Judges. That's interesting because Oreb has just been mentioned in 10:26 ("The LORD of hosts will wield a whip against them [the Assyrians], as when he struck Midian at the rock of Oreb"). Judgment against the nations is followed by a kingdom in which bandit chiefs like Ze'eb live peaceably with their prey. Which leads me to the final point:

5. The word translated "live with" in 11:6 is "gur," which so far (as I've worked through the narrative and legal parts of the OT) pretty much always has meant "sojourn as a resident alien." The "ger," or "sojourner," or "stranger," is one of the basic categories of helpless people entitled to protection in the Torah. The word always seems to imply a state of powerlessness. The stranger is cut loose from his normal support networks, cast on the mercy of those among whom she lives (like Ruth). But here the wolf is pictured as a stranger, begging the lamb to take him in. It's a complete reversal of the normal power relationship.

It was helpful to read this passage this morning, right after being part of a live online discussion yesterday on the Patheos website discussing a new book about the rise of ISIS and the proper U.S. response to it. My discussion partners, David French (co-author of the book) and Keith Pavlischek, both argued for a strong military response to ISIS, and both admitted that their approach would require the U.S. to be committed to a long conflict with Islamic radicalism. (Dr. Pavlischek commented at one point, "our sons will be having this conversation in a generation about whatever the radical Islamic group is in their day.") I don't have good answers to the question of what should be done right now. (The book argues for giving the Kurds heavy weapons, for a start, and while I have misgivings about such an approach it may be the least bad option at this point.) But in the long term, the use of military power to protect Western interests (and even to protect innocent victims, which is a much more legitimate use of force) will only contribute to the cycle of violence.

Isaiah is no stranger to that cycle. The dominant theme in the early chapters of Isaiah is that God uses the Assyrians to punish Judah, and will in turn judge the Assyrians. But out of this comes the promise that God will raise up a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and that the sevenfold spirit of God will rest on this fragile branch, leading to a kingdom of justice and peace. As Christians, we must, above everything else, bear witness to the in-breaking of that kingdom.

Greg Boyd's warfare theology, part 1

One of the major theological controversies in the evangelical world in the past couple of decades has centered on the theological position known as "open theism." The controversy seems to have died down in recent years, largely because open theists have been expelled from positions of influence in evangelical intellectual culture, not because their arguments have been effectively answered. For anyone reading with this not familiar with the controversy, I should define "open theism" before going further.

Open theism is the view that God does not know future free actions with certainty. God knows everything that exists, but the future does not exist yet, so God only knows the future insofar as it follows necessarily from what exists already. Free created agents, such as angels and human beings, make choices that do not necessarily follow from anything in the past. Hence, those choices are not yet real things that can be known. To say that God knows the unknowable is logically contradictory. Hence, open theists claim that they aren't denying God's omniscience. Open theism rests on the premise that time is a reality for God as well as for us, so that the future really is future for God. In other words, open theism denies the traditional view that God is timeless. Calvinists have naturally been the most active in opposing open theism, but they are not the only ones who see it as a denial of basic Christian orthodoxy.

When I applied for an open position in the Bible and Religion department at Huntington University in the fall of 2005, I was only vaguely aware of this controversy. I had read the exchange between John Sanders and Chris Hall in Christianity Today, and had had a couple of conversations with friends about the issue. But it was not really on my radar screen. As a church historian, I took the premodern Christian tradition as my theological starting point. I was aware of the work of theologians who challenged "classical theist" premises such as divine impassibility, and one of those theologians (Robert Jenson) had made an impression on me. But during the application process at Huntington, and after being offered and accepting a position as assistant professor of Bible and religion, I became acquainted with an entire world of evangelical theology that rested on presuppositions I found distinctly alien. The position I had applied for was open largely because of Sanders' dismissal. (I say "largely" because many of Sanders' theology classes were already being taught by another newly hired faculty member, so that both she and I could claim to be Sanders' "replacement.") Therefore, I realized that I needed to understand the controversy both in order to decide whether I would accept the position and in order to handle the very sensitive situation into which I would be stepping if I did accept it.

What struck me from the beginning was that Sanders' theology began from fundamentally evangelical premises. Ironically, this was precisely what I found unconvincing about it. I was arguably more orthodox than Sanders, but certainly not more evangelical. Sanders' starting point was his deep conviction that God is personal and relates to us as one person to another. For me, this was an aspect of classical Christian theology with which I struggled. I found (and still find) concepts of God as a fountain of life, a deep and dazzling darkness, a consuming fire of holiness easier to relate to than more anthropomorphic concepts. This isn't to deny the centrality of the Incarnation, but to underline it. Sanders seemed to think that the Incarnation is simply the fullest manifestation of something that was the case (and was in some sense knowable) all along. In my understanding, the Incarnation radically changes our relationship to God. This is, of course, not an adequate response to Sanders' thoughtful and well-argued work, but an indication of why I didn't, on the whole, find his approach convincing. During my years at HU, I had some interaction with William Hasker, perhaps the most notable philosopher of the open theist movement. (Hasker was retired, but he had an office across the corridor from me and we had a number of conversations.) Hasker challenged me on some of the logical difficulties with classical theism, particularly having to do with divine timelessness. But again, his fundamental assumptions seemed too limiting to me. His God, like Sanders', seemed extremely anthropomorphic, and neither of them seemed to have any place for mystery and paradox in their theology. Therefore, during my years at HU I found myself in the position of a friendly adversary of open theism. I was appalled by the way Sanders had been treated by the institution, and I felt guilty for the fact that I was occupying what had been his office (though my guilt was alleviated by the fact that he had beaten me for another of the jobs I'd applied for. . . . ). But I did not (and still do not) find open theism as taught by Sanders and Hasker a congenial form of theology. I respect their work, but their starting points are not mine.

Greg Boyd's version of open theism starts in a somewhat different place from Sanders and Hasker. While Sanders is primarily concerned with God's relationality, and Hasker with logical coherence, Boyd starts with what he regards as the Biblical picture of God as genuinely at war with evil. (Of course, all three theologians care about all three of these things. In particular, all three of them are deeply concerned with the issue of theodicy--how we can explain the existence of evil in the world given the goodness and power of God.) Boyd's "Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy" has been set forth in two companion volumes. The first, God at War (IVP, 1997), deals with the Biblical evidence. The second, Satan and the Problem of Evil (IVP, 2001), connects the philosophical and theological dots more fully. I've recently read both books and am going to discuss them in a series of blog posts. I find Boyd the most compelling of the three open theists I've mentioned, not because Sanders or Hasker fail to make powerful and interesting arguments, but because Boyd's starting point--that God genuinely fights against evil--is one that I find utterly convincing. I have come to believe for a long time now that many of the problems with Western theology derive from our failure to give the figure of Satan the same place in our thought that he held in the thought of early Christians. For instance, with regard to atonement theology, early Christians believed that Jesus' death rescued us from Satan, while modern "penal substitution theory," having eliminated Satan from the picture, seems to say that Jesus' death rescues us from God. (See my two posts on Aulen's Christus Victor.) Thus, I came to Boyd's work with a strong presumption in favor of his basic thesis about divine warfare, but many reservations about the open theist position to which Boyd links that thesis. In the posts that follow, I'll evaluate Boyd's arguments in more detail.

The Victory of Reason--a review

Rodney Stark is one of the foremost living sociologists of religion. His 2000 book Acts of Faith, co-written with Roger Finke, expounded an extremely influential "supply-side" theory of religion as a social phenomenon, countering the "secularization" thesis and arguing that there was a pretty steady "demand" for the "goods" provided by religion. Differences in religious commitment over time or across space were due to supply rather than demand. People had different kinds of religious needs, so that in a "free religious market" a wide variety of religious "suppliers" would develop, competing with each other for "market share." Under those circumstances, most people would have a supplier that met their needs, and thus would become actively involved in a religious community. But when a religious "monopoly" was imposed (as in a traditional European state-church society), people whose needs were not met by the official religion would have little interest in religion. Stark and Finke further argued that religious groups are most successful when they make significant demands on people as well as offering significant benefits. If the benefits of community membership are available without significant commitment, then the community will attract "freeloaders" and will not seem worthy of commitment. Communities that stand in "high tension" with the surrounding society, Stark and Finke argued, are likely to grow, as long as their demands are not impossibly high and as long as they offer benefits (both this-worldly and other-worldly) that compensate people for the costs of high commitment. But as religious communities grow, they tend to relax their demands and eventually become indistinguishable from other groups, making membership less and less worthwhile. This book was a systematic exposition of ideas already developed in historical form in the 1992 study The Churching of America, which described American religious history as the story of continual challenges to the reigning "mainline" churches by upstart competitors whose success eventually turned them into the new "mainline." These two books have provided a great deal of ammunition to American religious conservatives arguing that the mainline churches are declining because of their liberalism (though it's not clear to me that "high/low tension maps neatly onto "conservative/liberal"). When Ross Douthat wrote "Can Liberal Christianity be Saved" in 2012, he was essentially repeating the Stark/Finke thesis in a more polemical form.

Meanwhile, starting with The Rise of Christianity in 1996, Stark has written a series of historical studies (without Finke's collaboration) applying his sociological theories to the history of Western Christian civilization. I've looked at a couple of these, but the only one I've read all the way through is The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (2005). I read it several years ago, but didn't get around to writing a full review. Since I had it checked out recently for another project, I decided to remedy that deficiency.

The Victory of Reason builds on the work of Stanley Jaki on science to argue that the distinctive Western culture of technological innovation and economic enterprise was the creation of Christian faith. In contrast to Weber, Stark argues that capitalism was born in the Middle Ages and was not peculiar to Protestants, although in the last two chapters he criticizes post-Reformation Catholicism for taking an "anticapitalist" stance. His approach could be called an "ecumenical Whig" narrative. Whereas the traditional "Whig" narrative, in either its Protestant or secular forms, paints a picture of gradual emancipation from the shackles of traditional theology, Stark argues that the emancipation (from premodern, pagan ways of thinking) was a gradual process initiated and guided by Christian faith and was well underway long before the Reformation.

Many of Stark's points have considerable merit. He rightly demolishes the myth of a stagnant and anti-intellectual "Dark Ages," pointing out for instance that even the early Middle Ages were a time of great technological innovation, which of course accelerated rapidly after 1000. He is right, I think, to point out that many aspects of Christian thought have a deep affinity with many aspects of modern Western culture. For instance, the claim that Jesus fulfills the Old Testament leads naturally to the conclusion that God reveals Himself in a progressive manner (this is not actually the point that Stark made, but I'm helping him out here). The Christian doctrine of salvation may indeed be seen as the source of a certain kind of "individualism." And so on.

But even where Stark has legitimate points, he overstates them, undercutting his argument by trying to claim too much. He presents Christianity as a thoroughly progressive religion, ignoring or downplaying the copious examples of Christian theologians glorifying a perfect past and deploring current trends as part of the inevitable decline that would precede the Second Coming. He's not content to show that there are elements of Christian thought that favor science, while others might promote suspicion of science. No, Christianity in its essence must be shown to be thoroughly pro-scientific. The same is true with his discussion of slavery and of capitalism (in his view, Christianity is solidly opposed to the former and supportive of the latter).

One major issue that crops up throughout the book is the question of what it means for Christianity as a whole to be the cause of a social phenomenon. How does one distinguish between the things that happened in Christian culture in spite of Christianity (or simply in disregard of Christianity) and the things caused by Christianity? Stark's commonsense approach seems to be to argue that if some aspect of medieval culture was a break from the Roman past, then it is due to Christianity. So Christianity can't be blamed for slavery, because that was Roman. It should be credited with the withering away of slavery, because that was a change from Roman culture. But can every difference between medieval Europe and the ancient world really be credited to Christianity? Are no other factors at work? This assumption becomes even harder to sustain when we start talking about later developments in Western civilization, like religious freedom or the final abolition of slavery.

Stark's discussion of monastic capitalism founders on a failure to address this distinction. He cites scholarship showing what economic powerhouses medieval monasteries were and how they contributed to economic and technological progress. Fair enough. But he never mentions the frequent complaints about monastic "corruption" and the incessant efforts at reforming monasteries to return them to their original ideal as austere centers of study and prayer. Perhaps in fact a case can be made that the reformers didn't have a problem with monasteries being centers of economic enterprise. But I'm skeptical, and at any rate Stark doesn't even attempt to make that case. He never discusses the question of how monastic reformers (among the most important religious figures in the Middle Ages) saw monastic economic activity at all.

A further serious problem with the book is Stark's use of sources. In chapter two, on medieval progress, Stark speaks disparagingly of "most scholars" who accept the myth of the Dark Ages. What does he mean by this? Probably he is speaking of generalists like Daniel Boorstin, not actual scholars of the Middle Ages themselves. Of course, Stark is heavily dependent on such scholars, as his footnotes show. His rhetoric sometimes gives the impression that he is heroically refuting the errors of "scholars" by virtue of his own deep knowledge of the primary sources. But that obviously isn't true. When he cites primary sources, it is usually via secondary sources. On one occasion (chap. 2, n. 109), he cites the Summa Theologiae of Aquinas without any specification of which part of that voluminous work he is using. Fortunately, it wasn't hard to look up the question he was referring to, since he gave its title in the text. But this demonstrates just how vague and sloppy his acquaintance with his primary sources is.

Furthermore, his use of primary sources is not only highly selective but often just plain wrong, revealing a complete lack of understanding of the intellectual context of the patristic and medieval periods. Stark claims that he is citing the "major" figures, particularly Augustine and Aquinas, because they were the most influential and representative (p. 7). Fair enough. But he departs from this when it suits him, citing Nicole d'Oresme (hardly a household name, which he covers by calling him "great, if neglected") on p. 14 in support of the "clockmaker" image of creation, which Stark does not substantiate from either Augustine or Aquinas. More to the point are his repeated distortions and misunderstandings of both Augustine and Aquinas.

Stark tries to enlist both theologians for a doctrine of progress. He cites a passage from Augustine's City of God  (bk. 22, chap. 24) celebrating human ingenuity in developing various kinds of crafts. But Stark not only fails to discuss the passage's context, but uses ellipses to conceal from the reader the fact that in the middle of the very sentence he is citing Augustine refers to the harmful uses human beings have made of this God-given creativity. Augustine's overall point is to celebrate God's goodness and the goodness of creation, but acknowledge that human beings have made a bad use of this good creation through their sinfulness. To call this picture of the human condition "optimistic," as Stark does, reflects a lack of understanding of the overall thrust of the City of God and of Augustine's thought as a whole. As for Stark's citations supposedly showing that Augustine believed in theological progress, one of them (Stark 9) is, again, from a secondary source, but seems to be talking about the life to come, not a progress within history. The other passage, from Confessions, bk. 12, chap. 18 (cited in Stark 11), does not in fact say that the reader of Scripture may understand a passage better than the author (which is what Stark says it means), but that if the reader misinterprets the author's meaning but gets something true from the text, this doesn't really matter, because all truth comes from the mind of God and what really matters is to understand the mind of God. This isn't a modern doctrine of progress at all. Rather, it reflects Augustine's Platonic epistemology in which all knowledge comes by "divine illumination." To understand anything is to understand it in the eternal Truth. What matters in a text is not primarily the intention of the human author, but the eternal Truth reflected by the human words. Nothing further from a modern way of thinking about texts could be imagined, though perhaps there are some affinities with postmodernism.

Stark's errors in attempting to enlist Augustine for the doctrine of progress, however, pale in comparison to his interpretations of Aquinas and other medieval sources with regard to capitalism. Stark claims that Aquinas defines the "just price" purely in terms of supply and demand (65). But in the passage Stark cites (he doesn't say so, but it's ST II/II, Question 77, art. 1), Aquinas says exactly the opposite.  Stark seems not to understand that the opening section of any article of the Summa consists of objections to which Aquinas will reply later. He cites Aquinas saying (Objection 2) that everyone wants to buy low and sell high, as if Aquinas were approving of this behavior. But in fact Aquinas is quoting Augustine, who was quoting a saying of "a certain jester." And as Aquinas points out in the reply to the objection, Augustine quotes the jester only to condemn his saying as wicked. In the body of the article ("Whether it is lawful to sell a thing for more than it is worth") Aquinas makes it clear that the buyer's need for an item has no relevance to the just price of the item. A seller may charge more to compensate himself for the loss he suffers in giving up the item, but not to exploit the buyer's demand for the item:

Yet if the one derive a great advantage by becoming possessed of the other man's property, and the seller be not at a loss through being without that thing, the latter ought not to raise the price, because the advantage accruing to the buyer, is not due to the seller, but to a circumstance affecting the buyer. Now no man should sell what is not his, though he may charge for the loss he suffers.

Stark points to a passage (from the reply to Objection 1) in which Aquinas says that the just price is not fixed with "mathematical precision." Stark interprets this to mean that the just price is not "objective" but depends on supply and demand. Rather, Aquinas is saying simply that there isn't a precise sum but that the just price falls within a certain range, so that some variation is legitimate without violating justice. He is not saying that the just price is fixed purely by market laws. Perhaps a distinction needs to be made between the specific need of an individual buyer, of which Aquinas is speaking above, and a broader pattern of supply and demand. Perhaps Aquinas and Albert do define just price in terms of supply and demand in this broader sense. But Stark hasn't made the case with regard to Aquinas--the passage he himself cites is rejecting the view that a seller can charge more based on demand--and he has clearly misinterpreted Aquinas pretty badly by taking a passage from an objection as if it represented Aquinas' own view.

Stark's one solid point (though he doesn't give a citation--it comes from article 3 of the same question) is that Aquinas defends the legitimacy of a merchant selling wheat for a high price while not telling the buyers that other merchants would soon be arriving with more wheat. This does seem to imply that a "just price" for Aquinas relates to the laws of supply and demand. However, I still think that this is best explained by the interpretation that Aquinas thinks there is an objective just price which consists of a spectrum of possible prices rather than a single fixed sum. Within that spectrum, the laws of supply and demand apply. Outside it, a higher or lower price would be objectively unjust to buyer or seller respectively. Furthermore, even here Stark misrepresents Aquinas by saying that the situation involves a famine, which makes the price of wheat high. (Apparently Murray Rothbard also cites the passage this way--Stark doesn't cite Rothbard but one has to wonder if perhaps Rothbard is an unacknowledged source here.) Aquinas doesn't mention a famine. Given what he has to say in article 1 about exploiting the buyer's need, it seems dubious that he would justify the merchant's "price gouging" if he were taking advantage of starving people. Rather, Aquinas speaks more generally of "a place where wheat commands a high price." In support of Stark and Rothbard is the fact that the similar example in Cicero's De Officiis does involve a famine. Furthermore, Aquinas cites a different part of this passage from Cicero in Objection 2, showing that he is familiar with the discussion. But Cicero decides the question the other way--a virtuous person will not take advantage of the starving people. I would like to see some sold scholarly discussion of this passage and will look further into it, but at best Stark's characterization of Aquinas' position is extremely one-sided.

Stark may be confusing Aquinas with the Spanish "late scholastics" of the sixteenth century, who allegedly did define a just price in terms of demand. (I don't know myself that this is true, but it is commonly alleged and I am not personally familiar with these authors. If so, it would be ironic given Stark's characterization of post-Reformation Spanish "anti-capitalism.") Stark also cites Albert the Great, but again only through a secondary source.

Stark admits that Aquinas is "confusing" about usury. The confusion, I think, comes from Stark's inability to grasp that for Aquinas just profit has to do with compensating the seller for loss and for the time spent. Aquinas is very clear that a seller is not justified in simply charging whatever the market will support.

Stark further misrepresents the medieval attitude to private property (78-79), citing an author known as "Norman Anonymous" referring to private property as a "human right." Stark seems to think that this means what it would mean for someone in the Enlightenment--a basic right guaranteed by natural law. But in fact the passage as Stark cites it says the opposite: "God has made poor and rich from the one and the same clay; poor and rich are supported on one and the same earth. It is by human right that we say 'My estate, my house, my servant." (As usual, Stark is citing this via secondary sources.) The passage is clearly saying the same thing Aquinas would say later: that by natural law everything is held in common. "Human right" in this context means human law and custom, in accord with natural law but not necessarily mandated by it. Aquinas, as Stark points out, says that private property is necessary--but it is necessary for pragmatic reasons, to avoid confusion and conflict. Once again, Stark's ignorance of the basic categories of medieval thought serves him--and his readers--very poorly.

Certainly Stark should be cut some slack given that he's writing a book for a general audience, going outside his own primary area of specialization. We need more of that, and it's unfair for people with more specialist knowledge to jump on such books and nit-pick. But my objections above go beyond pointing out specific errors in detail. Stark systematically cherry-picks passages out of context to support an interpretation of the medieval Christian tradition as solidly in favor of private property, supply-and-demand economics, and technological progress.

Stark's failures in The Victory of Reason are frustrating because the secularist myths he takes on badly need to be debunked. Many of his points about the vitality of medieval culture (including science and technology) are important and badly need to be made in the face of widespread misunderstanding. But unfortunately, Stark creates an equally distorted picture of his own, so that I cannot in good conscience recommend this book to people who need to be informed on the positive achievements of medieval civilization. Christians who cite Stark as an authority are setting themselves up for embarrassment, or worse, engaging (however innocently) in a project of benevolent deception.

Medieval culture did have elements that favored scientific, technological, and economic progress. It also had strong currents of nostalgic idealization of a past "golden age," suspicion of economic activity as worldly and sinful, and mistrust of any kind of secular learning as ultimately pointless in a world where the salvation of one's soul was the primary concern. Neither the first set of trends nor the other are the whole picture, and they interacted with each other in complex ways. Both of them had roots in Christianity as well as in non-Christian sources. But on the whole, the second set of attitudes were more likely to be identified with the most devout and spiritually respected members of society. Stark's thesis founders on this fact. Medieval Christianity was not in fact distinguished from other religions by its joyful embrace of progress or its enthusiasm for scientific and economic activity. If anything, at least in comparison with the other two great monotheistic religions, the opposite was the case.

As a Christian, I do not think that this is something to be ashamed of. I certainly find much in the medieval "vale of tears" tradition to be dubious, and I often find the great poets and artists of the Middle Ages wiser than the single-mindedly devotional authors, precisely because of their gusto for life combined with deep piety (The Imitation of Christ is great, but the Divine Comedy and Piers Plowman are far greater.). But the fact remains that Christianity is an irreducibly ascetic tradition. It teaches us to value what the world despises and despise what the world values. It cuts across our desires for fame and power and wealth with a sword of flame.

Stark doesn't get this. For much of his career he has described himself as an unbeliever, but for about the past decade he has identified as an "independent Christian." In a 2007 interview, he made the revealing comment: "I have always been a “cultural” Christian in that I have always been strongly committed to Western Civilization." It is none of my business to judge the authenticity of his present Christian faith, but it's clear that in his own self-understanding it is simply a development of his longstanding commitment to Western civilization. Christianity does not exist in order to prop up Western civilization. Christianity exists to proclaim the Kingdom of God, which stands in judgment on all civilizations. Stark's ideological biases lead him to treat the civilization-building aspects of Christianity as fundamental and the "world-denying" aspects as peripheral (when he doesn't deny or ignore them outright).

Thus, throughout his career, Stark has defined Christianity and its benefits in primarily secular terms. This is understandable given where he's coming from. But people steeped in orthodox Christianity, whose starting point is the Cross and Resurrection rather than the glories of Western Civilization, ought to know better. Stark is, for Christians, like Egypt in the OT prophetic warnings: a reed that breaks when you rest on him. Better trust in the Lord of Hosts, whose power works through weakness and who laughs at civilizations and economic systems, especially when they boast of divine blessing.

Ten theses on gay marriage

OK, since no one (except Stephen Milliken) is excited about monism, here are some theses about gay marriage:

1. Gay marriage really is the redefinition of marriage to make it gender neutral. It is not simply the granting of "equal access" to an institution whose meaning remains the same.

2. However, given the shifts that have taken place in our cultural understanding of marriage, such a redefinition makes sense. That is to say, we have privatized the concept of marriage and defined it in terms of the desires and needs of individuals, while questioning traditional "essentialist" ideas about gender. Hence, it no longer makes sense to many people to define marriage in gendered terms.

3. The trend toward erasing gender differentiation is the root of gay marriage.

4. Gender differentiation is a natural given of the human condition and thus should not be erased, but the way it has been expressed historically is always shaped by sin, and so the recent reaction to gender norms is both a needed correction and itself the source of a new set of sinful "cultural constructions."

5. The concept of "homosexuality" as an intrinsic part of some people's identity, defining who they are, is probably best seen as a modern invention, parallel with the concept of race, and shaped by particular kinds of gender norms in the modern West. If homosexuality is to be seen as an intrinsic part of a person's identity, then it ought to be affirmed as a good part of God's creation. But it is not clear that it ought to be seen in these terms, given its culturally constructed nature.

6. Opposition to gay marriage rests on the belief that gay men ought to be treated just like straight men in terms of marriage law, and gay women like straight women.  In that sense it is radically different from opposition to racial intermarriage to which it is often compared. However, it's true that this results in gay couples being treated differently from straight couples.

7. Whatever one's position on gay marriage per se, it is abominable that same-sex couples are not able to have practical benefits such as visitation rights and joint tax returns. This really is a question of simple justice, and as long as these basic legal benefits are only extended to married couples, civil marriage for same-sex couples is indeed a basic mandate of justice.

8. Civil unions, the briefly considered and swiftly abandoned compromise, are not "separate but equal" if they are made available to everyone. Marriage, of course, already was available to every adult as an individual, but not to every couple (that is, gay people could marry, but they had to marry members of the opposite sex. While this may seem to be a "useless" right, it is nonetheless exactly the same right that straight people have.) Hence, there would be no inequality in retaining the word "marriage" for opposite-sex unions, while granting identical practical rights to any two (or possibly more) adults who wished to enter into a civil union. (Of course, this would not necessarily imply a sexual relationship, which simply isn't the business of the state one way or the other.)  However, given the present state of affairs, the best approach may be for the state to drop the word "marriage" altogether.

9. Contrary to common belief, the specifically Christian arguments for gay marriage (rooted in the overturning of gender norms in Jesus) are much stronger than the secular arguments, which are generally question-begging (inasmuch as they assume the validity of broader cultural shifts which genuine conservatives wish to contest in the first place).

10. Faithful, loving relationships between equals are always, in themselves, good. Hence, the pictures of happy couples celebrating yesterday ought to be cause of rejoicing to all decent people, whether or not we agree that "marriage" is the right word to use for those unions.

Monism part 2

Stephen Milliken, who provoked my first post on monism, pointed out that I never actually got around to defining it.

Indeed--with good reason, since it seems to me to be a term that can mean several things. I'm more interested in teasing out what those several things could be than in deciding which of them is the right definition. Insofar as I provided one, it was "that all things emanate from God." But as I pointed out, that's rather ambiguous.

Stephen then gives one possible definition:

for God to really be God, there cannot exist something which does not first find its origin in God. For if there was something that exists was not first found in God, evil perhaps, it would be said to have its own eternality and existence in some way distinct and separate from God. Thus, I do not think it probably for this to be the case for anything, including what we call bad things. That’s why, to not give them too much credit, I like Lewis’ construct of evil as a perversion or a twisting of an original good. However, if I can be nit-picky, even this perversion, to exist, must itself have an ultimate origin in this God thing.

The first sentence is, I think, totally orthodox. The problem comes when you throw evil into the mix. That's why Christians have historically said (Lewis didn't make this up) that evil is not a thing in itself--it's a privation, a lack of something that should be there. This lack has powerful effects--it distorts the nature of the created thing in question. So a human being with the "goods" of physical strength, intelligence, etc., but lacking a rightly ordered will, can do horrific evil, and the more of these goods one has the more evil one can do.

In the traditional view, the privation doesn't have to be "traced back" to a source, because it isn't a thing itself. But this is a difficult concept. William Babcock pointed out the difficulties that Augustine gets himself into in this regard in his article, "The Human and the Angelic Fall," in Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian (1992). Humans fell because Satan tempted them; Satan fell because? . . . . well, because he turned away from God to himself. But why would a good being, in a state of glory and bliss, do a thing like that, unless the Creator in some way caused him to? The origin of evil is perhaps the single most difficult problem in orthodox Christian theology, and I can see why you have problems with the conventional account. But if one endorses a robust theology of free will (more robust than Augustine's mature position), then one can argue that the "perversion" doesn't find its origin in God--only the ability to choose freely does. (I've been reading Greg Boyd, and while I don't agree with him on a lot of points, I think he's right to challenge any view that says that evil is something God looks on with some kind of acquiescence because it's part of a bigger plan.)

Anyway, I think it is tricky to suggest that we are to separate Creator and creation, which, importantly, the former is supposedly pure spirit and the latter is (or is defined by the former) what is material or non-spirit. Are we not setting ourselves up to value spirit over matter?

This is certainly a tricky question. As I believe I said in the first post, the traditional position at least since the 13th century in the West has been that angels are also wholly immaterial. Aquinas, who championed this position, argues that the difference between even such immaterial beings and God is that they are a "compound of existence and essence." I'm not sure I'm convinced, but I'm also not sure it's orthodox to say that angels are in some sense material. So I'm not necessarily defending the view that all created beings are in some sense material. Using Thomist terms, what I would say is that all created beings are in part potentiality and not pure act, as God is.

I think part of the problem is that because our minds are the part of us that most consciously shares in the divine nature, and are also the most "immaterial" part of us, we tend to equate "spirit" with "idea." And the Platonic heritage pushes us in that direction. I think this is where the Platonic heritage needs to be challenged, and perhaps, ironically, why the teaching that angels are immaterial is important. The Creator/creature distinction is much more radical than the material/immaterial distinction. Whatever it means for angels to be "spirit," angels are far more unlike God than they are unlike us. In fact, due to the Incarnation, there's an important sense in which we are more like God than angels are. God isn't the highest angel. So it can be true that God is immaterial without that being the fundamental thing that makes God God.

I think we can say that both "created spirit" and "created matter" reflect something of God without saying that God is both spirit and matter. "Spirit" is a less inadequate term for God than "matter," because it doesn't affirm something that is simply false about God. Matter is, in itself, limitation. Spirit is freedom from that kind of limitation. It is, in itself, a negative term about the absence of certain kinds of limitations. Or so it seems to me. Of course, created spirits would have their own kinds of limitations. But we wouldn't necessarily know much about those. That's why idolatry (in the literal, traditional, pagan sense of the word) is such a temptation. From our perspective, angels/gods look a lot like God, because angels are free of many of the limitations that make us unlike God. We have trouble seeing the far more radical ways in which "gods" are unlike God.

The Catholic theologian Stephen Webb has written a book called Mormon Christianity which argues, apparently, that God is beyond both spirit and matter and thus can be said in some sense to be material, just as he can be said in some sense to be spirit. I am not convinced by this, but it's interesting and I have not yet read the book.

A more traditional position can be found in Introduction to Christianity by Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict). I find his discussion of the Christian concept of God and how it relates to Greek philosophy (in Part One of the book-actually not the first part because there is a lengthy "Introduction" on the nature of belief) very helpful. On p. 146, he sums up the orthodox understanding of God as spirit this way:

The boundless spirit who bears in himself the totality of "Being" reaches beyond the "greatest," so that to him it is small, and he reaches into the smallest, because to him nothing is too small. Precisely this overstepping of the greatest and reaching down into the smallest is the true nature of absolute spirit.

That is why I don't believe that saying God is "pure spirit" or "pure good" somehow limits God's ability to sustain all creation from within, as you and I agree that He does.