Going on a summer holiday November 23, 2009
Posted by Damian in Biblical Exegesis and Interpretation.add a comment
I’m going away on holidays.
So I’m unlikely to be posting for a while. But I look forward to seeing you all when I return!
Textual consequences of a moral influence atonement November 22, 2009
Posted by Damian in Biblical Exegesis and Interpretation.Tags: atonement, christ, culture, Girard, mimetic theory, Paul, Rene Girard, sacrifice, scapegoating, slavery, women
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I was thinking about the consequences of moral influence theories of atonement. Readers probably are aware of my appreciation of Rene Girard’s version of this theory. But I realized that moral influence as a result of Christ’s sacrifice has a consequence I only considered this morning. Now first, I want to clarify what I’m saying – because I really am figuring out what I mean here as I go along.
Girard speaks of our contemporary passion for defending the rights of virtually every minority, of almost universal rejection of slavery by Christian-influenced culture, et cetera, as proof that Christ’s sacrifice was effective in influencing human morality.
However, if this is evident, it is also evident that this did not happen immediately: Minorities were still persecuted at the time of Christ’s sacrifice (his followers included) and still are, and slavery was once as much a Christian institution as it is still one in many countries around the world, and in all but name in many others.
In fact, these influences were barely evident even in the writings of the New Testament: Paul, for example, often treats women as second-class (as was the fashion at the time, and despite many modern believers arguing that he did not), and does similarly for slaves, and, to be honest, a wide selection of sinners.
This may suggest that, despite being in immediate receipt of Christ’s revelation, and being his contemporaries, the Apostles and the early church likely did not grasp the fullness of the implications of this moral influence, which in Girard’s terms is the rejection of tool of sacrificing the minority for the sake of the majority.
And this in turn might suggest a certain flaw in taking this early texts at face value. If the influence of what Christ did had not fully affected the culture at that time (and it has not two-thousand years later, so I don’t imagine that it did), then there will obviously be evidence of the non-Christological aspects of that culture (and there obviously is: Paul on slavery, for example).
Anyway, the point is that the whole thing got me thinking.
Free will and morality November 20, 2009
Posted by Damian in Biblical Exegesis and Interpretation.Tags: 38 articles, Adam, Anglicanism, christ, Christian, cross, evil, God, good, moral actions, morality, resurrection
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Doug has been revisiting the 38 Articles of the Anglican Faith, and I adored what he had to say about article ten:
The condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith, and calling upon God: Wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.
I admire Doug Chaplin’s affirmations:
…that God is always graciously going before us, and drawing created order out of chaos, and free moral choices out of random coincidences and constrained actions.
…that we are in the process of becoming human, and the world on its way to becoming good creation, and that this is initiated, sustained and will be completed by God’s acting graciously.
…that process takes shape and focus from the incarnation, death and resurrection of the Son of God. God created (creates) and re-creates the world in such a way that he might enter into its estranged otherness, in order to bring it to completion. In that sense, our very existence, never mind our individual moral acts, depend on the prior gracious initiative of God, and his desire for our good and, indeed, our becoming good.
And his objections:
…the way in which Christians may take it – indeed have taken it – and the ideas it contains as a club with which to beat the other. “There’s no morality without God.” “You can’t do anything good until you repent.” “Only Christians can be really moral people” Those sorts of statements seem to me at best unhelpful, although I would tend to describe them as smugly repugnant.
I think I can affirm these statements in turn. It is very important to realise that our moral actions (our choices to do good) depend on the initiative that God takes and once took. However, it is also important (to me) to realise that the moral actions of others also depend on that same initiative. That is to say, a persons morality is independent of their Christianity, although it is still dependent on Christ (in that it stems from his actions at the cross).
I don’t know that that is what Doug meant, but it’s how I interpreted it.
Messianic Judaism November 17, 2009
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Whilst I’ll happily admit that Doug’s amusing objections to the way that Brent Emery presents himself here, I certainly think there’s a lot to be learnt from Jewish prayer traditions as well as from Judaism in general. I don’t know a whole lot about Messianic Judaism (a Jewish friend of mine described them as travesties who can’t make up their minds), but I’ve written on what can be learnt from Judaism in the past – I really love Jewish prayer traditions, and think that modern Christianity has a lot to learn from them, in both their tradition of writing prayer, and their tradition of respecting and re-using the prayers of those who came before them.
I think Brent is right in pointing Christians to the 18 Benedictions as a place to find inspiration for prayer, although Doug is right that some of them are certainly inappropriate (just as many Talmudic instructions might be considered inappropriate for Christians). However, I wonder at Doug’s pointing the finger at Paul as one who objected to Gentiles following Torah. From my understandings of Paul, he judged a Christian life by their adherence to law, and yet did not believe that the Law itself saved anyone, anymore.
