From The Onion: Man Already Knows Everything He Needs to Know About Muslims
Category: Culture
On Law, Religion and Ethics, law professor Perry Dane offers some sane and cogent discussion of the debate over the proposal to build a mosque near Ground Zero. His three-part posting is here, here and here. His link to the 1657 Flushing Remonstrance is particularly apropos.
I’m pleased to announce the “Faith, Law and Culture Distinguished Speaker Series” to be held at Seton Hall University Law School during the 2010-11 academic year. The goal of this series is to create dialogue between legal scholars and theologians around the theme of “faith, law and culture.” Lectures are free to the public and will be held at Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey. If you’re a regular reader of Through a Glass Darkly and you can attend one of the lectures, get in touch with me about the after-lecture dinner with the speaker.
September 15, 2010: D. Stephen Long, Marquette University
October 27, 2010: Miroslav Volf, Yale Divinity School
February 3, 2011: David Bentley Hart
March 31, 2011: Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale University
James Davidson Hunter is well known to most of us interested in the intersection of Christianity and culture. His new book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World is sure to rock some boats. Here’s a snippet from Chapter Two of the book, in which Hunter lays out what he perceives to be the dominant modes of cultural discourse by contemporary Christianity:
the reality is that politics is the tactic of choice for many Christians as they think about changing the world. This has been most conspicuously true for Evangelicals, though it has also been as true for Christians in the Mainline Protestant traditions. It is not an exaggeration to say that the dominant public witness of the Christian churches in America since the early 1980s has been a political witness. This remains true today, again, particularly among Evangelicals who, through innumerable parachurch ministries, assert themselves into one political issue after another and into electoral politics as well.
Hunter goes on to discuss the “worldview” approach to cultural engagement, which encourages individual Christians, even if not directly engaged in politics, to transform culture through the power of ideas. He notes:
At the end of the day, the message is clear: even if not in the lofty realms of political life that he was called to, you too can be a Wilberforce. In your own sphere of influence, you too can be an Edwards, a Dwight, a Booth, a Lincoln, a Churchill, a Dorothy Day, a Martin Luther King, a Mandela, a Mother Teresa, a Vaclav Havel, a John Paul II, and so on. If you have the courage and hold to the right values and ifyou think Christianly with an adequate Christian worldview, you too can change the world.
He concludes, however, that “This account is almost wholly mistaken.”
The problem, Hunter suggests, is that “worldview transformation” approaches are rooted in idealism, particularly German idealism — the notion that “culture” is what exists in the “hearts and minds” of ordinary people. He argues that idealism misconstrues the capacity of individuals to change contingent historical circumstances, and ironically reinforces a sort of Cartesian dualism about “culture” “by ignoring the institutional nature of culture and disregarding the way culture is embedded in structures of power.”
A great deal of what Hunter says here resonates with me. I think he’s on to something important about how Christian and other religious lawyers and legal scholars should construe their roles as “culture makers.” More on some of Hunter’s specific conclusions in another post.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the connection between justice, judgment and love in Christian theology.
When I was in litigation practice, I always felt a bit of awe when I received an order from a Judge, even regarding something mundane like the exchange of documents in a civil case. That piece of paper represented the power and authority of the United States government compelling some person or corporation to behave a certain way, on pain of sanctions for contempt of court. When is the exercise of such authority legitimate and just? This is perhaps the most important question any legal system must address.
In my little corner of Christianity, American evangelicalism, we tend to focus quite a bit on God’s final judgment — the ultimate eschatological question of “who’s in and who’s out” of heaven. I’m worried that this typical faith narrative of ours lacks much meaningful representation of how justice, judgment, and love relate to each other or to God’s character. As I see it, the problem with this narrative isn’t that God judges; it’s that the god who is depicted as judge seems to lack any sense of justice or any attribute of love. Here is a god not unlike the gods of ancient mythology — arbitrary, distant, angry, petty, bent on destruction.
It seems to me that our Evangelical god sometimes isn’t really the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ. As my theologian friend Scot McKnight notes in his book A Community Called Atonement, “[j]ustice . . . cannot be reduced to revenge or retribution. Instead, it is the redemptive grace of God at work in God’s community of faith that preemptively strikes with grace, love, peace, and forgiveness to restore others to selves, and to restore selves to others.” God’s justice portrayed in the Christian scriptures is a justice of restoration. It is not arbitrary, but rather flows from the relational character of the Triune God, which is a relationship of perfect fellowship and love.
A United States federal district court judge’s orders are legitimate because and to the extent that they are constructed within the communal framework of our constitutional social contract. God’s judgments are legitimate because they are the extension of the communal life of God into the world He created to share in that life. But if God is love, why would his justice ever exclude anyone from enjoying the benefits of the restored community?
I think Hans Boersma, in his rich book Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross, offers a helpful (and very Augustinian) response:
Just as divine hospitality requires at least some violence to make it flourish, so also God’s love requires that he become angry when his love is violated. For God not to get angry when he is rejected by people made in his image (and redeemed in Christ) would demonstrate indifference, not love. . . . Love, it seems, requires passionate anger toward anything that would endanger the relationship of love.
Justice motivated by love requires a sort of “violence.” If God is to restore the community of peace, He must melt away that which opposes peace, just as the refiner melts away that which corrupts the strength and beauty of the metal. “For he [God] is like a refiner’s fire” (Mal. 3:2).
But how does this particularly Christian and Trinitarian understanding of justice, judgment and love translate into theories of culture and of positive law? We Christians obviously have a dark history of presuming license to employ physical violence against others — particularly our Jewish neighbors, but also fellow Christians with whom we disagree on matters of faith and practice — in order to establish what we think God’s community of peace should look like on this earth. Indeed, St. Augustine’s tract against the Donatists itself represents the temptation to appropriate the mechanisms of state violence in the service of a specific Christian view of the peaceable kingdom.
On this point I envy my Catholic friends who can point to Balthasar and the nouvelle theologie behind the Second Vatican Council for a rich contemporary understanding of justice, judgment, and pluralism. I don’t think the usual evangelical default to Kuyper and “common grace” helps very much. In fact, for Christian scholars of the law and culture in the evangelical tradition, I think developing a meaningful theology of justice and judgment in a pluralistic world is one of our most pressing tasks.
The pastor of the Hope Center, an urban ministry with which I’ve done some volunteer work, posted this interesting video on my Facebook wall. I absolutely love the creativity of the visual arts work here, and the “performance art” aspect of the piece. The artist’s commentary is interesting: “the fatherless generation has brought about the shepherdless generation.” I’m not sure I totally understand or agree with the intent of that statement. Urban churches such as the Hope Center, in my experience, tend towards a Pentecostal style of theology that emphasizes the moral and spiritual apostasy of the institutional Church. Some of this critique is drawn from dispensationalist teachings about the “true” church in the end times. Unfortunately, this can lead to an anti-intellectual and insular form of Christianity, which overlooks the many good things God is doing in denominational and other churches. And having grown up in relatively wealthy suburban evangelical churches, I’ve been blessed with many excellent shepherds, so it’s a bit hard for me to relate to the urban context. Nevertheless, I think there’s truth here that we all need to hear.
My next post on “Law” is up at the Jesus Creed: Red State, Blue State, Law and Mission.
This is an excellent video from N.T. Wright. I think he’s right that faithful readings of the text must try to disentangle the text from our prior cultural and political assumptions and battles.
My post on hate crimes and “thought crimes” is now up on Jesus Creed.
This is a wonderful article in the Cresset on scrapbooking and the nature of history.