Author: jwhorton

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ON SLAVERY, THE LIMITS OF THE BIBLE, AND HOW TO READ IT

Good Christians created that [slave] trade and sustained it for three centuries—Catholic and Protestant alike.  And they were happy to do so because, whether Catholic or Protestant, they heard the Bible telling them that they could.  Up to the late seventeenth century, no Christians challenged the existence of slavery as an institution.  If you had taken a straw poll in any Christian gathering before that date, such as from the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in my own home city of Oxford, and asked whether slavery was evil, not a single Christian hand would have gone up to say yes, it was evil.  That is because the predominant voices in the books of the Bible accept slavery as part of the God-given fabric of the world.  Now it is entirely the other way round: not a single Christian alive, I think, would defend slavery, and so in this respect, all Christianity is now out of alignment with the Bible.    

Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and its Legacy (Oxford UP) 2016, page 9

Now one might argue that those Christians who turned against the slave trade and eventually helped abolish it were also being Biblical: that is, perhaps they argued that given that we are all made in the image of God, and that Christ died for all us humans (according to scripture) it must be nonsense to think one person has the right to treat another person as property.  To “love thy neighbor as thyself” would seem to demand the abolition of slavery.  But the significant point to make here is that even if anti-slavery Christians were not out of alignment with the Bible, it must be true that in order to make this turn from Biblically based slavery to Biblically based abolition these Christians would have to have been reading the Bible in a certain way—a way which saw sacred scripture as not constituting a comprehensive and explicit list of do’s and don’t’s, a way which saw scripture as giving the raw material for people to draw conclusions not explicitly supported by that same scripture.  And here we find, therefor, a cautionary tale for those who challenge every moral or doctrinal statement they do not like with with the challenge, “does the Bible say that?”

Consider how jarring it must have been, after all, in the late seventeenth century, to consider on the one hand Biblical principles that were counter to slavery, but at the same time a Bible that had no explicit denunciation of such a terrible and very widespread practice in the ancient world.  Surely this constitutes some kind of cognitive dissonance in scripture.  But whether or not we accept the doctrine of Biblical infallibility, might we attempt some kind of dialectical reading with acceptance of slavery as the thesis, the salvation offered by Christ to all as the antithesis, and the resulting explicit denunciation of slavery as the necessary synthesis presaged by the Bible, even if not explicitly?

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A Meditation on Embracing the Darkness

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was no rhetorical question.  Jesus did not know the answer.  If those last words of Jesus were not asked for real, if they were just some show to say to an unappreciating world, “look how much I’m suffering for you!” then Jesus was never fully incarnated, never had the full deal of the shittiest elements of the human experience, which includes not understanding why suffering and injustice exist: he was merely slumming.

Both trees—the tree Adam and Eve ate from and the tree Jesus died on—are absurd.  That is the whole point.  It makes no sense that from a creation that was good in every respect a choice was made that brought sin and death into the world.  It makes no sense that omnipotent God, the ground of all being, must suffer death for life to prevail.  If we could make sense of evil, that would mean God had ordered a proper place for it in the creation, or that evil was a force outside his control and rivalling him.  Christianity rejects both these positions.

Jesus did not die absurdly so we could make sense of our own pain.  He embraced the darkness and absurdity that we also are in.  His resurrection indicates there is an answer to his question, but we do not know what it is.

I know this is not a rational answer to the problem of evil.  My point is that this side of the grave there isn’t such an answer even imaginable.  But let me say that the cross and the Resurrection are grounds for faith in the unimaginable.

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That All Shall be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation (2019) Yale University Press – by David Bentley Hart

A Quick Review

Christianity has a long-lasting problem: apparently, a just, merciful, and loving God will consign some persons to eternal suffering, or at the very least, eternal annihilation.  There seems to be a deep psychological or even ideological aversion to universalism, which is the idea that all persons, sooner or later, will be saved and eternally united with God.  So deeply entrenched is this aversion, that on the live chat feed of a YouTube featuring David Bentley Hart discussing universalism with several theologians, someone actually said (apparently in all seriousness) “universalism is depressing.”

David Bentley Hart is a Christian of the Eastern Orthodox Church and a scholar of religion.  His book is a defense of Universalism.  I have read defenses of universal salvation before, but none so bold as David Bentley Hart’s.  In fact, the last chapter, “Final Remarks,” begins thus:

Custom dictates and prudence advises that here, in closing, I wax gracefully disingenuous and declare that I am uncertain in my conclusions, that I offer them only hesitantly, that I entirely understand the views of those that take the opposite side of the argument, and that I fully respect contrary opinions on these matters.  I find, however, whether on account of principle or of pride, that I am simply unable to do this. (199)

I laughed out loud for sheer delight when I read this, because it is time the infernalist position not only be rejected, but rejected without quarter.  Indeed, Hart is even critical of Hans Urs von Balthasar, sometimes referred to as a “hopeful universalist,” because he wants to hold the infernalist and universalist positions apparently found in scripture “in a sustained ‘tension,’ without attempting any sort of final resolution or synthesis between them…. I [Hart] cannot quite suppress my suspicion that here the word ‘tension’ is being used merely as an anodyne euphemism for ‘contradiction’” (102-03).  It is encouraging to hear a scholar of Hart’s repute take such a bold stand.

The book addresses and refutes on a rational basis the usual objections to universalism.  One of these is that for human life to be meaningful humans must be free, and that genuine free will requires that individuals be free even to choose eternal hell, and that therefor damnation for some is at least possible.  Part of Hart’s critique of this view involves assailing the conception of freedom implied here.  Another objection to universalism is that God, being God, can do what he wants and is outside our paltry understanding of what we might call just, good, or loving, etc., and therefor can torture certain persons forever without in the least diminishing any of these qualities in himself.  Hart deals with this objection handily too, as well as others, showing that we cannot defend infernalism by letting our conception of the divine retreat into some ineffable mystery as a cover for sheer cruelty.

One thing this book does not do is undertake a thoroughgoing scriptural analysis of what the Bible might be saying about hell, nor does it pretend to do this.  Hart restricts the book mostly to a rational refutation of the idea of eternal hell.  I don’t know what his stance is on Biblical inerrancy or infallibility, but he is not prepared to sacrifice reason to scripture, if scripture speaks nonsense.

I have been asked more than once I the last few years whether, if I were to become convinced that Christian adherence absolutely requires a belief in a hell of eternal torment, this would constitute in my mind proof that Christianity should be dismissed as a self- evidently morally obtuse and logically incoherent faith.  And, as it happens, it would.  (208)

But it is not Hart’s contention that scripture does speak nonsense on this score.  He presents around the middle of the book numerous Bible passages which state or strongly suggest universalism.

To me it is surpassingly strange that, down the centuries, most Christians have come to believe that one class of claims—all of which are allegorical, pictorial, vague, and metaphorical in form—must be regarded as providing the “literal” content of the New Testament’s teaching regarding the world to come, while another class—all of which are invariably straightforward doctrinal statements—must be regarded as mere hyperbole.  (94)

If one can be swayed simply by the brute force of arithmetic, it seems worth noting that, among the apparently most explicit statements on the last things, the universalist statements are by far the more numerous.  (95)

Nor does Hart back off and give annihilationism (the belief that the damned are not tormented forever, but at some point annihilated) any quarter.

Hart is unintimidated by authority (Augustine or Aquinas, for example) or some idea of what we are “supposed” to believe according to such persons.  He has a distinct attraction to certain of the early church fathers, such as Gregory of Nyssa.  Calvin, however, comes in for some very hard knocks here.  In a YouTube somewhere (I quote from memory) Hart has joked, “some people think I hate Calvin.  And that’s because I do.”

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We Must Put Anti-Capitalism on the Liberal Table

It is the achievement of progressive politics (i.e., liberals and leftists, broadly defined) that issues of race, sex, and gender, as they challenge an unjust status quo, remain paramount in the public eye.  But what of an actual alternative to capitalism?  A defining difference between leftists and liberals is that the former criticize capitalism as such, and advocate for a different way of running the world, whereas the unquestioned liberal assumption is that only capitalism is possible or desirable.  According to the liberal, capitalism may have very serious problems, but they can be fixed: capitalism is and must be here to stay.

The essence of capitalism is that a certain class—the bourgeoisie, or in particular the big bourgeoisie or large corporations—own and/or control most of the means of production: land, machinery, patents, natural resources, etc.  They do this through their use of capital.  Whether the capitalists work hard or are as lazy as a sack of oats, the real source of their wealth is the wealth they already own, wealth created mostly from other people’s labour.  Even those very few capitalists who started out poor, no matter how hard they work, rise to the top mostly on the backs of the working class.  Even the most well-intentioned capitalists pay this class less than its labour is worth; if they didn’t, they would perish as capitalists.  The lie capitalism spreads is that the capitalists’ phenomenal wealth is the just desserts owed to the hardest working members of the global community, and that somehow, the 1% that owns between 30% and 50% of the world’s assets really does 30% to 50% of the world’s work.

If you believe it is humanly possible to work anything close to that hard, I have wasted enough of your time already and you may as well go elsewhere.

Liberals need to question capitalism: not just its excesses or abuses, or its favouring of white males, but capitalism as such, where exploitation is built-in regardless of anybody’s intentions.  An international rainbow coalition of the exploiting class, where all racial, gender, and sexual groups were proportionately represented within the palaces of privilege, would only rearrange the various identities of who are the rich thieves and who are their poor victims.  The amount of robbery and injustice would not decrease significantly.

The critique of capitalism, however, should not be done in competition with the usual liberal concerns over sex, race, and gender.  Rather, a critique of and opposition to capitalism has a great deal to do with these other forms of oppression and is a tremendous boon to the understanding of them.  When you think about it, anti-capitalism has a great deal to say about these other issues of oppression.

Consider these examples, which only scratch the surface:

 Traditionally, women in many times and places have not been allowed to own land: the most fundamental means of production.  They have been forced to rely for sustenance on fathers or husbands.  They often have not been allowed to have the same jobs as men, and where they have made progress and acquired some access to the same jobs, they have often been paid less.

Indigenous people have been oppressed when their means of production–the land–was stolen from them.  Because they were pushed onto reserves, where the economic potential of that land tends to be minimal, the oppression continues.

Africans, in being turned into slaves and taken to foreign lands, not only lost their means of production, but became the means of production: the fruits of which belonged to others.

A perennial problem with LGBTQS people is on-the-job harassment, or even the loss of their jobs if they are open about who they are.

Also, the exploitation of all workers, regardless of dis/ability, race, gender, or sexual orientation is inherent in capitalism.  The Marxist labour theory of value shows clearly that capitalism is founded on the theft of labour.  And even without familiarity with the ins and outs of that theory, we can see the bourgeoisie does not get rich in proportion to its labour.

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FIRST POST

Let me say, first of all, that I hate the word “facilitate” with the fiery passion of ten thousand suns.