Sub Ratione Dei

Altizer: A Twentieth Century Muggletonian?

2010-01-30T18:21:17+00:00

Earlier today reading through Lissa McCullough's introduction to Thinking Through the Death of God I re-read a quote I have read a number of times before, this being Thomas Altizer's 'confession of faith' in his 1966 debate at the height of the Death of God debate with John Warwick Montgomery:

'God is dead' are words recording a confession of faith. Let me be clear in emphasizing that as far as our intention is concerned, we intend to be speaking in faith ... I think that, if any attention at all is given to these words, it will be seen that they do not represent ordinary atheism. The ordinary atheist, of course, does not believe in God, does not believe that there is now or ever has been a God. But we are attempting to say that God Himself is God, and yet has died as God in Jesus Christ in order to embody himself redemptively in the world. In saying that God is dead we are attempting to say that the transcendent Ground, the ultimate final Ground of the World, life, existence has died ... to make possible final reconciliation of Himself with the world (xvii).

I have said before how I have struggled to understands Altizer's project and a break-through for me was reading his autobiography/theological memoir. Truth be told it is still something I struggle to get my head around and, don't want to spent too much effort on it which is probably why i'm taking on a secondary text on the subject. It is the atheism of Altizer's christian atheism that is all to often focused on but, as a reading of Altizer makes clear eventually shows us what is central to Altizer's atheological project is a particular and absolutely final apocalypse. That apocalypse is the 'incarnation' that spelt the death of religion. Hence Altizer writes that "Christianity became a world religion only by negating its original apocalyptic ground, but if we can understand the ending of Christendom as an apocalyptic ending, that ending could then be understood as the renewal of an original apocalyptic ending, and therewith the renewal of apocalypse itself (2006: 177)."

It is here that Altizer offers a reading of the Christ event that he suggests transcends the Christian narrative, by interiorising the message of the incarnation and Altizer moves beyond the Christendom mindset and in so doing acknowledging God's death but also presenting a far more radical apocalypse than that offered by orthodoxy. As Raschke (5-6) puts it in interpreting Altizer's move "Christ's self sacrifice elsewhere in the New Testament characterized as God's self-emptying, or kenosis, is something far more profound than what is suggested in the Chalcedonian formula of God becoming "man". It points to what is suggested in Hegelian terms is the abrogation, the Aufhebung, of God's eternal self-diremption, the negation of the divine self-negation, which in turn fulfills the concept of the Son as hypostasis. The metaphysical conundrum of co-eternality of Father and Son now becomes explicable in terms of what the author of Hebrews calls "a new and loving way opened for us through the Curtain [of the Holy of Holies] that is his body (Heb 10:20)."

All this is by way of preface to an interesting parallel I noticed in reading the Altizer quote with which I began, namely the functional similarity of the apocalyptic Death of God with the absolute immanence of human God in Muggletonian theology. What follows is a summary of Muggletonian teaching on the incarnation/apocalypse and the absolute assumption of mortality from T L Underwood (15):

Reeve and Muggleton claimed that the creator entered into the womb of the Virgin Mary, purified her nature, then died and shed his own mortality, quickened himself in pure mortality, and brought himself forth as the first born Son of God. Thus God the Father, who had been a spiritual man, became physical, mortal man, Jesus Christ ... With the crucifixion he died, both physically and spiritually, but then took on immortality again, yet with the same flesh and spirit.

And, this passible, and still absolutely immanent deity would, after the death of the death of God (so to speak) rule in heaven "in the form of a man, Jesus Christ, between five and six feet tall".Given E P Thompson's thesis on Muggletonian influence on William Blake and Blake's own documented influence on Altizer the relationship is not likely to be coincidental. In marked variance of the religious radicals both Altizer and the Muggletonians asserted a non-trinitarian high christology in which actual death of God presaged the Kingdom of God, albeit in the case of the Muggletonians drawing as they did on the Joachite Age of the Spirit this was a more conventional mode of heresy. I am sure more can be made of the social import of the two deaths of God but, I need to understand the Muggletonian context to a much greater extent before really passing comment.

References ...

Thomas J J Altizer, Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir, SUNY Press, 2006.

Lissa McCullough, Historical Introduction, in Lissa McCullough & Brian Schroeder (Eds), Thinking Through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J J Altizer, Suny Press, 2004.

Carl A Raschke, Rending the Veil of the Temple: The Death of God as Sacrificium Representationis, in Lissa McCullough & Brian Schroeder (Eds), Thinking Through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J J Altizer, Suny Press, 2004.

T L Underwood, Editor's Introduction, in T L Underwood (Ed.), The Acts of the Witnesses: The Autobiography of Lodowick Muggleton and Other Early Muggletonian Writings, Oxford UP, 1999.

Related

Altizer, Apocalypticism and Modern Thinking (1997).

January Books

2010-01-28T20:04:22+00:00

Incoming

Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin, 2006.

Ian Kershaw, Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution, Yale UP, 2009.

Keith E Yandall & Harold Netland, Spirituality without God: Buddhist Enlightenment and Christian Salvation, Paternoster, 2009.

John D Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Goods News of Postmodernism for the Church, Baker Academic, 2007.

Lissa McCullough & Brian Schroeder (Eds), Thinking Through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J J Altizer, Suny Press, 2004.

Outgoing

Janja Lalich, Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults, California UP, 2004.

E P Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, Cambridge UP, 1993.

David Haskell, Through a Lens Darkly: How the News Media Perceive and Portray Evangelicals, Clements Academic, 2009.

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, Harcourt, 1959.

Book Roundup, Mark One.

2010-01-23T16:55:08+00:00

I have more books to post on that I will have a chance to post at any reasonable length and I have held back four (Gandhi & Jesus, What Canst Thou Say?, Sacred & Profane, and Witness Against the Beast) that I want to comment on a bit more substantively. So here's part one of the round-up - part two will probably be up tomorrow.

Mark Ames, Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion in America, Snowbooks, (2007).

Going Postal is an intriguing book to read, by that I mean it is compelling, well written, and nonsensical in equal measure. It is at times extremely difficult to take seriously -take one of the book's central contentions by way of example: the slave trade is a very good analog of life of the average worker in Post-Reaganite America. Seriously?

Notwithstanding the bizarre and lengthy tangents on slave rebellions the book is a well documented and perceptive history and analysis of instances of "going postal". Although beginning within the US Postal Service the instances of work place violence multiplied across US industry and also schools. Ames pins the plethora of such incidences on the rise of depersonalised managerialism that accompanied the Reagan era. Reading that argument in the introduction i was sceptical of the argument but surprisingly Ames does a decent job of making his case. As such, the phenomenon of going postal is, for Ames, a revolutionary one and of profound sociological import. While the argument is compelling I don't see it (generally speaking) as anything more than a sufficient cause. It seems to me evident that one necessary component of such instantiations of rage is the weapon with which murder is dealt out. Work practises are not unique to the US, but the predominance of instances of going postal are; surely, there may be another explanation in addition to reaganite economics? Surprisingly, Ames never seems to even countenance the thought that perhaps the availability of guns is a further factor in the murder rates.

Richard P Church, First Be Reconciled: Challenging Christians in the Courts, Herald Press, (2008).

One of the best books I have read in quite some time. On one level it is simply an examination of the Paul's prohibition of Christians suing other christians and hence an exercise in exegesis.But Church, who is a Methodist (not common for a Herald Press book), uses this as a means of analysing the Christian's relation to the State in creative dialogue with the Anabaptist tradition. In doing so Church offers a convincing articulation of the Church's relationship to Justice (and it's imperfect corollary - the Law). What interested me is how much of Church's argument can be expanded to other areas of Christian Ethics, such as theological reflections on work, particularly public work and attitudes to violence. Recommended.

Gerald J Mast & J Denny Weaver, Defenseless Christianity: Anabaptism for a Nonviolent Church, Cascadia, (2009).

I had high hopes for this book but was pretty disappointed. It is not that the book is poor, in fact, as an exercise in anabaptist spirituality it is pretty good.However, while Weaver and Mast offer some pithy statements such as "Anabaptists did not become martyrs because they held on to standard theological formula. They became martyrs because they considered the standard theological formulas inadequate and developed statements that reflected their new understandings of ecclesiology and commitment to discipleship" (p. 55).

I have no interest in the lowest common denominator school of ecumenicism but it seems clear that the authors are arguing for a radical break from fellow christians and, strangely, there is no discussion whatsoever on the relation to the non-anabaptist christian communion. Disappointing.

Madawi Al-Rasheed & Marat Shterin (Eds.), Dying for Faith: Religiously Motivated Violence in the Contemporary World, IB Taurus, (2009).

As with most edited volumes the quality of the essays vary but overall this is an interesting book. Generally focused on political and social scientific readings of religiously motivated violence and death, especially those in pursuance of terrorist ends. Where the book is interesting is in its treatment of violence within New Religious Movements with treatments by Melton, Bromley, Eileen Barker and Introvigne. There is more than enough implicit arguments within the text to show that the paradigm of the religious terrorist is not that divorced as the NRM 'martyr'.

Through a Lens Darkly

2010-01-17T20:57:15+00:00

David M Haskell, Through a Lens Darkly: How the News Media Perceive and Portray Evangelicals, Clements Academic, 2009.

I was sent this book by The Theological Book Review to review. That I had to not only read the book but also, since its my first time reviewing for TBR also be fairly positive, is I take it payback for some heinous crime that I have unknowingly committed. In order words, that this is not a good book is a significant understatement, although should what i've submitted be published you may need to read between the lines to discern that.I have a post in my drafts which I may finish sometime outling one of the reasons I take issue with Haskell's thesis and his appropriation of Frame Theory.

Briefly put however, Haskellargues that Canadian evangelicals are discriminated against by the major Television news media in Canada with the result that Evangelicals in Canada are repeatedly presented in a negative light which he attempts to evidence on the basis of surveying a decade's coverage of evangelicals, together with a survey of news professional's personal responses to a questionaire. Being a Brit it will not come as much of a surprise that I don't spent much time watching Canadian news coverage so I don't know first hand the state of the subject in question but it seems clear to me that Haskell has made a bold accusation but has simply failed to provide the evidential base both in terms of empirical evidence and methodological approaches to justify this. In fact, I would not be surprised if evangelicals in Canada do get short shrift on occassion but Haskell has done nothing to convince me of an inherent institutional (aka liberal elite) bias, I'd be interested in some first hand experiences though so Frank (Freedom Log), Dave (Rattigan Writes) consider yourself tagged.

A Muggletonian on War ...

2010-01-17T12:19:59+00:00

The following quote is from a private letter by a Muggletonian painter Thomas Pickersgill in 1803 (some 150 years into the movement's history). I've given a very brief sketch on the early movement here.

From E P Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, Cambridge UP, 1993, 72:

Everything Acts according to its Nature, Reason Acts is nature, in going to war, to fight and kill, with Sword and Guns killing One a Nother, Army, Kingdom Against Kingdom, nut it is not so with faith, for no True believer ... can make use of any Such Weapons of Warr ... to Slay the Image of God, our Blessed Redeemer, because faith being of a Nother Nature, which is all love, and is that peaceable Kingdom of God.

The clear disparity of faith and violence is I think interesting, particularly given the Nicodemist approach of Muggletonians in their practice of their faith (the opening paragraph on Philip Noakes in the linked summary indicates this tendency). However, I have heard it said but have never been able to find an explicit reference that Menno Simmons made a very similar argument regarding the Christian's going to war, that by doing so the Body of Christ is divided upon itself. Any one have a reference?

Update: When I first wrote the Muggletonian piece I was contacted by someone developing a website on them. This is now online at http://www.muggletonian.org.uk, it is a really impressive resource.

The Monocultural Myth

2010-01-14T22:22:44+00:00

Review of Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, Penguin, (2006). ISBN: 0713999381.

Amartya Sen is well known as a economist and political theorist and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 1998. In this book Sen tackles the idea of identity and its link to violent conflict. Beginning on a more distinctly geopolitical level Sen discusses the potency of the clash of civilizations mode of thinking both on the more academic level (eg. Samuel Huntington) and on its more widespread appeal. The core of Sen's criticism is that such approach commit the reality of the practice of identity in the modern world is more complex than the monoculturalism the clash of civilizational paradigm assumes. While it is true that the world may be split into some major identity groups (Western, Islamic, etc) the ascription of singular identity for the millions of individuals that ascribe to these groups is naive. It is from this criticism that Sen derives his subtitle "The Illusion of Destiny", Sen convincingly argues that people cannot be boxed into a particular identity group, Muslim for example, and in doing so there beliefs about a particular issue (western decadence for example). Hence Sen writes:

In our normal lives we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups - we belong to all of them. The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, [etc] Each of these collectivities, to all of which this person simultaneously belongs, gives her a particular identity. None of them can be taken to be the person's only identity or singular membership category. Given our inescapably plural identities, we have to decide on the relative importance of our different associations and affiliations in any particular context (p. xii-xiii).

We acknowledge this on a local level; therefore, why do we believe that on an international level these plural identities are not operative. Sen argues with reference to India how they do. It is clear he argues that the claims of a Muslim civilization are nonsense. Moreover, this idea of ideologically separate civilizations does not cohere with the known facts of history; there has always been global development and many of the so-called western developments (freedom, democracy, separation of Church and State) have not only been present elsewhere but have served as the impetus for their development in the West. Thus far the criticism Sen offers is fairly standard; Sen however makes an interesting development in his argument against monocultural mindset that is the foundation for the clash of civilizations. This error of ascribing singular affiliations to cultural groups is also present in those who praise other group's true essence. To take Islam as an example. Sen notes that one of the first responses to the rise in islamophobia was a rise in the "true Islam is a religion of peace" rhetoric. Sen notes that this, like the clash of civilizational approach, fails in asserting a singular attribute to a cultural affiliation that is in reality far from homogeneous. What makes Sen's argument more interesting is his later argument against what he labels plural monoculturalism. In a readable survey of the problems of multiculturalism. Whilst a discussion of tolerance and diversity is sadly kept on the periphery Sen does raise the issue that often plaques multicultural theory, that of group rights versus individual freedom. Plural monoculturalism is the theory that modern life (I was going to use the word society but for the plural monoculturalist there is no such thing) is made of of numerous cultures exist alongside but distinct and separate and sealed off from all other monocultures. There is no real interchange or dialogue, an intermutual sharing of life and learning. Instead one is left misunderstanding and a denial of that most precious right, the freedom of self-definition. Multiculturalism requires and appreciation and indeed valueing of diversity; monoculturalism can live in oblivion to it. While Sen largely dismisses multiculturalism (something I do not) his discussion is a useful criticism of some popular misconceptions of the multicultural approach.

December Books

2010-01-01T12:47:04+00:00

Incoming
Paul Lehmann, The Transfiguration of Politics: Jesus Christ and the Question of Revolution, SCM, 1975.
A C Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: Is the Targetting of Civilians in War Ever Justified? Bloomsbury, 2007.
Steve Cohen (Ed.), From Immigration Controls to Welfare Controls, Routledge, 2001.
William Shawcross, Deliver Us From Evil: Warlords and Peacekeepers in a World of Endless Conflict, Bloomsbury, 2001.
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, Yale UP, 1987.
Nicholas Fotion, War and Ethics: A New Just War Theory, Continuum, 2008.
John Howard Yoder, The War of the Lamb: The Ethics of Nonviolence and Peacemaking, Brazos, 2009.
Glen Stassen (Ed.), Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm for the Ethics of Peace and War, Pilgrim, 2008.
Kenneth Waltz, Man, The State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis, Columbia UP, 1959.
William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, Oxford UP, 2009.
William Stacy Johnson, A Time to Embrace: Same-Gender Relationships in Religion, Law, and Politics, Eerdmans, 2006.
Gary Bass, Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention, Doubleday, 2009.
Michael Newman, Humanitarian Intervention: Confronting the Contradictions, Hurst & Co, 2009.
Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Verso, 2009.
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, Harcourt, 1959.
Gerd Ludemann, Paul: The Founder of Christianity, Prometheus, 2002.
Alan Gilbert, Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy? Great-Power Realism, Democratic Peace, and Democratic Internationalism, Princeton UP, 1999.
Gerald Prunier, The Rwanda Genocide: History of a Genocide, Hurst & Co, 1995.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Allen Lane, 2009.
Outgoing
Nicholas Fotion, War and Ethics: A New Just War Theory, Continuum, 2008.
Hans Jurgen-Goertz, The Anabaptists, Routledge, 1996.
Thoma Trzyna, Blessed are the Pacifists: The Beatidutes and Just War Theory, Herald, 2006.
Michael Graziano, The Divine Farce, Leapfrog, 2009.
Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Verso, 2009.

The Divine Farce, Or, On Not Finding God in Holes ** Contains Spoilers **

2009-12-29T14:23:44+00:00

Michael S A Graziano, The Divine Farce, Leapfrog Press, 2009.

It is I think telling that Graziano's The Divine Farce features within its pages a multitude, and quite possibly an infinitude of bodies that eat, drink, and copulate with Sage (the novel's narrator) there are only three actual characters and even here the name's are Sage's own inventions.

I don't generally "get" fiction, this book being the first novel I have read in at least a year. In spite of this I did find this short book (only 125 pages) immensely compelling. Of the reviews I have read most seem to read this book as an allegory the human condition, and I am sure they're right. However, and I suspect this interpretation is a consequence of my own neuroses, I could not help but find in the text an allegory of the humanity's metaphysical search, it's search for the grand arche that, once discovered, makes the seemingly complex clear. While notions of deity are only implied the reference to the divine in the title seems to point in this direction. But before interpreting the text let me introduce it.

The novel opens with three people ensconced in a concrete cell, not enough room to stand or sit but instead three tangled bodies lumped together for time immemorial and, quite possibly, for eternity. A prison, with no knowledge of what preceded the incarceration, a living hell for no discernible reason. The only sustenance being a pear nectar that ran down the cell walls. Existence, to the extent that there was any existence, was hopeless - the narrator, Sage, opines:
We should have been grateful for the nectar, but it didn't succeed in mollifying us. We stamped, we shouted, we pounded on the walls. Of course we did. We felt sick with panic. We shook with rage. We sobbed. But none of it helped. If I hit the wall, slamming it with the soft part of my palm, lunging at it with my shoulder, I accomplished nothing more than a wet slapping sound, a dull ache, and a bruise that I could feel afterward for a while. None of us could hear any indication of a hollow space behind the wall. its solidity was so absolute that I lost the ability to imagine emptiness outside the microcosm. In my mind the the universe was filled up infinitely with concrete, and at its center was one tiny bubble in which our randomly assorted souls had been entombed (p. 9-10).
What is interesting about the text is that for all the anger and futility quite soon anger turns to resignation, and even contentment and the developing "mutual harmony" of the cramped conditions. And this is where, in my own neurosis God enters the fray. The mutual harmony is shattered when the previously impenetrable cell is revealed to be penetrable after all and in a cruel twist just as Sage is resigned to an eternity of horrid but not quite unbearable existence locked together with his two companions the wall begins to slowly show signs of degradation. At first this was just a gritty residue on the tongue after drinking the pear nectar that dripped down the walls but with the possibility that the hitherto impenetrable cell is in fact vulnerable Sage is left with an existential dilemma. The possibility of escape therefore becomes both intriguing, hopeful and terrifying. What the hole in the wall however indubitably showed that sooner "or later, the entire surface was going to wear away around [them]. [They] were evidently not in eternal stasis" (26). Despite protestations from his companions and the inherent terror of entering the unknown the hole "had to" be developed and the wall torn down so as to see what, if anything, lay beyond it.
It is here that I felt such empathy with the Sage character, for it seems an analog of my own feelings regarding religion/God. Life, however constricted and shitty, would seem so much more amenable without the "God Hypothesis", and yet I must still engage theology. It is both a matter of reluctance and compulsion.
And so Sage digs his way out of his heaven/hell (Graziano maintains a real ambivalence throughout the text). However, on escaping one prison even though he does with his fellow detainees Sage falls to a far more expansive prison. Even though he had been cramped, unable to cramp or stand, the cavernous expanse prefigures a more severe confinement as soon the "mutual harmony" of the three co-prisoners is shattered as Sage overcome by the need to explore becomes detached and although surrounded by a multitude of bodies there is no mutual interaction on a 'real' level - even sex is impersonal.
And yet the desire to question, to seek what lies beyond continues and Sage spots another hole high in the Cave's ceiling, another window into what could but probably won't be a portal to a better future. In this way the story continues. The metaphysical search continues but it would be easier to cease, and yet Sage continues to move beyond the result is a yet deeper level of hell/heaven.
In this way the novel reminds me of Camus' interpretation of the Myth of Sisyphus although inverted, there is always a search for an arche, it will never be found, we know it will never be found, the search for it is itself regressive but nevertheless the search must go on. To refuse is suicide.
Highly recommended, it is definitely among the most thought provoking texts I have read this year.

Putting the Problem Back into the Problem of Evil

2009-12-26T16:23:58+00:00

Review of Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, Cornell University Press, (1999). ISBN: 0801486866. REPOST

This book has been sitting on my to read list for over a year and I am still not sure what motivated me to pick it up when I did. Although a Priest in the Episcopalian church and, at the time of publication Professor of Historical Theology at Yale (she has since moved to Oxford where she is Regius Professor of Divinity) Adams is best known as a philosopher within the analytic tradition. That is normally enough, particularly with my more recent continental leanings, for occasion disinterest. Coupled with this the fact that the title itself is less than appealing and that the language and argument is quite complex and difficult to follw in parts I read this with some trepidation.All of the above goes to show, to quote a cliche, that one should not judge a book by its cover. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God is an superb book, particularly in terms of how the book's argument is constructed. J L Mackie's argument in his 1955 essay "Evil and Omnipotence" is taken by Adams to be the work that set the agenda for five decades of philosophical reflection on problem of evil. Briefly stated Mackie put the problem the following way: (traditional) theism posits that God, is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good. However, in addition to the first proposition it is also the case that evil exists. These two statements are, according to Mackie, inconsistent to the point that it is the case that to hold both together is evidence against the reasonable belief in God. In short, the problem of evil makes theistic belief irrational. Adams begins by retracing (analytic) philosophy's attempts to respond to this argument. The second problem, "evil exists" is not generally challenged (although I guess Augustine's idea of evil as the privation of God rather than a separate entity does tip its hat in this direction) Some argument's, such as those of Rolt [in 1913, hence before Mackie's paper] and Hartshorne in their own way question Mackie's first premiss: the idea of omniscience and especially omnipotence (see Hartshorne's Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes), evil is in some sense a force that God is impotent against because s/he cannot prevent this. However, the majority of responses to Mackie's problem of evil do not agree with both of his propositions; where they differ is in the conclusion that the two are incompatible with each other. Adams offers a brief summary of each of the main trajectories of responses by Christian philosophers to Mackie's problem including the Free-will theodicy of Plantinga and the soul-making (Ireneaen) theodicy of John Hick. In and of itself this brief survey of Christian approaches to the problem of evil is a helpful introduction and overview to the current state of academic thinking on the subject; however, Adams' intention is not just to offer another "introduction to philosophy of religion" type of book but to actually advance and even more interestingly change the intellectual parameters within which the debate is played out. At the heart of Adams' objections to these contemporary approaches to the problem of evil is her contention that they simply do not appreciate the full force of the problem of evil. Evil is not merely a phenomenon that can serve as an intelluctual defeator of theistic belief for those philosophically minded it is something that can cause immense epistemological and existential (why the response to evil can be existential will, I hope, become clear in the course of this review). Part of the problem with contemporary theodicies, argues Adams, is that they simply do not take the terror of evil into account in their deliberations, evil is dealt with in the abstract apart from the anguishes and pain of modern life (and death). Consequently Adams critises Plantinga's startling admission that his "generic and global approach" enables one to "avoid specific consideration of evils, so appalling and so horrifying that we not only do not know why God permits them, we cannot conceive of any plausible candidate reasons" (p. 25). This leads us to Adams' introduction of horrendous evil back into the philosophical responses to the problem of evil. Horrendous evil is not however best understood as a particular category of evil (as opposed to minor and 'really bad but not quite horrendous' evil. Against the tendency toward abstraction Adams argues that an intellectually coherent theodicy must tackle the worst of evils; Adams suggests that horrendous evil should be understood as "evils the participation in which (that is, the doing or suffering of which) constitutes prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant's life could (given their inclusion in it) be a great good to him/her on the whole" (p. 26). This turn to the individual is one of the interesting features of Adams' approach. She is insistent that a more abstract answer to the problem of the compossibility of divine goodness and inexlicable evil will not do. In each case the question is the compossibility of evil with God's goodness to a particular individual. It is this problem, which the process theodicy of Hartshorne in particular ignore, that is at the heart of the existential problem of evil. Adams summarises her basic argument on this score as follows:
I contend that God could be said to value human personhood in general, and to love individual human persons in particular, only if God were good to each and every human person God created. And Divine goodness to created persons involves the distribution of harms and benefits, not merely globally, but also within the context of the individual person's life. At a minimum, God's goodness to human individuals would require that God guarantee each a life that was a great good to him/her on the whole by balancing off serious evils. To value the individual qua person, God would have to further to defeat any horrendous evil in which s/he participated by giving it positive meaning through organic unity with a great enough good within the context of his/her life.
Adams' criticism is not limited to Christian respondants to Mackie, however. The problem of evil as Mackie presented it is aperversion from the Christian view of God. For this reason Adams critises both the theologian and the atheologian for their presentation of the argument on 'neutral' terms. Consequently Adams writes concerning Mackie that "insofar as [he] wished to show the believer's view contradictory and irrational, he must take an interest whether (1) [God is omniscient,omnipotent, and perfectly good] and (2) [evil exists] can be understood as compossible on the believer's construal of these claims" (p. 13 - empahsis added). It is in this area that Adams made what was for me the most surprising departure in the text. After many chapters of analytic philosophy Adams changes tack to a smattering of historical theology/mysticism and good doses of biblical theology and social anthropology. The reason for doing this, as hinted in the quote above, is to paint a Christian understanding of the place of evil within the Christian narrative; a significant part of which, like David Bentley Hart's recent piece of popular theodicy, is to turn the the aesthetic, particularly the beatific vision. Against the doctrine of divine impassibility Adams presents a Suffering Christ (in both human and divine hypostases) as integral to an adequate doctrine of at-one-ment. All of the preceding argument leads up to answering one question: is the existence of horrendous evil compossible with God's goodness to individual participants in such horrors? Adams answers in the affirmative:
On my account for God to be good to a created person, God must guarantee him/her a life that is great good to him/her on the whole and one in which any participation in horrors is defeated within the context of his/her own life (p. 156).

Given Adams' language of God's guarantee of a life (both ante and postmortem) that is a great good it will not come as a surprise to see that Adams links this guarantee to a soteriological universalism and a God who has taken the initiative and suffered just as we have suffered. It is a fascinating argument, and one that I am at least sympathetic to. However, it is also at this point that Adams lets go of some of the rigorous scholarship that she has demonstrated throughout the rest of the text. An appeal to universalism is obviously not unique in philosophy of religion (see Hick for example, although Adams' is clearly of a different kind) but the justification for this development was surprisingly vague. However, beyond all of my initial expectations Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God is an excellent and intriguing book, and, as a result Marilyn McCord Adams is certainly on my radar in terms of future reading.

Anxious Souls

2009-12-23T17:14:45+00:00

Review of John W Matthews, Anxious Souls Will Ask ... The Christ-Centered Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eerdmans, (2005).
Bonhoeffer's prison diary Letters and Papers from Prison was the first writing of his that I had read. More than anything else what first attracted me to his thought was its honesty; the faith that was so important to him was also for Bonhoeffer a source of much doubt and questioning. However, no doubt because of the honesty with which Letters and Papers was written it was also, for me at least, a profoundly unsettling experience. How is one to read Bonhoeffer's call for a religion-less Christianity in a world come of age, for example. John W Matthews, a Lutheran Minister in Minnesota, attempts in this short book (it only runs to 80 pages). Matthews argument is that Bonhoeffer theology has strong continuities with his earlier work and that Bonhoeffer's prison reflections are an important resource in spurring contemporary Christianity to a more authentic faith. In the prison writings of Bonhoeffer Matthews identifies 5 "pillars" which, if appropriated by the contemporary church, will enhance its witness and mission. I will not outline each of these here (the book's short enough for you to pick these up in one sitting, in any case) other than to say that a key theme that runs through all is the need to the Church to take a 'reality-check' and be honest about its own context and vision and, mirroring the mission of God as incarnated in Jesus, take an approach in which suffering and vulnerability are to, if not welcomed then accepted so that, like Jesus, the church may become authentically human. In the her endorsement printed on the back cover Jean Bethke Elshtain writes that this book is "a powerful and poignant companion to Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison. Newcomers to Bonhoeffer's text and Bonhoeffer scholars alike will benefit from the fruits of John Matthews's pilgrimage alongside Bonhoeffer". There is no doubt that Anxious Souls will Ask ... does have some merit but I am afraid that, contrary to Elshtain's opinion, it is not anything like a "must-read". I am not at all sure anyone who has read even a moderate amount of Bonhoeffer (whether in primary or secondary literature) will find anything of real value. However, for the genuinely beginning reader, particularly one in the immediate unsettling aftermath of reading the Letters and Papers, then the albeit brief forays into Bonhoeffer's other theological work will be of assistance even if Matthews is more confident than me of the clear line of continuity that exist between, for example, Life Together and Discipleship with Letters and Papers.