Robin's Readings and Reflections: June 2011

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Insights from Donald Scott

I've been reading Donald Scott's book From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry, 1750-1850. I thought the following insight was particularly interesting, in light of what I said in my earlier post "Religion of the People, by the People, For the People."

In the eighteenth century, the submission and obedience that characterized the relationship between God and man had provided not only the source but also the 'type,' the ultimate model, of all the basic social disciplines. Increasingly, however, churchmen used the term to refer almost exclusively to the individual's personal relationship to God rather than to one's position and obligations in society. The surrender of the will to God was the ground, not of disciplines which were themselves forms of subordination, but of the inner controls needed to restrain the new, more autonomous character of the New England people. In this sense, evangelicals had evolved a sense of social discipline centered far more upon self-repression than upon internalized habits of deference to authorities.

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Friday, June 24, 2011

Islamophobia is not Racism

I had a friend that I grew up with (actually, I still consider her a friend, although I'm not sure if it's mutual) who I have not heard from since she wrote to me to say she had taken offense at what I wrote on my blog, and one of the things she mentioned was what I have written against Muslims. I wrote back that while I have criticized the ideas and practices of Muslims, I have nothing against them as people.

I never heard back from her so I don't know if she accepted my distinction. It would seem that many journalists also have difficulty getting their minds around this distinction. Consider the following statement from an article that Peter Oborne wrote:

Islamophobia...can be encountered in the best circles: among our most famous novelists, among columnists from The Independent and Guardian newspapers, and in the Church of England. Its appeal is wide-ranging. "I am an Islamophobe, and proud of it," writes Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, then writing for The Independent. "Islamophobia?" The Sunday Times columnist Rod Liddle rhetorically asks in the title of a speech, "Count me in." Imagine Liddle declaring: "Anti-Semitism? Count me in", or Toynbee announcing that she was "an anti-semite and proud of it". This just wouldn't happen and for very good reasons. Anti-semitism is recognised as an evil, noxious creed and its adherents barred from mainstream society and respectable organs of opinion. Not so Islamophobia.

It’s hard to tell what Oborne is actually suggesting, but it sounds like he is saying that ‘Islamophobes’ (which now apparently includes anyone even the least bit critical of Islam) should be “barred from mainstream society”?

Notice what has happened here. Islamophobia, which can include various degrees of antipathy to the ideas and practices of Islam, has been equated with a posture (anti-semitism) which includes various degrees of antipathy to a race. The effect of this subtle sophism is to get us to think of Islam as a race, with the corollary that objections to Islam are at the same level as objections to a race. Being a critic of Islam then turns one into a racist. To be against Islamic ideology is to join the ranks of people who hate blacks, Asians or Jews.

It is unfortunate that these categories are always being conflated, seeing that the ability to criticize other faith-traditions has always been a halmark of a free society. The bottom line is that Islam is not a race any more than Christianity is a race. Islam is a worldview that makes truth-claims about the world which people should feel free to criticize in public debate, just as Christianity is a worldview that makes truth-claims about the world that people should feel free to criticize in public debate. The concept of Islamophobia is putting this freedom in leopard. Do we really want to return to the era of the inquisitions, when people lost the ability to distinguish between the heresy and the heretic?

I can distinguish very well between hating the ideas and practices of Islam and hating the people of Islam. Unfortunately, it seems that some of my readers and former friends can't make the same distinction.

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Thursday, June 23, 2011

From the King James Bible to the i-pad

We all know that we are standing at a critical juncture in history when the future of the printed word can no longer be taken for granted. Many sociologists are asking what will happen as the printed word comes to lose the unquestioned primacy it has enjoyed since Gutenberg, being eclipsed by the digital word.

In a series of articles I published at the Alfred the Great Society, I have focused this questions more specifically to explore the implications these changes have for the church’s reception of scripture. What is the future of the Bible’s role for the church in a world where our communication technologies are changing so rapidly?

To read my articles, click on the following links:

From the King James Bible to the i-pad (Part 1)

From the King James Bible to the i-pad (Part 2)

From the King James Bible to the i-pad (Part 3)

Dumned-Down Political Debate

I recently wrote an article for the Charles Colson Center in which I compared contemporary presidential debates with the political debates 150 years ago. I pointed out, for example, that the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 could sometimes last seven hours and were packed with richly developed intellectual argumentation. What a contrast this is with today, in which politicians typically offer us a succession of quick, disconnected points which attempt to convey a general impression of competence and trustworthiness while lacking in the rigors of analytical depth and philosophical sophistication.

Someone who has chronicled the gradual dumbing-down of American political discourse is Elvin T. Lim, political scientist from Wesleyan University. His 2008 publication The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush, looks specifically at presidential speeches, yet his observations have relevance across the spectrum of our nation’s political discussions.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Manners

An article in the Daily Mail reported that old fashioned table manners are becoming a thing of the past - with most people now believing it is fine to answer a mobile phone during dinner, to talk with their mouth full and to start eating before others' food has arrived. "The study found more than half of people admit they pay little or no attention to manners drilled into them by their parents when they were younger."

This raises a crucial question: is it important to have good manners? Absolutely! In my article "Defending Christendom With Good Manners" article I have argued that the survival of civilization depends on good manners. Click HERE to read why the future of Christendom depends on manners.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Reproductive Freedom

The Center for Reproductive Rights has stated that its mission is to advance the cause of “reproductive freedom as a fundamental human right that all governments are legally obligated to protect, respect, and fulfill.”
But we should ask what the Center means by “Reproductive Freedom”?

According to their website, the “fundamental human right” of “reproductive freedom” includes both access to birth control and safe abortion.

Now this is just the thing to get a fellow wondering. We may well ask at what point in human history abortion and birth control suddenly became a fundamental human right. Suppose we say they became a fundamental human right as soon as the technology made them possible. But this is problematic, because in that case, their existence as ‘rights’ is not absolute but contingent – contingent on technology.

But what about other contingencies? Suppose access to abortion and birth control was so expensive that it would bankrupt the entire world to provide these ‘services’ for even a single individual? In that case, would it still be a universal right?

It should be clear that these, so called, ‘rights’ are not free-standing, absolutes, but contingent on factors that may or may not exist. Now here’s the rub: can ethics be one of those factors as well?

I merely raise the question.

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Saturday, June 18, 2011

Penal Substitution and the Problem of Justice

One key feature of Western theology (both Protestant and Roman Catholic) is a fixation on legal categories. The leads to certain ideas about justice and penal substitution which are simply not part of the picture within Eastern Orthodox theology, at least not according to Alexandre Kalomiro. This is not to say that the Eastern Orthodox view is not without its own philosophical problems. Given their synergistic soteriology, for example, one could question whether the God of the East satisfies the conditions necessary for God to even be sovereign. However, at least it solves certain problems about justice inherent in the Western mindset.

Of course, ultimately one would need to examine what scripture says about justice. Towards that end, I am looking forward to reading the book defending penal substitution that my good friend Steve Jeffrey has written on the topic. Not having studied the issue in much depth, however, what does strike me from the outset is that in the Old Testament justice is more of a hands-on, putting the world to rights, type of thing and less of an abstract, judicial tweaking of the accounts that is behind the Western idea of penal substitution, imputation, etc. Moreover, by understanding Jesus' relationship to Israel, Tom Wright has put forward an idea of substitution that may solve some of the ideas endemic to the Western model without completely abandoning the substitutionary paradigm.

So what are these problems inherent to Western legal theology?

From Pollyanna to Brutus to Bonhoeffer

As human beings we often face times of suffering. When we do, the temptation is often to deal with our suffering in an unbiblical way. In an article I wrote earlier in the year for the Charles Colson Center, I used the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a springboard to explore two unhealthy approaches to human suffering.

One of these unbiblical approaches is what I call “the Pollyanna method.” In the above article I write that "This describes a person who pretends that everything is happy even when it is not. Such an approach is sometimes referred to as being 'sentimental' and amounts to a functional denial of the reality of evil."

In the same article I went on to talk about an approach on the opposite extreme called Stoicism. Stoicism was a school of Greek philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium [pictured on right] in the early 3^rd century BC. The stoics held a pantheistic worldview which, in the words of Tom Wright, “[believed] that everything that exists is somehow either divine or impregnated with the divine.” But it is the Stoic approach to suffering that concerns us here. For the Stoic, freedom from suffering lay in an emotional detachment from pain. The good life lay in transcending the “passions”, including the emotions caused by human suffering. Since each of us must learn to resolutely submit to our fate, the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy observed that Stoicism provided “a psychological fortress which was secure from bad fortune.”

The character of Brutus in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar was a Stoic. Thus, when grief gets the better of Brutus and Shakespeare has him declare to his friend Cassius, “O Cassius, I am sick of many griefs”, Cassius replies, “Of your philosophy you make no use if you give place to accidental evils.”

Cassius, though himself an Epicurean, is reminding Brutus to be a good Stoic and not be affected by difficulties that only happen by chance (‘accidental evils’). Brutus responds as a Stoic, saying: “No man bears sorrow better.” His Stoicism reinforced, when Cassius latter expresses more sorrow than Brutus for the death of his wife, Brutus tells him to be quiet and speak no more of it.

If the Pollyanna approach is characterized by a constant artificial smile, the Stoic approach comes to us in the form of a perpetual stiff upper lip.

In my article 'gratitude and joy in the midst of suffering', I explain how Bonhoeffer teaches us how to navigate between these two escapist extremes towards the Biblical approach to suffering. To find out what that is, you'll have to click here.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Questions about Sola Fide

I don't dispute that the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone, properly qualified, is a Biblical doctrine. (I say 'properly qualified' because I think Tom Wright and the New Perspective on Paul has done a good job of showing that what Paul meant by 'justification by faith' is not exactly what Luther meant.) But I do have some questions about some things that aren't adding up to me about it.

In Yesterday's Breakpoint radio program, titled 'Inflated Expectations', Charles Colson had some good things to say about my article 'Generous Love.' He also added some helpful insights of his own about marriage and the meaning of love. To listen to Chuck's broadcast, click here. To listen to it, click here.

Thursday, June 09, 2011

The Marketing Industry and the Church

I hate malls, and in my 2009 blog post "A Trip to the Mall" I explain why. But I've recently been reading Jamie Smith's book Desiring the Kingdom, in which Smith makes a convincing argument that there is much we can learn from the mall, idolatrous as it tends to be.

“…I think we should first recognize and admit that the marketing industry – which promises an erotically charged transcendence through media that connects to our heart and imagination – is operating with a better, more creational, more incarnational, more holistic anthropology than much of the (evangelical) church. In other words, I think we must admit that the marketing industry is able to capture, form and direct our desires precisely because it has rightly discerned that we are embodied, desiring creatures whose being-in-the-world is governed by the imagination. Marketers have figured out the way to our heart because they ‘get it’: they rightly understand that, at root, we are erotic creatures – creatures who are oriented primarily by love and passion and desire. …But meanwhile, the church has been duped by modernity and has bought into a kind of Cartesian model of the human person, wrongly assuming that the heady realm of ideas and beliefs is the core of our being. These are certainly part of being human, but I think they come second to embodied desire. And because of this, the church has been trying to counter the consumer formation of the heart by focusing on the head and missing the target: it’s as if the church is pouring water on our head to put out a fire in our heart.”

Is Smith right? I'd like some feedback. Canterbury Chris has been making some similar arguments that are being published on the Creedal Christian blog, which may helpfully feed into the discussion.

Further Reading

A Question of Anthropology

Cultural Apologetics

Saturday, June 04, 2011

Slutwalk and Female Negation

I was recently asked to cover an event coming to London known as the ‘Slutwalk.’ The event, which features scores of women walking down the street dressed as ‘sluts,’ started in Toronto on April 3, 2011, with an attendance of over 3000 people. Since then (at least according to the Wikipedia article about it) it has spread to other towns throughout the US, Canada, Australia, Europe and even the Middle East. It is shortly to reach London.

It is anticipated that the event in London will be the biggest Slutwalk yet, with thousands of marchers meeting at Trafalgar Square. If the Toronto and Boston events were anything to go by, the march will feature scores of women dressed in bikinis, miniskirts and other minimalist outfits (some have even gone completely topless). In an earlier walk one woman marched in her underwear with the word 'slut' written across her skin.

There are many issues that an event like this raises and in an article at Alfred the Great Society I have explored some of the fundamental issues at stake regarding sexual identity. To read my article click on the following link:

Slutwalk on the Negation of Female Sexuality

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