Thursday, December 10, 2009

Radical Faith and Creation

May 23, 2008 by Lee

As my previous post may have suggested, I’ve been dipping into the greatest hits of H. Richard Niebuhr (Reinhold’s younger brother and no mean theologian himself).

Right now I’m finishing up his Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, which I had read as an undergrad, and I remember it making an impression on me at the time even though I was in a very different place, religiously speaking.

Faith, for N., has two aspects, the trust aspect and the loyalty aspect. To have faith in something is to trust it as a source of our worth and well-being. But it is also to have loyalty to that thing, to ally ourselves with it and take it up as our cause.

N. distinguishes “radical” monotheism from polytheism and henotheism. The latter term referred, originally, to the worship of one god, but a god who is recognized as one among several. This god might be a national or tribal deity, but isn’t identified with the universal lord and creator. It’s generally agreed, as far as I’m aware, that the OT scriptures exhibit a mix of henotheism and monotheism.

But N. wants to use both polytheism and henotheism in a more extended sense to refer to the ways in which we invest our trust and loyalty. For instance, if my loyalties are divided among devotion to work, family, community, leisure, etc. without any unifying or ordering principle, then I am a functional polytheist.

N. is more interested in modern forms of henotheism, however, both because forms of henotheism are more significant and because they often masquerade as monotheism. A classic case is when our ultimate loyalty is given to our country. Goodness as such is identified with what is good for the nation. And this is often draped in the clothing of civil religion. The cause of god is identified with the cause of our society. Henotheism always involves elevating the penultimate to the place of the ultimate.

By contrast, radical monotheism identifies the ultimate principle of value with the ultimate principle of being. Giving our loyalty to God as understood by radical monotheism means recognizing God as the bestower of existence and of worth. It also involves making God’s cause our cause:
For radical monotheism the value-center is neither closed society nor the principle of such a society but the principle of being itself; its reference is to no one reality among the many but to One beyond all the many, whence all the many derive their being, and by participation in which they exist. As faith, it is reliance on the source of all being for the significance of the self and of all that exists. It is the assurance that because I am, I am valued, and because you are, you are beloved, and because whatever is has being,therefore it is worthy of love. It is the confidence that whatever is, is good, because it exists as one thing among the many which all have their origin and their being in the One–the principle of being which is also the principle of value. In Him we live and move and have our being not only as existent but as worthy of existence and worthy in existence. It is not a relation to any finite, natural or supernatural, value-center that confers value on self and some of its companions in being, but it is the value relation to the One to whom all being is related. Monotheism is less than radical if it makes a distinction between the principle of being and the principle of value; so that while all being is acknowledged as absolutely dependent for existence on the One, only some beings are valued as having worth for it; or if, speaking in religious language, the Creator and the God of grace are not identified. (p. 32)
God’s “cause” or project is nothing less than all being. N. strikes an impeccably Augustinian note when he says that, for the radical monotheist, being qua being is good. God calls all that is into existence and calls it good. And wills its flourishing.

This is why radical monotheism qualifies all partial loyalties, at least when they threaten to displace the whole. Even putatively monotheistic faiths like Judaism and Christianity aren’t immune from henotheistic tendencies. A Christian tribalism that confines its concern to “the brethren” or an ecclesiasticism that comes close to identifying the church with God is a betrayal of the principle of radical monotheism:
In church-centered faith the community of those who hold common beliefs, practice common rites, and submit to a common rule becomes the immediate object of trust and the cause of loyalty. The church is so relied upon as source of truth that what the church teaches is believed and to be believed because it is the church’s teaching; it is trusted as the judge of right and wrong and as the guarantor of salvation from meaninglessness and death. To have faith in God and to believe the church become one and the same thing. To be turned toward God and to be converted to the church become almost identical; the way to God is through the church. So the subtle change occurs from radical monotheism to henotheism. The community that pointed to the faithfulness of the One now points to itself as his representative, but God and church have become so identified that often the word “God” seems to mean the collective representation of the church. God is almost defined as the one who is encountered in the church or the one in whom the church believes. (p. 58 )
The ethical implication of this radical faith, according to N., is to make the cause of all being our cause. Radical monotheism breaks down the barriers between the sacred and profane. Rather than there being “holy” places, objects, and classes of people are “secularized.” “When the principle of being is God–i.e., the object of trust and loyalty–then he alone is holy and ultimate [and] sacredness must be denied to any special being” and a “Puritan iconoclasm has ever accompanied the rise of radical faith” (p. 52). But the flip side of this iconoclasm is “the sanctification of all things”:
Now every day is the day that the Lord has made; every nation is a holy people called by him into existence in its place and time and to his glory; every person is sacred, made in his image and likeness; every living thing, on earth, in the heavens, and in the waters is his creation and points in its existence toward him; the whole earth is filled with his glory; the infinity of space is his temple where all creation is summoned to silence before him. Here is the basis then not only of a transformed ethics, founded on the recognition that whatever is, is good, but of transformed piety or religion, founded on the realization that every being is holy. (pp. 52-3)
One thing that struck me is how N. follows his own logic to its rather non-anthropocentric end; non-human creation has its own intrinsic non-utilitarian value:
How difficult the monotheistic reorganization of the sense of the holy is, the history of Western organized religion makes plain. In it we encounter ever new efforts to draw some new line of division between the holy and profane. A holy church is separated from a secular world; a sacred priesthood from an unhallowed laity; a holy history of salvation from the unsanctified course of human events; the sacredness of human personality, or of life, is maintained along with the acceptance of a purely utilitiarian valuation of animal existence or nonliving being. (p.53)
N.’s Augustinian outlook provides a foundation for a theocentric worldview. As Christopher has recently blogged, Christianity is still stuck much of the time in an anthropocentric perspective, seeing God’s concern aimed primarily at us. For N. this would just be another form of henotheism; God is being used to prop up the human project.

However, what N. doesn’t provide (which is perhaps understandable given the brevity of this book) is a criterion for ranking the importance of the needs of different kinds of beings. Are we too embrace a flat egalitarianism where all existents have the same value? That doesn’t seem right. And yet, any hierarchical ordering threatens to bring anthropocentrism in through the back door.

What I’m inclined to say is that ethics have to be grounded in the nature of different beings and the needs that arise from those natures, along with their relationships with other beings. What’s good for x is what x needs to flourish as the kind of being it is.

For instance, it’s sometimes absurdly claimed that proponents of animal rights want animals to have the same rights as human beings. But a right to vote or to an education, say, isn’t going to do a pig much good. Rather, what a pig needs arises out of her nature: room to root around, be social, to nest, and nurture offspring. If we are depriving our fellow creatures of the opportunity to express their essential natures, then that’s a good sign that we’ve overstepped the bounds of what we truly need to flourish. To attend to all being, then, doesn’t require us to reduce everything to the same level, but it may require us to curtail our own desires when they threaten the essential needs of other creatures.

The most appealing version of this vision that I’ve come across is Stephen R. L. Clark’s “cosmic democracy,” where each kind of creature is provided with sufficient space to thrive. But this presupposes a couple of things, first that the world is set up in such a way to permit this (which is, in part, a question about providence) and second, and more pressing, that human beings can learn to see themselves as one species among many.

Posted in Animal Rights and Issues, Creation
, Social and ethical issues, Theology & Faith, Uncategorized |

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894-1962) was a leading 20th century Protestant theologian (brother of Reinhold) and is most famous for his work Christ and Culture.

Internet Resources

Online Books

The Church Against the World (Willett, Clark & Co, 1935) with Wilhelm Pauck & Francis P. Miller. Niebuhr's sections are:

The Meaning of Revelation (MacMillan, 1954).

The Ministry in Historical Perspectives (with Daniel D. Williams, Harper, 1956)

Radical Monotheism & Western Culture (Harper, 1960).

The Purpose Of The Church & Its Ministry (with Daniel D. Williams & James Gustafson)

Articles

The Responsibility of the Church for Society from Kenneth Scott Latourette (ed), The Gospel, The World & The Church (Harper 1946), chpt 5.

Utilitarian Christianity, Christianity & Crisis, July 1946.

Theological Unitarianisms, Theology Today, July 1983 [edited version of 'The Doctrine of The Trinity & The Unity of the Church', Oct 1946]

The Seminary in the Ecumenical Age, Theology Today, Oct 1960.

The Reconstruction of Faith, excerpt from Faith on Earth and appearing in Christian Century, Aug/Sept 1989.

The Anachronism of Jonathan Edwards, excerpt from Theology, History & Culture, 1996 and in Christian Century, May 1996.

Secondary Articles

Miller, William Lee, Review of Ramsey, Faith & Ethics: The Theology H. Richard Niebuhr, Theology Today, Apr 1958.

Welch, Claude, The Making Of An American Mind?, 1975.

Chrystal, William G. The Young H. Richard Niebuhr, Theology Today, July 1981 [bibliographic information]

Porter, Andrew P. The Feritility of Niebuhr's Idea of Monotheism, 1994.

Ottati, Douglas F., God & Ourselves: The Witness of H. Richard Niebuhr, Christian Century, April 1997.

Marsden, George, Christianity & Cultures: Transforming Niebuhr's Categories, Insight, Fall 1999.

Gathje, Peter K., A Contested Classic: Critics Ask: Whose Christ? Which Culture?, Christian Century, June 2002.

W. Stanley Johnson, A Wesleyan Reading of H. Richard Niebuhr's Theology

Other

H.Richard Niebuhr Papers 1919-62

H. Richard Niebuhr Online

Read H.R. Niebuhr Online

Sunday, December 6, 2009

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894-1962)


"Because he loves the Father with perfection of human eros, therefore he loves men in the perfection of divine agape"

--H. R. Niebuhr


H.R.N.'s theology (together with that of his colleague at Yale, Hans Frie) has been one of the main sources of post-liberal theology, sometimes called the "Yale School."

The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929)
The Church Against the World by H. Richard Niebuhr,
Wilhelm Pauck and Francis P. Miller (1935):
The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry (1956):
The Kingdom of God in America (1937)
The Meaning of Revelation (1941)
Christ and Culture (1951) My study
Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (1960)
The Responsible Self (1962)
Faith on Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith (1989).

A Brief Indroduction:

Helmut Richard Niebuhr was born in Wright City, Missouri and brought up in a German American Family. His father, Gustav Niebuhr, was a minister in the Evangelical Synod of North America. His older brother, Reinhold Niebuhr, became a leading Neo-orthodox and Realist ethicist and theologian. His sister, Hulga Niebuhr, trained students at McCormick Theological Seminary (New York).

Richard Neibuhr was educated at Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, Illinois; Eden Theological Seminary, Webster Groves, Missouri; and Yale Divinity School. He taught at Eden Theological Seminary from 1919 to 1931, served as president of Elmhurst College from 1924 to 1927, and taught at Yale from 1931 to 1962. He specialized in theology and Christian ethics and was concerned with the absolute sovereignty of God and the issue of historical relativism. He considered Karl Barth and Ernst Troeltsch to be his main influences. His most famous work is Christ and Culture. It is often referenced in discussions and writings on a Christian's response to the world around them.

Webpage