Which Religion? Whose Spirituality?

Browsing through a questionnaire on social attitudes at the start of my long march through a PhD, I was brought up short by some questions that invited me to assess my religiousness and/or spirituality.

The problem is that I don't consider myself very religious, or very spiritual for that matter.

The difficulty is that both terms are used generically, without clear definition,as though we all knew what the essence of religion and spirituality respectively are. Unfortunately, for anyone wanting to use the terms this way, there is no such thing as a "religion" and no such thing as a "spirituality" without further qualification.

The question we need to ask, with appropriate apologies to Alasdair McIntyre, is "Which religion? Whose spirituality?"

As the question implies, both religion and spirituality at the very least, need some form of qualification before I could even begin to think about, contemplating giving any sort of an answer to the above question.

The issue of specifying which gods we are worshipping is important, because as Rowan Williams pointed out in his address Analysing Atheism, Unbelief and the World of Faiths, the early Christians were in a very significant and life-threatening sense not religious.

... to understand what atheism means, we need to know which gods are being rejected and why. Thus an early Christian was an atheist because he or she refused to be part of a complex system in which political and religious loyalties were inseparably bound up. 'Atheism' was a decision to place certain loyalties above those owed to the sacralised power of the state.

Simon Barrow in What difference Does God Make, makes clear, drawing on the work of Nicholas Lash, why "individual religiousness" is not really the point.

Before modernity, the term ‘gods’ was understood, correctly, as a relational one, designating whatever it was people worshipped – gave ultimate worth to. It resided in occurrences, activities and patterns of behaviour – not concepts. Explains Lash: “The word ‘god’ worked rather like the word ‘treasure’ still does. A treasure is what someone... highly values. And I can only find out what you value by asking you and by observing your behaviour… There is no class of object known as ‘treasures’… valuing is a relationship.”

However, with the dominance of instrumental reason, ‘gods’ became, correspondingly, things (objects, entities, individuals) of a certain kind, a ‘divine’ one. Analogously, the ‘home territory’ of God-understanding shifted from worship (the assignment of worth-ship) to description (the assignment of properties). It became a metaphysical enterprise rather than a matter of appropriate relationship. The difference is that the former has to make claims about essence or ‘being’ (of a person, a thing, or ‘god’) in order to find it meaningful. The latter does not, though it needs a good idea of what it speaks.

This double shift of meaning and affection fundamentally corrupted and disabled the modern comprehension of ‘God’ – because God is, logically and necessarily, beyond definition (delimiting) and categorisation. God is most definitely not a ‘thing’ belonging to a class of things called ‘gods’.[10] “Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheists all have this, at least, in common: that none of them believe in gods”, says Lash. Therefore religions are best considered ‘schools’ in which people learn properly to relate to God precisely by not worshipping any thing – not the world nor any part, person, dream, event or memory of it.

Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, nationalism and even atheism offer specific, and in varying ways overlapping and competing schools, in what it is to be and live humanly in the world in which we find ourselves. Spirituality, like religion is never generic. And in the account of religion that I am arguing for the substantive difference between "religion" and "spirituality" begins to disappear, in so far as spirituality is expressed in differing, and non-generic ways of learning to live in relationship to the world.

The key difference is that "spirituality" is seen as differing from "religion" in being less tied to institutional structures and intellectual formulations. This outcome is what we might expect if the move in public identification from "religion" to "spirituality" is the result of the deconstruction of Christendom. This process has generally fallen under the label of secularization, a process which is notably been played out in the geographical areas of the world shaped by Christendom.

In the light of this development the sociology of religion needs to be reconsidered and perhaps de-constructed as being powerfully shaped imaginatively and historically by its relationship to Christendom and its underlying assumptions. Such an exercise might have the helpful result of relativising its explanatory usefulness for Christians thinking about mission and church growth strategies. The analysis offered by this discipline with its focus on the "decline of religion" and the "rise of spirituality" if used without appropriate caution could simply result in importing the problematics of Christendom back into our ecclesiology and practice of mission.

Note: an edited and slightly extended version of this is now available on Ethos: EA Centre for Christianity and Society blog.

What should we return (render) to Caesar?

The gospel reading this week was Matthew 22: 15-22 on the much quoted, but much misrepresented passage on "rendering to Caesar".  The comment by Jesus on paying imperial taxation "give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar - and to God what belongs to God" has been frequently used to underwrite a political quietist stance in which a line is drawn between political activity and "religion".

Well, this approach just won't wash for a number of reasons starting from the fact that the distinction between a private sphere of "religion" and a public sphere of politics would have been incomprehensible at the time. To read such a distinction back into the text is anachronistic. We need to read the incident within its historical context. As a Jew, speaking to Jews, Jesus would have been understood to have been reminding his interlocutors of the prior and total claim of God over their lives. The books of Moses and the Prophets, whose authority he held in common with his interlocutors, were devoted to spelling this profound claim out in redundant detail covering the whole of life, from agriculture to food to economics in an arc whose trajectory pushed increasingly to emphasise the central character of the claims of justice and and mercy in walking humbly before God.

So what is going on here?

James Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts I think helps us get a handle on at least part of what is happening with his study of conflicts between the powerful and the oppressed, and his account of the difference between the onstage, public, and the off-stage roles and the differing accounts offered by both groups. What makes this passage so rare and so interesting is that Matthew offers us in the story an account of what the powerful, though still subordinate groups (remembering that the Romans are in overall charge),  the Herodians and the Pharisees are saying off-stage as opposed to their on-stage performance.

In this on-stage moment, they offer Jesus an opportunity to say in public what they suspect he might be saying as a member of the discontented oppressed class off-stage. What his reply offers is an account of a politics that is theologically unassailable, from their point of view, but is nevertheless quietly subversive of his interlocutors and the stance they have taken in their practice of engagement with the Roman empire.

Jesus' answer while apparently deferring to Caesar, is subversive in that it places people in a position in which they are invited, by implication to consider what it means to "give back to Caesar what is his" as against "giving back to God what is his". It does so by inviting, implicitly, a consideration of the question "what is Caesar's?", a question that, in Caesar's terms, should not even be asked. Such a question brings the possibility of a political and socially critical  discipleship into view. What we owe to Caesar, or the liberal democratic nation-state of Australia, itself aligned to an imperial power, is always, and must always, be open to question against the prior claim to return to God what is God's.

What should we return to Caesar? Not an easy question, but one that should be struggled with continually and communally. We can start our reflection on this question from Jesus' the point that the prior claim is to return to God what belongs to God, a practice which acknowledges that the baseline of the human is filled out for us paradigmatically in the life and teaching, the death and resurrection of Jesus. We learn from him what it looks like to return to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to return to God what is God's.

The irony of a "dead democracy"

The death of democracy was announced in a letter to the Canberra Times this morning. There is a certain irony about this announcement.

Democracy understood as the continuing struggle to try and place limits on the accumulation of unaccountable and arbitrary power by the state is always a struggle. And the recent demonstrated ability of vested interests to buy a decision by the expenditure of 20 million dollars in advertising against a proposed mineral resource rent tax shows why we have reason to be concerned about its future.

The death of democracy was announced in the very week that the Federal Government decided not to proceed with amendments to the immigration legislation that would have handed substantially increased  power to the Minister for Immigration that could not have been disallowed by Parliament, or reviewed by the courts.

This outcome was purely accidental and resulted from Tony Abbott's campaign of saying no to everything that the Government proposes. Nevertheless, even if only temporary, and for quite bizarre rreasons an attempt to extend the arbitrary power of the state has been at least delayed.

Wendell Berry - beyond the Sacred-Secular distinction

Poets at their best say things that need to be said, and get behind our disabling, dysfunctional dualisms.

See Wendell Berry getting beyond the sacred secular distinction:
The incarnate Word is with us
is still speaking, is present
always, yet leaves no sign
but everything that is

(Sabbath 1999, IX in Given: New Poems, Counterpoint, 2005, p.78)

How do you know that a war is a war?

 The following post was put up on an Ekklesia Project website  in response to the Nobel Peace Prize address by President Obama in 2009 and is now about to be taken down. I have reproduced Stanley Hauerwas's comments because there are a couple of critical issues he raises that I think  are worth noting.

You tube Obama speech 

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

How Do You Know a War is a War?

by Stanley Hauerwas
Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at the
Divinity School of Duke University

I think President Obama’s speech was remarkable. It was so because he makes articulate the defense of war and that is unusual for someone in his position. But the kind of defense he makes, he admirably acknowledges, is required by his being in a particular position, that is, the Presidency of the United States. The question for Christians is: how did he get in that position? Could he have been elected if he had said something as basic as “I am a Christian and Christians have a problem with war”?

Instead Obama says what a President is required to say. As head of a state he reserves the right to unilaterally go to war if the people he has pledged to protect are in jeopardy. Yet he well knows he is not the head of just any state, but America. He clearly thinks that to the extent “peace is possible,” America has done it. He is, therefore, not hesitant to represent a country that thinks it is in control of history. Thus his claim early in the speech that he believes we can bend history in the direction of justice. That seems such a worthy ideal, but it hides an arrogance that can result in imperialism.

There is, however, another perspective that suffuses the rhetoric of the speech. He genuinely feels the horror of war. Nowhere is his humanity revealed more clearly than in the paragraph early in the speech in which he acknowledges that because we are at war some will be killed, but others will have to kill. I thought it quite telling for him to recognize that part of the tragedy of war is not that you may be killed but that you may have to kill. The pathos of such a recognition can be a resource to make war less likely.

But there is a deep conceptual issue that he does not raise concerning war. That issue is: how do you know a war is a war? He begins with the claim that war in one form or another appeared with the first man. One assumes he’s referring to Cain and Abel. But what happened between Cain and Abel was not war. It was murder. His lack of clarity about what distinguishes war from other kinds of violence becomes the basis for his claim that because evil exists then war is necessary. Thus his suggestion that war is simply “there,” requiring acknowledgement. To recognize the necessity of war is to simply acknowledge history. But that is simply an assertion without argument.

I realize it seems odd, but I think one of the crucial critical questions for those that would so justify war is to ask them what they mean by “war.” I have tried to raise the question by asking, “If a war is not just, what is it?” The question is designed to challenge the assumption that war is just “out there.” Those who use just war criteria often seem to assume war is just “out there.” You then see how many of the criteria work, but even if you only get two out of six (depending on how you count) it is assumed it is still a war and therefore has moral justification. But why should that be assumed? If a war deserves the description “war” surely it must have been just from the beginning.

Though Obama assumes war is a necessary response to evil, he also thinks it can be regulated by just war considerations. He notes that later philosophers, clerics, and statesmen sought to regulate the destructive power of war, resulting in the development of just war criteria. But it is interesting that in turning to the criteria he doesn’t offer a clear statement of all the criteria. In particular he does not mention that the war must be declared by a legitimate authority, that the aims of the war must be declared to the enemy, and the intention to go to war cannot be different than the declaration. These criteria are very important if “just war,” as Paul Ramsey argued, is to be limited by making war serve a limited political end. That the intention to go to war be declared means, moreover, that war can never be fought for unconditional surrender. These are the kinds of considerations that Obama should have engaged if he was to give us a better understanding of what he means by war.

I suspect Obama thinks the crucial moral distinction is between wars between armies and wars between nations where civilians become blurred with combatants. He certainly would prefer wars between armies, and he may think just war is closer to that. But he needs to be clearer than he was in this speech about why he prefers the former. One assumes it is primarily because the latter involves civilian deaths.

While acknowledging the importance of King and Gandhi he nonetheless thinks that, though it is an evil, war is necessary and as he puts is,” it is on some level an expression of human feeling.” I have no idea what he means by “an expression of human feeling,” though I assume it suggests that there is a justice that shapes the necessity to go to war. He even underwrites the view that war is somehow fought for peace. But if just war thinkers are correct, the idea that war should be fought for peace is a mistake. War should not be fought for peace, but rather for relative justice. If Reinhold Niebuhr is informing his understanding of the necessity of war, it seems that we should be a bit more “realistic”.

Of course the idealism that is shaping his justification for war is extremely dangerous. Thus his claim that a “just peace” should be based on the inherent right and dignity of every individual. He then underwrites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a basis for accomplishing the peace that war makes possible. But to make rights the rationale for going to war will make war even more difficult to control. It may be, as he maintains, that peace is unstable if most rights are denied. But it is just as likely that claims for rights will lead to what some call war.

Obama’s idealism, I thought, was most apparent in the paragraph where he praises Nixon for dealing with Mao, John Paul II for reaching out to Walesa, and Reagan for his embrace of perestroika. He is right, of course, that you never get to choose between good and evil, but it seems to me he’s going to need a more complex case than the examples this paragraph provides. He needs better examples because of the claim that America is exceptional just to the extent that we were always an aspiration with commitments that are universal. That is a deep unrealism that can lead to war. So his speech comes full circle, back to the beginning in which he asserts that America is the people who have bent history in the direction of justice.

That the speech ends with appeals to love I suppose seems a good. But, again, I worry that such appeals make peace an ideal which war becomes the means to achieve.

Overall I think this is a remarkable speech that we would all do well to attend to. I plan to use it as the first reading for a seminar on War and Peace I will be teaching next semester. I continue to think that peace should be a more determinative reality than war. And hopefully Obama’s articulate defense of war will provide grist for that mill.

Interesting reflection from the blog Journey with Jesus by Dan Clendenin on "Transformed Non-conformity"

 Non-conformity by itself is nothing special. Here in California where I live, non-conformists are everywhere. They ride funny bikes, experiment with alternative energy, eat organic foods, dress down instead of up, and flaunt what they think is an independent spirit, but which often is merely a different type of social conformity. Sometimes, says King, non-conformity is little more than exhibitionism. In contrast, the non-conformity that Paul describes in Romans 12 has a specific direction, which is Christ-likeness through a “renewed mind.”

           The French sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) encouraged believers to move from being "negatively maladjusted" to the world to being "positively maladjusted." King says something similar: “There are some things in our world to which men [sic] of goodwill must be maladjusted. I confess that I never intend to become adjusted to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination, to the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive men [sic] of work and food, and to the insanities of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.” Christian non-conformity, in other words, has a specific direction.
 Hope for our world rests in creatively and positively maladjusted believers, says King. This week’s text from Exodus 1:8–2:10 provides an example of nonconformity in relation to the powers of this world, in contrast to conformity to God’s redemptive purposes. The Israelites were in Egyptian bondage, increasing in number and power, when Pharaoh gave the order for infanticide — to terminate all the male Hebrew births. But the midwives defied the state authorities because, the text says, “they feared God” rather than Pharaoh (Exodus 1:17). Later, when asked what had happened, they covered up their civil disobedience by lying (v. 19).

A hopeless confusion - current debates about marriage

I have great difficulty getting involved with current debates about granting the right to marriage to same sex couples. The debate from my point of view is hopelessly confused and to line up on one side or the other in the debate is but to remain enmeshed in the confusion and to leave entangled what needs disentangling, the respective roles and responsibilities of the sate and the churches, and any other group for that matter.

The historical and theological issues at stake are sketched helpfully in a piece by Simon Barrow What Future for Marriage? on the Ekklesia web site.

The interests of the state and the church in issues of relationships should be distinct, but we still have a massive confusion which goes back to the Christendom settlement. The state has responsibilities around assuring the protection, safety and well being of children, not directly but in holding parents and guardians responsible, and for legal issues around property.the church has responsibilities around supporting its members in the vocation of christian marriage and in carrying out their commitments to faithful discipleship in that role. As Simon Barrow observes:

What is called 'marriage' today is essentially a civil contract which can be dissolved or re-entered as many times as necessary. Superimposed on that is a Christian ideal of lifelong fidelity which many accept as a 'nice idea' but which is not necessarily what they are really choosing, and whose basis in a community of faith they often do not understand or accept. Ekklesia

 Simon's recommendation, for which I have a good deal of sympathy, is that we disentangle the respective roles of church and community groups and the state around the issue of marriage.

1. Our current confusion between the civil (secular), juridical (legal) and sacramental (religious) meanings of marriage arises from the 'Christendom' assumption that religious understandings can be superimposed on society through the state, and vice versa.
    
2. It is positive to enable people to express their civil commitments in legal terms which reflect the variety of long-term partnerships people are actually forming - and which offer as much stability, especially for children, as possible.
    
3. What the church calls marriage is not just another name for a legal and civil arrangement - it is specifically about the kind of relationships made possible by God's love and the community of people who seek to be transformed by this love through worship, common life, mutual forgiveness, and discipleship.
    
4. If you try to force everyone in society into a one-size-fits-all legal arrangement you risk devaluing what is possible for different kinds of partnerships, sell short the meaning of Christian marriage - and end up in something of a no-win mess. That is where we are right now. Ekklesia

And that is why I find it hard to enter into the current debate about same sex marriage. To take a position on the debate as it currently exists is to remain within the entangled confusions of the Christendom settlement. Much of the churches stance on marriage in the current debates is theologically confused and historically ill informed. Christians have no stake, in my view, in upholding the intervention by the state in upholding issues of Christian meaning with respect to relationships.