Nelson Mandela+ (1918-2013)

Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

Rightfully so, a lot of media attention is being given to Nelson Mandela this week. An interesting, if brief video on his life appeared via the New York Times. To view it, click on the link below.

New York Times Video on Nelson Mandela

A more in-depth documentary appeared recently on PBS's Frontline. You can watch it here.

Today's "Sightings" post by Martin Marty (read it here) draws attention to the connection between Mr. Mandela's moral vision and the Methodist tradition in South Africa, a tradition that Mandela said had deeply influenced him as a young boy and teen. The study of that religious connection would make for an interesting doctoral dissertation.

Late last week a former colleague of mine, Bob Schmidt, who was my dean at Concordia University, Portland, reminded me about how the World Council of Churches provided grants to the African National Congress (ANC), Mr. Mandela's party, and other liberation movements in Africa, after 1969. While some of these funds came from churches and church people, most of it came from the governments of the Netherlands and Sweden, who channeled their contributions through the WCC. 

Bob himself did his doctoral work on the WCC's support for these liberation organizations. According to him, "The motivation for helping the liberation movements was not Communist inspired" (contrary to those who labeled the WCC's actions in precisely those terms). "Rather, it came from the experience of some of the founders of the WCC who had spent World War II in Nazi prison camps or had barely survived as refugees. For them state-sponsored racism was the epitome of evil and needed to be resisted. When apartheid became the official policy of the South African government, the WCC stepped in with its contributions."

That aspect of Mr. Mandela's story ought to be more well-known and further studied, too.

Alvin Plantinga

The Lutheran theological tradition has sometimes been attacked for being inhospitable to philosophical reflection. Even the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago publicly displays Luther's famous one-liner, "reason is a whore." If one knew nothing else about him, that statement would likely be understood wrongly in the extreme. Out of context and used in a context whose aims Luther would likely have supported, the quotation ignores the fact that Luther operated at a high level of "reasoning" himself, that he was quite familiar with the most important streams of philosophy in his day, and that he has had a profound influence on later philosophers and thinkers (Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard come immediately to mind). For insight into this aspect of the Lutheran tradition one should consult the venerable works by Bernard Lohse (Ratio et Fides: Eine Untersuchun ueber die ratio in der Theologie Luthers [Goettingen, 1958]) and my teacher, Brian Gerrish (Grace and Reason: A Study in the Theology of Luther [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962]), in addition to the set of essays in the more recent work, The Devil's Whore: Reason and Philosophy in the Lutheran Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress), edited by Jennifer Hockenbery Dragseth.

Of course the Lutheran tradition also includes Philip Melanchthon, Luther's university colleague and humanist friend, who was no philosophical slouch himself. Melanchthon, who lectured on what was then called "natural philosophy" (a discipline that developed into today's "natural science"), once said: “Not infrequently I weigh in my mind all the reasonings of the natural philosophers concerning God, so that I can more clearly refute the tricks of false opinions, which the Epicureans or Academics spread over the eyes of people. We learn from the natural philosophers that nature that has understanding cannot originate from the irrational, or be produced by chance” (P. Melanchthon, "On Natural Philosophy," in Orations on Philosophy and Education, ed. Sachiko Kusukawa, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 136).

When Melanchthon wrote these words in the 16^th c., as a part of his strong recommendation that educated Christians study philosophy and what we today would call the natural sciences, he surely was thinking of the kind of philosopher we find today in Dr. Alvin Plantinga, the John A. O'Brien Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame and currently an emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College (where he also taught before going to Notre Dame). This observation is not meant to suggest that Dr. Plantinga’s reflections are out-dated! Not so. I am merely suggesting that were Melanchthon around today he would find in Dr. Plantinga a helpful resource for refuting the tricks of false opinions.

Dr. Alvin Plantinga

I was privileged to host Dr. Plantinga last week on our campus, where he delivered two public lectures on the broad topic of "science and religion." (I was impressed by how clear he could be after sharing a bottle of wine with me over dinner before each of the lectures!) Both lectures are based on a recent book he published (his 17th), Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

In this work he attacks the rather sophomoric "new atheists" (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens) and their naturalistic, materialistic metaphysical assumptions. He critically engages more reputable and sophisticated atheistic thinkers (Thomas Nagel, William Rowe, Michael Tooley), and he generally makes the argument that contemporary evolutionary theory is not incompatible with theistic, Christian belief. Along the way he makes the case that the main antitheistic arguments involving evolution are unpersuasive and, stunningly, that naturalism (the thought that there is no God or anything like "God") is in fact incompatible with evolution. Whatever conflict exists between "science" and "religion" is not a conflict between theistic religion and science but between naturalism and science.

Let's be clear: Plantinga fully accepts the theory of Darwinian evolution as the best available explanation for the development of species on the planet. He thus accepts the scientific consensus regarding the age of the earth (ca. 4.5 billion years old), the thesis of descent with modification, the thesis of common ancestry, and the view that the principal mechanism that drives this process of descent with modification is natural selection and random genetic mutation.

But let's also be clear: Plantinga makes the strong case that contemporary evolutionary theory is compatible with theistic, Christian belief. He correctly surmises that many Christians have wrongly equated "evolution" with "naturalism" or "materialism" (and thus with "atheism"), and that this is why so many American Christians reject the theory of evolution. Such Christians could benefit from reading Plantinga's work or listening to his online lectures that deal with this topic. He's good at refuting "the tricks of false opinions." He's also quite good at explicating the deep concord that exists between Christian belief in God the Creator and the "deep roots" of the natural sciences.

To listen to an online lecture similar to the one he gave at Valpo last week, you can go here:

Dr. Alvin Plantinga: Where the Conflict Really Lies

You might also benefit from reading the thoughtful, respectful review of Dr. Plantinga's book by Thomas Nagel, one of the most important American philosophers of the past half century. You can read that review

here.

I am grateful for Dr. Plantinga's work and for the help he provides in making a strong case for the compatibility between orthodox, mainstream Christian faith in God the Creator and the contemporary scientific theory of evolution.

The Reformation Polka

A friend sent me a link to a four-minute video on Martin Luther that is posted on YouTube. I hadn't seen the video until yesterday, the day that Lutherans traditionally celebrate the Reformer and his revolutionary action of writing and nailing/mailing his 95 Theses. The video is guaranteed to brighten any Lutheran's day.

CWCRadio

Here's the link:

A Reformation Polka

What Is He Trying to Accomplish?

Over the past several months I have learned from a number of individuals that there are people in the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod who are wondering about my intentions in writing about women's ordination and issues in science and theology. Apparently the same question has surfaced among these individuals, namely, "Just what is he [Becker] trying to accomplish in the LCMS?"

I am surprised to learn of this question, since I thought my aims have been clear.

Permit me to repeat those goals:

(1) to encourage members within the synod to think differently about two issues, namely, (a) the synod's understanding of Scripture that insists that only qualified men may serve as pastor in the synod; and (b) the synod's understanding of Scripture that requires one to interpret the creation accounts in Genesis to be literal, historical descriptions of what God did in the not-too-distant past over the course of six actual 24-hr. days ("six-day creationism");

(2) to have the synod change its position that restricts the office of pastor only to men;

(3) to have the synod reject "creationism" in favor of a more robust doctrine of creation, one that sets forth a theological understanding that better accords with the language and genre of these Genesis texts and that better accords with what people today know to be true and valid about the natural history of our planet.

My concern is that the synodical positions against women's ordination and in defense of "creationism" cannot be defended theologically, at least not persuasively. The position on "creationism" is especially susceptible to strong theological and scientific criticism. Finally, these synodical positions do harm to the mission of the LCMS in our egalitarian and scientifically-informed society and they do harm to individual consciences.

I believe it is the responsibility of academic theologians within a given church body to cast a critical eye on those theological positions of the church body that are questionable and debatable--and to set forth theological understandings that are more persuasive. I think we can learn something from Martin Luther in this regard.

A Couple of Book Recommendations

            "In the beginning was the Word…" (John 1:1). That biblical revelation has relevance for any engagement with human language, but it is especially meaningful in relation to beautiful words that shed light on the human condition and God's response to it.

            Christians believe that God created the universe through the Word. That same Word created us in God's image and likeness. Damaged and distorted through sin, that divinely-Worded image has been restored through the express image of God's very Being, "the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). We speak our faith and praise back to God because God created us to speak back to our divine Author.

          God sent forth the Word. That Word addresses us, redeems us, and summons us to faith, hope, and love. God the Creator, in whose image we are created and recreated, calls us to be creative. That, too, is a consequence of the divine Author's creative Word.

            Over the centuries there have been some truly great artistic creations that depict the Christian understanding of human beings and the salvation accomplished for them in and through the creative Christ. Think of the vision that one receives by reading Dante's Divine Comedy or Milton's Paradise Lost or the great novels of the Russian writer Dostoevsky.

            A couple of years ago I read that the British atheist, A. N. Wilson, had now become a believer again. It appears that he returned to the Christian faith of his youth, in part because of a careful study of Dante's masterpiece. The road that Dante trod in that trilogy helped to lead Wilson back to God. Great literature--and even not so great--can be used by God for such a purpose. That was true in the case of Francis Collins, the current head of the National Institutes for Health in Washington. He recounts in his book, The Language of God (Free Press, 2007), how the writings of C. S. Lewis contributed to his religious conversion. Someone I know from seminary days once told me that he had remained a Christian partly because of the depictions of human depravity in the novels of John Updike and of how those narratives often point toward the need for a transcendent source of human salvation. Only the mercy of God and the promise of divine grace and redemption can fully address these deep issues of human sin, failure, and death.

            What understandings of God and humanity emerge from readings of poetry by Donne, Herbert, Hopkins and other great artists? Or the central plays of Shakespeare? I worry that young people today and many older people no longer read poetry or "the hard" classics of world literature. Such a lack of attention diminishes our vision and frankly impoverishes our faith.

            George Steiner has written that the great "classics" in literature, music, and in the arts "read us" more than we read (listen to, perceive) them. "Each time we engage with it, the classic will question us." I suppose that's what makes a classic "a classic." Great works of art will "read" us better than we can read ourselves on our own. That is certainly true of the myths, stories, visions, poems, and parables in Holy Scripture. These diagnose our deepest problems and set forth God's historic solution to them.

            But Steiner's comment about the "classics" also holds true for two recent books I'd like to recommend. A person is not the same as he was before he read a collection of essays like those in Christian Wiman's My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer, published earlier this year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Or the poems in Wiman's earlier book, Every Riven Thing (2011), also by the same publisher. The reader "gets read" here, too, as he or she is imaginatively brought into the poet's struggles with doubt and his Christian faith, with illness and joy, love and fear, sorrow and hope. He often resorts to paradox to sort out his experiences and to convey an understanding of them that ordinary words can't quite capture. "I say God and mean more/ than the bright abyss that opens in that word." Such a line fits with Martin's Luther's reflections on "the presence of God" in God's "absence," and on how God can surprise us with the light of his graceful presence.

            Wiman had been raised a Baptist, then lost his faith as a teenager, but was restored to faith when he met a Christian woman and came to love her deeply--in the same year that he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Only the Christian faith, he came to believe, could give him the framework for dealing with those opposing experiences of love and serious illness (and looming death). 

            Those of you who struggle with pain and suffering, or who know someone who does, may find Wiman's poetry and essays illuminating. (For the past decade he has been the editor of Poetry magazine.) His creative use of language may give you words and phrases that help to reveal the presence of "the Word-made-flesh" in your own life.