Prayer of Confession for Perfectionist Children

Today, after lunch, we had a family meeting. The meeting occured in lieu of going to church.

We had every intention of going to church this morning. We'd missed last week because of a family trip, and we'll be missing next week because my wife will be running the Dallas Rock 'n Roll half marathon. So we really wanted to make it to church this morning.

But things happen. Some of it this morning involved a harmonica being snatched from an elder brother (and the subsequent drama of trying to get a four-year-old girl to relinquish the stolen toy and apologize for the theft). Some of it, however, involved what was supposed to be a pleasant mother-son run before church, but which took much longer than anticipated (and was less pleasant). My wife and son planned to run to the bagel shop (a little over a mile away), eat breakfast together, and then run back. But as the return journey was about to start, after my wife had told my son she'd be happy to carry his full bottle of orange juice home so that it wouldn't get wasted, my son threw it in the trash.

My wife scolded him for wasting orange juice. Now my son hates to do anything wrong, and responds very strongly when he feels he's done something he shouldn't have done. The wasted orange juice (which he's decided to give up for Lent and so only drinks these days on Sundays, making it a special treat) inspired a sulk that slowed the run into a ponderous walk, which then delayed the return home...which he then felt bad about. In short, he descended into a cycle of self-recrimination which culminated in a hand-written note delivered to my wife. The note said, simply, "All the bad things that happened this morning were my fault."

And I was reminded of my Lenten meditation from last week. I recalled the liturgical Prayer of Confession with which my son is familiar. For those unfamiliar with it, it runs essentially as follows:

We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. For the sake of your son, have mercy on us. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your holy name. Amen.

This prayer is often misunderstood, treated as a kind of litany of self-recrimination. But I don't understand it in that way, because the prayer is really about forgiveness, about acknowledging our common human condition, our collective tendency to be less than we can be--and then looking forward (and upward, towards the divine resources that not only help us to forgive ourselves, but also to do better than we knew we could do).

So I thought about how to word that idea in language that would make sense to a very precocious, perfectionist seven-year-old. I wrote something up and gave it to my son during our family meeting. I told him I tried to put the meaning of that prayer of confession we said in church into second-grade language. And he seemed to really appreciate it. He seemed to think it would help him stop beating himself up so much when he did something he shouldn't have done.

Just in case others have children with similar personalities (or have inner children with similar personalities), I thought I'd share this children's version of the prayer of confession--really more a meditation than a prayer--on this blog. Here it is:

We all make bad choices. That's part of being human.

But we can all make better choices, and God helps us do that. We pray for God's help to be better than we thought we could be.

We shouldn't beat ourselves up for making bad choices. God doesn't. God loves and forgives us. So should we.

Instead of being mad at ourselves for our bad choices, we should say, "I can do better," and then try to do better next time, with God's help.

Plagiarism and Forgery--Some Thoughts about Ehrman's FORGED

A number of advance reviews of Bart Ehrman's new book, Forged: Writing in the Name of God–Why the Bible’s Authors Are not who we Think they Are, have started coming out, including reviews by some bloggers I follow and appreciate. As expected, the responses to the book has been various--from those who see it as littered with uncompelling arguments and tricky rhetorical moves, to those who see it as a slightly sensationalist and overly confident repackaging of old research conclusions for a popular audience, to those who see it as making a useful new contribution to that same research, to those find it a welcome challenge to their faith journey. I'm sure many more find it an unwelcome challenge to their faith journey, but they probably won't read it or review it.

Not being a biblical scholar, I am not qualified to address Ehrman's more historical claims. And having not read the book yet (it's due out later this month), I can't speak to the merits of Ehrman's more philosophical arguments based on those historical claims. But I do think the preliminary discussion of Ehrman's book raises some interesting questions worth discussing on this blog.

For the sake of argument, I want to assume that the broad consensus among (at least the more progressive) biblical scholars is substantially correct: A number of New Testament epistles written as if they were being authored by one of the apostles (notably Peter and Paul) were in fact authored by someone else.  From what I can glean from the advance reviews, what Ehrman does beyond popularizing the scholarly case for this view is to make a case for a more challenging conclusion: This pseudonymous authorship, at the time that it was done, would have amounted to a misleading representation of one's work as someone else's, and would have been perceived as deceptive by readers at the time.

Here's what I take this to mean: the cultural context during which these "pseudepigrapha" were written was such that there was a presumption of accuracy in attributions of authorship, a presumption that was being violated in problematic ways. In other words, the attribution to someone else would not have been perceived at the time as simply a gesture of authorial humility and respect for the one in whose name one was writing. It would have been perceived as something like what we have in mind when we use the term forgery.

To reflect on this claim and its significance, I think it may be helpful to think about forgery in the light of a contrasting offense, one that seems more common today--namely plagiarism. Plagiarism involves passing off someone else's work as one's own, that is, writing as if someone else's ideas and arguments had originated with oneself. As I point out to my students just about every semester, you can plagiarize without deliberately setting out to deceive. If, simply through a kind of reckless disregard for which ideas and word choices originated with others, you write in such a way that it sounds as if the ideas and word choices are yours, you have plagiarized. Because in the absence of giving proper credit, the presumption is that you are sharing your own ideas--a presumption that will, among other things, frame a professor's grading of a student's paper. If you turn in a paper to me and write as if you came up with the ideas and arguments contained therein--because I am presuming that unless you indicate otherwise, this is the case--I will end up crediting you for coming up with those ideas and arguments. If the standard presumption is a false one, then you will be wrongly credited for someone else's work.

And this will be true whether or not you had any deliberate intention to deceive. Such an intent makes the plagiarism worse, of course. In OSU's official documents on the matter, deliberate plagiarism is academic dishonesty, which is a more serious offense than the lesser charge of academic misconduct. Your plagiarism amounts to the latter if you were simply careless about citing sources, if you simply forgot to put things in quotes or introduce borrowed arguments with the appropriate "According to so-and-so."  It's like the difference between murder and manslaughter--both are instances of criminal homicide, but the former involves the intent to kill and the latter involves a reckless disregard for life.

So what does all of this show? First, plagiarism is a function of cultural context. There are expectations in the academy concerning the crediting of sources, and there is a purpose to submitting written work (namely, the purpose of evaluating the intellectual accomplishments of the student) that is thwarted if these expectations are violated. Take away the former and the same document might no longer qualify as plagiarized. Take away the latter, and plagiarism ceases to be as big a deal. If I simply wanted to know something about penguins, and so my aunt wrote me an e-mail telling me all about them, it wouldn't appall me if I discovered that she'd cut and pasted much of the information from the internet without crediting sources. In part, I have no expectation that she will credit her sources when she sends an e-mail of this kind; and in part, it just doesn't matter anyway, since the e-mail's only function is to convey information to me.

Another point to make about plagiarism is this: The actual intentions of the plagiarist don't take it out of the class of things we call plagiarism, even if they do impact the severity of the case. We can, in other words, correctly identify something as plagiarized before we know whether there was any intent to take false credit, or whether the student simply did not know about the academy's expectations or understand their importance. These things are necessary for assessing degrees of culpability, but not for deciding whether a document is plagiarized.

One final point deserves mention as well. That something has been plagiarized does not affect our assessment of its actual merits. If a good idea is plagiarized, it's still a good idea. The problem lies with the fact that the good idea is being credited to someone who doesn't deserve credit. If a sound argument is plagiarized, it remains sound--but its soundness tells us nothing about whether the plagiarist knows how to put together a good argument. If an eloquent turn of phrase is plagiarized, it remains eloquent--but doesn't speak to the plagiarist's eloquence.

With plagiarism thus in place as a comparative foil, let's turn to forgery--which is a kind of inverse (converse?) of plagiarism. To forge a document, at least in the sense Ehrman has in mind, is not to take credit for writing something you didn't write, but to attribute credit for something you did write to someone else. Or, more precisely, it is to write in such a way that it appears as if the author is someone else.

Like plagiarism, forgery seems to be a function of context, including cultural context. If writing as if you were someone else is done in a context where no one supposes that the piece of writing is authored by the person it presents itself as being authored by, then there is no forgery taking place. For example, I write a fair of bit of fiction in my free time, and often enough I write in the first person. The story I'm working on now is written in the first person "by" a fifteen-year-old protagonist. I am not, however, a fifteen-year-old boy. So, am I guilty of forgery? What if I were to publish the story under a pseudonym, and chose as my pseudonym the name of my main character? Given that it's a kind of fantasy story and would be sold as young adult fiction rather than as memoir, would I be guilty of forgery then? Clearly not. But as soon as I write a realistic (if rather taudry and embarassing) first-person tale about a certain atheist biologist and sell it as memoir under the pen name "PZ Myers" (assuming I could get away with it), I would be guilty of forgery.

As such, it makes a great deal of difference whether, in the time at which the biblical epistles were written, there were an established literary convention in which authors would write in the spirit of someone they admired and then attribute what they wrote to that person. Given such a genre--whose existence would seem to require a clear means of distinguishing letters written within that genre from letters written by the person they seemed to be written by--no one writing within that genre and distributing it as a piece in that genre would be guilty of forgery. But even given the existence of such a genre, a piece of this sort would be a kind of forgery if it were represented as an eponymously authored piece. And in the absence of any such genre, but given a cultural expectation that authors represent themselves as themselves when they write letters, any pseudepigraphic letter would qualify as a forgery.

It appears that at least part of what Ehrman is attempting to argue in his new book is that the last of these conditions prevailed in the culture in which the purportedly pseudepigraphic epistles were composed. If this is right, it seems to be an important point to make, because it changes the moral significance of the authorial attributions: they are forgeries.

Unlike the case of plagiarism, its hard to imagine forgeries being unintentional. How exactly do you negligently end up attributing authorship of your work to someone else? Perhaps pseudonymously-authored first-person fiction might unintentionally get mislabeled as memoir, but that's not exactly analogous to unintentional plagiarism. In the former case, any negligence would occur post-production, so to speak, and I'm not sure we'd want to call it a forgery at all. Rather, we'd want to simply call it a work of fiction inadvertently passed off as memoir. Only if it is deliberately passed off as memoir would we be inclined to call it a forgery. In short, take away the intention to deceived, and I don't see that something can be called a forgery at all.

This point is important, because it means that if Ehrman is right about cultural context, then the pseudepigraphic epistles violate the conventional expectation of accurate authorial representation, and therefore were likely to mislead readers of that time. And it in the absence of genre pieces that could be erroneously mislabeled, it is hard to envision how the misleading of readers could be anything but intentional deception.

Of course, the deeper motives for such deception might be varied, and some of these motives might be more praiseworthy than others. But the way in which motives play into our assessment of actions is different from the way in which intent does. Contrast the student who says she didn't intend to plagiarize with the student who concedes that she meant to plagiarize, but that she had a really good reason. In the former case, if we believe her we'll label her act a lesser offense. In the latter case, things work differently. We'd want to know what the motives were and whether they gave her a good reason to do what would otherwise be a serious offense. I can think of few motives that would meet this standard--perhaps if she were deliberately plagiarizing as part of a university job to assess the effectiveness of professors' plagiarism detection skills.

So what would motivate someone to forge a letter? Since forgery requires the existence of conventions about accurate authorial ascriptions, conventions that are being violated by the forger, one way to approach this question is to ask what purpose these conventions are meant to serve. Conventions against plagiarism exist in order to give due credit, and avoid giving improper credit to those who haven't earned it. To some extent, conventions against forgery might serve a similar function--if an uncredited ghost writer authors a Sarah Palin memoir, I might inadvertently attribute to Sarah Palin an eloquence and cleverness with language that she may not actually possess. But in such cases of ghost-writing, we have a kind of collusion between the actual author and the one who is credited for authorship: The latter is plagiarizing, and the former is collaborating with the plagiarism.

This is presumably not what Ehrman is concerned is happening with the pseudepigraphic epistles--although some opponents of Ehrman seek to defend the legitimacy of these epistles by, in effect, supposing some sort of innocuous "ghost-writing" analogue (Peter told an educated friend or follower what to write while he was languishing in prison, and the friend went home and wrote it).

So, do the conventions that forgery violates serve functions other than preventing us from inaccurately crediting someone with the merits of written work that isn't theirs? Arguably, one of the most significant purposes of the conventions in question is to discourage a different kind of misattribution of merit. If a particular painter has earned a place of honor that has made his works enormously valuable, then a forger is likely to make considerably more money by bringing a newly discovered work by this painter to the market than by bringing a painting "in the style of" the artist to the market. Here, the prestige of the artist is being "borrowed" through misattribution so as to increase the perceived worth of the work.

And here, of course, is the most obvious motive for the deliberate deception that takes place in the case of forgeries: Someone wants what they have written to carry the kind of weight, to be given the sort of credibility or the kind of hearing enjoyed by the letters of revered figures such as Peter and Paul. And so they write as if they were Peter or Paul, hoping to mislead the communities that honor Peter and Paul.

And why do that? Not to get credit. The motives in such cases are not self-serving ones in the ordinary sense. But they might still be egoistic. I might think that what I have to say is just as significant, just as important, as what Peter or Paul had to say--but no one is giving me the kind of hearing I deserve. But I want to prove to myself just how great my ideas really are, and so I forge a letter--and everyone responds to my ideas as if they came from the mouth of an apostle. What an ego rush!

Or, more plausibly, I might really care about my community and my faction's ideological convictions about what is best for the community. I might think that certain influential voices in my community are dangerously misguided in their views concerning women's equality. My faction's ideology tells me that if their views prevail it will be disastrous. So I put my misogynistic ideology into the mouth of Paul, hoping the misattribution will be believed so that the honor in which Paul is held will spill over onto my ideas for the community's future. It works, and my faction prevails.

What these examples show, I think, is that there are good reasons why communities that attach special reverence to the words of particular leaders might adopt conventional expectations of authenticity in authorial attribution, especially in relation to these revered leaders. That doesn't mean that early Christian communities did adopt such conventions--but it's a point in favor of Ehrman's claim that they did. All else being equal, early Christians would presumably prefer to be able to tell when a letter was actually written by Paul or Peter.

But here is something to keep in mind: Just as the merits of an argument don't change just because the argument was plagiarized, so too with forgery: An idea can be compelling, a poem beautiful, and argument sound, even if it is attributed to someone other than the real author. While Ehrman's points in Forged have bearing on certain legalistic ways of conceiving the authority of Scripture ("if it's in Scripture, it must be profoundly true even if it appears to be banal or misguided"), they do not prevent anyone from finding things of value in the pseudepigraphic texts. No matter who the author, and no matter what the author's motives for attributing authorship to someone else, if the idea is a good one, it's a good one. But in a book where authorship is in question, we cannot decide that and idea is a good one simply on the formal basis that it was presumably authored by someone taken to be a rich source of good ideas.

A Lenten Meditation

The other day I was cleaning up my office and found—in a stack of papers—the 2010 Ash Wednesday bulletin from my church. Since Ash Wednesday was only days away, I decided that instead of tossing it (which is what I’d typically do with a year-old church bulletin), I’d leave it on my desk to look through on Ash Wednesday.


And so there it was this morning. I sat down and read through it as a kind of morning devotion: Psalm 51, the extended responsive confession, the prayers. And I found myself pausing over certain key phrases, phrases that jarred me because of a conversation I’d had earlier in the morning, when someone I love had been beating themselves up about their personal failings.

I won’t repeat exactly what I said in response, but it involved the importance of recognizing one’s positive qualities and not exaggerating the negatives. It was a short exchange, but I kept thinking about it on the way to work. I was thinking about the difference between acknowledging honestly when you’ve done something wrong and making the commitment to do better, on the one hand, and defining yourself in terms of your failings, on the other. You can look at your bad choices and say, “I shouldn’t have done that; I’m better than that,” and then commit to doing better in the future. Or you can look at your bad choices and say, “That’s who I am. I’m a miserable failure of a human being.” The former gives you a good name to live up to, inspiring you to reach for the resources that will help you to grow into your best self. The latter imposes a kind of roadblock: You define yourself in terms of your worst moments: it’s who you are. And if it’s who you are, then you don’t have the resources to do better.

These were the thoughts going through my head as I read through last year’s Ash Wednesday bulletin. And my attention was caught by verse 5 of Psalm 51: “Indeed, I was born steeped in wickedness, a sinner from my mother’s womb.” I read and reread the extended prayer of responsive confession, a litany of our offenses “in thought, word, and deed,” our failures to love God and neighbor. And more: “…our self-indulgent appetites…our neglect of human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty…our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us…our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us…”

And I imagined those words becoming a kind of self-flagellation, a litany of verbal self-abuse.

It occurred to me that for many people, that is exactly what these words mean, and that is exactly what the season of Lent is about: beating yourself up for being such a miserable sinner. I recall all the times I’ve witnessed Christians repeat the words, “I confess that I am in bondage to sin and cannot free myself.” Sometimes it is just rote words, repeated without meaning. But sometimes it is something more terrible. They are lashing themselves with the words, as if being in bondage to sin were the same thing as being nothing but a sinner—as if the cage were the only thing, as opposed to being what was keeping the dove from taking wing.

But in Psalm 51 the confession of wickedness is preceded by an assurance of God’s compassion and mercy; and the fifth verse, which seems to define the sinner in terms of their sin, is immediately followed, in verse 6, by the following: “Indeed, you delight in truth deep within me, and would have me know wisdom deep within.”

And then the psalm moves forward into the beautiful words so often repeated (sometimes sung) in Christian liturgies:

Create in me a clean heart, O God,
  and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from your presence,
  and take not your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation
  and sustain me with your bountiful Spirit.

The Psalm is about cleansing. And for something to be cleansed, there must be more to it than the dirt which is washed away. While Christians insist that we cannot cleanse ourselves, that we need the grace of God, this does not mean that there is nothing beneath the dirt. The words of Psalm 51 insist that sin and wickedness do not have a definitive hold on us. In its own way, at least for me, the psalm evokes the Genesis assurance that deep within we bear the “image of God,” and that despite our failings this is what we most essentially are. In our innermost being there is something precious, something that touches upon the divine—something into which divine truth and wisdom can flow, to cleanse us from the inside out.

The purpose of confession, of recognizing the scope of our failings, is not to justify self-loathing but to inspire the self-transcendence that comes when we open ourselves to that essential connection linking us to the divine. The narrow self that does not love enough, that neglects human suffering, that is indifferent to injustices, that wastes and pollutes the world—this self exists only to the extent that we cling to our sins, only to the extent that we say to ourselves, “This is my essence.” When we do that, how can we perceive cleansing as anything other than self-destruction? By conceiving ourselves too narrowly, by telling a story about ourselves that makes no room for the image of God, Lenten confession is reduced to beating oneself up. And so we are forced to choose between denying our sins (hiding behind self-righteous justifications) and hating who we are.

But Lent isn’t about letting go of false self-righteousness in order to hate ourselves more perfectly. It’s about reaching for a third alternative. When the psalmist says, “The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a troubled and broken heart, O God, you will not despise,” there is an assurance here: Honestly facing our failings does not require that we hate ourselves. Why should we despise what God does not despise? It is possible to fully confront our most heart-breaking offenses in all their troubling reality, because they are not the end of the story.

If these offenses defined us, then being heart-broken about them wouldn’t be possible at all. It is because we are more than our sins, even our direst sins, that we can weep over them. To let our grief over offenses rise to the level of self-hatred is therefore to reach the wrong conclusion. That we can grieve over what we have done means that we are more than that, that we are greater than that. That we can grieve over our offenses means that self-hatred is misplaced, because there is in us that which rises above our worst acts.

In grieving over our offenses, we give voice to that within us which is of God. But in hating ourselves for our offenses, we blind ourselves to that within us which is of God. Lent is about the former, not about the latter. And because it is about the former, it does not end with grief and confession. It only begins there. Lent is a journey of self-transformation whose starting point is honesty over how we have fallen short. But we must say, “I am better than this.” And for Christians this acknowledgment is deeply rooted in our understanding of ourselves as beloved children of God.

Even if our sin is intolerable to God, we are not. If our sin is intolerable to God, it is because we are better than that. Divine forgiveness is nothing more and nothing less than God’s unblinking attention to that which is greater than our sin—greater precisely because it was born in an outpouring of divine love.

Lenten repentance, if it is to reflect this spirit of grace--if it is to be the window to divine grace that it is supposed to be--must be a recognition that we are better than our sin, and that this is what makes our sin so heartbreaking. And to perceive our sin in that way--to see it as God sees it--is to forgive ourselves as God forgives us.

Some Thoughts of Universalism: Recognizing the Inadequacy of Pat Responses

I’ve decided that one of the more recent comments on my RD article about the conservative backlash to Rob Bell is worth reflecting on here, simply because it helps to highlight some of the unconvincing lines of thought that are too often unreflectively thrown out there in response to universalism. If Christians (and other theists) are to converse thoughtfully about issues such as universalism, we need to take our thinking deeper than the pat responses allow. And for that to happen, the weaknesses of the pat responses need to be clear. So here is the text of the comment, in which at least some of the pat responses to universalism are put forward:

In reference to the part of your article that discusses "when all means some," one must look at the entire context of a passage in the bible. If you only look at one verse, it is easy to pull things out of context and assume things. When these passages refer to "all," they are talking about all who trust in Him. If everyone on this earth is automatically saved and we can do whatever the heck we want with no consequences, then God would not be a loving God. Just like a parent who disciplines his or her children out of love, so does our Father in heaven. Doesn't it seem like a huge waste of time for those who have a relationship with God to continue if they are going to heaven regardless? Never underestimate the power of God's grace but ever take it for granted either.

There are three points made here. The first has to do with biblical interpretation. On this issue the commenter stresses the importance of reading the Bible holistically and interpreting isolated passages in the light of such holistic reading.

I couldn’t agree more. If the Bible is to be seen as authoritative at all, then I think it must be in these terms, where the plain sense of isolated passages is subordinated to the core messages that emerge through a holistic reading. Such an approach fits well with seeing the Bible as the product of diverse voices writing at many times and places in history, reflecting on their understanding of and experience of the divine in terms of their own cultural lenses. It is by reflecting carefully and critically (in conversation with others) on a cloud of such fallible witnesses that we can begin to see the common themes that lie behind their limited perspectives, and thereby transcend those limitations.

My point in picking out the “universalist texts” in my article about Bell was precisely to highlight the fact that an approach to the Bible that prioritizes a narrow reading of the literal sense of isolated texts is not as such consistent with a confident endorsement of the doctrine of eternal hell—because there are isolated texts whose literal reading seems universalist. Given the complexity of the text—given that there are isolated passages that in their most straightforward sense support universalism, while others support damnation and a few support annihilationism—reaching theological conclusions based on what the text says requires critical thinking in light of the whole, something which is most effectively done in open conversation with those who have a different reading. It is only by respectfully considering the reasons and arguments of those who read the holistic message in different ways that we can reach responsible conclusions about what the whole tells us (if anything) about the eternal fates of human beings. And the fanaticism of “hellists” such as Piper and Taylor impedes just this sort of critical dialogue.

The second and third points raised by this commenter go beyond the matter of biblical interpretation to more philosophical reasoning about universalism and “hellism” in the light of core Christian teachings. The commenter offers, in effect, two arguments. The first is stated as follows: “If everyone on this earth is automatically saved and we can do whatever the heck we want with no consequences, then God would not be a loving God. Just like a parent who disciplines his or her children out of love, so does our Father in heaven.”

The argument here, in brief, tries to spell out the implications of the traditional Christian notion that God is essentially loving in something like the way that good parents are loving (“our Father in heaven”). If God is loving in this way, God would not let us do “whatever the heck we want with no consequences,” because good parents do not let their kids do whatever the heck they want with no consequences. Apparently, however, the alternative to letting your kids do whatever the heck they want with no consequences is to reject them utterly and completely, decisively casting them away from you and into an endless torture chamber.

Excuse the sarcasm—but it is helpful in calling attention to the false dilemma at work in this particular argument. Universalism is in part premised on the recognition that there are alternatives to coddling or “enabling” those you love (protecting them from all the negative consequences of their poor choices) and utterly rejecting those you love. Good parents do neither. As such, if God is like a good parent, God would do neither. So what would God do, given the extraordinary resources that God has available (assuming traditional theological assumptions)? That, of course, is one of the key questions that Christian debates about universalism and hellism need to grapple with. One cannot rule out the various universalist answers with nothing but a bizarre false dilemma (“bizarre” because the options presented are both ones that seem to be things a God conceived in the Christian sense would avoid). And there are various universalist answers, since, of the different ways God might respond to beloved but frequently misguided and willful creatures, it seems that more than one might be thought to culminate in the salvation of all.

Finally, the commenter asks, “Doesn't it seem like a huge waste of time for those who have a relationship with God to continue if they are going to heaven regardless?” The reasoning here seems to be pragmatic: If all are saved, then no one has any reason to have a relationship with God (because the only reason to have a relationship with God is in order to get into heaven). Hence, we must reject universalism if we want anyone to be motivated to cultivate a relationship with God.

Presented in these terms, the weaknesses of this argument essentially speak for themselves. But just in case it isn’t obvious, let me enumerate the problems here. First, there is the assumption that “getting into heaven” is the only reason anyone could have for continuing a relationship with God. This suggests that there is nothing intrinsically rewarding about nurturing such a relationship in this life, that those who pursue a relationship with God are doing it wholly for future rewards and get no immediate benefits from it.

Really? I could understand this perspective if God is conceived as a tyrant in the sky who reards the loudest sycophants, or as an unpleasant uncle you might decide to spend time with so you can get written into his will. And there are certainly some people who do conceive of God in something like that way. But those who have had profound experiences of God's presence in their lives don't usually come away with an impression of God as a nasty tyrant or annoying uncle. They are like lovers smitten.

The baffling nature of this perspective really comes out when we begin to reflect on what Christianity has traditionally taken “heaven” to be. It is, simply put, having a relationship with God of the most immediate and powerful kind. Heaven just is intimate loving union with the creator—the beatific vision. And so the commenter’s question really amounts to this: Why should I bother to have a taste of heaven now when I’ll get to enjoy heaven later regardless?

Of course, the most significant challenge to universalism becomes apparent if we restate the question in a different way: Why should I bother to have a relationship with God now when I will eventually come to have the most intimate kind of relationship with God later? Stated in this way, it calls attention to the fact that relationships usually involve the voluntary participation of both parties. But doesn’t this mean that, if heaven consists in having a relationship with God of a particularly intimate and immediate kind, that there can be no guarantee that all will come to experience heaven (since whether this happens depends on the free choices of the creature)?

In the theological debate between universalists and hellists, this question raises the most interesting and thorny philosophical issues—issues pertaining to the nature of freedom. Some think that freedom is such that, if we assume that human beings are really free, universalism has to be rejected (or simply held out as a hopeful possibility). Some people treat this position as uncontroversial—but is it?

I think the controversy here can be highlighted by asking a different but related question. Suppose someone is confronted with a standing offer that is never withdrawn. Suppose, furthermore, that rejecting the offer has natural consequences that are negative (because one has a nature such that accepting the offer is the only way to really be satisfied), and that these negative consequences become progressively worse the longer one rejects the standing offer (in the way that thirst or hunger become progressively worse the longer one rejects water and food). And suppose, finally, that the person has every conceivable reason to accept the offer (the person has come to see that accepting the offer is supremely good in every conceivable way) and absolutely no reason to reject it (the person has come to realize that all supposed reasons to reject the offer are utterly vacuous). On these assumptions, can we imagine that a person who is free to do otherwise would reject this offer forever?

In effect, the latter part of That Damned Book (whose actual working title is God’s Final Victory) aims to answer this question in the negative. But while I may have more to say about this issue in later posts, for now I want to highlight the controversial character of the view that divine respect for freedom is incompatible with a guarantee of universal salvation. This view is hardly beyond dispute—in fact, it there is a powerful intuitive case for thinking that if people have every reason to choose something, no reason not to, and infinite opportunity to choose it (because it is a standing offer), they will eventually choose what they have every reason to choose and no reason not to choose. The choice will be free but inevitable.

Put simply, there is no pat biblical or philosophical/theological basis for dismissing universalism. Those who want to defend the traditional doctrine of hell need to confront some serious issues, and they should ideally refine their arguments in conversation with those who thoughtfully develop an alternative view.

Advertising, Religion, and the End of the World

Okay, so the title of this very brief blog post is a bit melodramatic--but I'm thinking of it as a working title for a future book that develops the ideas I presented a couple of weeks ago at the AAAS meeting in Washington DC. I've been thinking of offering a summary of that talk here--but a blogger named Brigid has saved me the trouble. She was apparently at the panel in which I gave my talk, and she does an excellent job of summarizing my main line of argument in a post entitled American Wind Power and the Power of Advertising. (My comment on that post has much more to do with the themes of this blog than the original talk did, which mentioned religion only in a brief concluding paragraph--as an invitation to further research).

New Religion Dispatches Article on Rob Bell

I decided to reflect a bit more deeply on the conservative Evangelical backlash against Rob Bell--a backlash that strikes me as a case study in "fanaticism," at least under one way of understanding that term. The result, Rob Bell Catches Hell from Conservatives, appears in today's Religion Dispatches.

It is Finished...Well, Almost...Just in Time for an Evangelical Preacher to Steal Our Market Share

A couple of hours ago, I e-mailed the manuscript for That Damned Book to the editors at Continuum...all except the bibliography, which is close to finished but needs some final touches. I now tend my children at home and feel this sense of...almost completeness. Once my co-author puts the last touches on the bibliography and we can both review it for the inevitable infelicities, life will return to one in which I can pay attention to other things.

And, just as John and I are finishing our manuscript offering a detailed philosophical case for the conclusion that the doctrine of universalism fits more coherently with core Christian teachings than does the doctrine of hell, it turns out that a monstrously popular evangelical preacher, Rob Bell (founder of Mars Hill Bible Church), has now come out as a universalist in his newest book, inspiring outrage among some evangelicals, condescending "I'll pray for your poor benighted soul" condemnation among others, and openness among at least a few.

Of course, Bell's position is hardly new. It was taught by such early Church Fathers as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. He isn't even the first modern evangelical to defend universalism.  A few years back, Robin Parry published The Evangelical Universalist under the pen name Gregory MacDonald--a wonderfully lucid and compelling case for universalism within an evangelical Christian context, which takes a very careful and serious look at the relevant biblical texts (that's right, universalism isn't unbiblical, as we spend a chapter arguing in our book). Bell isn't even the first pastor of a large and popular evangelical church to come out as a universalist. A popular evangelical preacher in Tulsa, Carlton Pearson, saw his huge church virtually evaporate when he had the courage to admit he was a universalist--only to be declared a heretic in 2004.

He may, however, be the first to make gobs of money from a book defending universalism--almost certainly FAR more money than we will.

The Final Outcome Argument

Theists often claim that naturalism strips life of positive meaning by implying that all of our activities, all of our aspirations and efforts, all of our accomplishments, are in the end swallowed up by the void. Not only does every human life end in death (meaning oblivion or non-existence); but every civilization collapses, and even the Earth itself will come to be destroyed, and the universe become a lifeless expanse of so much celestial flotsam.

William Lane Craig expresses this objection in the following terms:

Scientists tell us that everything in the universe is growing farther and farther apart. As it does so, the universe grows colder and colder, and its energy is used up. Eventually…there will be no life, only the corpses of dead stars and galaxies, ever-expanding into the endless darkness and the cold recesses of space, a universe in ruins… If there is no God, then man, and the universe, are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death row, we stand and simply wait for our unavoidable execution. If there is no God, and there is no immortality, then what is the consequence of this? It means that the life that we do have is ultimately absurd. It means that the life we live is without ultimate significance, ultimate value, ultimate purpose.

In his book, Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe, philosopher Erik Wielenberg responds to this objection to naturalism (as well as a number of others). He calls Craig’s argument “the final outcome argument” against the meaningfulness of life. And its key premise, Wielenberg points out, is that the value that attaches to something’s final state is the value that we should attach to the whole thing. This, Wielenberg rightly notes, is a mistake. If some activity is intrinsically worthwhile, then it remains intrinsically worthwhile even if it comes to an end. If my life is full of such worthwhile activities, then my life has value—intrinsic value—even if it should come to a final and irrevocable end.

Wielenberg’s point can be made by thinking of matters in reverse: If my life has no value if it ends, then it will have no value if it is made endless. An infinite sum of zeros has the same value: zero. And so, for an immortal life to have value, the finite slices of that life must have value too—which implies, in turn, that a mortal life can have value even if what lies beyond the boundary of death is nonexistence.

In short, this particular objection to atheistic naturalism isn’t very strong. If life can have value at all, then it can have value if it comes to an end. And so belief that life comes to an end—in the limited sense of a particular organism’s inevitable death, or in the cosmic sense of the universe winding down until it, too, is dead—is not as such a reason to think life has no significance, value, or purpose.

But perhaps Craig, and others who put forward arguments of this sort, just aren’t expressing themselves very well. Maybe the problem isn’t that, if life and love and laughter must end, then they have no value while we are living and loving and laughing. Maybe the worry is better expressed in terms of Karl Barth’s Das Nichtige—the “nothingness” that lies beyond the boundaries of finite existence. This is a concept I’ve talked about before. For Barth, Das Nightige has a power, a force, that no finite creature can ultimately confront head-on without the support of an infinite God. The problem, put subjectively, is this: If you look beyond your limits, what you are not utterly dwarfs what you are. Perhaps the problem that Craig and others like him are pointing to is this: Given a naturalist universe, life and love and laughter, while intrinsically valuable, are a speck in an endless ocean of non-life, non-love, non-laughter. The value of these goods is utterly swamped by that which is entirely devoid of value, making the goods of this life of trivial significance in comparison. It’s not just that you’re dead for a lot longer than you’re alive. It’s that your dead forever. The finite value of one’s life, set against this infinite void of non-value, has a relative significance that is infinitesimally small.

In a way, of course, the same can be said of a theistic universe: Whatever value my existence has, it is swamped by the infinite value of God. But in that case, what dwarfs the finite value of my existence is positive value—and so the ultimate message is that value wins. Not my value, but value. Not my goodness, but goodness. And so, if I stop being self-absorbed and simply treasure the good wherever it is to be found, then I find myself in a world overflowing with the good, overflowing with significance. The same is not true in a reality where there is no infinite good, no infinite reality, to set against the non-being that swamps the finite reality of each creature here below. In that case, to live beyond myself, to embrace ultimate reality and live for the whole, is to live as if all positive values are, relatively speaking, trivial.

And so, in that case, I need to resist all temptation to set my worldly life against reality as a whole, to attend to its relative significance—because to do so is like stepping back from a patch of color to see that it is but a speck set against an endless sea of blackness. To appreciate the color, I have to come in close, so that the patch fills my entire vision, so that I don’t see that which swamps it. Coming in close doesn’t mean paying attention only to my own life, or only to human life. It could mean immersing oneself in the diversity of life on earth, studying it, focusing on it. Or it could stretch beyond the boundaries of this planet to the teeming galaxies and mysteries of time and space and the origins of the cosmos. What it won’t allow is dwelling on what lies beyond the borders of this finite treasure of goods. Because what lies beyond a finite reality—in the absence of an infinite source of being such as God—is the all-consuming maw of Das Nichtige.

Given a theistic universe, stepping back and taking in the whole has a different implication. Doing so will, as before, render that patch of color just a speck—but it will be a speck in an endless sea of vibrant color and beauty, one tiny fragment of a vast masterpiece.

But let’s assume that none of this is sufficient to strip life of meaning on naturalistic assumptions. Let us suppose that naturalists can preserve a sense of subjective meaning by, in effect, saying, “The great sea of nothing is nothing, and hence nothing to worry about.” If there’s nothing beyond the patch of color, then staying focused narrowly on the patch of color is staying focused on what is. And that is where we should stay focused. To set what is against everything that it is not is to set it against what we should ignore because, well, it’s nothing worth paying attention to.

If this approach can be defended successfully, then the modified version of the “final outcome argument” might admit of an effective naturalist response. Whether such a response can be adequately developed I won’t pursue here, because there is one other point I want to make about Wielenberg’s response to the “final outcome argument”: it succeeds in doing more than neutralizing a specific theistic objection to naturalism. It also neutralizes a common naturalist objection to theism, one that Wielenberg himself articulates. Here’s how Wielenberg puts it:

If we know that God will make the universe perfectly just in the end, we lose one reason for trying to promote justice, namely that if we do not, no one will—though we still have a self-interested reason to promote justice, since presumably God rewards the just.

This idea is sometimes put less cautiously that Wielenberg puts it. Essentially, the atheist asks, “If God’s providence ensures that justice will prevail in the end, then why should anyone on earth care about promoting justice? Let God do it! And if there is a reason to promote it, it can only be because we don’t want to be on the receiving end of the uglier side of God’s justice. But if we promote justice simply because we don’t want God to smite us, are we really being just at all? We’re just doing the right thing out of fear of punishment. Caring about justice simply can't be a motive for theists to pursue it, since they think it will be realized even if they do nothing. And so theists who do pursue justice can only be doing it for self-serving motives.”

But notice, if the value of something here and now isn’t erased by its coming to an end, then the disvalue of injustice here and now isn’t erased by its coming to an end. An assurance that all will be well in the end doesn’t erase the reasons we have for seeking to eliminate or reduce the severity of the evils that afflict living creatures in this life. Even if we live in the assurance that God ultimately will realize perfect justice, that doesn’t change the fact that there are injustices here and now and that it would be better here and now if there weren’t.

And so, those who care about justice would have a reason to seek to reduce or eliminate the injustices that prevail around them, even if they believe that there is a divine guarantee that all injustices will be eliminated in the end. More broadly, theists have reasons to care about reducing earthly suffering, promoting happiness, and making the world a better place—even if they’re universalists who think that in the end, all will be saved, every tear will be wiped away, and the lion will lie down with the lamb.

If this is right, then ultimately our conclusion should be this: Whatever lies beyond this life and the finite boundaries of the physical reality in which we live, whether it be Das Nichtige at one extreme or the infinite and all-redeeming God at the other, the intrinsic worth of goods in the life and the intrinsic disvalue of evils provide reasons here and now to act.
 
(Assuming, of course, that there can be intrinsic goods and intrinsic evils if Das Nichtige is all that lies beyond the borders of physical reality--but for the moment, at least, I will grant Wielenberg's assumption that this can be true even if reality is conceived in broadly naturalistic terms).

Singularity Party Pooper

I just finished reading the cover article in this week's Time Magazine--an extended look at the notion of the coming "Singularity," that is, the predicted revolution--espoused most famously by Raymond Kurzweil in his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near--that will fundamentally and permanently change humanity. This revolution will, supposedly, be brought on by the emergence of supercomputers that surpass the brainpower of all humans combined--a level of intelligence so profound that it will bring unthinkable changes to everything we know.

Let me say, first of all, that I love science fiction, and that the greatest science fiction writers offer speculations about the future that can sometimes hit the nail very close to the head. I love such speculation. I delight in it, and I'm grateful that creative minds engage in it. But these speculations are just that. What Kurzweil and other "Singularitarians" offer are not speculations but predictions.  That is, they think they have reasons to believe that they are describing something that's likely to come true.

What are those reasons, and are they compelling? In thinking about this question, I cannot help but do so in the light of the talk I've been working on for an upcoming panel at this year's meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. The panel topic is this: "If the culture of growth is unsustainable, what needs to change?" The topic is born out of the recognition that the growth of human society--a function of both population and per capita consumption--is exponential, and is crashing up against the limits that our ecosystems can sustain. Kurzweil also speaks about exponential growth, but in his case its the growth of information technology that is at issue.

One essay I read as I was thinking about my panel topic was an essay by John Michael Greer, "The Onset of Catabolic Collapse,"--which was also an exercise in prediction. In Greer's case, however, the prediction was not of a technologically induced revolution, but of the decline and fall of the American Empire. His view is that the current recession is the first step in an ongoing process of America (and the world) coming to grips with exceeding its resource limits. His vision of peasant farmers plowing their fields "in sight of crumbling ruins of our cities" comes at the close of a timetable of fitful collapse that directly maps onto the timetable of the supercomputer revolution posited by Singularitarians.

So which is it? Peasants tilling the soil in the shadow of ruined cities that have long gone dark? Or a world of supercomputers and ageless cyborgs spreading across the universe?

What drives the vision of the Singularitarians is the observed trajectory of technological development, especially information and computer technology, which has taken on an astonishlingy consistent exponential growth curve across a range of different parameters--from the number of transistors that can be fit on a microchip to the speed of microprocessors. If this trend continues, then given the nature of exponential curves we'll be confonting almost inconceivable rates of advancement over the next decades, changes to dwarf the amazing changes that we have seen over the last five hundred years.

But the ecological sciences that stimulate Greer's grimmer picture also think in terms of exponential growth curves. But ecologists know something about these curves, something that seems to be a pretty consistent truth about them in the natural world: They can't be sustained.  At some point, exponential growth culminates in collapse--sometimes in catastrophic collapse--when the growth hits up against the reality of limits.And even when these limits don't produce collapse, the can and do stop the growth. Imagine a one centimeter lily pad on 100-meter diameter pond that doubles in size every day. For a long time it won't seem like much. Then it will suddenly burst across the pond--covering an eighth of it three days before the fateful day, a quarter two days before, half the day before--and then the whole pond. And then? Well, if we assume that lilly pads can't grow beyond the limits of the ponds they inhabit, then nothing. It's done. Astonishing growth that people have a hard time fathoming, followed by...stagnation.

Does growth in information technology face inherent limits of this sort? Is there just a point at which we can't fit more transistors on a microchip? I don't know. But even if--unlike pretty much everything else--growth in information technology has no inherent limits--such growth is coming at a time when human civilzation is hitting limits all over the place: water resource limits, arable soil limits, energy resource limits, etc., etc. And the collision of human civilization with all of these limits is guaranteed to have an effect on the funnelling of labor and natural resources towards the continuing growth of information technology.

Will we hit the so-called Singularity before catabolic collapse? Will the advent of a new technological epoch usher in miraculous solutions to all our troubles (or hasten our end, as computers decide we're expendable)? Or will the exponential growth in information systems slow, stall, and slide backwards as the rest of our society comes to grips with the impossibility of limitless growth?

I don't know. But given these uncertainties, it seems that the Singularity is more speculation than prediction. Great science fiction, but not much more than that.

Petitionary Prayer

Tomorrow morning my father has surgery to remove a cancerous bladder--a complicate surgery that may take anywhere from 4 to 7 hours to complete, with subsequent hospitalization for up to two weeks. I flew into Buffalo yesterday, just ahead of the major winter storm sweeping through the country, to be with my parents during the procedure and for a few days afterward.

Of course, friends have been calling or stopping in throughout the day. This morning Luigi called. Luigi is a former grad student of my father (a retired geology professor) who left geology to become a Catholic priest serving a mission in Peru. I sat nearby reading The New Yorker while my father talked to him. I looked up when my father became abruptly quiet.

"Well," my father said. "You know, that's something...I just don't know. I can't know. And so I don't have any beliefs about that. And that's okay with me. I'm at peace." The Catholic priest was asking the agnostic scientists about death, about what might lie beyond. Luigi, who is one of my parents' many "adopted" kids, accepted my father's response with his usual grace. He said something else, and my father replied, "I appreciate that."

A prayer had been promised.

Just a few minutes later, a neighbor knocked on the door. He'd heard about my father's surgery and wanted to express his concern. After a few minutes he said, "He's such a wonderful man. I'll light a candle for him at St. Peter St Paul's."

I've been assured by my pastor that she and many others are praying for my father. Many friends and relatives have offered up their prayers.

To be honest, I've had a troubled relationship with petitionary prayer ever since a time in college, when I was still flirting with a fundamentalist/charismatic Christian group. I was attending one of their meetings, and during an unstructured moment, someone in the group--call him Joe--mentioned that he had an injured thumb. One of the group leaders immediately grabbed me (since I was standing nearby) and asked me to join him in praying for this kid's thumb. He placed one hand over the damaged digit, raised his other hand, closed his eyes, and--with me standing there nonplussed, began this heartfelt prayer that went something like this:

"We ask you, Lord, to touch Joe's thumb, Lord, to just let your healing power flow out upon his thumb, Lord. We know that you are gracious, Lord, that you are the great physician. We ask that you reach out this night, Lord, to your servant Joe, whose thumb is hurt, Lord..."

And so it went. A part of me wanted to laugh. Another part of me wanted to blurt out, "That's absurd! Don't you think God has better things to do?" Another part--the budding philosopher--wanted to trot out the problem of evil, and ask why this guy expected God to miraculously intervene to heal a bruised thumb when He doesn't intervene to save starving children, to prevent rapes and murders, to save people buried alive during earthquakes, and on and on. In fact, I wanted to say, a God who did respond to the thumb prayer would be despicable, given that He doesn't respond to the anguished cries of so many others whose need is so much greater.

I still have trouble making sense of a theology in which God responds to human prayer requests in cases where, in the absence of such prayer requests, He would let those prayed for rot. It seems to me there is a strong argument for the view that either petitionary prayer is needless or it is useless. Either God cares enough to intervene and has the power to do so, or He does not. If the former, petitionary prayer is needless. If the latter, it is useless.

That said, I have read theological and philosophical arguments that strive to overcome this prima facie case against petitionary prayer, often with considerable subtlety.

But in a way, all of this misses the point. And--as is so often the case--the point is about love.

Luigi is far away, and he loves my father, and love expresses itself in tangible ways. As Simone Weil put it (I don't have the text here in Buffalo, so this is just a paraphrase), "The only way we can really show love for that which is eternal in persons is by caring for their tangible needs here below." Luigi cannot perform the surgery. He cannot do much to heal my father's diseased bladder or promote his body's recovery from the trauma of surgery. He cannot even bring a casserole to the house.

But he can pray. He can pray for healing. He can will that powers greater than he is might reach into this mortal coil, nudge the quantum forces that underlie my father's flesh, steady the surgeon's hand, and so move him back towards health.

The neighbor who came by this morning cannot do much for my father's health. But he loves my father and wants to show how much he cares for my father's health. A visit is nice, but it isn't directed towards healing, which is what my father needs. And love responds to needs. The neighbor can't remove the cancer. Be he can light a candle and say a prayer.

And tomorrow, when I sit for hours in the surgical waiting area, unable to do anything else for my father, I will pray. And if any of you want to do the same, I won't laugh or call your gesture absurd.