Love and Freedom

Note: I had this essay 90% finished months ago, and then fell off the blogging bandwagon!  My thoughts have continued to evolve on this topic in the months since I first wrote this, but I still wanted to give this piece its 10% polish and put it up here. Hope you enjoy! 

I recently finished Peter Brown’s biography of Augustine and now find myself, thanks to that book, re-evaluating my opinion of Augustine’s theology of grace as it relates to human free will. I had read his Confessions before, but beyond that, I had only read excerpts of his other works – mostly from the period of his struggle against Pelagianism. Reading that material left me with a negative view of Augustine’s thought on those matters. His thinking seemed rigid, forensic, and cold. My common complaint when faced with theological determinism also seemed to apply as a I read Augustine’s arguments against Pelagius: such views seem only to make sense if a person is willing to ignore subjective human experience – our interiority, our sense of freedom and responsibility, and the anxiety which accompanies both – imposing on such experiences a rigid theological system which fails to reflect how people actually, concretely live in and know the world.

All of us live everyday as if we have the power to make real choices. We debate and at least seem to decide, for instance, whether to eat Frosted Flakes or Lucky Charms for breakfast. Such internal debates pale in significance, however, when compared to the internal struggle we experience when attempting to make larger decisions about the direction of our lives or when attempting to deny a temptation and choose what we know to be God’s will. And even these situations are eclipsed in their ability to provoke anxiety in us – the anxiety of having to make a choice – by those times when we do not know what God’s will is or what the right choice might be. We struggle with choices in all these categories, we exhort one another to make certain choices over others, we develop whole rhetorical art forms dedicated to the notion that persuasion is possible, we celebrate our successful choices and regret our failures. For all these reasons, any attempts, including Augustine’s, to say that we are not capable of making certain choices for ourselves have always rung hollow to me. I think most such arguments are driven primarily by a desire to assert the absolute sovereignty of God, divorced from any consideration of human subjectivity and based upon the fallacious assumption of a fundamental incompatibility between divine sovereignty and human free will.  Thus theological determinism has always seemed to me far less interested in human subjectivity and for that reason inferior to those free-will theologies which do not deny what seems to be a universal component of the human experience (the possibility, responsibility, and anxiety of choice.)

I no longer believe, however, that this is the best way to describe the rationale behind Augustine’s theology of grace and volition. Brown does a fantastic job of demonstrating that it was Augustine, not Pelagius, who was concerned about the inner lives of individuals and eager to grapple theologically with such subjective experiences.

What [Augustine] criticized immediately in Pelagianism, was far less its optimism about human nature, as the fact that such optimism seemed to be based upon a transparently inadequate view of the complexity of human motivation. The two men disagreed radically on an issue that is still relevant . . . on the nature and sources of a fully good, creative action. How could this rare thing happen?  For one person [Pelagius], a good action could mean one that fulfilled successfully certain conditions of behavior, for another [Augustine], one that marked the culmination of an inner evolution.  (Brown 373)

For Pelagius, God was an “enlightened despot,” whose laws were to be followed by his subjects for the sake of their own well-being. Human goodness was completely coterminous with obedience to those laws. Nothing, furthermore, stood in the way of this obedience other than the force of negative human habits – a force that was no match for the power of the human will aided by the proper kind of moral environment and a good example to follow. The church provided the first, Christ provided the second, and all that was left was for Christians to shake off their moral laxity and make the choices they knew they should.

Augustine knew first hand, however,  that this description of human choice was woefully inadequate. Like Paul, he knew what it was to see the law of Christ at work in his mind but the law of sin at work in his members.  He knew what it was to will the good, but be pursued by evil – to feel as if he were ruled by a hostile power, “Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin living in me.” More was needed than a change of environment and a good example.  And even if such aids could help a determined individual arrive at a perfect obedience to God’s commands, this was no gaurentee that the inner motivations of such a person weren’t hopelessly twisted by pride, resentment, or insecurity.  The pride of the “saintly” is a sin just as serious and quite possibly more dangerous than the debauchery of the sinful.

Attempting to refute Pelagius’ view of grace and free will, Augustine relied on Paul’s distinction between the letter that kills and and the Spirit which enlivens.  Augustine believed it was the role of the Spirit to transform individuals into people with a capacity to love goodness for itself. Apart from such a love, obedience was not worth achieving, let alone achievable.  On this topic, Brown quotes from Augustine’s treatise, On the Spirit and the Letter:

You [Pelagius] enumerate many ways in which God helps us – the commands of the Scriptures, blessings, healings, chastenings, excitations, and inspirations; but that He gives us love and helps us in this way, you do not say. (Brown 374)

For me, the most effective argument against every type of theological determinism has always been to point to God’s desire not for automatic obedience but for love, not for the kind of perfect followers which robots make but for the kind of fealty only a passionate and free being is capable of giving.  What Augustine, through Brown, is forcing me to question now, however, is the relationship between freedom and love.  I always felt, intuitively, that the relationship was a simple one -freedom was the necessary precondition for love.  Love that was not an expression of an autonomous freedom was not, for that reason, love.  (I always recognized such freedom to be God’s gift to humanity that, while twisted seriously by the fall, remained strong enough to allow us to make the one decision that mattered most – to accept or reject God’s offer of grace.)

Here, however, is Brown on Augustine’s insights in this area:

Men choose in a way more complex than that suggested by the hallowed stereotypes of common-sense.  For an act of choice is not just a matter of knowing what to choose: it is a matter in which loving and feeling are involved.  And in men, this capacity to know and to feel in a single, involved whole, has been intimately dislocated: ‘The understanding flies on ahead, and there follows, oh, so slowly, and sometimes not at all, our weakened human capacity for feeling.’ Men choose because they love; but Augustine had been certain for some twenty years, that they could not, of themselves, choose to love.  The vital capacity to unite feeling and knowledge comes from outside man’s powers of self-determination.

This rings true to me.  When I see the sun setting over the ocean and hear its waves breaking in front of me, my heart swells in my chest with delight.  This delight comes unbidden, I cannot resist it, I did not choose it – it is part of who and what I am, part of how I’m made, and for that reason I value it as highly as I do.  God’s will is that we should all delight in him, as we were made to do – but sin has intervened.  We do not delight in God, and though we can choose a grudging obedience to him, we cannot make ourselves delight in him.  Augustine believed that only the unilateral action of God could bring about a transformation in a person that would allow them to delight in God.  That transformation was the substance of salvation.

As I think about this argument, my old certainties (I have fewer and fewer of them these days) about freedom, salvation, and love seem less certain. Its not that I think Augustine has gotten it all right.  No, I think he has come dangerously close to simply inverting the equation with which I started. Rather than making human freedom the precondition for human love toward God, he’s made human love toward God the precondition for freedom, asserting that human love toward God is wholly a gift from God to humans. This, however, sacrifices the full meaning of love by removing human choice from our love toward God. Both views, however, share something important in common. They think of the relationship between love and freedom as a one way street, one making the other possible in human beings.

I think it might be better, though, to think about freedom and love as interdependent. They grow together, mysteriously, each one presupposing the other, their twin existence a miracle. This divine occurence is more sublime because it is, at the same time, a human one. God includes humanity in his activity, sharing his agency with us. Because of this, we dance with God in freedom and in love. This is not as neat and tidy, nor as clear, nor as well defined a position as either Augustine’s or Pelagius’; it relies on mystery, paradox, and metaphor rather than philosophical categories, but why should that trouble us? I prefer the image of God and humanity dancing, the steps of our dance blurring together, our shared motions not reducible to forensic description without fundamentally altering the truth of the dance – a truth which can only be arrived at by living it. Whatever our theology, to follow Christ is to lose ourselves to this dance. In its dynamic, unending motion we experience the twin realities of love and freedom.  In the dance, they are one, just as we and our Lord have been made one.  Caught up in the delight of this unity-in-motion, we don’t think to capture and pin down the dance, to separate each step from the next, to analyze them in abstraction.  To understand the dance it must be observed from within – it must be danced.

In freedom and in love, we dance with Christ, happy to be caught up in the motion and flow of truths that can’t stand still, to be dancing with the one we love to harmonies no philosophy can follow.

Turning From or Committing To?

I’m rereading certain sections of James Dunn’s The Theology of Paul the Apostle as a way to think more carefully about the nature of justification after some constructive criticism I received on a theological paper I wrote for my denomination’s ordination process. I wanted to share the following quote from a section in which Dunn is discussing Paul’s approach to the event of conversion because it struck me as being an important and often overlooked truth:

Paul is just as shy of using the obviously related language of “repentance” and “forgiveness” [to describe the event of conversion]. Despite the relative prominence of the verb and noun (“repent, repentance”) in the Synoptic tradition and in Acts, Paul speaks of “repentance” only once in what we might call a conversion situation (Rom. 2.4). Even more striking is the fact that the usual term for “forgiveness” appears only in a scriptural quotation in Paul’s principal letters, and otherwise only in the later Col. 1.14 – “in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” For some reason not altogether clear to us, Paul evidently preferred not to talk in these terms. The reason may possibly be because such terms were so characteristic of his own former theology and practice. What he wanted was a different emphasis, and possibly a more positive summons. He found it in the call to faith – by far the more prominent theme in his gospel preaching and theology. It was less a “turning away from” which Paul emphasized and more the “commitment to.” There is a matter for reflection here in contemporary gospel preaching and theologizing. (Dunn, 327-328.)

Yes, there definitely is.  Too often those Christians who believe in the importance of a conversion event and preach with such an event in mind as a hoped for outcome, myself included, spend most of our preaching time focusing on what will be left behind by people who convert – sin and its consequences.  In the past I had simply assumed that Paul’s preaching was similar, but as Dunn points out from Paul’s letters, it was not. Paul relied far more on descriptions of the hope and prize to which people are called in Christ, beckoning them to join the kingdom rather than leave the world. I want to think further about what such evangelistic preaching might look like and hopefully get some practice at it as I move forward with my church in our plans to plant a new congregation in East Dayton in the new year.  Entering the kingdom includes turning one’s back to sin, but what matters most and what defines conversion is what a person is turning toward – Christ and his kingdom.  That is what I want to preach.

Thanks for reading! You can expect a more lengthy post about Augustine and the relationship between grace, love, and free will soon. Its been on the back burner for months, but I’ve picked it back up and hope to have it finished soon.

Self-Deception and Total Depravity

Well, I’ve been intending to write a larger post on Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, but have not found the time I need to craft the kind of piece I want to craft. In the meantime, I thought I’d post something less ambitious on a very interesting point Niebuhr makes as an aside in his chapter on the sin of pride:

Our analysis of man’s sin of pride and self-love has consistently assumed that an element of deceit is involved in this self-glorification. This dishonesty must be regarded as concomitant, and not as the basis, of self-love. Man loves himself inordinately. Since his determinate existence does not deserve the devotion lavished upon it, it is obviously necessary to practice some deception in order to justify such excessive devotion. While such deception is constantly directed against competing wills, seeking to secure their acceptance and validation of the self’s too generous opinion of itself, its primary purpose is to deceive, not others, but the self. The self must, at any rate, deceive itself first. Its deception of others is partly an effort to convince itself against itself. The fact that this necessity exists is an important indication of the vestige of truth which abides with the self in all its confusion and which it must placate before it can act. The dishonesty of man is thus an interesting refutation of the doctrine of man’s total depravity. (Niebuhr, 203)

Niebuhr was, by the time he wrote this passage, no longer a liberal protestant theologian. He took humanity’s sinfulness quite seriously, but he was not willing to embrace the idea of total human depravity. This passage, while not central to his argument, is (I believe) his most elegant and psychologically insightful refutation of that doctrine.

If you are a follower of Jesus you have, in one way or another, been forced to confront your sinfulness and therefore been forced to confront the chilling reality of your own self-deception. The further one grows in holiness, I believe, the more one becomes aware of the depth of one’s own self-deception and of the danger it poses to real spiritual health. One of my favorite passages from The Brothers Karamazov tackles this topic. In it the elder Zosima urges a woman at war with herself over matters of faith to “keep watch on the lie within yourself every hour.” He tells her that if she can simply manage to acknowledge her self-deception and the self-justification it is designed to fuel, the mere act of noticing it will remove its power and make room for genuine love to grow.

Dostoevsky’s point about the depth of human self-deception is (as Niebuhr points out so well) not an argument for but an argument against total depravity. Why should a totally depraved person need to convince him or herself that their selfish actions are actually selfless, or that their greed is actually an admirable form of ambition? The very depth of the self-deception indicates that deeper even than human sinfulness, at the very core of every person, there remains an image of God. We were his creatures before we were sinners, and though our sinfulness runs very deep and there is not one of us who is not caught helplessly in the web of sin, we are incapable of erasing God’s signature in our souls. No matter how deep the stain of sin has seeped into us, it cannot change the nature of the material stained – it can only twist, rot, and obscure it.

None of this is to say that I (or Niebuhr) believe in the inevitability of human progress – moral or otherwise. Rather, I say this because sometimes the evangelical community (of which I’m a part) seems incapable of recognizing the goodness and the beauty that exists both in individuals and in the world outside the church. This inability leads to a style of engagement with the world and of evangelism with individuals that is needlessly combative – attempting to convince people by rhetorical force of their complete sinfulness. A more subtle (and more effective approach) is to seek to connect with the good that still remains in people and to help them discover the truth embedded in the paradox of their own self-deception. The very existence of that deception is evidence of their creation by something or Someone very good and of their current state of alienation from that something or Someone.

I don’t know exactly what it would look like (and I am far better at writing about my theology than I am at living it), but I’m hungry for an evangelical Christianity that is willing to embrace, celebrate, and encourage the good that exists outside itself – wherever it might be found. I believe one route to that form of Christianity might be through a reexamination of the doctrine of total depravity – not in order to minimize the earth-shattering impact and ubiquity of sin, but in order to point out that as terrible and as ubiquitous as sin is, it has not been able to unmake the image of God in humankind – a fact which is actually corroborated by the very depth and ubiquity of one form of sin – self-deception.

“The Immanence of Infinitude in the Finite”

I am currently writing a sermon on Psalm 8.  The psalm is a profound contemplation of both humanity’s finitude and dignity. The psalmist is struck by our seeming insignificance in the face of a vast and awe-inspiring universe created by a majestic and sovereign God. Despite this, the psalmist never doubts that God cares for and is mindful of humanity – as small and seemingly insignificant as it is. The cognitive dissonance created by these two realities is not resolved by the psalm but explored and deepened at every turn, starting with the first two stanzas:

O LORD, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.

Out of the mouths of babes and infants,
you have founded a bulwark because of your foes,
to silence the enemy and the avenger.

The Creator God, whose glory is set above the highest heaven – the Sovereign over the entire universe – has established a bulwark on earth in a most remarkable way. He has chosen the voices of the weakest and the most vulnerable among us to be the seat of his power, his stronghold against evil, and the proof of his glory on earth. The holy, transcendent God, in other words, chooses to be revealed in the tiniest and weakest members of the human family. Or, as Isaiah puts it elsewhere:

For thus says the high and lofty one who inhabits eternity,
whose name is Holy:
I dwell in the high and holy place,
and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit,
to revive the spirit of the humble,
and to revive the heart of the contrite.

The transcendent God is accessible not through some flight into the universal, some shedding of particularity and personality in a superhuman effort to achieve a transcendence like God’s. Rather, the transcendent God meets us in our own brokenness and weakness – at the point of our own hearts’ greatest sorrow. The God who dwells above the highest heaven, also dwells in the squalor of every broken, sin-sick human heart that cries out for his forgiveness and his presence. Our brokenness becomes the site of the infinite God’s connection to us finite creatures.

The beginning of human dignity, then, is the acknowledgment of our sin and of our finitude. Because, when we acknowledge our distance from the transcendent and holy God, we find that it is erased and that the heights of transcendence which we sought to attain apart from God have been brought near to us – into our own hearts – by the God whom we jealously resented for his transcendence, imagining he had withheld that gift from us for himself.

He never has held back that gift, however, but continues to offer it to us through the particular and the immanent. We meet God, then, not by trying to ascend into the highest heaven, but by sinking into the neglected depths of our own hearts. This is what Augustine meant when he wrote:

Behold, you were within me, while I was outside: it was there that I sought you, and, a deformed creature, rushed headlong upon these things of beauty which you have made. You were with me, but I was not with you.

Augustine had sought, for a long time, to purify himself of all darkness (as a Manichaen) and to rise above the confines of his finite existence to taste the transcendence that he had always hungered for. He contemplated the heavens like the psalmist, but unlike him, he longed to become a part of them. He saw the vastness of the universe and resented his own smallness, perceiving it as an insult and yearning for more, never imagining that what he sought could be found not by forsaking his finitude, but by embracing it – not by fleeing the confines of his own heart, but by exploring them. He sought to raise himself up to God, only later to be amazed that God had already lowered himself down to him.

This revelation, which dawned slowly on Augustine over time, changed his life. Peter Brown, his most well-known modern biographer, chronicled the effect of this insight on Augustine’s exegesis. Especially in the Psalms (Brown noted), Augustine felt that the whole sweep of scripture’s message “vibrates in every syllable.” That is, each particular turn of phrase, image, or metaphor becomes “the vehicle through which an organic whole can find expression.” The whole grand narrative of scripture becomes accessible through the particularity of one concrete image, mirroring the way the transcendent God comes to us in the particularity of our own brokenness.

Noting this aspect of Augustine’s exegetical thought, Brown quotes quite appropriately from Whitehead: “In some sense or another, Importance is derived from the immanence of infinitude in the finite.”

And that, ultimately, is the message of Psalm 8.  Human Importance – our significance in this universe – is derived from the immanence of the infinite God in our finite lives. This is why the psalm begins and ends with praise for the majestic name of God. This is why the psalmist can stare humanity’s finitude in the face and not despair or lie as all other thinkers must do without God. This is why the tension of the psalm is left unresolved – to resolve the tension would be to destroy its central insight. Humanity matters not despite its finitude but because of it; because, for reasons we will never fully grasp, God chooses to communicate his transcendence in and through our finitude, his holiness in our sinfulness, his power in our weakness. Humanity matters because it participates in the universal through the particular, experiencing the life of God in its own life – a reality which drives us, as it drove the psalmist before us, to cry out in praise of such a God.

A Devotional Digression

Well, this has happened to me before, but my good intentions about writing regularly have been frustrated by a busy schedule and by other much less intellectually stimulating leisure activities (e.g. I’m currently watching the surprisingly good Nickelodian show Avatar: The Last Airbender and please don’t give me grief about it!).

As a token (more to myself than anyone else) of my resolve to write on at least a semi-regular basis, I thought I’d write briefly about a poem which has, in this time of transition and uncertainty, become important to me:

WHEN will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Peace.”

You can’t beat Hopkins for the shear beauty of his language. The first line of this poem, for instance, perfectly evokes the motion of a wooddove’s wings with its series of gentle w’s and soft vowel sounds. The beauty of the language however is matched by the beauty of Hopkins’ reflection on and desire for peace.

“I’ll not play hypocrite / to own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes”

Hopkins is unwilling to lie to himself, to pretend as though his situation is worse than it is. He has known peace, he is not utterly forsaken nor is he without hope. His complaint, however, is real.

“but  / that piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows / alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?”

Again, this is language to savor with a meaning to ponder. Hopkins’ complaint is that the peace he has known is not pure. It comes and goes, it allows wars, it even permits its own demise.  What good is a peace that remains peaceable even at the cost of its own extinction? What consolation can God give for this terrible deprivation? What will God give instead of peace?

“And so he does leave Patience exquisite, / that plumes to Peace thereafter.”

All that can be done in the absence of peace is exactly what God provides for – to wait for its return.  Not to make rash demands.  Not to set off to wrest peace for oneself from the teeth of some conflict. Not to deceive oneself about the absence of peace. But to simply and patiently wait.

“And when Peace here does house / He comes with work to do, He does not come to coo, / He comes to brood and sit.”

When I first read these lines they knocked me back on my heels. When God does at long last grant the peace for which we’ve waited patiently, he grants it not simply for our enjoyment or entertainment, and certainly not so that we might somehow live without burdens, duties, or trouble. Rather, when peace comes to us, it comes with work to do – it comes to give birth to something new and beautiful in us.

As I continue to walk through a time of transition, I feel encouraged by this thought: That pure peace is not to be had this side of the Resurrection and that, therefore, I can give myself to patience. To patience and to the hope for a peaceable-birth of something new within me – some new life, some new possibility, some new dream that will lead me, inexorably, away from the peace which gave birth to it and back into the conflict and struggle through which all dreams must be brought into the waking world. I look forward to this work of Peace in me.

In the meantime, I will build a nest.

Finitude and Freedom (Part 1)

As promised, I intend to offer some thoughts on the first half of Reinhold Niebuhr’s work, The Nature and Destiny of Man. That book (which had its genesis as Niebuhr’s Gifford Lectures) is divided into roughly two equal sections, the first of which is on the nature of humankind.

Perhaps the best way into Niebuhr’s theological anthropology is through the duality of finitude and freedom which he believes to be so important to an accurate appraisal of human nature. For Niebuhr, the Christian view of humankind is unique in its ability to hold these two realities in balanced tension with one another.

Human beings are finite – that is we are creatures with limited mental and physical capacities which we ultimately cannot transgress no matter how much we may wish to or how ardently we believe we can. Niebuhr repudiated the boundless optimism of the Enlightenment, with its belief in the essentially infinite potential for progress in the human race.  (I believe he would likely laugh at the current transhumanist incarnation of this belief as a form of self-parody.) Our finitude and creatureliness also mean that the structure of our lives is already determined to a significant, but not final degree. That is, we have certain biological urges and certain mental structures and capacities from birth which are simply givens for us and with which we must learn to deal. Niebuhr, then, would not fully endorse the notion that existence precedes essence. (Though Niebuhr’s thought would thus fail to meet Sartre’s definition of existentialism, it draws deeply from the wells of Kierkegaard’s thought and can rightly be called existentialist in another sense – as will hopefully be seen in coming posts.)

Though finite, however, human beings are also free. Our freedom is unique in both kind and magnitude and is derived from our capacity for self transcendence. The fact of our self-transcendence is illustrated in an interesting way by Niebuhr: Though I am finite and am subject to limitations, I am aware of this fact.  Even more incredibly, I am capable of “seeing” beyond my limitations so as to gain a kind of knowledge about how I, as a creature, am situated in the wider world. That is, I can imagine myself from a cosmic and even a meta-cosmic perspective and examine my relation not only to other creatures and to myself but also to the cosmos as a whole. Still more amazing is the fact that I can observe myself observing myself and examine my thoughts for flaws or wonder at my motives in those thoughts.  I can repeat this process ad infinitum. What this means, however, is that I am never capable of discovering the seat of my identity and consciousness. For as soon as I think I have found the source and ground of my self and I begin to examine that source, I realize that it cannot possibly be the source since it is now the object of my thought and what is the object of my thought cannot also be the subject which is thinking. Thus the quest for self-possession – for the discovery of the source and ground of the “I” that I am – is doomed to failure from the first, because each time I believe I have found it, I, in the very act of contemplating it, transcend the potential source, proving that “I” am somewhere and something else. The possibility for infinite regression in this process leads, then, to the absurd but unavoidable conclusion that my self actually does transcend itself and its world and that it has a ground which it cannot transcend and, for that very reason, cannot discover through the exercise of its own faculties.

The following quote captures this important feature of Niebuhr’s thought succinctly and with great beauty:

The rational capacity of surveying the world, of forming general concepts and analyzing the order of the world is thus but one aspect of what Christianity knows as “spirit.” The self knows the world, insofar as it knows the world, because it stands outside both itself and the world, which means that it cannot understand itself except as it is understood from beyond itself and the world. This essential homelessness of the human spirit is the ground of all religion; for the self which stands outside itself and the world cannot find the meaning of life in itself or the world. (14)

Precisely because we are self-transcendent, then, we cannot be self-reliant when it comes to the great human quest for meaning. Rather, the only possible source of meaning for a self-transcendent creature would be that which it could not transcend. Such a being would be identifiable neither with the cosmos nor with the human self, both of which human beings transcend in their spiritual capacities, but would have to be the “unconditioned ground of existence” itself.

If, at this point, Niebuhr’s theological language seems far from the language of scripture and if his definition of God seems too anthropocentric (derived entirely from a logical process which begins with an examination of human existence) – I agree with you. Thankfully, however, Niebuhr himself knows that “unconditioned ground of existence” is an inadequate definition of God and that his examination of human existence, within the framework of finitude and freedom will only be helpful once its brought into conversation with orthodox (indeed, for Niebuhr, Augustinian) theological categories. Once that conversation is begun, however, this existentialist anthropology becomes highly helpful and suggestive. In future blog posts I will examine how Niebuhr brings these two streams of thought together.

For now I will simply close by pointing out the importance of the small phrase in the second sentence of the quote above: “insofar as it knows the world.” Niebuhr obviously has a very high opinion of the human capacity for self-transcendence, but he never leaves behind the importance of acknowledging our limitations. Our ability to imaginatively transcend the boundaries of our finitude and examine ourselves from the outside must not be allowed, says Niebuhr, to fool us into thinking that we are more than we are nor to overestimate the accuracy of our knowledge of the world and of ourselves. We are both body and spirit (and never one without the other). We are both finite and free (free in, not despite our finitude). How this is possible is a paradox, yet I can’t help but see the necessity of affirming both these realities as laid out by Niebuhr.

Thanks for reading this long and somewhat boring post.  Where Niebuhr goes with this material is highly exciting and interesting and I hope to take you along for that ride!

Coming Soon . . .

I’ve been reading Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man recently and have found it, at times, literally thrilling.  Its the kind of thrill I get when reading a clear articulation of things I had previously only half-known.  It’s theological investigation of the nature of humanity is psychologically astute – ringing true with me in a way that few other works of academic theology have.  Niebuhr’s synthesis of such astute psychological observation with both Christian existentialism (principally Kierkegaard’s) and traditional Augustinian theology is not only thought provoking but actually enlightening.  The ambition of the book, reflected in its title, makes the humility with which its positions are explicated that much more indispensable (and surprising).  I plan on devoting the next several posts to reflections on the first half of the book, which is concerned with the nature, but not yet the destiny, of humankind.

I doubt, however, that I’ll be able to devote the necessary time to those posts until after this Sunday when I’ll be delivering a sermon and teaching the final lesson in a Sunday School series I’ve been working on.  All I can do now is offer the above description and explain that the book is the published form of Niebuhr’s 1939 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh.  Finally, I am aware of Stanley Hauerwas’ significant critique of Niebuhr’s thought in his own series of Gifford Lectures given in 2001, though I have not read a manuscript of them.  I would like to do so, however, after finishing Niebuhr’s book and will likely record my thoughts on Hauerwas’ critique at that time.  (I was once a fan of Hauerwas’ but have been finding myself less and less sympathetic toward him as time goes on.  I’ll be interested to see whether or not that trend continues as I finish this bit of reading.)

Until next week . . .