I have often puzzled about a comment made by Dr. Samuel Johnson, as reported by his biographer James Boswell. He had often tried to be a philosopher, Johnson said, “but cheerfulness kept breaking in.”
It makes me wonder what philosophers Dr. Johnson had been reading. I certainly know of a lot of gloomy philosophers—Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to name two obvious cases—to say nothing of many of the thinkers today who claim the “postmodern” label. But I don’t see gloominess as somehow intrinsic to philosophy. Some philosophical perspectives are gloomy, and others cheerful. Still others try to cultivate a healthy tension between the two moods.
The same holds for theology. I have to admit that I tend a little too much at times toward theological cheerfulness. My kind of Calvinism has to be constantly on guard against triumphalism. My theological hero, Abraham Kuyper, is famous for having declared that “there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” I basically endorse that manifesto. It acknowledges the reigning Kingship of the ascended Christ, who is above all principalities and powers and who has guaranteed the ultimate victory over the forces of evil.
But the cheerful disposition that this perspective encourages needs regularly to allow some gloominess to break in. I cultivate this, not only by making sure that I pay close attention to the horrific realities of human suffering, but also by occasionally reading, among others, Martin Luther.
My favorite Luther essay is his “On Secular Authority,” where he discusses, among other things, the calling of “the Christian prince.” If a Christian leader is to be assured that his exercise of authority is pleasing to God, Luther says, the leader “must anticipate a great deal of envy and suffering. As illustrious a man as this will soon feel the cross lying on his neck.”
This is good advice to all of us who want to serve the cause of Christ in the present age—a time when the ultimate victory over evil has not yet been made manifest. Not that we should be masochists, reveling in suffering. But we should, as Luther puts it, anticipate that some degree of suffering will be our lot. And we should not refuse to accept that lot when it comes our way.
More importantly, we should actively take on the suffering of others. If we do not regularly feel the cross on our necks we should worry about our spiritual state. Abraham Kuyper was right about how all of those square inches are under the rule of Christ. But a lot of human beings are pretty miserable these days as they live out their lives on those square inches. Cheerfulness about the ultimate outcome is certainly appropriate–indeed it can be an important motivating factor in keeping at the work of the Kingdom. But we should not be afraid to allow some gloominess about human suffering to break in during the here and now, particularly when that gloominess leads us to action.
I’m not going to jump into the fray about Senator McCain’s choice of a vice presidential running mate. But I am concerned about at least some of the flak she is taking for her religious views. This is not the first time we have seen the hypocrisy that characterizes the treatment of believers who speak out about issues of public life. I remember talking with a reporter who was trying to get me to say that the leaders of the Religious Right should not quote the Bible in defending their views on public policy. When I asked him whether he also thought that Martin Luther King should not have quoted Isaiah in calling for racial justice, there was a long silence, and then he said, “That was different.” When I pushed him to explain the difference, he suddenly had to move on to another interview. The most blatant example was when Senator John Kerry, who had appreciated what the pope had to say when he criticized American military efforts, responded to the same pope’s criticism of gay marriage by observing that the Vatican failed to understand “the separation of church and state.”
So here goes on Governor Palin’s theology.
The September 24 issue of The New Republic has a one-page piece entitled “The Case Against Sarah Palin.” It consists of nothing but comments that she herself has made in various public settings. The clear implication is that all one needs to do in order to declare her unfit for national leadership is to read her own words on a number of different subjects. Here is one of those comments quoted without comment by The New Republic, from a talk that the Governor gave at the Wasilla Assembly of God Church on June 8 of this year:
Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [American soldiers] out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that is God’s plan.
I do appreciate the fact that The New Republic actually offers us this expanded comment. I have read other reports about the same talk where she has simply been quoted as saying that Christians should pray for our military in Iraq because they are serving “God’s plan.” If that is what she had said, I would have quickly joined her critics. I publicly opposed the invasion of Iraq before it was launched, and I have never modified my view that the whole thing was a huge mistake.
Having said that, though, I do not find much fault with the Governor’s prayer request as embodied in this paragraph. I too can pray that our leaders are sending our troops on “a task that is from God.” And I agree with her that instead of telling God what he ought to think about American policies, “we have to make sure we’re praying… that there is a plan and that that is God’s plan.” I would hate to think that, in addition to having made the mistake of going into Iraq, we also have gone in without any clear plan. And even more important, I certainly would pray that somehow God will take the mess we have gotten ourselves in and make it serve his overall purposes in the world.
The fact is that on this particular point she is being ridiculed for expressing beliefs that many of us share as Christians, wherever we might be on the political spectrum. Suppose, for example, that Senator Obama were speaking to a United Church of Christ congregation and said something like this:
I think we ought to send an army of medical and social workers to the African continent to work diligently in serving the needs of HIV/AIDs victims. And we should pray for these folks and for the national leaders who send them there, that in striving to do what is right that they will be performing a task from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan, and that that is God’s plan.
I would find no fault with this. Nor would many of the others, I suspect, who are criticizing Governor Palin for asking people to pray that what we are doing militarily would be a means of furthering God’s plan for humankind. Christian politicians should not be faulted for speaking to their fellow Christians in church settings about the need to seek God’s will for public policy. Jimmy Carter did that all the time in his Sunday school classes, as he explained to his Christian congregants how his public policy efforts drew on his Christian convictions. The real question is whether a leader has made the right connections theologically. We Christians can and should challenge each other on those matters. But we ought not to criticize a fellow Christian—or put up with it when others lodge those criticisms—simply for trying to make the connections, especially when they also urge people to pray that God’s will be done.
Here is a passage that I often return to, from the inaugural address of one of my presidential predecessors, Edward John Carnell:
Whoever meditates on the mystery of his own life will quickly realize why only God, the searcher of the secrets of the heart, can pass final judgment. We cannot judge what we have no access to. The self is a swirling conflict of fears, impulses, sentiments, interests, allergies, and foibles. It is a metaphysical given for which there is no easy rational explanation. Now, if we cannot unveil the mystery of our own motives and affections, how much less can we unveil the mystery in others?
Others have also focused on the mystery of self-knowledge. In one of his rare love-poems, Matthew Arnold wrote: “What heart knows another? Ah! Who knows his own?” And commenting on St. Paul’s “Who has known the mind of the Lord?,” Gregory of Nyssa observed:“For my part I also ask: Who has known his own mind?Those who think themselves capable of grasping the nature of God would do well to consider whether they have looked into themselves.”
Carnell’s application of this realization is the right one.The awareness of the difficulty of self-knowledge ought to inspire in each of us a good dose of humility. If we have a hard time getting clear about our own motives and desires, we ought to hang a little loose in speculating about the inner life of others.
Even a non-Calvinist Christian should be able to affirm what John Calvin argues in the opening sections of his Institutes: the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self are intimately connected. We can’t grasp the one without the other. More specifically, Calvin says, we get a sense of our own inner life only when we view it in the “mirror” of God’s law.And, needless to say, that lesson is not learned by a one-time glance in the mirror. We need to keep looking, and even so, the best we can hope for is that we will see ourselves in a glass darkly, until the Day comes when our vision will be aided by a perfect Light. Which means that for now, humility is a virtue that needs to be cultivated on a daily basis.
In my last blog I discussed cremation. I’ll stick with death-related thoughts for another time around.
In a presentation I gave to an Oxford philosophy symposium recently, I talked about possible links between philosophical and theological discussions of the metaphysical composition of the human person. I gave some attention particularly to an excellent essay—it has become a classic of sorts—by the theologian Oscar Cullmann, where he discusses the New Testament treatment of the ideas of “soul,” “body,” and what is labeled by theologians as “the intermediate state.”
Cullmann has a dramatic way of introducing these topics. He illustrates what he sees as the clear difference between the Greek view of immortality and the Christian view of resurrected bodily life by presenting a stark contrast between the deaths of Socrates and Jesus. After a calm philosophical discussion with his friends, Socrates takes the poisonous hemlock in a seemingly cheerful anticipation of the separation of his soul from his body. Jesus, on the other hand, sweats drops of blood in Gethsemane as he pleads with the Father to allow the cup of suffering to pass from him. And then on the cross he cries out in agony over his experience of abandonment. The underlying issue here, says Cullmann, has to do with radically differing conceptions of the meaning of death. For Socrates, death is the welcome release of the spiritual from the physical. For Jesus, death is an enemy that threatens the destruction of the whole person.
After my lecture I was pushed by a couple of pastors who were in the audience about what all of that means when we minister to Christians who are struggling in a very personal way with the proper way to face death. They pointed out that some believers they know experience great fear about dying, while others accept death with calm confidence.
My own sense is that there is no “right” way for a Christian to face death. Indeed, Cullmann’s portrayal of the contrast between Socrates and Jesus leaves a lot of room for differing Christian attitudes toward death. The one thing we can be certain of theologically is that Jesus encountered death in a way that none of us have to. His was the encounter with sin and death. He faced death knowing that his dying was to be the once-for-all struggle with death. Because of the victory that he accomplished on the Cross we no longer have to face death as the Great Enemy.
At the same time, though, this does not make death into a friend. Cullmann is right to point to Socrates’ view of death as a clear example of how we are not to view death. Jesus did not make death into a friend, he made it into a defeated enemy. Think of a very dangerous person who has been captured. Those who have been seriously threatened by him now see him lying bound and gagged in a corner. He has been defeated. But this does not make him into a friend. He is a defeated enemy. Some may emphasize his defeat, and thereby gain confidence that he has been rendered harmless—he is a defeated enemy. Others may reflect on the dangers that he has posed, and continue to be wary of him—he is a defeated enemy.
Both emphases capture important aspects. Different personalities will react differently to the fact that Christ has defeated death. The important thing is to be clear about our theology of death. Once we have that clarity, we can allow for different ways in which Christians will encounter the Great Enemy that Jesus has decisively conquered.
Someone wrote recently to ask me for my views about cremation. This is the second time I have been asked about this in the past six months. In each case the person requesting my thoughts was not sure that cremation was a proper practice for Christians, and the expectation was that I would provide a theological rationale for opposing the practice. I had to disappoint them.
Both of my parents were cremated. They were devout evangelical Christians, and I have wondered whether they had thought about their plan in theological terms. My guess is that it was for them a pragmatic decision based on economic considerations. But having thought about it theologically myself, I have no serious problems with the decision they made.
This much is clear: cremation poses no serious obstacles to the God who has promised to raise them up when the trumpet sounds to signal that Resurrection Day has arrived. My parents will certainly be as “resurrect-able” as their parents and grandparents, all of whom were buried without cremation. We don’t have to go into the graphic details to make the point that, given what the Lord will have on hand to work with, the raising up with glorified bodies of those who have died in Christ will take a miracle in every case, cremation or no cremation.
I can imagine someone asking, however, whether deciding to be cremated isn’t a kind of in-your-face gesture toward God, a way of saying to the Almighty, “See if you can make a glorified body out of this!” And it may well be that some unbelievers have chosen cremation precisely in that kind of bravado spirit. For a believer, on the other hand, choosing cremation can be a special act of faith, an acknowledgement that our only hope for the afterlife rests on the sheer promise by a sovereign God that we will be raised up on the Last Day.
Indeed, I like to think of choosing cremation as a way of expressing our solidarity with the great martyrs in church history who have willingly presented their bodies for burning at the stake rather than deny their deepest convictions. The ones who were subject to that mode of dying for the faith are included in that number described by the Apostle John in Revelation 6:9-11: “I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony they had given; they cried out with a loud voice, ‘Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?’ They were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number would be complete both of their fellow-servants and of their brothers and sisters, who were soon to be killed as they themselves had been killed.”
