Category Archives: Philosophy

Jonathan Edwards, Philosophy, Religion, Theology

Jonathan Edwards’s Argument Against Unitarianism in Miscellany 96

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Today I’m finally putting pen to paper for a short introduction to two of Edwards’s miscellanies for a reader being published by Jonathan Edwards Press.

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In the reader I will be introducing Miscellany 96 which is on the Trinity and Miscellany 279 which is on the torments of hell. The plan is basically to introduce each miscellany and then explain how Edwards’s Trinitarian doctrine relates to his doctrine of hell.

Here is a pretty sloppy summary of Edwards’s two arguments against Unitarianism – a very early modern concern – in Miscellany 96.

Argument #1 – A Theological Argument

Claim: There must be more than a unity in infinite and eternal essence.

Argument:

  1. To be perfectly good is to incline to and delight in making another happy in the same proportion as it is happy itself.
  2. God is perfectly good, therefore God is inclined and delights in making another happy in the same proportion as he is happy.

This claim has to do with Edwards’s idea of communication. A perfectly good being desires and delights in communicating the fullness of itself to others, so that others may enjoy the goodness of that first being.

This however doesn’t get you Trinitarianism yet because a Unitarian God could “potentially” delight in making another as happy as God is himself. More is needed.

  1. Goodness is delight in communicating happiness.
  2. If “goodness” is perfect, the delight to communicate must be perfect.
  3. A delight is perfect if an only if the inclination to communicate happiness to the other is equal to an agent’s own inclination to be happy.
  4. To be the object of perfect delight one must be X and Y
  5. A creatures cannot (1)God cannot love a creature as much as God loves himself, (2) a creature cannot receive the fullness of God’s communication.
  6. Therefore creatures cannot be the object of God’s desire to communicate perefectly.
  7. If God exercises his perfect goodness then he must have fellowship with a person capable of receiving the fullness of God’s love and communication.
  8. If God is good then God must exercise perfect goodness.
  9. God is good
    1. Therefore God exercises perfect goodness
  10. God exercises perfect goodness
    1. Therefore God has fellowship with a person capable of receiving the fullness of God’s love and communication.
  11. It follows that there is an object to which God perfectly delight in communicating which is not a creature.
  12. It follows from this that there must more than a unity in the infinite and eternal essence.

Argument #2 – An argument from Experience

Experience shows that rational creatures, i.e. human beings, cannot be happy apart from communion and fellowship with others.

This is because:

  1. Rational creatures, i.e. a human beings, delights in communicating themselves to another and a rational creature, i.e. a human being, cannot delight without another to communicate himself to.
  2. If a rational creature, i.e. a human being, is happy then there is another.
  3. Experience shows that human beings can be happy, therefore human beings have fellowship with others.

Edwards then adds a “lesser to greater” argument:

  1. If this is true of human beings who are made in the image of God, how much more is this true of God who is perfectly happy?

Conclusion: God’s happiness consists in communion, just like the creature’s does.

Do these arguments convince you?

Do you have any suggestions for formulating these arguments in a tighter way?

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Patristics, Philosophy, Religion

Salvation at Stake

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Today we wrap-up a mini-series on the philosophy of doing history.

The final essay in we will look at in this series is a chapter from Brad Gregory’s Salvation at Stake. This final essay represents the strongest set of arguments against a form of historiography dominated by what have variously been called, “the new historicism,” “the linguistic turn” or most simply, post-structuralism.

In the introduction to Salvation at Stake, Gregory describes his two-fold purpose: 1)

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Brad Gregory holds the Dorothy G. Griffin Chair in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame.

present an account of Christian martyrdom from the perspective of four traditions and 2) make a methodological contribution to how historians approach the early modern period. (2) For the purposes of comparing this essay to the others from this week, our focus will be on the section titled “On Understanding Early Modern Christianity.” Here Gregory addresses how poststructuralist theory “alleges a radical disjunction between representations and realities, rendering truth claims unverifiable.” (9) The “insights” of post-structuralism have “taught” us that the martyrs who died for their religious beliefs, in fact held views that are mere constructions. Post-structuralism has also “taught” us that these martyr’s beliefs were nothing but “strategies of domination” and that the literature which reported martyrdom was nothing but propaganda and political power-plays.

In light of these “lessons” Gregory calls us to declare a postmortem for poststructuralism “so that we may avoid its dead end.” (10) Instead we should take these martyrs and their storytellers on their own terms. (10) Instead of deconstructing early modern accounts we ought to be reconstructing these accounts. (11) When we do this we will have come up with an account which (hopefully) the subjects of study would have recognized as their own.

In order to reconstruct plausible accounts Gregory has to address two issues. First, that all claims, including religious claims, are embeded within social relationships, institutions, and other cultural expectations. Second, that people often act for covert interests and rationalize their actions. The second issue can be addressed without adopting a hermeneutic of suspicion. The hermeneutic of suspicion should be avoided because it “destroys the very possibility of understanding historical difference” and “undermines the sincerity and integrity of people whose actions fall beyond the boundaries of behavior enacted ‘in good faith.’”(14) Instead of a hermeneutic of suspicion we ought to adopt a hermeneutic of charity, taking sources at their own words unless there are reasons to believe that the source is being deceptive. In the case of martyrological sources, one can maintain a fine balance between suspicion and charity by checking martyological literature against literature produced by opponents. Surprisingly, both kinds of accounts tend to be very similar in what they report. Thus, it seems as though a hermeneutic of charity can give us adequate details of events as they are reported.

Analysis

Out of the five essays we have examined this was the essay that I resonated the most with. I find myself agreeing with much of what Gregory has to say; especially as it concerns the problems of post-structuralism or “the linguistic turn.” The method he proposes does a good job of guarding against some of the realities that post-structuralism brings up, namely subjectivity and covert motives. His method does not dismiss these realities, however he refuses to let historiography be put into bondage by these realities. Instead he leverages these two points to develop an even more objective account of historical events.

In addition to the fact that this method has some payoff regarding research I believe that it also has another strength: it displays Christian virtue. By this I mean, that this method attempts to refrain from reading false motives into its subjects. In a sense you could say that this method attempts refuses to bear false witness against its neighbor and thus keeps 9th commandment. Also, one might think that this method is in line with Paul’s description of Christian love in 1 Corinthians 13: love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. For these two simple reasons I am drawn to Brad Gregory’s method over the method of the other authors we have examined thus far.

Patristics, Philosophy, Religion, Theology

The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the “Linguistic Turn”

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Today we continue a mini-series on the philosophy of doing history. In the next few days we will take a look at all sorts of views regarding how to do history. These views range from critical realist accounts all the way to post-structuralist accounts and even some feminist accounts.

“Has the lady vanished?” When Elizabeth Clark poses this question she means to ask, can we recover women’s voices in their pure and simple form from historical texts? (31) The simple answer is, no we cannot. However, answers to difficult questions rarely tend to be simple. This is also the case for this question, because in a sense, although the insights of the “linguistic turn” tell us that the “pure and simple” voice of women can no longer be found in texts, there are other ways to find traces of women’s voices in texts. As Clark explains, “she leaves her traces…embedded in a larger social-linguistic framework.” (31) And even though in a sense the lady has in fact vanished, “she lives on.” (31)

Clark’s essay which attempts to defend the possibility of feminist history after the

clark
Duke Historian, Elizabeth Clark

“linguistic turn,” referring to structuralism and post-structuralism, begins by explaining how these linguistically grounded schools of thought overlaps and contradicts the feminist agenda. The linguistic turn in literary criticism and even historiography has aided feminist thinkers by confirming the feminist critique of objectivity. The feminist historian can be thankful for this. Yet at the same time the various schools of the linguistic turn have so critiqued objectivity and so emphasized how we cannot escape our social-cultural-linguistic location that they “annihilated the female subject.” (3) After she explores a few potential solutions to this problem of the vanishing lady, and finding them wanting, she proposes a more temperate approach. This approach follows the work of Spiegel who suggests that texts can be treated as both consequences of extratextual development (read: cultural-linguistic frameworks) but also causes which can impose and help create new ways of thinking. With this dual concept of consequence and cause, the historian can not only approach a historical “text” as a product of the extra-textual realities which produced it but also as a “text” which also plays a role in producing new extra-textual realities.

For of how this consequence-cause concept plays out in reading ancient Christian texts we might look to how Clark understands Macrina’s voice in Gregory of Nyssa’s Vita  and On the Soul and the Resurrection. Like post-structuralists, Clark recognizes how Macrina’s voice, is written out within the framework of a particular genre: Lives of Philosophers

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An icon of St. Macrina

and within particular cultural assumptions about gender. Because of these two realities, we don’t “really” hear Macrina’s voice, but rather we hear: 1) Gregory’s voice and 2)the voice of the culture. However, in another sense Macrina has not “really” lost her voice, we can hear her voice as we examine how women and gender are constructed in the text.

Analysis

Apart from the direct application to feminist historiography, this essay provides interesting food for thought concerning the general epistemology of history. Like several of the other essays we have read this week, Clark’s essay emphasizes the large role that cultural-linguistic frameworks play in the creation and in our reading of texts. Clark is rightly worried that pushing this point to far yields a skepticism about the subjects of those texts. In other words, its not just the lady that vanishes, but the subject as well. The only thing we have left with an extreme version of he linguistic turn is languages and cultures – no individuals. This result should be concerning to the historian. Yet the historian should not be too concerned because Clark has pointed one way out of this problem: an emphasis on consequence and cause. This is an important distinction for some of the work I’m doing on Jonathan Edwards’s doctrine of hell. Edwards is in a sense bound up in his own cultural-linguistic framework when he thinks about this doctrine. Thus, everything he writes is a consequence of his social-location. However, to leave it at that would mean that he could never move beyond the ideological assumptions of that location. The concept of “cause” however opens up the possibility of examining how his work plays a role in changing the cultural-linguistic framework which makes up this doctrine. Thus, even an ideologically powerful concept, like the doctrine of hell, does not simply perpetuate a particular “oppressive” or “totalizing” agenda, that is, it does not necessarily act as a strategy for domination,” it can also challenge common agendas of the day.

Despite the significance of “consequence and cause,” I am left wondering if the hermeneutic of suspicion engendered by the linguistic turn leads us to being uncharitable to the authors of texts. It seems to me that emphasizing the “consequence” too much leads to an interpretation of texts that the authors would not recognize as their own.

Elizabeth A. Clark, “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” Church History 67 (1998): 1-31.

Culture, Philosophy, Religion

Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic

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Today we continue a mini-series on the philosophy of doing history. In the next few days we will take a look at all sorts of views regarding how to do history. These views range from critical realist accounts all the way to post-structuralist accounts and even some feminist accounts.

“Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic” is a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde confession. In the same man there exists two persons. The first is a “historian and polemicist of literary theory, who could speak with passion, without noticeable impediment about literature as a political instrument.” (59) This man could murder a piece of literature and expose show how literary texts are devious acts of power. The second is a man who simply enjoyed the pleasures of reading good literature. One might imagine that the second man is Dr. Jekyll, a polite, composed, model citizen and that the first man is Mr. Hyde, a ruthless villain, robbing people of the pleasures of life. Although many non-academics might see things this way, the fact is that in the academy – specifically literature departments – the second man is the one who is paraded as a model to be emulated and the first is deemed to barbarous to roam the halls of the elite institutions of academia. Such a man is called “non-literary.”

In explaining his experience of living as a literary critic and a lover of literature Frank

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Frank Lentricchia

Lentricchia exposes some of the absurdities of the sort of literary criticism practiced by various approaches to the study of literature, including (but not explicitly named) the New Historicism. He explains that at one point he was convinced that as a literary critic he could “be an agent of social transformation, an activist who would show his students that, in its form and style, literature had a strategic role to play in the world’s various arrangements of power” and that all literature was “either in opposition to or in complicit with the power in place.” (60) However, Lentricchia eventually came to believe that this sort of approach to literature, which is standard in literature departments is misguided. He now believes that literary criticism is “a form of Xeroxing.” (64) Literary critics a live in an echo-chamber, when they speak of the imperialism, homophobia, sexism, etc. hidden in a literary text, they are simply voicing their own ideological concerns. Instead of being concerned with the “power plays” supposedly voiced in literary texts, Lentricchia now contents himself with simply trying to “describe what is on the page.” (67) And thus, it seems that for now Lentricchia’s Mr. Hyde, the lover of literature, has eclipsed Dr. Jekyll, the literary critic.

Analysis

This essay does a fine job of exposing the fact that literary criticism can serve as a form of political activism. The literary critic, by exposing the supposed ideologies present in great works of literature, believes she can shape and mold her audience towards pursuing a better world. There is something noble about this. However, Lentricchia, rightly in my mind, exposes the fact that in their desire to make the world a better place, some critics can read things into texts that are not actually there simply because the critic is driven by a particular agenda. This is what he calls “Xeroxing.”

The act of “Xeroxing” is a danger that is not just present for the literary critic but the historian as well. Its too easy to read sexism or racism, issues which a historian is right to be concerned with, into historical texts which are neither sexist or racist. “John Calvin did not allow women to take the pulpit in Geneva, therefore he is a sexist.” “Peter Martyr Vermigli never attempted to teach outside of Europe, therefore he is euro-centric.” These are potential examples of “Xeroxing” in the discipline church history. Lentricchia is right, we should attempt to allow our “texts” speak for themselves instead of imposing our own judgements upon “texts” for issues that “texts” are not even concerned with.

See, Frank Lentricchia, “Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic,” Lingua Franca 6/6 (September/October 1996): 59-67.

Culture, Human Nature, Philosophy, Religion, Theology

“RIGHTS, RECOGNITION, AND THE BODY OF CHRIST: Responses” – ROWAN WILLIAMS – THE 2018 PAYTON LECTURES

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This year’s Payton Lectures are being given by the Right Reverend Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury – what follows are my notes from the responses given to the second lecture.

Payton Lectures
Theology and Human Rights: Tension or Convergence
“Rights, Recognition, and the Body of Christ” (Responses)
The Right Reverend Rowan Williams

 

Response #1: Sebastian Kim

Williams treatment of this subject leaves us much enriched with a sense of complexity of this topic. Thank you. What I appreciate most is twofold: 1) Having established his idea  of the connection b/w secular and theological context, he touched on the biblical concepts. Atonement plays a big role. 2) Justice is a divine gift and not a human achievement. The worshipping church is a community of justice because it worships what alone deserves to be worshiped. Giving to God what is God’s right is accomplished in the life and death of Christ – all receive their rights because of God’s giving.

While I appreciate the theological insights I would like to raise some questions:

  1. Williams mentioned that the worshipping community is a community of justice. The doctrines of justice and rights should be discussed side by side, but as we learn from Scripture, the people of worship do not always act justly. It is too much to assume that the church is a divine community of justice. Knowing and doing justice do not often go hand in hand.
  2. Discussion of justice and rights should also include the difficulty of how to apply J&R between different groups. The concept of justice in the Hebrew bible is different from the philosophical aspect because it is not an abstract concept. In the bible it is taking care of the victims of unjust systems: minorities, the weak, the oppressed.
  3. Christian theology provides resources for the global discussion of human rights, however, I wonder whether his comments are to cautious and whether Xians should say that Xian theology embodies the notion of rights, not just b/c of the imago dei, but b/c it is grounded in being in Christ.
  4. Lastly, Christians played a significant role in the UDHR. Towards the end of WW2 Christian leaders raised concerns about HR. There was a consensus for a universal bill of rights. Christians in the west were actively involved in drafting this bill. By ensuring religious freedom, Christians provided an anchorage of HR discussion in the human dignity in the image of God.

The challenge before us is how do we repent of not giving God his due of justice. How do we boldly demonstrate and practice human rights from a Christian standpoint.

 

Response #2: Erin Dufault-Hunter

The eloquently articulated, Christian account he offers, provides ground for questioning the discussion of rights language. We must remember what brought about the UDHR – the horror of sin and darkness in the wake of WW2.

The problem w/ Williams defense of rights, is that such language cannot produce the kind of people who battle the demonic. How do I know? The history of my own country in the 40’s and 50’s. We saw ourselves as the civilized who fought the good fight in the war, yet our practices of justice were absent at home. The UDHR of human rights flounders, not just because the UN is a weak organization. It is not merely because the US flaunts the rights of others through enhanced interrogation techniques. HR falters because law cannot make the culture we need – it cannot inculcate virtues. Untethered from a robust story, it fails to shape us.

Williams lectures are an example of why Christians should receive the bodies of others, even enemies, as a gift.

The Civil Rights Movement resisted evil, not by making claims, instead it drew on our moral intuitions by shaming us into reform.

The CRM, was always first about poetry, about capturing our imaginations, about dreaming of a beloved community. It allowed us to dream of alternatives to violence. But the demonic recognized that imagination is stronger than law to enforce its end. Thus, the CRM failed because “law” does not provide us with the weapons to actively resist evil. We have used “rights” as a shield from having to do justice.

What then are we to do? We must take up Williams’ vision to our churches, foster an imagination, we must bathe ourselves in the beautiful trinitarian theology of gift.

Use human rights language – but do not forget the story of those rights – rights enfleshed in a community by God’s grace and gifts. We must not abandon our Trinitarian framing of them.

Rowan Williams’ Response

Both respondents have picked up the fact that words are not what we should be focused on. Its easy to use “rights” as a shield to make the discourse of human rights as something which is self-congratulatory, self-protective.

I hold to the use of rights discourse in the face of this, I don’t think however that rights language itself is formative. There are those contexts in the world where such vocabulary is necessary for resisting dehumanization. But what actually motivates us to become persons who enact these rights? That is indeed an issue about the kind of communities we are seeking to create. This is indeed an issue of imagination.

The law is good and holy and right, but it doesn’t actually do anything. That is what Paul seems to say.

Who’s not here and who’s not speaking? This should be a natural reflex in believing community.

Lord Acton: The foundation of all political liberty is religious liberty. – There is a territory where power just cannot go, that is the seed of recognition that political power is not final, not all controlling.

 

Discussion

RW: If we are activists because we want to be effective we are discouraged. If we are activists because we want to witness we can carry on. If its just about bringing results, cynicism is around the culture. The opposite danger is utopianism.

EDH: One of my concerns about this generation’s activism, the danger, make sure you can say “come and see.” If you can’t sit at a table where people live in this reality, our activism belies a vacuous which is utterly dangerous to our souls.

RW: The focus on the sacredness of property, is a slightly modern one. We need a stronger sense of how states work with the grain of natural communities, with the grain of cooperative venture, so that we don’t simply see the characteristic modern standoff between individual and state.

EDH: The OT has some strong things to say about private property. This is quite applicable, especially when it deals when taking land. How do we reckon this with the OT’s concern that about giving land back. OT – God’s justice isn’t equality, but what happens when greed and consumption runs amok.

RH: On this Jubilee principle, as an Anglican, the Book of Common Prayer, in the earlier drafts, the exhortation to Holy Communion included an exhortation to unlawful withholding of the lands and good of others.

Q: What is our role as Christians against police brutality.

RH: As a foreigner, I see extraordinary tolerance of race-based violence by law enforcement. I find myself baffled by apparent non-concern by certain circles in this country. Law-enforcement is a public good which should not be franchised to interest groups.

Culture, Human Nature, Philosophy, Religion, Theology

“Rights, Recognition, and the Body of Christ” – Rowan Williams – The 2018 Payton Lectures

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This year’s Payton Lectures are being given by the Right Reverend Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury – what follows are my notes from the second lecture.

Payton Lectures
Theology and Human Rights: Tension or Convergence
“Rights, Recognition, and the Body of Christ” (Lecture)
The Right Reverend Rowan Williams

 

What is owed to human beings in light of their humanity?

  • Humanity’s existence is a free gift
  • “Healing” is a matter of gratuitous generosity
  • The matter of indebtedness works only one way, God owes us nothing, one might say
  • God’s creation may be gratuitous, yet it arises out of God’s eternal wisdom.

When God shows love and mercy to human beings, it is for God’s sake, not merely theirs. God honors his own fidelity and consistency in showing them compassion. God acts to uphold the divine pledge. God we might say, honors God, gives himself what is owed to God by forgiving humans. Christianity recognizes this gift – Christ alone gives God what is God’s due.

God is bound to the human creation because God is bound to God. This is the basis for the entire scriptural doctrine of justice.

The flow of life from God to creation, is in full harmony with the flow of life in divinity itself.

A theological approach to rights may begin with what creation itself entails. It will be filled out further with our understanding of Christ.

Rights language in a religious language is part of the “sacred.” The recognition of the other as a creature, that is the primitive generator of any theologically generated notion of “ius.” Recognition is a cultural skill/habit. Mere legal understanding will deliver less than a cultural recognition of some other’s rights. Twofold relation: X to the creator, and X to the other creatures in a network of relations.

The ground of rights is the presence of the body itself – as an irreducible inalienable place by which we make sense. It is a unique point of orientation which shapes our construction of meaning. The body is a place of orientation, the place from which we start making sense.

If the capacity for self-presentation is present, then respecting a human agent is respecting that capacity.

AQ: Why care about fairness? B/c distribution of goods is how we help others be who they were created to be.

Worthiness, is not a finite quality of a finite achievement.

Worthiness rests of the raw fact of being a bodily presence in a system of activity depending on the integrity and cooperation of all other finite presences.

Christ’s gift to the Father is the only finite gift given to God which matches what God actually deserves.

The justice of Christ’s self-offering is in its effect of renewing humanity in God.

The worshiping church is a community of justice because it worships what alone deserves to be worshipped. This act of just worship secures justice in the community, because all are giving God, God’s right.

When we are restored to God in worship we are able to serve one another rather than ourselves. This is our ultimate right. This is the liberty to be what we were made to be.

Our right is to freely honor the right of our neighbor.

A just social order doesn’t prescribe in advance what each agent gets to exercise. This is discovered in the living out of life in a community.

Justice is anchored in God acting for God’s sake.

The language of rights was learned and refined over a long period. It took time to learn how to talk about rights. Even when that language is dominated by rationalism (i.e. Locke), even w/ the myth of the self as a consumer, it has the ability to be a critique of power.

God honors God by honoring what is not God. What is not God carries the meaning and words of God, especially in the Word made Flesh. Our alignment with honoring God involves a challenge to our own conception of power, and calls us to reimagine power in the divine image.

Rethinking power as the ability to share/restore – allows us to situate rights language in a framework which is not fundamentally oppositional.

Law alone doesn’t prompt urgency when human rights are violated. But violation is a very strong word. If Millbank is right, then it relates to the sacredness of others.

The frustration of someone else’s right is a loss to the entire social ecology, and thus a loss for me.

Get your prisons wrong and you are probably getting everything wrong.

Rights are relational. Damage to one part is a damage to the entire system.

We shouldn’t conclude that modern discourse is completely disconnected from medieval discourse. The problematic elements arrives in stages: atomization, implicitly conditionality, and the property language that comes with it. But the idea of incommunicable or inalienable rights isn’t a byproduct of “property” type rights. It goes back to the middle ages.

God gives God what is due to God in creation and supremely in the life and death of Jesus Christ. To be in Christ is to be a sharer in this iustitia. To bear the image of God and to have it resorted in Christ is to be a sharer of God honoring God in and through creation.

 

Human Nature, Philosophy, Religion

“HUMAN RIGHTS AND HUMAN IDENTITY: Response” – ROWAN WILLIAMS – THE 2018 PAYTON LECTURES

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This year’s Payton Lectures are being given by the Right Reverend Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury – what follows are my notes from the discussion after the first lecture.

Payton Lectures
Theology and Human Rights: Tension or Convergence
“Human Rights and Human Identity” (Response)
The Right Reverend Rowan Williams

Respondent #1: Matt Kaemingk

  • Two Camps: Those who see conflict between theology and those who see convergence
  • Those who see conflict now see there is a common ancestry and numerous ways that contemporary rights talk is still haunted by these origins
  • Those who see convergence now see there are some deep conceptual chasms between rights rooted in the sovereign will of an individual and the sovereign will of a loving God
  • Three points to press:
    • At multiple points stressed the need to thicken up our concept of rights in the common good. Why not go the minimalist route? Why not salvage rights discourse by making it more limited?
    • What is the relationship between the intellectual concept of rights and the spiritual longing to see those rights upheld? You can explain X has rights, and the people will intellectually agree, however, the problem is that citizens “no longer long or hope” for societies where X’s rights are upheld at all cost. What we need is not just an intellectual articulation but a longing for these rights to be made manifest.
    • At a couple of points you mention smaller communities – and an individual’s needs for small communities and spaces where we can practice mutuality/sharing. Speak more to the need of associational and communal life for being able to carry out this articulation of human rights.

 

Respondent #2: Clifton Clarke

  • The dominant question is how can we hold the language of human rights and keep our discourse about theological traditions. The concept of human rights is most prevalent articulation of a moral ideal.
  • Movement from rights to goals? Are these a demonstration that powerful nations are no longer interested in rights.
  • Needed to address the link between white privilege and rights being used to bolster its agenda. Similarly, between powerful nations and their failure to uphold justice simply because they are in power.
  • While human rights negates colonialism (at least in thought), it simultaneously is used to justify it.

 

Rowan Williams’ Reponse

  • One can’t address this topic w/o addressing the cultural involvements would be that would take us forward.
  • The question about desire: Do we actually want our citizenship to be genuinely shared with the stranger? We have such little desire for the wellbeing of others…
  • The question about the implication of rights discourse in a Eurocentric/western thought… Yes it needs to be recognized. Its already in the thought of John Locke. However, see as a counterexample: Bartolome de las Casas.
  • We have been reminded of the uncomfortable gap between right’s discourse and practices of power.
  • Rights discourse will only work in small particulars, i.e. communities.

 

Questions & Discussion

  • If there isn’t something metaphysical grounding why human beings are equal, then all we have is a “liberal consensus,” and that won’t be enough.
  • Freedom = ability to exercise your humanity to contribute to human flourishing. Freedom is not maximizing the individual’s consumer choice.
  • The neighbor I confront is never at my disposal because they are already claimed by Christ.
  • No I don’t think I have a right to be offended, what I do think is that I do have a right to exercise the gift God has given me in the community I have been placed. Some kinds of speech have the effect of negating that.
  • As so often the old chap gets it right brilliantly. (Speaking of John Calvin)