When Chad Holtz lost his old belief in hell, he also lost his job.
The pastor of a rural United Methodist church in North Carolina wrote a note on his Facebook page supporting a new book by Rob Bell, a prominent young evangelical pastor and critic of the traditional view of hell as a place of eternal torment for billions of damned souls.
Two days later, Holtz was told complaints from church members prompted his dismissal from Marrow's Chapel in Henderson.
Via Tony Jones, I learned today that Holtz has, apparently "repented" of his view that God will not necessary torture and torment some, perhaps most, of us for all eternity. Here is an excerpt from his statment of "repentance":
I repent of my past denial of hell or that a person could ever be eternally seperated from a holy God. I know now that I had no fear of God. Therefore, I had no knowledge of God (Prov. 1:7). I was a fool with an MDiv. I was wrong.
Marrow’s Chapel United Methodist Church was right to ask me to leave. It was God’s mercy. I am so sorry for the pain I caused them through that entire ordeal last year and I ask their forgiveness. I have wept many tears over the last many months, pleading with God that no one would be lost for my prideful and blind confident assertions (1 Tim. 1:7). Love doesn’t win. God wins. And it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a holy, living God (Heb. 10.31). I lost sight of this and God, in His mercy, granted me a chance to repent.
The post in its entirety paints a very tragic picture of a man who was confused and tormented as many of us are, and although I'm sure for him there is a deep connection between his personal struggles and both his repudiation of hell and his recantation of that position, the there is no necessary connection between the two.
For the record, here's what he said at the time he was removed from his position:
"I think justice comes and judgment will happen, but I don't think that means an eternity of torment,
And here's the preview video for Rob Bell's Love Wins which Holtz was supporting:
That position -- that there is judgdment but not eternal torment -- is controversial in some quarters, but it has always struck me as a perfectly cogent and completely Christian position to take. And while I tend to subscribe to the view that one can hope for universal salvation, believe in a God who could offer universal salvation, and pray for the salvation of all, I do not believe that one can declare universal salvation as a matter of fundamental Christian doctrine. Judgement and Grace are interconnected, and the nature of God's judgement may be as mysterious as the nature of God's grace, and we cannot declare on God's behalf in advance what that judgment may be.
Yet Holtz's "repentance" of his willingness to be open to the possibility of universal salvation, irrespective of what follows, and irrespective of the personal demons he may be exorcising in the process of offering this testimony, smacks in a very scary way of the kinds of kinds of confessions and "self-criticisms" that one would be more wont to see in a communist show trial than within the Christian church.
Francis Spufford on the relationship between emotion and religious truth:
But then, this is where the perception that religion is weird comes in. It’s got itself established in our culture, relatively recently, that the emotions involved in religious belief must be different from the ones involved in all the other kinds of continuous imagining, hoping, dreaming, and so on, that humans do. These emotions must be alien, freakish, sad, embarrassing, humiliating, immature, pathetic. These emotions must be quite separate from commonsensical us. But they aren’t. The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.
In the ongoing saga of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and their efforts to enforce their own, very specific, not to say ideosyncratic, view of Catholicism on the American electorate, we have our latest exhibit, this time in the form of Bishop Thomas John Paprocki of Springfield, IL.
In a recent letter to parishoners, he urges them to "think and pray" about the upcoming election. Noting that the Democratic Party supports positions that are viewed within the Catholic heirarchy as "intrinsic evils," such as abortion and same-sex marriage, the good bishop states:
There are many positive and beneficial planks in the Democratic Party Platform, but I am pointing out those that explicitly endorse intrinsic evils. My job is not to tell you for whom you should vote. But I do have a duty to speak out on moral issues. I would be abdicating this duty if I remained silent out of fear of sounding "political" and didn't say anything about the morality of these issues.
Of course, Paprocki goes on to note that there are aspects of the Republican party platform that also run contrary to Catholic social teaching, but those positions are not in support of "intrinsic evils" but rather reflect "prudential judgments" on which people of good will may disagree. He then concludes:
Again, I am not telling you which party or which candidates to vote for or against, but I am saying that you need to think and pray very carefully about your vote, because a vote for a candidate who promotes actions or behaviors that are intrinsically evil and gravely sinful makes you morally complicit and places the eternal salvation of your own soul in serious jeopardy.
I pray that God will give you the wisdom and guidance to make the morally right choices.
He then added: "Vote Republican." Well, not really, but he might as well have. After all, the chain of reasoning here is quite transparent and the disingenuousness of claiming that you're not telling anyone who to vote for while threatening them with eternal damnation for the wrong choice is really quite staggering.
There are a number of vectors from which one could analyze this statement. My own low opinion of the moral authority of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is well documented, and I continue to stand by my "shut up old man" principle with regard to the Bishops' public statements about moral issues until a full airing of the facts around their complicity in a mass conspiracy to abet child molestation has taken place.
But even leaving that aside, this kind of statement represents a fundamental repudiation of the approach to Catholic public theology that is rooted in the work done by John Courtney Murray and embraced by John F. Kennedy. The detante between pro-choice Catholic politicians and Bishops that existed uneasily during the 1970s and 1980s has been officially abandoned by the Catholic heirarchy, who now feel free to do exactly what John Kennedy insisted should be out of bounds, namely presume to order Catholics to conform their policy decisions to Roman Catholic dictates rather than to questions of the public good or the constitution. And it's worth noting, most Catholics don't seem to be listening anyway.
What's more, as Amy Sullivan points out, the Bishops' hedging on the moral offense of Republican positions on issues of poverty and social welfare simply compounds their fundamental dishonesty:
If someone like Ryan uses his prudential judgment to decide that there are better ways to help the poor than to use the federal budget to fund programs that feed and house and provide other support to the poor, doesn’t he then have a responsibility to lay out what those other ways are? By not doing so, Ryan effectively shrugs his shoulders and says it’s not his job.
Ryan and his defenders rely heavily on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which Morlino defines as: “the problem at hand should be addressed at the lowest level possible—that is, the level closest to the people in need.” The federal government is so far removed from people on the ground, they argue, that it cannot possibly be responsible for addressing problems associated with poverty. That’s only true, however, if institutions at lower levels actually have the capacity to meet those needs. And that’s far from the case.
She continues:
Paul Ryan can believe that subsidiarity precludes the involvement of the federal government in poverty alleviation, but surely he doesn’t just get to kick the problem to the financially struggling charitable sector and say, “Good luck with that.”
Whenever I hear threats of the kind made by Paprocki, which rest on the threat of hellfire to enforce conformity with a moral position that I don't agree with, I find myself recalling Huck Finn, who believed in all sincerity that it was a sin worthy of damnation to help Jim escape slavery. But when faced with the prospect of turning Jim in, could not in good conscience allow himself to do it. "Alright. I'll go to hell," he thought to himself. And that's my answer to Bishop Poprocki: If voting my conscience on matters of social justice and the good of the country means that I risk eternal damnation, then my conscience forces me to say with Huck Finn:
Alvin Plantinga's new book Where the Conflict Really Lies has gotten some attention in the lat few days, since being reviewed sympathetically by Thomas Nagel in the New York Review of Books. Alas, despite the nature of the argument that Plantinga appears to be making, and that Nagel views appreciatively, the response has fallen along predictable lines.
Plantinga's argument, at least as summarized by Nagel and reflected in the clip above, is fairly straightforward: There is not any innate conflict between religion and science, and that properly understood the two disciplines can inform one another. The real culprit, he argues, is a form of metaphysical naturalism and materialism which is, he argues, ultimately self-contradictory.
The main thrust of his argument in the clip above is intriguing. He argues that metaphysical naturalism takes as its principle that evolution produces creatures that are well-adapted to their environment. But if that is so, he claims, then there is no necessary connection between being well-adapted to the environment and having the capacity to form true propositions about the environment. In other words, if it is evolutionarily advantageous for us to view the world in a way that does not reflect its "true" nature, then this is what evolution will select for. If the frog who "believes" that the fly he grabs with his tongue is gift from the Frog God is more effective at catching flies than the one who "believes" that both he and the fly are simply matter in motion, then the evolutionary argument is that the "religious" frog will have a survival advantage.
Plantinga's point, which Nagel appears to endorse, is that there is no way, from within a materialist metaphysical framework, to determine with any certainty that our beliefs about the world do in fact reflect the way that the world really is. This is not to say that we aren't quite well justified in behaving as though we had such certainty, but we can't establish it with certainty in the way that metaphysical materialist might like.
This is important in the ongoing science/religion debate because those scientists who view metaphysical materialism as the only rationally legitimate starting point for conversations about the nature of the world do so on the basis of the claim that their approach to naturalism operates within the context of things that we already "know" to be true. But Plantinga's point is that we only "know" them to be true in the sense that, on materialist terms, we are well-adapted to view the world as though it corresponded to materialist principles. The problem isn't that, as far as we know, they do in fact correspond to those principles. The problem is that we can say that only so far as we know, which is to say, not very far at all. The kind of certainty that the materialist wants to start with is no more available to him or her than the certainty that there is a God who exists. The materialst, just as much as the theist, argues from within an epistemic framework that he or she then works out from, rather than beginning from an epistemic blank slate and establishing unvarnished truths.
All of which is to say, in the hoary language of contemporary philosophy, that all of our knowledge about the world, both religious and scientific, is "theory-laden." We don't begin with a view from nowhere, but rather we begin from a framework, which is not itself subject to rational question. Or at least, to the extent that it is, it is so only to the degree that our questioning serves to establish enough grounds to proceed onto other questions with. Otherwise we'd spend all of our time questioning first principles and never get beyond the state that Descartes finds himself in at the beginnings of his Meditations on First Philosophy, a state of radical doubt from which we cannot escape. Descartes attempts to escape by establishing what he thinks he can know for certain. But these days many philosophers, myself included, would say that we proceed, necessarily, in the absence of any form of definitive certainty.
Now, like this argument or not, it is a philosophically important statement about the nature of both religious and scientific knowledge that calls into question some basic epistemic claims that materialists make in favor of their own positions. This appears to be what Nagel appreciates about the argument, as he notes here:
I say this as someone who cannot imagine believing what he believes. But even those who cannot accept the theist alternative should admit that Plantinga’s criticisms of naturalism are directed at the deepest problem with that view—how it can account for the appearance, through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, of conscious beings like ourselves, capable of discovering those laws and understanding the universe that they govern. Defenders of naturalism have not ignored this problem, but I believe that so far, even with the aid of evolutionary theory, they have not proposed a credible solution. Perhaps theism and materialist naturalism are not the only alternatives.
Now what Nagel is saying here is a restatement of Plantinga's point, namely that a naturalistic or materialistic account of the world cannot, in principle, step outside of its metaphysical presuppositions in order to establish with certainty that it is saying something true about the world. The way he phrases it, however, makes it sound as though he is saying that we lack a particular data point or set of data points that, as a result of our lacking it, makes a religious perspective justifyable. At this point, Jerry Coyne jumps in to accuse Nagel of falling for a classic "God-of-the-gaps" arguement:
Nagel has fallen for the God-of-the-gap trap. The credible solution is to do more work to find out how the structure of the mind produces consciousness, and how natural selection might have acted to promote that feature. Does Nagel think that science has used all its resources on this problem, and failed? Does he not know how relatively primitive neurobiology is right now? Nagel has just thrown up his hands and said, “You people haven’t explained it, therefore perhaps Plantinga is right.” Or there might be “another alternative.” Curious that Nagel doesn’t propose what that alternative might be. I guess he’s purveying a Philosophy of the Gaps.
The problem is that this is not what Plantinga appears to be arguing, nor what Nagel appears to be endorsing. The issue is not that we, as of now, lack a scientific account for how a certain kind of knowledge arises in the world, or that this account can be explained within the parameters of a certain kind of neurobiology. Coyne thinks that this is a question that is subject to scientific resolution. Plantinga and Nagel think it is not -- it is a philosophical quandry rooted in a philosophical position, vis., naturalistic materialism. If Plantinga's point is wrong, then it's wrong on the basis of some flaw in his argument, not on the basis of the development of more sophisticated tools for analysis of the natural world.
In a similar vein, Sean Carroll argues against Plantinga's understanding of the idea of "faith":
So what about faith? Even if your faith is extremely strong in some particular proposition, e.g. that God loves you, it’s important to recognize that there’s a chance you are mistaken. That should be an important part of any respectable road to knowledge. So you are faced with (at least) two alternative ideas: first, that God exists and really does love you and has put that belief into your mind via the road of faith, and second, that God doesn’t exist and that you have just made a mistake.
The problem is that you haven’t given yourself any way to legitimately decide between these two alternatives. Once you say that you have faith, and that it comes directly from God, there is no self-correction mechanism. You can justify essentially any belief at all by claiming that God gave it to you directly, despite any logical or evidence-based arguments to the contrary. This isn’t just nit-picking; it’s precisely what you see in many religious believers. An evidence-based person might reason, “I am becoming skeptical that there exists an all-powerful and all-loving deity, given how much random suffering exists in the world.” But a faith-based person can always think, “I have faith that God exists, so when I see suffering, I need to think of a reason why God would let it happen.”
Now, it may very well be that Plantinga's view of the nature of faith includes such certainty. His statements about the nature of what he calls "properly basic" beliefs might give one grounds for making that argument. But that is by no means a necessity. It is entirely possible to hold a proposition by faith while also being simultaneously completely aware of the possibility that it is wrong. This seems to me to be a mischaracterization of faith based, is is the god-of-the-gaps arguement, on a misunderstanding of the kind of claims that Plantinga is making, and that are supported within the broader field of the philosophy of religion.
The work of "saving the appearances" in a loving and all-powerful God in the face of the reality of suffering can take place within the context of the recognition that one may be wrong, and even within the context of grave doubts about the goodness and power of God. And here again the analogy to the work of science is a propos, because science too operates within the framework of accepted theories that have to find ways to maintain themselves in the face of counter-evidence.
To me the deep connection between science and religion isn't that they ultimately confirm or must support the same picture of reality, but that they are in many ways analogous approaches to thinking about how we know and what we know about the world, which run on parallel tracks with one another. They may view the same phenomena, and come to different conclusions, but they both operate with the context of human attempts to reason about and make sense of the world within which we dwell. And in that regard both are valuable and necessary.
At Martin Marty's "Sightings," Lariza Resnick points to an aspect of the judge's ruling in the Russian Pussy Riot case that I hadn't seen reported elsewhere:
For Pussy Riot, the "punk prayer" aimed to undo the identification between "normal Russian personhood," Putin's regime, and the Orthodox Church. The mutual constitution of a unified "Russian people" and a unified "Orthodox Christianity" reinforce the legitimacy of Putin's sovereignty along with that of his former KGB colleague Patriarch Kirill Gundyayev. On trial, then, was also the possibility of religious contestation—i.e. that one might be critical of a religious tradition and nonetheless speak for it rather than hatefully against it. As one blogger for Women in Theology notes, the language of Judge Marina Syrova's ruling pits Pussy Riot's feminist commitments against the "antifeminism" of Christianity. Judge Syrova explains that "The court does find a religious hatred motive in the actions of the defendants by way of them being feminists who consider men and women to be equal. Now gender equally [sic] is asserted, maintained by the Russian constitution [...] At the same time, Orthodox Christianity, and Catholic Christianity and other denominations do not agree with feminism and their own values are not in line with feminists."
Playing a theologian or a historian, the Judge publicly establishes a uniform "Orthodox Christianity," whose constitutive feature is an opposition to equality between men and women, so much so that any challenge to this inequality constitutes an act of hatred. (emphasis added)
This is, as Resnick points out, really quite remarkable. Even granted that the relationship between church and state, and between Christianity and society is quite different in Russia than in the United States, it's hard to conceive of the idea that a judge would rule as a matter of law that Pussy Riot's protest represented an "act of hatred" solely on the basis of the principle that it advocates feminism! The idea that it is definitionally impossible to be both "feminist" and "orthodox" (in either the large or small "O" sense of the word) is, on theological grounds, patently absurd. So how much more absurd must it be to see that assertion given the force of law, and then used in order to jail someone?
In the New York Times Sunday Review Molly Worthen offers up some words of wisdom, of a sort, for the Democratic Party regarding their relationship with the progressive Catholic social tradition:
Allowing Republicans to claim the mantle of Catholicism might cost the Democrats the election. As commentators have noted, Catholics may be the nation’s most numerous swing voters. Over the past few decades, Democratic leaders have alienated voters in one of the party’s historically strong constituencies. Through a series of ideological moves and cultural misjudgments, they have also cut themselves off from a rich tradition of liberal Catholic thought at a time when American culture requires politicians to articulate a mission that inspires religious and secular voters alike.
The Catholicism of Sister Campbell and Mr. Biden is a natural fit for Democrats. It is the faith of social justice activists like Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, the church whose pope pleaded for relief of the “misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class” in an 1891 encyclical.
Here, I'm wholly agreed. There is a great deal in the Catholic tradition that is far, far more amenable to the Democratic party than the Republican. However, the obvious caveat is then offered:
The Democratic Party has marginalized progressive Catholic intellectuals for the same reason that Rome has: because they habitually challenge sacred doctrines. In the days of John F. Kennedy, American Catholics voted Democrat by default. But things got rocky as Richard M. Nixon capitalized on the resentments of many “white ethnic” (often Catholic) voters in the wake of the civil rights movement. At the same time, Democrats began to take a harder line on abortion. By the late 1980s, they had transformed Roe v. Wade into a non-negotiable symbol of gender equality and lost interest in dialogue with abortion opponents.
Now, for the record: This is nonsense, as anyone who has paid attention to the way the Democratic party has treated the politics of abortion over the past several decades knows. Even among non-Catholic Democrats, abortion has often been treated as an unfortunate though legally necessary reality of modern life, rather than a fundamental right. You can see this reflected in the Clinton rhetoric (which, by the way, I endorse) that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare." The same senitment was reflected in Obama's position on abortion in the 2008 campaign. Few, if any, prominant Democrats have spoken out strongly in favor of abortion rights over the past twenty years at least.
That said, there is no doubt that Democrats have maintained, rightly in my view, the position that abortion, even if tragic in many cases, and even if morally sub-optimal in other cases, should remain a legal right, and that the decision should be between a woman and her doctor.
Of course, it's understandable that for those Catholics for whom abortion is the central moral issue of American society, this is an unsatisfactory position. But to suggest that Democrats haven't tried, repeatedly, to accomodate anti-abortion position and politicans over the years is to miss both the rhetorical and practical aspects of how Democrats have governed when the've had the opportunity.
Just because anti-abortion Catholics don't win the argument doesn't mean that they're being excluded from the conversation.
Yet, abortion cannard aside, I think that there is much to agree with in this essay, and the conclusion is also very much on the money:
If the Democratic Party is not listening to liberal Catholics, it is partly because they are not in a position to speak very loudly. They are dodging the sights of a Roman hierarchy more preoccupied with smoking out left-leaning nuns than nurturing critical thinking. “Is liberal Catholicism dead?” Time wondered a few years back. The answer is no: in some regards, liberal Catholic intellectuals are flourishing. They are writing and teaching, running social justice initiatives at the church’s great universities, ensconced in professorships around the Ivy League. Yet a cozy academic subculture can be as isolating as it is empowering. The handful of nationally known Catholic political thinkers who might be called progressive, or at least compassionate and cosmopolitan — like the journalist-scholars Garry Wills and E. J. Dionne Jr., blogmeister Andrew Sullivan, or the feminist nun and blogger Sister Joan Chittister — are far outnumbered by the ranks of prominent Catholic conservatives in the trenches of activism and policy making.
Some months ago, I appeared on a web show called "Different Drummers" that's filmed here in Chicago. At the time, they also asked me to do a commentary based on myChristian Century article "Virtual Good and Evil." From time to time I had wondered what had happened to that commentary. Turns out, it's online!
So if you're interested, here it is. Be kind. I had never used a teleprompter before.