IQ Takes a Knock

While my wife is the professional in psychology in our family, I've long had a keen interest in the intersections between psychology, philosophy, and theology. My fondness of such intersections probably accounts for my love of William James - who while known for his philosophic Pragmatism and for famous study of religious experiences, was trained in psychology and saw himself as first and foremost a scientist. But it has not yet steered me wrong.

As a nineteen year-old college flunk out, frustrated by the distance between my supposedly high IQ and my dismal academic record, I started looking for new ways to think about intelligence. The first two books I encountered did not disappoint. In Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goleman wrestled with the same issue that drove my teenage self crazy: why some conventionally intelligent people - many of whom are quite brilliant - can't seem to navigate life with much success. To put his finding crudely, he posited a new kind of intelligence, which he called (as you might guess from the title of the book in question) "emotional intelligence." This intelligence, EQ, exists alongside IQ, and can be an even better predictor of outcomes.

Reading his book I thought, That's what I'm missing! My cognitive skills were useless given my apparent deficiency in emotional intelligence and maturity. Whether or not it is in fact the case that there is a thing we can call "emotional intelligence," Goleman's work helped me see that this thing we call intellect, smarts, is not so simple as being able to perform well on a few academic tests. Rationality is quite useful, but it is by no means the only driving force of the mind.

The other book I picked up in my teenage quest to refine my understanding of intelligence in a way that would figure out what the hell was wrong with me was neurologist Antonio Damasio's Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. In it Damasio used neurology to combat the mind-body dualism of Western philosophy. He was also especially critical of the distinction we often make between reason on the one hand, and emotion on the other. While such a distinction can be quite useful - Goleman talks about "emotional highjackings," something I think we can all relate to - it is not so hard and fast as we would have it be. There is an intimate and physiological connection, Damasio notes, between what we call "emotion" and what we call "reason."

To highlight his point Damasio starts with the famous example of Phineus P. Gage, who as a twenty-five year old construction foreman in 1848, had a dramatic accident that fundamentally altered both his personality and his ability to think. An explosion shot an iron rod through his head. As Damasio notes, the rod "landed more than a hundred feet away, covered in blood and brains." But Gage lived. This fact made him a kind of modern marvel of his time, and so there was a great deal of research done on him.

While Gage was declared cured of all injuries less than two months after his accident, he was never the same man. And not just in terms of physical abilities. His fundamental personality was altered. Where before he had been ambitious and successful, after his accident Gage was rude and angry, apparently unable to regulate his behavior. Most distressingly, Damasio notes, Gage - who before had been an extraordinarily efficient worker, characterized by his excellent decision-making - simply could not make good decisions. Damasio writes:

Gage had once known all he needed to know about making choices conducive to his betterment. He had a sense of personal and social responsibility, reflected in the way he had secured advancement in his job, cared for the quality of his work, and attracted the admiration of employers and colleagues. He was well adapted in terms of social convention and appears to have been ethical in his dealings. After the accident, he no longer showed respect for social convention; ethics in the broad sense of the term were violated; the decisions he made did not take into account his best interest, and he was given to invent tales... There was no evidence of concern about his future, no sign of forethought.

Damasio uses the tale of Phineus Gage as an entry point for a study on the relationship between emotion, reason, and the physiology of our brains. He is especially concerned with what people like Gage, who have sustained injuries to specific parts of their brains, tell us about how those parts of the brain function - especially in terms of the relationship between emotion and reason. To sum up his arguments, he notes that both what we mean by reason and what we mean by emotion can be located in our brains, and that when parts of our brain are injured, or fail to function properly, that affects both our reasoning and our emotional life.

Perhaps the most powerful and informative case study in Descartes' Error is the case of "Elliot," a thirty-something who developed a brain tumor which required the removal of his frontal lobe. From that point on, Elliot had much in common with Phineus Gage. Most interestingly, while Elliot's basic cognitive functioning remained the same - he would have, for instance, not noticed a change in his IQ - he simply could not function as a human. He lacked any semblance of social skills, and often could not make the most basic decisions.

After building a cumulative case on the basis of stories like those of Phineus Gage and "Elliot," Damasio makes a profound claim about the way in which we reason: In most of the decisions that we make, both what we mean by "reason" and what we mean by "emotion" are engage. We navigate our daily lives not by reason or emotion, as though the two were opposed, but by the two of them working simultaneously, in concert. This challenges the way that most of us think about thinking. We (especially we pseudo-intellectual types in the Western world) often think of proper thinking as reason unclouded by emotion. But Damasio argues that such an image describes not a properly functioning thought-process, but rather total paralysis.

In seminary I encountered another way of thinking about intelligence, when I was forced to apply Howard Gardner's famous theory of Multiple Intelligences to teaching in a church setting. In a nutshell, Gardner - a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education and at the Boston University School of Medicine - argues that there is no single thing called "intelligence." Rather, there are several different kinds of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical (those two are what we general mean by intelligence), musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spacial, inter-personal, intra-personal, etc. (He is forever modifying his theory to account for new kinds of intelligence, as well as new ways of thinking about previously identified intelligences.)

In Gardner's thinking - and boy can I relate to this - a gifted mechanic is no less intelligent than, say a mathematician; they simply each are gifted in different ways. Lest you think this is some way of saying "everyone is special, so let's not hurt anyone's feelings by implying some may be more or less intelligent than others," Gardner does believe that we can to a certain extent quantify intelligence within these various categories. He just doesn't think that these modes of intelligence can reasonably be pitted against each other.

All of these positions, taken together with the thousand or so other new(ish) theories of intelligence, amount to a veritable assault on our assumed notion that there is a single quantifiable thing called "intelligence," which is the basic assumption behind the IQ. This matters in part because of the disturbing phenomena of scientific racism. For as long as there have been theories of race, there have been "scientists" who would use the tools of their day to demonstrate the innate genetic superiority of their kind of people, while reducing others to various kinds of brutes. IQ has been intimately involved in this effort to scientifically codify the intellectual superiority of some expressions of humanity, and the inferiority of others. But new research into the nature of IQ has shown that cultural differences on IQ tests are just that: cultural rathe than genetic.

I just read this article by Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorker. A review of James Flynn's What Is Intelligence?, Gladwell explores Flynn's observations on the change in IQ scores across generations.He argues that IQ tests measure not how smart one is, but rather how modern. Here is a most interesting passage that amplifies what is at stake with that distinction:

The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?

Initial Response to Play the Ball Where the Monkey Drops It

For my "Evil, Suffering, and Death in the New Testament" class we are required to keep a reading journal. Last week's book was Gregory Knox Jones' Play the Ball Where the Monkey Drops It: Why We Suffer and How We Can Hope. It is essentially a primer in Process Theology's response to the problem of evil, though it is not written as a work of academic theology, and never actually mentions "Process Theology." It is a very pastoral book, written not by a theologian but by a Presbyterian minister responding not to the concerns of the academy but the concerns of the congregation. What follows is my reading journal entry for last week, after reading the book. The entry reads more like a book review than a journal entry, reinforcing perhaps a point that my pastor made last week after hearing me preach in our chapel communion service, when she noticed that for great theological treatises I don't even need notes, but when I'm talking about myself I read verbatum from a manuscript. Be that as it may, here is what I wrote in response to Gregory Knox Jones' Play the Ball Where the Monkey Drops It:

My first response to Gregory Knox Jones’ Play the Ball Where the Monkey Drops It is that it was a delightful read. His stories are lively and engaging, and his concerns are refreshingly pastoral. I also appreciated that he takes the philosophic problem of evil seriously. By that I mean this: he recognizes that there is a fundamental logical contradiction between God’s omnipotence and benevolence and the reality of evil and suffering.

While his book is not as rigorously argued as my favorite work on evil from the perspective of Process Theology, Kenneth Cauthen’s The Many Faces of Evil, and while he does not engage the nature of evil in the way that Cauthen does, it serves as an interesting primer on the way that Process Theology meditates on the nature of divine power in the face of the reality of evil and suffering.

The experience of suffering is a legitimate starting point for theology. It is one of the givens of existence, every bit as much as the experience of the holy, the sacred, the other, that which we call “God.” As such, it is valid, I think, to demand that our concepts of God and our reflections of God be accountable to our experience of suffering. This, at a basic level, is what Process Theology does.

In Chapter Five of his book, titled “Persuasive Power,” Jones reflects on the nature of God’s power in the face of the given-ness of suffering. After laying out the basic problem of evil he says this:

If God is all-powerful and loving, then evil should not exist. Yet evil does exist. And not just a little evil here and there, but widespread evil that causes tremendous suffering throughout the planet.

It is from here, the logical impossibility of reconciling God’s unlimited love and power with the brute fact of evil, that Jones argues for the need to understand God’s power in a new way. He could here follow in the footsteps of Christian philosophers like Richard Swinburne, who cling to the language of divine omnipotence while places some logical boundaries around God’s power. But instead he chooses to boldly and honestly assert what I take to be the most responsible theological response to the reality of evil and suffering: “There are some things that God cannot do.”

This statement is troubling to many Christians – nay, to many theists, not just limited to Christian theists – because it radically denies one of our “givens” (see Jones’ reference to Burton Cooper on p. 56) concerning God. Omnipotence is, in fact, such a given that many are incapable of thinking about the word “God” without also thinking about “omnipotence.” I remember taking a philosophy class at a state university, taught by a professor with no personal religious commitments, in which it was categorically stated that “omnipotence” is an essential part of the definition of “God.”

This is also somewhat pastorally challenging. It can rightly be asked how a limited God, a God who allows suffering to happen not for some mysterious reason that humans can never discern, nor for our own good or for any of the other reasons offered up in our formal and informal theodicies, but because God cannot do all things; it can rightly be asked how such a God who lacks the power to initially prevent suffering, to forcibly restrain the forces that cause suffering, can effectively respond to suffering.

It has been suggested to me (by a former minister turned atheist) that we must choose between an omnipotent God who refuses to prevent suffering and an impotent God who is powerless to act in the face of suffering. This, I suggest, is a false dichotomy, and the sort of false dichotomy at work in the minds of many Christians who feel threatened by the statement that there are some things that God can’t do.

We don’t feel the need to impose on anything in the created order the standard we place on God. Of course, this could be because many of us assert that God is radically different from the created order, wholly other, and so it is impossible to make any analogy between God and something created. While I find that sort of thinking about God quite appealing, I also think we should consider this: we would never consider saying that because there are limits on the power of the president, he is essentially impotent. Such a statement would be absurd. Of course there are limits on presidential power – even if some presidents act as though they are unaware of such limits. And, of course the president, despite such limits, is by no means impotent. Both the person and the office contain a great deal of power.

Jones uses his own examples of this sort of argument, saying:

Some seem to think that if God cannot do everything, then God is a weakling. I disagree. We would never say, “If the professor cannot answer every question, he is a useless professor.” Or, “If the physician cannot diagnose every illness, she is a worthless physician.” Such statements are nonsense. Indeed, the professor may open wonderful new worlds to us through brilliant insights, and the physician may save numerous lives through her expertise. Admittedly these are crude analogies, but I trust they make the point.

That is in fact the case for every power we can conceive of in the natural world. Why can’t it be the case for God? Why must God be either omnipotent (as most theists assert) or impotent? I for one can’t come up with a reason.

Jones asserts that not only is God’s power limited, but that power which God does have is quite unlike we often suppose it to be. Jones is wont to wax poetic on the power of God, saying in one of my favorite lines in the whole book, “God is the most powerful force in the universe, brining order out of chaos and making life possible.” But this power is not the brute power to override other wills and impose particular outcomes on situations. Rather, it is what he calls “the power of persuasion."

Jones sees God at work in the world trying to influence situations and bring about the best outcomes, not trying to override the respective wills of each actor. This view of God’s power is quite compelling, in part because it makes sense of things that many of use experience. Many of us have felt the presence of God in our lives. Many of us have “heard” without hearing the “still small voice” of God. Many of us have felt an inexplicable sense of calling, a calling that often takes us far from where we thought we would go in life. In these Jones sees the power of God working to bring about the best in the created order.

This is also compelling because it preserves human freedom (and, I would argue that this freedom extends beyond the bounds of humanity to include all animals, not just the so-called “rational” ones). In fact, Jones takes freedom as, along with the existence of God and the brute fact of suffering, as one of the givens in the created order. I won’t argue with Jones on the given-ness of freedom, as I too experience freedom (or, the determinist would argue, the illusion of freedom) as a given. But, in light of his offering up freedom as a good in a book meditating on the nature of God in the face of evil and suffering, perhaps a few words on the “goodness” of freedom are in order.

Many theodicies hinge on an appeal to free will, arguing variations on this theme: freedom is a good such that its existence offsets the various evils and sufferings that are produced by its creation. That is, God is justified in creating a world that has suffering, because suffering is inevitable in an order that contains authentic freedom, and freedom is so good that it outweighs the collected sufferings that result from it.

When both freedom and suffering are givens – that is, when the experience of both are basic and essential parts of life – the absurdity of this sort of argument is not obvious. As such, we rarely ask ourselves whether or not we would be willing to exchange our freedom for an existence without suffering. If freedom were such an obviously manifest good that it outweighs all concerns about evil and suffering, then it seems to me obvious that all or at least most reasonable people would be categorically unwilling to exchange freedom for anything, as it is a good so precious and so valuable that it makes up for each instance of suffering.

But in times of crisis we learn that, in fact, the opposite is true. When faced with the threat of suffering, the fear of crisis and death, humans are surprisingly willing to exchange a great many individual freedoms (which participate in freedom itself) for even the tiniest illusion of security.

Any book that makes so much of freedom in the face of suffering – even if it does not attempt to offer up a traditional free-will theodicy – should, I think, wrestle more with our willingness to so readily exchange our individual freedoms for some protection from evil, suffering, and death.

Harry Potter and the Myth of Redemptive Violence

[Note: While this will engage some themes in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it should still be relatively safe reading for those who have not yet read the book but wish to do so. In other words, it should have no spoilers, though, of course, any discussion of any aspect of a piece of art involves a degree of spoiling. That said, no plot secrets will be revealed here.]

As I noted in my last pseudo-post, I've finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and have now had a few days to ruminate on it. I meant to post some initial observations on the end of the Harry Potter series earlier, but circumstances conspired against me until today. Perhaps there is some providence in that, as what I'm sitting down to write right now is not what I would have written right after I finished reading.

The final installment in the epic tale of Harry Potter was, like all of the others, and engaging - nay, enchanting -read. But, much like its immediate predecessor, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Price, it was also a disturbing read. Much has been made of the escalating violence in the Harry Potter books. While they began as children's books, they have been maturing with their audience, taking on more and more adult content.

"Adult content" - I'm not quite comfortable with that phrase. It is so often a euphemism for the worst sort of juvenile depictions of sexuality and violence. And there is a great deal of violence in the final Harry Potter book. But when I use the phrase "adult content" it does not merely euphemistically skate around something crass; rather, it indicates a deepening of the social and ethical content in the book.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a great story, but it is not just great because it captures the attention and imagination of the readers with compelling characters and an engaging plot. It is also great because it is an act of modern myth making. In fact, this is J.K. Rowling's genius: she creates modern myths, in an age in which mythos has all but been pronounced extinct.

I argued earlier that these modern myths - which I then called "fairy tales" - entailed both an existential and a mystical component. They also, I should add, contain an ethical component. As the Harry Potter books have matured, they have grappled with issues of racism, sexism, classism, totalitarianism, and violence. The final book brings all earlier ethical reflection to its telos, its natural end, its mature completion.

One of my biggest concerns about the Harry Potter series is that it, like so many other mythic works, divides the world into two basic camps: Good and Evil. This, coupled with the justification of the use of violence by the Good against the Evil, is an essential element of what Walter Wink identified as the Myth of Redemptive Violence. Wink calls this myth "the dominant religion in our society today," and its influence is not at all difficult to see. When president Bush identified an "Axis of Evil," he was speaking in the language of the Myth of Redemptive Violence. When he speaks of a war between Good and Evil, in which the Good will prevail if only they have the resolve to do what is necessary to fight and win, he speaks in the language of the Myth of Redemptive Violence. It could easily be argued that it is this myth - the true mythos of our culture - that lead us into the quagmire in Iraq.

And, it is no coincidence that Wink first noticed this myth not in his studies of ancient religions (though later he found it there) but instead watching cartoons with his children on Saturday mornings. Of the mythic structure of children's cartoons, he writes:

I began to examine the structure of other cartoons and found the same pattern repeating endlessly: an indestructible hero is doggedly opposed to an irreformable and equally indestructible villain. Nothing can kill the hero, though for the first three-quarters of the comic-strip or TV show he (rarely she) suffers grievously and appears hopelessly doomed, until, miraculously, the hero breaks free, vanquishes the villain or prevents his or her reappearance, and restores order until the next episode.

That's a familiar pattern that most of us recognize from our childhood entertainment. As Winks notes, you can see it in everything from Popeye to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This is also a pattern that can be found in the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation story, circa 1250 BCE, which Wink sees as possibly the origin of the Myth of Redemptive Violence. This mythic structure, then, has been around for well over 3,000 years, and has long shaped how we reflect on the ethics of violence.

As I understand it, two important hallmarks of the Myth of Redemptive Violence are:

1. the ineffectual nature of redemption, and
2. the relatively low cost of violence.

These two together mean that, in such a polarized and polemical moral universe (Good v. Evil), the Good are justified in using whatever violence they must to resist and overthrown the Evil threatening them. Attempts to somehow convert or reform the Evil are seen as cowardice at best, if not a covert Evil. There are generally disastrous consequences for nonviolent attempts to resist Evil, but there are little or no consequences for violent resistance. Sometimes violence is, in fact, the only mode of resistance contemplated.

In some respects, the modern myth of Harry Potter participates in this ancient but endlessly repeating Myth of Redemptive Violence. The magical world is essentially divided into two camps. There is a monolithically evil threat, Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters, who use Dark Magic. This threat must be resisted, and the resistance to it is often quite violent.

In one moment in the final book, for instance, Harry attempts to disarm an attacker rather than kill him, and the consequences are almost disastrous. He is chastised, reminded that this is war, and that he must be prepared to kill if he does not want to be killed himself. Toward the end of the book we see both Harry and one of his former teachers using so-called "Unforgivable Curses" - curses which, we are told at the beginning of the seven-book series, may never be justified - against threatening Death Eaters, with no apparent remorse.

This participation in the Myth of Redemptive Violence is quite compelling at times, which is one of the reasons that myth has survived and thrived for so long. I shed many, many tears reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; some tears of sorrow, some tears of joy, and many, many mixed and confused tears. One of the most gripping moments in the book, one of the moments that drew out of my at least half my daily intake of water, was when Hogwarts rises up against Voldemort, and prepares for battle. As the defenses are raised, as each character - including the school itself, which becomes a character - girds themselves for battle, I realized just how gripping the Myth of Redemptive Violence can be.

But despite those participations in the Myth of Redemptive Violence, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows deviates in some important and ethically instructive ways from that dangerous if compelling myth. Most importantly, it challenges two of the most basic assumptions of the Myth of Redemptive Violence: the irreformable corruption of the Evil, and the relatively low cost of violence.

In the Harry Potter series, the magical world seems divided into two camps: Good and Evil. I noted that above. But, as the series matures, the moral universe in it becomes more complicated. There is some bleed-through between the camps. There are other camps that are not so easily identified. Characters become more complex, more human, and less easily identified as monolithically Good or Evil. In the final book, not only does Severus Snape - long the sole question mark in the series - become even more complicated; but also do such polarized figures as Albus Dumbledore and Lord Voldemort - long personifications of Good and Evil - become more fully human, more complex, and less monolithic.

This book explores the errors of Dumbledore's youth, making him a more tragic, more flawed, and ultimately more human and therefore more heroic figure. It also sheds some light on Voldemort's motives for his behavior, making him - like Dumbledore - a more tragic and more human figure. He is no longer a pure personification of Evil, but is instead a corrupt human being who has at least the option of redemption, whether or not he chooses to accept it.

Also, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the escalating death-count makes real the high cost of violence. Even though, ultimately, violence is imaged here as the best response to the threat posed by Evil, there are tragic consequences for the violence used, even when that violence is deemed just. There is simply no way to walk away from this book thinking that violence is ever easy. Too many friends lay dead at the end for that. It is, then, a very realistic depiction of our own moral universe, a universe in which we may occasionally find violence unavoidable (though my pacifist friends would say that situations in which violence is unavoidable are brought about not by the inevitability of violence, but instead by a lack of creativity) but never without harsh consequences.

Finally, this book deviates from the Myth of Redemptive Violence by its use of Grace. While not all in it are redeemed, there is no one in this book ultimately so intractably evil that Grace is not offered to them. No one, in other words, is beyond Grace. And that may be the most morally instructive aspect of this book, and the way in which it - despite its justification of violence - more closely resembles the Gospel than the Myth of Redemptive Violence.

If J.K. Rowling's epic tales of Harry Potter are to be our new modern myth, then they are a welcome replacement for the Myth of Redemptive Violence that has long gripped us, even if they contain some elements of that troubled myth.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I've been offline the last couple of days, reading the final book in the Harry Potter series. I'd love to write something meaningful about the book, but frankly I'm emotionally exhausted. I'm sure I'll write something at some point - even if only in the comments section of this or some other post - but right now I'm just going to link to my friend Heather's review.

Why Do We Like Fairy Tales?

As you can see from the relative flurry of blog activity around here, I've finished my frantic re-reading of the Harry Potter books, giving my self a few days to emotionally process the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince before I pick up the series' final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

When I'd decided to re-read the whole series in anticipation of the final book, I was working my way through some Liberation theology. My wife says that I learn more outside of school than I possibly could in, and one look at the reading regimen I give myself each summer says why. This summer I'd already gone through a couple of Michael Eric Dyson books (not theology texts in and of themselves, but relevant to my own theological project), along with Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (I should write about that one sometime, an ambitious project chasing a thesis through history and pre-history), Paul Tillich's Radical Social Thought by Ronald H. Stone, and some other books that are not immediately relevant to my academic pursuits, but which were good reading anyway (Randall Balmer's Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical's Lament, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Karen Armstrong's first memoir, Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Self-Discovery, Zora Neale Hurston's famous Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Maya Angelo's follow-up to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, titled Gather Together in My Name).

After all of that, I decided to tackle some Latin American Liberation theology, as that represented a gaping hole in my education. I decided to start with Jon Sobrino's Spirituality of Liberation: Toward Political Holiness, in which he addresses the Vatican criticism that Latin American Liberation theology is just Marxism in Christian language. In it he argues - quite compellingly, I might add - that you can't separate the spiritual from the political, and so he makes more overt the innate spirituality of Liberation theology.

While reading that, I also found a copy of George Kelsey's 1965 book Racism and the Christian Understanding of Man (the whole story of how and why I found that text will hopefully be a post unto itself soon enough). So, as you can see, when I temporarily stopped letting Harry Potter interrupt my theological studies, I had more than enough to go back to. But when I picked Kelsey and Sobrino back up, I just couldn't quite get into it. My mind was elsewhere, in a magical world of children's fantasy.

I didn't want to read theology just yet, I realized. I wanted to read fairy tales. So I shelved Sobrino and Kelsey again, and picked up George MacDonald's classic 1858 work, Phantastes, in which a man named Anodos, on his twenty-first birthday, comes of age and inherits his late father's writing desk and memoirs. And, as happens so often in fairy tales, when he opens up his father’s desk, he finds a fairy. The fairy tells him, after a brief philosophic argument concerning size (meaningless, the fairy argues) and form (which, the fairy claims, really matters), that tomorrow he will see the fairy kingdom.

That's as far as I've gotten in it, so far. But, reading it on the heels of the Harry Potter books, I started wonder why, exactly, we like fairy tales? Why, in other words, would I put my theological work aside once again to pick up a nineteenth century fairy tale. I, who went over three years without reading a single novel? I, who read theology texts for fun?!?

I can't claim to know the whole history of fairy tales. I don't know when they first appeared, nor do I know which cultures have them and which (if any) do not. I can't even give a firm definition of "fairy tale." I can say that, by "fairy tale" I mean more than just stories with fairies in them. I mean what most mean by fantasy, though I have in mind a particular kind of fantasy: children's fantasy. Fantastic, imaginative books and stories meant for children, though they enthrall the child in each of us.

I wrote here that I've probably learned as much theology these imaginative works as I have from theology texts. Whether that's true or not, it feels true, and since

a.) I wrote that, and

b.) I tossed my theological reading aside for a round of Phantastes

I've meditated on what fairy tales have in common with religion, because I suspect that's why I like them, and that may be why others like them, too.

At a bare minimum, fairy tales and religion have these two things in common:

1. They both involve an existential component, a voyage of self-discovery, and

2. they both involve a mystical component, an unveiling of a hidden layer of reality.

Additionally, in both fairy tales and religion, the existential component is deeply connected to the mystical component.

Take the Harry Potter series, for example. In it, a young orphan, raised by is abusive aunt and uncle, with whom he can find nothing in common, dreams of being something more, something special. Then comes the moment of discovery: he is, in fact, a wizard. This moment of discovery is powerful and compelling, because it taps into our own sense of uniqueness, our own desire to somehow be more than we appear to be. And, this moment of discovery is both existential and mystical. In it Harry Potter not only discovers a sense of identity that both makes sense of and transcends his daily experience, he also has unveiled to him a hidden layer of reality: the mysterious world of witches and wizards, unknown to non-magical Muggles.

This theme is not, of course, unique to Harry Potter. In my own fairy tale library I see it over and over again. In Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain a young boy named Taran dreams of being more than an Assistant Pig Keeper, only to have unveiled to him a hidden layer of reality that changes his experience of self and the world. In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins sets off on a mystical quest and finds not only a wider world than he could have possibly imagined, but also a deeper and richer sense of self. In Lewis' Narnia books, British children walk through a wardrobe into a magical kingdom beyond their wildest imagination, in which they find themselves heroes and royalty. And, before there was Harry Potter, Ursula LeGuin wrote her Earthsea books, in which Ged, who dreams of being more than the son of a blacksmith, discovers that he is a wizard.

In each of these fairy tales - and, I suspect, in thousands more that I can't think of at the moment - the mystical and the existential are linked. A hidden layer of reality is unveiled, and someone small who dreamed of being large finds that who they are transcends even their most ambitious dreams. Stepping out into the wider reality starts a voyage of self-discovery, in which the lonely dreamer becomes the person they are meant to be.

This is very much like my experience of religion, an experience that I started to own for myself just before my fifteenth birthday, when I had my own meeting of the mystical and the existential. But, rather than tell that story now, I'd like instead to point to the dangers inherent in this experience of religion, as they are dangers shared by the characters of fairy tales.

The first danger is with the existential. While it is exhilarating to find that you are somehow more than you thought you were, more even than you ever dreamed you could be, that experience also can make you self-absorbed. This is, as I read it, the biggest character flaw in any fairy tale hero. While their mystical experience has broadened their metaphysical perspective, their concern is often still narrow, still self-absorbed. So, often, is it with those of us who have "found religion." In our ecstasy at beginning the long process of authentic self-discovery, we focus on that self-discovery, and on ourselves. The dangers of this should be obvious to any of us who fight the raging beast of ego.

The second danger is with the mystical. Seeing the more, the sacred, in a previously hidden layer of reality is also exhilarating, to say the least. But it can also make us inclined to neglect our normal experience, to minimize the value of the mundane. Catching glimpse of the sacred [note: here I am using "secular" and "sacred" in the sense of Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane - I'm not using "profane" because of the negative connotations of the word] can sometimes make the secular seem so trivial, so insignificant that we can't bring ourselves to focus on it except in an effort to let go of it. But this can lead to the worst sort of arrogance and moral callousness. Properly understood, if we grant a division between the secular and the sacred, we still see the sacred in the secular, making the secular a sacramental realm in which the sacred is mediated. It is, in other words, the vehicle through which we see God, and has its own unique value within the concern of God. So our mystical experience - like the mystical experience of the fairy tale heroes - should not drive us away from the secular, nor should it diminish our concern for the secular. Rather our mystical experience should drive us toward the secular, seeing it as a sacral realm.

Aware of these dangers, we can guard against them, using our own enriched existential experience of self to deepen our concern for others, and using our expanded view of reality to make more precious our daily world. Good fairy tales touch that part in us that craves meaning, and help us process the grand fairy tale that is the story of our life.

An Enchanted Sabbatical

In case you haven't noticed, once again I've taken a bit of a break from my blog. I'll explain why in a moment; first I've got to come out of a closet of sorts.

No, despite the insinuations of an anonymous commenter that, since I write from time to time on issues related to the GLBT community, I just might be hiding something, I have no sexual closet to come out of. But sexuality isn't the only area in which people pretend to be one way, while privately harboring some forbidden love.

I pretend to be a sophisticated person of sorts, with refined taste. But, in secret, I am... (pausing for dramatic effect)... a (another pause tossed in for good measure - I'd do a drum roll, but I can't) Harry Potter fan!!!

I know that puts me in pretty good company. Given that J.K. Rowling just became the first person to ever make more than a billion dollars for writing books, there are more than a few Harry Potter fans in the world. And, I am one of them. I don't feel the need to either explain or defend my love of the Harry Potter books and movies, and I suspect that none of my dear, beloved readers would expect that from me.

That said, I grew up on fantasy. Before I could read, my mother read to me from C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. The first books I ever chose for myself were written by Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L'Engle, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov. As a teenager one of my mom's brothers became my favorite uncle (despite being the only Republican in the family!) by introducing me to Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, giving me Lord Foul's Bane as a Christmas present.

I think I've learned as much theology from great works of fantasy - imaginative works that create new worlds in which to explore existential and ethical problems in the midst of ripping good yarns - as I have from theology texts. C.S. Lewis' Perelandra or 'Til We Have Faces are both more interesting and more theologically responsible than his myriad non-fiction books. And while Madeleine L'Engle's Time Trilogy (which, like Douglas Adams' "increasingly inaccurately titled" Hitchhiker's Trilogy eventually comprised well more than three books) may be the only works of "children's literature" that I've seen appear in the bibliography of a theology text (Walter Wink said that they provide "an excellent starting place for understanding the Powers"), a great many of the books I read as a kid might somehow find themselves in whatever magnum opus I decide to write.

So, it is no accident that I like the Harry Potter books. I've been critical of them from time to time - the use of magic can be downright lazy, there is too great a dichotomy between good and evil and few non-violent methods for dealing with evil, and I don't think the wizarding community has any sense of how they have interconnected and interdependent relationship with the Muggle world. Ursula LeGuin's Wizard of Earthsea books have a much better developed philosophy and ethic of magic. But the Harry Potter books are full of the most enchanting magic of all: they make children, raised in an age of television and video games, read again.

And this past week has been a great week to be a Harry Potter fan, with the new movie just out, and the long-awaited final book on its way. I've been downright giddy of late. And that, I'm afraid, is why I haven't been blogging. In anticipation of the new movie (I finally saw it this afternoon - Sami and I give it two thumbs up!) and the final book, I've been frantically re-reading the whole series. It's taken up all my time.

So I've been on an enchanted sabbatical, slipping off to the magical world of Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry every chance I get. See you when I get back.

(And, if, like me, you are a Harry Potter fan, don't foget to check out my friend Heather's new temporary blog, The Muggle Tongue.)

Summer Reading Book Reviews: The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore

This summer I've not only been able to spend even more time with my family (we're potty-training Adam right now - just over two days, and so far only one "accident"!), but I've also been able to do more reading. Well, maybe not more volume reading - at the seminary we joke that if you want to read less, go to law school! But, at least more voluntary reading, and more less-overtly-religious reading.

For our religion to have any bearing at all on our lives or the lives of those around us - and thus for our religion to have any real life to it - it must be informed not only by the abstract teachings of our faith traditions and mystical reflections, but also by all of the events and situations around us. Simply put, faith that is not in contact with the broader world is poor and powerless faith indeed.

My own theology is to a great extent informed not only by my reading of scripture and theological texts, but also (I hope) by my reading of contemporary situations. It is a theology in constant dialogue with political and ethical concerns. That it dialogues with political concerns is on the surface more than a little bit dangerous. A sharp separation between church and state is vital to the interests of both state and church, and Barth correctly identified the idolatry inherent in the mingling of political and religious symbolism in the German national church.

But a broader understanding of politics as the arena in which ethical concerns play out in social situations means that if there is any ethical content to our religious views, then our religion does have a political component to it. And that political component matters. Of course, that political component need not be fiercely partisan. I still shudder when I recall, as an eighteen-year-old, a conversation with a friend of mine. We were discussing our fledgling political affiliations. When I told him I was thinking about registering as a Democrat, he said something like, "But I thought you were a Christian." In his church, as in so many Evangelical churches, the Christian faith had been confounded with the Republican political party.

So, when I say that my theology is informed by my political and ethical concerns, I do not mean that my theology should be read as a mingling of political and religious symbolism, nor do I mean that my theology easily confuses my identity as a Christian with my standing as a Democrat. Jesus wasn't an American, much less a Democrat or a Republican. And, if I understand him at all, he would have serious issues with both parties.

When I say that my theology is informed by my political and ethical concerns, I simply mean that a theology that fails to speak to present social issues is a poor theology indeed. And, if a theology is to speak to present social issues, it must be well informed on those present social issues to which it seeks to speak. Which is a long, long way of saying that this summer instead of reading theology texts, so far I've been reading more overtly political texts. And, reading those texts is no less vital to my theological formation than reading the Tillich and James that I had planned to spend my summer reading.

In the past week or so I've read three books that I highly recommend to anyone who is concerned about the present state of American politics: Al Gore's The Assault on Reason, and Is Bill Cosby Right? (Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost its Mind?) and Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (which I wrote about here) by Michael Eric Dyson.

In The Assault on Reason Al Gore builds a strong argument that the present state of American politics (which he views as a threat to the very fabric of our democracy) has been caused by the removal of the mediation of reason and logic in our political conversation. Simply put, public discourse is coarse, and decidedly one-sided. While infotainment programs like Crossfire and Hannity and Colmes and the like pay lip service to the value of opposing viewpoints meeting together and discussing reasonably, they only further aggravate our public discourse. This is due both to the nature of those programs - in which it is assumed that there are two relatively equal sides to any issue, and as such one's preference is essentially arbitrary - and (more in keeping with Gore's thesis) of the nature of television itself. Gore repeatedly emphasizes that television is a one-sided form of communication, in which the average American receives but never sends information.

This is a far cry from Gore's reading of the Enlightenment, which he argues (persuasively, I might add) shaped our system of government. The Enlightenment, Gore argues, favored a "marketplace of ideas" in which everyone's views competed with each other, with reason mediating between them. In his idealized reading of the Enlightenment, there was a meritocracy of ideas that led to much better decision-making structures in government.

To build his argument Gore uses a common device: the Myth of the Golden Past. This is, I suppose, a necessary evil, in that most public arguments appeal to some idealized reading of history, and then use that idealized reading to critique the present situation. As such we are perpetually in a state of falling from the ideals of our past, and as such constantly need to reclaim our lost heritage. Gore presents this myth in the best way, constantly checking against the tendency to create a past that never existed. And, of course, he is right that reason once played a role in public discourse, and that its role has been greatly diminished in a state in which money, rather than the free exchange of ideas, counts as speech.

Because of the role of money as speech, granting access not only to politicians but also to the television "airwaves" that comprise the bulk of public speech, fewer people can actively participate in public discourse. This diminished participation in conversation leads, Gore argues, to a diminished participation in democracy, and a frighteningly poorly informed public who is thus total unable to hold politicians accountable.

However, framing his argument this way allows Gore to sometimes overlook the extent to which the Enlightenment - and, as such, the Constitutional government of our Founders - similarly suppressed participation. While Gore argues that the Enlightenment favored a meritocracy of ideas, there were many factors preventing all persons from freely participating in this conversation. Gore rightly acknowledges that literacy was a barrier, but he glosses over the role that race and class played in literacy. That education was by no means universal means that just as money keeps most citizens from participating in public discourse today, so race and class - in determining who was literate and who was not - kept most citizens from participating in public discourse in the Glorious Past to which Gore's framing of this myth points. He in not entirely blind to this, but because it represents such a vital criticism of his thesis, he doesn't exactly dwell on it.

While Gore's book is replete with example of how the Bush-Cheney administration has destroyed the very fabric of our democracy, he ultimately sees the present regime as a symptom rather than an ultimate cause of the problem. Much like his work on global climate change, this book is full of disturbing (and compelling) statistics, arguments, and observations. But, perhaps the most disturbing section is found in the middle of Chapter Nine, in which (as he often does) he begins to move from a disturbing diagnosis of what he sees as the problem, to a compelling set of constructive solutions. However, before he get hope, we have to have a full accounting of the problem, and the despair which eventually shakes us from our collective slumber. That problem, Gore argues, is principally ignorance and indifference, which conspire to allow the powerful to accumulate ever more power, ruining the democratic element of our governance. He cites a litany of studies to show just how ignorant we Americans have become:

... if citizens are deprived of a meaningful opportunity to participate in the national conversation, they can scarcely be blamed for developing a lack of interest in the process. And, sure enough, numerous surveys and studies have documented the erosion of public knowledge of basic facts about our democracy.

For example, from the data compiled by the National Election Studies on one recent election, only 15 percent of respondents could name even one of the candidates in their election district. Less than 4 percent could name two candidates...

Similarly, according to a study conducted by FindLaw.com, only 24 percent of Americans could name a single Supreme Court justice. In the survey, respondents incorrectly identified George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Supreme Court justices...

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute conducted a study in 2005 of what our nation's college students knew about the Constitution, American government, and American history that provoked the American Political Science Association Task Force on Civic Education to pronounce that it is "axiomatic that current levels of political knowledge, political engagement, and political enthusiasm are so low as to threaten the vitality and stability of democratic politics in the United States."

The study found that less than half of college students "recognized that the line 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' is from the Declaration of Independence." They also found that "an overwhelming majority, 72.8 percent, could not correctly identify the source of the idea of 'a wall of separation' between church and state."

While the current political environment has labeled Democrats "Defeatocrats," this book should not be read as a bashing of the American people, or a having of a white flag to the forces that have rendered democracy all but obsolete in the face of the accumulation of executive power. Rather it should be read as a love letter to the American people, begging them to reclaim their heritage. While isolated texts from this book can be misrepresented as an attack on American dignity, the book is actually a great expression of hope. In fact, it is an almost dangerous hope that the damage done to our democracy, much like the damage done to our environment, can, in fact, be undone.

It is well worth a read for anyone who has the courage to read it.

In the near future I will also offer similar reviews of the two Michael Eric Dyson books that I read, both of which I enjoyed even more than I did Gore's manifesto on democracy and public discourse.

Reflections on "Black" and "White" in Cone

For those of you who are sick on reading about James Cone, I apologize. I can't seem to escape him at the moment. I had moved on to J. Deotis Roberts, and found much I liked in Roberts. But I've had to backtrack a little bit, and revisit Cone. Roberts, you see, often responds to Cone, and I felt that in order to understand what Roberts is saying I need a better understanding of Cone. So I've picked up Cone's A Black Theology of Liberation, and so far find it as challenging (and at times infuriating) as Black Theology and Black Power.

Before I delve too much into today's topic - Cone's usage of the terms "black" and "white," and my reflections on that usage - I want to share a quote with Pam, who has also struggled with Cone, and has wondered aloud what, if anything, he has to say to her own experience of (small scale) oppression:

...there are, to be sure, many who suffer, and not all of them are black. Many white liberals derive a certain joy from reminding black militants that two-thirds of the poor in America are white. Of course, I could point out that this means that there are five times as many poor blacks as there are poor whites, when the ratio of each group to the total population is taken into account. But it is not my intention to debate white liberals on this issue, for it is not the purpose of black theology to minimize the suffering of others, including whites. Black theology merely tries to discern the activity of the Holy One in achieving the purpose of liberation of humankind from the forces of oppression.

Cone clearly indicates that he is concerned with oppression, even the oppression of whites. White suffering matters to Cone, and, as we shall see later, when white persons suffer, or act on behalf of those suffering under the yoke of oppression, they participate in blackness. You see, for Cone, any act of oppression is "white," and any act of liberation on behalf of the oppressed is "black."

In what I've read of A Black Theology of Liberation, much like in Black Theology and Black Power, Cone presents us with many powerful ideas, some of which all of us should agree with. One such idea is the connection between theology and community:

Theology... cannot be separated from the community which it represents. It assumes that truth has been given to the community at the moment of its birth. Its task is to analyze the implications of that truth, in order to make sure that the community remains committed to that which defines its existence. Theology is the continued attempt of the community to define in every generation its reason for being in the world.

The relationship between theology and community reinforces both the communal nature of revelation (see Teilhard's idea of the "organ made for seeing God") and the contextual nature of theology. Theology, as Cone understands it, "is defined by the human situation that gives birth to it." Thus, in crafting an overtly black theology, Cone is not doing something categorically different than what has been done before, insofar as it, like all other theologies, is a theology that comes out of a community, and exists for that community. What he is doing is simply acknowledging the fact that what had before been seen as a "universal" theology is a particularly white theology that reinforces the belief that the white experience is the normative one.

However, in part because Cone (rightly?) sees white theology as anti-black, his black theology is anti-white. What he means by anti-white becomes clear as we see in more depth how he uses the terms "black" and "white."

In Cone, "black" = "the oppressed," and "white" = "the oppressors." He sees "white theology" as theology of oppression, theology that helps fortify the power of dominators at the expense of the dominated. As such, because God is always on the side of the oppressed, white theology is theology of the Antichrist. Black theology, by contrast, is Christian theology. He emphasizes this so strongly, I suspect, because my criticism of him - that his theology is more black than it is Christian - is not, by any means, a new one.

At the onset of this book, Cone offers two reasons - no doubt offer in the face of opposition, though he says that back theology need not defend itself against white criticism - "why black theology is Christian theology":

First, there can be no theology of the gospel which does not arise from an oppressed community. This is because God is revealed in Jesus as a God whose righteousness is inseparable from the weak and helpless in human society. The goal of black theology is to interpret God's activity as related to the oppressed black community.

Secondly, black theology is Christian theology because it centers on Jesus Christ.

The second point, as you can no doubt see, is related to the first. The Christ that black theology centers on is not the blond- haired, blue-eyed savior of white Christianity, but the revelation of God to oppressed communities. The Christ that black theology centers on, in other words, is not the harmless giver of conventional wisdom, but the very power of God for the oppressed. This Christ is a much more revolutionary figure than the dull character found on the portraits hanging in white churches.

It may well be that the distance between the Christ of the black church and the Christ of the white church is at the heart of Cone's criticism of white theology. In any event, his criticism of white theology - that it is a theology of the oppressors, by the oppressors, and for the oppressors - helps us understand what he means by "black" and "white":

No white theologian has ever taken the oppression of blacks as a point of departure for analyzing God's activity in contemporary America. Apparently white theologians see no connection between whiteness and evil or blackness and God. Even those white theologians who write books about blacks invariably fail to say anything relevant to the black community as it seeks to break the power of white racism. They usually think that writing books makes them experts on black humanity. As a result they are as arrogant as George Wallace in telling blacks what is "best" for them. It is no surprise that the "best" is always nonviolent, posing no threat to the political and social interests of the white majority.

Overlooking for now that once again Cone has, in declaring nonviolence "no threat to the political and social interests of the white majority," failed to appreciate the power of nonviolent resistance; there is much here that speaks deep, powerful, and damning truths. But, is it quite true to say that "no white theologian has ever taken the oppression of blacks as a point of departure for analyzing God's activity in contemporary America,"? It may be. I don't know, and I don’t know if Cone, writing here in 1970, knew, either. But to become fixated on the historical accuracy of that statement is to miss the way that Cone is using "white." By "white" he does not mean those with light skin - though in his mind most if not all whites are light skinned even if not all light skinned people are white - nor by "black" does he mean those with dark skin - though, again, most black persons, as he understands it, are dark skinned. By "black" and "white" he means something more subtle than just race and ethnicity.

Cone understands "black" as the universal group of the oppressed, and "white" as the universal group of the oppressors:

Blackness, then, stands for all victims of oppression who realize that the survival of their humanity is bound up with liberation from whiteness.

Anticipating some criticism of this, Cone writes this - which spells out his use of the terms "black" and "white" - in the footnote to that statement:

I do not intend to qualify this statement, because too much is at stake - the survival of the black community. But perhaps some clarification is needed here. Some critics will undoubtedly ask, "How can you dismiss out of hand any criticisms that white theologians or others in traditional white Christianity might raise concerning your interpretation of black theology, and at the same time use quotations from white theologians, both European and American, with approval? If white theology is as bad as you say, why not dismiss them altogether, without any reference to their work?" Of course, these are challenging questions, and I can see whites milking this idea for all it is worth.

...those who press this point have taken too seriously the American definition of white. When I say that white theology is not Christian theology, I mean the theology that has been written without any reference to the oppressed of the land. This is not true of Karl Barth and certainly not true of Bonhoeffer. Reinhold Neibuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society moves in the direction of blackness. To verify the blackness of a particular perspective, we need only ask, "For whom is it written, the oppressed or the oppressors?" if the former, it is black; if the later, it is white. I do not condemn all persons who happen to look like white Americans; the condemnation comes when they act like them.

That is how Cone uses the words "black" and "white." Thus I think that we can say that, per the conventional use of the terms, it is possible for a "black" person to be "white" (though Cone does not say this, and may not agree with it) and likewise it is possible for a "white" person to be "black." Thus Cone can appropriate certain aspects of "white" theology (per the conventional use of "white" - that is, the work of Barth, Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr, Tillich, etc.) for his "black" theology.

But does this appropriation - combined, as it is, with his altering of the conventional usage of "black" and "white" - amount to the same sort of selective co-opting of white culture that whites have long done of black culture? To say that Barth's work or Bonhoeffer's work is not "white" theology, or to say that Reinhold Neibuhr's work "moves in the direction of blackness," is to say that white works that please Cone are really black works. Isn't this just what white culture did when "race records" or "rhythm and blues" became, in the work of Cleveland disc jockey Alan Fried, "Rock and Roll," so that it could be sold to white teenagers? And if that was racist, how is the black co-opting of the work of white theologians, coupled with the denial of their whiteness, not also racist?

I do not wish to deny the prevalence of white racism, nor do I wish to deny either my own participation in that or the long-standing connection between whiteness and cultural, social, and political domination. White culture has a long, sad history of dominating other cultures, and Cone is quite right in criticizing that. In many, many cases I humbly accept his criticism. But to redefine "white" as "oppressor," and to say that those white who work against oppression are not properly white, this I cannot accept.

For the good of all humanity whites need to deny the necessary connection between whiteness and oppressing others as vehemently as blacks deny the necessary connection between being black and being inferior. If Black Power calls blacks to stand up and understand themselves in a new way, then perhaps white culture can learn from that and have a similar movement. This movement should not be an attempt to deny past and present oppression by whites, nor should it be an attempt to further empower whites, who enjoy already far too much power. Rather, this movement should be an attempt to, in the face of the long, sad history of white exploiting and oppressing others, to reinvent what it means to be white. To own and honor those whites who Cone would call black; to say that these figures taught us that we don't have to participate in oppression, that being "white" does not have to include oppressing others.

This, of course, cannot be an attempt to deny the shameful past or the only slightly less shameful present. But, while it cannot deny a long history of morally unjustifiable domination, it must assert that, moving forward, domination is not a necessary attribute of being white.

In identifying "white" with "oppressor" and "black" with "the oppressed," Cone, while identifying a strong historical trend that continues into the present, does not, in my opinion, provide us with a way forward. Just as blacks are called to empowerment, whites must be called to repentance, and through repentance, transformation. And, just as white society has never been justified in demanding the blacks deny their blackness to gain acceptance, the call to white repentance, while it must involve a call to give up forever the ways of domination and oppression, cannot involve a denial of whiteness.

Liberation and Reconciliation Held Together by Roberts

We've already looked (perhaps far too) extensively at James Cone's Black Theology and Black Power, which seeks to Christianize Black Power (or, perhaps, Black Powerize Christianity) within a theological framework of liberation. Cone sees Christ as black, and sees the work of Christ in the work of Black Power. He hears Christ calling blacks to assert themselves and shake off the shackles of their oppression. To that end, his work is helpful.

However, as we've noticed, there are some troubling aspects of it. First, as we've already seen, Cone offers up a theological defense of violence in the name of resisting oppression. While I have some sympathy for his position, in that I agree with the need to make a sharp moral distinction between the violence of oppressors and the violence of the oppressed as they fight against their violent oppression, I am, to say the least, highly suspicious of any attempt to see Christ working through means that the historical Jesus would have certainly condemned.

More troubling, perhaps, is the exclusivism of Cone's position. He, as best as I can tell, sees God exclusively at work within the black community. Within his framework there is little hope for the salvation and reformation of whites, and perhaps even less hope for reconciliation. Yes, Cone does offer some halting suggestions for reconciliation, and at least a tiny morsel of hope for whites, but his primary concern, it seems to me, is to condemn white oppression of blacks, and to call blacks to power. While both of those tasks are noble, in and of themselves they hardly comprise the entirety of Christianity.

I plan to go on and read much more Cone, hoping to see how he develops a more comprehensive theology that will go beyond his equating of Christianity and Black Power. However, for the moment I am sidestepping his work and moving on to Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology by J. Deotis Roberts.

Like Cone, in the preface to the latest edition of his work, Roberts repents of his former sexism. Unlike Cone, however, Roberts has chosen to wash the sexist language from his work, revisiting the ways in which he speaks of both God and humanity to incorporate womanist and feminist critiques of language. This makes the book much easier to read from my perspective, but I am glad that Roberts calls attention to his former exclusively male language, so that he sidesteps the attack that Cone, too, tried to avoid: that of trying to forget past sins, and as such leave them entirely unaddressed, in the past.

Unlike Cone, Roberts is interested not only in providing a theological framework for the liberation of blacks, but also in reconciliation between the races. He sees the two as intimately connected to each other, and as together comprising the heart of Christianity:

My understanding of the Christian faith leads me to speak of both liberation and reconciliation as proper goals for the Christian church in general and of the black church in particular. I understand the church to have a center, but not a circumference - and exclusiveness to be a means to universalism and not an end. Therefore the black church, in setting black people free, may make freedom possible for white people as well. Whites are victimized as the sponsors of hate and prejudice which keeps racism alive. Therefore, they cannot know for themselves the freedom of Christians, for they are shackled by a self-imposed bondage. The cry for deliverance, for authentic freedom for existence, on the part of black people, may be salvific for all regardless of the nature or cause of oppression.

In the section surrounding this quote Roberts is principally concerned with two things:

1. Understanding a concept of "chosenness" as relates to the black people in general and the black church in particular, and

2. Offering up the family as a proper model for the nature, structure, and role of the black church.

To this end, Roberts devotes a great deal of time to understanding the history of "chosenness" as it applies to other groups who have claimed titles such as "the people of God" for themselves. He also devotes a great deal of time to understanding the history of the black family, both in Africa and especially in diaspora. He is particularly concerned with the impact of slavery and its aftermath on the nature and strength of the black family.

But within that project, he is also building to his understanding of the need for a black theology to be a Christian theology that is concerned with more than just black people. And, as a Christian theology, he stresses the need for black theology to be concerned with both liberation and reconciliation at the same time. In the above quote he is, within that context of both liberation and reconciliation, offering up a brief glimpse at the connection between black deliverance from white oppression and white deliverance from white oppression. He sees both the oppressed and the oppressors as the victims of oppression, with each being held in a kind of bondage to the evil power of oppression. This concept of the joint victimhood of oppression - even if only one party is morally culpable for the oppression - sets the stage for a joint deliverance from oppression, with blacks acting as a kind of "chosen people" whose deliverance makes possible the deliverance of whites, as well.

While Roberts is building here a black theology, it is not a theology that is solely concerned with black persons. Insofar as it is a Christian theology, it is primarily concerned with Christ, even if it is principally concerned with how God through Christ speaks to the black experience. Within this concern for Christ, the notion that ultimately "all are one in Christ Jesus is very important for Roberts. And this notion helps inform Roberts' view on black-white relationships, and ultimately paves the way for reconciliation between the races:

The assertion that all are "one in Christ Jesus" must henceforth mean that all slave-master, servant-boss, inferior-superior frames of reference between blacks and whites have been abolished. This principle must operate not merely on a spiritual level, but on the plane of human social relations as well. The slave must be set free, but the slave system must likewise be destroyed so that the suture will be free of human bondage. The black church, as a family, as a corporate expression of the Christian faith of black people, is called forth into empowerment actions. It must become a gestalt, a structure of mass power of black people operating against oppression under Christian sponsorship. The black church must use all its resources to launch a massive assault against white power in church, community, or state that is responsible for the oppression of black people. But even in our revolutionary action for the liberation of black people, we must hold up at all times the possibility for black-white interracial fellowship and cooperation. Reconciliation between equals, no less than liberation, is the mission of the black church.

Like Cone, Roberts calls the black church to the cause of liberation - the liberation of black people. Like Cone, Roberts sees black pride, black power, as an integral part of this work of liberation. The black church is called to help lift up the black people, and in doing so to help build them up. As such, the black church is called to fight against white power everywhere that white power oppresses blacks, even within the black mind.

But while Roberts shares the urgency of the "by any means necessary" crowd, he does not share their ethics. The black church is called to be a Christian church, not just a black church. As such, while the liberation of the black people is imperative - and is, in fact, a Christian duty - that liberation cannot be used to justify the full exclusion of all white persons from the process of making blacks equal to whites, both in reality and in the minds of both blacks and whites. Where Cone is willing to at least in part justify the use of violence to force whites to consider the basic humanity of blacks, Roberts reminds the black church that the church must always hold liberation and reconciliation together. And racial violence from either side makes the task of reconciliation that much harder. In other words, the violence of white oppression of blacks does not justify revolutionary violence.

Yes, the church is to "assault" white power, but that assault is not an assault against white people. Rather it is an assault against the structures of power ingrained in our culture. And, as we have seen from other sources, the best assault against what Walter Wink calls "the Powers" is a nonviolent assault.

At first glance Roberts' views may be much more comforting to white Christians than Cone's theology of Black Power. But, while Roberts calls the black church to act like Christians as they fight for liberation, he no less than Cone issues as strong rebuke to the white church, an anti-Christian church that serves as a vehicle for the oppression of blacks rather than the propagation of the liberating Gospel. Just as Roberts calls black Christians to act like Christians, he also calls white Christians to act like Christians. And he is pretty clear that, as far as he is concerned, most are not.

What separates Roberts from Cone, however, is that Roberts holds out more hope that whites will eventually see their own participation in the oppression of blacks as a denial of Christ and the Gospel, and will thus eventually repent and convert. Then, finally seeing blacks through the eyes of Christ, and as such as their fundamental equals, they will finally be ready for reconciliation between equals.

More on Cone and "Revolutionary Violence"

Despite having now devoted 3 posts to the subject (see here, here, and here) I'm not quite done with James Cone's Black Theology and Black Power. I am especially not done with his wrestling with the role of violence in revolutionary struggles.

I have already discussed this subject at length, but this morning, in the closing pages of the book, I read an even more thorough argument concerning the role of violence in the revolutionary struggle for Black Power. It is first interesting to note that, despite the appearance given from some earlier readings on the subject, Cone does not that the subject of violence poses some real problems for his equating of Black Power with Christianity:

Our chief difficulty with Black Theology and violence... arises from the New Testament itself. The New Testament picture of Jesus seems to suggest that he was against violence as a proper redress. He certainly never resorted to violence. In fact, he seems to have avoided the term "Messiah" as a personal designation because of the political (violent) implications. Also his constant references to love and turning the other cheek seem to indicate that the Christian life cannot be one characterized by an "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." ... Can we then, by strength of the imagination or clever exegesis, interpret his command to turn the other cheek to mean a turning of the gun?

Cone, then, is aware that the Christian argument against violence rests on something much more compelling that just the comfort of whites or the perpetuation of oppression. It rests on the very words and actions of Jesus of Nazareth. How, then, in the face of Jesus' powerful witness against violence, does Cone justify the Christianizing of violence in the struggle for Black Power? By once again attacking the assumptions of those who question the appropriateness of revolutionary violence:

The real danger of these questions is the implied literalism in them. Like the fundamentalist who stressed the verbal inspiration of Scripture, this view suggests that ethical questions dealing with violence can be solved by asking: "What would Jesus do?" We cannot solve ethical questions in the twentieth century by looking at what Jesus did in the first. Our choices are not the same as his... and thus we are placed in an existential situation in which we are forced to decide without knowing what Jesus would do. The Christian does not ask what Jesus would do, as if Jesus were confined to the first century. He asks: "What is he doing? Where is he at work?" And even though these are the right questions, they cannot be answered once and for all. Each question has its own problematic circumstances which force the believer to think through each act of obedience without an absolute ethical guide from Jesus... Therefore, simply to say that Jesus did not use violence is no evidence relevant to the condition of black people as they decide what to do about white oppression.

There is a great deal here that I can affirm, especially Cone's rephrasing of the question concerning violence. I agree that we - in a social, cultural and historical context far removed from first century Palestine - cannot decide what to do today merely by copying step for step the actions of Jesus of Nazareth. This is as absurd as imposing the laws of ancient Israel on present day America. That which was of God, and therefore effective, at one point in history does not, simply by virtue of its being ordained by God in a single place and time automatically become a universal fit for all places and all times.

However, I disagree with his assertion that Jesus' refusal to use violence to help the Israelites break free from oppression under the Roman domination system does not speak powerfully against the use of violence in the struggle for racial equality in America. First century Jews were an oppressed people, a violently oppressed people. Yet, in the face of this violent oppression, Jesus explicitly forbids the use of violence as a tool for resisting oppression. He did this, I suspect, not because he failed to see the innate violence in oppression, but rather because he saw nonviolence as the most powerful tool for fighting oppression. And, that his nonviolent method of resistance has been translated effectively to a wide variety of setting throughout history speaks powerfully to its enduring effectiveness as a resistance strategy.

To assert that one cannot simply copy the actions of Jesus should not be to say that one should do things that Jesus would never have approved of, in his name. Rather, to assert that one cannot simply copy the actions of Jesus should be an invitation to act creatively while resisting nonviolently. As both Walter Wink and Marcus Borg have noted, to take Jesus' instruction to turn the other cheek so literally that in all occasions of assault one simply turns their other cheek to be struck again is to miss the creative power of that strategy. It is offered not as a hard and fast rule, but as an example of how one can resist violent oppression with creative nonviolence, by refusing to allow their basic humanity to be stripped by the Powers.

I suspect that Cone's failure to recognize this stems from his framing of the issue of nonviolence in resistance. In the face of the violent nature of oppression, he argues:

The Christian does not decide between violence and nonviolence, evil and good. He decides between the less and the greater evil. He must ponder whether revolutionary violence is less or more deplorable than the violence perpetuated by the system. There are no absolute rules which can decide the answer with certainty. But he must make a choice. If he decides to take the "nonviolent" way, then he is saying that revolutionary violence is more detrimental to man in the long run than systematic violence. But if the system is evil, then revolutionary violence is both justified and necessary.

If Cone has correctly framed the answer here, then I suspect that we must conclude, in the end, that violence is indeed "both justified and necessary." But, must we really choose between affirming the violence of oppression and affirming the violence of revolution? Only if we fail to see the revolutionary power of nonviolent resistance.

The Christian who has faith in the methods of Jesus - and that faith is not a blind faith, but is instead supported by the success of nonviolent revolutions throughout the twentieth century - is not forced into the false dichotomy proposed here. Rather, the Christian who has faith in the methods of Jesus is free to choose the third way of creative, nonviolent resistance.

Response to Cone's Theological Defense of Violence in the Name of Black Power

Last Wednesday I noted reading this powerful passage from James Cone's Black Theology and Black Power:

The black man's response to God's act in Christ must be different from the white's because his life experiences are different. Christian love is never fully embodied in an act. Love is the motive or the rationale for action. The attempt of some to measure love exclusively through specific actions, such as nonviolence, is theologically incorrect. Christian love comprises the being of a man whereby he behaves as if God is the essence of his existence. It means that God has hold of him and his movement in the world. But this does not take away the finiteness of man, the existential doubt in making decisions in the world. To accept Christ means both self-acceptance and neighbor-acceptance with the existential threat of nonbeing. What existentialists call non-being is never removed from man's existence. Thus the love of self and the love of neighbor, which constitute the heart of one's being in God, never escape the possibility of self-annihilation and destruction of the neighbor. The violence in the cities, which appears to contradict Christian love, is nothing but the black man's attempt to say Yes to his being as defined by God in a world that would make his being into nonbeing. If the riots are the black man's courage to say Yes to himself as a creature of God, and if in affirming self he affirms Yes to the neighbor, then violence may be the black man's expression, sometimes the only possible expression, of Christian love to the white oppressor. From the perspective of a Christian theologian seeking to take seriously the black man's condition in America, what other view is possible?

It seems that the mistake of most whites, religionists included, is their insistence on telling blacks how to respond "as Christians" to racism, insisting that nonviolence is the only appropriate response. But there is an ugly contrast between the sweet, nonviolent language of white Christians and their participation in a violently unjust system. Maybe the oppressor's being is so warped by his own view of himself that every analysis made by him merely reveals his own inflated self-evaluation. Certainly as long as he can count on blacks remaining nonviolent by turning the other cheek and accepting the conditions of slavery, there will be no real pressure to confront the black man as a person. If he can be sure that blacks will not threaten his wealth, his superiority, his power in the world, there will be no need to give up his control of the black man's destiny.

Having chewed these words over and over again in my mind, I'd finally like to post a response. This is not the knee jerk response that I would have posted last week, as someone committed to nonviolence. Rather, this is, I hope, a patient and charitable response, a response that stems in part from a deep recognition of my own need to repent for my participation in an ongoing, dehumanizing power-structure that still robs blacks and other minority groups from access to all of the trappings of white privilege that I enjoy.

In this passage Cone makes a sharp and useful distinction between two kinds of violence:

1. The violence of the oppressors, and

2. The violence of the oppressed, in response to their violent oppression.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of most forms of pacifism that I have seen is that they, in condemning all manifestations of violence, fail to make the proper moral distinction between these kinds of violence. The violence of power - whether it is found in physical beatings, lynchings, murder, bombs being dropped on villages, or in the perpetuation of dehumanizing ideas and values, or the economic exploitation of the poor and marginalized - is a categorically different kind of violence from the violence of those who would violently shake off the shackles of their oppression. If we cannot clearly articulate that distinction, then we have nothing of value to say to those who are being ground under by the wheels of oppression.

Cone rightly calls the white church on our hypocrisy on this matter. He sees us preaching nonviolence in the 1960s the way that we once taught obedience to slave masters - as a way to keep blacks from rising up and demanding to be treated as human beings. Cone sees whites imposing nonviolence as a primary moral and spiritual duty, all the while benefiting from a fundamentally violent and oppressive system of domination.

I think, however, that Cone - while perhaps accurately diagnosing the motives that many whites had in extolling to blacks the value of nonviolence - failed to appreciate the power of nonviolent resistance. Nonviolent resistance is not exactly the same thing as nonviolence. While both nonviolence and nonviolent resistance teach that nonviolence is (at the very least!) preferable to violence, nonviolent resistance does not teach the oppressed that their primary moral and spiritual duty is to nonviolence. Rather, nonviolent resistance - Jesus' response to the Roman domination system; the Satyagraha of Gandhi in the face of British colonial rule in his native India and apartheid in South Africa, where he once practiced law and then began his career opposing power; the "civil disobedience of Martin Luther King, Jr., etc. - teaches the oppressed that, first and foremost they are called to resistance.

Nonviolent resistance tells the oppressed that they are human beings, and should demand to be treated as such. (We have already seen here how that plays out in some of the teachings of Jesus. See, for example, how "turning the other cheek" can be seen not as a form of submission, but rather as a nonviolent yet potent demand to be seen as an equal, a human being with all the rights and respect that entails.) Then, and only then, does it tell them that the way to go about asserting their fundamental humanity is through nonviolence.

In nonviolent resistance, in other words, nonviolence is not a moral norm, but a tool - the most powerful tool - for resisting oppression. In Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way, Walter Wink notes the overwhelming success of nonviolent revolutions in the twentieth century, saying:

If we total all the nonviolent movements of the twentieth century, the figure comes to 3.4 billion people, and again, most were successful. And yet there are people who still insist that nonviolence doesn't work!

Wink attributes the persistence of the delusion about the power of violence and the impotence of nonviolence to a number of causes. First, because as a culture we are "so preoccupied with power politics and wars," our history books are full of stories of wars rather than with the success stories of nonviolent movements. Additionally, he notes the negative nature of the word "nonviolence":

It sounds like a not-doing, the putting of one's energy into avoiding something bad rather than throwing one's total being into doing something good... "Nonviolence" is identified by many as the injunction to be submissive before authorities.

But the nonviolent resistance that Wink and others advocate is neither passive nor submissive. It is not simply the refusal to act violently, but the commitment to act creatively. It is the "third way," the path between "fight" and "flight."

Wink makes a sharp distinction between the kind of nonviolence that Cone repudiates and the kind of nonviolence that Jesus calls us to. He also acknowledges, with Cone, that this understanding of nonviolence as a tool for resistance is not the understanding of nonviolence that most Christians have:

Most Christians desire nonviolence, yes; but they are not talking about a nonviolent struggle for justice. They mean simply the absence of conflict... What they mean by nonviolence is as far from Jesus' third way as a lazy nap in the sun is from a confrontation in which protesters are being clubbed to the ground.

In the face of this common Christian understanding of nonviolence, it is easy to see why Cone - writing in 1969, as cities are being burned to the ground by race riots - would dismiss Christian appeals for nonviolence in the face of the threat posed to white supremacy by Black Power. Such appeals can easily be heard as a longing for a time when things were less complicated; when blacks "knew their place" and didn't rise up demanding to be seen as human beings. After all, the riots are accomplishing something. They are giving voice to the cries of the oppressed, and forcing the oppressors to see them and hear them. As such, as far as Cone is concerned, they are doing the work of God.

God's fundamental concern, made manifest in Christ, is for the poor and oppressed, the marginalized, the victims of power. In twentieth century America, those poor, oppressed, marginalized victims of power are black. The race riots of the late 1960s - which give rise to Cone's Black Theology and Black Power, and shape the theology in it - can be seen as the rise of those oppressed blacks, who now demand that the whites who tried to steal their humanity turn and face them as fellow humans.

The question we must ask, though, is this: Is violence in general, and riots in particular, the best way for the victims of power to assert themselves? I know that Cone would bristle at the notion of a white man asking that question. Who am I, one who carries the face of the oppressor, to pass judgment on the way that the oppressed revolt against the power that favors me? Who am I to tell slaves (and Cone sees the state of blacks in the late 1960s as a perpetuation of slavery) how to (or not to!) rebel against their captors?

I can't answer that question, though I can honor the concern that gives rise to it. It is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for the oppressed to trust someone who looks like their oppressor. I recognize that many who have counseled nonviolence have had ulterior motives. I affirm that when slaves were taught the Gospel, they were taught the Gospel of submission to authority rather than the Gospel of the release of captives. I recognize that that Gospel of submission persisted long after slavery was formerly ended, as a way to keep blacks captive to an oppressive social structure.

But, in doing so, I also assert the power of nonviolence as a form of resistance, and as the form of Jesus' resistance. The way of Christ - and Cone is here associating Christ with Black Power - is the way of nonviolent resistance, and not rioting in the streets. This is not - as most whites might have asserting in the face of Black Power - because the way of Christ is the way of submission to domination. Rather, this is because the way of Christ is the most effective way, the way that best ensures the success of resistance.

That assertion - that Jesus' third way of nonviolent resistance is the most effective way to fight oppression - is, of course, an article of faith. But it is not an entirely unsupported article of faith. History is full of examples of successful, nonviolent revolutions, even if those examples are not always as neat and clean as the few mentions of them we find it books. And, of course, Cone is not entirely opposed to having faith in the way of Jesus. In fact, in offering us a theological defense of Black Power, Cone confesses a deep and abiding faith in Jesus as Christ. His understanding of Jesus as Christ shapes his view of Black Power. Why, then, does he have less faith in the third way of Jesus?

In the end I think it is because he is suspicious of those who preached nonviolence to him, whether they be white oppressors or the black pastors that he sees as taking the bribe of relative success under the white domination system. And, while I can see and understand that suspicion, I think that it blinds him to the power of nonviolent resistance. As such, seeing only two options for blacks in the late 1960s, submission or uprising, he chooses uprising.

I wonder what he would choose today...