Magnifica Humanitas (1)

The Pope has recently issued an encylical, Magnifica Humanitas, which has been widely reported as dealing with issues of artificial intelligence - though I think it is actually has a somewhat broader theme, around technology and the technical society.  I don't often read papal encyclicals, although I have dabbled in one or two, but this is a topic I'm interested in and the Pope's intervention seems to have got some traction, so I thought I'd dive in and offer some reactions.  This post is mostly about method and stance; a second post will get into the details of the content a little more.  References in brackets are to the paragraph numbers in the encyclical.

Naturally, I'm approaching this from a Protestant and evangelical perspective, and so it is likely that many of my reflections on theological method will boil down to 'well, this is Roman Catholicism'.  This is most apparent to me in the theological method - in the first two sections of the encyclical, which look at the historical development of the Social Doctrine of the Church and the fundamental principles of that Doctrine, there is precious little Biblical content.  Indeed, although we are told that it is "only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear" (1 - citing the 2nd Vatican Council; see also 49, where there is a little more flesh put on these bare bones) it seems to me that this statement does not have much operative force in the rest of the document.  It becomes clear that the 'mystery of humanity' does not mean something about humanity which is only true in Christ - as, for example, that fallen humanity is redeemed - but something that is common to human nature which is only seen fully in Christ.  It is about "the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ" (15) and not about the grandeur bestowed upon us by and in Christ.  I think this is methodologically important, because it undergirds the regular appeal to the "common good" throughout the encyclical.  There is nothing inherently wrong in an appeal to a shared human nature - a human nature which is revealed in Christ - but it does seem to me quite a lot of weight is put on the shared nature and very little on Christ.  I wonder if there is actually anything in the positive teaching of the document for which the incarnation is a crucial foundation.

To my mind, this lack of Biblical and Christological reference paints a particular picture, of a church locked in conversation with itself.  One misses altogether the sense of a people addressed from above.  (In fact, the idea of the gospel coming "from above" - admittedly in this context mainly with a human imposition of the truth in view - is expressly repudiated in favour of the truth which "grows over time within the concrete interweaving of lives, communities and cultures." [25])  We are told that "this faith-based interpretation of history has never been interrupted" (45) - but I can't help wondering whether it wouldn't have been better if it had been interrupted, by the Word of God!  The Church pictured in the encyclical is open to dialogue with the world around it, but gives no indication of being open to the Word.  One consequence of this is that the overall impression given, when it comes to turning to the world, is that what is offered is simply the deliberations of a particular sub-section of humanity, which - drawing on ancient wells of wisdom and centuries of accumulated reflection - offers to its fellow human beings some proposals for ordering life and society.  But where is the 'thus says the Lord' in all this?  And without it, what authorises this sub-section to speak?  And what can compel the rest of us to listen?

This seems to me to overflow into the approach to history.  So we can read that under the guidance of the Spirit "the People of God come to recognize in cultural and social transformations both the signs of the presence of Christ, who comes and guides history toward its fulfilment, and those aberrations that obscure his face." (22) To be sure, this spiritual discernment is to involve interpreting the times "in the light of God's word" (22), but I can't help feeling that the specificity of the incarnation has gone missing here.  The history of Christ in his birth, life, death and resurrection seems to have been dissolved into Christ in history.

Openness to the world defines the stance of this document, which is what you would expect given the method (or perhaps the influence flows in the other direction).  A huge contrast with the evangelicalism with which I am familiar is that for the Pope the Church is a historical factor, one amongst many in driving the history of the world. (19) This has positive and negative aspects, I think.  Negatively, there is a huge amount of talk in this document about the responsibility of the church to build the kingdom of God - the two building sites (Babel and Jerusalem) which run through the encyclical form the basis of a call to be careful how we build.  (An appeal which could, of course, go back to the Apostle Paul - except that the Apostle is clear that what is being built is the church - the encyclical seems to be talking much more broadly than this).  There is a lack of eschatology in this document, and what there is seems to me to rely on the progressive growth of the kingdom through the activity of the church and its allies.  There is a lack of crisis, of the judgement on the world, which seems to me to characterise the NT message.  On the other hand, positively, the idea that the church might have something to say to society is a welcome corrective to some evangelical thinking which essentially sees the world as something to be escaped from into the church.  To put it another way, if the encyclical seems to present the church as standing in absolute continuity with humanity, with no sense of the rupture of the new creation, evangelicalism sometimes sees the church as standing in complete discontinuity with humanity, as a sect escaping the doomed world rather than as the provisional representation of the new humanity to be revealed at the eschaton.

More to follow...

Everything is dying

The lectionary took me into Luke 8 this morning, and the account of the raising of Jairus's daughter.  I was struck again, as I have been before, by the drama of the story: the urgent pleading from Jairus which surely any parent can imagine; the nightmare delay as Jesus looks around for a sick woman who has touched him in the midst of the crowd; the messenger with his news of death and despair; the outrageous call from Jesus to believe in the face of death that all will be well; the mourners, whose wailing turns to mocking laughter when Jesus declares that the girl is not dead in spite of the clear evidence; the direct address to the corpse, calling life back in; and even the little detail that she was given something to eat.

But what I really took away from this morning was this: how we need the God of the resurrection.

It is, perhaps, a sign of my temperament that even in the midst of spring, with the evidence of new life all around, I still find myself thinking about the fact that everything is dying.  It is a fact, after all.  I don't mean this in the sense of the more alarmist ecologists of our culture - though I suspect those people might be worth listening to, at least a bit, and sometimes what passes for alarmism is just realism coming into contact with a lethargic and dismissive culture.  No, I don't mean that, I just mean the simple fact: everything that lives dies, and as far as we know the universe as a whole is also on track for (a very slow) death.

This is why gods who are bound up with the creation are no good to us.  Gods who exists within the cycle of life and death - which is in fact not a cycle, but a spiral downwards - won't suit our need.  Even gods of healing alone are not enough.

We need a God who can enable us to look death in the face and to hear his voice saying: do not be afraid; only believe.  And we need a God who has demonstrated that even at the utter end of everything - even in death - he is able to reach out a hand and recall us to life.

We need the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God of the resurrection.

Neglect of the ascension

A late thought for Ascension Day...

I have wondered lately whether the neglect of the ascension in evangelical circles might not be responsible for other striking gaps in evangelical thinking.  The thought is not entirely processed yet, so here it is in what is probably the form of caricature, with more chewing over needed before I can add the necessary nuance.

Evangelicals stress the once-and-for-all nature of the work of Christ; we are right to do so, there is a Scriptural mandate for this, and indeed the doctrine of the ascension potentially helps us here.  The emphasis therefore falls on what Jesus has done.  No complaints about this.  But do we have enough to say about what Jesus is doing?  The ascension teaches us that the Jesus who lived and walked on earth lives now in heaven, as the exact person he was.  But does it mean very much for us that he lives now, over and above the admittedly very important fact that it demonstrates the success and acceptance of what he did in his earthly ministry?

I wonder whether the right emphasis on the 'once-for-all-ness', the completeness, makes it difficult for us to see and understand the ongoing work of Christ.  Take, for example, the eucharist.  The evangelical emphasis on the completed work - which is, let me say again, absolutely right - can easily mean that the eucharist is only a backward-looking ordinance; it directs our attention to something that happened, 2000 years ago.  It does do this, of course ('on the night he was betrayed...' is a pretty clear historical marker), but is there another aspect that is neglected?  With a proper emphasis on the ascension, might we not be able to see and understand a vertical dimension, a relationship in the eating and drinking to the Lord Jesus who lives and is with us in the here and now?

Mutatis mutandis, similar points could be made about our worship (is it just about the horizontal ministering the word to one another?) and our preaching (is it just commentary on the biblical witness - Bible teaching! - or is God speaking here and now as the Scripture is expounded to show Christ?)

The ascension can help to deliver us from our fear that any talk about things really happening in the here and now detracts from the completed, once-for-all work.  That fear is not unjustified.  An emphasis on receiving Christ in the eucharist, for example, can indeed slide into making that reception a work, in the sense of something that must be added to Christ's work.  But the ascension reminds us that the Christ who went up and now lives and ministers to us is the same person who suffered and rose; there is no conflict between his completed work then and there and his application of that work here and now.  It is all him, and insofar as we maintain the focus on him we are safe.

My sense is that we need a greater emphasis on the ascension, and the fact that the head of the church is now in heaven, and is now ministering to us and through us, out of the great fulness of his once-for-all completed work.

On the connection between theology and sin

When a teacher or Christian leader falls into sin, or is revealed to have sinned, it is reasonable to look at their expressed theology and ask whether there is anything in it that might have led them to be vulnerable.  It is not reasonable - because it is simply logically fallacious - to move directly from 'this person sinned' to 'therefore their theology must be wrong'.  That is just incorrect.  A person can have good theology, in the sense that what they think and say is orthodox and biblical, and still sin.  We all know that, I hope.

There is a discussion to be had over the best way to understand the relationship between sin and temptation, and whether there is perhaps a category for disordered desire that is best understood as neither sin nor temptation, but the result of sinfulness in a different way.  That we all have such disordered desires is evident to anyone who is not self-deceived.  It is not at all evident, to me at least, that there is an obvious and orthodox way to understand and talk about these desires, though there are certainly some ways that are obviously heretical.  It would be foolish in the extreme to judge any serious attempt to understand and express these things purely on the basis of any one exponent's sin.  Let me say it again, this sort of ad hominem argument is fallacious.

That doesn't mean that there isn't a conversation to be had about whether there is a better way to understand and express our fallen state, with all its attendant guilt.  There almost certainly is.  Nor is it to rule out of court the question of whether ideas and beliefs have consequences; of course they do, and so it is sensible to carefully and cautiously ask whether there is a connection between a person's theology and their sin.  But that can't be presumed, and rarely is it as self-evident as some people seem to make out.

I wonder sometimes (and now is one of those times) whether the way some Christians write and speak about others, particularly others who have fallen into sin, is not in itself expressive of disordered desire - not, of course, in the sexual realm.  The good desire to be right twisted into the wrong desire for others to be shown to be wrong.  The joy in seeing people we disagree with cast down.  I am not pointing fingers at anyone in particular.  I am just dismayed by tone; perhaps I am really just dismayed by the internet.

Anyway, all this is apropos of nothing in particular.  Just be careful out there, okay?

Questions about public prayer

The current furore over public prayer in the UK seems to me to expose some of the key misunderstandings about religion prevalent in our society.  Without intending to get into the substantive issue at all, it seems worth noting these two assumptions:

1. There is a category called 'religion', and all the different belief systems, communities, and movements which can be thus categorised are basically the same.  Differences can be noted, of course, and nobody is saying that all religions are literally identical.  But that they can be classed together and therefore should be treated the same seems to be a pretty deep assumption.  Everyone accepts some limitations on this - but I suspect would usually deal with this by re-classifying some movements as 'not religious', or not proper religions (cults, perhaps?).
2. Religion is essentially a private matter, and even when it is invited into the public sphere it is expected to remain a private matter.  The public sphere is assumed to be a neutral, secular space, into which people can bring their private faith so long as they accept that it will then be withdrawn without having altered the character of the public sphere at all.

It is worth interrogating both of these assumptions.  Pertinent to the current debate, for example, it might be worth asking whether there is a difference between inviting into the public sphere a religious group which is inherently territorial and expansionist versus a group which focusses its political ambitions on a community which is not co-extensive with any state or territory.  I'm not saying you definitely shouldn't invite the first group; I'm just saying that prayer from these two groups would have different content and different connotations, and would have different implications for the nature of the public sphere.

It would also be worth considering whether the kind of benign secularism which governs the idea of the neutral public sphere is workable in practice.  What if that sort of pluralism was actually - as I would suggest it certainly was - the historical outworking of a particular belief system?  In other words, what if it never was value neutral at all, and what if attempting to make it value neutral actually leaves it more vulnerable?  And all this is assuming that a neutral public sphere is even a desirable thing, which I think needs some argumentation.

Finally, just to note that I've seen some Christian figures voicing a commitment to religious pluralism in the public sphere which I can't help thinking is theologically and politically naive.  Maybe it is just that I haven't seen the working behind their conclusions.  At the very least, I'd say we'd be wise to tread very carefully here.

Mr Beaver on AI

"But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet."

Thus Mr Beaver to the Pevensie children.  He is speaking, of course, about the White Witch, who falsely claims human descent.

Now, in Narnia it is fine not to be human.  Aslan is not human.  ("Aslan a man!  Certainly not." - also Mr Beaver.)  The problem is anything masquerading as human, or trying to take a role which belongs to human beings.

Anyway, you can draw your own conclusions, but I tend to think that Mr Beaver is on to something and that he could have been talking about technology as much as witches.

Being angry biblically

I don't know about you, but recently I've been feeling angry.  I am not at all unfamiliar with anger as an emotion, but something about the present moment seems to stir up anger in a way which is particularly difficult to deal with.  Most recently, it has been mainly the news from across the Atlantic that has made me angry - not just the terrible events themselves, but the appalling arrogance and self-satisfaction of those driving them.  It makes me angry.  And I've realised that my feeling of anger is compounded by a sense of helplessness.  Often when I am angry about things, I can do something about them.  I can have a conversation with the person who has angered me, I can remove myself from a situation.  Here I can't do either of those things.  I don't have the ear of, say, the President of the United States, but I am obliged to live in a world over which he has a huge influence.  And I am angry about that, and angry about the people (including, and perhaps especially, those who invoke the name of Christ) who enable that.  Helplessly, hopelessly, angry.

As an aside, and in case you think this is unduly politically one-sided (though for myself I think sometimes one-sidedness is called for), here are some other things from across the political spectrum that have made me feel similarly angry recently: the deliberate erosion of the idea of the sanctity of human life by British politicians; the crass materialism which drives our politics; the confusion over sex and gender which has been deliberately inculcated to forward an individualistic and antinomian agenda; the critical underfunding of services in the UK to the point of collapse...  The list goes on.  I'm quite angry.

And this is where I think some of those dark and slightly awkward passages from the Psalms are pretty helpful.  You know the sort.

Punish them, God;
let them fall by their own schemes.
Drive them out because of their many crimes,
for they rebel against you.

God, if only you would kill the wicked
–you bloodthirsty men, stay away from me –
who invoke you deceitfully.
Your enemies swear by you falsely.
Lord, don’t I hate those who hate you,
and detest those who rebel against you?
I hate them with extreme hatred;
I consider them my enemies.

The examples could be multiplied.  What are these angry passages doing in the Bible?  Well, surely one thing they're doing is reminding me - and you, if you feel at all like I do - that the situation is neither helpless nor hopeless.  When we are angry, we can voice our anger in prayer to God - and these passages remind us that we don't have to first moderate that emotion, clear it up, tone it down.  No, here is full on anger, but it is anger brought into the presence of God.  Anger that implores him to do something about people and situations I can do nothing about.

The very violence of these verses is, I think, helpful.  God, if only you would kill the wicked.  I can't, and I shouldn't.  But you can, O Lord - vengeance is yours, you will repay.  And of course it is safe to make this appeal to God, in a way it would not be safe to make it to anyone else.  He knows what is right, and he will do what is right.  Only he can judge who are the wicked who must die; only he can ensure that the arrogant rebels receive what they deserve.  If I call down curses on an innocent head in my anger, he is able to turn those curses into blessings, and indeed to correct my perception if I am open to that.  In my anger, I commit myself and the world for which I am concerned to God.

Of course these Psalms aren't here for every moment of pique and fit of rage I might experience.  But when there is real anger, with real cause, here are prayers I can pray.