Domesticated Theology

The principle that governs Christian compassion... is not 'minimize suffering.' It is 'maximize care.' Were our goal to minimize suffering, no doubt we could sometimes achieve it by eliminating sufferers. But then we refuse to understand suffering as a significant part of human life that can have meaning or purpose. We should not, of course, pretend that suffering in itself is a good thing, nor should we put forward claims about the benefits others can reap from their suffering... The suffering that comes is an evil, but the God who in Jesus has not abandoned us in that suffering can ring good from it for us as for Jesus. .. Our task is therefore not to abandon those who suffer but to 'maximize care' for them as they live out their own life's story. We ought 'always to care, never to kill.' 

Gilbert Meilander, Bioethics: A Primer for Christians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), pp. 65-66, cited in Bretherton, Hospitality as Holiness, p. 173.

I come from a Christian tradition that eschews the organisation of worship. Drawing on an approach to worship developed in the 20th century which drew on Romantic thought, spontaneous worship was seen as more authentic and repetitious liturgy deadening to the soul. My own experience has been quite the inverse. I found spontaneous worship to be surprisingly repetitious and only different in that the level of care was lower and many crucial elements of worship (particularly confession and absolution) were often omitted. I love the prayerbook and find worship using Cranmer's prose to be uniquely nourishing to my soul.
I bring this sensibility to my reading of liturgy, particularly those texts in the New Testament which are so often wielded as weapons by the anti-liturgical. One of these came up today in the sermon, and liturgy was far from the topic which was eloquently covered by the preaching today, it still struck me as an interesting challenge for biblical interpreters striving to remain contemporary while not anachronistic.
The text is from Mark 7:

“Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. (For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders, and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.) And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”
And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”’ (that is, given to God)— then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.” (Mark 7:1–13 ESV)

The Pharisees and scribes, described as coming from the liturgical police in Jerusalem, were probably sent to undermine Jesus' ministry by pointing out the lax conduct of his disciples here. Mark even provides his readers with a gloss in verse 3 explaining the basis for their criticism. There is a polemic against the Pharisees on several levels here.
 
First, that they are slavishly attentive to ritual behavior without getting at the heart of the matter. Jesus drives this home by quoting Isaiah 29:13.1
 
Second, and perhaps worse still, this attentiveness to ritual is based on an overwrought respect for the "tradition of the elders" (Greek: paradosin tōn presbyterōn)  as Jesus notes, "You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men" (Mark 7:8). He goes on to intensify this critique of tradition in verse 9 and following as he notes that the practice of corban is a "You have a fine way of  rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!"
 
As I've seen, our response to this very incisive critique by Jesus can be overextended, and I tend to think that an over-reaction which seeks to abolish 'tradition' and purge our religion of 'ritual acts' has its own consequences. In some ways, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's appeal to tradition as a basis for the cultivation of coherent moral action, is a 20th century reaction to the 19th and early 20th century to the sort of over-reaction by Protestant Christians I am describing here.
 
So if we are to try and avoid overreaction, I would like to explore some possible ways we can read this text (and others like it) more carefully and less anachronistically.
 
First of all, as my good professor of NT studies at Regent college suggests, it is important to get the Phrarisees right: the trouble with the Pharisees is not that they sought to construct impossibly elaborate ritual schemes that imprisoned people. Rather, as Rikk Watts suggests: "we often hold them to be hypocrites and fairly nasty people" but actually, "you’d probably like having a Pharisee next door, they were good people: no late night parties; no wild women or loud cars; no drugs; a bit over keen on being religious, but not too bad. In fact they were respected by the people; even though the people couldn’t live up to their expections... Why then did they come in for such flack [from Jesus and his disciples]? Because they are the ones who are offering the most serious alternative to Jesus. Populist to a degree; not distant and self-interested like the Sadducees; not violent like the zealots, nor off with the visionaries in the desert: which for most was just not an alternative." (a few quotes from Rikk's brilliant Introductory NT course, in the lecture on Jewish and Palestinian Backgrounds to the NT).
 
Jesus' rejoinder to the Pharisees changes the language slightly, which is also noteworthy - while the pharisees are concerned that the disciples seem to be unconcerned with the "tradition of the elders" (paradosin tōn presbyterōn), picking up on the opposition posed in Isaiah 29, Jesus suggests that they "abandon God's commandments" and instead "hold to the tradition of men" (krateite tēn paradosin tōn anthrōpōn) - in verse 9 his reference is just to "your tradition," elders are not mentioned again until Mark 8:312. It helps if we note that this opposition is a specific one: between the commands of God, probably a reference to the Torah (or books of Moses) and the tradition of men (which is probably a reference to the accumulated oral tradition of rabbinic halachah, which involved exegesis on scripture). Taken in this light, Jesus' example in vs. 10-13 makes a good deal of sense: primacy is given to the Torah where we read in the law of Moses that one is to honor father and mother3. We may interpret that text, but if our interpretation overrides its plain meaning, this is unacceptable. But this example is itself a noteworthy defense of tradition, both in the sense of affirming the primacy of the original statement of the covenant over against innovative new interpretations, and in the very basic affirmation to honor one's parents - which is itself the most basic definition of tradition.
 
So we can not only rescue tradition here, but in fact affirm that Jesus is calling the Pharisees to a conservative form of tradition reception. But what of the dismissal of liturgy that we find in Jesus' words here? There are two different sets of ritual acts noted in the text: first ritual handwashing which Mark observes is not merely Pharasaic practice, but universally Jewish (in vs. 3 "...and all the Jews" GK: pantes hoi Ioudaioi). The second is added by Mark in vs. 4, where he refers to other sorts of ritual washing: "And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as  the washing of  cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches." I'll have to do a bit more background work on this before I'm confident about my conclusions here, but I'll preliminarily suggest that the same opposition holds for this example. Ritual washing for all people is nowhere prescribed in the Hebrew bible. We find the instruction in Exodus 30 that Aaron and his sons wash their hands before approaching the altar (which may have provided the basis for the rabbinic instruction), but this is as specific as the Hebrew bible gets on the matter. So the rejection here of ritual washing is not a rejection of a liturgical practice prescribed in Torah, but a creative extrapolation of one. This seems to me to be an important distinction, and affirms that we are not rejecting liturgical worship, but a dangerous method of interpreting scripture as the basis for commending certain liturgical forms.
 
Of course, I'm not so sure that the intention here is to reject creative biblical interpretation either, but I'll save that one for another post!

• 1. “And the Lord said: “Because this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men, therefore, behold, I will again do wonderful things with this people, with wonder upon wonder; and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden.” (Isaiah 29:13–14 ESV)
• 2. “And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.” (Mark 8:31 ESV)
• 3. ““Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.” (Exodus 20:12 ESV)

"...ethics cannot be understood and ventured as an independent discipline working on its own presuppositions and and according to its own methods, but only as an integral element in dogmatics." (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV.4 §74 "The Central Problem of Special Ethics").

I resonate with this statement by Barth so deeply, yet find the application of this conviction in contemporary theological writing so often results in moral reflection that is superficially engaged and deeply disappointing. Even though we may conceive of ethics as a part of the task of theological reflection, this does not mean that a degree in Christian Doctrine leaves one properly equipped to conduct the task of Christian ethics.

‘Parks, street trees, and manicured lawns do very little to establish the connection between us and the land. They teach us nothing of its productivity, nothing of its capacities. Many people who are born, raised, and live out their lives in cities simply do not know where the food they eat comes from or what a living garden is like. Their only connection with the productivity of the land comes from packaged tomatoes on the supermarket shelf. But contact with the land and its growing process is not simply a quaint nicety from the past that we can let go of casually. More likely, it is a basic part of the process of organic security. Deep down, there must be some sense of insecurity in city dwellers who depend entirely upon the supermarkets for their produce.’

From Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language (1977).

In reaction to... discomforts, whites frequently claim to 'not see difference'. Ignoring race with black people (such as not mentioning slavery or the race of a famous figure) is comparable to 'that [behavior] exhibited by certain people on encountering someone with a visible physical handicap. They pretend not to notice that the handicap exists and hope, thereby, to minimize discomfort.' Indeed, as Toni Morrison points out, 'the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture'. Yet the will to 'not see' these differences, Cose insists, is a costly 'solution'. Aversive reactions eventuate in practices of avoidance and group isolation, providing supports for an obliviousness that is a denied, thus repressed, will-to-disregard. This obliviousness, importantly, can co-exist with belief in equality and (Christian) inclusiveness.

Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church, (OUP, 2007) p. 20. Referencing Ellis Cose, Color-Blind: Seeing beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), 189-90.

But nowhere is the destructive influence of the modern home so great as in its remoteness from work. When people do not live where they work, they do not feel the effects of what they do. The people who make wars do not fight them. The people responsible for strip­ mining, c1ear-cutting of forests, and other ruinations do not live where their senses will be offended or their homes or livelihoods or lives immediately threatened by the consequences. The people re­ sponsible for the various depredations of "agribusiness" do not live on farms. They-like many others of less wealth and power-live in ghettos of their own kind in homes full of "conveniences" which signify that all is well. In an automated kitchen, in a gleaming, odorless bathroom, in year-round air-conditioning, in color TV, in an easy chair, the world is redeemed. If what God made can be made by humans into this, then what can be wrong?

The modern home is so destructive, I think, because it is a generali­zation, a product of factory and fashion, an everyplace or a noplace. Modern houses, like airports, are extensions of each other; they do not vary much from one place to another. A person standing in a modern room anywhere might imagine himself anywhere else-much as he could if he shut his eyes. The modern house is not a response to its place, but rather to the affluence and social status of its owner. It is the first means by which the modern mentality imposes itself upon the world. The industrial conquistador, seated in his living room in the evening in front of his TV set, many miles from his work, can easily forget where he is and what he has done. He is everywhere or nowhere. Everything around him, everything on TV, tells him of his success: his comfort is the redemption of the world. His home is the emblem of his status, but it is not the center of his interest or of his consciousness. The history of our time has been to a considerable extent the movement of the center of consciousness away from home.

Once, some farmers, particularly in Europe, lived in their barns­ and so were both at work and at home. Work and rest, work and pleasure, were continuous with each other, often not distinct from each other at all. Once, shopkeepers lived in, above, or behind their shops. Once, many people lived by "cottage industries" -home production. Once, households were producers and processors of food, centers of their own maintenance, adornment, and repair, places of instruction and amusement. People were born in these houses, and lived and worked and died in them. Such houses were not generaliza­ tions. Similar to each other in materials and design as they might have been, they nevertheless looked and felt and smelled different from each other because they were articulations of particular re­sponses to their places and circumstances.

From Berry, Wendell. "Living in the Future: The "Modern" Agricultural Ideal." In The Unsettling of America. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1986, 52-53.

In our day, we are unable to envisage comfort except as part of the technical order of things. Comfort for us means bathrooms, easy chairs, foam-rubber mattresses, air conditioning, washing  ma­ chines, and so forth. The chief concern is to avoid effort and pro­ mote rest and physical euphoria. For us, comfort is closely asso­ciated with the material life; it manifests itself in the perfection of personal goods and machines. According to Giedion, the men of the Middle Ages also were concerned with comfort, but for them comfort had an entirely different form and content. It represented a feeling of moral and aesthetic order. Space was the primary ele­ment in comfort. Man sought open spaces, large rooms, the possi­bility of moving about, of seeing beyond his nose, of not con­stantly colliding with other people. These preoccupations are alto­gether foreign to us.

Moreover, comfort consisted of a certain arrangement of space. In the Middle Ages, a room could be completely "finished," even though it might contain no furniture. Everything depended on pro­ portions, material, form. The goal was not convenience, but rather a certain atmosphere. Comfort was the mark of the man's personal­ity on the place where he lived. This, at least in part, explains the extreme diversity of architectural interiors in the houses of the period. Nor was this the result of mere whim; it represented an adaptation to character; and when it had been realized, the man of the Middle Ages did not care if his rooms were not well heated or his chairs hard.

From Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, p. 67-68.

The items in a code stand to the moral law as bricks to a building. Wisdom must involve some comprehension of how the bricks are meant to be put together.

This has an immediate bearing on how we read the Bible. Not only is it insufficient to quote and requote the great commands of the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount. We will read the Bible seriously only when we use it to guide our thought towards a comprehensive moral viewpoint, and not merely to articulate disconnected moral claims. We must look within it not only for moral bricks, but for indications of order in which the bricks belong together. There may be some resistance to this, not only from those who suspect that it may lead to evasions of the 'plain' sense of the Bible's teaching, but from those who have forebodings of a totalitarian construction which will legislate over questions where it would be better to respect the Bible's silence. But in truth there is no alternative policy if we intend that our moral thinking should be shaped in any significant way by the Scriptures.

Oliver O'Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, p. 200.

In my early days as an aspiring theologian, fresh out of undergraduate studies, I was keenly interested in the idea of social justice. It is hard to deny that we are by nature designed for community, and thus inextricably interconnected. In the light of this reality, the biblical call to do justly cannot be observed passively, i.e. not harming others, but must be seen as an active call. Each act we make (or moment of inaction) and each decision we make has consequences for others and we bear some measure of responsibility for these consequences, even if they are unintended or undesired. I don't mean to commend a lifestyle of constant hand-wringing or agonising over each act we undertake, as this can lead to a sort of paralysis or worse still apathy. Rather, I believe we are called to pursue a life of communally guided formation and submission which can lead us into increasingly positive choices. Along these lines, the key concern is not: how can I avoid oppressing a textile worker on a distant continent by shopping at the GAP; but rather how can I further the thriving of my neighbour by supporting their work. This sort of thinking does lend itself to localism, as the consequences of our actions are far more transparently evident when dealing more directly with out neighbours, but this is not exclusively the case.

Lately though, under the influence of the "Edinburgh-school" Christian ethicists, Michael Northcott and Oliver O'Donovan I've been drawn to a model of justice which is not only practice-oriented, but also one which is sensitive to the span of generations. You can read previous posts I've offered along these lines, when I suggested that political conservatives would do well to be attentive to the act of actually conserving something; in a series I did summarising and interacting with Oliver O'Donovan's common objects of love; and in my reflections on Edmund Burke's political philosophy. After several years of reflection on ecological ethics from the perspective of Christian theology, I'm convinced that any model for justice that is focused purely on one moment, or even one generation, is fatally flawed. Now that biblical scholars have laid to rest some of the more unhelpful eschatologies of the 20th century, it is time to turn our moral reflection to the future generations that God's will continue to sustain on this earth either with our help or--with what seems to be our present preoccupation--our hindrance.

It is certainly the case that preparing for the future requires a different sort of moral reflection than our acting in the present moment, but there are plenty of resources there to aid us. This generation's obsession with engineering-oriented science makes concepts such as the precautionary principle seem inaccessible. In spite of this though, we must begin to open our minds to the possibility that the slowing of technological achievement and economic growth in the present may be what is morally necessary to promote the flourishing of future generations.

This is, as Oliver O'Donovan observes in Common Objects of Love, the meaning of the fifth commandment:

The paradigm command of tradition is, 'Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which hte Lord your God gives you.'  It appears to our eyes to be concerned with the duties of children, but this is a mistake.  The duties of children are purely responsive to the duty of parents to be to their children what their parents were to them.  This is a command addressed to adults, whose existence in the world is not self-posited but the fruit of an act of cultural transmission, which they have a duty to sustain.  The act of transmission puts us all in the place of receiver and communicator at once.  The household is envisaged as the primary unit of cultural transmission, the 'father and the mother' as representing every existing social practice which it is important to carry on.  Only so can community sustain itself within its environment, 'the land which the Lord your God gives you.'  No social survival in any land can be imagined without a stable cultural environment across generations.  By tradition society identifies itself from one historical moment to the next, and so continues to act as itself.

H/t: Brad Littlejohn for typing the quote out.