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Christianity and technology

Christianity and technology.

Beginning in 1943, a small group of Christian intellectuals began to think seriously about the post-war world. The United States and Britain had talked about victory since the beginning of the War, but no one was certain, and many had grave doubts. But by 1943 victory was in sight, even if its details were not.

These Christian intellectuals included Jacques Maritain, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, Simone Weil, and T. S. Eliot. Auden and Eliot were poets, and Lewis, an Oxford don, is probably best known for his for his children’s fiction, Chronicles of Narnia. I’ve posted about Lewis and Weil elsewhere on this blog. The relationship among these men and woman was rich, complex, and varied. Some worked together, some alone.

The Problem

The problem they worried about is what sort of people the winners of this war of civilizations would become. What values could substitute for that of winning the war? Would the technological thinking that won the war destroy the values we fought for? It might, they argued, and they only thing that could stop it was an education that fosters humanity, sensibility and pity.

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Would you forgive a Nazi mass murderer?

It is difficult to state clearly the New Testament’s view of forgiveness. New Testament views would be more like it. Nevertheless, the central claim seems to be that forgiveness should be offered as many times as it is needed. In Matthew (18:21-22), Peter asks Jesus how many times he should forgive someone who sins against him, suggesting the answer might be seven. Jesus replies “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” (Or seventy times seven in some versions). Seven represents the number of completeness and perfection in the Bible, and the point of course is that for forgiveness to be perfect, it must be impossibly generous. Jesus expresses much the same point in Mark (11:25) when he states that when people pray, they must forgive anyone anything and everything, so that “your Father in heaven may forgive your sins.”

The Sunflower, or would you forgive a Nazi mass murderer

Little in Christ’s teachings suggests that I am required to forgive someone for an act against a third party. Yet, this issue comes up often in discussions of forgiveness. It is the main issue that seems to divide Christians and Jews in their responses to The Sunflower, a story told by Simon Wiesenthal.

The gist of the story is straightforward. A young Nazi is dying in a hospital located near a concentration camp where Wiesenthal is imprisoned. While being marched past the hospital in a work detail, a nurse selects Wiesenthal from the group of inmates and takes him to the room of the dying Nazi, who wants “a Jew” to hear his confession and grant him forgiveness. Evidently brought up in a good Catholic home, the young Nazi had willingly committed terrible atrocities against innocent Jewish civilians, burning many to death. Will Wiesenthal grant him forgiveness before he dies?

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Forgiving a mass murderer: the Amish

I want to tell you a story about forgiveness. It’s begins with the murder of five Amish school girls, and the critical wounding of five others, at a one room Amish school house in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, USA, on October 2, 2006.

The girls, the oldest of whom was thirteen, were murdered by a demented local man named Charles Carl Roberts IV, who brought with him to the schoolhouse a semi-automatic pistol, six hundred rounds of ammunition, a shotgun, a stun gun, plastic ties to use as handcuffs, sexual lubricant, and a board with nails to barricade the school door shut. The teacher managed to slip out the side door almost immediately and ran for help; three policemen arrived within minutes. Ten more police arrived several minutes later. Negotiations were brief. Hearing shots from inside they stormed the school. Roberts had shot himself in the head, but not before shooting the ten girls.

That evening, three Amish men went to visit Amy Roberts, Roberts’ widow, who was staying with her parents. “We just talked with them for about ten minutes to express our sorrow and told them we didn’t hold anything against them,” said one of the Amish visitors (Kraybill, p 44). Several miles away, an Amish man went to see Carl Roberts’ s father, spending about an hour with him. A spokesman for the Roberts family later said “He stood there for an hour, and he held that man [Mr. Roberts] in his arms and said, `We forgive you.'” Presumably Mr. Roberts’ father did not need forgiveness in any of the ways we ordinarily understand the term today, but perhaps that was not as important as the visit and the holding.

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The Book of Revelation isn’t nuts, but it subverts the spirit of Christianity

The Book of Revelation isn’t nuts, but it subverts the spirit of Christianity.

For years I thought the Book of Revelation was insane. After reading what several scholars have written about it, I no longer believe that. The Book of Revelation makes sense as a coded attack on Rome, among other things. While I understand its place at the end of the Bible, finishing a journey begun in Genesis, I still don’t believe Revelation belongs in the Bible, for it subverts the message of Jesus and the Gospels.

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What’s so great about eternity?

For all its importance in Christian thought, the concept of eternity in the Bible is remarkably unclear. The two most important Christian thinkers, Augustine and Aquinas, place God outside of time, in what is called the nunc stans. Nunc stans is the opposite of the way we ordinarily think of eternity as time going on forever. In the nunc stans, you experience all of time in a single moment. Or you would if you were God.

As Augustine put it, we pass through God’s today. The experience would be something like seeing time as though it were space, a plane spread out before you. You might focus on one part of the plane or another, but all time is there to be experienced in a moment. The term is Latin (no surprise). Nunc means now, and stans refers to stand. In the nunc stans, all of time stands before you.

Not in the Bible

Trouble is, that this way of thinking about time is nowhere in the Bible (I’ll confine myself to the New Testament, but the problem is found in the Old Testament as well.). The Greek term aeonios, for which so many translations mistakenly use the word “eternal” is derived from the noun “aeon.” “Aeon” means “age” or “ages.” Thus, the word translated as eternal really refers to an aeon or age, not forever. When Jesus says “I am with you always, to the end of the age (αἰῶνος), he does not mean forever, but until the end of the present age—that is, until the eschaton. Aidios (αιδιος) is the ancient Greek term for eternal, and it is used only once in the Bible in reference to God (Romans 1:20). *

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Jürgen Moltmann’s ecological God

Jürgen Moltmann’s ecological God.

In Theology of Hope, Jürgen Moltmann’s most well-known work, he argues that the man who hopes will hope to transcend this earth, including death.

All this must inevitably mean that the man who thus hopes will never be able to reconcile himself with the laws and constraints of this earth, neither with the inevitability of death. (Hope, loc 272)

As I argued in my previous post on Moltmann, this means that the eschaton (end of this world and beginning of the next) will be realized on this earth, on which immortal beings will dwell. I find this seriously weird.

More than weird, it denies what it is to be human, which is to be finite and mortal. Heaven there may be, but it will not be here (as if heaven were in time and space), and it will not be populated by immortal earthlings. More than this I do not know, and even about this I am far from certain.

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Jürgen Moltmann: heaven on earth and my heresy

Jürgen Moltmann is 92 years old. He is of the same generation as the well-known theologians I have posted about recently, such as Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. Like them, he was born in Germany and came of age in Nazified Germany. Unlike them he stayed, served in the Wehrmacht (Nazi army, not the SS), and seems to have experienced profound guilt and remorse when he learned about the concentration camps after the war. That’s his story, and I have no reason to doubt it.

In some ways he is the most interesting of the five German theologians I have posted about (Barth, Niebuhr, Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, and Tillich). I wish I understood why the most influential Christian theologians in the United States grew up in Nazified Germany, but I don’t.* Moltmann is interesting not because he is right, but because he is different. Moltmann is different not only because he believes in heaven, but in heaven on earth.

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Where does belief in God come from?

Psychological interpretations of God generally fail, turning God into some sort of psychic crutch. Sigmund Freud argued that God is a based on the childish idea of a powerful and protective father (The Future of an Illusion). D. W. Winnicott, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst working a generation after Freud, approached the question of God from a different direction, asking where he was located. If God were just an external being, he would lack emotional meaning and resonance. This is the God of a petrified religion, composed of a list of do’s and don’ts, a religion in which ritual has become sleepwalking.

But if God were just an internal reality, he would be no more than our fantasy. The God who feels real, the God who excites us (and God should be exciting) is the God whom we discover because we help to make him real.

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