Freedom and the good

David Bentley Hart writes:

Democracy is not an intrinsic good, after all. Where the moral formation of a people is deficient, the general will malign, or historical circumstance unpropitious, it is quite unamiguously wicked in its results...The only sound premise for a people's self-governance is a culture of common virtue directed towards the one Good. And a society that can no longer conceive of freedom as anything more than limitless choice and uninhibited self-expression must of necessity progessively conclude that al things should be permitted, that all values are relative, that desire fashions its own truth, that there is no such thing as 'nature', that we are our own creatures. The ultimate consequence of a purely libertarian political ethcs, if it could be take to its logical end would be a world in which we would no longer even remember that we should want to choose the good, as we would have learned to deem things good solely because they have been chosen... From 'In the Aftermath', p. 80

Hart puts his finger on something very real for Australian public discourse. The principles of political liberalism do not of themselves promote the good in the citizenry. Freedom is only beneficial when you have a culture of common virtue. Such a culture, if it ever existed (and actually, perhaps it certainly did), is but a distant memory... Moral outrage at pedophilia and Islamic terrorists are what we use to fill the blank space.

Hart on Providence

Does God do micro-management? And more importantly: how do we account for human freedom as a real and not imaginary gift of God if we have a view of God's providence that is too unvariegated? What is more: how can we account for God's providence without accusing him of commiting evil?

Hart says:

Certainly all Christians must affirm God's transcendent governance of everything, even fallen history and fallen nature, and must believe that by that governance he will defeat evil and bring the final good of all things out of the darkness of 'this age'. It makes a considerable difference, however - nothing less than our unerstand of the nature of God is at stake - whether one says that God has eternally willed the history of sin and death, and all that comes to pass therein,as the proper or necessary means of achieving his ends, or whether one says instead that god has willed his good in creatures from eternity and will bring it to pass, despite their rebellion, by so ordering all thigs toward his goodness tha even evil (which he does not cause) becomes an occasion of the operations of grace. And it is only the latter view than can accurately be called a doctrine of 'providence' in the properly theological sense: the former is mere determinism. (p. 82)

This makes a good deal of sense to me: it has to be possible that God does not will the death of a sinner, but that the sinner does indeed die. (2 Peter 3:9). And, if we are not careful in our attribution of all causation to the will of God, God merely becomes the devil in disguise. Aquinas posited a primary level of causation (ie God's) which transcends the secondary causes which are merely finite. So, my decision to get a cup of coffee in the morning is truly mine, though it arises out of appetites and conditions that aren't mine - my body, the world's economy that enables cheapish coffee to be delivered to me, the fashion to drink coffee etc. God does decide for me, at that level: but his providential will surrounds and transcends my will at every side. This means that I don't have to fall for those 'open God' theologies, which are beneath contempt, frankly.

Hart does not however deal with a couple of passages which seem to indicate a more micro-managing approach: Jesus talking about the sparrows and the lilies, for example....

The Doors of the Sea - Where was God in the Tsunami?

David Bentley Hart's small book The Doors of the Sea has finally reached me. I am surprised how vehemently it is an attack on certain Reformed understandings of the sovereignty of God - but then again, I do think that there is something weird, even perverse, about the way God is celebrated as a pure absolute will by some Reformed writers (though this is probably caricature, Hart provides some gob-smackingly callous examples of Reformed responses to the tsunami).

I thought this point was well made (among others):

...disturbing as it may be, it is clearly the case that there is a kind of 'provisional' cosmic dualism within the New Testament: not an ultimate dualism of course, between two equal princinples; but certainly a conflict between a sphere of created autonomy that strives against God on the one hand and the saving of God in time on the other...To say that God elects to fashion rational creatures in his image, and so grants them the freedom to bind themselves and the greater physical order to another master - to say that he who sealed up the doors of the sea might permit them to be opened again by another, more reckless hand - is not to say that God's ultimate design for his creatures can be thwarted. It is to acknowledge, however, that his will can be resisted by a real and (by his grace) autonomous force of defiance, or can be hidden from us by the history of cosmic corruption, and that final realization of the good he intends in all things has the form (not simply as a dramatic fiction, for our edification or his glory, nor simplay as a paedagogical device on his part, but in truth) of a divine victory. (p. 61-62)

I think provisional dualism is right: it allows for this 'autonomous' force of defiance, with which we have to deal, and whom we are to take seriously, but also ensures that God isn't somehow threatened ultimately by the struggle.

David Bentley Hart on the first commandment

Try this sample of David Bentley Hart. He must be tough to play Scrabble against! Here's a taste of the sample:

'....developed Christian theology rejected nothing good in the metaphysics, ethics, or method of ancient philosophy, but—with a kind of omnivorous glee—assimilated such elements as served its ends, and always improved them in the process. Stoic morality, Plato’s language of the Good, Aristotle’s metaphysics of act and potency—all became richer and more coherent when emancipated from the morbid myths of sacrificial economy and tragic necessity. In truth, Christian theology nowhere more wantonly celebrated its triumph over the old gods than in the use it made of the so-called spolia Aegyptorum; and, by despoiling pagan philosophy of its most splendid achievements and integrating them into a vision of reality more complete than philosophy could attain on its own, theology took to itself irrevocably all the intellectual glories of antiquity. The temples were stripped of their gold and precious ornaments, the sacred vessels were carried away into the precincts of the Church and turned to better uses, and nothing was left behind but a few grim, gaunt ruins to lure back the occasional disenchanted Christian and shelter a few atavistic ghosts. '