David Bentley Hart admits that "on the whole, the Gospel is probably not a very good formula for protecting public safety"

Ya think?

Here in Commonweal:

The Sermon on the Mount’s prohibitions of retaliation are absolutely binding on Christians, in both the private and the public spheres, for on the cross Christ at once perfected the refusal of violence and exhausted the Law’s wrath.

This simply begs the question, not only of present injustice, but of final judgment, which Christianity nevertheless teaches. The wrath of God has been hardly exhausted and will be meted out, according to the clear Christian teaching. This makes no sense if the Law's wrath has been "exhausted". The only conclusion to be drawn from that, if it is true, is that there will be no final judgment. This, of course, is where universalism comes from. And the doctrine of purgatory is its halfway house.

The ordinance not to retaliate, like all of the teaching, for example on poverty, is part of the wider message that the world is soon coming to an end. Take that end away, and the teaching becomes utterly obscurantist. It is only intelligible as an explicitly interim ethic in an eschatological time. But even at that, as Schweitzer correctly pointed out, it really represents the negation of ethics and is no ethic at all because all traditional human relationships under it have come to an end ("For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother").

That is why Tacitus correctly called the Christians haters of humanity.

 

It's also why Christians themselves at length gave it up.

People will not persist in an interminable state of poverty and undergo injustice in very large numbers or for a very long period. The history of the church tells us so. It is the history of the compromise and defeat of the original eschatological message. It is a history of degeneration.

Early in the essay Hart deflects the charge of sentimentality saying that he thinks there are very few opponents of capital punishment who do not realize the heinousness of many crimes. But in its place Hart advocates for his own sunny form of unrealism:

[I]f Newman was right—and believing Catholics had better hope he was, for the sake of the intelligibility of their faith—it is not only doctrine but also the church’s understanding of its teachings that is clarified over time by the Spirit. There may be slight missteps, of course, but the general view of development tacitly taken by the magisterium is that there are no violent retreats from clearly stated new discoveries; there is only a relentless narrowing and intensification of focus. This suggests, among other things, that the teachings of the magisterium under the current pontificate are probably more trustworthy than those under the pontificate of, say, Leo X.

I expect Mary to be declared part of the godhead any day now.

The 32-year old Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia promises liberalization of Islam

Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud

Quoted here:

"We want to go back to what we were, the moderate Islam that is open to the world, open to all the religions.

"We will not waste 30 years of our lives dealing with extremist ideas, we will destroy them today". 

There's a lot of liberalizing to do, based on the death penalty being allowed at least theoretically for apostasy, atheism, blasphemy, sorcery, witchcraft, etc.

Quelle surprise: Rob Bell speaks up for a version of progressive revelation

Quoted here:

'See? It completely contradicts itself.' And it does, unless you read it as an unfolding story and you realize that these two different passages were written at two different times, and they reflect a growing sophistication in thinking. Now we have something very interesting. We see that people were growing and evolving in their thinking about the divine. That’s a story that we are much more likely to find ourselves in. 

Well, why shouldn't Rob Bell go for progressive revelation?

After all, it's a convenient justification for jettisoning things in the Bible he objects to . . . like hell. To Rob Bell, hell isn't an example of our current state of evolved, sophisticated thinking, so the interpretive principle permits him to relegate it to an earlier, now obsolete stage of God's revelation to man.

But progressive revelation is also basic to the dispensational theology of Bell's former Evangelical faith.

You can take the man out of the Evangelicalism, but you can't take the Evangelicalism out of the man.

The modernist prejudice behind the theory of progressive revelation here is obvious, if little noticed by its critics, implying that the Biblical ancients weren't as enlightened as we are.

This is the sort of dismissive attitude toward the past which makes it impossible to understand them on their own terms, meaning there is a predisposition to misunderstand them.

But Evangelicals, former or otherwise, are particulary vulnerable to this lurch because of the degree to which their own heritage struggled with and assimilated modernism.

Rob Bell is only late heir of an age which long before us was already digesting modernism from the Christian point of view, for example in Thomas Dehany Bernard's The Progress of Doctrine in the New Testament, the Bampton Lecture from 1864.

More specifically, however, progressive revelation was the essential modernist presupposition of J. N. Darby's dispensationalist theology, without which we wouldn't have Evangelicalism in the first place, with its easy compartmentalization of features of God's revelation which are an effront to post-Enlightenment reason: food laws, animal sacrifice, capital punishment, just war, etc.

Apart from the obvious, that there is a development of ideas in the Bible which can be demonstrated historically, the very idea of progress itself remains, however, an unquestioned value of our time which we've inherited from modernity, which overthrew the ancient world's agriculturally inspired ideas of cyclicality, birth and death, and eternal return.

And Christians and secularists alike share it . . . in droves.

But it must be asked: Is it really progress in divine thinking to travel from the age of faith under the Patriarchs, to the slaughter of animals under Moses, to the human sacrifice of the Son of God under Paul, to the mass murdering of tens of millions of the age of the Enlightenment?

The more I look at the ceaseless ages run the more the pattern looks like degeneracy to me.

Over 7 billion people inhabit the planet today. But by 1 AD over 40 billion were already dead. What do we know that they did not? Only that Princess Leia is dead, too.

The prophets of the Old Testament, whose heirs John the Baptist and Jesus were, dreamed by contrast with our Christian world of the interminable Sacrifice of the Mass of a world finally founded by God eternally upon justice, without violence, without tears and without death, however mediated that must be through judgment. Appropriately, they were tortured and killed.

I fancy that we have been fooled into thinking that we have made progress at all by the times in which we have been living, that is, by the Holocene, which began approximately 11,700 years ago.

We don't grasp that we bask in the glow of a dying interglacial, and cannot bear that The Ice Man returneth.

The next round is on me!

On the Death Penalty in France

"The death penalty still exists in France, but only for the victims!"

-- Marine Le Pen

Augustine: In Favor of the Death Penalty, and of the Just War

"The same divine authority that forbids the killing of a human being establishes certain exceptions, as when God authorizes killing by a general law or when He gives an explicit commission to an individual for a limited time.

"The agent who executes the killing does not commit homicide; he is an instrument as is the sword with which he cuts. Therefore, it is in no way contrary to the commandment, 'Thou shalt not kill' to wage war at God's bidding, or for the representatives of public authority to put criminals to death, according to the law, that is, the will of the most just reason."

-- The City of God, Book 1, chapter 21

Thomas Aquinas: In Favor of the Death Penalty

"Every part is directed to the whole, as imperfect to perfect, wherefore every part exists naturally for the sake of the whole. For this reason we see that if the health of the whole human body demands the excision of a member, because it became putrid or infectious to the other members, it would be both praiseworthy and healthful to have it cut away. Now every individual person is related to the entire society as a part to the whole. Therefore if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and healthful that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good, since "a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump” (1 Cor. 5:6)."

-- Summa Theologiae, II, II, q. 64, art. 2