New Institutes

A Primer of Practical Theology for Twenty-First-Century America

D. C. Weiser

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781532681448, 9781532681455
• eBook ISBN: 9781532681462
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

New Institutes denies that science and moral consciousness are incompatible or in conflict with their basic assumptions or respective disciplinary domains. Written in a simple discursive style that is a pleasure to read, Weiser reinterprets three key concepts--faith, death, and resurrection--to arrive at practical insights about America and religion, morality and science, ecology and economics, history and ethics. This slim primer reassesses nine classic arguments for God's existence (Appendix I), reconciles and harmonizes the sister religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with new age spirituality, and takes seriously the secular eschatology of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Weiser offers a refreshing interpretation of: atheism, gods and goddesses, Calvinism, Jesus' mission, intelligent design, Christian ethics, science and religion, corporations and capitalism, ecology and economy. Weiser also provides readers the basic tools of logic and epistemology, with a view to exercising responsible citizenship (Appendix II). Avoiding polemics and technical jargon, this unique work clears the air of cant and drivel, consigning the evangelical bunk of Pat Robertson and Jack Van Impe, of religionist and anti-religionist alike, to the flames. New Institutes is truly what it declares itself to be: A Primer of Practical Theology for Twenty-First-Century America.

Part One

Faith

We grant, indeed, that so long as we are pilgrims in the world faith is implicit, not only because as yet many things are hidden from us, but because, involved in the mists of error, we attain not to all.

—John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion [471]

Moderns are apt to misunderstand faith because they confuse it with a different concept: namely, belief. Faith is not blind credulity and gullibility; it is not even William James’s pragmatic wish to travel hopefully, a confident expectation that things will work out for the best in the long run. It is certainly not that closed-minded a priori dogmatism that Charles Peirce termed tenacity: a knee-jerk bigotry that scoffs at argument and blinks at evidence. Faith is a living connection among all sentient beings, which transcends time and space, and a principle of communication that is more like the Force in Star Wars (though without the martial pyrotechnics) than it is like doctrinaire belief.

Faith is neither a belief nor a measure of belief; one need have no particular belief or set of beliefs in order to possess or embody faith, even a very powerful faith. Faith can perhaps best be understood in modern terms as being very like a social support network of family, friends, and colleagues, equal in their humanity and shared mortality, emotions, cognition, and intuitive dispositions—with this proviso: that one need have no actual family, friends, and colleagues, but may be as alone, isolated, and solitary as Socrates on trial or Christ in Gethsemane. Faith is, in the end, a matter of how extensive and inclusive a community one belongs to and represents.

One can only wonder what contemporary partisan factions would make of Calvin’s advice to “wait for further illumination in any matter in which they differ from each other (Phil. iii. 15).”4 Calvin had no truck with those prone to mistake their own emotional fervor for illumination, the kind of enlightenment that may legitimately claim the adjective: divine. For many reasons (among which I would include the rapid pace of technological transformation, dramatic geopolitical change, and the fear and uncertainty these foster for all of earth’s inhabitants), conflict has come to play too massive a role in our political life today, obscuring the purpose of consensus as a goal. Consensus is not, as some would have, mere agreement and ideological acquiescence, kowtowing to a party line, but rather something to be achieved through a process of opinion-sharing, substantive dialogue, and deliberation; a sifting and judicious weighing of arguments and reasoning, evaluated ultimately by the logician’s toolkit, experience, and the power of human understanding. Calvin taught logic and argued persuasively for its importance in theology. His insight here was never needed more desperately than it is today by Americans who desire a substantive religious and political life.

Conflicting opinions signify a need for reflection and forbearance in judgment. Current mores dictate the opposite strategy, yielding baleful results. If adherence to unbending “moral principle” results in intensified partisan rancor, then America requires a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of morality.

I have emphasized the priority of connection and communication as primitive notions central to our concept of faith. Let me unpack these ideas a bit further.

A sense of reverence and awe before the mystery of our kosmos is primordial and pre-political, as ancient as the first human sensorium confronting all the wonder, terror, and sublimity of a natural world. Pattern recognition—whether of way, logos, atoms falling, fire, Aristotelian being or Platonic form—provided ancient humans with a principle of order underlying appearances, a premonition of how things might work, constituting for them a purposeful system as well as the first model for scientific laws of nature.

Such a universal system we may well term ethico-religious teleology. Every religion and system of morality in the world today embodies such a view. Islamic civilization at its height and Medieval Christendom through the time of Augustine and Aquinas retain the ancient heritage at their core. The system has been inherited by Reformation figures like Luther and Calvin. Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist alike share a similar line of descent.

But our western endowment in religion comes primarily through the sixteenth-century Reformation and the seventeenth-century Puritans who formed the great migration from Europe to the Americas. That tradition, succinctly expressed in documents like The Cambridge Platform of 1648 and Westminster Catechism, contained germinal seeds of individualism and social responsibility; the particular brand of capitalism that emerged from Protestant secularism in the context of the North American frontier in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries drew primarily on what Perry Miller called the “individual mandate” and which was “exhausted in the twentieth century.” By 1957, Miller believed it was high time that America explored the conception of societal or collective responsibility inherent in our sacred political documents. In many ways, our political history during the last third of the twentieth century down to the present moment may be understood as an awkward, sometimes paradoxical cry for just such a mandate, an antidote to three centuries of unbridled individualism, and a preparation for something new and better.

Envisioning a better society and world is no easy undertaking, especially for a republic that fiercely guards its democratic elements. Implementing such a vision is sure to test the faith of citizens. A truly Protestant preparation for salvation will entail self-examination, a coming to terms with ghosts and demons inherited or projected, and the exorcising of delusions and obsessions. Instead of relying on shallow technical “expertise,” we will perform far better in the long run by trusting to the democratic impulse embodied in Calvin’s maxim for faith: to resolve conflict by waiting for illumination, that is, by deliberate reflection and the sharing of opinions. Even for men and women of good will, conflict will be a permanently recurring fixture of the political and cultural landscape; but from that conflict, consensus is sure to come, as surely as silence after full discussion—if we but wait for it, consciously attentive to luminous speech.

4. The Institutes, 471–72.

1

America and Religion

You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God.

—Exod 20: 4.

America is, once again, at the very crossroads of her cultural being. While the nation aspires to worship a God who jealously forbids graven images, it slavishly serves an advertising culture conditioned by a panoply of sensuous visual idols. The clash between the exclusively auditory commands of a Hebraic God and the Greek primacy of visual imagery could not be greater. Just as the photograph of the blue marble of Earth from outer space unified environmentalism, the pro-Life movement would be unimaginable without visual images of the fetus. Without the assumption of monotheistic deontological commands, how could George W. Bush ever have become president? Caught in the mesh of these two vast machines, America seeks its identity even while it morphs beyond recognition.

By plunging headlong on a course of rapidly increasing technological change without regard for consequences, America risks religious apostasy, on the one hand, and betrayal of her sacred constitutive principles of equality and liberty, based on the rights of man, on the other. Faced with mounting evidence of sheer human incapacity, rightwing “Christian” conservatives stridently insist that humans enjoy a boundless free will and condemn victims for their own disenfranchisement, without any sense of having abandoned a religious mission to intercede on behalf of “widows, orphans, and the poor.” The contrast between human inability and corporate empowerment is as stunning as that chasm between the resources and clout of most individuals and, say, Exxon Mobil or the Pentagon; yet most Americans seem oblivious to such distinctions. Do they really believe that the economic hegemony of capitalism or multinational corporations will look out for their interests? Do they believe that transnational corporations are an extension of the body of Christ, as Mother Church was once held to be?

Still worse: blithe acceptance of corporate capitalism’s economic orthodoxy—What’s good for Wall Street or Halliburton is good for the country—shows the extent to which these same Christian conservatives have embraced the very secularism that they so often superficially denounce. What boggles the mind is how a widespread public belief in the good will of multinational and transnational corporations goes hand in hand with abject political disillusionment, or the carte blanche granted to the corporate organization of the private sector with a pathological mistrust of “big government” and its ability to serve the public good. Betrayal of our sacred political principles by a majority of individual citizens represents a perilous abdication of moral and political responsibility, one that poses a dire threat to this Republic.

The history of messianic religions is full of imposters, from Sabbatai Zevi to Jim Jones, charlatans and deluded madmen who claimed a mystical authority for their deeds (and misdeeds). While the modern bias of Americans is to round up all of these scoundrels under the category of “politician,” to do so is, I believe, an oversimplification amounting to self-deception.

Authority takes many forms, including artistic, intellectual, moral, and religious. While I accept Hannah Arendt’s view that our concept of authority—inherited from the Romans—is originally and even essentially political in nature, I also believe that such distinctions are, by circumstance and context, fluid rather than fixed; and that they may overlap or admit of hazy boundaries. What we in America should seek is a touchstone of authority in our discourse and deliberations that accords with these five dimensions: political, artistic, intellectual, moral, and religious. That is what I have sought to attain in this book.

My approach is non-sectarian and non-denominational. I agree wholeheartedly with the assertion: “The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas.”5 Yet we are, all of us, citizens of some community or other. “We are circumscribed by the questions we ask,” my friend Paul Stebbing has written.6 In spite of the limitations implied by personal history, language, and nationality, we must strive to think of ourselves as actors on a global stage.

This work is not polemical and I carry a brief for no organized religion, institution, ideology, or party. In a radical and fundamental respect, I am like those prophets of old, a voice crying in the wilderness—except that, of course, I am no prophet and claim no special authority for the vi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Apologia
• Part One: Faith
• Part Two: Death
• Part Three: Resurrection
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Bibliography