Trading Hell for Hope: An Interview with Nicholas Ansell

Nicholas Ansell’s teaching and research focus on several areas of systematic and biblical theology, notably Christology, eschatology, Old Testament wisdom thinking, and the theology of gender. He has an ongoing interest in the phenomenology of revelation and the spirituality of existence. His new book, The Annihilation of Hell: Universal Salvation and the Redemption of Time in the Eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann, was released in North America in October 2013 and exposits the work of Moltmann on the topic of hell and universalism for anyone who is interested in theology, scholar or otherwise. He has also written several articles on hell and hope including this one in The Other Journal. 

The following is an excerpt of an interview conducted by Matthew E. Johnson on January 22, 2014 in Toronto, Ontario. For more, see the full version here in the open-access Institutional Repository at the Institute for Christian Studies.

GM: Dr. Ansell, thanks so much for making time to talk with me. I’m very excited about your new book The Annihilation of Hell, and I’d love to hear some background and a bit of “behind the scenes” about this book. I understand that one of the ways you have been influenced by Jürgen Moltmann is in what you call the “judgment unto salvation” theme that runs throughout the Bible. Can you say a bit about this theme in your work and in Moltmann’s?

NA: The “judgment unto salvation” theme is a point where I really connect with Moltmann. There’s a lot in Moltmann that I really like and there’s also a fair amount that I disagree with but still find thought provoking. But this theme is something that is straightforwardly insightful. It’s the idea that God’s judgment is not about damnation or punishment—it’s not about making a division between those who are in and those who are out. God’s judgment is always about putting things right, and it’s always in the service of life, opening life up again where life has been closed down. We often think of God’s judgment coming as something to be afraid of, but Moltmann argues that in scripture, for those who are the people of God, the idea of God’s judgment coming always creates hope and is something to be celebrated, prayed for, and so forth.

The tower of Babel narrative in Genesis 11, which tells of the breaking down of what seems to be the first Babylonian Empire with its attempt to impose a single language or a metanarrative upon its subjects, is a good example of judgment unto salvation. The empire emerges because people are afraid to spread out over the face of the earth, even though the fundamental blessing and calling to humanity is to fill the earth with God’s presence and to fill the earth in a geographic sense. But there’s this fear, and fear is the opposite of faith. So the people congregate, trying to stay put, and an empire of some kind emerges out of this. Then there is the judgment and the scattering, and it’s not simply God saying that there’s something idolatrous about building the tower and that it needs to come to an end or that this is simply a manifestation of God’s wrath. The scattering actually opens up the movement of history again, so that the people end up spreading out over the earth, which is actually rooted in the blessing of Genesis 1:26-28. The purpose of the judgment is to get people back on track with the dynamic of life—it’s giving them something positive. So the judgment is unto salvation. That is, the judgment serves something that is more than judgment; it serves life. I think that if you look at God’s judgment in general in scripture in the light of that pattern, it’s very illuminating.

GM: Based on your own research and Moltmann’s thought, what is the biblical basis for rethinking the doctrine of hell?

NA: There are something like 14 “hell texts” that mention hell specifically in the New Testament, depending on which translation you use. Of those, about 11 refer to hell in a way that’s connected to judgment for human beings. They’re all found in the Gospels, and they’re all found on the lips of Jesus himself. In these cases, the word is “Gehenna,” which is translated as hell, but I think it probably should be left as the word “Gehenna.” Of these 11, there are 7 references in Matthew, and then 3 all together in one verse in Mark, and there is one reference in Luke.

Moltmann says that, in terms of biblical material about final judgment, there are a certain number of texts that do not have a “double outcome” to them (that is, do not imply judgment or salvation) and will instead maybe imply universal salvation or something like that. Nevertheless there are a certain number of texts in which there is this division. In these, some will end up in hell, and some will not. Moltmann tends to simply play down the texts that have the division and emphasizes what he thinks is the stronger theme of judgment leading to salvation as being the most biblical approach. The problem is that all the counter examples that he wants to play down are attributed to Jesus, and Moltmann is a Christocentric theologian who always wants to focus in terms of the way Jesus discloses God to us. So this is a real problem for him, and he doesn’t resolve it to my satisfaction.

Valley of Ben-Hinnom, 2007.

My book works this out more exegetically and comes up with a different approach. I hope this is a contribution that my book could make, in addition to its interpretation of Moltmann’s thinking. So my argument in a nutshell is that “Gehenna,” the word that is translated as “hell” goes back to the Old Testament, referring to the valley of Ben-Hinnom. It is a geographical territory owned by a certain group of Israelites that includes a valley located just outside of Jerusalem. At a certain point in Israel’s history during the monarchy, it gets associated with idolatry and with passing young children “through the fire” and with certain idolatrous kings. So, in response, the valley of Gehenna becomes the place of God’s judgment.

In Isaiah, we see it as a place of God’s judgment, and here, it is a historical judgment, a judgment in history. It is the location of where God’s judgment will occur. Looking at the very last verse of Isaiah in particular, Gehenna is a place where Israel’s enemies will be judged. What happens in Jeremiah, though, is the judgment has been turned back on Israel, on Judah. So the place where some Israelites would be hoping the Gentiles would get judged becomes the place where Judah will be judged.

Jesus stands in the tradition of Jeremiah. Matthew’s Gospel is steeped in all kinds of allusions to the book of Jeremiah. This makes sense of why so many of the references to Gehenna show up in Matthew’s gospel in particular. So in Matthew, Jesus is saying something to his fellow Jews that is very similar to Jeremiah: although many are hoping for judgment to come down on the Romans, actually there is a judgment coming that will impact Jerusalem and the temple. In the Jewish War of 66-70 AD, which involved the generation after Jesus that he prophesied about in Matthew 24, the Romans razed the temple and Jerusalem. During this war, a huge number of dead bodies ended up quite literally in the Gehenna valley.

So “hell” or “Gehenna” is about a judgment in history, but it also marks a transition point between the old age and the new age. It’s an apocalyptic transition as well, and the book of Revelation picks up on that. The apocalyptic material in the gospels such as Mark 13 also focus on judgment as a transition point. Hence the “birth pangs” imagery in Mark 13:8 (and Revelation 12 also).

This exegetical approach gives a different understanding of the “hell” texts. It means that you can connect them much better to a judgment unto salvation understanding. The texts that Moltmann has problems with and has to sideline even though they come from Jesus, can actually be connected in a positive way to the kind of eschatology that he’s looking for.

GM: How is the judgment unto salvation theme and the way you reframe the “hell texts” related to universalism?

NA: Well, Moltmann is a universalist. Universalism is the belief that all people will ultimately be saved, which to some people is very controversial.

Last Judgment by Fra Angelico, c. 1431

However, the idea of hoping that all people will be saved is often seen by many Christians as a perfectly valid thing to hope for, in fact it’s a very Christian thing to hope for. Many people will say that you can really hope for this, but being dogmatic about it such that universal salvation is just what God has to do or something like that is another matter. But to be hopeful about it, that’s fine.

There’s no reason why we should be suspicious if Christians have that kind of hope, far from it. What Moltmann says is that the thing about biblical hope is that it’s not just wishful thinking for something you would really like. If you experience real hope, what comes with it is a confidence about what God has promised and that God will fulfill his promises. So it’s not that you’re dogmatic about it, but there is the confidence of faith.

If it’s okay for the Christian to hope that all might be saved, even if you don’t understand how that might eventually happen, then let’s not have that hope as just a kind of wishful thinking. Let’s explore it in terms of biblical hope. If God promises to bring this about, and there are biblical texts (such as 1 Corinthians 15:22) that do seem to suggest that, then it can be very deeply Christian position to trust those promises.

We can talk about how it is that God might be able to bring this about, and then there are the theological issues of God’s freedom, human freedom, and so forth. But in a sense those are secondary. Yes, we can talk about the mechanics of it, so to speak, but if we think that the promise is there, why not trust it, put one’s hope in it, and then start to theologize and think out of that conviction. Then it’s not a conclusion that you come to at the end; it becomes more of a starting point.

GM: As just a final question: as a Christian scholar, what role do you see scholarship playing in religious life and faith for the individual and the community?

NA: I think scholarship done by Christians has an important role to play in life in general for the Christian community and for the wider culture as well. I think it has to start by listening. You have to tune in to the deep issues and questions of your own culture, and then see how you can respond. So it starts with listening. It also can’t be any kind of pontificating. Nobody is interested in theology that pontificates these days anyway.

The Last Judgment by Stefan Lochner, c. 1435

One of the concerns that people, not just scholars, have about hell and final judgment and so forth, is about justice. There is a hunger for justice. This would be the problem for someone if we dispensed completely with the final judgment. What do you say to the person who has suffered injustice? This is very much part of the book for me, and Moltmann is also very strong on this. He doesn’t want to do away with final judgment; he insists that there is a final judgment. But he actually says that the judgment is not final—it’s penultimate, because it has to serve what comes after the judgment.

So if you write theology, you can connect with the hope in that. I think hope is something that resonates with everybody. Not all of us experience much hope, but I think we would like to. So if you talk in terms of hope, then you avoid the esoteric nature of much theology. I hate to write theology that is only of interest to theologians. I’d like to think that these are the topics that are addressed to all of us as human beings, struggling to find our way right now in history. So theologians and Christian scholars need to see themselves as in the same boat as everyone else. We’ve experienced this grace and this hope, so we have something we want to say. It is that hope and that faith that also helps us not just say stuff, but also listen and tune in well long before we start writing.

First photo used from https://wipfandstock.com/store/The_Annihilation_of_Hell_Universal_Salvation_and_the_Redemption_of_Time_in_the_Eschatology_of_Jrgen_Moltmann; second photo by Deror avi, used from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Valley_of_Hinom_PA180090.JPG; third photo public domain, used from http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/a/angelico/index.html; fourth photo public domain, used from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stefan_Lochner_006.jpg.

Evolution or Emergence: Freedom and Paradox on a Saturated Beach

by Joseph Kirby

In the Phaedrus, Socrates explains why he has no time to waste explaining away ancient myths in terms of the latest scientific discoveries:

I have not time for such things; and the reason, my friend, is this. I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and it really seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have understood that. […] Am I a beast more complicated and savage than Typhon [the king of monsters], or am I a tamer, simpler animal with a share in a divine and gentle nature.” (230a)

In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard calls this question “the Absolute Paradox,” the frontier to which thinking cannot help but arrive but also cannot possibly solve. Basically, we must know the answer to this question in order to determine which way of life is wise and which way is foolish, but it is impossible for human thinking to provide this answer. Something interesting occurs, however, when we filter the debate over the theory of evolution through the lens of this ancient riddle. It turns out that both sides actually agree on one fundamental point: that the theory of evolution, if true, dispels the Paradox, proves that human beings are really just complicated animals.

What if this agreement between science and religion is a mistake?

What if the Paradox cannot be proven one way or another, by either science or religion, because it is referring to the open-ended character of reality, human freedom, the fact that we are obliged to choose which of these two possibilities we are going to presuppose with our words and deeds? What if, in other words, we are free to decide whether our actions will imply that humans are really just savage beasts, or whether our actions will imply that humans bear the image of a divine and gentle nature that has been distorted by a life of injustice? If this is the case, the traditional job of religious discourse would have been to inspire those of us still wavering between the two poles of this Paradox to shape our lives in light of the latter presupposition. Modern science, meanwhile, would not have disproven religion so much as rendered some of this traditional rhetoric less persuasive – which, unfortunately, has made it very difficult for many people to believe that this second option is actually a rational possibility.

The problem with our current intellectual climate is simple: pious people are striving to persuade both themselves and others of the divine path by refuting the theory of evolution, but this is only making the problem worse. This rhetorical strategy just confirms the supposedly “scientific” mind in its mistaken belief that there is a dichotomy between the rationality of science and the irrationality of religion, that evolution has indisputably proven the beast and that anyone who says otherwise is a superstitious fool running from the truth. The way out of this dismal situation is simple: we must show the “scientific” mind and the pious mind that there is no dichotomy whatsoever between the scientific theory of evolution and the ontological claim that human beings are free to choose which ontology they will presuppose.

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Imagine a long empty beach. A single family arrives to have a picnic. A second family arrives, then a third. If the families are mutual strangers, it is unlikely that the new arrivals will sit immediately beside the people already there. Instead, they are more likely to go to some empty spot on the shore, leaving a respectful buffer between themselves and their neighbors – as when strangers fill the space of a subway car or men saturate a wall of urinals. There is no planning involved in this; space fills evenly, according to a logic similar to the diffusion of a gas. But when a tenth, a twentieth, a fiftieth family arrives, something different begins to happen. Forced into proximity, the interaction between the families must become more complex: paths from the back of the beach to the edge of the surf need demarcation; places for the disposal of waste, the procurement of provisions, the playing of sports, reading, swimming, need to be assigned; someone gets sick, so the families decide to establish a clinic; a fight breaks out so they decide to establish a police service and a judicial system to arbitrate disputes; more and more families continue to arrive, so a wall is built around the entire area to forestall the need for even stricter regulations; eventually, they establish a formal political institution for deciding how such regulations will be made.

Paths, clinics, judges, walls, politics – when there was only one family, none of these forms could possibly have existed. More importantly, however, it would also have been impossible to predict exactly what form these institutions would eventually take when the beach became saturated. This is a paradigm example of how complexity emerges: the material elements (individual families) that coagulate into a more complex form (political organization) do not determine the characteristics of that form. Moreover, conducting minute scientific observation of a single family, a single human, a single human cell, (a human genome, a hydrogen atom), will never allow us to predict what kind of political organization might eventually emerge on a saturated beach.

The supposedly “scientific” vision of reality usually takes physics, the science of the simplest bits of matter, as the paradigm for explaining how complex organizations emerge. This beach-story moves in the opposite direction: the obviously unpredictable emergence of political organization out of a field of families, this negotiation between the necessity of fixed law and the freedom to choose how law will be fixed, is seen as the paradigm for how all complex organization emerges. For example, when our universe was a vast and undifferentiated cloud of hydrogen and helium gas, it would have been impossible to foresee what rules would eventually come to govern the interactions between higher order elements. Until gravity concentrated these elements into coherent points (stars) and the pressure of this saturation gave rise to nuclear fusion and the formation of the periodic table, chemistry would be as non-existent as was political organization when the beach was populated by only a single family. The relationship between physics and chemistry, in other words, is parallel to the relationship between culture and politics, between one family and a space saturated with families that organize themselves in progressively more complex arrangements. The universe is not the temporal development of a logical structure already inherent in some ur-cloud of primordial atoms. It is the temporal unfolding of radical newness – and now, as the knife edge of this roughly 14 billion year old process, human beings are responsible for choosing how the ontologically unprecedented technological, political, and cultural layers of reality will come into being.

*     *     *

What does all this have to do with freedom and the Absolute Paradox? Let us begin with some sensible ontological humility: as human beings, we do not know whether and to what extent our actions are fundamentally free or fundamentally determined. From here, we can make an obvious point about the relationship between thought and action, philosophy and life: even though we do not know which ontological position is true, we are still obliged to live, and living means making (what at least appear to be) decisions. This is where the Paradox comes in: the decisions we make will inevitably presuppose one or the other ontological possibility. And now the crux: the more our decisions presuppose that humans are really just savage beasts, the more the world will come to appear that way to us; alternatively, the more our decisions presuppose that we are free to decide our fate, the more we will understand that we live in the context of a fundamental ontological choice between determinism and freedom. The theory of evolution, in this context, is being misappropriated by people who have made the wrong ontological choice as proof that there was never a choice to make. It appears, to them, that this is the only possibility. This thought experiment is an attempt to present how evolution appears from the other ontological possibility – not, of course, as some self-contradictory proof of freedom, but simply to point out that freedom is just as much a possibility today as it was for the people who lived prior to the advent of modern science.

I have found the opening of Genesis useful for understanding how all this relates to the real world. The beach, of course, is the earth today, saturated with families, engaged in the process of deciding where to put the paths and walls. As in the beginning, however, when the earth was a formless void covered in darkness, so has the earth become again, a formless cloud of greed, fear, anger, hatred, and lust. Like the god of Genesis, our job is to move over the face of this darkness, both as it manifests in our own lives and as it manifests in the world at large, and speak the words that will help it to move from death to life, from chaos to creation, words that will help usher in the next layers of universal complexity – society, technology, politics – in ways that lead to the flourishing of all life.

Joseph Kirby is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Christian Studies, focusing on the philosophy of religion, politics, and ecology.

First photo used from http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/plato/, public domain. Second photo by Philip Capper used from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maketu_beach_picnic.jpg. Third photo by NASA, public domain.

Building with a Borrowed Axe

“The trouble with the academic imitator is not that he depends upon traditions, but that the latter have not entered into his mind; into the structures of his own ways of seeing and making.”

               -- John Dewey, Art as Experience, 277.

Overwhelmed by the clamor of the newly industrialized American life, Henry David Thoreau retreated to simple quill and quiet in a cabin on the banks of Walden Pond with nothing but a borrowed axe on Independence Day, July 4, 1845 (Walden, 70). Thoreau, like many other 19th century Americans, fought to find his feet on the unfamiliar industrial ground. He lamented the passing of real work, and with it real satisfaction, seeing hidden in the eyes of Americans a quiet desperation. “A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed under what are called the games and amusements of mankind,” says Thoreau. “There is no play in them, for this comes after work” (18). Thoreau and many others at the time, felt a deep sense that something real was being lost or covered over by culture and technology.

This desperation drove Thoreau into the woods to find consolation in the “bravery of minks and muskrats” (18). Learning to depend only on the work of his own hands and the company of his own thoughts was, for Thoreau, a process of self-discovery, self-mastery, and self-reliance. For two and a half years, Thoreau lived in a cabin built with his own two hands and an axe his neighbour lent him. The ambitious solitude of Thoreau’s project is admirable and puts to shame many of our sustainability efforts and our meager attempts to make things from scratch and “off the grid.”

A reproduction of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond
in Concord, Massachussetts.

And yet Henry David Thoreau built with a borrowed axe. “It is difficult to begin without borrowing,” he admits (40).

I think Thoreau represents an essential dynamic in culture, one that seems always present and necessary at some level. In every generation, there are always those in Western society who feel that something important is being lost or covered over. Whether we label them “hippy” or “emo” or “hipster” or whatever else, each of these movements represents people who are dissatisfied with the pressure to conform to the cultural status quo that dictates what individuality ought to look like. These movements, just like the American transcendentalists, can illuminate oppressive structures hidden in culture, and we would do well to pay attention to them rather than dismiss them outright.

However, we should also acknowledge that it is all too easy to forget that our individuality does not emerge out of nothing. No matter how self-reliant we think we are, we can’t get around the fact that we begin by borrowing. Each of us was each born into a culture, a language, and a tradition, and we cannot select our identities prior to our immersion in these. We can resist the pressures of the culture we find ourselves in. But even so, we can’t get around the fact that we are acting in response to something that already exists. Our identities are always anchored in one way or another, for better or worse, to the communities we find ourselves already in. In these communities, we are inescapably bound to one another, creating and changing each other through how we interact.

The point here is a Heideggerian one. We owe the core of who we are to the world into which we were born. We were thrown into a way of life from the moment we opened our eyes, a way that orients us in the world and gives us a certain fluency in our being-in-the-world. We learn a language that allows us to express our innovative ideas, and it’s impossible to have any individuality and freedom of self-expression unless we are already indebted to the culture into which we are born and raised. Unless we have borrowed an axe, so to speak, we cannot begin building our individuality.

The deep desire for self-reliance that was made explicit in the American transcendentalists like Thoreau is still with us today, I think, in the way authenticity is so highly valued. It represents a legitimate concern that we be keenly aware and critical of the sorts of pressures that society exerts on us and the ambient noise that subtly shapes the way we think. At the same time, though, this desire for self-reliance grows out of a certain way of thinking about individuality that locates our individual uniqueness and our core selves somewhere deep inside ourselves, closed off from the world and from others. Coming to terms with our belonging to one another and to the culture into which we were born allows us to cultivate who we want to be in an authentic way that moves from simple self-reliance to other-reliance, to an ontology of dependence.

So it seems to me that the search for authenticity, or its fetishization according to some, is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as it contributes to a self-aware critique of the culture that shapes us, built on an ontology of dependence rather than the blind pursuit of self-reliant novelty. Authentic individuality, built with a borrowed axe, makes way for a new kind of self-reliance that is not just about our inner selves and is inseparable from our dependence upon one another.

Matthew E. Johnson is a junior member at the Institute for Christian Studies, focusing his philosophical studies on hermeneutics, aesthetics, discourse, and issues surrounding individual and group identity.

Photo used from http://blogs.dickinson.edu/romnat/2011/06/07/henry-david-thoreau/

In Preparation for Holiday Hibernation: Highlights from Fall 2013

But when the hard winter comes, the river-animal tamer, then even the most quick-witted must learn mistrust; and verily, not only the blockheads then say, ‘Does not everything stand still?’

‘At bottom everything stands still’—that is truly a winter doctrine, a good thing for sterile times, a fine comfort for hibernators and hearth-squatters.

–Zarathustra in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 201.

Thanks, Nietzsche the Grinch, for trying to ruin Christmas peace with your yuletide cynicism.

At the risk of being a “blockhead,” I must admit that I am very much looking forward to hibernating by the fire for a week or two over the holidays. It’s been a successful semester on Ground Motive, and it’s time for some serious hearth-squatting stillness. Before collapsing in a heap of holiday cheer, it’s worth reveling in the accomplishments of the past few months.

Here are some of the high points of the fall semester on Ground Motive.

The DooyAward

I’m excited to announce that the first Herman Dooyeweerd Award for the Best Blog Post (better known as the DooyAward) has been awarded to Stefan Knibbe, author of “Rhetoric, The Other, and Boycotting Ender’s Game.” The award takes into consideration the quality of the content, the effectiveness of tone and delivery, and the overall reach, including shares, views, and comments. Stefan’s article weighs in with some insightful comments on a controversial topic with grace and a respectful tone. Regardless of whether or not you’re interested in Ender’s Game, this post delivers a compelling case for compassion and the power of stories. Congratulations, Stefan!

Honorable Mentions

Most Viewed: Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Hermeneutic Circle

Outlining some parallels between the great detective’s crime fighting strategies and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, this installment of Ground Motive’s Popular Mythology series seems to have struck a chord with readers and takes the lead on the number of page views. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the long awaited third season of the British TV series Sherlock starts up in the new year!

Most Comments: When I Think of Things that Make You Feel That Way

ICS Junior Member and prolific author of the philosophy blog Re(-)petitions Dean Dettloff made an appearance on Ground Motive with beautiful insights from an unlikely place. Posted just in time for Thanksgiving, Dean looked to the hip-hop duo Blackalicious for helpful advice on how to live in gratitude despite our consumerist culture.

Best Guest Post: Perspectives from a Park Bench

Angie Hocking’s reflections on her ongoing street ministry at Church of the Redeemer in Toronto were both thought-provoking and haunting. This guest post holds up the mirror to us as readers in those times when we get too wrapped up in our own world and find it all too easy to forget that we share in a common humanity with all people, regardless of social status, income, or lifestyle.

Most Mentions of Assassins: The Search for Colombian “Q”: Discovering the Hidden Source of a Spirituality of Hope

Hector Acero-Ferrer, ICS Junior Member and born Colombian, shares a unique perspective on interreligious dialogue as a Colombian living in Canada. He explores the question of why Colombian Catholicism sometimes looks so much different from the Canadian variety. What are the hidden forces that shape religious tradition?

Most Controversial: Memes, Tradition, and Building a Culture According to Richard Dawkins

This post’s use of Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes and its surprising potential benefits for a robust understanding of human freedom raised a red flag for some readers. Because one of Ground Motive’s primary aims is to spark conversations about important topics in philosophy, religion, and social ethics, a controversial article represents an opportunity. So if you have an opinion on this article, don’t hesitate to add your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Post with the Deepest Thoughts: What Buddhist Meditation Taught Me About Sin

In a moving reflection on spirituality and embodiment, PhD candidate Joseph Kirby suggests that Buddhist meditation and Christian spirituality might be deepened by one another. Perhaps engaging in such interreligious dialogue makes us realize the profound similarities we share with others by simply being embodied human beings.

Best Post About the Upcoming Conference Are We There Yet? Economic Justice and the Common Good (thereyet.ca): Economic Justice and…family reunions?

Don’t forget to mark your new 2014 calendars for the upcoming conference in Edmonton on May 12 and 13! It’s going to be a fascinating couple of days that will challenge you and make you think. Take a look at this post for some information on why this conference is so important and what makes it unique.

Best Post about Free Stuff: Building a World Where Knowledge is Free

This semester, the Institute for Christian Studies launched their Open Repository, full of previously hidden gems of research and scholarship. In celebration of Open Access Week, this article, along with an interview with ICS’s librarian Isabella Guthrie-McNaughton, highlights the benefits and difficulties of moving towards an open access model of publishing.

Most Thought-Provoking Interview: Don’t Be a Hero

As the first post of the semester, this interview may not have received the airtime it deserved. In this post, Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, author of The World is Not Ours to Save: Finding the Freedom to Do Good, recounts his experiences in Christian activism and cautions against its tendency toward valuing heroism over real-world concern for real people. He goes on to suggest alternate ways of thinking about how to approach Christian activism in this excerpt and in the second installment as well.

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Thanks to everyone who contributed to Ground Motive this semester. It has been an exhilarating season of fresh insights and fruitful conversation. As we head into 2014, the Centre for Philosophy, Religion, and Social Ethics eagerly anticipates a new year of innovative research and inspiring ideas.

The Search for Colombian "Q": Discovering the Hidden Source of a Spirituality of Hope

By Hector Acero Ferrer

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to share some of my interfaith experiences in a session of a Muslim-Christian dialogue run by two very active interfaith organizations in Toronto. In the panel where I participated, youth and young adults were asked to talk about their particular encounters with other faith traditions in the context of a secularizing, globalized world. Since I was born and raised in Colombia, I was supposed to give an overview of the situation in Latin America, providing some context for my personal experience and for the way in which interfaith dialogue is done outside of Canada. As I started to think about the topic I panicked, as I had the same reaction many Canadians have when they hear the terms “interfaith” and “Latin America” in the same sentence: what can I possibly tell a group of Torontonians about interfaith when my own experience in the topic is so limited?

This was the first time I reflected upon the fact that I had appropriated a stereotype without further consideration: I assumed that Roman Catholicism was an overarching attribute of Latin American culture and, more to the point, that my own circumstances had isolated me from the input of other faith traditions. Although concerned about these prejudices and unfounded generalizations (especially coming from someone who claims to take philosophy and religion seriously), I began my analysis confidently, aware that it is common to all Colombians –every single one of them- to overgeneralize and exaggerate. In this process I found out that diverse faith traditions are still alive in Colombian territories, finding expression through radical Christian theologies, different forms of mystical spirituality, and an ongoing, insistent call to social transformation.

In order to further explore the encounter of faith traditions in Colombia, I should probably begin by mentioning Colombia’s current socio-political environment. Similar to many other nations in the so-called “Developing World,” Colombia is a country where many layers of conflicts and crises stem out of a single social contradiction: how is it possible to be so poor when we are so rich in all the resources that the world needs the most? This is not a new question, or one exclusive to this region, but it is certainly a concern that has oriented the “Colombian-experience” from the time of the Spanish colonial rule.

Claiming to be 90% Roman Catholic, Colombia is "officially" consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the birthplace of Liberation Theology (Conference of Latin American Bishops of 1968), and the location of the first office of the Spanish Inquisition in the Americas. Colombia is also the country where thanks to the traffic of drugs the meaning of "full of grace" and "full of sin" have collided, where the shrine for "Our Lady of the Assassins" is not only the content of a movie but a crude, escalating reality, and where the current well-being of its peoples is exchanged as the mortgage for an afterlife justice.

Although all of these seem to be extensions of the Roman Catholic worldview imported to the Americas by the Spanish colonizers, it is possible to argue that there is a plurality of faith traditions that have found their way into current faith expressions. When comparing the way Roman Catholicism is lived in Toronto to my experience at home I cannot avoid concluding that there is a source to my interpretation of Christianity, a second set of beliefs and practices that informed the ritualistic experiences in which I was raised, one that did not correspond to the Western worldview. In a similar way that Biblical scholars postulate “Q” as the missing source of information for the synoptic gospels, I was led to postulate a “Q” source in the Colombian case, a source identifiable with not only one, but a multiplicity of aboriginal worldviews.

Colombians’ strong emphasis on motherhood and the role of women in organized religion, the significance of rituals surrounding death, marriages, and welcomes, and the understanding of the church as an organization that should start the building of the Kingdom here on earth are not necessarily the foundational pillars of Canadian Roman Catholicism. It seems to me that all these are indicative of the profound multicultural context in which Latin American Catholicism continues to develop. What the Spaniard “Conquistadores” encountered in the lands now called Central and South American was a plethora of faith traditions (some of them more ancient than Christianity) that infused Romanism and produced a Catholicism with a renewed spirituality and strength, which we can trace all the way to Pope Francis,

“God makes God-self felt in the heart of each person. God also respects the culture of all people. Each nation picks up that vision of God and translates it in accordance with the culture, and elaborates, purifies and gives it a system[…] God moves everyone to seek God and to discover God through creation[…] God encounters us; God reveals God-self to us, God shows us the way and accompanies us[…]” (Bergoglio 2010, p,19)

The call to action, the profound concern for the poor, and the special attention to hospitality are all elements that the aboriginal peoples cherished and imprinted in the following generations of natives, blacks, criollos, and Spaniards in Latin American lands. It is now widely accepted that the cultural interchange that occurred during the colonization process of the Americas happened in more than one direction; what is not usually discussed is that the exchange is still alive after many generations. This very rich encounter continues informing Colombians silently on new ways of living out the gospel of Christ, of remaining hopeful, and of holding each other in trust as members of the same human community. Isn’t this interfaith at its best?

Hector Acero Ferrer is a junior member at the Institute for Christian Studies, currently focusing his research on philosophy of language and philosophy of religion.