Faith

Ambiguity in Scripture, Part III

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In Part II of this series of posts, we talked about how ambiguity expands the number of things that scripture can say to us in a single passage. This time, let’s talk about how ambiguity makes room for faith, theology and humility.

We have discussed a few examples of ambiguity in scripture, so I’m not going to devote time to trying to prove that scripture is often ambiguous and subject to human interpretation.

If you want more than a literary analysis to reveal Biblical ambiguities, I would suggest reading Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus. As you’ll probably see in other posts, I have some significant reservations about Ehrman’s approach to the historical Jesus, but I can guarantee that you will learn something valuable if you listen to or read something he’s done. I don’t remember anything in Misquoting Jesus that my general criticism of his work extends to.

Misquoting Jesus will walk you through the many practical problems with interpreting and understanding the Bible. In the New Testament, for example, Koine Greek was written without punctuation and without spacing between words (writing media were quite expensive, after all). When we read the gospels in English (or anything other than the original Greek), all those interpretive aids of syntax and structure are at best guesses by the scholars who edit translations of the Bible. By way of example about how a mere comma can change meaning entirely, compare, “Let’s eat, Grandma!” to, “Let’s eat Grandma!” With a little research, you can find a number of passages in the New Testament—some of them the words of Jesus—about which the proper punctuation and structure remains hotly debated by Biblical scholars.

Here’s my first new point about how ambiguity in the scriptures really is a good thing: without ambiguity, there can be no faith. Faith, by definition, is a conviction of the truth of something that cannot be proved. Existentially, we could not have faith in God if we could readily prove God’s existence—God’s hiddenness from us creates room for faith. The same is true on a smaller scale within Biblical interpretation—because ambiguity allows for multiple interpretations, none of which can be unassailably shown to be correct—none can claim to have the definitive understanding of Jesus.

On the one hand, as we’ve already touched on, this allows us to see more of an infinite God through competing possible interpretations, some of which may be dismissed when weighed against other passages of the scripture, experience, tradition or reason, some of which remain simultaneously potentially valid.

For purposes of this post, I want to focus on the fact that ambiguity is the great equalizer in terms of our faith in God and our following of Jesus. Were salvation, or even an understanding of Jesus, predicated upon intellect, education or interpretive ability, we would have a de facto form of Calvinist or Augustinian election. But, as Ephesians 2:8-9 tells us, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” This includes works of interpretation, I think.

As important, we are told, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 8). If God is love, by the transitive property the converse must also be true: anyone who knows love also knows God.

One cannot know love except by experience and personal encounter with it. One cannot reason one’s way into understanding love by intellect alone. In this way, human experience itself allows (through the experience and practice of love) the ability to follow Jesus and to be sanctified.

In this way, theology ought to be viewed as an exploration of what it means to love, what it means to follow Jesus, but it is not the thing itself. Those who do not grasp complex theological concepts, whether by choice or ability, are not to be excluded from Christ’s reach. I find the egalitarianism of that concept awesome in the classical sense of the word.

As someone who derives a great amount of his identity from being an intellectual, I find this realization amazingly humbling. For all my theologizing (which, obviously, I greatly enjoy), I’m not going to enlighten someone; I’m not going to reveal some truth heretofore unknown. As an amateur theologian, all I really do is help people to find ways to think about what it means to follow God or to live in a world where God exists. I’m at best a glorified moving guy—I can help you unpack, but I can’t get you the stuff in the first place.

There’s also an important point in how we deal with theological disagreements. Because we cannot be absolutely sure of the truth of our own theology (or theologies in the collective), we ought not to be too oppositional when discussing matters of faith with others. Overconfidence in one’s theological position leads to persecution of others, turning away the unchurched and generally working against Christ’s goals for us.

Important caveats here. First, I am not saying that theology is relative. I firmly believe that there is an objective truth to reality in all things, including theological matters and the way we are supposed to think about and relate to God and each other. My thoughts are not borne from a lack of belief in objective truth, but a healthy dose of skepticism about human intellectual capacity to clearly understand that truth.

Direct human knowledge of the capital “T” Truth, I think only comes from direct revelation from God. Every other method of understanding requires approximation. I believe that direct revelation from God has occurred and continues to occur, but this doesn’t really change things for humans as a whole. One person may have a revelation from God and know the truth, but since I cannot occupy that person’s consciousness to verify the reality of claims to know the truth, I cannot rule out the possibilities of self-delusion, misinterpretation of experiences, or outright lying. Someone else’s revelation carries with it the same ambiguity as any other form of indirect revelation—like the scriptures. Unless I’m the one who directly receives the revelation, I cannot be absolutely sure of its truth. To date, I have not received any direct revelation of truth from God—nor do I expect to. Everything I have to say is interpretation and should be treated as such.

Along with this, I don’t mean to imply that the lack of direct access to the Truth makes theology worthless. Quite the contrary. We need continuous theological investigation to evaluate our theology and allow it to progress into what we think is the closest approximation of the Truth. Theology may be an asymptote that comes ever closer to infinity but never touches it.

There is still ground for theological debate, and competing theologies can be weighed against one another by the amount of support we find for them through scripture, the application of logic and conformity with experience.

And, as I’ve mentioned above, I think that there is one thing in scripture (and reality) that is completely unambiguous. We are to love God and one another. For me, that’s the only Truth I need; I can live with the ambiguity of everything that follows.

Point Three: Ambiguity in scripture shows us that we are equal in the eyes of God, regardless of interpretive or intellectual ability.

For the next post in this series, click here.

Ambiguity in Scripture, Part II

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In the previous post in this series, we looked quite generally at ambiguity in scripture and how it draws us in to wrestle with difficult concepts of theology, metaphysics and existence in general. Today, I want to look at one passage in particular.

It’s the passage often referred to as “The Rich Young Ruler.” It appears in both all three synoptic gospels, but I’m taking the text here from Matthew 19:16-22 in the English Standard Version:

16And behold, a man came up to him [Jesus], saying, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” 17And he [Jesus] said to him [the rich young ruler], “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” 18He said to him, “Which ones?” And Jesus said, “You shall not murder, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness, 19Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 20The young man said to him, “All these I have kept. What do I still lack?” 21Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” 22When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.”

What happens at the end of this passage? Does the young man surrender his possessions and follow Jesus? The traditional answer is, “No,” and the following statement of Jesus about rich people and camels and heaven seems to support this interpretation.

But look closer. We don’t actually know what the rich young ruler does, we only know that he goes away with sorrow. We assume that he goes away sorrowful because he is not willing to give away his wealth, but he could just as easily be going away sorrowful because he has decided to give away his wealth and is suffering the angst and upset that inevitably follows the loss of material things.

Jesus’s statement about getting into heaven being more difficult for a rich man than a camel passing through the eye of the needle doesn’t really tell us anything that gives us logical support for either interpretation. Jesus could be implying that this young man has triumphed where others may not, or that this man, like many others, will be unable to let go of worldly things, or even that we don’t yet know what the young man will do and Jesus is simply describing the difficulty of the choice he has to make.

Which is the correct answer? We don’t know, and—purposefully, I think—we cannot know. Without a definite answer, we have to consider each possibility; we cannot cast any aside.

When we acknowledge the ambiguity in this story instead of glossing it over with the traditional answer, we are given to contemplate: (1) the difficulty of surrendering worldly things to follow Jesus, (2) the inevitable sorrow that would result from choosing to give up worldly things to follow Jesus, and (3) the difficulty of being within that choice, the struggle to decide one way or the other and to be willing to live with the consequences.

One story, three points. If we were definitively told that the rich young ruler goes away because he will not do what Jesus has asked, we lose meaning in this passage rather than gaining meaning.

Ambiguity allows several points to be put forth at the same time, simultaneously multiplying the meaning to be found in a passage while providing syntactic and stylistic efficiency the communication of those multiple meanings. In other words, the Bible says more with less when ambiguity is (under the right circumstances, of course) employed, as it is throughout.

Think about why Jesus speaks in parables. Parables are analogies; analogies have slippage between the two things compared, creating ambiguity. Thus, in parables, Jesus can convey more complex meaning than by making direct and unequivocal statements. This is, in part, why we often hear people say, “Every time I reread the Bible (or a particular passage), I get something new out of it.”

Your state of mind at the time you read a passage will influence how you resolve ambiguities. Therefore, at different times in your life and under different circumstances, the scriptures will speak to you in different ways, with the most applicable ideas from a particular passage always seeming to float to the top.

This is not to say that there is relativism in what Jesus says; on the topics of greatest importance, Jesus speaks clearly—“Love your neighbor as yourself,” for instance. Even in this passage, the meaning that following Jesus is the goal is not equivocated or made ambivalent. The Bible uses ambiguity selectively to force us to consider those things that are not ambiguous. It is clear that we are to love our neighbors, but what does it mean to love them? This is a serious theological question and, in current church issues, at the heart of the debates in various denominations about the approach to the LGBTQ community within the Christian faith.

I’ll talk a little about how I think we should approach resolving difficult ambiguities like the one above in a later post in this series. For now, I want to point something out about the ambiguity of how we love our neighbors. If Jesus meant for us to move away from the legalism of the Old Testament, such an ambiguous command is a perfect way to do it. Without detailed and clear guidance, we cannot easily say to ourselves, “I have done enough; I need do no more for my neighbors.” Instead, we must always ask ourselves, “Am I loving my neighbors? What more can I do, or what can I do differently, to love them better?” The ambiguity of how to carry out the command demands more of us than a black-and-white commandment, elevating, empowering and extending the exhortation itself.

Point 2: Ambiguity allows greater meaning in fewer words through the incorporation of alternative possible resolutions of the ambiguity.

For the next post in this series, click here.

Ambiguity in Scripture, Part I

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In the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, a German Jew who had fled to Istanbul to avoid the Nazis wrote what I think is one of the foundational books for any literary understanding of the scriptures. His name was Erich Auerbach; the book was Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.

If the stories are to be believed, circumstances forced Auerbach to do much of his work by memory, for he did not have access to all of the texts drawn from and cited to in Mimesis. While a fascinating thought, it is largely irrelevant; Auerbach was a genius whatever the strength of his memory.

It is only the first chapter of the book, entitled “Odysseus’ Scar,” that concerns us for the time being. In that chapter, Auerbach argues that there are two major iconic styles of storytelling running through western civilization, at least historically speaking. Like Tolkien, Auerbach was a philologist by training, born at the end of the 19th Century, and with a penchant for looking backward, far backward, rather than at the contemporary.

Two iconic styles of literature in historic western writing. Only two. The first, Auerbach tells us, is the style best exemplified by the works of Homer, in the Iliad and (as the chapter’s title suggests) the Odyssey. By way of example, Auerbach carefully describes the scene in which Odysseus has returned home in disguise after his long journey. He is recognized for his true self by a scar on his leg, and Homer gives us great detail about that scar—how it was got, where it is, etc.—as it plays its pivotal role in the plot.

That is Homer in a nutshell, overflowing with detail, carefully crafting images in our mind’s eye, little left out for us, all with the purpose (Auerbach says) of giving us a profound sense of awe, and therefore pleasure. This is a pagan style, rich in sensory data and concerned with worldly delight.

Homer is to be contrasted with the Biblical style—a Dragnet-style, “Just the facts, ma’am,” and not even all of the facts we want to know. We get the bare bones of the story, just enough information to understand the flow of events, but not enough to become cognizant of all that is going on in the story.

Auerbach’s example of this is one I never forget and often use. You should play along. Think about Abraham and Isaac in Genesis. We know that Isaac is Abraham’s son, that God has commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac as a test of his faith, that Isaac seems to go along willingly. But how old is Isaac? Before you go back to the text to check, I want you to see if you can recall the answer by memory. What does Isaac look like in your memory? How old is he?

Of course, I’m pulling one over on you. Genesis doesn’t tell us Isaac’s age at the time of Abraham’s trial. We tend to think of him as young, perhaps pre-adolescent, seemingly innocent and only wanting to please his father. But that’s not the only possibility.

In the middle ages, theologians largely believed that Isaac was thirty-three when Abraham took him to be sacrificed. An adult! One who might have moved out of his parents’ home! Who might have his own children! My age, in fact.

Does an adult Isaac willingly going along with Abraham seem strange to you? For the medieval theologians, it was strange to think that he was only a boy. Why? Because they believed that Jesus was thirty-three at the time of his crucifixion; they were searching for parallels that showed continuity between the Old Testament and the New.

What Auerbach wants to show us here is that the Bible often, seemingly purposefully, leaves out details from the story, even potentially important ones for the story’s meaning. The literary effect could not be farther from the Homeric one. Where Homer fills in all the details, forcing the reader to step back and spectate in awe, the Bible forces the reader to fill in the blanks, engaging with the story. The reader of scripture must make choices to resolve ambiguities in the text, must interpret, must participate.

It is commonly argued that the gospels are written in both style and substance in such a way as to force the reader to ask and answer the same question as everyone else in the narrative: who do you believe Jesus is? But Auerbach takes this idea even further—the very style of the entire scriptures (though he was more focused perhaps on the Old Testament) does not allow us to stand idly by and watch—we must struggle with the text (and here Jacob wrestling with God comes to mind quite readily) to make it mean something. We must invest ourselves in it and synthesize it with ourselves for the text to come alive. The sparsity of detail naturally pulls us in to do just this, even if you don’t recognize it’s happening.

Point One: Ambiguity forces us to engage; we cannot simply absorb.

For the next post in this series, click here.

Paganism in Christianity, Part II

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In my earlier post on this subject, I talked about my distaste for military imagery in Christian thought and theology. This time, I’d like to talk about something I think is even more dangerous—the quid-pro-quo.

We all know what the phrase means (from Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs if from nowhere else): “something for something”, a bargain, an exchange—perhaps especially driven by need more than desire.

The quid-pro-quo formed a foundational aspect of Greco-Roman religion. Given that the gods could be cruel and easily took offense at the unintentional misdeeds of humans, it seems that one might wish to avoid the attention of the gods to the extent possible. Similar to me and cats, for the same reasons.

On the other hand, the Greco-Roman pagans did seek otherworldly assistance in their lives. But, they asked and prayed for things more worldly than we might think of as proper (in Christianity). They wanted good harvests, protection from their enemies (or curses upon them, as many ritual objects attest), the love of someone they desired. Far less time was spent praying for things that would be considered “spiritual” or that concerned cosmic redemption or punishment.

There were many gods to ask favors of as well. There were the Olympian gods, the most powerful of the supernatural beings, but there were also daemones (not to be confused with demons—the daimones or daemones were nature spirits and tutelary spirits, who could be good, evil, or somewhat more ambiguous), genii loci (the spirits of places that had influence over that place) and many other beings of all manner of rank who were believed to have the power to effectuate change in the visible world.

For the ancient Romans (and probably also the Greeks, but I am somewhat less familiar with their religious practices—though fascinating), one simply did not approach a supernatural being empty-handed. Something must be given for something asked, a quid-pro-quo. And so sacrifices were made to the gods when a request was made of them. This could be something personal—an oath or vow made to a god if a request was granted—but animal sacrifice was common and human sacrifice, though quite rare, was not unheard of.

While we may have left animal and human sacrifices behind us, we to a large extent not abandoned the paradigm of the quid-pro-quo when dealing with the divine. This concept runs deeper than the place in prayer we’ve all been: “God if you do X for me, I promise I’ll never do X again,” or “God if X happens, I promise I’ll go to church more.” Other theologians have popularly described this as the “vending machine-God” approach.

It is comforting because it gives us some illusion of control, some ability to predict the movement of the divine so long as we hold up our end of the bargain. And yet, when we repeatedly find that that’s not how God works, our faith is shaken because it stands of the weakest of foundations.

This approach is also tied into the gospel of wealth movement: “If I’m a good Christian, God will make me wealthy and well-liked and powerful and important.” This empty theology has become concerningly popular and widespread in recent decades. Keep in mind, though, that this is only part of the reason the doctrine is so seductive; the inverse can also be a source of comfort from reality: “If I am rich and well-liked and powerful, I must be godly.” Dangerous stuff, that.

But this is not a post about the gospel of wealth. It’s about a more insidious type of quid-pro-quo—the spiritual bargain.

E. Stanley Jones, in his book form the early 20th century called The Christ of the Mount, tells us that we’ve been doing things the wrong way in Christianity  because we mistakenly believe that the point of Christianity is to “get into heaven.” For Jones, the point is “to become perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect,” but for now let’s focus on moving away from the wrong way rather than finding the right one.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Pascal’s Wager, named for apologist and philosopher Blaise Pascal. It goes like this: God is either real or not. In choosing how to live, we are told that God wants us to do certain things but not others, and that there are eternal rewards for those who follow God’s desires and eternal punishments for those who do not—again, if God is real. Without knowing for sure whether God is real or not (is the universe bluffing?), we must bet on whether we believe God is real. There are four possibilities then, based upon our bet and whether God is real. One, God is real and we believed and acted like God is real, so we get to go to heaven. Two, God is real and we ignored God and so we have to go to hell. Three, God is not real but we have lived our lives as though God is real, perhaps sacrificing some worldly pleasures and desires we might otherwise have enjoyed. Four, God is not real and we do not act as if God is real, nothing lost but nothing gained.

For Pascal, the answer to such a quandary is simple—one ought to act like the Christian God is real and try to obey God and be holy. If you’re wrong, your loss is minimal compared to God being real and not trying to obey, falling into perdition. It’s a betting man’s approach to faith, based upon probabilities, severity of the various possible outcomes, and the quid-pro-quo of what each possibility might net compared to the cost of the bet.

Pascal’s bet exemplifies the cynical quid-pro-quo approach to spirituality: “Don’t be faithful because of who God is; be faithful because it’s the fastest ticket to Heaven-town.” If this is the kind of faith that we have, it is no faith at all and we only deceive ourselves that we are seeking relationship with God.

The only way to avoid the illusion of the divine quid-pro-quo is to adopt an attitude of love—the kind of selfless love that we call agape—for God. It is a love that does not expect something in return, that does is not contingent upon a particular situation, that will not be rescinded when the unfortunate comes to pass.

Our God has negated the quid-pro-quo altogether. The work of Jesus Christ cleared the way to salvation and eternal life, not the bargaining or righteousness of man. We are called to sanctify ourselves to be sure, to pursue holiness and to become Christ-like. But this has been separated from salvation freely given by grace without cost. Our desire to be sanctified must come from our love for God, for by the time we make such a decision or have such a desire, God has long since given us the gift of life eternal. There can be no quid-pro-quo; the gifts have been poured upon us until our cups runneth over. We ought to act like it.

Roleplaying Games as a Microcosm of Free Will, Part 2

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In Part I, I described an extended analogy using (good) roleplaying games as an example of the compatibilist school of thought on free will. But why does it matter?

Our understanding of free will informs almost every other aspect of our theology. For a human being to be culpable for wrongdoing, he must have free will. This is a basic aspect of our criminal justice system and the same principle holds true for the cosmic importance of sin. Our understanding of the purpose and direction of Creation rests in part on our belief about how and how often God directly intervenes in our lives. Differing views about the cause of events—randomness, directly controlled by God or something in between—influence our understanding of theodicy. More important, perhaps, than all of these, our understanding of free will tells us something about our own place in Creation and about our personal relationships with God.

So why do I feel so strongly about the analogy presented in the previous post on this subject? Like all good analogies, I think roleplaying games show us something about a doctrine of free will that we might otherwise miss. It is not simply that the roleplaying game correlates with a compatibilist doctrine of free will and that makes so much sense to me, it’s what the game shows us about that doctrine.

Here it is: a compatibilist view of free will has a strong component of relationship when there is a being, a personality, behind the deterministic force. The Player and the GM may at times be opposed, but they are always together, negotiating a narrative through mutual agency and response. A good GM, much of the time, need not determine the course of the story—all she has to do is respond to the actions of the Player Characters by determining the logical consequences of those actions—in the physical location (or even the physics of) the game world or in the relationships between Player Characters and Non-Player Characters controlled by the GM.

It’s important to keep and mind that, when responsive determination of cause and effect is the GM’s role, that’s not determinism, at least not directly. We might attribute some determinism to the nature of the rules themselves as they provide the boundaries of possibility, but that’s something we can discuss in a later post. That is an impersonal determinism.

What’s fascinating here are those times when the GM decides that the Players will experience a certain event or encounter a certain character—here, the GM is making a conscious choice (stemming largely from personality) that allows the GM to directly determine his interaction with the Players. It’s a set-up to be sure, but a fundamental one when there are both free agents (the Players and their characters) and an consciousness in control of the game world.

Within a scene, both the Players and the GM (and the mechanics) work to determine what happens. The best GMs sometimes “fudge” the results, occasionally ignoring the dice (or whatever other action-resolution system is in place) and determines himself what happens. The very best GMs are able to keep the players completely oblivious about when this does or does not occur. This is determinism to be sure, but when used sparingly it is a powerful determinism that nevertheless preserves the power of Player’s choices. There must be trust between Player and GM that the other is “playing fair” and preserving free will (and not cheating the rules). Here both free will and determinism play important roles.

With all of this, the roleplaying lays out for us the why of compatibilism being the best school of thought for the Christian. It preserves God’s ultimate sovereignty, maintains the dignity and freewill of man and, most important, builds relationship between the two as they co-create narrative. Ours is a God of relationship—even the trinity points to this. Why would God not, then, write the rules of the universe in such a way that relationship remains the focus?

Roleplaying Games as a Microcosm of Free Will, Part I

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In this post, I’m going to use an analogy (or set of analogies) to describe the various philosophical schools of thought on free will. Being a nerd and avid gamer, I’m of course going to find that analogy in the world of gaming. Specifically, in that corner of the gaming world that is possibly the nerdiest (and also my favorite): roleplaying games (RPGs). Here, I mean RPGs that are played with pen, paper and dice (or some other mechanic) in a face-to-face situation—not video games that would be classified as falling in the “RPG” genre.

If you’re not sure how a roleplaying game works, I’ve written a basic explanation here.

Here begins the analogy:

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that written literature represents pure determinism (at least when you are the reader). The story is already set, the characters are going to take the actions that they have been written to take, and you’re just along for the ride.[1]

On the other end of the spectrum is when you tell a story to others and have no set requirements about the content or nature of the story. This is pure free will. No outside force determines the course of the story and no logic need constrain your characters; you are the sole captain of your ship.

Somewhere between pure determinism and pure free will, things get interesting. Here we find a debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists. The latter believe that any element of determinism destroys the existence of free will, while the former believe that some determinism and some freedom of will can peacefully and logically co-exist.

In a RPG, the GM is a little microcosm of a god, though GMs who take this seriously usually fail to keep in mind that they’re playing a game that the Players are there to have fun, and that being forced to act out a story over which they have no control is neither fun nor interesting. Players generally call GM behavior that forces them down an inevitable story arc “railroading.”

When a GM railroads his players, they may be choosing their actions, but the consequences of their actions will always lead to the same result. The meaningfulness of choosing is lost; only the illusion of meaningful choice remains. Don’t look at the man behind the curtain or that illusion will itself disappear.

Railroading in a RPG, then, represents something more akin to the deterministic nature of Fate in Greek theatre—the characters seem free to do what they want, but they will always reach the same result no matter what they do—just ask Oedipus. Like Greek tragedy, this is depressing; it’s only real meaning is the paradigm’s tautology that Fate is unavoidable, so no matter what you do, you cannot avoid Fate.

Both Greek tragedy and poorly-run RPGs represent incompatibilist theory—it’s plain to see here how the determinism of the situation makes the existence of the remaining modicum of free will ultimately meaningless.

Roleplaying games, when run by a skilled GM, fall firmly into the compatibilist free-will philosophy. There are some—indeed, many—things outside of a Player Character’s control. From the very conception of a game, the determination of the setting to be used for the game naturally precludes certain options for characters, both ontological and practical. Once the game begins, at least some of the events that occur are predetermined by the GM.[2] What has happened before the game begins, for instance, is usually dictated solely by the GM.

Once the story begins, however, the Players and their characters have true agency. When a PC acts, he has the capacity to enact change in the (fictional) world around him. The things he does influence the story in a tangible way as the GM incorporates the results of the character’s actions into the plot and narrative as they progress.

What we end up with is a back-and-forth, a give-and-take between Players and GM where both influence the course of the story. Determinism—the actions of the GM in setting the stage for the characters’ actions—and free will—the actions of the characters in pushing the story along—live side by side and feed off of one another. This scenario is clearly the most meaningful. We’ll explore why in the next post.

For part 2, click here.

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[1] I understand that many writers, myself included, would argue that a story takes on a life of its own during its creation and wanders in directions we never initially considered. Nevertheless, once put down, the story is immutable.

[2] It has become popular in the last decade to focus on building narrative in an RPG and, thus, to foster “collaborative storytelling,” in which the players have greater control over the story in a more cooperative relationship with the GM. Even games without such a focus have become less “adversarial” in their depiction of the relationship between GM and players. Nevertheless, the analogy for our purposes focuses on the situation where the GM has ultimate narrative authority but allows the actions of the characters to alter the story as it moves forward.

The Girl with the Former Tattoo

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I encounter her waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store, where our humanity is laid bare by the frustration of waiting and other people and uncomfortable awareness of self.

Like our very humanity, her shoulders are bare. Above her left shoulder-blade, there is a mottled patch of skin, scar tissue telling the tale of her life. The pattern it makes is undeniable: a large cross. The ink is long gone, but the shape of it remains impressed upon her.

Immediately, I am filled with curiosity, which I imagine (and hope) is mixed with compassion. The very idea of it tells the story in my mind’s eye, unfolding in short vignettes and clips formed of my own reverie.

This woman once held such profound faith that she elected to suffer for it, even with a cross. She displayed her faithfulness proudly, perhaps defiantly, a badge of honor, the tattoo an external reflection of the inner truth that her faith could not be separated from her. But the analogy is incomplete, for the tattoo can be, and has been, removed.

Not having a tattoo myself, I understand the pain it costs only by resemblance and conjecture. I know enough to know that it is not a small thing. Thousands of pin pricks to pierce the skin and deposit pigment, blood welling up from below. But the pain of removing a tattoo—I later learn—is worse.

She spent hours under a laser over many weeks, the spear of light heating the ink until it began to break down. Most report the pain as far greater than that of getting the tattoo in the first place. Despite this, the motley skin on her shoulder can only mean one thing: something happened so that keeping the tattoo of a cross became more painful to her than searing it off.

In my mind I play through many scenarios—the death of a loved one, rejection or harsh treatment by fellow believers, interpretation of scripture that clashed head-on with what she had been told was acceptable, the hypocrisy of the faithful or some other unfortunate event that left her broken. It seems to me that the hurt must be deeply personal to have moved her to bear the physical pain of tattoo removal.

As I imagine her life and her pain—too afraid (or, as I’d prefer to think, too polite) to ask her about it—I begin to wonder how much we Christians, acting in our capacity as professing Christians, do to hurt others and turn them away from the church. Or worse, from Christ.

We, collectively as Christians, regardless of denomination, do a poor job of admitting our faults, holding back our judgments and, as John Wesley warned us, refraining from doing harm. It is true that some of the pain and offense results from willing misconception that the church is God, but we could always be clearer that we have our own failings and are no better than anyone else. As important, how do we order our lives and our witness to do no harm, to avoid misrepresenting Christ to the world?

The Honest Seeker

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We sit together at breakfast this honest seeker and I, a young man who I have the great good fortune of meeting this morning, who reveals more to me than I to him. By happenstance, if such a thing is to be believed in, we have been brought together, him seeking faith, me welling up with unexpected passion to explain my own.

Our subject is honest about his position. He sees great value in the social structure the church provides, great wisdom in the moral and philosophical precepts the scriptures teach, great promise in the philanthropic work the body of Christ undertakes. And yet, he will state matter-of-factly that he remains unsure about the spiritual reality of Christianity.

On this foundation he stands, his mind open, seeking for ideas and doctrines, carefully and skeptically weighing them, patiently considering the advice and thoughts and experiences of others, ever pursuing a reality he is not sure of, unsure he possesses a spiritual inclination, intellectually fascinated by the possibility of encountering the reality he hears so much about from others, ready to be convinced but pessimistic that he can be.

As we talk he questions me with deep and thoughtful interrogatories: Why is there evil and suffering? Why do Christians see all sin as equal? What is the resurrection supposed to mean? I struggle along to provide what answers I can; he follows with more difficult queries, testing not only me but the very limits of rational thought. When I tell him that some questions are beyond human understanding, he pauses, pondering the thought, piercing it with the sharp edges of his mind, perhaps perturbed by the prospect but satisfied by my honesty (if not the truth of my assertion).

He holds my attempts at answers in his hand, turning them slowly to view them from every angle, taking the measure of them, ascertaining their boundaries and their flaws. When I tell him that faith is a truth that must be experienced, not proved, he looks back at me with understanding, his young eyes seeming older by far.

I appreciate his skepticism. He is cautious before ever finding faith. Even before he believes, he is building a tower, testing its foundations, proving it to himself before he makes it his home. His, when he finds it, will be a strong faith, well considered, conscious of the ambiguities with which one must become comfortable to maintain faith, both reasonable and beyond reason. He is honest, surely the God who sees his heart will reward such honest seeking.

We part ways after a few hours but agree to meet regularly to continue our fellowship. But I am no guide, merely a fellow traveler on a road we all must walk to its destination.

Dukkha in Christianity

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In this post, I’m going to—for now—sidestep the issue of how I think the Christian should consider other religions in relation to her own. Instead, I want to talk about how the study of the theology of other religions can shed insight of our own Christian theology.

I’m going to do that with the specific example of my encounter with Dukkha in Buddhism. Dukkha is a Sanskrit word often translated as “suffering.”

Although Buddhist thought sometimes considers suffering in a broad sense, it has a rich vocabulary for talking about different types of suffering. There is dukkha-dukkha, “true suffering” the suffering that comes from injury, illness, the aging process, emotional hurt and painful experiences; what we tend to think of when we talk about suffering. But there is also viparinama-dukkha, the suffering that arises from the transient and changing nature of things. Also sankhara-dukkha, what the Germans would call weltschmerz, the suffering caused by a knowledge of the way things should be compared to the way things are.

It is the specific interrelated categories of viparinama-dukkha and sankhara-dukkha that most interest me.

Sankhara-dukkha interests me because it points to a fundamental and primal human desire for that which is perfect. Complete happiness cannot be found in this world not simply because the world is not perfect, but because those fleeting glimpses of perfection are so rarely seen and dissipate so quickly, leaving us struggling to remember the sensation they caused. This inherent desire for perfection is our desire for God, our desire for participation in the Kingdom of God, our desire for paradise, our desire for perfection. Naturally within us there is a desire to “become perfect as our father in heaven is perfect” and to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth. That we do not readily achieve those things causes us to suffer in a deeply existential way. At the same time, our faith in a God who has promised these things to us brings us hope, from hope, joy. This dramatic tension is surely one of Chesterton’s paradoxes, where Christianity gets “over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious” (from Orthodoxy).

While sankhara-dukkha made me think about God and theology, viparinama-dukkha actually opened up scripture to me. In hearing about viparinama-dukkha, I came closer (I think) to an understanding of Jesus’s admonitions about material wealth.

As is clear from some of my other posts, I believe that we take many of Jesus’s teachings as proscriptive when they’re really meant to be descriptive. We hear a command when Jesus intends to teach, when awareness might do far more for our obedience than authority.

When Jesus warns that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Mark 10:25, Matthew 19:24), the thought of viparinama-dukkha changed my reading. Viparinama-dukkha destroys the happiness that we think we have in material things. Upon acquiring material wealth, we must necessarily lament its transient nature, fear for its loss, and suffer emotionally when it is damaged. Thus, our enjoyment is incomplete.

Viewed through this lens, we can see Jesus’s statements about material wealth as a description of the same idea captured in the Buddhist term. It is not necessarily that wealth in and of itself is evil.[1] On the other hand, the pursuit of material wealth has significant consequences if one is not careful. Such a pursuit is the chasing after a joy that will never be complete because of its transience, a false joy that leads us only to seeking more in hopes of recovering that fleeting joy first found. Worse, viparinama-dukkha has a strong propensity to lead to sin. The fear of losing material things has led many a man to his perdition when he finds the lengths to which he will go to cling to wealth. Our own times are replete with examples, from the common criminal to the Bernie Madoffs of the world.

And so we find in Buddhism—a religion as far from Christianity as it might be possible to be—ideas of value to our own understanding of our faith and the world. No religion can shy away from the problem of suffering (the field of theodicy is devoted to said problem), so why confine ourselves to our own tradition and history when exploring an issue that is so present in our everyday lives?

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[1] Chaucer’s quotation is often misremembered as “Money is the root of all evil,” though it is actually “The love of money is the root of all evil. The original is found in Canterbury Tales, The Pardoner’s Prologue, where it appears in Latin, “Radix malorum est cupidatis.”

Useless People and Worthless People

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I recently spent some time hanging around downtown Houston, and one of the things that struck me was the strange mix of feelings I had about the homeless, the strong desire to be compassionate combined with a latent unease at their presence and, of course, the shame that accompanies such a feeling.

I often tell people, mostly jokingly, that I don’t really like people very much. As K reminds me, it’s a horrible thing for a Christian to say. Even more, it isn’t true. Part of the reason I say such things is that I’m an introvert and especially uncomfortable in large crowds or gatherings. Really, though, what I mean to say is that I love people, but I find myself frequently disappointed by humanity as a whole.

Seeing and interacting with the homeless brought to the forefront of my mind my own complicity in the corporate horribleness of humanity at large. But it also made me think about the way society tells us we should view people and the way that Christ tells us that we should view people.

At least in Western (and specifically American) society, we are taught to commoditize people, to value them based on their productivity. What is the first question you’re inclined to ask a stranger after learning her name? “What do you do for a living?” It’s a shortcut to a determination of pecking order. We could just as well ask, “How much money do you make?” or “How important are you?” or “Where do you rank in the social hierarchy?”

We live in a society that believes that success means the accumulation of personal property–especially the ownership of more home than a typical nuclear family could practically use. We hear about “boomerang” children with jocular disdain and live in a society where a stay-at-home parent must defend himself from accusations of “having it easy” because he does not occupy a place in the standard workforce.

In short, we see useless people as worthless people. This, I think, is what gives us trepidation about the homeless: we fear associating ourselves with people whom we view as worthless. Hence the common fear about giving a beggar money that he’ll only use on booze and drugs–it’s the primal fear of wasting resources, the selfish fear of losing personal worth in giving away that for which we’ve worked.

Jesus does not think this way. Quite the opposite, in fact. I don’t need to provide specific scriptures for you to know that he called poor men to be his disciples, that he spent much of his time with the downtrodden of the lowest social classes, and that he warned repeatedly about the dangers of worldly wealth (see the post on Dukkha in Christianity).

But, there are scriptures that describe people as “worthless.” In the old testament, we have the Hebrew word בליעל (bĕliya`al; Strong’s H1100).[1] The New Testament gives us several words that have been translated to “worthless.”[2] Ultimately, though, I think that a word study on “worthless” in the scriptures is unhelpful. For one, this is a lexicographical or semiotic inquiry more than a theological one. More important, the words used in Greek and Hebrew seem to fall prey to the same conflation of profitability and worth—this issue is not a modern one.

One important thing that struck me from reviewing the words translated as “worthless” is that the use of these words tends to describe moral or spiritual worth rather than practical worth. Those described as “worthless” are those who have fallen away from righteousness or those who destroy rather than create. From this point of view, the words provide an important soteriological reminder—our salvific worth comes from the grace of God’s intervention within us and not from ourselves (compare with Romans 3 as cited below).

Instead of focusing on specific words, though, I think it’s best to focus on God’s assignment of worth to individuals. In both the Old Testament and the New, we see that God’s measure of worth is, at the very least, more complicated than what one produces. We commonly speak in Christianity about how God chooses the unexpected or seemingly unfit to become leaders—the younger son David, the stuttering Moses, etc.

If this is our tack on the subject, we focus the potential usefulness of a person as a sign of worth. A person who is in some way available to be transformed and used by God has a worth apart from her current contribution to society. In this way, all people have worth, because all may be—knowingly or unknowingly—servants of the Lord.

Even this thought gives me some trepidation, though. This again reduces human worth to our ability to do or produce—on a cosmic scale to be sure, but it nevertheless associates the value of a human with his action as an agent for God and not his identity. Despite our common imagery of the sovereignty and lordship of God—which I do not discount—it is also clear that our God is a deeply relational one. If the heart of Christian doctrine is that God created out of love and a desire for relationship beyond God’s self (which I argue is correct), then it is axiomatic that real worth comes from relationship and love rather than use.

The scriptures support this. We see this clearly in the first part of Psalm 139 (before it turns to asking God to slay one’s enemies!), where the psalmist exclaims “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made!” (Psalm 139:14) and describes how God knew him from his very creation. We see it so profoundly shown in the Incarnation of Christ and in his treatment of the least and the last, his willingness to spend time with sinners, his healing of those who produce nothing for society. We see this in the very nature of a triune God, where in three parts God is in relationship with God’s very self!

In the beginning, God created man (and woman) and pronounced them good. The Fall may necessitate our redemption, but it does not change the fact that God created us to be good, not just to do good.

As we relate to other human beings, then, we ought to take an ontological view of worth rather than a teleological one—each person is created to be a child of God, a unique and individual creation whose very existence is wonderful, to be celebrated and protected.

Are there useless people in the world? Under the secular description, we must admit that there are—people who take more than they give. Should we assign blame to such uselessness? That depends heavily on circumstances if we are to judge at all. We might also say that there are useless people in a spiritual sense—those who seek to destroy, to tear down, to lead astray rather than to create, to build up, to love. I would stress, though, that we ought to think that thought only in terms of the abstract and in the evaluation of our own selves; to do otherwise would certainly attempt to judge the spiritual value of another, something that we should humbly acknowledge is to be reserved to God alone.

Are there worthless people? No. The work of Jesus Christ clearly shows us that all people have intrinsic worth and we ought to love them, even when doing so is difficult or uncomfortable.

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[1] The word is often translated as “worthless,” but carries with it connotations of “wickedness” and “destruction.” So we have:

(1) “worthless fellows” in Deuteronomy 13:13 who lead others to serve foreign gods

(2) “base” thoughts that lead to sin in Deuteronomy 15:9

(3) “worthless fellows” who attempt to rape a sojourner in echo of the Sodom and Gomorrah episode in Judges 19:22 and 20:13

(4) “worthless men” throughout 1st and 2nd Samuel

(5) torrents “of destruction” in 2 Samuel 22:5

(6) “destruction”, “deadly things” and “worthless” things in the Psalms

and a smattering of other “worthless men” who are evildoers. Note also that the Belial is the name of a demon (or the devil) in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other apocrypha.
[2] Curiously–or perhaps accentuating the conflation of use and worth–Strong’s gives the definition of ἀχρεῖος (achreios; Strong’s G888) as “useless”, despite its being translated as in Matthew 25:30 as “worthless (servant)” and in Luke 17:10 as “unworthy (servant).”

The verb form of the same word (Strong’s G889) is used in Romans 3:12 in Paul’s citation of the Psalms that “all are worthless.” Both G888 and G889 also carry the possible translation of “unprofitable.”