Faith

A Rebuttal to Materialist Science

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Yesterday, I came across an article (“Are you sleepwalking now?”) on the digital magazine Aeon that I could not help but respond to, because it seems to be such a patent example of someone misusing science to “prove” things well beyond science’s ken.

The article is here: https://aeon.co/essays/are-you-sleepwalking-now-what-we-know-about-mind-wandering. It is well written and certainly thought-provoking, so it’s potentially worth reading on its own. More to the point, it is required reading for this post.

To practice what I preach, here’s my fair disclosure at the beginning, in case this is the first of my posts that you’re reading. I’m a faithful progressive Christian who believes in both science and God. As an existentialist theologian and somewhat of an epistemological pessimist (I’d say “healthy skeptic,” I believe that personal consciousness and experience is the foundational starting place of examining metaphysical questions. Hence why I might take the article so personally, though I think that my arguments stand on their own and I’m explicitly trying to go out of my way (unlike Dr. Metzinger, I think) to admit to what I believe that cannot be proved and what does or does not actually meet with standards of scientific inquiry.

The article was posted on the 22nd of this year by Dr. Thomas Metzinger, a professor at the university of Mainz, where he teaches theoretical philosophy with a focus on the philosophy of the mind (the subject of his article). He has written numerous books, given a TED talk and is undoubtedly a highly-intelligent person well-versed in the subject matter.

Nevertheless, I have to take issue with the assertions he makes in his article.

The article begins with what I can only describe as a masterful metaphor for the movement of “thoughts and ideas” from un- or subconscious to conscious, one that equates them to the motion of dolphins traveling at speed, occasionally breaking the surface of the water and often under it.

From there, Metzinger poses the questions he believes he can answer. He writes, “Philosophers of mind often fall into the trap of assuming that goal-directed, rational thought is the paradigmatic case of conscious cognition. But if we are only ever partly aware of what is happening in our own minds, surely we can’t be in absolute command of our thoughts, let alone causing them? Is it ever possible to distinguish between mental actions, which we can direct and select, from the more general category of mental events, which simply happen to us? In what sense are we ever genuinely mental agents, capable of acting freely, as opposed to being buffeted by forces beyond our control?” (emphasis Metzinger’s).

This question perhaps the most fundamental philosophical question when it comes to thinking about the mind. Experientially, I think that we can agree that we have thoughts that we would assert we have consciously and willfully called to mind and formed and those thoughts that seem to be generated spontaneously and inexplicably—in other words, the conscious and the subconscious.

The only complaint that I have with Metzinger’s formulation of these questions is the rhetoric that subtly slips in to begin his arguments from the inception of the question. On the other hand, this is easily forgivable as something most, if not all, of us are likely to do even unintentionally.

The next paragraph begins Dr. Metzinger’s tenuous assertions. Relying on the “empirical findings” of neuroscience and experimental psychology in mind-wandering, he asserts that, “Much of the time we like to describe some foundation ‘self’ as the initiator or cause of our actions, but this is a pervasive myth” (again, emphasis is Dr. Metzinger’s).

Here’s my first complaint: there is no description of these “empirical findings.” Dr. Metzinger does not explain what experiments have been conducted, whether they are peer reviewed, whether they have been replicated, what the specific results are—or, really anything other than that they exist and we should allow him to interpret them for us. This is not evidence; this is the basic rhetorical technique of asking the audience to rely on your authority as evidence enough.

The first sentence of the following paragraph gets to the heart of the matter: “Mind-wandering research suggests that we need to get rid of naïve, black-and-white distinctions such as ‘free-will’ versus ‘determinism’, ‘conscious’ versus ‘unconscious’, and what philosopher’s call ‘personal’ versus ‘subpersonal’ processes (roughly, accounts of cognition that look at the whole person’s reasons and beliefs, versus those based on biological or physiological functions).” What!?! How did we go from “empirical findings” suggesting that there are a lot of subconscious activities going on to positing that we should look to a solely biological basis for consciousness? This is a logical non-sequitur in the extreme.

Nevertheless, the statement is revealing: it’s a 21st Century version of the “bag of chemicals” argument made in the early 20th Century (i.e., that all of our thoughts and actions are really the result of chemical reactions in body and brain without any real volition or self) so readily rebutted by G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy.

Rather than solely referring to Mr. Chesterton (whose arguments should most definitely be read), I’ll point out a few of the specific problems: (1) lack of any evidence for this provided; (2) lack of consideration of the broader findings of neurological research (which I’ll refer to in more detail in a moment); (3) the solipsism and circularity of the argument (how is it that Dr. Metzinger is so special as to realize the falsity of the illusion and then to explain it to others by random chance of his own mental events)?; (4) the complete and willful ignorance of the human experience. We might phrase the last objection in terms of Occam’s Razor: which is more likely, that when we feel we are exercising our will we are or that there are multiplicative, subtler and (so far) inexplicable mental processes going on that cause this illusion?

In the case of neurological research that seems to point to other than a solely materialistic explanation for cognition, I’d point you to Dr. Mario Beauregard’s The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul in counterargument. In that book, Dr. Beauregard (a neuroscientist rather than a philosopher) explains how in certain experiments regarding addiction relief, it has been shown that the active cognition of the mind can actually alter the material function of the brain over time by creating new neural pathways. The whole topic of “neuroplasticity,” which is showing us that our brains remain more subject to change in adulthood than we previously thought, seems to cut against Dr. Metzinger’s argument.

As a caveat, when Dr. Metzinger says we ought to get rid of “black-and-white distinctions,” I think he’s right in that we need more complex and nuanced ways to think about the topic of free will as some interaction between personal volition and influence (or perhaps deterministic) influences. But this is nothing new in the philosophy of the mind (or theology, for that matter) and I’ve myself argued for such a position in previous posts. But when Dr. Metzinger’s seemingly-suggested resolution is to ignore one half of the equation entirely, we’re stepping backward instead of forward.

The logic further falters as Dr. Metzinger continues, writing: “As the dolphin story hints, human beings are not Cartesian egos capable of complete self-determination.” I would remind you that the dolphin story is a metaphor, by itself it cannot logically hint at anything except the to extent that it can be shown that the metaphor validly represents the things it is trying to explain (though this article contains none of that).

There’s a glimmer of reason after this, though, where Dr. Metzinger says, “Nor are we primitive, robotic automata. Instead, our conscious inner life seems to be about the management of spontaneously emerging mental behavior. Most of what populates our awareness unfolds automatically, just like a heartbeat or autoimmune response, but it can still be guided to a greater or lesser degree.”

I’d like to point out in the above that Dr. Metzinger wisely uses the words “seems to be” to indicate that he is speculating here. The problem, though, is that despite these subtle hints about the actual logical foundation of his argument (being very slight), he presents most of his ideas as authoritative through the rest of the article’s language.

For sake of time and space, I’m going to skip a few paragraphs where Dr. Metzinger discusses the positive and negative effects of daydreaming. He continues, “My view is that the mind-wandering and the DMN [what he calls the default-mode network of the active parts of the brain during rest periods) basically serve to keep our sense of self stable and in good shape. Like an automatic maintenance program, they constantly generate new stories, weaving back and forth between different time-horizons, each micro-narrative contributing to the illusion that we are actually the same person over time” (this time, emphasis is mine).

Again, Dr. Metzinger begins with words of speculation (“My view is…”) but then makes assertions as if they are fact. He’s put the cart before the horse here by assuming that the idea of the self is an illusion rather than a reality. And he’s done that without any evidence whatsoever. It seems here, as I think has become fashionable for some intellectuals investigating the still relatively terra incognita of the mind, to assume a Buddhist sort of worldview and then force the science to fit that mold. But the Buddhist idea that the self is an illusion is a religious and philosophical idea, not a scientific one. There is no defensible logic to starting with that assumption and working backwards. That’s simply not how science works.

The truth will out, as they say, and it certainly does in the next paragraph. Dr. Metzinger writes, “I should come clean at this point and confess that I don’t believe in any such entity or thing as ‘the self’” (emphasis mine). It’s a little late in the game here to make that confession—honest scholarship starts with a confession of biases that are known to the writer and probably unknown to the reader so that the reader can read critically. I think that this drives home the disingenuity on Metzinger burying the language of speculation with such extensive assertions of truth.

But it’s the assertion itself that is so ironic—who is making the confession if there is no self? The sentence, under Metzinger’s argument, is itself nonsense. And therein lies perhaps the biggest problem with the materialist approach to the mind—even the people who maintain that position cannot (and do not seem to try to) live as if it were true. The only way it is possible to interact with the world is through an understanding of self. That understanding may see itself as more or less connected to everything around it, but no one acts or thinks without reference to an “I.” If that “I” is an illusion, then there’s really no “I” to make the discovery that it is an illusion in the first place. Hence the circularity of this kind of logic.

To drive the weakness of Dr. Metzinger’s philosophy home, he then refers to “evolutionary psychology,” that perennial favorite of materialist thinkers like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Pinker. Evolutionary psychology is the field of making unfalsifiable assumptions about the development of the brain (and therefore mind) according to subjectively selected “societal needs” and then presenting those assumptions as fact. Dr. Metzinger joins in by arguing about the societal role of the “fiction” of the self, how “[h]umans have evolved to be a bit like method actors,” and asserting that “The self-as-agent is just a useful fiction, a neurocomputational artefact of our evolved self-model.”

This statement is unfalsifiable by scientific method because consciousness and self are, by their very nature, subjective. And yet, Metzinger presents his assumptions as the inevitable conclusions of science despite the fact that true scientific method (nor basic philosophical logic) would touch such a conclusion with a 10-foot pole. Further, Metzinger delicately (and probably quite deliberately) avoids issues like the “hard problem of consciousness” by simply denying that there is one.

In a further bout of spontaneous honesty, “But just as there is no ‘real’ character, there’s also no such thing as ‘a self’, and probably nothing like an immortal soul either.”

Metzinger is, for such an esteemed scholar, remarkably willing to conflate belief with fact and then to work backward from there.

I think it is sufficient to stop with a detailed rebuttal of Metzinger’s argument there, as the rest of the (lengthy) article simply repeats the same logical errors, rhetorical slight-of-hand and materialism as religious belief (in that it is the given from which all other inquiry begins) as science.

On the one hand, perhaps it is the arguments of the religious that have generated this kind of reactionary response. When we deny the usefulness of science because of religion (which, as I’ve often argued, we oughtn’t) it seems a natural (though not logical) response to use science to deny religion. And that’s really what these kinds of arguments are ultimately about (otherwise, why explicitly deny the existence of an immortal soul when the very argument makes such a distinction meaningless).

Frankly, I’m tired of it, on both sides. I’m tired of atheist materialists trying to claim philosophical and metaphysical truth through science and I’m tired of fundamentalist Christians denying evolution because the Bible doesn’t mention it.

To be clear, I have no problem with atheists saying that science leads them to believe in a solely materialist explanation for existence—they’re well within their right to draw that conclusion, even if I think it is the wrong one, just as some are led to faith because of their interpretation of metaphysical likelihoods based on science. Reasonable people may disagree, as we lawyers like to say. It’s when they claim that science proves their belief that I become offended as a person of deep faith who nevertheless is willing to make careful distinction between what science shows us (and often defers to science to inform theology) and what must be left to faith and belief.

At the same time, I’m upset both by the closemindedness and bad theology of those who question science based on Scripture that in no way asserts that that’s a proper (or even valid) way to analyze the world and the fact that, knowing I’m a Christian, many people with whom I’d like to have a real (and respectful) conversation about these kinds of topics will not listen logically because they somehow assume I’m that kind of Christian.

As I’ve said many times in the past, science is simply not equipped to answer metaphysical questions, which unfortunately must be relegated to the realm of belief, conviction, uncertainty and doubt. Let’s use science to examine and explore the material world, to learn what we can about all that we can. But let’s also admit when science is of no use and properly categorize those beliefs about the metaphysical as matters of faith, no matter who they come from, believer or not.

Sacrifice and Eternity

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I don’t know what the world to come will be like. I have no special insight into what happens to us and where we go when we die, what will occupy us in eternity. Like most of us, I suppose, I have my hopes and comforting beliefs about what the life eternal will be; my stubbornesses about which I say, “If there’s not X, I’m not going,” like I have some control over the situation; those feelings you–every rare once in a while–feel and think, “This. This feeling lasting forever; that must be heaven.”

I try not to cling too tightly to any preconceived notion of what awaits us, instead trying to trust in God that it will be far greater than I could imagine anyway. Frankly, I’m not too concerned about whether heaven is some entirely spiritual dimension of existence or embodied life in a world restored by God to perfection on the last day.

But there is one thing that I do believe strongly: even in the life to come, there will be sacrifice.

I don’t mean sacrifice on the cosmic scale, no dying that others may live, no giving up all that I have so that others may have something, not the sort of things that make us look at others who can make those kinds of sacrifices with such awe and respect. I mean the more mundane, everyday sacrifices we’re already called to make. The lesser sacrifices necessary to mutual relationship: I’d rather do X in our free time, but since you want to do Y, let’s do that instead and we can do X another time. That sort of thing.

Perhaps this sounds a strange thing to fixate on, but I think it’s a necessary expectation based on the few things that the scriptures and traditions of our faith do seem to tell us about the world to come. Christ promises us “eternal life.” The words used to create that phrase in the New Testament carry the connotation of not just surviving, but thriving–active, vigorous, fulfilled, unceasing, experiential life.

That means a few things. First, we will be ourselves–perfected perhaps, the dross burned away–but recognizable as ourselves. And why wouldn’t we be if we believe that we are purposefully, “wonderfully and fearfully made?” Second, we will not be idle. I don’t know what kind of activity is planned for us–though I’m fairly certain it will not be sitting on clouds strumming harps, singing ceaseless hymns and trying not to think of toilet-paper commercials. Third, we will be together. There’s no good and dependable answer to the question who “we” is (I believe, based on my limited knowledge of God, that all will be there eventually), so let’s sidestep that conundrum for now. Third, we will be in relationship with God and others forever. Again, why wouldn’t we be? The overarching narrative of both the Bible as a whole and the Gospels in particular is that ours is a God who values relationship.

Let’s look at those three things together. We’ll be ourselves. That means that, just like we do now, we will have our personalities, our preferences, our likes and our dislikes (we can go down some dizzying rabbit trails trying to think about the scope and limitations of what preferences and personality traits qualify as being righteously permissible, just as we could with what kinds of activities will be permissible, but let’s not today). We will do things. As a person with preferences, there are some things I like to do better than others. And we will do them with others.

When people come together, it is natural for personalities to clash at times, for preferences to butt up against one another. Unhealthy relationships can be ruined by this, but healthy ones engage in minor sacrifice to work out such petty disputes. Those relationships that do become stronger for it–when you know that I’m willing to give in for your sake sometimes and you’re willing to give in for mine in others, we know that we mean something to one another.

It is fashionable to talk about this phenomenon as a quid pro quo these days, “deposits and withdrawals from the love bank” if we’d like to resort to some especially cloying purple prose. Human nature being what it is–and some people being who they are–I suppose that sometimes that’s a fitting description. But for the best relationships, you don’t make those compromises simply to get future compromises; you do them simply because you care about the other person.

There’s every reason to think that the relationships we enjoy in the life to come will be the best of relationships. For that to be the case, we will eternally need to make some minor sacrifices for each other at various times.

So best to start practicing now, because some aspects of the life to come are not about the where, the when and the what; they’re about the how, how you see others and your relationships with them. That’s one small reason that we say that the Kingdom of Heaven is both a present reality and a future promise: there are aspects of perfected existence that we may participate in here on Earth if we’re willing to. Christ’s incarnation accomplished more than cosmic salvation–it gave us an example of how to think and act so that we do not have to wait to participate in the fullness of the life to come.

As Milton says in Paradise Lost, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” Jesus showed us how to do the former. Those happy little sacrifices we make for the ones we love are an essential aspect of creating that double joy of relationships that both affirm each person involved and become something greater than either. No reason to think that will change in the world to come.

History and Historicity

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I wrote in a recent post about some of the difficulties with issues of history and historicity in the Old Testament I’ve had in preparing for my impending journey to Israel. Having had some time to clarify my thoughts, I thought I’d share them.

First, I want to focus on an exemplum of my thoughts and then I’ll speak more generally. Let’s begin with the Bablyonian Captivity. Or, rather, a little bit before that.

In 1 Kings 18, the prophet Elijah confronts Ahab, the monarch of the Kingdom of Israel, on Mount Carmel in a rather memorable set of contests. Really, Elijah is confronting the worship of Baal in the Kingdom of Israel here, but Ahab is culpable for allowing the Israelites to stray from the worship of Yahweh alone.

The four-hundred and fifty prophets of Baal are asked to pick between two bulls brought to the mountain, to cut it to pieces and to smoke if over a fire; Elijah–as Yahweh’s sole remaining prophet–will do the same with the other. Then they will each call upon their respective gods and see who “shows up.” As the Baalite priests beseech their god, they get no response. With memorable taunts (Maybe your god is sleeping and needs to be awakened? Maybe he’s traveling? Maybe he’s busy defecating?), Elijah insults Baal’s prophets until it comes time for him to beseech Yahweh. When he does, the Israelite God sends his “fire” down to earth to light the prepared wood, burn up the bull carcass and the stones, soil and water prepared around the altar. After this, the priests of Baal are slaughtered by the gathered people.

I’m not actually interested in the historicity of this particular story but in what it tells us about the culture of the time (Ahab’s existence is attested outside of the Bible and he was probably king of Israel around the middle of the 9th Century BCE). As we find in the cultures surrounding Isreal-Palestine at that time, gods were viewed to be local; they were the gods of particular cities or nations. We see this explicit in other places even in the Bible, where the Isrealite God states that “he” is the God of Israel (hence the epithet “Israelite God,” I suppose).

What’s happening between the lines in this passage in Kings is a divine turf war. Baal (which is a title that means “lord” and which is borne by several distinct deity figures and used generally to mean “a god”) is a god of the Phoenicians in the city of Tyre. If you look on a map of Biblical Israel, you’ll see that Tyre is on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea (on an island, actually) just a short journey north from Mount Carmel. The question being answered by Elijah’s story is, roughly put, “If Baal is the god of Tyre, and Yahweh is the god of Israel, and they’re both geographically close to one another, which has dominion in the middle ground?” Clearly the answer is Yahweh.

I mention the above passage because it sets us up for the real point about history and historicity in the Old Testament that I want to make in this post. When in the (very early) 6th Century BCE the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzer sacked Jerusalem and deported the Israelites to Bablyon, a crisis of faith occurred. Again, as a brief aside, this event is attested in the historical record outside of the Bible. If the Israelites were to worship the God of (the nation/land) Israel, how could they do that when they’d been transported to Babylon, the land of the Babylonian gods.

And here comes the prophet Ezekiel. In the verses that open the book that bears his name, Ezekiel tells us that he has a vision of God while among the exiled Israelites in Babylon “on the banks of the Kebar River.”

In this vision, as the Biblical historian Cynthia R. Chapman says, “God gets wheels.” Literally; Ezekiel sees God enthroned upon what I can’t help thinking of as a super-high-tech, four-likeness-of-living-creature-powered motorized wheelchair. That strange image aside, the point of the vision is that the God of Israel is mobile, that God is personally and actually present with the Israelites even in their exile. As a side note, my NIV says that Ezekiel is taken back to the “Kebar River near Tel Aviv”–this should be read as Tel Abib (in modern-day Iraq) by the Chebar River.

Hearing about the underlying spiritual-cultural concerns with regards to these (and other) Old Testament passages did much to “resolve” my problem of “historicity” in the OT (for purposes of this post, I have left aside all of the issues of the construction of the Old Testament text–whether discussion of the three hypotheses of its construction or the timing of its creation).

What I find here is something that makes much more sense to me than either extreme of the historicity debate–humans writing stories of their evolving understanding of and relationship with God. These stories are neither entirely myth nor entirely history; they are stories that draw upon historical experience (and the religious issues raised by that experience), mythological content that may or may not be based in fact (I’m not worried about the answer to that), revelation of the nature of God from God (there’s that spirit-breathed bit), and human reactions and struggles in response to that revelation.

I see this especially as the Israelite understanding of the nature of God breaks free from social precedent and evolves from polytheism to henotheism to true monotheism.

In some ways, what we have in the Old Testament is the macrocosm of Jacob’s struggle with God at Penuel–a back and forth between God and man that may defy explanation but results in relationship.

Does that make interpreting the Bible difficult? Absolutely; I don’t have an answer for you on how we best sort God’s intent from the voice of the writers from the historical record from the cultural context, etc. But I’m certainly willing to say that it’s not supposed to be easy. I can’t imagine that God would decide not to directly appear before all people in an unmistakeable way (which, to be clear, God hasn’t) and yet make Biblical interpretation something as simple as looking at words verbatim.

In the near future, I’m going to return to the Babylonian captivity and the Book of Job to talk a bit about theodicy in Christianity.

 

This Year in Jerusalem

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In less than two months, I’m going to Israel. This will be my favorite kind of trip–a study trip with accompanying professors, homework beforehand, and the goal of coming to understand the cultures, history and geography of Israel and its surrounds to better understand scripture.

I am fortunate enough to have this opportunity because of K’s ministry; this is a trip for young clergy and their spouses. Some of my favorite people are going and we could be going to spend two weeks on the Jersey Shore (place or TV show) and I wouldn’t mind. But we’re going to Israel.

We’ve been given books to read and maps to study and mark up before we go. For me, it is a fascinating and tedious process–I see mentions of peoples or places or cultures from the ancient past and go on hours-long rabbit trails that conclude with me writing prodigious notes to myself on the backs of maps that have little to do with the main point of study. Did you know that there’s a good chance that the near-mythical “Hanging Gardens of Bablyon” were actually constructed by Sennacharib in Ninevah? The same Sennacharib mentioned in the Book of Kings as carrying off people from the Kingdom of Israel and nearly destroying the Kingdom of Judah?

None of that time is wasted, though I imagine it’s going to annoy the hell out of K as I offer (unsolicited) trivia throughout our trip. This course of study has made me feel like I’m in grad school again and–being the perpetual student–I’m loving it. Even moreso, it’s directed my thoughts in some ways that I believe will profoundly effect both my theological work and my fiction writing. Many of the things below will likely see their own posts and soon, but here’s some of what I’ve been brought to ponder lately:

Studying maps and geography has been eye-opening in terms of Biblical (and historical understanding). There are so many things that become clearer about both the broader historical context and the context of passages in the Bible when you understand (however abstractly at the current juncture) the “lay of the land.” The locations and movements of the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Arameans, the Edomites and the Moabites and all the other ancient cultures of the Levant sheds light the context of the Israelite people as they journey from polytheism to henotheism to monotheism (and back-and-forth quite a bit). The strategic importance of the Levant on the world stage and the many times it has changed hands over the millennia is just fascinating. There is much to be said about all this (much of it already written by experts in books, so who am I to spend lots of words on it?), but suffice to say that I have studied history extensively and am only now starting to see lots of things come into clarity now that I am locating events and peoples on the map relative to one another. Even some idea of motives become clear when you put things together. All in all, I’m actually a little disappointed that, in all of my historical studies, none of my classes spent a whole lot of time (if any at all) using the geography of the time and place to place events in context.

Of course, all of this study of geography makes me think of Avar Narn. This, coupled with the fact that I’ve recently spent some time looking through Tolkien’s old maps and drawings and their evolution has me going back to the layout and maps of my own fantasy world. I have posted some previous maps of parts of Avar Narn on this site, but I am afraid to say (but not really) that they will soon be obsolete and superseded as I replace them with a more thorough effort at consistently mapping the world (or at least the continent where most of my stories will be set) in line with its history, cultures, and languages. I am beginning to very much envy Martin’s choice to name everything in Westeros in English. In breaks from the map work for my impending journey, I’ve re-sketched the continent, placed it longitudinally and latitudinally, worked out air and sea currents (as best I know how) and, correspondingly, the various climate zones of the space.

Because of some changes in the history of Avar Narn which have occurred both in direct rewriting of that history and from ideas better explored (or created) in the first Avar Narn novel (still very much in progress, of course), there will be further changes to the locations of some of the nations and peoples as shown on the previous maps. Alongside that, I’ll be doing some renaming of locations to tie them in better with the linguistic work I’ve done for the setting. There will definitely be more posts about all of this in the future.

Back to the theology side, where I’ve also been thinking a lot about historicity in theology. This has been something of a journey and a struggle for me. Intellectually–as I’ve communicated through the blog before–I don’t believe that concern with historicity is the most fruitful or meaningful of concerns in understanding our faith. I believe that the text of scripture is divinely inspired–but also filled with human agency and not to be taken literally–but that it’s just not that important to know whether the Exodus actually happened as written (there’s no corroborating evidence that it did). What is important is what the story of the Exodus tells us about our God and the evolving Israelite understanding of God as a macrocosm of the way in which the individual gradually struggles with an understanding of the divine.

At the same time, I cannot deny that the historical context of the Biblical writings is illuminating in its interpretation. And in addition, I find that archeological and historical research can help us understand the human motives in the Bible and perhaps filter some of that from the divinely inspired aspects. For instance, there’s very little evidence to support that the conquering of Canaan as told in Joshua occurred; the gradual occupation of the land by the Israelites as told in Judges seems far more likely.

I’m fine with this; it doesn’t bother me that the Bible may not be historically accurate on all fronts–it’s not meant to be a history (well, maybe Joshua and Judges are somewhat) and has a different purpose for us that should not be confused with absolute historicity. In the same way, Genesis is not intended to be a science manual for the creation of all things.

What I’m struggling with is how emotionally bound to questions of historicity I find myself (in spite of myself). There’s a pang of upset in my stomach when I find that an event as told in the Bible is probably not actually how something happened.

I believe in the historicity of Jesus, but I’d be a Christian even if I didn’t–I believe that the story of Jesus tells us Truth about the nature of our Creator, Sustainer and Savior that is unfettered by our existential reference points. So why do I find myself caring so much about the answers to historicity? Especially when it’s clear that–in broad strokes at least–the Old Testament narrative about the Jews’ evolving relationship with God is borne out by the historical record. I think that this is a matter of wanting things to simple, clear and absolute. And this from someone who finds great wonder in the complexity, ambiguity and mystery of existence! Perhaps that’s what it comes down to–a minor crisis of identity. And that makes me wonder whether all obsessions with the historicity of Biblical events spawns from that very human concern.

In general, I think that the Christian testimony–as an unfairly broad generalization–would be perceived as more reasonable (which I believe it inherently is) if we were able to communicate our faith in a way that incorporates questions of historicity without being dominated by them. Many a man has gone in search of Noah’s Ark (with many claims to have found it), but even an indisputable confirmation of its existence would not tell us much about who God is that the Bible doesn’t tell us already.

I’m sure you’ll hear more about that as I post (to the extent that I’m able) from Israel, where the question will, in some part, be a constant concern of mine (if not all of us traveling together). Stay tuned for more on all fronts.

See my journal of the trip here.

The God Who Chooses Us

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It’s Advent, and I’ve been thinking about the Incarnation (no surprise there).  I am less concerned with the “how” of the Incarnation and more concerned with the “why.” My faith in the sovereignty of God means that I believe that God could have invented all manner of possible solutions to the problem of sin (not that we humans have intellect sufficient to speculate very effectively about what those infinite possibilities might be).

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the Incarnation tells us something about the nature, purpose and personality of God. What I find in exploring these issues is one of the most profound aspects of my faith, one I’d like to share with you.

Let’s begin with the question of God’s “passibility.” This is often defined as “the ability of God to suffer,” but this is not entirely correct. The truer definition of passibility is “the ability of God to be affected by some force or influence external to God’s self.” In plainer terms: can something make God be or feel a certain thing or do a certain thing?

The question is important because it presupposes a problem: If God is “passible” there is something in the universe that is more powerful than God because it can overcome God in some way, challenging God’s sovereignty. On the other hand, if God is “impassible” and cannot be affected by any external thing, can God feel sympathy with us? Does God “feel” anything, since feelings are responses caused (at least sometimes) by external forces?

This is perhaps the most fundamental question of theology–can God be both sovereign and good? If the answer is yes, then the basic nature of existence should be one of hope. If not, despair. All aspects of theology are influenced by the answer to this question. In theodicy, the question of evil only exists in such a troublesome state if God is both good and all-powerful. If not, we have an easy explanation for the existence of evil. The meaning of scripture, of the working out of salvation, of the Incarnation, all of these turn on this answer.

Let me propose that there actually is no problem in the question of passibility, though what the solution tells us is nothing short of amazing in its furtherance of the understanding of our God. We affirm that God is sovereign over all things and cannot be unwillingly affected by something external to God’s self. But if God cannot allow God’s self to be affected by some external factor, than God would not be sovereign, for God could not overcome God’s self. The God who cannot self determine is not impassible.

So, it does not follow that the all-powerful God is not good or cannot feel–God has chosen to be good and God has chosen to feel, to be affected by God’s Creation. To be in active and meaningful relationship with all of Creation.

The theologian Thomas Jay Oord has very convincingly argued exactly this–that God is impassible but has affirmatively chosen to suffer with us. For me, though, the realization of this came from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

“Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator…But in the terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.’ No; but the Lord the God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden, Satan tempted man; and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manenr through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God….”

The Incarnation and the crucifixion represent God’s choice about so many aspects of existence. Much has been written about its meaning as God’s choice to redeem humanity (I, personally, favor Karl Barth for this investigation and discussion), but I think that far too little has been put to paper (or screen as the case may be) about what the Incarnation says about God’s justice.

In the Incarnation we see God’s choice of (semi-)passibility as one of the few answers to the problem of evil that we humans can actually understand: No matter what suffering God has allowed to befall humanity, no matter why this suffering has been allowed (which we are ultimately incapable of explaining), God is so just as to not allow God’s creation to suffer anything that God will not suffer with us in the most personal and intimate of ways.

In Christ’s birth, we see God’s choice to be with us, not just physically, but existentially. How amazing is it that the God of all Creation willingly suffers with us for us. God is all-powerful; God has chosen to be good to infinite extents we cannot possibly imagine.

I invite you to keep this in your heart as we await the Christ child.

Rooted

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This seems a great follow-up to my last post.

In Chicago, from August 11-13th, the Rooted conference was held. Rooted was a conference for trans and gender-noncomforming Christians. That’s right, despite popular belief and common misconception, there is room for all people within Christianity–our God is everyone’s God.

More of a testament, I think, is the fact that there are enough people of non-binary gender or who are transgendered who manage to reach out to God despite what “mainstream” and (too-)conservative demagogues tell them Christianity is. They have a faith that speaks to the foremost issue currently confronting the Church–our getting in God’s way when we should be making the path to God easier. That they can overcome such obstacles gives me hope that perhaps others will, too–those we refer to as the “unchurched” who by upbringing or by bad experiences in churches have rejected Christianity because it is easier to see fallen people describing our faith than it is to see Jesus who creates our faith.

As I’ve argued in the past, I don’t believe that secularism is simply the result of the evolution of science and technology. Science and technology show us that there are gaps in our understanding and methods of human inquiry that can only be filled by faith, whether it’s faith in God’s provenance or in cold materialism. Thus, the next obvious answer for the push to increased secularism is that the faith isn’t living up to its calling. As a student of theology, I find that there are sound and well-argued philosophies about Christianity that incorporate science and critical methodologies into them; secularism is not the failing of our theology (though it might be a failing of those theologies which remain most popular). Instead, it is the failing of us as the Church to project Christ rather than to hide him.

My soapboxy tangent aside, I’m especially proud that Rooted was coordinated by the Reconciling Ministries Network of the United Methodist Church, an unofficial group of likeminded Methodists in support of full inclusion. I am a member of Reconciling Ministries through my participation in Reconciling United Methodist Texas Conference (formerly “Breaking the Silence.”) At the same time, I’m slightly dismayed by the fact that I only found out about Rooted almost a month after it happened.

I am not one to blow inherent media biases out of proportion (they’re there, but most mainstream journalists–at least in “neutral” outlets–have the integrity to mitigate and minimize them whenever possible) or to give much credence to the “fake news” outcry of the alt-right (boy, is that crying “wolf” if ever I’ve seen it), but I am curious as to why something like the Nashville Statement gets so much press and the only place that I’ve seen Rooted reported on is within the United Methodist News.

Maybe its that the internecine conflict over sexual and gender identity issues within Christian congregations is old hat now–the Episcopals have done it, the Presbyterians have done it, and we Methodists are still in the thick of it. On the other hand, though, I wonder if it’s that the Nashville Statement plays into the popular conception of Christianity, but that Rooted does not. Those of us convicted that full inclusion and the celebration of sexual and gender diversity rather than calling it “sinful” represents the truer understanding of Christianity ought to be looking for more ways to be more vocal about our theologies.

As I’ve also argued in the past, it’s unfortunate that–within Methodism at least– issues of sexuality and gender have become the battleground for a proxy war over hermenuetics and the theology of interpreting scripture. Hence the common buzzwords in issues of sexual and gender theology: “scriptural authority.” That’s not fair to people of faith with non-cisgendered identities or non-heterosexual desires.

Nevertheless, the Rooted conference is evidence of hope, that most necessary of spiritual gifts in any dark time. I am so proud of my siblings in Christ who attended and declared that they know and feel the love of our God despite what the world–and our own denomination–may throw at them.

 

A Response to the Nashville Statement

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Having read the “Nashville Statement” issued by the (self-proclaimed) “Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” (viewable here), my gut response is to respond with vim and vitriol, fire and brimstone—I am infuriated that people may engage in such hatred, fear and bigotry and yet have the nerve to call it Christianity.

However, the properly sarcastic response has already been made, so I would simply direct you to John Pavlovitz’s “Plain English” translation of the statement.

My intent here is to do two things: (1) provide a careful response to the language of the statement and (2) invite you to flood social media with response bearing the #againstnashvillestatement hashtag.

My response:

Scriptural Reference

I understand that the intro reference to Psalm 100:3 is an attempt to latch onto that conservative slogan “Biblical authority,” but the irony here is that in releasing a “manifesto” in the Nashville Statement presumably aimed at those outside their club, the CBMW has used a statement that could just as easily be construed against them—the member of the LGBTQI community responds by saying, “Yes! God made me this way, so who are you to tell me I’m bad/wrong?”

Preamble

The preamble opens with a lament that we live in a “post-Christian” society and that the “spirit of our age no longer discerns or delights in the beauty of God’s design for human life.” I do not disagree with the fact that we live in a post-Christian society, but I see this as a failing of the Church as a whole to accurately be the disciples and ambassadors of Christ to the world, not as a moral failing of those who disagree with my own faith.

And in this supposition, more than the microcosmic debate about human sexuality, is where the CBMW commits theological crime. The Nashville Statement is a thinly veiled argument for a dying theology, one that I believe is dying because of its utter failure to focus on the most important aspects of Christianity and to accurately portray the nature of God.

Like many ultra-conservative Christian groups, the CBMW’s first error is to insist upon the Bible as the literal word of God; this despite the fact that the Bible never claims to be an inerrant and literal message from the divine and points elsewhere for the source of the authority of the Word of God—to the person of Jesus Christ. The fatal error here is substituting a dead book for the Living God. Vehicle of divine truth though the scriptures are, there is no way to justify making an idol of them that usurps the place of Jesus in our theology.

From a logical standpoint, the CBMW, like most fundamentalists, refuse to acknowledge that what they purport to offer is an interpretation of the Bible and that such a massive and sometimes idiosyncratic document does not have meaning uncolored by the interpretative preferences of the reader. To accomplish this, the CBMW and those likeminded must ignore both logic and the by now well-developed field of literary criticism. They must plead ignorance to maintain their position.

But the problem goes well beyond the denial of intellectualism—to maintain its position, the CBMW must deny any competing spiritual authority: it must deny the movement of the Holy Spirit through both personal revelation and life experience, Christ’s example of loving your nature without caveat or command to “fix” their sinfulness, it must deny the validity of persons whose sexuality conflicts with their interpretation—telling them that despite their feelings to the contrary, they fall into the LGBTQI community by choice.

“It is common to think that human identity as male and female is not part of God’s beautiful plan, but is, rather, an expression of an individual’s autonomous preferences,” the Statement reads. This is logical garbage of the basest sort. First, this statement uses the flimsiest of strawmen: the argument of the faithful in the LGBTQI community is not that God gave them the right to self-determine their sexuality, but that God created them the way that they are and thus God’s “design for human life” must include a spectrum of sexuality rather than a binary. The statement ignores the argument altogether. As an aside, I ask how often our Triune God has made existence complicated versus how often our God has made existence simple and binary—simply playing the odds of likelihoods militates against the statement above.

Even if the argument were that God’s design gave us the right to self-determine our sexuality, is that an indefensible position? Of course not; we spend most of our waking hours creating our selves: pretending not to be the things we are ashamed of, struggling to become more like the ideals we’ve set for ourselves and, for the faithful at least, endeavoring to become more like Jesus Christ. If God’s commandments to us are to love God and love our neighbor, there are nearly limitless methodologies for both maintaining individuality and complying with our marching orders. The choice of sexuality itself, then, seems to at best be morally neutral—it doesn’t prevent a person from loving God and neighbor. Still, that’s exactly what CBMW wants to argue, as we’ll see. And, to reiterate, all available evidence of which I’m aware—most important the self-reporting of the LGBTQI community—indicates that human sexuality is rarely, if ever, a choice.

To follow, in pseudo-cryptic expression, the CBMW attempts to maintain the position that non-binary sexualities necessarily “ruin human life and dishonor God.” No support is given for this statement and none is available. Further, the sentence indicates a very fragile image of God if God’s glory may be diminished by human action.

If the CBMW wants to condemn promiscuity, sexual assault, adultery and other aspects of human sexuality that are destructive to self and others, that’s just fine. But these items are all entirely separate from the identities of the people involved in them. This comports with the Bible, probably to the chagrin of the CBMW—all but two of the references to homosexuality in the Bible (those being Leviticus 20:13 and Paul’s reference to the same in 1 Corinthian 6:9) include some universally-agreed upon sexual offense—slavery, pederasty, rape, etc. Therefore, those scriptures that denounce the acts as immoral never reach the question of homosexuality because of the other act also described—the homosexuality may well be irrelevant to the condemnation.

By my judgment, aside from societal influences, a homosexual relationship really isn’t different from a heterosexual one, because people are people and the genitalia with which they are equipped actually means little in relational dynamics. Societally-constructed gender expectations seem to be far more influential, though it must be emphasized that genders are thought constructs not necessarily based in any objective reality.

The Statement continues: “This secular spirit of our age presents a great challenge to the Christian church.” Before I logically destroy this sentence, let me first point out the position that it comes from—a view of Christianity as embattled, a Christianity that imperialistically needs to suborn all others to it. That’s not the Christianity of Christ.

Logically, the causation is backwards. The Church is not where it is today because of outside forces secularizing in a vacuum—the Church is where it is today because vocal aspects of it (like the CBMW) cling to antiquated and ultimately indefensible interpretations of the nature of existence.

Again, the statement must deny competing sources of authority whole cloth to stand. C.S. Lewis described the conscience as a sort of “natural law,” the Spirit moving within us to usher us toward truth even when we are consciously ignorant of it.

In our age, conscience demands a cessation to the creation of “others” of any category, morality requires respect and value for all humans in equality. When these mandates conflict with the teachings of the Church, which will win? Natural law, every time. I’d argue that this is God triumphing in the human spirit in spite of God’s Church rather than because of it.

From this perspective, it is the failure of Church to provide a true image of our God focused upon the person of Jesus Christ that has pushed others away from Christianity. The rejection of an interpretation of Christianity that increasingly focuses on judgment, identity and supremacy and decreasingly focuses on humility, diversity and sacrificial love lacks the power to resonate in the human spirit—but the Truth of the Gospel is not victim to these things and, when experienced, does not fail. The problem, then, is that fundamentalist sectors of the Christian faith offend the conscience so completely as to cause people to become unwilling to open themselves up to the experience of the Word of God in Jesus Christ. The attitude of Biblical literalism—with its single agreed-upon interpretation of God and God’s design—seeks to replace the ineffably true experience of God with the puerile and emasculated dogma of man.

I’m a big fan of cyberpunk novels, and one of the most memorable lessons from one came from my reading of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. In the world of relativity in social constructs and morality, one of Stephenson’s characters explains that hypocrisy becomes the only means of judging another group—you can’t judge their ideology, but you can sure as hell judge them if they don’t act in accordance with their espoused ideals. To many, this is what the Christian church has become. Whose fault is that, really?

The preamble now asks, “Will the church of the Lord Jesus Christ lose her biblical conviction, clarity, and courage, and blend into the spirit of the age?” In America, fundamentalist Christianity has been a prime force in the “spirit of the age,” not in a positive way. More important, why doesn’t the statement read: “Will the church of the Lord Jesus Christ become an instrument of social justice and equality, an agent of healing in turbulent times and a hand of mercy to the oppressed and downtrodden?” Priorities, people.

Ironically, the CBMW then attempts to set itself up as counter-cultural. Christianity is, in fact, counter-cultural in that it asserts that the things that have meaning in existence are not the same as the things that mainstream society tells us have importance. But the Nashville Statement is about clinging desperately to the cultural-Christianity of the past, where we made statements like, “You can trust him; he’s a good Christian man,” that served as cultural shorthand and an affirmation of the dominance of white culture over all others while having nothing to do with the declaration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is the dying mainstream culture of an old empire, not the living water of the life-affirming counter-culturalism of love found in Christ.

The language of the third and fourth paragraphs in the Preamble is telling. It tells us that each person “owes” to God “glad-hearted thanksgiving, heart-felt praise, and total allegiance.” It is good and righteous to give our praise and thanks to the Lord, and as a matter of logic all things that are ultimately derive from God. But the insistence of a feudal paradigm of the relationship between God and man is not what Christ taught, nor how Christ related to us. Not much farther down the page, it is explained that the purpose of God’s design for creation is to bring God glory.

A God who needs anything to complete God’s glory is not complete in and of God’s self and thus does not meet with our traditional Christian understanding of the nature of God. A god who creates purely for self-aggrandizement is not the kind of god I am interested in worshipping. Fortunately, the One True God as revealed through Jesus Christ is as far from that as can be—our God is not about glory, but love and relationship. Why else go to the cross?

At this point, it’s not even worth going through the declarations of the Articles—these kinds of statements have been discussed and dissected ad nauseum. To me, the poor theology expressed by the Preamble says everything one needs to know about the Nashville Statement—that it is not reflective of the intent of our God and doesn’t even reflect a strong understanding of the scripture it asserts is paramount.

The ultimately irony, of course, is how self-destructive this text is. It serves only to cause people to believe that the ignorant authors of this drivel stand for true Christianity, to reaffirm the preconceived and inaccurate understandings of the Christian faith and the Creator God at is heart—to make our culture more secular rather than more faithful by portraying faith as backwards, judgmental, bigoted and fearful.

As such, I invite you to share your own thoughts about the Nashville Statement on social media under the hashtag #againstnashvillestatement. Yep, it’s a long hashtag and it really cuts into the characters you have to use on Twitter, but consider that an additional challenge (and try to show some mercy for the fact that I usually treat hashtags with as curmudgeonly an attitude as is humanly possible, so I am unfortunately ignorant in their best usage).

As a final thought, the Nashville Statement does affirm one thing for me—why I am passionate about communicating the theology I have developed over the past few years and continue to develop through the writing of this blog. It is my sincere belief (and hope) that the theology I offer here is cogent, logical, well-supported by both scripture and the person of Jesus Christ and that offers an uplifting view of both God and man in line with God’s intent for us. I hope that this strongly contrasts with the oppressive theologies espoused by groups like the CBMW.

The Storm

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I live in Southwest Houston (Sugar Land to be exact); the past few days have been a trip to say the least. Yesterday morning, K and I quickly threw our most precious belongings and our beloved dog into our cars and drove to K’s parents’ house after a mandatory evacuation order was given for our neighborhood. Today we find ourselves effectively corraled into that home by high water, but we otherwise remain high and dry and–according to neighbors who stayed behind, our home does, too.

Last night it looked like that would not be the case. The rains were heavy all day, and by 11:00 a.m. The street we had used to travel here (clear at the time) had become impassable. We watched and waited as the waters crept closer to the house, moving furniture and valuables upstairs and mentally bracing ourselves for being flooded and without power.

This morning the rain is a light drizzle at best. Nearby rivers and creeks have not yet reached their high points, so we’re not out of the woods yet, but things are looking more optimistic than they did under cloak of darkness.

And thus it’s hard not to feel a sense of grace and protection as I drink my coffee and type this post this morning. But I must reject that assumption, because it is based on a tacit implication that somehow I (or the family members with whom I’m sheltering) merit such protection more than others who have lost everything in the storm and flooding. That simply is not true, and I do not believe in a God that plays favorites like that.

I do not believe that we should be looking for God in the rising tide or the pouring rains–this is not a punishment for a city’s wickedness. It is a natural event, something born of natural forces created by God in time immemorial but which is not directed purposefully as an instrument of divine wrath or favor.

Where we do see God moving in this catastrophe is in the good works of people truly loving their neighbors. The news is replete with daring water rescues (and one of our church’s pastors and his family were rescued from their roof in a brave mission undertaken by another of the pastors and our youth director). The outporing of aid in the form of material support, chuches opening as shelters of convenience or necessity, and the massive effort led by the “Cajun Navy” all indicate people following Christ, whether they do so consciously or not.

And that leads me to where I hope that God will move through all of this tragedy–our God makes a habit of pulling beautiful things out of tragedies, after all. In the context of this storm, I have seen people put aside all of the divisive issues engulfing our nation–race, immigration, economic disparity–to love one another. To be sure, those issues will not just go away; hoping that we do not have to confront them in the interests of justice and healing is both naive and counterproductive. But, if we can hang on to the sense of unity born from this strife, we may be able to make serious progress in addressing the ills that plague our nation–most particularly the lack of civil discourse that grips us.

To be sure, the road to recovery for us will be a long on. Even not having lost material possessions, I currently don’t know when I’ll be getting back to work and how long I’ll be feeling the inevitable economic slump. Others still have it far worse than I.

Nevertheless, it’s my hope that the storm’s legacy will be longer-lasting than the devastation–that the unity we’ve found here in Texas will pave a way forward for us and for our nation.

Brief Outline of My Theology

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Since this blog is, in part, about my theological ideas, I figured it’s only fair to provide some background into my approach and the broad-strokes theory of my approach to Christian theology. I have been working on a book laying out the core tenants of this approach (an early chapter draft of which was posted on the blog), but I don’t expect to be returning to moving forward on the book until after finishing at least the first draft of one of the two novels I’m currently working on.

Let us begin with the brief statement that I take as true the statements of the Apostles’ Creed—to keep this a “brief” outline, I’m going to need to take a few shortcuts.

We begin with an existential approach. I mean a few things by this. First, I start with human perception and experience to develop philosophy and theology—there simply is no other good place to start. Second, I acknowledge the difference between essence and existence—what things are and what they seem are not always the same. We may sometimes approximate the objective truth—which I maintain does exist as the true creation and will of God—but our own failings in understanding and perception mean that we must be constantly be guarded about our confidence in our own understanding. Hence, I adopt a position of epistemological skepticism regarding human knowledge with the caveats that I believe that direct revelation from God is possible to reveal objective truth to individuals (but because of the existential divide between individuals objective truth must be experienced directly and cannot be argued or explained to others with true efficacy) and that I believe that limited human understanding is sufficient to approach absolute truth, though we may never understand the absolute in its glorious infinitude of complexity. Human understanding is at best asymptotic—we may veer ever closer to the Truth, but it yet remains out of our full grasp.

As a minor aside, this approach acknowledges the value of human logic and rationality for building arguments to draw our understanding closer to absolute Truth while admitting the limitation of logic to fully do so—we are to be critical thinkers and to weigh evidence (thus relying on science were appropriate) while acknowledging that not all Truth is to be derived from logic—some may only be derived from ineffably experience.

The existence of God and God’s will underlying creation means that I must break with non-religious existentialist philosophers. I do not believe that the result of the existentialist approach is meaninglessness in the universe. Rather, the divide between objective truth and meaning as established by God and our own limited existential understandings creates a slippage that is best referred to, I think, as ambiguity. I’ve written several posts about ambiguity and the results of such a state on the blog, but they’re probably worth summarizing here.

Ambiguity creates a space of freedom for mankind. To paraphrase Joss Whedon: “If nothing we do in the universe matters, the only thing that matters in the universe is what we do.” In other words, ambiguity allows us to create meaning—God has called us to be agents of co-creation through this existential quandary. With God’s absolute meaning not readily available to us, we are forced to participate in creation in defining what has meaning and what meaning should be assigned to all aspects of existence. There is, I think, of necessity some amount of suffering that must be attached to such a state of being, though I acknowledge that this assertion fails to provide anything approaching a complete theodicy (though human inability to fully resolve the problem of evil seems to reinforce my arguments about epistemological skepticism and our ability only to approach the approximation of Truth). Thus, the existential approach to Christian theology (at least as I argue it) sees a great goodness in ambiguity, despite the existential angst it may sometimes cause us. Ambiguity allows for freedom of will, relationship and participation in Creation—an active role for humanity. In particular, I follow Paul Tillich’s ideas about humans as creators of meaning—primarily as storytellers. There is neither room nor will at present to address other aspects of his own existential theology.

Humans create meaning through relationship—Thing A is more like Thing B than Thing C. Only by comparison can we create meanings; unlike God we do not create ex nihilo but only from the building blocks with which we have been provided. We determine what is hard by opposing it to what is soft, what is pleasant to what is unpleasant, what is good to what is evil. Again, it is important to understand the careful distinction here between God and man. God may know good without evil, because God creates and understands the absolute. We do not. This is not relativism, where meaning itself is flexible. Our meaning may be measured against the absolute meaning of God, though not by us.

It is no coincidence that we create meaning by relationship—our purpose is relational. We are told that our God is love and love, of course, is about relationship. I believe there is good reason to believe that we were created for relationship—with God and each other.

If one accepts that we create meaning through vast webs of cognitive relationships, categories and comparisons, then we find a ready definition of both sin and holiness through the comparison of the meanings we create for ourselves with the meanings God intends in the creation and maintenance of the absolute. Sin is a state of being—one caused by ascribing to improper meanings (and thus improper relationships to the detriment of both sides). “Greed is good,” a definitional meaning clearly rejected by God in the person of Jesus Christ provides a ready example. One who accepts that meaning will be pushed out of positive, righteous relationships—with money and material things, with others, with justice, with self, with God.

On the other hand, we are told in the Sermon on the Mount to make ourselves “perfect as [our] Father in Heaven is perfect.” We define this as holiness; it is the natural consequence of adopting meanings and relationships between things more and more in line with the absolute meanings established by God. Often, we call this process of re-evaluation and re-definition of meaning “sanctification.”

Therein lies the power of Christianity—by the will of the Father, through the redemptive work of Jesus Christ and with the help of the Holy Spirit, we are able to desire to redefine our world as God would have us do. The start of this journey is, I believe, the heart being “strangely warmed” as Wesley would recall or, in another sense, being “born again.”

Why all of this? Because God desires relationship with us, but relationship itself only has meaning when freely entered into. Thus, God created humans to have free will, that we may create meaning and relationship for ourselves, but also gave us grace, that we might learn to choose what is good and to reject what is not. God wants us to be both free and good, for that is where relationship with God lies. I invite you to ponder the complexity of that combination—it is no surprise that faith is full of mystery, theology full of frustration.

In a previous blog post, I’ve stated that I call this theology “New Mysticism.” This is a matter of the acknowledgment of the non-logical (perhaps I should say “extra-logical”); that any knowledge we have of absolute Truth comes from God’s revelation. The most powerful form of this revelation is the Word of God—as Barth would define the term—the person of Jesus Christ. This must be separated from our understanding of the Bible as the “Word of God.” The Bible contains divine revelation for us, undoubtedly, but the true power of the Bible is its propensity for drawing us into a personal experience of the person of Jesus, not simply its usefulness as a tool to scour with our logic for glimpses of the absolute. In other words, the person of Jesus Christ is the divine manifestation of absolute meaning and Truth, our “north star” as it were. Jesus is not simply the teacher of the Truth (although he is that); Jesus is Truth itself. This understanding supersedes logic because Truth is the very nature of the universe itself, to which logic is subservient.

This approach allows us to appreciate other religions—these are full of people who are actively seeking after divine Truth and meaning, and perhaps finding some modicum of it here and there—while maintaining the assertion that Christianity is “the more excellent way,” because the center of Christianity—the Triune God—is Truth itself knowable only through direct experience of relationship with the Truth.

Please understand that such short space does a poor job of laying out the theology I have been (and still am) developing according to my own understanding and experience. It absolutely fails here to explore the many ramifications and consequences of such a theology. I have at best only touched upon some the expected points of a systematic theology—Christology, pneumatology, etc.

Nevertheless, I hope that this brief outline piques your interest—these ideas pervade all of my theological posts on the blog and you will be able to explore it more fully by reading through my various posts. One day, soon if God is willing, I will present it in greater length in book format, stepping through these points and more chapter by chapter.

In the meantime, I look forward to your comments, criticisms and questions as I continue to develop this theology into something truly systematic and—as much as any theology can be (which is to say “not really”)—complete.

Is liberal theology the future of Christianity? Should it be?

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If you read my blog, you know that I stand firmly on the side of liberal/progressive theology. I have a deep conviction that a liberal interpretation of faith and scripture gets us closer to properly understanding Christ than available alternatives—and I believe that it leads to not only a stronger, more resilient faith but also a better world. The proof is in the pudding, so to speak.

But I also try to maintain some humility and avoid the arrogance of assuming that the interpretations that I favor are automatically superior to others with which I am confronted. At the very least, we ought to be aware of and to understand differing interpretations as a check to our own. We ought also to understand alternative theologies to better understand and live with the people who hold them. As important, though, we need to be constantly challenged in our theology to refine and affirm it—this cannot be done only with echo-chambers of like-minded individuals.

And so, in a microcosm of this tension I try to maintain, this combined confidence and skepticism, I write this post on some of my thoughts about the future of Christianity.

Watching the struggles of my own denomination (the United Methodist Church) with conflicts between liberal and conservative theologies, I wonder whether the Christian Church—as a whole—can sustain itself on conservative theology. I have written, sometimes admittedly harshly, in other posts about the ways in which I believe conservative (to be fair, ultra-conservative) theology hurts the witness of the Gospel.

Recent events within the UMC—the election of Rev. Karen Oliveto to Bishop of the Western Conference, for instance, make it seem increasingly likely that there will be a split between the conservative and liberal elements of the UMC. The actions of the Wesleyan Covenant Association seem to underline the preparation for this split and its inevitability.

I believe that one of the greatest testaments to the love of Jesus Christ would be for the United Methodist Church to remain unified, living and worshipping together despite differences in what should be considered ancillary theological matters (I detect no differences in doctrine on the creedal values and statements). However, I am increasingly convinced that a split is coming.

There is a cynical part of me that believes that this is a good thing, which leads us to the crux of this post: I wonder if a conservative daughter organization of the UMC, and really any church adamant about conservative theology, can survive. I have a growing suspicion that conservative churches will wither and die.

I would like to say that this would prove that liberal theology is a superior interpretation of our faith than conservative, but this does not logically follow. The reason that I believe that conservative churches will continue to see their numbers fall in the coming years until they become unsustainable is that liberal theology has a much better chance of converting the ever-increasing population of unchurched young people. Conservative theology butts heads with many of the social values of younger generations, and I believe that this is ultimately irreconcilable.

But, to reiterate, that liberal theology might be more attractive to future generations (to the extent that any theology is, and that’s a significant question) does not make it correct theology. The Crusades were popular among Christians but certainly un-Christian.

So, here’s the dilemma I have—I really want to say that this perceived (and, mind you, totally unscientific) belief that liberal theology has higher chances of bringing new people into the Church is emblematic of C.S. Lewis’ “natural law,” that it is a subtle but God-breathed recognition of the conscience for the better morality. Wanting does not make it so, and there’s a grave danger of arrogance and the same dismissal of the other side of the argument that I often point out in conservative’s use of the phrase “authority of Scripture.” Hypocrisy is not a look anyone can pull off, myself included.

I think that all sides of the conservative/liberal theological split would agree that theology should never be adapted to become more attractive to potential converts. It should only be adapted when the newer theology seems to be correct for its own sake, without reference to the opinions of others. Unfortunately, I doubt whether we humans can separate those things from one another, and—even if I ultimately deny the claim—it is a question that ought to be considered, wrestled with and fully addressed when conservatives accuse liberals of altering theology to suit what makes them happy. Then again, the liberals might fairly accuse the conservatives of altering theology to suit what makes them feel safe. Ultimately, this just means that humans ought to carefully consider their own motives when reaching theological conclusions.

Despite my skepticism, which I believe should be maintained for a healthy theology (and a healthily low level of arrogance), I do believe that liberal theology is right and that it is a good thing—I refuse to speculate about the movement of the Spirit in matters such as this, for that would be to presume far too much—that what I believe is the better theology resonates more with younger generations. For me, this means a hope that the dwindling of avowed Christians may be reversed and, in the process, create a Church that is more faithful to Christ.

At the same time, it would be problematic at the least for conservative interpretations to die out. This is not a fair comparison, so please do not take it as such, but consider Arianism. The early church had to actually wrestle with and confront this heterodoxy; now we take its inaccuracy for granted. Conservative interpretation is infinitely more supportable than any established heterodoxy (though I find it ultimately insupportable). If we lose faithful, good-hearted people of conservative theology—of whom I’m sure there are many—we lose a “loyal opposition” that forces us to carefully evaluate and defend our own theology. No theology should be taken for granted.

Neither should we seek to maintain conservative theologians as strawmen or zoological exhibits—we must remember that, at least on some issues, their interpretations may be right. Most important, we must remember that our faith has many mysteries that may be unable to resolve, and thus we ought to be willing and ready to live in harmony with those Christians with whom we disagree on certain theological matters.

Because of my convictions, I sincerely hope that liberal Christian theologies will prevail over conservative ones, and that this will cause a revival and re-expansion of our faith. At the same time, I hope that we maintain a diversity of theologies that can challenge us and further refine our understanding of the person and nature of Jesus Christ.

As a final caveat, I have to admit that I cannot be sure that the conservative factions within Christianity will die off—many seem to be doing quite well, and some very conservative factions, such as the Mennonites, have endured for quite some time in the face of competing theologies (albeit in small pockets).