Theology

The Beautiful Truth about Evangelism

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When I was in college at Texas A&M, once a semester a certain Tom Short would visit campus. Mr. Short travels from university campus to campus, attempting to evangelize.

A close friend and I would skip class to watch –and argue with–him. You see, he offended me. Not because he’s an evangelist, but because he spread a message too filled with fear, shame and condemnation to represent the Gospel. Once, after standing amongst the gathered crowd and going back and forth with Mr. Short for several minutes about what I perceived to be problems with his idea of God, a fellow student approached me and handed me a flyer for an atheist and agnostic student club. When I told the guy that I was a Christian, but that I didn’t believe that the visiting evangelist was doing a good job of representing what Christianity is about, he looked at me, confused. That’s what this kind of evangelism accomplishes for Christ–it turns people away by giving them an inaccurate image of our God and our faith.

A bit older and wiser, I realize now that my public protest about evangelism in the style of Mr. Short was more about self-expression and formation of personal identity than any real attempt to prevent the preacher from accomplishing his goals. There never was any need for me to speak against him, as his entire production was–as I’ll argue below–doomed by divine design. That seems a very harsh thing to say, and it is, so I hope you’ll bear with some explanation.

I don’t know whether Short’s preaching (or polemic, as was most often the case) ever caused anyone to say that he confessed Jesus Christ as his savior, but I doubt the authenticity of any such declaration (while admitting that only God knows such things). I’m not sure that fire and brimstone, accusatory evangelism has ever made a follower of Christ. Someone who confesses to be a Christian, probably, but not someone who has fallen in love with our Creator.

There’s something anemic about a theology that pressures people to make choices only to avoid hell. It reeks of predation on man’s cowardice, a use fear to coerce an admission of belief. The whole scheme is anologous to torture–give me what I want or suffer the consequences. Like torture (according to recent studies), the practice at best goads people to say anything to avoid suffering–in this case, eternally, we are told. Even secular values would condemn the person who confesses a certain belief (or who abandons a previously-confessed ideology) just to avoid punishment. So why does anyone think that threats are a viable way to share the Gospel truth?

This post isn’t about man, though. It’s about God. It’s about a God so gracious that such condemnatory evangelical practices are doomed to failure. You see, a relationship with God through Jesus Christ can only be entered into voluntarily–no amount of threat or shaming can cause a person to make a choice in his heart. Again, coercion might make someone say they’ve voluntarily chosen something, but it won’t change a person’s true desires.

Here we find a poetic justice. If God is love, and God’s ultimate desire for us is to have a deep and meaningful relationship with God, then it should follow that God wants nothing to do with coercion in the establishment of the relationship. That a person may only willingly enter into that relationship demonstrates a humility on God’s part in God’s willingness to preserve our free will in the hope of a genuine relationship, one that we may never choose to pursue.

The scriptures tell us that a person comes to believe in Jesus Christ’s divinity only through the action of the Holy Spirit and not through the actions of humans. Thank God for that! I don’t want to delve too deeply into pneumatology in this post, but I’d like to summarily comment that it seems to me that the Holy Spirit makes a way for us (call it preveneient grace if you like; we Methodists do) to choose to enter into a relationship with God based on our love for God’s character and creation.

Likewise, scholars of religion and mystical experience often describe a profound spiritual experience as one that changes one’s life but is by its very nature ineffable to others. That no one can “prove” God to us safeguards the opportunity to seek God out for ourselves, makes room for belief. After all, faith is a choice to believe in things that we cannot rationally prove or disprove.

So what does that mean for true evangelism, a sharing of the Gospel that is (I think) more in line with God’s intent for us? All we can do is try to reveal the person of Jesus Christ to others: through our own actions, through our words, through our sharing of the Gospel. It is not for us to make believers–God has ensured that a believer can only make himself. To be clear, this post is not a condemnation of evangelism–far from it–but only a stand against evangelism based in anything but love for fellow man and a desire to share the great joy of knowing Christ.

This reality reminds us of God’s deep love for us.God intends a personal relationship with each of us–a relationship so unique to each of us that we can’t even even reasonably communicate it to one another. We can only bask in the awesomeness of it side by side.

Here’s the beautiful truth about evangelism: the God of love has created the universe so that only by love may God be approached by the believer. This is not a comment about sin or salvation, not a theodicy or an aspersion against the unbeliever, only a realization of the beauty of a God who will not let us be successful is using ways other than God’s to bring people into faith.

So, the next time you hear a preacher full of fire asking you where you’ll go if you die today, don’t get angry, but remember the beauty of a God who has by the very nature of existence decreed that such an ungodly approach to the Gospel will never succeed.

New Mysticism

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When I tell people that I’m an amateur theologian, they often ask what kind of theology I write about. That’s a tough question. In the past, I’ve responded by saying “existential Christian theology” or loftily explaining that I’d like to describe Christian theology in a way that makes it understandable, relevant and attractive to the millennial generation, on the verge of which I sit myself. To what extent that’s a reconsideration of current theologies or just a new marketing scheme, I don’t know. Neither does that matter so much, as the only really-persuasive, heart-changing thing about Christianity is the person of Jesus Christ.

All of that aside, as I’ve developed and organized my theological precepts in writing for this blog, I’ve come to realize the importance of mysticism in my own understanding (however limited it may be) of the divine. Were I to undertake the arduous task of writing a systematic theology, I think now that I might title the school of thought “New Mysticism.”

Dictionary.com (in the second entry) defines mysticism as “a doctrine of an immediate spiritual intuition of truths believed to transcend ordinary understanding, or of a direct, intimate union of the soul with God through contemplation or ecstasy.”

We live in a postmodern age, skeptical of any answers this world could provide us. On the one hand, we see extremists telling us that there is no possible argument about the truth, that it is painted in harsh tones of black and weight, never mixing, never graded. On the other there are those who tell us that there is no such thing as Truth, that everything is a matter of perspective, or society or culture, that everything is relative.

Every day, science continues to astound us with the complexity, strangeness and splendor of the natural universe, all the while failing to answer life’s most important questions. Neuroscience shows us the many ways in which the brain might be tricked into misperceiving; we must become skeptical of our own ability to know and understand the universe around us. But there are more things in heaven and earth, dear Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The myth of progress has failed us; we have more ways to entertain ourselves, more things to do with our time, ways to communicate and travel faster than ever before, and yet the worst of our problems remain to plague us. We are disconnected and disaffected; disparity in power, wealth and opportunity yawns wide between societies and individuals; we still exploit one another, play games of “us” and “them,” fear and hate one another.

The myth of a bygone Golden Age is a bad joke. Those who tell us we can “make America great again” want to do so by reliving the darkest parts of our history—oppression, suppression and regression. Human nature has always been what it is; our past reflects this.

Should we not look toward what we might make of ourselves rather than what has been? Should we rely on revolutions in science and technology that might cover over the darker parts of our selves rather than healing one another’s souls and becoming something better?

Why do we look to the world for our answers? Nothing satisfies. We have been gifted the power to craft and create purpose and meaning and we have ignored it. Look at the wonder of the stories we craft—and then look upon the fallenness of the world we have wrought.

When logic fails us in answering the great existential questions, what are we to do? We look elsewhere. We look to hope. We look to faith. We look to love. None of these is logical, yet they answer more meaningful questions than all of our intellectual works.

We look beyond the world we see, to the invisible we sense only by other means, means at once inexplicable and undeniable. We look to the God who moves beyond all things, reaching for us if only we will let ourselves be grasped, whispering to us if only we will open our ears to hear.

In the relationship God seeks with us, there only is to be found Truth, there only is the source of all meaning worth making, there only are the answers we cannot find through our own faculties, great though they may be. The answers are found in relationship, not in understanding.

I know no other word for that than mysticism. I have never experienced the unio mystica, never spoken in tongues, never had an ecstatic experience of the divine. I do not mean that we should attempt to seek God through asceticism, nor do I mean to advocate for any particular “mystical experience.”

I seek a mystical way of living, one that follows the example of Christ by placing importance on the things that cannot be seen and grasped but that are more powerful than anything we find in this world—relationships, meaning, love. It is my belief that, to do that, we must free ourselves from the notion that we have the ability to understand, much less control, all things, we must be open to receiving the transcendent touch of a God who graciously condescends to be present with us. Most of all, we must live in light of the change that such experience brings to us—and we must endeavor to share that change with a world desperately in need of it.

That I think, is a mysticism of its own kind, a mystical view of existence that does not sharply differentiate between the mundane and the spiritual, but holds them together in tension. In this way, I think that it is fair to call it “new,” though I may be falling prey to the myth of progress myself.

The Word of God for the People of God, Part I

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It is a phrase we Methodists hear every Sunday after the scripture lesson: “The word of God for the people of God.” This phrasing is not used just by Protestants; its origin is probably in the Institutio Generalis Missalis Romani, the Catholic Church’s liturgical document governing the celebration of mass, where the reader of scripture ends by saying, “Verbum Domini,” and the congregants respond, “Deo gratias.”[1]

The phrase troubles me somewhat, not in and of itself, but in the implications it seems to intimate, particularly for American evangelicals predisposed to literalist and infallibilist positions regarding the Bible.

The Bible itself makes no claim to be “the word of God.” In fact, the Gospel of John opens by identifying Jesus Christ as the Word. Now, Paul does tell us that all scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. 2 Timothy 3:16. I do not mean to call that statement a falsehood (I don’t think it is one), but let’s pull at the strings a little.

The apostle Paul was likely most active from 30 A.D. to 50 A.D., with his death likely sometime around 67 A.D. Scholars do not have a hard understanding of the time of writing and sequence of the Gospels, but they do have enough circumstantial evidence to build strong theories about the same. The Gospel of Mark was probably the first of the canonical Gospels to be written, appearing sometime between 65 A.D. and 70 A.D.[2]

Looking at those dates, we see that Paul had no access to the canonical Gospels during the time he wrote his epistles (which, since he was writing them, were also not part of any recognizable canon). The oral traditions upon which the written Gospels were probably based were undoubtedly in circulation, being preached by Paul himself, others whose names we have in the Book of Acts and certainly many unnamed missionaries as well, but when Paul wrote the words of 2 Timothy, there were no New Testament scriptures to be included in that statement. Really, what Paul is getting at here is that the Jewish scriptures—the Torah, the chronicles and the stories of the prophets—remain relevant to the Christian and should not be abandoned because of the Incarnation.

Let’s also think about the meaning of “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” Human cultures have always (at least as long as they’ve recorded their thoughts) used both positive and negative examples to model behavior for others. We tell stories of heroes persevering and triumphing over adversity to demonstrate those qualities we think best in a human being. Conversely, we tell stories about people meeting unfortunate ends to warn away listeners from behavior we have deemed harmful or anti-social.

Several genres are strongly based in using negative examples to persuade the audience to avoid or adhere to certain behaviors. The Greek tragedies, based as they are upon the hubris of their victim-protagonists, provide one sample. As a more modern (and specific) example, consider Friday the 13th, where teenagers at Camp Crystal Lake are murdered, typically after some carnal encounter with their fellows. The obvious moral: premarital sex will get you killed; don’t do it.

You can find plenty of additional positive and negative examples for instructing in behavior in your favorite literary medium. Without putting too fine a point on it, I mean to say that not all examples useful for instruction are ones we’re meant to follow. Paul isn’t saying, “do exactly what the scriptures say without question;” he’s saying, “when properly considered, all scripture has something worth learning.” I think that we can all agree with that, but it is not an argument for a literal interpretation as it is often used.

The New Testament did not become an official canon until centuries after Christ. Marcion of Sinope (declared a heretic for his dualistic belief that the God of the New Testament could not be the same as the God of the Old Testament—ironically based on a somewhat literal reading of texts that failed to make any attempt at reconciliation or synthesis) gave us the first list of “authoritative” (according to him) scriptures around 140 A.D. More lists, closer to the eventual official canon, existed by the beginning of the 3rd century and became relatively close in selection by the middle of the century. Still, the first appearance of the exact list that would become the canonized New Testament (and described as canonized) did not appear until a letter of Athanasius of Alexandria in 367 A.D.

In contrast, the first ecumenical council, the First Council of Nicaea, occurred in 325 A.D. Prior to that many smaller councils had occurred as early as 50 A.D. (the “Council of Jerusalem” described in Acts; the next known council was the Council of Rome in 155 A.D.) to 314 A.D. Each of these councils answered doctrinal and theological questions, though the pre-ecumenical councils were not dispositive as they led to different regions ascribing to different theologies, something the Council of Nicaea sought to rectify.

The First Council of Nicaea brought us the Nicene Creed (though it was amended in 381 at the First Council of Constantinople into the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed). These creeds, perhaps with minor differences in translation or stylistic variances, are still used in worship today. Admittedly, certain of the doctrines codified in these creeds—particularly Trinitarian doctrine and homoousios—came from disciplined close readings of available scriptural documents, but it is nevertheless important to note that the doctrines were adopted before the official canon, and that it is thus likely (based on human nature) that the official canon selected those books that supported already-adopted doctrine over those that provided arguments against such doctrines.

Did God have a hand in these debates, councils and thinkers who gave us both the doctrine and the canonized New Testament? I have no doubt. Did God fully ordain and control the development of doctrine and the canon? God could have, but that doesn’t match my own experience of how God moves in the world. Of course, I’ve been wrong before…

The point of all of this information is not to discredit the value of scripture in the Christian walk, nor to attempt to answer the ultimate questions of interpretation or theological position of the Bible. Nor do I suggest that we should stop using the “word of God for the people of God” phraseology in our liturgy. God does speak to us through scriptures, although this phenomenon I think is more complex than the reading of the words themselves. It should also be noted that the lack of capitalization of the word “word” in the liturgical phrase “word of God” is purposeful; careful Methodist theology is not trying to conflate the Bible with Jesus Christ. This, however, gets lost somewhat in the hearing of the liturgy.

My goal in this post has been to provide some complicating factors based on history and logic surrounding the creation of scripture to nuance our understanding of the meaning of the words “the word of God” when referencing the Bible as compared to “the Word of God” when speaking of Christ.

This discussion cannot end here, because it does not fully answer questions about the Word of God and the use of scriptures. While I will continue to examine this topic, I’m going to hopefully avoid some pedantry and redundancy by referring you to my early post, “Ambiguity in Scripture, Part IV” for a discussion of the Barthian approach to the Word of God as Jesus Christ, a point I’ll pick up on in the post that follows.

For the next post in this series, click here.

[1] An interesting footnote to this historical point, particularly in the context of this post, is that “Verbum Domini” used to be rendered in English as “This is the Word of the Lord” from 1969 until 1991, when the translation became “The word of the Lord.”

[2] It is possible that the theorized Q source predates Mark and was already in some circulation at the time the Mark was written, but this remains debatable.

A Wedding Homily

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I recently had the great honor of being asked by my sister to perform her wedding ceremony. I’m not an ordained clergyperson, but that’s the sort of request that one just does not deny, and I remain so moved to have been asked.

At about the time this post goes live, the ceremony will be underway and, depending upon the timing, you might be reading this just about the same time that I’m saying these words to the gathered witnesses. Regardless of when you read them, here are the words I will speak, am speaking or have spoken for her homily:

“A few minutes ago, you heard a reading from 1 Corinthians 13. It’s a verse that’s often selected for weddings, being about love and all, but it’s worth considering what’s going on in the whole passage.

The passage begins with ‘If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.’

The scriptures here tell us that love must be the foundation of meaningful action; all action not based in love is ultimately fruitless and forgettable. Your successes do not matter; your failures do not matter; but your love, your love matters. Why?

Because the purpose and foundation of existence itself is relationship with God, with one another, and Creation. So important is this to our Creator that 1 John 4:7 and 8 tell us that ‘Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God…God is love.’

Jesus often uses the metaphor of marriage to describe the relationship between the church—as the body of believers—and the divine. The marriage relationship, the facing of life together where two people put their partner’s needs before their own, that’s the closest human relationship that exists to the relationship that God seeks with each of us.

The passage in Corinthians ends, ‘And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.’ Faith, hope and love are so closely bound together as to be almost inseparable. Hope is the joy and peace stretching into the boundless future that comes from faith in the absolute love of another for us. This is the message of the gospel, but it’s also the foundation of marriage. A successful marriage must be founded upon those three: faith, hope and love.

That’s much easier said than done. Marriage is not always easy; it’s the careful fusion that makes two one but also retains and respects the individuality of both members. Here’s the paradox: you two love one another because of who you individually are, but your marriage is a promise to so bind yourselves together that you, for many purposes, are one. Sometimes, there will be a struggle between your own individuality and the needs or best interests of the marriage. That’s where you’ll need faith, hope, and love.

When I talked about the three above, I hope that I made it clear that love is the most important of the three—both faith and hope rely upon love to work. Fortunately, this same passage in Corinthians gives us something of a crib sheet if we’re wondering what that word “love” means.

You see, we use the word ‘love’ to mean a number of different things: I love my sister and I love my wife and I love chocolate, but none of those loves is the same as the others. This isn’t confined to the English language—the original Greek of the New Testament has, according to C.S. Lewis’s reading, four different types of love—conveniently, Greek actually uses different words for those different types of love.

Lewis tells us about storge, the love between people that comes from empathy and familiarity, the kind of love between parents and children. Then there’s philia, the brotherly love that people who share common values or interests. There’s eros, the romantic love of desire. Most important, there’s agape, the kind of self-sacrificial love that God demonstrates for us in the person of Jesus Christ.

In a marriage, you will have storge, you will have philia, and you will have eros. Those things are the rightful and righteous fruits of a marriage to be enjoyed, but they are not sufficient to keep a marriage solid. Only agape can do that.

Fortunately, 1 Corinthians gives us a map of agape. That was the description of love you heard earlier in this service. I won’t repeat it now—you’ve heard it many times before—but I do want to point something out. The things that define love in those passages, they are not feelings, they are not descriptions of conditions, and they don’t just occur. Those things that define love in the passage—patience, kindness, not boasting, humility, truthfulness, perseverance—those things are choices.

And that’s what your marriage vows are really about, about the promise between the two of you to continually choose agape, to choose to love one another and to protect and build your relationship, and not just when it’s easy. Especially when it’s not easy.

But remember that you are not alone. The people here before you have given their word that they will be there to help you when choosing love is difficult. And sometimes it will be.

It is my prayer for you that, through the continuous choice to love one another with that divine and unconditional love you will promise to one another in just a moment, the joy and peace that comes from hope, faith and love will be yours always, based in this moment you are about to share and the words you are about to say.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

The Name of God as an Answer to Existential Questions

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In Exodus 3:14, God tells Moses God’s name. In translation, this is usually written out as “I AM” or “I AM THAT I AM” or “I AM WHO I AM.” A while back, I started to think about the meaning of that and found myself amazed.

God’s name is not meant to be merely impressive title, nor is it simply something that sounds good. It is certainly not simply a logical theorem—such would not need to be spoken, because it is undeniable that a being is its being.

When God tells us that God’s name is “I AM,” God is giving us truth, giving us answers to questions we may not even have thought to ask (but, probably, at some time, have crossed our minds, however briefly).

Here are two things (certainly not an exhaustive list) that God’s name tells us:

The Impassibility of God

If we read God’s name as “I AM WHO I AM,” we are given a theological argument about God’s identity. The statement declares, or at least very strongly implies, God’s self-sufficiency and sovereignty. More important, it implies God’s impassibility. The theological term “impassibility” means that God’s person cannot be involuntarily changed by any event, force or influence outside of God’s self. In other words, God is perfectly according to God’s will and no other force in existence could make God be anything other than what God intends to be.

There is a caveat, though. Some theologians want to use God’s impassibility to argue that God does not have feelings in any sense that a human could understand, or that God could never be moved by something outside God’s self. I have tried to word the paragraph above to carefully avoid such an assertion. Yes, God cannot be moved by anything outside God’s self against God’s will, but to say that God could not allow God’s self to be moved by God’s own will to be vulnerable to an outside influence would logically negate the very idea of impassibility, because a force outside of God, some more law of existence that stands above God even, would be dictating God’s “impassibility,” and such an attribute must come from ontology to be logically consistent.

Rethink some of the things that God has done with and for humanity in light of this. When Abraham pleads with God for Sodom and Gomorrah, God must be making a choice to be persuadable in the first place. Whether this story should be read as historical fact or allegory does not matter—the point is that God willingly condescends to be in a responsive relationship with humanity. God is not distant and uncaring; God is personal and deeply involved in the experience of human existence. Think also of God choosing to suffer in the person of Jesus. An impassible God need never suffer—emotionally or physically—and yet the justice of our God is so great that God shows us that God will not allow any misfortune to befall us that God will not willingly suffer alongside us.

The Origin and Existence of God and Creation

“I AM.” The original Hebrew likely did not contain a period at the end of the statement, but it reads best, I think as “I AM [full stop].”

Have you ever thought to yourself, “If God created everything, where did God come from?” Or, perhaps, if you are not inclined to faith, “What happened before the universe started? What was before before?”

It is a question unanswerable in any meaningful way by the human mind. Two major mathematical solutions have been presented. In the first, something just is without reference to any timescale—at certain dimensions of scale time becomes irrelevant and it possible that, in some quantum physics calculations for example, the same result is generated regardless of the directionality of time (past to future versus future to past). The second major mathematical solution is an infinity of universes—one universe is generated by some event in a preceding universe and this stretches backward and forward in time infinitely. To a certain extent the two answers are really the same: existence just is.

Can we really do anything meaningful with either of those interpretations? No. The human mind is incapable of grasping the infinite in any truly tangible way and the attempt to do so is often met with nothing short of existential terror.

Before humans had any concept of quantum mechanics or advanced mathematics dealing with infinite solution sets, God gave us the answer to the primordial question. It only took God two words to explain in the entirety: “I AM.” God is, uncreated, eternal, without first cause. While we humans can say those sorts of words and understand in principle their meaning, we are, perhaps forever, incapable of actually understanding what they mean in their fullness. We cannot grok them.

We get a similar answer from God at the end of the Book of Job (perhaps my favorite in the Old Testament)—we are incapable of understanding all of existence, and this forces us to choose to either have faith in the creator God or not.

The End of Violence, Part IV: An Argument

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For the previous post in this series, click here.

As promised, I’m going to humbly offer here my own views as to the appropriate relationship between the Christian and violence. The best way to begin, I think, is to start with a few statements based upon the previous posts in this series (or from scripture not discussed) and which all readers could (I hope) agree upon. Following these statements are some questions raised by the previous analysis that represent issues that must be resolved.

First: When it has a chance of success, a non-violent approach is morally superior to a violent approach.

Second: Jesus never explicitly commands his followers not to do violence.

Third: Jesus wants us to love even our enemies.

Q: If some violence is acceptable, when and how much?

 Q: Does loving our enemies (or our friends, for that matter) necessarily mean punishing those who commit injustice?

Q: How do we resolve the tension that results when we are called to love both those who would do harm and those they target as victims?

The three statements and three questions give us a good foundation to build upon before we delve into the gray area. Here’s how we begin:

Precept 1: The Christian should, to the extent possible, avoid using violence.

Violence solves problems, yes, but it typically creates more problems than it solves. Thus, Matthew 26:52, “They who take the sword will perish by the sword.”

As a student of Renaissance history, I often think of the Wars of the Roses or the vendettas fought amongst the Italian nobility during the Quattrocento. One act of violence creates a need to “get justice” or “get even” or “punish wrongdoers.” We are left with a century of bloody conflicts, each subsequent engagement arising out of those fought before it. I’m not sure that any other century is different.

Machiavelli, writing about that time, offers the pragmatic advice in The Prince that, when one moves against one’s enemies, one ought to destroy every remnant, every vestige of the enemy and his friends and relations so that none is left to seek reprisal. In the struggle for power, as was the status quo in Machiavelli’s Italy, this is sound advice. But it also reflects the extremity to which violence must be used to prevent further violence.

We ought to realize that violence, even if used for just purposes, is a result of the fallenness of humanity. Were everyone to love his neighbor as himself, there would be no need for violence. Thus, while an individual act of violence may not be a particular sin, the use of violence is always the participation in the corporate sin of humanity. Because of this, it must be used only as a last resort and should be employed only with a since of sorrow that a better outcome could not be achieved.

Precept 2: Violence should only be used to prevent or stop violent injustice against a person, not after the fact. The need for violence must be immediate.

If there’s time to think of alternative solutions, there’s time to seek a non-violent resolution to a problem. On the other hand, if immediate action is required, however, the time for seeking de-escalation of the conflict has been lost. This precept helps us to comply with Precept 1.

Let’s also think of the collateral consequences here. One of the questions posed above was how we can balance loving victims and wrongdoers. When immediate action is not necessary, we can attempt to work on loving solutions for both parties. Yes, this may be punishment for a wrongdoer, but I leave that an open question for another series of posts. When immediate action is necessary to preserve life and limb, it seems just to intervene against the wrongdoer to protect the innocent. Not our first choice given the requirement to love even our enemies, but the choice to do something non-violent has been taken from us when immediate responsive violence becomes necessary.

This also means that we do not use violence to punish wrongdoers when there is no immediate threat. Violent punishment has largely been shown to be ineffective at deterring future offense (look at 18th Century England, where the death penalty was handed out like it was about to be outlawed). More important, punishment is more about the punisher and not the punishee. When we seek violent retribution for wrongs done to us or others, we are willingly participating in the fallenness that perpetuates violence in the world. “Vengeance is mine…sayeth the Lord” (Deuteronomy 32:35, Romans 12:19). Violence inflicted as punishment cannot restore to wholeness the party injured by a crime. Because only God is truly just, we ought to leave the meting out of retributive punishment to God. I’m not saying we should never punish wrongdoers; however, violently punishing them is nothing but retribution.

This also means that violence should not be employed to protect property—only people. I’d like to avoid (for now) debates about Jesus’ views on personal property and ownership. Without going into that, I think that we can agree that Jesus’ teachings and life made clear that he valued human life over any property rights he believes in (whatever those may be).

In Texas, where I live, the law explicitly allows justified use of force for the protection of property in specific circumstances. But the law and morality should not be confused—they are separate entities with separate goals and concerns, only sometimes aligned.

Precept 3: Only the necessary amount of violence ought to be used.

To the extent that we can avoid doing more harm than necessary, we should. This is an aspect of loving our enemies. Deadly force ought not to be used if less-than-deadly force could reasonably suffice. The amount of violence we use ought to be scaled to the injustice or violence we seek to prevent. This, perhaps, is what we should take away from Jesus’ statement about turning the other cheek—violence is not the answer to offense, even if violent, that does not really threaten life or limb.

I need to hedge and be absolutely clear that, while a solid precept from a philosophical/theological standpoint, strict adherence to this precept is extremely difficult in practice. When we apply force—especially deadly force—against another person, we have little surety in the ultimate results of the force. There’s plenty of second-guessing to be done in the aftermath of a violent engagement (Would fewer shots fired have been sufficient? Could I have done something differently to stop the attacker and injure him less?), but split-second decisions must be made in a fight and survival is on the line, so the objectively best choices may not be made in the moment.

I recently heard someone say, “if the bad guy is worth shooting once, he’s worth shooting five times.” This is tactically correct—while the human body is a frail thing and a single wound from a firearm may kill a person in a relatively short amount of time, the body is also highly resistant over the short term and a single shot from a weapon the likes of which a civilian would be wielding is unlikely to immediately physically stop the attacker (though it might psychologically). Since the goal of morally-applied violence is to stop the attacker as soon as possible, a high amount of force quickly applied may be necessary, making it less likely that the attacker will survive.

As another complicating factor, applying a lesser degree of force is often accompanied by a greater degree of risk of injury to ourselves. Having studied techniques of unarmed combat, I know (technically) how to defend and disarm someone with a knife. But the same training has made clear that, when fighting a person with a knife, you will get cut, and even expert fighters (which I do not claim to be) can be killed in a knife-fight because of bad luck. If knives come out and I have reasonable tactical distance from the threat, I’d rather be behind a gun. I’m not a big guy by any means, and there are plenty of people in this world with whom I’d prefer not to go toe-to-toe unless forced and, if I’ve decided that violence is morally justified, I’m going to fight to win. A disparity in force with my opponent means the stakes of the violence may be raised higher than I would have voluntarily raised them and I must respond in kind.

Where we can, though, we ought to mitigate the results of our violence to the extent possible. After the threat is over, we ought to provide all the medical attention we can to the injured parties—including and perhaps especially any wounded attacker(s). Again, this is a matter of loving our neighbors.

Precept 4: A Christian who is prepared to do violence must make efforts in the world to prevent the necessity of violence.

If, as I do, you stand willing to do violence to other human beings to protect the innocent, you must recognize some responsibility for participation in culture and human nature that permits violence. Recognizing that, you ought to make efforts to proactively prevent the causes of violence where possible.

By this, I mean actively trying to make the world a better place. Of course, the Christian is called to this anyhow; we are called to show mercy and love justice, so we ought to (non-violently) pursue justice for the oppressed where we can, and we ought to focus on giving wrongdoers the chance to atone and reintegrate into society rather than focusing on punishing them.

This means showing kindness and respect to others—especially those with who you disagree, helping the poor to escape poverty, helping to improve unjust systems and institutions, and showing the love of Christ to our neighbors.

The person willing to do violence ought not to be quick of temper and ought to be ready to forgive offenses—otherwise our readiness to do violence turns to definitely destructive and sinful ends. We ought to hope that we never have to do violence to another person, even if we devote time, talent and money to preparing for the possibility. We must recognize that the proper response to violence is not always more violence.

If we are prepared to do violence, we Christians must be more prepared to refrain from doing violence.

Conclusion

I’d like to summarize my argument thus: We ought to view violence itself as an evil, but one that may be occasionally be used to prevent greater evil. While Christ does not explicitly command us not to do violence, it is clear that love ought to prevail wherever it can. Violence should be employed only reluctantly and with sorrow for the alternative resolutions that have been lost, even if they have been lost through the will of someone other than ourselves. Most of all, we ought to do everything that we can to prevent violence, both in our immediate situation and in the world at large.

I think I probably have one more post on this topic to do, to clean up a few loose ends and address a few things that I realize I’ve left out (what about the Ten Commandments!). More to come.

 

 

 

The End of Violence, Part III: Re-examining Jesus and Violence

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For the previous post in this series, click here.

To be fair, there are several arguments (other than the one about the swords) given for the position that Jesus advocated for non-violence where possible but never took the position that violence was categorically impermissible.

An article on RealClearReligion.com by Jeffrey Mann organizes some of these arguments, so I’m going to make reference to it (from April 30th, 2014, available at: http://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2014/04/30/the_myth_of_a_non-violent_jesus.html).

Mann makes a few good arguments, I think. In the original Greek, the word used in Jesus’ statement about turning the other cheek refers to an open-handed strike—an act of humiliation rather than of serious threat. For Mann, the statement does not preclude a permission to defend oneself. Mann also argues that the example of Jesus going to his death without fighting against it should not be viewed as the example for all people in all scenarios.

I want to agree with the second argument, but I have to acknowledge that we get into tricky territory when we start to say “follow Jesus in this, but not in this.” That difficulty, however, is not sufficient to say that the argument itself is incorrect.

Mann also brings up the point that, when we’re talking about the use of violence to protect others, there is a natural tension between loving the person against whom we might use violence and loving those who we seek to protect. I want to acknowledge that, but I want to argue against his statement (drawn from C.S. Lewis) that failing to punish criminals is a failure to love our neighbors. Punishment occurs when there is no immediate threat; that is a very different thing than using violence to stop an immediate danger to life and limb. I’ll talk about my views on justice in the legal system in other posts, but suffice to say for now that I believe that our punishment of criminals is more about us than them, and I stand against the death penalty as a punishment.

Mann asks the question, “Should we simply forgive them [our enemies] when they do awful things? This clearly cannot be what Jesus intended.” And yet, Jesus forgives those who persecute and kill him. I think that Jesus would have us attempt to love both victim and offender—to help restore the victim to wholeness (to the extent that we can) and help the offender to not offend again. We are called, ultimately, not to judgment but to healing. Unfortunately, people do not always give us the option to help them and sometimes wholeheartedly resist our attempts to love them.

There is also the passage in which Jesus takes a whip to the moneylenders in the temple. (John 2:15). It’s hard to call that a non-violent event; it’s even premeditated considering that we’re told that Jesus fashions the whip himself. On the other hand, the other Gospels make no mention of a whip in the same event, the word for “drove” is the same root as when Jesus “drives” demons out of the possessed and, after all, John is the most metaphorical and least literal of the Gospels.

Origen, the only church father to have commented on this passage in the first three centuries of the Church, reads it in purely a spiritual rather than a literal light. And, nowhere is it stated that Jesus even swings the whip at people, much less that he strikes anyone. For a great commentary on John 2:15, see “Jesus, the Whip, and Justifying Violence” by Nathan W. O-Halloran, SJ on The Jesuit Post blog on Patheos.com (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thejesuitpost/2015/03/jesus-the-whip-and-justifying-violence/).

Where I strongly disagree with Mann is in his use of the Old Testament scriptures as an argument for the permissibility of violence. I’m sure, dear Reader, that you have read my posts on Ambiguity in Scripture and therefore already know my thoughts on this matter. I just don’t think that God did authorize the slaughtering of innocents for the benefit of Israel. I have less trouble with the idea of defensive actions fought by the Isrealites, but the question of whether such behavior is acceptable under Jesus’ New Covenant stands.

Before I leave Mr. Mann aside, I do want to accentuate his excellent point about the theological danger of heaping judgment upon professional or volunteer soldiers if one believes that Jesus would never tolerate any violence under any circumstance. Jesus also told us that “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” Soldiers end up in often horrifying circumstances not of their own choosing, being asked to give all to do things that others won’t do so that those same others don’t have to.

The soldiers I know, especially those who have seen combat, do not want to kill people but are willing to do so to perform their duty and to protect their brothers and sisters in arms. They have a tremendous respect for the enemy who faces them in open combat. They have a conviction of belief that makes them ready to shed blood for what they hold dear. That is a powerful thing, and to be respected.

On a different note, let us also not forget that Jesus also has hard—and sometimes downright terrifying—statements as well. He tells us that he has “not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). His pronouncements about the fate of the wicked often seem to be uncompromising, and he is unafraid to speak of the way that the world will hate those who follow him. Some of this is likely intended to be metaphorical, to be sure, but we cannot simply write off the apocalyptic sayings of Jesus.

Maybe I’m simply not capable of unambiguously dealing with an issue of importance. Or maybe it’s that every issue of importance remains ambiguous to some degree or another. Either way, we again end up with great ambiguity with the question of violence.

In the last (probably) post in this short series (here), I’ll try to offer a nuanced and workable approach that, I hope, seeks to follow Jesus intentionally and to the fullest extent possible while also accounting for the exigencies and realities of a fallen world.

The End of Violence, Part II: Jesus and Just War

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For the previous post in this series, click here.

Jesus is pretty clear about violence, it seems. We are to “turn the other cheek” to “do unto others as we would have them do unto us” and to “love our neighbors.”

The “sheepdog” community (those tactically-trained civilians who see it as their duty to protect the unarmed masses from threats—we’ll talk more about this later) often likes to refer to Luke 22:36, where Jesus tells the disciples, “And let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one…” as justification for the carrying of weapons and use of defensive force. This, I think, takes the comment out of context. Just two lines later (Luke 22:38), the disciples bring Jesus two swords and he says “that is enough.” Something non-literal, something symbolic is taking place here.

Some theologians point to the passage as Jesus ensuring that a prophecy is fulfilled, without any real intention that the disciples take up arms. Indeed, Jesus has up to this point defied the expectations of those awaiting the Messiah and avoided leading an armed rebellion against Roman overlords.

The authors of the New Bible Commentary: Revised Third Edition go even further, comparing the statement with previous times Jesus has sent the disciples out with nothing—especially not swords—and they had been provided for without fail. The statement “That is enough,” is Jesus ending a conversation the disciples have failed to understand rather than commenting on the number of swords he has been brought.

This jibes well with the events in the garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus rebukes Peter for cutting the ear off of one of the men who comes to arrest Jesus, healing the man and warning that “they who take the sword shall perish by the sword”—violence begets violence (Matthew 26:52).

The entire thrust of Jesus’ ministry makes clear that Jesus would have us love, and that his conception of love does not brook violence, right?

I think that we can definitely say that Jesus tells us (and experience bears this out) that violence is never a good solution to a problem. But does that mean that the Christian should never use violence as a last resort?

An example of the other side of the coin can be found in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, where the main character’s civics teacher, a military veteran himself, retorts to a student who complains that “violence never solves anything” to “tell that to the Carthaginians!” (During the Punic Wars the Romans completely devastated the Carthaginians so that they could never again be a competing world power against the Republic.)

It is true; violence does solve problems. A person you’ve beaten into submission or killed is no longer someone you have to argue with (at least not directly). But that doesn’t mean that violence is ever a good solution. Still, the exchange in Starship Troopers does, I think, lay bare the purpose of violence—to end a conflict that cannot be ended through peace, agreement and reason. Let’s explore whether that end can ever be legitimate in light of Jesus’ example.

I’d like to talk about Just War Theory or Doctrine. Just War Theory (within Christianity) has two primary concerns: when it is just to go to war (or to use violence) and how war must be ethically conducted (how violence may permissibly be used). In essence, this is the same inquiry I’m making in these posts, but I’d like to point out some places where I disagree with the commonly propounded aspects of the doctrine.

Both Augustine and Aquinas believed that war could only be justified by a proper governmental institution. To them, this was a safeguard that the aim of a war complied with the greater good of the people. Unfortunately, I think there is a greater tendency for violence authorized by the state to be unjust than to be just. In many cases, the desire for the highest degree of national security and the desire to act ethically are diametrically opposed. To make the state the arbiter of when war is just or not implies that the actor contributes to the righteousness of the thing at least as much as intention.

I also disagree with doctrines of Just War that assert that the punishment of a guilty party is sufficient cause for war (see below) or that a preventative war might be permissible as just. One of the conclusions that I’ll ultimately arrive at is that violence must be used only to prevent an immediate threat. A peremptory strike may obviate the possibility of attempts at peaceful resolutions.

Regarding the conduct of war, experience shows that no war is just in its conduct. Even in the best of circumstances and the noblest of intents, there is death, suffering, exploitation, humiliation, fear and a whole host of other undesirable ripple effects. These are things that may be necessary, but should never be called just. Can war be conducted ethically? Yes, particularly on the individual level. In the greater scheme of things, I’m not so sure.

On the subject of justice, my reading of history seems to indicate that most wars simply set things up for the reasoning of the next war. Consider the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the first World War and the second, with the Treaty of Versailles placing Germany in such a position as to allow the rise of one like Hitler. Shouldn’t a just war result in lasting peace? I’m not sure that there’s ever been such a thing.

That said, I don’t want to say that wars are never necessary or that they never accomplish some good. Certainly, Hitler and the Third Reich needed to be stopped because greater suffering would have resulted from their victory than from fighting them, steep as the cost was. Even less do I want to say that soldiers are evil, or even necessarily wrong, in the professional practice of violence. I hope that this will become clear as these posts continue.

So, point and counterpoint—Jesus tells us to avoid violence, but World War II gives us a seeming example of when violence proved necessary. And here’s the crux of this whole issue: we Christians want (or at least ought to want) to love as fully and deeply as Jesus did and to avoid violence, but sometimes violence seems like the best of alternatives. How do we resolve that discrepancy?

For the next post in this series, click here.

The End of Violence, Part I: Introduction

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This Saturday, I’m going to a combined defensive pistol and defensive carbine class. It’s not my first tactical shooting class, and I’ve in the past been an NRA Pistol Instructor and a Texas Concealed Handgun Instructor. Regardless, the occasion seems a good one on which to share some of my thoughts about violence given my Christian faith.

This is not an easy subject and, while I’ve spent a fair amount of time studying various martial arts—krav maga, karate, sport fencing, historical European martial arts (swordplay, knife/dagger fighting and wrestling, mostly) and shooting—I can’t say that I’ve ever been in a real fight. As such, I simply don’t have access to the experience of either the event itself or the psychological aftermath. I invite those with such experience to comment on this series; I’m going to attempt to restrict myself to the abstract and philosophical side of things.

As a person of staunchly moderate political leanings and progressive theological positions, I’ve had the rare opportunity to be considered both conservative and liberal. Coming from one of the most diverse counties in the U.S. and being a theatre person with friends holding a diversity of sexual orientations and gender identities, moving to College Station put me solidly in the liberal minority, at least among the studentry (I nevertheless had no problem finding likeminded people—Texas A&M is a big school, after all). Then, going to Austin for graduate school, I suddenly found myself to be considered a conservative by my peers.

When many of my fellow students of medieval and renaissance literature discovered that I had a license to carry a concealed handgun, they suddenly had this idea that I had fashioned myself a vigilante; that I wanted to live in the Old West and have a shootout at high-noon; that I had naively decided that combat would be fun (or evilly decided that hurting other people could be enjoyable). When I explained myself, however, I often found them surprised.

I told them that I preferred to carry—legally, and not all of the time (campus carry was illegal back then, of course)— a firearm that I had trained seriously with because that way I knew that I would walk away from a violent confrontation (or, I at least had a good chance of doing so) and that I could try every non-violent dispute resolution technique I could think of rather than responding out of fear. Indeed, as a Resident Advisor at Texas A&M I had been trained in conflict de-escalation, and Texas requires similar training as part of the concealed handgun license coursework. I am convinced that there is no more valuable skill that a person may learn—whosoever they may be—than how to communicate peaceably, respectfully, empathetically and constructively with others, even if that results only in an agreement to disagree. In the broader scheme, more training in the world in how to relate and talk to people with competing interests would save more lives than all the firearms training in the world.

That was certainly my experience the only time I ever came even remotely close to drawing my weapon when carrying it. This was, conveniently, in Austin. K and I were living in an apartment on the southwest side in a suburban area well away from campus. Nevertheless, at about 2:30 in the morning one night, some undergrads in the next building over were blaring music, drinking heavily, and throwing beer bottles into the parking lot from their third floor balcony.

Admittedly, I am a very grumpy person when disturbed from my slumber. I got up, put some clothes on, and holstered my pistol in concealed holster just in case. The first move was mine, and I immediately made a mistake: upon getting close to their building I yelled up at them to turn the music down, using no expletives but not in the friendliest of voices. Immediately, three men, all very inebriated, ran down the stairs to confront me. I stood my ground but tried to backtrack, apologizing for yelling and explaining that I wanted to come ask them to turn the music down and stop throwing beer bottles rather than just calling the police.

They responded with threats. I kept my hands up and palms toward them in a non-threatening manner (also because it happened to be a good defensive position, just in case), but I also made clear that I was not intimidated. I repeated my request matter-of-factly, despite their threats at my mention of the police (they were happy to remind me that they outnumbered me, despite the fact that they were all practically falling over on their own and any collaboration between them was certainly out of the question). In the end, it became clear, perhaps as it should have been from the beginning, that I could not reason with them. I cautiously removed myself from the situation, returned to my apartment and called the police. The next day, I reported the confrontation (although not my possession of a firearm, which was immaterial as it was never produced) to the apartment management. The offending tenants were evicted for threatening fellow residents—a clear violation of the Texas Apartment Association form lease.

I’d like to think that, despite my rough start, the confrontation went about as well as I could have hoped for—I walked away unscathed and without the regret and what-ifs what would have attached if I had injured someone else—justifiably or not.

But the point of this post is not to talk about me (although I hope the long introduction has provided some background to my own biases and experience). Let’s talk about weapons, violence and Christianity. We’ll start in the next post.

Skepticism in Faith, Part 2: Logical Skepticism

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For the first post in this series, click here.

We talked about a general skepticism of what we can know and how we know what we know in the last post. From this point on, we’re going to take the position that, despite our inability to be absolutely certain about our knowledge, we humans are capable of gaining “functional” knowledge of at least some things—that is, knowledge that approximates capital “T” Truth closely enough that we can reasonably rely on it.

Under that position, the next point of skepticism I’d like to discuss is a healthy skepticism about the ways in which we achieve knowledge and about claims made about the limits (or lack thereof) about certain paths to knowledge.

Let’s talk about science. I must first admit that science does an excellent job of telling us how the world works. However, I would argue that we must maintain skepticism about the extent of science’s ability to tell us about existence, particularly when it comes to the spiritual or metaphysical.

Reputable science requires implementation of the scientific method.[1] Under scientific method, the researcher/investigator must be able to create testable predictions about the object or process under study, a falsifiable hypothesis that may potentially be disproven through experimentation. If the predictions cannot be evaluated in a way that actually tests them, scientific method cannot be applied.

In a way, scientific method follows with a form of epistemological skepticism. Despite talk about the “laws” of physics and such, science doesn’t actually prove things in the way we laypersons tend to think of proof. Instead, science steadily disproves alternative explanations until we reach explanations that seem to be creeping ever closer to reality, but never absolute certainty (although close enough to treat it as such—by this point, Newton’s laws are as much a certainty as is possible).

Science, and particularly theoretical physics (which I greatly enjoy learning about so long as you don’t ask me to do any calculations), does often start with a theory based on observation and testing for refinement, but the testing of theories still involves attempts to disprove them to see whether they survive such analysis.

Here’s the issue where skepticism of the scientific method (as a general example of what I’m calling “logical” skepticism) comes in: some purport that science “proves” things that cannot be falsified by experimentation. Here’s a short list of examples:

(1) The existence of God. There’s not a scientifically testable hypothesis here. Yes, you can have a hypothesis, but it’s only as good as something like “I speculate that the color blue looks the same to me as it does to other people.”

(2) The materialist worldview. Again, this is a hypocritical application of science to try to “disprove” the existence of a spiritual reality; science isn’t equipped to answer those questions and those who use materialist to assert the absence of a spiritual reality have created an atheistic religion around science; a certain threshold of honesty has been crossed. To me, just the fact that there are very intelligent scientists who say “science made me a believer” and also very intelligent scientists who say “science made me an atheist” reveals the failing of science to definitively answer such questions.

(3) Near-death or mystical religious experiences. The problem here is in the name; it’s an experience, and thus not fully communicable between individuals. That said, the thrust of materialist science has been to “prove” that such experiences are actually the result of chemicals affecting the brain (ketamine for one) or electromagnetic effects on the same (the famous “God Helmet” experiment). Scientifically, those types of experiments are flawed in that they can demonstrate correlation but not causation (which takes us back to Mr. Hume, interestingly)—they can say, “we notice high levels of ketamine in the brains of people who later claim near-death experiences,” but they can’t logically claim that that means that ketamine was the cause. It could be possible that a near-death experience causes a release of ketamine in the brain; we just can’t know. Further, many experiments of this nature have been shown to be irreproducible, a key factor in scientific theory—a group of northern European scientists attempting to recreate the “God Helmet” study concluded that the results came from bad scientific method and the power of suggestion upon test subjects, not electromagnetic fields.

(4) Qualia. The “thingness” of subjective conscious experience. Both philosophy and science have thus far proved of little help in the analysis of experience. This is a natural consequence of the existential fact that we do not have the ability to share our own experiences with others and are therefore inhibited by the constraints of language from making deep comparisons of subjective experience between individuals.

Perhaps advances in science and scientific understanding will help us to answer some of the questions above with experiments I simply cannot conceive of with the knowledge available. However, I choose to believe that there is a damn good reason the most important questions are not readily answerable, and I think that that reason points to God’s purposefulness. I digress; we can discuss that another time.

It has become popular among certain scientists, like Steven Pinker, to create new fields of science starting from preconceived suppositions about the way the world works and using the new field to support those suppositions—“evolutionary psychology” is, I think, the foremost offender in this field. If you’re not familiar, evolutionary psychology seeks to explain modern human psychology as the result of greater or lesser degrees of evolution, in a similar way to the evolution of the human physiology. Now, admittedly, the theories of evolutionary psychologists could be absolutely true (though I strongly doubt it). The problem is that they sell the field as science. We don’t know enough about the psychology of ancient homo sapiens and his predecessors to do anything but speculate about the origin of our own psychologies, much less create a falsifiable hypothesis that can be tested—the conditions in which to test such theories have long expired. Interesting ideas to be sure, but it remains disingenuous to call them science.

It is only fair, as someone who believes in both science and faith and sees the relative boundaries for their application to certain questions, to apply the same sort of logical skepticism to faith.

At the end of the day, faith is the belief in certain answers to questions we cannot otherwise answer. That does not mean that we should look only to faith and tradition to answer every question about the world around us.

In the first of two points I want to make about logical skepticism in faith (with, of course, particular reference to Christianity), let’s talk about the Book of Genesis.

There is a trend among evangelical Christians, particularly in America, to believe in the literal truth of the Bible. Having read some of my other posts, you should know that I do not ascribe to, and passionately resist, such a belief as a necessary (or even beneficial) aspect of Christian faith.

Genesis gives us a creation story that, if read for allegory and metaphor, actually doesn’t clash much with what science tells us about the Big Bang, evolution and other well-supported theories about the physical origins of matter and life. Adam Hamilton has written some good work going through the ways in which faith and science coincide in Genesis; I believe that this is in his Making Sense of the Bible but I’m not sure as I write this post.

And yet, many Christians want to read Genesis as a literal explanation of Creation. Here’s where logical skepticism comes in:

First, let’s apply some logical skepticism to Biblical literalism in general. The doctrine asks us to believe that every book in the Bible was written directly by God through some form of automatic writing in the humans that penned it. I would not say that God could not do this (that would be foolish), but experience indicates that this doesn’t seem to be God’s usual modus operandi. Of course, using strict logic, this is not a question that can be definitively answered.

So, let’s consider some additional thoughts. When Jesus speaks, he usually tells stories and uses metaphor (see my earlier posts on Ambiguity in Scripture for an examination of how this makes his words more powerful and effective); rarely does he speak in a straightforward and plain manner—when he does, it is almost certainly a command to love.

If we want to result to hard literary criticism, we can note definite stylistic differences in books of the Bible, sometimes competing purposes or concerns (each of the Gospels recounts many of the same events but with different perspectives, motivations and goals) and even different underlying ideologies (like Platonism in Paul’s epistles). While God is certainly capable of using different approaches and different purposes between books, multiple authorial voices may be a better explanation.

Historically, we can point to the different periods of writing of the books of the Bible—Paul didn’t have access to the Gospels, for instance—and the long history of the compilation of the certain books that form what is accepted as the canonical Bible with the selection of certain texts over others, concerns about forgeries, dubious authorship and poor copies all along the way. We didn’t have the Bible as we commonly think of it until rather late in the 4th century.

One that needs little explanation: If we take Jesus’s statement that we ought to cut off body parts that cause us to sin literally, we ought to have a lot more amputees.

Again, none of this disproves the position of Biblical literalism and infallibility, but the evidence taken together makes it highly unlikely that such a position can stand under its own weight.

More important, because it applies not only to the question of Biblical literalism but to theology in general is that any theological system must maintain internal consistency; it should not contradict itself. When we take literally both the Old Testament events in which we are told that God endorses wholesale slaughter and Jesus’s command to love our neighbors as ourselves, we have problems in logical consistency.

I have heard many seemingly-commonly-held theological positions within Christianity that openly court such contradiction. Take “God cannot stand to be in the presence of sin”, for instance, a statement that is sometimes used to explain the need for Jesus’s redemption. The very statement is self-contradictory, because Jesus spends most of his time (all of it really) in the presence of sinners. If Jesus is wholly human and wholly God, the statement cannot stand. That it begins with “God cannot…” should be our first clue. We can’t rightly talk about “God could not”, though we might talk about “God does not” (or, correctly, “God does not seem to”).

To combine our skepticisms of both science and theology, when there is dispute between science and scripture, we ought to rely on the science to tell us how the world works and our faith to explain to us how existence works. I believe in evolution as the likeliest explanation for how humans became humans, but that doesn’t tell us why there are humans, or why, in a cosmic sense, there is life at all. I believe that we should incorporate new scientific understandings into our understanding of God—if God created the world in a certain way, why might God have done that? The synthesis of science and faith can do much more for us than vainly attempting to pit the two against one another.

But this brings me to the ultimate point: logical skepticism gives us some intellectual honesty. The tendency to question whether certain evidences prove something (much less how they prove it) protects us from logical fallacies.

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[1] There are some competing theories of scientific methods, such as the “anything goes” approach espoused by Karl Feyerabend, but these I think are sufficiently held to be “out in left field” by the scientific community at large to be largely discounted.