There’s a lively conversation going on downblog on the “Use and abuse of Celtic Christianity” post from a few weeks back. Welcome to any new readers! I don’t have much to contribute to the discussion at this point, but I’m happy to see it keep going.
Category: Theology & Faith
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Priorities
I like this, from Brandon:
Here and there over the past few years I’ve seen a great many Christians who are of the opinion that argument with the so-called New Atheists should be a major priority among Christians, and I recently saw another instance of this. They don’t generally ask my advice, but whenever people do, I always suggest that this is exactly the wrong way to go. The fact of the matter is, however important they may seem to themselves, and however visible they may be, they are of extraordinarily minute importance in the vast concerns of the Church. Our relations with Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists are all vastly more important, and our relations with our fellow Christians more important still. And of all the foes we fight in our fight against the World, the darkness of the Zeitgeist, the New Atheists are puppy dogs; it is foolish to spend our time focusing so much on the little pups that we ignore the wolves. And of all the problems we face, we ourselves are more of a problem for us than they are; particularly the absurd ease with which we all are distracted from what is truly important by the fact of who happens to have made it to the bestseller list recently, or by some other utterly frivolous thing. And what is truly important, of course, is clear: Love God and neighbor, and when we somehow fail to do so, set out again and again until with God’s grace we succeed. Everything else is hobby.
When’s the last time you saw a serious Christian engagement with Sikhism?
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Wrestling with the Bible
Via Lynn, a post written from a Jewish perspective on interpreting the Torah/Bible:
Those of us who study seriously, and those of us who do not reject the plain facts of history, are forced to acknowledge that the Bible as we know it is a complicated amalgamation of texts, edited and organized by imperfect human beings, frequently in the service of imperfect human purposes. It is a huge collection of books, containing a great range of perspectives, a great range of agendas, which frequently contradict one another.
One response to this is to say that if Torah bears the marks of the hands of human beings, if it cannot be said to be an inerrant divine document, then there is no point at all, and all interpretations are arbitrary. Another is to argue that, contradictions and gruesome horrors aside, the Bible is nonetheless the perfect and infallible word of God. Perhaps those who believe the latter are willing to believe that God is a hypocrite; more likely, they’re willing to turn a blind eye to difficult passages, willing to excuse themselves from the obligation of study, willing to quote passages to others when it’s convenient but not willing to struggle with difficult passages themselves.
But there is a third response: We can accept that the Torah has been edited and organized by human beings, and is therefore incomplete and imperfect — and we can simultaneously hold that the Torah contains the word of God, and that study can allow us to contemplate and draw closer to God.
The author disclaims any application of this to Christianity, but I’m inclined to agree with several of her commenters that it’s very relevant.
Even though it was obviously written over a much shorter period of time, the New Testament contains multiple perspectives on the meaning of Jesus, not all of them obviously compatible. It further says things that seem to contradict some of what we now know (or believe). Add to this the fact that Christians include the “Hebrew Bible” among sacred scripture and you’ve got a big, unwieldy collection of literature bursting with different (though related) takes on who God is and what God is up to.
I think everyone, whether they admit it or not, has a “canon within the canon” that they use to interpret and prioritize other parts of the Bible. For Luther, the Bible was the manger in which Christ lay, and Christ was the key to understanding scripture. He found the message of God’s grace most forcefully set forth in Romans and the Gospel of John, among other places, and used this as a yardstick of sorts for making discriminations (including his notorious judgment that the Epistle of James was a “letter of straw”). This moves us away from seeing the authority of the Bible in some textual property like innerrancy and toward seeing it as belonging to the message (and, maybe, the fruits this message produces in people’s lives?). There’s obviously a kind of hermeneutic circle here, but not necessarily a vicious one. After all, the Bible as we know it owes its existence to the church, which itself is a creature of the proclamation of the Gospel.
Personally, the more I read the Bible, the more I rejoice in the different perspectives there. It’s liberating to let go of the impulse to organize it into some architectonic theological structure where every book and passage finds its neatly assigned place. The real Bible (as opposed to the mythical Bible that’s often used as a theological or political bludgeon) is a lot messier and more interesting than that. Recognizing this can allow for an ongoing dialogue or dialectic where different parts of the Bible challenge and provoke us, instead of being absorbed Borg-style into a predigested theology. At the same time, though, the core proclamation of God’s grace and liberation in Jesus can provide assurance that the God we encounter in Scripture is one who is for us and whom we can trust, even in the midst of passages that are baffling, challenging, or even offensive.
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Eagleton on Jesus and “sprituality”
I haven’t read literary critic Terry Eagleton’s new book on the “new atheists,” and I’m frankly not that interested in the whole new atheist phenomenon period (I haven’t seen much to indicate that one wouldn’t be much better off reading, say, David Hume for razor-sharp critiques of religion). But Kim at “Connexions” has some provocative quotes from Eagleton here and here.
My one worry about Eagleton is that he just wants to use Christianity as a bludgeon to beat capitalism with, and isn’t particularly interested in whether or not it’s true. I can recommend his earlier book After Theory, though.
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Distinctivism in practice
I spent the weekend in Boston attending the wedding of some good friends. The ceremony itself was a Hindu-Christian fusion, certainly a first for me–Hindu and Christian prayers, blessings, readings, and rituals were interspersed throughout. There was also a joyfulness in parts of the service that seems all too absent from much mainstream Christian worship, though I can hardly say whether or not that’s typical of Hindu worship.
While the service was beautiful and moving, I’m not entirely sure what to make of it theologically. On the face of things, Hinduism can probably incorporate elements of Christianity more comfortably than the reverse. It seems to me anyway that Jesus could be absorbed into the Hindu pantheon more readily than Christianity can make peace with, say, prayers to Ganesh.
On the other hand, at least as I understand it, some schools of Hinduism see the various deities as manifestations of an underlying divine reality. Could Christianity affirm the same? Parts of the Bible do portray angels as intermediaries of sorts between God and humanity, and the saints have often functioned kind of like demigods who mediate divine power (in practice if not theory).
So, is there room in Christian cosmology for seeing Hindu deities as manifestations of the divine to a particular people, alongside God’s self-manifestation to Israel? Or maybe they could be viewed as archetypal imaginative responses to divine revelation, and not necessarily entities with an independent existence. I certainly can’t dismiss a tradition as wide and deep and ancient as Hinduism. But how does that fit with the belief that God’s definitive revelation was in Jesus?
I think, as Christians, the best approach is not to start out assuming we know how other religions fit into God’s will for the world, but to be willing to learn from them, and even open to the possibility of being by transformed by them.
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This is your brain on God
Marvin hits the nail on the head here: just because an experience can be artificially reproduced doesn’t mean it isn’t genuine or veridical when it occurs under other circumstances.
Why would we expect that religious or mystical experiences, if genuine, would bypass the brain anyway? In fact, why would we even think that’s possible?
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Sometimes a beer is just a beer
I agree that Christians should drink beer (I mean, if they want to). But I’m not sure they need to put this much thought into it. Surely what the world needs now is not legions of hipster Christian beer snobs.
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Religious distinctivism?
In talking about the claims made by the world’s religions, this is the familiar typology used to map the possible positions:
Exclusivism: the view that only one religion is true and/or salvific.
Inclusivism: the view that one religion is maximally true and/or salvific, but that adherents of other religions (or none) can potentially be saved.
Pluralism: the view that all religions (or sometimes, the “major” or “classic” religions) are equally true and/or salvific.
It should be clear by my use of the phrase “true and/or salvific” that there are a variety of possible combinations of these positions. For instance, one could hold that Christianity gets more of the truth right, but that adherents of other religions can have salvation mediated to them by their traditions. Alternatively, you could say that only the church mediates salvation, but that other religions contain insights about the truth.
Each position has its weaknesses. Exclusivism seems intolerant and, well, exclusivist, not to mention lacking in humility. Inclusivism is more generous, but can seem patronizing since it still ranks one religion above all others. Pluralism, ostensibly the most generous position, flattens important differences between religions and pretends to a superior “God’s eye” perspective from which it judges that all religions are essentially saying the same thing.
Recently I’ve been reading a book by Jay McDaniel called With Roots and Wings: Christianity in an Age of Ecology and Dialogue. As the title suggests, McDaniel is concerned both with the way religion addresses (or fails to address) ecological problems and with interreligious dialogue. While I don’t agree with McDaniel’s entire perspective (which is that of process theology), the book contains a lot of valuable insights.
McDaniel introduces the concept of religious distinctivism as an alternative to the three positions sketched above. Distinctivism rejects exclusivism in denying that only one religion can mediate truth and salvation; it rejects inclusivism in denying that any one tradition has the full truth; and it rejects pluralism in denying that all religions are saying essentially the same thing.
Instead, McDaniel proposes, each religion reveals a distinctive aspect of both the truth about reality and about human salvation or fulfillment. Instead of being different ways of saying the same thing, religions each contribute to a composite picture, while emphasizing particular parts of the truth:
Each religion has its strength, its distincitve insights, that help humans to become whole. This means that, as Christians, we can recognize that Christianity itself has unique fruits to share with the rest of the world, even as other religions have fruits to share with us.
But we must also recognize that our fruits are not exclusive or final; they do not exclude other fruits from other trees, that is, other truths from other religions. They are not final because there is always more to God than is ever seen in any of the truths of any of the religions. (p. 147)
So, for instance, a distinctive emphasis of Christianity is that the nature of God is characterized by limitless mercy and compassion and that this nature has been disclosed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. But are Christians committed to saying that this is all the truth about God there is? Or do other traditions contain truths that could supplement what Christians believe? McDaniel would say that other traditions provide additional emphases, and even corrections, to what Christians believe. Religions don’t need to surrender their distinctiveness; in fact, it’s in their very distinctiveness that they can enrich each other.
I think this view has some promise. Too many Christians, even those who don’t adhere to the harsher exclusivist forms of their faith, assume that they don’t have anything to learn from other traditions. And, in fact, throughout its history Christianity has borrowed freely from other traditions.
One question that presents itself, though, is how a distinctivist position would deal with apparent contradictions between traditions. Even if traditions are presenting different and specific aspects of the truth, what happens when their insights conflict?
This worry can be softened a bit by pointing out that many apparent contradictions turn out not to be actual contradictions upon closer inspection. For example, it may seem as though traditions with an impersonal concept of the divine are irreconcilable with theistic traditions that emphasize the personal nature of God. However, theistic traditions also teach that God transcends our understanding and that, even if there is a personal aspect to God, there is also an impersonal (or maybe better supra-personal) aspect to the divine. Other traditions can provide a helpful corrective here to an excessive anthropomorphism.
Still, we will sometimes be faced with irreconcilable differences, cases where, at most, one religion gets it right. In such cases, we will often end up making exclusivistic claims for one tradition or another. The only other way I can see to salvage a truly distinctivist position would be to push it in a more radically relativist direction and suggest that the various religious traditions are incommensurable modes of discourse or language games or what have you. But this just seems implausible. If religion is dealing with ultimate reality and ultimate human fulfillment in some sense, then all religions are trying to talk about the same thing, even if using different conceptual and linguistic tools to do it. Not only that, but if the traditions are truly incommensurable, then how can they enrich each other?
Distincitivism, it seems to me, ultimately reduces to a (perhaps modified) form of inclusivism. It allows that we can learn from other traditions, that their adherents are not outside the scope of salvation (and indeed that those other traditions can be paths of salvation for their adherents), and that no one tradition contains all the truth. However, unless we’re willing to embrace complete religious relativism (or some form of non-cognitivism), we can’t avoid affirming the superiority of some truth-claims over others.
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Doubting Dawkins
An excerpt from Keith Ward’s Why There Almost Certainly Is a God, a response to Richard Dawkins. (In Ward’s defense, he’s been debating Dawkins for years, so this isn’t cheap bandwagon jumping.)
The world of philosophy, of resolute thought about the ultimate nature of things, is a very varied one, and there is no one philosophical view that has the agreement of all competent philosophers. But in this world there are very few materialists, who think we can know that mind is reducible to electrochemical activity in the brain, or is a surprising and unexpected product of purely material processes.
In the world of modern philosophy, there are idealists, theists, phenomenalists, common sense pragmatists, scientific realists, sceptics and materialists. These are all going concerns, living philosophical theories of what is ultimately real. This observation does not settle any arguments. But it puts Dawkins’ ‘alternative hypothesis’ in perspective. He is setting out to defend a very recent, highly contentious, minority philosophical world-view. Good. That is the sort of thing we like to see in philosophy! But it will take a lot of sophisticated argument to make it convincing. It is not at all obvious.
Though this is only an excerpt, I think the objection an atheist would naturally raise is that, even if most of history’s great philosophers have been idealists (in the sense of believing that reality has something mind-like as at least one of its most fundamental constituents), we now think that many things can be explained without appealing to consciousness or purpose. Not that I think that’s a knock-down argument by any means, but it’s a challenge that needs to be addressed (and I assume Ward addresses it in the book).
A Thinking Reed 