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?
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.
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.
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).
Rev. Thomas Williams, an Episcopal priest and distinguished philosopher, ably dismantles some of the cruder anti-Anselm polemics that blame his theory of the Atonement for, well, pretty much everything bad in Christian history.
Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings brought these depressing opinion poll results to my attention. Essentially, the more of a Bible-believing regular churchgoer you are, the more likely you are to approve of torture:
53% of white mainline protestants said that torture can rarely or never be justified, while 46% said that it could sometimes or often(!) be justified. (1% weren’t sure or refused to answer.)
47% of white non-Hispanic Catholics said rarely/never; 51% said sometimes/often. (2% not sure/no answer.)
33% of white evangelicals said rarely/never; 62% percent said sometimes/often. (5% not sure/no answer.)
The religiously unaffiliated come off best, with 55% saying that torture is rarely or never justified.
And further, the more frequently a respondent attended church, the more likely they were to approve of torture.
Not only does torture cut against the grain of the moral witness of Jesus, but our willingness to support it in an attempt to save our own skins evinces a disturbing lack of trust in God.
I was flipping through H. Paul Santmire’s excellent book Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology, and discovered that he takes Matthew Fox’s (no, not that one) “creation spirituality” to task on many of the same grounds that I criticized J. Philip Newell. Like Newell, Fox embraces a form of nature mysticism, disdains talk of original sin in favor of “original blessing,” and embraces a “Christus exemplar” account of the atonement, wherein the “Cosmic Christ” reveals to each of us that we are already one with the divine.
Santmire has some sharp words for Fox’s view:
His approach resonates all too disquietingly with the anti-urban, romantic individualism of the Thoreauvian tradition. When all is said and done, Fox leaves us in the sweat lodge. His thought is not fundamentally at home in urban America. We can see this deficiency from the vantage point of any inner-city neighborhood. (p. 21)
Santmire goes on to consider, as an example, an inner-city neighborhood called Asylum Hill in Hartford, Connecticut and wonders what Foxian creation spirituality would have to say to a welfare mother, a pregnant teenage girl, or an unemployed veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
The message of Fox may speak to an elite, largely affluent few. What does it have to say to the impoverished urban masses around the globe, who must struggle every day for their sustenance, often against overwhelming odds? What does it say to a global society that is increasingly urban, for better or for worse? (p. 21)
He points out that the vast majority of people in the world are well aware of the reality of radical evil–a reality that Fox downplays; what they need is a message of hope and liberation. And the “Christian masses” throughout the ages have been quite aware of their own bondage to sin and evil, which is the experiential ground of the power of other atonement images: the Christus victor and Christus victim motifs. Christ the victor defeats the powers of darkness and death; Christ the victim reconciles us to God:
…the faithful in the Asylum Hills of this world are all too aware of their own mortality and their own sinfulness to make any sense at all out of the claim that they themselves, not just the Christ of their salvation, are somehow divine. They do not want to be told that they are divine. They do want to hear that they have been delivered and that they have been forgiven, so that they can then engage in the struggles for justice in this world, liberated from hopelessness and freed from the burdens of their own alienation. (p. 23)
Santmire agrees with Fox that “Cosmic Christology must be an urgent theme for contemporary theology” (p. 23), but “creation spirituality” glosses over the profoundly ambiguous nature of the created world and fails to do justice to Christian eschatological hope. The vision of the Bible is not a protological one, calling for the return to some primeval paradisical state, but an eschatological one, looking toward a future consummation and redemption:
Original blessing is not the ending, but the beginning for the Bible. Eschatology as a yet-to-be-fully realized dawning of a New Heaven and a New Earth, in the midst of which the New Jerusalem is to be situated–this is the driving biblical vision. But there is always what Ernst Käsemann called the “eschatological reservation,” the witness to the “crucified God” (Jurgen Moltmann), as the sign of “God with us” in our struggle to hope and to love in the midst of this oppressed and alienated world God creates and blesses as good. (p. 24)
In a neat turnabout, Santmire argues that it’s actually the often-demonized Augustine who can provide some resources for an adequate theology of nature and creation. The mature Augustine, he maintains, abandoned his Manichean roots and attendant distrust of the material world, and situated his narrative of fall and redemption within the context of a story of an unfolding and yet-to-be-consummated creation. For Augustine, creation is good and overflowing with blessings from its Creator, and yet the cosmos waits for its fulfillment in the end times. Within this process, human beings act out the drama of alienation from and reconciliation with God, the latter achieved by the incarnate Son. Augustine provides resources for a theology that does more justice to the goodness and ambiguity of both creation and humanity than Fox’s creation spirituality or the popularizers of an idealized Celtic spirituality.
Also, be sure to check out Marvin’s posts on the topic of Celtic Christianity and Pelagianism (this one and an older one here.)
Last night–somewhat against my better judgment–I went to hear a talk given by “Celtic Christianity” guru J. Philip Newell at a “faith forum” sponsored by a group of Capitol Hill churches, including ours. Though I didn’t know too much about Newell going in, my fears that it would be fuzzy feel-good New Ageism were, alas, mostly confirmed.
In Newell’s telling, we’re living at the birth of a “new consciousness.” This involves something like overcoming the dualities of earth/heaven, matter/spirit, male/female, nature/grace, the One/the many, etc. and realizing the essential oneness of all things.
Christianity’s contribution to this new consciousness will best be served, according to Newell, by rehabilitating the Celtic tradition and rejecting much of the standard-issue Western tradition. The most interesting part of Newell’s talk was an attempted rehabilitation of the much-maligned Pelagius. According to Newell, Pelagius was a gender egalitarian, appreciated the wisdom of the pre-Christian Druid tradition, and rejected the Augustinian view of original sin. (Confusingly, Newell seems to think that the Augustinian view holds that we are evil by nature, and that the Pelagian view rejects this; but Augustine certainly didn’t think that, which is not to say that his view of original sin doesn’t have problems.) Newell said that we have had the doctrine of original sin beaten into us and need to recover a doctrine of our essential goodness, as well as a sense that grace perfects nature rather than being in opposition to it (he didn’t use the exact phrase “grace perfects nature,” which might’ve given away the error that the evil Western tradition is uniformly anti-nature).
Although the talk (and Newell’s most recent book) was called “Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation,” there was actually very little talk about Jesus. Christ, he said, reveals the “heartbeat of God” which is also found in every person, and in all nature. But we didn’t hear much about the specific shape of Jesus’ life, much less his death and resurrection. In his scheme, Jesus seems to serve as an exemplar of a kind of nature mysticism, and this can lead Christians to embrace the “new consciousness.”
To some extent, I’m sympathetic to an attempt to rehabilitate Pelagius. I have no doubt the historical Pelagius probably got something of a raw deal at the hands of his theological opponents. And I don’t accept a full-throated Augustinian doctrine of original sin/guilt. But Newell’s view just doesn’t seem to have the resources to grapple with the reality of evil. I guess if you spend most of your time leading workshops at idyllic retreat locations like the Isle of Iona, off Scotland, and Casa del Sol in New Mexico, you might have a benign view of the world as good through-and-through. But, beyond those surroundings, we have a world that is full of a lot of brutality, violence, cruelty, suffering, and frustration. It calls for a more radical solution than attaining a new consciousness.
This is the truth contained in the traditional doctrine of original sin, however much we might need to re-think some of its cruder explications. Sin isn’t just a matter of limited knowledge or faulty perception, but a profound distortion of the will. The good that we want to do, we don’t do, and the evil we don’t want to do–that we do (to paraphrase St. Paul). This is why a New Age nature-mystic Jesus isn’t the solution to our problems, emphatically including the problem of our despoiling of the earth. Our ignorance isn’t the only–or even the major–reason that we take more than our share of the earth’s goods, crush the poor under our heels, and drop bombs on villages in faraway places. Rather, “we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves,” in the words of the Lutheran Church’s confession of sin. A Christ who can’t liberate us from the principalities and powers that hold us in thrall isn’t going to be much help.
The problem with appeals to “Celtic Christianity” is that the history of the Celtic church is shrouded enough that it enables modern liberals to project onto it pretty much everything good in opposition to everything they find bad about the “Western Church” (this is the term Newell used – why the Celts are not part of “the West” wasn’t clear to me). Such a construct is rarely going to be more than a reflection of whatever values we happen to hold, like the image of the “historical Jesus” at the bottom of the well of history, who simply reflects the image of the scholar peering down into it. Only the living Christ can actually stand outside of us to both judge us for and liberate us from our sin.
ADDENDUM: My wife tells me that saying “if you spend most of your time leading workshops at idyllic retreat locations like the Isle of Iona, off Scotland, and Casa del Sol in New Mexico, you might have a benign view of the world as good through-and-through” was a low blow. And she’s right. I have no idea how Newell spends the rest of his time and it was unfair of me to suggest otherwise. I think the point stands, though: I really don’t see how Newell’s brand of benign nature mysticism can account for radical evil in the world and in the human heart.
Ben Myers at Faith & Theology has a post that may be trying a bit too hard to be contrarian, poking fun at the “Green Bible” recently published by Harper Collins. This version of the NRSV is printed on recycled paper with a cotton/linen cover and features green-lettered passages that deal with themes of the earth or creation and contains essays on environmental topics from Christian figures like N.T. Wright, Pope John Paul II, and others.
I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, I deplore both niche Bible marketing and “green” consumerism. On the other hand, too many American Christians still have a very individualistic and anthropocentric understanding of the Bible’s message. So, if this version inculcates some awareness of “green” themes in the Bible, is that so bad? For example, a Bible study organized around “green” passages could be a fruitful thing for a congregation to pursue.
Myers quotes a piece from First Things by Alan Jacobs (not online) that suggests the Green Bible is trying to force the message of Scripture to serve a pre-approved secular agenda. But I think a better way of looking at it is as using something akin to Paul Tillich’s method of “correlation” in theology. To oversimplify greatly, this involves bringing our deepest questions into contact and conversation with the gospel message. It’s only now that we see ecological devastation being wreaked around us that we’re beginning to realize that this is something the Bible speaks to. This isn’t imposing an alien secular perspective on the Bible, but allowing the Bible to illuminate issues that weren’t as relevant to our forbears (largely because the human capacity for wrecking the environment was constrained by technological limitations). That doesn’t mean that the biblical message will line up neatly with the agenda of modern environmentalists, but the current focus on the environment can allow us to see aspects of that message that we may have overlooked.
A Thinking Reed 