Category: Theology & Faith

Sometimes I like to browse the religion section at major book retailers (Borders, B&N), not because I usually buy anything, but because I like to see what perspectives on Christian faith people are interested in (or at least what publishers think they’re interested in).

One thing I’ve noticed recently is that there seems to be nearly as much liberal tripe on the shelves as conservative tripe. It used to be that anti-evolution screeds and “purpose-driven” drivel dominated the shelves, but I’ve noticed a distinct uptick in left-of-center tomes.

The problem isn’t the liberalism, per se; its the dessicated, uninspiring version of Christianity that so many of these books seem to be peddling.

One book I was flipping through yesterday, written by a confessedly liberal pastor, urged the reader to stop worshiping Jesus and start following him. This is a classical liberal trope, that Christians (or Paul or the Catholic Church or someone) took the “simple” religion of Jesus the mystic/activist/countercultural prophet/shaman/whatever and transformed it into a religion about Jesus.

In this particular book, following Jesus coincides neatly with a litany of left-liberal causes. But what baffles me about this particular strain of liberal Christianity is why anyone would bother with it.

I mean, if Jesus is divine, then we really ought to be worshiping him. Sure, worship will entail, among other things, doing his will, as the gospels attest, but presumably it will also involve the religion about Jesus that some liberals are so eager to jettison.

But if Jesus isn’t divine, but rather is (was?) a mere wise man/prophet/social critic, etc., then why organize your religion around him? In fact, as a moral exemplar, I can think of any number of people who are more immediately appealing than Jesus, not to mention more successful. Plus, if the entire religion about Jesus is a mistake, then he has to be judged one of history’s biggest failures as a teacher, doesn’t he?

The liberal Christianity of, e.g., the Jesus seminar–the one that wants to jettison Christianity’s entire metaphysics and economy of salvation–simply can’t offer a compelling reason why we should take Jesus–particularly the shadowy and fragmentary Jesus of historical reconstruction–as the model and meaning of our lives. At best he would be one member of a pantheon of prophets and sages whose insights we might or might not find helpful and whose lives we may or may not find inspiring and relevant.

You certainly don’t need Jesus to be a good liberal. If Jesus is the norm for human life, it’s only because he’s also divine.

Marvin has another post on the “faith and/versus reason” theme.

One thing I’d want to add to the mix–in partial agreement with a comment Eric made at Marvin’s–is that there is a variety of understandings of “reason,” only some of which are inimical to faith.

For instance, a lot of debates about faith and reason seem to employ a rather dessicated, positivist notion of reason that is more characteristic of the 19th and early 20th centuries than the high tide of Enlightenment, not to mention pre-modern notions of reason (Platonist, e.g.). Most philosophers have long abandoned such notions, which seemed to exclude God or the transcendent pretty much by definition.

That’s how Richard Hall from Connexions describes himself in this thought-provoking post.

Jeremy and Jonathan both provided some good comments and helpful pushback on this post. Here are some follow-up thoughts:

I don’t think I was very successful at doing this, but it’s important to avoid positing a simplistic dichotomy between a monolithic reason and an equally homogeneous “faith” or “revelation.” I don’t assume that we can start from the “view from nowhere.” All our thought about the world is conditioned by our linguistic, social, historical, etc. location.

But at the same time, it’s oversimplified to suggest that we start from within a single tradition. The truth is, we each belong to multiple overlapping traditions. Or to put it another way, multiple traditions jostle within each one of us. We don’t have a systematic framework that neatly relates and orders the various parts of our knowledge. I’m both a Christian and an heir of Enlightenment humanism and liberalism, among other things.

What I think we need to do is bring different “truths” — or more precisely parts of the truth — into dialogue with each other. Christian theological claims can shed light on other areas of our knowledge. At the same time, knowledge gained from other sources can challenge our theology.

I take it that within theology there are more and less central truths. If I had to summarize the Christian vision it would be something like this: A loving creator God who made all that is, who became incarnate, suffered, died and rose again to reconcile us to God, and who is leading all of creation toward fulfillment and redemption. How we come to believe in this central vision is a complex issue, but I take it that it can’t be “proven” in a strict sense, even if reasons for it can be given. (Including “modest” natural theology, various historical considerations, etc.)

Beyond this there are various theological formulations that attempt to explicate and draw implications from this central vision. But the further you get from the “core” the more contestable your claims become. For instance, Christians have often drawn implications from their theological vision about ethics or the ordering of society which have been challenged from secular sources or from other faith traditions (as well as from dissident voices within the churches). This has led, in at least some cases, to a revision of theology but not an abandonment of the core vision.

Our traditions or narratives never really manage to encompass all of reality. There’s always some recalcitrant material left over that resists absorption (or abstraction) into any single conceptual scheme or narrative. That’s one of the dangers I see with Lindbeck’s view – that the “biblical narrative” (which is already something of an artifiicial construct) can absorb the world. This also tends to reinforce a highly conservative view of the church, since it’s assumed that the church has the truth and merely needs to bring its light to others.

The inevitable deficiency in any of our traditions/narratives/conceptual maps is an implication of what I take to be the key insight of a realist view of truth: that the world exists and has a determinate character independent of what we think about it. This ought to induce humility and openness to truth from other quarters.

For this reason, we have to attend to those other narratives or traditions that people use to understand and navigate the world. Not because there’s some “neutral” ground on which to stand and from which we can dispassionately evaluate them, but because by sympathetically entering into other understandings of the world, we can widen our perspective and gain a distance on our own tradition and its flaws and blind spots. Ideally, this leads to a more complete and truer understanding of reality.

So, I do need to backpedal somewhat on my previous post. It’s not that I think theological claims need to be tested by “reason,” understood as some context-free God’s-eye way of viewing the world, but that theological claims need to be tested by and brought into dialogue with other truth-claims: the findings of the physical, life, and social sciences, the convictions of movements for social justice, the tenets of other religions, people’s lived experiences, etc. etc. This will be a highly unsystematic process by which we try to bring these various claims into relation and see what kind of light they shed on each other.

To take one, fairly obvious example, for most of Christian history it was thought, more or less, that the opening chapters of Genesis provided something like a literal account of the creation of the world. This didn’t stop Christians from finding all manner of spiritual value in the rich symbolism of the story, but it was probably assumed that there was a bedrock of historicity. The advent of evolutionary theory, as we well know, called this into question and prompted a re-thinking, at least in many quarters. There are now many Christians, including most of the major denominations, who think that evolutionary theory is compatible with the essentials of Christian faith. The vision was not abandoned, but some of its penumbras were revised or rejected.

This doesn’t mean that theology will always “lose” in the sense of having its tenets overturned; sometimes we may find that theological claims hold up quite well, other times we may find that they need to be modified or are enriched by this encounter, and other times that they shed considerable new understanding on other areas of our knowledge or practice. I don’t think we can prescribe, a priori, what the outcome will be for any particular case. As Christians, though, we can be confident entering into that encounter, knowing that all truth is God’s truth.

Marvin reproduced an interesting quote from Gary Dorrien, who Google tells me is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. Dorrien offers this definition of a “liberal approach” to theology:

theology should be based on reason and critically interpreted religious experience, not external authority.

Depending on how key terms are defined, I’d have to say that I substantially agree with this.

A lot of 20th-century philosophy has taught us to mistrust appeals to “reason” and “experience;” we’re told that they are context-dependent, tradition-bound, and embedded in language.

While these are all valid points, the core of what Dorrien seems to be saying here seems unaffected.

“Reason” doesn’t need to be thought of as a kind of infallible algorithm for arriving at truth, or a means of shedding all our existing cultural, social, and linguistic baggage to adopt a “God’s-eye” view of the world (or, a “view from nowhere” as Thomas Nagel puts it).

And “experience” is not an unmediated apprehension of the world as it is independent of any subjective elements we may bring to bear.

I doubt Dorrien, or any critical thinker in the 21st century, would be making such claims.

But there are understandings of reason and experience that are relevant to testing theological (or any other) truth claims.

When some claim is presented for my belief, one thing I might do is consider whether it is reasonable and whether it comports with my experience. “Reasonable” here needn’t refer to some a priori faculty for arriving at truth; it can simply mean that it is consistent with the laws of logic and with widely-known and accepted truths about the world.

And experience is just that: my experience and other people’s experience of the world, including their moral, aesthetic, and religious experience.

None of this implies that reason and experience are “context independent” or “universal” in allowing an unbiased view of the world. That’s precisely why we, if we’re smart, try to widen our base of knowledge and experience by learning from other people, other cultures, traditions, religions, etc. This is a very piecemeal, fallibilist view of knowledge, but I don’t know what the alternative is.

In deciding whether to accept a certain truth claim, then, what other procedure can we follow but to see how it fits with what we know about the world and what we’ve experienced of it?

Thus any theological truth claim presented for our belief that 1. conflicts with the laws of logic (e.g., is self-contradictory); 2. contradicts well-established truths about the world (e.g., well-established findings of science); or 3. can’t make sense of widespread moral, aesthetic, or religious experience is, I submit and other things being equal, likely to be false.

On the positive side, if such a claim supports or is entailed by other knowledge, or provides a more satisfying interpretation of our experience than the alternatives, or sheds new light on previously accepted truths we have good reason (again, other things being equal) to adopt it.

Of course, as Dorrien mentions, many religions have been uncomfortable with this piecemeal sifting and testing of truth and have looked for refuge in an appeal to authority, such as the authority of an infallible church, pope, Bible, tradition or whatever.

But as we well know, this just pushes the question back a step: How am I decide which authority is infallible? The only way I can do it is by appealing to my (fallible!) knowledge (or reason) and experience. What other way is there? Again, not an abstract, universal knowledge and experience, but the knowledge and experience I actually have, supplemented by that of others.

I don’t know if this makes me a “liberal” or not by Dorrien’s standards; I consider the actual content of my theological beliefs to be fairly traditional. Food for thought.

More from Dorrien on liberal theology here.