An Open Letter to a Good Friend: On Dogma, Mystery, Concervatism, and his Break from Tradition.

Kevin,

I enjoyed reading your post.  From your writing ripples wafts chestertonian air.  It’s fun to read your writing.  While I am interested in all your content (publishing, marriage, choosing to love) I am, predictably, most engaged by your comments about breaking with tradition, about your journey ex evangelica.

As I considered your thoughts, it seemed like the first main thing you were getting at is, to put it simply, that there is a lot of intellectual crappiness in fundamentalism and evangelicalism. [1]  Its anti-intellectualism (trusting the minimally trained pastor; reading the bible without a brain; the notion that truth only comes from the Bible, and not the tribesman, etc) and emotionalism (worship is about raising your hand; the bible is a book of inspiration); its repetitive, overworked focus on and overvaluation of sex; its cliché, parochial, and shallow ethics (alcohol is bad); its negative emotional-epistemological stance: excessive ease of belief   (“people who can hold to any number of dogmas at any given moment”), its aversion to all things intellectually new.  …It’s all pretty crappy.

One issue you mention is just as crappy, though more complex.  Teaching you that there is a spiritual geography called heaven and hell.  We’ve here applied a particular (and troubling) literalistic view of theological language: when the Bible talks about a place called heaven with streets of gold, it’s all pretty straightforward—it’s a land in some definite place, pretty much just like ours (material, spatial, physical, etc.).   This literalistic understanding is present in other areas of Christian confession. We say that “God” is a person, who exists in a place with a mind, who has emotions and a will, and who acts in this world and communicates with people, etc.  All these attributions are understood literally, and those who make such confessions see what they are saying to be totally unproblematic.  We know what we are saying about God, and were saying it’s all true. 

The problem, of course, is that these things make no sense.  We can’t really understand there being a material, spatial, physical world outside of this universe, and no one believes that heaven is in this one.  So where is it?  What kind of cosmology are we predicating?  Or with God: What does it mean to be a person without having a located, perspectival consciousness?  How does he focus and attend to all people, to one in NJ and one in china?  How does God exist everywhere (and that not as some rarified material substance)?  I have no concept of existence except as of existing at a particular point.  What it mean to say that God thinks, when he just knows everything?  How does he choose without having a body?  Christians confess that he is at work in the world providentially, in and behind human decisions, for example (consider the story of Joseph in Egypt in Genesis 36ff).  How does this work?  How does God act?  How does he communicate with a soul, let alone all souls everywhere at one?  I could go on.  The point is, I don’t understand anything of what I mean when I make all the banal claims that Christians make about the existence of a particular God.

Its all pretty intellectually crappy, not to mention unattractive.

1) But that’s always been true.  There’s a lot of crap in the Christian camp.  Theological ethics that rarely get beyond sex and alchol?   The view that scriptures meaning is obviously apparent to all, and no one needs to learn to read it well?   Furthermore, our failure to realize the uter mysteriousness of all our language about God makes us look like foolishly overconfident to those pressing the philosophical complications.

But this is not why I stay in the tradition.  I'm not here for the crap.   I find Christianity intellectually habitable because the Biblical authors were themselves profound, subtle  sophisticated, and passionate thinkers.  Because there were Anselms, Luthers and Calvins, and because there are great minds in the church today.  As a man who I was wisely one encouraged to read said, We should “indeed be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false and unhelpful, but…wholly uncritical in the sense that we do not … waste time in thinking about what we reject but lay ourselves open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going.”  And I think there is a lot of fish here with these bones. 

2) To make a more specific comment on theological language: George Hunsinger’s essay “Beyond literalism and Expressivism..” is good reading here.  After noting the serious difficulty of maintaining our theological language if it is construed literally, Hunsinger proposes a realist view of theological language.  Basically, while God does not, for example, act in the way we understand acting, the word “act”, taken up by God into his purposes and used in his self revelation, actually is appropriate: God acts like we think of acting, but in a way that is also uniquely his own.  He is a “person,” but unlike person as we know it.  He has awareness, but different from any awareness we know.  Etc.  I think this analogical account of theological language needs to be applied all over, including with heaven and hell.  This language genuinely gets at reality, but not in an unqualified, literalistic way; but also not in a liberal, ‘this-language-is-just-a-metaphorical-way-to-express-my-religious-experience’ kind of way, either.  It’s all analogically asserted.

3) Of course, this raises the question of our epistemological stance.  We are sometimes so comfortable with the claims we made.  Yeah, yeah, some of the radical ones need to be defended (thank God we’ve got our William lane Craigs), but it’s all a pretty un-radical world.  Not so.  I think everything in the Christian life is mysterious.  Christian theology lays another layer of reality atop the one we see, and says its true.  The very idea of God-as-a-person, not to mention each of his attributes.  God’s activity of creation, the idea that he is at work in this world, somehow participating in it causally; the idea that God hears our prayer; that he speaks (without vocal cords); or even the popular idea that he “speaks” to us in our minds/souls inaudibly and through our feelings/sense of him—What is that?  How does he interact with our physiology?  The idea of the reality of human sin, the atoning nature of Christ’s death, the idea of God being man, etc.  It’s all mysterious.  It all believed by faith.  I can’t ground it adequately, for the system is simply way too large.  But I confess it all, and by grace believe. The problem I see, is with those who do not realize the fundamentally mysterious nature of everything we say about God.  

4) Your beef with the fear-filled culture of fundamentalism seems to note its (admittedly excessively rigid) conservative culture.  It’s not that conservatism is afraid of the new; it’s that its afraid of losing the old.  Time erases just as much as it creates.  So conservatism is about disciplined sacrifice: we may well miss out on the latest truths, but we will hopefully keep what we’ve seen in the past.  It’s surprisingly like marriage.  Marriage requires us to sacrifice and resist a whole set of impulses, in favor of taking one set farther in one direction than all the impulses of the present would ever take us on their own.   

Oh: is hoping for marriage more valuable than enjoying it?

Well, I hope that’s enough to make you think.   Your world of fundamentalism had a lot of crap, but maybe there are slightly better pools, and maybe even that water, unavoidably adulterated, can be filtered, and not just flushed.  Your final objection—about religion, particularism and universality, about the need for a religion or life philosophy (or version of Christianity) to account for, explains, and appeals to universal human experience [or something along those lines]— that will have to wait till another day. 

Nik B

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[1] IM sure my writing will miss your main points, though I have tried to grasp them; but nonetheless, I think it will help you clarify them, if you find the time.

The church's mission is not about making the world more christian...

[An old email (5/10/2012) to a friend on how culture is a real part of the church's mission, but not in the way it is sometimes conceived:]

Perhaps evangelicals like myself traditionally think of culture as having one basic referent--there is a culture out there (ex. general American culture).  Culture refers to public culture, culture of the world or nation state.  Then, since God is interested in culture, Christians are to do their best trying to redeem that (public, national) culture. So, aren't we supposed to argue for family rights, religious liberties, ethical law; we've supposed to make our world more compassionate to the weak, more caring for the suffering.  Better school education--better sex education--teach abstinence in the public school, crack down on drugs;  and not just that: encourage kids to be all they can be, rather than our current culture of lazinees or mind-numbing video and TV overload; try to see our country have better marriages, rather than cohabitation and divorce,  etc.  In other words, we're trying to reform our nation to make it look more...just!  moral!  really, to make it look more christian.  

But, I think (or wonder)  if this neglects an important and radical biblical distinction between church and world, perhaps doing so because of following in (cultural!) modernistic univeralistic thinking.  Our enlightenment worldview says that all people are basically one / the same.   Fundamentally, we are human [this might not be a purely enlightenment commitment], and all humans are of one basic kind.  In this common brotherhood, we share a common identity and we use reason as our common meeting ground.  And in this common ground we form a shared life called the public arena, governed by reason, the fruits of which is culture. That is where culture occurs.

But that all seems questionable to me.  Biblically, the church is a separate community.  Fundamentally, we are something else, with our own story, our own calling, called to live a common life together as God's people.  A people who are no longer Greek, no longer American.  and what does that mean if not a new identity, socially, and consequently, culturally. This is the church-world distinction. 

I believe this distinction between church and world has some import to our thinking about missions.  Sometimes we think of God so loving the world.  God displays his love of the world by using the church to be a vehicle to love the non-church.  
But I think that God's love for the world is displayed in the church.  God's goal of a redeemed world reconciled world is realized in the church, not outside it.  So, we see, in my opinion, a mission of the church to the world which is primarily a call to join it, to be included in the community of Christ, the sphere of restoration, blessing, reconciliation.   

But the distinction between the church and the world not only supports the idea that the church is the domain of the realization of God's mission to humanity.  It also, I think, will capture the fact that God's mission to to the world is not just achieved when people are brought into the church.  The church has not yet itself fully become that community of restoration, reconciled to God's lordship.  The church needs to grow into the life which is the goal of redemption, and it is a life which comes progressively, through the continuation of God's mission.  I guess what im saying is that justification is not the culmination of God's redemptive mission, but rather the sanctification of the community.  God labors for a people who are both his own and who have receiving in them (communally) the new (and eschatological) life of Christ.
 
The church-world distinction helps us think about the church as a distinct community, as the domain of God's enacted redemption, and as the place where God's mission climaxes. I think those commitments end up supporting the idea that the church's cultural and social mission is not in transforming the culture and character of the world, but rather in itself being a new, redeemed culture / society.   (And therein is its verbal and deedful testimony to the world that Jesus is its lord!).   God is interested in a redeemed culture; but he is looking for that redeemed culture in his redeemed community, not in his unredeemed community. 

The spiritual complexity of Luther and Karlstadt

There is something I love about Luther--things like his immovable conviction and courage or his total disdain for fame (my consolation is that in time, my books will lie forgotten in the dust").  But then when I read about Luther's return to Wittenburg from the Wartbug castle, and how under certain "biblical values" he tried to wrest the reform movement back into his own hands (which meant pulling it from those of Andreas Bodenstein Von Karlstadt) Luther appears so political, and quite frankly, repulsive.

Similarly, when I read about Karlstadt, I see such a ...sad man.  Nearly possessed with an inferiority complex, excessively accumulating degrees, taking criticisms personally, always feeling attacked  ever consigned to second fiddle, following Luther's theology but never credited much as a leader, except perhaps of aberrant movements happily forgotten--Karlstadt seems like a man trying to find a passion that would also establish his own worth.  He strikes me as a broken man, as one not whole.  But then when I read of his amazing paradigm shift, of his abjuring academics for the life of a layman, for sweat and toil; or when I hear hows his tracts showed a "vigorous concern for a regenerate life of obedience to the Lord," Karlstadt seemed to have a passion and vitality that not even Luther had.  He had something even Luther was missing.
 
Luther is protestantisms saint; but at times he seems such an unattractive man.  Karlstadt...is it right to say that he protestantism's embarrasing uncle?He was such a weak man, yet there was something so strong in his heart.  The complexity and humanness of these men--not even to mention their raw and prolonged animosity toward eachother--seem to me like sources that could teach me so much.