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.
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
[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.
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