Author Archives: Gregg Monteith

Is Sin real?

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Sin is not the problem with humanity.

Whew!  Nice to get that bit of “heresy” out the way!  But of course, sin must be the problem with humanity.  That’s what the Bible tells us: sin is the problem, and Jesus is the answer, right?

Wrong.

Think about it this way: if sin is the wrong way to be, then sin’s opposite would be the right way to be, which is holy.  So if sin is the problem, and Jesus is the answer, then Jesus came and died to make us holy, right?  But while the New Testament speaks of Christ’s death as removing sin, that is not the goal.  If it were, the matter would be left there.

But it’s not.

Rather, the goal is plainly stated: as part of inaugurating the kingdom of God—that is, claiming all of existence for God and as God’s—Jesus came to renew right relationship between God and all things.  Dealing with sin is part of solving the problem, but it is not the problem.  The problem is that all things (foremost among them, perhaps, human beings) are not in right relationship with God.

Or better, that God loves us and longs for us, but our relationship with God is sundered and needs fixing.

If this is so, then God never see us simply as “sinners” in need of grace but as Gregg, John, Sally, and Matt, whom God loves with wild abandon and whom God longs to embrace as God’s own, beautiful and beloved children.  God does not so much seek to make us right as to hold us tight—not so much to right our behaviours as to right our hearts (and to write God’s law within our hearts, as Jer 33:31), and then our behaviours will follow.

Now I am not, for all of that, suggesting that the notion of sin is nonsensical, oppressive or outdated.  Nor am I implying that the rightness of our thoughts, words, and actions are unimportant—both to ourselves and to God.  Perhaps I could say it this way: God’s love (and truth) are focal, but sin matters.

God’s love being focal means that Christianity is not about rules.  It means that as a Christian I never get to the point where I am “a hopeless case,” “unforgivable,” or “worthless.”

In short, for me the deep reality of God’s loves and God’s truth means that when people ask why I am a Christian I give them this reason: because I have been convinced by God’s truth and fallen in love with God, who loves and heals me.  Because I have felt the deep, deep desire of God for me and, like Augustine says, “the satiation of God’s love is insatiable.”

So what about sin: what is it and why is it important?

To my mind, “sin” is things we do or maintain (acts, thoughts, or dispositions commissive or omissive–conscious, pre-conscious, or unconscious), that thwart our proper relationship with ourselves, our fellows, our world, and ultimately God.  Fleshing this out in terms of life’s daily activities is an important task, but it’s beyond the scope of this post.

Instead, I’d like to offer my main reasons for not jettisoning a concrete notion of sin.  First, because evil is real.  Second, because evil is real.  Third—need I go on?

The reality of evil is the reality that people suffer and die.  In that sense, insisting on evil’s reality is  an insistence that people matter.  So against the idea that sin burdens us with unnecessary guilt, maintaining the seriousness of evil and wrongdoing does not straightjacket our freedom but rather deeply affirms our worth.  As such, it is the crucial correlate to the biblical claim that God loves us.

The flipside of evil being real (and wrong) is that justice is necessary.  And this is one of the central claims of Jesus as Messiah: he came to deal with sin and death—with evil in all its various forms.  But the reality is, God’s justice is limited.

What… more heresy…?

I think not.  But you’ll have to wait until next post to decide.

Hell is… good?

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Eternal damnation is good, because God is good.

For Christians like John Piper, God alone defines goodness, such that something is not good and so God does it.  Rather God does a thing, and so it is good.  Thus integral to questions about Hell is deciding (and how we decide) who God is, and deciding (and how we decide) what constitutes goodness.

Some Christians describe Piper’s perspective as a ‘high view’ of both Scripture and God’s sovereignty.  This high view amounts to prioritizing Scripture as the exclusive informer on this issue and, typically, identifying God exclusively as a sovereign or king.

Interestingly, for many Christians the “exclusivity” here is neither an option nor even a conscious choice, but is simply what is: their culture offers no other options, or excludes other options as (nearly) heretical.

Piper’s position (and the ‘high view’ of scripture that undergirds it) is thus handy because it intellectually “solves” any apparent contradictions with how God acts (or fails to act) and our understanding of God as infinitely good.  For Piper “it’s all good” with God, including Hell.

The problem is that intellectual solutions do not necessarily equate with either personal solutions or actual, real solutions.

More pointedly, Piper and others would insist that we take ourselves ‘out of our skin’ (or else harden our skin to rock) so that we do not feel loss as loss or hurt as hurt, and so do not perceive the notion of eternal punishment for finite actions as sadistic injustice.

The problem is that Piper is playing on one register while ignoring the other, and this in two ways.

On the one hand, he is taking a thoroughly modernist approach in prioritizing reason above the emotions, senses and other faculties.  For our emotions and senses clearly offer valuable information in everyday life (both to supplement and, at times, correct our reason) and are depicted in the Bible as essential to understanding God—humans are called to “taste” and “see” God’s goodness!

Thus true human understanding requires the use all our faculties that, for Christians, are God-given.

On the other hand, the exegetical basis on which Piper stands is remarkably one-sided.  By depicting God as primarily sovereign he ignores great swathes of the Bible that portray God as father and parent.  Re-stating Colin Gunton’s point, Piper is prioritizing the will to love.

Ironically then, by viewing God primarily as sovereign (with the goal, perhaps, of defending God’s ‘full divinity’) Piper denigrates our God-given humanity through falsely reducing us to rational beings who act according to our wills.  Even more ironically, this also strips God of so much of God’s own character, for God is love.  Piper’s position at best ignores this crucial point, at worst it imperils it.

For example, many people have abandoned Christianity because the goodness of God is contradicted by eternal, unending suffering just as it is when God doesn’t “show up” in the face of the hurt, loss, or evil in human existence.

Yet Piper’s view only compounds the issue because, according to his ‘high view’ of Scripture, God doesn’t need to “show up.”  To insist on such would reduce God to a puppet, not a king.  And on the injustice of eternal punishment, Piper and crew would likely side with St. Anselm: humans merit infinite, eternal punishment because they have transgressed an infinite majesty.

No, not so.

What I want is not a God who (purportedly) makes sense as a construct, but who loves me in ways that make sense in (and through) my lived existence—a God before whom I can sing and dance, and that I can adore as my children adore me: with joy.  Because no matter how powerful, clearly understandable, and awe-inspiring this God may be, I won’t bow to a tyrant—I won’t worship a beast.

We need a God who answers not with words, but with God-self; who answers not just our cries (or criteria or critiques) but ourselves.  Nothing less will do.

Magical Jesus

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“I don’t have time or energy for friends, only for my church and my family.”

A good friend and pastor recently said this to me, and then noted that emotional support from his church has been nearly nonexistent this past year.  I remarked that it is unhealthy and dangerous to expect that much support from his spouse—that marriages don’t work that way.

“But I don’t get my support from my family,” he said.

“Then if not your family or your church (nor your friends), then from whom?” I asked.

“I get my support from Jesus.”

Hmmmn.  Really?

How?

Enter “Magical Jesus.”  Magical Jesus is, well, magical!  For example, Magical Jesus can do anything (“For God all things are possible.”  Mt 19:26) and helps me do anything (“I can do all things through God who strengthens me.”  Phil 4:13).

Now I have two problems with Magical Jesus.

First, contact with Magical Jesus is entirely personal (and thus no one can challenge my view of the matter) and divine (and thus it defies explanation).  As such, when Magical Jesus is the reason for an action, then that action is beyond critique.

Now if people were perfect, maybe Magical Jesus would be too.  But because Christians believe in (and perpetuate!) wrong-doing and self-deception, anything impervious to criticism is also a great place to hide one’s true intentions and motives, especially from oneself.  In short, Magical Jesus conveniently sidesteps the requirement of providing truth values in order to substantiate our truth claims.

Second, biblical and historical evidence show that Jesus doesn’t work this way.  Against general notions that “everything is possible” for God and I can “do anything” through God, the Bible shows that what God ‘empowers people to do’ is to communicate the good news concerning Jesus despite the most daunting of circumstances.[1. Mt 19:26, Mk 10:27, Lk 18:27 all refer to it being possible for a rich person to be saved (“Then who can be saved? . . . For God all things are possible”).  Mk 14:36 is conditioned by Mk 14:35, with similar notions in Mt 26:39.]  In turn, what is “possible for God” is for this good news to find purchase (and so restore right relationship with God) with the most unlikely of people.[2. Likewise the context of Phil 4:13 is set by Paul’s comments about not worrying (4:6) and about being able to go with or without food (4:12), and is conditioned by similar notions in Rom 16:25, Eph 3:16, 1Th 3:13, 2Th 3:3, 1 Pet 4:11 & 5:10 .]

Thus we (its messengers) are strengthened to bring the good news and God (whose message it is) is capable of fructifying that message for all.

History too shows the matter differently.  Take Blaise Pascal and Thomas Aquinas.  Both claimed direct, personal encounters with God.  The results were staggering.  After his encounter Aquinas, author of some of Christianity’s most esteemed theological writings to that point, viewed all his writing “as straw.”  Pascal, a philosopher and mathematician, saw his life’s work as nothing in comparison to the God he encountered, “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—not of philosophers or scientists.”

When I challenged this pastor he seemed dumbstruck, like I wasn’t allowed to question what was between him and Jesus.  The problem for me, as his friend, is that Magical Jesus was coming between us—making my relationship with him unnecessary.

In fact, Magical Jesus actually opposes truth and deters love.  So by appealing to Magical Jesus my friend all but sidestepped the hard questions about truth (i.e., why he’s acting this way) and, because such appeals cut off critique, the only valid response is acceptance.  This in turn withers any relationship, such as caring friendship, that will not be so constrained.

But where Magical Jesus opposes truth and deters love, the real Jesus does just the opposite.  Pascal’s perspective adds a finer point on the matter.

It was not that Pascal’s profession (as mathematician and philosopher) was unimportant.  Rather, God’s interest is in people—Abraham and Isaac; you and me.  Thus Jesus came to renew right relationship (person to person, person to world, and person to God).  In this context, God’s truth that is quintessentially “for me” is the claim that I am deeply beloved by one whom I may love / by whom I would most desire to be loved.

And while this truth may remain incomprehensible for many, surely understanding it begins with parallels in our real-life relationships: sometimes with parents and siblings, sometimes with spouses and children.  And sometimes, too, with friends.

Tribal churches and “Relationship”

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I recently approached a friend that is a pastor and told him that I was sad that weren’t spending time together.

My friend offered this explanation: “I’ve made mistakes before in ministry—given too much energy to the church and had none for my family.  So now I make sure I give my family what they need.  But I only have energy for them and the church, not for friends or even my family of origin.”

While disappointing to learn I could no longer spend time with my friend, it was also troubling and made me wonder if this was related to the phenomenon of tribal churches.  Several points are relevant.

First, the chief value in a tribal church is uncritical acceptance (of certain people, practices, and ideas).  Such a church is naturally averse to conflict, though this is typically expressed as valuing “Christian unity.”

In tribal churches ‘unity’ is maintained by avoiding contentious situations, so anti-intellectualism wins out (over critical investigation) as does conformity (over diversity).  Further, as anti-intellectualism and conformity become normative, such churches both cultivate and attract dullness and a lack of creativity.

Second, because in a tribal church members already have all the answers (and so have no need of truth-seeking), and because the prominent role of acceptance means that dialogue (and the contentious issues it can raise) is eschewed, the tribe can only approach outsiders in one of two ways.

The typical approach would be charitably to condescend to outsiders: “We have the truth, will you not listen?”  However, tribal churches also use another method: overwhelming outsiders with ‘goodness.’

Now arrogance is understandably problematic, but goodness?  Surely this is just the orientation that one would look for in a church.  What issue could be taken with it?

Take my pastor friend for instance.

My observation is that he exerts so much effort for new and existing church families that he effectively “spends himself” on their behalf and has nothing left for his parent, his siblings, or even close friends.

Now love is the epitome of ostentaciousness, and love  functions according to an “economy” of superabundance: of giving, and giving more.  Yet my friend’s actions deviate from this example.

On the one hand, “superabundance” does not mean that I have to reduce my love for X so that I can give some to Y, just as parents do not love their first child less when the second arrives.  Rather, their love grows so that they love all their children more.

Also, even where the other is incapable of meeting my needs (e.g., infants cannot understand a parent’s need for a break), loving another is based in self-love.  So I take breaks, enjoy my friends and family because I love myself as part of loving another!

On the other hand, selfless exertion has more in common with the freneticism of need: the need to prove (or prove oneself worthy of) something.  It thus makes the other into an instrument—an object—that I use to obtain my real goal, rather than the person being a goal in him/herself.

In such situations a person’s identity does not matter—even the special people that God may put in our paths, like one’s parents, one’s siblings, and one’s closest friends are not prioritised.  Instead, it is their conduciveness to my goal that counts.

———-

If you walk into my friend’s church, the word you see most is “relationship.”  But if this is the goal, what does it mean that he has no peer relationships (with friends or siblings) and that he stands atop the hierarchy of all the relationships within the church (i.e., he is ‘pastor’ to everyone)?

Truth-seeking & outsiders

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“I don’t believe Jesus came to save us from our sins.”

In a room full of Evangelicals, you could imagine the reaction!  How could the leader of a Christian study centre possibly say that?  What could his strange words mean?

“Strange” words can indicate that someone is an outsider—a stranger to our way of thinking and viewing the world.  For evangelical Christians, strangers come in two general types: those who have different belief sets (non-Christians) and those who call themselves Christians but who read (and understand) the Bible in very different ways from Evangelicals.

Recently I discussed how, in a small town, belief sets play a key role in defining group membership—they are more about facilitating bonding between people than getting ideas “right.”  By corollary, in these contexts conformity is prized over diversity and intellectual complacency (rather than critical investigation) is the norm.

In such a context divergent beliefs or openness to questioning status quo beliefs—being unwilling to “check your brain at the door”—creates discomfort and suspicion.  To be accepted in such churches one must either share a bounded set of common beliefs or be willing to acquire them.  Otherwise, one is different: an outsider.  And at best, outsiders don’t belong.

The irony, of course, is that welcoming strangers is a Biblical norm, and Jesus self-identifies with the stranger (Matt 25:40).

Now Evangelicals may object: surely they accommodate many who are different.

They accommodate physical differences, for example, by creating special access and seating for wheel chairs.  Likewise they accommodate intellectually differences (e.g., developmental challenges), perhaps by special classes and teaching.

However, for evangelical Christians to “accommodate” those who are ideologically different (non-Christians) or methodologically different (like liberal Christians, who read and understand the Bible differently from Evangelicals) would amount betraying their Christian beliefs, which Christians cannot do.

The error in such thinking is failing to see that accommodating a viewpoint need not mean accepting it.  For if Evangelicals agree with Augustine that “all truth is God’s truth” then they need not fear truth, wherever it may be found.  Last and most importantly, as those called to love their neighbour “as themselves,” this includes respecting (if not always adopting) her ideas and texts as much as our own.

So how does this work?

Just as Evangelicals have empathy for physical differences and compassion for intellectual differences, so they need openness for ideological or methodological differences.  So “accommodation” for such differences amounts to dialogue which, unlike dispute, does not seek for the weaknesses in what is said, but for its real strength.

True dialogue is thus truth-seeking, and the openness that it requires is self-awareness: understanding that I know in part, but not in full.  Thus dialogue requires both: an openness to listen, a willingness to critique.

If my assessment is accurate it’s easy to see why most Evangelicals have no real interaction with ideologically or methodologically outsiders.

For where churches prize acceptance there is no real dialogue, for dialogue on contentious issues promotes conflict.  The result is that when it comes to ideas the church is not a place of reciprocity and openness, but of receiving and conforming.

Rejecting dialogue causes two misfortunes.

First, it forces newcomers to divest themselves of their identity in order to acquire some supposed, uniform Christian identity (as though being “in Christ” [Gal 3] is about personality as opposed to being about character and relationship).  Second, it serves to reinforce the church’s insularity as a “tribe”—keeping existing tribesmen untainted and unthreatened by anything that from outside.

 

“Jesus didn’t come to save us from our sins.”

No, he didn’t.

Matt 3:2 and 4:17, Mk 1:14-15, and Lk 4:43 all prove it.  Jesus came to inaugurate the Kingdom of God, which includes me (and my need to be delivered from the harmful patterns and negative consequences of so many of my orientations—my need to be in right relationship with God) but is neither mine nor primarily about me.  The difference is subtle, but the impact is crucial.  Thankfully for those that heard this comment, a healthy dialogue ensued.

Truth-seeking (in the sticks)

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“My fiancée is having an affair with my friend.”

“My pastor was caught having sex with the principal of the Christian school.”

“When my baby came I started going to church.  Not because I believed, but because I needed a place where I could sing—a place to express my joy and thankfulness.”

The price of truth-seeking is high.  Ask anyone who has walked away from a relationship or a belief that turned out to be false, or whose entire life was changed because they fell in love.  And where this thing is central to our self-identity, we do not simply choose what to believe or how to act but must actually—and necessarily—embody who we most truly are, and wish to become.

A philosopher I read called such moments “boundary situations,” situations of intense grief, despair, or love, where the stakes are so high that one cannot but respond with one’s whole self.

1 year ago I moved from a big city to a small rural town, in part because I hoped to find more authentic community here, in part because my pastor friend here seemed enthusiastic about my grad work in philosophical theology.  I had hoped to jump-start this process through the summers that I spent here with friends I had had, and through exposure to people in the community through my friends’ church.

However, I came to see that these pre-established relationships were mostly based on who Church people thought I was or, better, what they thought I believed.  They were based on them thinking that I was a member of their Christian “tribe.”  They weren’t so much accepting me (there was little interest even in who I am or questions about what I believed) as granting me membership, by association.

In small towns I had assumed ignorance to be the main reason that certain, faulty, religious beliefs were held: lack of information and / or lack of better formulations of the information that they have.  But after living here for a year I now see that ignorance or, better, complacency about knowledge, also has a social value.  It is an important denominator in communal identity.

In other words, where the most important thing in a small town is being part of the community, holding certain beliefs (or sets of beliefs) cements identity and delimit inclusion (and exclusion).

On the one hand, then, the content of a set (or sets) of beliefs is only every generally expressed and is not much at issue.  Rather, belief sets indicate which group one is part of, with different groups having different combinations of belief sets with variously different, though general, content.  Instead, membership is what counts.  On the other hand, attempts to examine (or worse, critique and modify) such belief sets will often be met with staunch resistance, because the issue is not so much what people believe but who they are and how (and whether!) they are rightly related to their fellows.

So the point is not that obtuse or uneducated people feel at ease with other such people.  Nor is it that rural people can’t be bothered thinking about whether a given belief is right or wrong.  Rather, it is that life is already hard enough and ready explanations and traditional views make life easier, particularly by facilitating bonding between people.  So by believing (by and large) what Joe believes I am accepted by Joe.  Or more generally, by believing what a group believes, I am accepted by this group.

And in a small community avoiding conflict and maintaining acceptance is crucial (to my identity and, to a certain extent, even happiness and prosperity).

Sadly, because they idolize acceptance, they also disparage conflict (and so avoid dialogue on contentious issues).  So tribal churches necessarily orient themselves toward anti-intellectualism (versus critical investigation) and conformity (versus diversity).  By thus dumbing-down the process of truth-seeking with respect to the gospel they also trivialize conversion into a mere “decision,” rather than a living encounter with a being toward whom one cannot but respond with one’s entire self.

For how could an encounter with a being who is love be less than a boundary situation?

Hell, free will, and love? (Or, Making a hot topic hotter)

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While it may appear mad, I venture that the free will / predestination debate is actually the most productive place to begin an assessment of the doctrine of Hell.

I recently skimmed Why I am not a Calvinist, where the authors note how in his article ‘How does a sovereign God Love?’ John Piper “insists on adoring a God who might consign his sons to hell.”[1. Jerry Walls and Joseph Dongell, Why I am not a Calvinist, IVP, 2004.]  For those like John Piper, God’s sovereignty trumps all: God is both Lord—and so can and should do as God pleases—and God is the measure of all things (something is not good, and so God does it; God does a thing, and so it is good).  Conversely, when non-Christians bemoan the absence of “signs” or “evidence” of God’s existence, other Christians counter that “God won’t prove his existence—that would violate your free will.”

Both of these perspectives are, in different ways, problematic.  And in their proposed resolutions we may find helpful pointers on the question of Hell.

The free will debate turns on what we make of this tension between God’s sovereignty and God’s love.  On the one hand, the authors above believe that “Piper has the question backwards and that . . . the question that we should be asking is how could a God of perfect love express sovereignty?”  Likewise theologian Colin Gunton observes that “in Western theology since Augustine, ‘the theme of love becomes subordinate to that of will.’ ”[2. Why I am not a Calvinist, 219 & 218.]

These criticisms express much of my experience: Christianity seems to prioritize laws to love, the will to the heart.  But what about the opposing view, that God is “unobtrusive” to allow human free will to develop into faith?

While I agree that God’s “coming on the scene” is not about convincing through miracles and signs, nor by righting all the world’s wrongs, yet I believe that God must show up.  And just as personal experience is critical to weighing up the Bible’s truth claims correctly, so God must “show up” in a way that does for each of us what God claims to seek to do for all the world: to enable authentic relationship with me.

So my criticism of both views intersects here: how we assess the greatest commandment “Love God with all your heart.”  The sovereigntist thinks to subordinate love to the will.  The free will advocate believes that faith prohibits ostentatious displays.  Both responses misunderstand the nature of love, and so both misportray God.

First, love by its very nature is a gift.  And a gift is no longer a gift when it comes as a response to subjugation (i.e., tribute) or petition (i.e., acquiescing) or threat (i.e., blackmail) or payment (i.e., exchange).  Many responses may come as a result of a command—love is not one of them.

Second, love by its very nature is the epitome of ostentaciousness.  The “economy” of love is superabundance and love is larger than we are (we “fall” into it).  Thus faith is both necessary to belief in God and yet strangely irrelevant in the face of love.

In the end, God’s law being “written on my heart” (Jer 31:33) can only reasonably describe the request of one who loves me deeply, whom I both love and by whom I deeply desire to be beloved; it describes a context wherein “sin itself would be seen not as the transgression of prohibitions but as the antithesis of life and grace.”[3. Paul Ricoeur, Religious Significance of Atheism, 69.]  This does not mean that truth vanishes in wishy-wash sea of emotion but that, beyond needing something that makes sense, I must agree with Bono: I need something “that I can feel.”  Deeply and powerfully.

So I wager that it is no co-incidence that while God epitomizes many attributes (justice, mercy, etc.), God substantively is only one: love.[4. See 1 John 4.  On either Exodus 3:14 or 34:14, I contend (without arguing here) that the substantive in 3:14 is fluid and difficult in translation, and 34:14 should actually be seen as a subset of the 1 John perspective.]  More to come.

Christian theology ♥ modernist philosophy: Why do Christians love modernism?

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The desire for absolute truth is wrong.

As I’ve sketched it in relation to Christianity, it starts as a wish for absolute access to the Bible’s truth claims, achieved by absolute openness to the Bible through unprejudiced neutrality, with a goal of providing absolute security: certainty about the Bible’s truth values.  But absolute access, absolute openness, and absolute security are all the same:

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

As I hope I’ve shown over my last number of posts, they are wrong because they are simply impossible.  And they are even more wrong for Christians because these views presuppose either the claim of being like God (which is idolatry) or a disparagement of creation (which is a key, God-given resource for validating biblical truth values).

But this is more than overblown aspirations, more than finite humans coveting the absolute.  In Christian terms, if this is sin then it is not simply a sin of commission—acting wrongly.  It is a sin of the mind and of association—choosing the wrong friends, for the wrong reasons.

Specifically, it appears that Christians have developed an entrenched affinity for “modernist” philosophy.

Thus as I argued in my last post, the quest for absolute access to truth claims via absolute, unprejudiced openness and arriving at absolute security (through certainty about truth values) is a portrait of Modernism.

Originating in 17th century Europe, modernist philosophy favoured reason over the senses, experience, tradition, etc., as the best—and only—way accurately to assess truth claims and adjudicate their truth values.  Its goal was to help people to decide on matters that concerned them, and to have certainty about the truth of their decisions.

Modernist thinkers like René Descartes, influenced by Plato, viewed knowledge as stronger (and so better) than belief.  But how could he be sure that was basing his decisions on knowledge and not just mere, unfounded belief?

Viewing reason to be the ultimate arbiter of truth, Descartes’ “method” involved doubting our customs and former beliefs until they pass the test of reason (and so can be considered true knowledge) and rejecting our emotions and passions as outrightly deceptive.  In effect, by starting anew from this neutral “view from nowhere” we would be free from false beliefs and reliant upon true knowledge alone.

The similarities with how some Christians approach the Bible could not be plainer.

So is Christianity bankrupt as a result?  Not at all—at least not on this count.  For again, these ideas are not inherently Christian.  The question is, Why have these views been so broadly (and unwittingly) embraced, and what can be done about it?

As to why, I believe that many Christians have embraced Modernism not only as a hedge against relativism but because it is easier than the alternatives.

First, the finite, contingent nature of human existence implies that we live with various tensions (knowing versus not knowing, presence versus absence, present versus past and future, etc.).  Part of our “job” as human beings, then, is to maintain a flexible and variable relationship between the poles of these tensions.  For example, on some matters we know more (and so can be more confident of our views), whereas on others we know less (and so must be more humble).

Modernism is easy because it effectively collapses the tensions into hierarchies—by following its method we avoid struggling with the hard questions of how to balance these tensions, and with the resultant hard work of possibly revising our beliefs when the balance shifts.

Second, however, Christians who embrace Modernism even collapse key tensions in the Bible!

For example, many over-emphasize how much the Holy Spirit aids Christians in understanding the Bible and under-emphasize (or ignore?) the detrimental and universal effects of sin on the same.  As a result, such Christians are often overconfident concerning how well they know the Bible.

As to what can be done, Christians clearly need to move beyond Modernism.  Next post looks at how.

More than April’s fools? (aka, Descartes’ unwitting disciples)

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Confession time:

I began this blog intending to show how Christianity is viable, and how the co-centrality of love and truth is instrumental therein.  But I have certainly not done so.

Why?

Because much about Christianity is problematic or broken and this must first be identified, cleared away, and better understandings / approaches put in their place.  For example, I cannot hope for the notion of truth-for-me to seem meaningful so long as readers continue to believe in such false ideas as being able to read the Bible without interpreting it, or to access the Bible’s (absolute) truth absolutely.

Thus my last nine posts have aimed to debunk false views about how we relate to the Bible.  Particularly, false views about how (and how well) we can know the Bible’s content.  Among them, the concepts of certainty, neutrality, and historical independence.

So where does our desire for certainty come from?  Why do we think that we should (or even could) be neutral rather than having biases and prejudgements ?  And why do we want to read the Bible “free” from the views of the past?

As I’ve shown in past posts, the Bible stands against human certainty and nowhere espouses neutrality or historical independence.  Further, it is important to note that the above are all questions about knowledge: how reliable it is and how we get it.  And knowledge (or epistemology) is the domain of philosophy.

Strikingly then our fascination with knowing, or accessing things, absolutely finds its origins in the philosophical movement known as “Modernism.”

The poster boy for modernist thinking is René Descartes.  A French mathematician and philosopher, Descartes is famous for the conclusion “I think, therefore I am.”  But the problem that precedes this conclusion—and the method he used to solve it—are what interest us most.

Through his studies and travels Descartes found that people held all manner of contradictory beliefs.  Nor did the number or education of people who believed something guarantee the truth of it.  In contrast, Descartes observed that in mathematics the proper use of reason guarantees certainty about our conclusions, and so decided that reason properly applied could grant certainty in other areas of life.

Now he had already deduced that all humans have the capacity to reason and that each person is equally able to apply this capacity.  So with the right method and enough practice, human beings could not only know things truly but could even master the natural world, living happier (and even longer) lives.

So what was his “method”?

He started with reason, which is not simply thinking but is specifically the ability to determine truth from falsehood.  Next, Descartes held that “properly applying” one’s reason meant only accepting things as true that were accessible to the mind in a clear and distinct fashion—things that could not be doubted.

But in order for something to be undoubtedly true it must be true despite one’s best efforts to doubt it.  And this is just what Descartes did.  He went through a process of doubting everything that he believed up to that point.

Having already observed how people typically establish their views on inherited practices and customs rather than reason, his method rejects all past opinions as false until proven–by reason–to be true.  Sense perceptions (what we see, hear, and experience) are likewise false until proven true.

The only thing that Descartes could not doubt was that he was thinking, and this gave him absolute certainty of his own existence, upon which he founded his entire philosophy: I think, therefore I am.

But is this important?

You bet.

For in showing us where these “problematic and broken” views about the Bible come from (and what they are based on), we are more able to replace them with better, more functional views.  Specifically, it seems Christians need a better philosophical orientation than Descartes’ Modernism if they are to do justice both to the real world  and to the Bible itself.  More next post.

The Cheese stands alone!

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Recently a friend was discussing her interpretation of a biblical passage.

“Yes,” I said, “that position originates with Augustine.”

“Ah, excuse me?” she replied, “I don’t remember mentioning Augustine.  We’re talking about what I know from what I read in the Bible.”

Her view of interpretation is different from the “you-may-need-to-interpret-but-I-just-read-what’s-there” view.  Instead of claiming not to interpret, she was claiming to interpret independently of other, past sources: to interpret the Bible directly, on the basis of her skills and knowledge alone.

This raises several points.   First, this method of interpretation consists in being maximally open to the Bible’s content.  Second, by assuming that we should (and can) interpret from our present situation and knowledge alone, it equates openness with being unbiased by past views and unprejudiced by false beliefs.  Third, it arrives at its goal (of getting the best possible interpretation) by basing interpretations not on mere biases or beliefs, but on true knowledge.

Now openness to biblical texts is important.  But is this degree of openness—or openness achieved in this way—possible?

I think not.

Let’s start by re-considering the above conversation.  How did my friend acquire her knowledge of the Bible?  Well, from her Christian family, her pastor, and her Bible college professors.  And how did they get their knowledge?  And how did their sources get their knowledge?  And how did. . . ?

New understandings are possible.  Yet they always stand in relationship to (and have been informed by) past views.  Thus no view is ever independent of the course of its development.  Stated another way, knowledge itself has a history.  And being ignorant of that history does not mean that we are unaffected by it.

Rather, as historical beings humans have a deep and unbreakable relationship with the past.  Humans are contingent beings: our way of perceiving and understanding the world is conditioned by the world itself.  As such we cannot escape—or be unaffected by—our gender, race, ethnic background, or upbringing.

So seen, it is not only unfavourable to be unprejudiced, it is impossible!  Aspiring to such “absolute” openness is desiring neutrality and detachment from our world and our history.  For Christians, this amounts to disparaging both the necessity and “goodness” of God’s creation, and our own nature as creatures within it.

In short, it is by our attachment to the world that we know and understand anything at all.

In fact, our English word “prejudice” comes from the French préjugé légitime—legitimate prejudgements.  Prejudgements are the result of being in the world—existing in specific ways and situations.  They are legitimate because everyone has them: we need them in order to get by (and even survive) in these specific ways and situations.

So the goal is not to be unprejudiced, but to know our prejudgements, their origins, and  their limitations.  In other words, adapting our prejudgements as we receive new nformation (about ourselves, others, the world, and possibly God) from a variety of sources.

As contingent beings we always run the risk of founding our understandings on false beliefs.  But we cannot swap (mere) belief for (true) knowledge.  This is neither possible—humans cannot be like God, knowing all things truly—nor desirable.  For even as our beliefs are formed through our attachment to this world, so they also anchor us to this world: they centre us on the only locale where humans may encounter God.

And who is this God?

We come a step closer to knowing by contrasting the biblical picture of God with this ideal of unbiased, unprejudiced, neutrality.  The Christian God is far from neutral.  God is clearly presented as being for us before ever being against us, and as constantly seeking relationship with humanity.  And God’s motivation for performing God’s greatest act, sending Jesus?  “For God so loved the world . . .”