"Everybody knows that..."

1. Have you ever been caught off guard by a question that has never occurred to you? "Why is it wrong to eat cat meat?" Children are especially good at asking questions like these. "If God is everywhere, why do we go to church?"

If we spend our whole lives around people who think and act like we do, it's easy not to ask questions about many things. The questions may never even occur to us. We just do what we do without thinking much about it. 

Then maybe you get married. Or you have a "strange" roommate in college. "Everyone knows," the husband once told his new wife, "that you roll the toilet paper from the top." That couple eventually divorced, by the way. "Everyone knows that you squeeze the toothpaste from the end and not the middle."

I was sitting near one of my brother-in-laws once at a dinner table. Out of the blue, he asked why I ate one food at a time on my plate. Frankly, I had never paid any attention to how I ate, but I suddenly realized it was true. I'm not sure what dictated the order. I couldn't give my brother-in-law an answer, but he clearly considered it odd.

2. Where did we learn all these "obvious" things? I suspect that the way I eat is rather individual and psychological. No one taught it to me. It's probably mostly a matter of my individual psychology. 

However, with most things of this sort, we absorb them from our environment as we grow up -- we get them from the culture around us. And that includes the Christian culture around us. Sometimes we talk about culture as if it's something out there, outside the church. But the church itself is a culture. In fact, there are multiple subcultures within the church. We can't get outside of culture. Even if we go live on a deserted island, we take it with us.

We absorb these cultures largely without knowing it. For example, I cannot give you a good reason why it would be wrong to eat cat or dog, but I think I'll avoid it just the same. The best explanation I know is that when we draw lines around the world and categorize things -- putting different items in different "boxes" -- cats and dogs go more on the human side than the "outside animals" side. We've domesticated them, humanized them. They become our friends.

To kill a cat or a dog is thus a bit like killing a human. It's different from hunting a deer. Indeed, one initial sign that someone might be on a path to killing people is killing pets.

We absorb these assumptions from our environment as we grow up. Our families teach them to us. We learn them at school. We learn them at church. We are being programmed, as it were, without realizing it. Then when we are older, we just assume this is the way the world works. These behaviors and beliefs are ingrained in the basement of our minds. 

The more monolithic our background is -- the less diverse it is -- the more unaware we may be that other people think and behave differently. Our lack of awareness works fine as long as no one is hurt by it. It's when we try to force others into our unexamined ways of thinking -- or when we try to eliminate those who are different -- that we especially run into trouble.

3. These are "unexamined assumptions" we have about the world. You may have heard the story about the new spouse who inexplicably chopped the ends off her ham. The husband, in this case, asked her why. Suddenly, she realized that she didn't know. It's just what her mother always did.

They ask the mother when they get the chance. Why did you always cut the ends off your ham? She realized that she had never asked that question either. "My mother always did." They go to the grandmother. "Grandma, why did you always cut the ends off your ham?"

"Because I didn't have a big enough pan." 

I don't know if this story really happened, but it is a good illustration of how we do a lot of things unreflectively. We do them because we have learned to do them growing up. If you ask why, we don't really know. We just do them. "We've always done it that way."

The child asks, "But why?" You give an answer. "But why?" You give another answer. "But why?" Perhaps a little annoyed, the parent eventually might say, "Because I said so."

4. People can get rather irritable when you catch them off guard like this on an issue of some importance to them. Perhaps it is something to do with family. Perhaps it is something to do with politics. Perhaps it is something to do with race. If our identity is wrapped around something about which we have unexamined assumptions, we can get angry when someone touches it!

When you live in an echo chamber -- meaning everyone in your group believes the same things and doesn't seriously question them -- you can get quite defensive when an outsider starts asking questions. You might have stock or pat answers to the questions, answers that the group accepts without much serious examination. What is important for the group is that you have an answer -- not that it's a good one.

I have found this teaching in evangelical contexts all my life. When it comes to many complex issues, I can get by without very deep or penetrating answers because the main thing is not to upset the apple cart. Probing questions make us feel uncomfortable. Then occasionally there will be someone in the class who comes from another denomination or another religion or who dares question the standard answers. That's when it gets interesting.

Predictably, this dynamic of uncomfortable questions happens regularly in the middle school Sunday School I help teach. For example, as we have gone through books like Judges and 1 Samuel, many awkward questions come up. Why did God kill Uzzah for touching the Ark? Why was Jael considered righteous for killing a man with a tent peg? I didn't even cover the story of the Levite and his concubine at the end of Judges.

As I have taught, there are some issues -- and possible answers -- I have often avoided. I'm a people pleaser by nature and don't like uncomfortable situations. Some thinkers seem to hit these thorny questions with delight because they are convinced they have the answers. Unfortunately for me, I haven't always found their answers to be as foolproof as they think. I can't relay their answers with the same confidence they do.

Of course, there are other teachers who hit hard issues without hesitation because they think the job of a professor is to make you squirm a little, to make you think. I remember the shock of one professor when a graduating senior talked about how she almost lost her faith in one of his classes but was stronger for it. It apparently hadn't occurred to him that his intellectual onslaught was so intense.

5. This book is a journey toward knowledge and self-reflection. On many issues, we begin with many unexamined assumptions. We may go our whole lives with them. We pass them on to our children. 

I have called these views of the world "unreflective knowing" or perhaps "pre-reflective knowing." We "know" things because they are in the water around us. We are like the fish that doesn't know it's in water.

I remember a discussion I had with my mother when I was in seminary. I was saying, "We Wesleyans do this" and "We Wesleyans think that." (I come from a denomination in the Methodist tradition known as the Wesleyan Church.) At some point, she found my wording a little alarming. "Stop saying 'Wesleyan,'" she said. "We just read the Bible and do what it says."

In my opinion, my mother was an "unreflective knower" when it came to the Bible. She knew the content thoroughly. She was an absolute master of the content. But she was almost completely unaware of the assumptions she used to organize its materials into a theology and a way of living.

My mother had fundamentally different wiring than I do when it comes to thinking. We both liked ideas, but her approach to truth was, "How can I fit the evidence into my existing beliefs?" In seminary, my approach became, "What is the most likely interpretation of the evidence?"

She was a group thinker. She used her intellect to defend the beliefs and practices of her tribe, her group. She was not an independent thinker. For her, the task of the thinker was to find possible ways to fit the data into what we already believe.

For me to stand outside our group and critically evaluate our perspectives was uncomfortable for her, perhaps even alarming. But at seminary, I was encountering people and thoughts from outside our bubble. Easy answers work great when there's no one around who questions them.

6. Now there's a whole debate to be had here about the extent to which we should question certain things. Some of you may be reading my description of my mother's "epistemology" -- her approach to truth and knowledge -- and you may be thinking she was on the right track. But you might not feel the same way if she had been a Baptist, a Muslim, or a Democrat.

For the record, my official position is that "faith seeking understanding" is the ideal Christian approach to knowledge. We start with the faith we have and move forward from there. However, I believe our understanding of faith needs to be revisable in the light of the journey. We can debate how revisable it should be.

I actually had the thought as a teenager. "It is amazing that I just happened to be born into a Christian family that has all the right answers. What is the probability?!" I was completely sincere and following my family's group epistemology.

But the fact of the matter is that it is doubtful that any Christian group is completely right on everything. We are likely right on some things and wrong on others. We just don't know which is which. I have stayed in the Wesleyan tradition because I continue to think that it is more correct on many issues than other Christian traditions. But even saying so makes me a little nervous. It makes me suspicious of myself.

In my final years of college and into seminary, I began to see holes in some of the views with which I grew up. I debated whether God was testing me. Did God want me to believe things that were false as a test of my obedience? In the end, I resolved that God was a God of truth. God was not against reason even though human reasoning is flawed and finite. The evidence is in theory a reliable path to truth even though we do not always have all the evidence. And we wear "glasses" with filters as we process it.

7. One of the biggest realizations is that we all wear glasses as we interpret the Bible itself. In my first year as a college professor, I taught a course on contemporary philosophy. In the class was a student who had been deeply influenced by another professor who emphasized approaching all questions from a biblical worldview. Yet it seemed to me that this professor had a doozy of an unexamined assumption. He seemed to assume that a biblical worldview was somehow self-evident and obvious.

But a little reflection made it clear that this biblical worldview was as much an interpretation of the Bible as the Bible itself. The Bible doesn't come pre-loaded onto our brain's hard drive. We have to input it. We have to interpret it. That means our unexamined assumptions (and our examined ones) are not only involved -- they steer what we think we see in the text.

The Bible is not a single philosophical work. It is a collection of books written over a 1000-year period to address dramatically different contexts. Words get their meanings from contexts. That means a biblical worldview involves a complex integration of differing pieces. No wonder there are so many different churches with so many different beliefs!

At the time, I would have hypothesized that my dear fellow professor had a "pre-modern" view of the Bible. By this term, I meant that he probably didn't realize his unexamined assumptions. He saw the Bible as a single book with a single meaning, all the while being deeply influenced by the thinking of a particular Christian tradition (especially what might be called Reformed epistemology). 

Yes, the content of his biblical worldview was built predominantly out of the materials of the biblical text. Like my mother, he knew the biblical text thoroughly and completely. But for him, the organizing principles for that content came from a much more recent theological tradition. And I don't think he really knew it. I don't think he knew how thick the glasses were that he brought to the text.  I could be wrong. 

The result is that we quote a lot of Scripture without realizing that the way we are defining and organizing the words comes extensively from ourselves and the water we swim in. The Bible serves as a mirror of our existing beliefs. We read verses the way our group understands the verses or the way the verses strike me given the English "dictionary" in my head. We fit the various parts of the Bible together into a unified whole that is as much of our own making as the Bible itself.

It is deeply ironic that those groups that most emphasize that our beliefs and practices must come from the Bible alone are often those that are the least reflective in their interpretations of Scripture. We see what we want to see -- what we need to see -- in the biblical text. The Bible becomes more of a banner for our group thinking than a real source of truth.

To be continued...