I have long thought that Karl Rove is a genius. I say that with admiration of his intellect, not his character. I say that with the admiration you might have for a clever adversary who outwits you.
Actually, I don't know for sure what I think about Karl Rove's intentions. I don't have a good impression of him at all, but I concede he might actually think he is acting for the good of the U.S.
I read a poll tonight that says about half the American people question Bush's honesty about now. I actually don't. I think he's incredibly honest, but incredibly misguided and naive. It's Cheney that I think of as a lying, manipulative snake.
I don't know to what extent Rove is a liar, but I do think of him as the most Nixonesk person I've seen in recent politics. Wasn't it Rove who in an act of true genius arranged to put homosexual unions on the ballot in states crucial to Bush's reelection. Because most people have trouble making distinctions, he knew the fervor against homosexuality would add momentum to Bush. In the free floating matching that is American think, Kerry automatically lines up with the pro-homosexual feeling regardless of what he did or didn't say about it.
What I find irritating about the Roves, Cheney's, and Clinton types is that they play the American audience as if we're stupid and Americans prove them right every time. With Clinton it was the numbers game. If I mention about thirty different statistics and throw a few thoughtful hmms in there, they'll buy it. Gore tried it, but he just didn't have the panash Clinton did.
I thought Cheney's false hurt over mention of his daughter's homosexuality was devious. He's not ashamed of her lifestyle and neither is she. What genius, though! Act like you're offended and all the parents out there who would be embarrassed to have the orientation of their child mentioned on public television will sympathize with you. Incredibly clever! It's the Rove maneuver. If the heat lamp is on you, create a diversion (heh, heh, Cheney did that with John Edwards so well, the snake--"here at this debate is the first time I've ever met you..." A bold faced lie)
And now, surprise, surprise, we find out that Rove "outted" Wilson's wife. Republicans are defending him as not having done anything illegal. I don't know whether he did or not and, really, that's not the issue. It's a diversion. Did he mess up her career and potentially endanger others for political gain? Yes.
What a clever beast! Wilson's wife was exposing the complete sham Bush's idea of Iraq getting uranium from Niger was. So Rove leaks (or draws attention to, if you want to go with one defense that he did nothing illegal) her identity to the news. I don't care whether it was illegal or not, it was unethical and dirty politics--especially when it turns out she was correct and Bush was absolutely wrong on the uranium deal. I remember thinking this was a stretch at the time, and I don't get daily briefings from the CIA. Maybe I should be president.
So hats off to you, Rove, for being a political genius. I'm not out for your blood, but you are a shameful man, a disgrace to President Bush. You're a man after Nixon's own heart.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Monday, July 18, 2005
Hermeneutics 2
This was originally posted on July 1, but I've moved it up to get the sequence.
2. Context is Everything
Words are incredibly flexible things. What I mean is that they can mean so many different things in so many different situations. What makes being fired different from getting fired up or firing a gun or lighting a fire? The context! To know what the word "fire" means, you have to know whether you are talking about your job, enthusiasm, a gun range, or camping.
The words of the Bible are no different in this regard. Why are there over 20,000 different Protestant denominations that disagree with each other yet claim to get their core beliefs from the Bible? It is this incredible flexibility that words have. If we are not aware of it, then we are bound to assume that the way we see the words is the only way to see the words.
An important distinction to make in this regard is the different between the original meaning of the words of the Bible and any other meanings we might find. The original meaning is the meaning these words had to the original authors and audiences of the books of the Bible.
What did Paul mean when he said a non-Christian might think people speaking in tongues were "out of their mind" (1 Cor. 14:23)? The word Paul used may have referred to the kind of things people were said to experience in a type of religion called a mystery religion. This example draws our attention to certain aspects of the Bible's original meaning. The original meaning of the Bible has to do with ancient audiences, and we do not automatically come equipped with anywhere near the necessary background knowledge to understand the words of the Bible as they were originally understood.
The idea itself of an "original meaning" is not without its complications. There were no doubt times when the original author of a book of the Bible had a different understanding than his audiences (all of the biblical authors were likely men). Further, some of the words of the Bible were spoken orally and only later written down. The words of Jesus can thus have slightly different meanings depending on whether we are thinking of 1) what he originally meant in whatever specific contexts he first spoke them and 2) the various connotations his words take on in individual gospel accounts. Further, it is certainly possible that God had meanings in mind for the words of which the original authors were not aware.
But in general, the difference between how the words might strike us and what the words originally meant is a valid distinction. For example, Judas was not the hero of the gospels, although someone might choose to read the story this way. I have heard of a certain tribe in Papua New Guinea that initially responded to the story of Jesus in this way.
Once we have established what the "original meaning" was, there are any number of interpretations of the Bible's words that differ from it. These other meanings vary from interpretations that are quite similar to the original meaning to interpretations that have little to do with anything the original audiences would have recognized.
For example, when I read about loving my neighbor, I am probably thinking things that are similar in spirit to the original meaning. But I have a strong hunch the specifics of loving my neighbor can be quite different today than when Leviticus or Jesus spoke of it (Lev. 19:18; Luke 10:27). On the other hand, countless sermons every Sunday morning do things with the Bible that may be true but have nothing to do with anything Moses or Isaiah or Paul would recognize. Indeed, you could argue that the most relevant of sermons often deviate the most from the original meaning, for the original meaning was most relevant to the ancient audiences--more than to us.
I submit to you three incontrovertible aspects of reading the Bible in context.
1. If we read the Bible for what it originally meant, it tells us it was written to someone else. The literal meaning of Deuteronomy or Romans or 1 Thessalonians requires us to recognize that none of the books of the Bible was strictly written to us. As Christians we believe these books are for us. But they were not written to us. Deuteronomy says, "Hear, O Israel" (Deut. 6:4). Romans says it was written to individuals in Rome (Rom. 1:7). 1 Thessalonians says it was written to the church at Thessalonica (1 Thess. 1:1). No one alive today is one of those Romans or 1 Thessalonians originally addressed. Even modern Israel is not really the Israel of Deuteronomy 6.
2. The way the original audiences understood the literal meaning was a function of the way they used and understood words. When Jesus said that God sends rain on the just and the unjust in Matthew 5:45, the Galilean peasants understood rain as a very positive thing. Further, they had clear ideas of what it might mean to be just or unjust--definitions that came from their world.
When Genesis 1 speaks of waters above the sky (Gen. 1:6-8) and stars put in the sky (Gen. 1:14-15, it pictures a universe in which you go up through a layer of stars before reaching primordial waters above them. When Paul speaks of three heavens (2 Cor. 12:2), he thinks of three layers of sky as you go straight up toward God. These should not be problems for our faith in the Bible. It simply confirms that God is a God who speaks to us in ways we can understand. He does the same to us today in our categories, not in the categories through which our great grandchildren will view the world.
3. The ancient audiences of the Bible's words did not understand words or look at the world the same way we do. Indeed, they differed from each other in this regard.
The preceding examples make this point clear. I might return to the example of rain to make the point again (Matt. 5:45). For many years I did not understand the original meaning of God sending rain on the just because rain in my "dictionary" is not a good thing. "Rain, rain, go away. Please come back another day." I thought the verse meant that God even allowed bad things to happen to good people.
But attention to the words around Matthew's statement (the literary context) as well as to ancient Galilean culture (the social context) at this point in history (the historical context) shows me that this interpretation differs from the original meaning. Rain was a very good thing to farmers in a land that sometimes went without rain. The verse is about how God gives good things even to bad people. We read the Bible differently from the original meaning all the time in subtle ways like this all the time.
We should probably not assume that all the new meanings we see in the words today are necessarily less from God than the original meanings were. Indeed, unless God speaks through the words beyond the original meaning, most of us are in trouble a good deal of the time. Even scholars often disagree on the original meaning. Nevertheless, the first step toward a deeper and more mature understanding of the Bible is to recognize the crucial and determinative role that context plays in the meaning we see in it.
2. Context is Everything
Words are incredibly flexible things. What I mean is that they can mean so many different things in so many different situations. What makes being fired different from getting fired up or firing a gun or lighting a fire? The context! To know what the word "fire" means, you have to know whether you are talking about your job, enthusiasm, a gun range, or camping.
The words of the Bible are no different in this regard. Why are there over 20,000 different Protestant denominations that disagree with each other yet claim to get their core beliefs from the Bible? It is this incredible flexibility that words have. If we are not aware of it, then we are bound to assume that the way we see the words is the only way to see the words.
An important distinction to make in this regard is the different between the original meaning of the words of the Bible and any other meanings we might find. The original meaning is the meaning these words had to the original authors and audiences of the books of the Bible.
What did Paul mean when he said a non-Christian might think people speaking in tongues were "out of their mind" (1 Cor. 14:23)? The word Paul used may have referred to the kind of things people were said to experience in a type of religion called a mystery religion. This example draws our attention to certain aspects of the Bible's original meaning. The original meaning of the Bible has to do with ancient audiences, and we do not automatically come equipped with anywhere near the necessary background knowledge to understand the words of the Bible as they were originally understood.
The idea itself of an "original meaning" is not without its complications. There were no doubt times when the original author of a book of the Bible had a different understanding than his audiences (all of the biblical authors were likely men). Further, some of the words of the Bible were spoken orally and only later written down. The words of Jesus can thus have slightly different meanings depending on whether we are thinking of 1) what he originally meant in whatever specific contexts he first spoke them and 2) the various connotations his words take on in individual gospel accounts. Further, it is certainly possible that God had meanings in mind for the words of which the original authors were not aware.
But in general, the difference between how the words might strike us and what the words originally meant is a valid distinction. For example, Judas was not the hero of the gospels, although someone might choose to read the story this way. I have heard of a certain tribe in Papua New Guinea that initially responded to the story of Jesus in this way.
Once we have established what the "original meaning" was, there are any number of interpretations of the Bible's words that differ from it. These other meanings vary from interpretations that are quite similar to the original meaning to interpretations that have little to do with anything the original audiences would have recognized.
For example, when I read about loving my neighbor, I am probably thinking things that are similar in spirit to the original meaning. But I have a strong hunch the specifics of loving my neighbor can be quite different today than when Leviticus or Jesus spoke of it (Lev. 19:18; Luke 10:27). On the other hand, countless sermons every Sunday morning do things with the Bible that may be true but have nothing to do with anything Moses or Isaiah or Paul would recognize. Indeed, you could argue that the most relevant of sermons often deviate the most from the original meaning, for the original meaning was most relevant to the ancient audiences--more than to us.
I submit to you three incontrovertible aspects of reading the Bible in context.
1. If we read the Bible for what it originally meant, it tells us it was written to someone else. The literal meaning of Deuteronomy or Romans or 1 Thessalonians requires us to recognize that none of the books of the Bible was strictly written to us. As Christians we believe these books are for us. But they were not written to us. Deuteronomy says, "Hear, O Israel" (Deut. 6:4). Romans says it was written to individuals in Rome (Rom. 1:7). 1 Thessalonians says it was written to the church at Thessalonica (1 Thess. 1:1). No one alive today is one of those Romans or 1 Thessalonians originally addressed. Even modern Israel is not really the Israel of Deuteronomy 6.
2. The way the original audiences understood the literal meaning was a function of the way they used and understood words. When Jesus said that God sends rain on the just and the unjust in Matthew 5:45, the Galilean peasants understood rain as a very positive thing. Further, they had clear ideas of what it might mean to be just or unjust--definitions that came from their world.
When Genesis 1 speaks of waters above the sky (Gen. 1:6-8) and stars put in the sky (Gen. 1:14-15, it pictures a universe in which you go up through a layer of stars before reaching primordial waters above them. When Paul speaks of three heavens (2 Cor. 12:2), he thinks of three layers of sky as you go straight up toward God. These should not be problems for our faith in the Bible. It simply confirms that God is a God who speaks to us in ways we can understand. He does the same to us today in our categories, not in the categories through which our great grandchildren will view the world.
3. The ancient audiences of the Bible's words did not understand words or look at the world the same way we do. Indeed, they differed from each other in this regard.
The preceding examples make this point clear. I might return to the example of rain to make the point again (Matt. 5:45). For many years I did not understand the original meaning of God sending rain on the just because rain in my "dictionary" is not a good thing. "Rain, rain, go away. Please come back another day." I thought the verse meant that God even allowed bad things to happen to good people.
But attention to the words around Matthew's statement (the literary context) as well as to ancient Galilean culture (the social context) at this point in history (the historical context) shows me that this interpretation differs from the original meaning. Rain was a very good thing to farmers in a land that sometimes went without rain. The verse is about how God gives good things even to bad people. We read the Bible differently from the original meaning all the time in subtle ways like this all the time.
We should probably not assume that all the new meanings we see in the words today are necessarily less from God than the original meanings were. Indeed, unless God speaks through the words beyond the original meaning, most of us are in trouble a good deal of the time. Even scholars often disagree on the original meaning. Nevertheless, the first step toward a deeper and more mature understanding of the Bible is to recognize the crucial and determinative role that context plays in the meaning we see in it.
A Brief Guide to Biblical Hermeneutics
Well, I thought I might spin out a 25 page booklet or so on biblical hermeneutics. I don't know if it will go anywhere. This was originally posted June 26, but I've moved it up so that the sequence is together.
1. Before You Apply
"God said it; I believe it; that settles it for me!"
The spirit with which this statement is often uttered is right on target. If something is God's will and God's position on an issue, no human being can dispute it. The Bible allows for questioning, but if God has spoken about something, his answer is the final answer.
"I, the LORD, do not change!" (Malachi 3:6).
Again, the spirit with which I have sometimes heard this verse quoted is right. In a culture where change is often seen as progress and we see science and technology getting better and better, we can tend to dismiss the old as irrelevant or ignorant. Christianity bids us believe that God has known everything from the very beginning. He is not growing up or getting better and better. God has always been an omniscient authority.
At the same time, these verses are often quoted to reinforce biblical ignorance and to support positions that are not God's. For example, you do not really know exactly what God has said, unless you know why he said it. To take a good number of the Bible's statements as timeless absolutes is to ignore the meaning God originally meant for those words, and thus to ignore the true message God was trying to get across.
And while God remains the same, humanity does not and has not. The Bible reveals that part of the unchanging "nature" of God is to communicate and relate to the world in terms it can understand. We cannot listen to the Bible and not see God meeting different people and groups in differing ways over time. The same Bible that allowed divorce in Deuteronomy 24:1-4 prohibits it in Matthew 19:7-9. The same Bible that involves stoning a man for violating the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32-36) tells a different group not to let anyone judge them because they do not keep it (Colossians 2:16-17).
God is an "incarnational" God, a God who takes on the flesh of those to whom he wishes to reveal himself. The story of revelation is the story of God meeting people where they are, using categories they understand, "stooping to their weakness." It is why Solomon's temple was structured just like the other pagan temples of his day--God was saying something to Israel in terms they could understand.
I suspect that discerning God's voice is ultimately as simple as becoming a person "after God's own heart" and being in the center of his will. But a deeper understanding of the process of hearing God's voice through the Bible is surely nothing to scorn, and it may just save us from mistaking our thoughts for God's thoughts.
Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. With regard to the Bible, it asks how we get from text to life. This is our topic of conversation in the following pages.
1. Before You Apply
"God said it; I believe it; that settles it for me!"
The spirit with which this statement is often uttered is right on target. If something is God's will and God's position on an issue, no human being can dispute it. The Bible allows for questioning, but if God has spoken about something, his answer is the final answer.
"I, the LORD, do not change!" (Malachi 3:6).
Again, the spirit with which I have sometimes heard this verse quoted is right. In a culture where change is often seen as progress and we see science and technology getting better and better, we can tend to dismiss the old as irrelevant or ignorant. Christianity bids us believe that God has known everything from the very beginning. He is not growing up or getting better and better. God has always been an omniscient authority.
At the same time, these verses are often quoted to reinforce biblical ignorance and to support positions that are not God's. For example, you do not really know exactly what God has said, unless you know why he said it. To take a good number of the Bible's statements as timeless absolutes is to ignore the meaning God originally meant for those words, and thus to ignore the true message God was trying to get across.
And while God remains the same, humanity does not and has not. The Bible reveals that part of the unchanging "nature" of God is to communicate and relate to the world in terms it can understand. We cannot listen to the Bible and not see God meeting different people and groups in differing ways over time. The same Bible that allowed divorce in Deuteronomy 24:1-4 prohibits it in Matthew 19:7-9. The same Bible that involves stoning a man for violating the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32-36) tells a different group not to let anyone judge them because they do not keep it (Colossians 2:16-17).
God is an "incarnational" God, a God who takes on the flesh of those to whom he wishes to reveal himself. The story of revelation is the story of God meeting people where they are, using categories they understand, "stooping to their weakness." It is why Solomon's temple was structured just like the other pagan temples of his day--God was saying something to Israel in terms they could understand.
I suspect that discerning God's voice is ultimately as simple as becoming a person "after God's own heart" and being in the center of his will. But a deeper understanding of the process of hearing God's voice through the Bible is surely nothing to scorn, and it may just save us from mistaking our thoughts for God's thoughts.
Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. With regard to the Bible, it asks how we get from text to life. This is our topic of conversation in the following pages.
Saturday, July 16, 2005
Sermon Starters: Three Years in Fairmount
I'm preaching tomorrow at a little Methodist church just outside Fairmount, so I thought I would share my notes.
Three Years in Fairmount
Scripture: Luke 4:14-22
Introduction:
Three Years in Fairmount
Scripture: Luke 4:14-22
Introduction:
- Bush's visit to Indianapolis
- The precautions when someone important is coming to town
- The helicopter that blissfully strayed into forbidden airspace
- Important people can come from nowhere--James Dean, Dick Van Dyke
- But you don't choose where you were born
- Jesus chose Bethlehem in part, Nazareth in full, Galilee
- These places have big churches now (aside on state of these Palestinian cities)
- But back then they were no where
- God choosing Nazareth, Capernaum, Bethsaida, Chorazin... It's like God choosing to spend three years in Fairmount.
Point 1: God took time out for an old "friend": Israel
- The movie Elf, the son interrupting the board meeting--even when you're working on big plans, some people are important enough to interrupt and spend some time with them
- God was working on big plans, the salvation of the world, the final end to evil.
- He took the time to come to Israel, the people with whom he had such a long relationship
- The puzzling story of the Syro-Phoenician woman--God was focusing on Israel
- Matthew 10--Don't go [yet] to the cities of the Samaritans and Gentiles
- The woman who touched the hem of his garment, he stopped what he was doing
- God is faithful to you all here today. He's not too busy with important things to take time for you. Sure there are terrorists blowing themselves up. God has the time to stop by Grant United Methodist Church on a Sunday morning just to let you know He hasn't forgot you. He has time to listen to your prayers and meet you in the singing. When you're in a relationship with Him, He's in it for the long haul--even when we aren't keeping up our end of the relationship.
- Who do you need to stop and spend some time with... despite your busyness?
Point 2: God was most interested in those who had lost their way: the sinners
- I don't know much about sheep, but I have been around some dogs that don't have much activity going on it their heads--the story of Happy and Princess running away in winter
- The lost don't always realize they're lost.
- Jesus didn't come to focus on the "righteous." I don't mean to negate my first point, but Jesus was as much on a rescue mission in Israel as on a visit to those who had kept in touch.
- Story of two sons in Matthew 21. Ironically, the son who had been trying to be faithful, didn't accept Jesus in the end.
- But the sinners did, toll collectors and prostitutes.
- John Wesley talked a lot about God's grace that comes to us when we aren't looking for it. Chances are, if you're here this morning, you have done better at keeping up in your relationship with God than the prostitutes and toll collectors of Jesus' day. If so, I invite you to reflect and celebrate the times God was watching out for you and you didn't even know you were in need.
- If you have family, friends, or know of people who need God's help desperately, but don't seem to want it. I invite you to revel in the faith that God is there with them, pursuing them, wooing them.
- God won't let you face more than you can bear. If you are maturing, you should be able to bear more and bear the longer you walk with God.
Point 3: ... In Nazareth, Cana, Bethsaida, Chorazin, Capernaum
- Where are these places? Answer: no where
- My son has no real understanding of space yet, he's five. Sometimes when I'm taking a short cut across the back roads of Indiana and all there is is corn field, he gets a little worried.
- That's where these places were in Jesus' world. We all know of them today. They have big churches today. But back then, the idea of the messiah coming from Nazareth? Preposterous.
- It was so preposterous that John the Baptist apparently had some second thoughts. He sends to Jesus to see if he's the one.
- Jesus' response was to recap to John's followers the things we read in our Scripture today
- the blind gained their sight, captives received liberty, the poor heard good news.
- It must have been a real pain to live under the rule of Herod... taxation to build things when they were subsistence farmers... more on this
- Jesus wasn't just interested in the spiritual. He was interested in their earthly existence too.
- We all plan to be in heaven. But what "little thing" are you struggling with today?
- The student who dropped the engagement ring in the snow... and couldn't find it for weeks. God cares about these kinds of things no matter who you are
Conclusion:
- Why Galilee? Many reasons. One was surely to show us how it's done.
- Start where you are.
- My supervised ministry in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. I haven't been back for over fifteen years, but it was where I was at the appointed moment and I ministered to those in a retirement home for three months.
- How great is God's love for you?
- Picture him being willing to spend three years in Fairmount.
- Picture him being willing to spend three years at your house helping you with the details of your life.
- Whatever you do, don't be like the places he went. Matthew 11 gives a stern rebuke to these very cities. Not only Nazareth, but Capernaum where he had lived for some time, Bethsaida and Chorazin where he had done most of his miracles. These cities rejected him.
- Give God the place he deserves in your life--nothing less than the very center. You won't be disappointed!
Thursday, July 14, 2005
Inerrancy, Wesleyan Style
I'am proud to be a Wesleyan for several reasons.
For example, Wesleyans have never fought over which way you should baptize. You can immerse, sprinkle, pour, do it to an infant, do it to an adult, or not be baptized at all. We were opposed to slavery when most other Christian groups were riding the fence and many preachers were members of the KKK. We were in favor of women voting and taking all roles in ministry a hundred years before secular feminism and long before it was the "in" thing to teach in American society.
I would put the Wesleyan stance on inerrancy in a similar camp. Now mind you, I am describing what I see--I'm not anything like an official voice of the Wesleyan Church. And, mind you, you usually can't really say that everyone in a denomination has a certain view on an issue. We've had a lot of growth from other conservative denominations who presume that because we look a lot like the churches they come from in so many ways, we are just the same. I want to make it clear that we actually are a little different in flavor from other churches that come close to us in some areas.
For example, it's true that most of our churches only practice adult baptism by immersion. Indeed, even some Wesleyans are surprised to find that you can baptize infants in our churches. Most Wesleyans do take standard fundamentalist positions on political issues, but our Methodist roots peek out here and there, leading some Wesleyans to emphasize social justice over the issues fundamentalists tend to focus on.
I would say that the difference between the Wesleyan Church and so many other conservative churches is our "flavor," our spirit. We have rankled over how to live in the past, things we used to call "standards"--should women wear jewelry, should you have a job on Sunday. But we have rarely rankled over the same ideas that some of the better known groups have.
In general, I would say that we are really neither fundamentalist nor evangelical in flavor, but pietist. I would describe pietism as an approach to Christianity that is far more interested in a person's spirit than their thinking. We did not fight the battles of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 1900's. Those were the battles from which the term inerrancy arose. Churches like the Southern Baptists or the Missionary Church have a very specific understanding of inerrancy. For them, the word evokes debates over whether the Bible contradicts itself on matters of history and science.
Wesleyans have never had these debates. When we were hashing out our current form, the two main groups from which we came discussed whether to put the word "inerrancy" into our official statements. One of these parent groups, the Pilgrim Holiness Church, didn't have this word in their statements. The other group, the Wesleyan Methodist Church, had only introduced the term into its statement in the 50's at the urging of a man named Stephen Paine. He was a scholar from Houghton College in New York who was tracking the fundamentalist-modernist issues.
Eyewitnesses have conveyed the process by which the term was introduced into our church statements. The Pilgrims had not been tracking the debate--they were more interested in putting statements on the end times (by the way, here is another issue where wisdom won out, the Wesleyan Church does not have a specific position on how the end times will happen. Most Wesleyans would be pre-millenial and would believe in a seven year tribulation, but all positions are possible for a Wesleyan, within the limits of basic orthodoxy). But who among us would want to say the Bible has errors? The statement was put into our Discipline as a vote of confidence in the inspiration, truthfulness, and authority of the Bible.
But we have never defined what inerrancy might specifically entail on the issues that gave the term birth. It is for us a very broad affirmation that God never makes mistakes and God inspired the whole Bible.
Why do I think this generality is a good thing? Because the whole fundamentalist-modernist controversy seems so confused in retrospect. While the fundamentalists opposed the modernist positions, they opposed them within the same modernist categories as their opponents. They defined errors in terms of modernist definitions of science and history when the Bible wasn't written for modernists. It was an anachronistic standard by which to define errors. Meanwhile, the Wesleyan tradition continued on its merry away, blissfully uninvolved in these controversies for the most part. It had a conservative confidence in the Bible without defining its meaning on modernist terms.
Take Harold Linsell, who wrote The Battle for the Bible. At one point he tries to harmonize the various gospel accounts of Peter's denial of Jesus. In the end, to get all the denials in the gospels in, he suggests that maybe Peter denied Jesus six times--three before the cock crowed once and three before it crowed the second time.
This is ingenious, but notice that Lindsell's suggestion doesn't actually match any of the gospels. Fundamentalists regularly end up making up their own, strange versions of the Bible's meaning in an attempt to fit things together. The problem is that Lindsell has created a fifth gospel that is actually none of the four that are actually inspired. His intentions are wonderful, but his effort and end product misguided. In the wrong hands, this approach can be dangerous because (like the Pharisees and the Judaizers) it pays more attention to the letter than to the spirit.
A Wesleyan would not usually worry about working out inerrancy in this kind of detail. Peter denied Jesus three times. Perhaps there is some way of fitting these things together, but the point of the incidence was not about the exact way in which the denials took place--it was the fact that he denied him (I suppose you could even debate whether this was even really a main point).
In this regard I like Asbury Theological Seminary's statement on inerrancy: "the Bible is inerrant in all that it affirms." The important question is thus, what was God affirming when He inspired this particular passage. Was the point of Philippians 2:10 that the earth is flat and that there are beings under and above the earth:
"So that at the name of Jesus every knee might bow--of those in the skies and on the earth and under the earth..."
No. The way of picturing the world is of course the way Jews in Paul's day pictured the world. The point God was making was not cosmology, but the fact that every living being that exists will bow before Christ. Am I surprised or disappointed in any way that God revealed this truth in terms that Paul and the Philippians readily understood? God forbid! How self-centered and narcissistic to assume He had to reveal on my terms when they were the original audience! No, I celebrate that God is a God who speaks, not above our heads, but in terms we can understand.
The fundamentalist understanding of inerrancy unfortunately is based on an incoherent understanding of language--one that the Wesleyan, "spiritual" sense of inerrancy thankfully by-passes. Because fundamentalism was a response to "liberal" challenges to the truth of the Bible, it had some basic sense of what it might mean to read the Bible for what it originally meant when it was first written. Meanwhile, my Wesleyan forebears were still reading the Bible in a "spiritual" way that, without really even realizing it, didn't pay much attention to the original meaning. They were interested in the spiritual message God intended the words to have.
But fundamentalists, since they were forced by the modernists to pay attention to the original context, tried incoherently to combine these two quite different ways of reading the Bible's words. They argued that the original meaning was the spiritual message for all time.
But these are two distinct meanings. There is the original meaning, the meaning these words had to their original audiences. Then there is any meaning God might have spoken to the later church or to individuals today through these words. The two are rarely exactly the same, for we don't view the world the way the original audiences did. If the words applied directly to us today, they would not have applied as directly to them. But since the Bible literally tells us these books were first written to them, they will not apply as directly to us today. The fundamentalist understanding of inerrancy is thus based on a fundamental confusion over how language works.
So as a Wesleyan, I think Asbury's very general statement of inerrancy captures our flavor well. If I am asked to bring my knowledge of the original context and meaning of the Bible to the word inerrancy, I have to get a little more complex.
If we are talking of the spiritual meanings God brings to the Bible, these meanings are of course immediately and directly without error. Anything that God has authentically revealed to the Church, to a specific church group or specific individuals, these meanings are of course without error.
In terms of the original meanings, we must look at all the books of the Bible as individual instances of inspired, inerrant revelation. The points that God was making in each case were without error for each particular context. The more we understand these moments of revelation in historical context, we realize that these moments are in a flow of revelation. God's message in Deuteronomy freely allowed for divorce and polygamy. There was no error made for that context. But Deuteronomy does not give us the final word on these subjects. We must thus understand inerrancy in terms of the place of each book in the flow of salvation history.
Further, much of the instruction of the Bible addressed specific situations and contexts. The passage of 1 Corinthians 11 on women's head coverings is so foreign to our culture that even scholars can scarcely agree on exactly what Paul meant. And greeting the brothers with a holy kiss just wouldn't come across the same way at my home church that it did in ancient Thessalonica. We must therefore understand inerrancy also in terms of the specific contexts and situations that each book originally addressed.
God is a God who takes on the flesh of those to whom He speaks. He did it as Jesus; he did it in the original meaning of the Bible. Each book of the Bible in its original meaning is an instance of God meeting a particular group of people with just what they needed, meeting them where they were at in their contexts and understandings, stooping to their weakness to move them in the right direction.
So I welcome those who feel a kindred spirit in our Wesleyan churches. But if from time to time you find some flavors that don't look Baptist, it's because we are really more pietist in our roots than fundamentalist. We may use some of the same words, but they don't always have the same exact connotations as they do in other traditions. The end result often looks similar, but it is a different spirit that is much more open than closed on matters like these. As John Wesley once said, "If your heart is as my heart, then give me your hand."
For example, Wesleyans have never fought over which way you should baptize. You can immerse, sprinkle, pour, do it to an infant, do it to an adult, or not be baptized at all. We were opposed to slavery when most other Christian groups were riding the fence and many preachers were members of the KKK. We were in favor of women voting and taking all roles in ministry a hundred years before secular feminism and long before it was the "in" thing to teach in American society.
I would put the Wesleyan stance on inerrancy in a similar camp. Now mind you, I am describing what I see--I'm not anything like an official voice of the Wesleyan Church. And, mind you, you usually can't really say that everyone in a denomination has a certain view on an issue. We've had a lot of growth from other conservative denominations who presume that because we look a lot like the churches they come from in so many ways, we are just the same. I want to make it clear that we actually are a little different in flavor from other churches that come close to us in some areas.
For example, it's true that most of our churches only practice adult baptism by immersion. Indeed, even some Wesleyans are surprised to find that you can baptize infants in our churches. Most Wesleyans do take standard fundamentalist positions on political issues, but our Methodist roots peek out here and there, leading some Wesleyans to emphasize social justice over the issues fundamentalists tend to focus on.
I would say that the difference between the Wesleyan Church and so many other conservative churches is our "flavor," our spirit. We have rankled over how to live in the past, things we used to call "standards"--should women wear jewelry, should you have a job on Sunday. But we have rarely rankled over the same ideas that some of the better known groups have.
In general, I would say that we are really neither fundamentalist nor evangelical in flavor, but pietist. I would describe pietism as an approach to Christianity that is far more interested in a person's spirit than their thinking. We did not fight the battles of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 1900's. Those were the battles from which the term inerrancy arose. Churches like the Southern Baptists or the Missionary Church have a very specific understanding of inerrancy. For them, the word evokes debates over whether the Bible contradicts itself on matters of history and science.
Wesleyans have never had these debates. When we were hashing out our current form, the two main groups from which we came discussed whether to put the word "inerrancy" into our official statements. One of these parent groups, the Pilgrim Holiness Church, didn't have this word in their statements. The other group, the Wesleyan Methodist Church, had only introduced the term into its statement in the 50's at the urging of a man named Stephen Paine. He was a scholar from Houghton College in New York who was tracking the fundamentalist-modernist issues.
Eyewitnesses have conveyed the process by which the term was introduced into our church statements. The Pilgrims had not been tracking the debate--they were more interested in putting statements on the end times (by the way, here is another issue where wisdom won out, the Wesleyan Church does not have a specific position on how the end times will happen. Most Wesleyans would be pre-millenial and would believe in a seven year tribulation, but all positions are possible for a Wesleyan, within the limits of basic orthodoxy). But who among us would want to say the Bible has errors? The statement was put into our Discipline as a vote of confidence in the inspiration, truthfulness, and authority of the Bible.
But we have never defined what inerrancy might specifically entail on the issues that gave the term birth. It is for us a very broad affirmation that God never makes mistakes and God inspired the whole Bible.
Why do I think this generality is a good thing? Because the whole fundamentalist-modernist controversy seems so confused in retrospect. While the fundamentalists opposed the modernist positions, they opposed them within the same modernist categories as their opponents. They defined errors in terms of modernist definitions of science and history when the Bible wasn't written for modernists. It was an anachronistic standard by which to define errors. Meanwhile, the Wesleyan tradition continued on its merry away, blissfully uninvolved in these controversies for the most part. It had a conservative confidence in the Bible without defining its meaning on modernist terms.
Take Harold Linsell, who wrote The Battle for the Bible. At one point he tries to harmonize the various gospel accounts of Peter's denial of Jesus. In the end, to get all the denials in the gospels in, he suggests that maybe Peter denied Jesus six times--three before the cock crowed once and three before it crowed the second time.
This is ingenious, but notice that Lindsell's suggestion doesn't actually match any of the gospels. Fundamentalists regularly end up making up their own, strange versions of the Bible's meaning in an attempt to fit things together. The problem is that Lindsell has created a fifth gospel that is actually none of the four that are actually inspired. His intentions are wonderful, but his effort and end product misguided. In the wrong hands, this approach can be dangerous because (like the Pharisees and the Judaizers) it pays more attention to the letter than to the spirit.
A Wesleyan would not usually worry about working out inerrancy in this kind of detail. Peter denied Jesus three times. Perhaps there is some way of fitting these things together, but the point of the incidence was not about the exact way in which the denials took place--it was the fact that he denied him (I suppose you could even debate whether this was even really a main point).
In this regard I like Asbury Theological Seminary's statement on inerrancy: "the Bible is inerrant in all that it affirms." The important question is thus, what was God affirming when He inspired this particular passage. Was the point of Philippians 2:10 that the earth is flat and that there are beings under and above the earth:
"So that at the name of Jesus every knee might bow--of those in the skies and on the earth and under the earth..."
No. The way of picturing the world is of course the way Jews in Paul's day pictured the world. The point God was making was not cosmology, but the fact that every living being that exists will bow before Christ. Am I surprised or disappointed in any way that God revealed this truth in terms that Paul and the Philippians readily understood? God forbid! How self-centered and narcissistic to assume He had to reveal on my terms when they were the original audience! No, I celebrate that God is a God who speaks, not above our heads, but in terms we can understand.
The fundamentalist understanding of inerrancy unfortunately is based on an incoherent understanding of language--one that the Wesleyan, "spiritual" sense of inerrancy thankfully by-passes. Because fundamentalism was a response to "liberal" challenges to the truth of the Bible, it had some basic sense of what it might mean to read the Bible for what it originally meant when it was first written. Meanwhile, my Wesleyan forebears were still reading the Bible in a "spiritual" way that, without really even realizing it, didn't pay much attention to the original meaning. They were interested in the spiritual message God intended the words to have.
But fundamentalists, since they were forced by the modernists to pay attention to the original context, tried incoherently to combine these two quite different ways of reading the Bible's words. They argued that the original meaning was the spiritual message for all time.
But these are two distinct meanings. There is the original meaning, the meaning these words had to their original audiences. Then there is any meaning God might have spoken to the later church or to individuals today through these words. The two are rarely exactly the same, for we don't view the world the way the original audiences did. If the words applied directly to us today, they would not have applied as directly to them. But since the Bible literally tells us these books were first written to them, they will not apply as directly to us today. The fundamentalist understanding of inerrancy is thus based on a fundamental confusion over how language works.
So as a Wesleyan, I think Asbury's very general statement of inerrancy captures our flavor well. If I am asked to bring my knowledge of the original context and meaning of the Bible to the word inerrancy, I have to get a little more complex.
If we are talking of the spiritual meanings God brings to the Bible, these meanings are of course immediately and directly without error. Anything that God has authentically revealed to the Church, to a specific church group or specific individuals, these meanings are of course without error.
In terms of the original meanings, we must look at all the books of the Bible as individual instances of inspired, inerrant revelation. The points that God was making in each case were without error for each particular context. The more we understand these moments of revelation in historical context, we realize that these moments are in a flow of revelation. God's message in Deuteronomy freely allowed for divorce and polygamy. There was no error made for that context. But Deuteronomy does not give us the final word on these subjects. We must thus understand inerrancy in terms of the place of each book in the flow of salvation history.
Further, much of the instruction of the Bible addressed specific situations and contexts. The passage of 1 Corinthians 11 on women's head coverings is so foreign to our culture that even scholars can scarcely agree on exactly what Paul meant. And greeting the brothers with a holy kiss just wouldn't come across the same way at my home church that it did in ancient Thessalonica. We must therefore understand inerrancy also in terms of the specific contexts and situations that each book originally addressed.
God is a God who takes on the flesh of those to whom He speaks. He did it as Jesus; he did it in the original meaning of the Bible. Each book of the Bible in its original meaning is an instance of God meeting a particular group of people with just what they needed, meeting them where they were at in their contexts and understandings, stooping to their weakness to move them in the right direction.
So I welcome those who feel a kindred spirit in our Wesleyan churches. But if from time to time you find some flavors that don't look Baptist, it's because we are really more pietist in our roots than fundamentalist. We may use some of the same words, but they don't always have the same exact connotations as they do in other traditions. The end result often looks similar, but it is a different spirit that is much more open than closed on matters like these. As John Wesley once said, "If your heart is as my heart, then give me your hand."
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Faith and Reason
Faith and Reason
It would be unwise to think any of the three great monotheistic religions had a single perspective on reason or the relationship between faith and reason. Within each we find varying approaches to the role of reason in religion.
Thus we find the Muslim thinkers Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Through them the works of Aristotle were actually saved from oblivion. St. Thomas Aquinas appropriated Aristotle for Christianity by way of their influence. And let us not forget Moses Maimonides, who did the same for Judaism in the twelfth century. All these medieval philosophers drank heavily from the philosophical thought of Aristotle and promulgated it in the three great monotheistic religions.
On the other hand, in each of these religions we also find streams that have looked askance at reason in religion. The third century Christian Tertullian is well known for his dismissive question, "What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem, or [Plato's] Academy with the Church?" In the nineteenth century, Soren Kierkegaard promulgated a proto-existentialist approach to religion that suggested faith was blind and that a faith that could be understood was no faith at all.
We find these same irrationalist streams in varying degrees in all three religions. In Judaism we might mention Kabbalah and mystical Judaism as less rationally oriented traditions. The more philosophical streams of Islam in the medieval were dismissed in the centuries that followed. The prevailing understanding of Islam today is that true affirmation of Allah as the only god (one of the five pillars of Islam) requires that a person not doubt but be unwaveringly certain in faith. This precludes the kind of questions that follow the evidence to any different conclusion than that which affirms faith as currently understood.
A recent wind blowing within Christianity has tendencies toward the temperment we have just mentioned in Islam. This wind, called "radical orthodoxy," rejects Enlightenment reason as intrinsically unchristian. Thinking about the world can only be called Christian if a Christian brings his or her Christian person to bear on that thinking. The result is that a project like this one, where we are attempting to look at religion from as an objective standpoint as possible, cannot properly be called Christian. A Christian cannot think Christianly unless a basic core of fundamentals are always presumed by faith in that thinking.
Can I satisfy the radically orthodox, particularly those of the Reformed tradition? It is doubtful. They will find my enterprise by its very nature unchristian, as will most Muslims who interpret the shahadah confession conservatively. Orthodox Jews will no doubt also shut this book out.
Why continue, since arguably these are the groups that most need this book? I continue because fundamental reason is so basic a part of human existence that it is impossible to deny it and remain sane. All these groups use reason to connect ideas together, and it is the same basic reason. There is a point at which a line of thought or evidence is so compelling that to deny it is to deny one's very existence in the world. This is the claim that Bultmann makes in the statements at the beginning of this chapter. I cannot make myself think that my car runs on magic.
I would identify the problem with the Enlightenment and with modernity as a problem of presuppositions. The eighteenth century David Hume defined natural and supernatural in a certain way and the logical conclusion was that miracles were an incoherent concept by definition. If the natural is that which occurs on earth as a result of a continuing process of cause and effect, then miracles cannot occur in the natural world by definition. They are events outside the normal chain of cause and effect.
Yet who made these definitions and presumptions about the natural world. They are presuppositions that in themselves are subject to scrutiny.
If I can call the reasoning of the Enlightenment a kind of "macro-reason," reason as it takes place on a large scale in consequence of certain presuppositions, I would call the reason I am proposing to use in this book "micro-reason." This is the reason that we all assume in our daily lives and normal way of going about things. This is a reason that works so well that despite its ultimate "truth," it works to say they are true.
These are things like the relationships between causes and effects. These are the existence of space and time. Something is itself, and is not literally something that is literally different from itself. We could hardly make it through an hour of living without acting on this assumptions.
I suggest the following model, whose application to life is so intuitive, so basic that we cannot maintain sanity without its acceptance.
Almost everything that we believe about the world and about truth consists of some combination of faith and evidence. Rene Descartes suggested that the only thing a person could not doubt was his or her own existence: "I think therefore I am." I think he was slightly wrong even here, for I could be a computer program. He would better have said, "I think, therefore something I am calling thought exists." Something exists--this is the only thing I think is a matter of perfect, 100% evidence.
All other beliefs are a matter of the combination of evidence plus faith. A completely irrational faith would be a belief for which there was no evidence at all. The only claim of this sort I can imagine would be the claim that nothing exists at all, the opposite of the only claim with perfect evidence. For all other claims there is some evidence, with the difference between that evidence and the belief being a matter of faith. Faith as I am defining it here is thus that component of belief that is not supported by the evidence but which is inferred by the believer.
Various beliefs we hold thus stand in varied combinations of faith and evidence. One belief I have is that the earth is round and that the moon circles the earth at some distance from it. All these things I believe circle around the sun in the course of an earth year.
On what combination of faith and evidence does this belief lie? I have never been to the moon. But I have been in a plane where all my senses told me I was far above the earth. I have been to Europe many times and the sun has behaved exactly as I was told in school. Indeed, I have never encountered any data that has seemed to contradict these beliefs I have.
Further, there are people I have seen on television who claim to have visited the moon or at least to have orbited the earth. I have mourned two space shuttle disasters and seen people on television who seemed to experience these events and mourn them even more deeply than I.
I have never known any person who seemed "to know things" who doubted these claims. In short, it seems that I have really good reason to believe that these things are exactly as I was taught. I would with good confidence consider someone unreliable in their thinking if they seriously doubted such things.
And yet it is of course possible that all these things are a hoax. Perhaps the earth is flat and all the space shots are elaborate hoaxes with actors. But I would say my belief in these things is more based on evidence than faith. For me to deny these things would be to move toward insanity.
Other beliefs perhaps consist more of faith than evidence. As a Christian I believe that the Spirit of God in the world is the same God as Jesus, but yet a different person from Jesus. I believe this idea by faith. But it does not make sense to me rationally. Indeed, I do not really understand what I mean when I make this statement, not really. It would be much easier for me to believe that what Christians call the Holy Spirit is really just the same God as God is manifested in this universe, not a different person in a Trinity.
For this claim, I would say that my faith far supercedes the evidence in this belief. After all, some would debate whether the evidence even predominates over faith in the belief that God exists at all. Whether that claim is the case or not, certainly this specifically orthodox Christian belief is far more a matter of faith than evidence.
We mentioned earlier in this chapter that the three classic tests for truth--pragmatic, correspondence, and coherence--still "work" in a postmodern age, especially if we make some postmodern adjustments. I propose that these basic rules of logical thinking are indeed so fundamental to human living that we deny them at the risk of our own sanity. I propose to use them in this book as we examine the thoughts and practices of various religions.
The pragmatic test is the test of whether beliefs "work." Clearly the idea of God works for more people on earth than those for whom it doesn't. If it didn't work for them, the majority of humans would surely stop believing in God. From a technical postmodern standpoint, this is the only real criterion of truth ultimately.
The correspondence test is the question of whether a belief corresponds to what we experience in the world. Does the belief that God is good correspond to what we see in the world, where "good people" (as each religion defines them) suffer? This so called "problem of evil" has always been at issue in Christianity, and its force became critical to Jews after the Holocaust. We probably will acknowledge that a good deal of faith is required when it comes to accessing the views of all three monothestic religions on this particular subject.
The coherence test is the question of whether a belief is coherent, whether it has internal contradiction. We are suggesting in this book that the postmodern context reveals that any belief--except for the denial of existence itself--can be made coherent by adjustments in the relationship between faith and evidence. If we suppose enough by faith, then we can make any amount of evidence, no matter how little, coherent with our beliefs.
The key distinction I am making from previous discussions of faith and rationality--what makes this book aftermodern--is that I am not pitting faith against reason, but faith against evidence. Microreason is involved in all sane thought, in all thought that is functional in the world.
Yet from a postmodern perspective we must make logical room for things that are "insane" to us currently. All systems of thought, all individual paradigms and larger worldviews, involve some degree of incoherence from the standpoint of evidence and perhaps even micro-reason. Even micro-reason, while it works on a universal scale so far as we can tell, is ultimately a matter of faith, even though it works and thus passes for a pragmatic epistemology.<11>
However, as we have also suggested, there is also a Bultmann point for anyone who is sane. There is surely a point for all of us where the evidence could speak so strongly against a belief that we could not affirm it and remain sane. And while all systems of thought must allow for some degree of insanity, there is surely a point at which the insanity so dominates that a system of thought no longer can work for a person.
In the following pages, I propose to examine the various claims of the major religions of the world to measure the various relationships between faith and evidence in them. Chapter two broadly considers the coherence of fundamentalisms of all religions. The main focus is on the idea of grounding one's beliefs in a scriptural text.
Chapters three through five will then survey respectively Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in their various varieties. Chapter six then looks at other forms of religion in the world today, including Buddhism, Hinduism, and secular humanism. The final chapter then asks where we are and where we might go as a planet in relation to religion.
<11>It is insane to exercise faith toward that which contradicts micro-reason when we are dealing with deductive matters where all the data is included and self-contained. We can only maintain coherence in such cases by exerting faith that the very axioms of all thought are in fact mistaken. With inductive matters we can maintain coherence by asserting that we do not in fact have all the data before us and that the faith conclusion is a matter of that unobserved data.
It would be unwise to think any of the three great monotheistic religions had a single perspective on reason or the relationship between faith and reason. Within each we find varying approaches to the role of reason in religion.
Thus we find the Muslim thinkers Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Through them the works of Aristotle were actually saved from oblivion. St. Thomas Aquinas appropriated Aristotle for Christianity by way of their influence. And let us not forget Moses Maimonides, who did the same for Judaism in the twelfth century. All these medieval philosophers drank heavily from the philosophical thought of Aristotle and promulgated it in the three great monotheistic religions.
On the other hand, in each of these religions we also find streams that have looked askance at reason in religion. The third century Christian Tertullian is well known for his dismissive question, "What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem, or [Plato's] Academy with the Church?" In the nineteenth century, Soren Kierkegaard promulgated a proto-existentialist approach to religion that suggested faith was blind and that a faith that could be understood was no faith at all.
We find these same irrationalist streams in varying degrees in all three religions. In Judaism we might mention Kabbalah and mystical Judaism as less rationally oriented traditions. The more philosophical streams of Islam in the medieval were dismissed in the centuries that followed. The prevailing understanding of Islam today is that true affirmation of Allah as the only god (one of the five pillars of Islam) requires that a person not doubt but be unwaveringly certain in faith. This precludes the kind of questions that follow the evidence to any different conclusion than that which affirms faith as currently understood.
A recent wind blowing within Christianity has tendencies toward the temperment we have just mentioned in Islam. This wind, called "radical orthodoxy," rejects Enlightenment reason as intrinsically unchristian. Thinking about the world can only be called Christian if a Christian brings his or her Christian person to bear on that thinking. The result is that a project like this one, where we are attempting to look at religion from as an objective standpoint as possible, cannot properly be called Christian. A Christian cannot think Christianly unless a basic core of fundamentals are always presumed by faith in that thinking.
Can I satisfy the radically orthodox, particularly those of the Reformed tradition? It is doubtful. They will find my enterprise by its very nature unchristian, as will most Muslims who interpret the shahadah confession conservatively. Orthodox Jews will no doubt also shut this book out.
Why continue, since arguably these are the groups that most need this book? I continue because fundamental reason is so basic a part of human existence that it is impossible to deny it and remain sane. All these groups use reason to connect ideas together, and it is the same basic reason. There is a point at which a line of thought or evidence is so compelling that to deny it is to deny one's very existence in the world. This is the claim that Bultmann makes in the statements at the beginning of this chapter. I cannot make myself think that my car runs on magic.
I would identify the problem with the Enlightenment and with modernity as a problem of presuppositions. The eighteenth century David Hume defined natural and supernatural in a certain way and the logical conclusion was that miracles were an incoherent concept by definition. If the natural is that which occurs on earth as a result of a continuing process of cause and effect, then miracles cannot occur in the natural world by definition. They are events outside the normal chain of cause and effect.
Yet who made these definitions and presumptions about the natural world. They are presuppositions that in themselves are subject to scrutiny.
If I can call the reasoning of the Enlightenment a kind of "macro-reason," reason as it takes place on a large scale in consequence of certain presuppositions, I would call the reason I am proposing to use in this book "micro-reason." This is the reason that we all assume in our daily lives and normal way of going about things. This is a reason that works so well that despite its ultimate "truth," it works to say they are true.
These are things like the relationships between causes and effects. These are the existence of space and time. Something is itself, and is not literally something that is literally different from itself. We could hardly make it through an hour of living without acting on this assumptions.
I suggest the following model, whose application to life is so intuitive, so basic that we cannot maintain sanity without its acceptance.
Almost everything that we believe about the world and about truth consists of some combination of faith and evidence. Rene Descartes suggested that the only thing a person could not doubt was his or her own existence: "I think therefore I am." I think he was slightly wrong even here, for I could be a computer program. He would better have said, "I think, therefore something I am calling thought exists." Something exists--this is the only thing I think is a matter of perfect, 100% evidence.
All other beliefs are a matter of the combination of evidence plus faith. A completely irrational faith would be a belief for which there was no evidence at all. The only claim of this sort I can imagine would be the claim that nothing exists at all, the opposite of the only claim with perfect evidence. For all other claims there is some evidence, with the difference between that evidence and the belief being a matter of faith. Faith as I am defining it here is thus that component of belief that is not supported by the evidence but which is inferred by the believer.
Various beliefs we hold thus stand in varied combinations of faith and evidence. One belief I have is that the earth is round and that the moon circles the earth at some distance from it. All these things I believe circle around the sun in the course of an earth year.
On what combination of faith and evidence does this belief lie? I have never been to the moon. But I have been in a plane where all my senses told me I was far above the earth. I have been to Europe many times and the sun has behaved exactly as I was told in school. Indeed, I have never encountered any data that has seemed to contradict these beliefs I have.
Further, there are people I have seen on television who claim to have visited the moon or at least to have orbited the earth. I have mourned two space shuttle disasters and seen people on television who seemed to experience these events and mourn them even more deeply than I.
I have never known any person who seemed "to know things" who doubted these claims. In short, it seems that I have really good reason to believe that these things are exactly as I was taught. I would with good confidence consider someone unreliable in their thinking if they seriously doubted such things.
And yet it is of course possible that all these things are a hoax. Perhaps the earth is flat and all the space shots are elaborate hoaxes with actors. But I would say my belief in these things is more based on evidence than faith. For me to deny these things would be to move toward insanity.
Other beliefs perhaps consist more of faith than evidence. As a Christian I believe that the Spirit of God in the world is the same God as Jesus, but yet a different person from Jesus. I believe this idea by faith. But it does not make sense to me rationally. Indeed, I do not really understand what I mean when I make this statement, not really. It would be much easier for me to believe that what Christians call the Holy Spirit is really just the same God as God is manifested in this universe, not a different person in a Trinity.
For this claim, I would say that my faith far supercedes the evidence in this belief. After all, some would debate whether the evidence even predominates over faith in the belief that God exists at all. Whether that claim is the case or not, certainly this specifically orthodox Christian belief is far more a matter of faith than evidence.
We mentioned earlier in this chapter that the three classic tests for truth--pragmatic, correspondence, and coherence--still "work" in a postmodern age, especially if we make some postmodern adjustments. I propose that these basic rules of logical thinking are indeed so fundamental to human living that we deny them at the risk of our own sanity. I propose to use them in this book as we examine the thoughts and practices of various religions.
The pragmatic test is the test of whether beliefs "work." Clearly the idea of God works for more people on earth than those for whom it doesn't. If it didn't work for them, the majority of humans would surely stop believing in God. From a technical postmodern standpoint, this is the only real criterion of truth ultimately.
The correspondence test is the question of whether a belief corresponds to what we experience in the world. Does the belief that God is good correspond to what we see in the world, where "good people" (as each religion defines them) suffer? This so called "problem of evil" has always been at issue in Christianity, and its force became critical to Jews after the Holocaust. We probably will acknowledge that a good deal of faith is required when it comes to accessing the views of all three monothestic religions on this particular subject.
The coherence test is the question of whether a belief is coherent, whether it has internal contradiction. We are suggesting in this book that the postmodern context reveals that any belief--except for the denial of existence itself--can be made coherent by adjustments in the relationship between faith and evidence. If we suppose enough by faith, then we can make any amount of evidence, no matter how little, coherent with our beliefs.
The key distinction I am making from previous discussions of faith and rationality--what makes this book aftermodern--is that I am not pitting faith against reason, but faith against evidence. Microreason is involved in all sane thought, in all thought that is functional in the world.
Yet from a postmodern perspective we must make logical room for things that are "insane" to us currently. All systems of thought, all individual paradigms and larger worldviews, involve some degree of incoherence from the standpoint of evidence and perhaps even micro-reason. Even micro-reason, while it works on a universal scale so far as we can tell, is ultimately a matter of faith, even though it works and thus passes for a pragmatic epistemology.<11>
However, as we have also suggested, there is also a Bultmann point for anyone who is sane. There is surely a point for all of us where the evidence could speak so strongly against a belief that we could not affirm it and remain sane. And while all systems of thought must allow for some degree of insanity, there is surely a point at which the insanity so dominates that a system of thought no longer can work for a person.
In the following pages, I propose to examine the various claims of the major religions of the world to measure the various relationships between faith and evidence in them. Chapter two broadly considers the coherence of fundamentalisms of all religions. The main focus is on the idea of grounding one's beliefs in a scriptural text.
Chapters three through five will then survey respectively Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in their various varieties. Chapter six then looks at other forms of religion in the world today, including Buddhism, Hinduism, and secular humanism. The final chapter then asks where we are and where we might go as a planet in relation to religion.
<11>It is insane to exercise faith toward that which contradicts micro-reason when we are dealing with deductive matters where all the data is included and self-contained. We can only maintain coherence in such cases by exerting faith that the very axioms of all thought are in fact mistaken. With inductive matters we can maintain coherence by asserting that we do not in fact have all the data before us and that the faith conclusion is a matter of that unobserved data.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
The (Non) Essence of Post Modernism
As you might expect, my passion for grinding out a book without guarantee and that I probably couldn't finish in time anyway has quickly burnt out. But I'll leave you with the gist of what I envisaged the rest of the first chapter to look like.
The (Non) Essence of Post Modernism
There is a good deal of confusion, I would say, about what post-modernism is. The main reason is that it really isn't something, rather than is something. Post modernism simply means after modernism. Properly understood, it is not a new thing. It is a reaction to an old thing: modernism. For this reason, you can only really define postmodernism properly by first defining modernism and then deconstructing your definition. [I'm having fun now--I would write more clearly if I ever really intended on publishing this].
So what is modernism? Modernism is characterized by the quest for objectivity in the pursuit of knowledge. Spock is the quintissential paradigm of a modernist, for he is completely objective in his thinking--emotions do not cloud his judgment.<7> Science is the god of modernism, for the typical modernist thinks of science as completely objective, the leaders and trailblazers in the quest of truth. Modernist truth seekers are aware of their biases, and they rid themselves of them.
So what would a pre-modern thinker be? A pre-modern thinker is someone who is unaware of the influences, prejudices, and biases that affect the way they think and view of the world. Such individuals assume that the way they see the world is the way the world really is without even realizing or taking seriously other possibilities.
The Greek historian Herodotus tells the story of a Persian king who asked two groups of people what they did with their dead. When the Greeks said they burned the bodies of their dead, another group called the Callatians were horrified. So then the Callatians were asked what they did with their dead. "Why we eat them of course." Herodotus concludes that "Custom is king over all." This is a standard relativist position taken by Herodotus: every group assumes without argument that their way of doing things is the right way.
But modernism is not relativist when it comes to truth. A modernist might assume that matters of art or religion or ethics are relative--no religious idea is any more or less correct than any other. But science is not relativistic for the typical modernist. Science is about absolute truth.
Now enter the period "post" modernism. In various ways and to various degrees, "post" modernism is about the death of objectivity, the recognition that no one is, in the end, completely objective, not even Spock. For some, postmodernism is the death of truth all together. But ironically, such individuals still have written books and taken positions on various issues. Nevertheless, individuals like Jacques Derrida and Paul deMan have done us a service by showing us just how unstable the meaning of words can be. In an analogous way, Michael Foucault has shown us the degree to which power is involved in our understanding of what is true. And Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend have shown that science itself is subject to social trends and has a significantly random dimension to it.
These individuals have given modernism its share of shock therapy. After the smoke has cleared, we still find that people try to communicate with each other with reasonable success. People still step out of the way of moving traffic (at least the sane ones do). And I just got a new cell phone that does things cell phones didn't do two years ago. Richard Rorty has penned the phrase "pragmatic realism." After we have got the point of the radical postmodern thinkers, reality still works.
As we begin to think about the role that reason and thinking might play in religion, I suggest the following perspective on the matter of truth. As we will see in the final section of this chapter [or actually, won't see, since I don't plan to write it now], various religious perspectives differ on whether in fact religious belief involves anything but irrational faith. Nevertheless, I hope the following perspective is so intuitive to you that you will find nothing objectionable regardless on your perspective toward faith and reason. My sense is that some ideas make so much sense to the way we live in the world that we can hardly object to them without negating our very existence, the fundamental ways in which we operate in the world.
First, it seems beyond debate that the situation of our birth and upbringing has a significant effect on how we view the world. Can we really deny that it is much more likely for a person born in Iran to be a Muslim than a follower of the gods of the ancient Druids? Is it more likely that a person born in the American Bible belt will be a Christian or a worshipper of the ancient Babylonian god Marduk? It seems to me that a person would be insane to deny that a person's religious and other beliefs are seriously affected by their situation in life and the possibilities of his or her environment.
Second, it seems beyond question that to be objective, a person needs to know all the "facts." Otherwise you cannot be certain that you are putting the data together correctly. But it is even more certain that no human being alive today knows all the "facts" of reality. In many of the religions of today, the only person who knows all the facts is God, variously conceived. The implication is that because only God is all knowing, only God is truly objective. We will talk about how the Scriptures of various religions might relate to the knowledge of God in the next chapters [except that we won't, because I don't plan to write them].
Therefore, to varying degrees, my perspective on the world is a function of my situation and the "facts" I know. It is helpful at this point to draw a distinction between "facts" and the glue by which I connect those facts together. Most people today would again be very comfortable with saying that they experience things in the world that are real. Sure enough, most of us also believe in hallucinations. A person sees a mirage in the desert. Someone else takes acid and sees elephants.
But I am very comfortable with the idea that there is a computer in front of me and that I slept in a bed last night and that a dump truck rear ended my van about a month ago. These are things I am calling facts or the data of the world. Sure, it is possible that I am really a computer program from the 23rd century and I only think I am a real person. But nobody really lives that way if they are at all close to normal. Even schizophrenics believe the outside world is real (with a lot of other things added in). Reality works.
Yet the glue that joins these facts together in our heads are interpretations. I do not experience the law of cause and effect. I only see my son fall down after his shoe runs into the crack on the sidewalk. The facts are the hitting of the shoe and the falling down. The glue of cause-effect is a matter of my brain.<8>
This distinction between facts and interpretation is very significant. It is the difference between the account of an eyewitness and what we call circumstantial evidence. If I find a cookie smear on my youngest daughter's face and a crumb trail from the cookie jar, I might conclude that she had just had a cookie. But this is an interpretation of the facts. It is possible that someone framed her by smearing the cookie on her face and planting the crumb trail.
Therefore, because no human today knows all the facts, because interpretation is involved in almost every significant act of knowing, we can reformulate the pre-modern, modern, post-modern paradigm into something more useful as we begin to look at the rationality of religious beliefs.
First, all humans are at the same time a mixture of pre-modern and modern in their beliefs. That is to say, we are always at the same time to varying degrees both aware and unaware of certain facts, and we are always at the same time to varying degrees both conscious of the influences at work in our interpretations and yet also unaware of other possibilities. This observation to a large degree reveals that terms like "pre" and "post" modern are not very precise. It would be better to speak of degrees of reflectivity and unreflectivity in conjunction with varying combinations of faith and evidence in our views and understandings.
Second, it is entirely reasonable to believe that "truth" exists, especially if we think of it in pragmatic terms. Certain understandings of the world "work" better than others. I am free to believe that I can fly. But this belief probably won't work very well, especially if I jump off a tall building. The language and paradigms by which I describe reality will always have a strong element of contingency and subjectivity. This language is a construct of human ways of thinking and speaking. But we can still very plausibly believe that the reality we describe in various ways is real and that our varying descriptions of it "work"--albeit some more effectively than others.
Some have called this perspective "critical realism." It is a belief in reality and of truth while also acknowledging that the way we describe that reality will always have a high degree of subjectivity to it. The way I describe a tree will depend on where I am standing in relation to it, just as someone describing it from another vantage point will reflect their situation. But in theory we are both describing the same tree, and the tree is real.<9> Of course in practice we are partially blind people describing a forest, which makes things a little less certain than a single tree.
Therefore, I suggest that the most basic criteria of truth continue to be useful even after modernism has been dethroned. These are the coherence test for truth, the correspondence test, and the pragmatic test. The pragmatic test is of course the one that is most appropriate to a postmodern world: does a certain belief work. From a pragmatic perspective, we can say that all the gods that people believe in are "real" in the sense that the belief in them does things. The idea that large trucks hurt when they hit you "works," even if I am really in computer matrix or program.
The correspondence test involves more faith, for it presumes that there is a world outside of myself and that my apprehension of the world through experience is real. While these things are ultimately unprovable, they make sense and "work." Most sane people operate on these assumptions every moment of their lives. It thus works to ask questions like whether a person named Jesus actually existed or is simply a legendary figure. Despite Wittgenstein, I would say it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether a God exists independently of this universe, our minds, and language games.
Finally, the coherence test works in the sense that we all understand the idea of contradiction. We all understand that if I am literally here, I cannot be literally across the room. Further, religion can create coherence when its claims are apparently incoherent by recourse to faith. In the final section of this chapter I will set up a "postmodern" model of coherence. Since every belief apart from belief in existence itself involves some degree of faith, any belief system can be considered coherent by recourse to that part of its belief that lies outside the evidence.
If I were to finish this chapter, I would write on the relationship between faith and reason, citing the various approaches that various thinkers in the three monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) have taken (e.g., Tertullian, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Mishnah, Maimonides, Koran, radical orthodoxy, etc...). My operating model, however, is one that sees belief as varying combinations of faith and evidence. I follow a modified Descartes in claiming that existence itself is the only belief that involves no faith.
It is thus always possible to be coherent in one's belief by recourse to some sort of faith in the face of whatever evidence. However, not all acts of faith are as believable or practically possible as others. Bultmann is ultimately right that most modern individuals could not look at many aspects of the world in the same way as their religious forebears even if they wanted to.
The rest of the book aims to analyze the varying combinations of faith and evidence necessary to believe various claims made by the three great religions. Chapter two would analyze Judaism, starting with a discussion of fundamentalisms of all types and the dynamics of Scripture centered religions in general. Judaism itself is of course a religion of orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy.
Chapter three would then discuss Christianity in its many forms and then chapter four chapter Islam in its many forms. The final chapter would then aim at bringing together the findings of the book as a whole, suggesting the overall relationship between various forms of religion and rationality.
But I don't think I'll ever write any of this...
<7> I want to thank the late Stanley Grenz for this wonderful illustration, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 5. On a personal note, it frustrates me deeply to realize that I have read this entire book and don't remember doing it. I see that I have underlined things to the very end of the book, yet I have no recollection of what it says or even of reading it.
<8> Students of philosophy will recognize my train of thought as a presentation of Immanuel Kant's epistemology.
<9> With these descriptions of the process of knowing, I am not saying that religions all describe the same reality from different vantage points, although this is one position a person might take on some aspects of religion.
three criteria of truth
The (Non) Essence of Post Modernism
There is a good deal of confusion, I would say, about what post-modernism is. The main reason is that it really isn't something, rather than is something. Post modernism simply means after modernism. Properly understood, it is not a new thing. It is a reaction to an old thing: modernism. For this reason, you can only really define postmodernism properly by first defining modernism and then deconstructing your definition. [I'm having fun now--I would write more clearly if I ever really intended on publishing this].
So what is modernism? Modernism is characterized by the quest for objectivity in the pursuit of knowledge. Spock is the quintissential paradigm of a modernist, for he is completely objective in his thinking--emotions do not cloud his judgment.<7> Science is the god of modernism, for the typical modernist thinks of science as completely objective, the leaders and trailblazers in the quest of truth. Modernist truth seekers are aware of their biases, and they rid themselves of them.
So what would a pre-modern thinker be? A pre-modern thinker is someone who is unaware of the influences, prejudices, and biases that affect the way they think and view of the world. Such individuals assume that the way they see the world is the way the world really is without even realizing or taking seriously other possibilities.
The Greek historian Herodotus tells the story of a Persian king who asked two groups of people what they did with their dead. When the Greeks said they burned the bodies of their dead, another group called the Callatians were horrified. So then the Callatians were asked what they did with their dead. "Why we eat them of course." Herodotus concludes that "Custom is king over all." This is a standard relativist position taken by Herodotus: every group assumes without argument that their way of doing things is the right way.
But modernism is not relativist when it comes to truth. A modernist might assume that matters of art or religion or ethics are relative--no religious idea is any more or less correct than any other. But science is not relativistic for the typical modernist. Science is about absolute truth.
Now enter the period "post" modernism. In various ways and to various degrees, "post" modernism is about the death of objectivity, the recognition that no one is, in the end, completely objective, not even Spock. For some, postmodernism is the death of truth all together. But ironically, such individuals still have written books and taken positions on various issues. Nevertheless, individuals like Jacques Derrida and Paul deMan have done us a service by showing us just how unstable the meaning of words can be. In an analogous way, Michael Foucault has shown us the degree to which power is involved in our understanding of what is true. And Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend have shown that science itself is subject to social trends and has a significantly random dimension to it.
These individuals have given modernism its share of shock therapy. After the smoke has cleared, we still find that people try to communicate with each other with reasonable success. People still step out of the way of moving traffic (at least the sane ones do). And I just got a new cell phone that does things cell phones didn't do two years ago. Richard Rorty has penned the phrase "pragmatic realism." After we have got the point of the radical postmodern thinkers, reality still works.
As we begin to think about the role that reason and thinking might play in religion, I suggest the following perspective on the matter of truth. As we will see in the final section of this chapter [or actually, won't see, since I don't plan to write it now], various religious perspectives differ on whether in fact religious belief involves anything but irrational faith. Nevertheless, I hope the following perspective is so intuitive to you that you will find nothing objectionable regardless on your perspective toward faith and reason. My sense is that some ideas make so much sense to the way we live in the world that we can hardly object to them without negating our very existence, the fundamental ways in which we operate in the world.
First, it seems beyond debate that the situation of our birth and upbringing has a significant effect on how we view the world. Can we really deny that it is much more likely for a person born in Iran to be a Muslim than a follower of the gods of the ancient Druids? Is it more likely that a person born in the American Bible belt will be a Christian or a worshipper of the ancient Babylonian god Marduk? It seems to me that a person would be insane to deny that a person's religious and other beliefs are seriously affected by their situation in life and the possibilities of his or her environment.
Second, it seems beyond question that to be objective, a person needs to know all the "facts." Otherwise you cannot be certain that you are putting the data together correctly. But it is even more certain that no human being alive today knows all the "facts" of reality. In many of the religions of today, the only person who knows all the facts is God, variously conceived. The implication is that because only God is all knowing, only God is truly objective. We will talk about how the Scriptures of various religions might relate to the knowledge of God in the next chapters [except that we won't, because I don't plan to write them].
Therefore, to varying degrees, my perspective on the world is a function of my situation and the "facts" I know. It is helpful at this point to draw a distinction between "facts" and the glue by which I connect those facts together. Most people today would again be very comfortable with saying that they experience things in the world that are real. Sure enough, most of us also believe in hallucinations. A person sees a mirage in the desert. Someone else takes acid and sees elephants.
But I am very comfortable with the idea that there is a computer in front of me and that I slept in a bed last night and that a dump truck rear ended my van about a month ago. These are things I am calling facts or the data of the world. Sure, it is possible that I am really a computer program from the 23rd century and I only think I am a real person. But nobody really lives that way if they are at all close to normal. Even schizophrenics believe the outside world is real (with a lot of other things added in). Reality works.
Yet the glue that joins these facts together in our heads are interpretations. I do not experience the law of cause and effect. I only see my son fall down after his shoe runs into the crack on the sidewalk. The facts are the hitting of the shoe and the falling down. The glue of cause-effect is a matter of my brain.<8>
This distinction between facts and interpretation is very significant. It is the difference between the account of an eyewitness and what we call circumstantial evidence. If I find a cookie smear on my youngest daughter's face and a crumb trail from the cookie jar, I might conclude that she had just had a cookie. But this is an interpretation of the facts. It is possible that someone framed her by smearing the cookie on her face and planting the crumb trail.
Therefore, because no human today knows all the facts, because interpretation is involved in almost every significant act of knowing, we can reformulate the pre-modern, modern, post-modern paradigm into something more useful as we begin to look at the rationality of religious beliefs.
First, all humans are at the same time a mixture of pre-modern and modern in their beliefs. That is to say, we are always at the same time to varying degrees both aware and unaware of certain facts, and we are always at the same time to varying degrees both conscious of the influences at work in our interpretations and yet also unaware of other possibilities. This observation to a large degree reveals that terms like "pre" and "post" modern are not very precise. It would be better to speak of degrees of reflectivity and unreflectivity in conjunction with varying combinations of faith and evidence in our views and understandings.
Second, it is entirely reasonable to believe that "truth" exists, especially if we think of it in pragmatic terms. Certain understandings of the world "work" better than others. I am free to believe that I can fly. But this belief probably won't work very well, especially if I jump off a tall building. The language and paradigms by which I describe reality will always have a strong element of contingency and subjectivity. This language is a construct of human ways of thinking and speaking. But we can still very plausibly believe that the reality we describe in various ways is real and that our varying descriptions of it "work"--albeit some more effectively than others.
Some have called this perspective "critical realism." It is a belief in reality and of truth while also acknowledging that the way we describe that reality will always have a high degree of subjectivity to it. The way I describe a tree will depend on where I am standing in relation to it, just as someone describing it from another vantage point will reflect their situation. But in theory we are both describing the same tree, and the tree is real.<9> Of course in practice we are partially blind people describing a forest, which makes things a little less certain than a single tree.
Therefore, I suggest that the most basic criteria of truth continue to be useful even after modernism has been dethroned. These are the coherence test for truth, the correspondence test, and the pragmatic test. The pragmatic test is of course the one that is most appropriate to a postmodern world: does a certain belief work. From a pragmatic perspective, we can say that all the gods that people believe in are "real" in the sense that the belief in them does things. The idea that large trucks hurt when they hit you "works," even if I am really in computer matrix or program.
The correspondence test involves more faith, for it presumes that there is a world outside of myself and that my apprehension of the world through experience is real. While these things are ultimately unprovable, they make sense and "work." Most sane people operate on these assumptions every moment of their lives. It thus works to ask questions like whether a person named Jesus actually existed or is simply a legendary figure. Despite Wittgenstein, I would say it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether a God exists independently of this universe, our minds, and language games.
Finally, the coherence test works in the sense that we all understand the idea of contradiction. We all understand that if I am literally here, I cannot be literally across the room. Further, religion can create coherence when its claims are apparently incoherent by recourse to faith. In the final section of this chapter I will set up a "postmodern" model of coherence. Since every belief apart from belief in existence itself involves some degree of faith, any belief system can be considered coherent by recourse to that part of its belief that lies outside the evidence.
If I were to finish this chapter, I would write on the relationship between faith and reason, citing the various approaches that various thinkers in the three monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) have taken (e.g., Tertullian, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Mishnah, Maimonides, Koran, radical orthodoxy, etc...). My operating model, however, is one that sees belief as varying combinations of faith and evidence. I follow a modified Descartes in claiming that existence itself is the only belief that involves no faith.
It is thus always possible to be coherent in one's belief by recourse to some sort of faith in the face of whatever evidence. However, not all acts of faith are as believable or practically possible as others. Bultmann is ultimately right that most modern individuals could not look at many aspects of the world in the same way as their religious forebears even if they wanted to.
The rest of the book aims to analyze the varying combinations of faith and evidence necessary to believe various claims made by the three great religions. Chapter two would analyze Judaism, starting with a discussion of fundamentalisms of all types and the dynamics of Scripture centered religions in general. Judaism itself is of course a religion of orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy.
Chapter three would then discuss Christianity in its many forms and then chapter four chapter Islam in its many forms. The final chapter would then aim at bringing together the findings of the book as a whole, suggesting the overall relationship between various forms of religion and rationality.
But I don't think I'll ever write any of this...
<7> I want to thank the late Stanley Grenz for this wonderful illustration, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 5. On a personal note, it frustrates me deeply to realize that I have read this entire book and don't remember doing it. I see that I have underlined things to the very end of the book, yet I have no recollection of what it says or even of reading it.
<8> Students of philosophy will recognize my train of thought as a presentation of Immanuel Kant's epistemology.
<9> With these descriptions of the process of knowing, I am not saying that religions all describe the same reality from different vantage points, although this is one position a person might take on some aspects of religion.
three criteria of truth
Religion and Sanity
Eight writing days till WJK Presidential deadline. I had decided not to write. But the bombings today got me going a bit, so maybe I'll fiddle a little. I don't think I can finish what I have in mind in 8 days, though. When I fall behind schedule, I'll stop.
My original project was going to be What Faith Will You Integrate? Now I'm thinking something like, Religion and Sanity: The Relationship between Reason and Evidence in Religion
Chapter One: Faith versus Evidence
Where Are We?
Rudolph Bultmann wrote in his famous article "The New Testament and Mythology," that the worldview of the New Testament was essentially mythical in character.
"The world is viewed as a three-storied structure, with the earth in the centre, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings--the angels. The underworld is hell, the place of torment. Even the earth is more than the scene of natural, everyday events... It is the scene of the supernatural activity of God and his angels on the one hand, and of Satan and his daemons on the other."<1>
Bultmann poses the question whether Christian preaching today can expect "modern man" to accept the New Testament's "mythical view of the world." His conclusion is that it would both be senseless and impossible to accept it.
"It would be senseless, because there is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such. It is simply the cosmology of a pre-scientific age. Again, it would be impossible, because no man can adopt a view of the world by his own volition--it is already determined for him by his place in history."<2>
"It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles."<3>
Over fifty years on, Bultmann's impossibility seems all too possible. Technology has advanced beyond anything Bultmann could possibly have imagined, and yet the same people who use wireless laptops and cell phones often believe strongly in spirits and miracles.
Of course no one said that we humans are always consistent or coherent in our beliefs. In general, religious thinking tends to follow different rules than we use in everyday life. There are of course countless exceptions, people who have rationally integrated their religious faith with the way they think and live in other settings. Yet many people put their faith in one box and their reason in another. Sometimes without even realizing, they follow completely different rules when thinking about religion than they do in all the other areas of their life.
Accordingly, the early twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein implied that religious language was not really about a distinct being called God or about things that were real outside ourselves. Instead, he suggested that religious language was a certain type of game we play with language that guides our entire way of living.<4> The implication is that when we talk about God, we are really talking about things like our values and our fears.
In one sense, God is real in this scenario, because the idea of God affects the world and how we live. But for Wittgenstein it does not mean that a being "really" exists outside the universe. An ontological being called God could exist, but that is something we simply cannot know.<5> Wittgenstein drives a wedge between religious thinking and non-religious thinking that we cannot cross. He makes religious thinking so completely unrelated to evidence that it is not something that could ever be proven false. It just does not work that way.
Again, we could find plenty of instances where religious people change their faith because in their opinion, the "evidence demands a verdict" different from the beliefs with which they started. For many religious people, religious beliefs are falsifiable. And we should not just think of people losing their faith because of evidence. We can identify instances where individuals have converted to various religions because they became rationally convinced of their truth.
Now we currently find ourselves in the throes of postmodernism. At its extreme, postmodernism rejects absolute and stable meanings of all sorts--in science let alone in religion. Some would say that in words we have merely "traces" of meaning contingent on other words whose permanence of meaning is just as elusive as the first word.<6> Scientific paradigms are merely passing phases of history, trends that change over time not least because of social factors and the deaths of older scientists.<7>
Accordingly, religious studies departments at American universities aim at diversity among their faculty rather than at people whose views come closest to the truth. Places like Harvard or Yale would never have hired conservative evangelical Christians in the '70's, because their views were considered patently false. But now we often find such individuals in offices next to others who are devout followers of Hinduism or Buddhism or Islam. Pluralism is the name of the game, and there is no basis by which one might say any religion to be more correct than the others, let alone by which you might falsify any of them.
I do not think that we can simply dismiss the postmodern voices in our heads. Yet at the same time the world could sure use some basis for dissuading some of the forms that "religious expression" is currently taking in our world. Is there no basis on which to say that the militant jihads of certain Muslims are inappropriate? Is there no way to discourage certain orthodox Jews from a Zionism that wishes to displace certain others from their current homes? Is there no way to convince certain Christians that their attitudes and actions toward others are inappropriate?
One standard method for convincing others to modify their religious views or expressions is force. We have certain phases of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic history as examples of this approach. Of course this approach also takes a substantial toll in human life and happiness. It has never proved to be a particularly efficient way of changing people's religious perspective, although it is often very effective in terms of those who survive.
Prosperity has sometimes curbed the more disruptive elements of religion. People get "liberal" and abandon the more radical aspects of their faith. Of course this process rarely happens intentionally. And of course, religious environments of this sort often turn out not to be very religious at all. Voltaire would of course be happy with this alternative.
But can reason have anything to do with religion? On the one hand, Bultmann is correct to say that there are some aspects of our worldview that we simply cannot wish away. It would be almost impossible for me to make myself believe that the world was flat or that the sun actually went around the earth. And I would have a hard time making myself believe that all sickness was always a product of demons at work on my body.
Yet Bultmann also proceeded from any number of assumptions that in themselves are not absolutely certain. Just because things often seem to happen by what we call "natural" causes does not disprove that there are times when things happen by what we call "supernatural" causes. And just because Wittgenstein never experienced a distinct being of heavenly origin does not prove that others have not.
This book is a call for clarity on the relationship between faith and evidence. In a postmodern world, we are keenly aware of the degree to which our view of the world is a construct of our own minds. Yet it is arguably not a construct we make completely from scratch. There is data in the world, "evidence" that we glue together with faith of all kinds. Our religious beliefs are no different, even if the glue sometimes comes from a different bottle.
Evidence almost never "proves" any belief we have. Except for the fact of existence itself, all other beliefs about the world involve some degree of "faith," which is the glue that binds the evidence together. This book is a call for us to be up front about how much of our religious belief is based on data and how much is glue. I am carefully trying to assume an impossible perspective in the following pages: I am trying to be objective. However, I am of course not objective--no human is. My very examples thus far betray that I am a Christian. But my goal is to play the role of a facilitator, a consultant to people of various kinds of faith.
The question I am asking in this book is this: given the evidence, what faith is required for your particular kind of religious belief? Are you an orthodox Jew? What is the relationship between the data of the world and your beliefs? What faith must you exercise to maintain your religious viewpoint and be coherent? Are you a Christian who holds to the historic faith of the church? Do you belong to some offshoot of mainstream Christianity? To what degree is your belief system reasonable given the evidence? Are you Muslim? To what extent do your beliefs correspond to that which seems to be the reality of the world today?
Faith is persistent and often ingenious. It would be wrong to think that a person is unintelligent because he or she holds a particular belief. Indeed, it often takes an element of genius to glue certain beliefs to the evidence at hand. My goal is thus to explore the ratio of faith to evidence necessary for certain faith perspectives. I leave the choice of conclusion to you.
<1> "The New Testament and Mythology," reprinted in Kerygma and Myth, Hans-Werner Bartsch, ed., translated by Reginald H. Fuller (London: SPCK, 1972), 1.
<2> Ibid., 3.
My original project was going to be What Faith Will You Integrate? Now I'm thinking something like, Religion and Sanity: The Relationship between Reason and Evidence in Religion
Chapter One: Faith versus Evidence
Where Are We?
Rudolph Bultmann wrote in his famous article "The New Testament and Mythology," that the worldview of the New Testament was essentially mythical in character.
"The world is viewed as a three-storied structure, with the earth in the centre, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings--the angels. The underworld is hell, the place of torment. Even the earth is more than the scene of natural, everyday events... It is the scene of the supernatural activity of God and his angels on the one hand, and of Satan and his daemons on the other."<1>
Bultmann poses the question whether Christian preaching today can expect "modern man" to accept the New Testament's "mythical view of the world." His conclusion is that it would both be senseless and impossible to accept it.
"It would be senseless, because there is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such. It is simply the cosmology of a pre-scientific age. Again, it would be impossible, because no man can adopt a view of the world by his own volition--it is already determined for him by his place in history."<2>
"It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles."<3>
Over fifty years on, Bultmann's impossibility seems all too possible. Technology has advanced beyond anything Bultmann could possibly have imagined, and yet the same people who use wireless laptops and cell phones often believe strongly in spirits and miracles.
Of course no one said that we humans are always consistent or coherent in our beliefs. In general, religious thinking tends to follow different rules than we use in everyday life. There are of course countless exceptions, people who have rationally integrated their religious faith with the way they think and live in other settings. Yet many people put their faith in one box and their reason in another. Sometimes without even realizing, they follow completely different rules when thinking about religion than they do in all the other areas of their life.
Accordingly, the early twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein implied that religious language was not really about a distinct being called God or about things that were real outside ourselves. Instead, he suggested that religious language was a certain type of game we play with language that guides our entire way of living.<4> The implication is that when we talk about God, we are really talking about things like our values and our fears.
In one sense, God is real in this scenario, because the idea of God affects the world and how we live. But for Wittgenstein it does not mean that a being "really" exists outside the universe. An ontological being called God could exist, but that is something we simply cannot know.<5> Wittgenstein drives a wedge between religious thinking and non-religious thinking that we cannot cross. He makes religious thinking so completely unrelated to evidence that it is not something that could ever be proven false. It just does not work that way.
Again, we could find plenty of instances where religious people change their faith because in their opinion, the "evidence demands a verdict" different from the beliefs with which they started. For many religious people, religious beliefs are falsifiable. And we should not just think of people losing their faith because of evidence. We can identify instances where individuals have converted to various religions because they became rationally convinced of their truth.
Now we currently find ourselves in the throes of postmodernism. At its extreme, postmodernism rejects absolute and stable meanings of all sorts--in science let alone in religion. Some would say that in words we have merely "traces" of meaning contingent on other words whose permanence of meaning is just as elusive as the first word.<6> Scientific paradigms are merely passing phases of history, trends that change over time not least because of social factors and the deaths of older scientists.<7>
Accordingly, religious studies departments at American universities aim at diversity among their faculty rather than at people whose views come closest to the truth. Places like Harvard or Yale would never have hired conservative evangelical Christians in the '70's, because their views were considered patently false. But now we often find such individuals in offices next to others who are devout followers of Hinduism or Buddhism or Islam. Pluralism is the name of the game, and there is no basis by which one might say any religion to be more correct than the others, let alone by which you might falsify any of them.
I do not think that we can simply dismiss the postmodern voices in our heads. Yet at the same time the world could sure use some basis for dissuading some of the forms that "religious expression" is currently taking in our world. Is there no basis on which to say that the militant jihads of certain Muslims are inappropriate? Is there no way to discourage certain orthodox Jews from a Zionism that wishes to displace certain others from their current homes? Is there no way to convince certain Christians that their attitudes and actions toward others are inappropriate?
One standard method for convincing others to modify their religious views or expressions is force. We have certain phases of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic history as examples of this approach. Of course this approach also takes a substantial toll in human life and happiness. It has never proved to be a particularly efficient way of changing people's religious perspective, although it is often very effective in terms of those who survive.
Prosperity has sometimes curbed the more disruptive elements of religion. People get "liberal" and abandon the more radical aspects of their faith. Of course this process rarely happens intentionally. And of course, religious environments of this sort often turn out not to be very religious at all. Voltaire would of course be happy with this alternative.
But can reason have anything to do with religion? On the one hand, Bultmann is correct to say that there are some aspects of our worldview that we simply cannot wish away. It would be almost impossible for me to make myself believe that the world was flat or that the sun actually went around the earth. And I would have a hard time making myself believe that all sickness was always a product of demons at work on my body.
Yet Bultmann also proceeded from any number of assumptions that in themselves are not absolutely certain. Just because things often seem to happen by what we call "natural" causes does not disprove that there are times when things happen by what we call "supernatural" causes. And just because Wittgenstein never experienced a distinct being of heavenly origin does not prove that others have not.
This book is a call for clarity on the relationship between faith and evidence. In a postmodern world, we are keenly aware of the degree to which our view of the world is a construct of our own minds. Yet it is arguably not a construct we make completely from scratch. There is data in the world, "evidence" that we glue together with faith of all kinds. Our religious beliefs are no different, even if the glue sometimes comes from a different bottle.
Evidence almost never "proves" any belief we have. Except for the fact of existence itself, all other beliefs about the world involve some degree of "faith," which is the glue that binds the evidence together. This book is a call for us to be up front about how much of our religious belief is based on data and how much is glue. I am carefully trying to assume an impossible perspective in the following pages: I am trying to be objective. However, I am of course not objective--no human is. My very examples thus far betray that I am a Christian. But my goal is to play the role of a facilitator, a consultant to people of various kinds of faith.
The question I am asking in this book is this: given the evidence, what faith is required for your particular kind of religious belief? Are you an orthodox Jew? What is the relationship between the data of the world and your beliefs? What faith must you exercise to maintain your religious viewpoint and be coherent? Are you a Christian who holds to the historic faith of the church? Do you belong to some offshoot of mainstream Christianity? To what degree is your belief system reasonable given the evidence? Are you Muslim? To what extent do your beliefs correspond to that which seems to be the reality of the world today?
Faith is persistent and often ingenious. It would be wrong to think that a person is unintelligent because he or she holds a particular belief. Indeed, it often takes an element of genius to glue certain beliefs to the evidence at hand. My goal is thus to explore the ratio of faith to evidence necessary for certain faith perspectives. I leave the choice of conclusion to you.
<1> "The New Testament and Mythology," reprinted in Kerygma and Myth, Hans-Werner Bartsch, ed., translated by Reginald H. Fuller (London: SPCK, 1972), 1.
<2> Ibid., 3.
<3> Ibid., 5.
<4> "Lectures on Religious Beliefs", in Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief as compiled from notes taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees, and James Taylor and edited by Cyril Barrett, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), pp. 53 - 72.
<5> "Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent," point 7 of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophus.
<6> Jacques Derrida, Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981).
<7> Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970).
Bombs in London
We're all mourning the bombs in London this morning. These are familiar places. I went through King's Cross several times a year--it's the northern station from which the bulk of the trains going north leave. I had an amusing run in with a purse snatching gypsy women around Russell Square involving her eventually walking topless and pointing at me to get me to stop following her (that will have to wait another day).
But I am not scared--I'm furious. God will have to help me love or at least pray for the repentance of these types of people. The first thought is to do something that would start a World War. You know, give these people some sort of concrete object lesson to show that "Allah" isn't exactly who they think he is.
Of course this is neither a wise nor the correct course of action.
So what is? What is the right antidote? Here are a few thoughts:
1. Subtle Bribery
Many of the driving forces behind these militants are rich Saudi Arabians, and I don't suggest this tact with them--they have money. But I think a lot of fundamentalist Muslims are in that camp because they are impoverished and live under oppressive circumstances. Despite Bush's rhetoric, America really only intervenes with other nations when we perceive it to be in our best interest. Accordingly, we have generally ignored the Palestinians and other disempowered people in the Middle East.
We can no longer do so. If not for noble or Christian reasons, we must pay attention to the needs and desires of these people so that their children like us. Money corrupts, and as much as prosperity is dangerous to the life of a Christian, it can undermine the militant Muslims. While Hussein was horrible, he was actually a corruptive force in Islam that bin Laden despised. I wonder if we need more "bad Muslims" in power right now rather than democracies that, in a group oriented society, simply empower the Imams and Mullahs.
2. As much as possible, we should move to the subtle rather than directly confrontational approach.
Obviously we need to hunt down the specific individuals who fly into world trade centers and bomb train stations. Obviously we need to be working big time to find the people planning these things before they happen. But tangential invasions of Islamic countries that aren't planning to attack us generally fuel these fundamentalists. You can tell them we have their best interest in mind until you're blue in the face. They're not listening. You lose. Everything you do will be interpreted in the worst possible way.
3. Invent things that stop the need for oil. Cut off the prosperity of that part of the world by inventing cars, planes, and things that work on something else.
4. Truth
This is a hard one. Religion is so tied to the non-rational, even irrational. We live in a climate today in America that emphasizes tolerance of people who disagree with us. We respect people of other faiths. Our university religious study departments are filled with teachers of every kind of religion imaginable. Our postmodern milieu even has gained access of evangelicals to big "liberal" universities. The underlying assumption is who's to say one religious viewpoint is better than any other. So let's bring an evangelical in and a Hindu and a Buddhist and an Islamic professor, etc...
I doubt that the apologetic approach to Christianity will work--there is too much disagreement among Christians. In other words, by "truth" I do not mean that I think a militant Christian assault--Christianity is true; all other religions are false--will work. By truth I mean something that is more dangerous and perhaps I am mistaken.
By truth I mean an honest assessment of all religion in accordance with the evidence. I do not mean in accordance with reason, the battle cry of the Enlightenment, although reason is of course involved. Faith is not the opposite of reason. It is the opposite of evidence.
Do you want to be a certain kind of Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist? Almost all viewpoints on the world are a mixture of evidence and faith. The only instance in which evidence is conclusive is that something exists. In all other cases the evidence is inconclusive in itself; faith fills the gap between evidence and conclusion.
So are we to be Christians? Let us be honest about the points where the evidence is strong and where faith is the greater element. I believe that Abraham really existed. But the only evidence I have is texts written many centuries after his existence. Could he be legendary? Of course he could. Let's be honest. My belief in him is a matter of reasonable faith.
Being truthful about the evidence leads individuals of all faiths into many a sticky faith wicket. I believe that it seriously undermines fundamentalist faiths of all kinds. Knowing Ugaritic texts, for example, undermines the orthodox Jewish practice of not eating dairy products with meat. Ancient historical texts of all types completely undermine the claims of some Muslims that there never was a Jewish temple standing on the Temple Mount. And the New Testament's use of the OT undermines a view of Scripture that sees all its words as timeless and unchanging.
Truth about the evidence is a potentially dangerous thing. But maybe the ignorance that is so often involved in the way humans use religion is pushing us to its reassertion. I believe Christianity stands up in the light of the evidence as a reasonable faith. But are we ready to face the possibility that we sometimes spin the evidence? In the interest of curbing the destructive ways that religion in general is affecting the world today, could someone please reintroduce a rational, evidentiary awareness into religious dialog? Is anyone ready to stop hiding behind cop-outs like "radical orthodoxy" and Kierkegaardian dodges to face the music? I say that if our faith can't cut the mustard, then it's not worthy of our God.
God is a God of truth. He is not a trickster. I have to believe that most of the time, an honest assessment of the evidence points in the right direction. If it doesn't, then how is God anything like what we believe Him to be?
But I am not scared--I'm furious. God will have to help me love or at least pray for the repentance of these types of people. The first thought is to do something that would start a World War. You know, give these people some sort of concrete object lesson to show that "Allah" isn't exactly who they think he is.
Of course this is neither a wise nor the correct course of action.
So what is? What is the right antidote? Here are a few thoughts:
1. Subtle Bribery
Many of the driving forces behind these militants are rich Saudi Arabians, and I don't suggest this tact with them--they have money. But I think a lot of fundamentalist Muslims are in that camp because they are impoverished and live under oppressive circumstances. Despite Bush's rhetoric, America really only intervenes with other nations when we perceive it to be in our best interest. Accordingly, we have generally ignored the Palestinians and other disempowered people in the Middle East.
We can no longer do so. If not for noble or Christian reasons, we must pay attention to the needs and desires of these people so that their children like us. Money corrupts, and as much as prosperity is dangerous to the life of a Christian, it can undermine the militant Muslims. While Hussein was horrible, he was actually a corruptive force in Islam that bin Laden despised. I wonder if we need more "bad Muslims" in power right now rather than democracies that, in a group oriented society, simply empower the Imams and Mullahs.
2. As much as possible, we should move to the subtle rather than directly confrontational approach.
Obviously we need to hunt down the specific individuals who fly into world trade centers and bomb train stations. Obviously we need to be working big time to find the people planning these things before they happen. But tangential invasions of Islamic countries that aren't planning to attack us generally fuel these fundamentalists. You can tell them we have their best interest in mind until you're blue in the face. They're not listening. You lose. Everything you do will be interpreted in the worst possible way.
3. Invent things that stop the need for oil. Cut off the prosperity of that part of the world by inventing cars, planes, and things that work on something else.
4. Truth
This is a hard one. Religion is so tied to the non-rational, even irrational. We live in a climate today in America that emphasizes tolerance of people who disagree with us. We respect people of other faiths. Our university religious study departments are filled with teachers of every kind of religion imaginable. Our postmodern milieu even has gained access of evangelicals to big "liberal" universities. The underlying assumption is who's to say one religious viewpoint is better than any other. So let's bring an evangelical in and a Hindu and a Buddhist and an Islamic professor, etc...
I doubt that the apologetic approach to Christianity will work--there is too much disagreement among Christians. In other words, by "truth" I do not mean that I think a militant Christian assault--Christianity is true; all other religions are false--will work. By truth I mean something that is more dangerous and perhaps I am mistaken.
By truth I mean an honest assessment of all religion in accordance with the evidence. I do not mean in accordance with reason, the battle cry of the Enlightenment, although reason is of course involved. Faith is not the opposite of reason. It is the opposite of evidence.
Do you want to be a certain kind of Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist? Almost all viewpoints on the world are a mixture of evidence and faith. The only instance in which evidence is conclusive is that something exists. In all other cases the evidence is inconclusive in itself; faith fills the gap between evidence and conclusion.
So are we to be Christians? Let us be honest about the points where the evidence is strong and where faith is the greater element. I believe that Abraham really existed. But the only evidence I have is texts written many centuries after his existence. Could he be legendary? Of course he could. Let's be honest. My belief in him is a matter of reasonable faith.
Being truthful about the evidence leads individuals of all faiths into many a sticky faith wicket. I believe that it seriously undermines fundamentalist faiths of all kinds. Knowing Ugaritic texts, for example, undermines the orthodox Jewish practice of not eating dairy products with meat. Ancient historical texts of all types completely undermine the claims of some Muslims that there never was a Jewish temple standing on the Temple Mount. And the New Testament's use of the OT undermines a view of Scripture that sees all its words as timeless and unchanging.
Truth about the evidence is a potentially dangerous thing. But maybe the ignorance that is so often involved in the way humans use religion is pushing us to its reassertion. I believe Christianity stands up in the light of the evidence as a reasonable faith. But are we ready to face the possibility that we sometimes spin the evidence? In the interest of curbing the destructive ways that religion in general is affecting the world today, could someone please reintroduce a rational, evidentiary awareness into religious dialog? Is anyone ready to stop hiding behind cop-outs like "radical orthodoxy" and Kierkegaardian dodges to face the music? I say that if our faith can't cut the mustard, then it's not worthy of our God.
God is a God of truth. He is not a trickster. I have to believe that most of the time, an honest assessment of the evidence points in the right direction. If it doesn't, then how is God anything like what we believe Him to be?
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Colossians and Philemon
Well, I'm back tonight from a few fun filled days with my wife Angie's family in Colorado. They're a rather fun loving bunch. In typical fashion, Angie volunteered to set up a variety show featuring the great grandkids (funny how the great grandmother continues to be the point of reference over seven years after her death--quite the mater familias I must say).
My son Tommy was one of many boys to sport bulges in their rears to some of the music to the song "I like big... and I cannot lie..." My minor role was as one of many back ups to MC hammer (one of the cousins lip sinking). Don't worry. Nothing I did can even remotely be construed as dancing. Stefanie, Stacy, and Angie clogged... sort of. And Sophie was one of three who dressed up the same to imitate one of the aunts who was high school queen four years running.
They're quite a lively bunch. I suppose my favorite point was when the whole lot of some 74 individuals marched in the Breckenridge July 4th parade.... They actually signed up to march in the parade. What hath Schenck to do with Breckenridge, or the Poppas family to do with July the 4th? Anyway, it was fun being waved at and we threw candy to the little people on the sidelines.
But of course you're mostly wondering what any of that has to do with Colossians and Philemon. Nothing, except I've been thinking a lot about my current novel project. I'll let you try to figure out what it might involve as time goes by.
Just a small piece of my reflection has been the dating and context of Colossians and Philemon. Traditionally, of course, they are dated to the time of Paul's first Roman imprisonment. But Ephesus is also suggested and of course, a sizeable chunk of Pauline scholars don't think that Paul even wrote Colossians.
I currently think that there was only the one Roman imprisonment and that Paul died at the end of Acts. This is not the preferred position of evangelical scholars at present, although in itself my suggestion doesn't break any rules. My reasoning goes like this: 1) I think Acts was written after Paul's death, 2) I think "Luke" knew the outcome of Paul's trial in Rome, and 3) the last third of Acts has a sense of foreboding, as if Paul's doom is on the way.
I am of course open to being convinced otherwise. When I'm in my private study, it's really the truth I am interested in, and I'm willing to say I was ignorantly stupid when I realize it. I've been reading Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's wonderful Paul: A Critical Life and enjoying it immensely. But he disagrees with me on this matter of only one Roman imprisonment. Oh well.
But I agree with him finally that Philemon was probably written from Ephesus. It has to do with the proximity to Colossae and Paul's intention of visiting there when he is freed. M-O (Murphy-O'Connor) thinks Paul actually went to the Lycus Valley where Colossae is after a release from prison in late summer of AD 53. To throw in some of my own, this would imply that 1 Cor. 15:32 refers to an imprisonment in mid-53. I like it. I won't go into the details.
The spark that I may pursue and publish on a scholarly level goes beyond M-O to think of two imprisonments at Ephesus. I want to make it clear that imprisonment was no punishment in Paul's world. A person was imprisoned while information was being gathered for trial. By two imprisonments I simply mean that Paul was put under arrest twice while he was at Ephesus. The first would be before 1 Corinthians and would be the allusion of 1 Cor. 15:32. Perhaps Paul wrote Philemon during this imprisonment. Onesimus seeks out Paul to serve as a go-between to Philemon (on this scenario, he is not a runaway but someone at serious odds with his master because of some significant issue).
A second imprisonment in Ephesus would thus follow the riot of Acts 19 and would be reflected in 2 Cor. 1:8. I think this imprisonment was more serious than the first. The first may simply have been exploratory on the part of the prefect, but the second was in response to public disorder. I think that Paul wrote Philippians on the occasion of this imprisonment. I would place 1 Corinthians and Galatians in between the two arrests (North Galatia primarily, but possibly worded so that it could also be used in South Galatia as well). 2 Corinthians 1-9 were then written from Macedonia after Paul (is kicked out) of Ephesus. 2 Corinthians 10-13 followed on shortly thereafter when Paul received news that the Corinthians had not responded as expected to the visit of Titus and two other brothers. Of course all this may be wrong, but a novel has to start somewhere.
So what of Colossians? I now think it too was written from Ephesus. I think perhaps Timothy had a bigger role in its writing, to explain the differences in style and conceptuality. The fact that Aristarchus is co-prisoner in Colossians while Epaphras is in Philemon is odd. I have read some attempts at explanations. Nevertheless, it would still seem that the two must have been sent together.
Well, sorry if I've bored you... Good night.
My son Tommy was one of many boys to sport bulges in their rears to some of the music to the song "I like big... and I cannot lie..." My minor role was as one of many back ups to MC hammer (one of the cousins lip sinking). Don't worry. Nothing I did can even remotely be construed as dancing. Stefanie, Stacy, and Angie clogged... sort of. And Sophie was one of three who dressed up the same to imitate one of the aunts who was high school queen four years running.
They're quite a lively bunch. I suppose my favorite point was when the whole lot of some 74 individuals marched in the Breckenridge July 4th parade.... They actually signed up to march in the parade. What hath Schenck to do with Breckenridge, or the Poppas family to do with July the 4th? Anyway, it was fun being waved at and we threw candy to the little people on the sidelines.
But of course you're mostly wondering what any of that has to do with Colossians and Philemon. Nothing, except I've been thinking a lot about my current novel project. I'll let you try to figure out what it might involve as time goes by.
Just a small piece of my reflection has been the dating and context of Colossians and Philemon. Traditionally, of course, they are dated to the time of Paul's first Roman imprisonment. But Ephesus is also suggested and of course, a sizeable chunk of Pauline scholars don't think that Paul even wrote Colossians.
I currently think that there was only the one Roman imprisonment and that Paul died at the end of Acts. This is not the preferred position of evangelical scholars at present, although in itself my suggestion doesn't break any rules. My reasoning goes like this: 1) I think Acts was written after Paul's death, 2) I think "Luke" knew the outcome of Paul's trial in Rome, and 3) the last third of Acts has a sense of foreboding, as if Paul's doom is on the way.
I am of course open to being convinced otherwise. When I'm in my private study, it's really the truth I am interested in, and I'm willing to say I was ignorantly stupid when I realize it. I've been reading Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's wonderful Paul: A Critical Life and enjoying it immensely. But he disagrees with me on this matter of only one Roman imprisonment. Oh well.
But I agree with him finally that Philemon was probably written from Ephesus. It has to do with the proximity to Colossae and Paul's intention of visiting there when he is freed. M-O (Murphy-O'Connor) thinks Paul actually went to the Lycus Valley where Colossae is after a release from prison in late summer of AD 53. To throw in some of my own, this would imply that 1 Cor. 15:32 refers to an imprisonment in mid-53. I like it. I won't go into the details.
The spark that I may pursue and publish on a scholarly level goes beyond M-O to think of two imprisonments at Ephesus. I want to make it clear that imprisonment was no punishment in Paul's world. A person was imprisoned while information was being gathered for trial. By two imprisonments I simply mean that Paul was put under arrest twice while he was at Ephesus. The first would be before 1 Corinthians and would be the allusion of 1 Cor. 15:32. Perhaps Paul wrote Philemon during this imprisonment. Onesimus seeks out Paul to serve as a go-between to Philemon (on this scenario, he is not a runaway but someone at serious odds with his master because of some significant issue).
A second imprisonment in Ephesus would thus follow the riot of Acts 19 and would be reflected in 2 Cor. 1:8. I think this imprisonment was more serious than the first. The first may simply have been exploratory on the part of the prefect, but the second was in response to public disorder. I think that Paul wrote Philippians on the occasion of this imprisonment. I would place 1 Corinthians and Galatians in between the two arrests (North Galatia primarily, but possibly worded so that it could also be used in South Galatia as well). 2 Corinthians 1-9 were then written from Macedonia after Paul (is kicked out) of Ephesus. 2 Corinthians 10-13 followed on shortly thereafter when Paul received news that the Corinthians had not responded as expected to the visit of Titus and two other brothers. Of course all this may be wrong, but a novel has to start somewhere.
So what of Colossians? I now think it too was written from Ephesus. I think perhaps Timothy had a bigger role in its writing, to explain the differences in style and conceptuality. The fact that Aristarchus is co-prisoner in Colossians while Epaphras is in Philemon is odd. I have read some attempts at explanations. Nevertheless, it would still seem that the two must have been sent together.
Well, sorry if I've bored you... Good night.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Commandments and Presidential Speeches
I'll interupt my hermeneutics sequence with some thoughts on current events.
First, I suspect that the Supreme Court ruling on the Ten Commandments was correct in terms of the Constitution. I was quite happy that they did not prohibit the Ten Commandments per se, only the 10 commandments when they further a specifically Christian agenda. They thus did not take a "separation of church and state" position of the sort the ACLU advocates, but a "Congress shall not establish a religion..." position that I believe is the application of the spirit of the Constitution to today.
Now did they make the right decision in terms of truth? That's a different question I think. Is it the Christian's duty to go beyond the Constitution and further a specifically Christian agenda in America? I'm not sure. God allows the world to disobey Him. He currently only insists on obedience from the church. We might debate this question, but in terms of the current Constitution, I think the SC made an appropriate decision.
As far as the President's speech tonight, I believe he is correct that it is our duty at this point to stick with Iraq until the government is able to take over in a stable way or until things are so bad that we may as well leave. I agree with him that bringing them to that point may still be a long way off, contrary to Cheney the snake. By the way, Rumsfeld is hilarious. What a stupid thing to say politically--12 years! Even if it's true, how stupid can you be! By the way, that's why my wife loves Rumsfeld: he just can't help but say what he's thinking.
I would also agree that we are currently fighting terrorism in Iraq, that it is the focal point of terrorists in the world at the moment. I would continue to disagree vehemently, however, as you know, that it was that way when we went in. While I continue to agree that the overthrow of Hussein was a good goal, I am not at all sure that the semi-theocratic leaning government is ultimately better for the world than Hussein's secular one. I also question whether many of the current "terrorists" in Iraq would even be into terrorism if we had not invaded.
Was it worth invading? Not yet. Maybe it will be one day. But as I look at a middle east more polarized and more fundamentalized than before, as I look at 2000 troops dead, as I look at the billions we are and will spend on it while secretaries and teachers are fired here in Marion because of lack of money for education, as I look at the families of countless National Gaurd troops who haven't seen them for months... No, it's not worth it yet. Maybe it will be one day.
First, I suspect that the Supreme Court ruling on the Ten Commandments was correct in terms of the Constitution. I was quite happy that they did not prohibit the Ten Commandments per se, only the 10 commandments when they further a specifically Christian agenda. They thus did not take a "separation of church and state" position of the sort the ACLU advocates, but a "Congress shall not establish a religion..." position that I believe is the application of the spirit of the Constitution to today.
Now did they make the right decision in terms of truth? That's a different question I think. Is it the Christian's duty to go beyond the Constitution and further a specifically Christian agenda in America? I'm not sure. God allows the world to disobey Him. He currently only insists on obedience from the church. We might debate this question, but in terms of the current Constitution, I think the SC made an appropriate decision.
As far as the President's speech tonight, I believe he is correct that it is our duty at this point to stick with Iraq until the government is able to take over in a stable way or until things are so bad that we may as well leave. I agree with him that bringing them to that point may still be a long way off, contrary to Cheney the snake. By the way, Rumsfeld is hilarious. What a stupid thing to say politically--12 years! Even if it's true, how stupid can you be! By the way, that's why my wife loves Rumsfeld: he just can't help but say what he's thinking.
I would also agree that we are currently fighting terrorism in Iraq, that it is the focal point of terrorists in the world at the moment. I would continue to disagree vehemently, however, as you know, that it was that way when we went in. While I continue to agree that the overthrow of Hussein was a good goal, I am not at all sure that the semi-theocratic leaning government is ultimately better for the world than Hussein's secular one. I also question whether many of the current "terrorists" in Iraq would even be into terrorism if we had not invaded.
Was it worth invading? Not yet. Maybe it will be one day. But as I look at a middle east more polarized and more fundamentalized than before, as I look at 2000 troops dead, as I look at the billions we are and will spend on it while secretaries and teachers are fired here in Marion because of lack of money for education, as I look at the families of countless National Gaurd troops who haven't seen them for months... No, it's not worth it yet. Maybe it will be one day.
Saturday, June 25, 2005
Some New Webpage Items
I've put a few new features on the main website www.kenschenck.com.
I've put the blogs from Israel on it. They're unedited, and I'm only gradually putting picture links on them. The links are only done from the first day and it will be a lot of work before it's finished. I'll probably edit the comments a bit over time, since I tend to be more unguarded on my blog than I want to be on the website (e.g., with politics and stuff).
I've added a book review section and my walk through passion week. I hope to gradually add photos to the passion week item.
Blessings...
Ken
I've put the blogs from Israel on it. They're unedited, and I'm only gradually putting picture links on them. The links are only done from the first day and it will be a lot of work before it's finished. I'll probably edit the comments a bit over time, since I tend to be more unguarded on my blog than I want to be on the website (e.g., with politics and stuff).
I've added a book review section and my walk through passion week. I hope to gradually add photos to the passion week item.
Blessings...
Ken
Friday, June 24, 2005
Clint Ussher
I had assumed that by today Clint Ussher would be on a plane home from Italy, but as of last night it wasn't at all certain that he would. I heard he might even fly back to Australia until things got sorted out.
By far the worst moment on the entire trip to Israel was in Milan when suddenly they wouldn't let Clint on the flight to Chicago because his green card was expired. Who'd have thought the Italians would be attentive enough to notice (after all, the Israelis never noticed)? Clint has been through any number of international airports since it expired without a problem. The worst we thought would happen would be that he would have to pay a fine in Chicago. In hindsight, he could have taken care of it even while we were in Israel and been ready to return.
For those of you who don't know Clint, he's Australian, a graduate of IWU, and married to Jamie formerly Jackson. He's a pastor in Indianapolis.
Charlie Alcock argued with the lady at the counter in Milan but by the time we all found out he wasn't boarding, she had already called the American consulate. From that point on his return was dead.
I hope Clint's on his way home as we speak. But I hope you'll mention him and Jamie in prayer when God brings it to your mind.
Are you out there, Clint?
By far the worst moment on the entire trip to Israel was in Milan when suddenly they wouldn't let Clint on the flight to Chicago because his green card was expired. Who'd have thought the Italians would be attentive enough to notice (after all, the Israelis never noticed)? Clint has been through any number of international airports since it expired without a problem. The worst we thought would happen would be that he would have to pay a fine in Chicago. In hindsight, he could have taken care of it even while we were in Israel and been ready to return.
For those of you who don't know Clint, he's Australian, a graduate of IWU, and married to Jamie formerly Jackson. He's a pastor in Indianapolis.
Charlie Alcock argued with the lady at the counter in Milan but by the time we all found out he wasn't boarding, she had already called the American consulate. From that point on his return was dead.
I hope Clint's on his way home as we speak. But I hope you'll mention him and Jamie in prayer when God brings it to your mind.
Are you out there, Clint?
Book Review: The Barbarian Way (McManus)
I've been working on several books this last month. Charlie Alcock lent me his copy of Erwin McManus' The Barbarian Way on the plane on the way back from Israel, so it will be the first of several book reviews I hope to put on my web page this summer.
The Barbarian Way is McManus' call to Christians away from the "domestication" of so much Christianity and to a life in which we act in total commitment to God's will and command, resisting the urge to be settled and respectable. He calls us to be "mushroom eaters" who are willing to risk being poisoned rather than people who watch the innovative so we can follow when we know it's safe.
As I tried to capture McManus' point, I decided that he was Tozer with a Romantic twist. Let me explain.
First of all, there's nothing new about calling Christians to a life of complete submission to God. Indeed, that's the very heart of my own Wesleyan tradition. "Would you be willing to go as a missionary to Africa if God called you?" Tozer used the example of Abraham to push the fact that we must be willing to sacrifice any and everything for God. If God asks you to sacrifice Isaac, you must be willing.
Again, this is hardly a new or provocative idea. I found myself wondering what Christians McManus is around, when this is such a basic principle of Christianity. He must be around a lot of rich and nominal Christians, I thought to myself. Is it because he ministers in urban California?
The most distinctive aspect of McManus' version of this message, however, is the "Romantic" twist. By Romantic I don't mean "lovey-dovey" as in modern parlance but I refer to the Zeitgeist of the late 1700's and early 1800's. The ideal Romantic artist was edgy and a loner. This person stayed to themselves and lived on the fine line between genius and insanity.
God's will in McManus' book is this irrational and whimsical thing that is highly individualistic and spontaneous. He treats God's will as most typically bizarre and absurd. It is mysterious and Kierkegaardian, something we cannot hope to understand.
Is this true? Sometimes. This brings me to my evaluation of the book. Christian leaders have a tendency to picture "genuine" spirituality in their own image. I know a pastor who is a contemplative thinker who spends countless hours in prayer and study in preparation for his sermons. This is truly his strength. But he has a tendency to think all pastors should be just like him.
McManus is the same. There are of course times when God seems to behave irrationally and require strange things of us. But God is not like this all the time. God can think too. I dare say we're on very dangerous ground if we dismiss countless Christians out there who see God as a God of truth and not just a God of roller coasters.
Similarly, McManus has a predictable edge of hostility to about 1500 years of church history when creed and liturgy reigned supreme. While I don't think he is all wrong to see the dangers of empty ritualism, I have a picture in my mind of a Roman Catholic woman who lingered in the burial chamber of Jesus weeping profusely and repeatedly kissing the burial spot. Such incredible passion she showed for what Jesus did for her! Yet I guarantee you that McManus would consider her way of worshipping on a Sunday morning "domesticated."
In short, McManus creates a false alternative in his contrast between the "barbarian way" and the "domesticated way." The same God that called John the Baptist to eat locusts and wild honey also inspired 1 Timothy with its structured roles of "elder" and "deacon" and its "deposit of sound teaching." We need both. We would be incredibly deprived without some Erwin McManuses out there. But the church would burn out if we didn't have some "oldies, but goodies" too.
It is no surprise that McManus finds it hard to arrive at any real understanding of the church using this model. He feebly tries to speak of "clans" of barbarians, but admits that the image doesn't work very well. His picture of the barbarian is the picture of a loner. His biblical interpretations are, as usual, mirror readings of his own cultural and personality "dictionary." For example, while the New Testament sees individuals as members of groups, he sees groups as collections of individuals.
And I have to wonder if McManus' book doesn't reflect to some extent how distant God's will has seemed to become to some in our generation. The distance is reflected in the mysteriousness of God's will. But McManus clearly does believe that God speaks.
From what I understand, this book is appealing to those who are just now emerging in the church. If it inspires you to innovate for God, go for it. It probably is exactly the kind of motivational message that inspires youth.
My appeal is to remember that this is only one side to the coin. You as an individual may do great things for God the barbarian way. But passion is like a flash that burns bright and then burns out. You need some of the rest of us too to help you recoup until the next flash.
The Barbarian Way is McManus' call to Christians away from the "domestication" of so much Christianity and to a life in which we act in total commitment to God's will and command, resisting the urge to be settled and respectable. He calls us to be "mushroom eaters" who are willing to risk being poisoned rather than people who watch the innovative so we can follow when we know it's safe.
As I tried to capture McManus' point, I decided that he was Tozer with a Romantic twist. Let me explain.
First of all, there's nothing new about calling Christians to a life of complete submission to God. Indeed, that's the very heart of my own Wesleyan tradition. "Would you be willing to go as a missionary to Africa if God called you?" Tozer used the example of Abraham to push the fact that we must be willing to sacrifice any and everything for God. If God asks you to sacrifice Isaac, you must be willing.
Again, this is hardly a new or provocative idea. I found myself wondering what Christians McManus is around, when this is such a basic principle of Christianity. He must be around a lot of rich and nominal Christians, I thought to myself. Is it because he ministers in urban California?
The most distinctive aspect of McManus' version of this message, however, is the "Romantic" twist. By Romantic I don't mean "lovey-dovey" as in modern parlance but I refer to the Zeitgeist of the late 1700's and early 1800's. The ideal Romantic artist was edgy and a loner. This person stayed to themselves and lived on the fine line between genius and insanity.
God's will in McManus' book is this irrational and whimsical thing that is highly individualistic and spontaneous. He treats God's will as most typically bizarre and absurd. It is mysterious and Kierkegaardian, something we cannot hope to understand.
Is this true? Sometimes. This brings me to my evaluation of the book. Christian leaders have a tendency to picture "genuine" spirituality in their own image. I know a pastor who is a contemplative thinker who spends countless hours in prayer and study in preparation for his sermons. This is truly his strength. But he has a tendency to think all pastors should be just like him.
McManus is the same. There are of course times when God seems to behave irrationally and require strange things of us. But God is not like this all the time. God can think too. I dare say we're on very dangerous ground if we dismiss countless Christians out there who see God as a God of truth and not just a God of roller coasters.
Similarly, McManus has a predictable edge of hostility to about 1500 years of church history when creed and liturgy reigned supreme. While I don't think he is all wrong to see the dangers of empty ritualism, I have a picture in my mind of a Roman Catholic woman who lingered in the burial chamber of Jesus weeping profusely and repeatedly kissing the burial spot. Such incredible passion she showed for what Jesus did for her! Yet I guarantee you that McManus would consider her way of worshipping on a Sunday morning "domesticated."
In short, McManus creates a false alternative in his contrast between the "barbarian way" and the "domesticated way." The same God that called John the Baptist to eat locusts and wild honey also inspired 1 Timothy with its structured roles of "elder" and "deacon" and its "deposit of sound teaching." We need both. We would be incredibly deprived without some Erwin McManuses out there. But the church would burn out if we didn't have some "oldies, but goodies" too.
It is no surprise that McManus finds it hard to arrive at any real understanding of the church using this model. He feebly tries to speak of "clans" of barbarians, but admits that the image doesn't work very well. His picture of the barbarian is the picture of a loner. His biblical interpretations are, as usual, mirror readings of his own cultural and personality "dictionary." For example, while the New Testament sees individuals as members of groups, he sees groups as collections of individuals.
And I have to wonder if McManus' book doesn't reflect to some extent how distant God's will has seemed to become to some in our generation. The distance is reflected in the mysteriousness of God's will. But McManus clearly does believe that God speaks.
From what I understand, this book is appealing to those who are just now emerging in the church. If it inspires you to innovate for God, go for it. It probably is exactly the kind of motivational message that inspires youth.
My appeal is to remember that this is only one side to the coin. You as an individual may do great things for God the barbarian way. But passion is like a flash that burns bright and then burns out. You need some of the rest of us too to help you recoup until the next flash.
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Israel Trip Conclusion: Sermon Starter
I now sit at home. Here's a final entry relating to the spiritual significance of the trip to me.
When Jesus Walked the Earth: The Model Practicum
I often tell my New Testament Survey classes that John gives us Jesus as he relates to us, while the first three gospels give us as much of Jesus as he related to them, the lost sheep of Israel. John tells us what we need to know about Jesus, but Matthew tells us that Jesus ministry while he was on earth was not focused on everyone.
The Gospel of Matthew tells us not only that Jesus did not focus on non-Jews while he was on earth, that he did not primarily minister to Gentiles while he was on earth. Matthew tells us not only that Jesus did not focus on all Israel while he was on earth, that he ministered primarily to the lost sheep of Israel. But Matthew reveals that Jesus' earthly minstry focused on the peasant population of Galilee while he was on earth.
Jesus did not primarily minister to the wealthy, although there were a few. Jesus did not primarily minister to Samaritans or the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Jesus did not primarily even minister to those in Nazareth. Jesus ministry focused mostly on a few villages on the north side of the Sea of Galilee: Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Chorazin.
I can see the Headline now: the day God came to Chorazin. Where? I bet a lot of people even in Jerusalem had never even heard of the place. These were villages of 300-1000 in backwater Galilee--nowhere, in other words. The idea that God focused His ministry here is almost unfathomable, from a strategic planning perspective. What was He thinking?
As I have reflected on these things, I have become attracted to the idea that in his three years of ministry, Jesus was showing us one way that we are to do ministry. College and seminary minstry students often have to do something called a "practicum." They take what they've learned in the classroom and they go do it. The places they do them are more varied than they are. I did some in local churches; I did one in a nursing home. Some do them in conjunction with hospitals or prisons.
After my trip to Israel, I have increasingly come to think of Jesus' earthly ministry as a brief example of how ministry is done, a model practicum that we can follow.
What did Jesus do for his practicum?
1. He started with where he was. And where he was wasn't anywhere special.
2. But every individual is special to God. And Jesus' ministered to the "nobodys" of Galilee as if they were the most important people in the history of the world.
3. Jesus ministered to their needs on every level.
He dealt with their physical needs by healing them.
He dealt with their spiritual needs by freeing them from demonic oppression and giving them an eternal hope.
He dealt with their economic needs when they were oppressed by the taxation of Herod Antipas, the one who beheaded John the Baptist. In the time of Jesus, this Herod only had control of Galilee and Perea--not prosperous places to raise money for his massive building projects in Sepphoris and Tiberias.
These were farming villages who usually just produced enough for them to survive--they didn't usually even produce enough extra to trade for other things. They mostly did it all themselves for themselves. Times must have been tough when this ruler not only notices them, but tries to squeeze everything he can get from them.
Jesus' earthly ministry in Galilee shows us what ministry should look like. The place and the people change: Marion, Lapel, Plevna, New York City. But the ministry is always to real people and real situations, and everyone counts.
When Jesus Walked the Earth: The Model Practicum
I often tell my New Testament Survey classes that John gives us Jesus as he relates to us, while the first three gospels give us as much of Jesus as he related to them, the lost sheep of Israel. John tells us what we need to know about Jesus, but Matthew tells us that Jesus ministry while he was on earth was not focused on everyone.
The Gospel of Matthew tells us not only that Jesus did not focus on non-Jews while he was on earth, that he did not primarily minister to Gentiles while he was on earth. Matthew tells us not only that Jesus did not focus on all Israel while he was on earth, that he ministered primarily to the lost sheep of Israel. But Matthew reveals that Jesus' earthly minstry focused on the peasant population of Galilee while he was on earth.
Jesus did not primarily minister to the wealthy, although there were a few. Jesus did not primarily minister to Samaritans or the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Jesus did not primarily even minister to those in Nazareth. Jesus ministry focused mostly on a few villages on the north side of the Sea of Galilee: Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Chorazin.
I can see the Headline now: the day God came to Chorazin. Where? I bet a lot of people even in Jerusalem had never even heard of the place. These were villages of 300-1000 in backwater Galilee--nowhere, in other words. The idea that God focused His ministry here is almost unfathomable, from a strategic planning perspective. What was He thinking?
As I have reflected on these things, I have become attracted to the idea that in his three years of ministry, Jesus was showing us one way that we are to do ministry. College and seminary minstry students often have to do something called a "practicum." They take what they've learned in the classroom and they go do it. The places they do them are more varied than they are. I did some in local churches; I did one in a nursing home. Some do them in conjunction with hospitals or prisons.
After my trip to Israel, I have increasingly come to think of Jesus' earthly ministry as a brief example of how ministry is done, a model practicum that we can follow.
What did Jesus do for his practicum?
1. He started with where he was. And where he was wasn't anywhere special.
2. But every individual is special to God. And Jesus' ministered to the "nobodys" of Galilee as if they were the most important people in the history of the world.
3. Jesus ministered to their needs on every level.
He dealt with their physical needs by healing them.
He dealt with their spiritual needs by freeing them from demonic oppression and giving them an eternal hope.
He dealt with their economic needs when they were oppressed by the taxation of Herod Antipas, the one who beheaded John the Baptist. In the time of Jesus, this Herod only had control of Galilee and Perea--not prosperous places to raise money for his massive building projects in Sepphoris and Tiberias.
These were farming villages who usually just produced enough for them to survive--they didn't usually even produce enough extra to trade for other things. They mostly did it all themselves for themselves. Times must have been tough when this ruler not only notices them, but tries to squeeze everything he can get from them.
Jesus' earthly ministry in Galilee shows us what ministry should look like. The place and the people change: Marion, Lapel, Plevna, New York City. But the ministry is always to real people and real situations, and everyone counts.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
The Final Day
And now today to end things. I may reflect on a deeper level after I get back, but here's today.
We started at St. Stephen's gate also called the Lion's Gate on the East side not far from the Eastern Gate. We entered to visit the Pool of Bethesda and the Fortress Antonio where Pilate would have sentenced Jesus.
This is all in the Muslim Quarter. The ordinary person here is eager to sell to you, but it also seems to be parking for the Temple Mount and one person in a car with a smile on his face made his finger like a gun while they drove by. I felt a little tense today since Sharon and Abbas are meeting today.
The Pool of Bethesda was a real serendipity as I had no expectations of it at all. Yet you could clearly see a first century cistern and several grottos where people could have bathed. Also there was a Crusader church to the parents of Mary (Anna in particular). Wilbur said it was the only Crusader church in the city Saladin did not destroy when he came in the 1500's I think.
Then down to the church where traditionally Jesus was sentenced and Barabas freed. This is the first station of the cross on the Via Dolorosa.
Then down to the church where traditionally Jesus was given his cross. This is the second station of the cross on the Via Dolorosa.
Then Wilbur took us to the church of Notre Dame which has archaeological remains underneath it, including a large cistern from the time of Hadrian. Now we were talking, as far as I'm concerned. Here was Roman pavement from the time of Hadrian and thus likely from the time of Pilate. Here was a Roman road with striations from carts. I am quite comfortable with saying that this was the true beginning of the Via Dolorosa, thankfully off the beaten path of the throngs carrying crosses from station to station.
At this point our group retraced our steps back out St. Stephen's gate. But I went back later to finish the Via Dolorosa and this seems the appropriate place to continue that part of my day.
When I went later I went by myself so I didn't have a really good sense of where I was going and I did not find the Israeli soldiers, who were stationed at strategic points, particularly helpful.
First I passed the Ecce Homo arch, which is now universally agreed to come from Hadrian's time. It was not there in Jesus' day. A man claiming to be Armenian tried to become my tour guide at station 3, the first time Jesus stumbled. I somehow missed station 4, as the shops began and I became a little concerned about where I was and where I was going.
Basically, from the Damascus Gate into the Muslim quarter is one long continuous corridor with continuous booth-like shops all along it. But there are crossroads and sidepaths in the part I was in that make it a little labyrinthine. I found station 5, where Simon takes the cross, and someone helpfully told me to take a right.
I found 6, where Veronica wipes sweat from Jesus' face, so I knew I was on the right path. This path then dead ended at station 7. I didn't realize it at the time, but this was the path that comes from the Damascus Gate. If I had turned right, I would have come out in the direction of my hotel. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, however, was to the left and with the barest nod from an Israeli solidier, I was on my way again.
I missed stations 8-10, but I was soon back in the Holy Sepulchre, which I have already described. I revisited Golgotha, the Armenian part of the church on the lower level, and the tomb. There weren't as many groups around so it was quite nice. With a little assistance I traced my way back and I was out.
Back to earlier in the morning.
We went from St. Stephen's Gate down to the old city of David on the south side of the now walled city from Saladin's time. We saw a wall from the pre-Davidic time of Jebusite occupation as well as ruins of houses from David's time.
We went through the Warren Shaft, which is where the Jebusites got their water. It is a shaft that ends with a cistern that goes down to the Gihon Spring. Joab climbed up this shaft when David was taking the city.
Then we went through Hezekiah's tunnel, knee deep in water. We had only one flashlight between about twenty of us, so it could have been real dark if my camera didn't have a pre-flash light I could use. It was a lot of fun, although shock therapy for the clostraphobic. This ended at the pool of Siloam.
Then the trip was over.
Some of us then went to lunch with Wilbur. Our normal fare has been shawarimas and falafels. Then six of us walked around the top of Saladin's wall from the Jaffa gate on the west to the Dung Gate on the South. We had to walk around to start as the other parts aren't open as starting places. After we found out we couldn't start at the Damascus Gate on the north side, we walked west to the New Gate, also on the north side of the old city. We went in there. I was a little nervous, not having a map. But it turned out to be the Christian quarter and there was basically only one way to go.
We finally started the Wall at the Jaffa Gate on the West and walked south till the corner, where we turned east. We passed first the area of the upper room, then the area of Peter's denial at Anna's house as we passed Zion's Gate. These sites are outside the current wall that dates from the 1500's and the time of Saladin, but the wall we were on was not there at that point in Jesus' day.
The city started with the Jebusite city south of the current Temple Mount. The city of David was in the same place. David then purchased the land of the current Temple Mount from Amunah the Hittite after the plague punishment for numbering the children of Israel. Solomon built the first temple there. Hezekiah then expanded the city to the west of David's city and Herod the Great expanded it even further to the north and built a palace where the current Jaffa Gate is. In other words, Saladin's western, eastern, and perhaps northern walls are where the walls were at the time of Jesus, but the southern wall wasn't there at all. It extended down into the Kidron valley to the Valley of Hinnom, I think (Gehenna).
Anyway, we finally we arrived along the wall at the Dung Gate within sight of the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock, the Al-Axsa Mosque, etc..
At this point Charlie and son Nathaniel, Greg Mervine and son Trent, and Clint took a taxi back. I continued walking east passed the steps by which Jesus would have entered the temple mount. I turned to the north and saw Absalom's grave until I reached St. Stephen's gate and the Via Dolorosa as I've mentioned.
That's it. Whew. The trip is over.
Maybe I'll reflect a little on the more important significance of the trip for me later. But from a shallow perspective, here are the top three non-significant things from the trip:
1. Climbing up Masada
2. Swimming in the Dead Sea
3. Walking through Hezekiah's tunnel
Thank you Wilbur Williams! And thank God for all the great opportunities He has given to me!
We started at St. Stephen's gate also called the Lion's Gate on the East side not far from the Eastern Gate. We entered to visit the Pool of Bethesda and the Fortress Antonio where Pilate would have sentenced Jesus.
This is all in the Muslim Quarter. The ordinary person here is eager to sell to you, but it also seems to be parking for the Temple Mount and one person in a car with a smile on his face made his finger like a gun while they drove by. I felt a little tense today since Sharon and Abbas are meeting today.
The Pool of Bethesda was a real serendipity as I had no expectations of it at all. Yet you could clearly see a first century cistern and several grottos where people could have bathed. Also there was a Crusader church to the parents of Mary (Anna in particular). Wilbur said it was the only Crusader church in the city Saladin did not destroy when he came in the 1500's I think.
Then down to the church where traditionally Jesus was sentenced and Barabas freed. This is the first station of the cross on the Via Dolorosa.
Then down to the church where traditionally Jesus was given his cross. This is the second station of the cross on the Via Dolorosa.
Then Wilbur took us to the church of Notre Dame which has archaeological remains underneath it, including a large cistern from the time of Hadrian. Now we were talking, as far as I'm concerned. Here was Roman pavement from the time of Hadrian and thus likely from the time of Pilate. Here was a Roman road with striations from carts. I am quite comfortable with saying that this was the true beginning of the Via Dolorosa, thankfully off the beaten path of the throngs carrying crosses from station to station.
At this point our group retraced our steps back out St. Stephen's gate. But I went back later to finish the Via Dolorosa and this seems the appropriate place to continue that part of my day.
When I went later I went by myself so I didn't have a really good sense of where I was going and I did not find the Israeli soldiers, who were stationed at strategic points, particularly helpful.
First I passed the Ecce Homo arch, which is now universally agreed to come from Hadrian's time. It was not there in Jesus' day. A man claiming to be Armenian tried to become my tour guide at station 3, the first time Jesus stumbled. I somehow missed station 4, as the shops began and I became a little concerned about where I was and where I was going.
Basically, from the Damascus Gate into the Muslim quarter is one long continuous corridor with continuous booth-like shops all along it. But there are crossroads and sidepaths in the part I was in that make it a little labyrinthine. I found station 5, where Simon takes the cross, and someone helpfully told me to take a right.
I found 6, where Veronica wipes sweat from Jesus' face, so I knew I was on the right path. This path then dead ended at station 7. I didn't realize it at the time, but this was the path that comes from the Damascus Gate. If I had turned right, I would have come out in the direction of my hotel. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, however, was to the left and with the barest nod from an Israeli solidier, I was on my way again.
I missed stations 8-10, but I was soon back in the Holy Sepulchre, which I have already described. I revisited Golgotha, the Armenian part of the church on the lower level, and the tomb. There weren't as many groups around so it was quite nice. With a little assistance I traced my way back and I was out.
Back to earlier in the morning.
We went from St. Stephen's Gate down to the old city of David on the south side of the now walled city from Saladin's time. We saw a wall from the pre-Davidic time of Jebusite occupation as well as ruins of houses from David's time.
We went through the Warren Shaft, which is where the Jebusites got their water. It is a shaft that ends with a cistern that goes down to the Gihon Spring. Joab climbed up this shaft when David was taking the city.
Then we went through Hezekiah's tunnel, knee deep in water. We had only one flashlight between about twenty of us, so it could have been real dark if my camera didn't have a pre-flash light I could use. It was a lot of fun, although shock therapy for the clostraphobic. This ended at the pool of Siloam.
Then the trip was over.
Some of us then went to lunch with Wilbur. Our normal fare has been shawarimas and falafels. Then six of us walked around the top of Saladin's wall from the Jaffa gate on the west to the Dung Gate on the South. We had to walk around to start as the other parts aren't open as starting places. After we found out we couldn't start at the Damascus Gate on the north side, we walked west to the New Gate, also on the north side of the old city. We went in there. I was a little nervous, not having a map. But it turned out to be the Christian quarter and there was basically only one way to go.
We finally started the Wall at the Jaffa Gate on the West and walked south till the corner, where we turned east. We passed first the area of the upper room, then the area of Peter's denial at Anna's house as we passed Zion's Gate. These sites are outside the current wall that dates from the 1500's and the time of Saladin, but the wall we were on was not there at that point in Jesus' day.
The city started with the Jebusite city south of the current Temple Mount. The city of David was in the same place. David then purchased the land of the current Temple Mount from Amunah the Hittite after the plague punishment for numbering the children of Israel. Solomon built the first temple there. Hezekiah then expanded the city to the west of David's city and Herod the Great expanded it even further to the north and built a palace where the current Jaffa Gate is. In other words, Saladin's western, eastern, and perhaps northern walls are where the walls were at the time of Jesus, but the southern wall wasn't there at all. It extended down into the Kidron valley to the Valley of Hinnom, I think (Gehenna).
Anyway, we finally we arrived along the wall at the Dung Gate within sight of the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock, the Al-Axsa Mosque, etc..
At this point Charlie and son Nathaniel, Greg Mervine and son Trent, and Clint took a taxi back. I continued walking east passed the steps by which Jesus would have entered the temple mount. I turned to the north and saw Absalom's grave until I reached St. Stephen's gate and the Via Dolorosa as I've mentioned.
That's it. Whew. The trip is over.
Maybe I'll reflect a little on the more important significance of the trip for me later. But from a shallow perspective, here are the top three non-significant things from the trip:
1. Climbing up Masada
2. Swimming in the Dead Sea
3. Walking through Hezekiah's tunnel
Thank you Wilbur Williams! And thank God for all the great opportunities He has given to me!
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