Category Archives: Philosophy of Religion

#49 Reporting to God for duty

07 Monday Mar 2011

Posted by in Ethics, God, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Theological Ethics, Theology

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When it comes to religion, some of us want to have it both ways:  when deeply religious people do bad things, we are quick to say that their religious beliefs are to blame, but when deeply religious people do good things, we take little to no interest in their religious beliefs, as if those beliefs were irrelevant.

Example?  The recent belief.net blog-post, “God in Wisconsin:  Scott Walker’s Obedience” authored by the scholar of religion, Diana Butler Bass.

In her post, the politically-progressive Bass slams Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s brand of evangelical religion.  For her, the most disturbing part of his conservative Christianity is his no-wiggle-room obedience to God’s commands.  Bass points out that, for evangelicals like Walker, “Once you know God’s direction, no change is allowed.  Doubt opens the door to failure.  Obeying Christ’s plan is the only option.  In this theological universe, hard-headedness is a virtue, compromise is the work of the Devil, and anything that works to accomplish God’s plan is considered ethically justifiable.”

This, she notes, is the same sort of evangelical religion that shaped George W. Bush–and led to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  She is of the opinion that President Bush’s obedience to God’s commands was the cause of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In spite of the ugh-producing situation of turning to someone like Walker or Bush to shed light on our own thinking, progressives, please take a deep breath (you may even need to swallow hard) and then ask yourselves this question:  is obedience really the problem here, or is the real problem the commands Walker or Bush claims to obey?  Because if Walker were obeying a different set of commands—say, God’s command that Wisconsin increase its minimum wage, would Bass (or you) object?  Or if Walker claimed to be obeying God’s command to work tirelessly on behalf of legislation to decrease the inequity between the richest and the poorest, would Bass (or you) object?

Most of us can name good people who have done good (defined here as progressive) things.  Yet, tsk tsk tsk, we rarely acknowledge their religious motives for doing that good.  Do we imagine that they were simply good people who would have done good things regardless of their religious beliefs?  Or is it simply that, because they did good things, their religious beliefs raise no red flags and so warrant no scrutiny?

But by overlooking the religious beliefs that motivate our heroes, are we ignoring some fundamental part of who they are?

Corrie ten Boom, raised in the Dutch Reform tradition, once said, “Don’t bother to give God instructions; just report for duty.”  For her, reporting for duty meant starting girls and boys’ clubs in her native Holland and eventually risking her life to hide Jewish refugees during WW II.  The risks were real; she was arrested but managed to survive Ravensbruck concentration camp.

And did you know that Florence Nightingale was a Christian universalist who believed that God wanted her to be a nurse?  In her journal, she wrote:  “God called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for him alone without reputation.”

Other religious do-gooders include Dorothy Day, John Newman, William Wilberforce, and Desmond Tutu.

Surely these report-to-God-for-duty folks would be troubled to learn that their religious commitment to serving others is being downplayed or ignored.  Surely they would be dismayed to discover that the force of their relationship with God is being excised from their biographies.

Though we may see ourselves as too autonomous or too agnostic to follow commands from God, we can learn something from the doggedness and zeal of those who report to God for duty.  Imagine for a moment that you believed, with as much conviction as a Scott Walker or a George W. Bush or a Corrie ten Boom or a Florence Nightingale that God commanded you to dedicate yourself to raising the average standard of living in the United States.  What if you could proclaim:  “Once I know God’s direction, no change is allowed.  Doubt opens the door to failure.  Obeying God’s plan is the only option.”

With a no-doubt, no-compromise, no-holds-barred, God-on-your-side-for-sure attitude, who knows what you might accomplish!  Would any effort seem too big, any policy-change impossible?

Maybe.  Maybe not.  Still, the point remains that disapprovers of the Walker and Bush brand of conservative religion can’t have it both ways when it comes to linking religious belief with good or bad actions.  Either religious conviction matters or it doesn’t.

If religion influences those with whom we disagree, then we have to allow that religion also influences those with whom we do agree.  To which Corrie ten Boom, Florence Nightingale, Dorothy Day, John Newman, William Wilberforce, Desmond Tutu, and many others would say amen.

#48 Better than milk: Got God

28 Monday Feb 2011

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theology

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Friends,

Long time no read!  Her Nakedness has been extra-busy these last few months with pre-dissertation requirements, writing academic papers, and attending conferences. Finally (finally!), full-time research and dissertation-writing are about to begin–with time set aside for blogging.  Look for a “real” post before week’s end.

But you don’t have to wait to read some new work. The Naked Theologian, aka Myriam Renaud, has a piece in the Spring 2011 issue of the UU World. To access it, click on this link: “Got God?” or cut and paste the following web address into your browser:  www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/175437.shtml

Want to support theological conversation in the UU World?  Here’s some ways you can let the editorial staff know that theology matters (even the fully-clothed kind) and that you’d like to see more of it in the World:

1.  Write a letter to the editor:  Christopher Walton, UU World, 25 Beacon Street, Boston MA 02108-2803

2.  Post a comment on facebook.com/uuworld

3.  Send an email to world@uua.org

Magazines look for internet chatter about what they’ve published so please mention the “Got God?” piece in your blogs (even if you don’t agree with my views) and include a link. The more chatter, the better.  So please, chatter away!

Be back.  Real soon.

#47 Men, please get as mad as hell!

21 Saturday Aug 2010

Posted by in Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theological Ethics, Theology

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When women have gotten the right to vote or to divorce or to inherit property or to have legal protection from rape, it’s because men have agreed to change the law of the land.  A few forward-thinking women demanded those rights—some nicely, some not so nicely.  Allied to their cause was some of the menfolk, the forward-thinking men who were as mad as hell about women’s lack of rights and about how other men treated women.  Especially since the Enlightenment, these men, sometimes at great costs to themselves, have toiled to persuade other men to get mad too.

Forward-thinking men had to do the convincing since men who don’t already think highly of women aren’t likely to pay attention to what women have to say. They only listen to other men.

In the United States, men-to-men persuading rippled through the ranks of maledom until eventually enough men joined together to bend the arc of history.

For example, would American women have gotten the vote as early as 1920 if President Woodrow Wilson hadn’t publicly declared his support for the 19th amendment?  The Senate refused to vote on the amendment, so women went into overdrive to convince the all-male voters to elect pro-suffrage Representatives and Senators.  The men came through, and in 1919, the all-male House of Representatives and the all-male Senate ratified the amendment.

When it comes to religious teachings, however, righteous anger among men over the fate of womankind is harder to identify.  In Afghanistan, men granted women the vote in 1963.  No matter.  In 2009, the government of President Hamid Karzai passed the so-called marriage-rape law.  This law gives Afghan husbands the right to force their wives to have sex with them.  It also permits them to starve their wives if they refuse to have sex at least four times a week.  President Karzai pushed this law as a nod to the country’s Shiite minority and as a nod to hardline Shia clerics whose votes he needed to be re-elected.

When, oh when, will hardline Shia clerics get mad about the abuse of their mothers and of their sisters and of their daughters?  When will they speak out against it?  Because what’s clear is that until they speak out, the abuse will continue.

And really, what man could fail to get angry upon seeing the August 9,2010, Time Magazine’s cover with its photograph of Aisha, an eighteen-year old Afghani woman whose nose was sliced off by her Taliban husband?

Photograph by Jodi Bieber

In case you’ve been absent from the news cycle recently, here’s Aisha’s story in brief.  When she was twelve, her father decided to give her, along with her four-year old sister, to the man destined to become their husband.  This gift was intended to settle the blood feud started by Aisha’s uncle when he killed one of the future husband’s relatives.

According to the August 6, 2010, edition of the International Herald Tribune, Aisha and her sister were left in the care of their would-be husband’s family during the long periods when he went into hiding.  During his absences, Aisha and her sister were forced to live with the livestock and treated like slaves.  They were also beaten as punishment for their uncle’s crime.  When Aisha reached puberty, she was married to the Taliban fighter.  And when she was old enough to take care of herself, she ran away.

“Shamed” by her flight, her husband “lost his nose”—or so goes the Pashtun saying.  He tracked her down and dragged her back to his home province.  There, “on a lonely mountainside [he] cut off her nose and both ears.”  And there, he abandoned her.  How she made her way off the mountainside she still can’t remember.  Aisha, although angry about what happened to her, refuses to reveal her family name to protect her father from scrutiny and approbation.

American aid workers took Aisha to one of only nineteen women’s shelters (all run by private charities) in Afghanistan.  Although few in numbers, these shelters are already under threat.  After a TV station in Kabul complained that they were merely fronts for prostitution, President Karzai convened a commission to investigate these complaints.  If the charges stick, then the shelters will be shut down, leaving abused women with no place to go.  The man chosen by President Karzai to head this commission is a conservative mullah.  Although no official report has yet been released, the mullah has already spoken out in favor of the prostitution claim.  The mullah’s name is Nematullah Shahrani.  It has been shared with the press and so he, unlike Aisha’s father, is open to scrutiny and approbation.  And approbation he deserves.  As does President Karzai.

Now is a good time for a disclaimer.  This post is not a “cynical ploy” to “justify [the] occupation” of Afghanistan by American troops by “exploiting gender politics,”—a complaint launched at Time Magazine’s cover story of Aisha.  However, it is a ploy to get men who aren’t already angry—well, angry.  Why?  Because the more men get angry at the status quo the more likely they’ll attain the collective strength of will required to stop other men from abusing women.

Whether the violence done to Afghani women is justified based on religion, or culture, or both, makes little difference.  Let’s face it, attempts to tease apart religion from culture in these situations usually lead to stalemates.  But the fact remains that Aisha has no nose.  Her now ten-year old sister is still a slave in her husband’s household.  The shelter that rescued her may be shut down.  Married women raped by their husbands have no legal recourse.  Intra-family honor killings continue.  The stoning of women convicted of adultery continues.

One day, a few forward-thinking Afghani mullahs will finally get angry about the treatment of women—for example, they will get angry about the stoning of purported adulteresses.  Their anger will compel them to look for resources within the Islamic tradition to develop the kinds of authoritative, legal opinions that Afghani men take seriously.  This is the key.  Islamic cleric must speak out against violence.  To speak with authority, they must find support in Islamic sources.  And if they seek support in Islamic sources, they will find it.

Indeed, we need look no further than Iran—yes, Iran of all places—for how this might work.  Let’s look at the case of stoning.  Until the ratification of the Islamic Penal Code in 1983, stoning did not exist in Iran.  However, stoning became a legal punishment when the republic of Iran came under the rule of Muslim clerics.  Since many Muslim jurists shared the opinion that stoning could be considered Islamic, this sentence was included in the set of legal options ratified by the government.

Sharia Law is based on three authoritative texts:  the Qu’ran, the sayings attributed to Mohammed (the hadith), and Mohammed’s biography.  Stoning does not appear in any Shiite hadith, but it does appears in the Sunni hadith collected by Sahih Bukhari; according to this Sunni hadith, Mohammed ordered stoning more than 34 times as punishment.  However, the Qu’ran makes no mention of this form of punishment.

Women and men all over the world protested when Iran made stoning legal.  Faced with intense and persistent international criticism, the government of Iran, unlike that of President Karzai, reconsidered its stance on stoning.  Iran also faced intense domestic criticism (Afghanistan does not).  Thanks to both external and internal pressure, Iran eventually placed a moratorium on stoning.  A few judges ignored the moratorium and handed down stoning sentences during 2006-8.  But as of June 2009, Iran’s parliament has undertaken a review of the Islamic penal code, intent on eliminating stoning as a legal form of punishment.

Like Afghanistan, Iran is a nation where Muslim clerics have a great deal of influence on daily life.  Unlike Afghanistan, Iran looked for resources within Islam to justify removing stoning from the Islamic penal code.  Because it looked for those resources, it found them.

Because Iran is majority Shiite, it could disregard the Sunni hadith.  A country like Indonesia did not have that luxury—it is predominantly Sunni.  No matter.  Indonesia’s majority-male legislators made stoning illegal (except for Aceh province).  Some of its clerics looked for Islamic resources to ban stoning and found them.  By extension, if its clerics decide to look for Islamic resources to ban all violence against women, they will find them.

Afghanistan’s Muslim clerics could follow suit.  The war on Afghani women will not end until mullahs change their minds about violence against women.  The war on women will not end until Afghani men get angry and demand the mullahs change.  The war on women will not end until more men around the world get angry and demand that Afghani men and mullahs change.

And why focus all of the attention on Afghanistan.  Women all over the world continue to be subject to violence.  So men of the world, won’t you please get mad as hell!

Reference:  Rod Nordland, International Herald Tribune, 6 August 2010, p. 5.

#40 What do Jesus and Reagan have in common?

22 Sunday Nov 2009

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Religious Philosophy

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According to Jonathan Chait, the author of The Big Con:  Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America, “In the conservative mind, the Ronald Reagan presidency lives on in the golden shimmering past, an ideal that Reagan’s successors must strive to approach but can never fully live up to, like the teachings of Christ.”

Although Reagan left the White House in early 1989, Chait describes how, more than two decades later, conservatives invoke Reagan with the fervor of religious acolytes, “seeking to spread his word to the faithful and beyond.”  As Chait tells it, the conservative press treats Reagan as if he remained a living, breathing presence.  They cite him almost daily, asking:  “What would Reagan do?”

Do you recall, during the debates between the candidates vying for the Republican Presidential nomination, how each candidate tried to distinguish himself from the others by claiming to be the most conservative and thus, the most Reagan-like?  In other words, WWRD has become the litmus test for deciding whether a particular issue or individual passes muster among red-state Americans.

So, take your pick:  WWRD or WWJD?

When the Washington Times listed the key lessons Americans learned from Reagan, the list included, most prominently, “lower taxes.”  In an editorial written for the Weekly Standard, William Kristol urged then-President George W. Bush to “start recapturing the Reaganite high ground of tax cuts and economic growth and opportunity.”  Any self-proclaimed conservative today aspires to emulate Reagan and cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes.

Why belabor the obvious, you say?  If you asked that question, then you’ve illustrated how narratives about the lives of public figures can be re-shaped for ideological purposes.  Because the written record, if one wishes to consult it, demonstrates the unthinkable—namely, that Reagan was far from the politician who epitomized conservatism at its purest.

True, Reagan enacted a substantial tax cut during his first year in office and “unapologetically targeted [it toward] the highest income levels.”  But here comes the gotcha moment.  “Panicked by rising deficits,” Reagan’s administration “signed on to the largest tax increase in American history in 1982 and another major tax hike in 1983.” No!  No!  No!  You say.  That simply can’t be!  But it is.  Did you really forget?

Despite the immense quantity of documentation (photographic, electronic and printed) pertaining to the Reagan Presidency, despite the constraining effects provided by the memories of millions of Americans who directly experienced the Reagan era, the life of Reagan is being re-imagined with virtually no protest.

Whether we’re progressives (who hate Reagan) or conservatives (who adore him), we nod our heads whenever Reagan is touted as the “cut-taxes-no-matter-what” President.   Still—if we earnestly wanted to ask WWRD today, the answer might not be that he’d cut taxes—at least, not if we turn to the historical record to formulate a possible answer instead of relying on today’s partly fictional account.

We have, in this re-imagining of Ronald Reagan, an example of how the collective memory of a public figure—in this case, of an American President—can be distorted (by some) for ideological purposes.

By analogy, we might wonder how much the narratives provided by Jesus’ disciples changed during the years that followed his crucifixion.  The earliest New Testament Gospel is the Gospel of Mark; most Biblical scholars assign it a date of about 70 CE at the earliest (a few scholars find evidence suggesting the early part of the 2nd Century).  Mark’s author makes mistakes about Galilean landmarks and customs during the time of Jesus; this supports the conclusion that he never, himself, traveled to Galilee.  Scholars also generally agree that the final portion of the gospel, Mark 16:9-20, which describes the encounter between the resurrected Christ and his disciples, is a later addition.

If two decades have allowed our collective memory of President Reagan to drift in spite of enormous documentary evidence, how did three decades minimum between Jesus’ death and the writing of the Gospel of Mark affect the collective memory of Jesus’ followers?  Note also that, today, skepticism is built into our worldview.  In the early centuries of the common era, belief in demons and magic was widespread, placing few checks on narrative renderings of events.

Until quite recently, most Christians assumed that the Gospels were sources of historical information.  Nineteenth-Century critical scholarship, however, witnessed an explosion of interest in reconstructing the life of Jesus.  Theologians like David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) studied the Gospels, intent on excavating the details of Jesus’ life.  Strauss hoped to write a historically-grounded account for his German audience.  Instead, he discovered that the Gospels contained only a few, truly historical fragments and these were so sparse that he decided it was impossible to reconstruct the personality of the human named Jesus.  The only Jesus accessible through the apostolic testimonies matched post-dated prophecies and proto-messiahs drawn from Jewish messianic literature.  Strauss’ efforts laid the groundwork for the research of later, highly-respected “life of Jesus” researchers like the Nobel-prize winning Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) who agreed with his conclusion about the irretrievability of the details of Jesus’ biography.

Strauss also realized that both supernaturalists and rationalists used faulty approaches when they attempted to construct the life of Jesus.  They read their own opinions about him into the thought-world of primitive Christianity.  Focusing on the passages that supported their views, and from these, they constructed the Jesus they wanted to find.  That Jesus was little more than the reflection of their own psychic faces, reproduced in the ancient, splotchy mirror of the Gospels.  Conservative theologians “found” a picture of the Jesus of conservativism; liberal theologians “found” a picture of the Jesus of liberalism.  Both pictures were, and remain, historically untenable.

Thanks to the research of scholars like Strauss and Schweitzer, the “life of Jesus” approach to reading Scripture was largely abandoned, although it was dusted off in the mid 1980’s and tried again by the (liberal) Jesus Seminar.

What can we learn from the Gospels?  Mostly, we find in them a record of the primitive church’s views about Jesus.  Read through the eyes of his early followers, Jesus rises from the page in the form of a visionary preacher with an apocalyptic message, the bearer of news about the immanent end of time and the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Is the absence of solid, biographical information about Jesus necessarily fatal to Christian theology?  Absolutely not.  Some Christian scholars—Paul Tillich, Gordon Kaufman, David Tracy, and Sallie McFague come to mind—acknowledge this absence and move on to develop compelling theologies in spite of it.  Nonetheless, too many theologians working today fail to acknowledge the abyss between the Jesus whose life story has been almost completely lost to history and the Messiah they claim to find in the Gospels.  Non-specialists follow their lead.

The similarity to the Reagan legacy is striking.  The press, right-wing Republicans, left-wing Democrats, and our fallible memories fail to acknowledge the abyss between the Reagan whose actual life was extensively documented, and the so-dubbed arch-conservative who “always” opted for cutting taxes.  Young people who didn’t witness the Reagan era follow their elders’ lead.

WWJD or WWRD, take your pick.  But to which J or R are you referring?  To a Jesus or a Reagan who reflects your own psychic face and who conveniently shares your opinions?  Or are you referring to a Jesus about whom you admit you know little?  Or to an Reagan whose historical record you’ve studied at least a little?

Post-moderns no longer believe that it’s possible to separate fact from fiction.  There is no such thing as “fact” post-moderns like to say; there are only “accounts” refracted through social norms and personal experience.  Perhaps.  But does this mean we should abandon the effort altogether?

There is a difference between the Gold-standard-for-cutting-taxes (wishful-thinking) Reagan and the author-of-the-largest-tax-increase-in-American-history (actual) Reagan.  There is a difference between the Christ-of-Christian-theology (speculative) Jesus and the Jewish-eschatological-preacher-about-whom-little-is-known (human) Jesus. Paying attention to the difference matters.  It saves us from mistaking the one for the other and dishonoring Truth.

And Truth, even if we can only hope to glimpse it imperfectly, is worth the effort, don’t you think?

References:  Jonathan Chait, The Big Con:  Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America (New York:  Houghton Mifflin, 2007); James C. Livingston, Modern Christian Thought:  The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Prentice Hall, 1997).

#38 Multifaith squabble–over love!

31 Saturday Oct 2009

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Religions, Religion, Theological Ethics, Theology

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If you imagine that multifaith dialogue is easy, this post will change your mind. Continue reading but be warned that you’ll be asked to tease out the intricacies of an argument between the University of Chicago historian, David Nirenberg, a champion of secularism, and His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, the champion par excellence of Roman Catholicism.

Ideally, when we enter into a dialogue about religious beliefs, we do so with a genuine desire for authentic conversation.  We attempt to understand, as much as possible, our interlocutor’s point of view especially when we find his or her point of view offensive.  But, in the present case, even a brilliant scholar like Nirenberg, who’s written insightful books about the three Abrahamic religions, loses his patience and calls on His Holiness to stop speaking like a Roman Catholic.

Nirenberg aired his differences with the Pope in a September 23, 2009, article in The New Republic, “Love and Capitalism,” in which he reviewed Benedict’s book-length encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate:  On Integral Human Development in Charity and Truth.”

The problem, for Nirenberg, is not the Pope’s claim to the Truth:  “Popes,” Nirenberg writes, “have the right, indeed the obligation, to teach believers the truth as they are given to perceive it, no matter how controversial.”

No, Nirenberg’s disagreement with the Pope centers around the meaning of the term “caritas,” a word that can be loosely translated into English as “charity” or “love.”

For Roman Catholics, however, caritas doesn’t mean plain old love or sympathy or concern or even charity in the way that most of us might use such words over a glass of beer. Caritas, as used by Roman Catholic theologians, including Benedict, is a technical term with a history that dates back to the 3rd Century Church Father, St. Augustine.

Nirenberg gets the Augustine connection (he quotes Augustine several times), but he doesn’t seem to recognize that Augustine’s usage of caritas has been superseded.  In the 13th Century, the theologian and so-called Angelic Doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas, redefined caritas.  And Aquinas, it turns out, is the key to an accurate understanding of Benedict’s “Caritas in Veritate.”  Why?  Because since the late 19th century (thanks to Pope Leo XIII), Aquinas’s thought has dominated Roman Catholic theology, including its usage of the technical theological term, caritas.

For Aquinas, caritas is a special virtue—a theological virtue, because human beings are incapable of caritas on their own.  The virtue of caritas requires God’s gracious gift.  It is the most important of the three theological virtues (the other two are hope and faith).  Aquinas taught, and the Pope agrees, that only members of the Roman Catholic Church who participate in its sacramental life may receive God’s gift of the theological virtues, including caritas.

The bottom line, then: if you’re not a Roman Catholic, God will pass you over when it comes to granting caritas.  And without God-granted caritas, you may act in what appears to be a virtuous, loving way, but your actions can never be perfectly virtuous since you, a mere human being, are the source of the virtuous acts.

In his encyclical, Benedict claims that only Roman Catholicism offers the possibility of the kind of universal fraternity necessary for authentic community. But he’s following Aquinas here; only Roman Catholicism offers a path to God-given love (caritas), and God-given love (caritas) is required for universal fraternity.  Only with God-given love are we able to love God first (as the first proper object of our love), and then, and only then, out of love for God, are we able to love God’s creatures—i.e. other human beings.

A bit more familiarity with Aquinas’ thought (called Thomism, another technical term!) is necessary to understand the Pope’s encyclical.  Aquinas (unlike Augustine) has a high anthropology.  According to him, there are some capacities all persons enjoy, whether they are Roman Catholic or not.  For example, he maintained that every person is born with the ability to reason.  Thanks to our natural reason, we can come together and solve problems.

With this brief primer on Thomism, we could have anticipated what Benedict did, in fact, say in his encyclical:  “Reason, by itself, is capable of grasping the equality between men and of giving stability to their civic coexistence, but it cannot establish fraternity.  This originates in a transcendent vocation from God the Father, who loved us first, teaching us through the Son what fraternal charity is.”

Like every good book reviewer, Nirenberg is tasked with picking a fight over some point and so he chooses this one:  “The problem is that Benedict is claiming to offer general answers to global questions that affect people of every faith (and sometimes of no faith), while at the same time insisting that the only possible answer to those questions is Catholicism.  Such a suggestion might be a plausible prescription for global peace and development in a Catholic world, but the world is not Catholic.”

But Benedict offers general answers to global questions that affect people of every faith (including some of no faith) because he believes (following Aquinas) that every human being has reason.  And because we’re blessed with reason, Benedict can issue a global call for us to work together to address global problems.  However (still following Aquinas), fraternal charity, which grows out of caritas or God-given love, is only available to Roman Catholics.  If the rest of the world wants to co-exist in fraternal charity, it must convert and join the Roman Catholic Church.

For Benedict to discuss the global crisis in purely secular terms would be to act without love (in the ordinary sense of that word).  Would it be loving of Benedict to choose silence over sharing with the non-Catholic part of the world the fact (as he perceives it) that there is only one path to fraternal charity?

Nirenberg, however, wants Benedict to set his Roman Catholicism aside and offer global answers “taught in a way that seeks to transcend the boundaries of the traditions that produced them.”  What if Benedict made an analogous demand of Nirenberg?  He’d insist Nirenberg leave his secular commitments aside and offer teachings “taught in a way that seeks” to reflect the Roman Catholic tradition!

Which man has the more loving approach?

At the very least, Benedict engages in authentic multi-faith dialogue.  He doesn’t pretend to set aside his convictions—as if he could!—rather, he shows the full set of cards he’s holding in one hand and extends the other hand in greeting.  We may, like Nirenberg, not like the cards he’s holding, but we can appreciate the fact that he’s showing us what he’s got.

One of the goals of an authentic conversation about religion is to try to understand our conversation partner’s point of view.  For this we must set aside our own religious commitments and adopt a willingness to interpret (i.e. make familiar the unfamiliar) what he or she shares with us.  Nirenberg was tasked with interpreting the Pope’s latest encyclical.  Unfortunately, conversing with an author via his or her book does not offer the possibility of a back-and-forth dialogue.  If he and the Pope had had the opportunity to get together at the local bar and talk over a glass of beer, Nirenberg could simply have asked, “Exactly what do you mean, Your Holiness, by caritas?”  The two could have had a brief discussion about their differing definitions of love.  Then they could have moved on to discuss something more important—the Pope’s central concern of his encyclical—how to solve our global problems.

References:  David Nirenberg, “Love and Capitalism,” The New Republic 240, no. 4868 (23 September 2009): 39-42; Waldo Beach and H. R. Niebuhr, eds, Christian Ethics:  Sources of the Living Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York:  The Ronald Press Company, 1973).

#35 The art of forgiving God

04 Sunday Oct 2009

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theology

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Yom Kippur just passed, that Jewish day of atonement and of human-granted and God-granted forgiveness.

But what about God’s atonement for God’s sins of omission and of commission?

After all, many of us hold God responsible for the tragedies that plague our world.  “Look God,” we might say, “Take a good look around will You?  See the people weeping over here and see the people weeping over there—why don’t You do something about their troubles?  Why do You allow their sorrows to continue?  You’re God, right?  So You could make the suffering stop if You wanted.”

Some of those who hold God responsible for standing-by and doing nothing, don’t believe in miracles.  When it comes to miracles, they’re deniers.  They’re the ones who would stand on a cliff’s edge on a lovely, starry night, and having asked God for a sign, would continue to wait even after a meteor with a sparkler-like tail swooshed in a majestic arc across a darkened sky.  They would notice the meteor but expect that a scientific explanation would neatly explain why the meteor appeared at this particular time and place.

The miracle-deniers are the ones who, having cursed God for failing to rid us of misery, no longer wait for God’s answer.  They wait even after they notice the letters SORRY tucked among some garish graffiti.

Basically, then, miracle-deniers are demanding miracles from God without believing in them.  Because, wouldn’t the interventions they expect from God qualify as miracles?  Aren’t they asking God to act like a cosmic magician who’s every wish (and ours too) is fulfilled instantaneously and effortlessly?

What if God was like a human agent with intelligence, with the capacity to make decisions, and with some super-powers thrown into the mix?  What if this God was willing to interfere in our affairs?  Then our lives would be either be less predictable than they are now or we would have unmitigated peacefulness.

If God interfered now and again, then events would occur around us, and to us, without any causal explanation.  The cause-and-effect rules we now perceive would become inconsistent and unreliable.

If God intervened every time suffering could occur, then we’d get into car accidents but walk away unscathed.  Parents would always die before their children.  With God’s consistent interference we’d live in what we call paradise, or in the end-time some call the Kingdom of God.

Isn’t it more likely that if an agent-like God is interested in human-affairs, God is sorrowful when we experience pain?  God weeps when we weep.  God suffers when we suffer.  But isn’t it also more likely that the agent-God works tirelessly but imperceptibly through cosmic and human history to help us achieve the goal of becoming what God would want us to be?  As of yet, there is no evidence that any of us are even close to 100% perfect human beings.

If the agent-God could wave a wand and change the course of history instantly, then why not simply ask God for this miracle—to turn all human beings, present and future, into 100% moral beings?  Wars would end instantly.  Crime, too.  Children would never suffer at the hands of others.  No one would starve or go without shelter or medical attention—as fully moral beings, we’d busy ourselves taking care of those in need.

Sit with this miracle for just a few minutes—imagine every single person, you included—100% moral, 100% of the time.

To return to the original question—if God has agency, then God is, in a sense, responsible for the tragedies that plague this world—responsible because God doesn’t step in and bring them to a halt.  Perhaps the agent-God does atone and hopes for our forgiveness.  If God prefers to work tirelessly, but surreptitiously to end our tragedies, then can God be forgiven for this choice?  There’s no good answer to this question.

Here’s the bottom line, then, for those who hold God responsible—it’s up to each to decide whether and how much s/he can forgive God.  Easy formulas are lacking.  Forgiveness, even (or especially) of God likely requires practice (to improve) and patience (to persevere).

#33 Theology: it’s all about conversation

17 Thursday Sep 2009

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The work of Paul Tillich (1886-1965), who is considered by many to be the leading Protestant theologian of the 20th century, offers an intriguing perspective on the God-musings of religion-scholar Karen Armstrong (see Post #32).   If nothing else, taking a look at Karen Armstrong’s views from the perspective of his work reminds us that theology is an ongoing conversation—at least for those with open, inquiring minds.

For the purposes of this post, we’ll set aside most of Tillich’s three volume systematic-theology and focus on a mere two pages in the introduction to his first volume, entitled Reason and Revelation, Being and God.  In case you’d like to reflect further on what follows, or want to bring your own mojo to bear on Tillich’s work, check pages 42-43.

In this short, but typically brilliant, part of his introduction, Tillich discusses what he calls the “experiential theology” which has grown out of the “evangelical tradition of American Christianity.”  Although Tillich was born and educated in Germany, a large swath of his career took place on American soil, giving him the unique ability to reach objective, well-informed conclusions.  He perceived that experiential theology, at least the kind particular to the American situation, attempts to generate an “empirical theology” grounded in experience.

Now we can bring Karen Armstrong into the conversation because her “sense-of-God” approach falls neatly into Tillich’s “empirical theology” category.

The first move of what Tillich calls empirical theology is to show that “religious objects [like God] are not objects among others.”  Armstrong made this exact move when she decided God was not an object among objects.  God was not like a plate or a glass or a table she could pick up and examine.  Those objects existed, and so they could be found.  But since she couldn’t find God (like an object), making God’s existence the starting point for her search had led her down a dead end.  That path had only served to alienate her from God—her travels had yielded nothing more than a shadowy abstraction.

Still with me?  Whoever said theology, even stripped-down theology, was simplistic?

Armstrong, having abandoning God’s existence as the starting-point for her search, found God when she identified a different starting-point—that of creating a “sense of God.”  In other words, she decided to look for God in what seemed, to her, to be the most secure source available—her own experiences.  Instead of starting with the question “Does God exist?” she started with “What does God mean to me?”

How many of you have reached a dead end like Armstrong’s and resorted to finding God in the quality or dimension of your own experiences?  If you have, then, like hers, yours is an American empirical theology.  Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?  Your friends’ jaws will surely drop open when you spring the words “American empirical theology” on them.  Try it and see.

Tillich further explains that American empirical theology agrees with European phenomenological theology a la Rudolph Otto in his famous book, The Idea of the Holy.   Now you can also tell your friends that your empirical theology has something in common with “phenomenological theology.”  A warning:  you’ll have to practice saying “phenomenological” several dozen times before you nail it.  But it’ll be worth it.  Your friends’ jaws will drop even lower.

Besides the concerns raised at the end of Post #32 by yours truly and by those who took the time (or had the time) to leave comments, Tillich identified a few problems with Armstrong’s empirical-theology approach.  Any theology, like most things in life, has its advantages and drawbacks.  The advantages, as Armstrong herself so well illustrated, was that she was able to find God after decades of fruitless search “out there”.

But here’s a potential drawback.  Let’s pretend that we’re using Armstrong’s empirical-theological method.  Since the whole of experience can’t serve as the source for a “sense of God,” we have to identify an experience as having a unique quality.  Surveying the vast set of our experiences, we look for one few that strike us as having a special quality, special enough so that we can label them religious experiences.  It could be that feeling of wonder when watching the sun rise (see Post #30), or an unexplainable feeling of calm in the midst of crisis (see Post #4).

This means that we’ve had the “special” experiences before we ever label them as such.  Until we assign to them the “special” status of religious as a result of theological analysis, the “special” experiences were simply part of the whole of our experiences.  Our theological analysis, looking for experiences to label religious, finds them.  Then, on the basis of these so-labeled religious experiences, we develop an empirical theology.  Philosophers call this circular thinking.

Is circular thinking a problem?  Not necessarily, but proponents of empirical theology should realize that their thinking is as circular as those who adopt other kinds of theologies, including ones that empirical-theology-proponents might find objectionable.

Are there any other (potential) downsides?  Empirical theology traps God in our experience.  God is “trapped” because God no longer transcends experience.  God, in the traditional sense of the God-Who-is-not-us is excluded from this kind of theology.  While such an entrapment is attractive for Armstrong, others will find it harder to walk away from theologies that locate God outside of the human realm.

The bottom line is that, like the conversation between Tillich and Armstrong in this post, theological conversation is ongoing.  All theologies, including our own are (or should be) works in progress.  As such, we benefit (as do academic theologians) from the ability to be clear about our assumptions and about what counts as adequate criteria of validity for us.  Any theology can be called into question.  Plusses and minuses are part of the package.  Does this mean we shouldn’t adopt an empirical theology like Armstrong’s?  Not at all.  But theologians, academic or not, will want to informed about the strengths and weaknesses of their positions.

#30 Deists of the world, unite!

22 Wednesday Jul 2009

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Deist, deist, theist—say those words in Jersey (pronounced Joy-zie) and they all sound the same.  Fortunately, spelling will help us keep tabs on which is which.  Besides spelling, there are important differences.  Of note: Deists (capital D) went the way of the dodo bird and deists (lowercase d) are rarer than diamonds.  Theists rule–like it or not.

Now to clarify.  A story about François-Marie Arouet , a.k.a. Voltaire (1694-1778), nicely illustrates the difference between a Deist, a deist, and a theist.  He’s considered by people-in-the-know to have been a “mystical, and even emotional deist.”

Voltaire was already eighty years old when this incident took place.  He rose before dawn and, with a visitor, he climbed a nearby hill to watch the sunrise.  Upon reaching the top, Voltaire was overcome by the beauty of the morning scene.  He took off his hat and knelt, exclaiming:  “I believe, I believe in you, Powerful God, I believe.”  Then, on his feet again, he drily proclaimed, “As for monsieur the Son and madame his Mother, that is a different story!”

Voltaire was a French Deist (note the capital D).  Deism (with a capital D) was a religious movement. Also called the “religion of reason,” it originated in 18th century England.  

Today, if someone adopts tenets like those of the English and French Deists, he or she qualifies as a deist (lowercase d).  How you doing with keeping the capital D’s and the lowercase d’s straight?

Here’s more.  Deism, deism and deists (words derived from the Latin for god, deo) subscribe to a God who created us and the universe.   Since then, the universe has continued to operate under reliable and discoverable laws.  And since then, God has not mucked with the laws of nature or with our personal lives. 

By contrast, theism and theists (words derived from the Greek for god, theos) subscribe to a personal God, active in human history, and guarantor of eternal life. You know—the beliefs to which most of today’s religious believers in the West subscribe.  In case you forgot, let me remind you–theists rule.

Probably because French philosophes like Voltaire were literary individuals, not trained philosophers, they were able to popularize and disseminate the new religious movement.  They believed (wrongly, it turns out) Deism would emancipate society from ignorance and fanaticism. 

Here’s how, in a lightly adapted passage, Voltaire described the deist:

A deist is a person firmly persuaded of the existence of a Supreme Being equally good and powerful, who has formed all existences; who perpetuates their species, who punishes crimes without cruelty, and rewards virtuous actions with kindness.  

The deist does not know how God punishes, how God rewards, how God pardons, for he is not presumptuous enough to flatter himself that he understands how God acts; but he knows that God does act and that God is just.  The difficulties opposed to a providence do not stagger him in his faith, because they are only great difficulties, not proofs.

He does not join any of the sects, who all contradict themselves.  His religion is the most ancient and the most extended, for the simple adoration of a God preceded all the systems in the world.

He believes that religion consists neither in the opinions of incomprehensible metaphysics, nor in vain decorations, but in adoration and justice.  To do good–that is his worship; to submit oneself to God–that is his doctrine.  He succours the poor and defends the oppressed.

Does this describe you?  Then you’re a deist. 

If so, it may be instructive to consider why Deism, the religious movement, was short-lived. 

Yes, Deism died in fairly short order both in England (in its more theoretical and abstract version) and in France (in its more popular and literary version).  

In place of Christianity, Voltaire envisioned a rather vague, popular form of Deism.  Doctrine would be reduced to belief in a just God, whose service was the practice of virtue.  Worship would be simple and would consist primarily in praise and adoration and lessons in morality. 

According to religious-studies scholar, James Livingston, Deism fizzled, in part, because it failed to attract the masses.  Why?

 1.            It was too abstract, too intellectual in spite of its claim to simplicity; feeling and aesthetic sense are required of any religious faith that expects a wide appeal

2.            It lacked unity—its radical demands for autonomy were liberating but did not encourage the shared sense of faith and worship necessary for congregation-building

So, deists of the world, you’re likely feeling pretty alone.  There aren’t many of your kind.  And anyway, you (supposedly) aren’t the sort to seek each other out to worship together.  Which is why there’s not a First Deist Church of insert-your-town’s-name-here.  Why not unite and start one today?  Dare to prove the experts wrong.

HNFFT:  If you qualify as a deist, what do you say to the charge that your beliefs are too abstract and intellectual for most people (this is not necessarily a negative)?  How do feelings and aesthetics come together with your deistic beliefs?

Reference:  James C. Livingston:  Modern Christian Thought:  The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, vol 1, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Prentice Hall, 1997), p. 26-28.

#28 And the newest convert from atheism is…

08 Wednesday Jul 2009

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Atheists, you’re about to get a lot more attention.  In Turkey, a new game-show will soon pit clergy from various faith traditions against each other by letting them have a go at trying to coax “sworn” atheists into their respective folds. 

The show, called “Penitents Compete,” will give an imam, a Buddhist monk, a rabbi, and a priest a chance to hone their persuasive powers on ten atheists.  The pay-off for the contestants?  Besides “serenity” and the ultimate prize of all—belief in God, the converted atheists will also be rewarded with the immediate and material pleasure of an all-expenses paid trip (ummm, pilgrimage) to the holiest site of their new religion—Mecca for Muslims, Jerusalem for Christians and Jews, and Tibet for Buddhists.  To prevent deceitful believers from posing as atheists just to win a vacation, eight theologians will question prospective contestants to make sure their views are in line with orthodox atheism.  To make doubly sure, contestants who, thanks to the show, decide to embrace one of the represented religions will be monitored to make sure their conversions are genuine.

The pay-off for the religious leaders?  A chance to argue the superiority of their faith traditions in front of a large TV audience.  And who knows, maybe some of the atheists sitting at home, rooting for their fellow non-believers, will end up converting too.  The show aims not just to rescue a few atheists from the ranks of the penitents (assuming that “Competing Penitents” refers to the contestants and not to the religious leaders who, in their own way, are themselves competing).  The show is also intended to give Turkish viewers, the majority of whom are Sunni Muslims, a chance to learn more about other religions.

Some early-complainers are worried that the show will trivialize faith and God, but if it gives viewers a delightful way to learn about other faith traditions, why not?  Most intriguing, though, are two facets that may not have occurred to the producers.  Viewers will be exposed to charismatic spokespeople who might very well make their respective faith-traditions seem equally plausible and equally appealing.  Could this give rise to a certain, well, skepticism, among heretofore comfortably-believing believers?  If several of the faith traditions seem equally plausible and appealing, the people sitting at home, watching, may end up wondering where truth is to be found.  Where they had had no doubts, they could find themselves asking about the kind of justification given for each of the religion’s beliefs.  How does one test the truth (or lack thereof) of a particular belief?  Can truth be found in more than one religion?  In all?  In none.  Where?  How can a person tell?

Of interest too is how the show will explore methods of evangelizing.  Is it really possible to persuade someone to change his or her mind about his or her religious views through the use of rational arguments?  The common opinion among scholars is that such arguments usually fail to persuade.  The producers are cleared-eyed on this point; they anticipate that, at most, one atheist out of ten will convert during any given show.

The imams on “Penitents Compete” will clearly have a competitive edge over the other religious leaders.  The atheists chosen to compete will be Turks who have rejected their birthright religion and bucked the mainstream (99.8% of Turks are Muslim).  Will they have done so in the privacy of their own thoughts?  If they have, then, to participate in the show, they’ll have to come out of the closet and identify themselves as infidels to a TV audience that will include friends, family and neighbors.  In the end, peer pressure and family disapproval may operate as the biggest motivators to convert from atheism—back to Islam.  So, all ye fancy hotels in Mecca, get a few rooms ready for some new Turkish believers!

HNFFT:  If you have converted to a different faith tradition, why did you do so?  Did rational arguments work with you?  What is your test for truth?

Reference:  Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1979); http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/5729452/Turkish-gameshow-attempts-to-convert-atheists.html

#26 No theology, no science–no joke!

18 Thursday Jun 2009

Posted by in God, Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Theology

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Science and theology are perceived, by some, as sitting on opposite banks of an abyss.  They assume that the twain never can (or should) meet.  But the separation between science and theology is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of the West.  Until the Renaissance, science was barely more than a descriptive discipline, while theology, considered the queen of the sciences, was a richly speculative and complex field of endeavor.  

Fortunately, theology (yes—theology!) came to the rescue of science by providing it with a new understanding of reality.  Theology (yes—theology!) provided science with the intellectual and conceptual tools it needed to get out of a deep rut and push forward with several important discoveries.  These discoveries, in turn, allowed the development of technologies that now seem as essential to us as air or water.  What–life without a computer?  Without Wi-Fi?  A cell phone?  Pleeease! 

This shift in human beings’ way of looking at reality occurred long enough ago that we’ve mostly forgotten that we haven’t always grasped reality the way we do today. Here’s a key illustration:  there was a time when it was “common knowledge” that the earth moved around the sun.  Peoples in the ancient world conceived of reality such that, for them, astral bodies such as the sun and moon rotated in orderly and eternally-static circles around the earth.  Based on simple observation this view of reality made sense.  The things they could see appeared to revolve around them while the ground on which they stood seemed solid and stationary.   Today, of course, we know that while we tend to perceive motion relative to where we ourselves stand, we may, from the perspective of someone else, be moving.

So how did our mindset change?  A 15th theologian by the name of Nicholas de Cusa (1401 – 1464) reached several novel conclusions about perspective.  Some scholars still refuse to count his contributions as scientific because, technically-speaking, he was a theologian.  But others, like philosophy professor, Karsten Harries, the author of Infinity and Perspective, credit him with destroying the belief in the geocentric theory of the cosmos inherited by pre-Renaissance science from the ancient world.

Thanks to Cusa, Harries argues in his book, Copernicus was able to break out of this mindset, a mindset that had persisted millenia.  

So what was Cusa’s insight, exactly?  It underwhelms us moderns but, in the 15th century, his insight was revolutionary.  Cusa had been sent by the Pope to negotiate a reconciliation between the Greek Church and the Roman Church.  On the return sea-voyage, his ship was heading home from Greece when he realized that if he couldn’t see the shore, he wouldn’t have any idea the ship was moving; instead, he would perceive the ship as sitting still in the water.  He also realized that if he were not a passenger but, rather, someone standing on the shoreline watching the ship, he would, from his vantage point on land, perceive the ship as moving.  Two perspectives (the one on the ship, the other on land) led to two experiences of movement. 

In his theological work, On Learned Ignorance, Cusa wrote that the centers “by which we orient ourselves are fictions, created by us” to reflect the standpoint of the observer.  Multiple centers of perspective, he realized, were not only possible but equally valid.  Applying this insight to the universe, he argued that a person standing on Mars or on the moon was just as likely as an earthling to consider his or her piece of rock to be the center of the cosmos.  Cusa concluded that the universe “will have its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere, so to speak; for God, who is everywhere and nowhere, is its circumference and center.”

By undermining the idea of a single-center based perspective, Cusa called into question any cosmology based on just one center.  His clarity about the possibility of multiple centers and perspectives took him even further than Copernicus and Kepler would go a century later with their heliocentric cosmology.  His influence was so sweeping and long-lasting that Kepler and Descartes acknowledged him as a precursor.  

The Cusa-Copernicus-Kepler scenario offers more than just intellectual interest.  If Harries is spot-on about Cusa’s contribution to science (historians of science, do you care to weigh in?), then there’s an important lesson to take away from this fascinating chapter in science-theology relations.  The lesson is that if scientists like Copernicus and Kepler had refused to take seriously the theological writings of a pious genius like Cusa, then we might all have had to wait a lot longer for modern science.   

Theologians and scientists live in the same world and, as fellow human beings, they’re charmed by mystery and seized by wonder.  They ask many of the same questions about the world.  They simply turn to different resources in their attempts to answer those questions, resources which need not be labeled incompatible.  But as long as scientists and theologians sit on opposite banks of an abyss (created ex nihilo), no conversation will take place.  Let’s start building a bridge, shall we?

References:  Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2001); Nicolas of Cusa, Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence Bond, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York:  Paulist Press, 1997).