Patrick Henry College, Paradigm of the Evangelical Liberal Arts?

I recently listened to a podcast of a booktalk by Hanna Rosin giving a talk (about a year ago) on her book, God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America.The book is about the school that seems to be a veritable breeding ground for White House interns, Patrick Henry College. In her talk, Rosin marvels at the juxtaposition of a student body which is intellectually sophisticated, culturally, well ... at least aware, and yet made up of students who maintain their rigorous fundamentalist faith.

Her main goal seems to be to understand this seeming juxtaposition and drive home just how unique a position Patrick Henry College occupies in the intellectual landscape. I would agree that the school seems to be quite an outlier in terms of many of its specific ends and means. I would not agree with what seems like the implicit assumption in much of Rosin's story: that the fundamental issues Patrick Henry College was specifically set up to address are all that different from other Christian colleges.

First of all Rosin sets up her story describing her view of the tension between the sacred and the secular in the lives of the student body. Rosin describes how she "could sense a real tension between the school's dual missions of leading a faithful Christian life and impacting the culture. The school really wanted the students to study Plato and Nietzsche or the modern novels or the enlightenment thinkers but they were worried that they might be corrupted by their ideas."

The way she characterizes the problem makes it seem like 21st century fundamentalists who are also busy competing for jobs in the White House are somehow the first set of Christians to feel a tension in how to live out their Christianity in public. But this is not a new problem at all. Christians have been wrestling with this at least since Saint Augustine penned his book City of God struggling with the right view of the Church after the fall of Rome. But of course it has really been an issue for followers of Christ from day one. Christians tend to adopt the language of 'two kingdoms' to deal with these issues. We sense two basic tensions: on the one hand there is the eschatological tension between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom, on the other hand there is the incarnational tension in how we are called to be ‘in but not of’ the world. And we Christians call these things ‘tensions’ with good reason. Answers in this arena are never merely plain on their face. I think anyone who takes their Christianity seriously and lives in a secular society, with secular neighbors or with a secular vocation - which is to say: everyone - struggles with striking the right balance in regard to these tensions at some time or another.

The next problem is that having missed how universal the felt tensions described above really are, Rosin depicts politically hyper-active Patrick Henry College as having somehow stumbled upon the idea of engaging in politics and the broader culture at the same time as maintaining a firm orthodoxy. She then backtracks and uncritically adopts Patrick Henry's characterization of other Christian insitutions of higher learning. Patrick Henry College sees itself as paradigmatic for any theologically robust evangelical liberal arts institution and views other schools either as lacking in true intellectual sophistication and thus not worthy of being called liberal arts institutions (Bible Colleges), or as accomodating too much to the secular University and compromising their orthodoxy (mainstream evangelical schools). Rosin apparently buys their story.

But Patrick Henry College is merely one recent, perhaps unique in some regards, example of a Christian institution of higher learning seeking to have some impact on the wider culture. Rosin is certainly aware not only that there are many other kinds of Christian colleges - liberal Protestant, Catholic, etc. - but even that Patrick Henry is exceptional among evangelical institutions; she mentions in response to a question, both Wheaton and my own alma mater, Calvin College, saying they are places that would almost certainly not hire a six-day, young-earth Creationist. So they seem to fit Patrick Henry's conception of an accomodationist school. But if she knew anything about these institutions, she would know not only that they maintain what most American Christians would see as a conservative core theology, but also that a central part of their missions is to have an impact broader than on their students private spiritual lives. Finally, if she did any more than scratch the surface she would also have know that, on the whole, places like Calvin College have very different ideas on how to go about this cultural and political engagement.

For example, in another place she mentions Farris [the school founder]'s model of reading atheist philosophers as one of doing 'opposition research.' As if one has to read this stuff just to be versed in enemy strategy. But I can't imagine an understanding of liberal arts education more divergent from this than the one in which my reading of atheist, secular or just plain old pagan books took place at Calvin. (Even on this front there is an internal discrepancy in that she admits that not all PH professors agree with Farris's views.)

The problem I think is that Rosin has appropriated wholesale Patrick Henry’s very wooden view of Christianity's two-kingdom mindset. From her viewpoint, a bright young student listening to secular music and reading secular philosophers on the one hand and then going to congress to lobby about teaching itelligent design, is seen as someone completely stepping in and out of their identity as Christians. They might listen to good music because it's entertaining and read secularists because it's useful, but they lobby congress because they're Christians; they do the former just because they're modern young people and only the latter specifically as Christians.

At another point she relates how the students "try and follow Farris's model of living in two worlds at once. Of keeping a running conversation with Jesus in your head at all times while still making it in the real world." ... "Michael Farris is not interested in adapters who bend to the will of the mainstream. He wants shapeshifters who can move in between two worlds with their essential natures in tact." As I've said, I think all Christians try to strike a balance here but Rosin does not see how the line could be tread in any other way than Farris's. Nowhere does she seem to contemplate the possibility of an orthodox Christianity that actually encourages an appreciation for art, even secular art, because it's beautiful and recognizes that all beauty comes from God, or a politics that seeks engage in the public sphere as Christians in order to contribute to the common good without merely seizing power and imposing as much theocracy as possible.

And this is where Rosin's lack of the ability to theologically critique Patrick Henry's understanding of Christian vocation matters. While I have asserted that all Christians feel tensions in how to live out their callings in life, the orthodox view is not that we navigate between purely sacred and secular spheres of life where we could alternately put on and shed our identities as Christians. This strict dichotomous view is not more orthodox or conservative but essentially an instance of the Christian heresy of gnosticism. Against this, Christians must recognize how, in Abraham Kuyper's words, "there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: 'mine!'" But while this means that we are called to engage specifically as Christians in all spheres of life, this engagement need not, and almost certainly should not, look like that of the stereotypical culture warrior.

Perhaps Rosin's portrayal of what Patrick Henry teaches its students to think is correct. I am not in a position to say. Even if it is, it is a serious error on her part to accept the school's own take on the theological landscape of cultural engagement and to uncritically employ its own self-assessment and characterization of the options available in Christian higher learning.

But this is probably exactly why she wrote the book. Patrick Henry's students and their mission are headline grabbing. They are more than likely unique, but not because of their intellectualism and not because of their desire to engage the culture, but merely in what they think constitute the right weapons for the Christian to take up and for which battles. If she had started out with a little background discussion of the historical significance of Christian conversations surrounding eschatological and incarnational tensions she could have given us a much more interesting account of exactly how Patrick Henry is, and is not, unique.

So Ms. Rosin and journalists everywhere, please take note, if you meet someone trying to act like a Christian out there in your 'public' sphere, know that we're not all from Patrick Henry.

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Cynicism, Faith and the Battle of Experience

In a review of a new Library of America collection of journalist A.J. Liebling's work, Fresh Air contributor Maureen Corrigan relates the following intriguing quote taken from one of his WWII pieces. He writes:

"Cynicism is often the shame-faced product of inexperience."

I found this line immediately striking as a succinct counterpoint to the overly relied-upon assumption that level of cynicism equates with quantity of experience.

We are all acquainted with that kind of world-weary skeptic who is always telling us that if we only knew what was really going on in the world, how truly nasty people consistently are to one another, we'd give up on our faith. This line of thinking will often present any religious faith in a good God as a holdover from the naive infancy of our species whereas now we should all be too grown up to get on with that kind of nonsense. As if human beings in centuries or millenia past were somehow less acquainted with suffering and death than is modern man, or too dull to realize that continued suffering in the face of God's goodness and power was difficult to comprehend. Not so the new enlightened man. We are all so very adult now.

When Liebling says it is inexperience that leads to cynicism, he seemingly says the exact opposite of the above assumption, but I think I know where he is going with this. The cynic usually assumes that the optimist has just led too sheltered a life. This is sometimes the case. But our experience of an event involves both the event itself and how we interpret it and the cynical interpretation is never just a strict conclusion from analyzing the facts.

What seems clear to me is that our interpretations of events, which we will have at least some control over, has much more to do with our overall level of cynicism than we might like to think. We all know that there are those who have lived through the worst humanity has to offer - think holocaust survivors - with their faith in God or maybe a general regard for humanity intact just as we have come across those who seem ready to resign themselves to a jaded view of all life has to offer simply because a girlfriend dumped them. The mere possibility of these two types existing side-by-side shows the lack of causation.

We need to keep ourselves open, whatever the events we live through, to interpreting, and thus actually experiencing life, otherwise than cynically. This openness to re-interpretation does not constitute a diminished experience but an alternative experience and offers a horizon vastly wider than that of the cramped complaints of the cynics.

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Rowan Williams and Creeds as the Least Silly Things We Can Say About God

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The Blasphemy Challenge and the Banality of Atheism in a Secular Society

In the bad old days of yore, as we are taught to call them, when religious beliefs were not mere matters of private opinion, one could get in real trouble for expressing the wrong beliefs. One could occasionally lose one's life! Now we just get mocked on the internet.

Today, in our enlightened age, one's beliefs or disbeliefs are no more the business of anyone else - let alone anyone in authority - than our tastes in clothes, food or entertainment.

Enter The Blasphemy Challenge. A group calling themselves the Rational Response Squad has come up with a new test of orthodoxy, or perhaps heterodoxy. Their challenge, posted via YouTube a while back, is to make a video of oneself blaspheming the Holy Spirit, the so-called unforgivable sin. The video responses seem to be mostly angry teenagers eager to shock and the occasional atheist celebrity trotted out to verify his credentials (as an atheist clergyman?) by publicly 'passing' the test. The irony of a test of heterodoxy is apparently lost on all involved.

The Rational Response Squad sets itself up as both defending and advocating for atheism. Defending because atheists are a persecuted minority whose right to disbelief is in peril. (From whom?) Advocating because ... well, I'm not quite sure. Altruism? The squad seems to not so much respond as to downright proseletize for their disbelief. They have debated the likes of Growing Pains child actor cum creationist Kirk Cameron (very telling!) and apparently have a weekly internet radio broadcast. Are we to expect late-night televangelists for the new atheism? Why do they care so much if I pass or fail their test. (For the record, I suppose I have failed their test simply by viewing their challenge and not meeting it.)

It's true, unlike the orthodoxy enforcers of old, they do not pretend to wield authority over those they test so they don't threaten those who fail their challenge with more than their enlightened scoffs. (Their method of 'rational response' is basically that of a schoolyard taunt. They've dared me to blaspheme and I've resisted so far. I can only hope they won't double-dog dare me.)

The very idea of the challenge relies on an understanding of Christian faith which is the very worst kind of caricature. It pretends to an understanding of Christianity by rummaging around in scripture's closet for a debatable doctrine based on a single text in order to pick on it. Holding it up for all to see, they can safely conclude, "See, Christianity is silly and thereby obviously false!" This all just goes to show, as if further demonstration were required, that many of this brand of atheist are far more fundamentalist than their Bible-thumping targets. Two sides of the same old coin.

One odd thing about the challenge is that, while it's obvious that it doesn't aim at serious engagement, it doesn't even get the most basic of facts right. Even in this highly debated quote, the scripture says nothing of denying the existence of the Holy Spirit as being unforgiveable but only about blaspheming against it. The scene one where Jesus' good works are attributed to the power of demons. I think that, given this context, a more likely candidate for commiting this kind of sin would be the kind of Christian who condemns the work of the Spirit just because it is carried out through the agency of a secular or non-Christian organization, not some kids saying they don't believe in the Holy Spirit the same way they don't believe in Santa Claus. Give me a break folks. You'll have to try harder than that.

Many Christians are offended by all of this though. Which is probably at least part of the point. Many post videos arguing back. Apparently some have even threatened the atheists to the point that they won't use their last names and even broadcast from an undisclosed location out of fear for their lives. This is deeply disturbing but not that surprising. There will always be those who take these kinds of things personally.

Now I for one am not offended by their blasphemy. I am not God, so how could I be. I also believe that, at least in this respect, God doesn't need me to stick up for him.

This does not mean that I am not offended by the blasphemy challenge. I am. Deeply.

I am offended, as a person who tries to be reasonable, at their use of the word 'rational' to describe what they are doing. Reason's got enough of a reputation problem without this response squad needlessly dragging her name through the mud.

So have your fun with your non-attempts at understanding scripture if you must. Nobody can possibly take that seriously. But lay off reason, some of us need her!

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Baptism, Why Bother? Sacramental Infighting and Clues to Original Meanings

This past Sunday, my son, Jonah Gregory, was baptized. But, "Whatever for?" you might ask. Well I've wondered this myself.

Everyone knows Christians get baptized. Few of us, even if we call ourselves Christians, think about why we were baptized, or why we should baptize anyone else.

Baptism is just one of those things. People don't want to talk about it or think about it because either A.) It's just what every Christian does, so who cares, and/or B.) Talking about it too much will lead to differences of opinion, disagreements between individuals or even divisions between churches, so it's better to leave well enough alone.

Baptism is central to Christianity so discussing its meaning is a shortcut to delving into the heart of the gospel itself. No wonder then about the disagreement. While the divisions we persist in are lamentable (let alone the violence perpetrated in the past by those willing to take just about any division as sufficient excuse), I subscribe to the theory that theological disagreements should be addressed and hashed out instead of ignored in favor of a race to the lowest common denominator. If the teaching of Christianity is worth thinking about, then it's worth arguing about. So we should maintain civility, but let's keep talking. Baptism is worth exploring.

I find it useful to address what baptism itself is from the angle of these divisions internal to Christianity. The basic split is between those who baptize babies and young children, and those who do not. The former group includes the majority of Protestants as well as Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians. This position represents what is called technically paedo-baptism (child baptism). The latter group practices believer's baptism or credo-baptism, holding that one must affirm belief before being baptized. They are commonly referred to just as Baptists (from Anabaptists, meaning re-baptizers because, since they do not recognize the validity of infant baptism, they re-baptize in their own manner those already baptized as infants in another Christian Church).

Now I am obviously a paedo-baptist. Both John Calvin, the founding father of my own Reformed tradition, and Luther, the original reformer, taught paedo-baptism. But, though I am personally persuaded by the reasons given in the tradition for baptizing infants, I fully recognize that the tradition of credo-baptism arises out of a sincere desire to be faithful to certain genuine aspects of the Christian life.

At its most basic, credo-baptism stresses the truth of human free will that is both the beautiful gift and terrible responsibility of every human creature. It also underlines the God-given integrity we have as individuals and the way in which God seeks us out often as individuals.

Another thing that can be said for believer's baptism is that it portrays a very clear grasp on the truth that "God has not willed the church to be reproduced through biology but through witness and conversion." [1] In other words, Christianity is not simply a hereditary religion. Rather, following Christ as a disciple is something all are called to regardless of parentage.

As I said, while I find the above elements attractive and the arguments offered in favor of them to be sincere, I am not persuaded. First of all, I have this sense that everything attractive about credo-baptism is covered just as well in paedo-baptist tradition; we do, for instance, obviously seek out and baptize adult converts.

Second, and more importantly, I just don't feel that denying the sacrament of baptism to children fits with my larger understanding of the faith, most especially in its insistence upon the absolute centrality and primacy of grace, even while affirming human free will.

My basic take on why elements of Baptist tradition are attractive despite my overall disagreement is that, like most theological mistakes and even outright heresies, credo-baptism arises not so much out of originating something opposed to Christian teaching as it does from an over-emphasizing of one strand of Christian teaching at the expense of the corresponding part of the paradox.

So just as the ancient heresies fought by the Church fathers were erroneous because they overly stressed, for example, either the humanity or divinity of Christ and ended up denying the incarnation. I would allege that credo-baptism (though probably not tantamount to heresy) has mistakenly over-stressed the role of human free will in conversion and at the very least muddied up a proper understanding of grace.

By way of caveat, I should say that being a Calvinist, the way I would navigate this mystery might be entirely predictable because, in the words of Richard Mouw, "When Calvinists get around to attempting to explain the relationship between God's sovereignty and human freedom, we are so concerned to protect the former that we are willing to risk sounding like we are waffling on the latter rather than to imply in any way that God's power is limited." [2]

So any potential disputant could just allege that their position occupies the center of the paradox and it is the Calvinist who has erred too far to the side of denying human free will. This has certainly been alleged before. But, as I've already said, on the issue of baptism, Calvinists happen to be in agreement with the broadest and deepest streams of the Christian tradition. I've never even heard anyone argue for an early historical precedent of anti-paedo-baptism, excepting, of course, the highly disputed interpretations over baptismal precedent in the New Testament itself, which is an issue I can't address here. In general though, I would be suspicious of any major Christian teaching that is claimed to have been completely suppressed for 1400 years or so only to pop up again in the 16th century.

Because baptism is our entrance into full membership of the Church, our understanding of it will have a direct impact on our understanding of grace. If we want to keep grace in the center of our picture of the Christian life, it should be important not only to see grace at work in the sacrament of baptism, but to be unwilling to compromise on its working there in any way. Lyle Bierma writes, summarizing paedo-baptism in the Reformed confessions, that:

"Whether one is an adult being baptized after conversion or an infant being baptized before conversion, the situation is basically the same. Christ has shed his blood no less for washing the little children of believers than he did for adults. (BC) As the HC* says, both belong to God's covenant and community and . . . are promised forgiveness of sin . . . and the Holy Spirit, who produces faith. Both are called to embrace those promises by faith, the adult immediately and the infant as he or she grows older. Both are saved not by their baptism but by God's grace as they live in faith and obedience as members of the covenant community." [3]*

But it is not just a matter of technical freedom of will, the overall sense of the grace at work in a church that celebrates infant baptism and one that bars it, seems to me to be reversed in terms of who is in the driver's seat in the conversion of the sinner. Bierma again writes that, "baptism is primarily God's speaking to us, not our speaking to him. It is there that he signifies and seals an operation of grace that he performs in the context of a community that he has established. How can this salvation sola gratia (by grace alone) be any more graphically demonstrated than in the baptism of a tiny covenant child, helpless, uncomprehending, and wholly incapable of any meritorious work? Infant baptism sets before the church in sacramental shorthand the entire doctrine of God's sovereignty in the salvation of the elect." [4]

If you say that one can't be baptized as an infant, then you're saying that one can't become a Christian without a certain level of maturity, whether intellectual or moral. It seems to me that if you do this, you are making conversion to Christianity and the salvation it is all about, far too much a result of one's own effort and abilities. I believe, not just that one is saved through grace, but also that one is converted to the faith that affirms this truth through grace. (If one wanted to be dismissive, this would be the place to start throwing that dirty word 'predestination' around!) For me, one always and only enters the Church, whose threshold is baptism, through grace, with the relative understanding of a child, regardless of one's age or maturity. Affirming that we should baptize infants is a line in the sand that reminds us that our conversion, let alone our salvation, is not of our making.

The objection could be raised here that the boots-on-the-ground difference between most baptistic and Reformed churches, for example, is actually very slight because the former often practice infant dedication with adult baptism; the latter, infant baptism and adult profession of faith. This might be true. The pastor and writer Douglas Wilson wrote recently of the idea of a "wet dedication" as opposed to full covenantal baptism. To the extent that this distinction has been lost, the fault is probably that of insufficient doctrinal education in paedo-baptist circles. If Reformed believers know what they are about, then they will always understand the relative importance of infant baptism and adult profession.

The difference between the two might just be a matter of emphasis, but for me, the distinction of where the line for full Church membership lies is very important. I believe that my 5 month old son is just as much a member of Christ's church as his (hopefully) much more mature, obsessively analytical father.

Finally and in conclusion, I can't help squeezing in the following quote on baptism. It's from the mouth of the fictional pastor who narrates the story in Marilynne Robinson's exquisite novel Gilead.

"There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn't enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time." [5]

The very beauty and power contained in baptism, signaled to here, probably makes it nearly inevitable that it will be misused. Baptism requires, like every other creaturely gift we enjoy in this life, certain boundaries to keep it from eroding rather than contributing to the dignity of human beings. For me those boundaries are one baptism in the name of the one triune God.

_____

Notes.

1. Hauerwas, Stanley. The Radical Hope in The Hauerwas Reader. p. 512
Hauerwas here is not discussing baptism but the validity of singleness as a Christian vocation. The point stands as a possible asset for credo-baptism.
2. Mouw, Richard. Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport. p. 27
3. Bierma, Lyle. Infant Baptism in the Reformed Confessions. Collected in, The Case for Covenanental Infant Baptism, edited by Gregg Strawbridge. Accessed on 1-16-08 at http://paedobaptism.com/bierma.doc
* "BC" & "HC" refer to the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism respectively.
4. ibid.
5. Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. p. 23

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Atheism & Agnosticism Defined or, Why Christians are Agnostic, & Atheists Should be Too (With Diagrams!)

Atheism and agnosticism are both terms that are thrown around quite loosely and sometimes even interchangeably. Because of this, discussions between professed members of either group, or between theists and members of either, can be remarkably unfruitful.

One sadly typical battle between theists and atheists is that fought over which position requires more faith. This interaction usually features the atheist deriding the theist for holding beliefs without sufficient evidence and the defensive believer replying that the atheist requires even more faith because an atheist is alleged to be someone who claims to know so much about the universe that they are able to confidently rule out the existence of a God or gods.

First off, this is a bad tack to take because the theist here is granting the premise that faith has something inherent about it to be avoided. Not a good strategy for a believer to take in the long run. Second, and more importantly, hardly any atheists really occupy this rather sophomorically rejected position. (Some of our crop of 'new atheists' might be exceptions, but we'll leave that alone for now.)

To properly define these terms would require a lot of background definitions like, for example, of belief, knowledge, faith and doubt etc. etc. Upon these definitions rest those for the isms for atheists, theists and agnostics. Since I must here skip over that background work I will begin by provisionally defining theism as the holding of a belief in God or many gods who in some meaningful way transcend the created universe, including - essentially here - human ways of knowing. (In most of what follows, though I will discuss theism generally, I am primarily concerned with Christian theism. That Christian beliefs about the God revealed in Christ.)

Based on this definition, I take atheism to mean simply someone who lacks such a belief. So atheism's definition is purely negative, saying only what the atheist does not believe, and nothing about what they actually do believe. In other words, to be precise: an atheist doesn't believe there is no god, they just don't believe there is a god. The difference is subtle but important.

It seems here that the very language we speak expresses the assumtion that most people hold some kind of belief in a god such that the exception is denoted by negation. This fact is also recognized by the rather silly spin campaign of Dawkins, Dennett and others to rename people who share their perspective, 'brights' in a self-conscious imitation of the homosexual community's appropriation of the term gay. (I say the campaign is silly because of how fatuous the term 'bright' is in itself and of how unlikely any change in useage actually is, given the aforementioned preponderance of believers.)

The lines thus far, though sometimes treated sloppily are fairly clear. We can still talk about what counts as a theistic belief - what kind of G/god is needed to be the subject of the belief - but we know ahead of time that an atheist won't believe that that god exists.

Agnosticism, being the new kid on the block, is where things get really muddy.

The term agnosticism didn't even exist until it was coined in the 19th century by the famed bulldog of Darwin and debater of Bishop Wilberforce, T.H. Huxley. By his own description, Huxley intended agnosticism to denote something opposed to the certainty with which others seemed to hold their metaphysical views. In other words, to Huxley, believers and atheists seemed to be claiming to know a lot more than they could reasonably be expected to.

The problem with this opposition is in the implicit assumption that the only knowledge that counts is certain knowledge such that anything that can be doubted is not really knowledge. There is a huge philosophical conversation behind this, but suffice it to say that this is to set the bar for what counts as knowledge incredibly high. (Just to note in passing another thread this could follow, I believe part of the reason knowledge had become almost equivalent with certainty was an essential change in philosophical assumptions in the modern period.)

So in the world as sketched out by the Huxleyan agnostic, there would seem to be basically three options on the table based upon one's answer to two basic questions. (See Fig. 1) For the agnostic one must first decide if knowledge (taken to be certainty) of something like God is possible, then if it is, come to a conclusion about whether there is or is not something actually in existence to be named God. If agnosticism, as Huxley seems to set it up, is a live option, one who answers "no" to the first question is labeled agnostic, one who answers "yes", becomes either an atheist or a theist based on their answer to question number two.

Being skeptical about our ability to answer big questions like the existence of God wasn't invented in the 19th century. What Huxley really did was define a firm position wherein decision is withheld indefinitely on any serious question, the answer to which can be doubted.

Agnosticism is often described as the position that certain questions are undecidable. What I want to question is the degree to which belief one way or the other can just be withheld because one feels like it. So what if you've decided that knowledge of the divine is undecidable! Does that somehow free you from having any opinions leading you one way or the other, just an inkling perhaps? Maybe opinions and inklings don't count as beliefs, but how strong of an inkling would a Huxleyan agnostic have to have to be counted as actually believing or disbelieving that there is a god?

Since I have already discussed why most atheists are actually atheistic-agnostics. I'll now briefly discuss why the Christian variety of theists are really theistic-agnostics. (Again, a similar argument could be made for theists generically but I am less interested in that grouping, and further am less able to characterize the nature of any god other than the Christian God.)

There are basically two reasons why the orthodox Christian position should be recognized as agnostic. Most basically, we could just rest our argument on the simple assertion that for the Christian believer faith is always part of the mix. If faith is involved in one's belief, and the Huxleyan definition of agnosticism as being a lacking in certainty is granted, then clearly the Christian is an agnostic. Christians seek assurance, they cannot attain certainty the way Huxley thought of it. If you try to believe what a Christian believes, then you will inevitably have your doubts. Jesus certainly did.

Another way of putting this is to say that for the Christian, belief in God is also recognized as undecidable. The difference is that the Christian recognizes that a decision must be made on a matter that is at the same time undecidable. Christians, despite all evidence to the contrary, are not primarily about believing in God but in following Christ. Christ called us to follow him and the problem with a callinlg is that one does not first decide that a call should be responded to, one just responds, even if the response is to ignore the call. The disciple called by Jesus cannot wait for all the data to come in before deciding, he either follows or he does not.

This is why faith is a leap not a conclusion. If beliefs were easily decidable, the results would be as obvious as two plus two equals four. Arithmetic sums are not decisions, they are calculations and inevitably reached. For something to even count as a decision in the first place there must be some element of risking making the wrong decision. Anytime a decision is made, faith is there. If faith is there, then doubt is too. Faith, it must be said, is never inevitable.

The second point is just to point out that in simple historical terms the orthodox Church Fathers were those specifically opposed to the varieties of groups who called themselves, or were called by others, gnostics. As before, we should expect that those lacking what one group claims to have could be safely labeled using an alpha privative. Thus the orthodox believers opposed to gnosticism become: agnostics.

Now note, that this is all granting Huxley's characterization of a kind of binary choice between certainty and non-certainty. When I say that Christians are agnostic I only mean on these terms and in no way imply that Christian faith imparts nothing that could be called knowledge. I believe there is much that counts as knowledge that falls short of certainty, including specifically Christian beliefs. The gnostic opponents of orthodoxy weren't just advocating that Christians know things in the everyday way we use the word. Gnostics were those who presented the possibility of a kind of direct, unmediated experience or certain knowledge of God.

(This is as true now as it was then as the temptation to discard faith is constantly with us. Philip Lee wrote a very fascinating book, Against the Protestant Gnostics, that is both entirely engrossing and at times quite chilling. In it he writes about the areas contemporary protestants, especially evangelicals, share many emphases with the gnostics and are in danger of repeating the mistakes of those ancient heretics. This area of the interaction of modern philosophy, Protestantism and gnosticism is just crying out for more attention.)

Because I believe that both Christians and those we would usually call atheists share a sense of agnosticism, I would argue for keeping four options on the table, with a possible fifth for the really faint of heart. In my mapping (see fig. 2), the two questions are the same as before. If one answers "no" to question number one, thinking that certainty is not attainable in these matters, one might try to cling to position number five by not thinking about it at all, but one who is honest with oneself must admit that they either tend to believe there is no god or that there is. They are thus either an atheist, simply lacking belief in a god, or a theist, a believer who has their doubts at times. If one answers "yes" to being able to know about the existence of God with certainty, one is labeled, depending on their answer to question number two, either an incredibly (scarily) confident atheist or just some nutty sort of theist strongly resembling a gnostic. This last option could only be called heresy in a Christian light.

In short, agnosticism is either a position of epistemological false humility when presented as a distinct option or else it is already just a part of the make-up of the majority of your average red-blooded atheists and theists and most certainly what any reflective Christian should recognize themselves as.

I'm afraid that agnosticism as a stand-alone term causes much more confusion than it is worth. My apologies Thomas, you'll always have that debate to be remembered by.

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Jesus & Dylan: Celebrity as Messiah and Vice Versa

I'm not usually in the position these days of writing on really current day-to-day events, the supposed forte of the blog medium. Well no more! Having seen a movie a few weeks back (on opening day I think!) I'm prepared to launch this blog into the world of immediate cultural relevance.

The movie was I'm Not There, a weirdly successful bio-pic of Bob Dylan as portrayed by six very different actors. The scene is one in which Dylan (the most realistic one, played by Cate Blanchett!) and Allen Ginsberg (David Cross) are heckling a life-size crucifix. Dylan yells up to the statue of the dying Jesus something like: "Play us some of your early stuff!"

Now I know, this would seem beyond blasphemous, but in a strange way Dylan's comment in the movie (which I have no idea as to its basis in fact or not) is spot on, not as a criticism of Jesus but as a sarcastic barb directed at Jesus' fickle followers. And Dylan would be one to know.

The overarching preoccupation of the film is the iconic status Dylan was thrust into after his early success and the reaction of his folkie fans when he continued to reinvent himself and his music. The movie's portrayal of the legendary performance at the Newport folk festival where Dylan first 'went electric' has Dylan and his band ascending the stage and assaulting the audience with machine guns instead of guitars. This is how betrayed Dylan's 'followers' were at his apparent selling out the purity of folk for the crassness of pop.

The connection between Jesus and a modern celebrity, especially one whose position was vested with more significance than the usual pop idol, is in how their followers treated them. Dylan's fans put him on a pedestal, made him the 'spokesmen of a generation', and in many ways became his devotees. When the man moved beyond the image and in directions not expected by the followers, they felt betrayed. The one who was the epitome of their ideal, they later felt justified calling a traitor. The savior becomes the Judas. So it was for Dylan, so too for Jesus.

Dylan fans wanted him to keep doing the acoustic political stuff they sentimentally thought would change the world; Jesus' disciples wanted him to keep up the trajectory of the Messiah apparently come to kick out the Romans and lead their nation to its glorious destiny. When Jesus started talking about rendering to Caesar what was Caesar's and the inclusion of the gentiles, I'm sure his crowds were thinking Jesus was selling out. And when the mission headed to Jerusalem, building up to a very different kind of confrontation with the powers-that-be than was expected of the Messiah, even the closest core of disciples were telling Jesus the first-century Messianic equivalent of "play us some of your early stuff!"

When a supposed disciple denounces the master as traitor it just shows the fact that the disciple never really intended to follow beyond the path they already knew on their own. The problem with being a follower is that it entails that the leader is the only one who could know the destination, and even he usually doesn't.

The persona of a celebrity, whether cultural or religious, is the possession of the fans and will be guarded from anyone who would disfigure it, even the person sharing the persona's name. The idolized savior is a projection tenaciously clung to and claimed by its followers who are capable of killing to protect its purity, even if it means killing the savior himself.

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Conversation Part III: Morality - Theistic, Christian and Otherwise

(continued from previous)

The conversation on the moral superiority of religion vs. atheism is in a way not interesting to me. If that argument were a horse race, mine would still be in the stable, biding his time, thoughtfully munching hay. As I've tried to say, I don't think being religious or having faith is itself any kind of virtue precisely because I do not recognize any strict epistemological dichotomy between faith and reason. (This is why I always gag when I hear someone lauding 'people of faith' in the political realm. The grouping 'people of faith' is beyond vacuous. What a stupid category of people to be in favor of.)

The only reason I pick up the gauntlet here is because the 'new atheists' so consistently seem to hold the opposite view in that they portray having religious faith in general as an inherently morally dangerous enterprise and thereby not holding such beliefs as inherently morally superior. (This is especially so for Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins, Dennett is much more sophisticated as is perhaps to be expected.) They do this without significantly distinguishing between different religions based on the content of their teachings and without distinguishing between actions taken by nominal believers that utterly contradict the tradition's teaching (hypocrites) and those taken in response to agreement with the broadest streams of the tradition.

At the same time that they do not deign to actually engage the content of the traditions they lump together, they speak from a perspective which is impossible to define and, as I will argue, is unable to defend its own moral standing on the same grounds it criticizes the theistic worldview. So we have a group of people speaking as if from a moral high-ground which they are completely unable to give a reasonable defense for holding, denouncing another group that, however in-credible you find its basis, at least has very specific internal reasons for holding its moral perspective. This confusion is why my horse is out of the barn. I am not out here to win the argument between theism and atheism or religion and secularism, but to significantly reframe it.

First I will describe how materialist or secularist assumptions do not entail a morality. Second, I will revisit the case of the morally hypocritical atheist. Third, I will consider some secular sources of morality and look at how the materialist's own assumptions interact with his moral beliefs. Fourth, I will attend to an important mistaken conclusion from the case for morality depending on something transcendent. Fifth, I will return to the case of the one inherently dangerous element that can attend secular morality.

It is of course very common for philosophers or theologians to speak analogically of 'height' or 'transcendence'. The secularist or materialist worldview on the other hand is a flattened perspective. The strict materialist or secularist is one who insists on understanding everything immanently and thereby cuts off the possibility of appealing to any external criteria. The mechanism of flattening a worldview comes in re-description. The materialist points to a perceived dimension of height or transcendence and reduces it to another, immanent, level of explanation - for example the biological, political, psychological or economic. Viewing everything flatly doesn't change what counts as morality, it redescribes behavior previously thought to be moral on another, amoral, level.

So not only is there no longer recourse to terms like God to defend desirable criteria, anything substituted for God is either itself a transcendental term, belief in which is equally or even more inexplicable, or, if it is truly immanent, fails to be able to provide criteria able to qualitatively assess the immanent world.

I propose that for the word morality to have any meaning, the morals must actually represent something really real, not merely an appearance of one thing that is really just some natural epiphenomenon.

The atheist employing the idea of morality derived from universal human feelings or common sense is missing the fact that flattening the world into two dimensions has removed the possibility of morality even being a useful word. The flat world is the world reduced of its transcendent dimension which is the dimension ideas like morality lived in. In the flattened world, morality is no longer really right or wrong - who could have the authority to say so? - it is just whatever the interest group or species with the power to do so defines it as. If we're going to start down the road of reductionism, we should have the courage to follow through to its logical conclusions unless compelled otherwise.

The game of reductionism is a dangerous one, its sword really is two-edged. If one starts with an assumed naturalism or materialism in order to say that all kinds of religious phenomena are just expressions of various natural phenomena, fine. But to be consistent one has to be able to swallow the conclusion that human morality, all of it, is just a chimera as well. If one dislikes that conclusion and knows of some other way of coming up with a basis for morality, I'm more than willing to listen. But beware, as Hitchens mentions in his book (and then ignores the implications of): nobody has been able to come up with a logically convincing and consistent secular basis for morality at least since David Hume pointed out the impossibility of bridging the gap from is to ought. As in, these are the facts; therefore, this is or is not as it should be. No pile of facts is big enough to constitute a single qualitative judgement on the rightness or wrongness of any other fact. If you can't provide a foundation either, then you have to admit that with respect to morals the theist and the atheist are on exactly the same ground relative to one another.

The theist operates upon a morality consistent with his worldview which is itself largely based on faith, the atheist operates upon a morality he has no rational basis for but takes to be correct based on faith. The atheist cannot provide a rational defense of the reality of his morality given his metaphysical views for exactly the same reason that the theist cannot coerce belief in the ground of his morality. The theist has at least the luxury of being internally consistent in his views, the atheist does not, and the discomfort of this leads to all manner of logical abuse.

This amorality of materialism is where my point of the impossibility of a morally hypocritical atheist originates. We've agreed, atheism as such, has no moral content and I am happy to add that neither does theism. What morality a theist holds comes from the character of the god he believes actually exists. The work is done on the level of faith that God exists. But once this is believed, the basis for morals, for good or ill, is firmly in place. The atheist believes himself to be 'neutral' or without any faith commitments as regards the existence of any gods. I don't buy it, but for the sake of argument, fine - he has no faith in regards to the existence of God or gods. He still hasn't explained how he could begin to defend morality from its detractors or conjure up a particular moral perspective, let alone one from which to denounce the theist from.

(Another hypothesis might be that one could just be a hypocritical human being. I have no idea what this would mean. The (biological?) definition of 'human being' implies no morals in and of itself. For example, let's say I'm a human being that just happens to enjoy rape and murder. But those are such value-laden terms! Let's try to be more neutral and objective. Really I just like (or rather am programmed) to spread my genetic material and get rid of competitors for successful completion of such. Perhaps this behavior is part and parcel of being human like it is for so many other purely biologically determined species. After all, we don't speak of bacteria committing rape or wolves murdering. They're just animals being animals, the perfectly flat biological definition of which rules out morality or immorality. For me to be hypocritical in my actions, I would have to hold some further belief about humanity that entailed that the forceful spreading my genes and disposing of rivals was wrong. If I don't believe any such thing then maybe I just have a different idea of humanity than someone who does. Such a one would either need to convince me that their idea of humanity is the right one or else how true morality can be derived without any tradition-based view of humanity.)

Frankly I find the solution of morality coming from 'human solidarity' to beg as many questions as it attempts to answer. I am not convinced humans have such an inborn idea of solidarity with their species. My evidence for this is strictly empirical. Even if they did though, this would not necessarily constitute morality. At most I could go along with the human animal having an evolved sense of protection of its own extended kin network or tribe; one protects and cares for those sharing one's own genetic material. But this is not morality anymore than it would be for any other species. A Water Buffalo protecting her calf from a pack of Lions might look noble to you and me (because we're anthropomorphizing), just as the human mother going without food to feed her child might bring tears to our eyes. But come on, set the sentimentality aside for a minute and let's really follow the skeptical rabbit hole all the way down. If morality is just nature's way of tricking the individual organism into caring about the next generation and the genetic community's survival more than its own, then we have not yet found something that could rightly be called morality.

For another way of showing why secular alternative sources for morality are not logically compelling, allow me to illustrate how reductionist skepticism of religious morality works just as well on secular morality by translating a paragraph intended to dismiss the specificity of religiously derived morals. I will put the original vocabulary in parentheses and my suggested substitutes in brackets.

"To invoke a (heavenly)[common-sense secular] morality you must be specific in your judgments. If (God)[reason or conscience] told you this or that action is unethical, be prepared for an answer that will get you no where close to justice. (God)[Reason] tells you its wrong? Well (he)[it] tells me it's right. This is the kind of relativism we keep (out of)[in] real courtrooms for a reason. You can swear on the (Bible)[human solidarity or the categorical imperative] (or not), but the moment you pull it to your side to defend yourself you will be very quickly dismissed." [Because why in the world should anyone else care if you think one should feel solidarity with the species or only act in a way that one could consistently will that everyone followed a similar course of action. What if they happen to think that that's perfect nonsense and choose to (unhypocritically) act in whatever way they please?]

My belief that reductionistic worldviews do not have sufficient criteria to muster any morality whatsoever is the reason that secular humanism - so proud of its morality - is, and always will be, so utterly unappealing to me. Philosophically it contains all of the 'weaknesses' of Christianity and nihilism without the consistency of either. Secular humanist thinkers who attempt to defend morality are, in my view, just sentimentalists unwilling to give up the ghost. The only philosopher's doubt who gives me pause is the nihilistic laughter of a Nietzsche. If there is no God then there really is nothing.

Allow me just to anticipate another common objection before it's made. It is often said that the theist who argues for the dependence of morality upon a worldview including a certain kind of God as I do (or at least some other kind of transcendental principle), is demeaning humanity and himself. The argument goes that humanity had morality before religion - people knew it was wrong to kill before they had the ten commandments (Though if it were really such universal common sense, then why would it still happen so much?) - and that further it is scary to assume that any particular theist would be out raping and pillaging if only he lost certain of his beliefs about God.

It is important to see why this misses the point completely.

I do not think that I would go out and commit a whole slew of abominable acts if I woke up tomorrow completely lacking in faith. I would probably continue in largely the same behavior I do now based upon what I have been taught is right and wrong (some of which very well might be wrong). The difference is that I would no longer have any rational reason for committing moral acts and refraining from immoral ones. I would still believe that rape and murder were wrong but I would no longer have any reason why they were.

The fallout of the above is that while both the Christian and the materialist atheist can be moral, and both probably will have some type of morality, the Christian must be moral, while the materialist's flattened worldview makes morality optional, a commitment of faith not derived from his more fundamental commitments. This means that materialist atheists or any others who assume their own neutrality must give up their presumably privileged position from which they adjudicate the morals of others.

So again we come around to the point of a certain danger inherent in secular morality. I am not reneging on my point of the moral neutrality of theism vs. atheism in general. The danger of secular morality is not that it doesn't have any morals, or has worse morals, but in its utter confidence in their rightness; its perceived lack of faith. Faith seeks assurance, secular moral reasoning seeks, and too often thinks it has found, certainty. This is why (at least three of) the 'new atheists' sound so like fundamentalists to much of even their atheistic audience. They are so unabashedly confident in the way that only one who believes his ideas derive from reason alone can be. (Atheist fundamentalists largely share a philosophy of knowledge with their Christian cousins. Fundamentalism in Christianity has not to do with the doctrines believed but in how one thinks those beliefs are arrived at; not with what is believed but how those beliefs are held. Orthodox Christians have been around for millenia, fundamentalists are a very modern phenomenon and, to my mind, are basically heretics.)

The Christian may take decisive action, but if she is thinking Christianly, she must do so in fear and trembling. She may err greatly, but if she is a Christian, she is aware of this possibility just about better than any, called so often as she is to repent for past mistakes. If she continues to consciously err in disregard of her professed beliefs then she is a hypocrite and should be named as such. The strict materialist as we have seen cannot be called a hypocrite if he denies the reality of any morality. But if he does feel a moral calling, the secular moralist, if he fools himself into thinking he has banished faith and proceeds by the pure light of reason, will come to his conclusions without-a-doubt and will proceed without caution. Woe to those who get in his way!

This goes to the point about the dangerous confidence of a nation like America. I don't necessarily disagree with defenses of the pleasures and privileges of living in America. The point I was making didn't have to do with life in America, but the life of America and Americans on the rest of the world. The Roman empire was undoubtedly a fine place to live too, if you were a citizen. But I hardly think the Romans patting of themselves on the back for the height of their civilization went over that well with those unfortunate enough to be labeled barbarians. The confidence of America in its status as such a great (the best!) place to live is why it has been so damned confident spreading its wonderful way of life to places like the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam, Central America and Iraq, countries and civilizations whose "thanks but no thanks" isn't very readily listened to. "No," says America, "You don't understand how great it is to be an American. Just try it!"

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Conversation part II: Present and Future Focus in Christianity

(continued from previous)

For the sake of the current discussion we'll call the two elements of the Christian tradition under consideration by the shorthand of present and future focus. The present focus is the spirituality of everydayness, the cultivation of moment-by-moment awareness. It includes both the consider the lilies stuff and the validation of finite historical human life itself. The future focus is eschatology, the orientation toward an ultimate end stuff.

Now when I talk about this as a strand within Christian thought, I don't mean the kind of strand that can be pulled out and employed on it's own. Pulling one strand out, any more than hypothetically, unravels the whole thing. (If you follow the metaphor, this is precisely what I take secular culture to have done: pulled out of traditional cultures the elements that it liked while ignoring their overall context. To switch metaphors, I take the ethics of secularism to be a kind of plucking of religious fruit which ignores the roots necessary to actually produce this fruit in the first place.) So, though the strands of Christian teaching can be talked about to some extent independently, they are always interrelated and when separated from one another completely, snap, so to speak. Perhaps it would have been better to speak of the sides of coins which are much more obviously just different angles of the same reality.

While I would understand why a secular onlooker would counsel the religious believer to just develop certain aspects of religion and ignore others (because this is precisely what he has done) the Christian cannot understand this as any more than being told to try and run faster by hopping on one leg.

Given these two distinctive strands of Christian teaching, we turn to some common criticisms and problems they are alleged to lead to. Many would argue that a person is at great risk of abdicating her everyday responsibilities to the extent that she gets caught up in mystical ideals of living in the moment, and to the degree that she thinks about the afterlife, she will ignore the needs of life around her. Notice that in both cases the Christian is criticized for the same thing: a lack of focus on the material, 'real' world around them.

The way that these criticisms apply to the instance of the clergy is instructive here. On the one hand, religious leaders are regularly criticized for being too otherworldly, talking about heaven and saving souls when people are hungry and dying. On the other hand, the criticism is most often paired with the reasoning that they do this in order to secure power and amass wealth in the here and now. So which is it, are the clergy too focused on this world or the next? Is Christianity to be blamed equally because it produces people both like St. Francis, the preacher to birds, and people like St. Dominic, the heresy hunter? Which one is the real Christian, neither, just one of them, or both?

Now obviously I would share anyone's disgust with any member or class of the clergy that would use talk of afterlife to extend their own material advantage. Take the most egregious examples: a Priest pocketing money from indulgences sold to the poor in order to shave years off Purgatory, baptisms in the New World used as justification for immediately killing the 'Christian' savages and conveniently taking their land, or just the charlatan televangelist tricking people out of their disposable income. These are our textbook cases of abuse of Religious privilege or authority.

So the question becomes: are these individuals too focused on their present lives, or are they too focused on heaven such that they allow themselves to commit such heinous actions in this then-devalued present life? But this is exactly the wrong question to ask.

On the one hand, it seems clear that these clergy are paying all the attention in the world to the present. They show clearly by their actions, that though they might hypocritically preach about the next life, this life is the only one that really matters to them. (It's hard to imagine even the most cynical atheist sincerely alleging my exemplars to be acting out of the true sense of Christianity. The whole point of being a hypocrite is that one's actions belie one's convictions.) On the other hand, seen Christianly, they are obviously not paying enough proper attention to their present life. Our wayward Christians do not need to tone down one part of Christianity and crank up another part, they need to practice Christianity! The answer is not to take a balanced approached to this life over against eternity, as if these were two different substances to be taken in equal measure, but focus on both lives, or aspects of life, rightly.

What we've been calling putting too much focus on one's present life or the afterlife is really not an error of where one is looking but in how one is looking. It's a qualitative not a quantitative error. One must not look to this present life as an end in itself but rather as a participation in and preparation for the next just as one must not look to the next life as an escape from this life but as a fulfillment and redemption of its beautifully created intentions.

Christian perspective then is bi-focal, it is properly focused simultaneously both on the creation around one and the eschaton toward which that creation yearns. Again, the question is not over which world one is looking to but what one sees the world as. If one sees the earth as creation then it is impossible to devalue it. When one looks at human beings who, though sinners and fallen, are fellow creatures they will be seen as image bearers of God. And one who viewed his fellows as such would be utterly incapable of committing the acts our exemplary hypocrites are guilty of. It's a little harder to learn to see this way than to walk and chew gum at the same time, but it can be done.

Now, when I mentioned above that our hypocrites can be seen, regardless of what they profess, as acting based on the assumption that this world is all there is, I'm not saying that their clearly immoral behavior is the only way of acting based on that assumption. There are plenty of examples of saintly types among atheistic folk too. But I'm curious on what particularly secular grounds an atheist can both tell the clergymen that it is wrong to do what he is doing, which he probably knows, and why. In other words, without disingenuously resorting to the authority of the believer's tradition, on what grounds other than personal preference could the atheist tell the clergymen, or a fellow atheist for that matter, that his actions were as despicable as we believe them to be.

My advice to the mis-behaving Christian is quite simple: act like a Christian. Christianity has plenty of reason for opposing all of this loathsome behavior and absolutely no reason for supporting it. The actions we criticized happen not because of, but in spite of the individual in question's Christian belief, if in fact they have any. The atheist could similarly tell the immoral atheist to act more atheistically. What could that possibly mean? Again, I'm not saying that atheism necessarily leads to immorality, but I honestly don't know how it could ever oppose it other than arbitrarily. Christians have no problem finding grounds to criticize the hypocrisy of their fellow believers and to tell them that they lack the right quality of behavior. And that is a good thing! What resources does atheism have for assessing correct and incorrect qualities of another's behavior, Christian or not, in the first place? The question is: can one be a morally hypocritical atheist?

Another problem brought up in this regard is the idea of religious action resulting from obedience to a call of some sort. We are fine with people being religious up to a point, but we don't like even the structural possibility for someone to hear a calling to some kind of radical life or action. We are worried about someone obeying if they believed, like Abraham, that God was commanding them to sacrifice their son.

My understanding of the Christian faith and Christian ethics means that this possibility cannot be ruled out. The nature of Christian faith means that one's ethical commitments are in a sense 'open ended,' that is, structurally open to include following through on something one does not fully understand. This leaves one open to undertaking heroic and selfless actions, but I acknowledge that there absolutely is the danger of also doing great evil. Those who have sincerely believed that God commanded them to do something vary from Moses leading his people to freedom and Jesus laying down his life for others, to Spanish inquisitors and 911 hijackers.

Enlightenment rationality tried to solve the problem of religious violence stemming from faith and obedience by advocating a mode of deafness to voices other than one's own conscience. But the danger of deafness is just as great as that of listening to the wrong voice. I would submit that it does not solve the problem of humanity's proclivity to commit evil and could even exacerbate it.

The reason it does not solve the problem is that the call one is deaf to could just as easily be that of the orphan or the widow and the voice of reason or conscience one follows can just as easily self-justifyingly lead to evil as that of a false god. The reason it could be even worse to blindly follow reason is that the follower of reason does not believe himself to be following anything and is thus even more confident and certain that his actions are just than the believer. The Christian believer who acts on faith knows that he can err, even that error is likely, and he thus should be more willing to question his motives. Doubt of course is the correlate of faith, not its opposite. The actor who believes his actions are wholly derived from reason has no reason to doubt his conclusions. These are the people we must watch out for.

Just think of all the wars that have been justified by serving the greater good, freeing those under dictators and burning villages in order to save them. The advocates of these wars probably believed just as strongly that their cause was just as the terrorist believes he is doing God's will. And the victims of secular wars are just as dead as those of religious wars. I also believe it is no coincidence that the two most dangerous empires of the 20th century, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., are nation states wholly founded on enlightenment philosophies of progress and justice which they believed were neutrally derived from reason. [1]

The problem with hearing any 'voice' whether one believes it's God or conscience, is one of discernment. And this is really the point all the way back to my original post on wrestling with a sense of vocation: the work of discernment is hard. It can be as tiring as wrestling with angels, or devils. This is what the apostle meant when he said that one must test the spirits to see if they are of God.

1. This is a paraphrase of Stanley Hauerwas from Resident Aliens

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Conversation on the Christian View of Sacrifice, the World & Eternity

(The following is part of a conversation with a friend wherein I try to answer his objections to my earlier post as to the place of self-sacrifice in Christianity.) [1]

We are going to talk about two seemingly separate strands within Christian thought. On the one hand there is the strand that underwrites or encourages a kind of sacred awareness of the present. You know, "consider the lilies", and all that jazz. A lot of people these days make this kind of insight into the entirety of their spirituality (they also seem to prefer to find their source material in the East, though I think the reason for that has much more to do with faddishness – it takes one to know one - than with what the tradition actually makes available) but most would have at least a sentimental appreciation of that kind of teaching whatever their background.

Christopher Hitchens, incidentally, is not one of these. He finds this type of advice to be positively immoral. I take it that this criticism stems from the perspective that the line of thought represented would lead to a type of resignation toward life, a lack of ambition or direction or maybe motivation to make things better for oneself and one's fellows here and now. This would be basically the old Marxist criticism that religion has the effect of getting people to not notice and attempt to better their circumstances. (This is not a bad criticism in itself, in that this is how religion, including Christianity, is in fact used by cultures and many, if not all of the powers that be. But this is not to say that since a tool can be misused we should discount its intended function.)

On the other hand, there are obvious, deeply held reasons for Christians to care about the shape of their lives. The best expression of this other strand of thought was probably made best by one of those mean old nasty Church fathers that people are so fond of lambasting, St. Irenaeus who said that the glory of God is the human person fully alive. What this means to me is that God delights in what we delight in, and is joyful at what we are made joyful by. But note that like for the human parent in regards to their child, it does not mean that whatever gives us pleasure for the moment gives him pleasure. More about how this comes about below, but basically if the Christian anthropology is right, that we are creatures first and foremost, then, while this knocks us out of the running to be gods – all our own little centers of universes - it gives us a very elevated position vis a vis random bits of purposeless matter. If we are creatures, then we are created for a purpose, and if we have a purpose, we should find it and live it full force.

While I would grant a lot of ground to criticisms made of the failure of Christians in general to live this rightly, I would still want to argue that, for the Christian at least, there will be times where the search for self-fulfillment commonly understood or the call to follow one's bliss will have to be denied. It is incoherent to imagine a Christianity that does not call for genuine sacrifice.

But the beauty of the Gospel is that precisely insofar as we follow through on the sacrifices we are called to make we will find ourselves more than fulfilled. Everyone knows the appropriate verses here: to lose is to find, to be last is to be first, so on and so forth. This is somewhat paradoxical but not that hard to grasp really. At bottom this just means that we are to deny a certain shallow self-fulfillment in the name of a greater, truer one. Everyone has basic experiences of this: to earn the satisfaction of finishing a marathon, one has to do a lot of painful training and preparation.

So it is not really a matter of pitting fulfillment of the self against sacrificing the self for others. Christian teaching rejects the idea that satisfying human needs is a zero-sum game. The truth is that we are actually not in competition with one another for happiness. To serve the Other really is to serve God, not in some loosey-goosey metaphorical sense but actually, factually to do something for God – "whatever you do for the least of these…" It's obvious that if anything in the Christian story is true, then this would mean finding our true meaning in life. If God is God, and created the world and us, then doing what we were made to do would be nothing if not the most glorious, blissful, joy-filled life possible. The problem is, it doesn't always feel this way. (Obviously, as I write this and try to act based upon it, I rarely if ever feel fulfilled making whatever daily sacrifices I'm called to perform.) So instead of trying to shave the corners off the square peg of our selves to fit into the round whole we were made for, we go around creating our own square holes to fit ourselves into. But the fit is never quite right.

And this dynamic of winning by losing goes to another objection that is often made against Christianity, by others and even by myself at times. It can be alleged that Christian teaching is just advocating a kind of delayed egotism. Indeed, sadly, sometimes individual Christians absolutely are guilty of reducing Christianity in this way. They would make the Christian life and the expectation for the afterlife a mere transaction where the person trades some unpleasant business here and now in order to reap the great payoff by and by. (The unpleasant business here and now can fall into the traditional category of 'works,' but faith itself, when taken to be a kind of unpleasant epistemological state to have to be borne for the time-being, fulfills the same role.)

This mistaken tendency is related to another that would have the incarnation of God in Jesus as a kind of mysterious disguise used to trick the fair-weather friends and attract only the true believers. This version would make Jesus' ascension and glorification as a kind of pulling-off-of-the-mask 'gotcha' moment where the enemies of God realize their mistake, weeping and gnashing their teeth while the disciples happily exclaim "Ha, I knew it all along!"

But this cannot be right. Christians believe that in Jesus, precisely through his earthly life, emptied of glory, full of suffering, destined for death, God himself is most fully revealed. The incarnation is not something to get past to see God (except insofar as we need to get past our mistaken expectations of who God should be) it is the very picture where God has most clearly shown what he is like. God is with us, in pain, in suffering, in life and in death. Christ's resurrection, ascension and glorification is God's ultimate seal of approval on creaturely, physical embodiment and the kind of self-giving, self-emptying way of being in the world that Jesus exemplified. It is not rewarded with an altogether different kind of life, it is shown to be the kind of life that imitates God himself and participates in his plan. Ultimately to live the kind of life Jesus lived, to the extent we are able, though it seems to be swimming against the stream of culture or human nature or whatever, is really to be going in line with how God intended things, to be going 'with the grain of the universe.'

Therefore Christian teaching is not that selflessness is a temporary state of affairs, a test to pass in order to be rewarded with an ultimate self-centered paradise. The Christian faith teaches that selflessness is ultimately how we were made to be (even the doctrine of the Trinity shows this: not even God exists for himself alone, but always in self-giving for an-Other.) And thus this is how we are destined to be if we are ever to be what might be called joyful but is better named blessed.

{…Kevin, wiping sweat from his brow, steps down from the pulpit…}



1. A good deal of credit for this conversation - the opportunity to wrestle with things, not the longwindedness with which I do it - goes to my interlocutor who will here go unnamed.

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Scripture, Church, Service: Personal Disciplines III

I have done next to no reading of scripture on its own over the past few years. I read a lot of theological books that quote scripture or reflect on stories or themes from it. There are of course scripture readings and sermons every Sunday. There are scripture readings in my prayer book. My church small group has done studies of a book or two of scripture. But on my own, with Bible in hand, I have done very very little. I have spent more time reading books about books about books of the Bible than I have reading the Bible. I don’t know why this is.

Part of me feels that I need to know a certain amount more background, context or theory to be adequate to the task. But those are all just so many excuses. Maybe I just think it would be less enjoyable reading, that it would be just harder. But that’s not necessarily true either. There is no doubt this is something I need to change.

Church: I began attending my wife's church, Church of the Servant, from time to time as a matter of familial obligation before, and then during, our first years of marriage. We were also married in her church more or less because she wanted to and I didn't have any other ideas. The Sunday-morning ritual had its pleasures though. The preaching in the church (now ours) was (and is) incredible. I enjoyed the beauty and intellectual stimulation of the sermons even when faith wasn't anywhere in my sights.

When things started shifting in my head and heart (who can say which was first?), I began to want to go more often and soon every week just for the reminder of what was so exciting about the faith and for seeing it come together in a worshipful setting. I was, and still am, torn at times about denominational and congegational affiliation. Fretting about theological subtleties and various mixed motivations for staying or going alternately. This conversation, like so many others, plays endlessly in my head lists of all the various bad reasons I could have for doing the right thing and good reasons I could have for doing the wrong thing.

What eventually convinced me that I should join this church as an adult member, and what convinces me to stay committed, was that it felt like home for me. To the extent that home is where family is, and family are those whom you do not get to choose, I would say that I felt this congregation's claim on me before I felt I could claim it. It seemed to both speak to me where I was, being part of the denomination I was raised in, but also to challenge me the way I was ready to be challenged since it is a unique congregation within the denomination. So i feel like it is a place to both put down and discover old roots.

I have made church-attendance fairly important. We don't miss too many Sundays unless we're out of town. Most Sunday mornings church is just where I want to be. I think it really does re-focus me, at least for a little while and I of course have a growing number of connections to people that I don't want to go another week without seeing. While we don't attend the night service like I did as a kid (few do these days) it could be that I'm just falling into the behavior of church-attendance I was raised for. I don't know, maybe that's not necessarily anything to be ashamed of anyhow. The view of Sunday worship I've tried to live up to is as a weekly training in seeing the world rightly, in getting priorities right, and of course as a time of learning through proximity from those further along in the way. Again the tension arises: do I force my will to do the action even when it is disagreeable, trying to keep the real goals in mind, or do I avoid the pitfalls of pride and Phariseeism by doing whatever I feel like at the time?

Service: I do not really do anything in the way of disciplined service. As I mentioned, I try to be more serving in my daily work and family tasks, or at least see them more as service. (Maybe the two are reciprical: seeing something more as service increases one's ability to serve through it, and serving more increases the ease with which the service in something is recognized.) But I'm not someone you'll see serving in a soup-kitchen line or other obvious do-gooder role these days. I idealize those stereotypical heroic front-line roles as the epitome of Christ-like service but have never really participated in them. I resented the near coercive ways these activities were encouraged in school for example, finding it easier to stay home with pure, though self-serving motives than to serve others with mixed ones. I suppose though that the recipients of aid don't much care about the motives of those bringing aid.

I have tried, especially over the last year, to start serving in and through the church itself, the place I think should be the focus of a Christian's service anyhow. So I started volunteering for whatever for whatever responsibilities advertised a need for help within earshot. I currently help out running the sound board one Sunday a month, I've taught a few Sunday-school classes and I just started a three-year term as Deacon. I don't know if any of these things are specially suited to any gift of mine, but they are all things that the Church needs done and I feel good in general about contributing to the daily running of or the institution that has and continues to do so much to serve me.

There are dangers, I think, to being active in the institutional life of an organization like a church. It is easy to either lose sight of the goals of the organization and focus too much on control and management or to become jaded by seeing the nuts and bolts operations and the flawed human beings who are trying to come together in the service of something beautiful; trying to be something beautiful. I think seeing the behind-the-scenes operations of my childhood Church contributed to my disenchantment with that Church and maybe religion in general. Though probably even the most sincere and humble Church in the world wouldn't have allayed my omnivorous doubts at the time.

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Work: Personal Disciplines II

I’ve been torn for some time, all along really, about work, both inside and outside the home. With all of the disciplines, drawn to theorizing as I am, I am not able to separate how I think the discipline should be thought of from how I actually experience it. My struggle is with how to get them to be one and the same.

With work this tension is the most obvious. On the one hand I believe one should perform gratefully, as God’s calling even, whatever work one finds oneself given to do. (I've found the clearest theological exposition of this view in the Benedictine and my own Reformed tradition.) So if I find myself working at an insurance company talking on the phone all day and chasing a toddler, rocking a screaming baby and washing dishes all night, then that’s what I should be happy doing. On the other hand maybe I have a real calling or gift in some other area that I should explore by going back to graduate school or seminary or at least by continually and intentionally developing whatever that gift might be in my 'free time'.

This might just be a tension I have to deal with but how I actually experience this does not feel healthy. I experience it by feeling resentful of the daily things I am given to do, the job that I should be more grateful for, the family that I should be more appreciative of and present to. This is obviously not a good situation, but how does one go beyond one's comfort zone and pursue a calling if it is not somehow away from one's normal, daily life. (Indeed, the very word calling seems to have the connotation of calling out of one life and to another life while the word gift seems to have the connotation of nearness and presence.)

Any possible way that I can imagine creating a life where my daily life and work involved my passion for education and the world of ideas, would necessarily involve years of sacrifice that I would ask of my family. How could I possibly do this just to satisfy my own selfish urges. Aren't I just ungrateful for all the comfort and ease I've been given and looking for even more by way of self-fulfillment? But then the other voice says: "Staying on the track you're on is just your allowing yourself to follow the path of the upwardly mobile, middle class. You're just justifying your trying to grasp the good life with the theology of everydayness." To which the other voice replies: "But really your describing your desire to pursue a career that involves your hobbies of thinking and reading and writing and calling it a vocation is just the theological justification of your own self-centeredness." Then the third voice comes in and says something to the effect of calling the whole interior monologue a sign of hyper-narcissism. The statement that "we should never have scruples about whether the state in life we have chosen is the most perfect or what sort of progress we are making. These are merely signs of excessive self-regard." [1] hits me like a punch in the gut.

It sounds trite but it really is anguishing to think about. I find it nearly impossible to compromise with myself. I feel like I either need to give up all desire for any change in my situation right now or I need to start changing it right now. The idea that I should be contented with my work for now with the possibility that another door will open down the road when the family situation allows it, doesn't satisfy any of the voices. It seems to validate the negative interpretations of all three.

How does one say that one way of life is right and another wrong when either judgement can be seen as self-serving? What does one do when one can't even discern one's own true motivations? How can the mind know the secret desires and motivations of the heart?

1. Prior Aelred, Singing God's Praises p. 304

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Prayer & Fasting: Personal Disciplines I

The first spiritual discipline I have worked at is prayer. I began with the assumption or conviction that prayer should be regular and as fixed in time as possible. I’m not sure what gave me this idea at the time, but I was sure that if Christian devotion meant anything it involved somehow submitting oneself to God, and submission can not happen in prayer if I only pray when and how I feel like it.

I came to understand it later in Benedictine terms as what Anthony Damron, O.S.B. calls “the sanctification of time.” He goes on to write that formal prayers are necessary because relying on spontaneous prayer would be too irregular and thus not useful for growth while also recognizing formal prayers have dangers too, that of becoming incantation. (Singing God’s Praises p. 43)

My attempts at actually going about praying, like I said, have been very mixed. I wanted a prayer regimen that was based in a book that was fairly easy to follow, that heavily incorporated the psalms, and that involved at least a few readings or offices a day. I leafed through the Book of Common Prayer a few times, but didn’t really get how it worked and didn’t know how to figure it out. (Outside the Abbey, I’ve only been to an Episcopal service a handful of times and don’t really know very many Episcopalians.) I came across a new prayer compilation, I think just about three years ago, still in the first year of my conversion, called The Divine Hours edited by Phyllis Tickle. It included four Offices a day, each with one complete psalm, a Psalm fragment repeated a few times throughout, some Collects from the BCP, a paragraph reading of scripture, the Gloria which I then recognized (this was also probably right about the time that I was brought to the Abbey for the first time), and also some other religious poetry or hymns.

When I started, I was very committed and read all four offices, one in the morning, one at lunch, then next right after work was through for the day and last, right before bed. I’m not sure how long I kept that up, but I think it was for a few months. Then I stopped for a few months after becoming disillusioned. One problem was that the book was rather large and thus a pain to haul back and forth to work. I then started back up for a little while doing all four, but soon left that off for an idea of my own devising. I continued using the prayer book for morning and evening prayers. During the day, I selected and memorized five Collects from the BCP to recite in place of a longer Office. The goal was to have a total of seven periods of the day, and I ordered them as made best sense for the rhythm of a workday. I couldn’t do them at fixed times, since my schedule varied, and I didn’t have five events to base them on, like meals and so forth. My solution was to recite them at fixed intervals, an amount of time that spread them roughly evenly between waking and sleeping (I think it was about every two and a quarter or two and a half hours.) I procured a watch that had an automatically resetting timer that also had a vibrate function, whenever it went off, the push of one button turned it off and started the countdown again. Wherever I was during the day, I would get a vibration every two and a half or so hours that no one else could usually notice, then at the next available moment recite the prayer mentally or verbally, depending on the setting.

I was pretty proud of my solution because I felt it suited my goals and matched the needs of my schedule and abilities. I liked the idea of having the simple memorized prayers and their carrying me through the day, so that even if I worked late, or ate lunch early, the cycle kept me aware of my relative position in the day. I liked the idea of a call to prayer; my little watch mirroring a monastary’s bell. Of course, I chose the number seven also to duplicate a monastic day’s cycle even if my ‘Little Hours’ were very little, about thirty seconds.

Most of all, I wanted something on a fixed schedule (intervals being an adequate substitute for fixed times in my mind) because I was drawn to the idea of making prayer a kind of seasoning spread throughout the day, acting as a reminder that everything I was doing during the day should be done with an awareness of God and as an offering to God. Since the interval model could and did catch me literally doing anything and everything in my day it held the opportunity of drawing me out of my indifference and redirecting me to my present task with greater mindfulness. Well that was the goal.

My actual performance of the discipline of prayer seems to swing from extreme to extreme. Either I am praying a lot and wondering why, or praying very little and wishing I was. (I try to get insight into this wishing but it's slippery. I don't think it's just guilt, which would obviously not be a good motivation. But just as I'm not always sure that my prayers are genuine, I'm not even sure that my desire for genuine prayer is genuine.)

These days have been very crazy: a new baby, an illness, just all around unpredictable schedules. But probably none of that is really to blame. I've just been going through a period of low motivation the last few months. These things seem to go in cycles for me. A good day for me lately has meant just a brief prayer before bed, read from my prayer book, or not, depending on how late I stay up and when my daughter wakes up.

There are a few other practices I've experimented with around the general topic of prayer, the first was the rosary I bought sometime in the first year of my conversion. Now I wasn’t very serious about intending to use it, I was even a little wary of buying it, seeming as it did to fit into that old tendency of mine to focus on accessorizing hobbies over the hobbies themselves. I was at the store with my wife who wanted to buy a rosary because she had been studying it a bit and I just got one for the heck of it too. In an interesting foreshadowing, the rosary I bought, selected based on purely aesthetic bases – it looked fairly solid and simple – turned out to be a Benedictine one, having Benedict’s cross embedded in the crucifix and a Benedictine medal at the joining. I never really did much with it, but I had never really intended to. For a time I used it to do repetitions of the Jesus prayer punctuated by the Gloria and then an Our Father at the end. I never found this avenue very fruitful – I think I was too self-conscious about it – but I haven’t ruled out trying to use it again.

I’ve many times read or heard someone talking up the benefits of scripture memorization and whenever I do, it strikes me as just the perfect thing to do. The first place to start was obviously the Psalms which over a few months I memorized eight of, but I also memorized, as prayers, a few religious poems: one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, A Dirge Without Music by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and the first of the Eleven Verses to the Lord by John Berryman, then also some non-religious poetry. I did the majority of this about two years ago. I worked on them, and then employed them, going for long walks around the neighborhood with my then infant daughter on my shoulder. I have no good reason for having stopped this exercise. I found it very helpful to be able to call up these words, and the work of memorizing I didn’t find that difficult. I still retain what I had though, or if one Psalm fades if I haven’t recited it in a while, I can usually recall it with a quick reading or two. I know this is a practice I need to return to.

To aid in the use of Psalms in prayer, either memorized or as encountered in prayer books, I wanted to study them. Over the past few years I’ve read a handful of small studies: Bonhoeffer’s Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Church, Breuggemann’s Spirituality of the Psalms, C.S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms, and I’m currently reading James W. Sire’s Learning to Pray Through the Psalms. In general I’ve found this study useful and definitely need to do more of it.

I’ve experimented with fasting for the last three Lenten periods. The first year I did a kind of sunup to sundown fast, eating a small breakfast, a regular dinner and nothing in between for most of Lent other than Sundays. The past two years I started with 24-hour fasts, having just a small lunch each day, then building toward longer fasts – 36, then 48, then 72 hours - at the end of the week and eating normally, perhaps more than normally - feasting, on Sundays.

I tried to talk about it as little as possible (Jesus' explicit instructions right?) but there were immediate and some extended family that had to know, the latter because we were living with them. Mostly it just felt kind of embarrassing to own up to. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was raised with. There were certain insights I was looking for or expecting based on what I had read about the discipline. I was hoping at the very least for a kind of increased awareness of my own weakness and an openness to God. I may have gotten that but it was mixed with the self-certainty that I could do this, could make it through x number of hours or days without food. C.S. Lewis writes that while self-mastery is the goal, one of the inherent dangers of will-focused disciplines like fasting is pride. What you could really call the pride at risk here is an idolatry of the will.

Then again there were days that were utterly humiliating, where I didn’t do what I had told myself to, where I came home at the end of the day depressed and tired and just sat and snacked. Emotional eating I’ve heard this called. Maybe seeing that this was obviously what I was doing on a ‘failed’ fast day was itself instructive in that it pointed to what I was probably doing during normal eating periods. Be that as it may, it still often felt like my ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ were counted for the wrong reasons.

I believe strongly that fasting is something that Christians are called to but at the same time I sometimes feel it is something that I have absolutely no business dabbling with. Maybe it's just the lack of guidance. But maybe it's my doubting my own faith that causes me to feel conflicted about my experience with such disciplines.

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