A friend and I were having a Facebook debate that turned into a skype debate over an article in the Huffington Post by David Lose, entitled "Is the Bible True?" Dr. Lose essentially makes the case that it is possible to read the Bible not just as historical fact, as fundamentalist Christianity does, or as non-historical moral-ism, as some of liberal Christians do. His point is essentially the same one that Dr. Throntveit brings up time and again: Both sides are asking the wrong question of scripture, namely, "Did it happen?"
Now, this is where my friend comes in. We've had many discussions like this before over these topics. He is an atheist and I'm a seminarian, so it's sort of what we do. But anyway, in this particular case, he found it hard to believe that a Lutheran pastor could, with any integrity, preach from the Bible after admitting that it is propaganda.
When we talked tonight, we were discussing "truth." I argued that, for Christians, historical truth is secondary to our belief that Jesus Christ embodies truth; i.e., truth is not a concept but a person. His stance was that Dr. Lose was trying to hold both historical and moral truth in tension, and that it just wasn't working. Hmm... I thought about that some and realized after the conversation that maybe this isn't an issue with truth. Or rather, maybe truth is the subject of the debate, but the grounds are actually the problem. And the grounds for the discussion is reason.
My friend is going to argue, no matter the question, from a perspective steeped in rationality. He's going to say (I think I can put words in his mouth here) that it is irrational to believe in God, and that the Bible does not stand up to reason. And in this regard, he is actually quite true.
Here's the problem: Christians don't believe by reason. In fact, Christianity distrusts every hint of reason. The very effort of trying to reason Christ is fraught with sin (putting ourselves before God). We believe not because of reason, but because of proclamation: the Word given to us through the Holy Spirit, particularly in the sacraments. And reason plays no part in this. In fact, it may very well be a downright detriment to faith--the old Adam hanging on, tempted to reach for the fruit from the tree of knowledge.
Does that mean that Christians can never be rational? About many things, yes we can be. In fact, systematic theology uses primarily reason, but that is only when God's existence is made a matter of faith in the first place. About God's existence, I have a tough time seeing reason playing a role.
I'm sure my friend won't like this reasoning, because, in fact, it isn't reasoning at all. If the grounds for the discussion of God's existence are reason alone, I come weaponless. Philosophers like Alan Plantinga might try to argue for God's existence on these terms, but I wonder if that isn't a faulty endeavor. Methodists, in line with the Wesleyan quadrilateral, want to hang on to reason as a means of believing in God, but I tend to see that in practice as sensible interpretation rather than philosophical dialectic.
So, is the Bible true? Yes, but only because I believe in God's promises in the first place. It's a wholly irrational viewpoint. But here's the thing: that isn't my concern, because I'm not out to convince but to proclaim. I'm not going to win people to my viewpoint, but "preach Christ: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1 Corinthians 1:23).
My friend's response:
ReplyDeleteI admire your honesty about your (lack of) reasons for believing in God. Your post made me think of a passage from Marx’s Contribution To The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:
“Luther, we grant, overcame bondage out of devotion by replacing it by bondage out of conviction. He shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests. He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart.”
Far more explicitly than Dr. Lose, you acknowledge that you lack sufficient evidence for a belief in God and admit that the Bible does not stand up to a reasoned inquiry. You face no threat of violence against your person for going this far and proclaiming what the Catholic Church would consider highly heretical (as would Luther!?). And yet you stop there, do a 180 degree turn, and proclaim a belief in God based on faith alone. I find this both fascinating and problematic not because Luther enchained your heart, but because you actually recognize that the chains are cutting off the flow of blood to your brain and consciously embrace the loss of oxygen.
Now granted you may think of these chains not as chains but as a crown of thorns you bear in the name of Christ, but you nevertheless observe the chains cutting off the flow of blood. The extent that the act of (self-) observation changes the observed is the extent which I think you and Dr. Lose are opening up a can of worms and passing its contents around the table at the last supper of God.
At the end of your post you write, “I'm not out to convince but to proclaim” and to the extent that on Sunday you stick to the gospel and not your discussions with atheists like myself, I’m sure you’ll do just fine as a preacher (I have no doubt that you’ll make an excellent pastor). Indeed, it seems to me that a large part of why you’re willing to concede reason is because you’d like to return to preaching the faith. This may well work for Lutherans and other mainline denominations in the short run, but it will likely be the death of you in the long run because it is difficult to stand firmly for Christianity on the precipice of atheism. And remember your back is to the precipice because you’ve marched up to the precipice and then done a 180 degree turn and decided to preach. Half your petitioners are liable to get a parachute and jump. And the other half are liable to give you a good push (as you’ve clearly already fallen from grace;) and run back down the mountaintop as fast as they possibly can.
Part II
ReplyDeleteMy primary point in responding to Dr. Lose’s article was less about what is true and more about where the two of you are standing. It’s one thing to say that you have faith in the truth of Jesus Christ, it's another thing to admit that what is implicit in the word faith: that there is insufficient empirical evidence for you to hold said beliefs. Faith is by definition a belief in something for which there is a lack of sufficient evidence to justify said beliefs. You are perfectly happy to find a Christian God by taking Kierkegaard’s leap from nothing into faith, but your observation and acknowledgment that this is what you are doing would seem to change your ability to maintain its legitimacy. You recognize that your beliefs are not empirically based and view Christian faith as the first premise of your beliefs, but it is actually the second. The legitimacy of faith alone, the legitimacy of a leap from nothing to faith is the first.
So you are extremely close to acknowledging that your first premise is something that recognizes any belief based in faith to be logically valid (or to flip Dostoevsky and much of Christian moralizing on its head, if faith is alive then everything is permitted). For if faith is an intellectually legitimate reason for believing in something, it is an intellectually legitimate reason for believing in anything because it does not require evidence, a leap from nothing will suffice. So given your first premise, “I have faith in Allah, that he commands us to kill the infidels, and that we should carry out his commands” is a logically valid argument. “I have faith that the purpose of our life is to worship invisible purple unicorns” is a logically valid argument. And “I have faith that there is no Christian God” is a logically valid argument. This last argument directly contradicts your stated argument for believing in God, so while both arguments can be said to be logically valid, neither can be said to be logically true. You’ve said before that many of your beliefs cannot be reconciled with mine because we don’t share the same premise of faith, but I think your problem is more fundamental than that. Any belief is logically valid from your first premise and you are unable to distinguish your argument from that of a crazy person.
Your heart may very well be sufficiently enchained to the pulpit to prevent you yourself from falling, but from where I’m standing you’re pretty damn close to unintentionally telling your parishioners where the parachutes are and why they should jump. Because if the Bible is neither historically accurate nor the word of God, maybe knowledge is a good thing, ignorance is not bliss, and the story of Adam and the forbidden fruit is thought control that gives Christians an unhealthy sense of guilt about knowledge, in the biblical and the intellectual sense.
My Response:
ReplyDeleteThe only thing that bugs me about what you write is that I am not giving up the authority of scripture. Scripture is our one unique witness to Christ. I preach Christ crucified and risen, and I preach the Bible with far more integrity (I believe) than Fundamentalists who are trying to make it fit a historical model that its authors never intended.
Secondly, there's nothing heretical in the belief that faith does not come through reason. The movement in scripture is always from God to us. Reason is an attempt to move from ourselves to God. It is, in Luther's terms, very much works righteousness, which he abhorred.
Finally, I think you are right about some of the implications of reading Scripture in this way. It is counter-cultural. But so was Jesus and I'm ok standing there.
Thanks Frank. What I heard in your initial post was that faith in Christ is properly according to the gospel (gift), but that our natural (sinful) human inclination is to attempt to establish faith according to the law (drawing a rational line from grounds to gospel)
ReplyDeletePerhaps another way to say that is: the gospel is offensive, not defensive.
Yes, Tom. I think that is a helpful way to talk about it without sacrificing theological language. There's a reason we don't so often talk about reason in seminary. It's because we are operating out of the law-gospel dialectic.
ReplyDeleteI wrote:
ReplyDelete"It’s one thing to say that you have faith in the truth of Jesus Christ, it's another thing to admit that what is implicit in the word faith: that there is insufficient empirical evidence for you to hold said beliefs."
Yes, you do continue to proclaim from faith not reason the authority of the scripture, but this is not what makes you a heretic. Indeed, belief through faith alone is highly orthodox:
"Faith Excludes Curiosity
From what has been said it follows that he who is gifted with this heavenly knowledge of faith is free from an inquisitive curiosity. For when God commands us to believe He does not propose to us to search into His divine judgments, or inquire into their reason and cause, but demands an unchangeable faith, by which the mind rests content in the knowledge of eternal truth. And indeed, since we have the testimony of the Apostle that God is true; and every man a liar, and since it would argue arrogance and presumption to disbelieve the word of a grave and sensible man affirming anything as true, and to demand that he prove his statements by arguments or witnesses, how rash and foolish are those, who, hearing the words of God Himself, demand reasons for His heavenly and saving doctrines? Faith, therefore, must exclude not only all doubt, but all desire for demonstration." -Roman Catechism explaining the true meaning of faith (a commitment to the profound ignorance of being not even wrong).
What distinguishes you heretic you from a good Catholic priest (other than the fact that you're a god damn Lutheran;) is that you used your faculties of reason to peak behind the curtain and admitted (albeit very reluctantly, but far more explicitly than Dr. Lose) that you couldn't see anything there. You applied reason to God and found him to be lacking. Yes, you nevertheless proclaim the faith and the authority of the scripture, but you do so having looked behind the curtain.
So if the position of the Catholic Church is:
(1) Humanity finds God though faith alone, rationally questioning God is an affront to the heavenly father.*
(2) I have faith in God, I have faith in the ultimate authority of the scripture.
*You should never apply your faculties of reason to God (or anything really), but if you must know we can assure you that we have applied our faculties of reason to demonstrate that belief in God is rational, so don't worry your pretty little head.
Then what you have said is:
(1) Neither God nor the Bible hold up to rational scrutiny.
(2) Humanity finds God though faith alone, rationally questioning God is an affront to the heavenly father.
(3) I have faith in God, I have faith in the ultimate authority of the scripture.
When not laid out explicitly, these two lines of thought look very similar because they both end in a faith in God and the scripture, but they are very different. The first concedes nothing because it never looked behind the curtain. The second concedes that it looked behind the curtain, found "our one unique witness to Christ" to be a pretty crappy witness, but decided to go ahead and take God and the Bible on faith alone. So yes, you do continue to proclaim the authority of scripture from faith alone, but you do so not as a good Catholic priest who chooses faith because it the correct path to God, but as an heretical Lutheran who chooses faith because it is only remaining path to God.
It still comes down to the order of operation. Reason is the way we primarily understand the world and make the case for an argument, just like physics is the way we understand how the universe works. God, however, is not subject to reason any more than quantum physics is subject to the laws of Newtonian physics; i.e. only so much as God's creation is self-limiting of God's revelation.
ReplyDeleteTheologically, the law cannot make us believe. Faith is always the work of the Gospel. So, my rejection of the argument is on the premise that you have any ability to argue rationally about God's existence in the first place. I don't make this argument because I have found that the hard-line approach to the Bible and God has failed me, but because it is by definition unable to bring faith in God.
So how then do I preach? I preach law and gospel. Rational arguments are law; theology is law; death is law. All these things may be interesting but will ultimately lead only to death. The only unifying story is in Christ; it is what separates the God in Christ from Allah or a floating teapot. The law will never save us. Christ is evident not in the law but in the Gospel--the freely given gift of God.
Your response steps backs from many of your initial claims by questioning our ability to reason. Let's take a look:
ReplyDeleteFirst, quantum physics explains more than Newtonian physics because it makes more accurate predictions about the behavior of subatomic particles, while making the same predictions as Newtonian physics about the much larger groups of atoms that classical physics analyzes. But the only reason we know this is because theoretical predictions have been empirically tested through observational experiment.
In contrast, you simply declare that God is not subject to reason. To see why this has no meaning, simply substitute the word Zeus for God. "Zeus, however, is not subject to reason." You don't say?
"my rejection of the argument is on the premise that you have any ability to argue rationally about God's existence in the first place."
I'm not sure what argument you refer to or what you mean by this. I think a negative is missing somewhere in here. If your point is something along the lines of you don't trust our faculties of reason, then I'm not sure how you think we can distinguish between a false god and a real god. Again, just read what you wrote substituting Zeus for God or Jesus and imagine spending your life devoted to Zeus (or Poseidon, but personally I'd go with Aphrodite).
"All these things may be interesting but will ultimately lead only to death. The only unifying story is in Christ; it is what separates the God in Christ from Allah or a floating teapot."
Yes, it does appear that is all ends in death. If you're saying here that what distinguishes Christianity is the promise of eternal salvation through the death of Christ, I see your eternal salvation and raise you a pony from the all powerful but unobservable celestial teapot that orbits the sun between Earth and Mars. Put another way, wishing doesn't make it so. Just because a little girl wants a pony doesn't mean she's actually going to get one. While Christianity may have a unique variation on it, many religions offer their followers a nice, cushy, and eternal afterlife, the ultimate pony as it were, but that does mean that it's actually available. Many protestants will argue that Christianity is different because all it requires is faith alone, to which I respond, you're telling me you get the same pony but that it costs less? Sign me up!
You can attempt to retreat from any claim of rational understanding, but without reason you are left not just with Jesus, but with Zeus, Poseidon, invisible purple unions, flying teapots, and a whole sundry of other deities you recognize as demonstrably silly. As a more pithy atheist put it:
"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
Finally, you write:
"Christ is evident not in the law but in the Gospel--the freely given gift of God."
Something is not freely given if the punishment for not accepting it is eternal hellfire and brimstone. It's actually the ultimate state of totalitarian coercion.
ok, now you're making this eschatological. Let's be clear, Lutherans do not believe in decision theology. You have no ability to "accept" the gift of God or "deny" it.
ReplyDeleteThat's all I have for now. I'm tired. Time for bed.