Fundamentalism & the Bible: Worth A Look

For one helpful explanation of why it is not a good idea to read the Bible in a word-for-word literal way, see Randal Rauser, "How fundamentalists undermine the authority of scripture." It is worth a look.

God & Reality (II)

Following on the previous post, "God & Reality (I):

Leaving agnostics and atheists to go their separate ways, people of faith are bound to find the analysis in the previous post dissatisfying.  We believe that God is real and engaged with reality as we know it.  Different religions describe the nature of God and of God's relationship to the world in different ways, but the consensus is that in one form or another we can know God.  While Buddhism, for example, is often thought of as a non-theistic religion, some Buddhist thinkers acknowledge that the Dharma can be thought of as "God," just so long as God is not conceived of as being a person.

We Christians base our affirmation of the reality of God primarily on experiences with the divine.  The central experience is with Jesus, which is both historical and contemporary.  Some 2,000 years ago, the founders of our faith had a mind-blowing, life-changing experience with Jesus that we are still trying to wrap our heads around.  Later generations have shared in that experience in their own lives.  Building on the Bible, we affirm that at the very core of it all, we experience God as love.  Christians in different ages, cultures, traditions, sects, and denominations have understood the love of God in different ways, given different interpretations and emphases to that love, but we share across the boundaries of our many Christianities the common sense that God is love, and we experience that love in Christ.

This brings us to a third way of talking about God.  We can speak of God in the abstract as "ultimate being."  We can affirm the living Lord as "love".  And we understand God as creator of all of reality.  The Old Testament affirms from the get-go that God in the beginning created the heavens and the earth.  In the evolution of their faith, the Hebrew people learned that their God was not a tribal god whose throne was in the temple in Jerusalem.  God's throne, instead, stood at the peak of the created universe, heaven, and the whole of the world was God's footstool.  In the tiny universe of the ancient world, this was as universal a view of God as was possible.  It took our understanding of God to a new level.  It transformed God's "kingship" and "kingdom" into something Beyond any human conception of God—even concepts such as "Lord" of the Universe.

God as the creator who encompasses all of reality takes us back to the neutral, abstract idea that God is ultimate reality but with one crucial difference.  We do not know what the relationship of ultimate reality is to mundane reality.  When we claim that God created the universe, we also necessarily claim that we can know certain things about God through the study of the universe, God's creation.  The universe reflects and therefore reveals something of the nature of God.  The abstract notion of God as ultimate reality becomes more concrete and comprehensible in some degree to us whose senses and perceptions are tied to the physical world.

The universe itself reveals God.  It is one of the "two books" of revelation, the Bible and Nature.  The discovery of the Book of Nature, which goes back to the early decades of the invention of science, was an important moment in the evolution of Christian theological thinking.  Rooted in the biblical view of God as creator, it continues to provide a key interface between faith and science.  It reminds us that many early scientists were looking for God in their scientific pursuits and that we should continue their journey today.  Stay tuned.

Where Do We Shelve Doubt?

Yesterday, I walked down to the Yale Bookstore in New Haven, Connecticut, and spent about a half hour browsing.  One of the books I bought was,  Doubt: A History, by Jennifer Michael Hecht.  It is interesting that this history of doubt was stacked with a row of books on atheism.  Looking at the table of contents, it is clear that it is not about atheism but rather a history of doubt including "Christian doubt," as one chapter title has it.  Somebody in the book store, however, assumed that a book about doubt belonged in a section of books on atheism, which included several books by aggressively evangelistic atheists like Richard Dawkins.

We can't blame the store clerk.  We've done this to ourselves.  By equating doubt, which is an important element of faith, with unbelief, we've handed doubt over to the "unbelievers".  And in doing so, we deny people who are chewing on faith an important path in the journey of faith.  We need to reshelve the history of doubt, putting it with other books on faith and spirituality.

God & Reality (I)

Is God real?  On first glance, this question seems simple and those of us who are people of faith will answer, "Of course, God is real."  On further reflection, the question is not at all simple, and we do well to think through our answer more carefully.  One description of God is that God is "ultimate reality."  Another one is, "God is Creator and Lord."  Still a third response is that "God is Love."  For this post, let's put the the second two descriptions aside and consider the first.

God is ultimate reality.  By this definition God is real but somehow different from the rest of reality, which is mundane rather than ultimate.  And that is just about all we can say about God as ultimate reality.  What is ultimate reality?  How is it different from everyday reality?  Is God as ultimate reality bound by the laws of normal every day reality?  Will we one day discover some that God has a physical presence in the universe that we haven't yet detected?  Our five human senses, the way we perceive reality, are all geared to detecting physical realities and while we acknowledge that some things are not "essentially" physical, such as love, yet they are real in a physical context.  Is the same true for God?  Is there something about God that is physical?

Or, are there aspects of reality, still hidden from us, that are beyond physical reality?  If so, what is the relationship of the metaphysical to the physical, and if God is a metaphysical reality what, again, is God's relationship to the physical world?  If we are limited by our senses to experiencing the physical world as the real world for us, then can we even answer any of these questions?  Or are they quite literally non-sense?

In the final analysis, we simply do not know how to deal with such abstract questions apart from faith.  We can say, "I believe that there is an ultimate reality beyond physical reality and that God is that ultimate reality."  Or, we can say, "I do not believe that there is such a thing as ultimate reality."   Theism and atheism are our choices, and to date we have no way of deciding which response is the correct one, which fact leads some to a third non-committal response of, "I don't know."  Agnosticism, indeed, seems to be the most logical response in face of the difficulties we face in otherwise discerning whether there is or is not a reality beyond physical reality.

From the perspective of faith, in other words, thinking of God as "ultimate reality" doesn't take us very far.  If we ground our faith in a God that is "ultimately real," all that we are left with is a bald, formless belief.  For, what else can we say about something that is ultimate?  Did this ultimate create reality or is it part of created reality?  If we affirm the ultimate reality of God, all we can really say about God is that God is Beyond our perceptions of reality.  God is Beyond any knowledge we can have of God, at least so far.  Maybe some day we will figure out what "ultimate" reality is and thus we can gain for ourselves knowledge of God—or, maybe we'll find a way to prove there is no ultimate reality at all.  But we have not reached either such point yet.  We either choose to believe in God, not to believe in God, or not to choose.  Those are our choices when it comes to God the Beyond.  Stay tuned.

Zero Sum Dialogue

Politics as it is being played in our nation today has become what in theological terms we can only call "zero sum dialogue," which is the worst kind of dialogue there is.  Dialogue in religious circles is an exercise in listening and reflection in which individuals share their faith with those of another faith.  The goal is deeper understanding of both the other's faith and our own faith.  It is a peacemaking exercise.

On issue after issue, what we see happening in Washington and in the state caiptals is a forced dialogue concerning the very nature of government.  Small Government Conservatives are battling it out with Big Government Liberals in what Charles Krauthammer calls, "a once-in-a-generation debate about the nature of the welfare state." (here)  We've seen this forced dialogue at its most intense in the debate over the debt ceiling.  Because a decision had to be made given the potential economic (and political) risks, the two sides had to engage each other.  Each side had to moderate its expectations, demands, and ideology to accommodate the other side.  They had to listen and understand each other—at least, do a degree.  But the result has left the country more divided, angrier, and less peaceful rather than more.  It was and remains dialogue at gunpoint.

Zero sum dialogue frustrates the movement of the Holy Spirit.  It is thus profoundly uninspired and uninspiring.  It bruises egos.  It leaves a bad taste in the mouth.  It does not heal.  When we compromise In The Spirit everyone wins.  Conflict is dampened if not resolved.  When we compromise Without The Spirit everyone involved ultimately loses, and we lurch on to the next fight and the one after that and the one after that.  Conflict without end.

Check the Facts

If you're as confused by all of the claims & counter claims as I am about raising the debt ceiling, you might want to consult a very helpful posting at FactCheck.org enttled, "Debt Limit Debate Round-Up."  Turns out that a number of the things being said are just plain not true.  I know you are shocked, but it seems to be so.  Fact check it out.

The Spirit Goes for a Swim

Palestinian women at the beach in Israel

The New York Times recently posted an article, reposted by the Herald Tribune, entitled, "Where Politics Are Complex, Simple Joys at the Beach," which reports on a modest social protest movement in Israel. A group of Israeli women have been secretly taking Palestinian women from the southern part of the West Bank for trips to the beach. For security reasons, the Israeli government has banned Palestinians from leaving their West Bank enclave for such jaunts.  These illegal excursions began out of the friendship between an Israeli woman, Ilana Hammerman, and a Palestinian teenager, Aya, who wanted to get out of her West Bank village home and see the world outside. Ilana smuggled Aya and two cousins into Israel and took them to Tel Aviv where they eventually ended up at the beach. It was an amazing experience for the young Palestinian women, documented by Hammerman in a long articled posted by Haaretz.com and appropriately titled, "If there is a heaven."

A woman's movement, called "Civil Disobedience," has risen from that initial clandestine visit, and its purpose is to smuggle Palestinian women into Israel so that they can spend a day at the beach.  Civil Disobedience has begun to publish advertisements about what its members are doing, and their efforts have garnered some support, especially in academic circles (here), and the group even has its own Hebrew language website (here).

It seems a small, almost trivial thing, for a group of Israeli women to take some Palestinian women into Israel so they can spend a day at the beach—trivial in the face of an ongoing Arab-Jewish conflict that has repeatedly plunged the Middle East into armed conflict and continues to infect it with violence, prejudice, and hatred.  But, this is how the Spirit works.  It inspires friendships across the things that divide us.  It infects us with the courage to disobey unjust laws.  It encourages us to bring joy into troubled lives and provide moments of freedom to those who aren't free.  It transforms a Mediterranean beach into a temporary piece of the Kingdom of God, removing that beach from the jurisdiction of a state police apparatus and delivering it into the hands of women who have never been to the beach before.  The Spirit quietly works on our hearts to such ends as these.  Amen.

In Defense of Hobbits

A Family of Hobbits by Avi Katz

A Wall Street Journal editorial entitled, "The GOP's Reality Test," makes a disparaging reference to the tea party faction of the Republican Party as "hobbits." The editorial accuses the tea partiers of living in another reality where they believe they can defeat the Democrats by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, "and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor."  Sen. John McCain (R - Az) picked up on the hobbit reference and branded the tea party opponents to raising the debt ceiling as "tea party hobbits" (here).

It is unnecessary, unjust, unkind, and just plain unfair to drag hobbits into what's going on in D.C. these days.  They are, after all, an unassuming, down to earth, and circumspect race given to simple harmless pleasures.  They know when to work, and they know when to eat.  Even wizards take delight in the endless complexities masked by their simple natures.  Indeed, it was two members of this admirable race, Frodo Baggins & Sam Gamgee, who completed the impossible quest to destroy the Ring of Power (with some help from Gollum) and save Middle Earth.

So, go ahead and have your squabbles and spats up there on the Hill, but for the sake of justice and kindness leave off with dragging the good name of a good and simple folk through the mud.  Is nothing sacred?

Wash Your Hands

An article in the Huffington Post worth our notice is entitled, "Super Bacteria? Fighting Resistance Could Be Trickier Than Thought." Based on recent medical research (here), it basically says that bacterial resistance to antibiotics is even more effective than researchers had previously thought. Successful resistance to antibiotics produces stronger little critters and is good for bacterial growth. That isn't good for us, however.

The best thing we can do? Be disciplined in our personal hygiene, and especially wash our hands regularly. A word to the wise. For some further details see (here).  And check out, "Hand washing: Do's and don'ts," posted by the Mayo Clinic.

When Faith Becomes Ideology

Earlier, we followed the brief controversy Rep. Todd Akin, Republican of Missouri, sparked when he claimed that liberals hate God and want to replace God with big government. While there was a momentary furor esp. among the liberal bloggers and some progressive clergy in Missouri, the budding controversy has quietly gone away. I had thought there wouldn't be much more to write about the Senate candidate, but in the midst of the battle going on in Washington over the raising the debt ceiling, Akin has unfortunately provided further fodder for comment.

He opposes the compromise bill on the raising of the debt ceiling Speaker John Boehner tried to get through the House of Representatives, evidently because it is just that—a compromise. Speaking before a local Republican group back home, Akin accused President Obama of being "a flaming socialist" while the Republican caucus is "pretty conservative." And he is convinced that the debt ceiling is not that big of a deal. The government might slow down somewhat, but it won't collapse. He also referred to the economic stimulus package originally passed while President Bush was in office as "trash."  He may be right about raising the debt ceiling, but leading national and international economists disagree with him.  They think it is a big deal.

Akin is an ideological true believer, and as we saw in those previous posts his ideological base is an ultra conservative brand of Christian faith.  He, in fact, is a seminary graduate so that he cannot be accused of being ignorant of his faith.  And that is the point.  In his heart of hearts, Akin believes that liberals like the President and his Democratic "colleagues" in Congress are against God.  Being theologically trained, he knows that rebellion against God is the very essence of sin, so they are sinful.  They are necessarily evil or, at the very least, evil-ish.  For him to compromise with Democrats and liberals is not a matter just of politics but also of faith.  He can't do it.  It would be a betrayal of everything he holds sacred.

This is what happens when faith becomes ideological.  Instead of opening the heart, it closes one's ears.  Instead of promoting a compassion that is other-oriented, it gives birth to a self-involved, stubborn refusal to see the good in the other especially if that other is "a flaming socialist."  When faith becomes ideology, it is no longer faith.  It is idolatry, which is putting something crafted by the human mind in place of God.

For a similar (if less theological) & more detailed analysis, see Richard L. Fricker, "The Christian Right's Rigid Politics."