Belief in traditional Christianity

Paul,

I’m a little confused by the implication that a person would “believe in Christianity”. What does that mean? For me the #1 problem I have with Christianity is that it has become something we are asked to “believe in”. The original idea was that we would gather a community around the belief in Jesus’ vision for a new world rule (the kingdom of God). We were supposed to have faith in the vision of Jesus for change not cultivate a belief in a 1st century understaning of God. At some point, the message became twisted into believing that a set of principles about how the universe worked and a particular definition of God’s nature or “his” attributes.

I think that beneath your 7 difficulties lies this one main concept. What if being a Christian isn’t about getting any particular beliefs correct or forcing our modern minds into denial about the working of the Universe? What if many belief systems about God or the working of the universe are completely compatible with the idea of joining a community built around the vision of Jesus for a new rule/kingdom on earth? Doesn’t that make items #1-7 go away as problems and still keep the beauty of the story in tact as a story that presents the vision?

Lastly, would it be possible for you to shift your hope from being hopeful that a particular story is true into being hopeful that the vision communicated within the story will BECOME true? I think that the difficulties we all have experienced with traditional Christianity are self-inflicted wounds. It doesn’t have to be so hard.

You ask some interesting questions, some of which have been around in some form for a long time. I'll do the best I am able to answer, I don't think my answers will be conclusive, and can only hope they will be a bit helpful.

1. The Bible reveals God as being someone high above us, or to use come more common ways of putting it, God is not a material being, but spirit. As such, I suspect that things that would be impossible in a material sense are not so for God.

I think that when we read things about Him that seem to "teeter on the edge of nonsense", this is in some sense a question of faith—will we believe what God says about Himself even if we can't make sens of it, or will we fall back on our own understanding.

2. Could you tell us a bit more by what you mean by God being absent? I can see a few different meaning to that, but would rather get things a bit clearer.

3. I know that there are many different things being said by real Christians and those who aren't real. I suppose there are things that aren't worth getting worked up over, but some things are. The best direction I can point you towards is to the scriptures, and no that's not a cop-out answer either.

4. It isn't an apparent claim, but a real one, one that Jesus made and that is further claimed and supported in the Bible. It isn't cultural hubris, it's the truth.

5. To borrow an argument from C.S. Lewis, what size of universe would make you happy?

6. This is an old question—the question of pain and evil. Theologians and philosophers have thought about this for a long time, and I'd suppose finding their opinions would not be too difficult. For now, I'll only say these things…1—God is good, and He loves and wants what is best for us. 2—God allows us to do both good and horrible things to each other, He has given us some measure of say and lets our actions have real consequences. 3—There will be a judgment day, and may it be soon.

7. Being a Christian has never meant being perfect, and someone claiming to be Christian has not meant that person has been Christian. I also should ask what you mean by Christians being "a force of evil".

Paul, 

I echo your points. As jazzact said, some have been around a long time. This doesn't detract from their pointedness, however.

But some of the points do bear looking at from various angles.

2. This is a question that is not, to my mind specifically a problem with Christianity, but a problem with any kind of belief system in the divine. To my mind it's closely related to points 6 and 7 as well. Personally, I don't think any system of explaining these issues does total justice to it - there is a point at which one must believe (trust), or not believe.

3. I wonder what myriad of voices and babble you're talking about. In some sense, the myriad is to be celebrated, as it reflects a group/culture's own input into the Christian story through the ages. But what do you mean by this?

4. I agree that the Europeans (of whom I'm one) have done a monstrously bad job in a lot of ways. But I agree with jazzact that the claim of the uniqueness of the message and way of Jesus is rooted in the texts themselves. That Europe mangled that presentation of the message gives us more layers of garbage to work through before we can hear and judge the claim on it's own terms. In my read of the NT, this issue was as much a problem then as it is now. Certainly the terms Kurios and Soter, as applied to Jesus, caused enough trouble for the early Christians. Jesus is not the only person to have made exclusive claims to truth, though, so the issue of a claim to truth is a bleat against exclusivist faith in general.

I honestly find it hard to hang on to a trust in Jesus if it's only a hope (in the vague sense of the word) that it's true. It seems to me that the crux of Christianity is that it does demand a trust that the story is a real explanation of the way the universe works. I too struggle with actually believing this, and tend to think that if it's not true, then it's simply another beautiful ideology. Something worth aiming at as an ideology, but not a the expression of  salvation for mankind. As an aside, I find that Andrew's series on Toward an emerging theology and his bit on "my tentative beliefs" helpful reflections with regard to some of your points.

Danutz,

 I think it helps to think about community instead of "belief in Christianity". The complication is that the community that Jesus started - and his vision for a new world - were both rooted within the historical traditions of Judaism.  The vision is a kind of belief about the universe - how it came to be, how it is ruled by God, where he wants it to go - and this does reflect very directly upon Paul's points. It helps to think of working to make the world into the kind of place the vision of Jesus wants it to be, but I think that the vision of Jesus (let alone Paul, Peter, James or John) is not simply a new kind of society that humans implement. If it is simply an issue of commmunity, then we do not need to worship Jesus. All we need are his ideals. And then we simply have an ideology - a beautiful one - but still just an ideology which is as subjective as any other on the planet.

Does this make sense to you? 

Paul

The disarming simplicity of your questions (and your own personal response) masks the profundity and reach of their implications. I note that you did not ask for comments - you were just expressing your own position. Will that preclude a response? No way!

1. How can Christ be both God and man? What better way for God to demonstrate his compassion for fallen man in a fallen world, than to come, as John Newman’s hymn had it: ‘In man, for man’?

2. Why is God so absent? One response to this question might be: Why are we so blind to his presence? One person looks at the natural world, and sees only blind, impersonal forces offering no comfort; another sees a natural world (more specifically, the heavens and skies) as declaring the glory of God - “Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.” Admittedly, this is speaking of words/speech, but words/speech implies a person who is speaking, which I take to be one of the hallmarks of presence.

3. The babble of voices and conflicting claims of Christianity. Actually, the diversity of intrepetation is something that I personally find attractive. It’s only when interpretation crosses a line into denial of aspects of the story which I would take to be its core components that diversity becomes, for me, a problem.

4. The exclusivism of its claims. Yes, this is what some have called: ‘the scandal of particularity’ (I think!). One issue is that the story of Israel, and hence of Jesus, is not the story of any other faith. Another issue is that through Israel, and Jesus, God addressed more general problems to do with the world in a way that they were not addressed by other faiths. On the other hand, this is not to say that there is no truth in other faiths, or that God cannot be found within them.

5. The unimaginable vastness of the universe. But so far, despite the breathlessness of each proclamation that the most basic forms of life might exist somewhere else in the universe, hard evidence of such has failed to materialise. The burden of proof rests with those who claim that life must exist somewhere else. Meanwhile, the particular problems which arose on earth seem to be unique to the universe, and to have brought out a unique divine response and initiative.

6. Did I detect a slight edge to the phrase God ‘can sit idly by’? How do you know that God sat idly by? I can’t remember who it was, but one Jew who went through Auschwitz and survived said that God was in the concentration camps; that God was there in the Torah - which spoke to every death, whether the perpretators heard it or not. It depends on what you are looking for and how you would expect God to act. Punishment and reward may not always be the immediate signs of God’s activity that it is helpful to look for and expect.

7. That Christians have often been a force for evil in the world. Yes, and the converse is also the case.

So why do I personally believe?

I agree with Augustine: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they have found their rest in you.”

I find the biblical story, the person of Christ and the experiences of his followers today and throughout history overwhelmingly compelling, and do so whether I am in a position personally to experience the immediate benefits of the story on the level of my feelings and current experience or not. There are many areas of doubt and uncertainty, disappointment and frustration, but I do not find the source of these to reside in any shortcoming or inadequacy of God; rather I have come to see that truth remains truth whether I am the current and immediate beneficiary or not. In this, my own experiences seem to mirror many of the biblical personalities through whom the story is played out.

P.S. (Added later) I did include a narrative-theological perspective to some of these thoughts in an earlier version - mainly to prevent apoplectic splutterings about modern evangelicalism in Andrew’s capuccino coffee-cup, but it got a bit complicated - and I would have come to the same conclusions anyway - which are slightly different from Andrew’s.

My main problem with Danutz’s argument is that it celebrates attempts at a gospel expression that is dissociated from a “premodern” worldview while simultaneously advocating for an implicit association with a modern one. De-particularization is not an adequate correction when accompanied by a simultaneous move of re-particularization. (Strikingly, jazzact’s approach makes a similar and relatedly fatal error in that the theological approach he advocates simply fails to acknowledge that it has been shaped profoundly by [a negative reaction to] modernity and, instead, passes itself off as profoundly ‘orthodox’ and, therefore, more ancient than it really is.)

Andrew’s literary approach, I think, at least has going for it an explicit divorcing from a Western-only worldview. Liberal theology—and I’ve studied with some of the best (Gary Dorrien)—has a fatal core flaw in that it still carries the fruit, if not the seeds and spirit, of Western colonialism (via modernity’s secularization program). Andrew’s approach does not and has the potential of building on and towards a truly global gospel.

Danutz,

Point taken on my comment on Borg and Crossan. I think your point about narrative (NT Wright) versus individual stories (Borg and Crossan, if I read you rightly) is exactly right. It's this which I have picked up from the bits that I've read from both men (and from Wright and others), and basically what I was aiming at in my comment. A major question is, of course, how one defines artificial. The criteria for determining communities, as well as the criteria for assuming an interlocking narrative, can be equally subjective.

Fred Peatross

Anathema! hehe

It humours me to see so many immediately become defensive to your thoughts and then attempt to become an apologetic for God. Paul, you did your job—you made people think. That's what a good teacher does. This is a superb post. I quoted and gave credit to it on my blog […link]

Chris

Thanks.

You suggest that Nazi anti semitism did not emerge fully fledged but had a long infancy; and you wonder whether there may have been occasions over its course when God sought to intervene but people did not respond- in which case it is unreasonable to blame God for his non intervention when anti Semitism has reached crisis point.

This is an interesting way of looking at the problem but I think it depends for its cogency on the conception you have of God.

If you accept the OT idea of God, I do not think it really goes any way to exculpating God. According to the OT, God constantly superintends the affairs of nations- their leaders think they are in control but in fact it is God who pulls the strings. If this is God’s mode of activity in the world, then we are forced to ask why he did not intervene at Auschwitz.

Also there are other kinds of human suffering that do not have a prior history in which God’s intervention might have been offered and refused- the Asian tsunami, or the two small boys in New South Wales who, earlier this year, climbed into the boot of a car, pulled the lid shut, were unable to escape and died of heat exhaustion.

I was interested in your comment that

“even in the creation account God abjures control and yields the future to his image bearer”

This is similar to Simone Weil’s idea that the creation was an act of abnegation by God- that God with the world was less than God without the world (in her view it was part of a triple abnegation by God, the other two being the incarnation and the resurrection). Could you give me a bit more of the background to your comment?

PaulH

Paul, I have a premonition that this is not going to be a small post, please bear with me.

First a little clarification, “in which case it is unreasonable to blame God for his non intervention”

Not quite, what I am suggesting is that in view of the process and the accumulation of human behaviours the questions of theodicy, of God’s responsibility, should not necessarily be seen as indicated only in crisis.

In other words the issue is not made extreme because of the extremity of the events. I don’t think the problem goes away because of this but it does gain some contextual qualification. Remember I have only responded on the issue of ‘social’ theodicy, on the situations where human beings, becoming more sub-human in a period of history, outwork their sub-humanity in appalling ways upon other humans.

I think the commonest problem with doing theodicy in the context of theology is ensuring that we work within appropriate categories. Auschwitz can also be seen, tragically, as a ghastly example of ‘the wages of sin is death’ or of ‘sin, full grown, leads to death’.

Culpability in other contexts needs other criteria of understanding. The two boys who died in the car - should adults not have foreseen the danger and taught the boys? Should the car’s designers not have been aware and ensured that an internal boot release was fitted. Perhaps they had, at some stage, and the manufacturers had withdrawn the specification for reasons of cost; seeing it as unwarranted in terms of risk-management. Who knows? More relevant for discussion of theodicy would be in what way and for what reasons do we expect there to be no accidents of behaviour or no bad consequences to ordinary actions (the design of cars, for example)?

But I come back to the question of categories, is culpability an appropriate way of coming at these issues?

Like all of us, Paul, I am a child of the twentieth century. As such, like you, I see the logic that if God is all-powerful and all-knowing, and if power is the same as control so that God has all control, then God also and by definition has all responsibility. Case closed, let’s go off and cry together in the corner, or let us rage together and shake our fist, bring down this outrage and call for God to be accountable to we who suffer his absence. Then let us demand that he take his place in our day of judgement. Then let us exact recompense. Then let us find that in our execution of it we have also executed the one who ‘upholds all things by the word of his power’.

The point of the caricature is simply this. If we are seriously going to fight for understanding, the struggle cannot be framed in forms of thinking that lead to the ultimate farce.

In sympathy with your original questions again I would extend them, hoping to make things better not worse. I feel these questions as deeply as anyone, but I also have to hold them in the context of other questions about the nature and the place of scripture and hold all these questions under the bigger question about the meaning of the word God.

In this journey I have not found the apparent contrasts between first and second Testaments to be very useful. Step an inch to the side the OT narratives and all the problems of theodicy come back. So, God, through Joseph saves the Egypt from a famine that swept across the middle East, what of the tribes and even nations who did not have access to the prophecy, and starved?

There are stories of intervention where God acts within the constraints of purpose, to further God’s project with God’s people, the stories of the entry into the promised land and subsequent conflicts would be a case in point, and produce some shocking stories of violent intervention, and some fascinating stories of interventions that miraculously involve less violence than anyone would expect. But there were natural disasters, local tragedies, personal pain that continued all through the period and across the world where we have no stories of intervention or a lack of it.

The problem between the Old and New Testament images of God only exists conceptually within the confines of Biblical narrative. Adjacent to the biblical narrative the problems have always existed, and remain.

Let me make a very tentative offering upon the altar of “who-screwed-up?”. (And this is where I will try to do what you asked me to do at the end of your previous post – yup, that’s right, I had not forgotten!)

One of the common fundamentals in this sort of ethical enquiry, and common to most debates on theodicy, is that theodicy is the problem of the victim (in most secular and some religious thought) or the culprit (in some religious thought). I am wondering if there is not a way of doing theodicy without victim-hood or culpability, seeing as neither of these has yielded good results so far.

In Genesis 1-3 we have a story that tells us that the genesis of everything is a God whose very mode of being is creative (that’s such an inadequate way of putting it, it is almost ugly, I will try to improve on it another time). We see a process so astonishing in its beauty, so coherent in its design, so elegant in its process and harmonious in its outcome that even the God who enacts it stands back and exclaims its perfection. It is as if God is surprised at what he has done. Eden stands as the expression of divine perfection, the dream of God come true, and somewhere within us remain the echoes of its song, the sense of its loveliness, the eternity of its living, breathing wonder. And we lament the daily betrayal of that memory, in Auschwitz, in Tehran, in Indonesia, in our own impoverished ways of being human. But here is the conundrum. (My apologies to any who have endured my eulogies on this point elsewhere, but I still don’t find this theme exhausted, or even tired)

The very first thing that this astonishing God does in that perfect setting is to sow the seed of its potential destruction. He planted, or chose, two trees, symbolic of alternative possibilities, of an open history, of a story not yet told. God created the possibility of failure where it did not exist before. And it is in the context of that garden, and in the shade of those trees, that God tells his Adam to rule, to work and to civilise the earth.

There have been times, when hearing the accusation that it is the Judeo/Christian ethic in Genesis that has released the pillage of the environment we see today, that I have wanted to soften the Hebrew ‘radah’ translated ‘rule’ to something that has more of the popular stewardship in it. Thirty-four biblical examples of translation, however, make this difficult to do. It is a tough word and it does, in context, carry more than a hint of a deep transfer of responsibility, not in the event of Adam’s creation but in the intent of it, especially in the syntax of ‘let us make… in order to’.

I do believe the mode of rule is stewardship, but not in the sense that it removes executive responsibility, and this for theological rather than exegetical reasons. In a review of Middleton’s 2005 book ‘The Liberating Image’ I found this comment, “The syntax… points to ‘rule’ as the purpose, not simply the consequence or result, of the imago Dei” ( p. 53). Such an understanding opens a way to see the human creature as the one delegated by God to take over the task of mediating and representing the divine presence on earth and, for that matter, continuing the work of cre