Four questions that every religion must answer

Andrew concluded his comment on the Evangelical Alliance statement of faith with this question:

“how different would this read if it was written not as an in house document for the evangelical church (implicitly in dispute with other parts of the church) but as a statement for the world? How would we want to summarize and explain our faith to normal people who find the language of ‘three persons’, incurring wrath, ‘truly divine and truly human’, ‘atoning sacrifice’, ‘mediation as the only Saviour of the world’, ‘justification of sinners’, etc., at best meaningless and at worst absurd. Why not make some sort of public statement of faith normative for the belief and practice of a missional church rather than this sort of abstruse and highly technical document? It might help us to get out of the mental rut we have got stuck in with our statements of faith.”

I have been thinking about this and I would make the following general comments.

• Creeds are often seen as a collection of truths ie propositional statements all of which are true.
• But the etymology of the word ‘creed’ suggests something else. Creed comes from the Latin ‘cor dare’, to give ones heart.
• A creed should thus be less about propositions we hold to be true (though it may include some such propositions) than about our understanding of the world, our vision of the good and our love for God.

In the light of this I have tried to think of the questions that any religion should try to answer. There seem to me to be 4 basic questions and I have listed them below, together with an explanatory comment on each question. This is obviously a very tentative list and I would be very interested in the views of OST participants about its adequacy.

FOUR QUESTIONS THAT EVERY RELIGION MUST ANSWER

The search for ultimate meaning

A dog enjoys what it can, endures what it must and then it dies. Not so human beings who want to know what it all means. What causes them to ask such a question? Certainly, suffering or catastrophe can precipitate it; but so can the ennui that comes after every appetite has been satisfied. Possibly it is the still small voice, not of the senses and not of this world that speaks to us. In any event, every society of which we have knowledge has searched for ultimate meaning (some philosophers – and people who are clinically depressed- have thought the world was simply meaningless, but they are a tiny minority). Looking for ultimate meaning seems to be an instinctive thing for human beings to do.

In the past, the search for meaning has usually found its answer in religion. But in the modern developed West, at least among the educated classes, religion has been rejected by many for whom questions of ultimate meaning are given purely secular answers.

A. The human condition

The search for meaning has invariably involved some kind of view about the “human condition”. But is there such a thing as the “human condition”? Ask a 17 year old boy who has just got his first set of wheels and the answer would be no. But for those who have grown older, and been buffeted by life, the answer will probably be yes. Religions have quite different understandings of the human condition. The Christian view is that humankind has been disobedient to God and in consequence has brought on itself suffering, sin and death. Buddha says the human condition is essentially one of suffering arising from ignorance. In the modern developed West, the search for meaning has become detached from religion. Modern liberal humanism sees a world characterised by ignorance, injustice, poverty and suffering but unlike Christianity or Buddhism focuses on the this-world causes of these conditions rather than the way humans respond to them or to their moral causes.

How do you describe the human condition?

B.Wherein lies salvation?

Some people, especially in the modern secular West, would deny that salvation, in the sense of rescue from ‘this vale of tears’ is either necessary or possible. But the idea of salvation is integral to all the modern world religions.

Salvation for New Testament Christianity is God making good his promise of a new creation in which the results of the Fall - sin, suffering and death- will be defeated. More concretely, it is the assumption by the saved of an incorruptible body when Christ finally returns in glory. And to be thus saved, a human being has only to believe in Christ’s death and resurrection (but note that this formula is short hand for a much larger narrative).

Buddhism has a totally different view. For the Buddhist, salvation is the escape form the perpetual cycle of suffering by achieving enlightenment- that is, understanding that egoistic desire is the cause of all our suffering. Secular humanism does not offer the religious kind of salvation but it does offer a this-world equivalent: the alleviation of the ills of the world by education, the discoveries of science, fairer forms of government, and public money spent to reduce poverty and sickness.

Protestant Christianity is insistent that human effort plays no role in salvation, that it is entirely due to God’s grace. Catholicism is more ambiguous: God’s grace is primary but it must be matched by effort on the part of the Christian (St. Ignatius Loyola: pray as if everything depended on God; act as if everything depended on you). There is also a split on this issue in Buddhism, but along different lines: the earliest form of Buddhism (Theravada) sees enlightenment as being entirely dependent on the efforts of the individual.The protestant equivalent in Buddhism (Mahayana) is much more like the Catholic position in Christianity.

Modern secular humanism sees salvation as entirely dependent on humankind’s own efforts.

Do you see yourself in need of salvation and how is it to be achieved?

C. Goodness

The search for meaning enquires about the “human condition” considered as a vale of tears; but it also enquires about the good life. What is it to be good and do what is good? Several preliminary comments. The good life is often considered to be obedience to God’s law. The trouble with this is that, concerning any law you can ask, is it good? That is, good is logically superior to law. Secondly, doing good is often considered to be a means of earning salvation eg in Hinduism and possibly some understandings of Catholicism. I would suggest (with Socrates) that goodness is something to be sought for its own sake; but likewise I accept that it has some connection with the idea of salvation.

The Christian ideal of goodness can be summed up in the image of the suffering servant, the one who surrenders himself for the good of others and for whom love takes priority over every other consideration. The pursuit of power, riches, sex or fame are seen as distractions at best and as fatal obstacles at worst to the practice of goodness. Buddhist compassion seems close to the Christian ideal of love and Buddhism has a similarly negative assessment of power, riches, sex and fame. Surrender of the ego is a central element of Buddhism but it is less an ethical prescription than technical advice about how to achieve enlightenment.

Modern secular liberalism is often thought to be value free but this is far from the case. There is in fact a strong consensus on morals in secular society eg universal human rights, the demand to reduce suffering, the ideals of freedom, equality, and self-determination. Much of this goes back to Christianity but the idea of self surrender has been replaced by its opposite, self determination. And it is much more accepting about the pursuit of power, riches, sex and fame.

What is the source or justification of these goods - for example, why is it good to regard love as superior to all other moral considerations? The Christian ethic finds its source in God either in terms of his commands or in terms of the actions and stories of Christ; and Buddhist compassion arises from the example of the Buddha in preferring to bring others to enlightenment rather than himself embrace nirvana. Modern secular humanism has great difficulty in similarly anchoring its ethic because the belief from which major elements of it emerged (Christianity) has been abandoned.

What is your vision of goodness?

D. The transcendent

Nearly always in the history of humanity, ultimate meaning has been located not in this world but beyond this world. How do we come to such knowledge? One response is that we don’t, that the other world is a human invention, a form of whistling in the dark (are deniers usually more hardy realists than the believers? I don’t think so). Most people in most ages have asserted such knowledge. But the transcendent is by definition beyond the usual modes of knowing: you cannot say you know God in the same sense that you know your next door neighbour; nor is it knowledge attained by deductive reasoning or from empirical investigation. Knowledge of the transcendent is thus a mysterious knowledge which is quite different from other forms of knowledge. For most of us most of the time, it is the small still voice which is like background radiation; but sometimes it has the force of a thunderbolt, as in mystical experience (Jesus, St Paul, Mahomet, Rumi, St John of the Cross, Pascal, Simone Weil).

Among the world’s great religions Buddhism, in its original (Theravada) form stands out in suggesting that God is not the subject of knowledge but merely of unresolvable speculation and as such diverts human beings from the real task which is the pursuit of enlightenment. Modern Western humanism, especially in the scientism variant, also denies knowledge of God, either on the grounds that the concept is incoherent or that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support it.

In most of the great modern world religions, the transcendent is seen as a unitary God who is the ground of being, who is the creator, who loves his creation, and who alone makes sense of the human predicament.

Humanity has always wanted to control the transcendent. In its crudest form this is attempted by magical practice which seeks to manipulate supernatural forces to achieve human ends; but the propitiation of Gods by sacrifice in an attempt to induce their intervention in human affairs has the same motivation. Even the great modern world religions, which see God as sovereign, and her intervention in human affairs as her own unprompted initiative (grace), struggle against the attempt to manipulate her. The protestant revolution against Rome was in part due to the sale of indulgences which automatically freed souls from punishment. And it could be argued that the desire for certainty, for example through the claimed inerrancy of scripture or the infallibility of the pope, springs from a desire to control God. (I know this is a controversial idea but I would ask you to consider it in the context of the broader idea of seeking to control God)

Because the human experience of God is so mysterious, so inaccessible to reason or the senses, most religions have developed a praxis by which adherents can affirm their understanding of God; find encouragement and solace in God as their refuge; and demonstrate their faith to the world. This praxis can become extremely elaborate generating holy times, places, practices, stories, symbols, songs, people. The temptation always exists to see praxis as an end itself rather than a means to an end and as such to become a form of idolatry. Religious history is littered with protest and schism in reaction to this development, with two of the most significant being the Buddha’s protest against the corruption of 4^th century BCE Hinduism, and Luther’s protest against the corruption of 15 ^th century CE Catholicism.

How do you understand the transcendent?