MysteriousFaith

Is Ultimate Truth Cross-Cultural and Trans-Historical?

Brian’s writing is always rooted in a firm sense of what he believes is not his to know, what is knowable only to God, and as a result of this what should be allowed to reside in mystery. His quotation of G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is especially powerful in this regard: “Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess players do … Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine … Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite … The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head … Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have the mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.” (page 149)

Is Ultimate Truth Trans-Historical and Cross-Cultural?

My general gratitude to Christian writers as a whole is unmatched to my specific thankfulness for the writings of Brian McLaren. His New Kind of Christian series touched me through its willingness to clearly establish what he holds as ultimate truth while at the same time honestly addressing the complexities to eternal damnation, religious bigotry, pluralism and other spiritual difficulties. His most recent book, A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-Yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished Christian (other than deserving an award for longest book title in 2004), is one of the more powerful and well written books I have ever read. I recommend it completely and hope deeply that Brian’s teaching and his books find broader audiences in the Christian community. That having been said, I am struggling to fully understand his section in chapter 10 (Why I Am Biblical), specifically his sections dealing with the Canaanite genocide (pages 166-171).

I wish to reiterate again that I resonate deeply with this particular book by Brian and more specifically, I found much to love about this chapter specifically. I found myself at one moment lifted very high in Brian’s writing within this particular section, and at the next moment left strangely dissatisfied and seemingly incomplete when he moved from generalities as to how he views Scripture to specifics as to how he views the Canaanite genocide. I profoundly appreciate Brian’s struggle in this delicate balancing act, and fear that in my own questioning and searching I have gone too far to one extreme. And yet, I find my thoughts today marked less by anxiety and trepidation than in the past. For whatever reason, my questioning has grounded me and afforded me an understanding of mystery that I did not have before. I write this essay in large part to ask a question, most simply this: has the emergent movement gone far enough in asking what within the Bible is man and what is God? Are we afraid of going farther for fears we may have to accommodate further claims of pluralism against certain ideas that even we have held as sacred? Are we choosing clearly how far is “far enough” on the basis of an implicit acknowledgement that some things can not be questioned, for if they are, they will lead to questions even we mystics fear to ask? I believe that in chapter 10 of Brian’s A Generous Orthodoxy we are seeing a mind at work, willing to go far in developing a more reasonable idea of the Bible’s meaning to modern man, but struggling to go as far as logic forces us to go. I hope here to walk the next couple of steps, taking Brian’s argument one step further. This is my walk, not his; these are my questions, no one else’s.

To begin properly, Brian’s comments at the start of chapter 10 are needed: “We wanted a simple, clear, efficient, and convenient plan for getting to heaven after death. Between now and then, we wanted clear assurance that God didn’t like the people we didn’t like, and for the same reasons we didn’t like them. Finally, we wanted a rule book that made it objectively clear, with no subjective ambiguity, what behaviors were right and wrong for all time, in all places, and among all cultures, especially if those rules confirmed our views and not those of people we considered ‘liberal.’ Although I was taught that the Bible fulfilled these modern-Western-moderately educated desires, I no longer see the Bible this way. But that doesn’t mean I have a lower regard for the Bible. Although I value it differently than I used to, and a little differently perhaps than my friend does now, I still, with my friend, value the Bible more than I can adequately explain. I hope I do so in the way the Bible tells me to.” (page 160) Here Brian captures essentially the entirety of my own story and struggle: raised to believe in the Bible not because of the value of what it taught but because of the walls it allowed us to build, we required a brittle view of Scripture founded wholly not in narrative or story, but in infallibility and inerrancy. These latter concepts were the white to our black, specificity to ambiguity. We needed Scripture to be something I now believe it was not intended to be; but such a position still begs the question of what we are to make of these wonderful words, these immutable truths that have uplifted the human spirit throughout history.

For us to explore what we are to make of Scripture, we have to ask the question of origins; it is as important a question for Holy Scripture as it is for personhood. Brian develops the nuanced idea that Scripture, while inspired by God, required human beings for it to be recorded and passed on. As such, it had cultural limitations that have to be taken into account. “In the same way Scripture is something God has ‘let be,’ and so it is at once God’s creation and the creation of the dozens of people and communities and cultures who produced it. One doesn’t decrease the other. One doesn’t lessen the other. One doesn’t nullify the other.” (page 162) But simply saying “one doesn’t lessen the other” does not make it so. Are we to make nothing of the assumption that what is Divine does not transcend that which is human? Are we to accept that something of Divine origins is bound culturally? To do so seems to strike at the heart of their being any metaphysical truths. I believe what Brian is saying here is not that truth changes across time, but that man’s development limits what God can do through us.

This argument is necessary for Brian’s explanation of the Canaanite genocide. Brian believes that “we need to reclaim the Bible as narrative.” (page 166) He goes on to relate this idea of story to the question of the morality of the Canaanite genocide by saying that “we must begin with a recognition of how violent the world of the ancient Middle East was. The violence of the Jews entering Canaan in 1400 B.C. [The slaughter of the Canaanites] was not extraordinary; it was typical of their day. And so we ask: in that context was God commanding the people to do, not what was ideal or ethically desirable for all time, but what was necessary to survive in the world at that point? Was there a viable alternative at the time for a group of wandering, homeless, liberated slaves seeking a homeland? In other words, assuming history is real and not a simulation, not a chess game in which God plays both sides, not a video game moving to the pressure of God’s thumbs on a controller - if God is going to enter into a relationship with people, then God has to work with them as they are in their individual and cultural moral development.” (page 167) I find a wholly unforgivable and egregious illogic in his reasoning: Brian’s argument assumes that these “wandering, homeless, liberated slaves” existed in a reality more historically vicious and dangerous than the more developed reality of modernity. I find that badly in want of any historical support. We have but four years ago ended the 20th century, the most vicious century mankind has ever known. Wanton destruction of militaries and civilians took place at levels in the last one hundred years that had never before been seen. It has been estimated that more people died at the hands of military and totalitarian governments over the last one hundred years than had died at similar hands for all of the rest of human history. And Brian wishes us to view the Canaanite genocide through the lens of story, a story that assumes the Israelites existed in a world more heinous than the world now? The facts do not support this argument, and even an attempt to develop an internal symmetry within the teachings of Christ would suggest that this explanation is very weak. Where in this story are we to make of the cross-cultural and trans-historical teaching that we “turn the other cheek.” Yes, we may turn flittingly to the Augustinian doctrine of just war in an attempt to explain how Christians can participate in combat but yet maintain our view of Christ’s teaching on our response to those who hurt us. But we do so outside the teachings of Christ and within the mandate of human rationalism. I fear neither the teachings of Christ nor the mandate of rationalism; but we need to accommodate some form of internal consistency between the two. Otherwise we vacillate from one realm of ideology to another, hopelessly shifting our foundations until we are forced to admit that Brian’s interpretation requires us to establish that truth is not cross-cultural and trans-historical. Truth is limited to history and culture, not to Holy Scripture.

Even if we accept Brian’s assertion that God is limited in what He can accomplish through man given the limitations of our culture and history, do we not have to seriously question what it means to say that at one point in history God can not only accept but Divinely mandate what may be seen in later stages of human development as genocidal? How can a Christian such as me begin to argue for the rights of Palestinians to live in equality with their Jewish brothers if we do not set aside the very real issue that too many evangelicals support the same heavy-handed treatment of Palestinians now that they see God supposedly ordained in the Old Testament? What are we to make of the claims of Jewish nationhood now? Perhaps we can afford to leave that undefined; what does appear to be a point of agreement are the means of accomplishing the goal of nationhood. If “holy war” was OK then only because, as Brian argues, man was less well developed morally then than man now is, I think we are in real trouble. In case my argument suffers from some ambiguity, let me make my point more clearly: man is no more or less man now than he was then. We are no less violent and in point of fact, have recent history to thank for the reminder that not only are we just as violent as our ancestors but our capacity to destroy ourselves is more damning now than it ever has been in all of the history of mankind.

I am forced to ask myself that if what is recorded in Scripture is not the highest form of morality am I waiting for further Divine revelation to manifest itself before I can evolve a more advanced sense of responsibility and morality? By accommodating not only the act of war, but putting forward a Divine mandate for it, we are forced into a complex calculus that seeks to explain that which is unexplainable. Brian’s conundrum is real, and I see his struggle very clearly on this point, for it is an intense struggle of my own. I believe Brian recognizes that if Christianity holds to the brittle ideas of inerrancy and infallibility in the forms conventional evangelical theology has, the future of Christianity not just in America but across the world is in jeopardy. His solution is magnificently progressive and deserves critical time and attention. I fear however, that those people brought into a narrative, story based view of Scripture will ultimately ask questions of his thesis that will bring down around them what they have held as essential to their faith.

For so much of this chapter I resonate deeply with Brian’s view of Scripture. I fear my criticism goes too far and I wish again to state my desire that this not be the case; yet, I think his view of openness has little to fear from the questions I am asking. Brian’s earlier thesis (that God had to limit Himself to the culture and history of the Israelites of the day), is supported by two analogies (pages 168-169). In the first, he acknowledges the mistakes of slavery and “near eradication of the people who inhabited this land [America].” Should Americans refuse to be patriotic? Should we deny our place in God’s blessing because of our troubled past? Brian argues that “there is no other raw material with which for God to work but this ugly, violent, primitive raw material.” In the second example Brian asks a more general set of questions for our civilization as a whole, specifically whether or not future generations should assume we had God’s blessing as we polluted the earth and laid waste to our natural resources. I find Brian’s omission of one key element in both of these stories particularly troubling: in neither of these does he present any argument that God told us to act this way! Where his earlier arguments justifying the Canaanite genocide resided in a culturally bound view of a God-mandated act of destruction, the two situations he puts forward to parallel his line of reasoning both fail to include the most important part of the original texts: the Divine mandate for the action! To not include the Divine mandate is to set aside the most essential point of conflict that makes this discussion necessary. I find both of these explanations to come up woefully short - the Old Testament stipulates that these heinous acts were God directed; Brian’s argument sidesteps that point entirely.

Moody’s Counterpoint Series has an excellent book on the topic of the Canaanite Genocide (Show Them No Mercy), a treatment of the question that I recommend. For me, I resonate fully with the theologian in this book that argues that all of reality must be interpreted through the lens of Christ and His teachings. I recognize that Brian wishes to set aside the very difficult questions this interpretation forces, namely, a real struggle as to what within Scripture is of man and what is of God. By rationalizing an explanation for why God would mandate genocide (the essence of the rationalization - that God works through cultural limitations - being a man made concept in existence outside of Scripture, an irony I think needs more exploration), the easier path of Divine narrative can be taken. To set aside both the answers offered by systemized theology and of critical-realistic narrative, one must bring an increasingly forensic perspective to Scripture. I believe Brian fears that this perspective will lead to questioning of the historicity of Christ and of the miracles in the Gospels. These are valid fears, but they are the products of questions that will be asked by those who come into this school of reasoning without all of the baggage of fundamentalism. We should make no mistake about Brian’s “story” approach: it is important, even critical, and will address deep questions people have about Scripture.

Brian’s writing is always rooted in a firm sense of what he believes is not his to know, what is knowable only to God, and as a result of this what should be allowed to reside in mystery. His quotation of G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is especially powerful in this regard: “Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess players do … Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine … Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite … The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head … Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have the mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.” (page 149) As I finish this essay I would like to make a final comment: I share Brian’s view that the Bible is special. I perhaps see more within the Bible as mythology pointing towards greater spiritual truths and not factual events than he does; however, what we hold as essential is our hearts, our intentions, our deepest complicity to the core teachings of Christianity. I will be held accountable not for what I got right about my view of how “inspired” Scripture is, but what I did with the essential truths within Scripture.

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• November 17, 2004

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