MysteriousFaith

Of What Value Orthodoxy?

What truths transform? What binds us together in a community? What truths spark in us an awareness of our inter-connectivity such that we sacrifice for the greater good? What truths get in the way of us loving one another? If grace, mercy and forgiveness matter most (Christians here may choose to insert other fruits of the Spirit), then what gives rise to these emotions being internalized and put into action?

Of What Value Orthodoxy?

Orthodoxy argues that certain truths hold an inherent value that, if believed in, will result in salvific ends uniquely better than those who hold to either opposing truth statements, or those who hold to no particular belief at all. A pastor friend recently commented to me that he believed that as you came into a greater knowledge of truth (in his case the argument revolved around our discussions on the truth of the Trinity, the Resurrection, etc.) you would be transformed in ways that were not otherwise possible to those who deny or are not acquainted with these truths. In his classic on Christian apologetics Scaling the Secular City, J.P. Moreland argues: “The church should be able to produce people who are moral and spiritual saints who experience full, satisfying lives to a greater extent than a random sampling of the population in general. Thus, the closer one gets to living according to mature, New Testament Christianity, the closer one should be toward the goal of uniting in one’s self the traits of a morally and spiritually virtuous life and the joy of a satisfying form of living. Authentic Christianity should produce people who exemplify the summum bonum - the harmony of the right and the happy - in their lives.” (Page 132 - Footnote) As can be the case when wrestling with truth, the first impression after reviewing my pastor friend’s comment or reading Moreland’s quote is to throw back the challenge that Christianity has failed to show this type of uniqueness, and to a very real extent this would not be untrue. What I want to argue in this essay is that any religious philosophy that places its primary emphasis on doctrinal purity (what I call here “orthodoxy”) will inevitably lead to becoming systemized, then politicized and then corrupted. I will also argue that a primary emphasis on orthodoxy inevitably gives rise to fundamentalism, and that fundamentalism within any religious, political or philosophical system is to be ardently argued against and be seen as being inherently destructive to humanity. I will also argue that an emphasis on orthodoxy ultimately inhibits spiritual transcendence because it asks what it admits to be unknowable truths to be the foundation of personal salvation.

Before going further into this argument, it is necessary to stop and address those who would point out that by denying the inherent value of orthodoxy, I seem to be arguing that no such thing as truth is knowable. Specifically, many orthodox Christians would argue that my thinking seems to suggest that the historical truth of an event like that of the Resurrection can not be established. This would be the wrong take-away from my initial line of reasoning: instead I am attempting to argue that regardless of the historicity of that particular event, it has not been proven to foster an individual salvific outworking that we can determine to be uniquely efficacious. Let the reader take note as here again my goal is not to deny the Resurrection, only to ask whether or not it “accomplishes” that which Christians say it will (a unique salvific outworking in our life) versus an idea (orthodoxy)that serves the primary purpose of separating believers from those within other faith traditions. If Jesus as Savior is only a dogma you need to define who is “in” and who is “out” then you have established the most caustic contribution religion has for humanity - its willingness to damn others to an eternity of torment - as the immediate outgrowth of a central truth you hold. If this particular dogma does not accomplish any unique salvific reformation (other than the legalistic response of being reconciled to God), what prevents us from holding to its truth (if you are so inclined) but deliberately acknowledging that it is not the world-changing idea that the Church has wanted it to be (perhaps because, in part, we have focused on the wrong part of the event and the wrong part of the implications to said event). I believe such a realization would inevitably force us to emphasize other parts of spirituality, specifically those that are devoid of dogma and pregnant with reformation. Even the most moderate of Christian thinkers must incorporate the idea of some form of accepted orthodoxy (”only Trinitarians will be in heaven” … “only those who acknowledge Jesus as Lord and Savior will be in heaven” … etc.) into their view of eternal security because of two things: they do believe in the historicity of their faith claims, and to focus only on the ideals of spiritual transformation is to become a full fledged pluralist, the implications of which are untenable to contemporary Christianity minus the small pockets of resistance in the Episcopalian and other older, more liberal institutionalized churches. This is why many postmodern evangelical Christian thinkers are dancing with ideas similar to universalism; namely, because they have realized that it is nonsensical to argue that being in relationship with an unknowable Being based on unknowable truths is in and of itself an ultimate good, and as a result, choose to readdress their view of God and His means of working in history.

Christianity is not our enemy. Islam is not our enemy. Buddhism is not our enemy. Hinduism is not our enemy. Socialism is not our enemy. Conservatives are not our enemy. Liberalism is not our enemy. Our enemy is fundamentalism. We may find grace in our willingness to forgive, to seek reconciliation and to leave our arms open to fundamentalists, but we can not overlook the danger they pose to spirituality, community and the world. Fundamentalists of all religious persuasions argue that without believing in specific ideas one cannot be saved. Most will deliberately delineate between salvation and spiritual transcendence. If they are right and God is a God of legalism - defining who has ascended the right mountain-top of belief - then they must address two difficulties: why would God allow the vast majority of people to die without having the right orthodoxy given to them and, why would He welcome belief over action (one can believe all the right things and not be transformed - begging the question of “how much” transformation is needed to be saved?)? Fundamentalists need to be forced to verbalize publicly the implications to their belief; the fact they believe the majority of mankind will know a literal fire for eternity (even the child in Africa who dies of starvation) should serve as a warning of the dangers to letting fundamentalism go unchecked within society. This type of fatalism can only breed hate, intolerance and, if they find their way to power, oppression. If God gave us certain historical events so that we might believe, does it make sense that His only wish was that we believe or that we be transformed, and if He desired most that we be transformed, might we not ask ourselves what truths matter - the truths of orthodoxy, or of orthopraxy (based on praxis - the idea of what we do, how we live). I believe we need to begin to sharply delineate between two types of orthodoxy: beliefs of identity (which always serves to define who is in and who is out), and beliefs of transcendence (beliefs that ask only what is most efficacious and necessary to change, to be reborn, versus those things that breed sameness).

What truths transform? What binds us together in a community? What truths spark in us an awareness of our inter-connectivity such that we sacrifice for the greater good? What truths get in the way of us loving one another? If grace, mercy and forgiveness matter most (Christians here may choose to insert other fruits of the Spirit), then what gives rise to these emotions being internalized and put into action? I am prepared to argue, having finished all three volumes of NT Wright’s “Christian Origins and the Question of God” that Jesus’ understanding of himself and his language about himself was veiled and heavily couched within coded allusions. His statements like “I and the Father are one” come far short of him proclaiming that he (Jesus) is God. My point here is not to argue this particular dimension to Christianity’s truth claims, but instead to point out that the much greater truths within Christ’s teaching were disproportionately invested in were related to speaking against religious intolerance, the religious fundamentalists of his day, and the deeper truths of grace, mercy, forgiveness, and an equality that immediately impacted the most marginalized of society. Our current day’s fixation with apologetics has robbed Christianity of its ability to show that its truths are unique in any way other than historically. That is to say Christianity seems to need the historical truths of the Bible to be upheld because it has implicitly acknowledged that its truths have no unique outworking in the lives of its practitioners. Historicity is a thin substitute for reformation, and I would suggest is a substitute that lays the foundation for brittle fundamentalism, something we should be wary of today.

Orthodoxy requires that by being wedded to particular truths only it has, the believer obtains a greater insight. Can we not see orthodoxy leading invariably to fundamentalism, then to politicization, then to oppression? But this line of reasoning falls apart when we substitute spirituality or the idea of transcendence for the concept of orthodoxy. When have spiritual adherents whose objective was transcendence institutionalized a religious foundation, then become political, and then persecuted those who did not believe? Can we not look at the first century Church and see Paul begging people to stop fighting over orthodoxy and embrace the truly transcendent parts of the Christian message: “For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters. What I mean is that each of you says, I belong to Paul’, or ‘I belong to Apollos’, or ‘I belong to Cephas’, or ‘I belong to Christ.” Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” (I Corinthians 1:11-13) Paul goes on to argue for the unique salvific outworking of the Cross of Christ, which I would propose for Paul was a combination not only of his belief in the historicity of the Resurrection, but on the greater truths that had made Christ’s life so efficacious. Paul perhaps here is attempting to maintain a delicate balance between creedal dogma and transcendence. This balance is one I err more on one side than he, perhaps because of my comfort in the wisdom of this world - which he bemoans in verse 19 - or because he was privy to evidence I am not.

If God is the God of fundamentalists then I am damned. I go to my damnation, if that be my eternal destiny, with heavy heart and with confused mind. But I go with those who I know did the best they could and who sought meaning in transcendent spiritual truths they felt brought them into relationship with the Divine. If God requires that we answer certain questions just right to be in fellowship with Him, and He has made the questions as difficult to get to truthful answers as we now realize, then the fundamentalists are right. I have chosen to reject this idea of God, believing that it is no true revelation of God, let alone the God that Christ pointed us towards. Pascal’s Wager, while a profound insight into his personality, is no profound truth, building its claim of truth on the shaky ground of fear - a fear that serves as the foundation fundamentalism is built and thrives on.

It seems to me that the time has come to divest ourselves of those ideas we can conclusively say have been proven to only divide us, those concepts that do represent real slippery slopes down which man has been unable to recover from. We can, to my liking, say that fundamentalism is the basis for most of the overreaching the Church, political and social institutions have been guilty of. Because fundamentalism requires the orthodoxy of identity (outliers and belongers must be clearly defined with ramifications - both eternal and temporal - to their respective positions of belief), it invariably becomes more popular in times of confusion, specifically in times when things are changing so quickly that we feel we have lost our sense of place or our ability to judge what is right and wrong - perhaps for no reason other than we must have answers to questions no one has thought of asking. In its ability to provide clear identity, fundamentalism requires no bifurcation - in fact, as with the Ayatollah’s Iran, fundamentalism argues that to be an adherent, one must allow your belief to have primacy in all of your life. This means that fundamentalists must merge the worlds of politics and religion in the belief that no political world exists - only the religious world. When this happens, the slide from supposed enlightened spiritual values to naked political power takes place at break-neck speed. The fundamentalist movement, once responding to people’s very real fear and giving them orthodoxy to be fully invested in and identified by, has now become an institution wedded to politics. This fixation on temporal power (a belief at odds with any argument that religion should have the power to help us change hearts and minds) realizes that it is not an efficacious remedy and embraces, whether implicitly or explicitly, those areas of temporal power where it feels it can make a difference. The Church then becomes just another institution fighting for its place, using orthodoxy as the means of control within its community.

Can orthodoxy save? We would have to agree on the meaning of two words in that sentence (”orthodoxy” and “save”) before going forward. For my purposes, salvation is being freed of myself, what Buddhism calls the anatta (no self), of having killed desire so that I know peace and have an identity outside of materialism. Salvation, to me, is being able to forgive those who hurt me over and over again. Salvation is no longer about hell. I see people in hell every day, and many of them are orthodox Christians. I would rather be saved in this world through having my heart, motives and desires transformed, than hold to unknowable truths and let these be petty substitutes for the deeper chance of remaking my very soul. It is time for a new religion, a new Church, a new spirituality. It is time to be done with orthodoxy and to begin with meaningful spirituality. Let yesterday’s institutionalized Church die, and let us remake something anew.

“The day we are completely satisfied with what we have been doing; the day we have found the perfect, unchangeable system of work, the perfect answer, never in need of being corrected again, on that day we will know that we are wrong, that we have made the greatest mistake of all.” Vincent Donovan

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• May 6, 2005

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