MysteriousFaith

Questions for Faith

A couple of my friends are in the midst of starting their own church. While talking with one of them in particular I was again made aware that I believe the church does not fully appreciate what separates believers from non-believers. The current Emergent movement is doing a very good job addressing the questions of those who identify themselves as Christians but are frustrated with the evangelical church in America’s. This frustration is typically built upon the church’s co-opting of the conservative movement’s ideology or frustration with what they feel is a deliberate choice on the part of the church to overlook its mandate to be socially prophetic with respect to questions like poverty and inequality. The Emergent movement is caught in a squeeze play between the fundamentalist and conservative members of their own body while also seeking to reach out to those disaffected with the church as a whole. Making the situation more complex is the Emergent church’s desire to bring into their fold, even if for only communal purposes, those who deny the teachings of the church’s orthodoxy. This is a delicate balance to work towards, often leaving those who attempt it with too few voices of support or appreciation.

Two approaches are primarily employed when reaching out to those who have moved outside the church. The first, and by far the most traditional, is an apologetic technique. This strategy is predicated on the belief that Christianity is a factual religion whose beliefs, even those that are miraculous by any historical measure, can be trusted to be accurate and reasonable. A preponderance of facts becomes the foundation upon which a Christian worldview is built, with some room being set aside for faith (typically on issues as to the nature of God, struggling with suffering, and other seemingly unanswerable questions, but rarely to more essential questions like the Resurrection). The second approach is employed most recently and effectively by the Emergent movement. This latter strategy is based on a recognition and acceptance model which admits the failings of past parts of church history, and more sincerely addresses those parts of the Bible that are not symmetrical and need to be discussed openly. This spirit of admirable openness holds to an over-arching view that the most positive contributions of religion will be religion that can be forthright about its own questions, frustrations, mistakes and omissions. Making this spirit that much more commendable is the attitude and lives of its adherents; the graciousness and social consciousness of people like McLaren, Wright and Campolo are too easily overlooked by picky people such as yours truly!

What I love, admire and appreciate about the Emergent movement is its willingness to acknowledge the past and present mistakes of those who wrap themselves up in the Christian faith. Who the Emergent movement speaks most importantly to are those people who desire a worldview with an encompassing Christian ethic that can be communicated to those around them. In addition, what the Emergent movement has tapped into is people’s desire to have the spiritual side of their being nourished, but with a diminishing emphasis on the brittle dogmatisms of evangelical faith. These are beautiful and important advances in the nexus between Christianity and doubting seekers; however, to a very large degree the position of the Emergent movement to-date continues to struggle with what I believe are the core questions of those who frankly have little need for the church as an idea, a community, worldview or ethic and who would like to see the Emergent movement’s dialogue encompass additional questions.

It would be fair to say that the fundamental disagreement in America today is between public religiosity and social secularism. I fear a secular America devoid of practices that seek to shape the interior dimensions to personal existence. I fear a secular America unwilling to reflect on ideas like forgiveness, grace and mercy because I know at some point I, my family, my fellow citizens and my country will need each of these from the rest of the world. I fear a secular America unable to discriminate between provocative, insightful religious words and aggressive, angry religiosity. But I also fear an America ripe with public religiosity. I fear an America where dissent is disallowed because disagreement means damnation. I fear an America wrapped up in symbols over substance; the engraved Ten Commandments held more highly than the responsibilities of citizenship. I fear a country as large and powerful as America descending into a chaos of placing faith above fact, feeling above reason, preaching instead of conversation.

My fear is that the Emergent movement represents one of the final barriers between the public religiosity and social secularism that, if either were to win out wholly in the immediate future, would greatly diminish the humanity and health of our society. We are unprepared for a society without religion. While I wish that philosophy and reason were placed more highly than religion and faith, I have to acknowledge a fundamental lesson learned after the Enlightenment, which is that man can not yet live without some shaping set of beliefs that focus their energies on internal reflection and personal growth. Religion plays an essential role for mankind as long as it is not replaced by something else, something more practical and consistent with the obligations of reason. I would imagine that in several hundred years, the shape of religion will change to accommodate greater flexibility over mythical belief statements; however, until that happens, we are obligated to recognize that man needs ideas and approaches that meet him where he is at. Today, man needs symbols, myth and story. Tomorrow, man may be better able to have symbols, story and reason, but not without significant increases in education. In the middle of this massive transition, during which the impact of the Enlightenment is still being felt, we need ideologies that serve as bridges to cross the chasm from where we are at, to a more idealized version of where we should go. The Emergent movement is one such bridge. We all, even agnostic secularists such as myself, need to see the Emergent church grow and succeed because it is one of, if not the, most viable options between public religiosity and social secularism. To do this, to be this great bridge, the Emergent leadership must begin to answer more specifically questions that really separate those unwilling to walk this part of the journey with them.

Miracles are, by their very nature, miraculous. They are unprecedented. They never happen again. Their modern counterparts are suspiciously unwilling to be subjected to proof-testing, and are, interestingly enough, quite embarrassing to the church. The Christian movements that emphasize miracles the most are those that are not coincidentally also the most embarrassing. Whether involving Pentecostals speaking in tongues, Word of Faith preachers “healing” elderly women of their sore hips, or the visions and healings at Lourdes, it is the rare Christian indeed who wants to make modern miracles a primary part of any discussion about their faith. But, miracles play an absolutely central part in the belief system of Christians (and for that matter, of each of monotheism). In modern apologetic efforts, one of the primary attempts is to take miraculous events and prove they are historically reasonable. A great example of this is N.T. Wright’s Christian Origins and the Question of God series. In the time that has elapsed between my having finished this series earlier this year and now, I have begun to feel some of my questions are appropriately questioning core parts of his thesis; namely, the incredible depth that goes into setting the events up before Christ and those involving his ministry contrasted against the truncated treatment of Christ’s death and resurrection.

The incredibly thorough treatment Wright gives most parts of his analysis is notably absent as he addresses the events of the resurrection and other plausible explanations as to the origins of the church. In Wright’s books, articles and speeches he frequently alludes to the Enlightenment argument that “dead men stay dead” being a logic that will not subject itself to the question of whether or not it can be said in a historically reliable form that what Christianity claims as essential in fact is accurate. Two points have to be made about this: first, is he willing to posture his own beliefs within his own logic and second, is whether or not what he argues for as reasonable in fact, reasonable at all? If what he argues for was reasonable, faith would be unnecessary. So what is faith for? We do not have to have faith about Christ’s resurrection apparently – that is a historical fact. But we do have to have faith about what exactly? Having immersed myself in Wright’s theology, I would have to hold to enormous faith in order to make any sense out of the convoluted illogic arguing for what we now live in being the Kingdom of God.

My point is not to disparage Wright’s scholarship (I have no business doing so); however, I take enormous issue with his logic – which we are all qualified to dispute. More significantly, I am deeply suspicious of the consequences to Wright positing that it is more reasonable to believe a dead man was resurrected from the dead than it is to believe that “dead men stay dead.” This is to me a tenuous position that puts a number of things above reason. For those of us who simply can not make essential those things we do not understand or that have no parallel in our modern world, we choose to look outside the church for our beliefs. What would it mean to make myth second to transcendence? Having written about that previously, I will only say again that where statements that hide from being tested are in evidence and are deemed essential, certain people will not choose to walk such a path. These people will walk a path of sacrifice and self-discipline, but it will not be a path that sacrifices logic, reason and rationale to symbol or story.

Having already written about things religion holds as sacred truth that have no moral contemporary version (Never Now, Always Then), I have looked a bit deeper to wrestle to the ground what I believe are frustrations behind beliefs that are impossible to pin down. The best example of this is the figure of Jesus himself. The teachings behind Jesus are stretched between two points in time impossible for man to traverse: on one end is a resurrection very much in dispute and at the other is a second coming which is impossible to foresee, explain or understand. This second coming will bring in a world just as physical as the one now, but it will be perfect; how this will be can not be explained. Yes, this is a wonderful idea. But is it a helpful idea? Say for just a moment that you were someone who doubted the truths of an afterlife; would it be potentially dangerous for man to take his eyes off of the world he is surrounded by in an attempt to procrastinate all his desire to see the world made better into a possibly non-existent heaven? If what advances mankind is a sincere and limited focus on what can be known, in the world we are immediately surrounded by, again I would ask, what good can come from looking away from the here and now towards an existence that may not be accurate?

This may seem as a surprising to some, but to many people, the idea of God is not particularly helpful. At first glance, this can be easily misinterpreted as people who can not accept God because of how such an admission would force them to change their behavior. Certainly for some this might be the case. For many people, what they reject about the idea of God is his “right” to be both arbitrary and distant. If God can be arbitrary because he is more powerful than we; then can I be arbitrary to animals? Can I be arbitrary to a savage? Where does this logic take us? It takes us to an ethic that says if you are more powerful or simply more knowledgeable, you can act as you wish. This is the logic of autocracy, oligarchy and totalitarianism. It could not be farther from grace, mercy, love and forgiveness.

Why also is God not helpful for some? Because of his distance from the modern world (but not-withstanding his managing to show up in a pillar of fire for the ancient Israelites, a burning bush for Moses, the resurrected Jesus for doubting Thomas), God has to be accepted or made pedestrian (which in fairness is really what Brother Lawrence in his Practicing the Presence of God does). If you are someone who has sought, wept, fasted, prayed for some sense of presence and simply never found it; what then? Or perhaps you are someone who just never felt it necessary to wrestle with the idea of God? Believe it or not, many people at church every Sunday rarely if ever think about God. They find certain disciplines at church that are helpful and accept the language, symbology and practices that go along with what they find most helpful.

Perhaps no more pressing question exists than this last one: why not focus only on spirituality? Why not focus only on those practices, stripped of their improvable mythology, that can be proven to provide constructive results? The simple answer is that Christianity’s unique contribution to the world is its theology, not its results. A world focused on transcendent values, on emphasizing only spiritual and moral truths that can be proven to positively shape mankind, would be a world with a healthy view of religion, and a nourished secularism.

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• September 1, 2005

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