MysteriousFaith

Faith’s Betrayal

Recently, while on a trip to Washington DC, I took the time to tour the Holocaust Memorial Museum. I really don’t have anything original to contribute to the masterful writing and thought that already blankets the horror of this moment in history, and as such, write now primarily for my own purposes and tangentially for those who have shared, and continue to, questions about what the reality of the Holocaust means to belief systems and worldviews each holds as precious. These are only the wandering thoughts of a man now content to be on a journey and weary of canned answers, hungry to know reality, even if reality requires embracing unknowing.

For Christians, the Holocaust has many dimensions that need to be explored: what spiritual significance should be made of God’s allegedly chosen people finding their way into the Nazi meat-grinder? Can Christians afford to make this moment only of temporal or historical meaning? Does systematic anti-Semitism color various cherished theological constructs or stories we tell within our traditions? How can we call this period overtly evil and gloss over parallel situations from the Canaanite epoch in the Old Testament? Perhaps most importantly, if we choose to limit our responses to this wickedness by the facts in evidence – what did and did not happen, who did and did not intervene – is a faith in some intangible good or benevolent purpose behind the universe properly placed?

The particular brand of Christianity I was raised in made an almost conscious decision to avoid the difficult questions. We wallowed in rules in order to prevent the penetrating light of reality force us to answer hard questions, many of which would have required admitting the limits of human knowledge and experience. Consequently, the really big questions, what most people view as matters of individual faith – believing in a singular God you could know personally, this God creating the universe, sending Jesus to die for your sins – did not require faith, but the smaller issues did. Somehow it was profoundly relevant to have your hair 1” off all collars and ear cartilage as it was similarly necessary for girls to wear sweatpants underneath their koolats while active in sports (the reader is aware of the lascivious thinking that young men are prone to when the immodest koolat is not paired to burlap-like sweatpants).

In hindsight, I think this misconstrued reality between the big and important and the small and irrelevant that I imbibed which has much to say about why I find it so hard to overlook the big issues now. I feel cheated. When I look back at all the time at church, church-school, church-activities, church-soul-winning, church-counseling, church-teaching it amazes me that we so adroitly made it past struggling with the momentous challenges to living and believing in a life of faith. Among those people who grew up in the same environment I did, several who are still Christians have made similar comments about how convenient our upbringing was: all our time was spent micro-managing issues which had little to no relevancy, while the issues many of us would stumble over and do faith-based face-plants went wholly overlooked.

This part of our fundamentalist history makes events like the Holocaust deal-breakers. For me, wrestling with the Holocaust matters for three reasons. First, if we are to posit that there is such a thing as God, what does the evidence of human history suggest about him and his intervention in our reality? Evidence in any arena – science, mathematics, law - other than religion which is inconsistent or disagrees with itself requires that the assertion be restated or thrown out. If we accept this as a relevant and perhaps singular mechanism for finding truth and exploring vagaries, can we actually say with a good conscious that the evidence in the world suggests a benevolent God is active in human history? We can, if we choose, abdicate reason entirely, and juxtapose our conception of a God onto the evidence and make an argument for God’s lack of involvement due to his respect for man’s free will or other such secondary justification (of note is that God’s respect in this eventuality is lower than his respect for innocent people being slaughtered, but more on that later). But what does the evidence actually show? It shows that evil men can and do rise to power when good men do nothing, or do something too late. These good men are of no particular faith or creed, and many of the most efficacious at dealing with history’s villains are men profoundly faithless and entirely dubious on matters of religion.

Among the reasons struggling with the significance of the Holocaust is important is that doing so inevitably drives us towards policies and frameworks within which future genocides can be dealt with. Unfortunately, the modern world is largely failing in this regard. The intervention in Kosovo and the subsequent trial of Slobodan Milošević stand as somewhat solitary attempts of the world to hold evil men accountable for their misdeeds. But this was too little, too late; a very much post-hoc intervention after diplomatic squabbling and inactivity had allowed genocide to go on. The evolution of modernity has a critical barrier through which it must cross – the concept of the state being subservient to limited formulations of international law, of which the latter is enforceable as any laws of consequence must be. The Holocaust is a reminder, and unfortunately not the most recent one, that the future of entire races may well ride on our activity here and now.

The final reason wrestling with the Holocaust is important for Christians is that the book Christianity holds dear – the Bible – has many very ugly chapters which entail supposed holocausts of their own, and these passages beg be dealt with. This issue, commonly referred to as the Canaanite genocide, plagues every branch of Christianity save fundamentalists. For fundamentalists, this portion of Scripture is traditionally rationalized through a systemized theological construct normatively referred to as dispensationalism, whose initiation and termination as God’s plan occurred very specifically in the first case and more ambiguously in the latter. In the Old Testament God says kill and it’s not only OK, but not doing so adds you to the “whackee” list. The alleged termination of this divine Soprano-esque theophany was supposedly dealt with more generally by none other than Jesus himself; since Jesus is God, and Jesus is the fulfillment of the law, and Jesus would never have us kill innocents, the divine whacking is no longer ordained. The latter portion requiring reading between the lines and will be found nowhere in as clear a terms as the original command to kill is.

Fundamentalist Christianity, and to a lesser degree its evangelical cousins, has a difficult time dealing with this issue. I have written about it at length in a more heated essay, Is This of God?, but would add this: many of my brothers and sisters in this life are more wedded to the idea of the Bible being in some vaguely literal sense of the word “divine” than they are man’s mandate to be moral to other men. This is their need to have some toehold on big questions – where did life begin, is their a singular originating cause behind the universe and can I trust that purpose to be benign or possibly even loving – before their willingness to float in a sea of unknowing, beset by tides of serious doubt and adrift to find direction only through plying their own hand to life’s oar.

The logical conundrum many find themselves in is the following: if I acknowledge that the Canaanite genocide was evil and wrong then as such acts always are now, this portion of the Bible is wrong. It may be wrong because misunderstood historical influences from various nationalistic tendencies found their way into the compilation of scripture (I would suspect this will be the position the Emergent movement will evolve to in the near future). Or, it may be wrong because men, fallible and wrestling with the ineffable as much as I, had no more sense of the divine than we do now. But neither can be acceptable answers because if they are, I must subject this book I hold precious to the same standards of modern rational thinking and civil discourse as I would any other book; because this can not be “any other book” it is not, even if such a position requires that I look the other way at the evil of a modern-day Holocaust. This is the crisis of spiritual authority which permeates much of contemporary theological studies. As with any human endeavor, in time new propositions will be made to attempt and answer the thorny questions being asked, each of which will have at its core the assumption that in some way, somehow, some form of literalism is to be afforded Scripture. A simple answer, that these stories are of human construct and never happened, or if they did, were not divine, is possible, but it requires that literalism be sacrificed on faith’s alter.

This is the moment of faith’s betrayal for many, I included. What we have faith in may be different than what we hope for, or are open to. Some may find faith not a virtue, and choose to only be open towards certain possibilities and hopeful for others. I am reminded of a memorable passage from one of Lee Strobel’s books when he asks a Christian professor how he responds to students who challenge his particular strand of belief because he needs to believe. The professor is honest enough to respond that this is precisely why he believes – because he must. Strobel, as insincere and visceral in this particular moment of his analysis as always, finds this profound. What we may hope for may have no bearing on reality: the abused wife can tell herself all day long that she is abused because somehow she deserves it, but this is not necessarily so. The unloved child can excuse his parents’ nihilism by believing that if he were somehow good enough they would pay attention to him, but such belief may be only a further step into self-loathing and misery. We may hope that there is such a thing as God, and that he is good, kind and merciful; but it seems to me that such hope must be secondary to the reality within which we live, and that any ideas or theological constructs which allow us to justify inaction or excuse immoral behavior be cast aside.

Faith that somehow the good book must be literally divine betrays the reality we all live within; for some, these inconsistencies are secondary to the reality of the faith orientations which drive their community and friendships. Man will never be free of religion, and no human has a position that is fundamentally error-free, myself included. But certain propositions and worldviews are demonstrably better or worse than others, and the conceptualization of the Bible as literally true in any form is worse than allowing it to be a work of men attempting to pass on their limited insights laden with their own prejudices. The betrayal of faith is that it requires of too many people the assertion that giving up on the belief in the Bible as literal also means that no good can be found in this book, a book of human construct, which has as much good, and evil, as any of us possess. In this, its potential but its flaws, it resembles us more elegantly than literalism will ever allow.

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• February 14, 2007

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One Response to “Faith’s Betrayal”

1. ben Says:
   February 24th, 2007 at 3:40 pm

   Hey Ben - once again you have written a post that is well written and incredibly thorough. I am currently struggling with innapropriate thoughts as I gaze at my “topless with culottes ” winter edition.

   In the same spirit as your last note to me - I’m not prepared to take this quite as far as you are. Having said that, I would be dishonest if I didn’t say that I am deeply troubled by the small corners into which so much of our (Christian - even my beloved emergent) belief has painted us.

   To be blunt - I often feel stuck between my faith and my refusal to make ignorant blanket statements that seek to explain away the problems such as those about which you wrote. Maybe that’s why I’m fitting so well into this whole emerging conversation.

   Thanks for writing so well…and know that I’m peeking over the stall next to you reading every word. Let me know next time your in jackson.

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