A Summons to Action

Prairie Winter - copyright image by Geo. Epp

Knitmare - copyright image by Geo. Epp

These thoughts follow my reading this morning of an article on the CBC website: What do you Believe? by Mary Hynes, host of the radio broadcast, Tapestry, airing weekly.

              

You’re welcome to click on the link above and read it for yourself before going on with my impressions. I’d also encourage you to subscribe to Mary’s podcasts; she produces some very profound, sometimes provocative programs touching on faith.

              

As you will have deduced by a post I wrote a few weeks ago, I’m currently disturbed by our reliance for unity on belief, on creedal statements and our acquiescence to them. In that post I described an event that appeared to me to urge a certain belief about the creation of the world based on a literal reading of the first chapters of Genesis. Quite obviously, the presentation didn’t meet with unanimous approval; much of the Christian world reads the creation stories of Genesis allegorically and could no more compel themselves (or be compelled by others) to believe the historicity of the Genesis account than they could force themselves to believe in Santa Clause, leprachauns or extra-terrestrials.

              

This morning we read the Apostles’ Creed in unison in church. It, too, clearly admonishes us to declare a belief in certain things and I occasionally find myself skipping a line or two because I’m not certain that I, personally, believe it.

              

Hynes quotes author Karen Armstrong on the subject of belief:

"The extraordinary and eccentric emphasis on 'belief' in Christianity today is an accident of history that has distorted our understanding of religious truth. We call religious people 'believers,' as though acceptance of a set of doctrines was their principal activity," Armstrong wrote.

"All good religious teaching … is basically a summons to action. Yet instead of being taught to act creatively upon them, many modern Christians feel it is more important to 'believe' them."

There might well be countering arguments to Armstrong’s viewpoint, but it occurs to me that our most divisive issues throughout church history and including today have been and are centred not on what we ought to do, but on what we ought to believe.

              

The discouraging consequence of this is that we are led to exhaust ourselves in questions of how our beliefs differ— who’s wrong and who’s right—before we ever get to the real question, namely answering the “summons to action.”

              

What difference would it make if our Bible study in our churches went like this:

1)      Read a passage of scripture aloud.

2)      Have another person read it again.

3)      Observe a few moments of silent contemplation.

4)      Ask participants to point out any features of the text that stick out for them.

5)      Ask the group what actions the passage seems to summon us to take.

6)      Conclude the study with open prayer or silence.

In my experience, Bible studies that are planned not to break out into comparisons of interpretations are productive precisely because—for a change—they focus us on the real questions: what actions does scripture compel us to take, and how will we respond? This is both a personal and a communal question and in the act of interpreting for action and not for belief, the quest for bringing about the kingdom in our stations and occupations is made central and clear.

Thank you, Mary Hynes. Thanks Karen Armstrong.

              

The substance of things hoped for . . .

Still life #6

“I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.”
(http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/i/immanuel_kant.html#ixzz1HWKiIuSS)

Let me begin by toying for a minute with the quote above from Immanuel Kant:

In the boarding house of my soul, I harboured two tenants; Knowledge and Belief. Belief was resident on the premises first and occupied the big room, but after Knowledge moved in, his need for space kept expanding and he demanded that he be given the big room. Thus ensued a continuous tension in the household and I felt compelled to make a choice. Since Belief was my cousin and was in close harmony with the remaining tenants, I sadly evicted Knowledge and resigned myself to living without him although I had found his dynamism invigorating.   

Obviously I’ve ripped the quotation out of its context, unless you consider the brainyquote website to be a context. Also, it could be interpreted in other ways than through the “boarding house” imagery. It could—by itself—be a lament for having misunderstood that knowledge and belief can dwell together, indeed must dwell together in harmony. And then there’s the whole issue of the meaning of the two slippery words at its core: What is our common understanding of knowledge? What do we mean by belief? Is knowledge a synonym for wisdom? Is belief another word for faith? Definitions of abstract nouns are approximations at best.

I’m pretty sure we all know what the quotation is about, nevertheless. When discovery contradicts belief, a crossroads presents itself. Many choose the road of denial in the assumption that holding on to a belief against all evidence is a virtue. Others turn their backs on their previously-held beliefs, sometimes with great disappointment and dismay. Some seem to have accepted the great conundrums of life with equanimity and confidence.

I don’t believe that earthquakes are shakings of the earth by an angry God. They are the inevitable results of the earth’s brittle crust reacting to the contraction of a gradually-cooling interior of our planet.  Fill a bottle with water, screw down the cap and set it out in a Saskatchewan January night. The bottle will break; earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods and tornadoes will happen. Knowledge tells us why.

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1).” Maybe we’re just too hung up on the sanctity of “believing.” Faith may be where it’s really at; faith in the sense of “the substance of things hoped for.” I suspect that between expanding knowledge and the kind of faith that hopes, that loves, that is optimistic about a future as yet unseen, there is no conflict.

 No reason why they can’t live amicably in the same house.

More on Agnostic Christianity.

Grand Canyon serenity

The word agnostic is a borrowing from the Greek where gnosis means “knowing,” agnosis, “not knowing.” In the previous post I referred to the term Agnostic Christians, which some might assume to be an oxymoron. Fact is, there isn’t a branch of Christianity—as far as I know—that claims its basic tenets arise from knowledge; In general, religious tenets are held by faith, not by knowledge, and so Agnostic Christian is no contradiction in terms at all.

Admittedly, a dictionary definition, even when supported by an etymology, doesn’t necessarily complete the picture of what words mean, or what they meant to people who used them in their original form. The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines an agnostic as “a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable [or] one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the non-existence of God or a god.” Most of us would associate the word agnostic with a response to religious faith, i.e. the stance that the existence of God or a god is unknowable, and that there is no reason to be either a believer or a disbeliever.

Agnostic Christians would probably argue that one can believe in God and in Christ and still take an agnostic stance on matters like, for instance, how the death of Christ is able to bridge the gap between God and humankind, or how it is possible for there to be a single, triune God. I admit, the explanations for these great conundrums are unknown, possibly unknowable to me, a stance of agnosis whether I am prepared to admit it or not.

Why bother even talking about this? Because the pretence of certainty is, in effect, a grand delusion, or even worse, a corporate self-delusion that is potentially extremely harmful. The pretence of certainty makes it possible to commit wars, supplies justification to terrorism, provides an argument for raping creation, makes theological mountains out of molehills. It also forces cracking of social cooperation and eventually, is responsible for much societal fragmentation.

Certainty inevitably requires intolerance to sustain it.

We need to shorten our creeds, weed out what is unknowable and what is as yet unknown, and admit that everything we hold as opinion or certainty now may be superseded tomorrow. We need to accept that Creator and creation are as mysterious as they ever were, and live our lives recognizing where agnosis lies.

It’s through this recognition that we might someday be able to live comfortably with the proposition that our neighbour just might be worthy, that she might just be right, or—at least—that a person’s value is not determined by how well we understand him.

Check out this link for further thoughts on the subject.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_theist

On faith, doubt and evidence

Suppose an anthropologist found some DNA evidence in a garment that had indisputably belonged to Christ. Suppose further that analysis of the sample showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Christ was the offspring of only one parent, a clone of his mother, if you will. What would change in your world as a result of hearing this? How would an evangelical atheist like Richard Dawkins live the rest of his life?

Would atheists seek to discredit the evidence? Would they propose that cloning was a procedure that had accidentally been discovered 2000 years ago, and was subsequently lost? Would they accept that Jesus Christ was what he and his followers said he was, the son of a virgin and, simultaneously, the Son of God? I wonder.

Would Christians jubilantly proclaim that they had been vindicated, and that their faith was now rewarded with the undeniable assurance that their gospel is the true Word of God? Would they finally have the confidence to proclaim the good news with the fervor of the early church? Would there be a new spring in their steps, new energy in their worship? I wonder.

Would young people, strangers, agnostics, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus suddenly flock to churches? Would that result in such harmony worldwide that we would very soon forget that animosity had characterized the world before? Would peace break out? I wonder.

You’ll no doubt recall the story of the rich man and the leper, Lazarus, told by Jesus to the Pharisees. Both die and the leper ascends to Abraham’s bosom, but the rich man goes to hell. The rich man begs Abraham to let Lazarus rise from the dead and go to his relatives to warn them of the horror they’re facing if they don’t repent. “If someone from the dead visits them, they will repent,” says the rich man in his torment. But Father Abraham is skeptical: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets they will pay no heed even if someone should rise from the dead.” The whole story can be found in Luke 16:19-31.

Jesus said that his miracles—actually surprisingly few given his power to turn water into wine, heal leprosy, even raise the other Lazarus from the dead—were done so that his faint-hearted followers would have their faith bolstered. He said to his disciples before raising Lazarus: “Lazarus is dead. I am glad not to have been there; it will be for your good and for the good of your faith.” Yet, having witnessed this miracle, the same disciples remained doubters, especially after it appeared that Jesus had been defeated through his own death and burial.

People will deny, deny (or, conversely, maintain, maintain) in the face of apparently irrefutable evidence, if denial or maintenance appear to be in their interest. There are plenty of indicators in the earth’s crust, for instance, that our planet was millions of years in the making (Carlsbad Caverns, Grand Canyon, Great Plains, Appalachian Mountains, etc.). Yet Christians of some fundamentalist stripes continue to declare that the Genesis account of creation is a history and that the Great Deluge had characteristics that reliably explain everything from the fossil records to the formation of the continents as we find them.

On the other side, it would probably take more than a rising from the dead to convince people like Richard Dawkins that the spirit of God is the Alpha and Omega of the universe. It appears faith is a choice, supported by evidence possibly, but not resting on it.

I wonder.