The Questioning Christian

A gene may make you ‘look on the bright side’ – or not; might that affect one’s faith?

“[A] genetic variation is linked with the tendency to look on the bright side of life. This is a key mechanism underlying resilience to general life stress. The absence of this protection in the other forms of this genotype is linked with heightened susceptibility to anxiety and depression.”

So says University of Essex professor Elaine Fox, lead author of a paper published Feb. 25 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, “Looking on the bright side: biased attention and the human serotonin transporter gene.”  (HT: Scientific American, May 2009, “Half Empty or Half Full,” Briefs, p. 28.)

I wonder whether people having this genetic predisposition toward optimism are any more inclined to trust that in the end, all will be well.

I’m also curious whether people having such trust are more inclined to believe in the existence of a Creator resembling, at least somewhat, the God of the great monotheistic religions.

Obama's faith, in his own words

Today BeliefNet features the full text of a 2004 interview of President-elect Barack Obama by Cathleen Falsani. (Hat tip:  Fr. Gawain.) 

Excerpt:

FALSANI:
Who's Jesus to you?

(He laughs nervously)

OBAMA:
Right.

Jesus is an historical figure for me, and he's also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher.

And he's also a wonderful teacher. I think it's important for all of us, of whatever faith, to have teachers in the flesh and also teachers in history.

FALSANI:
Is Jesus someone who you feel you have a regular connection with now, a personal connection with in your life?

OBAMA:
Yeah. Yes. I think some of the things I talked about earlier are addressed through, are channeled through my Christian faith and a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

It's worth a look.

An agnostic seeker emails me - my response

Reproduced below is an email exchange from a week ago, between me and someone who wishes to remain anonymous. I responded to this person by interspersing comments into the text of his/her first email to me.  (I broke up the paragraphing for easier reading, and am using Mark Harris's practice of putting long quotes in a different color.) I'm posting this with the other person's permission, with certain identifying details redacted.

I get emails like this every so often.  There are more than a few people like this out there. As putative followers of Jesus, part of our job, I believe, is to try to help these folks to take baby steps — which might be very difficult for them — in the direction of God.

===================

First, I'd like to thank you for your wonderful website ... I've been reading through it today, and it is helping me make some decisions on my faith.

Just to give you a little background on myself, I'm a XXXX living in XXX. Although I was baptized, I was raised in XXXX by agnostic / atheist parents [...] who generally scoffed at the idea of God.

Generally that led to me growing up in the same vein, although I didn't really think of the implications of an agnostic lifestyle until early adulthood.

Around that time, I considered the subject more, and I would say that throughout my 20s I vacillated between a belief in some sort of "spirituality" and fairly strong agnosticism.

I should also say that I'm highly scientifically minded, and have had a very difficult time accepting many of the stories as set forth by the Bible or the belief in a God that I could not scientifically verify.

[...]

For whatever reason, over the past few months (and certainly more so, weeks) I've once again become interested in the topic, so I launched a full-scale research effort.

I've looked down various atheist rationales, read the theories of some philosophers and looked at religion (mostly Christianity).

Unfortunately, most religions simply do not seem to acknowledge reality and what science has taught us.

That being said, I think that your visions of Christianity and religion reconcile rather nicely with modern science. The Big Bang does seem to me to indicate some variety of beginning.

So, as I first mentioned, I'd like to thank your for you website. I don't know how much "faith" I truly have, but as you present it, God seems plausible to me, and I'd like to explore further.  At the very least, it is comforting. [DCT:  Thanks!]

I have a few questions that I was hoping you could help me answer, if not, I understand. [DCT:  I’ll try ….]

==========================

How do you reconcile all of the unconverted souls throughout history with Christianity? ... [H]ow do you envision them fitting in under your vision of God?

[DCT RESPONSE:  I don’t worry about that.  Orthodox Christians claim that to be saved, you have to believe X, Y, and Z (for example, that Jesus is God Incarnate and his suffering and death atoned for the sins of mankind).  Jesus, on the other hand, reportedly told the inquiring scholar of the Law, in essence  (Luke 10:25-37), that if he followed the Summary of the Law, then he’d live eternally — “do this and you will live.”  

Inasmuch as we can’t control whether we ‘love’ God and our neighbor (at least I can’t), I usually paraphrase the Summary of the Law as entailing:

• striving to put God first — which entails, among other things, as best we can, facing the facts of the reality he wrought, along with keeping in mind that whatever God might be, we ain’t it; and

• seeking the best for others as we do for ourselves.

It seems to me that on the whole, individuals and groups that follow these two basic principles are far more likely to have their descendants survive to reproductive age, and for their cultures to continue being practiced. 

In other words, in emphasizing the Summary of the Law, Jesus put his finger on what I think is a crucial part of the fundamental fabric of Creation.

Getting back to the question of the afterlife:  It also seems to me that a super-intelligent Creator, who set up so many interacting natural processes that have produced us, his  ‘created co-creators’ (in the words of Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner), would not just consign us to nothingness when we die. 

Why?  Because eventually we’d figure out that there was no future for us after this life.  That would be pretty demotivating, no?  Such demotivation likely would make us of little further use in the continuing creation. 

That might be just fine with God, but in the absence of evidence to that effect, I’ll go with my speculation that he won’t just discard us like so much used sandpaper. 

By no means do I assert that for sure this is what’s happening; I just say it’s as plausible as any scenario posited by the virulent atheists. 

In any case, life is full of gambles.  The evidence appears pretty compelling that the Creator has set things up so that, on the whole (and not without horrible exceptions), life doesn’t seem too terrible for us, and it seems to be getting better over time. 

I’m willing to gamble on trusting the Creator that, in the very long term, things will work out OK for all of us.]

==========================

Also, I have always had a difficult time understanding how mentally impaired people fit into the religious fold. In instances of schizophrenia for instance, who is the soul?

[DCT RESPONSE:  I don’t worry about that either – “it is what it is”; see also the response above about life after death.]

==========================

Perhaps these questions are too mundane, but I'm trying to reconcile these ideas with a Christian view of God.

[DCT RESPONSE:  If by the Christian view of God you mean the Trinity, who (sometimes) answers prayers, rewards the ‘good,’ and punishes the ‘bad,’ I place that view in the same category as the Ptolemaic view of the universe:  it explains a few things in an OK way, but ultimately it’s unsatisfactory.

==========================

Also, I've briefly looked at the churches in my neighborhood, and most appear to be fairly traditional in the teachings of Christianity. Do you know how I could find some that are more along the progressive lines that you seem to represent? 

[DCT RESPONSE:  ... If I were starting from scratch, I’d look at the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the United Church of Christ, and the Unitarian Universalists (although from what I’ve read, the UUs have been pretty much captured by the atheists, agnostics, Wiccans, etc., and theists are made to feel like a distinctly-uncomfortable minority).  

As it happens, I’m an Episcopalian and can’t see that changing, even though we’re far from perfect.  If you haven’t already done so, you might look at my blog posting Why I Still Call Myself a Christian and an Episcopalian.]

==========================

Finally, is it ok for me to reach out to a priest in a local church to discuss these ideas, or would he / she be upset with my uncertainty of faith?

[DCT RESPONSE:  By all means!  Keep in mind that there are great priests like my rector (in the blog posting just cited, I tell a story about one of our conversations), but there are also some real duds, who get threatened if you even suggest that their worldview might be suboptimal.  If you run across one of the latter, don’t get discouraged.]

===========================

Related posts:

• A response to an inquiring non-believer
• Evangelism: Clear Soup First, Steak Dinner Later
• So Just What Do You Believe, Dad?

Our faithfulness, not our success, is what matters

"As a priest I am called not to be successful, but rather to be faithful to the Good News."  So says the new bishop-elect of the Diocese of Southern Virginia, the Rev. Herman “Holly” Hollerith, IV.  This standard, I submit, applies not just to priests, but to all of us:  What matters is not our apparent success or failure in the world, but whether we remain faithful to God and his Good News.

Fr. Hollerith's comment is found in his nominee statement, where he tells of an important moment in his spiritual journey:

Perhaps one critical and vocationally formative moment occurred when I was a young rector of a parish in South Carolina.  I had hit a low in my ministry and was feeling like all my efforts to enlighten minds, raise the consciousness of my flock, and resolve problems had come to naught.  I honestly felt the parish was moving backward in time, and I was pretty sure it was my fault and that I was simply an inadequate leader. 

Across the street from the parish rectory was a neighbor of mine, a prominent retired priest, who had been a supportive mentor and sounding board.  I wandered over to update him on my lack of progress and feelings of failure.  

Finally, in mid-sentence he stopped me, pointed his finger right at my nose and said, “Your problem, Hollerith, is that you have confused success with faithfulness.  They are not the same thing, but you have yet to figure this out and you think, only when you are successful, that you are doing the will of God.”   

Those words hit me right between the eyes, because they were the words of Christ.  Faithfulness and success are not the same thing!  As a priest I am called not to be successful, but rather to be faithful to the Good News.  It was a critical spiritual moment in my life that has since defined how I see things.

(Italics in original; bold-faced emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

We have to remember that the world will always tend to reward the appearance of success more than it does faithful effort alone. (We should also remember that the appearance of success can be fleeting, as recent turmoil in financial markets unhappily reminds us.)

And we can't just blithely ignore results, the reality of what our efforts actually produce.  Being faithful to the Good News requires facing the facts and being willing to change course when necessary.

But if we do the best we can —

• to face the facts;
• to appreciate the goodness of the creation;
• and to seek the best for our neighbors as we do for ourselves;

— in other words, if we do our best to follow the Summary of the Law — then we can stop worrying about whether we'll ever see "success" in our lives. Instead, we can luxuriate in the trust that in the very long term, things will turn out OK.

John McCain and Jesus

From Steven Waldman, Political Perceptions : The Religification of John McCain, in today's WSJ Online:

In the past, Sen. McCain has tended to emphasize a sense of duty as the key to his survival in Vietnam. "Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself, to a cause, to your principles, to the people on whom you rely, and who rely on you in return," he wrote. "A filthy, crippled, broken man, all I had left of my dignity was the faith of my fathers. It was enough."

(Emphasis added.) 

That pretty much sums up what I admire (and would hope to imitate) about Jesus of Nazareth.

Doubt is one of our noblest capacities

Bishop Don Wimberly presided and preached this morning.  Great sermon, based on the story of Doubting Thomas in today's Gospel reading. 

Some of the things he said (I paraphrase):

• Jesus was a doubter. He was a doubter about the Judaic notion of a warlord messiah. He was a doubter that without strict adherence to the Law it was impossible to be in a right relationship with God.

• Don't despise your doubt: Honor it; it's one of your noblest capacities.

• The faith you merely inherit, without ever questioning and struggling with it, will never truly be your own.

• An honest doubter, by subjecting his own doubts to the process of doubt, can come to faith by process of elimination.

* * *

I jotted down some thoughts of my own while listening to the bishop. Here's an edited version:

Doubt arises from a willingness to admit we don't know it all; a willingness to remain open to the reality that God wrought, instead of claiming (in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that we already know everything we'll ever need to know.

Doubt is thus an important contributor to faith as defined by the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor: "[An] openness to truth, whatever truth may turn out to be."

Are we smarter than the ancients?

Over at TitusOneNine, some of the commenters are rehearsing their scorn for the so-called liberal notion that we today are supposedly smarter than the ancients.

We probably aren’t any more innately gifted than the ancients were. But it’s indisputable that the intellectual tools we have for observing and making sense of the universe are many orders of magnitude better than what the ancients had.  Those tools are the result of thousands of years of accumulated experience and insights, tested against the reality of the world that God wrought.

(We should certainly hope that our gifts of memory, reason, and skill would have improved our intellectual tools over all this time!)

At the controls of his personal jet plane, John Travolta can cover the 26+ miles of the marathon run in roughly 3 minutes.  It’s thought that Phidippides, the ancient Greek hero of Marathon, took about 3 hours. It’s not that Travolta is 60 times better as an athlete; he just has better transportation tools.

Caucusing about the Creeds (or, pew aerobics)

Kendall Harmon at TitusOneNine frets about this report in Episcopal Life concerning a "pew aerobics" theological exercise:

The Rev. Tom Woodward of Santa Fe, New Mexico, once devised a startling way to show a congregation its belief, unbelief and the value of community.

He calls it "an experience with the Nicene Creed."

After explaining that they would be reading through the creed phrase by phrase, Woodward would give the charge:

"When the phrase is something you understand on one level or another, and believe, stand up or remain standing. When the phrase is something that makes no sense to you, or is something you do not believe, sit down or remain sitting."

The resulting dance, he says, appeared to be something akin "to a rebellious exercise class," with folks popping up, sitting down and squirming to watch their neighbors as they stood and sat and stood again.

At the end, Woodward would ask what they had observed. "The answers were always the same: No one stood all the way through the creed, and no one stayed seated all the way through, and there was always someone standing for every phrase."

(Emphasis added.)

Kendall Harmon says that "what it tells us is that we are church which is failing to teach the faith effectively ...." 

No, Kendall. What it really tells us is that when it comes to credibility, many so-called "core" Christian doctrines are pretty much on a par with, say, astrology. And deep down, many of our pew-sitters know it.

Think about it:  Conventional Christians fervently profess (for example) ancient trinitarian claims about the nature of God, while rejecting with equal fervor the contrary claims of (say) the LDS Church.  This is decidedly curious, inasmuch as none of these claims is supported by anything remotely resembling competent evidence; all rest essentially entirely on "faith" — which in this context is no more than a euphemism for wishful thinking.

That, not any failure in teaching, is the reason Tom Woodward got the results he did in his experiment. I suspect his results could be replicated in many Episcopal, Roman Catholic, and Lutheran churches.

Some scripturalists insist passionately that Christians would return to The True Faith if only the church would teach that faith more effectively. To me that sounds a lot like certain companies that never seem to be able to meet their sales objectives.  Quarter after quarter, in reporting results to their stockholders, the managements of these companies make excuses for their failures: Customers didn't buy because of winter weather; they didn't buy because of the stock market; they didn't buy because the planets weren't aligned correctly. These managements claim that Next Quarter Will Be Different (Really, We Mean It This Time).  Hoping to make it so, they fire their sales executives, or change their marketing messages, or switch advertising agencies — anything except facing the fact that customers don't buy because the product just isn't good enough.

That's what these True Believers sound like.

---

Related posts:

• Shortening the Nicene Creed
• Another Way to Read the Creed
• The Nicene Creed, Revisited
• Why Say the Nicene Creed?
• A sales-oriented approach to evangelism

A response to an inquiring non-believer

Commenter Jason, who seems to be related to ee cummings <g>, asks some good questions this morning about a posting I did a few years ago: 

... as a non-believer (some call me atheist), this has been an intriguing article to stumble upon. frankly, i am at a loss as to understand how you can display such sound logic and skepticism, yet at the same time maintain a claim to be christian, or even religious at all. ...

... you say you are christian, which is to say that you do in fact have faith about certain metaphysical matters. how can you believe in a heaven or hell if the very source and support for that idea is something that you admit is not reliable? 

... please contact me. your position is very interesting and new to me, as such i believe i can learn quite a bit from you.

Jason, I'm very glad you wrote. I'll try to respond succinctly, and I'm grateful to you for providing the impetus to do so. 

Christian is as Christian does

I don't agree that, to call yourself a Christian, you have to "have faith about certain metaphysical matters."  That puts me at odds with a large number of people who think that, to be a Christian, you have to believe in, for example, original sin and salvation through Jesus' atoning death.  Personally, I'm not persuaded about these things (except to the extent that original sin is a metaphor for our inherent imperfection).  I reject the idea that this disqualifies me from being a Christian, or from being 'saved,' whatever that means.

I think the Jesus described in the New Testament had a very different view than do these latter-day Christians. Jesus the Jewish reformer seemed to want people simply to serve God and one another.  He stressed, correctly in my judgment (more about which below), the importance of the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law, which I would paraphrase along the following lines: 

Acknowledge the Creator and commit your whole being to serving 'his' purposes. In particular, seek the best for your neighbor just as you do for yourself; and keep in mind that 'your neighbor' is not just your kinsman or countryman, but anyone who crosses your path, even your people's hereditary enemy. 

In response to a question from an expert in Torah, Jesus is reported to have said, "do this and you will live [eternally]."  (Luke 10.25-37.) 

If we're to believe Jesus, it would seem that anyone who does these things may claim the title of "Christian," no matter what particular theological doctrines they happen to believe to be true.   

FOOTNOTE:  Some of my Christian friends will scoff that the preceding paragraph smacks of salvation by good works, which is anathema to many Protestants, instead of by faith. They argue that you cannot be 'saved' unless your faith is such that you truly "love the Lord."  My response is that people usually can't control whether they "love" someone as we understand the term, so Jesus must have meant that we should <em>serve</em> God and our neighbor.  Moreover, serving God and others by doing good works can cause a change of mind and heart — Greek: metanoia, usually translated as "repentance" — which can lead to precisely the faith that some Christians insist is a prerequisite to salvation. 

FOOTNOTE:  It's hard to believe (and we have no evidence) that God would punish someone for failing to believe the "right" things: so far as I can tell, what we happen to believe is something over which we have little or no volitional control.  Of course, we can indeed sometimes talk ourselves into believing that which we really want to believe, regardless whether it's true.

Motivation:  Reasons for doing what Jesus said to do

Of course we have to ask why we should seek to follow the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law. After all, as many have pointed out, these injunctions are by no means unique to Christianity; they come from Torah and are manifested in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

For many if not most Christians, the principal motivation is the claim that Jesus was God Incarnate, and therefore we should do what he said. I'm afraid that doesn't do it for me, nor has it ever for the majority of the world's population. Indeed, those of Jesus' followers who actually knew him in life didn't seem to think he was God.  So Jesus' alleged divinity would not appear to require that we follow his teachings.

My own motivation is largely pragmatic.  I've come to believe that, on the whole, following the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law is humanity's best bet for evolutionary success, and also for cosmic significance.  In particular:

1. To me the evidence makes it quite likely that there is a Creator; undoubtedly not precisely like the God described in the Bible (who really knows?), but probably not entirely unlike that.

2. At least locally, the universe hasn't devolved into chaos, but has evolved into the relatively highly organized form we have today. And there's not much doubt that this constitutes "progress" as we define it, because few if any people, at any time in history, would permanently trade places with a random  person who lived, say, 1,000 years previously.

3. The Great Commandment and Summary of the Law "just works."  People who stay real, who don't worship their own wishful thinking, but who instead live in the reality that the Creator wrought, are more likely to survive and reproduce.  And over the long term, altruistic cultures have proved more likely to survive and grow than narcissistic ones.

All this suggests that the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law summarize one of the fundamental mechanisms by which the Creator's universe is being caused to evolve.  They appear to be like laws of nature.  Doing the math, it seems entirely plausible that they were ordained by the Creator so that we would function as created co-creators in his continuing creation of the universe.

This possibility is supremely exciting to me.  It might be just a matter of egotism, of my personal liking to be "where the action is," perhaps like Jesus' disciples James and John (and their mother!) importuning him to name them his chief lieutenants . If that's the case, it is what it is.

I can't be sure I'm right about this, of course.  But every day we make bets, choosing particular ways to conduct our lives on the basis of uncertain information.  This particular bet seems like an eminently worthwhile one.

FOOTNOTE: For an account of how I arrived at the above beliefs, see this posting about Why I Still Call Myself a Christian, and an Episcopalian.

FOOTNOTE:  Some of my Christian friends criticize me for relying on "private judgment" in reaching the conclusions above. Ultimately, I believe, it's I who am responsible for use of whatever gifts of discernment and judgment have been entrusted to me.  (Cf. the Parable of the Talents.) Prudent stewardship of those gifts will often entail choosing to rely on the judgment of others smarter or more knowledgeable than I. But in the end, "the buck stops here"; I'm the one who is accountable for my stewardship.

Faithfulness

I also admire Jesus because he was faithful to his people and to God's calling as he understood it. 

True, some of his early followers believed he was the long-awaited Anointed One, a man designated by God to become the warrior-king who would soon return to rescue Israel from oppression and usher in the Kingdom of God. The New Testament claims that Jesus himself believed this (although personally I'm skeptical about that). None of this happened, of course.

But that error is pretty inconsequential, as long as we're willing to face the facts, and not insist on living in a fantasy world.  Jesus was human; being wrong on that point takes away nothing from his faithful pursuit of his duty as he saw it, even unto death.

* * *

Thanks again for writing, Jason, and please do so again. You might read some of the postings listed in the right-hand column, if you haven't done so already.

Loving God, without believing in him

British journalist John Humphrys says he wishes he could believe in God the way he did as a child, but his faith was worn away by years of witnessing the evils of the world.  His piece, though, hints that he may well obey the Summary of the Law in his life, even if perhaps he doesn't know it:

• Humphrys seems to recognize and accept that he's not God. That's no small thing — some people seem to think they're entitled to have the world be what they think it is, or what they want it to be, as opposed to what God has wrought;

• Humphrys appears to try to face the facts, to live in the reality that actually exists — or as believers would put it, in the reality that God created — as opposed to living in the fantasy "reality" that we all tend to create in our imaginations;

• We get the sense that Humphrys isn't a totally selfish man; that at least some of the time he seeks the best for others as he does for himself.

That sounds quite a bit like the Summary of the Law, no? Maybe Humphrys doesn't "love" God and neighbor, in the sense of love as an emotional state. But it's not apparent that people have any control over the emotion of love. As far as the Summary of the Law is concerned, maybe Humphrys is doing all that's expected.

And if we're to believe Jesus' response to the lawyer, as reported in Luke chapter 10, then perhaps Humphrys the doubter has just as good a shot at eternal life as the most devout of orthodox Christians.

(Hat tip: TitusOneNine.)