The Questioning Christian

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.)

Religious intolerance may stem from fear of death

Some of us have long suspected that the vitriol that issues from religious radicals might have a significant psychological component. Apparently there's research to support the notion that the psychological component is the fear of one's own death.

The latest issue of The New Republic (Aug. 27) has an intriguing piece, Death Grip, by John B. Judis. He reports on extensive research by experimental psychologists, suggesting pretty clearly that:

... the mere thought of one's mortality can trigger a range of emotions--from disdain for other races, religions, and nations, to a preference for charismatic over pragmatic leaders, to a heightened attraction to traditional mores.

Judis writes:

To test the hypothesis that recognition of mortality evokes "worldview defense"--their term for the range of emotions, from intolerance to religiosity to a preference for law and order, that they believe thoughts of death can trigger--they assembled 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but, for one group, they inserted in the middle of the personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke awareness of their mortality.

One [exercise] asked the judges to "briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you"; the other required them to "jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead."

They then asked the judges to set bail in the hypothetical case of a prostitute whom the prosecutor claimed was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises set an average bail of $455. The control group that did not do the exercises set it at an average of $50. The psychologists knew they were onto something.

Over the next decade, the three performed similar experiments to illustrate how awareness of death could provoke worldview defense. They showed that what they now called "mortality salience" affected people's view of other races, religions, and nations.

When they had students at a Christian college evaluate essays by what they were told were a Christian and a Jewish author, the group that did the mortality exercises expressed a far more negative view of the essay by the Jewish author than the control group did. (German psychologists would find a similar reaction among German subjects toward Turks.)

They also conducted numerous experiments to show that mortality exercises evoked patriotic responses. The subjects who did the exercises took a far more negative view of an essay critical of the United States than the control group did and also expressed greater veneration for cultural icons like the flag.

The three even devised an experiment to show that, after doing the mortality exercises, conservatives took a much harsher view of liberals, and vice versa.

In conducting these experiments, they took care not to tell the subjects what they were doing. They also devised experiments to answer obvious objections to their theory. For instance, they substituted other exercises designed to increase anxiety--by reminding subjects of an upcoming examination or a painful dental visit--to determine if these thoughts had the same effect as the mortality exercises, but they didn't. It wasn't anxiety per se that triggered worldview defense; it was anxiety specifically about one's own death.

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

As Kendall Harmon would say, read the whole thing.

I would add: Anxiety about death is natural, but it also suggests a lack of trust that everything will be OK — in other words, a lack of faith, the faith of Abraham and of Jesus, as lauded by Paul in his letter to the Romans.

Contrast mortality anxiety with the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor's definition of faith as openness to truth, no matter what truth turns out to be — that would seem to be just the opposite of worldview defensiveness.

Creation: A Titanic Set of Processes That Continues Today (Part 1)

Cosmologists currently think that the universe evolved into its present physical state, including Planet Earth, in roughly the following way:

Energy Appeared in the "Big Bang." In the “moments” after (what we inaptly call) the Big Bang, some 13.7 billion years ago, our universe consisted solely of energy. We don’t know where the energy came from; some think it might have been the product of a quantum vacuum. Or energy might have been created ex nihilo (from nothing).

Energy Cooled Into Subatomic Particles.  Some of the energy released in the Big Bang “cooled” into subatomic particles such as quarks, moving every which way.  (Recall that under relativity theory, energy and mass are equivalent, with either one being convertible into the other.)

Subatomic Particles Formed Hydrogen Atoms.  The subatomic particles were drawn to each other by forces including their own mutual gravitational attraction. They coalesced into, among other things, protons and electrons, which in turn combined to form hydrogen atoms (typically, one proton and one electron per hydrogen atom) as well as helium and lithium atoms

Hydrogen Atoms Clumped Together; Became Compressed; and Eventually Ignited as Stars.  Still under the influence of mutual gravitational attraction, the primal hydrogen atoms clumped into gas clouds.   Some of the clouds became highly compressed by their own gravity, resulting in such intense internal pressure and temperature that their atoms' nuclei began fusing together, eventually “igniting” in a process of nuclear fusion.

Burning Stars Forged the Elements of Planets, and of Life.  The "burning" stars served as blast furnaces in which a number of different chemical elements were forged:  The stars' nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms resulted not just in the production of huge quantities of energy, but also in "ashes" such as helium, carbon, etc.  (This didn't include some of the heavier elements found in planets and in our bodies; that didn't come until the first-generation stars began to explode in supernovae.)

First-Generation Stars Exploded in Supernovae, Scattering Debris That Would Be Put to Use Later.  After billions of years (typically), the first generation of stars started to burn out their hydrogen “fuel.”  The outward pressure generated by the stars' nuclear fusion became progressively less capable of offsetting the stars' own gravity.  At various times, these first-generation stars began to collapse.  In many of these stars, the collapse raised the internal pressure and temperature to unimaginable levels.   In a process thought to be runaway nuclear fusion, the collapsing stars exploded, with incredible violence, as supernovae  — but not before creating heavier elements such as iron.  (Not all dying stars become supernovae; some just burn out.)  Each supernova's explosion blew its stellar debris across wide distances,

Supernovae Debris Furnished the Raw Materials for Planets, and for Us. Eventually, gravity caused various exploded stars' debris to coalesce into planets such as Earth (and also to fall into other stars, to drift through space, etc.).  And somehow, at least on Earth and perhaps elsewhere, the raw materials of life — manufactured in stellar factories, as it were — started to come together.

So if the cosmologists are right, our universe, our planet, and every atom in our bodies, were all created by an awe-inspiring set of ongoing processes — processes that evidently still continue to operate even today.  As the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne puts it, we are all made out of the ashes of dead stars.

These Titanic Processes of Creation Give the Appearance of Having Been Fine-Tuned.  There are a number of physical constants underlying these creation processes which, if they had been just a bit different, would evidently have made the universe, as we know it, an impossibility.  There may be natural explanations for these "cosmic coincidences"; for example, perhaps our universe is merely one of many, and ours happens to be the one in which the physical constants are what they need to be.  Or perhaps not ....

Barbara Brown Taylor Interview - PBS

Q: Why did you want to be a priest?

A: I didn't want to be a priest. I wanted to do the work that priests do, and that required becoming a priest. But I wanted to visit in hospitals, and I wanted to celebrate Communion, and I wanted to baptize babies, and one had to be a priest to do those things. So it wasn't so much a wish for the status as it was the work.

*  *  *

Q: In addition to tiredness and busyness, was there a part of it that had to do with your faith and your beliefs?

A: Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me during this time. Because so many of my certainties about who I was and what I was supposed to be doing fell away, that faith was really what I had left. [...]

*  *  *

Q: You had taken a vow to seek and serve Christ in all people?

A: That's a baptismal vow: "Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?" We say that every time we baptize a baby in the Episcopal Church. It's one of five baptismal promises. I don't know that that was part of the ordination service, but the primary identity for me was as a baptized person. The ordination is a secondary identity. But that was a question that is central to the way of life I'd chosen.

*  *  *

Q: What do you live by now?

A: I live by the simplest, perhaps facile command that Jesus ever gave, which is to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as the self, and I find that's entirely consuming. To do those two things leaves me very little time to do much else.

(Excerpted From Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR . July 7, 2006 | PBS.)

The Opposite of Faith is Fear - Verna Dozier, RIP

Susan Russell notes the death of Episcopal laywoman Verna Dozier with links to the Washington Post obituary and a wonderful quote from one of her books, The Dream of God:

Doubt is not the opposite of faith: fear is.  Fear will not risk that even if I am wrong, I will trust that if I move today by the light that is given me, knowing it is only finite and partial, I will know more and different things tomorrow than I know today, and I can be open to the new possibility I cannot even imagine today.

I've ordered the book and will be eager to see what Ms. Dozier has to say.

Troubling Inconsistencies in the New Testament: Five Reasons for Skepticism (Revised)

Occasioned by a discussion in which I participated earlier this week, I've just finished a major revision of an essay I did a couple of years ago, which is now titled, Troubling Inconsistencies in the New Testament: Five Reasons for Skepticism.

I did this revision primarily so that I'll have it as a ready reference — these days, I really am trying to get away from directly challenging traditionalists about their theology, because it's largely a waste of time. 

I'm far more interested in reaching out to skeptics and non-believers who, deep in their hearts, sort of wish they could believe, but haven't found a way to do so that's consistent with their educations and experience.  I feel a special obligation to such folks, perhaps because I used to be one of them.  They simply don't buy the argument that "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it!"   So I'm trying to articulate alternative, positive, empirically-defensible arguments why it makes good sense:

• to conclude that God exists;
• to put one's trust in him and make one's self available for his service;
• and to follow Jesus.

Faith, Reason, God and Other Imponderables - New York Times

"[Embracing religion] is what Francis S. Collins, Owen Gingerich and Joan Roughgarden have done in new books, taking up one side of the stormy argument over whether faith in God can coexist with faith in the scientific method.   With no apology and hardly any arm-waving, they describe their beliefs, how they came to them and how they reconcile them with their work in science."    Cornelia Dean, Faith, Reason, God and Other Imponderables, NY Times, July 25, 2006.

Why a Skeptic Should Follow Jesus: Steve Jones

From Steve Jones at Freethinking Faith comes one of the best arguments I've ever seen why skeptics — even those who, like Jones (and me) don't believe Jesus was God — should still follow him:

... I have taken that existential leap, I've ventured my life upon the essential truthfulness of the Christian message.  In all my weakness and doubt, I consider myself a follower of Jesus.

What else is there for me?  Atheism?  No, I see too much evidence for a Great Mind behind the complexity of life, a thing that never could have arisen by luck of the draw.  How about Deism, a God detached from the universe He created?  No, too many people have experienced too many things relating to the Sacred.  They can't ALL be delusional.

Well, what about other religions? Judaism? Buddhism?  No, despite their obvious virtues, I can't see myself embracing either of these.  Judaism, as far as I understand it, falls shorts of Christ's lofty ethic of love for enemies, open-ended forgiveness, unreasonable gentleness.  Buddhism is too accepting of suffering, too acquiescent toward evil for my taste.  The Christian is called to confront and defeat evil, not to find peace with its existence.  That's why Christian-based hospitals, orphanages and relief agencies dot the globe. We're not content to just let bad things flourish.

Despite all of the negative things -- like petty church people and dumb doctrines -- I have seen amazingly good thing come out of Christian faith.  I've seen so many examples of drugged-out, angry, aimless people becoming kind, sane, joyous people in the briefest spans (my own brother, for example).  There must be something divine about it all.  I never see that happen as a result of psychology or some secular philosophy.  But I've seen it many times when people enter a relationship with God as a response to Jesus of Nazareth.

Read it all.

Am I Just "Tone-Deaf" About the Traditional Christian Story?

For some people, the traditional Christian story — that God became man; died as a necessary sacrifice to atone for our sins; rose from the dead; and ascended into heaven — resonates so strongly that it captivates them right away.  To them, the story is simply and obviously true. 

It's never worked that way for me.  I've never been able to get past the troubling inconsistencies in the New Testament accounts, plus the fact that the men who actually knew Jesus evidently preached that he was the long-awaited Anointed One, not that he was God incarnate.  Those facts are what resonate with me (not least because professionally I'm all too aware of how easily memories and stories can become distorted).

But I can't rule out another possibility:  It may be that I just don't have what it takes to "get" the traditional story.  I might be like a tone-deaf person who doesn't have what it takes to "get" music.  

I have some idea of what that must be like:  The quickest way for me to get into a really good mood, and even a state of exhilaration, is to hear (let's say) What is This Feeling? from the original Broadway cast recording of Wicked, or to sing, say, O Zion Haste (Hymn 539) or Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah (Hymn 690).  I feel sorry for the unfortunates who will never know the joys of music. 

Perhaps that's how my orthodox friends feel about me and the traditional Christian story.