.:| The Mr. Renaissance Bi-weekly Newsletter |:. archives | discuss | subscribe | print page
April 25, 2007
Hello everyone,
It has been brought home to me all over again that how we view God has a tremendous impact on the quality of spiritual life that we live. I know a man who struggles to feel any sense of connection or closeness to God, not just sometimes, but for the entire course of his conscious spiritual journey which has spanned nearly two decades. That the universe is an inherently frightening and perhaps lonely place is a truism to him, as obvious as his own existence. I think too now of W.H. Auden’s poem The Shield of Achilles, in which a “ragged urchin, aimless and alone” could not conceive of “any world where promises were kept, / Or one could weep because another wept.”
A literature course I am taking this semester has us reading Albert Camus’ The Plague, set in the port city of Oran, Algeria, in the 1940s. An infestation of diseased rats bring with them the plague, believed until then to have been permanently quelled in modern society, and the city is put under mandatory quarantine. The novel functions on at least two levels: on one level, it is a metaphor for the German invasion in which the rats are the Germans bringing with them the scourge to Algeria; on another level, it functions as a metaphor for daily life as a prison from which no one escapes and with which all must deal. However much he might personally resist the label, for an existentialist like Camus, every day is lived with an awareness of the absurd: the only thing it takes to be condemned to die is to be born, something no one asked for. Day in and day out, we live lives in a search for meaning and purpose in a world in which there is no meaning or purpose.
A brief overview of historical events should serve as a helpful reminder. As we glossed in Enlightenment Thinkers: The Death of Teleology, for 1500 years, a God-centered cosmology was the dominant view of the world not only for men of the cloth but for men of science and the humanities as well. Not everyone believed that the bible, as written, was to be trusted, particularly those elements that seemed mythic or were obviously miraculous: those parts seemed elements of folklore, like statutes of saints that weep or relics that heal. Yet even as late as the 18th century, almost everyone at least held to a Newtonian God who wound up the universe and then walked away. Of all the classic arguments for the existence of God, the one overwhelming all others in the Enlightenment writings is the teleological argument, taken from the Greek word telos, or “end”: we call this argument “the argument from design.” To people of the day, it seemed patently obvious that the universe had purposeful design to it: even the strident skeptic Philo in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is forced to admit how extremely difficult it is to refute this apparent fact. Yet it was in part because of the inductive method proposed by Francis Bacon, among others, that the teleological argument began to lose its force in the contemporary world and the teleological argument remains rather unconvincing to many persons in our own day:
All of Aquinas’ arguments, as with those of the philosophers and theologians that came both before and after him, can only demonstrate the necessity of something being first in magnitude, temporality, or causation. Matters of Christian theology, such as salvation, sin, atonement, and the Trinity, are still matters of faith. They may be framed within a rational system, but to grant the premises one must take that initial step of faith. ... [T]he teleological, cosmological, and ontological arguments [at best] can only establish the necessity of a Supreme Being: they cannot reveal what revelation claims and that men must take on faith. If it can only be rationally demonstrated that a First Cause or Higher Power of some sort is necessary, that tells us next to nothing of the personality or lack thereof of this Being, to say nothing of His character. [Of Aristotle’s four causes,] how then can we know the end [telos] for which things are made? ... One may very well believe in “Divine Theology,” but it is in nowise a matter of reason—rather it is a matter of faith. Once accepted, it may be fit into a rational system, but an initial act of faith is required to “grant the premises,” as it were. For the Scholastics, natural philosophy (scientific inquiry) was largely deduced from the writings of Aristotle and Plato as well as the Scriptures; for the Enlightenment thinkers—particularly as charted out by Bacon—natural philosophy was inductive, starting from empirical observation and rational reflection. ... Approaching the world in this way from induction re-opened the question of creation and put to death a cosmology, once agreed upon by the common consensus of virtually everyone, on which all could agree. (Enlightenment Thinkers: The Death of Teleology)
Part of the teleological argument looks to the apparent order of the universe, yet the World Wars painted a much different picture in which the order of nature gave way to the chaos of war, hope gave way to despair, meaning gave way to nihilism, love gave way to fear, joy gave way to mourning, if God was real he was not manifest, and men were alienated from other men. Fear in particular is a sickness unto death and in our despair the manifest power of God is swallowed and the sun effectively becomes blotted out. Particularly in France where Roman Catholicism had been the de facto for centuries, a vacuum was left and the climate was ripe for questioning. In some ways, it might be said that the widespread acceptance of Christianity made the fall from grace that much more pronounced. As Kenneth Rexroth writes in his 1959 essay The Hasidism of Martin Buber:
Existentialism is a frame of mind. For people who do not know the maximum state of insecurity bred in most men caught in our disintegrating social fabric as in a thicket of fire, its dilemmas, like the epistemological dilemma that bothered the British for three centuries, simply do not exist. The dilemma does not exist for Buber. He cannot project himself with any success into the psychosis of total insecurity. He is too much at home in the world. ...
A few paragraphs earlier, Rexroth writes:
Religious Existentialism descends directly from Augustine to Luther to Kierkegaard to Barth. It is obsessed with the absolute transcendence of the creator and the utter contingency of the creature, and it recognizes no mediation except a sort of historically instantaneous thunderbolt, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, which must be accepted as an act of blind faith. It has no use for the responsibilities of community: Augustine put aside his wife, married after the rites of a slightly different sect, as a whore, and Kierkegaard’s love life was a pitiable farce. It pictures man as ridden by the anxieties and terrors of his only spiritual ability—his realization of his own insignificance. This is why atheist Existentialism is a philosophy of despair, “the philosophy of the world-in-concentration-camp,” a kind of utterly thoroughgoing masochism. Take away God and there is absolutely nothing left. Nothing but black bile. Nobody there. However Martin Buber might disagree doctrinally, take away his God and nothing important in his philosophy has changed. It remains a philosophy of joy, lived in a world full of others. (The Hasidism of Martin Buber)
One may object to bringing in the lives of proponents as proof of religious existentialism’s overall lack of community value—history has no shortage of advocates who fail to abide by their own doctrines—but certainly by the time existentialism reached the 20-century with the likes of Sartre and Camus, humanity was all alone in the world, absurdity and alienation the new watchwords.
In The Plague, one of the central characters is a Jesuit by the name of Father Paneloux. His rhetorical skills are legendary and his passion is genuine: his explanation for the plague is found in the opening lines of his sermon: “Calamity has come on you, my brethren, and my brethren, you deserved it” (94). Father Paneloux is not entirely one-dimensional: his sermon contains a call to repentance and a degree of mercy and compassion as well; in addition, he later joins the sanitation squad whose job is to tend the sick and help out with the plague victims in any way they can; looking at the historical metaphor, the sanitation project becomes the name for the resistance. When Dr. Rieux—we learn later that he is actually the book’s narrator—learns that the Father has joined the sanitation crew, he states, “That’s good. I’m glad to hear that he is better than his sermon,” to which Tarrou, the central organizer of the sanitation crews says, “Most people are like that. It’s only a matter of giving them a chance” (150). The implication, warranted or not, is that what Father Paneloux professes publicly is not necessarily the same thing he believes himself, whether he is consciously aware of any such discrepancy or not. Regardless, Father Paneloux obviously offers a Jonathan-Edward’s-sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God explanation for the plague, which for many typifies Christianity.
Our professor, in fact, was raised to see the world in this way; he told us of the two best hellfire-and-brimstone preachers he had ever heard in his life. One was a traveling evangelist from Arkansas whose name now escapes me; the other was his mother. He tells the tale of when he was around three years old, his mother had just taken him out of the bath and was toweling him dry in front of the heater. Pointing to it, she asked him what it would feel like if he stuck his tongue into the flame. He was obviously horrified at the thought, and so she went on to explain to him that hell was like that except that every second forever and ever without end was just as awful as the first and that rather than just his tongue, it would be his entire body. He said that it obviously made a big impression on him, as he still remembers it vividly to this day, prompting the student next to me to lean over and whisper, “Yeah, and you can see how much good it did him.” Given that our professor is something of a maverick never known for shying away from a life lived to its fullest, her humor did not fail to escape me and we both smiled.
Earlier in the semester, we were talking about whether there was such a thing as human nature and if so if it was inherently good, inherently bad, or somewhere in between. Given his exposure to Christianity, the professor did not see much room for the Christian answer allowing for any inherent goodness. And that, in its turn, reminds me of Michael Molloy’s comments in Experiencing the World’s Religions, which we first cited in Sipping Coffee on a Wednesday Evening:
The basic nature of human beings has been one of the great topics of discussion throughout the history of China. Is human nature good or bad or somewhere in between? This is not a theoretical question at all, because how one answers this question has crucial practical results. If human nature is basically good, it should be left on its own and trusted, and moral training, laws, and punishments are of little importance. If human nature is basically evil, human beings need strict moral education, stern laws, harsh punishments, and a strong ruler. A middle position is also possible: if human nature is neutral, human beings need education that is not coercive and a ruler who governs primarily through example. (Molloy, Michael. Experiencing the World’s Religions. New York: McGraw Hill, 2005. 238.)
When we covered Dr. Eboo Patel’s essay “On Nurturing a Modern Muslim Identity” in my own classes, I mentioned Molloy’s idea and we brainstormed as to the various ways a belief in the inherent nature of humanity would affect how a ruler ruled. We also spent some time matching up what we knew of various traditions with their beliefs about humanity: Daoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism. Before we look at the answer we arrived at for Christianity, let us look at Rexroth’s portrayal of Hasidic Judaism:
. . . Hasidism is ethical mysticism. Its dominant characteristic is joy in the good—in the good in every sense of the word, in life, in the good things of life, in the beauty of creation, in the good in all men, and in doing good. The joke, “Good food, good drink, good God, let’s eat,” could well be a brief Hasidic “grace.”
The great trouble with Talmudic Judaism is that it was used up emotionally—it had become a religion of rules and prescriptions, very difficult to get excited about. Hasidism changed all this. The Torah, the Law, became a source of endless intoxicating joy. To use the vulgar phrase of a bad American revivalist, they discovered that it was fun to do good and to be good. It is curious that with the exception of the Quakers, Christianity and the religions influenced by it teach or at least imply that it is very, very hard to be a good human being. This is simply not true, not at least for a person uncorrupted by manufactured guilts. It is not only easy to avoid lying, stealing, fornication, covetousness, idolatry, lust, pride, anger, jealousy, and the rest, it is a positive pleasure. Essential to such a life are magnanimity, courage, and the love and trust of other men. These are above all others the Hasidic virtues, along with humility, simplicity, and joy. These are all virtues of direct dealing with other men—the virtues of dialogue. To the Hasid the mystical trance is a dialogue. The self does not unself itself, but “forgets itself” in conversation with the Other; and from the Other, i.e., God as the ultimate and perfect partner of dialogue, flows out the conversation with all others—the life of dialogue, the philosophy of Martin Buber. (The Hasidism of Martin Buber)
We did not look at Hasidic Judaism as a class—it is, after all, English 110, not philosophy or religion 101, and in a secular state university as well—but our conclusion of Christianity’s answer to “what is the character of humanity?” was a little different than my professor’s and was in keeping with G.K. Chesterton’s musing that “Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously” (VI. The Paradoxes of Christianity). In sum, we decided that humanity was created in the image of God and that was a good thing; humanity also had a propensity for sin and that was a bad thing. Not unlike the struggle of inner jihad mentioned in the previous issue, there are two natures at war with each other. To be fair, there are, of course, branches of Christianity that see humanity as totally depraved with no redemptive qualities whatsoever just as there are branches of Islam that likewise not only believe as much but demonstrate it in totalitarian rule, but traditionally, at least, Christianity has always sounded two notes, not merely one. The real issue comes in parsing the particulars and they may not always be where we think them. Chesterton did not have this exact thought in mind later in what he writes, but the idea is nonetheless evocative when removed from its native context: “It is said that Paganism is a religion of joy and Christianity of sorrow; it would be just as easy to prove that Paganism is pure sorrow and Christianity pure joy. Such conflicts mean nothing and lead nowhere. Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things are balanced or divided.” (IX. Authority and the Adventurer)
To what degree do we need badness in order to understand—to know—goodness? It has been said of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” that the “knowledge of good and evil” was only possible when seen in contrast. Whereas Adam and Eve lived in utter goodness before that fateful encounter with the serpent, they did not know that it was goodness until they saw it against the black relief of its negation. And so we have another binary opposition where human knowledge progresses by pairs of opposites defined against one another as negations: up/down, right/left, inside/outside, A/~A. Therefore, for many in the psychoanalytic school of thought especially prevalent during the 50s and 60s in which classic texts were assigned symbolic readings, the serpent becomes the true champion, for he brought knowledge. Championing the serpent is prevalent in forms of gnosticism as well.
There are certainly schools of thought that see God as being as much the author of evil as of good; it so happens that the man mentioned in our opening paragraph who struggles to feel any sense of connectedness or closeness to God sees him as author of evil and good alike, doing as he pleases; as Rexroth says above of the religious existentialist, this man is haunted by “the absolute transcendence of the creator and the utter contingency of the creature.” For this man, his understanding of scripture makes it evident that we have no will, choice, or freedom to speak of when it comes to our salvation; further, salvation is absolutely necessary, for we have been born with the stain of guilt and are in danger of spending eternity roasting in the flames prepared by an angry God. God creates good and evil, heaven and hell, decides who goes where without allowing humanity any freedom in the matter, and is entirely justified in everything he does because he is, after all, God, free to do with the creatures he has created as he pleases. In almost a total inversion of the 20th-century existentialist in which humanity is everything, humanity becomes virtually nothing whatsoever: both views may be seen as extremes. As the Swedenborgian Daniel W. Goodenough reminds us in “Chapter II. Why Relevant?” of Providence and Free Will in Human Actions:
In general, believers in God prefer to think of the course of life as being directed by Providence, such that good always results, nothing really unfair happens, and our evil is always somehow overruled for good. On the other hand, we feel free in many things, and we want to believe we are free to choose good or evil, and therefore responsible for what happens to us and within our spheres of use. It is important to realize that we cannot have it completely both ways, because in the degree that Providence alone determines and causes something, people’s freedom and responsibility regarding it are eliminated. We are not responsible for, nor free in regard to, what the Divine alone determines. .... We cannot have it both ways, and if the appearance of freedom is true ([as] in the area of educating and influencing children), then some of the responsibility for our children’s upbringing ... lies with our free will.
Goodenough reminds us that we either believe in God’s providence to the exclusion of free will, free will to the exclusion of providence, or more realistically understand that there is some interplay between the two. Again, the existentialism of Camus and Sartre denies providence altogether making humanity responsible for everything whereas the man whose spiritual relationship with God has never really thrived feels responsible even when he knows that ultimately there is nothing he can do in the matter. His guilt is perhaps deserved within his theological frame because of God’s utter sovereignty, but from his human perspective it would appear to obviate him of any true responsibility, for his actions are all predetermined and a sense of fatalism undermines any intimation of intimacy with God he might otherwise feel. But things are not always as they seem in the existentialist camp either. In The Plague, for example, the narrator’s conception of humanity is not necessarily what one might expect given a plague-infested city that has become a metaphor for life:
[I]t is not the narrator’s intention to ascribe to these sanitary groups more importance than is their due. Doubtless today many of our fellow citizens are apt to yield to the temptation of exaggerating the services they rendered. But the narrator is inclined to think that by attributing overimportance to praiseworthy actions one may, by implication, be paying indirect but potent homage to the worse side of human nature. For this attitude implies that such actions shine out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy are the general rule. The narrator does not share this view. The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness. (131)
In this conception, we have a view something like that of Buddhism in which ignorance keeps humanity enslaved, yet even here, we see it served with a Judeo-Christian twist. The narrator, as we mentioned earlier, happens to be Dr. Rieux; Dr. Rieux also appears to be more or less a portrait of Camus himself. If this view is that of Camus, the goodness or badness of humanity alone says nothing of any ultimate meaning save what we bring to life. For ultimate meaning to have any ultimate meaning, one would have to reach beyond the immediate and learn what, if anything, exists beyond, and that step, whether for the atheist or believer, is necessarily one of faith. We are again back to our teleological dilemma: who knows the end—telos—for which man is made? If there is no God, or at least one that is knowable, the only end is the one we create for ourselves. Likewise, if God allows humanity no freedom, we are entirely at his mercy. If he is the author of evil as well as good, what we call virtues and vices are but, as Spinoza argues, mere human preferences we saddle upon the already highly anthropomorphized Almighty. As the rather cynical expression suggests, God created us in his own image and we returned the favor.
As we mentioned earlier in the excerpt from Enlightenment Thinkers: The Death of Teleology, “All of Aquinas’ arguments, as with those of the philosophers and theologians that came both before and after him, can only demonstrate the necessity of something being first in magnitude, temporality, or causation. .... If it can only be rationally demonstrated that a First Cause or Higher Power of some sort is necessary, that tells us next to nothing of the personality or lack thereof of this Being, to say nothing of His character.” The limitations of reason alone was not lost on Kant, who set it out in painstaking detail in his Critique of Pure Reason. More accessible is Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, written as a primer to the latter work. Both works set forth a series of “antimonies,” as Kant termed them, or the apparently irreconcilable logical contradictions that arise almost invariably when it comes to formal considerations of transcendence. Kant claims that these antimonies simply cannot be solved by reason, for it is possible to provide equally compelling answers both for and against them, making it impossible to tell which side is correct or if there is some possible reconciliation that transcends them. Kelly L. Ross has helpfully reproduced this chart of Kant’s antimonies online. Ross writes, “The ‘solution’ to Antinomies is that we cannot know how to resolve them. We must suspend judgment in the matter” (Religious Value and the Antinomies of Transcendence, after Kant). Kant agrees that insofar as reason is concerned, we must suspend judgment on such matters for they sit outside the scope of what can be known by the rational faculties; however, Kant leaves his system wide open to the possibly that at the threshold where reason stops, faith may be able to carry us on across. But faith is troublesome in itself: faith in what?
Things are not always helped when the would-be believer turns to the scriptures. The claim is often made that ideally, we do not interpret the bible, but it interprets us. I do understand that statement and certainly the overall desire behind it is to read the bible in a way that is as unbiased and impartial as possible, taking a more devotional tact and allowing God to speak through the words as he wills. Yet in order to understand even a single sentence in the bible, it presupposes a knowledge of nouns, verbs, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and other types of words. Given that we are reading a translation in English, we have to be familiar with the syntax and rules of the English language. That, however, is only the beginning of the reasons letting the bible interpret us tends to be a more ideal perspective instead of an actual one. We bring all of our previous experiences, our backgrounds, our assumptions, and everything else with us to any text.
If I read about something as simple as a fish, the picture in my mind will correspond to the physical reality of a wet and flopping thing such as I have perceived in my past. Presumably, the fish I see in my head will in some ways differ from the fish another sees in her head: the same principle holds true from top to bottom. One factor that influences how we view God that has been widely promulgated in recent years is how our parents raised us. We see this assumption playing out in the AA program which invites alcoholics to examine the relationships they shared with their fathers and how the same has influenced their conception of God. Among other thinkers who have looked into the subject of atheism, New York University Professor Emeritus of Psychology Paul Vitz writes about how many of the most outspoken atheists have had troubled relations with their fathers. With a certain irony, he suggests that when we use Freud’s own theories to examine his life, we see this factor at play, as well as in the life of Madelyn Murray O’Haire and others. (See his essay The Psychology of Atheism to get a flavor of his research.)
However, one thing that can help us understand at least some of the challenges of biblical interpretation is to realistically appraise what kind of book we hold in our hands, where its writings and their authors originate, and what methods they were using in an attempt to communicate their ideas. If we consider that Johannes Gutenberg was not born until 1400 (or very close to that date, as the exact date of birth is unknown), we realize something about literacy immediately: widespread literacy is a recent phenomenon. Prior to the Gutenberg Press, the Western world relied on monasteries and rich patrons to preserve its literature. To acquire a copy of a book for oneself meant a tremendous outlay of money—not available to the average person—and necessitated a literate person, usually a monk, to handcopy a manuscript one painstaking page at a time. What is more, technology was a long way from our own day; consider that electricity did not enjoy widespread use until after 1900. That to say that living conditions were harder and life expectancy was lower. And even though the invention of the plow and other mechanisms we think nothing about today did help further agriculture, there certainly was not the agribusiness of today in which one farm produces enough to feed thousands of people. That to say that medieval Europe had a much greater concentration of “honest laborers”—those who toiled with their hands, often from sunup to sundown. There was not time to pursue an extensive education unless one devoted his life to God and took up residence in a monastery living off the goodwill and charity of others. Now consider that we are describing only the living conditions of medieval Europe: we are not describing the conditions of nomadic wanderers without a home or a nation!
Also keep in view what we expect from our research and our written works today. Literacy is very widespread, even if some lament its apparent decline in the digital age. Information is so prevalent that a good many persons suffer from information overload. The fact that you are reading this newsletter suggests that you have contact with modern technology, something that would have been met with incredulousness even as little as fifty years ago when computer technology was first being born. The standards of credible sources has been refined and perfected at least since the printing press of the 1400s. Put simply, the rules of the road have changed a bit and the level of refinement, accuracy, and precision we insist upon—our very assumptions about what constitutes a credible source—have evolved considerably. The scientific method has affected our assumptions about documentation, information, and credible sources on every level: our historians keep detailed records and carefully corroborate their dates, our theologians consider a study in Greek and Hebrew essential, our anthropologists and archaeologists are systematic and exacting, or at least that is the ideal we uphold and strive to accommodate. Further, we document everything: many of my students are handed back papers swimming in red ink because of their carelessness in documenting sources. Let us reiterate: the rules of the road have changed.
Now what do you suppose happens when we saddle God with these assumptions? when we assume that because he is the ultimate author of the bible, that means that he has insured that his book remains up to 21st-century standards of scientific rigor and precision? Among other things, we begin to feel the need to defend our sacred text needlessly against all kinds of allegations that simply would not exist if we could just admit that God has long been in the business of working in and through imperfect persons. Take, for example, the whimsical Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. In one breath, we are told he does not change his mind as though he were a man; in another, he grows angry or relents. Based on a model of inerrancy in which the scientific method is implicit and assumed, we either make ad hoc amendments to the point of idiocy or else we reject this angry god outright, dismissing him as being other than the God revealed to us in the New Testament. However, recognizing the possibility of the same God working and moving amongst very real people—in this case, people without a home and without a nation (at least until the united monarchy of King Saul and King David)—we may have greater grounds to understand what is going on. These people are not total ignoramuses; they are also not 21st-century Westerners. The culture we are dealing with is an oral one in which even the very language itself is pictorial, something like the Egyptian hieroglyphs in which drawings of eyes and pharaohs stand in for words. As The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. IV reminds us (and as we first glossed in What Is Reality? It All Depends):
. . . Of the Hebrew words for pride, one presents the notion of mounting up, one of strutting, and one of seething, as a boiling pot. What fundamental idea of similar concreteness does the English word “pride” suggest?
There were not many abstract ideas to be conveyed in Biblical Hebrew; the absence of the words is a sign of the absence of the ideas. Such a sentence as “The problem of external perception is a problem in metaphysics,” or “The modifications produced within our nervous system are the only states of which we can have a direct consciousness,” would be untranslatable into ancient Hebrew. It is hardly too much to say that every generalisation—or, better, every general truth—expressed by the Hebrew is rendered with the utmost directness, and in phraseology as pictorial, as elemental, as transparent, as stimulative to imagination and feeling, as could possibly be. Such a language is the very language of poetry. The medium through which poetry works is the world of sensible objects—wine and oil, the cedar of Lebanon, the young lion, the moon, the cloud, the smoking hills, the wild goat, the coney and the stork; or, if we turn to Homer rather than the Psalmist, a plane-tree, the bright water of a spring, a snake blood-red on the back, the cheeping brood of a sparrow, or beaked ships and well-greaved Achaians. What is necessary in order to make poetry out of such materials is intensity of feeling, with elevation and coherence of thought. These, we have seen, were the endowment of the Hebrews. On the one hand, they were close to nature; they had not parcelled out their human constitution into separate and independent faculties; they had not interposed a cloud and hubbub of words between themselves and things; they had not so dissipated their powers in minute and laborious analysis that they were incapable of naïve views, powerful sensations and vigorous convictions. On the other hand, they had, as tending to coherence and elevation of thought, what to them was a sufficient explanation of all the wonders of the universe, and a sufficient impulse to lift up their hearts: these they found in their overmastering belief in God the Creator, God the Maintainer, and, for those who trust and love Him, God the Deliverer. (§ 3. The Nature of the Hebrew language, poetry and prose)
When we accuse the ancient Hebrews of anthropomorphizing God, we must admit they are guilty as charged. For how would the living God be perceived in the minds of such a people? He does not change: he consistently hates that which is evil and rewards that which is good. When he does “change his mind” (from the vantage point of human beings who also watch the sun “rise” and the sun “set”), he consistently changes it in accord with his unchanging nature. And when he “grows angry” (from the same human vantage point), it is because of the evil his unchanging nature hates. (Capuchin priest Father Weinandy is to be credited with this observation in his remarkably deep and astute Does God Suffer?) There simply is no reason to throw out the so-called “Old-Testament God” nor to go to elaborate lengths to make the scriptural accounts of him conform to a 21st-century standard. Rather, we merely read the text, recognizing that it is what it is, nothing more and nothing less: it is the testimony of a people in whose lives God worked as told from their perspective, rich in concrete images and earthy metaphor. Any time anyone’s life story is recounted we can learn from it; it can help edify and enrich our own. That factor is particularly true if we share a relationship with the same unchanging God who hates evil and loves goodness.
There is nothing particularly new in these ideas. Christianity has long since maintained, as St. Augustine puts it so well, that what in the Old was concealed in the New is revealed. The idea was that people’s understanding of God was limited and they did misunderstand and misrepresent the nature of God to a degree and that, in part, when we saw Jesus, we saw God as he actually was and as we could understand him. That people misunderstood and misrepresented God is evidenced in that it was in large part the religious leaders who had Jesus put to death.
If God is to be of any help to human beings at all, he should at once be both considerably bigger than humanity as well as accessible by humanity. If he is bigger but is not accessible, he does us little good and we may as well embrace existentialism and the other systems that subsist in the absence of a knowable god. Like many of the tribal religions in Africa, we may as well worship lesser deities because the creator god is far too transcendent and remote. But within Christianity, we find both transcendence and immanence. We do not so much find a balance, as Chesterton points out, as we do a binding together of opposites into a divine mystery. I am reminded of Sadhu Sundar Singh’s thoughts on the bible:
Seeker: Tell me more about this Master of yours. Did he write down instructions for us to follow like other religious teachers?
Sadhu: The Master never wrote anything down, nor did he ask his followers to record his teachings. His words are spirit and life. Spirit can only infuse spirit. Life can only infuse life. The Master’s teaching cannot be contained on the pages of a book. Other great teachers left behind books to replace the living voice, to guide and help their bereft followers. But the Master did not do this, because he has not left us. He is always with us, and his living voice guides and counsels us. His followers recorded his teachings after his ascension as a help to those who cannot yet perceive his living presence. In the end, however, when people ask me, “What made you a follower of the Master?” I can only answer: the Master.
Seeker: But don’t your scriptures reveal the truth about God?
Sadhu: They reveal much to us about the life and teachings of the Master and about the nature of God’s love. God the Spirit is the true author of the Bible, but this does not mean that every word, taken on its own, is holy or inspired. It is not the words in themselves, but rather the meaning that is inspired. The language used by those who wrote the books of the Bible was the language of everyday, not the language of spirit. Only when we make direct contact with the author, that is, with God the Spirit, can the meaning become clear. Just as many do not understand the Master, so too, they can not understand his words.
Seeker: I want to believe the truth of what you say, for I see its fruits in the peace you experience, but it is difficult for me to understand or accept.
Sadhu: God has created us with spiritual faculties and powers, but these must be used or else they will decay and be lost. Faith must be fixed on the living God or else irreverence and sin will rule; they will lead to doubt and ultimately destroy all faith.
Sometimes people say that they are ready to believe in God if only this or that doubt is removed or satisfied. Can one go to a doctor and ask that the pain of a broken arm be removed before the bone is set? This would be ridiculous because the pain is the result of the break. Once the limb has been set, the pain will pass away by itself. Doubts are spiritual pains that arise from our sin. Irreverence has broken our spiritual oneness with God. We must first restore spiritual union with God; then doubts with regard to the existence of God or the divinity of the Master will disappear on their own. Only then will the pain fade. Only then will we experience the wonderful spiritual peace that the world can neither give nor take away. The Master reveals God to us so that the union between God and us sinful humans might be restored. He has opened the way for us to enter his heavenly realm. Whoever sincerely seeks truth with an open heart will find it revealed in the Master.
We do not need knowledge of Hebrew or Greek, but we do need to be united with the Spirit. This Spirit guided the prophets and followers who recorded his words, and this spirit alone can reveal their true meaning to us. The language of the Master is spiritual, and we can only understand its meaning if we are awake in spirit. We do not need to know or understand anything about theological questions or criticisms. Indeed, a child can most readily grasp the Master’s teaching, for the child is still united with the spiritual world from which it came. But those who possess wisdom that is only of this world can never understand, for the Master’s spirit is not in them.
After quoting this extended excerpt, one may be left wondering how this approach is any different from the idea of “letting the bible interpret us” rather than the other way around. The difference, though apparently subtle, is actually greatly significant: the difference is that emphasis is not placed on the text at all, but rather on getting to know the God about which the text has been written. Thus, the idea is about knowing God and then bringing that relational knowledge back to the text, allowing God to communicate through the text as he wills. There are no requirements for the text to be perfect; there are no requirements that it be held up to any exacting standards. The sole requirement is that it serves its purpose in connecting humanity to God.
If our reading of the text creates a philosophical or theological system that is simply unlivable, leaving us apprehensive, fearful, and all those things which are contrary to the love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, and mercy we know to characterize the life of faith, perhaps it is not wise to let the text interpret us at all. Perhaps instead that is an occasion to pour our hearts out to God and implore him to reveal his character to us personally and to give us understanding about these troublesome passages that would seem to present him in a way totally contrary to the cries of our own hearts. One must admit that the interpretations some people get from the text—we have already seen how easily it is to read in all of our previous experiences anywhere from relationships with our parents to something as seemingly insignificant as our exact conception of the word “fish”—leave humanity far more virtuous and humane than its creator. If we cannot trust God enough to reveal his character and nature to us within our own hearts—if we think instead we can learn more from a text—that just shows how little we truly do trust him: we lock the living God in a book where he can be managed, closing its covers each night before bed.
The way that we view God has everything to do with how we lead our lives and to large degree, the God we see is the God we get. It may be that only when we reject the false god utterly, for the first time we will turn around and find ourselves enfolded in the arms of the God of love. What appears a tragedy may be the greatest blessing yet to befall us.
God bless,
Eric
Table of Contents | Home | About | Newsletter | Forum | Misc. | Contact | Search | Links | Random Page
.:| get up to date: newsletter :. 1&1 .: discussion forum: participate |:.