It's not easy to figure out exactly what some people mean when they say the Bible is "inerrant." And it doesn't help when they explain themselves by saying, "God said it; I believe it; that settles it."
To see my trouble, consider the following. When I look through my Bible I see a collection of writings in a wide range of literary genres: poetry, short stories, transcribed oral histories, aphorisms, letters of exhortation, sermons, myths and legends.
Myths and legends? Short stories? Yes. I think the Bible contains symbolically rich, non-factual literary forms that (like the best fiction) illuminate the human condition and help us to deepen our understanding of our world and the meaning of our lives.
But when some people say they think the Bible is "inerrant," part of what they mean to say is that my view of the Bible is false. There are no myths. There are no short stories. Whenever the Bible says "so-and-so did such-and-such," we should believe that so-and-so doing such-and-such was an actual historical event. (Well, unless it's in the Gospels and is something Jesus is saying in one of His parables--Jesus is allowed to tell fictional stories, so long as we all agree that it is an actual historical fact that Jesus actually told this fictional tale.)
The story of Jonah, they say, is not an ancient Jewish short story with a message about the divine, but a perfectly accurate description of historical events--and, they argue, to think otherwise is to deny the authority of the Bible. And so it becomes all about whether a man was actually swallowed whole by a big fish and spit out alive three days later, rather than being about the extent to which we are like Jonah, resisting God's call to reach out to heal our enemies because we think they don't deserve to be healed.
The tale of Job, they say, is not a brilliantly edited synthesis of a folk tale and a philosophically pregnant poem. It's a record of actual events. And so it becomes all about whether God really made a bet with Satan and heaped suffering on Job for that reason (and then, later on, disingenuously told Job, "You can't understand why I do what I do!" even though the folk-tale part of the Book of Job lays out a perfectly understandable human reason why God, if He behaved the way some schoolyard bullies behave, would heap suffering on him).
When Job is treated as a factual record, the reader misses the meaning that might be found in the tension created by bring together two disparate literary forms, one (the poetic theological reflection) breaking into the middle of the other (the folk tale where God messes with human lives on a bet). Maybe the deepest and most profound divine inspiration in Job, the deepest insight into human suffering, lies in that editorial juxtaposition itself--the way the mystery and skepticism of the theological poem repudiates the pat, ready answers offered in the folk tale. If so, you'll miss the source of inspiration if you're committed to the dictum, "The text says here that God shattered Job's life on a bet, so it must be a fact of cosmic history that God shattered Job's life on a bet."
It's like a bunch of engineers without any literary imagination who have gotten hold of great literature.
Now I have friends who are engineers, and some of them love poetry and can appreciate fine art. Nevertheless, there are engineers who exemplify the stereotype of the literal, concrete thinker great at designing bridges but utterly tone-deaf to abstract reflection and literary interpretation. I'm sure you know such people. They slept through their humanities courses in college.
My point is this: Sometimes, those who claim the Bible is inerrant strike me as engineers of that stripe. It's as if they've set out to reflect on Shakespeare. We can imagine how this is likely to go:
"Well, the one guy kills the other guy. And then the first guy rambles on for fifteen minutes. Why can't these guys talk in plain English? I mean, you could probably get the whole play down to five minutes without missing a single plot point! They should let me write this thing. But anyway, then this ghost shows up. Then there's more pointless gibberish..."
But suppose that these same engineers have been convinced that Shakespeare's plays were inspired by God. They can't dismiss the monologues as long-winded gibberish anymore. What are they going to do? I can imagine it would go something like this:
"Alright, so one important lesson here is that there are actual witches in the world who say 'Boil, boil, toil and trouble.' If the text is inspired by God, then that's really true. Wow. Who knew? But what about this stuff about the lady walking around rubbing her hands and saying, 'Out damned spot'? Does she have a dog she wants to put out? Well, the important thing is that God here is telling us that there was this lady who said that, for whatever stupid reason. God said it. I believe it. That settles it."
My point is this: Fiction can be inspired, even if it's fiction. Poetry can be inspired, even if it isn't asserting any facts. But inspired fiction isn't explicitly asserting things that are true, even if it reveals truths. More significantly, the most inspired fiction requires interpretive engagement by the reader. While some are fables with a blunt, in-your-face moral, the best fiction isn't like that. Instead, it invites us as readers into the fictional world, to experience what something is like--experiential understanding rather than a set of facts--so that we can approach the actual world and our neighbors with a deeper sense of what life and reality are like.
What does it mean to say that fiction of that kind is "inerrant"? Maybe something like the following: "When we immerse ourselves in the story, live in its characters, and wrestle with their struggles, we come out of that with experiences that are true-to-life, as if they were things that really happened to us. And so we end up wiser than we were before, with a richer body of experience to draw from, better equipped to wrestle with our own struggles."
But what exactly is "inerrant" here? All of this is really just a long way of saying that "inerrant" is a category mistake. Inerrancy applies to factual accounts but not to fiction. So if you insist on treating a work of fiction as if it were inerrant, you are squeezing it into a literary form (factual account) different from its actual form (fiction). And when you treat it accordingly, you miss out on the kinds of insights that it's meant to provide. In the only (metaphorical or analogous) sense that fiction can be called "inerrant," treating it as inerrant encourages you to approach it in a way that prevents you from uncovering its truths.
If the Bible is inspired by God, then it matters a lot what kind of literary form we're dealing with at any particular place in the Bible--because if we get the form wrong, we'll be like those engineers reading Shakespeare. Those who say, "the Bible is the inerrant word of God" intend to lift up the Bible. But if, in saying this, they aren't open to the possibility that a biblical narrative is a myth or short story, then they are in danger of forcing the Bible into a mold that distorts its meaning. In the quest to earnestly uphold its truth, they shut out the truths it has to share.
By the way, this whole post is, in a sense, an argument for why Christians should support a broad liberal arts education. You know, the kind where engineering majors are required to take philosophy and read Shakespeare.
Showing posts with label biblical inerrancy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biblical inerrancy. Show all posts
Friday, October 9, 2015
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Divine Revelation and Cultural Filters: The Human Journey to God
In the discussion section of my post on Abraham and Isaac, an interesting question came up: Would a God anything like the one envisioned in the Judeo-Christian tradition allow divine revelation to be filtered through (and possibly distorted by) the cultural lenses of the human recipients?
I think the answer is yes. In fact, my progressive theology is premised on an affirmative answer. Here's what I said in the discussion thread:
Here, in a nutshell, is the idea behind a progressive understanding of divine revelation and human religion: God is imperfectly encountered in experience, filtered through the assumptions and prejudices and conceptual categories that we bring to our experience--our worldview, if you will. But experience also transforms our worldview. When a square peg is forced to go through a round hole, the hole may not be the same afterwards. And the more malleable the hole, the more this is true. A hole made of clay may actually take on the shape of the peg being pushed through it. Likewise, our worldview is transformed by our experience, including our experience of God.
Revelation stretches the limits of our worldview so that more authentic revelation can make it through, in turn leading to further stretching in an ongoing cycle. While the transformed worldview remains imperfect at each stage in the cycle, it is hopefully closer to the divine reality than its predecessors. This does not only mean that future revelations are less distorted, but that some revelations make it through the filters which would have been entirely blocked out before.
On this view of revelation, we can't be biblical literalists, and we can't be so tied to traditional theologies that we refuse to let new experiences transform our understanding. All inherited accounts of the divine, all traditional theologies, are the product of limited human worldviews both filtering and being transformed by the self-disclosure of God. They represent centuries of human progress--and so must be treated with reverence. But we do not revere that progress if we strive to shut down its trajectory of unfolding revelation. That trajectory is an arrow--but what it points to isn't our worldview and our understanding of God. It points beyond us, to the truth that lies at the end of an ongoing human process--one that we are called to participate in, not try to freeze in place.
One frequent commenter on this blog, Burk, doesn't buy it. Here's how he puts it:
But Burk does more here than offer an alternative interpretation of religious diversity across time and cultures. He thinks there is a reason to prefer his interpretation, based on his conviction that were there a God, that God could (and presumably would) bypass cultural filters to produce a clear, direct, and cross-culturally uniform understanding of the divine.
Burk's implicit reasoning here parallels the reasoning in the traditional argument from evil--that is, the argument that challenges God's existence based on the evil in the world.That argument goes roughly as follows: God, as traditionally conceived, would be able to eliminate evil, would know how, and would want to eliminate it. Hence, if there is such a God, there would be no evil. But there is evil. Hence, there is no such God.
Burk's remark can be formulated along the same lines: The Judeo-Christian God would, in the act of divine self-disclosure, be able to bypass cultural filters, would know how, and would want to bypass them. Hence, if there is such a God, there would be a perfect revelation undistorted by cultural filters. (Interestingly, Christian fundamentalists routinely argue along the same lines.)
There is one big problem with this argument that I want to note right up front: It assumes a particular understanding of what God is like--and argues that if God is like this, then God would reveal Himself perfectly, without the distortions of cultural filters. Bit this assumption is seriously problematic from the standpoint of the progressive vision of divine revelation sketched out above. On that vision, we cannot ever be confident that our historically and culturally situated understanding of what God is like is beyond criticism or refinement. Hence, an objection to that progressive vision which is premised on the correctness of a particular understanding of God is really setting aside the progressive vision in the act of critiquing it. In other words, it's begging the question.
But let's put aside the problem of question-begging for the moment, just to see whether we can really be so confident that the understanding of God in play would lead where Burk (and many Christian fundamentalists) think it leads--to a God who would bypass cultural filters in the act of divine self-disclosure, in order to make sure that divine revelation is clear and accurate and uniform.
In fact, a few years ago on this blog I wrote a post that directly addressed an argument along these lines--an argument formulated by Christian funamentalists to support a doctrine of biblical inerrancy. I drew the parallel between their argument and the argument from evil, and noted that some of the "theodicies" that attempt to reconcile God's existence with the existence of evil might also be invoked to explain why God might not create a perfectly clear and inerrant revelatory text.
I think what I say there about an inerrant text can apply to any direct, clear, and unambiguous revelation. But my reasons for being suspicious of Burk's argument go beyond what I said there. If we are, indeed, creatures made by God, then God is responsible for us being the kinds of creatures that we are. And part of what is essential to us is that we are social creatures who form cultures and engage with the world through our cultural lenses. We meet reality as historically and culturally situated beings with concepts and assumptions and stories shaped by that context, which in turn shape our experience of the world.
That's part of what it is to be human. To bypass that would be to bypass our humanity, and to connect with us in a way that defies who we are. But a critic of theism might at this point regard this aspect of who and what we are as a defect--at least insofar as it interferes with our pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Our cultural context imposes limits on our ability to grasp our world, precisely because it puts up filters between ourselves and unvarnished reality.
Such limits and imperfections make perfect sense from a naturalistic standpoint, where we are nothing more than the products of blind forces operating through the mechanism of natural selection. But if you assume that the world is created by a God who cares about forging a relationship with us, we are forced to ask, "Why would such a God make us such that our capacity to experience the divine is limited by the filters of culture (among other things)?"
The mistake, I think, is in treating this as a rhetorical question. Because there are answers. John Hick, in his soul-making theodicy, offered a theological portrait according to which God, out of love, sought to create otherness--beings truly distinct from the divine who were afforded a space in which to develop themselves in accord with the rules of their natures and their own choices. Here's how Hick puts it:
And this is true at both the individual and collective levels. What it means is that if there is a God something like the Judeo-Christian God, we should not expect divine revelation to blast through our filters and presuppositions all at once--to essentially erase our identities in order to have a relationship with us.
To have a relationship with who we are in all our otherness, God must meet us where we are, cultural filters and all. But that doesn't mean we stay where we are after God has come to us. Instead, that's the start of a new journey of discovery.
I think the answer is yes. In fact, my progressive theology is premised on an affirmative answer. Here's what I said in the discussion thread:
I believe in a transcendent creator whose self-disclosure is difficult for humanity to grasp and understand properly given the cultural filters through which that revelation is received. As such, any historical report of revelation will be a distortion, and the task of historical religion is to attempt to work through the distortion by gradually evolving in the light of critical conversation about experience.Christian progressives are often accused of "cherry-picking" the Bible or the tradition, when in reality what they are doing is approaching their religious inheritance in terms of the perspective described in the quote: They see it not as the very revelation of God, but as the product of divine revelation being filtered through the limitations of merely-human, culturally-situated recipients. Such an understanding calls for critical appropriation--which is not the same as cherry-picking.
Here, in a nutshell, is the idea behind a progressive understanding of divine revelation and human religion: God is imperfectly encountered in experience, filtered through the assumptions and prejudices and conceptual categories that we bring to our experience--our worldview, if you will. But experience also transforms our worldview. When a square peg is forced to go through a round hole, the hole may not be the same afterwards. And the more malleable the hole, the more this is true. A hole made of clay may actually take on the shape of the peg being pushed through it. Likewise, our worldview is transformed by our experience, including our experience of God.
Revelation stretches the limits of our worldview so that more authentic revelation can make it through, in turn leading to further stretching in an ongoing cycle. While the transformed worldview remains imperfect at each stage in the cycle, it is hopefully closer to the divine reality than its predecessors. This does not only mean that future revelations are less distorted, but that some revelations make it through the filters which would have been entirely blocked out before.
On this view of revelation, we can't be biblical literalists, and we can't be so tied to traditional theologies that we refuse to let new experiences transform our understanding. All inherited accounts of the divine, all traditional theologies, are the product of limited human worldviews both filtering and being transformed by the self-disclosure of God. They represent centuries of human progress--and so must be treated with reverence. But we do not revere that progress if we strive to shut down its trajectory of unfolding revelation. That trajectory is an arrow--but what it points to isn't our worldview and our understanding of God. It points beyond us, to the truth that lies at the end of an ongoing human process--one that we are called to participate in, not try to freeze in place.
One frequent commenter on this blog, Burk, doesn't buy it. Here's how he puts it:
Why is that revelation received through cultural filters? Isn't that an argument that the various and sundry revelations might rather be culturally constructed & psychologically actuated, instead of culturally filtered? The revelation could have been brought far more directly (not to mention uniformly) to each person, given the theory you have of it, yet it is not. The epistemological situation seems highly suspicious.In other words, the cultural variation in accounts of revelation--both across cultural and religious traditions and through time--might well be explained in the following terms: Different cultures aren't encountering a divine reality and then understanding and interpreting it differently based on diverse cultural lenses and human limitations. Rather, they are making it up to meet varied psychological and social needs.
But Burk does more here than offer an alternative interpretation of religious diversity across time and cultures. He thinks there is a reason to prefer his interpretation, based on his conviction that were there a God, that God could (and presumably would) bypass cultural filters to produce a clear, direct, and cross-culturally uniform understanding of the divine.
Burk's implicit reasoning here parallels the reasoning in the traditional argument from evil--that is, the argument that challenges God's existence based on the evil in the world.That argument goes roughly as follows: God, as traditionally conceived, would be able to eliminate evil, would know how, and would want to eliminate it. Hence, if there is such a God, there would be no evil. But there is evil. Hence, there is no such God.
Burk's remark can be formulated along the same lines: The Judeo-Christian God would, in the act of divine self-disclosure, be able to bypass cultural filters, would know how, and would want to bypass them. Hence, if there is such a God, there would be a perfect revelation undistorted by cultural filters. (Interestingly, Christian fundamentalists routinely argue along the same lines.)
There is one big problem with this argument that I want to note right up front: It assumes a particular understanding of what God is like--and argues that if God is like this, then God would reveal Himself perfectly, without the distortions of cultural filters. Bit this assumption is seriously problematic from the standpoint of the progressive vision of divine revelation sketched out above. On that vision, we cannot ever be confident that our historically and culturally situated understanding of what God is like is beyond criticism or refinement. Hence, an objection to that progressive vision which is premised on the correctness of a particular understanding of God is really setting aside the progressive vision in the act of critiquing it. In other words, it's begging the question.
But let's put aside the problem of question-begging for the moment, just to see whether we can really be so confident that the understanding of God in play would lead where Burk (and many Christian fundamentalists) think it leads--to a God who would bypass cultural filters in the act of divine self-disclosure, in order to make sure that divine revelation is clear and accurate and uniform.
In fact, a few years ago on this blog I wrote a post that directly addressed an argument along these lines--an argument formulated by Christian funamentalists to support a doctrine of biblical inerrancy. I drew the parallel between their argument and the argument from evil, and noted that some of the "theodicies" that attempt to reconcile God's existence with the existence of evil might also be invoked to explain why God might not create a perfectly clear and inerrant revelatory text.
I think what I say there about an inerrant text can apply to any direct, clear, and unambiguous revelation. But my reasons for being suspicious of Burk's argument go beyond what I said there. If we are, indeed, creatures made by God, then God is responsible for us being the kinds of creatures that we are. And part of what is essential to us is that we are social creatures who form cultures and engage with the world through our cultural lenses. We meet reality as historically and culturally situated beings with concepts and assumptions and stories shaped by that context, which in turn shape our experience of the world.
That's part of what it is to be human. To bypass that would be to bypass our humanity, and to connect with us in a way that defies who we are. But a critic of theism might at this point regard this aspect of who and what we are as a defect--at least insofar as it interferes with our pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Our cultural context imposes limits on our ability to grasp our world, precisely because it puts up filters between ourselves and unvarnished reality.
Such limits and imperfections make perfect sense from a naturalistic standpoint, where we are nothing more than the products of blind forces operating through the mechanism of natural selection. But if you assume that the world is created by a God who cares about forging a relationship with us, we are forced to ask, "Why would such a God make us such that our capacity to experience the divine is limited by the filters of culture (among other things)?"
The mistake, I think, is in treating this as a rhetorical question. Because there are answers. John Hick, in his soul-making theodicy, offered a theological portrait according to which God, out of love, sought to create otherness--beings truly distinct from the divine who were afforded a space in which to develop themselves in accord with the rules of their natures and their own choices. Here's how Hick puts it:
For what freedom could finite beings have in an immediate consciousness of the presence of the one who has created them, who knows them through and through, whi is limitlessly powerful and well as limitlessly loving and good, and who claims their total obedience? In order to be a person, exercising some measure of genuine freedom, the creature must be brought into existence, not in the immediate presence of the divine, but at a "distance" from God. This "distance" cannot of course be spatial; for God is omnipresent. It must be epistemic distance, a distance in the cognitive dimension...this "distance" consists, in the case of humans, in their existence within and as part of a world which functions as an autonomous system and from within which God is not overwhelmingly evident...it is religiously ambiguous, capable both of being seen as a purely natural phenomenon and of being seen as God's creation and experienced as mediating God's presence. In such a world one can exist as a person over against the Creator.Thomas Talbott has similarly argued that "an initial separation from God" is crucial to the creation of persons at all. If God wanted to create persons distinct from God, Talbott thinks God would have no choice "but to permit their embryonic minds to emerge and to begin functioning on their own in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and indeterminism." This creates a distinct kind of dilemma, which Talbott characterizes as follows:
Some of the very conditions essential to our emergence as rational individuals distinct from God are themselves obstacles to perfect fellowship (or union) with him, and these cannot be overcome until after we have already emerged as a center of consciousness distinct from God's own consciousness.But this means that the very project of connecting with God will require that God come to us through the filters that our self-development apart from God have put in place. Those filters--fashioned through our upbringing as ignorant children by parents of limited understanding--are part of our self-understanding and identity. For God to simply bypass them or erase them would be to refuse to pursue a relationship with us. A change in those filters--an opening up that allows more of God to enter in--is consistent with preserving our identity if that change is progressive and incremental, and if at each stage the development is based on the recognition that the change is called for by insights or discoveries that one can discern from where one is at the moment.
And this is true at both the individual and collective levels. What it means is that if there is a God something like the Judeo-Christian God, we should not expect divine revelation to blast through our filters and presuppositions all at once--to essentially erase our identities in order to have a relationship with us.
To have a relationship with who we are in all our otherness, God must meet us where we are, cultural filters and all. But that doesn't mean we stay where we are after God has come to us. Instead, that's the start of a new journey of discovery.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Despair, the Hard Work of Theology, and Abraham's Test
I have a son. The other day my wife and I went to his first parent-teacher conference as a middle-schooler. We were told what an awesome kid he is. Afterwards, we got ice cream. Then we headed to the theatre to rehearse for a play he and I are in together.
Ice cream. Shared activities. Involvement in his education. These are things I associate with being a parent. Here are some things I don't associate with being a parent: Tying him down to a rock. Gathering kindling. Preparing to slit his throat and set him on fire.
Those are things I associate with being evil.
A couple of weeks back, Rachel Held Evans wrote an essay on the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac--you know, that story in which (at least on a straightforward reading) God tests Abraham by asking him to kill his son as a sacrificial offering. Evans declared, up front, that she would have failed that test.
So would I. More importantly, I share Evans' wariness of treating a straightforward reading of this story with anything but suspicion. Here's how Evans puts it:
But Evans' discussion is about the story when you approach it literally and treat it as an accurate depiction of what God has done. In that case, we are left with an image of God that is starkly at odds with the urgings of a conscience shaped by the Christian ethic of love.
Evans asks whether such a God is worthy of our worship--and sees those who answer yes as forced towards a theology that worships power, that sees omnipotence rather than love as God's defining attribute. And she calls us to a Christian faith that engages our conscience, that allows the richness of our moral experience to shape our reading of the Bible.
Based on this message, Samuel James accuses Evans of being "too tired" to do "the hard work of theology." He likens her to Brittany Maynard, the young woman diagnosed with brain cancer who has recently become a poster child for physician-assisted suicide. In James' analysis, Maynard lacks the perseverance to continue to hope in the face of her grim diagnosis, and so seeks to end her life rather than continue to affirm life's value by fighting to the bitter end. Evans, he thinks, is shaped by a similar despair. But in her case it's her faith, not her life, that's put upon the sacrificial altar.
This strikes me as dead-wrong.
Why? Let me begin by explaining why I can't approach the Abraham story as a straightforward account of what God did in His relationship with Abraham. The story, as it's told in the book of Genesis, takes the following as given: God really did order Abraham to sacrifice his son, and Abraham knew this.
The story asks us to assume that this is true, and to read the story with that assumption in place. For me, this is kind of like someone telling a story about a guy who cuts out a perfectly round square from construction paper and gives it to his girlfriend as a Valentine. If the moral of the story comes out only if one assumes that round squares are real, the storyteller might ask me to assume this for the sake of the story. Maybe, for that purpose, I could momentarily pretend that I believe in round squares. But I could never actually believe in them. And I don't know how long I could sustain the pretense.
Likewise, maybe I can pretend to believe, for the sake of extracting from the story the lessons it intends to teach, that Abraham really knew that God was commanding him to kill his son. But I'm not sure how long I could maintain the pretense.
Someone once asked me to imagine the story of Abraham's testing through Isaac's eyes. I did, and for me the most harrowing part was the trip down the mountain, after Isaac's trust has been violated, his childhood ripped away, his father stolen irreparably from him by an act of treason. Once I imagined it through that perspective, I could never unthink it. In the biblical version of the story, Isaac is incidental. He's just there to serve as the pawn in the test. But if we treat the story as something that really happened, then we can't ignore Isaac's experience. We can't ignore the question of what God would command--and what He wouldn't command--if he genuinely loved not only Abraham, but Abraham's child.
Let me put it this way. Were a voice to thunder from the heavens, "I, the Lord your God, command you to go and kill your son," I would assume I'd gone crazy. And if my sanity wasn't in question, I'd assume I was the object of some high-tech hoax. And if it came down to believing in a supernatural power as the source of the experience, I'd have to conclude something along the following lines: "Satan has taken to thundering commands from the heavens in the name of God."
Under no conditions would I believe that it was actually God who was commanding me to betray my son in defiance of the very meaning of parental love. And why not? Because to do such a thing would be evil. Even if I was sure that God would intervene at the last minute, my child would still be traumatized for life. A good God would not issue commands that, if followed, would inflict such horror. And I have an unwavering faith that God is good.
Put another way, to believe--even in the face of the most astonishing pyrotechnic display of supernatural fireworks--that God was actually commanding me to kill my son, would be to give up my faith in the goodness of God. It would be to stop believing that God is love.
Here is where Samuel James would accuse me of failing to do the "hard work" of theology. Apparently, to do that hard work is to do the hard work of believing the following two things simultaneously:
(a) God is perfectly loving and good.
(b) God might (and sometimes does) command people to fundamentally betray the trust of the children who love and depend on them, simply as a test or as a sign of loyalty to God.
Sure, I can say the words, "God is love AND God commands people to kill their own children." But I can also say the words, "There is a square that is perfectly round in its shape--but remains wholly a square for all of that." That I can say it doesn't mean I can think it.
I cannot possibly think it would be anything but evil for me to grab my beloved son, who trusts me and loves me, strap him to a stone, and prepare to slit his throat and set him on fire. I can say the words, but I can't think it.
I could pretend to think it, but such pretense would be hard work--the hard work of pretending to be someone I'm not. The hard work of repeatedly asserting what my conscience thunders against. Sometimes, betraying your integrity is hard work. Is that the "hard work of theology" that Samuel James is talking about? If so, he's turned theology into something ugly.
Let me be clear: Real theology is, indeed, hard work. And that work often includes the effort to determine whether two things that appear to be at odds on the surface are really compatible at a deeper level. When dealing with realities that transcend our limits, we may confront truths that we cannot readily understand. Wrestling with those truths is hard work.
But so is maintaining the pretense that you believe a contradiction. So is pretending to believe in what you can't coherently even think: that round squares exist, for example, or that a God of perfect love lovingly commands us to fundamentally betray the children who put their trust in us.
If James wants us to believe that there is a theological reconciliation that's possible here--a pathway to reconciling the apparent evil of commanding fathers to betray their young sons and the doctrinal commitment to the perfect benevolence of God--then he should do the hard work so that the rest of us can see what he sees. Instead, James simply accuses Evans of giving in to despair.
Presumably, James thinks that, unlike Evans, he has not given in to despair. But this seems wrong to me, too. If Evans has given in to despair, then so has James. And if James hasn't, then neither has Evans.
Why do I say that? Because Evans and James are both confronted with the same theological dilemma--and the difference between them isn't that one gives up in the face of the dilemma and the other does not. The difference is that, while both are forced to give up something to address the dilemma, they choose different things to give up.
Imagine that a parent is confronted with the following horrific dilemma: The house is on fire, and the parent can only bring two of her three kids to safety before it's too late to save the third. The parent who, in the face of this, curls up in a ball and cries while all three children perish has surely given in to despair. The one who charges in and saves as many as she can has not. Do we really think it matters which two the parent saves? If she saves little Billy and Cathy before the house collapses on Mary, she's given in to despair; but if she saves little Billy and Mary, then she hasn't?
Consider the following three claims:
And when genocidal maniacs lead campaigns of brutal slaughter and assert a divine mandate, I suspect that Samuel James is just as skeptical of the purported mandate as I am--and as Evans is. And for the same reason: Our conscience recoils.
And this means that 4 is true for all three of us--because the Bible has stories in which God commands genocide, and stories in which He orders child sacrifice.
And given 4, we each have to give up on 1, 2, or 3. It seems that Evans and I have, under these conditions, given up on 1, while James has given up on 3. That is, Evans and I have given up on a certain human theory about how the Bible is related to the revelation of God, while James has given up on a certain human theory about how the human conscience is related to the revelation of God.
How is one of these choices any more a matter of religious despair than the other? Perhaps it would be a matter of despair to give up on all three. I would argue it would be a kind of theological despair to it to give up on #2. But in the choice between 1 and 3, why is one choice any more reflective of despair than the other?
It isn't. Rather, it reflects a difference in theology--a difference in our theology of divine revelation, to be precise. It reflects different answers to the question, "How do we discern the self-disclosure of God?" Developing and defending your own answer to that question in the light of challenging cases that force us to make choices--that is doing the hard work of theology, not giving up on it.
To slap the label of despair on those who develop one theology of revelation rather than another is, it seems to me, simply a refusal to take seriously theologies that differ from one's own. And it seems to me that taking seriously theologies that differ from one's own is part of the hard work of theology.
Ice cream. Shared activities. Involvement in his education. These are things I associate with being a parent. Here are some things I don't associate with being a parent: Tying him down to a rock. Gathering kindling. Preparing to slit his throat and set him on fire.
Those are things I associate with being evil.
A couple of weeks back, Rachel Held Evans wrote an essay on the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac--you know, that story in which (at least on a straightforward reading) God tests Abraham by asking him to kill his son as a sacrificial offering. Evans declared, up front, that she would have failed that test.
So would I. More importantly, I share Evans' wariness of treating a straightforward reading of this story with anything but suspicion. Here's how Evans puts it:
While I agree we can’t go making demands and bending God into our own image, it doesn’t make sense to me that a God whose defining characteristic is supposed to be love would present Himself to His creation in a way that looks nothing like our understanding of love. If love can look like abuse, if it can look like genocide, if it can look like rape, if it can look like eternal conscious torture—well, everything is relativized! Our moral compass is rendered totally unreliable.Of course, there are metaphorical ways to approach the story. You can stress that child-sacrifice was not uncommon in Abraham's day, and treat the moment that God stays Abraham's hand as the key revelatory part in the tale--a kind of divine repudiation of a practice that was accepted at the time. Or you can see the story in terms of its narrative place within a Christian story where God gives His son up to be sacrificed for the sake of all humanity.
But Evans' discussion is about the story when you approach it literally and treat it as an accurate depiction of what God has done. In that case, we are left with an image of God that is starkly at odds with the urgings of a conscience shaped by the Christian ethic of love.
Evans asks whether such a God is worthy of our worship--and sees those who answer yes as forced towards a theology that worships power, that sees omnipotence rather than love as God's defining attribute. And she calls us to a Christian faith that engages our conscience, that allows the richness of our moral experience to shape our reading of the Bible.
Based on this message, Samuel James accuses Evans of being "too tired" to do "the hard work of theology." He likens her to Brittany Maynard, the young woman diagnosed with brain cancer who has recently become a poster child for physician-assisted suicide. In James' analysis, Maynard lacks the perseverance to continue to hope in the face of her grim diagnosis, and so seeks to end her life rather than continue to affirm life's value by fighting to the bitter end. Evans, he thinks, is shaped by a similar despair. But in her case it's her faith, not her life, that's put upon the sacrificial altar.
This strikes me as dead-wrong.
Why? Let me begin by explaining why I can't approach the Abraham story as a straightforward account of what God did in His relationship with Abraham. The story, as it's told in the book of Genesis, takes the following as given: God really did order Abraham to sacrifice his son, and Abraham knew this.
The story asks us to assume that this is true, and to read the story with that assumption in place. For me, this is kind of like someone telling a story about a guy who cuts out a perfectly round square from construction paper and gives it to his girlfriend as a Valentine. If the moral of the story comes out only if one assumes that round squares are real, the storyteller might ask me to assume this for the sake of the story. Maybe, for that purpose, I could momentarily pretend that I believe in round squares. But I could never actually believe in them. And I don't know how long I could sustain the pretense.
Likewise, maybe I can pretend to believe, for the sake of extracting from the story the lessons it intends to teach, that Abraham really knew that God was commanding him to kill his son. But I'm not sure how long I could maintain the pretense.
Someone once asked me to imagine the story of Abraham's testing through Isaac's eyes. I did, and for me the most harrowing part was the trip down the mountain, after Isaac's trust has been violated, his childhood ripped away, his father stolen irreparably from him by an act of treason. Once I imagined it through that perspective, I could never unthink it. In the biblical version of the story, Isaac is incidental. He's just there to serve as the pawn in the test. But if we treat the story as something that really happened, then we can't ignore Isaac's experience. We can't ignore the question of what God would command--and what He wouldn't command--if he genuinely loved not only Abraham, but Abraham's child.
Let me put it this way. Were a voice to thunder from the heavens, "I, the Lord your God, command you to go and kill your son," I would assume I'd gone crazy. And if my sanity wasn't in question, I'd assume I was the object of some high-tech hoax. And if it came down to believing in a supernatural power as the source of the experience, I'd have to conclude something along the following lines: "Satan has taken to thundering commands from the heavens in the name of God."
Under no conditions would I believe that it was actually God who was commanding me to betray my son in defiance of the very meaning of parental love. And why not? Because to do such a thing would be evil. Even if I was sure that God would intervene at the last minute, my child would still be traumatized for life. A good God would not issue commands that, if followed, would inflict such horror. And I have an unwavering faith that God is good.
Put another way, to believe--even in the face of the most astonishing pyrotechnic display of supernatural fireworks--that God was actually commanding me to kill my son, would be to give up my faith in the goodness of God. It would be to stop believing that God is love.
Here is where Samuel James would accuse me of failing to do the "hard work" of theology. Apparently, to do that hard work is to do the hard work of believing the following two things simultaneously:
(a) God is perfectly loving and good.
(b) God might (and sometimes does) command people to fundamentally betray the trust of the children who love and depend on them, simply as a test or as a sign of loyalty to God.
Sure, I can say the words, "God is love AND God commands people to kill their own children." But I can also say the words, "There is a square that is perfectly round in its shape--but remains wholly a square for all of that." That I can say it doesn't mean I can think it.
I cannot possibly think it would be anything but evil for me to grab my beloved son, who trusts me and loves me, strap him to a stone, and prepare to slit his throat and set him on fire. I can say the words, but I can't think it.
I could pretend to think it, but such pretense would be hard work--the hard work of pretending to be someone I'm not. The hard work of repeatedly asserting what my conscience thunders against. Sometimes, betraying your integrity is hard work. Is that the "hard work of theology" that Samuel James is talking about? If so, he's turned theology into something ugly.
Let me be clear: Real theology is, indeed, hard work. And that work often includes the effort to determine whether two things that appear to be at odds on the surface are really compatible at a deeper level. When dealing with realities that transcend our limits, we may confront truths that we cannot readily understand. Wrestling with those truths is hard work.
But so is maintaining the pretense that you believe a contradiction. So is pretending to believe in what you can't coherently even think: that round squares exist, for example, or that a God of perfect love lovingly commands us to fundamentally betray the children who put their trust in us.
If James wants us to believe that there is a theological reconciliation that's possible here--a pathway to reconciling the apparent evil of commanding fathers to betray their young sons and the doctrinal commitment to the perfect benevolence of God--then he should do the hard work so that the rest of us can see what he sees. Instead, James simply accuses Evans of giving in to despair.
Presumably, James thinks that, unlike Evans, he has not given in to despair. But this seems wrong to me, too. If Evans has given in to despair, then so has James. And if James hasn't, then neither has Evans.
Why do I say that? Because Evans and James are both confronted with the same theological dilemma--and the difference between them isn't that one gives up in the face of the dilemma and the other does not. The difference is that, while both are forced to give up something to address the dilemma, they choose different things to give up.
Imagine that a parent is confronted with the following horrific dilemma: The house is on fire, and the parent can only bring two of her three kids to safety before it's too late to save the third. The parent who, in the face of this, curls up in a ball and cries while all three children perish has surely given in to despair. The one who charges in and saves as many as she can has not. Do we really think it matters which two the parent saves? If she saves little Billy and Cathy before the house collapses on Mary, she's given in to despair; but if she saves little Billy and Mary, then she hasn't?
Consider the following three claims:
1. The biblical stories that purportedly report God's commands and activities, understood in their straightforward sense, offer an accurate portrait of God's commands and activities.And now imagine that the following is true:
2. God is perfectly good.
3. My conscience is a product of God's creative work within me, and as such is not profoundly unreliable.
4. My conscience recoils in horror at enough of the things that God purportedly does in biblical stories--at least in their straightforward readings--that I cannot embrace both the resultant portrait of God and the belief in God's perfect goodness unless I treat my conscience as profoundly unreliable."4" is like the burning building. It forces us to choose which of 1-3 to give up. And I think it is fair to say that both Evans and James are in this burning building. Unless I'm profoundly mistaken, Samuel James, like me and like Evans, would be deeply hesitant to slash open his son's throat just because a voice claiming to be God told him to. And the reason would be the same one that moves Evans and me: our consciences recoil in horror at the prospect of doing something so unremittingly awful. Surely no God of perfect love and goodness would command something so evil. Like me, I suspect he'd say, "I'm either having delusions or being misled by malicious agents. Surely this is not the voice of God."
And when genocidal maniacs lead campaigns of brutal slaughter and assert a divine mandate, I suspect that Samuel James is just as skeptical of the purported mandate as I am--and as Evans is. And for the same reason: Our conscience recoils.
And this means that 4 is true for all three of us--because the Bible has stories in which God commands genocide, and stories in which He orders child sacrifice.
And given 4, we each have to give up on 1, 2, or 3. It seems that Evans and I have, under these conditions, given up on 1, while James has given up on 3. That is, Evans and I have given up on a certain human theory about how the Bible is related to the revelation of God, while James has given up on a certain human theory about how the human conscience is related to the revelation of God.
How is one of these choices any more a matter of religious despair than the other? Perhaps it would be a matter of despair to give up on all three. I would argue it would be a kind of theological despair to it to give up on #2. But in the choice between 1 and 3, why is one choice any more reflective of despair than the other?
It isn't. Rather, it reflects a difference in theology--a difference in our theology of divine revelation, to be precise. It reflects different answers to the question, "How do we discern the self-disclosure of God?" Developing and defending your own answer to that question in the light of challenging cases that force us to make choices--that is doing the hard work of theology, not giving up on it.
To slap the label of despair on those who develop one theology of revelation rather than another is, it seems to me, simply a refusal to take seriously theologies that differ from one's own. And it seems to me that taking seriously theologies that differ from one's own is part of the hard work of theology.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
How Does God Reveal? Five Christian Reasons to Doubt Biblical Inerrancy
The Patheos website is currently hosting a multi-blog conversation about progressive Christianity and Scripture which has generated numerous engaging and thoughtful contributions--such as this one by James McGrath. Because the relationship between progressive Christian faith and the Bible is one of my enduring interests, the sudden flood of interesting essays on the topic has inspired me to take a few minutes to reflect on the issue myself.
As a philosopher of religion, the way I approach this topic is in terms of a philosophical question: What theory of revelation fits best with the Christian view of God? Put another way, if there is a God that fits the broadly Christian description, how would we expect such a God to reveal the divine nature and will to the world?
Many conservative Christians take it for granted that God has revealed the divine nature and will in and through a specific book. More precisely (although they aren't usually this precise), they believe that God inspired certain human authors at various times in history to write texts that inerrantly express divine truths--and then inspired other human beings to correctly recognize these texts and include all and only them in the comprehensive collection of Scriptures we call the Bible.
Let's call this the theory of biblical inerrancy.
Does this theory fit well with broader Christian beliefs? Is this a good Christian theory about divine revelation, culminating in a good Christian theory about what the Bible is and what sort of authority we should attach to it? I think there are a number of reasons to be skeptical.
Put more narrowly, I think there are a number of reasons why Christians should be skeptical, given their Christian starting points. Let's consider at least some of these reasons.
1. Christianity holds that Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God
Traditional Christian teaching holds that Jesus is the Word made Flesh, the incarnation of God in history. And this means that for Christians, the primary and monumental revelation of God is in the person of Jesus, not in any book (however inspired). It is this fact which motivated George MacDonald to say of the Bible,
It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save as leading to him.Biblical inerrantists might argue that nothing precludes God from both revealing the divine nature primarily in Jesus and authoring an inerrant book as a secondary revelation. This is true as far as it goes. But there are reasons for concern.
First, there's a difference between the kind of revelation that Jesus represents, and the kind that a book represents. A person and a book are different things, and we learn from them in different ways. Consider the difference between having a mentor in the project of becoming a better person, and reading self-help books.
Doesn't Christianity teach that God's preferred way of disclosing the divine nature and will is through personal, living relationship rather than fixed words? The problem with throwing in an inerrant book as a "supplemental" revelation is that it can lead to Bible-worship. Given human psychology, there is something alluring about having a book with all the answers. But if God primarily wants us to find the answers through personal engagement with the living God, as discovered in Jesus, isn't there a real danger that fixation on the Bible will distract the faithful from God's primary mode of self-disclosure?
None of this is to say that human stories--witness accounts of divine revelation in history--aren't important. They can motivate a desire to seek out the one whom the stories are about, and they can offer tools for discerning whether you've found the one you seek or an imposter. But once they are seen as secondary, as valuable as a means to an end, the need for inerrancy dissipates. If what really matters is my friendship with Joe, and if I sought out and formed a friendship with him because lots of people told me stories about him that revealed him as an awesome guy I wanted to meet, do I really need to insist that those storytellers were inerrant? Why?
2. The Jesus of Scripture was not an inerrantist
In John 8:1-11, we have the story of the teachers of the law coming to Jesus with an adulteress, and asking Him whether they ought to stone her to death as the Scriptures prescribe. The passage itself declares that this was a trap: If Jesus came out and directly told them not to stone her, He would be defying a direct scriptural injunction.
He avoided the trap: He didn't directly telling them to act contrary to Scripture. Instead, He told them that the one without sin should cast the first stone.
It is a stunning and powerful story (no wonder someone decided to write it into the Gospel of John, even though it didn't appear in the earliest versions). But notice that Jesus didn't tell them to do what Scripture prescribed. Instead, He found a powerful way to drive home exactly what was wrong with following that scriptural injunction--in a way that avoided their trap.
In short, Jesus disagreed with some of the teachings in the Scriptures of His day. In the Sermon on the Mount, he offered gentle correctives to earlier teachings--teachings which started in a direction but didn't go far enough. The lex talionis command to punish evildoers eye for eye and tooth for tooth may, at the time, have served as a restraint on retributive impulses: don't punish beyond the severity of the crime. But for Jesus, that level of restrain was insufficient. It was a start on a path, perhaps, but only that. Jesus followed the trajectory of that path to its conclusion, and enjoined His listeners to turn the other cheek.
In short, it's clear Jesus didn't have the inerrantist view towards the Scriptures of His day that conservative Christians have towards the Christian Scriptures of today. Conservatives might argue that Jesus would view the modern Bible--or maybe just the New Testament?--in the way they favor, even if the approach to Scripture that He actually modeled is at odds with their approach.
Allow me to treat such a speculative claim with suspicion. If Jesus is the primary revelation of God in history, then it strikes me as appropriate to follow His model for approaching Scripture, and respectfully look beyond the letters on the page to the deeper intentions that finite human authors might have missed, noticing trajectories and exploring where they might lead.
3. In the New Testament, Paul distinguished between his views and the Lord's
In 1 Corinthians 7:10-12, Paul says the following:
To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife. To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord): If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her...I've talked about this passage before, so I won't go into details. What interests me is the distinction Paul makes between his own views and those of the Lord. In this passage, it's clear that Paul did not see Himself as taking dictation from God. He made a clear distinction between his own opinions and those of the Lord, and by making the distinction explicit was signaling to his readers that they should treat the injunctions differently--as if he didn't want to claim for himself the kind of authority that he took to accompany Jesus' explicit teachings.
But if inerrantism is true, then Paul's teachings are the inerrant word of God, and so have the same kind of authority as Jesus' words. In other words, if inerrantism is true, then Paul was wrong to make the distinction he made. But that distinction is made by Paul in a letter that's in the Bible. And if inerrantism is true, a distinction made in a letter that's in the Bible has to be accurate. But if it's accurate, inerrantism isn't true. Zounds!
An exercise in creative interpretation might offer the inerrantist the wiggle room to escape this logical trap, but inerrantists are routinely skeptical of such creative interpretation of Scripture. At best, then, this amounts to a difficulty for inerrantism, the sort of difficulty one often sees when trying to force a theory onto subject matter that doesn't quite suit it. Theories can perhaps weather some such difficulties, but if they become too common it is hard to reasonably persist in endorsing the theory.
4. Efforts to overcome apparent contradictions in Scripture lead to a false view of Scripture
Speaking of difficulties of this sort, the Bible isn't a neat, orderly, systematically consistent treatise. The Gospel narratives, for example, aren't identical. They tell the stories of Jesus' life in different ways. Details differ--for example, in accounts of the resurrection. Bart Ehrman does a fine job of cataloguing many of these in Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible.
Mostly, these tensions aren't explicit contradictions but rather what might be called apparent ones: they don't seem as if they can go together, because you'd need to tell a rather convoluted story to make them fit.
Inerrantists have not been remiss in offering such convoluted stories. But if you need to tell enough of them in order to make your theory map onto what it's supposed to explain, the theory becomes increasingly implausible.
And there's another problem, one that should be of concern to Christians who care about the Bible. The convoluted tales that you have to tell in order to make disparate biblical narratives fit together end up leading you away from an honest appreciation of the message of the biblical authors. As Ehrman puts it, "To approach the stories in this way is to rob each author of his own integrity as an author and to deprive him of the meaning that he conveys in his story."
When you do this, you care more about preserving your theory about the Bible than you do about understanding and taking in its message. For me, this is one of the greatest tragedies of an inerrantist approach to Scripture: It makes it difficult for readers to engage with the Bible on its own terms. It's like someone who is so devoted to a false image of their spouse that they can't see their spouse for the person they really are. Likewise, the steps that need to be taken in order to preserve the doctrine of inerrancy in the face of the Bible's actual content means that it becomes impossible to have an intimate relationship with the Bible as it really is. This is not taking the Bible seriously. It is taking the doctrine of inerrancy seriously at the expense of the Bible.
5. God is love
Christianity teaches that God is love. In fact, it is the closest thing Christians have to a scriptural definition of God: "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." (1 John 4:7-8).
If God is love, then we experience God when we love. If God is love, then the primary way we can encounter God is through loving and being loved--that is, through cultivating loving relationships with persons. This may help to explain the Christian view that a person--Jesus--served in history as God's fundamental revelation, rather than a book. Books can't love you. And you can't love a book in the sense of "love" that Christians (and the author of 1 John) have in mind when we say God is love.
When we feel the profound presence of the divine showering love upon us--or when we feel the joy of being loved by others--we are encountering the divine nature as something coming to us from the outside. But when we love our neighbors as ourselves, we are channeling divine love, and experiencing it "from within" (so to speak). The divine nature is moving within us, more intimately connected to us than any mere object of experience. I think this is what the author of 1 John means when he says that whoever does not love does not know God. To love others is to be filled with the spirit of God. It is to let God in.
If any of that is true, then it is by encouraging us to love one another that God makes possible the most profound revelation of the divine nature and will. And while the Bible does encourage us to love one another, the theory about the Bible which takes it to be the inerrant revelation of God may actually be an impediment to love.
We end up focusing more attention on the Bible than on our neighbors. We are more committed to "doing what the Bible says" than we are to loving those around us. Out of a desire to be connected with God, we insist that homosexuality is always and everywhere sinful--and when the gay and lesbian neighbors we are supposed to love cry out in despair, their lives crushed by these teachings, we stifle our compassion, shutting out love in fear that loving them as ourselves might lead us to question the inerrancy of the Bible.
If God is love, then any theory of revelation that tells us to find God by burying our noses in a book is a problematic theory. If God is love, we must look for God in the love we see in the world. The Bible, understood as a flawed and finite human testament to the God of love working in history, can be a deeply meaningful partner in our quest to encounter God and live in the light of divine goodness. But as soon as it is treated as inerrant, it is in danger of becoming a bludgeon used to silence those neighbors who want to share experiences that don't quite fit with this or that verse.
The Bible points away from itself. Respect for it demands that we look up from the page and engage with our neighbors and the creation. God is alive in the world. The Bible tells us that God is alive in the world. In so doing, the book is telling us that if we want to find God, we need to look into our neighbor's face with love, and at the natural world and all its creatures with love.
Because God is there. God is there, revealing Himself in the vibrancy of life and the child's laugh and the mother's tender kiss. God is there, in the gay man who sits by his longtime partner's hospital bedside, gently stroking his brow. God is there, in the joyous wedding vows of the lesbian couple that can finally get a legal marriage after years together.
And any time a too-literal allegiance to the letter of the biblical text causes someone not to see the face of God in that tenderness and joy, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy has blocked divine revelation, impeding God's effort to self-disclose to the world.
Sunday, April 6, 2014
Anti-Gay Bigotry, Sincere Belief, and Christianity
There's a meme going around on social media that looks like this:
A recent Huffington Post article, "The Myth of Christian Discrimination in the LGBT Rights Movement," did a pretty nice job of explaining some of the key problems with this meme. But there are things I wish the article would have said--and there is a grain of truth in the meme that I want to acknowledge.
A recent Huffington Post article, "The Myth of Christian Discrimination in the LGBT Rights Movement," did a pretty nice job of explaining some of the key problems with this meme. But there are things I wish the article would have said--and there is a grain of truth in the meme that I want to acknowledge.
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
The Jesus Tea-Strainer, or the Jesus Poisonous-Seed-Strainer? Or Maybe the Jesus Gold-Sifter
Andrew Wilson just posted a piece on the Theology Matters blog, "The Jesus Lens, or the Jesus Tea-Strainer?", which begins as follows:
There are several concerns I have about Wilson's post:
I had an interesting series of debates with Steve Chalke recently, on Scripture, the Old Testament, the atonement and sexuality. There are all sorts of things I could say about them (and I probably will, in time), but for me the most striking feature of Steve's presentation was his continual reference to "the Jesus lens". In his view, the Bible should be read through "the Jesus lens", that is to say, in the light of God's self-revelation in Jesus. I agree. But he then goes on to argue that this enables us, and in fact requires us, to correct all sorts of things that the texts actually say, particularly those which involve wrath, death and sexual ethics. Reading through the Jesus lens, for Steve, involves reading a difficult text - say, one about picking up sticks on the Sabbath, or destroying the Canaanites, or Yahweh pouring out his anger - figuring that Jesus could never have condoned it, and then concluding that the text represents a primitive, emerging, limited picture of God, as opposed to the inclusive, wrath-free God we find in Jesus. Not so much a Jesus lens, then, as a Jesus tea-strainer: not a piece of glass that influences your reading of the text while still leaving the text intact, but a fine mesh that only allows through the most palatable elements, while meticulously screening out the bitter bits to be dumped unceremoniously on the saucer.Wilson goes on to list a series of biblical passages in which the Gospel authors attribute to Jesus angry words that Wilson takes to be in the spirit of the wrathful God that Chalke wants to reject.
There are several concerns I have about Wilson's post:
Monday, September 9, 2013
Salvaging Leviticus?
Maurice Harris, a progressive rabbi, has written what appears to be a fascinating new book: Leviticus: You Have No Idea. You can find excerpts and a table of contents on his website for the book. Here's a choice quote that convinced me to buy it:
Why do I think Leviticus can be a valuable book for people today who have—for lack of a more precise way of putting it—a progressive approach to religion? Because when it comes to Leviticus, we really have no idea. No idea of the surprisingly relevant questions and insights it contains, and little idea of how to integrate its strange, authoritarian, and intimidating worldview with our commitment to progressive values.
As with so many other parts of the Bible, we tend to miss a lot of what’s there in Leviticus by not taking the time to explore it and greet it freshly with the question, “What might we learn today from studying this text, from bringing our current problems and struggles into dialog with even this text?” And if, in the course of greeting Leviticus with those questions, we are willing to let our sacred texts be imperfect—let them be a record of our ancestors’ understandings of God, not of God’s literal words beamed down to us never to be challenged—then the potential for what we can learn that’s directly relevant to our moment in human history expands dramatically.The final message here resonates powerfully with some current work I'm doing on the concept of divine revelation. My philosophical question--rather different from Harris's scriptural one but, I think, leading to complementary insights--is this: What implications does one's view about God have for one's understanding of divine revelation? More precisely, does a particular understanding of God--say, the understanding of God as being essentially loving--require or preclude any specific views about how a God would self-disclose or what content should make us suspect/doubt revelatory origin?
My argument (which should come as no surprise to readers of this blog) is that if we take seriously the view that God is love, we should not expect to encounter God most clearly in the pages of a text, but rather in the context of loving relationships--that is, in the context of loving and being loved (including but not limited to our experience of loving and being loved by the divine, our passional reaching for the infinite and our occasional sense of "being in the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face," to quote Simone Weil's account of her first mystical experience).
But lessons drawn from our experiences of love need to be formulated, and it seems that if God is love then we should place our deepest trust in those lessons that emerge out of a community of loving discourse. In such a community, I think a holy text can serve as the proxy voice of those who have lived long ago. Their wisdom and insights can become part of the loving conversation--not an authoritarian conversation-stopper that we must silence in order to have a loving discourse at all (which is what fundamentalism would turn holy texts into), but a voice in the dialogue, as Harris suggest in the words above.
Friday, March 22, 2013
An Open Letter to a Gay Sister in Christ, from a Progressive Christian Who Accepts You as You Are
Yesterday, the Gospel Coalition reprinted an Open Letter to the Church from a Lesbian (it appeared a few days earlier on Hunter Baker's blog, under the more appealing title, "An Astonishing Message from a Gay Sister in Christ"). Although the letter's author doesn't use these terms, her message is a plea for the Christian community to follow Christ's example of "loving the sinner" even while continuing to "hate the sin."
There is eloquence in her account of what Christian love looks like, even in the face of what is seen as sinful. And there is insight in her account of how singling out homosexuality as a sin of special significance leads Christians to ignore their own shortcoming. But when it comes to her treatment of those Christians who oppose the traditional condemnation of homosexuality, there is misunderstanding.
And so I offer an open letter of my own.
There is eloquence in her account of what Christian love looks like, even in the face of what is seen as sinful. And there is insight in her account of how singling out homosexuality as a sin of special significance leads Christians to ignore their own shortcoming. But when it comes to her treatment of those Christians who oppose the traditional condemnation of homosexuality, there is misunderstanding.
And so I offer an open letter of my own.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Straw Men and the Chick-fil-A Kerfluffle
As I've followed the heated Chick-fil-A kerfluffle, one thing I've noticed is the plethora of straw men.
The "straw man fallacy," as it's called in critical thinking textbooks, is the fallacy of rejecting a view (or argument) by attacking a related but different view (or argument) that's easier to discredit. You thoroughly discredit a position that your opponent wasn't actually endorsing but act as if you've refuted your opponent (perhaps hoping no one notices the trick, perhaps not noticing it yourself). The fallacy is, I believe, named after the practice of burning in effigy a straw stand-in for the real target of outrage.
Sometimes the straw man fallacy is deliberate, sometimes inadvertent. I think the latter is more common: We don't listen carefully, we jump to conclusions, or a pithy retort springs to our lips before we can examine whether it's really fair. We fail to notice a distinction, and so attack what strikes us as outrageous rather than what the other person actually meant (a point which suggests that the straw man fallacy is related inversely to the principle of charity). I'm sure I'm guilty of this myself.
So, for example, Abe encounter progressives who are upset by Chick-fil-A's unapologetic financial support of organizations committed to perpetuating discrimination and social marginalization of sexual minorities. Abe then represents them as being upset about Chick-fil-A COO Dan Cathy exercizing his right to express an opinion, and trumpets how importance freedom of speech is to the American way of life and how awful it is that people are trying to deny Cathy this right. That's the straw man fallacy. To be opposed to practices that promote discrimination isn't the same as being opposed to someone's right to express an opinion.
There are other examples, from both sides of the debate. I know that some who came to Chick-fil-A's defense were actually opposed to Cathy's anti-gay practices but were equally appalled by certain city mayors who seemed to be threatening the right of Chick-fil-A franchises to operate within their cities. They were worried about the precedent that would be set if the right to do business could be jeopardized by where you donated money--but they were treated as if they thought there was nothing wrong with those donations. Defending someone's right to do X is not the same as saying X is right.
I'm sure you can provide your own examples.
My own favorite example comes in response to my own post about the Chick-fil-A business. Not many days later Methodist pastor Brent White, on his blog, vigorously critiqued a distorted variant of my post--rendering my argument easy to attack by ignoring terms like "many" and "in most cases," and by uncharitably interpreting an ambiguous use of the phrase "these people" so as to make the people referenced a much broader class than I had intended to be talking about. I suspect, given his tone of righteous indignation, that the straw man fallacy in this case was inadvertent--that his sense of affront led to a failure to read with care and charity. The result is that the view he was attacking, although it wasn't mine, burned very brightly indeed--as straw is wont to do.
So the question is, what do you do when you've been "straw-manned"? In fact, I think the most useful response is to use it as an opportunity for clarification. If a distinction has been missed, you now have the chance to make it explicit. If a qualifier has been overlooked, you can call attention to it. If you've left something out of your discussion for the sake of focusing on a particular issue--but what you've left out leaves you open to misinterpretation--you can fill in the blanks.
It's easy to get mad and defensive when you've been straw-manned. But it's better, I think, to treat it as an opportunity. One might say something like this: "I actually agree that the position you're attacking is mistaken for the reasons you offer. But I'm afraid you've misread or misheard me if you think that view is mine. Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I could have been. Here's what I meant to say..."
If you're a blogger, I think responding to straw-manning in this way is especially important. Because if one person has misconstrued your position and dismissed it based on the misconstrual, then it's quite likely that others have as well.
But if all of this is right, then I suppose I should do all of this in relation to Brent White's critique of my Chick-fil-A post. Here's how White understands my argument:
The author, Eric Reitan, says that the Christians who turned out last week during “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” did so because they have an “allegiance to an untenable theory about the Bible, a theory about how the Bible’s words are connected to divine self-disclosure, a theory that, as I see it, cannot stand up to any serious engagement with the Bible’s actual content and history.” They are, he says, inerrantists.
Really? For the record, while I’m not aware that my position on marriage and homosexuality differs from Dan Cathy’s, be assured, dear reader, that I am not an inerrantist. John Wesley wasn’t an inerrantist. Neither was Calvin, Luther, Aquinas, Anselm, Augustine, Athanasius, Origen, or St. Paul, for that matter.
This is classic straw-man reasoning. After all, go back just a few words in the very sentence White quotes, and you hit on the qualifying phrase "more often than not." While a universal claim can be refuted by a short list of counterexamples, the corresponding non-universal claim cannot be thus refuted. "All X's are Y's" is refuted by finding an X that isn't a Y. But "Many X's are Y's" is not thus refuted. For White's retort to work, he has to attribute to me a universal claim I didn't make.
But while this is adequate to expose the fallacy, I don't think stopping there is sufficient if one's aim is to use the straw-manning as a springboard for helping to clarify one's position.
So let's step back a little further and put the passage White quotes into its broader context. I begin by claiming that the Chick-fil-A "appreciators"--more precisely, those who stand with Cathy in endorsing the social and legal marginalization of gays and lesbians, as opposed to those who showed up simply to stand against any infringement on Chick-fil-A's right to do business--are guilty of a short-coming in love. But I think the problem lies with their actions more than with their motives: while what they are doing is unloving towards their gay and lesbian neighbors, they don't want to be unloving. They mean well. There is a disconnect between motives and actions.
Of course, this way of putting the issue is premised on the view that the categorical condemnation of homosexuality and the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage really is harmful to gays and lesbians. It wasn't my aim to make the case for that premise in a definitive way (one can only do so much in a blog post)--and so all I did was sketch out my case.
Here's the sketch, put in slightly different terms: Those of us who have really paid close and compassionate attention to the lived experience of gays and lesbians--those of us who have really sought to uncover the fruits of conservative anti-gay teachings--have a very hard time finding those teachings even remotely plausible. In practice, systematically excluding gays and lesbians from access to the bedrock instiution of society, treating their intimate life-partnerships as something less than familial, regarding their love as sin and hence treating their most meaning-bestowing relationships as something that ought to be broken up--all of this damages the lives of gays and lesbians in a holistic way. Hence, all of this is unloving in practice, no matter what the motives.
But it seems to me that many of those who engage in this unloving practice are no less loving in their underlying character and motives than most of the rest of us. So what is the source of the disconnect between heart and action? One answer lies in false beliefs.
So which false beliefs can cause well-meaning people, motivated by love, to endorse practices that bear such bad fruits--often tragic ones--for our gay and lesbian neighbors?
There are, of course, multiple answers. Back in the respective eras of Wesley and Calvin and Luther and Aquinas and Anselm and Augustine and Athanasius and Origen and St. Paul, the answer wouldn't be belief in biblical inerrancy--since, as White rightly points out, inerrancy is a fairly modern notion. But before the modern era, people knew next to nothing about homosexuality. The concept of sexual orientation as we understand it today was essentially unknown. The cultures of these eras lacked the conceptual categories that would have enabled those with a homosexual orientation to make their experience understood in the way that we can understand it today.
And so, in these earlier eras, it is quite likely that the theologians White mentions would have had false beliefs about homosexuality and false beliefs about the effects of church teachings (since those most affected by those teachings lacked the public voice to make their experiences known and understood). If, in relation to sexual minorities, there was a disconnect between their motives and their actions, I'd locate the source, not in a doctrine of inerrancy, but in understandable ignorance.
But the question I was posing wasn't about what caused the disconnect among long-dead theologians. It was about all those decent, ordinary American Christians who showed up on Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day to "appreciate" and facilitate Dan Cathy's financial support of discrimination and social marginalization. What explains the disconnect between their ordinary decency and their committed endorsement of the indecent treatment of fellow human beings?
Again, there are multiple answers. But the modern notion of biblical inerrancy has developed enormous currency among contemporary Christians in the pews, even in mainline churches that do not (at the level of their theology) endorse inerrancy. While I haven't done a sociological study of the matter, I suspect from my personal experience that the opposition to homosexuality among conservative Christians today is most often supported by an appeal to "what the Bible says"--an appeal of the sort that at least implicitly presupposes biblical inerrancy (in the sense that, without inerrancy as a hidden premise, the conclusion simply wouldn't follow).
But this is hardly true of all those who oppose homosexuality and same-sex marriage. White is absolutely right about that (which, again, is why I said "more often than not"). Among Roman Catholics, appeals to various natural law arguments or to Church authority are likely to be invoked. Others offer a range of arguments based on the purported social harms of normalizing homosexuality--which is why I have considered various arguments of this sort on this blog. It's also why I haven't contented myself with critiquing arguments against same-sex marriage, but have sought to make positive arguments in support of it.
And because conservative Protestant theologians from mainline denominations are likely to be conscious of the limitations of proof-texting and more conventional natural law arguments, my first published work on this issue (back in the '90's) took on a holistic biblical and natural law argument offered by a Lutheran theologian, one which tried to read into the Bible a "heterosexual order" to creation and attempted to ground opposition to same-sex relationships in their "violation" of that order.
Perhaps, at some point, I should summarize the argument from that paper (co-authored with John Kronen and published in Faith and Philosophy on this blog. Perhaps I should also devote a post to the various permutations of the natural law argument. There's something to be said for completeness.
But to take up all of these possibilities in the Chick-fil-A blog post would have distracted from its more focused aim--which was to zero in on what I take to be the most influential force underwriting anti-gay discrimination among lay Christians today. And that's why I prefaced my discussion of inerrancy and the way it prevents people from connecting compassionately with their gay and lesbian neighbors by saying that "more often than not" (not "always") the source of the disconnect between motives and actions on this matter can be attributed to an unreflective assumption of inerrancy.
And to be clear, I didn't mean "more often than not" in the history of Christianity. Prior to the modern era, the source of the disconnect was more likely, as already noted, to be invincible ignorance about the nature of homosexuality. Wesley and Luther and Calvin, etc., formed their understandings of sexual ethics without the benefit of being able to appreciate what it is like to be gay. They knew none of the things that can and should inform our thinking today. The question is why so many today don't inform their thinking in the light of this new knowledge. For some it may be misguided allegiance to a traditional teaching that was formed in the midst of profound ignorance. For others it may be something else. But for most Christian conservatives in America today, it seems to be allegiance to "the Word of God."
When I said that "these people aren't biblical scholars," I was referring to most of the conservative Christians lining up to give money to Chick-fil-A last week. Most of them were, I suspect, convinced they were standing up for what the Bible teaches--but not in some nuanced sense of "what the Bible teaches," according to which the teachings of the whole may deviate from and override the teachings of the parts. They weren't there because they had done a study of the Bible as a whole, uncovered the roots of its overarching sexual ethic (perhaps in the light of a careful critical reading of L. William Countryman's Dirt, Greed, and Sex) and taken a side in a controversial theological debate about what the Bible's sexual ethic is (if it has one at all) and how its authority for contemporary Christians should play out in the case of homosexuality.
Perhaps one or two among thousands fit this description. If you're one of them, I'll note here that your arguments should emphatically not be discounted just because they aren't the most prevalent. If they are to be rejected, they should be rejected because they aren't sound. If you are in this camp, you should know that I haven't been convinced yet by the arguments of your peers, and I think your burden of proof is extremely high given the despair and suicidal self-loathing that the views you support sow in too many gay and lesbian hearts. But if you want to share your own substantive positive case for the moral rightness of something that I have observed to cause so much life anguish for my gay and lesbian friends, I'll skeptically consider what you have to say, perhaps in the book on this topic that I've started working on.
But I'll also note here that you aren't typical of those who showed up for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day. My post was about the typical conservative Christians who stood in solidarity with the Cathy family and the Chick-fil-A franchise, who stood with Chick-fil-A because of shared values. And what would these average conservative Christians waiting in line, if asked why they believed Cathy was in the right to use Chick-fil-A profits to support discrimination, have said?
I'm pretty convinced from the body of anecdotal evidence available to me that they would have pointed to the fact that Paul calls homosexual acts unnatural and indecent in the first chapter of Romans. Or they would have invoked some other "clobber passage." Or offered a vaguer claim to the effect that "the Bible calls it a sin."
But I will concede that my evidence is anecdotal--and my experience may be colored by the fact that for the last 12 years I've lived in the Bible belt. Suppose the numbers game turns out differently. Suppose it was only 40% who fit the description I was focusing on in my earlier post--that is, well-meaning Christian Chick-fil-A supporters who failed to allow their choices to be shaped by an appreciation of the anguished cries of their gays and lesbian neighbors, and failed because they were trapped behind walls created by an unreflective allegiance to a doctrine of inerrancy.
Then I'd be wrong in my claim that "more often than not" inerrancy shaped their views. But my deeper point wasn't about how many were trapped behind walls of inerrancy. My deeper point was about how inerrancy can trap otherwise decent people behind walls, how it does so with many Christians, and how in those cases we should treat the misleading doctrine as the villain rather than the people who are misled.
But none of this is to say that every opponent of same-sex romantic intimacy is an inerrantist. That is clearly not true. I agree wholeheartedly with Brent White on that point. Where we disagree is on the issue of whether every opponent of same-sex romantic intimacy is mistaken.
The "straw man fallacy," as it's called in critical thinking textbooks, is the fallacy of rejecting a view (or argument) by attacking a related but different view (or argument) that's easier to discredit. You thoroughly discredit a position that your opponent wasn't actually endorsing but act as if you've refuted your opponent (perhaps hoping no one notices the trick, perhaps not noticing it yourself). The fallacy is, I believe, named after the practice of burning in effigy a straw stand-in for the real target of outrage.
Sometimes the straw man fallacy is deliberate, sometimes inadvertent. I think the latter is more common: We don't listen carefully, we jump to conclusions, or a pithy retort springs to our lips before we can examine whether it's really fair. We fail to notice a distinction, and so attack what strikes us as outrageous rather than what the other person actually meant (a point which suggests that the straw man fallacy is related inversely to the principle of charity). I'm sure I'm guilty of this myself.
So, for example, Abe encounter progressives who are upset by Chick-fil-A's unapologetic financial support of organizations committed to perpetuating discrimination and social marginalization of sexual minorities. Abe then represents them as being upset about Chick-fil-A COO Dan Cathy exercizing his right to express an opinion, and trumpets how importance freedom of speech is to the American way of life and how awful it is that people are trying to deny Cathy this right. That's the straw man fallacy. To be opposed to practices that promote discrimination isn't the same as being opposed to someone's right to express an opinion.
There are other examples, from both sides of the debate. I know that some who came to Chick-fil-A's defense were actually opposed to Cathy's anti-gay practices but were equally appalled by certain city mayors who seemed to be threatening the right of Chick-fil-A franchises to operate within their cities. They were worried about the precedent that would be set if the right to do business could be jeopardized by where you donated money--but they were treated as if they thought there was nothing wrong with those donations. Defending someone's right to do X is not the same as saying X is right.
I'm sure you can provide your own examples.
My own favorite example comes in response to my own post about the Chick-fil-A business. Not many days later Methodist pastor Brent White, on his blog, vigorously critiqued a distorted variant of my post--rendering my argument easy to attack by ignoring terms like "many" and "in most cases," and by uncharitably interpreting an ambiguous use of the phrase "these people" so as to make the people referenced a much broader class than I had intended to be talking about. I suspect, given his tone of righteous indignation, that the straw man fallacy in this case was inadvertent--that his sense of affront led to a failure to read with care and charity. The result is that the view he was attacking, although it wasn't mine, burned very brightly indeed--as straw is wont to do.
So the question is, what do you do when you've been "straw-manned"? In fact, I think the most useful response is to use it as an opportunity for clarification. If a distinction has been missed, you now have the chance to make it explicit. If a qualifier has been overlooked, you can call attention to it. If you've left something out of your discussion for the sake of focusing on a particular issue--but what you've left out leaves you open to misinterpretation--you can fill in the blanks.
It's easy to get mad and defensive when you've been straw-manned. But it's better, I think, to treat it as an opportunity. One might say something like this: "I actually agree that the position you're attacking is mistaken for the reasons you offer. But I'm afraid you've misread or misheard me if you think that view is mine. Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I could have been. Here's what I meant to say..."
If you're a blogger, I think responding to straw-manning in this way is especially important. Because if one person has misconstrued your position and dismissed it based on the misconstrual, then it's quite likely that others have as well.
But if all of this is right, then I suppose I should do all of this in relation to Brent White's critique of my Chick-fil-A post. Here's how White understands my argument:
The author, Eric Reitan, says that the Christians who turned out last week during “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” did so because they have an “allegiance to an untenable theory about the Bible, a theory about how the Bible’s words are connected to divine self-disclosure, a theory that, as I see it, cannot stand up to any serious engagement with the Bible’s actual content and history.” They are, he says, inerrantists.
Really? For the record, while I’m not aware that my position on marriage and homosexuality differs from Dan Cathy’s, be assured, dear reader, that I am not an inerrantist. John Wesley wasn’t an inerrantist. Neither was Calvin, Luther, Aquinas, Anselm, Augustine, Athanasius, Origen, or St. Paul, for that matter.
This is classic straw-man reasoning. After all, go back just a few words in the very sentence White quotes, and you hit on the qualifying phrase "more often than not." While a universal claim can be refuted by a short list of counterexamples, the corresponding non-universal claim cannot be thus refuted. "All X's are Y's" is refuted by finding an X that isn't a Y. But "Many X's are Y's" is not thus refuted. For White's retort to work, he has to attribute to me a universal claim I didn't make.
But while this is adequate to expose the fallacy, I don't think stopping there is sufficient if one's aim is to use the straw-manning as a springboard for helping to clarify one's position.
So let's step back a little further and put the passage White quotes into its broader context. I begin by claiming that the Chick-fil-A "appreciators"--more precisely, those who stand with Cathy in endorsing the social and legal marginalization of gays and lesbians, as opposed to those who showed up simply to stand against any infringement on Chick-fil-A's right to do business--are guilty of a short-coming in love. But I think the problem lies with their actions more than with their motives: while what they are doing is unloving towards their gay and lesbian neighbors, they don't want to be unloving. They mean well. There is a disconnect between motives and actions.
Of course, this way of putting the issue is premised on the view that the categorical condemnation of homosexuality and the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage really is harmful to gays and lesbians. It wasn't my aim to make the case for that premise in a definitive way (one can only do so much in a blog post)--and so all I did was sketch out my case.
Here's the sketch, put in slightly different terms: Those of us who have really paid close and compassionate attention to the lived experience of gays and lesbians--those of us who have really sought to uncover the fruits of conservative anti-gay teachings--have a very hard time finding those teachings even remotely plausible. In practice, systematically excluding gays and lesbians from access to the bedrock instiution of society, treating their intimate life-partnerships as something less than familial, regarding their love as sin and hence treating their most meaning-bestowing relationships as something that ought to be broken up--all of this damages the lives of gays and lesbians in a holistic way. Hence, all of this is unloving in practice, no matter what the motives.
But it seems to me that many of those who engage in this unloving practice are no less loving in their underlying character and motives than most of the rest of us. So what is the source of the disconnect between heart and action? One answer lies in false beliefs.
So which false beliefs can cause well-meaning people, motivated by love, to endorse practices that bear such bad fruits--often tragic ones--for our gay and lesbian neighbors?
There are, of course, multiple answers. Back in the respective eras of Wesley and Calvin and Luther and Aquinas and Anselm and Augustine and Athanasius and Origen and St. Paul, the answer wouldn't be belief in biblical inerrancy--since, as White rightly points out, inerrancy is a fairly modern notion. But before the modern era, people knew next to nothing about homosexuality. The concept of sexual orientation as we understand it today was essentially unknown. The cultures of these eras lacked the conceptual categories that would have enabled those with a homosexual orientation to make their experience understood in the way that we can understand it today.
And so, in these earlier eras, it is quite likely that the theologians White mentions would have had false beliefs about homosexuality and false beliefs about the effects of church teachings (since those most affected by those teachings lacked the public voice to make their experiences known and understood). If, in relation to sexual minorities, there was a disconnect between their motives and their actions, I'd locate the source, not in a doctrine of inerrancy, but in understandable ignorance.
But the question I was posing wasn't about what caused the disconnect among long-dead theologians. It was about all those decent, ordinary American Christians who showed up on Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day to "appreciate" and facilitate Dan Cathy's financial support of discrimination and social marginalization. What explains the disconnect between their ordinary decency and their committed endorsement of the indecent treatment of fellow human beings?
Again, there are multiple answers. But the modern notion of biblical inerrancy has developed enormous currency among contemporary Christians in the pews, even in mainline churches that do not (at the level of their theology) endorse inerrancy. While I haven't done a sociological study of the matter, I suspect from my personal experience that the opposition to homosexuality among conservative Christians today is most often supported by an appeal to "what the Bible says"--an appeal of the sort that at least implicitly presupposes biblical inerrancy (in the sense that, without inerrancy as a hidden premise, the conclusion simply wouldn't follow).
But this is hardly true of all those who oppose homosexuality and same-sex marriage. White is absolutely right about that (which, again, is why I said "more often than not"). Among Roman Catholics, appeals to various natural law arguments or to Church authority are likely to be invoked. Others offer a range of arguments based on the purported social harms of normalizing homosexuality--which is why I have considered various arguments of this sort on this blog. It's also why I haven't contented myself with critiquing arguments against same-sex marriage, but have sought to make positive arguments in support of it.
And because conservative Protestant theologians from mainline denominations are likely to be conscious of the limitations of proof-texting and more conventional natural law arguments, my first published work on this issue (back in the '90's) took on a holistic biblical and natural law argument offered by a Lutheran theologian, one which tried to read into the Bible a "heterosexual order" to creation and attempted to ground opposition to same-sex relationships in their "violation" of that order.
Perhaps, at some point, I should summarize the argument from that paper (co-authored with John Kronen and published in Faith and Philosophy on this blog. Perhaps I should also devote a post to the various permutations of the natural law argument. There's something to be said for completeness.
But to take up all of these possibilities in the Chick-fil-A blog post would have distracted from its more focused aim--which was to zero in on what I take to be the most influential force underwriting anti-gay discrimination among lay Christians today. And that's why I prefaced my discussion of inerrancy and the way it prevents people from connecting compassionately with their gay and lesbian neighbors by saying that "more often than not" (not "always") the source of the disconnect between motives and actions on this matter can be attributed to an unreflective assumption of inerrancy.
And to be clear, I didn't mean "more often than not" in the history of Christianity. Prior to the modern era, the source of the disconnect was more likely, as already noted, to be invincible ignorance about the nature of homosexuality. Wesley and Luther and Calvin, etc., formed their understandings of sexual ethics without the benefit of being able to appreciate what it is like to be gay. They knew none of the things that can and should inform our thinking today. The question is why so many today don't inform their thinking in the light of this new knowledge. For some it may be misguided allegiance to a traditional teaching that was formed in the midst of profound ignorance. For others it may be something else. But for most Christian conservatives in America today, it seems to be allegiance to "the Word of God."
When I said that "these people aren't biblical scholars," I was referring to most of the conservative Christians lining up to give money to Chick-fil-A last week. Most of them were, I suspect, convinced they were standing up for what the Bible teaches--but not in some nuanced sense of "what the Bible teaches," according to which the teachings of the whole may deviate from and override the teachings of the parts. They weren't there because they had done a study of the Bible as a whole, uncovered the roots of its overarching sexual ethic (perhaps in the light of a careful critical reading of L. William Countryman's Dirt, Greed, and Sex) and taken a side in a controversial theological debate about what the Bible's sexual ethic is (if it has one at all) and how its authority for contemporary Christians should play out in the case of homosexuality.
Perhaps one or two among thousands fit this description. If you're one of them, I'll note here that your arguments should emphatically not be discounted just because they aren't the most prevalent. If they are to be rejected, they should be rejected because they aren't sound. If you are in this camp, you should know that I haven't been convinced yet by the arguments of your peers, and I think your burden of proof is extremely high given the despair and suicidal self-loathing that the views you support sow in too many gay and lesbian hearts. But if you want to share your own substantive positive case for the moral rightness of something that I have observed to cause so much life anguish for my gay and lesbian friends, I'll skeptically consider what you have to say, perhaps in the book on this topic that I've started working on.
But I'll also note here that you aren't typical of those who showed up for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day. My post was about the typical conservative Christians who stood in solidarity with the Cathy family and the Chick-fil-A franchise, who stood with Chick-fil-A because of shared values. And what would these average conservative Christians waiting in line, if asked why they believed Cathy was in the right to use Chick-fil-A profits to support discrimination, have said?
I'm pretty convinced from the body of anecdotal evidence available to me that they would have pointed to the fact that Paul calls homosexual acts unnatural and indecent in the first chapter of Romans. Or they would have invoked some other "clobber passage." Or offered a vaguer claim to the effect that "the Bible calls it a sin."
But I will concede that my evidence is anecdotal--and my experience may be colored by the fact that for the last 12 years I've lived in the Bible belt. Suppose the numbers game turns out differently. Suppose it was only 40% who fit the description I was focusing on in my earlier post--that is, well-meaning Christian Chick-fil-A supporters who failed to allow their choices to be shaped by an appreciation of the anguished cries of their gays and lesbian neighbors, and failed because they were trapped behind walls created by an unreflective allegiance to a doctrine of inerrancy.
Then I'd be wrong in my claim that "more often than not" inerrancy shaped their views. But my deeper point wasn't about how many were trapped behind walls of inerrancy. My deeper point was about how inerrancy can trap otherwise decent people behind walls, how it does so with many Christians, and how in those cases we should treat the misleading doctrine as the villain rather than the people who are misled.
But none of this is to say that every opponent of same-sex romantic intimacy is an inerrantist. That is clearly not true. I agree wholeheartedly with Brent White on that point. Where we disagree is on the issue of whether every opponent of same-sex romantic intimacy is mistaken.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Are atheists just in denial? Hellish motives behind a misguided notion
I remember it vividly. It was after my first visit to my then-girlfriend's church, and I found myself out to lunch with her pastor--a forceful personality whose every word radiated a kind of aggressive conviction. You got the sense that, whenever he said something, there was an unspoken addendum that went something like this: "By the way, if you disagree with this, then you are spitting in the face of God and have proved yourself to be a dangerous servant of Satan whom I will do my best to convert or silence so as to make sure that you do not endanger anyone's immortal soul."
Or maybe that was just my imagination. In any event, I found him quite intimidating.
I was reminded of that lunch the other day while I was reading Stephen Law's recent post, "Do atheists know God exists? " Law's post is a response to another post by Randy Everist. Both are considering a claim commonly made by conservative Christians--namely, that atheists really know that God exists but are engaged in some sort of deception, including self-deception. Put another way: they're in denial. Both Law and Everist have some trouble with this claim, but Everist tries to salvage a version of it. Law--I think quite convincingly--shows why Everist's salvage job fails.
But I don't want to talk specifically about the merits of Law's arguments here. Instead, I want to think in a somewhat different way about this idea that all atheists and agnostics are in denial.
My girlfriend's pastor, lo those many years ago, asserted this idea over lunch. And when my face began to inch, ever so slightly, towards an expression that may have hinted at skepticism, he quickly invoked the Bible--specifically, Romans 1:18-20, in which Paul writes, "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."
The man said that last bit more than once: "They're without excuse." This piece was important to him. It was important that non-believers be without excuse. And I remember that an old woman at a nearby table overhead him (the pastor had a resonant voice--he was preaching even in the restaurant), and she felt the need to voice her earnest agreement.
When the preacher said this, I wanted to respond with vocal incredulity. I might have said "Are you nuts?" if I'd had more courage. You see, I knew lots of atheists and agnostics. Some were close friends. Others were loved ones. And it was quite apparent to me that their lack of belief in God wasn't about denying what was plain before their eyes.
Even though this happened years before The God Delusion hit shelves, I'd met atheists a bit like Richard Dawkins. And say what you will about Dawkins, it's pretty clear that he believes what he says about the absurdity of belief in God. I think it's clear to most followers of my work where I stand on this matter: We live in a world that is like that famed duck-rabbit image, a world that can be seen in different ways. And, contrary to Dawkins, I think one reasonable way in which to see the world is theistically. But in such a world, belief in the existence of God isn't a matter of knowledge but of faith--by which I mean it's a matter of choosing to see the world in terms of a hoped-for possibility. And this means that those who don't see it this way aren't denying something that they "really know in their heart is true."
But let's set aside such philosophical ideas and simply look at actual atheists and agnostics.
The reason I couldn't take that preacher seriously that day was because of the atheists and agnostics I'd known. Some had once been believers but had lost their faith--and they'd lost it kicking and screaming. They'd fought tooth and nail to preserve what had for so long helped to define who they were...until, finally, they had to admit that they just didn't believe anymore.
This doesn't smack of denial. In fact, I've know people who quite clearly were lying to themselves while they avowed belief in God, who really had already stopped believing and just weren't ready to admit it yet.
And I've known people who were perfectly open to the idea of God, but who neither found a compelling internal drive to believe nor saw any compelling evidence for God's existence when they looked at the world around them. And so they remained agnostic--friendly to believers, but honest enough to say, when pressed, "You know, I just don't have any beliefs about that." And these were not people full of "godlessness and wickedness," but rather people with a strong moral center, a noble heart, deep compassion and kindness.
I'm speaking, specifically, of my father.
The preacher at that restaurant table announced, in effect, that my father was without excuse. That he was willfully denying the truth--this man whose character I knew as well as I've known the character of anyone. And I can tell you this: Anyone who met my father, paid any attention to him, and then insisted that he "knew in his heart that there is a God but lied to himself and others about it"...well, such a person would have to have been doing what that preacher claimed nonbelievers do: Refuse to acknowledge the obvious.
More broadly, the notion that all atheists and agnostics are in denial is one that you can persist in clinging to only if you either don't pay attention to your atheist and agnostic neighbors, or if you willfully distort the evidence that pours in when you do pay attention. This notion operates as a way of blocking or impeding honest appreciation of other human beings. It is, in that sense, an impediment to love--because love begins with attention and the effort to understand.
So why do some Christians, like this preacher from my past, insist on clinging to this notion?
There are probably a number of reasons. Three in particular come to mind: First, because they cling to a doctrine of biblical inerrancy, and it sounds as if Paul endorses this notion in Romans. Second, because they cling to the doctrine that nonbelievers are damned to eternal hell at death, and they're astute enough to recognize that such a fate doesn't seem just if the person who is being thus damned is, well, exactly like my father in fact was. Third, because the level of certitude that they long to invest in their beliefs is hard for them to preserve in the face of sincere, authentic disagreement, thus leading them to want to deny that any sincere disagreement really exists.
And so, when they meet decent atheists and agnostics whose views are obviously sincere, views that express personal integrity as opposed to denial, they have to lie to themselves and others about those people, and declare them to be without excuse, in order to be able to cling to their infallibilist and hellish certitude.
In the process, they lose sight of what may be the deeper message of Romans 1:18-20--a message about paying attention to what's plain, about being honest with oneself about what one sees; a message about how those who fail to do this risk becoming alienated from the source of truth and love.
Or maybe that was just my imagination. In any event, I found him quite intimidating.
I was reminded of that lunch the other day while I was reading Stephen Law's recent post, "Do atheists know God exists? " Law's post is a response to another post by Randy Everist. Both are considering a claim commonly made by conservative Christians--namely, that atheists really know that God exists but are engaged in some sort of deception, including self-deception. Put another way: they're in denial. Both Law and Everist have some trouble with this claim, but Everist tries to salvage a version of it. Law--I think quite convincingly--shows why Everist's salvage job fails.
But I don't want to talk specifically about the merits of Law's arguments here. Instead, I want to think in a somewhat different way about this idea that all atheists and agnostics are in denial.
My girlfriend's pastor, lo those many years ago, asserted this idea over lunch. And when my face began to inch, ever so slightly, towards an expression that may have hinted at skepticism, he quickly invoked the Bible--specifically, Romans 1:18-20, in which Paul writes, "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."
The man said that last bit more than once: "They're without excuse." This piece was important to him. It was important that non-believers be without excuse. And I remember that an old woman at a nearby table overhead him (the pastor had a resonant voice--he was preaching even in the restaurant), and she felt the need to voice her earnest agreement.
When the preacher said this, I wanted to respond with vocal incredulity. I might have said "Are you nuts?" if I'd had more courage. You see, I knew lots of atheists and agnostics. Some were close friends. Others were loved ones. And it was quite apparent to me that their lack of belief in God wasn't about denying what was plain before their eyes.
Even though this happened years before The God Delusion hit shelves, I'd met atheists a bit like Richard Dawkins. And say what you will about Dawkins, it's pretty clear that he believes what he says about the absurdity of belief in God. I think it's clear to most followers of my work where I stand on this matter: We live in a world that is like that famed duck-rabbit image, a world that can be seen in different ways. And, contrary to Dawkins, I think one reasonable way in which to see the world is theistically. But in such a world, belief in the existence of God isn't a matter of knowledge but of faith--by which I mean it's a matter of choosing to see the world in terms of a hoped-for possibility. And this means that those who don't see it this way aren't denying something that they "really know in their heart is true."
But let's set aside such philosophical ideas and simply look at actual atheists and agnostics.
The reason I couldn't take that preacher seriously that day was because of the atheists and agnostics I'd known. Some had once been believers but had lost their faith--and they'd lost it kicking and screaming. They'd fought tooth and nail to preserve what had for so long helped to define who they were...until, finally, they had to admit that they just didn't believe anymore.
This doesn't smack of denial. In fact, I've know people who quite clearly were lying to themselves while they avowed belief in God, who really had already stopped believing and just weren't ready to admit it yet.
And I've known people who were perfectly open to the idea of God, but who neither found a compelling internal drive to believe nor saw any compelling evidence for God's existence when they looked at the world around them. And so they remained agnostic--friendly to believers, but honest enough to say, when pressed, "You know, I just don't have any beliefs about that." And these were not people full of "godlessness and wickedness," but rather people with a strong moral center, a noble heart, deep compassion and kindness.
I'm speaking, specifically, of my father.
The preacher at that restaurant table announced, in effect, that my father was without excuse. That he was willfully denying the truth--this man whose character I knew as well as I've known the character of anyone. And I can tell you this: Anyone who met my father, paid any attention to him, and then insisted that he "knew in his heart that there is a God but lied to himself and others about it"...well, such a person would have to have been doing what that preacher claimed nonbelievers do: Refuse to acknowledge the obvious.
More broadly, the notion that all atheists and agnostics are in denial is one that you can persist in clinging to only if you either don't pay attention to your atheist and agnostic neighbors, or if you willfully distort the evidence that pours in when you do pay attention. This notion operates as a way of blocking or impeding honest appreciation of other human beings. It is, in that sense, an impediment to love--because love begins with attention and the effort to understand.
So why do some Christians, like this preacher from my past, insist on clinging to this notion?
There are probably a number of reasons. Three in particular come to mind: First, because they cling to a doctrine of biblical inerrancy, and it sounds as if Paul endorses this notion in Romans. Second, because they cling to the doctrine that nonbelievers are damned to eternal hell at death, and they're astute enough to recognize that such a fate doesn't seem just if the person who is being thus damned is, well, exactly like my father in fact was. Third, because the level of certitude that they long to invest in their beliefs is hard for them to preserve in the face of sincere, authentic disagreement, thus leading them to want to deny that any sincere disagreement really exists.
And so, when they meet decent atheists and agnostics whose views are obviously sincere, views that express personal integrity as opposed to denial, they have to lie to themselves and others about those people, and declare them to be without excuse, in order to be able to cling to their infallibilist and hellish certitude.
In the process, they lose sight of what may be the deeper message of Romans 1:18-20--a message about paying attention to what's plain, about being honest with oneself about what one sees; a message about how those who fail to do this risk becoming alienated from the source of truth and love.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
On Marriage Equality: The Loving Grandfather vs. the Biblical Exegete
My Uncle John and Aunt Dorothy are featured in a recent short video spot about marriage equality. So are my first cousins once removed, Jake and Caleb--but the focus here is an on a love story that's lasted more than 70 years. John and Dorothy know something about what a successful marriage is, and what it can mean for a rich and full life. And they want the opportunity for such a life-deepening relationship for all their grandchildren, including the two who happen to be gay.
John's career was as a Lutheran pastor--and there are some conservative Christians, of various denominations, who will be scandalized by the fact that someone who spent his life in Christian ministry would speak out so unambiguously in support of marriage equality for all persons, regardless of sexual orientation. And so, as I was watching Uncle John on the video (with a bit of a pang, given how much he looks like a beardless version of his baby brother, my father, who died in the fall) I couldn't help but think of an essay that a friend of mine called my attention to recently.
The essay, a manifesto against marriage equality by Robert Gagnon, appeared a little over a month back on Mystagogy, the blog of John Sanidopoulis. And given what Gagnon says there, I have little doubt that he'd be indignant about someone like my Uncle John--a retired pastor who not only supports marriage equality, but in support of this position says that "Jesus was about love."
Uncle John's support of marriage equality isn't born out of some kind of willful betrayal of his Christian faith. It's an extension of it. In fact, at least as I see things, his position here is what typically happens when, instead of paying lip service to the idea of loving gays and lesbians while thumping biblical passages and invoking philosophically dubious arguments, you actually focus sustained compassionate attention on your gay and lesbian neighbors--that is, when the neighbors you sincerely seek to love as yourself happen to be gay.
Some people live in an isolated world where, in order to really connect in a sustained and loving way with gays and lesbians, they need to step out of their comfort zones, set aside their judgmental filters, and deliberately overcome habitual aversions in order to practice sincere empathy. For others, it comes quite readily--if, for example, you're defined by a spirit of affection, especially towards the family you hold dear; if you're the grandfather of some of the gay neighbors you're called upon to love; if you've watched them grow since infancy, held them on your lap, and seen the future in their eyes.
Of course, I'm describing here my Uncle John--a sweet, compassionate man by disposition, a pastor and church-builder (and, later, organizer of "Reitan Christian Tours") by profession, and a grandfather of two gay grandsons by chance.
And it seems to me that the best refutation of the kinds of argument we find hammered out by Gagnon and others may be the simple testimony of someone like Uncle John and Aunt Dorothy.
That doesn't mean it's impossible to sit down and pick apart Gagnon's arguments. His main focus in the linked essay is the question of whether the Bible has elements which can be used to justify a systematic opposition to same-sex marriage--and Gagnon, as a biblical scholar, makes a number of valid observations. But I'd be the first to concede that the Bible has elements that could be invoked to oppose marriage equality. The Old Testament is dripping in patriarchy, so much so that, according to Deutoronomic law, a rapist of an unpledged virgin can erase the wrong of his crime by paying the father off and marrying his victim (Deuteronomy 22:28).
Such a rule makes sense if the crime of rape is that of taking a woman who doesn't rightly belong to you, and the chief victim of the crime is seen not as the raped woman, but as the man to whom she rightly belongs (the husband or, in the case of the unmarried, the father and future husband). It makes some sense if, in a patriarchal culture, women both depend on having husbands for their survival and will never find a husband if they are regarded as "damaged goods." But that such a rule makes sense on these patriarchal assumptions just goes to show how appalling the underlying cultural patriarchy, presupposed in so much Old Testament law, really is.
What we have here is a deep cultural blindness to the full humanity and dignity of women. And it should hardly come as a surprise to anyone that such a framework would not only have appalling implications for women, but appalling implications for the prospects of sexual minorities to live a rich and full life.
That Paul was inspired, by his revelatory encounters with a God of love, to shake off much of this patriarchal outlook doesn't mean he escaped it completely. And so it should come as no surprise that even in the face of transformative revelatory experiences--the moments of inspiration that moved him to say that in Christ there is neither male nor female--some vestiges of the cultural norms he'd inherited remained. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that one can find in Paul patriarchal ideas at odds with same-sex marriage.
The chief question here is not whether such elements exist, but how Christians today should understand the relationship between the collected writings of the Bible, the cultural presuppositions within which the authors were writing, and the revelation of God. Gagnon doesn't address this question. What he does do is supplement his biblical case with strained natural law arguments against same-sex intimacy. He concludes that because two men are joining together body parts that aren't designed to go together, they are violating their own dignity and harming themselves (resulting in what he calls "the degradation of the gendered self that comes from engaging in homosexual practice").
Such a line of argument begins with an abstract and contestable theory about human nature and human welfare to arrive at a conclusion sharply at odds with the lived experience of gays and lesbians. Rather than looking at how the lives of actual gays and lesbians go--a practice of compassionate attention which would lead one to conclude that those gays and lesbians are happiest who throw off the culture of condemnation and embrace an expression of their sexuality analogous to what we find in heterosexual marriage--Gagnon subordinates the lessons of such loving attention to a theory that affixes enormous moral weight on physical plumbing. Although I'm sure this wasn't Gagnon's explicit intent, this looks to me like a case of prioritizing the implications of a controversial human theory over the lessons that arise from living out Christ's call to love our neighbors as ourselves.
I could dig more deeply into what strike me as Gagnon's dubious assumptions and strange logic, but the truth is that what is on display in Gagnon's essay is what happens when biblical exegesis and moral theorizing take place divorced from the actual business of loving the people who are most directly impacted by one's conclusions. And to let loving attention and profound human relationships guide our moral sensibilities on this issue is to live out Christ's injunction to love our neighbors as ourselves, and taking seriously Jesus' call to look for Him in the neighbor who comes to us in need.
And so, while at some point I may have to sit down and dissect arguments like the one Gagnon offers more explicitly and rigorously, I think a truer refutation is offered by the voice of love speaking from a lifetime of love. Uncle John and Aunt Dorothy offer that voice in this video:
John's career was as a Lutheran pastor--and there are some conservative Christians, of various denominations, who will be scandalized by the fact that someone who spent his life in Christian ministry would speak out so unambiguously in support of marriage equality for all persons, regardless of sexual orientation. And so, as I was watching Uncle John on the video (with a bit of a pang, given how much he looks like a beardless version of his baby brother, my father, who died in the fall) I couldn't help but think of an essay that a friend of mine called my attention to recently.
The essay, a manifesto against marriage equality by Robert Gagnon, appeared a little over a month back on Mystagogy, the blog of John Sanidopoulis. And given what Gagnon says there, I have little doubt that he'd be indignant about someone like my Uncle John--a retired pastor who not only supports marriage equality, but in support of this position says that "Jesus was about love."
Uncle John's support of marriage equality isn't born out of some kind of willful betrayal of his Christian faith. It's an extension of it. In fact, at least as I see things, his position here is what typically happens when, instead of paying lip service to the idea of loving gays and lesbians while thumping biblical passages and invoking philosophically dubious arguments, you actually focus sustained compassionate attention on your gay and lesbian neighbors--that is, when the neighbors you sincerely seek to love as yourself happen to be gay.
Some people live in an isolated world where, in order to really connect in a sustained and loving way with gays and lesbians, they need to step out of their comfort zones, set aside their judgmental filters, and deliberately overcome habitual aversions in order to practice sincere empathy. For others, it comes quite readily--if, for example, you're defined by a spirit of affection, especially towards the family you hold dear; if you're the grandfather of some of the gay neighbors you're called upon to love; if you've watched them grow since infancy, held them on your lap, and seen the future in their eyes.
Of course, I'm describing here my Uncle John--a sweet, compassionate man by disposition, a pastor and church-builder (and, later, organizer of "Reitan Christian Tours") by profession, and a grandfather of two gay grandsons by chance.
And it seems to me that the best refutation of the kinds of argument we find hammered out by Gagnon and others may be the simple testimony of someone like Uncle John and Aunt Dorothy.
That doesn't mean it's impossible to sit down and pick apart Gagnon's arguments. His main focus in the linked essay is the question of whether the Bible has elements which can be used to justify a systematic opposition to same-sex marriage--and Gagnon, as a biblical scholar, makes a number of valid observations. But I'd be the first to concede that the Bible has elements that could be invoked to oppose marriage equality. The Old Testament is dripping in patriarchy, so much so that, according to Deutoronomic law, a rapist of an unpledged virgin can erase the wrong of his crime by paying the father off and marrying his victim (Deuteronomy 22:28).
Such a rule makes sense if the crime of rape is that of taking a woman who doesn't rightly belong to you, and the chief victim of the crime is seen not as the raped woman, but as the man to whom she rightly belongs (the husband or, in the case of the unmarried, the father and future husband). It makes some sense if, in a patriarchal culture, women both depend on having husbands for their survival and will never find a husband if they are regarded as "damaged goods." But that such a rule makes sense on these patriarchal assumptions just goes to show how appalling the underlying cultural patriarchy, presupposed in so much Old Testament law, really is.
What we have here is a deep cultural blindness to the full humanity and dignity of women. And it should hardly come as a surprise to anyone that such a framework would not only have appalling implications for women, but appalling implications for the prospects of sexual minorities to live a rich and full life.
That Paul was inspired, by his revelatory encounters with a God of love, to shake off much of this patriarchal outlook doesn't mean he escaped it completely. And so it should come as no surprise that even in the face of transformative revelatory experiences--the moments of inspiration that moved him to say that in Christ there is neither male nor female--some vestiges of the cultural norms he'd inherited remained. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that one can find in Paul patriarchal ideas at odds with same-sex marriage.
The chief question here is not whether such elements exist, but how Christians today should understand the relationship between the collected writings of the Bible, the cultural presuppositions within which the authors were writing, and the revelation of God. Gagnon doesn't address this question. What he does do is supplement his biblical case with strained natural law arguments against same-sex intimacy. He concludes that because two men are joining together body parts that aren't designed to go together, they are violating their own dignity and harming themselves (resulting in what he calls "the degradation of the gendered self that comes from engaging in homosexual practice").
Such a line of argument begins with an abstract and contestable theory about human nature and human welfare to arrive at a conclusion sharply at odds with the lived experience of gays and lesbians. Rather than looking at how the lives of actual gays and lesbians go--a practice of compassionate attention which would lead one to conclude that those gays and lesbians are happiest who throw off the culture of condemnation and embrace an expression of their sexuality analogous to what we find in heterosexual marriage--Gagnon subordinates the lessons of such loving attention to a theory that affixes enormous moral weight on physical plumbing. Although I'm sure this wasn't Gagnon's explicit intent, this looks to me like a case of prioritizing the implications of a controversial human theory over the lessons that arise from living out Christ's call to love our neighbors as ourselves.
I could dig more deeply into what strike me as Gagnon's dubious assumptions and strange logic, but the truth is that what is on display in Gagnon's essay is what happens when biblical exegesis and moral theorizing take place divorced from the actual business of loving the people who are most directly impacted by one's conclusions. And to let loving attention and profound human relationships guide our moral sensibilities on this issue is to live out Christ's injunction to love our neighbors as ourselves, and taking seriously Jesus' call to look for Him in the neighbor who comes to us in need.
And so, while at some point I may have to sit down and dissect arguments like the one Gagnon offers more explicitly and rigorously, I think a truer refutation is offered by the voice of love speaking from a lifetime of love. Uncle John and Aunt Dorothy offer that voice in this video:
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Is Everything Paul Says in his Epistles the Inspired and Inerrant Word of God?
It occurs to me (based on comments on my last post) that it's been a while since I've posted anything directly addressing the fundamentalist Christian belief that every word and sentence in the Bible is there through a direct act of divine inspiration, and as such inerrantly represents divine truth even if the application of it to human life seems to magnify suffering, alienate people from one another, inspire bitterness towards religion, etc.
The idea (in its original Protestant articulation called the Doctrine of Plenary Verbal Inspiration) is that although God worked through human authors, they wrote precisely what he wanted them to write, thereby guaranteeing that what they had to say contained no mistakes. An this is taken to be so certain, such a given, any evidence to the effect that certain proof texts bear "bad fruits" when treated as inerrant truth is dismissed summarily. Jesus' injunction to distinguish between true and false prophets by their fruits is regarded as inapplicable to the teachings of any author whose work has made it into the biblical cannon.
I don't want to retread old ground here, but it occurs to me that there is a line of argument--a kind of "confutation" of this fundamentalist view--that I haven't shared on this blog. I'm not sure how convincing it ultimately is, but it's easy to lay out and, I think, worth considering. By a "confutation" I mean an argument that challenges a view on its own terms--that seeks to show that if you take the view seriously, you have to accept things that undermine the view.
Before laying out this possible confutation, let me quickly point out, for those who may not be used to thinking about the Bible in these terms, that there are a diversity of positions one can adopt concerning the Bible's relationship to divine revelation and its authority for Christians. Far too often, a false dilemma is presented according to which there are only two options with respect to the Bible: either (a) treat the Bible from cover to cover as the inerrant word of God, or (b) throw out the whole thing, regarding it as nothing more than a collection of superstitious writings by ancient peoples who knew next to nothing and surely weren't inspired by God, since there is no God. We might call (a) the fundamentalist Christian theory about the Bible and (b) the fundamentalist atheist theory.
These are not the only theories that you could have. You might, for example, believe that the biblical authors were endeavoring to report their own experience of God at work in their lives, or their community's experience of God at work among them. You might think that these authors were moved by profound revelations of the divine moving in their lives (or were trying to give voice the the collective revelatory experiences of their community)--but also believe that these authors were limited by their cultural and historical contexts, by their filters of prejudice and ignorance.
You might, in other words, treat these writings as a seminal collection of "testimonies" to God and his work. No evangelical Christian I know treats the witness testimonies of members of their congregation in terms of the sharp either/or that options (a) and (b) provide. If someone stands up in church and shares a moving story of how God has been at work in their lives, do evangelicals say, "Either we must treat this testimony as inerrant, or we must throw out the whole thing as rubbish?" Of course not. Nor do we treat our most trusted and admired pastors as inerrant, no matter how much we respect and attend to their sermons.
Likewise, one possible way of thinking about Scripture is along these lines: inspiring and inspired, but not inerrant. And you might treat the Scriptures as more than this, even without embracing inerrancy, because you might believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You might, for example, believe that even if the human authors were fallible, where several are gathered together God becomes present in a transformative way (a way He wouldn't be when one focuses in narrowly on what one author has to say while ignoring the broader context).
After all, many voices in conversation can serve as a mutual corrective, exposing the errors of some by bringing to the fore the most resonant truths. A police officer who wants to know what happened at the scene of a crime will appreciate the presence of many witnesses--and if he interviews enough of them he will become pretty darned confident about at least some core facts even though he treats no witness as inerrant.
What is true about facts and events may be even more true about persons. If four people tell you about someone they all know, and their portraits of this person don't always match up--one describes the person as serene and in control during a moment of crisis, the other as fiery and anguished during that same moment--their collective witness might nevertheless give us a more accurate portrait than we'd get if we listened to any one of them. In fact, sometimes when you hear enough stories about someone, from enough different people so as to get past the individual perceptual prejudices, the subject of the stories becomes multi-dimensional, coming alive for you in a way that wouldn't happen with just a single narrative.
You might think that Scripture not only does something like this in relation to the person of Jesus, but does so in a way that facilitates a genuine relational encounter--that the Bible is a "means of grace" in much the way that the sacrament of holy communion is treated by many Christians as a means of coming into relational contact with God. And here's the thing about the sacrament: the bread could be stale, the wine sour, the minister who speaks the words of institution rather rough around the edges. It doesn't mean the sacrament can't be a transformative experience in which God's presence is deeply felt.
In the greatest symphonies, there is something that emerges that is greater than the parts. In fact, as a violinist I know that even in the best orchestras, individual musicians sometimes miss a run or play a high note off-key. Some people fake their way through a section because they haven't managed to practice it. But despite the individual errors here and there, the performance as whole can be magnificent. But you won't appreciate the whole if you focus narrowly on one note being played slightly flat by the basoon.
The point of all of this is that a confutation of the fundamentalist view of the Bible, even if successful, doesn't entail that you must throw your copy of the Bible in the trash or cease to treat it is as a profound vehicle for building a relationship with God. This black-and-white either/or approach serves the interests of fundamentalists of various stripes, but it doesn't necessarily serve the interest of truth.
So with that preface, here's the confutational argument. According to the fundamentalist Christian, when Paul writes something in the epistles, he's serving as a channel through which God communicates His revelation to humanity. God is speaking to us through Paul's pen--and God is doing it consistently. Everything Paul says has the character of a divine revelation.
And yet, in 1 Corinthians 7:10-12, Paul says the following:
This seems to suggest that Paul does not take himself to be doing what fundamentalist Christians claim that he was actually doing. Now, I suppose fundamentalists could say that God could work through Paul in this way even without Paul's knowledge. God could inspire every word Paul wrote, guaranteeing its inerrancy, even if Paul didn't himself realize that this is what was happening.
But if so, why didn't God keep Paul from erroneously distinguishing between his own exhortations and those that come from a higher authority--a divine one? Why does Paul set two sets of commands apart, indicating one as having a divine source in the Lord and the other as coming from Paul ("I, not the Lord")? If Paul is wrong to make this distinction, then Paul's letters aren't inerrant. If he's right to make this distinction, then the fundamentalist view of the Bible is mistaken.
Now I can imagine one rebuttal, that goes as follows: Paul was not saying that the second set of injunctions didn't come from God. He was simply distinguishing between injunctions that had been explicitly voiced by Jesus while Jesus was alive, and injunctions that Paul was now issuing. But that is consistent with both injunctions having their origin in God's will.
Now this move is possible, but it strains the natural reading of the passage. Why make a distinction of this sort if, as funamentalists maintain, Paul's injunctions have the same divine mandate, the same link to God's authority, that Paul took Jesus' words to have? The distinction becomes trivial on that assumption. It becomes a distinction not worth making. There is meaning not only in the direct sense of words, but in what is said and when. If you rush into my office and ask me urgently for a fire extinguisher, you'd have reason to complain about my deceptiveness were I to direct you to one three flights down if I knew there to be one right around the corner. There is something called "conversational implication." In this context, my directing you to a particular fire extinguisher conversationally implies that the one I'm directing you to is the nearest one. If this isn't true, I've deceived you.
You make a distinction because you think it matters. Paul thought the distinction between his own exhortations and those of the Lord mattered. This is conversationally implied by the text. If fundamentalists are right about the Bible, then this implication of the text is false. Paul was misled and expressed his false belief by treating his own pronouncements as relevantly different in authority from the pronouncements of Jesus.
Or maybe Paul wasn't misled. Perhaps the distinction he makes here is sound. In that case, we shouldn't treat everything Paul says as if it came directly from God. Either way, it seems that the extreme fundamentalist approach to Scripture has to go--although I don't think this undermines "high" views of Scripture more broadly.
So what do others think? Does this argument work, or am I missing something?
The idea (in its original Protestant articulation called the Doctrine of Plenary Verbal Inspiration) is that although God worked through human authors, they wrote precisely what he wanted them to write, thereby guaranteeing that what they had to say contained no mistakes. An this is taken to be so certain, such a given, any evidence to the effect that certain proof texts bear "bad fruits" when treated as inerrant truth is dismissed summarily. Jesus' injunction to distinguish between true and false prophets by their fruits is regarded as inapplicable to the teachings of any author whose work has made it into the biblical cannon.
I don't want to retread old ground here, but it occurs to me that there is a line of argument--a kind of "confutation" of this fundamentalist view--that I haven't shared on this blog. I'm not sure how convincing it ultimately is, but it's easy to lay out and, I think, worth considering. By a "confutation" I mean an argument that challenges a view on its own terms--that seeks to show that if you take the view seriously, you have to accept things that undermine the view.
Before laying out this possible confutation, let me quickly point out, for those who may not be used to thinking about the Bible in these terms, that there are a diversity of positions one can adopt concerning the Bible's relationship to divine revelation and its authority for Christians. Far too often, a false dilemma is presented according to which there are only two options with respect to the Bible: either (a) treat the Bible from cover to cover as the inerrant word of God, or (b) throw out the whole thing, regarding it as nothing more than a collection of superstitious writings by ancient peoples who knew next to nothing and surely weren't inspired by God, since there is no God. We might call (a) the fundamentalist Christian theory about the Bible and (b) the fundamentalist atheist theory.
These are not the only theories that you could have. You might, for example, believe that the biblical authors were endeavoring to report their own experience of God at work in their lives, or their community's experience of God at work among them. You might think that these authors were moved by profound revelations of the divine moving in their lives (or were trying to give voice the the collective revelatory experiences of their community)--but also believe that these authors were limited by their cultural and historical contexts, by their filters of prejudice and ignorance.
You might, in other words, treat these writings as a seminal collection of "testimonies" to God and his work. No evangelical Christian I know treats the witness testimonies of members of their congregation in terms of the sharp either/or that options (a) and (b) provide. If someone stands up in church and shares a moving story of how God has been at work in their lives, do evangelicals say, "Either we must treat this testimony as inerrant, or we must throw out the whole thing as rubbish?" Of course not. Nor do we treat our most trusted and admired pastors as inerrant, no matter how much we respect and attend to their sermons.
Likewise, one possible way of thinking about Scripture is along these lines: inspiring and inspired, but not inerrant. And you might treat the Scriptures as more than this, even without embracing inerrancy, because you might believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You might, for example, believe that even if the human authors were fallible, where several are gathered together God becomes present in a transformative way (a way He wouldn't be when one focuses in narrowly on what one author has to say while ignoring the broader context).
After all, many voices in conversation can serve as a mutual corrective, exposing the errors of some by bringing to the fore the most resonant truths. A police officer who wants to know what happened at the scene of a crime will appreciate the presence of many witnesses--and if he interviews enough of them he will become pretty darned confident about at least some core facts even though he treats no witness as inerrant.
What is true about facts and events may be even more true about persons. If four people tell you about someone they all know, and their portraits of this person don't always match up--one describes the person as serene and in control during a moment of crisis, the other as fiery and anguished during that same moment--their collective witness might nevertheless give us a more accurate portrait than we'd get if we listened to any one of them. In fact, sometimes when you hear enough stories about someone, from enough different people so as to get past the individual perceptual prejudices, the subject of the stories becomes multi-dimensional, coming alive for you in a way that wouldn't happen with just a single narrative.
You might think that Scripture not only does something like this in relation to the person of Jesus, but does so in a way that facilitates a genuine relational encounter--that the Bible is a "means of grace" in much the way that the sacrament of holy communion is treated by many Christians as a means of coming into relational contact with God. And here's the thing about the sacrament: the bread could be stale, the wine sour, the minister who speaks the words of institution rather rough around the edges. It doesn't mean the sacrament can't be a transformative experience in which God's presence is deeply felt.
In the greatest symphonies, there is something that emerges that is greater than the parts. In fact, as a violinist I know that even in the best orchestras, individual musicians sometimes miss a run or play a high note off-key. Some people fake their way through a section because they haven't managed to practice it. But despite the individual errors here and there, the performance as whole can be magnificent. But you won't appreciate the whole if you focus narrowly on one note being played slightly flat by the basoon.
The point of all of this is that a confutation of the fundamentalist view of the Bible, even if successful, doesn't entail that you must throw your copy of the Bible in the trash or cease to treat it is as a profound vehicle for building a relationship with God. This black-and-white either/or approach serves the interests of fundamentalists of various stripes, but it doesn't necessarily serve the interest of truth.
So with that preface, here's the confutational argument. According to the fundamentalist Christian, when Paul writes something in the epistles, he's serving as a channel through which God communicates His revelation to humanity. God is speaking to us through Paul's pen--and God is doing it consistently. Everything Paul says has the character of a divine revelation.
And yet, in 1 Corinthians 7:10-12, Paul says the following:
To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.This is incomplete because what I'm interested in here isn't the content of the teachings about divorce, but rather about the distinction Paul makes in his paranthetical remarks. He is distinguishing between what he takes to be commanded by the Lord and what he takes to be his own injunctions. He distinguishes between what is coming from the Lord (perhaps he has heard various reports that Jesus himself issued a prohibition on divorce) and what is he is exhorting the community to do on his own authority.
To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord): If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her...
This seems to suggest that Paul does not take himself to be doing what fundamentalist Christians claim that he was actually doing. Now, I suppose fundamentalists could say that God could work through Paul in this way even without Paul's knowledge. God could inspire every word Paul wrote, guaranteeing its inerrancy, even if Paul didn't himself realize that this is what was happening.
But if so, why didn't God keep Paul from erroneously distinguishing between his own exhortations and those that come from a higher authority--a divine one? Why does Paul set two sets of commands apart, indicating one as having a divine source in the Lord and the other as coming from Paul ("I, not the Lord")? If Paul is wrong to make this distinction, then Paul's letters aren't inerrant. If he's right to make this distinction, then the fundamentalist view of the Bible is mistaken.
Now I can imagine one rebuttal, that goes as follows: Paul was not saying that the second set of injunctions didn't come from God. He was simply distinguishing between injunctions that had been explicitly voiced by Jesus while Jesus was alive, and injunctions that Paul was now issuing. But that is consistent with both injunctions having their origin in God's will.
Now this move is possible, but it strains the natural reading of the passage. Why make a distinction of this sort if, as funamentalists maintain, Paul's injunctions have the same divine mandate, the same link to God's authority, that Paul took Jesus' words to have? The distinction becomes trivial on that assumption. It becomes a distinction not worth making. There is meaning not only in the direct sense of words, but in what is said and when. If you rush into my office and ask me urgently for a fire extinguisher, you'd have reason to complain about my deceptiveness were I to direct you to one three flights down if I knew there to be one right around the corner. There is something called "conversational implication." In this context, my directing you to a particular fire extinguisher conversationally implies that the one I'm directing you to is the nearest one. If this isn't true, I've deceived you.
You make a distinction because you think it matters. Paul thought the distinction between his own exhortations and those of the Lord mattered. This is conversationally implied by the text. If fundamentalists are right about the Bible, then this implication of the text is false. Paul was misled and expressed his false belief by treating his own pronouncements as relevantly different in authority from the pronouncements of Jesus.
Or maybe Paul wasn't misled. Perhaps the distinction he makes here is sound. In that case, we shouldn't treat everything Paul says as if it came directly from God. Either way, it seems that the extreme fundamentalist approach to Scripture has to go--although I don't think this undermines "high" views of Scripture more broadly.
So what do others think? Does this argument work, or am I missing something?
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