“Feeling” God

I believe people need to “feel” God. In order to explain this I need to go into egghead mode. I’m gonna ramble for a bit if that’s okay with you…

Church ministry is a tricky business. Taking concepts developed in an innocuous vacuum of journal articles, magazine op-eds, and…well…blogs and translating them into real life is difficult. Rarely is the transition a smooth one. There’s a reason for this: while theology involves concepts, pastoring involves people. Though everyone lives from a place of personal theology, the outworking of that personal theology is often drastically different from one person to the next. Nurturing the growth of such a diverse group of folks can be the undoing of the most industrious minister. But I’ve noticed something that helps direct my personal ministry. One of the things I feel most “called” to in ministry is to help people understand and facilitate their ability to “feel” God.

I like to describe this idea idea using the term of somatization: the conversion of cognitive, emotional, or spiritual aspects into physical or tangible expressions. For spiritual purposes, it’s the work of  the Holy Spirit in bodily manifestation. Normally in the psychiatric/medical community, that term has negative connotations. But honestly, anything - good or bad, happy or sad – affects us physically. It’s the same idea found in the ridiculously overused term “psychosomatic.” Internal issues result in physical expression.

Over the years, I’ve watched many individuals have a spiritual encounter that completely shifted their personal paradigm of God’s nature and immanence. In each of those scenarios, experience (of some sort) confirmed the power of God available to them on a personal level. Personally, it struck me as odd that God would initiate a strong spiritual encounter when I knew that many of those who received it had little to no doctrinal knowledge. I believed God was doing things backwards; after all doctrine comes first, right? But it occurred to me that throughout the history of the church, many people openly rejected any attempt of indoctrination without a prior or accompanying spiritual experience to validate that doctrine’s truth. Once someone has an encounter where they “feel” God, they will desire to know more about the God who provided that experience. God anchors faith in experience until one becomes grounded in proper belief. I began to understand my pastoral role was to disciple a healthy and balanced Christian upon the foundation of those spiritual encounters – not denying their legitimacy or downplaying their appropriateness.

How Christianity translates the supernatural into daily life is the most important aspect of personal spirituality today. Many pastors and theologians are struggling with this. Contemporary Christians are eager to cast off strict, doctrinally-oriented approaches to Christianity without accompanying experience. We ask Christians all the time  to follow their beliefs with actions – that our love relationship with God requires corresponding expression in a personal way. But today’s Christians have turned the tables: they actually expect to understand God’s love through the experiences he provides. 

Christianity has always been a two-pronged religion. One side involves doctrinal ascent to a set of beliefs centering on the finality of Jesus Christ. The other side is more “subjective” – it involves the prospect of “feeling” God through experience. That experience becomes an anchor for faith that can be leaned upon as doctrinal maturity develops. Of course, ministers and theologians get this backwards all the time - we teach doctrine in hopes that it will lead to experience for our congregations. But people’s actions tell us differently. When they are forced to choose between experiencing something on a spiritual level or adopting a particular set of dogma, they most often choose experience, since they ultimately believe that experience will correctly inform their doctrine, not the other way around. In other words we’ve been doing theology backwards. Postmodern Christians don’t say “I believe because I know;” they say “I believe because I feel.” It doesn’t have to be crazy charismatic stuff…but it’s gotta be something.

Do you “feel” God?

One Too Many Critics…

I am so sick of critics.

Between political opinions and religious self-appointed doctrine police, I’ve heard more negativity recently than I can remember. Our society has conjoined the concepts of criticism and credibility at the hip. We’re not legitimate until we disagree. To find nothing wrong with someone or something has become a sign of ignorance or presumption. Because of that, we just may be the most opinionated society in the history of humankind. And we’re under the delusion that our opinions are worth something. But really we’re just taking the Western cultural paradigm to the extreme. Being critical does not make us credible. It makes us obnoxious. Before you write this post off as someone being critical of critics, let me explain where our “culture of suspicion” originated.

Everyone knows about the Enlightenment and the rise of rationalism as the guiding hermeneutic (to use a theological term) for secularism. Descartes introduced a new paradigm for Western society – one where evidence must be presented for a hypothesis to stand. Leibniz and Spinoza followed behind applying Descartes’ ideas to social and political theory. Empiricists like Hume, though disagreeing with the rationalists on many points, carried their negativity to the extreme in areas of anthropology and religion. Now, Cartesian methodology is fine as a foundation for the scientific method but this Enlightenment ”method of suspicion” guides our approach to everything – from politics to religion to media to relationships. After all, where there’s smoke there’s always fire, right?

As Americans, we are constantly steered toward this critical paradigm. I like what social historian Keith Thomas said about it in regards to our understanding of the supernatural: “Most of those millions of persons who would laugh at the idea of magic and miracles would have trouble explaining why.  They are victims of society’s constant pressure towards intellectual conformity” (emphasis mine). And it’s a more widespread epidemic than just the belief in miracles. At the core of this issue is our inability to trust. It’s become a human issue. Cartesian method quickly moved out of the laboratory and now influences dinner table conversations, news and political opinion, and has decimated our ability to treat people with honor and respect. We feel we need “evidence” to trust anyone. And that’s a very sad thing. That approach to life also eradicates faith – the belief in something beyond our explanation or full understanding. Rather than believing the best about another until proven wrong, we chose to expect the worst, while waiting for the slight chance that someone might actually do the right thing. We value the 10% bad and discard the 90% good about each other.

Here’s the funny thing about all of this: people who adopt this critical approach to life assume that they stand on the bedrock of human understanding. Most humanists I know feel this way. And who knows, maybe they have arrived at the pinnacle of intelligence. But really, the Western Enlightenment paradigm is only about three hundred years old. Rationalist thought didn’t fully permeate Western culture until about 250 years ago. And there were hundreds of paradigms that came before us. Presently. most other world cultures see our modernist suspicion as faddish and a sign of immaturity. After all, people saw things differently before the 1700s. And we now have the corner market on comprehension after 250 years? Is it possible we think too much of ourselves?

The Bible says we should believe the best about each other. That’s hard to do as we attempt to control others by labelling and distorting information to confirm our suspicion of others. I believe that’s called making a mountain out of a molehill. That type of criticism is only a reflection of deeper negativity inside the critic. Critics are unhappy people. Chances are good that a critic spends as much time in personal negative self-talk as they do talking about someone else. The truth is: we’re all okay. Not perfect. But most people have good intentions when not backed into a corner. We can choose not to believe that and let the “hermeneutics of suspicion” guide us. But if we do, we’ll be so busy criticizing the mistakes of others that we’ll miss thousands of chances to witness the good intentions of those around us. And that’s something I personally don’t want to miss.

Reconciling Faith and Science: A History Lesson, Part 2

Drawing from the foundations of Enlightenment philosophy and popular forms of Positivism, modern “Naturalism” consists of two underlying precepts: 1) nature is science’s domain and 2) nothing “exists” until it can be be proven by verifiable natural causes and events. And it’s that second part that gets us in trouble.  Naturalism hinges upon the assumption that everything worth proving can only be proven through naturalistic phenomena. Supernaturalism has no value in this worldview. Once again, it’s an “either/or” approach to life where only one explanation is possible. Belief, religion, perspective, and feeling have no place in naturalism, hence all the “prove to me that God exists and I’ll believe” pundits out there. Similarly, many feel that to choose religious meaning makes someone “unscientific” (which is why some reacted strongly to the “humanness” of science posts that start here). Unfortunately, most modern scientific disciplines were drastically affected by post-Enlightenment naturalism at the turn of the twentieth century. For many, evolutionary theory, chemistry, biology, psychology, social sciences, and physics all start with Naturalism.

A dark period in theology followed as theologians and philosophers attempted to remove the “supernatural” elements from the Bible to make it more palatable to the Positivistic age. For example, Thomas Jefferson, believing he was doing Christianity a favor, edited and released a new Bible for the modern thinker. What did Jefferson edit out? All the “supernatural” events in the Gospels. My favorite book title from this period is John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious. Toland’s point was that Christianity was a “reasonable” and rational moral choice when released from the shackles of religious superstition. For you history buffs out there, this all coincided with the rise of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, Moral philsophy, and the rise of the academic freedom movement in higher education.

Though progress seemed to be supporting the advances of science, something in the 1940s changed all of that: World War II. People began to realize that no matter what technological advances were made, they could not free the world from evil. Popular forms of positivism crashed and burned as we entered the Postmodern phase of history. However, “fundamentalists” in the area of science still assert that there is no other option for understanding our world other than Naturalism. The most recent form of Naturalism is particularly nasty and many atheists find themselves in this category. Here are some quotes:

Richard Dawkins (Oxford biologist) (The God Delusion) wrote this: “It may be that humanity will never reach the quietus of complete understanding if we do, I venture the confident prediction that it will be science, not religion, that brings us there.” See, for Dawkins, it’s “either/or.”

Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great) states: “Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation for anything important.” Let me point out that Hitchens, a journalist, is thanking inanimate objects here…

 These guys, though highly trained and quite knowledgeable, suffer from something called “explanatory monism.”  Explanatory monism assumes (believes) that there is only one explanation available for anything. The same “either/or” scenario in Rene Descartes’ view of the world. They choose naturalism and therefore feel they must reject supernaturalism of any sort. So, they overreach for natural explanations to religious issues or merely dismiss religion altogether. What’s so sad about this (other than the fact that their mothers should’ve taught them not to be so intolerant of opinions outside their own) is that this singleness of assumption is not necessary for pure scientific inquiry. Yet, it plagues our view of popular science today…and it’s the sole reason that many people believe that science and faith are incompatible. So, we’re not really talking about faith vs. science, are we? We’re actually talking about the technical discipline of science vs. the philosophical system of “scientific naturalism.” Science vs. Scientism.

Here’s that G.I. Joe quote again: “Emotions are not based in science, and if you can’t quantify or prove something exists…well, in my mind it doesn’t.” Anyone can choose to believe this way…so far as they recognize that it’s truly a belief system crafted from of our Western post-Enlightenment milieu. And those who do will never be able to reconcile faith and science. Scientific naturalism keeps them from doing so.

Reconciling Faith and Science: A History Lesson, Part 1

I went to see G.I. Joe two weeks ago. It was absolutely horrible. But one quote in the movie piqued my interest.  A supposedly really smart and highly educated soldier (played by Sienna Miller) said to another soldier “Emotions are not based in science, and if you can’t quantify or prove something exists…well, in my mind it doesn’t.” That quote is a great example of the popular understanding of why faith and science are incompatible to many people. I started this series of posts talking about the “humanness” of science. For some readers, that may have made you uncomfortable. Science should be as absolute as it was for the soldier in that movie. The reason we have this idea is from the historical event called the Enlightenment, a cultural paradigm called Positivism and their modern love child: something called naturalism.

Listen to a quote from Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. Collins describes the Enlightenment in one paragraph: “…the ‘God is the answer to everything’ perspective…held back our scientific understanding of the physical world in the Dark Ages…But with the Enlightenment, we began to search for a more scientific understanding – physics, chemistry, biology, and so forth. Not that we became atheists, but we gained a deeper understanding about how the universe works.”  Everything is so simple and neat isn’t it?  We’re not talking about a science book – it’s a business/management book for crying out loud!  But it’s not at all. What Collins gives us is actually naturalism’s triumphal take on the Enlightenment. God took a backseat once science explained things. Unfortunately, this ”Cliff’s Notes” view of history is the norm for many folks. So, let me unpack this idea for you so you won’t be enslaved by it.

So, how did the Enlightenment happen? Well, it wasn’t an overnight change like it’s often presented. The Enlightenment spans from the 1600s all the way into the 1800s. It was a slow gradual shift in perspective.  For me, the beginning of Enlightment thought started with Rene Descartes. He was a philosopher in the 1600s who came up with a unique way to view the world. Assimilating the discoveries of the Scientific Revolution (Copernicus, Kepler, etc.), he described a perspective in a way that would permeate science, religion, philosophy and politics to this day. The name is Cartesian Dualism: it’s the belief that the world can be artificially divided into two parts – the natural and those things above nature. The physical and the metaphysical. The term “supernatural” didn’t exist until the Enlightenment. Up until then, spiritual answers were acceptable to explain natural phenomena on earth. But Descartes came from the opposite direction. He said that we must approach everything with the assumption that nothing is proven until empirical evidence makes it so.

What’s funny about all of this is that Descartes, a religious person, was actually attempting to “save” God and religion from the onslaught of criticism that began when scientific discoveries began to “prove” the church wrong. Now, there was certainly nothing wrong with challenging the authority of the church…but people began to doubt the importance of religion, too. So, Descartes was attempting to remove God from the natural realm in hopes that critics would leave religion alone since God’s value was beyond empiricism’s grasp. But what this did on a popular level was create an “either/or” approach to our world. Feeling the unncessary need to prioritize different values, the second generation of Enlightenment thinkers pushed God out of the frame completely choosing to value what could be scientifically tested: the natural world order.

Rather than find solace and meaning in religion, something else took precedence in the 1800s: Positivism. Positivism is just a fancy word for choosing to believe that legitimate forms of knowledge are only gained through sense experience. But during that time, Positivism carried other cultural and intellectual connotations. Intellectuals and the general public fully believed that scientific progress was the key to the future. After all, they saw technological inventions and scientific discoveries left and right that confirmed this idea. God was no longer meeting society’s needs; science was. Progress became marked by a culture’s willingness to throw off the chains of religion (often relegated to ”superstition” by Enlightenment thinkers) and embrace the triumphs of science. Everything is supported by natural laws. If humans can learn those laws and utilize them in the lab and in mathematics, we can make a better world for ourselves.

We’ll pick up our history lesson next post…

Confessions of an Open Theist, Part 3: Science

If you’ve actually read these posts and the comments that followed, you have probably noticed two things: 1) you may be quite tired and 2) we keep bumping into a cosmological “frame” that informs our view of what God can and cannot do based on our modern understanding of how the world works. So, in order to explore this more fully, we have to enter the arena of science. I will tell you up front: science is not my strong suit. I rarely use Boyle’s law in my line of work. But I can shed some light on how the history of science has recently changed the paradigm of the Western world. For open theism, this is a great opportunity. I’ll explain more after a very brief look at the classical scientific worldview.

Early forms of science revolved around the goal of simplicity. If something can be stripped of its complexity and understood at a formulaic level, then it can not only be explained but harnessed for technological advancement. Simplicity was the best way to gain clarity – direct, observable, explainable. Many scientists still fall into this category and are called “reductionists.” After the introduction of Cartesian dualism, science began to look at the relationship between cause and effect as a way to explain life’s occurrences. Yet, many theolgians believed God acted in a similar fashion of simplicity, using those same natural laws to govern our world. So like the natural world around us, if God is the center of all life and his existence adequately explains the “effects” we see around us, his activity in the world can be reduced to a simplified level of cause and effect as well. Reduction to a mechanistic view of God would certainly be ontologically sound if his acts could be measured with “equation- like” simplicity. Classical theology has affirmed this view of the world – God is the cause of all and we see his effects in various natural and supernatural ways. What is the scientific “evidence” God has “acted” in the world? Well, in the causal nexus model, all the events of life reinforce the idea that God is at least the “First Cause” of everything. It’s a self- affirming system that goes something like this: “How do I know God is in control? Because a particular event happened. Why did a particular event (good or bad) occur? Because God is in control.” This circular reasoning  requires the underlying assumption that God determines everything we see. For years, “causality” looked like a slam dunk for explaining our world – for science and for theology.

Then something (or in this case, someone) happened: Max Planck. In the early twentieth century, Planck along with Werner Heisenberg came up with something called “quantum mechanics.” In essence, quantum theory forced the scientific community away from “large” explanations of the world to very small ones. Basically those guys said,  “There’s a whole lot of everything, and it’s all very, very small.” When the scientific world “shrunk,” something else happened, too - our ability to empirically measure the infinitesimal parts of the universe became impossible. And that, my friends, caused the classical understanding of a reliable tight-knit nexus of cause and effect to implode.  With it went our understanding of God acting within a predictable, orderly, and “explainable” world. And that doesn’t even include issues like “chaos theory” and “string theory”  – ideas that put the explanation of the world even further out of reach. Scientists like Larry Laudan, David Bohm, Paul Dirac, Thomas Kuhn, and Michael Polyani are coming out of the woodwork explaining the world in a different way. Things are not so tidy in the universe they say.  It’s complexity is overwhelming and scientists are acknowledging the “tacit dimension” of reality that exists beyond naturalism’s ability to measure. Of course, this would have been a huge problem when everyone thought they had the world figured out. But now, in the beginning stages of science’s exploration of infinitesimal complexity, a little help for the “subjective” side of life is not only acceptable – for many, it’s preferable.

Open theism is the only  theological system that gives significant explanation for this complexity by building it into its understanding of our world.  In fact, open theism thrives on it since it uses that complexity to explain prayer, suffering, the ambiguity in life, and a partially undetermined future. Can classical theological systems adapt (since they were created prior to the 20th century)? Sure. But it would be at the cost of losing some of their foundational philosophical (and, as we can see, scientific) assumptions. Right about now, you may be saying, “From what I can see, things look pretty ordered to me!”  Hold on there, Kemosabe – things only look that way. Here are two examples from John Polkinghorne’s Exploring Reality:

Hyperion, one of the moons of Saturn, explains how  life can look ordered when it’s really not. The small moon tumbles chaotically as it orbits Saturn. Polkinghorne says that based on quantum calculations, Hyperion’schaotic motion should cease roughly after a 37 year period. Yet Physicists already know that will not happen. Another influence on the planet makes its perpetual motions look ordered and wipes out quantum physics normal estimation that Hyperion will resolve its chaotic orbit. The moon is immersed in a low frequency radiation that derives partially from the Sun.  This radiation effectively erases any quantum process from affecting  Hyperion’s motion.  This keeps the moon in its perpetual state of seemingly changeless “order.” We see this and say, “Wow. The ‘causal nexus’ of our universe is maintaining order. Isn’t God great?” But the reality is that despite what our paradigm tells us, Hyperion’s orbit is a lesson in chaos masking itself as order. 

Polkinghorne also gives the example of an experiment using electric light bulbs, which only have two states: on and off. Stringing 10,000 light bulbs together, each bulb is correlated with two others somewhere in the matrix. Most people would expect to see a pattern emerge based on the correlation of the lights. But any pattern of simplicity seems like it would be immediately overcome due to the sheer number of lights involved.  In fact, the different states of illumination in this scenario are roughly 10^3,000 - a ridiculously impossible number to fathom. Yet when the experiment was conducted, all 10,000 light bulbs settled into a pattern of about 100 states of illumination. Once again, an incredibly complex model looks more “ordered” than it actually is. So, in the new era of science (and theology), complexity is the normal state of reality, even in cases where order seems observable to the naked eye.

Open theism at least treats the world as it is: a place of innumerable interactions and influences through which God must navigate to advance his will for humanity. In such a partially undetermined scenario, the sovereignty of God in the openness view is actually greater  than the classical understanding of sovereignty. This is the world in which we live…and in which God, in the midst of that complexity, draws us to himself.

Pentecostalism: A Postmodern Dream

Following up my controversial post the other day: “Are Christians and Occultists the Same?”, I want to write a little about where I think Pentecostalism fits into our present theological scene. That will require some brief background.

We live in a postmodern world. Oversimplified, we live in a time where the structured safety nets that once held our views of philosophy, religion, science, morality, etc. together have mostly evaporated in Western culture. Some blame the cynicism of world wars, some blame the introduction of eastern religions through Lyndon Johnson’s Immigration Act of 1965, some blame loss of collective national identity, while other point to the deconstructionists. I suppose any of those reasons will do. But what interests me as a pastor is where our present spiritual landscape is taking us.

Something pretty interesting happened a while back in Christian culture. Theology began to shift toward a postmodern view as well. On the backs of philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre and theologians like Bernard Ramm, postmodern faith began to take hold. I suppose that found its proper outworking in Frei and Lindbeck’s Postliberalism and its popularized (and shallow) knock-off, the emerging tradition, but describing it to you may be simpler. See, in evangelical circles, Christianity for many years was anchored on “propositions”: particular beliefs that guided the interpretation of scripture and formed the bedrock of the faith. Tried and true, these “fundamentals of the faith” guided evangelical theology for years. But slowly, with the encroachment of postmodern thought, those propositions began to be questioned. What meant one thing to one person may mean something totally different to someone else. So how can anyone really determine the true propositions of religion? This sent conservative Christians sounding the alarm, screaming big words like “antifoundationalism” (huh?) and the like. Postmodern thought had taken the Bible off its foundations plunging Christianity into relativism. Spirituality became a free-market with hundreds of choices – it became popular to be “spiritual but not religious.” In postmodern society, doctrine is not important compared to experience and personal belief.

Though conservative evangelicals have been wringing their hands over this scenario for years, trying to protect the “propositions” that were once so easily believed, I think there’s a better alternative. And one that isn’t mentioned very often. See, the rest of the global world went postmodern a long time ago. Some nations never even went “modern” so they could later become “postmodern.” And whether we believe that experience should be valued over dogma or not, there are some statistics that tell us something really important. There are 500 million Pentecostals worldwide – bigger than all other Protestant groupings combined. Only Catholicism is bigger. The rest of the world (while we chose scientific naturalism) went with experience over doctrine. And though we’ve always considered ourselves ahead of the curve,  we are now ”deconstructing” towards what the rest of the planet already knew: experience is (and always will be) the linchpin of faith. On a global scale, to be Pentecostal is to be Protestant. Experience-oriented Christianity is now the majority tradition. You don’t have to like it…but you better deal with it.

That means no one is really interested in hearing someone explain the case for “reasonable faith” or force a set of beliefs upon them. That approach to Christiantiy is now the minority. But people will happily adopt any set of beliefs if experience accompanies that belief system. Get it? So, for a minister interested in reaching people in this present spiritual climate, spiritual gifts are God’s way of making Christianity relevant from an experiential perspective, which is the majority view. Spiritual experience (through the charismata and other spiritual phenomena) was meant to be the anchor to the Christian faith in our pluralistic society. The last time a religious climate rivaled our present one? In the first century of the church. 

Sound doctrine is nurtured upon the foundation of experience, not the other way around. Now, that idea may anger you. That’s okay. Don’t run away from the idea…investigate it. You may find you end up agreeing with me. If you’re not into the whole “charismatic” thing, talk to someone about it…heck, you can talk to me if you want. God created us to experience our faith. That experience can make us relevant to the very people around us.

Come On, Just How Bad Is Calvinism?, Part 2

So, from my first post, it’s easy to see that Reformed theology doesn’t have everything wrapped up any more than other doctrinal systems. Yet as Chris said in his comment, there seems to be a feeling that Reformists base their conclusions on “scripture alone” and they have more scriptural support than any other group. After all, they are the majority tradition, right?

Could this be because they keep telling you that’s the case? Let’s cover some philosophical and historical ground here…

Actually, Reformed theology leans very heavily on classical (Greek) philosophical foundations that have little to do with the Bible. These philosophical foundations describe the character of God in a particular way. Philosophers and theologians have always struggled to define appropriate attributes for God to possess. Xenophanes despised the Greek gods’ inappropriate behavior and proposed a criterion of “decency”: traits that he believed deity should possess.  God should never behave as human do.

Plato’s version of God is perfect, needing nothing, and is sufficient in every way unto itself.  God maintains his state of perfection by experiencing no “joy or sorrow” – nor does he love since he needs no relationships.  Because of God’s perfection, he “mingles not with man.”  Plato also takes a deterministic slant to the cosmic order stating that all human affairs are predetermined, yet how this happens is a divine mystery (I heard that before).  Even God is subject to fate – “Not even God can fight against necessity.” Aristotle believed there must be an “unmoved mover” who is the first cause of all motion in the universe.  In order to remain unmoved and independent of all forces, God must also remain completely separate from the world. 

Augustine, the father of Latin theology, emphasized Hellenistic traits of God as well.  He maintained the traditional divine attributes the Greek philosophers did: “Whatever is changeable is not the most high God…that is truly real which remains immutable.”  Therefore, neither God’s knowledge nor his will ever changes.  Along with these beliefs, Augustine adopted the concept of foreordination or predestination – humans cannot thwart God’s will for “the will of the omnipotent is always undefeated.”  Scriptures showing God changing his mind were written for “babes” and do not reflect God’s true nature.  Augustine also believed that natural events on earth were designed by God at the beginning of time and hidden within the natural order of life (sound familiar?).  With Augustine’s endorsement of these philosophical attributes, the transcendent, unknowable and inaccessible nature of God became permanently etched into Western theology. 

Now, stick with me here – I’m going somewhere. When the Reformers attempted to develop a new system of theology apart from Catholicism, they merely fell back on the same familiar philosophical assumptions Augustine had found so useful.  This also included philosophical attributes of God like immutability and simplicity.  So, while making slight changes, the Reformers only reinforced the inherited view of God’s unavailability.

Calvin was even more structured in his understanding of God’s nature and interaction with creation.  He also characterizes God as immutable, simple, impassible and self-existent.  Echoing Luther’s view of sovereignty, Calvin stated that God does not will something because it is good; rather, an event in life is good simply because God willed its occurrence.  The mysteries of God’s will should remain a mystery: “Let us then willingly leave to God the knowledge of himself.”

Understandably, Calvin’s opponents had trouble reconciling his belief that “nothing takes place by chance” with the idea of God as a loving father.  But Calvin helps us understand his line of reasoning: the perils and tragedies of life’s existence at that time would have been intolerable if all events in life happened as a result of arbitrary chance.  Submitting to God, the Christian could at least believe that the miseries of life were intended for his own good. So, Calvin’s view of God was a product of his environment, not ours.

Okay, what does all that mean? It means that though Reformed theology is well developed (and that promotes security), it sacrifices the practical elements of God’s goodness. Rather than accepting God because he is good, we are told to accept God’s goodness simply because He wills it. Though Reformists say that they are the majority tradition, historically the majority of people have rejected at least part of their concept of God.

Here are a few quotes from across the spectrum to illustrate. Commoners during the Reformation turned to folk magic to bridge the gap between themselves and a remote view of God. In 1594, Lutheran inspectors in Germany reported that “the use of spells is so widespread among the people here that not a man or woman begins…or refrains from doing anything…without employing some particular blessing, incantation, spell, or other such heathenish means…” They weren’t exactly “leaning on the everlasting arms,” were they? Enlightenment philosophers wholly rejected the same view of God as well. Since God had already distanced himself from humanity, the rationalists merely pushed him further out of the frame into a state of inactivity. They finished the job classical theism had started centuries before. Voltaire questioned the character of a deterministic God and his foreordination of a disastrous earthquake in Lisbon in 1775. The philosophes’ underlying motivation became liberating the Western mindset from what Voltaire called a “religion that believes in a cruel God.”  

In the 1840s, Andrew Jackson Davis, prior to his conversion to Spiritualism, struggled with his Christian upbringing.  A member of the Presbyterian church, he rejected the “God clothed in Calvinist attributes, also in His eternal decrees of election and reprobation and also in many other points of faith ascribing unamiable qualities to the Deity.”  Protestant Liberalism was also a reaction to this view of God. Lyman Abbot, looking back upon his Puritan upbringing, loathed the view of God as a “kind of awful omnipotent police justice” and himself as “a scared culprit who knows he is liable to punishment but does not clearly know why.”  In the twentieth century, Carl Jung, the son of a Reformed pastor, had experienced the demoralizing aspects of Western Christianity.  He wrote, “I am aware of my unconventional way of thinking and understand that it gives the impression that I am not a Christian.  But I regard myself as a Christian…but I am at the same time convinced that…the present situation seems to me to be intolerable; therefore I think that a fundamental further development of Christianity is absolutely necessary.”

Now, we can pretend all these people are stupid and delusional and rebellious…or we can really look at what they are saying. People from Christian, occult, and secular traditions are all hinting at the same thing: the Reformed view of God is unacceptable. Though they disagreed on basically everything else, they certainly agreed on that! Maybe a theological system that implicitly undermines the character of God isn’t the best way to go.

Next, practical implications for everyday Christians.

I Like Atheists

I came across an atheist site the other day and read for a while. Most of what I saw was standard atheist fare. But I perked up when a well-meaning Christian on the site asked the others for proof from the Bible that God wasn’t perfect. The atheists happily obliged with several answers, two of which interested me.

I like atheists. They are usually good people. And many of the questions they pose concerning Christianity are valid. I have had some of the same questions and have aggressively searched for good answers to them. But in the end, religion requires faith. Even if I could “prove” ninety-nine percent of Christianity to a person, they would still have to believe in one percent. That one percent is whopper though – it encompasses things like the existence of God and the problem of evil.

Most atheist writings I’ve seen are deeply concerned with the character of God. What makes God worth following? Good question. I have found that most atheists are not full atheists. Actually, some would like to believe in deity. But most atheists reject a particular view of God. They see him as controlling of all events, yet unwilling to take responsibility when bad things happen or refuse to alleviate human suffering. Any “educational” lesson humans could derive from a God ordained disaster is immediately swallowed up by the horror of death, famine, disease, etc. Is the death of thousands worth any morality lesson? Honestly, I don’t blame them for rejecting that view of God. That’s not what I’ve come to understand about God anyway.

I have chosen to answer two objections of God given in response to the Christian on that site. The first is biblical and the second philosophical. These answers are out there for anyone to read. Unfortunately most atheists are too busy reading very angry books by Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris that reinforce their predetermined assumptions. And we know everything in those books is “spin-free,” right? Christians often do the same, refusing to interact with people who disagree with them and reading only Christian material for the sake of “strengthening their faith.” But our books aren’t spin-free either.

Response #1: God is not good because Jesus cursed the fig tree (Mark 11).

The gospel of Mark doesn’t tell us why Jesus did this. And it does seem kind of mean – what did that fig tree do to him anyway? Mark says that Jesus looked at the tree and only found leaves. What Jesus actually saw is that there were no taqsh on the fig tree. No what? Taqsh - the Palestinian word for little nodules that appear on a fig tree in early Spring, six weeks before the real figs start to grow. When Jesus saw only leaves (no taqsh), he knew the tree would never bear fruit again. It was barren and taking up ground where a perfectly good fig tree might bear fruit to feed the people. So Jesus cursed it, not because he was being rude or showing off to his friends, but because he was being eco-friendly. Jesus, the environmentalist. How about that? The misunderstanding occurs when people don’t look for the context that informs the biblical passage. How many more of those do you think we might have missed?

Response #2: God is not good/violent because Jesus got angry at the merchants in the temple (Matthew 21).

This response philosophically assumes certain things about God, mainly that a God who gets angry can’t be perfect. God must be free of all passion since passion denotes weakness. If you believe that, you’re not worshipping the God of the Bible, you’re more into what the Peripatetics and the Stoics were into. Atheists often assume (because Christians who don’t any different have told them so) that the Judeo-Christian God is calm, serene, and unaffected by the actions of human beings. The big fancy word for this is impassibility. People who believe this way allegorize the passages in the Bible where God gets angry, changes his mind, and expresses distress over the actions of humans. Unfortunately, to do this (and everyone from Tertullian to Luther has) is to cheapen the biblical view of God. Jesus was angry because the merchants were exploiting the worship of the Jews for money – people made in God’s image. That made him very angry and he did something about it. If anything, by acting out of emotional response similar to that recorded in the OT prophets, anger supports the divinity of Jesus, not dismisses it. And that’s the reason God is so great – he cares enough about you to get angry over injustice.

I’m not against atheism in the least. Most of them (not all – those who have made atheism their religion) are open to honest discussion as to why God does the things he does. They’re inquisitive and honest and authentic in their search. Christians should run to dialogue with them. If they ask something you don’t know, please don’t tell them they are going to hell. Go look it up and answer their question! They are on a journey…just like you.

Critical People Are Not Credible People

I am so sick of critics.

Between political opinions and religious self-appointed doctrine police, I’ve heard more negativity in the last few months than I can remember. Though I like WordPress, I can’t get over the amount of negative blogs they feature on their front page – as if denigrating and slandering others is meritorious. Our society has conjoined the concepts of criticism and credibility at the hip. We’re not legitimate until we disagree with a Palin or an Obama or a Bentley or a Boltz. To find nothing wrong with someone or something has become a sign of ignorance or presumption. And because of that, we just may be the most opinionated society in the history of humankind. And we’re under the delusion that our opinions are worth something. But really we’re just taking the Western cultural paradigm to the extreme. Being critical does not make you credible. Before you write this post off as someone being critical of critics, let me explain where our “culture of suspicion” originated…

Everyone knows about the Enlightenment and the rise of rationalism as the guiding hermeneutic (to use a theological term) for secularism. Descartes introduced a new paradigm for Western society – one where evidence must be presented for a hypothesis to stand. Leibniz and Spinoza followed behind applying Descartes’ ideas to social and political theory. Empiricists like Hume, though disagreeing with the rationalists on many points, carried their negativity to the extreme in areas of anthropology and religion. Now, Cartesian methodology is fine as a foundation for the scientific method (though some may feel that’s gone too far as well – go read Appleyard’s Understanding the Present to balance what you find in most conventional histories of science), but this Enlightenment ”method of suspicion” guides our approach to everything from politics to religion to media to relationships. After all, where there’s smoke there’s always fire, right? This Enlightenment based approach has also affected our understanding of scripture, specifically in the area of demythologizing the gospels to make them more “accessible” to the modern mind.

As Americans, we are constantly steered toward this critical paradigm. I like what social historian Keith Thomas said about it in regards to our understanding of the supernatural: “Most of those millions of persons who would laugh at the idea of magic and miracles would have trouble explaining why.  They are victims of society’s constant pressure towards intellectual conformity” (emphasis mine). And it’s a more widespread epidemic than just the belief in miracles. At the core of this issue is our inability to trust. Cartesian method quickly moved out of the laboratory and now influences dinner table conversations, news and political opinion, and has decimated our ability to treat people with honor and respect. We feel we need “evidence” to trust anyone. And that’s a very sad thing. That approach to life also eradicates faith – the belief in something beyond our explanation or full understanding. Rather than believing the best about another until proven wrong, we chose to expect the worst, while waiting for the slight chance that someone might actually do the right thing. We value the 10% bad and discard the 90% good about each other.

Here’s the funny thing about all of this: people who adopt this critical approach to life assume that they stand on the bedrock of human understanding. Most humanists I know feel this way. And who knows, maybe they have arrived at the pinnacle of intelligence. But really, the Western Enlightenment paradigm is only about three hundred years old. Rationalist thought didn’t fully permeate Western thought until about 250 years ago. And there were hundreds of paradigms that came before us. Presently. most other world cultures see our modernist suspicion as faddish and a sign of immaturity. After all, people saw things differently before the 1700s. And we now have the corner market on comprehension after 250 years? Is it possible we think too much of ourselves?

The Bible says we should believe the best about each other. That’s hard to do as we attempt to control others by labelling and distorting information to confirm our suspicion of others. I believe that’s called making a mountain out of a molehill. That type of criticism is only a reflection of deeper negativity inside the critic. Critics are unhappy people. Chances are good that a critic spends as much time in personal negative self-talk as they do talking about someone else. The truth is: we’re all okay. Not perfect. But most people have good intentions when not backed into a corner. We can choose not to believe that and let the “hermeneutics of suspicion” guide us. But if we do, we’ll be so busy criticizing the mistakes of others that we’ll miss thousands of chances to witness the good intentions of those around us. And that’s something I personally don’t want to miss.