Some Thoughts on History

I recently read Grant Wacker's excellent essay "Understanding the Past, Using the Past: Reflections on Two Approaches to History," from the book Religious Advocacy and American History (1997). Wacker makes some excellent points about the nature of history as a discipline and how it relates to religion. It's worth quoting at length:

"All but the most obtuse readers readily see that the discipline's natural tendency is to debunk. Readers quite reasonably begin to worry when they learn that all religious artifacts, including their own, can be substantially if not wholly explained without recourse to God. They desperately want to believe that their most cherished views about life and the after-life were discovered, not invented, and they shudder when historians suggest otherwise. Religious folk recoil when they find out that other men and women have fashioned intellectual and moral universes dramatically different from their own. It is important to note that the problem here is not pluralism per se, but the recognition that other men and women, holding other points of view, came to those positions intelligently and with moral integrity. As far as that goes, religious folk resist being studied at all, or treated as though their beliefs and rituals were a quantifiable part of the natural world. And for many the most upsetting part of all is to learn how shabby their own story - the story of their own tribe, their own sect - really is, for all too often it proves to be a tale of small-minded men and women inflicting large-minded cruelties upon anyone who got in their way.
"So how does an internal approach to the past help believers cope? How does it de-fang the serpent of the historical study of religion, and especially of one's own religion? Not by telling lies, to be sure. Not even by telling little lies of prudent omission. Rather it serves them by letting the dead speak just as they were, eloquent and stammering, mellifluous and gasping. Thoughtful souls, newly burdened with an acute sense of humankind's "terrible predicaments," as Herbert Butterfield put it, may emerge from their encounter with the past feeling "a little sorry for everybody." If the price of such chastening is a sharpened vision of human pretension, the reward may be a heightened sense of divine faithfulness generation after generation. Yet such enrichment becomes an available resource only if believers take the fifth commandment, to honor their fathers and mothers - their forebears - with utter seriousness. And here it is worth remembering that the fifth commandment was the first commandment of the second table of the Law, the table that told folks how to get along with each other after they had taken care of the seemingly more manageable task of getting along with God."

The Church's story is one with many twists and turns, and its certainly not one of unflagging faithfulness. There is a need to face this past with candor, however, as Wacker so eloquently points out. Lies of omission and distortion does no favors for the cause of the Gospel. Neither does dismissing the religious traditions or experiences of others. We have no reason to deny that people of all faiths can and do have encounters with God. They interpret them through the beliefs and framework of their religion, just as I do as a Christian. The difference is that I believe that Jesus Christ provides the fullest expression of God and his relation to humans. Whether this is true is obviously a point of contention, but that does not mean that my religious experience or anyone else's can be dismissed simply for being interpreted differently. A completely secular or agnostic interpretation of what I call the presence of God might simply be that such experiences are entirely generated by our minds, or psychological pressure, or chemical predispositions. The question is then one of the adequacy of the explanation. I won't take the time right now to offer my view on why I feel that I really do experience the Triune God and not just self-generated mental experiences, though suffice to say I do believe that this is the case.

My point is only that taking a dismissive attitude towards the religious traditions and experiences of others is harmful and misguided, because as Wacker notes, these other traditions represent many people with rational and moral integrity. Looking at the past means that we must take our own history seriously, and the history of others. We must let our forebear's speak for themselves; with wisdom, with prejudice, with finitude, with sinfulness, with grace. The past offers hard questions and uncomfortable events, but trying to twist it or downplay its blemishes is not only dishonest, it also shows a lack of faith in the God who has chosen to place treasure in jars of clay. The Church universal, and all its sects and denominations, bear witness to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and its deep and complicated history, skeletons and all, is part of this legacy. This may raise some troubling questions and provoke anguished soul searching, but that is part of the humility that we as Christians ought to embody.

On the Joys of Plural Perspectives

I frequently come across comments/arguments that go something like "every Christian (or insert religion of choice) group interprets the world/Scripture/whathaveyou in different ways. There are huge differences within the same group, so clearly none of this can be true. Afterall, if Christianity were true, then God would have revealed things more clearly so we wouldn't have all of these disagreements." This line of thinking goes a long way to strike at an approach to faith that sees itself as having all of the answers while everyone else in the world wanders blindly.

The problem is that it isn't close to what Jesus taught. It falls into a troublesome view of faith as a matter of propositional knowledge. If that's all that my Christian faith is, then I have a problem on my hands, as has been pointed out in places like this blog, which specifically approaches religion from this propositional standpoint. This kind of perspective, which many Christians share, assumes that the Bible is a great big book of propositional knowledge that contains "answers" to "questions."

To think this way, in my humble opinion, is a huge exercise in missing the point. The kind of knowledge the Bible has to offer is deeply personal, as is evidenced by Jesus Christ's invitation to "follow me". It is the kind of knowledge that comes from following God, not from learning propositions. The Bible is a story (or stories) of interactions between humans and God, and God's interaction in the world. It is full of surprises (after all, Jesus was nothing like the messiah the religious authorities of his day were expecting, and these were the people who had read the scriptures the most of anyone. This should give us pause before making confident pronouncements about what God will do).

Stories and propositions are very different in terms of the kind of questions that can be asked of them. Debating the probability/plausibility of God having done something in the past makes no sense, since we are dealing with something that if genuine is an historical event. There are plenty of improbable events in history. An event being rare or unprecedented or even sui generis does not make it unhistorical simply by virute of its uniqueness and improbability. This just goes to say that if we think of the Bible as telling a story, a story in which we are in the middle and still don't know the end, then we should be open to surprises and turns that we did not see or expect. This also means that any hope for confidence must rely on our confidence in the author of this story, not in our own understanding.

This means that our hope for communion with God and salvation is not based on our own propositional understanding. Encountering the God who is three persons has nothing to do with propositional understanding of the Bible and our attitudes toward it. This doesn't mean that our interpretative frameworks don't heavily influence the ways in which we try to relate to God, but it should give make us realize that our horizon is almost certainly not broad enough. If God is a person, then to know God is to know in a relational sense. This is huge. The difference between a propositional approach to God and a personal one is the difference between a conversation and an autopsy. Too many people (including other Christians) try to perform autopsies instead of engaging in conversations (that's probably a topic for another post).

The consequence of all this is that our confidence must be a confidence in God Himself, and not in how we interpret the Bible. How we interpret is important, but we must recognize that we are in the middle of the story, so any framework we have will be limited by our own human, historical, and cultural finitude. So someone else interprets the Bible differently than me. So what? We're both probably wrong about some of it. Salvation and eternity isn't riding on our propositional understanding of religion. It is about our attitude towards God, an attitude that says "not my will, but yours be done." Because God is calling us to know Him, and not things about Him, then it isn't terribly troubling that Christians disagree with each other. Our different perspectives represent our different histories, contexts, family backgrounds, etc. but none of that prevents us from connecting with the God who transcends all of these things and reaches down to us in our subjective finiteness.

All of these different perspectives shed different light and many offer wonderful insights, but we are not called as Christians to adopt a specific perspective, so we must learn to acknowledge the inadequacy of our own interpretive frameworks. We can learn from each other, especially about the need for humility. It is deeply saddening to see denominations attacking each other, because it reflects this propositionally-oriented view. I'm not saying that beliefs aren't important (I deeply love the Nicene Creed), but they aren't the whole story or even the main point. I just fear that way too many Christians have bought into a view of faith and the Bible that is foreign to what the texts contained within it teach, creating an unintentional straw-man which critics and skeptics are quick (and right) to attack. The problem is, it's a view that doesn't match up with the New Testament I read or the God who it reveals to me. Letting go of a propositional view that has sadly replaced a personal view will go a long way to helping us better understand on our own faith and making sure that we aren't following a caricature.

A Work in Progress

I have no idea if anyone will ever find this blog.
At the moment, I have no intentions of trying to promote it or generate traffic or suck up to other bloggers in hopes of piggybacking off of their success. I just felt the need for an outlet for many of the thoughts that I have been working through.

This is inspired by the often frustrating experience I have had reading blogs about Christianity. I struggle a lot with how I can best articulate my faith. I find myself inhibited with words that have almost been robbed of their power by flippant repetition and trite sloganeering. "Grace," "love," "relationship," "faith," are all used by many of my fellow Christians (often in a well-intentioned way) in a way that trivializes pressing questions, important dilemmas, and painful situations and events. I also read regularly from atheist and former Christian blogs, and I have been struck by the struggle to communicate that many of the Christians who feel the need to comment on these blogs experience. Sometimes these blogs provide caricatures and wildly uncharitable (to say the least) interpretations of the faith I cherish, but many times they also raise important questions that challenge certain views of God, Jesus, the Bible, the Church, etc.

I don't want my faith to be defined by someone else. I also don't want to provide just another voice of argument. This isn't going to be about arguments for the existence of God or why the existence of evil isn't a problem. I am not here to make confident assertions. Faith is hard. I have a lot of questions, and so do many other people. This is my attempt to deal with them. Thinking and reflecting is crucial, and also incredibly rewarding. I cannot express how liberating it is to probe deeply into who God is and find myself freed from misguided assumptions that are often paraded as unshakable truths by some of my fellow believers.
I have been called to work out my salvation in fear and trembling, and that means questioning and being questioned. It means that I need to have humility and a sober appraisal of my own abilities. In the midst of questions, doubt, fear, I have also found joy in Jesus Christ. I simply want to express all of this in whatever way I am able, and hopefully it may resonate with others as well.