Intellectual Adoration

7 03 2012

Victorian Britain—especially from 1859-1901—it is often described in terms of a “crisis of doubt.” Today we assume that this crisis in Christian thinking developed because of Darwin but, as Owen Chadwick argues in his very long and frequently cited history of the Victorian church, Darwin and the natural sciences had little to do with this Victorian intellectual crisis. Although geological discoveries early in the nineteenth century challenged a literal reading of the creation account in Genesis, this was long before Darwin and evolution came on the scene. And while Darwin’s 1859 publication of The Origins of the Species caused a stir, many British theologians were already convinced that science and theology were really involved in two different projects and, consequently, worked out something like theistic evolution. Thus, Chadwick argues that, by 1885, science as such was not what continued to shake Victorian theology.

No, the Victorian crisis of doubt that ultimately changed the theological landscape was caused by the discoveries in antiquarian fields that revealed that the biblical text was not, perhaps, exactly what the church had traditionally thought. Not only was the bible clearly not a science book but it became apparent that even discrete books within the bible were crafted over a period of time by multiple authors. More disturbingly, what had traditionally been understood as historical books like Jonah started to be understood in terms of different genres like parables…and if Jonah’s whale wasn’t a literal miracle, well then what basis was there for accepting other miracles like God becoming a human being in the person of Jesus or believing that this same Jesus was resurrected bodily from the dead on Easter Sunday?

During this crisis of doubt worship in the English church reached previously unseen heights of splendor. The Gothic revival in architecture and art spurred the production of ornate stained glass, glorious organ music and richly embroidered vestments that—when combined with the rich, poetic language of the Authorized version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer—produced an unsurpassed aesthetic experience of worship. The problem was, as superb as the Victorian Anglican church service could be, many educated Victorians had problems attending these services because of the creeds: those ancient affirmations of faith in things like the Incarnation and bodily resurrection.

Some eminent Victorians like Mrs. Humphry Ward and Henry Sidgwick called for the abandonment of the creeds so that worshipers could benefit from the beauty of the service and moral instruction the church offered without having to worry about difficult or questionable doctrines. During this great debate over the place and use of creeds in Anglican worship, the journalist Richard Holt Hutton wrote that reciting the creeds was “an act of intellectual adoration, in a day when the intellect is the source of some of our deeper troubles.”

While few people today are concerned with whether or not creeds are recited in a church service, the problem represented by the creeds remains very much alive: how can intelligent, well-read, critical thinkers believe in some of the key doctrines of the Christian faith? Isn’t it better to focus on Jesus as a great moral teacher, and example, and an inspiration than to demand individuals ascent to notions they do not think probable or submit to doctrines that they consider impossible?

While freedom of thought and conscience are essential to human dignity, there is a difference between seeking understanding within the context of faith and allowing the intellect to tyrannize over the individual, establishing each individual mind as the ultimate judge of all truth, alone weighing the nature and meaning of cosmic reality.

To recite the creeds—in nineteenth century Britain or today—is not to blindly agree, to stop asking questions or to cease from questioning and exploring. Rather, to submit to the doctrines of Christian faith is to say that I am not the sole adjudicator of all truth. It is an act of humility, a recognition of one’s limited understanding and an affirmation of the collective reasoning of the larger community of faith to which one belongs. And, as an act of humility, it is an act of adoration. It is an act of worship.

Jessica Hughes


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Categories : On Anything and Everything

The Grand, Multi-Color Story

30 01 2012

“Why is mythology everywhere the same?”  This may sound like a simplistic judgment – there are so many myths across history, from the Hindu Vedas to the Nordic tales and the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic. But the person who raises the question is Joseph Campbell, a Columbia University expert in comparative mythology and, according to Campbell, no matter which folk traditions are surveyed, from the peoples of Congo to the legends of the Eskimos, “it will always be the one, shape-shifting yet marvellously constant story that we find…” [1]

Campbell’s major book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, plots these common themes in the universal figure of the hero, whose adventures follows similar steps even in the most varied cultural settings: he receives a call to adventure, and after initial reluctance, he crosses the threshold to his journey. Here he faces numerous trials and meets forms of gods or goddesses, who mentor him and help he understand his mission, until he returns to reality with a message to proclaim or a mission to fulfill, and saves the community from its perils. (When George Lucas crafted the story for Star Wars and its hero Luke Skywalker, he leaned heavily on Campbell’s reconstructed hero’s journey).

So why is mythology everywhere the same? To explain our common stories, Campbell uses the theories of psychoanalysis, especially the views of Carl Jung, to explain the common source of our kaleidoscopic but similar myths and stories. Myths are reflections of our social mind, of archetypal urges deep beneath our psyches. In Campbell’s words, “They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.”[2]

Ok, these stories originate in our minds… but the question still begs itself: why? Why does the human mind keep producing these stories? Why are myths everywhere, and why are they so similar? What do these archetypes point to?

I believe a person’s journey will illuminate us here. C. S. Lewis was another expert in comparative mythology, and as he started to read the New Testament as an atheist, he was at once startled at how different and yet how similar the Gospels were to ancient myths. At first he was struck by how unlike they were to the metaphysical and fantastic shapes of myths: they smelled like real events, taking place in a specific place and a specific time, not like the pre-time, allegorical epochs of myths. “I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that none of them is like this [the New Testament record].”[3]

Yet even as Lewis noted that the Gospels smelled like real history, he could not miss the common themes it shared with the great myths. Especially, he could not miss the central plot of “the Dying and Reviving God” common to so many folk traditions. Lewis’ initial reaction was dismiss the story of Jesus as another myth, but as the historicity of the Gospels bogged him, he was further disturbed by a comment he once heard. “The real clue had been put in my hand by that hard-boiled Atheist when he said, ‘Rum thing, all that about the Dying God. Seems to have really happened once’.”[4]

I agree. That hard-boiled atheist is just right. How else would you explain variations of same stories cropping up again and again everywhere? They must be reflections, fragments of the Great Story the human psyche captures and different peoples emphasize differently. They are echoes, daydreams that emerge in fantastic forms from the unconscious, but which articulate the central themes of the human drama – our ideals, perils and longings for our Savior –, packaged with the infinite creativity of the human genius and its multiform cultural riches.

For an expert in mythology like Lewis, the multitude of human myths were not contradictions, but preparations for the true story. They were early echoes of God’s thunderous arrival on the planet in the person of Jesus Christ. “In my mind,” wrote Lewis, “the perplexing multiplicity of ‘religions’ began to sort itself out… The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simply false. It was rather, ‘Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?’” And as Lewis surveyed the ages, and found a historical event that culminated all the best of human aspirations and longings, his conclusion could not have been different. “If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this… Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man.” [5]

So why are myths so similar? Because they resemble the history of the universe, the drama of our creation, fall, and God coming to rescue us. They sprout little curious buds, small insinuations in delicate poetry, that came to full bloom when eternity entered time, when God became man, and the grandiosity of the myths met the ordinariness of history, and the Dying and Reviving God really did die on a cross in a Friday afternoon in Jerusalem in the first century, and revived on the early hours of the following Sunday. The grand plot of myth took place in history, and our stories cannot help but echo the universe’s defining moment.

René Breuel

[1] Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2008), 1-2.

[2] Ibid., 330, 2.

[3]  C. S. Lewis, “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism”, in Christian Reflections (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1967), 155.

[4]  C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life (New York: Hancourt, 1955), 235.

[5]  Ibid.


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Categories : The Heart of Faith, Tough Questions

On Testimony and History

28 10 2011

In an earlier post I suggested that, when comparing different religions with Christianity, one must take seriously the centrality of the person of Jesus. That means, rather than starting with ethics or metaphysics, comparisons of Christianity should start with Christ. (Admittedly, this is not an original idea.) What this means in practice, however, is that one has to begin with history. Whatever else we may conclude about Jesus, he was also a first century Jewish man living and working in Palestine (the Roman provinces of Galilee and Judaea).

But what can we really know about Jesus? The New Testament contains four different Gospels (referred to as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John after their traditional authors), which are accounts of the life and work of Jesus, with particular interest in his ministry, and death in the early 30′s CE. (Jesus’ death is particularly important for these authors because according to them [and the earlier writer Paul as well] death was not the end for Jesus – he rose and now reigns as lord over all.)  All four are different, with different points of view on various events and controversies, though three of them are closely related and share a number of sources (though the precise connection has been debated since antiquity and doesn’t look like it’s letting up any time soon). They (or parts of them) were probably written sometime from ten years after Jesus’ death to the end of the first century or perhaps beginning of the second century CE. These facts have led some to ask, “Can we really trust these accounts of Jesus?”

I would like to suggest that we can and that the case of the gospels is not really different in principle from any other historical text. Historical events and persons are not subject to proof, i.e. they are not verifiable, in the same way that contemporary events are and certainly not in the same way that one proves a mathematical or scientific hypothesis. But even contemporary events are difficult to understand. If three people witness the same event, say, a convenience store robbery, it is unlikely that their descriptions will be the same. Each has their own point of view, and it is further affected by their relationship to, in our example, the robber: the store owner’s account would likely be very different from the account of the doting mother who happened to be there. In reconstructing the event, the police rely on human testimony (even alongside such fancy technology as a security camera) to understand what happened.

Working with events and persons in history is even more complicated than that, but the crux remains the same: do you trust the one giving the testimony? If not, then it is unlikely that even a very plausible event would be accepted. If so, then even some difficulties in the testimony might be allowed within the limits of that trust. But all history, and indeed most knowledge about anything, is based on one sort of testimony or another. The historian’s job is to weigh the various accounts of an event and decide what is coherent and what does not fit.[1] The Gospels (along with the whole New Testament) testify that Jesus was more than he seemed. He was the Messiah of the Jews, who was also the very presence of God among his people. This Jesus, as Paul testifies with the Gospels, “died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.”[2]

This is what they testify. The question is, do you trust them?

Ben Edsall
______________________
[1] Of course, we bring our own presuppositions to the table too, but that is a matter for a different post.
[2] 1 Corinthians 15:3-4


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Categories : Tough Questions

“Are You Religious?”

6 07 2011

I get asked this treacherous question a lot, and I know I’m not the only one.  The question, in its variant forms, is not only asked to those who teach, write, or talk about religion professionally. Obviously these folks are subject to scrutiny simply by virtue of their trade. But others too have faced this excruciating question at some point. Once the most anticipated meet-and-greet questions have been asked—questions like “What do you do?” and “Where do you live?”— there are only so many other ways to keep the conversation flowing. Eventually, mundane conversations give way to discussions about the sacred, and people want to know what others believe about religion.

The reason why the religious question is so difficult is because very few responses turn out well.  If you answer in the affirmative (e.g. “Why, yes, I certainly am a very religious and devout person”) then immediately you are seen as smug and self-righteous. On the other hand, if you say, “No I’m not very religious…” then you get may get characterized as a crass materialist. The optional added phrase “… but I’m spiritual,” could simply lead to the perception that you are a spineless agnostic or hokey New Ager. All of these characterizations are unfair, especially for the thoughtful and intelligent readers of Wondering Fair.

So how does anyone, religious or not, answer this question? First, it is important to ask Mr. or Ms. Socrates to clarify what they mean. Is a “religious” person one
 who goes to a house of worship on a regular basis? Someone who prays before meals? Or tries to convert others to what they believe? Or has weird beliefs about creation and the dinosaurs? Whatever the assumption, it’s critical to have this issue addressed preliminarily because “being religious” means different things to different people, and no one wants give an answer only to have it immediately misconstrued.

Second, and more importantly, the question “Are you religious?” mistakenly assumes that some people are religious while others are not. Granted, not everyone participates in organized religion, but all people are functionally religious about something. Everyone who walks the planet organizes their life around a set of ideas about the world, what is of utmost value, and how we should live. Regardless of how well people articulate these ideas, the particular way of life that emerges from this set of beliefs, if you think about it, is in essence a religion.

Recently, the people most fervently discussing the idea that we are innately religious creatures are not theologians and rabbis, but rather a group of anthropologists and archaeologists. In June, National Geographic Magazine did a cover article on what is now believed to be one of the world’s first religious temples ever built. Located in Southern Turkey, the site archaeologists have uncovered called Göbekli Tepe is not only fascinating because it predates Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid at Giza by thousands of years, it is also striking because it has forced anthropologists to reconsider a long-standing belief that religion came into existence after the rise of agriculture. This theory held that religion was born out of a need for social cooperation and the establishment of shared beliefs and values. In other words, first there were humans, then came agriculture, and then later on came religion. Now, however, in the words of Charles Mann, “What [Göbekli Tepe] suggests, at least to the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself.”[1]

To me, all this sounds similar to the Apostle Paul’s words in Romans: “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.”[2] If Paul and the archaeologists at Göbekli Tepe are right, then the best question is not, “Are you religious?” Instead, since it seems we are all religious about something, the real question is, what will that something be?

Paul McClure

[1] Mann, Charles. “The Birth of Religion.” National Geographic Magazine. June 2011. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/06/gobekli-tepe/mann-text

[2] Romans 1:20


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Remembering beyond Memory

4 07 2011

In his memoir Dreams from my Father, Barack Obama unveils something of the complex development of his identity. Written before his political career started, in his early 30s, Obama narrates how he came to grips with both sides of his white and black family of origin, his journey through prejudices, complex relationships, and influences, and his early quest for the father figure. Obama’s father left the family when he was 2-year-old, and he recalls the anecdotes he heard from his mother and grandparents about his father – his booming voice, self-assured manner, brilliant intellect – and his early effort as a boy to patch these stories into a coherent whole, to understand who his father was, and, as a consequence, who he was.

A scintillating glimpse of that mental journey occurs when Obama compares his personal background, explained by his mother with a family picture album, with a children’s book he had in his room, about the origins of the world. The family album would explain to him “a tale that placed me in the center of a vast and orderly universe,” a tale about his father’s journey from Kenya to Hawaii, about how his father and mother met and fell in love, about how his father would leave to study at Harvard and then to serve his home Africa. Similarly, Obama recalls that “the path of my father’s life occupied the same terrain as a book my mother once bought for me, a book called Origins, a collection of creation tales from around the world, stories of Genesis and the tree where man was born, Prometheus and the gift of fire, the tortoise of Hindu legend that floated in space, supporting the weight of the world on its back.” [1]

Obama’s parallel between his family history and the history of the universe struck me because of this. For him – and for all of us, even if we grew with both parents – early history is a matter of revelation. It goes beyond our memory, and we need outside sources like our parents to tell us about our birth and what led to it. So is also the history of the world: humanity’s collective memory recalls up to a certain point, when we found ourselves already breathing in this wondrous world. But to know what took place before our memory – what led to our collective birth and the formation of the universe – we can only be a matter of outside information.

The big question, then, is what source to trust. “What supported the tortoise? Why did an omnipotent God let a snake cause such grief? Why didn’t my father return?,” started to ask Obama some years later. Obama could do some investigation to refine his mother’s picture of his father, and we can of course investigate nature for traces of our origins, but even then family trees and scientific evidence can tell us only a limited number of things. We know, for example, that the universe came to be around 13.7 billion years ago, and most scientists believe that a big explosion called the Big Bang started it. But what caused the Big Bang? How could insurmountable mass and mind-boggling complexity come out of nothing? Our memory doesn’t reach so far back, and our current investigation can only answer some of our long-asked questions.

So what source should we trust? Who witnessed our creation and can explain it to us credibly? As Obama’s children’s book hinted, this is a religious question. It can only be narrated by someone who was before we were, some form of intelligent life that predates humanity. The origin of the universe and our origin and identity as humans can only narrated by a divine source, if there is one. It has to be outside revelation.

The next burning question – so what source to trust, among so many – can only be addressed in another post. But one thing we cannot set aside today or any other day: the quest for our origin and identity. We may want to leave this unsettling question aside, but if we want to grasp our essential identity, and therefore our competency and potential, as individuals and as humans, we have to come to grips with our origin. I imagine Obama’s journey would be very different had he settled for an unexamined life, for instance. Our sense of purpose, and meaning, and identity, and vocation, and beauty, and sacredness, depends on our grasp of how we came to be. We have to reach beyond memory, wrestle with hard questions about ourselves and the world, and find the credible voice that allows us to understand our potential and live empowered by the image of our Father.

René Breuel

[1]    Barack Obama, Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 10.


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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

On the Meaning of Freedom?

27 10 2010

Much gets said these days about liberty and freedom across the political spectrum. At the heart of talk about “inalienable rights” is usually the notion of freedom, and in the contemporary context, we find political systems often construed as protectors of personal rights. Yet when the foundation for the notion of justice and right is personal liberty, or “freedom,” problems arise.

Let me give an example. Freedoms can often be pitted against one another: the exercise of one person’s right to free speech can enable the defamation of another person, impinging upon their right to maintain an accurate depiction of their character and reputation. Similarly, my right to affordable food can impinge upon the right of another person to just working conditions in a distant land. Amidst these sorts of troubles, it remains unpopular to suggest that religious faith might offer some sort of a solution, and while this sentiment is deeply rooted in Western history, it is not necessarily productive.

With the rise of Protestantism, the medieval notion of authority came under threat. Long-held convictions regarding the subject of moral authority were questioned, leaving people wondering whether they owed allegiance to the pope, the prince, or neither. After over a century of bloody wars and conflict across Europe over the subject of religion, a treaty was struck and Christian doctrine was sidelined as a unifying factor for the political identities of the emerging European states, at the Peace of Westphalia. Leaders concluded that it would be best to sideline religion for the sake of social stability. Following a few generations after this legacy, the philosopher Immanuel Kant developed a new way of moral thinking that could respect the need for social order but leave faith conviction on the sidelines. The system he imagined has become one of the more enduring philosophical legacies for the succeeding centuries!

Fast-forward to the present day, and it has become clear that, though Kant offered a new sort of “objectivity,” there were losses as well. In order to grant coherence to the concept of duty in this newly secular modern world, objectivity became the new focal point of moral deliberation. And this objectivity comes at a cost, as Plato suggests: “If we are to have clear knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body” (Phaedo). Old theological notions such as justice, were replaced with new secular ones like ”fairness” and “equality.” But this brave new world can be bleak at times, as the secular vision for the good life, which was to be achieved through science and engineering, has been frustrated in a wide variety of circumstances, including new wars, Nazi projects in human engineering, and fascist experiments in social engineering. To be fair, this new Scientific society has also brought us refrigeration and disposable toilet cleaners, but one is often left wondering… where is the idea of the “good life”?

In Kant’s vision, created particularities had to be left on the sidelines along with the creator. In privileging our rational faculties for the sake of objectively discerning our duties, Kant also left behind the role of our emotional lives and the unique contours and needs of the social life of neighbourhoods. 

I would argue much is to be gained with a re-affirmation that at the true center of freedom lies the notion that we are created, contingent creatures. In the wake of the creeping failure of the modern orientations for the moral life – progress, science, engineering – in some cases people have finally given up on orienting our societies to any sort of purpose at all. And, without an orientation, we are prone to wander. As Augustine observed in another age of violent conflict, “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you [God]” (inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te). I think it is no accident that Augustine puts this in the plural as well. Not only are our personal lives prone to disorientation when we have nothing by which to order them, so too is our common life prone to wander restlessly searching for an orientation which can guide our life together.

Jeremy Kidwell


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