In my last
post I referred to Andrew Bunt in the Think Theology blog (“In Praise of Brainwashing,” Tues., May 19, 2020).
In his post,
Bunt describes “three questions that should be asked of any belief system”:
Is it coherent?
To be worth adopting a belief system needs to be
coherent. The issue here isn’t whether it is true or whether we want it to be
true, but whether it could work if it were true.
Is it good, beautiful, and life-giving?
This question helps us think about whether we want the
belief system to be true. It might be coherent but unattractive and damaging.
We want to be shaped by beliefs that will do us and others good.
Is it true?
This is obviously the most important question. Does
this belief system align with reality? Does it make good sense of what we
already know to be true and of how we experience the world?
Bunt asks
those questions in regard to the belief systems each of us might hold. In keeping with the theme of this blog, I am
going to explore those questions in terms of our inability to hold on to our
very selves. I will attempt to
demonstrate that what we really believe in when we embrace a belief system is
not the system itself; rather what we believe in is our ability to
conceptualize ourselves as participants.
Or to put it
another way: We accord ourselves the ownership
of our souls, even as we give them continually (we think) to God. Of course the situation is logically
untenable; we cannot give away what we never rightfully possessed. All that we—the fitful imaginings of
consciousness that we are—can do is accept the fact that we are riders—slipping,
grasping riders—on our souls, whose fate we share.
As I wrote
previously:
Our souls are thus unyielding because they are our
true selves. If we—as we must—assign
fundamental importance to the status of our souls, then we must reckon that the
status of any surrounding or countervailing reality (no matter how “real” in
some objective sense) is subject to change.
And of
course here is the true challenge. We
are only too willing to give ourselves away to escape the fate of a fallen
world, as long as we can define ourselves and the world that surrounds us. We look at the world from our viewpoints, and
we can even do a more-or-less good job of figuring it out, but we cannot figure
on our peripheral tenancy in our own souls—our peripheral and thus distorted
viewpoints.
In my
previous post I referred to “John the Baptist in Matthew, singling out the
religious parties”:
“O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee
from the wrath to come?” (3:7, KJV) The
Pharisees and Sadducees had tight and well-tested belief systems—so much so,
that John directs his thrust not at the intellectual lives of those divines,
but at the possibility that undiscovered (or perhaps denied) elements of their
souls could be keys to their repentance.
There were
apparently things in this world—or at least in existence—that triggered still other
things within the Pharisees and Sadducees.
Some of those authorities, presumably, came to true repentance—there are
hints enough to that effect across the Gospels.
John’s “Who hath warned you?”
could have been at once accusatory and exploratory. If salvation is as important and fundamental
as it seems, then no precincts of our thoughts or selves should be walled off
from possible discovery. We would ask
ourselves, “What in the world is going on in the world?”, and be thrust by the
same impetus into the question, “What in the world do I think I’m doing,
leaving untouched my perception of this “I” that I think I understand?”
And this is
where—rather unsurprisingly—it starts to get really tricky. The Pharisees and Sadducees had surrounded
themselves with what were—by the prevailing standards of level-headed,
real-world experience—objectively defensible belief systems. A least Jesus left untouched their status as
authorities, and presumably with good reason; if Jesus had undertaken to
dismantle—with explanation—each element of the human race’s mutual interplay of
authority and indoctrination, he would probably still be at it. Given how complex and deep-seated such things
are, we might as well have expected him to stick around and explain each of our
dreams to us.
Somewhat
like the Pharisees and
Sadducees, we all of us have (reasonably) objective perceptions of a
surrounding world and of ourselves as actors in it. What is especially problematic to us is that,
while we can believe we have at times discovered new things about the world (or
about “existence”), we cannot correspondingly discover new things about
ourselves without becoming new selves (or perhaps differently oriented toward
our “selves”) in the process.
I’m sure
there is some school of metaphysics to which I should be referring, but I’m not
very good at such things, and if presented with some threshold of entry into them,
I’m as likely as anything to bounce off it.
And for now merely touching on such things—or bouncing off them—should
serve, since I intend at present to describe my layman’s experience with others
who have claimed religious epiphanies:
Nothing in
my experience is more emblematic of an insubstantial or toxic religious breakthrough
or conversion than statements like “I learned things about myself that I had
not realized,” or “it really turned my life around.” Such things can be good, but the ostensible qualitative
effects of such things are still dependent on the person making the
self-assessment. Assign perceived
direction and value to any experience, and you can proceed to say, “I learned
things about myself that I had not realized,” or “it really turned my life
around.” The listener is then thrust
into a position to reply with anything from “That’s really great,” to “Whoopee
for you”—sad as it is to say, much of religious experience falls onto such a
scale.
Embraced
openly as a concept, religious experience soon becomes explicable only as a realm
of which one says, “I experienced, if only briefly, the realization that I will
never grasp the extent of my soul.” And
as for “it really turned my life around”—do we really want to depart this life
with that on our lips? I’m not sure how
that testimony would play before the Judge.
And so I
would like to take us from John the Baptist, hurling initial judgments, to
Jesus’ depiction in Matthew of the final judgment of the “sheep” and the “goats”. We would all like to have the Son of man say
to us:
Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom
prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was
thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited
me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord,
when saw we thee an hungred . . . ? (25:34-37, KJV)
Most of us are
familiar with the story, and how Jesus reveals that “the least of these my
brethren” are to be understood as the Son of man himself, and treated as
such. Many of us might have also
wondered how the story could come to fruition as written, since Jesus has given
away the ending, and has directed it to be broadcast to the four corners of the
world.
Or is
something else in view here? I would
like to revisit Bunt’s “three questions that should be asked of any belief
system.” First, there is:
Is it coherent?
To be worth adopting a belief system needs to be
coherent. The issue here isn’t whether it is true or whether we want it to be
true, but whether it could work if it were true.
Of course a
belief system is coherent; that’s what belief systems are—insubstantial and
therefore unassailable mortar slathered upon the few things we know about
existence. And the least of concerns is “whether
it could work.” My goodness, we could
espouse a militant Christianity of Bible-believers—a remnant in a cruel and
godless world—foment bellicose nationalism in the name of Christ, precipitate a
nuclear holocaust, and if we were lucky enough to survive in a distant
stronghold—Presto! It worked!—a Bible-believing
remnant in a cruel and godless world.
I know it is
easy to make fun of any belief system, but there is a core to such criticism
that cannot be dispensed with. I wish I
had written down the name of the wit who observed that no one ever invests
themselves in climbing Ararat for evidence of Noah’s ark and doesn’t find it.
On to Bunt’s
second question:
Is it good, beautiful, and life-giving?
This question helps us think about whether we want the
belief system to be true. It might be coherent but unattractive and damaging.
We want to be shaped by beliefs that will do us and others good.
This
question takes us one step closer to the scene in Matthew of the final
judgment. I will credit Bunt with not
wanting to live in a post-apocalyptic bunker while humanity suffers; moreover,
I will credit him with wanting to be down in the perennial trenches, where most
of what is seen does not seem to be good, beautiful, or life-giving.
What I must
also say, while “We want to be shaped by beliefs that will do us and others
good” is a laudable sentiment, it is also one phrasing of a tautology; do we
not also want doing us and others good to shape our beliefs? Have we not in effect already said so?
Unfortunately
Christianity, perhaps uniquely on the earth, has been racked with controversy over
“trusting in works.” What is really
alarming is the fact that admonitions to forsake trust in works are—when viewed
with a certain dispassionate logic—seemingly prudent. Who, after all, are we to presume that we
could ever make ourselves good enough for God?
Unfortunately,
controversies often become characterized by their two most basic iterations,
one against the other. In Christianity
it’s usually “Good people can go to heaven” versus “Jesus saves only those who
trust in him.”
I want to
deal with this matter in the next post, touching on the final judgment and Bunt’s
last question. What will really be
central, however, is the matter of questions like the one above about faith
versus works—or more precisely, how such questions could have third (or fourth
or fifth or sixth) answers.
What I will
offer is the notion that we ought to trust God to decide perfectly what amount
and type of works is enough. But that is
not what, on that question, I want most to describe. I want to describe that notion in terms of
the two-most-basic iterations paradigm I mentioned above. As I would conceive the matter, the third
option—and its proponents—have roles of scurrying stragglers, often exhausted
and confused.
In such a
mode a person is likely to feel disconnected from parts of himself or
herself. I will ask whether we ought not
to prefer such a state to all others.
