Persian version of Mithra
While
doing my usual message board thing this weekend I notice a lot of
atheists making arguments like God is a big man in the sky, and what
about all those other faiths and so on. I got in a dispute with atheist
about the nature and purpose of religion. There's the old
perennial
divide and conquer strategy that they are so fond of. "What about all
those other religions how do you know yours is right? There's a amalgam
of issues I'm trying to get at here I think the way to do it is this one
central concept. We must look pat the specifics of individual
traditions and look at the abstract nature of what religion is about and
what it's meant to do. This is all coming from my old notes at Perkins
in Dr. McFarland's class on religion in a global perspective.
Before getting into this some might be confused into thinking that I'm not a Christian, or that I
DON"T
believe in the unique role of Jesus in salvation. I am a Christian and I
do believe that Jesus plays a unique role in salvation (ie no other
other name given under heaven by which we can be saved). I'll deal with
how I see the role of Jesus and the atonement in this on Wednesday.
All religions seek to do three things:
a) to identify the human problematic,
b) to identify an ultimate transformative experience (UTE) which resolves the problematic, and
c) to mediate between the two.
But
not all religions are equal. All are relative to the truth but not all
are equal. Some mediate the UTE better than others, or in a more
accessible way than others. Given the foregoing, my criteria are that:
1) a religious tradition reflect a human problematic which is meaningful in terms of the what we find in the world.
2) the UTE be found to really resolve the problematic
3) it mediates the UTE in such a way as to be effective and accessible.
4)
its putative and crucial historical claims be historically probable
given the ontological and epistemological assumptions that are required
within the inner logic of that belief system.
5) it be consistent with itself and with the external world in a way that touches these factors.
These
mean that I am not interested in piddling Biblical contradictions such
as how many women went to the tomb, ect. but in terms of the major
claims of the faith as they touch the human problematic and its
resolution.
How Does the Bible fulfill these criteria?
First, what is the Bible? Is it a rule book? Is it a manual of
discipline? Is it a science textbook? A history book? No it is none of
these. The Bible, the Canon, the NT in particular, is a means of
bestowing Grace. What does that mean? It means first, it is not an
epistemology! It is not a method of knowing how we know, nor is it a
history book. It is a means of coming into contact with the UTE
mentioned above. This means that the primary thing it has to do to
demonstrate its veracity is not be accurate historically, although it
is that in the main; but rather, its task is to connect one to the
depository of truth in the teachings of Jesus such that one is made
open to the ultimate transformative experience. Thus the main thing the
Bible has to do to fulfill these criteria is to communicate this
transformation. This can only be judged phenomenologically. It is not a
matter of proving that the events are true, although there are
ensconces where that becomes important.
Thus the main
problem is not the existence of these piddling so-called contradictions
(and my experience is 90% of them stem from not knowing how to read a
text), but rather the extent to which the world and life stack up to
the picture presented as a fallen world, engaged in the human
problematic and transformed by the light of Christ. Now that means that
the extent to which the problematic is adequately reflected, that
being sin, separation from God, meaninglessness, the wages of sin, the
dregs of life, and so forth, vs. the saving power of God's grace to
transform life and change the direction in which one lives to face God
and to hope and future. This is something that cannot be decided by the
historical aspects or by any objective account. It is merely the
individual's problem to understand and to experience. That is the nature
of what religion does and the extent to which Christianity does it
more accessibly and more efficaciously is the extent to which it should
be seen as valid.
The efficacy is not an objective
issue either, but the fact that only a couple of religions in the world
share the concept of Grace should be a clue. No other religion (save
Pure Land Buddhism) have this notion. For all the others there is a
problem of one's own efforts. The Grace mediates and administrates
through Scriptures is experienced in the life of the believer, and can
be found also in prayer, in the sacraments and so forth.
Where
the historical questions should enter into it are where the mediation
of the UTE hedges upon these historical aspects. Obviously the
existence of Jesus of Nazareth would be one, his death on the cross
another. The Resurrection of course, doctrinally is also crucial, but
since that cannot be established in an empirical sense, seeing as no
historical question can be, we must use historical probability. That is
not blunted by the minor discrepancies in the number of women at the
tomb or who got there first. That sort of thinking is to think in terms
of a video documentary. We expect the NT to have the sort of accuracy
we find in a court room because we are moderns and we watch too much
television. The number of women and when they got to the tomb etc. does
not have a bearing on whether the tomb actually existed, was guarded
and was found empty. Nor does it really change the fact that people
claimed to have seen Jesus after his death alive and well and ascending
into heaven. We can view the different strands of NT witness as
separate sources, since they were not written as one book, but by
different authors at different times and brought together later.
The
historicity of the NT is a logical assumption given the nature of the
works. We can expect that the Gospels will be polemical. We do not need
to assume, however, that they will be fabricated from whole cloth.
They are the product of the communities that redacted them. That is
viewed as a fatal weakness in fundamentalist circles, tantamount to
saying that they are lies. But that is silly. In reality there is no
particular reason why the community cannot be a witness. The differences
in the accounts are produced by either the ordering of periscopes to
underscore various theological points or the use of witnesses who fanned
out through the various communities and whose individual view points
make up the variety of the text. This is not to be confused with
contradiction simply because it reflects differences in individual's
view points and distracts us from the more important points of
agreement; the tomb was empty, the Lord was seen risen, there were
people who put there hands in his nail prints, etc.
The
overall question about Biblical contradiction goes back to the basic
nature of the text. What sort of text is it? Is it a Sunday school
book? A science text book? A history book? And how does inspiration
work? The question about the nature of inspiration is the most crucial.
This is because the basic notion of the fundamentalists is that of
verbal plenary inspiration. If we assume that this is the only sort of
inspiration than we have a problem. One mistake and verbal plenary
inspiration is out the window. The assumption that every verse is
inspired and every word is true comes not from the Church fathers or
from the Christian tradition. It actually starts with Humanists in the
Renaissance and finds its final development in the 19th century with
people like J. N. Drably and Warfield. (see,
Avery Dulles Models of Revelation).
One
of my major reasons for rejecting this model of revelation is because
it is not true to the nature of transformation. Verbal plenary
inspiration assumes that God uses authors like we use pencils or like
businessmen use secretaries, to take dictation (that is). But why should
we assume that this is the only form of inspiration? Only because we
have been conditioned by American Christianity to assume that this must
be the case. This comes from the Reformation's tendency to see the
Bible as epistemology rather than as a means of bestowing grace (see
William Abraham, Canon and Criterion). Why should be approach the text
with this kind of baggage? We should approach it, not assuming that
Moses
et al. were fundamentalist preachers, but that they
experienced God in their lives through the transformative power of the
Spirit and that their writings and redactions are a reflection of this
experience. That is more in keeping with the nature of religion as we
find it around the world. That being the case, we should have no
problem with finding that mythology of Babylonian and Suzerain cultures
are used in Genesis, with the view toward standing them on their
heads, or that some passages are idealized history that reflect a
nationalistic agenda. But the experiences of God come through in the
text in spite of these problems because the text itself, when viewed in
dialectical relation between reader and text (Barth/Dulles) does
bestow grace and does enable transformation.
After all
the Biblical texts were not written as "The Bible" but were complied
from a huge voluminous body of works which were accepted as scripture
or as "holy books" for quite some time before they were collected and
put in a single list and even longer before they were printed as one
book: the Bible. Therefore, that this book may contradict itself on
some points is of no consequence. Rather than reflecting dictation, or
literal writing as though the author was merely a pencil in the hands
of God, what they really reflect is the record of people's experiences
of God in their lives and the way in which those experiences suggested
their choice of material/redaction. In short, inspiration of scripture
is a product of the transformation afore mentioned. It is the
verbalization of inner-experience which mediates grace, and in turn it
mediates grace itself.
The Bible is not the Perfect
Revelation of God to humanity. Jesus is that perfect revelation. The
Gospels are merely the record of Jesus' teachings, deposited with the
communities and encoded for safe keeping in the list chosen through
Apostolic backing to assure Christian identity. For that matter the
Bible as a whole is a reflection of the experience of transformation
and as such, since it was the product of human agents we can expect it
to have human flaws. The extent to which those flaws are negligible can
be judge the ability of that deposit of truth to adequately promote
transformation. Christ authorizes the Apostles, the Apostles authorize
the community, the community authorizes the tradition, and the
tradition authorizes the canon.
The A priori
God
is not given directly in sense data, God transcends the threshold of
human understanding, and thus is not given amenable to empirical proof.
As I have commented in previous essays (bloodspots) religion is not a
scientific question. There are other methodologies that must be used to
understand religion, since the topic is essentially inter-subjective
(and science thrives upon objective data). We can study religious
behavior through empirical means and we can compare all sorts of
statistical realizations through comparisons of differing religious
experiences, behaviors, and options. But we cannot produce a trace of
God in the universe through "objective" scientific means. Here I use the
term "trace" in the Derision sense, the "track," "footprint" the thing
to follow to put us on the scent. As I have stated in previous essays,
what we must do is find the "co-detemrinate," the thing that is left
by God like footprints in the snow. The trace of God can be found in
God's affects upon the human heart, and that shows up objectively, or
inter-subjectvely in changed behavior, changed attitudes, life
transformations. This is the basis of the mystical argument that I use,
and in a sense it also have a bearing upon my religious instruct
argument. But here I wish to present anther view of the trace of God.
This could be seen as a co-detmiernate perhaps, more importantly, it
frees religion from the structures of having to measure up to a
scientific standard of proof: the religious a prori.
Definition of the a priori.
"This
notion [Religious a priori] is used by philosophers of religion to
express the view that the sense of the Divine is due to a special form
of awareness which exists along side the cognitive, moral, and
aesthetic forms of awareness and is not explicable by reference to
them. The concept of religion as concerned with the awareness of and
response to the divine is accordingly a simple notion which cannot be
defined by reference other than itself." --David Pailin "Religious a
pariori" Westminster Dictionary of Chrisian Theology (498)
The
religious a priroi deals with the speicial nature of religion as
non-derivative of any other discipline, and especially it's speicial
reiigious faculty of understanding which transcends ordinary means of
understanding. Since the enlightenment atheist have sought to explain
away religion by placing it in relative and discardable terms. The major
tactic for accomplishing this strategy was use of the sociological
theory of structural functionalism. By this assumption religion was
chalked up to some relative and passing social function, such as
promoting loyalty to the tribe, or teaching morality for the sake of
social cohesion. This way religion was explained naturalistically and it
was also set in relative terms because these functions in society,
while still viable (since religion is still around) could always pass
away. But this viewpoint assumes that religion is derivative of some
other discipline; it's primitive failed science, concocted to explain
what thunder is for example. Religion is an emotional solace to get
people through hard times and make sense of death and destruction (it's a
ll sin, fallen world et). But the a priori does away with all that.
The a priori says religion is its own thing, it is not failed primitive
sincere, nor is it merely a crutch for surviving or making sense of
the world (although it can be that) it is also its own discipline; the
major impetus for religion is the sense of the numinous, not the need
for explanations of the natural world. Anthropologists are coming more
and more to discord that nineteenth century approach anyway.
Thomas A Indianopolus
prof of Religion at of Miami U. of Ohio
Cross currents
"It
is the experience of the transcendent, including the human response to
that experience, that creates faith, or more precisely the life of
faith. [Huston] Smith seems to regard human beings as having a
propensity for faith, so that one speaks of their faith as "innate." In
his analysis, faith and transcendence are more accurate descriptions
of the lives of religious human beings than conventional uses of the
word, religion. The reason for this has to do with the distinction
between participant and observer. This is a fundamental distinction for
Smith, separating religious people (the participants) from the
detached, so-called objective students of religious people (the
observers). Smith's argument is that religious persons do not
ordinarily have "a religion." The word, religion, comes into usage not
as the participant's word but as the observer's word, one that focuses
on observable doctrines, institutions, ceremonies, and other practices.
By contrast, faith is about the nonobservable, life-shaping vision of
transcendence held by a participant..."
The
Skeptic might argue "if religion as this unique form of consciousness
that sets it apart form other forms of understanding, why does it have
to be taught?" Obviously religious belief is taught through culture,
and there is a good reason for that, because religion is a cultural
construct. But that does not diminish the reality of God. Culture
teaches religion but God is known to people in the heart. This comes
through a variety of ways; through direct experience, through
miraculous signs, through intuitive sense, or through a sense of the
numinous. The Westminster's Dictionary of Christian Theology ..defines
Numinous as "the sense of awe in attracting and repelling people to the
Holy." Of course the background assumption I make is, as I have said
many times, that God is apprehended by us mystically--beyond word,
thought, or image--we must encode that understanding by filtering it
through our cultural constrcts, which creates religious differences, and
religious problems.
The Culturally constructed nature
of religion does not negate the a priori. "Even though the forms by
Which religion is expressed are culturally conditioned, religion itself
is sui generis .. essentially irreducible to and undeceivable from the
non-religious." (Paladin). Nor can the a priori be reduced to some
other form of endeavor. It cannot be summed up by the use of ethics or
any other field, it cannot be reduced to explanation of the world or to
other fields, or physiological counter causality. To propose such
scientific analysis, except in terms of measuring or documenting
effects upon behavior, would yield fruitless results. Such results
might be taken as proof of no validity, but this would be a mistake. No
scientific control can ever be established, because any study would
only be studying the culturally constructed bits (by definition since
language and social sciences are cultural constructs as well) so all
the social sciences will wind up doing is merely reifying the phenomena
and reducing the experience. In other words, This idea can never be
studied in a social sciences sense, all that the social sciences can do
is redefine the phenomena until they are no longer discussing the
actual experiences of the religious believer, but merely the ideology
of the social scientist (see my essay on Thomas S. Kuhn.
The
attempt of skeptics to apply counter causality, that is, to show that
the a priori phenomena is the result of naturalistic forces and not
miraculous or divine, not only misses the boat in its assumptions about
the nature of the argument, but it also loses the phenomena by
reduction to some other phenomena. It misses the boat because it assumes
that the reason for the phenomena is the claim of miraculous origin,
“I feel the presence of God because God is miraculously giving me this
sense of his presence.” While some may say that, it need not be the
believers argument. The real argument is simply that the co-determinates
are signs of the trace of God in the universe, not because we cant
understand them being produced naturalistically, but because they evoke
the sense of numinous and draw us to God. The numinous implies
something beyond the natural, but it need not be “a miracle.” The sense
of the numinous is actually a natural thing, it is part of our
apprehension of the world, but it points to the sublime, which in turn
points to transcendence. In other words, the attribution of counter
causality does not, in and of itself, destroy the argument, while it is
the life transformation through the experience that is truly the
argument, not the phenomena itself. Its the affects upon the believer
of the sense of Gods presence and not the sense of Gods presence that
truly indicates the trance of God.
Moreover, the
attempts to reduce the causality to something less than the miraculous
also lose the phenomena in reification.William James, The Verieties of
Religious Experience (The Gilford Lectures):
"Medical
materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded
system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism
finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a
discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It
snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an
hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his
age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a
disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a
gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are,
when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis
(auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of
various glands which physiology will yet discover. And medical
materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such
personages is successfully undermined."
This does not
mean that the mere claim of religious experience of God consciousness
is proof in and of itself, but it means that it must be taken on its
own terms. It clearly answers the question about why God doesn't reveal
himself to everyone; He has, or rather, He has made it clear to
everyone that he exists, and He has provided everyone with a means of
knowing Him. He doesn't get any more explicit because faith is a major
requirement for belief. Faith is not an arbitrary requirement, but the
rational and logical result of a world made up of moral choices. God
reveals himself, but on his own terms. We must seek God on those terms,
in the human heart and the basic sense of the numinous and in the
nature of religious encounter. There are many aspects and versions of
this sense, it is not standardized and can be describes in many ways:
Forms of the A priori.
Schleiermacher's "Feeling of Utter Dependence.
Frederick Schleiermacher, (1768-1834)
in On Religion: Speeches to it's Cultured Disposers, and The Christian
Faith, sets forth the view that religion is not reducible to knowledge
or ethical systems. It is primarily a phenomenological apprehension of
God consciousness through means of religious affections. Affections is
a term not used much anymore, and it is easily confused with mere
emotion. Sometimes Schleiermacher is understood as saying that "I
become emotional when I pay and thus there must be an object of my
emotional feelings." Though he does vintner close to this position in
one form of the argument, this is not exactly what he's saying.
Schleiermacher
is saying that there is a special intuitive sense that everyone can
grasp of this whole, this unity, being bound up with a higher reality,
being dependent upon a higher unity. In other words, the "feeling" can
be understood as an intuitive sense of "radical contingency" (int he
sense of the above ontological arugments).He goes on to say that the
feeling is based upon the ontological principle as its theoretical
background, but doesn't' depend on the argument because it proceeds the
argument as the pre-given pre-theorectical pre-cognative realization
of what Anslem sat down and thought about and turned into a rational
argument: why has the fools said in his heart 'there is no God?' Why a
fool? Because in the heart we know God. To deny this is to deny the
most basic realization about reality.
Rudolph Otto's Sense of the Holy (1868-1937)
The
sense of power in the numinous which people find when confronted by
the sacred. The special sense of presence or of Holiness which is
intuitive and observed in all religious experience around the world.
Paul Tillich's Object of Ultimate Concern.
We
are going to die. We cannot avoid this. This is our ultimate concern
and sooner or latter we have to confront it. When we do we realize a
sense of transformation that gives us a special realization
existentially that life is more than material.
see also My article on Toilet's notion of God as the Ground of Being.
Tillich's concept made into God argument.
As
Robert R. Williams puts it:
There is a "co-determinate to the Feeling of Utter dependence.
"It
is the original pre-theoretical consciousness...Schleiermacher
believes that theoretical cognition is founded upon pre-theoretical
intersubjective cognition and its life world. The latter cannot be
dismissed as non-cognative for if the life world praxis is non-cognative
and invalid so is theoretical cognition..S...contends that belief in
God is pre-theoretical, it is not the result of proofs and
demonstration, but is conditioned soley by the modification of feeling
of utter dependence. Belief in God is not acquired through intellectual
acts of which the traditional proofs are examples, but rather from the
thing itself, the object of religious experience..If as S...says God is
given to feeling in an original way this means that the feeling of
utter dependence is in some sense an apparition of divine being and
reality. This is not meant as an appeal to revelation but rather as a
naturalistic eidetic"] or a priori. The feeling of utter dependence is
structured by a corrolation with its whence." , Schleiermacher the Theologian, p 4.
The believer is justified in assuming that his/her experinces are experiences of a reality, that is to say, that God is real.
Observatoins
there
are certain things I wan to point out here and I want to know if you
agree, or disagree, undersatnd or find it interesting.
(1)
The major thing it's saying is that religious belief is based upon
knowing truth through a phenomenological encounter with truth and not
upon reification (meaning, scientific reductionism).
(2) Doing this is a matter of consciousness.
(3)
If raising consciousness boardens one's understanding of the world and
has the desirable effect one expects to get out of a religious belief
system (ie for the Buddhist enlightenment) then why is not not a warrant
for belief?
(4) if one understands the nature of
religious belief to be the point of religious engagement with a
tradition then is being result oriented not the proper mythodology for
discussing validation of a religious tradition?
(5) If
in some sense hard data is sought, and hard data is obtained in
relation to the outcome or the 'payoff' in terms of a transformation
that resolves the problematic then why is that not satisfactory for
one's demand for empirical data?
(6) empirical data
proving that one had transformation effects. if that's the point of
region why would that not be the proper sort of empirical data to watch
for?
Freedom from the Need to prove.
Schleiermacher
came up with his notion of the feeling when wrestling with Kantian
Dualism. Kant had said that the world is divided into two aspects of
reality the numinous and the phenomenal. The numinous is not
experienced through sense data, and sense God is not experienced
through sense data, God belongs only to the numinous. The problem is
that this robbs us of an object of theological discourse. We can't talk
about God because we can't experience God in sense data.
Schleiermacher found a way to run an 'end round' and get around the
sense data. Experience of God is given directly in the "feeling" apart
form sense data.
This frees us form the need to
prove the existence of God to others, because we know that God exists
in a deep way that cannot be entreated by mere cultural constructs or
reductionist data or deified phenomena. This restores the object of
theological discourse. Once having regained its object, theological
discourse can proceed to make the logical deduction that there must be
a CO-determinate to the feeling, and that CO-determinate is God. In
that sense Schleiermacher is saying "if I have affections about God
must exist as an object of my affections"--not merely because anything
there must be an object of all affections, but because of the logic
of the co-determinate--there is a sense of radical contingency, there
must be an object upon which we are radically contingent.
