Christian Whack'a-Mole in the 21st Century Religious Arcade

My church, the United Methodist Church, but perhaps more generally American Christians, have been playing anxiety whack’a-mole for many decades now. I was out of the country for a couple of decades, but from what I can see the moles that have popped up in our Christian arcade are: LGBTQ inclusion, Biblical Authority, preserving the orthodox faith, adhering to church law, changing worship styles, mega-churches, millennials, the church growth movement, and many others.

These are real issues and challenges. They simply aren’t the real source of our very palpable anxiety. They pop up and dare us to whack them down, but when and if we do that anxiety simply pops up somewhere else. And we haven’t really addressed them either.

Seeing this I see a classic problem describe by family systems analysis: Free floating anxiety that settles out on different people and issues. These then become the third corner of a triangle and excuse those who are anxious about their relationship from addressing the actual cause of anxiety. 

If we look beyond the triangles created with these presenting causes there a real source of anxiety. That source is nicely chronicled (and a chronicle is the way one usually identifies the real source of anxiety) in Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is the anxiety that comes from knowing that we as Christians can choose not to be Christian, that we who believe in a transcendent God can choose not to believe. This choice is ever before us and between us. We can each choose to leave the long standing relationship we have all relied on. 

It isn’t just between us as Christians. It is between us and the society in which we so long had a privileged role. Knowing that our social and cultural home can choose to do without us creates group anxiety in every affected religious group. 

The easiest way to cope with this anxiety is for all those involved to focus on a group, usually that which is most vulnerable, that all can agree is the cause of the anxiety. If any significant number of us agree on that choice of the source of our anxiety we have a classic case of triangulation and a temporary source of unity. We've created a new mole to be whacked. 

Among the current objects for this triangulation are LGBTQ persons. At the last General Conference we managed to all agree that LGBTQ people are somehow the source of our anxiety both within the church and between the church and society. Whether we want what is called full inclusion, or whether we want strict boundaries on behavior we agree that their presence that is making us anxious and that if we can just decide what to do about them, positively or negatively, our anxiety will go away. 

It won’t. And it does put vulnerable people who are just trying to live their lives as good Christians in the terrible position of being held responsible for resolving anxiety they had no part in creating. Triangulation is fundamentally unfair and usually harmful. 

There is a healthy way of dealing with anxiety, and I think we find it in many and maybe even most Christian congregations. True, they have their own internal cases of family system whack’a-moles. This is true of any family. But in my experience those congregations that focus on carrying out their mission are not anxious. Because day by day they are deciding both that they are believers together and that they are an important part of the life of their community. They are directly addressing the underlying cause of Christian anxiety rather than triangulating on someone else or some particular issue. 

Which isn’t easy when the whack’a-moles are continually being pushed up to taunt us on Facebook, and the denominational blogs, and in the news, and sometimes even in meetings and conferences. And they are tempting. Whack’a-mole survives as a long standing arcade game because it is actually entertaining. It excites our minds. It makes us feel active, engaged, and sometimes even successful and accomplished. Boom! Mole whacked. And . . . 

The anxiety returns. As it will until we admit and address it directly through our concrete actions affirming our belief in God and engaging the community of which we are a part with the Gospel. 

And in the meantime? Let’s leave real people, people who can be hurt, out of it; especially LBGTQ persons, but also millennials and any other collection of actual humans that can be hurt by our whack’a-mole mallets whether lingual or legal. 

Fantasy League Ethics: Good versus Evil

By far the least interesting characters in the Star Wars sagas are the emperors. With men totally committed to the possession of power there is no place for character development. You know they will never be good or do good, so the only question is whether they can be tricked and thus defeated. Their capacity for strategic thinking rather than moral reasoning is all that is at stake.

Obi Wan and Yoda aren’t much better. They aren’t perfect, but they seem to be perfectly good, so again the plot for them doesn’t turn on character development but on whether and how they might make a mistake. 

The real characters in these films, and indeed in all films worth watching and stories worth telling, are those who must make real choices about who they are in the midst of a definitive crisis. That is where the real battles are fought: in the complexities of the human person who is neither good nor evil, but is drawn in different directions by the complex variety of competing goods. 

A film that pits pure good against pure evil would be pure boring. It doesn’t matter who wins, because nothing is going to change. 

This is the genius of Rice and Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. They understand that Judas is choosing between competing goods in his final decision about who he will be. And he is haunted by the fact that history won’t understand this and will paint him as evil. Pilate is in the same position, and likewise knows the judgment that awaits him. And Jesus? In the musical he too must make painful choices - although he is distinct precisely in not knowing, never knowing, how he will be understood by his disciples and the crowds who cheered him to Jerusalem and then jeered him to the cross. All three of them, and even Mary Magdalen and Simon Zealot speak to us, draw us into their crisis and decision as one that we ourselves might live through. 

If only the authors of the current UMC drama, or for that matter progressives and evangelicals in American Christianity were so skilled. 

In fact the current dramatics in the American church have become boring. They pitch a fantasy good that doesn’t exist in the real world against an equally fantastic evil. Of course each side disagrees on which fantasy ethics team they represent, which goal of the Manichaean League game they are defending.  But neither expects to change in any significant way no matter what crisis they face. 

Like the Emperor or Obi Wan the only question is which tactics will succeed, not who will be changed in the process. Whether they are for or against LBGTQ marriage and ordination, for or against reproductive rights, for or against Trump they know they are good and the other is evil and therefore all that’s left is to win or lose. And we all know whether this or that incarnation of the dark and light sides of the “force” is finally vanquished it will be back. Like Freddy Kruger, it always is. 

So who cares about Church Division the movie, episode whatever? 

Fewer and fewer people as it happens. That is why American Christianity as a national institution is dying and deserves to die. It can’t write its own story with even the artistry and humanity of a couple of atheist kids from England or a myth obsessed Hollywood director. It can’t understand that a battle between good and evil is a farce, not drama, and what counts are the countless battles as humans in complex situations try to discover who they are amidst competing goods. 

Fortunately that story, that real drama, that real re-enactment of the gospel narrative is happening in Christian congregations on all sides of the ostensible divide between good and evil. And the more intense and real the conflict within and between the individuals of those congregations the more real their witness to the power of Christ. Not because good triumphs over evil, but because real people stand before the pharisees and Herods and Pilates of this world and choose who they will be not knowing what they will become in the greater drama of the world. 

We see as if in a mirror dimly and still we must and do choose. And that is the kind of faith that follows Jesus our pioneer in faith and draws others to his path. That is the good news. That is the kind of story that people don’t just read, they join. 

Science and Theology: Being Human in Light of Transcendence

The unique value of revelation isn’t primarily what it tells us about God. After all, as Paul says and the human study of multiple cultures affirms (Romans 1:20), "For 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.” We can know and speak of God without revelation. Pragmatically this means we Christians don’t have much to offer to the philosophy department when it comes to God. Natural theology or philosophical theology can achieve their goals without us.
 
Nor is revelation primarily about human beings. The human stories in the Bible are wonderful and dramatic, but they are all ultimately variations of human stories found in many cultures and many books. The Bible frequently attains the status of classic human literature, the more so when it isn’t being mined for moral points. But there are other classics and if the humanities are poorer for ignoring the Bible they are by no means bankrupt.
 
Finally we need to consider the common liberal protestant view of revelation: regarding it as an expression of human faith in something or someone unseen except in this particular manifestation.  In this interpretation the Bible is neither about God, nor about humans, but is a record of human faith in God from which we can learn about both because “faith” in the tradition from Schleiermacher onward is an expression of a self-consciousness with the unity of the universe. Faith is a manifestation both of being human and of the primal unity of being human and the universe as a whole. 
 
However, as I mentioned in the previous post, this has been largely rejected in the academy as simply sneaking theology into religious studies via psychology with the false assumption that the imagined object of faith must be real. Besides, a very large number of Christians find this understanding of revelation incoherent with their own and their community’s experience. When they read the Bible they understand themselves to be encountering the Word of God, not just the faith of the apostles as it more fully expresses or elicits their own faith.
 
So what is revelation? And as importantly why should revelation and faith be taken seriously as contributors to the goal of the academy?
 
I want to suggest that where revelation and faith intersect the concerns of academics, whether in the physical sciences, social sciences, or humanities is in its description of what it means to live as a human in light of transcendence. Of course the Bible is much more specific. It deals with living as a human in light of God’s will expressed in a series of distinct covenants and interventions. Yet to initiate a conversation I think we need to start at a broader more conceptual level.

That begins with the assertion that the transcendent isn’t merely a figment of the human imagination, but like other aspects of reality directly impinges upon our perception of the world. In other words revelation really is revelation, not just an account of a human experience within the immanent frame. Revelation is the imposing of transcendence on us in the same way as gravity, or light, or sound, or anything else perceptual. Only this understanding of revelation can rescue it from the accusation of being merely a particular state of mind.
 
The best evidence for revelation in this sense seems to be contemporary cosmological theories. All these theories in one way or another find that to explain the results of both experiment and developing mathematical models the researcher comes up against infinite possibilities. These in turn interrogate the investigator to not merely provide a better model, but to explain the relationship of being human with the very possibility of describing reality. In other words what cosmologists call the “anthropic principle.”

Robert Jastrow pointed this out in an article about the Big Bang. Jastrow, writing in 1978 wrote:

“At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” 

Since the time of Jastrow numerous efforts have been made by cosmologists to get around this impasse; to find a way to describe reality that does not leave a mystery at the beginning of time. Adam Frank gives an excellent summary of those attempts in his book About Time, Cosmology and Culture in the Twilight of the Big Bang. He says: "The Big Bang is all but dead, and we do not yet know what will replace it.”

His concrete proposal for dealing with this is in part:

“Seeing the interdependence of universes and human beings, we should not devalue our position in the cosmos even as we begin to comprehend the awe-inspiring vastness of that cosmos. Rather than make claims of final theories, perhaps we should focus on our ever-continuing dialogue with the universe. It is the dialogue that matters most, not its imagined end. It is the sacred act of inquiry wherein we gently trace the experienced outlines of an ever-greater whole. It is the dialogue that lets the brilliance of the diamond’s infinite facets shine clearly. It is the dialogue that instills within us a power and capacity that is, and always has been, saturated with meaning.”

What is striking here is his recognition that humans are in dialogue with a universe that has an “ever-greater whole,” possessing “infinite facets,” and this is a “sacred act,” “saturated with meaning.” Frank’s whole point is that humans have not been and can never be abstract observers of of an objective reality. It always engages them as humans even as they engage it. We cannot, as disinterested observers, interrogate the natural world demanding answers. It interrogates us demanding that we account for ourselves.
 
Even Carl Sagan, anxious to preserve science from either mysticism or psychological longing (see his Science a Light in a Demon Haunted World)  said, “The sky calls to us, if we do not destroy ourselves, someday we will venture to the stars.” It seems hard even to those most dedicated to objectifying the universe they study to avoid a sense that it is a subject in a dialogue. 
 
This sense that the object of study becomes an interrogating subject is what happened with the politicization of science in the 20th century. Researchers began to realize that they are not disengaged intellects measuring, analyzing, and developing theories. They are at least moral beings with a responsibility for the results of their actions. What is been called the anthropic principle is in some ways a further expansion from this recognition of moral responsibility to the recognition that humans have been drawn into a quest for the meaning of their research because they are confronted with the inexplicable existence of infinite possibilities, with what theologians call transcendence. 

So while Frank is hardly a theist his description of culture in the twilight of the Big Bang certainly sounds theological.

As importantly Frank recognizes this this relationship, this dialogue between the universe and human researchers isn't a merely human intuition or feeling but arises out of the rational process of analyzing the evidence emerging from scientific experiment and theory. The liberal theological distinction between physics and metaphysics, between science and religion breaks down. It turns out that, contra what I was taught 40 years ago in theology school, science and religion have a common question: what does it mean to be human in the cosmos?
 
However, those of us with a commitment to revelation and faith as ways of knowing should not naively believe that the infinities confronted by cosmological theories translate into what theologians call the transcendent. A colleague at SMU (Stephen Sekula in the book Reality in the Shadows) has said  that mathematics is the language of nature. As he and his co-authors mean that term the useful concept of infinity is found entirely in the immanent frame in which scientific reasoning is located. So transcendence isn’t merely a function of the existence of mathematical infinities. Rather, it is the particular way that an infinity of possible cosmos arises from cosmological theory to interrogate the human reasoner. That is the starting point in a discussion of transcendence and revelation.
  
Secondly we must recognize that what Charles Taylor describes as “heroic atheism,” or a refusal to quit searching for the entirely of what is true within the immanent frame, should be respected as a defense of the integrity of human reason. Such a defense is absolutely necessary if theological reasoning is to be preserved from a descent into subservient listening instead of active dialogue. God, as the Bible makes clear, wants to engage us in a wrestling match, not follow blindly those who claim to represent the Divine will. A robust theism depends on atheism, even as it regards atheism as an intellectual manifestation of the demand by transcendence to explain what it means to be human in the cosmos.
 
Of course there is much work to be done if theologians are to engage in meaningful discourse with others in the academy. Yet perhaps since a half-century of scrambling by physicists to get beyond the ledge that Jastrow first identified hasn’t moved cosmology beyond the question posed by the universe in the Big Bang, those on the ledge who have heard the same question might begin talking to one another.