The Lost Enlightenment

To the extent that the current leadership of the United Methodist Church was trained in American theological seminaries, then those of us in theological education must admit that we have failed. 

We have failed to train leaders capable of engaging in fruitful dialogue across complex cultural and theological divides. Indeed their skill level appears to be just a little lower than that of our current US president and his North Korean counterpart. 

I expect one reason for this is that while Enlightenment paradigms still dominate our construction of theological knowledge (objective, rational, historically conscious, and divided into theory and practice) we have actually lost touch with the most important shift in human consciousness of the Enlightenment.

That shift was to recognize that knowing, while it may begin with the work of the individual mind, is inevitably social. It is democracy, not science, that is the greatest fruit of the Enlightenment. Indeed the bedrock of science is the demand that it be democratic: that it engage in public observation and public reason for its products to be considered worthy of consideration as shared knowledge of reality. All else is mere esotericism. 

The core of a truly enlightened education isn't universal truths. It is the necessary skills to engage in a universal discourse on the nature of reality. To be enlightened isn't to know the answers, it is knowing how to seek them with others.

One need only read the references and authors of a modern scientific paper to see just how universal that discourse can really be. One recent proof of an important mathematical theorem (Fermat’s Theorum) drew on well over 2 dozen scholarly works by authors ranging from China and Japan across to India, Africa, Europe, the Americas and England. It is quite typical of the genre. No biologist, physicist, mathematician, for chemist would dare be unfamiliar with the work of her peers around the world. 

One only need look at a contemporary American work on theology to see how narrow our world of discourse really is. Even references to Europeans are likely to be few, and typically those published in English. In certain specialities Latin American references might be found. Africans? Almost never. South Asians? Almost never. East Asia? Even fewer. Southeast Asians? Even fewer. Which American scholar has ever learned an Asian language or an African language? Which theology school gives more than a cursory glance (if that) to theological work being done in Kenya, Brazil, Indonesia, Korea, or India? How many graduate schools of theology teach Swahili, Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia, Korean, or Hindi? 

We’re quite at home with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew: happily in engaging in a discourse with the dead (who almost always agree with us.) And our graduate students must learn German or French, usually to access theologians long passed from this world. It is hardly surprising that we have no idea how to talk to those who are living. And that is our graduate schools. Our students in MDiv and DMin programs? Those who we expect to lead the church? 

They will graduate with little or no cross-cultural experience, no contemporary language skills to speak of, and a knowledge of the largest and most populous Christian continents gleaned from a couple of weeks on a mission trip. If that. 

Of course a chosen few, bishops for example, may travel widely. Most will have the cross-cultural knowledge that can be gained by a few days in a conference room of an international hotel chain and an outing for photo ops among the indigenes. They may actually have long conversations with their counterparts, but even these will be distorted by the ubiquity of a Western education among non-Western leaders and vast differences in financial resources.

This must change. First, at the core of theological education we need to have engagement with the voices of theologians, speaking out of the Africa, Latin American, and Asian contexts. And no - Saint Augustine doesn’t count as African. Their works need to be in our libraries and in our syllabi, and their voices need to be heard on our campuses. 

Second our students need to learn cross-cultural skills as fundamental skills in pastoral ministry and congregational and church leadership. 

Third, substantial, intentional, supervised cross-cultural engagement needs to be a required part of theological education. 

And finally our classrooms must be diverse. They must become the laboratory in which students learn to engage with fellow Christians and pastors from other cultures and other theological convictions. They must become the beit midrash where the universal capability of humans to learn from their fellow humans is fostered rather than marginalized. An international student presence isn't an option, it is a necessity if we're going to prepare leaders in ministry.

In our time the church does not need to train men and women toward sectarian purity. That is available as the cultural norm. We need to train leaders with both the confidence that knowledge, not least knowledge of God, will emerge among us if we engage in open dialogue with others.  Faith is a hope in things unseen. 

Inside My House

Inside my house everything looks great today. Everything is in order. 

I have just thrown out all trash, rearranged the furniture and made it all just fine for me. Outside it is cold and wet and unpleasant. And full of such unpleasant people. It is a good day to stay inside.

Of course living indoors all the time one has to make adjustments. Especially if it is a very old house. For example, the floors are not very level. So my furniture is propped up on newspapers or wooden blocks to keep it stable. There are cracks in the ceiling and the walls, so I have to constantly plaster them up or cover them with wall paper. The roof leaks, but this is easily enough cured with a bucket. Or two. 

And why would I want to do anything else? Understanding the cause of these problems would require that I go outside into the rain and the cold. I’d have to go outside to see why the earth is shifting and my foundation is cracking. Did I mention the unpleasant people outside?

Of course, sometimes I am interrupted. My neighbors knock on the door and tell me they can see that shingles are missing from my roof. They can see one corner of the house is sinking. 

This isn’t news I want to hear. I try to explain through the crack in the door how cozy and warm and well put together my house really is. How excellent every part of it is. How tasteful the decorations.

But maybe I shouldn’t tell them so much, because with the door open I feel the chill and the rain. Did I mention how unpleasant they are? 

You see their problem is precisely that they are outside the house. They are out in the wind and the cold and the rain. Instead of looking at my house from outside where they will see all of these unpleasant things, they should see things from my perspective, they should see that all is good.

I could let them in. As long as they behave like the guests they are, and don’t bring their unpleasantness inside. I mean why should they bring all their shivering and dripping with water and talk of shaking ground and shifting foundations. If they come in like that it wouldn’t really be my house would it? It wouldn’t be cosy, safe, and warm. 

You see what I fear: first it will be a few of them, then many, and pretty soon the door will be propped open. Then there will be more and more with them. Then the wind and rain will blow through the open door. Then it wouldn’t be cosy, safe, and warm.

Of course I wish I could help them, I really wish I could help them. So I will help them.

Out. 

They’ll be happier where they are at home; out in the cold and rain. They are used to it. And I’ll be happier where all is cozy, safe and warm.

Then all I need is locks. Locks on the windows and locks on the doors, an attic full of wall paper and paint and a kitchen full of buckets. And every so often to throw out the trash.  

If You Don't Like Change

You’ll like irrelevance even less. 

The greatest challenge humanity will face in the next 50 years is a challenge that Christian theologians have barely begun to consider, and which Christian preaching appears to not address at all. That challenge will be the removal by artificial intelligence of many realms in which humans find unique self-worth. 

The term “artificial intelligence” really says it all in this regard. Up to today Christians have understood that their unique value within the order of creation is precisely intelligence. Traditionally the divine image in us, what sets us apart from the other creatures, is our intelligence. This neatly avoids anthropomorphizing God while setting us apart from the beasts. Indeed, when analytic philosophy is used as a means of apologetics it is through the assertion, simply put, that our minds are uniquely shaped to resonate with the existence of God and even the specifics of the Christian gospel. 

Of course we make room for variations in this characteristic. Not all minds reflect exactly the same characteristics of the divine mind. And we recognize that all humans, regardless of variations in this thing called intelligence, are recipients of God’s love. That could change. Genetic research going on today (SA Feb 2019) will develop therapies to alter structures in the brain as a cure for “diseases” and “abnormalities.” 

But just as increasing understanding and appreciation of animal intelligence is narrowing what humans can uniquely call their own in some realms, so Artificial Intelligence is reducing the realm of observation and analysis where heretofore human intelligence has been unique. We justly celebrate the human “computers” whose skills in the middle of the 20th century ushered in the age of modern science, but realistically the computer on which I type this is carrying out thousands of times more calculations in a second than an army of such “computers" could accomplish in a year. And when it comes to higher level analysis? 

Right now with relatively few inputs (my keystrokes) this laptop computer and the appropriate software can look at everything I’ve written and suggest not mere words, but complete sentences that finish my thoughts. Computer algorithms already create art (musical and visual) in almost any style that is indistinguishable by non-experts, and even experts, from that created by humans. 

But who will write those programs? Who will conceptualize them? Well the writing of many types of computer programs is already in reach of AI. Indeed software engineers depend on these virtual helpers. Conceptualizing what needs to be written is of a higher order, but is still based on analysis that can be accomplished by AI. All that AI lacks is an inner motivation to do anything at all. Once given most tasks, however complex, AI is capable of accomplishing them. And don’t think people aren’t building motivation into AI systems.

At a recent conference on AI we heard that there already exists machine intelligence that will create thousands of possible clothing designs, use virtual focus groups to test their popularity in all dimensions with various demographics, work out the processes necessary to both create the designs and market them, and finally manage the machines that create the garments and those that produce the various forms of advertisements and deploy them in various media. Robots will package them and deliver them to stores. Or when they are available online, deployed from fully automated warehouses, what’s left? Accounting in this realm is a trivial task requiring no humans - mere interactions between computers. 

The only task left for humans is to buy the product.

In short, in the long economic evolution that led from being hunters and gatherers to being producers and consumers of industrial products, to being producers and consumers of services and entertainment is leading us to become only consumers. Machines will be the producers. This is why the coming period is often referred to as the “fourth industrial revolution.” 

Naturally this poses profound economic challenges. If most of us cannot compete with machines in the market for producers how will we have enough money to purchase products to consume? The question won’t be about redistribution of wealth, but about redistribution of dwindling opportunities to produce and how we pay for supposedly "non-productive" human interactions. 

Right now, for example, we depend on volunteers for a lot of important human activities. Little league coaches, scout leaders, Sunday school teachers, community theaters, and so on. What happens when people don’t have the jobs to support leisure time volunteerism? Or must work two or three jobs reduced to minimum wage by competition with machines? The real work in our society may become that to which we currently assign no monetary value. 

And this is where Christian witness needs to rediscover its central purpose: restoring humanity to those from who it has been stolen, taken captive, held for ransom, by Sin. The challenge of the new millennia is to raise us all up as something more than mere producers and consumers. The challenge is to restore us to stewardship even as our technology relieves us of the burden of production. The challenge is to restore us to the vocation of truly being fruitful and multiplying as our technology begins provide us all our needs. 

Genesis 1 and 2 has now so often been misinterpreted by Christians that we can hardly see what is before our eyes. The first humans weren’t called to produceanything. The Garden did that. They were called to be stewards. So what could it mean to “be fruitful and multiply and cover the face of the earth” other than to spread this stewardship over all of creation. The need to produce is a symptom of sin, not the fundamental purpose of humanity. 

Put more strongly, the child feeding her pet rabbits every day, changing their litter, and insuring that they are warm and dry is far closer to the human vocation than her parents out working to make a living. Not that their task isn’t, for the moment, necessary and even virtuous. But it isn’t a necessity that should take precedence over their real human vocation of stewardship; love of creation and one another. 

Unfortunately the church seems to have tacitly accepted that humans are defined by their capacity to produce and consume; by their value in the labor marketplace and as responders to marketing rather than to God’s calling. 

We should beware the siren call to a ministry of production for religious consumers; whether it be of new members, changed lives, worship experiences, or social services. With increasing number of Christians participating in worship through electronic media it is almost trivially easy to replace preachers, worship leaders, musicians, and so on with their virtual counterparts. Computers that already write convincing poetry and song lyrics won’t have any trouble out-preaching the average pastor, and creating an avatar indistinguishable for a real human has already been done. 

And the call to faith? To repent and follow Christ? There will be an AI in the future more effective than Billy Graham and quite possibly based on a careful analysis of his sermon content, vocal stylings, and larger institutional framework. Indeed, in the future people in search of inspiration will be able to list their top five preachers and get a sermon delivered by an artificially created amalgam of all of them, keyed particularly to their challenges, needs, and emotional trigger points. No doubt Google and Facebook are working on the app even now, as hackers insert just a little bit of perversion in the mix.

Contemporary Christianity is already halfway to being just another product on the market for transcendent meaning, and Christians to becoming consumers in that market. Even the Eucharist is now doled out in many churches in machine packed servings of grape drink and “bread.”  It is hard to see why AI’s couldn’t take us the rest of the way toward eliminating any inefficient human touch.  (And, it might be noted, leading meditation classes, conducting Hindu rituals, offering dharma instruction, chanting the sabbath prayers, and leading the Friday call to prayer.) 

Again, the growing consolidation of Christians into larger and larger, and increasingly virtual communities, would seem to make this inevitable. So we should never forget that AI’s are the only real masters of the virtual world. 

Even our social services can easily be managed, and probably more efficiently, by algorithms that measure exact need, design interventions, coordinate community resources, and with the aid of self-driving vehicles and virtual classrooms deliver it all in precisely measured quantities to communities in need. Already we are obsessed with demographics and statistics whose meaning is far better discerned by AI than mere humans. Having displaced real people with statistics why not go the whole way and let them be cared for by algorithms? 

There is another path, but only if the Christian church vigorously offers an alternative vision of humanity to that which sees us as producers and consumers of goods, services, and entertainment. Only a vigorous assertion that the primary, indeed only distinctly human vocation is the love and care of one another and creation will save humanity. Without it we will become mere animals scrabbling for the crumbs that fall off a table set and served by AI’s for tiny fragment of humans who direct their efforts for their own pleasure. 

But this will require a careful reconsideration of the mission of the church. From the beginning until today we have assumed that our social and cultural frameworks would provide the myriad human interactions that give humans immanent purpose. Economic, political, and social interactions would provide the leaven that made for fruitfulness and multiplication. All we Christians needed to provide was the spiritual seasoning, the salt that gives life a little extra flavor.  

Now, as all those immanent human purposes fall into the hands of intelligent machines we must be the first to say that the true purpose of humans is to love. Love is the real leaven that makes human societies and cultures fruitful. So we must be the community in which the sole vocation is cultivation and expression of love. Only this will make us relevant. 

Christians Cannot Know it Alone

In a recent edition of Scientific American, Dec, 2018, there is an article on “how to fix science.” An important component of that article, which follows up on the work of Adam Frank and others, is the idea that knowledge in the broadest sense must be public. Descriptions of reality that are un-communicated and therefore untested by those outside the scientific community can hardly be taken seriously as knowledge. The scientific method, which demands results that can be reproduced by more than one investigator, must be expanded to include communicating to and testing those results with those outside the guild. Scientific American itself is part of this process as its authors seek to explain current scientific knowledge to the general public. 

But it is only part, and that is what the article recognized. The real test of scientific knowledge isn’t that it can be communicated by professionals for comprehension by amateurs. The real test is that it can be communicated to those entirely outside the guild and its methodologies and tested against the human experience of nature unshaped by scientific ways of knowing. Only then is there a pragmatic political result for the good. A scientific claim to know something that cannot be known publicly, however grounded in one’s well tested methodologies, is simply esotericism.

In many fields of knowing this idea that knowledge of reality is public is profoundly unsettling to   communities that have taken for granted a cultural consensus around their core beliefs and practices. In the academic realm whole careers have been dedicated to mastery of a field of study confirmed by the guild of fellow researchers. To have an academic title and position in the modern university is essentially a claim to know things that the public doesn’t know and cannot know without reproducing the skills learned within the guild, whether it be the guild of natural science and its sub disciplines, or the guild of the arts, or humanities, or the social sciences. Or Christian theology.

Christian theologians, like all of those engaged in the academic disciplines, typically pursue knowledge of the Christian faith in a framework dictated by the traditions of their guild for use in a wider Christian community that accepts that framework as both normative and authoritative. And if that is the limit of their knowing then I fear they don't know anything. There has been a breakdown in the process of communicating theological knowledge to the public and then testing it with what the public knows. 

Indeed there is more than a breakdown. In some theological circles there appears a denial that theological knowing need be public knowing at all. In the previous blog I critiqued David Watson's apparent ignoring of natural revelation. Yet he does take up the possibility that God is speaking in a variety of ways, so long as "God's speaking is tested against what God has spoken in the past - and spoken through authoritative interpretation." And where is access to that authority for Watson?  It is only through the Church which "interprets Scripture in dialogue with the church through the ages."

In short for Watson, and for those who self-identify as "orthodox" or "traditionalist" there really isn't any need to know with the public. If it is true "about God, human beings, and the world we live in," then the final authority is the Church's tradition of interpretation of scripture. The problem here is that Watson is essentially telling people what traditional Christianity has always told people: "our special revelation and tradition gives us a better knowledge of who you are than you have yourself or yourselves."

Now this might make sense to people if Christians restrict their pre-emptory knowledge to knowledge of what it means to be human to the human relationship with God. However, traditionalists aren't willing to be so limited. Their presumption extends to knowledge inward to the biological and psychological origins of human sexuality and outward to the nature of the human family. 

The exclusive claim to speak authoritatively about the human person seems to be a view borne out across a much wider range of theologians who clearly communicate only for and within the guild and the larger church. And who teach only to create the next generation of acolytes on their way to guild altars. 

I suspect that this has happened because there has arisen a Christian tradition that entering into the realm of knowing God, humanity, and God’s relationship to the world requires a special, esoteric quality called Christian faith. In short it demands that one know the world as the Christian community knows it before one can know it at all. In this view there simply is no natural revelation worth speaking of. 

It is fairly obvious that in the United States this insistence that Christian faith precedes knowledge of reality has been an evangelistic disaster. Even those raised in Christian communities are falling away, and those attracted to them are often naively attracted by simple human fellowship, or are more dangerously seeking the mindless comfort of a sect or cult. 

Too many pastors, who with the rise of modern seminary education were on the frontlines of engaging in the dialogue between theology and public knowing, are now called by both their congregations and their bishops to be carnival barkers whose livelihood depends on bringing crowds inside a big tent with narrow views. They must grow churches of people obedient (like themselves) to the cult rules, and not to engage in an ongoing dialogue between Christian and public knowing. 

But more importantly the insistence that orthodox Christian faith precedes genuine knowing is potentially a disaster for academic theology itself; and enterprise which too easily becomes the manipulation of relationships between increasingly esoteric symbols drawn from Christian tradition into structures of knowledge impenetrable by all but the experts in the theological guilds. And when this happens the guild no longer produces any knowledge at all, because Christians cannot know it alone. It is ludicrous to claim knowledge of the God of all reality while claiming that the test of true knowledge is the particular preserve of the Christian community in conversation with itself.

This may sound like an invitation to reiterate the failure of the liberal theology that traces its roots to Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion to its Cultured Despisers. But the liberal project didn’t diminish because it sought to make theological knowing a form of public knowing. It has diminished because public knowing has changed. The public no longer knows reality according to Enlightenment principles (and in terms of the broadest public probably never did.) But public knowing (except within diminishing cultural redoubts) isn’t pre-modern either. We cannot go back to the “good old days” when the cultural consensus had already been shaped to, and had shaped, Christian knowing. The contemporary public is diverse and complex and has not as yet been effectively engaged by Christian theology - witness its waining interest in what we Christians have to say. 

I would suggest that the most important task of contemporary Christian theology is, if not to reiterate the liberal project then to reiterate its aim: to know God in public by engaging the God-knowing public in dialogue. And I will go further and assert that doing this is simply taking on the task Christ gave the Church to bear witness to him to the ends of the earth.

The apostles of Christ thought with their audience as they bore witness to him. They didn’t demand Christian faith prior to understanding.  Like Jesus they engaged the faith they found with their witness of what they knew. 

Just as scientists need to engage not merely in the public defense of knowledge, but the public production of knowledge so Christian theologians need to cease making claims and begin learning with those outside the faith but within God’s providential self-disclosing. Only then will theology actually know something about the God who disclosed God’s self in Jesus Christ.