Science and Religion in the 21st Century

When considering the relationship between science and religion we must recognize that the fundamental question is not about the existence of God. It is the question of how we know anything at all about reality.

From the beginning of the Enlightenment until the present day we have been trying to distinguish between what constitutes physics and what constitutes metaphysics and which is credible or whether both are credible. For much of the 19^thand early 20^th centuries it seemed that physics, or science more generally, was gradually excluding metaphysics and thus religion as a serious approach to knowing reality. 

There was, however, a shift in the middle of the last century when it became clear that the universe we know of had begun with a “Big Bang.” At that time the astronomer Robert Jastrow famously said

“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 that time 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.”

The basis for Jastrow’s mid-century comment has been deeply problematized by advances in both astronomical observation and theories seeking to unify relativity theory and quantum theory. Yet these theories also appear to be both mutually exclusive and currently untestable. So while the phrase, “we do not yet know what will replace it” can be read as a confidence that we will someday know, it may also be read as leaving room for religion as a way of knowing. 

What has changed between the time of Jastrow and Frank is the rise of a vigorous scientism. Jastrow and other scientists who believed that a contemporary cosmology allowed for metaphysics are dismissed with the argument that only the scientific method provides a legitimate way of knowing reality. Only science is sufficiently rigorous in providing coherent testable models to be taken seriously as a way of knowing what is real. One of my colleagues at SMU says: “mathematics is the language of nature.“ It is only a short step further to equate nature with reality and say that what cannot be described mathematically can’t be taken seriously to be real. 

Scientism doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but it does claim to possess the only legitimate means of finding those answers. And this includes questions of ethics and meaning traditionally reserved for religion and philosophy. The popular works of Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, Laurence Krauss and others are contemporary examples of this scientism. 

From this perspective the mere fact that we don’t know what will replace the Big Bang, or even that some contemporary theories are not yet fully coherent and cannot be tested doesn’t justify turning to metaphysics. As Steve Weinstein suggested in his book Dreams of a Final Theory, and Carl Sagan echoed in his Science a Light in a Demon Haunted World, science doesn’t need to provide answers now or even the promise of an answer in the near future. Its pursuit lifts human life from the realm of farce to that of tragedy. Put another way, science gives life authentic meaning precisely in its rejection of all other consolations. This is what the sociologist and philosopher Charles Taylor calls heroic atheism in his book A Secular Age.

As there have been developments in science so there have also been developments in religion. One, which I’ll mention and dismiss, is the idea that mathematical tools can be used to prove God’s existence. Robert Spitzers work, New Proofs for the Existence of God, offers an example in its first part. But since he is a philosopher presenting what he regards as a scientific argument I see this as an internal scientific debate unrelated to religion. 

Another I’ll note and dismiss is what is called the “God of the gaps” approach, allowing religion to speak where science is silent. Apart from the critique from scientism itself, this approach is inherently unstable since it allows an ever expanding science to define its boundaries. 

A more serious religious approach, which really rises with Romanticism, is an aesthetic argument for religion as a way of knowing. As Ralph Hodgson wrote, 

Reason has moons, but moons not hers, 

Lie mirror'd on the sea, 

Confounding her astronomers, 

But O! delighting me. 

Romanticism as a movement sees art in all forms not merely as a way of presenting reality, or even the genius of the artist, but as a kind of revelation through which Reality discloses itself. Knowing is not merely formulating models of experimentally verifiable facts obtained objectively. It is a subjective experience of engaging reality as it speaks the language of aesthetic experience.

This kind of aesthetic reasoning typically makes more modest claims than scientism. It acknowledges that nature speaks the language of mathematics, but it also listens for other languages that are spoken through nature.

But my focus in this talk will be neither on scientism nor aesthetics, but on places where there may be a convergence of interests between scientists and theologians with regard to understanding reality as a whole.

I should note that there is an observable defensiveness on all sides here. The pride of place once held by philosophers, theologians, and artists has been displaced by science ever since the 19th century. One only needs look at funding patterns in the academy, business, and government to observe this. 

At the same time scientists are fully aware that they and their work is seriously under attack by resurgent anti-intellectualism led by people who self-identify as religious and artistic. 

What I hope to do this evening is avoid that defensiveness. I will survey briefly the perspectives relating religion to science that have arisen in the last 60 or 70 years and the questions they raise. And finally suggest some avenues through which science and religion may be able to seek a common language of discourse.

To get at the science side of things I’ll mention a book co-written by a physicist and colleague who has been working on the Higgs boson. The title is Reality in the Shadows: or What the Heck is the Higgs? Because it is a collection of independent essays written by three authors it is frankly difficult to read. So I read the book a second time and constructed a spreadsheet to trace the major lines of scientific development and identify their interrelationships. This allowed me to highlight themes that often got buried in the details. 

The categories of scientific inquiry that emerged were: 1. Observation and experiment, 2. The development of new tools for observing nature, and thus new experiments. 3. Discoveries emerging from deploying these new tools, discoveries that gave new information about nature. 4. The evolution of mathematics, both applied and pure, that give scientists the language through which to articulate their theories about the inter-relationships of the emerging information about nature, 5. And finally the theories themselves, each replacing the last to account for new information arising from ever more precise experiments, and each demanding more complex mathematical tools.

Of the many stories that emerge as people and groups absorb and integrate these different lines of inquiry, one is central to the last 70 years: the gradual shift in emphasis from experiment driving the need for new theories, and new theories driving the search for mathematical tools, to mathematical models becoming theories that are then in search of validation through experiment.

Or as Steven Weinberg noted in his book Dreams of a Final Theory, physicists have almost become neo-Platonists, believing the abstract mathematical forms to be more real than nature as experienced through experiment. This is not so far from theology, a critique made by scientists themselves of some popular but unverifiable theories involving multi-verses and undetectable dimensions. 

This internal critique not withstanding, the reach of complex mathematical models and the related theories seeking to achieve a unification of relativity and quantum theory may offer insight into an intersection between scientific and religious discourse. For these scientists are concerned with grasping reality as a whole. They are concerned with a “final theory” that unifies large and small scale descriptions of the universe. They seek something more than a collection of useful descriptions of reality. They have a concern for what Stephen Hawking called in his Brief History of Time (no doubt metaphorically) “the Mind of God.” 

Turning to religious ways of knowing reality it seems to me that there are three broad approaches to justifying religion as a way of knowing reality that might be of interest.

These seek to demonstrate how an a priori assumption of the existence of a transcendent God is a rational, coherent, assumption similar to the a priori assumption of cosmologists that nature as a whole can be described within a single theoretical framework. 

I’m thinking of several recent popular books in particular. Richard Beck’s The Authenticity of Faith, Alvin Planting’s Knowledge and Christian Belief, and Joseph Hinman’s Traces of God, as well as Andrew Newberg’s How Enlightenment Changes Your Brian. These books argue from different perspectives that human experience, properly and systematically measured and interpreted, strongly indicates that the a priori assumption of the existence of a transcendent God is not only coherent, but offers a credible addition to a scientific description of reality toward the goal of descriing Reality as a whole.   

Obviously I can’t review all of these books this evening, but I think they can be characterized. 

Beck, Hinman, and Newberg use psychological, sociological, and neurological approaches to analyze mystical experience. In them we see a revival of the work of William James, Rudolf von Otto, and Marcus Eliade. While Beck and Hinman focus on common observation of religious phenomena, Andrew Newberg argues that measurements of brain activity using a variety of brain imaging techniques show that religious practitioners of meditation have a physically unaccounted for change in the structure of their brains. What all these approaches assert is that through the working of the human mind, both individually and socially, Reality is speaking through nature a language that is more religious and theological than mathematical. 

Plantinga’s approach is more properly philosophical. He argues that religious belief in general, and Christian belief specifically, is warranted by a careful examination of the way in which the human mind is constructed and articulates its inner working through language. His arguments are rigorous and complex, and it is problematic to represent them in a few sentences.

But it seems to me that he is arguing that just as the human mind coheres with the natural world that it knows and explores, so it also coheres with a transcendent God in such a way as to suggest that this God exists and has particular attributes. In other words, if the human mind is capable of grasping the language of nature in mathematics in such a way as to give confidence that what it grasps is real, so its capacity to grasp the language of theology should give confidence that the object of theology, God, is equally real. 

It should be noted that these approaches to demonstrating the credibility of belief in God do not claim to constitute a proof of God’s existence. They are content to assert religious speech about God is warranted on terms similar to those that warrant mathematics as the language with which to explore the unity of natural law.

In closing I’d like to suggest that we can see some constructive possibilities for a dialogue between religion and science. 

One of these stems from the relationship between revelation and transcendence. Such a discussion would focus on two things that are part of both scientific and religious discourse: 1. the beckoning call of the unknowable to be sought out and known, and 2. the idea of an epiphany in which the unknowable makes itself known without any traceable process of human reasoning. Like religious people, scientists find themselves caught up in experiences described with words like “wonder” and “inspiration.” 

A second possibility for mutual discussion stems from a common concern with epistemology, knowing how what we know is true. As I’ve suggested above, Plantinga and others such as my colleague Billy Abraham are engaged in the kind of formal exploration of the warrant for believing that abstract representations of Reality comprehensible to the human mind that should be of equal concern to scientists who are presently must wrestle with whether complex mathematical models can be taken as actually representing reality to us. 

And a third possibility, not unrelated to the other two, stems from a common concern with the relationship between human faith and human meaning. In my own discussions with science minded atheists this appears to be the most contentious point of debate, because typically atheists of a scientism bent argue that “faith” as commonly understood plays no role in their understanding of human meaning. Scientists are, they would say concerned only with that which can be observed and placed in bounded mathematical frameworks. 

To which I must answer that such a claim is in itself based on faith, not accumulated evidence in a comprehensive framework. 

As Kurt Godel showed, the one statement any formal system cannot make is that the system itself is complete. Such an understanding of completeness must come from outside the system. So whether we believe in God or deny the existence of anything transcendent at all, we cannot stand outside the framework of explanation we have adopted and declare that it is complete. Thus at least to the extent that we are seeking a Grand Unified Theory of reality, whether expressed in religious or mathematical language, we are living by faith.

And this, it seems to me, is closely related to whether the pursuits to which we give our lives are meaningful. The scientists I know aren’t excited about the reiteration of known truths. It is precisely the unknown that animates their efforts and makes them seem worthwhile. The same is, or should be true of those in pursuit of religious knowledge. Just as a pursuit of reality that doesn't elicit wonder is unworthy of science, so a God who is fully known through doctrinal systems has become unworthy or worship.

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. 

Yes, Academics are Biased

The last post outlined one major reason that academics are biased - they remain true to the methods necessary to attain the goal of understanding reality. But that is only part of the story.

Another part, and a source of considerable misunderstanding even in academia, is that in the 20th century both the emerging social sciences and the established physical sciences became politicized. This doesn’t mean that they became partisan. Rather scientists recognized that maintaining a stance of neutral objectivity toward the subject of their research and its effects was fundamentally immoral. 

Bear in mind that the vast advances in chemistry and physics of the late nineteenth and early 20th century were almost immediately weaponized in two world wars. No scientist could escape the moral dilemmas posed by having their work used for the  destruction of human life on hitherto unimaginable scales - even if the ultimate goal was victory over tyranny or the defense of other human lives. 

Similarly social scientists gradually realized that their engagement with human subjects carried with it moral demands. Nor morally decent person can use human lives, individually or in groups, simply to write another research paper or get an advanced degree. And this is particularly true if one is observing humans and human groups suffering as a result of the prevailing political, economic, and social forces. 

And the same was true of the humanities. After all, the study of philosophy, history, law,  and literature began for the purpose of training leaders in society. They always had an intrinsically moral purpose, and teachers in the humanities could not ignore that moral purpose in their research and writing.

But note again that the politicization, the moral engagement with society found in the liberal arts university, was not based on partisanship but rather on commitment to moral purposes. The key value being perpetuated was the well-being of humans and humanity, not a particular political agenda.

One would imagine that exactly this human-centric morality would resonate with the commitments of religious people. And it did with many. However at least three forces mitigated against any easy alliance within the university. The first I mentioned the previous post: the accelerating exclusion of revelation and faith from the mainstream of academic life as across the disciplines as scholars sought to preserve the integrity of the scientific and critical method against attack. While there were religious scholars seeking to engage their colleagues around questions of epistemology without recourse to fundamentalism, in the post-WWII American context fundamentalism was the ascendent religious voice. 

As a result of systematic exclusion of their perspectives from academic life religious people felt, with some justification, that the particular way of knowing represented by revelation received and interpreted through faith was being expelled from academic life. Departments of religious studies are perhaps the best example. From the 1920’s onward scholars studying religion diligently sought to remove anything resembling “theology” or actual references to God from their field. And across the university it became doctrine then dogma that naturalism rather than supernaturalism, the study of the immanent rather than the study of the transcendent was the only legitimate framework for authentic scholarship.

It is anecdotal, but worth noting, that when I went to the University of Texas this major tier one university did not have and never had a department of religious studies. Religion was completely absent the curriculum unless it snuck in through philosophy, anthropology, or social sciences.  

The second force separating those with religious commitments from academic life arose from the necessary combination of moral commitment and a naturalistic framework for understanding reality. Quite naturally scientists concerned with moral questions would ground their reflections in a familiar naturalistic framework. They would look within humanity itself rather than in humanity’s relationship with God for a basis for morality. As a result, as much as religious people might agree on specific moral issues, they might well disagree on the basis by which decisions concerning morality were made. 

I want to stress that a morality based in immanence doesn’t of necessity oppose morality based in revelation and faith. On any moral issue from saving endangered species to abortion to LGBTQ rights immanence based morality can move in multiple directions depending on how the “good” for humans and humankind is understood. Religious and non-religious scholars may ultimately agree on many moral issues. 

The problem is that naturalism excludes and even denies moral reasoning based on revelation. It is hard for people to reason together about moral issues, and academic life is all about reasoning together, when they have no shared basis for advancing and critiquing arguments. 

The third force mitigating against inclusion of religious ways of knowing is the focus on value added in academic research and dialogue. The sciences and humanities could readily show progress in the 20th century across a range of positive human goods. They were advancing knowledge of the world and humanity and in many cases making human life longer, more fruitful, and happier. 

On other hand religious scholars do not seem to have articulated any distinctive contribution to academic discussions from their knowledge of revelation and faith. Indeed they have largely been on the defensive, protecting the credibility of their own discourse whether it is through analytical philosophy, the fulsome embrace of critical methods in the study of scripture, or the wholehearted application of the social sciences to understanding religious life and communities. 

After all, one substantial branch of Christian theology, evangelicalism or Neo-orthodoxy aggressively asserts that Christian theology has nothing new to say at a basic level about either God or humanity. If you haven't learned anything knew in your own field of study what do you have to offer that's new for other fields of study?

And even liberal or progressive theology would be hard pressed to articulate just what new revelations about God or humanity have emerged in a 20th century busy with new theologizing. Process theology? The Schleiermacher lineage? Not even the majority of Christians are particularly excited by these advances. They certainly haven't take philosophy and religious studies departments by storm. 

Given these three forces, systematic exclusion, lack of a common basis for discussions of morality, and an inability to show value added as understood in academic circles it isn’t surprising that revelation and faith as ways of knowing find themselves in a tenuous place in the academy. So there is some justification among religious people for feeling that their particular contribution to human knowledge, their particular way of perceiving reality through revelation and faith has been excluded from academic life. 

But again the problem isn’t bias in the negative sense. It is rather focus on achieving results through a set of proven methods.

Those of us who believe that attending to revelation and faith might in fact be enlightening need to recognize this, and realize that our obligation to the university is to show a view of reality through the lens of faith may well illuminate that which an excessive focus on immanence obscures. And there is a way forward to do this - if we will ask in new ways just what it means to be the recipients through faith of God's revelation. 

Are Academics Biased?

Of course they, just as pastors are biased, corporate leaders are biased, union organizers are biased and you, dear readers are biased. Any person or organization that is engaged in purposeful activity is biased, because purpose demands bias. It demands focusing on some things and ignoring or even putting aside other things.

A football player or a basketball player who is trying to win is biased against the views of sportswriters, fans in the stands, and possibly even his or her fellow teammates if they discourage him from staying focused on winning.

And what about the classroom? Well when I teach about cross-cultural communication in a MA seminar I’m biased against viewpoints that deny the existence of cultural difference or maintain naive views of language. A class focused on preparing leaders for complex cultural organizations isn’t going to waste its time on freshmen linguistics. Or, to use another example, a class on wastewater management engineering isn’t a likely place to raise the issue of privatization of government services. Water flow equations don’t mix with politics. 

But let’s go a little deeper, because the purpose of an institution isn’t limited to specific goals or subject matter. Virtually all institutions, but particularly colleges and universities, have the purpose of perpetuating certain core values. Let me repeat, perpetuating core values, not merely passing on information. No one ever founded a university or came to teach in one in order to fill students’ heads with knowledge. We’re here to impart the value of discovering the truth about reality and the value of using particular methods of discovering that truth. 

In every university or college both sets of values, the value of discovering the truth and the value of the particular methods for discovering the truth go hand in hand. And this is where the accusation of bias comes in. Because although everyone agrees, or pretends to, on the value of discovering the truth, there are serious disagreements concerning the methods for discovering the truth and thus the outcomes that we regard as “the truth.” 

In the West, or better the world of modernity created out of the North Atlantic world, a schism grew up from the time of the Enlightenment onward. It is relatively easy to characterize. Within the classical arts and sciences tradition revelation as a source of knowledge and faith as a means of knowing were gradually bracketed out as the search for truth, if not being outright rejected. Religion became an object of study rather than a means of discovering the truth. 

The initial pushback against this from American fundamentalists was a naive and ultimately futile effort to defend a Biblical understanding of a three tiered cosmos and a seven day creation of the earth. More moderate were efforts in the tradition of Schleiermacher and philosophical theology to support faith as a distinctive means of knowing reality, while bracketing out those aspects of reality better understood by science and critical studies.

Still, it is the pushback by the fundamentalists, played out in public from the Scopes trial onward that left a bitter combativeness against religion in the academy, and particularly religion deployed for political purposes among those seeking to break free from such nonsense. After all - it was precisely teachers that the fundamentalists were attacking.

That bitterness hasn’t disappeared even as science has triumphed in its creation of the world we live in and its methods for discovering the truth about it. The scientific method and critical inquiry in the liberal arts have been wildly successful in creating a better, more fruitful, more peaceful, and more prosperous world. To the extent that revelation and faith pit themselves against these accomplishments they remain for many academics an enemy of the core value of the university - free inquiry into the truth about reality. 

This bitterness has been exacerbated by the politicizing of religion against science and critical inquiry in the post-Moral Majority age. Given that the now dominant political party has become a staunch denier of the results of scientific inquiry and resister of scientific research, universities may justifiably fear that a combination of conservative Christian religion and pseudo-conservative politics are indeed an enemy to their core values.

The result is that the defense of the scientific method and critical inquiry has become one of the values perpetuated in the modern university. In the current political climate many academics believe that only by rejecting revelation and faith outright can the university defend its key methodology and thus pursue its goal of discovering the truth about reality. 

So yes, most academics are biased, but not because they are naturally political liberals. Nothing about the pursuit of scientific and critical truth favors political liberalism or political conservatism. The truth is non-partisan. But attacks on science and critical thinking have become partisan, lodged in the detritus of a Republican Party that has traded small government and fiscal responsibility for populist attacks on the perceived enemies of religion. And so long as self-identified political/religious conservatives attack both the results and methods of scientific and critical inquiry as “fake news” the university faculty will identify with political liberals who at least appear to protect their core values. 

And the future? I’ll offer this as a theologian in a church related university. We who believe in revelation as a source of knowledge and faith as a means grasping the truth could offer a great deal to the larger, and shared, value of pursing the truth. But if we seek short term gains in political power by attacking our peers in the academic world then we deserve to be rejected and our doom is as deserved as it is assured. 

Of course there is another side to this story - next post.

The Authenticity Impulse

Yesterday a Facebook post told the story of a United Methodist pastor whose license was revoked for performing a same sex marriage. http://wlos.com/news/offbeat/chattanooga-pastor-fired-for-officiating-same-sex-wedding

I quote the story directly "She said that her commitment to be their pastor meant that she should be with them through this day."

If you follow stories like these you’ll note that this theme “commitment to be their pastor” is quite common. Pastoral commitment to a same-sex couple demands being pastor at their wedding. 

Let’s look at another story. “Two big churches seek to leave denomination.” http://www.umc.org/news-and-media/2-big-churches-seek-exit-from-denomination

Again a quote, "Lead pastors of both churches expressed frustration with the denomination’s intensifying homosexuality debate, calling it a “distraction” from ministry.” And Rev. Bryan Collier, “we can reach even more people for Christ if we weren’t distracted by this argument.”

Although the pastor(s) performing same-sex marriage and those leading their congregations out of the denomination come from completely opposite sides of the current debates in the UMC they have something in common. They are essentially congregationalists, concerned with serving their congregations and leading a congregational mission undistracted by the larger denominational conflicts.

This focus on having a primary responsibility to congregation and its mission is at odds with the ecclesial tradition of which Methodism is a part. In the Methodist tradition, stretching to John Wesley’s refusal to be bound to a parish, serving a congregation is just an instance of serving the Methodist mission. And sometimes that mission means confronting rather than comforting a congregation and its members.

Similarly congregations are a missional outpost of the United Methodist church. They don’t exist for themselves, or for their sense of congregational mission, but to serve the mission of the larger church. And the pastor’s job is precisely to keep the congregation engaged in that larger church, not to lead it out.

In both cases responsibility to the larger church which creates both pastors and congregations for its purposes may mean that personal and congregational goals and purposes are thwarted. But of the many reasons that the UMC ordains clergy and creates congregations, self-realization isn’t one of them. 

Now I fully expect that a lot of folks across the spectrum don’t like this analysis of where they and their congregations stand in relation to the larger church. There is a difficult and sometimes painful balancing act when one is called to serve two competing goods. Neither pastors nor congregations, or anybody for that matter, likes to have their ministry or mission rendered less effective or even denigrated through guilt by association.

Yet in the end we humans are not individuals but social creatures. Every individual draws his or her identity from those with whom he or she has chosen to, or is even forced to associate. We don’t get to create ourselves. And every small society (and even mega-churches are small societies) is part of a much larger and more complex social context. It doesn’t get to create itself either. 

I think traditionally Methodists (and thus United Methodists) have understood this. But as the representative stories above show, we may be forgetting and thus join the individualist, and thus congregationalist, impulse that has always animated part of American culture. 

It remains an open question what will be the most effective form of witness in our present cultural context. Ours is a context that strongly associates ethical credibility with personal authenticity. And the quest for authenticity is manifest in everything from pastors who feel compelled to act against the teaching of the church to congregations whose authenticity is threatened by association with those pastors. 

No Context, No Knowledge

At a recent dialogue I again encountered a phenomena that one sees frequently in Christian circles. At issue was what Jews and Christians understand by the idea of God as Father. I was talking about Christianity and a well known Orthodox Rabbi was talking about Judaism. 

When time came for Q&A a person in the audience proceeded to read a text from the Christian Old Testament, the part the Jews call the Torah, and then told the Rabbi that because the text says that the children of Israel were afraid (the scene is at Sinai) then Jews must be afraid of God. 

No amount of persuasion could convince this person that Jews interpret the text differently, that the Talmud and not merely the Torah is a critical part of a Jewish consciousness, and that the rabbi wasn’t just being obstinate. If the rabbi's understanding of Judaism was different from what the scripture clearly said about Judaism then the rabbi must be wrong. God said it, I believe it, that settles it.

You’ll see what was going on here. The person questioning the rabbi believed that the information in the Bible is context-free. It could be derived simply by reading the words without asking about the history of Jewish interpretation and without recognizing the influence of Christian interpretation. (She was clearly unaware that she was reading through the lens of the Book of Hebrews) 

The idea that knowledge is context-free took on overwhelming cultural force in the Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment and the years that followed subjective human experience, as found in the old Ptolemaic universe, was replaced by objectivity. Through science and the language of mathematics humans step out of the center of the universe so they can observe it whole. They can, and I quote Stephen Hawking's introduction to A Brief History of Time know the mind of God. Because they have taken God's perspective on the universe.

What makes this idea sustainable in the face of our obviously limited powers of observation is the assumption that the laws that govern all the things we can’t see are identical to those we can see. Only this allows us to speak about the universe and not that limited perspective that Hawking (I believe) calls our "light cone;" the bounded area of space time accessible to us to observe. The assumption that there is a single structure and law makes the universe a uni-verse, a single thing about which we can meaningfully speak. Whether the observers' context is Earth or some planet circling Alpha Centuri the necessary assumption of modern science is that they will see the same thing. 

What the questioner of our rabbi, who claimed a PhD from Liberty University, was doing was applying this assumption to the Bible. The words of the Bible, if true, should mean the same thing at Sinai, in 1st century Palestine, in medieval Spain, and in a contemporary UMC chapel. Because truth must be context-free to be truth in an enlightenment epistemology.

Needless to say there are a some problems here. First, and lets be bold, the Enlightenment project of creating objective scientific knowledge turns out to have serious limits. All contemporary cosmological theories acknowledge not merely the possibility but the probability of multiple unobservable universes with differing structures and laws. The laws that govern our universe are in fact subjective in the sense that only we (as far as we know) are subject to them. It turns out the Ptolemy was kind of right. We are the center of our universe.

This doesn’t mean that the law of gravity is subjective, or that the results of scientific research are really just cultural framings of reality. But it does mean that gravity affects you more or less depending on where you are located in space-time and that human comprehension of the meaning of climate change will be shaped by culture. 

More importantly all efforts to gain and exchange knowledge about reality are caught up in the fundamental human enterprise of meaning-making and meaning-sharing. Science never was and never has been about simply exchanging information necessary to develop ever more sophisticated models of the universe. Scientists aren’t computers connected by high speed digital data busses. They are people. 

You can see this by the vast amount of energy scientists pour into writing popular books describing their work to lay audiences that cannot possibly grasp the information scientists go to such efforts to gather, or offer any useful information in return. Sagan, Weinberg, Hawking, DeGrasse Tyson, Frank, and hundreds of others have turned from their calculations to try and explain what they mean. I know, I have all those books. And in the end they wax philosophical rather than cosmological

And this observation about meaning-making and meaning-sharing is true of the Bible as a book. Because like all books it is intended to convey meanings and not merely information. Because human language is never simply an objective report of the truth in clear terms. Human language is always about the meaning of what is being reported for an intended audience. We don’t deploy language to merely share information. We deploy language to share meaning.

And that meaning is always determined by the context of the communicative act. If you don't know it, or you ignore it, you don't know what the Bible means - even if you have a PhD.

Stepping Back to Center Stage

Where do humans belong in the universe?  

The Copernican revolution de-centered humanity in the universe for the purpose of doing away with the increasing bizarre abstractions of the Ptolemaic system. The revolution we need now will bring us back to the center and rescue us from the alienating abstractions of a theology (or cosmology) that seeks to transcend its human origins and represent the mind of God.

Matthew Crawford in The World Outside Your Head and Adam Frank in  About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the End of the Big Bang come to remarkably similar conclusions even though one is a philosopher asking about human self-understanding and the other is a physicist trying to understand the beginnings of the universe. Simply stated: they both understand that the Copernican revolution and the Enlightenment project of objective knowledge have led us into vast new realms of knowledge and mis-led us in our understanding of ourselves. 

Both Crawford and Frank rightly note that the combination of de-centering humanity in the universe and adopting a idea that knowledge consists of mathematical representations of reality has placed humans as humans in an isolated and isolating position. Frank Tippler’s The Physics of Immortality compliments nicely Isaac Asimov’s  short story “The Last Question” in positing what AI fans seem to long for, the ultimate objectification of humanity into machines that busily calculate away until they become what we call God. 

These latter books represent a real insight; God has become identified as the objectification of the human mind in its purest and most comprehensive knowledge of reality.  So the physicist, as Stephen Hawking says in his Brief History of TIme, seeks to “know the mind of God.” And in this is little different from the post-Enlightenment theologian unleashing a full range of logical tools on philosophical problems while simultaneously operating on revelation with the compliment of historical critical analysis of Biblical texts. Theist or atheist, both seek an internally coherent, precisely formulated, and logically complete description of reality. Which is, at least theologically, the mind of God.

Now Hawking was almost certainly speaking metaphorically, and I won’t make him out to be a crypto-theist. But there is a real problem for Christians when our theologies become increasingly abstract representations of God, and God’s will, based on models created in the mind and articulated for our fellow humans in that great Enlightenment goal: Systematic Theology. Such a theology, at least as I learned it, was to tie together the sum of human knowledge of Humanity, Nature, and God into a dogmatic whole. In it the human mind and the Mind of God have become one and the same and who can say which has been elevated and which diminished.

Liberation theology was supposed to deliver us from all this by focusing theological attention on God’s subjectivity in the form of God’s “preferential option for the poor.” Orthopraxi would at least compliment, if not replace orthodoxy. Yet it seems to me that orthodoxy and orthopraxi have for the most part simply bi-furcated. Self-identified orthodox theology nerds continue their quest to know "that which was believed, everywhere, always;” surely the summa bonum of Enlightenment even if it is attributed to the church fathers. 

Activists in the meantime, build models of an activist God. The coherence of those models is ideological and their credibility is enacted rather than observed. Yet once created in the mind and articulated on a rally poster these models give us a God can trample out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored with oppressive zeal. Because humans, whether victims or oppressors, are central only in being at the bull’s eye in the site of God’s subjective concern, while it is the quality of justice that is at center of God’s heart. And thus it turns out that this most subjective God is understood in abstract terms of justice relating to a humanity understood statistically in terms of income inequality, homelessness rates, distribution of goods and services, educational opportunity, teen suicide, and so on. The Bible and the latest census data or UNHCR report become two sides of the same theological coin. 

Now the point of my caricatures above is show the extent to which humans as the makers of theology, the seekers of knowledge, remain de-centered in contemporary theology. In the new orthodoxy we continue to create of models of God in our heads using the classical tools of philosophy and theology while the new activists create such models out of ideology and statistics. Either way we remain where the Enlightenment put us, out of the center looking down on at the universe and formulating our models of God based on what we can see. We may test our models against the Bible and the church fathers, or against the Bible and latest social science data. Either way the pre-enlightenment world in which humans were both at the center where God was incarnate and in the heavens where the elect live in God’s eternal presence has been lost.

If you aren't grounded its likely that you're lost in space. 

So perhaps we should find the center again. Not in the naive physical sense. We can’t go back there. Nor in the naive metaphysical sense. We can’t go back their either. Rather we might consider, as Crawford and Frank suggest, recognizing that we are inevitably the center of our models and the experiences by which we test them. That old map was a poor representation of reality, but an excellent representation of the only way we can really see reality. 

With regard to the physical universe this is exactly what Stephen Hawking helped articulate with the concept of the “light cone” representing that portion of the universe which is available to us for observation. That cone spreads out, representing the distance light travels in different periods of time, from the human observer. Inevitably we are in its center, and there is nothing we can know for sure about what is outside it (most of the universe) without the questionable supposition (but fundamental to all science) that what is outside must look like what is inside. The problem for science is, as Frank details, that the cutting edge undercuts the supposition of uniformity in the universe.

The Christian analogue to the light cone is the effect of revelation. All we can know of God is what comes to us when God deigns to reveal God’s self within the world of human senses. When God revealed God’s self in Jesus our knowledge of God was both made possible and limited by that revelation and its subsequent record in the Bible. The writer of the gospel of John is well aware of the limits of what he can know even of Jesus. And we must be aware that as much as we know about what God was doing in Judea and Samaria in Jesus Christ, we know nothing of what God was doing a few hundred miles south in the Arabian peninsula. The light of revelation has its own cone and its own shadows beyond. To go beyond revelation (natural and special) requires assuming that God’s nature and activity is fully disclosed in a revelation limited by its human receptors: a theological absurdity. Better to acknowledge our own centrality and recognize the limits it imposes on all our statements about God including those that claim to be most inclusive. 

Ultimately I think the point of Frank's and Crawford’s works is to remind us that our task as humans isn’t to know the mind of God, which inevitably dis-engages us from reality, but to engage in an ongoing dialogue with reality and both realize and revel in the meaning that gives our lives. And that means, at least in part, that we realize and reject futile efforts to complete that dialogue with increasingly abstract characterizations of reality no longer in touch with any imaginable human experience. 

The Copernican revolution de-centered humanity in the universe for the purpose of doing away with the increasing bizarre abstractions of the Ptolemaic system. The revolution we need now will bring us back to the center and rescue us from the alienating abstractions of a theology (or cosmology) that seeks to transcend its human origins and represent the mind of God. It is, after all, ourselves that we must most urgently know and understand if we are to survive. 

About a Book

Before you ask what scripture means you must first ask why we should care. And that is a political question.

The meaning of a text is important only in the context that describes what type of meaning it should have. Put another way, ecclesiology is the source of hermeneutical standards for the Bible, because the context in which the Bible has meaning for Christians is the church. 

Let’s take a simple example from outside the church: the United States Constitution. In the context of US Supreme Court deliberations the meaning of this text are extremely consequential. It is the primary authority around which deliberations of law take place. And so Americans concerned with Supreme Court decisions get pretty excited about hermeneutical arguments related to judicial restraint and judicial activism.

But what about my home for seven years, Austria? Well our American arguments about restraint and activism as hermeneutical principles don’t mean much to Austrians, because the US Constitution has no meaning in their context. Indeed in their political context the principles of “restraint” and “activism” don’t occur. 

Now we’ll find the same thing if we look at, say, the novels of Jane Austin. Arguments about the characters, author’s intent, and meaning rage in college English classes, literary solons, among TV producers, and elsewhere in the world that holds Jane Austin in esteem. Not, notably, down at the White Rock Boat Club. Get a bunch of guys together on the dock having a beer and you’ll find that bringing up whether Jane Austen was a proto-feminist empowering women through her characters is pretty much a buzz-kill. In that context hermeneutic disputes in relation to Jane Austin mean nothing. 

And that gets us to a second reality: the rules of interpretation, or disputes over the rules, are fixed by the social context in which the book is read. The US constitution is read in the particular political context of the United States, and it is through the political process of selecting judges that the hermeneutical debate between restraint and activism was shaped into its current form. 

It isn’t hard to imagine that a debate about the meaning of Jane Austen will be somewhat different in a college classroom than in a neighborhood reading circle. One might focus on the intent of the author, or how the books reflect and shape social standards, in the the other one might find personal responses to the characters quite divorced from the intent of the author. 

Again, methods of interpretation are determined by the social context within which the book is read. 

You see where I’m going with this. The Bible is a book that has authority only in the context of the Christian community, and disputes about interpretation are meaningful only in the context of that community. The Bible as a book worth reading and attending to really doesn’t even exist outside the Christian community. Beyond our boundaries its just a book of historical interest (if that), and possibly just a collection of words that people can take or leave as they will. And they do leave it. My own research on the distribution of scripture portions in late 19th century Malaya showed that almost all were used to line boxes, fill cracks, or start fires. Apparently its numinous, sacred quality wasn't recognized so easily. 

We, the church, are the context in which all disputes and decisions about interpretation of the Bible must be made. There is no outside authority to whom any side can appeal, no meta-standard of interpretation of texts against which our hermeneutics can be judged. The Bible doesn’t belong to literary critics, or post-colonial theorists, or anthropologists, or political scientists. Of course they can read it, analyze it, determine their own rules of interpretation, and offer what it means to them. But not to us.

Unless we choose to invite them into our conversation about hermeneutics. We can even choose to give them a relatively authoritative role in those discussions. But that is entirely our choice, based on our own internal understanding of the Bible and our own internal needs as a community that looks to it for authority. We should not appeal to them over and against ourselves. 

But we do! Perhaps the biggest problem with contemporary United Methodism is that in our effort to present the results of our hermeneutical inquiries as credible outside the church, primarily in the academy, we’ve granted that outside context not merely an authoritative voice, but a determinative voice in our internal Christian discussions over hermeneutics and meaning. 

Does a scholar of comparative religions and ancient texts categorize the gospel accounts of the resurrection as myths? Then many of us willingly abandon belief in the resurrection, or virgin birth, or miracles of Christ. We give up the witness of the church through the ages that Christ has risen in order to satisfy the ever-shifting demands of post-enlightenment rationality. We place our own experience and authority beneath that of a culture which has itself come almost to a place of collapse as the pretensions of the so-called Copernican Revolution are finally exposed.

In particularly United Methodist debate this willing surrender to the Enlightenment, trading the rich broth of Christian tradition and Christian experience for the thin gruel of Cartesian rationality, comes by an appeal to the so-called Wesleyan quadrilateral. No assertion of belief can pass muster in current UM debate unless the gatekeepers of epistemic authenticity in the secular academy give it the once over and declare it in accordance with “reason.” 

What makes this richly ironic is that the academy itself is recognizing (post-modern debate about meta narratives quite aside) that the so-called Copernican revolution that took humanity out of the center of the universe has led us to an epistemic shallows that is impossible to navigate. In cosmology we’ve seen the rise and return of the “anthropic” principle that wonders why it is that the universe happens to be so finely tuned that it allows for the kind of life that eventually discovers just how finally tuned it is, and how immensely improbable such a universe is. 

Outside the world of physics we find the near complete entanglement of subjectivity and objectivity in everything from sociological research to ethics. So while UM debaters appeal to “reason” and the results of scientific research to bolster their claims about the meaning of scripture we find increasing recognition among scientists that their descriptions of reality are inconclusive, particularly with regard to moral issues, outside a specifically human context of inquiry. There is no dis-engaged, objective, standpoint which represents “reason.” Descarte started in the graveyard of knowledge, not its womb. 

Not that this solves our hermeneutical problems. What it does, see my next blog, is properly locate them within ecclesiology, and particularly the politics of authority within the church. 

Trapped in a Secular Age

United Methodist discourse and disagreement is trapped in secularity. Indeed it is proof of Charles Taylor’s thesis that our secular age is one in which the conditions of belief have perceptibly and irrevocably changed. This does not mean that United Methodists don’t constantly refer to God. But all of those references are mediated by scripture, and scripture as it lies entirely within what Taylor calls the immanent frame. Once we deploy scripture to prove our point it is no longer God’s word but a human tool; a tool shaped by our immediate needs, whether rational or polemical. 

A good example of this are arguments related to the ordination of. . . . women. There are few United Methodists, none I know of, that oppose the ordination of women. But there are plenty of Evangelicals, Catholic, and Orthodox who do. We’ll let John Piper represent the first if you are interested. https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/is-there-a-place-for-female-professors-at-seminary. Noteworthy here is Piper's literalism. It is essentially a post-enlightenment form of rational interpretation of scripture based on certain assumptions about the mechanisms by which human authors serve a divine intent. Like all enlightenment rationality, it insures authority through adherence to a particular rational procedure.

So how do you argue against a well-known scholar who deploys Biblical arguments against the ordination of women and having women teach future ordinands? 

Well, a well know evangelical/conservative voice in United Methodism is Ben Witherington of Asbury Seminary. You’ll find his arguments here: http://thebiblicalworld.blogspot.com/2012/04/ben-witherington-on-women-in-ministry.html

Dr. Witherington is no literalist. His arguments depend on the set of procedures typically called critical hermeneutics. These are based on an expert knowledge of cultural locations within and beyond the text, appropriate translation in relation to original cultural context, historical situation, and etc. His arguments would have been unimaginable prior to the Enlightenment.

What Piper and Witherington have in common is bringing scripture down to earth, as a human book that can be interpreted with the tools of the immanent frame, to reach a conclusion. For Witherington the authority of scripture comes from God, but its meaning is clearly mediated through the earthly tools. And it is deployed here with those tools fully in view. 

For an official commentary on United Methodist ordination of women you can go here: http://www.umc.org/what-we-believe/commentary-the-ordination-of-women. I think you’ll find that its deploying of critical tools is non-different from that of Ben Witherington. Indeed, I was hard pressed to find any UM voice, or indeed any voice in support of the ordination of women, that didn’t deploy some form of critical exegesis along these lines. (It is interesting, probably telling, that of the official UM articles on this only one is written by a woman.) 

So, to repeat my initial point, it seems that we United Methodists are stuck in the immanent frame, unable to refer to our most basic source of authority without bringing it within the realm of culturally determined procedures for interpretation and deploying it as a human tool. 

Now if this seems natural, and the word itself as we use it is a product of modernity, then consider that it wasn’t always so. In pre-modern Western culture the scripture had a plenitude of meanings, none of which was discovered by rational operations on actual words and sentences to discover authorial intent. For the pre-modern Church the methods of allegory, typology, tropology, and anagogy were equally legitimate paths to both understanding and thus exposition and potentially argument. And they all depended on the assumption that scripture was bound together not by historicity, culture and cultural change, and authorial intention, but by the same gold chain, the eternal chain of Being, that bound all things on earth to heaven. 

The door back to those days is closed to us now. The Wardrobe in Lewis’s novels does not allow grown-ups a path to Narnia, and neither can we, by any act of will, recover our naiveté. On this Charles Taylor is correct.

Still, we might consider looking for another way forward that isn’t trapped in secularity and (as it happens) endless, irresolvable, and utterly fruitless disputes of the meaning of God’s Word dragged to earth by the all-too-base-metal chains of human reason. 

I will suggest, and perhaps explore further in future posts, that the path forward will be to recover God’s Word as the primary resource in a shared spiritual quest to hear God’s intent for our common life. To do this we will not instrumentalize scripture by deploying rational arguments in this or that dispute over church discipline. 

Instead we will read aloud to each other its words, all its words, and then dwell and listen in silence for God’s voice. And when we think we have heard, we will share what we have heard. And listen to what others have heard. And then we will dwell in those voices, possibly asking for clarification but never disputing or denying what others have heard. 

It may be that we will eventually come to a common mind, hearing synchronously what God is saying through scripture. It has happened before in the UMC, with regard to the ordination of women for example, or the ending of slavery. 

It may also be that we will have no common mind, that the fruit of the spirit called unity will not yet be ripe in our hearts. And we’ll either carve out space for disagreement in our common polity or decide we must for a time separate. 

Either way we will have returned to the respect for God’s Word that was lost when it became imprisoned in a secular age. And the sword of God’s word will not be deployed by us to make our enemies bleed, but by God to open up our own hearts. 

Fruit Asymetrical Christian Comparisons

Who is more righteous? The US Army that accepts same-sex marriage or the United Methodist Church that does not? 

Its a fruit-asymmetrical question. In other words worthless. 

Many Christians, and thus their non-Christian critics have a profound misunderstanding of the difference between sin and immorality, as they do the difference between righteousness and morality. This makes for bad theology, bad dialogue, and worse behavior. 

In scripture the word “sin” is invariably associated with the relationship of persons and nations to God. That brokenness may be observable through lawbreaking, but this is only because the laws broken are the laws of God. Similarly righteousness as it refers to humans refers to living within God’s covenant, and thus being in the correct relationship with God. Such a relationship is observable through obedience specifically to God’s law. 

Now when I looked up the word “moral” in the Bible I found it occurred only once, in the book of James, and even there in only a few translations. “Ethics” didn’t appear at all. “Immoral” appeared a number of times, and in every instance was preceded by “sexual;” the complete term being “sexual immorality.” A cruise through your old SBL Greek NT can educate your further.

In any case these uses of the term “immoral” in the New Testament are related to public (and even cross-cultural) standards of behavior rather than the concepts of sin and righteousness. Paul refers to these same moral standards in his letters when he speaks of the kinds of behavior and attitudes “everyone” approves. And understanding this is an ethical commonplace. 

Aristotle wrote the book on ethics in the Western tradition, and he wasn’t Christian and didn’t refer to scripture. His Asian equivalent was Confucius. Ethics is the pursuit of the good, and goodness can be known without recourse to special revelation. And it can be, and should be, transmitted in the form of social norms.

Now the distinction between righteousness and morality is critical. Morality is the agreed conventions of behavior in a society that lead to what society regards as good. Morality has to do with the covenant humans make with each other to behave in certain ways. Righteousness refers to living specifically within the covenant which God makes with God’s people, and more widely humanity. 

Put another way. If you want to know what kinds of behavior are righteous just read Genesis 9:1-17, which gives the specifics of God’s covenant with humankind. If you want to know what is moral you’ll need to engage in a more sustained conversation with the specific norms of the society in which you live. Of course there are disagreements about both righteousness and morality, but they must be argued in different venues on the basis of different authorities. Arguments about righteousness must refer back to the Bible. Arguments about morality will need to look for reasoned assessments of the good and concepts of social contract. 

Put yet another way, you can have morality without a relationship with God, but not righteousness.

Practically speaking this means that a person can be moral and still be alienated from God. Those who are willing to submit to the moral norms of society, the covenant we make with each other, are moral, but may not be righteous. And of course truly righteous people might find themselves obliged to break the moral norms of society. 

Now the church is called to be righteous, not merely moral. So you can’t compare the behavior of the church, obliged to live according to its covenant with God, with the moral behavior of an organization like the army, which merely carries out its duty within a purely human covenant. 

Coming up. The author of the facebook posting attributed “love” to the army, saying its behavior on accepting same-sex marriage was loving. That too represents sloppy ethical thinking. Which I’ll take up in the next post.

Afraid of Phobias?

The accusation was like many others: "You’ve quoted an Islamophobic author." Another matching accusation: "You’ve cited a homophobic theologian." And: "So you fear immigrants too?"

If there is a national disease for our time it is certainly the epidemic of phobias. Although that isn’t quite correct. It is the epidemic of accusations of phobia. Most of the time the accusation is simply a form of intellectual laziness or its flip side, arrogance. It allows dismissal of any argument by waving it away as a neurosis, an emotion; a phobia.

It is the modern equivalent of accusing women of “hysteria," but this game is open to all sexes, and is usually followed by the academic or ecclesial equivalent of “mansplaining” available to professors and pastors of any gender.

The accusation that a person or group is “phobic” comes from the work of Sigmund Freud, who brought the word into common usage. It is an accusation based on a faux-Freudian diagnosis of emotional impetus based on a few observable actions but minus years of conversation and analysis. What we've done is take Freud further into the realm of instant psychological analysis of inner feelings from outward words. As if every movement of the tongue is actually a "Freudian slip."

Does someone oppose LGBTQ marriage? Must be homophobic. Does a governor call for action against Muslim terrorists? Must be Islamophobic. Does a senator want to keep people from crossing US borders illegally? Must be afraid of immigrants. Reject a progressive agenda? Must be afraid of change. Dislike conservatism? Must have a fear of tradition.

It is yet another convenient way of dividing the world into rational people (like me and my tribe) and irrational people who I don’t have to pay attention to.

There are different words used to do the same thing as well. The language of phobias comes pretty naturally to academics like myself. We have almost all read Marx, Freud, and Foucault. We instinctively believe that we can diagnose motive from action but without going through the serious social and psychological studies carried out by sociologists and psychologists. Once the phobia has a name we just mine the internet for behavior we can attach to it.

In the Wall Street Journal, the doppelgänger of the liberal academy, the preferred term is “sentiment.” All those who can’t see the hard logic of capitalist economics are simply sentimentalists pursuing their pipe dreams of equality. The sentimentalist accusation is also favored by various neo-conservatives who believe if you aren’t blowing people up you’ve clearly gotten soft on terrorism. "Snowflake" is another term that attaches behavior to sentimentality, and the WSJ opinion pages regularly mine the same digital media as academics for examples.

In such Jewish circles as I read this tendency is manifest in the lists of “facts” about Israel and the Palestinian Territories that are issued by organizations like AIPAC, the AJC, and Israel's political leaders. This “factual” approach is contrasted to “hysterics” of Palestinians and their allies who swept away by anti-Semitism, idealism, or Arab emotionalism.

Among progressive Protestants the factual approach is found in the endless parade of statistics on teen suicide, sexual assault, homelessness, and poverty intended in part to fend off the accusation of sentimentality from conservatives but mostly to prove that if you aren't part of the progressive political agenda you must be stewing in phobias rather than responding to the harsh reality of human suffering.

I realize I’ll fallen into this tendency myself, and I repent. Useful (lets not call it rational) dialogue begins when we cease diagnosing phobias and assigning motives to people we barely know, or don’t know at all. Instead we need to cease the electronically mediated psycho-analysis based on soundbites and news clips and actually talk to each other face to face. That, and ONLY THAT, provides a reasonable basis for understanding another person's emotional states. And that, and ONLY THAT will result in useful cooperation to make our world a better place.