Tomorrow I go to Oxford for the annual meeting of the College of Bishops. Before it finishes I will head off to Wittenberg for the annual joint meeting of the Meissen Commission. (See last post for more.) So, I am interviewing ordinands, clearing the correspondence and catching up on ‘loose’ reading. (I am also speaking this evening on the great, late German lay theologian, preacher and politician, Johannes Rau.)
Catching up on unread back copies of Third Way (subscribe to it today – it’s the best Christian magazine on the market), I stumbled across Charles Foster’s wonderful account of some Christians’ reaction to his latest book, Wired for God: The Biology of Spiritual Experience. I say ‘wonderful’, but it is also sad. What are some Christians afraid of? He asks perfectly good and reasonable questions and finds himself accused of ‘heresy’, ‘blasphemy’, ‘poor scholarship’, ‘literary treason at its worst’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘worthless’. And all this because he takes Augustine‘s dictum seriously and follows it through: “Nature is what God does.”
Now, anyone who sticks their head above the parapet knows what it is to get it shot at. The certainty of ignorance certainly fires the venom of people who, I am sure, are normally quite pleasant, but become nasty when their little worldview is challenged.
Foster goes on to ask what it is that motivates such people:
There are many possible answers. I would like to believe that the main motivation is charitable: that they genuinely think that people like me endanger eternal destiny, and that my opponents pick up their verbal swords reluctantly, more in sorrow than anger, to protect the weaker brethren. But it doesn’t read that way. There is one absolutely unmistakable smell about the responses: it’s the stink of fear.
He later goes on to muse:
What are they afraid of? They’re afraid of questions. They’re afraid of leaving the ghetto. They’re suffering from a paralysing spiritual agoraphobia… They choose a view of the ghetto wall when they could have a view of the universe.
And, in a final swoop at luddite theology that cannot be challenged by the outside world, he concludes (putting words into their mouths, of course):
We are the faithful remnant, and the more of a remnant we are, the more faithful we must be. If sacience doesn’t help to reassure, cognitive dissonance will.
This evokes two memories for me: (a) growing up knowing church cultures that displayed this security in being a remnant (as opposed to shrinking because they have nothing attractive to offer), and (b) Jacques Ellul‘s The Meaning of the City in which he describes Cain building the city he calls Enoch (Genesis 4) as a way of creating meaningful space in a meaningless universe without God (and alienation from his created purpose). I picked this up in one or two of my books as it vividly illustrates the predicament of human beings seeking to create meaningful space and the choices we face when the universe is opened up to us – full of threat as well as promise.
Foster is right to identify fear as the smell that fires such indignation. What is there to be afraid of in opening up to questions about the world and its ways? As someone once observed, if Christianity is true, it is true because it is true; it is not true because it is Christianity.
Get a life. Get an imagination. Get a bigger vision of God and the enormity of the universe. As Foster concludes:
If you don’t ask [honest] questions,… I might suspect that it’s because you don’t really, truly, in the early hours of the morning, trust God to have the answers.
September 12, 2010 at 4:16 pm
Wonderful. Thank you for posting this as I think it is absolutely correct. Everything changed for me many years ago when I suddenly realised how open, rather than defensive, Jesus was when others came to question him. And he asked a few questions himself.
September 12, 2010 at 4:37 pm
Some years ago, I was profoundly moved by this comment from a hospice chaplain, where the average length of stay for the patients was 10 days before dying. Asked whether this had affected his theology he answered :
“Since working here,I know less but I believe more”
Yes, yes, yes!
Part of growing up in the Christian faith is learning to live with our questions rather than run from them, or deny their existence, surely?
September 12, 2010 at 8:14 pm
I’ve always liked Johannes Rau and I’d love to know more about what you will say about him.
September 12, 2010 at 8:17 pm
Erika, just back from doing it. I’ll post separately on it when I get a chance.
September 12, 2010 at 10:14 pm
Or, as the 1897 Lambeth Conference put it (with regard to Higher Criticism), “a faith which is always or often attended by a secret fear that we dare not inquire lest inquiry should lead us to results inconsistent with what we believe, is already infected with a disease which may soon destroy it.”
September 13, 2010 at 7:36 am
Richard, this is similar to [Archbishop] Frederick Temple’s response to the’Essays and Reviews’ controversy about ‘liberalism’: “I believed that many doubts and difficulties only lived because they were hunted into the dark, and would die in the light… I believed that all opinions of the sort contained in the book would be better if tolerated and discussed, than if censured and maintained in secret.”
September 13, 2010 at 3:20 pm
I have always welcomed diversity of thought and belief, perhaps simply because it obliges me to check my own assumptions. But for those who question ongoing reason on the basis that is not part of of existing scripture I would remind every thinking Christian that Our Lord Himself stated, ‘He that believeth, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my father’ (John14;12). And, ‘I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he will not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come’ (John 16; 12-13).
Human reason and judgement can err, but this should allow us to condemn those who seek truth in His name. Seek and ye shall find.
September 13, 2010 at 9:00 pm
Lionel, is there a word missing somewhere? I am not sure I understand your point.
September 14, 2010 at 8:01 am
The last sentence meant to read ‘This should NOT allow us………’ Makes a difference!!! Thank you.