So What?

Is Christianity a Materialist Faith?

I've been involved, albeit  peripherally, in a debate about the relationship between psychotherapy and the Christian faith.  It is on the Premier Christian Radio site and as usual the discussion took some unintended twists and turns.  This one included a fascinating discussion about materialism. 

It started as one of those futile exchanges between atheists and Christians about which has caused most violence.  This can get a bit futile as neither side is prepared to accept the other's examples or that all people are prone to violence.

I read this exchange and remarked that the word materialist was being used rather indiscriminately by the Christians to mean in effect atheist (and so the sole cause of the worst of twentieth century wars and persecutions).  I pointed out some Christians are materialists; on reflection I meant Christianity is a materialist faith.

I don't mean materialism in the sense of individuals who care solely for consumer goods and the accumulation of wealth.  Also, I do not mean the philosophical position taken by many atheists that there is a material world that is solely responsible for everything we know.  Consciousness itself cannot be accounted for by matter alone.

I mean there is no distinction, from where we stand as human beings, between matter and spirit.  This is not a denial of some sort of spiritual reality nor is it a refusal to accept the findings of modern science.

It seems to me the doctrine of incarnation is essentially materialist.  God loves matter.  We believe God creates matter and why should God bother if it is evil?  It is the Gnostics who had a dualist view of matter and spirit, where matter is bad and spirit is good.  The Christian Church has always rejected this view, arguing that Jesus is God incarnated as a full human being. 

This puts Jesus, and therefore God, into a unique time and place.  Our faith is still one of here and now, rather than in heaven or the hereafter.

The Liberation Theologians in the 1970s were inspired by elements of Marxism, and found his dialectical materialism is at root a means to interrogate the here and now.  They found, as Christians have found time and again throughout their history, that it is the poor who suffer.  They were rejected by church and state because they sided with the poor.  They pointed out inequalities are anathema for God, and their Marxism was therefore used against them.

So, yes the Christian faith is materialist, unlike atheism which is not noted for its solidarity with the poor.

Theology and Science: Why Bother?

I've never understood the fuss about science and theology.  I don't see why either needs to compromise.  We need to understand the methodologies of both and apply them with respect for each other.

At one time, it was suggested they are two independent magisteria.  I don't see the need to go this extreme.  If we argue the two methodologies are entirely independent then we are saying neither is relevant to the other.  It is better to understand neither has authority over the other and to encourage conversation between them.  They are different worldviews that complement and critique each other.  They cannot be independent.

Their methodologies, properly understood, do not necessarily undermine each other.  Theologians sometimes do not appreciate scientific method.  In principle, any scientific theory is open to modification.  This cannot mean there are no certainties.  Richard Dawkins makes the case that theories, such as the theory of evolution, are not in any way provisional.  I think he is right.  Any future changes to our understanding of evolution will build upon modern evolutionary theory, rather like the way Einstein's theories of relatively built upon Newton's work, in the sense that Newton's theories became special cases of a theories with wider applicability.

Equally, some scientists think theology is about what we believe.  It seems the object of theology is to produce some formula to explain the truth about the universe.  I can't deny some theologies attempt to do this.  But it is a profoundly mistaken approach.  Complete certainty cannot be achieved through theology any more than it can through scientific theory.  The aim of theology is not to bolster belief but to challenge it, by explaining the hope that is within us.  

My aim as a theologian, therefore, is not to demonstrate the truth of claims about God.  It can't be done.  We cannot possibly know the entirety of God's relationship with humanity.  My aim is more modest but I still maintain, important. 

I aim to demonstrate it is not irrational to be a Christian.  Those atheists who use science as a means to critique Christians, maintain faith is somehow irrational.  We do not have objective information but an imaginary friend in God or Jesus.  My aim is not proof but to demonstrate our faith should be taken seriously and treated with respect.  

I do not want to use the findings of science to bolster faith because science itself develops to different rules and so what supports a faith view today might undermine it tomorrow.  Rather the two need to be engaged in dialogue.  My hope is the lives of all involved will be enriched through respectful dialogue.

Faith and the State

The Multifaith Chapel and Library meets three times a month at the Burngreave Ashram  on Spital Hill in Pitsmoor.  This eclectic group of 'believers in just about everything (including nothing)' meet to compare notes.  The three meetings are on consecutive days and at lunchtime on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.  I suggested we tackle the topic of 'faith and the state' and of course I have now discovered I will be away for all three meetings.  So, I have been asked to prepare something for them to read.

The problem is, of course, I have no recollection of what it was we were discussing when I suggested this topic, so I will raise a few issues and hope the conversation sprouts wings.

My first point is about secularism and I think applies to all faiths.  To be secular is not necessarily to be against religion.  It is to believe faiths, as institutions, have no business running countries.  Generally, throughout history religious people, imposing their morality on the state, have not been terribly successful (sometimes successfully terrible).

The reason for this is the claim that certain actions are ordained by God has a tendency towards infallibility.  If God has ordained such and such behaviour, what do we do with those who disagree?  They are obviously against God and so cannot be good people.

The issue is one of accountability.  People of faith can be involved in legislation because in democracies their beliefs are subject to debate.  All is provisional; if we don't like them we can vote them out.  To remove a Catholic because we disagree with his or her politics is no attack on the Catholic Church. 

So, from a general observation, applicable to all faiths, to a focus upon Christian faith.

What we forget, perhaps because our churches want us to forget it, is that the early church was a political movement.  It was a movement against the Roman Empire and was persecuted for that reason.

Christians became church once Christianity was adopted by the Roman Empire.  Before that, although perhaps trends were towards institutionalisation, the Christians were more like a movement.  People who were identified as opposed to Emperor worship, were united by faith in Jesus, who had shown the way of opposition through the cross.

His conquest of death meant his followers had no fear of death and so had the courage to stand up to Rome in its more tyrannical periods.  Their aim was not power but to carve out a place for an alternative to empire.

Since then, there have been many movements of Christians.  Some relate to the state by supporting it, some attack it, creat alternatives to it, learn to live within it, contribute ideas to it, become obstacles to progress ...

This may seem random and perhaps it is ... but it is important to see what unifies them all.  The Spirit uses churches to introduce what is new into the world not by force but by example.  When we complain of secularisation, meaning change, too often we forget the source of those changes.  Because Christians have an uneasy relationship with the state, they are pre-eminent amongst those who contribute new ways of doing and being.

It is the conversation between state and church, which leads to change in both institutions - or should do if only people were not so entrenched in their views.  Life in a multi-faith nation, introduces new voices to this conversation.  As we learn to collaborate, new possibilities will open up for all of us.

On Religious Authority

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, reviewed Philip Pullman's new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ  in The Guardian Review, 3 April 2010.  I have mentioned this new book before  but still not read it!  Here are a couple of quotes from the review:

Pullman's Jesus is scathing about "smartarse priests" who talk about God's absence really being his presence.  Well, yes: Christians use this kind of language.  But not to let themselves off lightly; they're arguing that you only get anywhere near the truth when all the easy things to say about God are dismantled - so that your image of God is no longer just a big projection of your self-centred wish-fulfillment fantasies.

They (Francis of Assisi, Bonhoeffer, Romero) have seen through the surface froth of religion and heard the voice Pullman himself obviously finds so compelling.  That should make us pause before deciding that the New Testament is quite as successful in sanitising an uncomfortable history through religiously convenient truth as Pullman implies.  It is aware of its own temptations.  It trains its readers in self-questioning.

The late Ed Kessler, lecturing about parables at the Urban Theology Unit , captured the point of the parable of the Wheat and the Tares in unforgettable fashion.  He formed his fingers into a gun and pointed at his own temple.  He said, 'I'm going to shoot the tares.'

You remember the story of the landowner, who finds tares are growing with his wheat?  His servants ask whether they should pull up the tares.  As any fool knows, this would pull up the wheat too. 

It seems, as I read atheist critiques of Christianity, they are enthusiastic tare removers.  I agree with 99% of what they're saying and yet ... and yet I'm always left with the feeling they have missed the point.

Of course we should question what religious people say.  The world is full of people who want power and try to get it through claiming a hotline to God.  But if you consistently deny the existence of all gods (as atheists do and the first Christians did), what are you left with?

Atheists claim nothing.  They need to take a long hard look at what they mean by nothing.  I suspect nothing is their god.

And what do Christians who reject all gods find?  How do you speak of something where if you speak of it, you misrepresent it?  For it to be real, we have to deny the reality of the nothing we find ...

29 Proofs for the Existence of God

I found 29 proofs for the existence of God on a website  devoted to debates between Christians and atheists.  (I'm not sure how long this link will last for but in the event of its demise, I think this post will still make sense.)  I love this sort of thing.  All 29 were worthy and of course profoundly tedious.  Taken together,  apparently they might provide weight of evidence in favour of theism.  Do try to keep awake.

The atheists had a field day; at long last they had a formal statement of the case for theism.  So, they systematically demolished every argument.  For which the atheists have my most profound gratitude.

History is full of nutters who think they have the final conclusive proof of their particular take on divinity.  Theists need atheists to rein in their excesses and ensure Christians never have any conclusive proof for the existence of God.

The one proof that has any weight for me is the proof from religious experience.  Here it is:

1.   Many people of different eras and of widely different
  cultures claim to have had an experience of the "divine."
2.   It is inconceivable that so many people could have been so
  utterly wrong about the nature and content of their own
   experience.
3.   Therefore, there exists a "divine" reality which many people
   of different eras and of widely different cultures have
   experienced.

Inevitably this formal proof firmly grasps the wrong end of the stick.  It is tempting to appeal to the combined might of 2 billion plus believers.  But this is not the point.  The Christian faith is not based upon the dictatorship of a majority (or a minority for that matter).

My story is of a journey with God and as a preacher, a teller of stories and a writer; perhaps something of God's presence in my life will mean something to others.  The experience that matters first, is our relationship with God.  How it makes sense, in the light of the central stories, turns my story into our story. 

We are not philosophers producing final proofs but weavers of stories that make sense.  Our witness is to that moment when everything slots into place and the sceptic, who believes there is nothing new under the sun, suddenly captures a glimpse of the reality behind all the old stuff.

The churches can forget theirs is a living faith.  But each of us, as we struggle with the stories that have been handed down to us, can catch a glimpse of something real.  This something real cannot be proved, if it could it would become just another thing we have to see through or around to capture a glimpse of the something real that always eludes us.

There's nothing magic or supernatural about any of this, just love.

Lent 40: Gerard Manley Hopkins

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.  (God's Grandeur, verse 2)

Thomas Gradgrind  might have scorned this poem - what on earth does it mean?  It certainly doesn't deal with facts.  I have returned to it many times and find it speaks to me at some level, although its message is bounded by its own words.  It is about the grandeur of God, seen despite the best efforts of humanity to obscure it.  Beyond that no explanation is possible.

We are told by those who have been there that encounter with God through meditative prayer cannot be put into words.  Perhaps this is Hopkins' attempt?  Can we express ours in some way?

Lent 30: Karen Armstrong

Even though the Greeks found his interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve far too literal, Augustine was no diehard biblical literalist.  He took science very seriously and his 'principle of accommodation' would dominate biblical interpretation in the West until well into the early modern period.  God had, as it were, adapted revelation to the cultural norms of the people who had first received it.  One of the psalms for example, clearly reflects the ancient view, long outmoded by Augustine's time, that there was a body of water above the earth that caused rainfall.  It would be absurd to interpret this text literally.  God had simply accommodated the truths of revelation to the science of the day so that the people of Israel could understand it; today, a text like this must be interpreted differently.  Whenever the literal meaning of scripture clashed with reliable scientific information, Augustine insisted, the interpreter must respect the integrity of science or he would bring scripture into disrepute.  And there must be no unseemly quarreling about the Bible.  People who engaged in acrimonious discussion of religious truth were simply in love with their own opinions and had forgotten the cardinal teaching of the Bible, which was the love of God and neighbour.  The exegete must not leave a text until he could make it 'establish the reign of charity', and if a literal understanding of any biblical passage seemed to teach hatred, the text must be interpreted allegorically and forced to preach love.  (From: The Case for God , page 122.)

I have admired Armstrong's writing for a long time and this book, published last year, does not disappoint.  She introduced the idea of mythos and logos in her earlier book, The Battle for God .  Logos is broadly what we would understand scientific thought to be.  Mythos is the parallel truths found in religious experience.  Fundamentalists and atheists both tend to confuse the two.  The Case for God develops this theme in more detail.

This paragraph interrupts a discussion of Augustine's idea of original sin.  It shows Augustine, with most exegetes from the three main monotheistic faiths, understands scripture must be interpreted afresh in every age.  Those who claim it has a plain meaning are not aware they are interpreting the text as much as everyone else.  This dishonesty falsifies faith and is used as an excuse to persecute minorities by labeling them as sinners.

Lent 25: Marcus Borg

I encounter this in my university students.  Every term one or more of them says to me after class, "This is all very interesting, but I have a problem every time you use the word 'God', because, you see" - here there's usually a pause and a deep breath - "I really don't believe in God."  I always respond in the same way: "Tell me about the God you don't believe in."  Invariably, it is the God of supernatural theism.  I then tell them that I don't believe in that God either.  They are surprised, for they know that I believe in God.  They're simply not aware that there is an option other than supernatural theism.  (From: The Heart of Christianity , page 68)

If you want to know what the other option is, you will have to read the book!  As a preacher I spend a lot of time correcting false images of God.  Both Christians and atheists believe in the same unbelievable supernatural God.  I include Borg in this series because he is a well-known radical theologian who does not make the common liberal mistake, where having rubbished the supernatural God, we are left suspended with half a faith and no way of moving anywhere else.

We need to ask ourselves who we are fooling.  Why do we find it so difficult to pass the Christian faith on?  Our educators, preachers, theologians and ministers conspire to set up barriers to God through their insistence in belief or doubt about a God who does not exist and is not believed in by people of faith.

Lent 17: Stuart Kauffman

Whether or not I am right that life started with collective autocatalysis, the mere fact that such systems are possible should make us question the dogma of a central directing agency.  The central directing agency is not necessary to life.  Life has, I think, an inalienable wholeness.  And always has.  (From: At home in the universe , page 275)

Kauffman challenges doctrinaire neo-Darwinism by arguing life is inevitable in our universe.  We're not here by chance and against the odds.  His views are not incompatible with natural selection but go much further to explain how selection might work.  I have argued elsewhere  there is no design to which nature adheres but that life develops naturally according to its own rules.  (This book was recommended to me after I'd written this series of posts about evolution.)

God is known through experience.  There is no proof of God in the universe, the universe itself is all the proof we need.  Kauffman does not answer the question: why is there anything at all?  Instead, he deepens the question by showing, in a highly technical way, how creative the universe is.  Such a universe in conversation with God, needs no design.

Lent 3: Graham Dunstan Martin

Now let us emphasise this key point: the contemporary reductionist view is that, fundamentally, there is only matter.  Their definition of matter exactly corresponds to Berkeley's definition, namely that it is devoid of consciousness.  By their definition, consciousness is 'derived from it'.  Let us ponder this in the light of the distinction between percipere [the active verb to perceive] and percipi [the passive verb to be perceived].  If according to reductionists, consciousness must be a product of the mechanical processes of unconscious matter, that is seeing can be causally and logically derived form being seen, then according to them, seeing is not primary.  Being seen is primary.  Intuitively, one feels there is something wrong here.  How can reality be derived from a passive verb?  (From: Does It Matter? The Unsustainable World of the Materialists  (2005), page 49.)

This book was a gift in September 2008.  It confirmed so many of my own suspicions, I cannot resist returning to it over and again.  I have already written a sequence of posts  about it in my other blog.  The point is not that Martin clinches some argument against atheism, it is rather that he shows there are rational arguments on both sides.  There is no clinching argument about God because this debate about the existence of God poses the wrong question .

If consciousness is primary, then the whole universe is in a great conversation .  Things happen because there are other things.  So, where can God be found in the universe?  Somehow the intervention or incarnation of God in the world seems more credible, when we picture the creator in conversation with the created.  It is worth pondering what that conversation between the material world and God might be.