Thinking Christian

Is Jabberwocky the best nonsense poem in the English language? If not, then in what language is it the best nonsense?

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We’re on the leading edge of a long weekend here (Monday is Memorial Day in the United States). I’m the last to leave my office today; the boss gave us all the afternoon off, but I decided to stay a while, to read and write in the quiet. It’s not, I’m sad to say, as quiet within me as it is around me. So much to do! So much to catch up on! And why?

Christianity’s chief heresy down through the ages has been legalism: seeking to earn favor with God by what we do. It is a Christian fault because it is a very human fault. What confusion surrounds this whole matter! We do not understand unconditional love as God offers it. We want to earn his love; we want to be the sort of thing that could earn his love. We want to show that in ourselves we deserve his love, that he owes it to us, for the special things we do in particular. We are, in fact worthy, but not by our own works or goodness. We are worthy because he has deemed us so.

There is – - though this is dangerous to say – - something of an insult in the way God loves us. 

If we could stand before him and say “thank you very much, God, for your love, and we can all certainly see what I’ve done to earn it;” if we could say that, then that would be something to be proud of. That’s not, however, the way it is. One might almost say it’s regrettable that’s not the way it is. Except for this: for us to be able to face him that way, God would have to be shrunk down to our size. He would no longer be the object of our worship but the subject of our manipulation.

I think to a great extent that’s actually what legalism is about. It’s about manipulating God,t rying to get on his good side, so that we can get good things from him, or to feel good and special about ourselves. It’s about controlling God, or at least our relationship with him. Even a teenager can sense manipulation a mile away, though. How much more do you suppose God will always resist it?

But here’s the astonishing thing: though we try to shrink God to our size so we can impress him – - and how God must laugh at that! – - yet he emptied himself, and in a sense shrunk himself down to our size. He was born a babe in a stable, grew up in a craftsman’s home, wandered for a few years and taught a small band of followers. In the course of all this he met two kinds of responses: those who insisted on being impressive before him, he defeated by argument and by his works. Those who saw the grandeur of God in him, he set on a course toward a Kingdom.

He still says that those who humble themselves before him will be lifted up. For many of us, the hardest part of that is knowing it is because of his own goodness, and not ours, that he gives us his love. We need not earn it, largely because we could never earn it. But for those who want real love, it’s there in abundance, without measure and with only the condition that we accept it on his terms and not on our own.

Yes, of course there is an answer to the “why” question I opened with. Understanding God’s love, and that we cannot earn it by our work we still work because it is good to do so, to be fruitful and productive, to serve, and obviously to make a living. God worked for six days and rested on the seventh; we work to follow God’s own example. 

But our work is not a way of scrabbling toward the light of God’s love. It is a way of basking in that light.

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The 225th Christian Carnival is up at Parableman.

Here is more on what the Christian Carnival is all about.

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I lived in Southern California for 13 years, where it was a regular occurrence to run into New Age spirituality almost anywhere I went. My wife and I were talking a walk in the hills above Anaheim one day, and were intrigued to hear the sound of a drum and voices, out of sight among the trees ahead of us. I thought maybe it was a Boy Scout group. Our path took us right by the source, and I was wrong: it was 13 people in a circle chanting praises to earth, air, fire, and water. We vacationed in places like Carmel, California, and Sedona, Arizona, both of which are hotbeds of this kind of spirituality. We passed more than one ritual fire circle along a trail above our campsite in Sedona, and the town itself is full of interesting places like this Center for the New Age. Of course we had friends who were avid followers of New Age.

Here in southeastern Virginia it’s been different. The dominant employers here are the military (all five services including the Coast Guard, plus whatever they do at Camp Peary) and shipbuilding. We have the Jefferson Lab accelerator facility, and lots of historical tourism and research revolving around Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown. California is, well, California; and this has been different, either because of the forms of industry, or because things are generally more conservative here on the East Coast. I have had very little contact with the New Spirituality lately.

New Age Resurgence?
Until the last year or so, that is. One reason for that change has been the way Oprah Winfrey has been promoting Eckhart Tolle. Tolle has one book ranked at #2 at Amazon today, and another ranked at #20; and he and Oprah claim viewership in the millions for their combined advocacy for the message of “A New Earth” and “The Power of Now.” One of the most common search phrases by which visitors have been finding this blog lately is “the church of Oprah.”

Contradictory Beliefs
Part of the New Age message is that many paths lead to one goal, even if these paths are in many ways contradictory. This morning I heard a talk by Ravi Zacharias that is very germane to this topic. He was born and raised in a high-caste family in India, but now travels and speaks as a leading Christian thinker. The talk I’m referring to here is on pantheism and its contradictions: the contradictions really do matter, in spite of suppositions that there is an “Eastern” sort of logic in which they are of no consequence.

His website’s design does not permit me to give you the URL for the page where his talk is linked. You would need to begin at the Just Thinking page, and navigate through the archives to “Secularism and the Illusion of Neutrality, Part 3.” I trust, though, that they will not begrudge my providing you some shortcuts. You can:

Download the mp3 directly here, or
Listen online with RealAudio here.

His main point is that even in Eastern religions, with which he is very familiar, contradictory statements cannot both be true at the same time in the same relationship. That’s the dry version. You’ll his telling of it to be far more entertaining than that!

(I strongly recommend all of Zacharias’s talks, so once you listen to this one, I suggest you go back for more; even subscribe to his podcast.)

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This thread is open for continuing discussion on the topics leading up to here.

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Book Review

In this, my fourth and final post on Francisco Ayala’s book Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, I wish to examine very briefly his views on knowledge as related to science and religion. I am addressing the same primary audience that he does in his book: believers in God. For the sake of brevity, and because Ayala seems also to have accepted them himself, I am going to work on the basis of two starting assumptions: there is a God, and he has revealed himself through the Scriptures. I ask readers who contest those assumptions to recognize that this is not the place for me to defend them. This is a blog, not a book, and to do the job properly would run very long. Even as it is, my treatment here can only be an introduction to issues of religious versus scientific knowledge, but I trust it will at least open up some good discussion.

Fences Around Religious Knowledge
Ayala devotes an entire chapter to showing there need be no contradiction between revealed religion–Christianity, to be specific–and evolutionary theory. Clearly he respects Scripture. He would like Christians to understand that Darwin has been a gift to religion as well as science. If it is a gift in the Ayala takes it to be, however, it comes to us as a horse once did to Troy with dozens of armed men hidden inside. The problem is most clearly expressed on page 172 (emphasis added):

The scope of science is the world of nature, the reality that is observed, directly or indirectly, by our senses. Science advances explanations concerning the natural world, explanations that are subject to the possibility of corroboration or rejection by observation or experiment. Outside that world, science has no authority, no statements to make, no business whatsoever taking one position or another. Science has nothing decisive to say about values, whether economic, aesthetic, or moral; nothing to say about the meaning of life or its purpose; nothing to say about religious beliefs (except in the case of beliefs that transcend the proper scope of religion and make assertions about the natural world that contradict scientific knowledge; such statements cannot be true).

When there is a conflict of knowledge or opinion between science and religion, science always wins; religion’s statements “cannot be true.”

Now, is this necessarily so? Why would it be? One could muster several plausible reasons, I suppose: science is evidence-based, its conclusions are open to public challenge and revision, it follows a near-universally trusted method for determining what is true, and its results have been wildly successful in helping us understand and control nature.

Why Would This Necessarily Be?
Let us, however, recall the assumption we have made for present purposes, and that Ayala seems to hold: that there is a God who has revealed himself through the Scriptures (an assumption that I hold to be quite true, but again, it is not my purpose this time to defend it). This God is revealed as the omniscient and omnipotent Creator, faithful and reliable, certainly able and eager to reveal himself to humans. He speaks with complete authority: he knows what is true. He cannot lie. Therefore what he speaks through the Scriptures is true, and if I may paraphrase, when science makes assertions about the natural world that contradict Scriptural knowledge, such statements cannot be true.

Given our assumptions, why would that conclusion not follow? Why would Ayala (who appears to have respect for God and Scripture) say just the opposite? We can never trust any Christian beliefs except as science allows, he says. It’s tantamount to saying we can only trust God as far as science allows; but who forced God aside and enthroned science in his place?

Religious knowledge has its obvious difficulties. Agreement is hard to find, and from a human perspective there is no universal method for testing religious truth. Let us not overstate the problem, however. Ayala is not speaking of comparative religion, or the conflicts of belief between Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and secularists. He speaks as one who believes in a Christian conception of God, to others who believe in the same God.

Interpretation: It’s for Both Science and Scripture
Ayala takes the position that the Bible just isn’t intended to speak to the same questions as science. It’s not a book on natural history or cosmology. Therefore if science contradicts the apparent teaching of theology on these subjects, then theology can gracefully bow aside and say, “A thousand pardons; I didn’t mean to be intruding on your territory.” This opens up the matter of interpretation: how literally (for example) are we to take the Genesis creation account? That’s a valid question. But interpretation is a valid question for science as well. How do we interpret nature and its evidences? Theologians have been wrong; scientists have been wrong too. Scientific knowledge is fluid, sometimes adjusting in minor ways, sometimes completely being overturned. A few years ago it was scientific knowledge that stomach ulcers were caused by stress; now it’s scientific knowledge that about 90% of them are caused by H. Pylori bacteria, and most of the rest by certain medications. Why then should “assertions [by religion] about the natural world that contradict scientific knowledge” necessarily be false?

Historic Christian theology teaches that God has spoken through nature, through an internal witness in human hearts (conscience, for example), and most clearly and unambiguously through Scripture. Psalm 19 expresses all three of these sources of revelation. Some theologians point out that God has written two books: the Bible and the book of nature. Both “books” may be understood correctly or incorrectly; both need to be interpreted. For a Christian, then, there is more than ample room for discussion about interpretation: Are the early chapters of Genesis intended to be taken literally or figuratively? Great question! Let’s work on it. The book of nature is open to similar discussion. Properly understood and interpreted, the two sources of knowledge must agree.

Necessary Agreement
If God is indeed God, the Creator of all, who speaks only truth, there is no need to ask which source of knowledge trumps the other, for in the end there can be no contradiction between them. Apparent contradictions are signals that our understanding or interpretation from one or both of these perspectives is wrong, and that we have more work to do. They do not automatically signal that science is right and that Scripturally-based knowledge is wrong. That view of knowledge is no gift at all.

Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, by Francisco Ayala. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2007. 256 pages. Amazon price $24.95.

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From OneNewsNow.com:

A new study shows that people of faith in America have a huge heart in terms of giving to Third World countries — and the study cites a surprising dollar figure.

Carol Adelman of the Hudson Institute cites the information in a study done with Notre Dame University. “We didn’t realize it would be as large as it was, and we came out with a number of $8.8 billion worth of goods and services that churches are giving overseas to developing countries,” she points out.

That figure represents nearly 40 percent of the foreign aid provided by the United States to the same region — and the money from churches is apparently doing a lot of good, says Adelman….

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