The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 2

You can read my first post on Newbigin's book for some context on the matter. Today's post will cover Chapter 2 of the book, "The Roots of Pluralism."

At the heart of our pluralist society is the stark division between what we can know as fact and what we merely believe to be true (for us). That we are created by a good God, who is sovereignly in control of everything in the world, and who sent his son Jesus to die for our sins was, for the 1500 year period from the start of the church to the Reformation and the Enlightenment, fact in the same that gravity is a fact and that the laws of thermodynamics are facts. Now, we consign such facts to the category of belief, something that might work for an individual "believer" but not for humanity writ large. 

Part of this is signaled, as so many things, in the way we speak. Rather than speaking of right and wrong in an objective sense, we speak about "values." These values are not grounded in any ontological claims about the world, but simply in our own feelings on an issue. 

Compounding this division is the way in which modern scientific discoveries unsettled what was previously known as "fact" and therefore unsettled the whole world. Descartes is famous for trying to find some truth that could be known absolutely. He settled on something as boring as his own consciousness. Pass. Newbigin argues that since Descartes, the "dualism" inherent in his thinking between our sensory experience and our intellectual experience of the world has developed into a "skepticism about whether our senses give us access to reality ," a skepticism that has become the defining trait of European philosophy. Since we can only know the phenomenal world available to our senses, our managing of existence is contingent no longer on a kind creator but by the exigencies of our minds. The buck stops with us, so to speak. 

What Newbigin does in the latter part of the chapter is attempt to critically examine what dogma "undergirds this rejection of dogma" in the modern world. Chesterton once quipped that when people reject Christianity they don't believe nothing, they believe anything. So it is. The absence of faith does not leave a vacuum but is precipitated by some other theory that seeks to both create and fill the void. I will come back to the direction of that examination in the next post.

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 1

Seeing as it has been some time since I have written with any regularity, consider this post as my hope that this can soon be rectified. It is not, necessarily, that I don't have time to write, merely that I have used this time mostly for other things. That being said, I have undertaken a couple of reading projects for Lent and my intention is to update with things I am reading and learning.

One of these works is Lesslie Newbigin's The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Newbigin wore many hats throughout his career, but he started his ministry in the mission fields of India. The purpose of the book is to recover gospel proclamation in an era where plurality is valued for the sake of plurality and dogma is a bad word. He posits the question thus:

Only what can stand up under the critical examination of the modern scientific method can be taught as fact, as public truth: the rest is dogma. One is free to promote it as a personal belief, but to affirm it as fact is simply arrogance. How, in this situation, does one preach the gospel as truth, truth which is not to be domesticated within the assumptions of modern thought but which challenges these assumptions and calls for their revision? (5)

One assumption of modern thought, the Enlightenment focus on "rationality," often works to constrain the church. Newbigin points out that even a large number of those defending the faith do so on the basis of rationality, adopting as they do so the "fundamental humanist assumption" (2). What looks like a defense is therefore a "tactical retreat" (3). We are playing under the terms set for us by a philosophy hostile to viewing the non-empirical as fact.

Dogma, which originally meant "to seem" and was used by the ancient church to delineate what could be accepted on "competent authority" now stands "precisely for all that is ignorant and arrogant, for the very opposite of a sincere searching after truth" (5). Dogma narrows the world and denies the abundance of avenues to truth in the world. Dogma destroys our open-mindedness, which is a virtue in the modern world, closing us off from the beliefs of others. Our culture distinguishes facts from values. Christianity, and other faith systems, belong to the world of values and it is wrong to impose those values on others. Newbigin ends the first chapter by making a few points that will be picked up as the book continues.

The first is that "dogma is not the unique particularity of the Church." Every faith system is built on dogma; assumptions, premises, are necessary in believing anything. It is difficult to question the assumptions we have built our worldview upon; difficult both for the Christian and for the pluralist.

Second, every culture "depends for its coherence upon a set of. . . 'plausibility structures' which predetermine which beliefs are acceptable within a culture and which are anathema. Within the plausibility structure of modern science, divine explanations for events will naturally seem implausible. Newbigin contends, though, that "the gospel gives rise to a new plausibility structure, a radically different vision of things from those that shape all human cultures apart from the gospel" (9). 

Third, the statement that truth is bigger and more complex than any one person or one system of thought can articulate is well-intended but can also be used to close off any dissent from that position. In the famous example of the people feeling different parts of the elephant and describing a wildly different creature what we often lose sight of in the pithy lesson of different apprehensions of the truth is the fact that to know they are touching an elephant someone has to see the whole elephant. To the charge of arrogance at Christian belief in truth, Newbigin responds: (a) "The truth is that it is dogma rightly understood, namely the free gift of God's grace in Jesus Christ, which alone can establish and sustain freedom of thought and of conscience." (b) "[W]e do not defend the Christian message by domesticating it within the reigning plausibility structure." (c) Christians should be lifelong learners and seekers after truth, but it is important to insist that "this learning is, like all genuine learning, an exercise which is guided and disciplined by a tradition." (d) "The dogma, the thing given for our acceptance in faith, is not a set of timeless propositions: it is a story."

The defense, then, of our faith becomes as much about who we are and how we live as what we believe. By living outside of the plausibility structure of scientific, postmodern, late-capitalist America we invoke a different story and way of living than that which dominates our culture. We tell ourselves a different story about life and the ordering of virtues and the practice of community and the beauty of dogma and the exclusivity of truth than is allowed in our culture. And, implicit in Newbigin's picture, we do so joyfully.

The Feast of the Epiphany

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany, a day in the church calendar when we celebrate the arrival of the magi to give their gifts to the infant Christ and the day that also marks the end of the twelve days of Christmas. 

I have been trying to imagine this feast as it must have felt to Christians hundreds of years ago, to my ancestors in northern Europe for example. One thing that I love about Christmas is that it takes place during the darkest time of the year. Of all of the pagan holidays to appropriate for the birth of the Christ-child, surely a holiday celebrating the winter solstice is a great place to start. And, yes, I know that Jesus was more likely born sometime in April. I don't care. People who point that out tend to be annoying anyway. The point is the arrival of light in the middle of darkness, the glory of the only Son from the Father driving out the darkness. To imagine that the symbolism of the day chosen is not important is unimaginative.

Not to put words in the mouth of my northern European ancestors, but I imagine that the celebratory mass and 12 days of feasting meant a lot to them in the middle of winter. We are so protected from weather and darkness in our culture that we cannot conceive of what it must have been like to endure a winter with very minor restraints from the bone-chilling cold and the all-pervading darkness. I read the other day that part of the reason we are so fat is that we don't spend any time being cold anymore. In our overcalorified, enlightened (literally) era it can be difficult to grasp what Christmas must have meant, how anticipated it must have been, how melancholy that last night of the festival must have been. That last night of feasting before a season of privation and darkness. 

However, I did not intend to write ruminations about our coddled inability to appreciate winter festivals, but rather to celebrate with the church the arrival of the magi, those mysterious Asiatics with their inscrutable gifts. This year during Advent we would read our devotional and then sing a Christmas hymn. Invariably we sang the classic "We Three Kings," a song that features prominently in my recollections of childhood Christmases but which I dropped as kind of cheesy sometime around the millennium. As we sang the words, though, both Clara and I noticed a depth to the song we neither remembered nor anticipated. (The tune still kind of sucks.)

The verses, for those who like me do not remember them, track each gift given to the baby Jesus. The first is gold:

Born a king on Bethlehem's plain
Gold I bring to crown him again,
King forever, ceasing never,
Over us all to reign.

The next gift is frankincense:

Frankincense to offer have I;
Incense owns a deity nigh;
Prayer and praising, voices raising
Worshipping God on high.

And, finally, myrrh: 

Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom;
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone cold tomb.

I am ashamed to admit that before reading these lyrics I had never before made the connection between these gifts and their purpose, or what they say about who Jesus is. Gold for a king; incense for a deity; myrrh for a dead man. Each gift evocative of another aspect of the manifold glory of Christ. I got chills reading that, and on this day when we remember and celebrate the wizards who tracked down Jesus it is wonderful to reflect on how much foreknowledge they were given into the life of our Savior.

T.S. Eliot taps into this in his poem, "The Journey of the Magi", where the now elderly king remembers the journey and the mystery of the birth they encountered:

This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

What the magi came to witness was not merely the birth of a beautiful child, but the certain knowledge that this child was born to die, born for Death, in a manner in which no other mortal could be. In celebrating Christ's birth we celebrate his death. In reflecting on the infant laid in the manger our minds are inexorably drawn to the man upon the cross. The season itself is infiltrated with death. The magi brought in their wake the genocide of infants surrounding Bethlehem, when impious Herod tried to hold onto power. And reflection on death is as it should be, which is to say that it is not morbid, at least in a pejorative sense. All three things were heralded at Christ's birth: his kingship, his divinity, and his death. Amen.

The song ends:

Glorious now behold him rise,
King and God and sacrifice;
Alleluia, Alleluia,
Peals through the earth and skies.

As the twelfth night wraps up, let us remember that. Though embalmed he rose. And when he returns he will return as king forever. 

Unapologetic

Today I started reading a book that I have been looking forward to for a long time: Francis Spufford's Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. Spufford is a British author and novelist as well as a believer. Unapologetic is his effort to show that Christianity is not merely a matter of believing a set of facts but living a set of emotions. I read the first chapter, and Spufford already has pulled me in with something very near and dear to my heart. I have nothing to add; simply read this:

The point is that from the outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don't talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue. If I say that, from inside, it makes much more sense to talk about belief as a characteristic set of feelings, or even as a habit, you will conclude that I am trying to wriggle out, or just possibly that I am not even interested in whether the crap I talk is true. I do, as a matter of fact, that it is. For the record, I am not pulling the ultra-liberal, Anglican-going-on-atheist trick of saying that it's all a beautiful and interesting metaphor, snore bore yawn, and that religious terms mean whatever I want them to mean. . . I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. No dancing about; no moving target, I promise. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don't have the feelings because I've assented to the ideas. (18-19)

Advent

One of the things that I love most about remembering Christ's coming during the advent season is the way this remembering gestures toward the future, toward the second coming of Christ, the one in which he will wipe away every tear from every eye, in which he will take all of the brokenness and frailty and decay of this world and make it all new, in which people from every tribe, tongue, language, and race will come before him and cast their crowns at his feet. Ah, for that day.

I was playing with my son the other day. We were both pterodactyls; his pterodactyl name is Quackie (did you know that pterodactyls quack like a duck?) and mine is Daddy Pterodactyl. We were flying around doing pterodactyl stuff like pterodactyls do, when Quackie decided that we should play with some bear cubs and lion cubs. Daddy Pterodactyl thought that sounded like a terrific idea but had one concern: won't the lion and bear cubs (who are all named Owen, by the way) try to eat pterodactyls if we come into their cave? No, Quackie assured. I don't know, Quackie, I think they will try to eat us. No, they won't, he affirmed. He then sealed his argument with the clincher: Jesus came back and made them good and now we can be friends with them.

My son is going to have random memories of me grabbing him up into a huge hug and kissing his face off when he says what to him are probably random things, a habit I promise to stop by the time he is 14. What a beautiful idea he has and how true to Scripture's promise. This is the promise. Christ will come back. He will make enemies friends. Pterodactyls will play with lion cubs. I will fulfill my lifelong desire to wrestle with a bear.

Advent points us both backward and forward. Backward to the miracle of the incarnation, the mystery of God-made-man, the miracle of Emmanuel, God with us, "pleased as Man with men to dwell"; backward to the physicality of our faith, the real blood that coursed through real veins, the real cries fueled by real pain and real lungs that broke the silence of that night, the utterly non-metaphorical presence of God in the here and now.

And forward to that promised day when King Jesus comes back again in glory to judge the living and the dead. The future promise of Christ's reign is one of the things that resonates so deeply in Milton's "Nativity Ode." Here he pictures the eventual triumph of Christ:

The aged earth aghast,
With terror of that blast,
Shall from the surface to the center shake,
When at the worlds last session,
The dreadful Judge in middle air shall spread his throne.

And then at last our bliss
Full and perfect is,
But now begins; for from this happy day
Th' old Dragon underground,
In straiter limits bound,
Not half so far casts his usurped sway,
And wrath to see his Kingdom fail,
Swings the scaly Horror of his folded tail. (160-172)

The caveat, of course, in the triumph is the already-not-yet paradox of Christianity. The triumph has begun as he says so beautifully in that line: we are living in the midst of a partially restored cosmos, though one that still longs for its full redemption. Advent reminds us of our suspension, cautioning us to beware lest we fall into either side of the ditch. For the world is neither abandoned by God nor are his promises all fulfilled. There will be a day when he comes again, the "dreadful Judge" arrayed in splendor, and because of the first incarnation we can look forward to his return.

Advent is about waiting, too. Israel waiting, mourning in lonely exile until the Son of God appears. We Christians now waiting for the trumpet sound and to meet the Son of God in the air and welcome him back to his kingdom. Help us as we wait, O Lord. Help us to wait well.

Where Does Morality Come From?

During the early part of the fall I read Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Formerly of the University of Virginia, now at NYU, Haidt is a moral psychologist specializing in the ways in which we develop our moral intuitions. In this work, Haidt is asking the nearly impossible--for a bit of mutual understanding in the midst of the culture wars; for Republicans, Democrats, libertarians, and Dennis Kucinich to, if not smoke the peace pipe, at least put down the weapons. There are many different aspects of the book I want to jump into, and, with an eye to my prior success in blogging through multiple topics in a single book, I hope to write about a few in the coming weeks.

One of Haidt's central points, and the one he begins the book with, is that humans by nature desire to be righteous. We are not only "intrinsically moral" but also "intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental" (xix). We do not merely want to be right; we judge everyone who might feel differently. These righteous minds of ours make it possible for us to exist in large cooperative groups but also demand that those same groups be marked with "moralistic strife" (xx). In fact, some degree of conflict is what allows societies to flourish.

Haidt's first chapter addresses the question posed in this post title: where does morality come from? Haidt's central claim here is the claim that dominates Part 1 of the book: intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. There are two traditional explanations for morality: nativist or empiricist. A nativist believes morality to be inscribed in our nature, whether by God or by evolution (Christians and Darwin are in agreement here). The empiricist position is that we are born more or less as a blank slate and we learn from our culture and upbringing what is right and what is wrong. 

While Haidt was receiving his education in the field, a third option had emerged and immediately dominated: rationalism, which says that kids "figure out morality for themselves" (6). It is neither innate, nor learned directly from adults, but "self-constructed, as kids play with other kids" (7). We learn principles of fairness by playing games, and we reason to these conclusions in a utilitarian, greater-good mode of rationality. Haidt points out that liberals were quite taken with the idea of children as "moral philosophers trying to work out coherent ethical systems for themselves" (9). Indeed, most proponents of this moral development schema actively argued that "parents and other authorities were obstacles to moral development" (10). Further studies seemed to show that children intuited that rules about clothing, food, and many other things were merely social conventions, which can be changed or modified, while rules that prevented harm of others were moral rules. Thus, morality outside of principles of harm were all relegated to mere social convention, something perhaps valuable but ultimately mutable. 

Haidt felt the instinct to challenge this (liberal) conviction. For him it seemed "too cerebral" and lacking the emotion most of us feel about moral issues. When another child steals a toy from my son, he doesn't respond, "Dear sir, you have violated our social convention concerning property rights and a greater moral issue of harm to my welfare. Do consider returning the stick I am pretending is a sword forthwith." Haidt's research led him to tribes around the globe and over time he developed the conclusion that Western views of morality were almost entirely unique in the world.

Many of the differences in morality between the West and other cultures can be distilled to the intense individualism of the West in contradistinction to the sociocentrism, wherein the group or the tribe comes first, of much of the rest of the world. The liberal theories of western psychologists make sense in a western framework but would be unrecognizable to vast swathes of other cultures. In an individualist culture, anything that assaults the freedom of the individual can be questioned. In a sociocentric culture, anything that assaults the harmony and functionality of the group must be challenged.

As part of his doctoral research, Haidt organized a study to challenge the western perception of moral development. He wanted to pit "gut feelings about important cultural norms against reasoning about harmlessness, and then see which force was stronger" (22). One of the biggest surprises in Haidt's research was the number of people who tried to create victims in a clearly victimless violation. One of the taboo stories he had given was about eating a dead dog:

A family's dog is killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.

If harmfulness is the deciding factor in moral decisions, then this scenario should not alert moral alarms for people. But people feel a natural disgust toward dog-eating and tried to explain their revulsion in terms of harm (i.e. many people said the family would be harmed by getting sick from eating the meat). Haidt discerned that these justifications were simply "post hoc fabrications." People knew right away that something was wrong, but after the fact tried to come up with a rational explanation for why it was wrong. They reasoned from their gut and then counted on their brains for justification.

The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume wrote in 1739 that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them" (qtd. in Haidt 29). This is a controversial position and I have been in more than one good-natured argument on the subject in the past six months. We want to believe we are rational creatures, driven by our minds to discover truth and make moral decisions reasonably. But the evidence is pointing in the other direction. As Haidt claims, "moral reasoning [is] often the servant of moral emotions" (29). 

Rather than coming from our minds, morality seems to come from our gut.

It Is Well With My Soul

One of the blessings of my job teaching at a Christian school--and one entirely unique in my prior work experience--is the chance to work to glorify Christ as part of my work. This past Monday at our English department staff meeting our department head played the hymn "It Is Well With My Soul" to get the meeting kicked off. There is something about that song. It stayed with my all day; I have been singing it in the shower all week.

Many of you know the backstory. Horatio Spafford, the hymn-writer, and how he came to write the song. Spafford was heavily invested in Chicago real estate and was nearly bankrupted by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Distraught, he scheduled a family vacation to Europe to relieve the stress on his family. Delayed by business, he sent his wife and four daughters ahead of him. On their Atlantic crossing, the ship carrying his wife and daughter was struck by another ship and most of the passengers, including Spafford's four daughters, were killed. Spafford's wife, Anna, lived and upon arriving in England telegrammed Spafford the haunting words, "Saved alone." 

Spafford left the United States to be with his wife and England and on the voyage across the ocean he penned the song "It Is Well With My Soul." The courage and faith required to write something like that in the face of such tragedy is something I cannot even imagine. 

The third verse of the song is my favorite and the reason the song has been playing on auto loop in my head this week:

My sin, O the bliss of this glorious thought
My sin not in part but the whole
Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more
Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord, O my soul

The older I get the more aware I am of my own sin. I do not mean that I told a white lie to my wife last week or that I drank too much while in New York for a friend's wedding or that I swore while watching the Royals lose the World Series. I mean that deep down in my bones I am a sinner. That profound evil and depravity rule my nature. This awareness can easily lead to guilt and often has. But the faith that Christ has taken all of my sin and nailed it to the cross, that the record of debt that could be used to condemn me has been set aside, pulls me out of that despair.

In Knowledge of the Holy A.W. Tozer writes:

“The mercy of God is infinite too, and the man who has felt the grinding pain of inward guilt knows that this is more than academic.  ‘Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.’ Abounding sin is the terror of the world, but abounding grace is the hope of mankind. However sin may abound, it still has its limits, for it is the product of finite minds and hearts; but God’s ‘much more’ introduces us to infinitude. Against our deep creature-sickness stands God’s infinite ability to cure.”

What Tozer is driving at here, and what Spafford assures us in his song, is that our sin is weak and empty in the face of what Christ has done. The love and grace of God to us is infinite--boundless--while our own sin and failure and evil is finite--contained. We can only do so much that is wrong, our depravity can only go so far. But the mercy of Christ is contained by nothing, is inexhaustible. Where my sin abounds, his grace abounds far more.

That is why we can say that it is well with our souls.