Atheists, Christians, and Fact Fundamentalism

In 1910 Harvard Professor Charles Elliot advocated for a new form of Christianity, a Christianity that would have only one commandment, “love of God expressed in service to others.” At the time, most
Christians were radically opposed to this expression of the new scholarly and liberal Christianity. Feeling threatened a group of Christians published a series of booklets called The Fundamentals in which they laid out a list of fundamental beliefs required to be a Christian. They listed five beliefs that they then used to define which people were Christian and which were not: 1) Biblical inerrancy, 2) virgin birth of Christ, 3) substitutionary atonement, 4) resurrection of Christ, and 5) the second coming of Christ in glory.

This was the birth of fundamentalism, but in order to understand the social context that gave rise to this movement a fuller understanding of the history of both the religion and philosophy is necessary.

In the 4th century the Christian religion began to be expressed in creeds. As Harvard Professor Harvey Cox succinctly notes the creeds began “replacing faith in Jesus with tenets about him.” As expressed in the fundamentalism of the 1900s all five beliefs are beliefs about Jesus, and though they deal with his birth and death not a single one touches on his life or teachings.

The Enlightenment era moved the West, religious and non-religious alike, towards a scientific view of the universe, a view in which the only truth that counted was a propositional truth. Statements must be either true or false. The law of the excluded middle (A or –A) formed a large part of the basis for the development of philosophical logic. There was a place for metaphor and symbolism, but only in literature and art, not religion.

This in turn gave rise to two main responses by the religious establishment. One is a kind of postmodern religion which emphasizes human spirituality and liberation from religious and political hierarchy. The two most prominent examples today are liberation theology and non-fundamentalist expressions of Pentecostalism in which the spirit truly is privileged over the written word.

The other response is fundamentalism, which grew as a reaction to the moral uncertainty of the scientific view of the universe. Feeling threatened with the loss of a religious context from which to discover meaning fundamentalist fought back by accepting the viewpoint of propositional truth and arguing for certain propositions that they determined to be fundamental to the faith.

The new atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennet, etc.) fought back with fiery rhetoric denouncing the blind belief in propositions that are clearly non-factual. Despite an appearance of intense disagreement with fundamentalists both the new atheists and Christian fundamentalists share a common premise, that the importance of religion is belief in a set of propositional truths.

I would like to suggest that religion at its core is not about belief.  Rather, it is about faith, a faith understood not as propositional assent to certain dogmas, but rather as trust, love, and awe at the mysteries of self, other, and universe. Albert Einstein wrote beautifully about the feeling of mystery that I consider to be at the heart of faith:

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.

Religion at its best is a human community attempting to grasp the ungraspable. It is a community developing a shared understanding through the use of poetry, symbol, myth, art, music and ritual to express that which can never be expressed in scientific prose.

Marcus Borg expressed the task of today’s theologians as follows, “I see my generation of public theologians as helping church people move into a form of Christianity that is non literalistic, non exclusivistic, deeply in touch with tradition, but with a historical [and] metaphorical way of understanding tradition and so forth.”

I inevitably find that whenever I attempt to talk or write about mystery or meaning I use Christian myth and symbol because Christianity is my native religious language. I think it is important to preserve that language while recognizing that it is not the only framework from which to interpret life, but rather one of many. I look forward to learning more about the others through my participation in State of Formation as well as working to refine my understanding of Christianity and move in a direction that avoids the fact fundamentalism that has hampered so much interreligious dialogue. I think we will have much more productive dialogue when we begin to express our religions in terms of stories rather than doctrines.

This blog is also published at: http://www.stateofformation.org/2011/01/atheists-christians-and-fact-fundamentalism/

When You Stretch Out Your Hands I Will Hide My Eyes From You

When it comes to the causes of poverty there’s usually a lot of disagreement. The classic liberal rhetoric will blame social structures (lack of jobs, poor educational opportunity) while the conservative will blame personal decisions (laziness, dropping out). There is truth on both sides, and both sides are mutually reinforcing, i.e. poor educational opportunity leads to a higher dropout rate.

But the Bible says the root cause of poverty is something altogether different, oppression. In Elsa Tamez’s thorough study of the Bible in over 90% of the cases that poverty is mentioned and the cause for it is known, that cause is oppression.

Of course, the fact that oppression was the cause of poverty in Biblical times doesn’t prove that it’s the cause of poverty today, but it certainly seems like something the thoughtful Christian should consider.

The poor are a forgotten class in our news media and political rhetoric. Both parties claim to be for the middle class. References to the working class are as close as any politician will get to the poor, the obvious reference to work being a way to avoid the now assumed cultural default that the poor are lazy. When the census reported that 1 in 7 people in the United States now live below the poverty line it did not even make a full 24 hour news cycle.

Oppression remains as part of the reality of our economic system. The extractive (mining) industry exploits both people and environment in the name of profit. The environmental and social destruction that is being reaped upon Appalachia would be unacceptable (or at the very least newsworthy) in any other region of the U.S.  

As Jeff Goodell wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed, “…mining is destroying vast swaths of Appalachia while providing fewer well-paying jobs. From 1984 to 2004, the average coal miner's per-shift productivity more than doubled, while wages declined by 20 percent (adjusted for inflation). If we simply increase consumption, we will be condemning large areas of the country, including eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia, to national sacrifice zones.”

We are all linked to and complicit in this destruction.  You can enter your zip code here and learn which mining operations are powering your home.

International mining is even less regulated and more destructive of the environment, individual workers, and entire social fabrics. The phrase ‘blood diamonds’ has made it into the general social consciousness, but the mining of coltan remains largely unknown. Coltan is a mineral that is used in many electronic devices, particularly cell phones.  Danish Church Aid reports:

The largest reserves of Coltan are to be found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and much of the finance sustaining the civil wars in Africa, especially in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is directly connected to Coltan profits. Coltan is extracted under terrible working conditions in mines in Eastern Congo.

The United Nations reports child labour in Africa has significantly increased in Coltan mines. In some regions of the Congo, about 30 percent of schoolchildren are now forced to work in the mines.

Eastern Congo is the site of the most lethal conflict since WWII with over 5.4 million killed and that number rising by 45,000 a month (International Rescue Committee). Rape is commonly used as a weapon of war in the conflict, and thousands of women have been raped by armed soldiers.

Last month I attended a panel hosted by the Mennonite Central Committee. One of the speakers was Rev. Rose Lala Biasima, a member of the National Parliament of Congo and the Associate General Secretary of the Department of Women and Family of the Church of Christ in Congo. I vividly remember her telling us, “When you hold a cell phone, you hold Congolese blood in your hand.”

I immediately thought of Isaiah 1:15 “When you stretch out your hands I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.”

The blood and suffering of the poor in the Congo and in our own backyards of Appalachia is cutting us off from God. Jeremiah condemned King Jehoiakim saying, “Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice; who makes his neighbors work for nothing, and does not give them their wages;” (22:13). Jeremiah goes on to say that to do justice to the poor and needy is to know God. (22:16)

Today Jeremiah might declare woe to those who power their house by unrighteousness and communicate with friends and family by injustice. Woe to those of us who make our neighbor's children work in mines and do not give them living wages. Oppression is not the only cause of poverty,  but denouncing oppression remains as much the concern of the Christian today as it was for the Isaiah, Jeremiah, all of the other prophets, and Jesus.

Isaiah spells out what we must do to repent and wash ourselves clean. We must turn away from the systematic exploitation of our neighbors and our planet and instead seek justice and defend the cause of the powerless. (1:16-17)

Wash yourselves; make yourselves

     clean;

remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;

   cease to do evil,

learn to do good;

    seek justice,

rescue the oppressed,

   defend the orphan,

plead for the widow.

Introduction

Hi!

I'm Nate and I decided to start a blog because it gives me a chance to collect my thoughts in an organized fashion and an opportunity to work on my informal writing. I've had to write a few blogs for work, and that got me interested. I also really miss writing papers for school. If anyone enjoys reading my blog or wants to comment and enter the discussion that's also great.

I'm currently working at Jubilee USA as part of a year with the Lutheran Volunteer Corps. I called it the Catholic Lutheran to reflect the way I feel about the two churches. I grew up in an ELCA church but I have immense respect for the Catholic Church, and really appreciate the contributions of Catholic theologians, particularly in the field of ethics. I'm also marrying into the Catholic Church, though I do not plan to convert.

Though I still consider myself a Lutheran I wanted to acknowledge the way my experience in the Catholic Church has shaped me. A lot of my posts will be about one of the two church bodies and most of the rest will be reflections on theology that are shaped by my background in the Catholic and Lutheran churches. I may be a Lutheran, but I think I'm a Catholic Lutheran.

As a final note, this is not a personal blog or a place where I'll be writing about my private life. Though events in my life may trigger certain reflections on theological and Biblical material the blog will be about theology and current events.