The Story of Secularism (I)

Well I’m back from a week of work-related travel (thank you Bethany Players) and in the process of planning out my summer. As always there will be a fair bit of time spent on trying to catch up on some of my teaching areas but I’m also starting to think about August 25 and my initial trip to Prague to begin PhD studies.

Part of that task is trying to get through Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, a massive volume that attempts the ambitious task of telling the story of how, in approximately 500 years, Western culture made the transition from being a place where disbelief in God was virtually impossible to being a place where it is quite easy.

One of the interesting transitions he talks about in the first few chapters is between the pre-modern and the modern self. The argument is that people thought of themselves quite differently 500 years ago and that changing concepts of the self are a crucial part of the story of secularism.

In the pre-modern world the boundary between the ’self’ and the world is ‘porous’ (permeable). The self is vulnerable to all kinds of external forces, often considered to be spiritual in nature but including a whole range of phenomena such as fertility, prosperity, natural disasters and success or defeat in battle. Taylor catalogues this in some detail but the basic conclusion is that the self was seen as one very vulnerable piece of a complex cosmic order.

Some have referred to this kind of world as being ‘enchanted’. One example is the fascination with relics that is pervasive in medieval Christianity. Whether these relics are the bones of the saints or the elements of the Eucharist, the belief was that they contained real spiritual power that could protect them from the evils that threatened them. It’s not as if these forces ‘existed’ for those who happened to be Christians but somehow didn’t for those who were not, the world was generally seen to be charged with meaning and the self was a vulnerable (’porous’) piece of this kind of a world.

In this kind of a world, the church was a place of refuge and security, an institution that guaranteed that good would ultimately triumph over evil and that the self, even if it suffered in this life, would somehow survive in to the next.

In this kind of a world there is great risk and great danger in ‘going heretic’ because to do so is to take one’s chances in a frightening and dangerous world. In this kind of world, it is virtually impossible to disbelieve in God. From today’s perspective it is easy to look back on the ‘intolerance’ of earlier forms of Christian belief but we rarely understand how people understood their collective fate to be bound up in their corporate adherence to religious norms. This was their only guarantee of order or safety. The idea that an ordered society could exist without shared religious beliefs was unthinkable.

From the perspective of 21st century and liberal democratic ideals about the sovereignty of the individual, the only real sense many can make of a time as strange as the pre-modern world (and it’s religious uniformity) is to suppose that an authoritarian church was squelching the curiosity of its members and suppressing challenges to its supremacy.

While there are examples of this kind of thing, Taylor describes this as a naive way of understanding what that world was actually like and how the transition to a secular age actually took place. It can be very easy to read our own assumptions onto earlier generations and suppose that every person that has lived has valued the things we value, aspired to the things we aspire to and enjoyed the same level of relative economic security and comfort from which to indulge in questions of personal fulfillment.

While this is a more convenient way of reading history it tends to assume that the entire sweep of history culminates in people somewhat like ourselves. This might be an attractive piece of fiction but it is actually evidence of how difficult it is to honestly examine our own basic assumptions in the process of understanding how we came to hold them.

The Incompetent Keenan

Let’s review the wisdom of Keenan after the demise of the Flames last night.

Apparently it involves not only dressing Anders Eriksson, but using him in key situations, on both the power play and the penalty kill. How is someone bad enough to be a healthy scratch one game and good enough to throw out against Thornton and Co. on a power play the next? Only Keenan knows.

It also involves pulling Miikka Kiprusoff in a 4-2 game with well over a period to go (Curtis Joseph promptly let in a soft wrist shot that finished the Flames off). None of the four goals to that point were Kipper’s fault. Listening to the post-game interviews you could tell there were a lot of players who didn’t think much of Keenan’s decision.

The final straw for me was a third period power-play when the Flames were down 5-3. Who would you expect to see on the ice? Well obviously Jim Vandermeer (at FORWARD!!), David Moss and Anders Eriksson. You know, the snipers.

Well done Keenan. With coaching like you’ve given us it’s a miracle we even made the playoffs. Here’s hoping your ‘existence’ is somewhere far away from Calgary next year.

The Philosophical Keenan

OK, it’s probably time for some kind of commentary on my Flames (it is that time of year after all). Yes, it’s been great to see the boys push the Sharks to game 7, yes it’s been great to see Jarome Iginla establish himself as the best playoff performer out there and yes it’s been great to see the Saddledome faithful decked out in red again.

But all of this pales in comparison to the joy I receive from listening to Mike Keenan’s ‘insights’ following these games. After the big 2-0 win on Sunday Keenan had this to say regarding the improved performance of the underachieving Kristian Huselius,

”That’s the best hockey game I’ve seen him play. I think it was important for Kristian to step out of the box and find a different place to live and have a different existence on the ice.” (ht: tsn)

Wow, thanks Mike. That is truly profound. With wisdom like this behind us, how could we possibly lose game 7.

Apologetics 10 - The Challenge of Pluralism

Well I’ve finally dug myself out from under a pile of year-end marking and grad has come and gone, so I thought I should at least wrap up some of the topics we covered over the past few weeks of my apologetics class. We spent the last few classes talking about the challenge of pluralism which is a loose way of referring to the basic sentiment that any kind of exclusive faith is untenable (and probably arrogant) in a world in which there are so many religious (or irreligious) options available.

A fairly important distinction (as always) concerns some of the different ways the word ‘pluralism’ is understood. The significant shift here has been that the word has gone from describing a fact (there are many different options), to expressing a preference (it’s a good thing there are many different options) to prescribing an evaluation (it is wrong to discriminate between different options). The word is currently used primarily with one of the last two meanings in mind.

The basic motivation for advocates of pluralism is avoiding particularism - the uncomfortable idea that ‘the truth’ could be expressed primarily within one particular tradition or one particular way. We don’t like to think that lots of sincere, morally decent and otherwise pleasant people could be at least partially wrong regarding their basic beliefs. So pluralism is put forward as an alternative. For many, it seems better to evacuate all perspectives of their exclusive claims to truth and affirm their therapeutic value instead.

So whatever devout religious adherents think they are doing, what they are really doing is expressing their own partial and limited understanding of an ultimate reality is beyond any one perspective. The problem is that most religious perspectives make real claims about ‘the way things are’ and most seem fairly resistant to paternalistic reminders that those truth claims are simply partial attempts at explaining a reality that is beyond them (a reality that, interestingly, only the pluralist sees).

The irony is that the pluralist has argued that of all the perspectives on the table, the ‘true believer’ is the one who is wrong. I, for example, may happen to think that Jesus Christ is the definitive revelation of the character of God but in reality that is just my particular way of approaching things. I am basically wrong about what is going on in the religious realm and my view is clarified in light of what the pluralist argues is really happening. The same could be said for any other religious perspective that claimed to tell the truth about the way things are.

So the circle is complete. The pluralist, motivated by the desire to avoid telling people that they are wrong, has told most people that they are wrong. Motivated by a distaste for totalizing worldviews, he has offered a total view of ‘the truth’ that relativizes all particular perspectives that do not fit within one particular scheme.

All this to say that, while there is a certain attraction to the idea that each religious (or irreligious) perspective is right in its own way, the stubborn question of what is actually the case about reality will not go away. The pluralist perspective, for all its apparent generosity and tolerance, is still offering a vision of what is true and this vision, while it appears to accommodate all others, actually serves to trivialize them to the point of irrelevance.

This is not to say that there is not a needed rebuke here. Christians have long been guilty of an over-confident approach that smugly assumes the corner on truth while remaining ignorant of the social and cultural factors that have influenced their beliefs. So the reminder of the ‘partial’ nature of all human knowledge is a good and necessary one but it does not absolve us of the task of seeking to discover what is actually the case. The fact that our knowledge is incomplete is not evidence the truth is inaccessible.

Apologetics 9 – The Resurrection of Jesus

The Christian faith is dependent on an historical event; it is dependent on the fact of the empty tomb. As Paul himself wrote, ‘If Christ has not been raised then your faith is futile’ (1 Cor 15:17). So there is very little doubt that, at least historically, Christians have been people who have staked their lives and their identities on a dead man being resurrected.

There has been a lot of effort made to ‘investigate’ the early Christian claims of the resurrection of Jesus, many of which focus on details surrounding the resurrection itself (the empty tomb, the post-mortem appearances of Jesus, the reliability of the reports of the first witnesses etc.). I do not intend to minimize the force of these arguments but I have found the origin of the Christian church itself to be one of the most persuasive arguments in favour of the resurrection.

While there is a wide spectrum of belief on the question of whether or not the resurrection really happened, there is no debate over the fact that the early Christians believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead and that this belief launched the Christian church. How do we explain this belief? In brief, either the early Christians told the truth about what they experienced or else they were mistaken.

If they were mistaken then are a few options for explaining how that came to be the case. They could have been lying, they could have been so traumatized by the loss of Jesus that they manufactured the idea that he had not really died, they could have experienced some kind of cognitive dissonance that led to their ‘projection’ of the idea that Jesus was alive again, they could have mistakenly believed he was dead when in reality he only fainted on the cross and was later revived in the tomb.

Or it’s possible that we have misunderstood the disciples all these years. Maybe they weren’t talking about an actual physical resurrection at all. Maybe they were referring to Jesus’ spiritual exaltation , his final vindication by God after the suffering and rejection he experienced at the cross. The theories that attempt to account for how people could have come to the conclusion that Jesus was alive again are numerous and well-publicized.

When you look at the actual history of the first century, however, it becomes fairly obvious that the word ‘resurrection’ has a fairly clear (and limited) semantic range. There is no equivalent belief in Greek philosophy, where the afterlife is thought to be a shadowy existence in Hades or a paradisaical state where the soul contemplates the perfection of the forms. In Second Temple Judaism, there was a growing belief in a future Resurrection where the nation of Israel would be restored and the righteous dead would rise but that was not a vision of life after death, it was a vision of the end of the age.

In the first century the word ‘resurrection’ means what it appears to mean – a dead person somehow being alive again. The fact that this was the word that Jesus’ disciples used to describe what happened after his death is a very unique historical fact that requires some kind of explanation.

There were a number of messianic movements in the years leading up to and following the life of Jesus. Judas Maccabeus (167-160 BC), Judas the Galilean (6 BC), Simon Bar Giora (AD 66-75) and Simeon Ben Kosiba (AD 132-135) were all seen, at least by some, as messianic figures. All of these men died at the hands of the pagans against whom they were revolting, and none of these men were proclaimed as ‘resurrected’ by any of their followers after their deaths. All of these movements died with their leaders which begs the important question of how Jesus continued to be proclaimed as the Messiah, even after his death.

There was a widespread belief that Jewish martyrs were exalted to the presence of God as they awaited the final Resurrection of the dead and this would have been the default assumption regarding what happened to Jesus after his death. What is critical to note is that the word ‘resurrection’ would not have been used to describe it.

So when it comes to explaining the historical fact of the disciple’s belief in Jesus’ resurrection, we can rule out any kind of a confusion between physical resurrection and spiritual exaltation. N.T. Wright puts it well:

“It is impossible to conceive what sort of religious or spiritual experience someone could have that would make them say that… a crucified leader was the Messiah when he obviously was not… However strong the disciples sense may have been that Jesus had been vindicated, that they had been forgiven, or whatever, they would still not have said he had been raised from the dead.”

While it will always be counter-intuitive to proclaim the resurrection of Christ, the historical fact of early Christian belief in the resurrection is undeniable and demands some kind of explanation. Obviously the explanation that seems best to me is that the tomb really was empty and Jesus was, in fact, risen.

Apologetics 8 – A New Story About Christian Origins

We live in a world in which the name ‘Jesus’ is not entirely unfamiliar. The Western world was born out of the ruins of the Roman empire and this world, from the time of Constantine onward, was a fusion of imperial power and the Christian religion. With this as the historical backdrop of our culture, we will never quite be able to shake loose from at least passing interest in Jesus and the church that bears his name.

Yet the majority of contemporary Westerners have rarely read the gospels and know very little about the historical Jesus. So we have a world in which Jesus is at least somewhat familiar but where most people have only a faint knowledge of what the Bible actually says about him and even less of an understanding of the history of the church. The same could be said for large segments of the Christian church itself. So there is strong interest in Jesus because of his historical influence. There is also a strong appetite for speculative theories (see a recent Maclean’s article for a regrettably obvious example) that undercut received wisdom and challenge the authority of the institutional church (of whatever variety).

So a new story (what N.T. Wright calls the ‘new myth of Christian origins‘) about how Christianity developed has emerged in recent inquiry into the historical Jesus. It goes something like this: the first four centuries of the history of the church were a battleground over what Christianity would look like. This is very much the picture presented in popular depictions of this time period (the classic example being Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code). The church was struggling to define itself and there is not much distinction made between something that happened in the first century or something that happened in the fourth. It’s almost as if these 400 years are treated as a self-contained period where everyone was asking the question: Who gets to decide what the picture of Jesus is going to look like? Who gets to decide what kind of religion Christianity is going to become?

A variety of texts were in circulation, all of which made claims as to what would be the accepted picture of Jesus. The writings that made it into our NT were chosen by the church in order to reinforce its power and to suppress ‘minority reports’. Jesus was ‘divinized’ by the church through its selection of certain gospels and ignoring others (Gospel of Thomas, Peter, Mary, Judas etc.). So the first four centuries saw a kind of Darwinian struggle for survival among rival texts (or, perhaps, ‘memes’), all of which sought to present a certain authoritative picture of Jesus that would carry the day for the fledging Christian church.

The problem is that the history didn’t really unfold this way. It’s not as if a council of bishops had 60-80 equally valid presentations of Jesus and simply selected the ones that reinforced their own power and suppressed the role of women in the early church. The four canonical gospels are nearly unanimously affirmed as being written in the latter half of the first century (so within a generation or two of Jesus’ life and death). The so–called ‘lost gospels’ are mostly from the second and third century (although Thomas is still hotly debated).

The most obvious reason for evaluating these gospels as being later than the canonical gospels is that they look very Gnostic in terms of their theology. Gnosticism is a mingling of Greek philosophy with early Christianity that occurred as the early church moved from being primarily Jewish to becoming primarily Gentile in its composition. The Jesus that emerges from many of these later gospels looks a lot more like a neo-Platonist than a Jewish prophet and it seems safe to say that the historical development would have been away from Jesus as a Jewish prophet announcing the kingdom of God and toward a kind of wise sage offering secret knowledge as the pathway to salvation.

The historical origins of the New Testament is a fascinating topic in and of itself but it seems to me that most of the more speculative theories about who Jesus really was and what the church ought to have looked like are based on a fairly suspicious reading of the motives of the early church that tends to import twenty-first century ideals back to a time in which they would appeared as foreign as that time appears to us.

Apologetics 7 – The Historical Jesus

It would not be much of an overstatement to say that the historical claims about Jesus of Nazareth get very close to the heart of the Christian faith. While Christianity may be many other things, it is above all, a commitment to a personal God that we believe was revealed in an actual flesh and blood human being who lived in Palestine in the first century AD, who died a criminal’s death and was physically raised from the dead three days later.

So Christianity is a fundamentally historical faith. It’s not as if Jesus was merely an exemplar of a life lived in union with God, nor is it the case that Jesus primarily sought to offer some kind of spiritual enlightenment (much of which would align with the teaching of other religious perspectives). No, in the case of Christianity, if the things we say happened didn’t happen, then what we’re left with is not much at all.

Yet we live in a time when people are more and more suspicious regarding how much we can actually know about who Jesus actually was. There is a suspicion in the air (popularized, for example, by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code) that the church probably covered up the truth about Jesus and presented a view that reaffirmed their own authority.

At a scholarly level there is widespread suspicion that the four canonical gospels are not reliable historical accounts of Jesus’ life because they were written by people who believed in him and were committed to propagating certain theological views about his identity. So many have seen the job of New Testament scholarship as that of getting behind the gospels themselves to the real Jesus of history (as opposed to the exalted Christ of faith).

Of course this begs the important question of what we mean by this term ‘history’. The most obvious answer is ‘history is simply what happened’. We might imagine someone on the scene as events are unfolding, hopefully recording them on a video camera so that there will be no doubt about what actually happened. There is simply the objective reality that ’something happened’ or ’something was said’. The challenge is to get at what that something was with as great a degree of accuracy as possible.

Increasingly people are realizing that this type of history is nearly impossible to record. Someone is behind the camera deciding which events or words to focus on and which to ignore. Even a brief glance at the evening news and the rampant use of ’sound-bites’ should make this obvious. So we might be forced to the conclusion that every historian, whether someone recording on video or writing on ancient papyri, is forced to be selective. And this means that whatever ‘really happened’, historical records of anything are acts of interpretation.

In the first century, history was primarily oral and the primary interest was in the meaning and significance of events (as opposed to detached, objective reporting of facts). It is very difficult for us to think about a world in which our knowledge of the past was passed down around a campfire or through a song.

Our minds immediately jump to questions of how reliable this information was or how it could be verified. But we must continually remind ourselves that these are our questions not those of the writers of the gospels. While we may have standards for what counts as reliable history, those standards cannot be imported back into a first century context in which they would have made little sense.

And this is not merely a ‘Christian’ view of history, this seems to be the view of Greco-Roman historians as well. Our basic historical knowledge of the ancient world is dependent upon sources that would seem dubious by contemporary standards. One of the more famous examples comes from a Greek historian named Thucydides who recorded the history of the Peloponnessian War of the 5^th century before Christ. Thucydides writes,

It was difficult for me to remember the exact substance of the speeches I myself heard and for others to remember those they heard elsewhere and told me of… I have given the speeches in the manner in which it seemed to me that each of the speakers would best express what needed to be said about the ever-prevailing situation, but I have kept as close as possible to the total opinion expressed by the actual words.

It seems that Thucydides thought his responsibility was to record the ‘gist’ of what happened and what was said and the uncomfortable fact is that most of our knowledge of the ancient world depends on this kind of historical work.

So are the gospels historical? They do undoubtedly look different than modern historical writing. Each of the four gospels has a clear ‘theological angle’ and there is no effort present Jesus in a detached, objective manner. The gospels omit many key biographical details (e.g. Jesus’ childhood and early adulthood, his appearance) and focus predominantly on a handful of key teachings and the events of the last week of Jesus’ life. The overwhelming emphasis throughout is on interpreting the meaning of Jesus’ life and teaching. While this kind of ‘agenda’ may seem unreliable to modern historians it was very common in ancient literature and does not force the conclusion that because the writers of the gospels believed in Jesus, their writings are unreliable.

Craig Blomberg summarizes the ancient view of history well, “The attitude then was: Why bother to record and pass on the story of certain events unless there was a moral to be learned from them? So if the Gospels were not ideological, they would have been unparalleled among ancient historical and biographical writing.”

All this to say, our evaluation of the sources of our knowledge of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus must be made on first century and not twenty-first century terms. To fail to do this may say more about our ideologies than those we are purporting to uncover. When we do evaluate the gospels in this light we see that they cannot be so casually dismissed. There is the issue of ‘other gospels,’ other accounts of the life of Jesus that were excluded from the New Testament canon but that is a subject for another day.

A New Opportunity

In the midst of a sea of papers and general busyness, I recently received some very welcome news. I’ve been accepted into a MPhil/PhD program at the International Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague, Czech Republic (see below). I first heard about this school through a friend here at Bethany (who is nearly finished the same program) so it’s been great to have someone to reassure me that this could be a good option for me and to give me a sense of what the next nine or so years of my life might look like.

This program involves yearly trips to Prague (tough I know!) for three week seminars with the bulk of research and writing completed here at home. My broad area of interest (to be refined and clarified significantly I imagine) is on secularism and its impact on evangelical piety. So the first round of study takes place at the end of this coming August. I can’t wait!

Apologetics 6 - The Problem of Evil

We’ve spent the better part of the last three weeks talking through what is surely the most significant challenge to Christian belief and undoubtedly one of the questions that casts a shadow over all of human existence. The problem of evil has occupied the brightest philosophical and theological minds for most of recorded history so there is not much point in trying to come up with an original angle. But what follows is a brief summary of the approach that seems best to me.

At the outset it is important to note that while evil is undoubtedly a theological/philosophical problem it is first and foremost an existential problem. All of us are far more interested in coping with actual experiences of suffering than we are in whether or not the problem is ’soluble’ intellectually or spiritually. Evil is above all something that is suffered and only secondarily something that can be explained. Jurgen Moltmann puts it well:

[Evil] is not really a question at all, in the sense of something we can ask or not ask, like other questions. It is the open wound of life in this world. It is the real task of faith and theology to make it possible for us to survive, to go on living with this open wound (The Trinity and the Kingdom, 47,49)

Nevertheless, we have to make some kind of attempt at an answer (and that is all that can be offered, in my opinion), especially those of us who hold to belief in the providence of a good God. My own approach to the problem is based on two key convictions that have shaped many historical Christian responses to evil.

The first is that the world was originally created in freedom and that human freedom is part of what it means to bear the image of God. This is not freedom for its own sake but freedom as the prerequisite for genuine love. Christians believe that God is love. God does not happen to be loving (as compared to some other standard), God defines love and is the source of all human love as a result. This freedom to love defines God and this freedom to love has defined what he has created out of the overflow of that love.

The second conviction is that evil has resulted from a corruption of that freedom to love. While the origins of evil will always remain a speculative and mysterious subject, a Christian view holds that it originates in a corrupted will, a will that has misused the freedom to love. This is the view depicted in the Genesis 3 account of the fall of humanity, a fall away from original goodness. It is from within this ’space’ created for free creatures that the possibility of evil must have emerged.

So evil, in the Christian understanding, must always be described as corrupted goodness. C.S. Lewis famously remarked in Mere Christianity that there is no such thing as being bad for the sake of ‘badness’ but there is the distinct possibility of doing good for its own sake. What he calls badness always emerges from the right goals pursued through the wrong means.

Having said all of this, Christians are still open to the question, “Was the price of human freedom worth paying? Should God have not seen the misery that would come with the gift of freedom and decided against it?” This is an argument that has a certain force. Who, after all, can look honestly at some of the horrors of history and not wonder whether such a terrible gift was worth the price.

At the end of the day, however, it is a profoundly moral argument. And an argument against God that depends on a moral foundation like this seems doomed to fail. How, after all, can you argue against God’s existence based on what kind of a world God should have made when the word ’should’ itself implies a moral standard that must be accounted for.

As a Christian, I confess to an ongoing sense of bewilderment and grief at the extent of innocent suffering and senseless violence that plagues our world. I am forced to admit, however, that the choice to make this kind of a world was not mine and that my vision is very small and very limited. This compels me to think that the possibility of goodness and love, however partially realized, is itself a ‘problem‘ that demands an explanation because, like our revolt against evil, our attachment to goodness, love and beauty points to a memory of a world and of people better than what we see around us.

Go Read This

This is a fascinating read on parenting, mortality and the way we seem incurably drawn toward a lasting hope. It sort of reminds me with a conversation Julie and I had the other day about whether or not she had to become an adult some day. The upshot of the conversation was that she was OK with being an adult as long as we could all still live together. There’s something about as that wants to preserve and make permanent the relationships and experiences that matter the most.

Ht: Ryan