How can I believe?
My great & good friend, Jeff Duntemann
was talking about religion, and said (somewhat edited):
"My key difficulty is one that a lot of educated
people confront as they try to integrate their spiritual feelings with
their earthbound, rational conscious mind. It's about . . . whether you
can think about God, where "think" means come to some sort of coherent
understanding of what God is and what He wants."
Of course we can -- bearing in mind that whatever
understanding we come to (coherent or otherwise) is only a limited view
of What and Who is beyond comprehension. Our ideas about the
world are a map of what is out there, drawn upon the screen of
our inner eye -- our
imagination. To quote Korzybski: "The map is not the
territory" Maps of what is beyond the world are inherently less
precise.
Science, to a great extent, is the process of
checking to see if our interior maps actually and accurately
reflect what is outside of our heads. There is no epistemological
or metaphysical guarantee that what is in our heads does match
what is outside -- we must perform the experiment -- and learn
more when it fails than when it succeeds.
"Does God have to make sense? And if so, what kind of sense, and how much?"
No, He doesn't -- but he seems to have gone out of
His way to try. God is, by definition, well beyond what we
can make perfect sense out of. In the Bible, we see Him talking to
Israel -- and later all mankind -- in several voices. Each
of these voices is pitched and tailored to the
understanding of the people He talks to -- whether nomadic Bedouins (Abraham), or sophisticated Greeks (Paul's Epistles).
The idea that we must, each, understand everything
in the world is an aberration of the last 3 centuries. The
"Enlightenment", for all that it did to kick-start science and
technology, imposed intellectual demands on us that no real human can
live up to. To think about and logically decide every proposition
is what is classified as Obsessive-Compulsive nowadays -- and a great
number of stories and biographies from the 18th and 19th centuries show
exactly that happening to their protagonists.
Rationality -- and bi-valent logic -- have inherent
limits, as Kurt Goedel showed in his Proof -- no usable logical system
exists which does not involve contradictions. Yet it is that
very demand -- lack of contradictions -- which makes the
Englightenment's demand so diabolical.
Jeff continues:
"People with stronger faith than I often miss the
importance of this question. Strong faith can pave over some of the
cracks into which pure rationality can fall."
And those cracks are quite wide and deep. With inherent contradictions at the bottom.
"Those of us without strong faith are left standing
on the edge of the crack, trying to decide what to do next."
The paralysis of analysis -- quite familiar.
"You've heard me mull some of these issues before
...: What is the purpose of divine punishment (Hell) that allows no
possibility of rehabilitation? How can infinite punishment for finite
transgression be just?"
Because everyone in Hell has decided, of their own
free will to be there. It is hard work getting into Hell, but
some people seem to relish that. The popular (and literalist
Fun_DUH-mentalist) idea of Hell as a place of literal physical fire and
ice -- as portrayed by Dante -- just does not wash nowadays. The
scientific revolution engendered by the Englightenment finds no holes
in the ground which lead to Tartarus.
We are then left to regard it as a state of the
individual soul -- who has willed (and continues to will) to turn away
from the Glory of the Presence -- and the chief suffering is know
that the Presence is there, but still willing to separate oneself from
it.
And further:
"If some of the Church Fathers were wrong (Aquinas
insisted that women were defective men) or simply psychotic (Augustine
claimed that watching the damned roast in Hell was one of the perks of
being in Heaven) how can people like me interpret these foundational
thinkers of the Church?"
By realizing that they were men -- and hence
fallible. By refusing to base (or reject) one's faith on the
ideas of someone else. Faith is not an intellectual assent to a
verbal proposition. It is a movement of the heart, a movement of
the intuition, an experience of the Godhead -- however distorted
through human perceptions and obsessions.
"If the worldwide community of Christians
(which includes Western Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox) have been
unable to come to a common understanding of the Bible, how can I
accept that the Bible is inerrant?"
"Inerrant" does not mean infallible. 1 Kings
7:23 says that PI is 3 -- the Hebrews, like the Greeks after them,
hated irrational numbers (those not expressible by a ratio of
integers), and tried, like the Tennessee Legislature in the 1920s, to
"rationalize" a Law of Nature.
Nor are we expected to follow the prescriptions to
bash babies against stones -- an example that atheists regularly use to
torment Fundies. The Bible is not an inerrant guide to life and
belief. It is first of all, the record of Israel and the early
Church's encounter with God. And it _IS_ an inerrant guide to
turn toward God, and to live our lives in His regard, and according to
His will -- which is to love as He loves us.
Aside from the Church -- the community which wrote,
edited, and published it -- the Bible has no authority whatever.
To set it up as an authority separate from the Church Christ founded --
His Mystical Body -- is to practice idolatry -- bibliolatry, in
fact. Setting up a strange god -- a book, even -- before God.
So the answer to the question is: Yes, the
Bible is inerrant, when interpreted in the context of the Church -- the
Body of Christ -- which formed it. The greatest modern theologian
I know (and by far one of the best writers), Bishop Kallistos Ware
(Oxford don turned Greek Orthodox bishop) puts it very
succinctly: "God is Love." Anything that portrays God as
unloving is a distortion and a heresy.
"Questions like these have haunted me since grade school."
Bright kid! (I was/am one, too :)
"We're not wrestling with gnats here. These are
major issues, which cook down to a series of Big Ugly Questions:"
"Is God loving but utterly ineffable?"
Yes. God is Mystery, not a proposition to be solved.
"Is God comprehensible but a sadistic bastard?
Not unless you are a Calvinist -- or a 50s Catholic Jansenist.
First, God is _NOT_ comprehensible -- everything we
say about Him is false, because infinitely inadequate. To pretend
to prove or define God by logic and syllogisms is simply hybris -- man
is not the measure of all things, and human intellect is not the ruling
principle of the Universe.
Second, the Jews are described in the Old Testament
as a "hard-hearted, stiff-necked race", and a great deal of the roaring
and rhetoric -- not to mention the graphic imagery -- was the attempt
by the prophets simply to get the attention of Israel. Being
polite didn't work very well -- a 2 x 4 was called for. To interpret that sort of thing as a positive command to
terrorize the neighborhood has to be the work of Satan -- not God.
"Is God simply incoherent?"
No -- but we often are.
"Does God exist at all?"
Well, yes -- to them that seek Him. See below.
"How can I tell, and what, in the end, is really on the table?"
Faith, as we learned from the Baltimore Catechism in the 1950s, is:
"A supernatural gift of God, infused into the soul at Baptism"
The Orthodox quite rightly call "Sacraments" --
"Mysteries", because they are the work of the Holy Spirit, not the
magical maneuverings of men. Faith is not an intellectual thing,
it is a visceral thing.
Understanding follows Faith -- when you feel God's
presence -- specifically Jesus' presence in the Eucharist -- you begin
to get an understanding of what the catechism and the preaching is all
about. Each of us approaches God in our own way, and mine is a
sort of a vison:
I am walking up a small hill -- there is a high
point sticking up at the top, with quite a drop below it.
As I walk up toward that point, the clouds boil and twist, lightning
flares from cloud to cloud, and ground to cloud. Thunder rolls,
shaking my guts and almost knocking me over. It gets louder and more
violent, the closer I get to the top.
As I reach the top, I throw out my arms and cry inarticulately.
The heavens open, and rivers of light and fire flow out.
I am Regarded.
The light and fire flow around me, and I am no more.
I wake sometime after, still shaking from that thunder and that Regard.
My bones tremble with the Fear of God.
My heart sings with the Love with which I have been Regarded.
My spirit soars with the Glory of the Presence into which I have been irresistably drawn.
My mind simply boggles.
I cry with Isaiah:
KADOSH!
KADOSH! KADOSH!
YAHWEH TSEBAOTH!
HOLY!
HOLY!
HOLY!
LORD GOD OF HOSTS!
HEAVEN AND EARTH ARE FILLED
WITH THY GLORY!
HOSANNA IN THE HIGHEST!
That, my friend, is Faith -- and grounded in that
faith, in that vision, I can go forth and preach the Love of God.
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