Undeception

Since childhood, my personality has been marked by an undercurrent of a haunting yearning sometimes referred to in its extreme forms as “melancholy”, very much like what C. S. Lewis called “joy”. I have always chalked it up to my Scottish heritage, but I imagine a lot of other ethnicities (I’m thinking particularly of Russians) can claim the same. I’m not prone to depression or anything, but I’ve always been attracted to haunting music, mystical stories — anything that might be referred to as sad beauty.

It’s something I’d love to stir up in whichever of my children are like me. To that end, when I tuck my children in each night, I’ve begun to complement “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” and “Seek Ye First” with some old Scottish folk songs/ballads I know, such as “Loch Lomond” (stay with me — this is going somewhere):

By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes
Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomon’
Where me and my true love were ever wont to gae
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomon’
Oh! ye’ll tak’ the high road and I’ll tak’ the low road
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye
For me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomon’.

The allusion to death is oblique enough there, isn’t it? But the sadness that’s there is made more potent by combination with such a beautiful Gaelic melody.

Another song whose melody I find absolutely mesmerizing is “Lowlands” (the version in a minor mode), an old sea shanty that evidently originated in the foreboding dreams of sailors long away at sea that they took as ill omens concerning their loved ones at home. “I dreamed a dream the other night/Lowlands! Lowlands away, my John/. . ./And then I knew my love was dead/My lowlands away.”

Then there’s Bonnie George Campbell:

Hie upon highlands and laigh upon tay
Bonnie George Campbell rode out on a day
He sadled, he bridled, and gallant rode he
And hame [i.e. home] cam his guid horse
But never cam he.

Of course, I won’t be singing any of the later verses that speak of the bloody saddle — at least not at bedtime! But the thought of doing so does remind me that people in older cultures gained an awareness of the gruesome nature of war much earlier and more vividly than we do with our sanitized and cartoonized versions.

I got to thinking about my early attraction to the bittersweet, my acknowledgement of the inevitability of hardship, and my love for humanity’s attempts to cope with sorrow through expression as in these songs, and not through suppression or denial. Indeed, in bygone days it was much harder to deny sorrow than it is in modern day America, where a broken arm is sometimes about the worst thing a child can imagine happening to someone. But when I compare myself with so many others in my religious tradition, I see a definite contrast.

The broad community of evangelical faith with which I am most familiar does not duly acknowledge sorrow and suffering. They regularly deny it and suppress it: this is evident in their contemporary Christian music stations advertising their wares as  ”positive, encouraging” music. I understand that they offer this as an alternative to hopeless, purposeless music that they find destructive; without hope, suffering can indeed be devastating, and wallowing in it is not going to help anyone. But what I find is that they actually miss out on engaging negative topics by offering stock slogans as their solution. Another evidence is that they’re suspicious of down-to-earth efforts at meeting needs, spurning social concern because they think that the black in this world is challengeable only by their white: the gospel.

Now, I do think there is relief for our personal struggles to be found in turning to God, but the impression given by so many of these believers – which they themselves seem to accept – is of a dramatic “before Jesus” and “after Jesus” photo that is not commonly fulfilled in a way relevant to most people’s life experiences. Many if not most of these believers end up in practice denying the potency of problems such as uncertainty, fear, and suffering rather than acknowledging them as mainstays of our existence with which we need help and for which we need to offer help beyond the formulae and platitudes. When they chalk up everything unpleasant to a Fall long eons ago it has the effect of filing it all away for a fix long eons away. Just “praise the Lord” and get on with it (where “it” means praising the Lord and trying to get others to.) The Ned Flanders stereotype came from somewhere, you know.

But the denial of problems doesn’t end there. In fact, it’s typified most obviously in the blind trust they place in the Bible and in their tradition’s interpretation of it. They steadfastly renounce all who would peel back the veneer for just a moment to admit that, by any reasonable definition, there are problems with their inerrant answer book; to do so would mean that they’d have to live in a world that’s not black and white. This is clearly intolerable.

This leads me to consider that there’s no coincidental correlation among those of us most mesmerized by haunting beauty and precious sorrow, those who truly come to grips with difficulties, suffering, and hardship as integral to the human experience and make the best of them, and those of us who are willing to grapple with a living faith as it exists in a grayscale world, with no hope for certainty, no inerrant guide to the world, and only a mystical inkling that, at bottom, things might really make sense after all.

All of this is closely intertwined with what Keats called “Negative Capability.” As Keats described it, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” he might be described as having negative capability. He associated it with great poets, for whom a deep-seated sense of beauty permeates all they do, such that beauty is evident, or even most evident, where there is pain. Negative capability is often used these days to explain someone who is content to find value in life even while embracing uncertainty in the most fundamental aspects of our existence, and who will be satisfied to enjoy the journey even when guaranteed no safe arrival.

Here I think we see another commonality between the atheists who suffer no exception to their rationalistic epistemology and conservative Christians who will countenance no challenge to their epistemology founded upon the divine perfection of Scripture. I could never be comfortable either place.

My thoughts turn yet again toward Abraham (regardless of questions of his historicity), whose patriarchy I claim. He was called out by a mysterious deity and followed Him with implicit trust from a familiar land to a strange land. God’s test of faith during the Mount Moriah incident should scandalize the conservative Christian because it consisted of challenging Abraham to trust Him even when it contradicted systematic theology. Keats described the great poets as the exemplars of negative capability for whom “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” The faith of Abraham was this: he never let Beauty leave his sight despite the changing scenery, uncertainty, doubts, and conflicting information he was given. I gladly call him Father Abraham.

I wonder what other correlations that can be drawn. For instance, I’ll bet that many of us who continue on our religious journey even after having our systematic faith exposed as a paper mâché bulwark are likely to be the type most enamored of fantasy and science fiction. Thoughts?

My regulars know that I like podcasts, so I thought I’d give everyone a heads-up on a reboot of an old podcast (on which I once appeared) from LFAM.

The new version is called At the Well Radio. In this incarnation, the regular hosts are the podcast’s founder, a young Christian who’s traveled a path similar to my own, and a Canadian friend who self-identifies as agnostic.

The goal of this podcast is to help Christians and other seekers to navigate a “third way” between mainstream evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity and an absence of all faith in God, encouraging its audience to step back from unexamined dogmas and look at what — besides condemnation — our faith has to offer the world. By partnering with an agnostic, Travis is able to use this podcast to strip away the artificial barriers between those with faith and those without faith that unnecessarily exacerbate the Church’s isolation from our mission field (the world) which obstructs our accomplishment of anything useful in the world.

The show takes the approach of looking at a number of news items with their commentary. At times they obviously enjoy tipping evangelicals’ sacred cows, but not for the pleasure of it so much as to make those evangelicals aware of the dangers of having sacred cows in the first place.

Do check it out.

Since at least the time of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man up until quite recently in Francis Collins’s The Language of God, as well as among Vatican theologians, it has been argued that at some indeterminate time within our species’ evolution from primates, there was a special endowment from God upon our ancestors whereupon we knew right from wrong and morality was born. Further, it is argued that natural processes cannot explain humanity’s innate sense of right and wrong (regardless of the fact that it differs somewhat from culture to culture). This “Moral Law” argument seems to be the last God-of-the-gaps holdout for otherwise progressive theologians who accept common descent.

On the other side, atheists enjoy knocking this argument down. Despite Collins’s assertion that there is not likely to be any research that shows a naturalistic explanation of human conceptions of morality, there is indeed much promising research in that regard, much of which is highly suggestive of just such an explanation, even if the details are not all filled in yet (cf. the fossil record). This is how Steve Wiggins recently summarized the naturalistic explanation:

Apes plan ahead, recognize fairness, and can even see issues from the point of view of others… They are clearly inheritors of the moral sense that evolution has crafted among all cooperative animals over the eons. Religions like to lay claim to the origins of morality: we behave this way because our god told us to. In a sense that may be true, but only if the “god” is nature itself and the instruction it gives is the way for a species to thrive. Caring for one another, all religions aside, is the formula that evolution presents as the most successful choice of natural selection.

via “Ape Versus Primate”

Is it true that “only if the ‘god’ is nature itself” can it be maintained that the cultivation of morality and ethics systems are derivative from a god? In the sense that I don’t believe there was a *poof* moment of moral clarity among humanity from some divine spark nor that morality is only apprehendable through divine revelation, I agree with the gist of his comment, but there seems to be a bit of a non-theistic overreach in his reasoning. It is quite easy to understand how one can indeed “instruct” or proscribe things through proximate causes, and insofar as theistic evolutionists do not violate logic when they state that God ordained to create through naturalism, it is wholly within the realm of possibility that God intentioned that our species develop a moral compass to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others (broadly speaking) in more or less the same sense that He intended that we should have two arms and two legs.

What I wonder, though, is whether saying that He intended our ancestors to develop a moral sense is the same as saying that “we behave this way because our god told us to”. It’s a fine line perhaps, and quite open for discussion among philosophers and theologians. But it seems science, and still less scientism, has almost nothing to contribute there. Let scientists focus on closing the gaps in our understanding of the universe, and theologians focus on closing the gaps in our understanding of the meaning of God’s gapless universe.

I have really enjoyed Pete Enns‘s contribution to BioLogos of late. His latest frames the Adam/Eve question in an interesting and honest way. Here’s an excerpt related to my last post:

What if we affirm that Paul’s view of human origins does not settle the matter for us today? Of course, this leaves us with a pressing question: how do we think about Adam today?

This is where the conversation begins for those wishing to maintain a biblical faith in a modern world. And whatever way forward is chosen, we must be clear on one thing: we have all left “Paul’s Adam.” We are all “creating Adam,” as it were, in an effort to reconcile Scripture and the modern understanding of human origins.
….
[O]nce you move to [the above affirmation], you have left Paul’s Adam and are now working with an Adam that is partially and even largely shaped by your own understanding and worldview. You are in an entirely different discussion.

It sounds bleak, but I have hope that efforts like the BioLogos Foundation, if they continue on their current trajectory, will begin to push through.

Christians coming to terms with evolution, including many ID advocates who acknowledge common descent, will often arrive at a midpoint of sorts between denial of evolution and all-out theistic evolution (or evolutionary creation) that acknowledges that we are by-products of evolution and seeks to hold the line on the most theologically problematic aspect of evolutionary theory: the historicity of Adam and Eve. For many, this is a comfortable resting place and they remain content acknowledging the deafening scientific consensus of common descent on one hand and believing in a literal first human pair on the other.

This is often done by positing a bottleneck of the population down to two individuals, often misunderstanding the unfortunately ambiguous terms Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam. The more sophisticated (but odd) way of doing this is to allow there to have been more than two at the time of Adam and Eve, but to posit that the Fall event occurred to them uniquely, and that the effects have passed down to later humanity through descent from them.

From Denis Venema and Darrel Falk at BioLogos comes a handy explanation of the relevant genomic evidence.

Attempting to square the Genesis account and common ancestry by positing a literal Adam and Eve who were the progenitors of the entire human race is, biologically speaking, looking for the most extreme population bottleneck a sexually reproducing species can experience: a reduction to one breeding pair.

Is there evidence that such a bottleneck has ever occurred?

The short answer is no, and that there is much evidence against it.

This leaves those seeking to maintain both common descent and theological concordism advocating one of the following positions (as best I can tell):

1. defining the pair as a literary representation of the entire human population at the time of an historical Fall (as C.S. Lewis did)
2. defining the Fall as something not passed down genetically, but as a metaphor for something that happened within a group of our race’s representatives (possibly even a literal pair)

Any other options I’m missing?

I prefer to just embrace the idea that the Jewish religious leaders who compiled Genesis from earlier stories used those stories to teach various theological concepts, including an etiology for sin, death, toil, the excruciating pain of childbirth, and the pitfalls of trying to live life doing “what seems right in [one's] own eyes” without due dependence on the system prescribed by those leaders. There’s more there of course, but I want to emphasize that our fundamental task in interpreting Scripture has to be to put ourselves in the minds of its human authors as best as we can given the tools of literary and historical research rather than read into Scripture all kinds of theological beliefs we already hold.

With evolution and with Scripture, we aren’t pushing God out of the picture to say that He in some sense authored both via natural processes. A committed affirmation of God’s creation by general Providence doesn’t selectively comb nature for divine signatures or other Easter eggs that will prove His authorship of it; we accept the whole creative process, warts (death, pain, etc.) and all as finding its source and being in God, with all the mysteries and difficulties this creates, resisting the urge to say, “God doesn’t do things that way, so science must be wrong here.” In the same way, we shouldn’t posit theological gems of special revelation throughout every passage of Scripture, somewhere between the lines, redeeming otherwise problematic passages. Rather, we simply do our best to uncover what it says, warts and all, and acknowledge that whatever it says, it was meant to be that way. Most of us already accept that David wasn’t speaking with the ideal level of faith, understanding, and resignation to the Golden Rule in the cursing Psalms; I’m merely saying that we should carry out that sort of evaluation consistently.

“Just think of the natural sciences as they increasingly develop into a comprehensive knowledge of the world. A short time ago no one could have conceived of this development. What then do you suppose the future holds, not only for our theology, but for our evangelical Christianity? … There are those who can hack away at science with a sword, fence themselves in with weapons at hand to withstand the assaults of sound research and behind this fence establish as binding a church doctrine that appears to everyone outside as an unreal ghost to which they must pay homage if they want to receive a proper burial. Those persons might not allow themselves to be disturbed by the developments in the realm of science. But we cannot do that and do not want that. Therefore, we must make do with history as it develops.”

—Friedrich Schleiermacher, On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr Lücke [1829] (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1981), p. 60.

H/T to my friend Matt Raymer for the foregoing and for his observation that although here we are nearing two hundred years since the above quote, Christians like Matt and I have had to rediscover from scratch so many of the lessons Schleiermacher learned so long ago.

I embedded a video at the bottom so that you can hear this TIL while you read it.

All This Time

written and recorded by Sting on The Soul Cages

I looked out across the river today
I saw a city in the fog and an old church tower where the seagulls play
I saw the sad shire horses walking home in the sodium light
Two priests on the ferry, October geese on a cold winter’s night

All this time, the river flowed
Endlessly to the sea

Two priests came round our house tonight
One young, one old, to offer prayers for the dying to serve the final rites
One to learn, one to teach which way the cold wind blows
Fussing and flapping in priestly black like a murder of crows

All this time, the river flowed
Endlessly to the sea
If I had my way, I’d take a boat from the river
And I’d bury the old man,
I’d bury him at sea

Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth
Better to be poor than a fat man in the eye of a needle
As these words were spoken, I swear I hear the old man laughing
“What good is a used up world and how could it be worth having?”

All this time the river flowed
Endlessly like a silent tear
All this time the river flowed
Father, if Jesus exists
Then how come he never lived here?

Teachers told us, the Romans built this place
They built a wall and a temple in a edge-of-the-empire garrison town
They lived and they died, they prayed to their gods but the stone gods did not make a sound
And their empire crumbled, ’til all that was left were the stones the workmen found

All this time the river flowed
In the falling light of a northern sun
If I had my way, I’d take a boat from the river
Men go crazy in congregations
They only get better one by one

One by one…

Hard link: http://www.youtube.com/v/OcXmO-CkxKg
(Please note that the actual studio video for this song is dated, lame, and distracting, so I chose this one instead.)

These are some of my favorite lyrics, but they certainly are haunting! Sting presents a valid critique, but I consider it more of a warning than an inescapable fate.

Now what do you think?