Undeception

For most of us growing up as conservative Evangelicals, the term humanism was scarcely used apart from the modifier “secular”, and even it when it was, that scary adjective was implied and inferred. For this reason, one of my theology teachers in undergrad liked to try to reclaim humanism from the clutches of secular humanism among his students by describing the great movement of Christian humanism as represented by Erasmus. Dr. Bowdle defined humanism simply as “trying to be the best human you can be,” or the desire to reach one’s full potential as a human being in all areas, physical, mental, emotional, etc. I came to think of humanism as a main goal of Christianity — mine at least.

In a recent post called “Christianity as humanism,” David Withun reproduces part of a summary of Irenaeus‘ thought as described by Paul Tillich. Here’s a bit of it:

“Here we have a profound doctrine of what I call a transcendent humanism, a humanism which says that Christ is the fulfillment of essential man, of the Adamic nature. Such a fulfillment became necessary because a break occurred in the development of man; Adam fell away from what he was to be come. The childish innocence of Adam has been lost; but the second Adam can become what he was to become, fully human. And we can become fully human through participation in this full humanity which has appeared in Christ.”

So in a mystical sense, Christianity has the potential to be humanistic. I do not at all disagree. But I am afraid that even many who champion this understanding of Christian humanism fail to distribute their emphasis in all the necessary places. More on that in a minute.

Erasmus the scholastic humanist

One of the ideals that modern Christians have lost out on after eschewing humanism as dirty, atheistic idolatry (humans are crap — didn’t you get Augustine’s memo?) is the importance of education and the development of the mind. Great institutions of higher learning were begun by those who believed that Christians couldn’t be the best humans they could be without an emphasis upon the life of the mind, whereas the early twentieth century saw the tide of Protestants intent on pitting the life of the mind against the life of the Spirit swelling, warning of the dangers of “overeducation”.

Education is a vital aspect of humanism, obviously. Learning the right stuff is important, no doubt. So is keeping our bodies healthy, producing art, etc. But how about our moral and ethical behavior? Isn’t being as good a human as I can be actually dependent on how I live? Certainly, as good humanists will tell you, because humanism is about a holistic approach to betterment; it’s about a dedication to excel for all the things human can excel in. This means that humanism, at least Christian humanism, is not an end in itself. You don’t become the best human you can be just so you can be proud of yourself. It’s because you recognize humanity as something valuable — and not just your own humanity.

Looking back, I see that the appreciation for humanism that awoke in me during college probably influenced my conviction about the importance of social concern as a necessary feature of Christianity. It might be returned that I’m confusing humanism with humanitarianism, but I would disagree: the latter is a significant element of the former. Integral to valuing humanity and human potential is being interested not only in what it means to be human, but being interested in actual humans. This is especially true of Christian humanism, or Tillich’s “transcendent humanism”, because NT theology teaches us that kenosis is an essential feature of God’s character (John Piper’s warped views notwithstanding). From a Christian perspective, the desire to become the best human you can be necessarily entails becoming more God-centered; becoming as divine as you can be (theosis) necessarily entails becoming more human-centered. “And the second is like it,” said our teacher.

Tragically, because of the lie that works = human effort and a myopic misunderstanding of Christian social concern as “the social gospel”, most conservative American Evangelicals really stink at this stuff. I give these guys are hard time for that. But unfortunately, it’s not just them: there are other faith traditions that despite being keenly aware of the need for orthopraxis as a complement of orthodoxy nonetheless seem to think that worship, whether in ritual/liturgical practices or in emotive song services, satisfies the bulk of the requirement. I asked one believer from the Orthodox tradition what the Christian life was all about, and the response consisted of things like mystic communion with God and following the ritual/liturgical guidelines prescribed by the Church. The Orthodox may affirm “transcendent humanism” all day long, but an attempt to partake of the divine nature and commune with God apart from cultivating the desire to emulate God’s love by substantive efforts to mitigate the suffering of fellow humans is not at all sufficient to be called humanism.

Developing one’s mind and body and contributing to human achievement are valid components of humanism; likewise, praying and communing with the Spirit of God are wonderful. But until we learn to obey God by developing His heart within us, our worship and rituals are nothing at all but clanging cymbals. Your praxis is not truly orthē and your sanctification/theosis is a farce without humanitarianism. In the Gospels, the manifestation of the Kingdom of God frequently took the form of Jesus demonstrating compassion — not just feeling it or passing the buck to God by praying that He intervene. We can’t then “become fully human through participation in this full humanity which has appeared in Christ” without an ever-present sense of compassion that erupts in action. “Oh, those poor suffering people” is a contemptibly selfish sentiment when it’s not followed through on, much like feeling sorry for or simply praying for a woman as you see her being raped in front of you.

Let me put it bluntly, brothers and sisters: you simply cannot live an authentic Christian life without being consumed by the passion that motivated God in Jesus: love and care for humanity. And not just their eternal destinies (which is mostly out of your jurisdiction anyway), but every part about them. We prove our dedication to God by taking care of their material circumstances and let God worry about whether they dedicate themselves to Him.

The brute fact is that people are dying of starvation and preventable disease, and we’re sitting over here in our comfort expecting to commune with God while we take care of our marginal concerns. This should not be so.

Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

Philippians 2.4-7

What makes us think that the “full humanity” which Christ brings with him could look like anything other than full, self-emptying submission to God through service of others?

All flaws duly acknowledged, I still loves me some C.S. Lewis. He is the reason I am where I am today (whether that’s credit or blame is up to you to decide, of course!). His thoughts here have been articulated time and again on my blog in my words, but I am glad to present them here in Lewis’s well-spun words.

Dear Mr. Beversluis,

Yes. On my view one must apply something of the same sort of explanation to, say, the atrocities (and treacheries) of Joshua. I see the grave danger we run by doing so; but the dangers of believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him ‘good’ and worshiping Him, is still greater danger. The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of Scriptures is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two. Indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissible.

To this some will reply ‘ah, but we are fallen and don’t recognize good when we see it.’ But God Himself does not say that we are as fallen as all that. He constantly, in Scripture, appeals to our conscience: ‘Why do ye not of yourselves judge what is right?’ — ‘What fault hath my people found in me?’ And so on. Socrates’ answer to Euthyphro is used in Christian form by Hooker. Things are not good because God commands them; God commands certain things because he sees them to be good. (In other words, the Divine Will is the obedient servant to the Divine Reason.) The opposite view (Ockham’s, Paley’s) leads to an absurdity. If ‘good’ means ‘what God wills’ then to say ‘God is good’ can mean only ‘God wills what he wills.’ Which is equally true of you or me or Judas or Satan.

But of course having said all this, we must apply it with fear and trembling. Some things which seem to us bad may be good. But we must not consult our consciences by trying to feel a thing good when it seems to us totally evil. We can only pray that if there is an invisible goodness hidden in such things, God, in His own good time will enable us to see it. If we need to. For perhaps sometimes God’s answer might be ‘What is that to thee?’ The passage may not be ‘addressed to our (your or my) condition’ at all.

I think we are v. much in agreement, aren’t we?

Yours sincerely, C. S. Lewis

Big thanks to Alex Smith at the Evangelical Universalist message board for this gem (and David Baldwin for tipping me off).

No one disputes the observation that most conservative American Christians are both inerrantists and believers in constitutional “strict constructionism”, i.e. the idea that if a given power was not enumerated or otherwise granted by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, it’s out of bounds for the U.S. Federal government. The clever parallel between the errors of inerrantism and constitutionalism seems to have first surfaced in the biblioblogosphere a couple of years ago and made ripples throughout many of the sites that I usually enjoy for their theologically unconservative Christian views. I’ve seen the comparison rediscovered and reasserted several times since, and it’s grated on my nerves long enough to get me to write about it.

Image via Wikipedia

The first thing to point out is that believing that we should follow the Constitution as much as possible is not predicated on the belief that the Constitution is even approximately inerrant. What would it even mean to say the Constitution is “inerrant”, anyway? Most of the people who maintain that the Bible is inerrant mean primarily that the Bible does not err in matters of science, history, theology, and any presentations of facts. Now, can any of these expectations about the Bible be made to apply to the U.S. Constitution? Have you ever seen anyone try?

Taken that way, the inerrancy/constitutionalism argument is a sloppy criticism indeed, but the critics’ actual objection is not really as unreasonable as that. What they instead mean to imply is that neither the Bible nor the Constitution are infallible in their respective areas, and that inerrantists and constitutionalists believe against all the evidence that they are. The only thing that keeps this from being a completely laughable straw man is that there are indeed some constitutionalists, who indeed generally also happen to be inerrantist Christians, who talk as though the Constitution could not be improved upon in any way. There are certainly no fewer ignorant constitutionalists than there are among most political viewpoints, but even these would hardly say that criticism of the Constitution is out of bounds because of some mystical infallibility: rather, they’d say that criticism of the Constitution is automatically wrong-headed because the document was based on a sound political philosophy that they would be able to articulate even if the Constitution had never been written.

See, sniggering insinuations that constitutionalists believe the Constitution or its authors were endowed with something akin to divine inspiration is closely analogous to the preposterous idea that agreeing wholeheartedly with Why Evolution Is True is tantamount to believing in Jerry Coyne’s divine inspiration, when all it really takes is a decent, informed understanding of evolution to see that anyone who disagreed with the book’s broader points would be running afoul the scientific consensus undergirding the book. Many constitutionalists support adherence to the Constitution because they happen to think the principles are sound. Mocking the Constitution doesn’t knock down the political philosophy behind the Constitution, any more than refuting inerrancy logically refutes faith in God, of which the Bible is a fallible ancient expression. That actually leads me to perhaps the widest gulf between inerrancy and constitutionalism.

The constitutionalist’s “faith” in the Constitution is no more unreasonable than expecting any other law should be upheld or changed rather than merely ignored. Good laws, such as those against murder or theft, are meant to be universally applied. We suffer no loopholes or reading between the lines on those. Then there are tax codes: liberals, the chief skeptics in regard to constitutionalism, are the most likely to insist that every single person eligible to be taxed be required to contribute their fair share, and campaign to modify or repeal laws that don’t tax certain brackets in the proportion they see fit. The whole idea behind laws is that they do not suffer exceptions lightly: every possible exception must be codified in the wording, and every loophole must be closed or it will be exploited and the intent of the law thereby thwarted. If you understand this, you understand constitutionalism.

In fact, it’s not constitutionalists who make the U.S. Constitution out to be some sort of mystical exception: that’s actually done by those who have found it expedient to pretend that it, unlike every other “legal and binding” writ in jurisprudence, is a “living document” that is actually meant to be manipulated, conveniently misconstrued, and generally ignored.

And before you remind everyone, I am aware that Congress had compromised on these ideals before the first president’s first term was complete. This is a testament to the inadequacy of the Constitution as framed, and to the predilection of those in power for finding shortcuts to more power; but here again, this weakness doesn’t mean that we can allow politicians to proceed in running roughshod over “the supreme law of the land.” It means we need to patch up the holes a lot better. Here’s the thing: the Constitution never considers itself immutable, and neither do those who support it. But as with other imperfect or bad laws, you don’t ignore the flaws or come up with phony alternative interpretations of its meanings, like apologists who make the objectionable parts of the Bible into a holy allegory: you either amend it or you repeal it. If you think the Constitution should authorize the federal government to ensure that healthcare be free, or that abortions be illegal in all fifty states – whatever it is – you don’t corrupt the meaning of definite, established phrases in the Constitution to lend an air of legitimacy; you augment the powers of the federal government through the amendment process. Just as with any other law, exceptionlessness is a protection against the partiality and whims of demagoguery, the runaway ambitions of the political class, and power brokers who try to buy the federal government’s favor. To simply ignore the supreme law of the land when convenient is by definition lawlessness — and try to find a liberal who believes that anarchy is a good thing! Not having the powers of the federal government constrained by anything other than politicians’ imaginations is a sure way to maintain an oligarchy, which is essentially what we have now.

Please don’t dismiss me as a blind constitutionalist or a political conservative. I am neither. I used to have a higher opinion of the Constitution than I do now. I was taught by political and religious conservatives that although it’s not perfect, it’s the best thing free people have come up with in quite a long time, and maybe ever. I now think that’s an overstatement,  and I can point out several flaws without even trying very hard. Maybe the Constitution is entirely inadequate and awful, that the form of government it was intended to establish and perpetuate is useless for today’s world. Maybe what we need is more centralization of power rather than the checks and balances on national powers to preserve local, subsidiarian governments as intended by the Constitutional Convention. Maybe so. We can talk about that. But please don’t pretend that demanding that the federal government take no more power for itself than was set aside for it by the law written to establish it is somehow completely looney and absolutely necessary for reasonable people to dismiss. And still more, be intellectually honest enough to admit that insisting on laws having definite meaning that should not be ignored by the whims of the current majority is in any way related to believing that the Bible contains no errors.

The simultaneous popularity of inerrancy and strict constructionism among conservative Americans is mostly coincidental, with the exception that conservatives think that both ideas are worth conserving. Then again, given that there are plenty of things that even liberals want to conserve, that exception does not make the comparison of constitutionalism and inerrantism useful for anything but a cheap shot.

Going into this post, please be aware that I will indulge in the obnoxious habit of capitalizing Truth to distinguish the abstract concept of veritas from small-t truths that amount to individual factoids. I hope this will not distract you.

As a teenager I was once informed by a mentor that I was a “seeker of Truth.” This was a defining moment for me, not because it changed my behavior, but because it made me startlingly aware of this behavior. I have proudly owned that badge ever since, although I do generally try to keep it under my coat so as not to annoy people. This blog has been a workshop for me in my continuing mission to search for Truth, especially in places considered unlikely by others who shared my upbringing.

In the last year, however, something has changed. It’s not that I value Truth less; it’s just that I have behaved less and less as though it were my sacred calling to fight for Truth. One of the truths I have seen confirmed again and again over the last several years is that no one, not even inveterate Truth-seekers, have a monopoly on it. The greatest threat to Truth comes from those whose confidence that they have it lead them to root out everyone making a counter-claim. This conviction puts me on a collision course with heresy hunters, who in the name of defending the Truth of God have crammed it so tightly into a cage that I can scarcely imagine their having any real affection for it.

Here’s another lesson that I have been learning over the last several, quiet months, which I’ve just now figured out how to articulate: Truth doesn’t need my protection. It is larger than I am. I am not its steward; instead, I am responsible for my own character — my own actions and reactions. I can and should promote what I think is true and show what is false for what it is, with discretion and all due diligence in determining it, of course. But primarily, I am called to follow Christ, subjecting my will to the service of God and others. By far the best and most important way to serve Truth is by acting like we believe it, viz. through obedience to what we believe. I believe that the highest, most elusive truth of the universe is Love — so if my life is not characterized by Love-seeking, how can I pretend to be a Truth-seeker?

Watching the biblioblogosphere as closely as I have for the last couple of years, I’ve seen and participated in far too many ugly wars for Truth. Bitter, dismissive, and insulting diatribes put into defense of beliefs are not a bit more common among the heresy-hunting Fundamentalist types than it is the enlightened who embrace doubt and uncertainty. Friends, Truth is a sword meant to hew through the brambles of untruths, not the people trapped behind them.

If I can’t act in love during my tousles for Truth, treating the other person as a child of God no matter how obviously, infuriatingly ignorant they are, then what I am upholding and defending is not Truth but my own pet truths, factoids that I cognitively assent to, at the expense of the greatest truth I know. There is nothing more false than conflating my truth with the Truth.

I forsee the objection that impassioned debates are often necessary to ferret out the facts; besides, didn’t Jesus himself use angry words and call his opponents on the carpet? Indeed he did. But he also told us, “Be angry, and sin not.” This tells me, until you’re righteous, don’t feign righteous anger. Righteous anger is so hard to distinguish from the unrighteous kind; this ambiguity is a caution against blowing up in defense of our rightness. We need to remember what we’re fighting for.

You see, fighting for Truth so often treats it as a trophy to be won, a public reward for our diligent Truth-seeking. I want to get out of this closed circuit of seeking Truth for seeking Truth’s sake. If we don’t live up to the light we do have – and I hope we can all agree that living a life characterized by loving humility qualifies – no matter how accurately and convincingly we argue for truths, we are not lovers of Truth.

The old meaning of the adjective true, seldom used these days, was faithful; actually, that meaning is still around in our usage of it in the sense of faithfulness to reality. The Truth I seek is a more robust form of faithfulness than that: faithfulness to God even more than faithfulness to reality, which we can hardly claim to know with any certainty anyway. I want to be much more than a Truth seeker; I want to be a Truth lover. Even if I miss truths here and there, and even though I recognize that I’ll never obtain certainty in this world, Truth will continue to be my ideal and the template I use to shape my character.

If I mistake, he will forgive me. I do not fear him; I fear only lest, able to see and write these things, I should fail of witnessing, and myself be, after all, a castaway—no king, but a talker; no disciple of Jesus, ready to go with him to the death, but an arguer about the truth; a hater of the lies men speak for God, and myself a truth-speaking liar, not a doer of the word.

G. MacDonald

The subtle, silent epiphany of the last several months has been that what I must seek first is not truths – disembodied facts and undeceptions – but righteousness. One of the most profound undeceptions I’ve undergone is the realization that righteousness is not some legal decree that magically covers and converts my own rancid attitudes and actions. It’s not that simple at all. Being a true Christian in the deepest sense of that word (maybe I should capitalize it) is hard work. But the real dirty work of Christianity is not in controlling our actions, but our re-actions: how we respond to problems such as getting cut off in traffic, how we deal with those who are hurting those we love, and how we treat defenders of patent falsehoods. Seeking Truth is not enough; we must be true.

God give me a true heart.

A Bible study I’ve been attending recently decided to go through Focus on the Family’s The Truth [sic] Project, for which I will gladly accept your condolescences, sympathy, intercessory prayer, donations, etc. This is especially awkward in that I am still altogether “in the closet” regarding the ways in which my beliefs differ from the conservative Presbyterian beliefs of the others in the Bible study (unless one of them reads this, in which case: Hi there!), but sitting through this nonsense is enough to ensure that I’ll bang my head against the wall hard enough to tumble out at some point.

Anyway, I started to blog through it, but having a flagging interest in chronicling every misguided and/or stupid statement made by Del Tackett (the host), I am foregoing that effort and directing you to my friend Mike Beidler’s review of The Truth Project series over at Rethinking the αlpha and Ωmega. But in the last episode he discussed something I hadn’t spent too much time thinking about before, and in the few days since watching it I have come across two independent rebuttals (coincidentally? hmm…) that I thought I’d share with you.

Tackett targets “assumptive language” in the educational miniseries Cosmos hosted by Carl Sagan, who begins his narration with the statement, “The cosmos is all there is, or was, or ever will be.” Notice, says Tackett, that Sagan is subtly and craftily painting God right out of the picture, because God is not part of the physical universe. I was tracking with Tackett here. Pretty slick, Carl.

Then Tackett drew a box signifying the entire material universe and called it the “cosmic cube” to illustrate that Sagan’s statement negated the possibility that anything existed outside the cube. Now, I don’t want to try to make too much of what was probably just a poorly chosen diagram, but there are certain factors that make it worthy of a serious critique. I became uncomfortable as he took great pains to elucidate how Sagan was contradicting the Real and True Bona Fide Christian Fact that God exists outside of our universe. This isn’t to say that God doesn’t intervene in our universe, but that He exists fundamentally independently of it. Atheists simply deny that anything outside the box exists; deists deny that God ever steps into the box; “supernatural naturalists” (who?) believe that some force or forces exist, but only within and as a feature of the physical universe. Tackett’s diagram looked something like this:

I do hope that you, dear Christian, don’t have a problem with this diagram. After all, it is the Christian view, whereas everything else is a deceptive, godless lie.

This is my chief problem with The Truth Project: it is everywhere assumed that there is a single, authoritative “biblical worldview” that is somehow obvious and will be universally recognized just by reading our Bibles, the interpretation of which we all agree upon. Points of divergence among different Christian traditions are ignored except where said to be indicative of an “atheistic worldview” that is opposed to God — or worse, the Bible Himself.

Is the only proper Christian view that God is external to the universe, a “wholly other” who steps in to influence and settle our affairs but remains totally separate in every meaningful sense? One thing’s for sure: this diagram does a particularly bad job of upholding the concept of omnipresence that I’m sure Tackett affirms. Moreover, it also implies that if God were to cease to exist, the universe could keep trucking along. What happened to “by him all things consist”? I ask again, is this the Christian antidote to Sagan’s reductive materialism?

The next evening while still pondering this, I ran across a quote that I ended up using for my most recent “Mondays with George MacDonald” feature. Allow me to reproduce part of it here:

I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made man out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything; God is all in all, and he made us out of himself.

Even if, as Sagan and Moby agree, we are indeed made of stars, MacDonald would probably contend that the stars themselves are made of godstuff, at least infosfar that they, like God, exist. Coming from a man whose theology I appreciate so much, that was a weighty counterpoint for me. Considering Tackett’s view as contrasted by MacDonald’s, it’s obvious why humans are considered by certain theologies to be wholly fallen, by nature at enmity with God, and utterly incapable of anything good. (The incongruity is that this depravity seems more like a flaw in the design of the “cube” than the result of the two human progenitors’ failure. But I digress.)

Later in the same lesson, Tackett began a short discussion of the Euthyphro Dilemma: “Is piety loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” Tackett answers it by denying both horns, asserting that God is by nature what we recognize as good; His own immutable character, which apparently just happens to be what most humans recognize as good and ideal despite our residence in the cube and our innate sinfulness, is the standard by which He judges the universe He created. Tackett contends that the laws of ethics/morality are neither based in God’s arbitrary will nor in some external code, but flow from God’s unchanging nature. I think Tackett handled this tolerably well, if only for the fact that he explicitly rejected divine command theory; still, I was not satisfied with his implication of morality being rules imposed from outside the cosmic cube upon those within the cosmic box. Couldn’t put my finger on it, but it sounded fishy.

Then, the day after I found the MacDonald quote, I stumbled upon David Withun‘s recent video, Euthyphro Dilemma Redux. I was once again fascinated by the coincidence of my own theological meanderings with the ancient beliefs of the Eastern Orthodox. Please take the time to view this short (18 min.) video.

(YouTube link)

It amazed me the relevance that this video had to that lesson of The Truth Project. The Orthodox version of panentheism (N.B. not pantheism) as explained by Withun is, to my mind, a highly preferable way of viewing God’s relation to the universe, and makes better sense of Tackett’s own rejection of the Euthyphro Dilemma: God pervades and animates the universe, and so the extent to which we grasp morality is the extent to which we are in touch with a very real ought built into the fabric of our universe — not something alien to us or our “cube”, but something that essentially composes our entire reality, including God. Anyone who lives apart from God and in opposition to His nature is what MacDonald called “a live discord, an anti-truth…an abyss of positive negation.” Or as Epimenides put it, “In Him we live and move and have our being.”

Agree or not, the views that MacDonald and Withun describe – and I do not mean to imply they are identical – have very interesting and profoundly Christian (even biblical!) things to say about the nature of God, the definitions of good and evil, and the condition of man (i.e. our default disposition toward God and His toward us). But most of those unquestioningly drinking in whatever Focus on the Family and/or Del Tackett tell them in Tackett’s Christian re-education program presumptuously titled The Truth Project are unlikely to ever hear that such views exist.

The irony of the thousands of Christians who sit and listen uncritically to someone warning them of the dangers of sitting and listening uncritically to everyone else is painfully striking. So is the irony of seeing someone placing God in a box precisely by ejecting Him from the one box He willingly fills with Himself.

And don’t get me started on Tackett’s anti-evolution, anti-postmodernism diatribes. Holy walking Jesus fish!

The following is the opening snippet of a guest post I contributed to Religion at the Margins.

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This week I listened to an excellent discussion between Sheikh Dr. Muhammad Al-Hussaini and Patrick Sookhdeo, a former Muslim. I came away with immense respect for both men.

The Sheikh made some great points about religious violence having a tribal, racial, and otherwise sociological basis rather than any sort of profound theological grounding in Islam’s scriptures. The former Muslim in the conversation, now a Christian, was in complete agreement: there are passages that seem to justify violence upon those outside the faith, and others that no more or less vaguely discourage it.

Dr. Al-Hussaini’s observation applies to so many aspects of how we live out our religion: we think we’re basing the way we live on the truth, when so often it’s the other way around. We often say we’re being “biblical” when we find what we’re already conditioned to believe somewhere in the pages of the Bible.

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Click here to read the rest of this post.

Image via Wikipedia

…and why the Church in the East never did.

Listening to most Evangelical first-string leaders, you’d get the impression that apart from an historical Fall of Man that marred the souls of all the descendants of the ones who fell, you’d have no need for Jesus, and Christianity sails right out the window. So much more than inerrancy hangs on the question: original sin and total depravity hang on some sort of historical Fall, don’t they?

Perhaps they do (though not necessarily) — but the massive blind spot we have is that a rather large, ancient, and revered segment of the Christian Church rejected both of those teachings long before science came along and refuted the possibility of an historical first pair of human progenitors. And yet these believers still maintain that the work of Christ in atonement is absolutely necessary for every individual regardless.

Archbishop Lazar Puhalo explains:

The Schism between the West and the East is great indeed, so much so that Protestants rarely ever hear that perspective. These sorts of surprises are why I have begun to love glancing at Christian theology through the lens of the Orthodox.