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?

Polycarp at The Church of Jesus Christ and I seem to be travelling the same paths lately (does this indicate that I’m finally a part of the Church of Jesus Christ? The U.S. branch, anyway?). He recently wrote a series of posts, some in depth and some quite short, regarding hell and universalism in Scripture and in the ECF, appropriately leaving the question open-ended.

Now he’s gone and dredged up another topic left conveniently buried by most modern Protestants who champion orthodoxy and good theology (so long as it comports with their already composed beliefs): baptism.

I was thinking yesterday during Sunday School that I should write a post on “unapproved” answers to Evangelism Explosion question number 2, in which God asks the recently departed who appear on His doorstep, “Why should I let you in to my heaven?”

The correct answer, according to EE and other Protestants everywhere, is something along the lines of, “I stand on Christ’s finished work.” I got to thinking that even saying “I believed the story in the Gospels” would ostensibly not quite cut it, because “even the demons believe, and tremble.” Rather, one must have faith that transforms, a conversion experience. And even that’s not quite enough: it is conceivable that one who believes with all his heart and experiences remorse for his guilt and acknowledges it before God who is nonetheless not one of the Elect would still be sent packing away from the Pearly Gates.

Yet all of the below are scriptural answers, sometimes given to people in the NT without the benefit of any of the above qualifiers (e.g. #2 below). And all of them would be considered somehow deficient by most of those who would endorse the Evangelism Explosion method of proselytization.

1. I repented and was baptized. (Acts 2.38, 3.19) (EE response: “GASP! ‘Baptism’ is a work — do you think you could by human effort contribute to your salvation?”)
2. My father believed and our whole household was baptized. (Acts 16.31) (EE response: “GASP! Doesn’t matter what your father did — did you believe?”)
3. I always thought that Jesus was God somehow, and even said so when asked. I mean, why else would God have raised him from the dead? (Romans 10.1) (EE response: “But did you ever bother to consult God on the matter? Did you even really mean it? Did the Holy Spirit come in and begin to work on you from the inside out?”)
4. Well, You oughta know, Lord – You’re the One who wrote down my name before the world began. (various Calvinist prooftexts) (EE response: “Even the Elect shouldn’t be so impudent!”)

Ok, the last one was somewhat facetious. But do you get my point? Most of the dogmatic “saved by faith alone” persuasion would be horrified with the first two answers at least. The third was an attempt to depict someone in a satured Christian culture (as in my own south-eastern U.S.) who hadn’t really thought about it that much before, but assumed it was true and yet never had a conscious conversion experience.

Now, I don’t want to put words in Multifish’s mouth (Lord knows he has enough in there already), but his posts on baptism certainly suggest (as I have stated before) that in this area, Protestants who look askance at baptismal regeneration are forced both to twist Scripture and ignore early Church tradition in order to do so.

Scripture is anything but perspicuous. And it’s not even particularly coherent: there is no natural way to tie together the answers given in the scriptural references of 1 through 4 above, but all of the answers I gave were in some sense undeniably “scriptural”, nonetheless. This is at the heart of my antipathy toward systematic theologies: they always leave out or skew some data from the historical witness of the early Christians. And as Manyvehiclep pointed out in this well researched post, “Paul was not speaking about written documents when he spoke of Tradition; he was speaking about teachings handed down,” and these teachings kept circulating alongside Paul’s writings and are present in the writings of the Early Church Fathers. Yet they uniformly taught that instead of simply being a symbol of life renewed or a covenant initiation rite, “baptism is dying out to sin,” the outward act necessary to turn to God, just as the confession with the mouth is the act by which Paul says we are saved (Rom 10.10). To these early believers, outward acts aren’t merely signs, but the acts by which things are actually accomplished.

I’m not personally arguing for baptismal regeneration. I’m merely putting on display more of the many necessary assumptions that go into our modern sanitized, preapproved Protestantism. In the end, the majority evangelical view may indeed be correct, but until we receive more, or more authoritative, revelation than what’s contained in Scripture and the ECF, we have no right to be arrogantly dismissive of other Christian traditions that disagree with us, even when it’s in the important area of soteriology. You are free to continue to assume that what you’ve always been taught is correct and that baptismal regeneration is incorrect, but you are constrained by Christian humility to acknowledge that it is an assumption and that other believers who don’t share that assumption can do so in good conscience.

The poll in my sidebar asking Christians how important they considered the faith/science debate to be ran for four months as of yesterday. In that time, 99 votes were cast. Today as I close it out, I add my own as the last vote.

I voted Critical. No surprise there.

What I do find surprising is that one of two choices that received almost no attention early on, Worse than unimportant, finished just a few votes behind one of the early contenders, Important, but not critical. Sure, it received a clear minority of votes, but given my blog’s audience, most of whom are at least vaguely aware of the debate’s importance, this is disturbing to me.

These people are asking why I should be wasting my time distracting Christians from what they really should be doing; none of them came on to the blog as requested to explain what exactly they thought I should be focusing on. Was it just a matter of, “Please, I’m uncomfortable with this topic — can we move on to something else already?” Perhaps, but I’m guessing that the evangelicals who would vote “Worse than unimportant” would genuinely feel that the debate is a distraction from what they consider to be one of the most important things on the evangelical’s to-do list: evangelism.

In an interesting coincidence, today is also the day Karl Giberson posted an essay entitled “Evolution Matters” that tells why he thinks it’s something we can’t ignore.

Most parishioners probably think evolution is false, but mainly they just don’t need to think about evolution at all. Why should a pastor engage a topic that seems irrelevant when it will certainly lead to controversy?

Despite these perspectives I think evolution is far more important than most Christians appreciate. The reason why it may seem like a back burner topic is that the people with the questions have left the church and taken their questions elsewhere. If they, and their questions were still in the church then their voices would be heard and the issue would seem more pressing.

The distinct possibility of apostasy seen in so many cases following a convincing encounter with mainstream science is a concern of mine that I have repeatedly emphasized. Giberson elaborates on the E. O. Wilson example:

Wilson was raised a Southern Baptist and was quite devout as a child. But he was taught that his faith and evolution were incompatible. He went off to study biology at the University of Alabama and learned, to his surprise, that the evidence for evolution was compelling and, like virtually all serious biologists, he accepted it. This, of course, meant he had to reject the Christian faith of his childhood.

What I want to highlight is that those who view the evolution/creation debate as less important than evangelism are missing the forest for the trees: sure, you might get more people to “make a decision,” but what is it that you’re telling them they’re making a decision for? Surely the Christian life exists for more than replication: that’s more a characteristic of cancer than of a healthy organism, more like the Borg than the Federation. But more importantly, if you convince people that our faith in God is but a consequence of being right about certain important matters of history recorded in the Bible, then their becoming convinced at some later point that the mainline evangelical view is wrong on matters such as creation is surely going to rock the world of anyone you convert. Isn’t it best to teach them to put their faith in God alone and view theology as a fallible understanding of Him and His ways?

I am persuaded that those grounded in their faith, by which I mean those having experienced God through profound life experiences, not those cocksure of the infallibility of their theology, are less likely to reject God than those who have done as the creationists urge and hung the whole shebang on the reliability of their sources for theology, i.e. preachers, Sunday School teachers, and high-profile evangelicals who decry evolution as a mere “creation story for atheists” (Kirk Cameron).

But neither do I want to abandon my fellow believers to their fastidiously maintained blissful ignorance; this blog exists in large part as an attempt to provide an example of someone who seeks critical evaluation as an expression of faith rather than avoiding honest inquiry to preserve faith. I am convinced this can be done. I am of course aware that these are unlikely even to read my blog, but I also hope to encourage others like me to engage those threatened by critical inquiry of all sorts, including that which has wholly overthrown creationism.

This story is certainly making the rounds around the blogosphere, but I can’t pass it up, particularly because I have some things to say about it I haven’t read elsewhere. I thought I’d link to one of the better reactions I read (be sure to read the whole thing):

An Associated Press story this weekend fetes Saddleback Church’s Rick Warren’s ability to raise 2.4 million dollars at his megachurch in an economy where many are suffering because of our national plague of greed.

via Money Driven Life « Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.

As someone else put it, “I’m curious if [Warren's] ‘hoi polloi’ could be galvanized to donate that much money in that little time to a worthy charity.”

I’m sure Saddleback does some outreach. And there’s no doubt that a large part of charitable giving on the part of Americans comes from certain segments of the church. But think of it, friends: with $2.4 million, there are probably entire nations we could feed and train to feed themselves — and this is a single money drive, taken up over two days’ time, after the holidays, and from just one American church. Where are the concerted efforts to bear the burdens of the neediest in our own cities, let alone the truly destitute Third World?

A couple years ago, I mused “aloud” on this blog a couple times about the possibility of the Church mounting ambitious, large-scale endeavors to seriously impact those in need the world over. A story like this underscores the potential lying in the bank accounts of the rich American church. Unfortunately, we’ve got one group that’s willing to fork out big bucks to ensure ongoing personal fulfillment and another group that’s more interested in maintaining an uncompromising grasp on the fine aspects of their theology and in converting others to the faith (despite a noticeable lack of Scriptural support for either emphasis). And even if either of the latter were of paramount importance to the Christian and social concern a secondary matter (I emphatically reject this), surely we can, nay, must walk and chew gum at the same time:

What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

I can’t help but feel that Christians are so blithely content with maintaining the perfect theology (ahem) and seeking out more people to uncritically believe all the right things win to Christ that, to an utterly shameful extent, we seem to have lost the plot. What can be done, Christians?

In a discussion involving my rejection of inerrancy, a frequent commenter mentioned the inerrantist objection, ”Without [our Bible] can we confidently walk up to a non-believer and ask him to believe our own personal faith in God without showing him something that he can see that points to that God?”

The first thing I’d like to note is that we can confidently show our non-inerrant (can anyone think of a better term than “errant”?) Bible as something that points to God. The Bible, if nothing else, points to God, but this obviously stops well shy of “proving” Him or anything about Him. But what the commenter is getting at is the inerrantist’s uneasiness with the fact that we have no official “last word” source text whose very existence will elicit compulsory belief from the doubter to whom it is presented. This is, in effect, what the inerrantist holds the Bible to be: you must believe because the Bible says so.

In actuality, I doubt very many reasonable people become Christians solely because they have been persuaded that the Bible is inerrant. They become convinced by what it says, and this may or may not suggest to them that the whole thing is absolute, crystalized divine perfection. We don’t need to be assured of inerrancy in order to make good use of a newspaper, but our confidence may be boosted by its consistent accuracy.

Telling an unbeliever, “Accept Christ as Lord, just as the Bible says,” is not itself dependent on inerrancy at all. Laying aside any questions about the value of proselytism, rejection of inerrancy itself does not undermine it in principle, although it does underscore the invalidity of one common tactic.  I think it no less likely (and more probable, in fact) that I might convince someone to adopt my faith if I told him that…

(1a) the Bible was written by ancient witnesses who believed Jesus was Lord, and that

(2a) I’ve found that to be true in my life and seen it at work in others’ lives

…than if I tried to convince him that…

(1b) the Bible is 100% perfect because it and I say it is,

(2b) Q.E.D., Jesus has been proved Lord.

(3b) Oh, and I’ve found that to be true in my life and seen it at work in others’ lives.

If they find one error in Scripture, or even just one difficulty without a plausible answer, they’ll be obligated by sound reasoning to declare (1b) unsatisfied and chuck (2b) without a second thought about (3b). In other words, when they ask, “Why should I believe your Bible?”, which puts a more significant strain on credulity? “Because it’s perfect, which proposition I accept because it says so about itself,” or “Because it works, and has yielded extraordinary results for believers and for society as a whole throughout the centuries”?

The inerrancy doctrine has been used more than anything else as a blunt object to decisively “prove” Christianity. But only the young or gullible come to accept Christianity based upon that. Too many Fundamentalists and evangelicals feel as though they have to prove the Bible’s perfection so that their faith will be “proved” as well. But we don’t need proof of its inerrancy; we need evidence of its usefulness and its reliability. Even if we don’t consider the Bible to be any more indicative of actual events in the times they describe than historians assume for the uninspired, non-inerrant, but sincere works of Josephus, Tacitus, or Julius Caesar, we still have something to reckon with.  And for all my rejection of inerrancy, I find it an unmotivated leap to also reject its adequacy for leading us to the formative and definitive stages of our faith’s history, from which starting point we and the Church throughout history have gone on to encounter the truth of God in Christ.