The truly remarkable thing about Christianity is the fact that it refuses to be nailed down by simple philosophical or doctrinal presuppositions. Try as some have over the ages, they simply have not been able to fit this faith of ours into any tidy categories or comfortable social gospels... the true witness of the Apostles in Scripture and church tradition has soundly resisted all attempts to do so.
The Gospel of Christ is always expanding itself beyond comfortable norms and smug simplifications, convicting the slothfully content and preaching humility to the proud and the arrogant.
This is why debates about things such as predestination are so frustrating and even ultimately dangerous. While it may be important to be able to articulate (in some sense) the nature both of God's true and real sovereignty over His creation and our troublingly apparent ability to set our will against our Creator, it is ridiculous to settle for any position that makes no practical sense of either the nature of God or our own human experience! Both strict determinism and Armenian free will are drastically simplistic philosophical positions that fail to articulate either the fullness of the revealed nature of God or the aim of the Christian life in a way that is helpful to mere humans that are struggling through daily life and apparent freedom. When we settle for such articulations, we do not merely expose ourselves to pride and error, we also run the risk of letting everything that our simple philosophical positions ignore actually dominate our lives and our thinking behind our backs.
A perfect (and more dangerous) example of this phenomenon is the apparent neo-gnosticism of much of our own popular Christian culture. Most Christians will say that they believe in the incarnation of Christ and the bodily resurrection of the dead... but how many of us truly understand the implications of this reality? How often do you find in the church a reasonable understanding of the significance of physical and material presence in the reality of our spiritual life?
In the righteous ardour of our "sola fide" thinking, it seems that a subtle error has crept into our theology (though once again, not into our daily living). We say that in Christ the fullness of the Deity dwelt bodily (Col. 2:9), and we acknowledge that it is through Christ's physical death and resurrection that we have obtained life... but somehow we are unable even to hear a strong statement about the effective power of baptism or holy communion without falling into a panic. My point here is not so much a theological one - that baptism , for instance, is actually necessary or not necessary for salvation. My point is that our immediate suspicion of the power of physical processes may be more suspect than the power of those physical processes themselves. Do we believe that the bodily aspect of Christ's salvific actions were irrelevant to our salvation? Do we really think that "grace through faith" means that faith entails mere cognitive acceptance of theological propositions? I think that this whole train of belief smells of gnosticism.
The belief that body is bad and spirit is good may be far from the living practice of modern-day Christians, but our denial of any physical instrumentality in spiritual processes indicates that something is rotten with our theological presuppositions. The fact that no one actually lives as though gnosticism is true can be seen clearly by the great care that we take to keep our bodies fed and clothed and content. The great majority of our time is spent looking after bodily needs, and we fully acknowledge the spiritual aspect of physical actions such as addiction and adultery. How then in our thinking have we come to deny the power of bodily action for the good of our souls! How have we left off of fasting and kneeling and verbal confession... of denying ourselves and taking for our salvation the true body and blood of Christ?
What I am not saying is that we can build a tower up to heaven... No one in their right mind really believes that we creatures possess saving power inherent to ourselves, and that we are able to thus "work" our way to heaven by our own physical strength. The issue here is not an issue of "works vs. faith" in salvation. The issue is whether or not we allow our understanding to acknowledge that the grace of Christ uses physical processes to accomplish spiritual ends.
The inherent danger in denying this principle is great. I have Christian friends who pray and meditate and think nothing of their addiction to pornography or their damaging relational isolation. They are convinced that their cognitive assent to theological principles has been credited to them as righteousness, and they wait patiently for the free gift of sanctification, trying desperately to ignore their spiritual loneliness and deep inner turmoil. The true Gospel of Christ is radically against such false notions of grace and the power of God. We are physical beings as well as spiritual beings, and there is no salvation of our souls that does not include an element of salvation for our bodies as well. To say that God "declares" us righteous - as though our fall had only to do with an arbitrary penalty imposed by abstract legal considerations - is to completely ignore the true and dire ramifications of both the fall and of salvation, and serves ultimately only to numb the mind of the modern Christian with vague notions of metaphysical transactions that make no sense of the present and actual guilt, error and brokenness of our fallen humanity.
What our modern age needs to see is that what we do (or do not do) affects our spiritual condition. If we are to trust God to make us righteous, this work of grace must change our bodies if it is to change our souls, and the bodily change requires the same active obedience that we take for granted in our mental progress. All of the well-meaning and theoretical assent in the world would not have worked for our salvation if Christ had not consented to undergo the physical trial of death and resurrection. This spiritual end was obtained by a physical means because there is not a tidy separation between the two. Any dichotomy that we work to create in this regard does not change this fundamental truth of reality... it serves only to hamper our ability to truly discern our own spiritual condition, and as we hinted at earlier, this very denial of reality makes us blind to the ways in which our souls are truly being affected, and lets our spiritual sickness spread through neglect. So why aren't we thinking about what our bodies are doing? And why don't we want our Scriptures, our holy men or our church to be telling us what the Gospel has to say about what we ought to be doing with our bodies to be saved?
6 comments:
This is the quote that I was talking about that helped me. "If we are to trust God to make us righteous, this work of grace must change our bodies if it is to change our souls, and the bodily change requires the same active obedience that we take for granted in our mental progress. All of the well-meaning and theoretical assent in the world would not have worked for our salvation if Christ had not consented to undergo the physical trial of death and resurrection." I think you guessed it right yesterday in the car, but I just wanted to confirm it. I like the phrase "theoretical assent." It describes well what I felt like I was doing in the Prot. church. And it ties in nicely and makes a lot of sense that Christ's mental assent would not have saved us. Not until His body went. I guess it's a strange divide anyway, because it makes no sense to say that his mental assent could happen without his body...I think I'm still viewing a dichotomy that isn't there. This will take some time to get out my system, huh? :-)
"The truly remarkable thing about Christianity is the fact that it refuses to be nailed down by simple philosophical or doctrinal presuppositions."
hmmmm... I agree that Christianity cannot be nailed down as you describe it, but it also strikes me that I might make a similar (but different sounding) argument against a naturalist or philosophical pragmatist for why their "religion" is not compelling. Why aren't I a pragmatist? well, because it doesn't make sense. I'm wondering if Christianity "doesn't" make sense in a way that is more compelling than worldviews that we might reject. A positive spin is always to call Christianity mystical. What do you think?
Matthew,
I always cringe at pulling the "mystical" card - even though it seems like certain aspects of the faith are best referred to as mystical - if only because I don't yet trust myself with the term. I'm usually very cautious (though you wouldn't know it from my blog) about accidentally ignoring good arguments because of poorly applied trump card terms. Here, though, I think my argument is just trying to agree with Chesterton by saying that mystics "get" more about the world than our philosophical friends, because most "merely" philosophical stances are too narrow for the "bigness" of the world (like trying to illustrate the Trinity by talking about water, ice, and steam... something important will be left out in the description). What I am appealing to is an instinct that people already posses... I'm assuming that people naturally perceive the world to be bigger than most articulations that they've heard.
I think I'm open to the possibility that not ALL philosophical positions fall short (just narrow ones *irony acknowledged*). The philosophies you mentioned, for example, are all too narrow for the thing they're trying to describe. They all leave something I consider to be important out (the presence of the supernatural, the value of things that do not appear "useful").
I know that most modern thinkers would wryly point out that what I am doing is merely assuming my own dogmatic position and thus choosing what I believe to be the "significant" detials out of my own bias. Even something as big as "postmodernity" though, leaves something important out of its description (despite the purpose of the movement seemingly being not to do so)... namely, a consistent standard for making such rational judgements. I don't think that postmodernism accounts very well for the apparent order of the universe, and I'd rather accept a "mystical" explanation of this order than try to ignore it.
If it all comes down to preferrence, I'd rather take the position with hope that seems to allow me a basis for making claims about the world.
What do you think?
"Here, though, I think my argument is just trying to agree with Chesterton by saying that mystics "get" more about the world than our philosophical friends, because most 'merely' philosophical stances are too narrow for the "bigness" of the world (like trying to illustrate the Trinity by talking about water, ice, and steam... something important will be left out in the description)."
But it seems to be that even the Trinity analogue of water, ice, and steam (trite as it is) is better than nothing. A mystic can only be said to "get" more of the world if she concedes that God is too big for philosophy to envelop. On the other hand, these two positions aren't mutually exclusive. The water/ice/steam analogue is true (for the sake of argument), but it is limited. So if a philosopher knows her limits, and allows for mysticism where her philosophy reaches its limits, then wouldn't she be best off -- "getting even more" of the world?
Matthew,
Sure, this seems right to me... I certainly believe that there is a place for philosophical explanations (as long as the philosophers know their limits)... and our age has seen better than most ages what happens when people continually pull the "mystical" card in order to avoid taking a philosophical explanation seriously.
The problem seems to come when a philosophical stance refuses to acknowledge its limitations and starts to consider itself exhaustive... or conversely, when "mystical" just starts meaning "something we don't ask questions about".
However, one could say against the philosophers that the old "H2O" example of the Trinity is, in fact, useless because the Modalism inherent in the example renders the illustration incoherent for the purpose of understanding one God, eternally existing in three persons - the differences might be major enough to not really be telling you anything important about the Trinity. This is what I am always worried about doing with something like Reformed theology - which seems to hinge on an illustration that is so specific that it necessarily excludes a great many things worth knowing about the subject.
On the other hand, being "mystical" does not mean abandoning inquiry into a topic. When I talk about Christianity, I assume that the phenomena we are talking about are things that can universally be acknowledged to happen or to have happened - and that have philosophical implications. Folks saw the resurrection, and people at Pentecost started speaking in tongues. Modern-day saints perform miracles. Sure... why not allow for philosophical speculation on how these things fit into theories of mind, epistimology, and the immortality of the soul?
I am certainly not opposed to more knowledge!!! I am only opposed to settling for an articulation that leads to erronious conclusions in other areas (and thus is not actually knowledge). If your model of, say, medicine, encourages you to balance the four humours of the body in order to cure a person of sickness... its remarkable internal consistency and ability to explain common medical maladies is of little interest when you consider how much the theory gets wrong!
Basically... my point is that a thing needs to be true if it is to be accepted... and true things always account for the whole world, not just the bits relevant to the theory. And now, of course, I have said something simple enough to be obvious, and probably have proved that my point was too simple even to be worth having been made :)
I think I agree. And "Reformed Theology" is really the only major Christian thought that I would point to. Even Thomas Aquinas (in the height of Scholasticism) makes explicit his limitations. Calvin's (and especially Calvinism's) theology is more than just a totalizing philosophy; it's weakness are shown in the idea of Geneva itself.
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