Revelation by God, but through a man

Islamic scholar Abdulkarim Soroush thinks the Koran should be viewed in historical context, and as the writing of a human being (albeit a divinely inspired one) rather than the transcribed word of God.

[Soroush] told me that the prophet “was at the same time the receiver and the producer of the Koran or, if you will, the subject and the object of the revelation.” Soroush said that “when you read the Koran, you have to feel that a human being is speaking to you, i.e. the words, images, rules and regulations and the like all are coming from a human mind.” He added, “This mind, of course, is special in the sense that it is imbued with divinity and inspired by God.”

As might be expected, this hasn’t endeared Soroush to conservative Muslims. But it’s an encouraging line of thought. Precisely this kind of thinking about the Bible has led Christianity to an understanding of the text that is, I’d argue, more in line with what its authors understood it to be: a collection of accounts by fallible humans seeking the divine. In this light, scripture (whether the Bible, the Koran, or something else) is not taken at face value – it forces the reader to engage the text, and decide what it means to him or her, today. That’s no impenetrable firewall against extremism, but it’s an important first step.

Funny how these things look, in retrospect

On BoingBoing Gadgets, an almost-entirely-random but excellent essay from John Brownlee about a particular Christian edutainment series, which in retrospect is pretty creepy and philosophically squishy and maybe a bit scary when you think about it. I don’t think I ever saw the video franchise in question, but I definitely got a lot of exposure to that sort of thing growing up. (“McGee and Me” anyone?) My parents are anything but fundamentalists, but no congregation is ideologically uniform – and so I was subjected to more-conservative-than-at-home Sunday School lessons maybe 75% of the time. (I’d say my family falls into the leftmost quartile of most of the churches we’ve attended.) This phenomenon probably reached its apogee in early middle school, when I was recruited, along with all my peers, into a “Children’s Sunday” service culminating in an elaborate choral number – performed in front of the whole congregation, with one of us* dancing around in a gorilla costume – about how silly and nonsensical and fundamentally un-cool it is to believe in evolution.

I guess I can’t really claim to have been brainwashed.

—————–
* Not me.

“I think that religion at its best comes with a big dose of doubt.”

Over on BeliefNet, Steve Walden has the transcript of a fantastic 2004 interview Barack Obama gave to Chicago Sun Times columnist Cathleen Falsani, in which the future president discusses his faith in detail. As in other discussions of religion, the overwhelming impression is that Obama’s beliefs are heavily filtered through introspection and reflection on the consequence of particular doctrines. He believes that different religious perspectives can find common ground in shared values that transcend doctrine:

So, I’m rooted in the Christian tradition. I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people. That there are values that transcend race or culture, that move us forward, and there’s an obligation for all of us individually as well as collectively to take responsibility to make those values lived.

He responds to questions thoroughly, and with flashes of humor, cracking wise about “harps and clouds” when asked about heaven, for instance. And, over and over again, Obama turns away from certainty in favor of a more tenuous, dynamic, active faith:

I think that religion at it’s best comes with a big dose of doubt. I’m suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.

I think that … there’s an enormous amount of damage done around the world in the name of religion and certainty.

This is miles away from the faith of our current President, which is blinkered in the literal sense of wearing blinders – unable and unwilling to reflect on the meaning of positions taken, the kind of faith has no real response to reason or doubt. Barack Obama’s faith is a living faith, and it means that he’ll be a more truly Christian President than George W. Bush could ever be.

Left Behind movie: as bad as the book

Someone has, for reasons upon which I will not speculate, uploaded the entirety of the film adaptation of apocolypti-porn blockbuster Left Behind to YouTube. Which is as good as an invitation to slacktivist Fred Clark, who’s already eviscerated the book. A brief sample:

This is why NORAD doesn’t let foreigners with satellite-broadcasting equipment just wander in to their central command. You shout something, some botanist translates it for them, and the next thing you know your military secrets are being broadcast to the entire world by some hack reporter who acts like you’d just sat down with him for an interview.

California’s Proposition 8: bad for straight marriage, too

On Slacktivist, lefty evangelical Fred Clark reams the State of California for “un-Californian” behavior and makes a very important point about recently-passed anti-gay-marriage ballot measure Proposition 8:

For all the scaremongering “defense of marriage” language used by supporters of Proposition 8, the passage of this silly measure actually dealt the institution a severe blow. What had been a right is now only a privilege — a privilege that the state is free to withhold as it sees fit. Yielding that kind of power to the state is not the sort of thing that a free people ought to be doing if they wish to remain a free people.

Utah town won’t take seven more Commandments

I can’t resist this one: a (very) minority religious group is suing a Utah town because it wouldn’t accept their donation of a monument to sit beside a Ten Commandments plaque in a public park. The New York Times says the case goes to the Supreme Court tomorrow. The minority religion in question is called Summum – it apparently incorporates elements of Gnostic Christianity and ancient Egyptian iconography. The monument they to donate would have been carved with the text of Summum’s Seven Aphorisms, which are supposed to have been given to Moses along with the Ten Commandments.

The situation is a real-world version of the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument against mixing church and state – once you incorporate one religious narrative into state-sponsored architecture, science curricula, or whatever, how can you argue that any religious narrative isn’t appropriate for inclusion? (The FSM is a facetious Creator originally proposed for inclusion in Kansan public school science classes, as an “alternative” to both scientific explanations and Christian Creationism.) The Summum church has a point. And that point is (perhaps contrary to their actual wishes) that the Ten Commandments has no more business in a government-funded public space than the Seven Aphorisms do.

Towards an empirical morality

ResearchBlogging.orgAndrew Sullivan links to a thought-provoking 1998 essay by E.O. Wilson, in which the champion of sociobiology delves into the question of whether morality arises from divine revelation or natural selection. Wilson takes an interesting position, attempting to turn the question around by ninety degrees:

But the split is not, as popularly supposed, between religious believers and secularists. It is between transcendentalists, who think that moral guidelines exist outside the human mind, and empiricists, who think them contrivances of the mind. In simplest terms, the options are as follows: I believe in the independence of moral values, whether from God or not, and I believe that moral values come from human beings alone, whether or not God exists. [Italics sic.]


Photo by lumierefl.

Although this perspective pulls back from the God-vs.-Science dilemma, it doesn’t quite eliminate it. Science tends to lean towards the “moral values come from human beings alone” position, and not just because any “transcendent” source of morality is probably beyond the scope of scientific inquiry. Exhibit A is the “trolley dilemma” dissected eloquently in a 2006 episode of Radio Lab: To prevent a runaway trolley from hitting a group of bystanders, most people judge it moral to pull a lever to divert the trolley onto a side track, even if doing so kills one person standing on the side track. But ask them to push that single person into the path of the trolley to stop it hitting the crowd, and most people balk.

In the experiment at the focus of that Radio Lab episode, Joshua Greene and his coauthors used functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at brain activity in people considering the two variants of the trolley dilemma, and found evidence that the dilemma creates a conflict between rational and emotional responses [PDF]. “Rational” parts of the brain were active in the decision to pull the lever, but “emotional” ones were involved in unwillingness to push a person into the trolley’s path. As Greene et al. write:

The thought of pushing someone to his death is, we propose, more emotionally salient than the thought of hitting a switch that will cause a trolley to produced similar consequences, and it is this emotional response that accounts for people’s tendency to treat these cases differently.

This result suggests that there isn’t some universal, transcendent standard of morality by which people are making decisions – in either pushing or lever-pulling, the choice is whether or not to sacrifice one life for the sake of many. But something in the fundamental architecture of the human brain determines that sometimes morality is judged in purely utilitarian terms and sometimes it isn’t. This is the kind of data that bears on the transcendence versus empiricism debate that Wilson outlines.

But empirical morality seems to run directly into the “naturalistic fallacy,” conflating that which is with that which ought to be. Wilson argues that empirical morality does not assume that the innate moral judgments of the human brain are also the judgments we ought to make – instead, it requires constant introspection and re-examination of the consequences produced by society’s moral code:

The empiricist view recognizes that the strength of commitment can wane as a result of new knowledge and experience, with the result that certain rules may be desacralized, old laws rescinded, and formerly prohibited behavior set free. It also recognizes that for the same reason new moral codes may need to be devised, with the potential of being made sacred in time.

That seems an inherently progressive point of view, one not far removed from the way Jesus described a morality that built on and universalized the old Jewish law, as with revenge: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (Matt. 5:38-9, italics mine) And Jesus also tells his disciples to judge prophets not by their appeal to some special (transcendent?) revelation, but “by their fruit,” the consequences of their teachings (Matt. 7:15-22).

Yet – how do we judge what is a good outcome and what is a bad one? Science is good for predicting the consequences of actions and moral positions, but it is unable to determine which ones are good. Ultimately, empirical morality must proceed from some basic ethical framework, some agreed-upon prior definitions of “good” and “bad.” But that’s not really a victory for the transcendentalists. Even a perfectly articulated Platonic morality needs data from which to proceed – how many people are in the trolley’s way, and how much mass it would take to stop the trolley. Morality without reference to the empirical world is worse than meaningless. And the only access we have to the empirical world and its mechanisms is the scientific method.

Reference

J.D. Greene, R.B. Sommerville, L.E. Nystrom, J.M. Darley, J.D. Cohen (2001). An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment Science, 293 (5537), 2105-8 DOI: 10.1126/science.1062872

Powell endorses Obama, defends Muslims

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell officially endorsed Barack Obama for President on Meet the Press this morning. But, incredibly, that’s not the most important thing he had to say in the interview. Referring to the Republican whisper campaign that claims Obama is a crypto-Muslim, Powell said (around 4:38 in this video):

Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, “What if he is?” Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be President? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop this suggestion, “He’s a Muslim, and he might be associated with terrorism.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

Powell puts his finger on the ugly nature of the Muslim Obama rumors, which has bothered me basically from the first time I heard it, but hasn’t been much discussed in any major media outlet: why should it make a difference if Barack Obama is Muslim? As long as he’s an American citizen, his religion shouldn’t matter in a run for the Presidency. On the Media only picked it up last week – though once they did, they dissect the issue with the acumen you’d expect. More even then the endorsement, which is a big deal, I hope Powell’s MTP appearance starts a conversation about this.

Mennonites in the marketplace

In this week’s Mennonite Weekly Review, my friend Steve Kriss muses about the religious offerings in the marketplace of ideas:

When considering that the U.S. religious reality is a marketplace of faith and ideas, it’s easy to think that it becomes a competition. …

But the marketplace also invites creativity, not just competition. I think of the markets of Morocco or the shops at Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. Sure, what’s offered is largely the same — clothing, art, food — but it nourishes differently and uniquely.

Steve’s describing exactly the sort of interfaith relations that are key to a functional, multicultural, democratic society. But the thing about marketplaces is that everyone has to more or less agree on the rules that govern them. For different religious positions (including non-religion) to take part in a marketplace of faiths, every one has to consent to a certain level of mutual respect and civility, and everyone has to agree on some set of universal “goods” by which competing religions are measured. The separation of church and state is supposed to enforce exactly this idea – regardless of who is in the majority, be they Christian, Hindu, atheist, or whatever, society still works by a set of rules that everyone recognizes as good.

But I don’t know how many religious people are interested in playing by a set of common marketplace rules. To do so is to admit that there are some overarching ethical principles that are held in common by people with all faith positions – and that these common principles are more important to the way society works than the special revelation of any one faith or denomination. That’s directly opposed to the claims of most religions (and anti-religions), who are more interested in establishing a monopoly than trading ideas in the marketplace.

Christ Church as it is: Church and state

Here in Moscow, Idaho, it’s hard to avoid hearing about Christ Church, a local conservative mega-church with ministries encompassing a publishing house, a Bible college with dodgy accreditation, a private k-12 school, a ministerial training program, and its own denomination of conservative neo-Calvinists. All of which are headquartered in Moscow, ID, population circa 23,000.


Figure 1: State, and Church
Photo by eqqman.

Non-Christ Churcher Moscovites mostly know the group for its ties to Christian Reconstructionism, a movement that aims to return U.S. society resurrect the Confederate States of America as a “Christian” nation. Including, yes, slavery. Douglas Wilson, the pastor of Christ Church and éminence grise behind most of its ministries, earned the attention of the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center when he published a (substantially plagiarized) book explaining that slavery wasn’t so bad after all. Christ Church has since tried to downplay this fundamentally racist history, and succeeded in snowing a New York Times reporter who profiled the affiliated New Saint Andrew’s College.

Actually, reading that Times piece, you can sense that the reporter may have under-represented CC/NSA/Doug Wilson’s racist undercurrents not so much because Christ Churchers hide them very well (Doug Wilson on mainstream conservatives: “They voted for Bush; I’d vote for Jefferson Davis.”) but because locals who are creeped out by Christ Church can sound a bit, well, shrill. Which brings me, finally, to the point of this post: I’ve started looking into what Christ Church has to say about itself. It’s one thing for a bunch of Moscovite hippies (yours truly included) to be worried about a conservative megachurch in our midst; it’s another if that church actually, by its own admission, takes extreme and worrying positions.

Today’s topic: the relationship between church and state. This is a good starting point because one of the major accusations against Christ Church is that its aims are basically theocratic – that, politically, Christ Church (or Wilson, who might as well be synonymous with the church’s policy positions, as we’ll see below) wants to enforce Old Testament law on the entire population of the United States. Now, there are actually three theological components to that position, if Christ Church does indeed hold it:

  • Whether, for Christians, the Old Testament text is a standard for normative ethical behavior (as opposed to viewing the Old Testament through the lens of the Gospel, as we Mennonites do);
  • Whether Christians should ask non-Christians to accept Christian ethical views (whatever those are); and
  • How Christians should go about doing that.

You might take all sorts of positions on these three questions and still fall somewhere on the spectrum of theology Christians have built up over the last two thousand years. The question is, where does Christ Church fall on that spectrum? Well, fortunately for the curious among us, Christ Church’s newsletter, “Credenda/Agenda”, has just run a cover story on religion and politics. Let’s see what it (and, by it, I mean Doug Wilson, who is the editor of “Credenda/Agenda”, natch) has to say.

(First, a complaint/warning to those clicking through to the source text: it’s long and kinda rambling, much like this post. This is probably because Wilson’s primary employment is writing sermons, which are not usually structured as five-paragraph essays. That’s fine for speaking aloud, but less so in written form.)

Anyway. Wilson starts out by strongly affirming the political relevance of the Gospel:

Jesus was crucified in a public way, and His death necessarily has public ramifications. There is no way to be fully faithful to the message of His death and resurrection in private.

I could actually fully agree with Wilson on this point; my thinking about the relationship of the Gospel to politics is basically lifted wholesale from the writings of John Howard Yoder (no relation), who wrote things that sound a lot like the above quote. For example, in his masterwork The Politics of Jesus:

The kingdom of God is a social order and not a hidden one. … it is that concrete jubilary obedience, in pardon and repentance, the possibility of which is proclaimed beginning right now, opening up the real accessibility of a new order in which grace and justice are linked, which men have only to accept.

But it’s also possible that Wilson means something completely different from Yoder when he says the Gospel is politically relevant. Yoder held that Christian ethics are political because they necessarily challenge the authority of the state, but he didn’t mean that Christians should take over the state – he meant that Christianity challenges the entire concept of human government:

Preaching and incorporating a vision of an order of social human relations more universal than the Pax Romana … [Jesus] permitted the Romans to deny their vaunted respect for law as they proceeded illegally against him. This they did in order to avoid the threat to their dominion represented by the very fact that he existed in their midst so morally independent of their pretensions.


Figure 2: Jesus conquers
Photo by RATAEDL.

(That’s more from The Politics of Jesus.) Yoder was unsure whether Christians should vote, much less run the country. What political meaning does Wilson see in the Gospel, then? Explicating a passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Wilson writes,

… Christ and Him crucified is theonomic postmodernism — when the nations are discipled in accordance with His Word and are taught to obey all that He required, this means the necessary exclusion of secular democracy (which is the political expression of modernity). … Christ is the Lord of the new polis that has been planted right in the middle of the old polis. God did this so that the new way of being human in Christ would … gradually transform all the nations of men. [Italics all Wilson’s]

That sounds to me like Wilson wants the Church (presumably, his) to be more than present in the world – he wants it to rule the world. A quick dig in Wikipedia for the definition of “theonomy” suggests this is the case: the term literally translates as “God-law,” and in modern times, it’s apparently associated with Christian Reconstructionist (theocratic) thinkers.

In theological response, I’d point to the words of Jesus to his disciples in the Gospel according to Matthew:

You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave — just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Jesus isn’t just rejecting the current model of government under which he and his disciples live (i.e., Roman dictatorship), but the entire concept of government, of one human being exercising power over another. Note also the reference to the Crucifixion – Jesus is setting up his basically passive submission to Roman authority as a model for his disciples. It’s hard to govern in any meaningful sense of the word if you’re submitting yourself to death on the cross.

And but so Wilson thinks that the Church should rule the world. Eventually, anyway – he’s vague on the topic of how it gets to rule. That seems to answer both the second and third question above – what about the first? Where is Wilson getting the ethical standards by which his Church will rule? Here there is much verbiage about “cruciform politics” and “sacrificially” testifying to the lordship of Christ, but not a lot of actual policy positions, or the specific sources from which they spring. Except for this one:

The idols of the age are always decked out in respectable clothing, and people who attack them are always dismissed (initially) as crazed nutjobs and disturbers of the peace. In our day, one of the central idols is the the swollen state. In other words, the political aparatus [sic] over which Jesus will be Lord needs to be about 100 times smaller than it currently is. [Italics Wilson’s]

And this one:

Issues like abortion and homosexual marriage are far more important than are issues like minimum wage laws. But the lordship of Christ does apply to minimum wage laws. It is just that we might not want to start there—especially if we think they are a good idea.

So, according to Wilson, Jesus is for limited government, outlawing abortion, and preventing legalized gay marriage. He’s interested in minimum wage improvements, but they’re not a top-tier priority precisely because they sound like a good idea. Apart from this last weird, counter-intuitive assertion, this is a pretty tired outline of Christian Right talking points. And it’s maddening, and sad, and completely disconnected from the Gospel text.

Jesus never said a word about the “size” of government (whatever that means), abortion, or homosexuality. Never. Nothing. If you dig around in the Old Testament and the Epistles, you’ll find a handful of statements against homosexuality (depending on how you define the term), and also against women leaving their heads bare in church, men shaving their sideburns, and anybody eating owls. Meanwhile, Jesus spends a lot of time talking about being generous to the poor. So does the Old Testament. Which suggests to me, just looking at, you know, the Bible, that God might actually care about minimum wage laws. Quite a lot. And way more than he (or she) cares about the latest skirmish in the U.S. culture wars. In other words, Doug Wilson and Christ Church might be interested in setting up a theocracy, but it sure won’t be a Christian one.