Something you can’t hide
Says you’re lonely
Hidden deep inside
Of you only
It’s there for you to see
Take a look and be
Burn slowly the candle of life

Something there outside
Says we’re only
In the hands of time
Falling slowly
It’s there for us to know
With love that we can go
Burn slowly the candle of life

So love everybody
And make them your friend
So love everybody
And make them your friend

Something you can’t hide
Says you’re lonely
Hidden deep inside
Of you only
It’s there for you to see
Take a look and be
Burn slowly the candle of life

Something there outside
Says we’re only
In the hands of time
Falling slowly
It’s there for us to know
With love that we can go
Burn slowly the candle of life

-Moody Blues

Total religious apathy.

Here’s the thing: I like religion. I like the Bible. I like going to church. I like churches. I like ministers, bishops, and clergypeople. I like prayers, religious books, religious traditions, liturgies, and hymns. I like contemporary Christian music, even. I like religious symbolism. i like allegories. I like the ideas of Christianity. I like the theology. I like the idea of Jesus Christ. All of it is very moving and interesting, both intellectually and emotionally.

But I don’t know if I can really believe.

I’m not against church or God or Jesus. I certainly wouldn’t presume to actively disbelieve in any of it. And the motions of Christianity are natural enough for me to go through. I’ve even had a significant mystical experience or two. But to affirmatively believe? I have a hard time with that. Maybe I just can’t.

I don’t know what that makes me, or what that means.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am entirely unqualified to write an opinion on the subject, and I say that by way of a caveat.  It’s entirely possible that I am going to be totally wrong about this.  But it’s my take on the mess, for what it’s worth.

I want to talk about what Post-modernism is and what it isn’t- I know that’s a philosophically big piece of meat to bite off, and like I said, I’m prepared to live with the consequences of being just plain wrong.

Why is this important?  Because the interplay of Modernism and Post-modernism seems to really be at the heart of much of our society’s issues about religion.  And as we as a society move towards being fully Post-modern, it is going to shape religion for the next several centuries.

To most fundamentalists, and probably to many evangelicals, Post-modernism is a demon of  “moral relativism,” a solid and pernicious philosophical enemy to the gospel of Jesus Christ. When these people talk about Post-modernism, they’re talking about a philosophy of absolute relativism.  It’s the mindset that refuses to accept that there are absolute rights and wrongs, and it’s the mindset that, religiously speaking, comes up with ideas like “many different paths to the top of the mountain,” the idea that Christianity is one of many equally valid (and equally real) religious approaches.  In fact, it holds that all religious approaches are equally valid, and that they’re all “real” to the person who takes them.

This bothers traditional Christians because Modern Christianity, as a product of the Modern mindset, deals with absolutes- objective facts that can be known to be absolutely true or absolutely false.  The “Post-modern” approach, to traditional Christians, completely undermines Christianity, because if Jesus is a way instead of the way, then He isn’t really, well, real, in the Modern objective sense of the word.  It reduces the glory of Jesus, it undermines scripture, and permits people to reject God and His commandments by invoking the mantra of “you do it your way, I’ll do it mine.”  Worse yet, this approach is often perceived as openly hostile to belief systems that claim absolute truth, e.g. Christianity.

In one sense, these Christians are not wrong.  The kind of “absolute relativism” that I’m talking about is a fairly popular way of looking at the world these days.  It’s certainly convenient, in that it really imposes no obligations on the individual aside from those obligations the individual chooses.  It also seems to go a long way towards explaining the mind-boggling global diversity that is becoming ever more of a reality to people in our society.  An absolute, objective philosophy feels arrogant to a lot of people, and so they go completely the other direction.

The thing is, I believe that this popular form of “absolute relativism” isn’t really Post-modern at all.  Instead, it’s simply reverse of Modernism.  If you say your philosophy is “a,” and I turn around and say mine is “not-a,” I’ve hardly come up with a completely new way of thinking!  I’ve just reversed your philosophy.  Thus, my “new philosophy” is really just a reflection of your old philosophy.  A reflection has no real substance of its own. It depends entirely on the thing it is reflecting for existence.  Without the reflected, the reflection ceases to exist.  Thus, the reflection is really just a part of the reflected, and not a new thing at all.

“Absolute relativism” is thus not an independent philosophy but a dependent philosophy.  As such it has no meaningful existence of its own.  As a knee-jerk reaction to Modernism, Absolute relativism has no substance of its own.  Without Modernism, Absolute relativism ceases to exist.  It isn’t a new philosophy at all, and in no real way is it Post-modern.

What then, is Post-modernism?  Post-modernism isn’t simply about being the opposite of Modernism.  Post-modernism means an entirely different approach, a whole new way of looking at the world with a fundamentally different emphasis, the same way that Modernism wasn’t just the reverse of Medieval thought, but was something entirely new that asked completely different questions.

I do believe that Post-modernism is basically relative, but I use that word with a slightly different connotation.  While Absolute relativism rejects the very idea of absolute truth and objective facts, Post-modernism is just not particularly concerned with them.  It is asking different questions entirely.  The questions that it is asking are relative ones, by which I mean questions about how one thing relates to another.  Modernism looks at a given thing in isolation, defining its characteristics and its behaviors more or less in terms of the thing unto itself.  Modernism classifies, dissects, and scrutinizes the indivdual thing (or person) in order to define it in a way that is objectively true in isolation.  Post-modernism, on the other hand, is much more concerned with how a thing exists in relation to other things.  It is concerned with how things (and people) are connected and inter-connected.

So Post-modernism is indeed “relative,” by which I mean “relational.”  It’s not the opposite of objective truth and absolute facts; it’s something completely different.  Comparing Post-modernism to Modernism is not like comparing black to white; it is like comparing black to a broomstick.

Post-modernism only undermines Modernism in the sense that ultimately, the Post-modern person simply is no longer concerned with the same factors that the Modern person is concerned with.  Ultimately Post-modernism will supplant modernism by taking its place, but not by reversing it.  It’s different, but that doesn’t mean opposite.

Look at the world we live in, where we are becoming more and more interconnected.  Communication (cell phones, e-mail, internet chat, television, radio) put us into direct contact and thus into relationships wit more people.  The internet itself, which dominates our society, is not a repository of facts, but a web of computer networks that are defined by their relationship to each other.  Science is looking at levels of existence where relation is far more important than definition.  We are quickly turning into a society of people that are not concerned with what the thing is, but how the thing relates to everything else, and how it relates to us.  Facts are meaningful not in and of themselves, but only insofar as they are relevant.

So what does that have to do with religion?  Assuming I’m right, and not so far out in left field that I’m playing a different game, Post-modernism means that gradually Christianity will grow more concerned with how we relate to God through Christ and how we relate to each other.  In contrast, it will simply no longer be concerned with worrying about reducing Christianity to a set of objective, verifiable facts because objective, verifiable facts will no longer be all that important to people.

It won’t happen overnight, and it won’t happen without some heavy resistance and awkward transition from Modernism, but it will happen.  What is important is that it won’t injure the divinity of Jesus Christ or His mission in any way.  All it means is that we will begin looking at Jesus in terms of how he relates to us instead of dissecting Him under a microscope.  It’s already been happening in the last century as more and more Christians talk about a personal relationship with Jesus.  That’s not a thing that the Reformers talked about!  Relatively speaking, it’s an entirely new doctrine, and one that is a harbinger of Post-modern Christianity.

Christianity will survive without Modernism the same way that it survived the fourteen centuries before Modernism existed.  Jesus wasn’t Modern, and neither were the apostles.  God is not dependent on human paradigms.  He transcends our experience entirely, and so just because we look at God in a new way doesn’t mean we have changed God or fallen away from Him.  It just means we look at him in a new way- a way that is meaningful and relevant to us.

For awhile last fall my wife and baby and I were attending a Quaker meeting for worship over in Bethesda. It was a “liberal” unprogrammed-style meeting, which means you sat in silence and listened to the Inner Light. The idea is that you sit and listen, and nobody says anything unless they are moved by the Spirit (which they usually call the Light, I guess).

It was actually really cool, and we had some intensely spiritual experiences that I’d like to talk about. But I also had some serious reservations, which I would likewise like to talk about.

The first time we went, our baby was making a little bit of noise. I had this overwhelming feeling that as a baby, he was so much closer to the ultimate source than we are as adults. He is toally unburdened by culture, society, philosophy, or even language- just completely pure, and as such what he had to say was probably so much more meaningful than anything the rest of us would say, filtered as it would be through established cognitive frameworks, etc. It struck me very powerfully. I also kept thinking of the music to “Candle of Life,” a fantastic song by the Moody Blues that captures perfectly the kind of cosmic awe that I was feeling at the meeting.

I also was attracted to the Quaker testimonies: their commitment to peace, to equality, and to integrity seemed to be the very heart of what Jesus Christ was trying to teach us. And I got the impression that Quakers were actually genuine about it, and not hypocritical.

Quakerism also handily deals with the question of how there can be so many different religions the world over. Their answer is that in every person there is some of that which is God, and anyone can listen to what it has to say and be inspired by it. In other words, nobody has a monopoly on the Light. That was nice as far asI was concerned. It meant that as someone considering leaving the Mormon church, I didn’t even have to give up the Book of Mormon! Even if it wasn’t a factual record of the ancient Americas, it still can be inspired by God.

In many ways, Quakerism seemed like a true universal religion: all-encompassing enough to really take in everybody, but grounded in their testimonies in a way that, say, the Unitarian Universalists are not (I consider the UU’s fairly bland and wishy-washy). Quakerism seemed like the kind of religion that could not only be universal to all people, but in all times as well- it’s the kind of religion we could take to the stars and have ot be still relevant, or even more so.

At the core Quakerism is about the mystical experience, and as a Mormon that was not unfamiliar territory. But it is also incredibly egalitarian, and a religion where the individual is really responsible for his own relationship with God, not needing a human intercessor of any kind.

But I did have concerns. We actualy stopped going to meetings because we were offended by the way one lady told us to put our baby in the nursery and not bring him to the meeting. My only real experience with church had been with Mormonism, where noisy babies in the service are just a part of things. Looking back now, i realize that most churches have child care during the worship service, and while it;s nice to be able to worship as a whole family, it’s also nice to not be distracted by a fussy baby, as much as you may love him. A downside to the Mormon approach is that parents constantly have to take their crying children out of the chapel, which means that parents with babies often miss more Sacrament Meetings than they get to sit through, for years at a stretch.

The Quakers were nice about it- after the incident, they sent us cards apologizing, and they even called us to talk about it. We took the opportunity to look elsewhere though.

My biggest concern with Quakerism was the noticable lack of emphasis on Jesus christ and on the Bible. Honestly, I’m still not sure if that’s important because like then, I am still trying to figure out how I feel about Jesus. Maybe the Quakers have it right! Maybe they’re dead wrong. In either case, the noticable lack of Bibles and Jesus was a little discomfiting. at a bare minimum, I saw nothing transformational about Quakerism, at least not in a divine sense. Jesus might have even be acknowledged, but I didn’t see where his Atonement fit in, and I certainly didn’t see any real sense in which His Atonement works directly in the life of a Quaker. Again, given how wishy-washy I am about Jesus, you would think this shouldn’t necessarily matter to me. And maybe it doesn’t.

Another concern I had arose over time, and that is a concern with the nature of mystical experience itself. C. S. Lewis said, in Mere Christianity,

In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F. an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, “I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!”

Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is only admittedly coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.

Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God-experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion-all about feeling God in nature, and so on-is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.

And I wonder if that isn;t particularly applicable to Quakerism. Yes, there’s plenty of the mystical experience there to satisfy the most God-hungry soul out there. But it is practical? Does it lead you anywhere? C. S. Lewis makes the argument in favor of the traditional Christian creeds. Do the Quakers’ testimonies accomplish the same thing (i.e. are they a map that gets you somewhere)? Maybe so, but it seems problematic to me.

In any case, I wouldn’t be against going back to a Quaker meeting. I haven’t completely written Quakerism off yet.

Sometimes I think about just giving up on Christianity and becoming an Asatruar.  Seriously.  Sometimes Christianity looks no more real to me than anything else claimsto be.  Sometimes I just can’t buy the absolute truth of it.  Sometimes Christianity seems completely irrelevant to me.  Sometimes it looks like nothing more than a messianic cult that sprung from Judaism, like Christianity is to Judaism as Mormonism is to Christianity (not that Mromonism is necessarily a messianic cult per se, but that Mormonism claims to be a divinely-guided restoration of original truth whereas it just looks to me like a perfectly explicable 1800’s restorationist sect that outgrew itself).

If God really is more of a nebulous spirit entity or oversoul, and the specifics don’t really matter that much, then why even be Christian?

In many ways Asatru, which is supposedly a revival of the religion of my Northern European ancestors, might even be a better fit.  Soemthing about cultural relevancy.  It’s attractive to me for much the same reason that Anglicanism is attractive to me- I am a man of Northern European descent, of heavily British-isles extraction.  Because of that, Anglicanism (and also Asatru) just seems appropriate.  Culturally relevant, if that makes sense.

Despite the comfort that I have with Christianity due to a Christian upbringing, I wonder sometimes if I’d be honestly happier revering Odin, Thor, and Freya.  I’m probably too chicken to ever formally renounce Christianity though.  I’d be much more likely to quietly and gradually slip into your basic agnosticism.

But then if I became an Asatruar, I would probably be honor-bound to go back into the military and go to war so I could go to Valhalla or something.  And to be honest with you, I don’t really want to do that.

Sometimes I think the only reason I stay Christian is that I really, really like Christmas.  For now, that’s reason enough.

I guess I have been thinking a little bit about biblical infallibility. I know that some people believe whole-heartedly that the Bible is the infallible and inerrant Word of God. I do not. To start with, it’s a fundamentally untenable position. If the Bible is God’s complete and inerrant word, how come it never says so? There’s absolutely nothing in theBible that says that theBible is either complete or inerrant. Sure, there may be scriptures from which one can infer some kind of inerrancy, etc. but I think it’s a case of knowing what you intend to find before you go looking for it, and then, of course, finding it.

One problem with the inerrant-Bible idea is that it leads to a kind of Bibliodolatry, where the Bible itself becomes deified or at least elevated to the same level of God. The only thing I can think of that would support the Bible being on the same level as God Himself is the first chapter of St. John, where it talks about the Word. However, it certainly does not say that it’s talking about the Bible as we know it. I am more inclined to believe that the logos, or Word, that it mentions is Christ himself, as the living expression of God the a person’s words are his expressions. So, a metaphorical title at best, or perhaps some kind of synechdoche or metonyny (I forget which is which).

So, what do I believe than? I see a classic fallacy in many arguments about Biblical inerrancy, which is that the Bible is either 100% true or you have to throw it out completely. That’s the false dilemma again, rearing its ugly head. There are a lot of percents between zero and one hundred, and then there are a lot of senses or qualities of truthfulness along the way. Furthermore, again we have no independent basis for dividing the question into two possible answers- there’s nothing in the Bible (or anywhere else that we might see as reliably from God) that says it’s a black-and-white either/or analysis.

I guess I would have ot say that I believe (at least on days when I’m feeling particularly Christian) in Biblical reliability. In other words, I belive in the central message of the Bible, that Jesus Christ died for us, is clear and fairly unimpeachable. In general, the books that made it into the Bible did so not haphazardly but with care, thought, and with the weight of tradition (not to mention the judgment of people who were contextually a lot closer to when the books were written!). If soemthign is in theBible, we need to listen up and pay attention because it’s probably important and probably true.

But I don’t think that just because something is “in the Bible” means that it’s the same as if it came right out of God’s mouth. In fact, I think it laughable to postulate that the words of Paul or Obadiah are exactly identical in reliability and significance to the words of Jesus. I buy off on the legitimacy of the Gospels (I realize that reasonable people miht disagree with me, but that’s their business), but I also believe in the primacy of the Gospels. When Jesus says one thing and some other dude says another thing, I don’t have to try to rack my brain to construct extra-biblical doctrines to reconcile the two. I can just say that the words of Jesus trump the words of, well, pretty much everyone else.

In fact, I think the source of a lot of probably false extra-biblical doctrines comes from the mistaken assumption that every word of the Bible is equal to every other word. When two passages seem to contradict each other, you’ve then got to either toss the whole thing out, or try to figure out some way to interpret them so that they don’t. Sometimes that approach might be legitimate, but I think some times you get some dumb doctrines that way.

At the same time, I also think it is ridiculous to assume that the people who actually wrote the Bible were some kind of spirit-posessed God-robots, transcribing exactly the words that God dictated to them. Such a thing is possible, of course, but there’s nothing in the Bible itself that would lead me to believe that such was, in fact, the case. I find it much more reasonable and likely that the people who write the Bible were insipred by the Spirit to write what they wrote, but that they werenevertheless writing in their own cultural context and influenced by their own thoughts and personalities. In particular I think this applies to the epistles of the New Testament, which are a collection of correspondances between early church leaders and various churches and other church leaders, not a set of records of direct revelation (as opposed to, say, the book of Revelations).

Does this approach mean that I just pick and choose the parts of the Bible that I like, and toss the rest aside willy-nilly? Maybe it does. I’m not sure. I’ll talk more about this as it relates to specific issues in future posts.

I haven’t written much in a few days because I haven’t had much in the way of particularly brilliant or incisive religious thoughts.  I’m not going to post just for the sake of posting.  Plus, I’m in law school, which means I’m generally pretty busy.

Also, I’ve been kind of stuck in the same place.  I’m not feeling particularly spiritual, or religious.  On the contrary, I feel almost perfectly apathetic about God.  Or gods.  Or whatever.

This evening I feel spiritually discouraged. Maybe I don’t even believe in God at all. Or maybe I believe in a nebulous, ill-defined spiritial something-or-other. In any case, I don’t really think I believe in the Bible or in Jesus. See, when I talk about “having doubts” these days I’m not talking about a little nagging in the back of my head. I’m talking about a loud siren blaring that says “Don’t bother! It’s all pretty much crap, and you know it!”

This isn’t the kind of little piddly doubt that I can just persevere through with my little light of faith. This is utter spiritual despair. The entire premise of Christianity seems ludicrous to me. It looks to me like a messianic cult that grew out of Judaism but then was appropriated by Europeans, add two thousand years, and season to taste. The Bible seems unclear at best, and at worst it seems very clear about things I simply cannot believe.

I dunno. Maybe I just need to lay off the Chick tracts.

Much of my thought revolves around conversion.  There are two threads running in my religious quest.  In the first place, I am looking for a church home, a church, faith, or denomination where I can go and enjoy it and not have any reservations whatsoever.  Maybe my standards are too high and I’m looking for a perfect church (or faith, or even religion- I’m not always necessarily confining it to Christianity) that doesn’t exist.  But that’s not what I’m concerned with at the moment.

The second thread is a quest for conversion.  I want to belive in God, for real, and I generally want to believe in Jesus Christ for real, too.  I have no interest whatsoever in settling on a Pascal’s Wager type of faith (not that I think there’s anything wrong with Pascal’s Wager per se).  If I’m going to believe, I want to really believe.  If I am to be converted, I want to be converted for life.  A half-assed attempt at faith holds no allure to my soul.  I don’t want ot say “here it is; I’ve found it,” and then a week or a month or a year ot even ten years down the road say “oh, well never mind; I thought I had found it but I was wrong.”

At the same time, I don’t know if I can believe like that.  I don’t know if I can be committed for life.  It just seems like too much to ask.  Maybe the problem is that while I have no problem with the idea of being committed for life, I have yet to find anything at all (except for maybe my wife) that I want to be committed for life to.

Maybe an analogy to my wife is the correct one- I’m far more committed to her now than I was sis years ago when we were dating, before we got married.  In a sense I chose to fall in love with her, to commit myself to her for life, and  over time, my commitment grows deeper and more real.  Don’t get me wrong; my wife was smokin’ hot, absolutely cool and fun, and in so many ways exactly what I was looking for, but a person isn’t really committed ot another person to the depths of their soul right away.  That’s not realistic.  I fell in love with her, and so I chose to be with her, to orient my life around hers while she oriented her life around mine.  And again, over time the depth of our love and commitment only grows stronger as we live together, love together, and continuously nourish our relationship.

Maybe my search for faith should look more like my search for a wife did.  I don’t know.   Sometimes I wonder why this has to be so hard, and if there’s therefore even a God at all.