Desperately procrastinating from writing what I hope will end up being more regular blog entries, I stumbled across a provocative little gem. After making about the third espresso of the day I sat down to read the BBC news feed for the fourth or fifth time and found an article titled: "Can Religion tell us more than Science". The joys of going to an afternoon Church.
It started promising and interesting. John Gray maintains that the New Atheists have kind of missed the point when showing religion to be an inadequate scientific thesis. Which I agree with. But the main opinion of his text I fundamentally disagree with. The crux of his position is summed up in the last sentence of the piece:
"What we believe doesn't in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live."
Matthew 22:36-40. "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
It started promising and interesting. John Gray maintains that the New Atheists have kind of missed the point when showing religion to be an inadequate scientific thesis. Which I agree with. But the main opinion of his text I fundamentally disagree with. The crux of his position is summed up in the last sentence of the piece:
"What we believe doesn't in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live."
Religion, he maintains, is all about behaviour and not particularly about belief at all: "Practice - ritual, meditation, a way of life - is what counts. What practitioners believe is secondary, if it matters at all."
It got me thinking- is that really true? I realise that some of my thoughts on faith might come across a little bit that way. I think that faith is absurd and rationally inexplicable, I don't feel particularly like new atheism has much threat to my faith. But surely what we believe is vital, its central to how we act. Otherwise our actions, our behaviour might be fulfilling and enjoyable on one level but surely they're ridiculously inconsistent. I don't quite understand how we might believe without it moving us to action. It is beyond me.
Consistency is probably one of the things I value most in a person and one of the things that I think might be lacking in a lot of modern Christians. I find it troubling that someone's indifference and agnosticism towards a deity might lead them to attend worship devoted to one every week. But it scares me. This attitude towards faith is only increasing. And honestly I find it totally and utterly at odds to the teachings of Christ. It makes no sense to say "what matters is how we live", inferring that to follow Christ's teachings is somehow valuable in its own right. The idea of following the teachings of Christ without any faith, without any belief is one that I think Christ would have found utterly ludicrous. You only need to pick the New Testament up and read it (which surely is contained in the notion of religious practice) to find that belief matters.
Love God, love people. That is the heart of Christianity. It escapes me how I ought to love something or some being that I don't believe in. It escapes me that my devotion and practice of daily devoting my life to Christ might be an empty gesture. It is actually pretty offensive. It is only from belief that true behaviour can stem. Sartre calls this notion 'bad faith', the idea that we pretend that we are only objects like trees and rocks. He describes a waiter who 'plays the part of a waiter', he is so wrapped up in 'being a waiter', he denies that there is any choice, any belief involved. This notion is at the heart of Sartre's account of morality.
And that strikes me as the heart of the problem of the dying Church of the UK: Apathy and inconsistency Thousands of people acting and living out the 'Christian life' in Bad Faith. Ticking the 'I go to Church' box on their conscience. They are Christians as objects, they live their lives in complete bad faith. But they never let the radical words of Jesus transform them, never let worship escape the box they put it in. They don't allow their minds to be transformed. And most of them don't have a clue what they believe.
And that strikes me as the heart of the problem of the dying Church of the UK: Apathy and inconsistency Thousands of people acting and living out the 'Christian life' in Bad Faith. Ticking the 'I go to Church' box on their conscience. They are Christians as objects, they live their lives in complete bad faith. But they never let the radical words of Jesus transform them, never let worship escape the box they put it in. They don't allow their minds to be transformed. And most of them don't have a clue what they believe.
I believe that faith can change your life. That Christ can change your life. I believe that. We might see new atheism and passionate unbelievers as a barrier to this. I don't. Dawkins might be quite an angry, influential speaker and commentator on modern religion. But at least he's consistent. At least he acts on what he believes. To be honest, good on him. And I hope that he wakes people out of apathy. Out of the lie that what you believe doesn't matter. Because it does.
Christianity needs to learn to do the same. To wake people up who are sleeping in their Churches. Who are filling pews, who have been 'living' without belief in complete bad faith. Consistency is so important at the heart of modern radical Christian living. We need to be people who are brutally consistent. If we believe that Christ's promises are true, we need to live them in our lives. If we don't, if we are feeling doubtful and far from God, why go through the motions? We need to not to sing "In Christ alone my hope is found" when we don't really believe a word of it. We need to not preach that Jesus has changed our lives if we don't think that he has. We need to learn how to be consistent. Communities of people who believe what we believe and act what we believe. There is a lie that says that putting a brave face on, of acting like everyone else is acting is the right thing to do. It is a lie that belief doesn't matter. And it is dangerous to live in bad faith. This is what Jesus says about it:
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’"
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’"
I find that terrifying. That is a stark warning against apathy, bad faith and inconsistency and it is one we need to take a little more seriously than we do.
Not quite sure where you're basing your fear of the threat posed to contemporary christianity by 'postmodernism'. In addition to the popular 'emergent' postmodern christian leaders and writers such as Brian McLaren and Rob Bell, the genuinely postmodern treatment of christianity in terms of phenomenology (see Jean-Luc Marion and the Radical Orthodoxy group in his wake), hermeneutics (see Richard Kearney), and deconstruction (see John D Caputo), for me, offers a lifeline that must be embraced (consciously or not) if the church is to overcome the real threat that is the enlightenment/modernist mindset we have been applying to christianity for the last few hundred years.
ReplyDeleteIt is this very mindset that lets us dualise belief and action, when maybe we should be thinking about it like this, which demonstrates the inseparability of the 'two' categories: http://peterrollins.net/?p=2864
Quotable: "In the West we are very prone to think that beliefs operate at the level of the mind, however what goes on in the mind has no necessary relation to the material realty of our operative beliefs (those that we enact). For example a person may “believe” that they are utterly safe in a roller coaster and yet be too terrified to ever step onto one. The point is that the conscious claim (I am rational and know that this is safe) is a mere story that covers over the operative belief (I will not be safe).
"In Biblical terms the latter is understood as the category of the “heart”. The text clearly informs us in various places that we live from the heart rather than the mind. Indeed Bonheoffer shows us that the text categorically rejects the notion that beliefs arise from the latter. This means that when we read of how we should confess with our lips and believe in our heart that Christ is Lord this does not mean that we ought to make some intellectual confession. The text is abundantly clear that to confess with ones lips means to speak love, grace and mercy and that to believe in ones heart means to demonstrate these virtues in the very texture of ones life."
Thanks for the comment Tom. I think postmodern was probably the wrong word to use. I've altered it a bit since, so thanks for the comment. I really like what you said about the failed attempt to dualise belief and action. I think that articulates what I was trying to say quite well actually and what I found frustrating about the BBC article. He seems to suggest religious action without religious belief is of some value and is actually at the heart of religion. But I find it strange to think that we could really have religious action which religious belief was not a part of.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you also that confessing with our lips cannot be an intellectual confession but must be present in our action. What worries me, and what I think is a real danger to the Church is those that confess with their lips but don't act it out fully. They fail to let it infiltrate their consciousness.
What do you think? Maybe I'm still missing the point a little?
Having now read the Gray article (which was a hell of a lot better than his recent attempt to explain Marxism) I actually think you (and I) agree with him more than you realise. I think the meaningless pew-filling and box-ticking of the church today is the 'conscious claim' of belief (see the Rollins quote above), i.e. the rational, modernist 'belief' that is nothing more than a mental abstraction that we think makes sense in our heads. What I think Gray is praising in religion, and what I understand Jesus to be referring to in the passages you quote, what I think you are trying to put your finger on as the missing component in the church today, is the 'operative belief' (Rollins), the practical response to our experience of the mystery that we call God. As far as I understand it, the only way we can carry out the two greatest commandments (that is, to actually be a christian) is by practically demonstrating a radically self-giving hospitality, that is a love for the wholly other, the unlovable ('love your enemy). Indeed when we commit ourselves to Christ each day, that doesn't mean thinking about some otherworldly or even historical being called Jesus, it means that we commit ourselves to actually loving and serving his present body, i.e. one another. Of course, what I have just described is still just a conscious claim (albeit about an operative belief) and my actual operative belief consistently fails to carry it out, however this is where we introduce the idea of grace. And, sorry to cop out, but rather than repeating him, I'll let you read the Pete Rollins article I linked to above for his thoughts on grace.
ReplyDeleteI've read the Rollins article. It's interesting and i see where you're getting at. But I'm not sure I fully agree. Or perhaps I don't fully understand. I find even in saying that we believe with our hearts rather than our heads he makes a bit of a strange division that I'm not sure is there.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you to a point that the only way we can carry out the two greatest commandments is by actually doing them, and that it isn't about 'thinking'. But surely in some sense we do commit ourselves to serving the historical Jesus daily. And whilst confessing with our lips that Jesus is Lord is a matter of the heart and of action, without the intellectual confession also (i.e. without committing to the proposition that "the man Jesus who walked the earth 2000 years ago was God incarnate and will restore humanity and creation") I don't think it makes much sense.
And this is what I find frustrating about the Gray piece- at least at some level there must be an intellectual sense in which I believe, and if there isn't, then what is the purpose of my religious behaviour?