Does it work?

Another condition which effects what we say we know and believe is the prevailing impact of utilitarianism on Western culture. That is, the criteria for evaluating whether a proposition is to be believed or not is not actually whether it is true but whether it works. Perhaps I have put the contrast too strongly: it would be hard to imagine that some element of ‘truth’ is irrelevant in most people’s thinking about what they believe. Pragmatism is a very powerful consideration, and increasingly so since we think we can measure what works in a public and objective way and thus have an actual discussion about it with others. 

This may seem surprising since we live in the age where our heroes and saints are scientists, who seem to have a grasp on tangible reality more than the rest of us and so can pronounce about the truth of the material with authority. But the real power of the scientific paradigm is that it appears to work so successfully in making our lives more pleasurable. It offers us a great deal on truth. ‘The Truth’ itself is, in any case, some distance off from the ordinary person, who cannot possibly hope to evaluate the claims and counter-claims of specialists. 

Now, at the same time, many Westerners have found this materialist pragmatism crass and disheartening – and unspiritual. Counting the bottom line is objective, but it isn’t pretty. And at that level, it doesn’t ‘work’ as it claims it should. It certainly doesn’t produce the kind of happy lives that it promises. And so, many Western people have found themselves attracted to Eastern religions and philosophies. The irony is that Westerners cannot even at this point rid themselves of their utilitarianism – because they find that Eastern religion ‘works’ for them. Adopting an Eastern religion isn’t for Westerners usually a matter of believing various metaphysical propositions, but rather of experiencing the benefits of religious practices: a better work-life balance, a more peaceful inner world, opportunities for doing good works and a healthier lifestyle. 

What matters for people is what will work in the living of life. In a sense this is indisputable: who doesn’t want a life that actually works? What I think needs challenging is the criteria by which we think we rightly evaluate whether things are ‘working’ for us. What are these criteria? How can we accurately measure whether they are working or not? Over what period of time should we consider whether something is working?

There’s two important things that religious beliefs introduce into the discussion here which make an evaluation by the simple criteria of ‘does it work’ even more complex. The first of these is that human suffering might be redemptive in some way. That is, something that might appear not to be ‘working’ might, through divine intervention or whatever means, turn out to be the epitome of human action. This is an alarming thought for relatively comfortable Westerners to confront. And I’d hasten to add that the religions have very different ways of accounting for suffering. Some in the Eastern traditions see suffering as a result of negative karma. Christianity, for its part, names suffering as evil in and of itself, but capable of being woven into the divine plan for extraordinary good. 

The second element of most traditional religious belief is that of the afterlife. Again, the religions differ massively on the details of the afterlife. But an afterlife of any kind offers a point of evaluation for human life that lies beyond this world. It speaks of a perspective on human events that is beyond our knowing at this point. It relativises our contemporary evaluations of the viability of the lives we are leading. We cannot yet see what it mean for life to ‘work’ and so we need a framework that gives us more than pragmatic answers to our most profound questions.

The Unchooseable Choice?

But we need to pause here and retrace our steps somewhat, because there’s a complication to the story – a complication I call the ‘unchooseable choice’ condition. It is true that people today speak of belief in God as something that one chooses for oneself. But there’s a contradiction here, too. People also characteristically speak of being religious or not as something about themselves that they can’t change and that just ‘is’ – like their eye-colour or race. They will say ‘I am not a religious person’. Philosopher Alain de Botton recently spoke of his unbelief as if it was inescapable fact about him that was not at all open to revision or question regardless of any choice he might make. Religious beliefs, or the lack of them, are something deeply ingrained in us from childhood to the degree that we can close off a conversation about religious matters by simply referring to this state of affairs. So, we have a choice that, ironically, many people feel they can’t choose. 

This condition is part of a deeper paradox at the heart of the culture of the west. It’s a paradox which reverberates right through western politics, science, economics and education, and which has no obvious philosophical solution. It’s this: one the one hand, we exalt the notion of human autonomous free will. It’s a fine idea, alright: liberty is an aspiration which lends the human individual dignity and enables us to talk about the rights and duties we owe each other regardless of skin colour or gender. The freedom to pursue happiness is the basis of our consumer economy, and of our system of justice, in which we hold individuals largely responsible for their actions as far as we can. We expect it from each other. And yet at the same time, various branches of human knowledge are offering powerful descriptions of the human condition as entirely and comprehensively determined by factors outside of our control – whether that be genes, natural selection, brain chemistry, our parents or whatever else. So, the whole idea of free choice may turn out to be a grand illusion. (see Sam Harris)

There’s a false dilemma here. True, the idea of picking through the various religious options, testing each as if you were evaluating the ripeness of an avocado in the supermarket, is an appealing myth, but nothing more. We’d love to think of ourselves as standing independently over all the possible choices and selecting one (or none) with a dispassionate logic and complete freedom.

But the reality is of course that we don’t do anything of the kind. We are a bundle of predispositions and preferences, marked by our experiences and relationships and shaped by our genetic makeup. When we choose, we make a decision in media res, in the middle of things, with time ticking away and with events swirling all around us. And yet, even if we can’t give a clear philosophical account of why the things we choose to do are real choices, we still have the felt experience of evaluating options and making decisions. It’s a felt experience of decision-making for which we feel (mostly) responsible – except in extreme circumstances, when someone’s drug addiction or abusive relationship with their father has distorted the choosing. In these cases it is up to the individual to explain how their experience of decision was inhibited or distorted. 

Which means: human beings are capable of evaluating their own decision-making processes – of engaging in self-reflection to the degree that people can give an account for their preferences and biases, and perhaps revising them. While our imagined ability to survey all our options from a neutral standpoint is false, to us is given the ability to reflect on ourselves as choosers and knowers. The gift of human self-consciousness bestows on us this perspective at least; and to that we should add that, as social and historical beings, we have the benefit of others to help us.

Of course, the decision for a particular faith or against it is felt by 21^st century people to be a highly personal one – as personal as one’s sexual preferences or taste in music. That is also a by-product of the Reformation period – the after-effect of a change in theological outlook. That’s not to say that the choice is simply a matter of personal preference, but that it is felt by many people to be a very private and internal matter. The old cliché about not mentioning religion, sex and politics as the three taboo subjects is very much in force – especially regarding religion. Even sex is talked about in public with less reticence. Public preachers and door knockers are the height of bad taste. It is also very much the case that the spectre of violent religious disagreement hangs over our culture. If we are to live at peace with one another, then it might be better if religion were held to be a purely private matter and not for public discussion. 

But I think  that we are greatly impoverished by this secretive and private attitude to matters of faith. While it protects us to a degree, it renders us inarticulate about some of the most profound experiences that are given to human beings. We are not challenged in the biggest questions of our lives to think more deeply because we prefer not to discuss them from fear of disagreement. We are crippled by this social convention. Personal need not mean entirely private.   

Difficulty breathing

Once upon a time, it was not so difficult to believe. 

Believing in God was like breathing – a second sense of which people were hardly aware. Even with a man as rational as the great English philosopher John Locke in the seventeenth century, lack of religious belief was an extraordinary and aberrant thing that wasn’t worth tolerating because it must surely lead to social chaos and even treasonable behaviour. Philosophers like the great medieval writers St Anselm and St Thomas Aquinas offered their famous arguments for the existence of God not because they imagined that they would convince an non-believer but because they saw them as confirming what believers (that is, everybody) knew to be already true. 

Not only was the world self-evidently the handiwork of the Creator, but it was also the case that it was shot through with his divinity. Divinity oozed from physicality. Reality was connected in a great chain of being which participated in the highest being – namely, God. Human beings were a part of this great connected whole in which they could actively participate through prayers and other religious acts, mediated through the agency of the Church. The ‘divine’ and the ‘natural’ were not separate explanations for the workings of the world. 

Today we like to think of believing - as we like to think of many things – as primarily a choice. We think of our religious views as a preference – not a trivial one, it should be granted, but a preference nonetheless. What’s more, believing in God has become a highly contested choice, vehemently challenged by some of the most prominent intellectuals of our times. 

How has this come about? It would be too easy to say that the rise of the scientific world-view is the culprit. That is a common way of telling the story: as science and technology have enabled us to grasp the world more successfully and efficiently, the less mysterious the world has seemed. Take medicine, for example: once we could talk about bacteria and viruses and their effects, we could start addressing illnesses without supposing that a priest is going to have a great deal to contribute. It is true that science has provided alternative explanations of the workings of the world which at many points make appeal to a divine power apparently unnecessary. But that would be to miss the story of the how the scientific world-view come to prominence in the first place; and how it depended for its emergence on certain changes in the way faith and belief were thought of in Western Europe. The scientific world-view did not cause the change in the nature of believing, since it arose at the same time as the changes themselves took place. 

That change had to do with the extraordinary movement within the Western church: the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Reformation, bound up as it was with the intellectual movement sometimes called ‘humanism’, introduced the notion of ‘faith’ not merely as ‘believing certain propositions to be true and others to be false’ but as a giving of the whole of one’s self in deep trust to the promises of God. The big thing that connected you to the divine world was now an inward and individual matter, whereas before this the external work of baptism was held to be the ground of your religious life. And this believing, this faith, was part of your life’s story: it was possible to tell a story of not believing and then believing, of coming to know what trust in the promises of God was as the Spirit of God did its work on you and you changed. Though the Reformers were adamant that faith itself was a work of God in the human person, it was still the case that the human person’s will, reason and affections were involved in the getting of faith. Even if one ought retrospectively to speak of the illumination of God’s Holy Spirit working in your heart to bring faith to flame, the experience of coming to faith felt certainly as if it involved one’s hearing, understanding and a moment of decision. At this point, faith became an act of the will – a reality decided upon. Mine to choose, mine to reject. 

At the same time, Protestantism concentrated the sphere of divine action in the Word of God. Instead of seeing God’s presence rippling through nature, Protestantism warned of the danger of confusing the created things with the Creator himself. There were many possibly idolatrous distractions from the decisive place in which God was at work – in Christ revealed in Scripture. And it would not do to forgot the sheer transcendent otherness of God. If anything, the gospel of the cross of Jesus Christ revealed to humankind the radical alienation of humankind from the divine being. The significance of this separation of God from his creation was that the world’s natural processes became available for study on their own terms, without the confusion of a metaphysical explanation. This was the beginning of the scientific revolution, and a revolution in the way people in the West thought about faith.

But we need to pause here and retrace our steps somewhat, because there’s a complication to the story – a complication I call the ‘unchosen choice’ condition. It is true that people today speak of belief in God as something that one choses for oneself. But there’s a contradiction here, too. People also characteristically speak of being religious or not as something about themselves that they can’t change and that just ‘is’ – like their eye colour or race. They will say ‘I am not a religious person’. Philosopher Alain de Botton recently spoke of his unbelief as if it was inescapable fact about him that was not at all open to revision or question regardless of any choice he might make. Religious beliefs, or the lack of them, are something deeply ingrained in us from childhood to the degree that we can close off a conversation about religious matters by simply referring to this state of affairs. So, we have a choice that, ironically, many people feel they can’t choose. 

There is a kind of wistfulness expressed at this state of affairs, too. With the rise of an absolutist New Atheism, it would be easy to overlook the fact that a kind of longing for the ‘ability’ to believe is widespread. There is a wistful look over the back fence of religion. People frequently express admiration for aspects of the religious world view, and for the beneficial effects that religious belief brings to those who are so fortunate. Those who have moved on from a religious past will express feelings of grief and loss – even when the circumstances of their leaving are quite bitter.

Sydney and Brawling: Sattler, Baldwin, and Murder Most Ordinary

Read it here

A Sinner's Lament - On Catherine Parr

Catherine Parr, the survivor among Henry VIII’s six queens married him in July 1543. She was an accomplished writer, and at some point between her marriage and Henry’s death in 1547 she wrote a spiritual autobiography called The lamentation of a sinner.

At one level, Queen Catherine maintains a dignified privacy even as she confesses her sins. There is no airing of her dirty laundry, or wallowing in her misdeeds. Nothing here would provoke a tabloid frenzy. But the Queen earnestly laments the state of her soul before she understood the true nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Her diagnosis of her spiritual condition prior to her conversion is most grave. It is not merely that she was a sinner: in one sense, she is able to confess that she is ‘not like other men’, and not an ‘adulterer, nor fornicator, and so forth’.

But for Catherine it was her spiritual pride which is at the dark heart of her former life. In this attitude of high-handedness she was guilty of ‘most presumptuously thinking nothing of Christ crucified’ and ‘went about to set forth mine own righteousness’. What’s more, ‘the blood of Christ was not reputed by me sufficient for to wash me from the filth of my sins…but I sought for such riffraff as the bishop of Rome hath planted in his tyranny and kingdom, trusting with great confidence by the virtue and holiness of them, to receive full remission of my sins’.

But the solution to this pride was not to display a greater humility – as if to find a virtue to outweigh it. For one thing, Catherine remembers herself as blind to her spiritual state: ‘If any man had said I had been without Christ, I would have stiffly withstood the same; and yet I never knew Christ nor wherefore He came’.

Rather it was an encounter with the cross of Jesus Christ that led to her change of heart. The cross at once revealed to her the love of God and her own sinfulness. It produced in her a new kind of faith: not any longer a ‘history faith’ but now a ‘lively faith’. What did Catherine mean by the distinction? She writes of ‘a dead human, historical faith, gotten by human industry, but a supernal lively faith, which worketh by charity’. One kind of faith might rightly be called a kind of virtue in that it is attained by human effort. But the faith that enlivens and justifies the sinner is ‘supernal’: it comes from a supernatural source. It is God’s own gift by the Spirit and not in itself a work earning merit before God. As she writes:

Yet we may not impute to the worthiness of faith or works, our justification before God: but ascribe and give the worthiness of it, wholly to the merits of Christ’s passion, and refer and attribute the knowledge and perceiving thereof only to faith: whose very true only property, is to take, apprehend and hold fast they promises of God’s mercy, the which maketh us righteous: and to cause me continually to hope for the same mercy and in love to work all manner of ways allowed in the Scripture that I may be thankful for the same.

What we have in this remarkable document written by arguably the most powerful woman in the kingdom at the time is a confident and joyful testimony to the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone. It reveals not only the doctrine, but the spirituality of faith alone. It is a solafidean spirituality that shines through in the way that the Queen speaks of the intractability of her pre-conversion state; and the way in which she describes the nature of the faith she has now found as emanating from God himself. But above all, it is Catherine’s call to a constant meditation on the cross of Christ as the ‘cunningest lesson in divinity’ which reveals just how deeply embedded this newly found spirituality had become.

This was one woman’s testimony and not an official church document or a formulary of some kind. However, it is evidence that the Reformation teaching on justification was not a piece of arcane theology, or the pretext for a manifestly political break with the Church of Rome. This was a deeply-held conviction: a transforming truth which had the power to captivate people and to give them a new self-understanding.

Sydney and Mates

http://sydneyanglicans.net/life/culture/7-sins-of-sydney-3-loyalty-to-mates


I feel I should put in an explanatory note about how I am working on these 'Sins of Sydney'.
Some people feel I have been too critical of 'our' side.
It would be too easy for the series to degenerate into a series of swipes from a height at the culture we inhabit. But that seems to be cheap to me. In each piece I have tried to include a reference to the way in which churches and/or Christians are themselves part of the 'sin' that we are describing and analysing.

The importance of this is theological and rhetorical and historical.

It's historical because (I hope) it is simply the truth that we have shared in the sins of our city to some extent and there is no point denying it!

It's rhetorical because in our times to admit one's faults is a very important thing to do in order to get a hearing (if indeed they are faults). In addition, we will find it very hard to accurately and precisely speak to society about its sins if we don't understand our own complicity in the social pathologies we discover.

It's theological because the one thing that constitutes the church is that it is a repentent church that has received mercy. There's no need for us to be defensive: we can be genuinely repentant in the expectation that there is no condemnation for those in Christ.

Quite simply: we, of all people, have nothing to hide!