The Progression of Religion (Originally posted Oct. 9, 2007) -AS

First off, I apologize for my inactivity in the forum as of late. I'm busy and when I do have the time I very much resonate with your friend in not wanting to write just anything. That being said, I'm going to give a much abbreviated version of some of the issues being raised in my life as of late regarding faith with the hope that such brief remarks will generate further discussion/inquire from others who may be more qualified to speak to the matters at hand or who may have more time to look deeper into them.

I should preface by explaining the root of the issues. I am taking a Survey of History until 1500 course at school that is taught by what I perceive to be a "sneaky humanist", though this is simply a judgment I've made based on the way the course's content is presented. With the guise of objectivity, he manages to paint pictures with the material that are not necessarily imperative to one's study of history. It is so subtle that is it difficult to pinpoint, but as the post progresses I hope to clarify what I mean by that. My other main secular influence is a World Literature professor who is what I think most Protestants would call a Catholic pluralist--ascribing to Catholicism herself, rather devoutly I might add, but at the same time accepting other faith systems as legitimate means to spiritual "enlightenment" though I don't mean to allude to eastern religion at all with that term. Also, she has an IQ of 140. I refuse to allow myself to vocalize my disagreement with her on most things as this usually ends up in an intellectual beat down for me. Don't ask why she is teaching at a community college. She is very big of Jungian (philosopher/psycho-analyst, Carl Jung) Myth Criticism, which, as she explains it in a very watered down manner posits there are three levels of “consciousness” if it can be called that. The first is the personal consciousness. That is where we live day in and day out. It manifests itself through our different personas (friend, brother, son, youth leader, etc.) as a result of our ego (don’t think of that in a pejorative sense…I’m told it is deeper than what we consider ego). Personal unconscious is the next level. Sometimes our personal unconscious can seep through to our personal consciousness. This is supposedly what happens when we have dreams. Our personal unconsciousness is slipping into consciousness, though we aren’t ready to face those as realities yet. Underlying both of these levels is the collective unconscious. It is connected to through the “anima” for men and the “animos” for women. (I really don’t know what either of those mean.) The collective unconscious is just as it sounds, that which is collectively “known” apart from geography, race, gender, religion, creed, and all the rest of that good stuff. This level is exhibited best in the great works of literature. The Bible being one of them, but every other great work being one as well. That was a little rant for you, MR, but I suppose it is somewhat relevant. Another quick note on this before I move on. From my observations, few though they may be, it is not noble to seek to know the source of the collective unconscious. It is much more virtuous to simply recognize it’s existence and be in awe of it. Once responsibility for the phenomenon is shifted to a cause, specifically a deity, it loses its awesomeness. Just a note of interest there.

So, what types of things have these two professors of mine been corrupting this young, pliable mind with? Briefly, I suppose if I had to put it in a box and wrap a bow around it I’d label the box “the progression of religion”. I would guess that most who frequent this forum have heard the arguments against a divine being that rely on the progression of religion as evidence. First, “God” (I use that as a generic term, not referring to a certain monotheistic religion’s with which we are all so familiar nor excluding polytheism/pantheism, etc.) is an animal. Then, we kill so much of that animal that it dies out or something, so then we say “God” dwells inside this holy temple that only certain “priests” can go see. Well, eventually people go inside the “temple” and find no “God” so they say “He” must be atop this very high mountain that no once can climb. Well, we end up climbing the mountain and find “God” is not at the summit. What do we do next? We say “He” resides in the heavens. That is, in the celestial bodies. Well, we look up there with telescopes and eventually fly up there with space shuttles and see no “God”. So naturally, there must be some “heaven” in a fourth dimension or something that is not visible to the human eye where “God” resides. I realize I butchered this, but you get the point. There was a guy who did this a lot more effectively than I have a while back in a book or something, but I don’t remember who he is. Oh well. So, we see a progression of religious beliefs to bring us to where we are today.

*From this point forward my sole historical source is a guy with a masters in history from Mercer University, so if my history is at all off, he is to blame. It is my intention to express the ideas with the bias that he may have provided me with unbeknownst to me.

Long story short, my history professor without coming out and saying it has hinted that a similar progression is seen within the Judeo-Christian context. First, you have the Jews being monolatrous initially. (I’m sure [someone else's] expertise can be useful here in the arena of dating Old Testament books and the relationship of theology to chronology in the OT.) That is, they lived with a polytheistic world but chose to focus on the worship of a particular deity, yet they didn’t damn other deities, they just chose to worship Yahweh. Of course, as the Hebrews progress and by the time we get to the Prophets we see worship of Jehovah alone with much exclusivity there. Nations being punished for worshiping other gods and so on and so forth. Enters Zoroaster.

Zoroaster is the founder of the Zoroastrianism religion. The time of Zoroastrianism’s origin is a matter much disputed by historians with estimates generally ranging between 1600 to 750 BC. Zoroaster (also known as Zarathustra) was a prophet/holy man who renounced “the Lie”. “The Lie” was the ritualistic religiosity practiced by so many of the contemporaneous religions. He, instead, advocated a personal relationship with Ahura-Mazda “Wise Lord”, the “One True God”. Zoroastrianism’s creed has been summed up as “good thoughts of the mind, good deeds of the hand, and good words of the tongue.” The emphasis was on the importance of the individual to Ahura-Mazda, the only true God amongst a world of many idols. Ahura-Mazda’s adversary was Ahriman. Ahriman, a devil of sorts if you wish, had battling helpers who waged war against Ahura-Mazda and his force of spiritual beings in a cosmic battle between good and evil. The prophet’s teachings are copied in the “Zend-Avesta” The Law, which was copied by priests called magi and finalized during the 3rd century BC. Also unique to this faith system was it’s “Last Judgment” in which there would be a resurrection of the dead at which point there would be a trial by fire. For those who rejected “The Lie”, they would be purified by the fire unto eternal life. For the bad, they would be punished by fire as an eternal torment.

I’m sure it goes without saying that there are some remarkable similarities here to some very popular western religions, specifically Christianity. I’m going to go ahead and end here. I realize this hasn’t been the best written of posts, but what do you expect from a flustered college student that is trying to rush things so he can study for his test he has in the morning. I hope that this post has been useful at least in part, if for no other reason than that [someone else] can clear up any misconceptions I have may have gotten. I’d love to hear what everyone thinks. -AS

Faith: Part 2 (Originally posted Sept. 13, 2007)

Ok, so now that we’ve gotten to the point of proposing a “mechanism” for receiving and discerning spiritual truth, we can move on to testing our hypothesis. Just to recap AS’s definition, let me cite some of his statements along with the supporting scripture references:

“Why do differences in doctrine exist? Sin. Laziness- an unwillingness to do the hard work of interpreting the Scripture rightly, which may include things like learning the original languages and reading books by gifted teachers, etc. etc. Spiritual immaturity or perhaps better stated as a lack of spiritual maturity in certain areas - we may just plain be unable to handle certain truths at particular points in our lives. Bad English translations of the Bible. Who knows what else?”
-AS

“My point in reviewing all those texts you provided that speak of spiritual enlightenment coming via the Holy Spirit was to emphasize I don’t think that the Holy Spirit is necessarily the means by which every spiritual truth is understood.” -AS

“But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.” (Heb. 5:14)

“Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.” (2 Tim. 2:7)

“I think there is a fine line between understanding spiritual truths as intellectual constructs and understanding them as spiritual insights.” -AS

This is one distinction which I have to recognize. The intellect certainly plays a role in discerning truth, spiritual or otherwise, and intellectual laziness can certainly be blamed for poor theology. Jameson already did a good job providing the scripture to support this point (Heb. 5:14, 2 Tim. 2:7 and 15).

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth, for He will not speak on his own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak, and He will declare to you the things that are to come.” (John 16:12-13)

“Again, I think this is a disciple-limited promise that the Holy Spirit will guide the apostles ‘into all the truth’ in the early church age so that they may speak the very words of God and communicate the ‘whole counsel of God’ to believers as was achieved via the New Testament.”
-AS

Someone could probably ascribe a name to this position, whether it be one of the proposed “dispensations” or something else. Whatever the case, I don’t know that I subscribe to the idea that God revealed spiritual truth to his apostles any differently than He does to us today. Even if I could accept that they received a heightened capacity for discerning spiritual truths, I cannot accept that we operate by any different principle. And it’s the principle that I think we are most concerned with. The simple fact that Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Truth in John 14:17 (see also John 4:23-24) reveals that spiritual discernment is one of the roles of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. (And anyway, what part of the scripture you cited do you not believe to apply to the modern-day believer?). I think our contention, if there is any, concerns the location of that subtle line distinguishing that truth which is discernible through the work of the intellect versus that only discernible by supernatural revelation. I think in many cases the latter is no more than a unique condition of preparedness to receive the lesson…Spiritual revelation in my experience has always come to me as a sort of chain reaction connecting hundreds of previously understood lessons which effectively produces a glimpse of the larger picture of who God is and what He’s all about. I call that “revelation” because it’s a moment where the intellectual components work together in a uniquely orchestrated fashion that allows me to “see” God. Perhaps the only supernatural part of the whole thing is that God is responsible for directing the course of my intellectual growth that allows that moment of “enlightenment” to unfold (see Ps. 119:130). In this case, maybe the question is more about the extent to which we can expect to hear from God via means other than our intellect. Can you think of any instances in which spiritual discernment is more strongly differentiated from discernment via intellectual constructs. How are such revelations validated? Against what measure or standard are we to test these revelations?

“What I do know though is that we have the Bible. Why? Why didn’t God just give us a systematic theology book that we could just turn to a page and get the answer to whatever question we had under the appropriate heading? I can’t be sure, because I’m not God, but I could guess that one of the reasons is because he wants us to work.” -AS

This is a worthwhile question to consider. Why is the majority of the Bible (particularly the Old Testament) written in story form rather than as a book of systematic theology? Why also, within these stories, would God choose to be less than clear on the intrinsic lesson - assuming there is one (not very didactic of Him, huh Jameson)? As Justin has previously pointed out, the Bible tends to be more descriptive than prescriptive. It tells the story as it happened and very seldom takes the extra step to supplement the events that are occurring with any moral qualification. So, why Story? Let me provide the only possible explanation I have come across as presented in John Eldredge’s book, Epic.

Story is the language of the heart. Or, in other words, the heart receives and frames its beliefs within the construct of story. As Eldredge suggests, “Life doesn’t come to us as a math problem. It comes to us the way that a story does, scene by scene (Epic, pg. 2).” He goes on to suggest that story is also how we figure things out (as evidenced by our fixation with the news, novels, and movies and our tendency to look to them for illumination into our own lives).

This principle has applications to our spiritual life as well. For instance, God uses this tendency to redeem all those dead, stagnant periods of time (chronos in Greek) by providing also divinely orchestrated moments (kairos in Greek) which infuse them with meaning. But if we understood life and internalized our experiences with our bare bones intellect, we wouldn’t find it necessary to draw a distinction between chronos and kairos at all. But the fact of the matter is that we do perceive such a distinction, and this is why human beings love stories. All the elements of a great story - setting, plot, conflict, character, point of view, theme - work because there exists a corresponding quality in our nature. If we can accept this principle, then we’ve understood the premise of Eldredge’s worldview. He goes on to say,

“Every story, great and small, shares the same essential structure because every great story we tell borrows its power from a Larger Story, a Story woven into the fabric of our being - what pioneer psychologist Carl Jung tried to explain as archetype, or what his more recent popularizer Joseph Campbell called myth.” -Epic, pg. 12-13

“Every story we tell is our attempt to put into words and images what God has written there, on our hearts.” -Epic, pg. 73

While I might be missing some inherent flaw in his theology, I think Eldredge’s explanation serves at least one crucial purpose and that is to provide a framework within which we can understand our communion with God. If God has made our hearts to learn and grow through the medium of Story, then it might follow that He meant for our communion with Him to be an experience more centered around the heart than the mind. We can all agree that our intellects are more adept to learning through concise, systematic presentations of facts and principles. Stories, on the other hand, tend to teach us things which our intellect often has difficulty putting to words. The lessons take a “back road” to accomplish its intended purpose. Blaise Pascal writes in Pensées, “The heart has its reason which reason knows nothing of.” We’re all familiar with the idea of a girl’s emotions preceding her intellectual comprehension of those emotion’s source. They cry before they even know intellectually what’s wrong. Stories do that…after watching the movie Braveheart, you might feel inspired to take up arms with William Wallace without ever grasping the politics or necessity of his cause. It moves our hearts, and so we act.

As implied in this framework, Story is the language of the heart; and incidentally, Story is also the dominant form of divine expression available to believers. It must follow that God intended a communion of the heart to be the center of our relationship with Him. Story is an especially powerful tool to teach, grow, and challenge believers in their faith walk with the unique characteristic of transcending the intellectual limitations of its hearers (positive actions can be inspired without the antecedent of intellectual comprehension). This quality of Story relieves the tension that exists between intellectual capacity and one’s ability to “rightly divide the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15).

I believe God intended for our heart, rather than our intellect, to be the center of our faith walk. I think this point is communicated in Prov. 3:5-6: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding…”; and Prov. 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” We cannot ignore the emphasis the Bible seems to place on the heart’s activity and the debilitating limitations He has placed on our intellect. In Ecclesiastes 11:5, Solomon writes, “As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.” In 3:10 he writes, “He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” David reflects on God’s intimate knowledge of him and responds, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain (Ps. 139:6).” And Proverbs 25:2 suggests that God conceals things in mystery for the sake of His glory (it’s interesting to consider the “God of the gaps” discussion in this light).

The intellect is indispensable in discerning spiritual truth, but I believe that God intended our heart to be the primary instrument for communion with Him. Granted, the concept of the heart is kind of ambiguous and can hardly be separated from the mental process, but I think we are all aware of the distinction between the type of meditation our hearts engage in as compared with that of the intellect. The intellect, stripped to bare bones, would produce a naturalist or a monist. The metaphysical heart is the bridge between our bare bones intellect and that abstraction which we call the supernatural (see The Abolition of Man, pg. 25). An acknowledgment of both is essential to the Christian worldview, yet they have different means of receiving truth.

So, anyway, let me bring this back to the essential question. How does God’s choice of story form to express Himself (according to Eldredge’s worldview) relate to the discussion of discerning spiritual truth? For one, It appeals to a heart-centered form of communion whereas our discussion up to this point has more supported discernment via the intellect. I feel pretty certain that, if we are to take the Biblical perspective, we are going to have to accept some degree of supernatural discernment which is not so dependent on intellectual capacity. Likewise, I think there are fundamental qualities of the Christian faith that are lost to an intellect-driven faith walk. On the other hand, I think the alternative forces us back into that uneasy territory of subjectivity, which is very difficult to defend. In one last quote, AS, you said:

“But if the primary means through which God speaks is the Bible, and I think it is, it might would be an apt illustration to say that that voice is in a language that needs to be interpreted. Interpretation, of course, involving the intellect.” -AS

What would you propose is the “shape” of spiritual discernment (that not arrived at via intellectual constructs). What does it look like? How is it practiced? What is it and what is it not? Is there communion with God beyond that which is freely accessible through intellectual exploration of His word? Can we truly expect the type of intimacy which many Christians are claiming is available to us or is nearness to God nothing more than harmony with the theology of the Bible? WHY DOES IT SEEM THAT CHRISTIANS ARE CONTINUALLY MISSING IT!?…“Like sheep without a shepherd…” That is the question.