I'm looking on some of these exchanges and the links posted, and the impression I seem to get is that God can only be apprehended through the use as a worldview of a philosophical methodology that requires an undergraduate degree in Philosophy (or at least considerably more reading of the subject that the vast majority of people are able, inclined or have the opportunity to do) to understand. This seems a remarkable way for God to hide himself. Especially when the philosophical methodologies in question only appear to have been around for a couple of hundred years.
I don't see how philosophy can adequately approach this question, either. With or without a degree or a class or one book. As we've seen in this thread. People seem to be clarifying what they think, what they think is knowable, how one may know what is knowable, etc, but never actually whether God exists.
Our problem, I think, is that the "rules have changed" regarding how we think we can know anything about God, that is the Christian God. I know I'm not telling you anything you don't know already, @KarlLB .
Historically, standard-issue-Christians didn't approach the question of God's existence or action in the world philosophically or scientifically. And they didn't require special schooling or special smarts. They based their belief on what they understood to be reliable, eye-witness accounts of God's unusual work in the world -- demonstrations of his godness -- particularly in the works of Jesus. Up until fairly recently. This is not new news.
I agree that the "rules" have changed, but not quite in the way that you outline. Up until the "golden age" of proofs for the existence of god in the 17th and 18th centuries, western people (Christians) didn't question the existence of God. They didn't need to - it was an accepted (and/or normative) part of life. Anyone doubting the existence of God would have kept quiet about it. What changed this, as much as anything, was the widespread publication of the myriad proofs themselves - in effect, legitimising the question. It may sound perverse to us, but the aim of the proofs was *not* to demonstrate the existence of God to atheists and agnostics. See here, although the author's conclusion seems a bit of a stretch.
I take away a couple of things from this. Firstly, that up until that era, for individuals, doubts about the existence of God were mostly internalised. These days, the tendency of individuals questioning the existence of God (in contrast to believing in God, or knowing God) is to externalise the problem. Secondly, that the past isn't just a place where they do things differently - the inhabitants of the past also think differently from us. They have different worldviews.
A couple of thoughts come to mind - firstly what are you meaning by "internalising" and "externalising" here?
And secondly, for me "believing in God" is the same thing as "believing God exists", and that's the sense I commonly hear it used. Parsing "believe in God" as more like "trust in God" strikes me as a usage specifically found amongst Christians (and possibly other religious groups but I have no data on that), but not outside that group. It would be strange indeed to hear someone say "I don't believe in God although I believe God exists."
In psychology, internalization is the outcome of a conscious mind reasoning about a specific subject; the subject is internalized, and the consideration of the subject is internal. Internalization of ideals might take place following religious conversion, or in the process of, more generally, moral conversion.
Which defines it in terms of the outcome, rather than the process whereby doubts, etc, are resolved. I'm not sure if there's a specific term for that.
Externalization is a term used in psychoanalytic theory which describes the tendency to project one's internal states onto the outside world. It is generally regarded as an unconscious defense mechanism, thus the person is unaware they are doing it. ... Like other defense mechanisms, externalization can be a protection against anxiety and is, therefore, part of a healthy, normally functioning mind.
I hope that makes sense.
And secondly, for me "believing in God" is the same thing as "believing God exists", and that's the sense I commonly hear it used. Parsing "believe in God" as more like "trust in God" strikes me as a usage specifically found amongst Christians (and possibly other religious groups but I have no data on that), but not outside that group. It would be strange indeed to hear someone say "I don't believe in God although I believe God exists."
I'm assuming the audience for this thread includes people identifying as Christians as well as non-Christians. A Christian usage didn't seem out of place.
In psychology, internalization is the outcome of a conscious mind reasoning about a specific subject; the subject is internalized, and the consideration of the subject is internal. Internalization of ideals might take place following religious conversion, or in the process of, more generally, moral conversion.
Which defines it in terms of the outcome, rather than the process whereby doubts, etc, are resolved. I'm not sure if there's a specific term for that.
Externalization is a term used in psychoanalytic theory which describes the tendency to project one's internal states onto the outside world. It is generally regarded as an unconscious defense mechanism, thus the person is unaware they are doing it. ... Like other defense mechanisms, externalization can be a protection against anxiety and is, therefore, part of a healthy, normally functioning mind.
I hope that makes sense.
Unfortunately, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
You'd probably have to give a concrete example of what expressing doubt in an internalised and externalised manner would look like.
"When I pray, coincidences happen. When I don't, they don't"
That can be used to make a statistical prediction that in principle at least could be tested. I wonder if it has?
This is a digression. We live in a part of the world in which it is not unusual to find oneself driving at 20mph stuck behind a tractor on a road with a speed limit of 60 or 70 mph, with too many bends / oncoming traffic to overtake. My husband gets totally exasperated by this.
When our children were small, I objected to him using the sort of language I didn't want our children picking up. They were still young enough that we generally avoided not just swearing but "unkind words." So, to counter this, when I was driving and got stuck behind a tractor, I started praying out loud Dear Lord, we give thanks for farmers who work so hard to provide our food, and in particular we pray for the farmer driving the tractor in front of us, who was up and working this morning while we were still in our beds.... etc etc.
I regarded this as modelling good behaviour to our children. (My son as an adult describes it as classic passive aggression.)
BUT, I kept being thwarted! No sooner would I start praying than the tractor would indicate and turn off the road! I probably started "tractor prayers" about 25 years ago, still do it, and I don't think I've ever been stuck behind one long enough to finish my prayer.
By contrast, my husband still gets stuck for miles behind tractors.
I'm fairly sure this is just a perception thing. My husband starts to get annoyed when he sees a tractor on the road ahead; I start praying when I'm actually behind it. So that must create a couple of minutes difference, and then time spent praying happily passes more quickly than time spent grinding one's teeth.
However, it is a fact that, as far as the North East family is concerned, Dad gets stuck behind tractors but Mum doesn't. This isn't answered prayer, of course, because I'm not praying for the tractor to pull over. It's just a thought on the perception of a situation.
Since you brought it up...
The following is in no way a hard-and-fast scientific way of addressing the world or any entity in it; but it IS odd how often it works for me.
My family has a 40 year pattern of statistically unlikely concatenatations of crises that arrive more or less three months apart. At least, it was like this up until about three years ago--you could literally put it on the calendar "Multiple crises clusterfudge this week, avoid scheduling stuff" and we did. One was always the week before Christmas; one fell during Holy Week; and the others were spaced out about three months apart in between.
Knowing this pattern, we would routinely clear the decks of all ordinary responsibilities (shopping, paperwork, etc.) so we would be free to deal with the incoming clusterfudge. Which always showed up.
What were these clusterfudges like, you ask? One year we had a 24 hour period in which a) someone left a suicide note on our answer machine; b) two families in our parish had a multicar accident resulting in several injuries and were taken to two separate hospitals, requiring a ton of pastor visits and interpretation help (no English spoken); and c) (can't recall now, probably something like a family member developing cancer or my boss telling me I was going to be laid off, something of that level). I'm talking really over-the-top stress. All hitting in a day or two. The seminarian who was staying with us that year decided to bail out of Vietnamese ministry when he saw it.
I am aware that the concept of the devil is laughed at on the Ship. But if you had a pattern of 40 years of this shit hitting you on a fucking SCHEDULE, and reliably right before the major Christian holidays you have to cover with no assistance because you're leading a poor mission church--well.... Once is coincidence, two is happenstance, three is Enemy action.
So what did we do? Of course we prayed. We also planned ahead and cleared the decks, as I mentioned. And finally we started something I can only describe as behavior modification for bad archangels. It's the sort of thing you do with a toddler who is acting out. You set up consequences that the individual-in-question deeply dislikes, and then you impose those consequences every time the objectionable behavior takes place.
So a clusterfudge would come along, and immediately we would think of the thing most likely to piss off the devil if we did it at that moment. Sometimes it was something mundane, like upping our Bible study and prayer time. Sometimes it was something targeted, like taking concrete steps to do good to a particular enemy of ours. And every time the crisis ramped up, we'd do it again.
It was interesting how quickly the crises ramped DOWN in most cases.
This sort of thing worked on my toddler, too, though he was far more reasonable than the archangel.
@KarlLB - you may - or very well may not - find Eastern Orthodox theology helpful when it comes to the 'Personhood' of God - if we can put it that way.
God is always 'personal' in Eastern theology but the way that's discussed or described is often very 'apophatic' - we can say what God isn't, if you like, rather than what he 'is' - which is ineffable.
Then we get into the 'essence/energies' thing which ties my brain in knots.
It's all very paradoxical but it can help as it means you don't necessarily have to have nice warm fuzzy feelings which is something some strands of pietistic Christianity aim for and encourage.
I find it hard to articulate what I'm driving at here. So I'll shut up.
And secondly, for me "believing in God" is the same thing as "believing God exists", and that's the sense I commonly hear it used. Parsing "believe in God" as more like "trust in God" strikes me as a usage specifically found amongst Christians (and possibly other religious groups but I have no data on that), but not outside that group. It would be strange indeed to hear someone say "I don't believe in God although I believe God exists."
Good points.
In general, people talk about "believing in ____" as believing in the existence of ____.
At least in the States though, we also say "I believe in him/her/it/them" in order to indicate "I have confidence in him/her/it/them to carry out some expectation." We often tell someone, "I believe in you!" as an encouragement, equivalent to "You can do this!"
That meaning is probably expanded from (I'm guessing here) the meaning you mentioned: to trust in. I think you are right that this is a particular way that church people speak. (There certainly are plenty of others.)
Maybe, in a tortured moment, one might say, "I believe that God exists, but I don't believe in God." Still leaving oneself wide open to a confused response.
I think we tend to parse "believe in x" as meaning "believe that x exists" when the existence of x is in question, and as "have confidence in" when it isn't.
The latter meaning of having confidence is Old English; the OED gives the first example of the former, "I believe in God, that is, I believe that God is," as 1659.
I think we tend to parse "believe in x" as meaning "believe that x exists" when the existence of x is in question, and as "have confidence in" when it isn't.
Which sort of points to the first meaning being the primary one; the second meaning only comes in when the first cannot logically be the meaning.
@KarlLB - you may - or very well may not - find Eastern Orthodox theology helpful when it comes to the 'Personhood' of God - if we can put it that way.
God is always 'personal' in Eastern theology but the way that's discussed or described is often very 'apophatic' - we can say what God isn't, if you like, rather than what he 'is' - which is ineffable.
Then we get into the 'essence/energies' thing which ties my brain in knots.
It's all very paradoxical but it can help as it means you don't necessarily have to have nice warm fuzzy feelings which is something some strands of pietistic Christianity aim for and encourage.
I find it hard to articulate what I'm driving at here. So I'll shut up.
I'm long past looking for or expecting warm fuzzy feelings.
I don’t follow your understanding of how phenomenological analysis proceeds, which omits bracketing which is used to focus on particular experiences, for example (citing from the page linked):
“For example, the act of seeing a horse qualifies as an experience, whether one sees the horse in person, in a dream, or in a hallucination. 'Bracketing' the horse suspends any judgement about the horse as noumenon, and instead analyses the phenomenon of the horse as constituted in intentional acts.”
As I understand it, Husserl between his Fifth and Sixth Cartesian Meditations (so I'm told) came to regard bracketing as a mistake. (A fatal mistake, or something like that, he said in a letter.) Investigation of the phenomenon in an intentional act finally showed that what had been bracketed out were in fact the conditions of possibility of the phenomenon.
Neither Heidegger nor Merleau-Ponty make use of bracketing. Rather the opposite.
A couple of thoughts come to mind - firstly what are you meaning by "internalising" and "externalising" here?
...
I hope that makes sense.
Unfortunately, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
You'd probably have to give a concrete example of what expressing doubt in an internalised and externalised manner would look like.
Hmm. On reflection, forget the definitions - I'm not convinced they help that much. What I'm trying to convey is how the changed certainties about the existence of God affect individuals doubting their own understanding of his existence (or non-existence), and how this can affect the expression of the associated emotional aspect of doubt.
I'm looking at this in the context of the dissonance we experience when our worldview gets out of step with our self-view (or self-understanding).
We are not born with a worldview; we acquire it, from a young age, from our parents (primary caregivers), authority figures and society. In a world (or time) where the accepted default across a society is belief in God, people grow up believing in God, usually without wondering why - there, doubting the existence of God is a private, internal, affair.
In the modern western world, belief in God is not a given. Even if we start with the beliefs of god-believing parents, it doesn't take long before we become aware that these beliefs are far from universally accepted. I'm not sure if the situation is greatly different if you start with explicitly atheistic or agnostic beliefs - our perception of the norm, against which we view ourselves, can be influenced by multiple factors. (Which introduces potential for further doubt, between the liberal/consumerist freedom to "choose" our beliefs, and how our families and/or communities feel about exercising that freedom.)
In any case, the emotional aspect of doubt is still internal, even if we are disposed to view the mental process as a reasoned exploration of externally-defined positions.
I don't see how philosophy can adequately approach this question, either. With or without a degree or a class or one book. As we've seen in this thread. People seem to be clarifying what they think, what they think is knowable, how one may know what is knowable, etc, but never actually whether God exists.
Our problem, I think, is that the "rules have changed" regarding how we think we can know anything about God, that is the Christian God. I know I'm not telling you anything you don't know already, @KarlLB .
Historically, standard-issue-Christians didn't approach the question of God's existence or action in the world philosophically or scientifically. And they didn't require special schooling or special smarts. They based their belief on what they understood to be reliable, eye-witness accounts of God's unusual work in the world -- demonstrations of his godness -- particularly in the works of Jesus. Up until fairly recently. This is not new news.
I agree that the "rules" have changed, but not quite in the way that you outline. Up until the "golden age" of proofs for the existence of god in the 17th and 18th centuries, western people (Christians) didn't question the existence of God. They didn't need to - it was an accepted (and/or normative) part of life. Anyone doubting the existence of God would have kept quiet about it. What changed this, as much as anything, was the widespread publication of the myriad proofs themselves - in effect, legitimising the question. It may sound perverse to us, but the aim of the proofs was *not* to demonstrate the existence of God to atheists and agnostics. See here, although the author's conclusion seems a bit of a stretch.
I take away a couple of things from this. Firstly, that up until that era, for individuals, doubts about the existence of God were mostly internalised. These days, the tendency of individuals questioning the existence of God (in contrast to believing in God, or knowing God) is to externalise the problem. Secondly, that the past isn't just a place where they do things differently - the inhabitants of the past also think differently from us. They have different worldviews.
Yeah. I didn't sense a need with this crew to review Premodern world views or the various roots of Modernism. I figured indicating them in my post was enough.
Recognizing different world views through history, or even during the present, is helpful, but not enough. Something happened in the past. People wrote about it. Folks have been reading ancient history since before it was ancient, presumably because they have though there was more to be gained from it than a good story.
We can pull a Rortian move and say that the texts are as far as we can get or that we can use those texts however we find meaningful. But that's not the way historians work. Our very recognition of other world views (as well as our own) demonstrates we can understand something about them, grasp differences and consider them, make some use of those texts as historians have been doing for a long time.
A number of early Christians saw Jesus as peculiar enough to be worthy of something that resembles history or biography of his life and/or ministry. The early churches used these texts, presumably seeing some value in them beyond the basic understanding that God exists and does stuff.
I want to come back to this part of my earlier post, which you left out @pease :
Biblical texts recognize this concept of witness and rely on it. I am grateful for the empathy some of the authors demonstrate for later Christians, who wouldn't have access to the original witnesses, or anyone else from that time. The empathetic writers understood the challenge of faith without having seen it oneself.
While the authors were writing from a basic understanding that God exists, they demonstrate awareness that the things being taught about Jesus and God's work through him wouldn't automatically cause the hearer to cry, "I believe!"
I don't think the NT exposition of the OT in relation to Jesus can answer the specific question of God's existence as asked and understood today. It doesn't seem to at least. So the work is left to historical enquiry and assessment, the world view of which also changes as well, which also must be dealt with. I've heard answers to those historical questions that go in multiple directions. In spite of the uncertainty, I think the best we can do is work with the accounts of Jesus, and decide if those are enough for us.
@KarlLB's question -- not only his -- is entirely legitimate as asked. I don't think the answer we want (Yes or No) is available, though.
Thinking more about a godless universe, it strikes me that the 17th century saw a split between matter and spirit, so that a mechanistic universe came be seen as standard. In such a universe God is hidden, and humans play hide and seek, or just give up. However, one solution is to go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it. Of course, you risk being called a crank or a dotty vitalist. Can't be helped. I keep hearing Alan Watts in that Cunard ad, "I wonder, I wonder, if you had the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream."
Thinking more about a godless universe, it strikes me that the 17th century saw a split between matter and spirit, so that a mechanistic universe came be seen as standard. In such a universe God is hidden, and humans play hide and seek, or just give up. However, one solution is to go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it. Of course, you risk being called a crank or a dotty vitalist. Can't be helped. I keep hearing Alan Watts in that Cunard ad, "I wonder, I wonder, if you had the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream."
What would it look like to 'go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it.'?
Thinking more about a godless universe, it strikes me that the 17th century saw a split between matter and spirit, so that a mechanistic universe came be seen as standard. In such a universe God is hidden, and humans play hide and seek, or just give up. However, one solution is to go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it. Of course, you risk being called a crank or a dotty vitalist. Can't be helped. I keep hearing Alan Watts in that Cunard ad, "I wonder, I wonder, if you had the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream."
What would it look like to 'go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it.'?
Well, it would be an experience, not a theory. I'm not sure what that would be like, some kind of all-loving sense of unity.
Thinking more about a godless universe, it strikes me that the 17th century saw a split between matter and spirit, so that a mechanistic universe came be seen as standard. In such a universe God is hidden, and humans play hide and seek, or just give up. However, one solution is to go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it. Of course, you risk being called a crank or a dotty vitalist. Can't be helped. I keep hearing Alan Watts in that Cunard ad, "I wonder, I wonder, if you had the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream."
What would it look like to 'go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it.'?
Well, it would be an experience, not a theory. I'm not sure what that would be like, some kind of all-loving sense of unity.
OK, how would one go about having that experience?
Thinking more about a godless universe, it strikes me that the 17th century saw a split between matter and spirit, so that a mechanistic universe came be seen as standard. In such a universe God is hidden, and humans play hide and seek, or just give up. However, one solution is to go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it. Of course, you risk being called a crank or a dotty vitalist. Can't be helped. I keep hearing Alan Watts in that Cunard ad, "I wonder, I wonder, if you had the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream."
What would it look like to 'go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it.'?
Well, it would be an experience, not a theory. I'm not sure what that would be like, some kind of all-loving sense of unity.
OK, how would one go about having that experience?
I think there are tons of ways, via prayer, meditation, drugs, music, sex, etc.
Thinking more about a godless universe, it strikes me that the 17th century saw a split between matter and spirit, so that a mechanistic universe came be seen as standard. In such a universe God is hidden, and humans play hide and seek, or just give up. However, one solution is to go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it. Of course, you risk being called a crank or a dotty vitalist. Can't be helped. I keep hearing Alan Watts in that Cunard ad, "I wonder, I wonder, if you had the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream."
What would it look like to 'go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it.'?
Well, it would be an experience, not a theory. I'm not sure what that would be like, some kind of all-loving sense of unity.
OK, how would one go about having that experience?
I think there are tons of ways, via prayer, meditation, drugs, music, sex, etc.
Thinking more about a godless universe, it strikes me that the 17th century saw a split between matter and spirit, so that a mechanistic universe came be seen as standard. In such a universe God is hidden, and humans play hide and seek, or just give up. However, one solution is to go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it. Of course, you risk being called a crank or a dotty vitalist. Can't be helped. I keep hearing Alan Watts in that Cunard ad, "I wonder, I wonder, if you had the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream."
What would it look like to 'go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it.'?
Well, it would be an experience, not a theory. I'm not sure what that would be like, some kind of all-loving sense of unity.
OK, how would one go about having that experience?
I think there are tons of ways, via prayer, meditation, drugs, music, sex, etc.
I'd need convincing that was actually "spiritual" rather than "high".
Perhaps I'm just not built for this. I'm a thinking being in a physical universe and complicating that just seems to confuse.
Thinking more about a godless universe, it strikes me that the 17th century saw a split between matter and spirit, so that a mechanistic universe came be seen as standard. In such a universe God is hidden, and humans play hide and seek, or just give up. However, one solution is to go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it. Of course, you risk being called a crank or a dotty vitalist. Can't be helped. I keep hearing Alan Watts in that Cunard ad, "I wonder, I wonder, if you had the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream."
What would it look like to 'go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it.'?
Well, it would be an experience, not a theory. I'm not sure what that would be like, some kind of all-loving sense of unity.
OK, how would one go about having that experience?
I think there are tons of ways, via prayer, meditation, drugs, music, sex, etc.
I'd need convincing that was actually "spiritual" rather than "high".
Perhaps I'm just not built for this. I'm a thinking being in a physical universe and complicating that just seems to confuse.
That's a good point about high. I would say that people's actions are the proof of the pudding. If you are in a loving state, it shows.
Thinking more about a godless universe, it strikes me that the 17th century saw a split between matter and spirit, so that a mechanistic universe came be seen as standard. In such a universe God is hidden, and humans play hide and seek, or just give up. However, one solution is to go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it. Of course, you risk being called a crank or a dotty vitalist. Can't be helped. I keep hearing Alan Watts in that Cunard ad, "I wonder, I wonder, if you had the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream."
What would it look like to 'go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it.'?
Well, it would be an experience, not a theory. I'm not sure what that would be like, some kind of all-loving sense of unity.
OK, how would one go about having that experience?
I think there are tons of ways, via prayer, meditation, drugs, music, sex, etc.
I think we tend to parse "believe in x" as meaning "believe that x exists" when the existence of x is in question, and as "have confidence in" when it isn't.
Which sort of points to the first meaning being the primary one; the second meaning only comes in when the first cannot logically be the meaning.
Surely for me to believe (have confidence in) something, it is necessary, but not sufficient, for me to believe in it (think that it exists).
I think we tend to parse "believe in x" as meaning "believe that x exists" when the existence of x is in question, and as "have confidence in" when it isn't.
Which sort of points to the first meaning being the primary one; the second meaning only comes in when the first cannot logically be the meaning.
Surely for me to believe (have confidence in) something, it is necessary, but not sufficient, for me to believe in it (think that it exists).
I think you may have me arse about face. What I meant was that "Believe in" = "Trust in" only comes into play when "Believe in" = "Believe exists" can't be the meaning because it isn't in doubt.
E.g. if I said "I believe in the Supreme Court" I'd have to mean I trusted its decisions, because believing it exists is a given, so why would I bother to say it?
Whereas if I say "I don't believe in ghosts", most people would not assume I meant I didn’t put my trust in them; they'd assume I thought they didn’t exist, because their existence is a contested issue.
I think we tend to parse "believe in x" as meaning "believe that x exists" when the existence of x is in question, and as "have confidence in" when it isn't.
Which sort of points to the first meaning being the primary one; the second meaning only comes in when the first cannot logically be the meaning.
Surely for me to believe (have confidence in) something, it is necessary, but not sufficient, for me to believe in it (think that it exists).
I think you may have me arse about face. What I meant was that "Believe in" = "Trust in" only comes into play when "Believe in" = "Believe exists" can't be the meaning because it isn't in doubt.
E.g. if I said "I believe in the Supreme Court" I'd have to mean I trusted its decisions, because believing it exists is a given, so why would I bother to say it?
Whereas if I say "I don't believe in ghosts", most people would not assume I meant I didn’t put my trust in them; they'd assume I thought they didn’t exist, because their existence is a contested issue.
Ah - I think we completely agree, and I had my head backwards.
Although I'm not quite sure where to put the people who say that they act as though God exists, and Believe in Him, even though they're not entirely certain that He actually exists. They seem to fall outside our logic.
@KarlLB - you may - or very well may not - find Eastern Orthodox theology helpful when it comes to the 'Personhood' of God - if we can put it that way.
God is always 'personal' in Eastern theology but the way that's discussed or described is often very 'apophatic' - we can say what God isn't, if you like, rather than what he 'is' - which is ineffable.
Then we get into the 'essence/energies' thing which ties my brain in knots.
It's all very paradoxical but it can help as it means you don't necessarily have to have nice warm fuzzy feelings which is something some strands of pietistic Christianity aim for and encourage.
I find it hard to articulate what I'm driving at here. So I'll shut up.
I'm long past looking for or expecting warm fuzzy feelings.
In which case you are a lot further on than I am. I miss them ... 😉
More seriously, I do think there's room for what the Reformed tradition calls the 'religious affections'. Somebody who is Reformed will probably come along and correct me on that.
@Gamma Gamaliel Jonathan Edwards's Book "Religious Affections" was a fascinating read, considering the entirely unsophisticated stereotype of the man that is usually parroted. You might enjoy it. I did.
I think I may have read extracts of it, many years ago.
Sure, I know there was more to Edwards than 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.'
I do know that a lot of charismatics used to take elements of Edwards's 'The Religious Affections' out of context and pumped it up a fair bit. They did the same with some of Wesley's writings.
...
Our very recognition of other world views (as well as our own) demonstrates we can understand something about them, grasp differences and consider them, make some use of those texts as historians have been doing for a long time.
...
Your post looks at biblical texts with what is evidently a modern, western, Christian worldview. Are you able to look at them or understand them from the perspective of a different worldview?
I don't think the NT exposition of the OT in relation to Jesus can answer the specific question of God's existence as asked and understood today. It doesn't seem to at least. So the work is left to historical enquiry and assessment, the world view of which also changes as well, which also must be dealt with. I've heard answers to those historical questions that go in multiple directions. In spite of the uncertainty, I think the best we can do is work with the accounts of Jesus, and decide if those are enough for us.
As far as I can tell, you're saying that you don't think the NT accounts of Jesus address the question of the existence of God, but are suggesting that we should look at them anyway, to answer that question. That makes sense in a worldview that considers Jesus to be "in the very nature" God, but is otherwise hard to justify.
@KarlLB's question -- not only his -- is entirely legitimate as asked. I don't think the answer we want (Yes or No) is available, though.
Legitimate, definitely. But I struggle with the logic:
I'm looking on some of these exchanges and the links posted, and the impression I seem to get is that God can only be apprehended through the use as a worldview of a philosophical methodology that requires an undergraduate degree in Philosophy (or at least considerably more reading of the subject that the vast majority of people are able, inclined or have the opportunity to do) to understand. This seems a remarkable way for God to hide himself.
This seems to be suggesting that God himself is involved in the creation of (somewhat convoluted) arguments for and against his existence, which is a bit of a leap.
I don’t think you have to know the philosophical terminology - in plain English you’d say - God is not something you can prove, disprove or test. God is known through faith and personal experience of meaning in one’s life.
But people have faith and experiences that lead to contradictory ideas about God. How do we know who's getting it right?
I would compare this to saying "People have faith and experiences that lead to contradictory ideas about Love. How do we know who's getting it right?"
In both cases, I'd say the question "How do we know who's getting it right?" looks like category error. Which is rather ironic.
In the same way everyone knows what love is, but few people would set out looking for its molecular structure.
Because it would be a category error. Love is an emotion, a feeling, a commitment to act in particular ways. God is proposed to be a person,
Not in mainstream Christian theology. [Not being to do with logic.]
and people certainly can be examined. And not just physically, but in terms of their personalities. That is not, in my experience, true of God. Or is experience only a guide when it points in the "right" direction?
The following, however, is the aspect that is entirely legitimate and compelling:
The irony is that while being ultimately agnostic I remain provisionally Christian on entirely subjective grounds. But contra what a lot of people say, that isn't actually working out.
These two statements, and the human condition that they describe, make complete sense to me.
Of course Kendel is looking at these texts from a western Christian stand-point. She's a modern, western Christian. How else would she be expected to look at them?
We all approach the scriptures through the lens of our particular affiliations, cultures and traditions. How can it be otherwise?
...
Our very recognition of other world views (as well as our own) demonstrates we can understand something about them, grasp differences and consider them, make some use of those texts as historians have been doing for a long time.
...
Your post looks at biblical texts with what is evidently a modern, western, Christian worldview. Are you able to look at them or understand them from the perspective of a different worldview?
You are arguing in the wrong direction. My abilities or inabilities demonstrate nothing more than themselves.
I don't think the NT exposition of the OT in relation to Jesus can answer the specific question of God's existence as asked and understood today. It doesn't seem to at least. So the work is left to historical enquiry and assessment, the world view of which also changes as well, which also must be dealt with. I've heard answers to those historical questions that go in multiple directions. In spite of the uncertainty, I think the best we can do is work with the accounts of Jesus, and decide if those are enough for us.
As far as I can tell, you're saying that you don't think the NT accounts of Jesus address the question of the existence of God, but are suggesting that we should look at them anyway, to answer that question. That makes sense in a worldview that considers Jesus to be "in the very nature" God, but is otherwise hard to justify.
I think I may have read extracts of it, many years ago.
Sure, I know there was more to Edwards than 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.'
I do know that a lot of charismatics used to take elements of Edwards's 'The Religious Affections' out of context and pumped it up a fair bit. They did the same with some of Wesley's writings.
Edwards a la charismatic. The mind goes places. R.A. felt like the dear man was letting his hair down, or taking his wig off. Any more, and he might run mad. : )
Of course Kendel is looking at these texts from a western Christian stand-point. She's a modern, western Christian. How else would she be expected to look at them?
We all approach the scriptures through the lens of our particular affiliations, cultures and traditions. How can it be otherwise?
I'm reluctant to engage with arguments that are slap-dash or dismissive, especially when I have a vested interest from my own context. The point @pease is making is important and deserves closer attention.
@Kendel I'm going to look back at a mention you made of Terry Eagleton, not because I want to address the content of Eagleton's post ( he is very good on Catholicism as a cultural discourse) but because I want to bring up something relevant to what @pease mentions.
Forty years ago, Eagleton was at Cambridge leaning on the work of Raymond Williams and together with Frederic Jameson and Pierre Macherey, one of the leading Marxist literary critics of the day. You probably know this if you've read any histories of literary criticism in Europe, the trajectory from Georg Lukacs and the Frankfurt School.
But in the United States, from within a very insular and Western 'bubble' at Harvard and Princeton, you find a literary critic and thinker in exile from the Nakba in Palestine, Edward Said. His work on Orientalism changes the debate in the West because academics realise that they are unable to 'read' outside of their own tradition except in a racist or exoticising way that distorts texts and images from or about the Middle East. And Said is reading Eagleton and UK-based working-class critics but he has a problem: it is all very well to study and write about Hegel, or Marx or Althusser, but what Said deals with outside of the university is Reagan-omics and the Cold War aftermath. He sees Eagleton and others as sequestrated in a privileged academic discipline and buffered from the struggles of real-life Britain or America. He also sees that none of them are reading Frantz Fanon from Algeria, they have no analysis of post-colonialism or Empire because they can't see beyond the 'bubble'. All they have to fall back on are the stale old Western stereotypes.
When posters talk about revisionism and newer readings of Puritanism and Edwards, or the enduring paradoxes of Kierkegaard, I'm looking for a more sensitive and global reach, what has emerged from contexts that are not Eurocentric or mainstream Christian, because that is what keeps shifting the discourse in a pluralistic and multicultural world. 'Faith' may be as fragile, provisional and estranging as 'coincidences', depending on where you're writing from.
Of course Kendel is looking at these texts from a western Christian stand-point. She's a modern, western Christian. How else would she be expected to look at them?
We all approach the scriptures through the lens of our particular affiliations, cultures and traditions. How can it be otherwise?
I'm reluctant to engage with arguments that are slap-dash or dismissive, especially when I have a vested interest from my own context. The point @pease is making is important and deserves closer attention.
@Kendel I'm going to look back at a mention you made of Terry Eagleton, not because I want to address the content of Eagleton's post ( he is very good on Catholicism as a cultural discourse) but because I want to bring up something relevant to what @pease mentions.
Forty years ago, Eagleton was at Cambridge leaning on the work of Raymond Williams and together with Frederic Jameson and Pierre Macherey, one of the leading Marxist literary critics of the day. You probably know this if you've read any histories of literary criticism in Europe, the trajectory from Georg Lukacs and the Frankfurt School.
But in the United States, from within a very insular and Western 'bubble' at Harvard and Princeton, you find a literary critic and thinker in exile from the Nakba in Palestine, Edward Said. His work on Orientalism changes the debate in the West because academics realise that they are unable to 'read' outside of their own tradition except in a racist or exoticising way that distorts texts and images from or about the Middle East. And Said is reading Eagleton and UK-based working-class critics but he has a problem: it is all very well to study and write about Hegel, or Marx or Althusser, but what Said deals with outside of the university is Reagan-omics and the Cold War aftermath. He sees Eagleton and others as sequestrated in a privileged academic discipline and buffered from the struggles of real-life Britain or America. He also sees that none of them are reading Frantz Fanon from Algeria, they have no analysis of post-colonialism or Empire because they can't see beyond the 'bubble'. All they have to fall back on are the stale old Western stereotypes.
When posters talk about revisionism and newer readings of Puritanism and Edwards, or the enduring paradoxes of Kierkegaard, I'm looking for a more sensitive and global reach, what has emerged from contexts that are not Eurocentric or mainstream Christian, because that is what keeps shifting the discourse in a pluralistic and multicultural world. 'Faith' may be as fragile, provisional and estranging as 'coincidences', depending on where you're writing from.
@MaryLouise your posts are a feast. You have studied in depth things I only had an opportunity to taste decades ago and am attempting to return to again on my own. I am regularly amazed at your ability to incorperate what you've studied into your faith and life, which is the point.
If/when you have time or inclination, I would be grateful to hear more about the global reach you mention. Nearly all my multi-cultural reading is old. None of it has been Christian. Much of it has been from African-American authors, which I have been able to continue to engage with (along with real people) and learn from. But nothing recent, global or Christian. And I don't know any Christians here who would touch the stuff I've read or am reading or have waiting to read without condemning it. Well, except Edwards.
I hadn't intended to provide a vitae but want to give you some kind of picture of some of what informs my thinking.
At this point I'm wondering if we're not missing a privilege - intellectual.
I don’t think I'm thicker than a whale omelette, but quite often I find many of the posts here very hard to understand - and not just the ones apparently in Tamarian. I follow the links people post but what I find there conveys very little to me.
I stopped studying humanities of any kind when I was 15 having just failed O level History. English literature I didn't study at all and I scraped a pass in language. I'm currently trying to help my daughter with her GCSEs and the science and maths practice papers I can mark with only occasional reference to the mark scheme to qualify levels of precision and so on, while with the English language I'm frankly as mystified as she is. She's performing at level 2/3 in GCSE and (the levels go up to 9 for non-England and Wales Shipmates' benefit) and I'm not sure I'm much better.
Which is a lot of waffle and personal experience stuff (hey, isn't that the only thing that's real according to some people or something) to point out a similar phenomenon to that I was referring to in my post which @pease apparently misunderstood. Is God really so obscure that an ability to work at a high level in the Humanities is required to get anywhere with the concept? Especially when that level may be inaccessible to some of us regardless of how much we may attempt to achieve it?
And more widely historically and geographically, how many people have had the privilege of sufficient time?
It’s a fair point @KarlLB - but I think it is also just very hard to express cross discipline. There might be a brilliant analogy to explain what I’m trying to say in physics or maths, but being poorer in those areas I’m unlikely to know what it is and vice versa.
? Not knowing where the particle is, doesn’t make Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle wrong ?
? Consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems, the universe is an infinitely complex system and therefore is an omnipresent, omnipotent God - because by definition it is everywhere, contains all power and all information ?
It is a valid point @KarlLB but some of us here have had to unlearn much of what we were taught in formal education and find different texts or disciplines in order to 'do theology from below' or counter the inaccurate historiographies and assumptions of inferiority foisted on the developing world under colonialism. I'm very conscious in workshops out here how many participants are working across polylingual understandings or neurodiverse differences, and how hard people work to equip themselves for mobility in a chaotic or crisis-ridden world.
Pease: Your post looks at biblical texts with what is evidently a modern, western, Christian worldview. Are you able to look at them or understand them from the perspective of a different worldview
Hmm..Does it matter what your lens is if you are culturally incapable of seeing beyond it anyway? When all is said and done the scripture writers had a Jewish lens on a Greco Roman world and we, 20 centuries later have seen them read and still do through Catholic, Orthodox, reformation and a multitude of other lenses. Nah..the lens thing is over rated. It is really just more post modernist gloop to tell us we can’t really know anything. As Will Roper says in ‘ A Man For All Seasons’ ….”the devil’s work done by the devil’s ministers!”
It’s a fair point @KarlLB - but I think it is also just very hard to express cross discipline. There might be a brilliant analogy to explain what I’m trying to say in physics or maths, but being poorer in those areas I’m unlikely to know what it is and vice versa.
? Not knowing where the particle is, doesn’t make Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle wrong ?
? Consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems, the universe is an infinitely complex system and therefore is an omnipresent, omnipotent God - because by definition it is everywhere, contains all power and all information ?
I think my point is that if God is for all and everyone then, to put it bluntly, it shouldn't be that difficult.
I stopped studying humanities of any kind when I was 15 having just failed O level History. English literature I didn't study at all and I scraped a pass in language.
In that case, as far as studying humanities of any kind goes, you didn't get any further than I did. And what I did next was get into computing.
Is God really so obscure that an ability to work at a high level in the Humanities is required to get anywhere with the concept? Especially when that level may be inaccessible to some of us regardless of how much we may attempt to achieve it?
I think the intellectualisation of Christianity itself is disastrous.
The intellectualisation of discussion *about* Christianity is not the same thing.
Pease: Your post looks at biblical texts with what is evidently a modern, western, Christian worldview. Are you able to look at them or understand them from the perspective of a different worldview
Hmm..Does it matter what your lens is if you are culturally incapable of seeing beyond it anyway? When all is said and done the scripture writers had a Jewish lens on a Greco Roman world and we, 20 centuries later have seen them read and still do through Catholic, Orthodox, reformation and a multitude of other lenses. Nah..the lens thing is over rated. It is really just more post modernist gloop to tell us we can’t really know anything. As Will Roper says in ‘ A Man For All Seasons’ ….”the devil’s work done by the devil’s ministers!”
And I'm the one who has been accused of using arguments thaf are 'slap-dash and dismissive' ...
😉
FWIW @MaryLouise I do apologise as I didn't intend to sound dismissive of any attempt to look at things through different lenses to those we have been inculturated into. The process of unlearning can be as arduous as that of learning - if not more so.
I'm not convinced we can entirely change the prescription on our specs. For instance, I was Protestant. I'm now Orthodox. The prescription on my specs is still Chalcedonian, however much it may have changed in other respects.
But yes, @pease and your good self raise important issues about at least trying to understand things from other perspectives.
I don't see that as necessarily making us hostages to 'post-modernist gloop.'
Pease: Your post looks at biblical texts with what is evidently a modern, western, Christian worldview. Are you able to look at them or understand them from the perspective of a different worldview
Hmm..Does it matter what your lens is if you are culturally incapable of seeing beyond it anyway?
Even if that cultural lens is colonialist or has the rose-tint of empire?
When all is said and done the scripture writers had a Jewish lens on a Greco Roman world and we, 20 centuries later have seen them read and still do through Catholic, Orthodox, reformation and a multitude of other lenses. Nah..the lens thing is over rated.
If/when you have time or inclination, I would be grateful to hear more about the global reach you mention. Nearly all my multi-cultural reading is old. None of it has been Christian. Much of it has been from African-American authors, which I have been able to continue to engage with (along with real people) and learn from. But nothing recent, global or Christian. And I don't know any Christians here who would touch the stuff I've read or am reading or have waiting to read without condemning it. Well, except Edwards.
Thank you for your post.
Sorry not to get back to you sooner @Kendel. You know, if you've been reading African American authors, it can be argued that Black theology often comes out of the Harlem Renaissance and Civil Rights literature. In South Africa, the response by US Black theologians like James Cone and Cornel West to the murder of the writer and activist Steve Biko looked back to the outraged and prophetic writings of James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. One of my favourite US theologians has been the late Katie Cannon of the Uniting Presbyterian Church, who grew up in North Carolina at a time when she wasn't allowed to use the swimming pool or library alongside white children, and her work at Union Theological Seminary drew on the creative work of bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Zora Neale Hurston. Katie was one of the mentors who encouraged the West African theologian Mercy Amba Uduyoye to found the influential Circle for Concerned African Theologians. She also supported the queer theology of Episcopalian priest Carter Heyward (God's Fierce Whimsy) and the feminist theological ethics of Beverley Wildung Harrison stimulating the theology of younger Black theologians like M Shawn Copeland (Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being) and so many writings now coming out of African Diaspora depts at US universities.
And there are ongoing connections and support networks with Latinx/ Hispanic women theologians like Elsa Tamez or Elizabeth Conde-Frazier (Newyorican from Puerto Rica) who work in the traditions of the Latin American liberation theologies, the Asian-American theologians (Chung Hyun Kyung from Korea) and Caribbean scholars building on the work of the poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation. For those white readers who haven't been exposed to the themes and issues addressed, it can be hard at first to read work that isn't primarily addressed to the concerns of mainstream middle America: writers talk about invisibility in an oblivious and heartless society that can't acknowledge racism exists; the terror of the penal system and pervasiveness of addiction; the ongoing damage done by slavery, the hope located in an embodied musical tradition of subversion and resistance.
This is hasty, eclectic and partial but perhaps a small place to begin looking at how faith is resourced all around us? I know discovering certain authors has been epiphanic and serendipity for me at times, more than a coincidence, to open the right book at the right time.
For those white readers who haven't been exposed to the themes and issues addressed, it can be hard at first to read work that isn't primarily addressed to the concerns of mainstream middle America:
This was a point in a book or discussion many years ago. It was surprising and jarring, not because I expected the author to concern herself with me, but because the author (or prof) knew I did and refused. And that refusal itself had nothing to do with me. I wasn't on her radar -- at all, not even to ignore. No one would notice if I sat by and listened or didn't. I realized I should anyway.
Thank you, @MaryLouise. Very much. I will copy your post into a note, so I have it for future reference. A lot in it is new for me and all of it is worth keeping.
More than coincidentally.
But in the United States, from within a very insular and Western 'bubble' at Harvard and Princeton, you find a literary critic and thinker in exile from the Nakba in Palestine, Edward Said. His work on Orientalism changes the debate in the West because academics realise that they are unable to 'read' outside of their own tradition except in a racist or exoticising way that distorts texts and images from or about the Middle East.
....
He sees Eagleton and others as sequestrated in a privileged academic discipline and buffered from the struggles of real-life Britain or America.
...
All they have to fall back on are the stale old Western stereotypes.
When posters talk about revisionism and newer readings of Puritanism and Edwards, or the enduring paradoxes of Kierkegaard, I'm looking for a more sensitive and global reach, what has emerged from contexts that are not Eurocentric or mainstream Christian, because that is what keeps shifting the discourse in a pluralistic and multicultural world. 'Faith' may be as fragile, provisional and estranging as 'coincidences', depending on where you're writing from.
This is hasty, eclectic and partial but perhaps a small place to begin looking at how faith is resourced all around us? I know discovering certain authors has been epiphanic and serendipity for me at times, more than a coincidence, to open the right book at the right time.
I wanted to come back to these two posts from @MaryLouise, not in disagreement with you, @MaryLouise, but as part of a wider discussion of reading from farther up this thread.
But your posts are related.
I am aware of Said but haven't read him. I've read others whose message about thinking from within our bubble is similar. It can be a real kick in the gut, many in fact. As well as a revelation.
Let God use it for my sanctification as well.
We can't step out of our time and place or race or gender or other formative factors, but we can 'read' in a better-informed way, allowing ourselves to be educated and even changed by the 'texts'. I expect this will be a lifelong pursuit with many bruises. I have a less dismal (maybe naive) view than many critics regarding people's ability to receive more from 'texts' than only what they bring to them. This requires vulnerability (even a willingness to be humiliated by the text), and a willingness to negotiate meaning. Which I think we are doing right now, for example.
As an American and Baptist, reading (a little of) Edwards and other theological decedents of Puritans has been both valuable and maddening to me. Although I can't read as one of his white congregants or slaves or Native American congregants, reading some of his sermons as well as Religious Affections helps me understand some of the peculiarities of the brand of Christianity I am a part of here. I find a work like Religious Affections a fascinating view of a man who is normally seen as one dimensional.
But reading Edwards' work today is complicated for me, for example, by his participation in slavery -- consider, for example, Jamar Tisby's views on how Edwards' work should be handled. I actually can ignore it. I have. Tisby can't. And he's right in that. I have to take Tisby seriously, if I am to be honest in regard to Edwards, but as an influenced reader, I have to decide for myself what to do with Edwards, if anything. I read both ways as well as others. Does Edwards have anything of value for me? I think so. But I also say so recognizing more than what is on the page.
Kierkegaard's work is a current, not lifelong, pursuit. Currently, I read him much like a foreign language student reading above her level, with a dictionary, a notebook and my sharpened pencil with a new eraser. What did he (not) say? My personal question is specifically what did he (not) say regarding faith in the mix of rational disbelief. Which is not a question that is going to go away in the West anytime soon. And is a question that will confront believers of all kinds in other places as well. Esau McMacaulley addresses a similar problem near the beginning of Reading While Black, describing his first encounter with liberal theology at university, where he found the profs attempting to rid the students of the same fundamentalism: "That is the testimony of Black Christians who saw in that same Bible the basis for their dignity and hope in a culture that often denied them both." Kierkegaard may have something for me to use. Or not.
I'm looking for much more than paradoxes. If that's all he has to offer, I will be disappointed and move on. The questions I am bringing to him, though, have wider application than only to myself, or only to my context.
I have yet to find many encounters with 'texts' that weren't valuable in one way or another. I don't expect this project to end until I do.
Comments
I take away a couple of things from this. Firstly, that up until that era, for individuals, doubts about the existence of God were mostly internalised. These days, the tendency of individuals questioning the existence of God (in contrast to believing in God, or knowing God) is to externalise the problem. Secondly, that the past isn't just a place where they do things differently - the inhabitants of the past also think differently from us. They have different worldviews.
And secondly, for me "believing in God" is the same thing as "believing God exists", and that's the sense I commonly hear it used. Parsing "believe in God" as more like "trust in God" strikes me as a usage specifically found amongst Christians (and possibly other religious groups but I have no data on that), but not outside that group. It would be strange indeed to hear someone say "I don't believe in God although I believe God exists."
wikipedia Which defines it in terms of the outcome, rather than the process whereby doubts, etc, are resolved. I'm not sure if there's a specific term for that.
wikipedia I hope that makes sense.
I'm assuming the audience for this thread includes people identifying as Christians as well as non-Christians. A Christian usage didn't seem out of place.
Unfortunately, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
You'd probably have to give a concrete example of what expressing doubt in an internalised and externalised manner would look like.
Since you brought it up...
The following is in no way a hard-and-fast scientific way of addressing the world or any entity in it; but it IS odd how often it works for me.
My family has a 40 year pattern of statistically unlikely concatenatations of crises that arrive more or less three months apart. At least, it was like this up until about three years ago--you could literally put it on the calendar "Multiple crises clusterfudge this week, avoid scheduling stuff" and we did. One was always the week before Christmas; one fell during Holy Week; and the others were spaced out about three months apart in between.
Knowing this pattern, we would routinely clear the decks of all ordinary responsibilities (shopping, paperwork, etc.) so we would be free to deal with the incoming clusterfudge. Which always showed up.
What were these clusterfudges like, you ask? One year we had a 24 hour period in which a) someone left a suicide note on our answer machine; b) two families in our parish had a multicar accident resulting in several injuries and were taken to two separate hospitals, requiring a ton of pastor visits and interpretation help (no English spoken); and c) (can't recall now, probably something like a family member developing cancer or my boss telling me I was going to be laid off, something of that level). I'm talking really over-the-top stress. All hitting in a day or two. The seminarian who was staying with us that year decided to bail out of Vietnamese ministry when he saw it.
I am aware that the concept of the devil is laughed at on the Ship. But if you had a pattern of 40 years of this shit hitting you on a fucking SCHEDULE, and reliably right before the major Christian holidays you have to cover with no assistance because you're leading a poor mission church--well.... Once is coincidence, two is happenstance, three is Enemy action.
So what did we do? Of course we prayed. We also planned ahead and cleared the decks, as I mentioned. And finally we started something I can only describe as behavior modification for bad archangels. It's the sort of thing you do with a toddler who is acting out. You set up consequences that the individual-in-question deeply dislikes, and then you impose those consequences every time the objectionable behavior takes place.
So a clusterfudge would come along, and immediately we would think of the thing most likely to piss off the devil if we did it at that moment. Sometimes it was something mundane, like upping our Bible study and prayer time. Sometimes it was something targeted, like taking concrete steps to do good to a particular enemy of ours. And every time the crisis ramped up, we'd do it again.
It was interesting how quickly the crises ramped DOWN in most cases.
This sort of thing worked on my toddler, too, though he was far more reasonable than the archangel.
God is always 'personal' in Eastern theology but the way that's discussed or described is often very 'apophatic' - we can say what God isn't, if you like, rather than what he 'is' - which is ineffable.
Then we get into the 'essence/energies' thing which ties my brain in knots.
It's all very paradoxical but it can help as it means you don't necessarily have to have nice warm fuzzy feelings which is something some strands of pietistic Christianity aim for and encourage.
I find it hard to articulate what I'm driving at here. So I'll shut up.
Good points.
In general, people talk about "believing in ____" as believing in the existence of ____.
At least in the States though, we also say "I believe in him/her/it/them" in order to indicate "I have confidence in him/her/it/them to carry out some expectation." We often tell someone, "I believe in you!" as an encouragement, equivalent to "You can do this!"
That meaning is probably expanded from (I'm guessing here) the meaning you mentioned: to trust in. I think you are right that this is a particular way that church people speak. (There certainly are plenty of others.)
Maybe, in a tortured moment, one might say, "I believe that God exists, but I don't believe in God." Still leaving oneself wide open to a confused response.
The latter meaning of having confidence is Old English; the OED gives the first example of the former, "I believe in God, that is, I believe that God is," as 1659.
Which sort of points to the first meaning being the primary one; the second meaning only comes in when the first cannot logically be the meaning.
I'm long past looking for or expecting warm fuzzy feelings.
Neither Heidegger nor Merleau-Ponty make use of bracketing. Rather the opposite.
I'm looking at this in the context of the dissonance we experience when our worldview gets out of step with our self-view (or self-understanding).
We are not born with a worldview; we acquire it, from a young age, from our parents (primary caregivers), authority figures and society. In a world (or time) where the accepted default across a society is belief in God, people grow up believing in God, usually without wondering why - there, doubting the existence of God is a private, internal, affair.
In the modern western world, belief in God is not a given. Even if we start with the beliefs of god-believing parents, it doesn't take long before we become aware that these beliefs are far from universally accepted. I'm not sure if the situation is greatly different if you start with explicitly atheistic or agnostic beliefs - our perception of the norm, against which we view ourselves, can be influenced by multiple factors. (Which introduces potential for further doubt, between the liberal/consumerist freedom to "choose" our beliefs, and how our families and/or communities feel about exercising that freedom.)
In any case, the emotional aspect of doubt is still internal, even if we are disposed to view the mental process as a reasoned exploration of externally-defined positions.
Yeah. I didn't sense a need with this crew to review Premodern world views or the various roots of Modernism. I figured indicating them in my post was enough.
Recognizing different world views through history, or even during the present, is helpful, but not enough. Something happened in the past. People wrote about it. Folks have been reading ancient history since before it was ancient, presumably because they have though there was more to be gained from it than a good story.
We can pull a Rortian move and say that the texts are as far as we can get or that we can use those texts however we find meaningful. But that's not the way historians work. Our very recognition of other world views (as well as our own) demonstrates we can understand something about them, grasp differences and consider them, make some use of those texts as historians have been doing for a long time.
A number of early Christians saw Jesus as peculiar enough to be worthy of something that resembles history or biography of his life and/or ministry. The early churches used these texts, presumably seeing some value in them beyond the basic understanding that God exists and does stuff.
I want to come back to this part of my earlier post, which you left out @pease :
While the authors were writing from a basic understanding that God exists, they demonstrate awareness that the things being taught about Jesus and God's work through him wouldn't automatically cause the hearer to cry, "I believe!"
I don't think the NT exposition of the OT in relation to Jesus can answer the specific question of God's existence as asked and understood today. It doesn't seem to at least. So the work is left to historical enquiry and assessment, the world view of which also changes as well, which also must be dealt with. I've heard answers to those historical questions that go in multiple directions. In spite of the uncertainty, I think the best we can do is work with the accounts of Jesus, and decide if those are enough for us.
@KarlLB's question -- not only his -- is entirely legitimate as asked. I don't think the answer we want (Yes or No) is available, though.
What would it look like to 'go back to "spiritual matter", or whatever name one calls it.'?
Well, it would be an experience, not a theory. I'm not sure what that would be like, some kind of all-loving sense of unity.
Then we would be stuck with the question regarding the reliability of individual experience. It might work for one person.
Who is "we"?
OK, how would one go about having that experience?
I think there are tons of ways, via prayer, meditation, drugs, music, sex, etc.
Which would reveal what?
I'd need convincing that was actually "spiritual" rather than "high".
Perhaps I'm just not built for this. I'm a thinking being in a physical universe and complicating that just seems to confuse.
That's a good point about high. I would say that people's actions are the proof of the pudding. If you are in a loving state, it shows.
Well, you would have to try it.
Surely for me to believe (have confidence in) something, it is necessary, but not sufficient, for me to believe in it (think that it exists).
I think you may have me arse about face. What I meant was that "Believe in" = "Trust in" only comes into play when "Believe in" = "Believe exists" can't be the meaning because it isn't in doubt.
E.g. if I said "I believe in the Supreme Court" I'd have to mean I trusted its decisions, because believing it exists is a given, so why would I bother to say it?
Whereas if I say "I don't believe in ghosts", most people would not assume I meant I didn’t put my trust in them; they'd assume I thought they didn’t exist, because their existence is a contested issue.
Ah - I think we completely agree, and I had my head backwards.
Although I'm not quite sure where to put the people who say that they act as though God exists, and Believe in Him, even though they're not entirely certain that He actually exists. They seem to fall outside our logic.
In which case you are a lot further on than I am. I miss them ... 😉
More seriously, I do think there's room for what the Reformed tradition calls the 'religious affections'. Somebody who is Reformed will probably come along and correct me on that.
But we don't all 'need' them.
And they can lead us astray.
Sure, I know there was more to Edwards than 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.'
I do know that a lot of charismatics used to take elements of Edwards's 'The Religious Affections' out of context and pumped it up a fair bit. They did the same with some of Wesley's writings.
Legitimate, definitely. But I struggle with the logic:
This seems to be suggesting that God himself is involved in the creation of (somewhat convoluted) arguments for and against his existence, which is a bit of a leap.
I would compare this to saying "People have faith and experiences that lead to contradictory ideas about Love. How do we know who's getting it right?"
In both cases, I'd say the question "How do we know who's getting it right?" looks like category error. Which is rather ironic.
Not in mainstream Christian theology. [Not being to do with logic.] The following, however, is the aspect that is entirely legitimate and compelling:
These two statements, and the human condition that they describe, make complete sense to me.
We all approach the scriptures through the lens of our particular affiliations, cultures and traditions. How can it be otherwise?
Will try again.
Sorry for the clutter.
You are arguing in the wrong direction. My abilities or inabilities demonstrate nothing more than themselves.
Then you misunderstand me.
Edwards a la charismatic. The mind goes places. R.A. felt like the dear man was letting his hair down, or taking his wig off. Any more, and he might run mad. : )
I'm reluctant to engage with arguments that are slap-dash or dismissive, especially when I have a vested interest from my own context. The point @pease is making is important and deserves closer attention.
@Kendel I'm going to look back at a mention you made of Terry Eagleton, not because I want to address the content of Eagleton's post ( he is very good on Catholicism as a cultural discourse) but because I want to bring up something relevant to what @pease mentions.
Forty years ago, Eagleton was at Cambridge leaning on the work of Raymond Williams and together with Frederic Jameson and Pierre Macherey, one of the leading Marxist literary critics of the day. You probably know this if you've read any histories of literary criticism in Europe, the trajectory from Georg Lukacs and the Frankfurt School.
But in the United States, from within a very insular and Western 'bubble' at Harvard and Princeton, you find a literary critic and thinker in exile from the Nakba in Palestine, Edward Said. His work on Orientalism changes the debate in the West because academics realise that they are unable to 'read' outside of their own tradition except in a racist or exoticising way that distorts texts and images from or about the Middle East. And Said is reading Eagleton and UK-based working-class critics but he has a problem: it is all very well to study and write about Hegel, or Marx or Althusser, but what Said deals with outside of the university is Reagan-omics and the Cold War aftermath. He sees Eagleton and others as sequestrated in a privileged academic discipline and buffered from the struggles of real-life Britain or America. He also sees that none of them are reading Frantz Fanon from Algeria, they have no analysis of post-colonialism or Empire because they can't see beyond the 'bubble'. All they have to fall back on are the stale old Western stereotypes.
When posters talk about revisionism and newer readings of Puritanism and Edwards, or the enduring paradoxes of Kierkegaard, I'm looking for a more sensitive and global reach, what has emerged from contexts that are not Eurocentric or mainstream Christian, because that is what keeps shifting the discourse in a pluralistic and multicultural world. 'Faith' may be as fragile, provisional and estranging as 'coincidences', depending on where you're writing from.
@MaryLouise your posts are a feast. You have studied in depth things I only had an opportunity to taste decades ago and am attempting to return to again on my own. I am regularly amazed at your ability to incorperate what you've studied into your faith and life, which is the point.
If/when you have time or inclination, I would be grateful to hear more about the global reach you mention. Nearly all my multi-cultural reading is old. None of it has been Christian. Much of it has been from African-American authors, which I have been able to continue to engage with (along with real people) and learn from. But nothing recent, global or Christian. And I don't know any Christians here who would touch the stuff I've read or am reading or have waiting to read without condemning it. Well, except Edwards.
I hadn't intended to provide a vitae but want to give you some kind of picture of some of what informs my thinking.
Thank you for your post.
I don’t think I'm thicker than a whale omelette, but quite often I find many of the posts here very hard to understand - and not just the ones apparently in Tamarian. I follow the links people post but what I find there conveys very little to me.
I stopped studying humanities of any kind when I was 15 having just failed O level History. English literature I didn't study at all and I scraped a pass in language. I'm currently trying to help my daughter with her GCSEs and the science and maths practice papers I can mark with only occasional reference to the mark scheme to qualify levels of precision and so on, while with the English language I'm frankly as mystified as she is. She's performing at level 2/3 in GCSE and (the levels go up to 9 for non-England and Wales Shipmates' benefit) and I'm not sure I'm much better.
Which is a lot of waffle and personal experience stuff (hey, isn't that the only thing that's real according to some people or something) to point out a similar phenomenon to that I was referring to in my post which @pease apparently misunderstood. Is God really so obscure that an ability to work at a high level in the Humanities is required to get anywhere with the concept? Especially when that level may be inaccessible to some of us regardless of how much we may attempt to achieve it?
And more widely historically and geographically, how many people have had the privilege of sufficient time?
? Not knowing where the particle is, doesn’t make Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle wrong ?
? Consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems, the universe is an infinitely complex system and therefore is an omnipresent, omnipotent God - because by definition it is everywhere, contains all power and all information ?
Hmm..Does it matter what your lens is if you are culturally incapable of seeing beyond it anyway? When all is said and done the scripture writers had a Jewish lens on a Greco Roman world and we, 20 centuries later have seen them read and still do through Catholic, Orthodox, reformation and a multitude of other lenses. Nah..the lens thing is over rated. It is really just more post modernist gloop to tell us we can’t really know anything. As Will Roper says in ‘ A Man For All Seasons’ ….”the devil’s work done by the devil’s ministers!”
I think my point is that if God is for all and everyone then, to put it bluntly, it shouldn't be that difficult.
In that case, as far as studying humanities of any kind goes, you didn't get any further than I did. And what I did next was get into computing.
I think the intellectualisation of Christianity itself is disastrous.
The intellectualisation of discussion *about* Christianity is not the same thing.
And I'm the one who has been accused of using arguments thaf are 'slap-dash and dismissive' ...
😉
FWIW @MaryLouise I do apologise as I didn't intend to sound dismissive of any attempt to look at things through different lenses to those we have been inculturated into. The process of unlearning can be as arduous as that of learning - if not more so.
I'm not convinced we can entirely change the prescription on our specs. For instance, I was Protestant. I'm now Orthodox. The prescription on my specs is still Chalcedonian, however much it may have changed in other respects.
But yes, @pease and your good self raise important issues about at least trying to understand things from other perspectives.
I don't see that as necessarily making us hostages to 'post-modernist gloop.'
Sorry not to get back to you sooner @Kendel. You know, if you've been reading African American authors, it can be argued that Black theology often comes out of the Harlem Renaissance and Civil Rights literature. In South Africa, the response by US Black theologians like James Cone and Cornel West to the murder of the writer and activist Steve Biko looked back to the outraged and prophetic writings of James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. One of my favourite US theologians has been the late Katie Cannon of the Uniting Presbyterian Church, who grew up in North Carolina at a time when she wasn't allowed to use the swimming pool or library alongside white children, and her work at Union Theological Seminary drew on the creative work of bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Zora Neale Hurston. Katie was one of the mentors who encouraged the West African theologian Mercy Amba Uduyoye to found the influential Circle for Concerned African Theologians. She also supported the queer theology of Episcopalian priest Carter Heyward (God's Fierce Whimsy) and the feminist theological ethics of Beverley Wildung Harrison stimulating the theology of younger Black theologians like M Shawn Copeland (Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being) and so many writings now coming out of African Diaspora depts at US universities.
And there are ongoing connections and support networks with Latinx/ Hispanic women theologians like Elsa Tamez or Elizabeth Conde-Frazier (Newyorican from Puerto Rica) who work in the traditions of the Latin American liberation theologies, the Asian-American theologians (Chung Hyun Kyung from Korea) and Caribbean scholars building on the work of the poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation. For those white readers who haven't been exposed to the themes and issues addressed, it can be hard at first to read work that isn't primarily addressed to the concerns of mainstream middle America: writers talk about invisibility in an oblivious and heartless society that can't acknowledge racism exists; the terror of the penal system and pervasiveness of addiction; the ongoing damage done by slavery, the hope located in an embodied musical tradition of subversion and resistance.
This is hasty, eclectic and partial but perhaps a small place to begin looking at how faith is resourced all around us? I know discovering certain authors has been epiphanic and serendipity for me at times, more than a coincidence, to open the right book at the right time.
Thank you, @MaryLouise. Very much. I will copy your post into a note, so I have it for future reference. A lot in it is new for me and all of it is worth keeping.
More than coincidentally.
I wanted to come back to these two posts from @MaryLouise, not in disagreement with you, @MaryLouise, but as part of a wider discussion of reading from farther up this thread.
But your posts are related.
I am aware of Said but haven't read him. I've read others whose message about thinking from within our bubble is similar. It can be a real kick in the gut, many in fact. As well as a revelation.
Let God use it for my sanctification as well.
We can't step out of our time and place or race or gender or other formative factors, but we can 'read' in a better-informed way, allowing ourselves to be educated and even changed by the 'texts'. I expect this will be a lifelong pursuit with many bruises. I have a less dismal (maybe naive) view than many critics regarding people's ability to receive more from 'texts' than only what they bring to them. This requires vulnerability (even a willingness to be humiliated by the text), and a willingness to negotiate meaning. Which I think we are doing right now, for example.
As an American and Baptist, reading (a little of) Edwards and other theological decedents of Puritans has been both valuable and maddening to me. Although I can't read as one of his white congregants or slaves or Native American congregants, reading some of his sermons as well as Religious Affections helps me understand some of the peculiarities of the brand of Christianity I am a part of here. I find a work like Religious Affections a fascinating view of a man who is normally seen as one dimensional.
But reading Edwards' work today is complicated for me, for example, by his participation in slavery -- consider, for example, Jamar Tisby's views on how Edwards' work should be handled. I actually can ignore it. I have. Tisby can't. And he's right in that. I have to take Tisby seriously, if I am to be honest in regard to Edwards, but as an influenced reader, I have to decide for myself what to do with Edwards, if anything. I read both ways as well as others. Does Edwards have anything of value for me? I think so. But I also say so recognizing more than what is on the page.
Kierkegaard's work is a current, not lifelong, pursuit. Currently, I read him much like a foreign language student reading above her level, with a dictionary, a notebook and my sharpened pencil with a new eraser. What did he (not) say? My personal question is specifically what did he (not) say regarding faith in the mix of rational disbelief. Which is not a question that is going to go away in the West anytime soon. And is a question that will confront believers of all kinds in other places as well. Esau McMacaulley addresses a similar problem near the beginning of Reading While Black, describing his first encounter with liberal theology at university, where he found the profs attempting to rid the students of the same fundamentalism: "That is the testimony of Black Christians who saw in that same Bible the basis for their dignity and hope in a culture that often denied them both." Kierkegaard may have something for me to use. Or not.
I'm looking for much more than paradoxes. If that's all he has to offer, I will be disappointed and move on. The questions I am bringing to him, though, have wider application than only to myself, or only to my context.
I have yet to find many encounters with 'texts' that weren't valuable in one way or another. I don't expect this project to end until I do.