Reflections on Christian scepticism as integral to faith

 There are so many intellectual critiques of Christianity that have been levelled for centuries, without actually eviscerating the institutional corpus of the faith, that some have posited the notion that, by default, the faith has proven to be both invincible and legitimate.

Historical inaccuracy, idolatry, disproving theism, incompatible with science, antidemocratic, literalism of scripture, historical Christian behaviour including colonialism, religious intolerance and bigotry, support for slavery, subjugation of women, support for capitalism, refutation of miracles and immaculate conception and the resurrection itself, and then there is the question of the eschaton* and soteriology#….these are some of the arguments against the Christian faith. Lastly, there is the overriding question of human “sin”, the study of which is called Hamartiology**

Arguments of apophatic/cataphatic terms, defining and describing God through negative (apophatic, what God is not) or positive terminology in referring to the divine have been into use around the subject of faith and religion, (and here we are referring to the Christian faith), that would leave many people exhausted and detached from the discussion, if not anxious and confused.

Whenever one wades into the turbulent waters of “God-talk” one risks considerable push-back, given that all arguments and positions proferred in words, even (or perhaps especially) words describing the indescribable, the ineffable, the absolute. And one of the questions at the core of any attempt to articulate a human relation/response whether conscious or unconscious or both, is the nature of any notion of a/the deity and the nature of man (human beings).

Perhaps my perceptions come from decades of both physical and emotional experience, as a child, an adolescent, and several chapters of adulthood, as those of all others would as well. And at the centre of my “views” continues to be the word and concept, the definition and applications of “power”. Humans have agency in thought and action, in feeling and imagination and we also have limitations to our several capacities both to understand and to accomplish. And, whether or not our notion of our identity includes/excludes our own agency, or perhaps some form of  evolution of both in states of internal harmony and angst, like a river of energy, we continually are in motion.

A common cliché is to hear people in extreme crisis pray to God to protect and  defend them from their unique exigency. Seeming to be in a situation which exceeds their concept of their own agency, and thereby at the whim of forces beyond their control, there is always a question of survival, and praying is one of the expressions of ‘agency’ to continue to exist. Psychological evidence abounds that suggests such prayer is calming, perhaps for providing a focus of thought and words and perspective away from the crisis, as well as offering a glimmer of something we call ‘hope’ (variously expressed as light, calm, peace, quiet, music, angels, memory, vision, slowing of heart-beat, etc.) The notion of being isolated in the face of extreme danger while remaining conscious and alert is one of the more difficult of situations each of us face. And the idea/notion/belief/conception that there is a loving and protective God (however we might conjure that God to be), is both supportive and necessary, for many of various faith communities.

Death, after all, is the last exigency we face in this physical existence and given that fear is attached to anything and everything with which we are unfamiliar, in Christian terms and concepts, whether or not we are going to a ‘better place’ in a heaven or not, may be part of our conscious and our unconscious apprehension. Often, it is and has been a central focus of consideration of death and an afterlife that has prompted many to conceptualize a good life, following some form of comprehended and assimilated and exercised morality. And that “good life” has not only been the subject of philosophy but also of religion and faith.

The intersection of “being good” and “being healthy in body, mind and spirit” continues to command much attention in both street and scholarly discourse. A similar intersection of the human being with the forces of nature including seeds, growth and development of both flora and fauna, the health and protection of land, water and air has increasingly captured much human attention, scholarly, politically, ethically and existentially. The question of how and whether God ‘speaks’ (and relates) primarily to individuals and/or groups (institutions, governments, nations, corporations is also a matter for considerable discussion and debate.

Indeed, there is virtually no aspect of man’s relationship to “God” however and whomever that entity is considered to be, that has not been written and spoken about, prayed about and fought over from time immemorial. Whatever words are tapped into this keyboard will never, and cannot be expected to have any impact on either individuals or the body of “mother church” or “father church”.

The notion of a singular God, as opposed to multiple gods, a tradition from Greek and Babylonian histories, is also one that has confounded thinkers and pilgrims for centuries. And while people like James Hillman, through the vehicle of archetypal psychology, have attempted to separate religion from psychology, by ascribing multiple mythic gods and goddesses, as archetypes (metaphors) working in and through our lives at various times, the separation of the human psyche from the human gestalt of a relationship with God, remains one of the more perplexing questions needing far more intellectual rigor and fervor than this scribe’s remaining time and energy permit.

It is at the intersection of human thought/action/attitude with theological ‘dogma/theory/creed/liturgy/language/archetype of God that this piece is specifically focussed. Immediately, one confronts the mountains of evidence of hypocrisy between what people of faith say and how they/we live their lives. And while it might be feasible to make an historic judgement of the relative merits of more or less hypocrisy between faiths, and even among different branches of a faith (e.g. conservative v. liberal; orthodox v conservative v. reform); Sunni v Shia), such an exercise seems at this point to be analogous to the ‘how many angels can one put on the head of a pin?’ sophomoric inquiry….somewhat specious, tendentious and hollow. One clergy of my acquaintance summed up Christian hypocrisy this way: “Church is the best place for Christian hypocrites to be, given that they might actually come face to face with their hypocrisy there and then.”

One cannot begin to reflect upon the intersection of a human being with a faith/God/Allah, without acknowledging that there are no traffic lights, no ‘cops’ and no standardized vehicles intersecting. What one can attest to, however, is that the intersection is a beehive of thought, reflection and especially judgement. And it is in the sphere of judgement, of one human being by another, that one could view as the nexus of how faith is both incarnated and demonstrated. What we each think, feel and express (through words or actions, and/or their withholding) offers one perspective on if and whether and how a faith has been, is and potentially will be enacted.

And in the busyness of our lives, bombarded with information, threats, dreams, temptations, losses, hopes and fears, coming from outside and intersecting with those on the inside, we can be compared in this light to a gnat zipping over the surface of a pond, lake or river, as the water (representing the world) lies dormant, circles in eddies and whirlpools, and flows or rushes and tumbles, depending both on the forces of its own energy and the state of our own individual perception. Perhaps our “faith” or our religion could be considered to have implanted a kind of geodesic dome or map of how the world works, not merely physically, and astronomically, but also inter-personally, and even organizationally and politically. And embedded in this map is our notion of what constitutes ‘right’ and ‘wrong’....no matter how strongly or tentatively we hold on to those guardrails. Notice, too, that, even among all faiths, whatever guardrails have been ‘established’ by those who have paved the way for the specific faith community, history and the ‘flow’ of culture and new learning, as well as new sensibilities tend to change the shape, the hardness, the elasticity and even the location of those previously considered ‘sacred’ guardrails or moral imperatives, depending on the faith and the moment in history.

It is more than a little interesting to read, this week, in coverage of the Pope’s visit to Canada, on his pilgrimage of penance, that the Roman Catholic church does not issue revocations of previous papal edicts, but rather issues ‘new teachings’ that are intended to have the impact and import of demonstrating that the church’s theology and practice has changed. The current application of this method of declaring the evolution of the faith regards the question of the revocation of the Doctrine of Discovery, which permitted Christians to colonize indigenous peoples, the affects of which have stained both thousand of individual lives, as well as the ‘standing’ of the church itself.

The question of the ‘church’ as an institution, or as a collection of individual humans, too, ranks as prominent in whether or not the Pope has asked for forgiveness and sought penance for the institution in addition to that sought and prayed for on behalf of misguided Christian men and women. Does the church bear responsibility for the actions of individual humans or not? There are many church writings that separate the ‘value’ and the sanctity and the sacredness of the sacraments at the Eucharist/Mass from the personal purity and/sin of the celebrant/priest. This attempt to separate the holy from the human is one of the more perplexing aspects of all discussion and reflection on the Christian faith.

On the other side of that coin, (separating the human from the holy) is the notion, widely expressed (think Tolstoy and Fox, Quaker ‘father,’ among others) of the in spark of the divine being inherent in each human being. How to seek and find that spark, depending first on the conviction that it does indeed reside within, obviously as metaphor, is another of the several complexities at the heart of each pilgrim’s journey. And here is where the issue of the perspective/interpretation/understanding/acceptance/tolerance-intolerance/belief/conviction/adoption/sharing of who we are as people of faith (or not) has to reckon with another feature of human existence: the truth that truth comes in many different forms, faces, and levels of language, including allegory, metaphor, archetype, fantasy, dream, illusion, documentary, letter and poetry.

Any conscious or unconscious reduction of any notion of a deity, of whatever faith, that attempts, as a botanist to pin the various component parts onto a slide for microscopic viewing, is not only reductionistic. As Graeme Gibson once told a grade twelve student in North Bay, “You have to murder (the poem) in order to dissect it.” Whether individuals ‘see’ God as a judge, a teacher/mentor, a healer or a shepherd/pastor, cannot be contained in any single perception, given that we all have the capacity to consider God through eyes and ears and sensibilities that encompass all of those roles. Perhaps it is feasible to rank our perceptions, and thereby to follow up by searching for and possibly even finding a church community that tends to have a similar ‘ranking’ of the role and identity of God.

However, that search is highly dependent on the kind of relationship one seeks in a faith community, which search is also dependent on the early formative years of one’s exposure and experience with ‘church’.

Doubtless, the evolving panorama of perceptions of both God and the identity of the individual is one common to millions. My own, having been apparently undergirded by a scepticism of whatever was being delivered as “hard and fast truth” tended then, and continues even today, to ask not so much for proof, as in empirical proof of the validity of the proposed theological statement, thought, observation or especially sanction and threat or prediction. My own scepticism comes from a conviction that I do not and must not etherize my mind, brain, heart, emotions and even my demons if and when I enter a church, a seminary, a retreat, a counselling session as counsellor or client. Indeed, my neon banner of how I envision God starts with, and clearly does not end with the exhortation.

I had to look up the scriptural reference (John 10:10) and I have and continue to consider this promise to be relevant, applicable and verifiable in the life of each and every human regardless of their specific religious/faith convictions:

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy: I came so that they would have life, and have it abundantly.”

In truth, I have no idea and certainly no historical conviction that Jesus, himself,  actually uttered these words, nor that whoever wrote and transcribed them witness their original issue. I also have no need to “submit” my conviction to a literal and thereby a legal interpretation of that dictum. Indeed, I consider it less a dictum than an ‘ideal’ by which I have tried to live, however imperfectly and intermittently and however insensitively and injuriously to others. Indeed, the pursuit of an ‘abundant life’ (not a life filled with investments, cash, mansions, BMW’s, yachts, titles, offices and power over others) as the prime motivation of the last eight decades. And, with or without a church community, or a faith seminary, or a spiritual mentor and guide, or a professional colleague or a life partner, this simple phrase has provided a bridge between my darkness and my unknowing and my own turbulence and whatever deity God may be envisioned, imagined, prayed to, engaged with and debated.

Does that epithet negate a Christian faith, prove a Christian faith or merely offer a secular guidepost?

The limits of my own ‘knowing’ prevent a final answer, but clearly prompt a continuing and searching walk in the forest…and preclude any attempt to foist my views on any others.