Under my last post in this series (which I thought I had ended!) The Philosophical Primate made this comment:
Eric, I am… puzzled. Specifically, by this:
The short answer to the question, of course, is that there is. No one can reasonably deny it. There are liberal Christian theists. There are even liberal Christian atheists, though most of them do not put it quite so bluntly.
What is puzzling is that you spend most of the rest of this post talking about those Christian atheists — for, as you note, that is the only possible honest description of Freeman, Cuppitt, Spong, et al — without ever returning to support the claim that there is a liberal Christian theism. Given your prior posts on this subject, there seems to be an intrinsic problem of inconsistency between being genuinely liberal in one’s theology/theism and maintaining any sort of commitment to the scriptures as God’s Word. Frankly, I took that line of argument to be a quite reasonable basis for denying that there can be genuinely liberal Christian theism, because to be both Christian and theistic must at minimum require treating the Christian holy text *as* holy, with all the illiberal implications thereof — those implications being what makes Spong’s “sins of scripture” sinful in his estimation. Indeed, the only Christian theist you discuss in this post, C.H. Dodd, seems to be striving for theological liberalism but failing, because he cannot escape that traditional view of scriptures as being the authoritative “Word of God.” I fear perhaps that, desiring not to go on too long, you left out something important you’d intended to say.
So, is there a liberal Christian theism? I say yes, but then I have to qualify my yes. I was going to write this as a comment in response to our furry philosopher, but it seemed more appropriate to bring it up front and face it a bit more publicly.
Let’s start with Dodd, because I do not think that he fails to be a theological liberal. What I think happens in Dodd’s case is that he takes Christianity as being inherently liberal. The conclusions that he comes to in the course of his book on the authority of the Bible are liberal ones, not liberal so far as the idea of the inspiration and authority of the Bible goes, perhaps, but liberal insofar as the message of the Bible, as he understands it, turns out to lead to a religion with liberal values, broadly speaking. He takes the critical-historical conclusions about the Bible seriously, and then, within the parameters set by the “higher criticism,” endeavours to locate a liberal message of love and toleration, and finds it. You may say, if you like, that he is reading this message into the text, and that is true. But that is true of everyone who reads a text as a sacred text having authority. Christian doctrine cannot be read in the biblical text. It may have seemed natural to the first Christians to think of Jesus as divine, given what is said in the gospels, but at no point in the gospels is there a clear statement that Jesus is the Son of God. In fact, in Mark, Jesus goes to some trouble to stress that he is the Son of Man. So, if you want to take Jesus as the Son of God, or to understand God as Three Persons in One God, you have to do a lot of creative reading. Thus, reading a liberal message in the Bible is not all that hard, if you single out, for particular notice, certain developmental themes that run through the Bible as a whole, but I will let you read Dodd if you want to find out how he does it. Spong does essentially the same thing, though it is hard to think that Spong remains a theist, whilst Dodd certainly was.
That judgement may seem to conflict with what I say about Dodd, as when I say that this simply won’t work, because he brings his liberalism to the Bible. But everyone does that. As I said in the beginning, literalists are not so much literalists about the Bible as they are about the things that they bring to the Bible, the doctrines in the light of which they interpret it. That is the problem with revealed religions. There is simply no check that you can bring to bear that will mark out one reading of a holy text as the correct reading, thus, with the mark of a red pencil, turning all other readings into heresies. Of course, to be fair to Dodd, he has much more to go on than the evangelical protestant who refuses to read the Bible in a critical-historical way. For Dodd can show that there is indeed, if the biblical criticism available to him (and as he understood it) was right, a fairly clear trend in the Bible towards the development over time of a more humane religious ideal, from the very primitive tribal religion of the early patriarchs to the universal religion of the great prophets, and then, for the Christian, on to the Jesus of the gospels, whose good news is represented, not wholly without reason, if you cut away the some of the most egregious examples of sectarianism, as one of love, inclusion, and forgiveness. Dodd is an early example of this trend, which became more liberal as time progressed, producing such theologians as Maurice Wiles, Dennis Nineham, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Macquarrie, and many others. (You will not be surprised to discover that these are all Anglicans, with the exception of Niebuhr.) I might have chosen Dennis Nineham’s The Use and Abuse of the Bible as my example instead of Dodd’s, and that would show how much had been achieved in a more liberal understanding of Christianity between the 1920s and the 1970s, when Nineham’s book was written. My point is (and I did not make this as clearly as I thought) that these are in fact liberal trends within Christianity. They may fail to justify the claims they make of scripture as a source of revelation, but it is not for want of trying to do that, at the same time that they recognised the need to make what is thought to be revealed consistent with a more liberal understanding of what Christianity is about.
What interests me more, however, because it is more in tune with where I was at the time that I stopped taking an active part in the church, is the Sea of Faith type of Christianity, that accepts the Christian story, as Spong suggests, more or less as a cultural epic, and tries to live within that circumscribed understanding of the church’s sacred things, including Bible, liturgy, sacraments, etc., in such a way as to be at the same time contemporary, yet culturally faithful in its appropriation of the past. This provides at once a way of life that retains a link to the tradition, at the same time that it permits one to engage without qualification in the modern world, accepting the findings of science, including the scientific discoveries that have been made about the psychological and other factors that underlie religion, and engaging fully in the world as at once religious (in what most religious believers would judge an unacceptably attenuated way) and secular.
But that, I have argued, still won’t do, and it won’t do for fairly straightforward reasons, and if this kind of liberal religion won’t do, then genuinely believing liberalism won’t do either. The problem as I see it is simply this. Even this attenuated belief system, in which religion is recognised as a human creation, not least its gods, still leaves too much of religion in place. It seems pointless to try to create a liberal religion from scratch, for then it would lack all seriousness. What gives religion the extra jolt of psychological gravitas is its long tradition; however, if that long tradition is retained to provide the sense of depth to the experience of religious belonging, it brings along with it all the other aspects of religion which are, in fact, not only illiberal, but often downright dangerous. It is all very well for some members of the Christian family to claim, as do the Sea of Faithers, that they only accept Christianity as a human creation, including the gods that are worshipped and the liturgical practices which, in their original context, bespoke the “real” presence of the god being worshipped; but it is hard to see how this can be done without leaving all this cultural impedimenta in place for those who will eventually think of the Sea of Faith interpretation as a departure from the true faith. In other words, everything that those in the Sea of Faith movement find objectionable about religion will be left in place to be picked up by some zealous reformer in years to come, whose zealotry will be that much more dangerous because a reaction to what is perceived as godless unfaithfulness. I see no way of obviating this problem. If I had seen such a way, I might still be a member in good standing of my church. Greta Vosper, whose book With or Without God I have not read, may think differently, but I see no way of making a religion safe for liberal believers, let alone liberal unbelievers; therefore, it seems to me, we are better off opposing religion entirely.
That, of course, does not mean that I do not think that something may be missing when we do that. As I said in my last post, it is hard to believe that the loss of something to which so much creative energy has been devoted, as so much energy has been devoted to religion, will not be culturally impoverishing. I may agree with Richard Dawkins when he speaks about the wonder of the natural world, and how much more wonderful it is when we understand its inner workings; but this is not obviously something which can take the place of the social and cultural functions of religion. And there are other things that will be lacking too. Religion has a way of providing a place for the most ordinary of ordinary persons to play a role within a living community, a role which can, in fact, contribute much to the richness of a person’s inner life, giving them a sense of identity that they would lack without the social participation that religion provides them. It also enables people to take their inner lives seriously, to refine them in various ways — the rite of self-examination and confession, for example, is often a liberating and deepening experience for those involved, in much the same way that psychoanalysis can be – and to attune them with the inner lives of others. To take but one example, almost all religions have evolved rituals and customs surrounding death that help people assimilate loss in creative ways. I could go on, but will forbear. My point is only that, at the same time that I do not see a way in which these aspects of religion can be preserved without at the same time preserving the dangerous and damaging aspects of religion, we are left with the realisation that with the loss of religion (were that to happen, which is unlikely) there would be some cultural impoverishment too. In this respect, I suppose, though I have not read his book, I am agreeing with de Botton. On the other hand, it would be a good thing if humanists could devise some reasonable alternative to those characteristics of religion the loss of which prevents religious adherents from abandoning commitment to religious institutions they no longer fully support.
I’m new to your blog, Eric. I’ve been particularly impressed with this series. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve posted a couple of these blog entries on my fb wall. A friend was similarly impressed, but had a criticism regarding the following assertion: “Scriptures are a much more conservative force than that, and will continue to be used as a springboard for oppression and injustice, precisely because their language, even if some can jump through the philosophical hoops and recognise it as purely human in origin, will continue to tug readers towards real transcendence, and real supernaturalism, and people will continue to be willing to defend their beliefs by sacrificing their lives and the lives of their opponents on the strength of them.”
My friend responded with, “I’m a little disappointed in this conclusion. It is, or course, true that people oppress and kill, etc., in the name of their transcendent commitments. But those commitments do not exclusively bear the name of gods, nor are they couched in recognizably theological language. And there remains the possibility of being committed to just such a transcendent signifier that happens to be the one that tells us we can’t commit those things, whoever we are.”
I was curious as to how you might react to this criticism.
Well, Banglin, welcome. I’ll try to answer as well as I can.
What your friend says is no doubt true, although I have a little trouble with “transcendent commitments” that do not bear the name of gods. What would such transcendence look like? I am not altogether sure what ‘transcendent’ means here. What I do know is that there are violence of God traditions in the Bible, the Qur’an, the Gita, and practically every other sacred text. Interpreting these in such a way as to marginalise these violence of God traditions is all very well, but it leaves the texts as they are, and they are always accessible to those who think that the path of faithfulness runs this way. On the other hand, there is no obvious reason why secular narratives require violence traditions, nor is there any reason why, where they exist, they cannot simply be expunged, no particular sacredness attaching to them. Where secular commitments exist that are modelled fairly directly on theological assumptions, such as communism, which, at one time, was said to have the structure and function of a religion (therefore, it was held, by some Christians, that we need to learn to respect it as such), I acknowledge the problem, but the problem, again, is the kinds of commitment, and their inalienability (or otherwise) from the tradition. Ideologies with absolute commitments that would govern the behaviour and beliefs of others, and which do not allow of compromise, are, of course, always a danger, no matter what their origin.
However, to get back to the religious issue. If Christians, Muslims, etc., could agree to go through their holy books and remove all the problematic passages, perhaps this would remedy the situation, but the original texts would still be available, and would still exercise their fascination over the minds of faithful believers. The point is that the reason that people do harm in the name of their religious commitments is that they are in a sense morally compelling for the believer, and it is hard to expunge this sense of moral compulsion from the record. I think Islam is a particularly evident case of this, but it is not foreign to Christianity either. That Christianity has become relatively well behaved says a lot about the liberal compromise reached at the end of the 17th century, and does not speak to the inherent peaceful nature of Christian beliefs. The teaming up of Islam and Roman Catholicism is an example of this. They may speak of it as ecumenical togetherness, but it is a power move that is ratified by the essentially theocratic nature of both religious traditions. But even liberal Christianity, which still holds the Bible in reverence, that is, a book which includes the violence traditions, is always a potential vector for violence, since there will always be someone who thinks there are ways to be even more devout, more holy. Conservative Christianity, such as evangelical Christianity in the Us and Africa is much more prone to the use of biblically endorsed violence. And the danger is always there wherever these texts are regarded as holy. This is my concern.
Eric, what you’re describing sounds like the approach taken in theory by the Universal Utilitarianism movement — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism — although in practice some attendees report that it is still hostile to atheism. Clearly some people enjoy getting together to be lectured at and sing songs every Sunday. But to me as a strong individualist it all seems utterly daft.
Thank you for explaining more fully, Eric. I’m still trying to wrap my head around your rather complicated conclusion — so let me try to summarize, and you can correct me where necessary.
Yes, there definitely is a liberal strain of Christian theism. What makes such Christianity liberal is, in effect, the set of liberal values — and hermeneutic tools and aims shaped by those values — which it brings to bear on interpreting the meaning of sacred texts, which in turn shapes the religious practice of believers. Conservative and even fundamentalist Christians are not marked by any lack of hermeneutic tools, but only by different tools shaped by different values: “Biblical literalism” is simply a confusing and dishonest misnomer. (I would note, as an aside, that in both cases, the “values” in question are not just moral values, but also epistemic values.) However, insofar as a liberal Christian tradition and community remains genuinely theistic and committed to the sacredness of texts at all — that is, insofar as believers at some level remain believers, committed to faith — it remains vulnerable to corruption from the intrinsically illiberal character of faith. Faith, i.e. belief without evidence (or, indeed, in the face of counterevidence), can be used to support and endorse less liberal or even reactionary values just as easily as (or more easily than) liberal ones, so faith cannot be a stable foundation for the very values that make liberal Christianity liberal. (That last sentence involves some inference and expansion on my part. You never really mentioned in this particular series of posts *how* religion is illiberal and dangerous, although you’ve certainly said plenty on the subject elsewhere.)
Furthermore, the Sea of Faith-type Christians who seek to push those liberal values and hermeneutics further and (ironically, given their self-identified label) abandon faith* in the existence of God and divinity of Jesus entirely are still vulnerable to the same instability of values. Why? Because they cannot retain the “psychological gravitas” of their Christianity without retaining a deep-seated will to believe, even though they eschew belief. Also, such unbelief may very well be realized (perhaps only tenuously or partially) in the minds of the most theologically-minded participants, with the bulk of those in the pews sticking with more traditional views. Given the ecumenical leanings of liberal Christians, it’s almost guaranteed that any community containing no-longer-genuinely-believing Sea of Faith-type Christians — even a community led by a minister with those views — will also include many traditionally-believing Christians, possibly a majority thereof, so it’s misleading to imagine that these are wholly separate or separable religious traditions anyway.
If my summary is roughly correct, I think your account of exactly what the dangers of even liberal religion are (and therefore why it’s better to give up religion entirely) is incomplete. I think it’s important to emphasize exactly how much cultural “cover,” and even outright endorsement, liberal religion provides for conservative religion. Even the most liberal Christians — even the more-or-less non-theistic Christians you describe here — still propagate and endorse the epistemically and morally bankrupt claim that faith is a virtue — that formulating and adhering to beliefs which shape your actions in the world without any respect for evidence and reasoning is somehow not only acceptable, but is a good thing. But faith is not a good thing at all; it’s very, very bad. The evils which faith not only allows but encourages (and which, I have argued, faith exists for the very purpose of encouraging) are far too high a price to pay for the somewhat nebulous benefits you suggest the loss of religion entails.
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*Or at least, doxastic faith. Christian theologians and apologists do love to play word games with “faith” and give it other definitions, which they inevitably conflate and equivocate later, much like their perpetual baiting-and-switching of definitions of “God.” I’m very cynical about so-called fideistic faith and apophatic theology, which always seem to be the last refuge of scoundrels who want to keep believing exactly the same things while pretending through word-play to be doing something different, c.f. Karen Armstrong.
Naturally, while I was composing my comment, you eloquently filled in your reasoning on the dangers of even liberal Christianity in reply to someone else’s comment.
That said, my own articulation of the dangers of faith itself in very general terms might serve as a supplemental answer to your questions, Banglin. Even non-religious ideologies (Marxism, Maoism, Randian strains of Libertarianism, etc.) can be embraced by true believers with the fervor of faith and consequent rejection of evidence and reasoning, and their founding texts treated as holy writ. The only real difference is that such non-religious ideologies always claim to be based on arguments rather than faith (even though critical evaluation of their claims rather easily reveals otherwise), and so they don’t propagate and endorse treating faith itself as a virtue in the same way religion generally does.
It is worth noting that not all systems of ideas are equally amenable to becoming faith-based ideologies, though. This is where the underlying values matter, and why I mentioned that both moral and epistemic values are relevant to this discussion. A core characteristic of both conservative religion and non-religious faith-based ideologies is that adherents place a high value on certainty and conviction. Certainty and conviction, however, are not epistemic virtues, they are vices. Epistemic virtue lies in carefully apportioning belief to evidence and enduring, even embracing uncertainty. Valuing actual truth rather than valuing certainty is probably the single epistemic value that best distinguishes liberal and conservative value systems, and it might be useful to go back and read Eric’s first post about Biblical hermeneutics with that distinction in mind.
So then, in other words, my friend has a point regarding the possibility of approaching these traditional texts in a positive light (he’s free to choose any supposed transcendent signifier he so desires), but the problem is that any approach which leaves these texts intact and sanctified as holy still leaves the door open to the continuation of the negative side of the ledger we’ve witnessed throughout history? This sounds a good deal like arguments often made by Sam Harris, if I understand him and both of you correctly. My RO leaning Christian friends would probably ask but what of the positive side of the historical ledger? Does it count for nothing? They’re also postmodern enough to always be quick to tell me that certainty isn’t part of their lexicon…that doubt has always played a role in their tradition.
Oh, sorry about the Banglin thing. Don’t know how that happened.
Hi Barry! In the essay I linked to in my comment above (and might as well link again here so you don’t have to hunt for it), I pose a clear counterargument — possibly overly-detailed and too dense, but clear, I think — against the attempts of believers who defend faith by citing its supposed positive consequences. The short version goes thus: While people might have all sorts of poorly justified beliefs, the default understanding of the character of beliefs is that they ought to be justifiable — except for religious beliefs, for which people carve out an exception called faith, “the evidence of things not seen.” So whatever else believers try to say about the nature of faith, the actual use to which faith is put by believers reveals that faith serves as a motivation for believing claims which are not and/or cannot be justified. Since faith is by its very nature an alternative to or substitute for justification, it is inevitable that faith frequently motivates people to believe claims which are epistemically and morally unjustifiable. That does not mean that every claim any given believer might embrace as a matter of faith is in fact epistemically or morally unjustifiable. However, it does mean that if a claim someone believes as a matter of faith does happen to be justifiable, faith — being an alternative to justification — cannot take any credit for that. In more specific reference to the defense you’re talking about, faith simply deserves no credit for the justified moral claims which happen to be accepted by believers. However, because the whole purpose served by faith is to motivate belief in unjustifiable claims, faith does deserve the blame for the unjustified moral claims accepted by believers.
There’s also the pragmatic question of what the payoff for believers in liberal Christian theology is going to be. There is, I think, a strong relationship between the inherent improbability of one’s faith and the ‘kick’ one gets from professing it in public among like-minded people. Fundamentalists clearly get much more of a charge from church activities and church-related commitments than the more wishy-washy. I can’t imagine that any Christianity which is liberal enough to be plausible is going to give its adherents any real sense of solidarity or in-group membership. What are the apophatic Christians going to picket? What’s the point of their even going to church? How are they going to distinguish themselves from just plain folks?
I’ve found Eric’s blogs and the comments (particularly in this thread) very stimulating. I’ll recast some of the wording to tease out a metaphor…
Rather than faith serving as a motivation for believing claims which cannot be justified, or that faith can be regarded as a virtue, I’d argue that the feeling of faith is the reward for certain belief. It’s not a virtue but an addiction. Hence the ‘kick’ that that corio37 refers to. Hence the hunger for regular services to top up one’s addiction. Hence the difficulty in giving up faith. Faith fulfils a hunger for feeling in a person, no further justification required. Much like cigarettes or heroin. And as difficult to give up.
This leads back to Eric’s point. The Sea of Faith people, and other liberal Christian theists, are merely working around an addictive substance (faith as borne out by their holy texts). They are using nicotine patches of liberal views to satisfy their ‘addiction’, but the unfiltered cigarettes of the holy texts remain available. Available, and tempting for anyone who wants the ‘hit’ of faith.
I hope I haven’t given the impression that I don’t sympathize. I do try to see these issues from the vantage point of different perspectives in an effort to understand them, but I am in agreement for the most part with the line of thinking being expressed here. I share the concerns Eric outlined in his response.
I was especially impressed with this line, “That Christianity has become relatively well behaved says a lot about the compromise reached at the end of the seventeenth century, and does not speak to the inherent peaceful nature of Christian beliefs.”
Would you mind if I quote it, Eric? I don’t know how you feel about the reproduction of your writing, either a line or in it’s entirety, but I think your particular perspective could often be the impetus for interesting conversation.
Barry, certainly, quote away! This is, by the way, something that seems simply to be ignored by most liberal Christians, seemingly unaware that the faith that they want to read in a liberal way is quite simply the faith that, in the past, led to a period of warfare in Europe which decimated the population of Germany, at any rate, and caused people to act in such inhuman and unregulated ways that Hobbes came to believe that the only solution was to vest all authority in a single person. Luckily, Locke came along with a much more sane solution to political authority. But it is so easy for Christians simply to forget the horrible consequences of Christian belief. The deism of the 18th century was clearly a reaction to the politically intrusive faith that had caused the breakdown of order in 17th century Europe. If God were off there “paring his fingernails” and taking no interest in the petty affairs of human beings, humans themselves could get on with the task of ordering society with justice and equity, prescinding from religious belief entirely. The contemporary attempts of religions to reintroduce themselves into the public sphere, encouraged, largely, by the irruption of Islam in the West, simply ignore the past, and pretend that there is a positive future for the involvement of religion in public life. This is an enormous danger. Instead of reacting in this way, what we should be doing is challenging Islam’s right to the kinds of respect it has so far squeezed out of Western liberalism by threats of terror. If we do not soon put a stop to this, I predict a very troubled time ahead for the world, troubles that will make the 17th century chaos look like children playing in a sandbox.
“paring his fingernails” Very funny. Thanks.
Barry, the reference is to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Discovered Joys: I’ve been thinking about that issue, too. Certainly, there’s scientific plausibility to the theory that religious social solidarity is generated and reinforced by “costly display” behavior. (Here’s one paper on the theory.) This suggests a chain of motivation: If faith, as I argue, does serve as a motivation for accepting claims which cannot be justified, it is natural to ask why on earth anyone would want to embrace such a motivation? Faith motivates believing the unbelievable, but faith in turn is motivated by its solidarity-reinforcing costly display function: Publicly declaring your belief in ridiculous and patently implausible claims about invisible beings and forces firmly identifies one as a member of the in-group.
The evidence also seems to back up the idea that the failure of liberal religion to require such costly displays has consequences. The demographics of American Christianity consistently show dwindling participation in liberal denominations. When denominations splinter into more and less liberal groups, over time the liberal groups hemorrhage membership. The fastest-growing groups are always the ones with some of the looniest, most extreme beliefs and social demands, e.g. Mormonism.
That’s not the whole story, though, because many of the members leaving liberal Christian groups find their way into atheism or some non-practicing non-committal halfway house; and the extreme groups, though they grow quickly, can also collapse quickly when they attract too much attention, violate the law or simply go out of fashion — as Scientology seems to be now.
One feature of modern Christianity is that the border patrols who used to make it clear who was in and who was out have been retired or employed elsewhere. There’s no longer any official brand of Christianity which has enough authority to draw those lines; and as a result there are a lot of people calling themselves ‘Christians’ in general and ‘Catholics’, or ‘Anglicans’, or ‘Presbyterians’ in particular, who would have been considered atheists outside the church under the rigid rules of the nineteenth century.
The Philosophical Primate: Yes I’m aware of the ‘costly display’ concept of group identification. I’m a little cautious about it – which comes first the group identity or the display? Or do both grow and inform each other. If the ‘costly display’ is results in a true benefit, then perhaps it isn’t costly. I don’t know. I think there are also issues about other types of selection that might be working at the same time – the peacocks tail has been put forward as a costly display candidate but it might be purely the consequence of sexual selection (arising from no discernible cause). I don’t know, again.
Running with the addiction metaphor… you could also argue that,like drinking dens and smoking dens, churches (mosques, temples etc.) are faith dens. Places where your behaviour is accepted and your social identity confirmed, but the social identification mat not be as important as the hit of faith. Possibly a mix of ‘true believers’ and ‘social believers’. Perhaps other research exists, or maybe that’s another investigation.
Elvis Costello paraphrases Joyce in ‘Watching the Detectives’
‘…she’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake…’
I was involved in the Sea of Faith movement for a while – I would describe it as a methadone fix after coming off the heroin of a full blooded Christianity. After a time, you don’t need the methadone either.
Mike, interesting analogy. I wonder if that is true for everyone. I was also a member of Sea of Faith for awhile, although I only attended one conference. One of the things that Sea of Faith makes possible is for people to move away from irrational beliefs but remain connected with their communities. I know quite a few people from my former parish who still go to church, but do not go because they consider themselves Christian. It’s just the way social events are organised in rural Nova Scotia communities. Social contacts divide pretty well on denominational lines, and those outside the magic circle, unless they are fairly well educated, and belong to writers and artists groups, or rich, and belong to bridge clubs, have limited social contacts. So, to have a church group that is more or less made up of unbelievers is quite a powerful attraction for people.