Today I wrote a paragraph on my Facebook that would have had me burned at the stake in previous centuries by people like John Calvin and company. This is what I wrote:
"Perhaps the fundamental difference between the view of God in classical theology and the view of God in contemporary theology is that the former is about a God who displays and demands power and the latter is about a God who empowers the other. The former capitalizes on unilateral omnipotent action while the latter capitalizes on relational omnibenevolent and kenotic (i.e. self-emptying) action."
Then a Facebook friend who identifies with Calvin's tradition composed a post that was ostensibly written in opposition to mine (or at least served as a response) which read like this:
"The Bible is holy, inspired, inerrant, and sufficient. The God-breathed Scriptures are not subjective responses to man’s encounters with God, but rather they are God’s Word which reveals Himself to His creatures, and this Word demands the submission of mankind to His objective truths."
(As an aside, I wrote an article for my college's newspaper a while back that argued precisely that Scripture acts as a subjective response to encounters with God, and this guy wrote a response to it in that paper. So it's safe to say he was responding to my post.) Now without going into all of the scholarly and theological reasons for why the Bible is not best taken as inerrant, I had to shiver a little in thinking about how this guy's response may have manifested itself differently a few centuries ago. Would he have been like Saul as he stood by and watched the stoning of Steven approvingly? I don't know. He's always been kind to me in person and to my face, but he stands by a tradition and theology which not only provided a hegemonic justification for witch- and heretic-burning a few centuries ago (not to mention slavery and the subordination of women and widows), but his own camp believes that mine is hanging over the Lake of Fire by a thread.
It is discomfiting to say the least. Do people not understand the dangers of their beliefs? Do they not realize that a world built on classical theology takes us back to the time of Puritan theocracy and persecution of heretics? The dark side of conservative logic is that it justifies the condemnation of our own beloved flesh and blood in the human race in favor of a God no one has ever seen. As the Apostle John said, who can love a God they have never seen if they cannot love a human being they have seen? Reformed theologian R.C. Sproul once said that we cannot slay truth in the streets for the sake of peace. And based upon this logic, some of us choose to sacrifice peace in the streets for the sake of a truth we cannot prove, not to mention a truth that has failed to produce peace for millenia.
You would think that after thousands of years of believing in wrathful, egotistical gods that provide hegemonic ideologies for greed, oppression, violence, and war, many more people would question traditional religion. That they would look back upon theory with the retrospection of praxis and consequence. Jesus said that "you will know them by their fruit." A theory that claims to create peace in the world but fails to do so needs to be questioned. Is not the theory a lie if it cannot accomplish what it says it can?
There are two kinds of insanity in the world. The first is the belief that the old cycle of violence, war, and the old moral-metaphysical God of Divine egotism can still redeem the world after ages of not only its failure to do so, but its very place as a culprit in such atrocities as we have witnessed. The second kind of insanity is the belief that an understanding of God as pure love and of our lives as channels of that generous, merciful, and creative energy that comes from this God is in fact the way forward, and that it will more likely create a better world than the first insanity which has committed even the most humble and loving of people (e.g. Lao Tzu) to claiming that the world is forever committed to Samsara (the endless, unchangeable cycle of the world).
The bottom line is that no one really knows rationally and/or empirically that their religious convictions are true, so perhaps the best litmus test for religious validity is once again the one put forth by Jesus himself: you will know them by their fruit (remember the fruit of the spirit? love, joy, peace, etc.). Unfortunately, the logic of the conservative church flies directly and stubbornly against this.
"Perhaps the fundamental difference between the view of God in classical theology and the view of God in contemporary theology is that the former is about a God who displays and demands power and the latter is about a God who empowers the other. The former capitalizes on unilateral omnipotent action while the latter capitalizes on relational omnibenevolent and kenotic (i.e. self-emptying) action."
Then a Facebook friend who identifies with Calvin's tradition composed a post that was ostensibly written in opposition to mine (or at least served as a response) which read like this:
"The Bible is holy, inspired, inerrant, and sufficient. The God-breathed Scriptures are not subjective responses to man’s encounters with God, but rather they are God’s Word which reveals Himself to His creatures, and this Word demands the submission of mankind to His objective truths."
(As an aside, I wrote an article for my college's newspaper a while back that argued precisely that Scripture acts as a subjective response to encounters with God, and this guy wrote a response to it in that paper. So it's safe to say he was responding to my post.) Now without going into all of the scholarly and theological reasons for why the Bible is not best taken as inerrant, I had to shiver a little in thinking about how this guy's response may have manifested itself differently a few centuries ago. Would he have been like Saul as he stood by and watched the stoning of Steven approvingly? I don't know. He's always been kind to me in person and to my face, but he stands by a tradition and theology which not only provided a hegemonic justification for witch- and heretic-burning a few centuries ago (not to mention slavery and the subordination of women and widows), but his own camp believes that mine is hanging over the Lake of Fire by a thread.
It is discomfiting to say the least. Do people not understand the dangers of their beliefs? Do they not realize that a world built on classical theology takes us back to the time of Puritan theocracy and persecution of heretics? The dark side of conservative logic is that it justifies the condemnation of our own beloved flesh and blood in the human race in favor of a God no one has ever seen. As the Apostle John said, who can love a God they have never seen if they cannot love a human being they have seen? Reformed theologian R.C. Sproul once said that we cannot slay truth in the streets for the sake of peace. And based upon this logic, some of us choose to sacrifice peace in the streets for the sake of a truth we cannot prove, not to mention a truth that has failed to produce peace for millenia.
You would think that after thousands of years of believing in wrathful, egotistical gods that provide hegemonic ideologies for greed, oppression, violence, and war, many more people would question traditional religion. That they would look back upon theory with the retrospection of praxis and consequence. Jesus said that "you will know them by their fruit." A theory that claims to create peace in the world but fails to do so needs to be questioned. Is not the theory a lie if it cannot accomplish what it says it can?
There are two kinds of insanity in the world. The first is the belief that the old cycle of violence, war, and the old moral-metaphysical God of Divine egotism can still redeem the world after ages of not only its failure to do so, but its very place as a culprit in such atrocities as we have witnessed. The second kind of insanity is the belief that an understanding of God as pure love and of our lives as channels of that generous, merciful, and creative energy that comes from this God is in fact the way forward, and that it will more likely create a better world than the first insanity which has committed even the most humble and loving of people (e.g. Lao Tzu) to claiming that the world is forever committed to Samsara (the endless, unchangeable cycle of the world).
The bottom line is that no one really knows rationally and/or empirically that their religious convictions are true, so perhaps the best litmus test for religious validity is once again the one put forth by Jesus himself: you will know them by their fruit (remember the fruit of the spirit? love, joy, peace, etc.). Unfortunately, the logic of the conservative church flies directly and stubbornly against this.
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