those poor, unenlightened, scientific peoples

Future peoples will look back on what is today called the “scientific worldview” and feel that same mixture of benevolent pity and gentle mockery with which we currently look back and view the medieval worldview with its guardian angels and demons. I don’t mean that they’ll muse at how far behind our scientific information was, when compared to theirs. Everyone already expects that they will have learned more science by then and wouldn’t be surprised to time travel and confirm that that has been the case. I mean that future peoples will laugh at and mock our scientific worldview, the assumption that science can provide a comprehensive mode and means of relating to one’s universe

Future peoples with future outlooks, future spiritualities, future ways of conceptualizing the divine, and the origins of it all will marvel that there was a time when science, a discipline that deals in that one very small aspect of reality which can be observed and measured, could have written this check that it can’t possibly cash.

In the same way that we laugh at wonder-drug, cure-alls that quack pharmacists used to pedal before modern medicine, future peoples will parody and jape at how, “as recently as the 21^st century,” many people actually believed that the very important but narrow field of science was a sort of panacea for every human question.  

Three groups in our time will be spared from these future jests:

1)    The least educated, who we’re never bothered much by science in the first place.

2)    People like my Mom, who know as much as any lay person should about popular science but who have enough common sense to know its limitations.

3)    And ironically enough, actual scientists, who know better than anybody the limitations of their discipline.

That leaves people who know enough science to be dangerous but not enough to know what they don’t know.

One of the podcasts that I listen to religiously is Pete Holmes’, “You Made It Weird,” where one time fundamentalist turned spiritual seeker, Pete, interviews other comedians. And always, toward the end of the show, he asks them a few questions about faith and spirituality. In the most recent interview, Adam Conover said something that was representative of a majority of the answers that come from these comedians, a disproportionate number of whom identify as agnostic or atheist.  

After Pete had described an experience of awe and wonder that he equated with “worship,” Conover responded that he had had similar experiences but “What you call worship, I call understanding.” He then went on to speak of how learning new facts about the world inspires in him feelings of awe.

What’s interesting is that Conover is not dumb. He’s very smart. Most successful comedians are. But to say something like “What you call worship, I call understanding,” one must fundamentally misunderstand what it means to worship, what it means to understand, or both.

This statement assumes that “worship” is what we do when we know less and “understand” is what we do when we know more. But anyone who has ever really both worshipped and understood knows that these two things are apples and oranges. There is no two dimensional continuum which allows us to travel from worship on the one end to understanding on the other.

But what Conover is really parroting is the popular notion, widely held and almost never analyzed in our time, that things like “worship” are old and outmoded and things like “understanding” are new and progressive.

Almost the opposite, I would say. What he calls “understanding” reflects a very datable notion that emerged in what we call the enlightenment. It’s the notion that knowing through human reason, informed by empirical observation, is the only type of knowing that has any value. And this isn’t new at all. It is actually a two or three century old notion that reached its shelf-life right around the time of Heisenberg and Einstein when the straightforward link between observation and knowing was shattered into trillions of trillions of illogical and unobservable little zips and flashes of energymatter and timespace.

But there is always a lag time between these paradigm shattering discoveries and their adoption in the popular worldview of a given age. Centuries sometimes.

But the more central point is that the general atheistic party line of this historical age called the enlightenment reflects, in philosophy speak, not an informational problem but an epistemological problem. Epistemology is the study not of what we know but of how we come to know what we know. When that great chapter in world history called the enlightenment—of which the somewhat hackneyed atheism of our day is a hangover—decided that reason was the only faculty by which we come to relate to our universe and the divine, it was like saying let’s all start boxing with our hands behind our back or go skiing with our eyes closed.  

If this will be seen by those future-lings as an epistemological deficit of this age, then what are those faculties that they will once again embrace?

That will be part 2 of this blog.

prophecy--it's not just fortune telling.

"The Nazis were bad" sounds like an obvious enough statement to most levelheaded adults in this day and age. But there was a time when it wasn't obvious at all. 

Because it was such a small handful of highly educated clergy, theologians, public officials, military officers and other leaders who were able to see what was happening early on and take the stand that everyone else should have been taking against Hitler, those who did, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoller, Karl Barth, and others, are sometimes spoken of as some sort of oracles or fortune tellers. For those with just a passing knowledge of that time, understand that the outcry of this small minority against the Nazi agenda started almost a full two decades before the whole world would know what had unfolded at Auschwitz or Treblinka.

Of course, the basic character of Nazi ideology should have been clear to everyone, even before the atrocities started in earnest: worship of power for its own sake, the Übermensch philosophy, which says that there is no truth other than what the strongest guy in the room says is true, suspicion of minorities and immigrants, disdain for the weak and feeble, glorification of war, and so on. But few saw or chose to see what was really going on. The party was not just introducing one more candidate to choose from on election day. They were subverting civilization and replacing it with tribalism and subverting sanity with fear. Among the many ways that those in the majority church justified their silence in the face of this movement was this old chestnut, which people frequently regurgitate when they want to enjoy their religious club and not be bothered by Jesus and his whole thing: “the church shouldn’t be involved in politics.”

The relationship between telling the truth about the world as it is and reading the writing on the wall for where the world is heading is about the oldest tradition we have. It begins with Amos and Isaiah, chronologically the oldest books in the Bible, and is picked up by Micah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Jesus, John of Patmos and several dozen others.

This is one reason why there is so much confusion now, among Christians, about the biblical job description of a prophet. Most assume it has something to do with predicting the future, magic 8-ball style, and that the sole job of the Old Testament prophets was to foreshadow Christmas (also assumed to be a safely non-political, religious event, all the poems about bringing “down the powerful from their thrones” and King Herod’s mad attempts to assassinate an infant, notwithstanding). Even if we accept the go to lines that Christians normally point to, this understanding of prophecy requires us to throw out 99.9% of what the prophets said--which is unfortunate because they said a lot that could really stand to be repeated today.

To be fair, the great prophets do often seem to blur the line between telling the truth about the present and telling the future, but that won’t seem like such a magical talent if we simply compare what they were doing to what Bonhoeffer was doing. If there is predictive power in what Isaiah or Jeremiah have to say, it’s not because they have some magical sixth sense about the future. It’s because the future is always a product of the truths of the present. To put it another way, if they seemed to have seen something coming that no one else saw, it wasn’t a matter of future-telling but of truth-telling.

And here is my point about Bonhoeffer. He was a very smart guy, but it didn’t take great intelligence to see what the Nazis were about. He was an incredibly well-educated guy, but there were lots of well-educated people who said nothing. He was a fastidiously moral person, but it didn’t take a moral giant to see that Hitler and his cronies were in the wrong.

Rather, what set Bonhoeffer apart was something that I call moral courage.

We can swirl a brandy around in a plushly upholstered arm chair and discuss the nature of morality until we’re blue in the face, and we’ll get hardly a little bit closer and maybe quite a lot farther from “the good” than any toddler who knows to share, talk nicely, don’t hurt, and so on. But someone with moral courage believes that right action is the only kind of right there is. They get antsy when they see our uniquely human capacity to ponder the good become an excuse not to do it, let alone when we use that same capacity to justify most any evil.

That you should “practice what you preach” sounds obvious enough. But I don’t believe that moral courage comes from just anywhere. It requires a profound confidence that our future well-being is not secured by any worldly attempts to stay safe, defend what we have, or “fly under the radar.” Death is the biggest guarantee in life, so keeping out of the fray rather than doing the right thing is no guarantee of safety, but it may well be a guarantee of a life not lived.

If the story of Jesus the Christ’s life, death, and resurrection gives us confidence that it’s finally God who gives, redeems, and then saves our lives, it also broadens the scope of our concerns. To no longer fear death is to see that there is more to live for than just getting by. It is to yearn for the kingdom of God more than the preservation of self.  

And to discover the kingdom of God is not to discover a moral or an ethic at all. It is to discover grace.