Alongside Mill's idea has arisen the postmodern idea that truth is relative, and that truth claims are power plays meant to subjugate people. Throughout history, people who claim to know the truth tend to follow Al Capone's famous maxim: "you can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word." Theology, then, on a postmodern account, is just a power play, designed to give an elite class privileged status, or else merely an exposition of one's subjective ideas.
Standing over against this view is the orthodox Christian belief that Truth exists, is knowable, and is communicable. If Truth exists, and if God exists, then Theology is a category of non-fiction; that is, it describes, and attempts to describe accurately, something that actually exists.
Suppose you were writing a travel guide to a fantasy world. If the world was a product of your own imagination, then by definition whatever you said about it would be true. But if you're describing an actual place, like London, then your descriptions of it are either true or false. The statement "Piccadilly square is painted green" either accurately described Piccadilly square or it doesn't.
But now suppose that there are no boats capable of bearing us across the Atlantic and so nobody we know has ever been to London. Who can tell us what it's like?
The book of Job, the earliest book of the Bible, records what mankind has been wondering about God ever since the beginning:
"If only I knew where to find him;
if only I could go to his dwelling!"
"If only there were someone to mediate between us,
someone to bring us together..."
But the gospel of John tell us that even though no one can travel to where God is, there is One who came to tell us everything we need to know:
"No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known."
"No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father."
And in 1 John it all comes together:
"Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God...this is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins...no one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them." (1 John 4:7-16)
Jesus claims to bring a firsthand account of London. Should we believe his claims? What should we make of them if we do?
That's Theology, the Queen of the Sciences. And if you've ever caught yourself wondering, "What's the point?" then nothing could be more relevant, or more timely.
Allow me to open by pointing out that the notion that "the best public policy option is one of agnosticism and pluralism in public" has "become the prevailing notion in contemporary America" is mistaken at best. I will return to this point.
ReplyDeleteYou assert that seeing as God, Christ, and Christianity all are Capital-T True, not only is theology an exceptionally interesting topic, but a crucial matter to consider when creating public policy.
You are putting the cart before the horse.
How can you prove to me that Jesus has ever been to Piccadilly Square? How can you prove to me that Jesus was anything more than a man who believed we should love our fellow man to the point of our own ruination. What if a man doesn't even care and is simply ambivalent on the point?
Religion is based on faith. What is true to you might not be true to someone else. That is not relativism. That is a fundamental fact of being a human. That God is real and Christ is his son and your savior is as real to you as there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet is to an Islamic extremist. You have no more proof of your claim than he does. You both may marshal arguments about the nature of human life, you may appeal to the emotions and the reason of your fellow men, you may try to pull their heart this way or that with various clever arguments and examples from your own life. But you can never prove it. You can never sit down and say "a-ha! here is Truth! here is God! come and see!"
And that very reason is why the most fair, the most peaceful, and the most Christian practice is to build the laws of a nation on ideas that are self-evident to all men. Murder is wrong in the eyes of the law, not because God says so, but because killing people arbitrarily is something most humans can agree is bad for business. Theft, arson, fraud -- these are all things that we ban because we know that if that behavior ran amok in the world, no one could get any work done because we would all be blown from side to side constantly by chaos.
But you have no leg to stand on when you say that public policy should be built upon theology. Building public policy on theology is no different from building it upon conspiracy theories and fictional literature. Not to say that it is necessarily the same quality or worth as either of those things, but that it grapples with things that will never quite be real to us, things that can seem to be just on the verge of reality if only we believe hard enough but will never quite materialize.
Allow your theology to govern your life. Allow it to govern bodies of like-minded believers. But when you use it to govern men who merely wish to be left alone and worship as they chose, or to not worship at all, you become a tyrant.
And as far as the American political arena goes, wake up. We force our politicians to submit themselves to litmus tests of whether or not they're really Christian enough to be given the keys to the kingdom. President Obama has been routinely and viciously attacked because a certain group of people refuse to accept that he isn't a Muslim or, that if he is, he's just as fit to govern as any other men. If you step into politics in America, you are automatically assumed to be a Christian and it is a rare and shocking thing for you to come out and say that you are not. We still have states which have laws on the books requiring one to be a Christian to hold any public office. We spend millions and millions of dollars to defend Israel not because it's a wise foreign policy move but because at least half of the government believes that God Wills It to be so. America was meant to be a nation where no group of people was marginalized by a belief system or monolith, but that is not what it has become. It has very much become a nation in the thrall of Christianity and that is not always a good thing.
Thanks for responding! I have a few thoughts in response.
ReplyDelete"Religion is based on faith."
I assume, although I could be wrong, that what you mean here is that religious claims cannot be subjected to scientific experimentation and thus cannot be "proven."
"What is true to you might not be true to someone else. That is not relativism. That is a fundamental fact of being a human."
A Google search for the definition of relativism turned this up: "the doctrine that knowledge, truth, and morality exist in relation to culture, society, or historical context, and are not absolute."
Do you realize here that your statement that truth is different for different people undermines your claim that there are such things as "fundamental facts of being human?" Suppose the idea is true for you, but not true for me? On what basis could you tell me I'm wrong?
"You have no more proof of your claim than he does. You both may marshal arguments...appeal to the emotions and...reason...with various clever arguments...But you can never prove it."
Setting aside the rather uncharitable comparison (the last thing I blew up was a balloon), if we can only know things based on science, then yeah, all I've got is rhetorical flourish. The thing is, we can know things aside from the scientific method, like abstract objects. Numbers, for instance.
"And that very reason is why the most fair, the most peaceful, and the most Christian practice is to build the laws of a nation on ideas that are self-evident to all men."
Who is to say that fairness and peace are in any way desirable, beyond the sentiments of a certain group of people? By claiming that there are ideas that are self-evident to all men, You're actually claiming that universal values exist, right?
ReplyDelete"Murder is wrong in the eyes of the law, not because God says so, but because killing people arbitrarily is something most humans can agree is bad for business. Theft, arson, fraud...no one could get any work done..."
First of all, couldn't it be that God says it's wrong AND it's bad for business? The two don't conflict. Second, are we to base our policies on "what works", or what "most humans can agree on?" There are sometimes vast differences between the two. Which takes priority?
"things that can seem to be just on the verge of reality if only we believe hard enough but will never quite materialize."
This is often true, sadly. Even people like Mother Theresa complained of the feeling of the absence of God. And if it doesn't feel real to you, then theology can feel like building castles in the sky out of imaginary bricks made of wisps of cloud.
"But when you use it to govern men who merely wish to be left alone and worship as they chose, or to not worship at all, you become a tyrant."
This is a fair point, but consider what Ben Franklin said: "man shall either be ruled by God or by tyrants." In other words, people have to restrain their urges and desires in order for society to function. That can either happen by people being virtuous, or being forced to behave by an outside authority. Of those two, I prefer the former, and when people undermine the former, the latter becomes necessary, as history so often shows. "Freedom", wrote Milton, "can only be enjoyed by good men. The rest crave not liberty, but license."
"America was meant to be a nation where no group of people was marginalized by a belief system or monolith, but that is not what it has become. It has very much become a nation in the thrall of Christianity and that is not always a good thing."
The motto of my home state of North Carolina is "Esse quam videri", which means "to be, rather than to seem." As we know from history, the process of extending freedom and justice to all Americans has been slow and painful. But Christians have not only been part of the problem, but also the tip of the spear for change.
I'll close with the words of MLK: "The end of life is not to be happy, nor to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, but to do the will of God, come what may."