Confessions of Spiritual Bias in the Search for Truth

The following are two examples of the spiritual bias that can distort our search for truth as we ask our questions of God. Remarkably, both come from intellectuals who are openly confessing this.

'I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.' - Thomas Nagle, from The Last Word.

'We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.’ -Richard Lewontin, ‘Billions and billions of demons’, The New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, p. 31

Just what you asked for: a catalogue of mustache names

"The Imperial, the Walrus, the Stromboli, the Handlebar, the Horseshoe, the Mustachio (also called the Nosebeard or the Fantastico), the Pencil, also called (by idiots) the Mouthbrow...the Fu Manchu...the long, droopy Pancho Villa...the Toothbrush." - Rich Cohen, 'Becoming Adolf' from Vanity Fair, November 2007.

“Are you still beating your dog?” Or why there is such a thing as a ‘bad question.’

[This is my first post on sermon 1 “Where are you?” from my Advent Series “The Questions of God.” You can find the mp3 of this sermon at the Redeemer Memphis website or as a podcast via iTunes.]

We’re taught from childhood that ‘there’s no such thing as a bad question.’

We hear it from teachers trying to coax shy students into revealing where they need help. More generally, our culture’s embrace of all questions and questioning stems in part from the triumph of the Enlightenment, which used 'rational' questions as a tool for subverting the authorities of tradition, religion, and oppressive political regimes.

To us, it’s unquestionable that all questions are good, and all questioning innocent.

But this is too simple.

Yes, questions are an indispensable tool for gaining knowledge. True - the Christian church had to learn the hard lesson of what happens when legitimate questions (particularly from its youth) are ignored, dismissed, or too hastily answered.

However, despite all this, there are such things as bad questions – questions based on false assumptions, questions that presuppose their own answer, questions asked out of false motives, questions that don’t fit their object, etc.

In the quote below, theologian Thomas F. Torrance helps us see the difference between good and bad questions:

What, then, is the nature of true questioning? A genuine question is one properly open to the object of inquiry, but a question cannot be open to the object of inquiry if it is foreclosed from behind [before-hand]. Hence to be genuine, a question must allow itself to be called in question; it must be ready for reconstruction in light of what the inquiry reveals.

What Torrance is saying is that when you ask a question, you do so because, presumably, you do not yet know the answer! And if that’s true, then authentic questions require 1) that we be truly open to receiving new information or knowledge, and 2) that we allow such new knowledge potentially to challenge or revise our original question and previous assumptions.

The open nature of a true question is especially important when the ‘object of inquiry’ is God. For “the more ultimate” the question, “the more completely” the questioner must let “himself and all his prior understanding be called into question.”

(Thomas F. Torrance, ‘Questioning in Christ,’ in Theology in Reconstruction, 123-124).

This is one of the points I was trying to make in the first Advent sermon yesterday in which we looked at the most fundamental question we can ask God - the question of his reality or existence.

Of course, it’s vitally important to call people to ask such questions when (not if) they have them. As Francis Schaeffer put it, the “donkey of devotion” can only bear so many unanswered questions before it lies down and dies. In Scripture, God’s people are always voicing their questions about God to God; just read Job or the Psalms. God’s people today must exercise the same freedom within their Christian communities.

But we also have to be aware of the opposite problem, of how our questioning of God can become unhelpful. That’s what I tried to address some yesterday.

We should ask our questions honestly; and with the kind of genuine openness and humility Torrance recommends above.

New Advent Sermon Series

I'm starting a new sermon series for Advent tomorrow at Redeemer called "The Questions of God." First one is on "Where are you?", dealing with our struggle to know God's reality, existence, presence.

Other three questions to come are:

2. Who are you? (Who is Jesus? 'Who do you say that I am?', Mk. 8).

3. Why is it so hard to follow you? ('Could you not watch with me one hour?', Mt. 26).

4. Why have you forsaken me? (Christ's cry and ours from Ps. 22/Mt. 26).

Each of these are questions we ask God and questions he (often Christ) asks us in return.

The mp3s are podcast at iTunes and will be posted also at the Redeemer website.

Because I usually have more material than I can ever use in my sermons, I hope to post additional thoughts, quotes, resources and references here during the week following each sermon. Redeemer folks are especially welcome to comment, ask questions, etc.

Fall Reading

For the last year or so I've tried to faithfully update my Good Reads page with what I'm reading but have fallen off this fall. Now that I'm restarting this blog, I plan to put those quick updates here (and do Good Reads if I have the time).

So...here's what I've read this fall:

The Rule of St. Benedict. Published in the Library of Christian classics along with Sayings of the Desert Fathers (that I scanned through) and the Conferences of Cassian. For all that's been made about Benedict's rule (and I've greatly benefited from its exposition by others), reading the actual document was somewhat disappointing. Maybe I'm missing something.

Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone. Franzen's partial memoir about growing up in Webster Groves in St. Louis. His writing about his relationship with his parents is especially insightful and moving. The chapter on his youth group experience in a liberal Protestant church is worth the price of the book.

T. F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction. As with other Torrance I've read in the past year, this book is a mixture of 1). some of the most profound theology I've ever read (on Trinitarian theology, Christology, analogy, the ministry of the Spirit), 2). the most impenetrable writing I've ever read, and 3). what seems to me pretty straightforward theological error (often because of the subtlety and far-reaching power of Torrance's overall 'system' that, to me, requires his doctrines of universal union with Christ in the Incarnation, Christ's assumption of fallen human nature, a Barthian-like view of election and Scripture, etc). Still, there are sections that are beautiful and deeply edifying. His chapter on 'Questioning Christ' is enormously helpful and helped inspire my upcoming sermon series for Advent at Redeemer.

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea. Hadn't read this since high school; was one of my favorite books then that I re-read several times. Wasn't disappointed; so short and powerful.

Robert Graves, Goodbye to all That. This book and its author is discussed throughout Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory and I ran across it at the local library book sale. Graves is one of the primary British literary figures to emerge out WWI and Goodbye to all That is his war memoir. A fascinating sketch of pre-War British society and its dying Victorianism. Graves' descriptions of trench warfare, the at-times absurd army culture, post-war Oxford capture a moment of cultural transition. And though hard to believe, the book is funny too.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy & Franz Rosenzweig, Judaism Despite Christianity. In keeping with my recent and growing fascination with 'ERH' - who I'm convinced will be as important to future generations of academics as some of his more famous colleagues were to ours - I ordered this new version as soon as it was available. There are several essays of historical background and interpretation in the book, aside from the correspondence itself. A couple of these essays are by ERH and shed great light on the correspondence; there's also a letter from ERH to a student on Hitler and prayer (!) that's stunning. Then there's the correspondence itself, which is unlike anything I've ever read. Both men were deeply passionate, creative thinkers and actors, with ERH being the elder. They wrote the letters while each was deployed during WWI in the German army. As top-level scholars their level of casual erudition is daunting (lots of Greek, Latin, French, German phrases, quotes, references - thankfully translated in most cases) and the strength and candor of their debate thrilling. Of course, I resonated most with ERH's presentation and defense of Christianity, but Rosensweig's own thought emerges in the letters with real force. Reading these letters is like watching two giants do battle with all their heart and mind about the most central questions of life, religion, and philosophy. Ironically, their careers went in different directions after this exchange; Rosensweig's genius was recognized in his few works produced in the 20s and 30s (especially his The Star of Redemption, which was greatly influenced by ERH's thought) but he died early (by the late 30s). ERH lived another 50 years and produced dozens of volumes of work, but was mostly unrecognized by the the academic establishment.

Frederick Dale Bruner, The Christ Book (Commentary on Matthew). Read just parts of this for my Fall Adult Ed class at Redeemer, but have to say that it's probably my favorite commentary. Completely unlike anything else: unapologetically theological, filled with application to church life, creative, pastoral, and still excellent on exegesis and interpretive issues. If you're intrigued, just read his section on Matthew 1 and the geneology: beautiful. And his Sermon on the Mount material was, again, the best I've read on it. I look forward to using it in the future.

Good and evil

"..evil exists...and evil increases automatically. Inertia, laziness, cowardice, death, are self-multiplying...good 'is' not, except by propagation; it is not in any man, but originates only between teacher and student, between father and son...No man is good. But the word or act that links men may be good. And by link-work evil has to be constantly combatted...[but many] ignore this constant reproduction of the good, and leave the arousing, evoking and conveying of goodness to accident." - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, 'The Soul of William James,' in I Am An Impure Thinker, p. 27.