Draft first chapter of a forthcoming book:
The Scandal of God: It’s a Metaphor, Stupid!
THE PHONY DEBATE: BELIEVERS 0 -UNBELIEVERS 0
“When the Israelites ask me, ‘What is his name?’ What shall I say to them?” And God
said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM . . . I AM has sent me to you . . . “
Exodus 3: 13-14.
“Certain kinds of truths are convincing only in a narrative . . . The argument is the
reality, and the absence of certainty the certainty . . . In the beginning was the word: in
the beginning, and in the middle, and right there at the close, Word without end,
Amen.”i
Adam Gopnik
“To be an unbeliever is not merely to be ‘open-minded.’ It is, rather, a decisive admission
of uncertainty that is . . . connected to the repudiation of the totalitarian principle, in the
mind as well as in politics.”ii
Christopher Hitchens
“Man is imbued with the fallacious hope that, thanks to science, he can live a completely
disordered life with impunity.
Paul Tournier
We’re in trouble. The fault-line through the polemics regarding the status
and place of religion is getting more and more fragile. Both sides start from
fundamentalist assumptions. And this is where the trouble starts. One side
asserts the literal truth. The other side points to its absurdities. There are many
rumors concerning the demise of religion. Blogs such as the following (including
the misspellings) abound.
The sooner religon [sic] is consigned to history the better. There is no place in
modern society for myths and legends, (except as a good story). I cannot
understand how otherwise intelegent [sic] people can belive [sic] in a
supreame [sic] being that controls all of our lives. This is just a throwback to
the uneducated trying to rasionalise [sic] the workings of nature by inventing
something to attribute it to!iii
The misspellings are important. They betray the level of discourse on both sides.
There can be no room for agreement or reconciliation. There are, however, those
of us who believe that good stories are important for us to understand ourselves.
But stories are never just stories. Some stories are better than others. Some stories
are true. Some are false. The big question is how do we adjudicate between
stories? Those of us who take this third way of repudiating fundamentalism and
literalism in the name of religion risk being accused of being unbelievers by one
side and being called fudging hypocrites by the other. Both the true believers and
the belligerent unbelievers assume that the only honest way to interpret the
stories and texts is literally.
This fundamentalist assumption renders the word “God” almost
unusable. It can be made to mean anything you want it to mean – from the
absurd to the sublime, from the cruel to the tender. Yet it also seems that we can’t
do without it. Some, in an effort to emphasize its openness to definition, spell the
word with a hyphen: G-d.
This is a book about G-d and the impetus to write it came after a public
conversation broadcast on local public radio in San Francisco with Christopher
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Hitchens about his book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I
thought and still think it’s a very thin book, grabbing at the low hanging fruit of
the follies and evils of “religion” but I enjoyed not only our conversation but also
his intellectual brilliance and curiosity. I wondered and wonder at his flashes of
deep humanity and stabs of downright meanness. I was puzzled by his animus
towards religion in toto, his seeing the whole mess of it as essentially totalitarian
and fascistic. Anything good in it is incidental and accidental. This wholesale
and blanket condemnation doesn’t seem to jibe with his gift of subtlety and
nuance when he deals with literary criticism.
When Hitchens describes his “unbelief” as connected to the repudiations
of the totalitarian principle” he is describing what I understand to be the life of
faith – “the absolute certainty that there are no certainties” – echoing the
Anglican monk, Herbert Kelly’s aphorism, “the opposite of faith isn’t doubt. The
opposite of faith is certainty.” When he insists that religious faith is essentially
servitude, I insist that true religion is about freedom or it’s about nothing. We are
already at cross-purposes. But when he waxes eloquent about the wonders of
literature and science, we are reading from the same page. When he writes of
how little we know and how the fields of our ignorance are expanding at such
velocity that we are left gasping with astonishment, we are on common – dare I
say Mosaic and sacred? – ground. I realized that when Hitchens
describes
himself as an “unbeliever”, he was also describing my experience of “belief” – his
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Catch-22 -- an embracing of both uncertainty and commitment.
How does
“uncertainty”, which honesty demands, connect with commitment, without
which life isn’t worth living.
Hitchens affirms “the superiority of literature over religion as a source of
morality and ethics”iv. He has his own theology and scriptures. He also has his
certainties – privileging risk, ambivalence and ambiguity as articles of faith. He
has a strong doctrine of sin and judgment as well as an interesting list of saints
and sinners, of those to whom he is indulgent and those to whom he shows no
mercy. In his somewhat self-serving memoir Hitch 22 he confesses his sins and
gives himself absolution. The title gives the game away. He’s in a catch 22
situation, caught between uncertainty and commitment. Nothing he says or does,
in the end, is his fault. He’s caught just like Joseph Heller’s hero. The poor
bastards who annoy him or simply piss him off, are simply written off. He is his
own god, dispensing grace and condemnation on all sides. This anti-theist has a
religious sensibility.
But, in spite of all this, I found and find myself caught by something that
won’t let either of us go. I share Hitchens passionate distaste for totalitarian
“solutions” from either the left or right. of English heritage who, like me, sees
history as ironic, with no settling place.
After our conversation,
it struck me that getting embroiled in a row
about whether god/God existed was a waste of time. We had a common foe –
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the literalistic fundamentalist mind, which tended to embrace totalitarianism. It
also hit me that the literalistic mind-set wasn’t the province exclusively of
religion. In sum, I was realizing more and more that I really didn’t care whether
people believed in God or not. This may seem an odd admission for a priest. The
reason is that I don’t think the issue is about “beliefs” understood as a list things
to which we are supposed to give intellectual assent. It’s about trust and
commitment to each other in the face of uncertainty.
Religious people got into trouble when they tried – about three hundred
years ago – to treat religion as if it were like science – an explanation of how God
runs the world. When religion sets itself up as if it were a scientific explanation of
the world, it looks increasingly ridiculous. That’s why I think that, at this
moment in history, arguing about whether God exists or not is a waste of time.
Not long after my conversation with Christopher Hitches, I began my
retirement as dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. My wife and I flew to
Singapore and enjoyed having over two months at sea on a container ship to
“nowhere”.
I say to “nowhere” because while we stopped at wonderful
sounding ports – Shanghai, Nagoya, Kobe, Pusan, Montevideo, Santos and Rio –
we had little or no opportunity to experience these places for very long. Staying
in port costs the ships money, so the turn-around was made as fast as possible.
I’ve languished outside Shanghai but haven’t seen it. I’ve spent two hours in a
shopping mall in Durban, South Africa, and had coffee at Starbucks in Kobe. The
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trip gave us the opportunity to experience the world-as-shopping-mall, the globe
as one great engine of consumption – glorious and pathetic at the same time. The
ship became the container of all my questions about the human enterprise and
whether anything really mattered.
We were given the great gift of time, punctuated by hours of DVDs and
books stored in Kindles – hours of evidence about “the human condition” and
hours to digest and think about it. The list of books and DVDs was pretty
arbitrary but there were common threads through them all: meaning-of-life
stuff, what’s-a-human-being stuff, mangled-theology stuff, sex-and-power stuff,
greed-and-politics stuff – all the perennial and unanswered questions that
human beings ask. Very little of it was overtly religious. A lot of it was a
critique/satire on American/Western consumerism. Imagine hours of TV shows
like House, Six Feet Under, Thirty Rock, Monk and four seasons of Battlestar
Galactica. Not to mention hours of Masterpiece Theater (Jane Austen, Queen
Victoria and the Scarlet Pimpernel).
I was particularly struck by the series Battlestar Galactica. The religious
element was divided into two. On one side was a group fed by a pot pourri of
vague Greek mythology with characters saying, “My gods!” instead of “My
God!” On the other side was a woozy and brain-dead monotheism (or, better,
monism) with a mixture of machinery and sex. But the show raised all the
questions about our confusion about our nature and expressed the tension
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between biological and cultural evolution. In the middle of the sex, mayhem and
fantasy were deep questions about the evolution of consciousness, what makes a
human being human, what might the next stage in our evolution be? Perhaps the
cylons (humanistic robots – don’t ask) are the breakthrough into the next stage
of what it might be to be human? On the other hand, the chances
of our
continuation and survival are slim unless . . . Battlestar Galactica was an attempt
to respond to the “unless”.
The need to commit ourselves to a great conversation to probe those
questions is much more than a call to an idle chat over a cup of coffee.
Undoubtedly, that’s why Battlestar Galactica has captured the imagination of so
many. The series makes you wonder about a possible human future. This book is
a contribution to the conversation about our future together. It’s not unlike going
on an archeological dig – layers of civilizations and artifacts, tablets and scattered
inscriptions – a psychological and spiritual excavation to discover clues as to our
identity which includes the search for “God” which, at the very least, is a code
word for the disturbing and radical openness of our identity.
The famous Marxist dictum that religion is “the opiate of the people”
speaks to the need for a comforting, justifying, all-encompassing narrative. We
need stories to provide us with the illusion that things make sense. But religion
is not only an opiate. As Marx pointed out, it is also “the heart of the heartless
world”. Does “having a heart” mean living with an illusion?
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For some of us the quest for meaning is – whether the route is science or
religion – a drug. The quest is an opiate and we’re all addicts. Do we only have
two choices: cynicism or delusion? And there’s the rub. We cannot do without
stories and they are notoriously unreliable. There I was in the self-contained
world of a freighter, waking up more deeply to the fact that I’d been living in a
play, or a series of plays, in which I had played various roles: priest, husband,
father, divorcé, sinner, lover and failure. Yes, there were moments of grace and
glory, laughter and joy. The question that kept coming into my head and one I
wanted to ask Christopher Hitchens and his fellow atheists was, “What play are
we all in?” Or “How do we rewrite the one we’re in now?” We are all caught in
our own interpretations and the interpretations of others and yet we cannot do
without them. There is no escape from interpretation. Convinced of the truth of
our view of things, we suppress the fact that it is a necessary construction. So, we
are caught between construction and deconstruction and, perhaps, faith is the
third place of nakedness beyond all interpretations?
Our love of stories, novels, movies, adventures, science fiction, romance,
horror, sit-coms is a good place to start. No-one (at least most of us) takes them
literally, yet they play an important part in helping us interpret the world and
simply get through the day. They provide the architecture of our thoughts and
help us find a place for our feelings. In fact, some of us don’t know how to act –
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to make love, be angry, grieve, laugh – until we’ve seen someone do it on
television. We’re great copiers and mimics.
Nevertheless, many of us (in spite of living inside a narrative) have
swallowed the lie that science somehow is THE privileged language – the only
language that’s really, really true. We’re not good at seeing that we all live inside
a story (not necessarily a good one) and that knowing what story’s playing itself
out inside us might help us move into a truer one. That’s why I love reading
fiction for the sake of truth. Those nine weeks on the container ship allowed me
to plunge into story after story after story. It was a relief to realize, again and
again, that there are stories out there other than my own; and when I let those
other narratives get a foothold, the story I’ve been telling myself about myself is
threatened, challenged and revised. Those other stories gave my own a fresh
and wider horizon and I discovered chapters I hadn’t known about or expected.
When I am open to it, my story changes and deepens. So . . . after our time at sea,
my conviction that fiction is vital to our understanding ourselves in new ways
was reinforced. I also became more and more convinced of the deadly and
narrowing power of literalism and fundamentalism in both their religious and
atheistic manifestations.
Discerning the truth in fiction is the antidote to literalism and
fundamentalism in both their religious and atheistic forms. We need to be as
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clear as we can about things that really happened – in the real world, yet “what
really happened” is subject to endless interpretation.
All we have is language and the unreliable organ we call the imagination.
Our frustration is that these instruments are only capable of either stating the
trivial or pointing inadequately to that which cannot be spoken. George Steiner
in an essay on Moses’ encounter with God at the Burning Bush writes of the
“ambiguous loftiness and terror of the unsayable.”v The God of Moses cannot be
said, cannot be put into words. I am Who I am, I will be Who I will be. This is why
we need stories – not to break the silence of the unsayable but to guard and
preserve it.
It would, however, be a mistake to think that all we can do is argue about
language. The world is getting smaller, more crowded and the human future is
at stake. Poverty, economics, climate change, ecological degradation, depression,
violence, crowd in on us. The implications for our shared life on the planet are
enormous. How we imagine the world makes a difference. The stories we read or
tell to help us get through and understand what’s happening to us matter
because stories lead to action in the world – sometimes violent and vengeful.
We must deal with the issue of metaphor because we should never
underestimate its power, particularly if it fuels resentment and a sense of
grievance. Metaphors can kill. Metaphors can justify all kinds of horror. Never
say, “It’s only a metaphor.” Stories and metaphors have to be critiqued as well as
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read-for-the-story. They require a community of readers and critics involved in a
never-ending conversation about interpretation.
It’s hard for us to accept that there’s a psychic zoo inside all of us – not
just one character but a whole menagerie. We need stories in order to understand
the cast of characters inside us. Bertie Wooster and Dr. House, for example, are two
very different characters played by the brilliant actor Hugh Laurie. Bertie (P.G.
Wodehouse’s upper class twit) blunders through life with kindly stupidity and
with no trace of malice. Dr. House, wounded, cynical and bitterly honest goes
around “doing good” in spite of himself.
We need them both to say the
unsayable. Between them they may get it right. Human beings seek to be
grounded in the “real” world and yet not totally bound by it. Each of us, I
suspect, has a bit of Bertie and some of House inside us – naively optimistic on
the one hand, and deeply cynical on the other – two differently ways of seeing
the world. We need stories – art, poetry, metaphor, religion – to keep our own
Bertie and House in touch with each other.
Art, poetry, metaphor, religion are expressions of cultural evolution just
as dynamic and vital as biological evolution. We’re in the midst of a big shift
away from literalism and scientism – or we’d better be if we are to survive. I see
religion as essentially a matter of narrative --
open and “unresolved” – albeit
tied to historical events (you can’t get out of time and space). The trouble is that
the “unresolved” frightens us. The “unsayable” is deeply disturbing. Resistance
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to what is unresolved and unsayable is passionate and largely unconscious. It
terrifies us. That’s why we are tempted to embrace what is presented to us as
certain and literal. Taking things literally is a blunt and simple interpretive tool.
But interpretation is as distorted as it is straightforward. It is very tempting
because “For every complex problem there is a solution that it simplistic, direct,
and wrong!”
We all live by symbols and the power of symbols and the emergence of
symbolic behavior goes back a long way – 40,000 to 60,000 years, by some
reckoning. Culture (the beginning of symbolic life)
included the ability to
imagine the future. We’re now in trouble because a future in which human
beings not only flourish but continue to exist at all is sometimes hard to imagine.
When we can’t imagine a hopeful future, we become slaves to a debilitating
sense of meaninglessness.
What is astounding is that great science is driven by the unknown and yet
many scientists simply accept that the universe “just happened”. The sheer
absence of curiosity to ask why is amazing: always asking “what” and never
asking “why”. This was one of the reasons that novelist John Updike was
repulsed by atheism – “its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
Where was the ambiguity, the ingenuity, the humanity . . . of saying that the
universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead.”vi
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Perhaps one can account for the lack of curiosity because there is no final
answer as to the “why” of things. So why ask the question in the first place?
Science has no patience for questions which have no answer in principle. It loves
and thrives on the unknown but cannot embrace ultimate unknowability. But
when we fail to ask unanswerable questions and struggle to identify and say the
unsayable life is diminished, made shallow and unsatisfying. We end up with
nihilism and re-name it freedom. Catch 22?
This nihilism is the mark of modernity. Theologian David Bentley Hart
writes, “To be entirely modern . . . is to believe in nothing.” To be truly free is to
believe in nothing. He points to our trust in an original absence, which we
believe underlies
“all of reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arises no
impediment to our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make
of ourselves what we choose. We trust . . . that there is no substantial criterion by
which to judge our choices that stands higher than the unquestioned good of free
choice itself, and that therefore all judgment, divine no less than human, is in
some sense an infringement upon our freedom.”vii
This kind of freedom requires nihilism, which, of course, is no freedom at
all. There is little understanding that there are two freedoms – the freedom to
choose one thing over another, and the higher freedom of knowing that what we
have chosen is in accord with our true nature. And finding our true nature is the
great spiritual task of all human beings. Dante’s great poem of the soul’s choice
(The Divine Comedy) gives us a picture of Hell as the place where we have our
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own way forever. We don’t know what to choose and when we do we don’t
always choose wisely. The life of freedom requires training. As philosopher
Thomas Nagel puts it: “We all want to know how to live. That includes not only
knowing how to get what we want, but knowing what to want, and what we
should and shouldn’t do.”viii
It is a challenge to preserve the “unsayable” when our main instrument is
words! Literary critic Terry Eagleton has a stab at saying what cannot be said
when he writes of the scandalous “non-God or the anti-God of Scripture, who
hates burnt offerings and acts of smug self-righteousness . . . the enemy of idols,
fetishes, and graven images of all kinds – gods, churches, ritual sacrifice, the
Stars and Stripes, nations, sex, success, ideologies and the like.”ix These are
contradictory scandals worth exploring. For the Christian believer, the biggest
scandal in the store- house of stories is the claim that we matter and that God
loves us so much that the divine entered into our own mystery by becoming one
of us. This scandal – absurd as it sounds -- places us all before the Burning
Bush, confronted by a presence that is both real and unsayable.
.
The poet Coleridge affirmed wonder at the heart of being human: “In
Wonder all Philosophy began; in Wonder it ends: and Admiration fills up all the
interspace. But the first Wonder is the offspring of ignorance: the last is the parent of
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Adoration.”x Adoration is the bond between uncertainty and commitment and is
the key to our finding out who we are and what we are to do.
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Adam Gopnik, “What did Jesus Do?”, The New Yorker, May 24, 2010, p. 72 ff.
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22, New York: Twelve, p. 422.
iii See BBC News on Science and the Environment, March 22, 2011, Religion may become extinct in nine
nations, study says by Jason Palmer – and the following comments.
ivHitch-22. p. 391.
v Steiner, p. 273.
vi quoted by Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End, New York: W.W. Norton, 2009, p. 41.
vii Hart, p. 21.
viii Thomas Nagel, “What Peter Singer Wants of You,” in the NYRB, March 25, 2010, p. 24.
ix Eagleton, p. 18.
x S.T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, Aphorism IX
i
ii
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