Like the dutiful Vancouver husband/father that I am, I marched off to lululemon on Saturday to see if I could find my wife a gift worthy of both her maternal skills and her status as an emerging distance runner. lululemon is a Vancouver company famous mainly (I think) for its yoga-wear (although I couldn’t help but notice that their tags say “designed in Vancouver, made in Cambodia”). At any rate, it is, apparently, where all the cool moms get their workout gear so off I went to see what I could find.

After an interesting experience that involved, among other things, being asked if various store employees “measurements” were similar to my wife’s, I found myself trudging back to my car, the proud owner of a shiny red environmentally responsible plastic bag with the “lululemon manifesto” emblazoned across it (I didn’t realize that fitness outfitters were allowed to have “manifestos” - who knew?). Not surprisingly, I found the wisdom on offer rather intriguing.

It ranged from the prudent…

Drink FRESH water and as much water as you can. Water flushes unwanted toxins from your body and keeps your brain sharp.

to the vacuous…

Breathe deeply and appreciate the moment. Living in the moment could be the meaning of life.

to the strangely morbid…

Visualize your eventual demise. It can have an amazing effect on how you live for the moment.

To the comical…

Children are the orgasm of life. Just like you did not know what an orgasm was before you had one, nature does not let you know how great children are until you have them.

To the unexpectedly insightful…

Listen, listen, listen, and then ask strategic questions.

To the axiomatic…

What we do to the earth we do to ourselves.

To the quasi-Buddhist…

The pursuit of happiness is the source of all unhappiness.

To the narcissistic…

Your outlook on life is a direct reflection of how much you like yourself.

To my personal favourite, the “protest against nature”:

Nature wants us to be mediocre because we have a greater chance to survive and reproduce. Mediocre is as close to the bottom as it is to the top, and will give you a lousy life.

You can imagine my relief at having nature’s nasty plot brought to my attention.

All in all, though, an interesting medley of pop-psychology, philosophy, and ethics for the side of a shopping bag (certainly more than I’ve come to expect from, say, Shoppers Drug Mart). If nothing else, it made for a nice distraction as I was painfully inching my way out of an overcrowded parking lot on a Saturday afternoon.

SURPRISE ENDING: Well, it seems that while my Mother’s Day selections were good as far as style goes, the sizes were slightly off so they had to be returned for exchange. Two hours later, my wife returned home with a couple of books for the kids, but no lululemon bag. It seems that she just couldn’t stomach the prices, and decided that a couple of home-made cards from the kids were present enough.

Sniff… I love that woman. So principled, so strong-willed, so well-grounded, so fearless and bold, refusing to be manipulated by the marketing machine…

Maybe another line should be added to the “manifesto”:

Breathe deeply, and choose not to spend exorbitant sums of money on ridiculously overpriced consumer goods.

I’m not holding my breath.

One of the central components of my thesis (which is, mercifully, coming closer to completion) is that the new atheist account of reality is not “deep” enough - it does not provide a rich or satisfying enough account of the phenomenology of being human. Huge swaths of human existential concerns are relegated to the realm of evolutionary peculiarities or “misfirings” in the attempt to squeeze everything into what John Haught has called an “explanatory monism” which assumes that one mode of explanation - the scientific one - is all we need. This reductive approach to human beings is then held alongside (awkwardly and incoherently, in my view) an arrogated moral authority in the attempt to discredit the very religious traditions which it is unwittingly borrowing from.

I couldn’t help but think of this while reading the opening chapter of Walker Percy’s The Message in the Bottle. The book is about language and, among other things, what our ability to use it - to address others and to be addressed as subjects - might say about our uniqueness in the cosmos, but here, at the outset, Percy simply wonders about how an understanding of human beings as nothing but “organisms in environments” can account for the alienation and longing that is so pervasive a feature of human existence - even when our environment is the best (materially speaking) that our species has ever seen:

If beasts can be understood as organisms living in environments which are good or bad and to which the beast responds accordingly as it it has evolved to respond, how is man to be understood if he feels bad in the best environment?…. A theory of man must account for the alienation of man. A theory of organisms in environments cannot account for it, for in fact organisms in environments are not alienated.

Percy, writing in the mid-twentieth century, summarizes a human predicament that I suspect has not changed much since he penned these words:

Man knows he is something more than an organism in an environment, because for one thing he acts like anything but an organism in an environment. Yet he no longer has the means of understanding the traditional Judeo-Christian teaching that the “something more” is a soul somehow locked in the organism like the ghost in the machine. What is he then? He has not the faintest idea. Entered as he is into a new age, he is like a child who sees everything in his new world, names everything, knows everything except himself.

We might behave as “organisms in environments” on the physical level - we have the skills to survive and have proven wondrously adept at bending the natural world to our material purposes - but at the psychological or spiritual level, this is certainly not the case. If the story of cosmic history is about the emergence of species suited to their environments, why do we seem to be such an odd fit? How has nature thrown up a creature that expects so much more from its environment than it could possibly give it? Is it because, for reasons unknown, we’ve evolved prefrontal lobes that are too big (and overactive) for our own good? Or are human beings more than just organisms in environments.

Percy sets forth the metaphor of human beings as “homeless” wayfarers as opposed to organisms adapting to their environment in order to account for the alienation we feel. While the word “homeless” gets my theological antennae up (it seems to connote an escapist eschatology - “this world is not my home, I’m just-a-passin’ through” - which is problematic on a number of different levels), I think Percy powerfully captures the Christian idea that human beings were made for more than our current experience of the world allows.

To say that we are made for “more” does not require the further claim that this world is not a good one, just that it doesn’t seem to be enough for us. This is more of an empirical observation of how human beings, in fact, think and live in the world than it is a theological claim. The relentless human search for purpose and meaning, no matter what exotic paths this might take us on, is evidence that we at least think we are more than just “organisms in environments.” Simply put, we expect more from the world than it seems able to deliver.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways of interpreting this empirical phenomenon: 1) With Richard Dawkins (among others), dismiss it as the “whingeing self-pity of those who think that life owes them something”; or 2) With Percy (among others), consider the possibility that it might just represent a clue to the mystery and meaning of the universe. Either the phenomenon is an evolutionary oddity which makes no contact with what is actually true about the cosmos, or it is a hint of things to come.

When I was a kid I distinctly remember feeling, at times, somewhat resentful of my “Mennonite-ness.” It wasn’t anything distinctly theological (although like many kids, I suppose, there were moments when I didn’t like being “the Christian” amongst a group of friends who mostly were not) or cultural (I don’t recall particularly liking borscht at the time, but ours was not a family that clung to any of the typical cultural identifiers of German “Mennonite-ness” too fiercely). I knew enough Christians to mitigate the unpleasantness produced by my status as a “cognitive minority,” and there were enough sweet German pastries to offset those Mennonite dishes that happened to offend my palate. No, the source of my resentment lay elsewhere.

To be blunt (and it’s somewhat embarrassing to admit this), I resisted how frugal we were taught to be. This came both from my own parents and, more directly (at least in my admittedly spotty memory), from my grandparents. I remember being told all the time to not throw item x out because it could be reused, to turn out the lights when we left a room (I can’t help but think of these silly BC Hydro commercials where people are applauded for turning out the lights, unplugging their cellphone chargers, and so on - we have our own ways of separating the sheep from the goats these days, don’t we?), to eat what we took (or take less!), to avoid littering, to turn off the water while brushing our teeth, to take shorter showers, to put on a sweater instead of turning up the heat (had to stick that in dad!), to be content with used hockey equipment, and the list goes on. Waste and profligate consumption were, quite simply, anathema to my grandparents.

I can’t help but notice the similarities between the way that my grandparents approached life and the way that we are currently being “encouraged” to live to avert environmental catastrophe. In both cases, a lifestyle of responsible consumption and fiscal restraint are offered as important components of living well in the world. The difference is, I think, in the motivation behind the two ways of approaching the world.

I’m not going to romanticize or over-theologize about my grandparents reasons for advocating a lifestyle of responsible consumption. They had nine kids and money was tight. To whatever extent the “three R’s” (reduce, reuse, recycle) represented their approach to consumption, a good deal of the reasoning behind this was simple economic necessity. However, I think they told us not to waste and to use resources wisely for deeper reasons as well. The earth was the Lord’s, and all within it. We were accountable to God for how we treated the planet he had made. Being wasteful and irresponsible in our consumption of resources was not just imprudent, it was immoral.

My grandparents may not have had all of the sophisticated scientific justification for living modestly that we now possess (or think we possess), but I think that their reasons for challenging their wasteful and careless grandchildren went beyond economics. Simply put, the God we served expected better from us. They knew what it was like to go without and that many on our planet struggled to meet basic needs. To live wastefully was to adopt a posture of indifference to the plight of others and to turn our backs on an important part of our heritage by refusing to learn from it.

I’ve been reading Bjorn Lomborg’s Cool It over the last little while and I’ve appreciated the way in which he probes our current cultural obsession with such things as reducing our “carbon footprint.” Lomborg is as convinced as the next person that human consumption and lifestyle patterns are having a negative effect on the environment (although he differs with some of the apocalyptic predictions of some popular commentators); he’s just not convinced that such initiatives as the Kyoto protocol are the best way to attack the problem. More importantly (and necessarily, in my opinion), he’s a bit skeptical of the rhetoric being used to promote responsible action. I was drawn to Lomborg’s citing of the following passage from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth:

The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise…. When we rise, we will experience an epiphany that this crisis is not really about politics at all. It is a moral and spiritual challenge.

I wonder what my grandparents (or other Christians down through the ages) would say about Gore’s implicit view of those eras which preceded our current cultural moment. No “generational mission?” No “compelling moral purpose?” No “shared and unifying cause?” I have no illusions that my grandparents saw their approach to consumption as an “epiphany” or as a response to a grave “moral and spiritual challenge” in and of itself. But I’m quite convinced that they saw it as a (small) part of what it meant to be a responsible bearer of God’s image - as a (small) part of what it meant to respond in gratitude to the God who had made them and the world in which they lived. Sounds almost like a “compelling moral purpose” to me…

So now, twenty-odd years later, I look back at how I was raised with a sense of irony and appreciation. It is deeply ironic that a culture that has spent decades consuming itself to death has now “realized” that our future may depend on living with less and using what we have more responsibly. I think my grandparents (and many before them) knew that a long time ago. My appreciation comes from the fact that we were taught to live this way (although we didn’t always learn very well!) not as a response to catastrophic predictions from a sometimes hysterical mass media or because of a felt need for “spiritual transcendence” or a “unifying generational mission” but because we simply had obligations: to God, to our fellow human beings, and to the planet.

As in many other areas, I find myself in the position of expressing appreciation to those responsible for helping a stubborn, ungrateful, wasteful and acquisitive youngster to find his way in the world. I’m grateful that, to whatever degree they were able, my parents and grandparents modeled a way of being in the world that was, in some ways, ahead of its time. Whether this was the result of economic necessity, theology, or, more likely, a combination of the two, I’m thankful that it has, at least partially, trickled down to me. As a result, I will enthusiastically do my part to “save the planet” but for reasons that have less to do with the edicts delivered from on high by the current prophets of climate change than with a cultural and theological heritage that I am only beginning to properly appreciate.

The following exchange on beliefnet is worth checking out for those interested in the problem of suffering and evil, and how the biblical narrative addresses (or fails to address) it. Bart Ehrman is a former Christian and professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina who has recently authored God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer. N.T. Wright is a biblical theologian, the Bishop of Durham, and the author of numerous books on the the historical Jesus and the early church, as well as, more relevant to this discussion, Evil and the Justice of God.

Their discussion is a very interesting one, although as always in this age-old issue, there are many questions that go unanswered. Both make compelling arguments and are persuasive to differing degrees on on various points. To be honest, I resonate more deeply with Ehrman’s obvious pain and bewilderment when he thinks about the sheer amount and variety of horrific pain in the world; Wright isn’t blithe about it, to be sure, but you really do get the sense that this is much more than an academic issue for Ehrman (again, not to suggest that this isn’t the case with Wright, just that it is more obvious with Ehrman in this exchange).

After reading this exchange, I’m left with the same question I had when I first saw the title of Ehrman’s book, and after reading the introduction to the book while waiting for a flight last month: Does he think he’s offering us some kind of new information? It’s hard for me to understand how a man as obviously intelligent and morally sensitive as Ehrman could imagine that he’s “discovered” something here - as if for most of two millennia of Christian history people had never witnessed horrific evil and wondered how it fit into their view of a good and powerful God; as if most of those who have lived with and under Scripture throughout history were under the misguided impression that the Bible provided an airtight argument explaining the philosophical problem of evil. At best, Ehrman’s book seems to be a chronicle of how he, personally, arrived at a place in his life where he found the disjunction between the existence of evil and his faith in God to be existentially untenable.

I’m intrigued by Ehrman because he’s so honest. Suffering is, simply, a massive problem, and he feels the full force of it. On top of that, he’s spent a good portion of his life in the Christian tradition as a pastor and an educator. His is not some ignorant dismissal of Christianity based on trolling around a few fundamentalist websites - he’s read his theology, he’s done his exegesis (although thinkers like Wright have major disagreements with his conclusions), and he’s spent decades of his life in the community of faith. No one can accuse him of not taking matters of faith seriously. It seems like the pain of the world has just become too much for him to bear.

As always, however, I’m left wondering what positive alternative Ehrman has substituted or would recommend substituting for the Christian view he has deemed insufficient for providing the biblical, philosophical, or existential resources for dealing with the problem of suffering. Wright touches on this quesstion briefly in his last post, but I think much more could be made of this. As many have pointed out, suffering and evil are only problems if you think you have good reasons to expect otherwise.

Unless I missed something obvious in the “blogalogue” (another wonderful technologically-fueled addition to our lexicon!), Ehrman doesn’t address this. I’ve not read his whole book, to be fair, so it’s possible that he does have some groundbreaking insight into this question (although I’m not too optimistic). From my perspective, it’s not worth sacrificing my own moral intelligibility for the sake of a very specifically conceived understanding of how a good God and evil fit together. As I’ve said elsewhere (probably too many times, by now), I just don’t see how things get better (logically or existentially) once God’s out of the picture.

Well (sigh) this was supposed to be a very brief post and is increasingly looking like, well… not that. I suppose I can’t help myself when it comes to this question - it’s something I spend a lot of time thinking about. I’ll simply conclude by recommending that you read what is a very interesting, engaging, and civilized exchange between Ehrman and Wright.

h/t: Mark Roberts via Ben Witherington

One of the dangers of choosing a thesis topic related to a relatively recent (and controversial) socio-cultural phenomenon is that there is invariably a lot of material produced on the subject that one should at least attempt to keep abreast of while writing. In the case of the phenomenon that is the new atheism, this is proving to be a monumental task.

It seems like every two weeks another book comes out in response to the recent attacks on God and religion - many, unfortunately, doing their best to cleverly work into their title the word “delusion” in a rather pathetic playground-esque attempt to one-up Richard Dawkins (”you’re deluded about God,”… “no you’re deluded about atheism“… “in fact, you’re so deluded that you’re probably from the devil“… and on and on we go). I’m getting close to the finish line here, so I’ve more or less given up on the attempt to keep up with the backlash, but I did sit down and read Chris Hedges I Don’t Believe in Atheists (another unfortunate title choice) last week. It was enough to convince me that I’ve read enough reactions now.

It’s not that it’s a terrible book - Hedges has some good insights, and properly challenges the new atheists on their conviction that scientific rationality is poised to usher the planet into a future of untold bliss and religionless harmony. But it seems like every time Hedges makes a valid and necessary critique, he follows it with a prolonged rant against the view (from the new atheists or from right-wing religious fundamentalists - Hedges seems just a little too desperate to distance himself from American Christianity) that history is a story of progress toward a fixed end. For Hedges, this belief is not just mistaken, but evil, in and of itself. It has led to too much violence and misery over the years, as those who claim to have an exclusive vision of this utopic future, be they religious or atheistic, impose their vision on others. Here’s a sample:

The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.

We are not saved by reason. We are not saved by religion. We are saved by turning away from projects that tempt us to become God, and by accepting our own contamination and the limitations of being human.

Human history is not a long chronicle of human advancement. It includes our cruelty, barbarism, reverses, blunders and self-inflicted disasters. History is not progressive. The ancient Greeks, like Hindus and Buddhists, saw human life and human history as cyclical. We live, they believed, in alternating stages of hope and despair, of growth and decay. This may be a more accurate understanding of human existence. To acknowledge the purposelessness of human history, to refuse to endow it with a linear march toward human perfection, is to give up the comforting idea that we are unique or greater than those who came before us. It is to accept our limitations and discard our intoxicating utopian dreams. It is to become human.

As I was reading this book (which might have been more appropriately titled I Don’t Believe in Utopias), I found myself frequently writing in the margins “yes, but…” Yes, a measure of historical humility is obligatory; yes, it’s a good and necessary thing to recognize human limitations; yes, human beings are not going to “perfect” themselves.

But…

…in light of our predicament, what ought we to do? Is the answer really moving back to a cyclical understanding of human history? Is recognizing human limitation and acknowledging the purposelessness of history really salvific? Is giving up our “intoxicating utopian dreams” really what it means to become human? In his haste to condemn the new atheists for imposing their vision of the world on others, Hedges seems to default to a bleak pessimism that, at least to me, is difficult to square with the human need for hope.

I think that Hedges is misguided in his approach to new atheists. Rather than attacking their deeply flawed means of achieving legitimate and irreducibly human ends, Hedges simply labels the ends themselves as illusory. It’s one thing to say that this or that tool is not up to the task of fulfilling human longing or that, ultimately, human beings are incapable of manufacturing the conditions that would fulfill our “utopian” desires. It’s quite another to simply label the desires themselves illusory and call this understanding salvific. The problem with the new atheists is not, from my perspective, the illegitimacy of the ends they have in mind; rather, it is with the theoretical justification they offer for these ends and the unwillingness to acknowledge their religious character.

According to the Christian vision, we do not become human by recognizing our limitation and adopting a posture of resignation to a fatalistic universe in the present, nor does salvation consist in turning away from “projects that tempt us to become like God.” In a sense, becoming “like God” is exactly what we are called to do as image-bearers - not in the idolatrous sense of believing that the task of ushering in God’s future falls exclusively to us, but in the responsible sense of understanding that God has called us to represent him well, to do our part in allowing, however incrementally, his kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.

A central component of the Christian faith is the idea that this history is not a purposeless cyclical meandering with no fixed end in sight, that it is governed and guaranteed by a “God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not” (Rom 4:17). The goal and the hope of a future unlike the present can be and has certainly been a dangerous one and the source of much suffering throughout history. But it has also produced an awful lot of good - indeed, it is largely responsible for the very shape of Western history itself. The answer for the dangerous “side-effects” of our religious and irreligious hopes is not to declare their object illegitimate, but to orient it within a proper framework which validates it and gives it shape, and which provides the resources and motivation to work toward its fulfillment.

To suggest that the solution to the conflict between religious and atheistic approaches to understanding and living in the world is to simply discard our “absurd hopes” is just as simplistic as the views Hedges is criticizing. Our best hope is to stop hoping? Sounds pretty sterile (and hopeless) to me.

A while back I came across this interesting pictorial feature on the spaces where writers write. Perhaps it is just the myopia and delusions of self-importance produced by spending days on end in an office trying to bang out a thesis which leads me to believe that others might be interested in such a thing, but I needed a diversion, and snapped a few pictures of the space where I spend a good part of my days. Not quite as inspiring as some of the photographs from The Guardian (Hilary Mantel’s is among my favourites), but a place that I have grown rather attached to…

This is looking in from the kitchen. We got the picture of the tree on the wall from Ten Thousand Villages at some point and I rather like that it is the first thing I see when I walk in. It sort of serves as a reminder that what I do in this space ought somehow to contribute to light and life (some days the message gets through more clearly than others, needless to say…). You can also see a little part of one of the kids’ drawings to the right of the tree - another reminder that the world consists of more than what I happen to be thinking and writing about on any given day. The rolled up mattress on the floor is not for personal nap breaks (believe it or not) but for visitors when they come. We have limited space, so the office does double duty as a guest room from time to time.

Here’s the view from the window. Quite a chaotic mess of books, beverage containers, receipts, cereal boxes (!), and who knows what else, but inspiration still does manage to emerge from time to time. A whole bunch of theological metaphors come to mind (light out of darkness, order out of chaos, good out of evil…), but I will resist the temptation toward any more over-dramatization/theologizing than I am already, undoubtedly, guilty of.

And finally, looking back toward the window. We had to pick up another bookshelf in our second year out here due to my inability to restrain myself at bookstores. “Professional expenses” or “monuments to my fiscal irresponsibility?” Ah well, who’s to say. A freezer may seem like an odd thing to have in an office, but there was nowhere else to put it and it serves as a handy place for accumulating miscellaneous clutter (a laptop and my son’s table hockey game, for example!).

All in all, it’s a space that I enjoy being in most of the time. There are days where time spent in here gets tedious and frustrating, but all in all I can’t (or at least shouldn’t) complain. The time will come soon enough when I must emerge from my cave and re-enter the real world. No matter how sick I may be of my thesis in the present, I suspect that I will then look back on these writing days and this writing space fondly.

(Thanks for indulging me.)

This weekend, a friend alerted me to an interesting DVD special where four of the more prominent atheists out there right now (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) get together for a round-table discussion. The two hour unmoderated discussion is, interestingly, entitled “The Four Horsemen” - a reference, presumably, to the protagonists’ understanding of themselves as the agents entrusted with the hastening of the demise of the blight upon human history that is religion.

From the bit that I watched, the special seems to be mainly about these four guys sitting around congratulating themselves on the obvious superiority of their views, ridiculing religious people, and sharing stories about the “persecution” they’ve experienced from those who have not yet attained their level of intellectual development. I watched twenty minutes or so of the first hour on YouTube and found it fairly uninteresting - mostly, I presume, because I’ve read each of their books and they don’t really say anything in their discussion that they don’t say in their published works.

One part that did interest me, however, was near the end of the first hour when Sam Harris asked his fellow atheists if they had ever come across an argument that gave them pause, that planted even the smallest seed of doubt in their minds that their militant assault on religion might be misguided. For the most part, they said that they could not. Dennett just bluntly said “no”; Dawkins and Hitchens said something to the effect that they sometimes wondered about the political ramifications of angering religious groups, but not one of them claimed to have ever come across an actual argument that wobbled the foundations of their atheism in any way. One gets the sense that it is literally beyond their capacity to imagine how or why any intelligent person could possibly not see thing the way they do.

The new atheists are frequently accused of a rather breathtaking and condescending form of arrogance in claiming to understand and diagnose the “disease” that is religion, but for me, their arrogance is most obvious in their implicit view of the history of human thought and experience. They really do portray themselves as representing the absolute pinnacle of human intellectual development; they, alone, occupy the privileged position of surveying the human condition with absolute clarity, free from the superstitious fantasies that have clouded the judgment of the overwhelming majority of human beings who have ever inhabited the planet.

C.S. Lewis once said that one of the things he found most troubling as an atheist was the view he was forced to take with respect to how others think. In Mere Christianity, he says:

If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view.

The “Four Horsemen,” it seems, have no such misgivings. They simply know the truth; the only issue is how to break the news to the rest of us - how to relieve us of our delusions in the most painless manner and avoid stoking the flames of religiously-fueled violence.

In each of the new atheists’ books that I’ve read, the author expresses astonishment at how religious people can claim to have certainty about their beliefs. After reading their books, observing a few of them in debates, and now my brief exposure to their discussion amongst themselves, I can only wonder where the epistemological humility they plead for from religious folks is. John Stackhouse, in a word of warning to those tempted toward claims of certainty in the arena of faith, has recently posted on the importance of recognizing the epistemic limitations faced by all human beings, religious or not. Here’s a summary passage:

This is, finally, the point of it all. We Christians “live by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7)—and so does everybody else, actually, since no human being can transcend our common situation of epistemic finitude. In fact, if we enjoyed all the certainty (in the former sense) that some Christians say we should claim, well, then, we wouldn’t need faith anymore. We would just know things, and we would know that we were entirely right about them.

I think that a little more humility would be a very good thing, on both sides of the atheist/theist divide. We simply are not the sort of creatures who can know, with 100% certainty, that we are right - especially when it comes to metaphysical questions of meaning and purpose. A kind of “fortress mentality” is as evident in “The Four Horsemen” as it is in the most dogmatic circles of religious fundamentalism. In response to the ambiguities and complexities of the real world, both retreat to the safety of certainty, simply declaring (louder and more angrily if necessary) that they are right and everyone else is wrong.

The problem is that the certainty being sought and claimed (on both sides) is illusory. As Stackhouse reminds us, it simply is not possible to transcend the inherent limitations of being human. A wider appreciation of this truth could lead to the welcome recognition that conviction and commitment can be held and articulated humbly and graciously, without demonizing, ridiculing, or questioning the intelligence of those who do not share it.

Over the course of my thesis research over the last year or so, I have come across a lot of different reasons for doubting the existence of God. One major stumbling block for those who reject Christianity is those parts of the Bible which seem to justify actions that we consider to be culturally backward, confusing, and irrelevant or, even worse, immoral. And I think that most Christians, if they’re honest, will agree that there are parts of the Bible that they find baffling, frustrating, or, possibly, just plain offensive.

A friend and I were in Alberta for a speaking engagement this past weekend and one of the biblical figures we focused on in one session was Moses. Most people are fairly familiar with Moses and the cluster of stories in his life which are prominent components of our biblical imagination (scenes like the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, the receiving of the Ten Commandments, etc). One feature of Moses’ journey that is, perhaps, less well-known is the way in which he boldly interceded to God on behalf of his people when God seemed ready to wipe them out for their idolatry. Moses repeatedly calls on God to remember what he promised, to consider what the other nations would think, to turn away from his anger and show mercy (Ex. 32:9-14; 33:12-17).

Surprisingly, God relents. Moses’ courage and boldness appear to earn him God’s favour in a manner  somewhat analogous to how Job’s blunt expressions of confusion and outrage at his misfortune led God to ultimately declare that he, and not his friends with their neat and tidy religious formulas explaining human suffering, had spoken rightly of God (Job 42:7-10). In both cases, confusion, ambiguity, and outrage were presented to God honestly and unapologetically. In both cases, it seems that God was less interested in human beings pretending that God’s actions and intentions were perfectly obvious, transparent, and morally praiseworthy from a human perspective than he was in an honest acknowledgment of the pain and offense that walking with him can and does cause.

I’ve been reading Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God over the last week or so. Here’s what he has to say about what to think when we come across a passage in Scripture that we find outrageous:

To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you…. Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? … Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination.

In other words, one skeptical assumption worth challenging is that if God exists and chooses to reveal himself to human beings, he is obliged to do so in a way that will simply confirm and validate our (profoundly historically and culturally conditioned) conceptions of what is good, admirable, and admissible.

On one level, I don’t find this much easier to accept than an atheist or an agnostic. I don’t find the idea that my moral conceptions might not represent the last (or at least the best thus far!) word on the question of what God is like to be a particularly comforting or comfortable one. But if I take seriously the fact that human beings are finite and fallen creatures, whose only access to reality is profoundly shaped (in positive and negative ways) by a whole host of historical, cultural, and psychological factors, then it makes sense to say that my vantage point might not be the plumbline which these matters are adjudicated.

In one of my philosophy classes in university, a professor told the story of a friend of his who was a committed Christian and a celibate homosexual. When my professor asked his friend if he agreed with the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality, his friend said that he did not. This, my professor found truly baffling. How could he possibly choose to commit to a religious tradition when he was in such obvious disagreement with it on a matter as important as his sexual identity? His friend said that Christianity made sense of enough important elements of his experience, and that God had proven faithful enough over the years that he had learned to trust and yield to him when it came to matters that he disagreed with. His confusion and disagreement with God were preserved within the context of faith, and with the understanding that it is at least possible that human conceptions of what is right and wrong might require modification.

My professor obviously found this pretty difficult to stomach. What, after all, could be more important than being true to one’s own beliefs? If anything is sacred in our post-Christian Western culture it is the individual’s freedom to decide what is true and meaningful for themselves. Yet I got the sense that he had a deep respect for his friend, as well. His friend’s position was not inconsistent or absurd. It simply took seriously the fact that human beings don’t see the whole picture and exhibited a conviction that faith does not require us to sacrifice our honesty - before God or before each other.

I find that facing the implications of the inherent limitation of the human condition - even when it comes to our moral intuitions - it is somewhat liberating in a strange sort of way. I don’t have to pretend that I love everything in the Bible, nor do I have to pretend that God’s way of acting in the world makes obvious sense and demands nothing but my reflexive and unthinking praise. Whatever else may be going on in the stories of how Moses and Job related to God, it seems that one important lesson is that God is not put off by human doubt, anger - even offense - in response to their understanding of how he is working in the world.

There are few things better than getting free books. Last week a friend of mine happened to find himself helping clean out the basement of James Houston (one of the founders of Regent College) and was rewarded with a stack of books for his troubles, some of which, due to my friend’s generosity, found their way into my hands. Among these books is Houston’s two-volume compilation of various “letters of faith”written down through the ages and arranged into a year-long collection of daily readings.

Today’s letter was written in June, 1876 by the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky to V.A. Alekseyev, a soloist with the Marinsky theatre orchestra. The letter was written prior to Dostoevsky’s completion of his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, in which the Grand Inquisitor condemns Jesus’ failure to turn stones into bread in response to the devil’s temptation in the wilderness (Mat. 4:2-4). Dostoevsky strongly resisted the idea that once the material needs of human beings were met, all of their problems would thereby be solved. It is in the context of his resistance of “European Socialism” that the letter containing this excerpt was written:

If the question had been simply one of satisfying Christ’s hunger, would there have been any reason to broach the subject of man’s spiritual nature in general? Besides, Christ did not have to wait for the Devil’s advice on how to obtain bread. He could have obtained it before if He had chosen to. By the way, remember Darwin’s and other contemporary theories about man’s descent from the ape. Without going into any theories, Christ declares directly that, besides belonging to the animal world, man also belongs to the spiritual world. Well then, it does not really matter what man’s origins are (the Bible does not explain how God molded him out of clay or carved him out of stone), but it does say that God breathed life into him. (But what is bad is that by sinning man can once again turn into a beast.)

What I found fascinating (and refreshing) about this letter was Dostoevsky’s almost casual treatment Darwin’s theory of human origins. He seems to not much care - indeed he assumes - that human beings are a part of the “animal world.” How God brought human beings into existence seems to be of little concern to him. It is obvious to Dostoevsky (as it is to most people) that while human beings are similar to animals in many respect, they are different in obvious and important ways. God breathed something different into human beings - something to which we are accountable to nourish and cultivate. Failure to do this, according to Dostoevsky, represents a return to the beastly part of us which we are called to transcend.

I couldn’t help but compare Dostoevsky’s understanding of the significance Darwinian evolution to the following passage from the opening pages of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene:

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?’ Living organisms had existed on earth for, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.

The difference between the two passages and their assessment of Darwinian evolution is remarkable. For Dostoevsky (who is writing, it is to be remembered, only a decade or so after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species), the mechanics of human origins are almost incidental; what is important - what is conveyed by Christ’s statement “man does not live by bread alone” - is that human beings have a destiny that goes beyond the material, the animalistic.

For Dawkins, Darwin’s theory represents a new kind of Copernican revolution in human understanding which fundamentally reorients our conceptions of all important questions. Elsewhere, Dawkins approvingly quotes zoologist G.G. Simpson who, in a discussion of such questions as “what are human beings for?” and “what is the meaning of life?” claimed that “all attempts to answer that question before 1859 [the year of the Origin's publication] are worthless and we will be better off if we ignore them completely.” Dawkins sees Darwin’s theory as the hinge upon which the history of human understanding turns.

Dostoevsky, on the other hand, sees it as an unexceptional reminder that we are simultaneously “of the earth” and made for a future that goes beyond our present experience of it. While Dawkins feels compelled to write off most of the history of human reflection upon life’s most important questions as primitive, unenlightened nonsense (although he’s not entirely consistent here - at other points Dawkins is quite clear that on moral and political issues, we cannot expect much help from Darwinian evolution), Dostoevsky is perfectly able and willing, apparently, to incorporate new discoveries within an overall framework which makes sense of fundamental human needs and capacities and which has the happy benefit of not rendering thousands of years of reflection on important questions “irrelevant.”

That’s a pretty important benefit, in my estimation.

Last Thursday I took my kids with me to our church’s Maundy Thursday service. I wasn’t really sure how they would react - it is, after all, a fairly somber and dark service, whose purpose is to lead its participants through the fearful events of Jesus’ final days. I had some reservations about even exposing a couple of impressionable six-year-olds to the full weight of the Easter story, but my apprehension intensified when they informed me, after watching a steady stream of volunteers moving to the front to read the selected Scripture readings, that they wanted to read one too.

Initially, I was fairly reluctant to let them go up. First, while their reading is pretty good for grade one (in my unbiased opinion), there were a handful of words that I was fairly certain they had never seen before and would likely be unable to read. Second, the readings were, well, focused on Jesus’ crucifixion - not exactly PG material, to put it mildly. All in all, it didn’t seem like a great idea.

But two six-year-olds loudly whining about not being allowed to go read at the front in the middle of what is supposed to be a quiet and somber ceremony didn’t seem like a great idea either, so I hastily leafed through the program, desperately searching for the shortest of the fourteen readings (preferably, containing the fewest foreign words!) for the kids to read. I found one that was a mere paragraph long and it was agreed that they would each read two sentences and then blow out the candle together. Peace and quiet was preserved.

And so, I found myself in the somewhat unexpected position of standing at the front of the room, coaching my beaming twins through a rather grim Easter reading which included such words as “Golgotha,” “skull,” “Nazarene,” and “crucified” followed by the the blowing out of a candle, symbolizing the darkness of that horrible day when God subjected himself to the worst that human beings could inflict upon him. They did a great job, but I was very relieved when their task was completed. I was also very curious to find out about their impressions of the service. What does a six-year-old think about narrating an execution scene for a subdued gathering in a dimly lit church basement?

Turns out, they didn’t have much to say. When I asked them what they thought as we were driving home they didn’t seem terribly interested in talking about it in much depth. They probably just enjoyed the opportunity to read in public and the attention that it garnered. But I was curious - I wanted to know what they made of the idea that for some bizarre reason Jesus’ death is something that is remembered and celebrated in the religious tradition of which they and their parents are a part. When I pressed them a little more, both simply said something to the effect of “I wish Jesus didn’t have to die.”

Today I was reading W. Waite Willis’s Theism, Atheism, and the Doctrine of the Trinity and came across the following paragraph, summarizing Jürgen Moltmann’s view of the significance of Jesus’ final hours:

Christian theology becomes relevant only when it takes the theodicy question as an “absolute presupposition,” only “when it accepts this solidarity with present suffering.” Because these issues are found in the heart of the Christian faith itself, in the crucifixion of Jesus and his dying cry, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, Christian theology must be done “within earshot” of the cross. “All Christian theology and all Christian life,” Moltmann says, “is basically an answer to the question which Jesus asked as he died.”

Six-year-olds know, I think, that something is wrong with the world. They may not be able to use important-sounding words like “theodicy,” but they seem to have some idea that things aren’t as they ought to be, and that something needs to be done about this. They know that bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it, and vice versa; they know that God doesn’t act in ways that are as obvious as we might like; they know that prayers aren’t always answered as we would prefer. They know that the world needs fixing.

A couple of years ago one of the kids’ preschool friends was killed in a tragic traffic accident and they asked about him as we were getting out of the car after the service on Thursday. This boy’s death has left a deep impression on them. It doesn’t seem right that such permanent loss could be the result of ordinary everyday activities like getting groceries, crossing streets, forgetting to look both ways just once before running toward dad at the end of the day. Nevertheless, they seem satisfied with the idea that their friend will “rose” like Jesus did some day. Resurrection has to be enough - for them, and for all of us - because nothing else will do.

I found myself thinking about last Thursday frequently over the course of Easter weekend. I, too, wish Jesus didn’t have to die. But the world does need “fixing,” and fixing of a more complete and lasting kind than anything we are able to conjure up on our own. Some day my kids will probably ask me why God didn’t just fix the world some other way - a way that didn’t involve nasty words like “Golgotha” and “crucified.” And I’m not sure I’ll have a neat and tidy answer to give them. I’ll probably say something like, “whatever we might think of the way God has chosen to redeem his world, it remains his way - the way he has chosen to do it.” A God whose defeat of evil involves entering and experiencing it himself will likely always seem a somewhat strange one, but it’s what he has done. Out of death comes life; out of darkness comes light.

Thanks be to God.