12.19.09
Posted in Religion, Spirituality at 8:52 pm by Karl
Today is a Sabbath unlike most of the many others I’ve spent since 1969. If memory serves, my church, Sligo Church, has failed to hold services on only two or three Sabbaths in the last 40 years due to inclement weather. So today’s closure due to heavy snowfall is a relatively rare event.
As I watch the snow pile up—15″ to 19″on the sunroom roof just beneath my daughter’s old bedroom window—I am multi-tasking: oscillating between watching the Loma Linda University Church’s broadcast, skimming an article in The Times Literary Supplement‘s online site (Times Online), and making these journal notations. Though seemingly incongruous these varied activities in their way help heighten my appreciation of Sabbath rest in general and this Sabbath in particular. How so?
On this day when I’m free of compulsion to do work of any kind, by virtue of these varied activities I have serendipitously lighted on several sources that have each contributed to my spiritual enrichment. The absence of the need to keep some appointment or complete some imposed or voluntarily assumed task liberates my mind to wander anywhere it pleases, alighting on ideas that resonate or fascinate at the given moment in time.
I serendipitously found one such fascinating idea or insight in the 18th December 2009 essay by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in the aforementioned Times Online. Sacks’ essay is titled, “Credo: Thank God for the Courage to Live with Uncertainty” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6962016.ece.
I consider the piece a type of “Psalm of Thanksgiving:” successive paragraphs begin:
I thank Him for the love that has filled our home… I thank Him for the blessing of grandchildren… I thank Him for those rare souls who lift us when we are laid low… I thank Him for the gift of being born a Jew…
The two “verses” of the psalm that I find so resonant and fascinating then follow:
I thank Him for the atheists and agnostics who keep believers from believing the unbelievable, forcing us to prove our faith by the beauty and grace we bring into the world…
I thank Him for the gift of faith, which taught me to see the dazzling goodness and grace that surround us if only we open our eyes and minds. I thank Him for helping me to understand that faith is not certainty but the courage to live with uncertainty, not a destination but the journey itself…
This last sentence puts me in mind of Hebrews 11:1; in the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible it reads:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for the evidence of things not seen.
There’s an unmatched lyrical, poetic quality to the KJV version. But the same text in Today’s English Version (TEV) gives it a little ironic twist that is echoed in the sentiment expressed in the last sentence in the above excerpt from Sacks’ essay:
To have faith is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see (Heb. 11:1, TEV).
Amen!
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11.09.09
Posted in Religion, Spirituality at 9:37 pm by Karl
Since October 24, the Believers & Doubters group have been discussing Karen Armstrong’s most recently released book, The Case for God. Over the course of the group’s study I’ll occasionally post my interpretation and understanding of what she has to say and my reactions based on this understanding.
Just prior to starting in on The Case for God I finished reading Armstrong’s fascinating and informative memoir, The Spiral Staircase. It’s a record of Armstrong’s spiritual journey and is useful, if not indispensable, background to understanding the interpretative framework she employs in writing about religion generally and the subject of this study in particular. This book is quite timely coming at a time when books by prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have achieved best seller status.
Following is what I take away from my reading of the introduction to The Case for God. It sets the tone and framework for the chapters which follow.
1. Our talk about God today is often rather facile. Religion is complex. For one thing, it’s inaccurate to call God the Supreme Being, for he’s not a being at all, she says. People of God will admit that God is transcendent, but we scarcely know what this means. Sages preferred to say God was “Nothing”–a way for them to express the mystery that God is, the notion that God was not just another being. Armstrong says that because we modern people have access to written scriptures and other religious writings mystery is alien to us while premoderns found it quite hospitable.
2. Premodern cultures (i.e. prior to the 17th century) had two ways of thinking about, speaking or acquiring knowledge: mythos and logos (reason), as the Greeks referred to them. Logos was necessary for survival while mythos helped them cope with those aspects of the human predicament that were outside the capability of mythos. According to Armstrong, myth was not something primarily to be believed because it was true. Rather it was something to be acted out–a program of action. Put into practice, myths can tell us something profoundly true about ourselves as human beings.
3. Like myth, religion was not something that premodern cultures thought about but something they did. For Daoists, for example, religion was a “knack” that they acquired through constant practice. Like any knack or skill religion requires practice and as such some people will be better at it than others.
4. Religious knowledge became primarily theoretical beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries. This is when theologians began to adopt the criteria and methods of science applied to religion. The meaning of “belief” changes to become “credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines.”
5. This rationalized interpretive approach to religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. Fundamentalism, the literalistic reading of scripture, is an effort at producing rational, scientific faith.
6. Armstrong believes that the “new atheists” are reacting to a fundamentalist conception of religion, thereby weakening their critique, because fundamentalism is a “defiantly unorthodox form of faith.” These new atheists are not radical enough, Armstrong avers. In support of which she makes the remarkable statement that “Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and there is ‘nothing’ out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God’s transcendence.”
As I understand her position, Armstrong does not deny the reality of God. She in fact says that “If a conventional idea of God (which I take to include the concept of a personal God, which she doesn’t subscribe to) inspires empathy and respect for all others, it is doing its job…Because God is infinite, nobody can have the last word…Quarreling about religion is counterproductive…”
Religious as well as secular people have both lost sight of the value of unknowing, says Armstrong. Both need to take account of the long religious tradition of recognizing the limits of our knowledge and the value of reticence, silence and awe–a sentiment with which I heartily agree.
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11.09.08
Posted in Spirituality at 9:32 pm by Chris
One of the attractive features of our Believers and Doubters class is its capability and courage to discuss any topic. We do a wonderful job in fusing faith, the WORD, and personal experience to strengthen one’s spiritual experience. Last Sabbath was no different with the exception of our discussion of the nature of mankind. Our discussion continued to marinate in my mind with an unsettledness. I thought I would like to use the forum of our blog to continue the discussion.
Frankly, I thought that the “wickedness of man” status was settled doctrine as stated by Lewis. Both the Old and New Testaments, all Christian creeds, and confessions declare that “there is no good in us” either implicitly, or explicitly. When the divine measuring stick is applied, we always come up short.
What makes the Gospel “Good News” is that a remedy has been found for our dire spiritual diagnosis. The story of John 3 with Nicodemus is my favorite illustration of this doctrine.
I look forward to your comments to further clarify a varied viewpoint on this issue.
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