During my three years of seminary, my nagging question was,
“Is Christianity Intellectually Respectable?” Growing up, I learned that the
highest calling was to be a ruthlessly skeptical intellectual who delights in
tearing down the pretensions and falsehoods of tradition. Then, I had a
conversion experience and returned to my Christian Faith during college. How
would intellect and faith hang together in one soul? Seminary - an academic
gathering of people of Faith - seemed like a good place to figure this
out.
The easiest answer to my question was to simply say that
faith is a private feeling that is to be respected but not held to account by
reason or other systems of understanding the world. This might be called the
“live and let live” approach. Faith – however – is not only private. It is
public. It relies on language, narrative, tradition, and practices that take up
space in the world, make claims on behavior and can be shared between people. If
it were purely private it would be impossible to communicate the Faith one
person to another.
Much has been written about the origins of the “live and let
live” approach in Western Culture. In part, it comes from the fear that
religious claims tend to be held as absolute and therefore lead inevitably to
conflict and violence unless they are made private and relative. While based on
the experience of religious warfare in Europe during the 17th
Century, this point of view strategically ignores the spiritual resources that
support sobriety, humility, and non-violence within the Christian Faith.
The second answer to my question is embedded in the example above;
i.e. ignore the full texture of the Faith and reduce it to a simple punch line,
such as “Religion leads to violence.” I will call this the “reductionist
approach” where we either dismiss Christianity in a brutal summation or make
Christianity intellectually respectable by reducing it to another discipline of
thought, which has wide appeal and public credibility. For example: “Faith is
best explained by psychology.” Freud reduced thousands of years of religious
development to the oceanic feeling we vaguely recall from our mother’s womb. Or
we could use Marx; “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”
The problems with reductionism are many. At its best
reductions are suggestive. Basically we are taking one disputed discipline and
applying it to another disputed discipline as if one is totally sensible and
the other is not. “All religions are the same” is another classic reduction.
Once again, all the particularities of a tradition are brushed away as if they
are disposable and the truth is somehow a separable reality underneath or
outside the particulars. It is akin to saying that we can think without
language, when, of course, we cannot. Language and thought are completely intertwined,
as is the religious experience of God and the particular tradition in which you
live your faith. It is also interesting to ask this: “When we make the judgment
‘All religions are the same,’ where am I standing?” From where do we gain that
perspective that judges all religions? It is a little like climbing one
mountain and saying, “All mountains are the same.”
What is fun for me, as an intellectual Christian, is to poke
holes in these odd habits of thought which take delight in passing judgment on
my beliefs without applying the same scrutiny to their own assumptions. Often, critics
of Faith are poorly equipped to explain their own positions or how their
perspective is also formed by a tradition as much as by some logical argument.
The ‘new atheists’ often fall into this category. They parrot arguments that
have existed since David Hume in the 17th century as if they were
freshly invented and never disputed.
Another great reduction that I hear frequently is “Science
explains everything.” The notion seems to be that science has a privileged
access to reality and that all forms of thought – poetry, literature, politics,
and religion – can be described exhaustively by math, genetics, and physics. While
I am huge fan of science and its results, this is a problematic overstatement
for both scientific and philosophical reasons. (And I rarely hear actual
scientists say it!) Put most simply, if genetics explains everything then
chemistry must explain genetics and then we should give up on chemistry too
because chemicals are made of atoms and physics explains that. So science
itself has its own reduction ad absurdum problems!
Should we explain Jane
Eyre through an equation? Will translating literature or religion into
chemistry, physics, or genetics really shed more light or exhaust the well of
meaning and treasure held in our culture and traditions? It certainly can shed
light. My dispute is with any claim to be an exhaustive or total explanation.
The problem is that folks use ‘explain’ exhaustively and
without nuance. Often the results contradict the scientific discipline of connecting
conclusions to data. For example, much of what Darwin wrote is wonderful and
true but there are real debates about natural selection, the notion that
organisms adapt to gain comparative advantage so as to pass on their genetic
material. Disputes in the science don’t seem to stop other folks from turning
natural selection into a schema that explains all human behavior. As is often
the case, the original insight gains a second life as a metaphor and enters the
culture detached from the original argument and data.
So where does this leave us?
Martin Smith famously said, “Your need for intellectual
respectability is so important to you because it protects some idea you have
about yourself. How does that self-concept give you value? What would it mean
to let go of that egoistic notion? Would it feel like dying?”
The fact seems to be that we all live in an ocean of
tradition. Our concepts, language, and practices are all mediated through
tradition and culture. They limit what we can know and how we can know it. This
is true for science and for poetry. The philosopher Otto Neurath used the metaphor
of a boat. We all live in a boat. We like to tell ourselves that our ideas and
perception are original and free, somehow floating outside of history,
tradition, and language, but really we are in boat that was handed down to us.
We also like to think we can rip up the whole boat at once and start over. In
that case, we will drown. The best we can do is learn everything we can about
our boat and tinker with it one board at a time.
What I learned about my boat is this; I can only live my
life inside the narrative I have received. The good news is that the narrative
is full of resources, contradictions, open-ended sentences, and mysteries that
make life an adventure full of growth and opportunity. The narrative can expand
and communicate with other religions and other disciplines too. What I learned
is that my boat is partly made from my family history. My mother reacted to her
Southern Baptist upbringing by moving as far as she could into liberal,
intellectual theology. That was her liberating journey, but it did not need to
be mine.
So, is Christianity Intellectually Respectable? I believe it
is, because I can give an intelligible account of my faith that is accountable
to public curiosity and humble about its own limitations. For me, this meant
sacrificing the illusion that my intellect somehow transcends tradition. Spiritually,
I needed to learn how to assent to, even submit to, my place within the flow of
ideas and history. From this primary spiritual act of assent and submission, I
have been richly blessed.
- The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
