Randal Rauser's Blog, page 151

Update on An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar

As many of you know, I’m currently writing a book for Prometheus Press with atheist Justin Schieber titled An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar: Talking about God, the Universe, and Everything. It’s been great fun to write this book with its casual banter, conversational structure, and exploration of some novel and/or under-utilized arguments.

The book is due to be released in December (and you can already preorder it at Amazon at the above link). But that means the manuscript is due to be sent to the publisher next Thursday. So while Europe’s “The Final Countdown” plays in the background, I will be taking a week’s hiatus from blogging to finish the manuscript. 

Emotions as a way to moral reflection and theological truth

A few days ago I received an email from a reader that posed a question and invited my response. With permission I’m reproducing a portion of the email. I’ll then offer a response below:

If I had to say what I have found most helpful about your work, it would be your insistence on the relevance of personal experience and the emotions in moral reasoning. (A paradigmatic example of what I am thinking of would be your descriptions of the physical hacking and bloodshed that would be involved in ANE genocide. Your posts on the subject are a large part of why I now read the conquest narratives differently than I used to.)

As you undoubtedly know, many in North American evangelicalism (the tradition I am from) are resistant to evidential value of responses (especially emotional responses) to experience.

So here’s my question: what passages would you recommend basing such a message–a message about the importance of carefully listening to the experiences of those whose experiences might challenge us–on? More generally, do you have any advice for addressing very Scripture-oriented crowds on this topic? (I guess that’s two questions!)

First off, I’m always heartened to hear that some of the 2000+ articles I’ve posted online have been of some use to somebody. I’m especially heartened to hear in this case that the positive influence extends to something near to my own heart: the role of emotion in reasoning. And the questioner is right to note that many evangelicals — and many others besides — exhibit a troubling skepticism toward the value of emotion in moral reasoning.

I have always sought to challenge that assumption by basing my own moral analysis on intuitive reflection rooted in richly detailed and moving narratives. Is it possible that God command a genocide? Before we rush to answer that question, let’s paint a detailed picture of what a genocide would look like and then let that content inform our subsequent reflections. Is it possible that God could command a person face capital punishment by being pelted to death with rocks? Again, let’s paint a detailed picture of what a stoning would look like and then let that content inform our subsequent reflections.

The other day when I was speaking in Louisville one of the attendees came up to me and said that he had heard me speak before. It was November, 2010 at the annual conference for the Evangelical Theological Society and I was giving a paper on biblical violence. He recalled that I had shared a story of a woman in our own day who had committed a heinous act to her child under the misbegotten belief that God had commanded it. What is more, he also remembered that I had grown emotional whilst relaying the narrative. Finally, he recalled that at that moment, the entire mood in the room changed as many people were led to consider a moral and theological issue from the reality of concrete reflection on real-life cases.

With that in mind, we can turn back to the evangelicals who are skeptical of the place of emotion in informing our moral intuitions and thus our reasoning generally. How might we begin to challenge their assumptions, and in particular to do so within the confines of a sermon?

I have no idea how one might construct a sermon to that end. But I can make some general observations on the way that story regularly serves within scripture by appealing to our emotions as a way to truth.

Consider, for example, the case of 2 Samuel 12, a famous incident in which Nathan the Prophet confronts David over his sin of committing adultery with Bathsheba and killing her husband. Note how Nathan engages with David: he tells an emotional story about a cruel rich man who stole the sheep of a poor neighbor. Here is David’s response:

“5 David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, ‘As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this must die! 6 He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.'” 

It is at this point that Nathan points his long, bony finger (as I envision it) at David and in his raspy prophet’s voice, he growls: “You are that man!”

In a moment David is confronted with the horror of his sin, the depth of his hypocrisy, and the breadth of his self-deception. His flashes of rage are now turned in on himself as David melts in guilt and shame.

There are many things one might draw from this story, but one undeniable fact (so it seems to me) is that the appeal to emotion through narrative provides new insights into our moral standing. Sometimes, as with Nathan’s story, the narrative still requires the storyteller to provide an application (you are that man!). But other times, bare reflection on an event is sufficient to offer data for further reflection (as in reflection on the nature of genocide or stoning).

The story of Nathan and David is a negative one. But let me now turn to a positive example, one that comes from perhaps the most beloved of Jesus’ parables: the story of the Prodigal Son. Countless generations have been moved to tears by the narrative, in particular the stunning image of a regal, middle eastern father raising his robes to run toward his beloved, wayward son. Could God really be like this? The key point is that the emotions that are stirred by this kind of storytelling do not merely “play on the emotions” and thereby obscure hard theological truths. Rather, they become the very means by which those truths are revealed to us in profound new ways.

Just as Jesus communicated powerfully through emotional stories that appeal to emotions, so we are called to do so as well. To illustrate the point, I’ve typed up three pages from Philip Yancey’s 1997 book What’s So Amazing About Grace? in which he offers a rich and provocative retelling of the story of the Prodigal Son. The story is meant to appeal to our emotions, but again, it does so not as a way of obscuring theological truth, but rather as a way of unveiling it. Here’s the parable:

A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old-fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. ‘I hate you!’ she screams at her father when he knocks on the door of her room after an argument, and that night she acts on a plan she has mentally rehearsed scores of times. She runs away.

She has visited Detroit only once before, on a bus trip with her church youth group to watch the Tigers play. Because newspapers in Traverse City report in lurid detail the gangs, the drugs, and the violence in downtown Detroit, she concludes that is probably the last place her parents will look for her. California, maybe, or Florida, but not Detroit.

Her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she’s ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her some pills that make her feel better than she’s ever felt before. She was right all along, she decides: her parents were keeping her from all the fun.

The good life continues for a month, two months, a year. The man with the big car—she calls him “Boss” – teaches her a few things that men like. Since she’s underage, men pay a premium for her. She lives in a penthouse, and orders room service whenever she wants. Occasionally she thinks about the folks back home, but their lives now seem so boring and provincial that she can hardly believe she grew up there.

She has a brief scare when she sees her picture printed on the back of a milk carton with the headline ‘Have you seen this child?’ By by now she has blond hair, and with all the makeup and body-piercing jewelery she wears, nobody would mistake her for a child. Besides, most of her friends are runaways, and nobody squeals in Detroit.

After a year the first sallow signs of illness appear and it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean. These days, we can’t mess around, he growls, and before she knows it she’s out on the street without a penny to her name. She still turns a couple of tricks a night, but they don’t pay much, and all the money goes to support her habit. When winter blows in she finds herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. ‘Sleeping’ is the wrong word—a teenage girl at night in downtown Detroit can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens.

One night as she lies awake listening for footsteps, all of a sudden everything about her life looks different. She no longer feels like a woman of the world. She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She begins to whimper. Her pockets are empty and she’s hungry. She needs a fix. She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she’s piled atop her coat. Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills her mind: of May in Traverse City, when a million cherry trees bloom at once, with her golden retriever dashing through the rows and rows of blossomy trees in chase of a tennis ball.

God, why did I leave, she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart. My dog back home eats better than I do now. She’s sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home.

Three straight phone calls, three straight connections with the answering machine. She hangs up without leaving a message the first two times, but the third time she says, ‘Dad, Mom, it’s me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I’m catching a bus up your way, and it’ll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you’re not there, well, I guess I’ll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada.’

It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City, and during that time she realizes the flaws in her plan. What if her parents are out of town and miss the message? Shouldn’t she have waited another day or so until she could talk  to them/ And even if they are home, they probably wrote her off as dead long ago. She should have given them some time to overcome the shock.

Her thoughts bounce back and forth between these worries and the speech she is preparing for her father. ‘Dad, I’m sorry. I know I was wrong. It’s not your fault; it’s all mine. Dad, can you forgive me?’ She says the words over and over, her throat tightening even as she rehearses them. She hasn’t apologized to anyone in years.

The bus has been driving with lights on since Bay City. Tiny snowflakes hit the pavement rubbed worn by thousands of tires and the asphalt streams. She’s forgotten how dark it gets at night out here. A deer darts across the road and the bus swerves. Every so often, a billboard. A sing posting the mileage to Traverse City. Oh, God.

When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, ‘Fifteen minutes, folks. That’s all we have here.’ Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She checks herself in a compact mirror, smooths her hair, and licks the lipstick off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips, and wonders if her parents will notice. If they’re there.

She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect. Not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepare her for what she sees. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of forty brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to boot. They’re all wearing goofy party hats and blowing noise-makers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a computer-generated banner that reads ‘Welcome home!’

Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad. She stares out through the tears quivering in her eyes like hot mercury and begins the memorized speech, ‘Dad, I’m sorry. I know…’

He interrupts her. ‘Hush, child. We’ve got no time for that. No time for apologies. You’ll be late for the party. A banquet’s waiting for you at home.”(49-51)

To be honest, I’ve never met a Christian who denied that the appeal to emotions in stories like this can be a powerful means to unveil truth. But if we can appeal to emotions here to provide insights into profound truth, then presumably it is possible to do so in other circumstances as well. And that could even include instances that would provide new content which might force us to reexamine some traditional readings of popular biblical passages.

The most blatant case of a company man apologist

A few years ago I wrote an article titled “Apologetics and the Company Man Image” in which I noted that apologists often suffer from a highly biased approach to the defense of their subject matter. I wrote:

“The problem with company men, as we all know, is that they don’t give a balanced account of the world. They have a carefully selected list of facts (or “facts”) which they use skillfully to vindicate their assumptions.”

Apologetic company men can be brilliant, but their highly motivated reasoning and one-sided case building process provide a distorted picture of the world, one that can obscure the truth.

Company man apologetics is not simply a tendency among Christian apologists. One finds it across the spectrum of apologists: Muslim, atheist, Mormon, etc. One also finds it in political punditry.

And that brings me to the case of Jeffrey Lord, a very intelligent, seemingly irenic pundit who is also a committed defender of Donald Trump. Lord is a regular guest on CNN, and he can always be counted on to defend Trump: whatever the demagogue says or does, Lord always has a ready defense.

Lord’s company man apologetics tumbled to a truly absurd nadir yesterday when he “doubled down” (as any good Trump apologist does) by resolutely insisting that Trump’s inflammatory and racist statements about the “Mexican” judge were, in fact, trenchant criticisms of racism.

Watch this twenty minute clip as Lord continues to insist that black really is white in front of a panel of baffled pundits:

The Pastafarians have infiltrated my daughter’s school

The FSM in the Flesh … or is it in the Semolina? (Image from the FSM website: Veganza.org)

The other day my daughter reported that three boys in her junior high class came to school wearing colanders on their head and smugly declaring themselves devotees of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I’ve been following Bobby Henderson’s satirical new religion for the better part of the last decade (it was launched in 2005) and I’ve been surprised with the way the skeptic and atheist communities across North America have adopted it.

(Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised: Henderson’s best-selling 2005 book The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is an engaging and cleverly written satirical critique of intelligent design theory (the narrow target) and religious doctrine and practice (the broad target).)

Clever though Henderson’s satire may be, typically those who want to join the fun by counting themselves “Pastafarians” are oblivious to the origins of the FSM in the debates over intelligent design theory. Even worse, they are equally oblivious to the way a clever satire can devolve into ignorant caricature of complex and nuanced traditions.

As for those three junior high neophytes of the new religion, alas, they were forced to remove their colanders in third period by an indignant teacher. Time to call the civil rights attorney!

Muhammad Ali on the contrast between Islam and Christianity

I had a great time speaking this past weekend at Daylight Church in Louisville, KY. During my time there, the favorite son of Louisville, Muhammad Ali, passed away at the age of 74. (But you already knew that.) And so, after my talks on Saturday we braved the crowds and visited the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville. As you can imagine, the place was packed and included not only the faithful and the curious, but also abundant news trucks and reporters from CNN, MSNBC, etc.

As I gazed through the fascinating and revealing displays, my eyes lighted upon a wall featuring reproductions of Ali’s various writings and doodles. Particularly intriguing (and sobering) for this Christian theologian was the man’s contrast between Islam and Christianity. As you can see, it speaks for itself.

Speaking in Louisville

Today through Sunday I’ll be in Louisville, KY to speak at Daylight Church culminating their “I Object!” series. I’ll be doing two talks tomorrow on the Bible and violence followed by a Sunday morning sermon. So if you’re in the area, drop by.

 

Does God demand love under threat of damnation?

A reader emailed the following question to me. With permission, I’m reproducing and responding to the question here:

One recurring thought I keep having that I’d be interested in reading your thoughts on relates to the nature of salvation vs punishment and the way in which Scripture seems to call us to respond to God. Now, as I read it:

1. We are sinful/flawed human beings that require God’s mercy and love to save us.

2. We are told that if we don’t accept that love & mercy, then horrible eternal fate awaits us as due penalty for our sins/rejection of God’s love

3. We are then also commanded to love God.

Now, this may not be an ideal analogy – but please bear with me. Suppose I have for instance, a daughter. She’s working somewhere, and a man she’s never met before and has no reason to know or trust approaches her and tells her that he loves her, and will provide her a wonderful future – if she loves him in return. This would be odd enough on the surface. But then – suppose this man followed up with the provision that were she not to love him and respond to his love favorably, he would return for her and torture her for the remainder of her existence (I suppose a factor here is that in the Christian sense, the torture would perhaps be eternal, depending on one’s view of ECT/etc.)

Our gut level, natural reaction would be to consider this person a sociopath and a danger. While I’m not leveling such an accusation about God, by any means, the broader point is that our human nature naturally doesn’t have a “love” reaction to such things. It feels contrary to the concept of love and supreme grace. My objection isn’t that sin shouldn’t have consequences, or that humans don’t/shouldn’t have free will. But it seems as though the traditional Christian view is that we are supposed to have a loving and grateful response to what is a horrific construct.

Now, one could accept that this is simply the unpleasant reality and respond to it – believe it, repent, and do what one believes is congruent with living out the Christian faith, but we are also commanded to “love” God. Which means that we don’t have the option of simply viewing it as a reality, we are also supposed to have a loving response to a figure that presented us with a “turn or burn” reality. I liken it to someone living under rulers they do not trust the character of, or chose, but continue to abide by their laws and edicts. They may well comply – but their heart response is unlikely to be that of love. It would be more akin to fearful submission – something that the Scriptures also seem to speak against, including warnings in Revelation and other places that the “weak” and the “fearful” will face wrath.

This is a common objection or concern as regards Christian theism. It seems to me that the objection is two-fold. To begin with, we have the initial problem that love cannot be coerced/forced/commanded. And yet, this is precisely what God seems to demand of us. To make matters worse, God then threatens us with damnation should we fail to love him. But threats are apt to make individuals less likely to love, not more. Consequently, God’s forceful demands and threats leave the human in a seemingly impossible predicament.

You will like the dessert … or else!

You probably don’t need another analogy to sense the problem here, but here is one anyway. Imagine that you’re over at a friend’s house for dinner when he says: “I made something new for dessert.” Then his expression darkens: “And you will like it.”

You’d think that was a strange demand. After all, you may like the dessert and you may not. But it seems unreasonable to demand that you’ll like it. Taste doesn’t work like that.

To make matters worse, your host then pulls out a shotgun and points it at your head. “And if you don’t like it I’ll blow your head off!” he barks. Now you’d be even less likely to enjoy the dessert. Indeed, as long as a gun is pointed at your head you’d be unlikely to enjoy eating much of anything.

Mutatis mutandis for a divine being who demands that we love him or face an eternity on a cosmic rotisserie.

So what can be said in reply?

God as Hound of Heaven

Let’s begin with with a definition: Just what do we mean when we say “God”? I’ll tell you what I mean. I mean that being than which none greater can be conceived, the maximally good, most perfect person who is the source of love and goodness. Since I believe this is who God is, I reject any picture of God as commanding love under the punitive threat of damnation.

But that is not the only point at which the objector’s picture is askew. The objector also seems to view the love of God as, to some degree, arbitrary, like that strange suitor who appears out of nowhere to demand the love and fidelity of a young woman. But God is not merely a strange suitor who appears out of the mist and demands our allegiance. Rather, as I said, he is the ultimate source of love and goodness and as Augustine said, our hearts are restless until they rest in him. He pursues us so we may find fulfillment in him, the source of all life.

As for hell, I view it not as an arbitrary punitive measure imposed on those who refuse to submit to this arbitrary interloper. Rather, hell is the predictable consequence of self-imposed wretchedness endured by those who reject the life that is offered to them.

Think, for example, of the addict who willfully rejects the entreaties of loved ones to return home to shelter, warmth, fellowship and food, preferring instead the misery of life on the cold, dark street. The life endured is a living hell, but it is one self-imposed and most emphatically is not the arbitrary punitive imposition of the bereaved family members. That is how I view hell.

The picture of God that I’ve described here answers the objection presented. And it is not idiosyncratic. Rather, it represents a mainstream view — and I believe the correct view — of God in the Christian tradition, one that is famously summarized in Francis Thompson’s iconic poem, “The Hound of Heaven.”

95. The Problem of God-Breathed Violence

Non-Violent Randal Rauser Picture

Over the last several years I’ve reflected, written, and spoken extensively on the problem of biblical violence. So when I was recently invited to present a devotional at a board meeting, of course I decided to talk about the Bible and violence.

In this episode of The Tentative Apologist Podcast I read that devotional reflection as a starting point for further reflection on this critically important topic.

TWU Today Archives Part 6: Would Jesus smoke a doobie?

I wrote this article for the TWU Today Newspaper back in the spring of 1996. The topic was a timely one for me as I had just interviewed Mark Emery as my subject for a class I was taking in culture change. In the class we were assigned the task of interviewing somebody who was aiming to change the culture. I suspect most people would have interviewed a pastor or Christian social worker. I decided to think outside the box by interviewing Emery, an avowed anarchist who was devoted to the abolition of Canada’s marijuana laws. So I called him up and scheduled an appointment. Emery had a little shop in Gas Town (a trendy, gentrified neighborhood in downtown Vancouver). Twenty years ago selling merchandise linked to marijuana and hash was far more provocative than it is now, and the police were keeping a close eye on Emery. He has since gone on to lead a very public life as an activist. You can read more about him at his substantial Wikipedia article.

Here is the question. There are many practices that may not be physiologically good for the body including the drinking of a Coke or a beer, the eating of cheesecake or Doritos, the smoking of a pipe or a cigar. And yet, in moderation we consider these socially acceptable behaviors. What is more, in the interests of developing relationships with others, we might even partake in the ingestion of substances that we would usually avoid. If my new friend offers me a Coke, for example, I’ll accept it as a matter of social propriety, even though I regularly avoid soft drinks.

If that is the case, what about the recreational use of marijuana? Imagine you’re in a jurisdiction where the use of marijuana is legal and your new friend offers you a joint instead of a Coke. Would you accept or decline? And if the latter, would your declination be based on a moral issue in a way that refusal of the Coke is not?

In short, would Jesus smoke a doobie?

 

TWU Today Archives Part 5: The mixed fruit of Charismatic Christianity

Here’s another article I wrote for the TWU Today Newspaper from the nineties. This article was published in October 1995 and describes my mixed experience at a charismatic conference in Kelowna, BC featuring John Arnott of the Toronto Airport Vineyard (later Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship). Back in the mid nineties the Toronto Airport Vineyard was attracting visitors from around the world with the promise of a powerful experience of the Spirit. The most common phenomenon from Toronto was uncontrollable laughter, though attendees exhibited many other phenomena as well including barking, screaming, and the traditional being slain in the Spirit. Harder to come by were a deepened intellectual understanding of God or a renewed and expanded sense of mission and social justice.

I attended the conference in Kelowna as part of a paper I was writing for a course I was taking on Charismatic Christianity. While I grew up in the Pentecostal church and thus had significant first hand exposure to charismatic phenomena, I was frankly appalled by the conduct of those at the conference. This account gives my somewhat diplomatic report of the experience.