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| Contents
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| Introduction -
Theology as Autobiography
Frederick Buechner claims that good theology always contains autobiography. Theology comes from the Greek words Theos (deity) and Logos (discourse) which makes it: Talk about God. All talk about God is human talk. An exception may be made for those few souls who hear God talking about God directly. The rest of us are left to talk to each other about it. I have done an extensive study of the evidence for God and my conclusion is that there is not enough evidence to prove that God "is" but there are good reasons to think God "might be." You can read my findings at: Evidence For and Against God. Given my somewhat less that rousing conviction that God "might be" I wouldn't blame you if you stop reading right now. Those of you who do keep reading have probably been looking for others who share a similar perspective and will be curious to see whether what I have learned rings true with what you have learned. This is theology, talking about what we have learned about God. After winnowing out the chaff of religious ideas that I have collected over the years I have come down to five areas of continual interest. They are not single truths, but instead distinct areas of study that together make up the theological subjects I am most interested in talking about. They are the paradigm shifting Mimetic Theory, the deep and subtle wisdom of the Quakers, the hard and honest realizations of the neo-orthodox theologians, the unsettling ramifications of stages of faith theory, and the deep running world of symbolism, dreams and story. May you find something here that you have been looking for, or perhaps something you have been ignoring.
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| The Foundational
Myth
All human culture and most religions are based on a collective murder. This idea, and the corollary extension that "the peace" is maintained with violence, is the central subject for what is variously called the Mimetic or Girardian theory. Rene Girard, a French literary critic and professor, who is now retired from Stanford University formulated the theory after noting that most foundational myths, epics, and great stories from the oral and written traditions throughout time contain the same underlying reality: peace and order are maintained by the use of a mechanism that must remain unconscious in order to work. That mechanism is Mimesis. MIMESIS
"All human culture" is an interplay of modeling; and specifically the modeling of desire. We don't just look around and see things we want, we look at what others want and want those things too. But the most startling realization of all is that we don't just want what we see, or what others have, we want other peoples desires. Not just the objects of their desires, we want other people's wants. Why did my friends fight so vehemently over a place on the team, only to loose interest in the game as some as they had gained the positions? Why do children fight over toys and then set them aside when the have them? Why do men fight over a woman, or women over a man? Desire itself is addictive. Girard does not actually explain the biological or psychological cause of this, simply that it happens and that the objects of desire and the resolution of that desire have little to do with the behavior. A good place to start reading Girard is his article on the web called: "Are the Gospels Mythical?" Girard asserts that the Gospels reveal THE way to interpret Myth. He explains Satan as the arch modeler, as the one who draws us into longing for the wrong things. Satan is also the provider of a way out of the cycle of violence spawned by such longings. Satan gives the "Scapegoat", the person to blame. Blame, heaped on an "other" deflects mimetic rivalry and gives people a sense that their own desires are valid. Some evil other is causing our problems and if we get rid of it, we get rid of the problem. This is the most active and noticeable side of Mimesis. By Killing or expelling the "bad guy" peace is restored. Girard points out that unlike most myths (which retell the scapegoat story), Christianity insists on the innocence of the scapegoat, insists that we resist the mimetic power of the hero, insists that we remove ourselves from the power of the crowd. Christianity brings into consciousness that the scapegoat is something else: a victim. Christianity is, in certain ways, the stumbling block for mimesis. The birth, life, and death of Jesus seem to follow a familiar pattern, the dying and rising God. But the stumbling block is that Jesus is not the hero, he is the victim. Jesus does not vanquish the bad guy, He does not provide a cathartic release for the collective rage of the civilization, because all the while he is pointing to the process. He is saying, "THIS IS NOT A MYTH, THIS IS REAL" and the amazing thing is that the writers GET IT. The Bible seems self aware of the fact that it is breaking the mold. It is deliberately trying to point out the Mimesis and saying, "Warning, Avoid this!!!" And at the same time Jesus is saying, "Copy me, Desire what I Desire." The message seems to be: "Become aware that this Mimesis exists and can work in your midst to make you stumble. It is an unconscious force that must be brought into consciousness. Grab hold of it and use it by mimicking me, not each other, not the father of lies." In some real and powerful ways, this idea offers a "peace-loving-phlegmatic" like me some real hope. The good news, interpreted this way says, "humanity must give up its old, partial peace founded on victimization, and push on for the great peace that comes from the demythologizing work of Jesus." This is "hidden in plain site" stuff. It is about Seeing the stuff we have learned to miss. It is about becoming aware of how we "are the way we are" not by choice, but by accident, almost. John Ralston Saul, Canada's most important living philosopher, puts forward the premise that there are two forces in the world. One runs towards unconsciousness and the other runs towards consciousness. ( I'm not sure he would word it this way, or that he would approve of the over simplification this assessment brings.) The idea of the two forces is not expressed directly by Saul. I conceptualized it after reading the ultra conservative critic and writer Thomas Molnar. Molnar did not label the two forces either, he simple hammered away at a view of the one force he called, "The Pagan Temptation." Molnar tried with all his might to show that illuminated Christians are under a constant temptation to give in to paganism, the power of the unconscious. The reason Molnar put forward is that Paganism seems to "answers the questions better" at a deeper level. But Girard illuminates the possibility that at least half of the reason is that Paganism is the easy road to Mimesis. Pagan Myths are one powerful and pervasive way to deal with Mimetic Violence. This is very tempting indeed. It is the Good Guy/ Bad Guy temptation. But Girard is expert in pointing out that it is a hollow solution. The problem, like Arnold Swartzenager's Character, will be back. In The Unconscious Civilization, Saul shows that these two competing forces have been around since Socrates challenged the Homeric explanation of what it is to be human. The Myths of Homer are about the God's and destiny. Basically they say that our destiny is in the hands of the Gods. We are subjected to them and have no freedom to change our future. It is written in the stars. Key thinkers in the movement against the Homeric or Pagan tradition are what Saul calls, "Conscious Thinkers." You can spot them by their tell-tale ways. They ask a lot of questions. They resist the group. They challenge the status quo. They are obsessed with ethics. They are always searching for the truth. They believe in the individual. They avoid the written word (because it can so easily be misunderstood) and instead choose to act. They are democratic. Think of Socrates, Jesus, Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, Mother Theresa. And who are the Unconscious Thinker? The Republicans, like Plato, who value the written because it solidifies and codifies, they value power and devalue the individual. They like laws, not for justice but for power and fear. They are utopian. They are anti-democratic, even if they fain a love for democracy. They esteem ideology, abstraction, rationality. They promote the old answers, the easy answers. They tempt with myth, simplification and emotional appeal. They control and placate. They disdain the citizen and establish class systems. They are corporate, managerial and contractual. They promote Mimesis, violence, and competition. Saul writes about Jung and Freud and suggests that they made the too common blunder that is made when we attempt to examine the human life. They uncovered things about the self that had been hidden. They brought into the light things we didn't know about ourselves. It seemed like a great chance to know more about us. But the opposite happened. That seething mass of unconscious irrationality scared us to death. It was so HOMERIC! It painted a picture of us pushed about by our sexual and unconscious selves unable to change or find control. But as so often happens the medium became the message. Instead of understanding ourselves we just had more vocabulary. It is all about communication. Unconsciousness is a lack of communication with ourselves. Awareness is framed by understanding. Jung and Freud have not really helped us understand ourselves much, Socrates and Jesus hold better keys. And so do Quakers, who have championed conscious awareness of victims and others for many years.
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30 truths I learned
from Quakers
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| NEO-ORTHODOXY (Neo-Reformed)
Key Thinkers:
The glue that held the original neo-orthodox thinkers together was their love of the basic ideas of the reformation and early church. As well they all shared a disillusionment with scholasticism, the liberal movement and the idea that mankind is progressing or improving. (this insight following the 1st WW) Essential in the beginning were the views that:
Both extremely conservative and extremely liberal theology make a common mistake. Both systems reduce complex issues and experiences to creeds and doctrinal statements. The Neo-orthodox position insists that complex matters are greater than the sum of their reducible parts. Reductionism of any kind is dangerous if it does not at the same time recognize the idea of gestalt. There should be a discomfort when we try to understand the deep things of the spiritual life. We are barely able to comprehend them because they are often paradoxical. One of the key Paradoxes is the idea that we should have a healthy tension between faith and doubt. According to the Neo-Orthodox view of things it is possible for an honest skeptic to have a more authentic faith than someone who accepts things without really questioning them. Moments of crisis, doubt and paradox should be embraced as an opportunity to receive revelation. Neo-orthodoxy is dialectic in the Socratic traditions, believing in the process of questioning to derive insight and truth. It also affirms the technique of posing opposites against each other in the search for truth. Soren Kierkegaard believed that such posings sifted out mere prepositional truths from true paradoxes. Paradoxical insight is gained as a result of a leap of faith following the anxiety and tension of living with the oppositional truths. Thus it is crisis that fosters real understanding. paradoxes of faith must remain precisely that, and any method which seeks to find the truth in the opposites leads to a true dynamic faith only if it respects the necessity of the paradox. Paradoxes are not riddles to be solved, but quandaries to exercise the mind to apprehend new levels of meaning. This willingness to live with things unsettled, allowed Neo-orthodox thinkers to attempt things no other tradition would dare try. For instance they tried to find a way of accepting the truths of Biblical criticism while at the same time preserving the authority of the Bible. Most theologians set about defending one position or the other. Neo-orthodox thinkers recognize that some paradoxes resolve in synthesis, but that others are irresolvable and must be accepted as part of the dynamic of faith. They eventually returned to Luther's idea that the Bible witnesses to the Word of God and thus contains the Gospel, and at the same time shows the faltering hand of men limited in time and space. All revelation, to Neo-orthodoxy, is Paradoxical. How can a wholly other and transcendent God make himself known to us? EXAMPLES OF PARADOX:
Conclusion Neo-orthodox not only works in the heady land of theology but it also makes some sense of our limited being in relation to an eternal and transcendent creator. By boldly refusing to "settle" every issue it acknowledges the complexity of life in general and faith issues in particular. Neo-orthodoxy as a vibrant movement died with the thinkers that came up with it. It is a difficult theology because it requires individuals to embrace crisis, and the tension of doubt and faith. It offers no formulas or solutions but instead insists that God is bigger than we think. It puts us on the borderland between the world we know and the transcendent world of God. It makes no attempt to translate God for our limited minds. Instead it attempts to infect people with the joy and wonder of that elusive higher level of being that Jesus spoke of as the Kingdom (realm) of God. Fundamentalist and Evangelical theology, while sincere and Biblical, play it too safe. The vast crowd of evangelicals suffer from excessive veneration of scripture. This solution is too easy. Liberal theology looks too hard for rational explanations and lacks a rigorous logic. The Liberal solution is too washed out. In an attempt to expand on the role of paradox in human spiritual development I have created a web site called Ionparadox. The phrase literally means: "To Go Beyond Established Opinions." but includes the subtler suggestion of a journey, with companions, towards insights of such ephemeral ambience that they are difficult to see. some Ion Paradoxes result in a synthesis of apparent contradictions while others stand as permanent conundrums that continue to produce insights over time. Many times Ion Paradoxes stand as border markers between the various stages of personal development and involve the deepening and expansion of awareness. It is to those stages that I now turn.
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| Stages of Faith or Stages
of Personal Development
The idea of stages of development has occurred to various people in various cultures but has taken on a certain respectability in the last 75 years because of the scientific work of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, Kurt Fischer, Howard Gardner, Karl Pibram, and Robert Kegan. Each of these individuals have mapped out different areas of change in human growth. These areas or lines of development include: morals, emotionality, self-identity, psychosexuality, cognition, ideas of the good, role taking, socio-emotional capacity, creativity, altruism, spirituality, joy, communication, worldviews, higher reasoning, kinesthetic skills, identity, empathy, and attitudes about life and death. There is now no doubt that most people who are born into the world will move through predictable, if widely variable, stages of development in these areas. These lines are, however, widely independent, meaning that some people may be very well developed intellectually, for example, but not very well developed as musicians. The evidence is also clear that no stage in a line, say morality, can be skipped. No one is born a "Mother Theresa," though some people may move faster through some lines of development than others. I have, elsewhere, given a reasonable overview of this theory of change; To read more please see my Stages page. The importance of this understanding to Theology is rather startling. If we grow in all these areas of development and if our morality changes over time it is reasonable to conclude that our understanding of the Divine will also change over time. This means that what we consider to be the most complete view of God, reality and the universe will always be open to more insight. God is not whatever we conceive God to be at our stage of development, but our understanding of God will be different depending on where we are along the line. As we gain, use, and discard paradigms we have the opportunity to compile a more accurate view of the way things are. Stephen Hawking has suggested that this may be the best approach for theoretical physics as well because there is so much information now that it is unlikely a unifying theory could be understood by one individual. It is my opinion that the natural development of a healthy spirituality involves the embracing of one stage such as "born again" and then the movement through that stage to the next. Biblical literalism, xenophobia, and other forms of fundamentalism are important developmental refuges but must ultimately be set aside for bigger and better ways of understanding what is. The failure to release a limiting paradigm will result in a narrowing of options for growth in the future.
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