2011/07/17

the tension

Recent posts by Ross McKenzie and Philip Jensen (h/t to Ross, again; I wouldn't have gone seeking out that particular blogger) remind me to try to sum up the tension that's really bothering me.  Here goes.

My Christian friends are not nearly scientific enough.  And my scientist friends are not nearly spiritual enough.  It's a rather longstanding tension, of course, but that doesn't make it any easier to handle.

On the one hand, Christians (and especially Evangelical Christians) really are prone to lapse into a rather mediaeval understanding of the world around us.  They are not alone in this, of course: woeful ignorance of, say, Newton's laws of motion is quite common in the general population. But as I've said previously, the theology of prayer really needs a radical overhaul.  Many of the things which are said to arise through spiritual means are much, much better explained by chance or by psychology, or a raft of other sciences.  Just tolerating the young earth creationists (even without agreeing with them) is a shocking piece of intellectual sloppiness.  Failing to follow through and accept that archaeology casts doubt on the historicity of big bits of the rest of the Old Testament is equally a careless piece of head-in-the-sand thinking.    Denying the results of good textual criticism of the biblical texts - and holding instead to vague myths about origin and authorship - is just setting yourself up for a fall.

And so it goes on.  None of these things is essential or central to the Christian gospel, and pretending that the metaphysics of the dark ages is better than today's scholarship is just a distraction, and liable to make thinking people reject the whole package out of hand.  Then there's issues of morality ... but those are best left to a different discussion.

On the other hand entirely, many scientists seem equally stuck - albeit in the nineteenth century instead of the fourteenth.  There is an optimistic hubris which assumes every problem will be solved eventually.  There is an appeal to a kind of reductionism which 20th century mathematics and physics showed to be fundamentally untenable.  Some will point out that in the middle ages, the thinkers of the day were kept from certain topics whereas today everything is open for research: conveniently ignoring that there is a long list of areas in which you would truly struggle to get taken seriously, or even allowed to proceed at all.  (I refer not to the periodic nutter who invents a perpetual motion machine, but to a range of questions whose answers are not incontrovertibly settled but are nevertheless entirely un-researchable.  There are subjects for which we do not want to know the answer, or are unwilling due to concerns of ethics, to ask the question).  Equally, epistemology has moved on immeasurably, even to the point of asking whether there are truths about the universe which human minds will never comprehend.

The language we use to describe those truths is of course instructive.  If pressed, most will admit that they are dealing with models of reality, models which must be mutable to take account of new observations.  Frequently that language is suppressed in favour of a discussion of "how it is" - deficient as such wording is, along with its cousin "existence".  A fixation upon whether or not things "exist" seems awfully dated, and not terribly helpful - whether one is dealing with quantum theory or theology.  Insofar as we can understand the cosmos from our position inside it, taking account of the role of the observer seems to matter greatly - and therein is spirituality.

So I find myself reluctantly living in that tension.  I find a lot of people who want glibly to resolve it one way or the other, or who want to inhabit "faith with science-lite" or "science, with personal faith if you must" but both seem really quite unsatisfactory to me.  Perhaps this is partly due to that unhealthy parting of the ways in the mid-to-late 19th century, wherein real rigorous dialogue dried up in favour of is/isn't debates which often miss the point.  In many ways, I envy those priest-scholar-scientists who lived before that divide, for theirs was a more holistic existence.  But we cannot go back there. The Universe is much more wonderful than they could possibly have imagined; life more incredible than they might have dared to think.

2011/07/02

schism

Insofar as I understand Anglican ecclesiology, this seems significant news:
A NEW conservative Evangelical group, the Anglican Mission in England (AMiE), already has three newly ordained clergy waiting to minister in the UK.The Society, launched at the end of last week, offers alternative episcopal oversight when diocesan bishops “are failing in their canonical duty to uphold sound teaching”.The three unnamed clerics were ordained in Kenya on 11 June by the Archbishop of Kenya, Dr Eliud Wabukala [...]The AMiE has appointed its own “panel” of five bishops “to pro­­vide effective oversight in collaboration with senior clergy”. The panel consists of one serving bishop, the Bishop of Lewes, the Rt Revd Wallace Benn, and four retired bishops [...]
To this outsider, flying people off on a rather hush-hush basis, on a long-haul flight, so that someone can lay on hands, and pray for them and their future ministry, seems a most peculiar way to pursue "biblical Christianity".  But what do I know?

My impression is that this may mark the beginning of the end for conservative Evangelicals in the Church of England.  I imagine that quite a few will be wondering now whether they want to be counted in the AMiE or in a gay-clergy-affirming women-bishop-consecrating Church of England.  The whole thing has been played out in slow motion, and it's easy to be impatient for a resolution - but I have a grudging respect for the tortuous processes involved, which may yet lead to a compromise which keeps everyone in the fold.  I used to despise such Anglican fudge, but am coming round to the view that it is preferable to open schism.  That said, the polemic on both sides appears irreconcilable: if a parting of fellowship is inevitable, it would be best done quickly, for delay will simply inflame passions and raise the temperature to no good benefit.


2011/07/01

Evangelicals surveyed

[Where did June go?  Blogs have been getting infrequent.  Oh dear.]


A couple of weeks ago, the Pew Forum published the results of a substantial Global Survey of Evangelical Protestant Leaders.

It makes interesting reading for two reasons:  first, because I think that many of its questions are quite insightful and go to the heart of quite a few matters.  Second, because the answers are enlightening, and often scary.

Take, for example, these snippets:
lausanne-exec-9 lausanne-exec-10

More than half say that consuming alcohol is enough to stop you being a good evangelical.  Ooops; that's 'Good Evangelical'.  Oh dear.  Then again, if 97% see it as essential to follow the teachings of Christ, but 27% don't see that as extending to helping the poor and needy, which bible did they read, actually?

It's interesting in the light of my blog from a couple of months ago that 76% have experienced or witnessed divine healing.  I'm also a little blown away by the fact that 61% confidently assert that "the rapture of the Church will take place before the Great Tribulation".  Perhaps it's more positive to learn that 13% think that homosexuality should be accepted by society (51% of those in Latin America; 23% of those in Europe), even if 55% think a wife must always obey her husband, and 33% think women should stay home and raise children.

I think the thing that struck me most was this question:

lausanne-exec-14

Firstly, missing is any kind of self-doubt.  Perhaps that's the survey's fault, but if you fear a decline in Evangelicalism (and a small majority in the global North anticipate one), surely you have to ask yourself whether that decline is due to an inherent flaw - a mistaken theology, philosophy, or pattern of thinking or behaviour. But, more generally, what can "influence of secularism" possibly mean here?  That there's a battle of ideas - and you're losing?  Likewise, "influence of Islam": if you believe that the gospel of Christ is the truth, and that the teaching of the Koran is not, well, why fear the latter?  And so on.  Many of the other things are fears about the gospel or the work of the Holy Spirit being insufficiently strong to protect the faithful: that seems at odds with the rhetoric about the power of the gospel.

Over all, the survey gives me the sense of evangelicalism - at least, northern hemisphere evangelical protestantism - being a spent force, far more concerned with the maintenance of its own way of being than with an essential spark of a movement of the Holy Spirit of God.  But perhaps I'm unduly cynical.