For some time, a few months maybe, I’ve had the idea for this blog, a blog of serious ideas and personal reflections on ideas, but I do not know how to begin. It seems appropriate to articulate some scope of the subjects I might hope to address here and I’d like to believe that this first post will be the hardest one. Of course, any definition I put here will be limited and I cannot foresee the full breadth of topics that might be touched upon. But in my hesitation, ideas have come and gone for which I regret not writing on. So it is with a small amount of urgency that I mount the task of this writing project, with hopes that it becomes something to instigate personal growth within me and inspiration to those readers it draws.
The title of this entry should be an obvious fact to most individuals, obvious to the point where it is almost absurd to state. Clearly, I am not God, and if I seem to imply that there was really any question, one might accuse me of illusions of grandeur. Yet, I think if put differently, the question of whether or not we (each of us) think we are God is really the contemporary crisis of common humanity’s philosophy (or religion), at least in Western Civilization. For clarity, instead of asking, Am I God, might I not ask, who do I worship?
Even if in responding to this question the answer seems clear. I don’t, or at least I try not to, worship myself. Instead, I try to worship God, who is truth, goodness, rightness, lovingness, creatorness, etc. All of these things which I have identified as aspects of God, because I have been taught that they are aspects of God, make God worthy of my worship. Thus while, I might have to fight my selfish desires on a daily basis, I can measure my success by how well I am able to devote myself to God that day.
This response to the question is coming from one who has been culturally attuned to a particular understanding of God that is built upon tradition which has changed over time but in general holds a benevolent view of God. But there are other cultural stances which do not hold this view of God, or most often more accurately deny that the benevolent aspects listed above are attributable to any god, though in most cases they acknowledge the benevolence of such attributes apart from a god. Holders of such a stance might say, There is no god, but there is goodness.
So we come to the question of what is goodness. This becomes more tricky because what some people think to be good, others may think is bad, or at least not “good.” In a recent conversation in my cell group, someone made the statement, “I feel uncomfortable saying what things are right and what things are wrong.” Fopr reference, this was in a conversation about sexual behavior. To me this statement was fairly astounding, particularly because the other cell members seemed to be in agreement. Of course I’ve heard such sentiments expressed widely in a secular humanist context, but here I was among a group of Christians who all seemed to have a similar evangelical sort of background and they had misgivings about saying what is right and wrong.
Their misgivings really aren’t shocking when viewed in a wider context. Among today’s “intellectuals,” or the higher educated, the widely agreed upon understanding of truth is that it is impossible to for any individual to identify the Truth, which is absolute, if such a thing exists, because all conceptions of truth are corrupted by individual experience. Experiences in which we are actually present are our most direct encounter with actual truth, beyond that our understanding of the world is based on the accounts of others, whose reliability may vary. This understanding of the world in turn affects how we interpret the experiences in which we are present. Even our direct perception of reality may then be distorted by unreliable information we have received from outside sources. No one can presume that every source is reliable, so based on our understanding of reality, we must pick which sources we think best convey the truth, even though our understanding is shaped by sources in our development which we were unable to pick and which may be unreliable.
Thus the consensual conclusion among the higher educated is that truth is not ascertainable, so we must rely on our personal sense of what truth is, and subsequently, our personal sense of goodness can only be defined by we as individuals for ourselves. With this in mind, we return to the question of who do we worship and it takes on a slightly different meaning. If our only conception of goodness is what we define for ourselves, if no one else has the “right” to tell us what is right, then the god of our worship is not the God of truth, but a god of our understanding, a small and unreliable god based on an unreliable understanding of goodness.
Too often, I feel that even those of us who are Christian fall into this flawed habit of relying on our own sense of what is right, or in other words, what is “right for me.” We lose trust in the communal understanding of rightness if it seems to disagree with our personal sense. Or we pick and choose, saying the community cannot discern this particular truth. This is understandable when considering the cycle unreliability in human interactions discussed above, but to reject community in preference to our own discernment we run the risk of rejecting the God of truth in preference for the God of ourselves.
I am not saying that the God of community or tradition is perfect and without flaw. I am only rejecting the notion that the truth is unascertainable and the subsequent irrational conclusion that therefore we must settle for a flawed truth we construct solely from our own experiences. Truth instead can be realized through a give and take process with the community, where we are constantly processing and re-processing our ideas among those around us. This is how we become more reliable to both ourselves and others.
Thus is the scope of this blog, a give and take process in pursuit of the truth and in search of a God that does not fit inside our personal definitions. Perhaps this first post is a bit confused and badly argued. There’s a lot more to be said for sure (…and I’ve been writing at work in between customer service phone calls). Hopefully future entries will provide better more thought out points, or more interesting stories. In the meantime, I hope you can take something away from it and give something back with your comments.
2 comments:
This is a very interesting problem, the conflict between personal and social/communal verification. It extends beyond religious questions - it's a major topic of conversation and debate throughout philosophy. Within Christianity, the strongest testimony is in favor of social construction and verification of beliefs and practices. Biblically, from the ordination of Abraham through the teachings of Paul, it looks like God mostly relates to humanity as a whole, not so much to humans as individuals. Where I can think of that God does have a personal relationship, it is to situate the individual in the community. This is where I think the whole sola scriptora and later the 'personal relationship with Jesus' traditions are harmful departures from the entire history of Judeo-Christian faith and practice. They lead to individualistic fracturing and isolation. On the other hand we have the danger of making an idol of the Church itself. I erred on that side as a teen. That leads to an arid spiritual life, an inability to experience conversion (both theological conversion and conversion of heart), and a failure to help the Church progress and clean house so to speak. The Catholic Church suffered from this error big time throughout the medieval period, which I think directly caused the excesses of the Reformation in the other direction. My personal solution, though I don't know if it is a good idea for anyone else, was to leave all religious affiliation for a time and seek to hear and follow the voice of God. That voice eventually led me back into community, and I have tried to accept the command to obey and at least give the benefit of the doubt to established traditions of that community even when I don't feel a personal sense of verification for them. After all, what are the chances that I am right and hundreds of saints and theologians over thousands of years were wrong? Unless I really have an unshakable conviction that God's will (for me) differs from Church teaching, I accept Church teaching.
Thanks for your account Zeb. Personally, I don't think completely leaving the community, as you did, is good idea for everybody. Inevitably, the struggle between individuality and community will cause some drama between a person and the church, as with any serious lifelong relationship. But it seems too often that a trial seperation becomes a permanent rift.
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