This post is more or less connected to the debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan, and a followup to my two posts about it in the last week here and here. If this subject interests you, I encourage you to read the Harris/Sullivan blogaloue and my two previous posts and the comments after them. I'm on Sullivan's side on this issue, and I think much of what he has to say is very good, but my angle of approach to these issues is somewhat different.
In this post I want to lay a foundation for a broader discussion of the creedal dimension of Christian belief. I never saw the task of this blog as one for Christian Apologetics, but rather one of simply talking about the world from the point of view of someone trying to make sense of it from a particular perspective, and to characterize that perspective as postmodern Catholic is fairly accurate. The postmodern part of that is explained in my comment to Eusto in the second post referred to above. No choice about that part. The Catholic part is more problematic.
I know the word "Catholic" triggers intensely negative associations for many people, and for good reason. I feel the burden of the crimes and stupidity committed in the name of the Church. I feel similarly about being an American. The bottom line is that I feel the same way about being human. As there is no escape from the last, neither really is there any point in trying to escape the other two. I guess what I'm saying is that I've made a life for myself by sticking it out with all three, some of it chosen, some of it not. Purity is not the name of the human game. It's more about recognizing grace wherever you can find it, and we find it everywhere, even in Rome.
I'm joking, sort of. I guess the point is that while I cannot diminish the importance of human institutional failures, whether in Rome (or Boston) or in Washington, the people who set those policies are in my view usually the least interesting representatives of their respective groups. We need what they do, but they overestimate their importance, and it's a mistake for the rest of us take them too seriously. What makes America great is not its government, but its people and their intelligence, imagination, and diversity. It's the same among Christians--the least interesting, with some exceptions, are the ambitious ones who have sought and gained managerial responsibilities. Or to return to my music analogy, I'm not interested in the centralizing, control-freakery of the concert hall's house management, but rather in the freedom, grace, and beauty of the singers. The singers--the great souls who have sung the Christian song--make the very steep price of admission worth the cost. I understand why that price seems too steep for some, but for me nothing could be more important than learning from them how to sing that song, and sing it better.
The managers often enough do not like the song--that's the point of Dostoyevski's great parable of the Grand Inquisitor, but the song will not be suppressed. For in the final analysis all that matters is that the song be sung. The denominational divisions and the doctrinal disputes are head trips that are relatively inconsequential. I am only interested to find those places where the singing is good, and it is found in the most diverse idioms. But the idiom for me is sacramental, and that's why the song I try to sing is Catholic. I find such joy in it. Not always, and and at different time with varying intensity. But it is one of the central themes of my life.
Does joy equal truth? Does my subjective experience necessarily correlate with what is objectively, historically true? Am I certain that Christianity is necessarily true or more true than other religious convictions or the conviction that it's all fantasy. Well for reasons I've explained in the other posts, the issue of "certainty" doesn't interest me very much. But since some readers have asked me to come clean about what I think about central Christian truth claims, such as the resurrection, or the the biblical account of the virgin birth, I'll take a shot in my next post of explaining my approach to such assertions. I will say this, though. I am not a fan of Bultmannian demythologization. It's a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to get at the "truth" by attempting to reduce something large and rich into something small and poor. We need an approach that takes us in the opposite direction, from small and poor into what is large and rich.
And let me further preface what I'll say then with these remarks. I think it's a mistake to approach religion as if its primary expression was in its intellectually formulated propositions. They are important, but secondary. I think that a religion is in the last analysis to be evaluated not on the level of propositional truth, but on the best kind of human beings that it produces, and that's to be judged on their performance, not on the purity and certainty of their beliefs. Too many theologians and prelates are like experts in music theory and music history but who cannot sing or play any instrument. They can think about music, but they cannot perform it. The theory they teach may be interesting and even helpful, and performers benefit from knowing it, but it's useless if there is no one who can perform.
The music is the only important thing, and the primary task is not to understand it but to immerse ourselves in it and to love it. And then thinking about what it means comes later. It is secondary and derivative of the basic experience of participating in the song. It's another way of saying that if you don't love the music, you can't really understand it. The medievals had a phrase for it: Fides quaerens intellectum. Knowledge abut the song is different from singing it. You've got to sing the song for awhile before you can even begin to understand what it means.
It's another way to say that the test of one's religion is not in what knows or thinks but in the fruits (not some rigid orthopraxy) of a life lived well. And anybody who has read this blog over time knows that I think there are plenty of non-Christians, even atheists, who are far better human beings than those who call themselves Christian. It's not because Christianity is untrue; it's because it's a very hard song to sing well and only a few have done it really, really well.
And it's because grace does not discriminate along lines that favor one group over another, even Christians. The disposition of the human will is far more important than the disposition of the mind. The mind is important only insofar as it works as an aid to help open us up to this ubiquity of grace or as it works to close us off from it. When it does the latter among Christians, it causes the same syndrome that affected the Pharisees of the gospels, and results more often than not in the zombie condition I've called here 'whited sepulcher syndrome'--squeaky clean and boring on the outside, rotting stink on the inside.
And so the approach one should take in evaluating the truth claims of any religion is rather more like that of a music critic than of a scientist. Look to the quality of its best performers. The questions should not be "Are these claims true? If you say so, what is the evidence for them?" Rather the questions should be "Does this singer have depth and clarity? Does she have freedom and grace? Does she move us to see the world in a larger frame? Is there something that inspires her song that comes from a source outside the cave of the subrational and the senses? Those, at least, are the things that I look and listen for.
But the ideal critic is not a supercilious snob, but one who is warmhearted and eager to find genuine talent, and recognizes it wherever it appears, even when it is raw and undeveloped. And neither is he someone who lies to be polite when he does not find it. And it is in that spirit that I approach all the world's religions and all its philosophies. I'm not interested in whether they are wrong or right in some intellectual sense, but in the quality and depth their song expresses.
I love Nietzsche and Camus and Kafka, not because they are right or wrong, but because many of their songs ring profoundly true and enrich and broaden the range of my experience and imagination. And I am drawn into the depths from which their songs are sung. But I also love St. John of the Cross, Augustine, and St. Paul for similar reasons. Not everything each of these and so many others wrote was good, but so much of it was, and it's that part that I care about. You cannot truly know what you do not love, and I know in my own life my failures in understanding and judgment are mostly due to failures in love, not to faulty reasoning. My grumpiness, vanity, impatience, and anger are more obstacles to really understanding what it's important than any limitations of my IQ or ignorance of the facts.
Of course the facts are important, but to know fact is to know only the surface truth; it's only a beginning of knowledge. The cognition of deeper levels of truth require the development of faculties that are not exclusively brain based. We must make judgments about truth, but the more important judgments are not about their factual truth or falsity, but about their goodness or their lack of it. Knowledge is in this sense erotic and relational. (If you want more on this read Buber and Kierkegaard.) So I would argue that only with that mindset can you approach and judge the truth claims of any philosophy or religion, from aboriginal animism to trinitarian monotheism.
That being said, readers like Eusto want to know what I think of the truth claims of Christianity, particularly what I think historically happened. If there were a video camera posted at the tomb where Jesus was buried, what would it have recorded on Easter morning? Even though I think it's a wrong-headed question circumscribed by the biases and limitations of the modern mindframe, I'll take a shot at answering it later this week.