Heretical Parables of Jesus

Jesus went up to the hill to teach the crowds, saying, “Those who keep their faith will lose it, but to those who lose their faith, faith will be given. Again I say to you: All who hide their shame will be laid bare, but to them who are honest, shelter will be provided.”

Then Jesus said to them, “The kingdom of God is like a rock that fell from a great height. The foolish people said, ‘There is a rock! Let us take it home with us.’ However, when they went to retrieve it, they were crushed by the rock’s weight. But when the wise saw the rock they said, ‘There is a great mystery. Let us not approach too close, lest we be killed.’”

Then Jesus turned to his disciples and said, “The kingdom of God is like an American auto-maker. When the economy was strong, the company produced many American cars and made great profits. Seeing the great profits, the workers began to grumble because they were not paid well. The workers formed a union and fought the company for better wages and better pensions. After long negotiations the auto-maker finally compromised and the workers’ union gained great power. When the economy weakened, the company still produced many cars, but it could not make a profit. After too many quarters with no profit and after too many workers were laid off, the auto-maker went bankrupt. Then there were no more workers and no more new cars, no more union and no more company. The bad economy was just too bad, the union’s demands were just too demanding, and the American cars were just not American enough. After all these losses what can be said for the economy? Is it not time for the workers to rise up in revolt?”

When Jesus had finished saying these things, the disciples whispered to each other, “What can this mean? This is surely a hard saying.” Then they turned and walked back to the city confused.

Degrees of Uncertainty

In a recent conversation, my friend Nigel brought to my attention a problem with my discussion of the latency of God—I haven't been defining my terms well.  To a certain extent my ambiguity is on purpose because I'm still doing quite a bit of searching, but I suppose a little clarity would be helpful.  Although I'm not sure I can offer much of a definition of latency yet, here's some more explanation....

The basis for much of my thinking about God (and the rest of life, for that matter) is that I cannot know anything with complete certainty for the simple reason that I am not omniscient.  Because I am a limited, finite human being, there is always a chance that I am wrong about the things I think I know.  It is important to note, however, that this isn't a crippling realization for me.  It's something we all deal with everyday—it's a simple fact of life.  Not knowing for certain which apple will be crisp, juicy, and sweet doesn't stop me from picking out apples in the produce section.  Not knowing with absolute certainty whether my wife loves me didn't stop me from marrying her.  Every decision I make is based on either approximations or trust (or occasionally on blind guesses).

So, I guess that means that my uncertainty about God is not qualitatively different from my uncertainty about which apples are tastiest.  But there is certainly a quantitative difference.  If we limit our discussion to the notion of existence, I can't be absolutely certain that the table I'm sitting at or the computer I'm using actually exist.  There is some chance that I'm hallucinating or that I'm actually in some sort of interactive simulation (like in the Matrix).  However, my uncertainty about the existence of the table or computer are obviously quite different from my uncertainty about God.  I think what it comes down to is sensation....

In ordinary life, the way that we "know" something exists is that we can sense it.  That means we rely on sight or touch or some combination of our senses (or, in the case of scientists, they rely on their instruments to do the sensing for them) to suggest to our minds that there is something there.  For the most part it is pretty straight-forward—I can see a chair in front of me, I can touch its wooden back and padded seat, and I "know" that it exists.  In ordinary life, it doesn't matter that theoretically I could be wrong.  I base my day-to-day living on this type of "knowledge."

However, there are some things that aren't quite as straight-forward, some things that are kind of on the edges.  Usually they are things that we sense only briefly, infrequently or faintly, like hearing noises when we're home alone or like seeing faint, quick shooting stars.  We sense them but because we can't really hear or see them again, we're uncertain about their existence.  To some extent, it seems to me that God often falls into this category.  Experiences of God are often hard to grasp and hold onto, they are brief and often occur when we least expect it.  For some people, these brief experiences are enough to say that they "know" God exists.  However, for many of us, our experiences of God are similar to uncertain noises or faint shooting stars, leaving us unsure whether the experience was real.

So, when I talk about being uncertain about God's existence, I'm not talking in a purely theoretical sense—for me, the latency of God has as much to do with lived experience as it does with theory.  As much as I wish God's existence were as apparent to me as the physical objects I encounter in everyday life, that just isn't the case.  Even if the existence of physical objects is theoretically questionable, it seems to me that God is questionable in a much more real sense than that.

You can call God mysterious, unfathomable, unknowable, or infinite.

I'll call God uncertain.

The Elephant in the Room

I have to admit that in my descriptions of agnostic theology and a latent God there has been something that I've been avoiding—revelation.  For the most part, the avoidance has been accidental.  I just didn't happen to post on it.  However, I think there is a part of me that just isn't sure what to make of revelation, and so I just (unconsciously?) skipped over it.

I think the reason I struggle with revelation has to do with my understanding of human limitations/frailty/finitude/stupidity.  What I mean is that I'm not sure that how capable we, as humans, are of distinguishing the voice of God from voices in our heads.  We've all had the experience of hearing something and asking the person next to us,"What'd you say?" when really no one said anything at all.  If can't distinguish the voices of people physical present to us from noises in our heads, how can we possibly distinguish the voice of God from self-delusions?

Yes, I know that there are plenty of responses to that kind of skepticism (and at times I've been the one defending revelation), but I want to be clear about what I'm trying say:  The only claim I'm making is that revelation is hard for me to grapple with.

And don't worry, I haven't forgotten that revelation includes more than just God-spoke-to-me-in-a-dream kind of stuff.  There is, of course, the Bible (at this moment I'm imagining an ancient leather-bound book falling from the sky and landing with a staggering thud, throwing up an immense cloud of dust—as the dust clears, you can see that the ground beneath it is fractured, evidence of the book's great weight and power).  

The Bible has it's own set of issues.  To start, it didn't miraculously come down from heaven as a complete, bound book (like in the description above).  The Bible was written over a vast period of time by many different people.  The Bible was edited, reworked, added to, and subtracted from.  It was written from many different viewpoints and suggests many different (and sometimes competing) understandings of God.  It doesn't even make any claims about it's own authority (we can debate about 2 Timothy 3:16).  It is normative for Christian faith, not because God said so, but because Christians said so.

And to make it all more complicated, every book of the Bible began as the kind of revelatory claim I describe at the beginning—someone said God spoke to them (and other related claims).

Again, this all comes back to one big question for me—what do I do with revelation?  It's not that I necessarily discount or disbelieve revelation as a whole, but I think it is clear that sometimes "revelation" turns out to be wrong (David Koresh, for example).  How, then, are we to distinguish between true and false revelation?  

I started to list different possibilities and plenty  of examples and counterexamples, but I think it is better just to let the question stand because, honestly, I don't know.  Revelation is something that is hard for me to deal with because it doesn't fit neatly into the realm of my experience.  It is a troubling, up-ending, messy thing.  It turns my notions of what is and isn't upside-down.

And that is precisely what makes revelation an elephant in the room.  It is something that common sense says shouldn't be there, but it's there whether we like it or not.  So, I guess we have to talk about it....

Talking about God

Recently I've been thinking a lot about what it means to talk about God.  It's almost funny that we, petty humans, even try to talk about someone so great—someone who is by nature ineffable and undescribable.  God is so far above/beyond our intellect and language that anything we say about God is at best insufficient and at worst flat-out wrong.

But that doesn't mean we should stop.  On the contrary, we must talk about God.  God is so ever present in our human lives that it would be disingenuous to remain silent.  It would be like ignoring an elephant in the room.

Yesterday, I ran across a passage in Mirror of Simple Souls by Margaret Porette (sometimes spelled Marguerite Porete) that expresses my thoughts perfectly:

For there is no God, other than he of whom one can know nothing perfectly; and he alone is my God of whom one cannot say a word [...] But I wish to speak of it, and I do not know what to say. But none the less [...] my love is such a mind that I had rather hear what is not true of you than that people should say nothing about you.  And that without a doubt is what I do.  I say of you what is not true, for everything which I say of you is nothing but untruth about your goodness.  But you must pardon what I say which is not true of you.

I agree with her—I would rather talk about our ineffable God and fail than remain silent.  I know that in my search for God I will say many wrong things, and I hope God will forgive my failings.  However, like Porette, I will continue to speak about God, even if it means I am bound to be wrong.

Then again, perhaps that isn't the best idea—Porette was burned at the stake as a heretic....

Struggling for a Latent God

If I want to take a leap of faith and place my hope in our latent God, first I have to find God. Even if I am able to wade through the mucky uncertainties that faith creates, even if I am willing to overcome the hurdles that doubt presents, I still have to find God somewhere. If God is latent, is there any way to find God? Or am I doomed to be disappointed, with lots of faith to give but nowhere to put it?

Are we forced to find this God we want to believe in? If God is not readily evident, how does God become real to us? The God who is hidden from the world must somehow become visible if we are going to believe in God. If God is latent, is it up to us to make God manifest? Must we must struggle against the odds to bring God into our reality?

Perhaps in some way faith is how we find God. Perhaps faith is what makes God visible. This act of finding/revealing makes us into dramatic incarnations of God in the world. Through faith God becomes evident to us by becoming visible through us. The act of believing brings God into our world in a real way. Without faith, God is intangible. God is nowhere to be touched or seen or heard or felt. A God who is known only through hypothesis and conjecture is a shadow of hope, nothing more. But when we come to know God through faith, God becomes real and actual to us. As God lives in and through our lives, we become incarnations of God in the world.

If God is latent, existing as potential in the world, we must struggle to bring that latent God into our reality. Without faith, God remains distant and intangible, but by the act of believing God enters into our lives. It is through our struggle of faith that God becomes incarnate in us--and that is how God comes into our world.


Read my first three posts on this subject: "Acknowledging a Latent God," "Confronting a Latent God," and "Wrestling with a Latent God."

Agnostic Theology

I’m currently in the process of applying to grad school, so I’ve been trying to figure out what I should write about in my statements of purpose. What is it that I want to pursue? What area of study am I passionate about? Where might I make a significant contribution? I’m interested doing some sort of constructive theology with great weight given to theological and social ethics. For me, theology has to be honest and relevant. That means that I’m not really interested in discussing lofty issues like the trinity or soteriology unless those discussions are intimately linked with daily life. Questions about God aren’t that important unless they mean something to us on an intimate level.

As I try to define what it is that I want to pursue, I keep coming back to one phrase: agnostic theology. What I mean by that is working out a humble theology that recognizes our inability to know God completely, where even the surest of statements is never more than a “possibility.” I always have to be willing to admit, no matter how strongly I feel about an issue, that there is a decent chance that I am wrong. There are so many competing ideas about God that it is asinine to claim to be the sole bearer of truth. Every pious person is as sure as the next that he or she has the truth, but there is no way to evaluate the competing claims. Can anyone tell who is more certain? Who can judge whose experience is most legitimate? Maybe there’s some crazy stuff that can be ruled out on the fringes, but by and large it is one claim against another.

So I am forced to pursue agnostic theology—speaking about God with honesty. The word “agnostic” may immediately raise red flags for some, but even the Bible admits that faith is based on incomplete knowledge—faith is being “certain of what we do not see.” My brand of agnostic theology is not meant to be a threat to faith—it is choosing to speak faithfully about God while fully recognizing the uncertainties that are inherent to faith. Because our knowledge of God is doomed to be incomplete, we don’t have to worry about getting everything 100% correct. There is freedom in that. Agnostic theology allows us to move beyond endless debates over the minutiae of metaphysical truth and to step toward discussions about what it means to live as Christians in a world where God is both revealed and disguised.

From My Theological Journal VI

Once again, here is an entry from the journal that has been trapped in the confines of my hard drive for the last year. This one is probably heretical--maybe I should have kept it on my computer:

November 9, 2006

One thing that troubles me about my own theological thoughts is the way I think about Jesus. As long as I can remember, “Jesus” has bothered me. Not his life or atonement or anything like that—it has just bothered me that people talk about him and to him so much. I’ve always been more comfortable praying to “God” and not Jesus. It makes me uncomfortable when people make reference to Jesus in their everyday speech. I understand that in Christian theology, Jesus plays an important role—he is God. He is the way and the truth and the life, but why just him? More recently, this has been what has troubled me. There are so many people who do not know Jesus and will never know Jesus, but who earnestly seek God through their own cultures and religions. Is their sincerity and piety worthless? Perhaps what is important is recognizing our need for God (which is where Jesus comes in), and regardless of culture it is this recognition (and the resulting lifestyle change) that God is interested in. I am just uncomfortable with Jesus.

Another thing that has been troubling to me is the idea that Jesus is God. I essentially reject the trinity as a definition for God. Why must only those three be “God”—why not the other manifestations of God throughout the Bible? Also, the definition of God is too neatly defined. How do we know who begot whom and what substance each has? The Bible is not that explicit about any of it. And what good does the idea of the trinity do, anyway? Historically, it was used to fend off heresy, but I’m not sure that coming up with a human definition of God is a very good idea…. This was verified to me when my theology professor admitted that the idea of the trinity is essentially a hedge around the truth about God, and it is not the truth itself. To bring this back to Jesus, my professor in Johannine Writings has reaffirmed my thinking by showing us that Jesus is not necessarily understood as God anywhere in Johannine literature (or anywhere else in the New Testament). Yes, Jesus was divine, but his exact metaphysical relation to the Father is not laid out. What is his nature? How is he human and divine? The Bible doesn’t say, and early Christians didn’t know. Exactly how it works is not clear, so it should be okay if it is unclear for me….

But I am still left with the difficulty I have with Jesus. I don’t know what I think, but I know that I tend to avoid him, except when it comes to atonement. And that is unfair—I can’t pick and choose when I want Jesus and when I don’t. I just don’t know what to think. I am interested to see what Bonhoeffer does with Jesus (especially in the LLP). It makes me uncomfortable that Barth and Bonhoeffer are so Christologically focused, but maybe they can show me how to reconcile Jesus, God, and the real world I live in.

From My Theological Journal II

The following is the next entry from a journal I kept on my computer last year. Please keep in mind that these entries are questions and possibilities not conclusions:

Early morning October 30, 2006

Last Monday night I was up late completing a take-home test for Existentialism. Before I answered the final question on the test, I went into the chapel to think. I had to sort through Kierkegaard’s ideas in Fear and Trembling and try to apply them to real life Christianity. I was pacing around the chapel, talking out loud, frustrated because of my spastic thoughts. As I walked down the center aisle and neared the front, I was distracted by the altar. It was just a simple, blond table placed at the back of the small stage—and it was empty. I started thinking about the symbolism of that table, how in the days of the temple it was on the altar that animals were sacrificed to atone for our sins. It seemed funny to me that the altar had been transformed from a large, bloody stone structure to a simple table inside a chapel. But it makes sense theologically. The altar (like the cross) is there to remind us that our sins have been paid for already and are constantly being paid for. Jesus’ sacrifice was for all time. The altar and the cross are to remind us of Jesus’ enduring sacrifice, but they are free from a bloody victim (in the case of the protestant church) because he has been resurrected and is no longer dead. But then I had a horrible thought—what if it were just like the Emperor’s New Clothes? It is totally possible that some kid will stand up in the back row of the church and start laughing at us and point, saying, “The altar is empty! Don’t be silly! And there’s nothing on that cross at all!” What if everything we have been told by our preachers and teachers is a lie? What if they are just as deceived as the rest of us and there is nothing there? Perhaps we are all wrong. Perhaps we are seeing something where there is nothing. Perhaps, to our embarrassment, the emperor is naked.