“Quia de deo scire non possumus quid sit, sed quid non sit, non possumus considerare de deo, quomodo sit sed quomodo non sit.”
This is St. Thomas Aquinas’ introduction to his whole Summa Theologica: “Since we cannot know what God is, but only what God is not, we cannot consider how God is but only how He is not.”
At different points in my life, I’ve been pretty sure that we can know exactly who and what God is. We could define him quite precisely. We could come up with a list of attributes. We could name a bunch of names written in an old dusty language: “Jehovah Jireh,” “Adonai,” or “Yahweh.” Of course, we had only a vague idea what those words meant, yet we felt quite confident using them. We pulled out the good book and felt we had not just a good handle, but a definite handle on who God was and what he was like.
Yet the further I travel on the road of faith, the more I learn about the divine mysteries, the more I realize it is just that: mystery.
Anthony de Mello recounts how the great Karl Rahner, in one of his last letters, wrote to a young German drug addict who had asked him for help. The addict had said, “You theologians talk about God, but how could this God be relevant in my life? How could this God get me off drugs?” Rahner said to him, “I must confess to you in all honesty that for me God is and has always been absolute mystery. I do not understand what God is; no one can. We have intimations, inklings; we make faltering, inadequate attempts to put mystery into words. But there is no word for it, no sentence for it.” And talking to a group of theologians in London, Rahner said, “The task of the theologian is to explain everything through God, and to explain God as unexplainable.”
De Mello concludes: “Unexplainable mystery. One does not know, one cannot say. One says, “Ah, ah…” That is what is ultimate in our human knowledge of God, to know that we do not know.”
It is a strange comfort, this unknowing. It is threatening, to be sure. But also comforting.
This is what the mystics are perpetually telling us, notes de Mello: “Words cannot give you reality. They only point, they only indicate. You use them as pointers to get to reality. But once you get there, your concepts are useless. A Hindu priest once had a dispute with a philosopher who claimed that the final barrier to God was the word “God,” the concept of God. The priest was quite shocked by this, but the philosopher said, “The ass that you mount and that you use to travel to a house is not the means by which you enter the house. You use the concept to get there; then you dismount, you go beyond it.” You don’t need to be a mystic to understand that reality is something that cannot be captured by words or concepts.”
To know reality, de Mello states, you have to know beyond knowing.
Perhaps Jesus was on to something when he stated in Mark 10:15: “Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” We must become as little children. Because children are in a place of wonder, and see things afresh. We see things and think we know. And sometimes, our knowing is what gets in the way.
A short poem. It came out of a question that emerged for me from last night, somehow: what if God was approached by people who want access to heaven and hell to bring love to those they loved in their lifetime here? Enjoy.
Improbable Souls
Angels dart glances on the rare occasion
Where God sits in speechless reflection
On a new request, never uttered by the
Billions before, the seemingly simple request
To have dual citizenship, bilateral passports
Into heaven and hell, for the freedom
To visit friends across the chasms,
As both are missed and loved, dearly
The impossible prayer sent to the Source:
Why should eternal punishments and rewards
Deprive them of a friend’s love?
After all, love asks nothing in return,
Love is kind, love graces without
Requirement of worthiness,
This is the infinite love,
Of which God’s brow in
Wrinkled ironies, acceded,
Greeted with the gratitude of improbable souls
Who would delight in spending time
With loved ones, faithful and fallen alike.
— Jack Ricchiuto is best known across the US and globally for his experience as writer and engagement artisan. His work focuses on teaching people how to work together well and facilitate people working together well in education, organizations and communities. He lives in the Tremont community of urban Cleveland.
TONIGHT at our regular Pub Theology DC gathering, we’ll be LIVE TWEETING – you can join us in person, at the Bier Baron at 1523 22nd St NW – just a few blocks west of the Dupont Circle Metro stop, or you can jump in on the conversation via Twitter using #pubtheology. Be sure to follow me (@bryberg) and (@pubtheology). Here are the topics we’ll be discussing:
If you could name the street you live on what would you call it?
If you received an extra burrito when ordering at your local shop would you say something?
True or false: We should be wary of any efforts to improve human nature.
Did you march on Saturday? Are you marching tomorrow? Does marching lead to justice?
Did Jesus pay for our sins? In what way?
Is hell a just punishment for sinful people?
WE’D LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU! Come on down and join us for a pint, or grab your smart phone, a craft-brewed pint, and hit the Twitters! Starting at 7pm.
This is a follow-up to my previous post about moving on from old models of reality, in which I critiqued ‘evangelical modernism’ and suggested that our old paradigms need revising both in science and in faith. This time I’d like to expand on that by critiquing our obsession with facts and factuality as the epitome of truth. It’s an obsession which I believe has tended to impoverish our spirituality.
Facts are of course central to the modernist paradigm. The modernist ideal of truth is verifiable scientific fact, something which can be shown to be observably, provably, objectively true and real. Such facts or data can be accurately observed, measured, quantified and analysed.
Then by means of logic and reason, these facts can further be fitted into overarching structures of theory that usefully hold together sets of data in ways that accord with the observable behaviour and properties of the physical reality. Thus we can build up a better and better picture of the universe, ultimately filing in all the gaps in our knowledge like the unknown areas in a map of the world.
But then along comes post-modernism and pulls out the rug from under modernism by challenging the very idea of verifiable objective ‘fact’.
Unknowable truth
Post-modernism doesn’t say there are no facts, or that nothing is true; that there is no objective reality, or that we can just make things up as we see fit. Rather it introduces radical and irreducible uncertainty and subjectivity into the equation. It says that there may or may not be truth and objective reality, but that truth is not fully knowable by us in an objective form. It may be there, but we can’t see it directly, any more than we can directly see what we look like in the mirror with our eyes shut (leaving aside photography).
Indeed, by looking at reality we alter that reality, so that our act of observation becomes part of the phenomenon we’re trying to look at. Similarly by thinking about reality, we change it so that our thinking becomes inextricably intertwined with what we’re thinking about. In other words, there’s an inherent subjectivity in our observation and analysis which can never be fully eliminated.
So post-modernism undermines the objectivity of fact. It also introduces a degree of suspicion about the very idea of ‘fact’, and questions whether the modernist ideal of truth as primarily a matter of facts is actually a helpful one. And it suggests that there are problems which the modernist approach and the scientific method cannot solve, mysteries which they cannot clarify. It seems to me that these are all valid critiques.
Knowing in part
Don’t get me wrong – facts are of enormous practical use in our daily lives. Almost anything we need to do in the physical world depends more or less on the reliability of factual information. Catching a train, using a computer, cooking a meal, wiring a plug, even holding a conversation all rely on the basic accuracy of factual information.
The point is simply that facts, while vital in practical matters, are nonetheless limited, partial and provisional. They cannot tell us everything about all we need to know, and in some areas they can tell us very little of use. There are whole dimensions of our lives in which the kind of information that underpins science and technology is largely useless. These are the areas that deal with things like meaning, purpose, value, rightness or wrongness, human relationships; with things like suffering, death, love, eternity and God. For these we need another conception of truth, one that encompasses the ideas of personal truth, poetic and symbolic truth, non-factual or beyond-factual truth.
When the apostle Paul famously writes in 1 Corinthians 13 that for now we ‘see in part and know in part’, he’s describing an inherent condition of our current state; not something that will change as we get better at science. We can only know in part, for now. It’s just about possible that one day we will be able to unravel all the secrets of the physical universe – though it seems unlikely, given that we still don’t have any idea about the nature of the ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ that make up most of the universe. But even if we do, we’ll be no nearer to unravelling the mysteries and enigmas of humanity.
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr describes our modern western mind as essentially ‘dualistic’. By this he means that our system of thinking is based around making divisions and distinctions between things so that we can study and analyse them, so we can think and talk about them. While this is essential for science and indeed for much of practical life, reality is always more complex, more paradoxical and less categorisable than this system allows. For dealing with the bigger things, Rohr argues we need instead to cultivate the contemplative mind. I can’t do his argument justice here, so have a look at his book The Naked Now or listen to his Greenbelt talks here.
A question of perspective
Optical illusions may help illustrate the partiality of fact and the importance of personal perspective. Is this well-known picture a rabbit, a duck, both, neither, or simply a set of marks that has no inherent meaning? There’s no real way of saying – it could be any of those.
In fact, something similar applies to any poem or picture or piece of music. I can analyse the Mona Lisa and say what it means and how the effect is achieved, but that does not replace or negate the work of art. The painting remains as a non-reducible entity that defies final analysis or categorisation; it simply is.
Indeed, the same applies to all of our actual experience of the world. Look out of the window and watch the clouds or birds move across the sky, or wind moving in the trees. There are all sorts of ways you could seek to understand and quantify what you’re seeing, in terms of weather patterns or mathematical descriptions, or even psychological analysis of how the scene makes you feel and why. But none of them can adequately describe or replace either the reality itself or your experience of that reality. The ‘facts’ are not enough.
Interpretation and subjectivity
Or finally take a scenario from everyday life. Person A comes in with a load of shopping and slams the door angrily, while Person B is watching TV and doesn’t get up to help. It’s easy to leap to conclusions, but the interpretation of the scene depends on all sorts of things which we can’t necessarily know – the precise relationship between the two participants, the wider context, what’s led up to the situation, etc. Each person involved will have a different perspective, an outsider watching would have a different one again, and any attempt to resolve the scene into factual truth would miss out something vital.
Crucially then, facts and data always need to be interpreted, and at this point the element of subjectivity inevitably creeps in. Five people can witness the same event and each interpret it in different ways; and there may not be one single correct version that we can pin down. With the benefit of CCTV we may possibly be able to arrive at a more-or-less factual account of what took place, but certainly not its full meaning or implications.
Facts always need to be fitted into a larger picture or schema which can make sense of them. But again we have a problem here, for the larger schema is always just a model and never a perfect one. Furthermore, we can often fit the same set of facts into very different, even mutually opposing, models of reality.
In an earlier post ‘Born to believe?’ I listed a number of pieces of evidence that can be interpreted in diametrically opposite ways depending on your starting assumptions. For example, the discovery that we’re apparently hard-wired to believe in God could be evidence for atheism – that religious belief is just down to our evolutionary programming. But it could equally be evidence for religious faith, that the Creator has built into each of us the hardware and software that we need to start our search for him.
Facts and Christianity
So facts are good, facts are useful and important. But they are not all, and they are not enough. Facts are not the ultimate expression of truth or reality.
And in one sense, I don’t actually think ‘facts’ or ‘information’ matter a great deal in Christianity. By which I don’t mean that Christianity has no factual basis. I just mean that I don’t believe we actually need any kind of factual understanding in order to belong to the Kingdom, to be ‘in Christ’, to be redeemed. Nor do we need to convey factual information to others to get them into the kingdom, to get them to be ‘saved’. The kingdom has to be something that is equally open to an infant, or to someone who’s illiterate, or to a person with a condition that prevents them from being able to learn or process factual information.
I would argue that the kingdom is about openness or receptiveness to Christ’s light, life and love – none of which require intellectual understanding at all. It’s about ‘seeing’ rather than analysing and explaining. It’s about becoming alive, and being transformed. It’s about being loved and learning to love. It’s fundamentally incarnational rather than intellectual.
I love both theology and science and I think they can both be very beneficial and life-enhancing. But I don’t believe either is necessary for salvation. And one day, when we know in full even as we are fully known, I suspect we won’t have need of either.
In the meantime, I think we need to find new approaches that take account of the factual but somehow go beyond mere factuality to deeper truth. I suggest we need to develop Rohr’s non-dualistic contemplative mind – an ability to hold paradoxically contradictory truths together, and to accept reality as it comes to us rather than always trying to analyse or categorise.
— The Evangelical Liberal is a blog to explore more open and liberated ways of being a Christian, particularly for those who have struggled to find their way within the evangelical tradition.
An excerpt from An Essay On Man by Alexander Pope, 1734:
— Say first, of God above or Man below What can we reason but from what we know? Of man what see we but his station here, From which to reason, or to which refer? Thro’ worlds unnumber’d tho’ the God be known, ‘Tis ours to trace him only in our own. He who thro’ vast immensity can pierce, See worlds on worlds compose one universe, Observe how system into system runs, What other planets circle other suns, What varied being peoples every star, May tell why Heav’n has made us as we are: But of this frame, the bearings and the ties, The strong connexions, nice dependencies, Gradations just, has thy pervading soul Look’d thro’; or can a part contains the whole?
Is the great chain that draws all to agree, And drawn supports, upheld by God or thee?
—
On its publication in 1734, An Essay on Man met with great admiration throughout Europe. Voltaire called it “the most beautiful, the most useful, the most sublime didactic poem ever written in any language.” In 1756, Rousseau wrote to Voltaire admiring the poem and saying that it “softens my ills and brings me patience.” Kant was fond of the poem and would recite long passages of the poem to his students. Voltaire later satirized some of Pope’s themes in Candide.
One of the things that I often see in discussions concerning some thinker is the use of the phrases “agree” and “disagree.” For instance, in relation to my own work I often see phrases like, “I agree with much of what says,” “I don’t agree with everything” or “I disagree with…”
These terms can initially seem like evidence of critical thinking (i.e. someone is willing to critically affirm or question what they are reading), yet these terms are actually more symptomatic of uncritical thought. The reason lies in the way in which these terms imply that the individual is taking the material and simply comparing it with what they already believe is correct. Insofar as what is heard or read corresponds with the persons own position they affirm it and where it differs they reject it.
Something that one learns quickly in a first year philosophy class is the need to suspend this attitude of agreement and disagreement so that we might enter into the world of the philosopher we are reading and let their vision impact our own.
While reading a thinker the question, “where do I agree or disagree with them,” effectively domesticates them and acts as a defense against the possibility of their work actually vacillating our existing paradigm. By vacillating our existing paradigm I mean the experience where one remains within ones intellectual frame, while experiencing it as a frame.
This is a vital experience in the critical process for we need to be exposed to other thinking in order to gain a vantage point over our own way of seeing the world; all the while avoiding the fantasy of being able to step outside of it.
To understand the process we can compare it to being immersed in watching a movie on an old TV set. Imagine that, half way through the film, the screen shakes. At such a moment we gain a distance from the movie while still watching it. We are then reminded of its status as a movie. In the same way the intellectual process involves allowing another to vacillate our paradigm (something apologetics courses are fundamentally set up to avoid). This process involves entering the others world and asking, “where would this thinker agree and disagree with me?”
By doing this one enters into a properly antagonistic relation with the thinker, a relation that is more likely to lead to a development and deepening of ones own thoughts.
— Peter Rollins is a widely sought after writer, lecturer, storyteller and public speaker. He is the author of the much talked about How (Not) to Speak of God. His most recent work is entitled The Idolatry of God.
Wish you could store those files, photos, music and video but running out of space?
If you’re like me, you’re constantly shifting stuff off of your aging laptop onto a hard drive that you hope will last long enough for the day you’ll need to access it.
What if you could store data on yourself? Like maybe your forearm, or… forehead?
A team of Harvard and Johns Hopkins geneticists has developed a new method of DNA encoding that makes it possible to store more digital information than ever before.
Apparently I’m not the only one running out of space – according to Robert Gonzalez: “Humanity has a storage problem.” He goes on to state that “With data accumulating at a faster rate now than any other point in human history, scientists and engineers are looking to genetic code as a form of next-generation digital information storage.”
In fact, they say the world’s information is “doubling every two years,” which is probably a conservative estimate, based on my own Instagram usage.
Archival storage is where DNA comes in. As storage media go, it’s hard to compete with the universal building blocks of life. At theoretical maximum, one gram of single stranded genetic code can encode 455 exabytes of information. That’s almost half a billion terabytes, or 4.9 * 1011 GB. (As a point of reference, the latest iPad tops out at 64 GB of storage space.) DNA strands also likes to fold over on top of themselves, meaning that, unlike most other digital storage media, data needn’t be restricted to two dimensions; and being able to store data in three-space translates to more free-space. DNA is also incredibly robust, and is often readable even after being exposed to unfavorable conditions for thousands of years.
My question is: when will I be able to tweet hands-free, and device-free? And when I can I take a photo with my eyeballs? My 20-20 vision could use some filter options, however, and perhaps a zoom lens. Clearly I don’t understand the technology, because I tried to write this blog post simply by thinking it.
Can you read me?
But a serious question becomes: what are the ethical ramifications for this, if any? Will we hire people to donate DNA to store data on them? Will people get “DNA storage” tattoos as a way to make some extra cash? Or worse, will we begin cloning mindless beings to simply act as data storage units? Or maybe we could find a way to make cats useful.
In any case, this gives new meaning to the term: “thumb drive.”
The real reason ‘spiritual but not religious’ is a cop-out A guest post by Robert Kroese
Robert Kroese is the author of Mercury Falls, Mercury Rises, and many other engaging apocalyptic adventures! This post was originally published on his blog at robertkroese.com, and was a thoughtful response to Alan Miller’s post.
—
Recently I ran across a blog post with the title My Take: “I’m spiritual but not religious” is a cop-out. I read the post with interest because I’ve often thought this very thing: that claiming to be “spiritual” isn’t an answer to a question about one’s religious beliefs, but rather a way to avoid the question while sounding like one has put some thought into it.
Sadly, the post almost immediately devolves into unverifiable, baseless generalizations. For example:
Those in the spiritual-but-not-religious camp are peddling the notion that by being independent – by choosing an “individual relationship” to some concept of “higher power”, energy, oneness or something-or-other – they are in a deeper, more profound relationship than one that is coerced via a large institution like a church.
Whoa, what now? That’s a bold statement. And it doesn’t appear at the end of a chain of rigorous reasoning or citation of studies about beliefs; it’s just thrown out there, as if it’s a brute fact of reality. The author follows this up with all manner of other vague and unsupported statements, somehow managing in an 800-word blog post to attack moral relativism, a culture centered on “feelings,” and megachurches — and going on to defend “old fashioned” values and the King James Bible (which has done all right for 400 years without his support, thank you very much).
Hidden in that rhetorical avalanche are two short paragraphs that I think actually come close to dealing with the matter at hand:
The trouble is that “spiritual but not religious” offers no positive exposition or understanding or explanation of a body of belief or set of principles of any kind.
What is it, this “spiritual” identity as such? What is practiced? What is believed?
The problem, as these paragraphs indicate, isn’t that “spiritual but not religious” is a bad answer to the question “what are your religious beliefs?” (as Miller seems to argue in the rest of the post) but rather that it’s a non-answer.
Imagine a group of plane crash survivors stranded on an island, debating the best way to get off the island. Some argue that the best way is to build a signal fire. Others argue that they should try to build a raft. Still others say that trying to get off the island is a waste of time; that they should focus their efforts on basic survival. Finally one person pipes up with, “Well, I don’t agree with any of you, but I definitely think we’re on an island.”
The man isn’t wrong, but his answer doesn’t get them anywhere. It doesn’t add anything to the discussion. It’s just an acknowledgement of the predicament. And worse, it’s an answer that seems calculated to put the speaker above or outside of the arena of discussion: “Have your petty disagreements amongst yourself; meanwhile I will sit here and contemplate the ocean surrounding us.”
Let me clarify that I’m not saying that the “spiritual but not religious” person is being intentionally smug or provocative, but that this is how is answer is going to be received by people who have been pulling their hair out trying to figure out a way off the island. It could be that he has already considered and rejected as wanting all possible attempts to get off the island and possesses some knowledge about the island that the other survivors aren’t privy to. But if so, then he’s doing a disservice to the other survivors by not sharing his knowledge. And if not, then he’s just wasting their time by pointing out the obvious.
The “spiritual but not religious” label points to three possibilities, as far as I can see:
1. The person has done a thorough study of the world’s religions, found them wanting, and took a different path.
2. The person is largely ignorant of religious beliefs but has been blessed with a mystical understanding that allows him or her to see the shortcomings of any “man-made” religion, and took a different path.
3. The person is largely ignorant of religious beliefs, has no real wisdom to offer, and is parroting an answer that he or she has heard various celebrities use in interviews with some success.
Without lapsing into pure cynicism, I’ll point out that (1) requires a lot of work, and (2) requires that the person be able to see a reality that is evidently hidden to most of the world’s traditional religious believers, whereas (3) requires only pure ignorance, which is in bountiful supply on this planet.
Of course, answering a question about religious beliefs by saying “I’m a Baptist,” “I’m Jewish,” or “I’m an atheist,” isn’t any more inherently difficult than saying “I’m spiritual but not religious.” In other words, there are lazy and ignorant Baptists, Jews and atheists as well as lazy and ignorant “spiritual-but-not-religious” people. Some Baptists have thought long and hard about what they believe and why. Others are just parroting answers they learned in Sunday school. But to their credit, at least they are answering the question.
Further, it seems odd to me that “spiritual but not religious” is such a common answer to the question about one’s religious beliefs. If you really want me to believe that you’ve made a deliberate choice to walk the road less traveled, then you might try giving a different answer to a question about your religious beliefs than that given by, say, Lady Gaga. Otherwise, aren’t you just a Gagaist? What’s the difference between you and every other “spiritual but not religious” person? If there is a difference, then tell me what it is. If there isn’t, then you’re just a member of another vaguely defined religion.
If you are asked about your religious and you don’t really have any religious beliefs, I suggest saying, “I don’t really have any religious beliefs.” If you have some vague belief that people have souls and that there are bad consequences to immoral behavior, say that. If you think that we’re all part of the Great Mystical Oneness, then say that. Saying that you’re “spiritual” doesn’t communicate anything. And saying that you’re “not religious” only communicates that while you may not know what the answer is, you suspect that most of the answers other people have come up with are wrong, or at least deficient.
You might have some really interesting thoughts about God, souls, sin, redemption, justice, forgiveness, love, purpose and oneness. But if you start out by saying that you’re “spiritual but not religious,” I’m going to seriously doubt it.
Note: Alan Miller is Director ofThe New York Salon and Co-Founder of London’s Old Truman Brewery. He is speaking at The Battle of Ideas at London’s Barbican in October.
By Alan Miller, guest post
The increasingly common refrain that “I’m spiritual, but not religious,” represents some of the most retrogressive aspects of contemporary society. The spiritual but not religious “movement” – an inappropriate term as that would suggest some collective, organizational aspect – highlights the implosion of belief that has struck at the heart of Western society.
It seems that just being a part of a religious institution is nowadays associated negatively, with everything from the Religious Right to child abuse, back to the Crusades and of course with terrorism today.
Those in the spiritual-but-not-religious camp are peddling the notion that by being independent – by choosing an “individual relationship” to some concept of “higher power”, energy, oneness or something-or-other – they are in a deeper, more profound relationship than one that is coerced via a large institution like a church.
That attitude fits with the message we are receiving more and more that “feeling” something somehow is more pure and perhaps, more “true” than having to fit in with the doctrine, practices, rules and observations of a formal institution that are handed down to us.
The trouble is that “spiritual but not religious” offers no positive exposition or understanding or explanation of a body of belief or set of principles of any kind.
What is it, this “spiritual” identity as such? What is practiced? What is believed?
The accusation is often leveled that such questions betray a rigidity of outlook, all a tad doctrinaire and rather old-fashioned.
But when the contemporary fashion is for an abundance of relativist “truths” and what appears to be in the ascendancy is how one “feels” and even governments aim to have a “happiness agenda,” desperate to fill a gap at the heart of civic society, then being old-fashioned may not be such a terrible accusation.
It is within the context of today’s anti-big, anti-discipline, anti-challenging climate – in combination with a therapeutic turn in which everything can be resolved through addressing my inner existential being – that the spiritual but not religious outlook has flourished.
The boom in megachurches merely reflect this sidelining of serious religious study for networking, drop-in centers and positive feelings.
Those that identify themselves, in our multi-cultural, hyphenated-American world often go for a smorgasbord of pick-and-mix choices.
A bit of Yoga here, a Zen idea there, a quote from Taoism and a Kabbalah class, a bit of Sufism and maybe some Feing Shui but not generally a reading and appreciation of The Bhagavad Gita, the Karma Sutra or the Qur’an, let alone The Old or New Testament.
So what, one may ask?
Christianity has been interwoven and seminal in Western history and culture. As Harold Bloom pointed out in his book on the King James Bible, everything from the visual arts, to Bach and our canon of literature generally would not be possible without this enormously important work.
Indeed, it was through the desire to know and read the Bible that reading became a reality for the masses – an entirely radical moment that had enormous consequences for humanity.
Moreover, the spiritual but not religious reflect the “me” generation of self-obsessed, truth-is-whatever-you-feel-it-to-be thinking, where big, historic, demanding institutions that have expectations about behavior, attitudes and observance and rules are jettisoned yet nothing positive is put in replacement.
The idea of sin has always been accompanied by the sense of what one could do to improve oneself and impact the world.
Yet the spiritual-but-not-religious outlook sees the human as one that simply wants to experience “nice things” and “feel better.” There is little of transformation here and nothing that points to any kind of project that can inspire or transform us.
At the heart of the spiritual but not religious attitude is an unwillingness to take a real position. Influenced by the contribution of modern science, there is a reluctance to advocate a literalist translation of the world.
But these people will not abandon their affiliation to the sense that there is “something out there,” so they do not go along with a rationalist and materialistic explanation of the world, in which humans are responsible to themselves and one another for their actions – and for the future.
Theirs is a world of fence-sitting, not-knowingess, but not-trying-ness either. Take a stand, I say. Which one is it? A belief in God and Scripture or a commitment to the Enlightenment ideal of human-based knowledge, reason and action? Being spiritual but not religious avoids having to think too hard about having to decide.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Alan Miller.
“What the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say…”
– Paul Ricouer
“Really?” you might ask.
I think most of us have a hard time believing that. How could anyone make such a statement?
Surely the most important thing is what the author meant to say when he wrote it. I tweeted this quote recently and someone responded in such a fashion. The meaning then is more important than the meaning now. I am inclined to agree. As a student of the New Testament (and the Hebrew Scriptures), and someone who preaches, I spend a lot of time working hard to understand what a text meant when it was originally written, in other words, ‘what the author meant to say’.
My assumption is that the more I can understand the original intention, the better job I’ll do of being true to that text. So from this perspective, what the text originally meant seems to be the most important thing! Upon first glance then, Ricouer, a French philosopher of language, appears clearly wrong.
But here arises the challenge of understanding what the original intent actually was. We don’t always get this exactly right, do we? Someone says something, and we want to know what they intended to mean. In reality, this isn’t always accomplished even in everyday life, in face-to-face conversation. We want to be understood, and get incredibly frustrated when we are not:
Didn’t you say…?
“But I meant to say…”
“You misunderstood me!”
“That’s not what I meant at all.”
One of the worst things possible is being misunderstood.
Yet if it can happen to us today, in face-to-face direct speech acts, how much more might the written word— indirect speech—be misunderstood? And even further, the written word from a different language and culture by an author who is now centuries and even millennia dead.
(Of course this is where, in an act of faith, one might trust that the Holy Spirit will step in and say, “What I meant to say was…”!) But for the purposes of this post, let’s leave that component to the side for the time being. (Invoking the Spirit is necessary, but can often be an easy out in place of the hard work I believe God calls us to do in understanding the text).
Since misunderstandings can (and do!) happen, it seems that our best recourse is to disagree with Ricouer, and assume the original meaning as intended by the author is the most important. After all, why would we spend all the time we do trying to understand this meaning if it were not the case? In fact, it seems such an open and shut case, that perhaps we should be done with it.
But… yet… perhaps…
Importance of the Now
Back to the original provocative statement: “What the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say…”
We noted earlier that it seems almost intuitively obvious that this statement is wrong.
Yet I wonder… perhaps there is something to this after all.
I wonder, if our interpretation, our attempts at recovering what the author meant to say and thus declaring what in fact the text said and says, is, in fact, more important. Think of it this way: When a preacher preaches on any given text, and supplies it with meaning —that is the meaning the listeners take away. When a person reads a verse with their morning coffee and senses, “What I just read means [this] to me”—that is the meaning this person is taking away. In this sense, I think Ricouer is right. What the text says now is more important than what the author meant to say. In fact, this has to be the case. Think about it. What the text says now is all we have. The author is dead. The Apostle Paul cannot rise up when we read a selection from 1 Corinthians and say, “But what I meant to say was…!” (Though we surely wish he would!) What we have is our understanding of the text now. What we have is what the preacher interprets the text to mean. What we have is what we ourselves take a text to mean anytime we read the Bible. That is what we have. That is the meaning of the text here and now—and it is that meaning, not the original meaning, that goes on to have impact and live into the world.
Now don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that what the author meant to say is irrelevant or unimportant. Hardly! It is crucial. And we must work hard to attempt to recover that meaning in any reading and work of interpreting. But the facts are that we can’t sit down with the writer of Matthew when we open that Gospel and make sure we ‘get it’. It’s impossible. We can’t sit down with The Teacher when we read Ecclesiastes to make sure he was as skeptical as he seems. We can’t dissect a Psalm and have David back up our interpretation.
In that sense—a perfect recovery of what any given author meant (of a text in the Bible or any other text)—is impossible. The meaning we supply to the text is the meaning we have. That’s it! That’s the meaning that lives in the world today. And the meaning that lives in the world at any given moment is the more important meaning—that is the meaning that causes people to act in certain ways, to believe certain things, to commit themselves to a certain path. We simply don’t have the original meaning in full. What the text says now is more important, as Ricouer so daringly ventured.
And this actually squares with a Reformed understanding of preaching. There’s a classic statement that says, “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” (As stated in the Second Helvetic Confession.) I always thought this was a bit presumptuous, and laid too much emphasis on the role of the preacher. Yet, in light of Ricouer’s analysis, I think there is a lot of merit to this approach. When the community gathers, and the Word comes forth, and that Word is explicated, interpreted, delivered: we all have some sense that something sacred is happening, that God is engaging us, indeed, that God is speaking.
Consider Calvin:
“When a man has climbed up into the pulpit… it is [so] that God may speak to us by the mouth of a man.”
Or Luther:
“Tis a right excellent thing, that every honest pastor’s and preacher’s mouth is Christ’s mouth…”
Invisible Readers
Ricouer notes that through writing, “discourse escapes the limits of being face to face. It no longer has a visible auditor. An unknown, invisible reader has become the unprivileged addressee of the discourse.”
In other words, at one time, the text belonged to the writer—he wrote it down, and he shared it with people, and could inevitably correct misunderstandings if they engaged the writing in person. But once the work becomes widespread – such corrections vis a vis a face-to-face encounter with the writer, becomes less and less possible. And once the author dies, impossible. The text will reach readers that were invisible to the author, indeed, readers who did not yet exist.
Merold Westphal says it is this invisibility that gives the text an autonomy, an independence from authorial intention. This is known in interpretive circles as “the death of the author.” The absolute author (the one who knows what he or she meant to say) is not replaced by an absolute reader, but by one whose authority is limited, relative to a particular context, and without the presence of the author.
You and I are such readers when it comes to any ancient text (or even reading Steinbeck or Updike).
But here our interpretive journey takes another turn.
Perhaps the author him- or herself is not in full possession of the meaning of what they have written. Perhaps more is being said than even the author was intending!
Merold Westphal notes that “not even the author is in full possession of the whole that would give fully final and determinate meaning.”
In other words, perhaps what the author intended isn’t the whole of its meaning. (I would say this is particularly the case when it comes to Scripture.)
Nick Wolterstorff gives an example of this possibility of a multiplicity of meanings:
At dinner Mom says, “Only two more days till Christmas.” To her young children, who think that Christmas will never come, her speech act is a word of comfort and hope. But to her husband “she may have said, in a rather arch and allusive way, that he must stop delaying and get his shopping done. One locutionary act [vocal utterance], several illocutionary acts [words of comfort and hope, words of warning, even command], different ones for different addressees.”
Wolterstorff shows how a single utterance can have different meanings for different hearers, and they can each be right!
Merold Westphal notes that as Wolterstorff tells the story, Mom is the godlike author whose words have just the meanings she put into them. They mean different things to different hearers so that the meaning of her discourse is a plurality of different meanings. In godlike sovereignty she knows all the hearers and controls the meaning each receives.
Westphal then proposes:
But suppose they weren’t all at dinner and Mom didn’t know that Dad was in a position to overhear her. Dad would rightly take Mom’s speech act to be one of reminder, warning, and perhaps even command, though that was not the meaning she (intended to) put into her discourse. The meaning of the utterance escapes the horizon of its author and its original, intended audience precisely because of the invisibility of at least one additional audience. This is the situation of human authors in general, says Westphal, biblical or otherwise.
By now you’re incredibly uncomfortable with this analysis. You’re resisting this approach. You’re thinking that preachers and scholars are in an awfully important (and scary) position – because they most often are entrusted with helping us understand the text.
This is true. Yet in a sense we all are in this position, we are the invisible readers, at least those of us who read and engage texts (of any sort), especially the Bible.
But fortunately, there is more to it. We’ll get to this in the next post.
Optical illusions may help illustrate the partiality of fact and the importance of personal perspective. Is this well-known picture a rabbit, a duck, both, neither, or simply a set of marks that has no inherent meaning? There’s no real way of saying – it could be any of those.
Say first, of God above or Man below
