Other religions: let's be practical!

All religions are basically the same?

Bob Ackroyd at Brunsfield Evangelical Church explores the practicalities of this and I've discussed an approach a little while ago.

All religions are the same in that they all ask four basic questions:

1. How does your belief inform where you come from (the origin of man)
2. Where you are going (post death?)
3. Why you are here (existential definition)?
4. What's right, what's wrong? Why (meta-ethical epistemology)?
   

A great basis for a conversation: you listen to them, maybe they will ask you your views. See where it goes.

Two questions I would either add or substitute are:

1. Who are we? (aiming to get to Schaeffer's point about the 'mannishness' of man: i.e., in God's image)
2. Why do we suffer? (On the premise that ALL religions are about the problem of man's suffering and pain.)
   

Look out for putative resolutions of these questions that deny obvious reality, the reality of the human dilemma: man is both great and cruel, has joy and suffers, or seek the resolution in man either individually or collectively, on a 'try harder' basis, or an 'it doesn't matter' basis...and how would either help when they are within the very system that is the product and source of the dilemma!

The resolution has to come from without and has to be final: it cannot be part of an infinite regress of causes.

It cannot be contained in the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, but can only be in a system that is open to resolution from without, from not where the dilemma and its discontents arose and are hosted.

Indeed, as Schaeffer tells us: there are only two religions (and our discussion with the 'omni-religious' should have this back of mind}: paganism: the uniformity (or not) of natural causes in a closed system, and Christianity: the uniformity of natural causes in a fallen but open system: open to the creator, the eternal, self-existing, communicating person.

Beware the deist 'god'.

A recent comment on an NT Wright video on his new book The Heart of Romans:

NT talks in many lectures about us having 'platonized' our eschatology, and I guess he's on the money in some areas of church practice; I'm happy to say that I remember from my teenage years a vague belief in the new creation. I think the Apostles creed might have had a part to play in that.

 

But where we have as a church madly platonized is in the creation doctrine. When NT talked about the ease with which the deist caricature of God had headway, it occurs to me that the description of creation in Genesis 1 is from the get go the antidote to deism.

 

Tom talks about God's domain (heaven) and our domain (earth) coming together, but he seems to slip over the fact that the great initial conjunction of heaven and earth is in the creation. Not a platonic or figurative creation, but a real concrete creation. This itself underlines and honours God's creation of a material cosmos with earth in it. In fact, we seem to have an almost Gnostic fear of a concrete creation located in history in connection with our history by the work being done by the Word at a tempo marked by the days which mark our lives.

 

This is perhaps the first move of communion: God shows that he is present and active directly in the world he has made for his creature as the place of communion of they with him and in the concrete terms of the world that he made concretely for that very purpose (concrete as opposed to figurative or conceptual or idealist).

 

The glory of communion of creature and creator comes to its apogee and tragic nadir in Genesis 3:8: God seeking to join communion with his creatures in his image (and thus enabled to commune with propositional content) and finds the opportunity dashed by their rejection of the opportunity.

 

I think this approach to Genesis 1 is not fundamentalist, but the most exciting; spine tinglingly full of joy and the portent of much greater to come. It is consistent with the God who made the material creation to take joy in it and celebrate that by creating in the terms of the creation and by his direct word. Thus, while not fundamentalist, the creation should bear the marks of this creation...as against a deist 'creation' where 'god' is remote, or an evolutionary 'creation' where 'god' is merged into the creation, panentheistically and almost 'paneverytingistly' to use Schaeffer's aptly coined word.

 

Being in his image, we also create by word. Only, as material creatures we use our hands to deliver the idea we have: our word made material while God's word made flesh!

 

Thus the 'days' constitute the frame-of-reference for our concrete congress with God, and his direct (by Christ) participation in his creation. They contextualize all subsequent contact between God and man: the theophanies, the prophets, 'miracles' and the incarnation, in our world marked by a uniformity of natural causes in an **open** system, to again borrow Schaeffer's term.

Do you integrate?

The French philosopher Sartre is reputed to have claimed that with out an infinite reference point, man is doomed to absurdity, or words to similar effect.

Absurdity comes from both the grandeur and wretchedness of man being equally terminally inconsequential and without any final significance.

For Sartre, Camus and the rest of the existentialist cheer squad, even the 'integration' that might come from some decisive existential gesture was hollow, because one would never know if any particular act or experience would be that consummating event. Ironically, the individual, in this scheme, is left to 'faith' in the ultimate event being an obtainable experience to (self) actualize one's life. Futile!

Francis Schaeffer* resolves man's humanity in the word 'mannishness': his being god-like in a material cosmos as having personhood, of being able to communicate and come to personal encounter with another, with the ability to understand himself and his setting in rational propositional terms, at least to some degree.

The dilemma of man (not his absurdity), comes in his failure to live fully as a human, a person in the image of his maker, the creator God, but to have features of this in his grandeur: however marred, his creativity, his joy in others, his loves, compassion, and humility, disrupted at every point by the inversion of his humanity: his cruelty, selfishness, conceits of wisdom and understanding that alienate man from man and man from maker.

Why cannot we be our own 'integration' point? Is this not the mature, wise man at ease in his own being?

In a world conceived in purely material terms, no integration point is available, because all reality is finally materially determined and oblivious to personhood. It is contingent and reality and our place in it can only be framed as dependent on a prior cause...and prior causes go all the way to a meaningless  actual infinite chain of causes, with no identifiable actual cause, or to an explosion of what amounts to dust. All that sits beneath a stream of contingencies is more contingency; nothing that is necessary, or independently real.

A disintegration point that is illustrated in this conception in every man whose life is a brief tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing between two piles of worm dung (Shakespeare: Macbeth).

In a world conceived as an impersonal (spiritual) monist illusion, the infinite regress disappears into a nullifying absorption into the 'great' one of what amounts to a nothing machine.

So the soul can find no base, no connection with what is truly real in either.

As Sartre said, the integration point must be infinite, perhaps meaning self-existent or it is nothing but more of the same; it must also have a personal basis, or our personhood is reduced and Shakespeare again sees the pointlessness. In Othello: "it is a silliness to live when to live is torment; and then have we a prescription to die when death is our physician."

Our creator is our integration point, or rather we integrate properly in our human calling in Christ, enlivened by his in-dwelling Spirit to grow into life in companionship with our creator.

*Schaeffer, The Trilogy; The God Who is There, Escape from Reason, He is There and is not Silent.

Now, just who did make God?

In a video shown at church this morning, promoting children's camps, we saw one boy enthuse that he was able to ask interesting questions such as 'who made God'.

Firstly, it's good that he could ask that question in confidence of being taken seriously, perhaps not so good that maybe he didn't think he could ask it at his church.

When one is asked this question, the reflexive reply might be 'No one 'made' God, he has always existed.' or 'Only entities that had a beginning need a cause, God does not have a beginning'.

But a better way would be to ask questions. This demonstrates that you want to engage with the person, and gives you more information about their thinking behind their question.

On the surface the question seems to contain an assumption or two: that god is contingent, first off. That is, he depends upon something/one else for his being. This would imply that he is a denizen of the world, the cosmos, that we know. This is the mistake made by the Russian cosmonaut who reported that he didn't find God when in orbit around  Earth. The other possible assumption is that the very idea of 'god' is made-up, a human invention. This produces the typical unbeliever's view that we made God in our own image.

Now, the ancient Greeks and Romans certainly fell for that error; their gods are very human like. But the God who speaks is very much not so. Just check the demands in the beatitudes!

So our questions can explore the questioner's understanding of God.

Questions you might ask could be:

What would be able to make god?

When you say 'god' what do you mean?

How would you characterize 'god': i.e., what is 'god' like, in your estimation?

If someone made god, then who made that someone?

Why would you think that God needed to be 'made'?

The strategy is to find out if they think 'god' is an invention, a entirely contained by the  cosmos, that he is a type of creature...and is thus the result of an infinite regress, or an epiphenomenon of material.

For most people, consider that the questioner is, at least, an unconscious modern materialist, and probably evolutionist, or perhaps, again unconsciously, a 'paneverythingist' (as per Schaeffer in He is There and He is Not Silent). That is, with a vague belief that the universe is 'god', or 'god' is an undefined and probably impersonal spirit, such as would represent the 'karma' belief of Hindus.

Most people, and I think, even some Christians, hold that (material) reality is characterized by a uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. However this fails to explain man, the universe and its form (and intelligibility). It fails as a basis for real knowledge of any kind.

Christian faith invites us to the world created by the creator: God who is love. Here we have the uniformity of natural causes in an open system in a limited time span.

The God who is there made the universe, with things together, in relationships. Indeed, the whole area of science turns upon the fact that He has made a world in which things are made to stand together, that there are relationships between things. So God made the external universe which makes true science possible, but he also made man and made him to live in that universe. He did not make man to live somewhere else. So we have three things coming together: God, the infinite-personal God, who made the  universe, and man, whom he made to live in that universe, and the Bible, which he has given us to tell us about that universe. There is a unity between them.

(Schaeffer, He is There and He is Not Silent, p, 329 in the Crossway compilation, vol. 1)

What's the greatest question in Christian 'Leadership'?

I was invited to answer this question by an e-mail from a Bible school I had attended.

Here is my answer:

My greatest 'leadership' question is why has the church followed the world in its obsession with 'leadership'?

The scripture calls us to SERVE. Our leader is the Holy Spirit!

We need to revive the notion of ministry and ministry as support of the discipleship of others, of each other! We have grown a flabby church with insufficient dedication to reading and understanding the scriptures in private devotion and study, insufficient emphasis on the service of all believers in their congregations to each other and insufficient application to our daily routines and behaviour.

The notion of 'leader' passivates the average Christian and offers a mantle that many rightly eschew. What we need is to train Christians for their ministry: be it teaching, preaching, evangelism, administration, etc. and to take responsibility for the application of those gifts.

For those who are younger or less mature, the title 'leader' is an invitation to pride, if not hubris. One has to ask, if one is a leader, who are the followers? Do the followers then defer to the leader for their own spiritual responsibilities?

What we must do as the church is train our brethren in their own growth in faith, in study of the scriptures, in application to reading of fruitful Christian literature (at the maximum level of their intellectual capability) and in serving each other in grace and humility (Phil. 2:3, 4). We must also train in communicating the gospel: Koukl's books Story of Reality, Tactics and Street Smarts are good resources (I add, even though I diverge from aspects of his theology).

BTW, for some background, I have served churches over the decades in administrative committees and as a full time administrator of a medium sized church in Sydney. In my prior professional life I have worked as a senior executive responsible for a budget in excess of $1b (billion). I have served both my employer(s) and my team(s) by building up people to develop their own capability and in taking responsibility for (the management triad): clarifying the mission, providing resources and developing capability: of the team and its individuals.

If anything, this 'triad' is perhaps the nub of taking a role of responsibility for the work of a (any) group!

 

That's the answer.

 

As an addendum I note that it has taken a scholar in management to put his finger on the problem. Henry Mintzberg, who may or may not be a believer, complained about the obsession with leadership rather than, as he puts it, 'communityship'.

Second addendum: in the church I worked for we  avoided the term 'leader'. We had 'convenors' for home study groups, 'coordinators' for various outreach ministries, 'organizers' for others. Some groups had ministry team members, helpers, facilitators, workers, arranger, moderator...and so on.

All religions are basically the same!

You may have often come across this claim, or indeed, even made it yourself.

Firstly, no they are not. But there's a more important point of departure: all religions seek to make sense of the world, or our human life in the world. In the terms of that 'making sense' they all seek to deal with the same thing. This they have in common.

What is this 'same thing'? It is what I (after Francis Schaeffer) call 'the dilemma of man'. In Schaeffer's terms this is the fact that mankind shows both grandeur and degradation. He is noble and cruel, selfish and selfless, proud and humble. A mix of opposites, one in denial of the other.

How so?

How so also man seeks community but lives in alienation, is material, but personal, is personal but finite, contingent, yet hopes for what is beyond the present.

How do religions seek to resolve these tensions, if not conflicts?

They do it through their concept of the independent ground of our being, or of reality: personal or impersonal, material or spiritual, contingent (and then, what truly constitutes the ground) or necessary (self existent), and how does this resolve the dilemma: confrontation, ignoring, neglect, negation, or dissolving, or a true resolution that takes the arms of the dilemma and brings them into a final cohesion?

Then, what is the locus, or domain, of the resolution? Is it within or beyond the life-world or the cosmos that is our denominating constraint? Does it conceive the 'system' that hosts the dilemma can also host its resolution, or does is see the resolution coming only from outside or beyond the system that hosts it?

These questions, give us a means of dimensioning the means of resolution that a religion proposes.

Does man contain the means of resolution; which on the face of it seems absurd as the illness cannot contain the cure (homeopathy aside), or must it come from outside man? And who or what is 'outside man, and the system which hosts, contains and embraces him at every existential point? Or is Sartre and crew right in their despair of resolution, leading to resolution only in the work of power over others, while there is no real power over self?

Finally: the results of any proposed religion need to be considered against its proposals. Do they work? do they seem to work? Can they work? 

Do they even deal with the real reality, or deny it, reduce it, or set it to one side?

All worthy points of discussion.

As Schaeffer in his famous trilogy argues: only the 'religion' of the incarnate creator: Yeshua the Nazarene, the Christ, brings this resolution.

It takes seriously the world, it structures the personal, it knows the dignity and  degradation of man and confronts it head on with the need for and gift of new life, Not a thing of us alone and by our own efforts, but be the gift of fellowship with God in Christ, his Spirit come within to grow us into new creatures to live in a renewed creation and so to enjoy him forever.

It comes from outside our Life-world, from the personal-infinite self-existent creator who knows us intimately and takes our significance, dignity and degeneration from being like him seriously.

See the Anglican Catechism or, for a much better statement of our purpose, the Westminster Catechism, in its beautiful opening: 

Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?

A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, [a] and to enjoy him for ever. [b]

[a]. Ps. 86:9; Isa. 60:21; Rom. 11:36; 1 Cor. 6:20; 10:31; Rev.
4:11

[b]. Ps. 16:5-11; 144:15; Isa. 12:2; Luke 2:10; Phil. 4:4; Rev.
21:3-4

(apart from that I'd be wary of its Calvinism).