Agnostic Christianity

A Story

When I was a kid I wanted to go to Disneyland.  Back in the nineteen fifties, every kid I knew did.  But no one in my neighborhood could afford a trip to California.  It might as well have been on the moon.  We fantasized about it, looked at pictures, and watched glimpses of it on TV.  Then one fall, as we headed back to school, on the bus that first morning, my sometime friend, Frankie DeLuca, stunned everybody.  He said that he had just returned from a trip to Disneyland.  The bus erupted.  There was some disbelief, but mostly awe, envy and lots of questions.  Over the course of that bus ride, Frankie described it all.  Much of what he said painted a picture familiar to us from watching it on TV, but a few things were brand new.  Frankie told of a tower with a winding stairway that was almost as high as the Empire State Building.  At the top, there was a platform where huge birds landed (he wasn't sure if they were mechanical or living, that was my question) and visitors got to climb into seats on the backs of the birds and ride over Disneyland and see everything from above.  I believed every word.  I was once again awestruck by how wondrous that California paradise must be.

It is embarrassing to admit that when I was in my thirties and took my young daughter to Disney World, I still looked around for something resembling Frankie's story.  The fact was, of course, that Frankie had never been to Disneyland.  He just made it up out of his own imagination.  He pictured and described what he wanted Disneyland to be.  He pretended to know what he could not have known because, for a time, it made him feel special and it gave him some kind of power over the rest of us.  He was the possessor of this special experience and knowledge that the rest of us didn't and couldn't have.  And very few other kids dared to disbelieve or question Frankie's story, because when someone did, Frankie was ready to defend his story and his honor with his fists.

The Problem of Certainty

Perhaps that is why one of the most dangerous of things is when people presume to know with certainty something that they simply cannot know.  Unfortunately, almost all brands of the Christian religion have been doing that for hundreds of years and have been willing to defend their assertions with more deadly means than fists.

There are doctrines about what happens after we die.  Some of them as rich in detail as Frankie's story about the big birds.  They include a heaven, a hell, a purgatory, a limbo; with many of these places described by religious professionals in graphic detail.  There are rules about who goes where and for which offenses and for how long.  Of course, the truth is that what happens after we die is one of those mysteries to which we cannot know the answers.  Is there some separable spiritual entity in us that goes its own way after the body dies?  Is there some cosmic force that determines our spiritual fate based on what our lives were like, whether it functions like karma or judgment?  We simply cannot know.  No one can come back to tell us.  Yes, there are people who have returned from near-death experiences, but those are just that, "near-death."  By definition, no one who is dead can ever tell us what we long to know about some other reality that comes after.  Likewise, there can never be any definitive answer from science about the future of a soul that science can neither detect nor measure nor quantify nor explain.

The real absurdity is the certainty that so many people, both religious and secular, seem willing to assert about something that we simply cannot know much about.  And, of course, in most versions of the Christian faith, this is just one small example.  People believe in a virgin birth of Jesus.  They believe in the literal inerrancy of a book written by dozens of different authors over the course of fifteen hundred years in a time far more primitive than ours.  They believe in the paradoxical notion that God is both three separate persons and yet one at the same time.  They believe that a man was brought back from the dead after three days in a tomb.  They believe that that same man never did a single thing wrong in his entire life because he was actually God.  And the list of beliefs goes on and on.

I don't need to judge any of these specifics of some versions of the Christian faith or to say that any of those doctrines are true or false, profound or absurd, helpful or destructive.  The problem is certainty.  We can believe what we will.  Some of those beliefs can aid us in our spiritual journey and some may hamper us.  But what is dangerous is the presumption that we "know."  All of our Christian doctrines and most of our beliefs are in the realm of those things that we can never know.  We need to always remember that.  And anyone who espouses certainty about such things is simply deluded or a liar.

When preachers get into the pulpit and say that they are certain that God wants you to do one thing or another, they are either manipulating you with dishonesty or badly delusional themselves.  To pretend that you know a thing that you cannot know is wrong on so many levels.  To take the fruit of human imagination (either current imagination or centuries old imagination) and preach it, promote it, or legislate it as fact and or as the truth, is dangerous and oppressive.  It narrows our minds and it creates a barrier preventing any future growth and discovery.

This kind of certainty about items of belief has a name, of course, and that name is fundamentalism.  Fundamentalism is a disease of religion and it has expressions in every religious faith.  There are also fundamentalist believers among the atheists.  There are those whose materialism or behaviorism or secularism begins to have the rigidity of certainty about things that are by their nature in the realm of mystery.  Even non-believers need to try to live by Hamlet's line, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Like Frankie DeLuca, holding on to his Disneyland fantasy, sometimes fundamentalist believers become violent when their certainty is challenged.  Some tie so much of their identity to their particular beliefs that they inevitably see others who believe differently as their enemies.  Hence, Muslim fundamentalist seek to purify their societies to assure that everyone must live as they choose to live.  Many of our Christian fundamentalists need to identify this country as a Christian nation based on their understanding of the Christian faith.

Idolatry and Revelation

One of the central themes of the Hebrew Scripture is the proscription against idolatry.  The early Israelites understood that the real threat to faith was not unbelief; it was worshipping things that were not worthy of worship.  They knew the danger to genuine faith of treating relative things as if they were absolute.  They knew that elevating human-made things to the level of sacredness was the one thing that would separate people from a real relationship with God.  The very first commandment and the most vital was to "have no other gods before" Yahweh.

Theologian Paul Tillich defined faith as an "ultimate concern."  Everyone has something that has ultimate value to them whether it be God, money, family relationships, humankind, race, nation or some other.  Faith is that relationship that we have with whatever it is that we consider truly transcendent.  The danger is to have an ultimate concern for things that are not ultimate at all.  That is what happens when the Bible is considered sacred in itself.  Human beings wrote it.  It is a human document.  To consider it perfect or inerrant or directly created by God is to take something human-made and to elevate it to the status of God.  Even within the bounds of the faith traditions of both Christians and Jews, this is idolatry and the worst kind of affront to genuine faith.  We all know how scary it is when race or nation become people's "ultimate concern," because those sources of allegiance and identity tend to separate people and alienate one group from other groups.  The elevation of one book or one doctrine within a religious tradition to "ultimate" status creates the same kinds of human divisions.

Of course, the argument in Christianity that enables this kind of idolatry is the claim that Christianity is a "revealed" religion.  That means that we know that the doctrines or the scriptures are true because they have been revealed directly by God.  Thus, a Fundamentalist might hold that the Bible is holy and inerrant because what is in it was revealed to the writers directly by God, just as some Roman Catholics believe that the Pope when speaking "ex cathedra" can be inerrant because then he speaks with God's direct inspiration.

The interrelation between reason and revelation in Christian thinking is a long and complicated one that we need not delve into here, because the point it elsewhere.  There is a necessary caveat even for those who believe in revelation, and I am one.  While I suspect that God is revealed in myriad ways in every aspect of life at all times, that revelation comes to us in our limited minds and spirits.  While we may believe that God is absolute and that we can sometimes glimpse some absolute truth, the ones doing the glimpsing are broken, prejudiced, ignorant creatures locked into limited points of view who are liable to misinterpret God's revelation at almost any and every point.

There may be some absolute truth and it may be available to us, but we are neither capable of grasping it nor able to avoid skewing it according to our own twisted predispositions.  It is simple to believe in revelation.  It is absurd to believe in the perfection or dispassionate reporting of those who bring us that revelation.  When revelation came to the Israelites, it come conveniently wrapped in the notion that they and they alone were the chosen people.  When revelation came to Jesus' disciples, it came conveniently packaged in the idea that the one guy that they had chosen to follow was the one and only son of God.  When revelation came to Mohammed, it came with the certainty that he was not only God's prophet, but also the greatest and final prophet.  Revelation so often seems oddly self-serving.

How We know About Spiritual Things

There are (at least) three different ways of knowing something.  One has to do with a preponderance of evidence.  This is the way of science.  Observations are taken, experiments conducted, and evidence is evaluated.  Anyone can look at the evidence and decide what the facts are.  It is the way in which we know almost everything we know about the external world.  While differences sometimes exist in how to interpret the evidence (witness the debate over global warming) one can usually wait for more evidence, further experiments or for time to move the bulk of expert opinion in one direction or another.  However, this kind of "knowing" can tell us very little about issues of transcendent meaning; what we value, why we matter, and who we are.

The two other ways of knowing things are of more value for our internal lives.  The first has to do with what we figure out about the world and ourselves.  We look at our gifts, abilities, and experiences and we try to discover patterns.  We create stories.  We find the plot lines of our living and figure out the internal narrative.  When we link our lives with a larger story line we create religious narratives.  It is no accident that most of the world's sacred literature is comprised of stories.  Our lives have a mythology, a structure that we discover or impose that gives coherence to the chaos of events, relationships and experiences.  We find patterns in the randomness.  Whole cultures do the same thing in creating religious and national mythologies.

Buddhism is a great example of a religion that was "figured out."  Siddhartha Gautama had some profound experiences of human suffering and then he sat down under the bodhi tree and meditated until he figured out how the metaphysical world worked.  Then he gathered people together and taught them what he had figured out.  People could either decide that what he said made sense and resonated with their own experience and so choose to follow his prescriptions or they could decide that he was crazy or mistaken and choose to ignore him.  The path of the Buddha's reasoning is readily understandable and is available for anyone to follow and evaluate.  Certain assumptions about the nature of the spirit are inherent in his thinking (karma and reincarnation among others) and his reasoning makes sense only if one shares those assumptions in some way, but the logic is transparent.

The other way of knowing in our spiritual lives overlaps with the first.  It has to do simply with experience.  We know what we have seen or what has happened to us directly.  If we have had direct experiences of God, the belief in God is not even an open question--it is what we know.  Of course, many people don't think that God has touched their lives directly or with sufficient clarity for them to "know" anything for sure.  The Bible is filled with stories of theophanies--Moses at the burning bush, Isaiah in the temple, Elijah on Mount Horeb,  Jesus in the Jordan River, or Paul on the road to Damascus.  God speaks and acts in scripture with definitive force.  Of course, that is because the stories are told to convince, instruct and inspire others.  They are also told within the metaphoric and symbolic context of our faith tradition.  There are prescribed ways to tell an epiphanic story and these stories all follow the handbook.  I suspect, however, that the actual incidents that inspired the stories were as uncertain and personal as our own.

We have all experienced God directly as our faith traditions understand it.  The question is just whether we interpret our experiences in the context of faith.  Everyone has stood on some mountaintop and looked at the vista below and felt some internal response to the vastness and the beauty.  Call it awe or wonder or some other sort of longing to touch or be a part of that grandeur, it doesn't matter.  For people who see their lives in terms of the spirit, that wonder or awe is the experience of God.  It is direct.  It is personal.  It is unequivocal.  Most of us have had like experiences while walking on the beach at night, hearing and feeling the power of the surf and the vastness of the sea, or looking at a particularly vivid sunset in a big sky.  It is the experience of God, not just because it is beautiful or big, but because it stirs us on the inside.  It calls us in some way and speaks to us of our place in the cosmos.  Without the eyes of faith those same experiences may mean nothing or be just a pleasant or unnerving sensation.

Similarly, everyone has experienced some "dark night of the soul;" whether it be a time of profound grief or deep disappointment or contemplation of suicide.  We have all had moments when we were coping with something that was more than we could emotionally handle.  We've sat, at least metaphorically, at our kitchen tables at three a.m. with our head in our hands and our heart in our throat wondering whether we actually had the strength to go on.  At times like those, most of us have been saved or brought back by something; a surprising word of comfort from a friend or a family member, a discovery of strength beyond what we ever thought we had, or the glimpse of some light in the depths of our hearts in the midst of the darkness.  Whatever it was, that something, deep at the heart of us is, for those of us who look through the eyes of faith, the experience of God-- direct and unmistakable.

All of us have experienced love.  Sometimes it is a romantic love for one other person; the kind of love that makes you do stupid things or recite poetry.  Sometimes it is the love gathered around our table at a birthday party when we feel it coming to us from everybody there.  Sometimes it is the love we feel for some larger group.  I remember blubbering like a child while I stood in front of my first congregation trying to say goodbye.  The depths of my love for the whole community overwhelmed me.  Sometimes it is love for some strangers when we are moved by empathy for the plight of people suffering halfway around the world.  But whatever its form, people who see the world through the lens of faith find in that love the very heart of God.  It is direct and unequivocal.  Christians who read the words from John that "God is love," find in the experience of love the deepest and most powerful experience of God that anyone can have.

Some people know there is a God because they have experienced God personally and that part of faith is beyond doubt.  Others may feel just as sure of God's absence based on their very different interpretation of the same kind of experience.

Agnosticism

When we experience something we feel that we know it.  And religious experience feels transcendent.  It is not just ours; it is a revelation of the real heart of the whole world.  It shapes how we interpret everything and feels like the most important thing that there is.  Of course, on the contrary, what we know from experience is actually just personal.  It is knowledge, not about the world or the universe, but mostly about us.  We join together in religious communities because we long to have others who see the world as we do to confirm our experience as well as our interpretation of it.  With others who share our interpretation, we can boldly proclaim that we have experienced God and that we know some important things about God.  And so we do.  But just as all revelation comes only through our, all too human, lens and point of view, these personal experiences of God are ours alone.  The truth revealed is our truth.  It is provisional.  We cannot make assumptions about everyone's experience because of ours.  We can base our life decisions on our inner certainties, but we cannot think that we know the way things are everywhere just because we know how things are in our own hearts.  We cannot inflate our own personal narrative into a mythology that defines us all.  We cannot pretend to know things that we cannot know.

As Paul wrote so wisely (he was not so wise about many other things), "we have this truth in earthen vessels."  Those earthen vessels are us; our limited thoughts, feelings and understandings.  If we believe that God is infinite, then by definition, God is beyond our comprehension.  We cannot know or express anything substantial about what we cannot begin to understand.  When we trumpet our "truths," whether from what we've been taught or from what we've experienced, as the only truth or the truth for all, we are indeed delusional.  We are taking the, oh so limited, contents of our own minds and hearts and inflating them into some universal things that they are not.  That is an affront to reason, to the real search for truth, and an affront to the infinite nature of God.

And so, for religious people, and I am one, what we "know" is always a personal thing.  We have experienced things that we insert into our own personal mythologies in a particular way.  We may link those personal narratives with the broader narrative of a part of the Christian tradition, but when we think about the wider world we must always understand that our ideas are, not just limited, but provisional.  Our constructs may be built on personal experience, but they remain just our own constructions that don't even begin to grasp what we believe in as God.

Even the idea of God is a provisional one.  What we have experienced when we refer to the experience of God is some tiny microcosm of what the idea of God might actually mean and we can't quite grasp even that.  We can speak only in stories and metaphors and vague language about realities that are completely beyond us.  To assert that God, as we interpret God, exists or doesn't exist is both beyond our ken and beside the point.

We yearn, we long for something, we experience some transcendent and unrepeatable moments, we sense that love and beauty are at the heart of everything, we feel that the whole cosmos has more depth and mystery that what we can see on the surface, and we feel that human life and all life is touched with some sacred majesty that we can't quite define.  Perhaps that is all that we can say without going too far.  And even that is just confessional.  We open our hearts and this sense of the transcendent comes out.  How I choose to make sense of it is no better than anyone else's version.

So perhaps the most faithful thing that we can be is agnostic.  We look at the universe and into the human heart and sigh with the mystery of it.  If it is the infinite we are after, any label, any concept, any thought, had better be provisional or it is just plain stupid.  Thoughts of transcendence should open our minds, not shut them off.  Ideas of an infinite God of love should connect us more deeply to other people who are different than ourselves, not erect more barriers.  True experiences of the holy should leave us wondering at the mysteries, not trying to sell our little ideas to other vulnerable people.

I call myself a Christian agnostic because all of my beliefs about God are provisional things.  What I don't know is the infinite thing.  But I try, in my ignorance, to follow the spirit of one wandering Jew who taught that love was at the heart of everything, because that is also what I make of my own experience.  Other faiths have much to teach me and my own spiritual yearnings push me to be a seeker in many directions.  But save me from those who say they know the truth.  Save me from those whose beliefs are certain.  Save me from those who have the answers to life's persistent questions.  For they have little or nothing to do with the God I seek; the God who crosses boundaries, and opens hearts, and aches with love, and remains this infinite and insistent mystery pulling us out of the prison-houses of our ignorance and presumptions.