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DanLittauer's picture

Why We Needed Rules-Based Faith. And Why We Need to Move Past It./ Charles Park

Submitted by DanLittauer
on Tue, 04/05/2011 - 16:38

 

In his recent book, Future of Faith, Harvey Cox laments how the Roman Empire co-opted Christianity and pushed the ‘Age of Belief’ onto us.  He looks to the spirit-filled Pentecostals of the developing world to usher in the ‘Age of the Spirit.’
 
I find much to agree with him about the coming age of the spirit.  However, the Pentecostals of the developing world tend to be fundamentalists, the very group Prof. Cox opposes.  If he’s looking to them to bring us out of the fundamentalist colors of the age of belief, he will be disappointed.

I also disagree that the ‘age of belief’ was a historical accident that did not have to happen as he contends.  The historians talk of ‘Axial Age.’  It brought us out of the ‘Mythic Age’ when even the gods were criminals.  Think of Greek myths where Zeus does crazy things.  The first emperor of China tried to ‘bury every scholar and burn every book.’  He killed people in truly epic scale.  Jaw dropping things happened back then.
 

In that context, Confucius came talking about the ‘will of heaven.’  He located authority higher than the people in power who were acting like criminals (stage 1).  He built an elaborate and very rigid system of code of ethics and honor where everyone had their place, and everything had it’s rightful use.  Confucianism is a bounded set on steroids.  It was a much needed antidote to the chaos of his times.
 
He was not well received in his life time, but in a few generations, Confucianism became the ruling philosophy of East Asia for 2,000 years.



The ‘Axial Insight’ or ‘Axial Revolution’ refers to this period two millennia ago, in the span of several centuries, we see Confucius in East Asia, Doctrine of Karma in India, Rise of Islam in Middle East, and the Rise of Judeo-Christianity in the West.


Virtually every advanced civilization today owes it’s existence to one of these systems of ‘way of life.’  The Axial Age brought human civilization out of the chaotic, stage 1, criminal ‘mythic age’ to the stage 2 ‘age of belief.’  So, it was the historic imperative necessity that drove the development of belief-centric, code-centric, bounded set approach to faith in Christianity.  I see it as inevitable development.  In other words, the need to establish ‘law and order’ beyond capricious human authority was the need of the time.  What makes the West so unique that they could skip this stage of development?
 

But since the reformation, the West has been moving towards the next age, because the struggle to establish law and order has been largely resolved without having to resort to ‘higher authority.’  But, in the developing world, the struggle continues as is evident in places like Libya.  But in the West, we are experiencing the next great shift.   We live in interesting times.
 
This might explain the great schism in the Anglican world today.  The Anglicans from the developing world cannot compromise on the source of their authority in a code.  The Anglicans in the developed world live in a different reality.  The two are living in different ages.  Therefore, it is not likely they can be reconciled.
 
But, this shift in age is not a bad development for Christianity.  Of all the religions that arose out of Axial Age, only Christianity has the potential to break free of ‘code’ as the source of authority.  We follow the risen Christ as the perfect revelation of God on earth.  But for example, Islam considers a book, Koran, as the perfect revelation of God on earth.  This is why the West must re-discover the stage 4 faith taught by Jesus.

Dave Schmelzer's picture

What's Your Take on Science of the Mind?

Submitted by Dave Schmelzer
on Thu, 02/24/2011 - 15:52

Thanks for your comments yesterday--Vince comes through in the clutch again, it seems, and helps us understand a bit more about how that last conversation went the way it did.  I was helped!  ...By the end.

Another note: I'm on the road right now and will be for good chunks of the next, count 'em, three weeks.  (I'm writing this, viz. Louis C.K., IN THE SKY!  It's my first use of inflight wifi.)  So I'd, as always, love to see any guest posts that come to mind for you.  You lead the conversation for a bit and see what happens!  My tip as you compose your guest post: don't just pose a question.  (As I'll do below.)  Give us a bit of your take on the question posed, so we'll have actual grist for conversation.

One thing I'm finding in awesome folks I'm meeting in Seek and other similar settings is that more and more people have been impacted by what, in the old days, one might have called "Science of Mind" thought.  So The Secret and The Law of Attraction.  That stuff.  Thoughts are things.  What we think we inevitably bring to ourselves, so we'd better keep our thoughts focused on positive things and on what we want, because that's what we'll draw to ourselves.  We need to rid ourselves of negative self-talk, because that's what we'll bring to ourselves.  Etc.  I meet lots of people--who in most cases are now trying to follow Jesus--for whom this line of thought is mother's milk.

Here's where the "on the one hand" talk starts.  On the one hand, this--if lived out in the context of following Jesus--has upsides and has points of connection with the New Testament.  "Rejoice always" comes to mind.  Commands to be grateful and generous are very easy to understand for my friends with this background.  And, as has just been debated endlessly, this blog tends to take a generally positive tone itself, and that's in the spirit of things here.

On the other hand, I'm trying to work this into a worldview which also involves, as best as we can pull off, unyielding obedience to Jesus as the bottom line, something I'm also pretty motivated towards.  And, while I'm on board with a positive, grateful, generous approach to life, it remains pretty important to me that we're looking to Jesus, not the impersonal universe, to choose to give us these good gifts.  (My friends in these various contexts would not dispute that.  They've all recently chosen to follow Jesus themselves.  But it can all feel like a bit of a package.)

So how about you?  What's your take on science of mind (or a Christianized science of mind)?  Is this no big deal which has some upsides?  Is this to be fled from as one would flee a marauding beast?  Are you having similar conversations, or is no one around you into this?  Help me out here, if you can and would.

Dave Schmelzer's picture

Is this liberal?

Submitted by Dave Schmelzer
on Thu, 02/24/2011 - 15:39

So one thing that might have zero interest for some of you, but great interest for others, is the question of whether the faith we're describing here is (theologically, not socially) "liberal."  Again, for some of you this will be neither here nor there, so feel free to read your other favorite blog now.

But, for those of us in the church biz, this comes up every now and again.  And I actually spoke to this this last Sunday when I preached on that ever-hot-button topic of homosexuality from a churchgoing point of view.  (Should you be interested, all of our sermons are available online at www.bostonvineyard.org.)  I pitched the conversation as best happening in a centered-set perspective.  And I mentioned how, to folks who come to questions of faith from a particularly-conservative point of view, talking about centered-set will just seem like code for "liberal."

But then I pitched that this was a false perspective.  Centered-set, it seems to me, is neither conservative nor liberal.  Both of those are bounded-set categories. 

And when we consider what theological liberalism is, we'll see that this take on centered-set is far from that.  Theological liberalism kicked into high gear in the late 1800s as a response to the Enlightenment.  Was faith in Jesus invalid now that the scientific method disallowed miracles or any reference to the supernatural?  One response was fundamentalism.  This, crudely-stated, pitched that the most-scientific thing on earth was the Bible, which was distilled "truth."  Forget all that supernatural stuff--the ticket to respectability is a resolute focus on the Bible.

The other response was theological liberalism.  Yes, sure, let's dismiss the miracles and the supernatural.  But surely Jesus is our best picture ever of a good citizen!  And so liberalism--again, crudely-stated--focused on Jesus' social ethic as the relevant aspect of faith.  Descendants of this perspective are the Unitarian Church and most mainline denominations.  In our area, the UCC would be a great picture of a theologically liberal church.  In many Unitarian settings, for instance, talking about Jesus at all would be seen as offensive.  In some, talking about God would be offensive.

My feeling is that the take on faith we talk about here has zero to do with liberalism.  The whole point of this take on faith is that this God is very interactive, that that's central.  It's that we have a center of our set which, if we orient our lives around moving ever-closer to this center, will give us living and active feedback and change our lives--Jesus.  This really has nothing to do with theological liberalism.  It's quite possible it has very little to do with theological conservatism as well.  Again, you could make a case that both are bounded-set and this is just a different framework entirely.

What's your take on this?  Do you on occasion feel the need to defend yourself against charges of "liberalism" from your theologically conservative friends?  Does this never come up for you?

DanLittauer's picture

What are your thoughts on conversion?

Submitted by DanLittauer
on Thu, 02/17/2011 - 16:59

I'm in a periodic email conversation with a mixed group of Christian Westerners who've spent time in the Middle East and Middle Easterners who, as Muslims, have had some sort of encounter with Jesus.

A question being batted around at the moment is what we think of "conversion"--in this case of Muslims to Christianity, but also in general.  This would seem to tie back to our bounded/centered-set conversation.  So, for those of us who are trying to follow Jesus, should we hope to see a given Muslim "converted" to Christianity or to Jesus or whatever?  If so, that will clearly cause them lots of problems, but should that just be the way the cookie crumbles, as it were?

 

Or--one stream of the conversation proposes--should we regard conversion as an evil?  It's saying that we think some other person should become a different sort of person--one, happily enough, just like us!  Instead should we want everyone to be that awesome person they are.  And, as people trying to follow Jesus, should we hope that Jesus could be a part of everyone being that awesome person they are?

That might sound like semantics, but you wouldn't believe the volumes and volumes of erudite responses that question has elicited from these folks for whom this is such a significant part of their story, from either the Western or the Middle East vantage point.

What do you think?  Are you hoping to help people convert?  Or definitely not!?  Or some other thing that involves Jesus?  What are the stakes to you of this conversation, if any?

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