The essence of theology--and religion

Over the past weeks several of you have raised questions about the meaning of religion and theology. Included in these inquiries: How do you tell good religion from bad religion? What do you know you didn’t know 50 years ago? Which sort of theology is helpful, and which is not? Why is it that more people don’t see what theology is at heart? What about the problem of evil?

And then, “Why can’t you answer these questions in six sentences?” It seems so simple. After all when you mix one atom of Oxygen and two atoms of Hydrogen in an electric atmosphere you get water. Simple! I will try and answer these questions as a theologian and not as a religious scientist. And there is a difference. Science asks two extremely valuable questions: “What” and “How”? Theology, at heart, asks “Why?” Science can split the atom. Theology asks what it might mean. Pure science is value free. Theology is value centered.

How does theology work? Picture an ancient primitive family sitting around their campfire. The brightest kid asks, “Why did grandmother die? Tell us about the flood. Why is getting enough to eat so hard?” And the grandfather replies, “Let me tell you a story.” Stories do not describe what happened, but are about the meaning of whatever happened. There was no Adam and Eve, no Noah’s ark. Religious stories are about what never happened but is always true. And these stories probe the meaning of events. It is so in all religions. They are all articulated in stories.

The stories are always about those who look over the horizon to what cannot be seen. Religious gurus are captured by what cannot be proved; by that which lures them on. They are like Hannibal, who when he came to the end of his maps, kept marching. Religious sages keep marching off all the known maps.

Some quick stories to illustrate. Abram of Ur felt a call to something beyond his comfortable life, and he went out, “not even knowing where he was to go.” Moses saw a bush that burned but was not burned up—it was the consuming fire within him that could not be extinguished as long as his people were slaves in Egypt. Gautama, the Buddha, in a chariot ride from his father’s secure palace, saw a old beggar, a diseased man, a decaying body and a mystic, and wondered if there was more to life than riches and comfort. Jesus looked at his own religious tradition and said, “you have heard it said of old, but I am here to tell you something new.” Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream.” They and millions of others had come to the end of their maps, and just kept marching. Why did others see the same things and were not lured to look beyond them?

“Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes - The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Science confronts mysteries which become problems, which can be addressed with enough money, time and smarts. Theology deals with Mystery (GOD) which is not solvable but before which we bow in awe. In Job chapter 38, a marvelous poem, God confronts Job who has been struggling with the question of why evil. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know.” The poem goes on at great length detailing the extent of the natural Mystery which surrounds life.

So far we have been talking about the essence of theology. Now we must get to the question of religion(s). And here is where it gets awkward. Instead of bowing before the Mystery and marching off the maps, some have attempted to control the Mystery. So they constructed rules, doctrines. They generated boundaries, walled out those they didn’t want in, insisted that their rules and doctrines had it right and everyone else had it wrong. Saw God as a controlling dictator.

In religious history there emerged parallel tracks. One sought to continually confront the Mystery and extended arms as wide as the world, and the other continually sought to construct fences to keep out the others.”

One reached out with new ways to humanize the creation, and to care for the creation itself. The other sought to wall out the world; convinced that they were God’s only people, and those who adhered to their doctrine were the only “saved.” They sought to guarantee a safe trip to some better world for their elect alone.

What is the evidence you ask for? On one hand you have universities, schools, hospitals, medical—agricultural--educational missions. You have liberationists, compassion for lepers, support of abolition, civil rights, women’s rights, labor rights, GLTB rights. You have not only peaceful people but also peacemakers. On the other hand you have the Inquisition, slavery, the Salem witch trials, fundamentalism on and on.

He drew a circle that shut me out. Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win.
We drew a circle that took him in.
Edwin Markham

Certainly good religion does not have a corner on or solely invent any of the positive things. Their generation is shared with people of all faiths and people of no faith. But in Western society the evidence for the Mystery is: Oxford University, monasteries—the first hospitals, those arrested inside the Capitol last month while holding a vigil on behalf of America’s poor, a group of totally bereft people living on the garbage pile in Mumbai, India who shared gladly what little they had with anyone whose need was as great as theirs (I was with these people a while back).

There are millions of other examples. Do you want hard evidence that there are people who follow a vision which is the Mystery beyond them? Just look around.
Read a bit of history. Listen to the testimonies of the visionaries. See Father Damien at work with lepers on the isolated island of Molokai. Go with me to the gates of an army camp in Georgia where they train generals for South American right-wing dictatorships. Thousands gather in protest in November year after year. Many are arrested. All in the name of the Prince of Peace. Then there is the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, Bach’s Mass in B Minor, beautiful liturgy, drama, literature of kinds, simple unexplained acts of compassion.

The opposite also exists, and it is the opposite that gets the press. American fundamentalism is alive and well. But it is only two generations old, started in the American South convinced that five fundamentals (doctrines) divided the saved and the lost. One can find multitudes of examples of the downside of religion. Anyone going through the Internet can produces startling examples and file them on r/t. But they are not the authentic heart of religion. They are perversions.

Jesus was asked about the heart of religion and he replied. “All the law and the prophets can be summed up in these words, ‘Love God and love your neighbor.’”
The apostle Paul writing to one of his churches put it this way. (I Corinthians 13). “Faith hope and love. These are the only things that last. And the greatest of them is love.” And that is what the world needs—all three. These are the ways in which the Mystery, which is God, is known and served, and the earth made a more human place.

As the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr put it:
“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.”

Have I honestly dealt with your questions? If you read carefully you will find most of the answers within this essay. Let me add a bit to two more questions.
“What do we know now we didn’t know 50 years ago?” All of life and thought evolves. History is not static. The creationists are just wrong. Religion evolves. There is a great progression from the slaughter of the Canaanites by Joshua, to the ethic articulated by Jesus. In the past fifty years we have been led to discover what must be done about a rapidly decaying and abused physical earth. We have discovered the injustices heaped on GLBT people. We have new insights and information about the documents which lay behind the writing of the New Testament. We have much new information about the sayings of Jesus (I am a member of the Jesus Seminar which has made remarkable discoveries—yes, using scientific literary tools.) ---and much much more.

What about the problem of evil? Does God interfere causing rain in Texas if people pray? Does God ask fathers to abuse their children—and the scores of other horror stories you find in r/t? Or is this just the kind of world we have, and the processes of nature unbroken? God is not a wise old man in the sky who looks down and plays favorites. Jesus said, “The rain falls on the just and on the unjust.” Nature is ours to understand and manipulate. Science is our vital partner. God is not in the businesses of interfering, but luring. Everything that is born dies—everything, and the human task is to make as much just sense in the lifetimes we are given.

I do not ask any of you to be convinced, but just to listen. I have been as honest as I can be. I trust your open minds might hear.

My guess is that you will get knee jerk responses that will not engender discussion.

...or irrational fears. Does not being convinced otherwise mean I don't have an "open mind"?

As for answering "why?" questions... science can certainly handle that, so long as the context of the question is clear. "Why" always has a context, despite the fact that people often forget this, or just assume (for no good reason at all) that there's some Ultimate Context in which "why" is answered in terms of Greater Purpose, forgetting also that "purpose" is also not a context-free concept.

I'd say more, but I have to keep this short at the moment.

can you answer why are there numbers and why they behave like they do, in the context of a well defined logical system containing number theory (e.g. Principia Mathematica)?

...it's just a first step for nailing down what someone means when they ask "why"?

Not being able to find an answer once a problem is well defined, however, doesn't mean "therefore GOD!". It only means "therefore I don't know".

Gödel = God ;)

Or, pardon my French, Le Dog.

Enough joking, the point was that there are implicit truths that cannot be proved (ie. derived axiomatically). In other words: "It's true because I can't prove it".

If someone wants to call unprovable truths which manifest also in science and logic and especially in math "god(s)", I would say that is a matter of situation awareness, personal taste, cultural background etc.

Also what you say about nailing down what someone means by "why" is very important - for example is some kind temporal relation presupposed in the question and if so, what kind (reason, purpose etc.).

Now, what do you think, in scientific or other terms, about the question "Why all this (time, being, experiencing, number theory, forms), in the given context "all this""?

...they are assumed truths. You decide to provisionally accept an idea as true (say, "parallel lines never intersect") and see where it leads (along with a few other axioms, Euclidean geometry).


I'm afraid I can't parse your question well enough to be sure what you mean. If you're asking "Why is there anything at all?", why is there any universe at all for us to be discussing, the best answer is "I don't know". Simple as that.

There's no good reason to assume there is a "why" there that can be answered. The concept of "why" could very well only make sense inside our universe, and not have any meaning in any theoretical context, if such a context is even possible or meaningful, where the universe is viewed as provisional.

Once again, the difficulty of asking such questions, of even framing them, does not somehow grant religion any special status for providing answers or meaning.

The question "why" does not lead to a definition or an axiom. It rather leads to probes. But probes are the essence of both science and philosophy. Probes into the known may elicit answers, but probes into the unknown only describe the nature of the search.

And you are right about the greatest philosophic conundrum, "why is there something, and not nothing?

While we do not agree about many things, I find most of your responses thoughtful and polite.

which we are challenging. Can your ideas hold up to scrutiny? Can you defend your arguments?
If not they are useless.

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why people follow a religion and what can result.
I see nothing there to show the basis of any religion has any foundation in reality.

I have no idea what this means: "Theology deals with Mystery (GOD) which is not solvable but before which we bow in awe. "

It seems to me to say that God obviously exist and theology deals with him. A presumption not in evidence.

many things in the scientific world cannot see, but we do see the evidences of existence from what they produce? I cannot clearly define the "good" but I can see goodness. What I attempted to suggest is that the evidence of religion lies in the lives which it has produced.

Those things you say science doesn't see. Well they do see them, just not with our naked senses. And for them to be accepted they are precisely defined. So that no matter who does the experiment, no matter what their personal bias is, the results will be the same. That is why science produces objective proof.
What you describe is your interpretation on things you see, or think you see done in a way that does not preclude all your personal biases.
It might be evidence for religion, But it is not any evidence of the things that religion is based on.

I will be offering an opinion which describes a few of the things that science once posited as absolute, but which don't seem to be.

First, it's old hat. We all know that science changes. In fact, one of the major reasons that science is the superior methodology that it has become is because it has built-in pathways of self-correction when hypotheses turn out to be wrong.

Second, I think everyone who is still trying to talk to you would prefer it if you'd stay in thread. That is, if you want a discussion. If you want a soapbox, then OP away...

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“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
-Gandhi

At least thanks fo the response.
And good old atheist citizen Smith threatened death to those who disagreed. A threat that was carried out in spades!

for a very long time. They didn't tolerate criticism well at all, now did they? Why was that, one wonders?

I didn't threaten anyone.

I doubt seriously that any atheist has a slaughter number as high as Christianity.

as to whose religion is the "true" one and whose is the perversion. Using the one tool at your disposal - theology - you'll never come to agreement.

So tell again me how useful it is.

doesn't mean that diety does not exist. Atheists do not agree on many points, but they are nonetheless atheists. As a matter of fact, just about any group or arrangement of humans united under any banner or creed are not in total agreement on points relating to their respective units.

leaves me with more IQ points than if I had read whatever post is there!

But it does not answer the question I posed, as promised, nor does it even state it accurately. It poses the question as:

“What do we know now we didn’t know 50 years ago?”

When the question actually posed was: “What do we know now that we didn't know 50 or 100 years ago, and what do we understand better than we did 50 or 100 years ago, because of theological inquiry?”

In response to the question I actually asked, NONE of these things even remotely qualifies. Discoveries made through scientific or historical inquiry certainly don’t, nor do things discovered or conclusions arrived at by other means and merely acknowledged or recognized by theologians much later. I'll leave it to anyone reading to decide for themselves why the question would have been misrepresented in such a fundamental way, when it could have just as easily been cut and pasted exactly.

"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake." - H.L. Mencken

convincing people that their religion does good and makes sense. It is not about actually understanding anything.

To start with, you've changed the questions with your paraphrasing. SkepticScott has already pointed out how you ignored the most important part of his question, and you can hash that out with him if you have the wherewithal. For my questions, I did not ask about which theology is more helpful, nor did I ask how to tell "good" religion from "bad." I asked you, specifically, how you know that your chosen theology is correct. Not "good", not "helpful", just correct. You've given a response tailor made to convince people that your chosen theology is better than others, but you haven't expounded one bit on how you know that your chosen theology is the correct one.

Since you have substituted the questions asked of you for questions that are easier for you to answer, I would normally point out that you have invoked a straw man. However, you didn't even answer the questions you posed to yourself, and you managed to contradict yourself in the process. You tell us early on that there was no Adam and Eve, and no Noah's Ark, telling us that these are just stories through which the meanings of various truths are delivered. Then, later in the post, you quote Jesus from the Bible as if he is telling you exactly what religion should be. Why is Jesus not a story when Noah is?

The refrain of your story is mystery, the end of maps, the continuance of "marching." You even ask, in a context so plaintive as to be insulting, "Why did others see the same things and were not lured to look beyond them?" Yet you refuse to see, or to admit, that this refrain details exactly what many of us see as the problem with religion and theology: You're making it up as you go along. You've as much as admitted it.

You have not honestly responded to any of the questions posed to you here. You haven't even managed to answer the questions you posed to yourself. And now that I've addressed your OP as a whole, I'd like to focus on a few individual problems.

1. "Pure science is value free." That's bullshit, and you know it. Scientific research tells us why the atom splits, why the rock falls, why the plane flies, and why the sky shows us all the colors of the rainbow at one point or another. Scientific research has been, in fact, the only reliable way in which we have managed to discover both the how and the why of natural phenomena and processes. What you are confused about is the difference between scientific application and pure, unbounded research. Scientific application gives us the what and how that you spoke of, but pure and unbounded scientific research is what scientists do in pursuit of the answer to that question of why.

2. On what you know now that you didn't 50 or 100 years ago. All you've managed to illustrate with that paragraph is that it took your theologians far longer to discover such things as the failure of the environment and social injustices than it did for those who study the natural and social sciences.

3. On the problem of evil: You said something rather close to true here: "God is not in the business of interfering." This is an interesting statement because it accepts, from a theological standpoint, the fact that the unfeeling and indifferent universe seems to us exactly as it would be if there were no God.

atheists constantly make on the pretense of some superior knowledge:" the fact that the unfeeling and indifferent universe seems to us exactly as it would be if there were no God." To make such an asinine statement you would first have to define what "god" is, or who God is, and the nature of god. It is not enough to simply state that there is no god and the universe behaves exactly as if he/it did not exist.

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r/t has been totally in the hands of the anti-religionists. Why the objection to someone who takes pro-religion seriously? That is not trolling. It is to respond to what religion and theology might also mean.

where do I even start with this?

"totally in the hands of the anti-religionists"?! Holy fuck what a statement. Why is it that you must so often complain that people here are critical of religion? It's a fucking discussion board. If people didn't disagree with you, what would you discuss?

"pro-religion"?! Do not make the mistake of believing that the post you refer to is "pro-religion". Anti-atheist is not the same, not remotely, as "pro-religion."

Now, I'd suggest you focus on what I posted before humblebum made his predictable appearance. That way you and I might be able to have that novel thing called a discussion.

I posted a three page essay at the head of this bit. Please indicate the lines that you describe as anti-atheist. The only thing I said was that the Christian religion was not the only force to produce the things I mentioned, but those of every religion and those of no religion.

I have made a decision that I will no longer respond to personal attacks. I'll continue to stay very active on r/t, but am through with responding to those who want to use my responses for their own ad hominium assaults.

Unless you and humblebum are the same person, I never referred to anything you wrote in this thread as anti-atheist. Now, do you have anything to say in response to my first post in this thread, or not?

Unless you and humblebum are the same person, I never referred to anything you wrote in this thread as anti-atheist. Now, do you have anything to say in response to my first post in this thread, or not?

between interesting questions and personal attacks. I had originally thought simply to press the little red man about five times. If you go back over all your responses to my stuff and suggest that you never make personal attacks, you haven't reread your own bits. The questions you asked in 20 have been dealt with. What I find is not an opening for conversation among people who basically trust each other's integrity, but ways to give you just another load of ammunition. That is a game not worth playing. There are a number of people in r/t who radically disagree with me and say so in graphic language. Their responses have been sharp but without personal rancor, name calling or abuse. I will continue to dialog with them no matter how sharply they take me on.

The issues I raised in my first post in this thread were clearly too difficult for you to deal with, and you found an escape mechanism in claiming persecution. It's the same thing you did to SkepticScott, and the same tired MO you use to run from threads full of discussion and post brand new OPs.

I think you just want a soapbox. Color me uninterested.

are tired of seeing you label criticisms of your opinions and declarations as "personal attacks" or the like, and using that as an excuse to avoid answering difficult and awkward, but legitimate questions.

But the criticisms will not be blunted by your refusal to respond. They will simply stand on their own, without rebuttal or discussion.

The alternative is called "spam".

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how do you tell a good religion from a bad religion?

Why is your way better?

Why, if so many profess the same faith as yourself, do they do so much evil?

Cherry picking the gifts of religion and claiming them for your theology while ignoring the evils perpetrated by those other guys who "try to build walls around the mystery" is just more marketing. You're building walls as much as they are.

The irony is many here appreciate your theology more than you do. You don't have to convince anyone. Your task is to inspire them.