Systematic Theology, Tradition, and the Cross

While I've been waiting for a copy of Cox's book to read, Father Stephen has posted an excerpt from Richard Wurmbrand’s With God in Solitary Confinement.

Jesus Himself thought unsystematically on the cross. He began with forgiveness; He spoke of a paradise in which even a robber had a place; then he despaired that perhaps there might be no place in paradise even for Him, the Son of God. He felt Himself forsaken. His thirst was so unbearable that He asked for water. Then He surrendered His spirit into His Father’s hand. But there followed no serenity, only a loud cry. Thank you for what you have been trying to teach me. I have the impression that you were only repeating, without much conviction, what others have taught you.

In this, we here the echo of that oft-repeated axiom from the fourth century Orthodox monastic Evagrius of Pontus: A theologian is one who prays, and one who prays is a theologian. In the West, we tend to be systematic about things, studying them, taking them apart and seeing how they all fit back together. But this is not living the Way. The Way operates on us, in us. The Way changes us. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Where is the systematic theology in that? What is being fixed? If we spend our time praying intead of worrying about re-forming this or that area of the church, this or that system of theology, we'll end up living The Way instead of trying to figure out the right form. But we need form. We need structure. We create structures to provide a framework for living. Take away the structure, take away the Tradition and we'll create new ones. Jaraslov Pelikan (a late convert to Orthodoxy) observed

Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.

At another time, he said “The only alternative to Tradition is bad tradition.” And this is where we end up without creeds: with bad tradition. In fact, we end up re-formulating our thinking so much — re-creating our personal creed — that we don't have time to actually live it. As Henry David Thoreau observed:

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

This is why we have Tradition. First, because if we didn't have it, we would end up creating it anyway and, second, because we want to create deep mental paths. Where systematic theology failed us, Tradition offers a way out.

When I wrote about possible apocalypses last month, I neglected the other extreme that we tend to go to. Just as many of us live preparing for a coming apocalypse, many think that we're on the cusp of a new utopia, a golden era. Harvey Cox's “Future of Faith” could be seen as one example of this, just as Sam Harris' “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason“ could be seen as another. Both share a utopian view of the future: “One day, soon, we'll all live in peace!” Today, a friend shared an article with me that manages to synthesize Cox's utopian view with that of Harris': “Stepping Up to the Age of Empathy; ‘Empathetic Civilization’: When Both Faith and Reason Fail”. I had just finished reading a review of “Kinds of Killing”, so it made an interesting juxtaposition. Following is my response to my friend.

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When Jeremy Rifkin mentioned “embodied experience” the first thing that popped into my mind was existentialism. But then, also, the ancient (Hebrew) conception of belief: that it must be lived. At least in modern times it is common to claim to believe something, but live in ways that contradict that — often, it seems with little self-awareness. But this bit I would take issue with:

For the former, especially the Abrahamic faiths, the body is fallen and a source of evil.

I'll agree that Augustinian Christians do see the body this way. Eastern Christianity (at least how I've experienced in, and in my reading of the Saints) sees the body as made “in the image of God”. The body is not the *source* of evil. In this way we echo the ancient Greeks who saw evil as the absence of good, rather than something of substance itself. The body isn't evil, but when we fail to do good, we “do” evil. So, I'd say much of this is an straw man argument, or, at least, an argument against a distortion of Christianity. If we don't think the emotions and the body are not part of our baptism into Christ, then, sure, the argument makes some sense. But those of us who see the body and emotions as integral parts of the whole person would disagree. This may not be the common understanding of Christianity in much of the West, but it isn't a new take on Christianity that only just appeared during the “Age of Empathy”. Which makes this a non-question:

If empathic consciousness flows from embodied experience and is a celebration of life—our own and that of other beings—how do we square it with faith and reason, which are disembodied ways of looking at reality and steeped in the fear of death?

I think it is telling that the Enlightenment took place in Western Europe, but there wasn't (at least as far as I know) a similar renaissance in the East. The Byzantine and then Russian Empires filled the power vacuum that the fall of the Roman Empire, along with its civilizing influence. Which is not to say that the East is somehow purer, but that our understanding of history and philosophical development is very Euro-centric. The very notion of “Ages” seems, to me, to be part of our desire to compartmentalize. “That was then, this is now.” This is fed by our infatuation with ourselves: the idea that Humanity is advancing philosophically as well as technologically. What period of time, wherever people had the resources to sit around and write articles like this, hasn't seen itself as entering some grand new “age”? I'm sure, for example, American slaves didn't see a new age coming, but their masters certainly did often enough. None of this is to imply that we haven't seen a dramatic technological shift in the past 100 years. But our visions of the future are just that: dreams. Our dreams of utopia or apocalypse may change, but in the end, we'll probably end up somewhere in the middle. Speaking of apocalypse, I just got done reading this book review. I thought the first paragraph, which talks about how to prepare private citizens for war was good. Then, this bit, farther down:

Mostly, though, soldiers complained of the miserable conditions of life that Russian villages offered them. “Partisan resistance prompted further reprisals, leading more to join the partisans, and so the escalating cycle of violence continued.” This inevitability, ironically, seems to have escaped the notice of present-day nations. What is the use of an upper hand if you can't spank someone with it?

So, the non-profit (which shall henceforth remain anonymous) that had me all excited called today and let me know that they had hired someone local. Oh well. I'll just have to work on my consulting.

Sweet Victory: Another Six-Word Memoir Post...

Another Six-Word Memoir Post...

I know some people who read my weblog entertain fantasies about publishing a book. Say you get your wish and someone publishes your book. But then it doesn't sell. And no one wants to buy the stock from the publisher. What then? Real Live Preacher tells us.

Oh. My.

After what seems like an eternal hiatus, dvfmama has written something!

God is as separate from His creation in as much as I am separate from my children. I have total sympathy for God.

Since I frequent places that regularly post links advocating the Gold Standard, What if a Golden Meteorite Hit the Earth?

The recent revelation that Mother Teresa was a doubting Thomas almost the entire time she worked in India but yet remained faithful shows the lie that Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens would like to promulgate: belief in God is comforting.  (And here, I thought we were still struggling with Catholic Guilt.)

While I've no doubt that some believers gain primarily comfort from their belief, the religion that Jesus teaches isn't very comforting at all. "If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you."

And, of course, any Mennonite knows that Martyrs Mirror is filled with stories of people who endured a great deal of suffering. My own children have listened to the lives of many martyrs in the Orthodox lexicon of Saints, Nikolai Velimirovich's Prologue -- so many that whenever they hear the Emperor Diocletian's name mentioned, they can tell you the end of the story.

Perhaps some people make Christianity out to be a nice bedtime story, but anyone who pays attention to what Jesus said or what Paul wrote knows that any comfort offered isn't the whole story: we are called to live sacrificially.

Which is exactly what Mother Teresa did.

What strikes me most among discussions like this one is the idea that Mother Teresa had an obligation to announce her doubts to the world.  "She's a public figure" the thinking goes "and she kept this from us?"

Well, no, her struggle with doubt or the lack of God's Presence was her own and she kept it between herself and her spiritual confessors.  If she wanted to announce her doubt and be done with it, she could have done that without making her life any more uncomfortable.

Mother Teresa was doing something completely foreign to most of us.  Jack Welch was a better humanitarian.  Mother Teresa was not a humanitarian and Christopher Hitchen's was right to discredit this notion of her.  Jesus said "You will always have the poor" and Mother Teresa understood this to mean that we should be more concerned with loving the poor and having compassion for them than with giving them a handout.

"You take care of their tomorrows, I take care of their todays," she said.

Secularists who don't know Mother Teresa won't appreciate the way she chose to use her money.  Evangelicals won't appreciate her Gospel.  Atheists see her doubts as her hypocrisy.

But there is something else going on, also.  She identified with the poor in the same way Christ identified with us.  She emulated his compassion.

And of course isn't that the whole Problem of Evil all over again?  As Judas pointed out, the money spent on the perfume Mary poured on Jesus feet was a year's wages -- surely there was a more practical use for it.  Surely Jesus could have done more than forgive sins, couldn't he?  He was God, after all, shouldn't he have done more?

Mother Teresa is someone many people can admire from a distance.  Most will be repulsed by her, though, if they take a closer look.  She shows us exactly why true religion isn't comforting.

I finally got around to uploading some pictures from our trip last month.

Via slashdot, this academic paper about postmodern computer science. Since they even take time to validate Perl as a a postmodern programming language.

Finally, it is interesting to consider Java vs. C#. Both are arguably postmodern languages, although less so than Perl, and with stronger streaks of modernism, especially in the one-language rhetoric surrounding Java, matched by the CLR rhetoric surrounding C#. There are no significant technical differences between the two languages -- both with C++ syntax, somewhat moderated by the Pascal tradition, with a ersatz-Smalltalk object model and a handful of Modula-3 thrown in for concurrency and modularity. The key reason these languages are postmodern is that they cannot be considered against technical criteria: comparing them is like comparing Pepsi and Coke: you don't drink the cola -- you drink the advertising.