Testify!

Whatever’s the opposite of writers’ block I’m suffering from it. I just seem to keep on writing and writing without much editing capacity and the results are not so good.

The following is one of several posts I’ve been working on and they all seem to have no end in sight. It’s scaring me. So I’m posting in the hope I break the trend. I don’t think it’s too painful to read but you could skip to the “aside” at the end if your short on time and you’d get the gist.

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One of the perennial challenges of discussing spirituality with other people is when you encounter the person who expects you to treat their experience of the spiritual as evidence – the testimony as proof.

Just the fact's, Mam.

I’m fairly liberal when it comes to what constitutes evidence; I think we should compose our opinion of the world and god based on our experiences even if they aren’t repeatable under controlled conditions. Other peoples’ experiences that aren’t repeatable or even independently observable should also be allowed to influence our world view. That doesn’t mean that there is no standard to testimony at all however. It doesn’t mean someone can make any kind of assertion as their experience and call it proof.

If you want a testimony to be credible and evidential to other people you need to actually talk in facts. These facts are not interpretations of events but the “stuff” that leads into the interpretation. This includes subjective feelings, heck it can even include thoughts but those thoughts are treated as events. Here’s a basically decent testimony of a premonition complete with feelings and thoughts as events;

“I was walking along the beach on a sunny day and I felt a cold chill along my spine. Although I felt fine I had a thought pop into my head that I could die soon. I decided not to go swimming. Later I read the reports of shark attacks that day.”

Because the testimony stuck to facts we can consider them and come to our own conclusion. We can also spot missing details. An obvious question that comes to mind is whether there are frequent shark attacks at that beach or not. Another obvious question is whether the person avoids swimming for fear of death most days or just that day. Is this the one in a million premonitions that came true? Personally I don’t believe in premonitions however if there were rarely any shark attacks at that beach and if this person regularly swam there then this testimony would weaken my disbelief.

Here is a terrible example of a testimony;

“I have experienced Gods touch, his love and his mercy over and over again. Recieving his Holy Ghost, and being renewed are times I will never forget. Being able to be in his prescence should never be taken for granted. God has blessed me tremendously as a young person...” from http://www.wordsoftestimony.com/

This person has just strung together a series of conclusions with none of the “stuff” that led into them. “I have experienced God’s touch” and “God has blessed me” are interpretations of facts. Those facts may have been the sensation of a touch or a lift in mood or a run of good luck but the attribution of them to God is the conclusion. Jumping to conclusions adamantly and repeatedly is not good testimony.

I’ve included a decent testimony about a psychic phenomenon and a poor testimony about Christianity deliberately (and without difficulty). This is because a particular type of Christianity is the religion par excellence for both privileging the testimony as proof and doing it badly. This particular type of Christianity is labelled Evangelical; those churches of the Wesleyan legacy and the American revivalist traditions and their numerous offshoots. Due to their prominence in America these groups have had profound influence across the western world so much so that many denominations outside of a strict category of Evangelist contain members with a similar flavour.

The evangelical tradition is the inspiration for many amazing elements of modern Christianity. Although other Christians also opposed European slavery it was evangelicals who turned the tide. Many of the suffragettes were evangelicals. The Salvation Army is also born of the evangelical movement as was Alcoholics Anonymous, the YMCA, the social work profession, many Christian peace movements and so on. Evangelicals have challenged other Christians to roll up their sleeves and involve themselves in the need around them. Evangelical churches reversed a nineteenth century European trend that church was for the wealthy by growing new churches among the poor. In the case of African Americans and Hispanics, along with the missionary movement in Asia and Africa (a mostly evangelical enterprise) this has challenged the ethnic and geographical centre of Christianity as European.

The evangelicals also expanded Christian liturgy. Most Protestant Hymns were just reworked psalms prior to Evangelicals. Pop music and church music were very separate. An evangelical liberality in worship styles brought forth both Amazing Grace, and O When the Saints Go Marching In. Today Christian Heavy Metal, Rock, Folk and R&B music all owe their acceptance to evangelicals. On the one hand Evangelicals gave us the alter call, estatic worship and mega-churches. On the other the small home church and the pub church go back to them too.

Lastly personal testimony as evidence is also a legacy of this movement. Due to its evangelical nature (which means to spread the gospel) non-christians encounter personal testimony more so than quieter expressions of Christianity. Some people first encounter it on t.v. on many Christian panel shows or when approached by a street preacher or at a drop-in youth group. In such cases there may be no other knowledge of Christianity to compare it to even when the viewer converts. Subsequently modern generations of Christians see personal testimony as a core element of Christianity even though it plays little part in Orthodox, Catholic, High Anglican, Lutheran and Presbyterian traditions historically.

Personal testimony is so central in evangelical Christianity it can rival and exceed the importance of scripture. From About.com:Christianity;

“Skeptics may debate the validity of Scripture or argue the existence of God, but no one can deny your personal experiences with him. When you tell your story of how God has worked a miracle in your life, or how he has blessed you, transformed you, lifted and encouraged you, perhaps even broken and healed you, no one can argue or debate it. You go beyond the realm of knowledge into the realm of relationship with God.” (Their emphasis)

That’s an insanely privileged place for personal testimony to hold. I’m not even sure what the last sentence means exactly but you know it’s good. I can’t think of any other faith outlook that puts personal testimony on such a high pedestal except the equally conversion orientated Seventh Day Adventists or interestingly aggressive atheism.

As for doing it badly Christians who testify seem to suffer under an obligation to say that there is nothing metaphorical at all about their meeting Jesus. Some will tell you it was a real meeting of a real person, as real as they are meeting you. Those people will then say that Jesus entered their heart. Now either one of those statements is false or there would have been a god-awful mess. This obligation to effectively lie is the consequence of first of all the privileging of personal testimony amongst evangelical Christians. A personal meeting with God can in some churches be the difference between a real Christian and a pending one. This can even be referred to as a second baptism (baptism being a Christians ritual introduction to membership) so that without such a meeting you are only a nominal member. This pressures an evangelical Christian to amplify the personal basis of their faith.

I also think there is a wider cultural bias about the right basis for belief that Christians must contend with and that newer denominations are themselves riddled with. Perhaps it’s a by-product of the cultural reach of American individualism or maybe it’s a consequence of empiricism as the default way of knowing; maybe it’s the inevitable effect of Protestantism feeding back into itself; maybe it’s just diversity in the spiritual marketplace and our consumer role in it. Whatever the cause, we seem to expect people to believe in God for unique individual reasons in a way that was less common for people only a few generations ago. In addition this experience must be absolutely non-metaphorical. It must conform to direct sensory perception. This certainly afflicts the newest faith on the block, popular atheism, which equally treats a personal and empirical experience of God as the sole legitimate basis for belief. Christians who rise to this criticism of their faith are obliged to produce such an experience of God.

Personal testimony is also a key element of the other new faith which competes in the western world with Christianity –New Age beliefs. The problem for Christianity (as I see it) is those phenomenons included as New Age are just so much more amenable to this kind of evidential testimonial treatment. Whether it’s a premonition as testified to above, or psychic pets or the recollection of past lives these are phenomenons which are happily reducible to facts. They are discrete chains of cause and effect distinct from every day life with each link able to be described independently of the observer.

In fact New Age beliefs seem to me to be exactly those aspects selected from a range of broader traditions which are amenable to evidential testimony. Crystal healing are removed from any broader understanding of how spiritual and physical overlap. The I Ching is used to divine without a broader appreciation of Chinese thought. The New Age movement takes the rituals of Paganism or Wicca and throws them into a toolkit of “useful” things from completely different worlds such as an Egyptian motif tarot deck. Each selection though is pseudo-scientific enough to provide the basis for evidentiary testimony.

The experience of sinfulness and salvation, of changes in what seems important and insight into one’s own behaviour are never going to fit neatly into the sort of testimony that constitutes evidence because these are not independent facts occurring at discrete moments in time in chains of cause and effect. This may be why such elements of faith outlooks like Wicca are left out of New Age toolkits. Perhaps this is also why when such Christian experiences are competing with new age stories then the metaphorical language which sums up the whole experience has to be turned into a series of mundane facts, e.g. I met Jesus. He spoke to me. This would explain why such testimonies are so hollow of detail such as the sound of Gods voice or where they touched you; because these mundane facts are really metaphors.

Ultimately if Christianity remains committed to evidentiary testimony it will evolve Christianity into the type of faith that evidentiary testimony can express. Healings, prophetic messages (inspired premonitions) and full sensory experiences of a walking, talking Jesus will be more central to the faith because that is what can be talked about in a testimonial format. In those churches which most think of testimony as evidence we can already see this trend. It’s a sort of New Ageing of Christianity just as other faith outlooks have suffered.

On my very first post on this blog I expressed an interest in hearing about people’s experience of God. That interest remains and I’ve certainly heard a few experiences since then. I’ve written this post partly because I’m getting tired of slippery language that insists on being taking seriously without a standard for what evidential testimony is. But more so because I don’t like what the trend towards that language is doing to Christianity, a faith tradition I admire.

There are amazing stories to be shared by Christians. There are lives lived differently in response to a big idea like love one another and a reliance on faith to maintain that commitment. There is the feeling of coming home to the faith, of being disconnected without it and of understanding oneself best in the language of Christianity. I am more interested in these stories than those miraculous evidentiary moments that some seem to think an atheist needs to hear. But if you do insist on telling me that a corporeal Jesus held your hand then I will expect you to remember left or right.

An aside...(probably the best bit)

The Gospels contain a fascinating story about an apostle who needed personal physical proof of Jesus’ resurrection. Thomas is called the doubting apostle but it would be fairer to say that he is disbelieving. Without any doubt at all Thomas thinks that the other apostles are talking rubbish when they say that Jesus is alive. And Thomas has a pretty high standard of proof before he’ll change his mind.

Jesus then appears to the apostles, in a locked room none the less, and in accord with Thomas’ demand for proof places Thomas hand in the wound in his side.

Here’s the thing; I identify with Thomas. I like a guy who needs to experience something for himself all bloody and mucky too. In fact the comments about atheists and their privileging of personal experience in this piece are about myself. However I also think that this need is warping Christianity by producing false testimonies of Thomas like experiences. On the one hand I won’t believe until my hand in is in his side. On the other I don’t think Christians should make that the focus of their faith. Am I having my cake and eating it too here? What do I really want Christians to do?  Whatever it is I hope they don’t care enough to jump to it.

"Don't Diet, Riot."

I have a t-shirt in my closet from the last decade. Its a little paint stained now. It’s from the RMIT Tafe Womens Collective and bears the slogan “Don’t Diet, Riot”. Even at the time I got the t-shirt I could see the irony to it. After all, I knew a few people inclined to riot that might have benefitted from changing their diet of a litre of coffee for breakfast first.

The point of the slogan is to challenge how much energy women in particular are encouraged to devote on self-change rather than social change. Back in those Uni days I was involved in a lot of efforts to produce social change. I organised as well as attended rallies, I helped create free-food networks. I published zines, postered and otherwise proselytised. I took a bucket of chalk into the city regularly and encouraged people to take up temporary graffiti. I was a member of collectives who occupied buildings and built tent-cities. I even joined the Greens and stood as a candidate for a seat they would never win; It allowed me to talk to all the high schools in my local area about workers rights and feminism.

I often saw and seized opportunities to demonstrate collective action and build solidarity in everyday situations; the dole que or the supermarket. I identified as an activist before anything else. I was radical but committed to engaging with society not separation. My final student placement was at Centrelink and I was employing action research principles to engage young service users. I wasn’t just an angry lefty. I was an optimistic anarchist.

Then I got beat up at a protest. By police and pretty badly. (September the 11^th a year before the trade towers fell) Further to cover up their crime they charged me with assault. Afterwards poorly aware of how badly this had affected me I pretty much trashed my health and a long term relationship I was in. This certainly replaced my optimism about activism with fear. I never knew the readiness of the state to turn to violence to serve the powerful so well before. It wasn’t that which really ended my activism however. It was a feeling of the uselessness of the “movement” in helping me hold it together and eventually get back to some healthy place.

The post-protest support networks seemed to be organised by and for various political factions. I was never a member of those. I felt unknown. One activist “ally” even refused to hand over photos of my injuries for the court case because they were her property. The only people who I felt stood by me were my real friends, many but not all of whom were fellow activists, and family. Subsequently I felt and still feel that I was naive in my belief in ideological solidarity. If family is blood to friendships’ water then ideology is as thin as air.

After the court case died down I was still angry and suffering for it. Even more than trusting family and friends I had to conduct some serious self-change. I went to counselling. I cut down caffeine, did some relaxation techniques, worked on my sleeping and (with the assistance of my elder brother in particular) paid attention to my diet. Perhaps to the mortification of Tafe Women’s Collectives I even made sure I looked after my appearance. These things made a life saving difference. It was good dieting not rioting that I needed then.

When I felt well enough I did re-engage with society but it wasn’t as an activist. Although I now had a social work degree my self-confidence was still too low for paid work so I took some volunteer work at a drug and alcohol detox. A year or so later this turned into a job. I remember talking to some young firebrand of a uni student about this time. She saw me as burnt out and didn’t want to hear when I said “I just feel it’s healthier for me to be working on the individual level at the moment.” She couldn’t see that the individual level and the social level are connected, that the one forms the other. She would be even more unimpressed with me now.

Now I’m a dad. I’ve worked in a few places, more detox work, in prison briefly, with street-involved youth in Toronto, at a supported accommodation for people with mental health issues, but I was very happy to give it up to be a dad. My partner has worked full time for almost two years now and aside from a day a week of family day  care started six months ago I’ve been the stay-at-home dad (horrible term really) since our kid was one and half. Further we have no t.v. and I hardly ever read the paper. We live in Bendigo. At the last election I handed out how to votes for the Greens with a stunning lack of knowledge of the issues. This is really the apex of my withdrawal from social activism and my involvement with society writ small.

So why am I telling you all this? Well I asked for some blog post ideas because the piece I was working on started to look a little crappy. I got two suggestions. One about what Democracy means and another that asked “How important is physical occupation as opposed to conceptual heft/virtual profile etc. to the Occupy movements success?” Where I’m coming from at the moment I don’t have a lot to say that easily addresses these topics. Both are interesting but I look at them sideways in a way that some people might feel misses the point. I thought I should explain why I want to speak from this place instead of any other. I’m not against big movement, public activism but it doesn’t capture my heart either. I still remember its uselessness in my hour of need.

That said I often feel dissatisfaction with my almost complete disengagement with social activism. As the kid gets older I want to reconnect with making the world a better place alongside other people rather than at home one load of washing at a time (which reminds me). This blog is actually a part of that.  I’m also contemplating chicken co-ordinator at the kids kinder.

You can look forward therefore to a few more political posts mixed in with the philosophy and theology. I even have some thoughts about the specific topics suggested to me; about 1,400 words worth at last count but I’ll let my sexy editor review it first.

Until then, eat well.

Christianitys' Dangerous Idea

A review of Alister McGrath’s Christianity’s Dangerous Idea. (Harper One 2007)

Alister McGrath can’t be faulted for lack of ambition with his book Christianity’s Dangerous Idea. In about 500 pages McGrath attempts a history of Protestantism unlimited by geography or denomination from the pre-reformation humanists to the modern day. In addition McGrath gives a rendering of the primary debates and divisions within Protestantism. Then he speculates on the future of the Protestant church(es) particularly via Pentecostalism.

The consequence is that much of McGraths book has to skim detail. Unlike a 2000 page biography of Calvin where a reader can be led through events to draw their own conclusions McGrath has to summarise. He does this with great care and takes pains to make the reader aware how historians’ perceptions also have their own histories. There are inevitable disappointments for the adherents of minority philosophies or fans of particular figures of history. Theistic existentialists like Kierkegaard don’t make the cut. Liberation theology gets one sentence. I was saddened to see that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol wasn’t given a mention (whilst The Chronicles of Narnia briefly was).

In my opinion the only truly grievous oversight is McGrath’s far too superficial treatment of women’s status in the church.  I am probably influenced here by how large this issue looms in Australian Protestantism. The church leaders of Australia’s wealthiest and arguably most powerful Anglican diocese in Sydney consider feminism a deeply anti-Christian philosophy with “biblical” gender roles connected to the doctrine of the trinity, part of the created order and a core component of God’s plan. There are alliances with Australian Presbyterians in this regard and threats of schism over the ordination of women.   Around Adelaide a very different Anglo-Catholic grouping in the Anglican church are making overtures to rejoin the Catholic church with a concern over women’s ordination also one motivation. In this context the close link between feminism and protestant Christianity’s priesthood of all believers (the first feminists were overwhelmingly Christian) would have been very interesting to read more about. Instead McGrath spends more time on hymnody than gender struggles in the church.

McGrath knows defining Protestantism is a dangerous decision itself. For McGrath this is Protestantism; a belief in the supremacy of the Bible to which all doctrines must apply for authority. The consequence of this is the dangerous idea that no other authority can absolutely mediate the believers’ interpretations and access to the Word.

Others may wish McGrath defined Protestantism more narrowly. Lutheran and Calvinist theology share an anti-pelagianist emphasis. Pelagianism is the name given to any belief that suggests human salvation can be earned. Luther was so adamantly opposed to Pelagianism that he questioned the inclusion of the letter of James in the canon. (James is often used to challenge the doctrine of “justification by faith alone”.) Calvin argued that even the suggestion that people could accept or reject unmerited salvation was a kind of Pelagianism. For both these church fathers and their descendants Sola fide (Faith alone) is as important as Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone). Understandably some readers will be uncomfortable with a definition of Protestantism that isn’t faithful to either of its most famous heroes.

McGrath however makes his case well that Protestantism can’t reasonably exclude leaders and churches who didn’t and don’t accept Sola Fide. In fact the forefather of Protestantism is generally considered to be Erasmus who had no significant doctrinal disagreements with Catholicism but who believed in a need for general access to Scripture and moral purity. From the very beginning of the Reformation Zwingli and the Ana-baptists felt that moral reform of the church was crucial for its restoration as a Christian church. Both Lutherans and Calvinists considered this emphasis on moral reform to be pelagianist. Wesleyans and some Pentecostalists would also be excluded by a strict requirement for Sola Fide. In fact Sola Fide is less well understood than Sola Scriptura even in Lutheran and Presbyterian churches. It’s not impossible to imagine these churches moving away from Sola Fide while still remaining Protestant. It’s much harder to imagine a movement away from Sola Scriptura.

McGrath recognises that Sola Scriptura faces challenges in application. If there is no authority above Scripture then how is there to be any adjudication about the various interpretations of Scripture (such as in the issue of Sola Fide or even more critical issues such as the Trinity). Any naive hopes about the clarity of scripture in its plain language were shattered by early disagreements about the real presence of God in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. To resolve this (albeit with different conclusions) Lutherans and Calvinists accepted the creeds of the early churches as divinely inspired formulations (though under scripture) and paid attention to the writings of Augustine in particular. The Ana-baptists did not.  For the Ana-Baptists scripture alone meant exactly that and they subsequently took a Congregationalist approach with individual congregations drawing their doctrinal conclusions from scripture by God’s grace. If disagreement arose, such as over the biblical basis of the trinity, Congregationalists would either leave to establish a new church or tolerate difference. Whereas Lutherans and Calvinists were able to produce confessional documents which have been resistant to change Ana-baptists and their descendants have been remarkably adaptable.

This adaptability eventually even raises difficulties for McGrath’s schema. It is only a difference by degree to say that the Holy Spirit ensures true interpretation of scripture to saying that the Holy Spirit can provide additional new revelation. After all one persons new interpretation if radical enough looks like a new revelation to others. Pentecostalism fits this bill and McGraths claim that it may be the future of Protestantism is a contentious one. Is a God as present as the Pentecostalists’ one, a Holy spirit who provides the gift of prophecy amongst others, consistent with Sola Scriptura? Even if there isn’t any new teaching wouldn’t a documenting of the workings of this spirit at least form another book of Acts?

I feel more ambivalent than McGrath about seeing Pentecostalism as a continuation of the protestant reformation. To me it has the look of a new reformation. In fact I think there are more parallels between early Christianity and Pentecostalism than between early Christianity and Protestantism. Early Christianity like Pentecostalism was a religion of the poor, largely shared orally and uncontained by geography which astonished the establishment of their time by its rapid growth. Protestantism was immediately attractive to merchants and princes wanting relief from church control and often blind to the needs of the poor (in England the destruction of the monasteries equated to the removal of a welfare and hospital system for the poor), extremely literary and scholastic and rapidly organised by geography (coinciding as it did with the emergence of the nation state).

In fact this dissonance with the early church raises a fascinating contradiction. Sola Scriptura is itself not particularly scriptural. For example it is often said that Christ only instituted two sacraments – baptism and the Eucharist or communion. McGrath mentions how in the Reformed tradition (excluding Lutherans) the place of the Eucharist as the central focus of the architecture and worship service was supplanted by the gospel reading and sermon. An alien observer would have to consider that this reading of the gospel was a more important element of Christian tradition, a sacrament in itself.

Another subtle shift in the early reformation is a move away from emulating Christ to understanding his message. To express it imperfectly, the medieval spiritual ideal was the saint while the protestant spiritual ideal was the theologian. This is certainly too simplistic - Luther’s courage and piety are celebrated and Aquinis is a theologian of high regard in the pre-reformation church - however there is some shift in the mean between ideas and example. It may be that Sola Fide rather than Sola Scripture is the real cause here however increased access to the bible aids the shift. In a world order with the bible at the centre it is natural that the biblical scholar is king. Ultimately the institutionalised practice of Sola Scriptura ironically resembles the biblical representation of the Pharisees with their scriptural trap-setting. In it’s extreme form the behaviour of Jesus (such as generosity, non-prejudice, forgiveness and self-sacrifice) are seen entirely as messages about what God is like and nothing mere humans should try and repeat. I think this creates a spiritual vacuum which we see filled in Protestantism by Pietism and their bold question “What would Jesus Do?” amongst many others.

I had a great time reading the first half of McGrath’s book. Calvin and Luther often dominate histories of the early reformation merely because Calvinists and Lutherans as creedal movements are more interested in their origins. McGrath’s book helped to fill major gaps in my knowledge about Zwigli and the Ana-Baptists. McGrath has also served to remind me how much I really need to read a decent biography of John Wesley and a history of the Methodists.  

One very interesting section of McGrath’s book was his discussion of the role of missionaries under colonialism. McGrath gives solid evidence that they were often defenders of indigenous culture and language, against state and commercial interests. Sponsoring churches were not always understanding of the virtue of protecting what they saw as heathen ways of life so some missionaries stood against their own faith communities as well.   Certainly there is the famous case of David Livingstone who sought to open up Africa for Christianity and commerce, but less well known is Hiram Bingham who in the 1820s refused to teach Hawaiian islanders English believing this would destroy their culture or Silas T. Rand who advocated for the Micmac people of the Canadian Maritimes in land rights disputes. Our Australian history of missionary interaction with indigenous peoples is a similarly complex and contradictory one.

I found the latter half of Christianity’s Dangerous Idea a lot harder going. Partly this is due to the missing detail on women’s status in Protestantism. Partly this was due to my uncertainty that Pentecostalism belonged in this history. Also I think McGrath excels at compiling and combining the work of other historians. McGrath has not only read and comprehended broadly but he is sensitive to ongoing debates as well as clever with his choice of examples. As McGrath moves into areas which haven’t been so extensively explored his book becomes weaker merely because he has less to work with.

I not sure how good a history can be when it tries to do as much as this one in so few words. Still there is definitely a place for trying to tie everything together which a more specific history couldn’t do. Subsequently I’d make a qualified recommendation of Christianity’s Dangerous Idea. At least the first half serves as an excellent springboard to further reading.

As an interesting aside while reading this book I attended a talk on “New Monasticism”. This movement is friendly with another called the Emerging Church and together they put forward a very intriguing vision for the future of Protestantism. These small home church movements and devotional communities emphasise living and evidencing the Gospel rather than doctrinal exactitude. They are a reaction against the logocentricism of Sola scriptura as well as the emotionalism (and lack of relationalism) of the Pentecostal mega-church.  McGrath discusses this movement briefly as “the church of cells” which he relates to origins in Asian Pentecostalism. The talk I went to connected the movement to medieval monastic movements like the Franciscans and Benedictines. I’m not sure they are talking about the same thing. Indeed given the “dangerous” idea of direct access to the scriptures it’s perfectly possible that McGrath’s book has become outdated since publication in 2007. The future of Protestantism remains fundamentally up-for-grabs with Neo-Calvinism, Pentecostalism, reconciliation with the Catholic church and New Monasticism all likely to play some part.