Doubting Doubt

Much as I may disagree with many of Peter Tatchell’s views and methods, I respect his passion and sincerity. I’m interested (h/t Church Mouse) in his account of why he is a secular humanist:

Religion is the world’s single greatest fount of obscurantism, prejudice, superstition and oppression. It has caused misery to billions of people worldwide for millennia, and continues to do so in many parts of the world. As a human rights campaigner motivated by love and compassion for other people, I would be betraying my humanitarian values to embrace religious beliefs.
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By the time I turned 20, rationality finally triumphed over superstition and dogma. I didn’t need God any more. I was intelligent, confident and mature enough to live without the security blanket of religion and its theological account of the universe. Accordingly, I renounced religion and embraced reason, science and an ethics based on love and compassion. I don’t need God to tell me what is right and wrong. We humans are quite capable of figuring it out for ourselves.

What particularly interests me is that, coming from a similar generation but with a loving and decent (but not Evangelical Christian) upbringing, his description of his formation in atheism rings a bell for me. A similar process led me in precisely the opposite direction as a teenager, from atheism to faith. Bearing that in mind, I'd fill in a similar form, perhaps, a bit like this:

Religion, like politics or sex, is part of being human. There’s good religion and bad religion, some healthy, some toxic. Failing to realise that made atheism seem clever. I had high ideals, but a limited capacity to distinguish between my own passionate feelings and a higher truth and calling which I have not yet attained, but towards which I could still struggle. Faith in God prevents me always externalising the foe, and reminds me that I have to struggle within myself to be the kind of change I want to see in the world, or all my efforts will be no more than anger and opinionations self-righteously aimed at others.

As a teenager, I realised that although I didn’t need God, better people than me had searched seriously for him. He did not exist as an object, in the way I had crudely imagined as a child. I became intrigued by the elusive possibilities this raised. Following up this perception was rather like the 3-d image in a magic eye picture emerging from what had seemed a simple, if complex, 2-d one.

Thus it dawned on me that things are not, in fact, always what they seem, and reality has many planes and dimensions. In a universe where something as basic as number theory cannot be anchored entirely securely in rational axioms, I came to see that human reason could not possibly be the measure of everything, but pointed beyond itself. Grasping reality would require awareness of hermeneutics, and a sense of history, as well as my own opinions.

Accordingly, I searched beyond simplistic secularism and began to grasp the complexity of life. I studied history, and engaged with the languages and content of Biblical texts on an adult level. I don’t need God to tell me what is right. I do, however, find his spirit gives me more wisdom, grace and power to live than I can generate within myself. We humans are quite capable of figuring it out for ourselves, but frustratingly incapable of delivering the goods on the basis of passion, and our own time- and ego-bound reason and emtion.

Labels, tins, and stale sauce

Are we all going nuts, in a world of labels, factions and namecalling? Tim’s Post-Christian Blog surveys the wraths and sorrows of current US Political discourse, as revealed in some of the idiotic polarized scare tactics over healthcare this year. This could be a perfectly rational debate about how to tackle a pragmatic necessity that everybody knows has been a costly mess for years. Instead people with wide flaring nostrils shout past each other. You can’t, suggests Tim, have civilisation without a certain degree of civility.

And nearer home, in gentler mode, Church Mouse questions our increasing need to find the right pigeonholes for others. Do Anglicans really need a whole complex alphabetti spaghetti of acronyms, factional descriptors and sub-species?

Why?

We're starting to build a two dimensional model. Along one axis we have the liberal – conservative dimension, along the other the Anglo-Catholic – evangelical dimension.

Unfortunately, the complexity of this has led to the use of numerous other labels to fill in some of the gaps, or to describe particular intersections on these two axes. Step forward the charismatics, the liberal evangelicals and the open evangelicals. Take a bow orthodox Anglicans, confessing Anglicans, affirming Anglicans and inclusive Anglicans, and apologies to any mouse has left out.

Mouse quotes, illuminatingly, a Guardian interview with Nicky Gumbel, leader of Alpha and prominent Christian Evangelist:

This may sound pernickety but I wouldn't describe myself as an evangelical. These are labels, which I don't think are helpful. If I was going to use any label it would be Christian, and if you push me any further I'd say I'm an Anglican – that's the family of the church that I belong to. There's nothing wrong with any of the other labels, but if you have any of them I want them all. If you're going to say, 'I'm Catholic, liberal, evangelical … ' let's have them all. But I wouldn't want to isolate one of those. Personally I think labels are terribly unhelpful because they enable you to dismiss things.

It’s up to us how we choose to label ourselves, and others, and what significance we attach to them. Four thoughts strike me:

1. In days gone by the Church of England, like all Western Christianity, was probably, to use a marketing term, over-branded. Sub-species identifiers gave some shape to a complex rambling bundle of institutions, colour coding them with the quaint simplistic language of “Churchmanship.” The term, in itself, is a subtle hint that women always were probably rather more grown up about this stuff.
   
   
2. There is a world of difference between the kinds of labels people use to describe, themselves, what they are trying to achieve, and name-calling. Nicky Gumbel makes a very wise point about the power of the names we stick on others to absolve us from engaging with them. Take the most basic label of the lot. If someone says to someone else “You remind me so much of Jesus that I’m going to call you a Christian” that is immensely cool. However, if I say of myself, “I (as opposed to all these other people) remind me so much of Jesus that I’m gong to call myself a Christian,” it’s almost impossible to resist the tsunami of pride, ego and folly that follow directly from the whole exercise. Do this on a corporate level, and you end up with a tangle of astroturf organisations that take themselves far too seriously having largely taken leave of God. Clichéd words reveal clichéd thought, and soon we are all idiots.
   
   
3. There’s a basic principle in St Paul’s writings that what proceeds from faith is faith. That’s something we all need for this journey. By implication what proceeds from fear, ego and political indoor games is, er, fear, ego and political indoor games. Someone said of Zwingli that he was a great campaigner and lousy theologian. By their fruits ye shall know them. That’s what the man said.
   
   
4. This is a missional no-brainer. However pleased with themselves partisanship may make partisans feel, the punters can see through ithe sillinesst from a mile off. The world is full of self-important screwed-up Mr Angry factions. People on the threshold of faith are longing for better possibilities and, quaintly, surprisingly often, look to the Church to model them. They have no desire to join yet another sect. And the idea that any denomination or faction has some kind of franchise on being a real Christian actually obscures the key notion that the Church actually is supposed to be the bridgehead expression of a new humanity God is pulling together in Christ. The most “successful” factions win the battle but lose the war. The Devil has a good laugh, and the show rolls on.
   

So I’m rather with the Mouse. Let’s try consigning the labels to the fiery pit for a while, and see what happens if we entertain the daring notion that ths enterprise is all about Jesus Christ, not human ego, vanity and insecurity?