In Praise of Doubting Thomas

In The Case for God, Karen Armstrong quotes a story from Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner. It’s a story I’ve heard in several other contexts, as it illustrates a beautiful approach to religious faith in the face of tragedy.

“Even in the camps, some of the inmates continued to study the Torah and to observe the festivals, not in the hope of placating an angry deity, but because they found, by experience, that these rituals helped them to endure the horror. One day a group of Jews decided to put God on trial. In the face of such inconceivable suffering, they found the conventional arguments utterly unconvincing. If God was omnipotent, he could have prevented the Shoah; if he could not stop it, he was impotent; and if he could have stopped it but chose not to, he was a monster. They condemned God to death. The presiding rabbi pronounced the verdict, then went on calmly to announce that it was time for the evening prayer.” pp. 277-278

What I find heartbreakingly beautiful about this story is that sufferers had the audacity to throw their anger and suffering in God’s face, but also recognized that they couldn’t walk away from God that easily.

This reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the New Testament. It’s recorded in John 11:1-16. I will paraphrase.

Jesus’ friend, Lazarus, fell ill. When Jesus heard of it, he waited for a couple of days, and then announced his intention of returning to Judea, where Lazarus lay. The disciples pointed out that this might not be the best idea, as Jesus had narrowly escaped a stoning at the hands of the Judeans. Jesus and his disciples have a brief conversation, where Jesus cryptically speaks of death, resurrection, and faith. Then, Thomas gets the final word. Yes, that Thomas. The only disciple to have his own personalized adjective permanently affixed to him; “Doubting”. Here’s what good old Doubting Thomas says. “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

What I hear Thomas saying, and what I hear the victims of the Holocaust saying in Wiesel’s story, is “I don’t understand this. I don’t understand what God is doing. I think it’s a terrible idea, in fact, if this is truly God’s plan. I think it’s a terrible idea, and I’m not afraid to engage God in a conversation about what a terrible idea this is. However, when it all comes down to it, I’m going to continue to follow Him. I’m going to keep following because I know that, despite my questions and confusion, despite my disagreements and anger, this is the only path toward peace for me.”

To say, “Let’s follow him so we can die alongside him”, acknowledges confusion and questions, and also an incredible depth of faith. It’s hardly fair that Thomas has been so freely labeled as The Doubter.

I can’t follow like Peter or John. I can’t. I can’t be the disciple who enters an empty tomb to look for God, or who steps out of a boat to follow God across the water. I just hope I can follow like Thomas, who Jesus pitied. I hope I can follow like Thomas, who had the strength to admit his questions, and the faith that God would accept his questions and even his anger.

Michele Bachmann and the Fundamentalist Gigolo

I’m not going to pick on Michele Bachmann, though I am going to quote her. “I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?'” Apparently, when God speaks to Michele Bachmann, he does so through earthquakes and hurricanes. (OK, I guess I am going to pick on Michele Bachmann.)

There are so many ways I can go with this. I think it’s dangerous when we smugly claim that we know who God is, and what God wants. The danger is when God appears to want only our happiness and success. This kind of thinking reeks of wish-fulfillment. The danger is that we become complacent, or hateful, or even cruel, and we do this with the conviction that God approves of us and our goals. We feel that we are the chosen people, so we don’t need to question our motives or our actions. We feel that whatever we do is God’s will, so that excuses a host of horrors. This is dangerous politically and personally.

When I say that it’s dangerous politically, I don’t mean that Mrs. Bachmann is in danger of losing any elections because of this kind of language and thinking. What I mean is that if the electorate endorses this kind of language and thinking, we are in danger of losing our way as a country. We are in danger of setting up our self-interest as our god, and claiming that we have divine sanction whatever we feel driven to do.

When we, either as a people, or at the prompting of our leaders, think that our country has been given a God-given directive, we are engaging in idol-building. We are identifying God based solely on projections of our own hopes and fears.

This kind of thinking is also dangerous personally. I know a man who feels that God loves him, and wants him to be able to live a life of sexual promiscuity. (This man is married, by the way, and his wife does not feel that God’s message is quite the same.) Here’s his line of reasoning. “God loves me. God approves of me. I can do no wrong, as long as I continue to have God’s favor. Abraham had multiple wives. David had multiple wives. Hell, Solomon had 1,000 wives. God obviously condones promiscuity among his men of faith, as each of these men were patriarchs who lived in God’s favor.”

By the way, this man would identify himself as a fundamentalist. He claims that the only way to read the Bible correctly is to read it literally. His very biased study has made it clear to him that the Bible contains no contradictions or difficulties. It has also made it clear to him that he is one of God’s favored people, and God wants him to have sex with as many women as possible. Needless to say, this has created many problems for the rest of his family, who don’t read the Bible in quite the same way.

The temptation to reduce God to an idol who agrees with our politics, both in and out of the bedroom, is nothing new, as Karen Armstrong makes clear in The Case for God. She also makes it clear what a disservice we are doing to ourselves when we limit our concept of God in this way.

Is God Knowable?

Several years ago, I was asked to teach a large Sunday school class for a week while the regular teacher took a sabbatical. About thirty people attended the class, and I hoped to spark some discussion by dividing the class into smaller groups. I don’t remember exactly what we were discussing, but I do remember that I had a theory that the group would divide into two theological camps on a question about a certain passage from the Bible. I wanted to find a way to divide the class into those camps without their knowledge, so they could comfortably engage in discussion among themselves before turning to face the opposite group.

So I posed the question to them, “Is God knowable?” I thought that the group of people who felt that God was knowable would have one response to a further question about a passage from scripture, and the group who felt God was essentially unknowable would have a dramatically different response to the same scriptural passage. I also thought the group would divide fairly evenly over the question.

I was wrong. What I learned is that only two people felt that God is essentially unknowable. Those two people, by the way, are people I know well, people who participated in a small group with me. Nearly the entire group felt that God is basically knowable.

We didn’t explore the implications of the question. I didn’t really want to spend a lot of time on this question, but just hoped to use it as a way to divide the group into two different theological camps. What I learned is that this particular group, which I hoped would fall across the spectrum on the question of the human mind’s ability to know God, was amazingly uniform in its opinion. This surprised me.

Karen Armstrong’s treatment of this same question in The Case for God suggests that those two guys, who would agree with me that God is essentially unknowable, are anachronisms. That mindset was more prevalent among early Christians than it is today. And here I thought I was a modern Christian.

The following passage from The Case for God quotes St. Thomas Aquinas, who went to great lengths to demonstrate the otherness of God, and the inability of the human mind to grasp God.

"Even revelation could not tell us anything about God; indeed, its task was to make us realize that God was unknowable. ‘Man’s utmost knowledge is to know that we do not know him’, Thomas explained. ‘For then alone do we know God truly, when we believe that he is far above all that man can possibly think of God…by the fact that certain things about God are proposed to man, which surpass his reason, he is strengthened in his opinion that God is far above what he is able to think.’" p. 142.

Apparently, even among Christians who don’t identify themselves as fundamentalist, the initial assumption is that God is essentially knowable. It would be interesting to see how conversation would develop on this question if we decided to explore it further, rather than just using it as a litmus test for a different scriptural question.

The Americans: The Colonial Period - The Quakers

Early in The Americans: The Colonial Experience, Daniel J. Boorstin looks at four groups of colonists to America. He focuses on the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, the settlers of Georgia, and the Virginians. We tend to look back through the haze of history more with a goal of telling ourselves an inspirational creation story rather than understanding the complexities and variations in the group of colonists who braved the Atlantic passage for a new life in the New World, and we often view the colonists as a homogenous group of people, but Boorstin’s approach reflects the complex motivations that drew people to the New World, and the ways those motivations influenced and shaped the different colonies. By understanding the goals of the colonists, we can understand not just what drove them to the Western Hemisphere, but why they met with success or failure.

I found the unit discussing the Quakers especially challenging. So much of the Quaker approach is appealing. The ideals they espoused resonate nicely with the outlook of a modern day liberal: belief in equality, informality, and toleration. However, it is Boorstin’s contention that their attitudes toward these ideals made the Quakers ill equipped for governing. It’s the familiar argument of a pragmatist; idealists are naïve and unrealistic. While the Quakers possessed great personal bravery, and were willing to sacrifice their own lives for a cause they championed, their unwillingness to accommodate the political realities of the day caused others to suffer as well.

The chapters dealing with the Quakers caused me to view them with a combination of admiration and frustration. I found their ideals admirable, and their insistence on following those ideals long past the point of futility to be frustrating. In the end, one of the most admirable things they did was to recognize their own unsuitability to govern, and to voluntarily give up their political power.

Wuthering Heights

The realization that it has been almost exactly twenty years since I first read Wuthering Heights was a cruel one. I am now old enough to simply forget if an event took place ten or twenty years ago. Perhaps that’s why I find myself compelled to journal or blog about the books that speak to me. I can revisit my notes to refresh my ailing memory, without needing to resort to pulling entire college reading lists off my bookshelves.

I originally read Wuthering Heights without being required by a college professor or high school teacher, which is regrettable. While the narrative isn’t difficult to follow, it is difficult to know how to respond to the main characters, Heathcliff and Catherine. The connection shared by Heathcliff and Catherine often causes Wuthering Heights to be described as one of the most romantic English novels, but this book is not your mother’s romance novel.

In fact, the dark tone set by the novel, in which all of nature seems to echo the tumultuous relationship of the main characters, has proven a real attraction to Japanese readers, who flock to the moors of England in large enough numbers to require some remote road signs to be printed in English and Japanese.

My reaction to Heathcliff was apparently more ambivalent than that of his Japanese fans. Heathcliff’s passion for Catherine seems to require an active hatred for the rest of mankind. His only pleasure seems to be in planning the torment of those around him, and I find myself too easily echoing the sentiments of the less imaginative characters in their condemnation of Catherine and Heathcliff’s actions.

Still, Bronte has created two unforgettable characters in Cathy and Heathcliff, and her affection for them is contagious. You won’t forget them, but you may forget precisely how long it has been since you first encountered them.

MythBuster

My last blog entry might have been well written (the jury is still out on this) but it doesn’t really have a lot of myself in it.  It’s long on exposition, and there’s very little personal reaction in it.  The subtitle of the blog, I might remind myself, is “my response to what I’m reading”.  Apparently, I had little response to the pages I read that week.  The blog entry is more of a synopsis of what Diamond already wrote, but there’s not much of me in it.


Since I started reading the Guns, Germs, and Steel, I keep thinking of a guy I know.  As will become clear, I have ambivalent feelings toward the guy, for a host of reasons.  (Perhaps a more accurate explanation of the relationship would be that I do not have ambivalent feelings toward him at all, but actively dislike him, for a host of reasons.)

One of his favorite themes was the thoughtless greed inherent in Western Culture.  He proudly cherishes a mythologized image of Native American nobility, and is constantly holding up this image against American culture, and finding, unsurprisingly, that American culture falls far short of his idealized image.  This image of the nobility of the Native American is ridiculously stereotypical, artificial, and contrived, and reminds me of the anti-littering television ad from several decades ago, in which a Native American quietly weeps at trash blowing by his feet.  Key elements of this image are that Native Americans consider all of nature as brothers, view the hunting of animals as a religious experience, use the entire carcass from any animal killed, and only hunt what is absolutely needed.

However, Diamond tells a different story.  Diamond presents an image of human nature and culture being more constant over time and space, and argues that no society can hold itself up as possessing greater intellect or spiritual gifts than any other society.  Throughout the book, whether he is addressing the first arrival of humans on a continent, the development of agriculture, or the domestication of animals, he has mentioned a startling fact.  It appears that large mammal species were nearly exterminated from the Americas shortly after the arrival humans on the continents. As humans evolved in Africa and Eurasia, they slowly became more and more efficient hunters.  The large mammals that lived on those continents had the advantage of evolving along with us, and managed to develop a fear of humans as we became more proficient hunters.  By the time humans arrived in Australia and the Americas late in our evolutionary history, our hunting skills were highly developed.  The number of large mammal extinctions in Australia and the Americas is quite high shortly after the arrival of humans on each of those continents, where the native fauna had not developed a fear of humans.

So much for the image of Native Americans possessing a spiritual approach to living with the environment.  If that environmental sensitivity is not just a beautiful mythology, it only developed after large mammals across North and South America were hunted to extinction.

The Fertile Crescent Had Lots of Grass

The motivating question in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is clearly articulated in the prologue.  It was asked of Diamond by a native of New Guinea decades ago, and has been asked in one form or another by people for centuries.  “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”  Put in a more general form, the question is phrased elsewhere in the book as, “Why did history unfold differently on different continents?”

That question, and the dozens of questions that spring from it, are frequently answered with an undercurrent of implicit racism.  We explain Eurasia’s primacy in developing agriculture, domesticating animals, and eventually creating societies that allowed for the invention of advanced technologies in terms of the people who lived there.  People who would normally blanch at the suggestion that they harbor racist assumptions fall back on what amounts to racist explanations when considering the difference in the states of civilizations in Europe and the New World at the time of Columbus.

Explanations that rely on presumed racial differences to explain the Eurasian development of plant and animal domestication hide a much more prosaic reality.  Human nature and capability is fairly universal, and something other than racial differences explains the reason that agriculture developed in Fertile Crescent before it spread to or developed in the rest of the world.

In order for agriculture to develop, the raw materials, in the form of wild grasses or grains suitable for domestication, are required.  Botanists have studied wild grass distributions, and find that the Fertile Crescent has an enormous advantage in terms of the number of promising wild species which are native to the area.  When gathering wild seeds, early hunter gatherers would naturally favor grasses with the largest seeds.  Botanists have identified 56 prize wild grass species with especially large seeds, and find that 32 of these wild grass species are native to the Fertile Crescent, or to nearby parts of western Eurasia.  Compared to other areas where agriculture developed independently, no other region offered early man nearly as many promising species for plant domestication.  Mesoamerica, the region that has the second highest number of promising wild grains, has only 5 wild species ideal for domestication.  Not coincidentally, agriculture developed in Mesoamerica 5,000 years after it did so in the Fertile Crescent.

One reason that agriculture developed in the Fertile Crescent before anywhere else in the world has less to do with racial differences, and more to do with the available wild grass species that flourished in the area.  The domestication of those wild grains would support a higher population density that would allow for the development of such technological advances as writing and the wheel. The concentration in the Fertile Crescent of the biological building blocks necessary for the development of agriculture is a better explanation for the different rates that human societies developed than looking to Providence or racial differences for that explanation.