There’s an old story about a congregation that was disturbed when a bar opened up right next door to the church. The preacher got up Sunday after Sunday and railed against the presence of this bar and all the sin that the church members imagined was going on in there – right next to the church. One week, the preacher said, “I want you to pray with me that God will burn that place to the ground.”
Well, wouldn’t you know, that very night a lightning bolt came and burned that bar right to the ground. The bar owner had heard about the prayers being offered by the church and he went to court – sued the church for damage to his property. The church members protested. They told the judge, “You can’t seriously blame us for a lightning strike! We had nothing to do with it.”
The judge finally settled the case in the church’s favor but her final remark was, “I think it’s very interesting that the bar owner believes in the power of prayer more than the church does.”
As Christians we used to live in a world where we believed that great powers are at work. We lived in a world where God was active and present and yet so were dark, shadowy forces that opposed God. We prayed, not just because it was good for our minds and our bodies and calmed our nerves, but because something was at stake. There was some great drama going on and we wanted to enlist God on our side or to enlist ourselves on God’s side.
But then we became reasonable people and we had to give all that up. Or so we thought. Lightning strikes are no longer acts of God, they’re lightning strikes caused by an imbalanced electrical differential between earth and sky. (I think…my scientific knowledge is pretty limited.) The causes of things have more reasonable explanations. When we try to talk about that God-filled world which is filled with drama and wonder and enchantment we find ourselves stumbling over our words, unsure of what our neighbors will think of us.
Last month in Britain there was another court case – this one a real case. A Christian counselor in Bristol with five years of experience was sacked, as they say in the UK, fired, because he was asked to do something in conflict with his Christian beliefs – in this case, to provide psycho-sexual therapy to same-sex couples. It was the policy of the agency he worked for to provide this therapy to everyone and when he asked to be exempt from the policy on religious grounds he was fired. He then sued to agency for unfair dismissal and discrimination.
This background to the case is interesting in its own way because of the questions it raises about what Christians believe and how they act in situations where their beliefs are challenged and whether the agency should have interpreted the counselor’s behavior as discriminatory against same-sex couples. But the case was raised to a whole new level by the judge’s ruling in the case which denied the counselor the right to appeal his firing. Lord Justice Laws said that “the promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds cannot…be justified. It is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary.”
Now, I’m not really qualified to comment on British legal opinions, but as I read his ruling I saw the groundwork being laid for denying a place for any kind of religious reasoning in the public square. He said that laws protecting positions held because of religious belief are irrational, but the judge also believes that religion itself is irrational. Earlier in the same statement he said that “in the eye of everyone save the believer religious faith is necessarily subjective, being incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence.”[i] He says that doesn’t make religious faith untrue – it’s just not something you can prove rationally.
Let me be clear about this. I understand the dangers of having a public space overrun by religious authorities. Jesus saw that in his own day. When you give Pharisees and Sadducees and Ayatollahs political power they generally mess things up. Britain, like the United States, is a pluralistic country with lots of different kinds of faiths, lots of different kinds of Christians and lots of people with no faith commitments at all. So, yes, the law needs to remain neutral with regard to religious belief.
Suggesting that religious belief is irrational or opposed to reason is something entirely different, though. It’s the same sort of thing that the so-called New Athiests have been saying in their writings in recent years. Writers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have been dismissing Christianity and faith in general as something like “believing impossible things.” Hitchens has been so dismissive as to say, “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”[ii] And by evidence he means a very narrow range of scientific evidence – a sort of “I’m from Missouri, show me” kind of evidence. The evidence of a heart strangely warmed or a life transformed or a conscience formed by a Christian community and by scripture is not evidence for Hitchens and it is not communicable in rational society according to Lord Justice Laws. It is just subjective experience and therefore useless to society.
What is it that we believe reason is? Is it only knowledge? Knowing what things are made of or how to put them together in interesting combinations – does that constitute real reason? Or is there something more? Don’t we value reason because it helps us evaluate what we know, helps us guide our actions, helps us live more fully human lives? Someone who knows how to split an atom may know a lot, but reason tells us that knowing how to make an atom bomb doesn’t qualify you to be a reasonable person. As the theologian David Bentley Hart says, “It is even easy for educated persons to believe…that knowing how genes work is the same thing as being authorized to say what a person is or should be.”
We want to say that reason is more than manipulating information or reducing the universe to a formula. And the truth of the matter is that reason, in this larger sense, is something that Christian faith has given birth to. Again David Bentley Hart says, “Reason…is a whole way of life, not the simple mastery of certain techniques of material manipulation, and certainly not the childish certitude that such mastery proves that only material realities exist. A rational life is one that integrates knowledge into a larger choreography of virtue, imagination, patience, prudence, humility and restraint. Reason is not only knowledge, but knowledge perfected in wisdom.”[iii] This is why reason became such a value for Christians. It was not something we reject so that we can believe any old silly thing that we want. It is something that hones our faith so that we can love God better. Knowledge is always brought back to the love of God.
So universities owe their birth to the Christian love of reason. The study of astronomy was guided by Christian pursuit to understand the mysteries of the universe. The practical engagement with the stuff of the world is a legacy of Christians who did not see the material world as something evil that needed to be sloughed off, like some of their pagan contemporaries in the ancient world, but rather they saw the material world as a part of God’s revelation of glory.
One of the places where the Bible talks about this is in the book of Job. In the midst of all the bewailing of miseries, there is a song n chapter 28 about wisdom. After talking about its great value – “more precious than gold, silver and sapphires”! – the song asks, “Where does wisdom come from then? And where is the place of understanding?” The only hints of it come from Destruction and Death who say, “We have heard in our ears a report of it.” And we suspect the same thing, that in suffering and death, we might get a glimpse of some deeper meaning.
Ultimately, though, even these can’t reveal the mystery. “God understands the way to it and God knows its place.” After stretching out the heavens and giving thunder its voice, God looks to humanity and says, “The fear of the Lord – this is wisdom, and turning aside from evil is understanding.”
The great danger of a world that imagines that its religious roots are irrational and primitive and mere superstition – incommunicable to the larger world – is that it will start to see life as less than the miracle that it is. The horrors of the world wars were constructed by people considered reasonable by the standards of their day. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot – they built their terrors on the back of reason divorced from religion. But reason is more than that. Reason joined to the love of God and the fear of the Lord – that is wisdom, and what the world needs is wisdom.
At the same time that we are reminding ourselves of the rationality of faith, we can also reclaim science as our own. David Wilkinson of St. John’s College of the University of Durham says, “Christians need to stand against the tide of the current trend of science bashing. The birth of modern science came from the Christian conviction that science was a gift from God for exploring the world and in bringing healing to creation. Responsibility was given to use this gift wisely…We need to recapture that sense of gift and responsibility.”[iv]
So having travelled this far – four weeks now we have been talking about the intersection of science and faith – what can we say? That science is not necessarily an enemy of faith. Science, in its modern form, is a remarkable human achievement for describing the world and explaining how it works. But science is, like all human things, fallible and still developing. And it will always lack the instrument for determining why we are here and what the meaning of life is.
Science can lead us into wonder. At its best it doesn’t reduce life, but enriches it – giving us new words and ways to love God and this world which God has made so that we can yet be “lost in wonder, love and praise.”
Finally, science should spur us to be just as diligent in pursuing knowledge of our faith as scientists are in pursuing the objects of their research. We should not be afraid of hard questions or where they might lead. What we should fear is God. Not the fear that has us cowering in the corner or failing to be what we are. But the fear that overcomes us when we are in the presence of something awesome – like the bend in the road that puts us face to face with a mountain peak. The fear of the Lord, who is greater than all things, this is wisdom.
You remember that church that prayed for the bar to be burned down? This is how Annie Dillard writes about the kind of spirituality we find in that church and sometimes in ours. She writes:
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”[v]
The waking god may draw us out where we can never return. What will call us out there to truly live in this amazing world? What wisdom, what understanding will help us see the wonder and the danger? What role will you play in the drama? And when will you believe? Thanks be to God.
Job 28:12-28
Where will wisdom be found?
And where is the place of understanding?
Humanity does not know its value
And it is not found in the land of the living.
The deep says, “It is not in me.”
And the sea says, “It is not with me.”
Fine gold cannot be exchanged for it
And silver cannot be weighed out for its price.
It cannot be measured against the gold of Ophir
Against precious gems or sapphires
Gold and glass cannot equal it
Nor can it be exchanged for articles of refined gold
No thought shall be made of coral and crystal
The drawing up of wisdom is better than corals.
The topaz of Cush cannot compare with it
And it cannot be weighed in pure gold
From where does wisdom come then?
And where is this place of understanding?
It is concealed from the eyes of all living things
And hidden from the birds of the air.
Destruction and Death say,
“We have heard in our ears a report of it.”
God understands the way to it
And God knows its place.
For God looks to the ends of the earth
And sees all that is under the sky.
When he made for the wind its weight
And apportioned the waters by measure
When he made for the rain a decree
And for the thunderbolt’s voice a way
Then he saw it and recounted it,
He established it and sought it out
And he said to humanity,
“Look, the fear of the Lord – this is wisdom
And turning aside from evil is understanding.”
[i] Quoted in “Lord Justice Nero” on the blog Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, May 7, 2010, http://www.practicalethicsnews.com/practicalethics/2010/05/lord-justice-nero.html.
[ii] From GoodReads, http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3956.Christopher_Hitchens.
[iii] David Bentley Hart, Athiest Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, [Yale University Press: New Haven, 2009], p. 236.
[iv] David Wilkinson, quoted in Paul E. Stroble, What About Science and Religion?: A Study of Reason and Faith, [Abingdon Press: Nashville, 2007], p. 48.
[v] Annie Dillard, from Teaching a Stone to Talk, quoted in “An Annie Dillard Sunday,” on the blog Through the Glass, Darkly, “ 10/17/2004, http://throughaglass.net/archives/2004/10/17/an-annie-dillard-sunday/.
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