I've been writing about the intersection between faith and the arts and between faith and technology for some time now. But lately I've been thinking more about the intersection between the arts and technology (in the light of faith), because my main art form (photography) has taken an even more technological with my going digital and getting into Photoshop.
I wrote about the art-technology relationship a bit for my master's degree in “Technology and Christian Spirituality.” I pointed out that the Greek word technē is the word for both the arts of the mind and the fine arts and crafts. The German philosopher Heidegger, after defining “Enframing” as that aspect of technology which takes us captive because we are not aware of it, suggests that art might be the solution to this enslaving and depersonalizing side of technology. He writes “the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.” Samuel Florman, a philosopher-engineer, writes in The Existential Pleasures of Engineering that the engineer, like Bezalel, is “filled...with the spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts.” (Ex. 31:3, NIV)
Theo Jansen is an artist who is also an engineer and combines the two in an amazing way. He says “The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds.” Watch this video of some of his “kinetic sculpture” work:
I'd love to hear what other people think about art as it relates to technology, and how we can reflect theologically on that intersection.
19 May 2007
18 May 2007
Christian Thinking on the Arts
Comment has a recent article by Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin called 'What's the point?' Summer Reading on the Arts, which gives some recommendations on what is good among the huge slew of new books on theology and the arts.
I'd also like to draw your attention to this conference which David Taylor (of Diary of an Arts Pastor fame) is organizing: Transforming Culture: A Vision for the Church and the Arts (April 1-3, 2008, in Austin, TX). Tell all your artist and pastor friends about it. There's going to be a phenomenal line-up of speakers, including Eugene Peterson, and Jeremy Begbie, founder of Theology Through the Arts and a scintillating speaker. This is one not to be missed.
I'd also like to draw your attention to this conference which David Taylor (of Diary of an Arts Pastor fame) is organizing: Transforming Culture: A Vision for the Church and the Arts (April 1-3, 2008, in Austin, TX). Tell all your artist and pastor friends about it. There's going to be a phenomenal line-up of speakers, including Eugene Peterson, and Jeremy Begbie, founder of Theology Through the Arts and a scintillating speaker. This is one not to be missed.
05 May 2007
The Beauties and Dangers of Pluralism
After I asked in an earlier post “If there is a God, which one?” Rosie picked up the thread and continued with another posting on Pluralism. Here is my response to hers.
First, let me recount an interesting experience of Pluralism that took me by surprise the other day. I have just finished re-reading My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok—fantastic book, by the way, and the most coherent answer I have yet read to all aesthetic questions, all the more amazing because it doesn’t answer them… it just is the answer (or the art itself that lives in the book is the answer) in an almost Till We Have Faces kind of way. Anyhow, it’s about an Orthodox Jew, a Hasid, who is born with an incredible, uncontrollable gift for painting. His parents don’t understand this non-Orthodox gift, this “waste of time.” He should be learning Torah & travelling around the world helping other Hasidim, not scribbling on walls & on the pages of sacred books! But the Rabbi eventually realizes that this is Asher’s gift, & sends him to study with a great (but non-religious) artist. Asher’s parents are more and more alienated, especially when he begins painting models in the nude and studying crucifixes—because “I can’t get that expression anywhere else.”
[N.B. I just discovered that Potok himself is a painter & has painted the central work in the novel! See here]
Some of Asher’s classmates, and even his father, think that he is from the Devil and going straight to Hell because of his pagan paintings. While I was reading, I suddenly became aware of my own involuntary response. I found that, because of Chaim Potok’s great narrative skill, I believed that Asher was going to heaven. I believed it within the world of the novel, of course, but I felt it in my insides as if it were true in the “real” world as well. What does that say about my belief in Christ as the One & Only Way to Heaven?
Well, really, nothing. It could mean that I thought perhaps, as does one of my undergrad profs, reputedly, that Jews are still under the Old Covenant and can be saved by fulfilling the works of the Law without acknowledging Christ as Messiah. I don’t know if I believe that; I think such a suggestion is tenuous at best! But all my response really means is that Potok appealed to the part of me that is able to have pluralistic dialogue—the (small) part that is able to understand what other people believe and to feel with them, while I don’t believe with them.
I have that unfortunately capacity to be able to respond more deeply to fiction than to fact, sometimes. I understand Asher better than I do a Messianic Jewish acquaintance who practices what I judgmentally call “legalistic” rituals and rules and regulations in his home, imposing them on his children—or blessing his children with stability. I feel more sympathy and understanding for Hester Prynne than I do for friends who tell me of their romantic misdemeanors or errors of judgment.
Yet, though my response needs refining and sanctifying into kind, compassionate, Christ-like understanding, there’s something to be said for the distinction. I strongly believe that pluralism should be viewed as an opportunity, not an ontology. I mean that true Biblical love involves communication of the Truth (the One Truth) through compassionate story-sharing, commiseration & empathy, and any other kind and generous means available. But to treat pluralism as an expression of a metaphysical reality is logically, rationally, and spiritually fallacious.
Here is an official definition: “PLURALISM = A condition or system in which two or more states, groups, principles, etc. coexist; a theory or system that recognizes more than one ultimate principle” (OED). I think that Rosie’s post is really defining & re-applying pluralism, or trying to free it from its misapplications. When she quotes “energetic engagement with diversity, active seeking of understanding across lines of difference, encounter of commitments, based on dialogue, I believe she is saying what pluralism ought to be, but isn’t. By sheer definition, it can’t be an “encounter of commitments,” because there can be no commitments in a “system that recognizes more than one ultimate principle.”
Rosie believes that “there is only one God, and that all the monotheistic religions believe in that same one God, though they may call him by different names. And they all may believe in or experience different attributes of God. Our human minds are limited, so we can only comprehend a small fraction of what God is like.” Now, this may be true as far as it refers to God’s attributes. Even without looking outside of Christianity, the variety of Protestant denominations can illustrate many of God’s attributes: one focuses on His love of spontaneity and effusive, expressive joy, pointing out His imminence; one emphasizes His transcendence and values a respectful, orderly, awe-filled worship; another points up His powers of reasoning and our sub-powers of reasoning about Him, prioritizing discourse and study; and so on.
But once you bring in other religions (or even before), I do not understand how pluralism could possibly work on the cosmic level, I mean ontologically. Do Catholics go to Purgatory and Protestants go straight to Heaven? Do Catholic babies go to Limbo, while covenantal Presbyterian babies go to Heaven? Can the Christian Heaven & the Buddhist Nirvana & Hindu reincarnation all literally exist? Are they different metaphysical spheres, and good Christians go to Heaven while good Buddhists go to Nirvana and good Hindus come back in higher forms, and so on?
I mean, if one exclusive truth is true, it excludes the others.
Rosie said “Perhaps we Jews and Christians also need devout Muslims and Sikhs and others to elucidate other aspects of God that our sacred texts and traditions might not have taught us about.”
Yes. That is true, and neglected. This is “all truth is God’s truth” again. Let me tell you a wonderful account. A missionary friend of mine recently came back from a year in Southeast Asia, where she has been travelling around Singapore, Indonesia, and Burma. She settled in Burma for a time at the end and got to know the culture pretty well. She learned something amazing while she was there. If I’ve got this right, she now believes that Buddhism in some ways prefigures Christianity, much as the Old Testament prefigured the new! Here are her two examples. Apparently the Buddha once said, “I am not the Way. One will come after me who has the Truth. He will be the Way; follow Him.” Wow! And there are speculations that the Buddha, who lived during the reign of Darius the Persian, probably traveled in Darius’s realms and heard the decree, after Daniel stood up to the lions and all that, about worshipping the one God of Daniel! So the Buddha would have pondered what he had heard, and brought some of it into his teachings. The other is that there is a Buddhist festival called, I think, The Festival of Lights (sound familiar?). Buddhists decorate their streets with beautiful lights, strung all across the streets and sparkling all across the sky. They set up these lights to wait for the One Who is to come and to welcome Him when He comes! And some Buddhist monks have found ways to redefine classic teachings in light of the new revelation missionaries have brought. One goes around in his saffron robe, knocking on doors and telling people that “Jesus is the way to Nirvana!”
And that’s my main item to communicate here. In our dialogue with other religions, and all the amazing and beautiful things we can learn from them, we do have to get—somehow, eventually, in relationship, kindly, humbly—to “Jesus is the way.”
Because even though we Christians need to be humble and not go around with our noses in the air thinking “we’ve got a corner on the truth,” nor (maybe not) to be door-to- door salesmen of Christian faith, the one thing we can know, are told to know, must know is that “Jesus is the way.”
Everything else is too risky. Think about Pascal’s Wager. Even if there is a way for people of other religions, or “innocent savages,” to get to God, Christ said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father but through me.” So anything else is an eternal, damnable (literally) gamble.
So, too, are statements like “Sikh founder Guru Nanak might have been Christ in the flesh again.” That’s exactly what Christ warned us against. He specifically said that people will want us to think that, and that they are false Messiahs. So if I really loved you, wouldn’t I want you to know the truth?
First, let me recount an interesting experience of Pluralism that took me by surprise the other day. I have just finished re-reading My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok—fantastic book, by the way, and the most coherent answer I have yet read to all aesthetic questions, all the more amazing because it doesn’t answer them… it just is the answer (or the art itself that lives in the book is the answer) in an almost Till We Have Faces kind of way. Anyhow, it’s about an Orthodox Jew, a Hasid, who is born with an incredible, uncontrollable gift for painting. His parents don’t understand this non-Orthodox gift, this “waste of time.” He should be learning Torah & travelling around the world helping other Hasidim, not scribbling on walls & on the pages of sacred books! But the Rabbi eventually realizes that this is Asher’s gift, & sends him to study with a great (but non-religious) artist. Asher’s parents are more and more alienated, especially when he begins painting models in the nude and studying crucifixes—because “I can’t get that expression anywhere else.”
[N.B. I just discovered that Potok himself is a painter & has painted the central work in the novel! See here]
Some of Asher’s classmates, and even his father, think that he is from the Devil and going straight to Hell because of his pagan paintings. While I was reading, I suddenly became aware of my own involuntary response. I found that, because of Chaim Potok’s great narrative skill, I believed that Asher was going to heaven. I believed it within the world of the novel, of course, but I felt it in my insides as if it were true in the “real” world as well. What does that say about my belief in Christ as the One & Only Way to Heaven?
Well, really, nothing. It could mean that I thought perhaps, as does one of my undergrad profs, reputedly, that Jews are still under the Old Covenant and can be saved by fulfilling the works of the Law without acknowledging Christ as Messiah. I don’t know if I believe that; I think such a suggestion is tenuous at best! But all my response really means is that Potok appealed to the part of me that is able to have pluralistic dialogue—the (small) part that is able to understand what other people believe and to feel with them, while I don’t believe with them.
I have that unfortunately capacity to be able to respond more deeply to fiction than to fact, sometimes. I understand Asher better than I do a Messianic Jewish acquaintance who practices what I judgmentally call “legalistic” rituals and rules and regulations in his home, imposing them on his children—or blessing his children with stability. I feel more sympathy and understanding for Hester Prynne than I do for friends who tell me of their romantic misdemeanors or errors of judgment.
Yet, though my response needs refining and sanctifying into kind, compassionate, Christ-like understanding, there’s something to be said for the distinction. I strongly believe that pluralism should be viewed as an opportunity, not an ontology. I mean that true Biblical love involves communication of the Truth (the One Truth) through compassionate story-sharing, commiseration & empathy, and any other kind and generous means available. But to treat pluralism as an expression of a metaphysical reality is logically, rationally, and spiritually fallacious.
Here is an official definition: “PLURALISM = A condition or system in which two or more states, groups, principles, etc. coexist; a theory or system that recognizes more than one ultimate principle” (OED). I think that Rosie’s post is really defining & re-applying pluralism, or trying to free it from its misapplications. When she quotes “energetic engagement with diversity, active seeking of understanding across lines of difference, encounter of commitments, based on dialogue, I believe she is saying what pluralism ought to be, but isn’t. By sheer definition, it can’t be an “encounter of commitments,” because there can be no commitments in a “system that recognizes more than one ultimate principle.”
Rosie believes that “there is only one God, and that all the monotheistic religions believe in that same one God, though they may call him by different names. And they all may believe in or experience different attributes of God. Our human minds are limited, so we can only comprehend a small fraction of what God is like.” Now, this may be true as far as it refers to God’s attributes. Even without looking outside of Christianity, the variety of Protestant denominations can illustrate many of God’s attributes: one focuses on His love of spontaneity and effusive, expressive joy, pointing out His imminence; one emphasizes His transcendence and values a respectful, orderly, awe-filled worship; another points up His powers of reasoning and our sub-powers of reasoning about Him, prioritizing discourse and study; and so on.
But once you bring in other religions (or even before), I do not understand how pluralism could possibly work on the cosmic level, I mean ontologically. Do Catholics go to Purgatory and Protestants go straight to Heaven? Do Catholic babies go to Limbo, while covenantal Presbyterian babies go to Heaven? Can the Christian Heaven & the Buddhist Nirvana & Hindu reincarnation all literally exist? Are they different metaphysical spheres, and good Christians go to Heaven while good Buddhists go to Nirvana and good Hindus come back in higher forms, and so on?
I mean, if one exclusive truth is true, it excludes the others.
Rosie said “Perhaps we Jews and Christians also need devout Muslims and Sikhs and others to elucidate other aspects of God that our sacred texts and traditions might not have taught us about.”
Yes. That is true, and neglected. This is “all truth is God’s truth” again. Let me tell you a wonderful account. A missionary friend of mine recently came back from a year in Southeast Asia, where she has been travelling around Singapore, Indonesia, and Burma. She settled in Burma for a time at the end and got to know the culture pretty well. She learned something amazing while she was there. If I’ve got this right, she now believes that Buddhism in some ways prefigures Christianity, much as the Old Testament prefigured the new! Here are her two examples. Apparently the Buddha once said, “I am not the Way. One will come after me who has the Truth. He will be the Way; follow Him.” Wow! And there are speculations that the Buddha, who lived during the reign of Darius the Persian, probably traveled in Darius’s realms and heard the decree, after Daniel stood up to the lions and all that, about worshipping the one God of Daniel! So the Buddha would have pondered what he had heard, and brought some of it into his teachings. The other is that there is a Buddhist festival called, I think, The Festival of Lights (sound familiar?). Buddhists decorate their streets with beautiful lights, strung all across the streets and sparkling all across the sky. They set up these lights to wait for the One Who is to come and to welcome Him when He comes! And some Buddhist monks have found ways to redefine classic teachings in light of the new revelation missionaries have brought. One goes around in his saffron robe, knocking on doors and telling people that “Jesus is the way to Nirvana!”
And that’s my main item to communicate here. In our dialogue with other religions, and all the amazing and beautiful things we can learn from them, we do have to get—somehow, eventually, in relationship, kindly, humbly—to “Jesus is the way.”
Because even though we Christians need to be humble and not go around with our noses in the air thinking “we’ve got a corner on the truth,” nor (maybe not) to be door-to- door salesmen of Christian faith, the one thing we can know, are told to know, must know is that “Jesus is the way.”
Everything else is too risky. Think about Pascal’s Wager. Even if there is a way for people of other religions, or “innocent savages,” to get to God, Christ said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father but through me.” So anything else is an eternal, damnable (literally) gamble.
So, too, are statements like “Sikh founder Guru Nanak might have been Christ in the flesh again.” That’s exactly what Christ warned us against. He specifically said that people will want us to think that, and that they are false Messiahs. So if I really loved you, wouldn’t I want you to know the truth?
01 May 2007
May Poem of the Month
It's May! It's May! The lusty month of May...
That Fierce Joy
We watch the distant sunrise change the sky.
I think that cloud-light touches almost amber
treetops, like your honeyed hair; you think
the flame outlining sky-streaks is a wonder,
like my lips; we find our hands together
and we ponder when that happened, when
the colors started, when the wind that moves
without us left these fires on our skin.
I think that sight is sun beyond the hills;
you imagine it as far-off light;
we seem to stand and face it, till we turn
and find it is the middle of the night.
That dawn was something intermingled, cast
by our two shadows growing brighter where they crossed.
~ Admonit
That Fierce Joy
We watch the distant sunrise change the sky.
I think that cloud-light touches almost amber
treetops, like your honeyed hair; you think
the flame outlining sky-streaks is a wonder,
like my lips; we find our hands together
and we ponder when that happened, when
the colors started, when the wind that moves
without us left these fires on our skin.
I think that sight is sun beyond the hills;
you imagine it as far-off light;
we seem to stand and face it, till we turn
and find it is the middle of the night.
That dawn was something intermingled, cast
by our two shadows growing brighter where they crossed.
~ Admonit
24 April 2007
Philosophy post 5: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
On to the fifth major field of philosophy: Political Philosophy or Political Science, “The branch of knowledge concerned with politcal activity and behaviour.” (OED). The overarching questions of this enquiry are:
Is Utopia possible? What is the best form of government?
Some other questions that are relevant to this study include:
- How should societies be organized?
- What laws should civilizations legislate and enforce?
- Are people basically good or evil?
- How much do people need to be restrained?
- How much freedom should citizens have to do whatever they please?
- Should the government legislate, dictate, or restrain religion or religious practices?
Instead of answering particular questions this week, here is what I would like you to do. Describe your concept of the ideal state.
Start simple and build up the details. Begin by describing the form of government. Who would rule? How many people? How would they be organized? Explain whether your system is a known form of government—monarchy, dictatorship, democracy, republic, oligarchy, anarchy, etc.—or if you think you have invented a new form. Next, explain the role of the individual in this system. Then begin getting into specific results of your system. What would you do for education, laws, punishments, judicial system, etc? Would you legistlate your ethics—in other words, make laws enforcing your personal morality?
If that task seems too overwhelming, try this one instead:
Write a new Bill of Rights. List ten or so basic rights that you believe all people should have. Make a general rule, but then also (this is important!) explain how you would apply this general right to specific situations. In other words, suppose that you retained the “right to free speech.” How would you apply that to hate speech? Public or media profanity? Libel?
You get the idea.
Please add other thoughts as they come to you, including descriptions of utopias you may have encountered in movies or literature.
Do you think Utopia is possible?
What kind of government do you personally believe the Bible suggests or commands?
Have fun.
Is Utopia possible? What is the best form of government?
Some other questions that are relevant to this study include:
- How should societies be organized?
- What laws should civilizations legislate and enforce?
- Are people basically good or evil?
- How much do people need to be restrained?
- How much freedom should citizens have to do whatever they please?
- Should the government legislate, dictate, or restrain religion or religious practices?
Instead of answering particular questions this week, here is what I would like you to do. Describe your concept of the ideal state.
Start simple and build up the details. Begin by describing the form of government. Who would rule? How many people? How would they be organized? Explain whether your system is a known form of government—monarchy, dictatorship, democracy, republic, oligarchy, anarchy, etc.—or if you think you have invented a new form. Next, explain the role of the individual in this system. Then begin getting into specific results of your system. What would you do for education, laws, punishments, judicial system, etc? Would you legistlate your ethics—in other words, make laws enforcing your personal morality?
If that task seems too overwhelming, try this one instead:
Write a new Bill of Rights. List ten or so basic rights that you believe all people should have. Make a general rule, but then also (this is important!) explain how you would apply this general right to specific situations. In other words, suppose that you retained the “right to free speech.” How would you apply that to hate speech? Public or media profanity? Libel?
You get the idea.
Please add other thoughts as they come to you, including descriptions of utopias you may have encountered in movies or literature.
Do you think Utopia is possible?
What kind of government do you personally believe the Bible suggests or commands?
Have fun.
18 April 2007
Pluralism: Will the true God please stand up?
Admonit asked in another post, "If there is a God, which one?" I thought I'd start a new thread rather than adding another lengthy comment there, because this one veers somewhat off the original topic.
I believe there is only one God, and that all the monotheistic religions believe in that same one God, though they may call him by different names -- Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Vāhigurū (the latter is the one personal and transcendent creator god of Sikhism). And they all may believe in or experience different attributes of God. Our human minds are limited, so we can only comprehend a small fraction of what God is like. It would stand to reason that different peoples over time in attempting to understand God as he has revealed himself to them have described him in different ways, like the blind men describing the elephant (one says it's like a rope, because he is feeling the tail; one says it's like a tree trunk, because he is feeling one of the legs, etc.).
We in the Judeo-Christian tradition believe that God has revealed something of himself to us through Scripture (though certainly not all of himself; even all the books in the whole earth couldn't contain all there is to know about God). Christians also believe that God's ultimate self-revelation was through his Son, Jesus Christ. While they do put us in somewhat of a unique position with respect to understanding "which God" there is, these things don't exempt us from the same limiting factors that all people of various faiths are bound by, namely finite minds further clouded by sin. We are like the blind men with the elephant when we read Scripture. Some of us (Christians) see great prophetic passages in the Old Testament (or "First Testament" as some Christians choose to call it so as not to offend Jews) and perceive that those texts are surely talking about Jesus of Nazareth. Others of us (of the Jewish faith) see the prophetic texts -- e.g., about the Suffering Servant -- as referring to the nation of Israel. So who is right? Or are we both right in some sense? I think we both need each other for a full understanding and interpretation of Scripture. And perhaps we Jews and Christians also need devout Muslims and Sikhs and others to elucidate other aspects of God that our sacred texts and traditions might not have taught us about. And likewise Muslims and Sikhs need us to tell them what we've learned about the good news of redemption through Christ, among other things. I think it is arrogant of any of us to say we have "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God." Even if Christians do have a corner on the truth (which I don't think we do), it certainly won't win us any hearing with others to go about claiming that they are wrong and need to believe the way we do.
At this stage in my life, I am coming to a place of trying to live well within a pluralistic society. I have seen too much hatred and war between people of different religions to think that vigorously defending our differences is worth it. I'd rather look first for our common ground and engage in respectful dialogue about our differences from there. While I expect to go to my grave still believing in Christ as Lord, and the Bible as the Word of God, I still want to learn from my neighbors of other religious traditions rather than view them as "projects" to work on (those Christian tracts about how to witness to Jehovah's Witnesses or Muslims or Mormons used to intrigue me, but now make me cringe). My church upbringing taught me how to interpret Christ's statement of being "the Way, the Truth, and the Life," the One through whom "no one comes to the Father" without. But I'm open to the possibility that our interpretation might not be 100% correct. Are there not others who can relate to God as Father without knowing Christ? Or perhaps it is through Christ that they are enabled to come to God, even though they are not aware of his mediatorial role. (See Romans 2.) I'm more inclined to believe the latter.
I had some neighbors across the street from me who were Sikhs and were very friendly. They were pretty assimilated into American culture and didn't wear the turban or kirpan, but their relatives who visited them from time to time (and to whom they introduced me) did. My pleasant encounter with these Sikh neighbors has given me a curiosity about the Sikh religion. It was fascinating to read some of the stories about its founder Guru Nanak and find them quite similar to stories about Jesus in the Christian Bible. It made me wonder whether Guru Nanak might have been Christ in the flesh again. Jesus rose from the dead and is at the right hand of the Father, but who says he cannot appear in our presence again (as he did with the disciples after his resurrection) and perhaps even be unrecognized as the incarnate God again (as he was on the Road to Emmaus)?
I found a very good articulation by Diana L. Eck of what I think is a good way of relating to those of other faiths. Worth quoting in its entirety here:
"The plurality of religious traditions and cultures has come to characterize every part of the world today. But what is pluralism? Here are four points to begin our thinking:
I believe there is only one God, and that all the monotheistic religions believe in that same one God, though they may call him by different names -- Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Vāhigurū (the latter is the one personal and transcendent creator god of Sikhism). And they all may believe in or experience different attributes of God. Our human minds are limited, so we can only comprehend a small fraction of what God is like. It would stand to reason that different peoples over time in attempting to understand God as he has revealed himself to them have described him in different ways, like the blind men describing the elephant (one says it's like a rope, because he is feeling the tail; one says it's like a tree trunk, because he is feeling one of the legs, etc.).
We in the Judeo-Christian tradition believe that God has revealed something of himself to us through Scripture (though certainly not all of himself; even all the books in the whole earth couldn't contain all there is to know about God). Christians also believe that God's ultimate self-revelation was through his Son, Jesus Christ. While they do put us in somewhat of a unique position with respect to understanding "which God" there is, these things don't exempt us from the same limiting factors that all people of various faiths are bound by, namely finite minds further clouded by sin. We are like the blind men with the elephant when we read Scripture. Some of us (Christians) see great prophetic passages in the Old Testament (or "First Testament" as some Christians choose to call it so as not to offend Jews) and perceive that those texts are surely talking about Jesus of Nazareth. Others of us (of the Jewish faith) see the prophetic texts -- e.g., about the Suffering Servant -- as referring to the nation of Israel. So who is right? Or are we both right in some sense? I think we both need each other for a full understanding and interpretation of Scripture. And perhaps we Jews and Christians also need devout Muslims and Sikhs and others to elucidate other aspects of God that our sacred texts and traditions might not have taught us about. And likewise Muslims and Sikhs need us to tell them what we've learned about the good news of redemption through Christ, among other things. I think it is arrogant of any of us to say we have "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God." Even if Christians do have a corner on the truth (which I don't think we do), it certainly won't win us any hearing with others to go about claiming that they are wrong and need to believe the way we do.
At this stage in my life, I am coming to a place of trying to live well within a pluralistic society. I have seen too much hatred and war between people of different religions to think that vigorously defending our differences is worth it. I'd rather look first for our common ground and engage in respectful dialogue about our differences from there. While I expect to go to my grave still believing in Christ as Lord, and the Bible as the Word of God, I still want to learn from my neighbors of other religious traditions rather than view them as "projects" to work on (those Christian tracts about how to witness to Jehovah's Witnesses or Muslims or Mormons used to intrigue me, but now make me cringe). My church upbringing taught me how to interpret Christ's statement of being "the Way, the Truth, and the Life," the One through whom "no one comes to the Father" without. But I'm open to the possibility that our interpretation might not be 100% correct. Are there not others who can relate to God as Father without knowing Christ? Or perhaps it is through Christ that they are enabled to come to God, even though they are not aware of his mediatorial role. (See Romans 2.) I'm more inclined to believe the latter.
I had some neighbors across the street from me who were Sikhs and were very friendly. They were pretty assimilated into American culture and didn't wear the turban or kirpan, but their relatives who visited them from time to time (and to whom they introduced me) did. My pleasant encounter with these Sikh neighbors has given me a curiosity about the Sikh religion. It was fascinating to read some of the stories about its founder Guru Nanak and find them quite similar to stories about Jesus in the Christian Bible. It made me wonder whether Guru Nanak might have been Christ in the flesh again. Jesus rose from the dead and is at the right hand of the Father, but who says he cannot appear in our presence again (as he did with the disciples after his resurrection) and perhaps even be unrecognized as the incarnate God again (as he was on the Road to Emmaus)?
I found a very good articulation by Diana L. Eck of what I think is a good way of relating to those of other faiths. Worth quoting in its entirety here:
"The plurality of religious traditions and cultures has come to characterize every part of the world today. But what is pluralism? Here are four points to begin our thinking:
• First, pluralism is not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity. Diversity can and has meant the creation of religious ghettoes with little traffic between or among them. Today, religious diversity is a given, but pluralism is not a given; it is an achievement. Mere diversity without real encounter and relationship will yield increasing tensions in our societies.
• Second, pluralism is not just tolerance, but the active seeking of understanding across lines of difference. Tolerance is a necessary public virtue, but it does not require Christians and Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and ardent secularists to know anything about one another. Tolerance is too thin a foundation for a world of religious difference and proximity. It does nothing to remove our ignorance of one another, and leaves in place the stereotype, the half-truth, the fears that underlie old patterns of division and violence. In the world in which we live today, our ignorance of one another will be increasingly costly.
• Third, pluralism is not relativism, but the encounter of commitments. The new paradigm of pluralism does not require us to leave our identities and our commitments behind, for pluralism is the encounter of commitments. It means holding our deepest differences, even our religious differences, not in isolation, but in relationship to one another.
• Fourth, pluralism is based on dialogue. The language of pluralism is that of dialogue and encounter, give and take, criticism and self-criticism. Dialogue means both speaking and listening, and that process reveals both common understandings and real differences. Dialogue does not mean everyone at the “table” will agree with one another. Pluralism involves the commitment to being at the table -- with one’s commitments."
17 April 2007
What is the world made of?
Admonit asked us to think about: What is this world made of, ultimately or fundamentally?
(I posted my reply in the wrong place... apologies for the duplication)
I am also interested in the evolution of people's ideas about what the world is made of. I'd love to know more.
Since I rambled, here's my short answer on what, as i understand it, physics says about the question:
Long ago, Democritus said: the world is made of Atoms & the Void.
This was an incredibly fruitful proposition, but now, in its pursuit, atoms & the void have lost their independent existence.
These days, quantum physics suggests answers like:
The world is made of energy.
OR
The world is made of information.
OR
The world is made of correlations.
here's my long answer:
For millennia, physicists have been calling the smallest piece of any given element an “atom,” meaning INDIVISIBLE. But in the late nineteenth century it began to appear that all atoms themselves were made of a few common materials. You can build a Lego house with only one kind of building block, you can write a message in Morse code with only two kinds of symbols, and you can construct the hundred-odd elements of which the world (and we) consist from architectural arrangements of only three kinds of particles. Gold and oxygen, lead and helium, arsenic and calcium--they are all made of the same three things: electrons, protons, and neutrons. In itself, an amazing discovery.
The protons & neutrons together make up the nucleus, which is a hundred thousand times smaller than the atom as a whole. The electron is even tinier. The atom--and thus you and everything that is built from atoms--is mostly as empty as the skies.
Meanwhile Einstein showed that space and time are not independent & eternal but are all part of one thing, which we now call spacetime (special relativity, 1905). Then in General Relativity (1916), he showed that space--emptiness--is affected by what is in it. Spacetime is bent by matter.
But it gets weirder and more amazing. In 1928, Dirac discovered that light could spontaneously become a particle of matter and a particle of antimatter--for example, an electron and a positron. Matter is spontaneously created out of light. It happens all the time and it can go the other way too: if a electron finds a positron, they will annihilate each other in a burst of light--matter becomes light.
This all goes to verify Einstein's famous statement of 1905 that matter and energy are different forms of the same thing
(E = mc^2).
Similarly, when the huge accelerators send sub-atomic particles crashing at each other, where you might expect fragments of broken particles, instead you find a host of NEW particles, far more and bigger than could fit inside the supposedly smashed particle. Matter is created out of the energy of the collision.
So... what is the world made of? "atoms" are not the final answer, and neither, really, are "elementary particles," which can endlessly be turned into each other or created out of energy. (So we don't even need to go into quarks, which are the constituents of neutrons and protons!)
Maybe "energy" is an answer.
But it can't be the whole answer, because one of the facts of quantum mechanics is that things seem to be changed by, or to depend on, observation. As to what that means, or if it means anything, there almost as many perspectives as there are quantum physicists. But the fact is that our most fundamental theory of "what the world is made of" has this feature, that it seems to say that matter on the atomic scale instantly reacts to being observed.
Many of the new wave of physicists who are interested in information theory would say that INFORMATION is what the world is created out of. Their motto is "IT FROM BIT" ("it," as in "i saw it. it was right there" and "bit" being the smallest piece of information, 1 or 0). I wish i could explain this whole point of view, but i don't come close to understanding it, so i can only mention it for the interested mind.
Finally, other physicists have, in wrestling with quantum mechanics, come to the conclusion that the most fundamental thing about the world is CORRELATION--that correlations between objects are more fundamental than the "objects" themselves, which change when they are observed, etc. The most dramatic correlation of quantum physics is the phenomenon of entanglement, where a particle that has once interacted with another particle, no matter how far they ultimately separate, acts as if it is responding to measurements done on its faraway friend.
You can see why people begin to think religion and quantum physics have something to say to each other, and i definitely caught echos of quantum physics in the two beautiful posts on "the epistemological role of love" and "we are what we behold." Not to mention the world beginning with "LET THERE BE LIGHT," or "IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD."
A disclaimer, though: it always seems to be a mistake to tie religion down to science, because science will always change.
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