Sunday, October 08, 2006
Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: Brunch Club Theology
A long, long, time ago, back when "the music used to make me smile," I was a regular participant in a gathering of similarly inclined young folks, all of whom had had Christian upbringings and none of whom were entirely comfortable with them. It would be fair to say that we were all either fallen away from our original religious allegiances, or were leaning away from them as we looked for something else. That having been said, God, the story of the Incarnation and Redemption, and the moral teachings of our various sects were constantly on our minds. These were the topics of our regular Sunday mid-morning meetings, which we called "the brunch club."
(Yes, we were able to get dates for Saturday evenings. Sometimes they even accompanied us to brunch. Stop trying to change the subject.)
One of the sub-topics that came up most frequently was the Christian doctrine of Divine omniscience. It was a real stumper for almost all of us, a stumbling block over which our desires to overcome our objections to our shared faith -- and Christianity really is a single faith, merely celebrated in diverse ways -- had fallen and couldn't get up. Omniscience, it seemed, defeated the equally important concept of human free will. For if God knows all, then our decisions must have been inevitable, enforced upon us either by some aspect of natural law or by Divine coercion. Therefore, our wills are not free.
Even non-Christians can see where this compels us to go. It eliminates personal responsibility for one's choices, and therefore invalidates the conceptions of good and evil. But what point is there to a religion, or to any moral-ethical system, without good and evil? Why trouble oneself about right and wrong? Surely what matters is just to get what one wants at the lowest possible cost! Theft, fraud, rape, murder: they're only "wrong" if you get caught.
To the best of my knowledge, none of us became a burglar or a rapist, or went on a killing spree, in consequence of this line of reasoning. Our internal inhibitions against that sort of behavior were adequately strong. But we were young, and like most young people, under-supplied with perspective. We had little sense as yet for how second-order effects act to transform a society. Had it been otherwise, we wouldn't have been (gasp!) liberals. But I digress.
The fundamental problem with our brunch club theology was a special case of a more general logical malady: we thought that, since we knew the meanings we intended for the words we used, therefore we possessed real knowledge about the things we used them to talk about. We assumed that God is as mired in time, and in cause and effect, as we humans are. We had unthinkingly imposed human limits on God.
God created Time. He stands outside it. Indeed, only He knows it for what it really is. We humans cannot, at least while we're on this side of the grass. To posit that God's relation to Time is as rigidly linear as ours is to commit an intellectual arrogance that precludes the resolution of the "problem" of Divine omniscience.
We who are trapped in one-way, linear time, who confront choices that cannot be unmade, see only one set of consequences from a human decision: the set that we "actually" experience. If the Divine consciousness were like our own, that would indeed place the doctrine of omniscience and the doctrine of free will in irremediable opposition; one or the other would have to give way.
Therefore, God's relation to Time must differ fundamentally from our own. Perhaps He sees Time not as a linear progression from each instant to the next, but more like a two-dimensional map, where the consequences of every possible human choice are depicted, while men are free to select among them. Or perhaps we are not what we naively see ourselves to be: linear creatures continuous along a single, infinitesimally wide strand of moments. Perhaps we really do make every available choice, and live through the consequences of all of them. The thread of our consciousness would in that case be a single fiber in a multidimensional tapestry of existence: a supreme work of Art by an Artist inherently beyond all appreciation or criticism.
We think we know ourselves. We do not. We think the tools with which we have learned to reason about our physical realm are sufficient to unlock the mysteries surrounding the nature and character of God. They are not.
But the brunch club, as I said above, was a gaggle of young minds, incompletely trained in the arts of reason, and barely tainted by knowledge or perspective. It was, in its way, a constructive exercise, for it taught us a most important attitude toward arbitrary claims of authority: the skepticism that reserves judgment until enough facts are available. It would have been still more constructive if we had thought to question our own assumptions as sharply as we allowed ourselves to question the assertions of others. But the milieu in which we lived had presented us with a set of inducements to cast faith and moral constraint aside, and we were pondering arguments for doing precisely that.
Theology, which ponders the nature of God and His relationship to the temporal universe, is not a game for children. Neither is it a pastime for the scoffer or the unserious man. Better that these should be left out of the discussion, for all they contribute is noise. When an atheist demands that I prove the existence of God, I chuckle. If I were to respond, "Prove that He doesn't exist," he would probably take it as proof that my beliefs are without foundation. It would be better for him to ponder the limits on his own knowledge, actual and potential; they are no less constraining than mine.
Young people, scoffers, and unserious men will practice brunch club theology nevertheless. For those of us who have been touched by faith and feel the Omnipresent Immanence in our hearts, there's no point in dueling with them. Particularly, not for those of us who are Christians, for we proceed from events reported to have occurred in this universe -- the teachings and miracles of Christ; His Passion and Crucifixion; and His Resurrection as He had predicted -- which were multiply witnessed and recorded by scribes in whom we've placed our trust.
Yes, we could be wrong. If you're so inclined, go ahead; try to prove it. We'll wait.
