Hardly the Last Word

When I was a junior in college, I was Resident Assistant for the mighty and noble third floor of Webb Hall, a place where youth group kids came to become Milligan men.  In that time, one of the many fine people I came to call friend was Phil Rutledge, now a seminary student at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis.  Phil wrote in soon after we’d released last week’s episode of CHP, and his response was thoughtful and lengthy enough that I’ve decided to respond to it here rather than on the podcast itself.  Since Phil’s email response dealt mainly with Biblical interpretation and the nature of syncretism, I’ll take each in turn, then close with a couple comments of my own.

Psalm 90 People and Psalm 100 People

When I teach the Bible in my own church and as a visiting Sunday school teacher, I tend to emphasize that the Bible is a rather capacious collection of documents, allowing all sorts of people to see themselves reflected and at the same time refusing any one person to remain comfortable in the face of all the books at once.  While I admit the possibility of systematic theology’s articulating a unified theological vision, I do tend in my own efforts at systematic theology to see the Bible as a multifaceted collection rather than a choir-without-parts, and I tend to look on systematic theologies that claim to present “the Biblical view of things” as narrow-sighted at best.

That’s not to say that the other hosts of CHP agree with me.  (While I’m not going to pretend that a trio of Protestant teachers of college English is anything like an ecumenical gathering, we do differ enough from one another that we can sustain interesting conversations for an hour a week.)  Because Michial and David do call themselves Calvinists, I imagine they imagine the Bible as more of a unity-with-parts than I do, and until they convince me or I convince them to change positions, we should have some interesting conversations about such things. But Phil is right to point out that my own reading of the Bible’s many texts leads me to a position that simultaneously allows for a strong view of Providence and tools for experiencing evil in the world and crying out to God to blast it away and passages that present the possibility that one’s misfortunes are one’s own making.  As far as I’m concerned, that flexibility in the library that is the Bible is one of its literary and theological strengths, and I celebrate it every chance I get.

That said, Phil calls differences between systematic theologies as matters of “personal choice,” and I would take issue with that picture of things.  (Phil, if you want me to produce the text of your email as an appendix to this post, feel free to contact me via the comments here or via email.)  Because Christian theology is a dialectic discipline (in the sense that it proceeds by assertions and negations, not in the sense that it’s necessarily Hegelian), I do think that the forces that shape systematic theologies are much more complex and powerful than those that determine what sort of breakfast cereal one prefers.  (I’m a Raisin Bran man myself.)  Moreover, I do think that although every conclusion in human intellectual endeavors is at least in some senses provisional, I also think that Christians can and should talk about more-adequate and less-adequate articulations of the Faith.  So I really do mean that I hope David and Michial keep trying to convince me to be a Calvinist, and I hope that I have the fortitude to continue my attempts to convince them otherwise.  Only in the Aristotelian relationship of friendship-seeking-excellence can we mortals reach the best sorts of thinking together.

Incidentally, that you said we’re almost liberal makes me chuckle, not because I think it’s true or false but because on more than one occasion Michial Farmer and I have spent a lunch conversation playing a game in which each tries to establish that the other is actually the liberal and that his own position is far, far from it.  It’s a game I miss playing.

Syncretism–Everybody’s Doing it

I do regret somewhat that we used what we thought was mainly an academic term but, as Phil points out, often comes packaged in pejorative wrapping in evangelical contexts.  When we referred to Voodoo (or however one ought to spell that in 2010) as a “syncretist” tradition, our main point was to note that, unlike traditions like Confucianism or ancient Egyptian henotheism, whose roots are largely unknown except as specialists’ speculations, we can point to certain intelligible sources that combined to make up the cultus that involves loas and other such entities.  Phil is right to note that, because Christianity is also a tradition that emerges in a relatively well-documented era, one could point to the apocalyptic, Hellenistic, Rabbinical, and other roots of Christianity and call it syncretistic, and one would be right in an academic sense.

I do differ from Phil’s take on the relative proximity and distance between medieval- and Renaissance-European witchcraft and Voodoo traditions.  I’d say that both constellations of phenomena involve a written record primarily generated by the tradition’s enemies, latter-day appropriations of the same texts on the parts of Wiccans and whatever Voodoo practitioners call themselves, and vocabularies of spiritual life that owe as much to nineteenth-century Spiritualism as they do to second-century Druid runes.  (If I’ve placed the Druids in entirely the wrong era, I do apologize–as Phil notes, this is decidedly not something in which I’m well versed.)  Moreover, I’ll agree with him and quibble with his terminology when I say that every Christian tradition that’s still extant has some structural similarities to witchcraft and Voodoo in that all of them have polyvalent roots, even if the historical record has obscured many of those roots.

In other words, while I tend to call myself a cultural relativist, I’m not in the end a moral relativist.  The former, cultural relativism, holds that every human tradition of any complexity, including orthodox Christian traditions and modern-era atheism and Voodoo, has something of an internal structure, that a tradition that appears entirely irrational probably appears so not because of a lack of inherent order but because the observer hasn’t worked hard enough to discern it.  The latter would claim that all “religious experiences” are at the best differing decorations for some unifying “supernatural” experience or at the worst different literary manifestations of a common human delusion.  On the contrary, I do stand with David Grubbs’s assertion that, standing within historical Protestant and Catholic traditions (as every Protestant does in some respect), we probably should, unless we have good reason to do otherwise, use Paul’s assertion that we Christians should regard gods-other-than-the-Father-and-Son-and-Spirit (ah, how I wish we English writers could compound words the way the Germans do) as spirits that ought to be subservient to the one true God but for some reason are not.  Paul happens to borrow the philosophical daimon vocabulary to name such spirits, but one could imagine (or read, if one knows one’s New Testament) other vocabularies to get at the same relationships.

I should note, in closing, that I, Nathan Gilmour, have written this response, and the other Christian Humanist Podcast hosts are well within their rights to differ at significant points.  I should also thank Phil Rutledge for giving me occasion to flesh out things that, in a one-hour podcast, necessarily get short shrift.  So gentlemen, differ if you will, and Phil, thank you sincerely.  All three of you I hold as my friends in the pursuit of human excellence, and I thank God for all of you.

by ngilmour