ad radicem

To the friends and sometime fellow travelers of the eccentric gathering known as “Ad Radicem”:

Greetings from a sunny Saturday afternoon. I am writing a brief letter to notify you of a few upcoming happenings (and non-happenings) connected with the weekly meeting at El Mariachi. 

First, I want to make known the topic for this Tuesday’s conversation in hopes that I’ll pique the interest of a few potential conversationalists enough to tempt them into turning up and participating. This week we will be talking about how people of faith, particularly people of Christian faith, understand people of other traditions. Throughout the history of the church, those “others” who haven’t fit inside the Christian fold have been cast in various roles. Sometimes they have been seen as potential converts who have yet to turn from their wicked behavior; sometimes they have been seen as bedeviled enemies entrenched in error whose deceptions can only lead the faithful astray. Other times, they have been seen as innocently misguided souls whose misfortune has prevented them from hearing or believing in the fullness of Christ’s gospel. Of course, these type-castings are do not only take place within the Christian tradition; labels like “Infidel,” “Free-thinker,” or even “Muggle” call to mind the way in which the “Others” has been depicted by various groups. Why in God’s name are there so many people who disagree so strongly over just what God’s name is?!? 

After presenting a few of the options for understanding the “other” given to us by both history and contemporary culture, as well as fleshing out some of the presuppositions that produce those options, we will talk for a while about the relative merits (and demerits!) of these various perspectives. Drawing boundaries and distinctions is a necessary but impossibly thorny aspect of faith, and one that calls for deeper thought and conversation. 

Second, I want to give fair warning that there will be no meeting on April 29th. I’ll be away (and Carolyn is coming with me) at two graduation ceremonies. One for my sister-in-law in California, and another for myself in British Colombia. 

After this brief hiatus, Ad Radicem will resume on the 6th of May. We will start a new series of conversations working within a constellation of topics dealing with Christian faith and the human body. We’ll talk through various notions and spiritual practices surrounding bodies: souls and bodies, the suffering and healing of bodies, the death of bodies, and the resurrection of the body. In all of this, we’ll think about the implications of the Christian confession that the Son of God has a human body, one which he offers to share with you and I. There are a number of fascinating issues surrounding these topics, and a lot of confusion in the air as well. “We” have an odd relationship to our bodies, we often think in terms of “having” a body, and we do our best to wield control over our bodies through exercise, prescriptions, surgery, and tattoos. Yet our bodies do things that we don’t like. Besides the obvious and embarrassing farts and warts, our bodies slowly deteriorate, develop tumors, or catastrophically fail us. We seem to be both “in control” and “out of control” when it comes to our bodies. That tension is fruitful space for some good conversation about identity, faith, and embodied life. These conversations will aim to explore what a deeper and a healthier relationship to our bodies might look like, both individually and as a society. 

Below you will find the material from our discussion on April 15th. It comes in the form of four answers to the question above (why is pluralism profoundly challenging to faith?). Each answer is given a brief response, reasons not to abandon faith despite the challenges that life in a pluralistic context can impose upon people of faith. Enjoy thinking through what you find here and feel free to comment at the bottom!
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1. We can all see the world in more than one way. Living alongside people with very different beliefs and goals reinforces the plausibility of alternative ways of understanding ourselves, our place in the world, the world itself, and the relation of the whole to God/god/the transcendent. This leads all of us to recurrently think, “I/we could be wrong.”

Insofar as ideological pluralism keeps us from killing one another over our disagreements, pluralism is an aid to humility, love, and justice. Insofar as it undermines the credibility and coherence of the deepest motivations toward humility, love, and justice, those embedded deep within particular traditions, pluralism leads us toward a crisis in which these values are question-able.

2. In a secular context, religion is regarded as something peripheral, something private, something that does not belong in “public” spaces (yet religion is made “appropriate” when it takes the form of spirituality). Politics and economics take place in a “neutral” space where controversial theological and metaphysical questions are (supposedly) excluded.

For better and for worse, the boundary between public and private breaks down in both directions. It is necessary to carry “private” convictions into “public” spaces insofar as those convictions deeply affect the manner in which people act there (i.e. ethics), and influence the projects that they choose to pursue in that space (i.e. legislation on abortion vs. free trade agreements). In the other direction, supposedly “neutral” political and economic messages inevitably carry theological content. For example, the “duty” of patriotism; or, advertisements that market a product as an identity. In short, while the ideal of a theologically neutral public space has some pragmatic value, it is essentially an un-human place where humans come to interact with all their different “theological” perspectives. No human being sleeps, loves, is born, or dies in neutrality; there is no such thing as a neutral position.

3. The strong claim of faith to have access, or partial access, to truth requires an implicit claim that otherwise rational, good people are wrong about their most basic commitments and self-understanding. By apparently signaling a special privilege for some people over others, this claim calls into question the love and justice of a God who would create all people and allow only to some of them to grasp the truth.

Every perspective deals with the challenge of accounting for alternative viewpoints; every “us” looks like elitism to everyone lumped into the “them.” Each tradition’s story meets this challenge in one way or another. To speak of the logic of election, mission, and service is not inherently less plausible than to argue that all religion can be explained by muddle-headed projections of cosmic parental-figures or the persistence of superstition.

4. Living as a person of faith is challenging in a pluralist context, not only because of the interaction between many different faiths (and non-faiths), but also because of intra-tradition pluralism. People who share a basic starting point and theoretically ought to be able to agree with one another in common practice and fellowship (i.e. Christians, or even more narrowly Lutherans), seem unable to do so. This makes every tradition and sub-tradition look more and more like a “merely human construction”—especially as adherents to different sub-traditions lay that charge against others.

There is no way out of “human constructions,” nor any good reason to believe that truth should be found totally beyond history, language, culture, and material embodiment. The idea that truth should be universally or automatically accessible to every individual through reason or experience, quite apart from interaction with other people (or even institutions) is a claim far from obvious at first glance. In fact, it looks suspiciously like a concession to individualism and a cynical distrust of all authority. Once the notion of a “pure” truth, unmediated by others is disallowed, the conversation must turn to consider which human constructs are better and worse, both within each tradition and between traditions, and the criteria on which those evaluations should be made (e.g. faithfulness to revelation, instrumental value for society, universal benevolence, etc.).