The gist of our discussion was about whether the Bible permits Christians to be friends with atheists.  I feel like there’s not necessarily a problem with it, and verses about not being “yoked with unbelievers” or tossing false teachers out of our churches (at least, that’s how I interpret 2 John) don’t seem to mean that we are never to engage or be friends with nonbelievers.  So I don’t see a “contradiction” between such verses and, say, Paul’s instructions to believers on how to behave when eating dinner at the homes of nonbelievers.  ThoughtCounts Z seemed, at least, to credit my interpretation as reasonable, but she raises a more general point about how people should deal with “contradictions” in Scripture – isn’t it more reasonable to conclude that the book isn’t divine or authoritative?

So how should Christians deal with apparent contradictions in Scripture?  Plenty of believers simply maintain a level of cognitive dissonance, or blithely dismiss one or more parts of the Bible out of wishful thinking – or, as my dad puts it, “the last verse read wins.”  It’s an easy trap to fall into, and I pray that I don’t.  I feel like the appropriate response varies from situation to situation.

Some “contradictions” require a reevaluation of how one verse or the other is interpreted (or even translated – human language is not infallible, and it’s sometimes worth checking into things).  Or how BOTH are interpreted.  If there seems to be a contradiction, perhaps one or more of the Scriptures don’t mean what you think they mean.

Others require a larger contextual understanding – God is unchanging, but the nature of God’s covenant with humanity certainly did change.  The regimen of sacrifices and dietary regulations in the Torah were intended to be taken seriously by Israel, but later prophets and apostles (not to mention the Christ) made it very plain that such regulations were never really the point.  Or an understanding that inspiration is mysterious and God did not dictate the Bible word for word – this means that if the writer of the Chronicles and the writer of Kings use different numbers to describe a battle scene, or Mark and Luke put events in Christ’s life in different order, it doesn’t remotely bother me, as such things aren’t really the point, and nowhere does God say that the Bible is comprised of the infallible and perfect words of angels, as some other holy texts claim to be.

But more importantly, I find the idea that “contradictions” can disprove the Bible to be problematic at a more fundamental level.  Modern Western culture has things backwards, I believe, when it comes to the big picture of how the world works.  We feel that “the ground truth” is logical, governed by strict laws, mathematical – even binary – in character, and that our emotions, perceptions, will, desire, consciousness, and languages are “heuristics” – that is, ways of simplifying a complex underlying reality to better get by in and understand the world.  The idea is that, if we simply had a computer quick enough and powerful enough, we could crunch all the numbers in the universe and have perfect knowledge.

But what if that has it mostly backwards?  What if the base of reality is perception, consciousness, will, desire, and language (”the word”), and our logic and reason are simply “heuristics” to help us simplify a complex, probabilistic, subjective, and personal universe to get by in it?  I think there’s good evidence that this is the case.  For example, the deeper one gets into physics, the less “sense” everything starts to make.  As a computer science student, I spent plenty of time in classes proving that there are things that computers can’t do – problems that can’t be solved in a reasonable amount of time.  True logic knows its own limits.

People sometimes point to computer models as though the mere fact that the results came from a computer means the results are reliable.  But a logical system is only as good as the data that goes into it, the assumptions built into it, and the appropriateness of the logic to the task at hand.  In computer science land, they say “Garbage in, garbage out.”  I believe this to be true of all systematic logic.

While logic is the appropriate tool for building airplanes and radars, and (to a certain extent) for describing and understanding the physical workings of the universe, it is not always the appropriate tool for understanding human language or relating to other personalities – it is seldom the appropriate tool for understanding the eternal and the divine.  After all, as God is perfectly supreme and in no way bound by our universe, on what basis can anyone “logic around” with God?  God is outside of time, cause and effect, and even the proposition that something can not be both X and not X.  Trying to reason about God as though any of these assumptions were true often results in goofy conclusions – consider the kerfuffle about predestination, or interminable arguments about the divinity/humanity of Christ, or the nature of the afterlife, or the nature of the trinity.  It doesn’t take much logic to realize that these things are beyond our comprehension, and applying systematic logic as if God was a train in a word problem won’t make the mystery any less mysterious.  We might fool ourselves, or we might get frustrated, but we won’t near the truth.

I think we intuitively understand that reason isn’t the best tool for interacting with other people.  Sure, a person can be both happy and unhappy all at the same time, but does that mean God can be perfectly loving and perfectly just at the same time?  I suppose because God is supposed to be “perfect,” some take that to mean that God is easier to stuff in a box and logic around with, rather than infinitely more difficult.  What if our longing for simplicity and pure truth, unadulterated with complexity, probability, emotion, and perception, is itself irrational and inappropriate?  It seems to me that a great deal of wisdom consists of letting go of the need to understand everything in terms that enable us to predict, manipulate, and feel certain about them.

Otherwise, you wind up chasing your tail.  You read “God is love,” and if you treat that as a mathematical certainty, you end up attaching a lot of baggage to the phrase, as though now the “perfection” or “inspiration” of Scripture is fully backing your own personal concept of divine love.  So if your own personal concept is all puppies and rainbows, and you read one of the many other revelations where God is not all about puppies and rainbows (to put it mildly), or, say, observe nature or human history for any amount of time at all, you might get frustrated and confused.  You may even doubt whether God really is love, instead of doubting whether “God is love” means what you think it means, and adjusting your understanding accordingly.

Now, does all this take big religious questions out of the realm of arguability?  Not really.  It takes them out of the realm of systematic understanding and “provability” – but, of course, they were never really there in the first place.  But it doesn’t mean that every interpretation is equally valid or likely, or that any religious faith (or lack thereof) makes as much sense as the next.  There’s still room to argue about things, and even be right or wrong to some degree.  The Bible could still make some critical claim that could be demonstrated not to be true – as Paul said,  if Jesus was not resurrected, then it’s all been in vain.  These questions are not entirely ethereal.  However, things are fuzzier and more complex than we often allow for, and require a great deal more humility than we often give them.

I do not believe that something can only be either mathematically provable or essentially unknowable.  There’s plenty of room in between.  People who believe in the (potential) infallibility of human inferences seldom turn their own level of analysis and criticism on their own beliefs – it’s easy to see other people’s beliefs as irrational and wrong, and assume your own are the reasonable status quo.  The “burden of proof” falls easily on other people.  I know I’m often guilty of it – to be constantly doubting oneself is intolerable.

Too many religious arguments that I got into when I was young devolved – after we both realized we didn’t have enough information to be really certain – into arguments about whom the burden of proof should fall on.  This is sort of like saying, whichever side I want to be true gets to be true.  It’s kind of lame.  Trouble is, that may be the best we can do sometimes.

I suspect that, while reason can help clear away some chaff and help us work our way towards a level of knowledge about the universe, there’s a good deal of truth that can only be known by revelation, and this only by analogy and often through human language.  This puts the big questions more in the realm of trust than a lot of folks are comfortable with.  Can we trust the writings of the prophets and apostles, or the sayings of Jesus?  Can we trust the community that passed these teachings down and preserved them?  The New Testament doesn’t ask its readers to accept Christ on the basis of no evidence, but on the testimony of witnesses – which we have, passed down generation to generation.  It requires trust, and that’s a hard thing to move once it’s gained or lost – someone who has been mistreated by the church (and there have been plenty, unfortunately) is going to be harder to convince of the church’s trustworthiness.  I expect that, Christianity would have an easier time of winning people over if we were better about actually living out Jesus’s teachings.  Arguments and logic play a part, but they are seldom “the clincher,” so to speak.

So all this to say, presumed “contradictions” in the Bible don’t necessarily bother me.  I’m inclined to see good faith on the part of the prophets and apostles who wrote the Bible, and where there’s ambiguity assume that the more ambiguous can be interpreted in the light of the less ambiguous.  It’s a matter of trust more than anything else, I suspect.

So, to ThoughtCounts Z, I’m sorry that it took me so long to respond, and I’m still not sure that this kind of posting is really the right way to go, as I felt uncomfortable using the second person for most of it, so it felt awkward.  I’m also going to stuff some individual responses to your last comment in parentheticals, like this:

(I didn’t intend to imply that Leviticus is a more inspired or authoritative book than the Psalms – my point is simply that if any book should be parsed like law, it would be a book from the Torah, which was intended as law, not the Psalms, which were intended as poetic expressions.  Thanks to the revelations of later prophets and apostles, we now know that while God intended the law to be followed, the law was never really the point (see Isaiah, Romans, Hebrews), so no, I don’t hold everything in Leviticus to be authoritative for modern Christians – although some of it certainly is.  I imagine books have been filled trying to sort through it all, but that’s the quick-and-dirty, I guess.)

(Again – thanks for engaging, if you’re still around.)

Disneyland, of course, was not designed to be a park for 3 year olds.  It was designed to be a park for families.  In fact, the principal source of its appeal, in my opinion, is the way it caters to many types of people at once.  Take, for example, the witty, more adult lyrics of the Country Bear Jamboree combined with the humorous, cartoon-like audio-animatronics of the bears themselves.  Or the Haunted Mansion – both grotesque and non-threatening (somehow) all at the same time.

Nonetheless, in spite of all this, Disney has decided over the years to fulfill the expectations of parents who were shocked and offended that so much of the Magic Kingdom involves shrunken heads and rotting corpses.  So they’ve added Dumbo clones wherever they can.

Dumbo, of course, is the most merciless kiddie ride in the entire complex.  Little kids force their parents to wait in line for hours to spin around in a circle on what is essentially a 30 second carnival ride.  Three-year-olds were walking down Main Street expecting a park full of Dumbos, and the Imagineers decided not to disappoint – even if, in my opinion, such changes make the Magic Kingdom’s appeal much less timeless and sublime.  The scary parts of Snow White’s Adventures are eviscerated.  The Extra TERROR-estrial Alien Encounter is converted into a pablum Stitch-themed experience.  The jokes at the new Monsters, Inc Laugh Floor are barely even groan-worthy.  And there are Dumbo clones everywhere.

I think some of us want to do the same thing with the teachings of Jesus.  We have this image of Jesus as this really nice, unassuming guy, a guy who somehow exudes nothing but compassion and love from every pore.  He’s only the Jesus of the children’s church bulletin board – a smilingly inoffensive man surrounded by multiethnic children.  But then folks actually open up the New Testament and discover that Jesus seems to have done (along with his incredible acts of mercy, love, and self-sacrifice) a lot of things that aren’t quite as nice: brutal rebukes of his enemies, frank discussions of agony and destruction for those who reject God, parables designed to deliberately hide the truth from most people, woes and curses and profoundly shocking statements left and right.  The Jesus who welcomed small children is the very same Jesus who cursed a fig tree for not bearing figs when he wanted them.  But rather than deal with the complex, real, dissonant Jesus, I think some of us would rather have Dumbo clones.

Perhaps we tastefully ignore the harder teachings.  Perhaps we constantly find ways of interpreting his sayings as to reduce their difficulty.  Perhaps we project our own values and ethics – more a product of our American upbringing than God – onto Jesus, and put words into his mouth and actions into his life for which we have no evidence.

And when all the construction projects are finished, we’re left with a world that makes a 3-year-old happy for a few minutes, and offers little magic (or truth) for a grown-up.

Warn them before God against quarreling about words; it is of no value, and only ruins those who listen.

I often find myself frustrated over arguments about words.  They seem so pointless and divisive.  It’s nice to see the thought in one of Paul’s letters.

In fact, it’s easier to concede points to the other side when you don’t get the impression that they’re out to destroy you.  Your personal pride is less of an issue.  An environment of mutual respect makes it easier, I imagine, to arrive at something like the actual truth.

I also find it interesting how, in spite of Bloom often being claimed by conservatives, many liberals aren’t at all hostile to his arguments.  I found this interesting article in the New York Times trying to claim Bloom as a friend of both left and right, and I think it makes a number of fair points.  Bloom, being a classicist and lover of the quest for virtue, was not necessarily a friend of populism – and a certain breed of modern conservatism, represented by, say, Sean Hannity or Sarah Palin, relies heavily on populist sentiment.  I’m not really big on that part of conservatism either.

Nor am I big on the idea of “the market” as a good in and of itself.  As far as I’m concerned, capitalism, being essentially “freedom,” is the freedom to do good or to do bad.  Such freedom is necessary but not sufficient for good to occur.  Capitalism and democracy are not intrinsically good – they’re better than the alternatives in lots of important ways, but they’re not enough.  And there’s certainly a great deal of evil that such freedom allows – evil that has to be fought.  So those particular arguments against conservatism don’t much bother me.  (Christ is higher than politics, after all.)

So I guess all this to say that I’m heartened that folks from both sides of the political spectrum can come together around Bloom’s writing – if this article is representative of anyone on the left other than the author.  I hope so.

Not that there haven’t been times where I’ve longed for some wise believer to be able to make sense of things for me – the Bible is not the easiest book to grasp, and there’s lots of potential for misunderstanding and self-deception.  But the “wise believer makes it easy for me” thing  just doesn’t happen.  Too often you get books that start by telling you how “shocking” their conclusions are and generally not leaving you to make up your mind about their arguments, or spend a lot of time trying to elevate issues that struggle to feel like they matter, or tell smarmy anecdotes, or belabor obvious points for chapters upon chapters, or hide seething judgmentalism, or any number of things that leave me going, “Is there any wisdom in the entire world of Christendom? Anywhere?”

N.T. Wright’s book What Paul Really Said was one of the rare books I really enjoyed reading, although I think I didn’t (and still don’t) really grasp his point.  He spent a good deal of the book trying to elaborate on what was meant by “the gospel” and how it was larger than what we usually mean when we say “the gospel,” but his thoughts didn’t gel sufficiently.  Nonetheless, he seemed to be the scholarly, wise believer I was hoping for, so I kept reading over certain passages trying to figure out what he was really getting at.  I’m still not really sure.

I’m not really enjoying, however, Surprised by Hope.  Nonetheless, I hope that by blogging my thoughts about it as I read (slowly), I’ll be motivated to actually finish it.  Surprised by Hope is about heaven – or really, about the resurrection, and how there’s an important difference between the two ideas.  Wright tells us that our beliefs about the resurrection matter because they affect our engagement with the here and now.

There’s truth in his arguments, I suppose.  He elaborates for a while on how vague, syncretic, strange, and mixed-up the average Christian’s view of the afterlife really is.  There’s really no arguing with this.

Where I find myself questioning his thesis is on the idea that any of this actually matters.  He argues that our belief in a disembodied heaven versus a bodily resurrection coincided with, and also inspired, Christianity’s disengagement from efforts to improve society.  He hasn’t convinced me – at least not yet.  It seems improbable, because I don’t give a flying small mammal’s posterior about the question – either way could be right and it would affect me emotionally not the slightest.  The idea that God is in control and will reward righteous behavior and show mercy to those who believe is really the big, important point.  The details seem to be (a)beyond our comprehension, and (b)irrelevant.

I’ve always hated arguing about eternity – as though it were possible to stick a concept like heaven or hell or the soul or divinity in a box and reason about it in some productive, not-intrinsically-stupid way.  God has revealed things to us, and we know pretty much what God told us.  Arguing about the nature of hell beyond “it’s going to royally suck and you DON’T want it, whatever it is, to happen to you,” is silly.  Arguing about what eternity looks like for the saved beyond “it’s going to be really awesome and, whatever it is, you DO want it to happen to you,” is silly.  Arguing about whether we have “an immortal soul” is silly.  Arguing about the trinity is silly.  It doesn’t leave a lot of space for intellectualism, but I shed no tears for that.

So, at least, as of midway through Chapter 3, Wright hasn’t convinced me that he’s not just piddling around in silliness.  He hasn’t yet offered any evidence other than a sort of vague correlation that our belief about this particular afterlife-related question is related to our view of social justice.  It seems more probable to me, at least at this juncture, that if Christians disengaged from trying to improve the world, it’s because they came to feel that they owned the world – the Constantinian problem.  They became a fundamentally conservative force – preserving the power they had acquired – rather than a force for change.  I don’t know that evolving (or devolving) beliefs on the nature of the afterlife had anything to do with it.  It would surprise me, at least.

Now, this could certainly all be premature on my part.  Part of me hopes it is, and I’ll get to write a “I was wrong and stupid about N.T. Wright’s book” post.  Hopefully, I’d be tough enough to own up to it.  We’ll see.

I have to wonder, though, whether it might be defeating the purpose for the Department of Education to get involved in “spreading the model,” so to speak, since (as a conservative) I have to wonder whether the fact that this program ISN’T a bureaucratic, publically funded institution is part of the reason for its success in the first place (although the article itself is careful to say that the full success of the program is yet to be gauged).

¹³Arise, O LORD, disappoint him, cast him down: deliver my soul from the wicked, which is thy sword:

¹⁴From men which are thy hand, O LORD, from men of the world, which have their portion in this life, and whose belly thou fillest with thy hid treasure: they are full of children, and leave the rest of their substance to their babes.

¹⁵As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.

I found Psalm 17 looking up the concept of “reward,” to see what I could find to clear up some nagging issues.  There are those who argue that the Old Testament isn’t as concerned with the afterlife as the New Testament is, or that we put too much pleasure in the hereafter rather than the here and now.  They may be right or wrong to whatever degree.

But all the intellectual ponderings and struggles occasionally fade away in sheer bliss when you read a verse like 15 – no excess of words, beautifully balanced, loaded with layers of meaning, a perfect poetic expression of astonishing faith, contentment, and joy.  Maybe I’ll just bask in it for a while.

Too sentimental?

I don’t care.

My initial gut reaction to this heaven video was one of frustration – why argue about the nature of eternity, or “what’s going to happen” at the end times or when we die, if eternity is beyond our present ability to understand?  However, I feel like it wouldn’t be fair to leave it at that, as the video doesn’t go into details as to why Wright feels any of this is important.  So I’ve ordered Surprised by Hope to find out.  Hopefully, my initial gut reaction will prove to have been premature.

I’ll let you know how it goes.