There is a fine but important line to be drawn between reasonable disagreement and irresponsible name-calling. It is thus surprising when a commenter baber begins with name-calling in response to a claim by Karen Armstrong with which he might simply have chosen to disagree.
Here, then, is Armstrong’s claim, via Brian McGrath Davis’ review here on RD:
In The Case for God, Karen Armstrong explains that until the modern period, the major Western monotheisms all concerned themselves primarily with practice, the doing of religion, rather than doctrine.
And here is commenter baber’s response, entitled “Armstrong is a Liar”:
This is utterly false. Christianity was, from the outset, all about belief—about metaphysical claims concerning the existence and nature of God. Theologians and councils wrangled about fine points of theology and, as Gregory of Nyssa reports, theological argument was a popular passtime [sic]: used clothes sellers and bath house attendants argued about doctrinal minutae in the streets for sport.
Armstrong, like most religious studies scholars, is an atheist. There’s nothing wrong with being an atheist but the suggestion that religion is really not about belief is just disingenuous.
I don’t believe that God, if there is a God, cares in the least whether we believe he exists or not much less whether we get the theological details right or whether we are, in any sense, religious. But it’s quite another thing to suggest, falsely, that religion is not really about belief, or that the idea that it is is [sic] some newfangled Western notion. That is just plain false.
Let me tackle the essential problems of assertion in the first and third paragraphs (I simply do not know how to respond to an ungrounded assertion about Armstrong’s “atheism,” when her public discussion of her own spiritual journey seems to contradict this description pretty clearly).
The main problem here is the disavowal of history. Religious Studies is not so much a discipline as it is an interdiscipline (and one that, when done well, poaches freely and creatively and unapologetically from other fields). Central to the practice of comparative religion are History, Anthropology and Sociology. The failure to attend to history and to an anthropology of religious practices tends to reduce Religious Studies to a sub-field in Philosophy (and normally carries with it the false premise that Religion is essentially “Philosophy Lite”).
baber asserts that Christianity was “from the outset, all about belief.” He then quotes a late fourth/early fifth century theologian to ground an assertion, I take it, about the first century practices of Jesus-followers. There is a problem here, and it is more than merely historical.
Followers of Jesus in the first several centuries attended closely to practices, their own and others.’ They worried about who was able to worship, and they worried about how they worshiped. Catechumens were dismissed after their instruction because they were not yet deemed capable of authentic worship. Baptism was the central initiation ceremony, after which the initiate could participate in the sacred meal and the kiss of peace. The initiate could not eat meat sacrificed to idols, could not engage in porneia (there are debates about what this meant), and could not eat an animal cooked in its own blood. Christian martyrs were invited to sacrifice to the Roman imperial genius and if they refused, they were often jailed or killed.
Note that I have not yet made a single theological claim that is separable from a practice. I haven’t really made any theological claims, in the modern sense, at all.
And now I turn to Saint Gregory. baber’s suggestion actually falsifies what Gregory of Nyssa said. He did observe that, by the early-to-mid fourth century, Christological controversies had become so entrenched that everybody weighed in on them, whether you asked them to or not. You couldn’t buy a loaf of bread, Gregory complained, without the baker telling you that the Son was consubstantial with the Father….
Gregory’s point, and his concern, was that the debate had spiraled out of control and reached the point where people wanted to fight about Christology; they didn’t want to resolve it.
That gives the lie to baber’s final claim that “[t]heologians and councils wrangled about fine points of theology.” This assertion operates on the false impression that church councils were “all about theology” (I am referring to the so-called Ecumenical Councils, seven in number and spanning 325-787 CE, meetings in which bishops from throughout the emerging Christian world gathered to sort out matters of church governance). That is the main point: the bishops’ concerns were for governance, first and foremost. They did indeed hammer out points of doctrine in such councils—either as a pastoral attempt to defuse a theological conflict, or else as a political means to marginalize their episcopal rivals as “heretics.” But they spent equal time at such councils hammering out matters of ecclesial governance, administrative organization and, yes, fundamental questions of orthodox Christian practice.
Their religion was not all about theology. Nor was it all about practices. It was many things at once. The commenter has set up a false contrast, and then invited us to take sides. He’s a lot like the baker who worried Gregory so.
baber concludes by suggesting that he does not really have a dog in the fights waged by theology, but that he does have a dog in the battle over truth and veracity. Fair enough; so do I. But the mischaracterization of Armstrong’s views—her alleged assertion that the conception of religion as belief is “some newfangled Western notion”—misses once again the historical argument that Armstrong, among many others, have made for many years.
It is, in short, the idea that the Protestant Reformation is the real prelude to the Modern age, and that central to Luther’s revisioning of the Christian religion was his renewed emphasis on scripture and belief… to the exclusion of practices.
Sola scriptura, sola fide is indeed “all about belief.” Which is why in contemporary English one may speak of “practicing Catholics” or “practicing Jews,” but to speak of “practicing Protestants” just sounds funny. They don’t practice. Not the old way.
If one ponders what the Protestants endeavored to take away, then they are almost all matters of materiality and attendant practices: holy water and incense, statues and frescoes, saints and pilgrimages, monasteries and celibacy, Maryology, “real presence” in the Eucharist. At the conclusion of the Reformation’s fundamental re-imagining of what religion is at its core, faith had been foregrounded in an entirely new way, and practices had receded into the background of suspicion that they were little more than “pagan” holdovers.
What remained was an empty worship space, a cross (if there were a cross) emptied of the bleeding body of the Lord, and the Book held up by the preacher in precisely the same way the priest had once elevated the Host at the culminating moment of the mystery of the Mass.
Armstrong’s historical point is that the Reformation culminated in a very Modern way of imagining religion, much as the commenter does, as “all about belief.”
I well recognize that the question of whether and how history should matter in the contemporary practice of Philosophy is a question that has riven departments, schools, even close friendships. We do not suffer that disciplinary fault-line in the academic study of religion. History matters to our practice, always and everywhere. The results of ignoring history in the public discussion of religion are well evidenced by this regrettable accusation.
Tags: belief, early christianity, history, karen armstrong, responses
According to Davis' review, Western montheisms were concerned primarily with practice rather than doctrine until the modern period. The late fourth century, when Gregory of Nyssa flourished, is not the modern period. Moreover I suspect that Gregory, who was a very able philosophical theologian, was not worried about theology spiraling out of control so much as he was amused by hoi polloi spouting theological party slogans without understanding the metaphysical issues involved. Gregory had a sense of humor.
I myself am amused by theologians, who now style themselves "religious studies scholars," dabbling in history and in armchair sociology. Philosophical theology is a booming business and I've never understood why theologians, instead of contributing to the enterprise, prefer to do Anthropology Lite.
I know lots of "religious studies" folk. Most of them adopt what they call a "non-realist" interpretation of theological claims, which is to say, they don't believe in God. Of course that doesn't bother most of them, who hold that religion isn't about supernatural states of affairs at all or, besotted by non-analytic "philosophy," tell me that God is beyond mere existence.
I don't understand this. In my books, to believe in God is to believe that there exists an x such that x is a supernatural, incorporeal being with psychological states. It is to hold that there is a being which is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent--or close to it. If you hold that existentially quantified statements like this are false, you are an atheist; if you suspend judgement about them you are an agnostic. By this standard I suspect most religious studies scholars are atheists or agnostics and my guess is that Karen Armstrong, and the author, are among them.
Religious studies scholars, and I suspect a good many clergy, fudge and cover their tracks. They talk the religious talk to the vulgar, confident that the cognoscenti will recognize it as code. That is disingenuous--and patronizing. Most people, as they know full well, assume religious claims purport to be about the existence and nature of God and other supernatural states of affairs.
I doubt that this is an artifact of modernity. However much the Fathers may have been concerned about church discipline and practice, and however much their theological squabbles were politically motivated and politically supported--which I readily grant--I get the distinct impression that they believed that there was a God as described above and that philosophical discussions of the nature of God, logic puzzles concerning the doctrine of the Trinity and such, were both important and inherently interesting.
With respect to the following: "If you hold that existentially quantified statements like this are false, you are an atheist; if you suspend judgement about them you are an agnostic. By this standard I suspect most religious studies scholars are atheists or agnostics and my guess is that Karen Armstrong, and the author, are among them."
To help pin down what I think is wrong with this comment, let me suggest a way to approach the view that religion is more about practice than it is about belief: To believe in God is not so much about believing THAT some set of propositions is more likely to be true than false as it is about living one's life as if a certain holistic worldview is true.
Is it possible to be, in effect, agnostic about the purely academic question of whether proposition P is objectively accurate (in fact, to treat that academic question as importantly beside the point), and yet be firmly committed to the practice of living one's life in a manner that pragmatically amounts to an affirmation of P?
Imagine a mother whose son has gone missing and hasn't been heard from in a year. She keeps his room clean, keeps adding new quarters for his coin collection "so that it'll be up-to-date when he gets home," and sets a place for him at the dinner table each evening "in case he comes home tonight."
Is she living as if her son is still alive and might return? Yes. But if you asked her whether she gives intellectual assent to the proposition that he is still alive, an assent based on a weighing of the relevant evidence, she might say, "What do I know about the evidence? There is no evidence. He's missing. No one knows what happened. I leave it to others to try to figure out whether it is more or less likely that he's alive or dead. I can't say I have any clue about that. But I will live in hope."
In the thoroughly modern and academic conception of what it means to believe, this mother is an agnostic. But in the practical sense, in terms of how she lives and organizes her life, she's a believer.
This doesn't mean that evidence is wholly irrelevant to her. It may well be the case that were her son's body to be found, she'd stop behaving as if he might be coming home. It does mean, however, that her belief is more about how she behaves than it is about what her intellect judges to be true on the basis of reasons and evidence. As such, she's not likely to be much impressed by someone who trots out inconclusive evidence and says, "On the basis of this, it seems more probable that your son is dead than that he's coming home."
She's likely to be more impressed by someone who say, "This isn't doing you any good, and it's not going to bring your child home any quicker. How are these rituals affecting you and your husband? Look at your daughter. You spend more time on your son than on her, even though he isn't here. She's feeling neglected and starting to think the only way you'll take notice of her is if SHE disappears, too."
In short, pragmatic belief is more appropriately assessed in pragmatic terms. What does living as if P is true mean for your life and the lives of those around you? When one lives as if P is true because the answers to these questions speak in favor of doing so, one is engaged in what I call, in my book, "pragmatic faith."
As a philosopher, I am not qualified to determine just how dominant such pragmatic faith has been in the history of religion or to what extent it provides a clue for understanding religious life through the centuries. A historian such as Armstrong is better equipped to assess such questions.
Fair. Then the question is, what would it mean to live as if one believed that God existed? Maybe engaging in various sorts of cultic activity would count, e.g. going to church, praying and talking religious talk. According to some empirical study, about half of the active members of mainline churches in the US are "lay liberals": they go to church, believe "maybe there's something there," without being specific, and that "it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you live right.
Does that count as religious belief? I think so because: (1) they haven't suspended belief but rather, recognizing that there's no compelling evidence one way of the other, decided to bet on God by (2) engaging in characteristically religious behavior. Not a heavy bet, but good enough.
With the mother, it looks like she's betting too--assuming that the counterfactual "if they found the body I'd stop doing this stuff" is true. If not, if they find the body and she still keeps on, it's just compulsive behavior and I don't think you'd count her as having believed even in the pragmatic sense. Similarly, one asks: would the lay liberal count as a religious believer if he would keep going to church even if he became convinced that the proposition "God exists" were false? Or, better, would he have gone to church for all those years if he had been convince that it were false?
Where I balk is at the suggestion that the kind of behavior that constitutes as religious belief in the pragmatic sense is "living one's life as if a certain holistic worldview is true." I don't understand what a "holistic worldview" would be much less what it would be to live one's life as if such a worldview were true.
Admittedly I'm not a RS scholar myself, but it doesn't seem to me plausible that the folk, particularly pre-modern folk, would understand religious life as a matter of any "worldview." When does what they do count as religious practice? When do they count as believing in a god or gods? Surely Athenian slaves and thetes count: they go to temple sacrifices, pour libations and believe there are various supernatural beings, some of which are sufficiently powerful to count as gods, but do they have "worldviews"?
"In my books, to believe in God is to believe that there exists an x such that x is a supernatural, incorporeal being with psychological states. It is to hold that there is a being which is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent--or close to it. If you hold that existentially quantified statements like this are false, you are an atheist; if you suspend judgement about them you are an agnostic."
That's a pretty specific set of assertions about the nature of God to bundle in with your definitions of "belief" and "atheism." If somebody believes, say, that God exists, but is not supernatural, but rather an emergent property of the natural universe... that person is an atheist?
In my books, that's wildly slinging around a term for which you have your own, very personal definition that differs from the commonly-accepted one.
On top of which there's the whole etymological root of the word "exist"-- it basically means "to stand apart from," which flatly contradicts a whole slew of Christian statements about the nature of God. But that's another matter entirely.
I appreciate this interesting article very much. Thank you.
You say there's a teapot on the table. I say there's no teapot on the table--just a lump of clay because it hasn't got a handle or a spout or, most importantly a hollow in the middle to hold tea bags and hot water.
"That's a pretty specific set of assertions about the nature of teapots," you respond. "What if somebody believes that there's a teapot there, but that it's not a thing with a handle, spout and hollow that holds water and tea bags but rather a lump of clay."
To say this is to propose linguistic revision: the linguistic community uses the word "teapot" to designate things that have handles, spouts and hollows to hold water and tea bags. You propose that the linguistic community adopt a new convention so that "teapot" should be used to pick out lumps of clay, or maybe objects that are either things with spouts, handles and hollows OR lumps of clay. But why should we adopt this proposal? We have perfectly good words, "teacup" and "lump of clay" that work well for us, make it clear what we're talking about.
Understanding "God" to mean, roughly, a very powerful supernatural being with psychological states is precisely not a "very personal definition": it is the definition the folk assume, what ordinary English speakers mean by "God." "Sophisticated" speakers propose linguistic revision so that "God" is to mean "an emergent property of the natural universe." But why should we folk revise linguistic practice?
The motive seems to me the feeling that being an atheist isn't quite nice. There are lots of people who don't believe that there exists a powerful, supernatural being with psychological states. Given the current common definition they count as atheists. On the revised definition they aren't atheists because they believe in emergent properties of the natural universe or whatever. So the new definition by fuzzing things up maximizes niceness: now lots more people get to say that they aren't nasty atheists.
I don't see why this linguistic revision is desirable. For one thing, it's unfair to atheists, most of whom would not like to be redefined out of their atheism. There's nothing not-nice about being an atheist, any more than there is something not-nice in not believing there are Platonic forms or not believing there's a teapot on the table.
I suspect there's a popular market for books like Armstrong's because there are a great many people who don't believe there's a supernatural being with psychological states but don't want to consider themselves atheists because they think it's not-nice. Revisionary theologians tell them, "Don't worry. If you believe there is an emergent property of the natural universe or you believe that the Sermon on the Mount delivers deep moral truths or you believe that Jesus' early followers promoted peace, joy and love--you're not an atheist! You're a nice spiritual person!"
What not rather stick with the talk of the folk and recognize that it's perfectly ok to be an atheist?
There's nothing wrong with being an atheist. The point is that it's somewhat arrogant and presumptuous to label people (despite the fact that they do not identify as such) simply because they do not fit into your constructed categorizations. If you read Karen Armstrong's book, you'll see that she very comprehensively shows the rich history of how Christians (and folks from other faiths/religious practices) understood the meaning of "God"- and it certainly did not always have to be a "supernatural being with psychological states".
I know many atheists who tell me they hate it when their more "liberal" Christian friends say something to the effect of, "Well, based on the way you act and treat others, you're more of a Christian than most Christians are." It's condescending, and not because there's anything wrong with being a Christian. In a similar way, I don't particularly like it when my atheist friends tell me that I'm pretty much an "atheist" because I don't fit the mold they've invented for themselves as to what a true Christian should be.
I believe in God, so I am not an atheist, but I think that any attempt to project my own very limited understanding onto God and claiming it as "truth" is in effect idolatrous. Metaphors are helpful, and help us practice our faith, and so we use them. Thus we can speak of God in many different ways, but even so, it is always good to acknowledge our own inability to truly understand the mystery of life and creation so that we do not fall into a fundamentalist idolatry of metaphors.
Well said. I once had a conversation with a friend who is a big fan of Richard Dawkins, whereby I said that Einstein believed in God. He argued saying "THAT WAS NOT BELIEVING IN GOD! Believing in God is believing in a supernatural person who lives in the sky!" Because Einstein didn't believe in this particular God, my friend claimed that Einstein didn't believe in God. The real question is, who gets to decide what people believe?
It is similar (and western arrogance) to argue that aboriginal people believe in totems--pieces of wood carved into animals because that is how their beliefs are represented in their artistic creations. The same can be said for the God of the Bible, who takes many forms, including anthropomorphic ones.
So, why should this line of reasoning go for God but not for teapots? Someone produces a lump of clay and calls it a teapot. I wouldn't be arrogant if I said it wasn't a teapot--I'd just be saying something about common English usage. If I say Einstein didn't believe in God I am, similarly, just making a semantic point: the folk don't use the word "God" to mean what Einstein meant, i.e. Spinoza's deus sive natura.
It does raise some intriguing points though about when and under what conditions linguistic change occurs.
I returned from a trip and just read through these thoughtful responses last night. thank you one and all for them. I believe this is precisely the sort of thoughtful exchange RD wishes to promote.
Baber, if I may, I would offer one corrective about my own location and what you assume it entails. I really am not a theologian, though I study theologies of various sorts. I really am a religious studies (or comparative religion) scholar, one who works primarily on the ancient Mediterranean and the way Greek culture especially has been appropriated by subsequent cultural formations, "from Rome to Romanticism." Viewed this way, the New Testament is an interesting and important chapter in the history of Greek literature. So is Gregory of Nyssa.
I would argue that this distinction, between theology and religion, emerged in the Modern period, and we see it instantiated in the new curriculum designed by Humboldt for the University of Berlin in 1809. After that, it was possible to take a course on Christian theology with Schleiermacher, and a course on religion with Hegel. Hegel would talk about Egyptian and Greek and Roman paganism, as Schliermacher would not. While today there is vast disagreement among religious studies scholars about what their relation to Christian theology actually is, all would admit to some distinction. (I think you correctly sense that I am less hostile to theology than some of my fellow practioners). In any case, that's where I continue to puzzle over what happens when we shift from the language of theology to the language of religion. The god in question is changed, it seems to me, if not sidelined, forcing us to focus on other aspects of the religious and the sacred. And that raises acute problems for the label "atheist": *which* conception of god has one rejected, since no one rejects a god-concept in the abstract.
Thank you all, once again, for this spirited and thoughtful exchange.
The early church, like other ancient religions, was focused on religious practice because it enabled the EXPERIENCE of God. Initiation rites, such as baptism, prepared people for rituals that opened one to the divine presence by training perception to receive it. This training was important because a host of spirits and demons populated the world, and recognizing and accessing the one you wanted was important, since some spirits might mean you great harm (one 2nd c. church personified Satan as the Goddess Roma). Even the most sophisticated philosophers had some idea of higher divinities, while they thought the ordinary folks had lesser gods.
For Christians, the risen Christ, host of the great Thanksgiving meal, and the communion of departed saints joined them at the feast, where they were filled with the same spiritual power to do divine deeds in the world. They spoke of their relationship to the divinity of Jesus as a model of their own divinity and his life as the forerunner of their own. No need to speak much of believing this, if you experience it. The ideas were argued all the time, but everyone came to the Eucharist for the experience.
When we are in the presence of those we love, we do not ask if they exist, and, even when we are apart from them, we do not doubt their love or existence. We greet them gladly when they are present to us and draw complex life-giving things from being with them. At the same time, we do not know everything about them. Just as we ourselves are often a mystery to ourselves, those we love can never be fully known as logical propositions. In fact, logic seems a trivial way of knowing and can interfere with the complex and enriching experience of profound presence. AN Whitehead noted we cannot live by bread alone but still less can we live by antiseptics. Maybe that was why Gregory was impatient with the obsession with arguing--the arguing was a lot politics, as it is today.
I am a feminist Christian theologian and happy to call myself one because I experience divine presence often in my life. I don't believe a lot that is propositional about divinity, which is why I study the variety of ideas people have when they say "God." I am an agnostic about ideas of all sorts, since I once trained as a scientist and know everything is theoretical. Some theory is very useful for explaining things; some not so much. I actually don't place great store in what I believe, but I base my life on what I experience, which constantly challenges what I believe. The experience that challenges me most is my capacity to love. Most times, when I risk the limits of what I can love, I find myself pulled into a mystery that is life-giving. Ideas and words, even the Word, are inadequate for capturing such experience and power, and such experience is something I trust.
The medieval Western church created a chasm of hell between Christ and humanity, sustained by terror of judgment and bridged only if sinners abjectly submitted themselves to the authority and power of the church. The Eucharist became ritual murder and consumption of the corpse of judgment, and real, redeemed life got jettisoned into an unreal afterlife promise to be fulfilled after the apocalypse--an ever unrequited fulfillment of divine presence. Once such distance between Christ and humanity could no longer be breached, God became more an idea than a practice and experience. Protestants, especially, reduced spiritual life to words and Word and hearing them. Yet, I am a Protestant, and while I don't experience as much divine presence in church as I do a lot of other places, I experience it often enough to be nourished there. Sometimes, it is spectacular, and the discipline is going and waiting because it has its own unique quality, and there is nothing else the same when it happens.
Is divine presence in church a function of the church, or something inside you? I think the risk is church tends to become the God that the observers in that church worship. Perhaps the people feel a closeness to God in the church, and then they start to feel God is in that church, and the teachings of the church are inspired by God. Then they can no longer see God working in the world because everything is filtered through the lense of the church, and behind the scenes the church is really in the business of growing the church and propagating it to the next generation. I think God can only deal with individuals, and that can't happen in church because church is always too involved in groupthink.
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