Supernatural Claims: Knowledge, Belief… or Nonsense?

15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.16 And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
Genesis 2:15-17 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

6 Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. 7 But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

1 Corinthians 2:6-8 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Crucifixus est dei filius; non pudet, quia pudendum est.

Et mortuus est dei filius; credibile prorsus est, quia ineptum est.

Et sepultus resurrexit; certum est, quia impossibile.

[The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed--because it is shameful.

The Son of God died: it is immediately credible--because it is silly.

He was buried, and rose again: it is certain--because it is impossible.]

Tertullian

De carne Christi ch. 5, 4.

The believer does not seek to understand, that he may believe, but he believes that he may understand: for unless he believed he would not understand.

Anselm

Proslogium, ch 1

It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work. ... We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.

Rudolf BultmannNew Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1984) pp. 3-4

Points

1. There are a number of distinguishable yet related terms that I will use to indicate the natural world as we humans know it at this point in post-Enlightenment, secular history, including life, human existence, reality, and nature.
2. I’ll try to stick to the term “life” in the sense of modern, human existence in a world largely (though not exclusively) experienced through the lens of science.
3. There are three possible alternatives to the question, “What is the meaning of life?”

• Life is meaningless
• Life is its own meaning
• Life’s meaning is disclosed from a source outside itself

4. There is a possible fourth alternative: why would you ask such a stupid question? :-)

• I suspect it isn’t because of the nature of personhood itself.
• While dogs may live their lives with their snouts to the ground following a scent for reasons beyond their kin, because of human brain development and our ability to conceptualize both our own death and the death of all things as an abstraction, it seems reasonable that humans must ask the question.
• Evolution would seem to dictate that a species of animal that responds in more or less effectively to the imminent threat of death would be selected over animals that are oblivious to such threats and that this would apply to humans just as it would to any other animal.
• Because of our ability to abstract and imagine the inevitable death of all things, the threat of death is always imminent to humans even if suppressed from conscious awareness.
• I know it is always shaky to argue that the absence of proof is a point in an assertion’s favor but one only has to pop a blown up paper bag on a jet taking off at the point of highest strain on its wings and consider the reaction of the people around you to see that the brain may do a good job at suppressing the fear of death but its always just around the corner. (And you’ll have a lot of time to think about it in jail! :-) )
• Quote: Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve. Erich Fromm, Man for Himself
• Quote: In every calm and reasonable person there is a hidden second person scared witless about death, but for someone thirty-two the time between Now and Then is ordinarily so vast, so boundless, that it's no more than maybe a couple of times a year, and then only for a moment or two and late at night, that one comes anywhere near encountering that second person and in the state of madness that is the second person's everyday life. Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
• Quote: The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
• The biblical, if mythological, response might be that we ask the question of the meaning of life because in eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge we did not literally die on “that day” (as the biblical citation above states) - but lost our animal-like innocence and became uniquely aware of the mortality of all things we value. And so we taste death on a daily basis ever since long before the last day of our biological life.

5. First Alternative: Life is meaningless

• This is Nihilism. I’ve known and conversed with a large number of skeptics, atheists, secularists, and those of other religions, but I do not believe I’ve ever met a Nihilist. (Some bishops, on the other hand, based on a close reading of Church history, have given me pause… :-) )

6. Second Alternative: Life is (or contains) its own meaning

• The first flavor of this interprets “Life” as “Life as a whole,” as in, “The meaning of  life is life.”
• The second flavor of this will choose some aspect or aspects of life as revealing the meaning of all of life. For example, “Love is the meaning of life,” or “Friends and family are the meaning of life,” or “Productive work is the meaning of life,” or “Serving the poor is the meaning of life.”

7. Third Alternative: Life’s meaning is disclosed in life by something that is beyond or transcends life.
8. If one grants the above, I think four conclusions and an observation can be drawn.
9. The First Conclusion: If life is considered natural, then anything that transcends life must be - by the simple meaning of the word natural - super-natural.
10. The Second Conclusion: Not just the third alternative, but all three alternatives require supernaturalism because life itself does not contain the necessary evidence required for choosing the alternatives of immanent meaning or meaninglessness based on reason alone. [Note: maybe the problem is ultimate meaning. Maybe transient meanings subject to mortality are sufficient without requiring ultimate meaning.]
11. The Third (Tentative) Conclusion: I am convinced that belief in the supernatural is sufficiently coherent and grounded in human experience that it is not nonsense. As to whether it constitutes knowledge about which true assertions can be made or belief, I am leaning towards knowledge
12. The Fourth Conclusion: As all we have available to us is the natural world (that is, human experience as understood in a secular, naturalistic, and scientific way, the only available means of encountering, sharing and enacting the supernatural meaning (if such meaning is real) disclosed or revealed within the natural world are metaphors, symbols and rituals in which the “stuff” of natural life is that which is the better known part of the metaphor and that which transcends natural life is the lesser known (allegedly) disclosed by the metaphor.
13. An Observation: The Christian flavor of the third alternative

• Orthodox Christianity in the institutional church (as first tolerated by, and then patronized by, and finally enforced under pain of death by  the Roman empire) came to accept the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God as the “wormhole” connecting the supernatural to the natural.

Saved to be Free

5 1 For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
Galatians 5:1 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

14 Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, 15 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death. 16 For it is clear that he did not come to help angels, but the descendants of Abraham.
Hebrews 2:14-16 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

The Three Freedoms of the Christian… And All Other Folks If They So Choose

1. The freedom to fully and joyfully embrace life without reservation, with the attendant vulnerability that implies;
2. The freedom to challenge, rebuke, and resist death and its precursors, especially through our availability to others and our advocacy for and alliance with the marginalized;
3. The freedom to live in hope despite complete realism regarding the likely consequences of our piercing the illusions of and provoking the gods of power, escape, or negotiation as those powers are embedded in the persons, institutions and events of our private and public lives.

Good News? Given Up For Dead, Broken People Worship a Broken God

7 But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. 8 We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; 9 persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed;10 always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. 11 For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. 12 So death is at work in us, but life in you.

2 Corinthians 4:7-12 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

1. Like a “good news / bad news” joke, the Good News of God in Christ is paradoxically both good news and bad news - for Christians and non-Christians alike.
2. The bad news aspect is that which provokes hostility and even violence from its hearers - again, Christians and non-Christians alike.
3. The good news aspect is that which makes - and has always made - the foundation of the Christian community the dirty, the sick, the whore, the thief, the disabled, the foreigner, the murderer, the poor, the hungry, the marginalized, the scandalous, and - ultimately - the enemy, no matter how wealthy, popular, sophisticated, erudite, politically savvy, influential, and glorious the edifice their more righteous brethren have built upon that foundation.
4. The good news is that in dying a scandalous, tortured, death at the hands of the political and religious authorities, Jesus so embodied and recapitulated the goodness of God’s creation that Christians came to recognize him as the definitive self-expression of God on earth. That is, by dying the death of every person - in high or low places, in glory or dishonor, in peace or in terror and agony - Jesus declared all of life holy. In Jesus, there are no godforsaken people, places or events no matter how broken those people (that is to say, US people), places and events may be.
5. Why Jesus? Why not? As God’s self-disclosure has been embedded in all personal and corporate human history, the eccentricities of the human narrative caused a far-off, obscure and religiously weird province of Rome in antiquity to reveal the focus of that revelation in the person of Jesus and the people of Israel - to those with eyes to see and ears to hear - at that particular place and time.
6. Now, the bad news. The bad news is that it is only in the acceptance of life as it is, as a free gift, without indulging destructive and ultimately murderous fantasies of overcoming death through power, escape or negotiation, that - despite the inevitable struggle and corruption of life and our ultimate biological end in suffering and death, one can be saved from power and authority death and its precursors would claim to have over us in life.
7. For those rich and powerful, for those lost in their entertainments and vanities and trivialities and folly, and for those who have built immortality monuments to themselves through their good works, their charity, their accomplishments, and their reputation (if not even and especially their religiousity! :-) ) as a way of salvation from death,  this can be very bad news indeed.

Sorry...

Just realized that notifications on comments has been going to an address that has been dead for years.

Didn't notice because it didn't occur to me that anyone would comment on anything.
That has been corrected. My email address is bill (dot) bekkenhuis (at) g mail (dot) com.

The Quality of Fear: What the Ebola Crisis Reveals About Culture (NYT: David Brooks)

The Quality of Fear

What the Ebola Crisis Reveals About Culture

 ...you’ve got our culture’s tendency to distance itself from death. Philip Roth once wrote: “In every calm and reasonable person there is a hidden second person scared witless about death.” In cultures where death is more present, or at least dealt with more commonly, people are more familiar with that second person, and people can think a bit more clearly about risks of death in any given moment.

David Brooks (New York Times)

Saved? From What? And Why on Earth Would I Want To Be?

34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel,[i] will save it. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?

Mark 8:34-36  New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

1. Bible, Hebrew and Greek words for the outcome of accepting the gospel include salvation, immortality, resurrection, life, eternal life, and everlasting life.
2. Death: Looking up these words in Merriam-Webster online, we see that they all - in one way or another - indicate an overcoming of the barriers of space and time as well as death and its presentments or precursors.
3. Freedom from Death a Universal Desire: The desire for salvation from bondage to death (or Death, when personified) is universal. Every creature wishes to be saved understood in a manner appropriate to its nature. Microbes, bugs, dogs and humans all share the desire to be saved from death (either as individuals and as species) though that desire is expressed and acted upon and imagined (in the case of humans) in vastly different ways. Salvation is in the eye of the beholder.
4. Salvation in the Eye of the Beholder: In the case of humans, how one conceptualizes salvation (including using a different word to conceptualize it!) depends on the particular aspect of death from which one feels the need to be saved. For a sinner, salvation is forgiveness. For a sick and suffering person it is health and wholeness in mind and body. For the teacher it is knowledge. For the engineer it is the technical solution to a human problem. To an atheist, it is freedom from religious beliefs and practices they feel forced on them by family, friends and society. But we all want to be saved from something.
5. Salvation Through God in Christ: The Bible and the Christian tradition indicates that salvation occurs through encountering, sharing and responding to the good news (gospel) of God in Christ: a salvation that transcends time and space such that it is appropriate for me to say I was saved, I am saved, I am in the process of being saved, and I will be saved - and all are true.
6. Ironic Salvation: Christian salvation is as ironic as one might expect from a salvation whose central symbol is an impoverished peasant under military occupation being tortured to death:  one gains their life by losing it, one overcomes death by resisting but ultimately succumb to it. As Princess Leia said in a different context, “This is some rescue.”

Quotes:

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
Erich Fromm

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

*   *   *

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.
Woody Allen

Thus the vocation of the baptized person is a simple thing: it is to live from day to day, whatever the day brings, in this extraordinary unity, in this reconciliation with all people and all things, in this knowledge that death has no more power, in this truth of the resurrection. It does not really matter exactly what a Christian does from day to day. What matters is that whatever one does is done in honor of one’s own life, given to one by God and restored to one in Christ, and in honor of the life into which all humans and all things are called.

The only thing that really matters to live in Christ instead of death.
William Stringfellow

Dictionary Resources:

life

death

immortal

eternal

everlasting

salvation

resurrection

Biblical Resources;

The Rich Man (eternal life)

The Righteous Judgment of God (immortality, eternal life)

The Servant’s Mission (salvation)

The Resurrection of the Dead (everlasting life)

The Question About The Resurrection (resurrection)

The Authority and Consequent Obligations of the Christian and Others

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. 
-Romans 8:38-39 NRSV

The Good News of Jesus Christ authorizes and, indeed, obligates humanity:

1. To live in hope, celebrating and enjoying life;

2. To live in resistance to death and its presentments;

3. To live realistically, without illusions of power, escape, or negotiation, regarding the power of death as we confront those presentments..

Thoughts on Mike Feigley

Mike Feigley

The Man Who Never Met A Stranger

October 3nd, 2014

Wednesday night, Matt Feigley took me out to an all-you-can eat Chinese buffet where we talked about his dad - whom I knew through Scouting since at least 1981 if not earlier - and his dad’s memorial service.

Matt described his dad as someone who “never met a stranger.”

Sadly - despite Mike’s tactful admission before his death that the failure to reference the word “God” at his memorial would not unduly displease him - this expression stuck in my mind and triggered some theological second thoughts. Occupational hazard...

The psychiatrist Erich Fromm once said, “Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.”(1)

And that problem, in my opinion, is the human animal’s glory and curse in that - of all animals - it is the only one whose brain has developed in such a way that it can contemplate death in abstract and think about its implications long before one ends up in a funeral home.

The Christian lawyer, theologian, and political activist William Stringfellow said:

“Death is the contemporaneous power abrasively addressing every person in one’s own existence with the word that one is not only eventually and finally, but even now and already, estranged, separated, alienated, lost in relationships with everybody and everything else, and - what is in a way much worse - one’s very own self. Death means a total loss of identity.

“Death, in this sense - death embodying this awful threat - is the death which is at work not only on the day of the undertaker, but today”(2)

A person’s religion, in my estimation, is the manner of life they develop in response to the ever-present reality of death whatever sectarian symbols - or lack thereof - are involved in their verbal or ritual expression of that response.

Mike confronted death many times, as do we all. Mike experienced precursors of his death in the dissolution of his first marriage, his being laid off from Crayola, the decline of his health in the last year of his life and - most dramatically - in a health crises at age 35 necessitating cardiac bypass surgery.

So I am confident that, on the day of his passing, Mike Feigley learned nothing new about death as he had already “been there, done that, and got the tee shirt” many times before.

And his religion (if he would excuse the expression) - the way he responded to death as verified by my personal experiences with Mike and Matt’s description - was to fully embrace life and, though he was never one to suffer fools gladly, freely befriend the people he encountered despite his knowing that, in so doing, this openness and vulnerability would cause him a lot of pain along the way.

Estranged, separated, alienated, lost in relationships with everybody and everything else up to and including one’s own self: Mike’s religious response to the problem of his own existence  was as far from that as can be conceived.

And that is why Mike Feigley never met a stranger. No matter the changing circumstances of his life and experiences that anticipated his death, he simply refused to be estranged from full participation in life and engaging life’s fellow participants.

Bill Bekkenhuis


References

(1) “Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.”
-Erich Fromm

Read more at BrainyQuote

(2) “Death is the contemporaneous power abrasively addressing every person in one’s own existence with the word that one is not only eventually and finally, but even now and already, estranged, separated, alienated, lost in relationships with everybody and everything else, and - what is in a way much worse - one’s very own self. Death means a total loss of identity.”

“Death, in this sense - death embodying this awful threat - is the death which is at work not only on the day of the undertaker, but today”

-William Stringfellow (“Instead of Death,” Seabury Press, 1976, p. 22)

ON AWKWARD BIBLE VERSES

I was the officiant at a memorial for my friend Michael Feigley , father of Matt Feigley and Eric Jon Feigley .

Matt is an atheist and his father skeptically inclined - "I guess he was Christian, to the extent he was anything," per Matt. Before he died, he indicated to the pastor who ministered to him that it was quite okay not to bring up the G word in the memorial.

So Matt and I discussed the arrangments for this second service in the Lehigh Valley and - other than a welcome and a few brief remarks at the end - I was largely introducing the various speakers.

I took notice of the Bible verse referenced towards the end of the service but didn't think much about it.

So I show up and the program at the funeral home is going fine and his wife his giving a moving eulogy and I saw that - while all the other parts of the program had names of the assigned speakers penned in - the Bible reading (which followed the brief musical offering following the eulogy, which was almost at an end) was not annotated.

And I realized that it was not annotated because they had just assumed I would bring a Bible to a memorial service I was officiating!

(Can't imagine why, though I suspect it was because I graduated from seminary, was the Camp Minsi chaplain for many years, and babble constantly about Jesus Christ - something like that, I suppose. :-) )

I had not.

I walked over to Matt and whispered that I neglected to bring a Bible but the funeral home must have one. He shook his head - not enough time - and said, "just forget it."

So, eulogy and final music complete, I got up to make closing remarks when I saw Matt flagging me.

"Er, I think Matt would like to say something before we leave."

Matt gets up, pulls out his hand-held... and reads the verse.

So the Christian forgets to bring a Bible, the atheist (and the internet) have to bail him out... and I've come to the conclusion that the Unitarian Universalist church I attend is ruining me. :-)

Matthew 11:28-30 (NRSV)