The Way We Know
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Rev. Clare Butterfield
Opening Words:
From Job 12: 7-9
But ask the animals, and they will teach you;
The birds of the air, and they will tell you;
As the plants of the earth, and they will teach you;
And the fish o the sea will declare to you.
Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?
Prayer:
From the New Zealand Prayer Book of
the Anglican Convention
Eternal Spirit
Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:
The hallowing of your name echo through the universe!
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world!
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth.
With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.
For you reign in the glory of the power that is love
Now and forever. Amen.
Readings:
From 1 Kings 19:11-12
He [God] said, "Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for
the Lord is about to pass by." Now there was a great wind, so strong that
it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the
Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not
in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the
fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.
From Job 38:4
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements - surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
Or who laid its cornerstone
When the morning stars sang together
And all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
Sermon:
Today you are helping me with some
homework. I say that because I have distributed on six chairs here a feedback
form on the ideas in this sermon. It's not, actually, an invitation to critique
delivery or word smithing, but an invitation to have a conversation with me
after the service about whether or not you find the ideas we'll be talking about
today useful for your own religious development. If you can't stay to have that
conversation, please pass your piece of paper to a neighbor who can - but I've
distributed them randomly so that we don't self-select for folks who like my
preaching or for folks who've specifically been waiting for an opportunity to
give me a piece of your mind.
This is for my Doctor of Ministry degree, which, God willing, I'll finish by next spring. I'll be doing the same thing again the next two times I preach.
But that doesn't mean that this isn't a real worship service. Or that the ideas we're going to talk about today and then in September and October aren't real religious ideas. They may, in some ways, cover ground that you've heard me cover already. But they're complex ideas. I think it's ok to talk about them more than once over a two-year span. In my next three visits here I'd like to spend some time talking about the ideas that are the center of my D.Min. work - a theology of emergence, as it were. You may remember emergence, because I've been talking about it a lot lately. It's a biological idea that systems grow capacities out of their complex interactions that are not reducible to nor predictable from the sum of the parts of those systems. The proposition of the next three sermons is that this wonderful biological phenomenon has religious significance and vitality.
But we can't start there, I don't think. I think we have to start with natural theology, then talk about emergence, then talk about how, if we accept natural theology, emergence shifts the classical ideas of God. Mark your calendars now, I guess, one way or the other. Over the next four months (I won't be here in August) and the next three sermons we'll explore natural theology, emergence, and, finally, a sort of natural theology of emergence. Theology times three. In November we'll do something entirely different, I promise.
So today's sermon is about what theologians call "natural theology," or how we know what we think we know about God. Natural theology refers to theology which derives its ideas about the nature of the divine from the empirical world - from the observation of the earth and the universe or from the operation of reason.
Now, being good Unitarians all, you might wonder what other possible sources one could use to derive ideas about God and how there could be any controversy at all about the legitimacy of trying to figure out who or what God is by reasoning from experience and observation.
Well there is one obvious alternative source, and then there is the obvious alternative conclusion. The obvious alternative source is scripture - or the divine self-revelation. We know about God precisely what God tells us in the scriptures that God has given us. I know, I know, for us that's not very satisfying. But it's a legitimate theological position and one followed by many of the faiths that have scriptures.
The other perfectly legitimate theological position, the obvious alternative conclusion, is that we simply know nothing about God.
There are advocates for these views, and they are not all cranky authoritarian evangelical Bible thumpers either. Karl Barth, the German crisis theologian who wrote after the terrors and waste of World War I, suggested that God intersects with the human reality only at the barest point of contact, and only through God's abundant grace - that we meet at the very horizon of reality, at a point of approach toward which God, in God's mercy, invites us. But that only God's scripture can tell us any thing real and true about God - nothing about our experience here can tell us anything with any confidence.
Barth came to this conclusion after the trench warfare of the first world war. In the bloodthirsty episodes that followed this inauspicious beginning to the 20th century we have forgotten just how awful WWI was - just how careless and profligate of life. Barth could very reasonably have risen up from that mess and concluded that whatever we might know of the perfect Creator we aren't going to learn it down here.
"The Being and Action of God," he said, in his book on The Epistle to the Romans "are and remain wholly different from the being and action of men. The line which separates here from there cannot be crossed: it is the line of death, which is, nevertheless, the beginning; it is the 'No,' which is, nevertheless, the 'Yes'." [pg. 111]
His theological reflections on this nevertheless lead him, after all that carnage, to an absolute confidence in God's grace - a fairly spectacular conclusion under the circumstances. Barth is a giant and his ideas are both comforting and useful.
I tell you this because I want you to bear with me on the idea that any of these positions might be perfectly reasonable. Being Unitarians, out of the American Transcendentalist experience, we have a prejudice in favor of the direct revelation of the nature of the divine as experienced in nature. That is a prejudice - it's not an epistemological certainty.
I like that word. Epistemology. It's fun to say. It means the way that we know things - it's the study of knowing things. An epistemological theory would be a theory not about the content of a belief but about the form of knowledge - how the knowledge of that belief was acquired.
As someone in the business of social analysis put it - no one makes an observation from nowhere. We acquire our knowledge based on where we're standing, and on the traditions about knowledge that we grow up with.
I suspect that when we get right down to it whatever we think we know about God is in large part a matter of prejudice. When I'm outside, looking at the grace of God that is displayed in the beauty of the Midwestern landscape I know what I know. But on some level I also know that I only think I know it. Or I know that I know it as a matter of faith, and not as a matter of objective judgment.
So, natural theology has its detractors and those detractors have views that, on this highly speculative subject, are just as reasonable as those of us who insist that our ideas of God are empirical. I want to say more about that in a minute, but I think I need to say something more about natural theology itself first.
I believe that there is a divine presence which underlies all things - that in some sense all things live in this divinity. My word for this is God, which is a perfectly good word although a little beaten up with misuse. I choose it because it is powerful, and a good placeholder for something much bigger than words. I believe absolutely that this God I refer to is good - that it is the source of goodness and the source of love and that in spite of all the devastation of this world its capacity to generate goodness within creation is inexhaustible.
I cannot tell you precisely how I believe this, how I have come to this belief over a lifetime of seeking, but I can tell you that I'm in pretty good company. The most important Unitarian theologian of the 20th Century, Charles Hartshorne weighed in on the subject with his "A Natural Theology for Our Time" in which he says that "it is demonstrable from almost any classical conception of God that he cannot be known in any merely indirect way, by inference only, but must somehow be present in all experience. No theist can without qualification deny the universal 'immanence' of God….And if God is in all things, he is in our experience, and thus is in some fashion a universal datum of experience." [pg.2]
He then goes on to say that while there is no empirical evidence for the existence of God (and thus, no conflict between science and religion), it is possible through the application of reason to define coherent criteria for God based on God as a datum of human experience.
Many more recent writers have also suggested that we might replace any attempt to conform our notions of God to some specific fact about the world with the idea that our notions of the divine should be submitted to an internal test for logical coherence - but this is still a natural theology - it's based on activity at our end, rather than on God's initiative.
Now I know this is a little abstract, but you know by now that I think it's important. In the context of Unitarian Universalism I think it's important because we really just go around assuming that the world of the spirit is analogous, somehow, to the material world. But then, being the cockeyed optimists that Unitarians have historically been, we assume that the realm of the spirit is a generally positive place.
Seriously, why do we think that? Those who are of a religious bent tend to see the natural world as proof of the benevolence of the Holy One. Nature is a rather bloodthirsty place, though, when it gets right down to it. And we like to use reason to create elaborate rational proofs of the goodness of God (well, some of us do, anyway). But if we look at the world as some kind of analogy for the ground of being, it pretty much argues either way, doesn't it?
What kind of God does Darfur argue for? What kind of God is suggested by the desertification of sub-Saharan Africa? What kind of God, I ask you, would let the Polar Bears go extinct?
There is a complicated theological answer to this question, which is called the theodicy question - the problem of a good God in a bad world. But we tend to see the world as good in spite of all the evil in it. I'm afraid that our natural theology carries our prejudices. We go looking for a good God and we create analogies to the beauty of nature that help to support the idea of one.
We go looking for a good God and we create coherent arguments around the theodicy problem - arguments that happily limit the power of God in order to preserve God's goodness. I'll talk more about those later - though they infuse the modern Protestant church we continue to underestimate just how radical they are, and just how important they might turn out to be also.
But when all is said and done, the sunset is no more argument than the slaughter of children. The bomb and the toxic dump and the desert and the poisonous snake, they are all arguments of some force and measure, and they do not speak for the God that Unitarians have historically decided to believe in.
There is one distinction that can be made between the examples we tend to use as evidence for the goodness of God and those that raise the bloody theodicy question. The former tend to be drawn from nature, and the latter from the realm of human activity.
Our analogies suffer, then, because we like to anthropomorphize God, but the more like us God gets the less likely we're going to be to make a coherent argument for God's goodness. It becomes a tortured sort of argument that argues first for our goodness in spite of our evil activity and then, by analogy, for God's goodness in spite of his permitting of our evil activity. A truly anthropomorphic God couldn't be as good as we claim God to be.
No theology can be tolerated that is a scandal in the face of dying children, and this kind of analogical argument in which God has the power to prevent evil but does not is a scandal.
But it is not a new problem, however much we like to think that history begins with us. The story I read to you about the prophet Elijah is, in its way, the anti-natural theology position from early Hebrew Scripture - the voice of sheer silence that is the voice of God. We know on some level that this story is true. God is not in the whirlwind but in the voice of absolute silence. What we know about God we do not know as directly we might prefer to know things.
In contrast to it is the voice of our brother Job, who may have been the first of the true natural theologians. When God speaks to him out of the whirlwind it is the majesty of Creation that he sites in response to Job's questions about the dying children, about illness and suffering, and particularly the suffering of a just man, and Job has the courage to insist that he is. There is a more pat answer in the frame to this story, but that was just to sneak the middle part into the canon. The poet who asked the question about God's justice in the face of the suffering of innocents answered it with no answer but the power and the glory of the world around us. It was a natural theology that simply says that God is greater than we are, and that the answers God gives us are likely to be on a scale which is not directly applicable to the scale of our lives. This is an analogy from Creation, and it is, in its way, a comforting one, but it is not one that resorts to some human idea of balance and fairness on earth.
The kind of God that a modern natural theology would lead one to describe and believe in is something we will talk more about in September and October. But the point for today is simply that natural theology is one legitimate way to look for ideas about God.
I would say, also, that in my opinion the only way we actually know anything is through experience. Even if we are trying to reason things out in our heads, all our words, all our ideas, will come from experience of some kind. When we think about historical events at which we were not present we think about them analogously. When we take apart the biology of life we do so with reference to our experience as human beings - experiences of the senses, our emotional repertoire, etc. We only know what it is to be anything by drawing on our experience of what it means to be human.
Therefore, to say that we cannot know anything about God based on the analogy of our experience within Creation is to shut down that avenue of inquiry. It describes a God with whom we can have no relationship. If that's how God is, frankly, I'm not interested. It posits a God about whom any kind of religious activity is fairly pointless. It doesn't help us to be better people, because the other side of the conversation is obstinately silent, no matter what the question from our side.
So I am a happy natural theologian, mindful of the risks of any position, and understanding that ultimately whatever you choose to believe in requires a leap of faith of some sort. This is mine - what is known here, to the best of our ability to know it - has meaning for what is known there, wherever there is.
"O Rabbi what can we learn from a telephone?" asks the poet, and the rabbi answers her "My shiksa daughter, your faith, your faith/that what we say here is heard there."
Amen.