Rational Christianity - An Oxymoron?

I separate the Christian faith into two branches, the Irrational, which insists in the absolute truth of the literal word of the Bible and maintains there is no separation between the natural world and the supernatural, and the Rational branch, which teaches there is no conflict between faith and the scientific method, or evolution and that there is a separation of the natural and the supernatural realms. !0,000 Christian Clergy recently signed the following statement:

An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science

Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible - the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark - convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as "one theory among others" is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God's good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God's loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.

When I referred to these Clergy as Rational Christians, I was challenged by a contention that they were just as Irrational as their bizarre brethren, the only difference was in degree.

The test? The topic of this thread, can a rational person accept the Resurrection of Jesus as a real event?

Here is my answer...

The Rational branch of Christianity supports the notion that there is no conflict between science and faith, that they recognize that the natural and supernatural are different realms. This philosophy was purchased with a currency of horror and abhorrent brutality, the ultimate cost of millions upon millions of lives has yet to play out to a grand total in our own times - and has beyond doubt, surpassed the power of reckoning.

Such is human history. Religion wasn't alone in what has been a long rear-guard action against knowledge and rationality, every aspect of what we call 'modern' civilization has had to try to claw its way past an ultimate truth of human existence - we are human animals, and as such we are fully capable of exhibiting feral, brutal, tribal behavior.

That struggle, widely misidentified as an emergence from nature, is in fact a struggle to accomodate nature. It reveals that the early religious teaching that man was created in the image of God was right on the mark in at least one respect - in its own words, the deity of the Old Testament was at times as irrational and bloodthirsty a specimen as any feral tribe of humans that has ever existed.

Eventually, to keep their faith in the face of a world of increasing secular knowledge and moral awareness, Rational Christianity had to break free from the belief that God sanctified and ordained what was the worst of human behavior - mass murder, slavery, every abomination under the Sun - and that these were proper, even noble pursuits for a Christian to undertake. Science too, presented arguments that were so glaringly self evident in the power of demonstration as to cause incredulity in Biblical claims to the contrary in any dispassionate observer. Theology had to cope, or lose all credibilty.

They had to mend their fences with the rest of humankind, too. Rational Christianity no longer taught that those that are not Christian, even Atheists, are excluded from salvation. To be sure, they teach that a person has a better chance for salvation if they accept and follow the faith. However, they teach that the power of God's wisdom permeates through all existence, and this can be confirmed by the number of shared moral precepts to be found in almost all religious movements as well as noble lives lived by those with no belief in the supernatural.

For example, Rational Christianity has allowed theology to be developed and taught within its ranks that place the resurrection entirely outside of a historical element. Non-material resurrection is the belief that Jesus' corpse need not have come back to life in order for the resurrection to be significant.

Nowhere in Rational Christian teaching or theology is it taught that Jesus suffered a cellular death. In fact, a basic tenet in the language of the day is that Christ's body was to know no corruption, but rose again soon after death. The very term "corruption" would, I submit, translate to "cellular death" in today's language.

The theologists behind these teachings aren't Atheists, they acknowledge, insist, that according to New Testament faith the raising is an act of God within God's dimensions, therefore it can not be a historical event in the strict sense: it is not an event which can be verified by historical science with the aid of historical methods. For the raising of Jesus is not a miracle violating the laws of nature, verifiable within the present world, not a supernatural intervention which can be located and dated in space and time. There was nothing to photograph or record, neither the raising itself nor the person raised can be apprehended, objectified or measured by historical methods. As the The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner once wrote, "it is obvious that the resurrection of Jesus neither can be nor intends to be a `historical' event".

At first glance, such teachings seems to be at cross purposes with the popular, plain meaning of scripture, but what makes this theology such a strong challenge within Rational Christianity is the claim that its view is actually the position of the earliest Christian believers. These advocates argue that it is those who maintain a literal bodily resurrection of Jesus who have misunderstood scripture. They deny that the earliest Christians believed in the bodily resurrection of Jesus at all. These theologians are a minority in Rational Christianity, but their teachings have not been repudiated. None of these theologians have been cast out of their denominations, none of them have been excommunicated, silenced or damned.

In addition, it can be demonstrated that is it physically possible that the resurrection could have a historical basis if Jesus did not die on the cross, and therefore that story, as handed down by the people of the time, could be a reasonable conclusion given the knowledge and culture it came from.

Which brings us to the Rational Christians of today. What then are we to make of a professed belief in the supernatural, shall we label all of Rational Christianity as irrational, that the terminology of Rational Christianity has no meaning, no context, no applicablity, that it is merely Irrational Christianity expressed to a lesser degree?

I say no. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I maintain that the beliefs allowed within Rational Christianity can be construed to view the supernatural as a matter of aesthetics.

My own view of existence is that I, and everything in existence, is part and parcel of the universe in and of itself. Consciousness, as expressed by my consciousness, the consciousness of people, animals, plants - any animated matter - is in fact a form of self-awareness on the part of the universe, with all the limitations and opportunties imposed by the life form one finds oneself occupying.

I like this philosophy. It is heavily influenced by, but not a direct conclusion of the scientific method. It is an aesthetic judgement.

Unless I myself am willing to label all aesthetic judgements as irrational out of hand, I cannot label all of Rational Christianity as irrational. Belief in the supernatural, as an aesthetic expression, with no denial of reality, no opposition to the real world sciences or scientific method, has placed itself outside of the rational sphere - without an impact, whence are we to point fingers at the entirety of Rational Christianity?

I do not deny that there are those within Rational Christianity that are irrational. I do not deny that many official teaching within Rational Christian denominations are irrational. However, given the range of theological freedom within Rational Christianity, its demonstrated ability to adapt and change its teachings, and its opposition to interference in the purely rational field of science and the scientific method, I say it is unfair to say that Rational Christianity is irrational A priori.

I would not judge those with different aesthetics to be irrational because they differ with mine. Even one that does not share a belief in the supernatural, a professed Atheist can enjoy the aesthetic cultural pleasures to be found in those beliefs:
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Quote: Originally posted by muddybanks
I was married in front of a Catholic priest and felt no insincerity in doing so since most of the people in my culture use the Catholic Church as a similar means. This could have been done in front of a judge simply to satisfy the legal requirement but we happen to like the ceremony and formal atmosphere that the Church provides.
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It is physically possible that Jesus did not die on the cross, the resurrection could have a historical basis.

But what about the acceptance of this belief in modern times? As it has been pointed out, a literal belief in a resurrection can't be supported, those that contend it happened carry the burden of proof. If you accept that it could have been a case of mistaken death, that does not satisfy a belief in a supernatural event. There are few in today's world that are willing to hold with a belief because of it's pure implausibility, few indeed like Tertullian, who said of his Christianity "I believe because it is absurd," a comment that meant that no one would try to pass off such an impossible story unless it was true.

We can say that this belief is like the bread and wine example from communion, with two contradictory perceptions at the same time. The problem there is this is not a question of a different perception of matter, but a state of existence. You're alive or you aren't.

Most Christians aren't aware of non-material resurrection theology, although nearly any Roman Catholic or Episcopalian with a higher education should have been exposed to it.

As a cultural, ethical system of existence and a means of delegating control over the population, religion and its hard and fast rules came to the rescue to provide the ethical view of human life, and flourished in the old religious culture. The answer was simple, Jesus came back from the dead, there was no body of knowledge to challenge it.

The rescue of that authority today is a work of the imagination, in which the aesthetic attitude took over religious worship as the source of intrinsic values about 'deep questions regarding existence'. People today can say they believe in the resurrection bcause there is no conflict with knowledge - it is now a matter of aesthetics, truly outside of the real world, but now not to be found in a belief in an actual supernatural world either.

Modern life has boxed in religious beliefs, demonstrated facts and increased knowledge have shrunk the areas where religion once held sole sway and authority. The growth of psychological science was linked to its ability to wrestle the intellectual interpretation of trances, fits and visions away from its theological rivals - so effectively, that many denominations used the same arguments to 'debunk' the the so-called 'ecstatic' religious experiences of its rivals, while continuing to maintain their denomination provided the 'real occurrence'. Theologians soon dropped their claim in this domain, the movie "The Exorcist" notwithstanding.

We know that we are animals, parts of the natural order, bound by laws which tie us to the material forces which govern everything. We strongly suspect that the gods are our invention, the supernatural, once accepted without question is conspicuous by its absence, and that means death is exactly what it seems. Our world has been disenchanted and our illusions destroyed. At the same time we most people do not want to live as though that were the whole truth of our condition.

With the repudiation of the literal word of the Bible, came knowledge of the great evil and harm done in the name of religion, a further dilution of moral authority, not from a replacement of fiction with facts, but by the knowledge that what was intended as a force for good in society and the individual had been exactly the opposite - and this had gone undetected by men of goodwill.

It also had another implication - we could no longer entirely trust beliefs as ordained by God, but had to use reason to determine what was consistant with the message of Jesus and actual good works. In the last hundred years, theology has been allowed to range further and further from traditional beliefs in an effort to find 'truth' from a perspective that was ultimately humane, moral and beneficial, and had a basis of some kind in the teachings of Jesus. Nothing was out of bounds, save for a dismissal of Jesus as a teacher, even his divinity and the nature of divinity was and is debated. Scholars even went back and carefully studied and debated the writings of the most noted Biblical scholar of the last 500 years, Sir Issac Newton, whose research led him to a belief that Jesus, while a savoir and messiah, was an ordinary man, and he should not be worshipped.

I contend that a belief structure at its core satisfies a human need, not for a belief system itself, rather it is natural for most humans to want to belong, to be within a group with shared values and beliefs that reinforce their own - both within and beyond a family - and this has a biological basis. The desire for tribal identity has a long history - it is a part of the human condition, part of just not Homo sapiens, but extending back to our earliest beginnings as a member of the genus Homo. Belonging to a group enhanced the chances of survival. As such we have a drive to find expression of that role in our lives.

Aspects of modern man, such as significance, love, relationship, and the fear of nonbeing can be addressed by another human trait - the existence of meaningful aesthetic experience. In the sentiment of appreciation for the pleasure it brings, for in the sentiment of the sublime we seem to be able to see beyond the world, to something otherwise inexpressible in which it is somehow grounded.

I think for Rational Christianity, the 'beliefs' for many, if not most a form of devotion akin in generality if greater in degree to being a sports 'fan' for a local team, and every bit as unconscious - and like sports, delivering the 'goods', providing the feelings, fellowship and tribal idenity they need. It comforts in the modern age, aesthetic value is a subjective reality that cannot be reduced to 'nothing but atoms in the void'.

So, we have a combination of a belief system that by its own profession is forced to seek tenets closer and closer to an ideal of morality and compassion, moving further and further from from arbitrary rules and regulations to actual ethics of love and conduct based on what is called the 'golden rule'. Culture keeps the specifics of increasingly less important concepts like the supernatural within the faith - but for most believers, the supernatural aspects are something they accept without critical examination, it's just part of the shared tribal beliefs, with no impact in their everyday lives.

Prayer is an outlet for meditation and other important needs, like the easement of fear, and the acceptance, the reconciliation of our lifes events, good and bad. It too delivers the 'goods' for many that practice it.

For many if not most, Rational Chriatianity is an aesthetic experience, it is an activity that believers have an introduced cultural appreciation for, as real as a favorite pizza, a favorite team, or the way their family prepared a favorite recipe, but much more broadly humanizing and sustaining. by enhancing their perception of existence. It provides resolution to a real human need.

So why does that modern person accept the story of the resurrection? It makes them feel good. They keep that belief in a place where it doesn't conflict with the real world, one of the few still available as a haven to faith in the modern world, as an unconscious aesthetic experience.