The Cognition, Religion and Theology Project at Oxford University recently completed a major study of the human disposition to believe in gods and an afterlife. At one level, the study appears to have been an exercise in spending large amounts of time and money on proving the blatantly obvious: humanity is incorrigibly religious.¹

The £1.9 million project involved 57 researchers who conducted over 40 separate studies in 20 countries representing a diverse range of cultures. The studies (both analytical and empirical) conclude that humans are predisposed to believe in gods and an afterlife, and that both theology and atheism are reasoned responses to what is a basic impulse of the human mind.

Project Co-Director Professor Roger Trigg:

We have gathered a body of evidence that suggests that religion is a common fact of human nature across different societies. This suggests that attempts to suppress religion are likely to be short-lived as human thought seems to be rooted to religious concepts, such as the existence of supernatural agents or gods, and the possibility of an afterlife or pre-life.’

This last quote is particularly telling and appears to confirm the results of the most rigorous and widespread multi-generational studies of the phenomenon of human religiosity, namely, those undertaken in the systematically atheistic societies of the USSR and China. These cases both provide remarkable data: the USSR unparalleled for geographical expanse and cultural diversity; China for sheer size of population. Both these projects in atheistic social engineering encountered remarkable resistance, and I don’t simply mean that some ‘religious’ people clung fiercely to their beliefs and chose martyrdom rather than apostasy. There were two more innate and (ultimately) more subversive forms of resistance, both of which tend to support the claim that humanity is an inherently religious species.

The first was demonstrated by the persistence of religiosity despite the destruction of its organisational forms. The natural focus for opposition to religion in both the USSR and Communist China were formal religious institutions: Churches, temples, shrines, monasteries, places for the training of the professional religious classes. Many were dealt with brutally. It seems to me that we could frame this an an experimentation upon the hypothesis, that “religiosity is propagated and sustained by religious institutions/classes of people.” The hypothesis was tested with exceptionally severe rigor. I assume that the hypothesis was generated out of the intuition that religion functioned within society as a means by which power was exercised by a few over the many (certainly, Marxist thinkers expressed their intuition in these terms). Religion was a mechanism, alongside private property, access to capital, access to education, through which societies structured their power relations. But if the essence of religion is social control, when one removes the ability of religion to provide this function (by destroying its organisational form and organising ability), religion should die, its superstitious garments simply withering away. But does religion without control implode, like the unmasked Wizard of Oz?

As stated above, this theory was tested. Rigorously. And shown conclusively to be wrong. The human impulse to religiosity is not imposed, generated or sustained by ‘external’ modes of control.² As the atheistic regimes in the USSR and China discovered, the result of the suppression of religious organisations was not the destruction of religion but the destruction of theology or its equivalents: the destruction of rationalised forms of religion. Religiosity continued, even rapidly expanded in some places, but frequently in the form of ‘folk’ religion. The atheist regimes found themselves increasingly battling against cults (and ironically, increasingly found themselves being turned into cults). It became apparent that the religious organisations that had been suppressed were primarily modes of systematisation of religious impulses, not the cause of them.³ And when the various religious organisations were suppressed, the result was not the destruction of religion but its disorganisation. The conclusion appears to be that while the forms in which the religious impulse is expressed may be dependent on systematic religious organisation, and these religious organisations may function as a vehicle of social control (as was recognised with great clarity in Tudor England),  the religious organisation is not the source of general religiosity, it is the result.⁴

The second form of resistance that ‘religiosity’ demonstrated against atheistic attempts to destroy it has been already mentioned: it was the remarkable way in which religious forms insinuated themselves into purportedly ‘atheistic’ social structures and organisations. The more fiercely anti-religious the various Marxist reformation movements became, and the more they were successful in their destruction of organised religion, the more they began to resemble civil religions themselves. The most powerful symbol and example of this atheistic cult was perhaps the embalmed Lenin in Red Square (a source of embarrassment to many of Lenin’s more rigorously Marxist comrades, including his wife). The atheist cult extended to the canonisation and study of particular texts; the posthumous ‘deification’ of particular leaders; Communist Youth Groups (who directly lifted their organisational structures from prior Christian versions); most profoundly, ‘religious’ narratives about time and space, history and country, which were ultimately, religiously constructed narratives of identity. The more vigorously ‘Religion’ was suppressed, the more religion returned. The State increasingly found itself at the centre of popular worship.

I’d like to take some time (at some stage) to explore what this ‘sense of god/the gods’ might be: I don’t propose to leave my opening questions completely unresolved. But even if we set that investigative project to one side, there are a number of interesting implications that flow from the conclusion that humans have a disposition toward religiosity.

First, the common atheistic call for the abandonment of religious education in schools is incredibly naïve. The contemporary militant proponents of atheism routinely argue that religious education is an abuse of religious/parental power, children should not be indoctrinated with religion until their critical faculties have matured to a point where they will be able to (inevitably) reject it as superstitious foolishness. The underlying hypothesis appears to be a version of the one I mentioned above: that “religiosity is propagated through religious institutions (religious education)”, and that humans, if left to their own devices, would be irreligious. Simply put, the best science is against this position. The removal of religious education would not remove religiosity from our children, it would simply deprive them of any contact with collective, systematic, rational reflection on their religiosity. Removing religious education will not make people irreligious, just religious and uneducated.⁵

Secondly, the ‘decline of religion’ in contemporary Western societies is a myth. What we have witnessed is not a decline in religion, but a shift in its expression away from the organised (and sometimes enthusiastically disorganised) modes of reflection that have served our societies over the past century. Christians shouldn’t be particularly shocked by this, while human religiosity is constant, the form in which this is expressed shifts constantly.⁶ Any reading of the Old Testament would establish this claim from the experience of Israel. What is perhaps unusual and interesting about our contemporary situation is the colossal bad faith in which our worship is undertaken. We live in a time, perhaps not unlike the period during which ‘atheistic’ Christianity rose to prominence in the Roman Empire, when the dominant forms of religiosity in our society refuse the label ‘religion’. Where that will end is a matter for others to divine.

All the nations may walk in the name of their gods; we will walk in the name of the LORD our God for ever and ever. (Micah 4:5 NIV)

Image by Vicki Wolkins

Footnotes
1. It must be said, however, that the Oxford Study was very instructive, not least for the methodology employed and the diversity of samples taken.↑
2. What we mean by ‘external’ at this point is questionable, but probably something along the lines of, not universally shared but imposed by a distinct (minority) group upon the society as a whole↑
3. I do not mean to deny by this that religious organisations can serve other purposes, including social control↑
4. The Chinese communist party has shown itself to be significantly wiser (and more pragmatic) by seeking to control religious organisations rather than simply banning them.↑
5. Those arguing against contemporary forms of religious education would be better advised to bite the bullet and own up to the fact that what they really desire is not a religiously neutral education but an atheistic one, and that atheism (at its best, which is hardly ever) is just as much a systematic, rational reflection on human religiousity as any other form of developed theology.↑
6. I recently came across a fascinating book entitled Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, a study of Oprah as the embodiment of ‘spiritual capitalism’.↑

Karl Barth has a wonderful discussion of the attributes of God (his ‘perfections’) in the second volume of the Church Dogmatics. The final of these studies is his examination of the concept of God’s glory. An element of God’s glory, according to Barth, is the truth that the form of his works is beautiful. Scripture consistently witnesses to the idea that all God’s works call out our joy (he relies upon an argument that joy is the response called forth by beauty). God’s glory is not only his goodness, which could be solemn and severe, but his beauty. His works awaken righteous desire, rejoicing. And he draws the delicious (and proper) conclusion that therefore the task of theology should be joyful, not boring, beautiful.

At this point we may refer to the fact that if its task is correctly seen and grasped, theology as a whole, in its parts and in their interconnexion, in its content and method, is, apart from anything else, a peculiarly beautiful science. Indeed, we can confidently say that it is the most beautiful of all the sciences. To find the sciences distasteful is the mark of the Philistine. It is an extreme form of Philistinism to find, or to be able to find, theology distasteful. The theologian who has no joy in his work is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this science. May God deliver us from what the Catholic Church reckons one of the seven sins of the monk—taedium [tedium] —in respect of the great spiritual truths with which theology has to do. But we must know, of course, that it is only God who can keep us from it.

(Karl Barth, “The Eternity and Glory of God”, Church Dogmatics, § 31 “The Perfections of the Divine Freedom.” Volume II,1, 656).

Don’t you find this compelling? If our thought is properly theological it should call forth joy, not exasperation, in both ourselves and our hearers. The theologian should be the most joyful of people, because he or she is called to the contemplation of the ultimately Exquisite. The first commandment of theology is: Love the LORD your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. And the beauty of God is such that, giving himself freely to be loved, drawing lovers to himself, those who love him and come to know him through that love, are filled with an unshakeable and inexpressible joy. His beauty calls forth beauty. His glory, our rejoicing.

Seriously, that’s theology done in the mode of the Book of Psalms, right?

I have asked one thing from the LORD; it is what I desire: to dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, gazing on the beauty of the LORD and seeking Him in His temple. (Psalms 27:4 HCSB)

Amen.

Yes.
I am calling out to anyone who is really ready to Reveal the Wrath of God against All Unrighteousness. You know what I’m talking about – solving Mysteries, battling Minions, and Old Time Religion.
It shall be known as…
“The League of Righteousness” (hereafter as “The League”).

It was G. K. Chesterton got me thinking along these lines. I occasionally read his Father Brown stories when I’m wrung out and need to relax. Father Brown is a small, unremarkable-looking, catholic-priest-version of Sherlock Holmes. Along with his penchant for Solving Mysteries and Fighting Crime, he never passes on a good opportunity to make profound theological speeches (I like to think of it as his ‘Secret Power’).

This one is a corker (admittedly the exegesis is a little shonky):

‘I know the Unknown God,’ said the little priest, with an unconscious grandeur of certitude that stood up like a granite tower. ‘I know his name; it is Satan. The true God was made flesh and dwelt among us. And I say to you, wherever you find men ruled merely by mystery, it is the mystery of iniquity. If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it.
(Chesterton, “The Purple Wig” in The Wisdom of Father Brown, 181)

Doesn’t that get you in the mood for Solving Mysteries?

Here is a task for theologians, philosophers, and scientists:
to tear down false mystifications in the light of The Mystery Made Known.

“We demolish arguments and every high-minded thing that is raised up against the knowledge of God, taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” (2 Cor 10:5 HCSB)

Quoted by John Piper in The Future of Justification from John Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae; or, The Mystery of the Gospel Vindicated and Socinianism
Examined, Vol. 12, The Works of John Owen, ed. William Goold (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth,
1966), 52.

I’m trying to work out the point of things. I have an hour.

Aren’t we meant to wait until the long afternoons and daylight savings for that sort of work? We need a verandah.

What do you think this means: The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever?

The Westminster Shorter Catechism?
Isn’t it all in the verbs? whatever it means, its got to do with those two verbs, ‘glorify’ and ‘enjoy’. Strange that there are two verbs but only one ‘chief end’.

Two activities, but what kind of action? Are these not really actions, just active verbs masquerading as actions? What is it to ‘enjoy’ something? Do I do it, or is it done to me? What about ‘glorifying’? It seems more straightforward, I glorify someone, there is a subject and a patient. But that’s just grammar, what does the activity consist in?
Isn’t it possible to glorify someone by not doing anything, just by existing? The way a great painting glorifies the Master.

So…
It’s quite possible that man attains his end just by being.

Isn’t that what you would expect for the handiwork of the Creator?

What am I doing then? Why am I restless?

Faith arises in us under the creative impact of the self-witness and self-interpretation of God in his Word, and in response to the claims of his divine reality upon us which we cannot reasonably or in good conscience resist. It takes the form of a listening obedience to the address and call of God’s Word and the specific beliefs that are called forth from us like this entail at their heart a conceptual or epistemic consent to divine truth and become interiorly locked into it. (T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, p. 21)

We must learn from God himself what we are to think of him, for ‘God cannot be apprehended except through himself.’ (T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, p. 21)

On the one hand, then, faith is characterised by a certainty of conviction which derives its force from the truth of God himself thrust upon it, but on the other hand, faith is characterised by an open, ever-expanding semantic focus which answers to the unfathomable mystery and inexhaustible nature of God. (T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, p. 22)

pic by martinonflickr

Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. (John Donne, Holy Sonnets

The first quatrain of this sonnet hangs on the wall in our lounge room, it is the most beautiful expression of a prayer that I feel I am constantly praying.
I’ve been thinking a lot about faith over the past few months, thinking about the role of faith in the knowledge of God, the relationship of faith between God and human as that which constitutes the particular nature of Christian subjectivity, the role of the ‘faith of Christ’ in Christian redemption. and on and on.

There is something in the concept of ‘faith’ that captures the heart of what it means to be human.

What does that make me then, in my faithlessness?
I can only pray that God will give me to myself, that he will batter my heart.

and this is not from ourselves; it is God’s gift

Wherever we might begin, we only continue in the knowledge of God as faith seeks faith.

Interestingly, propositional revelation was the subject of our doctrine class today, and I find that I’m not completely on the same page that I used to be. Sometimes my whole life seems to be a process of working out what my Dad was talking about.

Our class today was a strong defence of the primacy of propositional revelation. In fact, I’m being generous – there were definite points at which it was claimed that there is no revelation other than propositional revelation. The discussion was heavily guided by D. B. Knox’s article entitled, Propositional Revelation, the Only Revelation. (Have a read).

It was an interesting, stimulating class. It’s always more interesting to be lectured by someone with whom you’re not sure you agree. As I sat and chewed over what we were being taught I had to conclude that I simply cannot agree with that statement, as expressed in the title of Knox’s article, if it is given its normal sense.

Put down your stones…

It turns out I’m not alone, Michael Jensen wrote a helpful blog post about the issue a couple of years ago, I wish more notice had been taken of his point.

There’s a couple of things I would add to Michael’s article.

First, the continued use of the phrase ‘propositional revelation’ with a idiomatic definition of ‘propositional’ fosters poor critique of other theories of revelation. In our class it was suggested that, ‘propositional’ in ‘propositional revelation’ should be “understood in the less rigorous sense, of truthful communication” (yes, that’s a quote). Surely, most people would agree that, on a charitable understanding, ‘truthful communication’ describes revelation per se. The addition of the adjective ‘propositional’ is intended to characterise the form of that truthful communication. If you are allowed to define your position this broadly, you can say whatever you like about competing theories, without really grappling with the questions a rival theory is trying to solve.

Someone like Pannenberg, or Brunner, would be a staunch defender of propositional revelation, if by this you simply meant, ‘truthful communication from God’. When they attack propositional revelation they are attacking a particular understanding of the form of that truthful communication. Either we hold the view they are attacking, or we do not. At least we should be clear.

Secondly, the problem we might have with Pannenberg, Brunner or others, in their attempts to understand revelation ‘non-propositionally’, is not really that they think the concept of ‘revelation’ is broader than ‘propositions’. We’ve already conceded that much. It is that they appear to be seeking a way around (or behind) the Scriptures for a kind of essential revelational bedrock.
As I understand it, Pannenberg wants to find the bedrock of revelation in the public history of Jesus, focussed upon the resurrection; Brunner, in the Divine-Human encounter.
Pannenberg and Brunner both appear to make Scripture a contingent element of revelation. Someone committed to ‘propositional revelation’ (in Knox’s sense) objects to this conclusion. The commitment to ‘propositional revelation’ is really the commitment to the essential role of the Scriptures in God’s revealing of himself.

The long and short of it is this,
I think my Dad was right, in that God’s communication of himself is not reducible to true or false statements about himself. And yet, God in his sovereign freedom communicates himself in an essential relation to the text of Scripture. I’m still working out what I think that means – intelligibly, linguistically, and?
But of this I’m pretty sure:

I believe in scriptural revelation.

I know for certain that God teaches me, because I have experienced it: and to prevent misunderstanding, this is what I mean when I say that I know for certain that God teaches me. When I was younger, I gave myself overmuch to human teaching, like others of my day, and when about seven or eight years ago I undertook to devote myself entirely to the Scriptures I was always prevented by philosophy and theology. But eventually I came to the point where led by the Word and Spirit of God I saw the need to set aside all these things and to learn the doctrine of God direct from his own word. Then I began to ask God for light and the Scriptures became far clearer to me… than if I had studied many commentators and expositors. Note that it is always a sure sign of God’s leading, for I could never have reached that point by my own feeble understanding. (H. Zwingli, On the Clarity and Certainty or Power of the Word of God)

I’ve been reading Holy Scripture by John Webster with a few guys, in a book group, at College. It is a cracking read.
This quote from Zwingli came in the middle of a chapter entitled ‘Reading in the economy of grace’. The chapter is a theological analysis of how a Christian reads Scripture.
It’s a bombshell – throughout the book Webster essentially denies one of the central presuppositions that undergirds critical Biblical scholarship – and ultimately Modernity itself: that knowledge is, in principle, equally open to any knower.
Crudely put, one of the central philosophical assumptions of our society is that it doesn’t matter who you are, a Fact is a Fact. Certainly there have been endless critiques of this assumption through Post-Modern philosophy, yet they all seem to end with a collapse into solipsism – the knower can only know him or her self. Obviously, this is less than satisfying when applied to a theory of reading Scripture. Indeed, it is downright idolatrous.

Webster manages to dismiss the Modernist assumption while avoiding the barrenness of a Post-Modern alternative.
Starting with any of these notions, according to him, will get your theology all bent out of shape, because, when it comes to knowing God, it really does matter who you are.
I’ve got plenty of questions for Webster – big, meaty ones. I’m suspicious that his answers are just too simple. But I’ve got to love a guy that, today, moved me to want to quit Theological College, and just read the Bible.

For Zwingli, then, the real nature of the interpretative situation is best described as as struggle to replace mastery by teachableness. (Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch, John Webster)

Here is a [ridiculously long] quote from our lecture notes today. Don’t expect it to make sense – it does, just not in normal Ingerlish.
The context is John 1:1

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.

καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος ought to be translated ‘the word was God’ (not ‘a god’ or ‘divine’). One noun is the subject and one is a predicate nominative.
[Our Greek Grammar] Wallace, 42, says the subject is the known entity and is distinguished in three ways: it can be a pronoun, have an article, or be a proper name. Here the subject has the article. ‘Colwell’s Rule’, has often been applied to John 1.1 to demonstrate that the verse is teaching the divinity of Jesus. Wallace, 256-70, argues that Colwell’s rule has been misunderstood and therefore misapplied. Colwell’s rule states that ‘definite predicate nouns that precede the verb usually lack the article’ While this means that predicate nouns without an article that appear before the verb might be definite, Wallace says that this rule was understood to say that they will definitely be definite. Wallace goes on to suggest that a general rule about pre-verbal anarthrous (no article) nouns is that they are normally qualitative, sometimes definite and only rarely indefinite. Qualitative means the noun refers to the quality or ‘kind’ of thing that is being referred to. What are the implications for John 1.1? The translation could be ‘a god’ (indefinite); the God/God (definite); or divine (qualitative). He points out that if it is indefinite then it would be the only example in the Fourth Gospel. Moreover, contextually, the fact that the Word existed in the beginning makes the translation ‘a god’ unlikely. Wallace suggest that a definite understanding means that the Word = God, which is a form of Sabellianism. He suggests that a qualitative meaning is best (‘divine’), a translation that preserves the thought that the essence of the Word and God is identical (‘Jesus shared the essence of the Father, though they differed in person’, Wallace, 269). However, the translation ‘the Word was divine’ might be misleading in English because we can apply the adjective to angels. NEB ‘what God was, the word was’ captures the thought well: the Word had all the attributes and qualities that God had.
(David Peterson, Lecture Notes)

This is very cool. Particulourously, as I had a good long chat with a Jehovah’s Witness in a Cafe on Friday. It was a very civil conversation about all sorts of things, but about 40mins into it she could resist dropping this:
[JW]“You know we don’t believe in the Trinity”
[DA]“I had heard that, actually…”
[JW]“Oh”
[DA]“I think you’re wrong on that”
[JW]“…”
[DA]“…”
[JW]“…”

Well, I wasn’t going to break out Colwell’s rule on her was I? It turns out I’d have been wrong anyway.
Still, it is an absolute tragedy not to believe in the Trinity.

These are the opening words of Robert Jenson’s, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel.

It need not be argued that the Western church now little uses or understands Christianity’s heritage of trinitarian reflection and language. So long as Christianity was the established religion of the West, the Western church could just barely survive this debility. The doctrine of the Trinity comprises, as we shall see, the Christian faith’s repertoire of ways of identifying its God, to say which of the many candidates for godhead we mean when we say, for example, “God is loving” or “Dear God, please….” So long as we could suppose it obvious which putative god would truly be God if there were any, Western Christians could shut their eyes to the disuse of these means. We no longer have that luxury.

Know your God.
Get educated about the Trinity.