How to save theology

     Massimo Faggioli has warned us that theology in Catholic colleges and universities is in danger of disappearing. (Massimo Faggioli, Theology and Catholic Higher Education, Orbis Books, 2024) Let me suggest an approach that might revive it.

 

Clifford Geertz

     Clifford Geertz was an anthropologist respected enough to gain a position at the “Institute for Advanced Studies,” the institute that housed Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

     In his book (Clifford Geertz,  Religion as a Cultural System. Tavistock, 1966) and other writings, Geertz proposed that there are four ways that humans interpret their experiences:

     1.     common sense

     2.     scientific

     3.     aesthetic

     4.     religious

     The common sense way is the way we live from day to day. We experience things and don’t question our experiences. We eat breakfast and assume that the milk and bread we consume are safe. We expect the car to start and the office we go to will be there when we arrive. Geertz cites the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz who wrote about this way of experiencing reality.

     The scientific way of approaching reality is an attitude of questioning. When we study anything scientifically, we take nothing for granted. We verify everything by experience. No interpretation (theory) is final. The next observation may upend all our previous theories. Think of how Einstein’s theories replaced Newton’s.

     The third way humans approach reality is the aesthetic way. Here the focus is on pure experience. When we stand before a painting, we enjoy the experience of contemplating the work. We can think about what the artist was trying to share, but that speculation is secondary to our simply enjoying the experience of looking (or listening, or using any other of our senses). We bask in the immediate experience. The artist has presented us with something; each of us can experience it in our own unique way, and no one way is definitive.

     The fourth way is the religious way. This is similar to the common sense way in that we do not question our experiences. But the focus of our attention is not on everyday life but on what Paul Tillich called “ultimate reality,” the foundations of existence. What is life all about? What is the meaning of my existence? Why is there a universe? Religious traditions answer these questions, with their stories and symbols and rituals.

 

The problems of theology

     The ancient slogan is “fides quaerens intellectum,” faith seeking understanding.” The slogan says that the “understanding” that we seek is a deeper appreciation of what religious experience gives us. The goal is not to destroy religious experience, it is to deepen it.

     The scientific revolution began when thinkers such as Galileo and Copernicus began to question traditional interpretations of ultimate reality, on the basis of empirical observations. Galileo’s observations verified the theory that the earth is not the center of the universe—it goes around the sun. That theory upended many people’s religious assumptions. I recall seeing a Berthold Brecht play that portrayed the social chaos that Galileo’s ideas caused. The scientific method became highly developed in Germany in the 1800s.

     The effort to incorporate the German scientific approach into religious issues caused many religious people to lose sight of the “faith seeking understanding” goal. The first scientific observations in the field of religion focused on the texts of the bible. Close examination reveals that there are four different strands of tradition behind the text of the book of Genesis. Roman Catholic church authorities saw this interpretation as corrosive of faith and banned the approach for Catholic scholars, a ban later reversed by church authorities. Archeologists began to discover ancient texts whose similarity to biblical texts suggested a more human origin of biblical texts than older theories of revelation accepted. For example, the 1945 discovery of texts in the upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi revealed what is now called the “Gospel of Thomas.” Babylonian excavations discovered similar biblically analogous texts. Scholars began to think of the bible as a human creation that was shaped by the cultures surrounding Judaism.

     Martin Luther correctly accused medieval theologians of destroying faith by putting too much emphasis on Aristotle, one of the first philosophers to use observation as a companion to speculation. Thomas Aquinas used Aristotle’s writings as a stimulus for his thinking about God. Thomas himself started with faith, and used his mind to understand it more deeply. As later philosophers moved away from seeing their work as a way to enrich faith, their speculations did indeed corrode faith.

 

Theology as companion to piety

     If religion is interpretation of reality that one accepts without questioning, then theology should not be focused on questioning the faith but on enriching interpretation of faith. How might this be done?

     It can be done by studying, through observation and discussion, how people have developed their experiences and understandings of God.

     There are two basic questions that lie behind all theological work: What is God like? What does God want of us?

     There is no point in asking whether God exists. No one can prove that God exists, and no one can prove that God does not exist. The important question is, if God exists, and religious people assume that to be as true as that the sun will rise tomorrow, what is God like?

     There are answers to that question. Jewish writings provide answers. Christian writings provide answers. Muslim writings provide answers. Atheist writings do not provide answers because they start with the assumption that God does not exist, and so asking what God is like is a meaningless question.

     Religious traditions take God seriously. People live their lives based on the stories the traditions tell.

     Theology starts with the question: How have adherents of any faith arrived at their understanding of God?  To answer this question, we have to do two things. We have to understand what people of faith say about God, and we have to appreciate what their understanding means to the people who live by it. We have to take seriously experiences based on piety.

 

Theology as a STEM discipline

     Saying that theology is a form of “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics” is an overstatement, but my purpose in saying it is that theology is as important for good living as knowledge of any of the STEM disciplines. We do theology because we want to enrich the lives of everyday people, just as we teach mathematics. We want them to see God from a broader perspective, enriched by, for example, what christians experience when they practice christianity, and how their religious traditions and texts lie behind their experiences.

     The theology that I studied for four years in the seminary was a STEM discipline. It was focused on what priests should know, based on what Catholic tradition says about God, and about what God wants of us. That seminary theology did not ask questions, it told us what it thought we needed in order to help the people we were expected to serve. What it did not do was examine where the traditions came from, how they developed, and how they helped or hindered people’s closeness to God.

 

A curriculum for religious education and college theology

     For years I have heard college professors complain that students arrive in college with twelve years of Catholic education and know nothing about Catholicism. I have no experience with what goes on in Catholic grade and high schools today, but sixty years ago, when I taught “religion” in Catholic grade school and high school, the experience even then had me asking, “what are we trying to do here?”

     The Baltimore Catechism will not cut it. We do not need catechisms, we need something that will enrich and deepen young people’s understanding of what God is like and what God wants of us. We need something that is not boring, but also has enough structure that the student can see ahead to what is coming, and look forward to what further study might provide.

     I suggest that religious education on all levels, primary, secondary, and college/university should follow a recurring and deepening sequence:

      1. Start with a traditional text or religious ritual, such as the bible or praying the rosary. Read the text or experience the ritual. Let the reading or experience be something that can be linked to students’ personal stories.

     2. Ask where the text or ritual came from, what christians have done with it, what the text taught them about what God is like and what God wanted of them. Learn how later generations have changed the interpretation of that text, why they changed it, and whether the change was justified in the light of the overall objective of knowing what God is like and what God wants of us.

     3. Ask how christians have lived out that interpretation in good ways. We have hundreds of years of christian history and of the effects of the text on broader historical events.

     4. Ask about the pathologies of interpretation that the text has created, how people have used the text to do bad things, like start wars or diminish personal dignity.

     5. Compare the text with texts from other religious traditions, such as Islam, and ask what people of other religions have done with their texts or traditions, how their understandings have developed over time. 

     Five steps, structuring the enterprise. Select a text or ritual, study how religious people of a certain denomination have accepted or changed the text, study how christians have lived holy lives based on the text, and how christians have done evil things based on the text. Finally, compare the text or experience with texts or experiences from another religion or religions.

     Then start over, on a deeper level. And start over again, with the same five steps, with each repetition going deeper into history and the literature surrounding the history.

     The goal is to learn what God is like and what God wants, using texts and how people have interpreted the texts along with experiences that people have had using the texts.

     There is meat in this approach. There is direction to it. If the texts are well chosen, and information supporting each of the four steps is carefully and critically selected, the student knows that the next step might deepen his or her faith. It will not be boring.

     This plan will require teachers to know the material, the historical facts, the ways that so many people have understood religious texts, with the depths of the teachers’ knowledge depending on the age of the students they are teaching.

     For religious teachers below the college level, who may not have had the benefit of college study, online sources of information are available, but the theacher will have to evaluate each text for accuracy and spiritual benefit. Wikipedia is one possible tool, especially if someone has prepared reliable guides toward entries in that source.

     To repeat:

     1. What is the text or experience?

     2. What do the text or experience tell us about what God is like and what God wants of us?

     3. How have religious people interpreted the text or experience in fruitful ways?

     4. How have religious people interpreted the text or experience in ways harmful to themselves or others?

     5. What texts in religious traditions other than one’s own can enrich one’s understanding of the text?

 

 

 

Voiceless

[published as a letter in Muddy River News, January 27, 2025]  

    I am politically voiceless.

    I am voiceless because I am a Democrat in Illinois’s 15th Congressional District. The State of Illinois, run by Democrats, has gerrymandered me into a district where my representative, Ms. Mary Miller, is not likely to take my views seriously.  She will not do that because if she does, she will be primaried, and there will not be enough Republicans to save her. Democrats who might support her are voiceless in her primary.

    Of course I am not alone. All the Republicans in Illinois’s Democratically  gerrymandered distracts are just as voiceless as I am.

    But us gerrymandered “voicelesses” are not alone either. Anyone under the age of 18 is voiceless too. 

    What got me thinking about this is the plight of so many people around me who are “undocumented.” It has to be terrifying to live in a place where you can leave home to go to the store and never see your family again. ICE (Immigration and Customs) can pick you up and disappear you, possibly without even a phone call home.

    I suspect (without evidence, having not done any scientifically reputable research on the question) that there are a lot of young people who are screaming angry not only because of what will be happening to our undocumented friends and neighbors, but because of what will be happening to our environment when we resume “drill, baby, drill.” Those young people will have to live in the world that drilling will accelerate. But they are even more voiceless than us older gerrymandered “voicelesses.”

    I got to thinking of how we voiceless people could get our voices heard. We could create online communities, including under 18’s, but in the age of AI, we could be cloned by the thousands and buried in our clones. How could we avoid that?

    Well, maybe if we could create a verifiable chain of real people, extending from ourselves to some real person that most people in the neighborhood would recognize as a real person, we might be able to resist cloneness. That would put value on personal contact between actual human beings, and some of us could use more of that kind of contact. Suddenly we would have a voice, somewhere, and someone might listen.

    Gerrymandering is destroying our politics. It is rendering half the country voiceless. Both parties are doing it.

    Not surprising. I am a Christian, and Christians believe that all of us humans are capable of sin, which is behavior that hurts others, not only God. We create our own punishment. We make ourselves voiceless.

 

Brother Joe Zimmerman, O.F.M. 

 

Stories about God

 

We live in a world where millions of people tell stories about God. There are collections of stories shared by millions, and collections shared by much smaller groups of people.

I “belong” to a group that shares stories that come from the Jewish people, followed by stories about the person named Jesus Christ, and all the stories that have resulted from his presence in human history.

From a strictly scientific standpoint, no one can “prove” the truth any of these stories. By “proof” I mean a story grounded in empirical observation and shared by a community of scholars who evaluate the quality of the observation and the quality of the theory that scientists tell as a result of their observations. (A theory is a story, a fiction, about what someone has observed.) That does not mean that all of the stories are  “false” or “myth.” Some of them are surely as true as any other story we tell in life—we just can’t prove the truth of our religious stories by empirical observation. We religious people “believe” the story we take as normative for ourselves. By belief we mean that we know the story is true even if we can’t prove it.

Religious stories tend to have characteristics that are different from other kinds of stories. They are different from scientific stories (theories), but they are also different from the stories grounded in everyday experience. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, sixty years ago, proposed that people tend to approach the world with four different frames of mind.

The first kind is the common sense frame of mind, in which I implicitly develop a story about things I do from moment to moment as I go about my daily business. I don’t question anything, I just focus on the activity at hand. The second kind is the scientific frame of mind. Geertz says that the scientific frame of mind is characterized by an attitude of explicitly questioning everything. To a scientist, there is nothing that can be proven for sure. Every scientific theory can be overturned by observations that call it into question. Think of what Einstein did to Newton. But we cannot live in a scientific world view. We could never eat breakfast if we had to be sure that the milk we drink is not poisoned, and we can never be sure it isn‘t.

The third world view is the aesthetic world view. This world view revels in experience. We experience delight from seeing or hearing something produced on canvas or performed by a musical group, or something in nature like a sunset. That emotional delight is what we seek when we are looking at something aesthetically. We verbalize artistic experiences by expressions of delight and that verbalization is an artistic kind of story.

The fourth and final world view is the religious. Geertz says that this is similar to the first, common-sense, world view in that it is just taken for granted, like everyday life, but it deals with the most important issues in life, what the theologian Paul Tillich called “ultimate reality.” We do not try to prove the truth of stories in this world view. We take them as true and they ground our approach to the rest of our experiences.

In earlier ages, people developed the idea that anyone who did not share their religious story was bad, and had to be persuaded or compelled to change the story they were telling about “God.” This may have been the result of religious leadership becoming fused with political leadership—the king was both political leader and religious high priest. When you are living in a community of people who share the same stories about God, the intrusion of someone who doesn’t share those stories in uncomfortable and disorienting.

We are learning that it is possible for people to live together in peace even when they do not share the same stories about God. Possibly that advance in human culture occurred as a result of the experience of the founders of the United States. Those men had experienced the tragic effect of religious persecution in Europe, and they wanted to set up a society where no one would persecute someone else because of their religious beliefs.

My Roman Catholic community came to accept this approach when our church leadership, in the 1960s series of meetings of church leaders called the Second Vatican Council, said that every person’s conscience should be respected—if in conscience you accept a certain story of God, we should respect your belief and allow you to go about your business undisturbed.

To see religions as stories about God, and to accept that none of us can be absolutely sure about the truth of the story we accept, and to agree not to persecute people who share a different story, opens us to new experiences.

First of all, I may learn something about God from the stories other people tell about God. The stories in my tradition, both Jewish and Christian, have changed over the centuries. There are stories about God in Jewish tradition that I believe were changed by the experience of living with Jesus Christ. There are stories that the Roman Catholic community used to accept as true (for example, that charging interest on a loan will lead to bad outcomes) that Catholics later rejected. Moral beliefs are based on stories that describe bad outcomes when you do something.

There is no way for any group to prove the truth of its story. There is no “natural law.” What Catholics have called natural law is the set of stories about bad outcomes accepted in our community across centuries. Secular social science has come to reject the term “natural” in describing events that human beings experience. There are indeed features of our experience that seem to be biologically programmed, but it is very difficult to separate those from features that we have accepted because our societies have accepted them as true. Some people used to accept as true the story that the human race is divided into “races” that are innately superior or inferior to one another. Most people now reject that story. Ultimately all moral rules are the result of human agreement and learning.

To put it another way, the idea of natural law is a denominational belief accepted by some denomimnations. We and everyone else should be free to accept it or to reject it, following our consciences.

Much of the bitterness surrounding the issue of abortion in our country could have been avoided if we Catholics had quit treating our beliefs about human life as “natural law issues” and accepted the possibility that other people’s approaches to the legality of abortion can be based on their beliefs in conscience about what God wants them to do.

In the gospel of Luke, Jesus gives to his disciples what Christians have come to call the “Great Commission.” “Go and make disciples of all nations.” (New American Bible translation of Matthew 28:19) The term "disciple" comes from the Latin word that means “to learn.” A disciple is a learner. To learn is to change your mind. We Christians are called to help all nations, including ourselves, to be open to changing our mind about what God is like and what God wants. We are all learners. As Jesus once said, “You have but one teacher.” (Matthew 23:8)

(Aside: The Greek of Matthew 28:19 does not use the term “disciple.” The Greek can be translated literally as “preach the gospel to all nations,” which is not the same as making disciples. Preaching does not presume that the preacher controls anything the hearer does about the message.)

There is a God. It’s just that none of us has a corner on what God is like, and we can learn from each other about what God is like. That kind of learning can be very enlivening and exciting.

A shortage of sinners

            Today’s Great Problem—the Problem behind many of our greatest other problems—is that we don’t have enough sinners.

The reason we don’t have enough sinners is that we don’t have enough sin. Without sin we are trapped in a space where we have no choices.

You see, sin implies that I am doing something that I can do differently. The Decision-Makers in our world today cannot do anything differently. They have no choice. Ask them. That’s what they will say.

Why is Mr. Putin trying to take over Ukraine? He will say he has no choice. It is his destiny to restore Russia to its ancient (imagined) glory. The Ukrainians opposing him say that they have no choice either: they have to oppose his dreams.

Why is Mr. Netanyahu killing tens of thousands of the people in Gaza. He has no choice. Gaza belongs to Israel, and the people who oppose that idea, Hamas, have to be defeated, no matter what it costs.

On the level of realpolitik, Mr. Netanyahu cannot stop the war in Gaza because stopping it will cost him his parliamentary majority. If the tiny minority party that is the key to his retaining a majority in the Israeli parliament should leave his coalition, his government would fall, and he would probably go to jail. Those people of the tiny minority party, the ones who believe that God wants every inch of ancient Israel to be controlled by a Jewish government, have no choice. God wants every Palestinian off the land, permanently, forever, never to return. What else can they do?

In all of this there is no sin. There is just blind fate, deterministic, out-of-control fate. We outside observers see what has to be done, but we know there is no one who can change the situation. We just have to wait for things to work themselves out.

There are no sinners. There are just pawns under the control of political and economic and social forces. We all understand this. We accept it. It is sad. It is a challenge to our dreams of a future governed by rationality and technology and even beauty. Things are definitely going in the wrong direction, but what can we do about it? We are powerless.

In earlier, less enlightened ages, there were sinners. Of course there were many people who did not see themselves as able to change, but there was a wider recognition that some of the actors in great dramas were actual sinners, able to change what they were doing and deliberately choosing to continue their bad actions. There was, at least I speculate and hope, a wider moral condemnation of their behavior and a recognition that there were other possibilities beyond blind political fate. Today that moral condemnation is gone, swallowed up in a consensus that, even though we construct our political and social systems, we are sometimes powerless to control them. It is easier for us to look at evil and say, “Sad, but what can anyone do? This and this and this will have to change before the situation can get better. And this and this and this are not likely to change in the near future. We are powerless.”

That’s an easy way to respond to evil. It is easy, but it is deterministic. It takes us off the hook, and it dampens our moral outrage. Those other people aren’t so bad. They have no choice.

My Christian worldview says that human actors have choices. We who look on may refrain from judging bad actors, and say that “they” have no choice. Do “they” know better?

My Christian world view says that all of us are free to do good and to do evil. We are free to change our behavior. We are free to accept forgiveness, if we are willing to engage with the people we have hurt. We are free to offer forgiveness, if we are willing to engage with the people who have hurt us.

My Christian world view says that the God of all creation, who created us as moral creatures, is willing and even anxious to forgive us, no matter how evil our actions have been. That God pleads with us to be as forgiving, and to be open to being forgiven, because. short of forgiveness, there is only death.

NPR this morning said that there are more children in the world today growing up in the midst of warfare than ever before in history. Every such child will continue in life with emotional and moral disabilities that will continue to harm them and everyone around them for years to come.

We are not doing well. We need more sinners. 

As I reflect on what I have written above, the name of William Shakespeare comes to mind. The stories he told could help us to see that people with great power are also moral actors. And his stories could make us think about what happens when powerful moral actors face decisions about evil in their own actions.

Who are you talking to?

         We are "christians," or at least we call ourselves that. 

        The most important thing about us christians is that we talk to God. 

        We are not the only people in the world who talk to God. But we can't worry about those others. They have to deal with God in their own ways, and God will deal with them in God's own ways. We've got enough trouble in our own back yard--we don't need to control everybody else. God can take care of that--of them. We say that God loves what God has made. God made them. End of discussion. 

        So we talk to God. 

        We do that because we know that God listens. We don't just think that God listens. We know it. That's what faith means. 

        But talking to someone else is an open-ended trip. It's open-ended in two ways. First of all, we never know how it will go. We don't control it. And second, we don't expect it to end. 

        But isn't that how it goes with other people in our lives? From our first moments, we never know how things will go, and we have no idea how the talk will end, if it will ever end. 

        There is a widespread walking away from religion in our "western" world. It is only natural for us christians to ask why that is happening. I think it is because we of the western world have become so engrossed in "eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage" (to quote Luke 17:32) that we don't have time to think about God, much less to think about having a conversation with God. Our western world is not all that unique in human history. 

        Since so many of us don't think about God, we naturally have forgotten how to talk to God, or how to listen to God.

        I found myself in that situation. Or, to be more precise, I keep finding myself in that situation. It is strange. I was raised in a pious family, spent my student years in pious schools, and have lived my adult life as a professional religious person. And still I keep finding myself wondering if I am really speaking to God. I'm never sure. So I keep on trying to be aware of who I'm talking to. 

        Here is where I have latched on to that ancient prayer book called the "psalter." 

        A psalter is a book containing "psalms," which are prayers meant to be be recited or sung as poetry. It's an old book, at least two thousand years old. My christian forebears have used it all the years since Jesus Christ walked the earth, and Jesus himself surely used it. There was a Latin saying "In David, Christus." David was supposed to have composed the psalms. The saying says that if you know the psalms, you know Christ. 

        If you know the psalms, you also know a lot besides Christ. You find yourself immersed in several hundred years of Jewish history, with all of its warts and wounds exposed. The psalms teach you to talk to God, but they also teach you about the messiness of being human, and how you are not likely to be any less messy than the men and women who prayed them before you. 

        The meanings of some passages are lost forever, but isn't that true of our own stories? Sometimes a psalm scolds us, but don't we need scolding ever so often? I used to be turned off by all the talk in the psalms of "enemies," but life has taught me that there are people in my world who can qualify as my enemy. They mean me no good. I'd rather not face them, but maybe I should face them more often and more openly. Conflict is not evil. It's uncomfortable, even painful sometimes, but if we do it with love, it is life-giving. They used to say, on Marriage Encounter weekends, "Sometimes you have to fight, but hold hands while you're fighting."

        My church (Roman Catholic they call it) has surrounded the psalms with the story of Jesus. They call it the "church year." It begins with Advent and Christmas, which recall the beginnings of his story, continues with Lent and Easter, and spends the rest of the year reflecting on the rest of Jesus's life. As I do this year after year, I begin to see how my own life can become patterned after his life. That includes his death, which, as I approach my ninetieth birthday, is more than likely for me not too far in the future. 

        And all the while, as day after day I take up my book of psalms (which today is on my Kindle--blessed be some technology), I feel close to all those women and men and even children who have gone before me, with all their warts and wounds. 

        The psalms help me talk to God, and even, every so often, to listen to God talk back. 

The danger of thankfulness

     Years ago I took part in a simulation exercise ("game") called, if I recall, "Starpower." The purpose of the game was to illustrate the dynamics of inequality and social class.

     Each of us participants was issued an envelope with tokens of some type. Some tokens were worth $25, some were worth $10, and some were worth $2. The tokens were spread around randomly among the participants. We were then told to bargain with one another for something--I forget what we were trying to "buy" with the tokens.

     I had more than my share of $25 tokens, and I was able to bargain very successfully. I remember very clearly my emotional response to the situation. I felt blessed. God had been good to me.

     Then I reflected. My blessedness was the result of random chance. I did nothing to "deserve" my advantage. God had nothing to do with my success.                                                                                                                                                                          

     The media I watch and listen to--mostly public broadcasting (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR)--are making me aware of what is happening as I write this: in Gaza, in southern Lebanon, and in Haiti. In these places people are seeing their homes destroyed, husbands and fathers killed in front of their families, women raped, and everyone lacking sanitation, health care, and even food and water. Here I am, living quietly in Quincy, Illinois. The trees have just shed their beautiful leaves, and people are preparing for Thanksgiving travel and Thanksgiving dinners. I am blessed.

     But what did I do to deserve this? Why was I not born in Gaza or Haiti?

     True, my parents worked to create a home where I could grow up healthy and without violence. What did they do to deserve the advantages that allowed them to raise me?

     Those gifts to them and to me were not only blessings from God. Many people contributed to those blessings. People left their homes in Europe and began new lives in this country. The men and women who founded this country struggled to set up a constitution that would "make it easier for people to live good lives" (to quote, I believe, Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day's colleague in founding the Catholic Worker movement). A fair amount of struggle against violence and injustice made our "American" way of life possible.

     We all get used to things. We get used to our advantages, and soon we think it is normal for us to be advantaged, and that somehow that's the way things ought to be. We come to see ourselves as virtuous, and as blessed.  If we want to feel pleased and grateful, we see our blessedness as caused by our virtue.

     The danger is that we then begin to see other people's lack of blessedness as the result of their lack of virtue. That allows us to ignore them and to neglect seeing ways that our blessedness might have contributed to their troubles.

     Some politicians can accuse us of being "woke" when we talk about such things. But that is the kind of wokeness that Jesus and the Old Testament prophets tried to create in us.

     So in this Thanksgiving season, I am going to be grateful for the blessings I enjoy, but along with my gratitude I hope to be compassionate toward people who do not have the same blessings I have. I will think about how "but for the grace of God" I might have been in their shoes.

     Such thoughts might make me feel warm and cozy. But my mind must roam further and explore the stories of how some nations came to be poor and some nations to be rich. Sin may have played a part in creating my blessedness.

 

 

 

 

Machines and Games

 

        My recent reflections about "saintly institutions" got me recalling some old ideas from my sociology teaching days.

        The intro soc textbooks typically said that there were three or four lines of theory in sociology: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, conflict theory (Marxism), and rational choice theory. I thought that the last two could be considered sub-forms of the first two, which is not something that I want to go into here. I want to focus on the first two.

        Functionalist theory uses a living organism as the metaphor for how societies should function. Living organisms have structures like skeletons and circulatory systems, and each structure has a function. For example, the skeleton helps the organism  hold together, and the circulatory system nourishes the cells in the organism.

        An organism is just a highly developed machine. It is deterministic. When it is stimulated in a certain way, it responds in a certain way. If something from outside disrupts one of its functions, it corrects the disruption (homeostasis).

        The organic metaphor sees society as a set of structures (rules and laws). Each rule has a function. If we design the rules well, the organism will function well. When things aren’t going well, we revise the law. Our law library shelves get longer and longer, and we need more and more lawyers to navigate what we have created. Even behaviors that are not covered in the law books can lead to lawsuits, which means more lawyers and more restrictions on what we can do.

        The second line of theory is labeled "symbolic interactionism." Its defining metaphor is the game. The people playing the game make the rules, and most players obey the rules. When a lot of them don't obey, the players change the rules or create handicaps. This theory says that there are no divinely-sanctioned rules for living--all moral rules are arrived at by group consensus. This goes against my Catholic tradition, but I point to areas where my Catholic tradition has had to change what it considered "natural." For centuries the church forbade "usury," taking interest on loans. Somewhere around the 1500s it abandoned that moral principle. Somewhat later it quit accepting slavery as a permissible moral practice. Recently a top church authority (Pope St. John Paul II) said that capital punishment is immoral, a judgment echoed by most church authorities these days, in spite of widespread U.S. Catholic belief that it is still permissible.

        In other words, the Catholic community has changed its rules.

        An institution such as "the economy" is a set of games. When I said that no institution is saintly, I was saying that no institution operates like a machine. We cannot design an economy so that it will always operate with justice. When we try to do that, we can change the rules, and in the back of our mind we can hope that one more tinkering with the rules will make the machine automatically produce justice. But it won't. We are in a game, and there will always be some people who will break the rules. We can punish the rule-breakers (sinners), or we can hold back on the punishment (forgiveness) and consider modifying the rules to make the playing field more fair.

        In practice, both theories appear similar, but they differ in how we make moral judgments on their basis. If we believe that there are divinely authorized rules (natural law), then we see rule-breakers as worthy of punishment, and if punishment does not work, worthy of exclusion from society. ("Lock 'em up and throw away the key.") We tell ourselves that our punishment (prison) is remedial--we want prisoners to be rehabilitated so they can return to society as fully-functioning participants, but in most places we cannot find the resources needed to practice rehabilitation alongside punishment. Prisons in most places are designed for punishment, period. If there is rehabilitation, somebody is going beyond what the "correctional" institution is capable of. Such people are to be applauded, but the correction system cannot do more than punish.

        If we see our institutions as games, we are more open to modifying the rules without excluding rule-breakers from future play. We punish rule-breakers, but always with the assumption that the rulebreakers are just like us, and forgiving their violation may be better than punishing them. They may even be prophets calling us to make the game more fair. They are part of "us," not a cancer on the body politic.

        Our economic rules do need serious modifying. Most of us admit that the middle class has been shrinking, and that it is getting harder and harder to find decent housing, and affordable food and transportation. This is why we elected Donald Trump.

        Mr. Trump's backers are not likely to be open to changing any rules that will make the game more fair for people below them on the economic scale. They will say that the economy is a machine, and is working just fine. Rising tides lift all boats. Except that they don't. They will resist the idea that the game is set up so that more and more people cannot win. If they do not adjust the rules, the players will take their marbles and go home. They will abandon the game. They could vote Mr. Trump and his allies out in the next election, or they might decide that democracy will never work and turn to violent ways to get what they think is fairness. 

        In fairness to Mr. Trump, the Democrats have been no more likely to welcome changing the rules than backers of Mr. Trump. Voters have recognized this, and have punished the Democrats.

        To recap: our institutions are not saintly; people keep breaking the rules. There is no perfect structure that will prevent that. We should look at our institutions as games that require fair rules if we want people to keep playing them. Rule-breakers are not all evil, worthy of hell-fire. They are people like us, who want to play in our games. We should welcome them and listen to them. There will always be some people who will push the limits and break the rules, but when we decide that there are too many such people, we will change the rules of the game.