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 teacher 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.