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.
