Nostri Patri?

So, I must admit, I failed my expectations for the weekend. Fortunately, however, I *might* be done with my thesis, so all is not lost. I am going to try, though, to finish the 3 posts I promised. So this is post number 2.
In my last post, I suggested that there is a lot in theology that is untenable. If it does not help people pastorally or ethically, and preferably in both ways, then it is rather useless for religion. This does not mean we should just do away with anything we think is extra, as many parts of religion (for example, vestments, hymns, incense and liturgies, etc) have powerful effects on people pastorally. We do have to consider, however, whether this is the case for any given issue. For example, after Vatican II, most religious sisters were no longer required to wear habits, and now most in the Western world do not. However, in Asian and African countries, many sisters still wear habits, as it is understood and perceived differently in these cultures.
To continue along this line of thinking, however, I want to bring into question the entirety of the Patristics period. I have known many professors and students alike who hold strongly to the early Fathers. After all, it seems, these men established the ground rules for theology. In fact, during the Reformation, John Calvin and Martin Luther largely drew from Augustine's thought rather than the more comprehensive Thomas Aquinas or any other Medieval theologian.
Don't get me wrong here. I don't doubt the impact that the early Church Fathers had. If nothing else, I can appreciate how much they contributed to Christian understandings of, well, just about everything. However, this is what makes me quite nervous. The names of Jerome, Augustine, Athanasius, Gregory of Nissa, Gregory Naziansus, John Chrysostom, Origen and others are almost untouchable. We can't call anything they say into question or we seem like bad Christians. But I am right now calling this into question. Allow me to explain why.
In the first place, they introduced into Christianity a lot of Hellenistic thought, particularly of a Platonic nature. This is not necessarily bad, but it led to a lot of confusion and intellectual acrobatics. The Semitic tradition of Palestine did not require a Platonic understanding of the world to work. The Platonic view of God tends to be utterly transcendent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and profoundly other. The Biblical view of God tends to be much more personal and relational. The entire Bible can be read as a story of the developing relationship of this God YHWH and the people he creates and develops a loving relationship with. It is a profound love story that has given countless millions hope in this life when none other was there. Contrast this with the Platonic God who is so utterly other that, as St Thomas says, we can only say anything is like God by analogy and not by any degree of reality. This creates the great problem of trying to resolve the apparent contradictions of the Bible, a book written by Jews in the Palestine region, with a Greek understanding of the Ultimate. The two are not compatible because they were never meant to be. The Biblical understanding of God was not oriented at informing Greek philosophers just as Plato (despite what Origen thinks) was not trying to introduce Semitic Monotheism into Greek culture.
Now, don't get me wrong. I think we can understand Christianity better using other subjects of knowledge. I appreciate theologians who incorporate psychology, sociology, evolution and other sciences into their theology, and I owe a lot to St Thomas' combination of Aristotelian ethics with Christianity. However, the Patristics took it all a step further. Rather than using Plato's philosophy as a tool for theology, they tried to force an unhappy marriage between the two. Thus, we get the Christological controversy.
I cannot stand the Christological debates of the third through fifth centuries in the least. These were the great debates where the best minds in the theological world tried to define God. Out of these debates we get the Trinitarian "formula" and the conception of two natures within the person of Jesus. Words like "hypostatis," "prosopon," "physis," "natura," "ousious," "sarx," and "anima" were thrown around like candy at a parade. If none of those words meant anything to you, don't worry. Often times people were condemned for getting these ideas wrong, or putting them in the wrong order. If you want to be a good, orthodox Christian, you have to say that Jesus is 1 ousious with the Father, the Trinity is 3 prosopa but 1 natura, Jesus has 2 physeis but is 1 prosopon, and Jesus has a fully human sarx, anima, and logos which is combined but not mixed with his divine natura and logos. If you missed one of these apparently vitally important notions, congratulations, you're condemned for the next 1600 years as a heretic.
I have four big reasons for why I don't like the Christological controversy. 1) It's extremely arrogant. It seems rather stupid to condemn others for not believing God to be exactly constituted the way that you think God is, even though the Platonic view (which gives us the lovely vocabulary list above) insists that God is wholly other and everything is related to God purely by analogy. Furthermore, none of these terms makes any real sense, either for human beings or for God. At some point, it all becomes a competition to see how complex of a Christology you can derive before you have to admit that God is mysterious. It's not enough to say Jesus is God but the Father is God and how that works is a divine mystery. Rather, we are forced to say Jesus has a human body, human mind and human soul that is somehow unmixed with God but also has a fully divine nature and the way they're combined is the mystery. 2) It's all unbiblical. At no point does the Father say, "I am one in ousious with the Son" nor does Jesus ever say, "My divine logos is willing, but my human logos is weak." Yes, there is some contradiction in the Bible. But as Kierkegaard and Tillich point out, part of being a Christian is accepting what seems absurd. We don't have to come up with an overly complicated formula to completely understand it. 3) These terms are utterly confusing. Not everyone could agree on their meanings when the formulae were established and they left that to other theologians to figure out. If this seems minor, let me reiterate: Men were condemned because they did not use the right Greek term for substance or soul but the men who won did not know exactly why they won. And yet we still consider this orthodox? 4) These ideas can no longer be held with our modern understandings of the universe. We no longer assume a soul-body dualism that allows us to maintain sarx vs anima anymore and so teasing out all of these distinctions is not only useless but a waste of time today. We have a more nuanced anthropology of humanity and (I hope) a better understanding of God and if we talk about God's "substance" today, we should expect to be ridiculed.
Of course, there are also many other reasons why I think we should be reluctant to give the Fathers any real credibility today. Augustine was clearly a misogynist who often changed his mind to argue against different people and used dirty politics when he lost (such as when he originally lost against Pelagius). Origen reportedly castrated himself and wanted to be martyred but his mother hid his clothes so he was afraid to run outside naked in front of the Roman soldiers (Oedipal much?). Jerome was also a misanthrope who went to live in a cave to get away from all people. Nobody during the Patristics period was pure, and yet, we maintain their views as if there are no problems. If any of their writings were published today, they would immediately be criticized for being misogynistic, anti-semites who employ logical fallacies and rhetorical showmanship in order to win over their audiences. And yet, this is what we consider true doctrine.
Now, once again, I do not mean to say we need to get rid of everything the early Fathers said. I do think, however, that we need to realize that the burden of proof now lies on them, rather than modern critics. If we excuse away their odious attitudes as relics of an age past, we must also excuse away their doctrine as relics of an age past. Rather than accepting all they say, except for the parts that are clearly not useable, I think we should rather only accept those things from them which are useable. It is time we move beyond the ignorant views of a bygone era and begin to view Christianity as something more positive.

Unanswered Questions

So Alexa and I had a long discussion today which involved several different things. However, there is really one which I would like to expound more. Anybody who has paid much attention to controversial issues of the day knows that a chief topic is Creationism versus Evolution.
Concerning the topic of Creationism, there are several big objections I have against it. The timing makes little to no sense, nor does the order of creation. Additionally, I have a hard time with the idea that God, being a god who is thought to work inside the confines of nature would create the world in such a strange manner, ignoring matter and universal properties rather than creating the sun with light, and land with the sea. Additionally, there is the simple matter of logistic errors. Why is there water in the sky? Why is woman pulled out of the side of the man? Why is the sun created after the earth? Finally, there is the contradiction in stories. Yes, storieS. Chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis provide two different stories of the creation. In one instance, God creates everything, and in the end creates humans. In the second, God creates man, then creates everything else in order to be used by human. Both stories supply woman as being created after man, in one instance being drawn from his actual body, and in the other being created almost as an after thought.
However, even with these many objections, I do think that the Creation has some merit to it. It is a scriptural story that has lasted through thousands of years, a claim that NO OTHER origination idea can claim. Also, There is the simple fact of human telos and God's glory in us. Whether or not we believe the stories to be literal, they demonstrate for us God's love in a very basic way. God loves us from the beginning, makes us in God's image and watches out for us and takes care of us.
Also, there is a lot to be gained from the story allegorically, as Origen, even in the second century, admits. We learn a basic pattern for human labor. We learn a metaphysical truth that Aquinas would verify in the hierarchy of being. We learn the connection between all things and the divine origin of the universe. Finally, we see that all that God has created is GOOD.
Evolution has several problems with it as well, however. Human achievment, intelligence and sentience is discounted if we are little more than a step on the evolutionary ladder. Identity and purpose is void if we are simply mutated simians. Thousands of years of philosophies and theologies are invalidated because the true answer to human existence lies in random chances and chemical reactions.
Furthermore, the truth is that the idea of human origin through evolution is not a scientific principle, though thought by many to be so. Evolution is cited as a principle, insofar as we have observed it in lower life-forms (bacteria and insects, ie). However, the idea of humans being descended from primordial primates is NOT a principle, but merely a theory. Granted, it has valid implications and has plenty of basis, but as there is no definitive proof, one cannot state that evolution of human origins is a proven principle.
Also, Evolution is an idea only 150 years old (this year!). Science continually disproves itself. The physics of Aristotle's time were disproven by Cartesian physics, which were disproven by Newton, who was shown to be wrong by Einstein, which even today is considered incorrect by Quantum physics. Biological origination has come a long way since pre-Pasteur. Even evolutionary theory has moved a long way since Origin of Species. Thus, to assert the absolute correctness of modern evolutionary theories would be to deny any possibility of a better theory in the future.
I have no problem synthesizing the two ideas, however. If we imagine for ourselves a God who operates in the natural world, one can posit biological development as if God were working in a petri dish which we term "earth." Thus humanity can emerge from the natural world, a world which even the Genesis account deems to be "good." Human diversity, awareness, sense of telos and natural curiosity can be accounted for by God's creation of us, whereas our animal bodies can be explained by the evolutionary aspect of it.
It is important to note that science does not and has never disproven God. Furthermore, true theology should never conflict with scientific truths. Thirteenth century Muslim philosophers understood this idea better than most Christians do today. Muslim thinkers like Averroes and Avicenna taught that if a scientific principle conflicted with theology, either we misunderstand the scientific results or we misunderstand our theological truths. God cannot create a universe that disproves Him. This is essential for us to understand as believers. For those skeptics out there, it is important to remember that modern scientific method is derived from the Golden Age of Islam.
Finally, we must cede that we do not actually understand or know where it is that we come from. As believers, the best we can truly say is that we believe we are made in God's image and likeness. As scientists, the best we can say is that our physiology, anatomy, and DNA suggests a close relationship between us and other primates which suggests a common ancestry. But whether an idea is three thousand years old, or only a hundred and fifty, we do not know definitively what the real answer is. Thus, I think it is wrong for either side to discount the other completely. Being completely ideologically opposed to the propogation of the other idea is just as bad as the accusations leveled against whatever group we support.
Best of all we need to understand that as believers, we must be willing to accept what science tells us and seek to understand God better through this rather than denying whatever new ideas may come at us. The theology introduced in the Torah is radically different from the theology of the Gospels, which is added to and explained over the course of the proceeding two millenia. To follow the mantra of evolutionary theory, if we do not adapt with our theologies, we shall find that we whither and die.