Belief-o-matic: what sort of religion should one have?

The Stroppy Rabbit: Belief-o-matic:

I do the Belief-o-matic questionnaire occasionally as a sort of personal inventory. My latest results (interestingly, I am now only 87% Pagan):

It's quite a while since I did it, and here is the result:

1.	Orthodox Quaker (100%)
2.	Eastern Orthodox (95%)
3.	Roman Catholic (95%)
4.	Seventh Day Adventist (87%)
5.	Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (81%)
6.	Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (80%)
7.	Liberal Quakers (65%)
8.	Hinduism (64%)
9.	Orthodox Judaism (52%)
10.	Unitarian Universalism (51%)

It was a bit of a surprise, because the last time I did it, I think the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) came third, and now they're a long way down, and the Quakers are up. I think they keep changing the questions.

Orthodoxy and Evangelical Protestantism

Benedict Seraphim has drawn attention to this report on Biola University and the Orthodox (Biola? Sounds like some kind of health drink!).

For those who may be interested, it is a comprehensive statement of what Orthodoxy looks like from an Evangelical Protestant point of view.

It has some serious flaws, however.

In the first item, on "justification", it points out, quite correctly, that Orthodoxy does not accept the Protestant idea of forensic justification (based as it is, on the notion of penal substitution). But it makes the error of supposing that the Orthodox understanding of Theosis is comparable to the Protestant understanding of justification. A fairer comparison would be between Theosis and the Protestant understanding of sanctification. There may be differences, but at least it would be like comparing Cheddar with Camembert, rather than comparing chalk and cheese.

Much of the remainder of the document seems to make the Orthodox Church look like the Roman Catholic Church in precisely the areas where the Orthodox Church sees itself as differing from the Roman Catholic Church. The problem here is with the frame of reference. The Biola report looks through Western spectacles, with a Western frame of reference, and does not really take into account the different frame of reference.

War and the Enlightenment

In Notes from a commonplace book: war and the Enlightenment there is an interesting comment on how the Enlightenment changed Western attitudes to war.

I've not really looked into that before, but have been interested in how the Enlightenment changed European attitudes to witchcraft, and made it difficult for Europeans to understand African attitudes to witchcraft, because it disturbingly reminded them of their premodern past (see Christian responses to witchcraft and sorcery).

This piece, however, sparks off a new train of thought. Even today white apologists for Western colonialism use the argument that European rule in Africa brought about peace and ended the endless wars that devastated the continent. But if we look at the precolonial wars in Africa, they were generally much milder than the wars brought about after colonialism, which are often driven by neocolonialism (eg the history of Congo for the last 50 years). This modern warfare was far more devastating than the precolonial kind, with the possible exception of the Mfecane.

I'm not sure whether this is simply another postmodern reaction to the worldview and values of modernity, but I think it needs further study.

Get a life!

I've often seen the comment "Get a life" on electronic discussion forums. It usually indicates that the person who writes it disagrees with what someone else has said, but can't be bothered to get to grips with the issues, so it has become a meaningless cliche.

But here is an indication that at one time the phrase may have had a real meaning: Changing the World (and other excuses for not getting a proper job...): Get a First Life!

Gnosticism, neognosticism and Orthodoxy

A couple of days ago I caught glimpses of a TV programme on Leonardo da Vinci. It had to do with a picture of two babies kissing, and whether it was by him, and if so, whether it showed that he was influenced by Gnosticism. I didn't follow the arguments closely as I was doing something else at the time, but it reminded me that there seems to be a growing interest in gnosticism in the media, and I got the impression that the people who made that TV programme thought that gnosticism was cool, and wouldn't it be cool if it could be shown that Leonardo da Vinci was influenced by gnosticism.

Now I'm no fundi on gnosticism, and I'm not particularly interested in it, but I do find it interesting that there seems to be a social tendency, at least in the West, towards a greater interest in gnosticism.

Some 45 years ago I wrote to my cousin and quoted something from the Nag Hammadi documents, which recorded as a saying of Jesus, "Lift the stone and thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and I am there." My cousin, who was going through a rather puritanical Baptist phase, wrote back asking if those were gnostic documents, and implying that if they were, there could be nothing good about the saying. There seemed to be a great prejudice against anything that might possibly be tainted by gnosticism.

Now the prejudice seems to be the other way. If it's gnostic, it must be good. Leonardo da Vinci was a great genius, but if he was a gnostic, his genius must be greater still.

As I said, I make no claim to be a fundi on gnosticism, so I defer to the opinion of one who is an acknowledged expert, Elaine Pagels. And I think she got it right in her description of the difference between gnosticism and Orthodox Christianity, and why Orthodox Christianity rejected gnosticism:

Orthodox Christians were concerned - far more than gnostics - with their relationships with other people. If gnostics insisted that humanity's original experience of evil involved internal emotional distress, the orthodox dissented. Recalling the story of Adam and Eve, they explained that humanity discovered evil in human violation of the natural order, itself essentially "good." The orthodox interpreted evil (kakia) primarily in terms of violence against others (thus giving the moral connotation of the term). They revised the Mosaic code, which prohibits physical violation of others - murder, stealing, adultery - in terms of Jesus' prohibitions against even mental and emotional violence - anger, lust, hatred.

Agreeing that human suffering derives from human guilt, orthodox Christians affirmed the natural order. Earth's plains, deserts, seas, mountains, stars and trees form an appropriate home for humanity. As part of that "good" creation, the orthodox recognised the processes of human biology: they tended to trust and affirm sexuality (at least in marriage), procreation and human development. The orthodox Christian saw Christ not as one who leads souls out of this world into enlightenment, but as "fullness of God" come down into human experience - into bodily experience - to sacralize it (Pagels 1981:174).

Now, on the fifth day of Christmas, one tends to think of the relationship between God and the material world, and that God so loved the material world as to take human flesh and enter it as a man. This is a stumbling block to Jews, folly to the Greeks and blasphemy to Muslims. But it's what Christians believe.

Pagels did not get everything right in her book. She had some strange ideas about some of the details, such as Orthodox Christian views of St Mary Magdalene (one of the Myrrh-bearing women and Equal-to-the-Apostles, according to the Orthodox). But she got the big picture right on the difference between Orthodoxy and Gnosticism.

Orthodox Christianity, unlike gnosticism, is characterised by ubuntu, humanity.

Christ is born -- glorify Him!
Christ is in our midst -- He is and always shall be.

On relativism and fundamentalism

Peter Berger has some interesting comments on relativism and fundamentalism and the way they interact in modern (and perhaps postmodern) culture.

There are some fields of study, and missiology is one of them, in which one becomes aware of how much our worldview is culturally conditioned. In electronic discussion forums, especially international ones, one also becomes aware of how different people's perceptions are, when they come from different cultures.

"Fundamentalists", in Berger's sense, appear to be those who reject relativism, and believe that the values and worldview of their culture are universal and equally applicable to all people everywhere.

I find this difficult, because it makes any kind of communication between different cultures and worldviews impossible. So I sometimes find the phenomenologists' "bracketing" can be useful -- when examining a particular phenomenon or culture or worldview -- accept it as valid in its own terms in order to try to understand it.

Another way of deescribing the "relativist" and "fundamentalist" views that Berger describes is as "subjective" and "objective". For relativists, all truth is subjective. The existentialist philosopher Kierkegaard coined the slogan that subjectivivity is truth. For fundamentalists (with a small "f"), truth is objective. They believe that there is objective truth out there, that it can be known, and they know it.

The trouble is that when one tries to look at things objectively, one sees that fundamentalists are actually very subjective, and fail to realise that objectivity is an unattainable ideal.

For myself, I believe that there is objective truth out there, and that it can be known, but it is primarily known subjectively. So I suppose that makes me a relativist fundamentalist, but not a fundamentalist relativist. Fundamentalist relativists believe that everything is relative and that there are no absolute truths, except one: the propoistion that everything is relative is absolute truth, and may not be questioned.

Theological worldviews

I found a quiz on "What's your theological worldview?"

I was struck by the remarkably narrow and circumscribed view of the author. It has no provision for Orthodox Christianity. It has such things as "Classical liberal" and "Modern liberal", which I find difficult to conceive of. It also omitted significant movements in Western theology like liberation theology, black theology, feminist theology etc, and non-western movements like Zionism.

So one couldn't even say that it had a Western bias -- its bias seemed far narrower than that.

I posted my results for the quiz on my other blog, here and was interested to see that (in admittedly small sample) Orthodox Christians seemed to come up with

1. Roman Catholic
   
2. Evangelical Wesleyan/Holiness
   
3. Neo-orthodox
   

in the top three.

I suppose that, of all Protestants, Free Methodists come closest to Orthodoxy in at least sharing some similar concerns.

The quiz also had an "Emerging/Postmodern" category, which I had only heard of quite recently, yet I am sure that both the Orthodox and Zionists outnumber them by several millions.