Nate Knows Nada

I end up continuing to respond to Ryan, but he’s been posting some smart, provocative stuff lately (not that he doens’t always say smart and provocative stuff, but the posts of late have been some good shit).

“God told me so” is not an investigation-closer; it’s a claim that’s full of data. Sometimes it involves a gut emotion, reinforced by community or pastoral approval. Sometimes it’s authorized by complex interpretation of dreams or hallucinations. Sometimes “God told me so” can be taken quite literally- people hear voices inside their heads, they have long conversations with God and Christ. (The third member of the Trinity- the Holy Spirit- tends not to speak to people. It speaks through possession and glossolalia).

“God told me so” presents an acceptable response in some fora, but the problem is that our political system is founded on an Enlightenment rationality that requires that answers to public questions be bases upon “reason” (a term that I don’t want to delve too much into, because Ryan and I both smart know that we may not resolve that in a comment box *grin*).  Whether that’s good or not, whether it’s true or not, the system has a foundational stone in that premise.

“God told me so” doesn’t play by that rule, and that’s the path that Revealer has gone down.  If the system is not rational, this seems to be saying, we shouldn’t enter it into the public sphere.

Sound unsatisfactory?  It probably is, but it’s one of the weaknesses of our political system.  Though ideologically different than me, Nicholas Wolterstorff over at Yale has done some interesting work on how you can bring non-rational (Enlightenment sense), religious explanations into your political reasoning.

The Holy Spirit does talk to people — in fact, orthodox Christian theology would indicate that those voices that people ascribe to the Father/Parent or the Word (the Second Person of the Trinity) are actually the Spirit, which is the person of the Trinity with God’s church in the latter days (i.e., the days after Christ).  All three persons are different manifestation of the one God, and to say that “God” (Father) or Jesus spoke to you is probably to commit (probably not maliciously) the heresy of tri-theism.

I’m not trying to be the theology police here, because my own theology is hardly completely orthodox (I sometimes flirt with panentheism, which isn’t explicitly called heretical in Christianity, but it’s probably heretical).  But tritheism is a serious danger in Christianity (as my Jewish friends do constantly remind me, and they often have a point, especially in light of the explanations of Christianity they seem to have gotten from Christians who don’t know much about their own religion), and it’s a useful spiritual exercise to think these things through.

This entry was posted on Friday, 30 January 2004 at 11:33 am and is filed under Rayleejun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.