Around the Table: Talking Graciously about God

Acknowledgments

I suppose every author feels like I’m glad that’s finally over when a project comes to close. I feel like that now, but of course none of this is really over—I’ve just stopped writing. The writing has been the easy part; the hard part is learning to live out all the things I pretend to understand.

But I do have heaps of people to thank. Chris Spinks at Cascade Books has been supernaturally patient with my lame excuses for yet one more delay. I’m grateful to Steve Dunmire (director of Church Relations at Houghton) for inviting me to present an early version of chapter 2 several years ago at a regional pastors’ conference, and to J. Richard Middleton and the organizers of Evangelical Theology: New Challenges, New Opportunities at Northeastern Seminary (October 2017) for allowing me to present a shortened version of chapter 4 (on the New and Newer Atheists). Several of my students at Houghton also contributed their valuable time in reading and commenting on the early drafts: Ben Murphy, Lex Dakin, Bethany Kuiken, and the snarkiest and best assistant I’ve ever had, Holly Chaisson (who I miss dearly). I also must thank my old friend Andy Johnson (Nazarene Theological Seminary) for taking the time to read sections of the manuscript and give me candid advice.

And then, above all people on this planet, I have to thank my daughter Carolyn and wife Miriam for putting up with my endless theological rambling and talking through issues aloud in the car and around the dinner table. That didn’t start with the writing of this book, of course, but it certainly worsened as the writing continued! Carolyn, a master of the art of verbal jiu-jitsu, knows how to both shut me down and crack me up, while Miriam knows exactly when to leave me alone while I’m working out a theological horn stuck in my gut, when to tackle me, and when to tell me to put down the books, grab my fly rod, and get out on the river before I drive everyone crazy. She helped enormously with proofreading and formatting the manuscript, but in the grand scheme of things, that pales in comparison to all that she does. I don’t know how I’d get through this life without her.

My dad never understood what I do for a living; academia was an alien world to him. He was a truck driver, a mechanic, and a machinist, but he read voraciously, loved good conversation, and told the most outrageous (and lavishly embellished) stories you ever heard. Toward the end of his life, he told me that he was learning to love people even if they didn’t love him in return. This work is dedicated to the memory of that grand old man.

Pentecost Sunday, 2018

Abbreviations

LW Luther’s Works

Works The Works of John Wesley

Introduction

Can We Talk?

What This Book Is About

Several years ago, my wife, daughter, and I decided to stay away from an annual family reunion. This was an extended family reunion: siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins and shirttail relations, in-laws (and outlaws), and even some friends of the family would all be attending. Our work schedules would have allowed us to attend, we were all in good health, and we hadn’t made holiday plans over reunion weekend by mistake. We decided to skip out because the previous year’s reunion had been racked by tension over a host of culture war issues (all the usual suspects: healthcare reform, climate change, immigration, same-sex relationships). During the previous year’s reunion, what should have been a happy, back-slapping time of reconnecting with friends and relatives descended into alternating periods of sharp exchanges and awkward silences around the picnic tables, with some people quietly excusing themselves and others firing off cheap shots toward their favorite political or religious targets.

When people dragged God and the Bible into the discussions, things only got worse. You know the kinds of statements: "Well, my Bible says . . . when the Bible says nothing of the sort. You can’t be a Christian and believe . . ." when thoughtful Christians line up on both sides of an issue. No one cared to listen to me, of course, since I’m a professional theologian. I came home that year frazzled and scratching my head over what it would take for people to talk through contentious issues, especially those issues that concern theology, or simply, God-talk. God-talk makes most of our conversations more difficult.

This book comes out of a sense of pain and bewilderment as I’ve wrestled with this question: How can we talk graciously about God, especially in view of our disagreements? Through the years I’ve served as pastor, missionary, and (currently) professor of theology. Much of what I do in the classroom is help students from various positions on the theological spectrum—from Roman Catholics to independent Baptists to nones—gain perspective on their positions, think about what’s at stake, and consider carefully how to navigate the disagreements they have with each other. As someone who stands in the Wesleyan-Methodist tradition, my theological DNA is irenic, and in this book I don’t pretend to solve actual theological problems. I’m interested in aerial-view or big-picture questions about the kinds of disagreements we have with three different groups of people: other Christians, members of other faiths, and atheists and agnostics. Sometimes we’re so caught up in the heat of the moment, with misperceptions and accusations flying about, that we lose perspective on what our disagreements are really about. In a nutshell, this book is about questioning the questions, and questioning our conversational stance when we attempt to offer answers.

Other authors have addressed some of my concerns, of course. Richard Mouw’s Uncommon Decency: Christian Decency in an Uncivil World emphasizes the importance of maintaining Christian civility and developing conversational skills in a fractured and divisive world. Rob Bell’s What We Talk About When We Talk About God is a provocative (if a bit fluffy) piece about the oddness of God-talk in an age that seems increasingly dissatisfied with conventional answers given by the church. Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense offers a brilliant and witty rendering of Christianity’s legitimacy in public discourse and its capacity to speak to human beings’ deepest emotions and needs. Finally, Os Guinness’s Fools Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion attempts to revive the persuasive art of Christian apologetics, although in my view it dismisses too blithely serious questions posed both by members of other religions and our atheist critics, and of course it doesn’t address the situation of Christians disagreeing theologically amongst themselves.

What’s largely missing from books like these are conceptual tools that help us gain the big-picture view I’m talking about, tools that enable us to see the forest for the trees. So in this book I explore questions such as:

Why and how our conversations over heated theological issues tend to break down.

Why all arguments between Christians about God don’t carry the same weight, and why Christian unity has to be based on more than doctrinal unity.

Why our conversations with people of other faiths stall precisely over the question of salvation through Christ alone, and why we should affirm a providential role for the world’s religions.

Why all agnostics and atheists are not the same, and why our apologetics attempts often miss the boat entirely with these people.

Why our aims in these various conversations should be different, given our different conversation partners.

These are the sorts of questions that keep me up at night, and in this book I attempt to piece together an aerial perspective on the issues we argue about in a way that helps reduce the temperature in the room and enables us to talk with each other more thoughtfully and graciously. The importance of being able to do so in these times shouldn’t be lost on anyone.

Talk Talk Talk

I can hear it coming already: talk is cheap. We constantly hear the complaint about politicians and clergy that they’re all talk. If anything, we’re told that we need more action and less talk. When it comes to Christian love, I couldn’t agree more. We blah-blah-blah way too much about the gospel and fail spectacularly to enact it. But talking is rarely a matter of merely sharing what we think or feel about something. We talk with others and about others and about what those others believe. Our talk can encourage or discourage, heal or wound, bless or curse, calm or incite. Every major political decision to take action has been preceded by talk, and the effects of that action are usually spin-doctored to death by more talk. From international conflicts to discussions amongst family and friends, knowing how to talk to each other remains one of the most important skills we can have. I used to joke that we never talked about three things in my family: religion, politics, and everything else. That was a joke. Sort of.

In a world where caricaturing one’s opponents and shouting people down often carries the day (as one politician infamously put it, Never retreat; instead reload), some folks would say that reflection on the different types of conversation we have (talking about talking) is an indulgence few people can afford. Real-world problems demand that we ram our agenda through by any means necessary: the fate of the nation, church, or world (or all three) is at stake! But this real world argument itself is part of the problem. Anyone with real-world experience knows that settling issues by majority vote never settles issues and that you never convince anyone by sheer volume, misrepresenting their position, or flat-out lying about them. These short-term solutions in the end serve only to alienate people. The other problem with this position is that it’s not Christian. God doesn’t temporarily suspend our commitment to the Golden Rule and give us license to use whatever means necessary because we’re convinced we have the truth, or because we’re dealing with people we consider enemies because they disagree with us.

In the digital age, the sheer nastiness directed toward anyone who disagrees with us has reached dizzying levels. Digimodern theorist Alan Kirby paints a familiar picture of internet rancor. When I read the following description, I think of the jagged-edged online theological discussions in which I’ve participated.

One individual locked in a tiny room sitting at a computer screen typing out their irritation, projecting their bile into the atmosphere; and fifteen miles away a stranger doing the same; and five hundred miles away another, and so on, around the world. All of these streams of rancor and loathing then coalesce in the sky into a thin cloud of black and shallow dislike, and fall gently but dishearteningly to earth. None of the projectors is aware of any other: they spew in a void, and the contents of their irked guts are displayed potentially to everyone forever. I’d argue that this tends to be the pattern of Internet forums in general.¹

If Kirby is right, then one of the downsides to this new textuality called digimodernism is the proliferation of trolls (people who disrupt conversations with extremist or hater comments). I shouldn’t be shocked by now, but I’m still amazed by how many online arguments, over issues you ordinarily wouldn’t consider all that controversial, end with variations on a common social media benediction: Fuck you and die. The human race has never been without trolls, but now we possess the technological means at our fingertips to amplify our trollish tendencies. Theological trolls number amongst the worst, and I hope that, at a minimum, this book would help us become a bit less trollish. But that’s a bare minimum. Is it possible for us to become more gracious, deliberative conversation partners whilst bringing the full weight of Christian conviction into our conversations? That’s what I’m really after.

Before laying out how I mean to break down and tackle my central concerns, I’m going to offer a few reflections on why talking about God in our present national and global contexts is so tricky, and what we might reasonably hope from conversation, given different discussion partners. Following that, I’ll try to flesh out the central metaphor that holds this book together: that of sitting around the picnic table and talking at a family reunion. Then I’ll wrap things up by explaining where I’m coming from theologically, and what to expect in the following chapters.

Political Rhetoric: It’s the Worst!

Given the massive political divide currently afflicting the United States, talking graciously about nearly anything is becoming a lost art. In the world of guns and trumpets, political discourse gears itself toward anything but genuine conversation. We refer to the public form of discussion amongst politicians as debate, which should mean something like principled argumentation designed to convince others of your position (surely a laudable aim of conversation). But, while having the semblance of vigorous and open debate, the majority of political debates are a waste of time in terms of real conversation. No matter how well or poorly a candidate performed during a debate, even a casual political observer can predict with near 100-percent accuracy the blinkered post-debate commentary from the Right and the Left. In other words, public political discussions as a means of learning anything or changing minds are almost worthless, and these United States presently suffer from politicians’ inability to engage in anything resembling a genuine conversation. Most of us who have memory stretching back farther than a few decades would be hard-pressed to name a time in which political discourse was so debased. The old ideals of statesmanship (even if they were largely ideals) have gone by the boards.

This book is not about politics; it’s about God-talk. However, I bring up the example of political debate for this reason: I’m convinced that the more we come to imitate the rhetorical gamesmanship of our elected officials, the worse shape we’ll be in as a church. In this country, where politics and religion often slide seamlessly into one another, theologically liberal and conservative churches can barely talk to each other without lapsing into abusive ad hominem arguments, engaging in slander, or dropping the h-bomb (heresy!) on each other. Some churches, of course, unashamedly align themselves wholesale with one side or the other of the culture wars, to the point that they seem like little more than ecclesiastical extensions of the Republican or Democratic parties, all the while forgetting that the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church possesses its own idiom irreducible to modern political cant.

We’re Talking Not Merely Amongst Ourselves

If this were strictly an inbred American conversation, it would be bad enough. But the American church increasingly finds itself a marginalized player within the context of global Christianity. Philip Jenkins noted over a decade ago that, during the last century, the Christian world’s center of gravity has shifted southward, to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Today the largest Christian communities on the planet are to be found in Africa and Latin America. A ‘typical’ contemporary Christian may be a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela.² If we northerners, who share a common history and language, can’t talk to each other, how will we ever be able to talk with these southerners (vast numbers of whom are now among us) with whom we share even less culturally?

As if talking to fellow believers isn’t difficult enough, the stakes are even higher when you consider talking to members of other religions. American Christians’ ignorance of the rudiments of other religious traditions often results in disturbing stereotypes, caricatures, and even violence. Many liberals hold that all religions say the same thing; many conservatives point out the differences, but often don’t understand them, and those that do frequently interpret them as a threat. Both perspectives render conversation superfluous or almost impossible. As Stephen Prothero puts it,

What we need on this furiously religious planet is a realistic view of where religious rivals clash, and where they can cooperate. Approaching this volatile topic from this new angle may be scary. But the world is what it is. And both tolerance and respect are empty virtues until we actually know something about whomever it is we are supposed to be tolerating or respecting.³

With religious differences often at the root of violent clashes around the world, many of our fiercest critics see religion and its totalizing discourse itself as the real problem. As careful as authors such as Mark Juergensmeyer⁴ or William Cavanaugh⁵ might be when nuancing the relationship between religion and violence, ham-fisted agnostic and atheist critiques, such as those offered by Christopher Hitchens,⁶ Richard Dawkins,⁷ and Sam Harris,⁸ continue to exert considerable influence on the public imagination. Religious people, our critics say, tend to be scientifically and morally arrogant, and perhaps primed for religious violence on account of their unquestioned beliefs in divinely revealed truths about the origin, order, and end of this world. Even if you are religious, it’s hard to not see the point. When talking with people shaped by these new atheists and agnostics, we need an orientation toward conversation that’s different from our orientation toward other Christians or members of other religions, and we should be honest about our expectations in these conversations.

What Can We Hope from Conversation?

In graduate school, I studied the works of the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, and in my more idealistic moments I’m still drawn to the way he describes, perhaps a bit naively, what genuine conversation looks like:

A conversation is a process of two people understanding each other. Thus it is a characteristic of every true conversation that each opens himself to the other person, truly accepts his point of view as worthy of consideration and gets inside the other to such an extent that he understands not a particular individual, but what he says.⁹

The to-and-fro movement of play emerges as one of the central motifs in Gadamer’s analysis. Similar to the experience of playing a game in which you lose all sense of time, the mysterious nature of conversation holds us sway in a reality that seems to overwhelm us. It happens almost effortlessly.¹⁰ Taking Gadamer’s description to the extreme, you might picture sitting round the pub with your mates through the wee hours of the morning, losing all sense of time as you surrender to the effortless to-and-fro of the conversation. Passion, wittiness, and sharp jabs abound as you banter about everything from sports to movies to music to office politics, but it’s all good fun and carried out in good will. Who doesn’t live for these kinds of conversations?

Do most of our conversations proceed like this, however? In the academic, egg-heady world I inhabit, two contemporary philosophers in particular, Juergen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, have kicked the legs out from any rosy understanding of how we actually communicate. While mutual understanding remains the goal, Habermas demonstrates how various levels of power always condition our attempts at communication, and how the very language we use is frequently systematically distorted so as to marginalize or even silence dialogue partners.¹¹ Derrida muddies the water even further by revealing how the slipperiness of language itself constantly trips us up as the hard and fast distinctions we rely on dissolve or deconstruct themselves.¹²

You might think these discussions are a bit rarefied, but most of us recognize on-the-ground conversations in which the balance of power is anything but equal. We’re often expected to say buzzwords or phrase things a certain way, or to avoid particular questions or topics at all costs, since we already know what the other person will say in response to delicate questions. These pressures prevent people from having real conversations. We frequently follow, to varying degrees, scripts in order to maintain order or position, and we’ve all experienced those times when no matter how hard we tried to explain our position, the meaning we were aiming for slipped further and further away the harder we tried to make ourselves clear. So, while explaining the ins and outs of Habermas or Derrida would fall outside the scope of this book, their core insights throw a little cold water on us and remind us that it’s impossible to enter into conversations with others on an absolutely level playing field and/or to predict how things will go. We shouldn’t expect all conversations to go or end the same way.

Getting clear about our expectations in conversations can save us loads of frustration. In Paul Varo Martinson’s book Families of Faith, he describes four levels of dialogue.¹³ Low-level dialogue is the basic activity of getting to know something about each other, maybe chatting across the backyard fence or on the footpath or in the supermarket. Mid-level dialogue attempts genuine understanding of each other, perhaps through engaging in cooperative efforts like community projects or local government. This level involves empathy: trying to put yourself in your conversation partner’s shoes and seeing what things look like from her perspective. High-level dialogue is where the deepest sharing, out of mutual trust, becomes possible; in other words, friendship. Most of our conversations with people never reach this level, even if many people crave these relationships, and it’s uncomfortable when someone tries to jump levels before you’re ready, or you’ve tried to move to this level before your conversation partner is ready. Yet, Martinson says, beyond these forms is the kind of relationship that Jesus had with people. It is a relationship defined on the Christian side by self-expenditure for the sake of the other, a self-giving for the other’s sake, regardless of how we might agree or disagree.¹⁴

Martinson’s four-level taxonomy provides a good reference point for understanding the various levels of conversation, but I suspect that a question in the back of many people’s minds as they read this book is whether I’m in love with an unattainable ideal of conversation (perhaps his third or fourth level). In truth, I don’t think absolute transparency and trust is possible (or even desirable) with any human being; we always have to reckon with the fact of finitude and its sundry warts. Given the thorny conversations we find ourselves in, and the angularities of our different conversation partners, I’d be happy if what I’m doing in this book could help us approximate the second level (seeing things from someone else’s perspective) and nudge us to the brink of the third level (mutual trust and friendship). That would go a long way toward defusing fighting talk.

In Search of Models and Metaphors

I’ve tried to think of a helpful model or metaphor that would integrate the various themes in this book, and, as a theologian, I suppose I should come up with something theological (or at least biblical). Theologians’ fondness for models and metaphors sometimes glosses over the difference between these two terms. To rely on a classic distinction by philosopher Monroe Beardsley, a model is a precise description of the properties and interactions of whatever we happen to be investigating, with little room left for ambiguity or interpretation. The more precise a model is the better, to the point that it can exercise a kind of prescriptive or controlling function. A metaphor, on the other hand, redescribes something familiar in different terms so we can approach it in a new light, and leaves room for the listener or hearer to creatively fill in some of the details.¹⁵

Over the past few decades, many people have employed the doctrine of the Trinity as a model for ecclesial fellowship, and it’s tempting to drag the relations between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit into this discussion as a model for conversation. For many theologians, I suspect that the inspiration for this way of thinking comes from books like Yale theologian Miroslav Volf’s extraordinary After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity.¹⁶ But even Volf admits that, while the way we think about God’s triune life shapes the scope of Christian thought, there’s no easy one-to-one correspondence or application from the Trinity to our social reality.¹⁷ Any sort of application you might dream up has to be nuanced carefully before it can address our situation in any