Howard Wettstein
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All Your Deeds
I just read the seventy-third psalm. I don't understand much of it, but it begins with a complaint about injustice, and I certainly feel like I get that part.
The last line caused me some trouble, though. In it Asaph, the psalmist, says "I will tell of all your [God's] deeds."
Okay, what exactly are those deeds? What can we ever reliably say about God's deeds? If God had done something in history that were not open to historical doubt, there would be no atheists.
The tradition gives us stories about God, and a century of biblical criticism calls those stories myths. Still, as I have argued elsewhere (here, and here, for example) myth is not - or should not be taken as - a synonym for falsehood. Stories may be myths and true, even if not historically true.
As Howard Wettstein argues in his Significance of Religious Experience,
Which makes me wonder: what roles does God play in my life? What "deeds" may I speak of?
Before I reply, let me hasten to say this: I am often reluctant to write too strongly about this sort of thing because I do not want to say that others must believe what I believe. If God has led me to belief, (grant me that for the sake of argument for a moment) God has not strong-armed me into belief but allowed me to arrive at my beliefs over time, letting them be shaped by experience. I do not see why I should allow you less liberty than God has allowed me.
So I write the following admitting that I do not know what I am writing about. As Augustine confessed, when I speak of my love for God, I do so simultaneously wondering what I mean by "God." What can I compare God to? What is God like? I do not know how to answer those questions, except by telling stories, expositing roles. So here goes:
When I was a child, belief in God motivated a family in my neighborhood to care about me and to welcome me into their home when my family was falling apart. Without that love...I shudder to think what I would be today.
God gives me a name for what I pray to. God gives me a focal point for my attention in the vast cosmos, and God gives me a sense that in such a cosmos persons matter. And because persons matter, justice matters. This is not to say one cannot be just without belief, or that belief makes one just - far from it! - only that I find for myself the two ideas closely bound together.
God gives me solace in my mourning and hope when I pray. My mother is dead, but when I speak to God about her, she is not lost.
God gives me a story about the centrality of nurturing love. A reason to think all things are related. Someone to thank. Someone to be angry with. Rest for my soul. Quietness, and in it, trust.
God gives me a story about giving, and why giving and receiving should matter so much.
A story about why, and how, to turn a guilty conscience into repentance. A reason to forgive, and, very often, the strength to forgive. And to hope that I too am forgivable.
A reason to hope that no one is beyond redemption, beyond all hope, completely unworthy of love.
Belief that every person matters. More than that, belief that a teenage girl could be a vessel of the divine; that a third-world martyred prophet could save the world; that an inarticulate foreigner could be a world-historical lawgiver; that a persecuting zealot could get hit so hard by grace that he lives the rest of his life to preach good news for all people everywhere.
Hope that prison doors could be opened, that tongues could be loosed, that great art and great music might be signs of the divine.
I could be wrong about all of this, I know. I know there are other explanations of what I have written above. I also know those explanations apply to music, too, and I'm not interested in hearing about them there either if the reason for offering them is to help disabuse me of my love for good music. I know that people use the same word I use here to justify violence, self-interest, and hatred. I cannot help but feel angry and disgusted when it is used for those ends, ends which seem so contrary to what the word means for me, ends that make me think someone has read the wrong script, mis-cast the character, not known what deeds God has done.
The last line caused me some trouble, though. In it Asaph, the psalmist, says "I will tell of all your [God's] deeds."
Okay, what exactly are those deeds? What can we ever reliably say about God's deeds? If God had done something in history that were not open to historical doubt, there would be no atheists.
The tradition gives us stories about God, and a century of biblical criticism calls those stories myths. Still, as I have argued elsewhere (here, and here, for example) myth is not - or should not be taken as - a synonym for falsehood. Stories may be myths and true, even if not historically true.
As Howard Wettstein argues in his Significance of Religious Experience,
The Bible’s characteristic mode of ‘theology’ is story telling, the stories overlaid with poetic language. Never does one find the sort of conceptually refined doctrinal propositions characteristic of a doctrinal approach. When the divine protagonist comes into view, we are not told much about his properties. Think about the divine perfections, the highly abstract omni-properties (omnipotence, omniscience, and the like), so dominant in medieval and post-medieval theology. One has to work very hard—too hard—to find even hints of these in the Biblical text. Instead of properties, perfection and the like the Bible speaks of God’s roles—father, king, friend, lover, judge, creator, and the like. Roles, as opposed to properties; this should give one pause. (108, emphasis added)The stories may not be about historical "deeds" but may be about the character, the roles of God.
Which makes me wonder: what roles does God play in my life? What "deeds" may I speak of?
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| The preface to the complaint in Psalm 73 |
Before I reply, let me hasten to say this: I am often reluctant to write too strongly about this sort of thing because I do not want to say that others must believe what I believe. If God has led me to belief, (grant me that for the sake of argument for a moment) God has not strong-armed me into belief but allowed me to arrive at my beliefs over time, letting them be shaped by experience. I do not see why I should allow you less liberty than God has allowed me.
So I write the following admitting that I do not know what I am writing about. As Augustine confessed, when I speak of my love for God, I do so simultaneously wondering what I mean by "God." What can I compare God to? What is God like? I do not know how to answer those questions, except by telling stories, expositing roles. So here goes:
When I was a child, belief in God motivated a family in my neighborhood to care about me and to welcome me into their home when my family was falling apart. Without that love...I shudder to think what I would be today.
God gives me a name for what I pray to. God gives me a focal point for my attention in the vast cosmos, and God gives me a sense that in such a cosmos persons matter. And because persons matter, justice matters. This is not to say one cannot be just without belief, or that belief makes one just - far from it! - only that I find for myself the two ideas closely bound together.
God gives me solace in my mourning and hope when I pray. My mother is dead, but when I speak to God about her, she is not lost.
God gives me a story about the centrality of nurturing love. A reason to think all things are related. Someone to thank. Someone to be angry with. Rest for my soul. Quietness, and in it, trust.
God gives me a story about giving, and why giving and receiving should matter so much.
A story about why, and how, to turn a guilty conscience into repentance. A reason to forgive, and, very often, the strength to forgive. And to hope that I too am forgivable.
A reason to hope that no one is beyond redemption, beyond all hope, completely unworthy of love.
Belief that every person matters. More than that, belief that a teenage girl could be a vessel of the divine; that a third-world martyred prophet could save the world; that an inarticulate foreigner could be a world-historical lawgiver; that a persecuting zealot could get hit so hard by grace that he lives the rest of his life to preach good news for all people everywhere.
Hope that prison doors could be opened, that tongues could be loosed, that great art and great music might be signs of the divine.
I could be wrong about all of this, I know. I know there are other explanations of what I have written above. I also know those explanations apply to music, too, and I'm not interested in hearing about them there either if the reason for offering them is to help disabuse me of my love for good music. I know that people use the same word I use here to justify violence, self-interest, and hatred. I cannot help but feel angry and disgusted when it is used for those ends, ends which seem so contrary to what the word means for me, ends that make me think someone has read the wrong script, mis-cast the character, not known what deeds God has done.
∞
This week I've been reading and re-reading Howard Wettstein's The Significance of Religious Experience and, at the same time, talking with my friend John Kaag about creativity and wonder in Peirce and the other classical Pragmatists.
At the end of his Cambridge Conference lectures of 1898, Peirce quoted a phrase from the Book of Acts, ch 17. The phrase is "live and move and have our being." It appears in a speech by St. Paul, the only time the Greek Testament records a Christian conversing with philosophers. Paul quotes two Greek writers in that speech, Aratus and Epimenides.
The citation of Epimenides is relevant to the Areopagus, the place where Paul is speaking, as I have written elsewhere. Paul quotes Epimenides' poem, the Cretica, in which Epimenides says of Zeus. "In him we live and move and have our being."
Epimenides had been summoned to the Areopagus several centuries prior to Paul's visit. The Athenians were suffering from a long plague and none of their sacrifices had ended it. As Diogenes Laertius recounts,* Epimenides suggested that if their sacrifices to the gods they knew were not availing them, perhaps they should sacrifice to an as-yet unknown god.
The difficulty is that if you don't know the god, how do you know what the god wants? What are the proper prayers? What are the right sacrifices? Who should make them?
Epimenides' solution appears to have been to confess ignorance and then to engage in the ritual to the best of his knowledge. In the absence of settled doctrine, he leaned on human practice. As Epicurus once pointed out, (see the very first line in Epicurus's Principal Doctrines) if your god gets angry about that sort of thing, it's probably not a god worth worshiping anyway.
To put a positive spin on that, consider how the Epimenides story ends: he directs the sacrifices, and the plague ends. And the Athenians leave the altars to an unknown god on the slopes of the Areopagus, where Paul finds one centuries later. Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to pray without knowing everything about God. And maybe, if there's a God, that God knows we don't know much about God at all, and is okay with that. Maybe religion is, as Wettstein suggests, like mathematics, something we can engage in even in the absence of settled knowledge about the underlying metaphysics. I hope so.
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Epimenides, Or Religion Without Metaphysics
This week I've been reading and re-reading Howard Wettstein's The Significance of Religious Experience and, at the same time, talking with my friend John Kaag about creativity and wonder in Peirce and the other classical Pragmatists.
At the end of his Cambridge Conference lectures of 1898, Peirce quoted a phrase from the Book of Acts, ch 17. The phrase is "live and move and have our being." It appears in a speech by St. Paul, the only time the Greek Testament records a Christian conversing with philosophers. Paul quotes two Greek writers in that speech, Aratus and Epimenides.
The citation of Epimenides is relevant to the Areopagus, the place where Paul is speaking, as I have written elsewhere. Paul quotes Epimenides' poem, the Cretica, in which Epimenides says of Zeus. "In him we live and move and have our being."
Epimenides had been summoned to the Areopagus several centuries prior to Paul's visit. The Athenians were suffering from a long plague and none of their sacrifices had ended it. As Diogenes Laertius recounts,* Epimenides suggested that if their sacrifices to the gods they knew were not availing them, perhaps they should sacrifice to an as-yet unknown god.
The difficulty is that if you don't know the god, how do you know what the god wants? What are the proper prayers? What are the right sacrifices? Who should make them?
Epimenides' solution appears to have been to confess ignorance and then to engage in the ritual to the best of his knowledge. In the absence of settled doctrine, he leaned on human practice. As Epicurus once pointed out, (see the very first line in Epicurus's Principal Doctrines) if your god gets angry about that sort of thing, it's probably not a god worth worshiping anyway.
To put a positive spin on that, consider how the Epimenides story ends: he directs the sacrifices, and the plague ends. And the Athenians leave the altars to an unknown god on the slopes of the Areopagus, where Paul finds one centuries later. Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to pray without knowing everything about God. And maybe, if there's a God, that God knows we don't know much about God at all, and is okay with that. Maybe religion is, as Wettstein suggests, like mathematics, something we can engage in even in the absence of settled knowledge about the underlying metaphysics. I hope so.
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| Foreground: Agora of Athens; Background: Acropolis (L) and Areopagus (R) of Athens. |
I took this photo from the temple of Hephaestus on the West end of the ancient agora of Athens. The ruins in the foreground are the old marketplace and civic buildings. At the top left is the Acropolis and the Parthenon; just to the right of the Acropolis is the Areopagus, which currently hosts no buildings, though if you look closely you can see some tourists walking around on the hill. Presumably Epimenides built his altars on the slope leading up to the Areopagus. According to the story in Acts, St Paul preached first in the agora and then on the Areopagus, walking up past an altar left by Epimenides.
*****
* We also find reference to the altars erected by Epimenides in Pausanias (I.i.4); and in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius. Lucian's Philopatris alludes to it as well, but it is possible that he is referring to Acts 17. Epimenides is quoted more than once in the Greek scriptures; he is also quoted in Titus 1.12.
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Wettstein on Narrative Theology
I have occasionally written about theology and theomythy in this blog. And in my book From Homer To Harry Potter my coauthor and I attempted a longer defense of the idea that the heart of the Bible is not propositional theology but narrative theology and storytelling. I am right now working up a review of a marvelous book by Howard Wettstein (the picture on his home page is worth a thousand words) entitled The Significance of Religious Experience. His book is thought-provoking and illuminating -- I'll save the details for the full review -- but for now, let me offer two helpful quotes.
“We often speak of the biblical narrative, and narrative is another aspect of the Bible’s literary character. The Bible’s characteristic mode of ‘theology’ is story telling, the stories overlaid with poetic language. Never does one find the sort of conceptually refined doctrinal propositions characteristic of a doctrinal approach. When the divine protagonist comes into view, we are not told much about his properties. Think about the divine perfections, the highly abstract omni-properties (omnipotence, omniscience, and the like), so dominant in medieval and post-medieval theology. One has to work very hard—too hard—to find even hints of these in the Biblical text. Instead of properties, perfection and the like the Bible speaks of God’s roles—father, king, friend, lover, judge, creator, and the like. Roles, as opposed to properties; this should give one pause.” (108)
I will confess that this is a difficult review to write; it's rare that I find a book that I'd rather quote at great length rather than summarize. His writing is lucid, combining analytic rigor and pragmatic vision with Talmudic wisdom. It is delicious in its suggestiveness. It's the sort of book I expect will tinge everything I write for a long time.“Biblical theology is poetically infused, not propositionally articulated.” (110)