© Roy King 2013. All Rights Reserved.
Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation
May 5, 2013
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How do we know what we know? This is an age-old question that has haunted philosophers and theologians for millennia. In particular, Western Christianity has based itself on professing certain creeds such as believing in the Trinity or in Jesus' resurrection. But we as Unitarian Universalists often have found our way here seeking alternatives to dogma and creeds. Like the Romantic artists and poets of the early 1800s, we are seekers of experience. Today, I will talk about three ways of knowing: The way of faith, the way of doubt and the way of faithful doubting.
The way of faith is the mode of knowledge most familiar to those of us who are embedded in American religious culture. It is the bedrock of the evangelical. Nowhere do we see faith raised to such an important pitch as in the Gospel of John. The book of John opens with declaring that Christ is the Word of God and pre-existing throughout eternity. It is sprinkled with familiar sayings such as "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life; believe in me; No one comes to the Father except through me" and so on. In our reading toward the end of the Book of John, we find that the setting is post Easter, post-resurrection.
John sets up Thomas as a straw man for the argument that faith is more important than experience. A few days before, Jesus had appeared to the other disciples while the disciple Thomas was absent. At this point, Thomas, always the skeptical one, approaches Jesus with the requirement that he must see the marks of the nails on his hands and touch the wounds suffered from the crucifixion in order to be convinced that Jesus is truly alive. From an embodied perspective, such a request seems natural, given the importance of touch and sight in deep interpersonal relationships. But Jesus, playing Thomas as the fool, tells him to put his fingers in his body's wounds and look at his hands and believe without doubt. Thomas then responds in amazement with the Christian confessional "My Lord and my God," persuaded that Jesus is the risen Christ. Jesus through the Gospel of John then replies, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe," thereby elevating faith over experience.
This confrontation between Jesus and Thomas has been repeated in my life and in conversations between my father, who is a devout Baptist, and me over the years. My father constantly is asking me whether I believe that Jesus rose from the dead. When I say to him that I have my doubts, that I actually don't believe in the violation of scientific laws, he always pats me on my back and says, "I hope that the future you will believe in the resurrection."
I've been so vexed by this impasse between me and my dad that a few years ago I asked Marcus Borg, a progressive Christian theologian and historian, how to respond to him. While I was driving Borg to the Oakland airport after giving a sermon at the Berkeley UCC church, he encouraged me to say, "Yes I believe in the resurrection," while in my heart qualifying it with a metaphoric interpretation, a kind of "fake it till you make it" theology.
The extolling of faith over experience is not just an issue with Christianity but extends across many of the world religions. Vikram Gandhi is a young South Asian Indian-American director who grew up in a Hindu household in New Jersey. He recalls the wonderful sense of peace his grandmother evoked while performing Hindu rituals in his home. Later, during adolescence, he became agnostic and secular and his orientation. He lamented the Western appropriation of Hinduism in the form of global yoga. He noticed the blind faith in followers of the yoga traditions perpetuated by gurus from both India and United States - gurus pronouncing occasional wise sayings in the presence of many devotees who listen enthusiastically to their every word. He originally wanted to do a documentary film on yoga gurus and during initial filming of this documentary he discovered that many of them deliberately exploited some of the young women who became their followers.
Because of the Vikram's Indian ancestry, he decided to grow a long beard, don orange robes and walk barefoot assuming the fake identity of a guru he named Sri Kumare. He traveled to Arizona and gave spiritual talks and yoga stretching classes at several local yoga studios. After a short time in Arizona, he developed a circle of devotees. He would often state that he was a simple man from India and not a guru and that the guru within is the master to whom you should be devoted.
Nonetheless, his followers still adored him and placed him on a pedestal pronouncing their belief in his transformative power and mystery. At the end of the documentary, Vikram, in tears, confesses the fact that he has been lying and acknowledges himself to be just another normal American kid. Even so, many of his followers felt inspired by his pretense and learned to trust in themselves rather than searching for an external purveyor of truth. So no religion is exempt from the problems of blind faith.
If knowing through faith has the disadvantage of relinquishing individual responsibility to the dominion of religious authority, then maybe we should explore knowing through doubting. Doubting is a core Unitarian Universalist value and historically arose from our Unitarian branch. One of our sources of UU living tradition is humanism. Humanist teachings counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science and warn against idolatries of the mind and spirit.
Although humanism entered into Unitarianism in the late 1800s and early 1900s, since the origin of America Unitarianism in the early 1800s, our beliefs have been grounded on rationalism. We were one of the first denominations to openly accept critical and scientific biblical criticism. From the beginning, Unitarians doubted the biblical miracles such as raising the dead, the virgin birth and the resurrection as scientifically implausible. This stance would certainly place us on the side with Thomas demanding naturalistic proof of the risen Christ's wounds.
Many American scholars, scientists and political leaders subscribed to these humanist ways of doubt. One fascinating scientist was David Starr Jordan. Jordan's middle name, Starr, was given him by his parents in order to honor Thomas Starr King, the Unitarian Universalist minister of California after whom my internship congregation was also named.
Jordan was raised Universalist and in the late 1890s became the first president of Stanford University. Later in life, Beacon Press, the Unitarian publishing house, published many of his works. Jordan was a prolific scientist and a prominent university president. He was very devoted to the social ideal of world peace and felt that wars were always unjust. But Jordan had his flaws.
He was trained as a biologist to study the classification of fish and became an early proponent of Darwinism. But like many public intellectuals of his time he also believed in eugenics and felt comfortable with the idea of sterilizing those whom he felt were physically or mentally inferior. Naturally, Anglo-Saxons like Jordan, himself, were at the top of the fitness pyramid. The main reason Jordan was a pacifist was that he felt that the superior individuals would be selectively killed during war thereby lowering the level of the race. Jordan subscribed to these beliefs since they represented the best of scientific biology of its time. Ironically, Jordan was such a competitive educational leader that it is rumored that he murdered Jane Lathrop Stanford by poisoning her with strychnine in order to keep his post at Stanford University.
We can also find more recent examples of moral errors from turning over to scientific rationalism, decisions about communal values. During the last decade in my field of psychiatry, the concept of evidence-based practice has spread throughout mental health treatment. Only if replicated by multiple controlled studies would any psychological or a pharmacological intervention be considered valid. No longer is medical or psychological intuition viewed as a source of knowledge about how to treat a client.
I am so pleased to be preaching at Mission Peak UU congregation where Rev. Meyers has set up a creative and compassionate mental health ministry that has moved beyond the limits industry driven medical treatment.
Even in the field of education, evidence-based evaluation of teaching has created a paralyzing uniformity in the way we educate our kids. This has resulted in a lack of intuitive spontaneity in the classroom. Nowhere is scientific rationalism more problematic than in the case of the district superintendent for the Atlanta school system and a cohort of 35 educators who were indicted and jailed a couple of months ago. They were accused of cheating by modifying their students' test scores in order to elevate the overall scores of their classrooms. This would afford them bonuses and job security. A total reliance on standardized tests, as scientific as it may appear, has resulted in rampant cheating.
Clearly knowledge through doubt suffers from some of the same problems of knowledge through blind faith, namely, an excessive reliance on authority and standardization. Without the face-to-face encounter with nature that science originally demanded of us, we are faced with many intermediate levels of authority and the screening of knowledge that interpret for us evidence buried under a morass of data. What a limiting and obscuring perspective!
Instead of relying on pure faith or pure doubt, what if we return to Thomas' need for direct human experience through touching and seeing Jesus? Little known is the fact that the disciple Thomas, himself, was reputed to have traveled to South India to start an Indian Christian church shortly after the death of Jesus.
The Gospel of Thomas was only discovered in 1948 in the desert of Egypt as part of a collection of papyri containing a rich assortment of Christian, Gnostic and philosophical texts. In this amazing theological diversity of early Christianity, biblical scholars view the Thomasine followers as direct competitors to those following the Gospel of John.
Thomas proposes a wisdom approach through a personal experience of the Divine by seeking the Kingdom within. "When you come to know yourself, then you will be known" as we heard from the Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel of John avoids relying on direct experience and God can only be know through faith in Christ, not through self-awareness. Very, very different ideas about how to grow closer to the Divine. The Gospel of John lifts up love, but it is an exclusive love for members a closed community - those who in common follow the Christ God. Touching and seeing are for us an increasingly important source of knowledge.
As the anthropologist, Ashley Montagu, in his book Touching phrases it, "We in the Western world are beginning to discover our neglected senses. This growing awareness represents something of an overdue insurgency against the painful deprivation of sensory experience we have suffered in our technologized world".
Montagu exhorts us to touch, to ground, to move away from either exalting our intellect or drowning it in blind faith. Relying on experience, we are not certain, we are inbetween.
Thomas, as well, encourages us to faithfully live in that inbetween space. Truth is not out there but within, within our Holy reflections and coursing through our hearts. For Thomas, Jesus is kind of a shaman who points the way to the Divine through visionary and tactile feelings and in the recognition of the complex paradoxes of the world. Jesus is like Vikram Ghandhi's revealed guru - We are each gurus within, relying on our own perceptions of the Holy and we assemble together to share our own unique and intuitive experiences. This is doubting in community. This is faithful doubting.
Amen and Blessed Be.
[24] But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came.
[25] So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe."
[26] A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you."
[27] Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe."
[28] Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!"
[29] Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."
(3) Jesus says:
(1) "If those who lead you say to you: 'Look, the kingdom is in the sky!' then the birds of the sky will precede you.
(2) If they say to you: 'It is in the sea,' then the fishes will precede you.
(3) Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and outside of you."
(4) "When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the children of the living Father.
(5) But if you do not come to know yourselves, then you exist in poverty, and you are poverty."
(5) Jesus says:
(1) "Come to know what is in front of you, and that which is hidden from you will become clear to you.
(2) For there is nothing hidden that will not become manifest."