Can You Believe Both Those Things at Once? Yes. But Can Both be True?

Intersessions are grueling. I try to teach one each time they are available for a couple reasons: 1. on the whole, a better quality of students (driven, motivated, prepared, less whiny), and 2. I get paid for an entire class at the end of the month, rather than four separate payments. At the end of day 4, the students will loathe the sound of my voice, and Friday is always miserable because I've completely exhausted them with questions they can't answer. The cycle begins over the second week, but it takes less time for them to hate me, as they're still in psychic shock from week one.

We finished day two today. I typically being Comp II by having them read Ethics, by Linda Pastan. We talk about ethics, and ultimately morality and its origin. By the end of hour two of the four hour day, their eyes are starting to get bloodshot, foreheads are resting against palms, and looks of irritation flash across their faces as I continue to insist they answer the question: where does morality come from? We deconstruct all the answers, refute all the trite aphorisms, quibble about the Bible versus other texts, shred God's law, navigate Moses, Hammurabi, and the Bill of Rights, finally settling for whatever answers the students started with: my mom, god, the Bible, internal moral compass, we make the shit up as we go, social contract, etc. The goal is not to deconstruct their faith, but to deconstruct their lazy thinking. It's exhausting, and that's day one.

Day two, today, is a recap of Randall Kenan's The Foundations of the Earth. In the past, I've bitched about students' inability to identify biblical allusions: Gabriel, Hezekiah, the damn title, Maggie's vision, gird up your loins like a man, etc. Today I realized I'm more disturbed that even with the biblial allusions explained, the story explicated, and the clear point that Kenan is making written on the boad, students were incapable of answering a simple question: why can we not assume homosexuality is a moral choice in light of Kenan's argument? (The three students who offered cogent counter arguments to Kenan's thesis were all self-described non-Christians, including two atheists.)

Here's his point: inasmuch as Christians prefer one text over another when texts clearly contradict, they implicitly admit to having a criteria by which they determine which text has more authority. It only takes about five minutes, or ten if they're stubborn, to show the foolishness of assuming a hermeneutical method can be consistently applied throughout the Bible. All Christians confer differing degrees of authority on texts, and the criteria they use is one of the hardest things to flesh out, hidden as it is under layers of preference and convenience and denial and piety. Kenan's argument leads the reader to conclude that the text about homosexuality in Leviticus has less authority than a commandment. Once you introduce the issue of graded authority, you're left holding a collection of texts that inevitably slam into each other, and the real world. Fundamentalists do not fare well in this environment.

One student anticipated where the conversation was headed vis-a-vis gay marriage and the Constitution, and asked why Christians think the law of God ought to be the law of a country. We briefly discussed moral, civil, and ceremonial law, the death of Jesus, the parsing of the Law, and how, if they wish to be consistent, the Law must be an extension or at least emblematic of God's character, not a list of arbitrary rules that we are obliged to follow but He is not "because He's god." Another student took issue. God can do what he wants, she insisted. Then you can't trust him, I replied. Why not? Because if he can do what he wants, he can lie to you and you may not be saved after all. He doesn't lie, she said. You said he can do whatever he wants. He can, but he doesn't lie. How can you know that? Because he says his word can be trusted. But you said he can do whatever he wants. She failed to realize the contradiction she'd wandered into. She insisted she wasn't contradicting herself. I finally asked the class to say whether she was or not. They agreed she was. I still don't think she believes it.

She is not alone in using language as explanation even when it explains nothing. She kept insisting that God can't lie because she'd always been told that. She even believes it, and she simultaneously believes he can do whatever he wants. So, does he not want to lie or can he not lie, and could he if he wanted to? This is problematic when assigning absolute truth values to texts that seem to say two different things: love your enemy versus hate your enemy kind of stuff. For the Christian who would then point to Jesus bringing a new law, I'll just sigh deeply and say, "I know. But are you obligated to keep the new law, or does he just say all that stuff so you'll despair and rely on grace?" The possible ways to parse texts and corresponding responsibilities in light of texts are dizzying, and I'm finding more and more that students have never been given the skills by their schools or churches to actually flesh out what it is that they're supposed to believe beyond "God likes me. Jesus died for me. I go to heaven." 

Clearly there are ways to make arguments in light of what I've written here and what Kenan argues, but not one person of faith made a good one. A couple atheists and a Science of Mind girl did, but not the Bible believers. Umm...y'all might want to rethink Christian education.

Comments

[Leighton]

I don't know -- I think Christian education, in the U.S. at least, could not possibly be any better at its implicit purpose of manufacturing lifelong Republican voters. In a different arena, airline security is a joke ("Security theater," as Bruce Schneier says) if you think it has anything to do with the security of passengers, but it's a slick, well-oiled machine if you assume its purpose is to protect airlines and airports from liability in the event that anything actually does go wrong. Assuming that Christian education is intended by its curriculum designers to have anything to do with Christ is too literalist, IMO.

[April]

I am currently finishing up a summer session world religions class as a TA. Today one of the Muslim students in class couldn't wrap his head around the idea that a self-proclaimed prophet after Mohammad (Bahá'u'lláh, specifically,) issues a challenge to the notion of "the seal of the prophets" and the idea of the Quran as a complete and perfect text, and that the very notion of "seal of the prophets" functions to discount any prophets coming along in the future. Lazy thinking, it isn't just for Christians.

[Greg Horton]

April, I've seen it from Muslims and Christians both as well. It seems to be generally theistic, but I've also found a bizarre level of naive certainty among pantheists, even wiccans, who left the church because it was too dogmatic. I am literally begging for critical thinking to be part of the general education curriculum of colleges, but it ought to be part of junior high and high school curriculum as well.

[cheek]

As a matter of logical possibility, the answer is yes: they could both be true. However, as a matter of contingent fact it seems highly unlikely. God could be able to do whatever s/he wants and still always do what's good. However, unless there is some pressure on what s/he does in each case, then that fact would be so implausible as to strain belief beyond any limit. It would be like saying a fair coin could be flipped a trillion times and always come up heads. It's logically possible, but that possibility is so remote as to be completely uninteresting. A weighted coin, however, might sip the scales a bit. If helped along, I imagine your student would end up saying that god's character weights the coin in favor of doing good actions. However, for god's character to do the work of ensuring that s/he always does what's good, it would have to be such that divine character compels (not merely influences) conduct. If character compels conduct, and a good character always compels good conduct, then it is not true that god can do whatever s/he wants except in the weak sense that s/he actually does what she wants. A further problem would be that I don't know of any Christian theology that allows for the possibility that god's goodness is a contingent fact.