ANOTHER MANIFESTATION OF THE LOGOS/MYTHOS TENSION

An African Indigenous Church meeting for Worship

Here is a link to the notes I compiled for my talk at NCBC on Vulnerable Mission. Vulnerable Mission is an approach to mission developed by Jim Harries in Africa. Roughly speaking the Vulnerable Missionary avoids being a channel of Western culture, language and wealth and instead seeks to work beside his native colleagues using the language and resources they already have. This circumvents some of the problems that arise when Western backed mission becomes bound up with crude attempts to graft the methods and resources of the industrialized world upon African culture, a grafting that often comes to grief in rural Africa because it fails to cater for vast differences in culture and industrial infrastructure. In this video Jim explains in detail what his work involves.

Jim Harries mission is of particular interest to me because it picks up on a recurrent theme in my thinking; namely, the polarisation between the Logos and Mythos world views. The Logos world view builds models of the world using linguistic tokens and in particular exploits the mechanistic “law and disorder” ontology that seems to be the dominant dynamic of the cosmos. This dynamic facilitates the techno-scientific exploitation we are familiar with. The Mythos world view, on the other hand, is far more intuitive and far less easy to articulate. It resorts to mystical connections with reality via feelings, sensings, epiphanies, revelations, rituals, mysticism, mythology, instincts etc. In contrast to the Logos paradigm which seeks explanation using the elemental and the impersonal, Mythos thinking has a propensity to personify the cosmic dynamic by imputing spiritual significance to the events around us. In its world spirits are pervasive; in other words it is inclined toward animism.

If the “Out of Africa” theory is valid then African culture is far older than the cultures of the northern hemisphere. Migration to northern latitudes was probably inhibited by the ice age and thus it is only relatively recently that the north hosted modern humans. It is in Africa then (and perhaps Australia as well) that human culture finds its roots, in particular, its roots in animism. But the experience of finding roots grates and highlights the existential dissonance present in Western thought. In the industrialized hemisphere there is an instinctual alienation from the anonymous social systems and technology required to administrate huge communities: Firstly, the sheer size of these communities means that it is beyond human cognitive ability to know and identify with everyone in a community; tribal identifications are difficult to foster. Secondly, the paradigm of mechanistic elementalism that facilitates industrialization cuts across preliterate animism, an animism that is so natural to the thinking of many aboriginal people, including, it must be said, the religious sensibilities of many Westerners.

The biggest intellectual feat of homo sapiens is not so much the discovery of the laws of physics as it is the ability to comprehend other human psyches – objects which are far more intricate than the relatively elementary models normally dealt with in physics and chemistry. However, humanity doesn’t piece together an understanding of other minds from first principles; when it comes to inter-human relations human beings have a large amount of “hard wired” faculties (like the “language instinct”) dedicated to enabling those relations. These built in social cognitive abilities do such an effective job in facilitating human-human relations that we are unconscious of the underlying complexity of the mental resources they muster, and in most cases this background mental processing only surfaces in our minds as instinctual perceptions. But these instinctual intuitions are extremely important for they make our human relations possible; without them we are autistic. It is no surprise that given this awesome instinctual package of dedicated mental resources for handling the understandding of personality it is very natural to turn the power of this package beyond human society to the cosmos as a whole; very naturally, then, the human mind populates the world with spirits and imputes to it intentional forces. It is second nature for human beings to humanize their environment in this way. In contrast the instrumentalism of science tends to exorcise the animistic dynamic and expels the magical enchantment of religious meanings.

Jim Harries Vulnerable Mission brings him into close contact with an ancient strain of animistic and magical thinking about the cosmos that is often at odds with the successful working of industrial society. Jim’s work with African Indigenous Churches reveals what to Western minds are bizarre practices. But there is no cause for Westerners to feel superior. Animism is not far under the surface of Western society; less than three hundred years ago, well into the Newtonian revolution and the enlightenment, witch hunts were still being conducted in Europe. Moreover, today, many Western Indigenous Churches have a version of Christianity that is weird & wonderful; for example, they may eschew intellectual engagement in favour of a shamanistic relationship with God and Angels mediated through trance like modes of consciousness. (See the video below). They effectively supplement the basic Gospel message of God’s love and sacrificial grace with Gnostic elaborations. In general there is an underlying dissonance in Christian fundamentalist philosophy that manifests itself in a dualistic outlook that sets the material against the spiritual. In contrast the culture of rural Africa harks back to a time when humanity’s world view was less dualistic and more holistic. But the thoroughgoing animism of Africa sits uneasily with techno-scientific mechanism and so it is not surprising that the vestigial animism of the industrial north has resulted in a gnosto-dualist discontinuity in Western religious thinking.

Like gravity and quantum mechanics, science and animism remain as an incommensurable and disunited duality in the West. But the simple mathematical objects of science are too simple to be self-explaining. Science, then, is therefore destined to leave an irreducible logical hiatus in our thought. Self explanation, I submit, is more likely to be found in the a priori complex rather than the simple objects of a law and disorder ontology. The fundamental and necessary incompleteness in scientific explanation leaves a vacuum that those very human abilities for dealing with complexity will rush in to fill; in short Humanity’s personality processing package will readily step into this space with an argument from intentionality. The fundamental incompleteness of scientific explanation will help ensure religion is here to stay; even in the West.

“Angels! Angels! Angels! Angels…” screams Todd Bentley. Weird vestigial animism manifests itself in Western indigenous churches

STEAM PUNK MUSIC FACTORY

Behind the sacred looking wooden façade of NCBC’s “rood screen” stands a large assemblage of machinery two stories high: this is the church organ installed in the early nineteen fifties. It stares everyone in the face Sunday by Sunday, but in spite of that the congregation is only conscious of the all too familiar sound of traditional organ music, music that gives the illusion of not emanating from behind this holy façade, but instead, ventriloquism style, from where the initiating action is seen to take place; that is, from the keyboard.

In the Middle Ages the chancel was the sacred domain of the priests. These priests dispensed the sacraments in accord with their divinely ordained authority. The mystique of this authority held the serf congregation in awe and also (mostly) in their God ordained place in the feudal system. But how times change. The Protestants who built churches like NCBC had a tradition that was apt to erode the distinction between laity and clergy. But during their socially up and coming years after the repeal of the Test Act, the Protestants often built churches along similar lines to the architectural styles of the established Church of England. They thereby gave themselves the problem of what to do with the chancel as they had no priesthood to make use of it. In NCBC’s case, however, the chancel was half filled with the machinery of music – a large two tier organ containing resonant pipes whose number must run into the hundreds. It is so large that it is one of those machines you can walk around inside of. It is, in fact, a semi-automatic music factory controlled by the human operator stationed at the keyboard.

When music machines were introduced into nonconformist chapels in the nineteenth century, thus serving notice on the traditional music leaders, there was, needless to say, resistance to them. As is so often the case, a peripheral matter bound up with convenience and taste was cast in the mold of a vital issue endangering the spiritual life of the church: Charles Jewson, NCBC Church historian, tells us of the stormy introduction of a harmonium in the second half of the 19th century:

The year 1863 saw a revolution in worship, when for the first time, a musical instrument – a harmonium – was introduced into the Chapel with the consent of the Church. Thirteen years before, when the pastor had offered to present such an instrument, Robert Tillyard, a deacon and a leading shoe manufacturer, had raised a strong objection to the introduction of an instrument as “imperiling the rights and spiritual interests of the church.” The idea had been dropped, and James Colman appointed to lead the singing instead.*

When it comes to new innovations the moral of this story seems to be to keep trying until people get used to the idea! However, today things have come full circle: The modern tendency to replace the traditional organ with a leading band is often met with disapproval from traditionalists. But the circle may have turned yet again: I suspect that there are Christians out there for whom the bulky steampunk organs of the past are just too steeped in stultifying tradition to express spiritual life. Thus, any revival of the organ’s fortunes is likely to be greeted with dismay by Christians who instinctively feel that an airy spontaneity and exuberance is a requisite of authentic worship and that this is incompatible with the traditional heavy duty mechanisms associated with large organs. I suspect therefore that the issue of music will, once again, likely be argued vehemently from fancied spiritual mandates.

For me the experience of entering the internal world of NCBC’s organ was very reminiscent of my time amongst the fully automatic organs at the Thursford collection (See here). To be frank the experience is slightly unnerving; it leads me on to think of those last scenes in the Wizard of Oz when the awe aspiring apparition of the Wizard is revealed to be the contrivance of a man operating some clever machinery. But in some ways the NCBC organ is also a fitting symbol of the demise of the medieval chancel-based priesthood whose mystique of authority, an authority which help sustain it for hundreds of years, was in due course revealed to be a contrived interface.

As I walked round the NCBC organ interior I was struck by the apparent discontinuity between the experience of its music and the mechanisms behind that music; the music is, if the organ is well played, a seamless and apparently indivisible experience, whereas the mechanisms behind that music are analytic and reductionist. There is a metaphor here for the human psyche: Human experiences are so well fused and orchestrated that their coherence seems axiomatic. And yet get inside the human skull with the latest probing technology and these experiences appear to map, on a point by point basis, to the operations of neurons, connections, signals, fields, neurotransmitters and the like. This dichotomy between the qualities of human experience and their formal tokens realized in matter must, I submit, be accepted and embraced as is. To make full sense of reality both perspectives must be held in the mind as complementary accounts of reality. We must come to terms with both accounts - one perspective should not be done away with at the expense of the other. It is a dichotomy that is an irreducible feature of our world, a dichotomy giving meaning to the cold and heartless formalities of mechanism and yet giving coherent scientific account of the qualia of experience: The formal objects of science give account of our experiences, but those experiences are required to provide science with the observations it needs; the relationship between the two is one of mutual dependence.

"I can't see any music in here - just pipes, wires and valves"

*From the Baptist quarterly 1941

THE FOUR TO SIX MIX

A survey at NCBC last Sunday returned a male to female mix  of 37% to 63% . So, after first posting on this subject three years ago what I refer to as the “four to six mix” of males to females is being approximately maintained. My previous posts on this subject can be found in these monthly postings:

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html

SHIELD OF FAITH

English heraldry has its origins in the middle ages; it originated in the symbolism appearing on the shields of nobles as they rode into battle. These nobles were quite often far from noble in their behavior, but that didn’t stop heraldry accruing idealized connotations of lineage, stability, strength, dignity, chivalry, good breeding, excellence and above all identification with, and the protection of, the community the symbols stood for. The irony of human behaviour is that admirable ideals so easily become mixed up with pride and snob value and so in a desire to ape the upper classes the up and coming middle classes adopted heraldry themselves. Below are two examples of non-aristocratic parties associating with heraldic motifs.

The above picture is a detail of the statue of Sir Samual Bignold, son of a freeman grocer, Norwich Union grandee, Sheriff of Norwich and MP. The statue appears outside the Marble hall on Surrey street. The coat of arms can be seen hanging from the chain.

This coat of arms is found on the stained glass window of Norwich Central Baptist Church, home church of successful business men, mayors and MPs (we're talking ancient history here!).

The coat of arms we can see in these pictures is the Norwich civic coat of arms. According to this web site:

The City's arms are based on a seal of the Fifteenth century. They were recorded and confirmed on 27th May 1562.The shield depicts Norwich Castle and the royal lion of England. This was traditionally granted to the city by King Edward III (1327-1377).

Thus Baptists join with the old Norwich Union to proudly display their identification with their community, city and country. What a contrast: Today Christian groups are largely subcultures found on the margins of civic society with little to give them a sense of belonging, identification or protection. Accordingly, some Christian groups have become alienated “holiness” sects with a tendency to attract only clients with a propensity for an unbearable spiritual intensity and a self righteous hostility toward the rest of society (and church) around them. As I said, the irony of human behaviour is that admirable ideals so easily become mixed up (and corrupted) with pride and snob value. Let them take note of the following epitaph found on a tomb in St. Stephen’s church, Norwich:

“A scholar without pride, a Christian without bigotry, and devout without ostentation”.

Norwich's coat of arms: Symbols of dignity, protection and attack.

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH DEAR FRIENDS, ONCE MORE: MYTHOS VS LOGOS

This post on Uncommon Descent by Young Earth Creationist (?) Paul Nelson tells the interesting story of Martin Gardiner, a man who started life as a Christian fundamentalist. I set this story against this post where I published a church magazine article by the prewar Minister to St Mary’s Baptist Church, Gilbert Laws. This article was evidence that Laws respected the results of science; he believed that those results should be coped with rather than rejected. The fundamentalist ethos that the findings of science are automatically suspect because they are to be identified with an anti-Christ scientific conspiracy probably never entered Laws head; but then those were was the days of the civic church, a church that identified itself with the establishment.




Paul Nelson takes up the story of Martin Gardner:

It is not generally known that Gardner grew up as a Christian fundamentalist in Oklahoma, and indeed entered the University of Chicago as an undergraduate zealous to defend his faith, and to return America to its Christian heritage:

"In his adolescent fantasies he saw himself as chosen by the Lord to lead this new awakening. And to carry out this stupendous undertaking he conceived a brazen plan….He would enter the very citadel of the enemy. He would master all the science and modern learning that a great secular university had to offer. Every false and infernal argument would be examined and exposed. He would probe the diseased heart of twentieth century theology, dissect it nerve by nerve, artery by artery."

The passage comes from Gardner’s autobiographical novel, The Flight of Peter Fromm (1973), which Bill Dembski has used as a textbook in seminary courses he’s taught. While Gardner’s fundamentalist Christianity died a long and painful death, his theism never did.

And according to Gardner’s Wiki page:


His semi-autobiographical novel The Flight of Peter Fromm depicts a traditionally Protestant Christian man struggling with his faith, examining 20th century scholarship and intellectual movements and ultimately rejecting Christianity while remaining a theist

The candid fundamentalist mind, when exposed to honest science, finds no elaborate conspiracy to deceive but instead genuine challenges to his faith. I don’t believe there is any necessary conflict between science and theism or between science and Christianity for that matter, but there is a conflict between science and fundamentalism.

The tradition of NCBC is not one of opposing science. However, the potential to oppose science and reason are present: The tensions and paradoxes found in the logos versus mythos dichotomy have a tendency to resolve themselves by resort to extremes of legalistic rigidity and/or gnostic irrationality. When faced with the challenges of science both of these religious extremes are apt to barricade themselves into the epistemological play pen of an assertive fideism.

THEODICY AT NCBC

The last two NCBC evening services have been café style services with the aim of introducing and discussing intellectual conundrums relating to Christianity. Rev James East has done an excellent job of presenting this series and has managed to cover a lot of ground succinctly and clearly. Last Sunday’s café service was on Theodicy. Below is a copy of the handout we received.

(Click to enlarge)

My Comments:
The need for theodicy arises out of the seeming inconsistency in positing a loving, just and almighty God who creates and sustains a world containing evil and innocent suffering. Are we to conclude that God is neither loving nor almighty? Or perhaps He simply doesn’t exist? A “Theodicy” is an attempt to resolve this paradox.

The Augustinian theodicy probably ranks as the de-facto folk theodicy of suffering and evil: “It’s not God’s fault; it’s all those creatures of His who keep abusing their free will”. This theodicy attempts to shift the responsibly for suffering and evil from an all almighty God to His created subjects. This answer, however, begs the question of why God should be absolved of any responsibility when it is He that creates and sustains free-will; surely an almighty God could do a better job of creation? If free-will is bound up with a strong likelihood of evil choice making, is it, in fact, right to claim that it is ‘free’? Should God have created it at all?

The other problem with this theodicy is that it obliges the view that all innocent suffering is ultimately sourced in human, demonic or Satanic activity. Thus, suffering found in natural disasters has to be somehow causally linked with creaturely willfulness somewhere; a point of view that can be tricky to maintain given our modern understanding that the natural world seems to conform to its own patterns and logic rather than the fiat of inscrutable freewill. Sometimes there are attempts to see suffering as an obscure ramification of the fall or may be construe it as a righteous judgment visited upon sin. There is a strong resemblance between this folk theodicy and the pre-scientific weltanschauung of a capricious nature ruled by malign spirits; a view well symbolized by the green man one sometimes finds depicted in medieval churches. The invention of agriculture lead mankind into an even more up and down existence; it offered very great winnings and yet at the same time the risk of disastrous famine.

I’ve never been impressed with the Augustinian theodicy. Trying to link every daily aggravation to the choices of humans, demons or Satan requires the same kind of paranoiac mentality that is able to support the intrigues of conspiracy theory. Moreover, as far as I am aware the Biblical writers expressed no similar sweeping opinion that all suffering traces back to the willful choices of God’s creatures.

However, the Irenaean Theodicy and the comments of Dostoyevsky and Clayton (see handout) lead us down an entirely different avenue. To be sure all three have an important commonality: They weigh suffering and evil against virtue and whilst they may not dare to suggest that virtue outweighs the former they leave us on the horns of a dilemma. One might ask, however, why isn’t it possible to have virtue without an offset of pain and evil? But the trick employed by this class of theodicy is that they make suffering and evil logically inseparable from an accompanying virtue. The Irenean theodicy points out that the virtues of courage, forbearance, hope, spiritual growth and above all the grace of Christ’s sacrificial love are best observed in a world of suffering and evil. Like stars they shine all the more brightly against a background of darkness.*

The underlying idea here is cost; some beautiful things come with an inevitable cost. Dostoyevsky invents a rather contrived situation in order to help us appreciate this truth, but there is, I believe, logical necessity behind it. God has chosen to reify the story of our contingent world, a world selected from who knows how many other possible worlds residing in the platonic realm. He could have reified a story of perfection and angels, but he didn’t; instead He choose to tell our story, a story of a world where our very existence is inextricably intertwined with the presence of suffering and evil – get rid of that suffering and we cease to exist; our existence is conditioned on it. Thus, I face a dilemma: Do I say ‘yes’ to life with all its suffering and evil? Or do I say ‘no’ and wish for annihilation or that I never was? For surely if God had created a world of perfection I, a saved sinner, would have no part in that world. Dostoyevsky is weighing suffering against existence itself: What is to be one’s choice given that one’s existence is being weighed against the suffering and evil inevitably entailed by this existance?

According to Clayton the dilemma here should be met with silence. But perhaps we know the answer in our hearts: Even Nietzche, the atheist, via the intellectual device of the so called “eternal return” answered with an affirmative ‘yes’ to life; to him sentient existence was worth all the pain and evil of this world. Something inside us puts a very high premium on conscious existence, come what may.

However, Clayton is right in one sense: In the face of real suffering silence (if not rage) is the most eloquent and empathic response. Clayton also alerts us to the ultimate cost of our painful yet beautiful world, namely, Divine suffering on an unimaginable scale. He tells us of an empathizing God who takes creative responsibility for His world and who, above all, identifies with it emotionally; a world only He can witness and feel in all its heart rending entirety. Thus, the gift of existence is given to our world with the deep love and tears of God. The picture is of a suffering God who reifies, maintains and identifies with our contingent world at profound emotional cost to Himself. What more powerful, enduring and inspiring symbol of that love and suffering can we find in the history of time than the cross of Christ? Given the grace that our world should receive the gift of existence, then once this choice is made there is a binding logic of divine suffering from which even the Almighty has no escape.

The Divine Predicament

Footnote:
* The notion of weighing evil and suffering against virtue may have some biblical support from St. Paul when he says: “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” (Roms 8:18)

HERALDRY AND SYMBOLISM AT NCBC

Have a look at these examples of heraldry and symbolism on the north windows of Norwich Central Baptist Church. What do you think they mean and what light do they throw on the spirituality of the post war church? (I'm working on it, but any help and comments welcome)

(Click to enlarge)