Why so Cognitive? Missing Elements (Main Forum)

I, TOO, am concerned that this Forum is becoming too intellectual. Philosophising about the Nature of Faith, while it was a very good article, is hardly helpful to ordinary people.
For me, Faith is my relationship with God. That was also the Faith of Jesus.
John

Hi Nicholas,

Just a quick response to your insightful post.

Giving value to 'Experience' is a danger for institutional bureaucrats who find it far easier to deal with uniform expectations and simple categories.

However, Experience is how THE INDIVIDUAL arrives at and recognises his or her uniqueness and authenticity.

Catholicism's strength is in community not in the 'individual', but I think there needs to be a reconsideration of the individual if we are to come to a contemporary understanding of what it means to be human.

As for emotion. Behind the facade of RATIONAL management, which is asserted as being fair, impersonal and partial, there is more emotion than admitted to. Rationality confines knowledge to certain discourses, and steers away from those that are equated with emotion, that is, gender and sexuality. Rational argument effectively keeps these issues off the organisation agenda.

Rational argument also diminishes emotional knowledges, which include subjectivity, intuition, creativity, even cooperation.

Emotion is, by the way, a part of the way we recognise experience and draw our understanding, from which we arrive at meaning.

Arguably, it is one reason why Catholicism is not relevant to many - simply because critical aspects of their experience (e.g., emotional subjects such as gender and sexuality which are key to individual understanding) are not given serious consideration.

Anyhow, hope this is not too RATIONAL!!!!

Bye for now,
Jane

While that string on the nature of faith was letting itself stream in the wind I was caught up in other blusters. Nicholas has since drawn attention to what I too felt was missing. (How come he does this all the time?)

No time again to enlarge, but time to say that what was missing for me – although I didn’t read everything – was the whole person dimension. We don’t just think. Or feel. Faith – in my experience: and I discovered one time that my experience is the main thing here (even Paul invokes the idea of ‘consciousness’) – is an interpersonal thing. I learn this in Paul’s writings. Without going into those, I will try an analogy, perhaps best illustrated for me in a passage by Victor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning):

In the dark of one early winter morning he was marched out with his inmates from the concentration camp bunkroom to work in the frozen fields. When he had been incarcerated, his young wife had been taken off to the women’s section. As he struck at the hard earth, his thoughts – sorry, he – turned to her in his heart. A distant light flickered from a farm house. Light began to come up from under the horizon. It was a moment of grace for him. He felt very close to her.

Frankl wrote in part:

‘Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. [...]

‘I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no means of finding out... but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. [...]

‘In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. [...]

‘Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.’

‘Love never ends,’ wrote Paul. ‘God is love,’ wrote John. Faith is a relationship in love: a communication or opening to the other: more, it is a reception of the other. It brings wordless enlightenment and a recognition – ‘consciousness’ - that we are loved.

Hi guys,

as C.S.Lewis says:"We read to know that we are not alone".

And we then may ask, why?

Rich

In response to Dr Kania's article on models of saintliness for kids, I mentioned that I am out of touch because of the age gap.

However, I think that the place to start when introducing young people to God is where the young folk are themselves. Isn't that where God is with them right now?

A now aged former teacher tells me that if she were the RE teacher with teenage girls today, she would start with "Home and Away". As I am not overly attracted to chick-flicks I haven't seen the show.

My friend tells me that "Home and Away" raises issues that are of vital interest to the young people of the female variety. She tells me that if you want proof of that, just listen to the conversation of the girls. The pre-catechesis is virtually done on the show. To move from the girls' discussion of the show towards discovering the presence and action of God in their own lives and to helping them respond in faith-relationship to the God revealing would make faith real.

A while back Fr. Kevin Murphy wrote on Action-Reflection-Action. Many youngsters at schools today are involved in voluntary social work. What a wonderful starting point for reflection on the God at work in their lives and who cares for others through them.

Peter

Thanks for these responses. Warren, your thoughts on mindset change rang a bell with me, as well as the issue of giving spirituality primacy over religion. Richard Rohr got me thinking on both of those, as did Wilber. I’ve got a lot more reading and reflecting to do.

Jane, I appreciated your point about ‘individuality’. Many of us (esp anyone formerly in the priesthood or religious life) have ingrained into us that as individuals we must disappear. I think individuality must be complemented with ‘community’, and realise that you are talking about a matter of emphasis. Many of us have never experienced community. We experience ‘congregation’.

Herbie, thanks for that wonderful passage from Victor Frankl. It was so moving, and so relevant – spirituality and consciousness. Presence.

I suppose it is the nature of these discussion boards, since we communicate through text, that one’s contribution must make rational sense as a piece or a response via text. Consequently, there is a tendency for most things to be reduced to rational discourse, unaccompanied by the complementary feelings, emotions, intuitions – the other ways of knowing, believing, being community. But maybe we can try to include more of those elements.

Our theological tradition poses quite a problem for us because, as Warren says, we need to change the mindset in which we have been trained. But we also need to learn how to communicate with the changed mindset, and that will not be easy.

Hi All,

I have to admit that I find this kind of discussion about the need for emotional or spiritual perspectives uncomfortable. Not that I deny the importance of prayer, meditation or "touchy-feely" discussion about Jesus "meek and mild"; but this is not the only, nor the primary, means for processing our faith. I am much more comfortable with a “cogitative” or “intellectual” appreciation.

I freely admit that my approach is “rationalistic”; but surely there is no real dichotomy between faith and reason. I believe that rational appreciation of the Bible and our Tradition is indispensable, especially if we want to reach those former Christians who have been disaffected by too much emphasis on sentiment and "blind faith". It is my firm belief that far too much emphasis has been placed on the emotional, and this part of the problem – religion has become to be seen as anti-intellectual.

Ultimately, the question comes down to this: Is religion a matter for rational enquiry concerning matters of fact in the phenomenal (physical) world, or is faith beyond the ken of reason in that it deals with matters of the numinal (spiritual) world?

This question, even given the fact that I can pose it, suggests that faith and reason are mutually irrelevant. The very question is grounded in an account of the nature of rational enquiry and Christian theology, which are seems as mutually distinct disciplines (with respect to their differing goals, foci, and methodologies). In terms of goals, theologians or people of faith want to know why the world is the way it is (explanatory), and rationalists want to know how the world is the way it is (descriptive). In terms of foci, people of faith focus on revelation, tradition, faith-experience, and rationalists focus on nature and sense experience. People of faith are concerned with matters of value, while rationalists focus on matters of fact.

Similarly, following this view, faith and reason appear to utilize two different methodologies. In the popular imagination, people of faith ruminate on revealed truth about nature of ‘being’ (ontological), while rationalists apply intellect and experimentation to understand the data derived through sense experience (epistemological evidence). On the one hand, people of faith grant primacy to biblical truth. On the other hand, rationalists say that such faith statements make “no sense”. For many who have deserted the Church, the faith-based perspective simply does not describe the way the world is – the doctrines and scriptures of the Church do not accurately represent reality. And, many of us would agree – in part. All-too-often we imagine that the subject of faith is not open to rational enquiry; that faith deals with a sacred world that is not available to sense experience.

The problem is, however, that there is a descriptive component to religion (especially the three revealed ‘monotheistic’ religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam), which makes certain claims about the “real” world. Religion is not simply about ethics and value systems. Christianity, in particular, does make claims about matters of fact – e.g., virgin birth, resurrection, miracles, and efficacy of prayer. And both faith and reason, or perhaps we might say theology and science, deal with ultimate questions of origins and purpose – e.g., true nature and goal of human existence and the cosmos.

Indeed, I would signal three kinds of claims about “the way the world is” according to revelation that cannot be “reconciled” with the rationalistic perspective:

(a) Divine Creation ex nilhilo (from nothing), which has a bearing on various “natural sciences” - eg. Astrophysics;

(b) Divine purpose of human creation as the imago dei (image of God), which might in some quarters be seen as conflicting with the findings of evolutionary biology and genetics; and

(c) Divine Revelation in history (Israel, Jesus, Muhammad), which makes certain claims that are open to critique from the fields of archaeology, history, and sociology.

Thus, I would argue, that theologians (if not every man, woman and child in the pews) cannot ignore the fact that revelation tells us a great deal about the "real" world. Nor can we ignore the fact that this age is one characterised by a strong materialist rationalism, and scripture, doctrine and faith will be the subject of rational critique by those "outside".

If we are to attract the disaffected back to the ranks of faith, we cannot simply ignore reason.

We cannot wax lyrical about mystical experiences, the sacred realm and, even more importantly, our peculiar views about God, humanity, Christ and salvation without providing some rational justification for these “things" that we would want to claim are matters of fact. Accordingly, it is importnat to ask questions about the authorship of the biblical texts and the transmission history of those texts, in as much as such enquiry helps to establish the objective reliability of the information they carry. Such enterprise is intended to be apologetical, not divisive or destructive.

It is worth noting that accommodating “rationalist” view of the world is only incumbent upon the great religions of the West (Christianity, Judaism and Islam). It is not a problem so much for the Eastern traditions. Hindus believe the world is an illusion and science itself is merely the study of a nebulous and transitory phenomenon. Buddhist realism has no problem accommodating the scientific view – the world, after all, just “is” and our pain and suffering derives from our attitudes.

Revelation is so fundamental to our faith and our world view that we cannot simply dispense with it when it seems out of sync with the data derived from our sense experience. However, we must apply the unrelenting gaze of reason upon our faith to arrive at a way forward that grants primacy to scripture, while not flying in the face of irrationality. One can grant a primacy to scripture that is both critical and rational without undermining the claim that such scriptures are divinely inspired, historically reliable and that they accurately “describe” the way the world is, which was all I was trying to say in this week’s commentary.

Godspeed,

Ian

Ian J. Elmer

I am prepared to press onto the end along a path on which each step makes me more certain, towards horizons that are ever more shrouded in mist (Teilhard de Chardin)