(From our theologically liberal - very liberal - friend)

Dec. 16, 2007

Certitude Without Knowledge - A Fine Trick If You Can Pull It Off

By Harry T. Cook

With no hint of nuance, no suggestion that he might be speaking metaphorically, the pastor slamming his hand firmly down upon the pulpit rail said, "I know that last Tuesday evening when Betty closed her eyes for the last time on Earth she opened them in the next instant in heaven to see Jesus smiling at her saying, 'Welcome home.' "

This is a pastor who claims to be an evangelical, the philosophical stance of whose denomination is Luther's sola scriptura - the scriptures alone. In that tradition, one is not supposed to hold, preach or teach any doctrine that is not clearly traceable to scripture. Not only do the scriptures give no warrant for the pastor's declaration, but, alas, no data of an objective sort exist to support the pronouncement he made over the body of the dear departed Betty.

The optimistic pastor is not alone in his assertion of the implausible and indemonstrable. Take the recently issued encyclical from Pope Benedict XVI, Saved By Hope.

Critical of theory and practice that attempt to redress the grievances of economic and social injustice, Benedict wrote: "The claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false." Really? Even considering the supposed majesty of the papal office, I can't imagine how any mortal could know what any unseen and imagined deity does, might do, won't do or doesn't do.

In both the pastor's astounding declaration and the pope's certitude lay the besetting difficulty of most religion. Generally called "fideism," the religious philosophy of both the pastor and the pope is based on revelation. It has been revealed to the pastor in question and to the pope that such-and-such a thing is a priori the truth of the matter. Ergo, it is indisputable and certainly not accessible to the process of inductive investigation and analysis.

Meanwhile, I have been told more than once that the church of which I have been pastor for 20 years would all this time have had more members if I had been saying the kind of thing my colleague said - and not only said it but believed it - and if I, like the pope, would only demonstrate a little more certitude about the truth of the church's doctrine.

I guess I will never be the poster priest for church growth because I could never, would never make such statements as the pastor and the pope made. And that is because I think it at once arrogant and injurious to do so.

Certainly the pastor was trying his best to comfort the bereaved arrayed before him. But his statement to the effect that Betty was "now with Jesus" is, for one thing, wholly unbiblical and, for another, impossible to take even metaphorically - unless he meant that Jesus, having been born some 2,000 years ago, is now (and still) truly and sincerely dead along with Betty.

It is also injurious to people to tell them what amounts to prevarication. Such sermonic pronouncements verge on malpractice, if you ask me. To teach people with such certitude that there is life after death when there is not a shred of evidence to that effect is like dispensing the Kool-Aid directly from the package.

For the pope - who is, after all, a man differing from other mortals only by accident of birth and being in the right place at the right time - to tell the world what God can and cannot, has and has not done is an outrage. None of that can be known, nor is it knowable if only because there is no reliable evidence that the deity Benedict worships is in any way real.

What the pastor might have said at Betty's funeral was that her survivors could comfort themselves with the reality that she had been an exemplary wife, mother and citizen - which, in fact, she had. The pastor might have said that the memory of her could sustain her survivors in their natural grief if they would let it. He might have said that, even though Betty died young, she had lived her life pretty close to its full potential.

All of that was demonstrably true, including the part about memory. I have been without a living parent in my life for 30 years, come Dec. 28. I miss my father every single day, and it is the burnished memories of him that sustain me. Ditto of my mother, who died 53 years ago at age 36.

As for the pope's sucker punch to the gut of socialism, liberation theology and other efforts to bring some measure of economic and social justice to the unfairly disadvantaged, it is no wonder that people have tried albeit in sometimes flawed ways to help themselves and others. The pope's god may not go in for that kind of thing, but the Nazarene sage of First Century Palestine seemed to have concentrated on it. Of that much we can be fairly certain.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.