I make my decision between right beliefs and wrong beliefs by looking at the imperatives and consequences and seeing if its imperatives and consequences have played out in my experience or in wider experience. If it has no imperatives and has no consequences, then there is no way to experience the truth of the belief, then I have no basis to judge the asserted belief, and—quite frankly—then I find it hard to summon the energy to care and I don’t understand why I should. Given that it has imperatives and consequences, then I should be able to see them.
Take, for instance, the assertion that the celebration of communion (in the bread-and-wine/bread-and-wine-substitute form) is necessary for a proper relationship of God, and that it forms the feeding of the soul without which the soul will whither and die. The imperative there is to celebrate communion regularly, with the consequence being closer relationship when you do so and more distant relationship when you don’t.
Okay: given that belief, I should be able to see the difference between when I attend communion services and when I don’t. But even when I was in the habit of attending church with communion, I’ve missed the communion services for months and felt no ill effects, so that’s out. But perhaps I’m just some kind of outlier case. Do I see any kind of transformation in parishioners among those who came to a communion service versus those who missed it? Do I see churches that celebrate the communion more often being more spiritually aligned with God? In a word, no. To paraphrase James, even heretics celebrate the communion and worship.
So, given the imperative of that belief, I don’t see its consequences playing out right. Based on that, I’m left asking why I should believe something which seems to be contra-indicated by my experience: why, in short, I should believe something which seems to be false. Why shouldn’t I write off that belief as a black swan or a mistake of Christian theology akin to physics’ luminiferous aether?
Ultimately, theology is a lot like science. Both know there is some kind of underlying reality. Both know that they have some kind of handle on it. And so based on that handle, both build up a model to describe that reality. In science, the model is tested through empiricism; in theology, it is tested through God’s revelation (general, special, and personal), of which empiricism and logic are just a subsets. Unfortunately, this creates a very difficult catch in theology: since people have no way of vetting any given revelation, everyone is forced to turn back to God and forced to appeal to His revelation for them personally. And, for some reason, God gives different revelations to different people, so the best we can do is compare notes and check them with what God has revealed to us. That is the purpose of theological conversation, despite the ultimate individual foundation.
And that’s why I enjoy hashing out things with Jen and other people whose assumptions are so wildly different than mine. I want to improve my model so that I can grow closer to God and better know His will.
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