Thank you for your thoughtful response. I do think I see where the difficulty lies, and I do not see it in the same place you do. I will try to explain, but please know it's OK with me if we do not see eye to eye. If we can disagree amicably, I will count that an accomplishment unto itself.
Now, on with the discussion.
1) On the question of literalism:
I understand you are seeing an apparent inconsistency, where some on the evangelical side are claiming literalism, versus my claim of Historical-Grammatical method. I think this is just the natural variance in eyewitness testimony. As an attorney, I expect some testimony to appear different at the outset but be reconcilable when examined closely. I have been in the trenches with almost all the evangelicals posting here, and I know for a fact they too are using the Historical-Grammatical method, only some with more rigor than others. FR is after all little more than a digital block party. People show up as they are, and if the atmosphere is right, everyone can learn. If it devolves into a food fight, that usually doesn't help anyone much and it wastes all that good food. So I would urge you to withhold judgment on the nature of the purported hyper-literalism of the evangelicals here until you have a more fully developed experience of our range of discussion.
As one prime example, consider our frequent debates on the Eucharist. The Catholic contingent is prone to accuse us of inconsistency on this issue because we hold the Lord's Supper to be a metaphor of our spiritual feeding on (believing in) Jesus and what He literally and spiritually did for us on the cross. This is confusing to some of our Catholic friends because like you they expect us to be pathologically literal in every interpretation. They consistently misunderstand us on this point and the conversation typically degrades quickly from the point of misunderstanding our hermeneutic. The responses are frustrating. Often, a recitation of "This is my body" is tossed back at us without commentary, as though we should accept it as literal, when in fact anyone using the Historical-Grammatical method can see that this statement, in context, reads very well as a direct metaphor. Yet we are the ones who are supposed to be the rigid literalists. It is ironic. We get used to the straw man, as we've seen him and burned him to a cinder probably hundreds of times, but like some bad zombie movie they keep reviving him. So we get our matches ready for the next encounter.
As you can see, that kind of environment is not conducive to a conversation that actually goes somewhere. People start taking the matter personally, believing (incorrectly) that no reasonable person could possibly be so stubborn in the face of clear facts, and so guilt is assigned, and the spiral spins down to an even deeper and uglier turn.
But all of this is not the fault of true truth. Which leads to the next topic:
2) Infallibility versus Unknowability
One cannot be a classic theist without believing God is capable of delivering His message to the people He wants to receive it. Yet people are, as you say, fallible. But it is itself a fallacy to suppose that human fallibility renders God unable to communicate truth. If we believe that God exists eternally as the supreme, sentient, personal being, Creator of all, we are duty-bound to believe He is as powerful in His ability to communicate truth as He is in His power to create truth. Therefore, we have to believe that even our fallibility would not prevent Him from telling us His truth, nor prevent us from receiving that truth.
However, the downside is that not everyone receives truth in the same manner. Sometimes this is just innocent natural variance, such as two witnesses seeing the same crash and reporting it each from their own point of view. It is the same objective truth, but the reporters when taken together give a fuller view of the matter. But other variation is the result of different attitudes toward the truth. Sometimes it is something we don't want to hear, or something we have predetermined we will not allow to affect our life choices.
And again, the fault is not the trueness of the truth. The fault is in us. Which is why we can have an infallible record of God's message to us, and yet come up with so many different responses to it. The difference is, we can believe that message is infallible, and study that message, and come to believe that message, and be truly correct in how we have understood it, and still be lost, because we have not embraced it as the basis for our life. As James says, even the devils believe in one God, and fat lot of good it does them! That's a paraphrase. :)
This is where faith comes in, because it is faith that takes us past truth as mere facts, to a place where truth becomes the vehicle by which we find our relationship with God. Jesus described truth as the prerequisite to spiritual freedom. We cannot become free of the sins that condemn us until we come to Him. He is the truth. To deny Him is to deny truth, to accept slavery, to embrace eternal loss.
As evangelicals, we are not prepared to do that. Our quest for truth is not negotiable, because it is how we come to know and love Him and each other. Which leads to our next topic:
3) On Tolerance
I agree with you in principle that we should approach differences of opinion with humility. But not a false humility. Moses is said to have been the most humble of men, yet he led Israel under God's direction. He was not afraid of truth, nor of the dissension that might follow if some did not see it. He had received an infallible message from God, and in his humility he acted on it. This is humility because he did not presume to judge God, but elected to trust God no matter how foolish it might make him look to his peers. In other words, his ego did not get between him and the truth. That is true humility, and a great place to be if one can get there. It is the secret to fearlessness.
But none of us claims to be Moses. But we do have an infallible revelation from God in God's word. Humility requires first of all that we not allow our desire to be liked to control our view of the truth. Jesus did not say that a relationship with Him would make everyone like us, or at least think we are nice, tolerant folk. Just the opposite:
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
(Matthew 10:34-37)
See, the problem is, we've been dropped into the middle of a war zone. We have a real enemy, Satan, whose pattern of thought is widely accepted in the world, and so it puts the world against us, just for being friends of Jesus.
If you believe Christian truth, that is. If one has rejected the supernatural altogether, rejected it as part of the "pathological literalism of fundamentalism," then none of this is going to seem reasonable at all. I get that. But this is the view from inside the Christian mind, and I think it is well-grounded in reality.
Which is why we can appear intolerant. What we are not tolerating well is that which is opposed to reality. Let me show you this by an analogy. We love our children. When they are young, we let them pretend to be able to do amazing things. But we do not let them act out their pretending in dangerous ways. When she was young my sister hurt herself jumping off the neighbor's barn. Not life-threatening injuries, thank God. But she had imagined a reality that wasn't true, and tried to act on it, and got hurt. Likewise, we wouldn't let a child run out into the road and "pretend" some oncoming vehicle was just a big fluffy pillow that would do no harm. We would be "intolerant" of that because we love. If we were "tolerant" of such dangerous behavior, we could rightly say such tolerance was in truth a kind of hatred, a calloused disregard for the well-being of another, and a massive fail for one claiming to be a follower of Jesus.
Because Jesus was intolerant of harmful falsehoods also. He had a better way of getting at the truth than we do, but he was not reluctant to go there in the name of love. When he confronted the rich young ruler, who thought his conventional goodness was enough, conformity to the rules, Jesus broke right through that delusion and challenged him where it hurt, his love of possessions, his violation of the law, thou shall not covet, which is a lack of love for one's neighbor. The man went away disappointed because Jesus had not tolerated the man's self-deception. But the man did end up with something much better. He had the truth, and he had the love of Jesus.
Which gets us to our next and final topic:
4) On the Origin and Nature of Marian Belief
I thought your analysis here was very good, though I still end up seeing it differently than you do. The profound link we have with our mother-figures no doubt does feed the emotional commitments of any form of religion where the female achieves superhuman status. This is probably a major psychological element in all of the goddess religions, from Ashteroth, Queen of Heaven, to Dianna of the Ephesians, to Gaea of the modern new age religions. Each of these groups have shown great passion in defending the mother-figure, and it is easy to see how this could be at play in the elevation of Mary to a status well beyond what God describes for her in His word to us. The defensiveness is palpable. We evangelicals are routinely renounced for our alleged disrespect to Mary, simply because we seek to align our views of her with how she is presented in Scripture. At one point, it was even indirectly implied to me (by a poster who shall go unnamed) that I was anti-semitic for rejecting the Catholic version of Mary. Exactly how that makes me anti-semitic is unclear to me even to this day. But there you have it. Defensiveness on steroids.
But the question is, what to do? Your argument, as best I can understand it, seems to be that if it hurts to talk about it, then leave it alone. The underlying premise of that is that absence of conflict is the greater good. I contend it is more harmful to leave some things alone, in the same way it was harmful for my sister to falsely imagine she could jump off that barn, with no one to challenge her error of belief. Falsehood can do more to hurt you than an honest challenge to believe the truth. I wish someone had told her not to jump off that barn, and if I had been there, I like to think it would have been me.
So if you have Jesus telling people to put all their eggs in His basket, that their eternal life depends on it, and some johnny-come-lately comes along and says, no, give some or maybe all those eggs to Mary, then yes, that looks like exactly the sort of situation that needs a truth intervention, based on well-established truths of Scripture. No, we don't presume ourselves to be infallible. But when a parent sees a child doing something which is obviously dangerous, they don't wait around for an epistemologically perfect environment in which to act. They just put their ego aside and go out there to protect the child. It's just in a parent's nature to do that. It comes from love.
Again, I know the impulse is to say, but how can you know they are in danger? What gives you the right to decide you can help them? But that begs the question. Look at your own attempt at intervention. Was it not motivated by your belief that you had some truth that could help us all? And such a motivation is a good thing. I am not putting it down at all. But if you can decide something is true enough for you to act on, why then is it wrong for someone else to act on the truth they have come to know and confidently believe, just like you?
In any event, I have to get going. If we end up agreeing to disagree, that's fine, no hard feelings. I wish you all the best. :)
Peace,
SR
You are very considerate and thoughtful, which engenders my respect and affection.
Nonetheless, I really want to back out of this conversation. My fear is that by criticizing the basis of the behavior I found objectionable, I could end up undermining someone else’s faith. I am not a professional, and have no authority to speak for any Church.
You can’t keep a Church together, without a common basis of understanding, so there pretty much has to be some agreed upon dogmas or fundamental beliefs. Having a Church accomplishes so much in helping people, that they need to be preserved.
But ultimately, our limitations can’t encompass everything, and earthly Churches or dogmas are limited tools. When you lock in some fundamental dogmas, there will be some inevitable unintended interpretations and conflicts from that. People will understand things differently, despite the best intentions.
You say that the Eucharist is a metaphor, but that Jesus saying that he is the only path to God is literal. These are human opinions about the divine. By adopting these interpretations and attributing them to be absolute, you can build a certain set of conclusions, to structure a particular kind of Church. If that Church helps people to be better, great. If I undermine someone’s faith in one of these fundamental assumptions, I fear that it might do more harm than whatever good.
As you point out, faith is what brings the message into the real lives of people. I don’t want to attack someone’s Christian Faith, in a way that is a disservice to them. The standard which you seem to propose for determining when this would be appropriate, is when it varies from one of your fundamental assumptions - heresy, essentially. The standard that I propose is to assess the effects on moral behavior and spiritual fruits like patience, forgiveness, kindness, and so on.
As long as someone’s interpretation is comforting or helpful to them, and they are not being immoral as a result of it, I am going to leave them the benefit of the doubt. For example, I really admire the righteousness of the Mormons that I have worked with (I love me some Mormons, in fact), even though I find little doctrinal agreement. My own understanding may change by next year. The Lord works in mysterious ways, as the saying goes.
So even within my own Church, I don’t throw down the gauntlet any time something doesn’t seem to make perfect sense to me, as I believe that they are basically trying to do the right thing - I just carry over a set unresolved issues for future study.
So my argument is not “If it hurts, leave it alone”, but rather, “Don’t get so carried away with ideological certainty, that you become harsh to good people”. You are not harsh, but others were. In describing the the role of Marian practices to soothe pain and fear among those suffering, I was trying to highlight or inform how some of this missionary zeal could be perceived by the audience, not that they should be immune from analysis. Included in such analysis should be the tangible comfort provided to untold millions of suffering people.
I’ll throw in some added mystical commentary, at no extra charge:
The practice of Communion is a mystical practice, which is the main point of the Catholic Mass. Whole Religious Orders have existed for centuries, focused on contemplation and prayer, to draw closer to God in actual experience. In my experience, it is such mystical practices which have moved me most deeply. Perhaps that is just my bent. I personally have no direct experience with the brown scapula, but my experience with the Eucharist has been profound for me.
From a mystical interpretation, the Eucharist, or sayings like “I am the way” “None come to the Father, except through me” can be understood as guidance toward the experience of communion.
It is my observation that many Evangelicals also engage in mystical practice, interpreted as the Holy Spirit, despite ideological objection to words or forms associated with the Eucharist. For me, the experience is kind of outside of the realm of words and concepts.
Anyhow, even though it has been a pleasure chatting with you, it takes a lot of time (I am a slow writer), and I need to get back to work and get some exercise. So please forgive me if I stop posting on this thread, it is not intended to be rude to you. I do feel better about Evangelicals/Fundamentalists after your considerate attention, so I offer a prayer for your health and happiness, and that of your family.