MY RELIGION AND ITS BLESSINGS
(Based on Wayne Booth's definitions in his unpub. MS)
A. Kissel 1/98

Let me see whether I, as a Christian, can accurately describe the theology that makes up my religion. (I find the five Boothian topoi of religions not so far from the "Four Spiritual Laws" passed around in Christian apologetics tracts, for whatever reasons, so the assigned structure may be easier to follow for me than for others.) I think that my attempt is nearly doomed by my theology itself.

To me it does follow that the world, as a creation of God--not being God--is lacking in the perfections which makes God able to create in the first place. But I find no great rottenness in the inability of Nature to create for itself a new universe. What's wrong with the world, rather, is that people--thinking, rational beings--live in it. As beings who think and reason, we are able, as Nature is not, as God is not, to make mistakes of judgment. Worse, people seem to be able to will even those things we know to be evil. In a sense we prove our free will by showing that we have chosen what we know to be wrong (this seems to be most of Satan's fallacy in Paradise Lost--see also Booth, Dogma, p. 96n)--in this sense our failure in good-will stems from our faulty judgments. In comparison to God's will, which is perfect--assuming that God is the one who ultimately defines what the "good" is--our will is flawed, and people can be good but are often bad. In Boothian terms, what "went wrong" is partly due to human errors of judgment and partly due to "bad" exercise of will (including those bad-will acts in which reason was not used at all)--and these problems seem to be inescapable for us mere humans.

What does my theology call me to do about this natural brokenness of man? As for "bad" exercise of will for its own sake, there may be some use in behaviorist therapy, but my role is likely to be more the exposer of "bad" acts (however, in humility, I ought first expose and remove the sins within me before I even begin to look at those of others). As for errors of reason, part of my mission in the academic world is to spot faulty reason and help correct it (again, first in myself wherever possible)! But in Christianity a major part of the exercise of our religion, in "doing something about the brokenness," is to focus on the Unbroken, on God (also see the conclusion below on God-as-model), and to worship God in God's perfection (and also for other reasons; see the part on blessings)--and to encourage others to do the same. And in Christianity nothing more is called for, since from man's point of view there is an "unbridgeable" gulf between God and man which ultimately can only be bridged by God (taking, for various purposes, the form of the various persons of the Trinity); the brokenness can never be fully healed by man.

I take the fifth Boothian topos to imply an ethics of obedience. According to my theology, this obedience can be directed only toward God. Obedience then consists in surrendering my (broken) will to God's, performing what God desires rather than what I desire. A life goal of the Christian is to conform the human will to the point that it desires all of and only what God desires (assumed here is that God has interacted enough with Creation that we can know something substantial about God's desires). How do I determine the difference between my will and God's? I suspect that if our next essay is about evidence, authorities, and the like, I will have more space to answer this question there. For now, let me claim merely the sixth blessing: a certainty based ultimately on faith.

All this comes out of a cosmology including little more than a Creator who has certain reasonable attributes, and a Creation which also has certain reasonable attributes. Of course, once we assume a Creator who continues to interact with people, the ontological door is spread wide open. God seems to be able to create anything at any time (behind this is an acknowledgment that God may also reserve the practice of limiting future creation for some purpose); who says God isn't holding each atom together with scientific precision? There could be all manner of weird creatures in "other parts" of Creation, and there would be no challenge to my cosmology whether or not they exist.

As for the blessings of my particular, not unusual form of Christianity, there certainly is a great deal of peace, comfort, radiance, wonder, awe, reverence, joy, gratitude, for this sense of an ongoing relationship between Creator and mankind (whether we all buy into it or not, I feel this on behalf of all of us!), and specifically the relationship between Creator and Kissel. Furthermore, in recognizing that God does have a will, that God defines a teleology which despite all manner of complications will come to pass, there is an ultimate cosmological comfort in a good "conclusion" in our future. Finally, in buying into this teleology as a Christian (here, as a Protestant), I am also buying into a certain story (another "blessing" among the Boothian eleven). I believe that all those who buy the teleology (at least; possibly all of us) will end up in a state of "post-purification" (this is where a lot of teleological Christian hope comes in) in which God has done away with the bad-will and the wrong-judgment parts of our persons, so that an eternal "communion" with God will be possible--continuing to worship God in God's perfection, still lacking that perfection in the same way that Nature lacks it, but also worshiping out of gratitude to God for being able to take part in the story. Knowing that we perpetually lack perfection yields humility, yet the blessing in this is that the story reminds the Christian to take comfort in a being who needs no humility.

Other blessings make their way into the story. For one, God is, in my view, an interventionist who knows the future but does not always dictate it (my essay on free will and destiny must come at another time). But again, the blessing is that God "steps in" when necessary (God must be the one to define necessity) to accomplish God's ends--which are self-defined as good ends--to prevent me and us from trying to accomplish ends that result from our own bad-will and wrong-judgment and limited knowledge. (My story also includes an end-of-the-world in which, whatever has happened to that point, God finishes accomplishing the Final End. I like that poetry of Eliot's, "the fire and the rose are one," in this context.) It also seems likely that many things in the world have a neutral moral value--in these things, certainly, if God does not care one way or another, God might actually give us things that we ask for.

As for blasphemy--if God defines "good" as a term which includes God, but you define God as "bad," you are contradicting God's definition of the good, and you'd better get out of His way. God is inviolable, sacred ("set apart"), sacramental ("mysterious"), from a human perspective, because in my cosmology we are hopelessly inferior to God. Is this a blessing? I suppose it's good that something else is a lot better, wiser, and stronger than we are, and unable to be hurt by us petty humans--we get something inviolably good to which we can turn our attention.

Christianity does also contain social blessings. God's fundamental relationship to each person is the same, or similar enough that most Christians can find ways to worship together ecumenically, via verbal or other symbolic rituals. And God seems also to form a relationship with Christians as a people (especially for Catholic and Orthodox traditions), as with the Israelites of old. Finally, while ultimately the mission of Christians is to worship God, we believe that there is some additional purpose for us while in the universe--something having to do with practicing getting our wills to naturally align with the will of God. (On discerning the will of God, see, again, probably, the next paper.) So if God loves and respects every person as deeply as can be, so should we. If Jesus is our model of a living faith, then it is indeed a blessing to have such a model of charity. And if Jesus is also God and a perfect model, and if we can correctly interpret (oops, here's the trouble again) what in the world it means to follow that example, we might be in better shape than many people think.