In my teens probably no single Christian author was a bigger influence on me than C.S.Lewis. As an INTP trying to reconcile my inherited faith with my growing knowledge about the world and exposure to secular academia, Lewis' ability to rationally and reasonably explain a Christian worldview and how attacks on it are almost always inherently contradictory, along with his simple love of God's creation and desire to capture the Christian imagination as well as mind, left a lifelong impression on me that continues to this day, evidenced in the fact that I have trouble making it through two blog posts without quoting him at least once. (The "trick people into running around with fire extinguishers when the problem is a flood" analogy found in the Screwtape Letters is a gift that keeps on giving these days)
Where Faith and Reason are Strangers...
Lewis helped me form a really robust, scripturally-based worldview which has served me well as an engineer/programmer-turned-missionary. Coming to Taiwan, however, I have been perpetually surprised and fascinated at the wholesale lack of a felt need for religious belief to be reconciled with logic or reason. People believe mutually exclusive faith systems simultaneously, seemingly with perfect equanimity, yet evidence that something deeper is at play can be seen in the fact that nearly everyone I have asked "Where does the Buddha fit into the pantheon of Chinese deities?" has replied with surprise "I've never thought about that before. I guess it's different?"
Some western-educated people living here believe, though not always expressing it in so many words, that it's a defect of a society that hasn't truly understood rationality on a culture-wide level. Yet my impression has never been exactly like that. To be sure, the sort of Math-Logic-Philosophy mental framework that the West has preserved since Ancient Greece doesn't seem to be mirrored by anything in the pan-Chinese historical tradition. I'm sure smart people thought of it at points throughout history, and were sometimes exposed to those very same Greek philosophers via the Silk Road connection (the "Byzantium-Baghdad-Beijing" trade connections that passed along cultural knowledge too), but for whatever historical reasons it became part of the core of the West, and not China, where Philosophy had different partners. (Exactly what that philosophic matrix at the core of pan-Chinese culture looked like is something I'm just starting to get into now; any enlightened commenters are welcome to point me in the right direction)
However, Taiwan is a Pacific Rim island nation of high-speed-rail-linked cities and a globally significant economy. While fascinating cultural links all the way back to China's earliest history can be observed, and those sometimes influence the direction to which technology is employed (did you know an annual sea goddess pilgrimage following the symbolic transfer of an important idol between two temples in different towns has its own app in the iStore?), certainly people have no trouble recognizing that whether you are building a bridge or writing software, A cannot be non-A at the same time and in the same sense.
So what makes religion different? Why can Taiwanese people happily devote themselves to mutually irreconcilable faith traditions while Westerners have for centuries turned a respectfully critical eye to their own religious belief and expected faith to conform to logic at some basic level, be able to defend itself with reason, and even struggle a bit when accepting concepts in scripture (like the Trinity) which stretch human logic to a point where we must be content to leave a well-evidenced signpost pointing to things beyond our ken?
Some Enlightenment from G.K.Chesterton
I have had some ideas about this rumbling around as I maintain a busy ministry and outreach schedule in our community, but the clouds parted and a ray of light illuminated this particular enigma as I was reading G.K.Chesterton's "The Everlasting Man" this past week.
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| You wish you could rock a fedora -and- eyeglass chain with this kind of gravitas |
Chesterton was devoting a good deal of time to analyzing prechristian paganism, both its beauty and its ugliness; the tacit recognition of a Creator hidden behind all the local gods and longing for beauty common to all people, and the perversion and violence into which it inevitably descends. As this discussion began to turn towards the coming of Christ, he made this remark:
"Certainly the pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes like a Christian. He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses and invents."
This was interesting, because one thing I had noticed about local religion in Taiwan is that compared to any monotheistic faith, a lot of it can be made up as you go along. The things you aren't supposed to change are because of the weight of tradition, not because the gods have left instructions demanding it be done in one particular way, and innovation can even be seen as a sign of sincerity, like how in addition to the traditional paper spirit money, some people burn paper credit cards or even ipads to honor ancestral spirits. But I could have shouted with excitement as Chesterton continued with lines any Christian wanting to work in a pre-christian culture ought to be made to memorize:
"The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even in the most rational of these civilisations. It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalise them, and even then only by trying to allegorise them. But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers.
This was the singular point, that no westerners in Taiwan have ever mentioned in related discussions these past several years.
I had been baffled by the lack of any felt need to involve reason in belief, and even more baffled when people pressed for an explanation simply chose at random anything they could come up with, because I was coming from Christendom. It was precisely that idea that there is The Truth (with the Way and the Life) that is precious and must be determined and lived for, vs. the pagan idea that there is one Higher World which doesn't dictate the terms of your approach but is indeed that mountaintop to which any sincere path can lead.
The Bible was given to us precisely so that we wouldn't need to merely imagine what God might be like, but could know the essential parts we'd a) never be able to discover on our own, and b) having made guesses, never have a way to know how right we were. We'd be stuck permanently at Romans 1, never getting farther than the basic idea of God to grasp at, without any details. The Bible is a threat to, and viewed unfavorably by, many people because they don't -want- those details. Murky is nice, because murky doesn't demand anything of you.
Two Initial Take-aways:
I will be wanting to develop this idea further, and I pray that some more fruitful models of gospel articulation in Taiwan will result from it. In the mean time, here are two practical things we can take away from Chesterton's piercingly accurate observation:
1. For Taiwan: Pagan/Pre-christian religious people are approaching the divine fundamentally in an imaginative way, even if some imaginations have become codified in long-standing tradition. I very quickly saw that apologetic/reasoned argument-style approaches were of almost no help in Taiwan whatsoever, except for very specific demographics of people; now that makes a great deal of sense, and I understand why there is no "doctrine"--if it's not being made up as people go along now, it's a tradition that someone came up with at some point in the past. (This doesn't include "real" Buddhism, which is different, but that is less common in Taiwan, though people feel free to borrow concepts or traditions from it for the very reasons stated above)
Gospel work in Taiwan should recognize that people are approaching religion with "sincere imagination" that is not subjected to logic because it wouldn't make sense to. This meshes perfectly with a growing, undefinable intuition I've felt lately that what Taiwan needs is not more apologetics but something like a natively Taiwanese Narnia--something to capture people's religious imagination in a way that points to Christ.
2. For America: The post-christian is the pre-pagan. This idea (common in America now too) that the Bible or Christianity is oppressive because it denies people the use of their imagination when approaching the divine is an essentially pagan objection. It makes no sense to a Christian because it's like saying dictionaries are oppressive because they deny people the ability to imagine how a word ought to be spelled. (Which, of course, some people now say as well.) But the idea that Christianity is oppressive because of attitudes toward gender issues or anything else is really a related issue; for progressives, humanity should be allowed to feel its way forward with imaginative sincerity into the darkness of relative truth. (Finally the perennial popularity of John Lennon's ditty of deconstruction "Imagine" begins to make sense...)
By contrast, Christians claiming the light of unchanging Truth has already been given to mankind puts the lie to this entire quest for crowd-sourced truth. But the leaders of that quest and their devoted followers prefer and insist on darkness, because it lets them imagine reality as they like, and hate light because it forces them to confront reality. Schroedinger's Jesus might not demand they leave everything and follow Him, if we don't open the box. So then, the so-called progressive movement in the US is in various ways a progression indeed: out of post-christianity into a new age of paganism. This now occurs, however, in a culture where Christianity has deeply and permanently altered the ideascape. The Enemy is working hard to scrub these Biblical concepts out of the Western marketplace of ideas, but they are memes which don't die easily.
I look forward to seeing what else comes out of this amazing book. If you haven't read The Everlasting Man by Chesterton, I strongly encourage it. The Kindle version is only $1 on Amazon right now.
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