Faith and Korea

Part of the reason I haven’t written anything here in a long time is that I am currently in S. Korea, and I’m blogging my trip elsewhere. If you want the URL, let me know and I’ll leave it with you in a private comment. The only thing I ask is that you not mention this blog on that one, because the readership is much wider and includes a number of people who I regard only as friendly acquaintances (or who, for other reasons, I am not really comfortable revealing my inner thoughts to).

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about faith a lot, lately. The dominant set of thoughts can be concisely stated.

First, I rarely have what I might call “religious affections.” I don’t feel love for other people or gratitude towards God. I understand the idea of sin, and I understand that I am a sinner, but I usually don’t feel like it’s a big deal. I often find myself manufacturing guilt feelings to make up for that. I have almost zero passion for evangelism. This is not a new state of affairs; I have never really understood the excitement that some Christians exhibit. This is all bad, but from the point of view of my overall personality, I supposed it isn’t as dire as it could be. It’s not like I get excited or impassioned about much of anything. It’s more a manifestation of a personality or character type (or defect) than an anomalous lack of interest in God, specifically.

Second, I have been more and more bothered recently by Genesis. I’m reading a book called An Historical Survey of the Old Testament that was written in the 1960s. The author spends a great deal of time defending young-earth creationism in an overly confident tone using mind-bogglingly bad arguments. The present and ongoing trouble is, I can criticize what he thinks and how he presents it, but I don’t think anything. However bad his scientific arguments are, I have none, really.

It’s the elephant in the room of my faith, because, in my considered opinion, it is difficult or impossible to honestly reject Genesis while maintaining the rest of Christianity. If the bible can’t be trusted in places where it is scientifically falsifiable, why should we take the “spiritual” parts seriously? Also, it’s not like Genesis is a parenthetical note, like one of Jesus’ parables or the book of Job. It’s firmly embedded in salvation history. Systematically speaking, it might be possible to understand it somewhat allegorically, but not too much. I’m no scholar, but I’ve read Genesis, and there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way of disentangling the plainly historical from the possibly mythological. For one thing, the genealogies are traced right on back to Adam. Where would we insert the break?

These two things are related, even though they don’t seem like it. Lately, some Christian philosophers have taken the position that Christian belief is rational (partially) because Christians have a direct, spiritual apprehension of God. This is as real to them as sight, smell, touch, taste, or hearing, and only prejudice would lead us to take our “physical” senses to be reliable while rejecting our “spiritual” sense.

This is a very thought-provoking line of reasoning. I am not a sophisticated enough thinker to know whether it’s a good argument. It makes superficial sense, but almost everything can be stated in such a way. What’s interesting, rather, is my personal response to it. Initially, it seemed to smack of fideism. It made me a little angry because it seemed to sweep up belief in God into an impenetrable fortress.

I don’t want to dwell on answers to those objections or feelings. I just want to say that in considering them, I’ve come to realize to a greater degree how little of what I believe and say is in any sense rational. It’s 90% conventional. It’s from the “world view” given to me by my culture and education. Thinking clearly about whether to believe in God or not is very complicated, and for most people, it’s a decision that rests lightly on a shaky foundation of unexamined assumptions.

For me, personally, that often takes the form of giving entirely too much credit to “scholars” or the “scholarly consensus”, particularly on scientific issues. USAmericans have a rocky relationship with science.. we fluctuate wildly between wild-eyed skepticism and child-like acceptance. In spite of almost being a scientist myself, I am really no exception.

But science is immensely complicated. Almost no one who practices it thinks very much about what they are doing or how it can be justified or criticized philosophically. We have almost all unquestioningly adopted a naive realism.

That’s about all I have to say about that. It’s disconnected and disorganized, but that’s only because I don’t know what it means.

The second set of thoughts began just last night, really. I went out to a couple of bars with a new Korean friend and a fellow countryman who is also in the EAPSI program. The Korean took us to places where a lot of English speaking foreigners hang out. At the second one, I chatted for two or three hours with a man who was about 55 or 60.

He has led an interesting life, by most accounts. He is a freelance English teacher, and has been one for a long time. He’s worked in at least four Asian countries. Before coming to Korea about 10 months ago, he was in the Philippines for about 15 years. Before that, he was in China and Taiwan, where he learned Mandarin.

Then again, there he sat, in a cruddy Korean bar run for foreigners, flirting with a bartender just a little more than a third his age. He didn’t seem happy or enthusiastic about what he’d accomplished and where he had been. Instead, it seemed to me that he was leading his life perpetually in pursuit of novelty, but only finding cynicism, loneliness, and boredom.

Thinking about that man today has refreshed in my mind an old conviction that being “religious, but not too serious about it” is stupid in all its manifestations. Without some overarching purpose in our lives, some understanding of what (if anything) we are intended for, we are all like that man, just looking for the next diversion.

Jesus sets us a task, a mission, and even though it is often uncomfortable or boring, we choose to do it for the joy set before us, which is in large measure the Lord Himself. That kind of pursuit, of intentional living, can only be maintained when we have deep confidence in God. A shallow “not too serious” kind of faith approaches belief itself as though it were a diversion. Palliative, but never a cure.