Consider Christian fundamentalism. This religious system comes packaged with extensive apologetics that render it almost entirely self-consistent and apparently coherent. Fundamentalism offers an answer to every challenge. But though Christian fundamentalism does contain some ideas that are meaningful and true, its contains many significant flaws that represent neither the true message of Jesus nor the nature of broader reality. Awareness of these flaws does more than cause an adherent to change specific beliefs; rather, such awareness can challenge the entire coherency of the fundamentalist system and by implication cause the former adherent to reject all aspects of his or her religion, both the good and the bad.

Thus, because virtually every human belief system is flawed in some way, the very coherency of such a system can in the end lead to the rejection of all its components, regardless of their individual merit — a sort of “guilt by association” of beliefs. Anecdotal evidence for this claim is found in the many stories of Christian fundamentalists who eventually become atheists, rather than, say, moderate or liberal Christians, after they are forced to recognize the error of some component of their fundamentalism.

What we need most then in our worldviews is not total coherency and self-consistency, with the resultant false security of certainty. Rather, we should be willing to let paradox, mystery, and doubt break into our faith, lending us humility and the willingness to not have it all figured out at once. The willingness to accept uncertainty or even apparent contradiction will give our faith a different sort of coherence, a fluid coherence that allows our ideas to adapt to our changing experiences of God and of people. When we accept paradox as a means to the end of truth, our religious worldviews will be more mature, more resilient, and more effective as methodologies for understanding and knowing God.

I highly recommend this essay as a manifesto for the necessity for radical political, social, and cultural action by Christians. The author, a former missionary, combines down-to-earth Christian experience with academic acumen, and did a good job shattering my own stereotypes about what sorts of things people doing missionary work believe. Drawing from such diverse authors as C. S. Lewis, Walter Wink, Naomi Klein, Walter Benjamin, and Slavoj Žižek (who is cited the most frequently), Ingleby unapologetically calls for very left-wing solutions to the crises that face the world.

Ingleby does a good job of critiquing several inadequate Christian approaches to environmental and economic crisis in the world, dispelling the myth that “this world is not our home” and that therefore we should ignore its problems. The author’s admirable goal is to contextualize the message of the Gospel to the real-world circumstances that face twenty-first-century humanity, and thus he is unashamed to see Christianity as being inherently environmentalist, anti-capitalist, and justice-oriented.

Two insights struck me as particularly valuable. Ingleby makes the much-needed point that “because relationships are at the heart of all this, we can say that even more important than survival is justice.” Borrowing from Walter Wink, Ingleby straightforwardly describes systems that privilege survival over justice as demonic, and correctly notes that sacrifice will be needed for justice. Though easily (and, I feel, wrongly) critiqued as naïve, this moral clarity is a much-needed reminder in the current political climate.

Ingleby’s other key insight is his appropriation of Žižek’s call for an alliance between political radicals (particularly in the environmentalist movement) and proponents of Christian apocalypticism for the creation of a “radical emancipatory politics.” Ingleby is correct in his assertion that these two groups (often viewed as polar opposites in popular discourse) share many of the same goals. It is tempting to imagine what American politics would have looked like over the past few decades if this call for a leftist Christianity had been heeded earlier.

Constrained by the shortness of his essay, Ingleby presents few solutions to the crises he trumpets. But Christians and Catastrophe effectively presents the Biblical case for a renewed and contextualized Christian apocalypticism, and, perhaps most importantly, reclaims apocalyptic rhetoric and vision as a tool of radical hope rather than destructive despair. For this vision of Christianity as a call for action in crisis, I recommend this short book as a basic, coherent introduction to its topic — and even as a manifesto for a differently-politicized Church of the third millennium.

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ He answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.’ And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ Jesus replied, ‘A man was driving down from Tempe to Flagstaff, and fell into the hands of a militia, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a pastor was driving in his Cadillac down that road; and when he saw him, he switched lanes and passed by. So likewise a businessman, when he drove through the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But an undocumented Mexican while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having cleaned them with soap and water. Then he helped him up, brought him to a hotel, and took care of him. The next day he took out what little money he had and gave it to to the hotel manager, and said, “Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.” Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the militia?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’

[See also: "Arizona and the Least of These"]

Matthew 25 contains some of Jesus’ most famous stories. Jesus speaks in the parable both to the righteous and the wicked, and to the latter he says, “For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me. … Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” This passage has long stood as a perennial call to Christians to stand with the oppressed, with the “least of these,” with those at the bottom of society, those most marginalized by “the system.” I believe that it is this passage which must frame Christian discussion of Arizona’s immigration law.

I submit that Christians must regard undocumented immigrants as “the least of these” in the context of the American immigration debate. Every year, millions of people around the world struggle to make enough money to live, to feed their children, to be able to go through their day-to-day lives with some semblance of security. Many of these people find that they are unable to find work in their own country, and so they seek to emigrate and establish a new life somewhere else to provide for themselves and their families. Pushed out by broken systems and broken circumstances, marginalized by greedy economic structures and ineffective governments, many look towards the United States and its relatively strong economy as offering hope for the future of themselves and their children.

Unfortunately for most of these people, it is incredibly difficult to immigrate legally to the United States. The process is time-consuming, costly, and uncertain, and can thus leave a potential immigrant who is denied a visa worse off at the end of the attempt than at its beginning. Daunted by the difficulty of this long-term process, with fears compounded in many cases by immediate economic uncertainties, many people are put into a situation where they see no other option to provide for their themselves and their families than to enter the country illegally. With no realistic alternatives, they live at the margins of American society.

These undocumented immigrants, truly the “least of these,” are the targets of Arizona’s new law. SB 1070 is manifestly designed to further marginalize these people and those who help them, to make it easier to arrest and prosecute them, to interrupt their day-to-day lives as they work (often in below-minimum-wage-jobs) to set food on the table every night. Rather than try to fix the broken systems that put these people in the situations they are in, Arizona has decided to punish them and ostracize them. Arizona has cracked down on the victims of America’s broken immigration system rather than try to address the underlying problems with the system itself.

I believe that a straightforward application of the message of Jesus Christ condemns Arizona’s immigration law. The Kingdom of Heaven is a kingdom of grace not legalism, of inclusion not exclusion, of welcome not hostility. The Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth is a proclamation of justice in the face of oppression, of liberation from bondage, of love for the marginalized. With this in mind, I ask Christians across America to remember that as they do to the least of these, so do they do to Jesus himself.

[This post was originally published at YourPerspective.org]

I will tell you that I am a Christian. I am not an orthodox one. I am so far gone into what I hope to be heterodoxy (and fear, at times, to be heresy) that many would say I am not a Christian at all. But I identify myself as one because at the core of my world is Jesus of Nazareth.

I’m agnostic more often than I’m comfortable with. I might even say that I’m an agnostic Christian. I have faith in many stories and many people, but I don’t have beliefs about some propositions that are central to many people’s conception of Christianity. I have faith in the story of Jesus and faith in “God”, but I’m not sure what it means to believe that God “exists” or to believe that the supernatural is “real”. I’m not a dualist – I don’t accept the strict distinction between soul and body, between spiritual and physical. (Indeed, I argue that the fact of the Incarnation, which is the starting point of my theology, politics, etc., necessitates the rejection of ontological dualism. This is connected, at some level, to my somewhat panentheistic understanding of the Trinity. My theories about the nature of God are of course in tension with my feeling that at some level saying that God exists (or doesn’t exist) is meaningless or useless or irrelevant.) I might even be a materialist, in the ontological sense. At any rate, I’m not comfortable saying that I’m not a materialist.

Mysticism is an important component of Christian religion. Obviously a central challenge for non-dualist, materialist, (pseudo-)agnostic Christians such as I is the question of how to make sense of mysticism and make mysticism relevant in our own religious lives. What is the nature of spiritual experience, which cannot in itself be discounted even as most frameworks for interpreting it are rejected?

I propose a materialist mysticism, a mysticism of symbol and metaphor. For the non-dualist, the material is the spiritual; no distinction can be made, no separation posited. Thus, all material experiences can be understood to be spiritual ones. (This act of understanding or of seeing in a different way, with the result that we orient ourselves different toward that which is ultimate, is what we call “faith”.)  This is why, as poets have long understood, the contemplation of nature is an intensely “spiritual” experience that reveals to us whatever it is that we know as “God”. This is why living in poverty or walking down a street at night serve as vehicles for theological reflection.

Tonight I meditated in a Buddhist chaplaincy, sitting on one of a circle of pillows enclosing a group of shimmering candles. (My prayer was that a parable, or story, or metaphor about these candles might come to me.) I understood the candles to be like stars, shining in the night. I saw them as universes going in and out of existence. They were atoms, tiny particles, constituents of something grander. They were moments in time, infinite futures stretching from the present, infinite pasts converging to the now. They were both cosmos and microcosmos. I saw in them the glory of something that I have elsewhere called “God”, but any conception of God or Brahman or universe or humanity is inadequate to express fully the mystery and truth that we call by so many names.

This was of course a metaphor. Just a story, or a product of linguistic associations of meaning. It was material and physical. This means of course that it was spiritual and mystical.

Again, in religious terms: The apocalyptic task has always been the work of the prophets, not the priests. The priests say that if the current system ended, everything would be over; the prophets say that if the current system ended, the new one could at last begin. Perhaps the prophets are “unrealistic”; perhaps they are “naïve”. That’s what was said of MLK, of Gandhi, of Milk — but these men and others like them, though dismissed as ignorant and idealistic and unworthy of being taken seriously, are the very prophets who have given us hope and brought us change. It takes an act of daring and dreaming to listen to their visions; but when we do, we see suddenly not the end of the world, but the true beginning.

The questions are alike because both are category mistakes. It makes no sense to ask if electrons are purple, because the concept of color is utterly inapplicable to electrons. They are smaller than the wavelengths of light required to have colors at all. Electrons are relevant at a more fundamental level than are color categories.

My position (inspired especially by Paul Tillich) is that asking whether God exists implies a similar category mistake. Just as the content of the electron-concept is more fundamental than color-categories, the content of the God-concept is more fundamental than ontology-categories. This is why Tillich, for example, talks about God not as a being but as the ground of being. Subatomic particles can in some sense be thought of analogously as the ground of color, because they enable color-categories to be relevant.

So “Does God Exist?” is the wrong question to be asking. Some of the right questions to ask instead might be, “How do we interpret experiences of the divine?”, “Is it meaningful to talk about the action of God in the world?”, or “For what is the language of the divine a useful metaphor?” But if we ask the ontology-question, if we ask “Does God exist?”, we’ll always be disappointed, because there is no answer.

The broader issue, of course, is that of what categories we can use for God if not ontological ones. Aesthetic? Ethical? These are questions to consider. Hopefully I’ll have some more thoughts on this once I read Marion’s God Without Being, which arrived from Amazon today. But these are some preliminary thoughts on the subject before I dive into that text.

My early impetus for theological reflection was the question of freewill. In elementary school I considered that perhaps everything I did was a series of causes and effects tracing all the way back to a cause I had no control over and was frightened. Could this place, the mind in which my introverted psyche spent so much of its time and attention, be a mere metastasis without independent form or merit? Yes, it must be. So I selfishly held out hope for God and Heaven. I readily admit my position is no courageous one. It is the Calvinist who throws absolutely all worth and identity directly on God, not an inch remaining. It is I who protect my insular identity so I may have enough time to think for a while longer about God, the Universe, and where my final allegiance lies if I am generous enough to grant it.

I have bared before you my original motive for mounting the ambitious project to equate Calvinism and atheism. But I do myself I disservice: I came on the synthesis by surprise after a long chain of conclusions. People presented me with Calvinism hard and soft, but the latter theories were ambiguous, arbitrary, or eventually collapsed into hard Calvinism. In short I found that if God has a motive to predestine some he must predestine all, otherwise he is creating a superior race with full right to subjugate the elect and damned that posses no freewill and thus no reason (see Aristotle’s defense of slavery), clearly contradicting imago dei. But if God controls our destinies he is also controlling our actions. Those who have received Christ will bear the fruits of conversion while the pitiful ones will remain lost. We have no choice whether to live a good or evil life, and all life on earth acts upon God’s determination. The entire Universe identical to God’s will.

Where do we fallible creatures draw the line between the sovereign God and what God wills? There is none. God is holy from beginning to end and God’s will is just a way we talk about God’s nature in the context of how it relates to the Universe. If the Universe is God’s will and God’s will is the Universe, the Universe is God. This is pantheism equating to atheism by the logic that if God and the Universe are the same thing, and the Universe is real to us and God is only an idea, then it is useless to claim anything supernatural. The most realistic way to speak about the Universe in this scenario does not require God.

My heart has softened and I realized that Calvinism intuitively feels not so much like atheism than its antithesis. What is that? Many have said theism, but that is not enough. Calvinism is as fixed, stone-faced, and absolute as atheism, but on the other end of the conceptual spectrum. The point I overlooked in my original analysis is that the Universe is by no means the entirety of God’s will, though no part of it is not God’s will. The Universe is encompassed entirely within the identity of God, though it is not the entirety of God, what we know as panenthiesm. The most realistic way to speak about God in this scenario does not require mention of the Universe because the concept of God includes the concept of Universe.

If atheism is all Universe and no God, Calvinism is all God and no Universe.

When I consider that Calvinism might not be atheism after all, a passageway opens. I used to only be on one side of the creek, hoping to group all my opponents on the other side far away from me. But now Calvinism and atheism now occupy the right and left banks, and I am plunged cold and uncomfortable in the current in between. And there is a way out.

My faith is greedy. I want to have all the glory of God and all of my own identity so that I may fully appreciate it: all God and all Universe, separate but fully realized. Though they seem in extreme contradiction, I desire both Calvinism and atheism. I want God and I want the Universe, separate but deeply connected entities in a beautiful relationship of love and teleological exchange. It is my faith that this is not a contradiction but a paradox. To ask how I can delight in both a God of Life and a Universe of formless waters is to merely ponder again the holy mystery of God’s creative power. Under the rule of atheism all is chaos. Under the rule of Calvinism all is order. Under the direction of this greedy, age old Christianity, order assembles from chaos, matter emerges from the abyss, and a simple man stands blinking in the sudden daylight of a garden after death on a Roman cross.

The third location that I visited during my weekend stay in occupied Palestine was Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank after Jerusalem itself. In the very heart of Hebron is an illegal settlement of more than 500 Israelis, guarded by over 1200 IDF soldiers. Walking around the city with my uncle (a Methodist minister) and our guide (an advisor to Christian Peacemaker Teams in the region), I saw many things that were deeply affecting — checkpoints that impeded free movement by the locals, roads reserved for the use of settlers alone, paths to Palestinian schools maliciously blocked by barbed wire, the Star of David painted provocatively onto Palestinian homes and shops, and much more. But the most moving experience of all was not a place or scene, but a person.

In the heart of the city, our guide introduced us to a 75-year-old Muslim man who had grown up in Hebron. He could still remember the days when the Muslims and Christians of the city had lived side by side in peace and harmony with the pre-settler Jewish community. Growing up, his neighbors had been Jews, and his mother had breastfed one of the Jewish girls when her own mother died. According to Islamic law and custom, this act made the girl his sister, and he said that she was still alive, working as a lawyer in Tel Aviv. His story underscores that the current conflict is not fundamentally about faith or differences of religion, though religious extremism has certainly developed to some degree on all sides—Israeli, Palestinian, and American.

Our guide told us that this man is the last Palestinian to live in his section of the town, as the surrounding neighborhood has otherwise completely been taken over by colonizing settlers. He has to pass through three military checkpoints to get to his house; one of them exists solely for his home, all by itself. The soldiers do not allow him to receive visitors, and when his children and grandchildren pass to and from his house, the settlers harass them, shouting and throwing rocks. His next-door neighbor is a Zionist with a reputation as the most extreme, most radical proponent of the settler ideology in the entire Palestinian territories.

This 75-year-old man has every reason in the world to be bitter or to become an “extremist” in response to the violent extremism directed at him, his children, and his community every single day. But as he spoke to us under the shadow of IDF guard towers and settler homes, he said things that brought tears to my eyes. He told us that when the settlers first came to his part of the city, he went and offered them fruit, for his religion of Islam instructs him to love everyone, whether Muslim, Christian, or Jew. He offered them fruit, and they threw stones at him. But still he knows that God wants him to love everyone — it is written in the “Book of Muhammad,” in the Qur’an. “We are all human,” he said. This man is hated and oppressed by these settlers; they throw stones at him, they file false charges against him in court, they take the land and homes of his neighbors, they put soldiers in front of his house. But his response is to love, for “we are all human,” for his faith tells him to love all without regard for creed or color.

During her time in Gaza before her death at the hands of the IDF, the American peace activist Rachel Corrie wrote, “The vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance.” I saw the truth of that statement in this man, for whom merely to live, to go about his business, is an incredible act of nonviolent witness and protest. To breathe in and out in the morning, to walk out of his own home and back in through the checkpoint that is there just for him, to insist that he will live there in dignity, is an act of resistance in the face of evil and oppression that most in America cannot even fathom. He was a picture of dignity, wearing a wool jacket, a full-length matching wool cloak, and a clean white kaffiyeh. He lives, and his life, his simple act of going through the day, every day, signals light in the midst of the darkness of the Occupation. He is not alone in his resistance; indeed, he is joined by the vast majority of Palestinians in Hebron, who go about their lives despite the soldiers and settlers, one day buying groceries under the shadow of guns, the next day gathering for a nonviolent demonstration in front of one of the numerous guard towers. As Rachel said, “These people are being shot at every day and they continue to go about their business as best they can in the sights of machine guns and rocket launchers. Isn’t that basically the epitome of nonviolent resistance?”

Thus, in political terms, this man is a hero. In Christian religious terms, he is a saint. I believe that in a very real way he embodies all that is (or should be) holy about this “Holy Land.” All too often the sacred sites of Israel and Palestine are used as ammunition in a battle of exclusion, as fuel in the fires of separation and division. As a Christian, I worship a God who “desires mercy rather than sacrifice” and follow a Messiah who preached reconciliation with enemies and liberation for the oppressed. In my understanding of the Christian message, then, the sanctity of the Holy Land should be a hope for peace with justice rather than a threat of exclusion and division. All too often the opposite is the case, but this humble Muslim man shows that there is yet hope for something better in these lands. I do not understand his courage; I do not understand his love. But I know that his life is filled with and exhibits the holiness and justice of God (“the most merciful, the most compassionate”), and serves as a call for people of all faiths to practice that holiness and justice in their own traditions. This is the Palestine that America must see, and this is the Islam that Christianity must recognize.

“We are all human.”