“Christian Agnostics”
Today, I finished listening to a series of 36 lectures, Philosopy of Religion, by James Hall, professor at University of Richmond. Dr. Hall is an excellent speaker who speaks in a pleasant manner and communicates well his views. He did not pretend to be impartial and often gave his opinion about the particular topic of that lecture. He, admirably, identifies himself early in the course as an “agnostic Episcopalian”. After listening to his lectures, I think that means someone who attends an Episcopalian church, but does not believe the teachings to be true in the objective sense of the word, or at least resigns himself to not ever having knowledge of the veracity of Christian claims.
In his last lecture, he essentially encourages all Christians (actually, all “theists”) to become “Christian agnostics”. He defined a Christian agnostic as one who is committed to his faith, but when it comes to relating to society, culture, and those who do not share our beliefs we should not insist on the truth claims of our faith. Hall’s admonition is that we would be better to understand theistic claims simply as “stories”. It does not matter if these stories are true or not. What matters is that they serve some cultural or human good. He then used the illustration of the story of Santa Clause to clarify his position. When his child approached him concerning the veracity of the Santa story, he did not answer in a straightforward manner. Basically, he said, it doesn’t matter whether you think the story is true or not. What matters is that the story carries great meaning about the virtues of giving. Now, Hall denied that he was equating the claims of Theism with the claims of the Santa story, however, it was not hard to see that that was exactly what he was doing.
That is exactly what we all do, when we give into the “postmodern” notion of subjective truth. If all Christianity consists of are moral stories, it is not to be preferred over any other set of beliefs. One might just as well join the Church of Aesop. It seems to me one cannot be a “Christian Agnostic”. Christianity claims that certain things are objectively true. For example, Christianity makes historical claims about Jesus of Nazareth that are either true or not. If not, Christianity is just a set of moral stories, and it’s central teachings (which are not moral rules) are groundless and worthless.
I do understand Hall’s motivation for his classifying all religions as just stories of which we do not need to worry about whether they are true or not. He is concerned about religious exclusivism. The “I’m right and you’re wrong” mentality. He traces many of the ills of the world to this exlusivist mentality (wars, terrorism, etc). However, one does not have to surrender to subjectivism and give up on the concept of objective truth to be a good citizen. It is perfectly reasonable, and appropriate, for a Christian to hold that his beliefs are true and another is false (especially since they make contradictory claims and both cannot be true). That does not necessitate a militant imposition of one’s beliefs on others. Tolerance does not mean we accept all claims as equally true. It means we do not impose our beliefs on others. We allow others to express their beliefs. Those competing claims are evaluated in rational discourse, through which we all might come closer to embracing what is true.