Will Humanity Survive Religion?. W. Royce Clark
sick with his feelings of his inability to find meaning and provide adequately for his family. He turned deeply inward, and the primary inheritance he passed on to his survivors was pitiful memories of a broken and ineffective husband and father. After he died, although his dutiful wife usually verbally defended the honor of her deceased partner, it finally slipped out one day that she could never forgive him for what he did.
His children never understood him, and they had absolutely no use for any of the common religious trappings or affiliations. Well, almost. In the end, a grandson accidentally took up with a religious cult in the mountains of Colorado, probably because of the religious and social vacuum Clarence’s children had inherited after he left the ministry. When the leader of the cult brought the whole enterprise to a violent implosion, the grandson became somewhat a hero/martyr in killing the leader to protect some of the innocent women and children of the compound.
What is Updike saying? There may be several possibilities. First, he might be saying that faith can be lost by reading the wrong books or thinking the wrong things that draw one away from a conservative if not totally literal understanding of the Christian scriptures. But I think this is not his point. Second, he might be saying that the truth lies only in the synod mediator’s position, that real faith is not opposed to reason, science, doubt, self-criticism, or criticism of the sources and traditions of the religion. Third, he could be saying that real faith can be found in either the conservative or liberal posture, provided one is not hypocritical in trying to hold simultaneously to the conflicting sides. A fourth possibility would be that faith is a totally individual experience, and so cannot be communicated, taught, passed on, or inherited, so no one is responsible for anyone’s faith or lack of faith, and no one else can affect positively or negatively one’s own faith. Or finally, he might be saying that religious faith depends neither upon any particular interpretation of traditional doctrines nor on one’s participation in a formal religious community although it might be found there, but instead is a common basic human trust in relating to other humans, a trust essential to civil society, and a trust that comes from finding to some degree one’s own identity within them. The latter would be read from the story of the grandson and the turn his life took.
My purpose in posing these possible interpretations of Updike is twofold. On the one hand, these five (and there are many more than five) possible interpretations attest to the fact that the text itself will or could speak in different ways to different readers because of their unique positions, understandings, and needs, despite what the author may have intended. A text may be anonymous, but it usually has intentionality by an author. But to determine that intention may be neither easy nor even possible or relevant, given the changes of perspectives over time and the fluidity of language. A text can and always does to a degree stand on its own, has a life of its own as its plethora of meanings blends with the intricate understandings of each communicant within a given community of discourse, as the words themselves bring to light a unique situation, a new reality, or even irrelevance.
What is true of Updike’s text may at least be implied for all texts, including texts of sacred scriptures, that they can spawn all kinds of different “interpretations,” not simply because of some inherent ambiguity within them, but rather because of the difference of the situation of each reader, hearer, or participant in the text, and the vast gap between the present readers or interpreters and the original authors or editors. The answer to any question of whether there is a single “true” reading or “original” interpretation, which remains constant, then, is a misdirection, and especially if one thinks the essence of such true or best interpretation lies almost primarily in the past, as if one who masters some foreign or familiar though strange language, or the one who accumulates encyclopedic knowledge of that age alone will own the secret key to the truth. To think one can ever uncover the original author’s “intent” suggests a certain amount of mind-reading or Romanticist imagination of the nineteenth century.3 We know that specifics will change continually, requiring reinterpretation. It is also possible that a scholar may read with even the unrecognized motivation of finding something totally novel, so to “interpret” can mean ignoring the obvious or simply using a text to say what one wants.4 But access to some Absolute certainty of some author’s hypothetical “original intent” is never a possibility. Immediacy of the past is not present. In this sense, it is not different from the issue of U.S. citizens trying to figure out how to interpret the U.S. Constitution.5
A meaningful interpretation of an ancient text will require more than a study of past word-usages, idioms, tenses, accents, anacolutha, ellipses, and the like, more than great facility within the original language and tremendously broad knowledge of the historical, cultural setting of the documents, original authors and their motivations, and even possible opponents whose positions stimulated the authors to write. A text does not mean something (or even anything) in the present simply because an authority that has vested interests in its influence emphasizes its importance. Regardless of what a text might have meant in the past in its original setting, to be meaningful in any present, it must stand within the present “public reason” and present languages to meaningfully elucidate, relate to, or enhance present and future life in its manifold relationships as presently perceived.
The second reason I had for listing these different ways of reading Updike is to further illuminate the thesis of this book. It is very simple. In my life at the present, I find that religious faith can perhaps most appropriately be identified with the fifth possible interpretation mentioned earlier, yet I realize that to many people that would no longer be religious at all. It certainly is not religious by the most distinct feature I identified with religion, since I did not include supranatural or mythical elements, much less, an Absolute.
But the religious community itself still might serve humanity in an ethical way, perhaps more potently than it did as a “religious” group believing in myth and a supranatural world with an Absolute or unquestioning element. On the other hand, I do not see that the goal of faith could be simply “finding” truth6 through only a “conservative” or only a “liberal” interpretation of a sacred text and derived traditions and doctrines. People do not fall into such extreme caricatures in their understandings and behavior in life but instead are often even a very incongruous mixture of what one calls “liberal” and “conservative.” Faith, as trust, however, involves not positions as much as it involves people and their relationships. Faith or trust is an interdependence of two or more people in their acceptance of each other, and it does not depend upon their mutual acceptance of a plethora of mythical, metaphysical, or theological ideas. These foci on specific elements of “creeds” or elaborate doctrines of the metaphysics presumed are only the paraphernalia of faith or trust, only the exhaust, the residue, but neither what constitutes faith or trust nor its focus, even if some people get the cart ahead of the horse.
The metaphysics, myths, hyperbolic traditions, stories, and theologies do not themselves build self-integrity, but often contest a person’s self-integrity, as they did for Reverend Wilmot. Hence, the “burden” is not self-integrity per se, but how religion’s Absolute makes it difficult for one to maintain self-integrity in espousing the religion’s unquestionable doctrines.
If a religion is about “character” as Whitehead suggested in the introduction to this study, this means that it is about ethical relationships. The sad thing was that Reverend Wilmot failed to see that he had made the priorities out of the secondary aspects of the religion, thereby missing its real focus. He judged his theoretical insights, his mental consistency, his faithfulness to an institution’s presumed position as the most important element in his self-integrity instead of seeing how his self-integrity was derived from his relationship with his wife and family and parishioners in their daily struggles for meaning. It was giving priority to ideas over real persons and actual relationships. This mistake of his was learned in seminary because it has always had to be taught since it was so unnatural otherwise. The misunderstanding of what a religion is about is traceable back to “authorities” who define it with their vested heteronomous positions, including its incredible metaphysics.
I neither do believe nor am I even suggesting that faith’s (or trust’s) rewards or one’s self-integrity come only through the assurance that one never contradicts oneself, changes one’s mind, reasons inconsistently, or acts hypocritically. In such case, trust