Introduction

Welcome to Uniting Lines! This is a blog site exploring possible meaningful relations between traditional concepts and truth claims of Christian theology and modern scientific understanding of human beings and the natural world. There could be numerous grounds for such an intellectual quest, and I’d like to make my starting point clear. Actually, Professor Wesley Wildman might as well do that for me:

Too many theologians have not exerted themselves to learn what they need to learn from the sciences of cognition and culture. Just think of Augustine or Thomas within the Christian tradition, or Maimonides in the Jewish tradition; these were cutting-edge thinkers who were masters of the sciences of their time. But most contemporary theologians have wound up resorting to very useful, but tired, categories such as sin to talk about the human condition; then use those words as if they had a stable meaning, and do not need to be rearticulated for our time, in relation to the various other insights we now possess into human behavior … Theology has not been agile enough to rearticulate its fundamental pathways in relation to the rapidly changing understanding of human nature created by the sciences of cognition and culture. As theologians, we have not followed in the footsteps of Augustine and Thomas, Maimonides, and Sankara, and all the rest of our luminous-genius forebears. I take the fundamental theological categories themselves to contain priceless insights, but those insights are profoundly obscured when the anthropology in which they are expressed is 1,500 years out of date.*

There you’ve got it. Christian believers already have the means to defend theism against evidentialist atheist attacks: there are videos on YouTube where this is done by witty theologians. Basically everybody knows that religious beliefs can’t be absolutely refuted on rational grounds. Yet for a decent apologist this could be nothing more than a beginning. If indeed her beliefs contained ”priceless insights”, should she really be happy thinking: ”Brilliant! At least I’m not totally denied epistemological justification for my theological propositions! Too bad there are more and more people who really can’t comprehend what I mean by them.” No, she would have to consider the propositions separately, critically, and constantly asking herself: ”What do I mean by this? Is this belief a justified truth-claim when articulated this way?”

As for me, I am not a practicing Christian at the moment. I do occasionally pray and might even attend a service once in a while, but I don’t feel any urge to engage in religious activities or to formulate a solid Christian worldview that I could promote. My interests in writing about theology are more intellectual than apologetic, even though the views and arguments presented here might have some apologetic value. Having said this, I do not wish to alienate anybody from core Christian beliefs and concepts: I am deeply interested in, sometimes even obsessed with, making sense of them where it seems problematic. I have, however, no hurry in this project, and if there be no point where everything ”starts making sense” then so be it.

My religious background is ambiguous. A belief in the existence of some kind of God or at least in the meaningfulness of that concept has virtually always been part of my worldview, but there are very few if any dogmatic statements about God I’d always have embraced. I very much like the way Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke of religious beliefs as resembling not propositions but images, thus being immune to propositional counterarguments and mutable only through the complex and capricious set of experiences we call life.

God is such a ”wittgensteinian image” in my mind, and its characteristics have undergone wild changes over the years. I feel very strongly that my conception of God has always been shaped by theological interpretations of my own life and circumstances, rather than by any dogmatic Christian theology taught to me. I have been brought up by agnostic parents, in no way hostile to religion but not especially concerned in it either. Then again I live in a historically overwhelmingly Christian country and my ”theology of life” has been full of Christian – although very arbitrarily applied! – ideas, most prominent of which have been the omnipotence of God, divine violence and God as the source of love.

My congregational activities have exclusively taken place in liberal Protestant surroundings. In my teens I have been an active member of the Töölö congregation in Helsinki, where I used to attend service regularly and assist in confirmation school (see link for the Finnish definition). It was partly my background in the congregation, partly another impromptu theological interpretation of my life that led me to apply to the University Of Helsinki to study theology in 2013.

The questions I find especially interesting, concerning the relationship between Christian theological anthropologies and scientific understanding of humans, as well as between the ”will of God” and the dynamics of nature, have not always been that important to me. In fact, I first had more interest in history of religion outside Christian contexts: my Bachelor’s Thesis dealt with Iranian (Zoroastrian) mythical dualism and its possible roots in cultural interaction between Indo-Iranian and Uralic speaking prehistoric populations. At the same time, though, certain events in my personal life were a strong incentive for me to keep thinking about theological and philosophical issues, and to explicitly formulate problems that, in my view, needed to be solved. Soon after completing my thesis last spring, these problems became my foremost scientific concern.

Questions to which I am eager to seek answers can be presented as follows:

Who/what is a human being?

Can the functioning of the natural world be seen as manifesting divine moral preferences?

Is there a universally meaningful use of the theological concepts ”sin” and ”Fall”?

All the possible answers need to be grounded on theological, scientific and philosophical considerations, with disregard to none of the fields. A merely theological answer will not be enough, nor can it suffice to address a problem in scientific or philosophical terms alone. My starting point is the conviction that different kinds of truth claims should fit together and form a coherent system of some kind. If we are to assume that theological truth claims have some bearing on realities that are understood and discussed in other terms (biological, for example), then we need to challenge ourselves to seek meaningful relations between the discourses concerned. This involves analyzing and comparing the truth claims and, of course, the very concepts that are used to describe reality in them.

My basic assumptions allow me to ask questions like ”what does it mean that God created man when we know that even the very first Homo sapiens was a product of evolution and had non-human ancestors?” Some, say, Barthian thinker could claim that the two categories of information, revelational and scientific, are so totally different that it will not be worth it trying to form a meaningful relationship between them. Revelation-based truth claims are not claims about the reality observed in science, but about something that is true in a whole different way. Science can’t and shouldn’t be used to ground or rationalize this kind of propositions: they have to be accepted by faith instead.

But then again theological statements are often presented as having some bearing on the ”natural” world, the one that we can observe empirically and describe scientifically. We learn our theological concepts and form our religious beliefs through narratives. They describe, at least superficially, events in comprehensible social situations, with humans surrounded by other humans, various natural objects and creatures, and often supernatural agents as well. The narratives, whether they be Biblical or part of some folk tradition, present human actions and circumstances as something that can be interpreted and evaluated in religious terms. Insofar as such narratives are dominant in a community, the individual members are indeed encouraged to make interpretations of the world they inhabit. They learn to associate things and events with theological concepts, which in turn derive their content from narratives and the way the narratives are discussed in the community.

At least it is seldom clearly spelled out whether a claim is supposed to be true merely in theology or in other contexts as well. There are Biblical beliefs about God creating the world, about him stating what is proper conduct for creatures, about human beings doing something God is unhappy with, and so on. There are traditional beliefs about a specifically human condition, sin, which implies opposing God’s will; and finally about salvation, in which this harmful condition is miraculously overcome by the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Indeed, it is claimed that Jesus saves human beings from sin. These are beliefs about us and our surroundings, but then what are we and what are our surroundings?

The most general answer one can give is that we as living things are very complex and variable, and the world we inhabit is not very simple either. There is thus a vast array of different perspectives one needs to take into account in order to fully appreciate the richness of being human. We are members of Homo sapiens populations, shaped by evolution – which is a system of a great many variables and definitely not just a simple cycle of adaptation and natural selection. We are brains, neurally connected to certain kinds of bodily organs, sorting out an unbelievable amount of information and producing a unique experience of the world. We are persons, living creatures with a first-person perspective, usually possessing means to conceive of ourselves in the first person, that is, language. We are deeply social beings. Most of the capacities we’re born with are of no use without a human social context: the company of other humans and intense communication with them is the kind of environment we definitely have adapted to. We are also axiological beings: we ascribe value to situations and actions, and this is articulated in language, for example when talking about moral issues.

And then, of course we might be images of God. We are probably sinners, and if so, we can also be redeemed. For me, these propositions are best understood as synthesizing and making sense of everything mentioned above plus a lot more, making sense of it in a deeply human way, in a religious way. Similarly, I presume, the religious claims can be made sense of in other discourses. Just how exactly one is supposed to do this is the big question that fascinates me. I am already grateful for all the people I’ve encountered with whom I share this interest, and I invite all of you reading this post to participate in the search for a rich and up-to-date understanding of humanity, world and Christian theology.

*Quote from an interview published in Conversations on Human Nature (Agustin Fuentes & Aku Visala, 2016)