Pat Robertson Falls From the Ladder of Being (And So Do We)
Poor uncle Pat. He just prefers his answers to be easy. The “main and plain” not only for the Bible but world as well – and who can blame him? Most of us want the Bible – or science, or politics, or television – to explain the schematic of life, not scribble all over it indelibly.
We prefer divine judgment to disaster. We prefer all homosexuals to be perverts and all feminists to be frigid. We cherish our villainous CEO’s as much as our historical fascist dictators and romantically pit them in battle against our crusading forces. We prefer WWII to Vietnam or Iraq.
We like all our Christians to be saintly (or sadistic) and our artists avante-garde (or addicted). We like our blacks and whites, our gender-roles, our partisanships, our winners and our losers. Oh how we love our losers. As Americans we prefer our sports with easy acronyms and decisively-bloody endings – NFL, NASCAR, MMA. The rest of the world can keep Soccer with its low scores, slow pace, and ambiguous endings.
It’s easy to read the Bible this way – and most of us do – until you get to Job, and Ecclesiastes…and Jesus. I recently heard John Goldingay summarize Writings:
“Proverbs says: ‘These are the rules of life: follow them. They work.’ Job and Ecclesiastes says: ‘We tried them. They don’t work!’”
Pat Robertson is echoing Proverbs when he condemns the Haitians for their tragedy, and so are we when we condemn him back. Earthquakes are more complicated than ancient Hebrew Proverbs. As is God, Haitian history and (believe it or not) Pat Robertson as well. It’s a Proverbs world that tries to make sense of tragedies with God or science, and it’s a Proverbs world that vilifies uncle Pat, too. Of course he’s wrong, and it’s important to say so, but slipping into his black-and-white shoes won’t change a thing.
What the world needs in an age of easy Bible answers and pretentious scientific posturing is more of Job, more of Qoheleth, more of the wounded-realist who has tested the prevailing ideology and found a few holes alongside the hope. Wounded realists are compassionate radicals, pushing relentlessly for understanding and justice (like Job) but wisely recognizing the imperfections in all of us (like Qoheleth). This requires a humility almost totally absent in the world of liberal/conservative, saved/lost, science/faith, gay/straight.
Psychologist J.P. Guilford called this oversimplified paradigm, “convergent thinking.” Robert Inchausti, commenting on the career of economic-thinker E.F. Schumacher in his excellent book, Subversive Orthodoxy, explains:
“[With convergent thinking] the paradigm is natural science, with its stipulative definitions and its verifiable hypotheses. Problems that come from the “real world,” Schumacher argues, do not yield to such reductionism. They usually demand a synthesis of irresolvable antinomies of some sort or another – such as freedom and order or security and risk – and this requires divergent thinking, that is to say, rule breaking, re-categorizing, and renaming kinds of processes so that we may rise to a more inclusive vision that synthesizes apparently irreconcilable oppositions into a higher conceptual unity.”
Alongside Schumacher, Inchausti places this progression of thought on a “ladder of Being,” reckoning it to be a more inclusive and creative approach to problem solving, saying,
“To the degree modern thought has [reduced] all things to their materiality, it has turned convergent thinking into an absolute, thus making ethical and philosophical problems increasingly difficult to solve – postponing them inevitably until some new science can be developed that will reduce every variable to controllable, atomistic, material elements.”
In this way, even though Modernity claims to liberate us from superstitions, life’s problems are tackled in remarkably similar ways by the scientist and fundamentalist alike: take a pill or memorize a Bible verse. That will solve all your problems. Reduce all complexities to their simplest encapsulated form and don’t question the experts.
Here is why we struggle to solve the problems of religious and ethnic pluralism, political and ethical dilemmas like abortion and stem-cell research, social ills like poverty or the disaster in Haiti. Convergent thinking always favors the simplistic, the decisive, the bloody. Convergent thinking turns Haiti into a divine object-lesson or a pragmatic political opportunity (just you wait and see). At its worst we find a willful ignorance that can only be described as arrogance or laziness (is there a difference?).
Not surprisingly then, Schumacher’s prescription outlined in A Guide For the Perplexed is a radically humble spiritual journey that begins with learning from both “society and tradition” and ends with “dying to oneself,” that ultimate act of faith best articulated by Jesus, by far the most perplexing figure in human history. It’s the presence of metaphor, paradox, and irony in scripture – especially in the incarnation of Christ – that most closely resembles real life and forces us into a posture of God-directed, unified humility. What we need most is the divergent Spirit of Christ.
In the days to come unified humility is what we’ll see in diverse partnerships of relief. Those who see themselves in the ravaged Haitians will bring the most mercy. That’s divergent thinking. That’s humility, and God is in it. It’s also what we’ll see in those who forgive Pat Robertson, not because they’re better than him but precisely because they recognize themselves in him. That’s the only way to make a difference and it’s the only way to climb back on the ladder of Being.
