(Ir)religiosity

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We like to dichotomize things.  It makes our lives much easier when things can be easily compartmentalized and divided.  But the problem with that tendency is that it creates unneeded — and often blatantly false — polarities and bifurcations.  These type of constructions are endemic in the modern church and some of the more common and noticeable ones are the divisions between conservative and liberal, evangelical and progressive, traditional and contemporary, and so on.  Even within the latest renewal movement which aims to rethink and re-imagine “church” and Christianity we see a division between emerg-ing and emerg-ent.  This penchant to create fissures and fractures seems to be a natural one.

Nevertheless, I think something is missed in doing so because no group or category has a monopoly on Truth (capital “T”) but each one has a certain part, a certain important piece, of the truth (little “t”), a piece that is lost when its counterparts jettison it altogether.  So I like the tension and the dialectic.  To me, that’s the real sweet spot.  It can be painful and messy, yes, but I think that makes it all the more beautiful.

Of all these petty and unnecessary binaries the division between orthodoxy and orthopraxy is one of the most important, or at least one with greater implications.  It’s also one of the most divisive that will almost always incite inflammatory or emotional reaction from someone.  Really, when you think about it, where stand here has implications for just about everything.  It’s serious business.  And the usual arguments are so…tiresome.  Conservatives insist that orthodoxy trumps everything and that it must be vigorously defended against heresy.  Likewise, liberals, quoting Matthew 25 no doubt, rebut that praxis must be emphasized over (and sometimes against) belief.  But both poles have blind spots, blind spots that their counterparts love to point out.   And so goes the endless deadlock and debating round and round the circle.

I think both of these points are hopelessly unimaginative and helplessly beholden to a modern mindset that is very quickly becoming outmoded.

I want to suggest that it is not either/or and that placing doxis (belief) and praxis (action) against one another misses the larger movement.  I think it is and/both.  And rigid hegemony of either is dangerous if not destructive.  Belief is deeply important to me but only insofar as it transforms the very fabric of my being, rupturing my comfortable and conventional way of relating to the other, with something wholly Other, something I otherwise thought to be impossible, even absurd, but now made very possible via my response to God’s grace and Jesus’ to call to radical love.  Similarly, those tangible actions and that palpable praxis, because it is so radical and beyond predictable possibility, simply cannot be brought to full fruition without a grounding narrative or belief, a reliance on something beyond my own finite human capacities.

So both belief and action are inherently interdependent and mutually interactive.  And both are understood differently.  Belief is not simply something to which I submit my mental or cognitive assent, neither is action, like some sort of fetish, something I do in order to avoid guilt or shame.  Both of those usual conceptions avoid real transformation.  As much as we might argue otherwise, they just don’t alter our being, our person-hood, and our relations with God, self, and the other.    And for me that is the ultimate point.  That is what we are striving for:  individual and collective transformation so that we are realigned according to God’s purposes, restored of the Imago dei so we can responsibly participate in God’s alternate reality (what Jesus called the kingdom of God) and graciously increase the love of God and neighbor in our various contexts.

Belief and action, doxis and praxis.  Both are very important and both are contingent upon the other, but neither can be allowed to crust over into tired dogmatism because when they do we run the dangerous risk of slipping into idolatry. And when we do that, well, we’ve really missed the point.