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"Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." (John 20:29)
People will believe what they want to believe, which is both encouraging and frustrating to those of us who work in theological education. It is encouraging that people hold steadfast in their beliefs, because life will challenge anyone who tries to walk a spiritual path.
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Yet, blind faith in established beliefs can also be frustrating to those of us who observe human religious activity, because unexamined, embedded beliefs can divide people into walled compounds where the only communication between groups is to lob the occasional word-grenade over the wall at one's neighbor. Sometimes, the chosen weapon is not merely words.
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What is it about the human mind which exposes people to the risks of self-delusion and the denial of reality? Take an historical example: the death of Abraham Lincoln.
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President Lincoln was shot dead. You've seen dramatizations of his assassination. People living in 1865 America had no motion picture or TV cameras, but they had their newspaper accounts and photographs of the corpse. He was buried in Springfield, Illinois. After a plot to steal the body was thwarted in 1871, rumors that Lincoln was not in the box continued. So, the coffin was re-opened five times: December 21, 1865, September 19, 1871, October 9, 1874, April 14, 1887, and September 26, 1901. After the 1901 opening, 23 witnesses testified that it was in fact Lincoln. Yet the rumors continued.
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Why did so many people question something which was an established historical fact, i.e., Lincoln was dead and buried in that box? Why did rumors persist that Elvis Presley did not die but escaped somehow into self-imposed obscruity, away from the limelight he cherished all his adult life? What about the JFK-lives rumors? Or the persistent whispering during my youth that Hitler was alive and well and living in Argentina? What about the resurrection of Jesus? (Oops! That raises the question to a whole new level. Disregard.)
Lincoln was assassinated so long ago, you say. Okay, let's take a more recent example. Ronald Regan was adored by the Religious Right, even though he never attended worship services or permitted them to be held at the White House. His Hollywood lifestyle (including divorce) was hardly a family values epitome, and his wife was a New Ager who consulted astrologers. And whom did this reprobate defeat? Jimmy Carter, a life-long Baptist Sunday School teacher, married to the same woman, abstemious and almost puritanical in his personal affairs.
When meditating on the soci-political turmoil of the world, especially when applying religious solutions to complex problems, it is probably wise to remember the words of Harry Emerson Fosdick:
The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth. [1]
Or, in the immortal words of popular wisdom, "Putting lipstick on a pig..." Well, you know the rest of the story.
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[1]Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Living of These Days (NY: Harper & Brothers, 1956), 230.
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