Another Thought About Tribalism and Christianity

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It seems to me when you look at ancient religions, they mostly function as ways of hardening tribalism.  Ancient religions did not really ever say “your gods are not real.”  They said, “your gods are inferior.”  This fact is sometimes used to prove the greater perniciousness of Christianity, since it drove Christianity to proselytize others, and this is a great evil, to the modern mind.  The ancient pagans did not often try to proselytize the followers of other gods.  But the forcible conversion of unbelievers is no part of Biblical Christianity and happened more rarely than most people seem to think.  On the other hand, when you say, “your gods are inferior,” given the way religion worked in ancient times as an inseparable aspect of a particular ethnic group’s culture, what you were actually saying was, “you are inferior.”  The inferiority of another people was justification for attacking and enslaving them.  And how did you know they are inferior?  Because you were able to attack and enslave them.  If their gods were stronger than your gods, they would have protected their people from you.  So yes, they didn’t proselytize followers of other gods, but they did attack and enslave them all the time.

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Christianity and Tribalism

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This is a fascinating article on Slate Star Codex about tribalism, group identity and ideology.  It is long, but well worth it, and will help you understand a lot of what I’m on about here.  But here’s the basics of what he’s talking about:

Nations, religions, cults, gangs, subcultures, fraternal societies, internet communities, political parties, social movements – these are all really different, but they also have some deep similarities. They’re all groups of people. They all combine comradery within the group with a tendency to dislike other groups of the same type. They all tend to have a stated purpose, like electing a candidate or worshipping a deity, but also serve a very important role as impromptu social clubs whose members mostly interact with one another instead of outsiders. They all develop an internal culture such that members of the groups often like the same foods, wear the same clothing, play the same sports, and have the same philosophical beliefs as other members of the group – even when there are only tenuous links or no links at all to the stated purpose. They all tend to develop sort of legendary histories, where they celebrate and exaggerate the deeds of the groups’ founders and past champions. And they all tend to inspire something like patriotism, where people are proud of their group membership and express that pride through conspicuous use of group symbols, group songs, et cetera. For better or worse, the standard way to refer to this category of thing is “tribe”.

Tribalism is potentially present in all groups, but levels differ a lot even in groups of nominally the same type. Modern Belgium seems like an unusually non-tribal nation; Imperial Japan in World War II seems like an unusually tribal one. Neoliberalism and market socialism seem like unusually non-tribal political philosophies; communism and libertarianism seem like unusually tribal ones. Corporations with names like Amalgamated Products Co probably aren’t very tribal; charismatic corporations like Apple that become identities for their employees and customers are more so. Cults are maybe the most tribal groups that exist in the modern world, and those Cult Screening Tools make good measures for tribalism as well.

His large point is that a great deal of the ideologies people claim has not much to do with the actual content of the ideologies, and more to do with the groups of people they affiliate with, which happens for complex historical reasons.  So, the ideology is not the movement.  I think he’s very much right about the way people in general behave, including an awful lot of Christians.  I don’t think it’s totally a coincidence that most people in Norway at a certain point were Lutherans or that most Spanish people were Catholics.  I don’t think there was necessarily a genetic predisposition to those religions in those areas.  I think that history happened, and history ended up with those different faiths becoming dominant for lots of historical reasons and then most people fell in line, because group identity and tribalism really is that powerful.

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University Bias

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From David French at National Review, the bias in universities is real.  Only 5% of the faculty in social sciences identifies as right of center politically.  Christians need to keep that in mind when considering what the conventional wisdom on human behavior in any field actually is, since the vast majority of studies on human behavior are being done at these universities, and ideological bias absolutely affects the outcome of these studies.

The Bible is always our only infallible authority, and never science.  Science can be useful, but if it’s telling you things contradicted by the Bible, the choice should be clear.

The Church Has Always Been Like This, and That is God’s Plan

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Sometimes, I see books or articles being circulated lamenting the state of the church, and the articles say something like, “The church has become [x]” or “the church these days is more concerned with [y] than with God’s truth or the gospel” or something along those lines.  The problems diagnosed might be any number of things, and the problems diagnosed are almost certainly true.

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Most Marriages are Salvageable

Matt Powell, , 41 Comments

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The good news is, most marriages are salvageable.  This is when you are talking about believers, of course.  When it is unbelievers, then things get harder.  But if we’re talking about believers, then the power of the gospel is sufficient, more than sufficient, to save even the most difficult of marriages with the most intractable, dug-in problems.  And in fact, marriage is a wonderful opportunity for this to occur, because marriage is an environment that makes it hard to accommodate your own selfishness.  It forces you to face it.

The bad news is, we’re all sinners.  That’s why the first point is such good news.  But for the good news to be the good news, the bad news has to be understood well.  We have to face squarely the way our own sin distorts the way we look at marriage problems, in our own personal life and as church leaders.

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Victorinus

Matt Powell1 Comment

Augustine tells a great story in the Confessions that really moved me.  The story came to him from his friend Simplicius, about Simplicius’ friend Victorinus, who was a rhetorician like they both were, and a pagan.  But he’d become convinced of Christianity.  He was unwilling to go to church, however, because he was worried about what his friends and business associates would think of him.  Simplicius would say, “I will believe it when I see you at church,” and Victorinus would respond, “Is it the four walls that make a Christian, then?”

But Victorinus read Jesus saying that He would not confess his name before His angels in heaven if he were ashamed to confess Jesus before men on earth.  So Victorinus realized his error, and suddenly, one day, to Simplicius’ surprise, said, “Let us go to church.  I want to be made a Christian.”  So they went.  Victorinus was catechized and instructed in the faith, and the time came for him to take his vows.  Normally vows were taken on a raised platform in front of the congregation, but for people who would be embarrassed by this, the priests would permit it to be done in private, and that was offered to Victorinus.  Victorinus said, “All these years I have not been ashamed to speak my own vain words in front of crowds.  Should I now be ashamed to speak His name in front of His humble congregation?”  So he took the vows publicly.  And when he did so, a murmur went through the congregation, for he was famous, and scarcely a person in the congregation was not whispering to his neighbor, “Victorinus! Victorinus!”

What a wonderful story of the humbling power of the gospel, and the sincere honesty of confession of faith contrasted with the empty fame of this world.

Mercersburg and the Federal Vision

Matt Powell, , , , 2 Comments

Studying for a church history class, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the Mercersburg controversy in the German Reformed Church in the mid 1800’s.  It strikes me again how much this has in common with the Federal Vision controversy of our own century.

(“Mercersburg” refers to the Reformed Church’s seminary at Mercersburg, where John W. Nevin and Philip Schaff both taught and promulgated their ideas.)

Theologically, John Williamson Nevin championed a high view of church and sacrament, very high.  He claimed it as Calvin’s view over Zwingli’s, but admitted himself that he went further than Calvin.  He taught that the human life of Christ was infused into the the believer through the Sacrament, similarly to what John Calvin taught, but Calvin taught that the power by which this happened was the Holy Spirit using the ordinances of the church as an instrument, while Nevin located the power in the instruments themselves.  Nevin taught that the human and divine natures of Christ fused into a third thing, what he called the “theanthropic principle,” whereby the human nature of Christ took on divine attributes.  That deified humanity itself then becomes the power that lies within the church, the body of Christ, which he sees not just as an instrument of God’s working but as being truly in an organic union with Christ, so that the life of Christ becomes active in a metaphysical sense in the church.  Being baptized inserts a child, entirely regardless of anyone’s faith, into the life of the church, which one must remember is not just a social or communal fact, or an instrument, but is the actual metaphysical or spiritual life of Christ.  Salvation then becomes partaking in the life of Christ by being in the visible church and partaking of her sacraments.

Many in the German Reformed Church fought him tooth and nail, but he claimed they did not understand him or were insufficiently educated.  He continually accused others of misrepresenting what he was saying, even though he himself came to say it more and more clearly and directly as time went on and he became immune to criticism.  The German Reformed Church had always viewed its chief forefather as Zwingli and took a more Zwinglian view of the sacraments, that they were real means of grace but by divine influence as a visible preaching of the gospel, not by the transmission of Jesus’ human essence to us in any sense.

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We Are All Judaizers

Matt Powell, 1 Comment

We are all naturally Judaizers, whether we admit it or not.  Sometimes we talk a lot about legalism and antinomianism as errors in opposite directions, like falling into the ditch on one side of the road or another.  And it’s true, to an extent, since legalism and antinomianism present themselves in different ways.  But so often I see people fall into one or the other of these errors because they don’t actually know what they are.  A “legalist,” to some, is one who cares about the law of God and tries hard to keep it.  An “antinomian,” to others, is someone who refuses to be bound by all your made-up rules.  I want to be a legalist and an antinomian, if this is what it means.

But what a legalist really is is someone who believes that their law-keeping can merit God’s favor in some sense.  An antinomian is someone who doesn’t care at all about God’s law.  And really, even though these two things do in fact look like the opposite error, they are ultimately the same error.

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