Why Recognizing My Apeness Makes Me Better at Worship: Or How Evolution Can Help Create a Christian Framework of Ontological Distance

Note: the next two posts[1] are exercises in experimental theology.  They should not be taken very seriously.  But part of what I tried to do by getting graduate degrees from top ecology and theology programs[2] was to try to think carefully about the interaction between theological and physical anthropology.  So I have been doing some work on that.  It is experimental which means it has a high probability of being wrong.  But there are not a lot of people thinking carefully about this, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

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Evolutionary skeptics[3] often will say things like:

‘You can’t really believe that you are essentially just a trousered ape can you?’ 

But the thing is…I can, easily. [4]  I sometimes see a very distinct apeishness in myself and my species.[5]  But the surprising thing is that I often find self assessing as a ‘trousered ape’ can be spiritually helpful in at least two ways.

1.     Increasing Perceived Ontological Distance Between Ourselves and God

The constant human conceit is to underestimate the ontological distance between God and people.[6]  Those of us who actually recognize God’s existence often project him simply as a remarkable[7], invisible person with a few super powers.  But perceiving human ontology and culture as closer to the animals than to God, creates a helpful head space for apprehension of the otherness of God, a thing we call holiness.  And fleeting apprehensions of holiness is at the heart of the thing we call worship.

2.     Decreasing the Perceived Ontological Distance Between Ourselves and Other People

 Apprehending the holiness of God is the primary tool in Christian faith and practice to help us take ourselves less seriously.  But the surprising byproduct is that it leads to taking other people more seriously, and investing ourselves in their lives and needs, something we call ‘love’. 

Considering ourselves better than other humans is the second pervasive human conceit.  We are constantly overvaluing our preferences and overestimating our advantages over other people.  Self evaluation in light of the holiness of God (from any set of anthropological assumptions) ‘flattens’ the relative distance between humans. 

But what if we entertained the hypothesis that humans are ‘a chosen tribe[8] of apes[9]’ that God made his ‘image bearers,’ creating a strange species of ‘half way creatures’ with ontological moorings in the material and spiritual realms he rules.  That helps us see ourselves as more like the other half-way-apes, and makes us less likely to place ourselves above them.  Even if I am the most talented and important monkey[10] (which I am not, I only think I am) it is still hard to take that too seriously, or feel too much pride about that relatively modest accomplishment. 

Bonus Idea: It helps me take the rest of creation more seriously

Finally, I think the real Christian concern about evolution is that by decreasing the ontological distance between us and the rest of creation we open the door to injustice and the loss of human dignity.  But part of that is because we have lost a sense that we are care takers of creation, not consumers of creation.  We fear seeing each other as part of God’s biological creation because we treat that creation so poorly. 

We are unique among creation as self conscious ‘care taking’ instances of God’s makings.  But we are not the only part of creation with value and dignity.  The problem may not be that we think too low of humans, but that we think too low of the rest of creation.  The answer might not be to elevate human dignity far above the rest of creation, but to elevate the dignity of creation in general, so that a modestly elevated human dignity is something untouchable.

Recognizing our ontological proximity to animals (which is fundamentally how the evolutionary narrative ‘challenges’ Christianity) helps me take myself less seriously and helps me take God more seriously.  It helps short circuit the two human conceits (that God is kind of like me and other people aren’t).  That is not a bad thing.

This post was written while listening to Thrice (and while I was supposed to be working on other things[11]).

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[1] And, including the last one, makes kind of a trilogy of human apeness.

[2] I have a graduate degree in ecology from UC Davis and in theology from Wheaton.

[3] I’m not ever really sure how to describe my fellow Christians who do not buy the evolutionary narrative. Pejoratives are silly.  Many of them are kind, intelligent, and frankly wonderful.  Many of them are more kind and intelligent than I am.  So pejoratives are out.  Fundamentalist doesn’t work because many of them are evangelicals (and if you don’t know the difference, maybe you should pause before throwing those words around, especially as pejoratives).  But Creationist doesn’t work either, because I believe that God created the earth and cosmos through a portfolio of direct and indirect agency.  So the word ‘creationist’ doesn’t distinguish my position from theirs.  So, essentially, the only difference is that I think the evidence supports the evolutionary narrative and they do not.  It is an evaluation of a data set, not a reflection of our character.  So I’ll go with Evolutionary Skeptics.

[4] I mean, have you met me?  I’m ridiculous.

[5] Yesterday I took my kids to a restaurant and fox news was playing in the background.*  The silent talking heads were wearing ties and $300 haircuts and were very animated about something.  But all I saw was silly apes throwing poo.

* We are in Mississippi for 6 weeks.  This would never happen where I live in CA.  But I often have the same experience with CNN or MSNBC.

[6] This is partly God’s fault because he insists on a very close relational distance to us (you know, with all that love and access and incarnation stuff), and we mistake relational distance with ontological distance.  Christianity isn’t an immanence or a transcendence religion.  It insists on both.  Ontologically transcendent and relationally immanent.  But we can mistake relational familiarity with ontological proximity, which throws our worship and life out of calibration.

[7] Or more often, an unremarkable one.

[8] Does ‘choosing a tribe for a special purpose’ sound like the kind of thing that the Christian God might do? (cough-Hebrews-cough). 

[9] I have another post almost complete which is a though experiment that posits that our apeness has nothing to do with our status as the image bearers of God; that God could have ensouled dinosaurs instead of apes just as easily as he could have ‘chosen’ the Hittites instead of the Hebrews to be his people of purpose.  I’ll try to run it next.

[10] I KNOW…it is just such a superior word for the purposes of taking myself less seriously.  Also, monkeys are cuter.  By the way, chimp culture has all of the worst aspects of human culture (murder, war, sex trafficking*).  (And I know, bonobos are more peaceful, ape hippies, but I also think that is oversold). The more I learn about ape culture the more I believe that the fall was the  process of God giving us back over to our ‘appetite for apeness,’ which left us not only as half way creatures ontologically but also ‘morally.’  

*Genetic studies show that alpha males consolidate power by ‘buying’ allegiance from secondary males by granting them sexual encounters with tribe females.  The barter sex with the females under their power for male allegiance to consolidate their power.  Seriously, I haven’t been able to fancifully linger by the Chimps at the zoo since I learned about this.  Like the vampires in the Buffyverse, they are like humans but without souls.  (And yes, I am aware about the recent science on ape morality – I may even do a post on it sometime – but it demonstrates a pro-sociality that is economically justifiable, not any sort of altruism which is still the great and gorgeous human inefficiency…and, I believe, part of what Genesis calls ‘the image of God.’)

[11] But that is how most blog content happens.  It starts as a footnote in my preaching or fiction or scholarship and proves to speculative or experimental or odd to be useful there.

Lessons From a Year of Preaching Part 3: Beyond Behavior Modification

So this series has outlived its name[1] and I am going to make this the last post on this topic, for now. My preaching partner and I are teaching a preaching class this year so, if you are interested in my thoughts on this, the MP3’s and resources will be showing up at the class website. But for my final post in the series I wanted to talk about the motivating behavior change in ourselves and others, a topic that has far more nuance, complexity and peril in it than I ever imagined.

Most of us share the experience of trying to motivate behavior change in ourselves. We have a behavior or habit that we want to minimize or discontinue all together (e.g. over eating, carbon usage, prejudging people based on perceived relationships between their easily observable characteristics and behaviors we have formerly correlated with those characteristics[2]). Or there is some behavior that we would like to do more than we do (e.g. exercise, spending time with kids, or allocating resources for the poor or the environment) [3]. But one of the great shared experiences of our humanity is that most of us who have undertaken some long term project of behavior change have also failed at it. So, if at least part of the intent of preaching is to help offer cosmic resources for behavior change it would seem like understanding what motivates behavior change in ourselves and others would be fundamental.[4]

But the water is actually murkier than that. Because, from a Christian world view it is not sufficient to do the right things. Doing the right things for the wrong reasons makes them the wrong things. Behavior change with the wrong motivations is not progress. So simple behavior change is not a reliable metric of either personal growth or effective preaching. We are a very clever species. We can often find ways to ‘hotwire our hearts.’[5] That is, we can find ways to modify our behaviors or the behaviors of others[6] by appealing to fears, insecurities or appetites that are themselves unhealthy.[7] This kind of behavior change can leave someone worse off than before.[7.5] So the key to motivating behavior change both in our own spiritual journeys and in the journeys of those in our communities (through preaching or other graces/sacraments) is to reject illicit motivational strategies. But we can’t simply reject manipulation. We have to replace it with something better. So this final post will look at the two sides of the ‘motivating behavior change’ coin: a warning and a proposed way forward.

1. Beware of Moralism

Christianity is not a religion…so you can not treat it like one. The standard religious resources are not available to us. In general, religions hold out the prospect of earning divine favor and avoiding divine punishment as a cosmic ‘carrot and stick’ to motivate the behaviors the religion deems valuable and disincentivize those it considers antisocial. But the Christian story is not one of accumulating merit and avoiding guilt in the cosmic ledger…it is a story of unilateral rescue. If you try to apply the carrot/stick motivational methods to Christianity, it becomes something else.[8]

This means there are tools in the motivational tool box that are simply off limits for Christians. Guilt is very effective for short term behavior change, but it is out of bounds. And this turns out to be pragmatically helpful anyways because, as my brother likes to say, ‘the guilt button is effective but fragile.’ If you push that button too many times, it stops working. Guilt and fear are simply not long term motivators. They require an emotional intensity that we cannot sustain. Trying to earn God’s love and stay off his naughty list is not unlike trying to earn the love of a parent or avoid our daddy’s belt…it can motivate behaviors but it leaves you disappointed and bitter. It can make you do stuff but it can’t change your heart.

2. Offer a Greater Love

But it would be absurd to suggest that Christianity does not have relatively rigorous behavioral prescriptions. So those of us who are ‘all in’ on Jesus are constantly looking for licit ways to bring our behavior in line with many of these counter-cultural practices which, we believe, are fundamentally pragmatic.[9]

The reason that simply telling people to knock it off because God is gonna get em doesn’t work, is because we are fundamentally motivated by what we love. You hear people say all the time that we should all ‘follow our hearts[10].’ This is an empty cliché. But it is not absurd because it is false; it is absurd because it is trivial. We all, always ‘follow our hearts.’ We, without exception, behave in accordance with what we love. If you are going to give yourself or your community a significant chance at spiritual progress, you can’t just try to modify behavior you have to help develop better affections. You have to cultivate and offer a better love that can supplant the parasitic, destructive things that currently fill our hearts. You have to reintroduce us to a God whose beauty and worth dwarfs the paltry half loves that currently motivate us.[11]

Sin is fundamentally a worship issue. It is organ failure of our capacity for wonder. If someone is stuck in a behavior that diminishes them, strategies will help[12], but fundamentally, they need a bigger God. They need to love the good and the beautiful more intensely. And the role of the preacher is to reveal it to them. You need to exalt a beautiful God and call us to his beautiful mission…so that the bleak life of self centeredness looks as pitiful as it actually is.

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[1] I am now well into my third year of regular preaching.
[2] i.e. prejudice or the more insidious racism
[3] I recently made one of the strangest resolutions of my life. I resolved to watch more football this season. I love football (for reasons I will cover in an upcoming post) and watched less than 4 hours of it last season. This is symptomatic of self importance and an unhealthy addiction to productivity. So this year I am going to try to prioritize Sabbath and rest by watching more football. So far, so good. I am already up to 6 hours for the season.
[4] I realize that ‘preaching to cause behavior change’ sounds arrogant…almost like a violation. But in the Christian community it is consensual. We all recognize our need for help and look to each other for spiritual resources. Preaching is one of the formal methods we utilize to look together at the scriptures to find that help.
[5] Credit, Keller…I know, shocking.
[6] Way too many marriages work this way.
[7] The most glaring example of this in college ministry, where spiritual zeal is hypercharged by sexual tension, is students whose confuse their desire to impress cute Christian girls with their motivation to live the Christian life. I honestly think this is an underrated reason why so many people find the transition from Christian community in college to the Church (as a married adult) to be underwhelming…because they lose the powerful sexual components of their motivations and it feels a little flat.
[7.5] This is at least one reason why Jesus recomended that so much of Christian practice should be done 'in secret' whether acts of personal devlopment (e.g. prayer and fasting) or acts of social justice (e.g. generosity). By taking the opinions and reactions of other humans out of the equation we are freed of many (though certainly not all) of the illicit motivations for these activities. You simply cannot read the Jesus narratives without coming away with the overwhelming impression that motivation is more important to him than act. He is more interested in who we are becoming than what we are doing.
[8] I started this paragraph by stating categorically that Christianity is not a religion. But, of course, it often is. Many self identifying Christians have no idea that it was never meant to be a merit based worldview. And even those who understand the rescue narrative find themselves lapsing often into moral performance categories. So, Christianity is not a religion but it is full of religious people…like me…which is why we have our share of self righteous prudes. But the goal of spiritual formation (and, therefore, preaching) is to move from a self righteous merit based belief and praxis to a grace based self understanding and lifestyle.
[9] In that, they do not feed our physical or even social appetites, but we believe they are fundamentally for our good. This is what Piper means when he bombastically claims that Christians are just hedonists with perspective. We are looking to maximize our good on a cosmic scale. The idea has rhetorical flourish and some theological issues but is interesting.
[10] This, it seems, has become the only acceptable polemic for contemporary art to assert. Either art has to be non-polemical (as if that was possible) or it has to offer this cliché.
[11] What the Hebrew Scriptures like to call idols.
[12] Preaching has to be practical. It HAS to engage with the daily life and felt needs of a non-religious-professional. But it is an error to think that practical means non-theological. If worship is the engine of behavior…if we do what we truly love…then it is highly practical to paint a picture of God’s worthiness that creates more space for him in our hearts. But we would also error to think that this justifies turning preaching into a regular lecture in academic theology. Worship is fundamentally holistic, so preaching that generates worship has to engage the mind, emotions, volition and soul.

A Surprisingly Familiar Satisfaction

For years my favorite part of living out west was the hiking and backpacking. Living hours from some of the greatest backcountry in the world and less than a day from most of our country's National Parks was the highlight of our move out here and we took full advantage. When we finally decided to have our first child (a mere 9.5 years into our marriage) we actually picked up the pace. In the 3 years before Charis joined our family we did extended hikes or backpacking trips in Glacier (my personal favorite), the Canadian Rockies, Olympic, Cascades, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Lost Coast, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Yosemite (several times). (This gives me an excuse to post gratuitous backpacking photos.)

We knew that we would enjoy the parenthood life stage and were not mourning the loss of our extended newlywed phase. We just knew that one of our favorite activities would be on hold for a decade or so and we tried to get as much of it in as possible. When 'we' actually got pregnant I started to take existential steps to embrace the new season. I even wore my special, REI, $10/pair, hiking-only socks for other athletic purposes as a personal act of moving on. I was thankful for the life stage we had lingered in but ready to start something completely different. What surprised me was how existentially similar the experiences were.

There are several reasons I love to backpack. I am a big fan of the exercise vacation. I am goal oriented to the point of personality disorder. I enjoy the air, the sounds and the solitude. Amanda and I once covered 15 spectacular miles along the High Sierra trail and encountered more bears than people (final score: bears 1, humans 0). But mostly it is the experience of transcendence. The proximity to bigness. There is a familiar emotional response that comes from staring up at the shear mass of El Capitan, peering out over the jagged peaks of the Palisade range or watching the sun come down over the watery pacific horizon. It is the feeling of transcendence...the strange and terrifying comfort you feel when the confining walls of the ego are shattered and you are overwhelmed with otherness. When there is something else so grand, so lovely, so original you, for just a moment, have an accurately sober self assessment.

But, for me, this was the great surprise of parenthood. It is flush with these same moments. I had expected that in trading backpacking for parenthood I was trading up, but for a qualitatively different experience. What I didn't expect was that my favorite moments of parenthood would remind me of my favorite moments in the mountains. The beauty and wonder of our daughter affects the same experience of joy in transcendence. (This gives me an excuse to post gratuitous Charis photos.)

John Piper believes that our desire to experience the transcendent through sunsets and mountains is a clue to our fundamental nature. We are existentially wired to desire to be near that which is qualitatively greater than ourselves. He actually expands the realm of greatness to include sports. This is why we watch the Super Bowl, the World Series and the Olympics. The reason that I, as a completely heterosexual man, am so drawn to the power and beauty of Kevin Garnett is because I desire the experience of fundamental otherness. I want to celebrate greatness. I have a base code level desire that seeks satisfaction in greatness. I was designed to worship. Lewis famously calls these temporal passes with transcendence 'the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.'

I have always found backpacking satisfying because the greatness of the geologic anomalies we protect as monuments become conduits of worship. I am awed by their bigness and by analogy (or syllogism) I am more awed by their creator. The surprise of parenthood is that I find it satisfying and worshipful in precisely the same way.