Safety in Numbers?

It’s true: there is safety in numbers.

At least for sheep and wildebeests and elephants.

But there is not necessarily truth in numbers. So if your theology demands perfect truth for your safety, you might be disappointed.

For most of my Christian life, I’ve been warned not to stray too far from the herd, in the sense of not striking out on my own as I pursue a deeper understanding of theology. Over and over during my years in evangelical churches, I heard that there was a collective wisdom to be recognized and honored. Many countless theologians over the centuries, I was told, had wrestled with the Word and arrived at a surprisingly consistent doctrine. As such, it was very dangerous for me to spend time considering theology on my own, as I might end up in error without the benefit of that collective ability to “hear from the Holy Spirit.” “Don’t be the black sheep,” was essentially the warning.

It’s been especially pronounced as I’ve been rethinking and remapping my faith for the last four years: I’ll express my dissatisfaction with – or total rejection of – some element of orthodox Christianity, and I’ll be told “you know, many thousands of theologians over the years have held that position, and we should place great faith and trust in the crowd of witnesses to those interpretations.”

It occurred to me recently that when we make that assumption, we’re assuming a certain purity in the process, that may not in fact be factual. No, I’ll say it more forcefully: it’s not factual.

The problem with “numbers,” with the idea that we do our best thinking as a group, is that it discounts a very very deep and fundamental aspect of human character: the need to belong.

I would argue that the need to belong is so strongly baked into us that it prevents us from accurately assessing our own motivations. We innately, maybe unconsciously, recognize that taking certain counter-cultural positions will isolate us from the tribe, and for most of us, that acts as a sort of fence that constrains our thinking. It’s extremely hard to separate ourselves from tribal thinking, to be truly counter-cultural, when our sense of security and safety and even our own identity is wrapped up in the tribe itself.

This tendency will manifest as a sort of stampede. Once it gains some momentum, nearly everything in its path gets wrapped up by it, and that makes it more powerful to continue on the same path. Nothing opposing it can stand against it. And so eventually the entire herd is agreeing with itself, out of self-protection.

Take for example the practices of institutional church. Very little of what happens today in the average church anywhere in America can actually be found in the Bible. The word “pastor” for example has a certain meaning to any American that really doesn’t look like anything in the New Testament. It connotes a great many things, many of which could be inferred as perhaps a side effect of actual Bible language, but not demanded. As a consequence, when someone studies the Bible in anything related to “pastor” or “shepherd” their expectations based on their church culture inherently drive their reading of the term. It’s almost impossible to break out of that mode of thinking all the way back to the original meanings. As a consequence, every verse that we find that is even slightly connected with “pastor” is remapped into our modern ideas, reinforcing our existing convictions. The same turns out to be true of quite a few other systems and roles in today’s church.

So the “safety in numbers” that conservative theologians insist on believing is inherently colored by tribal expectations.

How much of the ancient thinking was similarly tribal? Or more to the point, how much of the varied thinking was deliberately suppressed by the church?

It turns out that there’s a surprising amount of variation in early Church theological thinking, when you read it for yourself. In fact, I’d argue that most of what I was told about the solid consistency among theologians down through the ages was, at best, deeply misinformed, and at worst, a demonic lie to scare me away from actually encountering any ideas that might vary from my church’s dogma.

In fact, what I found was that the vast majority of my doctrinal understanding was either completely unknown to the earliest theologians, or was the tiny minority view for centuries.

It’s fascinating – in the same sense that a train wreck is fascinating – to read how the institutional church, with the Roman empire’s assistance and encouragement, aggressively suppressed everything but one generally consistent line of thinking. The Roman emperors Constantine and Theodosius saw great political value in centralizing and streamlining the early church, which prior to their influence, showed great diversity in thinking about a large range of what we think of as core doctrinal issues. Constantine called the great council in 325 CE which resulted in the Nicene Creed, and after that creed failed to adequately standardize the practices across the Roman Empire, in 381 CE Theodosius convened the First Council of Constantinople, which resulted in significant narrowing of acceptable doctrinal positions, state charges of heresy, and exile of those who disagreed with the Council’s conclusions.

Later the church even began executing those convicted of heresy – which of course simply meant anyone who refused to recant from a different doctrinal position than the church (and thus the Empire which used the church as an instrument of citizen control).

Furthermore, a great number of writings of the early church were intentionally sought out and destroyed as heretical. The Catholic church, under the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (or “Index of Forbidden Books”) which was enforced for over 400 years from 1560 to 1966, condemned thousands of works considered heretical. But similar efforts – and literal book burnings – had been ongoing since much earlier; such actions were well-documented by Origen concerning the “heretical” works of Marcion, for example. In the late 200s AD, Diocletian brutally oppressed the followers of Manichaeism. These are just a few examples. These efforts were so effective that many writings of certain early church fathers only exist as quoted snippets in anti-heresy writings refuting their doctrine.

And it even went as far as execution of those condemned of heresy. For example even as early as 385 CE, Priscillian of Avila was executed for “sorcery” by the Emperor Maximus after doctrinal disputes and charges of heresy. At about the same time, St. Augustine wrote a long letter explaining why the Donatist sect was in error and why state persecution would be justified in fighting the heresy, even repeatedly referencing martyrdom as a consequence.

Under these conditions, which persisted for many centuries, it’s no surprise that we have a picture – however false – of early church unity, when we don’t poke too deeply at the history. It appears, at the surface level, as if the early church was solidly unified in its early doctrinal stance – because for the most part, the only story that got told was the victor’s story. But the more accurate picture that emerges when we look more closely at the history is nearly the opposite: there was a broad diversity of theological understandings from the very beginning; it was a very human effort, usually with the support of secular authorities who were interested in a simple peace among their subjects, which brutally suppressed a wide range of that diversity. In the end, there was very little readily visible diversity left over.

And the key takeaway here is that the unity was not a natural result of theologians wrestling graciously with each other. Instead, it was a brutal and violent result of an Roman Empire and Catholic Church supported need for authoritarian suppression of dissension.

Not a God-Breathed, God-Perfected Bible

But didn’t the Holy Spirit ensure Truth?

Evangelicals who believe in an inerrant, God-breathed Bible, will regularly assert that the Bible and its process of development was carefully and perfectly managed by the Holy Spirit, resulting in a literally-true and perfectly-accurate Bible, despite the constant participation by fallible humans. Given this posture, it would be easy to similarly assert that the Holy Spirit managed the process of winnowing down the resulting doctrine over centuries, even with the participation of secular government.

But when we look at the history of the church, and the number of times that it was clearly in error – consider the low-hanging-fruit examples such as slaughtering tens of thousands of Jews and hundreds of thousands if not millions of Muslims in the Crusades, or centuries of support for enslavement – it seems necessary to view this secular-state-supported establishment of doctrine with a very healthy skepticism.

Remember that much of the doctrinal meddling supported by the emperors – and the Popes and Bishops – were focused on controlling their subjects. But Jesus and Revelation repeatedly spoke against participating with any empire, but being willing to live as exiles and surrendering power and control over others.

Even if we assume that the result of these sustained and repeated all-too-human purges was a holy consolidation of doctrine around the actual truth, we have to contend with the huge variety of doctrines still present today. The range of variation may be smaller than it would have been, but it’s still quite significant.

Of course, an apologist would immediately respond, “sure, there are a lot of denominations, but we all agree on the important core theologies.”

That is an attractive apology, but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Witness as just one cheap example the infighting in the Southern Baptist Convention in the early 2020s, resulting in disfellowshiping churches which ordain women. They consider that to be a matter of supreme importance, serious enough to consider breaking up the unity of their denomination.

So without needing to do any deep analysis at all, it’s obvious that today’s church is deeply fragmented over a host of issues, which many of them consider serious enough to avoid fellowshiping with those they see as opponents in the faith.

Clearly, there is a lot of disunity. The doctrines are not universal, not by a long shot.

Conformity

Also of prime importance in this discussion are the issues of conformity and confirmation bias.

For one thing, there’s a fairly strong pressure within any sizeable system to conform to the system. This is pure human nature. When one’s job, one’s welfare, perhaps even one’s life are at risk due to any deviation from the norm, there is a true incentive to avoid straying off the well-beaten path. This pressure may be overtly external, but the result is often unconsciously internal. We will avoid spending too much mental energy on any topic that we know is dangerous to our human interests, and this causes us to conform to the norms around us, within our secular and religious cultures. It takes a special level of self-confidence and conviction to break out of those norms, and in fact we know that such people are often heralded as visionary – even if they were ultimately killed or brutally suppressed for their efforts. Most of us don’t have the guts to take such a stand, so we honor those who do.

For another thing, we’re often unaware of how our expectations for doctrine – or even social norms – cause us to mentally lock into already-safe conclusions. Again, this is human nature. Even without any pressure to conform, we have already made a set of decisions (often based on conformity) about how the world and the Kingdom of God work. When we encounter opposing information, we automatically reject it, or find some way to wrap it into our existing theology.

A good example of this would be an inerrantist’s response to the two dramatically different accounts of the death of the traitorous Judas Iscariot in Matthew 27:3-5 and Acts 1:16-20. Did Judas hang himself, or trip and “fall headlong” and burst open his gut? Did Judas buy the field, or did the Apostles buy the field? A inerrant apologist would view these two events as simply different descriptions of the same thing, and concoct some explanation for how they are actually the same. But someone not wedded to inerrancy would read these two straightforward but dramatically different accounts, and conclude that one or both of them were incorrect or at least embellished. In fact, I would suggest (as was true for me for decades) that the inerrantist would perhaps not even notice that they were sharply different accounts, and if he noticed the difference, would concoct an explanation that allowed him to safely continue in the dogmatic position of inerrancy.

As a more modern, and quite current, example, consider the political response among Christians to the current administration. Some praise the Holy Spirit for the work that President Joe Biden is doing on various policy fronts, and point to the sins of Donald Trump that disqualify him from further office. Others praise the Holy Spirit for raising up former President Donald Trump to defend the cause of Christianity in America, and call President Biden demonic. Even without assessing the truth of either set of claims, it’s pretty clear that one’s starting set of assumptions leads to rather different conclusions about the work of the Holy Spirit in the church.

With conformity and confirmation bias in mind, I think it’s critical to consider that “thousands of theologians” are not at all independent in their assessment of the actual words recorded in the Bible, or even of the influence of the Holy Spirit in their hearts as they read and study the scriptures. So it seems to me that it’s quite impossible to look at the long history of the flow of doctrine and conclude that the general doctrine that has been wrestled together over a couple thousand years is ultimately very safe and trustworthy and true to the will of God because of that long history.

It just isn’t.

In fact, I would argue that precisely because of that long and very not monolithic history, the “doctrinal consensus” that does exist is ultimately LESS safe and trustworthy and true.

Given all this, I don’t find it reasonable to conclude that there is, in fact, any useful “safety in numbers.” It’s a false sense of security to believe that our own doctrine is eternal, uncorrupted, and supported by a 2000-year history of theological concurrence. Neither the numbers nor the history support such a claim.

Whatever we have today has been deeply and irreversibly shaped by empire and fear and authoritarian control.

What then?

So what do we do with this? If there is no inherent safety in numbers, if we cannot assume that only the perfect and true doctrine survived all these human purges, and if we see clear and obvious indications that we did not in fact end up with just one true and holy and righteous and completely trustworthy doctrine, where are we to stand?

Here are some of my suggestions.

• Look outside our tribe to see what other ideas exist, and to help us identify our shortsightedness. It may be only those totally outside our own tribe that can clearly see where we are blinded by our preconceptions. That may mean getting outside our own denomination. It may mean getting outside our own religion, too – because other religions are able to see Truth – as we know from Romans 1:20, that the invisible things of the world are clearly seen by all mankind – but from a sharply different lens that may actually benefit our Christian understanding of the Truth. It may even mean getting entirely outside of religion; I have found that atheists often have a very clear understanding of what I recognize as eternal truth, just without the religious language that we prefer, and it does me well to see it from their perspective too. It may mean getting outside our own circle of family and friends; this may be the hardest step to take, because it’s also the most risky for our social realm.
• Be open to deep study of doctrines you may have been taught were judged heretical by centuries of theologians. Be willing to deliberately sit in discomfort with such doctrines, and ask God to open your heart to whatever Truth may exist in it. I increasingly sense that nearly everything called heresy down through Christian history is founded on some essential revelation about humanity or God; in throwing it away and calling it heresy, we prevent ourselves from a richer understanding of the Divine infinity.
• Be open to the idea that there may not actually be only and exactly one “correct” doctrine. We Westerners, affected strongly by literally centuries of Enlightenment thinking, strongly hew to dualism, to the idea that there is One Right and True Answer to any given question, with the corollary that any other answer is Wrong. That is a very specific modality of thinking that is fairly new on the theological scene, and is in fact still uncommon in some cultures today. Much of Jewish theology, for example, is quite comfortable with uncertainty and non-dualistic answers to spiritual questions, and welcomes and even invites discussion and disagreement. Some fascinating writings by the early fathers expressed their willingness to accept mystery, that their ideas might not be fully correct, that the answer might be bigger than any single doctrine. But in our Enlightened arrogance, we disparage such thinking – even though it was exactly the typical cultural and religious mindset that infused the world while the Bible was being composed.
• Spend some time considering what the earliest thinkers said about the new church and the remarkable upheaval that Jesus caused. Read the Patristics, the early church fathers. Participate mentally in the early debates about the nature of God, of Jesus, of the Trinity, of the virgin birth, and so forth. The debates that took place, and of which we have volumes of writing, are richly instructive, no matter which side of a matter you prefer.
• Read the history of American religious thinking, in particular evangelicalism. Its development in the last few centuries, and especially how it chose certain doctrinal positions and suppressed others, is very instructive, and will give you an appreciation for the deep ignorance behind the statement that “this is what we always believed.”
• Learn the detailed counterpoints to whatever dogma you inherited. Even if you end up sticking with that starting position, you’ll at least gain an appreciation for the deep and thoughtful rebuttals. You’ll find that those with whom you disagree doctrinally actually do have serious thinking and centuries of attention and Bible study behind their viewpoints. If nothing else, this will help you give your brothers and sisters in Christ who hold different views a lot of grace.
• And finally, consider the distinct possibility that the closest we can ever get to the capital-T Truth is a synthesis – or even the simultaneous full coexistence – of a broad array of apparently mutually-exclusive ideas. For example, the idea that the communion is a ceremony that reminds us of Jesus’ death, or that the communion is a meal taken with those of other social situations, or that communion is a bonding experience that strengthens the church, or that something mystical happens when the bread and wine touch our lips, may coexist perfectly even though different churches lean into one or the other expression for their own identity. Or the idea that Jesus’ death paid a debt God demanded may coexist perfectly with the idea that Jesus was a moral exemplar to show us how to live – and those may coexist perfectly with the idea that Jesus’ death paid a ransom to sin and the devil. So step back from dualism and recognize that the spiritual realm is so “other,” so unlike ours, so transcendent, that the “both and” may be far more true than the “either or.”

To summarize: I find that the idea of finding safety in the long history of doctrine from the time of the Gospels until today is a false hope. The history of Christianity is much more messy and shaped by secular forces than I would like. I have to be comfortable with what the Holy Spirit is doing in my own mind and heart, even if it requires me to step away from a place of perceived safety, and to set aside some doctrine that my tribe was taught was immutable and eternal.

I wish I could leave you with some assurance that taking steps like this makes the process of rebuilding your faith any easier. I don’t think it does – other than to give you permission to see a more diverse, a richer faith than you were raised believing. It’s hard walking away from something you believed for decades. It requires a grieving process, I’ve found; you will find yourself denying that anything is wrong with your doctrine. You’ll be angry about what you were taught. You’ll maybe bargain with yourself that you’ll just accept a small change but you won’t let your faith waver. You may wrestle with depression as you see bits of your doctrinal foundations crack or crumble. Finally you’ll accept that it all just wasn’t what you were taught. And that cycle may happen over and over as you pick apart many different doctrinal structures.

But as you continue to walk this path – because I don’t think it has an end – you’ll discover that the load gets lighter and lighter, as you find yourself carrying only the True things that the Holy Spirit has truly made your own, and fewer and fewer things that were placed on your back by others with good intentions but lacking knowledge and truth. You may end up with a very different idea about God than you started with – but it will be God who has been very personally revealed to you directly, rather than one that you simply inherited from your forefathers. It’s like that moment when Jacob, who had been resting on the faith of his father and grandfather, encountered God directly in the desert and wrestled with God until he was blessed. His faith had to be personalized, to be owned, and it was not without a struggle. And so, I expect, it is with each of us. So hang in there; I can tell you it’s worth the wrestling match.

I hope this has been helpful to you. Please leave a comment or a like if so. We’ll talk again soon.