Action And Belief Part Two: Virtual Beliefs

This is a follow-on from Action And Belief Part One: Ima­gin­ary Beliefs

Jesus‚Äô invoc­a­tion to ‚Äúfollow me,‚Äù demands a cent­ral role in any theo­lo­gical her­men­eutic of belief and action. The saying, ‚Äúfollow me,‚Äù does not imply belief that makes fol­low­ing sens­ible, but fol­low­ing that makes belief sensible.

The action makes the belief possible.

Des­pite this, our lived exper­i­ence sug­gests a struggle to ‚Äúrecon­cile‚Äù belief and action. It is common to cite Paul‚Äôs let­ters in rela­tion to this. How­ever, it is worth noting that‚Äôs Paul‚Äôs struggle with belief and action expresses itself in the midst of mis­sion­ary journey.

The mis­sion makes belief rational.

Many times, when we appear to struggle with recon­cil­ing belief and action what is really going on is a struggle to recon­cile real beliefs with ima­gin­ary beliefs. We kid ourselves that the solu­tion rests in some form of ‚Äúbeliev­ing harder.‚Äù Often­times beliefs will change more read­ily if we alter the con­text within which we act, rather than change the way we think about our beliefs.

The con­text frames the belief.

Travel, real travel, changes everything — just as it did for Paul. The people who travel and do not change their out­looks and beliefs are often those that carry with them the highest forms of insu­la­tion and secur­ity from local cul­ture and custom. These people travel within a bubble of vir­tual belief — recre­at­ing real­ity around them to map a zone of pre­de­ter­mined com­fort and luxury.

Vir­tu­al­ity insu­lates ima­gin­ary beliefs from reality.

Is there any more acute example of simu­lacra that a Brit­ish tour­ist who travels to Spain, or Dubai or Hong Kong only to visit a Brit­ish themed pub, drink Brit­ish beer, eat Brit­ish food and watch Brit­ish foot­ball on tele­vi­sion? The same could be said for Amer­ican, Aus­tralian, Indian or Japan­ese tour­ists. In the same way many for­eign embassy com­pounds and not a few mul­tina­tional offices are sim­ilar havens of virtuality.

Vir­tu­al­ity is easier that nego­ti­at­ing difference.

Churches can embody vir­tu­al­ity in this way. There are many inner city churches whose doc­trine bears no prac­tical rela­tion to the imme­di­ate con­text they find them­selves in — whose con­greg­ants com­mute to that loc­a­tion to ‚Äúdo church‚Äù and then com­mute back to the rest of their lives. I‚Äôve seen theo­lo­gical fac­ulty that behave in the same way.

Vir­tu­al­ity allows you to safely main­tain the status quo whilst arguing against it.

That‚Äôs why the study of any reli­gious group or eccle­si­ology needs an exper­i­mental and qual­it­at­ive edge. We cannot just exam­ine abstract doc­trinal beliefs and hope to get any worth­while insight into the people who artic­u­late them. We need to tease out the extent to which those beliefs are ima­gin­ary, fic­tional or vir­tual and the best way to do that is not to look at abstract state­ments of beliefs, but to look at prac­tices and pat­terns of life.

In order to be prop­erly theo­lo­gical, we need to stop acting like theologians.

(Thanks to Jason Clark, whose recent posts on related sub­jects have inspired me to revisit this topic).

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