Micah Redding - Christianity & Transhumanism

The New God Argument and A New Apologetics

micah — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 05:33:22 +0000

Recently my friend Lincoln Cannon released the third version of his groundbreaking New God Argument. This argument is a philosophical justification for trust in God, laying the technical groundwork for a rational approach to religion and theology.

As a technical philosophical work, appreciating it requires overcoming some fairly big obstacles. Additionally, it’s an argument that was crafted within a Mormon context, with a cosmology and language unfamiliar to most religious people. This means that mainstream Christians will most likely have trouble seeing how it could relate to their faith and understanding of their religion.

Despite these obstacles, I believe that this argument represents a new kind of apologetics, an apologetics that ultimately has much more to offer the world than the apologetics that we have known. Beyond the argument’s own merits, the very approach it takes is a substantial reorientation from prior approaches.

First, it is based on the future, not the past.

Classical apologetics asks us to reason backwards to first causes, or original unmoved movers. This means that God is always conceived primarily in terms of that which is behind us. History is then seen as the flight from God, the never-ending descent from original perfection — and human life and civilization easily become portrayed as a meaningless effort doomed to failure.

As several generations of theologians have been telling us, this perspective is neither biblical nor wise. God should not be portrayed as being primarily in the past — just as religion should not be construed as a call to return to some earlier way of life (say, the 1950s, or the 1780s, or even the first century).

The biblical God is primarily a God of the future — a God whose most intense displays of power are yet to come. It is, after all, “kingdom come”, not “kingdom gone”.

It is time for our theology and our apologetics to reflect that.

Second, it is based on action, not mere assent.

In much of Christian culture, “faith” has become collapsed into something a lot like “intellectual assent”. This means that questions about the age of the earth, the geographic nature of Noah’s flood, and the taxonomy of Jonah’s fish, become portrayed as significant and viable concerns — concerns which could potentially have eternal consequences for the fate of your soul. Even when those particular issues aren’t being argued over, others usually are. In practice, this means that “faith” is agreeing with a particular set of assertions, and disagreeing with another set.

This state of affairs is a far cry from the biblical example of Abraham, whose faith consisted of heading off into the wilderness, leaving his homeland in pursuit of a future civilization that no one else could possibly foresee.

It is clear from the biblical record that Abraham was incredibly conflicted about all of this. He could never quite stick to the plan, and kept waffling on even the most minor of issues. Nevertheless, his persistence earned him the title “the father of faith” — not because of how he felt, or what he said or thought he believed — but because of the future his actions testified to.

I call this enacted trust, and it is the difference between the faith by which Abraham was justified, and the faith by which “even the demons believe, and tremble.”

Third, it connects our belief in humanity and our belief in God.

It is common in traditional apologetics to end up arguing in favor of a God who has no obvious interest in the human race. In this approach, apologetics creates an implicit divide between our interest in God and our interest in humanity.

This feeling is at the heart of secular humanism, which takes the division implied by traditional apologetics, and makes it explicit. In secular humanism, to believe in humanity is to disbelieve in God.

But this divide is deeply problematic for Christians. After all, Christians affirm that God created humans in his image, and then went even further and became human in the person of Jesus Christ. From the very beginning of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, God is incredibly invested in humanity, continually concerned with our lives, our society, and our progress. For Christians, there can ultimately be no great divide, because God has thrown in his lot with the human race.

In Christianity, to believe in God is to believe in humanity, and to believe in humanity is to believe in God. [tweet this]

Until our apologetics embrace this most Christian of understandings, our apologetics won’t be Christian at all.

The New Apologetics

I believe that our future as communities of faith will require reorienting the way we understand the connection between theology, faith, and action — and will demand a more Christian approach to the relationship between God and humanity.

This will effectively be a new apologetics, an apologetics much fuller and richer than the apologetics of the past, an apologetics which echoes Jesus’ call to invest all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

The New God Argument points us towards this new apologetics, taking the first step on a long and thrilling path of exploration. But although this may be the first step down that road, it won’t be the last. Exciting times lie ahead, and we can hardly do better than to heed the cry of C.S. Lewis: “Further up and further in!”

What I Would Write

micah — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 16:09:43 +0000

Right now, my mind is a flurry of thoughts, ideas, and questions. This is typical for me, at this time of year, when there’s downtime, when everything is nominally starting over, when I’m reconnecting with my family, and resetting my expectations about life along the way.

With my family, that reset is usually in the direction of the surreal. My grip on conventional reality is loosened, and I start to imagine fresh new possibilities and ways of living.

I had another reset recently, on a speaking trip to Nigeria — fifteen hours of flight time each way, and a world both hauntingly familiar and uniquely alien on the other side.

Through all of this, one of the questions that has been haunting me is: if I had unlimited time to write, what would I write about?

The answer would surely have to include the thing that provoked the question in the first place—the sense that life is open-ended, that the world is full of untapped possibility. To tap into that sense, I turn to my favorite subjects: religion, science fiction, imagination, story-telling, technology, and space travel.

For me, these subjects all point to something about life itself: that it is constantly unfolding, that it wants to be free, that it is gnarly and diverse and unpredictable, rather than secure and stable and constrained. This is, in fact, what we mean by life. The opposite of these things is stagnation, and the ultimate form of stagnation is death.

To choose life is to choose improvisation. To choose life is to choose to face new challenges, and to be provoked to create new solutions to them.

There are many ways we can shirk that responsibility, draw back from the edge, retreat into our fortresses and hovels and holes. If we do that for too long, we end up in a kind of living death, having traded in possibility for security, and opportunity for stasis.

Ultimately, this is a fool’s bargain, because the only real security is in actually living, and for the person who prioritizes security—even what they have is eventually taken from them.

Given life’s bias towards improvisation, the skills we most need in this world seem to be things like play, and imagination, and creativity. This is where science fiction and story-telling and space travel come into play. These are the tools we use to fire up our imaginations, to ignite our creativity, to remind us of the possibilities of new worlds. We need these things, now more than ever.

But if play is important, so are games. One of the best descriptions of life I have ever encountered is the concept of finite and infinite games. Finite games you play to win. Infinite games you play to keep playing. Football is a finite game, while dress-up is an infinite one. ‘Run for President’ is a finite game, while ‘Write books’ is an infinite one.

Of course, life itself is the most infinite game of all.

If we think of life as an infinite game, where our ultimate objective is to keep playing, keep including new people, keep making it more and more fun for everyone — then we’re suddenly in the domain of religion. That, I would argue, is what religion really is: a focus on life at the largest scales, at the most extreme reaches we can imagine.

At these scales, we can only speak in images and metaphor. At these scales, we can only point and hypothesize.

So, of course religion and science aren’t quite on the same page right now. Science helps us see the next few steps ahead. Religion asks us to lift up our eyes to the hills…to the stars…to whatever’s beyond that.

In the gospels, someone asks Jesus what must I do to inherit eternal life? We might also ask, what must we do to play the infinite game?

I think the answer to both of these questions is the same. One of the ways Jesus expresses that answer is this: become like a little child.

Learn to play. Learn to see reality as open-ended. Remind ourselves of other worlds. Dream and imagine and create.

That’s what I think I want to write about. It’s a new year. It’s time to blow the roof off of reality, roll up our sleeves, and get busy playing.

Transhumanism is a Mars Hill opportunity

micah — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 19:07:48 +0000

In Acts 17, the apostle Paul does something remarkable. He walks onstage at Mars Hill in Athens, the center of the philosophical tradition of the Greek world, and begins to talk about an unknown god.

Unlike almost every other sermon in Acts, this one does not begin with the story of Israel, or a recitation of scripture. Instead, it begins with an account of Paul’s walk through the city, and all of the idols he had seen there.

Seeing all of these idols had cut to the core of Paul’s Jewish monotheistic heart. But he doesn’t chastise the crowd. Instead, he points out something he had noticed on his walk, an altar built to “an unknown god”.

For the Athenians, this altar was a sort of insurance. They worshipped hundreds of gods, and prided themselves on having their bases covered. So if there was a god that had slipped their notice — they wanted to make sure they covered that too.

So this is where Paul starts. He talks about the god they can only worship in ignorance, but which he can now help to reveal. And he proceeds to explain this god, and all of its characteristics and nature — using only quotations from their own philosophers.

For Paul, these pagan philosophers were not just accidentally correct. They had, even in their ignorance of the Jewish tradition, nevertheless correctly understood the nature of God. And this must mean that God had revealed himself to them—perhaps in subtle or even hidden ways, but nevertheless truly and authentically.

This remarkable attitude is characteristic of the early Christians and their unique belief that Christianity was universally applicable, that it had infinite reach, and that therefore, all truth was God’s truth. For them, Christ had fulfilled the partial and incomplete revelations of generations past, and as the one Messiah of the universal God, this wasn’t necessarily limited to the revelations the Jews had received.

Paul puts words around this in Romans 1, talking about how all of humanity has intuited the nature of God. Theologians call this concept “general revelation”, and it was an attitude that drove early Christian missions for hundreds of years.

Sometimes Christians discover the aftermath of these missions, and become concerned. For example, people periodically realize that Christmas trees are of pagan origin, and start to campaign against them.

But the pagan origin of Christmas trees is no secret conspiracy. Rather, it represents an early missionary attempt to take the goodness and truth in local pagan practices, and interpret them in the context of Christ and his mission.

Modern Christian practice is scattered through with relics from these kinds of past encounters with paganism. And what all of these encounters have in common is that they were resolved not by Christians stamping out local culture and practice, but by Christians recognizing the value and truth within them, and ultimately adopting them as their own.

This is the approach Paul models for us in Acts 17. Not watering down the truth, not diluting Christian ideas and teachings, but finding and drawing out all the truth God has scattered throughout the world. Where there are resonances with things we already believe, we illuminate them, where there are new things to be known, we embrace them. And in all of this, we claim the good, and leave behind the bad — recognizing that even in the darkest of places, God has not left himself without a light.

Today, we have a similar opportunity within the world of transhumanism. Transhumanism is usually understood to be a radically secular movement, advocating for controversial and problematic things.

But dig very far into the history and characteristics of transhumanism, and we discover a secular effort largely driven by the visions of Christianity, and by the disappointment in Christianity’s failure to live up to them.

Where Jesus proclaimed heal the sick, feed the hungry, raise the dead, Christians have sometimes been more content to follow the path of the Levite priest in the story of the Good Samaritan — and move to the other side of the road. Where Jesus taught his followers to pray your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven, Christians have sometimes been more content to counsel abandoning interest in the earth altogether. Where the New Testament talks about Jesus as the beginning of a new humanity—no longer defined by nation, temple, or social class—Christians have sometimes been more content to argue in favor of the old humanity.

In contrast, transhumanists are often fueled (whether they are aware of it or not) by the echoes of ancient Christian visions of transcendence and transformation. Even the word “transhuman” itself appears to be of Christian origin, the result of generations of Christians struggling to express the Christian view of mankind.

What all of this means is that the modern transhumanist movement represents a Mars Hill opportunity. An opportunity to recognize truth in every place that God has deposited it, an opportunity to reconnect many of these secular aspirations with their true fullness and depth, and—perhaps most importantly—an opportunity to challenge ourselves to rediscover the full nature of what we believe and profess.

What’s up with the word Transhumanist?

micah — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 02:17:31 +0000

Many of you know that I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to support and grow the Christian Transhumanist Association, an organization devoted to creating a better relationship between religion and technology. I’ve talked before about what Christian Transhumanism is, and what it means, and what our organization is about. But a question that I get from a lot of people is: why the name?

“Transhumanist” sounds weird, maybe even scary. So why use it? Why not call ourselves futurists, or technologists, or some other less bothersome word?

There are a lot of factors at work here, and I won’t go into all of them (yet!), but one thing that draws me so strongly to this word is its poetry and its history.

In its very essence, the word invites us to engage with humanity, but also to reach beyond it. It suggests that humanism was right to focus on the glory and possibility of human life — but also that stopping there was stopping too soon.

“Transhumanism” is currently a mostly secular movement. But in this fundamental orientation, I think it finds more in common with Christianity than traditional humanism ever did — certainly more than secular humanism ever did.

Jesus opens his greatest commands with just such a call to the transcendent:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength…and love your neighbor as yourself

In saying this, Jesus shows us what it means to be human. It is to connect outward to those around us, inward towards coherence, and upward towards God. As human beings, if we are unable to anchor ourselves in that which is beyond us, we lose something significant.

Throughout Christian history, this call toward transcendence has been fundamental. And so Christians have struggled over and over to express this idea in new ways—and sometimes—in new words.

Perhaps it was just this kind of confrontation with the limits of language that led Dante in 1320 to write:

Words may not tell of that transhuman change:
And therefore let the example serve, though weak,
For those whom grace hath better proof in store (The Divine Comedy, Paradiso, Canto 1)

…seemingly coining the word in the midst of one of history’s most significant works of religious literature.

This, of course, is not where things end. Other writers have worked with similar language to express these kinds of concepts. Theologian Paul Tillich expresses the core of Christian theology:

Here we have a profound doctrine of what I call a transcendent humanism, a humanism which says that Christ is the fulfillment of essential man, of the Adamic nature.

But perhaps most significantly, the language shows up in the work of Pierre Teilhard De Chardin. Chardin was a Jesuit priest, a paleontologist, and a mind-expanding theorist of the future. Some people credit him with foreseeing the internet, and discussing the possibility of accelerating technological progress leading up to a Singularity…in 1941.

In 1949, he explains what we mean by human freedom:

Liberty: that is to say, the chance offered to every man (by removing obstacles and placing the appropriate means at his disposal) of ‘trans-humanizing’ himself by developing his potentialities to the fullest extent.

And later, in contemplating whether humanity would ultimately vanish beneath the waves of time, as many philosophers and scientists were arguing, he uses the term trans-humanity to describe the spiritual vision that calls to us from beyond the boundaries of the world as we know it.

And this is where we rejoin the mainstream discussion of transhumanism. Because Chardin was good friends with a biologist named Julian Huxley; and in 1957, Huxley is credited with introducing the term transhumanism in its modern secular form:

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself —not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.

That, as they say, is history. A concept from deep within Christian history had passed over, through the language of a secular biologist, into a new area of culture. Later, secular futurists would pick up the term and run with it, creating the movement known as “transhumanism” today.

For us to use the word “transhumanist” is to reconnect with a set of aspirations and visions that began in the Christian tradition. And it is to simultaneously open the door to people looking for a way back to Christianity—which is what I want to talk about next.

The Infinite Morality of Jesus

micah — Sat, 08 Aug 2015 02:43:59 +0000

In his book, The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch argues that there are moments when something switches from being of only limited and local use, to having infinite reach.

If you’ve ever played around with Roman Numerals, you’ve experienced a bit of this.

As a kid, I loved Roman Numerals. They were sort of a secret code, and at the same time, they made a kind of sense that regular numbers just don’t make. Roman Numerals were perfect for carving into stone or a piece of wood, and because they were just based on adding together larger and smaller values, they were highly intuitive.

The idea is simple: you start with a symbol for “one”. For two, you write two symbols. For three, you write three symbols. When you start getting to the point where the symbols are getting a bit unwieldy, you invent a new symbol. So now you write “V” instead of five ones, and you continue as before.

One? I
Two? II
Five? V
Six? VI
Ten? X
Twenty? XX
One thousand? M
Two thousand? MM

But if you try to deal with large numbers, you run into problems. How do you represent one million? Would you line up a thousand M’s? Would you just keep inventing new symbols? What happens when you run out of symbols that are easy to write, or easy to tell apart?

It quickly becomes apparent that Roman Numerals, as nifty as they are, don’t scale. They aren’t appropriate for dealing with the number of people in a city, much less the numbers needed for economics or physics. The core limitation is that Roman Numerals need a totally new symbol for every order of magnitude (ones, fives, tens, fifties, hundreds, thousands). And so, no matter how many symbols you create, it will never be enough.

Arabic numerals, on the other hand, don’t suffer from this problem. They use something called place notation. This means that we don’t need a new symbol for every order of magnitude, we just need to shift one step to the left.

1
10
100
1000
10000
100000
…

You get the point. Where Roman Numerals were limited by the number of symbols that someone could etch into a rock, Arabic numerals have unlimited reach. They can represent literally any number imaginable, and never require any new symbols to be invented.

As I see it, the Law of Moses is like Roman Numerals, and Jesus is like place notation.

The Law of Moses, in so many ways, was great. It addressed every aspect of human life. It gave straight-forward answers to difficult questions. It created unity and cohesiveness and social strength, perhaps at a level that has never been matched.

But if you read it, you can see its limits. It contains instructions on roof building, clothing, and food that only make sense in the ancient desert. It doesn’t address electricity, bioethics, democracy, or any number of other issues that have come up in the last 3000 years.

Many people have tried to rectify this situation. Some rejected modern society, and took up an ancient way of life, hoping it would fit with the Mosaic Law. Others tried to slice up the Law in some way, applying pieces of it strictly, and other pieces not at all. Still others focused on the big ten (the 10 commandments) and asserted that they were the really important part.

None of these approaches can escape the fact that the Law of Moses was created for an ancient tribal society. Even those who try to recreate the lifestyle of 2000BC can’t recreate an entire nomadic tribe — and consequently, they can’t actually practice the core of the Mosaic Law: the tabernacle and its religious sacrifices and rituals.

Jesus, however, established a different sort of system. He redefined almost every concept in the Law to be related to intrinsic motivation and aim. He boiled down ethics to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength…and love your neighbor as yourself”.

In doing so, he created a system with infinite reach. While the Mosaic Law wouldn’t work outside of the ancient desert, Jesus’ morality would work just as well in the Andromeda galaxy. While the Mosaic Law couldn’t address new situations, Jesus’ morality could address any situation imaginable.

For example, when asked about matters of ritual cleanliness (a big deal in the Law), he said:

Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them…(In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)…For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person. (Mark 7:14-23)

It is one thing to tell people that (say) bacon is no longer unclean. It is another thing to say that there will no longer be any foods which are unclean. And it is still another thing to challenge the basis of the entire rule itself.

This is what Jesus does, not only moving away from clean and unclean foods, but moving away from regulations based on exterior actions. In Jesus’ framework, the things which have moral significance are things which arise in the core of a person and spread outwards.

This means that morality is no longer based on your environment, but on you. And so, suddenly, “clean and unclean” stop being categories which refer to a finite list of things and activities, and become categories which can operate across the universe.

Jesus doesn’t stop there. He does the same thing with questions of adultery, lying, covetousness, and even murder. And when asked for the greatest commandment in the Law, Jesus replies:

‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. (Matthew 22:37)

The last line is crucial. Jesus is stating that love is the core of the Law, and everything else is implementation.

Paul, the main expositor of Jesus’ message, picks up on this theme.

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. (Romans 13:8-10)

For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Galatians 5:14)

In my experience, Christians often pass over passages like this as if they were insignificant. But they weren’t insignificant to the early Christians: they were the core of a revolutionary new understanding of faith that promised — for the first time in history — a morality that could work across the entire world, and then keep going, on to infinity.

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” (Matthew 24:35)

If all that Jesus and his followers had done was to update the rules to apply to a new situation — if all that had changed was that one set of commands was replaced with another set of commands — then Jesus’ morality would not be unique or special. It would be just another moral code amongst the moral codes of other great teachers and leaders.

But Jesus does more than this. At a fundamental level, he does away with finite rules and laws altogether. And he replaces them with an infinite motivation, one that makes every other ethical and moral system redundant — one that calls to bigger and better things than had ever been conceived before.

From this point on, there is a new fundamental. Human nature may change, the earth may change, the sun may burn out and the galaxy dissolve. But whatever kinds of life there may be in our future, they will be defined by their reaction to a core motivation — a motivation that, recognized or not, is the infinite morality of Jesus.

The Church of Christ

micah — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:36:43 +0000

Some of you may know that I was raised in the Churches of Christ, a small religious group that emerged from the American Restoration Movement of the early 1800s.

At the time of the Restoration Movement, Christianity was radically divided. Not only were there large-scale barriers between Catholics and Protestants, but seemingly every Protestant church had fractured along many trivial lines, every single division marking a hard and formal barrier to fellowship or relationship with Christians on the other side.

One of the early instigators of the movement had himself come from the Old-Light Anti-Burgher Seceder Presbyterian church, each term in that title designating a historic division, and a group of people that were no longer allowed to participate in the work or fellowship of the community.

Something seemed very wrong about this, and many people were looking for a solution.

The answer that struck the leaders of the Restoration Movement was to pursue a path of theological minimalism. If people were divided over political alliances, they would avoid political entanglements. If people were divided over the nuances of different creeds, they would abandon creeds in favor of the scriptures. If people were split about worship styles, they would pursue the simplest forms of worship possible. If people were divided by labels, they would give up labels in order to be simply Christians.

In every way, they pursued unity by boiling down Christianity to its bare essentials. If they could arrive at the essence of Christianity, with no extra restrictions, no additional requirements, no added barriers, then every Christian would simply be a brother or sister, another child of God. And Jesus’ unity prayer would be fulfilled:

“That they may be one, just as we are one...so that the world will know that you sent me, and you have loved them just as you have loved me...” (John 17:22-23)

The result was a string of simple, populist churches springing up across the country. They were organically connected, with no hierarchy or central organization. Every congregation appointed people to serve their community’s needs, and nothing more was necessary.

Some of the early leaders even suggested that a church was simply wherever two or more Christians happened to be gathered together, echoing Jesus’ words: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.” (Matthew 18:20)

In all kinds of ways, this dynamic young movement was shaping the world around them. They inspired others to work for and realize greater unity, they changed the conversation in the broader religious culture, and they allowed many people to live their faith in greater freedom than they had ever known.

But over time, the emphasis of this young movement began to shift. It’s easy to transition from focusing on simplicity, to demanding simplicity from others. And that’s exactly what happened. Instead of just practicing simple and inexpensive worship styles (that all could join in, rich or poor, skilled or unskilled), they began criticising other people for worship styles that were not simple enough.

Soon, they had created all kinds of new divisions, based around different levels of greater and lesser simplicity. Worse, the arguments over these divisions led people to try to justify their choices by appealing to scripture — almost universally with badly out-of-context and misapplied verses. Instead of just defending their choices as an attempt to fulfill Jesus’ prayer for unity, they developed deep and convoluted arguments to try to demonstrate that their choices were the only ones acceptable to God.

In the end, these churches became weighed down with a complex and speculative theology, grown from the scar tissue of countless battle wounds, as the movement fractured again and again.

Today, the Churches of Christ retain some of that original vitality, a vitality which often pops up in surprising places and in surprising way. But they also retain the scar tissue, the battle wounds, and the baggage of that long history of division.

The movement that started out as the pursuit of Jesus’ unity prayer, ended up as another monument to division. The movement that started out by opposing man-made barriers, created new, unprecedented barriers of their own.

But I don’t write this to condemn. I write this to give hope.

It is not too late for the Churches of Christ to return to their original cry for simplicity and unity. To do so will require sacrifice, humility, and a willingness to be led by God. And it will require elevating the scriptures above our opinions, letting go of what is neither biblical nor sound.

Here are the four things I believe we must do.

1. Abandon unscriptural theology

In the heat of countless religious debates, some Church of Christ preachers came up with arguments and theological frameworks that were neither biblical, nor compatible with the New Testament. Rather than appeal to unity and simplicity as their predecessors had done, they appealed to ideas about religious ethics that appeared nowhere in the scriptures, and strained the credulity of everyone who heard them. And yet generations of preachers clung to these ideas like they were a life raft.

It is time to let go. It is our moral duty to let go. The scriptures want to be read as they are, not through an artificial lens we have created for them.

2. Embrace all Christians

A motto in the early Restoration Movement was “Christians only, not the only Christians”, but the Churches of Christ have sometimes turned this on its head. Rather than accept any obedient and believing Christian as a brother or sister in Christ, they have often required that these Christians be re-baptized by a Church of Christ minister, apparently feeling that belief in and obedience to Christ was not sufficient for salvation.

This is dangerous ground, biblically speaking. Christ and the apostles set out simple instructions, and adding anything to this gospel is not only wrong, it invites some of the worst condemnation in the scriptures.

3. Emphasize Baptism

One of the things that the Churches of Christ have often focused on is baptism. And rightly so — baptism is incredibly significant in the New Testament, precisely because it is the act of giving up our identity.

This is why Paul can say that he was crucified with Christ, and that other Christians were buried in baptism. He isn’t talking about what baptism looks like, or making an abstract metaphysical point — he’s suggesting that it is this act of publicly identifying with Jesus that destroyed an old identity, and allowed a new one to be formed.

We sometimes downplay this by suggesting that in baptism we are “turning our backs on sin”. But for Paul, it was far more significant than that. In publicly identifying as a Christian, he had not only abandoned his old beliefs and ways of living, he had abandoned his entire world, his station in life, everything that had given him meaning or value or significance. He lost it all, and it is precisely through that tremendous loss that he discovered a new and better identity.

In the same way, Christians of the first century abandoned their religious, social, and cultural status, and often their possessions and their lives. Baptism was a moment when, in a very real sense, one person died, and a new person was born.

This is why Paul can say that:

Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. (Colossians 3:11)

And...

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

In identifying as Christians, all of these racial, social, and cultural identities had been abandoned, and all that was left was the binding love of Christ. If we miss this, we miss the power and significance of the early church.

4. Share Communion

In the New Testament, Christians expressed their newfound identities by gathering to eat together, sharing their food and their compassion over a common table. This was called the “Love Feast” and “The Lord’s Supper”, because in this meal, a new family was being built — a family that in a striking fashion, brought together slaves and slave-owners, rich and poor — living out in a concrete way the peace and the kingdom of God.

This practice was so important to Paul that in 1 Corinthians 11, he takes his readers to task for it. When eating together, many of the wealthy people had begun eating first, leaving the poorer individuals to pick up the scraps. This was repulsive because it went against the whole purpose of the meal, and contradicted everything they were supposed to be doing.

This practice is something we can reclaim and embrace. But we must embrace it with the full meaning and significance that the scriptures give to it — not as one of many rituals, but as an expression of the heart of Christian identity, and the all-embracing love of God.

These four things would mark a return to the Restoration Movement, a return to calling for and creating Christian unity. And they would revive a minimalist theology based around the core elements of New Testament Christianity.

But they require sacrifice. To return to the simplicity of New Testament Christianity, we must abandon the things we have added to it. To return to the power and signficance of the early church, we must re-embrace their spirit and their purpose.

Perhaps then we would have a true Restoration Movement, one that not only brings about Christian unity, but goes on to play a part in the healing of the world.

Three ways of seeing the world

micah — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 05:16:37 +0000

It seems to me that there are three main ways you can look at the world.

The first is monism, and it holds that everything is one. God and the world and heaven and earth and you and me are all one blur, and all our dividing lines are illusions to be wiped away with a warm washcloth. As John Lennon sang, I am the eggman, they are the eggmen, goo goo g' joob.

This is a favorite in progressive spirituality, and it has a lot going for it. It seems to provide us with a basis for love right down at the root level of existence. It also has a ready-made type of salvation: simply wake up to the illusion you’re living in. Simply wipe away the lines between you and the rest of existence.

Its answer to the problem of evil is also simple. Pain and suffering and so on are simply inescapable things, and it’s up to you to adjust yourself to them. You need to learn to see past these problems, and embrace the world as it is. And since God is one with the world, and these problems still exist, they must actually not be bad things.

The second way is dualism, and it holds that God and the world are poles apart. In some forms of the idea, this separation is even due to human sin — we’re so evil, God has to stay a universe away.

This is a favorite in conservative spirituality, and it’s compelling for a couple of reasons. It seems to provide us with a natural framework: the world is bad, God is good, and whatever is least like the world is what we should pursue. For some people, that means cultivating the mind instead of the body. For others, it means practicing religion instead of engaging with culture. For still others, it means actively rejecting any truth claims but one’s own.

Salvation in this framework can mean escapist visions, like the Left Behind series, where a select few people are snatched up to heaven, and the rest of the world gets to burn. Or it can mean simple negation, where people feel that their body is a cage, and they are just waiting to escape it.

Its answer to the problem of evil is likewise simple: God is letting this place go to hell, and you shouldn’t expect any different.

The third way is less known. We might call it conversion, because it holds that heaven and earth are in the process of coming together. This, to my mind, is the worldview of great Christian writers like CS Lewis, NT Wright, JRR Tolkien, and GK Chesterton. In this view, and really only in this view, time and history play an important role.

Here, it is not simply that God is good and we are bad; rather, God is good, and we are in the process of being conformed to his image. Nor is it simply that heaven is great and earth is hell; rather, heaven is filled with the glory of God, and the earth is coming to progressively reflect that glory.

This seems to be what Jesus had in mind when he prayed: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Salvation in this framework isn’t escapism, it’s resurrection. It is life fighting back against death, it is the light overcoming the darkness. It is transformation in the present, and the promise of ongoing and ever more dramatic transformation in the future.

And here, the answer to the problem of evil is pragmatic instead of theological. Instead of telling us why things are often so bad, it insists that we must work to make them better. And it assures us that God himself is doing the same.

In my mind, the first view is compelling, but ultimately demoralizing. If you want to make the world better, you must be sure not to want it too hard, because striving too much against the way things are is a moral failure on your part, a giving in to the great illusion.

Similarly, the second view has a lot to offer, but also serves to destroy your motivation for doing good. If this place is going to burn, why bother making it better? Why bother improving the schools or the libraries or the parks? Why bother starting a business or working for a good cause? If all of this is horrific anyway, why waste the effort? Why not (to put a twist on Paul) just eat and drink, knowing that tomorrow all the good things we work for will die?

Only in the third view can I see a way forward, a way to fully engage as a human being in making the world better. Here, we do not accept the world as it is, nor do we reject it as incapable of redemption. Instead, we recognize the good, God-given nature of everything, as well as his intense desire to reclaim what he has made. Here, we do not accept politics as usual, nor resign ourselves to the evils of existence. Here, we affirm our physicality, yet look forward to transformation. Here, we cherish the past, and yet are not chained to it. Here, we value the present, but do not make it an idol.

Here, we have a future.

Against Consumerism

micah — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 04:41:34 +0000

I’ve written before about my love for Iron Man 3. In it, Tony Stark faces the hard question of personal identity. Who is he? Who is Iron Man?

At first glance, the answer would seem to revolve around his suit. Iron Man is the guy who wears the super-powered outfit — so as Tony’s anxiety escalates, he surrounds himself with more and more suits, gradually walling himself inside a fortress of armor.

But this is not the truth. As all of these suits are stripped away, Stark finds himself solving problems with creativity, ingenuity, and effort. In that, he finds his real identity: he is the mechanic, the one who creates.

This resolution isn’t the rejection of his technology, it is the recognition that the process of creation — not the artifact — is the substance of what technology and humanity is about. Instead of finding solace in the artifacts he has created, he finds solace in his ability to continue to create and transform.

This is also a core idea of the brilliant Lego Movie. For the Lego people, the essence of heroism is not about holding onto things which can make them safe, it is about learning to see the world as a platform for creativity and play and construction. The moment of enlightenment in the movie is the realization that all of life is play — that all things are constructable and may be transformed.

In that direction lies freedom. In the other direction lies consumerism.

When it comes to technology, our society seems to be caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, we have cheerleaders for the latest gadget, seeing technological advancement as a matter of fashion and lifestyle. Their engagement with technology is about waiting for a larger screen, a glitzier watch band, a sleeker profile. On the other hand, we have the reactionaries who fear that every new thing threatens their humanity. Their engagement with technology consists of looking for something to fear or protest.

These two responses — consumerism and reactionism — are both incredibly unhealthy. Instead of seeing technology as an outgrowth of our humanity, they approach technology as something alien and foreign to us. As such, they cannot engage with it in any meaningful way. They are living like Tony Stark, walling themselves inside a fortress of technological artifacts.

I suspect that consumerism is responsible for widespread ennui, depression, and disengagement. It is an answer which does not satisfy.

But neither does reactionism. Going to the woods only satisfies if it provides the opportunity to chop our own wood, to fell our own trees, to hunt for our own food. In other words, it only satisfies if it gives us the opportunity to engage in technological work and creation.

Few reactionaries make it that far. Instead, they retreat to an artificially constructed world of technological remnants from a different era. Perhaps they use books instead of ebooks, maybe they use TVs instead of computer screens. This is no different than consumerism of a different kind — the operation of fashion and lifestyle choices in a more unusual and self-deceptive way.

Those who have truly gone to the woods — like Kevin Kelly, like many of the Amish — know the value of technology, and know the joy of technological creation. They do not seek to consume, they seek to produce. They do not seek lifestyle, they seek creation.

What is Technology?

micah — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 05:16:02 +0000

A few days ago, I published an essay attempting to explain and define transhumanism. At root, I said, transhumanism is the idea that we can make things better.

One comment suggested that I should add an important qualifier: transhumanism is the idea that we can make things better through science and technology.

I agree that this is the main distinguishing factor of modern transhumanism. In fact, when we encounter older transhumanisms, or expressions of transhumanism not focused on technology, we usually think of them as religions. There are some groups of people today, for example, who believe they can make the world better through mysticism. There are others who believe they can make the world better through politics. Transhumanists are usually thought of as the people who focus on making the world better through technology.

So let’s accept this definition. Transhumanism is about making the world better through technology. But what is technology?

In his book What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelley coins the idea of “the technium”. The technium, he says, is the complete ecosystem of things which have physical presence, and yet which trace their roots to the mind of man.

This includes planes, trains, and automobiles, but it also includes every piece of art ever created, every book ever written, every song ever composed. It includes spoken language, the alphabet, the American justice system, the suit and tie, corporate board meetings, agriculture, farms, fireplaces, Christmas, graffiti, the banana, corn, the poodle, punk rock, treehouses, roads, rope, stories, the Magna Carta, numerals, and the metric system.

All of these things are technology, because they were all created through the application of ingenuity and effort. They began as concepts, creative ideas in human minds, and then spread into the world as physical entities taking shape and shaping their surroundings.

Sometimes, technology is thought of as the application of science. But in actuality, science itself is a technology, a tool which allows us to harvest knowledge from the world, and refine it into comprehensible forms.

Even organized religion, in this broad sense, is a technology. It has buildings and meeting times, mechanisms for communicating important information, songs and sayings, a shared culture, bulletins and church signs and books. It makes use of air travel and roadways to spread the message, it makes use of microphones and meeting halls to keep the community feeling in sync.

Technology is not something new, certainly not something foreign. It is intrinsic to who we are as human beings. We are inventors and builders, we create things.

If you set an ant down in the forest, it will construct an anthill. If you set a human down in the forest, it will begin to construct a technological civilization. It will start with fire, move to shelter, clothing, and then art. Soon it will have built weapons and gardening implements, and begun construction of a small farm. Give it a few generations, and it will have built a village, or even a city. Very quickly, these human beings will be writing music, history, and philosophy — and most of all, telling stories.

Stories are perhaps the most important technology of all. They imagine alternate worlds, alternate choices, alternate possibilities. They invite us to experience the world through other eyes and other hands. They compel us to step outside of ourselves, and contemplate how things could be different. They give us a sense of past, a sense of present, a sense of future. They create loyalty and honor and courage.

Stories are the engine of human change. Stories are the fuel of our ongoing development. Without stories, we would not be human in any recognizable sense. Without stories, we would not be able to shape our world.

So technology is not the shiny new Apple watch. Technology is not the internet or your laptop computer. Technology is the set of things we have created, the work we have done, the ingenuity we have applied to the world around us. Or, to sum it up:

Technology is every technique, method, or system created by the human mind in order to make the world better.

What is Transhumanism? And why should Christians care?

micah — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 06:36:56 +0000

In the past year, a strange new idea called “transhumanism” has started to show up in documentaries, tv series, and blockbuster movies. It’s often coupled with stories of amazing new medical developments, like restoring hearing to the deaf, or sight to the blind. Sometimes it’s coupled with stories of scarier things, like robot invasions, or murderous artificial intelligences.

You might be wondering, what is transhumanism? What does it mean, and why should I care? Or maybe, why is Micah always talking about this?

At root, it’s actually pretty simple. Transhumanism is basically just the idea that we can make the world better. We’re not stuck with how things are; we actually have the power to change things, and to do things differently.

This means that when we face problems like Ebola or cancer, we don’t simply sit back and say this is how things have to be. Instead, we apply our God-given ingenuity to working out solutions.

And when we face issues like extreme poverty, we don’t simply accept that this is how things are. Instead, we work to help those in need, and work harder to eliminate the things that caused the need to begin with.

Whether facing disease, poverty, or hunger, whether encountering the wounded, sick, or dying — we don’t simply throw up our hands in defeat. Instead, we set out to address the problem; we set out to improve the world.

Transhumanism is about working on these kinds of problems, problems that affect the world on a really large scale.

What’s amazing, of course, is that humans have been able to do so much already. Just in the last century, we’ve seen the widespread adoption of indoor plumbing and electricity. The impact of these things has been incredible, from dramatic reductions in disease, to the health benefits of refrigerated food.

The irony is that many people now act like things have always been this way; like we’ve always had electricity, plumbing, and indoor lights. In reality, of course, these technologies are barely two generations old. Not having had them is within memory of many people still alive.

This lack of historical awareness can blind us to the fact that things can be better, that there is still plenty of room to improve the lives of people at every level of society. That, in turn, can make us apathetic, leading us to surrender our role in making the world a better place. Or even worse — it can make us hostile towards those who are working to change things for the good.

But the reality is that the world has been radically transformed, over and over again, by the actions of people just like you and me. From fire and agriculture, to space travel and particle accelerators — we create new things, cultivate new life, and enable new ways of living, working, and playing. We explore and learn and discover, we imagine and build and invent.

We have always been transforming. That is who we are — that is what it means to be human.

And that means that we have the capability — and the responsibility — to make things better. We need to fight the impulse towards apathy, and embrace our responsibility as human beings. We need to realize how far we’ve come — and how far we still can go.

The future can be shaped. The world can be improved. Life isn’t static, change can happen.

We need to ask hard questions about the future. How can we solve the problems of global hunger? How will we deal with massive unemployment, if large parts of our economy become automated? What can we do to prevent the spread of biological weapons?

Rather than approaching these questions with pessimism or fear, we need to approach them as problems to be solved with ingenuity, passion, and hard work. We need to see the future, not as something terrifying, but as a chance for doing good, and an opportunity to improve the lives of billions of people.

That’s what transhumanism is about. Believing that we can change things. Recognizing that the world has transformed before — and will transform again. Thinking far enough ahead to see large-scale challenges, and larger-scale opportunities. Working towards making the world a better place for everyone.

At the moment, very few self-proclaimed transhumanists are Christian. This means that the people seemingly most invested in the future of the world — in considering its challenges, and contemplating opportunities to make it better — are mostly secular.

I'd like to change that. After all, Christianity is the religion that tells us we were made in the image of God, and charged with the care of all creation. Christianity is the religion whose prime directive is “love your neighbor as yourself”. Christianity is the religion which calls its followers to participate with God in the redemption, renewal, and reconciliation of the world. Christianity is the religion whose disciples were commanded to go out and heal the sick, feed the hungry, and bring life to the dead.

This is why I’m involved in helping to grow the Christian Transhumanist Association. We’re asking Christians to start thinking deeply about the challenges and opportunities of the future, and to start moving boldly and optimistically toward making the world a better place. We’re not suggesting a new idea, but an old one. We want Christians to wake up to what they claim to believe — and to connect more deeply with the heart and vision of their faith.

If you’re interested in taking on these kinds of challenging questions, being a part of this growing discussion, and working on ambitious ways to improve the world, we want your ideas and your vision. We'd love for you to join us.