Musings on plausibility structures
An assortment of brief reflections on some ways in which our environments help to form our beliefs
I
In Bulwarks of Unbelief, Joseph Minich argues that modern life makes unbelief more natural to us than belief in God, because the world doesn't tend to present itself to us as an order made by an intelligent agent, but rather, as inert raw material waiting to have our human agency imposed upon it.
What does it mean for a thing to be real for us? With the “background noise” of technological artifice surrounding us, it means that things present themselves to us for our use and manipulation. In such an environment, the idea that something (or Someone) exists that is not mere material available for our manipulation is inherently implausible. Minich writes:
Against this backdrop, then, what is the initial plausibility of any God (or transcendental reality) who is not suited to our convenience (perhaps even opposed to it) —and who is rather a dense and weighty reality outside of ourselves to whom the only appropriate posture is awe? Even further, what is the plausibility of any God at all-indeed —any fundamental person-like reality that can only be known by a sort of receptive hearing rather than an aggressively projected gaze? [Joseph Minich, Bulwarks of Unbelief, 124–125]
What is important for Minich's argument is that this is not primarily a question about propositions, which we might deliberate about in a rational manner, but about what intuitively feels right to us as modern people, embedded in this technoculture. The world, as we moderns actually experience it, is a world that does not speak to us.
II
John Piper caused something of a stir on Twitter some months ago, questioning the causal coffee-sipping culture that one can easily find in many contemporary evangelical churches. His later defence of his comments on the Ask Pastor John podcast are insightful:
The heart of the matter is that people and leaders don’t have a heart that resonates with what I mean by “reverence and awe” and the holiness, the sacredness of that hour of congregational worship on Sunday morning (usually). Those realities are not prominent in their mind and heart, those reverent realities. They know those words: reverence, awe. They know the words, but the words don’t have compelling existential content, with the kind of serious joy that makes people eager for reverence and awe. They’re just words.
Put another way, the environment of the contemporary church has been cultivated in such a way that the awesomeness of God is not regularly felt existentially, even if it is understood and affirmed on paper.
III
Christopher Schlect gave a talk some years ago on the rise of women's ordination in American Protestantism. Notably, he argued that this was not a matter of (feminist) ideas having consequences; rather, it was that male-only eldership ceased to be implicitly plausible in an environment where technology and church organisational structures had transformed church government into something quite a bit more gender-neutral:
When it comes to the issue of women’s ordination, most historians have tried to account for the change in women’s status in the church by examining how people theologised about women. But the theological arguments for women’s ordination that prevailed in the 1920s were actually the same old arguments that he been around for at least by then a couple of generations […]
The theology of women’s status in the church wasn’t changing, yet women’s status in the church was changing. We find the answer then by examining the every day routines, the material objects and even architectural space, all of which reveal an administrative revolution, I argue, that transformed American protestantism in the early decades of the twentieth century. I argue that this administrative revolution came freighted with gendered significance and it fuelled the change in women’s status.
In most contemporary workplaces, the sexes present themselves as roughly interchangeable. Most jobs, at least where hard physical labour is not a significant part of the work, present themselves to us as gender-neutral. At the same time as this, the ministry itself is increasingly understood as a series of skills or traits abstracted from particular persons—and from their sex.
Yet, we are stuck with Paul's instructions to Timothy. The belief in male-only ordination is surely something that one can be reasoned towards, with an open Bible and a whiteboard—and many evangelicals are convinced of it in this way—but it remains the case that the instruction does not fit the vibe of the world as we actually experience it. For many of us, the idea that a woman ought not to be ordained to the ministry doesn't instinctively feel right—and it certainly does not strike us as “a beautiful design”.
As church government increasingly takes the form of human resource management, the pastor's work of shepherding the flock becomes detached from the pastor's own person. The ideal shepherd of a local flock manages several other shepherds, in order to enable the church to grow beyond particular numerical barriers. Thus, the pastor’s job is really to facilitate certain outcomes brought about by the agency of other persons. But it must be asked: if pastoral ministry can be so detached from the pastor’s own person, how would it not be detached from his sex?
I would not be surprised if, within a generation, the male-only pastorate is going to be functionally eroded within conservative Australian evangelical churches, though it may live on in some inexplicable and tokenistic manner. This will not be so much because of the adoption of some "girlboss pastor" feminist ideology, but rather because of the managerial reformation that is already occurring within churches, which makes the sex of the manager practically irrelevant.
IV
The phenomenon of "church online", and the fact that the vast majority of churches seem to have embraced it indefinitely, will not be without consequence for the life of the church and for the nature of Christian worship. Live-streamed worship services will tend to undermine the logic of the church as a community to which one is committed, and to undermine the logic of Christian worship as bodily activity performed together with other embodied persons.
Part of what made "church online" plausible in the first place was the extent to which Christian worship had already mostly taken the form of passive consumption of other people's performances up the front. Given that the active participation of the congregation in worship was already so minimal, it was not inconceivable that the church's worship could be successfully performed without the church showing up at all.
The decision to install "church online", not merely as a temporary concession to exigencies, but as an ecclesiological fixture, is to make the personal attendance of the congregation for worship optional in principle. What does it mean, then, for a person to be a member of "church online"? What does it mean to submit yourself to the authority of its elders? What is the duty of the minister towards the invisible adherents of church online?
In an environment where church online is so normalised, it is plausible that the neglect of personal attendance in worship is not merely less-than-ideal, but disobedient?
V
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have all they that do his commandments… [Ps. 111:10]
While we are instructed to meditate upon the law of God in a more deliberative fashion, such meditation will always be most fruitful if we have committed to keeping God's law, delighting in it and walking in it all our lives long.
Those that seek for loopholes and ways out from under God's law will never understand its goodness and wisdom. For them, God's instructions will always be full of arbitrary, indiscernible and unreasonable restrictions that get in the way of the good life. But those who obey God's law from the heart will find over time, not only that it makes good sense to the intellect, but that it tends toward our blessedness and joy in our lives. God's law is bigger on the inside:
I have seen an end of all perfection: but thy commandment is exceeding broad. [Ps. 119:96]