You can do all that in C


In real life I program computers. Programmers have favorite computer languages. Mine is C, and I can always start an argument by saying we don't really need other languages. People who have other favorites then take umbrage and start a debate. It is common in the tech community to refer to such kerfluffles as religious conflicts, and that is unfortunately apropos.

The parallelism with religious debates is striking. People describing the same things in different ways, pursuing the same answers by different means, instinctively see one another as doing something wrong. I say that a program variable is, in reality, simply a numbered position in the computer's memory, what is called in computerese an address. That is the wrong way to look at it, say proponents of the higher levels of abstract symbolism. What is important, they say, is meaning. We sound like a bunch of theologians.

I am coming round to the conclusion, after years of thinking about it, that Christianity's emphasis on abstract theories is misplaced. Ours is not, primarily, an intellectual religion. You do not have to be an intellectual to understand the faith and practice it. Little children can see how it works. Christ took fishermen off the dock and made them his witnesses. Some of the finest Christians I know are of no intellectual pretensions, or even not too bright, but they see to the heart of Christ's message and follow it. Indeed, not many wise are called. (1 Cor 1:25-27)

Stirring up intellectual debates among followers who are only halfway intellectual results in disputes and divisions we can do without. Were you baptized as a baby? Well and good; now live out the hopes your sponsors voiced for you and over you. Baptized as an adult? A fine thing also, for you needed to make up your own mind about it. 

What is the meaning of the communion rite? Here I think that any view that fully accounts for what scripture says is a good attempt, for we are describing a holy mystery in earthly terms. We are certain to be imperfect, incomplete, in our understanding. The limits of what we may think are fenced by St. Paul's warning (1 Cor 11:27-30) and informed by what Jesus had to say about his body and his blood. Some of our explanations are plainly inadequate, and of the rest, some perhaps are more adequate than others, but if anyone thinks he fully understands, let him think further.

A difference between software "religious conflicts" and the real religious kind is that programmers are under no special obligation to love and serve one another and to work together in common cause. Christians are, and that is why our debates are unseemly. They're unseemly, at least, when they go beyond polite in-house debates to become strident, and then hostile, and at some points in our history, they have even turned violent. Strident objections to one another alienate us from one another and from the world at large. (John 17:20-21)

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A little PS:

My own religious views are likely unimportant to my broader message about putting up with one another, but here they are. I was baptized as an adult, in a church of the Anglican tradition, which means I had to stand up in front of God and everybody to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil. But I find no reason to think myself superior or even very different from someone baptized as an infant, who when grown lives out the calling thus extended to him.

As to what communion is about, I see no reason why real presence and pneumatic presence cannot be simultaneously true. Indeed, I think that one implies the other. What is spiritually true is true-er, if I may use that construction, than what we see happening on the material plane: realer than real, so to speak. But my part is only to follow out what Christ said specifically to me and to all followers, which is "do this." The rest is up to him. That touch of ambiguity, or mystery, is acceptable in my church's tradition.

He was the Word that spake it,
He took the bread and brake it,
And what that Word did make it,
I do believe and take it.

--John Donne


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