Conference Talks
John Churcher – lecture 1
– “The Unknown BCE God”
“Any place is sacred
ground, for it can become a place of encounter with the divine Presence.”
(David Steindl-Rast, a Catholic Benedictine monk)
My starting point is that
all Gods are human creations. However, they are serious attempts to put into
words those descriptions of 'through the dark glass' glimpses and experiences
of the Infinite Mystery that is within and beyond all, as Tillich expressed it,
"The Ground of Being". Following some of the thinking of Tillich I no
longer explain my experiences of God in terms of a supernatural interventionist
being although unlike Tillich, I continue to talk about the experience of the
presence of the Infinite Mystery - perhaps this is what Tillich called
"God above God"?
No one can define the Infinite
Mystery and any attempted description of a God experience is made within the
limitations of the symbols of language and culture that we use to create our
religious imagery. It is from such descriptions of experience that emerge the
different religions of the world. Out of respect for all faith communities and
their experiential explanations of their particular dark glass glimpses an
upper case 'G' will be used throughout.
All God-explanations of
the dark glass glimpses of the Infinite Mystery are valid, no matter how or
where they were or continue to be created. The Gods of the First Nations people
of the Americas are just as valid today as are the God-explanations imported
from across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere. However, when the name
of any God is invoked to terrorise or to kill those of other dark glass
glimpses then such actions are both illegitimate and blasphemous.
In the context of this
Conference, the Unknown BCE God is that Infinite Mystery, the source of all
things. Any human-created God is the therapeutic creation not just of our
ancient ancestors but is continually refined into that which we call religion.
By 'therapeutic' I mean those stories that try to explain experiences and offer
both answers to serious questions and comfort to those enduring pain, and so
on. Thus, although every religion creates it own God no human description can
capture much of the Infinite Mystery within and beyond time and space.
One of my favourite
contemporary religious writers is Karen Armstrong but all her works [and
similar studies by other researchers and writers] need to be approached with
the caveat: in evaluating the actions of ancient peoples we need to be cautious
in applying the insights gained from more recent cultural and scientific development
- is it all mere speculation on our part?
My interest in such
matters arose some five years ago when I gave a number of lectures at the URC
Free to Believe Reading Week at High Leigh Conference Centre on the outskirts
of north London. As the keynote speaker I was asked to explore Karen
Armstrong's excellent book 'The Case for God'. Armstrong writes, "One of
the conditions of enlightenment has always been a willingness to let go of what
we thought we knew in order to appreciate truths we never dreamed of. ... We
may have to unlearn a great deal about religion before we can move on to new
understanding" [page 10].
That is the spirit in
which I invite you to journey with me, and through this first chapter I
encourage you to keep three questions in mind:
1] Who or what is God?
2] What is the nature of
God?
3] To what extent is
religion a journey and not a destination?
One of my favourite
cinema films is Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'. From memory, the
opening 20 minutes are concerned with ape-like animals working together on
gathering their food. But then a new age dawns with the appearance of the
Obelisk. As one ape-like animal dares to touch it there is a transformation.
From that point on the apes become very tribal and then very vicious towards
apes of other tribes.
The species
Homo-Neanderthalensis and Homo-Sapiens [modern human] were almost
identical. However, the species became separated some 600,000 years ago
when the brain size of Homo-Sapiens increased. Although Neanderthals eventually
became extinct between 40,000 and 28,000 years ago, some palaeontologists
suggest that they had developed a ritual for burying their dead that indicated
an expectation that there was life beyond death. It appears that bodies were
buried pointing in a specific direction, accompanied by tools to be used when
the body woke again in another place. Could this indicate a growing awareness
of the supernatural, of that something greater than themselves?
The increasing brain size
of Homo-Sapiens allowed language to develop but with this came a new challenge.
Jack Spong reminds us that it was the evolution of a unique language system
that enabled Homo-Sapiens to remember and to learn from the past, to interpret
and to improve the present, and to anticipate and plan for the future. Such a
development added both hope and fear to the previous developmental level of the
survival instinct of 'fight or flight' alongside the need to eat and to
procreate. However, this new awareness and use of memory to anticipate a future
brought a new consciousness of death and the finite nature of life. Over time,
self-knowledge and living in community also led to the development of a moral
sense that makes the human animal different from all other living creatures.
As language developed so
it enabled each tribe to evolve its own unique conceptual thinking and tribal
stories that were used to come to terms with the growing realisation that there
was more to life than a stimulus / response mechanism. For example, nomadic
tribes continued to follow the source of food, and to do so they needed to
understand the rhythm of life in the changing seasons. And when the nomadic
tribes began to settle in their own claimed tribal area, there was still a
rhythm of life, for example, predicting and preparing for the season when crops
could be harvested or the great whales passed by the tribal settlements. These
developing language abilities, along with conscious observations concerning
such as weather patterns and seasons, gave rise to an awareness that there had
to be something greater than themselves. After all, there were great
uncontrollable powers that could destroy homes, settlements, crops, animals and
people. If only these powers could be harnessed to bless the tribe and to deter
destruction. Explanatory stories emerged along with new tribal Gods such as the
sun God that could scorch the earth; the rain God that brought storms and
floods; the thunder God that demonstrated displeasure with the tribe by
throwing lightning bolts and thunderous noise across the earth.
The fact that no such
Gods existed then [or today] was immaterial. Language had enabled tribal people
to create explanatory fictions to help them come to terms with the fearful
powers of the unknown. Sacrifice became one of the means by which certain
tribal Gods could be encouraged to either withdraw their displeasure or to
respond favourably to the tribal offerings. For example, sometimes virgin
daughters or the first fruits of the harvest were offered to the relevant
tribal Gods. So from the beginning of human consciousness Gods have been
created to be worshipped and obeyed and have had sacrifices made to them to
ensure their blessings upon the chosen people. It was fear of the unknown that
led to the creation of Gods. This was part of the process of evolutionary
development. Trying to make sense of their world: their life, food supply,
procreation, survival and death was the refining if not the beginning of
religion with its human-created tribal Gods.
In that early age of
evolutionary development, questions probably were beginning to be asked by this
developing species of Homo Sapiens about the origins of life. From those
questions developed creation myths, just like Kubrick's obelisk in '2001'!
These were not science but were therapeutic explanatory fictions. As such, we
humans have always created Gods in our image or imagination for our perceived
protection, advantage and privilege, especially when we have created words and
concepts to decide who is in our tribe and who is not!
We now return to Karen
Armstrong who says that the oldest known underground temple site is Grosse
Chauvet, where the earliest recorded ideological system has been dated to
around 30,000 BCE. Paintings were created deep underground using only fire to
light their way. Armstrong poses a number of questions:
Why use such deep caves?
Were these caves
sanctuaries from a hostile external world?
Were the paintings the
creation of an ideal world beyond themselves?
Did the paintings depict
a sense of the inter-relatedness and unity of all life?
Was this the beginning of
religion?
Armstrong also mentions
the 600 frescoes and 1500 engravings in the Labyrinth of Lascaux, Dordogne,
created about 12,000 BCE. The animals, including mammoths, appear in pairs but
it probably would not have happened in that way as the herds would have had
more chances of survival than solitary pairs:
What may the artists have
been trying to explain?
Also, the Horned Shaman,
the chief religious practitioner in the indigenous hunting societies, appears
here for the first time:
Is this the earliest
representation of the holy man, and if so, was this the founding of the
sanctuary myth? And again, if so, is this a further development of religious
thought?
The Palaeolithic paint
that was used was made from animal blood and animal excrement:
Might this indicate that
the hunters greatly respected the animals that they killed for their food? Is
the 'painted' representation of the killed animals a religious rite of
restoration to new life?
These deep dark caves may
have been the location of a rite of passage from boy to man. The boy may have
been abandoned with tales of cave monsters, and the like. Surviving the cave
monsters may have been the sign of psychological strength needed to protect and
preserve the tribe:
Was being sent from the
light into the darkness of the cave symbolic of death itself?
Was emerging from the
darkness of 'death' into the light of a new day symbolic of restoration to new
life or reincarnation perhaps?
But more of Armstrong
later! From my perspective, the Christian story does not start with Rabbi Jesus
of Nazareth but can be traced right back to the opening of the Book of Genesis:
"In the beginning - God." The Infinite Mystery has always been
present: the second verse of the therapeutic explanatory fiction of the Book of
Genesis says, "the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face
of the deep, while the spirit of God swept over the face of the waters."
I think of the Genesis 1
account of creation as being the chapter of count your blessings… "we are
in Babylonian captivity but just think of the good things that our God has done
and will continue to do for us in time to come…" I think of the Genesis 2
account of creation as being the chapter of answering questions such as,
"If God has made good things, why is there so much evil? Why is childbirth
so painful?" I repeat that these creation myths were not science but they
were both explanatory fiction and therapy!
However, within the
evolutionary process, along side the advent of the Gods there also developed
specific tribal social norms and laws. Tribes increasingly focussed upon their
created Gods believing in some unique God/tribe relationship. Often these
socio-religious communities became exclusive and so different tribal Gods were
brought into conflict. The Hebrew Bible is full of such God conflict between
the God of the Hebrews and the Gods of the gentile tribes. With the evolving
exclusiveness of religion, barriers were erected to define who was in or who
was out of that particular tribe. I repeat that religion is a human-created
tribal survival mechanism attempting, often unknowingly, to describe
experiences of the Infinite Mystery that is always present. Although religion
is a social phenomenon, it is neither meaningless nor non-sacred!
As an aside, we should
not forget the evolutionary importance of ancient tribal stories such as
Abraham offering to sacrifice his son Isaac [if you are a Christian or a Jew]
or Ishmael [if you are a Muslim] to God. Although the situation is far more
complex, we see the consequences of that Abrahamic situation being played out
day by day in Israel Palestine and across the Middle East, in parts of Africa
and South East Asia, in Britain, Europe and North America.
Also, there was a
developing understanding of the nature of God [or the height of human ethical
living] across the known world in different cultures over a long period of
time. Consider the following dates and draw your own conclusions as to what was
happening at various stages in history in different parts of the world,
criss-crossed by invading armies and trade routes, once again either knowingly
or unknowingly describing the presence of the Infinite Mystery.
Although Hindus believe
that Krishna was born 5000 years ago in the Indian sub-continent, various dates
have been given between 3100 and 1300 BCE that Hinduism began as a religious
movement. The Golden Rule is expressed in Hinduism as, "This is the sum of
duty: Do nothing to others which would cause you pain if done to you."
Buddhism is both a
religion and a philosophy that developed 500 years BCE also mainly in the
Indian sub-continent. The Golden Rule is expressed in Buddhism as, "Do not
hurt others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful."
Also 500 years BCE,
Confucius was living as a social philosopher in China, and the Golden Rule is
expressed in Confucianism as a question that is then answered: "Is there
one maxim which ought to be acted upon throughout one's life? Surely it is the
maxim of loving-kindness: do not do to others what you would not have them do
to you."
In Judaism, Rabbi Hillel
was teaching his followers in the Jerusalem Temple when Jesus was a boy and may
well have been one of the teachers with whom Jesus discussed aspects of his
contemporary Judaism before his parents returned to Jerusalem to find their
lost son. Hillel's teaching was this, "What is hateful to you, do not unto
your fellow man; this is the whole Law. The rest is but commentary."
The Prophet Muhammad was
born some 540 years after the birth of Jesus. In traditional Islam, whenever
the name of Jesus is used, it is followed by the words 'peace be upon him' -
the same salutation that follows the mention of the Prophet Muhammad. In Islam
Jesus is seen as the second last revelation of God, and the final revelation
was the Prophet Muhammad. And the Golden Rule within Islam is, "No one of
you is a believer until you desire for others that which you desire for
yourself."
Such unconditional love
of God for all people and between all people is expressed practically in
Matthew's Gospel ch. 22 in words attributed to Jesus: "Love the Lord your
God with all your heart, soul and mind and love others as much as you love
yourself. All the Law and the Prophets are based on these two commandments."
With that last sentence attributed to Jesus there is a definite echo of
Hillel's earlier parallel statement, "All the rest is commentary."
Notice something
important about this list of the Golden Rule: until Jesus the statements had
been about 'do not do' whereas Jesus seems to have turned this from a 'do not'
to a positive 'do'! However, as we have just seen, Christianity does not hold
the monopoly of the Golden Rule of Love. Love continues to be at the heart of
many religions today, some of which pre-date Christianity. Even though the core
message of Jesus is that of love and of doing to others what you want to happen
to you, Christianity was not the originator of the Golden Rule; nor was it the
last religious movement to claim love as its core teaching.
So how come Christianity,
Islam and Judaism have developed into sets of requirements, rules and
regulations that seem, too often, to have little to do with love and more to do
with exclusivity and setting the rules to show who is in and who is out and
therefore excluded from any God's unconditional love? The answer is tribalism
but the Infinite Mystery that is described as God is far too big for any one
religion to capture as its own!
In the Christian era the
Apostle Paul also explained to his gentile listeners in Athens [Acts 17:16-34]
that the Unknown God to whom they offered their sacrifices and worship was, in
fact, the God of the Jews met in Jesus of Nazareth. The Apostle Paul was acting
as prophets and religious leaders had done for millennia: speaking and acting
tribally! Let us take another example: the Jewish Sukkot and Christian Harvest
festivals are the continuation of those ancient attempts to thank, to encourage
and even to appease our tribal versions of God. And in saying such things I am
not ignoring the sacred aspects of life.
In saying these things I
am not ignoring the reality nor the compassionate dark glass glimpses of the
Infinite Mystery that is both within and without all of us and across Creation,
and we will explore a little more of this in our next chapter.
J. Churcher, lecture 2 – “The
Development of the Known CE God”
As we progress through this chapter I invite you to keep three questions in mind:
As we progress through this chapter I invite you to keep three questions in mind:
1] Had it not been for
the expulsion of the Jesus sect from the synagogues at the latter end of the
first century CE, would Christianity still be based within our local
synagogues?
2] Had it not been for
Emperor Constantine's take over of the fourth century Churches, how might
Christianity have developed over the following centuries?
3] Creeds capture
experiences and explanations at a particular time in history, but to what
extent are they still relevant for worship and life today?
I approach this session
particularly from a perspective of one who attempts [with difficulty] to follow
the orthopraxis - the right way to live as a follower of Rabbi Jesus of
Nazareth. To be able to understand how we have travelled from there to here it
is essential for us to know something of the history and the development of
Christianity. It has transformed the world in so many ways but is also now in
terminal decline in well-educated post-modern industrialised societies. Such
information demands a whole library of books and, therefore, this session can
only be a personal cherry-picked overview of how Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth became
Jesus, the Christ of the Church – and the two are very different – over the two
millennia of the Christian Church.
In our contemporary
post-modern mix and match world the life and message of Jesus as the Christ of
the Church has become increasingly irrelevant to most people but the life and
wisdom of Rabbi Jesus is always relevant. Therefore, it is important to
distinguish between the historical Jesus who was a faithful albeit radical and
reforming Jewish rabbi and the later theological development of the man and his
message. Such a development came through memory and interpretation by the
Christian Testament writers, the Early Church Fathers and later Christian
leaders who created both Jesus the Christ and the Church that bears his name.
Also it is essential that
we do not think of Rabbi Jesus as a Christian. Indeed, there is much about
theistic Christianity with which Jesus the Jew would be extremely puzzled. He
was born a Jew, lived a Jew and died a Jew at the hands of the Roman Empire. In
the years between the execution of Jesus (around 33 CE) and the destruction of
the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE the followers of the way of Jesus (for that was
their nickname), spread from Jerusalem across the Roman Empire. As they
travelled, often to avoid political and religious persecution, they established
small local groups of Jewish and gentile spiritual seekers within the
synagogues that welcomed this new Jesus sect. But probably, even in these
synagogues, there would have been Jews who rejected the claims of the Jesus
sect.
It was Saul of Tarsus,
the persecutor of Jewish followers of the Jesus sect, who eventually had a
profound spiritual experience. Not only did he become a member of the Jesus
sect but his name was changed to Paul. This Damascus Road event was not a
conversion to Christianity [that had yet to be invented] but it was the
fulfilment of his Messianic Judaism in the on-going presence of the spirit of
Jesus within the Jesus sect members of the synagogues of the fifth to seventh
decades of the first century CE. Within the early Jesus sect communities that
Paul established on his missionary travels, he encouraged a radical new way of
life based upon Jesus and his message: all were equal and accepted; men no
longer were considered to be superior to women, but were equal; slaves and
masters were equal. And most importantly, in Paul’s developing experiences his
God was equally for Jew and gentile in the Jesus community. However, the early
proper meals that Christians shared equally together were replaced by the
middle of the 1st century CE by the symbolic sharing of bread and wine.
After the execution of
the Apostles Peter and Paul in Rome, later leaders began to water down the
radicalism of both Jesus and Paul. Some of those first century leaders who had
built power and wealth within and beyond the communities of the followers of
Jesus began to assert their power and authority, establishing their privileges
over those who pre-70 CE had been made their equal by Paul. As happens
everywhere, the privileged usually protect their own status and importance.
Christianity eventually
became a religion set apart from Judaism. This followed the Jewish rebellion
towards the end of the 7th decade CE that ended with the mass suicide of Jewish
fighters at Masada in 73 CE. At that time the followers of Jesus were
systematically expelled from their home synagogues in an attempt to maintain
the exclusivity and perceived purity of Judaism. The inclusiveness of Jesus and
of his later followers threatened the very existence of Judaism as a separate
religion.
By the end of the first
century in some of the Christian communities [now called 'church' and
predominantly gentile in structure, membership and thinking] the social,
political and religious radicalism of the early years of what it had meant to
be a follower of the way of Jesus was all but lost.
Different theologies
concerning the meaning of the life and death of Jesus were created. For
example, Justin Martyr (100-165 CE) explored the idea of Jesus being the Logos
(the living Word of God) present on earth but in which Jesus as the Son was
subordinate to the Father. Another widespread interpretation of the God met in
Jesus also developed at that time: Gnosticism. Gnostics proclaimed that
salvation and restoration with God are to be found within knowledge of oneself
rather than through the atoning death of Jesus.
The battle lines were
drawn between the Gnostics led by men such as Marcion and the atoning
theologians such as Irenaeus of Lyons (130-200 CE). Marcion stated that there
were two quite separate Gods, one of the old Hebrew Testament and the other of
the new Christian writings. There was much debate as to the extent to which
Jesus was human or God but a consensus eventually developed in which Jesus was
seen as both fully human and fully God.
Another very influential
leader of the Western Church was Tertullian (160-225) who developed the concept
of the Trinity of God, adding the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son. This
was one God, all of the same substance but present as three different persons.
Tertullian described this God-head relationship as being distinct but not
divided, and different yet not separate. This remains a mystery for many today!
Arius, a leading priest and theologian in Alexandria rejected the idea of God
being a Trinity because God could only be uniquely One.
Two major branches of the
Christian Church began to divide during the time of Origen (185-254 CE) into
Eastern and Western thinking about the God met in Jesus. While the Eastern
thinking followed a clear distinction between God the Superior and Jesus the
subordinate Son, the Western form of Christianity continued down the atoning
fully human and fully God line.
The latter first century
CE practice of believers sharing bread and wine in the symbolic ritual of Holy
Communion, continued until Ambrose, the fourth century CE Bishop of Milan.
Ambrose introduced the new doctrine of transubstantiation in which the bread
and wine became the actual body and blood of Jesus the Christ. Note, as an
aside, the doctrine of transubstantiation continues to be rejected by the
mainstream protestant churches that broke away from the Roman Catholic Church
during the Reformation that began in the sixteenth century.
As time went by
Christianity continued to further remove itself from its Jewish foundations and
especially from the first century Rabbi Jesus who had walked the pathways of
Galilee, Samaria, Decapolis and Judea. Even among the Church Fathers right
through to the fourth century, the story of how Christianity developed away
from its rural Jewish roots is important – it was a process of in-fighting,
blood-letting and persecution. The Christianity that has been handed down to us
today is the history and interpretation of the victors in the struggles for the
'Truth' of orthodoxy.
And while the early
fourth century battles between different theological understandings and
explanations continued there was political upheaval in the Roman Empire. Onto
the scene came a military commander named Constantine. The Western Church was
to change forever under Constantine’s political leadership of the Roman Empire.
On the night before the decisive battle at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine had
a vision of a flaming cross. Although he was not a Christian it is said that he
took this as a sign that the Christian God was with him. He committed his way
to the cross in that, should he be successful in the ensuing battle, he would
convert to Christianity, the religion of the cross. His side prevailed and
following his victory he went on to be declared the new Emperor of the Roman
Empire.
But church historians are
not in agreement on the motives of Constantine. Some suggest that this was less
a religious conversion and much more a means of cementing the fragmenting
Empire together, using a new Christian orthodoxy of belief to bind the peoples
to Rome. The problem was that no such orthodoxy existed at that time. A series
of Councils were held during the fourth century at which the battle for
orthodoxy first swung one way and then the other. Many church leaders found
themselves excommunicated only later to be rehabilitated and then, for them in
turn to excommunicate those who had been the earlier perpetrators of the
punishments inflicted upon themselves.
Constantine called
together various church leaders to try to establish a Christian orthodoxy of
belief right across the Roman Empire. The Council of Nicea was held in 325 CE
and although only an aide to a bishop, Athanasius began to emerge as a
potential leader. He went on to become the influential Bishop of Alexandria.
The outcome of the 325 CE Council was the Nicene Creed, although this was
subsequently amended at the Council of Constantinople in 381 CE.
This Nicene Creed is a
statement of belief that is still regularly used in some Christian worship but
it would probably have caused Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth great concern as he would
not have recognised about whom they were proclaiming!
I believe in one God,
the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
and of all things visible and invisible;
the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
and of all things visible and invisible;
And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only begotten Son of God,
begotten of his Father before all worlds,
God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God,
begotten, not made,
being of one substance with the Father;
by whom all things were made;
who for us men and for our salvation
came down from heaven,
and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost
of the Virgin Mary,
and was made man;
and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered and was buried;
and the third day he rose again
according to the Scriptures,
and ascended into heaven,
and sits on the right hand of the Father;
and he shall come again, with glory,
to judge both the quick and the dead;
whose kingdom shall have no end.
the only begotten Son of God,
begotten of his Father before all worlds,
God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God,
begotten, not made,
being of one substance with the Father;
by whom all things were made;
who for us men and for our salvation
came down from heaven,
and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost
of the Virgin Mary,
and was made man;
and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered and was buried;
and the third day he rose again
according to the Scriptures,
and ascended into heaven,
and sits on the right hand of the Father;
and he shall come again, with glory,
to judge both the quick and the dead;
whose kingdom shall have no end.
And I believe in the Holy
Ghost the Lord, and Giver of Life,
who proceeds from the Father (and the Son);
who with the Father and the Son together
is worshipped and glorified;
who spoke by the Prophets.
And I believe one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church;
I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins;
and I look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. AMEN.
who proceeds from the Father (and the Son);
who with the Father and the Son together
is worshipped and glorified;
who spoke by the Prophets.
And I believe one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church;
I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins;
and I look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. AMEN.
As the Christian
community has continued to split into factions over the past two millennia so
alternative statements of belief have been introduced to suit the thinking of
each particular understanding of God. For example, there is an alternative
creedal statement known as the Apostles’ Creed that was used originally as a
baptismal prayer. Some Church scholars date it as the earliest of the Creeds,
written in the second century while others date it as late as the ninth century
CE. Again, I am sure that Jesus would be puzzled by what it says.
I believe in God, the
Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His
only Son, our Lord: Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the
Virgin Mary,suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He
descended into hell.The third day He arose again from the dead; He ascended
into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father Almighty;from thence he
shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost; the
holy catholic church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the
resurrection of the body;and the life everlasting. Amen.
Each part of these creeds
demonstrates how the human wisdom teacher became the Christ of the Church, the
unique Way, Truth and Life; the Only Way to Heaven; and so on. Sadly, rather
than unify the Christian Churches such imposed orthodoxy of belief has led to
continual arguments and schism. Again, during the fourth century CE Athanasius
further developed the doctrine of the Incarnation of God coming to live in
Jesus. In this action God became human so that humans could become like God. In
367 CE Athanasius also selected the twenty-seven books that would become the
Christian (New) Testament from the hundreds of texts that had been written
about Jesus and the early church communities. It has remained the same
twenty-seven ever since.
At the end of the fourth
century, Augustine (Bishop of Hippo) contributed his appalling doctrine of
Original Sin to the development of the Christian Church. This has, ever since,
undermined the dignity of humanity and led to alarming mental and cultural
abuse. Augustine said that, following the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the
Garden of Paradise, humans had ever since been born into the slavery of sin. We
are, according to Augustine, sinners by nature who are full of evil and need to
be saved by an unmerited act of a gracious and merciful Christian God. Still in
the liturgies of many Christian churches there are lines spoken by all that
state, “We are unworthy and there is no good within us.” As another aside, in
my experience, the healthy approach to being human is that we are beautiful
creations but, as Jack Spong reminds us, we are works in progress and not yet
fully human.
Another of Augustine’s
doctrinal developments concerned the nature of the Trinity. Augustine declared
that Jesus gave the Holy Spirit to his followers as a gift and therefore the
Spirit was a lesser Person than both the Father and Jesus in the Trinity.
Another dominant theology concerning the nature of the Trinity at that time was
that both Jesus and the Spirit came from the Father and therefore the Father
was the source and the Son and the Spirit were subordinate to the Father. Much
blood letting and persecution of Christian by Christian resulted from these
disputes. Augustine also recognised the role and purpose of a sacrament as 'the
visible form of an invisible grace' from the Christian God. This was further
developed within the Church so that many sacraments came to be recognised and
accepted.
Christian doctrine
continued to develop as people asked more questions about the dogmas of the
church. One debate concerned the nature of Mary, mother of Jesus. Some of the
questions that needed answering probably included such as, “If Jesus was God,
how could Mary, a fallen, sinful human give birth to the Son of God?” Or, “Was
Mary the human mother of the human Jesus but not of the God Jesus?” These
questions were addressed at the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE and the result was
the acceptance of the new orthodoxy of ‘theotokos’ that confirmed that Mary was
not just the mother of the human part of Jesus but was the mother of God
incarnate in Jesus. This resulted in a new way of understanding Mary, an ordinary
peasant girl of the early first century, transforming her into the Queen of
Heaven. It should be noted that this was not a unique title because previously
it had been applied to Goddesses in many ancient pagan deities.
Another debate concerned
the nature of Jesus Christ – had he been all Spirit cloaked in a human body or
was he both fully human and fully God at one and the same time? The Council of
Chalcedon (451 CE) answered this question by deciding that Jesus had been both
fully human and fully divine and could not be separated into these two
different constituent parts. The word used to describe this inseparable nature
of Jesus was ‘Homoousios’.
Notice also that there is
nothing new in our post-modern development of Christian thinking. Today, members
of such groups as The Sea of Faith hold that God is not a Being but is the
highest good that can be thought by our limited minds. However, this was very
much the thinking of Boethius at the end of the fifth century CE when he
attempted to bring together Christian doctrinal thinking and Greek philosophy.
The cracks between the
doctrines and theological thinking of the Western and Eastern Churches
continued to widen. In the latter there was the beginning of a Christianity
that concentrated upon mysticism and asceticism. Icons and images became more
important within Christian worship. However, the use of icons created yet more
questions and these were answered by the Second Council of Nicea (787 CE) that
affirmed the rightness of including them within worship. Eventually doctrinal
disagreements resulted in the great schism that split the Eastern and Western
churches (1054 CE), a situation that continues to this day.
In concluding this
chapter I once again emphasise that the real historical Jesus who lived and
died a faithful Jew would not recognise himself in what the Christian Councils
through the first millennium had debated, disagreed over and eventually decided
upon as to what they could or could not believe about him. The importance of
developing ideas of Rabbi Jesus about the right way to live [orthopraxis] was
lost, and greater emphasis was put on controlling what people believed
[orthodoxy] and protecting the growing privileges that come with power. Sadly,
imposed Christian orthodoxy has carried with it twin dangers. The first is that
it is a creator of barriers to show who is ‘in’ and ‘who’ is out – the very
antithesis of what Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth was attempting to achieve in the
latter part of his own life and ministry. The other danger is seen in the
confrontational view that all other experiences and explanations of God are in
error and that Jesus, as the atoning sacrifice, is the only way to God.
Subsequently Christian orthodoxy has led to appalling death and destruction of
fellow but disagreeing Christians, of Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus etc. – all
in the name of the Christian God.
It is Christian orthodoxy
that has contributed immensely to the free fall in membership of the Church in
this post-modern world – but more of that in the next chapter!
J. Churcher, lecture 3 – “Faith
and Reason”
What the Church added to
the story in the second millennium
As we progress through
this chapter I invite you to keep three questions in mind:
1] Anselm offered proof
that the Christian God exists - what proof do you have that any God exists
today?
2] To what extent do you
agree with the statement that the Protestant Reformation has failed, and failed
to do what?
3] Faith communities
based upon Jesus the Christ of the Church [rather than upon Rabbi Jesus of
pre-Christianity] owe more to political action and protected privilege than to
the life and message of Rabbi Jesus himself. What are your reasons for either
agreeing or disagreeing with that statement?
What we have now as traditional
Christianity and Christian theology is not as it was in the beginning of the
early Churches. It continues to be the voice of the victorious and the
powerful; of the vested interest - but it may offer little with which Rabbi
Jesus of Nazareth would agree or even recognise. So we need to continue our
exploration of how we have travelled from there to here!
The following background
information is important as it demonstrates the way in which ecclesiastical
governance, prayer and liturgy were determined and changed not so much by
careful research, consultation and discussion but by blood on the carpet. As
often happens, truth and lies are buried under the weight of the biggest and
most effective army. Second millennium faith moved to faith and reason, and
eventually to reason without faith. In addition, the development of
Christianity cannot be understood if we ignore the social, political, military
and cultural contexts within which the religion developed and changed.
For example, in 1096
there began the horrendous destruction of life and property as the so- called
Christian Crusaders began their attack upon Islam, finally capturing Jerusalem
- and all in the name of the Christian God of love. If ever there was blasphemy
then this was it, to attack the outsider and those of different religions in
the name of any God, especially of a God that is declared as all loving.
At the beginning of the
second millennium theological thinking and exploration moved into centres of
monasticism in which there was no challenge to the premise of the existence of
the Christian God. However, scholasticism also emerged and attempted to bring
together Greek philosophy and Christian doctrine. Rather than simply taking the
existence, nature and works of God at face value, reason and rationality were
used to explain the beliefs of the day. One of scholasticism's early leaders
was Anselm (appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093).
Anselm offered proof that
the Christian God really existed because life had needed something greater than
itself in the first place. Such proof may have sufficed then but has little
place in our contemporary Christianity. Anselm also took Augustinian theology
and developed it further so that we, a fallen race full of sin and of no worth
cannot appease or satisfy the righteous and sinless Christian God. We, unaided,
face the wrath and judgement of that Christian God. This theology of the Fall
of Humankind explained how we were expelled from Paradise so that we no longer
belonged to the Christian God but had been taken over by the devil. Anselm went
on to state that humans could do nothing to placate the wrath of the Christian
God, therefore that God had to do something for humans.
Thus the incarnation and
the cross were linked when it was believed that the Christian God sent his own
Son, Jesus, to live and to die in our place. It was through the sacrifice of
himself upon the cross that the wrath of God could be satisfied and humans
could be restored to that Garden of Paradise existence. But notice that this restoration
was not with the God of the Jews as told in the original story of the Garden
but with the Christian God. Anselm's approach was a form of substitutionary
atonement that was also linked to the earlier ransom theology of Mark (10:45)
in which the Christian God bought us back from the devil by sending Jesus his
Son to become our ransom through his death on the cross. [Note: Substitutionary
atonement and ransom theology are still major theologies in various Christian
denominations today.]
Also at the beginning of
the twelfth-century, Abelard developed a more reasoned and rational approach to
the death of Jesus. He rejected the developing theology of substitutionary
atonement and its accompanying ransom theology. In its place he developed his
'moral influence theory' stating that the death of Jesus demonstrated how much
the Christian God loved humanity by sending Jesus to lay down his life to
protect his friends.
By this time Sacraments,
defined as officially approved religious rites that confer identifiable
blessings on all who accept them, were becoming common place within the worship
and life of churches. In response to an ever growing list of sacraments, Bishop
Peter Lombard recognised only seven sacraments: water baptism in remembrance of
Jesus undergoing this rite; confession of sin; communion in remembrance of the
Last Supper that Jesus shared with his followers; confirmation of infant
baptismal vows made by parents and God-parents on behalf of the child;
marriage; ordination from lay into holy orders; last rites administered to the
dying. [Note: Later Protestant Churches rejected these seven and held onto just
two, baptism and the Lord's Supper or Holy Communion. Whether two or seven
sacraments are recognised, both Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches trace
them back to Jesus himself.]
Francis of Assisi
rediscovered an authentic Rabbi Jesus when he decided that the best way to be a
Christian was to abandon all wealth and privilege. It was in abject poverty
that Francis imitated the life of Jesus on earth. He not only treated women
with a dignity that was unknown in his day but also became a preacher to all
Creation. [As an aside, I do not want to get involved in American politics, we
have enough political problems and challenges in the UK! But I often wonder if
Francis of Assisi, just like Rabbi Jesus before him, was a prototype non-party
political socialist theorist. In much of our contemporary world socialist
theory is often accused of being the politics of envy but, in my experience it
is not - socialist theory is the politics of justice.]
In 1210 Francis
established a religious order called the Franciscans but not long after his
death in 1226 many of his followers took the religious order back into the ways
of the world. They began to accumulate wealth once again and became very
powerful in both religion and politics.
As both scholasticism and
monasticism continued to grow, many more questions developed about the nature
of both the Christian God and the Church. During the middle years of the thirteenth
century Thomas Aquinas made the first real attempt at developing a systematic
theology in which he recognised that the Christian God was so different from
human beings that we could only describe our experiences of God by human
analogy. He was also a teacher of ethics based upon what he called 'natural
law' that dwells within each person to guide our thinking and behaviour.
But the questions
remained concerning the nature of Mary the mother of Jesus. For example, in a
re-run of fifth century CE debates, how could Jesus, acknowledged as the
sinless Son of God, be born without the inheritance of Original Sin? A
Franciscan theologian, John Duns Scotus (1265-1309) concluded that Mary must
have been born without sin and therefore had broken the line of Augustinian
Original Sin. This is the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary mother of
Jesus that is central to the Roman Catholic Church to this day. Thirteenth
century theology was not straight forward and various schools of thinking often
opposed one another, for example, Aquinas was opposed by Scotus.
Then came another scholar
William of Ockham (1285-1349) who opposed all those who were getting very wordy
in their explanations of Christianity. Ockham stated that an explanation with
few words was infinitely better than those attempts to describe the God-experience
that took pages and often whole books of text! It was in reducing the
descriptions to a bare minimum that mysticism became another legitimate western
way to experience God. Thomas a Kempis (1379-1471) was a monk and priest who is
said to have hand copied the Bible at least four times while living a monastic
life. He certainly followed the mystical pathway and is remembered particularly
for his devotional book 'The Imitation of Christ'.
Towards the end of the
medieval period, John Wycliffe (1329-1384) burst onto the scene. No longer
content to accept that the Roman Catholic Pope had more authority than the
Scriptures, he spoke radically against the Church. Church and State had been
synonymous since the time of Constantine but Wycliffe challenged this
relationship and said that political leaders (kings and religious leaders) had
to live recognising the grace of the Christian God and exercising their
God-given privileges with justice. In an attempt to persuade the English of the
power and authority of Scripture over and above that of the Pope and the
Church, Wycliffe began to translate the Latin version of the Bible into the
English language so that the educated elite in England no longer needed to
depend upon Latin or its interpretation by the Catholic priests and scholars.
Bridging the thinking of
the years between Wycliffe and Martin Luther was Catholic priest and humanist,
Erasmus (1467-1536). He had no intention of leaving the Catholic Church but
wanted to reform it from within. From early in his priesthood Erasmus
challenged both the monasticism and the scholasticism that continued to
dominate the life of the Church at that time. His version of the New Testament
written in Greek and printed in 1516 was seen to be in opposition at various
points to the Latin Vulgate version of the New Testament that was then widely
used within the Catholic Church. Erasmus also wanted to get the Catholic Church
back to the historic and social contexts, concepts and teachings of the early
Church Fathers. In this respect, Erasmus was not only a forerunner of the
impending Reformation but also set the ground rules for the theologians who
emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Failed Protestant
Reformation
The early leader of what
became known as the Protestant Reformation was Martin Luther (1483-1546). He
was born into a Catholic family at Eisleben, Germany. His childhood was both
very unhappy and violent at the hands of his father and this drove him to leave
home in his early teenage years. In 1501 Luther began studying at the
University of Erfurt. A year later he gained the award of Bachelor of
Philosophy, and in 1505 a master's degree. But shortly afterwards he abandoned
his university studies and entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt where he
became a priest in 1507. All was well for Luther while he was in the
Augustinian monastery. However, over the winter of 1508-09 he was sent to the
newly established University of Wittenberg to study for his doctorate. Within
the year he returned to the monastery in Erfurt and then went to Rome for some
five months.
Luther later claimed that
this was a pilgrimage that he had undertaken in fulfilment of a vow that he had
made. But later commentators suggest that the real reason could have been
either a demand from the Vatican to attend a hearing or at his own request
because he was already expressing discontent and complaining about the way in
which certain parts of the Catholic Church operated its sale of indulgences.
[As an aside, in pre-reformation Catholicism, the buying of an indulgence
offered either partial or full remission of the punishment for the purchaser's
sin(s)].
Whatever the reason for
his visiting Rome the impact was profound. It deepened his developing and
reforming faith, and also fuelled his growing antagonism towards what he
considered to be the continuing abuses perpetrated by some leaders of his own
Catholic Church. Luther returned to Wittenberg and continued his doctoral
studies but his discontent continued to grow. He then began to challenge the
established theology that individual salvation was found within the sacraments
and life of the Catholic Church alone.
He began to interpret the
earlier Augustinian theology of Original Sin as something that could only be
dealt with by what he called 'justification by faith' brought about by belief
in the salvation and eternal life offered to all who accepted the atoning work
of Jesus in his death and resurrection. Justification by faith alone was to
become a central pillar of the protesting and reforming Christian faith.
Events came to a head
following the publication of Luther's Ninety-five Theses on 31 October, 1517.
These were nailed to the door of the Church in Wittenburg, not as an act of
defiance but in the normal practice of academics publishing their ideas in the
public arena. Luther also sent a copy of the Ninety-five Theses to his
Archbishop explaining their meanings. Luther was then charged with heresy and a
copy of his Ninety-five Theses and his explanations were sent to the Pope in
Rome. Luther was subjected to threats of punishment and excommunication from
the Catholic Church.
Until this time kings and
princes ruled their kingdoms and provinces under the authority of the Pope.
Here was an opportunity to break the power of the Church over the kingdoms of
northern Europe, and especially those in Germany. The reformers took advantage
of this situation. The more the Catholic Church persecuted Luther the more the
German kings and princes supported him against the Pope. This heralded the
start of one of the most bloody centuries in European political and
ecclesiastical history.
Luther the Catholic
reformer had become an unwitting leader of a revolution against the power of
the Catholic Church and its sacramental systems. In 1521 Luther translated and
published the first New Testament in the German language, further fuelling a
rising nationalism although he distanced himself from the Peasants' Revolt. His
translation of the entire Bible in the German language was published in 1534.
Luther was indeed an ecclesiastical anarchist and from his reforming work came
the irrevocable split between Christian Catholicism and Christian
Protestantism. Luther was the beginning and there followed a number of other
priests, especially in Germany and Switzerland, who continued to develop his
reforming work.
Philip Melanchthon
(1497-1560) gave birth to the 1530 Augsburg Confession that was a systematic
list of what the reforming priests now believed. It has become the basis of
faith for the Lutheran branch of the Christian Protestant Church. One of
Melanchthon's Swiss contemporary reformers was Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531). He
went the whole way and openly rejected both the Pope and the central Catholic
doctrine of the Mass. His emphasis, like that of Luther, was that the basis of
eternal salvation was a personal faith in Jesus rather than merely being a
member of the Catholic Church. Zwingli promoted the cause of the individual
Christian as being as important as the role of the priest. Inevitably national
politics challenged what had previously been the preserve of the Pope and the
Catholic Church.
Running along side all of
this Catholic and Protestant blood letting in both England and on mainland
Europe were two giants of the Reformation, Englishman William Tyndale and Frenchman
John Calvin. William Tyndale (c.1494-1536) was educated at both Oxford and
Cambridge and was ordained as a priest at the age of twenty-seven. He became a
controversial outspoken supporter of the reform movement and began to translate
the New Testament into his native English language, something that was
forbidden at that time by the still dominant Catholic Church in England.
In 1524, to avoid further
conflict with his Church authorities Tyndale travelled to meet with Luther at
Wittenberg, Germany. The first printing of his translation of the New Testament
into English began in 1525 and a year later was smuggled in great numbers into
England. Not surprisingly he was denounced and accused of heresy by the Roman
Catholic Church. Tyndale then began translating the Old Testament into English
but failed to complete this work. In 1536 in Antwerp, where he had moved two
years earlier, Tyndale was arrested, imprisoned, strangled and then burned at
the stake for heresy.
The Reformation movement
that had been very much on the European mainland then began to emerge more
openly in England. It was greatly helped by King Henry VIII (1491-1547) whose
personal life brought him into direct opposition to the Pope and the Roman
Catholic Church. As the young adult king, Henry married Katherine of Aragon,
the widow of his elder brother. The one child of the Henry and Katherine
marriage who survived was Mary Tudor (1516-1558). The king was obsessed with
needing a male heir to ensure the continuation of the House of Tudor and when
he decided that Katherine could not give him a son he attempted to divorce her.
However, only the Pope could give permission and he refused.
Undeterred, Henry
divorced Katherine and then married Anne Boleyn in 1533. This resulted in his
excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church. However, Henry took advantage
of the situation and rejected the authority of the Pope to control both the
politics of nation states in general and the Church in England in particular.
Henry responded by establishing an independent Church of England with himself
as the Head.
During Henry's reign the
developing emphasis upon the laity and politics was further promoted by Martin
Bucer (1491-1551). Having worked for much of his life in Strasbourg he spent
the final three years of his life teaching in Cambridge. His understanding of
the role of and relationship between Church and State greatly influenced the
development and publication of the Book of Common Prayer in England. This more
or less coincided with the political decision to replace Latin with English as
the language of Church worship.
The off spring of the
Henry and Anne marriage was Elizabeth (1533-1603) who subsequently became Queen
Elizabeth 1. Henry tired of Anne and had her arrested and tried for adultery
and high treason. Although the evidence lacked credibility the outcome was
execution by beheading. This left Henry free to marry again. Edward VI
(1537-1553) was born to Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour. Sadly Jane died
shortly after the birth of their son and within nine years the king himself
died. Edward became the boy king.
Edward's uncle, the Duke
of Somerset, declared himself to be Edward's Protector and became the real
power behind the throne of the boy king. The Duke of Somerset, along with
Thomas Cranmer who at that time was the Archbishop of Canterbury, completed
Henry's earlier attempt to break away from the power and influence of the Roman
Catholic Church and declared England to be a truly Protestant country. Cranmer
published the English Book of Common Prayer in 1549 and in 1552 the Act of
Uniformity was passed making it illegal for any act of public worship in
England to be conducted in any language other than English. [Note: the Welsh
were allowed to continue to worship using the Welsh language as an attempt to
stop them returning to the Latin and the authority of Rome]. This ban upon the
use of Latin in worship was primarily an attack upon both the Pope and the
Council of Trent (1545-1563). Trent had not only rejected all Protestant
Reformed theology and practice but had declared that all acts of worship
anywhere in the world should be in Latin.
In an attempt to keep
England Protestant, Edward declared his half sisters Mary and Elizabeth as
illegitimate and Lady Jane Grey was illegally pronounced as Edward's heir. She
became Queen upon his death. However, she was Queen for only nine days when she
was replaced by the rightful heir, Mary Tudor. Not surprisingly Lady Jane Grey
was executed. Queen Mary, a Catholic, returned England to the authority of the
Roman Catholic Church. During Mary's reign over 300 Protestants were executed
by burning at the stake. Elizabeth succeeded her half-sister as Queen in 1558
and promptly returned England to Protestant Christianity.
Returning to Tyndale:
although Tyndale did not add new theologies in the same way that his
contemporaries Luther and Calvin were doing, his translation work on the whole
of the Bible formed approximately 90% of the King James Bible that was
published in England and in the English language in 1611. The legacy of John
Calvin (1509-1564) has impacted to this day within a section of the Christian
Church that follows Calvin's doctrine of predestination. In this, Calvin
argued, the Christian God has chosen who will be saved and who will not since
the beginning of time. If you are in God's chosen (the elect) then salvation is
yours. However, if God has not pre-destined your eternal abode in heaven then
you have no possibility whatsoever to get there. The elect cannot withstand the
call of God and therefore no one has free choice - God has either chosen you or
has rejected you. The result is that once a person comes to salvation in Jesus
s/he can never lose that salvation.
Calvin also developed the
Augustinian theology of Original Sin to say that we are all totally depraved
and therefore condemned by the Christian God to spend eternity in hell - unless
of course you are amongst the elect in which case your total depravity will be
overcome by the death and resurrection of Jesus. This theology of Calvin states
categorically that Jesus died and rose again only for the elect. In 1534, to
escape the Catholic Church burning those it considered to be heretics, Calvin
left France and settled in Switzerland. There, two years later in Basel, Calvin
published his major work 'The Institutes of the Christian Religion.'
Calvin restructured the
Church in Geneva without the hierarchy of the Catholics. Clergy were pronounced
as equals within the structure along side lay people who gained a previously
unheard of importance in the development of a new theocracy in which Calvin's
protesting reforming theology replaced the structures and authority of Rome.
But as so often happens,
one tyranny is replaced by another and the excesses of the Roman Catholic
Church, including the authority of the Pope, were removed and the new theocracy
of Geneva took its place. No more indulgences were sold but Calvin's
understanding of the total depravity of the human condition resulted in
criminal punishment for sin. Being found guilty of breaking the new morality
often ended with the person being banned from the city and blasphemy became a
capital offence.
In 1553 Michael Servetus
visited Geneva where he questioned the doctrine of the Trinity. He was
arrested, charged and found guilty of heresy and was burned at the stake.
Notice that, back in 1534, it was a similar burning at the stake of those
twenty-four whom the Catholic Church considered to be heretics that made Calvin
flee France for sanctuary in Switzerland. In 1559, Calvin's 'The Institutes of
the Christian Religion' was both revised and translated into several languages
and distributed across Europe. Calvin died in 1564 but not before he had
established schools and the University of Geneva to ensure that only his brand
of Christianity was taught. His work and theology were continued by his
followers who travelled back into France and also into Germany, the Low
Countries and the British Isles.
John Knox (1514-1572)
took Calvinism to Scotland and laid the foundation for what became the
Presbyterian denomination of the Christian Protestant Church. Theodore Beza
(1519-1605) was another Protestant French pastor, scholar and theologian who
settled in Geneva. He became the successor of John Calvin and was the leading
Calvinist preacher and theologian in the three decades following the death of
his mentor. Calvin greatly influenced a new strand within English Protestantism
that developed over two centuries, beginning during the reign of Queen
Elizabeth 1.
Members of this
developing way of being pious Christians were known as the Puritans. They
believed, to the point of fanaticism, that only by following the Bible and
Calvin's doctrines could they live pious lives. Even though the Church in
England was, at least for a while, increasingly Protestant in its theology and
political expediency, the Puritans thought that it was too lax and lacked
spirituality and piety. There was a commitment to the understanding that
eternal life was reserved for the pious and eternal damnation for all others.
It was very much a carrot and stick approach to living: be puritanically pious
if you wanted to avoid the fires of eternal hell! Also, the Puritans wanted to
remove the professional class of clergy from the church preferring individual
engagement with and application of the Scriptures within daily life.
Another great dispute
within the developing Protestant movement was brought about by Jacobus Arminius
(1560-1609). Although Dutch by birth, Arminius studied in Geneva under Theodore
Beza and was ordained into the Dutch Reformed Church in Amsterdam at the age of
28. He spent his final six years as Professor of Theology at the University of
Leiden and became involved in an increasingly bitter controversy over
interpretations of Calvin's theology of predestination. Without denying predestination
Arminius declared that faith alone on the part of an individual brought about
salvation. In this Arminius held that the Christian God had not chosen who was
to be saved or to be condemned but had foreseen, since the beginning of time,
who would choose to be saved and who would reject such saving grace. After the
death of Arminius those who continued with his interpretation of Calvin's
theology of predestination became known as Arminians. [As an aside, over a
century later this Arminian movement greatly influenced John Wesley (1703-1791)
and became one of the major doctrinal emphases of his British Methodist
Church.]
During the early part of
the seventh century CE the new Puritan movement tried and failed to convert the
developing Protestant Church of England to the Puritan form of piety. As a
result a new movement began, that of the Pilgrims. Not wishing to remain under
the rule of the lukewarm religious leadership of both the Church of England and
King James, a number of the fanatical Pilgrims moved to the Netherlands and
from there, in 1620, to the Virginia colony in North America. This was the
voyage of 102 passengers to the New World on board the Mayflower. The Puritans
and the Pilgrim Fathers enthusiastically defended their understanding of public
morality and sought to remove what they considered to be sin from ordinary
society. Sadly, Puritan piety based upon their interpretation of the righteous
Christian God became yet another vehicle for the persecution and oppression of
those who failed to live up to the puritanical standards of belief and action.
[Note: much of the guilt imposed by both Roman Catholic and Puritan codes of
belief still impact upon so-called Christian society today.]
The 1640s saw the start
of the travelling ministry of George Fox. Uneducated compared with most other
religious leaders, but thoroughly familiar with the Bible, he was appalled by the
apparent mismatch between the practices of the Churches of his day and those
promoted by Jesus of Nazareth. Laying emphasis on the direct relationship
between the individual and the divine unmediated by specialist clergy Fox laid
the foundations of what later came to be known as Quakerism. Rejecting creeds
and formal liturgy, worshipping largely in silence, and adopting a non-violent
lifestyle, Quakers have maintained an influential presence on the religious
scene up to present times in spite of their relatively modest numbers. [Note:
Quakerism in the USA does include some meetings that have programmed rather
than silent worship.]
John Bunyan was born on
28th November, 1628, the son of a poor and uneducated itinerant labourer. He is
well known for his book 'Pilgrim's Progress', written whilst he was imprisoned
for preaching without the permission of the now established Church of England.
In total Bunyan wrote some 60 books and pamphlets. Rather than compromise his
Christian Puritan faith and stop preaching, Bunyan found himself imprisoned for
some 12 years. He died on 31st August, 1688.
One of the leading
preachers also involved in the politics of the time was John Owen (1616-1683).
Owen was a friend of and advisor to the Protestant political leader Oliver Cromwell
and regularly attended the preaching services of John Bunyan. Fifteen years
after the death of Bunyan the next British influential Christian leader, writer
and preacher was born, John Wesley [28th June, 1703]. During
his eighty-eight years, sixty-three of them as an ordained Church of England
minister, Wesley never ceased being a member of that Church. However, his
independent spirit challenged the established Church of England and led to his
growing Methodist Movement being expelled by the Church of England. He died on
2nd March, 1791.
His brother Charles was
also steeped both within the Church of England and very much in the Methodist
Movement. He was a prolific hymn writer putting the growing Methodist doctrines
into song. In total he wrote 8,989 hymns over some 50 years. It is often said
Britain escaped a similar revolution to that which took place in France [1789]
owing to the influence of the Wesleys and their Methodist movement. [As an
aside, it is said that street revolutions do not happen in Britain because it
rains and every one goes home!]
Bridging the 18th and
19th centuries was Friedrich Schleiermacher who stated that theology should be
established on experience rather than church authority. Soren Kierkegaard
[1813-1855] proposed that faith was individualistic for each one of us is
accountable to God for our actions. Faith was therefore primarily concerned
with ethics and practical action.
During the 19th century
Britain and North America slowly became more tolerant towards and accepting of
religious differences [although there were and there still are many battles
along the way]. Rudolf Bultmann [1884-1976] was concerned with making the Bible
more acceptable to modern people by demythologising the stories.
The twentieth century on
both sides of the Atlantic saw further schism and in the face of increasing
liberalism there arose fundamentalism, literalism, Pentecostalism and the big
evangelical crusades. Liberal and progressive theologians continued their work,
including Paul Tillich [1886-1965] who argued that theologians and preachers
should develop symbolic language to aid personal spiritual exploration rather
than offering facts to answer 'God' questions. Tillich spoke of God as 'the
Ground of Being' and 'God Above God' - that is what I call the Infinite
Mystery. However, the name 'Infinite Mystery' is not my creation, it is that of
Karl Rahner [1904-1984] who bases theology within human experience and talked
of God as the Infinite Mystery.
Jurgen Moltmann was born
in 1926 and he still maintains a very traditional Jesus death and resurrection
theology but sets the importance of the Christian message within orthopraxis
(the right way to do things) rather than depending upon an orthodoxy of words
of belief.
And now we have
progressive theologians and scholars such as Dom Crossan, Jack Spong,
Karen Armstrong and
post-modern theologians such as Don Cupitt and Richard Holloway.
I repeat an earlier
comment, in saying these things I am not ignoring the reality nor the
compassionate dark glass glimpses of the Infinite Mystery that is both within
and without all of us and across Creation. But more of that in our next
chapter.
J Churcher, Lecture 4 – “Creating
God in our Image?”
The second millennium
development of faith into reason continues to move to reason without faith.
Within many church denominations there is the continuing battle over
homosexuality, single sex marriage, abortion, women priests and the like.
However, as far as most of the post-modern world is concerned these are no
longer issues to be debated. The institutional Churches have already lost those
arguments.
And we have come almost
full circle with the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud [1856-1939] who said that
a believer's longing for a God was a primal wish for a protective father-figure
who would sooth fear and assure the believer that life would have a happy
ending, if not in this world then in the next. Just as early Neanderthal and
Homo Sapiens needed to create Gods in their image, Freud reflected on this
desire - and a century later we are still creating Gods in our image!
Again, I repeat an
earlier comment, in saying these things I am not ignoring the reality nor the
compassionate dark glass glimpses of the Infinite Mystery that is both within
and without all of us and across Creation. I am not being critical of those who
find support, hope and comfort within religion, organised or otherwise. In
fact, these lectures are intended to demonstrate that even though religions are
human-created the Infinite Mystery is real and we all, religionistas and
others, will seek personal dark glass glimpses of that which is both beyond and
within ourselves as we journey through the most needy times of their lives.
As we progress through
this chapter I invite you to keep three questions in mind:
1] What is it that you
may need to relearn as a result of engaging with this Conference Reader?
2] What God are you are
continuing to create to be fit for purpose in the twenty- first century?
3] To what extent does
the Charter for Compassion offer you a positive and transformational God-way of
life?
Over the past twenty-five
years I have had to unlearn and then learn afresh a great deal about religion
in general and Christianity in particular. Following the explanations created
by any religion should not make us more religious but they should make us more
human. As suggested earlier, my own experience is that the Infinite Mystery
[Tillich's "God above God"] is not an interventionist Being somewhere
over the rainbow, but is a sacred way of life built upon the values of what Dom
Crossan calls distributive justice in which all people have fair shares in the
abundance of life. For me at this time on my spiritual journey God is a three
letter shorthand description of that which is within and beyond all of us - it
is my dark glass glimpse of the Infinite Mystery.
As I said in the
Introduction, I encourage each of us to take responsibility for our own faith
journeys and not depend too much upon the people with official permission to
preach. In this way we should be creating and adapting our own personal
experiences of that sacredness which is always more than we can ever put into
words. Tribal religion always, by its very nature, confines and makes its God
far too small. My spiritual journey has left behind needing to know the
meta-narrative, that is the set of theological answers to all life's questions,
often the preserve of the literalists and the fundamentalists - especially
those answers to questions that no one is asking! It has left behind the need
for certainty in sacred matters and led me into the excitement of exploration
and provisionality of orthopraxis of a way of life rather than a set of creedal
or doctrinal statements of orthodox belief.
My role is encouraging
clergy and laity alike to have the confidence and the courage to engage with
contemporary biblical scholarship and to explore an emerging new paradigm of
consciousness and understanding of spirituality freed from the old ideas of an
exclusive supernatural and interventionist Being somewhere out there.
No religious text,
including the Bible, can be taken at face value and interpreted literally. Nor
can we have verses cherry-picked to support individual or corporate prejudices.
We need to be intellectually honest about our scriptures if we are to impact
upon a well-educated post-modern, mix-and-match society within and beyond the
walls of our churches. The Bible is the result of individuals struggling with
the Spirit of the Infinite Mystery to try to understand the social, political,
economic and religious situations in which they found themselves. It was
written at different times in different places, in situations including
monarchy, theocracy, rebellion, exile, military defeat, physical and cultural
genocide of people worshipping other Gods, persecution and plenty - no wonder
there are contradictions throughout the Bible! I suggest that the need today
[as in every generation] is for us to struggle with the same Spirit of the
Infinite Mystery that was in the writers to help us understand and interpret
the meaning of those texts for our world today.
As I said in the first
lecture, the Spirit of the Infinite Mystery dwells within all Creation and all
Creation dwells within that same Infinite Mystery. This is panentheism. From
the Neanderthals onwards the development of both language and the accompanying
ability to remember and then to predict led to the creation of Gods to offer
protection and blessing. To a great extent I think that we still create the God
that supports and encourages our prejudices, our psychological and social needs
and our personal wishes. Such a God is not necessarily wrong but it is
certainly incomplete and when tribal religion is used to divide then it is
never for the good. I repeat an earlier statement, the ultimate blasphemy has
to be when one religion sponsors the killing of those of a different religion -
killing in the name of one or other tribal God.
Creating our own tribal
God explanations of the Infinite Mystery is as true for those who are
fundamentalists and literalists as much as for liberals and progressives, for
theists and non-theists alike. Each of us makes a choice as to what is truth.
Some may simply take in all that the fundamentalist or literalist preachers and
leaders tell them is the truth - and remain silent if the told truth does not
make sense in personal experience. Liberals and progressives in all the
different faith communities are much more open to challenge, to seeking out and
creating their own truth that offers a richness and meaning, albeit
provisional, for themselves. After all, that is exactly what the Letter and
Gospel writers did in different towns and cities across the first century CE
Roman Empire as they attempted to explain their ongoing experiences of the
presence of the Jesus Spirit decades after his execution by Roman Imperial
power. So, what is my explanation of my dark glass glimpse of the Infinite
Mystery that I have created for myself and that makes sense to me in this time
and place?
Although a follower of
the way of Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth I find the Hindu 'Namaste' - "the God
in me respects and welcomes the God in you" - to be very close to my own
understanding and experiential descriptors of my personally created God.
I have no problem in
referring to God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit because this is Trinitarian
Christianity's description of its through the dark glass glimpse of the
Infinite Mystery. Of course, the Infinite Mystery is vastly greater than this.
Nor do I experience this Trinity as actual Beings or persons but as a symbol of
the complete unity within diversity that should be the pinnacle of all
religions.
There is the Infinite
Mystery's sacred bond of love that exists within and between all people and
within and across Creation. It is not some touchy feely emotionalism but it is
the costly compassionate love that requires us to die to selfishness and to put
the needs of others first. This for me is Christianity's Easter message: it is
not just an event that is celebrated once a year but it is a way of daily
living. Whenever we put the needs of others before our own self then we die a
little death. That is the Good Friday experience. And each little death to self
is followed by a renewal of life for both the giver and the receiver - that is
Easter Sunday lived daily! As a follower of Rabbi Jesus I see the challenge of
this daily-lived Easter message as that of living orthopraxis freed from the
killing religious orthodoxy that would be unrecognisable to Jesus. And the more
that I look at religious history the more I see Rabbi Hillel's "all the
rest is commentary" getting in the way of living in the Infinite Mystery.
I can also experience
something of the Infinite Mystery's presence by living a way of life based upon
the values of Galatians chapter 5 vv 22 & 23 'fruits of the Spirit':
compassion, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness,
gentleness, and self-control. All of these are easily said but difficult to
maintain in daily life as they are worked out within the context of Matthew 25,
"As you did it to the least of these you did it to me." However, that
is my calling to attempt to live these qualities as demonstrated by Rabbi Jesus
and seen throughout the Gospel records of his life, wisdom teaching and
ministry.
Another way in which I
can experience something of the Infinite Mystery's presence in my life is by
emphasising the Golden Rule that, in one form or other, underpins most world
religions. This does not mean that we need to abandon our individual tribal
explanations of our particular dark glass glimpse of the Infinite Mystery.
However, it will require us to see our explanations of these experiences for
what they are, 'our' unique explanations of the Infinite Mystery that also
point us to the highest level of what it means to be human. The Golden Rule
emphasises the commonality of compassion, justice and respect for difference.
The best explanation of
this in the present time is the Charter for Compassion whose leaders include
Desmond Tutu and Karen Armstrong. It is supported by leading thinkers from many
religions and traditions. The Charter was launched on November 12, 2009 as a
document intended to bring together and then go beyond ideological, national
and religious differences.
The Charter is a document
that brings together and then goes beyond ideological, national and religious
differences. The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious,
ethical and spiritual traditions. It is a growing movement that is supported by
leading thinkers from many religions and traditions. It is based upon the
Golden Rule: doing to others that which you would like them to do to you. The
bottom line of compassion is putting ourselves into the shoes of the other.
The Charter says that it
is " … concerned with both compassionate thinking and compassionate action
as the centre of religious, moral and political life. Compassion propels us to
work tirelessly to relieve the suffering of others; to see ourselves as ubuntu
people [that is that we are all in this together, and when one suffers
we all suffer and when one rejoices we all rejoice] rather than see
ourselves as the most important at the centre of the world... we need to honour
the sacredness of every unique person; to deal with all people with equality,
fairness, justice and respect; to cease from causing harm or inflicting pain
upon ourselves or others....it is necessary for individuals, communities and
nation states to refrain from acting or speaking violently out of spite,
chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to
anybody."
The Charter explicitly
states that to incite hatred by denigrating others - even our enemies - is a
denial of our common humanity. The Charter also acknowledges that we have
failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of
human misery in the name of their own God. "We therefore call upon all men
and women to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion; to
return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that
breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate; to ensure that youth are
given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and
cultures; to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious
diversity; to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human
beings - even those regarded as enemies. We urgently need to make compassion a
clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a
principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down
political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep
interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a
fulfilled humanity. Compassion is the path to enlightenment, and indispensable
to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community."
My dark glass glimpse of
the Infinite Mystery is central to the God that I have created for me at this
time - one that is experienced in compassionate social justice. For me, and for
many like me, Jesus was so full of compassion that individuals as well as
religious and political systems were radically challenged.
What now follows are
examples of different insights developed by some of our contemporary
progressive followers of the way of Rabbi Jesus. These may help you see the
breadth of developing experiences in the creation of each personal and
individual God fit for our time.
This challenging life of
Rabbi Jesus led to his execution as a political act carried out by Temple
authorities in collusion with the Roman Empire. As such, many no longer need to
see the execution of Jesus in terms of a cosmic 'God / devil' conflict played
out within the explanatory fiction of any ransom or substitutionary death
theology. Jesus was and remains a prophet who lived a totally transformational
God dimension of life that his followers, then and now, wish to emulate. But
all prophets are only human beings like the rest of us and are, like us,
subject to all the limitations of life, and even of death itself.
History demonstrates that
after the death of a prophet, memories of that prophet are developed to help
explain the on-going day by day sacred experiences met through the life and
teaching of the prophet concerned. These memories are then translated and
interpreted so that they often become creative explanatory fictions of a past
and/or a present experience rather than the historic truth of what the prophet
actually said and did. The many and varied experiential explanations of an on-going
sacred experience with the prophet, gained over two millennia, are what many
understand as the true resurrection of Jesus.
No prophet from beyond
the grave can change the world for the better, but it is the life style of the
followers of a prophet that continues to spread the influence of that which the
prophet brought to the world. Although many experience Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth
as a prophet the same searching and longing for glimpses of the Infinite
Mystery probably apply to all progressive faith individuals no matter by which
label they describe themselves. There is one God Above God and that is the
Infinite Mystery, known by different names and often experienced in culturally
defined ways. We each pass this way once and we have responsibilities to
ourselves, to our families, to our neighbours [no matter who or where they are]
and to the planet, our only and shared home in a vast and developing universe.
Many no longer need Rabbi
Jesus to be different to us in kind but he remains very different in degrees of
compassion so full of the Infinite Mystery in his radical life and compassion
that people experienced in him what they called either 'God' or the 'devil'
counterfeiting 'God'. To deepen our experiences of the Infinite Mystery is not
about a struggle to understand the sacred but it is about accepting the
always-present Infinite Mystery within and without each one of us.
Social, economic,
political and cultural change will continue to happen but lasting change will
not be through words of traditional belief. It will come through people of good
will acting together to challenge injustice and inequality, seeking a wholeness
for both this planet and all humanity. Experiencing and sharing the sacred
today will need more compassionate orthopraxis and less orthodoxy of words of
belief.
Life is a pilgrimage
shared along the way with people of different explanations of their experiences
of their particular 'dark glass' glimpses of the Infinite Mystery. Progressive
followers of the way of Jesus do not wish to convert anyone to a specific
gateway but seek to affirm the rightness of others to experience the Infinite
Mystery in their own way. Many see that how we live is more important than what
happens after the life journey is over. No longer is there a need to care about
what happens at life's end as there is nothing beyond this life except the
Infinite Mystery that has neither a beginning or an ending. We are born from
that Infinite Mystery's sacred bond of love, we live compassionately within
that Infinite Mystery's sacred bond of love, and we eventually die back into
that Infinite Mystery's sacred bond of love.
Many look upon their
sacred experiences not as another form of religious orthodoxy of belief but as
a compassionate orthopraxis - a way of living that hopefully enhances and
fulfils every life. For me, the Infinite Mystery is real and experienced as a
way of life based upon the values of Galatians chapter 5 vv 22 & 23 'fruits
of the Spirit': compassion, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness,
gentleness, and self-control. All of these are easily said but difficult to
maintain in daily life as they are worked out within the context of Matthew 25,
"As you did it to the least of these you did it to me" - the
motivation for my social justice agenda.
We who follow the way of
Rabbi Jesus see ourselves as the inheritors of his authentic message of
compassionate radical social justice, religious and political equality for all
people regardless of creed, colour, gender, sexuality, age, infirmity, and so
on. To live in this way will have far greater impact upon the world than all
the words of our explanatory fictions of human created creedal and doctrinal
formulae put together.
Although religion is
often blamed for all the ills in the world, religion has had and continues to
have very useful survival and comforting purposes in the process of human
evolution and daily living. The role of faith progressives is to encourage
individual responsibility for the development of personal spirituality - no faith
community will survive if it claims to have the only authentic meta narrative /
mega story of life and salvation, in a well educated, questioning post-modern
world.
I long for the day when
the different religious explanations of the Infinite Mystery will accept and
respect other people and their religions as having equally valid gateways to
the Sacred Experience. The future of religion cannot be guaranteed without a
compassionate social justice agenda of serving those in need. Without
compassion religion in an increasingly secular world will become little more
than a relic of the past, a museum piece.
So here is the
fundamental question concerning the future development of religion in general
and of progressive faith individuals and communities in particular - what God
is it that you are continuing to create as a God fit for purpose in the 21st
century?
Mo Wills
Gods, Goddesses and the Role of Gender in Divine Evolution
First I must introduce
myself and explain a little bit about me. It is, of course, a great privilege
to be here with you, and I would like to thank Roger very much for inviting me.
When it comes to my ‘bio’ as you call it here – at home ‘bio’ usually refers to
washing powder with added cleaning chemicals as opposed to non-bio which
doesn’t – well, I am very much ‘non-bio’ when it comes to academic prowess - I
am neither a scholar nor an academic. But I have a spent a great deal of time
exploring ideas and experiences of God, of listening to other people’s stories,
having conversations. I've spent most of my working life in work that involves
talking to people deeply - having those kinds of conversations that most do not
have day to day. I count myself as very fortunate to have been in the position
where that has been the case.
I am from Cornwall
which is in the extreme south-west of England, with a rich history as an
ancient separate Celtic nation with its own culture and language. The Cornish
language died out well over two hundred years ago but has since been revived
and partially reinvented by enthusiastic patriots. Being a long narrow peninsular it is surrounded
on three sides by the sea, the coastline being made up of dramatic cliffs and
sandy coves, perfect for both fishing and smuggling, and inland rich in both
tin mining and china clay.
But Cornwall also has
a rich religious heritage. Centuries ago
Cornwall was mainly a pagan region, people worshipped nature gods and
goddesses, and there are still many surviving sites dotted around the county of
pagan rituals – ancient stone circles, maybe not on such a grand scale as the
famous Stonehenge, but nevertheless just as ancient and mysterious. But the pagans were persecuted when
Christianity came to Cornwall in the 4th or 5th century –
at that time still a separate country from England where Christianity had
already been introduced by the Romans.
But the pagan stone
circles are not the only remains of a rich pagan spiritual history still around
today. We can still see paganism's influence on the art of very early
Christianity.
I consider that the
human race is artistic by nature. Crude and even quite complex drawings dating
back to prehistoric times have been found on cave walls, no doubt also a form
of communication before the written word. So I guess it was inevitable that
right from early days Jesus was depicted in both painting and sculpture.
But forget those
religious icons we are generally familiar with – the suffering wounded Christ
nailed to a cross, or the battered broken body of Jesus being delivered into
the arms of his grieving mother. The first Jesus in art isn’t the bearded
suffering Jesus at all – instead he is blond, boyish, fresh faced, happy –go-lucky,
curly haired and handsome. He is free and young. The first Christians weren’t
looking for a god that would make them feel guilty – that would never have
caught on in the Pagan Gentile world, they wanted a God that would make them feel
good.
So where did this
blond, curly haired boy-like figure come from? Well, it was Apollo- the
youngest and most handsome of the pagan gods – he was the one who was blond, unbearded, and curly haired. He was
the god of the sun and made you feel good – and that’s exactly how they
portrayed Jesus.
But it actually even
went further than that. When an old mysterious Christian statue was dug up out
of the ground just outside Rome, they thought it represented a woman, probably
an unknown goddess, a muse. It was only later that it was realised to be an
early Christian statue of Jesus.
Remember Jesus was
modelled on Apollo - well, depictions of Apollo could quite easily have been
mistaken for a woman. And this was often the case with pagan gods – they could
be male or female, and they could even amalgamate the sexes and represent both
genders at once. And it was no different with early depictions of Jesus – just
like the statue I mentioned just a moment ago, Jesus was often made to look
feminine on purpose.
And there was another
reason for that. Paganism was full of female goddesses, not just male gods.
They had Venus and Diana and Isis – but Christianity believed in only one God –
the one true God who was, of course, masculine. The entire feminine side was
missing. So could this feminisation of Jesus been a deliberate attempt by the
artists to fill the gap – to provide a feminine side for Christianity?
There is a painting in
Ravenna, in the Arian Baptistry showing the baptism of Jesus in the River
Jordan. It shows a soft, feminine, unbearded Jesus, described now as a ‘podgy
delicate Christ with child bearing hips.’ This is just one example of some of
the unexpected imagery of the dark ages.
Before this girly
Jesus could become fully masculine, grow a beard and turn into a man,
Christianity needed to find a feminine presence of its own.
Again, the early
Christian artists turned to pagan gods and goddesses for their inspiration, and
what better model than that of Isis. Isis was the Egyptian goddess of
fertility, and more than that, she was actually looked on as the mother
goddess, and it was from Isis that all life originated. No matter who they
were, rich, poor, well-to-do or even a slave, if they wanted a baby or they
wanted their crops to grow, then it was Isis they prayed to. But it gets even
better. In Egyptian art Isis was as often as not portrayed nursing her baby
son, Horus, on her lap. Horus was god of the sky and he was born at the time of
the winter solstice – that’s around December 25th
So you can see how
this captured the imaginations of those early Christian artists who so
desperately needed a female presence. It didn’t take much of a shift for Isis
and her baby son Horus to metamorphise into the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus.
And pictures of Mary and her baby Jesus became very predominant in the dark
ages. The very earliest picture of Mary in fact shows her holding the baby
Jesus on her lap – it was just a tiny fragment found in the Roman catacombs of
Priscilla. But the significant thing is, that this emphasis on Mary as a strong
female, and later divine, female presence, meant that Jesus no longer had to
play a feminine role. He could now become a man, fully masculine and bearded.
This early Christian
art would no doubt have been at some time or another displayed in people’s
houses. At first, for about 300 years anyway, there weren’t separate church
buildings and instead they met in rooms in people’s homes. I read it described
somewhere as ‘wonky bits of DIY where Christians could worship and celebrate.’
This arrangement served perfectly well until Christianity became the official
religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great in the early part of
the 4th century. Then Christianity really took off and everything
changed.
And as Judaism,
Christianity & eventually Islam evolved, the Pagan religions were
suppressed and the female principle was gradually driven out of religion. Women
were considered inferior to men. The God, King, Priest & Father replaced
the Goddess, Queen, Priestess & Mother. The role of women became
restricted. Jesus rejected millennia of
religious tradition by treating women as equals. Women played a major role in
the early Christian church. Later, epistle writers who wrote in the name of
Paul, started the process of suppressing women once more; positions of
authority in the church were limited to men.
A feminine presence
was re-emphasised to Christianity by the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE when the
Virgin Mary was named Theotokos (Mother of God). But her role was heavily
restricted and included none of the fertility component present in Pagan
religions.
But let's go right
back to the beginning of human kind. Most researchers currently accept the
belief that modern humans originated in Africa about 200,000 to 250,000 years
ago. 200,000 years ago people were
burying their dead with flowers. This doesn’t necessarily mean they believed in
a god at the time, but it does at least indicate a reverence for life, and a
remembering of those who lived.
Many scientists
believe the concept that our homo sapiens ancestors went through a number of
changes in their transition from being pre-human to fully human. This separated
our distant ancestors from all other animal species in the world. And amongst
other characteristics, at some point, unlike other animals, humans developed a
self-consciousness that made them aware of their own mortality. And it is this
realisation that at some time in the future we will cease to be that makes us
both unique as a species and fills us with dread. As Bishop Jack Spong says,
“It is that human capacity to be fully self conscious that marks homo sapiens
as different from any other form of life in the natural world....one cannot be
human, therefore, without being filled with chronic anxiety”.
And so they developed
a coping mechanism. It would seem that the God idea evolved not only from
respect for the dead and burial rituals but as a result of awareness of their
mortality and also a reverence and respect for nature and natural phenomena.
Hence they worshipped lots of gods –the sun was a god, the wind and storms were
gods, and so on, with human characteristics transferred to them. And thus began
one of the first religions, Animism - typically found in hunter gatherer
societies. The hunters had hunting gods and the gatherers had vegetation
goddesses. Fertility in both crops and animals, and even in the tribe itself,
was of paramount importance. The female life giving principle was considered
divine and a great mystery.
Human anxiety
dissipates somewhat as we feel more in control
- our distant ancestors felt more in control of nature when they felt
they could rely on the gods for help. Religion gave them assurance, confidence,
and peace of mind.
Do you remember the
film Cast Away? Tom Hank's character,
Chuck the director of parcel delivery company was the sole survivor of a plane
which crashed over the sea. He was eventually washed up on an uninhabited
island and the film shows how he adapted to his surroundings as the days passed
into weeks and the weeks stretched into months and eventually 4 years passed.
During the early days bits and pieces of the crashed plane started washing up
onto the beach and this included various parcels which had been on their way
for delivery. Chuck made use of some of the contents e.g. the blades of ice
skates which he used as a cutting tool. Amongst the cargo was a volleyball which
he first discarded as being useless but soon he began talking to it until
eventually he had completely personified it - drawing on a face, giving it
hair, and even a name, Wilson. When he eventually built a raft to escape from
the island he took Wilson with him and when it rolled overboard Chuck dived
into the sea, risking his own life to save Wilson. Chuck was an intelligent and
sane character and when he was finally rescued and returned to civilisation he
was still intelligent and sane - it was not that the trauma of the experience
had sent him into psychosis or some other kind of mental illness. Although this
was just a film nevertheless it is a perfect example of the need we as human
beings have of someone or something beyond ourselves. Chuck was alone cut off
from everything he was familiar with, he was frightened for his own survival
against the very real dangers of starvation and exposure and the unseen dangers
of whatever might be lurking in the undergrowth. Although he was resourceful
and determined he still looked for security that came from beyond himself just
as all human beings from their earliest history have needed that same presence
beyond themselves traditionally called 'God'.
To be human is to
engage with the world not only as rationalist philosophers and scientists, but
also as poets and artists. We think, and we feel and imagine. To help us
explore and discern what might be good and lasting human values, we have often
given those same values faces and personalities and we have turned them into
characters in plays, poems, songs, novels and films. For example, in ancient
Israel, “wisdom” became personified as a woman, Lady Wisdom; in Greece and Rome
“wisdom” was Athena and Minerva respectively. In Christianity this tendency to
personify was, of course, taken to its ultimate extreme in the figure of Christ
who, by degrees, became a personification, not just of one virtue but all of
them and, as such, for many Christians a male, father God himself. Over the
centuries this has become increasingly problematic and there are millions upon
millions of people around the world who really think God is a interventionist
and often violently judgemental male person arbitrarily condemning some to hell
and others to paradise both in this world and the imagined next.
In the face of this
horror I am often tempted to ditch the idea of personification altogether. But
remember my earlier point that to be human is to engage with the world not only
as rationalist philosophers and scientists, but also as poets and musicians —
we continue to gather around not only the lab-table but the campfire or hearth
and we are always already imagining and creating stories along the way.
A friend of mine from
Cambridge, Andrew is a big fan of the Roman poet Lucretius. Now, not being very
academic and pretty ignorant in a lot of things, I'm not really that au fait
with 1st century Roman poets but I decided to look up Lucretius because my
friend Andrew talks about him so enthusiastically. I looked up his poem 'On the
Nature of Things' - a poem Andrew is particularly fond of and often refers to.
I discovered that although Lucretius was a naturalist and atheist, he nevertheless
begins his poem, (On the Nature of Things), with a song of praise to the goddess Venus, who was for him a
personification of the beautiful face of Nature in its creative mode.
So with Lucretius'
Venus in mind, and also keeping in mind the need for, and value of, poetic
language in our exploration of human values, I’m going to suggest that there is
today a rich harvest to be gained by more regularly personifying God - or Nature
- as a mother rather than as a father. Remember, as I do this, that I don’t
think the personification of God - or Nature - as mother is any more
really-real than personifying it as a father — all I am saying is that in our
present age such a female personification seems more amenable, appropriate and
vital to our present and ongoing needs as human beings.
Consider the love of a
mother for her suckling child and also the image of God or Nature as mother.
Andrew - also talks extremely highly of his old university professor and
friend, Victor. He tells me that Victor apparently suggests that ‘if God is truth, then, since
mother love is a truer image of love, we perhaps ought to embrace it.’ Indeed,
I am inclined to agree with Victor that such an image better ‘expresses the
whole meaning of our existence’ than does the image of God as father. In
connection with this thought Victor told a story about something that happened
to him one spring in Vermont where he and his wife, Betty, have lived for many
years:
Victor says - and this
is Victor's story:
‘Some weeks ago, I was
loading a cart to carry my recycling down the driveway. It looked like rain, so
I though it advisable to cover it with a tarpaulin, to keep the paper from
becoming rain-soaked and hard to handle. The tarpaulin lay rolled up beside the
cart, where it had been for some weeks. When I unravelled it, I discovered that
a mother mouse had made her nest in it; there she was nursing her brood. She
was terrified as were her nurslings, whose eyes had yet to open. They clung to
her teats not, in this instance, to suckle, but because they found security
there. She tried to cover them with her body. They were as one being. It was a
beautiful sight, and yet heartbreaking. I had absolute power over them. I could
have killed them, and perhaps I should have. But I could not. Instead, I set
them gently on a flat shovel, and carried them to the edge of the yard and set
them down in some undergrowth. Once there, the faithful mother mouse moved
away, her nurslings still clinging to her breasts, and found shelter. Oh how I
wished that I might make all beings in the world safe! But I am not the king of
love, or a faithful shepherd. And there is no such power. There is only mother
love all the way down.’
Victor observes that
the aim of a mother’s love is ‘to nurture to maturity a free human being (or,
indeed, an adventurous mouse!), the perfection of the life that was conceived
in her womb and carried there.’
Where does this love
come from? The answer given in most churches points, of course, to the personal
God of monotheism, but for reasons already touched upon this is an answer which
is simply not available to me. Victor would answer, as would my friend Andrew, in
a Lucretian manner by suggesting ‘that it is in the nature of things to love in
this way.’ In other words an emergent quality of God - or Nature- is, in living
creatures, this astonishing thing we know as mothering love - it seems to be graven on the emergent hands
of Nature itself as Isaiah once believed it was graven on God’s eternal hands.
We could then perhaps conclude
that, although we cannot all be mothers, we can all learn to love like this,
tenderly, faithfully, steadfastly, in a way that nourishes, that gives life,
that comforts, that seeks to set free, as though we were all mothers to each
other.
I think Karen Armstrong
would agree with this sentiment when in her book The Case for God, she explains that until the modern period, the major Western monotheisms
all concerned themselves primarily with practice, the doing of religion, rather
than doctrine. A good Muslim was one who stood alongside and supported the
Pillars; a good Jew observed Sabbath and remained committed to the Law; and a
good Christian embodied the Sermon on the Mount by caring for the marginalized,
loving the unlovable, promoting compassion and peace, and sharing God’s love.
This is what it meant to be religious. Armstrong explains:
"For most of Western history, religion has been primarily a matter
of orthopraxy, not orthodoxy. In fact, no doctrine made any sense without
participation in the community of faith and in its rituals. No doubt, there
were certain thoughts or “beliefs” that mattered and were of extreme
importance; however, unlike today, these convictions were never understood as
either the core or the purpose of the religious life."
My present employment involves
working with the homeless in a hands on, practical way. As you can imagine I am
in contact daily with people who's homelessness goes alongside many other
issues, such as general poverty, drug and alcohol dependency, mental illness, family
breakdown, childhood trauma, neglect and abuse. This to me is the practice of
Christianity in a far more real sense than worship in church or adherence to a
set of beliefs and doctrines.
Armstrong suggests that a return to this tradition could make the god
symbol relevant once again. And I think we are seeing it already - look at the
Progressive Christianity Network (PCN), and other organisations growing in
number and fervency. PCN and others such as Free to Believe, Modern Church, Sea
of Faith etc - and I'm sure you have many more in the US - have been an incredible source of
encouragement and support to me for several years now. Throughout training and
ministry in the British Methodist Church it was stressed to me that the
Methodist Church was abroad and diverse church encompassing a wide spectrum of
theological positions and while acknowledging a progressive theology is not
mainstream it does fall within accepted parameters. The Methodist Church has
since said to me that even a progressive theology to the extent of mine is
within the parameters of acceptability. However, in practice this has not been
without problems and difficulties. Most of the members of all Methodist
churches have a traditional orthodox theology often never having developed
since early childhood teaching and the people in the community who I
encountered expected and assumed that I held these same beliefs. But it even
went further than this. As one of the more unusual requests I received was from
a lay preacher in my church. I don't know what the usual practice is in the
United States but in the UK generally when somebody dies the body is removed
from the place of death by a funeral director and kept in their chapel of rest
- in reality in their fridge - until the funeral takes place, usually a week or
so later. The lay preacher, we'll call him Angus - his Mother died and rather
than her body being removed by the local funeral director Angus wanted to keep
her at home in an open coffin on the dining room table. He asked me to go to
his house and pray over his mother every day until the funeral. As you can
imagine I found this extremely difficult because I felt hypocritical and false
when asked to pray to for this Lady's safe passage to heaven and for the
forgiveness of her past unknown, certainly by me, misdemeanours. By the 4th day
not only had I run out of things to say but the lady was looking a very odd
colour and smelling a very nasty smell. On the 5th day I was greeted by the
funeral director emerging from the dining room having flung open the windows
and warning me to make it quick. Fortunately on the 6th day we finally laid the
body to rest with another load of prayers for dead and the promise of eternal
life because she was a believer. It made me want to scream.
Imagine my dismay when ages afterwards - after I had left full ministry
- I attended a PCN (Progressive Christianity) conference in completely
different part of the country, and there sitting in front of me was Angus.
I don't think he could have grasped what
PCN was all about despite being an intelligent guy with a couple of degrees.
When it came to the question time afterwards he asked the speaker, who happened
to be a good friend of mine, a high falluting, incomprehensible question about
some philosopher. The speaker didn't understand the question either but he is
an experienced speaker and managed to answer a different question entirely. I
attended the conference with my mum, also a member of PCN, and we had arranged
to meet up with the speaker in the lunch break. Imagine my dismay when Angus
and his partner seated themselves at the same table as my mum and me leaving no
room for anyone else to sit with us and preceding to dominate the conversation
with clichéd Christian jargon - the Holy Spirit leading in this place, that we
should place our trust in God's plan for the world etc etc. which left us with
glazed eyes and losing the will to live. We escaped as soon as we could and sat
peacefully in the garden of the venue. I am ashamed to admit that when we saw Angus
approaching our general direction, we behaved in a very unchristian manner - my
mum leapt behind a tree and I delved into my bag for my phone and started to
talk animatedly. It was only afterwards that I realised I had spent the past 5
minutes talking into my hairbrush!
However, I digress. The point I'm trying to make by telling you this
story is that - although the Methodist Church has said that a progressive
theology is acceptable, in reality, at a grass roots level, trying to minister
or lead a congregation in any Methodist Church in the UK - in a mainstream
traditional denomination - it becomes
impossible. That's why I feel much more at ease doing the work I do with the
homeless and disadvantaged. But the Christian religious life is still very
important to me.
Karen Armstrong insists that religion was never supposed to provide
answers to questions that lay within the reach of human reason. Religion and
science have “different spheres of competence.” Armstrong insists that
religion’s task has always been, and should continue to be, “to help us live
creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there are no
easy explanations and problems that we could not solve: morality, pain, grief,
despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life.”
I have found it interesting that so often I have heard people who claim
to have no religious or supernatural beliefs come out with incredible claims
that they seem to truly believe. 'Everything happens for a reason' is one of
their favourites /it's fate that that the house sale fell through because 'it
was meant to be' that we would buy this one instead. Why is it that often
people cannot see the contradiction between their claim to have no time for, or
interest/belief in, supernatural phenomenon, or God, or to be religious, and
yet still seem to be deeply superstitious.
It reminds me of a time I attended a conference run by Peter Rollins - a
public speaker and writer on postmodern philosophy and spirituality. Pete Rollins was telling us about a workshop
he'd recently run with a group of card carrying new atheists - Richard Dawkins
type stuff. And yet as an experiment Pete told them of an ancient tribal
tradition- an ancient spell - a curse that used to be performed to strike down
children of rival tribes with fatal diseases - characterized by an agonisingly
painful death. Pete invited anyone present to come up to the front and to
recite the curse over the name of their own child while stirring a spoon
anticlockwise. Not one of the people present at the workshop would volunteer to
get up and recite the curse over the name of their own child. It seems that no
matter how scientifically minded we are, how much we consciously reject
superstition, (and I'm convinced that none of the atheists there really
believed in the truth of the curse for one moment) - yet there is a remnant of
fear buried deep in the human psyche - perhaps deep in the subconscious that
still paralyses us in the fear of the unknown.
Going back to what I said about those clichéd contradictions - that many
of my friends come out with regularly - everything happens for a reason, if you
think positively it will happen, ask the universe for it, etc. One of the
reasons I think that people engage in these - what appears to me to be
contradictions - is because, as I said
earlier - to be human is to engage with the world not only as rationalist
philosophers and scientists, but also as poets and artists, as myth and meaning
makers. Remember, we continue to gather
around not only the lab-table but the campfire and hearth.
So I think many people come out with these things as most people now -
in the West at least - have no religious language to be able to articulate the
myth-making side, the meaning making side of their humanity. Because they have
rejected 'religion' due to the post enlightenment's portrayal of it as a system
of propositions to cognitively assent to. Propositions that are incredible,
unbelievable, nonsensical to the modern mind.
Religion often strikes people in the west today as being about believing
6 impossible things before breakfast or as Spong says - doing metal gymnastics
and contorting your mind into a 4th century pretzel. So I think this leaves a
hole, a gap that myth making, meaning making, human beings are left to fill.
Science can't fill it - because
as we've said earlier - that is another
part of our humanity - they have
different spheres of competence. Religion was never supposed to provide answers
to questions that lay within the reach of human reason.
Armstrong points out that, as for scientists, they can explain a
tremendous amount. But they can’t talk about meaning so much. If your child
dies, or you witness or a natural catastrophe like hurricane Katrina you want
to have a scientific explanation of it. But that’s not all human beings need.
We are beings who fall very easily into despair because we’re meaning-seeking
creatures. And if things don’t add up in some way, we can become crippled by
our despondency.
Religion uses devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in
order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears in which we find
ourselves. Religion is therefore properly a matter of a practice, and may be
compared with art or music.
This is religion as it should be, and, according to Armstrong, as it once
was in all the world's best traditions. But Alas - we fall victim to the folly
of intellectualising the practice. This makes it into a matter of belief,
argument, and ultimately dogma.
Words such as "God" have to be seen as symbols, not names, but
any word falls short of describing what it symbolises, and will always be
inadequate, contradictory, metaphorical, allegorical. The mystery at the heart
of religious practice is ineffable, unapproachable by reason and by language.
Silence is its truest expression.
An Inquiry into God by
Dr. Charles Hedrick
Where it all Began
I was reared in a
Southern Baptist Church in the conservative religious environment of the
Mississippi Delta in the late 1940s and 50s, where I was taught that the Bible
was literally the Holy Word of God, a divinely inspired guide for human life.
After graduating from a public high school, I continued my education in a
Southern Baptist College and Seminary, eventually becoming pastor of Southern
Baptist churches in Mississippi and California—and an Army chaplain. At some point I turned to the critical study
of the Bible, and became a vocal critic of uncritical religious faith. My shift did not happen overnight but was
brought about over time by a critical historical study of the Bible and
reflection on the world around me.
My change in thinking was
fueled by the giant strides in the physical sciences and the continuing
challenge to religious faith by human reason.[1] At some point I came to two conclusions:
religious faith cannot demand that I believe something I find to be patently
false or only partly true, and that faith must begin with the world around me
rather than religious texts. The reason
is that our natural environment and human culture form a more certain basis for
theorizing about religion. The real
uniqueness of religious texts lies in their cultural roots, historical value,
and ethical perspectives rather than in any putative divine origin.
Here is where my Inquiry
Led Me
This
brief statement is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg: God is the spark
that ignited the Big-Bang, the most popular of the scientific theories for the
origin of the cosmos.[2] In short, God is an Unknown, Unknowable
before the Big-Bang. I believe in God
simply because I cannot explain why it should not be the case that there is
nothing at all. Or to put it another way:
my problem is the opposite of Martin Heidegger’s; he aimed to “explain the
problem of the meaning of Being,[3] while I, on the other hand,
am curious why there is something rather than nothing. In short my inquiry makes me a borderline
agnostic—meaning that God cannot be known, but I like to think of myself as a
marginal deist. What follows is the rationale that led me to this place.
Background
In the Middle Ages earth
was viewed as the center of the cosmos, and the church taught that human beings
were created in the image of God—their chief purpose being to serve God by
obedience to the teachings of the Church.[4]
In the Renaissance,
beginning in the 14th century,[5] the
Western world made a dramatic shift from a preoccupation with religion, and
embarked upon a discovery of the human being in the natural world. The fledging physical sciences and philosophy
threatened the idea of life controlled by God and church dogma. Wealth shifted from the church into the hands
of a merchant class and there was revival of interest in the classical “pagan”
learning of Greece and Rome.
With the Enlightenment of
the 18th century[6]
the Christian hegemony that had existed since the 4th century was
effectively shattered and human beings turned to other interests—to a study of
the natural world, for example. The
cosmos came to be seen not as the handiwork of God but as a natural phenomenon
whose operation and powers could be understood, and to some extent even
harnessed. Medical science was
discovering that disease was due to natural causes rather than to demon
possession and the wrath of God.[7] For good or ill, God, religion, the spiritual
world, and afterlife were no longer the exclusive preoccupation of the human
mind; people were becoming intellectually awake to their animal nature, the
natural world and the vast reaches of space.
Reason and the scientific method[8]
rather than prayer and sacrifice to God were becoming the model for solving
problems and getting on in the world.
So here we are today at
the beginning of the 21st century, nursing along a traditional faith
that no longer fits what we have come to know of the universe. We know, for example, that the world was not
created in six days (Genesis 1:1-2:3), and that Adam and Eve were not the first
in the classification hominid or even the first human beings;[9]
and that sacred religious texts are human products reflecting a search after
divinity. Viewed objectively, the
world’s sacred Scriptures do not provide answers as much as they raise some of
life’s enduring questions. Reason tells
us that our traditional Christian view of Deity[10] is not only out of place in the 21st
century, but such a view is clearly obsolete.
God is neither a creature in a physical location somewhere out there in
the universe, nor a super-supernatural Spirit in an invisible world inhabited
by angels, demons, and spirits, paralleling our own physical universe.
Here
is the Problem
Aberrations in the
regularly occurring benign cycles of nature pose the greatest challenge to both
the existence of God and in particular to the traditional Christian and Jewish
belief that God controls nature. Such
disasters have always “played the devil” with the belief that the
Judeo-Christian God, who by most definitions is a gracious God, controls
nature. This situation raises the following questions: if God controls nature
and such unconscionable disasters occur in nature, how can God then be
considered “good”? And if God is “good,”
how can God either be responsible for such unconscionable disasters or permit
such disasters to occur? It sounds like
the proverbial “catch 22” situation.
On the other hand, if
“Mother Nature” be considered as the cause of such events—that is, that such
events are natural disasters, then the disasters make better sense.
Mother Nature is ethically blind, and hence in an “act of nature” all
suffer—the “wicked” along with the “righteous.”
On the other hand, the God of Christian and Jewish faith is supposed to
behave in ethical ways—punishing the guilty, rewarding the just, and protecting
the innocent—which is not what happened in the 2011 Japanese tsunami (around
16,000 dead), for example.[11] Such natural disasters are tantamount to
killing a flea on your kitchen table with a hydrogen bomb—everyone and
everything in the vicinity suffers: plant life, infrastructure, animals,
innocent babies, the best of the populace, as well as the “wicked.” So how can
an ethical God be credited with destroying cities and their populations through
indiscriminate acts of nature and still maintain an ethically divine character?
Hardcore conservative
theologians will privilege traditional faith over common sense and claim no one
is innocent before God (i.e., on the basis of “original sin,” Genesis 2:16-17,
Romans 5:12-17)—not even new born babies still nursing.[12] But they will stop just short of saying “they
all deserved it,” because they know how incredible it sounds. Another answer to the issue is: God’s ways
are not our ways (compare the book of Job, for example) as though there could
ever be some rational way, which we cannot now conceive, to justify such
egregious behavior on the part of God.
Another explanation is: it will all eventually work out for the better
(Romans 8:28)—like a forest fire that clears out the old growth to make room
for new growth. Such an idea would bring
little comfort to the old growth, however.
The disastrous fire was still a tragedy from the perspective of the
trees that burned, and should have been seen as such by a God with a
conscience. Of course, we are not
talking just about trees in the case of the 2011 tsunami in Japan—we are
talking human lives, a big difference.
For my part, I gave up
defending God for the weather and natural disasters years ago. Mother Nature is the real culprit here, and
modern science has made great strides in understanding her, although I doubt
that they will ever understand her completely.
There are just too many variables.
In short, I have reluctantly been forced to conclude that we live in a
capricious universe that for whatever reason enjoys no divine oversight.
So What can be said about
God as Spirit in a Material World
In the Christian
tradition God is conceived as invisible Spirit (Colossians 1:15; John 4:24) and
not as matter—that is to say, God does not exist materially and hence is not substantial,
but rather simply is—in a way that cannot be apprehended by any of the
physical senses—that is, by seeing, touching, tasting, hearing, smelling, and
this makes any description of God completely subjective. A God, comprised of substance, would be
subject to the change, dissolution, and decay of the cosmos, as all cosmic
stuff is.
God’s immateriality makes
it rather difficult for one to describe God with any degree of accuracy or
reliability. Hence a responsible
description of God is simply impossible, a logical fact which renders all
descriptions of God inadequate and misleading.
Therefore in communities of faith, for the most part, believers in God
are only describing inherited concepts of God’s character and activities (i.e.,
describing what they have been taught); and they do so as if God were a human
being (i.e., using anthropomorphic language for the most part). With direct knowledge of God lacking, the
church is driven to use analogical language.
Does Divine Spirit simply
permeate matter—like leaven does flour, for example? A little leaven mixed into flour and water
and kneaded becomes dough, which rises in the oven (Matt 13:33). There is one theological explanation for the
relationship between Spirit and matter called “panentheism”[13]—God
as Spirit permeates all matter in the universe but is not to be identified with
any one thing; that is to say, God the Spirit, is infused throughout the
universe but without mingling with matter.
If that is the case, however, why is not everything “enhanced” or
“raised” to a higher level, like leaven in flour; and why are we still bothered
with the problems of an imperfect universe: disease, floods, drought, famine,
natural disasters, etc.? Our natural world does not seem “enhanced”
but it is clearly ethically flawed, as Paul clearly recognized when he
anticipated that “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to
decay” (Romans 8:19-21). Does God as
Spirit interface with matter, perhaps only periodically here and there? The general regularity of the universe seems
to eliminate this possibility, if God be conceived as in control. On the other hand, some assume the regularity
of the universe is caused by God as Spirit enabling the universe. But if that is the case why is the universe
flawed? Perhaps God as Spirit simply
hovers over the universe in a way similar to Genesis 1:2 and is not involved in
the universe at all. There were
religious groups in the early years of the Christian period who argued that
there was a sharp divide between the cosmos and God. Thus the highest God had nothing to do with
the creation of the cosmos; some attributed it to the work of a lesser God in
the divine realm. In such systems of
thought the matter of the cosmos was seen as flawed and evil.[14]
My colleagues would describe my question about the
interface of God and materiality as a fool’s errand. My evangelical friends would say accept on
faith that God as Spirit is involved with matter, even if how Spirit and matter
are related cannot be quantified. My
critically inclined friends would also counsel me to abandon the question for
the same reason, on the basis that Spirit itself falls outside any kind of
objective proof. Perhaps they are
correct, but if there is no way logically to explain how Spirit and matter are
related, Christianity is left open to the charge of superstition and self
delusion on a grand scale—And that means it is the case that human beings
through time have simply deluded themselves that there is a parallel
“spiritual” universe of Gods and other spirits; and Christianity is merely
another in a long line of inadequate religious views of reality, which
continues the formally pagan but now Christian view of a belief in a “real
world” of spiritual entities there—within, alongside, or parallel to the
material cosmos.
If God is spirit (John
4:24), then God cannot be an entity existing in space and time, as we human
beings do. We humans exist, bound in
space and time during our brief lives. God and supernatural entities of various
sorts, on the other hand, appear to be nothing more than concepts, inventions
of the human imagination, whose nature and character changes with each
religious group and/or individual.
Hence, it does not appear that God, however conceived, has an
independent existence, which corresponds exactly to any of those ideations of
the human mind.
The rationale for this
surprising statement is self-evident when viewed from the perspective of the
history of world religions. Each
religion (and there have been a lot of religions through human history)
conceives God differently, yet the adherents of this or that religion believe
that God is actually just like what they conceive. In short, they believe their view is the only
accurate and true view and that it captures the essence of God. But, alas, different understandings of God
exist in other religions and the adherents of these other religions likewise
think that their understanding of God is actually how God is.
For example, there is no
one biblical understanding of God, a plurality of descriptions of deity is even
found in the Bible.[15] Recognizing each of these ways of
understanding God as different is based on the recognition that the Bible is a
collection of diverse texts representing the historical evolution of two different
religions, Israelite and Christian: each author in the Bible should only be
held responsible for what he or she wrote.
Such an idea may be difficult to accept because modern users of the
Bible tend to treat the Bible as a unified text rather than what it is—a
collection of originally unrelated texts
By treating the Bible as a unified and harmonious text readers tend to
develop composite images of God (which themselves are also different).
My point is this: God is
who we think or believe God to be. If there is a Deity, apart from
the inventions of our minds, how would we ever come to the knowledge of that
apparently completely elusive figure among all the current and past claims for
who and what God is?
So how do we make Sense
of Matter and Spirit?
Since there is no way to
examine God directly, except to (1) examine the temples human beings have built
in honor of a good and Great Invisible Spirit; (2) examine the testimonies of
those who claim to have experienced the Great Spirit; (3) examine their pious
responses as to what they take to be God’s Spirit; (4) examine their fearful
responses to what they perceive to be evil Spirits; (5) examine their written
confessions about both good and evil spirits—but we cannot examine God
directly. It is only possible to examine
human responses to what they claim is God.
Hence, I begin with matter.
Observation #1:
If the universe is not eternal, it had a beginning. If it is eternal,[16] it is our “Alpha and Omega” (Revelation 1:8).
Observation #2:
It does not appear that the universe is eternal, however, since it is expanding
at a rapid rate.[17] This expansion is an indication of remarkable
change (hence, it is not eternal because it changes; even stars are born and
die[18]). This datum makes the idea of the known universe
originating in a Big-Bang a plausible theory.
But from whence came the elements necessary to produce a Big-Bang and
what ignited it. The igniter and matter-from-nothing constitute the Ground of
Being,[19]
since from the other side of the Big-Bang they have brought an end to
Non-Being. But both igniter and
matter-from-nothing are invisible, unknown, and unknowable since they are
precedent to and not immediately tangential (touching lightly) to our present
cosmos. If they were tangent to or part
of the cosmos then the universe has simply perpetuated itself (see Observation
#1). Hence, I conclude that there is
an Unknown, Unknowable preceding the Big-Bang.
Observation #3:
In theological thinking God is thought of as the Ground of Being in the sense that
God is the ground or matrix that lets all things in our cosmos come to be.[20] But the Ground of Being, from my perspective,
is not part of the physical universe or even involved with the universe, a fact
that is verified by observation of the known natural and social worlds. The survival of the fittest (i.e., Mr.
Darwin’s more plausible theory of the Origin of the species by natural
selection[21])
rules out, from my perspective, any master plan for the universe and its
denizens, and it seems to be the case with social organisms as well, for they
succeed or fail based on human ingenuity, energy, and money; and that, one must
suppose, also includes the church. In
short, no overall supernatural guidance or care appears to exist for things as
they are. We and the universe have
simply emerged into existence in the cosmos, and must do the best we can. Our fate hinges on good genes, lady luck, and
natural selection.
Observation #4: human beings are, however, universally
“religious.” To judge by our universal preoccupation
with religion, religious-like gestures are endemic to all human cultures. Hence humans seem to have in some way come by
a concept of a Divine Other and seem to have a vague sense, awareness, or
impression of a Divine Other—or they claim to.
The limitations and imperfections of our sense of a Divine Other account
for the contrasting varieties of human religious expressions: we sense in part and imperfectly so. Because of the universality of the religious
preoccupation, however, our “sensing” of a Divine Other seems plausible; so
where does the concept of a Divine Other come from, or does it arise from
within us—that is to say, are we just taught it or is the concept of a
Divine-Other latent in the human genes and/or DNA?
Observation #5: Certainly
it is possible that we each generate the concept of a Divine Other from within
ourselves, or perhaps it is generated by a few and learned by others.
Observation #6:
Possibly concepts of a Divine Other arise from the Ground of Being, that is,
from outside the universe on “the other side” of the Big-Bang. But how might that occur, if the Ground of
Being is not and never was a part of our experienced reality (see Observation
#2). Astrophysics suggests a possible
parallel in the material world. Scientists
discover unseen planets that orbit stars (those tiny pinpricks of light in the
night sky) in distant solar systems by watching for the gravitational effect of
an invisible planet on a visible star: “when the star has a planet orbiting
around it, the star wiggles slightly from the gravitational attraction of the
planet.”[22] I am suggesting that there may also be a
similar “attraction” between the Ground of Being and human beings that prompts
the universal religious responses (we have to learn to live without
recourse to the Gods). The scientist
sees nothing except the effect of the gravitational pull (the “wiggle”), and
does not actually see the planet or the gravitational attraction. Claims of “sensing” a Divine Other may be
based on a similar “wiggle” effect between human psyches and a Divine
Other. The only evidence of gravity
between the star and the postulated invisible planet is the “wiggle”; the only
evidence of a Divine Other and humanity is the human religious response.
Hence, my conclusion: God
is the Unknown, Unknowable initiating the cosmos and eventually all within
it—but whether by design or accident, I cannot tell. And so I think today.
Charles W. Hedrick
Roger Ray “Panentheism and
Humanism in Post-Theistic Views of God”
When we were young, our first science teachers showed us
illustrations of atoms with little colored balls called neutrons and protons
and they were surrounded by brightly glowing electrons moving in predictable
orbits in assigned shells around the nucleus of the atom. In our young
minds, actual atoms, if we could see them, would have looked just like
this.
Of course, you cannot see an atom, and if you could it
would look nothing like the model and yet the model helped us to understand
atoms, their behavior and nature and so models helped us to form a basis for talking about chemistry and biology and
physics. In fact, we would likely never have made much progress in our
comprehension of science if we had not, at the beginning, over-simplified
reality just to get a toehold on the initial climb up into the light of
understanding.
Your elementary and middle school science teachers were
not liars. They were not simpletons. They were, however, trying to explain a
complex idea to you in a way that made it possible for you to grasp it.
Unfortunately, for a lot of people, the introduction was where it stopped and
some of you might even be mildly irritated with me right now because you still
thought an atom looked just like that model. I can only tell you that your mild
irritation is likely to get worse. Sorry.
Similarly, we began our religious education with stories
about miracles, making tablets out of modeling clay to look like the Ten
Commandments, and learning about anthropomorphic images of the God who defies
description. We imagined God in human form. We created a God who
feels what we feel, who understands us and yet loves us.
Again, I want to credit my friend, Michael Dowd for so
clearly articulating the issue of personification. Our more ancient cousins
tended to personify nature, making the wind, the ocean, the sky, the sun, the
earth itself into gods who had names, characters, and peculiar appetites. Thinking of aspects of nature as persons was
a natural first step in trying to get our minds around our experience of the
world but it shouldn’t stop there.
Our first introductions to concepts of a Divine Other,
were quite naturally given to this same tendency towards personification. That
is why this conference is interspersed with these short videos from the series
“Nature Speaks.” Giving voice to aspects of nature lets us feel both a bit of
the primitive early religious personification of nature and at least a
suggestion of a renewed sense that the god of the universe is also in all
things.
Still, while we must graciously allow everyone the
freedom to believe and practice as they wish as long as they do no harm to
others, those of us who strive to embrace an evidence-based faith should open
our minds to new ways of trying to articulate a less anthropomorphic view of
the divine.
Bowing to the objective truth of sciences should not
remove the existential experience of awe, wonder, and even marvel at the
universe. “Mystery” is not the same
thing as “myth” or “magic.” We can eschew superstitious thinking while
embracing the profundity of a real universe that defies comprehension and that
continually astonishes us to the core of our being with beauty, paradox, and
simultaneous wonder at both the grand scale of the universe and the remarkable
art, geometry, color, and diversity in a microscopic view of something as
common as a pinch of sand or a drop of pond water.
Many of the scholars most dear to progressive religious
thinkers call themselves “panentheists.” The term may be new to many
modern religious people but the concept is as old as Epimenides who 2500 years ago conceived of God
as something other than a person with a body, who was “out there”
somewhere. The ancient Hebrews resisted creating statues or images of God
because God, as a spirit, could only be diminished by trying to describe the
Divine in human terms.
Western religious people often look at the religions of the east such
as Buddhism or Confucianism and wonder aloud if they are really religions
because they lack a single supernatural theistic god or a clear view of heaven
and hell. Hinduism, with its many gods, is even more confusing to those
who ipso facto assume that monotheism is superior to polytheism.
Eastern religions were not captured by the push towards the attempts
at monotheism as seen in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But, to be
honest, no monotheism has ever succeeded in staying the course, finding it
necessary to add other virtual gods in the form of demons and spirits to
account for the bad things in life.
Popular monotheistic religions could not resist creating semi-divine
characters such as in the incarnation of God in Jesus or the saints to whom
Catholics pray for special blessings or the angels and demons of Muslim and
Jewish lore.
Any attempt at describing the Christian Trinity as an expression of
monotheism requires gymnastic arguments worthy of an Olympic gold medal but
Trinitarian views cannot realistically be monotheistic.
Much of the attraction in recent years to the Buddhist view of God is
specifically because of its lack of specificity. Buddhists teach that all
that is, is connected and the divine is united with the all. As
Epimenides said, we all live and move and have our being in God. God is
not a rock or a tree but all rocks and trees are in God. God is not “out
there” only but is both “out there” and “in here.” There are, of course,
many forms of Buddhism and some will include more talk about the “devas” that
are non-human spirits but it is safe to understand such things as being
personifications of either things or ideas and not actual invisible, floating
spirits.
The fact that Buddhists refrain from trying to describe God does not
mean that they do not believe in a divine presence. That Hindus express
their understanding of the divine in hundreds of godlike images is just another
way of being open to a multiplicity of existential experiences of the
divine. Again, it is most likely the most accurate way to understand
the pantheon of Hindu gods as personifications of what we experience in life.
In fact, a persuasive case can be made for laying the blame for most
religious wars at the doorstep of monotheism. If you have a concrete
worldview that says, “My religion is not only right but is so very very right
that anyone who disagrees with my religion is evil and possibly even deserving
to be destroyed for blasphemy” then you have the historical basis for tragic
human conflict.
Most wars can be best understood by the old adage, “follow the
money.” Kings and Presidents use high
sounding moral or religious reasons for going to war but usually it is about
power, real estate or capital wealth.
Even if the motivations of governments likely had little or nothing to
do with religious beliefs, the hearts of believers left them vulnerable to
being recruited to crusades and wars in the name of an indefensible theology.
Paul Tillich, the famous 20th century theologian, created a
great deal of public controversy when he said "God does not exist. He is
being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists
is to deny him." 11 Though many chose to interpret that as a
statement of atheism what he was saying, in a very intentionally provocative
way, was that God does not have a body or a place, is not a thing or a person
and in that sense does not exist within time and space but Tillich was not an
atheist. He was what we now more commonly call a panentheist. 12
Pantheism is the belief that the universe is god but panentheism
differentiates itself from pantheism because though the universe is in god, the
sum total of rocks, trees, planets and stars is not, itself,
god. God is all of that and something more. And yet, almost
anything we say past that starts to look like trying to nail smoke to the
wall. Use every nail in your carpenter’s belt and you will still have
accomplished nothing and maybe will have done a lot of damage to a perfectly
good wall.
As Tillich said, God is the ground of our being although trying to
turn that profound awareness into a person by attributing anthropomorphic emotions,
will, intent, or even intervention in human history is bound to end up in
error. As one who lives and moves and has his being in God, I prefer to
speak, not so much in piled up adjectives about God but in terms of how my
awareness of God gives me a spiritual perspective on life.
Those who affirm that there is a vital connection between all persons
and the universe itself are more likely to choose to strive to honor that
connection to all other people and to the earth in ways that provide the greatest
good to the largest number of people and to the planet itself. That is
not a natural or a necessary choice. It is a conscious choice to embrace
this kind of spirituality, this perspective on reality.
A panentheist’s spirituality may express itself in forms of community
ritual or in choosing to avoid goods manufactured by slaves or forms of
transportation that accelerate the pollution of the planet. I will say
much more about the implications of a spiritual world in my next presentation but
for now I am inviting you to let go of all idolatry, all anthropomorphic images
of God.
Panentheism then becomes the most effective way of bringing both
scientific inquiry and spiritual concerns together into a consistent
synthesis. It also allows for a greater inter-faith cooperation.
There is an excellent introduction to Panentheism in Marcus Borg’s book, Speaking
Christian, 13 though it is the assumed theology of such authors
as Rosemary Ruether, and Sally McFague and many more. But we also see it
in Catholic scholars such as Martin Heidegger, Karl Rahner and Hans Kung.
We see panentheistic assumptions in the Hasidic Jewish scholar, Martin Buber,
the Sufi Muslim writer, Muhammed Iqbal and Buddhists such as Alan Watts and
Massao Abe.
In poetic terms, Hal Taussig, in an essay entitled “Disparate
Presence,”14 speaks of meditating on a poem, a song, a leaf, a
flower, the sunlight on the wall, fully anticipating each to have an impact on
how he thinks, feels and acts. He says,
“One might say that I treat these various objects before me as God. I would not disagree, but would hasten also
to clarify. I do not conceive a
collective consciousness behind these particulars. There is no ensemble making up a single
whole.”14 In this sense, we
can affirm the presence of the Divine without trying to cast a God in
anthropomorphic terms, making the Divine into a person.
In the hope of preserving credible, meaningful and relevant faith in
the 21st century, let’s stop trying to limit God to our own
religion, stop trying to manipulate the Divine into doing our bidding,
punishing our enemies or rewarding our friends.
All of that I have said about this so far is in my book, Progressive Faith and Practice. Since
publishing that little book a couple of years ago, I have realized that the
weakness of what I have said is in trying to define our concept of a
post-theistic or a de-personalized God by saying what I don’t believe, or
suggesting what we should be willing to now sacrifice from our religious
up-bringing.
Saying what I do believe is rather more difficult.
I will even give it to you in a Bible verse, I John 4:8 “…God is
love.” And for good measure, because scripture is not enough for a lot of us,
let me quote the Great Dane himself, Soren Kierkegaard: "This is all that I've known for
certain, that God is love. Even if I have been mistaken on this or that point:
God is nevertheless love."
We have often used the Ziggy Marley song in
our services in Springfield that announces, “Love is My Religion,” and the
Beatles’ hit, “All You Need is Love.” So, that’s my premise, my conclusion, my
ultimate point, and you might think, “Then why is he still talking?” but the
fact that poets, musicians, philosophers, and saints have been saying this for
thousands of years makes it inescapable that understanding what this means is
evidently darn near impossible.
Of course, much of the problem resides in
the fact that the word “love” is so over-worked. We say that we love Adel’s new
cd, I love sushi, I love scuba diving, and often even when we say to another
person, “I love you,” we say it with such a large “I” and such a small “you”
that it cannot always be seen as anything remotely holy.
But even when you let go of believing in an
imaginary friend who lives in the clouds, it is still difficult to give up on a
notion of god as a person. A person who
might favor the Brazil over Argentina in the summer Olympics, or the armies of
the USA over the armies of Isis. You would not get trapped in a theological
argument over whether God prefers blue over green, or Chinese food over Mexican
food, but it is harder to give up on the idea that God is somehow still a
causative agent in the world.
Much has been made over the implied theology
that we see in scifi moves, especially in Star Wars where people talk about the
force. In the very first movie, Obi Wan Kenobi explains to Luke, “the Force is
what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things.
It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” There is a dualism in the dark and light
sides of the Force in Star Wars… a good and an evil side….Nerds then burn the
midnight oil arguing whether George Lukas was influenced by Zoroastrianism,
Taoism, or Buddhism.
It is an interesting thought but, of course,
Lucas doesn’t remain consistent with whatever religious influences he may have
tried to clone into his movies. The Force quickly becomes little more than the
energy drink between good and evil guys fighting with light sabers and whatever
meaningful and helpful non-theistic conception of God there might have been
becomes silly.
But I don’t fault Lucas for that. This is
not an easy concept to talk about meaningfully.
The words “force” or “energy” may have roles to play in how we talk
about God as love and not as a person who will place bets on the World Series.
Albert Einstein is often referred to as
having been an atheist but he would not have described himself in that way. It
is just that what he did believe was so nuanced, so obscure, that it sounded to
traditional Christians like atheism. He
said:
We are in the
position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many
different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It
does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are
written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the
books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of
even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously
arranges and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our
limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.
Einstein concludes:
There remains something subtle, intangible and
inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend
is my religion.
This is the point where Buddhist monks start to sound like
astrophysicists and scientists start to sound like religious mystics. Both of
them insist that at the core of all existence is the inescapable truth that we
are all connected. We are all connected
to one another biologically, to the earth itself chemically, and to the rest of
the universe atomically.
That mystery, that connection, that force, or energy, we sometimes sense
as awe, the great Thou that seems to meet us in our deepest core… all of the
world’s religions have tried to describe this, to codify it, to teach it
through holy writ, rituals, hymns, art, and architecture and never quite get it
right.
Almost in exhaustion, prophets, saints, sages, scientists, and
philosophers finally boil it down to just this. . . love. It is my loving
others that we encounter the Divine, that is our true worship, our real
sacrament, the only scripture that we ever need.
The Dalai Lama said “Our
only purpose in life is to love one another.... and if you cannot do that, try
not to hurt anyone.” Which is, in a way, to acknowledge that there is a
dark side of the force… there is an opposite to loving… and the Zoroastrians
may not have been entirely wrong is saying that the two sides of the force are
of approximately equal strength.
There is the love that brings us together, that creates not only
marriage, but friendship, and community, and civilization. And there is the
darkness of narcissism, greed, self-righteousness that divides us, that pulls
us apart, that defeats civilization, destroys the peace, alienates lovers and
makes community impossible.
Far too often, the religious impulses that should help us to find a
spiritual path into a loving connection with others has become the dark and
dividing force that makes real spirituality nearly impossible. Bishop Spong has
called for a new reformation, one that allows us to strip away the magic and
superstition to reveal a kind of spirituality that is rooted in reality and not
in myth and imagination. And I think that we are seeing it happen in important
ways.
In our never ending Presidential campaign, we see nearly every
candidate trying to polish their religious bona-fides…
Donald Trump was seen in a Presbyterian Church and carries a family bible to
events in Iowa and still doesn’t know how to say the names of the books of the
New Testament and clearly is a stranger to the inside of a church. Attack ads
have called out other candidates for pretending to be right wing evangelicals
even though they neither attend nor support the churches they claim.
But for the first time in modern memory, we had a political candidate
this year who claims no affiliation with organized religion. We now know,
through the emails leaked by Wikileaks, that the Democratic Party was actually
planning to use Bernie’s lack of fervent religious affiliation against him.
I had been saying that if Bernie were elected that he would be
America’s first Jewish president but when he was pressed on this issue, even
though he grew up Jewish, he was bar mitzvahed and went to Hebrew school, and
even lived for a brief time in a Kibbutz in Israel, but now he says that he is
not actively involved in any organized religion.
He said, “I think everyone believes in God in their own ways,” he
continued... “To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is
connected, and that we are all tied together.”…which is precisely what we have
been trying to say.
The unique thing, for me, is that a popular presidential candidate can
publically say that he doesn’t practice any organized religion and the country
doesn’t come to a sudden halt in shock. What he is saying is not offensive to
us, it is not foreign to our ears and, truth be told, it is probably what most
of the candidates and public figures actually believe… the only difference is
that he was willing to say it.
The façade of false ancient religions is being drawn away from our
society. The echoes of ancient religious teachings, married to the mystery and
wonder of modern science lead us, not to become atheists, but simply to
acknowledge that while we believe in God all we really know about God is our
experience of awe and of love and the only path to drawing nearer to God is by
getting better at loving one another. This is both liberating and immensely
challenging…once freed from the constraints of ancient creeds and religious
manipulation, our first impulse is not always to draw one another closer in
love but to flee into much more narcissistic endeavors.
We still have a lot of work to do if we want to grow spiritually and I
hope we do… I know that I do and I hope that I am not alone. I may have been wrong about a lot of things
through the years but I am not wrong about this: God is love and the only way to know God is
through loving one another.
***********************************************************
Panentheism and Humanism
WHAT IS SO, SO WHAT, SO
“The Rise of Religious
Consciousness”
My hope is that a religious consciousness will begin to rise,
one based on enhancing humanity, grasping life in all of its complex wonder,
having the courage to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that each of
us can be and that it will express itself in our national life in more earth
centered, justice enhancing and humane ways. Bishop John Shelby Spong
I want to explore something of Bishop Spong’s articulated vision for
the future of the church… that is the hope that there might be a religious
consciousness that would arise from the myths, superstitions, and spiritual
instincts of more primitive times that would preserve a religious consciousness
that is relevant to modern life, that simultaneously is concerned about social
justice and the environment, while also finding deep and passionate wonder and
awe in the complexity and beauty of existence that might find substantive
expression in deepening and loving ties to one another.
John Churcher and I, … as well as many of our favorite authors: Bishop
Spong, Marcus Borg and Karen Armstrong, and others, all grew up in religious
environments in which we were expected to take Biblical narratives as being
historically and morally correct, normative, and even necessary to both
happiness and survival…. Especially in the eternal sense!
All of us went to graduate school, not to debunk that ancient faith
and confidence, but to build upon a foundation that would allow us to become
teachers of the faith and leaders within the structures of the church. None of
us were happy to discover that the intellectual and factual integrity of that
whole body of church teachings and assumptions about ancient scriptures was not
only unreliable but were, in very complex ways, sometimes factually mistaken
and psychologically dangerous.
There is a very high dropout rate in the more academically credible
seminaries all over the world. People who do not want to have their
bubble burst, people who want to hold onto magical thinking, some of whom burst
into either angry shouting or who dissolve into miserable tears in class, find
reality threatening and undesirable.
Realizing that there was a huge gulf between the academic
understanding of religion and scripture and what was both believed and taught
within churches, a group of scholars known as the Jesus Seminar, organized by
the now deceased Robert Funk. What inspired Funk to start this very published
and well known group of scholars was the awareness that there is and has been a
century, five or six generations of seminary educated pastors who were failing
to teach what they had learned in grad school but who were being forced to
either pretend to still believe in Iron Age myths or who managed to always
couch their words in incomprehensible verbiage so that they could keep their
church jobs.
By caving-in in this way, they were literally perpetuation a set of
beliefs that victimized church members, that asked them to assassinate their
brains and invest themselves in misinformation, bad moral guidance, and long
outdated views of gender, race, class, and, my friends, even of God and
eternity.
The religious consciousness that Bishop Spong has talked about hoping
to see arise within churches cannot come into existence in the thick fog of
sloppy thinking, magic or superstition of past generations. That is why we keep
holding these conferences and keep trying to draw back the shades and let some
light into the churches of the 21st century.
The people who ran screaming from the classes I attended at Vanderbilt
35 years ago were confronted with realities that they didn’t want to think
about, didn’t want to know, and didn’t want to allow to change their magical
thinking…. But, I would argue, they would always have to know that they had
chosen unreality over reality. They could never escape the fact that they were
dismissing the real world in favor of an imaginary world.
My friend, Michael Dowd, and I often write and talk about what we call
evidence-based faith. I’m advocating an approach to religion that is
based on what is known and not on what Iron Age myths and superstitions tell us
about the world. The physicist Brian Cox sums up the entire universe as being
comprised of 12 different types of subatomic particles that are held together
by four forces of nature, two of which we can see at work: gravity and
the magnetic force. The other two are observable only at the atomic level
and they have the unromantic names of “the strong force” and “the weak
force.”
You will never see them anyway so they don’t really need poetic
nomenclature, but they basically hold atoms together and make them behave in a
way that makes the universe possible.
Accepting this description of reality, we are all made, quite
literally, of the stuff that was created in the heart of super-hot stars.
The 12 particles of matter and four forces of nature that give us our bodies
are the same as the 12 particles of matter and four forces of nature that make
up the chair you are sitting on, the bricks in the walls around us, the trees,
grass, and houses down the road, and the stars and planets in the heavens above
us.
As cosmologist, Brian Swimme, as observed, “Four billion years ago Earth
was molten rock. Now it sings opera.” We are the product of
millions of years of evolution. We are the part of the universe that can
now become aware of the existence of the universe and consider its meaning…In
fact, I would argue, we create its meaning.
Here is the big shift, the breath-taking, dizzying, sometimes
infuriating and frightening shift…you were taught not to question. Unless
you had the good fortune of growing up in a UU church or a more intellectually
liberated household, you were taught that your family’s religion was the only
one that was right. You were taught that America was the greatest country
in the world. We were led to believe that capitalism was just a part of
freedom, democracy, and probably an untenable version of Christianity and that
we were to defend all of these assumed myths with our very lives if necessary
and to do so with virtually blind faith.
And that, dear friends, is the opposite of who we are now. The
old unquestioning approach to life stopped working for most of us. We
read our way out of it, thought our way out of it, or we were pushed out of it
through hardships and heartbreaks. For most of us, it was a combination of all
of those.
Now we understand that to really find meaning, we have to question everything.
We have not thrown away our sacred traditions, but we no longer believe that
there is such a thing as divine legislation. Now we critically examine
our religion. Through science, through rational thought and critical
thinking, we literally interrogate the universe to find out what is and what is
not true.
I remember hearing the famous psychiatrist and author, M. Scott Peck,
saying that anything we cannot question is an idol and all idols are slated for
destruction. We have protected our religious idols from scrutiny and
preserved them into the 21st century. But no longer will we
reject our gay and lesbian sons and daughters because some ancient nomadic
sheepherder condemned homosexuality three thousand years ago and wrote it down
in a book.
In 2000, I had applied for and received a grant from the Burrell
Foundation to conduct a research project into methamphetamine use in the
Ozarks. Todd Schiable, the center director, called me into his office to
talk about the project, and he said to me that there were three essential
questions we had to answer: What is so? So what? And, So?
That is, our research needed to discover the facts about what was
leading to the rapid increase in use and addiction to this
dangerous drug, and further we needed to be able to articulate clearly why it
mattered. We needed to be able to tell the public and the municipal,
county and state governments why they should care. And finally, we needed
to do more than just throw facts on the table. Our analysis needed to answer
the question, “So what can we do about it?” What is so? So what? And
so?
That conversation has never left me because I have applied it to my
life as a pastor, as a journalist and as a college professor. I don’t
just gather facts as if I were going to print a phone book or contribute to a
database. I need to be able to stand up in front a congregation, a
classroom or write in a newspaper column or book, saying what is factually
true. Then I need to be able to say why it matters and, finally, I need
to be able to say what should be done in response to those facts.
If there is a single compelling reason for me to be writing books
about progressive faith, it is to answer the “so?” part of this equation.
Many wonderful scholars and writers have described the reasons why we have made
this dramatic shift in how we think about religion. Many of us feel
indebted to the disciplined and insightful work of Marcus Borg, John Shelby
Spong, John Dominic Crossan, Karen Armstrong and others for helping us to understand
this very clear and objective approach to what were the protected idols of our
faith.
They have done a magnificent job of looking at the traditional
religion and helping us to see what is so. And they have done an
admirable job of telling us why it matters. And yet, each of them has
felt the need, as religious scholars, to rarely speak of that third “so”…. They
have left it to pastors and practitioners, to congregations…. To people like
you and like me, to figure out what is the “so?” of progressive faith.
More realistically, once we have been disabused of the superstitious
beliefs in a supernatural theistic being who will decide right and wrong, who
will send some eternal part of ourselves to either heaven or hell…once we are
no longer captured in that intellectual and moral prison…the question
becomes: Is life to be lived for personal gratification or is there a
larger purpose?
If I sit down on a park bench to eat my sandwich and a homeless hungry
stranger sits down next to me, do I devour my sandwich as quickly as possible
or do I divide it and share it with the hungry stranger? Nietzsche would tell
you that you are weak to even consider sharing your sandwich. Or, at
least that is how Ayn Rand would interpret Nietzsche. My own observation
of the way our economy has been run, and the way
banks, corporations and, sadly enough, our government, basically makes
decisions, it looks like the Objectivism of Rand’s school of self-gratification
is being lived out against the alternative view that I would call a spiritual
world view based on a global perspective on ethics.
Scientific thought deals with facts but facts alone cannot determine
ethical direction. I’ve spent years inviting congregants to reject what
cannot be known, what has only been presented to religious people as an
assertion of truth. There may be angels and demons, a heaven and a hell,
there may be souls, ghosts and spirits but since we cannot objectively analyze
any of these things, I have repeatedly said that it is meaningless to discuss
them.
Still, to be fair, I must acknowledge that there is also truth claim
at the foundation point of progressive faith. There is a fundamental
moral choice to be made between a life of selfish personal fulfillment, whether
you find that at a brothel or on Wall Street, and a life lived to deliver the
greatest good to the largest number of people.
The earth that once was primarily molten lava but now can rise up and
sing opera, through conscious human beings, also experiences great pain and sorrow,
but we have the potential of experiencing deep joy and meaning. The choice that
I make…the choice I hope that others will make…is to answer that “so” question
in a way that is not simply to seek personal gratification but is, instead, to
direct your life in a way that gives the greatest good to the largest number of
people.
The famous astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, says that we are all
connected, to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, to the universe
atomically. That is a scientific fact, and
I am choosing to credit that fact with spiritual meaning. I will honor my
connection to every human being, to the earth, to the universe, by trying to
reduce suffering, increase joy, and to protect the integrity of life, the earth
and the universe.
Owning my connection to the human race and to the earth we share, I
cannot be indifferent about the fact that there are hungry people in the city
where I live, even if I am personally over-fed. I cannot be indifferent
about the threat of waging war, even if I am far past the age of being
personally recruited into any army. The fact that I am employed does not
dilute the fact that many are not. Nor does my access to health care
afford me the luxury of being indifferent about those who do not receive
appropriate care. The fact that my neighborhood is free of toxic wastes,
that I have reliably clean drinking water and fresh air cannot make me
indifferent to the poisoning of the soil, water, and air on our shared
earth.
Being white, male, heterosexual and American does not excuse me from
the need for liberation from oppression for persons of color, for women, for
those of all sexual orientations, races, and nations of the world. And
the fact that I was free to choose where I drove my car this morning does not
deny the fact that there are more than two million Americans in jail or prison
right now, many of whom are incarcerated for reasons so wholly indefensible
that it is a social crime for us to keep silent about it.
Once Nietzsche was freed from the domination of traditional religion,
his choice did not make him the “ubermensch,” the superman, even though he
thought it did. In fact, followed to the logical conclusion of selfishness and
self-service, existence has no meaning at all. Nietzsche did not leave
the darkness of religious superstition to evolve into a super human, he left it
to de-evolve into, what appears to me, to be a kind of existential
meaninglessness.
The real “ubermensch,” the real heroes of post-modern existence are
those who choose to take their liberty in hand and to live lives of
self-sacrificing service, kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
The nature and character of faith communities is in time of rapid
change.
In the decades immediately following WWII there was a huge jump in the
birth rate which drove up the demand for family oriented churches, at least
here in the United States.
The 50’s, 60’s, and early 70’s were times when churches got bigger,
when they added education wings and expanded their youth programs, built up
impressive children’s choirs, church camps, and campus ministries. It was an
artificial bubble, the product of demographic changes more than it was some
grand resurgence of faith, but the memories of those days have plagued churches
for 40 years with nostalgia and dissatisfaction.
Still, even into the 80’s and early 90’s, it was common for people to
at least occasionally attend church though the numbers were certainly pointing
downward for the old-line denominations that were not peddling the cure to
eternal damnation in a frighteningly envisioned burning hell.
By 1990 every younger family had a computer in their home and before
the next decade ended, everyone was on the internet and was equipped with a
cell phone.
By 2010, everyone had a smart phone that was internet connected and
the nature of communication and social interaction was completely transformed.
We didn’t think any of these changes through. There was no plan of
social transformation. Technology just dangled itself out there and we have all
just followed along.
One of the most life-changing books I ever read was published in the
late 1980’s by the famous psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck. In his book, The
Different Drum, Peck described the human longing for community and the damning
fact that we were not very good at creating community or maintaining it.
Peck was a spiritual seeker, in fact he was a church goer, but he was
recognizing that what we really want from church is a peer group that both
nurtures and challenges us…. A safe place where we can find support and
healing, and a place where both our beliefs and our character can find
challenge, education, and growth.
But Peck recognized that the church, by and large, was no longer this
kind of community. He made the decision to try to start a community movement
that had no religion…. He started the Foundation for Community Encouragement.
I was one of his early converts.
I took the training in how to lead community starting events. I attended
several and tried to bring what I had learned back into the denominational
church where I worked.
It was prophetic that Peck’s Foundation for Community Encouragement
fell apart within three years due to a great deal of petty squabbling within
the ranks of their leaders. I still
believe that everything that Peck said about the human need and desire for
community is still true, but without a binding mythology that held it together,
a loving community that exists to be a loving community, has no lasting
foundation.
Mainstream churches were in rapid decline and the advent of the
megachurch seemed to have almost nothing to do with faith and had everything to
do with entertainment. Mainstream churches tried to revive themselves by
rapidly moving to what they called “contemporary” music and they incorporated
more of the arts and technology into their services to try to follow the lead
of the mega-church movement, none of which has worked.
Our new church start came into existence in 2008, right after the
largest economic downturn in nearly a century and just when the internet and
smart phones had virtually replaced actual social gatherings for a huge portion
of our culture. Trying to start a liberal, progressive church in an extremely
conservative part of the country was a huge task in and of itself but we were
also riding the crest of a wave of social change.
Our church would not have survived its first few months were it not
for the fact that I had a weekly newspaper column that was popularly read in
the city, even in 2008. But it was only a matter of three or four years before
newspaper subscriptions fell off a cliff as more people turned to, not just the
internet, but to Face Book and Twitter as their primary news sources.
The regular stream of visitors and new members we had come to count on
from my newspaper fame came to an end. But while print media was going down, we
literally stumbled into a new audience.
It was a matter of convenience when we decided to post video and audio
copies of my Sunday morning sermons. Several of our regular members lived out
of town and this gave them the opportunity to keep up with the church through
the internet. We did not try to get
discovered nor did we do anything more ambitious than just put the posts up on
Face Book.
It is hard to believe that social media was in its infancy just five
years ago but it was. We were picked up
by a Face Book page called “The Christian Left.” In those days, there was not
much of a selective algorithm to Face Book. When they posted my sermon link,
their tens of thousands of page members all saw the link in their crawl and in
a matter of weeks, we had grown an audience numbering in the thousands,
sometimes tens of thousands every week.
But, classic of our increasingly fractured society, the Christian Left
folks are politically liberal and theologically conservative, so, after
multiple warnings about being too liberal for them, they finally cut me off
and, in fact, banned my material from their page. Thankfully, we had acquired a
fairly loyal audience by that time that we have been able to keep.
I have tried to build a competing Face Book presence under the title
of The Emerging Church but we have had only limited success.
Changes in the nature of social media would make the bump that I once
got from the Christian Left much less important now even if they grew enough to
invite me back.
The birth of our seated congregation is directly related to our being
in print media just before print media became irrelevant. That boost didn’t
last long but it was just enough to give us a core group with which to start.
We have never found another successful means of reaching out to our immediate
area to recruit new members. We have used direct mail, special events, NPR
sponsorships, we have made ourselves visible in public events with banners and
t-shirts, and, of course, we exploit social media and occasional print media
opportunities. Still, we are fighting a war of attrition.
It is just very easy for people to quit going to church these days.
Liberals have no fear of hell or lust for heaven, they have no religious guilt
or obligation and so it can become very easy just to get bored, offended, or to
become interested in the Sunday talk shows.
The very nature of friendship is changing in the face of our
technology addicted age. People can “unfriend” a family member or fellow church
member almost as easily as they can “unfriend” someone on Face Book. Community
is, I believe, more fragile now than it has ever been in my lifetime.
Why did the Occupy Wall Street movement fall apart in a single season?
Why can’t anti-war movements every stay organized enough to have an effect on
political decisions?
MoveOn.Org will send out 5000 invitations to a demonstration in a
particular area regarding something of tremendous importance, and there may be
no more than six or seven people who show up.
All of this is tied to the move that we are experiencing from being a
seated congregation inside the four walls of a church, to increasingly being a
provider of liberal religious content on line.
As people disconnect from one another, they are also disconnecting, not
only from their local church but also from their local community.
People I know who are very smart, professionals, college professors,
the sort you would typically think of as being extraordinarily well informed,
do not know the name of a single member of the city council, they don’t know
who the mayor is, and may not know who their member of congress or the senate
is. They may make fun of their local paper but they have not sought local information
in any other format.
Here is the diagnosis that I fear has an intonation of real danger
about it: Liberals think that having an
opinion is tantamount to having done something. Dozens of our progressive
causes ask us to sign internet petitions which are nothing but the portal to a
request for a donation. We can click “like” on a Face Book meme, or now, by
popular demand, we can choose from one of five options of emotive responses to
a post.
Church attendance is in decline. Voter turnout is often abysmal. Union
membership is in decline. Just look at our organizing efforts for gun control
every time there is another tragic mass shooting.
Emotions flare. People attend a rally or two and we are quickly lulled
back into inaction. It is amazing, really, to watch, the very predictable onset
of public apathy. We have passionately held, well informed opinions, that do
not serve to unite us to like-minded people for long enough to get anything
done.
Right now, our church has become something of a hybrid… the only one
of its kind that I even know of. We are entirely financially dependent for our
continued existence on both our small seated congregation and our much larger
but more distant web based community.
But, if personal relationships have become very expendable, fragile to
the degree that they can be ended by only the slightest of personal friction,
internet relationships are true hothouse orchids. We know that we have between
15,000 and 20,000 downloads per month. I have had some kind of communication with
about 250 of these people. I have met in person, about two dozen of them. Fewer
than 80 actually financially support us, even symbolically.
People jump in and jump out of that web based community like pop-corn
kernels. I am long overdue for a sabbatical but I fear that even a brief break
in postings and our audience my evaporate entirely.
And though I feel very lucky to have been able to ride the rise in
tide of social media to acquire this audience, I also recognize that no real
competition has ever presented itself.
There are videos of famous scholars, the Borg, Crossan, Armstron, and
Spong sort, but they post rarely and virtually never move beyond biblical
commentary and history. We stand in a field almost alone as providing
theological reflection from a progressive perspective on current events.
We are like the CBS news from back in the days when there were only 3
channels. At some point, there will be a cable explosion of younger, more high
tech, presenters and I may become about as popular as a Nintendo 64 or a
leisure suit.
In the past year, Marcus Borg has died, John Spong published his sixth
book in a row that he swears will be his last book and his wife, Christine, is
nearly insisting that he stop accepting speaking engagements. Both Crossan and
Armstrong are nearing absolute retirement and there are no obvious successors
to carry the banner of progressive faith into the next decades.
I believe that what we are doing is important. We are intellectually participating in the
liberation of an entire generation from millennia of superstitious and magical
thinking. But will our progressive message create new communities of faith or
will our more sophisticated theology simply create more reality oriented
individuals who never coalesce into a community?
And, I am curious about the necessarily symbiotic relationship between
the bricks and mortar church and the content that people want on line. It is
like the news industry.
People don’t want to pay for a newspaper subscription when they can get
their news on line, but the best of news content comes from the journalists who
are on the payroll of printed newspapers.
Every year there are fewer and fewer real journalists, so who will
produce the news we hope to be spoon fed on line?
I may be able to transition into being exclusively an online pastor
sometime in the next couple of years but that is only because I have had 40
years of working in bricks and mortar churches. I cannot even imagine how
someone could go to a good graduate school, become proficient in the field, and
simply launch an online church from scratch.
And if they were able to do that, how would that lead to any
collective action or community involvement?
These are questions that keep me up at night.
I desperately want to see community strengthened. I want to believe
that we will find like minded people and become organized in ways that can
change gun laws, fight poverty, stop wars before they start, and demand a
living wage fore everyone. I’m eager to know what your ideas are.
*************************************************
August 14, 2016 Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbia,
SC
Dr. Roger Ray “Positive Spirituality”
We fear to know the
fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the
godlike in ourselves. Abraham
Maslow
The
famous psychiatrist and writer, M. Scott Peck, used to say that if you need
therapy but you can’t afford it, pretend to be an alcoholic and go to A.A.
meetings. And he gave that advise only partially tongue in cheek because, the
truth of it is, that A.A. has done a masterful job of distilling some of the
greatest psychological truths that we have into nice, pithy, proverbs that even
our sometimes rather pickled addicts can remember.
When
I was in my doctoral program at Vanderbilt, a part of my training involved
being the chaplain to the drug and alcohol treatment program at the VA
Hospital. Not all of our patients were there by choice. For some, it was a
choice between prison or a treatment program and so we had more than a few
fairly reluctant patients on our floor.
It
was a part of my job to run the intake group every Monday afternoon. We put our
new patients in a group therapy session with some of our guys who had been
around for a few weeks to help them to plug into our recovery community. We had
one old veteran, Buddy, who had not said a work in any group meeting for the
whole two months that he had been there. He just slouched down in a chair,
pulled his ball cap down over his face, and snoozed until the whole ordeal was
over.
But
one day we had a new young vet who was very sincerely sharing about how alcohol
had ruined his life. He told, maybe a little too much, about how he had been
discharged from the army, divorced, and then homeless. But when he said that he
had gotten up to the point of drinking 8 beers a day, Buddy suddenly sat up,
pushed up his baseball cap, and he exclaimed, “8 beers a day, shoot, I spill
that much before breakfast.”
Then
Buddy slumped back down, pulled down his ball cap and that was the last we ever
heard from him. Buddy was doing something that we see a lot in recovery groups.
There is a not-too-subtle competition to tell the biggest tales about how much
you drank and the wild behaviors it caused in all of its lurid, sexual,
illegal, and car crash details. Sometimes a meeting absolutely goes off the
rails with everyone trying to best the last person’s drunk story… all of which
starts to sound like they all kind of miss their drinking days rather than
reveling in the joys of being sober.
To
counter this very unproductive line of conversation, A.A. has a great proverb
that says, “Don’t tell us how sick you have been; tell us how healthy you want
to be.”
Just
that sentence, dropped in a meeting, will steer the ship back in the right
direction. Way too much of medicine, psychology, and, I’ll argue, religion, is
focused on illness rather than on health, on neurosis rather than talent, and
on sin rather than on virtue.
We
all know the name of Abraham Maslow from his famous introduction of the pyramid
of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
It
is a helpful model that points out that, generally speaking, we cannot focus on
social connections or personal accomplishment and fulfillment until we have met
basic survival and safety needs. But his famous hierarchy of needs is not his
most important contribution to the field of psychology.
Abraham
Maslow recognized that most of psychology was focused on fixing what was wrong
with people rather than spending time and energy in encouraging what is right
with them. It seems like an obvious point but no one ever schedules an
appointment with a counselor to tell them that their marriage is going great,
the kids are all excelling in school, that they sleep like a baby at night, and
they are nearly exhausted from all of the great sex that they are having.
People
come to counseling because of the opposite of one or two or three of those
things and so we tend to talk about the problem and nearly forget about a
person’s strengths, talents, successes, which, inevitably is where they will
find the ability to be more healthy.
Todd
Schaible, the director of our Burrell Mental Health Center in Springfield, used
to tell us in board meetings about when he kept going to the hardware store for
different products and advice about how to kill the weeds in his lawn. After
several failures and frustrated trips to the hardware store, a sage old hand
said to him, “Son, you need to quit worry about killing weeds and focus on
growing more grass. Plant good seeds, water and fertilize them, and the weeds
will go away on their own.”
The
field of medicine could learn a lot of valuable lessons from this same bit of
wisdom. We would all be healthier if we focused on eating good foods,
exercising, and avoiding toxins than we will ever be by constantly taking
pharmaceuticals to treat our symptoms of ill health.
We
need to quit trying to kill the weeds and work harder on growing grass. We need
to stop obsessing about how sick we have been and focus on how healthy we want
to be. Treatment can become its own
reward. We have a saying in the south in reference to our hypochondriac
relatives. We will say, “You know, Aunt Sally is enjoying ill health.”
People
can start to believe that their illnesses make them interesting. And why
wouldn’t they, look at how much attention they get from professionals for being
sick! Look at how many commercials are aimed at illness and dysfunction.
I
know from my own pastoral counseling practice that there are people who would
come and see me every week for the rest of their lives if I would allow them
to. There are people who nurture their psychological distress for the attention
and sympathy that it gets them.
In
counseling, I try my best to be sympathetic and encouraging, but I always try
to remember that the goal is health and I try to get people to strengthen what
is going right in their lives so that the business of growing grass will
naturally crowd out all of the weeds.
I
am allowing myself to realize the degree to which we have been guilty of this
same malady in the progressive religious movement. How easy would you find it
to be to describe your personal faith without using negative illustrations?
And
if you don’t mind me getting all up into your business a little bit… this is
especially true in Unitarian congregations…. Not this one but I’ve seen it in
all of the others where I speak. That we
find being cynical and angry and negative about our former church lives to be
as far as we need to take our religious faith.
If I may be allowed to say a word to Unitarian congregations across the
country, I know very well why you are mad, why you feel that you have been lied
to, deceived, manipulated and abused by traditional religions. Now, tell me
what you are in favor of. Tell me how faith informs your passion for justice,
your willingness to love the unlovable. Show me that you mean it by how well
you get along with each other, how you support and love one another…that’s the
message the world is dying to hear.
Perhaps
it was necessary, at some early point, to identify ourselves by talking about
what we are not. We do not believe in magic and superstition. We are not like
churches with creedal statements or assertions of truth about invisible things
like angels and demons, heaven and hell, souls and infallible religious texts.
We
have decried the irrational religious beliefs that inspire terrorism, that
demean women, condemn homosexuals, that provokes international wars, and
diminishes the importance of the environment.
We
have separated ourselves from the criminal institutions that exploit the weak
minded, taking their money while covering their own sexual and financial
crimes. We reject the neurotic guilt and sexual fear generated by their silly
religious assertions.
And
like old veterans sitting in a treatment center swapping stories about how
crazy, malignant, and deceptive our past church experiences have been, I think
it is time for us to stop obsessing about how sick we’ve been and start
focusing seriously on exactly how well we want to be.
Martin
Luther King, Jr. famously challenged churches to be the headlights of society
and not the taillights. But you know, most of the time we are engaged in
protest… we protested the invasion of Iraq, we have objected to oil pipelines,
fracking, and coal burning plants.
We
have decried police brutality and racial profiling. We have railed against
anti-union policies, and restrictive healthcare policies.
But
folks, can’t we be more than the loyal opposition? If you look back in time, you can see that most
religions actually began as liberation movements. Zorastrianism began among
Persian slaves seeking justice in their oppression. The Buddha left behind a
royal family and riches to compassionately identify with the poor and teach
others to do the same. Moses was a liberator of slaves. Jesus went to the poor
and outcast of Israel. Muhammad sought to unite warring tribes and lived in
poverty all of his life as an example to his followers.
And
what I hope you will never get tired of hearing me repeat…. Buddha insisted
that he was not a god, though his followers tried to say that he was. Muhammad
insisted that he was not a god, though his disciples have in every meaningful
way, divinized him. I believe that the historical Jesus also insisted that he
was not a god but later generations heap up these divine titles on their
deceased heroes to make them seem to be more important.
However,
trying to push any human onto a pedestal and throw roses at them effectively
silences them. Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, taught a
way of life and institutional religion tried to turn that life into a set of
beliefs.
What
we in the progressive movement are trying to do is to recapture the relevance
of the message. A lot of people are discouraged by the loss of supernatural
theism because they have had that hammered into them for so long… how could
they not be disappointed to lose it?
Still,
if you look back in American history, there is a reason why we have so many
hospitals with religious names… don’t you know why there is a Jewish hospital,
a Baptist, a St. John’s, a Methodist, a Deacon’s, a Sisters of Mercy hospital
in almost every city? Because there was a time when religious people realized
that the poor needed healthcare.
Now
what most of those institutions became is a virtual dragon compared to the
generous and loving people who started them but there was a time when being a
community of faith meant that you didn’t just curse the darkness, you started
lighting candles.
The
Civil Rights movement was cradled in the Black churches of the south. America
was ripe for a violent race war in which everyone would have ended up being
losers but by commitment of peaceful, non-violent protest, a disciplined and
well-organized movement saved America from being burned to the ground and this
happened in the lifetime of most of us here.
So,
sure, we’re against war but everybody knows that. Now we need to be in favor of
peace. We need to work for peace, plan for peace, sacrifice for peace. We are
against poverty but we can’t make enough noise in the opinion section of the
newspaper to end poverty. We need to work on the complicated task of creating
better jobs, paying living wages, and closing the gap between the haves and the
have-nots.
We
despise racism, and sexism, homophobia, gender bias, and unequal pay for women,
but for God’s sake doesn’t the church that speaks of community, and fellowship,
and claims to be full of brothers and sisters, don’t we know how to break down
the walls between blacks and whites, Latinos and Asians, between the straight
and the gay, the queer and transgender folks? Are we just against prejudice or
are we for love?
And
let me add this: Your situation here in
Columbia is very similar to my situation in Springfield, MO. We are surrounded not
just by a Red State but by a kind of militant ignorance that cherishes guns in
the face of daily tragic, lethal shootings. That resists education, universal
health care, and municipal investment while blaming the sick, poor, and
uneducated for being sick, poor and uneducated.
I
got to spend the fall of 2004 on sabbatical as a visiting fellow at Harvard and
I cannot tell you what a relief it was to get out of Springfield and to spend a
semester around intelligent, liberal, progressive, people who get it without
having to draw them a picture.
But
folks, have you ever tried to fly a kite on a windless day? It is only resistance that makes a kite
fly. I have the most downloaded
progressive religious channels on iTunes and YouTube. You might expect to find
the most popular progressive channels being produced in Los Angeles, or Boston,
or New York, or Seattle but I get emails every week from people in those places
who tell me that they can’t find a progressive church to attend.
It
is the challenge of our setting in ministry that gives us reason to sharpen our
message, to get more involved, to rise above the tree line and offer a beacon
of light in a world shrouded in darkness. Don’t despise your challenges, use
them to give you lift.
Finally….
Let me just say, I was never a fan of that old self-help book, Your
Erroneous Zones, but there was one line in it that I have held onto. The
author begged readers to stop dwelling on their dysfunctional families, their
less than adequate parents, their experiences of hardship and betrayal. He said, “So what if you mother beat you,
she’s not beating you now.”
I
don’t want to diminish anyone’s painful history, I don’t want to be dismissive
of how abusive religion can be and certainly has been in my own past. I just
don’t want to rent any space in my skull to those memories.
Don’t
call me a hypocrite the next time you see me pulling weeds but I’m just saying
that I think it is time, it is past time, for us to start focusing on growing
more grass and to let the weeds take care of themselves.
[1] Faith and reason /science are
not necessarily competitors. See the essay by William R. Stoeger, “God Physics
and the Big Bang,” pages 173-89 in Peter Harrison, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Science and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2010).
[2]
Louise B. Young, Exploring the Universe (New York: Oxford University,
1971), 380-81, 407-25, 437-42.
[3]
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson; New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 24: [The meaning of Being] is the
fundamental question.”
[4]
Robert Warnock and George K. Anderson, The World in Literature (2 vols.
in 1; Chicago: Scott Foresman, 1950), vol. 2:2-6.
[5]
Ibid., 2:265-66.
[6][6] Peter, Gay, ed., The
Enlightenment. A Comprehensive Anthology (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1973), 13-19.
[7]
For example, see the brief statement of the development of understanding
Epilepsy in Charles W. Hedrick, Blog: Wry Thoughts on Religion, July 8, 2016: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/
[8]
Young, Exploring the Universe, 13-14, 29-30.
[9]
Richard Potts and Christopher Sloan, What Does it mean to be Human?
(Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2010), 32-33.
[10]
As presented in the early Christian Creeds: Henry Bettenson and Chris Mauder.
Eds., Documents of the Christian Church (3rd ed.; Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 25-29.
[11]
In 2015 the National Police Agency reported that there were 15, 894 deaths,
6,152 injured, and 2,562 missing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tohoku_earthquake_and_tsunami
[12]
See, for example, 1 Samuel 15:1-5.
[13]
John A. T. Robinson, Exploration into God (Stanford, CA: Stanford University,
1967), 86-96; Hal Taussig, “Disparate Presence,” pages 149-60 in Charles W.
Hedrick, ed., When Faith Meets Reson. Religion Scholars Reflect on their
Spiritual Journeys (Santa Rosa, Ca: Polebridge Press, 2008).
[14]
Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis. The Nature and History of Gnosticism (trans.
Robert McLachlan Wilson, P. W. Coxon, and K. H. Kuhn; San Francisco: Harper
& Row, 1977), 59-67.
[15]
See Charles W. Hedrick, Blog: Wry Thoughts about Religion, May 17, 2016: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/2016/05/god-does-not-exist.html
[16]
While not claiming that the universe is eternal, the steady-state theory for
the universe understands it to extend to an infinite time in the past; see
Young, Exploring the Universe, 419-20.
[17]
Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Wings Books, 1980), 246-67; Young, Exploring
the Universe, 290-91, 395.
[18]
Sagan, Cosmos, 225, 232.
[19]
That is, the ground of all that possesses the quality or state of existence.
[20]
Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (3 vols.; Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1951), 235-38.
[21]
Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species (New York: Collier and Sons,
1909). 76-144.
[22]
Sagan, Cosmos, 210-212; it is what Nick Cohen calls “the radical
velocity method” of identifying planets in other solar systems: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-various-methods-used-to-identify-planets-in-other-solar-systems-as-well-as-the-distance-of-those-planets-from-their-suns
