“What do Progressives mean when we say ‘God’?” Dr. Roger L. Ray
THIS LECTURE WILL BE DELIVERED IN VARIOUS LOCATIONS IN ENGLAND DURING THE FIRST TWO WEEKS OF MAY. I REGRET THAT THE POWER POINT IMAGES DO NOT SEEM TO BE FOLLOWING THE COPYING OF THIS TEXT…. YOU WILL HAVE TO USE YOUR IMAGINATION.
As with any American who dares to travel abroad these days there are a couple of things that need to be said to clear the air. First:
Look, I’m really sorry. I don’t know how this happened. Other than Vladimir Putin, I don’t know who on earth would have voted for this train wreck. It happened and we’re doing what we can to get rid of him. We’ll try to make it up to you somehow.
Secondly, there is no rational explanation for the gun violence and the lack of gun laws in America. The simple greed of manufacturers and the paranoid delusions of gun collectors cannot be made to make sense of this stuff. I solicit your prayers and your sympathy. Sane people are busy doing what we can.
If you will show me this grace, I will promise not to bring up Brexit: because we all have a crazy uncle that we would rather keep locked up in the attic who still manages to get out and find his way into the voting booth from time to time.
I want to thank you for welcoming back to your church and I must say a word of thanks to our mutual friends and my hosts, drivers, facilitators, organizers and friends, Rev. John and Di Churcher. John and I found one another on the internet a few years ago and I have dragged him around the eastern half of the United States as he is now hosting me in my second tour of the United Kingdom. Though, I will say that when I have John in the USA that we share the speaking load and throw in a lot of music to make a day in church seem easier to take in…. today is mostly up to me so, this is one of the only times that I can be thankful that there is an awful lot of me to spread around. Trust me, I was not so thankful when I was poured into a tiny airplane seat on the way here!
John made a very poignant observation a few months ago when he said to me in an email that he wished that we were both 30 years younger so that we could partner in a long term multi-national ministry in trying to promote progressive faith. This summer I will hit my 40th anniversary of preaching and I am, honestly, glad that I don’t have another 30 years of this work to go before I retire to someplace populated with palm trees rather than parishioners, but I know what John means. We keep hoping for the progressive movement to take root and to flourish and, forgive me for saying it just this way, but to allow the more ancient magic and superstition of traditional religion to take its place alongside the historical religions built around Marduk, Zeus, and Odin.
Most of you here know John Church very well and you have had the good fortune of enjoying his insightful instruction. Some of you are listeners of mine and, I trust, many of you are readers of such authors as our friend, John Spong, the late Marcus Borg, and Karen Armstrong. But, knowing that some of you are seasoned progressive thinkers, still, let me try to give a quick introduction to those of you who might not be entirely familiar with these waters.
The Protestant reformation liberated people to not only read scripture in their own language but to begin to read it critically and academically. The process started slowly and with some great leaps of insights due to peculiarly talented scholars but over time a body of knowledge grew that allowed us to more comprehensively consider the history and language of our religious texts and the philosophical and theological presumptions of both scripture and the church.
We Christians were a lot more comfortable when scholars gave most of their attention to Old Testament studies and, given the time and space covered in the collections of the Hebrew Bible, there was a lot of territory to cover there. But, inevitably, academics, not being the sort to leave anything alone, eventually turned their eyes to the New Testament and our precious gospels.
Again, to avoid an encyclopedic list of contributing authors and thinkers, let me just say that the skills of historical criticism grew and a lot of the fog surrounding religious practice began to lift, at least it did within the walls of the better institutions of learning. This afternoon I will talk more about historical Jesus studies but initially I would like to just illuminate the crisis that was created by the non-parallel paths of the academy and the church.
Candidates for ministry were expected to spend a few years inside of the academy preparing to become parish pastors, priests, and ministers. For more than one hundred years, these young scholars were expected to learn how to do historical, lingual, and form criticism. They learned the difference between an exegetical view of scripture and the homiletic skills needed to step into a pulpit and provide pastoral leadership, comfort, and moral challenged to the gathered assembly of God’s faithful.
Again, we could point to some very interesting diaries of pastors who thought they were going to leave the ivory towers of Oxford and Cambridge, or Harvard and Vanderbilt on my side of the pond, and share their newly discovered knowledge with the church. Many fine and sincere scholars were almost immediately drummed out of the ministry because they were accused of being too liberal or, worse, as being heretics.
Those of us who survived our initial charges learned how to straddle the fence, to speak a kind of “church speak” in which we used terms that we knew meant one thing in the church but meant something different to those of us who were “in the know.” And, though I hate to indict my peers, most, I believe, over the years of pretending to believe in magic and superstition so that they could remain employed, began to forget their academic training and to actually fall for their own bologna.
When I started in seminary in the late 1970’s it was not uncommon for my professors to say things like, “Now, you cannot repeat this in church, but…” as if church folk were sheep who were too simple to be exposed to honest theology.
One of those Vanderbilt professors, Bob Funk, finally decided that the gulf between the graduate school classroom and the church pew needed to be finally and conclusively bridged. In 1985 he invited a couple of hundred leading religious scholars to come together to form what was named “The Jesus Seminar.”
Over a period of several years, they methodically read the gospels with a historical and linguistics lens and attempted to publish their findings in a way that would expose church goers to the fruit of a hundred years of serious biblical scholarship.
These publishing efforts gave us Jon Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong, Bishop Spong and a host of lesser known authors who have tried to put serious academic research into language that can be meaningfully read in churches by folks who have not been subjected to the rigors of a graduate school theological training.
Some of those books have enjoyed tremendous success in the marketplace and there are a few million church goers who have at least some of these books on their shelves at home. So, more than 30 years of a concerted effort at closing the gap between the classroom and the pew, millions of books have been sold, and seminars like this one have been held all over America, the UK, South Africa, and Europe… Thirty years, thousands of scholars, millions of readers later, . . . how are we doing?
Here is the irony that keeps me awake at night: Millions of people read the books, tens of thousands have attended seminars, I have taught college classes, written books, and traveled as much as possible and these students finish their final exam in my classes, they go home from one of Bishop Spong’s seminars, and they go back to church and carry on praying for a better parking spot at the grocery store and acting like our favorite people never really die but rather go to eternal bliss and the people we don’t like meet an entirely different end at the conclusion of their days.
Now, you have my permission to entirely ignore everything that I am going to say here today and tomorrow. In a few days there will be little left of me here but a jet vapor trail over the Atlantic Ocean and a few copies of a narrow little book that most of you will never read. But I have come a terribly long way at some considerable expense to try to say something to you that academics and scholars have been trying to say for a hundred years and I hope you will give it some serious thought. Then buy me a warm beer and we’re all good.
A little over a decade ago I was fired by my denominational church. I had spent nearly 30 years in an American denomination that was sort of our version of Irish Presbyterians, with a bit more fried chicken but all of that inherent Irish love of fighting. My habit of presiding over same sex marriages and leading protests of our military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq finally cost me the support of 51% of my parishioners, so I was booted to the curb with a lot of theological education and some good intentions and I was pretty sure that my church going days were done.
But a few dozen friends prevailed upon me to give it one more try. They suggested that we start a truly progressive church without even a hint of tipping the hat to old forms of creedal religion that had held our minds captive in the past. Now, because ministers are so concerned about words: let me pause just a moment for clarity’s sake.
Thirty years ago, people like me called ourselves “liberals,” in large part because we were not “conservatives.” We were “liberal” in the sense that, based on good scholarship and academic study, we were leaving behind some of the old constructs of religion in favor of a more honest, defensible, and meaningful expression of faith. But the word “liberal” has some negative connotations bleeding over from the world of politics, so a few years ago we started to use the word “progressive” which almost immediately was portrayed by our critics as meaning “socialist” which, at least in the United States is like wearing a sign on your back that says “Please kick me.”
At my church, we decided that we preferred the adjective, “Emerging” though even that is a word often claimed by neo-pentecostals and so it also lacks clarity. What we really mean is people who embrace higher academic values and want to proclaim an evidence-based faith but that is hard to put on a church sign.
What I am getting at, if I may be allowed to quote back to you one of your own, the British Philosopher, Bertrand Russell, said, "I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it is true. I must of course admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system."
So, here is the ground of the honest progressive, we will try to avoid teaching, passing along, or believing absolutely anything for which there is no good reason to believe it. Unicorns might be real. It is impossible to prove a negative. The simple fact that no one has ever seen a unicorn does not mean that they do not exist. There may, in fact, be an entire colony of unicorns beneath the gassy clouds of Jupiter, it is just that there is absolutely no reason to believe that such a colony of unicorns exists and until there are photos, or a horse’s skull with a single horn protruding from it that can be brought back from Jupiter, it is best that we simply not talk about it.
The phrase I like to use in the movement from traditional Christianity to progressive faith is that we have given up false certainty in favor of honest uncertainty. Creedal religion is full of certainty but most of it just isn’t true. Progressive faith leaves a lot of important questions unanswered but, at least we are honest about it.
My church is situated in the reddest of American states. My congressional district voted for Donald Trump by the largest majority in all of the USA, so I am in an odd place to promote an academic, liberal, and progressive world view. Our numbers are few, but we have found a global audience that downloads our sermons 15,000 every month. About half of our financial support comes from listeners scattered around the globe and this web-based church may have a lot to say about the future of religion but we’ll talk about that later.
When I am teaching world religions at Drury University in my home town, my students typically have no trouble in accepting that the tradition regarding Muhammad’s ride up to heaven on a winged horse that somehow had a woman’s face is not historical because my students are rarely Muslims.
However, they struggle with talking about the fact that the story about Moses dividing the Red Sea is also not historical.
And when I cast the story of Jesus walking on water as being similar to the story of Muhammad riding a winged horse to heaven, then some students will drop out and discuss me in their Sunday School class in their church.
Every world religion is like a language all its own. Each religion is produced by largely very sincere people attempting to articulate their most closely held beliefs in the best way that they can, which is usually in stories. It would be ridiculous to fault ancient people for doing what people have always done, which is to create narratives in which we hope to express ourselves.
We have experiences of a divine “other” and we try to find a way to express that experience and inevitably we end up turning an ineffable experience into a concrete narrative that someone can later render in oil on a canvas.
Let me give you an example from our Christian New Testament:
The Apostle Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, attempting to convince the church members that he is the real deal, not a fake Apostle but a real, honest to goodness, just as good as Peter, James, and John, Apostle, describes his conversion experience to them in this way:
Mystics of all world religions could read this account and nod their heads. This is a mystical experience… profound to the person to whom it happened, nearly completely indescribable to anyone else.
A generation after Paul is dead, a very enthusiastic disciple of Paul who wants to polish his hero’s reputation a bit, describes his conversion experience quite differently. Luke writes in Acts chapter 9:
I hope this is obvious to you. Paul, the person in question, the one who was actually there, says that he had an experience and that he doesn’t even know if he was in his body our out of it, and he saw things he cannot describe and heard things he cannot repeat. Twenty years later, Luke, who was not there and who probably never met Paul, is willing to give the experience a street address and specific dialogue.
Now, folks, Luke is not a liar. He is a story teller. He is not intending to deceive his readers, but he is intending to persuade his readers. We tend to pull difficult ideas and experiences down into images, stories, to make them easier to convey.
The Quran could say Muhammad had a mystical experience in a cave in Arabia in which he believed that he was told that Muslims should pray five times a day but that isn’t what it says. It says that Muhammad was physically taken up into paradise by a mythical creature and that God told him that Muslims should pray five times a day. It didn’t happen that way but, folks, there are a whole lot of Muslims who pray five times a day, right? So, who are we to say? Except, of course, it didn’t happen.
There are a whole lot of good things to say about the discipline of praying five times a day. It can be viewed as noble, admirable, wonderful even… but don’t ask me to believe in mythical creatures who give prophets a lift up to paradise.
Allow me to introduce a term that you may not have heard in a religious context before:
Personification is when we project personhood onto something that isn’t a person.
You would not be surprised to hear a dairy farmer refer to one of his cows as “Ol Bessie.” In fact, I would not be surprised to learn that there is a law that demands that if you have more than one milk cow, one of them has to be named “Ol Bessie.”
But the same farmer is just as likely to name his old truck, “ol Bessie” and that, as we say in Kentucky, is a horse of another color.
The most ancient strata of all world religions can be described as just this sort of personification. Ancient humans experienced the world through their emotions and so they would say that a wind tossed and violent sea that the sea was “angry.” The earth yielded a vegetable harvest that looked like it was literally giving birth to food and so the earth was personified as being a woman, a mother.
Aspects of nature were personified as gods… the sun, the moon, lightening, rain, wind, the seasons, the constellations, and more personal things like illnesses, infertility, insanity, were attributed to minor deities, demons, etc.
Our Sunday School images of the ancient Jewish faith mask the fact that our Semitic ancestors in the faith were not monotheists. Yahweh, Jehovah, began as a regional deity, in all likelihood, a god of war.
The much-discussed Arc of the Covenant was probably a large throne that was carried into battle suggesting that Yahweh was present with the Hebrew armies as they fought against rival clans. You see this imagery in many of the Psalms and in the Deuteronistic history.
Reform movements often try to destroy this image of a god as a personification. We are deeply disturbed by images in the news of Muslim radicals destroying ancient artifacts and our museums are full of ancient statues that have been beheaded or broken apart by early Muslim expansion.
But we often forget that there were reforms in ancient Judaism that involved destroying what they called idols and we would call “art.” And, of course, the Protestant Reformation that was begun by Luther, also went through a period of smashing out stained glass windows and destroying statues and paintings.
We keep trying to move beyond primitive understandings of God as a person but something in our psyche always pulls us back in that direction. Take a walk through the British Museum or through any of your cathedrals and what you see is a history of human kind’s constant attempt to personify god, nature, and the universe.
Xenophanes, the sixth century BCE Greek philosopher said, 2600 years ago, that if horses had gods they would look like horses. Or as Voltaire quipped 250 years ago: God created us in god’s own image and we have been trying to return the favor ever since.
So, though ancient Semitic tribes may have believed that Yahweh was enthroned in the clouds above their temple in Jerusalem and people will kneel and light candles in front of statues on every continent of the world today, we all know that God is not a white bearded old white guy who lives above the clouds acting like a 364 day of the year Santa Claus, granting wishes to those who pray hard enough and really really really believe in elves.
So, I hope that you are still with me. Our ancestors tended to project personification onto nature. We gave names to our imagined gods
of war, hunting,
fertility, wine, and everything else. But we all know that while this is a natural affect of the human consciousness that it isn’t good theology. This is just a way of talking, of comprehending our life’s experience and of expressing it to others. But from Xenophanes to Bertrand Russell we have always known that our personifications of our experience, turning nature into gods made in our image was only a hint of what might actually be real.
So, if we can accept that all religions are an attempt of human cultures to express their experiences of the divine, to try to put into words what cannot ever fully fit into language then we can dismiss the notion that Christianity is right and Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and all other religions are either wrong or somehow secondary or tertiary to our own.
If we can set aside creed, tradition, sectarian views, and our own nostalgia, what is left? What can we confidently say about God? What do we even mean when say that we are religious, spiritual, that we are people of faith… faith in what? Who and what is God?
We start off with a view of God as a person, a big, powerful, all-knowing, eternal person, but still a person, with likes and dislikes, who sometimes meddles in the affairs of humans. This is what we call supernatural theism. It is a holdover from a much more primitive time that still casts a shadow over modern religion as we pray to this supernatural deity for intervention in our lives, for forgiveness of our sins and we sing hymns of praise to appease and satisfy a rather seriously narcissistic entity which seems to crave compliments more than Donald Trump . . . and that is saying something.
Rejecting supernatural theism, many famous philosophers and thinkers jump straight into atheism or agnosticism.
We can understand why the fastest growing religion in the world today is typically called “none of the above” or “none’s”. Look, folks, if you have been brought up to believe that there is a harshly judgmental God who watches you all of the time and not only can see and hear you but can also know your thoughts and then you wake up to the notion that this is a truth claim for which there is no supporting evidence and that it is rooted in ancient, primitive, and rather silly myths, then atheism makes sense as a rational reaction of a scientific, fact driven mind.
And if you just speak of knowable, testable, provable facts, then we turn to the physicists who assure us that the universe is made of 12 different kinds of subatomic particles that are held together by four forces of nature. Everything that is, stars, planets, people, fish and chips, cheeseburgers, and flowers are all made up of the same 12 particles of matter that are guided by four forces of nature. This is the universe… everything that is, is made up of these same building blocks.
So Westminster Cathedral and the fichus tree that stands in my living room back in Springfield, MO are made of exactly the same ingredients. I don’t mean to denigrate treasured English architecture but here are the facts of physics.
But I can get a bit unsettled when you say that my amazing, brilliant, beautiful and wonderful daughter, Valerie, is also comprised of 12 particles of matter held together by four forces of nature. Does that mean that she and my fichus tree are the same? You don’t even know her and you know that isn’t true. I have had the fichus tree a decade longer than I have had my daughter, still, it is an ornamental tree and she is the princess at the center of the universe.
The point is this: This supernatural theistic view of the world is not true. It is inaccurate, deceptive, and wholly inadequate as a way of understanding our lives and the meaning of existence.
But this isn’t wholly adequate either, is it? Where is love in this? Where is consciousness? Where is beauty, music, math, where, in fact, is God? Beyond all superstition and magic, beyond all primitive projection and personification, and also beyond all flat-footed descriptions of the world based on physics, chemistry, botany, geology, and biology there is something more. And here I need to introduce to you to or at least remind you of a couple of theological terms:
In the most simple terms, Pantheism is the belief that all that is, everything, every animal and person, added together is “god.” Pantheism certainly rejects the notion of supernatural theism. It does not project personality or personhood onto the universe. The universe just is. As Michael Franti sings, “every spot of land is holy land and every drop of water is holy water.”
What you will read about in my book on Progressive faith is not Pantheism but something called Panentheism. Ancient theistic religions say that God created the universe. Pantheists and humanists will say that the universe is God. What I and very many modern academic theologians are saying is that all of the universe is what we call God…. All of the universe and something more. I don’t know if we should call is a consciousness or not… and that may be something you want to discuss in your small groups when I compassionately finally stop talking…. Is the universe aware? Awake? Conscious?
At times it seems so but I don’t want to fall back into projecting personification onto the universe… but I can tell you that the difference between my Fichus tree and my daughter is something like the difference between pantheism and panentheism.
Saying that, I know, raises more questions than it answers but I really must stop now and allow you to be the ones who raise the questions.
