Evidence Based Faith “Haud Ignota Loquor” (Speak not of what is not known)
August 4, 2019 Dr. Roger Ray
1. Evolution is true.
2. The Bible isn’t inerrant
3. Women have the same rights as men.
4. Homosexuality isn’t a sin.
5. Owning a gun isn’t a God-given right
6. America isn’t God’s chosen country.
7. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are God’s chosen political party.
8. The modern state of Israel isn’t God’s chosen people.
9. Decisions about abortion should be left up to individual women.
10. No religion has any real information about either heaven or hell.
I don’t typically repeat a sermon or a lecture unless I am on tour but I am going to share some thoughts with you today that I prepared for the Anderson Progressive Theology conference earlier this year which they failed to record very well. So I tried it again in Exeter, England in June and their rented recording equipment broke down just as we were starting the conference so, other than my good friend, Paul Thomlinson who has brought his guitar along with me as I spoke in a Presbyterian Church in Clemson, a Baptist Church in Anderson, and a Unitarian Church in Columbia, SC, hopefully this will be new material to be added to our online catalogue.
I promise you that nothing I tell you today is something you would not hear in a classroom at Harvard or Vanderbilt, Yale, or Princeton; I try to make the best of current academic thought seem to be persuasive and to encourage churches to embrace it, but we are all striving to figure out what it means to be progressive and it is a moving target, isn’t it?
Please allow me to engage you in a little memory experiment. I am going to quote a very familiar passage of scripture and I would like for you to repeat it back to me:
Ich bin gekommen, daß sie das Leben und volle Genüge haben sollen.
If you speak German, or at least my Kentucky accented German, you might have been able to do it, but otherwise, it is nearly impossible. But let’s try that passage again in English. It is John 10:10, most of you have known it forever:
“I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.”
Even if you had never heard the passage before, it probably would not have been difficult to repeat because, as English speakers, we have places in our brains for English words, places created through repetition.
My 30-year-old daughter has had the same cell phone number for 15 years and I could not begin to tell you what it is. From the beginning, it has been programed into my phone and I have never had to actually dial it in all of this time. I can, however, tell you the phone number from my parent’s home, where I grew up, even though that number has not been active for nearly 50 years. That number, through repetition, cut a groove in my brain and it will be one of the last things that I forget.
Most of us who have had loved ones who have sunk into the fog of dementia or Alzheimer’s know that even when they can no longer remember our names or recognize our faces, we can start to sing familiar Christmas carols or old hymns, and they will often brighten up and sing along.
The challenge, then, for progressive theology, is that new information has to go up against centuries of tradition and virtual muscle memory. For a hundred years we have been sending young seminary students to graduate school and, at least in the better schools, they have been introduced to biblical critical studies, helping them to let go of the kind of magical and superstitious thinking of the pre-modern era, and to see scripture and theology from a rational and historical perspective.
In grad school, generations of students have learned that God didn’t write the Bible. They learned that scripture is not either history or science but rather the product of ancient cultures attempting to articulate their understanding of the world and as such, they provide us with philosophical insights, inspiration, and devotional thoughts expressed poetically in metaphors and stories but not facts.
But these young men and women graduate, they are ordained, they look for jobs in churches, appointments or calls, and what they face are churches that have had very little of the training that they have had, but they have inherited generations of traditional faith experience and teaching.
Ministers then try to straddle the fence. At least initially, they try to maintain academic integrity while using a kind of coded double-speak to use the language of the church but to, at least in their own heads, change the meaning of the words.
They did, but who got changed in that deal? In the end, the church didn’t change. Ministers either became disillusioned and dropped out of ministry or they conformed to the expectations of the congregations.
So, this huge gulf grew, between what scholars were aware of; facts, insights, honest approaches to belief, and the church. We have a hundred years of scholarship bottled up in graduate schools of religion, and tens of thousands of churches that have built up defenses to remain intellectually and ideologically locked into the 4thcentury.
Millions of books sold, thousands of conferences, specials on PBS, the BBC and even interviews on popular TV talk shows but the impact of progressive thinking on the church still looks more like a scratch than a reformation.
Let me give you an illustration: For several months we had the good fortune of having one of the world’s leading textual critics, Dr. David Trobisch, stuck in Springfield dealing with family property and developing the next phase of his career. So, we had him guest lecture for us in our Sunday class during that period.
He was doing a series on the use of narrative myth in scripture… brilliant, really helpful stuff, and during the Q and A one Sunday, a longtime member, a good guy who had heard Spong at our church several times, he had heard me for years, and Trobisch for months and he asked, “In the Noah story, I can understand God killing all of the people who were evil but why would God kill all of those animals, they weren’t evil?”
I was both embarrassed and angry. How could you listen to all of this for years and still think that God actually flooded the whole earth, killing off almost everyone and every animal that wasn’t a fish? I announced, “Look, it never happened. It is just a story.” And David interjected, without even a blink, “But Roger, it happens every time the story is told.”
That is a very nice, very academic, very existential way of treating ancient narratives . . . it allows you to preserve the story within congregational life but, and here is my beef: It allows people like this very nice guy to just go on believing that God flooded the earth, And believing in angels, heaven, hell, Jesus being physically resurrected, and the prospect of having oft repeated prayers answered.
Attended was in the spring of 2005. Bob Funk was near death, finally succumbing to cancer. One of the founders was giving me some recognition for my work in popularizing progressive faith in the congregation where I worked at that time and Bob Funk flew into a rage. He was very angry at me for still working for a church. Bob had given up on the church ever changing and he felt that I should be working in a media or college environment where I might do more good.
Bishop Spong, on the other hand, still goes to an Episcopal church most Sundays. He publicly recites the Apostles’ Creed, sings the old hymns, and participates in traditional baptism and communion rituals. No one in the last generation has done more than these two guys to bring scholarship to the church but Bob gave up on the church before he died, and John is still in the thick of it.
I respectfully disagree with both of them on this point: I do not believe that we should give up on the church emerging from the shadows of the Council of Nicea, but I do not agree that we should placidly go on repeating the language of traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The world needs progressive communities of faith. We have a lot of important work to do in giving birth to a better, more just, and more sustainable society, but I don’t think that we can get there by just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We need a modern reformation that dismisses magical thinking in favor of critical thinking, and lets go of superstition in favor of scientific congruity in an evidence based faith.
We need to start writing liturgy that does not undermine what we are trying to say in our sermons. The liturgy, the hymns, the anthems, and prayers of our public gatherings are teaching opportunities and, if you look at almost any book of worship from any denomination, what the liturgical resources teach looks like it comes straight out of Darwin’s Waiting Room.
And the truth of it is, the church was not always mired in this kind of creedal and Biblical literalism. Karen Armstrong is exhaustively clear in her book, A Case for God, that history has been littered with scholars, bishops, and philosophers who were not fooled by literalism in their religious faith.
No one had a bigger impact on scholarship prior to the modern era than Augustine of Hippo. The 4thcentury teacher insisted that even though the Bible clearly 
described the earth as being flat and covered by a solid bowl that separated the waters below from the waters above, that to take that literally would bring shame on the Christian faith since it obviously was not true. In the 4thcentury, Augustine knew that you had to interpret scripture in the light of science and not to make the church look stupid by denying science on the basis of revealed scripture. In the 4thcentury, Augustine was saying to the conservative evangelical crowd, “Come on guys, knock it off, you are embarrassing us.”
In the 5thcentury, no one less than the prophet Muhammed said that Jesus wasn’t really the incarnation of God because that whole idea is ridiculous. Jesus was a great religious teacher and prophet, but no human is God. Think about it. The claim doesn’t even make sense. It is poetic language at best and not great poetry.
I won’t bore you with a recitation of everyone who tried to make the world wake up to the difference between literally interpreting creedal religion and the poetic metaphor of trying to express our highest ideals in the crude container of language but over the years you have heard pastors quote major thinkers from Voltaire, to Thomas Paine, Soren Kierkegaard, Tillich, and Neihbur. I suspect that many of us here escaped the mental prison of traditional churches by reading books by Borg, Crossan, Armstrong, and Spong, all of whom have sold millions of books over the past few decades and yet, I am left to worry about the future of the progressive movement.
Even with all of this clear, rational, scholarly information available to people who have read the books, heard the lectures, watched the videos, but it seems like the evangelical world has a strangle hold on society that is so strong that people come down to this false dichotomy: that you either accept the whole of religion on its face as being literally true or you reject it and become an atheist.
Forgive me for quoting Woody Allen, who is, obviously, a sorry excuse for a human being, but he illustrates my point for me, so we’ll give him a moment of sunlight…. In a commencement speech he delivered years ago, he sardonically concluded by saying, “More than any other time in history, we face a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
The choice is not between being an atheist or a traditional evangelical. There is 500 years of great biblical, theological, and philosophical scholarship that represents the best and highest of human thought and it offers to us a rational, progressive way into a future that allows human dignity, community, sustainability, and profound scientific and technological progress to flourish.
As the great Dane said: There are two ways in which a person can be fooled. One is to continue to believe what is clearly not true, and the other is to refuse to accept what is true.
The progressive reformation asks the church to let go of ancient myths and creeds which clearly are not true and to embrace the best of scholarship which is as close to the truth as we humans can get. And embracing that means that we have to change how we talk. It changes how we approach Christmas and Easter. It changes what hymns we sing and what readings we put in front of our people.
Because, as Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Religion has made men confident that they were to rule over women, that homosexuals were inherently evil, and that only Christians were right. None of which is true and all of which needs to go away.
First, please allow me to try to rescue the meaning of the word “faith.”
We have tended to use the word to refer to things that we believe because we believe them. We “take it on faith,” or we claim that it is an article of belief.
There is no evidence of the existence of angels or demons, of heaven or hell, of souls, spirits, ghosts, unicorns, leprechauns, or dragons but history is dotted with individuals who say that they have seen them and insist that they are real.
When the prophet, Muhammad, had his first vision in a cave in Hira, he thought that he had encountered an evil genie. He, in fact, considered committing suicide because he feared that he had been possessed by this evil spirit. But his wife sent him to talk with her cousin, who was a Christian, and she convinced him that it was the Angel Gabriel who had visited him and that he should go back to the cave and listen again. Muhammad’s wife, Khadija and her cousin, Warqah, gave Muhammad the images and the narratives from Jewish and Christian scriptures and he combined that with his own Arab history of superstitions and personal experiences to produce the Quran. He didn’t actually have a series of encounters with the archangel Gabriel, but he had mystical experiences that he expressed through the language and images he had been given.
But faith is not about believing in ghosts. Karen Armstrong talks about this at length, describing the early church’s practice of baptism that when a person was lowered into the water, as they came up, they shouted the Greek word for faith, “pistus.” For them, it was an exclamation of courage. In those early years, becoming a Christian was an act of defiance against an oppressive state and its emperor worship. It was not a suspension of reason but a two-fisted grip on courage.
It may not immediately feel like it is related but I need to introduce, or re-introduce another theological concept that is important to what we talk about next, and that is
“Personification.”
As humans evolved consciousness, self-awareness, their experience of life was interpreted through their emotions. They felt fear, elation, sadness, and desire. And they tended to interpret the world based on their own experience. Storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, the change of the seasons, were not matters of meteorology or tectonic movements.
They projected personhood onto aspects of nature and interpreted events as the emotions of persons. The sun, the wind, thunder, rain, rivers, the ocean, the earth itself, become gods and goddesses, who, like them, fell in love, got jealous, hungry, angry, or sleepy.
This instinct is not foreign to us, even now. The nature conservancy produced an a
But is Julia Roberts mother nature? Is Harrison Ford actually Poseidon, the god of the ocean? No, of course not. These are just the images we use to talk about important things… the same way Muhammad turned his mystical experience into conversations with Gabriel and people have, through the years done the same with Jesus, Mary, Buddha, Zeus, Odin, etc.
While personifications may be helpful in telling a story or as a teaching technique, we should not confuse our illustrations with reality. Now, you might reasonably ask me, “why does any of this matter?” If your cousin goes to a Pentecostal church and speaks in tongues and they really believe that they magically channeling the voice of God or of angels.
If your Catholic aunt prays the rosary, lights candles at the feet of statues of saints, and wears a scapular under her blouse to keep demons from jumping into her soul, or if your Mormon neighbor still wears magic underwear in the belief that it will protect him from car accidents and plane crashes, what’s the harm?
What goes through the mind of the person who killed all of those Muslims in Christ Church in New Zealand in May? And the guy who killed the people in the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston? Or the guy who murdered all of those people in the Pittsburg synagogue last October? What about when your religious beliefs inspire violence or perpetuate misogyny, homophobia, racism, sexism, or nationalism?
Religion makes good people better and bad people worse. A great deal of the magical and superstitious aspects of traditional religion is just way too easily coopted by people who use it to oppress women, discriminate against gay and lesbian and transgender peopled, and to justify military and terrorist violence between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Religion can promote good things or bad things and we have come to a time when we need to work hard to extinguish the bad and emphasize the good.
As Karen Armstrong famously writes in her autobiography: If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul, and for Muhammad, not to mention Confucius, Lao-tsu, the Buddha, or the sages of the Upanishads.
The church has been sold a truck load of snake-oil, being told that you have to put your brain on the shelf and believe any number of totally ridiculous things in order to be a good Catholic or Baptist, or Muslim, Jew, or Buddhist.
May I remind you that, if you take the narrative at face value, Moses became the founder of a religion by leading slaves in a revolt and an exodus. Buddha, tradition has it, was born a prince but he abandoned the palace and lived in poverty, teaching others to care for the poor. Jesus was a teacher of radical compassion, befriending lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes and foreigners. Muhammad, in stark contrast to the caliphs and sheiks who succeeded him, lived in a tiny house and wore ragged clothes in a lifelong identity with the poor.
I contend that every major world religion began as a reformation intended to bring social justice to the poor and vulnerable. In each case, after the deaths of the first generation of leaders, the religions evolved into creedal faiths, manipulated by the powerful to control the vulnerable.
Moses didn’t set out to create a Zionist form of nationalism. He spoke truth to power and told the pharaoh “Let my people go.” Jesus wasn’t some lunatic who thought he was God who was going to die for the sins of the world, he was a teacher who told people to love their enemies and to forgive their brothers and sisters.
Our religious narratives should not be encased in stained glass windows, repeated in creeds, and diving into wishful thinking about an afterlife. Our faith should be a matter of good deeds, kindnesses, mercy shown to the undeserving, and compassion shown to the sick, the poor, the immigrant, the imprisoned, the grieving, and the lonely.
Now, there are those who will insist upon reiterating a literal belief on Easter Sunday that Jesus came physically out of the tomb. There are those who, without evidence, will insist that heaven and hell are real, that they have an eternal soul that chickens, pigs, and fish do not have. They may continue to believe in a supernatural theistic friend who lives in the clouds and grants wishes, but I don’t know anything about those things.
What I do know is that more than half of the children in the school system in Springfield are growing up in poverty. I know that one in three girls and one in four boys will be sexually molested before they turn 18.
I know that millions of people are being refuse healthcare, housing, and access to education in the richest country in the world. I know that more than 30,000 people in my country are going to die from gunshot wounds this year and more than 60,000 will die from drug addiction. I know that our border security is currently holding 15,000 children in tiny, nasty cages, separated from their parents. I know that in 2019 women still earn significantly less than men, on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, no woman has ever been elected the head of state.
And that most churches still think that you have to have boy parts in your underwear to be able to preach, baptize, or serve communion. I will tell you, I have boy parts in my underwear and have never, in a 40 yearlong ministry, used them in any way in the writing or delivery of a sermon or in the administration of religious rituals . . . and I have a strong sense that policy will not change. It is time for the church to get real.
In closing, let me quote Virgil, who wrote in the Aeneid: Haud Ignota Loquor
Speak not of what is not known. We must get our heads out of the sand and be more concerned with how we live our faith and less concerned about the magical beliefs of our ancestors.
