De-mythologizing and Faith

Last weekend, the Toronto Globe & Mail reported on a Toronto church, affiliated with the large mainline body the United Church of Canada, that offered a different sort of Easter service. Instead of singing "Jesus Christ Has Risen Today", the congregation sings "Glorious Hope Has Risen Today":

Thus, it will be hope that is declared to be resurrected – an expression of renewal of optimism and the human spirit – but not Jesus...

So far, that sounds pretty good to me.

The article goes on to say:

There is no authoritative Big-Godism, as Rev. Gretta Vosper, West Hill's minister for the past 10 years, puts it. No petitionary prayers (“Dear God, step into the world and do good things about global warming and the poor”). No miracles-performing magic Jesus given birth by a virgin and coming back to life. No references to salvation, Christianity's teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus's death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god.

That also sounded good, although the very last sentence gave me pause--I don't believe that God is omnipotent--but no "god" whatsoever? What does this really mean?

Rev. Vosper has written a book titled With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe. I certainly would agree with the sentiment expressed by that title. I don't think it matters, for example, to God, whether we believe in God or what we believe about God; I think God is much more concerned with how we live (and love) than what theologian pronouncements we affirm. And I also agree with much of what the article describes as a summary of her beliefs:

Ms. Vosper does not want to dress up the theological detritus – her words – of the past two millennia with new language in the hope of making it more palatable. She wants to get rid of it, and build on its ashes a new spiritual movement that will have relevance in a tight-knit global world under threat of human destruction.

She says there's been virtually a consensus among scholars for the past 30 years that the Bible is not some divine emanation – or in Ms. Vosper acronym, TAWOGFAT, The Authoritative Word of God For All Time – but a human project filled with contradictions and the conflicting worldviews and political perspectives of its authors.

And yet, she says, the liberal Christian churches, including her own, won't acknowledge that it is a human project, that it's wrong in parts and that, in the 21st century, it's no more useful as a spiritual and religious guide than a number of other books.

She says now that the work of biblical scholars has become publicly accessible, the churches and their clergy are caught living a lie that few people will buy much longer. “I just don't think we can placate those in the pews long enough to transition into a kind of new community that doesn't keep people away.”

She wants salvation redefined to mean new life through removing the causes of suffering in the world. She wants the church to define resurrection as “starting over,” “new chances.” She wants an end to the image of God as an intervening all-powerful authority who must be appeased to avoid divine wrath; rather she would have congregations work together as communities to define God – or god – according to their own worked-out definitions of what is holy and sacred. She wants the eucharist – the symbolic eating and drinking of Jesus's body and blood to make the congregation part of Jesus's body – to be instead a symbolic experience of community love.

I find it hard to disagree with much of that. Yet there is a part of me that wonders if her de-mythologizing of Christianity can go too far. One of her colleagues, a progressive pastor of another church, was quoted as saying, "While I'm somewhat sympathetic to the aims of it all – getting rid of the nonsense and keeping the core faith – I think that there is something lacking in it all. Gone is metaphor, poetry, symbol, image, beauty, paradox.”

If I only wanted an intellectually tinged religion of deconstruction, I'd be a Unitarian Universalist. For me, religion is what inspires us to new heights. I see it as a kind of poetry for the human soul: "metaphor, poetry, symbol, image, beauty, paradox," as the pastor said in the quote above. I don't necessarily want to do away with the metaphors and myths. I just want some recognition that they are metaphors and myths. Let's talk about them as myths, and explore how they can inspire us in the way that all great myths can. I do want us to stop pretending that all the various and sundry mythological accounts are literally true. But let us not take away the poetry from religion either.

"Easter isn't about belief in the literal words of an old fairy tale"

From Glynn Cardy's blog:

At Easter time in church there is a lot of make-believe language. A dead Jesus coming back to life, stones being rolled away, bursting out of hell’s prison, victory over death…

This old familiar language, like a fairy tale, is the container, the shell of Easter. But it isn’t its contents.

The content of Easter is the belief that Christians hold that love is stronger than hate, and hope is stronger than despair. Love and hope is seen in the changes in people’s lives.

Easter isn’t about believing in the literal words of an old fairy tale. It’s about seeing lives changed, joining that movement that wants to colour the world in love and joy.

If this, or something like it, were preached in the churches that I attended, I'd feel a little less alienated from mainline Protestant Christianity.

Easter in the blogosphere

Here is a quote from James McGrath about the Easter of the disciples after Jesus's crucifixion:

Back in Galilee, some time later, the disciples had dreams, visions, encounters that persuaded them that Jesus was alive, that God had taken this individual who mistakenly thought the dawn of the Kingdom of God was imminent, and had made him Lord of that very Kingdom, which was yet to dawn fully.

That was Easter. When it occurred, and how it relates to the conviction that something monumental happened "on the third day", is hard to discern through the tensions and obscurities in the evidence.

Those experiences, rather than anything to do with the tomb, are at the heart of the Christian faith. While the events of the days that followed the crucifixion are shrouded in mystery and uncertainty, the Easter experiences continue to be part of human experience from then until today. And for those of us who have had such experiences, they do not prove anything about what happened to Jesus' body, or an empty tomb. But they do shine light on our existence, and the fact that we inhabit a universe where such experiences are possible fills us with awe, and wonder, and reverence. And it leads us to spend our lives seeking to do justice to the character of the universe and of human existence such experiences hint at.

Here is a quote from Mike L., who comments on the book "Resurrection: Myth or Reality?" by John Spong:

Is Resurrection a myth or a reality? I believe something real happened in the lives of these real people that lead to these important stories. I also recognize that the Resurrection is a myth about a transcendent reality that could not be described through any other means.

And here is a quote from John Shuck's Easter sermon:

The story of Jesus could have ended there. We are sorry for Jesus, but we are making progress. But the story didn’t end there. I don’t know how it happened. But his story became the focal point of a larger story that built around him. It grew. People began to tell each other: Rome doesn’t get the last word this time. Whether those who had the original idea had a spiritual experience, I don’t know. But people began to tell each other that God raised Jesus from the dead. The one that Rome executed, God raised. The Resurrection is God’s yes to Rome’s no.

The history of the church shows us that that story was bought and sold, tamed and distorted. The normalcy of civilization turned it into a way of controlling people through threats of hell and rewards of heaven. The Resurrection changed from a mystery to trust to a fact to be believed.

And yet, we still have echoes of the story’s transforming power in the gospels themselves. Despite the normalcy of the institution and of civilizations, people throughout our history to this day have found hope and power to say no to violence and injustice and yes to sharing, peace, and cooperation.

Easter is over. I survived.

I went to church on Easter. I don't know what I was thinking.

I had been busy on Sundays lately, hadn't been to church in a while, and I had some free time this weekend to go to church. In addition, on Good Friday, I dropped in for a few minutes during my lunch hour at a 3-hour long ecumenical event. At that Good Friday event, I heard a sermon that I liked from a seminarian, so it put me in the mood to experience church on Sunday.

I'd love to attend an Easter service that openly discussed and celebrated the idea that the resurrection events depicted by the Evangelists are mythological. I have a year to see if I can find a service like that. Or maybe I'll just skip church services altogether next Easter.

Process theology, empathy, and justice

I ran across a blog posting by a proponent of process theology who argued that process theology and liberation theology are irreconcilably opposed to one another. More specifically, the blogger disagreed that the God of process theology takes the side of the oppressed on matters of social justice. I was surprised to see this argument, which really does not jibe with what I personally believe about God--and I am certainly a defender of process theology. I believe that the blogger in this case is creating an unnecessary conflict between these two theologies where none need exist, and I believe it is possible to reconcile them.

The blogger cited her own ordination paper, which stated:

Process thought...avoids absolutes; to one extent or another, we are all representative of both the oppressor and the oppressed. God is therefore not on the side of one person or group. Instead, God is continuously offering salvation through grace, defined as acceptance, love, and forgiveness, to all persons.

I think this somewhat misses the point. To suggest that God is equally both on the side of the slaveholder and the slave, equally on the side of the oppressor and the oppressed, equally on the side of the torturer and the tortured, seems to take all moral dimension out of God's creative lure. While the blogger correctly notes that process theology sees God as the source of novelty and as a creative lure in the evolution of the universe, there is nothing in that understanding of God that precludes a moral dimension to God's creativity. Social justice is, in my view, a necessary and important part of the divine creative lure. One of the ways that God seeks to lure the world creatively forward is by luring us towards ever expanding notions of inclusiveness and justice. When we are more loving, when we treat others with justice, we are responding positively to God's lure. When we are less loving, we are acting contrary to that lure. Those who oppress, those who commit injustice, are thus acting in defiance of the Divine lure, and it would be contradictory to assert that God was somehow "on their side" when they so behaved. To assert that God is equally on the side of the oppressor and the oppressed would be to assert that God did not care whether people responded to the Divine lure or not; and if God really felt that way, there would be no point for God to even bother to participate actively in the world.

But, I would argue, God does care care what happens in the world. God does want us to respond to his/her creative lure. And that means that God wants us to act justly and to oppose injustice when we see it. God does take sides.

It is true, as the blogger points out, that process thought views God as continually offering grace, even to those who harm others through the exercise of violence or power. However, that is not the same thing as saying that God is indifferent to the outcome of events that result in oppression. It may be that the blogger is defining "taking sides" to mean that God has excluded certain people from his/her loving concern when they have defied God's will--and she rejects this view (as do I). But this isn't really relevant, as far as I can tell. Yes, God is on everyone's side in a certain sense--namely that God's love is universal and unconditional; but since process thought focuses on processes--namely, each individual action that represents a response to the possibilities offered by God--then God is always taking a position on what decisions people should be making, and taking a position is another way of saying that God takes sides at each moment of decision. God would ideally want people to respond as God is asking us to do. Process thought suggests that God adjusts his/her lure according to ever changing circumstances; what this means in practice is that those who commit injustice are always given new opportunities by God to change their behavior. To the extent that one does change one's behavior accordingly--to the extent that the oppressor stops oppressing--then God is on that person's side. If they do not change their behavior, God does not give up, but instead continually offers new opportunities for change. Thus the sides that God takes are provisional--they depend on what we do.

When individuals or societies willfully chose act in certain ways that are contrary to the way God wants them to act, and when those actions create victims as a result, then divine will and individual will have clashed; by definition, God takes a side on behalf of the victims. A God who did not do would not be a just God.

One of the ways that we defy God is when we hurt others. When we hurt others through institutional or societal means, God's infinite and perfect empathy feels the pain of the victim. This perfect empathy is a key principle of process thought; God, according to this view, feels everyone's pains and everyone's joys. God does not want people to be hurt. Thus, once again, I conclude that God naturally takes the side of those who are hurt by institutionalized injustice. God's interest in greater inclusiveness and greater love involves luring people away from sexism, racism, homophobia, war, violence, and the other ills that plague society. God wants an end to victimization, a victimization that God actually experiences at the same time that the victims themselves do. One of the ways that God can lure us to become more inclusive is to appeal to our ability to feel empathy ourselves for what others feel, even if we feel empathy much less perfectly than God does. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of injustice are all ways of denying our own capacity for empathy. Once we put ourselves in other people's shoes, it is harder for us to dehumanize them by oppressing them.

It is easy, I suppose, to dismiss the importance of empathy as a path to justice. I am reminded of a New York Times op-ed column by Daniel Mendelsohn titled "Stolen Suffering", in which the author (rather derisively) criticized the ability of people to feel empathy for those who suffer from truly horrible tragedies. Mendelsohn claimed that anyone who pretends that they really know what victims are going through--those struck with AIDS, for example, or Holocaust victims--are effectively devaluing the reality of the pain that the actual victims experienced. Mendelsohn writes:

The facile assumption that we can literally “feel others’ pain” can be dangerous to our sense of who we are — and, more alarmingly, who the others are, too. “We all have AIDS,” a recent public-awareness campaign declared. Well, no, actually we don’t: and to pretend that we do, even rhetorically, debases the anguish of those who are stricken.

While it is true that none of us can truly and exactly understand what others are going through--according to process thought, only God fully is capable of that--Mendelsohn's argument effectively devalues the power of empathy. Our limitation lies in the fact that we can only imagine what others are going through at any given moment, because we are all prisoners of our own subjectivity. Yet what gives us the ability to imagine the pain of others is the fact that, even if we don't know what others are exactly experiencing at any given moment, we can extrapolate from our own past and present experiences, and from that, apply our human capacity for empathy, which ennobles the human spirit. It allows us to, in some sense, "feel for" what others go through. Take away our empathy, and our humanity is diminished or even stripped away. Sadism easily results when individuals don't empathize with others.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a landmark essay more than thirty years ago titled "What is it like to be a bat?" Though Nagel is an atheist, his essay has interesting implications for those who believe in God, and for the subject of empathy. The gist of the article was his argument against a philosophical reductionism that saw the mind-body problem as being explained by purely material causes. Where this applies to the question of empathy is that in making his argument, he brought in the fact that each conscious being, whether they be a bat or a human being or a Martian, has a subjective conscious experience that we can only make inferences about:

But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.

We may call this the subjective character of experience.

And Nagel's point is that each of is limited by our own subjectivity, which is to say our extrapolations about what others experience are only imaginatively conceived descriptions. None of us really knows what it is like to be a bat--let alone another human being:

To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals. On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like.

So if extrapolation from our own case is involved in the idea of what it is like to be a bat, the extrapolation must be incompletable. We cannot form more than a schematic conception of what it is like.

I think Nagel makes a valid point. And yet here is the amazing thing: despite our inability to really know what others experience, we still somehow have ability to make a huge leap and act and feel in ways that express a presumption of empathy. Our human capacity for empathy is, as Nagel suggests, incompletable. It is, in effect, a kind of shadow or a dim reflection of God's perfect and infinite empathy. Somehow, though, despite our limitations, we still find ourselves capable of acting as if we can put ourselves in other people's shoes. We try to extrapolate from our own suffering, and somehow we imagine that other people's suffering must be bad, too. To the extent that we do this, we are reacting to the divine lure.

In response to Mendelsohn's op-ed piece, a letter writer to the New York Times had this to say:

Many see empathy as total identification with the feelings and experience of another person. Yet empathy also deals with accepting another’s experience as totally foreign, individualized and unattainable.

When a person exits that cattle car at the National Holocaust Museum, it is impossible for him or her to “know what it was like.” Rather, as human beings, we have a duty to realize how little we know about what it was like.

Our sacred individuality is what makes us human, and interestingly enough, it is also what ties us all together.

Perhaps process theology would say that, ultimately, it is God's perfect empathy, and the creative divine lure that asks us to share in that empathy through acts of justice, that ties us all together.

A pastor moves on

Jim Burko, a leading figure in the Center for Progressive Christianity, is no longer the pastor of Sausalito Presbyterian Church. According to the church's web site, he resigned on 2/29/2008.

I hate it when that happens

The satirical newspaper The Onion offers this headline:

Shroud Of Turin Accidentally Washed With Red Shirt

The text of the article begins:

The Shroud of Turin, an ancient linen cloth believed to bear the image of Christ and considered by many clerics and devotees to be one of the holiest relics of the Christian faith, was inadvertently dyed a light shade of pink after being washed with a red T-shirt, sources reported Tuesday.

"Belief comes naturally and quickly; skepticism is slow and unnatural"

The March issue of Scientific American contains an article by Michael Shermer that cites a study published in the December 2007 Annals of Neurology:

This research supports Spinoza’s conjecture that most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity and that belief comes quickly and naturally, whereas skepticism is slow and unnatural. The scientific principle of the null hypothesis—that a claim is untrue unless proved otherwise—runs counter to our natural tendency to accept as true what we can comprehend quickly.

Shermer is a professional skeptic, and perhaps takes his skepticism farther than I would; I'm not sure that he is necessarily a fan of religion in general, for example. That being said, I think if it is the case that most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity, then he raises an interesting point, one that explains a great deal about the appeal of religious fundamentalism, with its lack of tolerance for ambiguity, metaphor, uncertainty and symbolism. But with Easter just around the corner, I think it also explains how it is that many people can come to believe that 2000 years ago a corpse was resuscitated, walked around for 40 days, and then apparently without even so much as a jetpack on his back was lifted vertically off the earth into the sky into a heavenly realm that is physically located above the clouds.

Alternatives to intercessory prayer

I wonder if people sometimes conceive of unanswered intercessory prayers as a case of God being an unhelpful concierge, as illustrated above in today's Pearls Before Swine comic strip.

Anne Lamott, who has just published her third book on faith, was interviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle the other day. She was asked, "I read somewhere that you say two prayers: 'Help me' and 'Thank you.' Which one do you say more often?" She answered,

I say them both equally. I also say a third prayer ... I go, "Whoa!" — in the most California way possible. Sometimes I say it when I step outside or when I look up — like I'm sitting in this hotel, and, I mean, it's like the Sistine Chapel here but in a Southern, Deep South kind of way. I was looking up before you called, and I thought, "Whoa!"

I suppose "Help me" could be used as an intercessory prayer, although I don't think that this is what she meant by it, because later in the interview, she said,

I remember something that really affected me years ago, when Arthur Ashe died. I saw a quote of his that said, "I'm not praying to be healed. I never once prayed to win a tennis match, and I'm not going to tell God what to do now." But, you know, he was just praying for the willingness to trust and surrender — "Thy will be done," and all that. And that really affected me. That is so beautiful, so "money where your mouth is." You don't pray to win tennis matches. You don't pray for them to get your room ready sooner, just because you have a sore throat and possibly tuberculosis.

I think that "Help me", "Thank you", and "Whoa!" all sound like good prayers to me. They are simple, they are honest, and they are to the point.

Intercessory Prayer

Thanks to DKBlog for this quote from Rabbi Harold Kushner on the subject of prayer:

If prayer worked the way many people think it does, no one would ever die, because no prayer is ever offered more sincerely than the prayer for life, for health and recovery from illness, for ourselves and for those we love.

People who pray for miracles usually don’t get miracles, any more than children who pray for bicycles, good grades, or boyfriends get them as a result of praying. But people who pray for courage, for strength to bear the unbearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of what they have lost, very often find their prayers answered. They discover that they have more strength, more courage than they ever knew themselves to have.

This quote summarizes why I have never liked the use of intercessory prayer in church services. I understand that, for many people, prayers for health or healing or the like are really ways of unloading onto God our concerns and fears, rather than serving as a bona fide attempt to convince God to intervene theistically and supernaturally to change the course of events. But even if this is the way some people feel about it, in my experience it is rarely stated that way explicitly in church services, and even the term "intercessory" (which is sometimes used in church) presumes that God will somehow "intercede" on our behalf if we ask "him" nicely enough. On the other hand, as Rabbi Kushner says, if we pray for courage or strength in the face of our fears, frailties, and difficulties, then we often find that in just talking to God we discover something inside ourselves that allows us to better face the world. In that sense, God can be a wonderful shoulder to cry on.

It was 13.73 billion years ago today

A supernaturally theistic God intervenes upon the world from the outside--so to speak, casting lightning bolts from the sky, as in today's Bizarro comic:



A panentheistic God, on the other hand, acts not on the world from the outside, but rather within and through the world, and has done since for the past 13.73 billion years, give or take 120 million years.



It was reported yesterday that scientists have been able to measure the age of the universe to even greater precision, which is where the figure of 13.73 billion years comes from. Which is to say that, from the time that the universe first emerged into a great evolutionary unfolding that we refer to as the Big Bang, I for one believe that God has spent the last 13.73 billion years participating in the universe's continuing evolution and development.

How much more marvelously inspiring I find it to be to consider that God participates creatively in the world by participating through the world, than to imagine a giant super-Father-like figure in the sky who occasionally acts upon it from the outside through the exercise of "his" brute, raw power.

More on progressive faith

The discussion in my previous posting between myself and Bruce Ledewitz was picked up by the blogger XPatriated Texan (XT) of the Street Prophets blog at Daily Kos. I would have left a comment there, but I first had to sign up at Daily Kos, and then I was informed that there is a ridiculous 24-hour waiting period before I could even leave a comment there. In the blogosophere, 24 hours might as well be an eon.

In my blog response to Bruce Ledewitz, I had alluded to his comment that "progressive faith" seems to have two meanings--one referring to those who are theologically orthodox but politically liberal or progressive, and another referring those who are theologically progressive (such as Marcus Borg or Dominic Crossan.) That distinction wasn't really the focus of my posting, since I agreed with him on this point (and I had discussed this earlier in response to a blog posting by Jim Burklo of the Center for Progressive Christianity). However, XT wanted to focus more specifically on the what progressive faith really means. He defines it thusly:

"Progressive Faith" is simply those of us who seek to further the tradition of revelation by reconciling it with reason and science. It does not mean, necessarily, that earlier thinkers were wrong, only that they were not entirely correct.

Where things get interesting in my view is what happens when you actually do seriously undertake the process of reconciling revelation with reason and science. Once you go down that road, I would argue that a paradigm change becomes absolutely necessary. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you. I think that paradigm changes are just as much a part of religious history as they are of scientific history. Christians who honor their roots in the Hebrew Bible no longer believe that Yahweh is a tribal Deity, or that dead people go to Sheol. It is almost trite to cite Thomas Kuhn here, but I would argue that the Enlightenment brought on a crisis in the Christian faith that is still being played out, one that can only be resolved by a paradigm change that re-examines the traditional assumptions about a theistically interventionist God and about the more extraordinary and miraculous claims that are often made in the name of faith.

Of course this process of reconciling faith with reason and science means accepting the tools of modern scholarly biblical research. But I believe that in a post-Enlightenment world it also means looking at God in a different way, and at the stories and myths of Christianity's founding traditions with new eyes. The implications for me are that we cannot believe in a world of supernatural theistic intervention that violates the normal physical laws of nature. It means not believing that Jesus's corpse was resuscitated and that he therefore walked around on earth for 40 days after he was crucified. When John Shelby Spong says that "Christianity must change or die," he means that for it to remain an intellectually viable faith, we need to accommodate theology with a post-Enlightenment understanding of the world.

Pastor John Shuck has offered some sage words to offer on this subject. He recommends the book Jesus is Dead by Robert M. Price for this Easter season,

as a service to preachers who are trying to figure out ways to proclaim this mystery and as a service to churchgoers who dread attending another sermon in which the preacher berates people's intelligence by telling them that in order to be a Christian they have to believe that the corpse of the historical Jesus came back to life."

Yay, John! He goes on to say that, as Presbyterian pastor of the Reformed tradition,

I make that extravagantly humble and unprovable assertion in part because our deeply rich, varied, and open-ended tradition is always in danger of being hijacked by those who lack adequate understanding of science, history, and theology.

For instance, if Christians want to make the theological claim that God creates the world, that claim will lack any credibility unless they also affirm evolutionary theory.

If Christians want to make the theological claim that Jesus is alive, that claim will lack any credibility unless they also affirm historical scholarship of the New Testament.

John then lays it out beautifully:

[Price] shows throughout these essays that the "resurrection accounts" are fictions. It is really pretty obvious. The Jesus Seminar scholars concluded the same thing. The more bashful scholars, once you finally get them to move beyond their dissembling, also affirm that, yes, the accounts of the empty tomb are more indebted to creative storytelling than to historical reportage.

It is difficult for many Christians to accept that. A Jesus who is not "historical" cannot be real and worthy of Christian worship, so the argument goes. For some, that is true. Price is an atheist. That is his choice. I don't think one has to make that choice. I do not.

In a similar way, some scientists are atheists. Some are not. Whether or not one chooses to be an atheist or atheist, or a person of a particular covenant or not, is independent of science and history. I simply argue that the church is not served by bad science (ie. creationism) and bad history (ie. false claims for the historicity of the resurrection).

If the church can't take it, it deserves to die. Those of us who proclaim the theological mystery of the Risen Christ would do well to make that claim credible by appreciating true scholarship of Christian origins.

I agree with John that rejecting bad science and bad history lie at the core of progressive faith. So for me, progressive faith isn't just about accepting evolution or the Big Bang theory; it also inevitably must move beyond any literal acceptance of mythological stories about a physically resurrected Jesus walking on the earth. This is not something that I have seen in a lot of churches that describe themselves as "progressive", although there are exceptions, as Jim Burklo and John Shuck demonstrate.

Who gets to define the boundaries of faith?

I ran across the blog of an author named Bruce Ledewitz who promotes something that he calls "Hallowed Secularism". Ledewitz rejects organized religion but sets himself apart from militant atheists of the Hitchens variety, instead advocating a sort of secular spirituality that is disassociated with the dogmas of traditional religion, and which allows itself to conceive of God in metaphorical terms, or at least as a kind of "shorthand way of claiming a kind of meaningfulness and order in the universe." You might think that I would be in broad sympathy with his goals, but in fact he wrote a critique of progressive faith that, unfortunately, reflects a set of assumptions about what constitutes "legitimate" religion that comes right out of the orthodox party line.

I do give him credit for noting the fact that "progressive" religion actually refers to two different kinds of faith--one that is theologically orthodox but politically progressive, and the other which is progressive theologically (and probably progressive politically as well). But when he discusses the latter form of theologically progressive faith, he unfortunately trots out the typical conservative assumptions about the nature of "true" religious faith--characterizing progressive religion as "insubstantial", having "few followers", and--this is where he goes badly off course--he goes on to assert:

It does not work as Christian thought because the empty tomb cannot be regarded as mere metaphor. It does not work as Christian thought because the empty tomb cannot be regarded as mere metaphor. That Christian truth is meant to be historical, even if mysterious. Jesus really must have arisen from the dead. Discovering Jesus’ remains would be a Christian catastrophe.

Naturally, he is just taking for granted the definition of "Christian" faith that certain defenders of orthodoxy proclaim. In particular, in parroting the notion that a Christian faith cannot exist, or cannot somehow be legitimate, without a literal resurrection of Jesus, he seems to have let orthodox Christianity decide for him and the rest of us what kind of religious faith we are allowed to have.

When the pastor of a church that I sporadically attend was conducting sessions based on the "Living the Questions" DVD, I recall when she was concerned about how the people in attendance might react to Marcus Borg's statement on the video that it doesn't matter whether you choose to believe that Jesus was literally, physically resurrected or not. She had no problem with that statement, herself being a fan of Marcus Borg, but she was afraid that some of her congregation in the audience might find that statement unacceptable, or that it simply called into question their fundamental presuppositions about Christianity. Instead, it turned out that no one there seemed fazed by Borg's remark.

The very existence of people like Marcus Borg--who sells a fair number of books, who travels around the country speaking in churches, who blogs on the Washington Post/ Newsweek web site "On Faith", and so forth--calls into question Ledewitz's assumptions about what kind of faith can and cannot exist, and in turn it calls into question his assumption that the only way to find a "hallowed" life when you reject orthodox faith is by rejecting all forms of organized religion. Since progressive religion doesn't fit into his paradigm, he disses it as having no legitimacy or substance. This is a problem not unlike seen with militant atheists, who also casually dismiss progressive faith because it doesn't fit into their own paradigm.

The comment about having "few followers" is rather interesting in and of itself. (I wonder how many followers his "hallowed secularism" movement has.) In any case, this is not a race. There are no winners and losers here, based on who gets the most to sign up. Those of us who choose a path that is meaningful for us may just happen to do so because it speaks to our spiritual condition, not because we want to be on the winning team.

I suppose that the lesson to learn from Ledewitz's remarks is that it isn't just the militant atheists among the non-faithful who seem to have allowed a certain kind of religious dogma decide what is a legitimate form of faith or not.

Religion as a metaphor

Last Sunday's New York Times contained an article by Dana Jennings, a convert to Judaism, who wrote about the recent Pew Trust report on Americans changing their religious affiliations.

I particularly liked it when he said that

religions, if nothing else, are metaphors for how we choose to lead our lives, how we choose to defy the empty cultural whirlwind.

Our lives begin in mystery ... and end in mystery. In between, we try to explain ourselves to ourselves, all 6.5 billion of us who are wedged onto this improbable planet — 6.5 billion potential paths toward the holy.

Judaism is my faith, my road, my metaphor — but my metaphor isn’t any better than your metaphor, and vice versa — which still shocks the 10-year-old country boy who lurks in my heart.

Who's wishy-washy?

Sometimes I stumble across blogs for one reason or another and read them cursorily, perhaps assuming that they are more progressive than they turn out to be. One blog that I discovered to be quite a bit more orthodox than I initially realized has cited a quote from Richard Rorty, a non-believer, as ammunition against religious liberalism. I think the use of this quote by an atheist against liberalism illustrates once again the sort of curious alliance of convenience that sometimes exists between religious orthodoxy and atheists, both of whom often share certain assumptions about what makes a faith "legitimate". Here is what Rorty said:

I'm delighted that liberal theologians do their best to do what Pio Nono said shouldn't be done -- try to accommodate Christianity to modern science, modern culture, and democratic society. If I were a fundamentalist Christian, I'd be appalled by the wishy-washiness of their version of the Christian faith. But since I am a non-believer who is frightened of the barbarity of many fundamentalist Christians (e.g., their homophobia), I welcome theological liberalism. Maybe liberal theologians will eventually produce a version of Christianity so wishy-washy that nobody will be interested in being a Christian any more. If so, something will have been lost, but probably more will have been gained.

Here Rorty shares the assumption that many orthodox Christians also share about what constitutes legitimate faith. Many atheists just seem to defer to the orthodoxy (or, worse still, fundamentalists) when it comes to defining what "real" faith is, and anything that deviates from that is illegitimate and probably just one short step from atheism. As Rorty puts it, such faith is merely "wishy-washy". Of course, orthodoxy by its very nature likes to claim for itself the sole right to determine what form of faith is legitimate. But it is unfortunate that so many non-believers will readily defer to the orthodoxy and implicitly accept its own claims for itself as the sole arbiter of theological legitimacy.

Curiously, John Shelby Spong was then offered up as an example of this sort of "wishy-washy" faith. The idea that Spong, who is one of the more dogmatic proponents of his own brand of progressive Christianity, is "wishy-washy" seems rather curious. One thing he is not is "wishy-washy".

Another curious thing is that, in the comments to that posting, it was put forth that when religious progressives find certain theologies objectionable, they are wrong to oppose them nonetheless, because the very fact that a theology is objectionable is itself an argument for its legitimacy(!) This same argument popped up again in a later posting in the same blog.

God forbid that we have a theology that makes sense to us!

Church shopping and the Church Alumni Society

Marcus Borg responded in this way to the recent Pew Forum survey that revealed that a significant percentage of Americans have switched their religious affiliation from the one they were brought up in:

I think this is healthy. It suggests that many people have moved beyond their socialization within a particular form of Christianity to a thoughtful (and sometimes agonizing) re-assessment of what it means to be Christian.

And I suspect that most of these have moved from a more conventional and conservative form of Christianity to a more progressive form. This is encouraging.

I appreciate his optimism, but I wonder how much of this church shopping really does have to do with people finding their way to progressive faith. Certainly, there is a great deal of dissatisfaction among people who were brought up within certain forms of Christian orthodoxy and who then realized that they could no longer accept the dogmas they were once taught. But how many of those people have switched from a given affiliation to a more progressive one, and how many have dropped out of Christian churches altogether? In other words, how many people are successfully finding progressive Christian denominations they can call home, and how many have instead simply given up and instead joined the ranks of the Church Alumni Society?

My recent series of blog entries concerning Bart Ehrman illustrates this point. Many people who realize that the old orthodoxy is not tenable (like Ehrman) do not find their way to progressive Christianity. Instead, they just give up.

It is not the resurrection stories that make Easter

I found this quote from James M. Robinson's book, The Gospel of Jesus:

It is not the resurrection stories that make Easter, but the other way around. It was his disciples experiencing Jesus still making his point, as a gospel still real even after his death, that created the Easter stories. So that is the only valid form of Christian faith today. Easter faith is taking Jesus at his word, that God is a heavenly Father who really cares, who reigns for us and through us in our daily lives. Easter was not just the launching of another religion of a dying and rising God, of which the ancient world had already too many. It was the disciples' renewed experience of Jesus saying again that God continues to be there for us, and for others through us, in spite of the horror of "Good" Friday. That is indeed good news, the gospel of Jesus risen from the dead. (p.207)

I like this passage because I think it gets to the heart of the meaning of progressive Christianity. The first sentence summarizes an essential point: Easter is not about the mythological Easter narratives that appeared in Matthew, Luke, and John; rather, the mythological narratives are about Easter. Think about this for a second. What he is saying--and I agree--is that the literal truth of the narratives of Jesus walking around after he died is irrelevant to the Christian faith. It isn't those narratives that matter, but what those narratives point to.

And what those narratives point to is this--that the core of theological message, which Jesus did not only teach but lived out as radically and fully as possible--rang true for those early disciples and actually continued on, despite Jesus having died. And the message that rang true was, as the above quote indicates, "that God is a heavenly Father who really cares, who reigns for us and through us in our daily lives." Particularly, "through us in our daily lives" means that seeking the Kingdom of God isn't about obtaining some reward in the afterlife, but this Kingdom is in fact here with us now, whenever choose to live out God's will among us. God isn't a remote supernatural being outside the everyday world we experience, but acts through us in our own actions.

After Jesus died, his followers came to the conclusion that Jesus's life and message about the Kingdom of God were still valid, even if Jesus himself had been executed for having proclaimed it. They continued to experience Jesus calling them forth even though he was physically gone from their lives. This was the Easter experience--this was the "resurrection". Only later did the stories of an empty tomb and of Jesus walking on the road to Emmaus, and so forth, emerge to give a narrative framework to this Easter experience. But it was Easter that came first, before those stories emerged.

This is very much the inverse of what that bastion of orthodoxy, the Nicene Creed proclaimed. This creed focused almost exclusively on the supposedly miraculous events that bookended his life on earth while ignoring the message and lifestyle that he proclaimed in between those bookends of birth and crucifixion. Thus Christianity became distorted by this creed, which presumed that Jesus's ministry on earth was merely a prelude that pointed to his resurrection. Instead, let us consider that Jesus's resurrection pointed back to his life. His message lives on, even if Jesus is dead.

Coercion versus Persuasion

Interest in process theology spans across many denominations. For example, I found an article titled "Process Theology and Me" in an Adventist magazine. The author, David Larson, provides ten reasons why process theology interests him. Many of them are quite good, but in particular he then goes on in the article to focus on reason 8: "It claims that persuading others requires more true power than coercing them."

This relates to the quote from Majorie Suchocki that I cited in my previous posting, where she writes, "To be able to elicit the willing cooperation of another is a far greater power than simply to force the other to do as one wishes."

David Larson goes on to write,

I believe it does take much more true power to convince individuals who possess genuine freedom to do something than to force them to comply. Some people say that the God of process thought is “weak.” I disagree. But this debate is less about how much power God has and more about what kind of power we value most.

Whitehead wrote about “the deeper idolatry.” This occurs when we make God seem more like one of the tyrannical and capricious Caesars of ancient Rome than Jesus of Nazareth.

This analogy with ancient tyrannies is quite pertinent, I believe. I can't help but wonder if this model of Divine power through coercion that embodies the traditional concept of omnipotence comes from a direct analogy with the tyrannical, authoritarian regimes that were the prevailing political model of the ancient world. When the only model in human experience that you have for power is that of the king, emperor, or other ruler who acts by dint of coercion, then it is natural to think that the greatest force in the universe would act analogously.

I think it is easy to become theologically addicted to the notion of Divine omnipotence, to want to believe in a God who acts by exercising raw, coercive force. Yet persuasion strikes me as a higher, more sublime form of power than raw force. Maybe this need for coercive power comes from a desire for quick, magic solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Wouldn't be nice if problems could just be wished away?

The current issue of Creative Transformation contains an article by Bruce Epperly titled "Praying for a Miracle? A Father Faces His Son's Cancer". The author writes of the prayers that he and his family expressed in the face of his son's health crisis. He notes:

While in the week following Matt's hospitalization and diagnosis, I longed for a supernatural intervention to deliver my son from cancer, I knew deep down that hope for a supernatural interruption of the steady laws of nature, even those that governed the growth of cancer cells and the response to medical treatment, was not an option for me either spiritually or theologically. I knew that God would not single out my beloved child for a supernatural intervention, while neglecting the beloved children of Darfur parents, the parents of other children diagnosed with cancer, other persons at Georgetown University Hospital being treated for cancer, and adult children whose parents have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. I also knew that if God could supernaturally save my son from the immanent threat of cancer, God must also, in some way, have been the source of the germ cell cancer we were now trying to eradicate.

This insightful statement summarizes why I don't believe that God "intercedes" on behalf of those who say intercessory prayers. That isn't to say that prayers are not useful. Epperly himself believes in the value of prayer, writing:

In this long journey to daylight, we will continue to pray for a "miracle," but the miracle we seek comes from opening to God's energy of love in the midst of the valley of cancer and chemotherapy. The miracle of God's healing touch does not deliver us from the path ahead; but gives us the energy, inspiration, courage, and wisdom to be God's healing partners as we walk through the valley.

Some might suggest that my inability to expect, or even pray for, a supernatural intervention on our son's behalf is a reflection of my own lack of faith. But, I believe that prayer and trust without guarantees is, in contrast, a profound testimony to faith in a God who does not play favorites or undermine cosmic regularity in order to answer our prayers, but who seeks the well-being of all creation, including our son, and the children of countless other loving and worried parents. A God who cannot supernaturally intervene to cure cancer can still bring healing, comfort, and companionship in and through chemotherapy, prayers, touch, tears, love, and hugs. Perhaps that is miracle enough! The miracle of God's healing presence, nurturing us and luring us toward wholeness, regardless of what the future will bring for our child and our family.

I believe that once we shed the hope for supernatural intervention, once we have released ourselves from the bondage of attachment to the power of a hoped-for rescuing coercive force, we can then face life's troubles with a profound sense of appreciation for the power of God's nurturing love.

Freedom and Persuasive Love

Majorie Suchocki's essay, "What is Process Theology", available on the Process and Faith web site, includes this commentary on God's persuasive role and the freedom that exists in the universe:

In the relational categories of process thought, God creates with the world. We actually think this is a much stronger way to express God’s power. A children’s fable once told about a rivalry between the wind and the sun. Which one would be able to remove the coat of that man down there on the road? The wind thought that it could, and so it blew and blew and blew with great force. Unfortunately, the strength of the wind was such that the man just drew his coat more firmly around himself. Then it was the sun’s turn. The sun just beamed its rays down upon the man until finally he grew quite warm—and removed his coat. In process terms, the wind worked coercively, trying to force its will upon the man, but the sun worked persuasively, luring the man’s cooperative action. To be able to elicit the willing cooperation of another is a far greater power than simply to force the other to do as one wishes.

God creates through persuasive power. Don’t we experience it that way? We don’t see God yanking things and people around as if they were puppets! The tradition accounts for this by saying that God gave people freedom. Process people think that freedom isn’t an occasional thing limited to just some aspects of creation, but that something like freedom pervades all existence. Every part of God’s creation has some element of freedom. What we call “freedom” ranges from very low levels of indeterminately random events to very high levels of conscious decision-making. And there are many grades in between. God works with each element in existence, in every time and place, offering possibilities for achieving the good. Finally, the world determines what it does with God’s possibilities in every moment. Freedom means the ability to participate at some level in what one becomes.

If we take freedom seriously, then we must talk about three powers of creation. There is the power of the past, which simply means that where we are and when we are makes a difference to who we can become. We must take account of these past influences, because we simply do not exist in a vacuum. We exist relationally. In a sense, we take the creative influences of the past into ourselves in every moment.

But we also take the creative power of God into ourselves at every moment. In this second creative power, God offers us a future, a way of becoming oneself that is not quite like any other way ever achieved before. God’s creativity is the power of transformation, of hope, of a new future. God’s influence toward the future takes account of the past that affects us, offering a way of dealing with that past.

And the third creative power, of course, is ourselves. Finally, we decide what we will become. We are responsible for dealing with the actual past received from the world and the possible future received from God. The world as we know it is, in every moment, the end result of this creative process: the power of the past, which is the power of the world; the power of the future, which is the power of God, and the power of the present, which is our own power to integrate these influences into who we are becoming in every moment. Our freedom is to take these three creative powers and to use them. The choice of how we use them is ours.

So yes, God is by all means Creator, calling the world into existence in every moment. But God creates with the world, not independently of the world. The world enters into something like a creative dance with God, emerging anew in every moment as it takes its past and God’s future into its becoming self.

The power of persuasive love

In the Irreverent Epiphanies blog, which is authored by two San Francisco Bay Area Episcopal priests, comes another reaction to Bart Ehrman's interview with Terry Gross. In response to Ehrman's conclusions, the writer asks the question, "Is God all powerful, or all good? Because logically God couldn't be both." Here is the answer that the writer gives:

I simply don't believe God is all powerful in the traditional sense. I don't believe God controls things like natural disasters or individual fates. Nor do I believe that God allows evil, in the letting-Satan-test-Job sense. I believe about God's power what is described in the New Zealand Prayer book's translation of the Lord's Prayer: God is the one that reigns in the power that is love.

That is the kind of power God has. God's power is the power to invite each one of us, in each moment, into personal transformation and into actions that transform the world into God's kingdom. In this view, prayer is the cultivation of a mindfulness that allows us to see that invitation and to take it-- to be transformed and transforming-- Christ's hands in the world-- the human-power behind God's power of love. I suppose that means in the kingdom of God, there will still be tsunamis, but not lynchings. Shit still happens, but how we react is different. I have evolved this way of thinking by reading process theologian like Marjorie Suchocki.

More on Bart Ehrman and theodicy

Since the theological problem of suffering became the subject of some discussion in my previous posting, I wanted to recap the problem as I see it.

I agree with Bart Ehrman that the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God is not compatible with the existence of suffering that we see in the universe. I don't believe that the "free will" defense in this context is credible, for a host of reasons. I can therefore see three solutions to this conundrum, any one of which would solve the problem. They are:

1) God is not benevolent, or
2) God is not omnipotent, or
3) God does not exist.

I would note that option 2, the notion that God is not omnipotent, is not restricted to process theology, although that is one form of panentheism that certainly takes this view (the process theologian Charles Hartshorne once wrote a book titled Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes). Some modern day figures in progressive Christianity who are not process theologians also reject the notion of divine omnipotence. Marcus Borg, for example, who is a panentheist, rejects what he calls "supernatural theism". John Shelby Spong critiques what he calls simply "theism" in favor of some sort of Tillich-inspired theology. And among non-Christians, the Jewish rabbi Harold Kushner has written several books about God that reject the notion of omnipotence. (Many Jews have had a hard time reconciling divine omnipotence with the reality of the Holocaust.) The point is that while I cite process theology as an example of a response to Ehrman, it is hardly the only conceivable way that you can present God as not being omnipotent.

Among those three solutions listed above, the last alternative--that God does not exist--is therefore not the only possible solution to the problem of suffering. Believers in God don't have to resort to what some might consider rather desperate or lame excuses for why an omnipotent and benevolent God allows suffering. You can solve the problem and rescue religious faith by rejecting the view that God is omnipotent. It would not have been necessary for Ehrman to stop believing in God in order for him to reconcile himself to the problem of suffering.

To me, there are compelling arguments against the doctrine of omnipotence, not the least of which is the problem of suffering. I also think that we live in a post-Enlightenment world of physical laws, and the notion of divine intervention from the outside is not consistent with a post-Enlightment world view. Thus I consider non-omnipotence to be almost a kind of starting point for my theology. It both solves the problem of suffering and removes the philosophically untenable "God of the Gaps" who intervenes from the outside only in those circumstances we haven't yet figured out natural explanations for.

Indeed, I lean towards the position that God is not omnipotent but nevertheless benevolent. Now it is true that by accepting as a given that God must be benevolent, I am probably making a leap of faith. In theory, one could consider the existence of a God who exists but is not benevolent. But for me, that cannot serve as the basis for positive religious faith. I do believe that good exists in the world, and if there a supreme and ultimate reality, I think that this good springs forth from it. I could imagine a anthropomorphic demiurge who was not benevolent--but not an infinite presence who invoked life and who stands behind Being itself. This supreme and ultimate reality is what I call God. To me, to borrow a concept from the Ontological argument, God is that than which nothing is greater (or can be conceived to be greater); and I believe that which is greater than anything else must necessarily be defined in terms of love. This may just be my own bias in this matter. So be it. I think that love is greater than evil. Ultimately, as I have argued before, I think that "God" is a meta-narrative that people use to make sense of the universe, and for me, this is the working framework for existence that makes the most sense.

Bart Ehrman

As I listened to Terry Gross's interview with Bart Ehrman today, I was struck with how disappointing, yet not unexpected, his outlook on Christianity was. Ehrman is an ex-evangelical Christian, and yet again, like so many others who left conservative Christianity, he shows himself to have changed teams without having essentially altered his earlier, narrower understanding of what Christianity is or what God is or can be. Ehrman states that his reason for becoming an agnostic was the problem of theodicy--which is understandable, since the question of suffering is indeed a serious problem with the supernaturally theistic God of conservative Christian theology. Yet it was clear throughout the interview that Ehrman could not wrap his mind around any way of approaching the issue from a faithful perspective other than via the evangelical mindset he came from. Since he rejected the evangelical mindset he came from, he thus rejected religious faith altogether.

At some point late in the interview, Terry Gross finally asked the question that I was waiting for--namely, had he considered either another religion, or, more to the point as far as I was concerned, another concept of God who was not theistically interventionist. He rather casually dismissed the idea of any concept of God other than the omnipotent one that he more or less took for granted, suggesting that anything other than that sort of God would be so incomprehensible as to be meaningless--something that I for one, not to mention many panentheists, process theologians, and others, would seriously dispute. For all practical purposes, throughout the interview, he assumed a certain definition of God; while grudgingly acknowledging that God might not conform to that definition, he apparently had not bothered to explore any such theology. Yet, one solution to the conundrum of suffering that he had agonized over would certainly have been solved simply by altering his conception of Divinity--I would suggest, in particular, by rejecting Divine omnipotence.

I found this same sort of mindset in play as he discussed the Bible's various takes on the problem of theodicy during the history of its composition. He correctly notes that the Bible approached the problem from several angles, and yet he never really seemed to appreciate this historical evolution of ideas as an insightful process--of people trying to make sense of the world and of God; instead, he simply dismissed all of it as simple proof that the Bible is "wrong" and not to be trusted as an infallible guide--thus belying the evangelical background that he came from. Like many people from that background, he still seems to take an either-or approach towards the Bible--either it is an infallible guide, or it is useless (except for Ecclesiastes, which he does like). I could not help but contrast Ehrman's attitude towards the varying ways that the Bible addresses these questions of theodicy to the approach that Marcus Borg uses. Both scholars would agree that the Bible took varying and often contradictory approaches to the problem of theodicy; but whereas Ehrman saw it all as a failed effort, Borg found insight in the struggle and the process that was illuminated by the evolving ideas found in the Bible.

According to the book excerpt from Ehrman's latest book that is printed on the NPR web site, he writes that

about nine or ten years ago I finally admitted defeat, came to realize that I could no longer believe in the God of my tradition, and acknowledged that I was an agnostic: I don't "know" if there is a God; but I think that if there is one, he certainly isn't the one proclaimed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the one who is actively and powerfully involved in this world. And so I stopped going to church.

Here he commits the evangelical fallacy of assuming that Judeo-Christian tradition has ever just proclaimed a single theology about God's nature. In fact, the concept of God in the Bible was a work in progress, and remains so. The Bible showed an evolution from that of Yahweh as a tribal deity to God as a universal Deity of all humankind. There is no reason why we cannot continue that process today, standing on the shoulders of those who preceded us. That is how we can have feminist theology, liberation theology, process theology, and creation spirituality, to name just a few components of the broader stream of Christian faith.

A living faith tradition is not a single, dogmatic party line; it is instead a constellation of intertwined and evolving beliefs. This is not something that conservative Christians really understand, and, unfortunately, neither do many former conservative Christians.

When ignorance is a virtue

John Shuck quotes a letter to the editor of a newspaper from a creationist pastor, which includes the following sentence:

"I would rather be scientific ignorant (sic) and have my children as such than to be a conformer to the worldly view of evolution."

The natural world and God's benevolence

Here is a quote from James McGrath's blog:

If one had to believe that God directly created parasites to feast on other organisms and devour them alive, it would lead to a far more problematic view of God than evolution does. One simply cannot avoid rethinking one's views about God in light of scientific knowledge, but without evolution, the things we know about biological organisms might necessitate the abandonment of any notion of a benevolent deity.

I think this is an interesting point. It seems to me that the simplest way to reconcile the existence of God with the existence of, for example, parasites that feast on other organisms--not to mention all the other messy aspects of the natural world, like death and tornadoes and kidney stones--is to accept that the natural order in all its details was not the outcome of a predetermined divine blueprint that God conceived and implemented from top to bottom.

In order to reconcile the imperfections of our natural world with a perfect God, I could imagine a few possible explanations, many of which I don't consider tenable. I am sure there are others, but here are some possible proposals that come to mind:

* An omnipotent God really did create this world as it is in full detail, down to the lowest parasite, but despite the seemingly imperfect nature of things this is actually the best of all possible worlds (a la Leibnitz), and is the result of a perfect Divine plan that we just cannot understand. Every complex system has unintended consequences if you tweak just one little thing; take away one bad thing, and you instead get something else that is worse. So God made all sorts of compromises, and this is the best he could come up with. (Somehow, the idea that this is the "best God could come up with" doesn't really sound like a ringing endorsement of God's abilities, but maybe that's just me.)

Or:

* An omnipotent God created a slightly different sort of world that really was perfect, but then human sin altered the creation somehow and made it "depraved". Presumably the "depraved" world we know is not too radically different from the perfect world that God created; so, for example, in a perfect world, creatures that resemble us humans would walk on a world that would resemble our earth, perhaps even bound to that earth (so they walked instead of flew off into space) by physical laws that would resemble our gravity. But these humans in this perfect world wouldn't die or feel pain. And if the lamb would lie down with the lion, that means that creatures resembling our current lions and lambs would exist in this perfect world, with the difference being that the former would not eat the latter. It is as if God created a perfect oil painting, but then someone spilled a few drops of turpentine on it before the paint fully dried. (This point of view seems derived from a time when the Genesis story of Adam's Fall was taken to be literal history, but even today some Christians, even some who believe in evolution, take this position. It seems to me more feasible to take this view if you are a hardcore creationist. Otherwise, how or why the first human sinners managed to retroactively change the very physical laws of the universe, which were formed billions of years at the time of the Big Bang, long before any sinners were even born, isn't exactly explained.)

Or:

* An omnipotent God created the universe, using evolution as the mechanism through which we got the world we have today, and the world today thus reflects God's exact plan. God planned out the details, but the execution was slow and deliberate rather than immediate. This is essentially just a refinement of the first explanation above, except that it tries to reconcile this with the fact that we know that the universe evolved into its present state after billions of years since the Big Bang. (As to why God chose such a tedious, not to mention messy, process, complete with evolutionary dead ends, suffering, parasites, and all the rest-- since this God is omnipotent and could just wish the world into existence--isn't clear. )

Last, but not least, here is the position that I favor:

* A non-omnipotent God evoked the universe into being. Evolution is the natural result of the creative processes of cosmic development in place since the time of the Big Bang. God did not plan out the exact and full course of evolutionary development from the beginning. Instead, at each moment in time God offered the best creative outcome for that moment, which may or may not have actually taken place in response to God's lure. Because God could not control the outcome of each individual event, God then had to take stock of the new situation after each moment and respond accordingly with new divine lures to try to take the universe forward a little further. God is thus not directly responsible for the existence of, to name an example, parasites. When God created the universe, God did recognize the full possibility that the natural order would eventually lead to things like parasites, but God was willing to take that chance 14 billions years ago because he/she believed that the benefits of a universe that could eventually produce conscious creatures outweighed the potential problems. Because God is not omnipotent, every last detail of the natural order is not the direct product of a divine blueprint. Instead, God lure the universe forward despite its own imperfections, working in response to the state of the universe at each moment.

Ultimately, I think that if one is going to believe in God, the last of those possibilities makes the most sense. As James McGrath points out, evolution provides us with the way out of the theodicy conundrum--but I would argue that this is true only if we don't try to produce some sort of hybrid theology that hopes to merge a supernatural theism with an evolutionary understanding of the universe.

Evolution and Theodicy

I recently cited the case of a conservative Baptist pastor who offered an objection to evolution first and foremost because he feared that belief in it would cause his own theological edifice to come crashing down.

Someone like that seems like an easy target for criticism, since this attitude clearly comes across as a prescription for ignorance--it represents a simple "don't confuse me with the facts" sort of attitude. Still, in one sense, this pastor had a point. Evolution does have theological implications if you allow yourself to think them through; and maybe the old way of viewing things does need to be changed. But rather than run away from these implications, as he would have Christians do, I think it is better to face them square on. But do most Christians really do that?

Amy Frykholm has written an article in Christian Century that addresses this very subject. She points out that

knowledge of evolutionary history raises questions of theodicy in an especially disconcerting way. Evolution reveals a vast history of unfathomable waste, loss, extinction, suffering and death in the natural world. What has God been up to all these millennia? And what is God up to now? If we believe that God oversees creation, then God's way of doing it through evolution seems strange and even appalling.

Over the 4.5 billion years of our planet's existence, 98 percent of species have become extinct. Extinction is written into the pattern of life. What does it mean, then, to talk about a God who cares for "each sparrow that falls"? How can we think of God's care for the world in light of the millions of years of suffering and death that have been a feature of evolution in the natural world?

I think that a lot of more theologically orthodox or conservative Christians who nevertheless accept the fact of evolution have danced around these sorts of questions. But Ms. Frykholm is absolutely correct that 14 billion years of cosmic and biological evolution has been slow, messy, painful, and fraught with dead ends. How do you reconcile this with an omnipotent God?

The points that she raises, however, become conundrums only if you accept that very premise of divine omnipotence. Take omnipotence out of the equation, and these problems evaporate. The question that remains, though, is what kind of positive theology can one formulate in its stead? Interestingly enough, in her article, she never mentions process theology by name, although she does at one point cite the theologian Philip Clayton, who talks about God's actions as a "divine lure", which sounds an awful lot like process theology to me:

Nature can be "biologically constrained without being biologically determined," he says. He calls the divine-creature interaction "the divine lure." As evolution occurs, more complex structures emerge. And the more complex forms that emerge are not reducible to a mere compilation of the kinds that come before them. In the space between what is and what is becoming, God might be said to act.

Theologies that emphasize God as deeply involved in natural, open-ended processes seem better able to make sense of evolution than do the classical accounts of an omnipotent God. On the other hand, if Jenson is right, perhaps what is needed is a richer notion of the God in whom these processes occur.

Traditional theistic conceptions of God had him/her acting on the universe omnipotently from the outside. Process theology, and other theologies like it, consider God from a panentheistic perspective--which is to say that God acts through the universe, which is in turn contained within God. Ms. Frykholm cites a Lutheran theologian, Robert Jenson, who suggests this very thing.

In this kind of theology, we have a God who patiently acts to evoke the universe forward, present in every moment as a creative presence. Creation is a continual series of acts, an improvisatory process in which God plays a persuasive but not controlling role. In such a universe, the free will that is built into that process necessarily takes place over a slow, difficult trajectory. The suggestion here is that God considered it preferable to undergo the painstaking creative process of evoking the universe into its present state, despite all the biological extinctions and suffering and death, than for there to have been no life-sustaining universe at all.

Leaving behind conservative Christianity

Each of us who was brought up in conservative Christianity but who no longer accepts its premises has a different story to tell. For some of us, the experience has left scars; yet for others, it has been possible to make a smoother transition to progressive religious belief.

Two recent examples in the blogsophere explore this question. Matthew of Liberal Jesus explains why he is taking a break from church, and UU minister Ms. Kitty explores the question of why people reject conservative religious paths.

Two kinds of human needs

As far as I can tell, Reverend Ricky doesn't seem to archive his sermons on his web site, so I can only link to his newest sermon, which in this case pertains to Evolution Weekend. Because I can only link to his latest sermon, that means that this link will presumably point to a completely different sermon in the near future. In any case, in his most recent sermon, he addresses, among other things, the respective roles of science and religion.

He argues that science and religion were invented to satisfy two human needs, respectively: the human need for understanding, and the human need for meaning:

As we move through the world we’re constantly looking to satisfy both of those needs. We want to understand what and how, but we also want to know why and what for?

Science only gives us half of the picture. And people who give too much honor to science sometimes end up concluding the universe is meaningless and purposeless and random and uncaring, because that’s the way science portrays it. It’s easy to forget that science describes the universe the way it does because that’s the only vocabulary science has. Science has nothing to say about meaning and purpose, but it’s silence should not be read as denial. It’s not just no comment, it’s that science can’t even hear the question. The randomness of evolution doesn’t mean that the universe is random, only that if there is a purpose behind evolution it’s beyond the scope of science ever to reveal. Science itself doesn’t say that meaning and values and goals and caring are an illusion, only that science doesn’t have a way of investigating those.

Religion is a help with those topics, and thank God, because we need those things in our lives. But religion, too is only half the picture. The tools by which mystics intuit the nature of ultimate reality are not very efficient as tools for understanding mundane reality. And the general, abstract, metaphorical, symbolic language that religions use in order to describe divine purpose and aims, should never be confused with a literal description of the way things are and came to be. When God created human beings and called us good, that says a lot of important religious truths about the importance of using our lives in a human divine partnership moving our world toward holy goals. It shouldn’t be read as a God in the shape of a human being make a little model of itself out of clay and being pleased with the result.

Spong on the Bible

Blogger Steve Conger quotes from Bishop Spong's weekly Q&A email:

The Bible is a developing narrative, portraying the developing God-consciousness in human life. It moves beyond the tribal deity of some of its earlier parts to a universalism that defines God as both Love and Justice, and even calls us to love our enemies. The essential truths of the Bible, useful on all of our spiritual journeys, is that in creation God proclaims that all life is holy, in the Jesus story, the Bible asserts that all life is loved and that through the Holy Spirit, who is said to be "the Lord and giver of life," the Bible issues a call to each of us to be all that we can be.

I like the idea of viewing the Bible as a "developing narrative".

An additional point, as I see it, is that the narrative is still developing, even today.

When you make enemies out of your allies

With Evolution Weekend coming up soon, it is interesting to note that not all proponents of evolution support this effort. A year ago, PZ Myers, a Minnesota biologist, wrote in his blog a critique of Evolution Sunday (which was its name prior to this year). He dismissed the effort by claiming that

a few people whose training and day-to-day practice are antithetical to science will attempt to legitimize their invalid beliefs and expand their pretense to intellectual authority by co-opting a few slogans.

Instead of allying himself strategically with others who, like himself, might wish to promote scientific evolution against the tide of creationist ignorance, Myers decided to treat anyone who doesn't think like he does on the subject of religion as an enemy to be scorned, even when there is a common cause at stake.

Clearly, the idea of people of faith promoting science doesn't jibe with his stereotypical conception of what it means to be religious, as expressed by his assertion that theological "training and day-to-day practice are antithetical to science"--something that is simply not true. One wonders if he learned everything that he thinks he knows about religion by listening to Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. In any case, it is not hard to see how, when reality doesn't conform with dogma, the natural reaction to the resulting cognitive dissonance is just to circle the wagons and attack that which contradicts one's preconceived stereotypes. And to admit that it might actually be a good thing for people of faith to promote evolution would call into question a certain world view; it is easier just to strike out and attack one's erstwhile allies on an important issue.

This only goes to prove, once again, that militant atheists and religious fundamentalists have a great deal in common, both in their stereotypical conception of what religion is about and in their dogmatic resistance to anything that contradicts their dogmas.

Thanking God for Evolution

I got about halfway through Michael Dowd's book Thank God for Evolution! before giving up. I certainly appreciate what he is trying to do, and I liked what he had to say early in the book about the ways that science can inform our religious paradigms and about the development of emergent properties. But what interests me about the intersection of evolution and religion is the the inference that I draw from it of an unfolding universe of creativity. Dowd, however, took what was for me an unexpected turn when he began to focus on the evolution of the human brain and the development of human behavior. I felt that at this point he was getting into speculative neuropsychology and trying to connect that with both human behavior and with theology, and that was where he lost me. I just couldn't stay interested enough to finish the book.

When beliefs are driven by fear

In response to Pastor John Shuck's public announcement of his church's participation in Evolution Weekend, he received a condemnatory email from a creationist pastor of a nearby Baptist church.

Particularly revealing was this paragraph in the missive that John received:

If Genesis is not true and accurate as to its account of special creation, then the gospel is entirely irrelevant; for death did not, as the Bible says, enter as the result of human sin (Genesis 3:6; Romans 5:12). In that case death was entirely natural and normal, something from which no person needs saving. The Bible declares death to be an intruder and the immediate result of sin; it entered human experience through Adam's one act of disobedience and was defeated by Christ's obedience (Romans 5:18). Theistic evolution is an apostate compromise; it utterly denies the Bible's teaching about both man, sin, and salvation from sin and death.

In a nutshell, the creationist pastor managed to summarize the fear that drives creationist thinking. His argument ran along these lines: If evolution is true, then my carefully constructed theological edifice will come crashing down. Therefore, I choose to ignore any facts or scientific findings that contradict my theology.

It is obvious that fear of what will happen to one's belief system is frequently what drives the anti-scientific impulse of creationism (and Genesis literalism). The creationist pastor in this instance came right out and admitted that this was his justification. It had nothing to do with the scientific evidence, and everything to do with self-protection and fear--the fear of what might happen to his theology.

Fear is a powerful motivator sometimes. It is fear that often makes people cling to beliefs that otherwise lack all credibility.

God and Creativity

I recently ran across a posting in an evangelical Christian blog that described process theology as believing that "God is neither omnipotent nor directly active in his creation. " This statement is only half right; while it is true that process theology rejects omnipotence, it certainly conceives of God as having a critically active role in creation. Many who do not understand process theology seem to confuse it with Deism, perhaps incorrectly equating a lack of omnipotence with being passive or indifferent. However, according to process theology, it is God who offers creative novelty to the evolving universe; without God, the universe would never have arrived at its present state.

An illustration of the importance of creativity to the God of process theology was brought to mind by Benjamin Myers' blog review of Neil MacDonald's book Metaphysics and the God of Israel. I have not read MacDonald's book and am otherwise unfamiliar with his theology, but as I understand it based on the review, his conception of God is one who made himself present in the universe but who otherwise made no difference in the creation or evolution of the world. According to this strange theology, God "determined himself" to be the world's creator without having actually created it. He just sort of went along with the ride and named himself creator anyway. The result is, according to MacDonald's theology, that

If God had not determined himself to be this world’s creator, the world would nevertheless be exactly the same, except that it would not be identified as God’s creature.

This is starkly different from the God of process theology, in which God plays a crucial creative role in the evolution of the universe. According to process theology, without God, the universe would definitely not be the same as it actually turned out to be.

What MacDonald's theology may possibly share with process theology (and other forms of panentheism) is the value of God's presence in the universe. I don't know if MacDonald believes in God playing a sympathetic role as one who fully shares in our experiences; certainly, this is very important to process thought--the notion that God fully understands our pains and joys. It seems like, in MacDonald's theology, having taken away the creative role, there would otherwise not be a lot that God has left to offer us.

Ultimately, I think that a theology in which creativity plays an important role, both in the divine and in the world's relationship to the divine, is more interesting than a theology in which God takes credit for creating a world that he actually didn't create.

What is Progressive Christianity?

Jim Burklo has blogged about the fact that there seem to be two different definitions of "Progressive Christianity" in circulation--one political and the other theological:

In the last few years, the term “progressive Christian” has begun to be used by evangelical Christians who are disaffected from right-wing politics. Their definition of “progressive Christian” is mostly a political one; they tend to have orthodox, traditional views about religion while standing for economic justice and peace.

By contrast, The Center for Progressive Christianity does not define progressive Christianity in political terms. It’s 8 Point Welcome Statement embraces people of all sorts of persuasions. Our movement is committed to inclusiveness at many levels. We care a lot about justice, peace, and environmental responsibility, but we recognize that there are many different ways to approach these goals. While we encourage political activism, we care even more about values that are more enduring than current political passions.

He then goes on to say that "it is more important than ever for us to be clear about what we mean when we say we are progressive Christians"--and I agree wholeheartedly. While I do consider myself politically progressive, I found to my disappointment (and disillusionment) that many churches that describe themselves as "progressive" are focused on the political progressivism while remaining theologically orthodox. This is not my definition of "Progressive Christianity".

Burklo offers his own list of short phrases to try to capture the essence of what theologically progressive Christianity means. I think they are, for the most part, good ones. The list is:

* keeps the faith and drops the dogma
* experiences God more than I believe in any definition of God
* thinks that my faith is about deeds, not creeds
* takes the Bible seriously because I don’t take it literally
* thinks spiritual questions are more important than religious answers
* cares more about what happens in the war-room and the board-room than about what happens in the bedroom
* thinks that other religions can be as good for others as my religion is good for me
* goes to a church that doesn’t require you to park your brain outside before you come inside
* thinks that God is bigger than anybody’s idea about God
* thinks that God evolves

To me, these represent more interesting starting points for a progressive faith than any traditional creeds. For some of us, straining hard to make metaphorical sense out of ancient creeds is just too much work; but, on the other hand, I for one can much more easily work with the 8 points of the Center for Progressive Christianity, or those bullet points listed above.

A First Cause

In a letter to today's New York Times book review section, mathematician John Allen Paulos defends himself against the charge that his latest book attacks religion despite being "innocent of theology". His defense, interestingly enough, is not to deny that he doesn't know much about theology; on the contrary, he admits his own ignorance, but then claims that you don't need to know much about theology in order to be able to make sweeping statements about religion.

To justify this point, he goes on to say,

But how much theology is required to observe, for example, that assertions of God's existence suggest the obvious question, Who made God? If he's simply there and needs no explanation, then why not just say that about the world itself rather than multiply mysteries?

I used to say the same thing back when I was about 20 or so.

But then, what I later came to realize is that a unitary, all-encompassing, boundless, infinite God is not of the same order of reality as a bounded, limited, contingent universe. God is, if he/she exists, by definition that which nothing is greater than, and than which nothing greater can even be conceived; therefore it makes perfect sense, as part of the very definition of "God", that God is uncreated, because there could not be anything greater than God that would create him/her. I have no trouble, on the other hand, conceiving of the possibility of something that is greater than the world. The world doesn't seem so infinite or perfect. I can imagine something greater than the world. The question of who created God, the Ultimate Reality and the Ground of Being, doesn't even make sense, given the definition we are working with; but the question of why there is something rather than nothing at all, on the other hand, is a difficult one, at least for me, to make sense of, unless I accept that there is ultimately some uncreated and infinite reality that lies behind the something that we observe. This is one reason why I came to believe in God, and this is one reason why I eventually rejected the argument that Paulos expressed in the above quote, and which I had embraced when I was twenty.

One key point about my own take on the Cosmological Argument is that, as an adherent of process theology, I do not see God as an omnipotent being who simply forced the world into existence via a single, all-powerful creative act. But the important point is not whether we are talking about a traditionally theistic God versus a panentheistic God; instead, what I think matters is that, from my point of view, there is an infinite, uncreated Reality, which serves as the wellspring from which the world evolved. The "how" of that dependence depends on one's specific theology.

None of this, of course, serves as a proof that God exists. Maybe the world does just exist for no reason whatsoever. Maybe we just are--period. But this gets back to my earlier point about science being about "what" and religion being about "why". One possible answer to the question of why there is something instead of nothing is simply to say that there is no reason--the world exists just because. That would be the atheistic response. Religion, on the other hand, is for me a way of saying that there really is a reason why we exist. And for me, that reason, is God.