Unity was more important than truth

The text of a brilliantly scathing open letter from John Shelby Spong to Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, can be found here. Spong does an excellent job of documenting a whole litany of examples of Williams's failures of moral leadership on matters of sexuality and women's rights, as Williams continually capitulated to the religious right within his denomination. Spong points out that, for Rowan Williams, "unity was more important than truth." The final four paragraphs of this letter are as follows:

You continue to act as if quoting the Bible to undergird a dying prejudice is a legitimate tactic. It is in fact the last resort that religious people always use to validate "tradition" over change.

The Bible was quoted to support the Divine Right of Kings in 1215, to oppose Galileo in the 17th century, to oppose Darwin in the 19th century, to support slavery and apartheid in the 19th and 20th centuries, to keep women from being educated, voting and being ordained in the 20th and 21st century.

Today it is quoted to continue the oppression and rejection of homosexual people. The Bible has lost each of those battles. It will lose the present battle and you, my friend, will end up on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of morality and the wrong side of truth. It is a genuine tragedy that you, the most intellectually-gifted Archbishop of Canterbury in almost a century, have become so miserable a failure in so short a period of time.

You were appointed to lead, Rowan, not to capitulate to the hysterical anger of those who are locked in the past. For the sake of God and this Church, the time has come for you to do so. I hope you still have that capability.

I think that Spong really highlights the problem of favoring maintaining denominational unity at all costs, even at the cost of standing in the way of moral and social progress. Spong in his letter makes a historical analogy with slavery at one point, and it is an interesting one. Some American denominations were split into two over the issue of slavery during the mid-eighteenth century. When we look back at those divisive times, it is clear that taking a clear moral stand against slavery was the right thing to do, even at the cost of denominational unity. Why should anyone allow the march of moral progress today to be dragged down by obstructionist reactionaries?

Watering Down

As a followup to my previous posting on Sean Carroll, I ran across another blogger who essentially agreed with Carroll's comments on the supposed incompatibility of religion and science. I found one particular comment by the blogger particularly interesting:

It continually amazes me that theologians like John Haught or scientists like Francis Collins can get away with a definition of “religion” that is completely at odds with how most real non-Ph.D-holding humans practice their faith in the real world. To enforce a compatibility between faith and science, you have to water down “faith” until it becomes a vague deism that doesn’t permit its god to interfere in the working of the universe. And that’s simply not the way that most people construe their faith.

The above quote is pretty muddled in several ways, but one thing I find particularly fascinating is the assertion that any definition of God that precludes omnipotent interventionism is a case of "watering down" faith. How this constitutes a "watering down" isn't exactly clear, but the presupposition seems to be that there is only one legitimate way of conceiving of religion, one that amazingly seems to resemble that of conservative Christians, which involves a certain idea of omnipotent interventionism by a powerful deity. I'm not exactly sure where nontheistic faiths like Buddhism would fit into this strange definition of religion; maybe the blogger in question doesn''t consider Buddhism to be a real religion either, for all I know, since it doesn't involve a "god interfering in the working of the universe". The quote further confuses the issue in its reference to John Haught as a deist; in fact, John Haught, expresses views that are strongly influenced by process theology,which is radically different from deism, since the former entails divine creative activity in each present moment as a lure towards the future, whereas deism sees divine activity as having only taken place as a single creative act in the distant past.

Perhaps most telling is the comment from the above quote that "that's simply not the way most people construe their faith." What's funny about this is that it presumes some sort of dichotomy between a supposed common people's religion of supernatural interventionism and a different theology produced by the ivory tower. I don't know who all those people are who purchase books by progressive theologians, but I somehow doubt that all of them hold Ph.Ds. In fact, I am not a Ph.D-holding human, and yet my views on religion come pretty close to those of John Haught's. So how is it that the above blogger, who incorrectly lumps disparate theologies together under the label of "deism", gets to decide what is and isn't a legitimate conception of faith and God? And how is it that anything that deviates from this standard constitutes a "watering down" of religion?

It is not uncommon that those who disparage religion on the basis of certain stereotypical notions about what religion supposed is, when confronted with theologies that don't conform to those stereotypes, have little choice but to deny that these alternate theologies are legitimately religious at all. Thus the irony: people who are not religious and who are even hostile to religion have set themselves up as the authorities on what is and isn't "religion".

What we see here is an example of the "everyone knows" argument that I talked about previously--supposedly everyone knows what a religion really is. To emphasize the point, it is suggested that a religion is defined by whatever the majority of religious people do--note the comment from the above quote on how "most people construe their faith." Most? Again, even if we exclude from consideration nontheistic religions like Buddhism, and even assuming that the author has some kind of accurate mathematical estimate of what "most people" believe about their faith, the problem is that "most" is not "all", and "most" don't get to decide what the remainder believes about their own faith. Religion is not defined by whatever some purported majority considers their own faith to be about. There is a lot of variety of thinking out there in the world of religious faith, religion is more diverse than some people give it credit for, and the interest in these subjects is not confined to academia.

The "everyone knows" argument

Sean Carroll joins the list of scientists who write about the relationship between science and religion in ways that suggest that they understand little or nothing about the latter. Specifically, he has recently argued in a Discover magazine blog that science and religion are incompatible. The reason, he claims, is that

Different religions make very different claims, but they typically end up saying things like “God made the universe in six days” or “Jesus died and was resurrected” or “Moses parted the red sea” or “dead souls are reincarnated in accordance with their karmic burden.” And science says: none of that is true. So there you go, incompatibility.

So there you go. Carroll goes on to assert that "we find religion making all sorts of claims about the natural world, including those mentioned above — Jesus died and was resurrected, etc." Religion always makes claims about the physical world, right? How does Carroll know this to be the case? Has he studied theology enough in depth to actually know that his generalization about religion is true? I think we can summarize his explanation for how he knows this generalization to be true by, essentially, the "everyone knows" argument. Everyone knows, Carroll argues, that this is what religion is.

In fact, many religions frequently do make assertions about the physical world, but I think Carroll goes wrong on two scores. First, he asserts that religion is the domain of people who "believe in a supernatural being called 'God' who created the universe, is intensely interested in the behavior of human beings, and occasionally intervenes miraculously in the natural world." Aside from the fact that his references to Divine omnipotence don't jibe with the existence of non-theistic religions, and aside from the fact that his assertions about divine omnipotence don't jibe with process theology or other theologies that he has probably never heard of, the basic problem is his assertion is that religions always make claims about the physical world. Secondly, even among those religions which do make such claims, Carroll makes the mistake of assuming that the claims themselves are the essential core of what makes a religion "religious".

Carroll, like many others who make similar assertions, uses the "everyone knows" argument as essentially an excuse, since it serves to justify his own lack of knowledge of a subject that he pontificates about--by arguing that such knowledge is unnecessary. I do give Carroll credit, because he does not come across as overtly hostile towards religious people, at least not in the same way that PZ Myers does. Myers defends his own ignorance of religion with his so-called "Courtier's Reply" argument. According to Myers, atheists are like the child in the story of the Emperor's new clothes who calls religious people on their supposedly untrue and fantastical claims; and thus those who suggest that such atheist objections are not grounded in a knowledge of the variety of theologies that exist are merely like the courtiers in that story who claimed that elaborate knowledge of clothes was necessary to appreciate that the Emperor really was wearing clothes. Myers's "Courtier's Reply" argument is rather strange, coming from an academic, since I seriously doubt that he as a biologist appreciates it when people who are ignorant of biology pontificate on the subject (and as a strong proponent of evolution, he in fact encounters such ignorance all the time from creationists.) The real problem with Myers' "Courtier's Reply" argument is that he presupposes that "God" is analogous with clothing, and that since "everyone knows" what clothes are, everyone also "knows" what the meanings of religion and God are as well. After all, all nouns and concepts in the English language work according to the "everyone knows" principle, right?

The reality is that I am in agreement with Sean Carroll on the point that any time that a religion makes extraordinary claims about the physical world it is stepping into territory that rightfully belongs to science. If he had said that science is incompatible with irrational, unreasonable religion, I would have been in agreement with him. There is indeed a lot of religion out there that, unfortunately, embraces irrationality. But in insisting that religion isn't religion if it doesn't make such claims, he does a great disservice to the many people in the world who are engaged in a religious faith, in religious traditions, and religious communities, who don't accept such claims and who don't make those claims themselves. Religion is much more about things like meaning, metaphor, purpose, story, and how we fit into the greater universe that we inhabit. Those claims about the physical world that do crop up, I would argue, are secondary to the definition of religion because they serve the deeper purpose of religious faith.

There seem to be two sets of people who simply refuse to understand the depth and varieties of religious faith and how faith can be grounded in reason--religious fundamentalists, and certain anti-religion atheists in the scientific community. Maybe that's because the latter are essentially fundamentalists in their own way.

We value diversity, and by the way, this is what you should believe.

I suppose it is going to seem like I am picking on a particular church that I have never even visited, but it isn't really my intention to do that. What I really am trying to do is illustrate by example why it is that certain restless and unaffiliated souls like myself who are alienated from Christian orthodoxy but who have an interest in radically progressive Christianity see weirdly mixed messages coming from some churches that seem to proclaim openness to free theological inquiry on the one hand, but then on the other hand define themselves in strictly orthodox terms.

The example I am going to cite here is a church in San Francisco that has a very active web presence and a dynamic pastor who is well respected in his denomination. I have never met the pastor, but I believe that he is well liked by many of his peers and those in his congregation. Here is a brief sample what four Yelp reviewers had to say about this church:

"I'm jewish---and i love going to mbcc."

"We continue come for the community, the openness, the friendships, the intelligent discussions, and the encouragement to follow our own journeys of discovery with God."

"I love to see a place where i can come as i am, and not feel like the place is bound and limited by religious traditions that limit my own personal ideas and beliefs."

"MBCC is not about vestments and pageantry and rigid orthodoxy. The focus here is on building a community of faith where everyone is welcome. "

A lot of people clearly love this church, although to be honest I don't know how much of that is in response to the apparent informality of style found in its worship services (for example, people drink coffee during the services, from what I gather). Still some of those comments about "rigid orthodoxy" and "personal ideas and beliefs" make it seem theologically open. But is it really open to diverse and free theological inquiry?

To find out more, I visited the web site. Proclaimed at the top of the main page is a statement that the church honors "diversity of thinking"--also also taking pains to add that it is "grounded in Christ". Of course, what it means to say that a church is "grounded in Christ" is the $64,000 question. Two people can ground their faith in Jesus's life and message while having quite different views about whether he was divine, for example, but that may or may not be what this church means in this case. To give them the benefit of the doubt, I concede that the emphasis on diversity of thinking seems like a good sign. So then I click on the "about us" link on that page, and see on the resulting page the following quote from a member:

at MBCC I see evangelicals and liberals, ex-conservatives and post-fundamentalists, theologians and even agnostics, holding each other, side by side, embracing our uncertain world and being embraced by the undying love of God.

This sounds even better, suggesting that this is a church that really does embrace diversity of thinking. Or does it? On that page I see a link that says "read more about our beliefs here". I click on that link (I'm now three levels deep in the web site), and here is where all that attention to diversity that was indicated earlier just completely disappears; because here, on this page, I find that, in fact, despite all that lip service that it had paid elsewhere to diversity, "our" beliefs boil down to the same old standard creedal affirmations of orthodox Christianity that I for one do not accept. For example, "our" beliefs include the assertion that Jesus is "fully human, fully God", that God is Triune in nature, that "through Jesus' death and resurrection God triumphed over sin"--and last, but certainly not least, that that Jesus will actually return to earth some day in at some future date.

Having dug deep into the web site I have thus discovered what all this talk about diversity really means. It seems to mean that a diversity of thinking is welcome, and oh, by the way, here is a list of things that you are supposed to believe, and they are quite orthodox. What does this alleged diversity thus consist of? Your guess is as good as mine.

This, I think, is the problem that many of us "believers in exile" (to use John Spong's term) see in Christian churches. I am not opposed to participating in a church that defines itself specifically as a faith community built around the message and teachings of Jesus; on the contrary, if I wanted to participate in an eclectic spirituality that did not focus on Jesus in particular, I would choose the path of Unitarian Universalism. I am interested in the way that Jesus preached and lived--a way grounded in a compassion, in inclusiveness, in overturning the established theological and political order, in the in-breaking Realm of God, but this does not mean that I accept all the dogmas about Jesus that emerged within the Christian churches over the centuries after he died.

The problem is that there is a middle ground between eclecticism and orthodoxy, one that views how we interpret Jesus as a much more open question than that was allegedly "settled" by ecumenical councils held centuries after Jesus died, and which focuses more on how we can transform our lives by following Jesus than on whatever theological spin you want to put on Jesus's nature. I believe I am not alone in being someone who is interested in Jesus, his life, his message, and their resulting implications for today, and who are also interested in progressive theologians like Borg, Crossan, Spong, Fox, Pagels, Hick, and Cobb. And I believe I am not alone in embracing an intelligent reading of the Bible without taking at face value some of the mythological claims found there. I see a lot of churches that talk a good game about diversity; but when push comes to shove, it seems that in many cases diversity really means "think what you what but this is what you really should be believing." If they are really going to tell us what "we" believe by laying out a set of orthodox dogmas, then they should not advertise themselves as encouraging diversity--because they don't.

As I mentioned, I don't mean to pick on this church specifically, because I find this often in quite a few ostensibly progressive Christian churches. I am not sure that this particular church that I am discussing identifies itself as "progressive". In fact, it is possible that it does not use that label, and I'm not sure that I saw that word appearing anywhere in its web site. But in its lip service to diversity and inclusiveness, it speaks much of the same language that progressive Christianity speaks. You can put a hip veneer on orthodoxy by taking away the pews and serving coffee in the service, but underneath that veneer it is still orthodoxy. And it is precisely this orthodoxy that has driven some of us into exile in the first place.

What does it mean to say there is no God?

Here is a great quote from Cynthia, "Reverend Mom":

But for me, saying "there is no God" is like saying "there is no mystery" or "there is no transcendence".... And as Marcus Borg has been known to say as well, the God that most atheists denounce, I don't believe in either. Jillette names the God of religious belief as omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent but as most folks who don't believe in God or believe there isn't one, he doesn't go any further to try to conceive of a God who isn't any of those things--because if God isn't any of that, then it is argued, God isn't God. Just who gets to decide what or who God is? It's all of us, not just church fathers or seminary professors or theologians. Does that mean the mystery disappears? Of course not. How could the mystery of being and breathing and living and dying just disappear because someone believes there is no God? That's just one way of defining the mystery amongst countless others. And when you think about it, it's not very original.

I really like this quote from the blog "Aspiration Towards Inspiration":

I want, when I say “Christian,” for people to think of the teachings of Jesus… how he healed the sick and welcomed those who society spit at… how he forgave the unforgivable and ate with those that most people of his day would not even look at. I’m tired of “Christian,” meaning pamphlets with hellfire and gay-bashing. I’m tired of it meaning Bush-supporter and anti-evolutionist. I want it to mean “follower of Jesus” again.

I think that the idea of Jesus as a salvational figure is not useful. It becomes a shallow selling tool and, if it is even true, it is horrible motivation for being a Christian. As far as I’m concerned, one’s motivation for being Christian should be selfless… it should be about a profound connection with Jesus’ message and a will to live a certain way of Life—one in which the primary goal is to better Humanity, to help those in need, and to reach out to other beings in order to maximize the meaning that each derives from existence.

Church democracy

In a previous post, I referred to two Christian denominations that seem to have a lot in common with one another but which are governed according to two different models--the Catholic Church, which uses a top-down model, and the Episcopal church, which is more democratic in structure. Although I belong to neither church, I made no secret of my sympathies for a more democratic approach, because, first, I believe that theology can best flower to its full potential when it is liberated from authoritarian control, and secondly I believe that church decision-making rightly belongs to the people and not to a self-appointed hierarchy. Part of this viewpoint stems from my understanding of religion as something other than an unchallengeable dogma handed down to humanity on a from above, but rather as a continual human process of grappling with the ultimate meaning of our lives in the framework of an deeper cosmic framework. The key word in that conception, I think, is process. Process means that theology is always in flux, it is always about dialogue, discovery, change, communication, struggle, and a recognition that any and all of us can be prophets. Hierarchical control never serves those ends.

Democracy has its problems, to be sure; but if you see theology as an ongoing process, then real theological growth and reform can only happen if members of a religious community are free to engage in an open dialogue with themselves and with God. The authoritarian model of a magisterial thought police and the use of a denominational soviet-style politboro to select a leadership lends itself to both theological rigidity and to abuses against those who don't toe the party line. ( Just ask Matthew Fox and Hans Kung about that.)

That being said, democracy is clearly no guarantee of tolerance and theological openness in a religious community. There can be reactionary forces within a denomination or church who will use the procedural methods of that very democratic process to resist progressive change; these same forces will operate to persecute or hound progressive theologians and clergy, and promote exclusionary or oppressive doctrines towards women , sexual minorities or others. Sometimes, the tyranny of the majority prevails. But I would take the possibility of failure in a democratic process over the tyranny of a hierarchy any day of the week.

One clear example of this problem can be found in the very Episcopal Church that was the subject of my earlier posting. Despite its generally progressive reputation, it certainly has its own powerful and organized reactionary elements, as do many other Protestant denominations. It has a process for selecting bishops which, though fairly democratic, also has its checks and balances and procedural rules that can end up biting progressives in the ass. This came out recently when organized opposition successfully opposed the nomination of Kevin Thew Forrester for the position of bishop of the diocese of Northern Michigan--because he was apparently deemed too heretical for certain tastes. (A San Francisco Episcopal rector gives a pretty good analysis of this situation here and here.)

In this particular case, the usual suspects from the Episcopal Right were very much involved in opposing Kevin Forrester. Greg Griffith, for example, of the Stand Firm web site, launched a predictable broadside against him. (Griffith, I might recall, once quoted extensively from one of my own blog postings in order to attack progressives in the Episcopal Church, even though I am not an Episcopal myself. Griffith also once engaged in a sexist exercise of displaying his wife as a trophy and comparing her looks to that of a more progressive female Episcopal priest--thus showing how low these people will sometimes sink to pursue their agenda.)

Obviously, this problem exists not just within Episcopalian politics. The Presbyterian Church, to cite another example, has also had its own thought police who have busily rooted out heretics. Robert Jensen, who was not even a member of the clergy, faced an inquisition from members of his Presbyterian church for having unorthodox views and having the temerity to publicly express them.

You don't always get what you want as an end result in a democratic process. Christianity has been a two thousand year long journey among humans, and the broader religious project itself goes back to the very emergence of modern humans tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the point is that religion is not about the end result, but the journey. Religions have had a history of getting things wrong--it just seems to come with the territory. The Bible is a pretty good reflection of sometimes flawed morality that lies side by side with the most sublime beauty. Maybe there is value in the communal self-examination that takes place in the debates, even if they sometimes end up very badly at times. There has been a struggle within religious history for greater inclusiveness versus greater exclusion, and a struggle between those who seek to dethrone those who wield power versus those who insist on maintaining their control. Sometimes religion takes a few steps forward and then a few steps back. Jesus sought to subvert the religious authoritarianism of his own time, and yet the core message of inclusiveness that Jesus preached was largely subverted in the centuries after his death as new hierarchies and new acts of gate keeping emerged to define who was "in" and who was "out". Instead of "scribes and pharisees", we have seen magisteria, consistories and inquisitions. Meet the new boss--same as the old boss. So is the Jesus project some sort of failure? I don't think so. Many people remained inspired by his core message over the centuries, despite all that has gone perverse. We see in the modern world many Christians who have taken the principles of inclusiveness to their natural next steps, in ways once not thought possible--and thus we see female and gay clergy, for example, in many denominations.

The Jesus project thus goes on, but I think real change must come from below, from the grass roots of religious communities. Humanity is still trying to grope its way towards the Divine. It has taken us millenia to get this far. We still have a long way to go.

Beyond a theology of physical resurrection

Here is a quote from a book I am currently reading:

Sadly, the church has been declaring all those who do not believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus to be heretics every since. This includes thoughtful, committed Christians who do not believe that Easter has anything to do with the resuscitation of a corpse or believing things you know are not true in order to get rewards you secretly doubt are available. We don't live in a three-story universe anymore, and the disappearance and reappearance of corpses should be left behind with the ideas of demon possession, slavery, and the subordination of women.

-- Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus From the Church, p. 89

Catholicism and Episcopalianism

To be honest, I had not heard of Father Cutie (pronounced "coo-tee-ay") until recently, although he was apparently something of a media celebrity in South Florida and in the Spanish speaking community. He made the news because of his decision to leave the Catholic Church for the Episcopal church because he wanted to be able to be able to pursue both his religious calling and his natural human desire for romantic companionship, two things which, in the strange world of Catholic doctrine, are somehow considered contradictory. He decided that enough was enough, and now he is an Episcopal priest.

In the context of that news event, South Florida newspaper ran a story that tried to compare and contrast the Catholic Church with the Episcopal Church. I have never belonged to either of those churches, so the best I can do is make what are probably less than fully informed comments. The joke has always been that the Episcopal Church is "Catholic Lite", but, as the article points out, there is more to it than that. Nevertheless, it is true that a lot of ex-Catholics do end up being Episcopalians, because there would seem to be at least some similarities that would make an ex-Catholic feel somewhat more comfortable in that church than in more openly Protestant churches.

The question of sexuality is obviously one important question that impinged on Father Cutie's experience. It seems clear to me that the Catholic Church has historically held a view that deemed celibacy to be in some sense a purer way of life than one in which sexuality played a part. This unfortunate undercurrent (or sometimes overcurrent) of hostility towards such a significant part of human physical existence goes back at least as far as Augustine, but it can also be found in such non-canonical writings from early Christianity as the Acts of Paul and Thecla. The idea that such a basic part of our physical natures can somehow come into conflict with a higher calling reflects a kind of dualism about the physical and the spiritual, and in fact a hostility towards the physical.

Father Cutie is a famous example, but really he is just the latest of a long line of refugees, both famous and not so famous, from the Catholic hierarchy's intransigence on such matters as celibacy, homosexuality, the role of women, and freedom of theological inquiry. While the Catholic Church remains stuck in the dark ages in its views on women, for example, the Episcopal Church now has a female presiding bishop. The contrast is rather stark. The problem as I see it is that such medieval Catholic doctrines are not likely to be reformed any time soon. As one former Catholic priest quoted in the Florida newspaper article puts it,

"The Catholic Church is monarchical; we're democratic," says the Rev. Robert Deshaies, a former Catholic priest and current rector at St. Benedict's Episcopal Church in Plantation. "It's basically about how the church is governed."

The leader of the Catholic Church appoints like minded people to choose his successor. The closest model that I can think of for how the Catholic Church handles papal succession is the old Soviet system, in which the politburo picked new leadership when the old ruler died, with membership in the politburo itself being hand selected by the leadership. It is true that out of the Soviet politburo system there did eventually emerge a reformer like Gorbachev, just as the Catholic system produced a reformer like John XXIII; and yet, this is perhaps that is where the analogy breaks down, because theological doctrine, unlike Stalinist orthodoxy, is much more immune to economic and political pressures, and furthermore recent popes seem to have taken careful steps to make sure that only like minded people inhabited the halls of church power. The point is that as a non-democratic institution, the people within the church are essentially powerless to effect real progressive change; power flows hierarchically from above, rather than democratically from below, and I can't imagine women becoming priests, let along pope, any time in the foreseeable future.

It seems that some Episcopal churches do try to offer themselves as a refuge for people who don't fit into the Catholic Church. The website for Trinity Episcopal Church in San Francisco, for example, mentions a group called Sophia in Trinity, which describes itself as "an inclusive community welcoming all those on the margins and especially those marginalized by the Roman Catholic Church: LGBT people, those that are divorced, remarried, those who witness to reproductive rights, all seeking justice and equality and the integrity of creation." Of course, that doesn't help much if you don't live in San Francisco, and I don't know how many similar communities exist elsewhere, especially in small towns.

It also seems that some Episcopal churches are more Catholic than others. The newspaper article reports,

Even in the American church, differences have emerged. "High Church" Episcopalians insist on Catholic-style liturgy, with bells and candles and incense. Their "Low Church" brethren have less formal worship, often like that in an ordinary Protestant church.

Indeed, I once attended a service at one Episcopal church service that was quite "High Church"; it wasn't my style, and I walked out about ten minutes into the service. Had I had a Catholic background, however, my guess is that I might have felt more at home there.

All of this raises some interesting questions in my own mind about the role that loyalty plays in all of this. I know that there are many progressive Catholics, people who object to specific policies or theologies of the church but who remain loyal to it nonetheless. I admit that I don't really understand it; a church that has egregiously offensive views on gays or women and which is not open to popular change from below is not something that I would choose to be a part of. Of course, I wasn't brought up Catholic either, so clearly some kind of loyalty issue is going on that I don't understand.

More on Christian terrorism

It is reported that that Scott Roeder, Dr. Tiller's assassin, "was a subscriber to Prayer and Action News, a magazine that advocated the justifiable homicide position, said publisher Dave Leach, an anti-abortion activist from Des Moines, Iowa." The New York Times reports that Leach had this to say this about the murder:

“To call this a crime is too simplistic,” Mr. Leach said of Dr. Tiller’s death.

It is clearly inaccurate to characterize this crime as nothing more than the lone act of a madman. Rather, it is the expression of a movement that advocates terrorism as a tool for advancing its aims.

Spong on prayer

Here's another Q&A from John Shelby Spong. While one may or may not exactly agree with defining God as "a force present in me and flowing through me", I think that he is right that much of intercessionary prayer seems based on the idea that God is "a person", albeit a really powerful one, who resides outside of the world and who can manipulate the world if we ask him nicely.

Elmo Hoffman, via the Internet, writes:

I have read much of your work and met you once at Stetson University in Deland, Florida, at a pastor's conference. It was the same venue where I also met Marcus Borg. I am a retired civil trial lawyer and a late-life seminary graduate, now an ordained Disciples of Christ minister, although before seminary I was a lifelong Presbyterian (USA) from the same time frame and section of North Carolina as you. My question, which gives me a great deal of trouble, is: What is your basic understanding of petitionary prayer? I believe you have said, "A God who would save the life of one prayed-for cancer-stricken child and not another would be a monster." This makes sense but gives me a great deal of trouble in considering petitionary prayer. (I have read your book Honest Prayer — I find no answer to this problem there.)

Dear Elmo,

Thank you for your comments and for your question. Your question on petitionary prayer is almost always the first question that comes up wherever I go to lecture. People can talk about their understanding of God until the cows come home, but nothing really changes until they translate their understanding of God into their prayers. More than anything else, our prayers define our understanding of God. So to talk about prayer, we have to define who the God is to whom we pray. To say it differently, "Who do we think is listening?"

Most people, quite unconsciously, approach the subject of prayer with a very traditional concept of God quite operative in their minds. This God is a personal being, endowed with supernatural power, who lives somewhere outside this world, usually conceptualized as "above the sky." While that definition has had a long history among human beings, it is a definition of God that has been rendered meaningless by the advance of human knowledge. This means that for most of us the activity of prayer does not take seriously the fact that we live in a vast universe, and that we have not yet come to grips with the fact that there is no supernatural, parental deity above the sky, keeping the divine record books on human behavior up to date and ready at any moment to intervene in human history to answer prayers. When we do embrace this fact then prayer, as normally understood, becomes an increasingly impossible idea and inevitably a declining practice. To get people to embrace this point clearly, I have suggested that the popular prayers of most people is little more than adult letters written to a Santa Claus God.

There are then two choices. One says that the God in whom I always believed is no more, so I will become an atheist. People make this decision daily. It is an easy way out.

The other says that the way I have always thought of God has become inoperative, so there must be something wrong with my definition. This stance serves to plunge us deeply into a new way of thinking about God, and that is when prayer itself begins to be redefined. Can God, for example, be conceived of not as supernatural person, but as a force present in me and flowing through me? Then perhaps prayer can be transformed into meditation and petitionary prayer becomes a call to action. The spiritual life is then transformed from the activity of a child seeking the approval of a supernatural being to being a simultaneous journey into self-discovery and into the mystery of God. It also feeds my sense of growing into oneness with the source of all life and love and with what my mentor, Paul Tillich, called the Ground of All Being. It would take a book to fill in the blank places in this quick analysis, but these are the things that today feed my ever deepening discovery of the meaning of prayer.

– John Shelby Spong

Christian terrorism

Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, says that Dr. Tiller deserved to be killed. According to Terry, Tiller "deserved a trial of his peers, and a legal execution"; thus his disagreement with the murderer was only over the means, while he at the same time shared with that murderer the same overriding goal of ending Tiller's life. Terry claims that he supports peaceful actions, but supporting peace is contrary to issuing public calls for anyone's death.

The irony of calling yourself "pro-life" and yet calling for anyone to be killed is obvious, but the deeper question is how anyone who uses such hate-filled rhetoric can avoid a measure of responsibility for drumming up the atmosphere of hatred that served as the inspiration for the killer to pull the trigger. Terry is not alone in drumming up hatred against Dr. Tiller; the former state Attorney General, Phill Kline had pursued a vendetta against Tiller when he filed trumped up charges against Tiller, all of which Tiller was later acquitted of.

In essence, the acts of hatred and persecution leading up to the murder of an abortion doctor form a spectrum of acts of intolerance by certain elements on the Christian Right. There are those intolerant Christians who blame all of Islam for the terrorist acts of some Muslims, but in fact there are intolerant Christians as well who will resort to acts of violence in order to pursue their goals. All religions can have their share of extremists.

On the other hand, I would remind those atheists who might see this act of terrorism as an example of how "religion poisons everything" of what Dr. Tiller was doing when he got shot--he was serving as an usher in a Lutheran church.

Spong on heaven and hell

I presume that this Q&A from John Spong comes from an email list that Spong maintains, because I have only found its full text located a few places on the web. The entire text is as follows:

Joan from North Carolina, writes:
Do you believe in heaven and hell, the blissful heaven and the burning hell? And do you believe in Jesus Christ as your personal savior?

Dear Joan,

Answering your two questions is impossible until some terms are defined and some explanations are given. When you define heaven as "the blissful heaven" and hell as "the burning hell," you reveal an evangelical mindset that asserts a particular understanding that you are requesting that I either affirm or deny. It is to bind the discussion to your frame of reference. That immediately suggests that you do not want real answers, you want affirmation. I cannot give you that nor would I be interested in doing so. With that background, however, let me proceed to respond. I think it would be fair to say that I do not believe in a blissful heaven or a burning hell as evangelicals define those terms. I do believe in life after death and shall try to explain both why and in what way in my next book, which is scheduled for publication in September of 2009.

You define heaven and hell as places of reward and punishment where God evens out life here on Earth. I regard that as primitive, childlike thinking that transforms God into a parent figure who delights in rewarding goodness and punishing sinfulness. This portrays God as a supernatural, judging figure and it violates everything I believe about both God and human life.

If anyone pursues goodness in the hope of gaining rewards or avoiding punishment, that person has not escaped the basic self-centeredness of human life and it becomes obvious that such a person is motivated primarily by self-interest. The Christian life is ultimately revealed in the power to live for others, to give ourselves away. It is not motivated by bliss or torment. Both of those images are little more than human wish fulfillment.

The fiery pits of hell are not an essential part of the Christian story. If one would take Matthew's gospel and especially the book of Revelation out of the Bible, most of the references to hell as a fiery place of torment would disappear. That is a quite foreign theme to Paul, Mark, Luke and John. Evangelicals never study the Bible deeply enough to make this distinction. They basically talk about a book they do not understand.

When you ask about "believing in Jesus Christ as your personal savior" you are using stylized evangelical language. That language has no appeal at all for me. To assert the role of savior for Jesus implies a definition of human life as sinful, fallen and helpless. It assumes the ancient myth that proclaimed that we were created perfect only to fall into sin from which we need to be rescued. It was a popular definition before people understood about our evolutionary background. We have been evolving toward humanity for billions of years. Our problem is not that we have fallen from some pristine perfection into a sinful state from which we need to be saved, it is that we need to be empowered to become something that we have never been, namely fully human beings. So the idea that I need a savior to save me from a fall that never happened and to restore me to a status that I never possessed is in our time all but nonsensical. It is because we do not understand the nature of human life that we do not understand the Jesus role. I see in Jesus the power of love that empowers us to be more deeply and fully human and so I do not know how to translate your questions. Sorry, but the old evangelical language that you use is badly dated and I believe quite distorting to my understanding of what Christianity is all about.

– John Shelby Spong

Bart Ehrman

I don't make it a practice to read evangelical blogs, but recently I stumbled onto one, more or less by accident. I found a posting there titled "I don't get Bart Ehrman", in which the writer labeled Ehrman a "theological liberal." In fact, Ehrman is not a theological liberal at all, but an agnostic who has turned his back on religious faith, and lumping him with theological liberals confuses the issue.

The writer surmised that Ehrman is something of a media darling because "here’s a liberal scholar who not only writes for the public square; he also speaks about his own spiritual journey in those books." However, Marcus Borg, who unlike Ehrman is not an agnostic, also writes about his own own spiritual journey in his books, so I don't think that could explain it. The writer also suggests that a lot of theological liberals were former fundamentalists, and thus Ehrman fits that pattern; this may be true, but if so the liberals usually get to that point by first experiencing a kind of crisis of faith, brought on by their recognition that their former fundamentalist views were theologically, philosophically, morally, and scientifically untenable. Marcus Borg talks about the progression that he and many others have undergone, from pre-critical naivete, to critical thinking, to post-critical naivete. Basically, Ehrman is currently stuck in what Borg defines as the middle phase, "critical thinking". He has not come to (and for all we know may never come to) the state of post-critical naivete that constistutes theological liberalism--I would argue that he still adheres to his old evangelical paradigm about what a person of faith necessarily believes about God, religion, and the Bible. For Ehrman, if you reject that the Bible is inerrant, your own option is to reject religion altogether.

And I think that explains why Ehrman might be something of a media darling, while Borg is not; Ehrman fits into a rather simplistic paradigm that says that in order to be a person of faith, you have to accept certain premises about the the nature of the Bible and God. Ehrman has a problem with reconciling an omnipotent God with theodicy, for example, so for him this makes religious faith untenable. Ehrman either doesn't address or simply dismisses out of hand theologies, such as Borg's panentheism, or Cobb's process theology, that don't fit into his conception of what we might mean when we say "God". Basically, Ehrman is in many ways still an evangelical, because he still accepts many evangelical premises--he's just changed teams, or at least is now sitting on the sidelines. And since, I would guess, most people in the news media have never heard of panentheism or process theology (let alone Tillich), Ehrman's personal story of how he found agnosticism makes for nice, easy junk food that the media can easily consume and spit out again for public consumption. In a lot of ways, this illustrates how religious conservatives have managed to define the terms of religious dialogue in our country.

Michael Dowd on God

Here is a post from Michael Dowd's blog:

The crux of the problem, as I see it, is the failure of millions of people, religious and non-religious alike, to distinguish meaningful metaphor from measurable reality. God as a subjectively meaningful interpretation simply cannot be argued against. God is always a legitimate interpretation. But God is NOT (and never has been) an actual, physical Being, as science and common sense define reality. (Those who would attempt to argue that God is a REAL Father or King, but just in an unnatural, otherworldly sense are left in the bizarre position of claiming that God, the Creator of the Universe, is less real than the Universe, as I discuss here.)

HERE IS A WAY OUT OF THIS IMPASSE: Whenever you hear the word ‘God', think ‘Reality'. "I have faith in God" can be translated "I trust Reality". "God is Lord" means "Reality rules". Throughout the world, God has never been less than a mythic personification of Reality as a Whole, Ultimate Reality, or what today some call "the Universe". If we fail to recognize this, we miss everything. ALL images and characterizations of God are meaningful interpretations of Reality As It Really Is. When we forget this, we will inevitably trivialize God, belittle science, and desecrate nature.

Many believers and atheists alike define God as a being among other beings, spiritual in nature but still a being, who also happens to be super-powerful and possessing infinite resources. But God is not a being. God does not belong to the same ontological category as you and I. As soon as you stop thinking of God as a being then much of the debate between atheism and faith ceases to make any sense. This gets back to Tillich's conception of God as Being Itself. If you instead think of God as the foundational interpretation of reality at its deepest and most fundamental level, the whole question of "proving" a supernatural being's existence becomes moot.

The irreconcilable Easter accounts

The blogger JimII has put together a really nice visual summary of the irreconcilability of the resurrection accounts in the Gospels.

Borg and Crossan on what we mean by "God"

Borg and Crossan explain the difference between supernatural theism and panentheism. Borg reiterates his in response to atheists who say they don't believe in God--"Tell me about the God you don't believe in"--and he points out that usually this is the God of supernatural theism.

Indulgences as the HOV lane to heaven

This news story about the Catholic Church and indulgences is a old now, but I have meant for a while to comment on it. Here is how the New York Times described the doctrine:

According to church teaching, even after sinners are absolved in the confessional and say their Our Fathers or Hail Marys as penance, they still face punishment after death, in Purgatory, before they can enter heaven. In exchange for certain prayers, devotions or pilgrimages in special years, a Catholic can receive an indulgence, which reduces or erases that punishment instantly, with no formal ceremony or sacrament.

There are partial indulgences, which reduce purgatorial time by a certain number of days or years, and plenary indulgences, which eliminate all of it, until another sin is committed. You can get one for yourself, or for someone who is dead. You cannot buy one — the church outlawed the sale of indulgences in 1567 — but charitable contributions, combined with other acts, can help you earn one. There is a limit of one plenary indulgence per sinner per day.

This involves esoteric and highly specific details about the afterlife, along with a prescription for how to influence this outcome through specific actions--naturally, mediated through the institution of the Catholic Church.

This is a theology that says that certain kinds of good works or religious activity can grant you access to the HOV lane to heaven. I am an agnostic on the question of the afterlife, and I think good works should be their own reward, rather than as a way of erasing points off your permanent record, so this whole doctrine of indulgences makes no sense to me at any level. It seems to me, if anything, that it is a bit of an exercise in power tripping by a church that claims all sorts of divinely sanctioned authority for itself on matters that I think should best be left to God. But maybe that's just me.

Lost in Santa Rosa

I had signed up a few months ago to hear Dominic Crossan speak at the Westar Institute Fall 2008 session in Santa Rosa. I actually was interested at the time in more than just the Dominic Crossan talk, but I wasn't able to convince myself to invest an entire weekend out of town. But I had decided that I could do the 55 mile drive to Santa Rosa on a Friday night for one hour and a half session from an author and scholar who I respected a great deal, especially since it was dirt cheap to sign up for a single session.

Well, the session was this past Friday, and though my interest in all matters Jesus-y has diminished recently, I had paid for it and I had already asked for and received the day off from work because I knew that otherwise I would not be able to make it up there after work during the rush hour. Since I had done so much planning for it, I figured I might as well go. As it turned out, I got involved in other activities that afternoon and did not give myself as much time as I should have to get there. I had not printed out a map from Google or Mapquest or any other internet mapping site, and I did not bring a GPS device with me, so I had to navigate the old fashioned way, which is to say that I wrote down on a piece of paper the directions from the web site, which seemed simple enough--they said to "stay on Hwy 12 (which joins Farmers Lane) to 4th Street." After realizing I was no longer on route 12 and I also wasn't on Farmers Lane either at a certain point, without knowing quite how I had gotten off the freeway, I realized I was lost in Santa Rosa--a city with a population of over 150,000--and not with a lot of time left to spare. My only bow to modern technology was a cell phone that I had with me, so I called the hotel for directions.

When I finally arrived, barely in time, there wasn't enough time for dinner, so I asked the desk clerk where I could find a hotel vending machine. Dinner thus consisted of some cheesy crackers and a couple of Reese's peanut butter cups. That was enough to tide me over for what did turn out to be an interesting and often entertaining visual presentation of computer projected photographs of Roman Imperial inscriptions, coins, archaeological finds, and other artifacts, narrated by Dominic Crossan.

He spoke about a subject that has dominated much of his popular writing lately, namely the nature of Roman imperial theology. The subtext was only alluded to occasionally during the talk, although it came up more explicitly during the Q&A--namely, that the language used to describe Augustus Caesar (Divine, Son of God, Savior of the World, Bringer of Peace, etc.) is exactly the same as the language that early Christians used to describe Jesus. The point, of course, is that this was no coincidence, that in fact the early Christians were using theological language that the people of that time fully recognized and that was pervasive and culturally dominant--but they were applying it to a completely different individual; and by using such language they were challenging the prevailing Imperial theology of that time, and by extension, the authority of the Roman Empire itself. The prevailing theology of the time, as Crossan pointed out, proceded from Religion to War, from War to Victory, from Victory to Peace. Caesar was worshiped as divine because he brought peace to his people--through military conquest. This theology of peace through victory contrasted with Jesus's theology of peace through justice. Thus the early Christians used the identical language of Roman Imperial theology to present a subversively alternative religious and political vision. As he pointed out, telling people of the Roman Empire of that time that an executed Jewish peasant was to be described in the same language as was used to describe the ruler of the "world" at that time would have led many people to roll over with laughter. And yet, as we know, this is precisely what was done.

Crossan is a funny and interesting speaker who exudes Irish charm. It was a bit far away for an evening trip, and the drive back that night was somewhat long, but I enjoyed the experience enough that I might just have to consider attending more events the next time the Westar Institute holds a session in Santa Rosa. It even may have rekindled a tiny bit of my interest in religious exploration. I'm not sure if that is enough to inspire me to want to actually attend a church, though. I mean, let's not go overboard or get ridiculous or anything.

Enthusiasm

I started to write this entry on September 12, just before I left on vacation, but I did not finish what I started and left it as a draft. This posting represents a slightly edited version of what I wrote at that time, along with some additional paragraphs tacked onto the end.

I haven't had much to say lately. I am feeling a little disillusioned with this process of seeking out religious communities. I always knew that I was going to deal with theologies that I didn't necessarily feel comfortable with, but the more contact that I have had with ostensibly "progressive" Christian churches, the less satisfied I have become with just making do.

A few months ago, at Pastor Bob Cornwall's request, I wrote an article for a journal that he edits, in which I discussed my religious journey and my experiences visiting various churches. I wrote at the time about my frustrations as a spiritual outsider looking inward, as one who was attracted to the Christian tradition and yet repelled by many of its more orthodox doctrines. What kept me going through all of that, despite the frustration, was a certain spirit of optimism, and maybe a sense that God was calling out to me. There were plenty of new faith communities left to try out, and so many churches seemed open to the ideas of people like Borg or even Spong. I believed somehow that if I kept looking I might find something at least remotely resembling I was looking for; at the very least, the novelty of visiting new churches kept me going for a while. The desire to connect with God was also a strong motivator. Bob himself had suggested to me once, before he solicited the article, that the demands that I was placing on the Christian faith were unlikely to be met, and that I was probably not going to find mainline Protestant churches that were going to offer the kind of theology that I myself was interested in exploring. I knew at some level that he was right. And yet, something kept me going. I was willing to make certain compromises, on the theory that a little bit of moderately frustrating spiritual nourishment was better than none at all. But this was proving to be a decreasingly successful personal strategy.

I could at this point, I suppose, expand my exploration and go roaming out further afield into the suburbs, in ever widening circles of church shopping exercises, but the reality is that the payoff seems dubious, especially given that long Sunday morning car rides aren't my idea of a good time anyway.

I found some of the churches I visited through their affiliation with the Center for Progressive Christianity; and others I found by doing web searches; still others were I found via a list of "progressive" churches contained an appendix of Hal Taussig's book, A New Spiritual Home: Progressive Christianity at the Grass Roots. There was so much variety in approaches and theologies and congregations, it all started to make my head spin, and meanwhile nothing was really working. One church might have an interesting or progressive pastor, but the congregation was not very welcoming, or else I felt like I was crashing a party to which I was not invited. Other churches had services that were full of orthodox creedal confessions and high Christological language that just didn't work for me.

I had for a while been sporadically attending a small but active progressive church, with a progressive pastor. At one point the church had been offering discussion forums on the eight points of progressive Christianity. I attended one of them, and the subject of prayer came up. I am not a believer in the efficacy of intercessory prayer, and I said so at the meeting. No one argued with me or vocally disagreed with me, but in some sense I felt that I was speaking as an outsider with a different perspective than that of the others. The other members of this congregation were lifelong members of the that church's denomination who were edging into progressive territory, while I was an outsider who came at religious belief from a quite different direction. I realized at that point that no matter how progressive the Christian community is, I was forever standing outside of the Christian faith looking inward. I didn't want to play the role of iconoclast in any case. It was the real beginning of my disengagement with the church shopping process, although attending church during the previous Christmas season, with its celebration of events that I didn't for once second believe literally to have taken place, had also been a contributing factor.

It is hard for me to totally give up on this process. I haven't totally ruled out attending a church from time to time. And maybe my enthusiasm for this project will pick up again--anything is possible. There are one or two relatively progressive churches in my community that I could attend if I really felt the urge. But for the most part, at least at the moment, I am not feeling the urge. This represents a big change from how I felt when I first started this process a couple of years ago; at that time, I felt a really strong urge, as if God herself were calling me to go find a religious community.

While I was on vacation recently, I realized that maintaining this blog, and participating in online discussion in general, had been stressing me out. My vacation certainly had some stresses of its own--temporarily lost luggage being a major one of those--but somehow they were a different kind of stress, because things like lost luggage were vacation stresses; and once I did get my luggage I had the time of my life. I had internet access, but I didn't want to check this blog, write in it, or participate in blog discussions here or anywhere else.

I'm still basking in the afterglow of that vacation a bit, even though I have been back for over a week. What that means for the future of this blog remains an open question.

Origins in diversity

Here is a quote from the Sarah Sentilles book A Church of Her Own:

When people lament the state of religion today--how different it is than "the early church," how modernity has perverted "real" Christianity, how things used to be simpler and more clear--they seem to believe there is a pure version of Christianity that we could get back to. Today's multiple denominations, organizations, and interpretations stem from one early church, they think, and if we could return to that one church, then modernity and all its confusion would disappear. In this version of history, the farther back in time you go the less diversity there is. But, in fact, there was no such thing as "the early church." Tracing Christianity back to its origins, you will not arrive at one, unified community. The first Christians had no New Testament, no Nicene Creed or Apostles Creed, no church buildings, no organized and official hierarchy, and no single understanding of the significance of Jesus. The farther back you go, the more versions of Christianity you will find. Early Christians were wildly diverse groups of people with multiple, conflicting, and contradictory opinions about who Jesus was, what meaning they ought to make out of his life and death, and what was required of people who wanted to follow him. (p. 243)

God as our Ultimate Concern

Wade G. writes in his Evolution of the Mystery blog a really nice summary of Tillich's conception of God as our Ultimate Concern. He closes with the following comment:

But, regarding Tillich's conception of God as I understand it... I find that when my days are going rough, it is soothing to the spirit somehow to take a deep breath and ruminate on all of this. I'm not really sure I can express what my "ultimate concern" or "ground of being" is. I just know, somehow, that it is there - that life is not surface only, but deep. It has nothing to do with anything "supernatural" or anything that contradicts the rules of physics or my own perceptions. The closest word I can think of to express my "ultimate concern", which seems to just about fit, is that very simple one "love." Not love of something particular, but love in it's limitless and mysterious ideal. And maybe that is not far off from what the author of the first letter of John was telling us when he said (in the New International version translation) "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love."

This comes very close to my own understanding. Religion for me isn't about believing in miracles, or in the supernatural, or anything that contradicts the laws of nature. It is instead about a sense of awe in response to the depths of meaning, creativity, love, and purpose.

Faith and science

When I was 16 years old and decided that I could no longer accept the religion of my upbringing, one of the issues that came to the forefront for me was evolution. I had been taught that the Genesis account of creation was literally true and that evolution was a hoax. By the time I was 16, I could no longer believe this. And this realization made me angry. Really angry.

I was interested in science at that point in my life, and I resented the way religion could be such a force for ignorance. One member of my family accused me of being bitter and resentful, like that was a bad thing or something. But the reality is that when religions that use faith as an excuse for promoting ignorance, there is something fundamentally wrong going on. Fundamentalist Christianity made me angry at 16, and for good reason.

What I know now, which I didn't know at age 16, was that faith itself does not require taking an intellectually indefensible stance on the subject of evolution. I had to escape from all that brainwashing of my youth to realize this.

Which brings me to the subject of a headline from yesterday's New York Times reads "A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash".

The article describes how a biology teacher in Florida has been trying to teach evolution to students who have been, effectively, brainwashed by evangelical churches into rejecting the science of evolution. The teacher has a difficult task; his job is not to bully his students into submission, because otherwise, he will "lose" them.

But I think that what bothers me about this headline is that the battle here is actually not between faith and science at all, but rather between ignorance and science. One can be a person of faith without being an idiot.

The article mentions that many of this teacher's students have been enlisted as soldiers in the army of the ignorant before they've even set foot in class. For example,

Some come armed with “Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution,” a document circulated on the Internet that highlights supposed weaknesses in evolutionary theory. Others scrawl their opposition on homework assignment.

There is something funny about high school students going into the classroom without the intention of learning what the teacher has to teach them. But it gets worse. One local pastor has been deliberately trying to undermine science education by passing out a copy of an anti-evolution book to every graduating senior the previous year. This book has now been circulating among students.

The problem is also exacerbated by the fact that there are teachers in public schools who themselves are part of the problem and who actually teach their students not to believe in evolution. For example, one coworker of the teacher featured in the Times article

tells her students, but evolution alone can hardly account for the appearance of wholly different life forms. She leaves it up to them to draw their own conclusions. But when pressed, she tells them, “I think God did it.”

"I think God did it?" Wow, this is the God of Gaps rearing its ugly head, and this is the sort of thing that gives religion a bad name. But it really has nothing to do with religion per se. The fact is that being a person of faith has nothing to do with thinking this way. One can believe in science and also be a person of faith.

Tradition and faith

From Marjorie Hewitt Suchoki's book God's Presence: Theological Reflections on Prayer:

Tradition is like the crest of a wave always pushing beyond itself. Faithfulness to a tradition is not gained through treading water in repetition of some aspect of the past, but through swimming with the crest into fresh interpretations of God's gracious presence with us. The tradition is a living, fluid thing. Thus to use the texts and the tradition as a formative matrix for our knowledge of God is not to find an ironclad rule that determines what we can think. Rather, it is to find commonalities that not only shape how we think about the God we experience, but that also invite the questions born of faith. We know God through God's presence to us, and we interpret this presence through categories given to us through our communities of faith. But the personalization of these categories may in fact be part of their transformation in the ongoing process of a living tradition. Thus there is necessarily a certain openness in what we dare to call our knowledge of God. It is fluid--perhaps like God's own self. (p. 11)

Miraculous, but with a little help from human beings.

According to an AP story published today,

An eye-opening survey reveals widespread belief that divine intervention can revive dying patients. And, researchers said, doctors "need to be prepared to deal with families who are waiting for a miracle."

More than half of randomly surveyed adults - 57 percent - said God's intervention could save a family member even if physicians declared treatment would be futile. And nearly three-quarters said patients have a right to demand such treatment.

What I find interesting about this is that if God can miraculously heal people who are declared to be terminally ill, why do these patients' families want to continue treatment as a means of summoning the miracle? What does God need the physician for? Can't an omnipotent God heal people on his own?

Second grade Christianity

Sarah Sentilles writes this in her book A Church of Her Own:

Many ministers worry so much about the people they will upset if they change the language of the liturgy to inclusive language that they forget about the people who are upset because they don't use inclusive language. So harassed are they by the people who call to complain that the Holy Spirit was called a "She" or the Lord's Prayer called God "Creator" instead of "Father" that they don't have time or energy to think about the people who visit their churches and decide never to come back because they heard God called a man again and again and again. Refusing to use inclusive language, refusing to be creative about the metaphors we use to talk about God, sells our congregations short. And it sells God short. (p. 137)

She makes a very interesting point here. Isn't it possible that clergy members who are so afraid of introducing progressive ideas to their worship services lest they offend certain members of the congregation are not taking into account the people they might attract to their church through those same actions--those whom Spong labels "the church alumni society"?

The above quote, of course, is referring specifically to the use of inclusive language, which is separate from the issue of clergy introducing modern biblical scholarship into their sermons (which was discussed previously in this blog.) Yet both the use of inclusive language and the use of modern scholarship represent essentially twin threats to the established orthodoxy, and are resisted vehemently by religious conservatives. There are, I am sure, pressures on clergy from all directions, not just from the congregational members who might be offended.

Lest anyone think that clergy never get intimidated by conservative pressures, Sarah Stiles documents the case of a female assistant pastor in the UCC (a supposedly liberal denomination) who had to deal with various problems on the job, including sexism directed at her. At one point, twelve members of the congregation circulated a petition demanding a meeting with her, in which a litany of complaints were presented. One of the complaints

had to do with a sermon Eve preached a year and a half earlier in which she had questioned the historicity of the birth narrative of Jesus, something that has been questioned for decades by historians and biblical scholars who have argued that both Mary's virginity and the notion that her pregnancy resulted from divine intervention (the Holy Spirit) are literary devices, not historical facts. A mortal woman becoming pregnant by supernatural forces signaled that the child who resulted from that pregnancy would possess special powers, such as the ability to perform miracles. Rather than a literal fact, the virginity of Mary is a rhetorical device intended to demonstrate the significance of Jesus. "I was basically taking away their happy second-grade Christian theology," Eve said. (p. 112-113)

So it seems clear that clergy run up against serious pressures from congregations if they dare to threaten anyone's second-grade Christian theology. Yet, when balancing that against the number of people they may turn away from church by not offering something a little more advanced, who usually wins out?

My fairy tale is true; your fairy tale is false.

In a comment to my "What Makes a Community a Community" posting, One Small Step writes the following:

Now, yes, many hold to a literal resurrection based on fact. But that is forcing the person to push past the paradigm of natural laws, and as soon as that happens, what standard is used to evaluate the truth of something? All you can do is take it on faith, or one's personal experience with God. It is again an "anything goes." If there aren't limits put on what one is studying, then how do we determine what is and is not something literally true? What basis is used? On the one hand, we'd usually know that if a story contains a man coming back from the dead, people would reject it as a fable, and not be told that they are doing so from a personal "a priori." Yet if they apply the same principle to the Bible, they are? What causes the standard to change?

This raises an interesting important point about credulity. Even most of those who believe in a literal resurrection of Jesus are selective about their credulity. If I went up to them and told them that my friend Bob died, was buried, and three days later came back from the dead and walked down the street, most Christians wouldn't believe me. They would categorically reject my claim as ridiculous. This is an example of the "my fairy tale is true; your fairy tale is false" phenomenon.

I'm not normally crazy about quoting from militant atheists, but in this case I think that one individual, who operates the "Why Won't God Heal Amputees" web site, makes a really good point on this score. This individual offers a set of argument that are fairly commonly used by militant atheists against religion, and as the title of the site suggests, the problem of theodicy plays an important role in those arguments. I don't accept those arguments against the existence of God, as I have stated in the past, because I think that they set up a straw man that is based on the faulty assumption that religion necessarily involves a certain kind of patriarchal, supernaturally theistic conception of an interventionist Deity. That being said, I do agree with these critics of religion on their objection to the miraculous claims that many religions often make; it has always been my interest to seek out a rational religion that is consistent with a post-Enlightenment worldview. I don't believe in miracles as they are typically defined, and I don't believe that being religious requires a belief in them. Thus I agree with the point that is being made in the following quote from that web site, namely that many people who are skeptical about the extraordinary and miraculous claims made by other faiths than their own often turn around and exhibit considerable credulity when it comes to extraordinary and miraculous claims made by their own faith:

No one (besides little kids) believes in Santa Claus. No one outside the Mormon church believes Joseph Smith's story. No one outside the Muslim faith believes the story of Mohammed and Gabriel and the winged horse. No one outside the Christian faith believes in Jesus' divinity, miracles, resurrection, etc.

Therefore, the question I would ask you to consider right now is simple: Why is it that human beings can detect fairy tales with complete certainty when those fairy tales come from other faiths, but they cannot detect the fairy tales that underpin their own faith? Why do they believe their chosen fairy tale with unrelenting passion and reject the others as nonsense?

I am admittedly being provocative when I adopt that person's term "fairy tale" to describe the story of the resurrection of Jesus. I normally would use the word "myth" (rather than "fairy tale") to describe it, because myths have meaning beyond their literal or factual truth, and I actually think the fanciful stories in Matthew, Luke and John of Jesus walking around after his death have mythic value--that they are ways of articulating through stories and metaphor the fact that, after Jesus died, his followers believed that they experienced his presence in some way. I appreciate and respect that aspect of Christianity--as long as one doesn't fall into the trap of literalizing these myths.

I recently attended a church service where the pastor, who regularly deals with people in a congregation with diverse points of view, reacted to one of the lectionary miracle stories in Matthew (where Jesus walks on water) by saying that whether you believe it really happened or not doesn't really matter--what matters is the deeper truth that the story points to. I appreciate what the pastor was saying in that case--and I'm sure that Marcus Borg would say the same thing. But I am coming to realize how hard it is for me to look the other way on this subject. It is important to my personal faith that these myths not be literalized, and it is hard for me to say that it doesn't matter to me whether those stories are true or not. There are a lot of people of faith in this world who feel disenfranchized by organized religion precisely because they don't believe that these mythical miracle stories are literally true, and I fall into that category mysself. True, the congregation in this instance seems to hold together just fine despite whatever differences of theology exist among its participants. I know that there are some more rationalistically oriented skeptics among the membership, and some who appear to be more traditional in their outlook. So I obviously can't speak for others on this score. Others may have no problem with the "it doesn't matter" approach. But for me, while I certain respect the right of other people to take these stories literally, it is not so easy to just sit back and say that it doesn't matter to me whether Santa Clause is real or not.

A continuing conversation and dialogue

Marcus Borg, in his Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship, has this to say about what kind of understanding of the Bible results from taking biblical scholarship, and thus the Bible, seriously:

[T]he Bible as a whole...is the developing tradition of two ancient communities, ancient Israel and the early Christian movement. As such, the Bible is not a divine product that is to be believed no matter how incredible, but a human cultural product that is to be understood. The Old Testament is Israel's story, told by Israel and about Israel. The New Testament is the early church's story, told by them and about them. Together, they tell us how these two ancient communities experienced God, thought about God, and worshiped God, as well as how they thought they should live (communally and individually) in response to God. The Bible's ethical directives and codes of behavior were directly relevant to their lives in their time, not divine laws given by God for all time.

This transformed understanding of the Bible also leads to a quite different perception of its authority. When the Bible is seen as an infallibly true divine product, then it becomes an authority standing over us, telling us what to believe and how to behave, regardless of whether these beliefs or codes of behavior make sense to us. The alternative understanding of the Bible--as ancient Israel's and the early church's witness to their life with God--sees things differently. Within this way of seeing, the significance of the biblical canon is that it affirms that these are the ancient documents with which Christians are to be in a continuing conversation and dialogue. To take the Bible seriously is to seek to understand what our ancestors in the tradition knew of God. (p. 178)

What makes a community a community?

Here is a quote from the book A Church of Her Own, by Sarah Sentiles:

One of the challenges faced by recent divinity school graduates--and the communities they serve--is the disjunction between the theology they learn in school and the theology being preached in and professed by churches. There is a vast difference between what denominations claim as official doctrine and what students learn in graduate school. In many master's programs, students are encouraged to think to the edge of things, to question fundamental beliefs, to critique theological concepts, to recognize the effects of their theological constructs, to challenge the symbols and stories of their traditions. This critical work is understood as part of faith, not separate from it. Many church communities have not been encouraged to do the same. With lazy preaching and simplistic adult and children's education programs, we have done our congregations a disservice. Most congregations can handle--in fact they crave--complicated, challenging theology. This is not easy work. Challenging people's long-held beliefs--and having one's own challenged--can be frightening, uncomfortable, even devastating. What's more, exposing people to a variety of beliefs means making room for people to have a variety of beliefs and raises questions about what makes a community a community. What would a faith community look like that celebrated difference? What is essential? What holds us together? How do we make meaning? (pp. 53-54)

The Scylla of Orthopraxy and the Charybdis of Orthodoxy

John Cobb addresses the relationship of process theology to progressive Christianity in his latest column on the Process and Faith web site. In so doing, he describes what he sees as two primary streams of thought within progressive Christianity. I find this interesting because I don't find myself entirely comfortable with either of these streams.

One of them, which he identifies with Jim Adams and the Center for Progressive Christianity, reacts to the rigidity of conservative theology by virtually rejecting the usefulness of any kind of theology whatsoever. As Cobb puts it, from this perspective

Beliefs are less important than commitment to the common good. People in this stream believe that ethics is far more important than doctrine.

Jim Burklo, who is also associated with the Center for Progressive Christianity, was until recently the pastor of a church that identified itself as being about "deeds rather than creeds". Put another way, this type of religion emphasizes orthopraxy as the alternative to orthodoxy.

The other stream that he identifies, which he associates with Delwin Brown, focuses more on the social gospel. Cobb also makes the important point that this second group "takes theology seriously."

Cobb writes that the first group of progressives, those who have reacted against theology, have not responded very positively to process theology. This is understandable. Those who have little use for constructing any kind of conception of God's nature would certainly not have much use for a metaphysical system like process theology. My own sympathies for process theology probably explain why I don't see the appeal of recently prominent expressions of progressive Christianity along the lines of Greta Vosper's. It probably also explains why I am uncomfortable with John Shelby Spongs' continual denunciations of "theism" without his actually specifying what kind of theology he offers in its place.

Cobb sites an article by Gene Marshall in the May-June issue of The Progressive Christian as another example of this what this stream of thought entails. I fished out my copy of that issue and took a look at the article in question. Marshal writes,

There can be no beliefs about God because God is not an object alongside other objects about which beliefs can be held. God, the God witnessed to in the Bible, is a Presence, a mysterious Presence about which the mind has no information and can have no information whatsoever.

I can see why Cobb objects to what Marshall wrote. I would myself argue that to claim that we can say nothing whatsoever about God is an extreme conclusion to draw from the mere fact that God belongs to a different ontological category than ordinary objects that we experience in everyday life. Yes, I agree that God cannot be completely or accurately characterized by our own finite human imaginations. But I do believe that it goes too far to say that we can say nothing whatsoever about God. This gets back to the Blind Man and the Elephant analogy that I frequently make about human religions. It is not true that the blind man who feels the trunk of an elephant has "no information whatsoever" about the elephant, as Marshall claims; rather, the information that he does have is provisional and limited. The power of progressive theology at its best lies precisely in its understanding of the provisional nature of our God-concepts. It is why our concepts about God evolve over time--because humans are always developing new insights about the nature of their encounters with the Divine.

Cobb also notes a discussion between none other than the aforementioned Adams and Brown in that same issue of the magazine. Adams in that conversation criticizes Brown for suggesting that God could play any sort of role whatsoever in human creation. While acknowledging that Brown "has reduced God's role from designing to nudging, " Adams complains that "he still seems to agree with the creationists, the sworn enemies of evolutionary science, that God intervenes in the functioning of nature."

Again, I can see why Cobb objects to Adams's comments here. For Adams, the idea of Divine participation in the activity world of any sort whatsoever, even non-coercive participation, is fundamentally no different from traditional interventionist theism. He has thus conflated two radically different conceptions of God--the coercive and interventionist God of traditional theism, and the non-interventionist God such as outlined by process theology. (The activity as described in process theology is not really "nudging", I might add, but rather "beckoning". ) Ultimately I think that Adams's objection represents a sort of dogmatic thinking that I might expect from a militant atheist or a religious fundamentalist; but coming from a self-described progressive Christian, it is truly disappointing. In fact, there is more than one way of reconciling a post-Enlightenment understanding of an ordered and rationally operating world with a belief in the existence of God. Adams's insistence that the only way to reconcile God and science in the modern world is by rejecting any concept of divine participation in nature shows a failure of imagination on Adams's part.

Delwin Brown responds to this in the following way:

The crucial issue is, what does it mean to belief in God? What difference does it make to life? What is at stake when people say that God is, or is not? And to answer questions like these we are forced to ask a clarifying question: What do we mean by "God"?

If we are talking about the totalitarian deity so sharply criticized by Sam Harris and others, then I, like them, am an atheist. I do not believe in that God. That concept of God leads to, and supports the continuation of, unjust social hierarchies, blind indifference to modern science, the abandonment of careful thinking, and the privileged manipulation of power by a divinely favored few. And this illustrates my point: The important thing is to ask, what does belief in God mean for understanding and living life.

Even though I have had some reservations about Delwin Brown's formulation of progressive Christianity in his book, What Does a Progressive Christian Believe?, I am more sympathetic to Brown's view than I am to Adams's. I just don't see the point in believing in a "God" about whom we have no conception and who seems to make no difference in our lives or in the universe. On the other hand, the biggest problem that I see with the stream of progressive Christianity that believes that theology does matter is that, in practice, I have found that it often accepts many of the premises of traditional Christian orthodoxy too readily, and is too unwilling to take Adams's concerns about modern science to heart. Thus we have many self-described progressive Christians who still believe in Divine miracles or that Jesus was literally resurrected, which is not something that I can go along with. Adams is correct that traditionally conceived divine interventionism is unacceptable to the modern ears of many. The way that I found out of this dilemma was through process theology. Via process theology can we believe that theology still matters, and can we embrace a conception of Divine participation in the world, while at the same time rejecting classically conceived Divine interventionism.

I think that Adams and others who claim that orthopraxy is the sole alternative to orthodoxy ("deeds rather than creeds") are missing the point. Giving up on orthodoxy does not have to mean giving up on theology. A dynamic, living faith can be still about theology without being dogmatic. Giving up on dogmatism, rigidity, and theological authoritariansim doesn't require giving up on language about God altogether. There is indeed a middle ground.

So yes, for me, theology does matter. But the key point is this: for me, the real value in progressive Christianity is not that it offers a final word on these questions of theology, but that it offers a platform upon which a dialogue can be built. For me, religion is a continual act of dialogue by people within religious communities with each other and with God. Rather than giving up on God-talk, we embrace it in an open, dynamic fashion. If theology did not matter, then the dialogue would of course be pointless. But by the same token, this dialogue recognizes differences of opinion that necessarily exist among people of faith. An interest in theology does not necessitate an imposition of orthodoxy. We can have an orthopraxy that is rooted in a theology.

The real miracles

I just got around to seeing the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an amazing true story about a man who became paralyzed and unable to communicate with the world except by blinking one eye. One striking aspect to the movie was that, even though the main character himself was not particularly religious, almost everyone around him seemed to be a believer. He was often told, for example, that people were praying for him, and at one point he was even brought to church more or less against his will.

When I think about the idea that people were praying for him, I wonder what exactly they were praying for. That God would miraculously intervene against the laws of nature and give the man the ability to speak or even move again? Is this what people think God does?

I have never really made my peace with those parts of church services where intercessory prayers are offered for the sick. I understand and appreciate the sentiment that lies behind such prayers, and I know that at some level the idea of laying before God our concerns has great value. But it is one thing to tell God what concerns us; it is another thing to use God as a vehicle for a hope of magical solutions to the problems that plague us as creatures of nature who are limited by the physical world.

The real miracle in that movie, in my view, was not found in anyone's magic, but in the loving concern and attention that was directed to him by those around him, including by a wife who gave him more devotion than some might argue he deserved. Every act of communication on his part required active engagement by another party. There was something profound about the way people would begin a communication with him by reciting letters from the French alphabet, waiting for him to blink in order to signal which letter he wanted to communicate. This is in contrast to the way we normally express ourselves. If I want to say something, I just say it; but for him, the very act of "speaking" required that the recipient of the message look him right in the eye and start a recitation of letters.

To me, every time a human being takes care of another one, that is the real miracle. I think it is of much greater value for people to engage in tangible acts of compassion on a daily basis than to engage in futile attempts at conjuring up imaginary acts of magic by an interventionist Deity.