Atheist Schmatheist

John Shuck, a Presbyterian minister and progressive Christian, has referenced in his blog an article by a man, Robert Jensen, who recently joined a Presbyterian church and has been persecuted by some members of his denomination after publishing his beliefs in a newspaper article.

Robert Jensen describes his belief not so much in a personal God but in God as another name for the deepest mysteries in our life. He writes of the way that he was drawn to participating in a church community to serve certain needs that are often best served by churches. He also describes how he had to face an inquisition within his church, no doubt largely because he had described himself in the aforementioned newspaper article as an "atheist".

I actually don't consider Robert Jensen an atheist, despite his self-description. But that word seems to have served as a huge red flag that set off the conservative element within his denomination. His theology was not acceptable to conservatives to begin with, but to go public with his theology and to use the word atheist was probably just too much. The church's intolerant right wing tried to get him expelled.

From what I can tell it wasn't his own congregation that was the problem--his church is affiliated with the Center for Progressive Christianity. But within his broader denomination, it was another story. As I read Robert Jensen's account, I was struck with the horrible reality of him facing an inquisition like this--having to defend his very right to be a member of his own church.

I think his theology isn't much different from that of a lot of other people who are church members throughout mainline Protestantism--he just made the mistake of writing an article about it in a newspaper. Thus the lesson here seems to be this: you can be a dissident or free thinker, as long as you keep your mouth shut about what you think. What a terrible lesson that is. I am not a Presbyterian, but it seems to me a wonderful thing if a church will accept one who is an earnest seeker, if he wants to be a part of it and feels he has a role to play there.

During the inquisition process, some of those who reviewed his case defended him. Says Jensen, "one person used the image of Christianity as a circle, saying that so long as people could put one toe in the circle -- no matter what doubts they might have -- that was enough for membership." I wonder how many members of mainline Christianity have little more than their own toe within the Christian circle, as defined by the creeds or doctrines of their particular church? There are probably more than one imagines. And there are many others whose toes would be within the circle, but who stepped away from organized religion altogether because they sensed the intolerance and rigidity and the recitation of creeds that made no sense to them--those who became members of what John Spong calls the "church alumni association"?

I mentioned that I disagreed with Jensen's self-characterization as an "atheist". One reason he calls himself an atheist is that he views himself as one who lives as an atheist. Jensen writes:

In that sense, most people in this culture, no matter what their stated beliefs about God, live like atheists. Most of us accept the results of the Enlightenment and the application of the scientific method. We assume that actions in the world are governed by laws of physics that scientists have begun to identify, however incompletely. Whatever our views on the power of prayer, most of us also seek medical help when we are sick and trust in some worldly system of healing -- whether Western medicine or alternative traditions -- that is rooted in accumulated experience and/or scientific experimentation.

I will point out that I think Jensen is implying a dichotomy that really isn't there. He suggests that a belief in a personal God is incompatible with a belief in a world that is ordered and rational and that obeys the laws of physics, and since he accepts a modern scientific understanding of the world, he therefore believes that he cannot believe in any kind of personal Deity at all. Here he accepts implicitly that a personal God is necessarily a patriarchal figure who actively intervenes in the world, either according to His personal whim or maybe in response to our prayers if we pray hard enough or if enough of us pray. But I believe that God need not be reduced to this simple conception.

The point is, though, that he does devote his life towards a deeper, sacred reality, regardless of what he conceives God to be--and he does so within the context of a faith community rooted in Christian traditions. And for that reason, I do not consider him an atheist. Rather than believing in a personal God, he instead conceives of God as another name for Mystery. As long as he is seeking to probe the depths of that Mystery which he calls "God", then he is living the religious life. And if he is living the religious life, then I for one refuse to call him an atheist. It isn't about believing in miracles or divine intervention. It is about pointing one's life towards the depths of the deep, sacred Mystery that undergirds our reality.

And that's good enough for me.

Who needs the Holy Spirit, anyway?

In Marcus Borg's book The God We Never Knew, Borg distinguishes between what he believes to be two different models of God. One, he calls the monarchical model; the other, he calls the Spirit model. Borg makes a point of distinguishing between conceiving of God as Spirit, and the very specific doctrine of the Holy Spirit that is part of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Borg writes that "as a root metaphor for the sacred, Spirit images God as a nonmaterial reality pervading the universe as well as being more than the universe" (p. 72). Borg here is describing panentheism. Borg goes on to write

As used in the Bible (and as used here), its meaning is broader than the specific Christian doctrine of "the Holy Spirit", which sees it as one aspect of God. But in the Bible, Spirit is used comprehensively to refer to God's presence in creation, in the history of Israel, and in the life of Jesus and the early church. Its meaning is sufficiently broad to make it a synonym for the sacred. Spirit "evokes a universal perspective and signifies divine activity in its widest reaches." Strongly associated with God's presence in and engagement with the world (God's immanence), Spirit also points to God's transcendence. It images "God's ongoing transcendent engagement with the world."

It is important to consider this question of immanence and transcendence when we consider the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which holds to a very specific conception. The Holy Spirit, according to orthodox Christian doctrine, is seen as one of the three persons of the Divine Trinity, who the resurrected Jesus promised would be bestowed upon his followers after his ascent to heaven. According to the book of Acts, Jesus told his followers "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." Jesus was then lifted "up" into heaven (the author of Acts, like others of his time, imagined a tiered universe in which heaven lay literally and physically above the earth.) The author of Acts then reports,

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Shortly thereafter, the author of Acts reports that the apostle Peter proclaimed, "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit."

That is to say, according to this passage, the Holy Spirit is a "gift", only offered to those who have faith in Christ. So, according to this view, the Holy Spirit, far from being a manifestation of the universal immanence of God, is something that is only available to a select few.

As I see it, there are therefore three important implications of this doctrine of the Holy Spirit. First, according to this view, God's immanence (unlike God's transcendence) is conditional rather than necessary; second, it is offered to the world from the outside; and third, because it is available only to a certain set of true believers, it serves as a kind of legitimation of their doctrinal pronouncements. The theology of the Holy Spirit relies on God's transcendence as being primary, his immanence being thus secondary and dependent. God exists outside our plane of reality, according to this view, and he offers his immanent presence on a limited basis, at certain points in history to certain individuals. Further, this viewpoint suggests that God's immanence is not available to all (although, curiously, the author of Acts has Peter proclaiming the gift of the Holy Spirit as having been foretold by the prophet Joel, who said that God would pour out his spirit on all flesh.) The Holy Spirit, with its limited availability, is given credit for inspiring individuals or religious institutions to discovering certain "true" doctrines, which they then know to be true because they have the authority of the Holy Spirit to back them up.

God's spirit, as referred to in the Hebrew Bible, thus became interpreted to mean, according to many Christians, the Holy Spirit. Even though the writers of the Hebrew Bible who used the word ruach (meaning "wind" or "spirit") had no concept of the Trinity, which is clearly a specific Christian doctrine that came much later, Christians retrofitted their theology onto the words of the Old Testament. When the book of Genesis says, for example (according to the NRSV translation), that "a wind from God swept over the face of the waters", many Christians often translate the Hebrew word ruach in that passage as "spirit", and then further interpret that to mean the Holy Spirit.

If, on the other hand, if you take a panentheist view of creation, then God's spirit as an immanent presence participated in, and continues to participate in, the acts of creation taking place in the world. The spirit is not some doctrinally obscure "person" within a divine Trinity, but rather simply the expression of God's immanent presence working in the world. And because the spirit is available to all of us, doctrinal authority no longer becomes the exclusive province of a select few.

To me, as a panentheist, the divine presence is universal and necessary. I see God as both immanent and transcendent. That means that God's spirit is everywhere--it is not conditional, and it is not available only to a select few, and, it did not only penetrate the world at one or more specific times in history. I also believe that some individuals more closely relate to the immanent divine spirit than others do, that some people, through their lives, disclose what it means to be in an intimate relationship with God's spirit. I believe that Jesus was one such person. But one's relationship with the divine is not an either-or proposition; the spirit of God is available to all of us, although some of us are more adept at relating to her spirit than others are.

From "The Onion"

This headline from an article in the satircal newspaper the Onion reads: Super Priest Can Turn Anything Into Body, Blood Of Christ. You can read the rest of the article here.

Supernatural theism versus panentheism

Marcus Borg, in his book The God We Never Knew, compares two different conceptions of God within the Christian tradition:

The first conceptualizes God as a supernatural being "out there", separate from the world, who created the world a long time ago and who may from time to time intervene within it. In an important sense, this God is not "here" and thus cannot be known or experienced but only believed in (which, within the logic of this concept, is what "faith" is about.) I will call this way of thinking about God "supernatural theism." Widespread within Christianity, it is perhaps what a majority of people (both believers and non-believers) think of when they think of God. Some accept the existence of such a being, and some reject it. But it is the notion of God as a supernatural being "out there" that is being accepted or rejected.

The second root concept of God in the Christian tradition thinks of God quite differently. God is the encompassing Spirit; we (and everything that is) are in God. For this concept, God is not a supernatural being separate from the universe; rather, God (the sacred, the Spirit) is a nonmaterial layer or level or dimension of reality all around us. God is more than the universe, yet the universe is in God. Thus, in a spatial sense, God is not "somewhere else" but "right here." I will call this concept of God "panentheism". (p. 11-12)

In a previous posting, I mentioned that, after having read John Shelby Spong's book Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Spong clearly rejects "supernatural theism" (which Spong simply calls "theism"), but it wasn't at all clear to me whether he embraced panentheism or not. He mentioned the word "panentheism" once, almost in passing, without saying whether he agreed with it or not. Meanwhile, he used the language of Paul Tillich to describe God as the Ground of Being. He rejected the idea of a personal God. And he wrote a lot of God as being the depths of reality. While he embraced the immanence of God fully, he seemed to reject transcendence out of hand, seemingly equating transcendence with the "theism" that he rejected. Thus it seemed to me that he was in fact taking a position that seemed more pantheist than panentheist.

Borg explains the key difference between pantheism and panentheism in this way:

Pantheism lacks the extra syllable en, which makes all the difference. Pantheism (without the en) identifies the universe with God: God and the universe are coextensive (literally, "everything is God"). Pantheism affirms only God's immanence and essentially denies God's transcendence; though the sacred is present in everything, it is not more than everything. But panentheism affirms both transcendence (God's otherness or moreness) and immanence (God's presence). God is not to be identified with the sum total of things. Rather, God is more than everything, even as God is present everywhere. God is all around us and within us, and we are within God. (p. 32)

If Spong believes in transcendence of any sort, he seems to de-emphasize it to such a degree as to make it irrelevant to his theology. On the other hand, I believe that God is everywhere among us, that God is within us and that we are within God, but that God is also more than the sum of everything that is, that she is a sustaining infinite reality that supersedes the finite universe.

"Not many of you should become teachers"

We all know the difference between being sorry for what one said and being sorry that others were offended by what one said. The first is an expression of genuine contrition, while the second clearly isn't. And the Pope's "apology" with respect to his recent remarks that offended many of the world's Muslims falls into the second category.

Coincidentally, the readings from last week's revised common lectionary included the following text from James 3:1-12:

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue--a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh.

Wow, could the timing of this lectionary reading have been more appropriate?

Interestingly enough, the Pope's apparent hostility towards Islam may have a long history, which did not begin with his recent remarks. According to a column published last January in the Washington Times, the a friend of the Pope, Father Joseph D. Fessio, reported in a radio interview that the Pope held strongly negative views on Islam. (One of the pope's alleged assertions was that Islam is inherently incompatible with democracy, a strange complaint to come from the leader and former chief inquisitor of an authoritarian religious institution that has operated a top-down hierarchy and that has suppressed free inquiry and stifled the theological expression of dissidents.) The Washington Times columnist considered this at the time to be a "bombshell" that "has yet to explode because no one wants to touch it." It would seem that the bombshell has finally exploded.

A believer in exile

I have been reading John Shelby Spong's book Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile. In many ways, this book serves as Spong's manifesto, a philosophical treatise where he criticizes traditional Christian theology, offers a theology of his own, and suggests certain implications of his theology for prayer, ethics, and worship.

One of the most compelling and important parts of his book is Chapter Two, The Meaning of Exile and How We Got There. Here Spong points out that, contrary to what fundamentalist Christians will tell you, the great Western religions have never been static phenomena that dropped out the sky whole and complete. Judaism, the parent religion of Christianity, underwent important theological changes, long before the birth of Christ; it did not emerge from Moses's time a finished product that then didn't change up to Jesus's time. On the contrary; Spong cites the Babylonian exile as a key moment that introduced a crisis into the Jewish faith, and to which Judaism responded by developing new theological precepts. Although there were further changes that came later, Spong focused on the exile because he used this as a model of what he sees happening in Christianity today--and to bolster his point that modern Christianity is in crisis, he devastatingly shows how much of the Bible was built on a world view that has since been repudiated by modern understandings of how the universe operates. Although Spong doesn't cite Thomas Kuhn, his argument certainly brings to my mind an analogy between what Spong is claiming about Christianity and what Kuhn argued about paradigm shifts in science being precipitated by crises in the previous paradigms.

I believe Spong is correct in his assessment the failures of traditional Christianity to cope with the world as we now know it to be. What Spong hopes to do is rescue Christianity by replacing the old theism with something else. And this is where it gets tricky, and where I find myself in disagreement with him.

Spong admits that he has been influenced by the ideas of Paul Tillich. As such, he wants to replace the old theism that emphasized divine transcendence with something new, a theology that views God as the Ground of Being. What Spong means by this isn't entirely clear to me. He says that critics may call him a pantheist, which he doesn't directly deny, instead only saying that "many theologians, revealing their own limitations, seem to believe that if they can name an idea, they can dismiss it." He also suggests that others might call him a panentheist, but this clearly isn't the case, since panentheists believe in divine transcendence as well as divine immanence, and he clearly rejects transcendence as a divine attribute. He points to God instead as a deeper reality of the world we know. Citing Tillich's definition, he says that

the God to whom Tillich pointed was the infinite center of life. This God was not a person, but, rather like the insights of the mystics, this God was the mystical presence in which all personhood could flourish. This God was not a being but rather the power that called being forth in all creatures. This God was not an external, personal force that could be invoked but rather an internal reality that, when confronted, opened us to the meaning of life itself.

If I understand him correctly, this sounds an awful lot like pantheism. By denying that God has any externality outside of the world, he is essentially equating God with the world, or at least he characterizes God as a deeper reality that underlies it. My experience with pantheists in other contexts is that they consider God to be a deeper reality that underlies the world and unifies it--one analogy being that God is the ocean and we are its waves. The problem that I see is that Spong seems to be committing the fallacy of assuming that a transcendent God is necessarily omnipotent, and since he rejects omnipotence, he rejects transcendence; he should know better, especially since he even goes so far as to cite Alfred North Whitehead as one of the philosophers who hammered a nail into the coffin of traditional theism.

This is the issue that I have with Spong's conception of God. While I agree with his criticisms of fundamentalism and of traditional orthodoxy, and I agree with his criticisms of the idea of God as a transcendent being who acts omnipotently on the world from the outside, I disagree with him that this necessarily implies rejecting the idea of God as a transcendent being. Panentheism, which Spong refers to briefly before ignoring it entirely, agrees with Spong that God is not an external being who acts omnipotently on the world from the outside, but panentheism still sees God as encompassing something greater than just the universe. Instead, panentheism believes that God is both immanent (as Spong believes) and also transcendent--that God is the universe, and also something more. Spong equates a belief in transcendence with a belief in a father-figure God who intervenes in the world from outside by violating the normal laws of the universe. In fact, a panentheistic God (at least under certain understandings of the concept), who is both all of the universe and also external to it, acts in the world as a co-participant and co-creator who operates within the universe. By rejecting transcendence altogether, Spong is throwing out the baby with the bath water.

And yet, despite my disagreement with Spong's rejection of "theism", I think that there is much in what he writes that I can agree with. I agree with him that we cannot appeal to a father-figure God to intervene in the world. I agree with him that prayers to God to intercede on our behalf are ineffective and serve as bad theology. He rightly points out that it is morally unjustifiable to suggest that those who are alone in the world and who have no one to pray on their behalf are therefore not going to receive as much of God's favor as those who are popular or who otherwise have high profiles, and who are therefore more likely to have many who would pray on their behalf. The very idea that God is a favor-dispensing autocrat who will only intervene in certain circumstances if someone is lucky enough to have others who will pray for them is, on the face of it, absurd. What kind of God would act in that way?

We know how much injustice there is in the way fate deals out its blows to the people of the world. Bad things happen to good people. This has been understood for a long, long time--certainly going back at least as far as the book of Ecclesiastes. Spong is right to point out that this has nothing to do with who has received God's favor and who hasn't.

Interestingly enough, Marcus Borg, who describes himself as a panentheist, takes the curious position that intercessionary prayer for the healing of others does work, although he seems to suggest that this is because of some force at work that may not be God's doing. I think Borg is wrong on this score. Thus, even though I agree more with Borg's concept of God than I do Spong's, I am on this question more in agreement with Spong regarding this type of prayer than I am with Borg.

But even here, I differ with Spong. Spong admits never to having had any kind of mystical experience of the divine presence. He says that he has tried, for years, to achieve this kind of experience, writing,

I have always wanted to be a person of prayer. I have yearned to have that sense of immediate contact with the divine. Yet for longer than I have been willing to admit, even to myself, prayers addressed to an external supreme being have had little or no meaning for me.

From this personal experience he then makes the leap that, since he has not experienced the divine presence of a trascendent being, apparently no one else has either. This seems like a highly presumptuous assertion. His experience is not everyone else's, and he should know better than to assert that it is.

I can't address Spong's inability to sense the divine presence in this way. For most of my life, I haven't either. But, in a sense, I think that it was because I was either not looking or I was looking too hard. Recognizing the divine presence and cultivating its experience is not something I really could have ever tried to figure out. At times in the past, I used to be jealous of those who said that they felt the presence of God. But I do believe, over the course of time, that I have experienced it, and lately I feel I have been experiencing it much more often.

I admit that I have little use for the formulaic words and tones of most prayers. The words "Dear God" don't work for me very much as a way to begin a prayer. After all, I know that God is right there next to me and with me and within me. Saying "Dear God" to begin a conversation with God makes as little sense to me as turning to a friend who has been walking with you the entire length of a long journey and starting off a sentence with "Dear Bill". You are with God all along, and God is your deepest, closest presence--so, from my perspective, I see no reason not just say something to her without the formality.

Sometimes a conversation I might have with God is short, referring to something I just thought or said or did. In my mind I sometimes just say something like "Hey, I'm sorry!", or "You're right!", or just a simple "Hey there!" Sometimes I say nothing at all, just feeling the presence, because, after all, God knows what I'm thinking anyway. I find the structure of formal prayers, including formal prayers spoken by others, can often act as a barrier for my ability to relate to the Divine.

Of course, that's just me. Am I limiting myself by doing this? Is it a "better" path to God to use formal prayers? Do others know something I don't? I don't think so, but all I know is that I have to be true to my own spirituality rather than try to emulate what others do in a way that doesn't seem right to me. Certainly I am not saying that my way of relating to God is better or worse than anyone else's. In fact, I am saying just the opposite--I am aware that different people have different people of experiencing the Divine, and it is not my place to judge them or deny the reality of their experiences. What people take away from those experiences, on the other hand, is inevitably colored by their prejudices, their theologies, their cultures, their time in history, and so forth. When they try to name and describe their experiences, that is when things get complicated. As humans, we don't always understand God correctly. All we can do is try.

It is true that I don't feel the divine presence all the time. My mind is often focused on other things, probably most of the time--the details of my work, or the other traffic on the road when I am driving, or the plot of the movie I am watching. Cultivating the experience of the Divine in my life is something that I perhaps I think that may be why I attend worship services--as a way of cultivating my experience of God--even if the actual experiences of those services themselves aren't always completely satisfactory for me.

Looking at the different ways that Spong and Borg view God, and the different ways that they view prayer, and comparing those viewpoints to my own, it seems inevitable that I will never find a religious community that exactly meets my own theology. I may always be a believer in exile.

Christianity and Empire

Here is an interesting quote from Marcus Borg's book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time:

Paul's execution in Rome merits pondering. Was Rome simply mistaken in killing him? Was the execution based on a misunderstanding? Was it due to the decree of a crazed and callous emperor? Was Paul and his message actually harmless to the empire that killed him? Was it all about words--about calling Jesus "Lord" and refusing to give Caesar the same honor? Or was it about something much deeper and more important?

Certainly Paul and his small communities scattered through Greece and Asia Minor posed no immediate political threat to Rome. But did Paul's proclamation of a rival Lord and a rival social vision genuinely and ultimately threaten the imperial vision of life?

We who live after centuries of Christian accommodation with imperial systems are inclined to think that Rome simply made a mistake--that Rome failed to recognize that Christianity is harmless to empire (and maybe even helpful). But what happened to Jesus and Paul should give us pause. Christianity is the only major religion whose two most formative figures were executed by established authority. Accident? Plan of God? Or is there in Jesus and Paul a vision and a program, a message and a mission, that should cause systems of domination, ancient and modern, to tremble? (emphasis added)

Borg's allusion to "centuries of Christian accommodation with imperial systems" is itself quite interesting and also quite true. How Christianity evolved from a small movement of Empire resisters to become the official state religion of that same Empire is itself an interesting question to ponder. (In the modern era, the continued association with certain elements of Christianity with imperial systems continues. The ruler of the most powerful Empire of the present time claims to be a Christian and thus a follower of the religion of Jesus and Paul. Of course, not all of Christianity is guilty of collusion with Empire, and a social justice component has always been an important part of Christianity as well.)

Borg also implies that the mere words of Jesus and Paul seem hardly to have served as much of a threat to imperial Roman power. John Dominic Crossan, in his book Who Killed Jesus?, makes a similar point: the Romans did not concern themselves too much with those who merely said things. On the other hand, they were brutally repressive against those who acted in ways that challenged imperial authority. He cites the example of a different man named Jesus, who, in the year 62 wandered around Jerusalem proclaiming a dire fate for the Temple and lamenting "Woe to Jerusalem". He was brought up on charges for possibly seditious behavior, which could have gotten him executed. As Crossan puts it, "But this is only speech, not action...Roman authority finds it all politically irrelevant, judges the man mad, and lets him go free." The Romans were not so magnanimous with Jesus or with Paul. (Nor were they so magnanimous with John the Baptist.)

The conclusion is clear: Jesus and Paul challenged the prevailing authority of the Empire of their time. I would argue that to follow in the footsteps in Jesus means to challenge the Empire of the present time.

God is waiting for us to act

John Dominic Crossan, in his book Who Killed Jesus?, contrasts the radical visions of John the Baptist with those of his protege, Jesus. Both men were religious radicals who opposed the prevailing socioeconomic and political system of their day, and both men were eventually executed by the Roman authorities for their subversive activities. But Jesus's views were different from those of his mentor's.

John preached a doctrine of what Crossan terms apocalyptic eschatology. This was a belief that God would intervene in the world against the prevailing oppressive system of his time, through a cataclysmic act. John baptized his followers who then would await this moment of divine intervention. But, unfortunately for him and his movement, he was executed. This was "because his apocalyptic vision radically criticized and fundamentally subverted the religious, political, social, and economic basis for Herodian and Roman control of the Jewish homeland." By mobilizing a large group of people opposed to the dominant paradigm of Roman rule, John was a threat, and he was killed for it.

John's death no doubt brought on a crisis among his followers. Waiting on God to intervene appeared to be a failure; Roman rule still prevailed. One of those followers, Jesus, appears to have reacted in the wake of the crisis by developing a new, greatly more active message in response to the worldly corruption that he lived in. In contrast to John's passive and expectant waiting on God bringing on the apocalypse, Jesus lived and preached what Crossan calls sapiential eschatology. According to Crossan, sapiential eschatology

announces that God has given all human beings the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God's power, rule, and dominion are evidently present to all observers. It involves a way of life for now rather than a hope of life for the future.

The difference between John the Baptist and Jesus can be summarized in this way, according to Crossan: "In apocalyptic eschatology, we are waiting for God to act. In sapiential eschatology, God is waiting for us to act."

In Crossan's book Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, he elaborates on this point by stressing that while apocalyptic eschatology waits for a future Kingdom of God, Jesus's sapiential eschatology believed in a Kingdom of God that resided in the here and now, available for all of us to participate in. "One enters the kingdom by wisdom or goodness, by virtue, justice, or freedom. It is a style of life for now rather than a hope of life for the future.

This points to the power of Jesus's message. In Who Killed Jesus?, Crossan evokes the important social justice component of Jesus's teachings:

Jesus's phrase Kingdom of God evokes an ideal vision of political and religious power, of how this world here below would be run if God, not Caesar, sat on an imperial throne. As such it always casts a caustically critical shadow on human rule. It includes especially an eschatological rejection of the world as it is currently run. But the solution is that we must act now to incarnate God's power on earth rather than that God must act soon to do it for us.

Thus the sayings and parables of the historical Jesus often describe a world of radical egalitarianism in which discrimination and hierarchy, exploitation and oppression should no longer exist. This is his utopian dream of the Kingdom of God, in which both material and spiritual goods, political and religious resources, economic and transcendental favors are available to all without interference from brokers, mediators, or intermediaries.

Imagining a world of radical egalitarianism certainly made him a threat to the Roman authorities, just as his mentor was. And like John the Baptist, he was executed.

Jesus's followers responded to the crisis caused by his death in a different way than how Jesus reacted to the death of his own mentor. His followers came to believe that despite his death, he was still present and living in God's presence. Eventually, this belief became mythologized into tales of a physical resurrection, but originally his followers believed not in a physical resurrection but in simply the ascension of Jesus into God's presence.

So much of Christianity over the centuries has been wrapped up in theologies about Jesus and claims about his birth, resurrection, and presumed divinity, that it has forgotten what it was that he sought to do in his life. His radical message of egalitarianism, of living the Kingdom of God that is here with us if we only choose to allow it, remains as important and valid today as it was two millennia ago. God is still waiting for us to act, to bring about the Kingdom of God, the Dominion of God, the Presence of God. We cannot do this by waiting on God to magically intervene. We can only make God's presence possible through a socially just world by acting ourselves.

Art and religion

I went to a Monet exhibition today at a San Francisco art museum. As I looked at one of Monet's paintings, Road at la Cavee, Pourville, and considered the ways that he took the view of a path between two steep ridges and created an image made out of beautifully constructed triangular forms, an analogy occurred to me:

The Bible is to historical truth what a Monet painting is to a photograph.

Just as the Bible is often not a literal depiction of history in the religious events that it depicts, neither is a Monet painting a photographic record of what it represents. A Monet painting is an interpretation of reality that says something more, and often more beautifully, than a photograph can do, filtered through the imagination of the painter. A Monet painting is a metaphor for the reality that it conveys. And the same can be for how the Bible conveys religious truths and ideas about God. The Bible points to God, but it is filtered through the religious imagination (and biases) of those who wrote the Bible. The Bible is not a photograph of the Divine, or of Divine truth. And yet, just as art can be "true" without literally capturing an exact image of reality, so can the metaphors and images in the Bible be "true" without being literally accurate records of the events that they depict.

Intolerance from the Archbishop of Canterbury

According to the London newspaper the Telegraph, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and thus the heads of the Anglican Communion, has now come out against homosexuality as being acceptable within his church. This appears to be a 180-degree turn from a position that he used to espouse. What the implications of this are for the Episcopal church in the US is not clear to me. I am not an Episcopalian, and as an outsider the intricacies of that church's politics are not always clear to me. Last summer he seemed to be waffling on this issue at a time of division when a clear moral voice for justice and inclusion was called for, and thus he had already shown himself to have failed the test of moral leadership just by not taking a stand. But now he has gone from straddling the fence to actively taking the side of exclusion and intolerance, and that is a disturbing development. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out among Episcopalians.

It is sad to say that few Christian denominations seem willing to take a positive stand for social justice on this issue. Among the mainline Protestant churches in the US, the UCC is one of the few--perhaps the only one--that has taken a progressive stand on homosexuality. However, the issue is not quite as simple as that, since the UCC is a congregational church, and the views of individual congregations may not always match up with the official stance of the denomination as a whole. Similarly, the congregations and pastors of some other denominations, such as the Presbyterians and Methodists, in some cases may take a progressive stand on this issue, despite the intolerant position espoused in official church doctrines.

Nevertheless, I think that how a denomination officially comes down on an issue of social justice does matter. I am glad to see the UCC continue to be at the forefront of this issue. I am sorry to see that the leader of the Anglican communion appears to have, when push came to shove, backed out of his moral responsibility for social justice.

Pay phones as a social justice issue

Here's an item that I found in the September newsletter of the Unitarian Universalist church in San Francisco:

Following a policy of profit before people, AT&T disconnected our pay phone on July 14, 2006. This phone (415–441–9395) has served many visitors and members and never had vandalism or repair issues. It was especially helpful to persons who needed to call for a taxi during the evening hours when our office is closed.
A letter detailing our reliance on this phone for both service and emergency preparedness was sent to AT&T at 134 Northwest 6th Street, Evansville, Indiana 47708, and many phone calls were made by Nancy Evans to retain the pay phone, all to no avail.

AT&T replied that unprofitable pay phones are being pulled from locations much needier than ours, and had no sympathy with our concerns for safety. However, “customer advocate” Carol Schlachter (yes, that’s her real title) offered us AT&T’s option – a “convenience line” agreement at $75 a month!

We now have a phone with no dial tone. Senior and disabled members have already called the office to complain.

This is an example of something that has been going on for some time. As more people use cell phones, pay phones are being removed by the phone companies. But the fact is that large numbers of people don't own cell phones, and this is particularly true among the poor. Pay phones are not just a consumer commodity; they are a public service. The first sentence of that newsletter item, which pointed out that this is an example of "profit before people", identified the broader problem that lay at the heart of this issue. What is happening to pay phones is just a symptom of a broader phenomenon that affects much of society, in which profits are more important than human needs.

Entertaining angels

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. - Hebrews 13:2

I don't believe that there are literally angels who walk among us. But I sometimes like to imagine that angels exist. It somehow calls out to the sentimental side of me, especially to imagine that there are beings out there whose sole purpose is to go undercover as humans in order to do acts of kindness. How cool that would be if that were true. Maybe that was why I enjoyed a Norwegian movie from couple of years ago, titled Hawaii, Oslo, that was based on this very premise.

In reality, the idea of angels doing good deeds undercover seems impossible to justify theologically and morally, as nice an idea as it sounds in theory. Since angels (or at least the good ones) presumably act on behalf of God, the whole problem of theodicy returns. Considering how many bad things have happened and continue to happen to people in the world, one would have to wonder if angels are in seriously short supply. There seems to be too much to be done and not enough angels to do it. Or maybe the angels are selective in who they help, and when. But then we have the question of why some people are helped by angels and others are not. In any case, there certainly didn't seem to be enough angels in the world to prevent the Nazi holocaust.

It doesn't really matter. I just like the above quote from the book of Hebrews for its mythological symbolism, about the importance of doing good deeds to others. Because, ultimately, when we do those acts of kindness, it isn't about helping angels; rather, we become the angels ourselves.

There is a problem in my case, though. I would make a terrible angel. I am sure that I am just about the most incompetent person in the world when it comes to reaching out a hand and helping people I don't know. I manage to bungle almost every act of kindness to strangers that I try to do.

Last week, while riding the BART train in Oakland, a somewhat older woman in a wheelchair asked me what the next stop was. She seemed a bit gruff at first, but when I answered her question, she gave a polite smile and thanked me. When we got to the stop she was asking about, I was about to disembark to transfer to another train, and she motioned to me to help wheel her off. I had never pushed a wheelchair off a BART train before, and when I pushed her to the door, the front wheels got stuck in the gap between the train and the platform. There was a limited time to get the chair through before the doors would try to close, and I began to panic as I tried to figure out why her chair wouldn't move and as I tried unsuccessfully to push the chair through, and in trying to push the chair that wouldn't budge my leg bumped up against her back. The woman in the chair started yelling at me impatiently. Finally, another passenger grabbed the front wheels and pulled her forward past the gap and onto the platform. I felt like an idiot and apologized to the woman in the chair.

As I walked to the other side of the platform, another woman came up alongside me and complained about how ungracious the woman in the wheelchair had been towards my efforts. I told her that I actually had been of no help to that woman. She smiled and said, "But at least you tried to help her." She then turned left and headed down the stairs, while I continued straight and sat on the bench to wait for the train.

If I were a believer in angels, I might have considered the woman who walked alongside me and tried to reassure me to be one, since she came out of the blue and seemed to want to make me feel better about my failure at helping someone. But she was no angel--just a person like I am. My feeling about my failure to help was this: it does people no good to try to help others and fail. It only does any good if you actually help them. And who was more in need of an angel, anyway--me, or the woman in the wheelchair? The woman who helped me get the wheelchair off the train when it was stuck was much more of an angel to the wheelchair bound passenger than I was.

My usual incompetence with respect to helping strangers most frequently manifests itself via my inability to give useful directions to people when they stop me on the street. Even when I am familiar with the area I almost never know the answer to their question, or, even worse, I sometimes give directions that I later realize to be faulty. I was thinking about this very issue yesterday at lunchtime as I was walking to a restaurant from my car. As if by magic, two young women came up to me asked me where the corner of Portola and Vicente was. I knew this intersection were very close to where I was standing, but I wasn't sure. I looked around for Portola and finally saw a street sign for it up the hill. I pointed it out to them, and that seemed to satisfy them. They thanked me. Maybe they were angels, sent there to make me feel better about my inability to give good directions. But, in reality, I never did tell them exactly where the intersection that they asked about was located. I only gave them some small bit of information that may or may not have led them to where they wanted to go.

My feeling is that part of why I as a human being is put here is to make the world a better place than it would have been had I not been here. And I'm not always sure that I am really doing a very good job of carrying out that mission.

Healing a Broken World

Some church web sites provide the ability to listen to recordings of their sermons. I sometimes peruse web sites from liberal mainline churches, and when I find these recordings, I often listen to them to hear what the churches have to say. One such church, located in Chicago, states on its home page that it "welcomes all who want to thank God, have doubt, or do not believe." This openness to seekers with a variety of beliefs was appealing to me, so I was particularly interested to hear some of the online sermons. However, after listening to one of the sermons online about the subject of the divinity of Jesus, I was disappointed--not because I disagreed with the speaker's Trinitarianism, which I more or less expected, but because it expressed what I felt was an unfair characterization of those such as myself who do not accept the doctrine of the Trinity. I have no problem with Christians who embrace the divinity of Jesus. I have more or less made peace with myself over the fact that I have started attending a Trinitarian church despite the fact that I am not a Trinitarian; I am willing to let that theological difference slide because I find myself able to connect with God in the worship services despite that one difference, and because I am willing to de-literalized and mythologize some of the theological language that doesn't exactly correspond to my perspective.

In the online sermon that I listened to, I do give the pastor credit. He said that he was mostly asking others to consider certain questions that he was posing, and that he was only giving his own opinion in response to those questions. That is fair enough; it is far more admirable than what I would have experienced listening to a fundamentalist preacher who would simply proclaim what he claims to be the final and absolute truth and leave it at that. In any case, my objection is not with what this pastor believes per se, but with what I saw as an somewhat unfair attack on a belief that he rejects.

The sermon title was "What if Jesus wasn't divine?" In answering that question, the pastor asserted that there was essentially only one alternative to believing in Jesus's divinity, at least within Western religious traditions. According to him, this alternative was a belief in the goodness of the human race and an optimistic faith in the ability of humanity to solve the world's problems, perhaps by simply listening to Jesus as a great moral teacher. The pastor then summarily dispensed with this straw man by pointing out that history has shown that the world has indeed proved repeatedly to be a very broken place and humanity has had a poor track record of healing itself from the sins and evils that plague the world through its own efforts.

It is true that in the 19th century, a strain of thought did develop that held an optimistic faith in humanity's future progress, and this no doubt coincided with a characterization of Jesus as no more than a great moral teacher. This optimism about the future evolution of human society was largely shattered by the brutality of World War I. However, the pastor makes the mistake of assuming that there is any inherent connection between denying the divinity of Jesus and having a kind of 19th century optimism in the ever expanding moral progress of human civilization, or that such progress can be achieved by simply and earnestly following the teachings of a great moral teacher.

For one thing, the pastor leaves God completely out of the straw man that he erected. It is possible to deny the divinity of Jesus and still believe in God. Just ask any Jew. The reality is that it is perfectly possible to recognize that the world is broken, that humans benefit from the transformative power of a relationship with God, and that humans have historically shown a less than stellar track record in solving their seemingly intractable social problems, without believing that Jesus is divine. One can believe in a strictly monotheistic God and still believe those other things. Those 19th century optimists who he dismisses were, I suspect, largely secularists, who seemed to have removed God from the picture entirely. But to assume that one must be a secularist if one rejects the divinity of Jesus is obviously not valid. And if you believe that the world is broken and that people as flawed creatures benefit in some way from their relationship with God, then this can be true whether or not you believe in the divinity of Jesus.

Also, consider that there is the flip side of the equation. Does the pastor think that somehow believers in the divinity of Jesus have any better track record at solving the world's problems than those who don't? It is true that humans on their own have been unable to end wars, oppression and injustice; but how, exactly does a belief in the divinity of Jesus provide the solution to those problems that secularism is unable to provide?

How can we heal this broken world? Religion offers no magic solutions. I am not a naive optimist, and lately I've been feeling more pessimistic than optimistic about the future of the world. But, unless one takes a millenarian view that God will magically intervene in history and bring on an apocalyptic resolution to what is wrong with the world--and I certainly don't believe that--are we supposed to just throw our hands up in the face of the problems of the world and not at least try to make it a better place, to the best of our limited ability? The world will not get better unless we try. As a believer in God, I believe that God calls us to co-create with her the world that we live in, to try make it a better place. We don't always succeed. Often we fail. But the one thing we cannot do is give up. And that is true regardless of what we think Jesus's nature was.

The pastor correctly pointed out that the world was full of moral teachers other than Jesus--he names such historical figures as Gandhi and Marx as examples of this. He then asked the question, why is following Jesus any more worthwhile than following any other teacher? What makes Jesus so special if he isn't divine? That is a valid question. My own view is that, firstly, the question of "divine" versus "non-divine" is a simplistic take on what should not be an either-or proposition; it is not a question of anyone being God or not-God, because I believe that God exists within all of creation, and that all of us are a part of God, even if none of us are "Divine" in the sense of being part of a Godhead. Jesus was important not just because of his teachings, but because he lived according to his teachings to the fullest, and thus revealed by example that presence of divinity that exists and can be expressed in all of us. Secondly, I also believe that Jesus is not the only way that one has to follow; one can find the Divine in many ways, with other teachers and traditions. One can follow in the Jesus tradition, as I do, even though I am a non-Trinitarian, because it is a comfortable and meaningful way of mediating the experience of God that I can relate to. It is a tradition that I know and it works for me. But that doesn't mean that it is the end-all and be-all of how to find God. I think that Trinitarians can and do experience God, just as I believe that I experience God in my own way. I also believe that people of other religious traditions experience God, or the Divine, or the Ground of Being, or whatever you choose to call it, through the means that have worked for them.

Can we heal this broken world? I certainly would like to believe so, even if I think it is a depressingly uphill battle. Do we have to believe in the divinity of Jesus in order to try to heal the world, or even to heal ourselves as individuals? I believe strongly that the answer is no.

God, the Bible, and Pink Floyd

I started reading John Shelby Spong's book Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible With Jewish Eyes. From the title, I fully expected that the author would attempt to peel back the layers of Christian interpretation and instead try to examine the Gospels as Jewish works written in a time in history when Christianity was a sect within Judaism. But I was surprised to discover that Spong would do so from a very specific perspective of a theory about the origins of the Gospels that is perhaps not generally accepted by scholars, in this case one that was developed by a theologian named Michael Goulder.

According to this theory, the gospels were actually works of Christian lectionary meant to correspond to the Jewish liturgical year. In the case of the Gospel of Mark, for example, this meant that the book was ostensibly meant to be read in Jewish religious services over the course of six and a half months or so, from Rosh Hoshana to Passover. The Gospel was written around 70 AD, before the break between Christianity and Judaism had fully taken place, and Jewish Christians would have participated fully in the life of their synagogue and its liturgy at that time. Spong makes a persuasive argument that the various sections of the Gospel correspond neatly to particular festivals and Torah readings that take place during that part of the Jewish liturgical cycle. The catch is that this correspondence requires that you properly synch up the Gospel just so in order for this correspondence to take place--you must begin at Rosh Hoshana, and you must end at Passover. But when you do so, the Gospel does seem to match up well with the Jewish liturgy.

While I admit that Spong makes a persuasive case, I am a little hesitant to completely jump on board with this specific theory. What makes me hesitant is that his methodology reminds me a little bit of a phenomenon from the realm of modern popular culture: the Dark Side of the Rainbow theory. According to this theory, which has found popular expression on the internet, if you synch up the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon at just the right point while watching the movie The Wizard of Oz, the music matches up amazingly well with what takes place in the film.

On web video sites like Google Videos, there are videos of the movie with the Pink Floyd soundtrack. In some cases as I watch the video, I do find that there does seem to be a remarkable synchronicity. In other cases, I don't really see it. The members of the band Pink Floyd have, I might add, denied that they made their album with the movie in mind, pointing out that in 1973, consumer video tapes of movies didn't even exist.

What this all probably illustrates is the power of the human mind to make patterns out of random coincidences.

Is this what Spong is doing here? I am not saying that he is. I think the evidence from the text is not only interesting, but it does make some sense that Jewish Christians of that time would have created just such a lectionary. The theory also proposes an explanation for why the Gospel of Mark, the first of the four canonical gospels to be written, was created in the first place. Many scholars believe that the Gospel of Thomas and the hypothetical sayings Gospel of Q predated Mark, and both of these Gospels lacked the narrative content that Mark has, being mostly just collections of the sayings of Jesus. (Spong denies the existence of Q, by the way, which is contrary to the view of most contemporary scholars. ) This leap to a fully narrative-based Gospel could therefore have been spurred on by the need to fulfill a lectionary requirement by early Jewish Christians.

I think that what Spong proposes is interesting, but I'm not sure that I am willing to embrace it. Most of Spong's books, I believe, seem to be consistent with the mainstream of modern scholarship. Even if fundamentalists and conservative Christians may have rejected what he has written, in general his books have--as far as I have been able to tell, anyway--been based on the findings of mainstream biblical scholars. In this book, which he published 10 years ago, he seems to have gone out on more of a limb by attaching himself to a minority opinion. Still, like everything Spong writes, it is well written and interesting.

Getting Right With God

The pastor at the church I've been attending delivered a short sermon Sunday about two contrasting views of how one "gets right with God". One view is rules-based; it proposes that one must do certain things in order to achieve Divine grace, thus making grace conditional. The other view is that God's love is unconditional. It was clear which of those two views she aligned herself with, although she didn't exactly hammer home the point. She mostly left it up to us to think about the differences between those two concepts.

Here's a true story. I grew up in a church that served communion each Sunday, and it was apparently open for any believer, even children who had not undergone a believer's baptism, to participate in. Our family didn't go to church every single Sunday, and somehow I got it in my mind that I was jeopardizing my salvation by missing out on communion during the Sundays that we missed. So at every once in a while as a child--I am not sure how old I was when I started this, maybe six or seven or so--I decided that I needed to make up for all those lost communions. Often when we had grape juice in the refrigerator, I would drink several glasses of it with bread, hoping that by doing so I would sufficiently catching up.

Somehow, I had come to imagine that salvation was dependent on some kind of communion ledger that God kept the books on in heaven, and that by missing some of them my account was unfortunately in the red.

Here's another true story. I had a bike accident when I was seven years old. I was accompanying my father, who was taking an evening walk; I had been pedaling alongside him, and at one point he took a shortcut through a neighbor's yard. Small town homeowners don't take kindly to bicyclists riding on their manicured lawns, so I took a longer route that looped around on a side road. I pedaled as fast as I could so I could catch up with my father. As I rode, I saw an oncoming car, so I decided to slow down; on the old fashioned Sting Ray I was riding, braking meant pushing the pedals backwards. The momentum of my fast pedaling was so strong, however, that it resisted my effort at pedaling backwards, and the momentum actually pushed me forward off the seat; my crotch landed onto the bar below. This was obviously painful, and this in turn resulted in my losing control of the handlebars. They swung to the left, and I swerved right in the path of the car. As I saw the car coming, I prayed to God to save my life. I don't think God anything to do with my survival, but in any case the driver screeched on his brakes, stopped just before hitting me, and I fell to the pavement, breaking my right wrist. My father, who heard the screech, ran from the neighbor's yard--later he said that he ran so fast that he probably broke a world speed record.

I was understandably freaked out. As I, my father, the driver, and his passenger walked from the scene of the accident to my house, I told the others that my arm hurt, and I thought it might be broken. "No, it's just sprained," the driver told me. He was trying to be reassuring, but I just wanted to be told the truth.

I remember sitting in the waiting room at the hospital--either before the X-rays or before having the cast the put on, I'm not sure which--and still shaken up by all that had happened. I had just come out of an experience where, for the first time in my short life, I thought I was going to die. I started crying and told my mother that I was afraid that I would go to hell. My mother told me with utmost confidence that of course I wasn't going to go to hell. I didn't know how she was supposed to know this. I knew she trying to reassure me, but as in the case of the broken arm, I just wanted to be told the truth.

Thus I recall two incidents from my childhood that show how I had managed to internalize a rules-based conception of Divine grace. Where had I gotten such ideas from? I was brought up in what was essentially a rules-based religion that said that God's love was conditional--one must believe in Jesus as one's savior, for example, and if one didn't follow certain rules like that, one was condemned to eternal damnation. Even if I got the details wrong about such things as the role of communion in salvation, the general principle of a rules-based concept of grace was clearly instilled within me.

How wrong it is, I now believe, to instill into children notions like these.

The Wall of Discomfort

In my previous posting, I wrote something that made me realize more clearly the issues that have made me so conflicted about religion ever since I renewed my interest in religion some 18 years ago at the age of 28. In that posting, I wrote

It was this belief in reason, science, and a natural laws that had led me to reject religion in the first place when I was 16 years old; I wasn't about to come around full circle and accept beliefs in miracles, virgin births, and resurrections now, after all this time.

When I was 16, I told my parents that I had become an atheist. This was a difficult decision for me to make, and it had been preceded by a period of questioning. I had one conversation that I recall with a girl a little older than me in the church youth group to whom I expressed my doubts, and whose answers to my questions I found unsatisfying. I can recall one time attending some kind of religious event on the other side of town with my brother and then feeling so frustrated that I just left without telling anyone, walking three miles or so home, by myself, in the dark. This was all a prelude to my break with Christianity.

When I made the decision and told my parents about it, they did not take it well. My mother forced me to go to church. It was a fundamentalist church, an independent Christian church that was part of the Restoration Movement tradition that believed in congregational autonomy and baptism by immersion only for those old enough to decide to be baptized. I had made that decision myself in the sixth grade. As a prelude to baptism, I had attended a series of special Sunday School classes with other people about my age, where we learned about what it meant to be a baptized member of the Body of Christ. When I then stood before the congregation one Sunday morning and responded to the minister's question of whether I would accept Jesus as my personal savior, I was so moved by what was taking place that I was visibly shaking. I know that my shaking was visible because I was embarrassed later when a schoolmate who attended the same church told me he could see my shaking from his pew several rows behind me. (It's funny, but I don't really remember the baptism part of the ceremony at all.)

And there I was, some five years later, telling my parents I was an atheist. But even though 11 was old enough to make a decision to be a Christian, 16 was apparently too young to make a decision to be an atheist, so off to church I was forced to go. Often, though, we were late getting to church, and we only managed to make it to Sunday school (which, in retrospect, I guess must have come after the main service.) That was fortunate for me; adult Sunday School was separate from the ones the children attended, so while Sunday School was taking place I was able to slip out and walk around the streets of the city, alone in my suit (ah, those suits--I hated dressing up for church, even when I was a young believer!), and returned in time to meet up with my parents. I don't know if my parents ever found out that I did that, but if they did, they never said.

The objections that I had to the religion I was brought up in were, in my eyes, a rejection of all religion. This was almost certainly a byproduct of the all-or-nothing theology that I was taught to believe. Either the Bible was all true and inerrant, I was told, or it was all false. The only legitimate Christianity, I was taught, was a conservative Christianity that valued the Bible as the completely true Word of God. There was no picking and choosing allowed. You either believed it all, or rejected it entirely.

There were four main objections that I as a 16-year-old had with the religion I was brought up in.

The first one was scientific and rational. I was interested in science, I had read books about science since being a small child, I and took science classes in school and believed in the scientific method. I could not, for example, reconcile my belief in evolution with the book of Genesis. More generally, I believed in a world that obeyed certain laws of science, and I could not reconcile this with a belief in miracles.

The second objection was soteriological. I could not believe in the doctrine of hell. I had a brother who was an atheist at the time; was I supposed to believe that he would endure an eternity of torment simply because of the beliefs he held during his life? Was I to believe that people who never even heard of Jesus were condemned to hell? God was supposed to be all-loving, and all-forgiving. I was taught that God would forgive any sin, no matter how heinous--even murderers and other assorted ruffians could have the slate wiped clean, the catch being that the sinner just had to accept Jesus as his or her savior. That was a big catch, of course, but the idea that it was even possible for God to forgive anyone no matter what they did struck a chord with me. Forgiveness and universal love were to me the highest virtues, which Christians were supposed to emulate (because, after all, Jesus taught us to turn the other cheek and to love our enemies), and I found these virtues inspirational. Yet, on the one hand, God was said to have implemented this very forgiveness in the most extreme cases to those who satisfied the belief test; on the other hand, for those who didn't have the right belief, God was said to have imposed a terrible and eternal suffering on people who committed the slightest offense. The latter was justified by Christian apologists as merely Divine justice, but it was not justice; it was punishment that was all out of proportion for the offense, and, worst still, it stood in stark contrast both with God's own willingness to forgive more serious crimes and the universal forgiveness that Christians were taught to carry out. To this day, I still am amazed that there are large numbers of Christians out there who can believe this stuff.

The third objection was that of theodicy. It is a common complaint, of course, as to how an omnipotent God could allow evil to happen in the world.

The fourth objection was empirical. This actually goes hand in hand with the scientific objection that I listed above. I believed at the time that the existence of God should be subject to the same scientific principles that the phenomena that we sense in the world around us are. Since the existence of God was unprovable by empirical means, and because I believed that the burden of proof lay on those who would prove God's existence, I therefore rejected the idea of God.

I basically accept the validity of three of those four objections today, thirty years later. It was only the last of those that I later changed my mind about, when I became interested in religion as an adult, and it was this change that allowed me to rekindle a belief in God. I came to the conclusion that God, as an infinite being who sustains the world, makes philosophical sense as a deeper level of reality. That isn't to say that I don't have doubts about the existence of God, but it does mean that I don't believe that a Divine reality requires any kind of empirical proof. In fact, I have come, at least to some extent, to accept some variant of the "No watch without a watchmaker" argument for God's existence. I believe that a finite (or at least in some sense limited) universe requires an infinite reality to sustain it.

The question, however, is what kind of God this is that I believe in. And that is where those other three objections from my youth come into play. The first and the third objections--the rationality of the world and the problem of theodicy--were resolved quite easily once I discovered process theology and the panentheistic conception of God. Once you come to believe that God is not omnipotent, then miracles can no longer possibly be a part of your theology; and a non-omnipotent God can certainly not be blamed for the existence of evil in the world. This opened up a world of possibilities for me. As for the second of those three remaining objections, the existence of hell can be resolved simply by realizing that the traditional, orthodox Christian conception of atonement and hell is not the only way of viewing things. One can be a universalist who believes that everyone eventually attains salvation; one can believe that there is no afterlife at all; one can be an agnostic on the question of an afterlife and instead focus one's religion on one's relationship with God in this life. There are many possibilities. The point is that one need not believe in eternal torment for nonbelievers to believe in God. In and of itself, this was liberating, because I realized how much more mature my faith could be if it wasn't all about going to heaven.

Last, but not least, I came to view religious scriptures as not requiring an all-or-nothing approach. I realized that it was possible to view scriptures not as being the literal Word of God, but as human records of people's attempts at understanding God. What a form of liberation it was to realize that scriptures can be flawed! With that, it then became clear to me that many different religions might actually be simply different paths to God. At the same time, I realized that, of all the world's religious traditions, I was naturally drawn to Christianity because it was the religion I was the most comfortable with--it is what I was brought up in, it is the prevailing religion of our culture, and many of its values deeply inspired me as a young person.

But what has been scary about all of this for me is that those three objections from my teenage rejection of Christianity that I still believe to be valid continue to form a wall of discomfort whenever I come in contact with Christianity. The rejection of those beliefs that I found abhorrent or unacceptable still sits strongly within me. I do not want to be religious at the cost of my rational self. I do not want to give up my mind in order to please my soul. The aversion to certain aspects of Christian orthodoxy is so strong within me that it has kept me from exploring Christianity for most of my adult life. The reasons why I gave up on Christianity at age 16 were too important, and too integrated into what matters to me, to go back on now. I cannot and will not do that.

I think it only really began to sink in as I have read the works of people like Spong and Borg that it really is possible to be a rational, thinking Christian, and that there are many people out there who have similar views. It made it possible for me to dip a toe into the waters. The wall of discomfort still remains, and it is the reason why I am still treading the waters of Christianity very slowly.

Churches and Personal Belief

When I started this blog, I expressed a general dissatisfaction with existing Christian and Christian-derived religious denominations. I felt that mainline Christianity was too tied to old creeds and dogmas that made no sense in the modern world and which were inconsistent with a rationalistic understanding of the universe. I felt I was not comfortable attending a church that was rooted in ancient myths that I could not accept as literally true. I felt that what was needed was a kind of post-Christian realignment that could emerge out of existing Christian denominations.

And yet, in the weeks that have passed since I first expressed those feelings here, I have started attending services at a denomination of the United Church of Christ. I am now doing what I thought I could not bring myself to do. What happened to change my mind?

For one thing, I came to realize that my lofty goals of seeing the emergence of a new movement were largely pie-in-the-sky. I suppose I could have tried to take initiative myself and organize such a movement by recruiting other people who felt as I did, assuming that very many of these people actually existed and were willing to join such a movement. I could have thus tried to create something new, maybe attending meetings in homes and trying to build a new religious tradition built on a de-mythologizing of Christianity while appreciating its traditions. But that just seemed like a lot of work. And its chances of even getting off the ground, let alone succeeding, seemed remote.

At the same time, I discovered in online blogs and message boards that there were "progressive Christians" who viewed things much as I did, but at least in some instances were able to find homes within some strand of liberal Christianity. I continued to read books by Marcus Borg, John Spong, and others, and felt inspired by their own takes on Christianity. I found particular inspiration in Spong's book Resurrection: Myth or Reality?, which gave me clear insights in how to appreciate the mythologies that developed around Christian origins. From Spong's book I came to view the "resurrection" myths as having developed by Peter, Paul, and other early Christians as the visionary experience of Jesus's presence after he died, and that for them those visionary experiences were "real" without them actually believing that Jesus as a charismatic and deeply loved figure was physically raised from the dead--not unlike, I suppose, how anyone can "feel" the presence of a loved one who has died. It was only over time, as Christianity evolved, that the tales of a literal, physical resurrection developed. When Spong proposed his theories on how the Easter legends may have arisen around the Jewish feast of the Tabernacles (rather than Passover) and developed after the death of Jesus, it all made sense to me.

And thus I was able to listen to Easter stories and proclamations of Jesus's "resurrection" without flinching. Well, at least most of the time without flinching. I could listen to such proclamations and silently tell myself that I could incorporate those statements about a "resurrected Christ" into my own naturalistic understanding of what happened, and that it was okay if I didn't understand these events in the same way as the one doing the proclaiming did. And even as I listened to such proclamations, I felt a tremendous sense of awe and appreciation of the Divine, the same sense of the Divine that I have been feeling a lot of lately, that has been pulling me into a religious direction since this process of personal religious renewal began.

It was this same feeling, this sense of awe and Divine affinity that was drawing me to act in ways that I really didn't want to, towards becoming part of a religious community. Although this was a tremendously strong impulse, my natural response to it was resistance. Going to a religious service I knew nothing about, in a church full of strangers, when I wasn't sure if I could even accept whatever religious dogma they preached, was almost more than I was able to handle. Sure, I wanted to attend a church service, but I was afraid at the same time.

I knew that the United Church of Christ was a liberal denomination--generally considered the most liberal of the Protestant churches, although this does vary from congregation to congregation. In any case, their "God is still speaking" campaign caught my attention. But how to take this leap? Maybe such a grand leap wasn't necessary. I could try attending a UU church service first, and see how I liked it; if I didn't like it, it would at least represent a sort of first step towards going to a church, any church, so that I could at least overcome my generic resistance to attending a service somewhere. I would have gotten my feet wet at the very least.

So, indeed, I did attend a UU service--and it was just as stale and unfulfilling as I remembered UU services to be from my previous experiences. It only served to remind me that I wanted to attend the worship experience of a more spiritually focused religious community. I looked at the UCC web sites, and I looked at the web sites for UCC churches in my city. There was one not too far away. As each weekend approached, I would tell myself that I would attend a service that Sunday, and I felt a growing sense of anticipation. But then on Sunday morning, the anticipation was replaced by reluctance. Two Sundays in a row, I drove over to a local UCC church, parked nearby, and sat in my car--then drove away, disappointed in myself, and also feeling an unsatisfied need for spiritual fulfillment.

I knew I had no choice. I had to answer that which was pushing me to a church. So one Sunday recently, I finally went. It helped that my significant other volunteered to come with me.

What I discovered from attending was that the experience was satisfying in many ways. I liked that they used the word "God" in the church service. I didn't necessarily care for some of the Trinitarian language, but I was willing to let that slide. The people were friendly. I felt welcomed. No one forced me to "accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior." Having never attended a mainline church before, I was surprised by the little differences from the fundamentalist church I had been brought up in--such as the use of the liturgical calendar, the passing of the peace, and the manner that the communion offering was handed out. And even though I did not partake of the communion, that was okay too. I just watched and took it all in.

I think the biggest surprise for me was that I was coming around to accepting the idea that it was okay that I didn't necessarily agree with every last detail of the language or theology that was used. I never thought I would come to that point. I believe that there are a lot of people like that--people who attend a church for a variety of reasons, even if their theologies aren't an exact match with that congregation or that denomination. For all these years, I had always felt that I needed to be part of something where I was completely compatible theologically--or at least, where my rationalistic perspective was the prevalent paradigm. I have such a built in resistance not just to so much of traditional religious dogma, but dogmas in particular that are built around beliefs that I consider fundamentally at odds with my rationalistic understanding of the world. It was this belief in reason, science, and a natural laws that had led me to reject religion in the first place when I was 16 years old; I wasn't about to come around full circle and accept beliefs in miracles, virgin births, and resurrections now, after all this time. But I think my resistance to such beliefs had impeded my ability to accept and enjoy a spiritual experience in a liberal denomination where it was okay if I wasn't at the same place theologically as everyone else. The key point was to figure out what disagreements mattered, and which ones did not. Among the important things for me were the acknowledgement of God, a liberal approach to theology, a commitment to social justice, and a tolerance for my own place as a religious liberal within the congregation.

That is not to say that, at some level, there is still some discomfort with all of this. At the first service I attended, I was filled with a level of anxiety at the same time that I was enjoying the experience. Whether or how I will ultimately overcome these feelings is an open question. But for now, it is working for me as a means of finding the Divine.

Religious Intolerance

I was perusing a book in a bookstore today: Buddha or Bust: In Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness, and the Man Who Found Them All, by Peter Garfinkel. The book seems to be partly a travelogue and partly an exploration of the roots of Buddhism. I was a little intrigued by the book, but I also noted as I skimmed that at one point the author dismissed the Western notion of a belief in God as being not just contrary to the Buddhist path of enlightenment, but fundamentally flawed and detrimental to those who believe. Reading those words, I faced another unfortunate example of the reality that Christians who assert that only true believers in Christ can be "saved" aren't the only religiously intolerant people out there in the world.

Tradition and novelty

I found an interesting quote from the book From Jesus to Christianity, by L. Michael White. Commenting on the writings of the early second century Christian martyr Ignatius, he says:

...Ignatius shows little awareness of those writings from the New Testament that would have existed in his day. He shows some limited awareness of Paul and may paraphrase at times from 1 Corinthians, but does not seem to know about the other letters. It is possible that he encountered those Pauline materials for the first time upon arriving in Smyrna. Among the Gospels, he may have read Matthew (see Ign. Smyrna 1.1), although it was not a central fixture of Antiochene Christianity. The scriptures, for Ignatius, are the Jewish scriptures of the Septuagint. On the other hand, Ignatius does seem to know a wide range of early Christian traditions of vaguely recognizable character...

Here we see an illustration of the point that, approximately a century after the death of Jesus, the Christian community had no conception of a New Testament; and when they conceived of "scriptures" at all, they were referring to the biblical books of their parent religion.

Thus early Christianity expressed two tendencies with respect to the question of "scripture". On the one hand, believers respected the traditional scriptures of their predecessors. Yet, on the other, they lacked any foundational canon specific to their own, new faith. Their faith was not frozen permanently into a rigidly defined set of words that they would have to turn to as a definitive source for Christian doctrine. They were, in a sense, making it up as they were going along. Yet they weren't inventing their religion out of whole cloth either; they revered traditional scriptures of their predecessors who operated under a pre-Christian paradigm.

This combination of a) respecting prior scriptures, and b) not being bound by such scriptures--because they were in still in the process of creating those canonical works and figuring out what to revere and give special attention to for their new faith--represented a process that was lost once the canon was fixed. Whatever was gained by closing the canon, much was lost as well. This dual process of respect for tradition and inventing new ones represented a process of creative listening that is lost once the canon is frozen forever in time.

There is something to be said for revering the prior scriptures of a previous time and paradigm; there is value in seeing how prior generations tried to get a handle on God. But once you freeze the process and deny the continuing ability of God to speak to us in ways that are just as significant as they were many centuries ago, you shut yourself out of a dialogue with the divine. The worst consequences of this attitude towards the canon are the sins of fundamentalism, with its attendant doctrine of biblical inerrancy. It makes it possible for fundamentalists to claim that all the doctrines, all of God's word, is found in this set of writings many centuries old that a group of religious leaders decided would constitute a canon. If the canon were not so rigidly closed, the idea of biblical inerrancy as well as other notions of fundamentalism would have been much more difficult to justify, in my view. If you conceive of revelation as a continuing process and the "canon" as merely a developing expression of that process, it isn't clear to me how such a fundamentalist bible-idolatry could even emerge.

Yet a further problem with the closed canon is that even some who accept that revelation continues in the present day may also insist that any new revelation cannot contradict whatever was written in the Bible (or in the case of Roman Catholicism, whatever was expressed as official church doctrine.) This gives a rigidity to dogma, forcing believers to accept the infallibility of whatever certain individuals wrote or thought thousands of years ago. Ignoring the problem of contradictions that exist in the Bible, one of the reasons why continuing revelation is important is that many of the writers of the Bible may have just plain gotten some things wrong. They were human. They tried to understand God in the best way they could. But they didn't quite get it all right. They weren't perfect--any more than the people who chose what books were to become canonical were perfect in that decision.

That isn't to say that I don't think there is also value in the familiarity of a closed canon. By referring to certain known biblical passages and incorporating them into worship, rites develop around those passages that can contribute to the worship experience for many people. But I also think it might be worth considering the ways that humans can open up their dialogue with the divine. The United Church of Christ likes to say that "God is still speaking". The Quakers talk of "continuing revelation". These are valuable ways to consider the ever present process of revelation. Revelation did not end with the closing of the canon, nor was the canon an infallible record of revelation. Rather than shutting out this process of listening to God for new insights, let us revel in it instead.

God, ministry, and church

A blogger who is a Unitarian Universalist minister has written an entry in which she argues that the "humanist" label that her denomination frequently applies to itself is inaccurate. If I understand her argument correctly, she contends that humanism is historically a theistic tradition, while UUism is officially nontheistic in its principles (although many members in the denomination may themselves be theistic.) Instead, by shedding itself of God within its religious philosophy, UUism more closely resembles the nontheistic norms of Buddhism than humanism. Thus she argues that Unitarian Universalism is evolving into what she calls "vague Buddhism". Again, I may not be exactly paraphrasing her ideas correctly, but I believe that is the gist of what she has written.

I can't address this issue with much direct knowledge, since I am not a UU, but I did attend a UU service a few weeks ago, the first one I have attended in a few years. The church was in an interim period between ministers, and this particular service was conducted by its young adult group. The theme of the service revolved around the question of people finding their calling in life, and two individuals, a man and a woman (whose ages I wasn't sure of, but they were probably in their late twenties, give or take), discussed their own journeys as they tried to discover what they wanted to do in life. The man talked about spending some time choosing to sleep on the streets in Southern California as a kind of ministry to the homeless. This was indeed inspirational to hear, and it reminded me of my own comfort in life and the fact that I would not have the courage to undertake such an endeavor. The woman spoke of her re-evaluation of her career choices.

Both speakers told interesting stories. But neither speaker spoke of God. Although I think the word God may have appeared on the walls of the church somewhere in the form of a quotation by a nineteenth century Unitarian, there was no reference to the Divine to be found in the actual service itself. In fact, I found the word "ministry" rather odd when used in conjunction with the social justice work that the one speaker who had spent nights on the street was engaged in. I absolutely think that service to the poor is admirable, and his actions are praiseworthy. We need more people in the world who do those sorts of things, regardless of what their religious beliefs are. But I'm not sure how the term "ministry" describes this kind of work.

I am absolutely not saying that ministry requires religious proselytizing. On the contrary; I am not in the least bit a fan of those religious souls who use services to the poor as a means for them to preach to potential converts, or who expect those they serve to listen to listen their version of the Gospel. I do think, however, for it to be "ministry", it ought to at the very least be an expression of one's religious faith--at least when the word is used from a pulpit, as it was in that instance.

Perhaps I am splitting hairs, and I suppose it is possible to use the word "minister" in a broader sense, but when it comes out of a religious setting, for me it strikes a dischordant tone. Although the religious pluralist in me likes the idea of broadening the term as much as possible so that people of many different beliefs can be considered ministers, the God-believer in me also wants to view ministry in a community of faith as an expression of that faith. I personally think that those who believe in God reveal God's presence through their actions--not by preaching, but by doing. But without this religious basis for the actions, it seems to me to be nothing but a case of doing good deeds, which, wonderful as that is, is not to me the same as ministry. Sure, it is possible that the speaker at that service had a religious belief--perhaps a nontheistic, "vaguely Buddhist" one--that inspired him to act as he did, but he did not speak of what that was, if it existed. And if there was such a religious basis, the fact that it mattered so little to what he did that he didn't feel a need to mention it was, in its own way, quite telling.

None of which is to say that I have anything against Unitarian Universalism, or with Buddhists, or with "vague Buddhists". UUism serves a need for some people. I'm just not one of them.

The absence of God-talk in the service I attended, especially in conjunction with the idea that doing good without any religious impulse behind is the definition of "ministry", left me just slightly cold. I needed something more.

All of this is interesting in light of the book I am currently reading, Leaving Church by Barbara Taylor Brown. She was a pastor in an Episcopal Church who, like those speakers in the UU service I attended, struggled with trying to find her calling in life. However, she was in fact older than those young adults in the UU service, when she underwent some changes in life in pursuit of that dream. Repeatedly, she struggled with the difficulties of living according to what she thought was her calling and her dreams. Things didn't always work out well for her, and she learned the hard way that the grass is often greener on the other side. But at every step of her life, the actions she undertook of helping and ministering to others represented an expression of her theism--her love for God. This is what is absent from Unitarian Univeralism, and this is why I found myself looking elsewhere.

This past Sunday, I attended a service at a local UCC church. It was a small church and a small congregation, but it was also remarkably friendly and welcoming. And it was, for me, a breath of fresh air to hear the word "God" being used in the service. Even if my theology may be a little to the left of what that church teaches, no one forced a theology down my throat either. I might not have been crazy about a reference to the Triune God that came out at one point in the service, but at other points the pastor acknowledged a kind of religiously pluralistic perspective that I found comforting. It was okay if I didn't necessarily agree with everything, she seemed to be saying. But at least, for me, a starting point was an acceptance of a Divine element to one's religious faith.