Sanguin and Vosper

Thanks to a link in in the "Pluralist Speaks" blog, I discovered an article in the Vancouver Sun by Douglas Todd that describes the differences in thinking between two Canadian progressive Christian pastors: Bruce Sanguin and Gretta Vosper.

I enjoyed Sanguin's book "Darwin, Divinity, and the Dance of the Cosmos", which merged science and faith into a progressive ecological spirituality that celebrated the divine process of creativity. As for Vosper, I commented on her form of Christianity in two earlier blog postings (here and here). It seemed to me that essentially she was trying to create a kind of God-less Christianity. As Jerry Seinfeld would say, "Not that there's anything wrong with that." But I felt that it really wasn't necessary to go there. It seemed that she had jumped to a lot of conclusions about what one necessarily means when one uses the word "God", and then she offered a limited conception of what a progressive faith can offer in response.

Douglas Todd agrees that Vosper seems to be uninterested in the work of a lot of alternative or progressive theologians when she makes certain assumptions about the concept of "God" (and he mentions by name several process theologians among those she ignores):

Given all the expansive, multidisciplinary thinking going in progressive Christian circles these days, it's hard to understand why Vosper ignores so much of it.

Vosper doesn't cite any of the cosmology advanced by scientist-theologians, many of whom are Christians, such as Michael Heller, Charles Birch or Ian Barbour. Nor does she engage so-called "open" theologians, such as Canada's Clark Pinnock.

It's also odd she doesn't deal with progressive theologians who base their "constructive post-modern" thought on the work of Harvard philosophers WIlliam James and Alfred North Whitehead. They include feminists such as Catherine Keller and Marjorie Suchoki, as well as evolutionary thinkers such as John Cobb and Jay McDaniels.

Maybe Vosper is just not that interested in metaphysics, or philosophy or constructing an intellectually viable concept of God.

Sanguin apparently has a new book out, which sounds quite interesting. According to the Vancouver Sun article,

Sanguin is among the many progressive Christians who agree with Vosper's critique of authoritarian, dogmatic Christianity, which they argue holds up God as a kind of benign monarch.

But Sanguin worries that the manner in which Vosper sidelines God and demythologizes Jesus Christ reflects a "dismal conversation" of "desperation" he's long heard among some liberal Christians.

As Sanguin puts it, Vosper is suggesting the "only way forward is for congregations to jettison religious language about God and Christ altogether and teach the universal values of love and compassion."

Sanguin, instead, pursues intellectually defensible ways to redeem God and Jesus from the conservative Protestants and Catholics who tend to dominate the news. He does so with creative panache.

How exactly Sanguin wants to redeem "God and Jesus" isn't clear to me without having read his book. I am wary both of too much de-mythologizing and too little. It's a common dilemma that I have faced as I tried to visit several "progressive Christian" congregations that seemed to have done little de-mythologizing and thus ended up being too orthodox for my tastes. It is clear to me, on the other hand, that while Vosper has some legitimate criticisms to offer about traditional theism, I think she comes down on the side of de-mythologizing farther than I am interested in. If I wanted to take God out of the equation (or use the word "God" as a mere symbol of goodness), I can do that without keeping the trappings of religion. Even if I reject certain kinds of traditional theism, I am not against the concept of God per se, nor do I think that the Christian tradition is unilaterally bad; what I embrace is a concept of God that is rationally viable. It is not necessary to throw out the Christian baby with the Christian bathwater.

As Douglas Todd says,

More than a few liberal Christians are suggesting that Vosper makes some valid points and may be justified in self-identifying as a Christian. The Christian tent, they say, is supposed to be wide.

So I don't suspect many liberal Christians would want to place Vosper on trial for heresy. After all, how do you convict someone of having a limited metaphysical imagination?

The religion of "Me"

During a recent episode of the NPR programe "This American Life", the author Shalom Auslander tells the story of how he lost his faith in God. The story is presented in all seriousness, and there is no suggestion that Auslander is pulling anyone's leg; and yet it comes across as so absurd that I have to wonder what to make of it.

According to the story that Auslander tells, he once wanted to see a New York Rangers playoff game, but it took place on a Saturday. As an observant Jew, he could not drive to the game on the Sabbath, so he walked (along with his wife) from New Jersey to New York City, getting blisters along the way. Unfortunately, after all that personal suffering that he underwent as a loyal fan, the Rangers managed to lose the game anyway. Apparently he felt that this defeat was some sort of punishment or betrayal by God, which led him to lose his faith. After all, he did the things that God expected him to do before the game, and yet his favorite sports team still didn't win.

Wow. Did he think that the whole universe revolved around him? That his own religious observances were so crucial to the fabric of the natural world that sports teams would win or lose based on how observant he was? Did he think that professional sports results were dictated by the religious observances of fans? Did he think that hockey results were high on God's priority list of omnipotent intervention when we live in a world of unsolved problems involving war, disease, and hunger that are just begging for a powerful Deity to fix? And what if the Rangers' opponents also had religiously observant Jews on their side? Did Auslander's piety count for more than the piety of a fan of the opposing team? Suppose someone walked even farther than he did and got even more blisters than he got?

Auslander seemed obsessed by the idea of God as a stern, difficult figure who had to be placated by self-denial and punishment. To him, a relationship with God was a selfish bargain--if he would just follow God's rules to the letter to the point of suffering on God's behalf, then God would rearrange all the superficial, trivial things in the world that would make him happy. When God didn't provide the results he demanded, he just took his ball (or, in this case, puck) and went home. This is the stunted, self-centered religion of a five-year-old.

I suppose one could argue that this isn't much different from the prosperity Gospel that is preached in Christian churches. This is a religion of "me", the idea that God rearranges events in the universe to suit certain people if they just follow certain rules. This is something that the author of Ecclesiastes rejected a few millenia ago. But there are people who still cling to this kind of theology even today.

Ehrman and Wright

Beliefnet has been featuring an ongoing blog debate between Bart Ehrman and N.T. Wright about theodicy. I always find debates like these a little frustrating, because they create the illusion that an important question like this one can be boiled down to just two positions, when perhaps there are three or four or a dozen takes on the problem. This is certainly how I feel in this case, since I place myself in neither the Wright camp nor the Ehrman camp.

To a certain extent, I am more sympathetic with Ehrman's point of view than I am with Wright's, because I think that Ehrman raises valid points about theodicy that beg for answers. Even if I don't agree with the answers that Ehrman came up with, I think his questions are still important. So I was curious how Wright would respond to these points. Based on this online debate, the answer appears to be that he responds to them by evading them altogether.

Ehrman starts off the discussion by explaining how the problem of suffering led him to ask the question, "Where is God?" Wright responds by almost completely ignoring the whole problem of theodicy, and instead attacking Ehrman's rhetorical style as well as his scholarship. In particular, he accuses Ehrman of engaging in "emotional" arguments by detailing the horrors of evil that exist on the planet--as if that had anything to do with the substance of the problem that Ehrman identifies.

As for Ehrman's scholarship, that discussion might have been interesting if it had addressed the fundamental question that this debate was ostensibly about: how a benign, omnipotent God could allow suffering. No such luck. The closest Wright comes to offering a theodicy is to toss out some vague gobbledygook about how God's call of Abraham represented "the moment when God launches the long-range plan to rescue the world from its misery." This long-range plan, according to Wright, came to its culmination with the resurrection of Jesus. I have no idea how this is supposed to explain away the problem of evil. Are we just going to tell the victims of the the horrors of the world over the past several millenia that they should have just been patient in the midst of their sufferings because God had a "long-range plan" for the world, which of course would not include them because they'd be long dead by the time God got around to fixing things? Barman was correct in his subsequent response to Wright when he wrote

The issue of human suffering is not a logical problem to be solved or some kind of mathematical equation. It is a human problem that requires empathy, sympathy, emotional involvement, and action.

By contrast, Wright's "long-range plan" first and foremost ignores the plight of the here and now, ignores the suffering that individuals experience while they experience it, instead offering the platitude of some sort of "long-range plan" for the world as a whole. Individual suffering becomes secondary to the goals of achieving some kind of future world order. But making individual human experiences subservient to a Divine narrative involving the entire planet is not a theology of compassion. Here is where Wright's theodicy seems to be badly off track.

In his response, Ehrman points out another problem with Wright's "long-range plan" argument: it is predicated on a simplistic interpretation of the Bible. Wright treats the Bible

as if it were one continuous narrative written by a single author with one overarching theme (with Abraham as the lynchpin). It is not that, any more than the New Testament, or even the NT Gospel literature, represents one point of view of one author.

Regarding the Bible, Wright did offer one valid critique of Ehrman when he wrote, "I did have the sense, frequently, that the form of Christian belief you were rejecting was a particular kind of north American Protestantism which I don’t believe itself did justice to the material." I definitely agree that Ehrman has mistaken the theology of his own evangelical background with Christianity per se, and, as Wright points out, this comes into play in Ehrman's acceptance of the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. I think that ultimately this also comes into play in his conception of God, which is what led him to reject religion altogether as the only possible solution to the problem of theodicy.

Later in this debate, Wright then continued to evade the fundamental problem at hand, which became increasingly frustrating, although perhaps not surprising. Wright's argument was essentially that Jesus revealed to us what it means for God to rule the world, and that God ruling the world has nothing to do with ending human suffering through Divine intervention. Wright's answer to the problem of evil is, essentially to say that Jesus was all about challenging our expectations, and that includes our expectations of the logical and moral implications of God's ostensible characteristics of omnipotence and benevolence. In other words, according to Wright, Jesus told us that God doesn't work the way we expect him to, so we should just shut up and stop complaining. He writes:

What ‘we would want God to do’ – to have God measure up to our standards of ‘how a proper, good and powerful God would be running the world’! – seems to be the very thing that Jesus was calling into question.

This non-answer is a basic retreat from trying to explain anything away. It just says that this is how God runs the world, and we know this is so because Jesus said so, so get used to it and shut up already. Which, I suppose, is not much different from the non-answer that God gave Job out of the whirlwind. But just as God's answer to Job was unsatisfying, so is Wright's answer to Ehrman.

This is too bad, because Wright tantalizingly hinted at a better approach, when he wrote:

Near the heart of Jesus’ proclamation lies a striking redefinition of power itself, which looks as though it’s pointing in the direction of God’s ‘running of the world’ (if that’s the right phrase) in what you might call a deliberately, almost studiedly, self-abnegating way, running the world through an obedient, and ultimately suffering, human being, with that obedience, and especially that suffering, somehow instrumental in the whole process.

Now we are getting somewhere, at least potentially. And yet, although Wright stands on the brink of offering an insightful analysis, he never really makes the leap. The question of what Divine power means indeed, as far as I am concerned, gets to the heart of the question. If we define God in such a way as to suggest that God does not intervene omnipotently in the world to prevent suffering because God is not a supernaturally interventionist being--then the problem would have been solved in one fell swoop. But while Wright hints at that, I don't think he is really going there. He seems instead to be saying that it suits God's purposes to solve the world's problem's through a voluntary decision to do nothing in the face of ongoing evil; instead, he has put into place a long range plan that we cannot fathom but which is revealed via an ongoing narrative in the Bible, starting with Abraham and ending with Jesus--and this plan involves the Divine prerogative not to exercise his power in this way. If this is indeed Wright's argument, then that would suggest that God has the power to eliminate suffering immediately but he has decided not to use it, because Divine wisdom decided it was better to have a "long-range plan".

This is essentially an argument by authority--in this case, the authority of Jesus (as Wright interprets Jesus's message to be.) Since Jesus said that this is how God acts, then Ehrman has no right to complain. But, in fact, even if Jesus's life and message included this sort of theodicy, that hardly serves as a convincing argument to an agnostic like Ehrman of whether this is really a just use of Divine power. Wright offers no explanation of how this decision to not use Divine power to intervene (in accordance with a "long-range plan") is justifiable morally or logically. He lets himself off the hook by saying that he is just echoing what Jesus showed about God's own decision not to intervene in this way.

It is not a solution to the problem of evil; it instead says that you should just ignore the problem altogether and assume that God knows that what he is doing.

Again, I think that all of this would much more easily be solved by simply affirming that God's nature is not that of a supernatural interventionist who has the power to act upon the world from the outside if he/she so decides to, but rather as a creative force that acts through the natural world, through persuasion rather than coercion. Take away the idea of God as omnipotent supernatural interventionist, and the problem of theodicy goes away.

Martyrdom, resistance, and faith

Blogger Simon Barrow recently wrote about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor, who was murdered 63 years ago by the Nazis. He refers to an article on Bonhoeffer that discusses the question of how one distinguishes between the spiritual and the political, a question which came into play as people evaluated Bonhoeffer's own martydom:

Strangely, even some of his fellow Lutherans did not realize at first how consistently Bonhoeffer lived out his creed. Immediately after World War II, pastors in Bielefeld opposed plans to have a street named after him. Bavaria’s Lutheran bishop Hans Meiser, himself a prominent anti-Nazi cleric, protested vigorously against a proposal to install a plaque commemorating Bonhoeffer as a “witness to Jesus Christ among his brethren” at Flossenbürg concentration camp where he was put to death only days before it was liberated by U.S. forces.

In Meiser’s opinion, Bonhoeffer’s resistance was “political, not religious.” In a sense he was right. The Church of England showed more generosity. It adorned the western entrance to Westminster Abbey in London with a Bonhoeffer statue thus giving him the status of a 20th-century martyr. But then Anglicans do not draw as sharp a line as Lutherans between the secular and spiritual realities of life.

When it comes to the opposing Nazism, someone will have to remind me what the difference is between the political and the religious. I just don't see it. Ultimately, I think it is difficult in general to draw the line between the secular and spiritual realities of life, but when it comes to something as plainly evil as Nazism, this particularly becomes apparent. I would submit that it is an empty spirituality that does not concern itself with institutional evil and social injustice. If a religious faith does not lead one to engage in the political activity necessary to oppose Nazism, then there is something seriously wrong with that faith.

I need only point out that Jesus himself was murdered by the political authorities of a powerful and brutally violent Empire.

Prince of Peace, indeed

AP reports:

Dozens of Greek and Armenian priests and worshipers exchanged blows at one of Christianity's holiest shrines on Orthodox Palm Sunday and used palm fronds to pummel police who tried to break up the brawl.

The fight came amid growing rivalry over religious rights at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built over the site in Jerusalem where tradition says Jesus was buried and resurrected.

It erupted when Armenian clergy kicked out a Greek priest from their midst, pushed him to the ground and kicked him, according to witnesses.

When police intervened, some worshipers hit them with the palm fronds they were holding for the religious holiday.

Ah yes. What better way to honor the Prince of Peace then by pummeling your fellow worshipers?

The apostolic witnesses

It is interesting to note that the noun "witness" is singular in the term "apostolic witness". This lack of a plural assumes that there was just one witness, that the apostles presented a unified front, that they expressed a monolithic theology from the very onset of Christianity that served as the wellspring of modern Christianity. In fact, this is not the case. On the contrary, we know that there were at least two apostolic theologies in existence during the very first few decades after Jesus died. We know this because we have a polemic by one apostle against another one.

Consider what Paul writes against Peter in the aftermath of the Jerusalem Council, in Galatians 2. Paul accuses Peter of being "self-condemned", and of being guilty of "hypocrisy", because of Peter's views on a vitally important question of Christian belief and practice of the day, which differed sharply from Paul's own views.

Unfortunately, we only get one side of this dispute. Peter was presumably an illiterate Galilean peasant at a time in history when the overwhelming majority of people were illiterate. So Peter left no writings behind, thus leaving us without his own version of events. It would have been interesting to know what kinds of invective he might have delivered against Paul. Alas, Peter's side of the story is lost to us forever. Then again, perhaps he didn't have Paul's rhetorical skills anyway. What we are left with in a he-said, he-said dispute is only the word of someone who never knew Jesus when he was alive, while the apostle who did know him gets no chance to present his case. The author of Luke-Acts, meanwhile, which was written a few decades after Paul's account in Galatians, completely whitewashes this dispute after the Jerusalem Council altogether; in Acts 15, which discusses events from the same period of time, no mention is made of this quarrel in Antioch between Paul and Peter, which is probably because it would not have suited his purposes to mention such things. Luke was, of course, a secondary source for these events; the one primary source that we have comes from one of the parties in the dispute, namely Paul.

Peter's version of Christianity seems closer to that of the Ebionites, who were of course later declared to be heretics. (Bart Ehrman's book Lost Christianities discusses the Ebionites in some detail, for those who are interested.) In any case, the dispute between Antioch and Jerusalem was resolved in favor of Antioch when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. The winners get to write history, while the losers are consigned to heresy.

The idea of a single, monolithic "witness" from the apostles is a useful myth that serves the interests of orthodoxy. But it is a lie. The apostles who knew Jesus wrote nothing down. The only "witness" we have about Jesus is from people who never knew him--Paul, who got to put his own spin on things, and the gospel writers, who wrote anywhere from 40-70 years after Jesus died, and who increasingly had certain agendas at stake in what they wrote.

A religion's source tradition is a matrix from which multiple, often competing, movements and sub-traditions can and do emerge. The need for each of these sub-traditions to claim that it, and it alone, is the sole inheritor of the original tradition, is very strong. We see this not just in sub-traditions, but in sub-sub-traditions. Modern Quakers, for example, all descend from the original Christian movement founded by George Fox. They have argued with one another frequently through the years over who is the "real" Quaker. It would be hard to recognize that the conservative programmed Quaker church and the liberal unprogrammed Quaker meeting all come from the same religious tradition. And yet they do. And at the same time each accuses the other of violating the original principles of Quakerism. If you consider how it is possible that these diverse, contradictory theologies and worship styles can simultaneously claim to be the legitimate heirs of early Quakerism while at the same time they also can accuse the others of violating that very legacy, you will come a long way towards understanding how diversity and dogma come into play in religious movements.

After the founder of a major movement dies, his or her legacy is always fraught with ambiguity and unresolved issues that can serve as the germ of distinct, competing movements that all claim to be heirs of the same original source tradition, and yet which move in diverse and even contradictory ways. Competition among brother sects or movements within a faith tradition often produces an intense rivalry that is far stronger than what happens between traditions. The most heated arguments often happen with those with whom you share some kinship. In the wake of this competition, the need to claim legitimacy for one's own movement at the expense of others is most intense.

Those later Christians who enshrined the Trinity in the Nicene Creed claimed that they were the sole legitimate inheritors of the so-called "apostolic witness", while those "heretics" were not. Yet those selfsame Trinitarians could legitimately be accused by the "heretics" of redefining God into something completely unrecognizable by the faithful apostles or by Jesus himself. So who is the real inheritor of this supposed witness? Had events gone just slightly differently in the fourth century AD, it would now be the ones we call "orthodox" who would be painted as "heretics" by the non-Trinitarian Christians.

It is time, once and for all, to put to rest this idea of an "apostolic witness" from which orthodoxy springs. Christian orthodoxy has no more claim to legitimacy than any of the "heresies" that it violently suppressed. Just because you have the power to suppress dissenting opinions, that does not make you right. Christianity is a source tradition from which movements have always sprung, over the last 2000 years, despite continued efforts by orthodoxy to crush them. Such is the power of this source tradition that it cannot be bottled up so easily.

Doubt, but don't doubt too much

During Gene Robinson's interview with Terry Gross yesterday, he said the following about the debate within the Anglican Communion over his status as an openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church:

In the end, I don't want anyone to leave, and I don't believe we need to break communion over this. You know, we're not arguing about the divinity of Christ, we're not arguing about the Trinity, or the resurrection--those essential things that draw us together. We are arguing about something that is inessential, and that is the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people in the life of the church.

While I appreciate the point he is making, it also confirms my general disappointment with a lot of what constitutes "progressive" or "liberal" Christian thinking. By insisting that the Trinity or the Divinity of Christ are "essential things" in Christianity in general or the Anglican Communion specifically, he highlighted an irreconcilable gulf that remains between myself and mainline Christianity.

I hear a lot about this phenomenon called "progressive Christianity", but where is it? I see lots of web sites and blogs and churches proclaiming their progressive credentials. Churches sponsor talks by progressive Christian theologians like Marcus Borg. They sponsor book discussions about Borg's writings. They sponsor seminars like "Living the Questions". But ultimately, I'm not sure what it all means.

For the second Sunday of Easter this year (March 30), the Gospel reading from the Revised Common Lectionary was the story of "doubting Thomas" from the Gospel of John. It is interesting to read and hear online sermons from liberal pastors when they discuss this passage. Typically, liberal pastors like to proclaim their openness to doubt as a legitimate feeling. They contrast themselves with hard line fundamentalism, which has no use for doubt and which relies so heavily on certainty. Doubt, we are told, is perfectly natural and reasonable, especially when one is faced with extraordinary claims. The thing is, though, that there is always "but" at the end of this--you can doubt, but in the end as a Christian you naturally must come down on the side of accepting that Jesus was literally resuscitated from the dead. Thomas doubted, after all, but ultimately he put his hands through those crucifixion scars and he believed.

The skeptical Christian, we are told, doubts but still sides with orthodoxy. It's okay to doubt, but don't doubt too much. Ultimately, you have to accept that Jesus walked on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection. You have to accept that Thomas put his hands in Jesus's hands and side. You have to accept what later church councils said about Jesus's supposed divinity and place within the Godhead. Those are, we are told, "essential things."

Good question.

James McGrath asks this question:

Why, for some Christians, is affirming that the Bible is inerrant more important than taking seriously what it actually says?

Good question. Indeed, taking the Bible seriously means fully accepting its warts, flaws, and inconsistencies without trying to hide them under the rug or otherwise explain them away. Inerrancy is the direct opposite of taking the Bible seriously.

The question of why people cling to inerrancy is an interesting question. Does this address some inherent need? Or is it simply a product of brainwashing by fundamentalist churches that insist that the whole integrity of the faith depends on it? There is a part of me that would like to believe that at some point in future, inerrancy will be consigned to the dustbin of theological history, and Christians of the future will en masse look back at our own time with bemusement as they puzzle over how anyone could possibly believe such a thing. But if there is some psychological need for theological certainty that leads some people to believe in inerrancy, then this would be a vain hope.

Is Interfaith Dialogue Possible When you Think Other Religions are Inferior?

Reuters reports that "Pope Benedict, who is sometimes seen as insensitive to other faiths, will reach out to other religious leaders during his first visit to the United States."

The question I have is this: how it is possible to "reach out" to other faiths that you denigrate as inferior to your own? He not only believes that his religion is the only true religion, but he also believes that his denomination is the only legitimate Christian church. Any "reaching out" that takes place is not from a perspective of humility or a desire to engage in a give and take and to learn from what others might have to offer; it is rather from the perspective of "I'm right and you're wrong, but I'll condescend to talk to you."

I think that the value of interfaith dialogue under those circumstances is limited, at best.

Omnscience and Incarnation

In the comments section of the Versus Populum posting about Rowan Williams's view of God, I ran across the following sentence:

The living God as the divine perichoresis of the Trinity already contains and 'knows' what it means to be human in the unity of the fully divine/human person of Jesus Christ.

I admit that, after reading that, I had to look up the word perichoresis. It turns out there is a Wikipedia article on it, for anyone who is interested. It is a part of Trinitarian theology, as it turns out; but then, I am not a Trinitarian. In any case, what I found interesting was the suggestion that somehow the Incarnation was necessary in order for God to know what it means to be human.

I've run across this argument before. And I have to say that it makes no sense to me. Are we to believe that God didn't know what it was like to be human before Jesus was born? Are we to suppose that there are actually limits to God's knowledge and understanding?

I would suggest that God already knew and already knows what it is like to be human, that there is no limit to God's knowledge and understanding, and that furthermore this means that God knows what it is like to be me and you and the fish in the sea and the birds in the air and the bacteria in your lower intestine.

To say that God knows all of this in the fullest way possible means that God knows our experiences not just objectively as an outsider, but God actually knows what we are experiencing internally as well. God's empathy is perfect, in other words, in ways that our own capacity for empathy is not. God understands our own subjective experiences. This dovetails with the notion of panentheism--because if God shares in all of our subjective experiences, then God understands us not just as an external observer, but also from the inside; and this implies that God is within us and we are within God.

To suggest otherwise is to place limits on God's omniscience. I cited in an earlier posting a quote from Uta Ranke-Heinemann that stated that "A powerful God finds more supporters than a compassionate God." Perhaps we can add to this a corollary: a powerful God finds more supporters than an omniscient God as well. By that I mean that God's alleged omnipotence--which supposedly allowed him/her to act as a kind of divine sperm donor to a young woman 2000 years ago and thus create a miraculous birth so that God could incarnate himself on earth--is said have been a means of overcoming a certain limit to God's omniscience.

In my view, describing God as omniscient and omnibenevolent makes for a richer and more meaningful theology than what can be accomplished by describing him/her as omnipotent.

More on why I think Rowan Williams is seriously wrong.

In my previous posting, I responded to Rowan Williams's assertion that "we must get to grips with the idea that we don’t ‘contribute’ anything to God, that God would have been the same God if we had never been created."

I found an excellent quote from "Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition" that I think summarizes very well the fundamental problem with Rowan Williams's view. The quote takes place in the context of a discussion of whether God's love is solely creative, or if it is also responsive as well:

The traditional notion of love as solely creative was based upon the value judgment that independence or absoluteness is unqualifiedly good, and that dependence or relativity in any sense derogates from perfection. But...while perfection entails independence or absoluteness in some respects, it also entails dependence or relativity in other respects. It entails ethical independence, in the sense that one should not be deflected by one's passions from the basic commitment to seek the greatest good in all situations. But this ethical commitment, in order to be actualized in concrete situations, requires responsiveness to the actual needs and desires of others. Hence, to promote the greatest good, one needs to be informed by, and thus relativized by, the feelings of others. Furthermore, we do not admire someone whose enjoyment is not in part dependent upon the condition of those around them. Parents who remained in absolute bliss while their children were in agony would not be perfect--unless there are such things as perfect monsters!

In other words, while there is a type of independence that is admirable , there is also a type of dependence that is admirable. And, if there is a type of absoluteness that unqualifiedly admirable, that means that there is a divine absoluteness; and the same holds of relativity. Process thought affirms that both of these are true. While traditional theism speaks only of divine absoluteness, process theism speaks also of the "divine relativity." (pp. 46-67. Emphasis added.)

Rowan Williams's view of God thus confuses the absolute independence that is necessary in order for God to always make the right decisions with the concrete dependence that is necessary in order for God to respond appropriately to the individual situations as they occur. If God, to borrow a phrase from the ontological argument, is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, then it follows that the goodness of relativity and sympathetic responsiveness must also manifest itself in the most perfect way possible in God's nature. Thus God is affected by us, and God is not the same with us as he/she would have been without us. Otherwise, God could not be perfect.

Cobb and Griffin make an an analogy with human parents. What kind of parent is unaffected by their children? What kind of parent is indifferent to whether their children exist or not? What kind of heavenly Father (or Mother) would it be who was the same whether we existed or not?

Would God have been the same without us?

Dwight P. of the blog Versus Populum critiques the following quote from Rowan Williams:

A word of caution here: some modern thinkers have been very tempted by language that seems to suggest that God is in some way in need of having something else around in order to become more fully himself. … But I think we have to face a challenge here; we must get to grips with the idea that we don’t ‘contribute’ anything to God, that God would have been the same God if we had never been created. (Italics added.)

I could not disagree more with Rowan Williams. I have to wonder why anyone would want to worship a God who was so unaffected by the world. As I wrote in a comment to that blog posting,

If God is unaffected by what we do, then what kind of God is that? Why did God even create (or evoke the creation of) the world anyway, if nothing that happens in creation matters to God or affects him/her in any way? Rowan Williams's conception of God ultimately leads to a view of God who is impassive and not sympathetic to the human condition.

One of the contributions of process theology to this matter is its understanding that God has both a "primordial" nature--which is God's timeless, unchanging, perfect character in the abstract--and a "consequent" nature--God's sympathetic responsiveness to the world. Unless you take the view that God is indifferent to the world, then God must necessarily have a consequent nature. That means that God responds to the world as it unfolds.

Many people seem to confuse this point by assuming that if God were perfect, then God could not be affected by the world, under the assumption that once something is perfect it cannot change and still retain its perfection. This seems to be the mistake that Rowan Williams is making (at least, I infer this based on the quote above.) The problem with this notion of God as an abstractly perfect being is that it results in a God who is totally divorced from the world. It is a bit of a conundrum, because a God who was not perfectly sympathetic with the world would not be perfect, but a God who responds to the world must necessarily change!

The solution is really quite simple. One need only recognize that there are different aspects to God's perfection. In the abstract, God has a timeless, unchanging perfection of character. But God also responds perfectly with unlimited love and sympathetic response to the world, and the nature of this responsiveness depends on what happens in the world. These are simply two different ways that God's perfection manifests itself. The idea that Rowan Williams propounds really seems to come from an inability to understand this point.

So when Williams says that "God would have been the same God if we had never been created," he is both right and wrong. It is true that God would have had the same primordial nature if we had never been created; but God's consequent nature would have been different.

In the case of process theology, this consequent nature is realized through God's incorporation of the world into his/her own essence. That means that God fully experiences what we experience, and all our experiences thus enhance God's own existence.

"A powerful God finds more supporters than a compassionate God."

Here is a quote about theodicy from Uta Ranke-Heinemann's book "Putting Away Childish Things":

The question of the origin of evil, of what causes the tears and deviltries of the world, the question that no theologian has so far managed to answer, is one that humans have always posed. The Christian apologist Lactantius, who in the year 317 was called to Trier to be the tutor of Prince Crispus, cites an argument by the Greek philosopher Epicurus (d. 271/270 B.C.):

Either God wants to get rid of evil, but he can't; or God can, but he doesn't want to; or God neither wants to nor can. If God wants to, but can't, then he's not all-powerful. If he can, but doesn't want to, he's not all-loving. If he neither can nor wants to, he's neither all-powerful nor all-loving. And if he wants to and can--then why doesn't he remove the evils? (De ira Dei, chap 13)

On the question of the origin of evil, the theologians have always opted for the second possibility, that God can get rid of evil, but for whatever reason he doesn't want to. The theologians prefer to deduct points from God's compassion rather than from his omnipotence. A powerful God finds more supporters than a compassionate God. This is because people model their image of God on their own image. And potency and power mean a great deal to them--sometimes they mean everything--while compassion means less, and sometimes nothing at all. But we should rethink all this. God can't banish evil unless he drowns the human race. And so all he can do is mourn. (pp. 60-61)

When she says that "no theologian has so far managed to answer", I think it is fair to say that she really means no orthodox theologian. Certainly (and I hate to sound like a broken record, but I must repeat myself here) process theology does not conform to her characterization of "theologians" in this matter. But she raises a very good point. I agree with her when she says that "a powerful God finds more supporters than a compassionate God."

As an example of this, I consider a quote from Bart Ehrman's latest book that is found in James McGrath's blog. Ehrman writes:

Believing in a God who stands beside me in my suffering, but who cannot actually do much about it, makes God a lot like my mother or my kindly next-door neighbor, but it doesn't make him a lot like GOD.

How interesting that Ehrman so casually dismisses the idea of a non-omnipotent God who suffers with us. Ehrman simply takes for granted God's omnipotence--of course God must by definition be this way, and any conception that differs from this "doesn't make him a lot like God." Ehrman, a product of an Evangelical Christian background, betrays his presuppositions. Uta Ranke-Heinemann is indeed correct. A powerful God does find more supporters than a compassionate God.

Emerging paradigm

I recently ran across a posting by a Methodist blogger who objected to Marcus Borg's division of Christianity into two categories, an older paradigm and an emerging one. His complaint was that this categorization placed him, a moderate Christian, on the same side of that dividing line as fundamentalists or young earth Creationists. Certainly this objection is understandable; who (other than a fundamentalist) wants to be associated with fundamentalists?

I would agree that there are not just two theological approaches to Christianity. Sure, moderate Christians differ from fundamentalists in many ways. But, speaking as one who is uninterested in a miraculous, supernaturally theistic religious faith, the important point is that I find both fundamentalism and moderate Christianity to be equally unsatisfying. And I think that is the point that Borg is driving at. What both fundamentalism and moderate orthodoxy share in common is a belief in a God who has intervened miraculously in the world--including, but perhaps not restricted to, resuscitating Jesus's corpse. That issue does serve as an important dividing line for many people who are as John Shelby Spong puts it, members of the church alumni society.

Until I discovered Borg, I was not able to come to terms with Christianity. The progression of faith that he discusses, from "pre-critical naiveté", to "critical thinking", to "post-critical naiveté", in many ways mirrors my own progression of faith.

One of the problems that I have faced when I have tried to find progressive Christian churches is that many that describe themselves as "progressive" continue to preach as if things like the Virgin Birth or a literal physical resurrection were true. The distinction in those cases between "progressive" and "moderate" Christian in those cases seems blurry to me; it is almost more a matter of style and outlook rather than theology. What I would call "progressively orthodox" churches emphasize such virtues as tolerance and openness and inclusiveness. And while it is a style and outlook that is in many ways appealing to me, it isn't enough.

The Bible is not the last word. It is the first word.

I found a wonderful blog entry titled The Bible and Me, by a blogger named "Liberal Pastor in Burnsville". The author explains why he is a progressive Christian. He begins with the simple point that he is a Christian because Christianity is what speaks to him personally:

I was raised in a Christian environment and immersed from childhood on in the stories of Jesus. As an adult I have come to appreciate and chosen to appropriate the way of Jesus as my way. Jesus as I understand him is the guiding force in my faith expression. Although, I have also come to learn, appreciate, and appropriate teachings from other religious traditions as well.

This helps identify me , I suppose, as a progressive or liberal Christian. I do not think there is only one "true" spiritual path.

The author then goes on to point out that the authors of the Bible come from a pre-Enlightenment era, in which peopled believed in demons and spirits and virgin births and the like; and that this ancient world view does not match his own:

I am at home in this modern or post-modern world that I have been raised in. I accept the scientific worldview as I understand it with regards to evolution, the scientific and historic methods of inquiry, the marvels of modern medicine, and the de-mythologizing of our world....My world is non-magical, but still plenty enchanted with mystery and wonder and beauty.

He then goes on to say that "the Bible is not the last word for me on truth or life or even God. It is the first word." I really like that statement. He continues,

It is where I begin because it helps me understand my spiritual heritage. It also chronicles for me some of the great leap-forwards in spiritual insights in the history of humanity - in the works of the prophets for instance - and it gives us the life-testimony and teachings of Jesus, one of the most authentic spiritual leaders in history. The Bible also offers profound insights into the human condition (something that hasn't changed much in thousands of years), and plenty of stories as examples of the very best and worst of it on display.

But knowledge about our world and the way we think about God continues to unfold. Revelation is progressive. As we evolve individually and as a human community, the horizon continues to unfold before us. For this reason we will never be able to know all there is to know, another pre-modern notion. The more we know the more we realize how little we know. There is no way in the world Moses or Jesus or Paul or the biblical writers could have spoken the (God's) last word from their point in history and their worldview on events unfolding thousands of years later. As the UCC likes to say: God is still speaking.

Religion is ongoing process. Traditions are not straitjackets, but starting points. They provide us with a record of where religions traditions have come from. But the religions must not just freeze in their tracks. They must move on.

Are religion and science both narratives?

The author of the blog Pluralist Speaks critiques a comment by Rowan Williams, who compares science and religion by saying that both are just different narratives. According to Williams,

The truth is that both Darwinism and Christian theology are telling stories. They both work as narratives. Narratives assume drama, agency, and personality. But the paradox is that one of these stories knows what it's doing and confesses it is working in the categories of drama and agency and personality and the other apparently doesn't.

Pluralist points out that:

Many a scientist would not like to think that their enterprise is just narrative. Of course it is a series of questions seeking answers generating questions. Of course scientific answers are potentially transient, waiting to be falsified, but the longer they stay as a truth the more robust they become as truth. Paradigms - joining the dots - are always more transient still.

Does it diminish the qualitatively different roles that science and religion play to just describe religion and science as two narratives with different stories to tell? I tend to think of religion as something that informs and deepens the understanding that science provides.

On the other hand, I suppose one could argue that science does provide us with narrative-like features. The origins and history of the universe, from the Big Bang, through the creation of the earth, and the evolution of life here, have a certain narrative quality. Could religion then be described as a meta-narrative that informs the scientific narrative?

"Truth is constant"

Thanks to a tip from James McGrath, here is a brilliant spoof of creationism, which is found on the website of the reDiscovery Institute:



I like the slogan of the reDiscovery Institute: "Truth is Constant". The paragraph in the above image that discusses the evils of "Mendeleevian Periodicity" apes the sort of language used by religious creationists when they attack "Darwinian Evolution".

This just goes to show that satire is often the best way to respond to sheer nonsense.

God the Father

One of the revised common lectionary Easter readings for this year came from Acts 10:34-43. What struck me about that passage was how remarkably un-Trinitarian it seemed. It might be easy to miss this point because of what I think is a kind of automatic translation process that may easily occur when one hears those words. But I think that in just reading that passage as is, without the interpretive lens of Trinitarianism, it is rather hard to interpret that passage as an expression of Trinitarian theology at all.

The passage presents a speech by Peter, who repeatedly--and I mean repeatedly--distinguishes Jesus from God. For example, we are told that "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power", "God was with him", "God raised him on the third day", and "he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead." In every one of those phrases, Jesus is described as a distinct personage from "God". Jesus is the object of God's actions in all of those passages. Peter did not say that God did these things to himself, or that one part of God did these things to another part of God; he said that "God" did them to "Jesus". God is the subject, Jesus is the object. Two different personages. It would make no sense to phrase it that way if Jesus himself were part of the Godhead.

My guess is that most Christians who read those passages do a quick translation in their heads: they read or hear the word "God" in those verses but in their mind they conceive of the reference as being to the "Father" in a Holy Trinity. I think this is probably a common translation that many Christians make, not just in this passage, but in others in which God is distinguished from Jesus. For example, the hymn in Philippians 2 is often touted as an expression of Trinitarianism. But, in fact, the hymn specifically distinguishes Jesus from God, saying, for example, that "God also highly exalted him." Once again, we have God as the subject, Jesus as the object But most Christians probably just do a quick translation in their heads and conceive of "God" in that passage as "The Father of the Holy Trinity", thus resolving what is an apparent conflict with standard dogma.

Christians take for granted a Trinitarian doctrine that has been taught to them as a given of their faith, despite the fact that the word "Trinity" is not in the Bible and the doctrine of the Trinity was only "settled" (which is to say, imposed) more than three centuries after Jesus's death. But I think it is such an esoteric, not to mention confusing, doctrine, that itself was subject to intense debates over the finest of points early in Christian history (I wonder how many American Protestants could describe what the filioque is off the tops of their heads?), that I suspect that few who pay lip service to it fully understand in all its implications. People have to pay lip service to it, after all, lest they be branded heretics. What happens in practice is that there begins to be a confusion in passages like those between "God" and the "Father in the Holy Trinity". The tendency within Nicene Trinitarianism to give a certain primacy to the Father (itself a difficult concept to make sense of, given the Eternal nature of the Godhead) probably makes it all the easier to make this translation. The Father thus becomes sort of the default character in the Trinity, so that when the Bible says "God", it is just interpreted to mean the Father part of this Triune God.

But in reality, Trinitarianism says that God encompasses the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Thus when you talk about the Trinitarian God without qualification, you are referring, at least in theory, to all three at once. Yet when we run across verses where the Bible uses the word "God", the term often gets implicitly shrunk to just the Father when it deals with the relationship between Jesus and God. For unitarians, this clearly presents no problem; one could then simply say that what Jesus understood as the Father was another way of describing...God! One need not be a Trinitarian to understand that God was the "Father" to Jesus, just as God is everyone's "Father" (or, Mother, to avoid the use of sexism.) The Lord's Prayer begins, "Our Father", after all, and lots of people not named Jesus of Nazareth have recited that prayer over the centuries. God the Father is thus Father of us all. But that has nothing to do with the Trinity.

(The Biblical references to Jesus being anointed with the Holy Spirit, such as in the passage above, also raise similar questions. If Jesus is already one of the persons of the Trinity, why does he need to be anointed with another person of the Holy Trinity as well? He's already a "fully divine" presence, according to Trinitarianism. The anointing of the Holy Spirit might be useful for ordinary, sinful human beings, since we aren't God--but seems a little superfluous for Jesus, since he is already has an indwelling Divine nature, and thus would really have no need for another indwelt part of God while residing on earth.)

One of the most interesting examples of how Jesus was separated from God in the Bible can be found in Mark 10, when Jesus says, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone." This statement not only distinguished Jesus from God, but also called into question his perfection! No wonder the passage was modified by Matthew, who used Mark as a source.

I often feel like Trinitarianism is one of those things that people believe just because that's what they think they have to believe. It is so ingrained in much of post-Nicene Christian theology that even during the Reformation, it was taboo to question it (and Michael Servetus was burned at the stake by Calvin for just that reason.) Unitarianism can easily be dismissed by the orthodoxy as an "old heresy", as a way of squelching debate on the subject. Maybe it is time for Christianity to, once and for, rid itself of this taboo.

"Largest religion"

According to press reports, the Vatican newspaper has announced that Muslims have surpassed Catholics as the "largest religion." This struck me as rather odd; this would imply that the Vatican does not consider Protestants and Eastern Orthodox believers to be the same religion as they are. Otherwise, the proper comparison for which "religion" is larger would be between Christians and Muslims, not between Catholics and Muslims. And if one is comparing divisions with the faiths, why are Sunni and Shiite Muslims lumped together while Catholics are not lumped with Protestants? None of it makes any sense.

I tried to find the actual article (I could not find it when I looked online) to see if I could get an indication of what was actually said, rather than what was reported second hand by news services. Maybe it didn't actually use the word "religion" in this context. However, I was unable to find the article.

The historical context of theology

Blogger James McGrath uses the example of the Noah story to make the point that theology, including the theology that informs the writings in the Bible itself, emerges out of a historical context. He writes:

In the end, the story of Noah reminds us that we think about theology in historical contexts, with limited human reason, in partial and piecemeal ways. Its challenge to us is that any language that we today use about God will look as inadequate and perhaps even as horrific to future generations of humans, as that in the Noah story does to us.

Toxicity

Thanks to a reference from SocietyVs, I found an article in Maclean's magazine titled "The Jesus Problem". The article discusses some of the debates that have emerged about the future direction of Christianity in the light of modern scholarship about the historical Jesus.

The article mentions Gretta Vosper, the United Church of Canada pastor who I referred to in my previous posting:

When Gretta Vosper looks at the emerging historical Jesus she sees no rock on which to erect a church. "In trying to capture exactly what he said, we have found, quite by accident, that what he said has little power." But when she weighs up the Jesus legacy in terms of its validity and usefulness for the church today, she considers the entire Gospel tradition — not just the Jesus meek and mild of the scholars and spiritual seekers, but the divine Christ too. It's all part of the Christian heritage in her view. If the liberal church is going to refuse to face the implications of its own beliefs, then what matters is what is in the Bible, what has been proclaimed truth for centuries: "If we say we follow Jesus without clarification, we allow the assumption that we agree with all of his ideas, including the bad ones."

At first glance, this seems to represent the flip side of the "all or nothing" equation that I have objected to for a long time. Vosper's argument here seems little different from what fundamentalists often claim, which is that Christianity is a complete package, that you can't try to forge a theology that is built around the life and teachings of Jesus without also taking the entire orthodox package as is. Her answer, unless I am misunderstanding her (which is possible), is to instead forge a faith that divorces itself entirely from the theological traditions of Christianity while still using the name "Christian" for marketing reasons.

Why does she choose to use the word "Christian" despite having no particular connection to any aspect of the Christian faith traditions?

Because, she replies, her Christianity, like that of the Ebionites, is more a way of acting than a way of belief. "Being a Christian is about taking out of my faith tradition those things that are of value in my effort to live right with myself, with my relationships and with my planet," Vosper says. "And removing those things that are toxic."

Nor is the name essential, at least to Vosper personally, except that maintaining the word Christian is encouraging for other non-theistic churchgoers.

Fair enough. I'm all for removing those things that are toxic from a faith. And I'm not that concerned about her use of the term "Christian". However, I do think that she seems to be arguing for more than just removing the toxicity from faith, since she seems to argue that the entire faith tradition itself is a sort of sick body with inherently toxic elements that cannot be purged without killing the patient. This is what I mean by a rigidly defined, all-or-nothing depiction of a faith tradition. Traditions are more fluid, more dynamic, and more open to evolution than she seems to give them credit for. It is true that liberal Christian churches are often far too coy about biblical and historical scholarship. But I think the solution is to encourage greater honesty about Christian mythology, which has deeper resonance beyond their literal acceptance than Vosper seems to give it credit for.

De-mythologizing and Faith

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

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

So far, that sounds pretty good to me.

The article goes on to say:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Glynn Cardy's blog:

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

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

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

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

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

Easter in the blogosphere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Easter is over. I survived.

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

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

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

Process theology, empathy, and justice

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

The blogger cited her own ordination paper, which stated:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We may call this the subjective character of experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A pastor moves on

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

I hate it when that happens

The satirical newspaper The Onion offers this headline:

Shroud Of Turin Accidentally Washed With Red Shirt

The text of the article begins:

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

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

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

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

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

Alternatives to intercessory prayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intercessory Prayer

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

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

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

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

It was 13.73 billion years ago today

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



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



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

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

More on progressive faith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John then lays it out beautifully:

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

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

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

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

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