We start afresh in the fall on Saturday, September 17th, discussing a classic in the field of ethics and religion, John Stuart Mill's 1854 essay, Utility of Religion. It is but 53 pages long, but due largely to the writing style of that age, requires careful reading.
Mill is associated with a form of Utilitarianism, known as the "greatest-happiness principle" that holds that one must always act so as to produce the greatest aggregate happiness among all sentient beings, within reason.
You can read the essay on your computer clicking here
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Pagitt -- We End Here
Chapter Twelve looks anew at the ancient -- really ancient -- story of "creation" in the opening pages of the Bible. In contrast to a traditional reading of the story that points toward the complete "depravity" of humankind, Pagitt says that in "the fall" while our relationship with God and one another changed, our basic humanity did not. Still created "good," we can still "join in to the good things God is doing in the world. We are still capable of living as the children of God." (Page 136)
Thus, we are created "in the image of God to be God's partners in the world." Humanity is "inherently godly, rather than inherently depraved." As such, our purpose is to love, and to be loved. (Page 138)
Thus, he concludes, "the joy of this proper understanding [that we are godly, rather than depraved] is that we no longer have to feel ashamed of our humanity. It is not a sin to be alive." (Page 144)
Chapter Thirteen takes on the concept that God is our Judge. Christianity has used the language of the legal system to describe how God works: God give us laws, we break them and go before the Judge. A price is to be paid -- a fine, perhaps our life -- and Jesus steps in to pay it in our place. We walk out of the courtroom grateful to Jesus. But, says Pagitt, this distorts who God is, and elevates "the Law" above even God. God is subject to his own rules, so goes the argument.
Pagitt thinks that "sin" is real . . . and something to be death with in one's faith. But he calls for a faith that begins not with sin (as does the traditional, God-the-Judge theology of many forms of Christianity) but rather with God -- a merciful, loving, creative God who calls us to partner with God in renewing the world, in loving one another. (Page 156)
On sin: "Jesus cared about the sin in people's lives because sin kept them from being fully invested in life with God. Sin mattered because it was less than what God wanted for humanity." (Page 158) Sin is not breaking some code, the rules of God. And we don't need to be told what it is -- wee know that abuse and hatred, for example, are wrong. We know it is wrong because it brings disharmony into our relationships.
"Sin isn't a legal problem with God; it's a relationship problem with us." (Page 159) Judgement, then, is about restoration, reconciliation, redemption, renewal -- NOT about punishment.
Chapter Fourteen carries the idea of "sin" farther, to include Hope. The legal model of sin offers no hope. It is an unending cycle of sin, confession, forgiveness, and then sin again. The world is indeed rife with sin -- actions and attitudes that divide, that demonize, that kill. Christians don't pretend that all is well in the world. We see it, identify it, and then choose life, and choose hope that sin will not win out. That is the message of Jesus.
Why do we sin? That is, why do we so often seem to choose disintegration rather than reconciliation? Pagitt -- here wanting to incorporate the findings of science and medicine into faith -- says that sometimes there is a biological reason for our behaviors (Page 166) -- alcoholism is a good example. I personally think that fear motivates us to be less than we know we can be -- fear of ridicule, or losing something, of being seen as we are. Fear of "the other" surely is part of the worldwide divisions of race and religion.
Pagitt invites us to a faith that says, despite all evidence to the contrary, healing is yet possible, for ourselves, and for our world.
Chapter Fifteen reminds us that Jesus was indeed Jewish. And Chapter Sixteen continues to talk about Jesus in his Jewish context. He notes that the common idea of the "Messiah" to come would be a military figure -- God's warrior to carry on the war between good and evil. But Pagitt sees in the message of Jesus not violence, but peace. "The way of Jesus not just to shift the war motif from one kind of war to another, but to see Jesus as the ender of war. Period." (Page 191)
Jesus came in the spirt not of Joshua conquering the land, but Isaiah announcing justice for the poor -- a re-integration of society. To call people to be in partnership with God, to overcome evil not with more evil, but with good. The hope of faith affirms that in the end the good will prevail, even as in the resurrection the seeming defeat of Jesus was reversed.
Chapter Seventeen -- more about Jesus, this time focusing on the issue of the mix of humanity and divinity in the man Jesus. The paradox that is a great obstacle to faith for many -- How can a human being also be divine? -- is, says Pagitt, the fault of the Church's early adoption of the Greek view of reality. That view puts humanity and divinity at odds -- never the twain shall meet. But the Hebrew mind saw no such conflict. And that is what Pagitt calls us to consider. Using an image of St. Paul's, he wants us to see Jesus as the "second Adam." As the first Adam started disintegration, the second Adam begins re-integration.
"Jesus isn't a superhero, and he isn't just a great example." (Page 209) He is both Son of God and Son of Humanity. Jesus was saying to his followers, "This is what life with God looks like. This is it. And you can live this life too." (Page 211)
Chapter Eighteen, and the Last, is appropriately about Heaven. And it should come as no surprise that Pagitt takes issue with the usual, traditional idea that Jesus came to the world to save us, so that we can someday live in Paradise with him and all the other good people for eternity. (Current right-wing Fundamentalism adds the fun, and diabolical, twist that we good people -- no, the people who believe the right doctrines -- get to RULE over the rest of the earth, with force if necessary.)
For Pagitt the message of Jesus was all about today -- and how we live faithfully today. As Jesus famously said, "The kingdom of God is within you." That is, here and now, and more scandalously inside human beings. Pagitt: "Jesus was proclaiming a holistic reorganization of all that is and all that will be. He was bringing about a new kind of life that was meant to be lived out right away, right here, and forevermore." (Page 220)
Pagitt echoes some of Crossan's views on the kingdom, namely, that when Christians proclaimed the kingdom of God, they were uttering treason against the kingdom of Caesar. And when they said that "Jesus is Lord," they were also saying that "Caesar is NOT Lord." And that got them into trouble.
His conclusion is that understanding the "kingdom of God" not as a place to go someday, but a present reality within -- the presence of God to teach us, comfort us, chide us, and above all else go with us -- has revolutionized his faith, and has made "A Christianity Worth Believing."
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Pagitt: We continue
More of Pagitt . . .
In Chapter Seven Pagitt argues for “Holism” – the interchangeability of spirit and matter – kind of like the same-ness of energy and matter that Mr. Einstein liked to talk about, or so I think. In contrast to a sharp division between the reality of spirit and the reality of matter – and saying that only one of those realities is, well, real – Pagitt thinks that current worldviews tend to unite the two. Chapter Eight takes that idea farther – that the needs of body and spirit are the same. When one ministers to the body we minister to the soul and vice versa. “Connection, interdependence, and integration are woven into the very fabric of creation.” (Page 89)
He returns to (and will carry this out in following chapters) the mistake that the Church made when it opted for the Greek view of body and soul, namely, the complete separation of the two. The Hebrews, he argues, held them together; the Greeks drew a sharp distinction (and Gnostics added that spirit is good, matter always evil), and Christianity as most of us know it bought the Greek view.
Chapter Nine. He returns to his conversion story, saying that what drew him to faith was a vision of God with us – sharing our lives, present with us, suffering with us, accepting us so deeply that God became one with us. But Pagitt soon was schooled in evangelical (and Catholic too for that matter) theology that begins not with God involved with, even in love with humanity, but instead with God separated from humanity. The rebellion of humanity – its “sin” of wanting to usurp God’s place – caused a great chasm, a gap that only Jesus – through the Church – could bridge.
But Pagitt – and many of us would say this, I think – never felt separated from God. (Page 97) And if there was a chasm between God and humanity, why was God unable to close it? Traditional theology has put God way far away – “King of Kings!” we sing triumphantly in Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. A God perfect, and removed, and feared – “a God I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.” (Page 99)
Pagitt’s point is that the God that is worshiped in most churches is more like Zeus than Yahweh. The Jewish God, he insists, is “creator, lover, leader, redeemer, judge, advocate, and mediator.” (Page 101)
Chapter Ten. Instead of a God that is “up and out,” Pagitt’s God is “down and in.” He talks about the inadequacy of language – perhaps this is why we so easily go down the “up and out” path, using the language of “royalty, supremacy, hierarchy.” (Page 108) And he knows the fear that if we abandon that sort of language we may “turn God into little more than a really great guy.” (Page 108) And surely language is a barrier – all language is metaphor, and all metaphor is unclear, and subject to misunderstanding. But language is all we have.
And here he introduces the idea of “sin.” A tough one for us mainline liberal people. The conservatives talk about it a lot, and have it defined pretty closely, from swearing to adultery, from missing church to having an abortion. They can be obsessed with their sinfulness – perhaps another way of being obsessed with one’s self, which in my book may be what “sin” is all about. But surely God is more concerned about justice for the poor than my typing “WTF.”
Pagitt understands “sin” to be disintegration. (Page 112) It is a “problem of integration,” rather than (the traditional view) “of distance” (from God). Disintegration means “people feeling at odds with themselves and others.” (Page 112) Sin is “living in a way that hurts the efforts of God.”
For my part, I empathize with those who espouse the Old Fashioned view of sinning – well-defined, understandable, confessable. It’s easier to know when I’ve said “damn!” under my breath than it is to know when my apathy toward politics contributes to the misery of poor people. BUT easier doesn’t mean it’s right. And Pagitt’s idea of “sin” while harder to grasp intellectually rings true in my soul. “I don’t want to follow a faith based in fear. I find it far more compelling – and far more biblical – to live a life in which we are called to join with God, to be like God, to live the Jesus story.” (Page 115)
Chapter Eleven challenges the classic doctrine of original sin and “the Fall.” Franklin Graham – Billy’s boy – is quoted here: “The human soul is a putrid sore of greed, lust, and pride.” (Page 124) Now there’s something to inspire us! Pagitt: “We need to tell a better story.” Amen.
Friday, July 22, 2011
A Christianity Worth Believing, Part Two
Pagitt is all about contextualizing - understanding and articulating Christian faith – any faith – in contemporary culture. We get into great trouble, he says, when we pull the cultural assumptions and values of the past (the distant past at that) into the present, confusing the eternal, living faith with cultural expressions of that faith. As Jesus might say, putting new, living, fermenting wine into the stiff and decaying wineskins of the past will not come to a good end. The wine will be lost, and the skins too.
Says Pagitt: “Every theology is grounded in a culture and a set of culturally based assumptions and concerns. To hold to these theologies in the fifth century was to be faithful, for they were created as explanations for the understanding of the world at that time. But to hold to those same conclusions today, when the worldview that demanded them has expired, is simply foolish.” (Page 48). And “foolish” is a good word for a good deal of Christianity these days.
Chapter Six of the book takes on the foundation of Christian thought and experience – the Bible. Pagitt wants us to know that it is not a weapon – anyone remember having “sword drills” with their Bible? Can anyone think of a worse image for sacred writings?!
Nor is the Bible a reference book, as many want us to think. Got a question about anything? Anything at all? The answer must be in the Bible . . . somewhere. It may be waiting yet to be discovered, but it’s there! But of course that is NOT what the Bible is, that collection of diverse and conflicting writings created and re-created over centuries of time.
“I just don’t think that the Bible is always the best starting point for faith.” (Page 64) Amen to that, especially if the reader is educated and inquisitive, not prone to simply take the word of the biblical authorities, most of whom disagree with one another.
The Bible does not make the claims for itself that its more ardent followers make for it.
Chapter Seven introduces Pagitt’s emphasis on “holism.” A key concept that reminds me of what some of our previous writers , especially Haught, have been saying is this: “What we interact with in a normal day is not all there is; there’s more going on than we can see.” (Page 76) Here is the divide we’ve seen before: between those who “believe” only what they can see, touch, measure – the scientific naturalist; and those who “believe” there is more . . . lots more. Holism for Pagitt helps him understand how body and spirit are really the same . . . energy in different forms . . . Creator-cosmos congruency. (Page 88) “That’s just the way things are.” (Page 78)
“The theology of holism is a theology of invitation, of welcome, of God saying, ‘Look what I’m doing. Come and join me.’” (page 91)
Says Pagitt: “Every theology is grounded in a culture and a set of culturally based assumptions and concerns. To hold to these theologies in the fifth century was to be faithful, for they were created as explanations for the understanding of the world at that time. But to hold to those same conclusions today, when the worldview that demanded them has expired, is simply foolish.” (Page 48). And “foolish” is a good word for a good deal of Christianity these days.
Chapter Six of the book takes on the foundation of Christian thought and experience – the Bible. Pagitt wants us to know that it is not a weapon – anyone remember having “sword drills” with their Bible? Can anyone think of a worse image for sacred writings?!
Nor is the Bible a reference book, as many want us to think. Got a question about anything? Anything at all? The answer must be in the Bible . . . somewhere. It may be waiting yet to be discovered, but it’s there! But of course that is NOT what the Bible is, that collection of diverse and conflicting writings created and re-created over centuries of time.
“I just don’t think that the Bible is always the best starting point for faith.” (Page 64) Amen to that, especially if the reader is educated and inquisitive, not prone to simply take the word of the biblical authorities, most of whom disagree with one another.
The Bible does not make the claims for itself that its more ardent followers make for it.
Chapter Seven introduces Pagitt’s emphasis on “holism.” A key concept that reminds me of what some of our previous writers , especially Haught, have been saying is this: “What we interact with in a normal day is not all there is; there’s more going on than we can see.” (Page 76) Here is the divide we’ve seen before: between those who “believe” only what they can see, touch, measure – the scientific naturalist; and those who “believe” there is more . . . lots more. Holism for Pagitt helps him understand how body and spirit are really the same . . . energy in different forms . . . Creator-cosmos congruency. (Page 88) “That’s just the way things are.” (Page 78)
“The theology of holism is a theology of invitation, of welcome, of God saying, ‘Look what I’m doing. Come and join me.’” (page 91)
Friday, July 8, 2011
A Christianity Worth Believing?
A Christianity Worth Believing . . .
That is quite a claim. And that is the question our group has been asking, in one way or another, all year long. What is the Christian faith, and can we buy into it? There are of course lots of forms of this Christianity thing out there, and in the last twenty years we’ve been seeing – thanks to the multitudes of nutty people who do the most outrageous and immoral things in Jesus’ name, and to our media who likes to focus on the nutty in everything – we’ve come to think that Christianity is simply not to be believed. One thinks of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority that was neither, Jim and Tammy Faye Baker’s excesses, Pat Robertson’s idiotic pronouncements, Jimmy Swaggart’s tearful confession, the egomaniac in Florida burning a Qu’ran. That’s a short list.
Not to be outdone, the Roman Catholics just this month were stunned when their rockstar priest, Father John Caropi who for years has held massive campaigns around the country, and, until last March, was heard on Catholic radio daily preaching conservative Catholicism, was thrown out. Seems he has been living in luxury, enjoying certain chemicals not legally obtained, and “co-habitating” a few women.
So we can look at what passes for Christianity and rightly decide it’s not worth the effort. Lots better things to do with one’s Sunday morning.
Doug Pagitt represents what is becoming known as “emerging Christianity.” And A Christianity Worth Believing in an introduction to that movement. He’s practically a local boy – Minneapolis – and begins his book with, “I am a Christian, but I don’t believe in Christianity.” A good starting point I’d say. The book is “part memoir, part theological treatise.” He is exploring “new ways of being Christian, of being spiritual, of following God.” That, I think, is what our book group has been doing.
Pagitt grew up completely outside of “Christianity.” His family was not part of any church. But at age 16, invited to go with a friend to a “Passion Play” (and thinking that this had to do with the sort of passion that 16 year old boys are pretty well obsessed with), he to his great surprise had a spiritual experience – a conversion. “This is what I longed for, what I needed to be true. There was a God alongside the tortured and beaten Jesus.” (p 16)
Thus he entered the world of evangelicalism. And there he stayed for quite a while. Not always comfortably, though. Coming from outside, he looked at the faith as it was practiced around him (and urged upon him) with new eyes. Some of it made sense; other parts did not make any sense. And he became what he calls “a Christian contrarian.” His personal spiritual experience then combined with his education – in seminary, but also in other venues – and his own questions to start experimenting with new ways of being Christian – new ways of being with God in the world.
The book tells that story. Along the way he will be interacting with “classic” Christian doctrines, such as the authority of the Bible, to understand them in new ways, in ways that make sense to contemporary culture.
Pagitt believes that we are in the midst of a massive change in culture. This new culture is not simply tweaking the old. It is becoming entirely new, in how we think, what we value, what we see as beauty, and the tools we use. (These are the four markers of culture that he talks a lot about in another book, The Church in the Inventive Age.) What the “emerging” church is trying to do is to articulate and live out Christian faith in our culture. Other people we’ve read – Marcus Borg and John Crossan for sure, and folks who are in the Living the Questions DVD series we’re used at church and various places -- are in this same “camp” of folks who see a radical change in process.
Pagitt is not a theoretian only. His church, “Solomon’s Porch” is a living expression of this new kind of faith – A Christianity Worth Believing because it is intellectually sound, emotionally satisfying, and ethically grounded in justice.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
A Fine Sermon: What I Learned This Year
Guys -- Below is the sermon I preached last Sunday -- a "report" on the group this year, or more accurately, my observations from our reading. It's kind of "What I Learned This Year" -- See what you think!
-- Ralph
A year ago a men’s book group was launched with two purposes in mind. First to prove that yes, indeed we men could read books and talk together about them. And these were hard books too! But the second, more important goal, was to give us a chance to look at faith methodically and in its most basic form. I called it “Faith from Scratch” – clearing away our presumptions about the Christian faith, even about the very existence of God, in order to figure out just what it was that we each believe. Of course, you can’t really begin “from scratch” – we come to these questions with boatloads of presuppositions and experiences with faith and life. But we tried to start from the beginning, putting everything on the table.
And so we read some books. Seven in all. And we talked. And we thought about God and the universe and the Bible and Jesus and . . . you get the idea.
I am grateful for the opportunity to work through these books, and to wrestle with them with some very bright and insightful guys. Today I report. Not on what the group concluded, but what I have. So far.
We began with the mind – with how the brain works. Not chemically, but the patterns and functions of the mind – habits of the mind, how we process what comes into the brain through our senses. There is a relatively new field of research called cognitive science that has been exploring the habits of our minds. A book called Why Would Anyone Believe in God? summarized the latest theories of the mind, and related them to religious behavior. And it seems that we are hard-wired (at birth, or very early on) to be on the lookout for gods – “agents” seen or unseen that are doing things in the world. Looking for someone, something to explain some event, we – as individuals and as cultures – are not bashful to find a god in our midst. The point of the book was that it should be no wonder that we are by and large religious people; it’s practically our default setting. It was fascinating to think about how we think!
Armed with a little knowledge of the mind, we next listened to some objections – some very strong objections – to religion in the world. Sam Harris, in The End of Faith called for just that: the end of all religion in the world. The Bible and Qu’ran, he said, are mountains of life-destroying gibberish. Religion, he said, is a living spring of violence. Citing the rise of terrorism around the world, carried out in the name of God, Harris wrote forcefully that religion – and he here is talking about Fundamentalist religion – threatens our very existence as a race. It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity of most of our religious beliefs.
In religion’s place Harris proposed a rationalistic, scientific naturalism in which reason would guide individuals and societies to a more just and peaceful world.
In response to Harris’ withering attack on all religion, John Haught in Is Nature Enough? sought to lay out . . . a reasonable, scientifically informed alternative to naturalism. A purely naturalistic view of the world, he said, is too limiting. There are many layers of reality – kinds of experience – that are true, science being just one of them. Scientific naturalists like Harris were denying, with no solid evidence, whole realms of human experience.
Haught also started us on a road toward defining authentic Christian faith. Harris had legitimately exposed the atrocities of religion. But it was a religion of a certain kind. The mindless, fundamentalist kind. Haught and others we were to read talked about a very different kind of faith – a faith that was open and tolerant, liberating and compassionate. Faith that Marcus Borg talked about in his book, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time.
Marcus Borg is a very popular writer and speaker, one that many of you have seen either in person or on the Living the Questions discussion videos. He contends that Christianity has been falsely defined by Christian Fundamentalists because of their view of the Bible. About 150 years ago, reacting to the popularity of Darwin’s theories, and fearing science, Fundamentalists – that was their name for themselves – created a form of faith that was foreign to that which had gone before. Rigid, judgmental, closed, Fundamentalism elevated the Bible to the place of God. It took very human, flawed book and made it God’s perfect book; it took a collection of diverse styles of writing – history and legend, poetry and law, to say nothing of story and parable, letters, and wild apocalyptic vision – and made it a single book to be read literalistically. We say around here that God is still speaking. Fundamentalism says God spoke once for all, a very long time ago, and has nothing more to say.
Borg, on the other hand, said that the Bible is not a prosaic listing of true statements about God and everything – a recipe for God, a rule book for living, to be read literally. Instead we read this collection of writings through the “lens” of metaphor, seeking glimpses of God in story and parable.
With a different approach to the Bible that was new to some of us, we turned to two writers who invited us to look at the Christian faith in a new way. Jacques Ellul, a French writer and theologian of the 20th century, began where we did in the reading today, with the simple verse, “God is love.” Love to be genuine, he said, requires freedom. And so Christianity stands for love, and against any power that seeks to take away personal freedom, be it institutions of the state, or of religion.
John Dominic Crossan, a contemporary scholar whom many of you have seen on the Living the Questions videos, in his book God and Empire continued the theme that Jesus came not to start yet another oppressive institution (as the Christian church was to become) but a movement marked by love and grace, freedom and sacrifice, as he brought good news not to the rich and powerful, but to the poor and outcast. Crossan brought his considerable historical and biblical knowledge to his understanding of the man Jesus who became the Christ.
The last book, by Karen Armstrong, was The Case for God. In this sweeping overview of religion across the millennia and around the world, she traces how humankind has wrestled with the fundamental questions of religion: Where did we come from? Why are we here? How should we live? And, what is the meaning of death? Religion’s task was not give us the answers (such answers are not available), but “to help us to live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems that we could not solve: mortality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life.”
She, like Borg, makes a strong case that authentic faith – believing – is more a matter of the heart than mind. It is not giving mere mental assent to a list of doctrines, handing down to us, as if one might earn eternal life by correctly answering all the questions on God’s final exam. We use our minds, our powers of reason in faith; we bring to it the findings of science, of language, of culture to explore the questions. Faith is not mindlessly affirming things we know cannot be true. But at the end of our questions, and in the middle of them too, faith is of the heart, the soul – a trust in our God. For the answers to the questions we ask, and the God we seek to know, are so far beyond our experience and imagining that all words fail us. Armstrong encourages us to explore the way of silence – of sitting in speechless awe confronted by the Holy Presence – the Presence we encounter most often in the majestic wonders of nature, but also in the faces of our neighbors.
That was our journey, from the theories of cognitive science, to the objections of the new atheists, to new ways of reading the ancient text and finding there the radical mission of love and freedom that was Jesus’ then, and ought to be the church’s today.
So. My conclusions. So Far.
Humanity, be it by nature or by nurture, is “hardwired” to watch for causation, purpose, reasons for actions in the world. When the cause of some event is not clear – we immediately look for some explanation, some agency that is behind that event. We look for gods – and we find them too, gods by many names. That religious impulse doesn’t prove the existence of such gods. But it helps us understand why our race is so unrelentingly religious. Religion is likely here to stay.
No one religion is inherently “better” than the rest. No one religion has a lock on the truth, the only sacred book, the “right” view of God. No matter how loudly preachers or imams or rabbis tell us differently, all of our religions are noble but inadequate attempts to know the unknowable, to express the inexpressible.
There is good religion, and bad religion. Good religion, no matter its name, leads its followers to freedom, to kindness, to graciousness and forgiveness, to love, to compassion for others. Bad religion fosters intolerance, exclusivity and superiority, judgment instead of compassion, fear instead of love, hatred for those who disagree, instead of understanding and humility toward those not like us.
It follows that there are good Christians and very bad Christians. There are good Muslims and very bad Muslims. For in the end what matters in religion is not what one “believes” with the mind, but how one lives from the heart. Correctness of doctrine has nothing to do with the quality of our character. People can believe the most bizarre things, and yet live truly beautiful, compassionate lives.
Which is why it is possible for people to “believe” nothing at all about God intellectually – agnostics, atheists, humanists, whatever – and live as morally, compassionately, with mercy and kindness as any believer of any religion. The reading today said, God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. It didn’t say that God lives in people who profess correct doctrine, say the “right” things about God. No, God lives in anyone who loves – period.
The collection of writings that we call “The Bible” is not an inerrant account of what God is really like or what God says we must do. It is not a book of science, or careful history, still less a rule book from God. It is a collection of diverse, sometimes conflicting, witnesses to God’s presence in the world of many, many centuries back. The truth of sacred writings like these does not spring from the bare, literal words on the page but from the interaction of my spirit with the text, a sharing of ancient story and today’s experience. God is still speaking, any time we encounter the sacred text with an open heart, and mind.
And lastly, and with this I conclude: In that Bible we learn that the essence of Jesus’ teachings and life is that all are welcome to the banquet which is the presence and love of God. He stood against any powers that oppressed people economically, socially or religiously. His religion was one of grace and compassion, of inviting people to a new way of faith, challenging the powers of state and religion to become sources of freedom instead of prison-keepers of body and of soul. That was his mission, and that is ours as well, as we continue the journey of faith, growing in grace.
-- Ralph
A year ago a men’s book group was launched with two purposes in mind. First to prove that yes, indeed we men could read books and talk together about them. And these were hard books too! But the second, more important goal, was to give us a chance to look at faith methodically and in its most basic form. I called it “Faith from Scratch” – clearing away our presumptions about the Christian faith, even about the very existence of God, in order to figure out just what it was that we each believe. Of course, you can’t really begin “from scratch” – we come to these questions with boatloads of presuppositions and experiences with faith and life. But we tried to start from the beginning, putting everything on the table.
And so we read some books. Seven in all. And we talked. And we thought about God and the universe and the Bible and Jesus and . . . you get the idea.
I am grateful for the opportunity to work through these books, and to wrestle with them with some very bright and insightful guys. Today I report. Not on what the group concluded, but what I have. So far.
We began with the mind – with how the brain works. Not chemically, but the patterns and functions of the mind – habits of the mind, how we process what comes into the brain through our senses. There is a relatively new field of research called cognitive science that has been exploring the habits of our minds. A book called Why Would Anyone Believe in God? summarized the latest theories of the mind, and related them to religious behavior. And it seems that we are hard-wired (at birth, or very early on) to be on the lookout for gods – “agents” seen or unseen that are doing things in the world. Looking for someone, something to explain some event, we – as individuals and as cultures – are not bashful to find a god in our midst. The point of the book was that it should be no wonder that we are by and large religious people; it’s practically our default setting. It was fascinating to think about how we think!
Armed with a little knowledge of the mind, we next listened to some objections – some very strong objections – to religion in the world. Sam Harris, in The End of Faith called for just that: the end of all religion in the world. The Bible and Qu’ran, he said, are mountains of life-destroying gibberish. Religion, he said, is a living spring of violence. Citing the rise of terrorism around the world, carried out in the name of God, Harris wrote forcefully that religion – and he here is talking about Fundamentalist religion – threatens our very existence as a race. It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity of most of our religious beliefs.
In religion’s place Harris proposed a rationalistic, scientific naturalism in which reason would guide individuals and societies to a more just and peaceful world.
In response to Harris’ withering attack on all religion, John Haught in Is Nature Enough? sought to lay out . . . a reasonable, scientifically informed alternative to naturalism. A purely naturalistic view of the world, he said, is too limiting. There are many layers of reality – kinds of experience – that are true, science being just one of them. Scientific naturalists like Harris were denying, with no solid evidence, whole realms of human experience.
Haught also started us on a road toward defining authentic Christian faith. Harris had legitimately exposed the atrocities of religion. But it was a religion of a certain kind. The mindless, fundamentalist kind. Haught and others we were to read talked about a very different kind of faith – a faith that was open and tolerant, liberating and compassionate. Faith that Marcus Borg talked about in his book, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time.
Marcus Borg is a very popular writer and speaker, one that many of you have seen either in person or on the Living the Questions discussion videos. He contends that Christianity has been falsely defined by Christian Fundamentalists because of their view of the Bible. About 150 years ago, reacting to the popularity of Darwin’s theories, and fearing science, Fundamentalists – that was their name for themselves – created a form of faith that was foreign to that which had gone before. Rigid, judgmental, closed, Fundamentalism elevated the Bible to the place of God. It took very human, flawed book and made it God’s perfect book; it took a collection of diverse styles of writing – history and legend, poetry and law, to say nothing of story and parable, letters, and wild apocalyptic vision – and made it a single book to be read literalistically. We say around here that God is still speaking. Fundamentalism says God spoke once for all, a very long time ago, and has nothing more to say.
Borg, on the other hand, said that the Bible is not a prosaic listing of true statements about God and everything – a recipe for God, a rule book for living, to be read literally. Instead we read this collection of writings through the “lens” of metaphor, seeking glimpses of God in story and parable.
With a different approach to the Bible that was new to some of us, we turned to two writers who invited us to look at the Christian faith in a new way. Jacques Ellul, a French writer and theologian of the 20th century, began where we did in the reading today, with the simple verse, “God is love.” Love to be genuine, he said, requires freedom. And so Christianity stands for love, and against any power that seeks to take away personal freedom, be it institutions of the state, or of religion.
John Dominic Crossan, a contemporary scholar whom many of you have seen on the Living the Questions videos, in his book God and Empire continued the theme that Jesus came not to start yet another oppressive institution (as the Christian church was to become) but a movement marked by love and grace, freedom and sacrifice, as he brought good news not to the rich and powerful, but to the poor and outcast. Crossan brought his considerable historical and biblical knowledge to his understanding of the man Jesus who became the Christ.
The last book, by Karen Armstrong, was The Case for God. In this sweeping overview of religion across the millennia and around the world, she traces how humankind has wrestled with the fundamental questions of religion: Where did we come from? Why are we here? How should we live? And, what is the meaning of death? Religion’s task was not give us the answers (such answers are not available), but “to help us to live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems that we could not solve: mortality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life.”
She, like Borg, makes a strong case that authentic faith – believing – is more a matter of the heart than mind. It is not giving mere mental assent to a list of doctrines, handing down to us, as if one might earn eternal life by correctly answering all the questions on God’s final exam. We use our minds, our powers of reason in faith; we bring to it the findings of science, of language, of culture to explore the questions. Faith is not mindlessly affirming things we know cannot be true. But at the end of our questions, and in the middle of them too, faith is of the heart, the soul – a trust in our God. For the answers to the questions we ask, and the God we seek to know, are so far beyond our experience and imagining that all words fail us. Armstrong encourages us to explore the way of silence – of sitting in speechless awe confronted by the Holy Presence – the Presence we encounter most often in the majestic wonders of nature, but also in the faces of our neighbors.
That was our journey, from the theories of cognitive science, to the objections of the new atheists, to new ways of reading the ancient text and finding there the radical mission of love and freedom that was Jesus’ then, and ought to be the church’s today.
So. My conclusions. So Far.
Humanity, be it by nature or by nurture, is “hardwired” to watch for causation, purpose, reasons for actions in the world. When the cause of some event is not clear – we immediately look for some explanation, some agency that is behind that event. We look for gods – and we find them too, gods by many names. That religious impulse doesn’t prove the existence of such gods. But it helps us understand why our race is so unrelentingly religious. Religion is likely here to stay.
No one religion is inherently “better” than the rest. No one religion has a lock on the truth, the only sacred book, the “right” view of God. No matter how loudly preachers or imams or rabbis tell us differently, all of our religions are noble but inadequate attempts to know the unknowable, to express the inexpressible.
There is good religion, and bad religion. Good religion, no matter its name, leads its followers to freedom, to kindness, to graciousness and forgiveness, to love, to compassion for others. Bad religion fosters intolerance, exclusivity and superiority, judgment instead of compassion, fear instead of love, hatred for those who disagree, instead of understanding and humility toward those not like us.
It follows that there are good Christians and very bad Christians. There are good Muslims and very bad Muslims. For in the end what matters in religion is not what one “believes” with the mind, but how one lives from the heart. Correctness of doctrine has nothing to do with the quality of our character. People can believe the most bizarre things, and yet live truly beautiful, compassionate lives.
Which is why it is possible for people to “believe” nothing at all about God intellectually – agnostics, atheists, humanists, whatever – and live as morally, compassionately, with mercy and kindness as any believer of any religion. The reading today said, God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. It didn’t say that God lives in people who profess correct doctrine, say the “right” things about God. No, God lives in anyone who loves – period.
The collection of writings that we call “The Bible” is not an inerrant account of what God is really like or what God says we must do. It is not a book of science, or careful history, still less a rule book from God. It is a collection of diverse, sometimes conflicting, witnesses to God’s presence in the world of many, many centuries back. The truth of sacred writings like these does not spring from the bare, literal words on the page but from the interaction of my spirit with the text, a sharing of ancient story and today’s experience. God is still speaking, any time we encounter the sacred text with an open heart, and mind.
And lastly, and with this I conclude: In that Bible we learn that the essence of Jesus’ teachings and life is that all are welcome to the banquet which is the presence and love of God. He stood against any powers that oppressed people economically, socially or religiously. His religion was one of grace and compassion, of inviting people to a new way of faith, challenging the powers of state and religion to become sources of freedom instead of prison-keepers of body and of soul. That was his mission, and that is ours as well, as we continue the journey of faith, growing in grace.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Goodness, but we are current!
As always, Time magazine has come out, just in time for Easter, with a cover story on Christianity, this time on the topic of Hell. It’s actually more about the pastor of a mega church – Mars Hill Church outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan – and usually the Easter issue of Time has more to do with the resurrection or the Jesus Seminar. Time must have found out that articles on religion are good sellers around Easter – and Christmas too.
What is fascinating to me about the article are two things:
First, that anyone still believes that the God we worship – you know, the “God is love” kind, the one Jesus likened to a benevolent heavenly Father, who cares for us as his little children – that anyone professing that sort of God (and even the most Fundamentalists among us do) can still think God created or at least tolerates a Hell where people are tortured forever. And ever. And ever. Even a little while would be bad enough.
But alas millions of Christian people do believe in that Hell, and a God who sends people there. And so when an Evangelical like Rob Bell (the aforementioned mega church pastor) writes a book daring to question such a primitive and horrifying God, a whole bunch of people cry Foul! and declare him to be a heretic. Such is the state of the evangelical/fundamentalist world of America.
But aside from that, given our reading of Karen Armstrong and Marcus Borg, I am taken by the language used in the article. The writer clearly uses the modern – Enlightenment – ideas of what belief is. Belief is “traditionally” he says (Armstrong would say only recently “traditionally”) “the key is the acknowledgement that Jesus is the Son of God, who, for us and our salvation came down from heaven . . . and was made man. In the Evangelical ethos one either accepts this and goes to heaven or refuses and goes to hell.”
There it is: belief as intellectual assent, the affirmation of a list of statements about God. Here is logos – rational, thinking language -- rather than mythos – symbolic, experiential language.
Pastor Bell is daring to approach God through metaphor, reading the Bible not as a prosaic prescription for describing God but instead as poetry, symbol. And he’s getting into trouble for that from the right.
Let me add a third observation about the article, or rather about something Bell says in it. Namely: “I have long wondered if there is a massive shift coming in what it means to be a Christian. Something new is in the air.”
Marcus Borg, John Crossan, Karen Armstrong would agree, and might say that “something new” is already here, in people for whom faith does not mean intellectually affirming things that are patently false, but is rather experiencing the mystery of the universe that is God – unknowable, refusing to be limited by our language and minds – and in response to that awe seek to live compassionate, gracious lives.
Another recent book answers Bell’s wonderment with a resounding Yes, something very new is happening! Phyllis Tickle in The Great Emergence (2008) says that every 500 years the followers of Christ – the Church – has undergone a tremendous change. The last change was the Protestant Reformation. We are now in the midst of another revolution, she says, out of which will emerge a new faith, a new Christianity. One that I would think will have a lot to do with what we have been reading about in Borg, Crossan, and Armstrong – and Ellul too.
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