Asking the right questions
Friday, August 10, 2007
I'm on a short summer sabbatical from writing my Gen X Rising column for the United Methodist Reporter, so a couple of guest columnists are filling in over the next few weeks. This week's columnist is the Rev. Eric Van Meter, campus minister at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, Ark.
Eric has written a really insightful piece on how we, as the church, need to re-examine the questions we are asking about our future. Too often, Eric says, we get caught up trying to figure out the same old, predictable set of questions about our church's health. Stop me if you've heard these before: Where are our young people? Why are our numbers declining? Etc., etc.
What we need to do instead, Eric argues, is to ask different questions: What does it mean to live in an authentic Christian community? What characteristics do we need to embody as the church? How do we remain faithfully Wesleyan without using that term as a nostalgic desire to return to the glory of yesteryear?
These questions that he is raising drive to the core of who we are called to be as Methodists. Preoccupation with issues of numbers and decline is like trying to apply a band-aid to a gunshot wound. It just doesn't get at the root of the problem. So, Eric is saying, let's start to ask the questions that really matter. And they are questions of how we are called to be faithful in our present circumstances and time.
From my own conversations with Eric, I know that he is a person who has a deep sense of fidelity to Scripture, a deep love of the tradition, and a deep desire to seek out how to live faithfully in a contemporary context. He is part of a growing movement among young clergy in the Arkansas Annual Conference who have begun gathering to engage in fellowship and conversation around just these issues. That's good news. If more people across the connection will be willing to raise these questions and really seek out ways to answer them in community with one another, we may yet see the way forward in faith.
Oh, and thanks for the column, Eric. It's great!
posted by Andrew C. Thompson at 5:11 PM
5 Comments:
Eric I enjoyed reading you article and thank you for sharing it.
I think churches – the vast majority of churches - "traffic in certainty." In reality it is a false certainty, a narcotic that insecure people crave but in the light of the real world it cannot deliver or provide.
No person, no church can ever tell anyone who God is or what God is. All another person can share is how they believe they have experienced God.
Isn’t all God talk--including all scriptures, all creeds, all theology subjective? We can only journey into the mystery of God.
This version of Christianity thrives on ignorance, fear and trying to give answers to questions that human beings ultimately cannot answer.
Christianity and this brand of certainty mentioned above make Christianity – the Church - less and less relevant today. Our belief system, deep and real and genuine, collides every day with a world that is so radically different from the world in which our belief system was born.
We are people of the 21st century. To be a Christian in the 21st century more and more people feel as if they have to bend their minds into a first century pretzels just to say the old words of liturgy and creeds and sing songs of a by gone era. When we try do this with any sort of honesty and integrity, more and more people simply can’t. The price is far too high to pay.
God does not intervene. God does not occasionally come back to this world to accomplish some miraculous thing. God does not keep record books on us. God does deal in guilt or reward. God does not bless some with health and others with sickness and disease.
God does not punish with weather. Likewise, virgins don’t give birth. Stars don’t wander in the sky. People do not rise from the dead. And so on…
So much of the time churches deal in black and white answers of certainty in an ultimately gray world. The church believes they own God. As Paul Tillich said, “God who is the Ground of Being,” and this God cannot be owned.
As John Shelby Spong says, “God is a universal presence that under girds all of life. God does not bless and curse individuals according to an imposed prescription of conduct. God, the source of life, calls us to live fully. God, the source of love, calls us all to love wastefully. God, the Ground of Being, calls us all to have the courage to be ourselves. So when we live, love and have the courage to be, we are engaged in worship, we are expanding our humanity, we are breaking out of our barriers."
I hope your “new” questions will consider the above in your search for solutions. There really is a tragedy if Christianity dies a death of irrelevance. Perhaps the task of the church – all churches – my Methodist church is to empower us to be all we can be and not to denigrate others humanity...
JBush -
I'm curious. You seem sure that certain aspects of the orthodox Christian faith are false, and you seem to think that such bedrock aspects of the faith as ancient creeds and liturgies are irrelevant to enlightened modern minds.
But then you go on to quote Bishop Spong as saying, “God is a universal presence that under girds all of life ... God, the source of life, calls us to live fully. God, the source of love, calls us all to love wastefully. God, the Ground of Being, calls us all to have the courage to be ourselves."
How can you know such things, if you reject divinely revealed forms of knowledge? On what grounds do you make these claims about God's desire for us?
I'm not picking. It's a serious question.
I like the question – I do not see it as “picking”. It’s a fair question. I’m not sure I have an answer – but I’ll try to respond.
It’s not the irrelevance of “certain aspects of the orthodox Christian faith are false, and you seem to think that such bedrock aspects of the faith as ancient creeds and liturgies”. It’s that they become harder and harder for 21st century people to believe. And, if Christianity cannot find a way to become relevant it will continue to have less and less pertinence and significance.
We know so much more than the writers of the Old Testament - so much more about than first century people and even the writers of those ancient creeds and liturgies.
What we are really faced with today is to either being a secular humanist or a Christian fundamentalist. I believe we must find something between these two dead end options.
I struggle every time I worship at my Methodist and frankly any church - because I feel I must check my brain at the door before entering.
The old, traditioanl forms of Christianity are no longer convincing, valid or useful.
Christianity – the church needs to emphasize grace, mystery, and inclusion with a true emphasis on God whose primary action is to seek a relationship of unconditional love with us. The old, heavy handed, nullifying emphasis on belief, doctrine that envisions God as a god of divine authority with the authority and will to offer God’s love as well as God’s punishment will continue to be unrealistic and unbelievable. We must seek an understanding of scripture as a human product -- not a divine product. And in reality, this understanding in no way diminishes scripture. When we understand the Bible as a culturally conditioned historical product and sacred scripture, then I believe such an understanding can open up scripture. When we do this, certain stories of scripture taken on a more expansive meaning when understood in a divine context and then applied metaphorically to our own lives.
When we focus on - or argue over - whether an event in the Bible actually happened it becomes a red herring which could possibly result in our missing the meaning of the text. We simply never arrive at a significant discussion of what the event means because we’re stuck discussing whether it could have happened, did happen, had to have happened, etc. And some of us believe others when they tell us we aren’t entitled to the meaning if we don’t assent to an event’s historical occurrence, so we never discuss either.
I think if we can move away from a one-dimensional and rigidly doctrinal assent to factual statements about the revelation of God through Christ into a relationship with God leading to personal transformation. We are invited to see faith as a radical trust in the faithfulness of God, rather than a belief in certain assertions.
I may not be right – and frankly, I’m not sure anyone actually knows. I do believe if we do not try it another way – and this way makes the most the sense to me – that I and thousands and thousands of other people really have no other choice but to abandon ship.
And I think it is really time to give people permission not to believe everything they’ve been taught in church.
I’ll save the divinity aspect for later.
Thanks for the question.
I know I've written a lot about Yoder and Hauerwas this summer, but they have been what's on my brain. So let me respond with one more reference to their thought.
In "Preface to Theology," Yoder makes a statement along the lines that the best way of convincing some one, some community, or some philosophic tradition of the truth of your own position is not to adopt the axiom of your opponent. Communities (large or small) are defined by the grammar that they utilize. The church, for example, is defined by the grammar of Scripture and the Christian tradition. So Christian love is not some universalizable concept that can be taught or believed apart from its historical rootedness in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This is why the statement that our only options today are secular humanism or Christian fundamentalism must be false. The error of Christian fundamentalism is that it has actually adopted the axiom of Enlightenment rationalism; it claims the Scripture is a foundation that counters claims of the foundation of modern science exactly on the terms of modern science's axioms. When presented with contrary evidence, it simply claims that Scripture supercedes anything science says that runs counter to it.
But then, the liberal theology of a figure like Spong does the same thing. It just admits that Scripture is hopelessly mythological and attempts to universalize concepts of love along lines that are essentially secular humanist in nature. Its epistemology is not really theological, but rather comes from Enlightenment philosophical rationalism. It doesn't really need Christianity, except that it uses symbols from Scripture as poetic expressions of what it can arrive at by other means.
This is why so many liberals believe all religions essentially speak to the some universal, underlying truth about God. The way they do this is really prepostrous when you look at the particularistic claims of individual religious systems.
I always think about Buddhism and Christianity in this regard; how well-meaning people could think that a non-theistic religion that sees matter as the problem, and a theistic religion that believes God created matter and deemed it good, could be talking about the same thing is beyond me. In Buddhism, nirvana involves escaping the created order. In Christianity, the new creation involves the ultimate redemption of the created order. These are not the same thing!
Liberals have a hard time coping with the idea of a specifically Christian truth because they have abandoned the Christian grammar as the constitutive source of God's truth for the world. Their grammar is the grammar of Enlightenment rationalism. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, simply bury their heads in the sand and accept that Enlightenment rationalism is the guiding grammar in which we move while stubbornly denying that it can have anything to say with the truth of Scripture.
The way around these difficulties is to understand that our grammar constitutes us by our participation in a community across time. Scripture and the creeds are every bit as relevant today as they were when they were composed. The church continues to witness to their truth as it always has, and when we fully enter into the grammar they represent they make all the sense in the world (literally!).
I apologize, I am not familiar with the term “Christian grammar” but I will try to respond with what I think you are trying to say.
In all sincerity, I must disagree with your statement, “Scripture and the creeds are every bit as relevant today as they were when they were composed. The church continues to witness to their truth as it always has, and when we fully enter into the grammar they represent they make all the sense in the world (literally!).”
The scriptures are how the Jewish people experienced God. They are not the literalized words of God. It is not a divine product because it is and can only be a human product. It is equally a Jewish product. The words reflect a Jewish perspective.
If we read and interpret the Bible using “Christian grammar”, then we have no chance to understand it’s meaning much less the experience that produced the scriptures because we never bring to its understanding “Jewish grammar”.
Let’s take the Apostle’s Creed for example. It is an antique, a relic of past assumptions and needs. For instance, And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord: who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary… God did not impregnate Mary and Jesus was not part God and part human in any literal sense. Until the church communicates what this meant/means, people of the 21st century cannot wrap their minds around the literalness with any honesty and integrity.
A loose explanation from John Dominic Crossan: Who was the first human being in the 1st century who was called Divine Son of God, God from God, Lord and Redeemer, and Liberator and Savior of the world? That person was Caesar Augustus who was referred to by these titles before Jesus was born.
If you experienced God in the person of Jesus and you wanted to communicate that in the 1st century under Roman domination, you would explain the story of Jesus as being of the same status, the same titles as Caesar Augustus. The language – the grammar of the time must utilize divine birth and divine conception. As you must know, the story of Jesus' conception is not in the first gospel written, Mark. It's only in Matthew and Luke, which were written after Mark.
Crossan says, “If you are talking to a Jew at that time, you might say Jesus is the Christ, and the Jew would understand that means the Messiah. But if you were talking to a pagan, Jesus Christ almost sounds like Mr. and Mrs. Christ's little boy Jesus. But when you say Jesus Christ is Lord, than these pagans are going to understand what you're saying. Whoever this Jesus Christ is, you're claiming that person is supposed to be running the universe.”
“When he says Jesus Christ is Lord, which is another way of saying, as Jesus did, that the Kingdom of God has already arrived on earth. One speaks directly to Jews and raises the issue of whether the world should be violent or non-violent. But Jesus Christ is Lord speaks to pagans--and it also raises the question of whether this is a violent or non-violent opposition to Caesar.”
“What we don't catch is that the language of Paul is high treason, making a claim for Jesus that is ridiculous. Caesar was running the world, and he controlled the Roman Empire and brought peace to the Mediterranean--all of that at least makes sense because he is divine.”
“But Jesus? This nobody? Who was crucified on a Roman cross? He is actually the Lord of the universe? It's either very stupid or you're talking about a radically different type of world, a different type of God. You're not doing fine-tuning--lowering the taxes, lessening the oppressive nature of the Roman Empire. Paul is saying that the whole system is not the will of God.”
So when you take the virgin birth section of the Apostle’s Creed literally – you miss altogether what 1st century people meant. And now literalized, the Creed cannot be embraced with integrity because the church’s “Christian grammar” misses the “1st century grammar” and the “Jewish grammar”.
We have so literalized the way we have described our God/Jesus experience in the past that people are unable to connect with those literal explanations today. The church fails to suggest that there's something beyond that. The God experience can never be captured in words, it can only be pointed to. The creeds are not road maps that help us walk into the mystery of God and the love of God found in the person f Jesus. The creeds are more like straight jackets into which we try to force peoples mind to reside and they make no sense at all in the world - literally!
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