PART III
THE AMERICAN BATTLEGROUND
Transition to Part III
Norwich, Vermont – May 26, 2007 – Part II has described how, in the last two decades of the 1900s, I was able to have dialogues, with a variety of Russians, about all the ideas in Part I. Those Russian friends enabled me to introduce these ideas into larger circles: avant-garde priests in the Orthodox Church, scholars at the Institute of Philosophy, Christian educators at Open Christianity, scholars at the Gorky Institute, leaders in Bakhtin circles—and eventually to all the readers of my samizdat book.
Now Part III will return to the United States, where I’ll report recent dialogues with American friends about these same ideas. In fact, I’d welcome a dialogue with you, dear reader, at some future forum, or by e-mail. As I explain in Appendix C, “Continuing on the Web,” I think the Internet, with Web pages, blogs, and e-mail, may be just the way to give these ideas a decent hearing in the first decades of the 2000s.
It’s not as if Eugen, Franz, Berdyaev, Solovyov, and Bakhtin were entirely unknown here. It’s just that they’ve never had the broad impact enjoyed by such thinkers as Buber and Tillich. Eugen, in particular, as I’ve made clear, has been welcomed by Auden, arguably our time’s leading poet, and by Reinhold Niebuhr, arguably America’s leading theologian, but remains largely undiscovered in either academic or theological circles. If I’m right about the Web, you and I could change that situation in a relatively short time.
As I said in the Prologue, the current whirlwind of books attacking religion and the very thought of God may help provide just the opening that’s needed to introduce Eugen and his allies. The Unholy Trinity of Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett, now joined by Christopher Hitchens, form a loud quartet that is certain to be joined by more. The kind of supernaturalist religion which they attack is what Marcus Borg calls “the earlier paradigm.” It’s the same one that Bonhoeffer thought we’d outgrown—when he said that the time had come to articulate a religionless Christianity, one appropriate to a “world come of age.”
As promised, Part III will join the fray begun by the querulous quartet, trying to use their assault on supernaturalist religion and a supernatural God to help clear the decks for this book’s project—to celebrate the God who is already within us, as spirit, as speech, and as Logos, which I’m claiming are one and the same.
Here, as in the two earlier parts, I’ll continue to present my ideas in the form of dialogues and meetings with particular people. Thus, the Norwich Congregational Church, and the larger Norwich-Hanover community, will often provide my starting points.
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12 Transforming Christianity
Being Christian is not about meeting requirements for a future reward in an afterlife, and not very much about believing. Rather, the Christian life is about a relationship with God that transforms life in the present. —Marcus Borg
St. Simons Island, Georgia – January 24, 2007 – I’ve got many friends who say that “everything happens for a reason” and imagine that remarkable coincidences are somehow acts of God’s providence. While I don’t agree with them, my lack of faith in a God who intervenes in our affairs is sometimes shaken by experiences such as I just had last night.
I’ve been here for a three-day conference on “Emerging Christianity,” a meeting at which some eight hundred concerned Christians have heard Marcus Borg and Barbara Brown Taylor address that theme. I’ll now report on last night’s amazing coincidence by way of introduction to some thoughts inspired by Borg and Taylor.
It was about 6:00 pm, as Libby and I were standing in line for supper, when the man ahead of us turned around and greeted us. Carl Johnson said he was a retired Lutheran minister, who’d come to the conference with his wife and her cousin Ken Wolf, a university professor who was standing just ahead, along with his wife. We all introduced ourselves and the six of us agreed to sit together. At the table, I began talking to Ken, who was sitting on my right. He asked what had brought me here.
I explained that I’d almost finished writing a book which deals with themes much like those at this conference. I described how a favorite professor of mine, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who was a friend of Martin Buber’s, had introduced me to a Russian thinker named Nikolai Berdyaev. And how, planning to meet Berdyaev, in 1948 I’d gone to Paris where I’d met a colleague of his, a Catholic existentialist thinker named Emmanuel Mounier. Then how I’d begun an article for Mounier’s magazine Esprit, a text which I’d turned into a little book, one that had finally seen the light of day in Russia—and a text which now was largely incorporated into my current book, the one I’d almost finished.
It took me only two minutes to provide that background to what had brought me to this conference—and during those two minutes Ken kept looking at me with widening eyes and steadily mounting interest. Then he replied that, in the 1970s, he himself had been planning to write a book that would present Buber, Berdyaev, and Mounier as prophets for today, prophets of religious existentialism. While that book had never materialized, he’d send me an article that he’d published in an academic journal, describing Buber and Berdyaev in just those terms.
Of course, I was floored at hearing this. Imagine the two of us meeting in the line at this conference! It would have been unlikely that two Buber enthusiasts would have chanced upon each other, but adding in Berdyaev and Mounier made the odds almost overwhelmingly improbable. I didn’t say so but I have to admit that I thought it: mark one up for those who imagine an interventionist God.
Fortunately, I had in my briefcase an advance copy of Beyond Belief, a text which I explained was almost finished but which I thought might profit from some concluding chapters, ones that would link what I’d been saying to the way that Borg and Spong are being heard in the US today. Would Ken be willing to read it for me—and suggest any improvements? He’d be glad to, he said. I also enlisted Carl Johnson as an advance reader.
Now this morning I’m going to review my conference notes and Borg’s book, The Heart of Christianity, which I brought with me—and which makes points much like he made in his talks here.
Borg identifies two main elements of Christianity’s new paradigm that underlie all the others, or so it seems to me:
First, as regards the Bible, we should read it metaphorically rather than literally.
Second, as regards God, we should start thinking in terms of panentheism, as opposed to supernatural theism. On panentheism, Borg writes: “Rather than imagining God as a personlike being 'out there,' this concept imagines God as the encompassing Spirit in whom everything that is, is.”
That second element is the one I’ve been concentrating on in this book, seeing Eugen, Bonhoeffer, Berdyaev, and Solovyov as its exemplars. Still, I’ve touched on the question of metaphor and made clear that my mentors were not literalists. As I said in Chapter 1, for Eugen there was no supernatural, no “other world” beyond this one. Life’s miracles, like meeting Ken last night, are not ones that are contrary to the laws of nature. Christianity’s goal is not to compete with electricity or gravitation in the world of space.
Since I’ve already dealt with those issues of getting beyond literalism and beyond theism, two main elements of Christianity’s new paradigm, I’ll now turn to three others: faith without belief, living the Kingdom, and how we are all born again.
Faith without Belief
Of course, explaining how one can have faith without belief is critical for a book entitled Beyond Belief. Borg provides some of my best support here. He notes that the earlier paradigm included believing that Jesus was “born of a virgin; that he died for our sins and that God raised him physically and bodily from the dead; and that he will come again some day.” That paradigm is “affirmed by fundamentalists, most conservative-evangelical, and many Pentecostal Christians.” How can one have faith without such belief? Borg answers that question by examining four primary meanings of the word “faith,” using Latin words to help us understand them:
Faith as assensus, or assent, meaning that one gives one’s mental assent to a proposition. This meaning is a matter of the head. It is the sort of faith held by the fundamentalists and their allies. And it’s important to see how it differs from the next three meanings, which are matters of the heart.
Faith as fiducia, or trust, as radical trust in God.
Faith as fidelitas, or fidelity, faithfulness to our relationship with God.
Faith as visio, or vision, a way of seeing the whole, a way of seeing “what is.”
Borg points out that those last three meanings are “relational.” “They see faith as not very much about believing. Instead, faith is about the relationship of the self, at its deepest level, to God.”
As Eugen put it, faith is not a belief in things of the past but a willingness to commit oneself to the unknown future. That kind of faith is like fiducia and fidelitas, rather than like assensus. Faith as visio reminds me of what I was saying in Chapter 2 about the unity of knowledge, how everything relates.
Thus, both Eugen and Borg help me justify this book’s challenging title. Like me, they want to get beyond belief.
Living the Kingdom
In his chapter on the Kingdom of God, Borg writes that New Testament scholars in all traditions are practically unanimous in agreeing that the central message of Jesus of Nazareth concerned the coming of the Kingdom of God. He quotes Jesus’ first words in Mark, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.” He goes on to describe original Christianity as political, as a challenge to the oppressive and unjust secular kingdoms of its time. And he details what it would mean to take the Kingdom of God seriously in the US today: universal health care, an active concern for the environment, economic justice, and avoiding the misuse of imperial power, as in our optional war in Iraq.
Borg’s tone in this chapter reminds me of Eugen’s declaration: “The whole idea of the Christian era is but this: ‘Now is the time.’” We are not to postpone living the Kingdom. And it reminds me of the social concerns that were shared by Solovyov, Berdyaev, and Bulgakov. Like Eugen, all three saw our task as living the Kingdom now. As Solovyov put it, the Kingdom of God “comes only in so far as it is realized.” The Kingdom is not waiting for us in a heavenly afterlife; the Kingdom of God is at hand. Mentioning Bulgakov again reminds me that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has been a longtime admirer of his writings—and has published a major anthology of them.
In the US today, the ethos of living the kingdom is widespread in the UCC and other churches—as it is in such socially-concerned Christian organizations as Sojourners.
Blake spoke for all of us when he wrote:
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
We’re all Born Again
At first I was taken aback when I came to Borg’s chapter on being born again. I thought he was about to sell out to the fundamentalists. But then I realized that he was on target. He suggests that mainline Christians should reclaim this notion; that might enable us to make peace, one day, with the literalist-fundamentalist camp.
In his talk yesterday, Borg referred to his own experience of being born again. He was in his early thirties when he had an intense spiritual experience, one which changed him from just being a scholar of the New Testament to being a committed Christian. I’ve never described my experience that night of May 29-30, 1941 as one of being born again, but of course it was.
Borg concludes that most of us experience being born again. He says that dying to one’s old self, and rising to a new, is at the heart of all the word’s enduring religions. Lao Tzu said “If you want to become full, let yourself be empty; if you want to be reborn, let yourself die.” Just as those in other traditions are reborn, so they are “saved.”
While I never heard him say so, I think Eugen believed that the experience we had at Camp William James—leaving the safe life of suburbia and academe to live “all-out” in a new commitment—was a way of giving us the experience of being born again. Thus, the Peace Corps and other volunteer service work offer similar opportunities for rebirth.
I think that’s enough on Borg for this chapter. And I’ll wait till the next chapter to take up some themes suggested by Barbara Brown Taylor.
The End of Faith?
Hanover, New Hampshire – April 23, 2007 – Every Monday for the last six weeks I’ve been attending a course in which we read The End of Faith, the book which has made Sam Harris a leading guru of the current attacks on God. Under the title “God and Religion: Can This Marriage be Saved?” the course has been sponsored by the Institute for Lifelong Education at Dartmouth (ILEAD), which I heralded earlier. Led by Arthur Rosen, a retired businessman, and attended by fifteen men and women from surrounding communities, our course had its final session this morning. As planned, each of us read a short paper describing what we’d gotten from our meetings. My paper was as follows:
The God Beyond Theism—A Third Way of Thinking
This course has been a wake-up call for me, reminding me, quite forcefully, that each of us lives in a private religious, spiritual or philosophical world of their own. Art Rosen has been having an experience like my Congregational minister’s, Doug Moore, who says that leading our congregation is like trying to herd cats.
I remember at our first meeting, identifying myself as a long-time member of the United Church of Christ. But then, at our fourth meeting, one member of our group asked me, out of the blue, if I’d ever read the Bible. “Thousands of times,” I replied, but, of course, I wondered what prompted her question. I’m pretty sure she asked me that because, at almost every meeting, I’ve noted that I did not imagine God as a supernatural Supreme Being, all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, one who was capable of intervening in human affairs.
Instead of that theistic image, I said I thought of God in panentheistic terms. Since none of our class had ever heard of that expression, Art asked me to explain it. I said that panentheism, which had been with us as long as theism, referred to thinking of God as alive in each of us, rather than as an entity living above or beyond us. I also noted that St. Paul made a classic panentheistic statement when he wrote of God as he “in whom we live and move and have our being.” Apparently, my expression of faith in such a God, rather than the Supreme Being version, suggested to my classmate that I had not read the Bible. Either you were a theist or an atheist; there was no third way.
When we read Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, it seemed that he agreed with that proposition. Faithful Christians all believed in God as an intelligence that lives beyond the universe. Either you had this belief or you didn’t. Harris simply sets aside, as utterly insignificant, the many people of faith who interpret the Bible metaphorically and who see God in ways that are panentheistic rather than theistic. At one of the few points in his book where he pays attention to such Christians, Harris speaks quite positively about the theologian Paul Tillich. He quotes him as attacking the sort of “idolatrous faith” which is “an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence.” But then he writes Tillich off as “a blameless parish of one,” someone who has had next to no influence in the Christian community. Actually, the opposite is true.
I noted that Harris himself skirts dangerously close to idolatrous faith when he expresses great admiration for Buddhist meditation. He goes so far as to say that “meetings between the Dalai Lama and Christian ecclesiastics to mutually honor their religious traditions are like meetings between physicists from Cambridge and the Bushmen of the Kalahari to mutually honor their respective understandings of the physical universe.”
I also noted that, for me, the most important words in Harris’ book were not ones that he himself had written. Instead, they were the book’s endorsement by Joseph C. Hough Jr., president of Union Theological Seminary. Hough wrote:
Here is a ringing challenge to all Americans who recognize the danger to American democracy posed by the political alliance of right-wing religion and politics and the failure of the tepid and tentative responses by liberal persons of faith. While one might dispute some of the claims and arguments presented by Harris, the need for a wake-up call to religious liberals is right on the mark.
Responding to Hough as well as Harris, I said that we who sit in the pews of mainline churches need to mount a much more effective counter-attack on the overt fundamentalism and quasi-fundamentalism that are so widespread in American Christianity today. Harris was right to say that we were complicit by being passive in the face of their challenge—and Hough was right to call our response thus far too “tepid and tentative.” I believe that all in our group agreed. Besides the Harris book, our class considered The Question of God, as presented by Armand Nicholi in his book by that name. As he contrasted C. S. Lewis with Sigmund Freud, what struck me was that he assumed the reader had to choose one or the other: either you were with Lewis, as a theistic supernaturalist believer, or you were with Freud as an atheist. Again, there was no third way.
Thus, I was able, in this course, to bring up the widely-admired work of Professor Marcus Borg and Bishop John Spong—as evidence that many in mainline churches were, in fact, actively pursuing the third way offered to them by Tillich, and by many others: faith in God without supernaturalist theism or a literal reading of the Bible.
Since I’m currently completing a book which presents the work of several panentheistic thinkers, including Dartmouth’s own Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, this course has helped me, in very tangible ways, to perceive what goes on in the minds of my potential readers. I’ll hope to convince them that there is a third way.
When I’d finished reading that paper, Art asked me how I saw Jesus within the framework of this panentheistic thinking. I replied that I put a lot of emphasis, as Borg does, on the distinction between the pre-crucifixion Jesus and the post-crucifixion Christ. The first was a historical figure. The second, who Paul and others saw as the resurrected Christ, eventually was described as the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son. That Son represented what Christians felt called upon to embody in their lives. In fact, I looked upon Christ as being embodied in all people of good will, just as the Spirit is embodied in all such persons. I noted that I agreed with those early Church Fathers who said that there were Christians before Christ. In sum, my vision of panentheism was thoroughly Trinitarian and applied to all humanity—past, present, and future.
When everyone in the class had finished reading their papers, Art asked me if I’d tell them a bit about my book. I replied that its title was Beyond Belief: Christianity’s New Paradigm. In it I described my lifelong concern with three German thinkers—Eugen, Rosenzweig, and Buber. Joining them were two Russians: Berdyaev and Solovyov. All five had helped me formulate the ideas I presented in my book, ideas which I’d recast, updated, and put together as my own. I saw my book as offering new ways of thinking about panentheism—and thus contributing to Christianity’s new paradigm.
In less than five minutes, I managed to spit out most of the points I made in this book’s Prologue. So Art’s question at this final session was an author’s dream come true.
The Querulous Quartet
Norwich, Vermont – May 15, 2007 – When I signed up for that ILEAD course, I realized it would give me just the opening I wanted, in Part III of this book, to engage with Sam Harris and his accomplices. Since I’d already read the Harris book when it came out, I just reread it quickly for the course. Then I set about reading Dennett and Dawkins, finishing their books last month. Unfortunately for me, my plan to concentrate on the Unholy Trinity had to be expanded a bit when a fourth flaming atheist burst upon the scene: Christopher Hitchens with his God is not Great. I’ve just finished that, so can comment briefly on all four.
Both Harris and Dawkins are so shrill with their “blasting rhetoric,” as Wired magazine calls it, that they leave you gasping. Dennett is much more modulated; I like to think that’s because he’s a fellow Exonian, class of 1959. Hitchens seems to have read more deeply than I’d expected, offering quotes from Dostoevsky to buttress his arguments.
In any case, I continue to welcome the attacks on supernaturalist and superstitious religion made by this querulous quartet, just as Joseph Hough, president of Union Seminary, welcomed Harris’ book in 2004. Their attacks help us separate mature religion from its many childish forms.
Let’s listen now to how Dennett defines religion. Early on he writes, “I propose to define religions as social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” He goes on to say, “For some people, prayer is not literally talking to God but, rather, a “symbolic” activity, a way of talking to oneself about one’s deepest concerns, expressed metaphorically.... If what they call God is really not an agent in their eyes, a being that can answer prayers, approve and disapprove, receive sacrifices, and mete out punishment or forgiveness, then, although they may call this Being God, and stand in awe of it (not Him), their creed, whatever it is, is not really a religion according to my definition.”
Now, while I think prayer is much more than talking to myself, and includes a listening to all the imperatives which others have given me, in their words and lives, imperatives which combine together as God’s singular address to me, I don’t think that God is a being that can answer my prayers in the way that an “agent” could. Instead, when I listen to God in prayer, I feel compelled to be his agent in the world. Thus, for me, the image of God that Dennett is attacking is the same one that Bishop Robinson attacked, back in 1963, with his Honest to God. By Dennett’s logic, Clint Gardner is not religious; indeed, he’s an atheist.
In one chapter, Dennett turns to the views of Rodney Stark, author of the 2001 book, One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism. In that work, Stark discussed “what sorts of Gods have the greatest appeal.” Here’s Dennett’s comment on that:
[Stark] distinguishes two strategies: God as essence (such as Tillich’s God as the Ground of all Being, entirely non anthropomorphic, not in time and space, abstract) and God as conscious supernatural being (a God who listens to and answers prayers in real time, for instance). ‘There is no more profound religious difference than that between faiths involving divine beings and those limited to divine essences,’ he says, and the latter he judges to be hopeless because ‘only divine beings do anything.’ Supernatural conscious beings are much better sellers because ‘the supernatural is the only plausible source of many benefits we greatly desire.’
It’s quite evident that Dennett likes the way Stark presents us with only two real possibilities: choose the clear-cut supernatural being option or the wishy-washy essence option. What Stark and Dennett miss is the possibility of a third choice, which is the one I’ve been presenting in this book: God not as a supreme being or as a divine essence but as an experienced reality. As Eugen put it, in a typically concise way, God is known to us “as an event, never as an essence or a thing.” The God we experience daily is “the living God,” the one who enables us to speak, who puts words of life on our lips. And that God is very much alive in Daniel Dennett and his atheist allies, whether they like it or not. That living God is the one who moves them to speak their minds about out-dated ways of understanding God and religion. But they themselves are outdated. It’s telling that not one of them has an entry for “panentheism” in his index.
Now that I’ve commented a bit on Harris and Dennett, we come to Richard Dawkins. Like the other members of the Unholy Trinity, he’s quite clear about defining the God that he attacks. In The God Delusion, he describes what he calls “the God Hypothesis.” Believers think that:
There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.
During the conference on “Emerging Christianity” which I reported on above, Marcus Borg explained that he welcomed Dawkin’s rejection of that God hypothesis. “I don’t believe in that God either,” he said.
Last week I checked to see how Dawkins was doing on the Web. I was soon viewing and listening to an hour-long debate he had with Alistair McGrath, a prominent British theologian who’s also been a natural scientist—and appears to be a literal reader of the New Testament. Their main concern was whether God exists or not. Listening to them, I realized how lucky I was, in my freshman year at Dartmouth, to be introduced to Solovyov, Berdyaev, and Eugen; all three opened up ways of thinking which made that question seem irrelevant.
From those three mentors, and from my own experience, I learned that whatever is valuable in our existence we could come to recognize as God in us. If we exist as valuable creatures—ones who live inspired, responsible, and creative lives—then Spirit, Son, and Father exist in us. God is present in us, interdependent with us, an action in us—and still in process of creating us. One cannot debate, as Dawkins and McGrath attempted to do, the question of whether such a God exists. If we admit that we exist, then certainly that God exists in us, as the very ground of our being, as Tillich put it. However, such a God does not exist as a separate entity, outside of creation or before creation, a supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. There Dawkins is right on.
The problem with Dawkins and his allies is their assumption that thinkers like Berdyaev and Tillich have had little impact within the Christian fold today. Dawkins thinks well of Spong, calling him “a nice example of a liberal bishop whose beliefs are so advanced as to be almost unrecognizable to the majority of those who call themselves Christians.” Now he may be right about “the majority,” especially if you throw in Africa, but, in New England and many other parts of this country, I think the majority of parishioners and clergy have moved beyond literal interpretation of the Bible—and are beginning to welcome the sort of panentheistic thinking introduced by Robinson, Spong, Borg, Fox, Dewart, Baum, Teilhard de Chardin—and many others. (I speak with some assurance since the Bridges project gave me opportunities to visit dozens of churches throughout the northeast. The UCC even made me a “commissioned minister” to further the Bridges mission.)
Now, having briefly engaged the Unholy Trinity of Harris, Dennett, and Dawkins, I finally come to Christopher Hitchens and his God is not Great. While Hitchens is certainly a lively writer, he attacks the same straw man set up by his allies The God who is not great is that same all-powerful Supreme Being that has become a hopelessly outdated image for those who love God with their minds.
I couldn’t have agreed more with Hitchens when he called C. S. Lewis “dreary and absurd.” However, Hitchens himself becomes absurd when he asserts that he is “not choosing a straw man,” as he makes his elegant attack on Lewis. He calls Lewis “the main chosen propaganda vehicle for Christianity in our time.” If you tend to be a literal reader of the Bible, then Lewis may be your cup of tea. But, as made clear in such books as Christianity for the Rest of Us, by Diana Butler Bass, mainline churches across America are doing quite well as they move from the literalist Lewis brand and adopt the emerging paradigm described by Borg.
The “original error” of religious faith, in Hitchens’ view, is that “it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos.” Again, it’s absurd to imagine that people who are religious think that the world was created in six days, about six thousand years ago. He and the others in his quartet are simply attacking fundamentalist religion, which a large portion of Christians find as weird as they do.
Hitchens makes a particularly absurd remark about Abraham Lincoln: “it would also be inaccurate to say that he was a Christian.” The evidence for this was that “he never joined any church.” It just happens that my great-great-grandfather James Conkling was one of Lincoln’s best friends—and, when I asked my grandmother about Lincoln’s church connections, she said the family recalled them as quite irregular. But, to look at Lincoln’s life and words, and declare that he was not a Christian, is to go over the top. Hitchens makes a parallel remark about Bonhoeffer, calling his work “an admirable but nebulous humanism.”
Unfortunately, Hitchens and his companions get some significant traction by quoting the truly frightening statistics about the US population today. They cite figures such as Kevin Phillips provides in his recent book, American Theocracy: polls show that 55% of Americans think that the whole Bible is literally accurate; 60% believe that the story of Noah’s Ark is literally true, and that God created the earth in six days. If you ask just Evangelical Protestants about whether the world will end in an Armageddon battle between Jesus Christ and the Antichrist, 71% of them will say yes. Phillips notes that the churches housing these true believers made huge membership gains over the last forty years, while mainline churches saw memberships in relative decline. Of course, the result has been felt in the White House. Phillips quotes television journalist Bill Moyers’ comment: “one of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal.”
And the rise of delusional Christianity is not limited to the United States. Fundamentalism, with its literal belief, is the main current in Africa, China, South Korea, and those other far-flung parts of the world where Christianity is growing most rapidly.
Thus, the atheist choir of Hitchens and friends serve a useful purpose. They remind us that we mainline Christians have our work cut out for us. We should stop being so passive in the face of fundamentalism. Delusions are dangerous. Delusional religion can create a delusional philosophy, even a delusional political philosophy, like that of the monological neocons, the Richard Perles of the world. I think of Eugen’s words in Out: “A wrong philosophy must necessarily lead us into a wrong society.”
May 17, 2007 – Norwich, Vermont – Last night I went to the second monthly meeting of a theological discussion group which was recently announced in our church bulletin. The meetings are being led by Kenneth Cracknell, a retired Methodist minister who has served as director of interfaith relations for the British Council of Churches. As we broke up, Ken suggested that our third meeting, in June, should be on our understanding of the Nicene Creed. This morning I’ve written the following contribution for our group’s June meeting:
The Creed of the Living God
It was in 1946, when I first read Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s The Christian Future that it dawned on me that I could think of the Christian creed as an experienced reality. Before that the creed had seemed to me simply a formula that I was supposed to accept as part of being a Christian. From Rosenstock-Huessy I learned that the Nicene Creed of 325 had been expanded and clarified in the Athanasian Creed, attributed to Athanasius, the fourth century bishop of Alexandria. Unlike the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian uses the word “Trinity” and expounds on the idea that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are “co-eternal together and co-equal.”
In his interpretation of the creed, Rosenstock-Huessy identifies the Holy Spirit with inspiration, with all humankind’s calling to create a viable future; the Son (and Daughter) is our personal and individual response to that calling—through leading a sacrificial and committed life in the present; the Father relates to our inheritance from the past, to “the unity of creation from the beginning.”
Thus, Father, Son, and Spirit can be thought of as categories of being and becoming human. The three persons of the Trinity did not appear for the first time 2,000 years ago; they have lived in us from the dawn of our history. They have lived in all humankind, not simply in Christians. They live today in all persons of goodwill, in the lives of non-believers just as surely as they do in the lives of believers.
After I met Ken at our first meeting, I looked him up on the Web and learned that he’d recently published a book, In Good and Generous Faith: Christian Responses to Religious Pluralism. Taking the chance that it might provide some fodder for this chapter, I ordered it—and just finished reading it last week. I was right. Of all people, Ken turns to Franz Rosenzweig, when discussing Christian-Jewish dialogue, and to Martin Buber, when he discusses dialogue itself. My resources are still current!
Here are some points Ken makes that echo Marcus Borg. In his second chapter, “The Universal Presence of the Word: A Christology for Religious Pluralism,” Ken discusses how a vital part of Christianity’s new paradigm is its abandonment of the idea that only Christians are “saved.” He cites St. Paul as well as early Church Fathers to describe how Christ, as the Logos, is understood as pre-existent before Jesus. For example, one of the earliest Church Fathers, Justin Martyr (100-165) wrote:
We have been taught that Christ is the first-begotten of God. He is the Logos in whom the whole human race shares. Those who have lived in accordance with the Logos are Christians, even though they were called godless, such among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus...
In the light of Justin’s reflections on the Logos, Ken goes on to interpret the words attributed to Jesus in John 14.6: “No one comes to the Father except through me.” What those words really present is a universal message: no one comes to the Father but through the pre-existing Word of Logos. The message is not that the followers of Jesus are the only ones to come to the Father; rather, those words should be seen as welcoming to the Father all those who have lived in accordance with the Logos.
I’ve always seen Eugen’s work as a secular translation of John’s prologue on the Logos and as an expansion of those lines from Justin. Thus, The Christian Future opens with this epigraph from Hugo de Sancto Victoire (1096-1141):
The time span of the length of the Church goes from the beginning of the world to its end since the Church originated in her faithful from the start and shall endure until the end…For we basically hold that from the beginning of the world to the end of times, no period exists in which there cannot be found those who trust Christ.
Back to Meister Eckhart
May 25, 2007 – Norwich, Vermont – At a later meeting of our theological discussion group, I hope to present the work of the 14th century German theologian Meister Eckhart (1260-1328). Since we’ve already discussed panentheism, we’ve prepared the ground. I first read Eckhart in the fall of 1941, when my mother bought a new book of his sermons and sayings. Here are some she underlined, ones which I’ll type up for our group:
The Father ceaselessly begets his Son and, what is more, he begets me as his Son—the self-same Son! Indeed, I assert that he begets me not only as his Son but as himself and himself as myself, begetting me in his own nature, his own being. At that inmost Source, I spring from the Holy Spirit and there is one life, one being, one action.
Creatures have no Being of their own, for their Being is the presence of God.
When creatures came to be and took on creaturely being, then God was no longer God as he is in himself, but God as he is with creatures.
The authorities say that God is a being, an intelligent being who knows everything. But I say that God is neither a being nor intelligent and he does not “know” either this or that.
Looking through that Eckhart book today, I’m struck by how my fall 1941 reading of it undoubtedly reinforced what I’d just begun to read in Solovyov and Berdyaev in the spring of that awful year. I didn’t hear the word “panentheism” until 1948, but Eckhart had brought me to the heart of it seven years earlier.
The Schwärmerei of the Fundamentalists
This reminds me of what’s happened to Christianity between the 1940s and today. That enthusiasm for the new paradigm which was so evident in the 1960s, especially through Bishop Robinson and his Honest to God, had lost ground by the 1980s. It never occurred to me that we might be overcome by what Luther called “Schwärmerei,” that empty, fanatical religious enthusiasm of today’s “my Jesus” folk. I wouldn’t mind if these swarms were on the periphery, and I suppose that, to teach the illiterate in Africa, a childish form of Christianity may be quite appropriate. But for those with high school educations, like most Americans, I see no excuse. The literalists and fundamentalists should start loving God with their minds as well as their hearts; they should, in St. Paul’s words, grow up and “put away childish things.” As I’ve noted above, they’re now close to taking over Christianity in the US and beyond. That’s why Spong is right to say that Christianity must change or die. In educated adults, childish Christianity is decadent Christianity.
When Bonhoeffer spoke of a religionless Christianity, he meant Christianity without any Schwärmerei. Martin Marty, in a book on Bonhoeffer, writes that, “By religion Bonhoeffer meant hyperindividualism, self-contained inwardness, bad conscience or the sin-sick soul as psychological a prioris for Christian experience....or piety.” The sin-sick revel in their personal sin because it allows them to be “saved” by their personal savior.
With the rise of the Schwärmerei legions, we mainline church folk now find ourselves engaged in a war on two fronts. The most dangerous troops advancing on us are our fellow Christians. I see less danger on the second front, where Harris and Co. hope to tear down our walls. If Joseph Hough, who leads the seminary where Bonhoeffer had planned to teach, can say he finds Harris “right on the mark,” we can welcome such an eloquent atheist as a temporary ally.
I wonder what my mother would say about what’s happened. I didn’t list her in my opening acknowledgments because I hoped to say something about her later. This book could not have been written without Peg Gardner. She discussed all its issues with me, quite regularly—from my early teens. In 1950 she was reading the Church Fathers with such enthusiasm that the Norwich Congregational Church began to seem irrelevant to her and she joined our local St. Francis of Assisi Church. I think Eugen understood how one might become a Catholic, but I know my father did not!
A Note on Prayer
When I ended Chapter 1, I said that that I’d save for later the two morning notes that I wrote down the week before the June 6, 1944 invasion, notes concerning prayer and whether there is a life after death. They belong here because they relate to transforming Christianity—and are among my earliest efforts to express what I’d begun to grasp from Eugen and Berdyaev.
To Whom Do We Pray?
When we pray to God we do not establish contact with a “being” who “exists” somewhere outside ourselves. We establish contact, instead, with the past, present, and future of ourselves and humankind. Those are God’s three tenses—the trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit.
But if God is not a “being” who “exists,” then to whom do we pray? Do we pray merely to ourselves? No, we pray to the triune God. He lives in us whenever we are the responsive Son. But he has also lived in all the people and all the creation which have gone before us—our inheritance, our past, the story in which we live. In this sense he is our Father. And we pray also toward the future, to our children, our heirs, to the future generations of the race. As we pray that they too may have life, we pray to the Holy Spirit to give them that life.
We pray to the Father as our origins, the Son as our responsibility, and the Spirit as our destiny.
A Note on Resurrection
My second morning note from June 1944 concerned whether we should look forward to an afterlife—or to a resurrection:
After We Die
I do not believe that we have any individual consciousness of ourselves after death but that we can die peacefully if we have lived for what we have loved and what we believed in. Our resurrection and eternal life does not mean our continuing existence as a lonely soul above the clouds. Instead, it means that future generations will be enriched, possibly even inspired, by the word that we incarnated in our lives. We incarnate that word not only in our own bodies but in such larger bodies as the family, church, tribe, or nation.
After we die, we live on in those bodies, and in the lives of all whom we have touched. Salvation is not something reserved for members of a particular church, or religion, but is universal for all men of good will. We are saved—we are resurrected—to the extent that we have been responsible participants in the human story. If we had to choose, knowing that we were about to die, between some ongoing personal consciousness or a knowledge that we would be meaningful for the future of all that was dear to us, would we really prefer a million years of consciousness?
Five years after I wrote that note, in 1949 I showed it to Lothar Zacek, my friend at Die Neue Zeitung. I can still remember our ensuing conversation about the resurrection. He wanted me to make clear that there was not an ounce of fundamentalism in Eugen’s understanding of it. There was no ‘beyond,’ no literal life after death. While there was certainly resurrection, it was in what St. Paul called “a spiritual body.” In The Christian Future Eugen writes that St. Francis becomes resurrected whenever we in later generations emulate his style of life, his unassuming simplicity. Eugen cites Lincoln as an example, recalling how this “Commander-in-Chief of a victorious army walked into Richmond in 1865, on foot, without escort.” He sees Jesus resurrected that same way, not only in individuals but also in the church—and in all the secular institutions that Christianity has introduced.
When I assured Lothar that I’d say that in my book, he looked pleased. He was a Social Democrat, with no interest in the church, but he seemed to like the idea that I’d include him among the resurrected.
A final thought on this subject. After he’d delivered a talk at the Kendal retirement community in Hanover, Fred Berthold was asked whether he believed in an afterlife. His reply brought down the house. He said that he’d been raised as a fundamentalist, and his parents described life in heaven as being like going to a great picnic—where one would meet one’s parents and grandparents. Later, in college, Fred began to see some flaws in this picture. At the picnic table, his grandparents would have to be meeting their parents, and their parents’ parents, and so on back for a million years. The table would be quite crowded.
To continue, click Chapter 13 The New Transcendence