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Blaise Pascal, who wrote: “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.”*
In all of these congregations my appeal was to those who had either abandoned the religion of their childhood as no longer relevant to the life they were living, or, at the very least, packed their religious upbringing into a compartment of their lives, where knowledge or new insight would never be allowed to challenge it. The success I enjoyed in each of those places led me into the delusion that I had discovered the doorway into a new Christian future.
There is a game being played in contemporary church life where truth is suppressed in the name of unity.
Controversy in the Christian church is seldom just about biblical exegesis and theological formulations. By and large people do not want to engage these issues publicly, perhaps because they know deep down that their religious convictions cannot stand much public scrutiny. So most church fights and even divisions are on social issues such as racial prejudice, equality for women or members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, or issues of human sexuality like birth control, abortion and the ordination of women to be priests and bishops. Those issues, in which the church has
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Among those who are defined today as “millennials”—that is, those who were born from 1979 on, who have reached maturity in the twenty-first century—the religious category called “none” is now the majority category.*
Christianity appears to be destined to take its place along with other religions and deities of human history that have died. The God of Christianity will be in a long line that has included Baal, Chemosh, Marduk, the gods of Olympus and the deities of the mystery cults. Each is now a lost chapter in the human pursuit of a spiritual dimension. At the same time, if Christianity is to survive it must undergo so radical a transformation that people may well see no continuity between the Christianity of yesterday and the Christianity of tomorrow.
Perhaps we need to say that every aspect of medieval Christianity needs to be abandoned. A thesis, in this reformation scenario, would be short, succinct and to the point. I have decided on twelve theses, which cover everything from God to Christ to prayer to life after death. In my weekly column, over a period of about two years, I engaged my audience with the possibility of just such a debate, a reformation. I was encouraged. Finally, I decided that the time had come to put all those theses together in a primer—this book—and to invite a vigorous debate. Hence the title of this book,
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I claim today and will in the foreseeable future claim for myself the title “Christian,” but I reserve the right to define what that title means. I am not willing to allow the word “Christian” to be claimed and defined exclusively by the voices of the past.
An all-male ordained hierarchy, which stretched from the local priest all the way to the papal office, was acknowledged as the only proper channel through which that and the will of God could be discerned by human beings. That claim is what Luther was challenging.
The Nicene Creed had been adopted by Christian leaders at the Council of Nicaea
in 325 CE, and it was believed to have summarized the “essence of the Christian faith” for all time.
God was regularly portrayed as a supernatural, all-seeing figure who lived above the clouds, watching human behavior. God wrote down, it was said, the deeds and misdeeds of all the people in the “Book of Life,” which would determine the eternal destiny of each individual soul.
The fires of hell quite literally terrified the masses. Guilt was the coin of the church’s realm, and it permeated the emotions of every “sinner” with whom the church had to deal.
A thirty-year war raged across Europe as traditionalists and reformers fought to impose their understanding of God on their opponents. The sinking of the ships of the Catholic Spanish Armada sailing toward Protestant England was even said to have proved that God was on the side of the reformers.
The reformers needed a counterclaim, and they found it in the authority of the Bible, almost always literally understood and called the “Word of God.” So “the church teaches” became the claim of one side and “the Bible says” became the claim of the other. When both sides in any conflict believe that they speak for God, the result is that each side demonizes the other. That was the backdrop through which each side, in that moment of history, endured the bitter and destructive struggle that we call the Reformation.
It was by faith “alone,” not by works or deeds, that salvation was accomplished. Indulgences were works! The result of this struggle was, therefore, always inevitable. In time, Martin Luther was condemned by the church, excommunicated as a heretic and driven into hiding. His life in danger, he was protected by certain political princes of Germany, who saw in Luther’s upheaval a way to break the power and control of the Vatican and thus to allow both the nation states of Europe and their wealth to develop independent of religious control. It was a tumultuous time in European history.
The Reformation ultimately was not fought over what a Christian must believe to be a Christian, but over issues of institutional authority and power.
This one will not be about issues of authority; it must focus on the substance of Christianity itself.
We want to know whether the idea of God still has meaning. We ask whether the historical creeds commit us to things that we cannot possibly still believe. We wonder how or if we can still use those creedal words with integrity. Can those fourth-century documents still be authoritative? Can there still be a definition of ultimate truth? Are not the claims of an infallible pope or an inerrant Bible both ridiculous in today’s world?
The experience being described was identical, but each explanation reflected the time in which the explainer lived and the level of knowledge that the explainer possessed.
These illustrations point to the distinction between an experience, which can be real and even eternal, and the explanation of that experience, which is always time-bound and time-warped.
One cannot, therefore, literalize the biblical narrative without literalizing a mentality that is both dated and doomed. Biblical literalism thus quickly becomes biblical nonsense.
Therein lies the problem: Christianity, having recorded its first-century explanations of the Jesus experience in scripture, and its fourth-century explanations in creedal statements, then proceeded to make excessive claims
for authority of those explanations, essentially freezing them into their first- and fourth-century frames of reference. Literalized words are always doomed words since our perception of truth is constantly expanding and changing.
Can the Christ experience be separated from the dying explanations of the past?
If we can, however, the result will necessitate a reformulation of Christianity that is so radical that Christianity as we know it may well die in the process.
Can we place the experience of “the Christ” into words that have meaning? 3. ORIGINAL SIN
Miracles do not ever imply magic.
Atonement theology, especially in its most bizarre “substitutionary” form, presents us with a God who is barbaric, a Jesus who is a victim and it turns human beings into little more than guilt-filled creatures. The phrase “Jesus died
for my sins” is not just dangerous, it is absurd. Atonement theology is a concept that we must escape.
No modern person has any choice but to be a situationist.
Let us instead think of prayer as the practice of the presence of God, the act of embracing transcendence and the discipline of sharing with another
the gifts of living, loving and being.
Any structure in either the secular world or the institutional church that diminishes the humanity of any child of God on any external basis of race, gender or sexual orientation must be exposed publicly and vigorously.
The first is made up of those who cannot step out of the security system that theism created for them.
The second is made up of those who, unable any longer to affirm the symbols of
their religious past, have become members of what I call the Churc...
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These people want not just freedom of religion; increasingly they fight for freedom from religion. There is little ...
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Polarization, created in large measure by the death of theism, has become the political reality into which our modern world is living.
The religious institution, along with traditional religious thinking, is declining at breathtaking speed, while non-religious secularity appears to be the ascending majority.
Once one dismisses the theistic understanding of God as a literal being, who lives in a distant place to which no one has ever been—who sees all our deeds and misdeeds, records them and then rewards
or punishes us according to our deserving—then one has to
face the fact that God, as G...
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traditionally understood, looks very much like an adult version of the child’...
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one of “unfinishedness,” incompleteness, rather than a fall into sin, then the work of God is not to save us from our sins, but to bring about human completeness or wholeness. God cannot logically rescue
us from a fall that never happened, nor can God restore us to a status we never possessed.
It was Freud’s stated conviction that the force behind the creation of all religious systems was the need present in human beings to bank the fires of anxiety born in what he called “the shock of existence.” By this he meant the moment that self-conscious awareness appeared in the evolutionary process. Freud believed that religion was simply the human projection into the sky of a protective parental figure of our own creation. This deity used supernatural power to deal with all the anxieties of self-consciousness, such as meaninglessness and the certainty of our mortality.
Human praise for the theistic deity was designed, he said, to cause God to look favorably on us and our needs.
The image of the theistic God began to look more and more like the face of a punishing parent or perhaps that of an ultimate judge.
People were then exhorted to be “born again,” never to grow up, never to take responsibility. It was no wonder that the parental word “Father” became the name for the church-appointed representative of this theistic deity. Under the power
