I Don't Know   

By Harry T. Cook 

5/17/13

Harry T. Cook

"Where do we go when we die?" would be one question. My answer: Beyond the grave or crematory, I know of no other destination. "You mean we don't go to heaven?" was next. The answer: I don't know of any such place outside human imagination. Finally in exasperation came the question: "What do you mean you don't know?"

When it got to that point I would fall back on Socrates, who is reported to have said at his trial: I do not think that I know what I do not know. The allusion to Socrates only deflected for a time the kind of anger that comes of declining to affirm a person's dearly held belief, due to the absence of data to support it. Socrates had to imbibe the hemlock. I just had to take a lot of guff.

That sums up quite nicely the tenor of an event that occurred 15 years ago this month after several members of a parish of which at that point I had been pastor for a decade had read my 1997 book Christianity Beyond Creeds: Making Religion Believable for Today and Tomorrow. Offended by its candor and agnosticism, they demanded a meeting of the congregation that, as it progressed, took on some of the characteristics of a lynching.

Actually, there was nothing in that slim volume that should have been new to them, as from Day One I had made it clear that I could not and would not proclaim as truth articles of faith that did not have a secure basis in the commonsense, Enlightenment understanding of reality. I had done a lot of patient teaching over that decade, much of it in the analysis of biblical texts, their history and reason-based interpretation.

Nevertheless, 10 years of intellectual labor based on 35 years of research distilled in book form shocked those who were allergic to skepticism and impatient with doubt. "How," one person wondered aloud to anyone who would listen, "can this man be a theologian and speak the way he does?"

I explained that I was not a theologian but a working scholar of religious texts and the ideas that had arisen from them, preferring to deal with such texts and such ideas without trying to torture them into an abstract system.

"But you're screwing with my religion," said a woman through tears of exasperation. Truth was that I had been screwing with her religion for 10 years and apparently she hadn't noticed. She also was inordinately proud to say that she had not read my book and had no intention of doing so, her tears by then having given way to cold anger.

As things calmed down and a small klavern of the disenchanted had departed, I was able to quote Thucydides and be heard: Ignorance is bold; knowledge is reserved. The one who shouts a lot and claims to know the truth of what he shouts is to beware of. The one who cultivates the testing of hypotheses and tries to extract reasonable propositions from the testing is to be encouraged.

One of the sins of which I was said to be guilty was my refusal to confess belief in "God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." I said could do so if the statement were considered metaphorical, a poetry of a kind. I had come up with the following as an alternative to the airy idea of an omnipotent maker of all things visible and invisible and included it in my book:

[A source-orderer] may in some way have appropriated or even originated the universe's energy if not its substance, and, on a trial-and-error basis, has been experimenting ever since . . . A source-orderer could in such a scenario be credibly imagined or posited as a command center through which stimuli, signals and directions might be sent and received, encoded and decoded and retransmitted . . . [In any event,] something of unimaginable force and movement is now and has been underway for time out of mind . . .

By one irate man, that was dismissed as "science fiction." He, in turn, was challenged by another who asked why the officially prescribed creed itself wasn't "just a fairy tale." And so it went.

The book in question had been taking shape since the mid-1960s and should have been ready for publishing by 1970 or so. However, I had taken an appointment as an assistant pastor in a downtown Detroit parish in 1967 and was instantly engaged in the city's racial upheaval and the general unrest of the period. Like many of my generation who had prepared for a life of scholarship, I allowed myself to be caught up in the pregnant moment and crises that followed one upon another.

Had that first book of mine come out in the 1960s, it would have had a lot of company. That time was rich and ripe for new thinking. The Second Vatican Council was turning the Catholic Church upside down. The works of such thinkers as Harvey Cox (The Secular City), John A.T. Robinson (Honest to God), Thomas Altizer (The Gospel of Christian Atheism), Paul van Buren (The Secular Meaning of the Gospel) and James A. Pike (If This Be Heresy) were being widely read and discussed.

Not that a monograph from the pen of a neophyte just loosed on the world with a freshly minted graduate degree would have counted for much. Yet, in the company of those works mentioned, my little book would not have been thought to be so far off the mark.

Copyrighted in 1997, it had the bad luck to appear just as the gnarled fingers of evangelical fundamentalism were beginning in earnest to constrict the throats of liberal thinkers.

John S. Spong came out with his book on the creed and related matters (Why Christianity Must Change or Die) a few months after mine, and that helped a bit. However, Bishop Spong was then writing from eminence as well as the safe harbor of retirement. Following my retirement in early 2009 but with no eminence whatsoever, I managed to get three more books out the door -- each of them as unwelcome in the communities of orthodoxy as the one before. Yet another is to be issued soon -- with an endorsement from Bishop Spong.

During that turbulent time 15 years ago, I often heard myself thinking, or occasionally being tempted to say, what Martin Luther is said to have declared before his detractors: Hier ich stehe; ich kann nicht anders -- I am standing here; I can't do anything else. And, of course, I couldn't at the same time as trying to maintain some semblance of intellectual honesty.

re essay of 5/10/13 Having a Cup of Coffee With the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob                     

Blayney Colmore, La Jolla, CA:  

I learned early on to respond to questions about prayer by saying that praying is about opening the one praying to the change reality requires, rather than expecting magical altering of the reality. Prayer seems of a piece with virtually every discipline that seeks to calm our fears when faced with the certainty that we are limited beings, unable to shape the forces that shape us. To remain still, silent in the face of crisis, often does seem to keep us from otherwise disastrous efforts to exceed our powers. Perhaps prayer might be one way of holding ourselves to the often sage advice: "Don't just do something; stand there."

Don Caley, Milford, MI:

Please know that as part of your "extended family" I'm enjoying every word you write. The train piece was wonderful and brought back memories of when we lived "on the other side of the tracks" and I walked to in Detroit. My mother cursed the soot that accumulated on the washing she hung out to dry on the clothesline. 

Nina Gordon, Halifax, N.S. Canada:

Someone had to take on T.M. Luhrmann. I read her book "When God Talks Back," and wondered what had happened in the academic world. Research and reporting is one thing. Embracing one's subjects and their delusions is quite another. I'm sure you'll take a lot of criticism for your article. But thanks for it anyway.

Alexis Smith, Louisville, KY:

I'm using my maiden name in sending you this e-mail because I would make myself very unpopular here in saying that I loved your take on people hearing God speaking. If they said they were hearing Satan speaking, what would be the result? Honestly!

Tracey Martin, Southfield, MI:  

If only the pray-ers would abide by the Jesus injunction to pray in private, we'd never care because we'd never know.

S.L. Bryant, Brooklyn, NY:

My friend who knows of you through the Society for Secular Humanist Judaism sent me your essay about Prof. Luhrmann's research and writings on the subject of speaking and listening to G-d. I, too, have been mystified as to why the editors of the Times would give her so much space. I would expect to read such stuff in supermarket tabloids.

Cynthia Chase, Laurel, MD:

"God" is such a loaded word that I don't even want to say it anymore. To me, prayer is an interior conversation when I "call to remembrance" those people and causes dearest to me. Then ideas come to mind of what I could do to make their world and the world a better place-not that I always do them, but at least I am reminded.

Robert Rosenfeld, West Bloomfield, MI:  

Thank you for your excellent essay this morning: ". . . Having a Cup of Coffee . . ." There are always thoughts that you and our beloved mentor [the late] Sherwin T. Wine could ask to make us think.