By Harry T. Cook
7/26/13
Among the many readers of these essays are a number of older, mostly retired members of the clergy. They are Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, several rabbis and others who can no longer identify fully -- if at all -- with their religious pasts. Most of them I do not know, but certainly wish I did.
To the person, they share with me disillusionment with the various traditions from which we have emerged into what one confrere called "a heaven on Earth." He meant by that phrase, as he later went on to explain, the freedom retirement brought from having to stay uncomfortably close to the line between truth and nonsense.
For some of those readers, I do not go far enough in the critique of contemporary religion. A few of them have become convinced that, for example, most of the Bible is pure myth. I think they are wrong about that, but the point is that they had to deal with biblical passages for their whole ordained ministry and evidently felt constrained to treat many of them more or less as historical reportage. Some of them express relief at no longer having to put on such an act week after week.
One colleague told me he is ashamed now for having taken so readily an ordination vow requiring him to affirm belief that "the Holy Scriptures contain all Doctrine required as necessary for eternal salvation." As over the years his life as a priest ripened, he came to see such a statement as -- in his words -- "Gobbledygook and pure fantasy."
I recommended that he read Elaine Pagels book Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas/1 -- in particular the first chapter in which she makes a personal reflection on her life and its sadnesses as seen through the prism of an impromptu visit she made one Sunday to an ornate Episcopal Church in New York City.
Pagels soon became captivated by the music and drama of the liturgy going on within. That was not her last visit to the Church of the Heavenly Rest, as it is called so preciously. For years one of two or three top New Testament scholars and historians of early Christianity, Pagels had long since seen many church doctrines for what they are: supported neither by science nor reason. Withal, she fell in love with Heavenly Rest.
I suggest the Pagels book to my disillusioned clerical sisters and brothers in the hope that her widely acknowledged scholarship and familiarity with the biblical texts they know so well will help them see that they can still appreciate the church in the same way she does: by ignoring its Queen of Hearts-like pre-breakfast impossibilities.
That well-educated and erudite clergy, after 40 years in the harness, can end up cynical about the company line they were supposed to have been toeing is an indictment of the institutional church. Some of us just went right ahead to divide the word of truth/2 as best we could, given what we knew and were continuing to discover.
Some of our eminent forebears pointed the way: Bishop John A.T. Robinson (Honest to God), Bishop James Pike (If This Be Heresy), Hans K�ng (My Struggle for Freedom and many more), Gustavo Guti�rrez (A Theology of Liberation) and Thomas Altizer (The Gospel of Christian Atheism) and the entire Jesus Seminar consortium.
One of our current heroes is Bishop John Shelby Spong (Why Christianity Must Change or Die and Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World). He continues to write and lecture, thus encouraging us. In the Jewish world, the late Sherwin T. Wine hacked through the underbrush of his own tradition and came up with secular humanist Judaism -- a deliverance if ever there was one.
None of those mentioned above quit organized religion. They simply chose different paths within it. Mostly outliers, they abandoned theism/3 and were content to extract meaning out of the metaphor of religious texts using reason and analysis. In so doing, they demonstrated that church and temple have plenty of wisdom left to share with the world and, within their traditions, the wherewithal to help society do justice and make peace.
Neither have I departed the institutional life of organized religion. I have found community in a congregation of humanistic Judaism as well as in a Catholic parish. In both places are people who -- as I have done -- some time ago off-loaded the excess baggage of cumbersome pre-Enlightenment theology. Withal, we have found it both possible and desirable to embrace the scripture of our traditions -- not for the answers its texts allegedly provide but for the profound and pertinent questions they raise.
We are non-believers in the sense that we do not base our participation in the institution on what was geschrieben or on the vera doctrina. We are more interested in exploring what it can possibly mean in the second decade of the 21st century to take part in Shabbat services on Friday night or go to mass on Sunday.
We, like Willa Cather's characters Jim Burden and �ntonia/4, share a "precious, incommunicable past" founded on "early accidents of fortune" and are willing to go on as we may from there. We travel light, unencumbered by the past, but neither leaving it entirely behind.
Believing, we do not believe.
/1 New York, NY. Random House, 2003, pp. 3-29
/2 see 2nd Timothy 2:15 KJV
/3 Theism is one of several philosophical approaches to religious belief that posits a deity that is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent and that can be importuned by human beings to hear their prayers and answer them.
/4 Cather, Willa. My �ntonia