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"Where do we go when we die?" would be one question. My answer: "Beyond the grave or crematory, I know of no other destination." Next was, "You mean we don't go to heaven?" The answer: "I don't know of any such place outside human imagination." Finally in exasperation would come 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 dearly held beliefs, due to the absence of data to support them. Pass the hemlock.
That sums up quite nicely the tenor of a time some years ago 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 an accounting.
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 less a theologian than a philosopher, preferring inquiry to proclamation. I was and am an aspirant scholar of religious texts and the ideas that have arisen from them, preferring to deal with such texts and such ideas without trying to torture them into an abstract system.
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 under way for time out of mind . . .
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 the other.
Had that 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. A young Reform rabbi from Detroit named Sherwin T. Wine was stirring things up with the beginnings of what became secular humanist Judaism. The Second Vatican Council had turned 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 written by a neophyte just loosed on the world 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. Alas, it had the bad luck to appear just as the gnarled fingers of evangelical fundamentalism had begun in earnest to constrict the windpipe of progressive religion.
"You think too much," said one critic. Alas, I did then and do now. Still, I do not think that I know what I do not know.
Since retirement from parish work, I have functioned in the greater community as a teacher and lecturer. As such I am more likely to encounter people who are interested in the inquiry, whatever it may be -- much less interested in being told what they should believe, and even less interested in telling me what I should believe.
In essay after essay and in public talks, I make the point that belief founded on a priori tenets is beyond argument, research and intelligent discussion -- especially belief that is characterized as the opinion of the believer. If America is apple pie, it is also a land in which opinion is a protected category, each individual being entitled to his own, especially where religion is concerned.
Even the religiously unaffiliated generally seem to honor that social consensus. I think that is so because religious leaders in America put themselves forward as theologians, i.e. as deliverers of a higher truth rather than as philosophers ready and willing to encourage inquiry.
I was once asked this question: "Who goes to church to hear questions?" My reply was, "More people would if they knew they could ask some and not be patronized by an authority figure who has been taught that he not only knows the answers but has been told that it's his job to preach them."
My interlocutor persisted: "Why, then, all these megachurches that have nothing but answers?" I thought a while and then said, "Answers are like candy. Questions are like spinach. Which in the long run is better for you?"
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