A Liberal Christian's Journey

John Mark Ministries

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Theology

A Liberal Christian’s Journey

By Rowland Croucher and others ⋅ July 9, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

ALTERNATIVES TO TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN THOUGHT

Some personal discoveries

David Merritt

Melbourne

November 2006

Introduction

Two of our grandchildren who live in another state expect me to arrive each time with new jokes. Which is a tough ask! So I have to be on the lookout.

I saw one recently that I though might be about right. And then it occurred to me that it could be a symbol for theology. Two friends were talking. One said, �I have this wonderful new invention. It is an automatic shaver. Any man can put his head in this box and it automatically shaves him.� �But�, his friend said, �Everyone�s head is a different shape�. �Only at first,� the inventor replied.

Theologies from other peoples and other times sometimes do not fit us well � they don�t take account of our experience, our life, our knowledge and our times.

Perhaps a more poignant symbol of doing theology for me comes from the cry of Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600 by the Catholic Inquisition because he held ideas contrary to the then teachings of the Catholic Church: �I was a troubled soul trying to find a hat to fit this bursting brainbox�. I think that many of us in times of wonderfully expanding human knowledge are searching for that kind of hat. Perhaps another more encouraging symbol is that in 1889, on the spot where Giordano Bruno died, the faculty and students of the University of Rome unveiled a statue of Bruno. The inscription read: �To Giordano Bruno, from the century he guessed at, in Rome, on the place where he was burned.�

Two discoveries

If your matches are securely away, and you are not in a mood for burning heretics, my two discoveries of alternatives to traditional Christian thought and practice are about:

* The idea of sin and a saviour

* Why Jesus is important

1. �Sin and a saviour�

I have increasingly come to see that images and metaphors and stories are the stuff of all talk about meaning and values and religion. To be literal is to be seriously handicapped.

� So I have valued the Bible�s creation stories as 3000 year old stories of beginnings using the ideas of ancient pre-scientific people. They are wonderful examples of early searches for meaning by people with a profound sense of God.

� And alongside them I have valued our story of a vast universe billions of years old

- Of great DNA streams branching and interconnected starting with single cell life and evolving to the great diversity and complexity of life today, of which our species is both a small and wonderful part and now a possible threat to the whole ecosystem for all life.

- The story of the amazing emergence of consciousness so that after billions of years there is mind to begin to appreciate this story. The attempts to integrate these two stories of prescientific humans and contemporary science have seemed to me increasingly pointless

� and my interest in those attempts is nil. But more recently I have realised that the ancient stories of origins can do enormous damage to us as humans. Humans are depicted as somehow separate from the natural environment and masters of it to exploit it for their own purposes – and now we have to struggle to undo some of the disastrous results of that view. Further, the idea of humans beginning perfect and human sin as the destroyer of God�s perfect plan, as an offense against God, has contributed to appalling damage to the well being of people � to say nothing of making Christianity incredible and easy to reject.

The idea of a perfect beginning and human wilful destruction of that perfection as a sin that offends the creator is not compatible with how I understand the story of life on this planet. And the consequences of that wrong ancient story seem to me increasingly unacceptable.

� The emphasis on sin warps our view of life. The idea that human life is somehow essentially contaminated so that even new-born children are tainted is a terrible basis on which to build love of our children and compassionate communities. And that view is still expressed in many baptismal services and weekly prayers of confession, and Bible readings and hymns.

� It made it worse early in the Christian era, that Augustine and much of the church linked the transmission of the taint of sin with sex. That has distorted Christians� views of sex, of pleasure, of women, and of the relation of women and men.

� No-one in our day needs to be persuaded that human evil can be horrendous. In our time, in addition to widespread abuse of women and children and the exploitation of the poor around the world, we have witnessed the Turkish slaughter of over a million Armenians, Stalin�s bloody purges, the Nazi slave camps and gas chambers for Jews, gypsies and homosexuals, Pol Pot�s piles of skulls in Cambodia, Ruandan massacres, and on and on goes the catalogue of modern human evil.

� However, at a time when evil is often structural and national and international, to personalise the story of evil is both to trivialise the issues and to distract us from the great challenges to human societies for cooperation to create health, justice and peace, and to care for the environment. It makes Christianity and the church seem irrelevant to the real world.

� And the sin story led in the New Testament to the saviour story about atonement and blood sacrifice for a right relation to God that has dominated much traditional thinking about Jesus. What view of God requires the killing of a son to appease offense?? What would we say of the ethical quality of any father who dealt with a son or with any human being in such a way?

� And how can anyone think that such a sacrifice has broken the power of evil in the light of the activities of our species in our lifetime?

� There are sayings that would have been better never uttered if the speakers could know what damage to the human race they would later contribute to. Some of those sayings are in Paul�s ideas about atonement for sin. �Sin came into the world through one man and death by sin� (Rom 5 : 12) �We were reconciled to God by the death of his Son � (Rom 3) �God put forward Jesus as a sacrifice of atonement� �So one man�s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all� (Rom 5 : 18)

� The saviour emphasis is another part of the traditional story that for me at best is incredible and at worst ethically offensive. My thought journey away from the sin and saviour parts of our religious tradition has far reaching consequences for me.

So instead:

� I look at our incredible world that is vast beyond what we yet know and see the story of life on this planet over billions of years,

� I see our inextricable links with all life on this little planet over billions of years and the amazing story of humans developing over hundreds of thousands of years.

� Instead of the ancient sin and saviour story, I see us as a developing species with an inheritance that in some ways conflicts with what our new environment needs from us and what our new consciousness and knowledge make possible for us.

� And I want to live affirming that God is present and Jesus is one of the pathways to God.

My discoveries in progressive Christian thought are not about changing from one set of beliefs to another more authoritative set of beliefs but from being bound by the distortions of some earlier images and beliefs to seeing that beliefs are always partial and temporary and to be changed as our knowledge and experience and circumstances change.

And this I want to affirm is biblical faith � it is doing what the various biblical writers did over a couple of thousand years in their very different times and cultures. They looked with wonder and fear and distress at the world and life around them and using their experiences of God, of what gave meaning to life, and the ideas and wisdom of their day, they created stories that lifted their minds above the day to day struggle for survival and gave them hope and a sense of direction to their living. What they did inspirationally in their day inspires us to engage with God in our day.

2. Jesus as our window to God

My second discovery is about what Jesus means to me.

� My discovery is about what others have known but the church in its common life has largely kept silent about. About the variety of ways of thinking bout Jesus in the early centuries after he lived. About historical, political and philosophical factors that gave us our traditions. About early battles of ideas that shaped the New Testament and Creeds but that resulted not in victory for absolute truth but in victory for those who had clout in their day.

� The New Testament literature came from different communities exploring in their thought forms and in the circumstances of their day how the new ways of looking at life that came from Jesus transformed their living. Paul and the unknown writers of Mark and Luke and Matthew and John show a great variety of ways of thinking and talking about Jesus in their day.

� They are not descriptions but interpretative portraits � each a gateway to go through or a lens to look through

� A particular discovery is the importance for me of denying the truth of that destructive saying from the late first/early second century community that wrote about how they understood the meaning of Jesus in the Gospel of John: �No one comes to the Father but by me� (Another of the sentences that would have been better if never uttered)

� At this late stage in my life, I have become captivated by Jesus again.

� He was an extraordinary person – one of the towering figures in human history. The one above all others in our tradition who shows us a transforming way to live. Among an oppressed people in a country occupied by a brutal army, he showed people a different way of seeing their lives and what was possible. Among people where religion was often restrictive and focussed on rules, he focussed people on what religion was all about, on enlarging their minds and hearts to live with hope and love.

� He so captured their minds and imaginations that he lived in their memories and in the stories of the communities who remembered him.

� I read the parables of Jesus with a sense of discovery � those subversive stories that instead of telling us what to believe or to do more often end up with a question that is ethically and spiritually challenging at the heart of our lives.

- What is most important for a full life?

- What does it mean to be neighbour?

- What is the benefit to you if you gain all the things in the world and lose the richness of life?

� The strange unbelievable figure who meant a lot to the people of the third and fourth centuries as described in the historic creeds or the reformers of the 17th century has receded. In his place there is Jesus who is an inspiration and invitation to living � offering stimulating teaching that opens up possibilities, that invites me to deeper living.

� He is indeed a window to God and a signpost to depth in life. To be a part of a community of explorers of his way is what it means for me to be Christian.

3. Something to explore: How to think and talk about God

� God is the reality in whom we live and move and have our being � always present

� Our relation to God is not about persuading God to our ways but about aligning our lives with the deepest sources of meaning � about how we are connected to our environment and to all life.

� Perhaps God is to the universe as mind is to brain � although both of those distinctions may turn out to be category mistakes. There are �window-opening ideas� about this from a growing stream of writers around the world from Teilhard de Chardin to Michael Morwood.

� What images and words will energise me and give wings to my faith? What could worship mean with music that touched my mind and heart but without the mind numbing and ethically appalling hymns? Or without those prayer requests for God to do what is clearly the responsibility of humans to do � to build life-enhancing communities and grow compassion, to provide for the sick and poor and remove unjust systems that oppress other humans? That is something I want to explore! That is something I need to explore to give expression to my reshaping Christian faith. I am looking for an Aussie hat with a wide brim to fit this still bursting brainbox.

David Merritt

Melbourne

November 2006

http://www.pcnvictoria.org.au/disc200611dm.pdf