Humans are story-telling apes. We tell each other stories to share our “world” with one another. Sharing our stories and experiencing others’ helps us understand, explain, and change our stories, which are our realities, our lives. The most useful stories are those that take our existing narratives and re-tell them with new information and new insights so that we are compelled to re-examine our old stories and to change them to accommodate the new material. In making these changes, our “world” changes, and we experience it in new ways. Leaving our old “world” behind may be painful, but if we are to move forward with life, we must accept the pain and let the new insights create a new “world” for us.
I’ve recently read two “stories” that have caused me to re-examine my “world” and to begin to create a new story and a new “world” for myself. One is “Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality” by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, which I discussed in my posts on December 11 and 18, 2010 and on January 18 and 25, 2011. The other “story” is “A New Great Story” (Salem, Ore: Polebridge Press 2010) by Don Cupitt who writes: “In this book I aim to set before the general reader a fully-modern alternative to the traditional “Grand Narrative” theology of Latin or “Western,” Christianity…” (p1) This traditional narrative, which guided the West from the time of Constantine in the 4th century to the Enlightenment in the 18th, was set forth most notably in Augustine’s (CE 354-430) “The City of God.” It was “… a huge story of Everything that began and ended in eternity…” (p1) It tells of God’s creation of our world, our fall and redemption, the Last Judgment, and the triumph of the blessed. The Creeds summarize this story.
However, with Newton, Galileo, and Darwin we have new stories that, as the mathematician LaPlace said to Napoleon, have no need of God as a hypothesis. We are still coping with these new stories. Cupitt writes: “… the West found it extremely painful to relinquish its old faith, and extremely difficult to state its new faith with full philosophical clarity. Even yet, we have still not been able to settle into a lucid, confident and paradox-free secular-humanist world-view.” (p5) A major reason for this is our loss of “Objective Truth.” These new stories, specifically Darwinism tell us that “…our cognitive abilities are just survival-skills…” “…we cannot distinguish between ‘real’ truths and biologically useful fictions.” “All our knowledge is practical or ‘applied,’ and none is ‘pure.’” (p5) We are painfully learning that “There is no ready-made Real World, out there and fully independent of our language. There is only the historical succession of world-views, and of understandings of human nature, within the ceaseless motion of our language.” (p75)
Cupitt’s new grand narrative is based on these ideas. It “…will be a secular story about the whole process by which we have come to be what we are now are.” It will try to show how the world in our heads “…is made up of linguistic usages, myths, deep cultural assumptions, Gods, spirits, saints, our parents and our mentors, commandments prohibitions and valuations.” (p8) For most of human history our stories were predominantly religious, and they guided our progressive development. However, with the Enlightenment and the new scientific narratives, “…how are we to understand the queer fact that in the modern period religion seems to have led us beyond itself and become redundant?” (p9) As a result of this strange situation, Cupitt wants “a Christian narrative, and a story that makes religious sense, about the birth, the life, the death, and the afterlife of God.” (p9)
This new story is not about Fall and Redemption “… but the strangely-roundabout story of how we have become ourselves. It starts in the violent chaos of animal experience. Language irrupts, lighting up the chaos and beginning to make things intelligible and to shape life. The history of religion then develops as the story of how through language a world can be built, its law laid down, values posited, and long-term plans of action devised and carried out. Everything is first worked out at the supernatural level: the gods pioneered everything for us. Eventually, the fully developed Bronze-Age religious system produces a new breed of ‘enlightened’ individual critics – prophets, philosophers – who criticize it all and bring it all back down into the human beings for whose sake the whole process has been going on. The Grand Narrative then culminates in the Galilean preaching of Jesus, and the launch of a new divine-human way of living. The whole story is then surprisingly repeated into the history of Christianity, which also goes out into mediaeval elaboration, and then through its criticism in the Reformation and the Enlightenment gradually returns into the individual modern human being who at last feels able to accept contingency and to build a life of love without any remaining fear or bitterness.” (p9)
This progression of human religious development parallels to a remarkable extent the evolution of our sexuality described in “Sex at Dawn,” which outlines the evolution of our ancestors over the millions of years when they lived in foraging bands with multiple sexual partners. The rise of agriculture about 10,000 years ago led to, at least for women, monogamy. Monogamy grew out of agriculture, because a farmer wanted to be sure that his son, who was to inherit the farm, is indeed his son. To ensure this, the son’s mother had to have only the son’s father as a sexual partner. She must be kept from other men and to accomplish this, the father takes her as closely guarded property.
With agriculture, religion also changed. It became centralized and mediated by priests. Before agriculture, foragers and hunters moved about looking for food, with no fixed abode. Their gods moved before them, leading them into the future. In contrast, farmers settled down and needed markets for their produce. Markets developed into cities with the god’s temple on one side of the marketplace and the palace of the King, anointed by the god, on the other side. “By the priests, agriculture, religious cult, and culture were all woven together. And in particular, God invented markets, money and fair trade. God invented ‘centred’ life, and the city-state: politics, routine, law, and taxation. The first taxes, tithes, were paid to God the first landlord.” (p35)
The rigid hierarchy of this state religion could not completely eliminate the “…older type of religious professional – the charismatic, imaginative individual shaman or prophet …” (p61) We know best Israel’s prophets, who “…looked back to the simplicity and freedom of the old nomadic way of life…” (p63) These prophets sought “… a return of some form of religious immediacy. This in turn required democratization: God must decentre himself, coming down from heaven and distributing himself as spirit into human hearts…” (p64), as in hunter-gatherer times. This movement of our perception of God “…from the external socially-constructed world…” (p65) into ourselves comes to be known as “the Kingdom of God…”, and “…the old mystical yearning for union with God was also a demand for the disappearance of God as objective being, as Other. Instead, God becomes at last fully and completely internalized.” (p65)
Of course, this is the core message of Jesus: “… ‘the Kingdom of God’ was near, or had already arrived. The ancient prophetic hope was fulfilled. The divine world and the human life-world were at last coming together and becoming one.” “…God ceased to be an objective being. He had emptied himself out into human hearts. God and the human self were no longer two; they were now concentric. It followed that the difference between the pure and the impure, and between good and evil, was no longer imposed upon human beings ‘heteronomously’ – that is, in the form of a code of divine laws revealed to Moses and received thenceforth from tradition – but depended solely upon the autonomous human heart. Living well was not a matter of keeping rules: on the contrary, rule-morality does not produce and never could produce the kind of person Jesus wanted to see. No: for Jesus – who in moral philosophy was a straight emotivist and expressivist – you live well if you live in a ‘solar’ way, out from the heart, without any duplicity, so that your expressive life pours out upon a current of open, direct, generous and affirmative feeling. Jesus makes his point here by insisting that law-morality makes us mean-spirited. We are forever looking sideways at our neighbors, and feeling aggrieved if they are doing better than we think they deserve. He insists, paradoxically but brilliantly, that unless you are ready to go beyond mere justice and perform acts of ecstatic, excessive generosity, you are not a truly moral person at all.” (p68) In at least some of the sayings of Jesus, we can see: “…The superior human being (who) lives without resentiment or reactive feeling: he is purely affirmative. He does not nurse any kind of grudge or ill-feeling.” (p69) My post of Sept. 15, 2009 on Cupitt’s “Jesus & Philosophy” discusses this further.
Some of those who heard Jesus must have liked his message. “Otherwise, his memory and some of his words would not have reached us at all.” (p69) Of course, the synoptic gospels also preserve much sharp criticism: He was crazy, in league with the devil, kept bad company, lax about ritual purity and keeping the Sabbath, and he enjoyed feasting. He was eventually charged with being an all-out blasphemer and executed by the state. Cupitt thinks that the charges are historical; no one would have a motive for inventing them. He also thinks them justified. “Jesus was after all announcing the end of (his hearers’) world, and in many cases their livelihoods. St. Matthew tries, rather absurdly, to claim that Jesus endorsed the Mosaic Law in full (Matthew 5:17-19), but the fact is that not long after Jesus’ death the early Jewish Church did resolve not to impose the Law upon Gentile converts.” (p70)
“…the ethical teaching of Jesus in Galilee, approximately – and perhaps best preserved in Q/Luke … is Act Four of our new Grand Narrative theology and completes the main story. The plot is complete: everything has come together and there is only the endless, purely-contingent flow of things in our language-formed human life-world. … After Galilee there is no further or greater reality for us to aspire to.” The 1980 years since Jesus have seen repeated circular movements: a going out into catholic elaboration and the return into immediacy. “So, in a certain sense, we made God, and then God made us, completing his work by dying into us. Religious thought has been a laborious business, but it has somehow brought us a very long way. We are only a lot of dumb apes who have somehow been able to dream strange dreams that have lifted us out of the relative darkness of animal life, and made it at last possible for us moderns to say a whole-hearted Amen to our world, and to our own lives in it.” (p 75)
Showing posts with label Don Cupitt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Don Cupitt. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Nicholas Kristof, Don Cupitt, and the Sermon on the Mount
Nicholas Kristof writes in his “New York Times” column today of the differences between the Roman Catholic bishops and Catholic hospitals around the country which are sometimes not as strict in their abortion policies as the bishops would like.
As I read his column, I was struck by this passage:
“To me, this battle illuminates two rival religious approaches, within the Catholic church and any spiritual tradition. One approach focuses upon dogma, sanctity, rules and the punishment of sinners. The other exalts compassion for the needy and mercy for sinners — and, perhaps, above all, inclusiveness.”
This echoes almost uncannily Don Cupitt’s reading of the Sermon on the Mount in his “A New Great Story” (2010), which I quoted in my post on January 25th. He points out that The Sermon on the Mount is a mixture of passages that call for the “…almost existentialist ethic of open whole-hearted expression, and freedom from anxiety or calculation” (Matthew 5:13-16, 38-48, and 6:25-34). and others that “…take for granted the value of a strictly-interpreted religious Law, and a piety of secret good works and hidden inwardness which pursues and expects a heavenly reward after death.” (5:17-33, and 6:1-20 and 24) (p81, 82)
In Kristoff’s interpretation, the actions of some leaders of the Catholic hospitals could be seen as existentialistic and whole-hearted with anxiety and calculation taking the hindmost. While the bishops’ position values a strictly-interpreted religious Law with heaven as a reward for obedience to this Law. Cupitt writes of the Sermon on the Mount: “The difference is astonishing. In the two groups of sayings we find two entirely different, indeed opposite religious personalities.” (p82) He also points out that these different approaches are “…deeply embedded within the best texts we have”. (p81) What Cupitt calls “Church Christianity” had begun, by the year 50, shifting the focus “…from Jesus’ teaching to his person – and in particular his exalted status in the cosmic hierarchy”. (p79) It is this latter position that the bishops are defending today. Kristof writes about one such instance of “Church Christianity”: The bishop of Phoenix demanded that St. Joseph’s Hospital there never again terminate a pregnancy to save the life of a mother. In contrast, Linda Hunt, the president of St. Joseph’s responded, “St. Joseph’s will continue through our words and deeds to carry out the healing ministry of Jesus.” Two starkly different positions each rooted in different parts of the Sermon on the Mount. You pays your money, and you takes your choice.
As I read his column, I was struck by this passage:
“To me, this battle illuminates two rival religious approaches, within the Catholic church and any spiritual tradition. One approach focuses upon dogma, sanctity, rules and the punishment of sinners. The other exalts compassion for the needy and mercy for sinners — and, perhaps, above all, inclusiveness.”
This echoes almost uncannily Don Cupitt’s reading of the Sermon on the Mount in his “A New Great Story” (2010), which I quoted in my post on January 25th. He points out that The Sermon on the Mount is a mixture of passages that call for the “…almost existentialist ethic of open whole-hearted expression, and freedom from anxiety or calculation” (Matthew 5:13-16, 38-48, and 6:25-34). and others that “…take for granted the value of a strictly-interpreted religious Law, and a piety of secret good works and hidden inwardness which pursues and expects a heavenly reward after death.” (5:17-33, and 6:1-20 and 24) (p81, 82)
In Kristoff’s interpretation, the actions of some leaders of the Catholic hospitals could be seen as existentialistic and whole-hearted with anxiety and calculation taking the hindmost. While the bishops’ position values a strictly-interpreted religious Law with heaven as a reward for obedience to this Law. Cupitt writes of the Sermon on the Mount: “The difference is astonishing. In the two groups of sayings we find two entirely different, indeed opposite religious personalities.” (p82) He also points out that these different approaches are “…deeply embedded within the best texts we have”. (p81) What Cupitt calls “Church Christianity” had begun, by the year 50, shifting the focus “…from Jesus’ teaching to his person – and in particular his exalted status in the cosmic hierarchy”. (p79) It is this latter position that the bishops are defending today. Kristof writes about one such instance of “Church Christianity”: The bishop of Phoenix demanded that St. Joseph’s Hospital there never again terminate a pregnancy to save the life of a mother. In contrast, Linda Hunt, the president of St. Joseph’s responded, “St. Joseph’s will continue through our words and deeds to carry out the healing ministry of Jesus.” Two starkly different positions each rooted in different parts of the Sermon on the Mount. You pays your money, and you takes your choice.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
“Eternal Life: A New Vision”
Metaphor and analogy are the only ways we can think and speak about the great questions of religion. Traditionally, the metaphor of God as the focus of religion is external and separate from us humans. We say that God is not us. God is in heaven, above us, other than us. Alternatively, Moltmann has written that God is ahead of us, leading us into the future. In any case, God is the word we use to try to express that which is beyond our experience bound always by time and space. In “Eternal Life: A New Vision” (New York HarperOne 2009), John Shelby Spong employs another metaphor, one often used by mystics. God is within us; the divine can be experienced as an aspect of the human if we look inward.
Thus it seems that Spong in “Eternal Life” and Cupitt in “Jesus & Philosophy” are aiming at much the same idea: true religion is motivated from within, not imposed from without. Further, true religion is transformative. The truly religious are in the process of being possessed by the Eternal, slowly leaving behind concerns for security and punishment that stories of heaven and hell encourage. God is ceasing to be the judge above, but rather becoming the light within that guides our thoughts and actions. Freed from concerns about our welfare, we are free to work to help bring the Kingdom on earth.
Thus it seems that Spong in “Eternal Life” and Cupitt in “Jesus & Philosophy” are aiming at much the same idea: true religion is motivated from within, not imposed from without. Further, true religion is transformative. The truly religious are in the process of being possessed by the Eternal, slowly leaving behind concerns for security and punishment that stories of heaven and hell encourage. God is ceasing to be the judge above, but rather becoming the light within that guides our thoughts and actions. Freed from concerns about our welfare, we are free to work to help bring the Kingdom on earth.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
“Jesus & Philosophy”
In “Jesus & Philosophy” (2009 SCM Press, London), Don Cupitt assesses the place of Jesus in the history of ethics. Biblical scholars, particularly those in the Jesus Seminar, maintain that, starting about 20 years after his death, Jesus was made into the personification of his teaching and given an exalted cosmic status. After a few decades, a supernatural superstructure was built around him obscuring his own sayings, producing instead mostly fictionalized narratives of his life, as well as material pertinent to his followers’ current concerns.
Using the ranking system of the Jesus Seminar, Cupitt finds that the sayings most likely to reflect closely Jesus’ own teaching (coded red or pink) reflect a major innovation in ethics with a shift from realism to emotivism. The moral standard is brought down from heaven, thought to be real, and relocated in the world of human feelings and relationships, or, in Cupitt words, the world of ‘the heart’.
For Cupitt, Jesus stresses the moral importance of a high level of critical self-consciousness: Get the beam out of your own eye, calculate, and then be extravagantly generous, because that is what melts the heart, unfreezes human relationships, and breaks the culture of ressentiment (Cupitt’s emphasis). Ressentiment is the French word that Nietzsche uses to sum up the whole range of reactive or negative emotions, including scorn, disgust, dislike, envy, lust, disapproval, repugnance, contempt, impatience, malice, irritation, anger, rage, fury, fear, terror, hatred, boredom, indifference, recoiling, seething resentment, begrudging, outrage, indignation at, despair of, and many more. When they surge up in us in reaction to another, we want to separate ourselves as far as possible from that person.
In contrast, the positive emotions do not cloud or block our relation to the other person. These emotions are mostly very cool and transparent and not numerous. They include regard, attention, interest, sympathy, pity, respect, admiration, allegiance, friendship, and love. Usually the positive emotions don’t present moral problems, but the negative ones are often violent and a threat to social peace. To overcome them, we must often be almost supernaturally “big” and generous, going beyond justice.
To help us do this, the Jesus of the red or pink sayings urges us to choose a new moral world where everything is clear and brightly lit, completely open, explicit, bright and clear, not continuing with ill-feeling which is often double-feeling, such as malice, deceit, deception, and duplicity which imply a certain doubleness that maintains a gap between our displayed feelings and real but veiled feelings that are hidden behind them.
Because of his emphasis on feelings between people, Jesus values people more than the religious law. Stories like the healing on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:9-14) imply the end of the rule of religious law and the appearance of a human who is more radically free and autonomous than ever before. Thus, Jesus radicalizes Jeremiah and Ezekiel who proclaim that the law will be written on people’s hearts and God will take away people’s hearts of stone and give them instead hearts of flesh (Jeremiah 31:33; Ezekiel 36:26). Jesus becomes anthropocentric and emotivist, changing ethics profoundly by secularizing ethics, historicizing it, and humanizing it. However, to question the Divine Law is to question God, especially God who is “outside” us. Thus, these sayings may be some of the reason for Jesus’ troubles with the authorities.
Jesus’ teachings are difficult for individuals to follow, and, of course, threatening to the religious establishment. It is no wonder that an overlay of supernatural narrative was quickly put onto Jesus’ radical sayings. It is easier to worship than to follow and emulate. “Go and do likewise” is a difficult command; it is easier for us to leave the changing of the world to God. However, if the law is written on our hearts, we become God-like agents of change.
At the end of the book, Cupitt addresses this dilemma of direction from “outside and above” us and motivation from within, writing that ethics has two different faces or dimensions, corresponding to the doctrines of creation and redemption. “Creation” ethics would have us support existing reality: be loyal to the system as it is, obeying the rules, playing our parts, and raising the next generation. In contrast, “redemption” ethics would have us keep alive and spell out the Dream of a better world. If the Dream is sufficiently vivid and attractive, it will shape our values and the orientation of our lives. The Dream present in Jesus’ sayings has only recently, with the collapse of external religious sanctions, begun to be recognized and grasped as the way to the Law within us. Cupitt concludes by suggesting that the rediscovered historical Jesus might become the way to the reform and renewal of Christianity.
Using the ranking system of the Jesus Seminar, Cupitt finds that the sayings most likely to reflect closely Jesus’ own teaching (coded red or pink) reflect a major innovation in ethics with a shift from realism to emotivism. The moral standard is brought down from heaven, thought to be real, and relocated in the world of human feelings and relationships, or, in Cupitt words, the world of ‘the heart’.
For Cupitt, Jesus stresses the moral importance of a high level of critical self-consciousness: Get the beam out of your own eye, calculate, and then be extravagantly generous, because that is what melts the heart, unfreezes human relationships, and breaks the culture of ressentiment (Cupitt’s emphasis). Ressentiment is the French word that Nietzsche uses to sum up the whole range of reactive or negative emotions, including scorn, disgust, dislike, envy, lust, disapproval, repugnance, contempt, impatience, malice, irritation, anger, rage, fury, fear, terror, hatred, boredom, indifference, recoiling, seething resentment, begrudging, outrage, indignation at, despair of, and many more. When they surge up in us in reaction to another, we want to separate ourselves as far as possible from that person.
In contrast, the positive emotions do not cloud or block our relation to the other person. These emotions are mostly very cool and transparent and not numerous. They include regard, attention, interest, sympathy, pity, respect, admiration, allegiance, friendship, and love. Usually the positive emotions don’t present moral problems, but the negative ones are often violent and a threat to social peace. To overcome them, we must often be almost supernaturally “big” and generous, going beyond justice.
To help us do this, the Jesus of the red or pink sayings urges us to choose a new moral world where everything is clear and brightly lit, completely open, explicit, bright and clear, not continuing with ill-feeling which is often double-feeling, such as malice, deceit, deception, and duplicity which imply a certain doubleness that maintains a gap between our displayed feelings and real but veiled feelings that are hidden behind them.
Because of his emphasis on feelings between people, Jesus values people more than the religious law. Stories like the healing on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:9-14) imply the end of the rule of religious law and the appearance of a human who is more radically free and autonomous than ever before. Thus, Jesus radicalizes Jeremiah and Ezekiel who proclaim that the law will be written on people’s hearts and God will take away people’s hearts of stone and give them instead hearts of flesh (Jeremiah 31:33; Ezekiel 36:26). Jesus becomes anthropocentric and emotivist, changing ethics profoundly by secularizing ethics, historicizing it, and humanizing it. However, to question the Divine Law is to question God, especially God who is “outside” us. Thus, these sayings may be some of the reason for Jesus’ troubles with the authorities.
Jesus’ teachings are difficult for individuals to follow, and, of course, threatening to the religious establishment. It is no wonder that an overlay of supernatural narrative was quickly put onto Jesus’ radical sayings. It is easier to worship than to follow and emulate. “Go and do likewise” is a difficult command; it is easier for us to leave the changing of the world to God. However, if the law is written on our hearts, we become God-like agents of change.
At the end of the book, Cupitt addresses this dilemma of direction from “outside and above” us and motivation from within, writing that ethics has two different faces or dimensions, corresponding to the doctrines of creation and redemption. “Creation” ethics would have us support existing reality: be loyal to the system as it is, obeying the rules, playing our parts, and raising the next generation. In contrast, “redemption” ethics would have us keep alive and spell out the Dream of a better world. If the Dream is sufficiently vivid and attractive, it will shape our values and the orientation of our lives. The Dream present in Jesus’ sayings has only recently, with the collapse of external religious sanctions, begun to be recognized and grasped as the way to the Law within us. Cupitt concludes by suggesting that the rediscovered historical Jesus might become the way to the reform and renewal of Christianity.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
The Church of the Afterlife
Background
In his new book, “The Meaning of the West,” Don Cupitt writes, “…I can at last finally leave the old religion behind, not just because what is left of it has now become so weak and irrational, but much more because the afterlife of Christianity has now become so much bigger and more interesting than its earlier period of existence as a great world religion. The British Labour Party, for example, has done far more to build the Kingdom of God on earth during the past hundred years than the Latin Church achieved in the same territory during the whole millennium AD 600-1600.
He continues: “Christian supernatural doctrine has not been public truth for centuries. Jane Austen, for example, is a profoundly Anglican novelist. In her world clergymen abound, and many of her characters are very serious about religion. Christian ethics -- at least in the form of an acute awareness of and sympathy for the feelings and the misfortunes of others -- is everywhere presupposed. But nobody in the entire Austen canon seriously advances a proposition of revealed theology, or even so much as mentions the name of Christ. We cannot imagine any of them doing so. In brief, even in Jane Austen’s world Christian theology is already dead. The Anglican Church is still around, but Christianity is in reality already well into its afterlife period. (My emphasis.)
The Churches Today
Can today’s Church be part of the afterlife of Christianity? Cupitt thinks not. As he writes, what’s left of religion is weak and irrational. It’s weak because most churches, particularly of mainline Protestant denominations, are unwilling to proclaim the old supernatural dogmas with conviction, while fearing to preach new messages to their “base” that is perceived as clinging to the old ways for support. The price these churches pay for their weakness is that most people find them unnecessary to their lives. The churches say nothing helpful to most people, and they live in Christianity’s afterlife without missing these churches.
The churches that today are not weak are instead irrational. These, of course, are the fundamentalists; right-wing Ratzinger Roman Catholics (the latter most clearly seen in Opus Dei and Society of St. Pius X with its Holocaust denier); and the Evangelicals. The Evangelicals are now ascendant in the United States, a religious bloc that constitutes a quarter, perhaps a third, of the population (“Christian Century” editorial, January 27, 2009). Rick Warren, an Evangelical, was anointed by Obama and is, as a result, now the most powerful religious leader in the US. Although not a thoroughgoing fundamentalist, Warren’s invocation for the Inauguration showed him to be in the tradition of Church Christianity’s theological realism. Namely, God is a supernatural theistic being, not of this earth, who deigns to hear the prayer of us lesser, earthly beings but only if we pray in the name of Him who has sole access to God. The implication of the prayer was that others should get with this program or be left out. Such arrogance, of course, sets up a conflict between the saved versus the unsaved, and, many people I spoke to resented that this theism was given a national seal of approval.
Especially since the 18th century, theism has no longer held sway among either Christian clergy or people, and yet many people, even though they no longer identify with theistic language, expect to hear theistic language from Christian preachers. Thus, in the churches, both clergy and the people who still attend are using language that no longer moves them. As a result, the church has little effect on peoples’ lives. Of course, many people have already drifted away from the churches because what they’ve heard is meaningless to them. So except for the right-wing churches offering certainty for the timid, the churches are fading away.
The Afterlife of Christianity
Although the churches are fading away, Cupitt maintains that the postmodern West is secularized Christianity. Rejecting Christian dogma and leaving the church does not disconnect people from Christianity. He writes, “We remain what Christianity has made us, and in many respects the post modern West is more Christian than ever. If you are a Westerner and are committed to Western values, then you are a Christian.” In fact, Cupitt points out that the West is indelibly Christian. “…Much or all of what is most important in Christianity has become so deeply assimilated that we are no longer aware of it, and nobody has yet studied it in any systematic way.” No one has even thought of writing a theology of the indelible (Cupitt’s emphasis), namely all the vital cultural material of Christian origin that post-Christians have not and cannot throw off. The central example is the typically Western form of individual selfhood, specifically selfhood as anxiety and the consciousness of sin, derived directly from the seventh chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (see particularly verses 16-25), which leads to critical thinking, the basis of Western philosophy and science.
Other indelible ideas Cupitt identifies are the driving force behind Western humanitarianism:
1. The belief in the uniqueness and the unique value of each individual
2. The ethic of mutual love and forbearance
3. The principle that the weakest and most vulnerable members of society have a moral claim on our love and care. This, of course, comes directly from the Jewish requirement, as in Deut. 14:29, to care for resident aliens, orphans, and widows.
Many will see in these ideas the essence of the Gospel, which proclaims that this is what God wants and, therefore, God’s followers should “go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37).
Another “indelible” is ‘the uniformity of nature,’ a narrative picture of the world governed by universal natural laws accessible to us. This belief originally was strongly theological and is rooted in the covenant with Noah (Gen. 8:20-9:17) and in the belief in the faithfulness of God. Biblical theism has produced the indelible conviction that the uniformity of nature can produce reliable scientific knowledge and technologies.
The belief in progress is another indelible. It starts with the belief that God seeks the betterment of creation and that humans are God’s agents in this improvement. As humans act in God’s stead, power is gradually transferred from God to humans and with the irreversible transition of humans from innocence to experience we become more ‘God-like.’ Today, we are indeed burdened with our God-like destructive powers that can destroy the world, but we have yet to find the will to act fully as God’s agent for good. This one fact points to the urgency of our identifying how the Kingdom has already come and to work to bring it to earth more fully.
Society Without God The persistence of the indelible ideas from Christianity has been documented in the book “Society Without God” by Phil Zuckerman, even though he does not use the indelible concept. For 14 months, he talked to Danes and Swedes about religion, and his findings are discussed by Peter Steinfels in the February 28, 2009 issue of the “New York Times.”
Sweden and Denmark are among the least religious nations in the world, as measured by responses to poll questions about belief in God, the importance of religion in their lives, belief in life after death, or church attendance. And yet in these countries, the quality of life, as measured by life expectancy, child welfare, standard of living, and other categories, is among the highest in the world. Furthermore, these countries, Zuckerman found, were “moral, stable, humane and deeply good.” In addition, although they don’t seem to fear death very much and spend little time pondering the meaning of life, they were not “despairing nihilists,” but were “for the most part, a happy, satisfied lot.” Their Christianity is generally cultural with “little to do with God or creed,” but centered on “holidays, songs, stories and food.” Although not believers, many Scandinavians remain in the national, Lutheran church, and this cultural religion helps explain aspects of Denmark and Sweden that Zuckerman admires. One nonbeliever responded to a question about the sources of Denmark’s very ethical culture by saying, “We are Lutherans in our souls – I’m an atheist, but still have the Lutheran perceptions of many: to help your neighbor. Yeah it’s an old, good moral thought.” And, we might add, it is one of the indelible ideas from Christianity present in this no longer religious society.
Characteristics of the Church of the Afterlife
Cupitt believes that churches should be allowed to wither and die, as they are doing. However, I hope that if some of them can recognize the vigorous afterlife of Christianity already in western society, they could work to promote the coming of the Kingdom of God more fully here on earth, and thus have a role to play and be useful for people. The Church of the Afterlife’s main contribution can be to call attention to the afterlife of Christianity in signs of the Kingdom already here and to energize people to work to expand the Kingdom.
How would the Church of the Afterlife accomplish this? What would be its characteristics? Here are a few: Afterlife congregations will be explicit about religion as a vehicle for feelings aroused by experience. Also, these congregations will be forthright in discussing religion as myth, evolution as a new source for life-guiding myths today, and sex as a central human activity to be managed, not suppressed.
Religion as a Vehicle for Feelings We often think of religion in terms of doctrines: written statements of belief that characterize a religion. But doctrines are far from the basic stuff of religion. Rather, religion most profoundly is about our feelings, including our thanks, happiness, fear, love, hate, disgust, and surprise. In “Radicals and the Future of the Church,” Cupitt wrote, before he lost his faith in the church, that the church is needed because “It is a theatre in which we solemnly enact our deepest feelings.” The theatre analogy points to what happens in church. When we go to the theater, we usually naturally and easily suspend disbelief to enter into the world of the actors who by speech and action on stage in turn evoke in us actions, feelings, experiences and thoughts. So, likewise, during a religious service we may also suspend disbelief in the words and actions, and have religious feelings and experiences.
Charles Darwin contended that all humans everywhere have the same basic set of innate and constitutive emotions that are expressed by two kinds of muscular action: facial expression and bodily movement. We communicate these emotions to others often quite involuntarily as the result of instinct, rather than by learned behavior. Everyone worldwide recognizes and “reads” them similarly. Thus, we and those observing us may sense particular emotions while performing particular actions in worship, such as standing, sitting, kneeling, speaking, and singing. Joseph Ledoux in “The Emotional Brain” writes that emotions can produce conscious feelings, which, in turn, can lead to belief.
Religious rituals can bring meaning, a hallmark of belief, into focus. God can be the name and the marker for the meaning we find together in worship. God, as meaning, appears horizontally among worshipers while we understand that God in the vertical, supernatural direction is an exciting special effect produced as we together find God in our church, our theater of feelings.
Organized religion has usually been suspicious of feelings, because they are unreliable and not easily codified. Feelings are indeed erratic and fleeting, i. e., they are often over before they are identified or named. They come and go; they are conscious, but represent only some of our emotions, most of which are unconscious and not subject to our control. Thus, feelings, and more so, emotions, can be dangerous, which can heighten our anxiety. Furthermore, feelings can be hard to conceptualize, verbalize, and understand. They, like emotions, are virtually impossible to stop or control while happening and, once gone, may be hard or impossible to summon up again. Thus, feelings are like life as Cupitt describes it: finite, time-bound, contingent, unpredictable, transitory, and impermanent. Our feelings, quick, acute, and intuitive, tell us we are alive, and as insubstantial as feelings are, they are the basis of our life, our experience. They suffuse our experiences, including our religious experiences. However, if our awareness of God comes from our feelings and experiences, we soon learn that supernatural ways of thinking “improve” our God experiences, preserving them perfectly and unchanging, as Peter would have done on the Mount of Transfiguration when Jesus’ light shone before the disciples. But, of course, as Jesus knew, experiences can’t be preserved, but must be lived, even to death.
Religion as Myth Myths are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of and to interpret our feelings and experiences. Religious stories are myths; they are narratives we appropriate or develop to give meaning to our feelings and experiences. Religious narratives are not literally factual, but today’s dying churches usually assume that everyone is mentally seven years old and needs to be shielded from that knowledge. The influence of Fundamentalism, especially in America, is so strong that even mainline congregations are silent on the mythic nature of Bible stories and doctrines. Many of the people who remain in churches are either complicit in this deception or wishfully hoping that these stories are literal after all. They look for a return to childhood certainty. Of course, most people, even in the church, are past such pre-critical naiveté (this is Paul Ricoeur’s formulation) in which all stories are factual. However, people grow up; leave pre-critical naiveté behind, and sometimes embrace critical thinking, the next stage of maturity, as the best way of coping with life. However, few people in our culture, which demands certainty, move in their religious understanding to the third stage: post-critical naiveté. At this stage, we are able to apprehend the truth of myths, while embracing the knowledge that they are not literally factual. In Cupitt’s terminology, they are non-real. Non-realism is discussed on his website (http://www.doncupitt.com/realism/aboutnonrealism.html). Here is an excerpt:
“In religion, the move to non-realism implies the recognition that all religious and ethical ideas are human, with a human history. We give up the old metaphysical and cosmological way of understanding religious belief, and translate dogma into spirituality (a spirituality is a religious lifestyle). We understand all religious doctrines in practical terms, as guiding myths to live by, in the way that Kant, Kierkegaard and Bultmannn began to map out. We abandon ideas of objective and eternal truth, and instead see all truth as a human improvisation. We should give up all ideas of a heavenly or supernatural world-beyond. Yet, despite our seeming scepticism, we insist that non-realist religion can work very well as religion, and can deliver eternal happiness. Cupitt sees his religion of ordinary human life as the "Kingdom theology" that historic Christianity always knew it must eventually move to, after the end of the age of the Church and the arrival of a religion of immediate commitment to this world and this life only.”
So, the Church of the Afterlife can become an aid for people immersed in the flux of life and in the struggle to make sense of their feelings and experiences. The classic myths of Christianity, including God, Heaven, Hell, etc, can be experienced not as timeless Truths handed down from above, but as shorthand explanations of feelings and experiences we find ourselves coping with, such as awe, gratitude, bliss, love, hate, guilt, fear, etc. However, the classic church language generally is so antique and the approach so realistic that most people just tune out, often muttering, as they leave the church, “How can you believe such stuff?”
The “church as theatre” idea is important, because it gives us a way of seeing that post-critical naiveté may yet work in church, in spite of Cupitt’s pessimism, in much the same way as in the theatre. People still flock to movies, plays, operas, TV programs, and video games to be entertained, yes, but also to enter alternate worlds where various possibilities are presented for living our lives. In the theatre, people suspend their critical faculties to enter a make-believe world, and, if the show is good, the feelings of the characters resonate with the viewers and ideas come to them on how they might cope with similar feelings in their lives. Of course, this process goes back to the ancient Greek theatre where plays, whether tragedies or comedies, were religious. Aristotle pointed out that viewers of tragedies may achieve catharsis, the purging of the emotions of pity and fear. Similarly, a liturgy, a sermon, a class at church is good if these activities touch us and help us manage our feelings wisely.
Notice that in this formulation, religion is not about abstract doctrines concerning grand religious concepts, but rather about the feelings our experiences arouse. Religious language and activity can help us put these feelings and experiences in perspective, but there is nothing everlasting about religious formulations. They change as peoples’ needs change. So the Church of the Afterlife will reformulate old myths and develop helpful new ones.
Evolution as a new Source of Myths The concept of biological evolution can be a rich source for new and re-worked myths. Evolution, in Darwin’s formulation, is the idea that all living things are descended from a common ancestor and change by natural selection into new species. Of course, the idea of evolution has been resisted mightily by the churches, both because it is not in accord with the Genesis account of creation, but also more importantly because, as Darwin saw, and biologists after him have confirmed, natural selection, the mechanism of evolution, is random, opportunistic, and purposeless. Or rather, the only purpose possible to assign to natural selection is that it ensures that the most fit organisms reproduce, insuring the appearance of the next generation. Natural selection allows for no Guiding Hand from above. The action is strictly down here on earth where the struggle for existence and reproduction is intense. The only conditions needed for evolution are chance (contingency, randomness), a very long time (billions of years), and natural selection. Darwin came to the idea of natural selection out of his experience of humanly guided breeding, in which humans select and breed plants and animals for certain desired characteristics, such as disease resistance in wheat or speed in race horses. Darwin reasoned that selection of organisms most likely to survive and reproduce is constantly occurring in nature, where there is no one guiding the process.
The Theology of Evolution Few Christian theologians have embraced evolution as a source of theological insights. John F. Haught is an exception, and he writes in “God after Darwin” (2000), that Darwinian evolution is a gift to theology. Although Haught’s argument is nuanced, certain points stand out as bases for new myths derived from evolution.
Accept chance as part of life New species arise as the result of chance events called mutations. Although most mutations are useless or harmful, a few give organisms a reproductive advantage. Out of such random and unpredictable events more reproductively fit organisms then arise, while other organisms, less able to compete for resources and mates, die out. Thus, new, fitter organisms arise because of contingency. Contingency is not a mask for a hidden necessity dictated by past events, not yet understood. Rather, it can be interpreted as a new myth. It is the way the cosmos breaks out of subordination to habitual routine and opens itself to the future.
Note that two popular catch phrases, often offered as explanations for events, are at odds with this understanding of contingency: “Everything happens for a reason” and “It is God’s will.” Often, no compelling reasons can be adduced for events, nor can God’s will easily be discerned in them. Notably, Jesus is recorded as sidestepping such reasoning in Luke 13:4-5, where he asked if those killed by the fall of the tower of Siloam were worst offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem. He answers no, implying that some events occur by chance or by unknown causes, and God’s will need not be put forth as a reason. The acknowledgement of contingency as a common feature of life can be the basis for myths that are more helpful than the anxious demand for reasons for events. A better catch phrase is “You should play the hand you were dealt as best you are able.”
With novelty, evolution moves toward the future Because unpredictable novelty is a central feature of evolution, the future is unknown and not merely the working out of past conditions. As humans contemplate the future, they can both acknowledge their ignorance of future events and carefully plan to minimize the harmful consequences of certain human activities. Our acknowledgement of evolution and of our profound, often unintended, effect on our survival and that of other species leads to new myths centered on the need for us to take care of the earth if it is to flourish. Our Garden of Eden has been ravaged and needs our help. Are we wise enough to provide it? This is the new narrative, the new myth we can step into now.
God “lets the world be,” permitting evolution Cupitt calls for “solar ethics.” This ethics presupposes a new myth about the future: We are to shine in the world for others like the sun. The sun does not grasp but empties itself, living and dying at the same time, and in so doing serves us all. Such solar language recalls the great hymn to Jesus in Philippians 2 that starts in verse 5: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” Jürgen Moltmann argues that the creation of the universe itself can be thought of not so much a display of divine might as a consequence of God’s self-restraint. In order to create heaven and earth, God emptied Godself of God’s omnipotence, and as Creator, took the form of a servant.
God opens the future Further, Moltmann maintains, God can be viewed as the God of the future, and this suggests possibilities for a new myth, namely, God is not “up there,” but rather “up ahead,” drawing the whole creation forward into the future. In being the God of the future, God does not “micromanage” as a designer, but rather gives the world room to be itself. The world emerges as separate from and uncontrolled by God. This metaphysical and theological framework provides a way of bringing meaning not only to our bewilderment about our broken world and our individual suffering, but also the apparent struggle, waste, and suffering occasioned by evolution through natural selection. Calvin wrote that the world is a theater with God as the audience. This vision of God’s emptying is as if a “theater” has been provided where the drama of creation could take place. Like all good dramas, this play has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Science has sketched the outlines of the beginning of the world and the middle, our current time, but the future only God knows.
Sex: Central to Life Since St. Paul, the church has sought to suppress sex, imposing the myth that sex is bad. Unlike Judaism, which views sex as essential for its survival, the church depended frequently on conversions, often forced, as a main means of growth. As opportunities for conversions waned, heterosexual marriage was seen as a second best source of growth.
Paul set up a distinction between the flesh (a major source of sin or evil in our bodies) and the spirit (the presence of God, thus goodness, in our bodies). Although many of the works of the flesh that Paul compiles, as in Galatians 5, seem nonsexual (idolatry, sorcery, enmities, etc), these come in the list after obviously sexual ones (fornication, impurity, licentiousness), thus leaving the impression that sexual activity is bad or at least leads to bad activities.
Whatever Paul actually thought about sex, his lasting legacy in this area for the church has been that our sexually inclined flesh is at war with God, and we should mortify our flesh and deny our sexual nature to become the people God wants us to be. Sexual renunciation became the sure path to spiritual holiness, and as Peter Brown documents in “The Body and Society,” some in the church became “spiritual athletes” by becoming seemingly totally nonsexual and thus, it was thought, pure and acceptable to God by their heroic efforts. This accounts, of course, in the church for the high regard in which virgins are held. They are venerated not so much because of their martyrdom for the Faith, but because they are biologically intact. These heroes, of course, were a source of guilt for the ordinary church members who were not so subtly reminded of their own impure, often nonvirginal state.
It is difficult to overestimate the damage that this “just say no” myth about sex has caused. Just one example is telling. Homosexual teenagers are 3 to 7 times more likely to commit suicide than heterosexual teenagers. It’s likely that many of the gay teenagers who kill themselves couldn’t live with the knowledge that they were an abomination to be put to death (Leviticus 20:13).
However, this misery has been very good for the church. People’s guilt about their sexual sinfulness kept them coming back to church for absolution granted with the proviso that the sinner renounce the sin of sex and promise to be “pure,” meaning nonsexual. Now, of course, more and more people are accepting their sexuality as part of their lives and not something to be excised. However, they are getting precious little help from the churches in their efforts to become responsible sexual persons. People attending church learn that sex is evil, unmentionable, or both. The fundamentalists are still denouncing sex, while the liberals make great efforts to say as little as possible about sex as they can. The contortions of the mainline Protestant denominations over the gay question demonstrate this. The major impression from these discussions is that the churches fervently wish that they didn’t have to discuss sex, gay or otherwise. Because of the demand for sexual renunciation by the church, most people are embarrassed by sex and often can’t cope effectively with their sexual feelings and experiences, nor can they talk freely about sex with others.
So, the Church of the Afterlife will preach and teach to replace the “just say no” sexual myth of traditional Christianity with a “just say yes” sexual myth that celebrates sex as a central feature of our humanity. This “just say yes” sexual myth has a number of important aspects: Sex is central to life, sexual feelings are common and natural, sex is not only for reproduction, everyone is sexual, People are different sexually, and in sex, as in all of life, love your neighbor as yourself.
Sex is central to life For most multi-cellular organisms, sexual reproduction is necessary for the survival of the species, and therefore sex is as important as eating, sometimes more so. This simple fact needs be the main message of “just say yes,” namely, we are sexual people.
Sexual feelings are common and natural Further, many of our feelings and experiences relate to sex, relationships, and love. These feelings should be celebrated, not quashed. A church that requires its members to suppress sexual feelings because they are bad leaves people with shame and guilt for feeling sexual. If the Church of the Afterlife can help people recognize and accept their sexual feelings as good, it will make a useful contribution.
Sex is not only for reproduction As important as sex is to reproduction, that is not its only function. Sex gives pleasure whether for reproduction or not. Sex can build relationships and be the basis for companionship and bonding, as in the connection between sex and love, but sex can also be friendly. Sex can help establish hierarchies in primate bands, so much the same dynamic may play out in human relationships. Aggressive power relations can be sexualized, accounting for the often homoerotic nature of male bonding and competition.
Everyone is sexual From birth to death, sex plays a major part in human life. Often only sexually mature, young people are thought to be sexual, but infants, children, and older people also are sexual. Thus, infants and children are not “innocent” in the sense of being nonsexual, but, they have sexual feelings, thoughts, and behaviors appropriate for their age. The “innocence” of children in sexual matters is often invoked in relation in instances of sexual abuse or exploitation. In such cases, it is the abuse or exploitation that should be prevented or stopped. Children should not feel guilty about their sexuality, and abused children should receive help, if needed, in understanding that the abuse was not their fault.
People are different sexually Everyone is sexual, but not everyone is sexual in the same way. Peoples’ sexuality develops at different rates, sex plays a bigger part in some peoples’ lives than in others, people develop different ideas about appropriate sexual behavior, and, of course, not everyone is heterosexual. Current studies indicate that 5 to 10% of the population is sexual minorities, including male homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people. Children in sexual minorities would be particularly helped if early in their life when they normally ask questions about sex, the presence of these minorities were discussed with them. If this happened, many a gay kid would be spared the misery of being “all alone with no one to talk to” about his or her sexual feelings.
In sex, as in all of life, love your neighbor as yourself The second great commandment is, of course, a call to push back on our self-centered impulses. Evolutionary biologists suggest that altruism is an effort toward group cohesion. Protect the person who needs your help today; you may need it tomorrow. However, the second commandment is more radical. Do right by anyone who crosses your path, even though you don’t know what he or she might do in response. This can be dangerous. After all, the cynic’s motto is “no good deed goes unpunished,” but nevertheless we are called to treat others as we want to be treated. The union sex seems to promise may not always be realized. Sometimes, extending ourselves into sex can be punishing, filled with pain and heartbreak. As a result, we may go at sex warily, if at all, or become takers, rather than, sharers of sex. The second commandment is a good guide for us sexual beings, because as we try to follow it, we begin to see the situation from the other’s point of view.
Conclusion: The Trinity or Can God be Saved?
So, church is to become a place where expositions on myth, evolution, and sex take center stage? No, but churches should use these ideas to give people better tools to engage the world with a broad religious vision. The small, static vision of the world presented by most churches will make them even more weak and irrational, serving no need but their own survival.
Churches should be religious organizations, helping people apprehend and appropriate the “more,” in Williams James’s terminology, into their lives, so they might see the “big picture.” Of course, this “more” or the “big picture” is traditionally called God. However, “God” is rarely compelling in people’s lives. When people do make a forceful case for God it is usually because they are pointing us to the highest moral or spiritual values they can imagine. Nigel Leaves in his book, “The God Problem” writes of Feuerbach’s concept of a loving God as the human ideal of love projected onto the universe: “God” is love deified. God may become “real” when the feelings expressed about God strike us as real. Such a moment occurred for me watching Dustin Lance Black’s acceptance speech for his Oscar for best screenplay for “Milk” (http://www.couragecampaign.org/page/s/ThankYouForMilk), in which he assured gay teenagers that God loved them for who they were. Black’s obvious passion made God real in that moment. When we feel deeply, our use of God language to express our feelings can ring true, and God can become real.
From the record of the New Testament, something like that appears to have happened as people encountered Jesus or perhaps more accurately the post-Easter Christ. They began to experience him as God in human form. Bishop John Spong in his essay of November 20, 2008, entitled, “MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, Deepak Chopra and Biblical Illiteracy,” points out that it is possible to trace this divinizing trend in the New Testament from the writings of Paul in the 40s to the 60s of the first century CE, through the synoptic gospels in the 70s and 80s to the Gospel of John in the 90s with John’s writings clearly forming the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity. One way to explain this trend is to imagine people in worship listening to the Bible stories and having feelings for Jesus that could be best expressed in God language. Such language would lead to the idea of Jesus as God, embodied. The doctrine of the Trinity is an attempt to put such feelings into words, while maintaining the monotheistic understanding. However, words are never adequate to describe feelings. Without the feelings that first prompted the doctrines, they are lifeless. No one cares; they are but relics.
Such changes in our understanding of God are ongoing. In “Radicals and the Future of the Church,” Cupitt writes that some of us are coming to “... believe in an historically-evolving, human, and culturally-established God.” Further, “...we now have become responsible for our God. We’ve got to appraise him, update him, rewrite him continually.” Cupitt points out, following Hegel, that the doctrine of the Trinity is an obvious beginning for reinterpretation: “The co-equality of the second person (Christ, the Son) with the third person (The Holy Spirit) is an invitation to demythologize, because the full coequality and coeternity of the Son means that everything the Father is, the Son is also. And when the Son completely and irrevocably commits himself to becoming human then God has become human, without remainder. So everything that God is, this fellow human being beside me now is.” Also, “... the God of Pentecost (The Holy Spirit) is a postmodern God who has ceased to be a substance and has instead become the interrelatedness of everything.... the medium in which we live and move and have our being, the dance of signs.” Therefore, we humans can be God incarnate, expressing the Spirit through (as the old prayer has it) “our life and conversation.” The challenge lies in whether we can express God in our lives so that our words and actions will be in keeping with the ideals that we can envision.
By recognizing that religion is an attempt to make sense of and to share feelings, the Church of the Afterlife could revitalize old formulations in ways that capture peoples’ imagination anew. The power of their feelings could help them and those they touch to lead truly religious lives here, as they continue to help bring in the Kingdom on Earth.
(“The Meaning of the West” was published in 2008 in England by SCM Press. I bought my copy from www.blackwell.co.uk for $22.49, including postage.)
In his new book, “The Meaning of the West,” Don Cupitt writes, “…I can at last finally leave the old religion behind, not just because what is left of it has now become so weak and irrational, but much more because the afterlife of Christianity has now become so much bigger and more interesting than its earlier period of existence as a great world religion. The British Labour Party, for example, has done far more to build the Kingdom of God on earth during the past hundred years than the Latin Church achieved in the same territory during the whole millennium AD 600-1600.
He continues: “Christian supernatural doctrine has not been public truth for centuries. Jane Austen, for example, is a profoundly Anglican novelist. In her world clergymen abound, and many of her characters are very serious about religion. Christian ethics -- at least in the form of an acute awareness of and sympathy for the feelings and the misfortunes of others -- is everywhere presupposed. But nobody in the entire Austen canon seriously advances a proposition of revealed theology, or even so much as mentions the name of Christ. We cannot imagine any of them doing so. In brief, even in Jane Austen’s world Christian theology is already dead. The Anglican Church is still around, but Christianity is in reality already well into its afterlife period. (My emphasis.)
The Churches Today
Can today’s Church be part of the afterlife of Christianity? Cupitt thinks not. As he writes, what’s left of religion is weak and irrational. It’s weak because most churches, particularly of mainline Protestant denominations, are unwilling to proclaim the old supernatural dogmas with conviction, while fearing to preach new messages to their “base” that is perceived as clinging to the old ways for support. The price these churches pay for their weakness is that most people find them unnecessary to their lives. The churches say nothing helpful to most people, and they live in Christianity’s afterlife without missing these churches.
The churches that today are not weak are instead irrational. These, of course, are the fundamentalists; right-wing Ratzinger Roman Catholics (the latter most clearly seen in Opus Dei and Society of St. Pius X with its Holocaust denier); and the Evangelicals. The Evangelicals are now ascendant in the United States, a religious bloc that constitutes a quarter, perhaps a third, of the population (“Christian Century” editorial, January 27, 2009). Rick Warren, an Evangelical, was anointed by Obama and is, as a result, now the most powerful religious leader in the US. Although not a thoroughgoing fundamentalist, Warren’s invocation for the Inauguration showed him to be in the tradition of Church Christianity’s theological realism. Namely, God is a supernatural theistic being, not of this earth, who deigns to hear the prayer of us lesser, earthly beings but only if we pray in the name of Him who has sole access to God. The implication of the prayer was that others should get with this program or be left out. Such arrogance, of course, sets up a conflict between the saved versus the unsaved, and, many people I spoke to resented that this theism was given a national seal of approval.
Especially since the 18th century, theism has no longer held sway among either Christian clergy or people, and yet many people, even though they no longer identify with theistic language, expect to hear theistic language from Christian preachers. Thus, in the churches, both clergy and the people who still attend are using language that no longer moves them. As a result, the church has little effect on peoples’ lives. Of course, many people have already drifted away from the churches because what they’ve heard is meaningless to them. So except for the right-wing churches offering certainty for the timid, the churches are fading away.
The Afterlife of Christianity
Although the churches are fading away, Cupitt maintains that the postmodern West is secularized Christianity. Rejecting Christian dogma and leaving the church does not disconnect people from Christianity. He writes, “We remain what Christianity has made us, and in many respects the post modern West is more Christian than ever. If you are a Westerner and are committed to Western values, then you are a Christian.” In fact, Cupitt points out that the West is indelibly Christian. “…Much or all of what is most important in Christianity has become so deeply assimilated that we are no longer aware of it, and nobody has yet studied it in any systematic way.” No one has even thought of writing a theology of the indelible (Cupitt’s emphasis), namely all the vital cultural material of Christian origin that post-Christians have not and cannot throw off. The central example is the typically Western form of individual selfhood, specifically selfhood as anxiety and the consciousness of sin, derived directly from the seventh chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (see particularly verses 16-25), which leads to critical thinking, the basis of Western philosophy and science.
Other indelible ideas Cupitt identifies are the driving force behind Western humanitarianism:
1. The belief in the uniqueness and the unique value of each individual
2. The ethic of mutual love and forbearance
3. The principle that the weakest and most vulnerable members of society have a moral claim on our love and care. This, of course, comes directly from the Jewish requirement, as in Deut. 14:29, to care for resident aliens, orphans, and widows.
Many will see in these ideas the essence of the Gospel, which proclaims that this is what God wants and, therefore, God’s followers should “go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37).
Another “indelible” is ‘the uniformity of nature,’ a narrative picture of the world governed by universal natural laws accessible to us. This belief originally was strongly theological and is rooted in the covenant with Noah (Gen. 8:20-9:17) and in the belief in the faithfulness of God. Biblical theism has produced the indelible conviction that the uniformity of nature can produce reliable scientific knowledge and technologies.
The belief in progress is another indelible. It starts with the belief that God seeks the betterment of creation and that humans are God’s agents in this improvement. As humans act in God’s stead, power is gradually transferred from God to humans and with the irreversible transition of humans from innocence to experience we become more ‘God-like.’ Today, we are indeed burdened with our God-like destructive powers that can destroy the world, but we have yet to find the will to act fully as God’s agent for good. This one fact points to the urgency of our identifying how the Kingdom has already come and to work to bring it to earth more fully.
Society Without God The persistence of the indelible ideas from Christianity has been documented in the book “Society Without God” by Phil Zuckerman, even though he does not use the indelible concept. For 14 months, he talked to Danes and Swedes about religion, and his findings are discussed by Peter Steinfels in the February 28, 2009 issue of the “New York Times.”
Sweden and Denmark are among the least religious nations in the world, as measured by responses to poll questions about belief in God, the importance of religion in their lives, belief in life after death, or church attendance. And yet in these countries, the quality of life, as measured by life expectancy, child welfare, standard of living, and other categories, is among the highest in the world. Furthermore, these countries, Zuckerman found, were “moral, stable, humane and deeply good.” In addition, although they don’t seem to fear death very much and spend little time pondering the meaning of life, they were not “despairing nihilists,” but were “for the most part, a happy, satisfied lot.” Their Christianity is generally cultural with “little to do with God or creed,” but centered on “holidays, songs, stories and food.” Although not believers, many Scandinavians remain in the national, Lutheran church, and this cultural religion helps explain aspects of Denmark and Sweden that Zuckerman admires. One nonbeliever responded to a question about the sources of Denmark’s very ethical culture by saying, “We are Lutherans in our souls – I’m an atheist, but still have the Lutheran perceptions of many: to help your neighbor. Yeah it’s an old, good moral thought.” And, we might add, it is one of the indelible ideas from Christianity present in this no longer religious society.
Characteristics of the Church of the Afterlife
Cupitt believes that churches should be allowed to wither and die, as they are doing. However, I hope that if some of them can recognize the vigorous afterlife of Christianity already in western society, they could work to promote the coming of the Kingdom of God more fully here on earth, and thus have a role to play and be useful for people. The Church of the Afterlife’s main contribution can be to call attention to the afterlife of Christianity in signs of the Kingdom already here and to energize people to work to expand the Kingdom.
How would the Church of the Afterlife accomplish this? What would be its characteristics? Here are a few: Afterlife congregations will be explicit about religion as a vehicle for feelings aroused by experience. Also, these congregations will be forthright in discussing religion as myth, evolution as a new source for life-guiding myths today, and sex as a central human activity to be managed, not suppressed.
Religion as a Vehicle for Feelings We often think of religion in terms of doctrines: written statements of belief that characterize a religion. But doctrines are far from the basic stuff of religion. Rather, religion most profoundly is about our feelings, including our thanks, happiness, fear, love, hate, disgust, and surprise. In “Radicals and the Future of the Church,” Cupitt wrote, before he lost his faith in the church, that the church is needed because “It is a theatre in which we solemnly enact our deepest feelings.” The theatre analogy points to what happens in church. When we go to the theater, we usually naturally and easily suspend disbelief to enter into the world of the actors who by speech and action on stage in turn evoke in us actions, feelings, experiences and thoughts. So, likewise, during a religious service we may also suspend disbelief in the words and actions, and have religious feelings and experiences.
Charles Darwin contended that all humans everywhere have the same basic set of innate and constitutive emotions that are expressed by two kinds of muscular action: facial expression and bodily movement. We communicate these emotions to others often quite involuntarily as the result of instinct, rather than by learned behavior. Everyone worldwide recognizes and “reads” them similarly. Thus, we and those observing us may sense particular emotions while performing particular actions in worship, such as standing, sitting, kneeling, speaking, and singing. Joseph Ledoux in “The Emotional Brain” writes that emotions can produce conscious feelings, which, in turn, can lead to belief.
Religious rituals can bring meaning, a hallmark of belief, into focus. God can be the name and the marker for the meaning we find together in worship. God, as meaning, appears horizontally among worshipers while we understand that God in the vertical, supernatural direction is an exciting special effect produced as we together find God in our church, our theater of feelings.
Organized religion has usually been suspicious of feelings, because they are unreliable and not easily codified. Feelings are indeed erratic and fleeting, i. e., they are often over before they are identified or named. They come and go; they are conscious, but represent only some of our emotions, most of which are unconscious and not subject to our control. Thus, feelings, and more so, emotions, can be dangerous, which can heighten our anxiety. Furthermore, feelings can be hard to conceptualize, verbalize, and understand. They, like emotions, are virtually impossible to stop or control while happening and, once gone, may be hard or impossible to summon up again. Thus, feelings are like life as Cupitt describes it: finite, time-bound, contingent, unpredictable, transitory, and impermanent. Our feelings, quick, acute, and intuitive, tell us we are alive, and as insubstantial as feelings are, they are the basis of our life, our experience. They suffuse our experiences, including our religious experiences. However, if our awareness of God comes from our feelings and experiences, we soon learn that supernatural ways of thinking “improve” our God experiences, preserving them perfectly and unchanging, as Peter would have done on the Mount of Transfiguration when Jesus’ light shone before the disciples. But, of course, as Jesus knew, experiences can’t be preserved, but must be lived, even to death.
Religion as Myth Myths are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of and to interpret our feelings and experiences. Religious stories are myths; they are narratives we appropriate or develop to give meaning to our feelings and experiences. Religious narratives are not literally factual, but today’s dying churches usually assume that everyone is mentally seven years old and needs to be shielded from that knowledge. The influence of Fundamentalism, especially in America, is so strong that even mainline congregations are silent on the mythic nature of Bible stories and doctrines. Many of the people who remain in churches are either complicit in this deception or wishfully hoping that these stories are literal after all. They look for a return to childhood certainty. Of course, most people, even in the church, are past such pre-critical naiveté (this is Paul Ricoeur’s formulation) in which all stories are factual. However, people grow up; leave pre-critical naiveté behind, and sometimes embrace critical thinking, the next stage of maturity, as the best way of coping with life. However, few people in our culture, which demands certainty, move in their religious understanding to the third stage: post-critical naiveté. At this stage, we are able to apprehend the truth of myths, while embracing the knowledge that they are not literally factual. In Cupitt’s terminology, they are non-real. Non-realism is discussed on his website (http://www.doncupitt.com/realism/aboutnonrealism.html). Here is an excerpt:
“In religion, the move to non-realism implies the recognition that all religious and ethical ideas are human, with a human history. We give up the old metaphysical and cosmological way of understanding religious belief, and translate dogma into spirituality (a spirituality is a religious lifestyle). We understand all religious doctrines in practical terms, as guiding myths to live by, in the way that Kant, Kierkegaard and Bultmannn began to map out. We abandon ideas of objective and eternal truth, and instead see all truth as a human improvisation. We should give up all ideas of a heavenly or supernatural world-beyond. Yet, despite our seeming scepticism, we insist that non-realist religion can work very well as religion, and can deliver eternal happiness. Cupitt sees his religion of ordinary human life as the "Kingdom theology" that historic Christianity always knew it must eventually move to, after the end of the age of the Church and the arrival of a religion of immediate commitment to this world and this life only.”
So, the Church of the Afterlife can become an aid for people immersed in the flux of life and in the struggle to make sense of their feelings and experiences. The classic myths of Christianity, including God, Heaven, Hell, etc, can be experienced not as timeless Truths handed down from above, but as shorthand explanations of feelings and experiences we find ourselves coping with, such as awe, gratitude, bliss, love, hate, guilt, fear, etc. However, the classic church language generally is so antique and the approach so realistic that most people just tune out, often muttering, as they leave the church, “How can you believe such stuff?”
The “church as theatre” idea is important, because it gives us a way of seeing that post-critical naiveté may yet work in church, in spite of Cupitt’s pessimism, in much the same way as in the theatre. People still flock to movies, plays, operas, TV programs, and video games to be entertained, yes, but also to enter alternate worlds where various possibilities are presented for living our lives. In the theatre, people suspend their critical faculties to enter a make-believe world, and, if the show is good, the feelings of the characters resonate with the viewers and ideas come to them on how they might cope with similar feelings in their lives. Of course, this process goes back to the ancient Greek theatre where plays, whether tragedies or comedies, were religious. Aristotle pointed out that viewers of tragedies may achieve catharsis, the purging of the emotions of pity and fear. Similarly, a liturgy, a sermon, a class at church is good if these activities touch us and help us manage our feelings wisely.
Notice that in this formulation, religion is not about abstract doctrines concerning grand religious concepts, but rather about the feelings our experiences arouse. Religious language and activity can help us put these feelings and experiences in perspective, but there is nothing everlasting about religious formulations. They change as peoples’ needs change. So the Church of the Afterlife will reformulate old myths and develop helpful new ones.
Evolution as a new Source of Myths The concept of biological evolution can be a rich source for new and re-worked myths. Evolution, in Darwin’s formulation, is the idea that all living things are descended from a common ancestor and change by natural selection into new species. Of course, the idea of evolution has been resisted mightily by the churches, both because it is not in accord with the Genesis account of creation, but also more importantly because, as Darwin saw, and biologists after him have confirmed, natural selection, the mechanism of evolution, is random, opportunistic, and purposeless. Or rather, the only purpose possible to assign to natural selection is that it ensures that the most fit organisms reproduce, insuring the appearance of the next generation. Natural selection allows for no Guiding Hand from above. The action is strictly down here on earth where the struggle for existence and reproduction is intense. The only conditions needed for evolution are chance (contingency, randomness), a very long time (billions of years), and natural selection. Darwin came to the idea of natural selection out of his experience of humanly guided breeding, in which humans select and breed plants and animals for certain desired characteristics, such as disease resistance in wheat or speed in race horses. Darwin reasoned that selection of organisms most likely to survive and reproduce is constantly occurring in nature, where there is no one guiding the process.
The Theology of Evolution Few Christian theologians have embraced evolution as a source of theological insights. John F. Haught is an exception, and he writes in “God after Darwin” (2000), that Darwinian evolution is a gift to theology. Although Haught’s argument is nuanced, certain points stand out as bases for new myths derived from evolution.
Accept chance as part of life New species arise as the result of chance events called mutations. Although most mutations are useless or harmful, a few give organisms a reproductive advantage. Out of such random and unpredictable events more reproductively fit organisms then arise, while other organisms, less able to compete for resources and mates, die out. Thus, new, fitter organisms arise because of contingency. Contingency is not a mask for a hidden necessity dictated by past events, not yet understood. Rather, it can be interpreted as a new myth. It is the way the cosmos breaks out of subordination to habitual routine and opens itself to the future.
Note that two popular catch phrases, often offered as explanations for events, are at odds with this understanding of contingency: “Everything happens for a reason” and “It is God’s will.” Often, no compelling reasons can be adduced for events, nor can God’s will easily be discerned in them. Notably, Jesus is recorded as sidestepping such reasoning in Luke 13:4-5, where he asked if those killed by the fall of the tower of Siloam were worst offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem. He answers no, implying that some events occur by chance or by unknown causes, and God’s will need not be put forth as a reason. The acknowledgement of contingency as a common feature of life can be the basis for myths that are more helpful than the anxious demand for reasons for events. A better catch phrase is “You should play the hand you were dealt as best you are able.”
With novelty, evolution moves toward the future Because unpredictable novelty is a central feature of evolution, the future is unknown and not merely the working out of past conditions. As humans contemplate the future, they can both acknowledge their ignorance of future events and carefully plan to minimize the harmful consequences of certain human activities. Our acknowledgement of evolution and of our profound, often unintended, effect on our survival and that of other species leads to new myths centered on the need for us to take care of the earth if it is to flourish. Our Garden of Eden has been ravaged and needs our help. Are we wise enough to provide it? This is the new narrative, the new myth we can step into now.
God “lets the world be,” permitting evolution Cupitt calls for “solar ethics.” This ethics presupposes a new myth about the future: We are to shine in the world for others like the sun. The sun does not grasp but empties itself, living and dying at the same time, and in so doing serves us all. Such solar language recalls the great hymn to Jesus in Philippians 2 that starts in verse 5: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” Jürgen Moltmann argues that the creation of the universe itself can be thought of not so much a display of divine might as a consequence of God’s self-restraint. In order to create heaven and earth, God emptied Godself of God’s omnipotence, and as Creator, took the form of a servant.
God opens the future Further, Moltmann maintains, God can be viewed as the God of the future, and this suggests possibilities for a new myth, namely, God is not “up there,” but rather “up ahead,” drawing the whole creation forward into the future. In being the God of the future, God does not “micromanage” as a designer, but rather gives the world room to be itself. The world emerges as separate from and uncontrolled by God. This metaphysical and theological framework provides a way of bringing meaning not only to our bewilderment about our broken world and our individual suffering, but also the apparent struggle, waste, and suffering occasioned by evolution through natural selection. Calvin wrote that the world is a theater with God as the audience. This vision of God’s emptying is as if a “theater” has been provided where the drama of creation could take place. Like all good dramas, this play has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Science has sketched the outlines of the beginning of the world and the middle, our current time, but the future only God knows.
Sex: Central to Life Since St. Paul, the church has sought to suppress sex, imposing the myth that sex is bad. Unlike Judaism, which views sex as essential for its survival, the church depended frequently on conversions, often forced, as a main means of growth. As opportunities for conversions waned, heterosexual marriage was seen as a second best source of growth.
Paul set up a distinction between the flesh (a major source of sin or evil in our bodies) and the spirit (the presence of God, thus goodness, in our bodies). Although many of the works of the flesh that Paul compiles, as in Galatians 5, seem nonsexual (idolatry, sorcery, enmities, etc), these come in the list after obviously sexual ones (fornication, impurity, licentiousness), thus leaving the impression that sexual activity is bad or at least leads to bad activities.
Whatever Paul actually thought about sex, his lasting legacy in this area for the church has been that our sexually inclined flesh is at war with God, and we should mortify our flesh and deny our sexual nature to become the people God wants us to be. Sexual renunciation became the sure path to spiritual holiness, and as Peter Brown documents in “The Body and Society,” some in the church became “spiritual athletes” by becoming seemingly totally nonsexual and thus, it was thought, pure and acceptable to God by their heroic efforts. This accounts, of course, in the church for the high regard in which virgins are held. They are venerated not so much because of their martyrdom for the Faith, but because they are biologically intact. These heroes, of course, were a source of guilt for the ordinary church members who were not so subtly reminded of their own impure, often nonvirginal state.
It is difficult to overestimate the damage that this “just say no” myth about sex has caused. Just one example is telling. Homosexual teenagers are 3 to 7 times more likely to commit suicide than heterosexual teenagers. It’s likely that many of the gay teenagers who kill themselves couldn’t live with the knowledge that they were an abomination to be put to death (Leviticus 20:13).
However, this misery has been very good for the church. People’s guilt about their sexual sinfulness kept them coming back to church for absolution granted with the proviso that the sinner renounce the sin of sex and promise to be “pure,” meaning nonsexual. Now, of course, more and more people are accepting their sexuality as part of their lives and not something to be excised. However, they are getting precious little help from the churches in their efforts to become responsible sexual persons. People attending church learn that sex is evil, unmentionable, or both. The fundamentalists are still denouncing sex, while the liberals make great efforts to say as little as possible about sex as they can. The contortions of the mainline Protestant denominations over the gay question demonstrate this. The major impression from these discussions is that the churches fervently wish that they didn’t have to discuss sex, gay or otherwise. Because of the demand for sexual renunciation by the church, most people are embarrassed by sex and often can’t cope effectively with their sexual feelings and experiences, nor can they talk freely about sex with others.
So, the Church of the Afterlife will preach and teach to replace the “just say no” sexual myth of traditional Christianity with a “just say yes” sexual myth that celebrates sex as a central feature of our humanity. This “just say yes” sexual myth has a number of important aspects: Sex is central to life, sexual feelings are common and natural, sex is not only for reproduction, everyone is sexual, People are different sexually, and in sex, as in all of life, love your neighbor as yourself.
Sex is central to life For most multi-cellular organisms, sexual reproduction is necessary for the survival of the species, and therefore sex is as important as eating, sometimes more so. This simple fact needs be the main message of “just say yes,” namely, we are sexual people.
Sexual feelings are common and natural Further, many of our feelings and experiences relate to sex, relationships, and love. These feelings should be celebrated, not quashed. A church that requires its members to suppress sexual feelings because they are bad leaves people with shame and guilt for feeling sexual. If the Church of the Afterlife can help people recognize and accept their sexual feelings as good, it will make a useful contribution.
Sex is not only for reproduction As important as sex is to reproduction, that is not its only function. Sex gives pleasure whether for reproduction or not. Sex can build relationships and be the basis for companionship and bonding, as in the connection between sex and love, but sex can also be friendly. Sex can help establish hierarchies in primate bands, so much the same dynamic may play out in human relationships. Aggressive power relations can be sexualized, accounting for the often homoerotic nature of male bonding and competition.
Everyone is sexual From birth to death, sex plays a major part in human life. Often only sexually mature, young people are thought to be sexual, but infants, children, and older people also are sexual. Thus, infants and children are not “innocent” in the sense of being nonsexual, but, they have sexual feelings, thoughts, and behaviors appropriate for their age. The “innocence” of children in sexual matters is often invoked in relation in instances of sexual abuse or exploitation. In such cases, it is the abuse or exploitation that should be prevented or stopped. Children should not feel guilty about their sexuality, and abused children should receive help, if needed, in understanding that the abuse was not their fault.
People are different sexually Everyone is sexual, but not everyone is sexual in the same way. Peoples’ sexuality develops at different rates, sex plays a bigger part in some peoples’ lives than in others, people develop different ideas about appropriate sexual behavior, and, of course, not everyone is heterosexual. Current studies indicate that 5 to 10% of the population is sexual minorities, including male homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people. Children in sexual minorities would be particularly helped if early in their life when they normally ask questions about sex, the presence of these minorities were discussed with them. If this happened, many a gay kid would be spared the misery of being “all alone with no one to talk to” about his or her sexual feelings.
In sex, as in all of life, love your neighbor as yourself The second great commandment is, of course, a call to push back on our self-centered impulses. Evolutionary biologists suggest that altruism is an effort toward group cohesion. Protect the person who needs your help today; you may need it tomorrow. However, the second commandment is more radical. Do right by anyone who crosses your path, even though you don’t know what he or she might do in response. This can be dangerous. After all, the cynic’s motto is “no good deed goes unpunished,” but nevertheless we are called to treat others as we want to be treated. The union sex seems to promise may not always be realized. Sometimes, extending ourselves into sex can be punishing, filled with pain and heartbreak. As a result, we may go at sex warily, if at all, or become takers, rather than, sharers of sex. The second commandment is a good guide for us sexual beings, because as we try to follow it, we begin to see the situation from the other’s point of view.
Conclusion: The Trinity or Can God be Saved?
So, church is to become a place where expositions on myth, evolution, and sex take center stage? No, but churches should use these ideas to give people better tools to engage the world with a broad religious vision. The small, static vision of the world presented by most churches will make them even more weak and irrational, serving no need but their own survival.
Churches should be religious organizations, helping people apprehend and appropriate the “more,” in Williams James’s terminology, into their lives, so they might see the “big picture.” Of course, this “more” or the “big picture” is traditionally called God. However, “God” is rarely compelling in people’s lives. When people do make a forceful case for God it is usually because they are pointing us to the highest moral or spiritual values they can imagine. Nigel Leaves in his book, “The God Problem” writes of Feuerbach’s concept of a loving God as the human ideal of love projected onto the universe: “God” is love deified. God may become “real” when the feelings expressed about God strike us as real. Such a moment occurred for me watching Dustin Lance Black’s acceptance speech for his Oscar for best screenplay for “Milk” (http://www.couragecampaign.org/page/s/ThankYouForMilk), in which he assured gay teenagers that God loved them for who they were. Black’s obvious passion made God real in that moment. When we feel deeply, our use of God language to express our feelings can ring true, and God can become real.
From the record of the New Testament, something like that appears to have happened as people encountered Jesus or perhaps more accurately the post-Easter Christ. They began to experience him as God in human form. Bishop John Spong in his essay of November 20, 2008, entitled, “MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, Deepak Chopra and Biblical Illiteracy,” points out that it is possible to trace this divinizing trend in the New Testament from the writings of Paul in the 40s to the 60s of the first century CE, through the synoptic gospels in the 70s and 80s to the Gospel of John in the 90s with John’s writings clearly forming the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity. One way to explain this trend is to imagine people in worship listening to the Bible stories and having feelings for Jesus that could be best expressed in God language. Such language would lead to the idea of Jesus as God, embodied. The doctrine of the Trinity is an attempt to put such feelings into words, while maintaining the monotheistic understanding. However, words are never adequate to describe feelings. Without the feelings that first prompted the doctrines, they are lifeless. No one cares; they are but relics.
Such changes in our understanding of God are ongoing. In “Radicals and the Future of the Church,” Cupitt writes that some of us are coming to “... believe in an historically-evolving, human, and culturally-established God.” Further, “...we now have become responsible for our God. We’ve got to appraise him, update him, rewrite him continually.” Cupitt points out, following Hegel, that the doctrine of the Trinity is an obvious beginning for reinterpretation: “The co-equality of the second person (Christ, the Son) with the third person (The Holy Spirit) is an invitation to demythologize, because the full coequality and coeternity of the Son means that everything the Father is, the Son is also. And when the Son completely and irrevocably commits himself to becoming human then God has become human, without remainder. So everything that God is, this fellow human being beside me now is.” Also, “... the God of Pentecost (The Holy Spirit) is a postmodern God who has ceased to be a substance and has instead become the interrelatedness of everything.... the medium in which we live and move and have our being, the dance of signs.” Therefore, we humans can be God incarnate, expressing the Spirit through (as the old prayer has it) “our life and conversation.” The challenge lies in whether we can express God in our lives so that our words and actions will be in keeping with the ideals that we can envision.
By recognizing that religion is an attempt to make sense of and to share feelings, the Church of the Afterlife could revitalize old formulations in ways that capture peoples’ imagination anew. The power of their feelings could help them and those they touch to lead truly religious lives here, as they continue to help bring in the Kingdom on Earth.
(“The Meaning of the West” was published in 2008 in England by SCM Press. I bought my copy from www.blackwell.co.uk for $22.49, including postage.)
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
“The Meaning of West”
In the modern West, we are in transition between two versions of Christianity. The first is the old ecclesiastical version that ended in the early nineteenth century and is now slowly passing away. The second is our late-modern or postmodern civil society, which, with its liberal-democratic humanitarianism is the “Kingdom on Earth” version of Christianity. This is the thesis of Don Cupitt’s important new book, “The Meaning of West.” Liberal-democratic civil society is, he suggests, Quakerism writ large. Christianity is now becoming purely this-worldly and human. People are just leaving the clerical hierarchy behind. Cupitt calls these the officer-class of religious professionals who would control everything. One need only look at the collapse of the church in, for example, Spain, Ireland, and Italy to see the truth of this. In these once actively Christian countries hardly anyone goes to church and hardly anyone listens to, much less obeys, church pronouncements. The division between the sacred and the profane is gone. Now, we know only one world, our secular, human world. The entire divine realm has become scattered or disseminated into human beings.
Notwithstanding, the West is indelibly Christian. We are what Christianity made us. The modern Western-led international ethic is simply a continuation of Christian ethics. The proof of the ascendancy of the new “Kingdom" version of Christianity in the West is the fact that civil, secular society is now more consistently Christian than are the churches. The Church holds onto discrimination and injustice, as with its own employees, women, and gays, fighting inclusion and equality at every turn. Thus, the church is obsolete, and, Cupitt writes, we should leave it and commit ourselves with full religious seriousness to the best of our contemporary secular cultural life. Doing so, we would become better Christians. Of course, it hardly matters what the few people in the churches do. They are seen rightly as outdated anachronisms.
But even without the churches, Christianity is the active heart of the modern West, even though, as Cupitt points out, both religious dogmatists and Enlightenment scientific rationalists err because both are “realists,” wanting us to believe that the special bodies of knowledge out of which they earn their bread are objectively and permanently true. This isn’t so because any knowledge is always conditioned by our own human vantage point, our place in history, and the language we think, speak, and write in. And, because our language is always changing, our reality is also always changing since we have only our language to describe it. As a result we are learning to live without eternity, without foundations, without any absolute knowledge or reality.
Cupitt argues that this attitude helps us glimpse the long-awaited Kingdom of God on earth. This nihilistic religious-humanism-for-a-world-that-knows-it-is-passing-away, was, as far a we can tell, he writes, the original message of Jesus. Because he came to a dreadful end, his followers couldn’t see how his vision could be realized unless he were to return. He thus became a heavenly figure who would return one day to set the world right. This hope persisted, and ironically, drove the Faith toward working for the Kingdom here, because believers felt that Jesus was with them in this world. Cupitt calls this Faith’s own self-secularization. As Jesus emptied himself for us, so we in the West continue to recognize opportunities to empty ourselves into the world to help bring the Kingdom ever closer.
(“The Meaning of the West” was published in 2008 in England by SCM Press. I bought my copy from www.blackwell.co.uk for $22.49, including postage.)
Notwithstanding, the West is indelibly Christian. We are what Christianity made us. The modern Western-led international ethic is simply a continuation of Christian ethics. The proof of the ascendancy of the new “Kingdom" version of Christianity in the West is the fact that civil, secular society is now more consistently Christian than are the churches. The Church holds onto discrimination and injustice, as with its own employees, women, and gays, fighting inclusion and equality at every turn. Thus, the church is obsolete, and, Cupitt writes, we should leave it and commit ourselves with full religious seriousness to the best of our contemporary secular cultural life. Doing so, we would become better Christians. Of course, it hardly matters what the few people in the churches do. They are seen rightly as outdated anachronisms.
But even without the churches, Christianity is the active heart of the modern West, even though, as Cupitt points out, both religious dogmatists and Enlightenment scientific rationalists err because both are “realists,” wanting us to believe that the special bodies of knowledge out of which they earn their bread are objectively and permanently true. This isn’t so because any knowledge is always conditioned by our own human vantage point, our place in history, and the language we think, speak, and write in. And, because our language is always changing, our reality is also always changing since we have only our language to describe it. As a result we are learning to live without eternity, without foundations, without any absolute knowledge or reality.
Cupitt argues that this attitude helps us glimpse the long-awaited Kingdom of God on earth. This nihilistic religious-humanism-for-a-world-that-knows-it-is-passing-away, was, as far a we can tell, he writes, the original message of Jesus. Because he came to a dreadful end, his followers couldn’t see how his vision could be realized unless he were to return. He thus became a heavenly figure who would return one day to set the world right. This hope persisted, and ironically, drove the Faith toward working for the Kingdom here, because believers felt that Jesus was with them in this world. Cupitt calls this Faith’s own self-secularization. As Jesus emptied himself for us, so we in the West continue to recognize opportunities to empty ourselves into the world to help bring the Kingdom ever closer.
(“The Meaning of the West” was published in 2008 in England by SCM Press. I bought my copy from www.blackwell.co.uk for $22.49, including postage.)
Saturday, October 11, 2008
The Gospel in Connecticut
Yesterday the Gospel was proclaimed in Connecticut. Not in the churches, God knows, but in the Connecticut Supreme Court, which ruled that same-sex marriage was constitutional in that state. The court ruled further that Connecticut’s civil union law violated the constitutional guarantees of equal protection under the law. The court echoed the Gospel in affirming that justice requires equality. This aspect of the Gospel has been clearly proclaimed in Peter’s speech in Acts 10:34, where he says “I truly understand that God shows no partiality...” While many churches are working hard to restrict the rights of homosexuals to same-sex marriage, as in California, Florida, and Arizona, the majority on the Connecticut court clearly stated that without equality there is no justice. As Justice Palmer wrote: “Interpreting our state constitutional provisions in accordance with firmly established equal protection principles leads inevitably to the conclusion that gay persons are entitled to marry the otherwise qualified same-sex partner of their choice.” To decide otherwise would require us to apply one set of constitutional principles to gay persons and another to all others.”
“The New York Times” in its article, on October 11th, about the ruling stated: “Striking at the heart of discriminatory traditions in America, the court — in language that often rose above the legal landscape into realms of social justice for a new century — recalled that laws in the not-so-distant past barred interracial marriages, excluded women from occupations and official duties, and relegated blacks to separate but supposedly equal public facilities.”
As I wrote in my blog post of July 12, 2008, “Same-Sex Marriage: The ELCA and California, Compared”: “Equality and justice are hallmarks of the Gospel. In “Reforming Christianity" (2001), Don Cupitt points out that as the Church loses influence because of its ridigity and fear, signs of the Kingdom often appear 'on earth' in secular society.” As in California, a Connecticut court has proclaimed the Gospel, while the churches either oppose the Gospel or stand by mute, unwilling to take the risk of proclaiming God’s love for all.
“The New York Times” in its article, on October 11th, about the ruling stated: “Striking at the heart of discriminatory traditions in America, the court — in language that often rose above the legal landscape into realms of social justice for a new century — recalled that laws in the not-so-distant past barred interracial marriages, excluded women from occupations and official duties, and relegated blacks to separate but supposedly equal public facilities.”
As I wrote in my blog post of July 12, 2008, “Same-Sex Marriage: The ELCA and California, Compared”: “Equality and justice are hallmarks of the Gospel. In “Reforming Christianity" (2001), Don Cupitt points out that as the Church loses influence because of its ridigity and fear, signs of the Kingdom often appear 'on earth' in secular society.” As in California, a Connecticut court has proclaimed the Gospel, while the churches either oppose the Gospel or stand by mute, unwilling to take the risk of proclaiming God’s love for all.
Friday, July 25, 2008
A review of "Reforming Christianity"
A few posts ago in “The New Yorker,” Theodicy, and Don Cupitt, on July 2nd, I mentioned "Reforming Christianity" by Don Cupitt (Polebridge Press, 2001). Below is a review by Graham Warren from November 2001 of that book on the blog, "Sofia, Sea of Faith in Australia" (http://www.sof-in-australia.org/blog.php?blog_id=140). I think the review provides a good overview of Cupitt's ideas and a challenge to us church members to move out of church Christianity into Kingdom religion, because for me the saddest idea in Warren's review is "The Church has condemned itself to the sideline of history." This is because the church refuses, as Jesus did, to stand with "God facing up to nihilism."
By the way, "Radicals and the Future of the Church" is another wonderful book that I recommend highly.
Here is Warren's review:
Don Cupitt's latest book "Reforming Christianity" is a post-script to his 1989 reformation book, "Radicals and the Future of the Church." His proposals for and sketches of a church of the future - how it will be organized and what it will actually do - were mocked. Now, sadly, he portrays himself as a man who does not mind losing the church and its version of Christianity. However, he fears the loss of Jesus - a serious blow. Jesus may not be rescued as a divine saviour but we may be able to do something with him as an ethical teacher - provided we don't mind seeing him not as a god who can't be wrong but as a man who might be right.
My first acquaintance with Don Cupitt was a life-altering reading in 1988 of "Sea of Faith - Christianity in Change" (1985). I then read backwards "Taking Leave of God" (1980), "Jesus and the Gospel of God" (1978), "The Leap of Reason" (1976), "Christ and Hiddenness of God" (1971). Somewhere along the way I read "The Long-Legged Fly" but I have lost my copy and with it the memories and thoughts evoked in the reading.
Don Cupitt prefers plain speech. He refuses to be an ecclesiastical apologist. He is a philosopher of religion and an heir to the Enlightenment exploring Kant's insight that we fabricate our world. Like Hegel he believes that reality emerges in our encounter with historical developments. Don Cupitt follows the critical path of Schopenhauer, Freud, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida. Cupitt does a more complete draft of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer intimated - religionless Christianity. He asks 'do we want to grow up?' Do we want to join the global shift away from authoritarianism and traditionalism? Are we prepared to move away from the assumption that the world is ready-made and all we are required to do is to be enthralled.
Can Christianity be reformed? It is a given, is it not? Only if one has a belief system which is immutable - “deposit of faith” as it is known in the Roman tradition wherein all is revealed from above. Contrast this with a voluntarist view where autonomy and responsibility are balanced one against the other.
This book may scandalize the faithful. With each new book Don Cupitt adopts a more urgent iconoclastic polemic with the church as a “deposit of faith” squarely in his sights. One constantly hears echoes of the forebears of Cupitt's ideas: "…faith as an act of will", "…religion is an attempt to familiarize the terrible" - Soren Kierkegaard; "…man’s last and highest parting occurs, when, for God's sake, he takes leave of god" - Meister Eckhart. This book is an urgent call to throw off "the painted veil", a metaphor as old as Plato, to describe that which hangs between the eternal world and us. This is not new material from Don Cupitt but it is the most urgent and latest call to act. As Church Christianity melts away there is an urgency: don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Don’t lose sight of what Jesus represented!
The Church has condemned itself to the sideline of history and Cupitt has analyzed the reasons for this over a lifetime of writing. But now we are in danger of losing the voice of Jesus - not the Christ of faith constructed by the church since first they puzzled over the delay in the parousia - but the Jesus as the original caller to the Kingdom. Don Cupitt preaches kingdom theology, kingdom values.
Jesus preached the Kingdom and we got the church. Now that the church has reached its use-by-date, we need to rescue core teachings.
Don Cupitt argues that reformation and renewal of Christianity are possible. Church Christianity, as we have received it, is handicapped in its view by two great errors – the mistaken interpretation of Jesus Christ as being co-equal Son of God incarnate, and a mistaken belief that there is a controlling supernatural place beyond this world.
To escape we need to start again with the message of Jesus about the Kingdom of God on this earth. In honest reflection on this message Don Cupitt argues for a religion that is immediate, beliefless and entirely based on the here and now. Religion is no longer how we relate ourselves to the supernatural realm, but rather how we relate ourselves to life. To reject the church is to reject a mediated view of God.
What power had the old mediated view? It promised reward later! History and maturity have stripped us of this as a credible belief and we stare in the face of nihilism. Don Cupitt embraces nihilist Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer but shows us God facing up to nihilism. This is the voice, resurrected after two millennia, of Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus preached the Kingdom. Don Cupitt preached Kingdom religion. This is a combination of "solar spirituality" and humanitarian social ethics. It is autonomous and responsible. It embraces the end of belief in life after death. Why did Jesus express such eschatological urgency? Perhaps it is, and was, here and now. We need to embrace it. We are not called to prepare for it. It is now. "Solar spirituality" is lived not explained. If Jesus had so much trouble being understood, small wonder that Cupitt likewise does.
This is not a secular humanist rebellion against God nor a repudiation of Christianity. On the contrary, we see it as Christianity's own struggle to advance from its warped ecclesiastical stage to its final Kingdom stage of development. The church has always prayed "…thy Kingdom come (but not yet please!)”.
The church very early became locked into the view of Jesus as portrayed in John's gospel - a divinised Jesus Christ. This is in stark contrast to the human Jesus of Nazareth portrayed in the other gospels. Why do church theologians in seminaries not cross the corridor to listen to their colleagues in scriptural study? New hermeneutical tools and analyses have given us a chance to hear the muffled voice of Jesus. Why has the institution remained deaf and mute to these new understandings of their founder?
By the way, "Radicals and the Future of the Church" is another wonderful book that I recommend highly.
Here is Warren's review:
Don Cupitt's latest book "Reforming Christianity" is a post-script to his 1989 reformation book, "Radicals and the Future of the Church." His proposals for and sketches of a church of the future - how it will be organized and what it will actually do - were mocked. Now, sadly, he portrays himself as a man who does not mind losing the church and its version of Christianity. However, he fears the loss of Jesus - a serious blow. Jesus may not be rescued as a divine saviour but we may be able to do something with him as an ethical teacher - provided we don't mind seeing him not as a god who can't be wrong but as a man who might be right.
My first acquaintance with Don Cupitt was a life-altering reading in 1988 of "Sea of Faith - Christianity in Change" (1985). I then read backwards "Taking Leave of God" (1980), "Jesus and the Gospel of God" (1978), "The Leap of Reason" (1976), "Christ and Hiddenness of God" (1971). Somewhere along the way I read "The Long-Legged Fly" but I have lost my copy and with it the memories and thoughts evoked in the reading.
Don Cupitt prefers plain speech. He refuses to be an ecclesiastical apologist. He is a philosopher of religion and an heir to the Enlightenment exploring Kant's insight that we fabricate our world. Like Hegel he believes that reality emerges in our encounter with historical developments. Don Cupitt follows the critical path of Schopenhauer, Freud, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida. Cupitt does a more complete draft of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer intimated - religionless Christianity. He asks 'do we want to grow up?' Do we want to join the global shift away from authoritarianism and traditionalism? Are we prepared to move away from the assumption that the world is ready-made and all we are required to do is to be enthralled.
Can Christianity be reformed? It is a given, is it not? Only if one has a belief system which is immutable - “deposit of faith” as it is known in the Roman tradition wherein all is revealed from above. Contrast this with a voluntarist view where autonomy and responsibility are balanced one against the other.
This book may scandalize the faithful. With each new book Don Cupitt adopts a more urgent iconoclastic polemic with the church as a “deposit of faith” squarely in his sights. One constantly hears echoes of the forebears of Cupitt's ideas: "…faith as an act of will", "…religion is an attempt to familiarize the terrible" - Soren Kierkegaard; "…man’s last and highest parting occurs, when, for God's sake, he takes leave of god" - Meister Eckhart. This book is an urgent call to throw off "the painted veil", a metaphor as old as Plato, to describe that which hangs between the eternal world and us. This is not new material from Don Cupitt but it is the most urgent and latest call to act. As Church Christianity melts away there is an urgency: don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Don’t lose sight of what Jesus represented!
The Church has condemned itself to the sideline of history and Cupitt has analyzed the reasons for this over a lifetime of writing. But now we are in danger of losing the voice of Jesus - not the Christ of faith constructed by the church since first they puzzled over the delay in the parousia - but the Jesus as the original caller to the Kingdom. Don Cupitt preaches kingdom theology, kingdom values.
Jesus preached the Kingdom and we got the church. Now that the church has reached its use-by-date, we need to rescue core teachings.
Don Cupitt argues that reformation and renewal of Christianity are possible. Church Christianity, as we have received it, is handicapped in its view by two great errors – the mistaken interpretation of Jesus Christ as being co-equal Son of God incarnate, and a mistaken belief that there is a controlling supernatural place beyond this world.
To escape we need to start again with the message of Jesus about the Kingdom of God on this earth. In honest reflection on this message Don Cupitt argues for a religion that is immediate, beliefless and entirely based on the here and now. Religion is no longer how we relate ourselves to the supernatural realm, but rather how we relate ourselves to life. To reject the church is to reject a mediated view of God.
What power had the old mediated view? It promised reward later! History and maturity have stripped us of this as a credible belief and we stare in the face of nihilism. Don Cupitt embraces nihilist Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer but shows us God facing up to nihilism. This is the voice, resurrected after two millennia, of Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus preached the Kingdom. Don Cupitt preached Kingdom religion. This is a combination of "solar spirituality" and humanitarian social ethics. It is autonomous and responsible. It embraces the end of belief in life after death. Why did Jesus express such eschatological urgency? Perhaps it is, and was, here and now. We need to embrace it. We are not called to prepare for it. It is now. "Solar spirituality" is lived not explained. If Jesus had so much trouble being understood, small wonder that Cupitt likewise does.
This is not a secular humanist rebellion against God nor a repudiation of Christianity. On the contrary, we see it as Christianity's own struggle to advance from its warped ecclesiastical stage to its final Kingdom stage of development. The church has always prayed "…thy Kingdom come (but not yet please!)”.
The church very early became locked into the view of Jesus as portrayed in John's gospel - a divinised Jesus Christ. This is in stark contrast to the human Jesus of Nazareth portrayed in the other gospels. Why do church theologians in seminaries not cross the corridor to listen to their colleagues in scriptural study? New hermeneutical tools and analyses have given us a chance to hear the muffled voice of Jesus. Why has the institution remained deaf and mute to these new understandings of their founder?
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
“The New Yorker,” Theodicy, and Don Cupitt
“The New Yorker” didn’t publish my letter, below, so I’m posting it today:
Although James Wood cites Nietzsche at the beginning of his article, “Holiday in Hellmouth” (June 9th & 16th), he seems to yearn for the return of the theistic God, whom Nietzsche so famously declared dead, to solve the problem of theodicy. Such a supernatural, otherworldly, almighty God no longer captures the imagination of many people. Rather, as Don Cupitt writes in “Radicals and the Future of the Church,” some of us are coming to “... believe in an historically-evolving, human, and culturally-established God.” Further, “...we now have become responsible for our God. We’ve got to appraise him, update him, rewrite him continually.” Cupitt points out, following Hegel, that the doctrine of the Trinity is an obvious beginning for reinterpretation: “The co-equality of the second person (Christ, the Son) with the third person (The Holy Spirit) is an invitation to demythologize, because the full coequality and coeternity of the Son means that everything the Father is, the Son is also. And when the Son completely and irrevocably commits himself to becoming human then God has become human, without remainder. So everything that God is, this fellow human being beside me now is.” Also, “... the God of Pentecost (The Holy Spirit) is a postmodern God who has ceased to be a substance and has instead become the interrelatedness of everything.... the medium in which we live and move and have our being, the dance of signs.” Therefore, we are not passive bystanders in God’s world waiting for God to overcome evil, but rather we humans can be God incarnate, expressing the Spirit through (as the old prayer has it) “our life and conversation.” We know all too well that we have the ability to bring about evil. The challenge lies in whether we can express God to foster good.
This letter is an outcome of my re-reading “Radicals and the Future of the Church,” which, I think, 19 years after its publication, is still an excellent description of what the church could be like if non-realism were adopted. It is out of print, but Amazon has 6 used paperback copies from $7. It’s well worth the read.
Although James Wood cites Nietzsche at the beginning of his article, “Holiday in Hellmouth” (June 9th & 16th), he seems to yearn for the return of the theistic God, whom Nietzsche so famously declared dead, to solve the problem of theodicy. Such a supernatural, otherworldly, almighty God no longer captures the imagination of many people. Rather, as Don Cupitt writes in “Radicals and the Future of the Church,” some of us are coming to “... believe in an historically-evolving, human, and culturally-established God.” Further, “...we now have become responsible for our God. We’ve got to appraise him, update him, rewrite him continually.” Cupitt points out, following Hegel, that the doctrine of the Trinity is an obvious beginning for reinterpretation: “The co-equality of the second person (Christ, the Son) with the third person (The Holy Spirit) is an invitation to demythologize, because the full coequality and coeternity of the Son means that everything the Father is, the Son is also. And when the Son completely and irrevocably commits himself to becoming human then God has become human, without remainder. So everything that God is, this fellow human being beside me now is.” Also, “... the God of Pentecost (The Holy Spirit) is a postmodern God who has ceased to be a substance and has instead become the interrelatedness of everything.... the medium in which we live and move and have our being, the dance of signs.” Therefore, we are not passive bystanders in God’s world waiting for God to overcome evil, but rather we humans can be God incarnate, expressing the Spirit through (as the old prayer has it) “our life and conversation.” We know all too well that we have the ability to bring about evil. The challenge lies in whether we can express God to foster good.
This letter is an outcome of my re-reading “Radicals and the Future of the Church,” which, I think, 19 years after its publication, is still an excellent description of what the church could be like if non-realism were adopted. It is out of print, but Amazon has 6 used paperback copies from $7. It’s well worth the read.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
It’s Only a Paper Moon
This is the paper from January of 2007 that gave me the title for this blog, "Worshiping at the Church of Non-Realism." Your comments are appreciated.
At the conclusion of his recent book, "The God Problem: Alternatives to Fundamentalism," Nigel Leaves asks whether God is real or simply a (non-real) symbol of our ultimate concern. He finds the non-realism advocated by Don Cupitt and Lloyd Geering more intellectually compelling, but the realism upheld by Marcus Borg and Bishop John Spong more emotionally appealing. Like them, many of us feel the need for a real God.
However, today even in the face of this yearning, Cupitt writes in "The Old Creed and the New," the great faith traditions, including Christianity, are rapidly breaking down and melting away, particularly in the West. Many people are no longer moved and motivated by traditional religion. The upsurge in virulent fundamentalism that would maintain the old supernatural religion with its real God is a clear sign of the challenge of non-realism. However, many people are dissatisfied with fundamentalism or other forms of traditional religion, because they no longer provide reliable answers and assurances in daily life or a convincing picture of a life after this one. As a result, non-realism is a popular default religious position for many people who have left the churches.
That said, thoroughgoing non-realism has been a hard sell, and Cupitt’s sales pitch can seem bleak: Nothing exists outside this world except (following Nietzsche) the Void. We are of this world and live and die in it. We can not observe God outside this life or demonstrate God by scientific experiment. No better (or worse) otherworld with promises of a perfect, everlasting life after this life, as conjured up by traditional religion’s supernatural picture, can shield us from the Void. To think that we can know God in heaven or in another realm not of this world in the way we know facts here in this world is an illusion. With the rise of rational enquiry from within the religious traditions, science and technology have come to dominate our thinking, leaving little inclination for supernatural explanations. And yet, along with Peggy Lee, we ask: “Is that all there is?”
The Church as the Theater of Feelings
Cupitt has been a reformer, not a despiser of the Church, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, or Sam Harris. Cupitt has always encouraged us to become more consciously religious; he urges us to remain in the Church, but keep our eyes open, making, as he writes in "Radicals and the Future of the Church," the church our (his emphasis) work of art. He writes that the church is needed because “It is a theatre in which we solemnly enact our deepest feelings.”
The theatre analogy points to how non-realism could work in real churches. When we go to the theatre we usually naturally and easily suspend disbelief to enter into the world of the actors who by speech and action on stage in turn evoke in us actions, feelings, experiences and thoughts. So, likewise, during a religious service we may also suspend disbelief, and have religious feelings and experiences.
Calvin wrote that each of us is an actor and God is the audience, but with the death of God and the disappearance of the supernatural from our scientific world, there is now no audience for the plays of our lives. But what if, instead, we are both actors and audience? What if, like Judy and Mickey and all the other kids, young and old, we run down to the old barn of the church and put on a play? We create the play of and about God and perform our creation for ourselves and the others with us who are also creators and performers? Then, God, who only lives if we manifest God, in the words of the old prayer, by our life and conversation, can appear again: this time in our play, both as playwright and performer. Of course, to encourage God’s appearance in our post-modern production, we will have to sprinkle ourselves liberally with the fairy dust of Paul Ricoeur’s post-critical naïveté to screen awhile our critical thinking.
That worship produces belief is an old idea. In "On Liturgical Theology," Aidan Kavanagh reminds us that orthodoxy means first “right worship” and only secondarily doctrinal accuracy. This implies that worship conceived broadly is what gives rise to theological reflection rather than the other way around. In the phrasing of Prosper of Aquitaine (c. 390 - 465), it is the law of worship which founds or establishes the law of belief. Belief does not come first, then worship, but rather worship produces belief.
Today, psychology is providing evidence that behavior, e.g., worship, produces feelings. For example, in "Feelings," James D. Laird argues that feelings do not cause behavior, but rather follow from behavior, and are, in fact, the way that we know about our own bodily states and behaviors. James W. Pennebaker points out that emotions, motivation, and other private feelings are inferred from our behaviors rather than being directly perceived. Stuart Walton writes in "A Natural History of Human Emotions" that this idea goes back at least to Charles Darwin, who in "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" (1872), contended that all humans everywhere have the same basic set of innate and constitutive emotions that are expressed by two kinds of muscular action: facial expression and bodily movement. We communicate these emotions to others often quite involuntarily as the result of instinct, rather than by learned behavior. Everyone worldwide recognizes and “reads” them similarly. Thus, we and those observing us may sense particular emotions while performing particular actions in worship, and, as Joseph Ledoux writes in "The Emotional Brain," emotions can produce conscious feelings, which, in turn, can lead to belief.
Viewing liturgy through the lens of non-realism, then brings meaning, a hallmark of belief, into focus. God can be the name and the marker for the meaning we find together in worship. God, as meaning, appears horizontally among worshipers; we understand that God in the vertical, supernatural direction is an exciting special effect produced as we together find God in our church of non-realism, in our theater of feelings.
But aren’t our feelings an unreliable basis for a real God? Yes, indeed. Feelings are erratic and fleeting, i. e., often they are over before they are identified or named. They come and go; they are conscious, but represent only some of our emotions, most of which are unconscious and not subject to our control. Thus, feelings, and more so, emotions, can be dangerous, which can heighten our anxiety. Furthermore, feelings can be hard to conceptualize, verbalize, and understand. They, like emotions, are virtually impossible to stop or control while happening and, once gone, may be hard or impossible to summon up again. Thus, feelings are like life as Cupitt describes it: finite, time-bound, contingent, unpredictable, transitory, and impermanent. Our feelings, quick, acute, and intuitive, tell us we are alive, and as insubstantial as feelings are, they are the basis of our life, our experience. They suffuse our experiences, including our religious experiences.
However, if our awareness of God comes from our feelings and experiences, we soon learn that supernatural ways of thinking “improve” our God experiences, preserving them perfectly and unchanging, as Peter would have done on the Mount of Transfiguration when Jesus’ light shone before the disciples. But, of course, as Jesus knew, experiences can’t be preserved, but must be lived, even to death.
We yearn to be sure of something other than death, and, indeed, Cupitt writes, language is a sure basis for our philosophy and religion. Ordinary language (heightened in popular songs) is necessary for us to function as humans in society. Although language is the basis of society and religion, language is totally contingent, developing by trial and error, and open to continuing future change, evolving over (a long) time by consensus. We are born into a world where our language is a given, but it is a given hammered out by agreements arrived at by society’s members over the years, changing as new needs arise and old ones fade.
Therefore, using the theatrical analogy, our play of God is always in rewrite with many varied incarnations. One scenario, sketched here, presents some Christian concepts through the facial expressions, movements, and language of the actors, who thereby convey Darwin’s six basic, facially legible emotions -- happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise – using some of the physical indicators he identified. Other emotions or states of mind, including contempt (which Darwin gave indicators for), love, hope, and joy are mentioned, and even though the presentation of these may not be as clear as that of the basic six, they may be suggested with the addition of dialogue. The emotions, feelings, and experiences produced in church may be thought of and spoken of as religious. In keeping with Cupitt’s contention that people use ordinary language for their religious experiences, ordinary, non-religious, in preference to “religious,” language and songs are used as much as possible.
A Play for the Theater of Feelings
In this scenario, the play has a prologue, two acts, and a conclusion. In the prologue, we see God happy: smiling, laughing, dancing, and clapping, while drawing our attention to the nifty supernatural set, painted by the likes of Michelangelo and Chagall, and at the same time singing the anthem to non-realism: “Say, it's only a paper moon, Sailing over a cardboard sea, But it wouldn't be make believe, If you believed in me.”
In Act I, “By the River,” a presentation of feelings aroused by Rom 6: 3-11, we first see a roiling, fast moving, and apparently deep river with many people on the shore and in the water. Bullies are pulling, pushing or dragging others into the water and holding them under.
We sense the bullies’ contempt. They uncover their canine teeth on one side, snort, and turn up their noses as they manhandle their weaker fellows. We also know that the bullies are angry. Their faces are flushed, their eyes wide open, and their breathing accelerated. They grind their teeth, clench their fists, and incline their bodies towards their victims. We also see the bullies’ disgust by their wide opened mouths, their spitting, their blowing through protruded lips, and the retraction of their upper lips.
The tormented, struggling to the surface and breathing again, show, after the shock of the cold water, surprise at breathing again. They open their eyes and mouths wide and inhale suddenly. Of course, their flailing limbs and contorted expressions convey mainly fear. They are pale, breathe fast, and have dilated pupils and contracted neck muscles.
We in the audience empathize. We either cheer on the bullies or yell to those drowning to resist more vigorously. Of course, others may be drowning on their own without any bullying. Some, by their bold move into the river, convey misplaced self-confidence. Others look sad. The corners of their mouths are drawn down, they are pale, and their muscles and eyelids droop; they seem to be seeking drowning.
As this scene unfolds, we become aware of another group near the shore. By their calm expressions and open stance, they convey empathy for all, including the bullies, the tormented, the confident, the despairing, and all the rest in danger of drowning. They don’t turn away to avoid the perils of the river, but gesture in invitation to act as supporting guides for all those who would enter the river. Many of the guides are singing: “Yes, we’ll gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river, Gather with the saints at the river, That flows by the throne of God.” Some whom the guides put down into the river come up screaming at the shock of immersion. Others, before going in, show fear, cringing back from the deep, cold, rapidly rushing river and tensing up with possibility of going under, losing control, not being able to breath, suffocating, and dying. But some, who accept the invitation, show by their relaxation into their guides, a tentative, but growing trust and confidence that their loving guides, while putting them under, won’t abandon them as they are drowning. And, yes, some of these, upon being brought up, may show, by their tears of joy, happiness at being able to breathe again, to live again. Thus, this non-real drowning can engender as toward God real emotions and feelings of happiness and gratitude that people might feel upon being brought back to life from death.
Act II, “Walking, Talking, Breaking,” describes feelings upon reading Luke 24: 13-32. The first scene shows two people walking along a dusty road. Their slow pace, slumped shoulders, downcast expression, and desultory talk convey sadness. They are joined by a man who asks what they are discussing. The two continue to show sadness while telling him about the crucifixion of Jesus but soon show flashes of anger as they point out that his death, at the hands of both the Jewish and Roman authorities, has dashed their hopes that he would free Israel.
Now, added to their anger, is the memory of their surprise at the tale of some female followers of Jesus, who said that early that morning they saw his tomb empty and angels who said he was alive. The two walkers tell the stranger that other followers of Jesus also went to the tomb and found it empty but hadn’t seen him. As the walkers recount the women’s story to this male stranger, contempt replaces their surprise (“You know how these silly women are. They’re always seeing things.”) But they are still bewildered that the others have confirmed the empty tomb.
The stranger’s response is tinged with anger. He is provoked and irked by the walkers’ slowness to perceive the meaning of the crucifixion in light of the promise of Israel’s redemption. He shows exasperation at their distrust and refusal to imagine the Messiah’s glory. Their critical thinking has reinforced their fear of death and prevented them from entering into the women’s vision. For them, the promise is unreal; not yet non-real. They have not yet embraced their post-critical naïveté to allow them to experience the promise in their theater of feelings, where hope might contend with fear.
However, in the second scene, later at the walkers’ home, as they see the stranger breaking bread, their eyes are opened, and they know Jesus again, even as he vanishes. They have yet to name the emotion they sense: It is happiness, the physical indicators of which are the brightening of the eyes, a quickening of the circulation, and the coloring of the complexion. This is a good description of the physical correlates to their experience, described in Luke, of “our hearts burning within us,” as Jesus opened the promise to them.
But, of course, their experience was deeper than happiness; it was joy. As Huston Smith remarks about the early Christians in "The Soul of Christianity," “...they had laid hold of an inner peace that found expression in a joy that was uncontainable.” They radiated joy as the sun radiates light. Their post-critical naïveté, no longer fairy dust, now lit them from within. Cupitt writes that we, like them, should emulate the sun, which shines now without regard to whether it will shine in the future or whether it will shine again when it dies. So, in joy, we attempt to make Jesus’ words real: “...do not worry about your life...but strive first for the kingdom of God...”
As Jesus vanishes and our play concludes, we hear a voice: “The play is over.” The doors of the church swing open, and, as we leave, we look back and see the empty set where just awhile ago God sang and danced. Back in the real world, we will again grapple with sadness, anger, fear, disgust, contempt, surprise, and happiness. But, feeling God singing within us, we radiate joy.
At the conclusion of his recent book, "The God Problem: Alternatives to Fundamentalism," Nigel Leaves asks whether God is real or simply a (non-real) symbol of our ultimate concern. He finds the non-realism advocated by Don Cupitt and Lloyd Geering more intellectually compelling, but the realism upheld by Marcus Borg and Bishop John Spong more emotionally appealing. Like them, many of us feel the need for a real God.
However, today even in the face of this yearning, Cupitt writes in "The Old Creed and the New," the great faith traditions, including Christianity, are rapidly breaking down and melting away, particularly in the West. Many people are no longer moved and motivated by traditional religion. The upsurge in virulent fundamentalism that would maintain the old supernatural religion with its real God is a clear sign of the challenge of non-realism. However, many people are dissatisfied with fundamentalism or other forms of traditional religion, because they no longer provide reliable answers and assurances in daily life or a convincing picture of a life after this one. As a result, non-realism is a popular default religious position for many people who have left the churches.
That said, thoroughgoing non-realism has been a hard sell, and Cupitt’s sales pitch can seem bleak: Nothing exists outside this world except (following Nietzsche) the Void. We are of this world and live and die in it. We can not observe God outside this life or demonstrate God by scientific experiment. No better (or worse) otherworld with promises of a perfect, everlasting life after this life, as conjured up by traditional religion’s supernatural picture, can shield us from the Void. To think that we can know God in heaven or in another realm not of this world in the way we know facts here in this world is an illusion. With the rise of rational enquiry from within the religious traditions, science and technology have come to dominate our thinking, leaving little inclination for supernatural explanations. And yet, along with Peggy Lee, we ask: “Is that all there is?”
The Church as the Theater of Feelings
Cupitt has been a reformer, not a despiser of the Church, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, or Sam Harris. Cupitt has always encouraged us to become more consciously religious; he urges us to remain in the Church, but keep our eyes open, making, as he writes in "Radicals and the Future of the Church," the church our (his emphasis) work of art. He writes that the church is needed because “It is a theatre in which we solemnly enact our deepest feelings.”
The theatre analogy points to how non-realism could work in real churches. When we go to the theatre we usually naturally and easily suspend disbelief to enter into the world of the actors who by speech and action on stage in turn evoke in us actions, feelings, experiences and thoughts. So, likewise, during a religious service we may also suspend disbelief, and have religious feelings and experiences.
Calvin wrote that each of us is an actor and God is the audience, but with the death of God and the disappearance of the supernatural from our scientific world, there is now no audience for the plays of our lives. But what if, instead, we are both actors and audience? What if, like Judy and Mickey and all the other kids, young and old, we run down to the old barn of the church and put on a play? We create the play of and about God and perform our creation for ourselves and the others with us who are also creators and performers? Then, God, who only lives if we manifest God, in the words of the old prayer, by our life and conversation, can appear again: this time in our play, both as playwright and performer. Of course, to encourage God’s appearance in our post-modern production, we will have to sprinkle ourselves liberally with the fairy dust of Paul Ricoeur’s post-critical naïveté to screen awhile our critical thinking.
That worship produces belief is an old idea. In "On Liturgical Theology," Aidan Kavanagh reminds us that orthodoxy means first “right worship” and only secondarily doctrinal accuracy. This implies that worship conceived broadly is what gives rise to theological reflection rather than the other way around. In the phrasing of Prosper of Aquitaine (c. 390 - 465), it is the law of worship which founds or establishes the law of belief. Belief does not come first, then worship, but rather worship produces belief.
Today, psychology is providing evidence that behavior, e.g., worship, produces feelings. For example, in "Feelings," James D. Laird argues that feelings do not cause behavior, but rather follow from behavior, and are, in fact, the way that we know about our own bodily states and behaviors. James W. Pennebaker points out that emotions, motivation, and other private feelings are inferred from our behaviors rather than being directly perceived. Stuart Walton writes in "A Natural History of Human Emotions" that this idea goes back at least to Charles Darwin, who in "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" (1872), contended that all humans everywhere have the same basic set of innate and constitutive emotions that are expressed by two kinds of muscular action: facial expression and bodily movement. We communicate these emotions to others often quite involuntarily as the result of instinct, rather than by learned behavior. Everyone worldwide recognizes and “reads” them similarly. Thus, we and those observing us may sense particular emotions while performing particular actions in worship, and, as Joseph Ledoux writes in "The Emotional Brain," emotions can produce conscious feelings, which, in turn, can lead to belief.
Viewing liturgy through the lens of non-realism, then brings meaning, a hallmark of belief, into focus. God can be the name and the marker for the meaning we find together in worship. God, as meaning, appears horizontally among worshipers; we understand that God in the vertical, supernatural direction is an exciting special effect produced as we together find God in our church of non-realism, in our theater of feelings.
But aren’t our feelings an unreliable basis for a real God? Yes, indeed. Feelings are erratic and fleeting, i. e., often they are over before they are identified or named. They come and go; they are conscious, but represent only some of our emotions, most of which are unconscious and not subject to our control. Thus, feelings, and more so, emotions, can be dangerous, which can heighten our anxiety. Furthermore, feelings can be hard to conceptualize, verbalize, and understand. They, like emotions, are virtually impossible to stop or control while happening and, once gone, may be hard or impossible to summon up again. Thus, feelings are like life as Cupitt describes it: finite, time-bound, contingent, unpredictable, transitory, and impermanent. Our feelings, quick, acute, and intuitive, tell us we are alive, and as insubstantial as feelings are, they are the basis of our life, our experience. They suffuse our experiences, including our religious experiences.
However, if our awareness of God comes from our feelings and experiences, we soon learn that supernatural ways of thinking “improve” our God experiences, preserving them perfectly and unchanging, as Peter would have done on the Mount of Transfiguration when Jesus’ light shone before the disciples. But, of course, as Jesus knew, experiences can’t be preserved, but must be lived, even to death.
We yearn to be sure of something other than death, and, indeed, Cupitt writes, language is a sure basis for our philosophy and religion. Ordinary language (heightened in popular songs) is necessary for us to function as humans in society. Although language is the basis of society and religion, language is totally contingent, developing by trial and error, and open to continuing future change, evolving over (a long) time by consensus. We are born into a world where our language is a given, but it is a given hammered out by agreements arrived at by society’s members over the years, changing as new needs arise and old ones fade.
Therefore, using the theatrical analogy, our play of God is always in rewrite with many varied incarnations. One scenario, sketched here, presents some Christian concepts through the facial expressions, movements, and language of the actors, who thereby convey Darwin’s six basic, facially legible emotions -- happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise – using some of the physical indicators he identified. Other emotions or states of mind, including contempt (which Darwin gave indicators for), love, hope, and joy are mentioned, and even though the presentation of these may not be as clear as that of the basic six, they may be suggested with the addition of dialogue. The emotions, feelings, and experiences produced in church may be thought of and spoken of as religious. In keeping with Cupitt’s contention that people use ordinary language for their religious experiences, ordinary, non-religious, in preference to “religious,” language and songs are used as much as possible.
A Play for the Theater of Feelings
In this scenario, the play has a prologue, two acts, and a conclusion. In the prologue, we see God happy: smiling, laughing, dancing, and clapping, while drawing our attention to the nifty supernatural set, painted by the likes of Michelangelo and Chagall, and at the same time singing the anthem to non-realism: “Say, it's only a paper moon, Sailing over a cardboard sea, But it wouldn't be make believe, If you believed in me.”
In Act I, “By the River,” a presentation of feelings aroused by Rom 6: 3-11, we first see a roiling, fast moving, and apparently deep river with many people on the shore and in the water. Bullies are pulling, pushing or dragging others into the water and holding them under.
We sense the bullies’ contempt. They uncover their canine teeth on one side, snort, and turn up their noses as they manhandle their weaker fellows. We also know that the bullies are angry. Their faces are flushed, their eyes wide open, and their breathing accelerated. They grind their teeth, clench their fists, and incline their bodies towards their victims. We also see the bullies’ disgust by their wide opened mouths, their spitting, their blowing through protruded lips, and the retraction of their upper lips.
The tormented, struggling to the surface and breathing again, show, after the shock of the cold water, surprise at breathing again. They open their eyes and mouths wide and inhale suddenly. Of course, their flailing limbs and contorted expressions convey mainly fear. They are pale, breathe fast, and have dilated pupils and contracted neck muscles.
We in the audience empathize. We either cheer on the bullies or yell to those drowning to resist more vigorously. Of course, others may be drowning on their own without any bullying. Some, by their bold move into the river, convey misplaced self-confidence. Others look sad. The corners of their mouths are drawn down, they are pale, and their muscles and eyelids droop; they seem to be seeking drowning.
As this scene unfolds, we become aware of another group near the shore. By their calm expressions and open stance, they convey empathy for all, including the bullies, the tormented, the confident, the despairing, and all the rest in danger of drowning. They don’t turn away to avoid the perils of the river, but gesture in invitation to act as supporting guides for all those who would enter the river. Many of the guides are singing: “Yes, we’ll gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river, Gather with the saints at the river, That flows by the throne of God.” Some whom the guides put down into the river come up screaming at the shock of immersion. Others, before going in, show fear, cringing back from the deep, cold, rapidly rushing river and tensing up with possibility of going under, losing control, not being able to breath, suffocating, and dying. But some, who accept the invitation, show by their relaxation into their guides, a tentative, but growing trust and confidence that their loving guides, while putting them under, won’t abandon them as they are drowning. And, yes, some of these, upon being brought up, may show, by their tears of joy, happiness at being able to breathe again, to live again. Thus, this non-real drowning can engender as toward God real emotions and feelings of happiness and gratitude that people might feel upon being brought back to life from death.
Act II, “Walking, Talking, Breaking,” describes feelings upon reading Luke 24: 13-32. The first scene shows two people walking along a dusty road. Their slow pace, slumped shoulders, downcast expression, and desultory talk convey sadness. They are joined by a man who asks what they are discussing. The two continue to show sadness while telling him about the crucifixion of Jesus but soon show flashes of anger as they point out that his death, at the hands of both the Jewish and Roman authorities, has dashed their hopes that he would free Israel.
Now, added to their anger, is the memory of their surprise at the tale of some female followers of Jesus, who said that early that morning they saw his tomb empty and angels who said he was alive. The two walkers tell the stranger that other followers of Jesus also went to the tomb and found it empty but hadn’t seen him. As the walkers recount the women’s story to this male stranger, contempt replaces their surprise (“You know how these silly women are. They’re always seeing things.”) But they are still bewildered that the others have confirmed the empty tomb.
The stranger’s response is tinged with anger. He is provoked and irked by the walkers’ slowness to perceive the meaning of the crucifixion in light of the promise of Israel’s redemption. He shows exasperation at their distrust and refusal to imagine the Messiah’s glory. Their critical thinking has reinforced their fear of death and prevented them from entering into the women’s vision. For them, the promise is unreal; not yet non-real. They have not yet embraced their post-critical naïveté to allow them to experience the promise in their theater of feelings, where hope might contend with fear.
However, in the second scene, later at the walkers’ home, as they see the stranger breaking bread, their eyes are opened, and they know Jesus again, even as he vanishes. They have yet to name the emotion they sense: It is happiness, the physical indicators of which are the brightening of the eyes, a quickening of the circulation, and the coloring of the complexion. This is a good description of the physical correlates to their experience, described in Luke, of “our hearts burning within us,” as Jesus opened the promise to them.
But, of course, their experience was deeper than happiness; it was joy. As Huston Smith remarks about the early Christians in "The Soul of Christianity," “...they had laid hold of an inner peace that found expression in a joy that was uncontainable.” They radiated joy as the sun radiates light. Their post-critical naïveté, no longer fairy dust, now lit them from within. Cupitt writes that we, like them, should emulate the sun, which shines now without regard to whether it will shine in the future or whether it will shine again when it dies. So, in joy, we attempt to make Jesus’ words real: “...do not worry about your life...but strive first for the kingdom of God...”
As Jesus vanishes and our play concludes, we hear a voice: “The play is over.” The doors of the church swing open, and, as we leave, we look back and see the empty set where just awhile ago God sang and danced. Back in the real world, we will again grapple with sadness, anger, fear, disgust, contempt, surprise, and happiness. But, feeling God singing within us, we radiate joy.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
“Why Do We Believe?”: The Theological Implications
In the March 4th “New York Times Magazine,” Robin Marantz Henig explores “Why Do We Believe?” Her illuminating article presents evolutionary explanations for peoples’ belief in God. She also makes clear early on that the article does not probe the question of whether God exists. The quest for an answer to this age old question, she rightly maintains, is a matter for philosophers and theologians, and, indeed, the article leaves unexplored the theological implications of the exciting scientific information she presents. However, make no mistake; the explanations for our belief in God clearly have theological implications. From the explanations, it is possible, I think, to gain a picture of what God might be like if God were to exist and, further, the explanations point to the role we play in shaping our beliefs and making them more helpful for us.
Religion: a Byproduct of Evolution or an Adaptive Advantage?
Henig points out that although scientists studying the evolution of religion have different theories about how it came about, they mostly share one idea, namely, religion is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. Beyond that, they tend to fall into two schools of thought when asking why religion evolved. Is belief itself adaptive, giving believers a better chance at reproduction and survival, or is belief a mere byproduct of certain other evolutionary steps in the development of the human brain. Henig presents these as opposing views, and they may well be, but I tend to think that we are at the early stages of the exploration of the evolution of religious belief. Maybe the more mature development of our thinking will in time contain elements of both points of view.
Religious belief is widespread among humans. One U.S. survey in 2006 found that 92% of those responding believed in a personal God. Darwin noted in his “The Descent of Man” that “A belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems universal.” Religions everywhere share certain supernatural beliefs: noncorporeal God or gods, an afterlife, and the ability of prayer to change the course of human events. And, in his “Varieties of Religious Experience,” William James asserted that “All of our raptures and our drynesses, and pantings, our questions and beliefs...are equally organically founded.” In other words, religion is deeply human; it’s part of our makeup for most of us. In fact, religious belief, and not a lack of it, appears to be the default position for the most human minds
But why? Those who maintain that religious belief is a byproduct of the evolution of our large brain propose that belief is a side consequence of the development of a structure of such complexity. Religious belief, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin have proposed, is a “spandrel,” a trait with no adaptive value of its own. A spandrel in architecture is the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. It has no purpose on its own; rather, it comes into being when arches align.
But if religion is a spandrel, what is it a spandrel of? The byproduct explanation is that the hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among which were the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to develop causal narratives for natural events, and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires, and intentions. These abilities have been dubbed, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning, and theory of mind.
Our ability to detect possible agents primes our brains to believe in the supernatural, even when such beliefs confound logic. For example, agent detection can cause us to detect, in a shape just outside our direct view, someone long dead or a spirit ready to help or harm us. A second cognitive tool, our causal reasoning, leads us to impose a narrative with chronology and cause-and-effect logic on whatever we encounter, no matter how apparently random, while the third tool, the theory of mind, lets us to posit the presence of minds in ourselves and others, even though we cannot see or feel them. Our belief that we and others have minds leads us to accept the visible body and the invisible mind as separate. From there, the religious step is to posit that minds need not be in bodies and that there is an immaterial soul and a transcendent God. Scott Atran, a researcher in the field of the evolution of religion, calls the theory of mind folkpsychology, and he proposes that we’ve used it since prehistory to get along in life. Using folkpsychology, we anticipate the actions of others and this leads us to influence others to believe what we want them to believe, as in marriage, office politics, or poker. People without this trait, for example, those with autism, are impaired, because they are unable to imagine themselves in other people’s heads. Folkpsychology clearly is necessary to succeed in life, but how or why does it lead so often to a belief in supernatural, omniscient minds? The proponents of the byproduct theory tend to think that these beliefs are of little use in finding food or producing more children, so why do they persist? Atran says that evolutionary changes that permit organisms to adapt better to their environment frequently are accompanied by byproducts. For example, blood is red not because red colored blood allows organisms to adapt better, but rather because the hemoglobin in the blood increases the chances for better adaptation. The redness of blood is a byproduct of the presence of hemoglobin, not an adaptive advantage. So, religion may be a byproduct of the three cognitive tools that have evolved allowing humans to adapt, survive, and reproduce and not an adaptive advantage in itself.
However, those who think that religion does indeed offer an adaptive advantage also point to folkpsychology to support their position. We try to make sense of other people partly by imagining what it is like to be them. This is adaptive, because it can help us to outwit our enemies and get more food and fitter mates. However, imagining being dead is essentially impossible; we can not fill our conscious with a representation of no-conscious. We can not think about nothing, nor can we imagine what it would be for us not to exist. It’s much easier to imagine that our thinking somehow continues after our death. Belief in the afterlife is prevalent because we are not able to simulate our nonexistence. Thus, adaptationists say, belief is our fallback position; it is our reflexive style of thought. We have the capacity to reason about unexpected natural events and to see deeper meaning where there is none.
Such a capacity could be adaptive because religious belief can make people feel better, less tormented by thoughts of death, more focused on the future, and more willing to take care of themselves. As William James wrote, religion fills people with “a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life...an assurance of safety and a temper of peace and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.” Religion’s costs to the individual in time and devotion may be outweighed by the benefits to the individual’s group, which being cohesive and focused as a result of common belief, can better compete for scarce resources.
Scientist were at one time confident that science would in time answer all the questions that religion traditionally answered and God would become the “God of the gaps,” needed less and less to answer life’s questions. Now, however, science seems to be showing us that the real gap that God fills is the emptiness in our big-brained mental architecture that we interpret as a yearning for the supernatural. Our drive to satisfy this yearning, say both the adaptationists and the byproduct theorists, may be an inevitable part of what Atran calls the tragedy of human cognition.
Theological Implications of the Evolution of Religion
Atran’s invoking tragedy when referring to human cognition is significant. Perhaps he believes it’s tragic for humans to believe in God, someone who he believes doesn’t exist, who, he believes, the theory of evolution has shown to be nonexistent.
Atran’s remarks show us his metaphysical framework. Metaphysical frameworks are the trains of causal reasoning, the second cognitive tool discussed above, that we all use to impose a narrative with chronology and cause-and-effect logic on all we experience. The metaphysical framework from which many scientists work is called materialism. This position is essentially tragic because this framework does not supply meaning, purpose, or God to the workings of nature. In this view, life and the cosmos have no inherent meaning. Materialists have answered, “Yes” to Peggy Lee’s question, “Is that all there is?” God is dead, a relic from our collective childhood. Evolution is mindless with no guiding hand. For Atran, and many evolutionary materialists, time’s colossal reach, chance, and natural selection are all that is needed to provide an adequate picture of the universe. All natural occurrences can be deciphered exclusively in terms of a temporally prior series of mechanical causes. There is no need to look above to perfect Platonic ideal forms, we need but look to the cosmic past for the fullest explanation of all things.
Everyone has a metaphysical framework. Even maintaining that we have no metaphysical framework is to have one. Often our metaphysical framework comes out of unexamined assumptions, and, furthermore, our metaphysical framework is a choice we make, consciously or unconsciously, and we can change our metaphysical framework by re-thinking it. In “God After Darwin” (2000), John F. Haught presents a metaphysical framework for evolution that is an alternative to the common materialistic framework. Although his argument is nuanced, his metaphysics focuses on five major ideas: 1) There are orders of complexity in the universe, 2) information inheres in complexity, 3) novelty is possible because of contingency, 4) with novelty, evolution moves toward the future, 5) God “lets the world be,” so that evolution can occur.
Orders of Complexity: Nature exhibits hierarchies of complexity. Molecules contain atoms, organisms are made up of cells, and ecosystems are the contexts for lives of individual organisms. Furthermore, evidence is growing that the more complex cannot be completely understood by analyzing the simpler components of the systems. If we try to understand the more complex by merely reducing them to their simpler parts, we lose a crucial aspect of complexity: information.
Information: Haught uses “information” metaphorically as that which inheres in the ordering of entities, including atoms, molecules, cells, genes, etc. Information is something “more” than exchanges along the matter-energy continuum. Not physically separate, information is logically distinguishable from mass and energy, and, although it has neither mass nor energy, it patterns simpler components into hierarchically distinct domains. Obvious examples of information inhering in the chemical and physical “stuff” of life are DNA molecules. Chemically and physically the substance of all DNA molecules is more or less the same. The important differences among them are informational. The sequences of the four molecules making up the larger DNA molecules form a code, different for each organism, and this code provides the information to produce different individuals. The presence of information in nature is not mystical or supernatural, but it is distinct from the mechanical or material causes that most scientists have assumed until lately are the only causes needed to explain completely the operation of the universe. The presence of information in a system is verifiable, but cannot be reduced to a mechanistic model. It seems to abide in the realm of “possibility” waiting to be actualized in time.
An example from Taoism can illustrate the concept of information. Wu Cheng (1249-1333) wrote: “If it were not for the hollow space of the vessel to contain things, there would be no space for storage. If it were not for the vacuity of the room between the windows and doors for lights coming in and going out, there would be no place to live.” These ideas recall the spandrel concept discussed above. A spandrel can be neutral or it can take on a function. For example, building a staircase produces a space underneath it: just a blank triangular shape that is like a spandrel, i.e., a byproduct of the building of the intended object, in this example, a staircase. However, if a closet is built in that space, then the space takes on a function, and, although this function is unrelated to that of the staircase, it is useful, and, significantly, that added usefulness also increases the information inhering in the physical materials.
Novelty because of contingency: Contingency is a major aspect of evolution. Mutations, which are chance, contingent changes in organisms’ genetic make-up, make evolution possible. Those mutations that give organisms an adaptive advantage permit them to reproduce more and, with time and more advantageous mutations, their progeny become more dominant. However, the events of evolution cannot be predicted in advance for the very reason that they are contingent. Their contingency makes them novel, and the past is not a guide to new evolutionary events. For example, the emergence of life and consciousness could not have been predicted from even a close scrutiny of the early cosmic events. Contingency is not a mask for a hidden necessity dictated by past events but not yet understood. Rather, it is the way the cosmos breaks out of subordination to habitual routine and opens itself to the future.
With novelty, evolution moves toward the future: With the recognition of unpredictable novelty as a central feature of evolution, we can shift our metaphysical focus from the inexorable, predictable working out of necessary past conditions to the contemplation of the unpredictable, unknown future, filled with both threat and promise. This metaphysics of hope looks toward a future in which the apparent chaos now may resolve into more meaningful patterning in the “fullness of time,” in “God’s time.”
God “lets the world be,” permitting evolution: Haught is a theist, not a non-realist, but his theism is such that it has similarities with Cupitt’s non-realism. This is particularly apparent with regard to Cupitt’s solar ethics. Cupitt maintains that we are to shine in the world for others like the sun. The sun does not grasp but empties itself, living and dying at the same time, and in so doing serves us all. Such solar language recalls the great hymn to Jesus in Philippians 2 that starts in verse 5: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” Jürgen Moltmann argues that the creation of the universe itself is not so much a display of divine might as a consequence of God’s self-restraint. In order to create heaven and earth, God emptied Godself of God’s all-plenishing omnipotence, and as Creator took the form of a servant.
Calvin wrote that the world is a theater with God as the audience. This vision of God’s emptying is as if a “theater” has been provided where the drama of creation could take place. Like all good dramas, this play has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Science has sketched the outlines of the beginning of the world and the middle, our current time, but the future only God knows.
A view of God as the God of the future, suggests not a God “up there,” but a God “up ahead,” drawing the whole creation forward into the future. In being the God of the future, God does not “micromanage” as a designer, but rather gives the world room to be itself. The world emerges as separate from and uncontrolled by God. This metaphysical and theological framework provides a way of bringing meaning not only to our bewilderment about our broken world and our individual suffering, but also the apparent struggle, waste, and suffering occasioned by evolution through natural selection.
Emanuel
Judaism and Christianity are clear sources for the idea of God of the future. God beckons Abram out of Ur to he knows not where with a promise that he will be the father of a mighty nation. Abram trusts the Promise, even when at times it seems impossible.
God leads the children of Israel out of Egypt to the Promised Land with a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. The Israelites’ trust is less like that of Abram and more like ours. The difficulties of life make the promise hard to believe, harder to hold on to.
In Baptism, Christians hear the promises of God’s companionship through life. Thus, the biblical witness stresses not only that God promises, but that God is with us, Emanuel, and doesn’t abandon us and our world, as we struggle to trust the promise of the future.
Resurrection
In the Bible, God’s promise takes many forms, but always the promise has to do with life: Will Abraham and Sarah not forever be infertile, but be blessed with a son, a new life? Will the Israelites find a new life in the Promised Land? Will the Baptized find new life each day in the promises given at the font? The answer that the faithful give all too often is “Yes, but.” We will live, but we will die. Yes, the Bible is clear, as is biology, that all who live will die. Death is the natural end of life, but death is not the end of our life with God. Although Christians proclaim the resurrection of Jesus as the first fruits of the general resurrection, since the Enlightenment the supernatural nature of resurrection has been a stumbling block to moderns, both Christians and Jews. Now Jon D. Levenson has published a powerful new book, “Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life,” which places resurrection at the center of Jewish understanding. Levenson writes: “Given the reality and potency ascribed to death throughout the Hebrew Bible, what overcomes it is nothing short of the most astonishing miracle, the Divine Warrior’s eschatological victory.” The Divine Warrior in the Hebrew Bible is not a figure of religious fanaticism who urges believers to kill for the greater glory of their God, but rather One who “will rule the world justly and its people in faithfulness,” delivering the weak and victimized from the stronger hand of the oppressor. Thus, Israel’s God, sets us, who are made in his image, a vivid example of God-like living. We in the West can particularly take note of our oppressive overuse of the earth’s resources at the expense of our weaker neighbors.
The Hermeneutic Circle
Walter Brueggemann’s in reviewing “Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel,” in the February 6, 2007, “Christian Century,” comments that “...faith in resurrection, when we have the courage to overcome the intrusiveness of Enlightenment rationality, is vigorous and central to both Jews and Christians.” But how do we overcome the intrusive Enlightenment? Surely, we won’t by going down the dead-end road of fundamentalism. Perhaps a better route is suggested by Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic circle in “The Symbolism of Evil.” He suggests that we moderns have lost our immediacy of belief, but we can aim at a second, post-critical naïveté in and through critical thinking. By interpreting, we can hear again. In hermeneutics, the symbol’s gift of meaning and the endeavor to understand by deciphering are knotted together. In the circle: “We must understand in order to believe, but we must believe in order to understand.” In order to believe, we must practice religion, not merely think about it. In the phrasing of Prosper of Aquitaine (c. 390 - 465), it is the law of worship which founds or establishes the law of belief. Belief does not come first, then worship, but rather worship produces belief. By living in the circle of belief and interpretation, the future that God is leading us to will become ours.
Religion: a Byproduct of Evolution or an Adaptive Advantage?
Henig points out that although scientists studying the evolution of religion have different theories about how it came about, they mostly share one idea, namely, religion is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. Beyond that, they tend to fall into two schools of thought when asking why religion evolved. Is belief itself adaptive, giving believers a better chance at reproduction and survival, or is belief a mere byproduct of certain other evolutionary steps in the development of the human brain. Henig presents these as opposing views, and they may well be, but I tend to think that we are at the early stages of the exploration of the evolution of religious belief. Maybe the more mature development of our thinking will in time contain elements of both points of view.
Religious belief is widespread among humans. One U.S. survey in 2006 found that 92% of those responding believed in a personal God. Darwin noted in his “The Descent of Man” that “A belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems universal.” Religions everywhere share certain supernatural beliefs: noncorporeal God or gods, an afterlife, and the ability of prayer to change the course of human events. And, in his “Varieties of Religious Experience,” William James asserted that “All of our raptures and our drynesses, and pantings, our questions and beliefs...are equally organically founded.” In other words, religion is deeply human; it’s part of our makeup for most of us. In fact, religious belief, and not a lack of it, appears to be the default position for the most human minds
But why? Those who maintain that religious belief is a byproduct of the evolution of our large brain propose that belief is a side consequence of the development of a structure of such complexity. Religious belief, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin have proposed, is a “spandrel,” a trait with no adaptive value of its own. A spandrel in architecture is the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. It has no purpose on its own; rather, it comes into being when arches align.
But if religion is a spandrel, what is it a spandrel of? The byproduct explanation is that the hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among which were the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to develop causal narratives for natural events, and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires, and intentions. These abilities have been dubbed, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning, and theory of mind.
Our ability to detect possible agents primes our brains to believe in the supernatural, even when such beliefs confound logic. For example, agent detection can cause us to detect, in a shape just outside our direct view, someone long dead or a spirit ready to help or harm us. A second cognitive tool, our causal reasoning, leads us to impose a narrative with chronology and cause-and-effect logic on whatever we encounter, no matter how apparently random, while the third tool, the theory of mind, lets us to posit the presence of minds in ourselves and others, even though we cannot see or feel them. Our belief that we and others have minds leads us to accept the visible body and the invisible mind as separate. From there, the religious step is to posit that minds need not be in bodies and that there is an immaterial soul and a transcendent God. Scott Atran, a researcher in the field of the evolution of religion, calls the theory of mind folkpsychology, and he proposes that we’ve used it since prehistory to get along in life. Using folkpsychology, we anticipate the actions of others and this leads us to influence others to believe what we want them to believe, as in marriage, office politics, or poker. People without this trait, for example, those with autism, are impaired, because they are unable to imagine themselves in other people’s heads. Folkpsychology clearly is necessary to succeed in life, but how or why does it lead so often to a belief in supernatural, omniscient minds? The proponents of the byproduct theory tend to think that these beliefs are of little use in finding food or producing more children, so why do they persist? Atran says that evolutionary changes that permit organisms to adapt better to their environment frequently are accompanied by byproducts. For example, blood is red not because red colored blood allows organisms to adapt better, but rather because the hemoglobin in the blood increases the chances for better adaptation. The redness of blood is a byproduct of the presence of hemoglobin, not an adaptive advantage. So, religion may be a byproduct of the three cognitive tools that have evolved allowing humans to adapt, survive, and reproduce and not an adaptive advantage in itself.
However, those who think that religion does indeed offer an adaptive advantage also point to folkpsychology to support their position. We try to make sense of other people partly by imagining what it is like to be them. This is adaptive, because it can help us to outwit our enemies and get more food and fitter mates. However, imagining being dead is essentially impossible; we can not fill our conscious with a representation of no-conscious. We can not think about nothing, nor can we imagine what it would be for us not to exist. It’s much easier to imagine that our thinking somehow continues after our death. Belief in the afterlife is prevalent because we are not able to simulate our nonexistence. Thus, adaptationists say, belief is our fallback position; it is our reflexive style of thought. We have the capacity to reason about unexpected natural events and to see deeper meaning where there is none.
Such a capacity could be adaptive because religious belief can make people feel better, less tormented by thoughts of death, more focused on the future, and more willing to take care of themselves. As William James wrote, religion fills people with “a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life...an assurance of safety and a temper of peace and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.” Religion’s costs to the individual in time and devotion may be outweighed by the benefits to the individual’s group, which being cohesive and focused as a result of common belief, can better compete for scarce resources.
Scientist were at one time confident that science would in time answer all the questions that religion traditionally answered and God would become the “God of the gaps,” needed less and less to answer life’s questions. Now, however, science seems to be showing us that the real gap that God fills is the emptiness in our big-brained mental architecture that we interpret as a yearning for the supernatural. Our drive to satisfy this yearning, say both the adaptationists and the byproduct theorists, may be an inevitable part of what Atran calls the tragedy of human cognition.
Theological Implications of the Evolution of Religion
Atran’s invoking tragedy when referring to human cognition is significant. Perhaps he believes it’s tragic for humans to believe in God, someone who he believes doesn’t exist, who, he believes, the theory of evolution has shown to be nonexistent.
Atran’s remarks show us his metaphysical framework. Metaphysical frameworks are the trains of causal reasoning, the second cognitive tool discussed above, that we all use to impose a narrative with chronology and cause-and-effect logic on all we experience. The metaphysical framework from which many scientists work is called materialism. This position is essentially tragic because this framework does not supply meaning, purpose, or God to the workings of nature. In this view, life and the cosmos have no inherent meaning. Materialists have answered, “Yes” to Peggy Lee’s question, “Is that all there is?” God is dead, a relic from our collective childhood. Evolution is mindless with no guiding hand. For Atran, and many evolutionary materialists, time’s colossal reach, chance, and natural selection are all that is needed to provide an adequate picture of the universe. All natural occurrences can be deciphered exclusively in terms of a temporally prior series of mechanical causes. There is no need to look above to perfect Platonic ideal forms, we need but look to the cosmic past for the fullest explanation of all things.
Everyone has a metaphysical framework. Even maintaining that we have no metaphysical framework is to have one. Often our metaphysical framework comes out of unexamined assumptions, and, furthermore, our metaphysical framework is a choice we make, consciously or unconsciously, and we can change our metaphysical framework by re-thinking it. In “God After Darwin” (2000), John F. Haught presents a metaphysical framework for evolution that is an alternative to the common materialistic framework. Although his argument is nuanced, his metaphysics focuses on five major ideas: 1) There are orders of complexity in the universe, 2) information inheres in complexity, 3) novelty is possible because of contingency, 4) with novelty, evolution moves toward the future, 5) God “lets the world be,” so that evolution can occur.
Orders of Complexity: Nature exhibits hierarchies of complexity. Molecules contain atoms, organisms are made up of cells, and ecosystems are the contexts for lives of individual organisms. Furthermore, evidence is growing that the more complex cannot be completely understood by analyzing the simpler components of the systems. If we try to understand the more complex by merely reducing them to their simpler parts, we lose a crucial aspect of complexity: information.
Information: Haught uses “information” metaphorically as that which inheres in the ordering of entities, including atoms, molecules, cells, genes, etc. Information is something “more” than exchanges along the matter-energy continuum. Not physically separate, information is logically distinguishable from mass and energy, and, although it has neither mass nor energy, it patterns simpler components into hierarchically distinct domains. Obvious examples of information inhering in the chemical and physical “stuff” of life are DNA molecules. Chemically and physically the substance of all DNA molecules is more or less the same. The important differences among them are informational. The sequences of the four molecules making up the larger DNA molecules form a code, different for each organism, and this code provides the information to produce different individuals. The presence of information in nature is not mystical or supernatural, but it is distinct from the mechanical or material causes that most scientists have assumed until lately are the only causes needed to explain completely the operation of the universe. The presence of information in a system is verifiable, but cannot be reduced to a mechanistic model. It seems to abide in the realm of “possibility” waiting to be actualized in time.
An example from Taoism can illustrate the concept of information. Wu Cheng (1249-1333) wrote: “If it were not for the hollow space of the vessel to contain things, there would be no space for storage. If it were not for the vacuity of the room between the windows and doors for lights coming in and going out, there would be no place to live.” These ideas recall the spandrel concept discussed above. A spandrel can be neutral or it can take on a function. For example, building a staircase produces a space underneath it: just a blank triangular shape that is like a spandrel, i.e., a byproduct of the building of the intended object, in this example, a staircase. However, if a closet is built in that space, then the space takes on a function, and, although this function is unrelated to that of the staircase, it is useful, and, significantly, that added usefulness also increases the information inhering in the physical materials.
Novelty because of contingency: Contingency is a major aspect of evolution. Mutations, which are chance, contingent changes in organisms’ genetic make-up, make evolution possible. Those mutations that give organisms an adaptive advantage permit them to reproduce more and, with time and more advantageous mutations, their progeny become more dominant. However, the events of evolution cannot be predicted in advance for the very reason that they are contingent. Their contingency makes them novel, and the past is not a guide to new evolutionary events. For example, the emergence of life and consciousness could not have been predicted from even a close scrutiny of the early cosmic events. Contingency is not a mask for a hidden necessity dictated by past events but not yet understood. Rather, it is the way the cosmos breaks out of subordination to habitual routine and opens itself to the future.
With novelty, evolution moves toward the future: With the recognition of unpredictable novelty as a central feature of evolution, we can shift our metaphysical focus from the inexorable, predictable working out of necessary past conditions to the contemplation of the unpredictable, unknown future, filled with both threat and promise. This metaphysics of hope looks toward a future in which the apparent chaos now may resolve into more meaningful patterning in the “fullness of time,” in “God’s time.”
God “lets the world be,” permitting evolution: Haught is a theist, not a non-realist, but his theism is such that it has similarities with Cupitt’s non-realism. This is particularly apparent with regard to Cupitt’s solar ethics. Cupitt maintains that we are to shine in the world for others like the sun. The sun does not grasp but empties itself, living and dying at the same time, and in so doing serves us all. Such solar language recalls the great hymn to Jesus in Philippians 2 that starts in verse 5: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” Jürgen Moltmann argues that the creation of the universe itself is not so much a display of divine might as a consequence of God’s self-restraint. In order to create heaven and earth, God emptied Godself of God’s all-plenishing omnipotence, and as Creator took the form of a servant.
Calvin wrote that the world is a theater with God as the audience. This vision of God’s emptying is as if a “theater” has been provided where the drama of creation could take place. Like all good dramas, this play has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Science has sketched the outlines of the beginning of the world and the middle, our current time, but the future only God knows.
A view of God as the God of the future, suggests not a God “up there,” but a God “up ahead,” drawing the whole creation forward into the future. In being the God of the future, God does not “micromanage” as a designer, but rather gives the world room to be itself. The world emerges as separate from and uncontrolled by God. This metaphysical and theological framework provides a way of bringing meaning not only to our bewilderment about our broken world and our individual suffering, but also the apparent struggle, waste, and suffering occasioned by evolution through natural selection.
Emanuel
Judaism and Christianity are clear sources for the idea of God of the future. God beckons Abram out of Ur to he knows not where with a promise that he will be the father of a mighty nation. Abram trusts the Promise, even when at times it seems impossible.
God leads the children of Israel out of Egypt to the Promised Land with a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. The Israelites’ trust is less like that of Abram and more like ours. The difficulties of life make the promise hard to believe, harder to hold on to.
In Baptism, Christians hear the promises of God’s companionship through life. Thus, the biblical witness stresses not only that God promises, but that God is with us, Emanuel, and doesn’t abandon us and our world, as we struggle to trust the promise of the future.
Resurrection
In the Bible, God’s promise takes many forms, but always the promise has to do with life: Will Abraham and Sarah not forever be infertile, but be blessed with a son, a new life? Will the Israelites find a new life in the Promised Land? Will the Baptized find new life each day in the promises given at the font? The answer that the faithful give all too often is “Yes, but.” We will live, but we will die. Yes, the Bible is clear, as is biology, that all who live will die. Death is the natural end of life, but death is not the end of our life with God. Although Christians proclaim the resurrection of Jesus as the first fruits of the general resurrection, since the Enlightenment the supernatural nature of resurrection has been a stumbling block to moderns, both Christians and Jews. Now Jon D. Levenson has published a powerful new book, “Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life,” which places resurrection at the center of Jewish understanding. Levenson writes: “Given the reality and potency ascribed to death throughout the Hebrew Bible, what overcomes it is nothing short of the most astonishing miracle, the Divine Warrior’s eschatological victory.” The Divine Warrior in the Hebrew Bible is not a figure of religious fanaticism who urges believers to kill for the greater glory of their God, but rather One who “will rule the world justly and its people in faithfulness,” delivering the weak and victimized from the stronger hand of the oppressor. Thus, Israel’s God, sets us, who are made in his image, a vivid example of God-like living. We in the West can particularly take note of our oppressive overuse of the earth’s resources at the expense of our weaker neighbors.
The Hermeneutic Circle
Walter Brueggemann’s in reviewing “Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel,” in the February 6, 2007, “Christian Century,” comments that “...faith in resurrection, when we have the courage to overcome the intrusiveness of Enlightenment rationality, is vigorous and central to both Jews and Christians.” But how do we overcome the intrusive Enlightenment? Surely, we won’t by going down the dead-end road of fundamentalism. Perhaps a better route is suggested by Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic circle in “The Symbolism of Evil.” He suggests that we moderns have lost our immediacy of belief, but we can aim at a second, post-critical naïveté in and through critical thinking. By interpreting, we can hear again. In hermeneutics, the symbol’s gift of meaning and the endeavor to understand by deciphering are knotted together. In the circle: “We must understand in order to believe, but we must believe in order to understand.” In order to believe, we must practice religion, not merely think about it. In the phrasing of Prosper of Aquitaine (c. 390 - 465), it is the law of worship which founds or establishes the law of belief. Belief does not come first, then worship, but rather worship produces belief. By living in the circle of belief and interpretation, the future that God is leading us to will become ours.
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