11 — Myth in scripture and our daily lives.
Next morning my inbox had a reply from Hope. She said she’d found my email on communion helpful. It was making her think about her own attitudes to who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out.’ She wondered if there were any ways groups could form without implicitly excluding others. She added:
I’m reconsidering what was vilified in my former church as doubt and backsliding. I see now it was only sometimes about people getting lazy or tired of the self-discipline involved in being Christian. I now think that most of the time it was people moving into stage four but not being able to discuss it with others.
Just looked at Brian McLaren’s website. He’s just published ‘Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and what to do about it.’ I got a Kindle version. As far as I’ve been able to skim already, it seems he’s covering the same ground we’ve been dealing with in our discussions. He recommends an amazing list of authors; all ones you’ve talked of and more.
That made me wonder whether this is not just a few individuals questioning their faith. Is it also a culture-wide (Western culture at least) movement of questioning and searching? That fits what you said about Phyllis Tickle saying this sorting out is a thing Christianity does about every half millennium. Didn’t she quote someone saying it was like a 500-year rummage sale?1
That fits what I’m doing exactly. I feel like I’m sorting through all my religious clutter. I’m deciding what to keep. I’m choosing what to pass off to the rummage sale. I’m glad I started asking questions now. These days there’s a substantial literature for resource and support. It must have been harder when you started your stage four.
Can we meet on Thursday after work? Same place different time?
H
I was struck by Hope’s comments. When I began to question orthodox faith 15 to 20 years ago, there were only a few people who were speaking up. Dave Tomlinson’s Post Evangelical came out in 1995, just as I began ministry training. Then there was the alt worship movement, which I discovered in the early 2000s in New Zealand with Mike Riddell, Mark Pierson and Cathy Kirkpatrick.
Less rigidly organised, congregationally structured churches like Baptists were sometimes more able to make changes. They could experiment in worship and church organisation more quickly. They also, however, had more conservatives in their number who disapproved of new ventures.
The Presbyterian church in New Zealand tried its Theological Hall’s Principal for heresy in 1969, so intellectual questioning had been overt for a while before the 1990s. I thought about that moment, which I’d watched from afar as a teenager. I could now see it was an intellectual doctrinal battle between conservatives and liberals. They were scrapping over modernist interpretations of Christianity’s core propositions. Unfortunately, it seemed to also have stiffened conservatives’ resolve to not let theological ‘standards’ slip, a resolve not much abated in the early 21st century.
These debates were a 20th century version of 19th century heresy trials in Scotland. I remembered reading of one Presbyterian academic, William Robertson Smith, being questioned in 1881. He’d stated Moses didn’t write the first five books of the First Testament. This showed how biblical criticism threatened traditional views. These traditional views were held in the church, but not always in the academy.
Smith’s own teachers and his current Principal defended him on the grounds that discussion of broader ideas should be allowed without personal penalty. He was later deposed as a teacher in the church, though not as a minister.
I remembered the case well. Robertson Smith was writing articles for the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It tickled my sense of humour that he seemed to be committing heresy by alphabet. He wrote articles on ‘Angels’, then ‘Bible,’ then ‘Moses.’ No sooner was one trial completed, than another article was published. It must have been a tense time for the church as well as for Smith. The trials were followed in detail in New Zealand. Reporting of them in New Zealand Presbyterian church periodicals happened surprisingly quickly after the events in Scotland.
We experienced contemporary ‘post-’ movements in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These were responses to the crumbling of the modern project. Its ‘onward and upward,’ ‘making-progress-all-the-time’ approach encouraged a triumphalist Christianity which many now reject. Postmodern critique distrusts meta-narratives and assumptions of steady progress towards perfection.
Hindsight shows that the entire modern perspective in the Christian project was a false enthusiasm. It was bolstered by fear that Christendom was in its final throes. It had overtones rather like the panic induced by the fall of the Roman Empire centuries before.
Yet Christian perspectives remain in our general, though secular, society. In New Zealand I’ve observed many people in politics, not-for-profits and writers of different genres whose roots are in organised Christianity. Many later broke free of its narrower frameworks.
However, values learned in Sunday schools and church schools were imbued in them. These refugees from organised Christianity are significant contributors to a compassionate civility in parts of New Zealand society. For example, the third woman prime minister of the country, Jacinda Ardern, has a Mormon background. This may well have contributed to her urging the country to ‘be kind’ during the Covid 19 pandemic.
New Zealand, in 2021, still needs to grapple with prevalent racism, sexism, and grinding poverty for many. Conversations about these issues are now being held in the public space more overtly than before. The pandemic is showing up inconsistencies which had been hidden earlier. New alliances between formerly separate groupings of people are beginning to get traction on difficult issues.
In this postmodern setting I’ve been watching so-called ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ Christians. I am increasingly saddened by the way they discard Christian traditions, which seem to embarrass them as they become more liberally minded. I wonder if they are still influenced by the confident dominance of modernist thinking in science and religion, which arose just as their cohort became religious and societal leaders. They haven’t noticed that since then, postmodern questioning has led to a variety of positions being acceptable. Attitudes are now more fluid and flexible than during the mid-20th-century’s hard-line science vs religion wars.
In my view, progressives and liberals seem to frequently replace seeking spirituality with an activist stance in social justice. Several secular causes have benefitted from this infusion of energy, but I feel these individuals are missing out on numinous power. They do not seem to comprehend the underlying flow of the spirit I imagine in the metaphor of the aquifers. It is for me, a compulsive call which I still feel strongly.
1 Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why (Baker Books, 2008).