[Dialogue] 4/19/18, Progressing Spirit; Sandlin: More Q's, Fewer A's; Spong Revisited

Thu Apr 19 10:34:47 PDT 2018

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More Q's, Fewer A's

 Essay by Rev. Mark Sandlin, April 19, 2018
Most conservative and mainline churches don’t like to talk about it a lot, but the reality is that churches have done lots of damage to lots of lives for a long time. The list of damages is long. Frankly, that’s probably true for most institutions in general. It’s hard to gain a large footprint and not manage to step on people as you attempt to move forward. It’s hard, but it’s not really excusable and there is always room for improvement.
I think one of the more quietly damaging things the institutionalized Church has done over the years is to teach us that asking questions is bad, or at least asking investigative questions is bad. Feel free to ask the minister what a particular story means, but it’s practically blasphemy to ask why it couldn’t mean something else. As a matter of fact, the institutionalized Church has a long history of telling us not to ask too many questions. Us? We are told to trust in the traditional translations. We are told to learn and repeat the confessions even if we don’t agree with what they are saying. Doing otherwise is dangerous – doing otherwise shows a lack of faith. Or, so we are told.
As a matter of fact, I now try to minimize my use of the word “faith.” Colloquially, it has become the near equivalent of “blind belief.” And, “blind belief?” That’s just churchy language for “I wanna believe what I wanna believe.” Me? I’ve got no use for that. That kind of thinking (or should I say lack of thinking?) leads to gullibility and a spiritually shallow life. It has nothing substantial to stand on and falls down time and time again when it is put up to the challenges of life and what spirituality looks like in tough times. It cannot sustain you and it certainly cannot grow you spiritually. It just leaves you stuck in the quagmire that someone else created in order to control you and your perspective. Or as Saint Thomas Aquinas said, “Clearly the person who accepts the church as an infallible guide will believe whatever the church teaches.”
Personally, I prefer the old Chinese proverb that says, “He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.”
We should want to ask questions, to grow in our faith. We should be innovative in our thinking rather than traditional. That is not to say we should ignore the traditional thinking. Frequently, it is an excellent place to start, but we should not get stuck in a space and a place that used antiquated thinking, antiquated information, and antiquated tools to arrive at its conclusions. To grow, we must be innovative. To be innovative we must ask questions. That’s what helps us develop in, and advance, our spirituality.
It’s interesting to consider that the one group who probably shares with the world’s leading innovators a willingness to question everything is children. They learn through asking questions. Frankly, it’s the simplest and most effective way of learning. Author Warren Berger in his book “A More Beautiful Question,” says that children from ages 2 to 5 ask roughly 40,000 questions. Unfortunately, for most of us, as we progress through school and grow into adulthood, the number of questions we ask drops off dramatically.
It would seem that as we get older we somehow forget this oh-so-important lesson of asking questions. Sometimes, sadly, it is even taught out of us. From, standard school curriculum to the blind faith of institutionalized churches, we are typically encouraged to memorize and regurgitate someone else’s “knowledge” rather than develop our own. We learn answers rather than how to ask good questions. Interestingly, nowadays, it is very easy to find answers – nowadays, answers are practically a dime a dozen. With the aid of laptops, smartphones, and smart home products like Amazon Echo and Google Home, we can quickly get the answer to almost any question even when we personally have very little to no knowledge on the subject whatsoever. It seems to me that this instant access to “answers” makes critical thinking skills and the ability to ask good questions possibly more important than they have ever been. The bottom line is that knowing how to ask good questions is much more important than knowing the answers. Asking good questions helps us form our own beliefs and our own opinions instead of mindlessly adopting them from other people.
Here’s the thing, not asking good or even enough questions has a direct impact on the quality of choices we make. And, not making good choices in our spiritual lives is not just unfortunate, it can impact the health with which we move through life. Learning and practicing the art of asking questions helps us gain deep insight, develop more innovative solutions, and arrive at better decision-making.
Spirituality attempts to help us understand who we are and what we are to be within this grand experiment we call life. It attempts to lead us into being our best selves. To guide us in making the most positive impact we can in every moment of our lives. To play the best role we can in making lives better and Creation better. To recognize our universal connectedness. To capture glimpses of the thing we call God.
I don’t know about you, but while that may sound kind of beautiful, if I stop to think about it for a moment, it can be pretty overwhelming. I mean, that is a MASSIVE undertaking. There is simple NO WAY I can do that with what I know now.
Which is where asking questions comes in.
The brilliant thinkers of the world will tell you that, much more frequently than starting with the known “answers,” it is asking the right questions (and frequently they are simple questions) that almost always starts the process which leads to great breakthroughs.
If we want real breakthroughs in our lives, professionally or spiritually, we need to learn to embrace some uncertainty if we hope for creative answers to emerge. I mean, isn’t life itself one of the most amazing creative processes you have ever participated in? So, what if discovering and living out your purpose has much less to do with defining it and much more to do with letting it emerge slowly? It seems to me that most natural creative processes work that way. Part of our job is to create a nurturing environment for it and allow divine mystery to express itself.
One of my favorite modern scientists is a theoretical physicist and a co-founder of string theory. His name is Michio Kaku. He says, “I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence. To me, it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance.” He also says that in his own point of view, “you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God.”
It’s why I consider myself an agnostic Christian. It’s also why I assert that when it comes to spirituality, expecting to have all the answers rather than learning to constantly ask and live in the questions is far worse than just folly, it the height of egoism and self-importance.
One of the challenges of the modern Church is the reality that the roots of most religions are in providing answers. For example, we have creation stories because people in that pre-scientific age wanted to know where we came from, so religion provided the “answers.” In our scientific age, we have to begin looking at the other “truths” that these sacred texts provide and be willing to ask questions of, and about, them. Not only that, we must begin considering the importance of experience as a paradigm shift away from answers rooted in the past and toward questions rooted not only in the present but in the future.
Being rooted in questions acknowledges our ultimate inability to “prove” God. It opens us up to blooms of creative, spiritual insight, and innovation. It frees us from the oppressive need to be “right” and opens us to the experience of just “being.” Not only that, but in knowing that we do not have all the answers, it should also open us to the possibility that others may have perspectives that could help us – whether they come from a different belief tradition or no belief tradition at all. It should open us up to dialogues we may have otherwise avoided – dialogue that may grow us in ways we never dreamt of.
It might even open us up to the reality that no one way of growing is the right way to grow. That we all are growing in the same garden, in the same soil, nourished by the same earth.
I’ll conclude with something Austrian poet and novelist Rainier Maria Rilke once said, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
~ Rev. Mark Sandlin
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About the Author
Rev. Mark Sandlin is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) from the South. He currently serves at Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. He is a co-founder of The Christian Left. His blog, has been named as one of the “Top Ten Christian Blogs.” Mark received The Associated Church Press’ Award of Excellence in 2012. His work has been published on “The Huffington Post,” “Sojourners,” “Time,” “Church World Services,” and even the “Richard Dawkins Foundation.” He’s been featured on PBS’s “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” and NPR’s “The Story with Dick Gordon.” Follow Mark on Facebook and Twitter @marksandlin

Question & Answer

Q: By Rev. Laurel Gray

While traditional Christian congregations continue their gradual decline, I'm often asked, "Well, how is Progressive Christianity doing?"
Other than your comment, "It is growing" I have no credible answer to that. If indeed, PC is growing, I am happy to hear that, but to what extent is it growing? I've been attending the Jesus Seminars on the road for many years, and have noticed a definite decline in attendance, particularly among the youth. The millennials do not seem interested.
What does that say about the possible future of the PC movement?

A: By Fred Plumer

Dear Laurel,
I realize events like the Jesus Seminars, and the Jesus Seminars on the Road seem to attract mostly seniors and they are fading away. You are right, the younger crowd is not interested in much of these events. It is true for Bishop Spong’s crowd and to some degree they are not necessarily attracted to progressive Christianity. Even more obvious is that younger generations are not attracted to churches, especially churches that have not changed. Thus the losses and closing of churches is obvious to anyone who wants to look seriously at any of these things.
However, the millennials are the most spiritual group of people ever to be classified as a generation. They have started forming small groups for “Sunday discussion,” support groups and lots of other forms of planned communities. The have started dozens, if not hundreds of on-line connections.One of the first ones that kept popping up is “Juniper Path.” Like Headspace, Global Spiritual life, Search Inside Yourself, Juniper Path brings the tradition of meditation to modern day life. “It focuses on the rigor of ancient practices in new cultural packaging. It is committed to providing the wisdom and experience of a long-standing meditation tradition in secular form, tailored to contemporary culture, knowledge, sensibility, and psychology.” It is designed for people to meet in small groups but also to follow the teachings and suggestions from their website. Its primary goals are for transformation and accountability.
One of their participants, Lawrence Levy, states:  “We need a path - spiritual teachings, a spiritual way of life that is not an affront to what we’re learning in science and to our norms like gender equality. It has to blend with who we are because this is a path to make us the very best that we can be in our world-right here where we are sitting.”
One of the more interesting ones for me is something called The Dinner Party.  The Dinner Party is a young community gathering of 20-30 young people who have experienced a significant loss. There are others like it, Good People Dinners, Deliberate life, Civil Conversations Project but this one seems to be better organized. It is following the Alcoholics Anonymous model in many ways and it is having positive impact on lives. These gatherings bring people together for conversation that tend to be more intimate and personal than every day chit chat. They take on subjects like death, racism, and loneliness that ensures that connections are made more quickly and participant have the experience of being seen, truly seen. Some of their groups are identify as Christian. These folks make the dinner explicitly sacred utilizing communion bread and wine. Other groups are encouraged to bring a level of spirituality into the gatherings.
CTZNWELL, like The Feast, Kunto and Off the Matt, is attempting change the world from the inside out by mobilizing the well-being industry. Their main function is to increase the interest in the practice of personal transformation through meditation, the participant connects the dots between these practices and the politics of social and environment well-being.
>From their website: We engage in deep transformational work around our values; and are led through relationship to issues like access to healthcare, food justice, living wage, climate change and education. From there, we partner with campaigns led by the people most directly affected and respond in conscious and creative disruption and re-imagination of our world. We aspire to move and unify our community at a scale that will have an impact at a systemic and global level.
And finally, one of the closet things to church is something called The Sanctuaries. Like Sunday Assembly, and Bodi Spiritual Center, the Sanctuaries is a diverse arts community with a soul in Washington, D.C. It goal is to bring together a multi-racial and multi-spiritual community of “citizen artists.” Events like Soul Slams and Community Huddles allow people of diverse spiritual and artistic backgrounds to share their perspectives, do creative projects and engage in honest conversations. They develop creative skills to do social justice in the city and foster partnerships with other organizations.
Like other new communities they are building on the assumption of diverse spiritual and non-spiritual expressions. Besides the Huddles and other activities, they meet in large groups on Sunday morning. They assume a spectrum of spiritual and religious inclination and build from there, with a loyalty to fostering spiritual growth but not necessarily to a church like community format. They are primarily run by volunteers but they do have at least one ordained pastor leading services. There stated goals are personal transformation, community and social transformation.
“I definitely appreciate the love that I get from everybody-from all walks of life. To just be able to come and be themselves and genuine. The Sanctuaries allows people to open up and there’s no other place where people could do it, just given how life has become. Everything is hustle and grind, no time, no money, and stress. The Sanctuaries is a safe place that I can go to and share what I do, creatively.”
So my conclusion is that most of the old denominations are going to die or certainly become even less influential-the same thing for churches and organizations like the Jesus Seminar. However I still believe that something powerful will replace these things that will be more relevant to our changing world. Unfortunately I doubt it either of us will be around to see it happen.
~ Fred Plumer

Click here to read and share online
About the Author
In 1986 Rev. Plumer was called to the Irvine United Congregational Church in Irvine, CA to lead a UCC new start church, where he remained until he retired in 2004. The church became known throughout the denomination as one of the more exciting and progressive mid-size congregations in the nation. He served on the Board of Directors of the Southern California Conference of the United Church of Christ (UCC) for five years, and chaired the Commission for Church Development and Evangelism for three of those years.
In 2006 Fred was elected President of ProgressiveChristianity.org (originally called The Center for Progressive Christianity - TCPC) when it’s founder Jim Adams retired. As a member of the Executive Council for TCPC he wrote The Study Guide for The 8 Points by which we define: Progressive Christianity. He has had several articles published on church development, building faith communities and redefining the purpose of the enlightened Christian Church. His book Drink from the Well is an anthology from speeches, articles in eBulletins, and numerous publications that define the progressive Christianity movement as it evolves to meet new challenges in a rapidly changing world.

Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Can One Be Christian Without Being a Theist?

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on June 15, 2005

 As one who lectures extensively across this nation and the world, I have been asked questions by my audiences that have ranged from the naive to the profound, from the obvious to the obtuse. Some have been hostile, designed to embarrass, attack, and minimize. Some have been seeking in the wasteland some hint that the living water of faith might yet be available. No one, however, has ever confronted me with a question at once so penetrating and yet so devastating as the one with which I began this column.
It was articulated several years ago not by a critic of the Christian Faith but by a deeply committed layperson who had even thought for a time about seeking ordination. It went to the very core of the contemporary theological debate and forced me to think in a brand new direction. Theism is the historic way men and women have been taught to think about God and most people think it is the only conceivable way to think about God.
The primary image of God in the Bible is surely the theistic image; that is a God conceived of as a Being, supernatural in power, external to this world but periodically invading it to answer prayers or rescue a person or nation in distress. This theistic Being is inevitably portrayed in human terms as a person who has a will, who loves, rewards, and punishes. Although one can find other images of God in the scriptures, this is the predominant and familiar one.
Theism is also the understanding of God revealed in the liturgies of the Christian churches where we meet God as one who desires praise, elicits confession, reveals the divine will, and calls us into the spiritual life of communion with this divine Being.
So dominant is this definition of God that to reject theism is to be an a-theist. An atheist is one who denies the theistic concept of God and, since theism exhausts most peoples’ definition of God, that is heard to be saying there is no God. So when one is confronted with the question, “Can one be a Christian without being a theist?” the door is opened to much theological speculation. This question can only be asked when one lives in a world where the traditional theistic view of God has become inoperative because of the explosion in human knowledge over the last five hundred years.
We once attributed to the will of this deity everything we did not understand, from sickness to tragedy to sudden death to extreme weather patterns. But today sickness is diagnosed and treated with no reference to God whatsoever. Tragedies like the attack on the World Trade Center, tornadoes, floods and tsunamis are investigated by this secular society without much reference to the will of God. That was certainly not the case when things like the Black Death or the bubonic plague, swept across the world. When death strikes suddenly today, we do autopsies that reveal a massive coronary occlusion or a cerebral hemorrhage as the cause. We do not speculate on why this external Deity might have wanted to punish this particular person with sudden death. Even what the insurance companies still call “acts of God” are today thought to be completely explainable in nontheistic language. We chart the formation of hurricanes from the time when they develop as low pressure systems in the southern oceans and we mark their paths until these weather systems are broken up. No meteorologist I know of refers to these phenomena of nature as divinely caused to inflict godly punishment upon a wayward region, people, or nation.
One English priest and theologian, Michael Goulder, became an atheist when he decided the way he had traditionally conceived of God was nonsensical since, in his words, God “no longer has any work to do.” This God no longer cures sicknesses, directs the weather, fights wars, punishes sinners or rewards faithfulness. The idea of an external supernatural deity who invades human affairs periodically to impose the divine will, though still given lip service in worship settings, has died culturally. If God is identified exclusively with the theistic understanding of God, then it is fair to say that culturally God has ceased to live in our world.
If the theistic understanding of God exhausts the human experience of God, then the answer to the question of the layperson is clear. No, it is not possible to be a Christian without being a theist. But if God can be envisioned in some way other than inside the theistic categories of our religious past, then perhaps a doorway into a new religious future can be opened. To make that transition is what I regard as the most pressing theological issue of this generation.
Christianity has been shaped by traditional theistic concepts. Jesus was identified in some sense as the incarnation of the theistic God. It was said that he came to do “the Father’s (read: the external supernatural supreme Being’s) will.” Indeed, Jesus was portrayed as a sacrifice offered to this God to bring an end to human estrangement from the Creator. Theologians talked of original sin and “the fall,” to which, it was asserted, the cross spoke with healing power and in which drama of salvation the shed blood of Jesus played a central role. But in a world that has abandoned any theological sense of offering sacrifices to an angry deity, what could this interpretation of the cross of Christ possibly mean? In a post-Darwinian world, where creation is not finished but is even now ongoing and ever expanding, the idea of a fall from a perfect world into sin and estrangement is nonsensical. The idea that somehow the very nature of the heavenly God required the death of Jesus as a ransom to be paid for our sins is ludicrous. A human parent who required the death of his or her child as a satisfaction for a relationship that had been broken would be either arrested or confined to a mental institution. Yet behavior we have come to abhor in human beings is still a major part of the language of worship in our churches. It is the language of our ancient theistic understanding of God. It is also language doomed to irrelevance and revulsion. At this point the real question thus becomes, “Can Christianity be separated from ancient theistic concepts and still be a living faith?” That is why this inquiry from this layperson was such a threatening, scary question. Once it is raised to consciousness, it will never go away and will destabilize forever the only understanding of God most of us have ever had.
The “religious right” does not understand the issues involved here. On the other hand, the secular society where God has been dismissed from life has also answered this question by living as if there is no God. Only those who can first raise this question into consciousness, and who then refuse to sacrifice their sense of the reality of God when all theistic concepts fail, will ever entertain or address these issues.
This debate already rages in the theological academy where God has not been spoken of as an external, supernatural Being, periodically invading the world, in decades. Yet the experience of God as divine presence found in the midst of life is all but universally attested. Jesus as a revelation of this divine presence is at the heart of the Christian claim, but the way it has traditionally been processed and transmitted is now all but universally rejected by the academy.
So perhaps the major theological task of our times is to seek a new language in which to translate the premodern theistic categories into the postmodern, nontheistic language of tomorrow. The religious leader who does not address these issues offers little more than an unbelievable ‘opiate for the people.’ I cannot begin to say how much the posing of this frontier question about the relationship between the Christian faith and the theistic language of the past encouraged me from that day to this. It is the crucial concept in developing a revolution in theological inquiry. Most Christology seeks to explain how the external theistic deity could be met in the person of Jesus. Most moral theology is based on the assumption that a theistic deity will dispense reward or punishment. Most prayer is addressed to an external theistic deity who has the power to answer those prayers with an act of miraculous intervention. Most liturgy is directed toward this external theistic deity. Theism is therefore the lynchpin that once pulled brings the traditional formulations of the Christian faith crashing down. Reformation and the future life of the Christian church depends on the ability of the contemporary Christian to dismiss theism as an adequate explanation of God, without dismissing the God experience and even the God experience in Jesus as unreal. It is no wonder this debate scares so many.
The present split in the developed Christian world between fundamentalism and a growing secularity rises out of this very issue. The fundamentalists (who come in both a Protestant and a catholic version) refuse to engage the issue because they see no way out. The secular humanists embrace the debate but see no value left in traditional Christianity. My vocation has become to dismiss the theistic explanations without dismissing the God experience. Check with me in fifty years and I will tell you whether or not I have succeeded.
~  John Shelby Spong

Announcements
John Shelby Spong’s final book “Unbelievable” is now available!
Why Christianity Is No Longer Believable – And How We Can Change That

Five hundred years after Martin Luther and his Ninety-Five Theses ushered in the Reformation, bestselling author and controversial bishop and teacher John Shelby Spong delivers twelve forward-thinking theses to spark a new reformation to reinvigorate Christianity and ensure its future.

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