[Dialogue] 5/16/19, Progressing Spirit: Brian McLaren: What Am I Now?; Spong revisited

Fri May 17 07:07:16 PDT 2019

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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4027885298 #yiv4027885298templateBody .yiv4027885298mcnTextContent, #yiv4027885298 #yiv4027885298templateBody .yiv4027885298mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;}  }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4027885298 #yiv4027885298templateFooter .yiv4027885298mcnTextContent, #yiv4027885298 #yiv4027885298templateFooter .yiv4027885298mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }  Previously I shared a bit about my past, this piece turns to the present.  
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What Am I Now?
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|  Essay by Brian McLaren
May 16, 2019[In my previous piece, I shared a bit about my past. This piece turns to the present.]

I’ve just begun work on two books, the second of which is tentatively entitled, Do I Stay Christian? As I sketch out the shape and trajectory of the book, I’m thinking more deeply about why I still identify as Christian and what I think Christian can, and in fact, must come to mean in the decades ahead.

Two adjectives are commonly added to Christian when people describe or introduce me and my colleagues. I would like to briefly reflect on those adjectives, emergent and progressive.

[Of course, I have to first laugh at myself, because the title and subtitle of one of my better-selling books was a study in using adjectives to modify the problematic noun Christian: A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I am a missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist, calvinist, anabaptist/anglican, methodist, catholic, green, incarnational, depressed-yet-hopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian.]

The word emergent is probably one of the most common terms associated with my name. The term is derived from two primary sources. In the world of botany, in an emergent wetland, plants rooted in one world (water) emerge into another (air). In the science of emergent properties, a complex system sometimes generates possibilities that go beyond the sum of its parts. For example, if you take a bunch of ants and put them together, you simply have a bunch of ants. But if those ants are organized in a colony, each ant has its role, and the colony has a collective functioning and capacity beyond what any and all individuals could do alone. [Similarly, one-hundred billion brain cells, if linked together by the right neural pathways, can create a sense of self and consciousness that the same cells could never experience apart from the network.] The intelligence of the colony, hive, or brain are emergent properties.

Both definitions seemed to describe the experience of growing numbers of Christians in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. We felt that we were living in two worlds. Our roots were in Evangelical, Mainline Protestant, and Catholic institutions and traditions, all of which were deeply informed by premodern and hierarchical sensibilities augmented by modern and colonial sensibilities. We felt we were growing into some new postmodern and postcolonial space, and we felt that if we could connect and collaborate outside of traditional institutional mechanisms, something powerful, creative, and new could … emerge.

We also felt that we were emerging beyond the liberal-conservative polarity that had so typified modern Christianity. We acknowledged our liberal and conservative heritages, but we felt that neither was offering us the resources we needed to move forward. So we were emerging into new space.

[Sadly, but predictably, the word emergent was quickly “dumbed down” to mean singing chants and Taize songs, having worship stations, meeting around tables rather than in rows of pews, and so on. (Something similar has happened with the promising word missional.)]

People often added another word after emergent, namely, movement. But I didn’t feel, and still don’t feel, that we ever achieved movement status. In movement theory, before a new movement can begin, several things have to happen.1. A group of people have to agree that the status quo isn’t working or is unacceptable.
2. They have to engage in critical conversations to understand what’s not working and what should be done differently, and they need to recruit a critical mass of diverse people to contribute to the critical conversations.
3. The participants in these critical conversations have to agree on what’s wrong and what’s needed, they have to decide to do what’s needed, and they have to identify the proposals, demands, goals, and strategy by which they will do what’s needed.
4. They have to try, fail, try, fail, and keep trying and failing until the elites who have the power to enforce the status quo are sufficiently weakened or divided, so that the movement has a possibility of success.
5. When the moment is right (“in the fullness of time,” to use biblical language), they have to attract needed resources (including money) and launch their strategy.

I have felt that emergent Christianity has been working through the second of these stages for the last twenty years. We have been taking critical conversations to deeper and deeper levels, peeling the onion, so to speak, layer by layer, looking at matters of style, method, structure, leadership, substance, and vision. We have made a lot of progress in those twenty years, but I sense that we still haven’t penetrated to the depths of our challenges, nor have we come to wide agreement about what needs to be done. And although we have worked tirelessly to bring a more diverse group of people into the conversation, I don’t believe we have as yet reached either critical mass or diversity.

As I see it, for the movement we dream of to be born in North America, we need the emergent wings of several communities to come together: Evangelical, Mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, Historic Black, Latinex, Indigenous/Native/First Nations, Asian, Eastern Orthodox. These emergent wings are taking shape, but in different communities, and their size, strength, and stability vary greatly, as do their priorities and available energy for collaboration. In many cases, internal dynamics (i.e., tensions in the Black church community, or the Roman Catholic Community or the United Methodist communities) have been so preoccupying that trans-denominational collaboration has been stalled. Because the needed movement has not yet gained critical mass, many young (and some older) people in each wing are simply leaving Christian faith.

It may be that we will only be ready to move on from the second stage when we have young leaders, and in light of our history, young leaders of color, who are willing and able to take the lead, supported (but not controlled!) by those of us who are older in years and paler in skin. It also may not be possible or appropriate for such a movement to be born in North America unless it is linked up and working in harmony with parallel movements around the world. In other words, the movement we need may not only be multi-racial and trans-denominational, but also international.

And, I can imagine good reasons why it would be less than helpful for Christians to build such a movement alone. I can imagine why what we really need are parallel movements arising and collaborating from within Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Sikh, Humanist, and other communities. Having traveled to over 40 countries in the last few decades, I see these critical conversations springing up globally, across faiths, races, and denominations. There are encouraging signs of “movement pregnancy.” But births cannot be rushed.

Meanwhile, proposals, demands, goals, and strategy continue to come into focus (3). But elites continue to gain ground in terms of financial wealth and control over political, educational, and religious institutions. Their hegemony could topple quickly, but as recent elections have shown, they will not give up without a fight (4). As yet, nowhere near the needed financial resources have been discovered by the proto-movements that are taking shape (5), but, that too, could quickly change with a few generous people.

The word progressive well may be eclipsing the word emergent at this point, and it deserves some attention. The word means moving forward, and in that way, differs from a static, institutional liberalism that functioned as a static alternative to a static or regressive conservatism.

For participants in the critical conversations described above, institutionalism, whether conservative or liberal, is being identified as one of our key problems. (Not institutions themselves, but institutionalism: a preoccupation with institutional self-protection rather than institutional mission.)

Increasingly, I think, progressive implies an acknowledgement that we need to progress beyond static institutional liberalism.

[More practically, the term progressive is being defined by many solely in terms of affirming LGBTQ equality, which implies that once one affirms equality, one is in a static new category called progressive and all our problems are solved. In this way, progressive can become a resistant or reactionary stance rather than a revolutionary and dynamic one. If all our energy is used up resisting and reacting to traditionalist, conservative, and regressive actions, we won’t be able to provide a constructive holistic vision of a desirable future, and that vision is absolutely necessary for a movement to occur.

So the term progressive, like the term emergent, can quickly be dumbed down and its descriptive power blunted rather than sharpened.]

When I think about myself and my work, two other terms are also in play, along with emergent and progressive.

First, I believe the term contemplative will be key to the movement we need. The contemplative mind, as currently defined by Richard Rohr and others, is not just about exchanging old thoughts and beliefs for new thoughts and beliefs, but rather it is about an alternative way of thinking and believing. It is about including and transcending the dualistic mind (us/them, right/wrong, saved/damned, accepted/rejected) into something bigger and deeper. We might describe this non-dual or unitive mind as a whole-brained way of seeing that is simultaneously critical and conceptual (left brained), imaginative and mystical (right brained), and embodied (brain stem). This contemplative mind is within everyone’s reach, but many don’t even know it exists, and others may have had brief experiences of it, but haven’t been trained in practices that make it habitually accessible.

This contemplative mindset is essential because it helps us see that achieving what we want depends on becoming who we need to be. If we want an ecological civilization, for example, we need to learn to deal with our own consumptive and acquisitive desires. If we want a genuinely peaceful world or nation or neighborhood, we need to learn to deal with our own inner conflicts, fears, hostilities, and rivalries. If we want a just and equitable world, we have to become just and equitable people. In this way, the contemplative mindset leads us to integrate our inner work with our outer work.

This inner work is essential, but it is not sufficient; we can’t be satisfied with a more mystical or self-actualized version of organized religion in its current form.

That brings me to a final word, activist. Activism demands that organized religion be transformed into organizing religion (as I discussed in my book, The Great Spiritual Migration). I’m supremely uninterested in a reinvigorated form of institutional Christianity that fills churches with happy, fulfilled consumers of religious goods and services, while the poor and vulnerable suffer, the oligarchs make a killing, conflicts rage on, and the planet burns. An emergent, progressive, contemplative, and activist Christian faith is what interests me today and draws me forward, just as it did decades ago, when I didn’t have the words to describe it.~ Brian D. McLaren

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About the Author
Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is a passionate advocate for “a new kind of Christianity” – just, generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common good. He is an Auburn Senior Fellow and a leader in the Convergence Network, through which he is developing an innovative training/mentoring program for pastors, church planters, and lay leaders called Convergence Leadership Project. He works closely with the Center for Progressive Renewal/Convergence, the Wild Goose Festival and the Fair Food Program‘s Faith Working Group. His most recent joint project is an illustrated children’s book (for all ages) called Cory and the Seventh Story. Other recent books include: The Great Spiritual Migration, We Make the Road by Walking, and Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? (Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World).
Brian has been active in networking and mentoring church planters and pastors since the mid 1980’s, and has assisted in the development of several new churches. He is a popular conference speaker and a frequent guest lecturer for denominational and ecumenical leadership gatherings – across the US and Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He has written for or contributed interviews to many periodicals, including Leadership, Sojourners, Tikkun, Worship Leader, and Conversations.
A frequent guest on television, radio, and news media programs, he has appeared on All Things Considered, Larry King Live, Nightline, On Being, and Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. His work has also been covered in Time, New York Times, Christianity Today, Christian Century, the Washington Post, Huffington Post, CNN.com, and many other print and online media.
Brian is married to Grace, and they have four adult children and five grandchildren. His personal interests include wildlife and ecology, fly fishing and kayaking, music and songwriting, and literature.
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Question & Answer

Q: By Ron
If our knowledge of God can only be accessed through faith, and if the divinity of Jesus can only be affirmed through faith, why do we act and speak as if faith is the same as empirical knowing?

Wouldn’t we be further ahead in our spiritual journey and in our interaction with the world if we would present ourselves honestly by saying something like ‘I don’t ‘know’ God exists or that Jesus was divine in a greater sense than any of us? But I choose to live my life as if those things are true. That, to me, is faith and authenticity. It also protects me from the hubris of thinking that my tribe has the truth over all other truth claims. I’m interested in your perspective on this issue of faith vs knowledge.

A: By Rev. Matthew Syrdal
 Dear Ron, I appreciate your question and observation, especially your ‘choice to live your life as if…’ which seems to be a wonderfully clear and authentic articulation of faith to me. Perhaps faith truly is less a question to be answered, and more a mystery to be lived. Unfortunately, part of the confusion you point out stems from the fact that the modern-scientific age of empiricism has co-opted the word ‘knowledge’, and our understanding of what ‘knowledge’ actually is. Knowledge in the ‘objective’ sense is very important for scientific measurement and forming the mathematical hypotheses that have brought miraculous advances across a diversity of fields in our age of globalizing and quantum technologies. The question is at what cost? Perhaps the cost of these advances has been the loss of the ‘deep subjective’ which is both experiential knowledge (gnosis in the Greek), and relational knowledge (intimate, as the Hebrew word yada insinuates; see Gen 3). The deep subjective is that ‘I-Thou’ relationship spoken of by Martin Buber, not to mention indigenous animistic peoples, religious mystics, and even many deep ecologists.According to folks like Carl Jung and Stephen Galegos and others, there are four functions, or ‘windows’ by which we can know the world. Only one of those windows is the privileged thinking function. The others are sensing, feeling, and intuition, or imagination. Each ‘window’ let’s part of the light into the house, so to speak, but not all of it. They are designed to work together. It could be argued that Albert Einstein, for example, had a more powerful imagination perhaps than even his capacity for critical thinking. My opinion, partially drawn from the study of indigenous peoples, the ancient prophets, mystics and shamans of various cultures, is that real faith goes far beyond ‘thinking’ — the subject-object dualism of the strategic mind must be in a sense overcome for advances in faith and consciousness. To be whole we must incorporate all four ‘windows’ in the fullness of our capacities (I-the Self) in relationship to the dynamic world, other, God (Thou). It makes me think of the way jazz musicians improvise together when they make music in such a deeply intuitive way that they enter a flow state. They might even say that the music is playing them. In this way, it is the deep subjective, not critical thinking, that is the primary referent of faith.~ Rev. Matthew Syrdal
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About the Author
Reverend Matthew Syrdal M.Div., lives in the front range of Colorado with his beautiful family. Matt is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian church (USA), founder and lead guide of WilderSoul and Church of Lost Walls and co-founder of Seminary of the Wild. Matt speaks at conferences and guides immersive nature-based experiences around the country. In his years of studying ancient Christian Rites of Initiation, world religions, anthropology, rites-of-passage and eco- psychology Matt seeks to re-wild what it means to be human. His work weaves in myth and ceremony in nature as a way for people to enter into conversation with the storied world in which they are a part. Matt’s passion is guiding others in the discovery of “treasure hidden in the field” of their deepest lives cultivating deep wholeness and re-enchantment of the natural world to apprentice fully and dangerously to the kingdom of god. Matt has been coaching, and guiding since becoming a certified Wild Mind nature-based human development guide through the Animas Valley Institute and is currently training to become a soul initiation guide through the SAIP program.  |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Miracles and the Resurrection
The Fourth Fundamental, Part I

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
August 1, 2007
 I return this week to our running series on the Five
Fundamentals, that supposedly irreducible set of principles that believers were told had to be accepted as literally true if one wanted to be called a Christian. It was from the publication of these five fundamentals between the years 1910-1915, in a series of widely distributed tracts financed by the Union Oil Company (Unocal) of California, that the term “fundamentalist” entered the Christian vocabulary.In the fourth fundamental, two concepts were coupled together both of which had to do with acknowledging that supernatural, miraculous power was present in Jesus of Nazareth as the incarnation of God in human flesh. The literal historicity of the miracle stories of the New Testament was the first. These miracles were designed, it was said, to demonstrate the divinity of Christ who had the ability to do Godlike things. The second was the greatest miracle described in the New Testament that asserts that the divinity of Christ is best seen in the fact that he conquered death by walking physically and bodily out of his tomb on the third day after his death by crucifixion. On this primary supernatural act of the resurrection of Jesus in a physical bodily form that could be handled, touched and on which the wounds of crucifixion were visible, the fundamentalists declared that the whole Christian experience lives or dies.In the next few weeks in this column, I will examine both of these claims, biblically, historically and theologically. I need to note at the very beginning that few, if any, world class biblical and theological scholars would acknowledge the literal accuracy of either claim. Much to the dismay of the fundamentalists, however, these scholars continue to be practicing Christians. The gap between the Christian academy where biblical scholarship is engaged deeply and the pews, in which the typical worshiper sits on Sunday morning, has been growing for at least 250 years. I seek to bridge that gap in this series.Miracles first appear in the gospels in Mark, the first gospel to be written in the early seventies. They are in three general categories: first, the nature miracles, by which I mean stories depicting Jesus as being able to control or manipulate the natural laws of the universe. Examples of this category are the stories of Jesus walking on the water, stilling the storm, cursing a fig tree and causing it to die immediately and the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness with a limited number of loaves and fish. This feeding story is actually told twice in Mark, once on the Jewish side of the lake where five loaves and two fish are expanded to feed 5000 men, plus women and children and after all have eaten their fill twelve baskets of fragments are collected. Then Jesus moves to the Gentile side of the lake and with seven loaves and a few fish feeds 4000 people after which seven baskets of fragments are collected.

Second there are the healing miracles. These healing stories in Mark fall basically into four categories: the blind receive their sight, the deaf hear, the lame (those with crippled or withered limbs) are made whole and the tongues of the mute are loosed so that they can speak or sing. Sometimes these categories are mixed since the inability to hear and the status of being mute are in some cases, two parts of the same affliction. Once we referred to this as being “deaf and dumb.”

Third are the raising from the dead miracles. Mark records only one such episode, the restoration to life by Jesus of the daughter of Jairus, a synagogue leader. Every miraculous event attributed to Jesus in the first gospel to be written falls into one of these three categories.When we come to the second gospel, written about a decade after Mark (82-85 C. E.) and popularly attributed to Matthew, we note that this gospel is basically an expansion of Mark. Mathew clearly has Mark in front of him as he writes and quite literally incorporates about 90% of Mark’s content into his gospel. He expands that content, however, with his own additions, making his work a twenty-eight chapter book as opposed to Mark’s sixteen chapters. Matthew’s expansions include the genealogy of Jesus with which he opens his gospel, the introduction of the miraculous birth tradition, complete with stars in the east, magi, gold, frankincense and myrrh, the narrative parts of the temptation in the wilderness story, the Sermon on the Mount and some uniquely Matthean parables like the parable of the Last Judgment in which the sheep and the goats are separated. Matthew also expands Mark’s story of the resurrection from Mark’s original eight verses to twenty. For our purposes in discussing the miracles of Jesus, however, it is of note that Matthew includes every miracle story introduced by Mark. Matthew might vary the details in some of the recountings of Mark’s miracles, but nothing is changed so dramatically that the story is not easily recognized. There are no new miracle stories in his gospel.When we turn to Luke, who wrote either near the end of the 9th decade or in the early years of the 10th decade (88-92 C.E.), we discover that Luke also has Mark in front of him as he writes, but he is not nearly so dependent on Mark as Matthew has been. Luke incorporates about 50% of Mark into his gospel and also expands Mark dramatically, but in a different manner from Matthew. While Luke, like Matthew, adds a birth narrative and a genealogy, his major expansion is in the section of the gospel in which Jesus is teaching his disciples on the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. The journey section in Luke is about three times the length found in Mark. Luke also includes those parables of Jesus that are the most familiar to most of us and that appear nowhere else in the gospel tradition – the Good Samaritan; the Prodigal Son; the Unjust Ruler, and Lazarus and the Rich Man. Luke also changes the resurrection material dramatically, relocating it from Galilee, where it is centered in both Mark and Matthew, to Jerusalem. He also makes Jesus’ resurrection more obviously physical, while stretching his appearances out over 40 days. In addition Luke writes a new climax to the Jesus story by adding narratives of Jesus’ cosmic ascension and the Day of Pentecost, which are told only in Luke’s second volume that we know by the name of the Book of Acts.It is noteworthy to recognize that Luke edits Mark’s miracle stories dramatically, while adding new miracle accounts about which Mark seems not to know. For example, Luke omits Mark’s second feeding of the multitude story, but adds both a healing story (the cleansing of the ten lepers of whom only one, a Samaritan, returns to give thanks) and a new raising of the dead story (the only son of a widow in the village of Nain).When we come to the Fourth Gospel, John calls these supernatural events not miracles but “signs” and he develops them into long elaborate narratives with great theological monologues attached. Most of the Johannine signs can be correlated with earlier miracle stories, but two are unique to John. One is a nature miracle story, the account of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee and the other, a raising of the dead story that we know as the dramatic narrative in which Lazarus is raised from his four days old grave.That is the briefest possible summary of the miracles attributed to Jesus in the New Testament. If we are going to talk about and understand in any way what these supernatural events mean we must begin by becoming aware of their number and their nature. One cannot make sense of the miracle stories of the gospels with only a vague awareness of their content.One further observation will complete this first phase in our study of the miracles attributed to Jesus. No evidence has been found of miracles being attributed to Jesus in any other Christian writing prior to Mark in the 8th decade. Paul who wrote between 50-64 C.E. never refers to or mentions a supernatural act or a miracle that he attributes to Jesus. That omission in no way made Jesus less divine in the writings of Paul. It is clear in all of Paul’s writings that in Jesus God has been met, engaged or, in some way not always clearly articulated, experienced in a dramatically new way. Knowledge of Jesus possessing supernatural, miraculous ability, however, clearly did not seem to be part of Paul’s consciousness.A second source that many scholars date earlier than Mark is called Q, a hypothetical collection of the sayings of Jesus. When all of Mark was deleted from both Matthew and Luke, it was discovered that there were other sayings of Jesus that were identical or near identical in Matthew and Luke that were not Marcan. So the theory was developed that Matthew and Luke both had a second common source on which they drew in the composition of their gospels. Once this source was identified some scholars began to date this Q material even earlier than any of the gospels. I am not convinced by these arguments but those who espouse the Q hypothesis are learned people whose opinions must be taken seriously. However, my point is that if these scholars are accurate in their early dating of Q, it is noteworthy that there are no miracle stories in Q. Nor are there any in the Gospel of Thomas, discovered in the late 1940’s at Nag Hamadi and which some scholars believe was written before Mark.So these are the data we need to explore in this segment of our study of the five fundamentals. Miracle stories attributed to Jesus are no earlier than the 8th decade. They are in three categories: nature miracles, healing miracles and the raising of the dead miracles. Are they literal descriptions of historic happenings? I don’t think so. Is belief in the historicity of the biblical miracles a fundamental truth upon which Christianity hangs? Well only if you want to say Paul would not therefore have been a Christian. I hope this whets your appetite. This study will continue next week.~  John Shelby Spong  |

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Announcements

2019 Common Dreams Conference, Sacred Earth: 
Original Blessing, Our Common Home

The 2019 Common Dreams Conference, Sacred Earth: Original Blessing, Our Common Home, will be held on 11-14 July at Newington College in Stanmore, Sydney, AU.

The distinguished international keynote speaker will be Matthew Fox & the conference program is based on his concept of Creation Spirituality, which is rooted in ancient Judeo-Christian teaching, inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions; welcoming of the arts and artists; wisdom centered, prophetic, and committed to eco-justice, social justice and gender justice.
 Early Bird Discount ends May 31st - Click here
for more information/registration.  |

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