[Dialogue] 2/25/2021, Progressing Spirit: Rev. Dr. Robin R. Meyers: Saving God From Religion; Spong revisited

Thu Feb 25 09:29:14 PST 2021

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Saving God From Religion
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|  Essay by Rev. Dr. Robin R. Meyers
February 25, 2021
Let’s be clear, this is an audacious idea.  Writing a book about God is an audacious project.  In fact, claiming to know anything about God is more than audacious—it is intellectual blasphemy.  So, to begin, let me be clear.  I have no idea what I am talking about.  Nor do I possess even a shred of secret, spiritual information about God that is not available to anyone, or to everyone.  Being a recently retired, lifelong parish minister (a “man of God” in the old patriarchal language) provides me no special knowledge either.  Nor does being a person of prayer and meditation.  Nor does it help to have advanced degrees in rhetoric, or to have published other books about Jesus and progressive Christianity.  The Divine Mystery is not a rational idea; it is “trans-rational.”  Indeed, not even being a white man of privilege, with tenure no less, is an advantage.  It may be a disadvantage.  All of which is to say that such a project should not be attempted.  Do not write a book about God. 

When I told my wife that this was exactly what I planned to do, she responded, “That’s great, Robin.   At least you picked a small, manageable topic.” 

No wonder it took five years.  Books about God make editors nervous.  They do not sell as well as books about Jesus.  Both scholars and the reading public are prone to pick up such books and feel slightly nauseous.  Why?  Books about God usually fall into one of two categories:  1) An extended “proof” that God does in fact exist, since that is what the author believed to begin with.   Or 2) an extended proof that God does not in fact exist, since that is what the author believed to begin with.  Both things, of course, cannot be true.

Such an approach was never my intention, however, since “existence” when it comes to God has never made sense to me.  I have spent my life as an ordained “a-theist” (a non-theist).  Why?   Because everything that “exists” once did not, was brought into being by something that preceded it, and will one day cease to exist—hardly things that most people are comfortable believing about God.  Neither does it make sense that humans could have a subject/object relationship with that which is beyond knowing or naming—unless, of course, we have created God in our own image--the opposite of imago dei--that beautiful idea that we are created in God’s image. 

Creating God in the image of humans, however, is exactly what we have done.  Look no further than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo’s most famous fresco, the creation of Adam, depicts the most iconic image of God in the western world.  God is a white, bearded European elder, surprisingly buff, who is surrounded by a heavenly bevy of attendants, one of whom is embraced by Godfather God as if she is a gift that is about to be offered to Adam.  Is that Eve, or is it Mary?  Art historians are not certain, but the real focus has always been on the world’s most famous “gap”—the space between God’s outstretched hand reaching down to touch Adam’s hand, where their fingers do not quite touch.  Theology has been “minding” that gap for centuries, promising to bridge it.

Granted, many people reading this will say that they do not believe, at least intellectually, that God is an old White Guy in the Sky.  Yet studies have shown that until an old image is replaced by a new one, the original image remains.  It is the default image, if you will, and evidence abounds that we are still stuck with this default image of God.  “He” is male (just listen to our liturgies, even in progressive churches); “He” is white (just look at much of the church art hanging in the vestibule), and more dangerous still, “He” is a kind of the heavenly vending machine (handing out favors to God’s chosen, while ignoring, or punishing everyone else—the unchosen?). 

God in western theological models is William Blake’s Nobodaddy.  He is a heavenly Partisan, the fearsome and petulant head of the cosmic household, a jealous tyrant who must be appeased with gifts of supplication (obedience, prayers, praise) in order that “His” subjects may be restored to their right relationship with Daddy—who, for some strange reason, wants or needs to be worshipped?  These traits remind us of many earthly fathers, of course, or kings, or authoritarian politicians, and that is no accident.  Western God language is profoundly monarchical, as we crawl into the sovereign’s throne room with our petitions, unworthy wretches, or worms, that tremble as they seek divine favor or beg for forgiveness.  What’s more, “His” eye never sleeps, and he is perpetually disappointed in what “He” sees.  Consider that our image of God is not all that different from our image of Santa Claus:   He sees you when you're sleeping/He knows when you're awake/He knows if you've been bad or good/ So be good for goodness sake!

There is another way to think about the Sacred Mystery, however.  It is more consistent with many Eastern religious traditions where God is not a “being” at all, but rather no-thing.  Instead of God being just a bigger version of you and me, perhaps God is the animating Spirit of everything that does exit, a kind of evolutionary insurgency in the universe, a Primal Memory of the Big Bang, a transcendent, sacred Mystery that does not initiate discriminatory action, but is action and change itself.  What if we are “entangled” in what Barbara Brown Taylor called The Luminous Web, where all actions have consequences, physical and spiritual.  To assume otherwise, to think that any of us are exempt from the consequences of our actions, is sin, because separation is sin, as Paul Tillich put it. What if the life of faith means acknowledging and embracing the life of spiritual entanglement, and the time has come for the church to replace a theology of obedience with a theology of consequence?  By their fruits you shall know them.

Strange as it sounds, what if God does not do anything, but without God nothing gets done?  What if, as quantum theory suggests, the universe is made up of “non-local stuff?”  What if there is a spiritual version of string theory, so that instead of a God who pulls strings, God is the string?  

Since human being are always claiming to know what God is up to, and those claims have done great harm (as when a pastor tells a grieving mother that God wanted her baby in heaven early), wouldn’t it be better to think of God as up to nothing in the world?  Wouldn’t this solve the problem of evil?  What if quantum entanglement proves that everything really is connected to everything else—beyond time and space—in ways that baffled even Einstein?  And what if, as chaos theory posits, there are no variables too small to change the outcome of complex systems?  In other words, what if what we do, down to the smallest choices we make every day, chains out in an infinite and incomprehensible dance of cause-and-effect—rippling across the luminous web for good or for ill like the proverbial stone tossed into the pond?  What if that Luminous Web is God? 

What’s more, what if—since we can never know what the ultimate aggregate of any single action may turn out to be—we could return personal responsibility to the life of faith, rejecting the idea that we are helpless and must be rescued.  What if Process Theologians are correct when they imagine that even God is evolving?  What if, instead of pretending that faith means believing things we know are not true in order to get rewards we doubt are available, we could return to the servant model of just trying to do the right thing.  What if, in our small corner of the universe, we acted in love and then trusted in a “this-worldly” faith that Bonhoeffer called “religionless” Christianity?  

Dr. King called it the “moral arc of the universe.”  He endorsed the “entangled spiritual life” as opposed to our intensely privatized, individualized gospel when he said, “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” 

Perhaps God is not, and never was, an Old Man in the Sky.  Rather, God is something closer to Pure Relationship.  When we enter into that relationship by trusting in the power of unconditional love, risking forgiveness, offering mercy with no strings attached, imagining the plight of others as if we were the other, and making the world a safer and more welcoming place for the weak and disenfranchised, then we act in faith.       

Freed from dogma and doctrine, we could stop believing stuff to get stuff, and live by trusting the power of the choices we make entangled in the Luminous Web.  It is, after all, trust—not certainty—that makes us “believers.”
 ~ Rev. Dr. Robin R. Meyers

Read online here
 About the Author
Rev. Dr. Robin R. Meyers is retired senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC Church, Oklahoma City, Distinguished Professor of Social Justice Emeritus at Oklahoma City University, and Adjunct Professor of Homiletics at Phillips Theology Seminary.  His is a fellow at Westar, a member of the God Seminar, and his most recent book is Saving God from Religion:  A Minister’s Search for Faith in a Skeptical Age. Visit website here:  RobinRexMeyers.com

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Question & Answer

Q: By Oskar

I'm agnostic and if it's true there is no hell it would be a relief, but this has raised some questions: What about those who have sinned? What happens to those who have broken some of God's rules or do you not believe in sin either? Or, if you are a guy like me, who couldn’t make up his mind that God does or does not exist? Or what about the very bad men in human history like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc? How will God deal with those mad men who have taken the lives of billions of peoples? Why doesn't God help our world, why does he let there be so much pain and suffering?

A: By Rev. Aurelia Dávila  Pratt

Dear Oskar,

I feel the angst in each of your questions. They are so profound that piles of writings throughout history have attempted to chip away at them. First, I’d like to thank you for your vulnerability in voicing them. Second, I’d like to apologize. While I do intend to provide you with a response, I won’t be offering an answer. 

When it comes to matters of God, I simply despise black and white answers. Even more, I hate how often people assume they have them. While I resonate with these questions and continue to ask them myself, moving away from dualistic thinking has ultimately revived my faith. It’s not that I stopped having questions. I simply stopped needing answers to navigate my spirituality.

I take comfort in Jesus, who very rarely gave hard and fast answers, and more often offered nuanced responses. Those who followed him were the ones willing to accept a faith paradigm where love and action in the present moment were more important than doctrine, prescriptions and future kin-doms. Jesus was about bringing heaven to earth now, and I believe this is the urgent work we have before us as well. As a result, I am less concerned with hypothetical what-ifs and more concerned with building the world I want to see right now.

When I was taking my final course of seminary, I was asked to write an essay presenting a theological take on hell. I was filled with such angst over this assignment, not only did I skip writing it altogether, but I also didn’t show up to class on the day it was due. This resulted in the only “B” grade I received in my otherwise “perfect” seminary education.

I know it sounds ridiculous, irresponsible, and even immature of me. But you see, I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pretend to have concrete answers where I don’t believe they exist. And ten years later, I continue to believe it is unhelpful to provide answers to some of these theoretical questions. Instead, I choose to lean into embodied responses, which most often look like solidarity.

And I do offer you my deepest solidarity. I have asked all your same questions at one time or another. Often, I find myself revisiting them. Wrestling and feeling lost; feeling peace and knowing fullness - these are cycles I’ve learned to receive with joy. They remind me I am human. They remind me I am normal (sort of, ha!). They remind me that this mystical Christ-space is right where I want to be.

I am not a typical pastor. I have no interest in filling in the blanks for people. I am sorry I don’t have the best answers for you, but I do hope my response can be helpful as you piece together the puzzle of your own faith journey. If it helps, I have faith you are exactly where you need to be.

~ Rev. Aurelia Dávila  Pratt

Read and share online here

About the Author
Rev. Aurelia Dávila Pratt is a pastor, writer, paradigm-shifter, and sacred spacemaker.  She is an imago-dei enthusiast who finds real joy in helping people live into the fullness of their God-given divine image. Find her on Instagram or Twitter @revaureliajoy where she shares pastoral care nuggets for deconstructing Christians and people of faith.

Aurelia is the Lead Pastor as well as a founder of Peace of Christ Church. She is the co-creator and co-host of the Nuance Tea Podcast, where she is redefining what it means to be a clergywoman of color. Aurelia is president of the Board for the Nevertheless She Preached conference and a regular contributor at Progressing Spirit. She is a licensed master of social work who currently serves on the Board of Advocates at the Diana R. Garland School of Social Work.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXX:
The Epistle to The Hebrews

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
July 22, 2010
We do not know who wrote it. We do not know the date of its composition. We do not know to whom this book in the Bible was actually written. We are clear that it was not authored by Paul. It was certainly not written as a letter or an epistle. Its format is much more that of an address, a lecture or a sermon. The “Hebrews” to whom this work is addressed do not even appear to be Hebrews, at least not in a religious sense. They were, rather, Jewish Christians — that is, people of Jewish background who had become followers of Jesus. They had roamed far from the strict orthodoxy of traditional Judaism, but they were still deeply familiar with and committed to Jewish liturgical practices. They were Hellenized and breathed deeply of the Greek culture that had spread over the known world from the time of the conquest by Macedonia in the forth century BCE under the leadership, first, of King Philip II and later of his son, Alexander the Great. This letter to the Hebrews was written in Greek, not Aramaic, the language of traditional Judaism. It nonetheless reveals a deep and significant connection to the Hebrew Scriptures, but it is noteworthy that, whenever the Epistle to the Hebrews quotes these scriptures, it does so from the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament done about 250 years before the birth of Jesus. Where these Greek-speaking, dispersed Hebrews lived when they received this book cannot be determined. The guesses as to the time of its writing range from the late 60’s CE at the earliest to about 140 CE at the latest. The weight of opinion, however, would fix its date no earlier than the late 80’s and no later than 100 CE. The Epistle of Clement, a well-known piece of early Christian writing which is generally dated in the middle years of the tenth decade, does in fact quote the book of Hebrews. This should provide us with an outer limit, but the proposed date of Clement is itself also widely debated, though most would gravitate to around 96 CE. All we can really do is to peruse the text of this book and learn whatever we can from its content about both its author and its audience.

The atmosphere reflected in the Epistle to the Hebrews is tense. It speaks of those who are in danger of drifting away (2:1). It mentions those who have fled for refuge (6:18). It urges its hearers to hold fast to their confession of hope without wavering (10:23). It refers to those who have the need of endurance (10:36). It urges perseverance in the race or task set before them (12:1). Finally, it assures its readers that since Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever, their hearts should be strengthened by grace (13:8-9).

Many scholars suggest that this level of tension in the Christian community reflects the persecution under the Emperor Diocletian, which ravaged the Church between 81and 96, making the latter years of this reign our best guess for the date of the composition of Hebrews.

The recipients of this treatise seem to reflect one constituency in the evolving Christian Church. While Christianity was born in a Jewish womb as a Jewish movement within the synagogue, it turned, primarily under the influence of Paul and of Paul’s followers like Luke, Timothy and Titus, into being more and more a gentile religion. This fact served to make it harder and harder for some of the earliest disciples of Jesus, who were traditional Jews, to continue to live and worship inside the Christian movement. That is a reality that has been replicated again and again in religious history. Growth always marginalizes the original members who feel left behind, and thus not part of the present consensus. They no longer felt that they fitted into what Christianity was becoming. They were tempted to pull away from their Christian convictions and were tempted to return to the Judaism of their childhood. The author of this book sought to dissuade them from this step by demonstrating the superiority of Christianity to traditional Judaism. The way this author chose to do that is quite telling.

A significant holy day in the life of the synagogue was Yom Kippur, The Day of Atonement. It came in the fall of the year and was observed with a 24-hour vigil of solemn penitence and somber mood. The liturgy focused on two animals that were brought to the high priest. Both animals had to reflect what the Jewish people yearned to be, physically perfect in body and morally perfect in mind and spirit. These two animals could be lambs or goats, or one of each, and they were gone over scrupulously by the high priest until he was assured first that they were perfect physical specimens; they could have no scratches, blemishes, scars or broken bones. Secondly, they were deemed to be morally perfect since they lived below the level of human freedom and were thus incapable of choosing to do evil. One of these animals, normally a lamb, was then slaughtered in a sacrificial, liturgical manner and its blood was smeared on the mercy seat of God in the Temple’s Holy of Holies. This blood was believed to possess cleansing power. Through the blood of this perfect lamb of God, the people believed they could now stand before God on this one day despite their sinfulness. They came to God “through the blood of the lamb” that washed their sins away.

The second animal, referred to in Leviticus as a goat, was then brought into the assembly of the people and placed before the high priest who, taking the goat’s horns began to confess the sins of the people. The sins of the people were thus said to come out of the people and to land on the head and back of this goat, making this goat the bearer of the people’s sins. This animal was then banished from the assembly and run into the wilderness, leaving the people symbolically cleansed from their sins. This goat was called “the scapegoat” for he bore the sins of the people and vicariously endured the fate the people had earned for themselves.

There is no doubt that the liturgy of Yom Kippur was instrumental in interpreting the Jesus experience among the earliest Jewish Christians. Echoes of this connection are found throughout the New Testament. Paul uses this Yom Kippur formula when he wrote in I Corinthians 15 that “Jesus, (like the lamb of Yom Kippur) died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.” Mark makes reference to this liturgical understanding when he wrote (10:45) that Jesus, like the lamb of Yom Kippur, gave his life as a “ransom” for many. When John the Baptist sees Jesus for the first time in the Fourth Gospel, he called him “the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” a phrase lifted almost verbatim from the Yom Kippur liturgy.

It was this understanding that later got incorporated into substitutionary theories of the atonement, which found expression in the Protestant mantra, “Jesus died for my sins!” and is referenced when Catholics refer to the Eucharist as “the sacrifice of the Mass.” The mass thus makes timeless the sacrifice of Jesus as the lamb of God, to take away the sins of the people.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews was thus writing to discouraged Jewish Christians, who no longer felt at home in predominantly Gentile worshipping communities, hoping to prevent their return to the fold of Judaism. One cannot go back, he argues, to the ineffective sacrifice of the lamb at Yom Kippur, which has to be repeated annually because it affects nothing permanently. Yom Kippur, he contends, only expresses a yearning for change; it does not itself create change. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, he argues, did in fact break the power of sin that made sacrifices necessary in the first place. We can now enter the presence of God, the author of Hebrews argues, just as we are with all our warts and shortcomings visible, for in the cross of Calvary the love of God accepted the offering of the new lamb of God, embraced us in our sinfulness and transformed us by assuring us that nothing we can do and nothing we can be will finally separate us from the love of God seen in Christ Jesus. This was the message Jesus lived because he reached out in accepting love even to those who betrayed him, denied him, forsook him, tortured him and killed him. In the death of Jesus on the cross, a once-and-for-all act was accomplished, which brought God and human kind together in a new creation. So, he concluded, if one leaves the Christian faith to return to Judaism, one is actually leaving the sacrifice that made all future sacrifices unnecessary in favor of a sacrifice that must be repeated annually. Jesus was the perfect offering for which God yearned, while the Yom Kippur animals were only a symbol of the eternal human yearning to be whole. Thus, this writer argued that in the sacrifice of Christ all sacrifices were brought to an end and all human beings can now become new creations in the oneness of God. It is to our ears a strange argument, but it resonated with the audience to whom it was first addressed.
The author of Hebrews also likens the priesthood of Jesus, not to the high priests of Jewish worship, but to the eternal priesthood of a figure named Melchizadek mentioned in the book of Genesis. His priesthood was without beginning or ending. Perhaps this is the place when the idea of pre-existence first entered the Christian story.

In this paradigm, the Christ is at one and the same time both the new sacrifice and the sacrificing high priest. It was an argument based on ancient worship patterns, but it must have impressed some contemporary leaders since this book was quickly incorporated into the Canon of Christian scriptures. Yet, as the Church became more and more Gentile, the power of this argument faded. Today it sounds like another version of the old religious cliché: “My God is superior to your God!” In its day, however, it stated the essential Christian claim that all people can come into the presence of God “just as I am without one plea,” which is, I believe, the one irreducible Christian claim. Yet, strange as it seems, some parts of the Christian Church still deny that the love of God is extended to all regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or even creed. The Epistle to the Hebrews ultimately proclaims that there are no boundaries on the love of God. That is a worthy message, even when couched in an archaic form.

~  John Shelby Spong
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