[Dialogue] 6/02/2022, Progressing Spirit: Rev. Brandan Robertson: When Progressive Christianity Runs Dry; Spong revisited

Thu Jun 2 07:43:51 PDT 2022

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When Progressive Christianity Runs Dry
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|  Essay by Rev. Brandan Robertson
June 2, 2022

I, along with many other progressive Christian ministers I know, have grown increasingly cynical about our faith. We no longer feel that the faith that we’ve evolved to embrace has much of a bearing on our daily lives or an impact on the world. Rather than a deep spiritual sense of grounding that faith promises, we feel aloof and disconnected from any sense of inherent meaning or a system of values and beliefs about our lives and the nature of the world. This obviously impacts the way we teach and minister, and oftentimes, our congregations begin to feel the same cynicism about their religious identity and will leave the church. This combination of personal cynicism and congregational apathy is leading many progressive ministers to walk away from ministry altogether. I know at least a half dozen young progressive clergy who walked away from their churches in the last year, and all of them would cite either one or both realities as driving their exodus from religious ministry.

I’ve been tempted to walk away from my sense of vocation and progressive faith altogether many times for these reasons. But instead of walking away, I’ve stubbornly stuck around to reflect upon why it is that my own progressive faith and that of many in my community had dried up. I’ve wanted to know why progressive people of faith are leaving churches and even ceasing to identify with their religious tradition altogether. While I’ve not arrived at any sure answers to this question, I do want to explore one of the primary reasons I think progressive Christian faith in particular is failing to deliver a robust and meaningful spirituality to the next generation of spiritual seekers.

For me, the answer to this question has become obvious when I explore why other religious communities seem to be flourishing- in our embrace of the values of modernity, like skepticism, biblical criticism, and anti-supernaturalism, we’ve rid our religion of all the meaningful aspects of a religion. The reason religion exists is, in part, to help root people in a worldview and common story that they put faith in and live their lives according to, which helps give shape and meaning to their daily lives. But for many progressive Christians, rather than embracing as true the narratives of the Christian story by faith, we’ve spent our time picking apart the historic veracity of these stories, which, while deeply interesting, provides little inspiration or foundation for us to live our lives.

The Danish Philosopher Kierkegaard is famous for his exploration of the idea of the existential anxiety that all humans face- and his remedy to this angst was to suggest that people take a leap of faith and buy wholesale into a set of religious stories, rituals, values, and community, which then provides meaning and peace in their lives. What Kierkegaard was not advocating for was intellectual dishonesty or blind faith- rather, he accurately understood that the point of religion throughout the ages hasn’t been to actually provide objective answers to the big questions of life, but rather to provide a subjective way for different communities and cultures to view the world with common language, rituals, and values, thus, manufacturing a sense of wellbeing , comfort, and purpose in the life of the members of the community.  

In other words, while we progressive Christians are good at doing critical studies of the Bible and our traditions, eventually, our faith evolves into nothing more than an intellectual curiosity– which is extremely important and valuable- but ultimately doesn’t provide the experiential sense of meaning and groundedness that religion is intended to provide. This is why progressive Christian communities are often described as “dry” and “lifeless”- when there’s no shared buy-in to a common story, common beliefs, common practices, and common hope at some deeply emotional level but rather a common intellectual curiosity and critique, it’s hard to feel much excitement or inspiration from one’s faith and begs the question why faith is important at all.

So, what am I proposing? I think progressive ministers and people of faith should rethink how we speak about, teach, and believe our own religious faith. We need to overcome our fear of being perceived as naive or unevolved for seeking to experience the Divine or for adhering to the collective Christian story. We should still be skeptical, we should still embrace intellectual curiosity and honesty, but we should also recognize that there is a time for everything- and sometimes, it’s just good to suspend our skepticism and just allow ourselves to experience the mystery and possibility that our faith provokes within us. Instead of placing caveats around the stories we tell or the spiritual practices we perform, perhaps we can take an imaginative leap of faith, and act as if the stories and claims of our faith are true.

In many other progressive religious traditions, we see this displayed in profound ways. I have many friends who are progressive Rabbis and Imams. They too are skeptical and willing to critique the objective truthfulness of their traditions and stories- but at the end of the day, when they celebrate their high holy days or speak about the stories of their faith, they appear to be as devout as the most orthodox of believers. They participate in an ongoing story that may not be factually true and may have aspects that should be critiqued or reformed but is embraced nonetheless deeply true and experienced in a visceral way by them and their communities. There are times and places for critical discussion and analysis of their faith- but there are also times to embrace their traditions, stories, and theology as deeply true and allow that to provide hope, stability, and way to interpret their lives and the world.

If we are to be progressive Christians, it’s important that we stop neglecting the unique Christian religious tradition we’re a part of. (I’m writing to myself as much as to anyone else.) We must allow our faith to become experiential and emotional once again, and we must dare to take the leap in our minds to believe that the Christian story and worldview is true. For me, this means believing- feeling as if it’s true- that there is a God, revealed in Christ, who has come to redeem the world. That God is actively at work in my life and in the world, and that everything is moving towards God’s vision of wholeness and holiness. This may not be the theological paradigm that you embrace, but I do encourage you to embrace some paradigm that requires an experiential faith and challenges the way you think and live.

This simple shift in how we think and speak about our faith, I believe, will have a profound impact on our lives and our communities. To encourage the embrace and value of faith might just be the spark that helps us see the value of religion and religious community once again, but more than that, can provide a deeply felt hope and stability in our increasingly unstable and scary world.

~ Rev. Brandan Robertson

Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Brandan Robertson is a noted spiritual thought-leader, contemplative activist, and commentator, working at the intersections of spirituality, sexuality, and social renewal and the author of Nomad: A Spirituality For Travelling Light and writes regularly for Patheos, Beliefnet, and The Huffington Post. He has published countless articles in respected outlets such as TIME, NBC, The Washington Post, Religion News Service, and Dallas Morning News. As sought out commentator of faith, culture, and public life, he is a regular contributor to national media outlets and has been interviewed by outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, SiriusXM, TIME Magazine, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Associated Press. He leads Metanoia, a digital spiritual community at MetanoiaCenter.org
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Question & Answer

Q: By A Reader

Do you consider anything a sin? I once had a minister who told me that sin is anything that gets between you and God.

A: By Rev. David M. Felten

Dear Reader,

Seriously? In these last few days, as we reel from yet another greed-induced, politically endorsed massacre of school children, shake our heads at the ineptitude and evil of the Southern Baptist Convention’s non-response to its sexual abuse crisis, as state legislatures sprint to pass ever-more-punitive anti-LGBTQ laws and gut reproductive rights, as states revel in their power to execute prisoners, as oil companies make money hand-over-fist while accusing the government of deliberately raising gas prices, as teachers are simultaneously demonized for teaching Critical Race Theory AND put forward as potential armed defenders of their children, as pastors gin-up Christian Nationalist White Supremacist sentiments in their churches, and as politicians consciously frighten and manipulate unsophisticated voters with increasingly deranged conspiracy theories, can you POSSIBLY be serious?

How about a list of sins?

   - Facilitating or doing conscious harm to others — especially the vulnerable who can’t defend themselves (including people/animals/creation itself)
   - Lying to defend institutional wrongdoing and embracing greed and power as ultimate virtues,
   - Killing people to show how much we hate killing people,
   - Corporate welfare for the privileged while countless fellow citizens go bankrupt or die without affordable healthcare, housing, & education.

 I’d go on but there’s just too much. What breaks my heart all the more is that those who justify harming others (by commission OR omission) often do so through misdirection, namely, blaming the victims. “Women who are seeking abortions obviously got pregnant because they were promiscuous. SINNER!” “People on death row (never mind the racial and socio-economic disparity of those sentenced to death) obviously committed a crime and deserve to die. SINNER!” “Transgender people are perverts seeking ways to groom and assault our children. DANGEROUS SINNERS!”

What is wrong with this picture? Namely, American-style Christianity has been reduced to a narcissistic purity culture of obeying certain rules (no drinking, no dancing, no cards, no movies, no sex!) It’s all about the righteous being promised heaven and sinners threatened with hell. Never mind that, taken as a whole, Jesus seemed to be concerned with the details of individual lives only insofar as they had a bearing on the broader life of the community as a whole. Jesus was striving to bring about the kingdom for ALL of humanity — and that meant calling out injustice in the social order.

As far as sin being defined as “anything that gets between you and God,” that old chestnut just plays into the hyper-individualized propaganda of conventional pop Christianity. Frankly, it’s probably counterproductive to even get God involved in the definition of sin. The Judeo-Christian God is a known and well-documented practitioner of genocide, misogyny, racism, and religious violence. So, I’m happy to “get between” God and those kinds of behaviors. If that makes me a sinner (or the manifestation of sin itself), then hurrah! Somebody needs to stand up for humanity against an obviously inept, often complicit, and more-often-than-not AWOL Divinity.

Look, doing the “not good” or “not right” is part of the human condition. But the time is long since past for us to stop being distracted by an obsession over individual “sin” and focus on the institutional “not goodness” and systemic injustice that is laying waste to our world and its inhabitants. To ignore these evils may be the biggest sin of all. 

~ Rev. David M. Felten

Read and share online here

About the Author
Rev. David M. Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions” and authors of Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity. A co-founder of Catalyst Arizona and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet. David is the proud father of three reliably remarkable human beings. Visit his website here.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

"Think Different—Accept Uncertainty" Part XIII:
Miracles As Signs to Be Interpreted

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
July 5, 2012

Today, as a part of the overall series entitled “Think Different–Accept Uncertainty,” I want to begin to press this mini-unit on the miracle stories of the gospels toward a conclusion.  My concern has been to show modern readers that these miraculous narratives found in the gospels were always symbolic, interpretive stories rather than supernatural accounts arising out of the lack of knowledge present in that pre-modern world, filled as it was with fear and superstition. The first thing we noted was that the miracles attributed to Jesus in the New Testament fell into three distinct categories: nature miracles, raising of the dead miracles and making people whole miracles.

Our next insight came from looking at the miracle stories found in earlier traditions in the Hebrew Scriptures.  There we noted that, for the most part, miracles in the Bible were centered in three cycles of stories.  First, there was the Moses-Joshua cycle where the miracle stories all seemed to involve power over the forces of nature.  Here we found such things as the plagues on Egypt, the splitting of the Red Sea to allow safe passage across the water for the fleeing slaves and the raining down of heavenly bread called manna.  These “natural miracles” dominate the Moses cycle of stories.  When we arrived at the Joshua cycle we found additional feats of natural power that included the splitting of the waters of the Jordan River, the collapsing of the walls of Jericho and the stopping of the sun in the sky in its journey around the earth to allow more daylight for Joshua’s troops to massacre more of his enemy’s soldiers on the battlefield.  Then looking at the nature miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospels we saw in them echoes of these Moses-Joshua stories.  Jesus also was said to have had power over water.  He did not split seas and rivers, but he could calm the storm and walk on the water.  Like Moses, Jesus could also feed the multitude in the wilderness with finite amounts of food, which could expand to any needed dimensions and the supply never be exhausted just like manna in the wilderness.  The power of nature was thus depicted in the gospels as subservient to the power of Jesus.  Like Moses, Jesus could command the forces of nature to do his will.

The second cycle of miracle stories in the Bible was found in the accounts that gathered around the persons of Elijah and Elisha, who were thought of as those who started the prophetic movement. Here most of the miracles were once again nature miracles.  Both Elijah and Elisha could part the waters of the Jordan River and they could both expand the food supply so that it did not give out.  They could also control the weather and even call down fire from heaven to serve their purposes.  Two dramatically new miraculous powers, however, were added to the accounts of Elijah and Elisha.  Both were said to have been able to raise the dead.  Elijah raised from the dead the only son of a widow.  Elisha raised from the dead the twelve-year-old daughter of a wealthy woman who had befriended him.  Elisha was also the first person in the Bible who was said to have performed a healing miracle.  He healed the leprosy of a foreigner, a man named Naaman the Syrian.  We looked earlier in this series at the relationship between these Elijah-Elisha stories and the gospel narratives and began to see the close connections.  Jesus, like Elijah, raised from the dead a widow’s only son, a story told only in Luke.  Jesus, like Elisha, raised from the dead a child in a narrative recorded in Mark, Matthew and Luke.  I might also add that Luke alone told the story of Jesus cleansing the leprosy of ten people, but that story turned on the fact that one of them was a foreigner, a Samaritan, and he, like Naaman the Syrian, was the only one to recognize the source of healing power.  The Elijah-Elisha stories appear to have shaped these gospel narratives dramatically.

Most of the best-known miracle stories in the gospels that surround Jesus, however, had to do with healing individuals or making them whole.  Jesus was portrayed with some frequency as being able to give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, the ability to leap and walk to those with lame or withered limbs, and to enable the mute to speak or sing.  What do we make of these stories?  Well, the fact is that they too grow out of the Hebrew Scriptures and were presented in the gospels as signs that Jesus was the appointed messiah.

For this analysis, we have to go to I Isaiah (Isaiah 1-39).  Someone must have asked this eighth century BCE prophet how people would recognize and know just when the Kingdom of God on earth was beginning.  In Jewish mythology to inaugurate the Kingdom was the primary role assigned to the figure they called the messiah.  I Isaiah wrote his response to this question in the 35th chapter of his book in beautiful and poetic language.  You will know that the Kingdom of God is at hand and that the messianic age is beginning, he said, when these things occur:  First, water will begin to flow in the desert enabling the crocuses to bloom there and the gift of life will be celebrated from Mt. Carmel to Sharon.  The second sign will be just as dramatic:  Human wholeness will begin to replace human brokenness.  “The eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy” (Is. 35:5-6).

That specific messianic tradition was lifted out of I Isaiah quite intentionally by the interpreters of Jesus and its content placed into the gospel tradition by the authors of both Matthew and Luke when they re-introduced John the Baptist into their narratives.  According to this story, John had been imprisoned by Herod for his preaching against Herod’s illegal marriage.  While John was in prison, these two gospel writers tell us, John’s confidence began to waver as to whether or not Jesus really was “the one who was to come,” that is, the expected messiah, or whether John and his followers must begin to look for another.  With these doubts motivating him, John the Baptist sent messengers to Jesus asking him to clarify his messianic status.

Jesus did not answer John’s question directly.  Instead he told the messengers to return to John and tell him what they had seen and heard and let him draw his own conclusions.  Then, he referred them quite specifically to this Isaiah text.  The blind that came in touch with Jesus were enabled to see; the deaf were enabled to hear; the lame could walk and leap, and the mute could talk and sing.  The signs of the messianic age were in fact breaking out all around Jesus.  In this narrative, Matthew and Luke were making specific claims about Jesus as messiah and they were quoting this passage from Isaiah to demonstrate that Jesus indeed was the expected one, “the one who was to come.”

If healing were to accompany the inauguration of the Kingdom of God and if Jesus was believed to have been that promised one, then he had to be portrayed as the bringer of wholeness.  This means that miracle stories had to be attached to the memory of Jesus in all three of the Old Testament categories: Moses stories, Elijah- Elisha stories and messianic expectation stories. Jesus was messiah was their claim and for supporting data for this claim they cited stories that demonstrated that he commanded the forces of nature, he raised the dead and he was the one who could and did bring wholeness to the brokenness of human life.

That is what those miracle stories were employed to communicate and that is why they need to be read as interpretive symbols, not as supernatural acts.  That was also why no miracles were connected with the memory of Jesus until the eighth decade.  It took that long for this interpretive process to get established. That is why Paul seems to know nothing of Jesus as a miracle worker.  Miracles were an eighth decade addition to the Jesus story, introduced first by Mark, then copied within a decade or so with no additions by Matthew.  By the time Luke wrote in the late 80’s to early 90’s, more Elijah-Elisha stories were added to the memory of Jesus.  That is why only in Luke did Jesus like Elisha, heal not one, but ten lepers.  Only in Luke did Jesus raise from the dead the only son of a widow just as Elijah did.  When Luke arrived at the climax of his gospel he once again adapted an Elijah story, magnified it and then retold it as a Jesus story.  That is why, only in Luke, did Jesus ascend into heaven, just as Elijah did, except that Luke says that Jesus did it without the help that Elijah received from a magical, fiery chariot drawn by magical fiery horses and propelled by a divine whirlwind.  Jesus, as the new Elijah, could ascend without any supernatural aids.  After Elijah ascended, he was said to have poured out a double portion of his powerful, but still human spirit on his single disciple, Elisha.  In Luke’s climactic narrative, Jesus, the “new Elijah, poured out the enormous gift of God’s Holy Spirit in sufficient quantities to transform the entire community and to last throughout the centuries.   In the telling of these Ascension and Pentecost stories, Luke tipped his hat overtly to the Elijah source from which he was drawing his material.   He even took the whirlwind that propelled Elijah’s chariot heavenward and he turned it into the mighty rushing wind that filled the upper room on the day of Pentecost.  He took the fire from the magical chariot and horses and turned it into tongues of fire that were said to have lighted on the heads of the disciples as a sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit.

A close examination of the miracle stories of the New Testament thus reveals that they were not written as the memory of literal events.  They were, rather, created as interpretive narratives presenting Jesus as the new Moses, the new Elijah and the expected messiah.  They are to be read not as supernatural tales, but as interpretive symbols.  Suddenly the miracles begin to look very different and we are able to read the gospels in a new manner.  To see this, however, we must “think different” and “accept uncertainty.”

We will continue this series next week.

~  John Shelby Spong
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