[Oe List ...] 8/30/18, Progressing Spirit: Roger Wolsey: Atoning for bad theology – both kinds; Dowd sermon; Vosper; Spong revisited

Thu Aug 30 06:37:08 PDT 2018

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Atoning for bad theology – both kinds.

 Column by Rev. Roger Wolsey on August 30, 2018
Humans frequently feel a sense of being less than – less than whole, less than healed, less than okay, less than worthy, less than spiritual, less than “connected,” less than Divine. This felt sense of less than, this sense of a gap between an ideal state and present reality, is what humans need to have tended to. We need to have it addressed. We yearn to know that we aren’t defined by our worst days, our worst actions, or our past. We yearn for a sense of “oneness” – and that we are sufficiently in a state of goodness, serenity, or contentment. We yearn to know that we belong in the universe and that the we are welcome to be here. We yearn to love and be loved. We yearn to know we are lovable and to feel that we belong on the planet.
A common and historic Christian way to describe this is to say that we desire atonement. And yet atonement has become a highly loaded and charged term, especially in the West. Philosopher Ludwig Witttenstein said that when it comes to words, “meaning is use.” And to the extent that atonement and atonement theology have come to largely be used in ways that imply something that many people find offensive, it’s only natural that many of those people will come to not care for those words.
Hyper-vigilance and overstatement are understandable. In the same way that the words “religion”, “worship,” “Church,” “Christianity”, and “theism,” have come to be allergens to some people due to the hijacking of those terms by conservative evangelicalism and fundamentalism – the words “atonement” and “atonement theology” have come to be anathema to many people of progressive Christian sensibilities.
There’s nothing wrong with the concept of atonement. Understood as “at-one-ment”, atonement simply refers to efforts, intentions, and practices for humans to realize their deep connection to God/Spirit/Source. Nor is there anything wrong with atonement theology – as there are forms of it that many progressive Christians subscribe to; i.e., either the Moral Influence theory of the atonement, or the Christus Victor theory of the atonement; or even simply through practices such as yoga, spending time in nature, art, poetry, community service, meditation, or centering prayer. And, neither is there anything wrong with thinking that Jesus is somehow a part of a Christian understanding of atonement. And yet, what many progressive Christians mean when they say “atonement theology” – is of course the penal/substitutionary theories of the atonement. While no Church Council in Church history has ever ruled that any one theory of the atonement is “the one, true, proper, or right one”, these two theories have in fact come to be the primary understandings of the atonement within conservative evangelicalism and fundamentalism. Sadly, those two forms of the faith have become “mainstream Christianity” over the past 4 decades in the West.
The notions that either “God had to lethally punish his son” for the sins that the rest of humanity commits, or that “Jesus is our proxy/substitute for a necessary and required Divine transaction” are of course abhorrent and reprehensible to progressive Christians – and it is because of the widespread notion that Christianity requires and necessarily involves those notions that so many Western people have increasingly been rejecting organized religion – and most specifically Christianity. It is important however to not conflate the retributive and penal/substitutionary theories of the atonement as being synonymous with atonement theology altogether. It is for this reason that I greatly appreciate Bishop Spong’s care to put “atonement theology” in quotes in his 2016 essay detailing the 6th of his “12 Theses” to indicate qualifying nuance with this exact concern in mind. It is, however, easy to become a bit lazy and to mis-use atonement theology by meaning the substitutionary theory of the atonement — see what I mean in this earlier Dec. 2015 essay. Quite a few other prominent writers have succumbed to this unhelpful conflation over the past few years as well.
Fr. Richard Rohr (a Catholic theologian and mystic who has also engaged in this sort of over-stated conflation – at least allowing it in headlines to his articles) has provided a helpful summarizing of the thinking of the late Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotis on these matters – “Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.” It isn’t about humans needing to appease some sort of angry, demanding, judgmental, or vindictive tyrant in the sky, but rather, it’s about helping people to come to see the vast and amazing fullness, love, grace, compassion, and inclusion that is available to all to partake in and experience. With this in mind, the Way Jesus lived his life, his teachings, and his example – including how he allowed himself to be on the receiving end of the worst that the Roman Empire could dish-out – corporeal beating and crucifixion – is what matters. It isn’t about his having died a violent death, and it isn’t even about him dying at all. It’s about trusting that following the counter-cultural, subversive, and highly peculiar and vulnerable way of life that Jesus taught – is what allows us to experience true wholeness. Similarly, on pages 115-120 of my book Kissing Fish, I elaborate on Jesus’ understanding of salvation – which translates better as “wholeness/healing” (social, communal, and personal) here and now – instead as something that happens to individuals which is primarily concerned about where they will spend the afterlife.
I recently discovered this more mystical take on atonement – enjoy:

Blessings to us all as we find our way to feeling right in and with the world.
~ Rev. Roger Wolsey

Click here to read online and to share your thoughts
p.s., For further exploration, here is a video clip of Bishop Spong talking about Why Atonement Theology will Kill Christianity; Here is a fine essay “Confronting Atonement Theology” (note the aforementioned unfortunate conflation of terms) from a United Methodist perspective back in 2013; here is a really helpful and well-presented Primer on Atonement Theologies within Christianity; and here as even more detailed treatment on Various Christian Theories of the Atonement.

About the Author
Rev. Roger Wolsey is an ordained United Methodist pastor who directs the Wesley Foundation at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is author of Kissing Fish: christianity for people who don’t like christianity; The Kissing Fish Facebook page; Roger’s Blog on Patheos “The Holy Kiss”

                            Rev. Michael Dowd's 25-minute guest sermon at First Congregational Church of Sheboygan, Wisconsin on June 26, 2018. (The first five minutes are his "scripture" readings.) This is the core message Rev. Dowd feels called (compelled) to deliver in moderate-to-liberal and progressive Christian and Roman Catholic churches in 2018.

For additional sermons and longer programs (especially his 80-minute "EcoTheism: Ecology as the Heart of Theology" narrated slide presentation, which is a follow-up to this sermon). This is a slightly longer (80 min) version of the main multi-media program he offers in moderate-to-liberal and progressive Christian churches (Catholic and Protestant)

Here are the six main topics covered in this video presentation:
1. How Nested EcoTheism Un-trivializes God, Guidance, Gospel, Good & Evil
2. The Evolutionary Purpose of Religion and Religious Necessity of Science
3. Big Green History (GOD's Time) -- The Cosmic 101-Year Timeline
4. Reality Speaks -- What's Inevitable, What's Futile, What's Christ-ian?
5. The Death & Resurrection of Faith: Unnatural vs. Undeniable Christianity
6. Ten Commandments to Avoid Extinction and Redeem Humanity

For videos of recent sermons and longer programs visit his Reverend Reality YouTube Channel and our two main websites: The Great Story and Michael Dowd.org.                        

Question & Answer

Q: By Dave Bythell,

The other day it was coincidence that I had some clergy friends, all retired, for supper and so laid on the story recently in Progressions about Americanized Chinese food vs. the ‘Real’ Chinese food. Bible as it has been told for hundreds of years vs. the real meanings in the Biblical stories. This drew more than a little discussion. One very experienced clergyman, almost 90 and a humanist Christian and a modern thinker, made an analogy. He said that progressive Christianity was like a doughnut, all sugary and nice but that there was nothing in the centre but a hole.

I am told that at meetings of the clergy in my isolated city of 110,000 people that they discuss truth in religion among themselves. I asked why they didn’t mention some of the obvious things, shown by science, from the pulpit. Was it that they feared losing their jobs and their pensions? Trying to exist in this community of staunch Protestant and Roman Catholic traditions bordered by Bible chapels is a lonely existence particularly with no overt support from clergy.

1. Why won’t intelligent clergy step up to the pulpit and tell the truth at least about the many Biblical things that can be explained with mechanisms known in the last 2000 years? (e.g Darwinism, radio carbon dating, our world is not earth centred, and earth is round not flat!)

2. How does a progressive Christian exist with no Christian community of support even from clergy who certainly do discuss modernized theology. It certainly is a lonely vigil.

3. And how are we to fill that doughnut hole? Tough imagining something beyond comprehension and greater than can be imagined. What is there to grasp in the hole for Progressive Christians?

[ Obviously I am trying to solve some of my own problems by subscribing to Progressions and the Progressive Christianity websites. I have also remotely joined Gretta Vosper’s West Hill United Church which is a mere 20 hour drive from Thunder Bay Ontario. I get their news and upbeat messages by their newsletter/bulletin. Still, it would be nice to find a few people who see Christianity in an enlightened form as I do, certainly among clergy many of whom certainly are in agreement with a progressive stance even if it has to be in a clandestine guise. I am certainly not against ritual etc. but am against Creeds and prayers I feel are absurd now after 2000 years of progress in society.]

A: By Rev. Gretta Vosper

Dear Dave,
Your questions are the those asked by progressive Christians around the world. Each is a great question and deserves to be answered fully. So this is an answer only to the first. The others will come in subsequent opportunities.
There is no single answer to this question. Every clergy person has a different reason for not sharing what they know with their congregation: “My role is not to trouble people’s faith; it is to support their beliefs, no matter what those beliefs are”, or “They know what I mean; I don’t have to say it outright,” or “I don’t ‘tell’ the people anything; I let them discover the meaning of God’s word for themselves,” or, as one colleague confided, “I’m an economic coward,” a confession that broke my heart.

The late Marcus Borg and I had very different opinions about the use of Christian language. Marcus, who was never trying to obfuscate, inadvertently offered clergy the tools with which to do so. While he felt that it was crucial to maintain language exclusive to Christianity both for nostalgic reasons and to reinforce the Christian community around its common language, encouraging clergy to continue to use it provided them the smoke screen they needed to limit demands for their true beliefs.

With Marcus’ guidance and the work of many scholars over the centuries, “God” has undergone extensive renovations and come to mean much more that it ever originally did (if we can even know that). The process theologians have used is “stipulative redefinition”: take the old words and s-t-r-e-c-t-c-h-e-s them over new definitions. So the Holy Trinity, for example, doesn’t have to mean God is god, Jesus is god, and the Holy Spirit is god and all of them are the same god, in the way the church fathers hashed it out in the fourth century. It is now seen as a metaphor and may bring us to understand that god is the communal struggling necessary to articulate our highest ideals for our own time (or anything else, for that matter). Marcus believed that we needed to teach our new, metaphorical understandings to our congregants so that we could continue to use language like “Holy Trinity” in our gatherings and be understood. I disagreed. In my opinion, to do so simply closed the door to those not initiated into the secret code shared by clergy within a congregation through bible classes, sermons, or over Saturday morning coffee.

And, sadly, I think there is no small amount of paternalism by clergy toward their congregants. I say that because of my own experience as a clergy person who has been belittled for my “infantile” beliefs or my use of “straw man”, “simplistic” descriptions of the god called God to make my arguments, when god is really so much deeper and richer than that. Those who make such accusations have clearly not been interested in understanding what it is I am saying (which stands regardless of what definitions one uses); they seem, rather, interested in proving how much more highly evolved their own definitions are, and, by extrapolation, how much smarter they are than I. I suspect they have similar attitudes toward members of their congregations, deigning only to be honest about their beliefs to those they know can “handle the truth”. It is as though congregants won’t be able to stand it if we’re honest with them about what we really believe.

The truth is, many, maybe even the majority, won’t be able to stand the loss of the truths they thought we still held. But that is okay. We cannot shirk the responsibility of honesty simply because it is onerous or its repercussions may be catastrophic. Indeed, the decline of liberal, Christian denominations across the board may be the catastrophic result of not telling the truth, or to be more polite, the result of “stipulative redefinition”, which, even as it maintains the use of language that comforts those in the pews, protects those in the pulpit.
~ Rev. Gretta Vosper

Click here to read and share online

About the Author
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best-selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers.

Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

To Hell with Limbo / The Newest Act of an Irrelevant Christianity

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on January 25, 2006

Perhaps the second silliest thing that religious institutions and its leaders can do is to pretend that they know what will happen after one dies and then to be delusional enough to think that they can actually describe it. This ranks as number two on the silliness list only because the one thing sillier than that absurdity is to announce that perhaps you did not get it right the first time, so you offer an amendment to previous thinking. Yet that is exactly what we have witnessed from the Ratzinger Vatican in recent days. Limbo, as they say, is now in Limbo 
This teaching about Limbo, a top commission of Roman Catholic scholars now assures us, has never been an official part of the doctrine of the church. That will come as a great surprise, I will wager, to those parents who have over the centuries, been frightened out of their wits by the threats emanating from that church about what will befall their unbaptized children if they did not rush to baptism. The existence of a place called Limbo has had a very long history. Since at least the 4th Century of this Common Era it has been a part of the package of the afterlife doctrines of western Catholic Christianity. This package was not designed primarily to inform the faithful about what waited for them when they died but rather to aid in the task of controlling with the weapons of fear and guilt every aspect of life from birth to death. While Limbo never had real credibility among thinking people, it nonetheless possessed enormous power and was indelibly planted into the consciences of many.
Tracing the history of the concept of Limbo is itself a fascinating study. It appears to have emerged in Catholic teaching near the end of the 4th century through the work of Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, a man of enormous intellect but whose theology was significantly driven by the concept of original sin. So deeply was Augustine convinced that all human life had been permanently stained by the sin of Adam’s disobedience, that for a child to die unbaptized was to be doomed to hell. Baptism, in Augustine’s mind, was thus the necessary act that broke the power of that original sin and therefore was the essential step in the drama of salvation. Heaven was reserved only for the saved, for whom baptism was the visible symbol of their redemption. The unbaptized were inevitably, to put it bluntly, bound for hell. It was a harsh argument in which grieving parents, who gave birth to stillborn fetuses or whose babies had died in childbirth, were left without consolation. Sometimes, circumstances over which parents had no control would require the postponement of a baptism and, in a day of rampant infant mortality, it meant that some children died unbaptized. The specter of a burning hell for those regarded as not yet at the age of reason seemed harsh and unfeeling. Even Augustine felt this incongruity and he sought to address it by postulating that some regions of hell might contain a special room where the temperature was not as hot as it was in the other regions. It was an ingenious suggestion. In that “special room,” we now believe, Limbo made its entry into Christian thinking.
In the 13th century, primarily under the influence of another brilliant theologian, Thomas Aquinas, this “special room” got the name “Limbus,” which means a boundary, as it took another step in doctrinal development. Aquinas also felt the need for a concept that was more palatable and sensitive and not quite as grotesque as the image advanced by Augustine. Children, innocent at least in the sense that they were too young to choose to do evil deeds, were nonetheless stained by that universal human corruption. He declared, however, if they died without baptism they were assigned forever to live in this bounded place, this Limbus, which Aquinas called, a state of “natural happiness.” While not ultimately fulfilling like the “Beatific vision,” it was not unpleasant. A conscience-healing act of compromise thus brought modern Limbo into being.
In time, this Limbo of natural happiness was expanded from being simply the abode of unbaptized babies into a place where good pagans might also go. It was thought to house ancient people who had lived before the saving grace of Christ had become available to them. This meant that Limbo counted among its residents such people as Moses, Virgil and Socrates. Later, in the centuries that came after Christ, there were some other obviously holy lives who had died without becoming Christian and thus without being baptized, but exemplary in all other ways. One thinks of holy Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Jews and, most spectacularly, one thinks of Mahatma Gandhi. It just violated too much to consign these good people to the eternal punishment of hell. Limbo was once again a convenient compromise between Christian judgment and Christian sensitivity. The church could not, however, become so loose and sentimental that it lost its power to control people’s lives. That required an ultimate threat to keep order in the ranks of believers. Limbo served both needs. It was unfulfilling enough to be punishment. It was kind enough to allow the church’s judgment to be tolerated.
The Church of the Middle Ages filled its rhetoric with such phrases as “there is no salvation outside the Church” and “baptism is necessary to salvation.” Later this stark religious division between the saved and the unsaved spurred the great missionary fervor of the 19th century that was historically the century of
the fastest growth of the Christian faith in all of western history. Few people stopped to notice that it was also the century of the western empires and colonial domination of the third world. If a Christian nation’s aggression against and conquest of primitive societies could be justified on the basis of “bringing
salvation to the heathen,” then it became a sacred duty, rather than religious imperialism, effectively perfuming the evil of war. If one was convinced that salvation for all people was accomplished only in Christ and that baptism was the only sure sign of that salvation, then the horror of a God who would condemn unbaptized children to an eternity of second-class citizenship was a small price to pay to keep the institutional power of the Church intact. The enhancement of the idea of Limbo continued in 1905, when Pope Pius 10th stated clearly, and I’m sure he thought pastorally, that “children, who die without baptism, go into Limbo where they do not enjoy God but they do not suffer either.” One wonders why Pius 10th thought he was competent to know. However, that was where Limbo was in the teaching of the Catholic Church when the 20th century dawned.
In the 1960s at the II Vatican Council, the modern spirit of Pope John 23rd brought fresh air into this musty institution. That Council stated that “everyone, baptized Christian or not, could be eligible for salvation through the mystery of Christ’s redemptive power.” With that understanding beginning to emerge, Limbo began its slow but inevitable decline.
The final blow to this presumptuous teaching occurred when the Vatican raised the issue of abortion to a new level of intensity. In the abortion battle they desired to portray abortion as murder, so their assertion that life begins at conception was crucial to their argument. There had been a time when the Church taught that life began at the moment of “quickening” that occurs normally in the second trimester. With this new definition, necessary to keeping the debate emotional, the aborted fetuses began to be counted as unbaptized babies destined for an eternity in Limbo, however Limbo was defined. That was even more than the hierarchy itself could swallow. The justice of God collided with the tactics of control. The justice of God won and when it did Limbo was doomed. Now the Vatican Commission has begun the process of removing Limbo from the consciousness of believers. It will take a while, perhaps a century or two, but Limbo will finally disappear.
Two insights need to be understood here. One is that most of the church’s talk about life after death is not about life after death at all. It is about controlling the behavior of human beings in the here and now. Fear, combined with the power of guilt, is the ultimate ecclesiastical weapon of control. If you are afraid that violating the Church’s teaching or its practice will result in an eternity of punishment in the after life, you are likely to be motivated to be a good little boy or girl. If you are made to feel so guilty about your own shortcomings that you seek to expiate that guilt with confession and attendance at services of worship, you are more likely to be faithful. Salvation thus rests more on what you believe than it does on how you act. The quality of your life, living for others, serving the needs of the poor and dispossessed counts for little without proper believing and the act of being baptized is what separates you from Limbo and assures you of heaven. That is a great motivator.

The second observation is that whatever occurs after death is not something that any of us can know. We can dream or fantasize but there is no way that human knowledge can penetrate this ultimate mystery. Only religious arrogance, buttressed by claims to possess revealed truth, could suggest otherwise. What the Church has never understood is that if a person’s primary motivation in life is to win an eternal reward of bliss, then each act of that person, including acts of kindness and generosity, is an act of egocentricity. If the ultimate task of the Christian Church is to help to create whole, non-self-centered lives then all control tactics, including heaven as a place of reward and hell as a place of punishment to say nothing of limbo and purgatory will have to be jettisoned. At that point the Church might finally be ready to talk about the meaning of our hope of life after death with integrity. That would be a welcome new point of departure.
~  John Shelby Spong

Announcements

We the People Book Club

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Books allow us to travel alongside the lives of others and understand them from the inside out. They foster and reinvigorate democracy by increasing our empathy, tolerance, and compassion.

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