[Oe List ...] 4/07/2022, Progressing Spirit: Rev James Burklo: Walking Points: How to Respond to Evangelical Christians; Spong revisited

[Ellie Stock]

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Walking Points
How to Respond to Evangelical Christians
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|  Essay by Rev. James Burklo
April 7, 2022
All of us at some point will be approached by evangelical Christians attempting to convince us to become their kind of Christians.
 
What’s the most Christian way we can respond to them?  -- whether we are Christians or not?
 
I’ll share here an outline of how I respond to the evangelical efforts to convert me, a Christian pastor for over 40 years, to Christianity.  I imagine myself and an evangelical Christian having a chat while taking a walk together.  Here I share my side of the conversation:
 
“I really sense the depth and significance of your faith in Jesus, and also the sincere concern you have for me.  I can at least begin to imagine how it must feel for you to believe that I am in danger of eternal damnation.  To think that I and so many other people you genuinely care about might experience such a horrible future – that must be deeply disturbing to you.  How do you cope with such a huge concern?  Tell me more about how that feels…
 
“Is it okay for me to respond?  I may say some things that could disturb you even more, though that is not my intention.  My goal is not to weaken your faith, but just to share what my faith is like.  I do hope that what I have to say might be helpful to you.  Should I continue?...
 
“For me, Christian faith is the practice of compassion.  “Heaven” is giving and receiving the unconditional love that is God, here and now, on earth – and that “hell” is a metaphor for what life is like when we fail to give or receive divine love…. 
 
“It seems to me that our conversation about faith in Jesus involves some other initial assumptions that we might best explore together before going much further.  Tell me, what do you mean by the word “God”?.... 
 
“My understanding about God resonates with 1 John 4 in the New Testament:  “God is love.”  It seems to me that this statement has very big implications.  Love is real, it is powerful, it is everywhere.  But the nature of love is that it does not force itself on the world:  it is attractive, not controlling.  It invites us to do good, but can’t prevent us from doing wrong.  If God is love, then God is natural – not supernatural or omnipotent.  If God is love, then God is a quality of personal relationships, so it is natural that we would use the language of personhood to talk about God, even though God is not a sort of “person” like you or I…. 
 
“You’ve quoted the Bible to me quite a bit as we’ve started our conversation.  What do you say the Bible is?...
 
“I read the Bible as a collection of ancient writings by people about their spiritual experiences.  I see it as a language of faith, rather than as a prescription of what we’re supposed to believe or do.  Its writings come from times and circumstances that in many cases are far removed from our own.  Its myths, stories, and poems have always been precious raw material for Christians to use in creative ways in expressing their journeys of faith.  That’s the way Jesus used the Hebrew scriptures, and that’s the way I read the Christian scriptures.  So for me it does not make sense to take the Bible literally, nor does it make sense for me to “believe” the Bible.  Instead I seek inspiration in it where it is to be found, seek to understand its historical contexts, and make creative use of it in expressing my faith and growing in it.  There is deep truth in many of the Bible’s myths, even if they are not based on facts.  So when you use passages from the Bible to “prove” your points, that approach does not fit my understanding of what the Bible is nor how we best can read it and use it….
 
“Yes, I understand that you believe the Bible to be the word of God, even though the Bible doesn’t refer to itself at all, since its writers didn’t know their writings would be gathered together later into what we now call the Bible.  The Bible does not say that the Bible is the word of God.  So clearly, much later than when the books in it were written, people decided what would be included in the Bible and what would be left out.  And then they came up with the idea that the Bible was the word of God.  I respect that idea as something important in the history of Christianity, but I don’t find it to be a useful idea today.  I treasure the Bible as a human record of human experiences of spirituality over thousands of years.  It is the language of myths and story and poetry that I use to express my faith….
 
“I understand that you believe in the miracle stories in the Bible – that Jesus was literally born from a virgin, that Jesus literally walked on water and literally rose from the dead.  I take these stories seriously but see no point in taking them literally since they don’t fit with our modern understanding about how the world works.  There was nothing like science, nothing like history in the modern sense of the word, in the time of Jesus and the early church.  People believed that the Roman emperor was born from a virgin.  Lots of stories circulated of people rising from the dead and performing miraculous healings in the first century.  To me, it seems like a cruel threat to say that to avoid hellfire in an afterlife, we must accept stories as factual that were much, much easier to believe in the early days of Christianity than they are for us to believe today…
 
“I understand that you believe human beings are hopeless sinners who deserve eternal punishment for their sins, and that you believe that God sent Jesus to die on the cross as a sacrifice to pay for our sins, and that if we believe in him the way you do, then we’ll be saved from hell in the afterlife.  Is this what you think is the central “take-away” message of Christianity?....
 
“I understand how important you believe the message of blood atonement for sin to be.  In the context of first-century Israel, that theology would have had a cultural context that made it deeply meaningful.  For instance, all meat that people consumed came from animals that had been ritually sacrificed to establish or maintain a relationship with various supernatural divinities.  So the idea of blood sacrifice was universal at the time.  Today, we buy meat in shrink-wrapped packages in grocery stores, with no rituals associated with the process.  So we are culturally very distant from the idea of blood atonement for sin.  I don’t find it to be the most compelling or meaningful message of Christianity.  I see the cross confronting us with human suffering, making us look at the ways we impose suffering on others, and pointing us toward reconciliation and forgiveness and compassion….
 
“The take-away message of my faith is this: Rabbi Jesus discovered that the center of his being was not his body or his ego, but God, who is unconditional love.  He taught people to discover this for themselves, and to practice the radical compassion that follows from this awareness.  He organized the church to cultivate this awareness and put it into action in the world.  He demonstrated unconditional love so profoundly that the Roman government considered him a threat to its authority and killed him on a cross.  Out of love he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus’ followers turned the cross into the symbol of his unconditional compassion, and his church has strived to follow his way ever since…
 
“I hope that our conversation leaves us both with deeper understanding of each other… and that we can keep on sharing love – who is God - with each other!”

~ Rev. James Burklo

Read online here

About the Author

Rev. Jim Burklo is the Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California.  An ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, he is the author of seven published books on progressive Christianity, his latest book is Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus (St Johann Press, 2021).  His weekly blog, “Musings”, has a global readership.  He serves on the board of ProgressiveChristiansUniting.org and is an honorary advisor and frequent content contributor for ProgressiveChristianity.org. 
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Question & Answer

 

Q: By A Reader

I don’t know if this is a question or just an expression of exasperation. A Roman Catholic priest recently resigned and all of his baptisms were declared invalid because he said “we” baptize instead of “I” baptize. Words fail me.


A: By Rev. David M. Felten
 
Dear Reader,

This kind of legalism leaves me gobsmacked, too. Especially if one considers the ripple effect: imagine that one of these invalid baptizees went on to be ordained a priest himself. Since his baptism is now invalid, then he’s not really a Roman Catholic, his ordination is invalid and all the sacraments he’s ever performed are, likewise, invalid. Too bad for those who can’t come back for a re-do of their last rites (Commendation of the Dying)! This kind of obsession with the letter of the law is a perfect example of why people get fed up and abandon organized religion. Where’s the grace? Where’s the kindness?
 
Look, I’m not a Roman Catholic and I’m certainly no canon lawyer, but in thinking about this situation my thoughts go back to a question raised in seminary: what about the efficacy of sacraments distributed by morally flawed clergy?
 
Traditionally, the effectiveness of the sacrament isn’t supposed to depend on the merit of the person doing the dispensing. A sacrament is effective simply because it is being performed. The fancy Latin term is “ex opera operato.” This was first clarified back in the 4th century in a dispute with the soon-to-be-declared-heretics, the Donatists (who believed the validity of the sacrament was contingent upon the holiness of the clergyperson). St. Augustine said, whatever the sacrament, it was Christ doing the “work” and flawed clergy performing the sacraments are just a spigot through which the blessing flows: If that power “should pass through defiled beings, it is not itself defiled.”  (In Ioannis evangelium tractatus, 5, 15)
 
The issue in today’s case, though, is control. Since the priest said “we” baptize (instead of “I” baptize), he is accused of implying that the community at large possesses a modicum of “power” in the administering of sacraments. The presiding Bishop, Thomas J. Olmsted, said, “it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Him alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes." In other words, the church holds the licensing agreement to all things “Jesus.” God forbid anyone (especially “the people”) threaten that monopoly.
 
So, it finally comes down to being a turf issue. The Church knows that it is losing influence and has ceased to be authoritative in any real way in the world. It’s only hope in maintaining any relevance is to protect what it perceives to be commodities that are available nowhere else: in this case, baptism. Any hint of a loss of control over this product cannot be tolerated.
 
This also plays into the longstanding effort to infantilize the faithful into believing that the sacraments are not symbolic, but actually some sort of magic. If the incantation (expellio ridiculoso!) is not done exactly as printed in the book of spells, there’s no telling what dark magic could be unleashed. Sound silly? It is.
 
If only it were as simple as assuming that the person participating in the sacrament receives whatever “power” is advertised by virtue of their having agreed to participate in the sacrament in the first place and leave it at that. But alas, an increasingly desperate and irrelevant Church needs to protect its “turf” — even when doing so means reinforcing its reputation for pettiness and magnifying its obsolescence.
 

~ 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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|  This Week's Featured Author
 
Matthew Fox: Essential Writings
on Creation Spirituality
Selected with an Introduction by Charles Burack

In his Introduction to Matthew Fox, Dr. Burack recounts the life and influences that helped form Fox’s outlook and spirituality, from the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart to 20th century Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. The book then presents selections from all Fox’s major works.   READ ON ...   |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited


"Think Different - Accept Uncertainty" Part VIII:
Deconstructing the Story of the Fall

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
March 29. 2012
The way Christians have told the Christ story, beginning with Augustine in the fourth century and continuing through Anselm in the twelfth century, is to postulate an original and perfect creation from which human life has fallen.  This original perfection was first perverted and then lost by an act of human disobedience. At least that was the way the biblical story of the Garden of Eden was interpreted. Expelled from paradise because of this act of disobedience, the only human hope was that God would somehow come to rescue us from this fall; to save us from this original sin and to redeem us from our lostness.  Given these presuppositions it should come as no surprise that Jesus was portrayed as God’s special rescue operation.  His death on the cross represented the terrible price that God had to pay to accomplish our salvation.  So on the Protestant side of Christianity we learned to say such things as, “Jesus died for my sins,” and on the Catholic side of Christianity we began to refer to the Eucharist as “the Sacrifice of the Mass,” which meant that the Mass re-enacted liturgically that moment when Jesus died for our sins. My last column in this series ended with the question: “What is wrong with these familiar concepts?”  My answer was “Everything.”  Today I seek to put theological flesh on those bare bones.

It is interesting to note how negative Christian churches have been about the work of Charles Darwin.  Enormous religious energy has been spent in attempts to blunt the insights of Darwin over the last 153 years since the publication of The Origins of Species by Natural Selection in 1859.  This negativity has given rise to a more militant fundamentalism, brought John Scopes to trial in Tennessee and spawned attempts to promote as alternatives such discredited concepts as “creation science” and “Intelligent Design.” It has captured the attention of State legislatures and even of the 43rd President of the United States.  It has motivated politicians to force upon school districts the judicious editing of public school textbooks to allow alternatives to evolution to appear to be credible. One does not see this kind of emotional reaction unless there is a deep emotional threat.  The work of Charles Darwin has clearly disturbed the security that traditional religion seeks to provide.  What, we must ask, is the nature of that threat?  Well, in its earliest phase Darwin clearly challenged the literalization of the Bible and especially of the Bibles’ creation story, rocking the claims of the fundamentalists.  That, however, does not seem enough to generate the levels of emotional hostility toward evolution that has been expressed in churches over the last century.  Indeed, very early in the dispute, fundamentalists decided that each day in the creation story could have been a billion years or so and that was enough to save their literal Bibles, or so they thought.  It was an answer that did not meet any scientific criteria of competence, but it did lower the threat and calm the fears.  The real reason for this continuing visceral hostility must be deeper than that.  It is as we shall see!

The real and unrelenting hostility of traditional Christians to Darwin rises out of the fact that Darwin has annihilated the familiar way the Jesus story has been told through the years.  If Darwin is right, and the world of science is overwhelmingly convinced that he is and his insights have been confirmed by the discovery of DNA, then the way traditional Christians have told the Christ story explodes before our eyes.  Let me examine that idea for a moment.

The traditional telling of the story, adapted from a literal reading of the opening chapters of Genesis, begins with a picture of the perfection of creation, which was both good and complete.  One cannot claim perfection for creation unless it is a finished process.  A still evolving universe could make no claim to be finished or complete. Yet that was at the heart of Darwin’s insight.  Darwin said that there never was a perfect, finished creation, but that we have been evolving for a very long time.  Darwin himself did not realize just how long that had been he only knew that it was ongoing.  At this moment new galaxies are still being formed.  There was, therefore, no such thing as a state of perfection in which human life was formed.  Human beings as part of life have been evolving since life began about 3.8 billion years ago, when in the form of a single cell it began its journey.  During hundreds of millions of years it evolved first into multi-celled complexity; then into the division between plant and animal life with primitive forms of consciousness appearing on the animate side; then into the journey of living things out of the sea and on to dry land that occurred about 600 million years ago; then into the rise of reptile dominance epitomized by the dinosaurs; then into the climactic changes that took place about 65 million years ago rendering the dinosaurs extinct and allowing for the emergence of the dominant mammals; then into the development of higher forms of consciousness, and finally into the majestic step from consciousness into self-consciousness that finally produced the recognizable form we call human life.  Depending on how one defines human life, that last step occurred anywhere from four million to 250,000 years ago.  There is absolutely no biological evidence anywhere that with human life the permanent goal of evolution has been achieved. Homo sapiens assume that, but my guess is that the dinosaurs also assumed that 65 million years ago.  Instead evolution indicates that life is a work in progress, not a finished product.  Certainly it makes no sense to claim today that human life began in an original perfection.  Look now at what this now established conclusion might mean for the traditional telling of the Christ story.

If there was no original perfection, there could be no fall from that perfection into a state we have called original sin.  So the idea of original sin is at best nothing more than pre-Darwinian mythology and at worst nothing more than post-Darwinian nonsense.  It is obviously no longer a viable way to describe the flaw we observe in human life that we call evil.  To continue the carnage, if there was no fall from perfection into sin, there could be no need for a divine rescue so the idea of seeing Jesus as the savior of the sinful, the redeemer of the fallen or the rescuer of the lost becomes nothing other than inoperable word constructs and, as a direct consequence, to call Jesus savior, redeemer or rescuer becomes untranslatable.  If there was no fall, not even metaphorically, there could be no restoration from this fall, for no one and no thing can be restored to a status that persons or things have never before enjoyed.  So Darwin first challenges and then demolishes the frame of reference in which Christians for centuries have told the Jesus story and the tragedy is that we know of no other way to tell our story.  So, if Darwin is right, Christianity, as we have understood it, is wrong and its days are therefore numbered.  This is a theological system based on a now abandoned understanding of human anthropology and good theology can never be constructed on the basis of bad anthropology.  This means that no divine figure ever came from God into this world to be the savior of a fallen humanity!  Yet this theology has shaped our worship, our understanding of the Eucharist, our hymns, our prayers and our sermons, to say nothing of our creedal understandings of both God and Jesus for centuries.  When we understand the depth of the Darwinian challenge, perhaps we will then begin to understand why fundamentalists cling so passionately to their outdated concepts and even seek to impose them on everyone else as the only way for their point of view to survive.  It also helps us to understand why mainline churches are in a statistical freefall.  They know that the old literalism no longer works, but they do not know how to replace it, so they drift without a message and they are no longer able to bind people out of loyalty to their institutional forms. Separating oneself from religion is now relatively easy.

Does that mean that we are witnessing the end of Christianity?  I suspect it does, if by Christianity we mean the traditional way of telling the Christian story.  The question we need to ask, and it is a deeply radical question coming at us from many angles, is this: Is the traditional way of telling the Christ story the only way to tell that story?  Is the only way to talk about God the theistic way, that is, to define God as a supernatural being who dwells somewhere external to this world and who can and will invade the world to come to our aid or to answer our prayers?  Is the only way to speak of Christ something that involves us in seeing him as the incarnation of this theistic deity, as one who, in the words of Charles Wesley’s Christmas hymn, was a divine being simply “veiled in flesh?”  The fact is that only inside these dated categories, can we still talk about being “saved,” about salvation, about meaningful worship, about achieving forgiveness or even about life after death.  Once we pull the central piece from this carefully constructed puzzle, is there anything left?  Does not the whole religious system of the past 2000 or so years come apart, shattering like a piece of precious glass into a million shards, never to be reassembled again?  To be able to think differently about the Christian faith or to accept uncertainty in the presence of this kind of challenge does not mean merely nibbling around the edges of our religious system.  It does not mean simply doing a facelift on the corpse of traditional Christian thinking.  It calls us, rather, to a radical re-visioning of our faith story.  It requires that we find a new entry point.  It means that we become willing to give up everything we have ever known in order to move to a place where there are no road maps or road signs and we still have the responsibility of putting one foot in front of the other as we are forced to step into the cloud of unknowing.  Many are no longer willing to risk this journey. They are the new fundamentalists. The pain of this transition is too intense, but the alternative is little more than a life of deception and illusion.  Theological honesty requires that we admit that we have arrived at the status of the total bankruptcy of our traditional Christian symbols.  What do we do now?

We first must recognize that good theology can never be built on the basis of bad anthropology.  So we must begin by understanding what it means to be human.  We will pick up this thread and see where it leads us when this series resumes.

~  John Shelby Spong
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Announcements
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      The First Creed: Discovering a Hidden Faith in Humanity
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     Faith and the American Caste System: The Creed Now        READ ON...  |

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