We are smothering God. And our church. We're engaged in an unholy combination of implicit theocide and communal suicide.
That is the conclusion I have reached in trying to understand the long, anguished, painful decline of mainline Christian denominations. I look around and realize that I can't find among them a robust depiction of God's immediacy in the world. It's as though we offer only a view of an antique God of yore, rolled out and displayed like a museum piece on Sunday mornings, not a Mover and Shaker of today's reality. When only the hate-filled pronouncements of "Christian" imposters like Pat Robertson or Fred Phelps presume to represent God's current temperament, it makes me understand why the younger generations have not repopulated our denominations.
On balance, mainline denominations appear to be unwittingly denigrating the contemporary, immediate presence of God--and it's proving lethal. The denigration takes three primary forms: disdaining contemporary epiphanies, misrepresenting myths and facts, and implying a half-baked resurrection.
As for contemporary epiphanies, we seem not to take them seriously. Our preaching consistently mines the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament to the exclusion of contemporary epiphanies well articulated by today's Christians. We treat Scripture as though its authors had a greater capacity to perceive God's activity in the world than we do in 2011.
But with the possible exception of those who personally experienced the companionship of Jesus before his crucifixion, no other author of works considered "Scripture" enjoys any empirical relationship with God that is qualitatively different from that which is possible for any of us today. Do they?
The corollary implication of our reticence to discern and declare God's contemporary action is that back in those days God was either more active in the world than now, or was more adept at making divine will understood. Can that be true?
But we somehow feel obligated to spend time explaining away Scripture texts that propound notions that have long-since become moot (e.g., dietary laws that protected desert tribes lacking refrigeration) or are truly repugnant (e.g., Paul's views of women and slaves) at the expense of preaching vivid depictions of God's will in action today. Can anyone doubt that God's will is better expressed in The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, "I have a dream" speech than in any of scores of pages of irrelevancies still regarded as Scripture simply because they were written during some presumed Golden Age of revelation and were bound into a Bible?
We compound our denigration of God with a persistent misrepresentation of both myths and facts. During the twice yearly surge of participation in worship at Christmas and Easter, worshippers listen in vain during these sermons and rituals and reenactments--in even the most theologically enlightened congregations--for any tiny hint that such notions as Jesus' being born to a virgin are totally mythological, meant to signify his specialness and not to suggest that God somehow re-jiggered the processes of human reproduction for a few minutes in eternity just to make a point. And so both the faithful and the would-be seekers are left to feign belief, or to mentally cross their fingers, or to conclude that these people putting on this affair are not on the same wavelength that they are.
The tragedy is that myths can be such profound bearers of truth. Young people and old people alike willingly suspend disbelief in order to be moved to tears by a love story or to get an adrenaline rush from a thriller. These things touch us. But if the producer of that love story or that thriller suggested that we had to take everything as fact, to believe this tale as if it were non-fiction, all that power would simply evaporate as the audience's respect was sadly but resolutely withdrawn.
Beyond misrepresenting myths as facts, our misrepresentation of actual facts makes the situation even worse for these new generations well taught to be critical thinkers. Preachers who know better routinely harken back to the Israelites' escape from Egypt by crossing the "Red Sea". Never mind the fact that the term "Red Sea" never appears in the original languages of the Bible. But the term "Sea of Reeds" (yam suph) does appear repeatedly and offers a perfectly cogent depiction of how the fleeing Israelites might have slogged on foot through the reed-infested wetlands between Egypt and Sinai which would then function as a quicksand-like moat to slow and swallow the heavy horse-drawn chariots of their pursuers. Still a great story, but it doesn't require accepting Cecil B. deMille's indelible vision of Charlton Heston and companions marching into a deep canyon riven through quivering walls of water as an historically accurate demonstration of how God once again suspended the laws of physics to favor certain friends.
What's up with us, anyhow? Do we underestimate people's curiosity or intelligence? These are the same thoughtful adults who turn to the internet hundreds of millions of times a year to do medical research on their symptoms and conditions so they can be on equal (and oftentimes superior) footing when consulting with their doctor. But back in the sanctuary, once again they are implicitly being told by the church that they must embrace ancient fable as fact, leaving them little choice but to either play dumb or throw out the Christmas baby along with his bath of charming but fanciful trappings.
Finally, we unwittingly depict Jesus' resurrection as ineffectual. How else to explain all the talk about Jesus' presumed return in the future. Just listen to the verb tenses that are used in preachers' sermons and prayers--they are all about "Jesus will come again" rather than "Jesus does come again." Well, if he will come again, that means only one thing--he ain't here now. Or, at least, not enough.
And so by futurizing Jesus' definitive presence, once again we find a way to declare the present to be impoverished and impotent, devoid of qualitatively supreme engagement between creature and Creator. Thanks anyway, say the seekers, I think I'll just keep looking.
So here is what I propose: let's recover the spirit of the Oral Tradition. Until about 1,000 BCE the stories of God's holy presence and action in this world were not written down and ossified, they were only spoken person to person. They were alive. Each re-teller of the stories "spun" the stories to reflect both the teller's own experience of God and the listener's best means of comprehending it. Most importantly, when some stories lost their relevance or were superseded by superior understanding of God's will, people stopped passing them along. They mercifully disappeared. And when new perceptions of God were grasped, those new stories joined the caravan of revelation. People preached them, too.
So, enough already with shying away from full engagement with God right here, right now. Let's dare to believe that God still speaks today, and that we have it in us to hear and declare God's word afresh.
Bring it on.
Rev. Emily C. Heath: Mainline Christianity's PR Problem
As usual you have stirred the pot, which means somehow the holy spirit is alive and well. As I read this wonderful string I'm reminded of some faithful person who way long ago said "Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief"
By the way, the whole notion of "believing in" religion is foreign to me. This is not about assenting to propositions (e.g., "I believe that the sun rises in the east, and that 2 + 2 = 4"). This is about knowing.
On the other hand, I am somewhat allergic to simple-minded faith, by which I mean a faith that can't be bothered to think for itself, is willfully ignorant of the origins and nature of what we call Scripture, is suspicious of others' ways of relating to God, and is all too willing to follow an enthusiastic herd led by a charming pulpit prince or princess. Never seems to work out too well in the long run.
True, He made a covenant with Abraham to champion Israel but then allowed the Assyrians to partition Judea, the Jews to be taken into Egyptian then Babylonian captivity, looked the other way during the Greek, Seleucid and Roman occupations, saw to it that Christianity blamed the Jews for killing Jesus (something they’ve been paying for ever since) and allowed the Diaspora under Hadrian before fleeing to the higher heavens, leaving priests in his wake to supply the “immediacy”.
Give me a non-personal deity anytime or better yet, I’ll stick to atheism.
That is not only a denigration of what God really is, it is a denial of what God really is, and it it ignorance of God's omnipresent reality.
The fulfillment of all religious prophecy will mean that the proud, militant, offensive people who now cause so much conflict and division will be exposed and rebuked by the true servant-messenger of God, and that will enable the humble, gentle, kind, peaceful majority of people in the world to inherit the earth and establish truly representative governments.
A portal to the message of that servant is at http://cjcmp.org
If clicking the links does not launch the blog, copying and pasting the URLs into the browser address bar might. However, Huffington Post comment post display appears to include extra hyphens in the text. These hyphens, if inserted into the URLs, might alter the URL and cause “Page Not Found” errors. Comparing the pasted URL with the original might reveal such occurrences. If the blog still does not launch, trying at a later point might achieve better results.
Well Eliot I have another idea. How about daring to accept the world for what it is, rather than indulging in the childish pretense that there is some almighty Big Daddy Up Above who created the universe just for us, and is ever so interested in helping us out, and spends all his time listening to our prayers and deciding which of us to help?
"Enough already" is quite right.
But the declaration that Jesus was "was born of the Virgin Mary" is included in both the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed, making it one of the the fundamental tenets of the Christian religion. So, yes, the worshippers probably are listening in vain, if they are hoping (as evidently Daley hopes) to hear a pastor renounce part of the very creed that pastors ask their congregations to recite in unison, in almost every service!
And what could be more absurdly or more blatantly false than to suggest that this tenet was not meant by the creed writers to be taken literally, but was merely a way of indicating Jesus' "specialness" - as if being the Son of God and part of the Divine Trinity still might leave some doubt as to just how special Jesus was?
Daley complains that "We compound our denigration of God with a persistent misrepresentation of both myths and facts."
But in trying to pretend that earlier Christians, such as the Creed writers, didn't intend the very tenets of Christianity to be taken literally, Daley is the one who is misrepresenting facts.
With the constant wars and changes between 525BC and the birth of Christ there is no reason to believe that the memories of over 2,000 years of esteemed virgianal rule would have died from longing for peace. That the Creed writers unscored the importance of virginal birth indicates the need for a powerful virgin glorifing God was still a longed for hope, met by Mary and her son, Christ.
We can aleast acknowledge the real historical realities of the power of ancient beliefs in virginal adoration and submission to God. That history provides for those interested in the subject.
Why did you pretend, in your essay, that it could possibly be reasonable to hope that a Christian pastor would ever dare to renounce one of the fundamental tenets of Christianity - the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin - in the course of leading a church service?
And how could you pretend that the Nicene Creed doesn't really mean what it plainly says, and plainly means, without "misrepresenting the facts" - as you complain that others do?
I welcome your thoughts.
It might be a good business model.
The fact that we created God, and not the other way around, shouldn't mean that we completely dismiss of thousands of years of spiritual wisdom, insight and tradition. As reasonable people we need to see belief in God as having been a natural step in human moral evolution and, at the very least, respect it for that.
Our churches do need to meet and reconsider issues. Only please remember that it was only in 1996. We knew God wasn’t returning to set up his earthly kingdom as promised by the 1650 chronology of Archbishop James Ussher. No matter how convincingly Hal Lindsay wrote agreeing, that it was going to happen in the latter half of the 20th century.
I can’t help think, that this fact alone isn’t given the consideration it should in Anglo-Protestant churches. It’s only 15 years ago and I believe the shock that HE DIDN’T Come Back is only now receding. Causing enlighten leaders such as yourself to recognize that what the churches have, had been teaching can no longer be validated as true. That there is much wrong with traditional ‘sermonizing’. Sometimes, I question how many preachers actually write new sermons. Wondering if instead they go mining sermons published in 1820 or 1760 updating the English, and giving it that Sunday.
If our churches continue as they have, God might speak again to them along the lines of Rev. 1
Ben Franklin, in his autobiography, stated he had no problem with his minister borrowing from a good sermon. He said it made more sense to hear a borrowed inspired sermon than a poor original one. I have to agree with him.
I can't imagine minister today mining sermons for the Age Of Enlightenment. Those sermons are too risky and are more-anti materialistic (and non-PC) than I think modern congregations want to hear.
I agree with Ben as well. Few modern congregations are made up of as tolerant folks like Ben. Most are made up of folks deeming good pay for good work and effort. Mining old sermons and updating them is not what they would consider good work or effort.
Sermons haven’t change since 1650 their jest is the same. My comment was in part a joke at the same old, same old even as 1996 has come and gone! It is killing our churches! Surely the comfort of the same old isn't as important as learning about the ways of our Lord, who still hasn't returned. Can we suggest theological misunderstanding?
Why be concerned about chronology? It is one of the oldest and simplest ways to keep track of blocks of time.
Thank you for your comments, and have a nice day.
Yet elsewhere,Jesus said the events preceding the Parousia were to come in rapid succession (Matthew 24:9) ‘immediately after the tribulation…’ (Matthew 24:3)… when ye shall see all these things know that it is near, even at the doors’), and they were all to happen while the current generation was alive (‘Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass, till _all_ these things be fulfilled’).
Too bad he was wrong: that generation passed without seeing the prophecy’s fulfillment. For example, the stars didn’t fall out of the sky while his listeners were still living. And they haven’t fallen out yet, 2000 years later.
Books of wisdom are necessary for the free transmission of knowledge. Think religion is an oligarchy now? Try it with a secret, unwritten code only passed on from memory by an elite, like the Druids. Books and reading popularize knowledge.