The Light that Shines on our Functional Atheism

November 11, 2009

I’ve been reading and thinking a great deal lately about how we go about thinking theologically in the church and the way we live out our theology in the church community. More and more as a pastor, I’ve become aware of the horrible tensions between what we say and what we do because, as a “company man”, the institution of the church requires my absolute allegiance to theological formulations I am acutely aware the church neither believes nor lives out in our daily life. And as a Christ follower committed to the Truth, Life, and Way of Jesus, I find it increasingly unbearable to live as a pastor as if this tension does not exist.

In other places, I have called this exploration a “Quest”, and wondered whether or not the motivation for such a quest comes from merely selfish or more altruistic intentions. But increasingly I sense that my position in the church as a pastor places a heavy responsibility on me to speak not only for myself but for the communion of the saints, living and ancestral. And it is in this communion of faith where I sense the gulf between our creedal statements of faith and our practical understanding of God and way of life devoted to God and to each other, particularly as we understand that way of life as the one we call Messiah lived it.

I see this gulf everywhere in the life of the church. Social researchers have long exposed the lack of any significant social distinction between Christians, in particular, and other communities of human beings, though there are many notable individual exceptions, and perhaps a few communal exceptions, like the Mennonite and Amish communities of faith. But what I have observed as pastor runs far deeper than these social manifestations of Christian faith. Parker Palmer has called the way Christians approach God in postmodern life “functional atheism”, a term that describes the theology of a people who live as if God makes no real claim on their lives (Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, Jossey-Bass, 1999).

Functional atheism manifests in ways that go far beyond holiness or righteous living. As a pastor, I have lamented not only the profound level of scriptural illiteracy in the Christian church, but also the many ways in which sociological realities and concerns trump any real form of theological struggle among those of us who claim to follow Christ. The reason we do not know how to engage in theological discernment stems in large measure not from apathy or ignorance, but from our very real fear of where such discernment might lead us.

Lay persons abdicate all responsibility for theological reflection to the clergy (only performed after the fact, if at all, in order to justify our preconceived notions and ideology). And if they disagree with the clergy, they simply find a pastor who espouses a theology more conducive to their way of thinking, rather than engaging the offending pastor in a dialogue that could be fruitful or transformative for the relationship. Clergy are only too happy to accept this no-contest plea from laity, at least until we realize the tyranny of popularism requires us to seek not the truth but a justification of the current social reality.

As a backdrop to this morbid dance, we idolize some imaginary divine ally who puts paid to all who argue against us – not that we would actually have to live by any of our arguments, but so that we might be vindicated among those who cannot see the world as we do. And since we know that such an idol is but a fantasy, and all we hear conclusively from heaven is silence, we conclude that there is no God but our own power to have our way in this world – be it the power to persuade, dismiss, or dominate.

And since the “real” God will do none of these things, we quite consciously overthrow God (who at any rate allows this overthrow without protest) and live as if God were not a part of human existence even and perhaps especially in the church. (I say especially because the church places such a relentless value on articulation.) We prefer this rebellion and idolatry to the intolerability of a silent and apparently impotent deity – yet for some reason our makeup requires that we maintain a façade of faith in such a deity, at least in ceremonial form. I cannot fathom for whom we play this religious act – unless we put it on for ourselves.

Here is the grand lie and its rationale: we need it in order to anesthetize the pain of the nihilistic reality of our Faustian bargain. We leap from the searing frying pan of a God who leaves us entirely alone into the consuming fire of utter separation and meaninglessness. And who wants to face up to such a brutal reality? So we speak on God’s behalf, as infallible holy persons who know the secrets of the infallible holy books, in order to pierce the deafening silence from the deep wells of our souls, where no one remembers how to seek a God we have ceased to hope might be found.

The key to our lust for unchanging Truth lies not in its infallibility but that it lies within our grasp – that we can know and claim such Truth – about God or ourselves. We will trade anything for the existential comfort that comes with certainty – even God and whatever we mean by freedom or justice – or even life itself (in all its abundance, whatever that means). We who claim allegiance to the Christ idea appreciate the incarnation (how conveniently articulate) but not the enigmatic Rabbi Yeshuach who even now refuses to be comprehended or claimed by any of his disciples. Dostoyevsky speaks for all of us in the dungeons of the Inquisition: “Go away, or we will kill you again.”

Yet incomprehensibly, he refuses to die.

Of course I would pin the blame (or credit) for the persistent awareness of the gulf between what we say and do as Christians on our namesake – even though we have transformed his name into a hope. He speaks as one with authority, not necessarily because he has “descended” from “heaven” but because he relentlessly lives into the promise of a realm of truth and life which claims us but which none of us can claim. Like a bull in a China shop, he tramples conventional ways of making peace with hopelessness and of sleeping with the enemy, regardless of the consequences for himself or for anyone who dares to come along for the ride. Because he has not come to bring peace.

The stories told with voice and ink and blood convey a sense of passionate identity that refused to rely on any of the conventional ways in which human beings typically seek meaning. Like his mentor, John, Yeshuach lived a wild and untamed life to its violent (tragic? Or inevitable?) end, and promised to accompany anyone with the chutzpah to leap into this passionate whirlwind of reckless, angry love. He also promised pain, injustice, and enslavement to a fearful path of destiny beyond ourselves.

How we have tamed him – mocked his euangelion and the martyrs of his Way, of whom the world was not worthy – and killed him endlessly on the cross of our comfortable, controllable “faith”.

But how else could we have created a powerful, popular faith expression in the world? After only a mere three centuries of sporadic debate about whether or not cowardice and apostasy negated discipleship, the young church was more than ready for the killing embrace of the Emperor – the true (or at least realistic) god of all gods. How much more efficient could be our penetration into heathen lands and peoples who would inevitably fall beneath the boot of raw power. And once we had sealed our pact with power, it would cease to matter with whom we allied ourselves. Any rabid, effective dog would do. Power and infallibility would come to justify any means toward the end of “saving” the world from ambiguity and the maddening call of a crucified “lord” to empty ourselves for others.

We believe in God the Father Almighty…

And yet… and yet. Like sand agitating relentlessly within an oyster, the life of a savior who suffered in life and in death refuses to bow to the idol we have fashioned of steel, silicone and weapons grade plutonium. He mocks our houses of worship where we insulate ourselves from suffering and ruthlessly enforce a homogenous form of faith in ourselves. The revolutionary rabbi taunts us as we read (while anxiously watering down) the incendiary stories his early followers called euangelion. We would mob and carry him to the brow of a cliff and toss him to his death to shut him up if we could only get our hands on him – yet he passes through us like a draft, the source of which we dare not discover – because we know his breathing on us keeps us alive in this coma in which we have learned to settle.

…the resurrection of the body…

How persistently he called to his rotting friend, after days of comforting rest from the labor that is life. Did he weep because he can never leave us alone? Because he knows he bids us to die again and again? We sleep while he prays, sweating blood as he wrestles with the silent God who places relentlessly before us the cup of sorrows. Yet every time we gather to break and bless and chew and swallow we are remembered into his body, forever broken and spilled out. Every time we rehearse the ancient stories, a fire kindles and then rages within us that wearies and overcomes our attempts to hold it in.

Our darkness cannot comprehend such light. We cannot know, even dimly. But perhaps it is enough to know that we are known. Enough to be overwhelmed by love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Our theology and our sociology can be far more tentative – more awestruck by the sense of the realm of love that never – never fails. Perhaps this, finally, is the measure of life in all its abundance – to live beyond either questions or answers about the nature of God or humanity, embracing love that never fails in every moment of our lives, fearlessly, relentlessly, even recklessly, in the wake of a savior who beckons us to suffer together for love without end.

…and the life everlasting.

Scripture and Prayer

I write today in response to a query from a good friend about my purpose in offering a Bible study on scripture and homosexuality (in particular) and about my overall understanding of the place of scripture in spiritual discernment, vis-a-vis the many other ways spiritual seekers experience the presence and guidance of the Divine. Joy puts it best when she summarizes that scripture and prayer (in words and in action) are profoundly related and necessary to each other, both in confirming and in conforming (transforming) human experience of the divine.

As an ordained pastor, I am accountable to scriptural authority - but the interpretive latitude of that mandate embraces tradition, reason, and experience in what amounts to an understanding of ongoing inspiration, at least in practice (if not officially). Of course, in the church, the latitude is considerably more vast - given what many pundits call scriptural illiteracy in the church (among laity and clergy, to be blunt). That illiteracy accounts for our flocking around such spurious projects as "The Prayer of Jabez" or "Your Best Life Now".

As I continue to grow in faith, especially in the wake of Divinity School, I experience scripture in the way I have been taught that an icon functions in prayer, as a spiritual catalyst or window through which we can (though by no means always do) experience greater clarity of understanding of God's presence, will and Way. I have come to understand that scriptural authority is not inherent in itself, but lies in its appropriation in the faith community that gathers around it to confirm their experience of the Holy in every generation and to reinforce the Spirit's call to live for God and others.

Different people will understand scriptural authority (and it's place in Christian discernment) in different ways - as the scriptures themselves amply attest. My purpose in offering an examination of scriptural passages traditionally used in the church to justify discrimination and abuse of homosexual persons is to demonstrate one way to resolve an apparent conflict between scriptural discernment (an apparent divine justification of punishment of homosexual people) and human experience (the fruit of faithfulness and love expressed in the lives of homosexual persons). I do not believe there is any conflict - traditional interpretations of scripture notwithstanding.

I am well aware that there may be no receptive audience for what I have to say. On the one hand, those Christians who hold to a more traditional (they might claim that it is more "literal") understanding of scriptural interpretation and authority certainly argue that my interpretation is de facto liberal revisionism in order to reconcile scripture to the higher authority (for me, they might argue) of human reason and experience. On the other hand, someone who holds a far more nuanced understanding of scriptural authority and interpetation might see my project as an anachronistic gloss on a hopelessly time-bound document that has little contemporary relevance either for religious or philosophical seekers of Truth. I prayed long and hard about scrapping the entire project for those reasons. But in the end, I felt I needed to speak my mind, not so much for the defense of scriptural authority, but as a testimony and thanksgiving of how scripture functions in my life as a means of discernment and experience of the reality of the divine in the human community (past and present).

Given my profession as a scholar of scripture and a theologian, I suppose my passion for this project should come as no surprise. I grew up in a tradition that valued scripture as the sine qua non of spiritual discernment, and I continue to experience God's presence in it's profound testimony. Though I no longer understand scriptural inspiration in a magical way (i.e., divine dictation), I value more than I can say the power of scripture to draw me into conversation with a community that spans six millennia and more of companions in this spiritual journey that is life. These include nomads, prophets, poets, kings, beggars, lepers, messiahs, disciples, governors, soldiers, revolutionaries, farmers and fishers, shepherds, prostitutes, children and their parents. They are not dead to me. Their testimony (both implicit and "literal") interprets my life and experience just as I am compelled to interpret its mysterious meanings (sometimes a different facet with each fresh reading), and calls me far beyond the boundaries of myself - to experience something that begins to take the shape of what we (too casually, more often than not) refer to as God.

I am a student of literature, and the scriptures are certainly great literature. But I have inherited, for better or worse, a tradition of interpretation and a community that has gathered and gathered around this collection (canon) as a vessel for understanding God's ways among the human community. Their relevance or authority in every generation comes from our engagement not so much with the words but with the community that gathered around those words in many ages and times. We ratify their authority and ability to "lead us into all Truth" not a priori, because they are the Holy writings, but because more and more of us experience their power to interpret our experience (of prayer and of life) as related by love to one another and to God. For some, this happens on a surface level that I am tempted to dismiss as naive and immature. At moments of better clarity, I realize that even in this apparent disparity, God's grace meets each of us at our point of need and receptivity.