Review: A New Kind of Christianity by Brian McLaren

I picked up this book with some ambivalence. When I've read Brian McLaren's work in the past, I could tell that he was a progressive thinker with a deep understanding of why and where the Christian religion needs to change, but I could never shake the suspicion that he was holding something back. This was understandable--he writes, I think, for a largely Evangelical audience, so it is not surprising that he would sugarcoat his more progressive ideas to make them palatable to his not-particularly-progressive audience. But I'm not a part of that audience, and I didn't think I had much to learn from him.

The reviews for this book persuaded me to give it a shot, and I'm glad I did, because it's quite good. McLaren seems no longer to be restraining himself and has put forth an unabashedly progressive vision for a new kind of Christianity. For the progressive Christian reader he covers a lot of familiar ground, but he does so with arguments and examples that are lucid and, for me anyway, quite novel.

The larger part of the book deals with the "Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith." (A less optimistic person would describe them as "Ten Contentious Issues That Are Dividing the Church.")

The first concerns the "overarching story line of the Bible," which McLaren argues is quite different from the Creation/Fall/Redemption narrative most Christians have been taught, explicitly or not. He describes the latter as a "six-line narrative," beginning with perfection in the Garden of Eden, then "the Fall" into original sin, and then a period of condemnation. Following this is the coming of Christ, where the path splits in two directions: salvation and heaven for some, damnation and hell (understood as "eternal conscious torment") for others.

McLaren notes that this story can lead to an understanding of the meaning of our earthly existence as simply a process of "soul-sorting," where the purpose of our lives is to "deliver souls into their appropriate eternal bin." He also notes that a lot of people have been questioning this storyline, and suggesting ways in which it needs to be tweaked, but too few have actually questioned if this story "is morally believable" or "whether it can be found in the Bible itself." (He argues that it's not and that it can't.)

This is mostly good stuff, and I agree that understanding our existence this way is a gross distortion of the message of Jesus. Unfortunately, McLaren stumbles a bit when he blames it on the "Greco-Romanization" of the Church, which he understands as the appropriation by the Church of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. This is the weakest part of the book, as McLaren misrepresents both of those philosophers and the ways they influenced Christian theology. He does this as part of the creation of a "Greco-Roman" bogeyman, complete with its own god, "Theos," against which he can juxtapose the more authentic and more Jewish narrative he wants to promote. (He would do well to follow the advice of Albert Einstein: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.") In fairness to McLaren, he does acknowledge later on that it is too simple to "blame all our problems on the the Greco-Roman captivity of the biblical narrative." But that doesn't solve the problem of what he wrote earlier, which will turn off most people who actually know something about Greek philosophy.

McLaren finds another source of the Church's ills is the tendency to read the Bible as if it was a legal constitution that is univocal and internally consistent, instead of seeing it as a community library that contains a number of often dissonant voices and preserves the "vigorous internal debate around key questions that were precious to the theological culture in which it was produced." McLaren describes a number of ways the constitutional approach to the Bible has been used to justify evils like slavery and to condemn advances in science. Many Christians like to imagine that such abuses belong exclusively to the past, but McLaren disagrees, pointing to the widespread hostility toward homosexuals by those who read the Bible constitutionally as an example.

For many progressive Christians, a lot of what McLaren writes will sound familiar: Jesus' message about the "kingdom of God," commonly (and erroneously) understood as pertaining exclusively or at least primarily to the afterlife, is much more about transformation in this life; he points out that Jesus's message was not about converting from one religion to another, and this has implications for how Christians should relate to people of other faiths. Those familiar with the thought of Ken Wilber will see his influence in the last part of the book.

None of this is earth-shattering, but McLaren articulates it very clearly and has a knack for teasing out the perverse implications of some common Christian beliefs, often in ways I had never thought of. At the same time, he recognises that this new kind of Christianity isn't for everyone, and I disagree with his critics who claim that he is disrespectful or condescending towards those who disagree with him. On the contrary, he is unfailingly nice, which is probably why so many of his critics have labeled him a "wolf in sheep's clothing."

But McLaren is not a wolf, and he's not pretending to be a sheep. He's trying to show people that they don't need to be sheep, either. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in progressive Christianity, and I think this would be a great book to give to someone who is beginning to grow out of their conventional faith.

The Problematic Basis of the Incarnation, Part I

I read John Hick's The Metaphor of God Incarnate a couple of years ago, and I quite enjoyed it, but it didn't have much of an impact on my way of thinking until I read it again last weekend.

I've decided to write an extended review of the book. It will take a few posts, as Hick packs a lot of argument into 188 pages. I want to share some of his insights, and hopefully encourage some people to read it, because I think it's a terrific and important book.

One thing Hick writes about at length is how New Testament research has completely undermined the traditional source of authority for the doctrine, namely Jesus's own teaching, putting theologians in the difficult position of finding a new basis for it.

The consensus among scholars -- even among those who affirm the Nicene-Chalcedonian formulas -- is that Jesus never claimed to be divine. Hick quotes a number of "orthodox" scholars' admissions to this effect, including Michael Ramsey, C.F.D. Moule, and James Dunn, as well as some Chalcedon-affirming theologians like Brian Hebblethwaite and David Brown.¹

This development is no small matter. Hick writes,

From at least the fifth to the late nineteenth century Christians generally believed that Jesus had proclaimed himself to he God the Son, second person of a divine Trinity, living a human life; and their discipleship accordingly included this as a central article of faith. But that supposed dominical authority has dissolved under historical scrutiny.²

With the traditional basis of the doctrine having collapsed, theologians who "adhere to the Nicene-Chalcedonian dogma...have had to find a new basis for it." He observes that they have "decided that the doctrine of the incarnation does not require the knowledge or consent of the historical Jesus himself."³

Hick questions whether an incarnate God who doesn't know that he's divine is an intelligible idea, and asks further "how it is possible for the church to know something so important about Jesus that he didn't know about himself?" He has identified four types of responses:

The first involves a qualification of the admission that Jesus was unaware of and did not teach his own deity. This response holds that he was implicitly aware of it in his uniquely intimate filial relationship with the heavenly Father, and that he implicitly taught it by his actions, particularly in abrogating the law of Moses and in forgiving sins.⁴

Hick accepts the "widely received view that Jesus' use of the word [abba] did constitute a genuinely new contribution to Western spirituality," but points out that Jesus taught his disciples to think of and address God in the same way. Hick also points out "that to experience God as one's heavenly Father is not the same as experiencing oneself as uniquely God the Son, second person of the divine Trinity."⁵

Similarly, Hick finds unpersuasive the argument that Jesus was claiming to be God by teaching some things contrary to the Torah, citing the argument by E.P. Sanders that Jesus only demanded the transgression of the law in one instance, that being in Matthew 8.22, when he said, "Follow me, and let the dead bury the dead."⁶

Another quotation from Sanders explains the weakness of the argument that Jesus's forgiving of others' sins entailed a claim to divinity:The oft-repeated claim that Jesus "put himself in the place of God" is overdone. He is often said to have done so in forgiving sins; but we must note that he only pronounced forgiveness, which is not the prerogative of God, but of the priesthood.⁷

In my next post, I'll describe the other ways theologians who affirm the traditional doctrine of the incarnation have responded to the modern discovery that Jesus did not claim to be God, as identified and described by Hick.

Go to Part II.

Notes

All page references, unless otherwise noted, are to Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate, 2nd Edition. See Works Cited.

[1] 27-28.

[2] 29.

[3] 29.

[4] 30.

[5] 31.

[6] 32. The argument from Sanders is in Jesus and Judaism, 267. I would argue, following John P. Meier's fourth volume of A Marginal Jew, that there were other instances in which Jesus abrogated the Mosaic law, specifically in his prohibition of oaths. Having said that, this prohibition conflicted with a rather obscure point of the Mosaic law, and I imagine it's possible that it never even occurred to Jesus that there was a conflict. See Meier, Marginal, 4.182ff.

I would further point out that disagreeing with the law does not imply a claim to divinity. Paul was far more liberal in his approach to the Torah than Jesus was, and he certainly never claimed to be divine. Sanders argues, "It was Jesus' sense of living at the turn of the ages which allowed him to think that the Mosaic law was not final and absolute," (Jesus and Judaism, 267; quoted in Hick, 32). Paul also understood himself as living "at the turn of the ages," and claimed authority on the basis of what he interpreted as a revelation to him from God. It strikes me as probable that Jesus understood his own authority in a similar way, and for a similar reason.

[7] Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 240; quoted in Hick, 32. It's ironic that this argument is sometimes made by Catholic priests -- and Hick notes that it has been used by Cardinal Walter Kasper in his book Jesus the Christ -- despite the fact that Catholic priests do exactly the same thing in the confessional everyday.

The Problem is Orange

People often speak of "polarisation" in the Catholic Church; this term denotes a widening gap between two opposing groups, and these two groups are usually called "conservative"/"traditional"/"orthodox" on the one hand, and "liberal"/"progressive" (as well as a number of less flattering epithets) on the other. There is also a tendency, I think, for people to see these as two sides on a horizontal axis.

The reality is, as I've argued before, rather more complicated than this, and I'm going to explain a bit more how I understand this conflict in the light of developmental spirituality.

It is probably safe to say that the large majority of adults in the Church today fall into three of James Fowler's six stages of development (and the corresponding altitudes in Ken Wilber's thought, as mentioned in a previous post). These are "Synthetic-Conventional," or amber-altitude; "Individuative-Reflective," or orange-altitude; and "Conjunctive," or green-altitude. There are some adults at the "Mythic-Literal"/red-altitude stage, and others at the "Universalizing"/teal-altitude stage, but these are probably small minorities.¹

Fowler himself has noted that individuals at the (amber-altitude) Synthetic-Conventional stage tend to be the "orthodox" believers; this stage of faith, he says, "can be seen as having rootage in and preserving important elements of pre-Enlightenment forms of cultural consciousness" (emphasis in original; Faithful, 161). Beliefs at this stage are held tacitly; individuals at this stage are generally non-reflective -- or, at least, not very reflective -- particularly when it comes to matters of faith. Additionally, authority is located externally at this stage. Wilber would add this stage is typically ethnocentric, which is manifested in the triumphalism and exclusivism of conventional Christianity.

The orange-altitude "Individuative-Reflective" stage emerged with the Enlightenment, and reflects a "modern" consciousness. It is characterised by a more reflective awareness of one's faith, and a more critical approach to one's beliefs. Orange faith also features a "relocation of authority within the self" (Fowler, Stages, 179). Fowler identifies this as the "progressive" stage (Faithful, 161ff.). It was this type of spirituality that eventually precipitated the "modernist crisis" in the Church in the late 19th century, which provoked an aggressively amber response from the Magisterium. It also brought us rigorous biblical criticism, and made a measure of openness to non-Christian religions possible for the Church. (The documents of Vatican II are essentially a mishmash of amber and orange ideas, with, perhaps, an occasional sprinkling of green.)

I would argue that most of the really committed progressives in the Church are more likely to be at the green-altitude "Conjunctive" stage. Green faith moves beyond the dichotomous rationality of orange, and embraces a more dialectical form of reasoning. It can move beyond a merely critical approach into a post-critical position (Paul Ricoeur's "second naiveté"), and is more experiential and pluralistic. It reflects a more "post-modern" consciousness.

If, as I've asserted, most committed progressives are at green, then what is orange? Who do we find there?

One well-known type of orange spirituality is that promoted by the retired Episcopal bishop, John Shelby Spong. This is not to say that Spong himself is at that stage (I don't presume to know what stage he's at), but his work is very much aimed at converting late-amber Christians into orange faith. Spong, at least in his works that I've read,² follows an aggressive demythologising approach. It's not uncommon for people to read Spong and ask why, if what he says is true, anyone should bother with Christianity?

And that is the problem with orange. It simply isn't very appealing. Orange is the stage where many people say their goodbyes to the Church (and religion in general), and many never look back. Some will regress, and re-embrace, often with great fervour, an amber-level spirituality. Still others will ride it out, continue to develop, and find a much more satisfying spirituality at green, or higher.

The lack of an appealing orange spirituality is, I think, the great unrecognised cause of the so-called polarisation within the Church. Many progressives look at their conservative co-religionists and wonder, "Why do they have to see everything in black and white?" "Why can't they just think for themselves, and trust their own experience?" "Why is it so important for them to believe their religion is the only way?"

"Why," we might as well be asking, "can't they embrace a green-altitude spirituality?"

The problem is orange. It's a massive stumbling block -- that is, until you've cleared it, at which point it all but disappears.

I'll talk about some of the implications of this, as I see it, some other time.

Notes

[1] Wilber and Fowler match up quite well in the stages up to Conjunctive/green-altitude, but the next stage in Wilber, which he identifies as having reached "Integral" consciousness, is probably a more common achievement than Fowler's Universalizing stage. I've indicated in the past that I have some problems with Fowler's Universalizing stage, which he identified in the 1970s, long before Integral philosophy began to find a following.

[2] I haven't read a book by Spong since his autobiography, Here I Stand, was first published in 1999. I read several of his books prior to that, with Why Christianity Must Change or Die, which I also read in 1999, sticking out in my mind as particularly memorable. I suppose he might have changed his approach in the decade since then.

The Human Origin of the Bible

Marcus J. Borg, in his terrific book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, describes two different ways of looking at the Bible.

The more traditional way is to see the Bible as a divine product:

The inspiration of scripture is understood to mean that God guided the writing of the Bible, directly or indirectly. What scripture says, then, ultimately comes from God. (22)

The alternative is to see the Bible as a human product, which is the way Borg proposes.

I suspect a lot of people are somewhere in the middle, acknowledging to one degree or another than humans were involved in the writing, while maintaining at the same time that God was somehow involved, at least some of the time.

Borg anticipates this possible objection, but rejects it:

Why see the question as an either-or choice? Why not see the Bible as both divine and human? In my experience, affirming that it is both only compounds the confusion. (26)

The problem, he points out, is that when the Bible is seen as both divine and human in origin -- or partly divine and partly human -- it tends to lead to the attempt to separate what comes from God from what is merely human. To discern, in other words, what parts we have to take really seriously, and what parts we can dispense with. The problem with this is obvious enough:

[T]he parts that we think come from God are normally the parts we see as important, and thus we simply confer divine authority on what matters to us, whether we be conservatives or liberals. (27)

So there are some people, for example, who insist that everyone observe the prohibition of homosexual behaviour, while showing little or no concern for those who violate the prohibition of planting two kinds of seed in the same field (Lev 19.19), or for women who braid their hair, or wearing gold jewellery (1 Tim 2.9).

It does sort of raise the question, though: There are countless books that are "merely human" in origin -- why even bother with the Bible at all?

Some other time.

What did the early Church have that we don't?

I've written before about the problem of authenticity in religion traditions (see "What I'm Doing Here").

I've asserted in numerous places that inauthenticity has plagued the Christian tradition from early in its history -- not an original observation, to be sure -- and that one of the central concerns of "progressive Christianity" is the undoing of that inauthenticity.

This idea, hardly original to me, meets with a great deal of resistance by conservative Christians. If someone disagrees with doctrines originally articulated in the first few centuries of the Common Era, it's attributed to simple hubris, nothing more. That someone might have legitimate reason for finding fault with established doctrine has already been excluded as a possibility.

Underlying this is a rather curious confidence in the competence of ancient authorities -- whether biblical authors, or Church Fathers, or whoever -- apparently for no reason other than that they are ancient.

This is a curious assumption that warrants some attention. Why, for example, should Augustine's interpretation of the second creation story -- and, more specifically, the doctrine of Original Sin that derived from it -- be held as definitive against the interpretations of contemporary exegetes? Did he have access to any relevant resources that we lack? (The short answer is, "no.")

Conservatives will argue that the truth of the doctrine of Original Sin lies elsewhere than the authority of Augustine as an individual. It lies, they might argue, in the authority of the Church that accepted his doctrine, under the infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit. In other words, we'll ignore the fact that actual humans, whoever they were, actually made the judgment that Augustine got it right, and pass the buck to God himself.

And why not? We know church leaders are directed by God, because that's what they tell us -- and since they're directed by God, they can't possibly be wrong about it!

(Have you ever wondered what would happen if every human on the planet woke up one day with an awareness of the fallacy of circular reasoning, and the implications of this for their own belief systems?)

I suppose the real answer is simply that people want to believe that the very fallible humans who originally judged these doctrines to be true were somehow protected from error by the hand of God.

The absence of reason is arbitrariness. And as Bernard Lonergan points out,

"Arbitrariness is just another name for unauthenticity." (Method 122)

As much as I try to write about other things, I keep running into the same conclusion: a lot of the inauthenticity one finds in the Christian tradition is rooted in circular reasoning. Which is odd, because the fallacious nature of circular reasoning is so easy to grasp.

Why does it persist, in Christianity in particular, to such an extent? Is it just wishful thinking? That's a big part of the story, undoubtedly. But what does one do about that?

I have some thoughts about that, but I'll talk about that later.

Tradition and Progressive Christianity

I've given a lot of thought to the role and function of "tradition" in Christianity, particularly in the progressive form I happen to identify with.

Progressive Christians, in my experience, spend a lot of time deconstructing aspects of the Christian tradition, while creating a new (sub-)tradition, but I haven't seen much reflection on the role of tradition as a whole. So I thought I'd share my thoughts on the subject.

"Tradition" is a pretty broad concept. Etymologically, it refers to that which is "handed over," which, in a religious context, encompasses a whole lot of stuff. Any transmission of religious information is, in a sense, a participation in tradition.

In practice, of course, tradition is rarely defined this broadly. A line is generally drawn between "orthodox" and "heterodox" elements, the idea being that only "orthodox" elements should be transmitted.

The most obvious difference between progressive and "traditional" Christians is in which elements we have judged worthy of continued transmission. But this difference concerns the content of tradition, which is not what I'm interested in right now.

The larger issue is the role of tradition. For "traditional" Christians, tradition is inextricably tied up with authority. For example, consider one of the central points of disagreement between Catholic and Protestants, namely, the authority of "tradition," vis-à-vis "scripture." It is often said that Catholics affirm the authority of tradition, while Protestants reject it, but this is rather simplistic. When one realises that scripture is itself a product of tradition, one sees that Protestants did not reject tradition, they simply limited it's extent. And even this is a simplistic description: the doctrine of sola scriptura is an extra-biblical element of tradition that is held up as authoritative. In reality, the Protestant Reformers didn't reject tradition, they simply replaced the old one with various new ones (to which Protestants, to one extent or another, ascribe some measure of authority, de facto if not de jure).

What traditional Christians (Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise) have in common is a tendency to treat tradition as a norm against which each individual's faith can be measured. It provides a "box" within which each individual must sit in order to claim membership.

Progressive Christianity, as I understand it, largely does away with this. The role of tradition is not to provide a norm against which we measure our own faith to determine if we merit this or that label. It is simply a part of the context that shapes us, that makes us what we are. If we find fault with what has been handed down, we don't break with tradition so much as we expand it by seeking newer and better ways of expressing our understanding.

More on this later.

Review: With or Without God, by Gretta Vosper

As I've mentioned before, I wasn't overly enthusiastic about reading this book when I first became aware of it in March. Years ago I read a couple of books by John Shelby Spong, and while I enjoyed them, I ultimately found his vision of what Christianity might become to be a little thin. Spong was good at deconstructing Christianity, but much less capable of reconstructing it. When I saw that he wrote the foreward of Gretta Vosper's book, and found his name on the dedication page, I assumed Vosper might be offering up much of the same.

I wasn't wrong. And yet, I still enjoyed the book, even as I found it really underwhelming. Vosper writes with good humour, and avoids the counterproductive polemical tone found in Spong's work. Like Spong, she's good at identifying where changes need to be made.

Vosper echoes some of the points made by Jack Good in his book The Dishonest Church, which she explicitly cites. She notes the disparity between what members of the clergy are taught in seminary and what they actually preach from the pulpit. She rejects the approach taken by Historical Jesus scholar Marcus Borg, who seems content to keep the established language and forms of worship, while reinterpreting them in a non-literal way. I agree with some of her criticisms of Borg, but I hardly consider him to be part of the problem.

One major disagreement I have with Vosper is in the understanding of spiritual development. She draws on the work of James Fowler, and to some extent seems to have a good grasp of his theory. But I wonder. She writes at one point, "Fowler's ultimate stage in faith development ("Universalizing Faith") is where I believe the church should be as an institution" (275). I'm not sure what to make of that. The number of people who reach that stage is miniscule -- about 0.3% of the population, according to Fowler's Stages of Faith (319). This assertion is so preposterous, it makes me wonder if Vosper has actually read Fowler's work.

It should definitely be a priority of the church to encourage every member to develop as far as they will go. Needless to say, this doesn't happen: Church teaching is often aimed at stopping people at Stage 3 ("Synthetic Conventional"), before people start questioning authority and the tacitly held beliefs that are considered "orthodox."

Having said that, even if people were encouraged to develop as far as they could go, the fact is, people have to go through the lower stages. You can't just teach your kid to be a Stage 6 Christian. Everyone has to go through every stage, and they have to be taught at the stage they presently inhabit. You can't teach a Stage 6 level of faith to someone at Stage 2 ("Mythic Literal") any more than you could teach quantum physics to a six year-old.

Vosper's ideas about Jesus are interesting, but not without problems. Like progressive Christians generally, Vosper argues that a lot of the traditional beliefs about Jesus have got to go. She goes a bit further, though. Pointing to the scholarly efforts to determine what Jesus really said, Vosper writes, "In trying to capture exactly what he said, we have found, quite by accident, that what he said has little power" (41). I disagree with that, but judging from Vosper's interpretation of Jesus's message, I can see how she would arrive at that conclusion. Which is to say, I don't agree with her interpretation. She dismisses Jesus's words in Luke 12:22-29 by saying, "We cannot afford to be reckless about the future" (154), as if that's what he was counselling. If I felt that Jesus's words had "little power," I'm not sure I'd bother with Christianity, to be honest, but maybe that's just me.

Vosper acknowledges that, "Progressive thinking is not everyone's cup of tea, but it is the only tool that will possibly pull us through to the next stage of the church's development" (150). I agree, but I don't think Vosper's brand of progressive thinking is going to do the trick. I'm glad I read her book, as it's given me an opportunity to think about, and clarify, my own perspective. I would recommend it to anyone interested in progressive Christianity. But I can't endorse her main suggestions, because I think a much more robust and profound spirituality is possible, and necessary.

Gretta Vosper's Without or Without God: Orange or Green?

I recently started reading With or Without God, a new book by Gretta Vosper. Normally I don't blog about books while I'm reading them, but this one is particularly relevant to progressive Christianity, which is what this blog was meant to be about (and sometimes actually is). I knew I was going to have to blog about it when I found myself doing something I never do to my books -- I pulled out a pencil and started writing comments in the margins. (I have this weird, almost religious reverence towards books, which is why most of the books on my shelves look like they've never been read, much less written-in.)

Vosper is the pastor of the West Hill United Church, here in Toronto. She is also the founder and chair of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity. She is, apparently, somewhat controversial even within her own denomination, the already-quite-progressive United Church of Canada.

I was hesitant to pick this one up, for two reasons. First, I read an article in Maclean's a few weeks ago (I think I blogged about it, actually), and I wasn't overly impressed with what Vosper had to say. Second, the book is dedicated to, and features a foreward written by, John Shelby Spong. I don't have anything against Spong as a person -- I met him a few years ago, and he's a real gentleman, and a good speaker -- but I find his vision for the Christian religion to be a little thin. I suspected Vosper might be offering more of the same (and, though I'm not quite finished the book, that is still my impression).

Today I read an interesting article by Douglas Todd of the Vancouver Sun, that was published on Saturday. It compares Vosper's book with Emerging Church: A Model for Change and a Map for Renewal, a new book by Bruce Sanguin, who, like Vosper, is a pastor in the United Church of Canada.

I haven't read anything by Sanguin before, but in his latest book he apparently makes reference to Spiral Dynamics, and specifically the work of Don Beck. My knowledge of Spiral Dynamics is limited to what I've read about it in works by Ken Wilber. I actually thought about it as I was reading Vosper's book, because it seems to me that she is writing from a strictly "green" perspective. (By Douglas Todd's reckoning, it's more likely the "orange" level, which is the stage before green.)

Todd says he prefers Sanguin's "option of exploring different ways of understanding God, not defaulting to only ethics," as Vosper apparently proposes. He writes, "Given all the expansive, multidisciplinary thinking going in progressive Christian circles these days, it's hard to understand why Vosper ignores so much of it." I've been wondering much the same thing.

I should have some time to finish her book in the next couple of days, so hopefully I'll be able to write something about it soon.

The Jesus Problem

In the cover story of this week's issue of Maclean's ("The Jesus Problem," March 31, 2008), Brian Bethune reports that some Christians have decided that the Church might be "better off" without Jesus. I've heard some curious ideas before, but this was a new one.

As evidence of this, the article cites the recent publication of With or Without God, by Gretta Vosper, the pastor of West Hill United Church in Toronto. Bethune describes the book as "a passionately argued case for a post-Christian church" (40).

The article describes some of the conclusions of modern biblical scholarship, specifically the fact that many of Jesus' sayings are widely recognised as having been created by the early church. Some people, myself included, find the resulting "historical Jesus" to be a far more compelling figure than the gospel portrait of a man who went around claiming to be, among other things, "the light of the world" (John 8.12). Others, on the other hand, are less impressed, and Vosper is apparently among them:

When Gretta Vosper looks at the emerging historical Jesus she sees no rock on which to erect a church. "In trying to capture exactly what he said, we have found, quite by accident, that what he said has little power." (41)

If that's case, why bother with "Christianity" at all?

Vosper isn't so much prepared for the obvious questions she faces as inured to them. She's often asked, with various degrees of incredulity and indignation how, in the name of God or Love (if she prefers), she can call herself a Christian. Because, she replies, her Christianity...is more a way of acting than a way of belief. "Being a Christian is about taking out of my faith tradition those things that are of value in my effort to live right with myself, with my relationships and with my planet," Vosper says. "And removing those things that are toxic." (42)

I don't disagree with that. I've long felt that Jesus's message was more concerned with how we live than what we believe. Still, based on this article, I'm not convinced I'm going to find Vosper's vision of Christianity all that compelling. But I'll wait until I read her book before I make any final judgments about that.

On the Need for a Critical Theology

Religion as an Accident of Birth

The German existentialist Martin Heidegger used the term Geworfenheit – literally, “thrown-ness” – to refer to the fact that we do not choose to exist, but unavoidably find ourselves already existing, as if we were “thrown” into existence. And what is true of human existence in general is true of religious existence in particular: most of us who are Christians, for example, did not initially choose to be Christians – at some point we just found ourselves that way.

A lot of Christians seem to be okay with this. The simple fact that they were raised to believe the things they believe is, for them, evidence enough that these things are true.

In most cases, people are aware of belief systems other than their own. Insofar as this is true, their religion does not remain “unchosen.” We can choose to assume that our beliefs are correct, or we can choose to critically examine (and possibly change) them, but we cannot avoid making a choice. For those of us who are not content to assume that our childhood beliefs are correct simply because we were raised to believe them, this means undertaking the long, difficult process of critically examining the structure of our belief system. In this way we take responsibility for our belief system.

Finding the Basic Foundation

If you ask a typical Christian why they believe, for example, that Jesus was virginally conceived, they will likely point out that it says so in the Bible. And so it does. But they’ve explained their belief in one doctrine by pointing to another doctrine. Ask them why they believe the Bible is true, and they will give another doctrine – e.g., because the leaders of the church say so, etc.

No doctrine, however, can serve as the foundation of a person’s belief system. This is because there would always be the question of why they believe that doctrine. The basic foundation is never a doctrine, but is comprised of the basic criteria by which we make judgments of fact and judgments of value.

The Implications for Theology

A lot of people are reluctant to affirm this, but the foundation of our belief system is always our self. The starting point for theology is not a set of doctrines as defined by some external authority, but a set of beliefs held by the theologian, as determined by the theologian’s basic criteria of judgment. Of course, these might happen to coincide with the doctrines defined by the authority, but only if the theologian understands his or her beliefs the way the authority means for them to be understood.

Historically, most theology has been strictly speculative: that is, it began with doctrines as its premises, presuppositions that were simply taken for granted. The premises were the “articles of faith,” as understood by the theologian (although this was not usually explicitly acknowledged). The conclusions, in a sense, were always determined in advance. Theology was simply about joining the dots, filling in the blanks, systematising what was unsystematic, making explicit what was already implicit. It worked within a given doctrinal framework, and the framework itself was not questioned.

Various historical factors have led to the recognition that there is a need for a more critical theology. Beliefs can no longer be taken for granted. Some people will insist that Christian theology has to begin with explicitly Christian beliefs, but I don’t think this is necessarily the case.

Quentin Quesnell, describing this kind of theology, suggests that

The role of the past is not to provide objective norms outside the theologian and the community to whom the theologian speaks. The past fulfills its role when it has formed the theologian and the community to be what they are. (132)

"Christian theology" starts from any background that calls itself "Christian" and that sees its own work in terms of loyalty to what it considers "the Christian message" (133).

Obviously there are a lot of Christians who would disagree with this. So in a sense, critical theology, as defined here, has a limited audience. Personally, I don’t write with a conservative audience in mind. I’m not doing “liberal apologetics,” because I don’t particularly care if people agree with me or not. I am, then, writing for a small segment of the Christian community, and anyone else who might happen to be interested.

Works Cited

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1927. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.

Quesnell, Quentin. "On Not Neglecting the Self in the Structure of Theological Revolutions." Religion and Culture: Essays in Honor of Bernard Lonergan, S.J. Timothy P. Fallon and Philip Boo Riley (eds.). Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1987: 125-133.