Another sad disagreement with Christian fundamentalism

 There is a rolling drum-beat coming from many Christian churches declaring the world’s ‘need for God’….And the ‘sales pitch’, while familiar and somewhat historic, nevertheless, reeks of more desperation on the part of the church than it does of the desperation of the world. Phrases like, ‘the time is now for the church to be that Holy, Chosen, and Called Ones of God to clearly step up to the plate’ sound like a clarion call for God and for those chosen to ‘step up to the plate’ and warriors of the kingdom.

 While uttered, scribbled, prayed or even included in a homily, these words are anathema to the faith, devolving from the premise that believers are holy and separate and ‘Chosen’ and ‘Called’. Not only is the rhetoric hollow as a sales pitch, it is even more hollow as a theology.

The notion that God, the Christian God, the Hebrew or the Muslim God, the Hindu needs to have a “special forces brigade’ of saved individuals, as his army to save the world, is both pretentious, specious and tendentious. The notion comes from one who, as a proverbial story about such ambassadors of this theology goes, turns to the few adolescents in his car while driving them to a church event, takes his hands off the steering wheel and proclaims that God is now driving the car. It is also redolent of the Sunday School teacher who, while orienting new volunteers to the program, indicates, following the direction of the teacher’s manual from David Cook’s curriculum, “these are the words to say to the five-year-old’s who are saved, and these, different words, are those reserved for the five-year-old’s who are not saved.”

Rubbish, and the examples are not summoned up from an over-exuberant imagination. They are documented from a small stint as a clergy in small parishes where I followed this kind of theology. And where, to the surprise of none of those parishioners at that time, I was formally confronted by one of their ‘leading members’ and told to pack my bags, and leave the church and the town. I had been delivering a small number of homilies, based on a more liberal and less literal interpretation of both scripture and tradition, and was already deemed a ‘heretic’. When an announcement was handed to me during the offertory hymn in mid-service, without previous warning or viewing, and told to announce the screening of a video on Tuesday evening that week, (again to demonstrate how heretical were the homilies I had been writing and delivering) of course, I put the announcement in a pocket, without uttering a word of its content. Subsequently, I wrote to the ‘leading member’ a letter outlining his resignation as ‘warden’ from that congregation, and delivered it to his business address.

Sales pitches, in the church known as evangelism, that not merely suggest a divide between those who are Christians from those who are not saved, is a scourge not only on the faith itself, but on the whole community. It designates a single passage, under the direction of those already saved, to a consummated relationship with God through Jesus Christ. It also postulates a reading and interpretation of scripture that fails to acknowledge the poetic, the mythic, the historic and the legal as very different forms of thought and writing, irrespective of the extensive historic nature of scripture, and the multiple human minds, hearts, bodies and spirits that have had their part in its delivery.

The ‘road to Damascus’ bright light conversion written about by Paul, and then held up as the eye of a needle through which God intends and expects those who are seeking a relationship seems about as kindergarten-like and reductionistic a proposition that does not and cannot withstand scrutiny as a proposition of a faith worthy of the name. And yet, steeped in such interpretation, are many in both the pulpits and also in the theological schools as instructors who have a considerable following.

This kind of theology, however, while leaning toward the kind of dichotomous, binary, Manichean view of salvation that has not and will not penetrate the consciousness of some of us. And any sustained search for God, (itself a phrase fraught with meaning, complexity, nuance, dynamism, poetry, music, art, and even a prospect of spiritual health) has to be considered one of the more ephemeral, mysterious, mystical and both delicate and substantive journeys of the whole person imaginable. As the Pope uttered on a plane when asked about the “faith” of the gay and lesbian community, “Who am I to judge?”….a statement repeated and echoed around the globe for its surprise and its humility and its historic breakthrough the seemingly steel curtain of exclusion that has precluded such a papal utterance for centuries.

A child-like dependence, again based on a phrase from scripture, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3), that has been reduced to a single-minded innocence and submission to something like the will of God, through the saving grace of Jesus Christ, who died for ‘your sins on Calvary. There are, as we are all aware, multiple paths to changing and becoming like children. For some of us, that notion starts with a kind of awe and mystery and the appeal of both a story and a potential relationship that knows no boundaries and limits to its expectations. It cannot and must not be reduced to a simplistic, reductionistic total and absolute submission and surrender of one’s mind, body and spirit to this deity, as defined by some humans. And the Manichean nature of such a black and white faith posture, leaves those embracing it, and the faith itself vulnerable to the exclusive and superior component of abuse of its self-appointed, anointed and deployed power, in the name of God.

Manicheanism, is a faith that breaks everything down into good or evil. For Augustine, one of the primary pillars of Christian theology, according to  Roland J. Teske S.J. writing in the Catholic Historical Review, January 2011, pp 112-113, reviewing David BeDuhn’s ‘Augustine’s Manichean Dilemma,’ writes: (BeDuhn’s) “study, has for the first time, made Augustine’s conversion to the Manichean religion and his remaining in it so long intelligible for me. He argues that Manicheanism offered a religion to the young Augustine that promised to satisfy his deepest spiritual and intellectual aspirations--aspirations that remained much the same for Augustine the apostate from Manicheanism and new convert to Catholic Christianity.”

It (Manicheanism) is such an easily grasped perspective and the binary, dual, either-or concept has had considerable prominence throughout western history. Comparisons of related concepts, through research that postulates a null hypothesis to be disproven, for example, is one application. News and public affairs frames are historically and traditionally deemed to be a ‘position’ by one source countered by an opposing view from another source. In the court rooms, the plaintiff offers a version of the facts, while the defendant offers a different version of those same facts. Literature is seeded with multiple examples of so-called “Good” characters in conflict with so-called “bad characters” with more minor characters often serving as the porridge that brings them to the same table (metaphorically).

And yet, at the root of most of these “systems” of thought, is a primary concept: the focus on the literal, the nominal, and the tension that exists, (or we assume, or postulate, or profess, or believe or actual attempt to demonstrate) between one aspect of each nominal* notion and another.

In such a culture, ostensibly deemed by its political, economic and many of its theological and spiritual leaders to be “Christian” in some form and to some varying degree, much public discourse, and too much so-called theological and spiritual discourse, including the above quotes, are little more than heated (yet still dark and unimaginative, and uninspiring) debates about the ‘correctness’ of one position or view and the error of another.

“Is Hitler in heaven?” was hotly debated in first year in seminary at Huron College in 1988.

Is the apocalypse near? Is another such question that has fueled debates for centuries and even driven religions apart.

Does God have a class of ‘chosen’ people? Is another of those questions to which an either-or approach too often is applied, by people sincere in their faith.

What is the difference between faith and perception? And what role does perception and world view have in the development of a faith?

Who/what/where is God? Is another of those proverbial questions that tends to divide believers from non-believers.

Does DNA, or the Big Bang, or the mystery of the universe confirm or deny, or complicate the question of the existence of God?

Is war an instrument of God, or does God prefer peace?,,,,similar to the age-old, does God support capital punishment for criminal behaviour?

Is solitary confinement God’s chosen path to rehabilitation for criminals?...

The questions are endless,….and yet the answers are too often reduced to one side or another….as in the recent ‘abortion debate’.

The definition of a fetus, (at conception, or later) has consumed both tank-fulls of ink, and eons of air time among those contending on both sides….and yet, if we are open to a more tolerant, compassionate, complex and less simplistic notion of how we might regard this issue, along with many other issues, we might be able to take a view as a culture that, while preferring a general overview and stance, could still see the ethical value of individual situations in a manner that might try to emulate a less constricted and less rigid and less dogmatic application of “our personal” view of God’s will.

While I disagree with attempting to sell Christianity, and believe fully that such prosletyzing has resulted in both theological thought and praxis that has been detrimental both to the church and to the relationship between humans and God. And, lying at the heart of the western culture’s religion is the notion of evil, and the acts that comprise that empire, and especially the people who are accused, convicted and punished for their crimes.

Only recently have we begun to hear tentative rumblings about the correlation between young lives that have been seriously abused and the projected actions of many of those abused into their adult lives…and that kind of research and social policy has to be taken into account, as does the most recent discoveries about the multiple universes out there, by those who would take up the mantle of thinking about and reflecting upon and praying about the Christian faith. And such a project will need both the best efforts of clergy and laity, given the narrowness of mind and heart and spirit of too many standing in the pulpit.

 

*nominalism, of or pertaining to names, is the ontological theory that reality is only made up of particular items, denying the existence of general entities like properties, species, universals sets, or other categories.