Exile Amid Millions
My copy of J.S. Spong’s Jesus for the Non-Religious is highlighted, dog-eared and marked-up. There are notes tucked between the pages written on stationery from Chicago’s Sutton Place Hotel where I burrowed under the airy down and read for most of the day. It felt illicit. That was the intention of the book’s cover image — a shadowy Shroud of Turin corrupted by bold, red stripes. There will be no truck with superstition within these covers, it screams.
At the time, I found that exhilarating. A Christian, no less than a retired Episcopal bishop, didn’t believe in a bodily resurrection of Jesus! Gospel writers used the Hebrew Scriptures to create biographical details of Jesus! The pre-modern symbols and mythology of the Gospels aren’t effective in a postmodern era! One dog-eared page contains the highlighted passage: “The anxiety experienced by many is that when this structure is dismantled, nothing is left. If that is so, then let us be honest and face the fact that Christianity has died and the history of a post-Christian world has begun.” Aha, doctor. Here is my diagnosis!
The structure had, indeed, collapsed for me. The mechanism for this discovery was an interfaith dialogue project with a Muslim and a Jew. As the unfortunate product of a Catholic upbringing in which faith consisted of going to church and a parochial education in the decade after Vatican II in which it seemed the old books had been chucked into the dumpster but nothing had replaced them, I didn’t have developed explanations of Christian symbols and theology that I could deliver readily in a 21st century dialogue of faith.
In the end, I came out of that dialogue with a message that each of the Abrahamic religions contains the love commandment, which was articulated by Rabbi Hillel, Jesus, and Muhammad. I buttressed this with examples of Jesus breaking unjust religious laws, and the aphorism, “The opposite of faith is not doubt. It’s certainty.” I embraced my doubt and began to rebuild my Christian faith.
I traveled the country presenting myself as the Christian in an interfaith road show based on our book The Faith Club, but in truth I wasn’t sure my convictions were Christian enough. And, indeed, in some audiences they weren’t. I was “liberal,” “watered-down,” and “denied the exclusivity of Christianity” according to some evangelical experts. As a female raised in the Catholic tradition of dogmatic and male clerical authority, I was quite vulnerable to these attacks. They made my palms sweat and my confidence waver. When I spoke to crowds, I searched for the faces of the white males, especially those wearing collars, anxious for their approval. (It took me a long time to realize that the enthusiasm of thousands of women outweighed the disapproval of one man in a white collar.)
Now, as I read Spong at the Sutton Place Hotel, I realized I wasn’t alone in my doubt. The trouble was, I thought I was alone with Spong. He called himself a “believer in exile.” I entered his exile, too. He led me down a corridor but neglected to turn on the lights so I could see how many others were in this new room with me. At Faith Club presentations, I met thousands of church-goers who confessed doubt at the Bible’s supernaturalism and Christianity’s superiority to other faiths. At Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com I picked up books by everyone from Bonhoeffer and Borg to Pagels and Tillich. But for every insight that upheld Christianity, there was another that knocked it down. My deepest suspicion was that in the end social Darwinism would, indeed, explain it all.
Two years later I was holed up again in The Grove Hotel in Boise, Idaho on another Faith Club trip, but this time I had Gary Dorrien’s textbook with me. I was finally being introduced to the long history of liberal and feminist theology, and I was uncertain my highlighter held enough ink to mark all the passages that resonated for me. I found many of my own reflections in those pages, though I had struggled to formulate them in isolation.
As a female in support of women’s ordination, I was thrilled to learn of Georgia Harkness, ordained a Methodist Episcopal minister in 1927. Brightman’s idea of world religions was one I had articulated in my own presentations. When I came to Tillich’s rules for interfaith dialogue I wished I had discovered them years earlier. I agreed with Niebuhr’s theory that groups were more self-serving than individuals. I believed that reason and experience are the only ways I can judge the truth, and I savored Harkness’ simple and generous definition of religion as “faith in a meaningful existence.” The theologians I’ve read about in this class have had a practical effect on my life as well. After starting Susan Johnson’s book, She Who Is, I have expunged the human and male-oriented phrase “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” from my family’s pre-dinner prayers and begun to focus my own prayers toward the idea of Sophia.
All of these discoveries, however, are accompanied by frustration that the liberal message has not been more readily delivered from pulpits. Why hasn’t it translated well from seminaries and universities into a, dare I say orthodox, way of understanding Christianity? People are still interested in reading about God; every time Newsweek puts the word God or Jesus on the cover its sales climb. But we don’t read about liberal theology in the popular press.
I agree with those who have observed that part of the problem is the complexity of the language and arguments of many of the liberal theologians. The old symbols and language are easy to deliver in comparison. I recently tried to explain to my skeptical 11-year-old son that God doesn’t have to be thought of as a separate entity living in a heaven beyond space but something that encompasses us all, his reply was, “I don’t get it.” And, though I am a newcomer to the subject, I’ve had a hard time, myself, with some of the concepts of process theology, for instance.
I think there are a lot of people in the pews like me for whom the old creeds and symbols need to be reinterpreted openly – not while hidden underneath the covers in far-away hotels. Perhaps surprisingly, interfaith dialogue is an effective way to facilitate this. In fact, I think interfaith dialogue is one way out of the “double bind” articulated by Van Harvey — the problem “that theologians who identified with modern rationality and secularity became alienated from Christian communities, but those who identified with Christianity became alienated from the academy.”
In interfaith dialogue, one is forced to articulate a view of one’s faith that is personally meaningful, relevant and doesn’t rely on an established understanding of the symbols and creeds of the faith. That is because in such a dialogue, there are no common assumptions about those meanings. There can be as many interpretations of the meaning of the cross as there are people in the room. My own opinion is that each of those meanings tells us something about God.
There is a rich history of interpretation in the Jewish tradition. In fact, years of interpretations, known as commentaries, are written into the pages of Jewish holy books. My daughter has been to a dozen bar and bat mitzvahs this year in which 13-year-olds stand in temple and interpret the scriptures in their own voices. We need more of this in our churches. We need a freedom to interpret, and we need to be offered options of new language. After all, isn’t that an example set by Jesus in the Gospels? He delivered an interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures that shook the foundations of the traditionalists of the day.