Ever since I was twelve years old, I have been searching for Truth or, to put it another way, trying to get things Right.
The Beginning
It was in the spring of 1956 that my mother told me something that I claim as one source of my desire to get things Right and seek the Truth (the two are different but related) whenever I am confronted with a problem. We were riding south on Highway 61 from Dewitt to Davenport, Iowa in our old Chevy (all our cars when I was growing up were old Chevies, usually painted that dark green paint that I was told was leftover from painting tanks during World War II). My great-aunt, Rosa Nonnenmacher, who never married, was dying of cancer, and her nieces and nephews were making frequent trips to Dewitt to help her clean out her house and barn. On one trip home, I wondered or worried about something, and my mother told me that I was conscientious. I asked her what that meant and she said that it meant that I tried to do the Right Thing (or words to that effect). I was impressed, decided that was a good thing to be, and “internalized” that idea.
And that might have been powerful reinforcement of the idea (common, I am told, to oldest children) that I was expected to be good, to be a model for my two brothers and two sisters. Of course, trying to be “good” and seeking Truth are not necessarily connected, except in the mind of God (or Plato), but somehow I found myself burdened or blessed with these tendencies.
As I grew older, I became aware that yearning for Truth sometimes took the form of a desire for balance or moderation. The Latin motto, virtus stat in medio, virtue stands in the middle, became one of my favorite expressions when in high school. My search for truth was naturally intertwined with a normal adolescent rebellion—my parents were Republicans and I would become a liberal Democrat, first to be different from them and later by a more thoughtful choice. But before that happened, my teen-age desire to be different led me, as a junior in my liberal Midwestern Catholic high school in 1960, to support Nixon against Kennedy in the presidential election. I recall taping my picture of Nixon on the inside of my car window so it could not be destroyed.
An alert journalism teacher saw value in my desire to be different but challenged me to go public with it instead of just acting out my teenage rebellion. (I should add here that I was quite shy throughout my early school years, so much so that the explosion of extroversion that this teacher stimulated caught even me by surprise). He put me on the school paper where I wrote an editorial on the value of being “middle of the road.” I later became one of the editors of the paper during my senior year.
Looking for Balance
I have no idea why my search for Truth should have pulled me to the middle of the road during these early years, instead of to one side or the other. Yes, I did live on a street named Middle Road, but that connection never occurred to me until recently. Middle is not muddled, I decided, but show a willingness to take and defend positions and also alter them when required by new evidence.
Perhaps seeking the middle ground has something to do with a subliminal recognition of the world as a complex place in which the oversimplified arguments of extremists don’t make sense? The more education I received the more I noticed such oversimplifications. Of course, some things are black and white, but those of us who grow up to be “tender-minded” (a William James term defining those who want a sense of transcendence and want to believe that in the final analysis, the world does make some sense) seem more attracted to the “gray areas” in which we think truth usually resides.
Or, on another level, it may just be that I have never have had the sort of quick intelligence that excelled in oral argumentation. When I have time to write down my thoughts, I can make a decent case for my position. If you ponder and muse a bit, you naturally see more ambiguity. If you decide too quickly, you might miss some of the evidence. If you stir the soup slowly, you can see all the vegetables, but if you heat it too quickly, it will boil over and you will lose some of the contents. And in an argument, a boil-over is a defeat.
Midwest Catholic
In any case the Catholic high school I attended, Assumption High School in Davenport, Iowa, was a special place at a special time in my history and in that of my country. (Isn’t that what all nostalgic old people say?) It was there that my definition of what was Right was clarified and my search for the Right was nourished. I entered high school in 1957 and graduated in 1961, during the early years of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Loving neighbor, we were told, was the most important way to love God and imitate Jesus. One of the leading extra-curricular activities at our Catholic school was YCS, Young Christian Students. A group of 6-8 of us would meet at someone’s home in the evening for a study of social issues; we were taught to follow a three-step method: Observe, Judge, and Act. Observe a social situation (say, racial discrimination), judge what Christ would want us to do about this, and then devise some small action that we could take to improve the situation. This was an exciting way to understand religion as behavior rather than abstract belief, and we were being encouraged by energetic adult role models, newly-ordained priests in their twenties and early thirties. Society was changing, as was our Church, especially after 1959 when Pope John XXIII decided to “open a few windows and let some air in” by calling an Ecumenical Council to bring reforms to this ancient institution which had not changed significantly in its beliefs or practices since the sixteenth century.
The belief that getting things Right involved justice for other people was something that never left me, but, when combined with the “middle way” recognition of balance and ambiguity, it led to some difficult situations in college. Although I had left many of my family’s conservative views behind when I entered St. Ambrose College, I had not quite shoehorned myself into what would later be called the “politically correct” liberal mode. This became apparent during my junior year when, as editor of our college newspaper, I questioned the claim of a local black civil rights leader that a particular man should have been hired as a policeman, even though the applicant had been diagnosed with high blood pressure. The leader in question, Mr. Charles Toney, was upset enough at my piece (which indicated my support for blacks on the Davenport Police Department but questioned the wisdom of using this particular candidate as an example of discrimination) to go to the president of our small college and demand an apology (or my head). Fortunately, our newspaper advisor, an untenured English Department faculty member named John Rabby, stepped in and successfully defended my right to my opinion. I was not fired. Thank you, Mr. Rabby, wherever you are!
After college, I was attracted to further work in the discipline of History in part because historians are charged with discovering what really happened, i.e. the truth. I was especially interested in “intellectual history” or “the history of ideas.” I found myself particularly enthused when I discovered a book by William Barrett, Irrational Man, a history of “existentialism” that traced that philosophy (we create ourselves by what we do, not by who we or others think we are) back to the great Christian church father, Augustine of Hippo.
Religion and Truth
Religious thinkers have continued to attract me, perhaps because they are often blatant in their search for Truth and in their claims to have found it! My professional life has been spent studying History and Religion (as academic disciplines) since they seemed to be two of the best ways to seek and discover truth. Both of these studies also give us intelligent (the current phrase is “evidence-based”) ways of understanding ourselves, our world, and God. And this almost always involves challenging some established way of thinking, something I have enjoyed since discovering my “inner extrovert” in that high school journalism class!
So here you begin to see why I had to put Jesus in the title of this essay. Religion and Truth (or even truth) can’t be long separated; actually, they can’t be separated at all for any of us with the temperament that leads us to call ourselves “seekers,” a term rare in my youth but very common today. Some seekers like myself, however, are better at seeking than at finding. Many of us never enjoy an unambiguous sense of religious truth; we must be content to envy those who can—or say they can!
Jesus and I go back a long way, even if our connection has been a superficial one. When I was in grade school, I was told that Jesus (then a shadowy figure controlled by priests and nuns) was the Son of God and had died for MY sins. The very abstract notion that Jesus was the “Son of God,” a pre-existent-from-all-eternity divinity sent specifically by his Father to save us, was a doctrine in which I said I believed, but it was not, I have since learned, my truth, since truth is experiential, something felt, as well as something to which one gives intellectual assent.
Accepting Ambiguity
If the world is beset by many problems (and it clearly is) that we seem unable to address, much less solve, this is so in part because we are uncomfortable with change and the uncertainty it brings, especially in our vastly overcrowded planet suffering from climate change and ever greater numbers of poor, diseased, and angry people.
If we can’t find Truth, we have to make it up—or pretend that we’ve found it—in a form that allows us to remain at peace without making uncomfortable changes in our lives. Our fear of change and ambiguity makes for hatred, wars, and some very narrow ways of being religious, including various forms of idol worship in which our idol can be a book, a person, or an institutional structure, anything to which we can cling in order to avoid uncertainty. Some of us just can’t help it; it seems to be the way “we are wired,” as my wife likes to say. And even those of us who are not so wired do at times allow ourselves to be guided by the opinion of others, our ego need for acceptance or domination over others, or just our ignorance. None of us really likes living with ambiguity, even though I was told in school that “suspending judgment” can help us clarify a problem or understand an issue. We want to solve any problem as quickly as possible, even if it is a short-term solution.
However, now in my eighth decade of life and retired from a forty year teaching career, I can righteously repent of all those times in my life when I “missed the mark” by not remaining true to my earlier—and not always compatible—convictions that truth rested in the middle and in the ambiguous grey areas. Sometimes I sought answers too quickly, in order to take on an opponent or to win a debate. It takes patience as well as conscientiousness to get things Right. I should have paid more attention to James Thurber’s comment that “it is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”
Beyond but related to that, I also regret my own lack of interiority in my earlier years, my willingness to do what others wanted me to do or be or feed my ego instead of following deeper instincts and that “still, small voice” of God within. This sort of regret may be common among people my age, but the pharmacological wizards have not created either a precise name for this ailment nor a specific pill to cure it. I must, therefore, think and feel my way through such questions and regrets as arise during these, my Medicare years. And that is what I propose to do in this blog as I try to reflect upon what I have found to be some of the difficult but interesting questions in my life and in the history and practice of Christianity.
While my ability to tolerate ambiguity may be only marginally better than that of some of the more traditional thinkers I question (I hope with understanding and compassion), I am determined to use both my reason and my own experience to sort out the spiritual and religious issues I confront. I am convinced that, while this practice may not always lead me down the middle of the road, or help me get everything Right, it will bring me closer to the truth.
However, lest I be perceived as too cerebral, I also acknowledge a certain passion that must accompany my conscientiousness. Getting things Right can be energy-draining hard work, requiring study of the wisdom of others who have paved the road I wish to travel.. It is also something that I cannot do by myself. I must rely to some extent on an inner power that many call God or Spirit.
Being Liberal
My progressive approach to the study of history and religion is “liberal” as that term has been used in education rather than economics or politics, where its meaning has changed over the past 150 years. The liberal arts disciplines, each reflecting different ways of pursuing truth, include mathematics, the sciences, philosophy, history and literature. These studies help free us from prejudice by giving us useful information and insights that help us become more fully human, something that includes spirituality, while improving our problem-solving skills and, of course, our awareness of complexity and thus the ability to tolerate ambiguity. Study in the liberal arts can lead a person to a job or vocation, but they are fundamentally paths to self-understanding rather than vocational training.
This working definition of “liberal” as that which frees us from preconceived notions and allows us to think more clearly (using our God-given reason), helps us avoid the current clichés associated with the political term Liberal, that it means, for example, “throwing money at problems,” “encouraging the poor to become dependent on government,” and the like.
So how does this relate to questions about Jesus and Truth?
Looking to American History
After my retirement allowed me time to study the history of religion in the United States
I discovered that many before me have also been afflicted with the same tension that I experienced. I wasn’t the only person with a desire to question just who God was, who Jesus was, and who hoped to find the truth resting somewhere between the extreme positions they encountered. The history of religion in the United States is full of men and women who were passionate about getting it Right, hoping to finding truth in the middle, but willing to go wherever the search led them, using both their faith and their reason. I became fascinated by that story.
What historian and Union Theological Seminary professor Gary Dorrien, author of a three
volume Making of American Liberal Theology (covering the years from 1805-2005) calls liberal theology is an attempt to find a place for Christian belief and practice between the growing skepticism of thinkers in the scientific-industrial age and the reactive stance of those who responded to all reasoned, scientific criticisms of Christianity by turning the Christian Bible into a science textbook and a history of “what really happened” (Biblical literalism or inerrancy). Dorrien’s massive work begins with the Unitarians and Transcendentalists of the early to mid-1800s and traces the intellectual attempts made since that time to sail American Christianity safely between the twin rocks of a scientific, rationalist, and later atheistic disbelief on the one side, and a reactionary conservatism which refused to use any of the tools offered by “higher criticism” of scripture or by the humanities or the physical and social sciences on the other.
Liberal theology or liberal religion did occasionally bruise or embarrass itself by brushing against one or the other of these rocks (and becoming temporarily too emotional, too rational, or too “secular”), but by the early 21st century, liberal, progressive or “emergent” (a recent term) Christianity was giving respectability and energy to a new and more thoughtful search for Jesus and Truth. Such progressives also posed a healthy challenge to older religious institutions, practices, and creeds during a time—continuing to the present—that is being called by some a transforming moment in Christianity’s two-thousand year history, akin to periods of change in the history of the Jesus movement focused around the years 500, 1000, and 1500 CE.
Looking to Theology
Some of today’s progressive Christians speak of our time as one marked by a “Great Emergence” or a time when our species will reach a new stage in our spiritual evolution (see books by twentieth-century priest-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and others). In my own search, I have adopted the often-quoted definition of religion by pioneering American psychologist / philosopher William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902): ‘the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” To further set the stage for some tough questions, I add to James’ definition the understanding that all religion begins with a feeling of “absolute dependence,” a notion made famous by theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher in 1799, over a century before James wrote. For Schleiermacher, as for James, religious truth began with the individual person, and with what he or she could understand of God or divinity through intuition or personal encounter. For Schleiermacher, religion begins for each of us with the feeling or sense that we are creatures beholden to something much greater than ourselves, which we generally call God.
During my final years in the classroom, when teaching an introductory “special topics” religious studies class on the development of Christian Orthodoxy, I introduced the word “panentheism” in class one day, and was a bit surprised when even an Episcopal priest in the class confused this with the term pantheism, a way of seeing Nature as God or God as Nature. Panentheism, however, sees God as both outside of and independent of Nature or Creation as well as the “driver” (to borrow a word from the digital universe) within all of Creation. One early 20th century religious thinker described the God of Panentheism in the following creedal statement: “We believe in God, the Living, Spirit, Almighty; one, indestructible, absolute, and self-existent Cause. This One manifests Itself in and through all creation, but is not absorbed by Its creation. The manifest universe is the body of God; it is the logical and necessary outcome of the infinite self-knowingness of God.”
I introduce the concept of panentheism here because it seems to me to be a wonderful way in which progressive theologians have tried to steer between the “God out There” of traditional Theism, the Omniscient, All-Powerful, External and almost too Impersonal Being who governs the universe and the “God within” notion of traditional mystics, which somehow seems almost too Subjective. Of course, if progressive Christians have to lean one way or the other in their understanding of God, they will lean toward the God within, the God of whom the second century Christian leader Irenaeus wrote: “God became man, so man could become like God.” Schleiermacher (along with Immanuel Kant, Gary Dorrien argues) is the founder of “liberal theology.” And William James reinforced for English speakers the idea that the search for Jesus and Truth must start with us, within us perhaps, and not with an a priori acceptance of some person or group’s creedal statement that begins with defining the Nature of God, and then working “down” to what that belief requires of us humans in terms of behavior.
This inductive approach underpins the emerging questions that I tackle in these essays, created to share my understanding of Christianity in this age of re-formation. Just what is Truth, who is Jesus, and how should I understand what he did to have a major world religion after him? Is Jesus really important to people in the twenty-first century in the United States? To what extent do Christian churches reflect or distort the message of their “founder?”
These are not new or easy questions. Just to ask them again seems trite, since so many others have proposed answers—and that includes many with advanced degrees in Divinity or Theology. I have neither, but I offer myself as a curious (take that as you will) layman who wishes to engage in dialogue with others of a religious or spiritual bent—especially people who are no longer persuaded by the belief systems and frequent hypocrisy of the American version of “evangelical” Christianity and have left the ranks of religion to join the “spiritual but not religious.”
My reading over the past decade has focused on those who share my concern about why Christian churches of all varieties, from traditional “tall steeple” establishments to smaller groups of believers seeking community, are shrinking in numbers. There are many reasons for this, ranging from our too-busy lives to feeling that churches are irrelevant in our divisive plutocratic society to the ease with which we can now find a community (however impersonal) through internet relationships. I leave analysis of church decline to the sociologists, psychologists, and anxious church leader.
My conviction is that what some of us call progressive Christianity may help us return to the message of Jesus which has been too often fouled by conflicts over creeds, accusations of heresy, and intolerance of differences in beliefs and practice over the centuries.
Some initial Propositions
I formulate these convictions in the form of the following propositions, which embody for me the central tenets of a new understanding of Christianity:
- Christianity is about how we live, not what we believe; God is made manifest by what we do, not by what we say; it is particularly important to love, not just ourselves and our enemies, but even friends and members of our faith community with whom we might disagree—and not try to change them to be more like us;
- Christianity is about creating “the Kingdom of God,” and this kingdom is about love and acceptance, here and now not rules and practices, dos and don’ts; we access and share the divine love found in Jesus by being open to it, and though spiritual practices; followers of Jesus create this community in increments by rejecting all forms of hatred, domination, and dismissal of others, especially of those who are “not like us,” culturally, economically, socially;
- Christianity is about changing the world through nonviolent resistance to the “Principalites and Powers,” the “Dominion System” of human institutions that “are good, are fallen, and must be redeemed;”
- Christianity is about Jesus, more about his teachings than about his death and resurrection, though both of these are still important; death was not part of a pre-existing Divine Plan but was due to his love to solidify his message at the end of his life. His death and resurrection constitute a refusal to let the Domination System have the last word; resurrection (however understood) was also a sign of continuing incarnation of divinity in our world;
- Christianity is about individual transformation through community. Sin is a pattern of behavior rather than an act. Salvation is a process of spiritual growth through time. Salvation is individual and social and includes all creation;
- Christianity, like all religions, is embedded in culture, but also (like other world religions) transcends culture. The divine can be found everywhere, in all cultures and even among sinners; no one is outside the love of God!
These propositions, I should stress, are not intended to be a new creed. They are certainly not a comprehensive look at Christianity, but a way to reconsider some of the theological and psychological messages that many of us received as children growing up in the traditional denominations found in American Christianity. They are also not a covert way to ignore the many different understanding of God and religious practice found in the major world religions. One of the courses I taught over a thirty year career was a Survey of World Religions as part of our Religious Studies minor.
It is my hope that we might find in this discussion about religion and spiritual reality a way of reenergizing our conversations about and our understanding of that force we call the Divine, and the person we call Jesus. By doing so, we might together help create a community of believers who can sustain and grow what is best in that thing we call Christianity.
So here I am, many years after first hearing the word “conscientious”, still trying to live up to what I was told it meant—and maybe even to my mother’s hope for me. I welcome you, proverbial “dear reader,” and hope you will find enjoyment as you join me in my searching.