|
|
446 - Treating God as Real |
Treating God as Real
HAVE clergy of my type been neglecting to treat God as real? Do we in liberal, mainline denominations serve up a kind of worship on Sunday mornings that fails to convey God as experienceable, present, and active in our lives and world?
When I served a United Church of Christ congregation in Boston, I puzzled over the large number of Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty and students who attended another church in our neighborhood, a burgeoning, evangelically-oriented congregation. "How could scientifically-trained people be at home in a church with such an anachronistic view of the world?" It made me bristle.
Perhaps I didn't understand that the M.I.T. crowd is seeking a God as real as the phenomena they daily work with in the laboratory. Empirical reality makes their world go 'round. Why should the God they worship be any less real? In this conservative church and thousands more like it across our nation, God's reality is portrayed in terms respected by the scientist: knowable, predictably present, bringing coherence to all the world's phenomenological diversity with an all-encompassing law, one who makes things happen, is involved in the life of persons. The average American is ipso facto a scientist by virtue of our participation and tacit trust in a rational-functional worldview. Therefore, a "scientific" god-one who "behaves" like other objects we consider real-holds enormous attraction.
In those days, I was still unfamiliar with the history of evangelicalism's romance with science. For over a century, evangelicals and other conservative Christians have attempted to correlate scientificallydisclosed realities with the realities portrayed in Scripture. As George Marsden describes in Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925, the nineteenth-century Common Sense philosophy that was popularly embraced by American evangelicals "was considered to provide a sure base for the rational and scientific confirmation of the truths of the Bible and Christian faith. In an age that reverenced science, it was essential that this confidence in Scripture not be based on blind faith alone. God's
Joanne Swenson, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, is currently a doctoral student at Harvard in the field of religion and society. She writes that this article springs from eight months of "sermon grazing" as she visited a variety of congregations during her break from her typical routine as a parish pastor.
|
|
447 - Treating God as Real |
truth was unified, so it was inevitable that science would confirm Scripture."1
The hope that the best of scientific inquiry would vindicate Scripture continues to this day among conservative Christians. James Davison Hunter, in American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity, analyzed the "cognitive bargaining" of evangelicals that premits them to participate in a rational-functional world and, at the same time, hold to literal interpretation of Scripture. Hunter observed that many evangelical books and curricula have a quasiscientific style to them. While not scientific in content, these materials, ranging in topics from Bible studies to human sexuality, were peppered with references to findings and studies, cited authorities whose names were prefaced by "Doctor," and often relied on a format of setting out a "law" and then providing "proofs" for it.2 Clearly, this is an attempt to appeal to science as a legitimating authority.
However erroneously executed a correlation between biblical literalism and science might be, there is something of integrity at work. It is an integrity that has eluded me and my liberal colleagues. It is the attempt to portray God as real. Several years ago, Max Stackhouse wrote an article, entitled "Fundamentalism Around the World," in which he stressed that "every religion is based on certain fundamentals; and fundamentalism arises when these fundamentals are imperiled, obscured, or ignored."3 The fundamental that has been obscured by the liberal tradition is God's reality.
When I say "God's reality," I mean understanding God as an existent, materially-manifested being, whose life belongs to an objective and publicly accessible world. I fear that the liberal understanding so subjectivizes God that, for the contemporary churchgoer in our tradition, God is not real. God is a murky, diaphanous spirit who visits each individual in an entirely different way, so that experiences of God run the gamut from the sacrifice of Jepthah's daughter to the ministry of Mother Teresa. The preacher in the liberal congregation, mindful of the diversity of subjective experiences of God, refrains from saying anything of a confident, assertive nature about God. Sermons are perforated with the preacher's favorite escape hatch-profoundly sonorous "questions of life" that sound provocative and meaningful but require nothing by way of declarations about God.
The morning's sermon at a recent but typical U.C.C. church was on
1George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870-1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 16.
2Hunter describes this as the evangelical "couching of theology in the grammar of empiricism." See Hunter's American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), esp., pp. 72-84.
3Max Stackhouse, "Fundamentalism Around The World," The Christian Century (August 28-September 4, 198 5).
|
|
448 - Treating God as Real |
the importance of listening. The preacher drew heavily upon Taylor Caldwell's novel The Listener, in which a series of people find solutions to their problems by being in the presence of the Listener, an unspeaking but attentive character. Caldwell's Listener is, of course, to be understood as God, and her theological lesson is that we can find in God's seeming silence the power and healing we need-if we understand that silence as grace. The preacher, however, failed to draw out this theological point, or any theological point. Although he analyzed the impediments we face in being good listeners, never did God enter into the sermon: not as an element that adds insight to our dilemma of inattentiveness, and certainly not as one who might help us overcome our resistance to listening! A good talk, but where was the real God?
The current movement for theological clarity among liberal denominations such as the United Methodist, Presbyterian, and the United Church of Christ is to be welcomed. But theological clarity will not come unless a revolution in the reality status of God is allowed to foment. The revolution is needed to usher our largely subjective notion of God into the bright, public light of our contemporary rational-functional lives. For clergy and for parishioners, at least tacitly, reality is not subjective but objective. Reality is what stands over against us; it is what exists beyond the boundaries of any one person's consciousness. If our notion of God does not meet these standards of reality-standards by which we make the critical decisions of society, work, and family life-then God comes to be seen as less real and less impinging upon these very decisions.
We have every reason to sympathize with the reasons why, in the liberal tradition, God came to be construed as primarily subjectively real. We have learned too much in the twentieth century-or, rather, we have learned we know too little-to pop off easily about how God "is this way," or how God "wills you to do that." We now recognize the political agendas embedded in the very composition of parts of Scripture. We have come to see the oppressive implications of Bible passages once held dear. We realize that our "one, true faith" is a syncretistic grab bag of everything from Canaanite agrarianism to Chamber of Commerce boosterism. The Darwinian revolution forever shamed smarter Christians from going head-to-head against the findings of science for the sake of defending the facticity of the Bible's aetiological tales.
The liberal community's response to the traumas wrought by the Darwinian revolution and the growing influence of the historical-critical analysis of Scripture was to shift its focus from God to the experience of the believer. Since it was apparent that it is difficult, if not impossible, to speak of God with intellectual certainty, the liberal community has focused instead on that which it could grasp: itself. With the philosophical subjectivism of Schleiermacher and the religious individualism of Kierkegaard, the faith of the believer and not the nature of God became the focus of the church's energy. This priority continues to this day, and is exemplified in the enormous popularity of faith development studies,
|
|
449 - Treating God as Real |
the existentially-oriented writings of Tillich and his successors, the liberation theology movement, and the feminist reappraisal of the Bible as the "victor's" side of the story in an ancient series of religious struggles.4
These solutions to the shifting reality status of God, while providing a means to move forward intellectually on important fronts such as the psychology of faith and the history of religions, are in danger of unwittingly diverting the liberal congregation from its very reason for being. I fear that such intellectual endeavors will exhaust the religious vitality of our congregations if they divert us from thinking about God. How long can parishioners be satisfied with sermons and classes that skirt the issue of who God is and how God acts in our lives? People come to church searching for God-searching for the help and guidance they instinctively sense God can give them. Having faced the limitations of the power and wisdom of their own human resources, they turn toward the unlimited power and wisdom of God. While it is illuminating to learn of the diversity of others' religious experiences, ultimately one must ask: Is there any single reality toward which these experiences point? Is there a God who informs these experiences, or are they simply the unconscious repetition of patterns from our human relationships? What criteria may we use to discern how God might be real, how God might intend us to act? In short, it is time for theology.
Conservative churches have flourished, because they have never stopped speaking about God-about God's immanent reality, about God's availability to help the individual and community, about God's inexorable will for the world. These churches never stopped talking about God, because they stubbornly maintained a naive understanding of Scripture as unmediated "pictures" of God-in-action. Consequently, it was easy to talk about God. One had only to cite, again and again, the pictures of God provided by the Bible. But in the conservative's reality status of God, there is a curious epistemological glitch. God's reality status has never been doubted. God is as real as the phenomena of the laboratory. Yet, the "laboratory" that discloses to the conservative the "dimensions" of this real God is a dusty place with archaic equipment. The few scientists allowed into this sequestered space share the same agenda: to defend the Bible from the fact of its origins and its hermeneutical history. To these, the Bible contains one perfect picture of God, a picture upon which all subsequent models of divinity, morals, and destiny must be based. For a tradition so rightly concerned to keep God real, conservatives certainly push hard against the laboratory door, straining to keep out the very reality that would help them accomplish that critical aim.
4See, for instance, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her (New York: Crossroad, 1983), a feminist reconstruction of Christian origins that attends to the experience of women in the early church who initially exercised theological and ecclesiastical authority but who later lost that authority in both the church's practice and in the composition of its sacred literature.
|
|
450 - Treating God as Real |
Both conservative and liberal approaches to theology are hobbled when it comes to presenting a God that is real and comprehensible to the contemporary person. The God of liberals is never seen as independent of the apprehension of the believer. Theirs is a privatized God as varied as each believer's sensory calculus. The God of the conservatives demands that every advance in knowledge and social justice cohere with pictures gathered between the twelfth century B.C.E. and the second century C.E. (or, perhaps, congealed in the seventeenth or nineteenth), resulting in a God privatized by the parochial, special pleading for the factual accuracy of every jot and tittle of the Bible. Neither of these will do.