Why blog?

I’m not a natural born blogger. I also take a long time before I press the ‘publish’ button. And since I also keep my own diary of thoughts and ideas, why blog?

I’m aware that my decision to leave the ministry, and especially the reasons for doing so, have caused some consternation, sadness, and perhaps also a sense of betrayal. Even anger in a few cases. This could well be the case if you are one of my former pastoral ministry students, or if I was once your pastor in the congregation. If I taught you, prayed with you, and led you in the service of word and sacrament, how can I now seem to turn my back on that?

It’s for this reason that I’d like to keep blogging. I do care about the effects of my decision, and I don’t want you to think that all we shared was meaningless. You are important! Hopefully you’ll gain a glimpse of my reasons, and while not necessarily agreeing with them, you’ll know  they don’t come from ill feeling or lack of regard.

There’s another reason I’d like to blog. I believe there’s a need for more exposure to the ideas which have been part of academic discussion for decades and centuries, but have barely begun to trickle down to the pews. I can understand that you might be saddened by my defection, but I don’t think you should be shocked. For my journey is not at all uncommon, and the conditions and ideas that made it possible are all around us.

So here’s my plan for future blogs.

First, I’d like to share my own journey: how I got from the pastor you once knew to the person I am now. The change which you became aware of suddenly, did not for me come out of the blue. There is a story to be told, and I want to tell it as helpfully as I can. There’ll be nothing dramatic or scandalous in it, but nevertheless, in reading it you might find experiences and perspectives that you can relate to. That might take a few posts.

Second – and this will be more ongoing – I want to take up specific aspects of Christian faith and belief and examine them with the kind of openness I could not when I was under ordination vows. If I’ve received questions from you, hopefully I can also weave them in. To some this might sound like I’m ‘attacking’ the faith, and I don’t deny that there will be a critical side to what I write. But it won’t be criticism out of hostility. Rather, I will simply and honestly state how I see things – but without the need to censor my statements or make them acceptable to a confession I no longer hold.

However, this critical aspect will also serve a positive purpose. From critique, I’d like to move to restoration, that is, to recover how the beliefs of the Christian worldview might look if taken as symbols, as expressions (or constructs) of the religious imagination. In short, how might beliefs that are no longer regarded as divinely inspired still have human value? If no longer received as revelation, how might core convictions still be revealing of who we are as religiously oriented beings?

I’m not envisioning that I can actually do this for every doctrine or belief.  And so there will be a third kind of blog entry in which I mull over the value of Christianity and religion in a far more general way. Here I’m guided by a number of (post)Christian authors who, while arriving at conclusions similar to many agnostics, atheists and sceptics, choose nevertheless to spin it differently. Such authors agree that many beliefs in literal or realistic sense  are no longer sustainable, since they are products of another time and culture. But they also recognize that we in the 21^st century are not so different from the people in whom those beliefs first arose. Even if dogmatic orthodoxy is losing its grip on us, we are not less religiously susceptible.

So that’s what I think I’ll have a go at. These may not be your kind of questions or concerns, but they are mine. I don’t for a moment claim to have arrived at ‘the truth’, nor is anything I write beyond criticism. So feel free to respond as you will.

For now, here’s a signature quote by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, whose long career traversed the tensions between faith and philosophy.

Does that mean that we could go back to a primitive naïveté? Not at all. In every way, something has been lost, irremediably lost; immediacy of belief. But if we can no longer live the great symbolisms of the sacred in accordance with the original belief in them, we can…aim at a second naïveté in and through criticism. In short, it is through interpreting that we can hear again (The Symbolism of Evil, 351).