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 21st 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).
