It’s hard to be precise when and why my beliefs started to
change. There were no sudden revelations, no blinding lights on the road. At
the time I wasn’t even aware that it had
begun to change. I do vaguely remember that one day, in my late 30’s, I woke up
with the feeling that my Christian faith and preaching needed to integrate the
‘real world’ a little bit more. For example, at this time (serving in Pasadena,
Adelaide) I had become interested in the basics of evolutionary theory, and was
encouraged in this direction by one of my vicars (in the LCA vicarage = an extended
practicum for seminary students) who had a previous career as a scientist. I decided
to read some books written by credible practitioners, rather than apologists
for creationism. Some of these were by secular scientists, others were by theologians
well qualified in the sciences, such as Alister McGrath who, while opposing
Richard Dawkins on the religion front, nevertheless accepted the basics of the
evolutionary model.
Looking back at a notebook I recently dug up I can see that
I engaged with Alister McGrath, Dawkins’
God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life and also Ted Peters and Martinez
Hewlett, Evolution from Creation to New
Creation: Conflict, Conversation & Convergence. Also at that time I was
perusing two volumes on evolutionary science and a lovely read on Gregor
Mendel, the unwitting father of modern genetics: Eugenie C. Scott, Evolution vs Creationism; Jonathon
Miller & Berin Van Loon, Introducing
Darwin and Evolution; Robin Marantz Henig, A Monk and Two Peas. Interestingly enough, this notebook also reminds
me of the Catholic philosophy I was reading and trying to understand in my
spare time: Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas:
version of Thomism and Ralph McInerny, Aquinas.
(Sorry, no bibliographic details for you librarians.)
I particularly remember leafing through the book by Eugenie
Scott one evening, and being struck with a sense of awe at the relatedness we
share with our fellow creatures. Of course, such an epiphany at our common
ancestry is quite congruent with Christian teaching on creation. As some of the
above volumes make quite clear, Christian thought has by and large integrated
this frontier of science into its theistic worldview, as I hope most students
in Lutheran colleges will have discovered. Anyway, all this enabled me to start dropping some of the lingering
creationist ideas I still held to, even though I never subscribed to
‘scientific creationism’ as a whole – due mainly to my theological education
which had taught me to appreciate biblical genres (like we find in Genesis) on
their own terms, rather than importing later questions into them.
But apart from this, there was no effect on the rest of my
thinking, which would remain solidly ‘orthodox’ for some years yet. Two
incidents which come to mind confirm this. In mid-2005, while taking an extended holiday with my
family around the east coast, I dropped in on a public lecture being given by
some local Catholic theologian. I can’t remember exactly what the topic was,
but in broad terms it was about whether the traditional idea of the atonement
was a satisfactory explanation of the death of Christ. He presented a view that
explained the cause of Jesus’ death in political terms, but I can’t remember
much else, except that I was quite horrified that he seemed to deny that it was
for the sake of forgiveness and justification, which of course is a big thing
in traditional Christian teaching. I even remember correcting his views to the
lady sitting next to me! Apart from the fact that these are not things you
should be doing on your long service leave, I was obviously quite green about
what I have since taken more notice of – that all dogmas and doctrines are
human constructions, after the fact, for historical events which call out for
some kind of satisfactory resolution.
The other incident took place later that year at a Christmas
family gathering. I was given a book written by Bishop John Shelby Spong (Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism).
Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and had to state my views that
even though I looked forward to reading it, he was a heretic all the same. That
didn’t go down so well. But at the same time, I wonder if there wasn’t a small
part of me that feared some of his conclusions more than I disagreed with them.
So, to the best of my memory, at the end of 2005 I was still firmly entrenched
in orthodox belief.
However, over the next year I think there might have been more
mental processing going on than I realized. Because in 2006, when I was
scouting around for a university to pursue further study, I was becoming less
and less keen to attend any of the conservative US Lutheran seminaries that
many of our pastors have traditionally attended. There had also been for some
time a deep interest and attraction to the Roman Catholic tradition (made more
attractive by the steady stream of high profile Lutherans and Protestants swimming
the Tiber). As it turned out, because my interest at that time was in
liturgical studies, I applied for and was accepted into the Masters programme at
the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA.
This experience (mid 2007 – mid 2009) proved to be very
significant. I’ll just mention two factors. The first was that I really appreciated
the opportunity to get up to speed with recent biblical, philosophical, and theological
scholarship. Very soon it dawned on me that I had an awful lot of catching up
to do, but that Notre Dame was a very good place to do it, with the theology
and philosophy departments situated cheek by jowl in the same building. Now it
would be way too simplistic to think that university level theology caused my faith stance to change, or
corrupted it somehow. After all, most if not all of my professors there (some
Lutheran) were faithful and committed to their church traditions. Even more
telling, ND over the years has graduated many a conservative Lutheran graduate
student – after all, Fort Wayne is only a couple of hours down the highway. The
reality is that by this stage I had begun to think far more critically and
relished the opportunity to think outside of the boundaries set by our church
and tradition. And the more I did so, the more the huge disconnect between the
academy and the congregation began to dawn on me, and that (in my experience)
those in the pulpit were doing little to bridge that gap.
The other factor was being suddenly thrown into a different
culture, and a different church culture. At first we worshipped at one of the
local LC-MS (Missouri synod) congregations, where the people and especially the
pastor were quite hospitable and happy to have us there. We discovered first-hand
the well-established tradition of adult Sunday School, but above all, were
struck by the conservative (by our standards) view of the world which was of a
piece with the faith being taught. The simple, experiential insight this gave
me was how closely religion is tied up with culture, and how our view of
reality and even God is biased by the traditions we inherit. Hardly theological
rocket science, of course, but this was something that living there drove home
at an experiential level. In the end we settled for a more moderate LC-MS congregation.
But by this stage, probably compounded by study pressures, I started to
experience difficulties with prayer and worship more generally. I think this
was largely because for me these practices were too deeply linked to a
pre-critical faith stance, which was now making less and less sense to me.
Towards the end of our time at Notre Dame I applied for a
position that had come up at Australian Lutheran College. One American Friday in
March 2009, I flew out from South Bend, attended several interviews in Adelaide
on an Australian Saturday, and was back in time for my Monday lectures in the
USA. A month or two later I received news that beginning in 2010 I would start
work at ALC as lecturer in pastoral theology, specializing in the teaching of
worship and spirituality.
Obviously, with such good news, it was in everyone’s best interest
that whatever intellectual or spiritual journey I had begun, that it did not
venture too far from the straight and narrow. And when we returned to Australia
for a short 6 month interim placement for the second half of 2009, I was genuinely
committed to the calling I had received.
But as I was soon to discover, this was not to last...
