Faith journey (part 6)

OK, so it’s been over 4 months since I last entered a post. Being unemployed has actually been far busier than expected, and once you throw in the odd heart attack, time gets away on you. So let’s see if I can finish off this personal faith journey that led me out of ordained ministry to where I am now. Since I’m not going to recap, you may need to re-read the last post to pick up the thread…

Later in 2014, after I had spent time exploring some so-called ‘progressive’ approaches to faith, I shared a confidential 20-page faith statement with four ALC colleagues. It was, in effect, an effort to re-cast my departure from belief as a non-realist faith: I no longer believed, but I could still live by ‘faith’ in and through Christian symbolism, to embed my literal ‘no’ within a symbolic ‘yes’. Drinking deeply from post-critical theology and progressive Christian authors, I decided that this is how I could be honest about my unbelief while at the same time justify my continued employment within the institution.

So, for example, I didn’t hang back in stating what I no longer believed. Expressing my ‘no’ to literal belief, I wrote:

For it seems to me that the Jesus of history, who lived and died in 1^st century Palestine, was only human, like the rest of us. I do not believe in any literal sense that he was (or is) divine, born of a virgin, or physically raised from the dead. Nor do I believe that this same Jesus now reigns in glory, is interceding for us sinners, or that he will return at the end of time to judge the living and the dead. While I’m persuaded that he was a gifted and charismatic religious teacher of his time, it was within the movement that followed him that he progressively became the fully divine Son of God. In short, already for the first Christians, Jesus was the symbol of God, but a symbol that would soon become completely identified and indistinguishable from God’s own self.

But on the other hand, I also made the case for a symbolic and practical ‘yes’ to Christianity: 

Christianity is not about intellectually holding a set of beliefs or signing up to certain propositions. But it is about a particular way of being human and engaging in a particular set of practices which order one’s life: reading and interpreting Scripture, cultivating an inner life, participating in communal worship, practicing reconciliation and forgiveness, listening to and receiving others hospitably, engaging in charity, re-imagining a world, being reflective about life, truth and meaning, accepting a form of discipline, striving to cultivate certain virtues and avoid certain vices, and so on. Taken together, this is what it means to 'live by faith' — faith that this is a better way to live, that this is a way that one can live meaningfully, productively and honestly before God, in the world, and for others. And the medium for generating and sustaining this kind of faith are the Scriptural, doctrinal, and liturgical symbols of the Christian tradition.

Well, after much fear and trembling, I submitted this statement to four trusted colleagues, ranging in theology from more traditional to more liberal.  Without necessarily agreeing with me, none of them condemned me or threatened to ‘out’ me. All this was immensely gratifying, even though I felt I had just formed a kind of secret society. But furthermore, none of this could have a flow-on effect to my teaching (and life in general) unless I enjoyed the freedom to voice these opinions more widely. So the next step was to share some of these views at a regular forum where teaching faculty are given a chance to present their latest work or research. My four confidants became a little more uneasy here, and in the end counselled me to present it, not as my own personal view, but as a view ‘out there’, as something current in the world of thought and theology. So I presented my topic: What is the Second Naiveté? Engaging with Paul Ricoeur, Post-Critical Theology, and Progressive Christianity. As suggested, it was more academic, and less personally committed. I ended with the words by Lutheran theologian, Ted Peters:

A wager is a risk, a bet. In this case…we are betting that a hermeneutic of belief in the Christian gospel will be more fruitful for living in the world than the sceptical conclusions produced by a hermeneutic of suspicion. We will not forget our doubts. But we will press on, trying to understand ourselves and the world around us in light of the symbols of divine revelation. The wager is a form of hypothetical belief, a self-entrustment to the world of meaning created by Christian language (for full paper see my Academia site).

Of course, this wider audience was not fooled, and I think they got a fair idea that to some degree I identified (note the past tense) with this stuff. Most of the feedback was from retired professors, and most asked questions which betrayed the categories in which they’ve thought and taught for decades. One emeritus (probably more) in particular was definitely not happy, but interestingly, has not pursued things further with me. But in the end, I was thanked for taking people into ‘uncomfortable places’, and then life went back to normal.

Good place to stop. Next post won’t be so long in coming.