Faith Journey (part 4)

As I wrote in my last post, it was perhaps in 2006 that I first became open to critiquing my beliefs, and at that time only in limited areas. But it was when I began teaching at Australian Lutheran College that these initial cracks began to form into chasms. 

As far as my first year was concerned (2010), most of my energy was consumed learning the ropes and getting used to my new calling. As is often the case with beginning lecturers teaching courses for the first time, I was often only a couple of lectures ahead of schedule. It was also a rapidly changing work environment, and before too long I was no longer the new kid on the block. Professionally and socially, however, it was a great place to be, despite the various stresses and pressures. But even though I can’t remember in too much detail what I was thinking that year, I must have begun reading in a number of areas that would prove to have life changing consequences.

First and foremost was contemporary historical Jesus scholarship (something I only did to a limited extent at Notre Dame). This reading had no immediate connection with my current teaching areas (liturgy, spirituality), nor would it become a focus on my doctoral studies. But it was something I did to find answers for a number of questions which had been bothering me for some time now.

A key issue related to the doctrine of Christ’s ‘second coming’ (something I discuss at much greater length in my post “An Advent Analysis: refiguring the return of Christ”). I became aware that many biblical scholars now recognize that (a) Jesus believed the ‘end’ would come within his or his disciples’ generation, (b) much – but not all – of the New Testament operates with this presupposition, and (c) since this obviously didn’t eventuate, the church has had to reinterpret these early expectations in a way that protected Jesus from error. Obviously, this observation strikes directly at orthodox belief, but despite that fact, I became increasingly convinced that critical, and not orthodox, scholarship was more direct in dealing with these matters. And because this critique called into question both the reliability of the New Testament and its central figure, these were not views I could voice with approval in front of students or even staff. As a teacher of theology in the LCA I was now in dangerous waters.

I remember the disquiet caused by these new avenues of thought. In the early months of 2011, as we spent many hours working in the back yard of our seminary owned residence, I began to wonder how long we would remain to enjoy it. Four years before my resignation I already had a sense of where things might be heading.

Later in the year a further step was taken. I took my part in teaching a series of evening classes for members of the church, a regular fixture of ALC’s program, and was asked to propose a topic. I chose several that fell within the orbit of my competency, but also added a third option – the ‘New Atheists’. I was urged to go with this choice as it was considered to have more interest value. This proved to be a bit of a tightrope experience, as it was assumed my task would be to defend the faith and offer a robust response to the criticisms levelled at religion by Dawkins, Hitchens and company. But in quite a few instances, I was in agreement with their basic critique, directed as it was against realist conceptions of the bible and Christianity, even if I was put off by their frequent misrepresentations of ‘ordinary’ Christianity, or the belligerent tone of their assault. So the approach I took for the evening classes was first and foremost to understand the phenomenon of the New Atheism. As I wrote in a series of articles published in The Lutheran the following year:

We did not undertake to present a sure-fire way to refute and demolish the atheist platform. Our task was more difficult: to listen carefully and understand their arguments and reasoning as best we could. We didn't simply want to strike at their Achilles heel; rather, we wanted to face up to the very best the new atheism has to offer. http://www.lca.org.au/an-unholy-trinity.html

As it turned out, most of the participants appreciated this modus operandi, and since the others already knew in their own minds why the New Atheists were wrong, my job was made that little bit easier.

Another issue occupying my thoughts at this time concerned the biblical accounts of the birth of Jesus, and the doctrine of the incarnation which has traditionally been dependent on it. The view held by many scholars that Matthew and Luke’s infancy narratives (Mt 1:18-2:23 and Lk 2:1-52) were at the least heavily embellished, and at the most pious fiction, persuaded me more than the orthodox attempts to defend them. A host of reasons mounted concerning the fictive flavour of these two passages (which popular piety usually rolls together as one): the infancy narratives contradict each other on too many basic facts; they are historically implausible and historically unsupported; they lack attestation by the rest of the New Testament; they invoke naïve cosmology; they turn Old Testament passages into prophecies in order to ‘fulfil’ them; they are deliberately modelled on Old Testament narratives; they give Jesus divine ‘cred’ for a Greco-Roman audience; and finally, you can find out all of this by reading reputable biblical scholarship, and not only ‘radical’ theologians or unbelieving critics (who themselves often draw on standard works of biblical scholarship!).

The claims just noted here one after the other are something I’ll flesh out more in later posts. In terms of my faith journey, however, I now had serious doubts about two key aspects of traditional belief about Christ: his earthly beginnings and his final coming.

Then in October of 2011 I attended a ‘Hermeneutics Symposium’ (a conference on biblical interpretation) which gathered many Lutheran pastors and a number of overseas guest speakers. This was of deep interest to me, as I was well aware that the conclusions one arrives at about this or that biblical text or theological position is often determined by one’s methodological approach. How you read the bible will influence what you think it is saying. What you bring to a text has a lot to do with what you take out of it. The conference was also stimulating because by this time I knew I’d be taking a year off for study in 2012, with some kind of focus on hermeneutical issues. However, it was also apparent that even though the speakers were personally well versed in 20^th century interpretation theory, the range of ‘permissible’ views remained very narrow. It’s as if the LCA wanted to show that it was abreast of hermeneutical developments while at the same time hanging on to the safety of biblical inerrancy.  One small incident sticks with me. During a question time, I raised the matter of the contradiction between the two infancy narratives, just to gauge if there was a willingness to take such questions on board. I can’t remember what answer I received on the floor, but later on a fellow LCA pastor/theologian in effect told me that such questions were basically out of order. That’s right – in the LCA there are questions that you simply should not raise in public.

Anyway, it seems that from 2011 onward, issue followed issue, like an avalanche. It was a big step when I started to read and reflect on the very human dynamics of belief itself (something to explore more fully down the track). I came to realize that both the intense need as well as the amazing capacity for human beings to believe is a plausible explanation of how faith in any doctrine came about - the resurrection included. Once that happened I started seeing far more clearly how ‘faith’ of any kind helps us connect the dots of experience meaningfully and conquer chance and contingency with causes and reasons. Faith simplifies the bewildering complexity of earthly existence, maintains a ‘meaning framework’ for interpreting the joys and vicissitudes of life, and sets our lives within a much grander narrative. And this is no bad thing at all – it’s just very human. And once we believe, our perception and experience of the world is then tailored to fit our belief system, and in turn becomes increasingly immune and resistant to contrary information. Like a spiritual immune system beliefs are remarkable resilient and can normally maintain themselves in the face of any challenge or contrary viewpoint. But as I said, I want to unpack this in a future post.

Next time I want to recount how I began taking refuge in the works of liberal and progressive theologians, to see if there was a way, as they appeared to do, of maintaining a life of commitment to the church in the face of serious doubt. In a similar vein, I’ll briefly touch on my year of doctoral studies (without boring anyone’s pants). But I’ll also share how I became aware of a growing collection of books written by ex-pastors, and my discovery that I was not alone in this journey. 

Faith Journey (part 3)

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...

An Advent Analysis

I have a new (unpublished) paper on Academia (see link at top right of this blog). It's called "An Advent Analysis: refiguring the return of Christ". The little introduction to it reads as follows:

Those familiar with the Christian liturgical calendar will recall that the first Sunday of Advent continues the theme from the previous week, the end of the age and the coming of Christ. Since we’re at that time of year again, I thought it worth sharing some extended reflections on this theme, provoked by an Advent sermon I listened to almost exactly two years ago. It draws together a line of thought that biblical academics are quite familiar with, even if this line rarely makes it into the pulpit. It follows three sections: Recasting disappointment, Redeeming the text, and Refiguring the return.