Faith Journey (part 5)

As I said in my last post (quite a while ago now) from 2011 onward I became aware of a growing body of literature recounting the stories and struggles of theologians and ordinary pastors who had left the faith and church altogether, or felt increasingly torn between their own intellectual integrity and the doctrinal position of their church (often their employer). A few examples are Richard Holloway’s Doubts and Loves, John Loftus’s Why I Became an Atheist,  Kenneth Daniel W. Daniels’ Why I Believed: reflections of a former missionary , and the fascinating Caught in the Pulpit: leaving belief behind, edited by Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola (Lutheran pastors might be interested in this one). Reading these I immediately felt that there was a community of people around the world whose experiences were often similar to mine.

But despite resonating with the accounts of clergy who had abandoned their Christian beliefs, I was hardly ready to envisage myself as a non-Christian. Obviously there was the small matter of being a seminary lecturer, but besides this, I also wanted to learn from those Christian thinkers who fully recognized the challenges to orthodox belief, but chose to wrestle with them inside the believing community. And so I immersed myself in the works of ‘progressive’ and post-critical Christian theology, as well as the works of pluralist theologians. The idea that one could still have faith without subscribing to specific dogmatic beliefs was one that I found quite appealing, as was the notion that Christianity could have some unique practical and human value. In my next post I’ll share a list of some of the books I was or am continuing to read. 

Another stream feeding into my thinking at this time was provided by my doctoral studies. For a start, my choice of PhD topic was a kind of compromise between a traditional focus of our church (Luther’s commentary on Genesis 3) and a field of contemporary thought (Paul Ricoeur’s theory of symbol and narrative) which I felt would give me room to further explore some of these issues both within and beyond our ecclesial boundaries. For a nice video introduction to Paul Ricoeur see here. Indeed, it was very heartening to discover a whole field of literature and thought that I found intellectually critical on the one hand, but open to faith and the transcendent on the other. It was through Ricoeur and others that a ‘post-critical’ faith, often termed a ‘second naiveté,’ began to present itself as a real option.

2012 was entirely given over to advancing my PhD, and since I would be returning to full time work the following year, I worked as I hard as possible to make good progress. My proposal was accepted, and I began to develop the shape and content of my thesis. The weeks and months oscillated between Ricoeur’s world of contemporary hermeneutics and Luther’s 16^th century Reformation world, the common element being the human experience and understanding of evil. But I also worked hard for another reason. During this time I continued to draw a full salary, and so benefited from the church’s belief that I was a long-term investment. With all honesty, I wanted to honour that trust placed in me. So as well as straddling the worlds of Luther and Ricoeur, I also resolved to find a way of negotiating my own two parallel universes of confessional subscription and personal integrity. At the very least, I had to find a way of bracketing or managing my personal convictions so they would not fundamentally interfere with my calling and profession.

In 2013 I returned to full time ALC service (and part time study) reinvigorated and ready to go. But it was not long before I realized how hard it was to live in two worlds. While personally I found it liberating to think and believe authentically, what daunted me was the inability to share these views with anyone in the church – and that included a lot of people: colleagues, students, friends and family. Of course, I could share my PhD journey with anyone who cared to listen, or allude more indirectly to the issues this raised for theology. But as a lecturer in pastoral theology entrusted with the task of forming and educating candidates for the ministry, I could hardly say to my students, “Well this is what the church teaches, but as for myself, I find it completely untenable”. Even sharing too much with my colleagues was risky, not due to any intolerance on their part, but because everyone knew that in this particular vocation, personal faith is one of the first job requirements!

To give a sense of how I felt, here is how I described my feelings of the time on a private forum I would join some time later (I’ll get to that):

The question is, should I just try and focus on my list of responsibilities, and refuse to look the bigger picture, year after year after year? I would, except there is a sense in which this is almost impossible. For, by definition, the work of theology (like philosophy) centres on those bigger picture issues: the meaning of life, our origins and ends, the nature of humans, right and wrong, truth and falsehood. It’s not at all that ‘I hate my job’ in the way most people understand it – far from it. While a common complaint is ‘my work is meaningless’, in my case, it’s the actual reverse: my work is saturated with meaning, but a meaning I no longer own. This congestion of meaning is particularly intense in my position of training pastors. It’s not good enough simply to ‘respect the ethos’ of the Lutheran tradition in this place, as is the case for administrative staff, for example. Nor is it good enough to know, understand, and teach the faith, as might be the case with a religious studies lecturer. No, I have to show, before others, that I personally own and live this faith, when I don’t. I have to pray, lead liturgy, and say ‘This is the word of the Lord’, not just competently or even proficiently, but genuinely and authentically. The best I can do at times is to conceal my reticence.

On the family front this lack of authenticity was also taking its toll on me personally. I’m not going to share much about this, except to say that my predicament led me to become increasingly withdrawn and non-communicative about my work and faith (even though by this stage I had begun to admit to Jeanette where I was at). But as my children grew into inquiring teenagers, I felt it was pretty poor going to either avoid discussions about faith and life, or tow a line I myself didn’t hold. It was especially difficult when asked questions like “Why did you become a pastor, Dad?” or “Do you like being a pastor?”! 

So while 2013 had started out positively, by the end of the year I felt more constrained by these pressures than ever before. And being the kind of introvert that I am, the more burdened I felt, the less willing and able I was to talk about it. Depression and anxiety were setting in. I knew, however, that I could not continue like this indefinitely. At the beginning of 2014, therefore, I resolved to do several things: first, to start writing down what had, up to now, simply been swirling around in my mind; second, to find a support network; and third, to start exploring other career options. As it turned out, I did all of these things, and even more, which would be a first (and probably the last) as far as New Year’s resolutions go!

• In a private and confidential way, I began to open up to two of my ALC colleagues, both of whom listened without judgment and offered their support.
• I began sharing more of my internal changes with my wife, Jeanette, something she was well aware of by this stage. But now she would begin to realize that my ministry probably had a use-by date on it.
• I developed friendships with two non-Lutheran clergy, one who was very progressive, the other more rationalist. These guys were a great help, and we stay in regular contact.
• Probably the most radical move took place in January 2014, when I applied to and joined The Clergy Project, an anonymous online forum for clergy who no longer hold to supernatural beliefs, and are trying to move out of ministry. This meant I was now in contact with hundreds of clergy (or ex-clergy) in a similar situation to me.

In mid-2014 I had several appointments with a career counselor, as by now I felt I had no options but to leave my current calling. My meeting with her confirmed that I enjoyed the kind of work I do – it’s just that my beliefs were completely out of sync with the church! 

So in the end, I once again decided I wasn’t ready or able to seek other employment, but would somehow try to ameliorate and manage the cognitive dissonance I had now lived with for several years. My main strategy here was to share my journey with a few trusted colleagues, and hope that this would make things more tolerable. More on that soon! 

I'm still here

For those rare creatures who look at this blog or even read my posts, just letting you know that I haven't given up on recounting my spiritual/intellectual/whatever journey. We moved house a month ago, so together with the start of the school year (3 kids in high school now!) and keeping up with work and life in general, my blog cabin has been a bit neglected. But I hope to fix that soon...

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.

Faith Journey (part 2)

In my last post I briefly sketched out my years of uncritical faith, up to about 2006, after which I think I can detect the first glimmer of change. But before I turn to that, I want to reflect briefly on what prevented those changes taking place much earlier. What kept me in a state of uncritical, realist faith for so many years?

After all, it’s not as if I lived a theological bubble, completely sealed off from the world. Of course I was aware that  alternative ways of understanding life, the universe and everything existed. And not just in the world outside the church, but also held by many members of the church itself. And so naturally, my faith also was populated with lots of little question marks. But here’s the thing to understand: any doubts I did have were kept safely on the margins of thought, on the back benches of my mind, where they could have no real say.

This state of mental quarantine was reinforced by a number of factors.

The most important of these, as obvious as it sounds, was simply the influence of other Christians and the believing community as a whole. Most of my family and friends, mentors and teachers were Christian, and so it’s no surprise that my own beliefs were shaped by the common faith. This was all the more with those whose approval I sought or friendship I valued. I don’t think this is terribly unusual: we are social creatures, after all, and it’s commonly recognized that long before we assent to our beliefs or opinions consciously, the tradition we belong to has already determined our basic outlook. The effect of this was that even when alternatives or objections to Christian belief possessed real merit, they could easily be kept at a safe difference. There was simply no need, or desire, to engage with opinions that others were not bothering with. In short, our need to belong more often than not shapes the way we will believe. 

And this leads to a second factor. If you had invested a good part of your life in a religious vocation, as I had done, it didn’t make practical sense to think too seriously about intellectual challenges to the faith. Why challenge the very way of life that gives your life meaning, purpose and a salary? Not that I thought of it in those terms. But if you have a sermon to prepare, a bible study to lead, a confirmation class to teach, a pastoral visit to conduct, and a persona to maintain, it makes no sense to be thinking against the grain. Nothing would ever get done that way. In fact, it would paralyze you. Even when my views did begin to change, I just had to shut the door on such thoughts in the acts of leading worship or teaching or pastoral care. For much of the time, the state of my soul was determined by the demands of my role.

The third factor was the regular – almost daily – practice of bible reading and prayer. For many years the habit of scripture meditation achieved precisely what such spiritual exercises are designed to achieve – to keep you believing, reading and praying, and generally enmeshing you more deeply in the Christian thought world. For we know that without language, (human) thought is not possible. From our earliest years onward, language heard and spoken shapes both our conscious and unconscious mental world. The biblical passages I read and meditated on likewise shaped the pattern of my thinking. By praying my beliefs I confirmed them and incrementally sharpened my take on reality. At the time, of course, I understood this as the work of the Holy Spirit, who works through the word of God to create and sustain faith, and who reveals truths that reason could never arrive at. Formed in Lutheran piety, I  prayed that the Holy Spirit would always guide me into the truth and keep me from error, shape my emotions, heal my desires, direct my will, and generally bring about in my life whatever the text was on about.

What’s more, the worldview gained from such spiritual reinforcement served to frame and interpret any doubts, struggles, or temptations I did experience.  Any number of biblical passages (and centuries of Christian reflection) interpret doubt in such a way to reinforce faith. The human person is dead in sin (Ephesians 2:1-5), hard of heart (Psalm 95:8), spiritually blind and deaf (Mark 8:17-18), and naturally incapable of grasping the things of God (1 Corinthians 2:12-14). We naturally prefer the darkness of sin to the light of truth (John 3:19-20). And that’s not even mentioning the presence of the evil one who works day and night to undermine our faith (Matthew 13:19; 1 Peter 5:8). The net result of this is that any objection to Christian belief is framed within the very categories provided by the belief system itself. The believer then comes to believe that this is precisely what they can expect. Place your trust in the word, and without a doubt (!) the evil one will sow his thorns and weeds.

As a theological student this inoculation against heresy was carried even further. For one of the curious facts is that practically every argument against the factual and historical truth claims of Christian dogma has been raised by biblical scholarship. (If you want to seriously question the virgin birth, the resurrection, biblical miracles, or the last times, get into some contemporary biblical scholarship, much of which has kept apace, and even broken new ground, in the field of hermeneutics). However, I remember being urged by mentors and teachers not to take this stuff on board! For these so-called biblical scholars were infected by liberalism, they had ‘axes to grind’, they were captive to the spirit of the age, they were products of outdated ‘Enlightenment thinking’, they were casualties of twentieth century apostasy. Once again, I was being taught to negatively interpret anything that challenged the faith - even it came from reputable biblical scholarship.

All three factors – the believing community, the demands of vocation, the practice of prayer and meditation – served to marginalize (but not eradicate) any alternative to Christian belief.

All the same, I think it’s worth pointing out that my portrayal makes it seem more clear cut than it probably was. (That’s the nature of narrative, it tends to tidy up the irregularities and inconsistencies of lived experience.) So I’ll conclude this longer than anticipated post with several small spanners that always seemed to obstruct the effective working of my faith.

First, there was no time that I ever felt comfortable with witnessing or sharing my faith with non-believers, unless I knew them really well. Public manifestations of thankfulness ‘to my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’ made me cringe.  Obviously this was a liability as a pastor, and made me feel somewhat guilty and cowardly. Once again, I could interpret this ‘weakness’ in categories provided by the faith itself (e.g., Matthew 10:32-33). Even so, I put a lot of this down to personality. I was comfortable enough defending, explaining and promoting the faith to those who wanted to listen – but figured that evangelism just wasn’t my gift. But furthermore, no matter what the faith taught, I just couldn’t get gripped by the urgency of saving people from eternal damnation, simply on account of their not believing the way we did. It just seemed to stretch reality too far. I did occasionally preach on judgment or hell, if the text suggested it. And I was deeply concerned that my own children should grow up in the faith. But it seemed harder to generalize this concern beyond the circle of my immediate family.

Another faith spanner was my sneaking suspicion that prayer and intercession did not really have much (or any) effect on the state of the world, apart from the effect it had on the person praying, or on the person who was told that others were praying for them. As a pastor I repeatedly prayed my way through the membership list of my congregation, asking God to keep them in faith , to bring them to faith, to let the word of Christ produce fruit in their lives, and so on. As I grew in maturity and hopefully humility, I not only prayed for them, but with them, recognizing that we are all cut from the same cloth. But despite all the biblical promises about prayer, and despite the assurances that prayer is a secret and hidden work whose outcome in known to God alone,  I found myself wondering. In most cases it just seemed that a person’s commitment to church and faith came down to fairly observable sociological reasons, such as the need for community, the solace of religion in times of need, their upbringing, personality, and so on. Prayer by itself seemed to have very little to do with it, unless ‘converted’ into tangible action. In this sense praying was not much different to the way thinking about others can lead (ideally) to helping and engaging with others. Hence the saying: ‘Prayer does not change things, but it changes people who change things’. Fair enough.  

But as I’ve said, such ‘doubts’, if that’s what they were, stayed on the edges of my thought – they did not get the stage, nor did they hold the microphone. My beliefs continued to form my view of reality, and largely because it ‘worked’ so well. Christian faith gave me a highly effective framework to interpret almost any experience, in particular the experience of failure and fallibility, and did so in a way that only validated its narratives, doctrines, practices, and values all the more. 

Next time I'll start writing about how the challenges to orthodoxy began to take center stage and how my belief system began to change. 

Faith Journey (part 1 of about 10)

In the next 10 or so posts I want to recount my faith journey, especially focusing on the changes that have taken place over the last 5 or so years. Obviously it involves other people, but as much as possible I’ll keep names out of it, except for published authors. It’s not a comprehensive autobiography – just a bare bones account to help you understand how I’ve arrived at where I’m at now.  

I grew up in a Christian household which included regular church-going and occasional involvement in other church activities. I was exposed to a devotional piety which included bible reading and personal prayer—my father in particular had been influenced by a deeply spiritual and evangelical lay leader in our Latvian congregation, and also by one of Billy Graham’s crusades.  We joined the Lutheran Church of Australia (LCA) when I was 10 years old, and this meant I could at last understand what was going on in church. I attended Sunday School and eventually confirmation lessons, where I did quite well.

As a child and young teenager, Christianity, in its Adelaide hills Lutheran manifestation, was simply part of my background. In these early years and right through (public) high school, I don’t recall making any conscious or deliberate effort to ‘follow Christ’ or grow in my faith. However, it left its mark in a few ways. The first was a basic moral framework, which I didn’t always follow, and a fairly sensitive conscience, to remind me of the fact. The second was a belief in a hidden spiritual world and the danger of occult powers (witchcraft, Satanism, etc.) which ‘spooked’ quite a bit. A third was the conviction that God could be called on to provide help in trouble, which I considered validated in a few experiences.

I underwent a kind of spiritual awakening around age 19-20 and became involved with youth and study groups, both Lutheran and Baptist. The latter was quite significant, as there, for the first time, I encountered a vibrant youth spirituality, and made some friendships which remain current to this day. I also developed a piety based on bible reading and prayer, and began thinking about a future vocation. An aimless liberal arts course became a teaching degree, which then led on to a year at Lutheran Teachers' College. It was at this time (1988) that I became completely ‘taken’ with theological study, something that would consume me for years to come, and in some sense is still with me.

However, I had no idea at the time how deeply conservative and untouched by modern thought was the theology I was imbibing.  Premised on notions of biblical inerrancy, my education gave me no real opportunity to engage with contemporary theological trends. And if it did, I wasn’t interested. In those rare moments when I did encounter modern theology, I didn’t understand it, and still less accepted it. Whether by upbringing or temperament or education, the theological worldview I was passively adopting and actively constructing could be described as an ‘uncritical naive realism’. At an age when people often question their faith for the first time, I was busily building defenses against such questions. I was becoming quite dogmatic, and loved it.

So when I received a teaching placement in a Lutheran Primary school on the Gold Coast, it soon became apparent to myself and those around me that I’d rather be ensconced in theological studies than starting a classroom career. To my delight, I was accepted into Luther Seminary, and after seeing out two long years of teaching, I began my training for the ordained ministry.

The next five years were very formative. I was impressionable, eager, and competitive. As well gaining a basic theological education I also became aware of the supposed battle lines drawn across the church. Labels such as ‘confessional’, ‘liberal’, ‘pietistic’, ‘church growth’, ‘orthodox’, ‘charismatic’, and ‘liturgical’ would start taking on significance for me. (We even invented a few, like ‘caftan theology’.) At the end of 1995, when I was ordained, my theology and practice was still conservative, but I should stress, not fundamentalist or biblicist – at least by our church’s standards. For unlike my earlier entree into theological education, this time it was impossible not to engage with a range of theological opinions, and to some extent, my teachers did represent a broad-ish range of views on the theological spectrum. Nevertheless I prided myself (in a humble way, of course) on being ‘orthodox’, ‘confessional’ and ‘liturgical’.

Half way through my degree I married Jeanette, who comes from a committed and conservative Lutheran family. As a semi-outsider, this was possibly more educational than I realized at the time, for while I was strong on theology, the realities of rural Australian Lutheranism was something I had little exposure to.

As it turned out, my first parish was in Hamilton, Victoria, where for the next five years my existing theological inclinations would be encouraged and confirmed by conservative mentors and members both locally and throughout the district. Responding to what I perceived as both liberal and ‘church-growth’ threats to orthodoxy, I would become increasingly aligned with the ‘confessional’ wing in the church. During this time I also become interested in, perhaps even enamoured of, the more catholic expressions of the Lutheran tradition. This was exacerbated when some friends and colleagues themselves joined the Roman Catholic Church.

In late 2000 I accepted the call to serve the congregation in Pasadena, Adelaide. Here I encountered a more ecumenical (but still conservatively Protestant) congregational culture, which meant that my confessional and liturgical commitments met with occasional resistance, or at least disagreement. It’s hard to say whether some of these differences were a matter of theology, piety, or personality. But on the whole, my ministry was accepted and supported, even if a few were relieved when I finally left. I worked with many fine people, and was guided and assisted by colleagues whose advice and friendship I genuinely valued.

Even though I was starting to contribute to the life of the wider church (e.g., through its liturgical commission) and pondering the possibility of further study, it was also in my later years at Pasadena (2006-2007) that my thinking and beliefs first began to change. But before I start describing that, I want to reflect on what prevented those changes from taking place much earlier. That will be my next post.