Eyre Lines

An apology to Brian McLaren, Rob Bell and others

I have only very recently started reading things written by these two and quite a few other writers who, these days, are often labelled “Progressive Christians”.  I wish I had read them some years earlier, although in conscience, as I have only just emerged from a very long term clinical depression, I am not sure what I would have been able to do with the information.

The last time I thought of these names, they were labelled “Emergent”, and I looked at what “Emergent” seemed to mean – and it was clearly based in American Evangelical (and therefore probably Charismatic and probably Fundamentalist) Christianity. The writing I did find seemed to me heavily tinged with those tendencies.

There was no way I could have found real identity with the Evangelical-Charismatic-Fundamentalist tendency from the States. Yes, I have found pleasure and some occasional insight from debating with them over the years on The Religion Forum, and in trying to encourage some form of civilised exchanges between them and the members of other denominations and tendencies in Christianity and those of other religions and none (especially those of no religion!).

However, those exchanges have frequently been punctuated by cries of “heresy”, “false doctrine” “false prophet”, “agent of Satan” and on one occasion “Antichrist” (which I confess I initially read as “AntiChris”). I got used to these things online, and they are really water off a ducks back these days.

However I did not think these attitudes were likely to ensure me a warm welcome in the flesh, and had some experience of much less than warm physical welcome (involving shouting and fists) from Evangelicals in this country, admittedly nondenominational Evangelicals. Happily there are not such large numbers of those here that they cannot be easily avoided, and my heart goes out to those who are not in that position.

You may ask “Why were you ever putting yourself in that position, Chris?” Well, the answer is found in a phrase I first read recently from Brian McLaren, though he does not claim credit – he said that the choice in Christianity had been between “reason on ice and ignorance on fire”. Clearly he is equating Evangelical/Charismatic/Fundamentalist as ignorance, and mainline to liberal churches as on ice, i.e. with no “get up and go”, no spirit (possibly in either sense), no real commitment.

I could easily agree with ignorance in right-wing Christianity (for the most part – there are exceptions to every rule!).  If I cease for a moment to restrain myse lf:-

I find their doctrines ill-founded and frequently positively psychologically damaging, their exegetics  and hermaneutics lamentable and their grasp of biblical history non-existent,

I find their grasp of the nature of physical reality seriously flawed, their practices cult-like, their understanding of what Jesus actually taught minimal (and, at that, sidelined), their relationships with other churches let alone other religions hostile, their attitude to the disadvantaged, the different and any sexual orientation other than heterosexual and any gender other than male to be counter-scriptural and their politics the antithesis of everything Jesus stood for.

I believe that they are actively hastening the end of the world as we know it in at least two ways, faster than the rest of us would be likely to do it unaided

If I were at all interested in looking for modern application in John of Patmos’ symbol-laden and theologically confused outpourings, I would identify their churches as Babylon and their leaders as – well, exactly the way I’ve been described by them.

It’s a pity, because some of them are lovely people when shorn of their beliefs or, at least, when not acting on them.

But I don’t do that because Jesus told me not to. I acknowledge that I need to be extraordiarily careful about being prejudiced against them. I try my best to welcome them not only as fellow human beings, but also as brothers and (less often) sisters in Christ, and then try to use a little scripture – well, a lot really – for instruction reproof and correction. Training in righteousness may have to come later, Rome wasn’t built in a day. I try to love them as I love myself, in fact.

[For the last seventeen years that hasn’t been saying much, actually, as I didn’t love myself. At all.

Latterly I couldn’t actually feel love or any other positive emotion except very dimly, and with the exception of a low level generalised compassion which never entirely left me; eventually I couldn’t even be bothered to hate myself, which did at least make me a bit safer. No matter, for seventeen years I’ve been interpreting “Love your neighbour as yourself” as “treat others as you’d have liked them to treat you before you stopped caring and/or started hating yourself”. If you my reader is a bit depressed, imagine what it was like before that, if seriously depressed, ask what Jesus would do. Having emerged from the depression, I can actually love them.]

So I hope you can excuse me for treating anything smacking of this with a little caution, because I can’t. I was prejudiced, which is something I abhor in others.

However, they are definitely on fire in many cases. I need that. Here’s the reason.

Firstly, if nothing else, I am a social gospel man, and want to be involved somewhere which actually has the people and energy to outreach this way. I may even be verging on being a John Vincent style Radical.

My theology takes me to somewhere around the John Shelby Spong or even Don Cupitt area, but that doesn’t fit the bill for me because in going that far left they leave behind all which has any supernatural tinge, talks of prophecy of the future or deals in metaphysics, really. And I need that, because in there, if you don’t take it literally at all, are the parts which speak to me as a practising contemplative and mystic. Most of the more liberal end of analysis of scripture has the same problem.

(Of course, if you take it literally you end up with doctrine, about which I expect to be blogging shortly).

When I wasn’t looking, interesting things have started happening in a move from evangelical through emerging to something called Progressive Christianity. Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Tony Jones, Diana Butler Bass, Christian Piatt, Eric Elnes, James McGrath and Bruce Epperly are all identified as Progressive. (It was Bruce Epperly who suggested some names and got me looking… thanks, Bruce, and I’ll be gentle on the pre-reading of your next book!)

These guys are talking my language again, or, at least, they’re close enough to me in attitude that I can have productive relationships. I might even have found a single label which describes me without me having to have a “but…” inserted. Sadly, there seem to me none in my vicinity, but at the point of writing, I’m hopeful that I’ve actually found my home.

So, I admit prejudice, and it has damaged me, as such things often do, and I will try to do better in future.

Hello, thanks for reading something I’ve written, and I hope you’ve read “Witness, share, apology” as well.

Yes, I hope there’ll be more than one of you, but at the moment it’s just you and me, OK?

Now, I don’t know who you are, whether you have any faith or no faith or even if you aren’t sure which.

I don’t know if you’re some kind of twelve-stepper or not, or if you have any of the various compulsive behaviours (including addiction), psychological peculiarities or other defects of character which I may share about, whether they have their own Twelve Step programme or not.

I don’t know if you’re a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Bah’ai, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Sikh, a Jain, a Taoist, a Wiccan, a Pagan, a “Scientific Pagan, a Druid, a Shaman, a Practical Kabbalist, a Ritual Magician, a “Born Again Agnostic” or….. well, just because you’re not mentioned doesn’t mean I don’t mean you, and if you give me a nudge I’ll try to include you in the next version of this. As it is there, I have friends who describe themselves as each of these, and I’m pretty confident that they’ll read this sooner or later.

By “Christian” I mean you have faith in God – or at least want to – and try to follow Jesus as best you can, whatever conception you may have of what “God” means, what “Jesus” means, what “faith” means or what “follow” means. In other words, whatever “flavour” of Christianity you belong to – and if you’re a Seventh Day Adventist or a Latter Day Saint and think you’ve been missed out, I count you in Christian. I count me as Christian too, if you push me hard enough.

I don’t care about these labels. I think I mean that as an absolute statement, but if it turns out to be wrong, I am trying to move towards it as an ideal.

If you’re human, I mean to include you. I’d include anyone who wasn’t human as well, but I don’t think they’ll be reading this. You get the picture…

There is only one thing I really want to change your thinking about, and it is this. Please consider moving towards thinking of your fellow human beings more as I try to. They are all “us”, none of them are “them”.

Otherwise, don’t panic. I am not trying to convert you. On the “Art of Dharma” site, there is this quotation:-

To a man who asked to become a Buddhist, the Dalai Lama replied, “Please don’t. Stay in your own religion, and meditate.”  Further , he has stated, “It is better to stick with the wisdom traditions of one’s own land than to run from them pursuing in exotica what was under your nose all the time.”

I take his view, for the most part. If you have a belief structure and it’s working for you, use the maxim “If it ain’t bust, don’t fix it”. If you have no beliefs and it’s working for you (i.e. you’re a true agnostic, to my mind, though you may call yourself an atheist and that’s OK with me), use the same maxim. It’s possible there may still be something in what I write which is helpful to you, and I hope there is, but I’m not really writing for you. Sorry!

But if you have some beliefs and they’re not working well for you, I may have more to say (or not – I can only tell you how it is for me, and it’s up to you and, I suppose, chance whether you can find anything in my writing). Again, if you have a belief structure, I’d prefer you to be more comfortable with what you know rather than to shift wholesale; I may still have experience which is helpful. If you don’t have a belief structure, but feel a need for one, I may be talking about the one for you. Or not.  It is going to need to feel right and to help you develop faith, by which I mean love and trust, in whatever you can comfortably conceive “that thing which I tend to call God” to be.

I have a special note for you if you’re an atheist or an agnostic. I started the journey I’m on as an evangelical atheist, that’s to say I believed strongly that God didn’t exist, that the mere concept of God was pernicious and damaging and that I should try to convince everyone else of that. I then spent a significant amount of time as an agnostic, not knowing but still seeking.

And in some ways it would be fair still to regard me as an atheist (and some of my fellow Christians do); it would certainly be fair to regard me as an agnostic still, as I don’t know that any of what I believe is true, I just take positions on the balance of evidence or because they are useful to me and I can relate to them (though I have no option about faith; love and trust doesn’t get argued away easily) and there are still a fair number of the stories Christianity tells which I don’t relate to well, or sometimes at all. I know where you’re coming from. I’m on a journey, moving in a direction, and my beliefs have had to change along the way and will probably change further (though, granted, the changes recently have tended to be fairly subtle).

Please don’t get me wrong; I am very happy indeed with the belief structures I have and I think it would be really cool if you liked them too and tried them for size. For me, Christianity has the best, the most varied, the most useful stories – but to a great extent that’s because I grew up with these stories and know them better than I know other people’s. You’re not me.

I think everyone would be better off with a faith, and that their faith should be strong (as long as it doesn’t damage others or get in peoples’ faces or tell them what to do), and that some of what I’ve learned over some 45 years might help you with that. But I can’t tell you you’d be better off with more faith, as such, just that I’m convinced I am (and yes, it could easily be argued that I’m not from reading things I write about my experience; I try to signpost the points where I think there are dangers and what they are, though).

Finally, before you go further reading my witness, my share, my apologia, please be careful of one possibility. I have had people individually and sometimes collectively wanting to follow me, for me to be their leader.

Do not even think of doing this.

·         Firstly, you can’t get where I am by proxy, only by doing some things and having some experiences. You are not me, your experiences will be different, you can’t borrow mine, only find things in them which speak to your experiences and situation.

·         Secondly, I do not want to be put in the position of telling people what to do, it will embarrass me, and, within my belief structure, you should not be following me anyhow, you should be following in the direction I point. I want people to walk beside me, not behind me.

·         Lastly, I don’t want to be put in the position of having to say “no”, because that would pain me, but I would have to say no anyhow.

What I am writing here is, in bits, my witness, my apologia, my main share.

Dealing with the last things first (the first shall be last in the Kingdom of Heaven) I am a member of a Twelve Step programme and have been for something like 10 years, I suppose, though I only started to take the programme seriously in late 2006. What I write here is not, however, primarily about any particular twelve step programme or even about twelve step programmes generally.

A bit about Twelve step programmes

I am not writing for twelve step members, so if you are a twelve stepper you can probably skip this bit. However, I am a member of a twelve step programme and probably qualify for at least three others (I’ve only been to actual meetings of one of those), and it has been important in forming the way I think about some things, so you need to know where I am coming from.

In Twelve Step programmes, there is a practice called a “main share”. This involves a member giving a short  account of their life with reference to the programme, and frequently takes the form of sharing their “Experience, strength and hope”.  Another way of putting it is “What I was like, what happened, and what I am like now”. Often this takes place at the beginning of a meeting in which other members will in turn share more briefly aspects of their own experience strength and hope which have been brought to their attention by something they heard in the main share.

Members are expected to listen politely and attentively to each others and not to interrupt, nor in general to argue with other members, though they can (and often do) pick up a difference and share that for them, it was like this.

They are encouraged to listen attentively and to listen especially for similarities, not differences, and in that way they may be helped to understand their own situation or to remember something in their own past which has brought them to where they are.

Twelve step states that it is not a religious programme, it is a spiritual programme, but in it are a number of references to “God”. Some of them add the words “as you understand him”, and step 2 reads “Came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity”. Twelve step programmes are all based on overcoming some problem of addiction or compulsion (there are quite a few variants), and this addiction or compulsion is thought to involve a form of insanity which needs to be removed.

People will share that a variety of things have been sufficient as a “higher power”, including in some cases the AA group itself, in other cases the concept of “Good”, or “Good orderly direction” (G.O.D.) You are entirely free to choose whatever concept works for you, as long as it does work – and you can change your mind about what concept you use, as many members do.

In fact, the first twelve step programme (Alcoholic Anonymous, on which all the others are more or less closely based) made use of the programme developed by the Oxford Group, which was at least initially an evangelical Christian movement. However, AA saw that a specific religious affiliation was unhelpful to it’s one and only purpose, which was to help alcoholics to recover, and adjusted its thinking and wording accordingly, and there are now AA members of very many religions and of no religion, including atheists.

I think it possible that St. Paul’s “thorn in the side” was an addiction or compulsion. Certainly the way he writes about it fits well with it being something like that. I certainly view myself as having a number of thorns in my own side. If you read all of what I write, you’ll probably work out what at least one of them is, maybe more. But I am not writing about my recovery either, except insofar as that is part of my experience and has given me part of my strength and part of my hope.

A bit about witness

What I write is also my witness, my statement of my faith in something I call ”God”, and in Jesus Christ (as I understand him to have talked and acted and been), and in the transformative power of that faith. I use the word “faith” to indicate more “love and trust” than belief in its normally understood form. In the faith tradition I work within, it is encouraged to witness to others, and that I try to do wherever it is reasonable. As such it is technically “evangelical”, but again not in the way that word is commonly understood these days. I do not approve of “in your face” evangelism in any form; if you have a faith, I agree with the Dalai Lama, who said to someone who had talked with him and been inspired by his words, and asked if he should therefore consider becoming a Buddhist “No, go and become a better Christian”.

Apologia

An apologia is a rational justification of someone’s beliefs. Mostly, it is rationalisation after the fact. In other words, I didn’t get the faith I have by justifying it rationally, but it helps me to maintain that faith if I can defend the beliefs I have against anyone saying that what I believe is wrong, it gives me a basis on which I can ground an attempt to construct a better reason if someone does manage to demonstrate that something I believe is wrong, and it helps to convince my rational mind that what my emotional mind is saying to me in this particular instance is acceptable.

I’m actually a bit sceptical that anyone else gets to faith (as opposed to belief) by a process of rational argument either. The discipline of “Apologetics” often seems to me to be designed to convince other people by rational argument, but actually I think it doesn’t do that very well, or possibly even at all. My own experience and that of other people I’ve talked with seems to indicate that this is right, but I’m always open to hearing new evidence.

However, I’ve been helped a lot in the past by reading people explaining how they rationalised their own beliefs. This teaches me about them, it teaches me about the processes of rationalisation and it helps me do my own rationalisation. I’ll admit that it more often does the latter by making me think about why I don’t believe the same things they do, but occasionally it makes me adjust my beliefs.

I don’t hold any beliefs which I am so attached to that they can’t be changed in the light of new evidence or some challenge to my rationalisation, I do have a faith (love and trust) which I don’t think can be changed.

Tailpiece

I hope that when reading what I write here you can take it in the sense of a twelve step main share. I am always glad to have people share back to me their own stories, and if your reasoning disagrees with some of my own reasoning, I’m open to discussion. But it isn’t going to be productive if you say “This is not what I (my church, whatever other form of authority you use) says is the case, so you’re wrong”. That is their witness, their main share. It isn’t mine.

On Sunday, I met with a friend. Now, this guy is fired up with God, with Jesus and with scripture. And that’s all good. It’s better than good, it’s warming those he comes into contact with. I am really happy for him. He’s also fired up with a completely different view of scripture from my own. A different concept of God, a different concept of Jesus… I could go on.

We acknowledged to each other that we are in two completely different places (he reads my blog, bless him) but that we share one faith, one fire. He’s been used to my own fire being somewhat damped (I suffer from clinical depression, inter alia, and have done for quite a few years), but on Sunday, courtesy of some new medication, I was not feeling damped.

Now, I’m confident that as we were acknowledging that to each other, both of us were thinking with at least part of our minds “I’m in the better place, and you’ll eventually join me there”. I can’t see that happening myself, and I’ve no doubt that he can’t see himself joining me in my thinking. But we are one in love, we are one in spirit, we are one in religion (even, at the moment, denomination), we are one in whom we follow.

I think I see how there can be one church. I know there should be only one church, of all the followers of Christ (as a minimum). At my last count, however, there were several thousand denominations, and I found that depressing, particularly when one flavour of follower of Jesus shuns, anathematises or kills another flavour of follower.

We are very different. And we are exactly the same.

Week 4 is titled “Why and how do I pray”. The speaker gave a largely personal account, which I thoroughly approve of. OK, there was stress on involving the whole trinity, which I can understand but which to my mind gives you far too much to think about before you even get started. There wasn’t much stress on tangible results (” Oh lord, won’t you buy me a Mercecedes Benz…”) thank goodness, as I think there are all sorts of problems in taking some of the passages that suggest that whatever you pray for (in the right way…) you will get, such as Matt. 18:19 or John 14:13-14 – the first was mentioned, the second not. We also didn’t touch too much on the list of excuses for a literal interpretation of those passages actually not happening most of the time, as given in the Alpha manual. The speaker did say that when she prayed, coincidences happened. They do indeed. Granted, coincidences happen when you don’t pray as well, and I’m well enough aware of my own internal confirmation bias not to want to advance any personal evidence myself.

There wasn’t much stress on the ACTS formulation either (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication). Actually, I think this is a pretty fair formula. Some while ago a good friend told me how much he liked the Great Litany , which I’m not all that familiar with, despite hanging around a few fairly “high” churches in the past. I told him I thought it was a bit long, and he asked what I’d put in it’s place…

“Hey, Boss; Wow!; Sorry; Thanks; Help!; Whatever…”

He agreed that it was, indeed, shorter!

OK, that’s the outline, now fill in the specifics.

I talked a little about not wanting to ask for specifics, not only because I was unconvinced they’d be granted but also because I valued so much the second S which I’d add to ACTS – submission. I said my favorite and very much most used prayer was the Serenity Prayer – “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”. Of course, that doesn’t conform to the ACTS formula, but it’s big on submission. “Not my will but thine be done, O Lord” ends any prayer I make which actually asks for something.

Prayer is mandated as a continuing activity in Step 11 of AA’s Twelve Steps – “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out”, but I considered it valuable for exactly that purpose a long time before I had read it in a twelve step programme. Yes, I considered it valuable as one of very many spiritual practices which I explored in my early attempts to find a way of repeating the overwhelming “conscious contact with God” which kicked me off some 45 years ago. But, in conscience, though I generally pray (by myself and silently) quite a bit, I’ve only for fairly brief periods had a formal routine of prayer. I suspect I should; there was certainly a period of my life during which I lost the habit of pausing and praying for guidance and inspiration many times a day, and that may well have contributed to the fact that these days I mostly lack the instant feeling of response and presence which I once got used to. And, of course, took for granted. A big mistake, I think.

I will try to do better…

I didn’t mention special techniques such as lectio divina and Ignatian visualisatory prayer. I use a form of the first frequently. The second, I don’t counsel unless you have a spiritual director, which I don’t at present, but it can be extremely powerful. Possibly too advanced for this kind of group, at least in week 4? I did slide in a comment that telling the rosary can be viewed as a form of mantra yoga – Hindus and Buddhists have no monopoly on this kind of technique!

There was one slight sidetrack in the discussion, which I’ll talk about in another post. Suffice it to say that something I said gave another member of the group a new and energising insight. I give thanks that I was able to do this. It makes me appreciate the worth of doing this so much more.