With Or Without God

Why the Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe

Gretta Vosper

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781554684007
• eBook ISBN: 9781554689309
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Envisioning a future in which the Christian church plays a viable and transformative role in shaping society, Gretta Vosper argues that if the church is to survive at all, the heart of faith must undergo a radical change. Vosper, founder of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity and a minister in Toronto, believes that what will save the church is an emphasis on just and compassionate living -- a new and wholly humanistic approach to religion. Without this reform, the church as we know it faces extinction.

Vosper addresses the issues of spiritual fulfillment, comfort and connection in the modern world through a thoughtful and passionate discourse. She urges a renewal of old doctrines but does so with dignity and respect. Offering difficult but penetrating insights into a new generation of spiritually aware -- and spiritually open -- people, With or Without God offers a startling model for a renewed church as a leader in ethics, fostering relationships, meaning and values that are solidly rooted in our own selves.

1
IT’S TIME

THE FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY TO RECONSTRUCT CHURCH

In moments of utter chaos, great things can happen. The dissolution of order allows for new patterns to emerge, new relationships to form. Stereotypes and expectations slip beyond our reach and disappear into cocoons of “what might be.” Former structures crumble and give way, and in the remaining mixture of dust and sweat, things that once seemed outrageously improbable suddenly emerge as the next best, in fact, the only, thing you could possibly expect.

None of us are very comfortable in the midst of chaos. We prefer knowing what’s going to happen next. We like to think we can trust our responses in any given situation, and often we can. We know how we’ll react to certain kinds of events, or to hearing particular bits and pieces of news. Someone’s daughter is moving to Africa; someone else’s dad has gone into long-term care; the house down the street sold for a phenomenal sum. Few of us, though, are ever able to prepare for the really big “come what mays” and we don’t want them. The desire to wake up to a wildly different world than the one we fell asleep in is very likely limited to the discontented and the recently arrested. For the most part, we like things to stay the same on a day-to-day basis.

Our hesitation about chaos is exactly because great things can happen. There is no such thing as great things will happen. It’s not a given. Dreadful things happen, too, and, from the last scan of my field of reference, with more frighteningly disproportionate regularity. “Can” is never prescribed. “Can” only means there are lots of possibilities, only a few of which might end up being something exquisitely beautiful and deeply worthy of the disturbing sensations with which chaos takes its hold. “Can” means we have choices. We do.

Chaos has erupted in the mainline church. Things may still look pretty much the same—the slowly receding congregations, the reverential whispers, the soft light filtered through stained-glass saints—but beneath the veneer of our obligatory “Good morning”s ferments a newly mixed potion for which the church has not prepared itself. Critical thought has seeped in, mingled with centuries-old formulae for “what we believe,” and begun a reaction the likes of which any explosives chemist would be proud.

The Christian Church, as we have built it and known it, has outlived its viability. Less and less vulnerable to religion’s absolute and supernatural claims, people are no longer content with its ethereal promises. Evangelical, liberal, and sacramental expressions of Christianity scrabble for relevance in a world that they are, for the most part, ill suited to address. And yet, it is precisely because of the challenges present in today’s world that we most need the strength church might be able to offer should it survive the mess in which it currently finds itself.

AN INVITATION TO CHANGE

Can the church slough off the encrustations of two millennia of ecclesial doctrine and theology in order to address the world’s most urgent needs? Can it let itself dissolve into the pool of ideals, passion, and hope-filled primordial elements out of which it once grew and find in a new mix, in new combinations of those elements, something of value to offer the world? Can we who work in it, worship in it, watch it, and critique it open ourselves to what might emerge from that chaotic pool? And should we find whatever it is that emerges worthy, can we, regardless of our ideologies, shelter it and support it until its own strength can match the needs to which it must respond? This is an enormous challenge. This is almost too many “cans” for us ever to dream the likelihood of a positive outcome. The effort even seems ridiculous when so many argue change is unnecessary. But I am convinced that we must try and that we must try now.

As we consider the possibilities inherent in this new entity that may emerge from the chaos, there are many characteristics we will hope to find, things that, should we see evidence of them coalescing, we already know we must encourage, feed, help grow. Many of them have been part of our spiritual journeys, our reflective lives already: tools for creating and strengthening community; opportunities to gather for ethical exploration and challenge; time set aside for corporate and personal spiritual nurture and comfort; voices united in advocacy for justice; and compassionate efforts to heal and help others near and far. Perhaps as these things develop they will unfold in kaleidoscopic patterns and styles, offering myriad ways to explore, engage, and embrace. To be effective, for this new thing to do the work it needs to do, its many offerings will have to be supportive of humanitarian values and be inclusive of people of all faiths, philosophies, or worldviews who seek to live by those values.

There will be, however, other things that, should they begin to appear, we will have to diligently oppose. This will be difficult, for many of these will be things we will recognize, things we know and are comfortable with—the language, the rituals, the beliefs we have travelled with these many years. For millennia, these things have divided, excluded, disillusioned, and hurt many, even as they attempted, and succeeded, in including and comforting some. If we are to alter our self-destructive course, we must learn the lessons of our past and live by what we learn. Religious declarations and promises based entirely on speculation or individual experience or that claim a supernatural authority must be identified for what they are; we must refuse to grant them an authority they do not deserve. We have the right and the responsibility to draw the necessary line.

What the world needs in order to survive and thrive is the radical simplicity that lies at the core of Christianity and so many other faiths and systems of thought—an abiding trust in the way of love as expressed in just and compassionate living. Out of the multitude of understandings of religion, spirituality, and faith; out of the varying views of the origins, nature, and purpose of life; out of the countless individual experiences of what might be called divine; out of it all may be distilled a core that, very simply put, is love. This core message carries its own authority. It needs no doctrine to validate it, no external expert or supernatural authority to tell us it is right. Love is quite demanding enough as a foundation, sufficiently complex and challenging without the requirement of additional beliefs, unbelievable to many. The church the future needs is one of people gathering to share and recommit themselves to loving relationships with themselves, their families, the wider community, and the planet.

Such a church need not fear the discoveries of science, history, archaeology, psychology, or literature; it will only be enhanced by such discoveries. Such a church need not avoid the implications of critical thinking for its message; it will only become more effective. Such a church need not cling to and justify a particular source for its authority; it will draw on the wisdom of the ages and challenge divisive and destructive barriers. Such a church, grown out of values that transcend personal security, self-interest, and well-being, could play a role in the future that is not only viable but radically transformative and desperately needed.

In order for this sort of church to arise out of the chaos we are experiencing, the foundation of the church will have to shift from where it has been to someplace quite different, though perhaps even more deeply rooted in our human story. It must shift from its time-bound biblical and doctrinal base to a broader base of timeless, life-enhancing values—a base that would include all peoples of the world who embrace humanitarian and ecologically sound ideals, which, although differently interpreted and applied, are commonly held. It’s a broad vision, but a beautiful one.

Change Is Needed

Broad-vision change is not “new curtains” window-dressing change but real, deep down, “this is going to hurt” change. It can be liberating and refreshing, but it comes with costs. Without it, there is not only no future for the mainline church, there is also no need for one.

For the many still working hard to keep the church alive, imagining no need for the church is simply outrageous. For those who have long since written off the church as archaic and self-absorbed, it is a no-brainer. Between these two disparate reactions lies the possibility of the kind of church about which I speak and, too, the courage to bring it about. It will require asserting our right to assess the church’s claims and our responsibility to do so. Prepared for this new role, we will be able to look at what the church professes to believe, what it says, what it represents, and test those things for relevance, veracity, and value. What is irrelevant, refutable, or simply wrong we have to consign to the historical record. Those things that are worthy of being carried into the future will become the core of the church’s teachings and strength. It is a distillation process that must be employed over and again as new awareness, new knowledge, and new challenges become known. Much will be lost, now and in the future, but it will have been sacrificed for our own good and for the good of the planet that sustains us and all the life we know.

Since humanity is a decidedly self-centred life form, the sacrifice of what is no longer able to sustain or comfort us would seem to be a reasonable trade-off. At issue, however, is more than just our own personal comfort—it’s our sense of security. We don’t toy lightly with our lives. In healthy, supportive environments, children at a very early age learn that life is precious, but shortly after that, they also learn how unpredictable it can be. We find we are never completely secure in this life. Indeed, we aren’t going to make it out alive.

We have contrived, however, beyond the bounds of natural biology, a supernatural realm in which we believe our ultimate safety can be secured regardless of what happens to us or those we love throughout the course of our natural lives. We have called it “heaven,” and those who feel certain of achieving it may be less likely to lament the loss of a sustainable planet or the struggles of humanity. Intentionally dulling ourselves to the instinctual awareness of our dependency upon one another and the earth, we have shifted our need for security to what comes after this life as we know it and have found there what the church calls our “certain hope.”

Self-preservation is always capable, if not needful, of violence. The natural world is one great canvas of violent beginnings and endings through which life extends itself. Extrapolated into the afterlife, beyond the need for earthly things, self-preservation acquires an urgency capable of greater and greater violence. The church, and, in a broader sense, religion, has made its living nurturing that urgency. Finding in our most primal, universal need for security an unchanging rock upon which to build itself, the church has become both the proprietor and the agent of that otherworldly security. The billions who profess belief in a supernatural being are not comforted solely by this-worldly security. They will work, argue, fight, and die for a security for which there is no proof other than what they have been taught by the church or one of the other multitude of religions that barter the wares of the afterlife. For this reason, the idea of change in the church’s message will be anathema to many, for it will require a dismantling of that promised otherworldly safety and a willingness to risk living in whatever fragile, evasive security we can manage on this compromised planet we share.

Perhaps a greater challenge than the one being issued to the church is the one being issued to those who have left the church, those who have determined there is no God they can believe in, only a scientifically evolving world and the complexities of the life forms that exist upon it. Their explorations into and beyond the issues of faith are worthy and have helped prod the church to much self-discovery. But it is time for all of us to stop pointing fingers and guffawing. It is time for humanists and atheists, skeptics and agnostics to see they share a common future with the many who are still comforted by their religious beliefs. In the face of that future, harmony, not acrimony, understanding, not mockery, will make our coexistence so much more than merely palatable. We all have much to offer one another: not supernatural beings to whom we can offload our problems, but spiritual tools and practices that can help us know and honour our shared and richly human experiences of life.

Talking Change

When church-change gurus get together, they often talk about paradigm changes—the tectonic-sized shifts in perspective that unsettle the way we understand things. The term paradigm is used in the sense popularized by Thomas Kuhn in the late 1960s and refers to the particular concepts that are held within a discipline during a certain period of time. Kuhn was talking about scientific paradigms, charting and identifying the changes that happened within the scientific body of knowledge as new discoveries were made. He noted that scientific knowledge, rather than building progressively upon itself, stepped from paradigm to paradigm, each new set of concepts complete in and of itself and replacing, not simply adding to, previous knowledge, if that “knowledge” was now outdated.

In The Future of the Christian Tradition, Richard Holloway, retired Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, notes that paradigm shifts do not happen within religious, cultural, and social settings in the same clear-cut way they happen in science. The former don’t come out quite as clean as the latter. In fact, they don’t come out clean at all. There’s stuff left hanging about—bits and pieces of detritus that don’t get properly cleared away—things we no longer actually believe but have not officially so declared.

When a scientific paradigm’s day is done, it dies. If you are being educated as a scientist today, as Holloway explains, you don’t start with Aristotle’s paradigm and work up to the scientific approach that prevails today; you start in with the current paradigm. Unlike scientific paradigms, social, religious, and cultural paradigms seem to hang around forever. Though they may have only a shadowy existence, they never really die, are never really abandoned when a new paradigm appears. Rather, they get stacked up like trays in a self-service cafeteria.¹

Each of the major Christian paradigms that has existed throughout the history of Christianity continues to be found in one form or another within contemporary expressions of the faith. Not one of them has been entirely replaced. Dogma from each lingers, stalking any effort to bring new understandings, new ideas, and new beliefs to what continues to be referred to as a single monolithic faith—Christianity. Endeavouring to preserve our spiritual values, we hold on to the religious dogma with which they have long been fused.

Holloway seeks to explain why it is that we can’t let go of what has gone before; why it is that we get stuck with all these paradigms, one atop the other, each proposing real but differing understandings of Christianity; why it is that the gospel story of the early church hasn’t long since been bypassed in favour of an empirically sound one. He sums it up: humans don’t like change.

Drawing from Marx and Nietzsche, Holloway points out that not only do we dislike change itself, but the way change happens reinforces our distaste for it. Marx, whom he calls the “last and greatest of the Hebrew prophets,” taught us that change comes from the victims of the ruling power system.² Those victims challenge the power structure that has oppressed them, eventually overturning it. Such change is an affront to what has gone before and calls it aberrant or wrong. For most scientists, even those who initially resist new understandings, the replicable evidence of the new paradigm eventually convinces them of its validity. It becomes, then, a whole new world, a fascinating opportunity for further discovery. For the theologian, whose trade is debatable ideas, the new paradigm remains an unprovable accusation. It challenges and exposes chauvinistic thinking; it labels the old as an insult to those it sought to oppress. Up until now, the only way to answer that accusation and preserve self-respect has been to deny it, hold on to what has been, and attempt to use new words to explain and justify it; and so the paradigms stack up.

Progressive paradigms have matured the Christian faith over the centuries, but that work is constantly held hostage by those paradigms we have been hesitant, if not loath, to release. Emerging Christian movements, popularized by the disparate writings of evangelicals, such as Leonard Sweet, and mainline scholars, such as Marcus Borg, are the latest attempts to create a seemingly new church that can still coexist with all the previous incarnations that have gone before. Sweet holds on to the evangelical gospel message of exclusive salvation while co-opting contemporary postmodern language to communicate relevancy; Borg holds on to the archaic worship forms and language while re-explaining and retrofitting the gospel message with a view to pluralist sensitivities. (Borg’s and Sweet’s efforts are explored in more detail in Chapters Three and Seven.) Sweet’s refusal to grapple with the anthropological genesis of God and Borg’s enchantment with the ecclesial encrustations the church has endured keep the church tied to aspects of the past that we can and must move beyond. Sweet, Borg, and others might work hard to dress the church up for the future, but I believe the future requires much more. Their attempts suggest that the church is willing and able to change itself from within, but they are desperate last efforts to hang on to old paradigms the world has moved far beyond. The critically observant remarks of Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, ring balefully true:

We have to be honest about why [religions] are evolving. The door leading out of religious literalism doesn’t open from the inside. These religions have been moderated because of the pressure of modernity. It’s secular politics and a conception of human rights and our growing scientific understanding of the universe…This [evolution] is not to be credited to faith. This is the legacy of faith continually losing the argument to science, and secular politics, and common sense.³

Faced with the challenges brought to us from the outside, we’ll change as much as we feel we have to; but like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, we are only too happy to put off until tomorrow the creative, at-the-roots change that is ours to bring about. We lament that so many in the larger world are not interested in our message and are unwilling to join our worldview. Yet the minor accommodations we are willing to make leave the trays stacked up and the old paradigms in place, as we attempt relevance in a world laden with twenty-first-century-sized maladies.

Change Is Possible

There is a growing threat inside the church, however, that might now turn into an opportunity. Nietzsche noted that the victims of power structures often align themselves with others within the system who are willing to be unfaithful to it, either through moral weakness or because they are “intellectually restless” and eager to break rank with the increasing stupidity that is characteristic of strong but homogenous systems.⁴ Those on the inside of the church who have seriously challenged the system have always had to be cautious, keenly aware of the colleagues and mentors whom they love and who might be unsettled, or even harmed, by any sort of assault on the underlying assumptions, the foundations of the Christian fort. They have often stopped, necessarily, just shy of aligning themselves with those who have been victimized by the church—Aboriginal populations, women, non-Christians, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transg...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• 1 IT’S TIME
• 2 CONSTRUCTING CHRISTIANITY
• 3 CHALLENGING CHRISTIANITY
• 4 LIBERATING CHRISTIANITY
• 5 RECONSTRUCTING CHRISTIANITY
• 6 RESPONSIBLE CHANGE
• 7 CRUCIAL CHANGE
• APPENDIX
• NOTES
• INDEX
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Copyright
• ABOUT THE PUBLISHER