Asking

Inquirers in Conversation

Cook

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781498272414
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Too much communication in the world of religion is one-way: from clergy to lay persons who, if ever respectfully engaged, would become serious inquirers. The most desirable means of effective engagement is the give-and-take method of eliciting and clarifying questions and then drawing the questioner into the answering process. That, combined with the intellectual rigor of Enlightenment thinking in the formation of beliefs, will go a long way toward making contemporary religion a here-and-now enterprise, thus saving it from hopeless irrelevance.

1

Introduction

As I scan the landscape of religious thought at the end of the first decade of the millennium, I find myself to be an outlier, a reluctant a-theist where “god” is concerned and an agnostic on most other theological matters considered settled by most Christian bodies. I recently retired from congregational work, having rung up forty-two years an ordained minister in good standing of the Episcopal Church—not exactly what you would call an organization of free-thinkers. Moreover, I had been for twenty-one years employed by an Episcopal congregation whose members are unremarkable for their religious sentiments, though one of them did ask my successor if he was “the kind of priest who believes in God.” I guess I had taught them to take a dim view of inherited certainties.

It is only fair to acknowledge that when my first book (Christianity Beyond Creeds) appeared in 1998, several families left my parish in high dudgeon. The more curious fact is they had heard my sermons, read articles of mine that appeared in the public press, and took courses I had offered over more than a decade. So it must have been the systemization of my research in the book that prompted their anger. I must say their noisy exit left the congregation in a kind of extraordinary state of serenity from which, happily, we had not yet recovered at the time of my retirement. The philosophical and theological inquiries I helped to launch proceeded apace as my other books rolled off the presses and my occasional forays into public commentary continued to bring the curious into our midst.

I was able to say from the pulpit “I am an atheist in that I am not a theist” and there was scarcely to be seen the blinking of an eye among those in the pews. They got it. What I am certain they did not get and are in wonderment about still is how the church hierarchy so blithely ignored this heretic in its midst. A possible answer to that unspoken question is that the hierarchy is as unsure of the veracity of orthodox beliefs as it is vigorous in its continued promulgation of them. In a semi-playful way I teased my orthodox detractors by daring them to indict me before an ecclesiastical court on charges of heresy—and some of them did try but without success. Had they succeeded, not only would the sale of my books have improved, but the church would finally have had to tack into a stiff and uncompromising gale of common sense. My detractors would neither want me to enjoy the former nor would they themselves be able to weather latter. They know they would have to fall back on that thing called faith which one biblical text so optimistically calls “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”—a rather weak reed in the wind, as it turns out.

It is with the phrase “conviction of things not seen” that I have had difficulties. I may have been born an empiricist, for since the years of reason flowered I have demanded to apprehend in some more-or-less objective means (sight, sound, touch, taste, or smell, and rationalized intuition) data that would lead me to be able to say that such-and-such a thing is so, is true, is real. By a combination of those means, I became convinced that my parents loved me pretty much unconditionally, and that, for example, either the sun moved across the sky or, as I later came to appreciate, Earth rotates on its axis, thus exposing successive tracts of its surface to the sun during a dependable period of 24 hours (by the arbitrary calculation of time).

No observable data yet exist that have enabled me to say with acceptable certitude such things as “God created the heavens and Earth,” or for the righteous there awaits eternal bliss and for the unrighteous eternal damnation. That much religious literature sets forth such tenets a priori I will not gainsay. What I insist is that none of them can be arrived at a posteriori, which as near as I can tell is how most rational people decide on what they can rely as being real and true.

As the anthropological and archaeological record demonstrates, the phenomenon of religion in the human epoch can be traced to disparate sources. It seems clear that the worship of ancestors is an early source as succeeding generations, in seeking to control their societies, appealed to the received wisdom vouchsafed to them by dead elders. W. Somerset Maugham depicted one of his characters saying, “This is not so strange when you reflect that from the earliest times the old have rubbed it in to the young that they, the old, are wiser than they, the young, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was, they were old, too.”1

To tamp down doubt among younger members of the tribe or clan that such elders knew what they were talking about, adult members erected shrines to the memories of their predecessors by then unseen. It does not take much imagination to see how that process evolved into a full-blown worship of “gods,” but worship with an agendum, viz., to exercise control over people in creating and maintaining some semblance of societal order.

As agriculture replaced the hunter-gatherer societies, communities began to take shape out of loosely related tribes no doubt requiring some organization, division of labor and even greater control than was previously needed. It makes sense to think it was at this point that a thing we might call priesthood emerged as the guardian of the memories and enforcers of the order derived from them. It seems that in a good many societies of ancient civilizations, priests were to some degree in thrall to military and political leaders—an association that would become all too common in later times.

Such a time is now as religious leaders, often self-appointed, stumble over one another to claim possession of exclusive truth. Such efforts dovetail nicely with the hunger for certainty at the grass roots. It is said that angry young Muslim men are content to blow themselves up in terrorist attacks because they have been convinced it is the will of Allah that the infidel societies of the West or sympathizers of the West should be destroyed. The preachers on American cable television are just as certain that the god of the Christian Bible is speaking through them a set of inexorable truths that must be accepted by one and all to ensure their eternal salvation and to spare them eternal damnation. This contrasts dramatically with the idea of discovering within one’s own experience those elements and strategies that have been successful in the realization of peace and security, and then putting them into practice as examples others might wish to follow because their desirability has been demonstrated.

As the alphabet and written language took hold in the societies of antiquity, there was bound to have been the setting down of laws and covenants, stories and liturgical texts. The provenance of each can no doubt be traced to the “memories” of early communities related to the wisdom of unseen, that is to say dead, ancestors. And just as dead ancestors morphed into “gods,” so did the eventually written record of the law they developed, and that evolved in the lives of their emergent communities, become sacred writ. It fell, of course, to the priests to mediate the texts of that record and thereby to consolidate their power and authority. The text meant what the priests said it meant because the priests were, by virtue of their station, supposed to possess a kind of gnosis not accessible to the masses. One can draw an almost direct line from the priests of antiquity to the fundamentalist preachers of our own era, who, despite their denial of the validity of the office, amount to a Protestant priesthood whose members tell their congregations the Bible means what it says and says what it means. The Roman Catholic hierarchy, notably under the current pope, Benedict XVI, appeals through the church’s magisterium to the authority of the Bible as the Word of God, by which it does not mean the biblical text is inerrant in speaking for god, but that the pope and the magisterium interpret its inerrant content infallibly.

Such interpretations of so-called sacred texts enabled the bloody Crusades, abetted the church’s demonization of Galileo, fueled the Inquisition and its latter-day extension under Benedict (especially in his latter days as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger of the Holy Office) and inspired the legislatures of several U.S. states to attempt to outlaw the teaching of evolutionary biology in public schools. The science on which the modern practice of medicine and surgery operate is being called into question solely on the basis that the long-accepted theory of natural selection and the science that has flowed from its exhaustive testing do not conform to sacred texts. An outfit that calls itself the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (hereinafter NCBCPS) is pushing the use of courses that teach science with no mention of evolution and that claim the U.S. Constitution is based on the Bible.

What if the Constitution were based on the Bible? It would simply have as its basis another set of documents set down by human beings. But that is not how the NCBCPS sees it. If that organization’s public relations initiatives can convince enough people the Bible is of something other than human provenance, the gullibility of those convinced will easily admit to the Constitution’s origin being thus derived. Of course, the assertion that any or all documents of the Bible are of anything other than human origin is beyond ludicrous. Yet that claim is made in a fashion credible to millions of people every day by exponents of one fundamentalism or another.

I have found both amusing and helpful E.L. Doctorow’s commentary on sacred texts in his 2002 Massey Lectures at Harvard2. He likened sacred texts to stories:

The sacred texts of all religions based on Hebrew scripture have been communally amended, rewritten, commented upon, interpreted by rabbis, priests, imams, in order to transform religious apprehension into churches, unmediated awe into dogma, inchoate feeling into sacrament, brute expression into ethical commandment. But the authorship of God, through his intermediaries, is uncontested. And if a portion of sacred text is illogical, opaque, self-contradictory, bipolar, enigmatic, God in his authorial perfection is not to be questioned, only we, his readers, for our inadequacies.

Doctorow went on to say that after the Enlightenment and the advent of modern science, “Storytelling as the prime means of understanding the world was so reduced in authority that today it is only children who continue to believe that stories are, by the fact of being told, true. Children and fundamentalists.” What, then, shall religious exponents say of their cherished texts if they cannot say of them that they are revealed and therefore beyond challenge? They can say that such texts are repositories of human experience, inquiry, investigation, and acquired wisdom; that many passages in them are possessed of great lyrical beauty and astonishing insight worth paying attention to and considering in the making of important choices and decisions.

Imagine the relaxation of tension and conflict in the world, were religious leaders of the various communities of faith to refrain from claiming absolute and exclusive truth for their sacred texts. The energy now spent in the aggressive defense of the content of such texts would be channeled into packaging it for display and vending in the marketplace of ideas. To those who would complain that such a strategy would be an open door to syncretism, I say sectarianism certainly hasn’t worked very well. Let’s try a new way. Peace is preferable to war, calm to conflict, intelligent discussion to fevered controversy, light to heat.

My advocacy of the next logical step will make readers think of a philosophical development that was au courant almost fifty years ago and arose from the research and writing of such scholars as Paul M. van Buren, Gabriel Vahanian, Harvey Cox and Thomas Altizer to name but four. The development was dubbed by the popular press as “the death of God movement.” It was not a movement, and it did nothing close to writing God’s obituary. The argument was that “god-talk” had become ever more difficult in the wake of the Enlightenment as the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein had pretty much dismantled the universe of antiquity. The further argument was that the Holocaust and other dread episodes of what poet Robert Burns called “man’s inhumanity to man”3 had rendered the “dear heavenly father” concept of god incredible. Van Buren, in particular, argued after the fashion of David Hume, that human beings might more sensibly focus their attention on what could be apprehended by the senses and subsequently submitted to reason, viz., each other and the general affairs of humankind, and seek therein cues to further consideration and consequent action.

The perils inherent in god-talk were not as obvious a half-century ago as now. As fundamentalists across the religious spectrum have turned up the decibel level of their claims to truth, Allah, Yahweh, and whatever god it is that Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians posit seem to be in competition with one another. Osama bin Laden and his followers invoke Allah in merciless acts of terrorism. American supporters of George W. Bush invoked a weird alchemy of theism and patriotism in support of the war of attrition in Iraq and in other ideological endeavors. The Christian Right invokes the god of the Bible in its battle to fill the U.S. Supreme Court with justi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• About the Society for Humanistic Judaism
• A Word about Method
• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: Inquiry and Response: The Conversation
• Part Three: Where Inquiries of My Own Have Taken Me: An Epilogue
• Part Four: An Agnostic Secular Humanist Works with Biblical Texts
• Bibliography