Faith as Remembering

Ingram

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781532631009
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

Memories seldom happen in straight lines with chronological precision, but occur most often in spirals. Paul Ingram's essays collected in Faith as Remembering were created from memories. These memories, often in unpredictable ways, pushed him to new insights about the nature of Christian faith--insights often not desired, always unexpected, and always toward new directions of theological reflection.Theologians all too often write with an unintentional, and sometimes intentional, universalism. Ingram does not intend to write this way. These essays reflect his memories and are the sources of the theological conclusions he draws as a historian of religions who now finds himself a practicing process theologian. As a process theologian, Ingram does not even argue that the conclusions drawn here will be ones he will affirm in the future. All human knowledge is incomplete, and there are always new surprises for anyone practicing the art of theological reflection. But Ingram's hope is that the essays gathered together in Faith as Remembering will inspire readers to engage their memories as the foundation for drawing their own unique conclusions.

1

Faith as Remembering

Somewhere Stephen of Hungary (975–1038) once said, “Without a past, a nation has no future.”1 His words have a Whiteheadian ring about them. For the sake of our own futures, we must remember how the past has formed us in the present, what the past has brought us. This process involves positive and negative “prehensions” of the past, a process of bringing the past into the present as we anticipate future possibilities guided by our present individual “subjective aims” to achieve a wholeness greater than the sum of its parts. Of course, memories of the past are highly personal. According to Alfred North Whitehead, our individual subjective aims for ourselves are usually at odds with other individual’s subjective aims for themselves and with God’s initial aim that everything caught up in the field of space-time achieves an intensity of communal harmony in relation to all that exists and has existed in an interdependent harmony of wholeness and beauty greater than the sum of its parts. Process theologians refer to this as “the Commonwealth of God.” But we only know what we have experienced, and we must remember what we know to have a meaningful, non-repetitive, future of creative possibilities, a future marked by what process theologians call “creative transformation.”

It sounds quite easy, remembering what we know. But there is no better definition of faith. In remembering the past, we are drawn to future possibilities (God’s initial aim for all things and events ceaselessly moving through space-time) that we must take into ourselves and somehow balance with our subjective aims for ourselves that are mostly in conflict with God’s initial aim for us. Knowing and remembering are the yin and yang of faith, the defining polarities of faith.

Faith has little to do with “belief.” “Beliefs” are opinions we assert without sufficient evidence to call our beliefs “knowledge.” “I know something to be true or false” is different from “I believe something to be true or false.” Beliefs may be true, false, stupid, irrelevant, superstitious, or just plain weird. Beliefs may even express faith. But beliefs do not engender faith. As Luther found out the hard way during a thunderstorm, no one has ever “believed” oneself into a state of faith. We find ourselves in a state of faith, of trust, and then must interpret the meaning of what we trust to understand what we are into, which is the function of theology, that is, “beliefs.” Belief and doubt are two sides of the same coin whose only value is in an exchange of knowledge. They can crystallize as opinions that buy us nothing, or work for our profit as questions, for since both are really saying, “I don’t know, but . . .” as they lead us back to ask, “What, then, is true?” And if questions are pursued in fact, not fancy, they will bring us to new knowledge. But only if we don’t cling to the past we remember. It all begins with faith as remembering.

But if we are unfaithful, we forget. We forget our own experiences, which have shown us that the unknown exists and that we are contained in it. We know this because we always come up against the limits of our knowing and the fact that there is always something beyond what we know; because we have, if we are awake, experienced “miracles”—inner and outer events that cannot be explained by anything we “know.”

It is certain that the unknown surrounds us. Mostly, we forget. But when we remember we know the unknown as much as it can be known, but never completely. Then we become open to it, feel (“prehend”) our relationship with it, and understand by experience that it is the source of all knowing. Then we understand that it is the unknown that remembers us, and in remembering, we find (“prehend”) our own meaning.

It took me a long time to grasp this. I graduated from Chapman College (now University) in 1961 with a split-major in philosophy and political science, both disciplines steeped in the Enlightenment mind-body dualism going back to Descartes; “objective” matters of observable “fact” placed in solitary confinement from “subjective” experiences of these “facts” as the sole method for discovering “truth” in all academic disciplines. The natural sciences became the model for this way of looking at things because of the huge successes in what the sciences reveal about natural processes, ranging from subatomic particles to biological processes in all living organisms to the cosmological structures of the universe itself. Even most of the courses I studied in seminary during my Claremont School of Theology days—courses in Biblical Studies, Theology, Church History, Pastoral Psychology, and my major interest, History of Religions—were all grounded in Enlightenment assumptions that assumed “truth” was something static and unchanging.

Nevertheless, I had questions. At a time in which Neo Orthodox theology was making absolute truth claims about Christian faith as superior to all other religious Ways, I remained deeply skeptical that any Religious Way could corner the market on truth about “the Sacred,” as historians of religions often phrase it. I was then, and remain, a theological pluralist. I suppose this suspicion evolved as I encountered the sheer multiplicity of religious claims, some contradictory, some feeling like two sides of the same coin, some just plain stupid, some dangerous, some capable of harmonizing the religious pluralism ingredient in all religious Ways. So, the more I studied history of religions the less I felt it necessary to commit to any specific religious Way. I remained noncommittal regarding questions of normative truth, but deeply committed to describing the religious diversity of the Ways I studied, particularly in Japanese Buddhism, which was also the focus of my major professor, Floyd H. Ross.

Then in the fall semester of 1964, my last year in seminary, I bumped into John B. Cobb’s seminar on Alfred North Whitehead. Cobb is one of the most skillful and patient teachers I ever experienced. He had to be, because reading Whitehead’s major work, Process and Reality, is not easy for students trained in the presuppositions of substance philosophy and theology grounded in Descartes’s mind-body dualisms. Whitehead’s process view of reality is diametrically opposed to Enlightenment assumptions and paints an opposing metaphysical portrait. But reading Process and Reality for the first time was like trying to read a foreign language without prior knowledge of its grammar and vocabulary. So, like my father who was taught to swim when my grandfather threw him out of a boat into a cold Colorado lake, I jumped head first into process philosophy. And as I flailed around kicking and screaming for half the semester, Cobb finally threw me a rope.

I was very interested in symbolism and how symbols function in the world’s religious Ways. During one of many visits to Cobb’s office he suggested I might write a seminar paper comparing and contrasting Whitehead’s understanding of symbolism with Paul Tillich’s theory of how symbols function in theological reflection. As luck had it, I had written a paper on Tillich’s understanding of symbols the previous semester for a seminar on Tillich’s theology, so Cobb’s suggestion seemed as good as anything I could come up with on my own. By the time I turned my paper in at the end of the semester, the scales had been lifted from my eyes as the elements of process philosophy began falling into place. While I wouldn’t call this experience “revelatory,” I found myself asking, “Why had it taken me so long?”

The first thing I discovered was just how useful the categories of process philosophy are for understanding one’s own religious Way and the religious Ways other than one’s own. Process philosophy, as opposed to Enlightenment philosophies, provides an amazingly useful hermeneutical (“interpretative”) bridge by which to understand and interpret humanity’s religious Ways without falsifying the experiences of persons actually practicing these Ways. The structuring parallels between the Buddhist’s Way’s worldview grounded in the universal experience of impermanence and Whitehead’s understanding of process opened the Buddhist Way to me that has to this day been of great value in my work, particularly my work in Buddhist-Christian dialogue as well as interreligious dialogue in general. Later I discovered that process thought could make important contributions to science–religion dialogue. In fact, by the end of my seminar in Whitehead’s philosophy I couldn’t imagine anything that couldn’t be clarified by the process categories of Whitehead’s worldview. Things, or I should say “events,” were brought together in a creative synthesis—from history of religions to the natural sciences to the processes of education to philosophy to economics—that to this day continue to amaze me. In short, I had discovered a worldview that literally pushed me into interreligious dialogue and interreligious dialogue with the natural sciences as a third partner. I had experienced an intellectual conversion.

Yet I sensed that something was missing. While I was immersed in the study of non-Christian religious Ways, my approach to Christian tradition was best characterized as “skeptical.” I had taken numerous courses in theology and biblical studies from wonderful instructors during my seminary days. Still, I remained profoundly skeptical and resistant because of the sheer pluralism of two thousand years of Christian claims about the historical Jesus. I mean, just how many ways are there for understanding the history and meaning of the historical Jesus? Just how many views of the incarnation have evolved in the history of Christian teaching and practice? Which of these claims come closest to the truth of the actual events surrounding the historical Jesus? How many ways are there for confessing that the historical Jesus is the Christ of faith? And by the way, how and why did these confessions arise? Which of these confessions actually relate to life in the twentieth, and now the twenty-first, century?

These questions posed some hard issues. First, I discovered similar pluralisms ingredient in the non-Christian religious Ways I studied. Just how many portraits of the historical Buddha or Mohammed or Confucius are there? Which most accurately reflect these teacher’s lives and teachings in their own historical contexts? Just how many ways are there of being a “Buddhist” or a “Muslim” or a “follower” of the Daoist or Confucian Ways? The pluralism I discovered in the Christian Way is reflected in all of humanity’s religious Ways.

Second, if I was going to pursue research on interreligious dialogue I needed to immerse myself in the study of Christian historical and philosophical theology. And my world began to change in ways I never thought possible. An important part of this change was bumping into the work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith. As I read his book, The Meaning and End of Religion, more scales fell from my eyes.

According to Smith, there is no such thing as “religion.” What he meant was that “religion” is a noun, a categorical abstraction that mostly Western scholars imposed on religious experience in the search for some defining “essence” by which to measure whether what religious people do is really “religious.” He pointed out that there is no word for “religion” in the scriptures of the world’s religious Ways and that “religion” is an “Enlightenment” invention, useful for missionaries trying to impose the Christian Way on Asian, Middle Eastern, African, South American, North American, Australian, and Pacific Islander cultures during the heyday of Euro-American colonialism, but having little relation to what “religious” persons believe and practice. In other words, human beings have been “religious” since shamans painted the shapes of animals in deep caves in Lascaux, France, and Altamira, Spain, 18,500 to 14,000 years ago without the abstractions inherent in the noun “religion” to define what they did and why they did it.

This meant, third, that the categories of process thought with its emphasis on internal relationships, subjective experience, interdependence, and process and becoming not only opened avenues by which I could explore non-Christian religious Ways, process thought also opened me up to the depths of Christian faith and practice. I was what Karl Rahner called an “anonymous Christian,” meaning “a Christian without knowing it.” To my utter amazement, I was in a process of theological conversion, an intellectual conversion with little experiential depth of the meaning of Christian faith. I studied the “words” of Christian faith, but I still didn’t hear the “music” of Christian faith.

I don’t mean that I had never worn the label “Christian.” At age fifteen I joined up with a youth group called the “CYF” or “Christian Youth Fellowship” because I was chasing a girl. That didn’t work out, but I eventually joined First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Santa Monica, California. This required that I undergo baptism by immersion. I was previously baptized as an infant in the town of my birth, Pueblo, Colorado, at my father’s United Brethren church. But the Disciples didn’t recognize infant baptism or baptism by sprinkling. I had to have the full immersion. I am probably one of the few Lutherans who have been baptized twice. For Disciples, baptism was only offered to “adults” as a means of “washing one’s sins away.” But my friends tell me that even two baptisms were probably not enough.

The Disciples of Christ movement was the outgrowth of groups from various Protestant denominations (especially Presbyterian and Baptist) coming together in the nineteenth century, with early leaders Thomas and Alexander Campbell (father and son) and Barton Stone. More associated with the Anabaptist reaction against the Lutheran and Reformed traditions of American Protestantism, the Disciples claim to have no unifying theological doctrines or liturgy. Some local congregations are quite progressive, but most are fairly conservative while some border on Pentecostal fundamentalism. The congregation I joined was rather progressive in its social outreach while the minister was theologically conservative.

In 1957, the year I began my freshman year at Chapman College, I decided to “enter the ministry.” This goal lasted until my senior year. By this time, “being a minister” just didn’t fit into my developing interest in philosophy. The problem was that I had been accepted for admission to the School of Theology at Claremont, and I wasn’t sure I should pursue this avenue of education given my decision not to pursue ministerial studies. I had to make a decision: either begin my studies at the School of Theology or get a job for which an undergraduate philosophy major was mostly useless, like the job I was offered selling soap for Procter & Gamble after graduation from Chapman.

But then my luck changed, or perhaps grace again was at work at this point of my life. New students at the School of Theology were required to visit the campus for an interview with a member of the faculty before the beginning of the academic year. The academic dean, F. Thomas Trotter, interviewed me. He listened patiently as I explained my decision not to become a Disciples of Christ minister and that I wasn’t sure if seminary would be a good choice for me. When I finally stopped talking, he leaned back in his chair and flashed a grin. “Just give us a try,” he said. “You may have decided the ministry isn’t for you, but there are other avenues to pursue. You won’t know which one until you try.” So, I “gave it a try,” and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

The faculty at Claremont was incredibly excellent and diverse. Trotter taught a course in “Tragedy and the Christian View of Life.” I had to plow through Moby-Dick in an undergraduate American literature course. But I had not made the connection between literature and theological reflection until under Trotter’s direction I read it a second time. More scales fell from my eyes. The professors in Biblical Studies, Systematic and Philosophical Theology, Church History, and my eventual field, History of Religions were all...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Faith as Remembering
• Chapter 2: God’s Absolute Accessibility
• Chapter 3: Just Who Is a Follower of the Historical Jesus?
• Chapter 4: The Place of Honor
• Chapter 5: Why Did It Take So Long?
• Chapter 6: Is This All There Is?
• Chapter 7: A Beginner’s Mind in a Mirror
• Chapter 8: Why Should Christians Study the Buddhist Way?
• Chapter 9: On Seeing, Scripture, and Tradition
• Chapter 10: The Way of the Historical Jesus
• Chapter 11: The Christ of Faith
• Chapter 12: Unqualified Disciples
• Chapter 13: Religious Pluralism
• Chapter 14: A Meditation on Environnemental Destruction
• Chapter 15: The Pluralism of Life and Death
• Bibliography