Nance

Nance's Search for the TRUTH

Seek the TRUTH and it will set you free.

Dare to question, dare to test things,
Dare to seek, search unconfined,
God's embodied in your question
Already God had you in mind.

Dare to question, dare to feel doubt
Dare to take the path you chose
God's is already deep inside you
Closer than you dare suppose.

Dare to question, dare to say no to
Far too simple, glib replies,
Dare to wait and dare to waver,
God will still be at your side

Dare to question, bold and fearless,
God will still believe in you
Life in you is God's own purpose,
Already, God has you in view.

Dare to question, doubt and wonder,
You are loved, by God retrieved
You are longed for, seen, discovered,
Free to live and to believe
~Tor Littmark~

As some of my friends know,
I am experiencing a re-assessment of my spirituality.

The thoughts below from John Shelby Spong's books and essays ring true to me.

Facing 2007 with Apprehension

The year 2006 began with an unresolved war in Iraq. It ended with that war not just unresolved, but obviously deteriorating into the unmanageable chaos of civil war and tribal violence. More American military lives were lost in November of 2006 than in any month in over a year. On Monday, December 17, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer did its weekly honor roll, listing 20 new deaths of service personnel. The majority were less than 22 years of age.

At the same time, the war this President abandoned against Al Qaeda and its Taliban supporters in Afghanistan, has become a major battlefield once again, as unfinished wars almost always do. In between the first day of 2006 and today, the American people have spoken powerfully through the electoral process to say that the Iraq war no longer commands sufficient popular support to be maintained. Despite an obvious attempt on the part of those, who originally sought and promoted this military conflict, to portray those who spoke in opposition to it as unpatriotic, cut and run "defeatocrats," the American people voted for a change in Iraq policy. The resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, the principal architect of the war, was accepted on the day after the election. One thought the message might have been heard.

Prior to the election, as a result of political pressure on the President, a special bipartisan task force was formed to study American options in Iraq. This Task force, co-chaired by James Baker, a close confidant of the Bush family, who had served as Treasury Secretary and Chief of Staff for President Reagan and Secretary of State for George H. W. Bush, and Lee Hamilton, a retired and highly-respected Democratic congressman from Indiana, was made up of highly regarded citizens, including retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. No one could dismiss this task force as anti-Bush or even as partisan. Hopes rose for a change in Iraq strategy when Robert Gates, a member of the task force and a former CIA director was tapped by Mr. Bush to succeed Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Perhaps this administration was finally ready to listen to a broader segment of the nation than just the ideological "neo-cons."

When this report was made public, however, the President began to distance himself. In a series of carefully calculated photo ops and under the guise of seeking "the fullest possible consultation," President Bush asked for a military review and a State Department review to "balance" the Baker-Hamilton report. It was hard to believe that he would receive objective advice from either source since current military leaders are all Rumsfeld appointees and Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, has from the very beginning been part of the planning of the Iraq war that has turned disastrously wrong. In several television venues former Secretary Baker warned the president gently but consistently that no war can be successfully engaged unless it has the support of the American people. This war has lost that permanently.

The President then announced he would make an address to the nation on the war in Iraq before Christmas. Once more hopes rose only to be dashed again when the President, signaling great confusion in his administration, postponed this address until after the first of the year. "I will not be rushed," he said. Ten more soldiers died in combat the next day.

One also wonders why, after three and a half years of war begun and fought on America's timetable, so much time was now needed for a review. Did the President not have the facts? Is he unfamiliar with the chaos? Does he not know that people are dying while he dallies? Does he not realize that his tactics have not brought the results he anticipated?

In that interim between the proposed pre-Christmas speech and the now anticipated post New Year's Day address, the President began to float trial balloons. None gave any indication that he would heed the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton task force. First, Secretary of State Rice announced that the Administration would reject outright the recommendation that the United States talk with Iran and Syria. This has been this President's consistent policy and the results have been appalling. Refusal to talk to North Korea has accomplished nothing except the testing of atomic weapons by the North Korean government. Not engaging Iran led to the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, his present threat to build atomic weapons and his hosting of an international conference to declare the Holocaust to be "nothing but Jewish propaganda." Not talking with Syria led to a war in Lebanon and the rise of the Syrian-trained Hezbollah army. Mr. Bush does not seem to realize that talking to one's enemies is not a sign of weakness. In his testimony before Congress, James Baker noted that when he was Secretary of State he had talked with America's enemies, including mortal enemies like the Soviet Union regularly.

Then the rumors began to fly around Washington that the new Bush strategy might not be disengagement but escalation. Sending 20,000 to 50,000 additional troops to "finish the job" was the rumor bandied about. The President began to talk about honoring our fallen service people by sending reinforcements to defeat these "enemies of civilization." No military spokesperson I know supported that conclusion. No Republican leaders save for John McCain, saluted this trial balloon. David Gergen, a highly respected Republican strategist, said on national television that Mr. Bush was "doubling his bet." That is not a wise thing to do when one is holding a losing hand. Others referred to him on national television as "stubborn" or "headstrong." Many were haunted by the President's earlier claim that he did not consult with his father on foreign policy; he consulted with his "heavenly father." The only trouble with that is that religious people seem to hear from God that which they already believe.

As this drama was unfolding prior to Christmas, Anderson Cooper of CNN was hosting a series of telecasts on the subject, "What is a Christian?" Evangelical clergy were interviewed who believed that the Book of Revelation both predicted and justified the war in the Middle East. They read this late 1st century book as their guide to contemporary history. They also stated that the Bible was quite clear in its condemnation of homosexuality. These were men, well dressed, apparently well educated, not confined to a mental hospital, being interviewed on national television by a mainstream network. Viewers were presumably accepting these comments as rational, even worthy of serious attention. There was something about these two scenes: President Bush talking about the war and these preachers talking about the Bible that seemed to be eerily reminiscent of each other. Both cited their authority in such a way as to imply that it was not capable of being challenged. The President followed his own intuition, informed by his interpretation of God's will. These clergy followed their own intuitions, informed by their interpretation of the Bible as an expression of God's will. Perhaps 500 years ago these attitudes would not have seemed strange, but in a post-Freudian world, people do not dismiss the inability to make different decisions on the basis of new data as "stubbornness," they recognize it as delusional. In a world where critical biblical scholarship is more than 200 years old, no rational person would treat a book written between 1000 BCE and 135 CE by a wide variety of individuals as if it contained the secrets of the end of the world, a blueprint for the human disaster that is called the Iraq War and no one, except a mad man, would accept the idea that this ancient book, devoid of the medical and scientific data developed in the past hundred years, actually prescribed divine rejection of homosexuality.

Because someone perfumes both ignorance and prejudice in religious jargon does not make it less ignorant or less prejudicial. To claim authority for either a failed war or an oppressive religion is a sign of serious mental illness. To have minds closed to any possibilities save those within the comfort zone of a certainty-creating religious or political wisdom is to be incapable of living in the real world. The preachers, when revealed for what they are, can always retreat into their religious ghettos and sing their hymns and say their prayers to the God who does not require that they think or grow. However, when the President of the United States acts in that fashion, the destiny of the entire nation and even the world is placed at risk. Delusion can be tolerated in the private arena. It cannot be tolerated in the public arena. Yet if the president refuses to follow the advice of his bipartisan task force, co-chaired by the man who made him President by getting the Supreme Court in 2000 to stop the Florida recount, and instead of altering his now demonstrably failed war policy simply escalates the conflict by sending in additional troops to seek a victory that no number of troops can ever achieve, then it would not be out of bounds to name this behavior as no longer in touch with reality! Insanity is the act of continuing to do again and again that which has never worked and expecting a different result.

This nation does not want or need another impeachment trial, even if there have been high crimes and misdemeanors such as lying about the reasons for going to war, manipulating intelligence reports, allowing and concealing the abuse of prisoners in defiance of the Geneva Accords and violating the rights of citizens by the use of unauthorized wiretaps. While ignorance is not an impeachable offense, these violations of the law and of the Constitution are.

This nation does need, however, to recognize that there is something worse than the trauma of impeachment. That is to allow a delusional man unable to face reality to serve as our leader for two more long and dangerous years. Those are our choices if this President opts to escalate troop levels in his attempt to rescue with the blood of our armed services personnel this disaster of his own creation.

We await the New Year with apprehension. We await the President's decisions with hope but not with confidence.

In my search for the "truth," many of the beliefs I have embraced in the past are crumbling.
The heart will never worship what the mind rejects.

If a religious institution clings too long to concepts that no longer are believable, it will die of irrelevance. Once, human beings worshipped the sun. Then we learned that the sun is a ball of burning gas and matter and no longer would our minds allow us to worship that object.

I am still drawn to Gothic space, stained glass, great organs and beautifully done liturgy. I am not drawn to pre-modern concepts, an invasive supernatural deity who lives above the sky, the concept of original sin, blood sacrifice as the means of salvation, etc.

If God is understood as a supernatural miracle worker then why are miracles so few, so spasmodic? If God has the power to stop the bubonic plague, the Holocaust, the spread of AIDS or the Tsunami and does not, is God moral? Does the concept of miracle represent the limits on our knowledge or our unresolved superstition? Does it not seem to keep us in a state of dependent immaturity questing after the power the church claims to possess but rations so sparingly? I do not choose to live in a disordered world ruled by a capricious deity who blesses one person with healing and not another, saves one life from peril and not another.

The only miracle I recognize is the miracle of expanded knowledge, heightened awareness and transformed humanity that does, I believe, help us to see into the very realm of God where life is eternal, love is unbounded and all lives are called into the fullness of being. That is the God I now see in Jesus and the God we also see now so inadequately in the miracle stories of the first century and in the apparitions of the superstitious in every age. This is the God who captures my imagination, challenges my intellect and elicits my devotion.

I am not interested in being a part of a Christian Church that has to defend its faith against the insights of new knowledge. Any God who has to be protected from new truth cannot possibly be God. If the only alternative to the traditional view of God, that portrayed the deity as a supernatural theistic Being who invades the world periodically in miraculous ways to accomplish the divine purpose, is to say that there is no God, then I find that a healthier solution. That, however, is not the only alternative. I seek the God beyond the gods of men and women, beyond the gods of church and religious systems. I seek the God who is not bound by those antiquated creeds and dogmas that were hammered out in a world that no longer exists. If church leaders insist that all truth is ultimately defined by the inerrant words of a 3000 year old book, then we are back to the time when the Christian Church condemned Galileo. Christianity lost that battle and it will lose this one as it marches headlong into the marginalized existence that leads to an inevitable death.

The Christian Church has a choice to make. It will either engage the thought of the contemporary world or it will die. The early signs are that this Pope and the Church he represents have decided to cast their lot with the mindless fundamentalism, which is today the public voice of Protestant Christianity. This means that they are willing to allow their children to be shielded from truth and insight because the God they worship is simply too small to be God for the 21st century. A Christian Church ushering in a new Dark Age has no future.

Let me say boldly what religious leaders are loathe to say. There is no God in the sky who will send out a divine vacuum to gobble up the human waste that now warms our atmosphere. There is no heavenly filtering system through which we can recycle the water of our river, lakes and oceans. In today's world there is no scapegoat other than ourselves upon whom we can heap the blame for our rapid environmental degradation. That is why the number and intensity of hurricanes seems to rise every year. That is why the American Midwest has seen a tenfold increase in the number of tornadoes in the last fifty years. That is why killing heat waves have become regular features of both Europe's climate and ours. These things are not the result of a wrathful God punishing us for some supposed misdeeds; they are the direct result of human beings continuing to act with childlike irresponsibility because we have not yet embraced the idea that there is no supernatural God in the sky who will protect us even from ourselves.

Has not the time come for our understanding of God to mature, to embrace reality? Our 'heavenly parent' definition of God acts to relieve us of responsibility. Our great religious fear is that if God is not this Supernatural Being in the sky, then there is no God. Atheism is, we think, the only alternative to theism. That is the boundary over which religious people fear to walk.

Suppose, however, that God is defined as the Source of Life, so that our worship demands that we cooperate with all of nature rather than trying to conquer it for our own benefit. Suppose God is defined as the Source of Love, so that our worship enables us to journey beyond the limits of our fear to embrace all that is. Suppose God is defined as the Ground of Being so that our worship relates us to a holiness that permeates all that is. That is what we need to understand before we human beings can grow up and accept responsibility for our world.

I make no claim that my path is the only path or that my truth is the only truth.
I regard God alone as Truth and I know that I do not possess God. I only journey toward God.

More thoughts....

The primary image of God in the Bible is surely the theistic image; that is a God conceived of as a Being, supernatural in power, external to this world but periodically invading it to answer prayers or rescue a person or nation in distress. This theistic Being is inevitably portrayed in human terms as a person who has a will, who loves, rewards, and punishes. Although one can find other images of God in the scriptures, this is the predominant and familiar one.

Theism is also the understanding of God revealed in the liturgies of the Christian churches where we meet God as one who desires praise, elicits confession, reveals the divine will, and calls us into the spiritual life of communion with this divine Being.

So dominant is this definition of God that to reject theism is to be an a-theist. An atheist is one who denies the theistic concept of God and, since theism exhausts most peoples' definition of God, that is heard to be saying there is no God. So when one is confronted with the question, "Can one be a Christian without being a theist?" the door is opened to much theological speculation. This question can only be asked when one lives in a world where the traditional theistic view of God has become inoperative because of the explosion in human knowledge over the last five hundred years.

We once attributed to the will of this deity everything we did not understand, from sickness to tragedy to sudden death to extreme weather patterns. But today sickness is diagnosed and treated with no reference to God whatsoever. Tragedies like the attack on the World Trade Center, tornadoes, floods and tsunamis are investigated by this secular society without much reference to the will of God. That was certainly not the case when things like the Black Death or the bubonic plague, swept across the world. When death strikes suddenly today, we do autopsies that reveal a massive coronary occlusion or a cerebral hemorrhage as the cause. We do not speculate on why this external Deity might have wanted to punish this particular person with sudden death. Even what the insurance companies still call "acts of God" are today thought to be completely explainable in nontheistic language. We chart the formation of hurricanes from the time when they develop as low pressure systems in the southern oceans and we mark their paths until these weather systems are broken up. No meteorologist I know of refers to these phenomena of nature as divinely caused to inflict godly punishment upon a wayward region, people, or nation.

If the theistic understanding of God exhausts the human experience of God, then the answer to the question of the layperson is clear. No, it is not possible to be a Christian without being a theist. But if God can be envisioned in some way other than inside the theistic categories of our religious past, then perhaps a doorway into a new religious future can be opened.

Christianity has been shaped by traditional theistic concepts. Jesus was identified in some sense as the incarnation of the theistic God. It was said that he came to do "the Father's (read: the external supernatural supreme Being's) will." Indeed, Jesus was portrayed as a sacrifice offered to this God to bring an end to human estrangement from the Creator. Theologians talked of original sin and "the fall," to which, it was asserted, the cross spoke with healing power and in which drama of salvation the shed blood of Jesus played a central role. But in a world that has abandoned any theological sense of offering sacrifices to an angry deity, what could this interpretation of the cross of Christ possibly mean? In a post-Darwinian world, where creation is not finished but is even now ongoing and ever expanding, the idea of a fall from a perfect world into sin and estrangement is nonsensical.

The idea that somehow the very nature of the heavenly God required the death of Jesus as a ransom to be paid for our sins is ludicrous.

A human parent who required the death of his or her child as a satisfaction for a relationship that had been broken would be either arrested or confined to a mental institution. Yet behavior we have come to abhor in human beings is still a major part of the language of worship in our churches. It is the language of our ancient theistic understanding of God. It is also language doomed to irrelevance and revulsion. At this point the real question thus becomes, "Can Christianity be separated from ancient theistic concepts and still be a living faith?" That is why this inquiry is such a threatening, scary question. Once it is raised to consciousness, it will never go away and will destabilize forever the only understanding of God most of us have ever had.

This debate already rages in the theological academy where God has not been spoken of as an external, supernatural Being, periodically invading the world, in decades. Yet the experience of God as divine presence found in the midst of life is all but universally attested. Jesus as a revelation of this divine presence is at the heart of the Christian claim, but the way it has traditionally been processed and transmitted is now all but universally rejected by enlightened church leaders.

So perhaps the major theological task of our times is to seek a new language in which to translate the premodern theistic categories into the postmodern, nontheistic language of tomorrow. The religious leader who does not address these issues offers little more than an unbelievable 'opiate for the people.'

It is the crucial concept in developing a revolution in theological inquiry. Most Christology seeks to explain how the external theistic deity could be met in the person of Jesus. Most moral theology is based on the assumption that a theistic deity will dispense reward or punishment. Most prayer is addressed to an external theistic deity who has the power to answer those prayers with an act of miraculous intervention. Most liturgy is directed toward this external theistic deity. Theism is therefore the lynchpin that once pulled brings the traditional formulations of the Christian faith crashing down. Reformation and the future life of the Christian church depends on the ability of the contemporary Christian to dismiss theism as an adequate explanation of God, without dismissing the God experience and even the God experience in Jesus as unreal. It is no wonder this debate scares so many.

Strict constructionists are never satisfied and biblical fundamentalists will always be thwarted and disillusioned because they cannot stop the relentless march of time. Both the Bible, written between 1000 B.C.E. and 135 C.E., and the Constitution, written in the 18th Century embody truth, as truth was perceived in the time of the creation of each document. No document contains truth for all time, the answers to all problems or quotations to apply to every contemporary issue. Such talk is both uninformed and nonsensical. Yet we still hear this rhetoric and the ones who employ it are still trying to hide their prejudices beneath their source of authority. Time moves on, and when it does it always make "ancient good uncouth."* Either we learn how to move with it or we become irrelevant. "Strict constructionists" and "biblical fundamentalists" are both destined to lose. The issue is only how much harm will they do before they realize it.

We see the same mentality almost every day when various evangelical spokespersons, such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson or R. Albert Mohler go on national television to express their opinion that the words of Scripture are the inerrant word of God. Their comments are frequently in the service of opposing evolution. All of these gentlemen either ignore the last two hundred years of biblical scholarship or they are not aware of it. Their rhetoric does little more than give aid and comfort to uninformed members of local school boards in the less well educated and less cosmopolitan parts of our nation who thrive on a lack of knowledge and who want to carry us back intellectually to the 1920's, so that once again we might put learning on trial and convict it as we did in the Scopes Trial in Tennessee. One wonders when the historicity of Adam and Eve might begin to be defended again by the current ecclesiastical mentality. The Bible is so often used to perfume both ignorance and prejudice.

If one had any doubt about this developing religious darkness, an op-ed piece that appeared on July 7, 2005 in the New York Times removed any lingering questions. This article, written by the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schoenborn, suggested that evolution was "not compatible with Catholic doctrine." This author, no secondary figure in the Roman Catholic Church, served as the editor of the official 1992 Catechism of that Church. Earlier in his career this man had actually defended the literal historicity of the Book of Genesis. Adam and Eve here we come! Though the Vatican did not officially authorize this editorial, it is well known that Cardinal Schoenborn and Benedict XVI are very close friends and in that Church such events are never unplanned or accidental.

Cardinal Schoenborn's argument was intriguing as he first tried to undermine John Paul II's words spoken in 1996 that "Evolution is more than a theory." Secondly, he sought to drive a wedge between what he called the Theory of Evolution articulated by Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution that is held by those he called "The Neo-Darwinians." According to the Cardinal, the distinction was that evolution "in the sense of a common ancestry might be true," but evolution as "an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection is not." Perhaps he does not recognize that the full title of Charles Darwin's 1859 book was "The Origin of the Species by Natural Selection." The implication was that anything that disagrees with or challenges the true faith of the Catholic Church could not be truth ipso facto. That is the typical claim found in all imperialistic religious systems. Clearly an alliance is emerging between the Vatican and the "creationist" wing of Protestant fundamentalism.

Evolution, let it be said clearly, is no longer a debatable theory. DNA evidence has made it very clear that all of life is deeply and historically interconnected. Medical science assumes the truth of evolution in all that it does. The vast majority of the scientific world no longer salutes the primitive idea that a supernatural deity who lives above the sky has guided evolution to the glorious end of humankind and that it will go no further. Yet frightened religious leaders now interpret that to be an assault on their image of God. These leaders are unable or unwilling to embrace the fact that God for most Christians is a human creation that got frozen in a pre-modern form. The religious anxiety of our day stems from the fact that this definition of God is dying. Conservative Roman Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants appear to know that in the depths of their souls and so they seek to use authority in the task of divine artificial respiration. Former Christians also appear to know that much more consciously. That is why the fastest growing religious movement in the western world is the Church Alumni Association.

What the fundamentalists, both Catholic and Protestant, do not appear to embrace is that evolution by natural selection is only the tip of the iceberg that threatens their narrowly defined religious system. Once the Darwinian principle of evolving life is fully understood, the old idea of an original creation that is both good and finished is doomed. The post-Darwinian scientific world almost unanimously views creation as an ongoing, unfinished process. Therefore the suggestion that there ever was a "fall into sin," becomes nonsense, and the doctrine of 'original sin' collapses. The story of Jesus as God's invasion of the world to rescue us from this fall becomes inoperative. One cannot fall from a perfection one never had. One cannot be rescued from a fall that never happened. One cannot be restored to a status one has never possessed. Inevitably, as this theological house of cards falls, we become aware that the traditional way of understanding baptism as the washing away the sin of the fall, or the Eucharist as a reenactment of the moment when the divine rescue was accomplished on the cross also become meaningless. The idea that salvation was accomplished in the shedding of Jesus' blood becomes barbaric. Neither Cardinal Schoenborn nor the Protestant "creationists" appear to understand any of these implications in their shallow analysis of Darwinian thought. It is a sad day for enlightened people when the leaders of major parts of the Christian Church seek to reassert Catholic authority or scriptural certainty by herding us back into the ignorance of yesterday.

This frightening specter becomes very real when we recognize that this is the kind of Christianity encouraged by members of the Bush administration. They too are engaged in an assault on both intelligence and learning. They deny global warming, they oppose stem cell research, they are closed-mindedness about end of life issues, they express uninformed negativity about homosexual persons and they attempt to blur the line between church and state.

The clouds are darkening. The fundamentalists are now allied with the Vatican and the present administration has given this mentality credibility by embracing it. Is it any wonder that I fear for the Christianity that has long nurtured me and for the country that I love.