Waking up: The shift from one point of view to the another

My Facebook set of friends is one of the more diverse bunch of people I've run across online. That's because suddenly my past and present have collided in conversation in ways that would never happen if we limited our relationships to in-person contact. So what's happened is that my high school friends, who knew me mostly as a short, a-political, theater student without much of a religious agenda, are interacting with my college friends who knew me as this zealot who shared the Four Spiritual Laws with anyone stuck in a bank line with me. My missionary and Vineyard friends are interacting with my liberal theological graduate school buddies. My homeschool momma friends are talking to my business networking friends here in Cincy. And of course, my Obama campaign colleagues are talking to my rightwing radio pals from bygone years.

And like me, many of my friends have gone through significant shifts (either a deepening of loyalty to their original commitments, or a radical reassessment which led to a new, changed point of view).

I respect all of you (even when we disagree). I wouldn't keep you around on my FB if I didn't! In fact, I have kicked a few off my list when they've crossed that invisible line called "Coerce Julie back to what is good for her and tell her she is going to hell if she doesn't listen."

So here's the thing. For years (over 20), I adopted a point of view both politically and theologically that was rooted in a set of assumptions (these assumptions were handed to me with care and conviction, and they were based on the core doctrines of evangelicalism at the time). I remember once saying to Don Carson (some of you will remember him), the head of our Campus Crusade chapter at UCLA, "Why are you telling me that predestination as a theological tenet has to be believed in order to be a Christian? I haven't even had time to think about it yet." I had the same reaction to inerrancy (Is this really necessary to be a Christian? Can I think about it a bit?), to the doctrines of heaven and hell. I still remember saying at my first Bible Study at Kappa Kappa Gamma that I didn't like the idea of hell, after all, that would mean all my Jewish friends from high school and step relatives were going there... and I couldn't quite *get* that. I mean, it was one thing to believe in heaven and hell when you grew up in La Canada or Pasadena, where everyone you knew was Protestant. But what happened when you had to include people you loved, A LOT, in that number?

I found myself suddenly in conflict: to belong meant to adopt (uncritically, really) the values and doctrines that enabled me to remain a part of the community (this new, great group of people who were so much fun to be with), or I could reject those tenets and not be in the group, not have the love, worship, prayer, moral values, and community Christianity offered. So adopt I did (and worked to learn the apologetics for these tenets) and from then on, made it my chief aim in life to save those I loved and those I hadn't yet met from hell.

But time has a way of tugging at the tangled threads. The intellectual conflicts, the theological discrepancies, the arguments online with people I genuinely grew to love about splitting hair differences... how did these show the compassion of Jesus or the relevance of spirituality in a globalized world of diverse expressions of reality? It hurt to think Christians couldn't even agree on very basic ideas and would be cruel and critical of each other arguing over what amount to technicalities, many times.

The rightwing vision of politics has also walked in lockstep with the evangelical vision. Since we grew up knowing we couldn't criticize theology (who could ask if Jesus really rose from the dead with a physical body or if the Bible has mistakes, and stay in an evangelical church?), we are also equally beholden to rightwing politics as naturally right, clear. If someone speaks with conviction, we tend to adopt that point of view as long as it leads us back to reinforcing those original tenets we were told to adopt (our membership in the community is at stake if we challenge those tenets - ask me how I know this).

To inhabit someone else's point of view, to give it weight, to care about its interior logic is not one of the values of evangelicalism. We are taught to convert people to our point of view and to understand theirs only enough to change their minds. We spend countless hours reinforcing our own beliefs in community contexts, privately, listening to sermons and tapes, reading books, listening to music. We adopt these views as our own, but from within the safe protected context of like-minded people (and we elevate those with more education as leaders as a way to tell us that we are thinking critically, to help us navigate the pesky incongruity or penetrating question of someone from the outside). We suppress our own questions. We avoid The Jesus Seminar or Richard Dawkins, because they are dangerous.

This is not to say that there aren't brilliant men and women on the right or in the conservative evangelical movement who have dug deep and have spent time drawing conclusions that they feel are both intellectually sound and honest. There are. I've read them, met some of them. What I reject today is that so many people have adopted their thinking second-hand. (To be fair: on both left and right, though I am less versed in how this happens on the left - what I have seen is much more arguing over nuances on the left - a chief value of theirs is dissent!)

If you haven't sat inside the point of view (letting it be "right" for awhile, looking for its logic, how it hangs together, how it creates a worldview that coheres and supports a vision of life and happiness for the one who holds it), you can't actually know if yours is true (or at least, "true enough" for your life). It's one reason I attend a black church. I was sick of secondhand reports about what black leaders are doing and saying or not doing and saying. I was sick of the myopia of white church that thinks reconciliation means having a sister church that is black, or getting more blacks to attend your white church. I wondered what the black community had to say about it. I wondered how they experienced America, and the church, and "truth" from their experiences.

I spent two years reading pro-choice literature, getting inside the mindset that saw being "pro-choice" as the higher morality (yes, they do feel that way!), as the obvious right belief system that is more compassionate and ethical than the alternative. I did this after we had been actively involved in Operation Rescue. I also wish pro-choice people would spend time understanding the radical commitment of those engaged in civil disobedience to stop abortion, too.

What's happened to me, then, is that I got tired of secondhand news, theology, sociological commentary. I stopped buying into the scripts I'd been handed and became unwilling to defend something just because it had always been "true" in the community I loved. If I had one piece of advice for those who can't quite grasp what it is that's happened to me, I'd say pick the thing you are most afraid of (the thing you most don't want to be true) and go read about it. Meet someone who holds that viewpoint and let that person influence you. Invite their ideas into your living room, care to understand the world from inside someone else's mind. If you do that for a little while, yes, you will change. But your compassion will also grow, and your insights will be yours, and your spirituality will deepen.

I'm also conscious of the fact that there is so much I can't possibly know well enough to make adequate judgments (how could I ever say if global warming is real or not? I'm not a scientist, have no training or tools to evaluate the arguments, can't come close to making a real case that isn't some watered down version of someone else's). So I hold my current "positions" with some guardedness, knowing that I'm a few arguments away from another shift. But I'm no longer afraid of getting it right or wrong. I love the process, and I feel privileged/relieved/blessed to have been able to leave behind the need to vilify "the other" in order to protect my point of view. (That doesn't mean I won't criticize the other, but I hope I do it knowing that I could again shift my point of view if the facts that I understand warrant it.)

Peace.

Bonhoeffer: Religionless Christianity

This is an audio of my talk from the Truth Voice (Subversion) Conference in Dayton last weekend. We have a video of it, but right now only 12 minutes are posted. I'll put up the embed once they have re-uploaded it. I think audio is less distracting anyway (I use my hands so much! lol).

Bonhoeffer: Religionless Christianity

The meat of the material really gets going after minute 13. I give an introduction that includes personal story and some biographical detail of Bonhoeffer's life. I'd welcome any engagement with these ideas. Am slowly putting together a little dossier of materials, insights, writings and stories to include eventually in some sort of book. Yes, the elusive book goal! :)

Anyway, enjoy!

Here I am!

Julie Bogart: Bonhoeffer's Letters from Prison from Virgil Vaduva on Vimeo.

Virtual Lives

In cleaning out some old files on my computer, I ran across this journal entry from five years ago (Feb. 2004). It stunned me. I remember very clearly what prompted the insights and thoughts at the time. Yet it spoke to me on another level now. See what you think:

Dr. Dewey [professor of New Testament] commented: “God is not in any book but in the Reality of our lives. Trouble is we tend to lead virtual lives. Wouldn't know Reality if it knocked... yet when it does, well, it does. When the baby decides to come, when the water breaks, when the contractions start, you have to face Reality and go with the waves... The stories [in the Bible] are told to help people identify the waves in their lives... the beauty and the horror...”

Last night I had such an "Aha" about what it means to lead a virtual life. I kept playing over and over again in my head: what does he mean we wouldn’t know Reality if it knocked? And then the realizations of my own virtual existence poured in.

How many times have I felt someone else’s feelings instead of my own when relating to that person? I find myself out of touch with what I want, need or think and totally adjust who I am to what that person says, does or is. How often have I pretended that a viewpoint made sense when underneath was a horror or shock that I knew wouldn’t be acceptable?

I’ve lived in a world of faith that put more emphasis on the invisible that I can’t know or touch or see than on what I can know, touch and see. I’ve invalidated what I know to fit with what I’m told I ought to think.

I’ve not trusted my experiences – I’ve allowed other people to tell me what is right or wrong. I let people tell me what was right in my sex life. I let people tell me that my reasons for a move [to Ohio from CA] wouldn’t be good enough – I must let God have his way. I was told that my ideas about a career were inferior to God’s ideas of a career for me. And ironically, those who play the virtual reality game well figure out ways to get both – getting what they want in the guise of God’s giving it to them. This is my particular world of the virtual. There must be others that aren’t bound in religion. [And yes, those are the ones I'm getting know now.]

Am I saying that I am the final word on my life, my authority comes from within? Scary thought! A hundred voices immediately jump in front of me to warn me of the danger of being autonomous.

Yet I might be. And it is such a deeply ingrained wrong way to think (being responsible for self) that I'm almost nervous to write it out. But the truth is that we all submit to authority – only most of the time we pick an illusion – as though we can submit to something outside of self – something we deem bigger and more real than our own authority, even though our personal sense of right and wrong guides even that choice. To own our responsibility, as Bonhoeffer suggests, is too big for most of us. We have been trained not to trust self and we willingly turn over our consciences, our guilt, our aspirations to the stewardship of others pretending that we are not choosing, are not in control, are not risking being bad or making bad decisions.

Who gets control?

Religion
Government
Family
Culture
Pop stars
Fear of Rejection
Psychology
Fame

Reality: what is it? It’s the bottom rung on the ladder of experience and thought. What is the stuff that gets in the way? What do we heap up on top of it (like drugs to dull the pain of the contractions) to avoid living it and being responsible to it?

I love the idea of birth: the water breaking, the baby coming and going with the waves. Oh my God! I know that feeling totally. The baby is coming – I can’t stop it. I’ve lived this experience five times without drugs, without intervention. It was the most miraculous experience I’ve ever had. To let go of control and to completely yield to the process, to recognize that I could only cooperate or inhibit but that it would happen no matter what. My births were the most “in the moment” experiences of my life and the result was sheer exhilaration, power and joy!

What baby is on its way in my life right now? The profound disillusionment with literal faith is what is at work in me [Feb. 2004]. It’s shattering the old attachments and interpretations and ways of thinking… about everything.

Biblical literalism is such a scary place. The worldview that literalism represents has invaded every aspect of how I live and think. It has a strong hold on my thinking. I have a fog settle in any time I move out of it too far. And it is subtle. I thought I had let it go by letting the Bible be fallible and errant. But no! I then want to literally affirm the metaphorical truths in the same way I held to the literal history or geography.

I work hard to do things “right” so that I can control the outcomes. If I parent correctly, if I homeschool conscientiously, my children will not do drugs, they will love me, they will have friends and go on to college. I expect my obedience to the demands of these “promises” to pay off literally. No mystery. No chance to fail.

But what if Reality woke me up? What if there is more there than what I do? How will I respond? Will I suddenly wake up from my virtual existence and realize that there is something else more real?

And isn’t that what happens so often? My parents are “happily married” for 17 years and then Wham! Reality intrudes and my mom discovers my father in bed with another woman. What illusion were they living before? What virtual life had they tricked themselves into believing?

We pile up debt and believe we own things. We promise ourselves that next year will be better and then miss what’s happening today. What is today teaching me?

I find myself consulting experts and trusting someone else’s word over my own. I don’t want to follow my thoughts - I want someone to tell me how it is. But the baby is coming. I will be born. The “I” I’m supposed to fear, call sinful, distrust… that me is the baby this time. Can I trust that Reality is my greatest teacher, that I can find my way through life with as much honesty as I can muster? Direct access to reality! What a concept.

Dorothy Sayers says:

“And to every man and woman to whom integrity of mind meant more than material gain, defenders in the central keep of man’s soul, personal differences forgotten in the face of a common foe, to be true to one’s calling whatever follies one might commit in one’s emotional life, that was the way to spiritual peace.”

“There are a number of people who are disconnnected between what you do feel and what you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.

“Yes, said Harriet. “And I am one of them. I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel.”

“Oh I don’t think that matters, providing one doesn’t try to persuade oneself into appropriate feelings.”

Virtual living: persuading oneself into appropriate feelings.

And isn’t that the nature of not knowing Reality?

We have to learn the language game of the group we join and then reinterpret our experience of life in light of the new “proffered” reality. We aren’t free, we can’t speak, we don’t share. We conform, adhere, play by the new rules and find safety and protection from a direct experience of Reality.

This must be what E. M. Forster is about. He constantly challenges people to have their own opinions, to face their hypocrisy in the face of truth and beauty. Is it better to love a painting because someone famous paints it or because it speaks to you – you, the one for whom it was painted – the viewer, not the student or priest or tourist.

Oh my! It’s coming to me now. I know I may have a piece of it.

The truly free thinker, or free mind is the one that can stay open to self and not give in to the pressures of the group. On the other hand, we need each other to help us see reality. We need others to help us not be bound by our group think tendencies. But what are friends for? They aren’t supposed to exclaim loudly “How can you think that?” They are supposed to be the midwives of a birth. They don’t know ahead of time what the baby will be. If they do, they aren’t midwives any more. They are the ones who will rob you of the truth once it’s born. They will tell you what baby you should have had.

But real friends will marvel with you and help you see Reality as it unfolds in your life.

That’s it.

Hmmm. So many thoughts. I'll leave those for another day. What is your version of virtual living? How has Reality awakened you?

So what do you believe now?

That question is one I don't get asked as often as you might think.

One of my best friends, for instance, has staunchly defended me when I've been targeted as theologically dangerous. Yet she's never actually probed to find out what I believe today.

I told her once, "Please feel free to ask me anything. I don't mind sharing."

She replied, "I like you. I trust you. I don't ask because I don't really want to know. If you share something that I find contradictory to my beliefs, I don't want that to change how I feel about you. I don't know if it would. So I figure it doesn't really matter if I know."

I appreciated that point of view, actually. Mature and kind. And the truth is, my changed beliefs do impact my friendships adversely sometimes.

Still on the occasions where I've been asked, I do a profoundly poor (stunningly bad, inadequate, impoverished) job of answering that question. I fumble, mumble, stumble over big words and ideas, and offer something really lame like, "Well, I'm Christian, but not a Christian any more." Whatever that means.

On Monday, my therapist tackled the big question. What do you believe now? Do you have a Higher Power, anything from which to draw strength or help you define your purpose? Timing made sense. I was crying over things I can't change, won't change and what those patterns have cost me... maybe for good.

She flipped through her notes.

"You were an ardent Christian at one point in time. But you say now that you aren't. How is that for you? What is your spiritual life like now?"

"Religion, feh!"

She laughed. "I didn't ask you about religion."

Oh for the love of Schleiermacher! Hello. I tap-danced, sandwich-boarded, and Four-lawed that script: Knowing God is about personal relationship, not religion. Faith is about spirituality not religious practice.

But I knew she was broadening the search. What about Buddhism?

Ack! Sorry. Can't get into it. Something about saffron yellow robes and vegetarianism. When I read Buddhist writings, it's that hard-working place of foreign language learning all over again. Nothing familiar, strange accent, translation required. No peace.

Yoga works for me because it's the body not the mind, not even the spirit (though my yoga instructor might say otherwise). I just yield to it and stop processing. The readings are grounded in the real, not the virtual. I can do that.

Weirdly, I do attend church. Started up a couple of months ago. Downtown, inner city black church. I don't blog about it because it's not a project, it's a place for me to be in community. I do love it.

But the bottom line is, I don't have beliefs, I don't have relationship (with God), I don't have spiritual practices. And I don't want them.

For years Jesus stood in the gap when pain mounted, when I couldn't get the love I craved the way I craved it. I worshiped, sang, prayed my heart out, wrote thousands of pages of prayers and love notes, studied the Bible like my life depended on it (and in some very real ways it did). But the bottom dropped out.

I'm not in a search for meaning, for guidance, for principles, for tangible support outside myself (and I mean that humbly... I'm not relying on myself either; I'm bobbing along like a cork on the vast sea of life, letting life itself, and all of my interconnections developed over a lifetime, support me).

My mother prays for me.

My church prays and I hold the hands of the ladies in hats who sit by me and pray with them.

I find myself praying at the oddest moments... in the shower, sometimes in the dark at night, often in the supermarket when I'm alone. I usually laugh while I pray because I don't believe in what I'm praying or saying. It's reflexive. And comforting. And habit.

And helps.

And is a waste of time.

God from below is like that. It's not a head thing. Not even really a heart thing for me. It's more like dirt. Soil, out of which I grow.

The Aberration

In the history of the Christian church (all expressions, ethnicities, denominations), 20th century American evangelical fundamentalism is a blip on the computer screen of time. While it still has some evidence of a pulse, I'd say like Billy Crystal in "The Princess Bride": "It's mostly dead." The short life span is good news for the future of faith. It's not such good news if you were born in the sixties.

That life span, unfortunately, coincided with mine. Bill Bright (Campus Crusade for Christ) turned evangelism into a door-to-door sales strategy with little booklets and Four Spiritual Laws that paralleled (somehow) the physical universe. John MacArthur (Grace Community Church Sun Valley) redefined the sermon with his lengthy word by word exposition that had the look and feel of a college lecture rather than weekly nurturing from the "head of a flock." The US Center for World Mission approximated the number of "unreached people groups," never remembered to update the number and expected young Christians to give up everything to live in some of the most hostile, unreached parts of the world to win the lost to Christ... all by the year 2000.

Dr. James Dobson (Focus on the Family) "took back the family" from Dr. Spock by advocating wooden spoon spanking and following it up with strict patriarchy. Not content to merely take back the family, he created a following bent on taking back the country as well. Randall Terry (founder of Operation Rescue - pro-lifers who gladly went to jail to save babies) proof-texted the Old Testament to shame evangelicals into civil disobedience until he got tired of jail himself and started a bad radio show. John Wimber discovered that Christian pop worship music was big business and then proceeded to believe all he'd been taught about the Bible being literally true. (I admit to admiring that about the guy.) Unlike the rest of the conservatives on the landscape, he tried to "do the stuff" that Jesus did. Depending on who you ask, it's hard to say whether or not he ever succeeded.

Mary Pride led a revolution of large family-ism, home business, home education and home collapse. I remember back in the day explaining to my mother that Jon and I were going to go off of birth control to have as many kids "as the Lord wanted us to have." My mom's memorable response: "We're Catholics. We already tried that. It doesn't work."

New models and methods for "sharing" our faith were being fast forwarded into an exhausted movement of people who had prayed the prayer, had burned bridges with old friends, bosses and family by standing up for the Gospel, who had prayed for intimacy with God in tongues, in closets, on 40 day fasts, who'd studied the Bible until the pages wore out, searching for insights that would reinforce evangelical doctrines. Husbands were keeping promises to wives, wives had given up careers to stay home, children were being raised to distrust the culture, the public schools, Hollywood, and to expect men to lead and women to submit.

Evangelical Christianity became its own self-reinforcing loop of similar people who spoke one language, who saw themselves as embattled good people victimized by the ever-intensifying secular humanist American world. But even more than that, they saw themselves as reflecting true, orthodox, original Christianity, just updated by pop music, Veggie Tales, theater style buildings, television and radio shows, and hip male pastors.

It's so glaringly obvious now that this thing, this culture of evangelicalism, had more to do with a reaction to the slide into postmodernism than anything to do with Christianity of the historic formulation.

Some smart people in my life have tried to tell me that the Christianity I believed in was not the "real" Christianity. Gawd, how that used to bug me. I was living in this massive arena of evangelical interconnections that included superstars, the biggest publishing industry in the country, the most easily spotted Christian movement the media could identify. How could these non-evangelical Christian friends not know what I was talking about or who the heroes of this "true Christianity" were?

Even more, as I began to surf ex-fundamentalist sites, it was clear that there were loads of people like me who had thought that Christianity equaled the evangelical version of it. Proof that the version I knew was legit, representative of real Christianity, literal Christianity... at least by that measurement.

In a classic "baby and bath water" argument, a few of my friends on the outside of this suffocating movement have pleaded with me to reconsider my faith so as to retain a better version of it. Honestly, this is how I wound up in graduate school. I have never liked the "I was this, now I'm that" feel of ex-fundamentalism. I was no more qualified to evaluate arguments for evolution post-evangelical than while living as one. So the quick move to trusting some other "expert" (usually science for ex-fundamentalists) to define my worldview worried me a lot.

Worse, I still found things to like in the Bible, in Jesus and in Christianity. It wasn't all smoke and mirrors. The "commitment to marriage and family" arc of evangelicalism actually served my marriage and family (though I know it hasn't always worked that way for everyone). I loved my community of close friends in the homeschooling movement. I loved the community, period. And the themes of redemption, forgiveness and suffering, valuing the "other," and being a part of lasting change still speak to me loudest through Christian writings, theology and teachers.

Graduate school became the place where I discovered this big huge world of Christianities that I hadn't ever known, loved, understood or considered. It was like leaving the McDonald's playland for Disneyland. No comparison. Made the old version of faith look childish and insufficient.

As a result, I've come to agree with those critics in my life. I was in an aberrant form of the faith.

So now what do I do? Adopt another? Reject them all? Instead of Disneyland, I'm hanging out at the beach for awhile. I'm not ready to get the annual pass; I don't feel ready to commit to one location and call it home. My beliefs? Who really cares? They've not defined me very well for most of my adult life. I'm a bit gunshy of declaring "new convictions" given my history of changeableness.

I decided to try something else. Today, I live by faith, not sight. I got the idea from that one guy in the Bible, in fact. It's a really nice way to live, with lots of different people dropping in for tea and a chat.

Here's what they've said over the years

Quick caveat: The following post is descriptive of conversations that took place years ago when I was in the midst of change. It is not reflective of where I am today. But it may be helpful to those of you who are in the middle of that transition or who know someone who is. Hence the post.

I've been dusting off various old journals and digital copies of forum posts I've made on the Internet over the last seven years. I stumbled across this post from an ex-fundamentalist site I used to frequent. As I slowly admitted to the unraveling of my faith to friends and family, I collected a variety of responses.

I don't get these responses any more. Amazingly. What I get now is friendliness, acceptance, polite questions and perhaps more often than any other response: silence. But I don't mind the silence now (like I did then). I appreciate it. I feel respected by it. I find that I can now be in my old contexts of fundamentalists, evangelicals, and conservative Christians and feel perfectly at ease. I even find myself able to pray with/for them and to speak their language (so to speak) when I need to.

But I wanted to post this entry because it's so representative of the types of unhelpful responses many of us experience when we're going through these seismic faith shifts. I've italicized what I think are more helpful responses for those who'd like a script for how to treat your disillusioned struggling soon-to-be ex-Christian friend. :) Why not? It's my fantasy.

My conversations went like this (drawn from real interactions):

I said: I can't live with the idea that God damns people for eternity if they've never heard of Jesus or Christianity.

Answer: How do you think God feels? Don't his feelings matter? He created these people and they rejected him...

More helpful response: It is awful to think of human beings suffering forever. How have you felt about the various theological options for reconciling a loving God with eternal damnation? Why don't they work for you?

I said: I realized I had never considered whether or not the Bible was the "Word of God"/ divinely inspired. I had been taught that it was a right belief for Christians, was presented with "evidence" from a Christian viewpoint and was shown in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that if I didn't believe it, I couldn't join up. I had never heard that there were Christians, even, who didn't hold that belief. Let alone scads of rational people who don’t believe it at all.

Answer: You need to get into the Word. You need to have faith that it is God's Word and then the Word will speak to you and you'll know it's from God.

Follow-up from me: Certainly. That's exactly what I've always been told and have practiced. Still, how did you ever hear about inerrancy of Scripture? I mean, you didn't come to that viewpoint without someone suggesting it, did you? How many new Christians get up one morning, start reading the Bible and suddenly think, "These are the very, exact, perfect words of God!"?

Answer: You can't be a Christian without believing the Bible is the Word of God. And it has proven true in my life. (Anyone heard of circular thinking?)

More helpful response: I'll have to think about that. Would anyone come to a view of inerrancy without the explicit teaching of that doctrine? I don't know.

I said: These (various and sundry theological) questions have troubled me for my entire twenty years in the faith.

Answer: (thought and implied) Aha! Evidence for the fact that Julie may never have been saved to begin with...

More helpful response: It must feel really weird for you to have had questions all those years while asserting that you believed the main doctrines and acted on them in spite of the questions.

I said: I'm no longer a conservative evangelical and have questioned every single belief I have ever held. I don't line up with any of the cherished doctrines any more.

Answer: I worried about you and prayed. The Lord showed me that you were still his. I was so comforted. He told me that you were just going about your questions in a different way.

I thought: What "different way" is that? How else do people question something? Glad you are “comforted”... but I wish you would know the me I'm sharing with you, not the one you are creating for yourself so that you will feel more comfortable.

She said: You have a really good mind and Satan knows it and is trying to use it. He is attacking you. And because you have a good mind, you have to be extra careful not to be drawn in to his arguments that are lies. It’s a huge responsibility.

I thought: There's nothing to say to this. I can only thank her for her genuine care.

Someone else said: These are good questions Julie and they all have answers. My husband is really good at theology and he will show you what you need to know so you won't have to have these questions any more.

Someone else said: Let's have coffee. I've been through exactly what you're going through and then I found the Lord again.

I thought: Uh, can't be what I've been through if you came out on the same side you started on...

Yet someone else said: Here are some books you may not have read yet - hands over Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict.

Ironically, this is the first book I read as a new Christian in college. Moreover, I read all of McDowell's books and any apologetic work I could get my hands on.

Someone online wrote: Read Lee Strobel's The Case for Faith.

And so I did. That's when I knew I had begun a real theological education. His book felt small, un-nuanced and theologically shallow compared with the diversity of opinions I had begun to study outside of evangelicalism.

An old sorority sister said: How does your husband feel about this change in you? After all, he's the spiritual head of the household.

She hasn't returned my emails or phone calls in four years since posing this question to me in email.

A church friend could have said: We could tell you were struggling and we've been worried for over a year. That's why we've gossiped about you behind your back, I mean, prayed and have never called or cared to ask what you think now and why.

And most of my friends from the old days said: Nothing.

I have several friends who've never said a word yet have gradually disappeared from my life...

--

If you know someone going through a spiritual climate change, the best way to love and support her is to not take her experiences personally. Usually a person in flux is confronting her beliefs for very good (and sometimes painful) reasons. Even if the friend in question was the most radical, committed example of evangelical conviction and action you knew personally, even if that person is the one who led you to faith, the deconstruction process of faith is deeply personal and is not meant to be a commentary on you or anyone else.

Of course rejection of doctrine implies that those who still believe it are not dealing with reality (the new reality approved by the formerly committed believer). Yet interestingly enough, even in the height of my critique of evangelicalism, of the doctrines, of the practices and attitudes that drove me crazy, I didn't feel judgmental of my friends who held onto faith. (I know some do.)

What I did resent was the implication that there was a quick fix for me or that I had never actually known or experienced God before, like they had.

The friends who have served me best during this season are the ones who showed interest in me and my thought processes, who trusted that I was the same person in question mode as I was in committed evangelical practice, who asked me real questions borne out of curiosity, not out of a need to corral and rescue.

If you're reading and you're one of those friends, thank you. I love you.

Crazy for God

Franky Schaeffer has written the one book I'd like to read right now: Crazy for God (subtitle: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back... ). It's a memoir that does what I wish I could do but don't have the street cred to back it up. He writes a book that exposes the unintended consequences of aligning Christian moral ideals with political power in America. He exposes the dark sides of venerated evangelical leaders through the eyes of a son raised in the context of a Christian icon in his father (Francis). In short, with love and pain, he tells the truth.

I got to thinking about all the Schaeffers and the incredible influence they've had on me. I spent two different brief stints at L'Abri in Switzerland: the first in college for a week in 1982 and then the following summer for just over two weeks in 1983. I spent hours listening to Dr. Schaeffer on tape, I ate in their home and the homes of their children, I read as many Dr. Schaeffer books as I could both at L'Abri and when I returned home. I learned that culture and faith need not be at odds. I learned that Christians were supposed to be thinkers with questions, not apologists with answers.

In the fall of 1982, I read A Christian Manifesto by Dr. Schaeffer and for the first time understood that faith was supposed to make a difference in politics, in the larger culture. I do remember harboring some apprehension about the sweeping statement that if the government supported Christian moral values through legislation, it would be good for everyone because these laws would be based on truth (even if secular Americans didn't see it that way). I remember asking myself and my Campus Crusade leader if that posture precluded pluralism, a sacred, primary value in America. I had my doubts, but I still found the book challenging and compelling reading. It's interesting to remember that moment of pause and anxiety, and then to see what has become of the Religious Right. Even so, the How Then Shall We Live? series (conceived by Franky Schaeffer) combined with Reagan's election to office twice led me to my right-wing Republicanism which remained unabated until about two years ago.

In the following years, I joined the Los Angeles L'Abri chapter and attended their local workshops. When I married, I wore out my copy of Hidden Art by Edith Schaeffer (who taught me how to make housework an artistic expression, not the drudgery I had assumed it had to be). When I had children, one of the first books I read was by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay called For the Children's Sake where she unfolded a vision of a liberal education - one rich in the arts, music, nature study, literature, composition and nurturing. Our leaders used her book for a Bible study at the Anaheim Vineyard even though up to that point, it had only circulated in homeschooling circles that I knew of. That book had a profound ripple effect in my life and I can say without question that Brave Writer would not be the business it is without that early influence of the Schaeffers on how I viewed a rich education for children. In 2001, I attended a L'Abri conference in Minnesota to hear Susan speak. I also got to say goodbye to Edith in a serendipitous and memorable encounter.

All this to say: when a Schaeffer speaks, I listen. Franky used to bug me. He has a strident (at times caustic) writing voice (which sometimes seems the inheritance of sons whose dads are larger than life public figures - they have to shout to be heard). I remember Franky's conversion to Greek Orthodoxy, I remember his writing about films.

This latest book is something else. He's telling the truth... truths that have been hidden in the dysfunctional family called the evangelical church. I've been blowing my whistle on this movement in my own way for the last seven years. It's not easy. Loads of people want to limit your experiences, tell you that your version of faith was an aberration, that you misunderstood, that the people are the problem, not the theology or ideology, that you are just bitter or had bad experiences, and so on. In other words, evangelicals largely act like siblings in an alcoholic family: pretending it's not as bad as it really is.

I read this linked interview with Franky and want to share it with you. Read the whole thing. Perhaps I'll write more about particular parts of it later. I know I'll be ordering the book today. Peace.

If you knew me when...

In the last couple of weeks, a strange thing has happened. I've had dreams about people from my past - my best friend while I was in France, a pair of guys I knew during a summer project with Campus Crusade. Almost simultaneously, friends from my past have popped up on my phone, in my email. Apparently I'm one Google search away from being found by anyone who knows me. I tallied up the number of people I've heard from in the last two weeks who are from some earlier time in my life: six.

Suddenly I'm updating six different people on what has gone on in my life in the last 20 years. Has anyone else experienced this? It seems to be the combined impact of mid-forties and Internet search engines. Steve (who posts in the comments) and I met each other "again" through the Internet and as a result, I even went to visit him when I made my trip to LA. We hadn't talked or seen each other in 20 years.

One of the challenges of being "discovered" on the Internet is that my writings range from homeschool and writing advice to liberal theology and apostasy! Depending on when and how you knew me, the second set of writings might be a shock.

But so far, friendship has won out over orthodoxy in each of the recent six cases, and that is a gratifying experience.

Sometimes, though, it's hard for me to know where I left off in the retelling of my life. I get bored by my own story (I lived it and wrote so much about it as it was happening that I can't get up the enthusiasm to go back over and over it). Yet I know that when a person like me (radically committed to the point of inspiring others - so I'm told) makes a big change, it's one that creates that curiosity bug - what does it mean? How did it happen? (And the dark side: if it happened to her, could it happen to me?)

Remember those two guys I dreamed about last night? I Googled their names this morning. Both still work for Campus Crusade: one has his Th.D. from Dallas and the other is working with Human Resources in Asia. That makes a lot of sense based on my memory of them and what I knew about them before.

What would make sense to someone Googling my name who "knew me when" would be:

Jon and Julie Bogart are working for the Vineyard denomination, taking short term missions trips to North Africa, and writing articles about Muslim missions.

Instead, they stumble on my blog where I deconstruct prayer, explain the logical fallacies of soteriology and cap it off by saying that I'm totally sick of church. If pushed to say it, I even admit to being agnostic about God, believe theology is art, not the source of truth, and see Christianity more as cultural assumption than faith.

If you add Jon's journey, you wind up with two people who have abandoned all the trappings of our formerly committed Christian lives and we don't go to church (which is a Big Sin on the scale of homosexuality in the Midwest). What does it mean? What went wrong?

It's this. I suffer from spiritual exhaustion.

As I sat in evening meditation last night at yoga (our three minutes of silence), I realized that from the day I entered evangelical Christianity until several years past when I left it, I feel called upon to make commitments, to express conclusions, to participate in community, to work for good, to analyze and determine what version of faith would be "acceptable" to me in spite of my disenchantment with evangelicalism, to defend the process I'm in, to say nice things about my past and avoid saying critical ones, to find a church, to make use of my degree... in short, I feel called on to create and sustain a spiritual life that makes sense to others and can be classified as Christian on some level.

(I'm not aiming this post at any one of you. This is the collective sense of what I feel when I have had to interact about my faith (or serious lack of it) in the last five years.)

The truth is, though, I spent twenty years devoted, committed, seeking, open, worshipful, in a posture of prayer, relying on the Bible to convict me of sin, disciplined daily to share my faith, to pray for others, to seek to be used by God to heal, working to give to the poor as specified by my church...

I went on to give myself to equally devoted theological study over a five year period (four of which were in graduate school).

The "conclusion" (if you want to call it that) is that I must start over. There is no place for me in any of the current forms of Christian faith that I know about. As Spong says, I'm in exile. I live in midwestern exile from Southern California and I live in spiritual exile from Christianity. The interesting similarity between these two displacements is that I'm happy. I don't feel that I must rush back to Los Angeles to reclaim my identity, nor do I feel I must make sense of Christianity to include me in it.

Instead of passionate devotion and problem solving, I'm resting in the what "is" of my life. I wrote my first UPI column about the Freefall of Faith, something I still feel accurately describes me today:

My search for truth left me with something else instead: uncertainty — a total lack of confidence in any one theological position I had held previously, and as a result, a loss of confidence in God.

Still, though I lost faith, I never lost interest.

To exercise faith in the midst of so little clarity related to the things of God, I have discovered that I must leap into the unknown with humility, trusting that truth has less to do with propositions and more to do with dispositions. Interest has changed me. I am open to people and how they understand the world, rather than defending myself against them. I want to know why certain beliefs are meaningful in one context and not as meaningful in another.

In fact, without presuppositions and doctrines to support me, I feel a bit like I've jumped from a plane without any parachute at all. The view is gorgeous, though, as I look at the world from above, rather than defending one bit of turf as my own, as God's own. I don't know where I'll land. I don't know how fast I'm falling. But the air is chill and exhilarating, I sense the Spirit in the wind and I feel caught in a process of discovery that feels something like truth.

It's a freefall. I call it faith.

Seems I'm still living there, suspended in the air.

Home churching

We did a stint of home churching, that nutty scheme where one parent leads songs and the other gives sermons, and if you're a fundamentalist, it's always the man who talks and the woman who chirps.

In our case, I was fed up with weekly services in gymnasiums, converted warehouses, steeple-people brick buildings, theater in the round houses of worship, and build-to-suit auditoriums. After wandering in the Cincinnati ecclesiastic wilderness for over a year, I had no desire to meet in our living room. I had grad school (which was enough spiritual nourishment for me) and almost no desire to pray or sing or sermonize in a group. Jon, on the other hand, felt that the abrupt conclusion of our church quest would leave the middle kids especially feeling that we had abandoned all our beliefs. So for his sake and for the kids, I gave in.

Our first few weeks in the living room included a cassette player which pumped out Vineyard worship tunes. We stood, sang, raised our hands, closed our eyes, swayed... If you went to a Vineyard, you know what I mean. The middle kids stayed seated. It's a little weird when there are only seven of you.

We usually followed the singing with a Bible passage and discussion about what it meant, how we might apply it and I usually tacked on some historical criticism to make use of that degree I was earning. I mostly didn't pray. I was in the period of no prayer where any time I tried to pray, I felt like the biggest hypocrite. Jon prayed. I was grateful for that. But prayer and singing only lasted for about a year in our home church.

I mentioned in another post that Jon embarked on his own deconstruction process that was quite different than mine, though perhaps my process contributed to his on some level. He stumbled on a book by A.N. Wilson about Paul that he purchased and read for a Bible study we led about the book of Galatians. Wilson's book was followed by others, especially those that dealt with science and faith. Suddenly Jon found himself asking and answering his own questions which meant that our conversations became much less touchy.... for awhile.

A surprising side effect resulted from Jon's re-evaulation of his beliefs. I didn't like it. While I was the one asking the hard questions and discovering alternative answers, I had unwittingly relied on Jon to hold onto our original beliefs... for the kids, for me, just in case. It felt safe to play at the edges of doctrine when there was this anchor in the family who would still take the kids to church, who would still answer their hard questions with comfortable and familiar refrains.

Suddenly he was thinking thoughts and sharing new opinions... ones I didn't even hold. Worse, he drew what are known in the modern world as "conclusions." He moved into new positions, painted the walls and added a sectional. As a postmodern, I prided myself on sketches, architectural design schemes and flipping through magazines for new ideas. Ambiguity, reluctance to commit, openness to multiple positions, reserving judgment—these were my new cherished values. I imagined that anyone sincere in deconstruction would feel reluctant to switch allegiances too quickly or completely. Not so for Jon. He made changes faster than I asked questions.

But what did I know? This was his process, not mine. When he came to a new point of view, he shared it, with conviction, just like he'd always expressed himself. I had to regroup and allow for that difference between us. It was hard. Especially when I thought about the kids. What would the kids do with all this change so suddenly?

For a long while (over a three year period), we continued our weekly homechurch ritual, but it evolved. No more singing. Discussion of biblical passages now meant walking a tightrope - expressing our changing beliefs without overstating them or causing too much dissonance. Now the discussion of verses included Jon's ideas which were not identical with mine which were no longer identical with evangelical teachings. Johannah asked to be taken back to our old church (we accommodated). Noah opted out all together. And the younger kids stuck with us until we got sick of listening to ourselves.

What the Cee?

So what's up with me? I mean, do I have an agenda? Am I out to insult the sincere Christians in the world?

Of course not. Some of my best friends.... (you know the drill). And while I love the saints, I hate the unexamined life and culture.

So I'm out to expose the crazy-making, not the sincerity.

Because I want to. Because it helps me and some other people who read here. When I was in that deconstructing process myself, I looked everywhere to find someone who'd listen and help me think, reason and clarify.

I found out pretty quickly that Christians can't do it. Once you say something that appears critical, the closest you get is "Well, that may be true of some obscure minority that I've never heard of, but you must have had a very Unique Strange Hurtful Doctrinally Incorrect experience in Christianity because what you express is not at all normative nor correct."

Oh really? You don't recognize any of this in your church?

Well, then some of the nice ones come back and acknowledge that Yes, of course, there are excesses, and you can find extreme people in every group, but the truth is, there are lots more people who have better theology, who are loving and kind, who don't do the weird things you cite on your blog, who see faith as mysterious, who act generously, and so on... You overstate the case, they say.

That line of reasoning reminds me of arguing with my husband. You know how you get frustrated and say, "You never take the garbage downstairs after you take it out of the can." And then he's all, "That's not true. I take it out sometimes." But like, the point wasn't the frequency of his taking it out. It was the fact that today and enough times previous he hadn't and now you feel all up in his grill about it and want him to get just how irritating it is so you say "never" to get his attention, but that diverts it to a semantic argument until one of you attacks the other with a pillow and wrestles him onto the bed for a make-out session... Oh wait. TMI? Sorry.

Anyway, the point being... the emphasis in "overstating" or in what I consider "isolating" a behavior is to draw specific undiluted attention to the issue. Why would that be helpful? Why is it helpful for your bank to pay undiluted attention to each deposit or withdrawal on your account? Do you really want them to get it right "mostly" and to be generous to themselves as they process your experience of your bank statement?

H-e-double hockey stix no!

And while Christians are human beings with flaws (hopefully your bank is a machine without them), they are guided by what is called Absolute Truth. I'm looking at the damaging impact of that overarching belief on flawed human beings (not the good that that belief does) and expressing it here. That's the focus. That's the agenda.

I isolate behaviors because they affect (on balance) how everyone feels about Christians (all of them, regardless of what brand they are because the general population doesn't make the nit-picky distinctions between varieties that Christians make). Most Americans get a general impression and that impression is based on real, concrete, frequent applications of Christian identity to issues of faith, salvation, community, moral posturing, and (some would say, regrettably) politics.

So I bring that stuff here. But not every day.

I also like writing about postmodern theologies, feminism, black theology, Bonhoeffer, and the Jesus Seminar. Those interest me even more, though I don't write about them as often. But it appears by sheer number of posts that besides my fan-girl enthusiasms for Los Angeles, Tiger Woods in his red Nike underarmour, the Bengals when they win (which this season is like never) and the obviously clever, original comments of my children, deconstructing Christianity takes up the bulk of my posts.

But it seems like you have an ax to grind because you can't stop talking about it.

Well, yeah! I do. I might have to talk about it forever. Because if the only people who have anything to say about what it's like to leave that brand of faith stop talking, there is nowhere for those who are in that deconstruction process to go. They need writers like me. I need bloggers like them. And those are the people who like to read here (at least it seems like it; they never complain).

Are my experiences representative of evangelical Christianity? Of course, they are. I've got the resume to back it up. Are they the sum total of Christianity? Of course they aren't. But I'm not writing to be balanced or to describe the whole of Christianity. I went to graduate school to learn how to do that and it worked.

And as I thought about it all in the shower while shaving my legs, I realized that what I like? What really makes me happy?

...is creating a space for people who need to talk about their evolving disenchantment with Christianity.

It's a singular, startling, mostly liberating, sometimes painful, relationally isolating experience. Blogs and forums help.

If you're looking for balance or someone to find the jewels in the midst of the manure, go read someone else's blog.

For those who enjoy my writing, thank you. It's really gratifying to read your deeply thoughtful comments that contribute to me and the others who read and post here. And all of it's a lot of fun.

Falling away from faith Pt. 10

In addition to reading the Bible through the historical-critical methodology (which in itself was a genuinely new way for me to investigate Scripture), graduate school opened to me other modes of inquiry: ideological criticism, reader-response criticism, autobiographical interpretation, feminist and liberation critiques, narrative criticism and more.

The most powerful of these (to me initially) was ideological criticism, or sometimes called "reading against the text." In my years of evangelicalism, the aim of all Scripture readings was to find the harmonic thread - the way the passage being read fit into the rest of the Bible and validated our core beliefs. One such inviolable belief was that God never changed. That meant the God of the Old Testament who led the Hebrews to defend their lands, to take other lands and to wipe out other people groups had to be reconciled with Jesus, the Son of God who modeled radical notions of peace.

Another belief was that if the Bible said "God said it," then God must have said it. There was no chance that the words in the Bible were somehow the words men had put into God's mouth. If that were the case, then inspiration of Scripture (the version of inspiration that allows for no inconsistencies or errors) would be at risk.

Reading against the text, then, meant to consider that some stories consolidate power, subdue challenges to power or articulate proper hierarchies that control some and establish others as the God-chosen leaders. Ideological criticism, or reading against the text, means to ask questions about who gains what from a particular version of the story and who suffers loss. It means giving a close reading to notice if the text manipulates anyone.

I wrote a piece on Numbers 16 that takes an ideological critical view. Sometimes I think it's easier to understand how something works by experiencing it rather than my telling you about it. So I've included that short essay here.

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Question #2; Numbers 16:1-50 (Ideological Criticism)

The Bible is peppered with narratives that shape our ideas about power relationships between people and God, particularly how those power structures are formed and reformed. Who has access to God, is one of the recurring issues confronting the ancient Israelites. Given the gradual shift from the human experience of intimacy with a fully anthropomorphized deity in the Garden of Eden, to the God of Exodus who dwells in smoke and fire on a forbidding mountain, it’s not surprising that the privilege to approach God dwindles from general access to a select few, of God’s own choosing.

Any time a common experience becomes scarce or a select few are given special access, the potential for jealousy, rivalry and abuse of privilege exists. Numbers 16:1-50 represents the skillful conflation of “two episodes involving defiance of leadership” (Blenkinsopp 173). Dathan and Abiram (two Reubenites) join with Korah (a Levite) and 250 lay leaders to challenge how hierarchy and authority are lived in the community.
“Ideological criticism is interested in examining the content and context of these various faces of oppression and their ethical significance” (Postmodern Bible 304). What are the implications of this text as a product of writers who have a power position to protect? How is divinely appointed privilege (that separates laity from clergy) dangerous? I’d like to look at the nature of the content and context of this story first, and then at the ethical significance of this passage for us today.

Korah’s challenge to Moses doesn’t demand more authority for himself, even though that is how Moses interprets it. Korah says, “You have gone too far! The whole community is holy; every one of them, and the Lord is with them. Why then do you set yourselves above the Lord’s assembly?” (v. 3) Korah criticizes the system of leadership that operates according to pre-established degrees of holiness. He confronts the arrogance and exclusivity of the leadership.

Moses responds by asserting, “You Levites have gone too far” (v.7). He recasts the criticism as originating in a competing hunger for power and uses shaming tactics to underscore the danger of challenging or criticizing his leadership: “Is it too little for you that the God of Israel has separated you from the congregation of Israel, to approach him in order to perform the duties of the Lord’s tabernacle…?” (v.9) He assumes that the lay leaders and the Levites want to be full-fledged priests and argues that instead, they ought to be content with their current status in the community.

God confirms Moses’ interpretation and executes a spectacular judgment of Korah and his men; the ground opens and swallows the rebels including all that is defiled by contact with them–wives, children and even entire households (v. 32). No one could be in doubt of God’s meaning: don’t challenge the God-ordained leaders, nor should anyone desire a place in the religious hierarchy that has not been appointed by the Lord.

The judgment took place in the “midst of the assembly” (v. 33) and should have served as a teaching moment. But the congregation couldn’t discern that there had been cause for such a judgment, “You have killed the people of the Lord” (v.41), they protested. Their “rebellious” comments caused the Lord to send a plague upon the congregation, which was only quelled when Aaron (the rightful, ordained priest) executed the proper ritual to reconcile the people to God.

The ideological message couldn’t be clearer–leaders are appointed by God. Complaining about them lands followers in a heap of trouble. And only by the merciful execution of the proper atoning rituals by the elected leaders can the congregation remain rightly related to God and protected from further punishment. Situating this text in its historical context, Blenkinsopp suggests that a struggle for temple control and its revenues, as well as a challenge to priestly hegemony in the Persian period (6th-4th BCE) might clarify the ideological agenda of this story. The priestly writers, in an effort to protect their privileged position, have written a cautionary tale for the Israelites–a place for everyone and everyone in his place.

In my opinion, this story should not be used as an endorsement of authoritarianism. Nor is it a sanction against criticizing leaders. Read uncritically, one might find support for clerical superiority and resistance to criticism from the laity. As a woman in evangelical circles, I have experienced similar lines of reasoning: “Do not challenge male leadership of the church. God gives you your sphere of influence and it is wrong to question God’s hierarchical structure.” An ideological critique of this passage offers us a means for evaluating the dangers of authoritarianism, especially the kind that suppresses criticism of leaders by those who are in power.

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An ideological reading of the Exodus account might ask why Egyptians not in power deserved to suffer the same way that the leadership did? An ideological reading of New Testament epistles might ask why such a strong hierarchy related to men and women is asserted when there is no corresponding teaching in the Gospels, or why Paul seems inconsistent in his beliefs about the roles and value of women in Christ.

There are loads of other ways to read the Bible (I've not even touched on half of them here). Scot McKnight, ironically, is doing a series on Jesus Creed right now that is outlining some of them.

Are these new to you? Familiar? Helpful? Distressing? What do you think?

Falling away from faith Pt. 9

I'll be completing this series under this title with Part 10, but I'll continue to discuss issues drawn from this series and will change the title to reflect those changes.

A few emails have asked if I think "falling away" is an appropriate term for what has happened to me and others. I used that phrase because of what it means to those who are still in the more traditional formulations of the faith. It's often confusing to create new terms and then define them. What I've gone through fits the typical "idea" of "falling away" yet it also challenges it on some levels. So by using that title, I've given a signal about what kind of discussion this series will be, but I also hope I've challenged some of the assumptions of what falling away ultimately means or looks like.

I used to say that I had lost faith but never lost interest. That's still a workable distinction related to how I've changed in my relationship to Christianity. Still, we'll look at the word and idea of "faith" in another installment because the meaning of it has changed a bit for me as well.

Now for the next installment proper.

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When I threw out the "Hail Mary" to Dr. Dewey about my concerns regarding the Pentateuch, I did so because I could tell that my thinking was still limited by how I'd been trained to think about the Bible. I didn't expect a response from Dr. Dewey, yet he sent one and it was at the time, completely surprising to me. I've excerpted the parts I thought would be useful here. The bits from my original email are in blue, Dewey's response is in black, my new comments are in red.

Anyway, we got into whether there is enough credible evidence for the exodus to verify it as a historical event. Clearly there isn't enough evidence to prove it happened. But there is also an absence of disproving evidence as well (which in the circles I come from is some sort of validation for the historical fact of the exodus event...).

If someone makes an assertion then one must deliver an argument; one cannot simply argue from the negative.

I haven't forgotten this comment. When I read now, I ask myself what the argument for something is. If there is no argument to be made, I resist drawing categoric conclusions.

...But then Dr. Melcher went further to say that we can glean spiritual truth from the story regardless of its historical veracity. The discussion even went so far as to affirm that God delivers spiritual truth through it whether or not the exodus actually happened.

Remember when we talked about "true fiction"?

I remembered the discussion about the Gospels and Paul's letters. It's not that the writers were lying, it's that they were shaping the narratives to deliver a message. I could relate to this a bit as a writer, since I find myself doing it all the time, never with the intent of lying or misrepresentation, but with an eye to delivering the message with as much power and insight as possible.

...Something that did not happen but the insight was what was at stake.

Remember the word "insight" because it changed everything for me.

Remember the ancient oral tradition wants to generate meaning -- not fact. At the same time the story tellers come from a time and place. There is an historical and social location for these "true fictions."

There is some evidence of covenantal formulae in the ancient east 14th to 12th centuries BCE; such treaties appear again around the 7th. So, the older argument is that one can link the covenantal formula with these artifacts. What does this mean? That some sort of covenantal treaty was possible, when during the period formerly known as the time of the judges. In the pre-monarchic times the hill peoples and some incoming nomadic tribes gathered in a federation against the urban Canaanite culture. This incipient revolt is possibly mirrored in the exodus tales.

This calm discussion of what might have happened in the historical context that mirrored the texts felt strangely soothing. It felt neither defensive nor destructive. Just curiously interesting.

This is when I started to get muddled. I asked her if the Jews and Christians of history didn't in fact believe that God actually did those miracles and saved the Jews from the Egyptians in that way. She said that they did but that that wasn't the primary point of the story.

The ancient people were "naive literalists" but be careful - for the term literalist only works truly with early 20th century Americans who read the printed Bible with modern scientific empirical eyes. What I mean is that the ancients took the stories and used them in their present and if the stories had meaning in the present --they would modify them if necessary --they would continue to use them.

The truth is, we do this still today, even with the Bible. We avoid certain stories and texts that make us uncomfortable and embrace others based on the meanings we generate from them.

...And what good is that "truth" anyway? Are these "beautiful ideas" sort of like the Greek ideals? Or is redemption (by God?) real? If it's real, how would we know it? Weren't these "miracles of old" God's evidence of his redeeming power for another age? And aren't we now stumped as to how to know or prove anything about God? And what good is redemption metaphorically anyway? What am I being redeemed of? from?

...Don't get caught up in the behavior implied in the overarching metaphor without discovering the way in which the metaphor plays out. You sense this in the story of Abraham and Isaac. This is a story that masks the culture's move from sacrifice of children (evidently a Canaanite ritual) to a substitution model. The tradition keeps the story going, but the horror is somewhat muted. It is good to feel the horror again, to see what sort of breakthrough the story was gesturing at.

...It's times like these that I'm convinced I've lost all faith in God or contact with anything invisible or spiritual. I feel like a material girl in a material world. If I can see the bible as ancient literature that is both beautiful and horrifying, interesting and revealing (about peoples and times and religion from another era), I'm okay with it.

The Holy = fear + fascination according to R. Otto. There need not be any morality attached.

This was a brand new concept to me and it explained a lot of what I hadn't understood about the God of the Hebrew Scriptures.

e.g., an automobile for many Americans is a sign of the holy - for the vehicle both attracts and causes caution --throw in a sexy babe or hunk and the fear/fascination is multiplied. But nothing moral just a sense of power running along the nerves. This is very close to much ancient sense of the holy. The Jewish prophets started connecting the story about a God who cares for slaves, for the no bodies, the throwaways, to the sense of the holy and a new chapter comes about...Buddha is making startling connections in his own way around that time too. Hmmmm.

For the first time, I got chills. Connecting a holy, amoral God to a God who cares for the nobodies brings about a crisis for the nature of God. The narratives cause us to reevaluate what we thought we knew about God and to redefine what holy means to us today.

...But the moment someone tells me that there is rich spiritual truth in a story for me today that probably doesn't represent historical reality, and the metaphor I'm supposed to appreciate means I'm endorsing partiality on God's side with a capital P, well, I'm lost. The bible becomes a source of real angst, anger and disappointment.

You are detecting the underside of the Bible. It is there and there is even more.... If God is only what we have in the Bible then you will want to get clear of such a beast. But the Bible itself is complicated with starts and stops about what the divine can be. The Hebrew scriptures already contain rebellious moments where the humans enter into the divine without leaving the earth. A poor way of putting it... Another way. God was real for them because God was there, present to them. Can we say that today? God is not in any book but in the Reality of our lives. Trouble is we tend to lead virtual lives. Wouldn't know Reality if it knocked...yet when it does well, it does. When the baby decides to come, when the water breaks, when the contractions start, you have to face Reality and go with the waves... The stories are told to help people identify the waves in their lives...the beauty and the horror...

I stopped cold when I read "God was real for them because God was there, present to them. Can we say that today? God is not in any book but in the Reality of our lives..." I knew that what I had been shedding was "virtuality."

And then to think of the stories in the Bible as helping people to identify the waves in their own lives, not just beauty, but horror too...

Grrrrrr.

Is this all because I used to be a literalist? :-(

YES, you are taking things, words seriously. But look around for the context. It is probably more fluid and more complicated. But it still comes from human beings who are trying to make sense of things within their limits...

Something clicked back in 2004. I saw for the first time that the Bible might be a resource for exploring what humans understood to be the nature of the divine at any given point in time rather than a word-perfect for all time description of how God was, is and will be (that also needed to be harmonized and reconciled within itself).

Additionally, the idea that the biblical writers were moved to communicate insight (more than convey history) profoundly impacted how I read all texts. It's not enough to give a thumbs' up or a thumbs' down as to whether the writings represented 20th century standards of historical veracity. Rather, an author's intention in most instances is to describe an experience (a vision, a belief, an event) while delivering meaning. Even if the insight is one with which we ultimately disagree, finding out what that insight addresses is useful for theological reflection rather than merely validating it historically or scientifically.

In Part 10, I'll look at other ways to read Scripture that help us get at the "insight" layer.

Falling away from faith Pt. 8

Let's take a closer look at how a literalist reads the Bible, even when in the deconstruction phase of faith.

In February of 2004, I wrote an email to Dr. Dewey when I first entered the Pentateuch class (taught by a Presbyterian professor). That email does a good job of expressing my thinking at the time. I've quoted it below.

In another post, I'll share part of the response from Dr. Dewey. His way of interacting with what troubled me in the Bible was startling to me, and the beginning of a new way of reading the Bible.

I'll also share how my approach to Scripture has since shifted. There are methods of reading and interpreting the Bible that don't rely on a literalist mindset. Literalism plagues both believers and ex-believers. It's used both to support the accuracy of the Bible and to discredit it.

For instance, I remember one ex-evangelical saying on a forum that he remembers thinking when he was a Christian, that if he could just sit down for two hours with an unbeliever, and then could patiently walk that person through the Bible, by the end, the person would become a Christian. He could achieve a coherent reading of the meaning of Scripture that would "prove" the truth of the Bible and Christianity.

After he walked away from faith, he discovered that he had a similar feeling: that given two hours with a Christian, he could walk that person through the Scriptures showing the inconsistencies and problems with the text and by the end, the person would leave the faith. In posting these two similar accounts of his perceptions about how to relate to the Bible, he realized he had not changed his approach to Christianity at all, just his conclusions. His story describes well how literalism holds us (Christian and ex-Christian) hostage - we are beholden not so much to conclusions, but methods. Those methods lead us in circles.

I entered graduate school hoping to find a way to transcend the literalist tendency in myself. Unfortunately, my Pentateuch class had plugged me right back into that thinking and all the problems that came with it.

I'm stomping around my kitchen after tonight's class about the Pentateuch and I kept thinking one good conversation over a beer with you might clear things up. So I decided to type my rant out and send it as a kind of cyber prayer to you, my "professor /priest."

Anyway, we got into whether there is enough credible evidence for the exodus to verify it as a historical event. Clearly there isn't enough evidence to prove it happened. But there is also an absence of disproving evidence as well (which in the circles I come from is some sort of validation for the historical fact of the exodus event...). But what happened in class tonight really got to me.

Dr. Melcher pointed out that when we try to establish the exodus as a historical event by examining each of its details for historical credibility, we are laying a modern template over an ancient text and asking of it what it wasn't intended to deliver. The ancient writers weren't concerned with the degree of historical accuracy that we are today. They wanted to package and deliver theological truth in a narrative that may or may not have happened quite as they described it. So far, I understand. But then she went further to say that we can glean spiritual truth from the story regardless of its historical veracity. The discussion even went so far as to affirm that God delivers spiritual truth through it whether or not the exodus actually happened.

This is when I started to get muddled. I asked her if the Jews and Christians of history didn't in fact believe that God actually did those miracles and saved the Jews from the Egyptians in that way. She said that they did but that that wasn't the primary point of the story. The theological truth was more important still. Which truth?, I asked. "Well, the fact of God's redemption. God has worked as redeemer in many of our lives which validates that truth in the story."

Dr. Dewey, this is when I feel crazy. I want to stand up in class and say: What on earth are you talking about? If we can't verify whether or not God actually split the Red Sea (or the Reed Sea or the sand bar or whatever) to save the Israelites, if we don't know if the Israelites were ever slaves and then fled Egypt, if we can't verify the story factually, how can we possibly know if "God" is redeeming us "metaphorically" or "spiritually" in our lives today? And what good is that "truth" anyway? Are these "beautiful ideas" sort of like the Greek ideals? Or is redemption (by God?) real? If it's real, how would we know it? Weren't these "miracles of old" God's evidence of his redeeming power for another age? And aren't we now stumped as to how to know or prove anything about God? And what good is redemption metaphorically anyway? What am I being redeemed of? From?

But worse than all of that - whether or not the exodus really happened doesn't matter to me one way or the other. The idea that either in reality or metaphorically God would kill the first borns of all the Egyptians, would wipe them out playing "tribal god" to the Israelites as the means of delivering a message of redemption to believers for all ages, so sickens me I can't make heads or tails of what the powerful spiritual truth ought to be. I can't bear to think of God this way. I'm not moved. I'm not drawn into deeper awareness of God or redemption or spiritual truth.

Instead, I'm left horrified by both the potential reality and/or the metaphor.

So what the hell is wrong with me?

It's times like these that I'm convinced I've lost all faith in God or contact with anything invisible or spiritual. I feel like a material girl in a material world. If I can see the Bible as ancient literature that is both beautiful and horrifying, interesting and revealing (about peoples and times and religion from another era), I'm okay with it. I actually enjoy it. But the moment someone tells me that there is rich spiritual truth in a story for me today that probably doesn't represent historical reality, and the metaphor I'm supposed to appreciate means I'm endorsing partiality on God's side with a capital P, well, I'm lost. The Bible becomes a source of real angst, anger and disappointment.

Grrrrrr.

Is this all because I used to be a literalist? :-(

In rereading the email, it's satisfying to think that I wouldn't write the same one today. On the other hand, I stand by the challenges to literalism that this email raises. So before I post the response from my professor, I'd love to hear what you think.

If the Bible depicts events that we can't be certain happened, of what value is the theological message? Are we dependent on the historical validation of our theological truths? Or is redemption something we experience only on a metaphysical level (the biblical narratives serve as metaphor for that inner salvation/liberation from sin, not as indications of God's real time acts of liberation/redemption in history)? On what basis can we know that that redemption/salvation/liberation is real, if we are depending on metaphorical narratives and not verifiable evidence of God's activity?

If we do side with the historicity of events like the Exodus, what do we do with the summary judgment leveled at all classes of society, not just at the architects of the evil? How does that comport with our ideas of a powerful, loving, saving God? Does this text teach us that God prefers "my group" over other groups? If so, is it moral to side with a God who demonstrates a willingness to kill, exterminate, or do violence against those who oppose God? (These are the kinds of questions many ask who are in the process of deconstruction.)

Or, finally, are there other ways to read this passage (and others like it) that frees it from these burdens while allowing faith to be both realistic and reinforced?

Comments on comments: encounter, experience, etc.

We've been talking about encounter, experience, propositions and revelation in the comments on Part 6. I wanted to post some of my thoughts on this topic and hope more will unveil themselves as I keep writing.

Some kind of "touch" (either a feeling of warmth spreading in the body, or specific words spoken in the mind, or deep conviction of sin and the desire for forgiveness, or inexplicable peace in trials, or a sign - as in, asking God to reveal Godself through a specific sign and then seeing that sign fulfilled) is often associated with evidence of God's existence and personal care through relationship. For some Christians, the sacraments are what mediate God's presence and create the encounter with God that offers the reassurance that God is with us.

However, there is a large group of Christians who report that they have not had a "God-experience" though they pray, read the Bible, seek forgiveness, are in community, take the sacraments and believe the doctrines they've been taught.

What is faith, then? What constitutes the basis for faith? These are the essential questions here. Christianity is a religion that proposes the idea of revelation - that God makes godself known through revelation. By that revelation, we enter a relationship with God. The supreme example of that revelation is in Jesus Christ. A less explicit form of revelation is found in creation. A more personal experience of revelation would be the inner conviction of sin (so some say).

Yet if we scale back each of these, we see that the conclusion that God speaks to us is one we draw after we have applied a Christian perspective to the naked experiences. For instance, it is because we have 2000 years of Christian witness and interpretation that we conclude that Jesus is the revelation of God. It is because of interpretation that we conclude that the Bible reveals God to us. We say that creation testifies to the glory of God after we consider the possibility that God exists. We attribute guilt about sin to the work of the Holy Spirit after someone suggest to us that the HS is the source of that conviction.

When we say that faith must be sourced in a person, in a relationship, not in propositions, it is a bit of sleight of hand. The idea that Jesus goes on existing and can be known today does not come to us without a Christian proposition that makes that suggestion. Apart from dreams and some reports of visions, most people have never seen Jesus, nor have they any reason to even know about Jesus apart from Christian history and witness. We are taking someone else's word when we say that we believe that Jesus is the Son of God. That idea does not come by itself. Someone teaches it, and we accept it, adopt it, believe it. We then learn to correlate the experience of warmth in the body or conviction of sin or words in the mind or peace without understanding as evidence of the proposition we've been taught.

This is what is called encounter with God in my circles.

But the experiences themselves don't have definitions until we give them.

Belief in God and the Christian worldview can occur without experiences, though. Many people are drawn to the faith based on the beauty of its ideals, the values it espouses, the forgiveness for sin which leads to a promise of heaven. Without a correlating experience of God, though, it is difficult to believe as easily. Something in us seeks tangible evidence that the invisible actually exists because we are comforming how we view all of life to suit the Christian frame of reference. When we diminish just how central experience/encounter is in this relating to God, we are not necessarily helping the one who hasn't had the experience. We may unwittingly be raising the issue of why the person isn't as worthy as others to receive specific evidence of God's presence in that person's life.

Why can she "feel" God's love and peace and I can't?

Why don't I feel close to God?

Why doesn't God speak to me?

Aren't these the building blocks of all relationships? How does one have a relationship without communication? Those who suggest that the Bible is the source of that communication help a lot at this point. For many who have no experiences of God, the Bible takes them a long way in giving them a tangible source of communication. Yet it's a double-edged sword because if the Bible is the primary source of relationship, the day that the Bible becomes suspect is the day the relationship to God is destabilized.

That's why experiences of God are so pivotal in reinforcing faith. Otherwise, what is the personal relationship built on, if not these experiences or encounters or revelations of God?

If we assert that relationship with God is by faith, not experience, then what is that faith? Is it assent to propositions? Is it a relationship to the Bible? Is it belief in an invisible deity, trusting in the idea of God's existence without any way of knowing it is real? Is it fundamental trust in reality absent specific beliefs and experiences? Is it participation in a community? Is it bringing human care to the oppressed? What is faith exactly?

And then what does relationship actually mean?

I'd welcome more of your thoughts on these questions. :)

Falling away from faith Pt. 7

My second semester of graduate school plunged me into the Pentateuch. I'd read it, of course, numerous times. I had even recently read the five books in order aloud to my children. We worked through the chapters one at a time with a study guide, asking questions of the text as we read. Even though the source of the Bible study was a conservative homeschooling curriculum company, the questions we posed to the stories had the effect of provoking further questions which snowballed, as close readings combined with questions and children have a tendency to do. It had been much easier to read the Pentateuch infrequently and in bits, to think about the meanings of the stories, rather than facing the actual content directly.

Noah's ark - oh yes, lots of water, God punishes evil mankind, animals and Noah's family saved, olive branch equals peace, God redeems/saves humanity. But reading the text is different. Difficult to reconcile were the specific calculations - could there really be an ark built big enough to house all that food, all those animals? Really?

Worse, how many people were evil enough that they deserved death by drowning? Even babies? Children? Is this solution to the problem of evil moral? Just? Salvific? What does it say about God? About humans?

Having been so focused on the "rescue" operation directed toward Noah that always served to foreshadow the salvation story in Jesus, I had not allowed myself to contemplate the real deaths implied in the flood account. In fact, part of me didn't treat the story as factual history at all. I would assent to it as such in a Christian group, but in the rest of my life, I hadn't given it the same weight I gave, say, Hiroshima or even Pompeii (both catastrophic events that killed loads of regular people).

Taking the view that the Bible was literally, historically, scientifically true meant I had not questioned these texts, but had accepted them uncritically. They were part of the "salvation package" I had accepted right along with Christ when I converted. Yet even I knew not to talk about the Noah's ark story with my Dad, for instance. He's not a Christian. Somehow I knew that he wouldn't accept that story as factually true. I didn't attempt to persuade non-Christians that these events had really happened. I split history into two parts in my mind: biblical history that I shared with Christian friends, and "real" history that I thought about and studied in college or read in National Geographic.

So as I entered this Pentateuch class, I only knew two ways to think about the stories in the Pentateuch. They were either really true (scientifically, historically, prophetically and metaphorically) or they were not true. And for me, at that point in time, the first five books of the Bible had lost their historic credibility. I was especially unable to take Genesis as a word-accurate account of what really happened. Entering the Pentateuch class felt like entering a boxing ring, as a result. I expected to duke it out with the text (and maybe even the professor, depending on her take).

One thing I want to mention right here. Coming out of literalism is a bitch. When you finally put your finger on the text and suggest that these narratives can't be factually true, the next instant someone comes along to say "Well of course you don't need to take them literally. Whether or not Noah lived isn't the real point. The real point is that God is giving us the message of Christ thousands of years in advance and is foreshadowing the story of our salvation."

That kind of regrouping has always bothered me. Shifting the focus to the prophetic or metaphorical meaning exclusively avoids grappling with the challenges to the text, and more, to the method of biblical study and interpretation common in evangelical circles.

But even if I leave that aside, there's plenty in the metaphorical meanings to make the skin crawl anyway. What I really wanted was a good discussion about why it is disturbing to think about God drowning everyone on earth (factually or metaphorically). What difference did it make if it had happened or not, if the message taken from either reading was that God wanted a lot of people dead for being "irredeemably evil"?

And this is often as far as ex-fundamentalists and ex-evangelicals take it. Once the meaning is indicted along with the factual history, what use is there for a text like the flood account?

My Pentateuch professor helped me uncover new ways to read the Bible that changed how I thought about it. For instance, rather than choosing between a literal meaning and a metaphorical one (many people feel that these two ways of reading the text reflect conservatives versus liberals...), there was a third and fourth and fifth way.

Usually the first thing we did with the text in class was to analyze it as a text - to understand not only the words in it, but the authors behind it. How might it have been constructed? Who might have handled it? What kind of "paper" was it written on? What copies do we currently have? How old are those? What are the differences between the copies we have? Who determines the translation of difficult terms (those that are hard to read or smudged or unclear or not common enough to be well-known)? Who might the editors have been? How many times might the text have been transmitted, copied and transported? How many writers and editors contributed to each text? What other texts circulated at the same time as these narratives? How did these writings influence each other? How did the Genesis creation account, for instance, challenge the myths concurrent with it?

Further, were there any historically verified events in history that may have corresponded with the accounts in the text? What ways did this text relate to the needs and wishes of this people at this point in history? How did the narrative shine a light on the understanding of God at that point in time (that was limited by their time and place)?

Most of us don't take the time nor have the resources available to do this kind of study every time we open the Bible. It's why I wish more pastors would treat their congregations with respect and do this homework for them, teaching them about how to read the Bible and the importance of regarding the writings in it as fragmentary and fragile, historical and mythical. Bound in leather with my name embossed in gold across the cover makes the Bible I hold feel very different than it actually was and is, and consequently, we mistake the contents for transcription (of God's actual words and deeds) rather than narration (by human beings doing what humans do - writing stories to communicate their truths).

Another way to look at the texts is through the history of interpretations. How had the narratives' meanings changed over the thousands of years they had been in existence? How were Jewish interpretations different from Christian ones? How were modern interpretations different than the Middle Ages or ancient early church interpretations?

These two ways of engaging the text seemed obvious once we participated in them. Yet there were other methods still. And some of these proved to make Bible reading exciting and even beneficial again.

I will post some of these alternatives in the next installment.