If Christianity Cannot Change, It Will Die.
Christianity as a religion of certainty and control is dying. The signs of that death are present in the emptiness of the churches of Europe, in the decline of candidates for the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church, in the increasing obsession about issues of sexuality that bedevil church leaders, and in the rising secularization of our society. It is also seen, however, in the hysterical fundamentalism that marks conservative Evangelicals and Catholics alike in our world today. Fundamentalism is not a virtue; it is a sign of being out of touch with reality. Christianity is not dying because people are abandoning "revealed truth," as conservatives like to argue, but because the three major concepts of what was once called "revealed" truth are no longer credible today. These three concepts are: Christianity's definition of God, Christianity's definition of human life and Christianity's understanding of life after death. In this week's column I want to examine each of these concepts.
The traditional understanding of God has defined the deity as "a Being" supernatural in power, dwelling somewhere outside this world, understood after the analogy of a human parent and capable of acting in protective and miraculous ways. I call this "the theistic definition of God" and so deeply has it dominated Christian thought that one who cannot still believe in this theistic deity today is assumed to be "an atheist," and thus is said to believe in no God at all. That accusation makes sense only if theism is the only way in which God can be conceptualized. I do not believe that this is the case.
Theism is dying because the expansion of human understanding about the size of the universe, begun with Copernicus and aided by Einstein and the Hubble telescope, has destroyed what we once assumed to be the theistic God's dwelling place above the sky. That has the effect of dislocating our theistic mentality in a total way. When Isaac Newton, some 50 years after Galileo, revealed to us the precise ways in which the laws of the universe operate, the arena in which our claims about miracles, magic and God's ability to act on our behalf shrank perceptibly. The power of God to determine the weather patterns, so prominent in the biblical stories of Noah, Moses and Elijah, was destroyed by our knowledge about weather fronts, low pressure systems, El Nino winds and the ways in which tectonic plates collide far beneath the earth's surface. The power of God to control behavior by dispensing sickness and health was destroyed by the rise of medical science and its understanding of both the causes and cures of sickness, none of which had anything to do with punishment for not offering proper sacrifices or not obeying the divinely inspired laws. As each new insight removed one more arena in which the theistic God was thought to operate, this God increasingly was reduced to impotence and had no more divine work to do. Thus God became quickly and frighteningly an almost irrelevant and fading presence in modern life. If there is no way to define our experience of God except in theistic language, then there is little hope for this God's continued survival.
Next Christianity defined human life as that which had been created perfect in God's image at the dawn of history, but falling into sin by an act of willful disobedience. This idea meant that human beings were now theologically defined as lost and incapable of achieving salvation unless rescued by an external divine power. Salvation meant being restored to our pre-fallen status and the "savior" had to be seen as the emissary or even as the incarnation of the theistic deity. It was against this background that the story of Jesus has traditionally been told. In that narrative, the cross became the place where our salvation was procured by the death of Jesus. It was strange theology transforming God into a merciless judge, Jesus into the perpetual victim and you and me into being guilt ridden creatures. It was, however, so popular that the words "Jesus died for my sins" became the Protestant mantra and this understanding of the cross as the place of divine sacrifice came to be reenacted weekly in the Mass as the heart of Catholic worship.
It was the work of Charles Darwin, now deeply affirmed by the discovery of DNA that links all life into one unfolding whole, that rendered this Christian understanding of the origins of human life to be obsolete at best, dead wrong at worst. Human beings have never possessed a perfection from which they could fall. Original sin is thus a theological hoax. Human beings have evolved over billions of years from single cells into our present self-conscious complexity. We must be understood, therefore, as emerging creatures reaching out for a humanity that we do not yet possess, not fallen creatures who yearn to be rescued. So the heart of the way the Jesus story has traditionally been told has also become irrelevant, inadequate and quite simply not so.
Christianity's understanding of the afterlife has also depended traditionally on the idea that God was a theistic, record-keeping deity, living above the clouds, before whom we would have to appear for judgment at the end of our days. That understanding also depended on goodness and evil being objective categories easy to define. That traditional idea of judgment portrayed us as chronically immature people, who stood quietly before an authoritative parent figure sitting on a throne to receive either a reward for our goodness or punishment for our sinfulness. In either stance we were never to be allowed to grow beyond that stage of life in which the child tries to win the parent's approval.
Eighteenth century studies in cultural relativity made both truth and goodness hard to define. Nineteenth century studies in sociology revealed that human behavior is conditioned by our circumstances and that the relationship between hunger, education and poverty and the definition of evil are deeply present in the kind of evolutionary, competitive behavior that places the highest value on survival even as it is served by lying, stealing and killing. Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo painted that portrait powerfully in their novels. Twentieth century studies then established the psychological interdependence of all life and showed us how it is that the "sins of the fathers and the mothers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generations." This insight served to make assigning individual credit and blame to be all but impossible. So how, a modern person might ask, can we stand before the judgment of this theistic God?
When these core aspects of our traditional faith story began to fade, it was not surprising that organized forms of Christianity began to fade with them. As religious systems die two things always happen. First, those who cannot embrace life without their religious certainties become frightened and begin to assert yesterday's religious truths with great vigor and renewed passion. They become the fundamentalists, the evangelicals and the conservative Catholics. They shout their convictions loudly. They defend "revealed" truth vigorously, asserting such strange ideas as papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy. They condemn any one who disagrees with their convictions and they vow once again to conquer the world for Christ. That kind of right wing religion is omni-present in this generation. The second response is a significant rise in the number of dropouts from organized religion altogether, a secularization of the whole society and an increase in what might be called convinced humanism. This expression is also a reality in the post Christian world of today. The sterile battles that go on between the two manifestations of a dying Christianity are both public and boring, since neither approach really engages the real issues nor offers a viable solution.
There is, however, another possible response that needs to be discovered and it is the one to which I am committed. That response is to initiate a radical reformation within Christianity itself. It begins with the admission that traditional Christianity cannot be believed in its current pre-modern forms. It cannot be artificially respirated. It is to face the new possibility that these traditional understandings may never have been correct in the first place. It drives us to what I regard as a freeing distinction between the God experience, that I believe is real, and the human explanations of the God experience that are always time bound, time warped and destined to die. In a similar manner it suggests that there is a difference between the Christ experience and the human explanations of the Christ experience. The Bible is a first century human explanation of a powerful God experience associated with Jesus of Nazareth. The creeds are fourth century attempts in a Greek thinking, Mediterranean world to explain the Christian faith. No explanation is eternal but I believe the God experience is. The secret to the power present in the person of Jesus was that people believed they had experienced God in him. The task for the Christian future is to be open to the reality of the God experience, while rejecting as no longer adequate the explanations of that experience even when they are embodied in the most sacred relics of our faith story. My conclusion is that God will always be a mystery into which we can walk, but the truth of God will always be beyond the ability of human minds to understand, to explain or to exhaust. Christ becomes, therefore, not an idol, but a doorway through which our journey into God can travel. When we understand this, then a faith that can be explored, not a faith that must be believed becomes visible. That, I believe, is the hope for Christianity is in the 21st century. That is, therefore, the task to which my life is committed.
Comments? Discussion? Warm regards, Roger