Credible faith, part one

Source.  

In the sometimes tedious rhetorical duels between liberals and evangelicals, this quotation from a Church of England rector struck me as a dose of welcome sanity:

It has never been cool to go to church, but now it isn’t even really respectable. There is simply no market for a church which doesn’t really believe in God. If you’re going to take the social hit of admitting to being a Christian, you might as well actually be a Christian.

(Marcus Walker, "God's Comeback," in The Critic.)

It was Jessica Hoff's blog post "How Unbelievable?" that pointed me toward Marcus Walker's essay. Hoff and (indirectly) Walker are addressing assertions by a retired Anglican parson, David John Keighley, that the main reason for the church's decline is its hopelessly outdated theology.

“Traditional faith is dying,” he [Keighley] said. “Traditional supernatural theism is dead. A belief system that is unbelievable to a scientifically educated population, and is based on ancient, unintelligible creeds and outdated concepts, cannot remain the foundation of Christianity in the changed and developed culture of today.

Hoff observes that the generation of leaders (and maybe the attitudes?) represented by Keighley might in fact have something to do with this decline. I remember visiting a meeting in Britain Yearly Meeting during which an elderly Friend got up and preached along these same lines. I wondered, what was he thinking we would hear in his message? -- that every person of more or less orthodox faith was a plodding idiot?

I believed then, and still believe now, that whatever decline the church is suffering (and it certainly is!), this decline does not come from some stubborn church-wide insistence on superstition. There are very lively conversations going on among theologians and scientists, many of whom in the 21st century are drawing on insights ranging from biology to cosmology and quantum mechanics, all challenging the conventional boundaries between theology and science. Biblical scholars have equally fertile dialogues on the composition and ratification of the Scriptures, and sometimes even deign to tell the rest of us what they're talking about in language we can understand. Eastern and Western Christianity challenge each other's conceits, while both learn how to relate with the rest of the world's faiths, and with the atheists whom God loves as much as any of us.

The scandal that repels and expels people from the church is not its ability to express mystery and hope, nor its claim that we can have a meaningful relationship with the Creator who desired us into existence. It is our willingness to hide all that amazing stuff in the background in favor of our cutting and one-upping each other, cruelly exiling those we don't approve of, and straining all that is holy to ingratiate ourselves with the powers that be.

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As I am writing this post, the case of Bethany Christian Services, the largest evangelical adoption and foster-care agency in the USA, is riling the gatekeepers. Bethany has decided that their services will be available to gay and lesbian families, to the outrage of certain self-important leaders. I would go on about the predictable rhetoric of Albert Mohler and his allies, but you can probably already guess where I'm headed. What are those families and their extended social networks to make of Mohler's unstated implication? -- namely that these very people and the rights they've won are evidence of the nation's revolutionary choice to turn away from God.

Given this wicked, anti-evangelistic, and totally unnecessary (but utterly routine) insult to LGBTQ Christians and non-Christians alike, it's so interesting to read this observation from Marcus Walker's article:

And of the younger priests, it’s the gay ones who are often at the forefront of the battle to defend the creeds and Christian orthodoxy (if my more traditional readers can park, for a moment, their disbelief in the separation of questions of sexuality from orthodoxy). A study by the Dean of Virginia Theological Seminary showed that, across the American church, “our LGBT seminarians are not interested in a vacuous liberal theology that has no authority, no God, no Christ, and no sacraments”.

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I've spent my whole adult life as a small-e evangelical Quaker. In some Quaker settings, such as Canadian Yearly Meeting, that put me in a small theological minority. Since I loved those people who, without fail, encouraged and affirmed me along the way despite our differences, I had to think a lot about why those differences might exist.

I slowly realized that doctrines are not accepted or rejected solely on people's personal preferences or inclinations, nor yet on their having encountered, or not encountered, one or another persuasive Christian mentor, celebrity, or book. So much depends on temperament, worldview, historical accident, and countless other factors -- rendering any sort of arrogant assumption about someone else's beliefs completely out of order. What my faith told me that I owed others was a simple and honest account of what I found true about Jesus, and its ethical consequences, and about the community that gathers around him. Their response was their business; I could not hold them as emotional hostages.

These words from Hans Küng in On Being a Christian, which I first read forty-some years ago, gave me comfort, and still do:

If someone still has no idea or very little idea of what to make of the miracle of the resurrection, of the new life, but regards this Jesus as the ultimate criterion of his mortal life and finite death and thus as living, then it cannot be denied that he [sic] is a Christian. And he is different from that other person who regards Jesus' resurrection as a great miracle, but draws no conclusions from it for his own life and death.

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Credible faith, part two.

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Rachel Havrelock revisits Jericho and offers a biblical exegesis of violence in Israel and America.

The push toward Jericho culminated on January 6 in Washington, D.C. where blasts of the ram’s horn signaled their preparation “to take back America.” The night before, I recognized the battle plan to overtake the Capitol and perhaps the government, yet I could not think of whom to call with the claim that, as an expert on the book of Joshua, I knew there would be violence.

Perpetual War Department: William Astore on the U.S. military's cancel culture, or lack thereof.

No matter how poorly a major weapons system performs, no matter how much it goes over budget, no matter how long it takes to field, it almost never gets canceled. As a corollary to this, no matter how poorly a general performs in one of our twenty-first-century wars, no matter his lack of victories or failure to achieve mission objectives, he almost never gets cashiered, demoted, or even criticized. A similar thing could be said of America’s twenty-first-century wars themselves. They are disasters that simply never get canceled. They just go on and on and on.

Hello Frances Perkins. (This day in labor history.)

The Russian government's ongoing clampdown on political speech reaches Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. (In all fairness, the previous threat to RFE/RL came from the Trump administration.) Meanwhile, here's RFE/RL's update on Navalny's location.

The last idiot standing: A dream job at Mad magazine.

Shannon Brink, the reluctant missionary.

We grieve T. Vail Palmer, biblical scholar, Friends minister, and faithful student of the connections between faith and practice. To register for his memorial meeting on March 13, follow this link.

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"Good Morning Little Schoolboy" ... Tamara Zaritskaya and Ilya Giverts.