Depth and Postmodern Faith

I belong to an organization called the Northwest Association for Theological Discussion. It's a group of pastors (active or inactive), mostly Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) with a couple of us UCC types tagging along. It meets for a retreat once a year. This year's gathering is coming up in February. One of the things we will do is discuss the book Evangelical vs. Liberal, The Clash of Christian Cultures in the Pacific Northwest, Oxford University Press, 2006, by James Wellman of the University of Washington. I am tasked with being one of the responders to the primary presentation about the book. I have written up some comments and observations on and in response to the book. It may be of some interest even to those of you who are not part of our group and have not read the book.  Here's what I have prepared for the meeting.

Depth and Postmodern Faith:

Comments on Evangelical vs. Liberal, The Clash of Christian Cultures in the Pacific Northwest, by James K. Wellman, Jr.

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

January, 2014

Introduction

Since I am a responder and not the major presenter on this book, and since Keith has given a rather detailed summary of its content in his paper “Religious Vitality In a Liberal Church,” I will summarize the book here only very briefly. In the book Wellman, a professor of comparative religion with the Henry M. Jackson School at the University of Washington, has done a sociological study of thriving churches in western Washington and Oregon that he classifies as either evangelical or liberal. He analyzes these churches in terms of what he calls their moral worldviews and how those moral worldviews shape and direct the life and activities of the churches. The evangelical churches include both what we would more traditionally call Evangelical churches and Pentecostal or other charismatic churches. Apparently none of them accepted the label Fundamentalist, although that is what we liberals often call at least some of them. The liberal churches are congregations from the old mainline Protestant denominations. I strongly suspect that Wellman’s churches include among the evangelical churches both Seattle’s Mars Hill church and probably Seattle’s University Presbyterian Church (a mainline church among Wellman’s evangelicals, and UPres truly is evangelical in Wellman’s sense) and among the liberal churches Plymouth Congregational UCC in downtown Seattle, but I can’t be sure of that suspicion. In any event I suppose it doesn’t really matter. The moral worldview of the evangelical churches is grounded in a biblical literalism that sees humans as inherently sinful but saved by Jesus Christ if they accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. The moral worldview of the liberal churches is grounded in a biblically based understanding of God and Jesus Christ as all-loving and all-inclusive. The liberals are, in Wellman’s terms, morally libertarian in the sense that liberal churches believe in the right and obligation of each person to make her or his own moral choices. It is interesting that Wellman calls his liberals libertarian in this sense because in our common political parlance libertarianism is a kind of conservatism. Wellman says that the culture of the liberal churches is similar to the secular culture in which they are located in both their commitment to social justice and their moral libertarianism. Since they are grounded in such radically different moral worldviews, the churches of the two groups differ in almost every way—in their worship style, outreach to the community, expectations of members, expectations of clergy, and in just about every other way one can imagine.

I am a pastor of a church that falls squarely into Wellman’s liberal category, and although I am quite new to NWATD I suspect that all of this group’s members would identify more with the liberal churches than with the evangelical ones. My church is Open and Affirming. We believe in the right and duty of each person to make their own decisions about faith and values, a stance that may be in some sense libertarian but that in the religious context is hardly conservative. I preach Christian nonviolence and commitment to social justice. Some full disclosure: As I read Wellman’s book I found my head nodding in agreement with most of what he said about the liberal churches, both positive and negative. I found myself railing against most of what he said about the evangelical churches. I’ll just say here that I strongly disagree with the evangelical churches’ vision of what Christianity actually is. I was, as you’d suspect, most interested in what Wellman has to say about the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal churches in the Pacific Northwest.

With that disclosure, here are two issues that occur to me from reading Wellman’s book that I think are worth discussing. They are first: If Wellman is right that the culture of liberal churches is essentially identical to the secular but spiritual culture of the Pacific Northwest and that those churches therefore have a hard time differentiating themselves from that broader culture, what if anything do we offer people that they can’t get from secular organizations or from belonging to no organization at all? Second: Wellman uses the term postmodern on occasion, but the biggest lack I found in the book was his failure to analyze how the conflicting cultures of evangelical and liberal churches hold up in the light of postmodernism. I will discuss those issues in turn.

The First Issue

I think Wellman is generally correct that the secular culture of the Pacific Northwest (at least west of the Cascades, where his churches are located) is on the whole socially liberal and morally libertarian. So are Wellman’s liberal churches. Wellman posits that these characteristics make these churches so similar to the secular culture around them that it is hard for them to articulate what they have to offer that the secular culture does not. Their similarity to the secular culture, he says, raises the question for liberal churches of why people should be part of them. It is I think a serious question for us liberals, but I also think there are significant answers to it. When I first read Wellman asking the question about the similarity between liberal churches and secular culture the word that immediately popped into my mind was “depth.” That word comes from Tillich’s statement that faith expresses the depth dimension of reality. Our liberal churches may be liberal, but they are also churches. That means that they, that we, are about more than social justice and moral libertarianism. We worship God, not social justice, not individual moral choice. Our commitment to social justice and individual moral choice is grounded not in reason, not in merely cultural values, but in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Because we are communities of faith, we can offer people so much more than mere commitment to certain values. What we offer them is connection with God, with ultimate reality, with the depth of life.

I was talking about Wellman’s presentation of this issue with a couple of people from my church, and one of them asked me what I would say to put what we have to offer in simple terms. I said something like “We offer ultimate reality. We offer a connection with God, the truly ultimate, who will support, comfort, forgive, call, push, inspire you, and give your life meaning.” My parishioner responded “Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” No, it wasn’t; but how many of us say things like that to new people who ask about our church? How many of us preach it often and with conviction? I surely haven’t.

I have often heard people say when asked why they come to church that they come to church because they have done well in life and want to give something back to society. Fair enough, but when I hear that statement I always think OK, but you can give back to society by joining Rotary, or Kiwanis, or the Lions Club; and you can probably give back more directly and efficiently in those groups than you can in most small liberal churches. So why church? I think the answer to why church is precisely that we offer more than service clubs do. Our secular culture is inadequate for people precisely because it is secular. Because our culture is secular it is superficial. We human beings have as part of our makeup a longing for connection with something beyond mere physical existence. We long for connection with a reality that is deeper, more basic and more ultimate, than the reality we perceive around us every day. The great theologians of our time, including Tillich and Rahner, have explored that human longing in powerful ways and made it a foundational part of their transformative theologies. That longing is a basic fact of human existence, a fact that explains why every human culture we know of has developed religions, that is, systems of symbol and myth that function to connect people with that which lies in, behind, and beyond physical existence. We are liberal, but we are churches. That means that we have symbols and myths that can satisfy that elemental human longing for connection with something greater than ourselves, something greater, deeper, and more spiritually powerful than anything in the physical world.

As Wellman points out, another problem we liberal churches have that is closely related to the similarity between liberal church and secular society is that the people of our area are “spiritual but not religious,” and they think they find their spiritual connection in nature rather than in organized religion. Of course it is possible, and wonderful, to find a connection with God, with ultimate spiritual reality, in nature. But when I hear that people don’t join a church because they find their connection with God in nature I want to ask them: Are the deer going to come visit you when you’re in the hospital? Or when you’re on your death bed? Are the elk going to tell you that God loves you and will never abandon you? Will the beavers be there for your family after you’re gone? They’ll still be there out in nature, but will they hold your grieving spouse’s hand and help her grieve well? Nature spirituality may not be secular exactly, but it sure doesn’t take the place of a faith community or of a faith’s system of symbols and myths that truly connect us with that for which we long. As communities of faith we indeed have so much to offer that people can’t get in secular society or in nature.

So if Wellman thinks, or if we think, that we don’t have more to offer people than they can get without us he, and we, are wrong. If people don’t know that we have more to offer, that is our fault not theirs. If they don’t feel that more in our worship services, that is our fault, not theirs. I think that Wellman has not analyzed the relationship of his churches to their cultural context very deeply, but his question about what liberal churches have to offer people that those people can’t get outside them is an important one. We need to do a better job of living and communicating all that we have to offer.

The Second Issue

The second issue that I want to discuss has to do with the issue of cultures that are usually called modern and postmodern. A couple of times Wellman calls his liberal churches modern or modernist. He thinks we’re modernist because we value human reason and accept the results of scientific research. He never calls his evangelical churches modernist. He doesn’t discuss this issue at any depth at all, and that is for me the book’s biggest shortcoming. Of course, Wellman is writing here as a sociologist, not as a theologian, philosopher, or cultural anthropologist. He is reporting the results of research he and his assistants have done, so perhaps it isn’t fair to expect him to analyze larger anthropological issues. Still, I think Wellman gives a wrong impression when he calls us liberals modernist and doesn’t call his evangelicals modernist.

In this regard I was struck by the book’s very shortsighted view of the future. Writing in probably about 2004 or 2005 he said we won’t know if the growth of the evangelical churches has leveled off until the results of the 2010 census, a whole five or six years out. That’s a very short-term future. A major change is taking place in our culture, and the future of the church and of just about everything else about our culture has everything to do with the tectonic shift taking place from modernism to postmodernism, but we must view that shift in much longer terms than a mere few years. I am convinced that the church’s future depends more than anything else on how it relates to that shift. Can it adapt? Can it change? I think the liberal churches (or at least some of them) are already doing that to a considerable extent, and the evangelical churches aren’t—and can’t. Let me explain.

Western culture underwent a huge change between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries CE. We call that change the Enlightenment. One key part of the Enlightenment was the Scientific Revolution. By 1648 western Europe had been ravaged by wars, especially by the series of conflicts known collectively as the Thirty Years War, which greatly discredited organized religion because of the violence it had perpetrated and endorsed.  By 1648 Rene Descartes had already written cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, and attempted to recreate a world solely on the basis of human reason. The world hasn’t been the same since. Over the next two hundred years and beyond human reason displaced revelation as the source of knowledge, and it replaced the church as the source of cultural authority. Any detailed review of the history of these changes is unnecessary here, but their result is of utmost importance. One result of those changes was that in Western culture truth got reduced to fact. When truth is fact, there can only be one true answer to any question. Christians had always understood the Bible at least in part as factually true of course, and Christianity has been sinfully exclusivist from the beginning; but the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution resulted in truth being seen only as fact, and that epistemology strengthened Christianity’s exclusivism in powerful ways. The thinking went that if Christianity is factually true, then no other religious tradition can contain any truth at all.

Perhaps this story from my personal experience will help clarify things here. In the 1970s, while I was a graduate student in history at the University of Washington, I took a seminar from the great Russian/British historian/philosopher Isaiah Berlin.[1] Berlin told us that western civilization, by which he meant, I think, western civilization as shaped by the Enlightenment, holds to three fundamental truths. They are that every question has an answer, every question has only one correct answer, and it is possible for us humans to know that answer. Those three truths sum up the modernist worldview that came out of the Enlightenment very nicely. They apply to Wellman’s evangelical Christianity. That type of Christianity claims to know all the answers and to know the only true answers to the great existential questions humanity faces.

Modern biblical literalism, indeed modern literalism about all matters of faith, is a result of the Enlightenment. That is, it is a product of modernism, the worldview formed by the Enlightenment. As scholars applied human reason to the study of the Bible, and as science continued to discover truths that appear to contradict the world and the cosmos reflected in the Bible, many Christians, especially in the United States, reacted powerfully against those developments. That reaction reached its height in the appearance of true Fundamentalism in the early twentieth century. Yes, Fundamentalism was a reaction against some aspects of modernism. It was a reaction against critical study of scripture that revealed how problematic the Bible’s texts are. It was a reaction against science, especially the science of biological evolution. Yet Fundamentalism’s reaction against some aspects of modernism masks the radically modern nature of that movement. It was modernist because it accepted the modernist view of truth, that truth consists only of facts, that only one set of facts is true, and that we can and do know those facts. If the Bible says God created the world in six days, and if that statement is factually true, then the sciences of geology, anthropology, and biology that were presenting very different truths must be factually wrong. Fundamentalism’s assertion of the falsehood of modernist science is itself a thoroughly modernist statement and is grounded in modernist epistemology and ontology.

Today culture is moving beyond modernism. The leading elements of western culture are rediscovering kinds of truth other than factual truth. We are rediscovering the depth and the power of mythic truth, and we know how vastly it exceeds mere literal truth in depth and power. We are learning the limits of human reason. We know that though we can conceive of the infinite and the ultimate we can never fully understand of what they consist. We are experiencing the limits of human language. We are coming to understand that human language understood literally is incommensurate with the task we assign it of speaking a truth about the infinite. We have learned that our language can point to ultimate truth but can never capture it, can never define it, can never express it in its fullness. We have rediscovered human subjectivity. That is, we now understand reality from the perspective not of external objectivity, which is in the end something of which we simply are not capable, but of the human being as a subject who experiences a reality that seems to us external but that is actually something that we create internally. We therefore know in a way that modernism cannot that ultimate, absolute truth is beyond us and that all of our truth is relative and contingent. The world of modernism that produced contemporary religious literalism is dead. Yes, a great many people still live in it and don’t know that it is dead; but dead it is, and dead it shall remain.

All of these aspects of our current context have profound meaning for faith and for religion. Since the worldview that produced modern literalism is dead, biblical literalism is dead. It still exists of course, and a great many people still adhere to it; yet that reality is simply a function of how human cultures change over time. I said above that in the seventeenth century Rene Descartes wrote cogito ergo sum and the world has never been the same ever since. That’s true, but of course at first very, very few people were aware of Descartes or his radical new rationalistic philosophy. It took a good couple of hundred years before the rationalism and philosophical positivism of Europe’s leading intellectual lights filtered down into popular culture. The same process is underway today. Most Americans still live in a modernist world, but our culture is moving beyond that world. It will take a couple of hundred more years for the transformation to be complete; but it has begun, and it is unstoppable.

Which of course raises profound questions for the future of the Christian faith. By “the future” I mean the long-term future, not the very short-term future that Wellman addresses. To understand the long-term future of the Christian faith we have to start with understanding the basic truth of Wellman’s evangelical churches. Those churches are grounded in biblical literalism. Their notion that Christianity is about how one gets to heaven after death by believing in Jesus is grounded in a literal reading of certain passages of the Bible. Their Christian exclusivism is thoroughly modernist. It results from a literal reading of the New Testament combined with a modernist understanding of truth as fact. In the postmodern world that is to some extent already here and that is the wave of the future both textual literalism and a reductionist ontology are excluded. It is already clear to those with eyes to see that Wellman’s evangelicalism will not survive into the future that seems distant to us but that in terms of the development of human cultures is actually quite close.

That’s why, current demographic trends to the contrary notwithstanding, liberal Christianity in Wellman’s sense has a brighter future than does evangelicalism. It does, that is, if it has the courage truly to transcend modernism and modernism’s consequences for religious faith. Liberal Christianity has a future if it has the wisdom and the courage truly to move beyond biblical literalism. Liberal Christianity has a future if it has the wisdom and the courage truly to move beyond Christian exclusivism. Liberal Christianity has a future if it has the wisdom and the courage to move beyond devotion to specific doctrines and to offer people a truly deep connection with God, if it has the wisdom and the courage to engage people where they are today and to address the existential dilemmas of today rather than continuing with the old saws about sin and salvation that mean so little to so many today.

We humans have a longing for connection with the divine that is so much more than a fear of damnation. Yet assuaging a fear of damnation is where evangelical Christianity is grounded. Evangelical churches may express joy in their worship services as Wellman contends, but that joy is grounded in relief that one is no longer going to receive the eternal damnation evangelicals are convinced they and all the rest of us deserve. They may speak of respect for others, but they deeply believe in Christian exclusivism. The epistemological and ontological underpinnings of that kind of faith are steadily being eroded away in the postmodern world. Liberal, non-literal, non-exclusivist Christianity has within it that potential for adapting itself to the postmodern world and speaking a powerful truth to and for that world. Evangelical Christianity doesn’t. Therein lies the promise of a future for Christianity. Wellman’s book is an important and interesting snapshot of our current time, but it leaves the most profound questions about the future of Christianity unasked and unanswered.

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[1] Not Irving Berlin. Once during World War II Isaiah Berlin was introduced to Winston Churchill, who asked him to play something on the piano.  So it’s Isaiah, not Irving, Berlin.