A Challenging Read Ahead
An Introduction for the Maltby
Congregational 9 am Group
to
Liberating
Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium
By the Author
The Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson,
Pastor
You have told me that you want to read my book Liberating Christianity, Overcoming
Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium. I will be happy to walk you
through that first published book of mine. I continue to be convinced that it
is one of the best things ever written on contemporary Christian theology. If
that statement is insufficiently humble, forgive me. I am quite proud of this
book. I think it is really important. I hope that you will find it at least
interesting if not always convincing.
Before we start
reading Liberating Christianity I
want to make sure that you have some idea of what you’ll find within its pages.
This book is not an easy read for most people who either do not have an
advanced formal education in Christian theology or who have not educated
themselves in that field through extensive reading of the right kind of
literature. I don’t mean to suggest that you can’t understand it. I’m sure you
can. It may just take a bit of effort and patience on your part. Some church
people have told me that they find the book liberating in the ways I hoped it
would be when I first wrote it in the fall of 2006. More church people have
told me that they find the book challenging. One common comment is that a
person has had to read each paragraph several times in order to understand it.
So here for your consideration is an introduction to the book and some of the
challenges it presents. This is not the “Introduction” from the book, although
some of what I will say here is found there as well.
First of all there is an issue of the language and style of
the book. Liberating Christianity is more
academic in tone than is my other book you know about, Liberating the Bible. The language is often a bit terse. One
criticism I have today of what I wrote back in 2006 is that some statements are
made, then not developed or explained as well as they might be. As I wrote the
book I always struggled with the question of who the audience for the book was
supposed to be. Was it supposed to be the lay people of the church? Or
seminarians? Or academic theologians? All of those groups? The language of the
book is perhaps not as accessible as it would have been had I written it more
specifically for the lay people of the church. It is not as accessible as is
the language of Liberating the Bible, a book I did write specifically for the lay people of the church. I hope the
book’s somewhat academic nature won’t put you off.
Just what is the content of this book? Why did I write it? Liberating Christianity is my attempt to
do a couple of things. One purpose of the book was for me to think through,
clarify for myself, and write down my most basic understandings of the
Christian faith. On one level the book is my confession of faith. I wrote it
over ten years ago, but my understanding of the faith has not changed in any
fundamental way in the interim. On another level the book is my attempt to make
Christianity accessible and understandable for people of our time and place who
find Christianity as they have understood it unacceptable. The book is thus an
exercise in the theology of “apologetics,” the field of theology that works to
speak Christian truth to its particular context.
In addition to those
aspects of my task in writing the book, I wrote it in an effort take Christian
theology for church people deeper than Marcus Borg ever did. I wrote the book
in part because I think that Borg, while useful and widely read, is
philosophically superficial. In calling Borg superficial I mean that he does
not explicitly ground his ideas in the most basic aspects of human thought,
that is, he never gets to the level of philosophy, more specifically to the
level of ontology and epistemology. Ontology is the study of what is real. It
considers the foundational level of being. It asks: What is? What is not? What
does it mean to say that the physical world, or anything else, is real? Ontology
asks what seems to some a silly question, namely, what does it mean to say that
something is? Actually, that question is not silly at all. Most any human
intellectual endeavor is an attempt to discuss what is real, what exists, what
is. Therefore most any intellectual endeavor requires an understanding of the
basic nature of reality if it is to be grounded at the deepest level. Here’s an
example of what I mean. Is only the material, the physical, real? Does only the
material, the physical exist? Or is there something beyond the material, the
physical? If so, just what is it that is real but that is beyond the material?
Those are questions of ontology.
Epistemology is the study not of what is real but of how we
know anything at all, including our knowledge of what is real. What are the
processes of human knowledge? How do we know what is real? Does human knowledge
come only from observation of the physical world? How, in fact, do we know about
that which we take to be the physical world, and can we in fact know that what
we observe as a physical world is real? Are there valid ways of knowing beyond
observation, measurement, and experimentation? If so, how, if at all, do those
other ways of knowing differ from the ways of science, the ways of observation,
measurement, and experimentation? These are questions of epistemology.
I included an ontology and an epistemology in Liberating Christianity.[1]
The book’s ontology says that there is a level of existence, a level of reality,
beyond the physical. In the book I mostly call that level of reality “the
spiritual.” This level is what we have seen Borg calling “the More.” Philosophy
and theology give it other names as well. It is the depth dimension of reality.
It is ultimate reality. It is “being itself” or “the ground of being.” We
sometimes call it “the numinous.” Numinous is just another word for the divine,
the sacred, or the holy, all words that can properly be applied to this level
of the real. Our most common word for this level of reality is “God.” Just what
the nature of the word “God “ is I address in the book.
The book’s
epistemology is “empirical.” It holds that all human knowledge comes from
experience. All reality is experiential. We know anything at all only because
we experience it. All human knowledge is ultimately grounded in some human
experience. Through our physical senses we experience a world that appears to
be external to us. We experience that world as real, but we think it is real
only because we experience it as real. It looks real. It feels real. It
facilitates our lives to assume that it is real. So we take it for real. Yet
all we can really know is that we perceive and experience an external world as
real, not that it really is real. To put some philosophical words on it, we
perceive the world as an object with
reality beyond our perception of it, yet in fact all we have is our subjective perception of it. Because we
are created as centered selves who perceive through our senses, such a
subjective perception is all we have or can have about anything.
My purpose in putting this kind of analysis into the book is
to counter the common belief in western culture that only that which we can
observe and measure is real. In the book I hold that we experience the
spiritual in essentially the same way that we experience what we take to be the
physical. For the most part we do not experience the spiritual, that is, we do
not experience God, through the same senses as we use to experience the world;
but we nonetheless experience the reality of something beyond the material
world. Our perception both of a material world and of the spiritual is a human
experience, and the two types of experience (experience of the material and
experience of the spiritual) are the same type of experience at their most
fundamental level. Thus there is no basis for saying that the material is real
but the spiritual is not. Humans experience both, and it is our experience of
them that makes them real for us.
I doubt that many of
you have ever been taken through that kind of analysis of what is real and how
we know what is real before. You may find it obscure or even pointless. American
education rarely takes people into philosophical thinking. I know that you may
find that thinking difficult to follow, and you may choose not to follow it
because it is difficult and can appear useless. A great many people in our context
do. Still, it’s in the book, and it really isn’t useless at all. If you’re
going to read the book you need to be prepared to follow it as best you can.
You may well find yourself resisting the conclusions I draw. A great many
people do. You may find yourself asking: What? I can’t really know for sure
that the world is real and exists outside of my perception of it? Your answer
may well be “of course I can.” My answer is: No, you can’t. If you can’t accept
that conclusion that’s OK. Please just understand that it is my conclusion and
that it underlies at least some of the material in the book.
Some of you are likely to find the book difficult or challenging
in other ways as well. One of the central concepts in the book that I critique
and reject is what I there call Biblicism. Biblicism is the belief that the
Bible has its origin in God either directly or indirectly and that we must
understand it literally, that is, factually. A great many so-called Christians
today are really more Biblicist than they are Christian. That is, they believe
in the Bible more than they believe in the God we know in and through Jesus
Christ. In Liberating Christianity I
reject Biblicism and replace it with an understanding of the Bible as a human
creation consisting in large part of symbols and myths.
My use of the word myth in the book is something with which
many church people struggle. I say in the book that the language of faith is
necessarily the language of myth and symbol. Many church people bristle at my
use of the word myth. They bristle at it because they can’t get beyond what has
become the popular meaning of the word myth, namely that a myth is something people
take to be true that is in fact not true. As you read the book, please be
prepared to accept my definition of myth, which has nothing to do with things
not being true. In theology a myth is simply a story that acts as a symbol. It
is a story about God that points beyond itself to God and through which we find
our connection with God. A myth is a story that probably isn’t factually true
but that is or at least may be profoundly spiritually true. Many of the stories
in Bible are myths in this sense. Some of them are historical myths, that is,
they are myths that have some grounding in historical fact; yet any factual
grounding they may have isn’t particularly important. What is important is what
the stories tell us about the human experience of God. All true myths are
grounded in that experience whether they are also grounded in some historical
fact or not. When I taught this book before it was published to people at
Monroe Congregational UCC my use of the word myth was the hardest thing in the
book for them to accept. It may be hard for you to accept too. All I ask is
that you use my definition of myth as you think about what I have to say. If
you insist on thinking of a myth as something that is false you will find the
book difficult or just flat wrong.
Here’s another thing in the book that I suspect many of you may
have some trouble with. The book contains chapters with the titles “Beyond the
Classical Theory of Atonement” and “The Meaning of the Cross: The Demonstration
of God’s Solidarity.” In these chapters I deal rather harshly with one
particular theology that most people think is mostly what Christianity is. It’s
called, among other things, the classical theory of atonement. This is the
notion that Jesus Christ is mostly about salvation from the consequences of
human sin and that he saves us from sin because as the Son of God Incarnate he
came to suffer and die on the cross to pay a price to God that had to be paid
before God could or would forgive human sin. You have heard me preach against
that theology, but not as critically or comprehensively as I do in the book. In
Chapter 8 of the book I critique the classical theory of atonement on several
levels and conclude that it constitutes a significant obstacle to faith for a
great many people today. If the classical theory of atonement were the only
valid way of understanding Christianity, I would not be Christian. If it is
your way of understanding Christianity, and if that way works for you, fine. I
offer a different understanding, but I have no desire to take from anyone an
understanding that works for them.
In Chapter 9, I propose an alternative to the classical
theory of atonement as a better understanding of both Jesus Christ and God.
It’s called “theology of the cross.” You’ve heard me preach it a lot. It holds
that in Jesus Christ, as the Son of God Incarnate suffering and dying on the
cross, we see how God truly relates to us and to all of creation. We see God
entering into and experiencing the worst that human life can bring and
demonstrating God’s unshakable presence and solidarity with us when we too
experience the bad things life can bring. Whether you go along with my critique
of the classical theory of atonement or not, I hope you will find theology of
cross to be a powerful understanding of how God relates to us and how we relate
to God.
The last chapter of the book, Chapter 11, “Christian Social
Ethics: The Teachings of Jesus for our Time,” presents Jesus as a prophet of
social justice, nonviolence, and inclusivity. It includes a discussion of the
issue of homosexuality that you may find new, and some of you may find it
challenging. It considers what the Bible has to say about homosexuality. It
concludes that, while the Bible has a very few passages that refer to
homosexual acts, it actually says nothing about homosexuality. That’s because
homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality is a modern
concept of which the ancient worlds of the Bible had no knowledge at all. The
Bible assumes that all people are what we call heterosexual. We know that
assumption to be simply false. I hope you will find this discussion
enlightening.
So, if after you have heard all that, you still want to read Liberating Christianity, I’ll be happy
to walk you through it. If it gives you nothing else it will at least give you
a better understanding of me and my theology. I think it will also give you a
lot to think about. That’s perhaps the most common comment I get on both my
writing and my preaching: “You gave me a lot to think about.” I hope that Liberating Christianity will do that for
you.
[1]
Their most explicit exposition appears in the “Philosophical Appendix” at the
end of the book. You might want to read it first.
