For a Possible YouTube Video
September 1, 2021
Hello. I am the Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson,
but you can call me Tom. I want to introduce you to the new revised edition of
my book Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New
Millennium. The first edition of the book came out in 2008. It was well
received by some prominent people including Elizabeth Johnson, the brilliant
Catholic feminist theologian. That first edition is still available from Wipf
and Stock Publishers. You can order it on their website. I wrote the book in
the last few months of 2006. That’s getting to be a significant number of years
back now. Times have changed since 2006. So have I. So I decided to write a
revised and expanded version of the book. That’s the version of the book I want
to talk with you about today.
I wrote Liberating Christianity because
Christianity is in crisis today. In the United States and western Europe fewer
and fewer people identify themselves as Christians all the time. Membership in
mainline Protestant churches like my own United Church of Christ has been
declining for decades. More recently membership in more conservative
evangelical churches has begin to decline too. Membership in the Roman Catholic
Church remains level only because of the large number of immigrants in the
United States who follow that variety of Christianity. People no longer belong
to a Christian church as a matter of course as used to be true among us (which
actually might be a good thing because so much of that earlier participation in
the Christian faith was merely pro forma). Christians have less and less
influence in national affairs all the time (which may also be a good thing
because so much of way Christians used to influence those affairs was hardly Christian
at all). Other faiths, including especially Islam, are more prominent and
active among us than they have been in the past. In no way do I mean to
diminish or disrespect those faiths. My point is only that our country is more
religiously diverse than it ever has been before. If current trends were to
continue Christianity would at best become the faith of a small minority of
Americans and at worst cease to exist among us altogether.
In the Introduction to Liberating
Christianity I identify two major causes of Christianity’s decline. One of
them is the history of the Christian church itself. That history is at best
problematic and at worse horrific and sinful. It includes deplorable and
indefensible features including crusades against Muslim believers in the name
of Christ, the slaughter of Christians the official church deemed to be
heretics, the burning of women accused of being witches, religious wars (especially
those that ravaged Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), the
forced conversion of indigenous people
especially in the Americas, the oppression of women in the name of a male deity,
anti-Judaism so endemic and virulent that the entire history of the faith up to
the 1930s can legitimately be seen as preparation for the Holocaust, and an
anti-intellectualism that has resisted the discoveries of science and the higher
biblical criticisms and forced Christians essentially to check their brains at
the church door. My purpose here is less to bash the faith than to acknowledge
the sinful side of its history as the first step in overcoming it. Given the sordid
and brutal history of the church it is no wonder that so many sensitive,
well-intentioned, even spiritual people find Christianity today to be not unattractive
but downright repugnant.
We can’t change Christianity’s history, but we
can perhaps do something about a second major reason for the decline of
Christianity among us. Many people today reject Christianity because they
reject any spiritual view of reality. They adhere instead to a materialist ontology,
that is, a materialist understanding of what is real that denies the spiritual
dimension of reality and holds that only the physical is real. There are solid,
valid arguments to be made in favor of the reality of spiritual, and I make
some of them in Part One of Liberating Christianity titled “Overcoming
the Obstacle of Philosophical Materialism.”
Philosophical materialism is not the only intellectually
justifiable view of reality. It is in fact quite an intellectually impoverished
view. It is also a distinctly minority view of reality within the history and
present life of the world’s people. Every human culture has experienced the
reality of the spiritual dimension of being. We know that to be true because
every human culture tells stories of the gods or of God. You may have heard
some of the stories of the ancient Greeks about their gods and goddesses. Or
perhaps you have heard of Odin, Thor, and Loki from Norse mythology. Other
examples from all times and all earthly places could easily be produced.
Cultures produce these stories because at least some of their people have
experienced the reality of the spiritual. Their stories attempt to convey that
experience to others in ways others can understand and accept.
Then there is a third cause of the decline of
Christianity, one that is a major focus of Part Two of Liberating
Christianity. I have titled that Part “Overcoming the Obstacle of
Biblicism.” Ancient Judaism and early Christianity experienced the reality of
the spiritual, that is, of God. They too told stories about that God and that
God’s relationship to them and to all creation. We have collections of those
stories about God and that God’s relationship to the people. Those stories
certainly contain some facts, but they were never meant primarily to communicate
facts. Their authors, or at least most of them, understood their stories to be
allegories, myths actually, that don’t so much give facts about God as point
the hearers and readers of those stories toward a spiritual reality that mere
words can never encompass. These stories aren’t facts, they are fingers pointing
at the moon and inviting us to look to the heavens too. They are not the moon
itself.
The way that fundamentalist and other
conservative evangelical Christians insist that the Bible comes from God and
that we must understand it literally is a major obstacle to faith in our context.
In Liberating Christianity I call that approach to Christianity’s sacred
text biblicism. Biblicism is part of the anti-intellectual strand of
Christianity’s history. Biblicism demands that we accept some patently false
things about the Bible, namely, that everything in it happened just the way the
Bible says it did and that the Bible contains no contradictions. In Liberating
Christianity I present a different way of understanding the Bible. I
present it as a human product containing not facts but symbols and myths. Biblicism
is part of a much broader movement in western thought that comes from the
Enlightenment and the scientific revolution that was part of it, namely, the
reduction of truth to facts. The rationalism of the Enlightenment and the
incredible explosion of scientific discoveries about nature that began in the
mid-seventeenth century or even a bit earlier led people in every area of human
concern to believe that only facts are true. Forcing people to see the Bible as
consisting of facts that are irrefutable because they somehow come from God,
however, drives people away from Christianity in hordes. In Liberating
Christianity you’ll find a better way of understanding the Bible.
That understanding may be one you may never have heard of before. It
sees the Bible as a human product that seeks not to nail down that which cannot
be nailed down bur rather to direct our attention to the reality we call God
that both utterly transcends and intimately inheres in everything that exists.
When we see the Bible that way it is no longer the obstacle to faith that it is
when we think of it as only conveying facts that occurred to other people a
long time ago in a place far away. Understanding the Bible as being much more
than a recitation of mere facts unlocks its spiritual wisdom and power. Liberated
Christianity understands that not everything in the Bible has spiritual value. It
understands that much in the Bible doesn’t. Yet liberated Christianity also
knows that much in the Bible speaks profound truth if we can only get over
understanding it as mere fact.
In another book I wrote I end one of the three
volumes with these words that summarize liberated Christianity’s view of the
Bible:
So let me suggest one more thing about the Bible and what it is
for us as we end this first volume of our tour. It is an invitation to a
liberated Bible. Let me suggest that you think of the Bible as invitation. The
Bible doesn’t dictate truth to us. Rather, its ancient authors say here are the
experiences and understandings of some of your ancient forbears in the faith.
Generation after generation of faithful Jewish and Christian people have found
meaning, hope, comfort, and challenge in these pages. So come on in. Learn what
we have to say. Do the difficult work of really understanding our ancient texts
on their own terms. Then do your own discernment. We did ours, now you do
yours. We hope that what you read here will light your path to God, but we
cannot relieve you of your duty to discern God’s truth for you and your world.
We don’t all say the same thing. We didn’t all understand God the same way. We
didn’t understand the universe and human nature the way you do. But come on in.
Learn from us. There is great wisdom here. Learn from us, but don’t just parrot
back what we had to say. We invite you not to rote responses and easy answers.
We invite you to the hard but sacred work of study and discernment. May God be
with you in that work. Amen.[1]
I trust that
those words from a different book will give you a sense of the view of the
Bible you’ll find in Liberating Christianity.
In the interest of time I have not mentioned that last two parts
of Liberating Christianity. Part Three is titled Overcoming the Obstacle
of the Denial of Grace. It deals with issues like the nature of Christ’s saving
work and the meaning and dynamic of salvation. Part Four is titled The
Christian Life and Christian Values. Most but not all of the changes and additions
I made to the original version of Liberating Christianity for the
revised edition are in that last part of the book. It covers topics such as Jesus’
teaching of nonviolence and the radical inclusivity that liberated Christianity
makes possible and even demands.
You may find some—or much—of what I say in Liberating
Christianity challenging or even
problematic. I also trust, however, that what I say in this book will open your
eyes to new ways of seeing important aspects of Christianity if you will just
let them.
So thank you for sticking with me this far. I know that many
people find my vision of a liberated Christianity to be new, challenging, and
for some even false. Yet I also know that if you will stick with it, work with
it, pray with it, liberated Christianity will bring the Christian faith alive for
you in ways it perhaps never has been before. The revised version of Liberating
Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium is
available at very reasonable prices in both paperback and electronic formats
from amazon.com. If you search for that title on that website you should see
both the original version of the book and the revised edition. I hope that you
will read especially the revised edition. I pray that when you do it will
enrich and deepen your Christian faith just as writing and revising it enriched
and deepened mine. Thank you.
[1] From
the end of Volume One of my book Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided
Tour for Seeking Christians, soon to be available from amazon.com.
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