The Christian Atheist, by Ken Arnold

For the past year, I have been working on a book I call, for now, The Christian Atheist. It explores a spiritual discontent that has grown in me for several years. What I’d like to do here (today and in some subsequent posts) is test some of what I have to say and invite responses.

Despite having been reared as a Christian and ordained late in life as a deacon in the Episcopal Church, I have begun to realize that I can no longer accept the orthodox teachings of the church. I have reached this conclusion in the past six years, since 2002, when I published a book, Night Fishing in Galilee, that takes the resurrection seriously, although the book’s conclusion points away from an exclusive, revealed religion toward spiritual practice in the context of a broader wisdom tradition.

Here’s what I think: the fundamental teachings of the church–orthodoxy–are self-referential, in that the “revealed” scriptures on which they are purportedly based are themselves products of the creation of the church; moreover, much of what the church teaches is not “scriptural” at all. The gospels were written by apologists for a religious community in the process of breaking away from Judaism. They are arguments cast in fictional forms; it is difficult if not impossible to see behind them a person known as Jesus of Nazareth who is not the invention of the texts. And yet the historical basis of Christianity is essential to its being. Without a historical Jesus and his resurrection–without an incarnation of god in flesh–there is no Christian faith. (I understand that the church argues that god is truly revealed in scripture through the workings of the Spirit, but that simply contradicts the equally strong assertion of the religion’s historical truth.)

For there to be an incarnation, a Jesus idea (never mind an actual Jesus), there has to be a god–and a personal god at that. There has to be a scriptural account of this god, as well; otherwise, we do not know him. (We might know something, some sense of presence, some voice—however we define our “encounters” with the “divine”; but we only know the Christian god as the Bible defines him. It is unlikely, I think, that we would otherwise stumble on him, with familiar attributes in place. Alternative god possibilities abound.)

The incarnation depends on the story of the Fall in Genesis–and the dominant theology of the church depends on St. Augustine’s interpretation of that story which leads to the doctrine of Original Sin. “In Adam’s Fall, we sinn-ed all,” goes the old rhyme to help us remember that we are sinful creatures in need of redemption. As the Christian Creeds say, we fell away from god and despite god’s efforts refused to return to him; we were, in effect, bad Jews. God sent Jesus to repair the damage, to redeem us from that original sin. His death and resurrection in some not particularly clear way accomplish the task.

One problem I have with this scenario is that the story in Genesis is clearly a myth; but Christian orthodoxy argues that an actual human is required to repair the damage caused by the myth. (This is one explanation for the fundamentalist’s insistence on the historical truth of Genesis.) One might argue that the Genesis story is a myth that embodies a truth (as good myths do) and that Jesus is a truth that validates the myth. But Augustine is quite literal about his argument for Original Sin: the actual seed of Adam, and subsequently of all men (women having nothing to contribute to new humans, according to ancient science) carries with it the (literal) seed of destruction. Hence the problem with sex. These conclusions are based on a biology we no longer accept: when myth begets biology, lock up your women and children.

The story of the arrival of Jesus is deeply indebted to the Tanakh (what Christians have reorganized and renamed the Old Testament), and one might argue that the whole of the New Testament is little more than a re-reading of the Old to make the argument for the new form of break-away community I mentioned earlier.

In the beginning is not a god but a story (of the Jews) that is literalized in Christian orthodoxy. The problem with our present church structure of belief is that it has descended entirely into literalism. The poetry of the story has been abandoned to pseudo-history. The reason is not hard to find: the church faces extinction in the face of modern skeptical thinking. It now seeks refuge in clinging ever more fiercely to an imagined history to prop up a deflated orthodoxy.

Why does this situation lead me to doubt the existence of god altogether? Why not simply doubt the church and its teachings? Well, for the Christian, all we know of god is what the church tells us, as I’ve said. Since our experience of god is entirely conditioned by church teachings, if we reject them, we reject the whole show, god and all. They are the same. As the church becomes less stable, less sure of itself, less believable, what is at stake is not just an institution: the Christian god is in peril.

 

My Jewish Granddad, by Malcolm Boyd

This essay is reprinted from The Rev. Malcolm Boyd's new book, Samuel Joseph for President, published by KenArnoldBooks. It is available from Amazon.com.

 

 

   All of us, you and I, are individuals. At the same time we are part of relationships and communities. We belong to a family, a place of work, a church, synagogue or mosque, a neighborhood, a political party, ethnic bonds, a nation, a world.

     This reality led me to write “Samuel Joseph for President” and the other stories. Now, we seem to face new yet distressingly familiar crossroads. Public discourse in media, politics, religion, and race often intersects and enlightens. Too, it frequently collides and incites hate and violence. So while I find myself uplifted by progress toward inclusion, I’m also alarmed by a rising tide of intolerance. Otherness runs deep. It can help us build bridges.

     I want to share with you a very personal aspect of belonging that emerged in the complex network of my life. I am one-fourth Jewish. Three of my grandparents were Christian. The fourth, my maternal granddad, was a Jew.

     I never met either of my grandfathers. One was an Episcopal priest in Brooklyn around 1890 who fathered five children, including my dad, and died in his thirties. The other was Harry Joseph, a Conservative Jew, who married my grandmother Ruth. My mother Beatrice was their only child. They divorced after a few years of marriage. My separation from Jews, already a fact of life, increased in college when I joined a fraternity. All fraternities but one called themselves Christian. They excluded Jews. I remember the day when my frat brothers blackballed a prospective member because, in their view, he looked Jewish.

     During my high school and college days, I thought of Judaism as an alien faith, one utterly distant from my own experience. Jewishness often seemed forbidding and strange. What was kosher food? A bar mitzvah?

     Yet Harry Joseph has touched my life strongly in his Jewishness. I encountered the rampant anti-Semitism of the ‘20s and ‘30s in the U.S. Gradually it both shocked and revolted me. Then it exploded in Nazi Germany in the Holocaust. My world view had to include goose-stepping Nazis in shiny black boots. The staccato quality of Hitler’s voice forced its way into my awareness of a violent and evil serpent-god that demanded one’s essence, identity, blood, body, mind, soul—one’s very being.

     Years passed. In seminary I asked myself: Why does religion separate people instead of unite them? Why must universal love give way, in the priorities of organized religion, to erecting high walls between people in whom God’s love dwells? In my first parish in the inner city of Indianapolis, across the street was a small, very poor Orthodox synagogue. Early Saturday (Sabbath) mornings I turned on the lights inside. So I became a shabbos goy, a Gentile who performs such a task for religious Jews who cannot.

     In the civil rights movement I marched and went to jail with Jews. “Let justice roll down like waters!” the prophet Amos cried. This segued with Jesus’ words: “I was in prison and you came unto me.”

     It wasn’t until a decade later that I paid my first visit to Israel. The Sabbath was Saturday, not Sunday. It began Friday afternoons when everything stopped, life came to a halt, and the city grew quiet. Jewishness surrounded me. I liked going to the Israel Museum, spending hours immersing myself in Jewish culture and history. I stayed three months and, at Christmas time, went to hear Handel’s “Judas Maccabeus” instead of his “Messiah” as I had usually done in the U.S.

     I had no idea what awaited me when, late one night, I stood before the ancient Western (“Wailing”) Wall of prayer that holds deep meaning in Jewish history and consciousness. Bright lights illumined its stones. A figure dressed in black sat before the wall, chanting, his voice rising and falling. I placed my forehead on a cold stone in the wall. I prayed for my grandfather Harry Joseph.

     Suddenly I was aware that he had never been able to visit this land or this place. I was overcome by the sense that I stood here for him. I dug deep in spiritual roots as I meditated in the night’s silence. Finally he got to stand before the Western Wall, and say his prayers, only through the medium of his goy grandson who did so.

     I found this a somewhat overpowering spiritual experience. Across a lot of time and space, Harry Joseph and I had surely bonded. I marveled at what we innocently call the mystery of life. I have learned to be thankful for the diverse strands of life. They provide an essential networking that takes us outside ourselves into the great world. The human family is drawn together in the intimacy of what can be shared.

KABlog

Welcome to KABlog, where authors of books from KenArnoldBooks have a chance to write about what’s on their minds.

We are currently publishing posts from Brent Mooseburger, an Alaskan Pentecostal sports reporter, who is channeling messages about the presidential campaign. The Palin Prophecies will appear here almost daily; you can click on the status bar above to see the current post. The entries are also archived at www.thepalinprophecies.com and will be collected into an ebook to be published on Amazon Kindle in October.