The Christian Atheist, Continued, by Ken Arnold and Ken Burton

My blog posting, “The Christian Atheist,” drew a comment from an old friend, Ken Burton, which you can read in “Recent Comments” (below, right, on this page). He mentioned in passing the “oxymoronic” nature of my phrase, “Christian Atheist.” I wrote to him separately about that, but the subsequent exchange is one that we thought might be appropriately reproduced here. Perhaps others would like to join in the conversation. (Since we are both named Ken, I have identified us as KA and KB.)

KA Response to Blog comment from KB:

As to the contradiction in the phrase, “Christian Atheist,” I agree that on its face it is nonsensical. Let’s imagine that Jesus lived (and I’m sure someone like him named Jesus did) and that at the time his followers saw in him what they knew as and named God. They then decided he was intimately related to this God in a way that they understood to be like that of a father and son. In turn, this understanding led them to see Jesus himself as part of the Godhead. Etc.

Time passes. The mythic understanding of Jesus as God becomes harder to sustain. For me, for example, I begin to think that a Jesus without God is actually less difficult to imagine than a Jesus who is God. Like Buddha, he is a teacher–call him Master Jesus–but also like Buddha he can be followed as a human teacher. It is not necessary to posit a God to meditate on Jesus or to follow his way.

The problem is that Jesus is not Christ–and Christian incorporates an understanding of Jesus that insists on his being God, a resurrected being. But the way we understand Jesus, Christ, and God is encapsulated in Christianity; to make my point, I really need to use the word “Christian” to emphasize that we’re talking about the same Jesus here, that there is a continuity between the Way followed by his disciples after his death and the Way I think we need to recover that
eliminates the God barrier between.

KB:

Living out Jesus’ Way is nearly impossible for us flawed human beings. There is some evidence that Jesus had trouble with it himself. It becomes possible only when we are grounded in a transpersonal source of love, knowledge, and compassionate forgiveness, following, in this way as well, the example of Jesus. This “God” is not a “barrier” to living out the Way of Jesus but a necessary facilitator, although that is not the best description. This is not a defense of traditional Christian doctrine, much of which I agree is not defensible. (And I think you should be careful about attacking an Augustinian straw man! The Roman church and TEC [The Episcopal Church] may be hung up there, but many other Christians are not.) But it is a defense of my own lived experience, both of my major personal limitations and of God’s gracious and empowering love that
sometimes enables me to follow the Way despite my finitude.

One more thing. The problem that occurred with the passage of time was that the mythic construct got reified, that is, it came to be regarded as literal truth rather than mythic truth, as discursive prose rather than lyric poetry. So long as it is properly understood as myth, there is not a problem with the God image. That is not to say that it does not point beyond itself to something “real.” But whatever, or whoever, that is, we cannot know. At best, we can “see in a mirror, darkly.”

KA:

True. The literal is at the root of the problem.

KB:

But if you agree that “the literal is at the root of the problem,” doesn’t that undermine much of your argument? You’re no “Christian atheist” but a Christian believer whose understanding of God has gone beyond traditional dogma, or has gone back to Scripture!

Another take is to agree with George Fox that “these things I knew experimentally” (experientially, in modern English). And my experience is consistent with the Way of Master Jesus, although maybe not with the views of his subsequent apologists.

What We Hear in Church, by Ken Arnold

Barack Obama’s speech yesterday was notable for many reasons, not least that he spoke at all. It reminded me of the differences in pulpit messages in the white and black churches I’ve known. In general, white preachers in white churches have had little if anything to say about the way the poor and disenfranchised actually live. There is often a fear of how, in particular wealthy, members of the congregation will react if mention is made of social justice issues. And race has been, in my experience, taboo. (I am a white male, by the way, who grew up in the Disciples of Christ denomination in Northern Virginia and eventually became an Episcopalian. I am ordained but now retired from active church service.)

When I preached my first sermon, at the age of sixteen, I spoke about race. It was the early sixties, and I was an idealist. The sermon was greeted with silence, although the pastor told my parents that one family had left the church because of what I said. To his credit, the pastor allowed me to say what I wanted and defended me. On the other hand, I never heard him speak of race or much of anything beyond the ordinary platitudes of Christianity in those years of the civil rights movement.  Salvation in that church and in a subsequent Disciples congregation was a personal matter between God and sinner–and the sins were not primarily identified with social behavior such as racism or greed or injustice. (Note that there were Christian voices of protest in the sixties, for civil rights and against the war in Viet Nam; but that was also a unique moment. There are few such voices today in white Christianity.)

Obviously, I can speak only from my limited experience about what preachers say in white and black churches. But I have experience in both–and have also served in a diocesan capacity in the Episcopal Church, so that I have been in more churches than the average Christian.  So I will venture a generalization: one seldom hears about the sin of injustice from the pulpit of a predominantly white church; one hears it often from the pulpit of a predominantly black church. Prophetic preaching is more common in the black church than in the white church. (And yes I can think of examples that contradict those statements.)

I admit that there is no such thing as a generic white or black church. But my point still holds, I think, as an indicator of a basic truth about the difference in church experience of white and black Americans.

When I was in a black church in East Harlem through most of the nineties, I heard prophetic preaching. I heard anger. I heard denunciations of the powers, of the police, of the government. We went into the street to protest when the police pulled guns on citizens stopped for minor traffic violations. I also heard anti-Semitism from the pulpit and praise for Farrakan following the “Million Man March.” When I objected to the preacher’s use of anti-Semitic code language, he threatened to denounce me from the pulpit for failing to support the black community. I left the parish.

But that moment and that sermon did not change the fact that the people in that parish were living in a racist city where driving while black was still a possible crime. This was during the Rudy Guiliani years when racial tensions were high. The white congregations could relax in the knowledge that the streets were being cleaned up. The homeless were no longer as visible as they once were. (They had been moved out of Manhattan.)

When the invasion of Iraq began, the bishop I worked for in Massachusetts took a public stance against the war, to his credit. And some white preachers spoke against the war from pulpits. But they were in a minority because, as most put it, they couldn’t afford to say anything that might hurt the feelings of families whose sons or daughters might be in uniform. Prayers for peace always had to be balanced with prayers for soldiers.

My point here is that the white population in the United States does not understand injustice because, for the most part, we do not experience it. We only hear about it. We do not know what it means to be a young black man who stands a real chance of spending time in jail even though he is a law-abiding citizen. We do not believe that it is possible for someone to feel oppressed by the US government, for someone to doubt the benefits of democracy. We do not believe that our white skin delivers privilege.

In black churches, the pulpit is often a source of support for those feelings of fear and anger, sometimes in words that echo those sentiments and sometimes in language that provides comfort. In white churches, comfort is what the people in the pews want and usually receive. They do not want to be challenged in their core contentment. In Manhattan, when we still lived there, the parish we attended was one that focused exclusively on the comforts of spiritualized religion. People want to hear the good news, the priest would say–and by that he meant that the subjects of race, politics, war, and injustice had no place in the pulpit.

Publishing’s Heavy Footprint, by Ken Arnold

I am editing a manuscript we plan to publish later this spring that addresses the environmental crisis in spiritual terms. The author, an Episcopal priest named Nancy Roth, looks into herself for answers to the questions of sustainability, conservation, human greed. And she offers the rest of us a way to see ourselves as part of the creation we despoil. So much of what we read about the environmental challenge is negative, leaving us feeling hopeless rather than encouraged or envigorated. I don’t know about you, but I imagine a bleak future for the planet, one that I am glad I will not inhabit. But Nancy’s book offers hope.

Years ago I published an article by Jack Miles in CrossCurrents, which I edited for a time, that imagined an end to humanity in a devastated world. But that end, he suggested, might be a moment of spiritual transcendence. How do we know what our end is to be? My own death might as well be the end of everything; might the end of everything be greater than my imagining?

In the midst of editing this engaging book, and thinking dire thoughts, I ran across a reference to an article in this week’s Publishers Weekly about the “carbon footprint” of the publishing world. Almost everything we modern humans do leaves a footprint, and a fairly deep one, on the earth. We walk with heavy shoes. But publishers leave especially deep prints, it seems. We think of ourselves as an unalloyed good, bringing entertainment, education, enlightenment even, but of course we do that by clear-cutting acres of trees, mostly for books that end up being pulped because they are unsaleable. The waste in the publishing industry is phenomenal. Our inks are toxic. We think nothing of printing thousands of copies of books knowing half of them or more will never be bought and read. The economies of scale are synonymous with waste.

Electronic publishing is a helpful alternative, but computers are not necessarily more sound ecologically. I remember reading some years ago that one of the primary products of microchip production is toxic runoff. And think of the electricity required to power the computers to read the books on screen.

My publishing company prints books on demand. The model is less wasteful, to be sure–and I can therefore claim, perhaps, some environmental cred–but we actually began with a POD model because it required less capital investment up front. Still, one might argue that the sensible way forward is to print on demand in order to reduce the heavy weight of publishing on the environment. And it might have an even less negative impact than electronic publishing.

I got an email earlier this week from a company in the UK, Caffeine Nights Publishing, which is also utilizing POD to produce its fiction. The founder suggested the two of us are swimming with the sharks as we try to get attention for our books in these infested waters. It feels like that some days. But I am encouraged that we are treading (water?) a bit more lightly on the planet by printing books only as they are needed.

We take our virtue where we can find it.

Bookstores Closing, by Ken Arnold

In recent weeks, two bookstore closings have reminded us, once again, of the precarious nature of the book business. Dutton’s in Brentwood announced that it would shut its doors. According to the company’s announcement, the closing of another Dutton’s in Los Angeles made it impossible to continue. (On the other hand, a new store has opened, Skylight Books, which hopes to take up the slack.)

Just this week, I read this brief statement in Shelf Awareness:

“The Graduate Theological Union Bookstore, Berkeley, Calif., is closing by the end of the semester. The store stocks more than 12,000 titles ranging from scholarly books to books serving pastors and congregations to general religion titles.

“In an e-mail announcing the closing, manager John Seal said, ‘We fought the good fight against the chain stores and deep discount online competition and outlived many of our independent book-selling brethren, but our sales base has continued to slowly erode, and we can go on no longer.’”

It is particularly noteworthy that the GTU bookstore serves an educational community, a place where one would expect bookstores to thrive. One problem here, of course, is that seminaries in general are in trouble (because mainstream religion is in trouble). But the other problem facing GTU is the same one that faced Dutton’s and faces every independent store. And eventually will face the chains as well.

People buy books differently now. They do not assume that the local bookstore will have the book they want. And indeed the local stores do not intend to stock more than a few books (relative to the vast number published). It is not possible. Border’s has been experimenting with stores organized around themes–so-called “concept” stores–stocking even fewer books. Sales are reported to be up, however, because more books are displayed “face out,” so that buyers can see and be attracted, as bees to flowers, by the covers. These Border’s stores also have online order options for browsers who do not find the title they want.

A few weeks ago I saw a story about the Espresso Book Machine in Publishers Weekly. The machine will print books on demand right in a bookstore, allowing stores to stock, in effect, any book available through the system. Since the system accesses digital files instead of warehouses, and prints on demand, some of the key problems forcing stores like Dutton’s and GTU to close may simply go away.

The problem with the book business is not books themselves. In other words, the technology of the book does not need to change. Kindle may well succeed as a download technology, but it is not better than the book. What needs to change is the distribution system for books–and that is what Kindle really signals. Right now, distribution is a cumbersome and expensive process, requiring publishers to sell through distributors like Ingram or Baker and Taylor, and requiring publishers to accept returns. Bookstores, for their part, have to buy through these distributors and must manage inventory by returning titles that have not sold in a scandalously short period of time. A new book has only a few months to live.

On-demand printing for bookstores and direct sales to customers is the wave of the future. Technologies allowing quality printing and quick delivery already exist. Lightning Source, an on-demand print division of Ingram, already delivers tens of thousands of books every month, to stores, libraries, and other distributors.

I publish books through BookSurge and distribute through Amazon, eliminating warehouse problems and returns. (I will be adding our titles to Lightning Source soon.) That system makes it harder to work with stores, however. The Espresso Machine will help on-demand publishers reach into stores, assuming the company making the machines does not decide to serve only the mainstream publishing market or out-of-print books.

The bad news is that stores like Dutton’s and GTU are closing. The good news is that emerging systems will improve the distribution of books and make them more easier to find and buy.