Persnickety

The church that I belong to seems old. It has lost the ability to grow and it deteriorates with age. But it isn’t old just in the sense of losing its capacity to grow, in its energy; it is old in the sense that it imagines itself as old, and places itself at a time more than one hundred years ago, around the time of 1850 or so. That was the time when science never heard of natural selection. A time that was still pre-industrial and climate change was far into the future. It was a time when race was solidly understood by the majority of people as a great divide and a biological imperative. It was a time before the age of mass destruction from warfare and mass shootings. It was a time before even the term “homosexual” was known and used, and certainly not other terms such as “trans-sexual,” “queer,” “gay.” It was pre-dispensationalist, and so end times were not given so easily as an excuse for inaction. It was a time before the landmark collection, Essays and Reviews , was publish...

The churches where I live are experiencing highs and lows. Most have decreasing congregations, and whether they are so-called Bible-believing churches or more liberal mainline, it doesn't seem to matter. The Southern Baptists have for the past few years come into New England with an influx of leadership and money and are attempting a large church planting effort. Hundreds of small churches are being seeded here in New England. But these are pitiful efforts (just speaking honestly). They involve grabbing some Bible believer and trying to make a pastor out of him (it is always a man). The congregation might just be his family. A cynic could be forgiven, I think, for suggesting these plantings are an effort to show the hand of God on some spreadsheet handed around a table back home in the more fertile fields of the South: See! The Hand of the Lord is at work in New England! New Englanders have voted with their feet. They do not like going to church. Not on Sunday, not on Wednesday...

"Science, in other words, thrives on anomaly, inconsistency, controversy, and doubt. Certainty kills it." Hans Christian Von Baeyer, Discover , Mar.'96

"Give up your good Christian life and follow Jesus." --Garrison Keillor                                                                 "The only container for truth is a lie."--JM Lloyd  My position is that the Holy Bible is not holy, nor inerrant, nor consistent, nor is it God’s purpose that we view it as if it were an idol, as if it were perfect. It is the greatest work of literature ever written down, but is similar to how the Greeks viewed Homer’s epics, how the Romans viewed the Aeneid, or the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh or the Hindu Vedas. It is how a people came to view their history and how they answered certain ontological and epistemological questions. To put it in that company does not degrade the Bible; it elevates it. It is how humans have recorded our search for meaning and truth, for God. The Bibl...

What Hans Christian Von Baeyer once said of science ( Discover , March 1996) should also be applied to the church and spirituality: "Science, in other words, thrives on anomaly, inconsistency, controversy, and doubt. Certainty kills it." Whereas certainty comes from the mind, doubt comes from the body: an experience leaves the question, What has happened? Who am I , now that this instance, this thing, has occurred? Certainty says, This is so because X is Y . It is an answer. And the answers which the old church is leaving us are proving unsatisfactory. Perhaps the New Church should be like a ship at sea, not at port. The existing church sits at dry dock, getting its repairs done and reviewing its rules and regs: No homosexuality. Belief in transubstantiation (or not). Belief in infant baptism (or adult). The rules for Christ's divinity--all the stuff that has been worked out in creeds and so forth. The ship is painted with the colors of burdensome connotations: j...