Wednesday, February 1, 2012

A Double-Edged Sword: A Theological Interlude

What in the world is my theology? Do I think early members of a religion "made up" their stories? Sometimes I might talk like that. Am I some kind of atheist?

No. But I think of God as working through God's creations, through the human heart, head, and hands.

A lecturer I heard a couple of years ago, Rabbi Larry Hoffman, said that in biblical times, people looked at the heavens and saw God as "up there," "out there." Later, in the Germany of the 18th Century, where scholarly bible study emerged, the hierarchical view was prevalent. In our times, we tend to find God in the depth of our own hearts. I often experience God in that way, as acting through the hearts of humankind.

I don't seem to see any contradiction, though, between that and experiencing God as all around, or between that and talking to God--praying. Except that although I may feel I pray over distance, any answer is intensely here and now (not from far away). God--as far as the most distant star, as close as sheltering arms.

As to bible stories, as I must have made clear, I am not a bible literalist. I am not a bible maximalist who thinks the stories happened just as they are described. I am not a bible minimalist, either. A minimalist thinks the stories are made up. Nothing really happened. Surprise--I am a moderate. Something (not nothing) happened.

Something happened. As Phylis Tickle said at the 2008 Decatur Book Festival, whatever it was, it was like a train wreck. Everyone there saw something.

Something happened that was so profound, so earthshaking, so life-changing, that it had to be preserved, it had to be told, it had to be remembered. It had to be captured as best possible using the art of words, rehearsed, practiced, honed, memorized, communicated, and passed on. And eventually written down. Because it was so significant, people had to live their lives according to it. The universe was reordered because people now found meaning via the revelatory experience.

Revelation. It exerts a gravitational pull on life, as it both generates actions and behaviors and explains events and experiences, so that more and more of what happens comes to make sense in light of it, and more and more requires explaining in light of it.

Also, God's revelation continues now as in days of old--with revelation as captured in our foundational narratives available to shed light on the events and experiences of today. I don't think people's biology was different when they talked to God in those days. I don't think God is an anthropomorphic being whom we can hear as we hear human beings. I don't think God was that in biblical days, either. But human experience was different, and God was described according to how God was experienced.

There are different cultures and strange forms of language so that even these days people in different cultures experience reality differently. Even in different Western cultures, there are differences. We also experience a different reality than people who preceded us in our own culture, our grandparents, for example. The experiences of people in the ancient Near East differed from ours. And over the centuries between Abraham and David, and between then and the time of Alexander the Great, on up to Jesus' lifetime and beyond, experiences of reality continued to evolve. All this is to say that something happened, and those we now call the patriarchs, prophets, kings, rabbis, disciples, followers and saints found a way to preserve and explain their revelations and pass them down to us.

They did so in terms of what they knew and in terms of the language and literary forms they had at their command during their lifetimes. I personally don't find that disturbing or heretical. It was still God--the author of all revelation, understanding, and vision--acting through the hearts of people and revealing God's self in history, via events and through the natural world.

So, although I'm not a bible literalist, I believe in God. The people of yore had their revelatory experiences. They struggled and submitted, and they communicated their experiences, and in "turning it, turning it," we can learn from it to shine light on and bring meaning into our own lives today.

And why? Not just to make it through the night, but know why to get up. There is a reason why each of us is here. We are all different, all needed, all potential footsteps and toeholds for God's continual unfolding. We are each called to be our full potential selves.

I don't think it's too unusual for even great writers on the subject of Judaism and Christianity, even those who can speak intelligibly to me today, to take a jab or two at the other religion. I thought A. N. Wilson, in Paul: Mind of the Apostle, took a jab at Judaism with a crack about the Holy of Holy's being empty, and Irving Greenberg, likewise, in one of his books or articles, possibly For the Sake of Heaven and Earth, took a jab at Christianity with a jibe about a grave robber. If that's what they were doing and if they had recognized it, they could have restrained themselves--if they did recognize it. Each should know that such pokes don't change revelation, but reflect on the writer himself. Just goes to show they are human, though, and in general they are both fantastic writers and great at expressing their experiences and learning.

My purpose in my current writing is not to jab anyone or disprove Christian christological claims in particular. I hope I'm acceptant--except to the extent anybody's religious claims or faith rests on the objective inferiority of "the other" and their religion, or on "proof" of their own religion's absolute superiority for someone else. No tolerance for intolerance.

I've just had to rework a paragraph in my prior post, A Double-Edged Sword: Fulfillment Theology, and I hope it's improved. And I'm still working on what comes next.