Monday, July 20, 2009

Finding Answers To Hard Questions About Faith: A New Book For You

For a couple of years, it was possible from this website to access a book-length collection of short studies that I wrote under the title: Explorations in Faith and Belief. During the time that this material was up and running, I received a number of e-mails from readers that I found gratifying and challenging, and that encouraged me specifically to refine and focus the material around a better defined and more consistently carried out theme. With the technical help of Ms. Chris Guldi, who created and who has managed this website from its beginning over seven years ago, I have re-fashioned some of the original essays and a lot of new material into a very different kind of book that I hope you will find interesting and helpful.

If you will look on the right side of this page, you will see a link to this just finished book, whose title I have reproduced above. There are several ways for you to make it your own. The first is by reading it online, and/or downloading parts or all of it to your computer, from which you may then read, reproduce, and distribute it free of charge. (I keep having to remind myself, though, that printing downloaded material does not come cheap, at least as long as I continue to rely on desktop printers that drink ink as fast as I drink bottled water.)

If you would like this material to have and to hold in more traditional book form, Chris has made this possible, too. A CreateSpace paperback edition is now available through a direct link that she has provided. And soon, Kindle owners can order it directly for download through Amazon. (Needless to say, I never could have figured out how to provide these options on my own.) Together, these access points have drawn my writing completely into Cyberspace, where some readers have waggishly suggested my thinking has been for a long time.

The organization of Explorations … came about originally as a response to readers of Howe About who had been either intrigued, put off, or both by my opinions and who wanted to know more about the theological method and principles that inform them. Several correspondents wondered whether my approach to theology can be defended as an adequate way of representing the Christian message in the present-day, and if so, how? Their questions were legitimate and important, and Explorations sought to answer them respectfully and as completely as I could. One response to my efforts that especially caught my interest came in the form of a question that has occupied my attention ever since: How can we use these discussions of theological fine points in everyday conversations with everyday people about their very personal struggles with faith?

It did not take me long to realize that this question has been at the heart of my pastoral and academic ministry across a professional lifetime, and that I may have developed a perspective on it that is worth sharing with more than just my own students, parishioners, counselees, and fellow church members. The perspective is anchored in the fundamental conviction that when we are struggling with faith-issues, what we need most is to be surrounded by fellow believers and strugglers who listen well, who can resist the temptation to impose their own opinions on us, and who encourage us to seek answers to our questions that are acceptably Christian but at the same time congruent with the dictates of our own conscience. A major corollary of this conviction is that the process by which we arrive at answers is as important as the answers to which the process leads us.

One hope that I have for this book is that all of its readers will find in it resources for nurturing their own spiritual growth. A second is that those who are engaged in the ministry of listening and guiding will find in it some very practical help for working with people whose life-issues are being made more complicated by their faith-issues. Thirdly, I hope that this book will add an important and needed dimension to my previous books on lay shepherding, and to the lay Christians who continue to read and use them in their own congregations. And finally, I hope that I will hear from you about how to make my on-going thinking about the book’s subject a more helpful account of how struggling with questions about faith is also a witness of faith.

Monday, July 06, 2009

A Couple Of Biblical Texts In Context

I would like to think that it is a sign of maturing in faith and not just aging into crankiness that some of my favorite passages in the Bible have begun to trouble me as much as they comfort me. Two examples, both from my very favorite Gospel, should suffice to illustrate at least some of my --- and, I believe, our --- troubles. Since modern translations do not help very much to alleviate the difficulties, I will quote both passages in familiar King James language.

The first is John 3:16 --- “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.“ What is comforting and relevant about this verse is its picture of the scope of God’s love. Although the world of which it speaks is smaller than the world to which today’s astrophysical and ecological interests and passions stretch, it is still large enough to encompass the whole of the human world that St. Paul once characterized as groaning in travail, awaiting relief and release. (Romans 8:21-3) God’s love is for all, not some. It is not the limited, conditional love of one among many tribal deities, but the pure, unbounded love of the one and only Lord of all Life.

Well, not quite. As the Lord giveth in the first part of this verse, he taketh away in the second. All who are not “in” the Son (the mysticism here is an important theme running through the whole of this Gospel) will be cut off from the source and scene of eternal life. If we were Jewish Christians in the late first century of the second milennium, just kicked out of the synagogue for insisting that Jesus is the long-expected Messiah, we might want to take this verse to heart, give up our longing for an irretrievably lost fellowship with our still Jewish friends and family members, and rev up our participation in the Christian koinonia. But we are not of that time and situation. We are Christians in an increasingly interdependent and religiously pluralistic world of a new millennium altogether, who can no longer afford to allow the good news of John 3:16a to be swallowed up by the very bad and irrelevant news of 3:16b.

The second passage of this little exercise is John 14:6 --- “…I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” Here, too, there is something comforting and relevant to be gleaned. At least, I have found it so ever since I began struggling in late adolescence with how to be a faithful Christian in addition to being a new church member. I got what God was all about; what I did not get was how to translate my understanding of God into a better way of personal living than I had managed to come up with on my own. The Ten Commandments helped some, although the jealous God of whom they spoke was not the God I had come to know. “Look to Jesus,” a lot of my friends kept telling me. And that helped more.

It was the first part of John 14:6 that first showed me what I would find by looking in earnest, even though the exclusivity implied by the “The” of the passage seemed more than just a little extreme. As for the second part of the verse, I could only close my eyes and shake my head in consternation. Jesus had become worth listening to not because I saw him as my only path to God, but because the God who had already come to me along his own path was the same God who came to Jesus too, much more powerfully.

Every now and then, I get to wondering about just what might befall us in the life of faith were the original manuscripts of biblical books ever to turn up somewhere. At present and for the most part at least, we have every reason to suppose that they were copied accurately and faithfully. But… One speculation I have is that in that Johannine School of editors back yonder, there might have been a dyslexic guy who inadvertently reversed the original phrasing of 14:6b and whose reversal got picked up and incorporated into all the versions of the Fourth Gospel that subsequently made it out of the School. Consider this possibility for the original statement: “no man cometh unto me, but by the Father.”

Or unto the Buddha, or to Muhammad, or… As speculation, of course, this line of thought is clearly over the top. As theology, though? Now that is another story.