[This essay was written in response to a question from a
brilliant young man now almost 18, with whom I have corresponded almost daily
since before he was hospitalized more than 3 years ago with brain cancer and
other serious conditions. During our
conversations he had asked me about my loss of faith and I had resisted a
direct answer because I knew his traditional faith gave him great comfort. This essay on why I became a humanist is a
response to that question. Parts of this
essay were reworked from my book, The Gospel of Christian Humanism.]
You wanted to know more about what you
described as my loss of faith as a Christian and a minister. I disputed your characterization as a loss
of faith and told you that it was actually more of a growth from the
simplistic faith of a child to the more mature faith of an adult.
There is a poem that is helpful in
demonstrating some of the issues I will discuss, Trees, by a poet
and soldier who wrote before and during WW1.
Trees
Joyce Kilmer - 1886-1918
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
I will start with an observation. Kilmer refers to a tree as a poem. A poem speaks to us in figurative language
that is symbolic rather than literal.
The tree is given human qualities: mouth, arms, hair, bosom – but he
does not mean that the tree literally has a mouth or arms. He intends these visual symbols to convey
poetic and religious truth—truth that is not literal but symbolic and is conveyed
to us through images.
The book of Genesis in the
Judaeo-Christian tradition conveys symbolic meaning rather than literal
meaning. It is religious poetry. One passage in Genesis that has similar
imagery to Joyce Kilmer’s Tree describes man as having been
created from the earth, formed from clay and molded into the shape of a human
being. This is symbolic truth that is
not intended to be taken literally. It is
an image that pictures man as a part of the earth from which he was made and to
which he will return. When we say that
image is true we do not mean it is literally true.
So we begin with a premise, that the
concept of truth is complicated and can mean different things depending
on the context. When we speak to each other and use the same
word to mean different things our conversation becomes muddled and we do not
communicate with each other.
For instance, take the word lift. In the UK it is a noun and means what we in the
U.S. call an elevator. In the
world of ladies’ fashion, it refers to a high-heeled shoe. In common colloquial language, it means a ride
in an automobile. To an automobile
mechanic it is a hydraulic device that raises an automobile so that the
mechanic can get under it for maintenance.
Usually when we use lift in a
sentence or hear it spoken by someone else the context gives us a clue as to
which meaning applies, so the chance of misunderstanding is reduced. However there are times when we are speaking
to someone and that person has a different meaning in mind for a word we use. For instance, two women are talking and one
says to the other, “I am going to a party.
Would you give me a lift?” Someone
unfamiliar with the subtleties of English might be confused over whether the speaker
meant ‘would you loan me high heels’ or ‘would you give me a ride.’
That sort of language confusion is
most likely to occur when the persons speaking are accustomed to using
different languages where words may have different meanings and they are
unaware that the word they are using means something entirely different to
someone else. It is particularly
problematic and a source of much confusion in religion when those conversing
use a common word with different meanings.
On a discussion blog where I sometimes
comment a fundamentalist Christian had been arguing whether a particular statement
was “true” or not. Frustrated that the argument was going nowhere because the
parties had different assumptions about reality and truth, I interposed a comment:
That is nonsense*--literally. Those of us who live in the "real"
world of sense, reality, logic, proof, etc., do not accept your premise that
there is a world beyond the world of sense and experience, a world that
requires us to suspend our notion of what is real and step into a different world
where faith and belief are alternative ways of “knowing” in place of sense,
verifiability, logic and proof. That is a bridge too far for many of us to
cross.
*nonsense,
meaning not sensible, not subject to our senses of sight or touch, not
verifiable.
With that background I will attempt to
tell you something about what I believe and why I believe it. It is best told in the form of an autobiographical
story that describes my religious pilgrimage from the evangelical tradition in
which I was brought up, through a long dark night of unnerving and painful doubt
and theological confusion in my early adulthood, to the place where I am now,
the parameters of which may become clearer as my story unfolds.
Where I am now is only a way station
along the path but It is a place where I stand with some confidence that I have
assembled enough of the “theological fragments”** that were left to me to be
able to construct a personal faith that makes sense to me both as a framework
by which to understand the meaning and significance of life (a religious
philosophy) and as a way of living that life (an ethical commitment).
**theological
fragments is a term I owe to my teacher and mentor, Professor William H
Hamilton.
As early as high school I was aware of
some inner conflict and uncertainty about what was taught in Sunday School. I
was aware that the biblical stories could not be ‘true’ in the sense that they were
literal descriptions of actual events. I was desperately seeking some
theological explanation that would clarify the sense in which I could believe
that biblical events were ‘true.’ At the same time I was painfully aware
that those Christians around me acted and spoke as if they believed that
biblical stories were literally and
historically true and did not seem troubled by that. I think some
of my very early seriousness about religion was driven by my personal anxiety
and confusion about how to understand and explain these events.
During my senior year I won the
competitive exam for a 4-year $6000 scholarship from the University of Virginia.
That was a lot of money in those days. My
church said they would only provide financial assistance if I went to the Southern
Baptist affiliated University of Richmond. Since I was on my own
(and had been since 11th grade when my family disintegrated) and I was fearful
of not being able to make it without aid from my church, reluctantly I turned
down the University of Virginia scholarship.
In the fall of 1955 I entered Richmond
College at the University of Richmond. In the first semester I took a
course entitled Introduction to the New Testament where I was introduced
to critical study of the Bible. Biblical criticism is the scientific
analysis of the literary works comprising the Bible for inconsistencies in
style, language or viewpoint that may indicate multiple authorship or different
time or place of composition. It can elucidate passages that may have
originally existed in oral form prior to their written form or tease out clues
that hint to different origins for specific passages in a document or when,
where or why a particular biblical book appeared in its final form.
I had not thought much about how the
Bible came to be, but this critical approach was very disturbing and even more
troubling was that this critical approach was being taught by professors of
religion in a Virginia Baptist college. I wanted to leave college,
to do what else I did not know and had not considered, but I wanted to run away
from a very disturbing, almost traumatic, intellectual and religious challenge
to my faith that I was not prepared to deal with.
My religious beliefs at the time could
best be described as evangelical. I had expected my education at a Baptist
college to confirm and strengthen my evangelical beliefs. I expected to
acquire knowledge that would explain some Biblical passages and some elements
of Christian belief that were troublesome to me, and I presumed that I would be
intellectually equipped to defend the faith both to myself and to others.
The foundations of my world were badly
shaken by my early college experience. My long struggle with faith had
begun. I took many more courses in biblical and religious studies and in
philosophy in the next three years at Richmond, partly to meet the requirements
for a major in ancient history and biblical studies, but mostly to sort out for
myself what I could believe and what I must jettison. I struggled through
college and later through three years of graduate theological study trying to
make some sense of religious doctrine and to reconcile it with my scientific
and pragmatic outlook.
In high school I had been a pretty
serious student. I was aware that there were issues argued between
‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’ about what we could know and how we could know
it, what was ‘true’ in the Bible and what was not, whether or not belief in God
made rational sense, whether there actually was a heaven and a hell and where
they were, whether all people who did not believe in Christ would be damned,
whether it was possible to reconcile a loving god with evil and suffering in
the world.
By the time I had left high school I
had read many articles, pamphlets and books designed to provide the evangelical
Christian with answers to problems of faith. I believed that either you
accepted scientific concepts of the origins of the universe and the evolution
of man over time, or you accepted the biblical story of a world created by God
in seven days and a literal heaven and hell. Since they were in conflict it
was necessary to choose between them.
My professors did not see the world in
such neat ‘either-or’ categories. They affirmed that the creation story
was “true” but we had to make allowances for some of the details such as the
literal seven days, which could be interpreted as ‘eons’ or ‘days in god’s
time’ which is not necessarily the same as our time. You could believe in
the general scientific framework and you could simultaneously believe that the
Bible was quite literally true as well, but you had to do some careful verbal
dancing to explain the biblical stories so that the apparent conflicts were
resolved. My first instinct was to accept this strategy as a way to
resolve a number of issues that troubled me, but gradually it lost its
persuasive power and I came to see it as intellectually dishonest and arising out
of the unwillingness to accept reality.
As my studies progressed at Richmond,
what puzzled and disturbed me most was that my struggle with faith was
instigated by faculty in the religion department, who seemed unaware of the
mental havoc they were creating in me and presumably in others. I could
not reconcile their critical approach to the Bible (which I thought had some
pretty significant implications for traditional religious faith) with their
fairly traditional theology, which seemed similar in its broad outlines to what
I had grown up with. There appeared to be a radical disconnect between
their theology and their pragmatic approach to the world of reason and science
that I could not grasp.
The faculty apparently had reconciled
their theology with their critical approach to the Bible in some way that was
not clear to me. From my perspective it seemed that they did not draw the
obvious conclusion that there were irreconcilable differences between the way
they interpreted the Bible and their quite traditional theological views.
As faculty explained it, the Bible was still ‘God’s word’ to man despite the
messy way various documents had been assembled through oral traditions to form
the written documents that developed through the centuries into the form that
we have today.
They had explained that the Bible was
to be understood not as the literal “words of God" but rather the place
where God spoke to us through its pages when we listened carefully and
expectantly and were open to the still small voice within us. To put this in a
different way, they seemed to be saying that the Bible was not the words of God
so much as it was a place where God could be experienced. That made the
Bible a very human book, but a vehicle that could be used by God.
This made some sense to me, but it
still raised the issue of how we sort out the many conflicting claims made by
those who profess to have heard the word of God in its pages when it is
apparent that all those claims cannot be true. How do we authenticate the
genuine Word that comes from God from the self-delusion of what we want to
believe or hear? After all some people who hear voices are
lunatics.
By the end of my first year at
Richmond I had concluded that I was not interested in a career as a parish
minister. I considered briefly a possible career as a youth
minister, religious camp director, or other non-pastoral career, but by my
sophomore year I determined that my interest in religion was academic and I
wanted to teach and the only serious place to do that was in a university, so
it was clear that I needed a doctoral degree in religion.
Graduate school requirements for a doctorate
in any of the places I considered -- Yale, Princeton, and the University of
Chicago among others -- required a solid background in at least two ancient
languages, so I took the basic two-year courses in Latin and Greek and then
added German, which was necessary in order to do graduate work in theology or
philosophy, as much of the original work in theology and in biblical studies at
that time was in German. My undergraduate major in philosophy and
religion required courses in ancient history, biblical studies and philosophy,
and that proved to be a heavy academic load.
I wanted solid undergraduate preparation
to make graduate study easier. I took all available courses in the
religion department. Some were easier than others, by which I mean easier
on my religious sensibilities and acquired prejudices about what must be
believed by a Christian. The wisdom literature genre of
Proverbs, Psalms and Ecclesiastes, and the prophetic literature of Amos,
Isaiah and Jeremiah were easier to manage without too much troublesome conflict
with my sense of reality; however the early Old Testament books were filled
with stories and descriptions of improbable events that were in conflict with
what we knew or thought we knew about time, history and our universe.
When pushed on the historicity
of particular stories and events, I sensed some “evasive” answers from various
members of the faculty, with such suggestions as the probable difference
between god’s time and our time, and apparent conflicts caused by partial
rather than full revelation that created apparent rather than real conflict
with what we otherwise knew or thought we knew. The escape was to quote
Paul – “Now we see through a darkened glass but in eternity all these apparent
discrepancies and contradictions will be resolved.”
There were other responses, too glib
and superficial to be very helpful, but said with sincerity and a
straight-face: a day with god was as a million years; some things we just had
to accept on faith; there are many ways of “knowing” and religious knowledge
was a ‘different kind’ of knowing but not less important than other kinds of
knowledge; one implication of revelation was the peace that comes to us when we
accept through faith that all truth is essentially god’s truth and that there
can be no real conflict between the truth of god, the truth of the Christian
faith, and the truth of the world as we know it or think we know it because god
is ultimate truth; we are in the hands of God and it is presumptuous of us to
claim that we finite beings would ever be able to contain within ourselves
enough knowledge or wisdom to resolve all the apparent conflicts; the greater
our humility in the face of god’s truth the happier we will be because we will
have the present certainty that we will ultimately know the truth and the
ultimate truth that we will know in the fullness of time will give us
confidence that will make us free in our present.
I found this way of thinking about
serious religious and intellectual issues very curious and not very
convincing. The “circularity” of the reasoning made no sense to me.
Late in the spring of my first year at
Richmond I was at a very low point, the foundation of my religious “faith”
having been badly shaken. I had not yet found any way that Christian
faith could be interpreted for me in a way that did not seriously violate my
sense of intellectual integrity and my desperate concern to find meaning and
truth. Having found nothing solid that I could hold onto and having nothing
to lose, I met with Reuben Alley, editor of the Virginia Baptist monthly
magazine, whom I knew by reputation to be wise and ‘liberal’ in his
interpretation of religion, and with Phil Hart, university chaplain and a
professor of religion whose doctorate was from the University of St. Andrews in
Scotland, a fact which impressed me a great deal.
Each of them in his own different
style counseled the same general advice, first to be patient, that what I was
experiencing as a crisis of faith was not unusual, that the journey into
religious knowledge is in part self-knowledge and it can be a very bumpy road
with lots of detours but eventually I may find the journey worth taking; and second, to go north, the point being that
if I wanted to get anywhere teaching at a university in the south I needed an
undergraduate degree from the south to make me initially acceptable (e.g.
Richmond) and not an outsider, but I must have a doctorate from a northern
graduate school to give serious academic credibility among faculty colleagues,
who generally mistrusted the academic rigorousness and preparation of those who
remained in the south.
Reuben Alley and Phil Hart were right
in their advice, both as to the long and sometimes tortuous religious
pilgrimage that lay ahead, as well as in their suggestion that I ‘go north’ for
graduate theological education. While I
did not appreciate either piece of advice for quite some years, nevertheless I
followed the path that they suggested to me.
Graduate theological education at
Colgate Rochester Divinity School was another mental and emotional shock.
I arrived there in the fall of 1959, surprised at how cold it was in Rochester
in mid-September. Fall had arrived early, the days were considerably shorter
than they were in Virginia, the leaves were rapidly losing their fall color and
were already dropping from the trees in great heaps on the sidewalks, and the
final annoyance, I discovered I was allergic to whatever was in the fall air
and that added to the discomfort of being in a very unfamiliar and disturbing
environment.
The first year of graduate education
at Colgate Rochester was the theological equivalent of an intellectual and
religious boot camp. First-year theological studies seemed designed to destroy
the naive religious and theological simplicity of the thoughts, ideas and
values which most of us had brought with us to the campus. The
religious shock troops included James Alvin Sanders, Professor of Old
Testament; Harmon Holcomb, Professor of Philosophy of Religion; William H.
Hamilton, Professor of Theology; and Jim Ashburn, whose title I do not recall
but whose field was personality theory and psychological
counseling.
I mention members of the faculty by
name because they made quite an impression on me and, looking back on those
years with the distance of time, I am both amazed and appreciative of the fact
that I studied under some of the greatest minds in their respective fields in
that generation. How all of them were assembled at one graduate school at
the same time was either remarkably fortuitous or the brilliant coup of the
president of the seminary at that time, a cigar-smoking successful administrator
who stayed out of the classroom. However they were assembled, these key
faculty were clearly the intellectual stars in the field of religion in the
late 50’s and early 60’s.
An assignment in the first semester
course in biblical studies under Dr. James Alvin Sanders, an Old Testament
historian and expert who was involved in the translation of the Dead Sea
Scrolls and was a prolific writer on Old Testament studies, was typical.
The assignment was to read the books of the Pentateuch (the first five books of
the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, etc.) and several other books with a
stack of note cards at hand and to write on separate cards brief comments on
inconsistencies, troublesome problems or historical observations that we
encountered when we read passages with Sunday School familiarity but which we
read for the first time critically and carefully.
It soon became obvious there were many
problematic passages: the day the sun stood still so that a battle could
be completed in daylight, the seven days of the creation story starting with
the watery abyss, an obvious second creation story that differed in content
from the first, the serpent that confronted Adam and talked to him, the walls
of Jericho falling when the trumpets of the Israelites sounded, Jonah swallowed
by a great fish (not a whale) which delivered him to his preaching assignment,
to name a few. Reading the Old Testament in this “critical” way prepared
us for understanding the conclusions that biblical scholars (Catholic,
Protestant and Jewish) had reached in the past hundred years of linguistic and
historic study of the oldest available manuscripts of the Old Testament and the
related archaeological evidence.
Without getting into the very complex
details of this scientific approach to the study of the Bible (which is the way
we have learned to approach all historical and literary questions) and its
particular conclusions, it was apparent that a literal reading of the Old
Testament as if it were a continuous descriptive history without understanding
the background, the context and the culture of the time in which various
passages were written was simply not possible for us today.
The unstated but obvious educational
strategy of graduate theological education at Colgate Rochester was to knock
down naive assumptions, simplistic theological concepts, religious prejudices,
inconsistencies in thinking and conflicting values of those of us who came to
our theological education with a variety of preparatory experiences; and then,
having succeeded in at least disturbing the foundations, beginning the long
process of helping us build knowledge and faith that was ours rather than one
that was handed to us and accepted uncritically.
Put another way, the object was to see
if it was possible to develop a religious faith that could withstand the
various intellectual challenges of the 20th Century or, failing that, lead us
to another career option. They were pretty clear about that message and
strategy. It was not comfortable. Some of us had more discomfort
with this process than others.
Given my background, it was
particularly difficult on me even though I had already withstood some of its
shock during my college years. It forced hard choices as to what theological
baggage I must throw out and what pieces I would carry with me and perhaps
continue to struggle with. At times it was emotionally
unsettling. At times I was alone in the darkness of the black night of
the soul, struggling through to the dawn beyond and hoping with the dawn that
the light would break through. Sometimes it did. Often it did not.
The object of this struggle, so far as
I was concerned at least, was to figure out what was essential in Christian faith
and what was not, and to see if the pieces I was left with at the end of this
phase of the struggle for faith were enough to feel comfortable that I was
still within the boundaries of what could reasonably be called Christian
faith. Assuming that Christian faith comes to us from a previous
generation in the language, the style, and the wrappings of that generation,
can we sort through what is not essential to get to the essence that is true
for us and for all generations and then frame it in the particular language and
style of our generation in a way that makes some sense to us and to our
contemporaries.
It was and is rigorous, demanding,
intellectually stimulating work. There were several simultaneous
movements in Christian theological circles during this time. One of them,
and the most exciting and interesting to me personally, was a sustained
dialogue between religion and academia, an intellectual conversation between
theology and philosophy of religion on the one hand, and other academic disciplines
both in the ‘hard’ sciences such as physics and biology and the ‘soft’ sciences
such as history and psychology, with philosophy serving as the mediator.
Religion had gained new life and respect in the halls of academia.
Christian theology had moved out of
the churches (where it was no longer welcome) and had engaged in dialogue with
literature, drama, the arts, the sciences, world religions, and the philosophy
of literature. From the perspective of a
student who had serious doubts about the relevance of Christian faith to the
broader world, it was encouraging that religion had acquired intellectual
respectability and was being taken seriously in the academy as a legitimate academic
discipline that could contribute to the general exchange of knowledge that is
the currency of the university.
I think it was during this period when
Christian engagement with the intellectual world of the universities was at its
height that I concluded reluctantly that the religiosity and stultification of
the Christianity of the churches had reached an institutional dead end and that
serious Christian thought and dialogue had moved from the Church into academia
where it found a new home where it was able to maintain its vitality, its
essential core, and its integrity.
It struck me that the primary reason
that the Christianity of the churches had become irrelevant for so many of us
is that it had backed away from seriously confronting the implications of the
world of the 20th Century and had retreated into a safe and comfortable
isolation from the implications of scientific thought for religious
faith. The lessons of theological education were being ignored by the
graduates of theological schools and the Church’s professional clergy had withdrawn
deeper into a schizophrenic religious world in which what is said and implied
on Sunday morning not only was disconnected from the lessons and conclusions of
their theological education, it had virtually no connection with the real world
that we lived in during the rest of the week. The professional clergy were
unwilling to say out loud to their congregation: “of course we do not believe such
nonsense, that idea arose in a different time when people had a pre-scientific
world view, and of course we do not believe it happened that way, but that is
not essential to Christian belief, what is important is that….”
The essential implication of the protestant
principle (a term taken from the writings of theologian Paul Tillich, who developed this implied
extension of the teachings of Martin Luther and John Calvin) is that genuine religious
faith wherever and whenever it occurs results from a highly personal and
individual search for meaning in an otherwise meaningless existence as we try
to make sense of our lives and our world.
To put this idea in theological
language, the struggle for faith and belief is directly between each person and
ultimate reality (or god, however defined); it is not mediated by
religious authorities or a church or tradition or by a priest, although church,
tradition and priest may be among the helpful guides on the journey for
faith. In the end it is a journey that each of us must take for himself
along a sometimes lonely and difficult path as we search for meaning. For
those who are especially lucky, faith and a sense of meaning come easily,
without struggle or pain, without doubt or anxiety, as something given and
accepted and not questioned, without having to struggle through the dark night
of the soul.
Setting aside all the philosophical
language and getting to the heart of the questions I set out to answer, I have described
for you how I arrived at my current beliefs.
I am a Humanist because my starting place is human experience. I am a Christian because I found that Christian
mythology contains a core of truth in its symbolism and the teachings of Jesus propose
ethical values that are worth living by.
That is how I arrived at a philosophy that I call Christian Humanism.
It is a personal perspective for which
I make no universal claims. I have looked at alternative philosophies and have concluded
that the myth and imagery of Christianity provides a meaningful framework for
understanding life. It is true in the same sense that Trees is true—it
is poetry that conveys meaning and truth, and for me it provides a perspective
for comprehending the meaning and significance of life and an ethical
way of living life. It challenges us with what is ultimately real
and important. It is not believing a set of facts or confusing mythology
with history.
The search for a philosophy of life
that gives meaning and purpose is a journey and a task on the road to mature
adulthood, an individual journey that no one can take for us. It is not
specific content that can be taught like mathematics or history and it is not something
that can be taught to children. It is an attitude, a way of perceiving life
and values, a way of living, and it can no more be taught than we can teach
someone to be a poet or an artist or teach them to experience beauty or color. The
best we can do is to describe our journey, teach the importance of the
questions of life, stimulate intellectual curiosity, and help equip them for
their own journey.
Unfortunately religion as we know it
in Western culture has gone off the rails and become increasingly irrelevant by
confusing myth with history, contradicting our fundamental understanding about
our world, and asking us to believe what is unbelievable, and in so doing is
perceived not so much wrong as irrelevant.
The idea that taking Christianity
seriously requires not taking much of it literally is something that many of
the professional clergy understand but are afraid to say out loud, except for a
few who speak openly only in limited circumstances and with great
caution. That does not give me much hope for the future of religion.
That gets me to your second question,
why I am no longer a minister. The short
answer is that the question is mistaken, I am still a Unitarian Universalist minister. But there is a longer answer I should give,
why I chose to be a teacher, educator and writer rather than a minister in a
parish. That is much harder to answer.
In part it is because it is so easy to be misunderstood when the terms
that I use to discuss religious issues do not have the same meaning to those
hearing the message. In part it is
because of the tension between Humanism and Christian mythology
in my philosophy that makes conversation difficult—secular humanists are
impatient with my use of the myth and poetry of religion and liberal Christians
are offended by my nontheistic humanism.
But the most important reason that I am not a parish minister is that my
interests are more inclined toward teaching and writing, where I have the
freedom to be who I am without having to be concerned with whom I might offend.