Christian Humanism: An Essay on Faith, Meaning and Truth

[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.