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.

What is Christian Humanism?

Frequently I am asked to try to explain Christian Humanism in a few words, so as I thought how to begin writing again after a long hiatus due to illness it seemed appropriate to develop a short statement and a longer explanation of the general movement of Christian Humanism, of which I am a small part.  Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and rational inquiry are not only compatible with Christianity, they are fundamental to a proper understanding and interpretation of Christian belief. 

A myth has been created by contemporary fundamentalist Christians, who are appparently ignorant of their own history, that humanism is a recent creation of the Twenty First Century anti-theists who are out to destroy Christianity.  Unfortunately they fail to recognize the fact apparent to anyone who has taken a course in world history that humanism has been a part of Christianity since the First Century and a significant factor in its history throughout Western Civilization. Those who fail to learn from history are the fools of our generation who speak without knowledge.

Today there is considerable variance in the positions of those who fall under the umbrella of Christian Humanism, from those who are more generally at the liberal end of traditional Christianity but want to humanize it by refocusing it away from the archaic theological language of tradition and move it the direction of the example of Jesus by exhibiting  compassion to one’s neighbor, to the other extreme where I find myself, which is quite willing to dispense with the traditions and theology of the mysterium tremendum of Christianity altogether, extracting from the studies of Christian ethics what seems appropriate for our contemporary situation and emphasizing modeling one’s life on that of Jesus to the extent practicable.

Put another way, Christian Humanism ranges from the attempt to make Christians less interested in the mysteries of the world beyond and more caring about the world we live in, to dispensing with the superstructure of Christian thought and living in a world without god but with the Jesus of history as our teacher, model and guide.  Each of those extremes offers a full range of implications and problems, which we do not have time or inclination to deal with in this commentary. 

Christian Humanism is the conjunction of two different and typically unrelated conceptual approaches to understanding our world and for some of our contemporaries these terms and the ideas they represent do not fit together comfortably.  Indeed, for some it is an impossible and incompatible pairing of terms.  Christianity exists in the context of an overarching theological framework that informs and gives meaning to our understanding of our world and man’s place in it.  Humanism celebrates mankind’s intelligence as the key to understanding and explaining our world without the need for god or any other agency or rationale external to man, and at the same time it affirms our necessary connection with and dependence on each other for mutual support, concern and care. 

While it is an uneasy conjunction of terms, a look at history shows that Christianity and Humanism have had interesting interconnections going back at least as far as the Second Century when the writer of the Gospel of John and Justin Martyr (St. Justin) were contemporaries and both introduced the Greek concept of the Logos to the Christianity of their time (c. 125 A.D .), which they borrowed from the philosophy of the Stoics, the Gospel of John arguing that the Logos (in Greek thought the divine force that underlies the universe) predated but informed Christianity, and Justin arguing to the Roman authorities that Christian thought and values were consistent with the Logos and that therefore the Empire should leave alone this new sect because they were just stating the contemporary understanding of religion in a slightly different way that was not inconsistent with Stoic beliefs and values.  In both cases there was an integration of Christianity with the secular beliefs of the time.

This is not the place to create the history of the inter-relationships between Humanism and Christianity, or the intermingling of the divine and the human through the pages of history.  There are many sources for understanding that history for those who are interested, and perhaps the places to start are the New World Encyclopedia and Wikipedia, both of which have good summaries of Christian Humanism.  Here we will only mention the Middle Ages when Christian clerics controlled education through the monasteries and Charlemagne ordered centers of learning set up throughout the Empire, with monks and clerics morphing into professors.  Subsequently Western universities including Padua, Bologna, Paris, and Oxford were established through Papal decree and began teaching law, medicine, philosophy, languages and the classics (and so we have introduced the “humanities” to our curriculum).

In the Renaissance, perhaps the most significant single writing was Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) in which he argued that the religious duty of man is to approach learning from the human perspective, a very clear conjunction of Christianity with a humanistic approach.  In the Reformation human knowledge advanced with the invention of the printing press and the writings of Erasmus, Martin Luther and John Calvin.  The Enlightenment saw further advancement of the connection between humanism and Christianity with the emergence of secularism, liberal philosophy, Deism, bourgeois liberalism, an interest in the historical Jesus, and a non-conformist emphasis on reason and intuition in religious matters. 

We come back to our premise as stated at the beginning of this article—that Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and rational inquiry are not only compatible with Christianity, they are fundamental to a proper understanding and interpretation of Christian belief. 

How far can we stretch the fabric of the umbrella of Christian Humanism to include the extremes that claim a place under its framework?  It is clear that the movement within Christian Humanism that sees itself attempting to humanize Christianity with an emphasis on social concerns such as economic justice and concern for one’s neighbor is a legitimate Christian movement.  It is not at all clear that dispensing with traditional or modern Christian theology, and the willingness to live with only Jesus as teacher and guide, is sufficiently Christian to still fall within the broader Christian family.  As most ideologies, much depends on various interpretations of Christianity and who is doing the interpreting and for what objective.  I stand by my claim, while hearing and taking seriously the objections of those who argue to the contrary, that the version of Christian Humanism for which I argue on this site, a view that is willing to live without god but with only Jesus as our guide, is consistent with the views of other modern Christian thinkers including Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and deserves its place as both Christian and Humanist.

[Informed comments are welcome.]

The Myths of Christmas: Advice to my Fellow Clergy

The Toronto Globe and Mail published a column [6 September 2012] by a psychologist, Dr. Joti Samra, in which she responds to a mother who had asked for advice because her 12-year old son still believes in Santa Claus and, while it is endearing and embarrassing simultaneously, she was reluctant to break his spirit by telling him the truth.

Dr. Samra urged the mother to tell her son Santa was not real, noting that one of the amazing things about children is the innocence and enthusiasm of their beliefs and their awe at the wonders of the world, but that the duty of the parent is to help prepare them for the real world.  She observed that the way to approach the issue is to gently explain that the Santa myths have historical roots in the 4^th Century bishop St. Nicolas who was admired and recognized because he gave gifts secretly to those who were less fortunate and were in need, and then to help her son move beyond the Santa story to appreciate the value of unconditional gift-giving and the true spirit of Christmas which lives in us all when we give to others.

As is common for newspaper articles, readers commented on the story and I was fascinated by the range of comments, which can be categorized into several distinct groups: (a) Mom is the naïve one here because no 12-year old that is not living under a rock could possibly believe in Santa; her son is merely pretending because he has concluded there is some advantage in getting gifts from a pretend Santa.  (b) It is wonderful that there are kids who are so innocent of the hard realities of the world that we should let them continue to believe without destroying their innocence so long as it is possible for them because there is no point in discomforting them before they are ready for the truth.  (c)  As kids mature they give up their belief in Santa Claus as the jolly elderly elf who travels all over the world with his sleigh driven by flying reindeer and his sack of gifts for good children everywhere, so why as adults do they hold to the even more unbelievable story of a god who manages the events of the world and picks winners and losers, invisible guardian angels who fly, the son of the god born to a virgin, and a god who came back from the dead and now sits on a heavenly throne and will come back one day to judge the living and the dead. 

As I contemplated these responses from the standpoint of a humanist who chooses the life and teachings of Jesus as a model for ethical values but who does not buy into the mythical structure of traditional Christianity, I had some reflections from my early experience that might be helpful to parish clergy. 

A very long time ago when I was a student at a theological seminary in Rochester, New York, many students struggled with issues of faith and belief, which was one of the purposes of theological seminary (at least among the responsible seminaries!), and some seminarians who found they no longer believed the traditional theology found it was easier to pretend to believe than it was to give up their vocation and disappoint their friends and family.  Many of them chose to affiliate with liturgical denominations such as the Episcopalians/Anglicans, where they could say “the church believes” rather than “I believe.”

Early in my career, when I was chairman of the department of religion of an educational institution in New England I had a friend who was chaplain of a Catholic educational institution nearby that was run by a religious order and attached to a grotto of Mary that sold souvenirs and religious trinkets.  From conversations with him I knew that he did not believe that these trinkets had any actual spiritual value, so I asked him how he dealt with the fact that his religious order continued to sell these trinkets and encourage believing in their efficacy.  His response surprised me.  The people who come to the grotto are a very simple people, he said, like children, with very simple beliefs.  They don’t ask any questions and they are comfortable in their belief so why should we disturb them in their innocence and naivete?

Ah, the endearing innocence of children.  How comforting it is that our children are secure in their childhood beliefs in incredible stories and myths even as we know that the hard realities will intrude on them soon enough as they mature and outgrow them, some sooner, some later, but as that 1st Century Saint Paul (not Saint Nicolas!) reminds us—all of us must eventually become adults intellectually and spiritually and put behind us our childish beliefs.  That is all a part of the business of growing up spiritually.

And what is more incredible (“too improbable to be believed”) than the myth of a virgin giving birth to the son of a god who turns out to be the god himself,  expecting this god to help you win the next ball game or the next election or the war your nation fights against your neighbor.  What is more unbelievable than the claim that a collection of religious texts written two millennia ago was actually written by a god, or that a man wearing imperial robes and carrying a golden shepherd’s staff can act on behalf of a god as his emissary, or that the course of an illness or history will be changed because you asked for it.  The gullibility and the arrogance of such claims are monstrous.  They make the naivete of children seem so much more preferable, because at least the children outgrow their childish views.

Why don’t the same persons who are able to outgrow their childish views of Christmas not similarly outgrow their childish views about religion?

To my fellow clergy, who are reluctant to break the spirits of members of their congregation, you should need no reminder that the naïve beliefs of adults in your congregations are not endearing.  By using ambiguous language to avoid the issues you are prolonging their growth to maturity and interfering with the mandate of Saint Paul to put aside childish views and grow up into a mature faith that does not depend on mythology.  Borrowing from Dr. Samra, we suggest to our fellow clergy that the way to approach the issue is to gently explain that the Christian myths have historical roots in the 1st Century Jesus of Nazareth who was admired and recognized as a great teacher of love and compassion toward those who were less fortunate and were in need, and then to help their congregations move beyond the Christian mythology to appreciate the value of unconditional love and affirmation of others which is the true spirit of Christianity, which for the true Christian should live in them. 

What we wish for this Christmas is not that its myths be taken seriously, but rather that the spirit of generosity and kindness that underlies the spirit of Christmas become a reality in and for all of us, that the hungry are fed with bread and meat and not with empty promises, that the prisoners are visited with a spirit of reform of the human heart and not with promises of heavenly salvation, that the sick be visited with comfort and health care for all and a commitment to fight against the many illnesses that plague us, that the homeless find shelter accompanied by rehabilitation and job training and forbearance of foreclosures and evictions, and that the politicians sit down with each other and stop acting like children and get on with the business of compromise necessary to move us forward.

For all we wish joy, happiness and peace in the New Year – but we will not hold our breath waiting for it to happen.

The Unbelievers: Ministers Who Conclude There Is No God

The Boston Globe published a disconcerting feature article on Sunday April 11 entitled “The Unbelievers: What happens when a minister decides there’s no God.” The article is based on a study conducted by Professor Daniel Dennett of Tufts University that summarizes the content of interviews he conducted in depth with a number of ministers who over the years found that they have lost their faith in god and yet who continue to serve as ministers of churches because they are “trapped” in a profession that they do not know how to gracefully remove themselves from. In many cases these ministers are also caught in a situation in which they do not know how to break the news to family, friends and parishioners. Someone described the situation of these ministers as similar to being a closeted gay, unsure how they will be accepted once they come out of the church closet and conflicted about remaining in the ministry (as many do) or how they will support themselves if they have to give up their vocation as a result of their unbelief.


This study resonates with me because to some extent it is my story also, a story that I have told in some detail on my Christian Humanist website. Professor Dennett calls himself an atheist, but I prefer the term non-theist, because it is less confrontational and softer. I do not see any particular reason to be combative on the issue of belief in god or about my other beliefs and I do not want to provoke traditional believers. The question of the existence or reality of god does not interest me or seem worth the trouble to argue about any more than I am interested in arguing about whether tooth fairies or unicorns exist. I have just lost interest in god and do not find that term helpful, necessary or meaningful.

On the other hand, I believe that an ethical system is necessary. I find there is a great deal of value in Christian ethical beliefs and in the teachings of Jesus and I choose to base my ethical choices and priorities on those teachings. Therefore while I am a Humanist in that I value humanity and the humanities (and like many humanists, I do not believe in deities), I am a Christian in that I choose to be a follower of the teachings of Jesus. There are quite a few of us who identify ourselves as Christian Humanists, some who believe in god, some who do not.

Professor Dennett is right, however, when he observes the difficulty that a minister or priest encounters when they realize that faith has quietly left them and they must figure out how to navigate their way through some treacherous waters as they try to work out the implications for them, for their family and friends, and for their church. Over the past two years since I set up my website I have been contacted by a number of ministers who are struggling with the issue of faith, belief and vocation. The crisis of faith is sometimes so difficult that it results in the breakup of marriages, conflicts with families, and private despair for those who want desperately to believe, feel the loss of faith as a great loss in their life, but know that they cannot go back again.

Dennett summarizes his study this way:

"What emerges is a portrait of men (the one woman interviewed backed out at the last minute) grappling earnestly and incisively with the sort of theological quandaries familiar to anyone who has studied and doubted Christian doctrine. Just as strong, though, is the sense of secrecy and evasion that pervades their lives: having to hide their lack of belief from parishioners, friends, and even family members. Some spoke of feeling trapped: questioning their fitness for the pulpit but unable to leave because of a mix of personal, cultural, and even financial reasons.”

The Boston Globe allows reader comments on most of its news and commentary articles. This is the sort of article that attracts comments and as I slogged my way through the many hostile, angry and mean-spirited comments I was intrigued by a few of the more perceptive and interesting comments.

One comment observed cynically that “perhaps Mr. Bennett is on to something, that certain seminaries are in reality teaching 'anti-theology.'” Perhaps in some sense that observation has an element of truth to it, not because seminaries set out to undermine faith and not because they are deliberately engaged in false teaching, but because they have the mission of education in the broad sense of what that means (as compared to indoctrination, which is what happens in some seminaries).

Unfortunately some young theological students have the expectation that a theological education will resolve their doubts about matters of faith, but it rarely does, and as they learn more about the basis of faith, the biblical books and their background, various approaches to theology, philosophical issues surrounding faith, and the integration of theological knowledge with the world of knowledge, they discover that their doubts have increased rather than receded. That was certainly true in my case—I went to theological seminary with an undergraduate major in religion and I found that as my knowledge increased so did my doubts, and I came out of theological school with another graduate degree and a terminal case of agnosticism.

I have run into several variations on that theme from people who have contacted me through my website, most frequently suggesting that higher education is the source of the problem of the loss of faith and that as students are more exposed to liberal and atheistic college professors their innocent faith can be seriously damaged. The fear of losing faith (sometimes rationalized as a way of strengthening their faith) is a factor for students who attend conservative religious colleges and bible colleges, which tend to insulate students from confronting issues in science and philosophy that most of us expect students to be exposed to while in college as part of their educational growth toward intellectual maturity.

Here are some of the comments posted by Globe readers. It is apparent that readers were interested in loss of religious faith among their contemporaries generally, not just among the professional clergy, so the conversation begins to shift as more people comment.

"Mr. Dennett clearly has an agenda. His attempt to characterize his work as a study is fairly transparent. His self-serving drivel is an attempt to undermine religion and to coax those who may be weak and/or vulnerable to his position - kind of like gathering his own flock. And using others to do it for him is pure cowardice. Regardless of the denomination, it's about faith. Lot's have it, some don't. And that's okay. But to dedicate yourself to trying to destroy it in others is pathetic and very very sad."

# # #

"Dennett's notion that we might develop a secular form of religion, incorporating rituals similar to those of authentic religion, has no credibility whatever. Unitarianism is the most plausible candidate, but it's an abject failure at the task. There are no tenets worth speaking of, only the blandest of the bland platitudes. How can one be transported by such inanity? Insofar as one is pulled out of religious belief by thinking, how can one be pulled back into a secular religion by such vacuousness? It's sad of course that we can't replace the satisfying experience of religious transport by something secular. But it is the price exacted by thinking."

# # #

"When Dennett begins to recommend that non-believers be elevated to positions of leadership within churches, he steps away from any pretense of a "study." He is not attempting to open the church for those who doubt - he is attempting to take away the reasons for which most of us go to church in the first place. We already have an institution where non-believers come together for a pseudo-religious service and the purpose of doing good in the community. It's called the Unitarian Church, and they are a wonderful, historied organization full of community-minded people. I would direct Mr. Dennett there, but it seems his purpose in this "study" is not to find a place for non-believers who enjoy the trappings of religion, but to destroy the churches of those who have experienced and do experience doubt, yet continue to believe. No thanks. I'd rather live my life as though there is a higher purpose and a loving God, who commands us to come together to worship, to learn about Him and to do good in His name - even if I'm wrong."

The most interesting and perceptive comment, which appears to come from someone well informed on theological issues, deals directly with the issue of theological education and its impact on a serious theological student:

In his interview of Daniel Dennett, Drake Bennett raised the issue as to whether seminary education itself was a prime factor in the loss of faith among the clergy. Both Bennett and Dennett emphasized the study of biblical criticism as a factor in the undermining of religious faith. However, the study of theology itself can help to undermine religious faith too. Seminary students would, presumably, be exposed to the work of such eminent 20th century theologians as Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Hans Kung, whose work wittingly or unwittingly, deconstructed traditional concepts of God. Interestingly enough, all of those theologians were strongly influenced by the work of the 19th century atheist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, as well as by Nietzsche and Freud.

Tillich, in this regard is most interesting. The (atheist) philosopher Sidney Hook once remarked of Tillich:

"With amazing courage Tillich boldly says that the God of the multitudes does not exist, and further, that to believe in His existence is to believe in an idol and ultimately to embrace superstition. God cannot be an entity among entities, even the highest. He is being-in-itself. In this sense Tillich's God is like the God of Spinoza and the God of Hegel. Both Spinoza and Hegel were denounced for their atheism by the theologians of the past because their God was not a Being or an Entity. Tillich, however, is one of the foremost theologians of our time."

And Tillich himself once summarized his position in the following terms:

"If you start with the question whether God does or does not exist, you can never reach Him, and if you assert that He does exist, you can reach Him even less than if you assert that He does not exist. A God about whose existence or non-existence you can argue is a thing besides others within the universe of existing things. . . Actually, they have not only not refuted religion, but they have done it a considerable service. They have forced it to reconsider and restate the meaning of the tremendous word God."

Given this, one had to agree with Daniel Dennett that anyone who comes out seminary still believing in God (or at least the God of traditional theism) wasn't paying attention.”

The next quote reinforces the observation that theological education plays a key role in the loss of faith but also serves as an educational resource and incubator for those seeking a way to accommodate their loss of faith with a leadership role in the religious community. My own experience confirms that. Several of my fellow students during my theological school days were exploring religion for their personal and educational interest without seriously considering becoming a minister or going into professional church work. Others were struggling with issues of faith, with several different paths ultimately pursued. Some left the church or gave up any plan to enter the ministry as a career while others shifted to a religious denomination in which they believed they could fit comfortably, one into the Unitarian Universalist ministry, and two others into the Episcopal Church, the latter for a quite interesting reason—they were able to say “the Church believes” rather than “I believe.” I think that “out” was seen as an acceptable way to deal with the questions of faith among ministers to a much greater degree than is commonly admitted.

So we turn to a current theological student for the final comment:

As a student at Harvard Divinity School, I was hardly surprised at this study. I'd hazard a guess that at least 25% of the students at HDS are atheists or spiritual non-theists. Some, like me, are pursuing the academic study of religion: why people believe, what they believe, and how religious practices and institutions impact a wider society. But quite a few are aspiring clergy who do not accept anthropomorphic deities, yet still see a place for "benign" forms of religiosity in our culture. I did find myself nodding sympathetically as I read about the role of seminaries in fostering non-belief. I was a bona fide theist and practicing pastor when I went to seminary, but by the close of my first year the force of empirical evidence compelled me to surrender my faith. My professors spoke of the necessity of "re-enchantment" or a "second naïvete" as part of spiritual formation, but I never experienced a rebirth of this sort. And, for the record, I'm glad of it.

So where does this leave us? A significant number of ministers in American Protestantism (and I think this comment is true for Protestantism generally in the English speaking world) are facing a crisis of faith that has serious implications for the vocation of ministry. Critics have argued that this is a particular problem of the more liberal theological seminaries and is not a widespread problem. I think they are mistaken, perhaps even deluded.

There is increasing evidence that the problem is much larger than is generally realized because, as Professor Dennett’s study shows and as I have discovered from contacts with many ministers facing a crisis of faith, it is a secret that cannot easily be talked about even with close friends and family. Ministers feel trapped in a vocation that is not just a job, it is a faith commitment and a vocational commitment, it has taken years of professional training, it involves the religious faith of friends and family, it is a commitment to a congregation which is itself a community.

The loss of faith is not just a desire not to do the job anymore; if that was all it involved, it would require a career change and some career counseling. For the minister it is a great deal more than that, it is an admission of personal failure in the struggle for faith, it is an acknowledgment before family, friends and congregation that one has been living a lie, it is a personal loss, almost a death of the spirit. It is a personal tragedy. But perhaps it is a necessary step in order to keep one’s integrity.