5 Bad Doctrines

"Toujoursdan", an Anglo-Catholic friend of mine at Facebook and Beliefnet.com who also writes the blog Culture Choc, posted a note on Facebook and his blog answering a question someone had asked him, and tagged a number of people for further replies, including me. Here's Dan's original note:

“List 5 doctrines that are taught within the Christian church that you believe to be deeply [un]-Christian.

“1. The substitution of orthodoxy for faith. Faith is trust in God; orthodoxy is an intellectual assent to a series of statements about God. Too often the church teaches that doctrinal orthodoxy equals deep faith. Too often the church has taught that unorthodoxy is a lack of faith. Now I believe that creedal orthodoxy is beneficial in that it may lead to deeper intimacy with God, but it isn't faith and orthodoxy won't save anyone.

“2. Being "born again": Yes, Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be born again in the Gospel of St. John, but modern evangelicalism often turns Christ's "born again" command into an emotional "warm fuzzy" experience that distorts the conversion experience altogether. Extreme versions of evangelicalism turn "the sinner's prayer" into a magical incantation that prompts God to save a sinner, making God the passive party in our relationship. Conversion and discipleship are rarely instantaneous processes, and God chooses to save whomever God chooses to save. The rarely discussed dark side of "born again" theology are the doubts that occur once the warm fuzzies go away and need to recreate the warm fuzzies in order to remain secure in ones' salvation.

“3. Biblical inerrancy: Specifically, the belief that every book in the Bible, and in many cases, every verse in the Bible carries the same weight and is as infallible as every other book or verse in the Bible. This turns the Bible into a divine encyclopedia where one is supposed to find an answer to every question which often leads to disastrous results. Now of course, EVERY Christian picks and chooses to accept and apply some verses and EVERY Christian chooses to ignore other verses which they go to great pains to rationalize, but the rhetoric that "You can't pick and choose" is thrown around with great regularity. Of course you can pick and choose. It's the criteria and intent of what you pick and choose that makes all the difference.

“4. The Book of Revelation: Oh, how I wish the book has never made it into the canon. Oh, how I wish we'd headed the warnings of the Church Fathers who warned that it this book is likely to be misused. All the time and energy wasted trying to turn a letter of encouragement written in code, into a frightening glimpse into our future. Of course, all this energy is spent interpreting the Book of Revelation is done because we don't trust God and we want to know what will happen in the future in order to exert some kind of control over it, or control over our response to it. This turns faith on its head.

“5. That individual "faith" (see #1) in Christ is the only way to salvation. The flip side of this is that people who don't profess individual belief in Christ are unsaved and are targets for proselytizing or elimination altogether. Not only has this caused Christians to act with great evil toward Jews, Muslims, Africans and other indigenous peoples, but it transformed Christianity from a religion of peace and love to one based on fear: fear of God and fear of hell. When I read passages like the Sermon on the Mount I am led to believe that what Christ said and who Christ was does save people, but I don't accept the flip side of this belief. In the 20th Century mainline Protestants and Catholics looked for various ways to include non-Christians of goodwill into God's kingdom, but evangelicals still reject these efforts.

“Are there any you would add?”

I agree with everything Dan says and thought I'd post my further answers to him here. Here are my added five:

1. On the point of orthodoxy, I would add that it is an obvious human tendency to project our own subjective orientation and perceptions onto the rest of the universe as if they were normative, and to try to invalidate all that does not fit within the paradigm. This, however, is not God’s way. Creation is infinitely diverse, not uniform, and God seems to urge us to seek harmony through diversity, not monotony through unity or dissonance through conflict or exclusion. It was the human urge toward an artificially ordered, grandiose uniformity that God frustrated at Babel, and it was to the thus divinely ordained diversity of understanding that the Holy Spirit spoke at Pentecost in so many different tongues. Doctrinal orthodoxy never redeemed anyone. It is not nearly as important to agree with the orthodox fine points of Christology and the Atonement as it is to appreciate that the supreme power in the universe is Love and its supreme purpose is Reconciliation.

2. Much of contemporary Christianity is unwittingly infected by Gnosticism. The God of the Bible is not only supremely benevolent but also intimately involved in the material universe, including its ongoing creation, evolution, restoration and repair, constantly loving and reconciling and “seeing that it is good”. The ancient Gnostics in contrast upheld a cosmology in which matter and material existence were the corrupt creation of a false, evil creator-deity they called the Demiurge; in which purity, truth, and the true God could be found only in a spiritual, non-material realm; and in which the route to escaping material corruption and regaining spiritual purity required secret knowledge unavailable outside the closed community. Many strains of Christianity embrace a similarly Gnostic “pure spirit = good, carnal and material = evil” cosmology that ignores the significance of the Incarnation, and condition the escape from material corruption upon a form of secret knowledge in the guise of doctrinal correctness or “decision theology”. The predestinarian Calvinist strain of Christianity in particular also envisions God as a monstrous demiurge, able but unwilling to lift most of humanity out of a corrupt carnal condition.

3. Although most religious understanding is ultimately a speculative attempt to express in subjective, figurative terms what cannot be objectively observed and proven, Christianity is infected by an unhealthy tendency toward literalism and absolutism. This comes up both in terms of Biblical exegesis and application, and in terms of doctrinal orthodoxy. Genesis 1 is not a paleozoology or paleogeology textbook. When Jesus says, “this is my body and blood”, he is not speaking any more literally than when the Psalmist says, “the Lord is my rock”. When Jesus is metaphorically compared to the Yom Kippur scapegoat or the Passover lamb, it emphasizes continuity from the parent Jewish tradition in upholding the importance of atonement and deliverance, but it says nothing about the necessity of believing in the Penal Substitutionary Atonement as required by the Calvinist demiurge. Jesus taught in metaphors and parables, but as Ralph Waldo Emerson warned the Harvard Divinity School class of 1838, “the idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes.”

4. Related to Dan’s point about inerrancy, a doctrine that appears clearly false to me is the assertion that the Bible is the Word of God. The Bible was written by many different human authors over the course of about 1,200-2,000 years, and underwent many revisions, redactions, expansions and contractions before eventually reaching its final form by human consensus. It has far more useful things to tell us if we receive it as the authentic witness of an evolving faith community over a particular period of time to its genuine understanding and experience of God, than if we suppose it to be God’s own supernatural self-revelation. To treat the Bible as if it contained God’s verbatim utterances is to elevate a human artifact to divine status, or literally to “worship a graven image”; it is idolatry. When the phrase “Word of God” appears in the Bible, it refers to the Logos of John 1:1, not to the canonical anthology of scriptures. Which leads finally to:

5. Christianity in practice largely ignores or misunderstands the significance of the Logos. In the Greek philosophy from which the Gospel of John borrows, the Logos or Word is the rational ordering principle of the universe – not just drawing up the blueprints at the beginning of creation, but continually upholding and sustaining all existence, the “Ground of Being” as Paul Tillich describes it. John portrays Jesus as a personification or incarnation or human image of this Logos, through which all things have their being, but too often Christians turn the idea on its head and insist that the indispensible thing is the particular person of Jesus himself, rather than the universal Logos that John perceived to be present in him. When John says that “the Word was with God and the Word was God”, he draws an identity between seemingly disparate Jewish and Gentile apprehensions of divinity. Jesus the man personified the Logos to Christians, yes, but the eternal Logos survived the death of the human Jesus and, I think, has also been perceived in some fashion in all other cultures in every time. Whenever Christians insist that revelation was sealed with the closing of the canon, or that there is no valid religious apprehension except through Jesus or through Christianity, whenever they sneer condescendingly at “pagan” traditions or withdraw from them in fear, they are in fact alienating themselves from much of the omnipresent Word that according to their own tradition is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of all things. Instead of becoming effective agents of the Logos in the continuing reconciliation and redemption of the whole world, they are standing in the crowd at Golgotha, jeering at him even while they cast lots to claim his cast-off garments.

Avast, ye lubbers!

Me hearties, terday be both Talk Like a Pirate Day 'n' Rosh Hashanah, arrh, 'n' so Cap'n Fausto wishes all his mateys who be kinfolk ter ol' Cap'n Jonah that King Neptune hisself'll grant 'em fair winds 'n' seas, arrh, 'n'll carve their initials in th' gun'l's o' his divine galleon, 'n'll seal 'em up with pitch 'n' tar enough ter last another whole turn o' th' seasons, by Blackbeard's bloody boots, arrh.

'N' terday 'e also spied th' moon wi'out needin' 'is spyglass, arrh, 'n' 'e minds that makes th' morrow th'end o' Ramadan, 'n' 'e also minds that all mateys be equals under th' Pirate Code, arrh, 'n' so's not ter fergit his comrades in th' life what be plyin' th' coast o' High Barbary, 'tis ter them hale buckos he wishes, Eid mubarak, by Davy Jones' own whiskers, arrh.

Mary Travers, R. I. P.

We seem to be losing so many of them so fast lately. Today yet another flower is gone, long time passing, but she seeded the still-blooming social conscience of an entire generation.

Religion and Science: Conflict or Harmony?

A fascinating discussion here.
(Thanks to blogging buddy LutheranChik for the link.)

Edward Moore Kennedy, R. I. P.

I knew him, not only as a powerful politician from afar, but also as a father cheering on his son's team at the elementary school track meet. A troubled man who struggled -- not always successfully -- to contain the demons of his own desires and the temptations of his own privilege in order to serve all humanity and especially the oppressed and outcast, he has truly run the race and won the victory.

Yet as he himself said when he lost his 1980 Presidential primary challenge to President Carter, "For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Into thy hands, O merciful Father, we commend thy servant Teddy. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech thee, a sheep of thine own fold, a lamb of thine own flock, a sinner of thine own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of thy mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen.

Urgent for Twitterers: Iranian Solidarity

Courtesy of Lizard Eater, via Facebook. I don't tweet, but if you do:

For those who tweet: Change twitter profile to location: TEHRAN, time zone: GMT+3.30. Iran govt hunting 4 bloggers. If we're all Iranians harder 2 find them.

Famous UUs, Part Deux

If it is frustrating to see “Famous UUs” sometimes revered within our little denomination more for their fame itself than for the religious lessons they can help us remember, it is equally gratifying when one of them is honored outside the denomination for his or her forthrightly religious witness.

That’s why, this morning, I almost bounced with glee this morning when I sleepily turned to the editorial page of The New York Times and found an editorial tribute to the not-quite-so-famous-these-days Universalist and Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King, whose statue was removed from Statuary Hall in the US Capitol this week to make room for Ronald Reagan’s. An excerpt:

…King was a big deal in the 1800s, but hardly a Californian alive knows or cares. The vote in the California Legislature to replace his statue was all but unanimous.

…He was a Unitarian preacher, and an amazing one at that; spellbinding, said people who heard him. He spoke up for slaves, for the poor, for union members and the Chinese. Most memorably, he spoke up for the Union, roaming the state on exhausting lecture tours, campaigning for Abraham Lincoln and a Republican State Legislature, imploring California not to join the Confederacy. He succeeded, but he did not live to see the Union victory. He died of diphtheria in 1864, age 39.

“He saved California to the Union,” this paper wrote, quoting Gen. Winfield Scott.

…Here, then, a final toast to the worthy but obscure. To the frail patriot Thomas Starr King.

"Famous UU" revisionism

Oh, how we love our lists of Famous UUs. They stroke our egos. They remind us of how influential past UUs once were in society at large, and they kinda sorta suggest that either we still could be, or at least still have the moral rectitude to deserve to be, just as influential today. We enjoy basking in their reflected glory.

Such lists are often topped by John and John Quincy Adams, two of the four (arguably five, if you include Thomas Jefferson) Unitarians who have become President of the United States. While President, Adams the father signed the Treaty of Tripoli, which declared that the US is not a Christian nation, and which was unanimously ratified by the Senate. After stepping down as President, Adams the son argued and won the Amistad cases, freeing a shipload of mutinous African slaves. That's some mighty righteous UUing, right there.

But a disturbing quality I find in UU hagiography is that it often revises the portraits of our saints to more closely resemble who we would have liked them to be than who they actually were. For example, we like to claim the Adamses as our co-denominationalists, but when you look at them more closely, their religion wasn't one that many of us would want to claim as our own. Yes, they were accomplished politicians and did some things in that field that we still admire today, but few UUs today know that they were also devoutly religious, not in any modern "UU" sense but in the old New England Congregationalist mold, and that John Quincy Adams in particular produced a fairly weighty oeuvre of religious writing that included a new metrical translation of the Psalms for singing in church to replace the older Bay and Scottish psalters.

Here's a stanza from his setting of Psalm 14 that I had to find on a Baptist church's website, because it doesn't appear anywhere in Singing the Living Tradition or Singing the Journey. I think it's obvious why not:

The fool denies, the fool alone,
Thy being, Lord, and boundless might,
Denies the firmament, Thy throne,
Denies the sun’s meridian light;
Denies the fashion of his frame,
The voice he hears, the breath he draws;
O idiot atheist! to proclaim
Effects unnumbered without cause!

When we dismiss and ignore, rather than engage and wrestle with, this sort of challenging material from our denominational past, do we gain or lose?

I think we lose when we bury and forget those parts of our religious heritage we can no longer affirm. They can still serve as a reminder of the crucible of issues that made us who we are today, and help us frame issues that each generation needs to confront afresh in order to pursue a complete, rigorous and truly "free and responsible search for truth and meaning".

"Give then not hell, but hope and courage."

Well, that's certainly one way to do it.

Further reflection on May Day, a day late

How ironic is it that on May 1 of this year, the big headline in all the newspapers was that Chrysler was filing for bankruptcy, and would probably emerge with 55% ownership redistributed to the United Auto Workers?

Somewhere, Marx and Engels are smiling.