Category Archives: Progressive Christianity

Belief and Faith

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2015, ,

Belief, Faith, and the History of Christianity
a dialogue with Harvey Cox

In 2009 Harvey Cox published an accessible, well written book entitled The Future of Faith. I agree with his basic insight that the history of Christian religion can be meaningfully viewed in three overarching periods: (1) the early period before Constantine, (2) the period following Constantine until recently, and (3) a current period that is more like the first period than the second.

Cox characterized that first period as an age of faith, the second period as an age of belief, and our present and future period as another age of faith. Cox is clear that faith is an act of our deep existence and that belief is a matter of images, stories, and doctrines of the mind. I agree that it is important to understand this distinction between faith and belief, and also the relationship between them. Cox’s elaborations using this basic model are convincing and useful; nevertheless, I want to suggest that a still deeper perspective is needed. For example, Cox is clear that faith was not entirely dead in period two, and that the confusion of faith with belief existed in period one. Nevertheless, I will show how easy it is for Cox’s readers to idealize period one and demonize period two. Though Cox does not, some Protestants have virtually claimed that faith died shortly after the Bible was written and was not recovered until the time of Luther. This view of Christian history is deeply wrong.

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Interreligious Dialogue, Shallow and Deep

Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2015, ,

We live in a time in which dialogue with religions other than our own is almost unavoidable.  Such dialogue can be nurturing to us and can also build cooperative relations for social action among the most progressive practitioners of this wide array of very different religions.

The downside of this opportunity is what I call “religion hopping”—jumping from the most shallow portions of one of these grand religious traditions to the next, to the next, to the next, but never following any religious practice to the depths of that profound humanness that valid religions come into being to express.

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Religion and Quasi-Religion

Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2015, ,

Success with interreligious dialogue and with interreligious mission depends upon an agreed upon definition of “religion.” We must not define “religion” in such a way that Christianity is a religion and Buddhism is not. Therefore, belief in a Person-like Supreme Being cannot be our definition of religion. Let me suggest, therefore, the following definition of religion:

Religion is a temporal, humanly-created, down-to-Earth practice that points beyond itself in expression of an ultimate devotion to that which is Ultimate.

This definition requires understanding what we mean by “Ultimate,” but first a few examples of practices that are an expression of an ultimate devotion to that which is not ultimate. Nationalism is an example of an ultimate devotion to a nation, a reality that is not ultimate. Similarly, humanism is an example of an ultimate devotion to the human, a reality that is not ultimate. Communism is an example of an ultimate devotion to a theory of economic history—again an ultimate devotion to something not ultimate. These three widespread devotions might be called quasi-religions, for what they do takes the place of religion, if religion is defined as an ultimate devotion to that which is Ultimate.

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Loving God Means Loving the Earth

Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2015, , , ,

Three times Peter denied knowing his mentor.
Hundreds of times Senator Inhofe has denied global warming.
“It’s a hoax,” says he.
Peter feared a fickle population and
the chance of joining Jesus in being tortured to death.
The Oklahoma Senator fears fickle voters and
the loss of campaign cash from the fossil-fuel establishment.

Loving God
means trusting the Final Reality to be doing all things well.
Denying the climate crisis mean denying
the scientific facts
about God’s doings –
denying responsibility for the stronger winds in tornado alley,
for the fiercer droughts and fires in Western places,
for the wilder oceans in New York City subways.
And these clearly undeniable facts
are only the beginning.

As Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets slide into the oceans,
entire Pacific islands disappear beneath the brine,
along with coastlands in Florida and Bangladesh.
Let us also weep for New Orleans.
Yes, even a few Texans know
that it is not wise to mess
with Mother Nature.

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The Glory & Tragedy of Projection

Existential Ethics, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2015, ,

Projection: noun (1) an estimate of what might happen in the future based on what is happening now, (2) the attribution of one’s own ideas, feelings, or attitudes to other people or to objects; especially: the externalization of blame, guilt, or responsibility as a defense against anxiety, (3) the display of motion pictures by projecting an image from them upon a screen.

It has happened that human beings have projected the quality of human consciousness onto a tree or mountain. In these cases it is relatively easy to understand that such projections are projections, not facts. But let us notice how often we stub our toe on some inanimate object, and then take out our wrath on that object as if it had intended to hurt us. We also project the human form of consciousness upon our pets – a type of consciousness that they do not actually possess. Our dogs and cats are conscious beings, and we humans share in the type of consciousness they have, but these other intelligent, mammalian species do not manifest the uniquely human symbol-using, art-creating, language-forming, culture-building form of consciousness.

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Radical Pedagogy

Existential Ethics, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2015, ,

Our job as prophets of Reality, as teachers of religion and ethics, as aware persons of our profound humanness is to tell the truth.  We just tell the truth as we see it, the truth we genuinely believe has been shown to us by that Final Reality that baffles us as it also informs us.  We begin such radical pedagogy from within our own awareness of how Final Reality has revealed to us some measure of truth.  We do not know the whole Final Truth, we only know what has been revealed to us – a measure of truth that makes real for us our commission to speak truth to our times.

As radical pedagogues, it is our assignment to be as clear as we can, honoring all sources of truth – scientific, contemplative, and socially practical,workable ethical insight.   Radical pedagogues just tell the truth, live the truth, keep learning the truth, and stick to doing so.

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The Truth of Wonder

Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2015, , , , ,

Consciousness (when being conscious of consciousness itself) can stumble upon states of consciousness that we commonly call “wonder” or “awe.” It takes a bit of poetry to communicate from one person to another the deeply inward experiences of wonder. Following is some poetry on this topic. I like this particular poem because it summarizes the vast scope of wonder. The structure of this poem uses the overall metaphor of a Land of Mystery in which there exists a River of Freedom, a Mountain of Care, and a Sea of Tranquility.

The Land of Mystery

We live in a Land of Mystery.
We know nothing about it.
We don’t know where we have come from.
We don’t know where we are going.
We don’t know where we are.
We are newborn babes.
We have never been here before.
We have never seen this before.
We will never see it again.
This moment is fresh,
Unexpected,
Surprising.
As this moment moves into the past,
It cannot be fully remembered.
All memory is a creation of our minds.
And our minds cannot fathom the Land of Mystery,
much less remember it.
We experience Mystery Now
And only Now.
Any previous Now is gone forever.
Any yet-to-be Now is not yet born.
We live Now,
only Now,
in a Land of Mystery.

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Becoming a Revolutionary

Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2015,

“Realistic Living” is a revolutionary category, for most people, most of the time, are in dread flight from Reality.  Obsolete and mistaken notions rule our living, but we nevertheless cling to what has become familiar.  So realism can be dreadful.  But Realistic Living is also a joyous category, for being our authentic being in our real situation is a happy journey into our true humanity.  I nurture my realism from ancient religious sources, but I also nurture my being from those sources that best describe our contemporary world in vivid, unvarnished ways.

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The Critique of and Creation of Religion

Progressive Christianity

When we speak of the New Religious Mode we mean a new mode of thinking from which to critique religion and within which to create religion anew.   The New Religious Mode is a secular event unfolding since the 19th century.  Its essence is the dawning of the end of the two-story religious metaphor and the replacement of that metaphor with a new way of discussing the profound depths of humanness that have been explored for so long in that two-story manner.  The new manner of talking might be called “transparency” in the sense that the profound depths are now viewed through the ordinary as the ordinary turns transparent to those depths.

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The Secular Religious Revolution

Progressive Christianity

The most important historical development in the last 200 years was not the splitting of the atom or the invention of the internal combustion engine or the spread of the computer chip, but the advent of a new religious mode.

The most illuminating person that I have known personally, my mentor for 24 years, Joseph W. Mathews,  first called this history-changing event  “the advent of the secular religious.”  The four-day course that he and we who were his colleagues  taught to thousands of clergy began with a lecture on the cultural revolution.  The heart of that lecture was on what we called “the secular revolution.”  In that talk we spelled out how the ancient two-story metaphorical thinking is being replaced by living in one and only one  realm of reality.  In that talk we also noted how the imagery of angels and demons was being replaced by imagery about historically unfolding relationships. We opened that course for religious leaders with this talk because we claimed that this revolution in religious sensibilities set the context for the renewal of Christianity and every other religion that one might want to renew.

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