30 January 08 - 03:47
I Follow a Teacher
I had the privilege this past weekend to facilitate a marvelous little course on Religion in Life, offered by Scouts and Guides. This course was for the leaders, who would be leading by example, and who also could expect to get some of those, um,
I got to theological college at a lucky time, because the winds they were a-changing. You see for nearly a hundred years, the universities have been developing a historical-cultural-literary critique of the Bible, with interesting new approaches to understanding the nature of God, which they would teach to the fresh faced young men (mostly) who wanted to be ministers. And then they would tell them, "Whatever you do, don't breathe a word of any of this in your churches, you'll start a riot!" They had good reason for that caution. In the 1940's, Rudolf Bultmann took his paper about demythologizing the Bible to a conference, a paper which was bold enough to question the historicity of the virgin birth. The conference had to be shut down. Fist fights were breaking out in the hallways, and none of the other presenters could be heard over the din.
The ministers I grew up with all tried their best. They taught me to always be kind to others, to live a moral life, and never colour outside the lines, but they taught me nothing about modern criticism of the Bible. It didn't feed my soul, which sensed there was so much more to learn. Heck, I learned more about the Christian tradition from a Unitarian pagan one night at a party where there was, ahem, rather a lot of behavior going on that my ministers wouldn't have regarded as moral. (Um, is my mother reading this blog? I never did any of that immoral stuff, honest. I was just there for the conversation!)
But by the time I had made my long way to theological school, my professors had realized that these decades of silence weren't doing anyone any good. Ministers became secret keepers who couldn't preach what they truly believed, so their sermons were uninspired. Young people left the church in droves, because they sensed that they were being lied to. Nor were the secrets staying secret any more. Books about the new scholarship were making it into the mainstream; the huge interest in
And what were these secret truths that my honourable predecessors in the pulpit were keeping in such good faith? Well, that the Bible is a human document. Moses didn't write the first five books of the Bible (if he did, then how could he write about his own death at the end of Deuteronomy?), but rather these were stories of faith compiled from a bunch of sources by a bunch of priests at least 700 years after Moses died, who had a series of political points they wanted to make that were at least as important as their points about their faith. And that the Bible isn't history, it's faith history, and written about people's subjective religious experience, which sometimes rewrites the facts to make the story come out right. And that most of the miracles of Jesus are in the book because they make a claim for who Jesus is, not because the storyteller witnessed the miracle.
Anybody feeling too challenged yet?
I watched people struggle with their faith as they learned these things, and many more, but never even once was my faith called into question by anything I learned in theological school. Far from it. I had several ecstatic visions while I was there, and I experienced the Spirit of God like never before, because I learned a faith that didn't depend on the letter of the law. God was not afraid to let me fully explore my doubts, and as I learned about a tradition that was credible to my mind, my spirit soared like never before. As I learned about the very human people behind the stories of faith, I believed that I too, in all my very present humanity, could be a faithful follower of Jesus, letting the stories of faith guide me without needing them to be literally true.
Now I want to help other people walk that road. Jesus is my teacher and guide, and I am not afraid. But of course, I'm not always sure I'm following the same Jesus to whom millions of people have surrendered their lives as their personal Lord and Saviour. My Jesus overturned the moneychanger's tables. My Jesus questioned the authority of the religious leaders when he saw that they were more interested in figuring out who was in and who was out than they were in offering a cup of cold water to the thirsty ones. My Jesus never told anyone that they should colour inside the lines.
I taught the class on Religion in Life, and I didn't say any of these challenging things (okay, I did point out that there are two different creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2 with totally different orders of creation, and that the first one is really based on the Babylonian creation myth
Next stop: Teen confirmation class. Wish me luck.
Blessings, Heather.
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