Grace to
you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I have been pleased that in response to
the first two Epistles to the Nevadans, people have suggested various topics I should
attempt to elucidate. It is a mark that God has answered our baptismal payer
that you should have “inquiring minds.” We will get to many topics in due
course.
But in this Easter Season it seems good
to consider the whole question of “belief.” Just want do we Episcopalians
believe anyway? Joe once told his Baptist friend Fred he was an Episcopalian.
Fred said, “Oh that’s the Church that believes in drinking.” “No,” Joe said,
“Some of us drink but we believe in Jesus.”
Some “religions” – that’s actually a
Western sort of a word. Many of the world’s spiritual systems and organizations
wouldn’t necessarily have chosen that word for themselves. It’s just our
Western way of categorizing them – some “religions” like to say they don’t have
beliefs, just practices or disciplines. They equate “belief” with holding an
opinion, usually one for which there is little or no evidence. They see beliefs
as closing the mind, not opening it. So they regard us “believers” as narrow
and unbright.
So permit me, if you will, to start by
asking what we mean by “believe” before we get to the substance of “beliefs.”
The New Testament word pistevo comes
into the Church thorugh the Latin credo (from
which we get Creed because the “I believe” was for centuries upon centuries pronounced
“Credo.” Credo does not mean, “I hold
the opinion that.” It means – are you ready? – “I give my heart.”
Now the second point about Creeds: they
do not say, “I believe that.” They say,
“I believe in” – as in the Don
Williams country classic “I believe in you.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Biz5kBIAtic (if you get an ad at the beginning,
it’s short, just avert your eyes]. To “believe in” is both more and less than
to “believe that.” It isn’t so sure about details. But it invests trust. It is
a deep statement. I place my life in your hands. I can believe in you without
knowing everything about you. But obviously I must have some sense of you, some
intuition of your heart and soul.
The Latin credo found its way into English as beleven, same root as beloved, and it means, “I give my love.” This
is not just an emotional thing. It is a placing of ones life in the hands of
someone else. It is the basket where we put the existential eggs of our life’s
meaning. So let’s be clear on this up front, traditional Christian belief isn’t
dogmatic opinions. It’s faith like that Don Williams song.
So where do we place our faith? I heard
an NPR interview with an atheist this week – not one of those snide cynical
atheists, but a decent, humble, intelligent guy trying to make sense of it all.
He insisted that the reality we know is set in the vast context of a
supra-cosmic Reality we cannot know, and that the meaning of everything must be
found there and that authentic ethics must be grounded in that Reality. He just
didn’t like the word “God.” I felt sure that atheist and I would disagree about
a lot of things, but that we were closer in our hearts than I am to some
theists. We don’t believe in an Old English word. We believe in the Reality. My
difference with the atheist is that, for whatever reason, he rejects the
narratives, the rituals, and sacred traditions that make up our way of reaching
out toward the Mystery. But we agree about the Mystery.
The question of “belief” went off track
in the 16th Century when Christians had a huge family fight
including torturing and killing each other. The stakes having gotten mortally high,
they needed to tie things down precisely so you could know whom to kill,
whom to hide from, and whom you could hang out with. So they took the old
Creeds, which had been essentially narratival love poems, and replaced them
with rather ponderous and lengthy “Confessions” – hundreds of pages of them. If
you believe the 350 page Augsburg Confession you can be a good Lutheran. If you
believe the 550 page Westminster Confession, you can be a good Calvinist. And
so on. The Catholics kept up at the Council of Trent turning all sorts of
explanations that had once attempted to just help people understand what they
were doing in Church into dogmas to be believed on pain of excommunication. It
was a bad time for all of us. No one came out of that century with clean hands.
And let me never deny that religion, my religion that I love, has plenty of sin
of which to repent.
But since the days of Elizabeth I, we Anglicans
have by and large not done much in the way of Confessions. We had the 39
articles but they only go for 2 pages, and don’t really get a lot of play
except in our very most conservative churches. You will find them in the
historical documents appendix of the Book of Common Prayer. We are still a
Creedal Church, but not a Confessional Church.
So how does that work? Let’s take a
question that might well be on our minds this Easter season. We say in the
Creed “We believe in One Lord Jesus Christ . . .. On the third day he rose from
the dead.” What do we mean by that? How does the Resurrection work?
I am just wading into a challenging but
brilliant book by the physicist-theologian Robert John Russell, Time In Eternity. Early on he traces the
modern teachings about the meaning of the Resurrection. One main line goes back
to Rudolf Bultmann. For him the Empty Tomb is irrelevant. The appearances to
the disciples are everything because the Resurrection means Jesus lives on in
the memories, hearts, minds, and actions of his followers. No problem with
science there. It puts science in one world; faith in another. Bultmann taught
a subjective resurrection.
But Karl Barth taught an objective
Resurrection. Something actually happened. When we say Jesus rose from the
dead, we don’t mean we thought of him fondly and acted accordingly. We mean
something earthshaking (literally) happened.
Ok, but what was it? The Barth objective resurrection has
two forms. Number one is from Arthur Peacock: the Personal Resurrection. The
Jesus who rose was his spirit or soul. It really is Jesus, but Jesus is not
identified with the protoplasm that made up his body at the moment of his death
(our protoplasm pretty much changes out every few years anyway so we should not
over-identify with it.) For him the Empty Tomb doesn’t matter, but the
Resurrection appearances do – but they matter differently than for Bultmann. For
Peacock, the real Jesus actually appeared.
Option two: the Bodily Resurrection. This would go back to a
modern theologian, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and – stop and take this in – the
physicist-theologian Russell is arguing in support of this one. Yep, the material
flesh and blood body of Jesus of Nazareth climbed out of that tomb. It may not
have been the same. Something happened, something way more mysterious and
miraculous than a mere resuscitation. But it was of this earth, not just of
this spirit.
Now when I first came back to the Church, the Bultmann
resurrection worked for me. It was as far as I could have gone then. Somewhere
around the time I was ordained or maybe a little later, I came to believe in
the Peacock version of Barth’s objective Resurrection. It was my encounters
with the Risen Lord through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola that
took me there.
These days, with fear and trembling, I sign up with
Pannenberg and Russell. I hold with the bodily Resurrection even though I don’t
pretend to have a clue how it happened. It wasn’t visiting the elegantly
appointed tomb in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher that changed my
mind, though it was moving. It was the other tomb, the unmarked rarely visited
one way off in the corner of the Church, the one some archaeologists think is
more likely to be where Jesus was buried. It was crouching, nearly crawling
into that dank hole, finding my way by the flashlight app on my smart phone. It
was personally experiencing the emptiness of death in that empty stone niche
that made me feel and believe that it had no power over any part of him.
So, like Luther, “Here I stand. I can do no other.” But
unlike Luther, I do not insist that you stand with me. That’s the difference
between doctrines and dogmas. We can have inconsistent
doctrines that remain part of the conversation. They keep it interesting. Dogmas
end the conversation.
You see because we worship an infinitely mysterious God, we
are a religion of questioning, a religion of more questions than answers. In
her winsome new book, Plato At The
Googleplex, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein says,
The thing
about Plato is that he rarely presents
himself as
giving us the final answers. What he insists
upon is the
recalcitrance of the questions in the face
of shallow
attempts to make them go away.
The same might be said of Job who wasn’t buying the Proverbs
or of Jesus whose parables were zingers that undid the expectations of his
listeners. Followers of Jesus aren’t too sure of their answers. They are free
to love the questions precisely because they trust the Mystery. As Rainer Maria
Rilke so famously said:
Be patient
toward all that is unresolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms
and like books that are now written in a very
foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which
will not be given to you because you would not now
be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now. Perhaps, then you will gradually
without noticing it, live along some distant day into
the answer.
To believe
in this way is to love the questions trusting the Mystery to lead us deeper
into truth and hope and love.
I am not there yet. For example, I
don’t know that my opinion about the nature of the Resurrection is more right
than it was when I first began this journey so long ago. At first I experienced
the wild absurd leap of subjective faith taken by my fellow believers. Then I
met the Resurrected Lord in prayer, though not his physical self. Then I felt
the emptiness of death in what may have been his very tomb. And so my
experiences changed my opinions. I hold this opinion now. It is even a
conviction. But it isn’t what I “believe in.” I believe in Jesus. The
Resurrection is part of his story, part of who he is. But I do not pretend to
understand it or to claim my views on it are better than someone else’s. Others
believe too. Others trust the Mystery. Even that fellow on NPR who fancies
himself an atheist trusts the Mystery, believes in the transcendent meaning and
value of this whole fragile place we call earth, even hopes and trusts that the
oft absurd chapters of this story we call history cohere into a never ending
story we call eternity.
1 comment:
Nicely done, my friend.
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