of sins?
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Pentecost VIII—July 26, 2009
I have begun reading Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God. So far a re-sorting of ancient historical theology. Makes great sense, but blasts enormous holes in the Scriptured story. Follows man’s earliest notions of gods/spirits through hunter-gatherer cultures, shamanism, chiefdoms, early city-states, empires: a multitude of polytheisms gradually become a polytheistic pantheon, then a monolatry, and finally monotheism. I’ve got far to go in the book, but it’s making profound sense. Wright taught philosophy at Princeton, then religion at Pennsylvania. He started life as a hard-shell Baptist child, got the altar-call, was baptized, and now no longer calls himself a Christian, but refers to a moral compass. Neither affirms nor denies a God. But tries to align himself with the moral axis of the universe. Wright puts me in a new place, a place of saying, “Yes, it really is all metaphor, and it gives us no clues as to how the metaphor relates to God.”
So I find myself sitting here this morning asking from a different posture, from outside the metaphor if you will, “What is this all about?” If Wright is correct (or at least more correct than wrong), then what is this, my circle of standing stones, all about? What is going on here? This morning we baptized an infant Owen into this congregation and church. Why? And what did we just do? What difference did it make? To Owen? To us? To this community? To this church? To this world? Surely it was a very pacific, and harmless initiation rite. Was it anything more than that? I think so, but am unable to say what more. I’m puzzling, what is this church stuff really about? What difference can it possibly make? What is its influence? And on whom? And to what end? The preacher (the infant’s grandfather) proclaimed that we were not doing magic, that this was a beginning that we were not about making a better citizen of Owen or providing moral direction for him. But he did not say what we are doing.
So I find myself wandering through a strange landscape today. For sixty-five years it had been a familiar landscape, and through the years had been increasingly filled with landmarks and sign posts and direction markers that I could read with ease. It was a landscape I knew well, and better and better as I aged and grew wiser, one which I knew well enough that I could give others some direction and guidance. But today it is an unfamiliar and different landscape. The markers and signs are gone, obliterated, or erased. And it is somewhat a wilderness. Not a frightening wilderness, just a not-as-well-featured-as-before wilderness, a place where the only markers and sign posts are the ones I discern for myself, the ones I set up, a somewhat barren wilderness. And I am wandering, searching out my own way. Yet I do not feel lost. Just a little lonely. Squinting toward a tiny light on the distant horizon, looking toward a small, somewhat unconcerned figure far way on my horizon whom I cannot make out clearly, and who glances back at me from time to time, with a little curiosity. A quiet and small part of me may enjoy being out in this wilderness alone.
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August 29, 2009
Much water over (or perhaps under) the dam since last I wrote to this. Primarily Robert Wright’s book The Evolution of God, a fetching, though somewhat misleading title. He’s not really talking about God evolving, but about our image(s) of God evolving.
Wright is not so much a scholar, though a prolific reader, as a journalist. He collects and disburses information, vast quantities of it. But so far as I can tell he does not do much digesting of it, more like regurgitation. With an interesting beginning, as a Oklahoman Southern Baptist background in his teens, including the traditional altar-call, self-dedication and dunking (as though an adult) baptism, then on to a first year in a fundamentalist college, next moving to Princeton and a thorough going eastern, head-trip education. He writes. And sufficiently well that he has been invited to teach undergraduate courses in religion and philosophy. He seems at this point in his life enamored of cultural evolution and game theory and in his work he seems to base his study and reporting around those two foci. So he reads pretty traditional but quite up to date historical criticism of both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures through those two lenses, cultural evolution and games theory. It makes for an interesting and unsettling read. I have read him. I am now occupied with ruminating. This cud requires heavy-duty and long-ongoing rumination, re-chewing all I’ve read, studied, and thought over all these years. I guess I see my theological understandings and formulations as in flux these days, and myself as wandering through, as re-making-sense-of. I have announced to Steve and Stephen that, while willing to celebrate Eucharist, I am no longer able to preach, that there are no more sermons in me, at least for now, and will not be until I emerge with a new understanding of it all, and some things worth being said, both to myself and to others. But for now I am in preacher’s limbo with nothing in hand or head or heart to be said.
Where do I start? By reciting what I’ve read. Wright leads through prehistoric understandings, images of god(s), and traces the evolution of spirits to polytheistic god-images through these stages of cultural evolution understanding that it is the facts on the ground that drive our understandings/images of god(s), and probably not any mystical, god-driven revelations that shape man’s understanding. And who can tell whether the god(s) are evolving? Instead Wright is pretty clear that he is uncovering the culture’s evolving needs of god(s) and whether the god itself is evolving is moot and non-discernable. Then he moves on to the evolution within Hebrew Scriptures from polytheism (the worship of many gods simultaneously) through monolatry (the insistence of devotion to one god exclusively in the midst of many co-equal or hierarchical gods), and finally to monotheism (the conviction that there exists only one God), a late, third to second-century BC achievement in Hebrew devotion. His primary tool in doing this is the JEDP schema, unraveling those threads and putting times to their authors. What emerges is that those four authoring sources, writing in different periods, have differing needs of god, imagine the god differently in both word and deed. And Wright sees an evolutionary pattern in those differing images, a gradual movement, albeit in fits and starts, toward greater transnational and transethnic inclusiveness.
He sees this pattern continuing in the early Christian writings, Paul’s letters being the earliest (first generation), then Mark (circa 70 AD), the Q source, Matthean source, Lucan source, and finally John (probably post 100 AD). Wright sees Jesus as very much in the prophetic-healer mode (preaching the immanent, Isaiah-like kingdom). In Mark Jesus uses the word “love” only once, in the Great commandment (Love God, and neighbor as self.) Jesus’ God is not the Christian God of love we have received, but rather a God of judgment. Without Paul Jesus would probably have been forgotten and his sect lost within a few generations. Paul introduces and emphasizes the love theme, building his new congregations around love, i.e., transnational and transethnic inclusiveness, a taking care of each other (e.g., “See, how they love each other”). Paul’s version of Jesus is probably more important than Jesus himself, what he taught and did. It is those caring communities which Paul created in the urbanizing and industrializing (impersonal, oppressive, dehumanizing) Roman empire that made Christianity so vital and attractive. And Wright also points to the alternative, competing versions of Christianity (Gnosticism, Marcionism, Ebionism, et cetera). Paul’s Christianity was one of several (many?) versions, all competing with other mystery and pagan religions across the Roman Empire. The facts on the ground were that the empire had stopped conquering and was in a consolidating, unifying mode, and Paul’s version best met those needs. And then Wright tracks the evolution of the dominant theological doctrines: Jesus as savior, the kingdom as heavenly (vs. earthly and militant), born-againness, original sin, et cetera.
With all that regurgitated, where does the experience of reading his book leave me? I think Wright and I handle the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures differently. He seems to treat them mainly as fabricated (albeit unconsciously) fictional history, though he allows they might be inspired without exploring how that might be or what that might mean. He does some obligatory light wrestling with whether God really exists, remaining agnostic and coming to no conclusion. He allows that he cannot believe in the Judeo-Christian God, though he is fairly convinced that there is a moral directionality to history, and to cultural evolution guided by non-zero-sumness,
