simultaneously and therefore lost tactical advantage, so that the pursued could then re-engage from a more advantageous position, or else flee to escape. Club-hauling was perhaps the only way to execute such a radical turn of a ship, and it could only be done in waters shallow enough that an anchor could reach and grab the bottom. While at full speed the captain dropped the anchor on that side of the bow to which he needed to turn. As the anchor grabbed the bottom it was stopped off and would then jerk the head of the ship toward that side wrenching the ship into that direction so quickly that the engaging enemy could not react fast enough to keep his advantage. The one disadvantage of this maneuver was the loss of the anchor; the cable had to be cut the very instant the ship was turned, and before the anchor slowed the forward motion of the ship; under those conditions there was no opportunity to retrieve the anchor; a best bower was expensive equipment. But to rescue the ship in battle, or better yet, to turn the tide of the battle was worth that cost. Club-hauling.
In my spiritual pilgrimage since retirement I have experienced several club-haulings, books that have so violently jerked my head around as to send me spiritually off in an entirely other direction, escaping the muddle I was in, wondering whether to re-engage or to flee. While not as spiritually painful as my middler year of seminary when my childish theological foundations were necessarily ripped up and a more solid set of theological foundation stones set into place, while less painful, these have been equally traumatic and have sent my spirit wandering off in equally new and different directions.
The first of these club-haulers was William James’s lectures of 1902, The Varieties of Religious Experiences. I probably should have read this book while still in seminary, but I cannot recall that anyone suggested it to me then. James might have helped me start to build a much sounder theological2 foundation and framework. To read James’s book had occurred to me a few times previously, but I may have been shied off by an early experience of a flaky parishioner who was into paranormal stuff and engaged in automatic writing; her correspondent was William James. So after I retired I finally picked up Varieties to read. It was not an easy read; it forced me to re-sort some of my theological thinking. In these twenty-four lectures James tackled the psychology of religious experiences. A hundred years later, there is nothing radically striking to us in this work, but reading it set me to the task of organizing anew much of my thinking about religious experiences, the spiritual life, and my own spiritual development, not just from a faith point of view, but from the vantage of early psychology as well. James did not challenge or attack religious belief and experiences, but rather examined them from a nonjudgmental outsider’s vantage (though I think he was a Christian believer himself.) I came away from his lectures with a deeper and clearer understanding that there are two fundamentally different religious orientations. He called the one “healthy-mindedness,” a dedicatedly positive and affirming orientation toward the good. The other he called “the sick soul,” an unshakeable orientation to dwell on the evil aspects. The first sees man and the world as fundamentally good, the other sees man and life as irretrievably bad. This second type of soul is the one inclined toward the conversion experience, understanding that the only available salvific force from unrelenting evil is God; the “healthy-minded” soul is inclined not to conversion, but to grow gradually in his faith. Through James’s eyes I could understand why the two are so irreconcilably different in their makeups and outlooks, and unable even to comprehend or be at peace each other. In passing, James also pointed my attention briefly toward the mystical experience.
This book alone was not earth-shaking for me. But James’s analysis did set me to re-think and draw some new conclusions from my observations about spirituality and religiosity, and about my own spiritual experiences and yearnings. In essence I suppose it urged me onward in the spiritual pilgrimage which I had already begun after my retirement (that is, when my profession no longer seemed to prohibit my exploring far beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy). This, my first club-hauler.
At my retirement party Bishop Ken Price had given me my second club-hauler, a book he liked and thought I might find interesting. It was Jack Miles’s God: A Biography.The title alone is jarring, as was intended; how can one presume to write a biography of God? The book had lain on my shelf untouched and outside of my curiosity for several years when for some unfathomable reason I picked it up. I read with fascination. It was definitely inside my ballpark, i.e., it accepts the Hebrew Scriptures unquestioningly. Miles begins by stipulating his premise that the order of the books as presented in the Hebrew (the Masoretic text a.k.a. the Tanach) Scriptures is not mere happenstance (certainly not chronological), but is itself the editor’s statement about God as profoundly theological as the words of the texts themselves. Miles then guides us through each of the books in Masoretic order, focusing solely on the nature of the god therein presented: “What does God say? “What does God do?” and “How is God described?” This approach began to make order for me out of what had formerly been a chaos, God appearing so radically differently in various parts of the Scriptures. I read with interest and fascination. Then a year or so later I volunteered to teach Miles’s book in a short adult series at St.Luke’s Church; that effort forced me to really internalize Miles’s book, not simply read it while nodding yes. I was profoundly shaken. I understood now a pattern in God’s various behaviors, and even more, I very much disliked and disapproved of the God I found there. These Scriptures, which I adore, taught me a god whom I would not choose to worship, adore, or be obedient to.
I summarize the course, and therein a god very much in flux. We first encounter God in the two creation stories. In the first God is remote, majestic, solitary and absolutely omnipotent; in the second God is little more than a bumbling incompetent, and is vengeful to boot. While I prefer the second, I do not like or trust that God. After the first eleven chapters of Genesis God becomes little more than a family friend to Abraham’s lineage, and a not terribly helpful friend at that. In the second book, Exodus we encounter a quite different, ferociously militant God, brutal and unrelenting in organizing, leading and flogging this people whom God had chosen for himself, but who had not really chosen God for themselves. In the third, Deuteronomy God is at his absolute zenith, militarily competent but a harsh and very demanding lord. But thereafter God appears to be in decline (in my eyes, not Miles’s appraisal) In the four books about the kings God tinkers and complains, [so-and-so] “. . . did evil in the eyes of YHWH” is the drumbeat in these stories. And then in the books of the prophets God seems to have a mental breakdown, alternately and vehemently berating, cajoling and bemoaning (sounds bipolar!) And from that point God seems to diminish and wane through the story, appearing less powerful, less present, and less a part of the story until at last in Esther God is neither present nor even mentioned!
Now I had to take a deep, deep breath, and begin to ponder. This is not the God I had thought it was. Nor is this an attractive God. Not a god I want. The God of the Christian writings is somewhat more desirable (though not in John’s Revelation). But still not the God I had thought I was worshiping. Gradually my mind and my spirit began to watch my swirl of spiritual notions from a different vantage point. What if the God who is portrayed in our Scriptures is not so much the God but is more the god whom the people need at that moment in their history? That makes some sense of the changing-ness of the God of Hebrew Scriptures, and allows an even different God during the time of early Christian formations. So God, or at least the god we worship, perhaps is relative, a perception shaped by the needs of our era and culture.
The next club-hauler that came to my hand was Karen Armstrong’s A History of God. Armstrong’s purview is broader yet. She is primarily interested in the God of Scriptures, which takes in Jewish, and Muslim understandings as well as Christian (and she takes some sidelong glances at Buddhism as well), and she looks at the whole scope of writings, not just the Holy Scriptures of each. Her task is to trace how the concept of god changes and evolves through the course of the history of each religion. She presents a breathtaking vista. Tracing the history of each of these three religions in turn, she shows how they develop separately (though not without contact and mutual influence), but in parallel. Their patterns come out similarly. And I began to understand through her eyes that the god we know at any point in history is the god whom we need at that particular point in our history. Obversely, the Holy Scriptures are not so
