Note from Rowland: I like this guy. He’s brilliant. I don’t agree with him in a lot of places, but I like the integrity of his search for truth.

The following is a sad commentary on the wishful thinking of ultra-liberal theologian-pastors who believe their stance will somehow ‘attract more modern/postmodern people to the church’. But, as Harry notes here, the opposite is just as sad – the church as a haven for those committed to much-more-of-the-same.

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Preservation or Evolution?

By Harry T. Cook

1/7/11

The quixotic nature of my cause became clear to me in the instant a very intelligent
man of the Jewish persuasion married to a member of my parish told me that he did
not see religious communities as centers for intellectual pursuits. “That’s not
what people think they’re for,” he said. “They come here to be comforted and reassured,
not to learn.”

The venue in which he made his pronouncement was a session of my years-long Monday
night seminar series in which I guided participants through rigorous, academically
oriented considerations of religious ideas, texts and history. The man’s wife, thoroughly
enjoying the challenges she was encountering in the class, had just wondered aloud
why in a congregation of the size of ours only 10 or 15 people ever turned out for
what she called “these brilliant sessions.” Her husband provided the correct if
discouraging answer.

It was too late, not to mention impossible, for me to retreat into the world of
soothing pietism. I had long since staked out my position as a journeyman scholar
of religious texts and their histories and had based my teaching ministry on that
work.

I had characterized the initiative I was pursuing during the last two decades of
my congregational work as a project of “critical thinking and evolving belief.”
To have made such a proposal within the bounds of an ecclesiastical tradition that
requires the recitation of a 1,600-year-old creed as part of the Sunday service
was — as I now see — ludicrous.

One can either maintain a healthy agnosticism about what is to be believed on the
basis of objective data, or one can adopt the beliefs of a council of bishops reached
by majority vote and the anathematizing of dissenters — all well accomplished before
the observations of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein. As Jesus was
said to have remarked on another subject, “No one can serve two masters.”

The majority of my congregation had chosen to serve the master known as “preservation,”
I the one named “evolution.” There was never to be d ƒ ©tente, much less entente.

In the decade beginning in 1997 to the present, I published seven books. The first,
which caused the biggest smash-up, was Christianity Beyond Creeds, in which I made
the case that the ancient creeds are priceless documents of history and ought to
be treated as such rather than as statements of faith by people living in the age
of the cell phone, the Internet and space exploration.

I took each term of the so-called Apostles’ Creed and restated it in language and
concept that a person of intellectual integrity could abide, and in so doing had
to debunk the virgin birth of Jesus, his “miracles,” resurrection and ascension.
A few people in the congregation read the book, or parts of it, but those most zealous
in the witch hunt that ensued had only heard about the book. Even that was enough
to bring out the pitchforks and set the torches afire.

A couple of years ago, I came close to being indicted on charges of heresy by the
authorities of the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan. My publishers, undoubtedly thinking
of an uptick in book sales, surely would have relished such a development.

As it turned out, the charges were dropped, not because anybody in officialdom loves
me very much but because it was realized that such a spectacle would only have lifted
a few more shovels full of dirt out of the hole the church in general has been digging
for itself of late.

One of my graduate school professors, the late George Arthur Buttrick — eminent
scholar and preacher, editor of The Interpreter’s Bible and the Interpreter’s Dictionary
of the Bible — said that his better students would publish at least one book in
their particular fields of interest within the first 10 years of their professional
life.

It took me 35 years to get going, but after Christianity Beyond Creeds in 1997,
I turned out Sermons of a Devoted Heretic in 1999; Seven Sayings of Jesus; Findings:
Lectionary Research and Analysis and Life of Courage: Sherwin Wine & Humanistic
Judaism all in 2003 — the latter with Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Marilyn Rowens. Then
in 2006 came Belief in the 21st Century: An Appeal to Reason and Experience. In
2010 Wipf & Stock issued my Asking: Inquirers in Conversation. Later this year,
Polebridge Press will bring out my Resonance: Biblical Texts Speaking to 21st Century
Inquirers.

In the years between my ordination and retirement — 45 in all — I preached and
taught directly out of my research of biblical texts and the history of religions
and their ideas, never with an agendum of trying persuade people to believe the
unbelievable. I came to appreciate an engagement I achieved with those who had become
weary with and suspicious of rote orthodoxy and would say, “You really make me think.”
Alas, they were in the minority.

Last week, the congregation from which I retired almost two years ago after more
than two decades as its pastor called it quits. My scholarship, my books and the
direction of my teaching ministry had served to prove the point that many — maybe
most — people come to church to hear the old, old story, unbothered by information
or questioning.

A brave core of folk, some of whom had come because I was there doing what I was
doing and stayed because they relished being part of “a center for critical thinking
and evolving belief,” tried to hold out against economic drought and discouraging
demographics, but could not do it.

It is discouraging to realize that more people are into preservation than evolution
where religious belief is concerned. The ancient Egyptians tried to preserve their
dead by mummification. Ever seen a mummy?

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 © Copyright 2011, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used
or reproduced without proper credit.

Center for Rational Christianity | P.O. Box 182 | Clawson | MI | 48017

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Daniel Batt commented:

“The trouble with someone like this, I wonder, is he would take a scholar like NT Wright on the matter of the Resurrection and say Wright was just one of those intellectual pygmies interested in the old, old story, unlike himself, a man of high IQ and critical thought, unafraid to ask the dangerous questions.

Spong plays out this same old debating tactic which equates, say, belief in the Resurrection with belief in a 6000 year old earth. Frankly, I find this just as offensive as Richard Dawkins equating the monotheism of the unmoved mover with belief in faeries at the bottom of the garden.

All branches of Christianity need a skeptical ‘solvent’ applied from time to time to their beliefs, because we need to worship God, not our idea of God. But so many theological liberals get drunk on this solvent of skepticism and they end up way more passionate about what they don’t believe than what they do, like all fundementalists.

Sometimes, Christianity is like the painting of a great master, and it does need some solvent to remove the grime of centuries and reveal its true beauty. But too many theological liberals are like a drunk art restorer applying their solvent until all that isn’t eaten away is a picture frame. And then they have the gall to expect us to worship the frame and call it the ‘essence of Christianity’.”