I attend church regularly with my mother who is in her nineties because she has a tendency to fall unexpectedly. My somewhat realistic hope is to catch her if that should happen. Sometimes I have caught her, sometimes not. I love the women in her class, a warm and true group of stalwart souls. They have their own physical problems, however, and could not be expected to catch her.
Their Sunday School teacher recently offered a lesson on apologetics. She was unfamiliar with the word and said it sounded like apology, but she explained how the lesson materials defined it. She said we need to be always ready to explain what we believe and why.
I am there every Sunday with my mother and I listen to their teachings and their pastor’s sermons, often helpful in fighting the good fight against my own selfishness and sloth and in drawing nearer to God. These dear people are good for me.
Most of the time my disagreement with some of their viewpoints doesn’t matter very much, but there are times when it needles me sharply. This particular apologetics Sunday was one of those times. The teacher mentioned the very good column in The Courier-Journal, Faith and Works, by Peter Smith. This week Smith featured a debate on Evolution between Alfred Mohler and Karl Giberson, both authors and figures in Christian academia. Mohler represents a viewpoint that reigns broadly at my mother’s church. The teacher, a woman I love and admire, an RN and retired teacher of nursing students, said, as far as she is concerned, God said, it; I believe it; and that settles it. This quote among my mother’s people refers to every word of the Bible as literal and infallible truth. Giberson calls this belief “fundamentalist literalism,” according to the column.
Mohler is quoted by Smith as saying: “It simply is not credible, at least to me, that God gave us this text with such rich detail and sequential development” if it was only symbolic. This refers to the Genesis accounts of creation. As an aside here, I would ask Dr. Mohler and my mother’s pastor why then would Our Lord have given us such richly detailed words and actions and why would the apostles have written such marvelous passages referring to baptism and communion if they were “only symbolic”? But I will come back to this subject.
As the Sunday School teacher spoke of apologetics, I thought of people I deeply care about who have told me they lost their faith in college or grad school. And I thought of Giberson’s sad recalling of the many students who lost their faith because they felt forced to choose between their faith and scientific evidence, an unnecessary choice. Not only is a fundamentalist literalism to blame for this false choice, but also a certain closed minded dogmatism among some scientists and professors who have insisted that the big bang and subsequent magnificence could only have happened by chance. By accident, in their view, do we live with our powers of reason, imagination, and compassion amid this vast universe. The latest theory is that God is unnecessary to the natural processes at work in The Grand Design. God may be scientifically unnecessary, but then perhaps science needs new words, a new language. The word design most definitely implies a designer.
We do not comprehend the mysteries of God and Creation, the problem of evil, the why of it all, nor do we need to understand these things in order to know Christ crucified, to be conformed to the pattern of his death, and to experience the power of his resurrection. Nor do we need to deny the questions raised and perhaps to be answered by the Swiss collider experiments, the observations and conclusions of Darwin, or the mapping of the human genome in order to believe the Nicene Creed. Faith and the quest for knowledge need not be inimical.
But my mother’s people do not even use the creeds of the church. As her teacher continued, she said with emphasis in a tone of disapproval that there are other churches whose “doctrines are very different from ours.” When she ended the lesson we moved into the sanctuary where we received communion. Mom’s pastor once again reiterated that this act of remembrance is only that and has no power, no grace in itself other than remembering the great sacrifice of Christ. It is only symbolic, in their view. But for me Christ is real in the elements of his supper, whatever the pastor thinks. And in Christ I become aware that we are one church, all of us, whatever our differences. He sees us as one and probably regards our differences as petty and childish.
This brings me to my own church which I don’t get to attend very often. It is a small, struggling group of dear ones who work out their own salvation differently from Mom’s people. For them, symbol is what it represents, and myth is powerful and true in a more profound manner than that of a merely literal statement. For many of them, living in the presence of God is more essential than the points of a creed. But I generalize. For some of them, the creed is more important. They differ from one another and they tolerate differences, just as people in Mom’s church differ. Some in Mom’s Sunday School class, for instance, see no problem with women deacons, while others are more hardline literalists. Officially, though, there will be no women deacons.
In my church there is a woman pastor, two women deacons, and a Sudanese deacon. A deacon teaches our Bible study group, and she is a teacher I love and admire for her honesty and knowledge as well as her loving commitment to Christ and to us. Once a month I am able to attend this study and maintain contact with my church. The pastor made a comment recently that when she is asked if she is born again, she replies, “All the time.” Our former pastor often emphasized that doubts and questions are welcome here. Our organist and a choir member are a gay couple. All are welcomed in my church including many refugee people. We have language barriers but the liturgy and God’s love are the same in any language. On this Sunday in my Mom’s church the pastor spent some minutes of his sermon speaking against the concept of gay marriage. Some members of my church might debate marriage for gays but they accept gay couples.
I grew up in Mom’s church and I love them, but as a youth I longed for a deeper way. Many of them are content to accept what they have been taught and they are not bothered by doubt or question. It is a beautiful, strong, simple faith handed down and received intact with emphasis on prayer, trust, and kindness to others; it is my mother’s faith and I cherish it. It nurtured me in my youth, and I can’t sell it short.
But I had questions and more than doubts, I had a yearning for something it did not offer me, perhaps what might be called mysticism, but at least the power of symbol or metaphor, which is what it signifies. It is akin also to my awareness in nature that spirit is within everything. And so I found my way into the Catholic side of the Christian Church. Eventually a Protestant Catholicism won out over the Roman Church because of the Roman brand of fundamentalism and its failure to fully accept women. My mother’s church continues to be what I would call overly rational, eschewing sacramental theology which they might consider superstitious. With its inclusion of mysticism, the Roman Church is also very rational, formal, and suspicious of mysticism. Some in my church are more rational and some, more mystical. Everyone is welcome, and the differences are not overly legislated by church laws and dogma.
As I grow older and more of my loved ones move on to the other side of death, the communion of saints becomes ever dearer to me. To receive the body and blood of Christ is central in communion, and in that communion we become one with the whole church, living and dead, here and hereafter, and in all the tents with different labels, our brothers and sisters.
My church leaders enjoy learning, nor do they deny scientific inquiry and the growing body of knowledge. We have discussed whether discoveries in various fields shake our faith. In what is our faith grounded? If it is grounded in the Person of Jesus Christ, we will not lose faith. This we share with all those Christians in other tents.
I think of Mom’s pastor and a leader in her class with whom I grew up who have a rock solid faith, and they simply dismiss whole bodies of scientific knowledge as irrelevant and mistaken. They stick to the beliefs they were taught and do not stray from them. It seems to me there is a difference of personality type. These are intelligent and highly educated people who think in black and white terms perhaps or who simply have no need for complexities to the degree that I do. Perhaps they have no patience for complexities that I feel compelled to consider. I have had friends of other faiths as well who did not understand problems I discussed. It seemed we were from different planets. I sense that some in the sciences and some atheists have a similar simplicity.
I think of the openness of our deacons, priests, and others who serve Christ with a different perspective. Most of them do not see their lives as Christians dating back to a single moment of being born again. Rather, as for me, the Christian life is one of continual conversion and giving over more space for God to operate in our lives. Grace is given each day in many ways, and there are many conversion points through life.
Perhaps my commitment is less than that of my mother’s people. Simplicity is a virtue that I do not have. But ultimately these differences do not matter much, if only we could see it that way. We humans are more comfortable with our own kind, and so the different tents remain. Let us at least think and speak kindly of one another and work together as we can to fulfill the prayer of Christ that we all may be one, at least in his Spirit. In his kingdom we are to be one. As my brother once said, “How will we be at home in Heaven if we can’t love each other here?”
Their Sunday School teacher recently offered a lesson on apologetics. She was unfamiliar with the word and said it sounded like apology, but she explained how the lesson materials defined it. She said we need to be always ready to explain what we believe and why.
I am there every Sunday with my mother and I listen to their teachings and their pastor’s sermons, often helpful in fighting the good fight against my own selfishness and sloth and in drawing nearer to God. These dear people are good for me.
Most of the time my disagreement with some of their viewpoints doesn’t matter very much, but there are times when it needles me sharply. This particular apologetics Sunday was one of those times. The teacher mentioned the very good column in The Courier-Journal, Faith and Works, by Peter Smith. This week Smith featured a debate on Evolution between Alfred Mohler and Karl Giberson, both authors and figures in Christian academia. Mohler represents a viewpoint that reigns broadly at my mother’s church. The teacher, a woman I love and admire, an RN and retired teacher of nursing students, said, as far as she is concerned, God said, it; I believe it; and that settles it. This quote among my mother’s people refers to every word of the Bible as literal and infallible truth. Giberson calls this belief “fundamentalist literalism,” according to the column.
Mohler is quoted by Smith as saying: “It simply is not credible, at least to me, that God gave us this text with such rich detail and sequential development” if it was only symbolic. This refers to the Genesis accounts of creation. As an aside here, I would ask Dr. Mohler and my mother’s pastor why then would Our Lord have given us such richly detailed words and actions and why would the apostles have written such marvelous passages referring to baptism and communion if they were “only symbolic”? But I will come back to this subject.
As the Sunday School teacher spoke of apologetics, I thought of people I deeply care about who have told me they lost their faith in college or grad school. And I thought of Giberson’s sad recalling of the many students who lost their faith because they felt forced to choose between their faith and scientific evidence, an unnecessary choice. Not only is a fundamentalist literalism to blame for this false choice, but also a certain closed minded dogmatism among some scientists and professors who have insisted that the big bang and subsequent magnificence could only have happened by chance. By accident, in their view, do we live with our powers of reason, imagination, and compassion amid this vast universe. The latest theory is that God is unnecessary to the natural processes at work in The Grand Design. God may be scientifically unnecessary, but then perhaps science needs new words, a new language. The word design most definitely implies a designer.
We do not comprehend the mysteries of God and Creation, the problem of evil, the why of it all, nor do we need to understand these things in order to know Christ crucified, to be conformed to the pattern of his death, and to experience the power of his resurrection. Nor do we need to deny the questions raised and perhaps to be answered by the Swiss collider experiments, the observations and conclusions of Darwin, or the mapping of the human genome in order to believe the Nicene Creed. Faith and the quest for knowledge need not be inimical.
But my mother’s people do not even use the creeds of the church. As her teacher continued, she said with emphasis in a tone of disapproval that there are other churches whose “doctrines are very different from ours.” When she ended the lesson we moved into the sanctuary where we received communion. Mom’s pastor once again reiterated that this act of remembrance is only that and has no power, no grace in itself other than remembering the great sacrifice of Christ. It is only symbolic, in their view. But for me Christ is real in the elements of his supper, whatever the pastor thinks. And in Christ I become aware that we are one church, all of us, whatever our differences. He sees us as one and probably regards our differences as petty and childish.
This brings me to my own church which I don’t get to attend very often. It is a small, struggling group of dear ones who work out their own salvation differently from Mom’s people. For them, symbol is what it represents, and myth is powerful and true in a more profound manner than that of a merely literal statement. For many of them, living in the presence of God is more essential than the points of a creed. But I generalize. For some of them, the creed is more important. They differ from one another and they tolerate differences, just as people in Mom’s church differ. Some in Mom’s Sunday School class, for instance, see no problem with women deacons, while others are more hardline literalists. Officially, though, there will be no women deacons.
In my church there is a woman pastor, two women deacons, and a Sudanese deacon. A deacon teaches our Bible study group, and she is a teacher I love and admire for her honesty and knowledge as well as her loving commitment to Christ and to us. Once a month I am able to attend this study and maintain contact with my church. The pastor made a comment recently that when she is asked if she is born again, she replies, “All the time.” Our former pastor often emphasized that doubts and questions are welcome here. Our organist and a choir member are a gay couple. All are welcomed in my church including many refugee people. We have language barriers but the liturgy and God’s love are the same in any language. On this Sunday in my Mom’s church the pastor spent some minutes of his sermon speaking against the concept of gay marriage. Some members of my church might debate marriage for gays but they accept gay couples.
I grew up in Mom’s church and I love them, but as a youth I longed for a deeper way. Many of them are content to accept what they have been taught and they are not bothered by doubt or question. It is a beautiful, strong, simple faith handed down and received intact with emphasis on prayer, trust, and kindness to others; it is my mother’s faith and I cherish it. It nurtured me in my youth, and I can’t sell it short.
But I had questions and more than doubts, I had a yearning for something it did not offer me, perhaps what might be called mysticism, but at least the power of symbol or metaphor, which is what it signifies. It is akin also to my awareness in nature that spirit is within everything. And so I found my way into the Catholic side of the Christian Church. Eventually a Protestant Catholicism won out over the Roman Church because of the Roman brand of fundamentalism and its failure to fully accept women. My mother’s church continues to be what I would call overly rational, eschewing sacramental theology which they might consider superstitious. With its inclusion of mysticism, the Roman Church is also very rational, formal, and suspicious of mysticism. Some in my church are more rational and some, more mystical. Everyone is welcome, and the differences are not overly legislated by church laws and dogma.
As I grow older and more of my loved ones move on to the other side of death, the communion of saints becomes ever dearer to me. To receive the body and blood of Christ is central in communion, and in that communion we become one with the whole church, living and dead, here and hereafter, and in all the tents with different labels, our brothers and sisters.
My church leaders enjoy learning, nor do they deny scientific inquiry and the growing body of knowledge. We have discussed whether discoveries in various fields shake our faith. In what is our faith grounded? If it is grounded in the Person of Jesus Christ, we will not lose faith. This we share with all those Christians in other tents.
I think of Mom’s pastor and a leader in her class with whom I grew up who have a rock solid faith, and they simply dismiss whole bodies of scientific knowledge as irrelevant and mistaken. They stick to the beliefs they were taught and do not stray from them. It seems to me there is a difference of personality type. These are intelligent and highly educated people who think in black and white terms perhaps or who simply have no need for complexities to the degree that I do. Perhaps they have no patience for complexities that I feel compelled to consider. I have had friends of other faiths as well who did not understand problems I discussed. It seemed we were from different planets. I sense that some in the sciences and some atheists have a similar simplicity.
I think of the openness of our deacons, priests, and others who serve Christ with a different perspective. Most of them do not see their lives as Christians dating back to a single moment of being born again. Rather, as for me, the Christian life is one of continual conversion and giving over more space for God to operate in our lives. Grace is given each day in many ways, and there are many conversion points through life.
Perhaps my commitment is less than that of my mother’s people. Simplicity is a virtue that I do not have. But ultimately these differences do not matter much, if only we could see it that way. We humans are more comfortable with our own kind, and so the different tents remain. Let us at least think and speak kindly of one another and work together as we can to fulfill the prayer of Christ that we all may be one, at least in his Spirit. In his kingdom we are to be one. As my brother once said, “How will we be at home in Heaven if we can’t love each other here?”
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