The Christian Humanist

Christianity Without God

INTRODUCTION

Is it possible to be a Christian without a belief in God? I believe the answer is an unqualified yes--being a Christian without an operating concept of God is both possible and necessary for those of us who find the life and teachings of Jesus compelling but have difficulty with the concept of God as understood in traditional Christian theology. The various articles on this website—and in my book The Possibility of Christian Humanism—make the case for a non-theistic form of Christianity that is reasonably called CHRISTIAN HUMANISM.

Given the fundamental premises of traditional Christian theology—that we cannot bridge the gap to god with philosophy or science, that we cannot “know” god except through Jesus, that at least part of the meaning of the Trinity in Christian theology is that “Jesus is god in the flesh living among us,”—and given our difficulty with those premises and our ongoing suspicion about the possibility of any meaningful talk about god, it may seem a stretch to talk about non-theistic Christianity but it is that improbability to which I have come in my search for a meaningful and rational basis for a personal faith.

My particular religious perspective lies within the general framework of Christianity but does not include any concept of God in the traditional theistic sense. It is a position that I reached reluctantly, partly because I find language about god troublesome at best, but primarily because I am convinced that there was something unique about Jesus and his teaching that challenged the conventional wisdom and religious assumptions of his day with a timeless critique that even today continues to speak to something higher and better in us and challenges us to become better than we are. That is the substance of the religionless Christianity that I describe here.

NEW BOOK PUBLISHED

Stories, Folk Tales and Legends from the Bible

We are pleased to announce publication of a new collection of stories in contemporary language. The stories, legends and folk tales of the Bible have influenced our literature, our art, our drama, our music, our traditions, our politics, our sense of values and our culture. Familiarity with these stories is important for children and adults not because they are sacred stories that should be taken as literally true but because they are important culturally to those of us who are the inheritors and beneficiaries of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. The themes and images in these stories are reflected in the artifacts of our culture—our literature, our art, our music—and we would be aesthetically and intellectually impoverished without a working acquaintance with them. Warning—as in other myths and legends of the ancient world, there is violence, rape, incest and murder in these stories. The target audience is high school and adults. For a link to this book, and other books by the author, click <here>. For more about the book click <here>. To obtain an E-book version on Amazon, click <here>.

The Possibility of Christian Humanism

We must learn to live in a world in which talk about god no longer makes sense to us. We no longer use religion as an explanation to fill in the gaps of our knowledge of things we do not yet understand. We do not see a “conflict” between the world of science and the world of religion that requires us to separate our experience into segments with “keep out” signs posted at the borderline between “scientific” knowledge and “religious” knowledge. We do not try to harmonize the biblical 7 days of creation with what we know from astrophysics about the structure and sequence of the origins of our universe as if both were descriptive accounts of process that need to be reconciled. When we have questions about our physical world we rely on the principles of science for what we can know and how we know it with respect to physical things, whether matter, forces, energy, or the universe. Whatever we mean by the “truth” of the creation story, we accept the premise that it is not intended to be an alternative or competitive process description. [Available in both paperback and in Ebook format. Click <here> to obtain a copy.]