The Diary of a Religious Pilgrim
[A Spiritual Autobiography, Part I]
This is an autobiographical story of a religious pilgrimage from the uncritical certainty of the evangelical tradition in which I was brought up through a long dark night of unsettling doubt and theological confusion in my early adulthood to the place where I stand today, the landscape of which may become clearer in the pages ahead. It is a place where I stand with some confidence that I have assembled enough of the “theological fragments” that were left to me to be able to construct a Christian faith that makes sense to me both as a framework by which to understand the meaning and significance of life (a religious philosophy) and as a way of living that life (an ethical commitment).
As early as high school I was aware of some inner conflict and uncertainty about what was taught in Sunday School. I was aware that the biblical stories could not be “true” in the sense that they documented literal descriptions of actual events. I was desperately seeking some theological explanation that would clarify the sense in which we could believe that biblical events were ‘true.’ At the same time I was painfully aware that those Christians around me acted and spoke as if they believed that biblical events were literally true and did not seem troubled by that. I think some of my very early seriousness about religion was driven by my personal anxiety and confusion about how to understand and explain these events.
The place to begin this story about my struggle with faith is with memories from my childhood that may provide a useful background and frame of reference for understanding the confusion, uncertainty and naivete of my developing religious outlook.
My father died suddenly in 1939 of pneumonia. By 1942 my mother had remarried, taken my brother and me out of the orphanage into which she had placed us after my father’s death and moved us to Washington, D.C., where my stepfather had obtained employment with the War Production Board. By 1944 we had moved from the basement apartment that was our first home on Buchanan Street in northwest Washington to a low-rise brick apartment complex in southeast Washington in the district known as Congress Heights.
The first church I remember is Covenant Baptist Church, a small two-room church located several blocks away from our apartment that was reached by crossing the alley behind our apartment building and walking through a grassy field beyond that sloped unevenly downhill to an unpaved road in “the valley” that could be muddy and impassable after rains. There was a long way around by road that we took when we were dressed up and the weather was inclement. The church was small. A center aisle divided 8 or 10 rows of hard wooden folding chairs. At the front of the sanctuary was a center pulpit on a raised platform and below it a beat-up honky-tonk piano that was played with gusto during the services.
At the right side of the raised platform was a door leading into a room beyond. The minister and his wife lived back there. I do not know if the meager offering in the Sunday collection plate was their only source of support or whether they had “real” jobs during the week, but I suspect the minister had other employment. The minister was tall (or so he seemed to me, but I was in elementary school), heavy-set, whiskered, loud and gruff. His wife was a very obese woman who sat in a large wooden rocker just outside the door to their personal living space, rocking incessantly and fanning herself rapidly with a paper fan stapled to a stick that advertised the local undertaker’s services. She perspired ferociously. I never saw her get out of that chair. She said ‘Amen’ a lot. So did the congregation. It was a very expressive group.
I cannot remember why I attended there or how I became involved with that church and I do not remember any other children there. The minister had asked me to read the scripture lesson from the large Bible on the pulpit during services and he said I did it well and had a talent for it, and so I read regularly each week. That participation in the service gave me a feeling of importance, which is why I continued to attend there for some time. I was a member of a Boy Scout troop when I was old enough to join and the troop met at that church.
My mother and step-father did not like the emotional display or the free-flowing and expressive nature of the Pentecostal service and never went to church there with me that I can recall, but they never discouraged me from attending there. They attended frequently a Presbyterian church that got its start in the Atlantic Theater building about three long blocks away (which did not show movies on Sunday in those days); the Presbyterians eventually built a new facility an additional two or three blocks away from our apartment. It was more "northern" in style and more like the services my mother and step-father were accustomed to in New England. I attended there with my mother occasionally usually when my stepfather was out of town but it was very formal and boring and I resisted getting involved. I did not like the minister. He was not very friendly. He talked to my parents and ignored me.
My brother and I eventually attended a Southern Baptist Church on South Capitol Street, diagonally across the street from Congress Heights Elementary School, which I attended during the 5th and 6th grade when attendance boundaries changed. I think we were first involved with that church through their summer Vacation Bible School, probably having been invited by a friend from school, and we eventually attended the full range of their programs: Sunday school, morning church services, the youth fellowship (Baptist Training Union) and the Sunday evening service. My parents did not encourage me to attend there, although my mother made it clear that I should attend somewhere. Regular attendance became a habit and it would not have occurred to me that there was any other option.
I was baptized in that church. The baptismal pool was a large tank located in an elevated area behind the center pulpit, behind curtains that could be pulled back for the baptismal service. The service of baptism in a Southern Baptist church required the candidates to put on a white robe in place of street clothes and, one a time when the minister called each name, walk down a few steps into the baptismal pool and wait patiently while the words of the baptismal ceremony were spoken. The minister covered the celebrant’s nose with a handkerchief he kept in one hand, lowered the baptismal candidate backwards until completely submerged, pronounced the ceremonial words ‘I baptize you now in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,’ then raised the baptized one from the water dripping wet, and the newly cleansed person then climbed out of the baptismal pool up the stairs at the far end of the pool and went into the robing room to get dressed.
From this point I grew up as a Southern Baptist in Virginia. Southern Baptists in the 1950’s were not quite the right-wing radicals with the hard edge that they are today. Baptists were and are an independent lot, given to argument and bitter dispute over minor issues that were typically resolved by the minority group departing and creating a new splinter church. Baptists have no formal creed, or at least say they don’t, although they have many specific articles of faith that can be listed and argued about and used as tests to determine who is doctrinally sound. There were quite distinctive regional differences in belief and practices throughout Baptists in the South.
I was a Virginia Baptist. They were a distinct and self-consciously proud group. They leaned toward the left of the Southern Baptist spectrum, particularly in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington. Ministers in Virginia were a bit better educated than Baptists in other southern states, typically graduates of colleges such as Washington and Lee University and the University of Richmond, generally acquiring their graduate theological education at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville or Southeastern Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC, and came to their ministry with a more “classical” education than was the case in the other southern states, where education was not a necessary criterion for ordination into the ministry. Virginia Baptists were more rational, less emotional, less religiously confrontational than their colleagues in the rest of the south.
Even their church architecture tended to reflect the classical heritage, with most large Virginia Baptist church buildings built after the Civil War designed in Greek Revival style with imposing Doric or Corinthian columns in front, reminding us of Greek temples out of their proper context. Having learned in Sunday School, right out of the book of Acts, that Greeks were pagans that needed to be converted, I was confused about why Baptists emulated the Greek temples as a place to worship -- but who was I to raise questions about church architecture.
My mother and stepfather talked about their religion mostly as a factor of their early lives, mother speaking historically about her Sunday School and church participation, but mostly of Christian Endeavor, apparently a program in the northeast churches that provided wholesome programs and activities for the youth of the church.
My mother said that she met my stepfather at one of the larger regional Christian Endeavor meetings, where he was a regular speaker. She described him as a wonderful Christian man whom she had married despite the 20-year age difference between them because she had hoped he would be a good influence for my brother and me. There didn’t seem to be any friendship, warmth, tenderness or intimacy between them, or any show of affection that I ever saw. There was also no hostility apparent between them.
In 1950 I was sent off to a church camp located in a small town in Pennsylvania. An adult “Bible Conference” was associated with the camp and located on adjoining property. The camp program director (whose name was Joe Cosgrove, and who was a student at Wheaton College, a well-known evangelical college in Illinois) was also the director of radio programs for the Bible Conference, which had a regular Sunday evening live radio broadcast. The campers walked to the conference grounds for the Sunday evening service.
For reasons I do not know, maybe because I was an older camper and reasonably compliant, I was asked to be an announcer on the radio show one Sunday evening early in the summer. I was nervous and frightened but apparently it went well. The director told me I had the voice and the talent for announcing and he let me serve as announcer for the rest of the month I was at camp. It was an exhilarating experience. I felt an emotional fervor, warmth and excitement in this group that I had not experienced before and it resonated with me. I was excited to see how a radio show operated and to be able to work with a radio script, and in its own way this experience was one of many that led me gradually toward a career interest in religion.
At Falls Church High School, which I attended for my junior and senior years, I had joined the Bible Club. At about the same time in my junior year that my family disintegrated (a story too long to get into here), probably through the invitation of someone in the Bible Club, I was introduced to the phenomenon of Youth For Christ, a very dynamic and appealing program for high school age kids that was becoming a significant phenomenon at that time.
Each Saturday night Youth for Christ held a large and impressive meeting with youth from all over the Northern Virginia area at an auditorium in Alexandria, Virginia. It was a bit of a drive and I went first with friends who had a car but sometime during my senior year I had acquired my own car with $1000 inherited from a great-uncle, a 1950 Dodge Meadowbrook sedan, and I began driving myself to the YFC meeting, which I attended regularly on Saturday evenings whether or not anyone would go with me. The music was gospel, first quality, dynamic, with talent brought in for each Saturday show, and the nightly speakers were focused on youth, very persuasive and exciting, and very good at their job. They were interesting and challenging in a way that my own church was not. I remember feeling that I wished my church had the same evangelical fervor, emotional involvement, excitement, even joy that I sensed in this group. I had decided to enter the ministry by the time I was a high school senior.
I had always assumed that I was going to college, although I don’t think anyone told me I should. Neither my mother nor my father had attended college and there was no tradition of college attendance in my family. My stepfather claimed to have been a graduate of Yale and of the Sorbonne in Paris, but he had told so many tall tales and lie through the years that I did not believe him.
I was in the academic track in high school, which we would call today a college prep program, and college was the presumed goal of students in that program. There were three course tracks, academic, which had a focus on traditional academic subjects in preparation for college; business, which involved primarily shorthand and typing for girls and business math and bookkeeping for boys; and trades, which meant blue-collar trades and shop classes of one sort or another.
I had flirted briefly with the idea of a career in aeronautical engineering, since that was a hot new area of study at the time but the math and chemistry requirements specified in the Georgia Tech and University of Maryland catalogs looked formidable and daunting and scared me off. There was no “college counseling” as such. Guidance counselors directed students to the college catalog section of the school library. I spent a lot of time browsing catalogs and looking at requirements to see what I thought I could handle and what I might like to do.
I considered becoming a physical education teacher or full-time camp director, since I had gone to summer camp every year since I was 13 years old and making a career out of it seemed quite a wonderful life. Sometime late in my junior year I gave up on those options. Since I was interested in religion and I was encouraged by my church to consider ministry as a career option, and financial aid was available if I went that route, I decided that I had to consider the ministry. The minister of my church, the Reverend J Harvey Nichols, pushed me in that direction and promised scholarship money if I went to the University of Richmond, and I did not resist.
I was ‘licensed’ by my local church as a minister in my senior year. Licensing is a step below ordination, but many Baptist ministers (preachers they were called) were licensed without being ordained. It was primarily intended as a local church’s acceptance of a young man as a candidate for the ministry, or with older men, an acknowledgement by the church of the call of God to perform ministerial services without formal education and was generally for situations in which “professional” clergy were not available.
Being licensed was a necessary step, an acknowledgement of the congregation that I was qualified in their eyes to serve as a minister and that I had been granted official status as a student minister. Licensing also qualified me for loan funds from a fund set up for Baptist ministerial students [Later I that the funds had to be repaid after graduation, but they only gave me $200 so eventually I was able to pay back that amount].
When the Reverend J Harvey Nichols was away on vacation or attending church conferences or conventions I was the regularly-scheduled replacement minister to conduct services on Sunday. I had no training for this assignment. There was an assumption that God would put the words in my mouth. He didn’t, but I observed that Reverend Nichols had notes rather carefully prepared so I followed his example and prepared each sermon as well as I could. There were morning and evening services on Sunday.
During the summer months the Sunday evening service was outdoors on the athletic field behind the church, the worshipers sitting in their cars with the windows rolled down, in the style of a “drive-in” theater, with the minister conducting the service from a high upstairs window in the rear of the church building. I had an adequate singing voice in those days and occasionally sung a duet during the evening service when I was not otherwise serving as minister.
During the fall of my senior year I applied for, took a competitive exam, and eventually won a competitive scholarship to the University of Virginia, a 4-year grant of $6000, which was a lot of money in those days. I turned it down with considerable reluctance. My church would only provide financial assistance if I went to the Virginia Baptist affiliated university, the University of Richmond.
Since I was on my own (and had been since 11th grade) and a bit fearful of not being able to make it without the aid from my church, I turned down the University of Virginia scholarship. It was not just the money. I had some fear about going to a secular institution that potentially could undermine my faith. I believed, not unlike many others who studied for the ministry in that time, that the purpose of my theological education was to arm me to defend Christianity against the world with its secular views and I thought I would be better armed at a Baptist university.
In the fall of 1955 I entered Richmond College, the college for male undergraduates at the University of Richmond. In the first semester I took a course entitled Introduction To The New Testament where I was introduced to analytic and critical study of the Bible. Literary criticism is a scientific analysis of literary works of the past for inconsistencies in style, language or viewpoint that may suggest multiple authorship or different time or place of origin. It can elucidate passages that may have originally existed in oral form prior to their written form or examine clues that hint to the time and place where parts of the document came into being or when, where or why a particular biblical book appeared in its final form.
This was shocking stuff, very disturbing to me intellectually and emotionally. I had not thought much about how the Bible came to be, but this approach was very disturbing and even more troubling was that it was being taught by professors of religion in a Virginia Baptist college. I was quite upset. I was in pain. I prayed. I cried. I wanted to leave college, to do what else I did not know and had not considered, but I wanted to run away from a very disturbing, almost traumatic, intellectual and religious challenge to my faith that I was not prepared to deal with.
My religious beliefs at the time could best be described as “evangelical.” There is a subtle but distinct difference between an ‘evangelical’ and ‘fundamentalist’ that may be more a difference in tone, attitude and style than it is of substantive belief, although there are differences in theology as well. The fundamentalist tends to be less educated, less rational, more expressive and emotional, more separatist, more literalistic, more naive, ‘blue collar’ in background, more out of touch with the world of intellectual thought, more inclined to be combative in religious discussion, less inclined to engage in serious dialogue. The fundamentalist that has any education beyond high school is likely to be a graduate of a Bible college.
On the other hand the evangelical is more likely to come from a middle class family, better educated, more rational, more conversant with the world of ideas particularly those that impact his religious outlook, more aware of the arguments on both sides of a controversial issue, more likely to face outward and to engage in serious dialogue with non-believers, more interested in defending Christian belief from intellectual challenges (“apologetics”). He is likely to be a graduate of Wheaton College (IL) or Gordon College (MA), or other church-related liberal arts colleges, and may hold a respectable graduate degree.
I had expected my education at a Baptist college to confirm and strengthen my evangelical beliefs. I expected to acquire knowledge that would explain some Biblical passages and some elements of Christian belief that were troublesome to me, and that I would be intellectually equipped to defend the faith both to myself and to others.
The foundations of my world view were badly shaken by my early college experience. My long struggle with faith had begun. I took many more courses in biblical and religious studies and in philosophy in the next three years at Richmond, partly to meet the requirements for a major in ancient history and biblical studies, but I think a large part of the decision to major in religion was to try to sort out for myself what I could believe and what I could not believe. I struggled through college and later through three years of graduate theological study trying to make some sense of religious doctrine and to reconcile it with my scientific and pragmatic outlook.
In high school I had been a pretty serious student. I was aware that there were issues that were debated between ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’ about what we could know and how we could know it, what was ‘true’ in the Bible and what was not, whether or not belief in God made rational sense, whether there actually was a heaven and a hell and where they were, whether all people who did not believe in Jesus would be damned, whether it was possible to reconcile a loving god with evil and suffering in the world.
By the time I had left high school I had read a lot of articles and short books designed to provide the evangelical Christian with answers to his questions and solutions to these problems of faith. I considered myself pretty well informed on these issues and quite well-prepared to defend the faith against unbelievers. I believed that either you accepted scientific concepts of the origins of the universe and the evolution of man over time, or you accepted the biblical story of a world created by God in seven days and a literal heaven and hell. Since they were in conflict you had to choose between them.
My college professors, even in the religion department, did not see the world in such neat ‘either-or’ categories. They affirmed that the creation story was “true” but we had to make allowances for some of the details such as the literal seven days, which could be interpreted as ‘eons’ or ‘days in god’s time’ which is not necessarily the same as our time. You could believe in the general scientific framework and you could simultaneously believe that the Bible was quite literally true as well, but you had to do some careful work and verbal dancing to explain the biblical story so that the apparent conflicts were resolved. My first instinct was to accept this strategy as a way to resolve a number of issues that troubled me, but gradually it lost its persuasive power and I came to see it as intellectually dishonest, an unwillingness to face reality.
As my studies progressed at Richmond, what puzzled and disturbed me most was that my struggle with faith was instigated by faculty in the religion department, who seemed unaware of the mental havoc they were creating in me and presumably in others. I could not reconcile their critical approach to the Bible (which I thought had some pretty significant implications for traditional religious faith) with their fairly traditional theology, which seemed to me at least on the surface to be pretty similar in its broad outlines to what I had grown up with. There appeared to be a radical disconnect between their theology and their pragmatic approach to the world of reason and science that I could not comprehend.
The faculty apparently had reconciled their theology with their critical approach to the Bible in some way that was not clear to me. From my perspective it seemed that they did not draw the obvious conclusions that there were irreconcilable differences between the way they interpreted the Bible and their quite traditional theological views. As faculty explained it, the Bible was still ‘God’s word’ to man despite the messy way various documents had been assembled through oral traditions to form the written documents which developed through the centuries into the form that we have today.
The faculty had explained that the Bible was to be understood not so much as the “words of God" in a literal sense as it was a book where the Word of God became present and spoke to us through its pages when we listened carefully and expectantly and were open to the still small voice within us that whispered to the prayerful soul. To put this in a different way, they seemed to be saying that the Bible was not the Word or the words of God so much as it was the place where the Word of God could speak through those words to us. That made the Bible a very human book, but a vehicle that could be used by God.
This made some sense to me, but it still raised the issue of how we sort out the many conflicting claims made by those who profess to have heard that Word when it is apparent that all those claims cannot be true. Then how do we authenticate the genuine Word that comes from God from the self-delusion of what we want to believe or hear? After all some people who hear voices are lunatics.
I was a member of the Baptist Student Union (BSU) through my years at Richmond. It was a club whose purpose was both social and service. The BSU held social events, conducted a daily “devotional” service about 15 minutes in length each afternoon at 5 p.m. led by one of its members, and performed charitable service at the four Baptist “missions” in Richmond, which were very much community centers for black children run by white Baptists. They did social work, ran after school activities, provided counseling, and operated boys and girls clubs. I wasn’t much interested in this sort of thing, but I felt it was a duty and so I volunteered one afternoon a week during my sophomore year.
I worked my way into the leadership of the BSU, and managed a particularly important coup. I had no car at that time (the summer preceding my junior year), so I finagled the responsibility of caring for the BSU’s 1955 Chevrolet station wagon, a gift from the Virginia Baptist Association. That meant washing it weekly, getting its oil changed periodically, and checking it out to those who had a need for it to go to the various downtown missions or evangelistic crusades around the state that BSU sponsored or participated in with others at the request of a local church. When the trip was far from campus, which was not infrequent, the BSU members were put up in the homes of members of a local church. One benefit of being responsible for the care of the station wagon was that I got to keep the station wagon over the summer so I had a vehicle to use for my summer job.
I had already concluded by the end of my first year at Richmond that I was not interested in or cut out to be a parish minister. I considered briefly a possible career as a youth minister, religious camp director, or other non-pastoral career. But by my sophomore year I determined that my interest as academic and I wanted to teach, and the only serious place to do that was in a university, so it was clear that I needed a Ph.D. in religion.
Graduate school requirements for a Ph. D. in any of the places I considered -- Yale, Princeton, and the University of Chicago among others -- required a solid background in at least two ancient languages, so I took the basic two-year courses in Latin and Greek and then added German, which was necessary in order to do graduate work in theology or philosophy, as much of the original work in theology and in biblical studies at that time was in German. My undergraduate major in philosophy and religion required courses in ancient history, biblical studies and philosophy, and that proved to be a heavy academic load.
I wanted a good head start and solid preparation to make graduate study easier. I took all available courses in the religion department. Some were easier than others, by which I mean easier on my religious sensibilities and acquired prejudices about what must be believed by a Christian. The ‘wisdom literature’ genre of Proverbs, Psalms and Ecclesiastes was easier to manage without too much troublesome conflict with my sense of reality and possibility; however the early old testament books were filled with stories and descriptions of improbable events that were in conflict with what we knew or thought we knew about time, history and our universe.
When pushed on the “historicity” of particular stories and events, I sensed some “evasive” answers from various members of the faculty, with such suggestions as the probable difference between god’s time and our time, and apparent conflicts caused by partial rather than full revelation that created apparent rather than real conflict with what we otherwise knew or thought we knew. The escape was to quote Paul – “Now we see through a darkened glass but in eternity all these apparent discrepancies and contradictions will be resolved.”
There were other responses, too glib and superficial to be very helpful, but said just the same with sincerity and a straight-face: a day with god was as a million years; there were some things we just had to accept on faith; there are many ways of “knowing” and religious knowledge was a ‘different kind’ of knowing but not less important than other kinds of knowledge; one implication of revelation was the peace that comes to us when we accept through faith that all truth is essentially god’s truth and that there can be no real conflict between the truth of god, the truth of the Christian faith, and the truth of the world as we know it or think we know it because god is ultimate truth; we are in the hands of God and it is presumptuous of us to claim that we finite beings would ever be able to contain within ourselves enough knowledge or wisdom to resolve all the apparent conflicts; the greater our humility in the face of god’s truth the happier we will be because we will have the present certainty that we will ultimately know the truth and the ultimate truth that we will know in the fullness of time will give us the confidence that will make us free in our present.
I found this way of reasoning very curious and not very convincing. The “circularity” of the reasoning made no sense to me.
Late in the spring of my first year at Richmond I was at a very low point, the foundation of my religious “faith” having been badly shaken. I had not yet found any way that Christian faith could be interpreted for me in a way that did not seriously violate my sense of intellectual integrity and my desperate concern to find meaning and truth. Having found nothing solid that I could hold onto and having nothing to lose, I arranged appointments with Reuben Alley, editor of the Virginia Baptist monthly magazine, whom I knew by reputation to be wise and more ‘liberal’ in his interpretation of religion, and with Phil Hart, university chaplain and a professor of religion whose doctorate was from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, a fact which impressed me a great deal.
Each of them in his own different style counseled the same general advice, first to be patient, that what I was experiencing as a crisis of faith was not unusual, that the journey into religious knowledge is in part self-knowledge and it can be a very bumpy road with lots of detours, but that eventually I may find the journey ultimately worth taking, and second, go north, the point being that if I wanted to get anywhere in teaching at a university in the south, I needed an undergraduate degree from the south to make me initially acceptable (e.g. Richmond) and not an outsider, but I must have a graduate degree from a northern theological or graduate school to give serious academic credibility among faculty colleagues, who generally mistrusted the academic rigorousness and preparation of those who remained in the south.
Reuben Alley and Phil Hart were right in their advice, both as to the long and sometimes tortuous religious pilgrimage that lay ahead that could be ultimately rewarding, as well as in their suggestion that I ‘go north’ for graduate theological education, and while I did not appreciate either piece of advice for quite some years, nevertheless I followed the path that they suggested to me.
Graduate theological education at Colgate Rochester Divinity School was another mental and emotional shock. I arrived there in the fall of 1959, surprised at how cold it was in Rochester in mid-September. Fall had arrived early, the days were considerably shorter than they were in Virginia, the leaves were rapidly losing their fall color and were already dropping from the trees in great heaps on the sidewalks, and the final annoyance, I discovered I was allergic to whatever was in the fall air and that added to the discomfort of being in a very unfamiliar and disturbing environment.
The first year of graduate education at Colgate Rochester was the theological equivalent of an intellectual and religious boot camp. First year theological studies seemed designed to destroy the naive religious and theological simplicity of the thoughts, ideas and values which most of us had brought with us to the campus. The religious shock troops included James Alvin Sanders, Professor of Old Testament; Harmon Holcomb, Professor of Philosophy of Religion; William H. Hamilton, Professor of Theology; and Jim Ashburn, whose title I do not recall but whose field was personality theory and psychological counseling.
I mention members of the faculty by name because they made quite an impression on me and, looking back on those years with the distance of time, I am both amazed and appreciative of the fact that I studied under some of the greatest minds in their respective fields in that generation. How all of them were assembled at one graduate school at the same time was either remarkably fortuitous or the brilliant coup of the president of the seminary at that time, a cigar-smoking and highly successful business type who stayed out of the classroom. However they were assembled, these key faculty were clearly the intellectual stars in the field of religion in the late 50’s and early 60’s.
An assignment in the first semester course in biblical studies under Dr. James Alvin Sanders, an old testament historian and expert who was involved in the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and was a prolific writer on Old Testament studies, was typical. The assignment was to read the books of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, etc.) and several other books with a stack of note cards at hand and to write on separate cards brief comments on inconsistencies, troublesome problems or historical observations that we encountered when we read passages with Sunday School familiarity but which we read for the first time critically and carefully.
It soon became obvious there were many problematic passages: the day the sun stood still so that a battle could be completed in daylight, the seven days of the creation story starting with the watery abyss, an obvious second creation story that differed in content from the first, the serpent that confronted Adam and talked to him, the walls of Jericho falling when the trumpets of the Israelites sounded, Jonah swallowed by a great fish (not a whale) and delivered to his preaching assignment, to name a few. Reading the Old Testament in this “critical” way prepared us for understanding the conclusions that biblical scholars (Catholic, Protestant and Jewish) had reached in the past hundred years of linguistic and historic study of the oldest available manuscripts of the Old Testament and the related archaeological evidence.
Without getting into the very complex details of this scientific approach to the study of the Bible (which is the way we have learned to approach all historical and literary questions) and its particular conclusions, it was apparent that a literal reading of the Old Testament as if it were a continuous descriptive history without understanding the background, the context and the culture of the time in which various passages were written was simply not possible for us today.
The unstated but obvious educational strategy of graduate theological education was to knock down the intellectual underpinnings, the naive assumptions, the simplistic theological concepts, the various religious prejudices, the inconsistencies in thinking and the conflicting values of those of us who came to our theological education with a variety of preparatory experiences; and then, having succeeded in at least disturbing the foundations, beginning the long process of helping us build a faith that was ours rather than one that was handed to us and accepted uncritically.
Put another way, the object was to see if it was possible to develop a religious faith that could withstand the various intellectual challenges of the 20th Century or, failing that, lead us to another career option. They were pretty clear about that message and strategy. It was not comfortable. Some of us had more discomfort with this process than others.
Given my background, it was particularly difficult on me. It forced hard choices as to what theological baggage I must throw out and what pieces I would carry with me and perhaps continue to struggle with. At times it was emotionally unsettling. At times I was alone in the darkness of the black night of the soul, struggling through to the dawn beyond and hoping with the dawn that the light would break through. Sometimes it did. Often it did not.
The object of this struggle, so far as I was concerned at least, was to figure out what was essential in Christian faith and what was not, and to see if the pieces I was left with at the end of this phase of the struggle for faith were enough to feel comfortable that I was still within the boundaries of what could reasonably be called Christian faith. Assuming that Christian faith comes to us from a previous generation in the language, the style, and the wrappings of that generation, can we separate out the essence that is true for us and for all generations and then frame it in the particular language and style of our generation in a way that makes some sense to our contemporaries.
It was rigorous, demanding, intellectually stimulating work. There were several simultaneous movements in Christian theological circles during this time. One of them, and the most exciting and interesting to me personally, was a sustained dialogue between religion and academia, an intellectual conversation between theology and philosophy of religion on the one hand, and other academic disciplines both in the ‘hard’ sciences such as physics and biology and the ‘soft’ sciences such as history and psychology, with philosophy serving as the mediator. Religion had gained new life and respect in the halls of academia.
Serious Christian thought had moved out of the churches (where it was not welcome) and was engaged in serious dialogue with the “world” of literature, drama, the arts, the sciences, world religions, and the philosophy of literature. It was an exciting time. Particularly from the perspective of a student who had serious doubts about the relevance of Christian faith to the broader world, it was encouraging that religion was being taken seriously in the academy as a legitimate field of learning that could contribute to the general exchange of knowledge that was the currency of the university.
Christian thinkers were highly successful in demonstrating that what was essential in contemporary religious thought was compatible with the world of thought of the academy. Religion had acquired “respectability” as a valid subject of serious discourse.
I think it was during this period when Christian engagement with the intellectual world of the universities was at its height that I concluded reluctantly that Christianity of the churches had reached an institutional dead end and to all intents and purposes serious Christian thought and dialogue had moved from the Church into the academy where without suffocating it could maintain its vitality, its essential core, its integrity, its power to communicate a vision, and ultimately to compel us with a viable religious option for contemporary man.
It struck me that the primary reason that the Church has become irrelevant for so many is that it has backed away from seriously confronting the implications of the world of the 21st Century. It has retreated into a safe and comfortable isolation from the implications of contemporary thought for religious faith. The lessons of theological education were being ignored by the graduates of theological schools and the Church’s professional clergy have retreated deeper into a schizophrenic religious world in which what is said and implied on Sunday morning not only is disconnected from the lessons and conclusions of their theological education, but has virtually no connection with the real world that we live in during the rest of the week. The professional clergy are unwilling to say out loud to their congregation: “of course we do not believe that, that idea arose in a different time when people had a different world view, and of course we do not believe it happened that way, but that is not essential to Christian belief, what is important is that….”
The essential implication of the “protestant principle” (a term taken from the writings of the theologian Paul Tillich, who developed this novel but clearly implied extension of the teachings of Martin Luther and John Calvin) is that religious faith wherever and whenever it occurs results from a highly personal and individual struggle for meaning as we try to make sense of our lives and our world and to define ourselves in terms of Christian values and ultimate commitments.
To put this idea in theological language, the struggle for faith is directly between each person and god (whatever we mean by god); it is not “mediated” by religious authorities or by a church or tradition or by a priest, although church, tradition and priest may be helpful guides and sign-posts in the journey for faith. But finally it is a journey that each individual must take for himself. We must each travel the lonely and difficult path into the desert in the struggle for faith. For some, perhaps those who are especially lucky, faith comes easily, without struggle or pain, without doubt or anxiety, as something given and accepted and not questioned, without having first to go through the dark night of the soul.
Christian faith, if it is anything that ultimately matters, is a way of looking at the world and of finding in the Christian story the key to the meaning of life, or at least of our particular life. It involves both a way of looking at life and a way of living our life. It involves a commitment to what is ultimately real and important. It is not believing a set of facts or assenting to particular propositions. It cannot be taught in Sunday school by persons who do not understand or think seriously about life and meaning. Christianity is not about mingling mythology with history and teaching bad science on Sunday so that it can be unlearned on Monday.
The search for Christian faith is a pilgrimage, one of the tasks on the road to mature adulthood, a journey that no one can take for us.
That implies that Christian faith is not for children and it should not be taught to children. Why? The view of Christianity commonly held in the church, something we will call “Sunday School religion,” trivializes Christianity by confusing story with history, contradicts some of our fundamental understandings about our world, and asks us to believe what is unbelievable.
To put it bluntly, what is taught in Sunday School is typically on the same order as the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy, but it is said with a straight face to children who are much past the age where these stories are believable as history, fact or event. What is taught in our churches is perceived not so much as wrong as irrelevant, and at the age of understanding and independence children leave the church perhaps never to return, or perhaps returning as adults after a crisis or when a different sort of understanding or religious need compels their return.
The idea that taking Christianity seriously requires not taking much of it literally is something that clergy can say from the pulpit or within the church only in some circumstances and with great caution. That does not give me much hope that we can do very much to counter the silliness and irrelevance of what passes for Christian belief among regular church-attending Christians in the United States.
This was the issue I faced quite directly when my formal theological education ended at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, and my practical theological education began in a small parish some distance away from Rochester, in the village of Gaines, New York.
<home>
As early as high school I was aware of some inner conflict and uncertainty about what was taught in Sunday School. I was aware that the biblical stories could not be “true” in the sense that they documented literal descriptions of actual events. I was desperately seeking some theological explanation that would clarify the sense in which we could believe that biblical events were ‘true.’ At the same time I was painfully aware that those Christians around me acted and spoke as if they believed that biblical events were literally true and did not seem troubled by that. I think some of my very early seriousness about religion was driven by my personal anxiety and confusion about how to understand and explain these events.
The place to begin this story about my struggle with faith is with memories from my childhood that may provide a useful background and frame of reference for understanding the confusion, uncertainty and naivete of my developing religious outlook.
My father died suddenly in 1939 of pneumonia. By 1942 my mother had remarried, taken my brother and me out of the orphanage into which she had placed us after my father’s death and moved us to Washington, D.C., where my stepfather had obtained employment with the War Production Board. By 1944 we had moved from the basement apartment that was our first home on Buchanan Street in northwest Washington to a low-rise brick apartment complex in southeast Washington in the district known as Congress Heights.
The first church I remember is Covenant Baptist Church, a small two-room church located several blocks away from our apartment that was reached by crossing the alley behind our apartment building and walking through a grassy field beyond that sloped unevenly downhill to an unpaved road in “the valley” that could be muddy and impassable after rains. There was a long way around by road that we took when we were dressed up and the weather was inclement. The church was small. A center aisle divided 8 or 10 rows of hard wooden folding chairs. At the front of the sanctuary was a center pulpit on a raised platform and below it a beat-up honky-tonk piano that was played with gusto during the services.
At the right side of the raised platform was a door leading into a room beyond. The minister and his wife lived back there. I do not know if the meager offering in the Sunday collection plate was their only source of support or whether they had “real” jobs during the week, but I suspect the minister had other employment. The minister was tall (or so he seemed to me, but I was in elementary school), heavy-set, whiskered, loud and gruff. His wife was a very obese woman who sat in a large wooden rocker just outside the door to their personal living space, rocking incessantly and fanning herself rapidly with a paper fan stapled to a stick that advertised the local undertaker’s services. She perspired ferociously. I never saw her get out of that chair. She said ‘Amen’ a lot. So did the congregation. It was a very expressive group.
I cannot remember why I attended there or how I became involved with that church and I do not remember any other children there. The minister had asked me to read the scripture lesson from the large Bible on the pulpit during services and he said I did it well and had a talent for it, and so I read regularly each week. That participation in the service gave me a feeling of importance, which is why I continued to attend there for some time. I was a member of a Boy Scout troop when I was old enough to join and the troop met at that church.
My mother and step-father did not like the emotional display or the free-flowing and expressive nature of the Pentecostal service and never went to church there with me that I can recall, but they never discouraged me from attending there. They attended frequently a Presbyterian church that got its start in the Atlantic Theater building about three long blocks away (which did not show movies on Sunday in those days); the Presbyterians eventually built a new facility an additional two or three blocks away from our apartment. It was more "northern" in style and more like the services my mother and step-father were accustomed to in New England. I attended there with my mother occasionally usually when my stepfather was out of town but it was very formal and boring and I resisted getting involved. I did not like the minister. He was not very friendly. He talked to my parents and ignored me.
My brother and I eventually attended a Southern Baptist Church on South Capitol Street, diagonally across the street from Congress Heights Elementary School, which I attended during the 5th and 6th grade when attendance boundaries changed. I think we were first involved with that church through their summer Vacation Bible School, probably having been invited by a friend from school, and we eventually attended the full range of their programs: Sunday school, morning church services, the youth fellowship (Baptist Training Union) and the Sunday evening service. My parents did not encourage me to attend there, although my mother made it clear that I should attend somewhere. Regular attendance became a habit and it would not have occurred to me that there was any other option.
I was baptized in that church. The baptismal pool was a large tank located in an elevated area behind the center pulpit, behind curtains that could be pulled back for the baptismal service. The service of baptism in a Southern Baptist church required the candidates to put on a white robe in place of street clothes and, one a time when the minister called each name, walk down a few steps into the baptismal pool and wait patiently while the words of the baptismal ceremony were spoken. The minister covered the celebrant’s nose with a handkerchief he kept in one hand, lowered the baptismal candidate backwards until completely submerged, pronounced the ceremonial words ‘I baptize you now in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,’ then raised the baptized one from the water dripping wet, and the newly cleansed person then climbed out of the baptismal pool up the stairs at the far end of the pool and went into the robing room to get dressed.
From this point I grew up as a Southern Baptist in Virginia. Southern Baptists in the 1950’s were not quite the right-wing radicals with the hard edge that they are today. Baptists were and are an independent lot, given to argument and bitter dispute over minor issues that were typically resolved by the minority group departing and creating a new splinter church. Baptists have no formal creed, or at least say they don’t, although they have many specific articles of faith that can be listed and argued about and used as tests to determine who is doctrinally sound. There were quite distinctive regional differences in belief and practices throughout Baptists in the South.
I was a Virginia Baptist. They were a distinct and self-consciously proud group. They leaned toward the left of the Southern Baptist spectrum, particularly in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington. Ministers in Virginia were a bit better educated than Baptists in other southern states, typically graduates of colleges such as Washington and Lee University and the University of Richmond, generally acquiring their graduate theological education at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville or Southeastern Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC, and came to their ministry with a more “classical” education than was the case in the other southern states, where education was not a necessary criterion for ordination into the ministry. Virginia Baptists were more rational, less emotional, less religiously confrontational than their colleagues in the rest of the south.
Even their church architecture tended to reflect the classical heritage, with most large Virginia Baptist church buildings built after the Civil War designed in Greek Revival style with imposing Doric or Corinthian columns in front, reminding us of Greek temples out of their proper context. Having learned in Sunday School, right out of the book of Acts, that Greeks were pagans that needed to be converted, I was confused about why Baptists emulated the Greek temples as a place to worship -- but who was I to raise questions about church architecture.
My mother and stepfather talked about their religion mostly as a factor of their early lives, mother speaking historically about her Sunday School and church participation, but mostly of Christian Endeavor, apparently a program in the northeast churches that provided wholesome programs and activities for the youth of the church.
My mother said that she met my stepfather at one of the larger regional Christian Endeavor meetings, where he was a regular speaker. She described him as a wonderful Christian man whom she had married despite the 20-year age difference between them because she had hoped he would be a good influence for my brother and me. There didn’t seem to be any friendship, warmth, tenderness or intimacy between them, or any show of affection that I ever saw. There was also no hostility apparent between them.
In 1950 I was sent off to a church camp located in a small town in Pennsylvania. An adult “Bible Conference” was associated with the camp and located on adjoining property. The camp program director (whose name was Joe Cosgrove, and who was a student at Wheaton College, a well-known evangelical college in Illinois) was also the director of radio programs for the Bible Conference, which had a regular Sunday evening live radio broadcast. The campers walked to the conference grounds for the Sunday evening service.
For reasons I do not know, maybe because I was an older camper and reasonably compliant, I was asked to be an announcer on the radio show one Sunday evening early in the summer. I was nervous and frightened but apparently it went well. The director told me I had the voice and the talent for announcing and he let me serve as announcer for the rest of the month I was at camp. It was an exhilarating experience. I felt an emotional fervor, warmth and excitement in this group that I had not experienced before and it resonated with me. I was excited to see how a radio show operated and to be able to work with a radio script, and in its own way this experience was one of many that led me gradually toward a career interest in religion.
At Falls Church High School, which I attended for my junior and senior years, I had joined the Bible Club. At about the same time in my junior year that my family disintegrated (a story too long to get into here), probably through the invitation of someone in the Bible Club, I was introduced to the phenomenon of Youth For Christ, a very dynamic and appealing program for high school age kids that was becoming a significant phenomenon at that time.
Each Saturday night Youth for Christ held a large and impressive meeting with youth from all over the Northern Virginia area at an auditorium in Alexandria, Virginia. It was a bit of a drive and I went first with friends who had a car but sometime during my senior year I had acquired my own car with $1000 inherited from a great-uncle, a 1950 Dodge Meadowbrook sedan, and I began driving myself to the YFC meeting, which I attended regularly on Saturday evenings whether or not anyone would go with me. The music was gospel, first quality, dynamic, with talent brought in for each Saturday show, and the nightly speakers were focused on youth, very persuasive and exciting, and very good at their job. They were interesting and challenging in a way that my own church was not. I remember feeling that I wished my church had the same evangelical fervor, emotional involvement, excitement, even joy that I sensed in this group. I had decided to enter the ministry by the time I was a high school senior.
I had always assumed that I was going to college, although I don’t think anyone told me I should. Neither my mother nor my father had attended college and there was no tradition of college attendance in my family. My stepfather claimed to have been a graduate of Yale and of the Sorbonne in Paris, but he had told so many tall tales and lie through the years that I did not believe him.
I was in the academic track in high school, which we would call today a college prep program, and college was the presumed goal of students in that program. There were three course tracks, academic, which had a focus on traditional academic subjects in preparation for college; business, which involved primarily shorthand and typing for girls and business math and bookkeeping for boys; and trades, which meant blue-collar trades and shop classes of one sort or another.
I had flirted briefly with the idea of a career in aeronautical engineering, since that was a hot new area of study at the time but the math and chemistry requirements specified in the Georgia Tech and University of Maryland catalogs looked formidable and daunting and scared me off. There was no “college counseling” as such. Guidance counselors directed students to the college catalog section of the school library. I spent a lot of time browsing catalogs and looking at requirements to see what I thought I could handle and what I might like to do.
I considered becoming a physical education teacher or full-time camp director, since I had gone to summer camp every year since I was 13 years old and making a career out of it seemed quite a wonderful life. Sometime late in my junior year I gave up on those options. Since I was interested in religion and I was encouraged by my church to consider ministry as a career option, and financial aid was available if I went that route, I decided that I had to consider the ministry. The minister of my church, the Reverend J Harvey Nichols, pushed me in that direction and promised scholarship money if I went to the University of Richmond, and I did not resist.
I was ‘licensed’ by my local church as a minister in my senior year. Licensing is a step below ordination, but many Baptist ministers (preachers they were called) were licensed without being ordained. It was primarily intended as a local church’s acceptance of a young man as a candidate for the ministry, or with older men, an acknowledgement by the church of the call of God to perform ministerial services without formal education and was generally for situations in which “professional” clergy were not available.
Being licensed was a necessary step, an acknowledgement of the congregation that I was qualified in their eyes to serve as a minister and that I had been granted official status as a student minister. Licensing also qualified me for loan funds from a fund set up for Baptist ministerial students [Later I that the funds had to be repaid after graduation, but they only gave me $200 so eventually I was able to pay back that amount].
When the Reverend J Harvey Nichols was away on vacation or attending church conferences or conventions I was the regularly-scheduled replacement minister to conduct services on Sunday. I had no training for this assignment. There was an assumption that God would put the words in my mouth. He didn’t, but I observed that Reverend Nichols had notes rather carefully prepared so I followed his example and prepared each sermon as well as I could. There were morning and evening services on Sunday.
During the summer months the Sunday evening service was outdoors on the athletic field behind the church, the worshipers sitting in their cars with the windows rolled down, in the style of a “drive-in” theater, with the minister conducting the service from a high upstairs window in the rear of the church building. I had an adequate singing voice in those days and occasionally sung a duet during the evening service when I was not otherwise serving as minister.
During the fall of my senior year I applied for, took a competitive exam, and eventually won a competitive scholarship to the University of Virginia, a 4-year grant of $6000, which was a lot of money in those days. I turned it down with considerable reluctance. My church would only provide financial assistance if I went to the Virginia Baptist affiliated university, the University of Richmond.
Since I was on my own (and had been since 11th grade) and a bit fearful of not being able to make it without the aid from my church, I turned down the University of Virginia scholarship. It was not just the money. I had some fear about going to a secular institution that potentially could undermine my faith. I believed, not unlike many others who studied for the ministry in that time, that the purpose of my theological education was to arm me to defend Christianity against the world with its secular views and I thought I would be better armed at a Baptist university.
In the fall of 1955 I entered Richmond College, the college for male undergraduates at the University of Richmond. In the first semester I took a course entitled Introduction To The New Testament where I was introduced to analytic and critical study of the Bible. Literary criticism is a scientific analysis of literary works of the past for inconsistencies in style, language or viewpoint that may suggest multiple authorship or different time or place of origin. It can elucidate passages that may have originally existed in oral form prior to their written form or examine clues that hint to the time and place where parts of the document came into being or when, where or why a particular biblical book appeared in its final form.
This was shocking stuff, very disturbing to me intellectually and emotionally. I had not thought much about how the Bible came to be, but this approach was very disturbing and even more troubling was that it was being taught by professors of religion in a Virginia Baptist college. I was quite upset. I was in pain. I prayed. I cried. I wanted to leave college, to do what else I did not know and had not considered, but I wanted to run away from a very disturbing, almost traumatic, intellectual and religious challenge to my faith that I was not prepared to deal with.
My religious beliefs at the time could best be described as “evangelical.” There is a subtle but distinct difference between an ‘evangelical’ and ‘fundamentalist’ that may be more a difference in tone, attitude and style than it is of substantive belief, although there are differences in theology as well. The fundamentalist tends to be less educated, less rational, more expressive and emotional, more separatist, more literalistic, more naive, ‘blue collar’ in background, more out of touch with the world of intellectual thought, more inclined to be combative in religious discussion, less inclined to engage in serious dialogue. The fundamentalist that has any education beyond high school is likely to be a graduate of a Bible college.
On the other hand the evangelical is more likely to come from a middle class family, better educated, more rational, more conversant with the world of ideas particularly those that impact his religious outlook, more aware of the arguments on both sides of a controversial issue, more likely to face outward and to engage in serious dialogue with non-believers, more interested in defending Christian belief from intellectual challenges (“apologetics”). He is likely to be a graduate of Wheaton College (IL) or Gordon College (MA), or other church-related liberal arts colleges, and may hold a respectable graduate degree.
I had expected my education at a Baptist college to confirm and strengthen my evangelical beliefs. I expected to acquire knowledge that would explain some Biblical passages and some elements of Christian belief that were troublesome to me, and that I would be intellectually equipped to defend the faith both to myself and to others.
The foundations of my world view were badly shaken by my early college experience. My long struggle with faith had begun. I took many more courses in biblical and religious studies and in philosophy in the next three years at Richmond, partly to meet the requirements for a major in ancient history and biblical studies, but I think a large part of the decision to major in religion was to try to sort out for myself what I could believe and what I could not believe. I struggled through college and later through three years of graduate theological study trying to make some sense of religious doctrine and to reconcile it with my scientific and pragmatic outlook.
In high school I had been a pretty serious student. I was aware that there were issues that were debated between ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’ about what we could know and how we could know it, what was ‘true’ in the Bible and what was not, whether or not belief in God made rational sense, whether there actually was a heaven and a hell and where they were, whether all people who did not believe in Jesus would be damned, whether it was possible to reconcile a loving god with evil and suffering in the world.
By the time I had left high school I had read a lot of articles and short books designed to provide the evangelical Christian with answers to his questions and solutions to these problems of faith. I considered myself pretty well informed on these issues and quite well-prepared to defend the faith against unbelievers. I believed that either you accepted scientific concepts of the origins of the universe and the evolution of man over time, or you accepted the biblical story of a world created by God in seven days and a literal heaven and hell. Since they were in conflict you had to choose between them.
My college professors, even in the religion department, did not see the world in such neat ‘either-or’ categories. They affirmed that the creation story was “true” but we had to make allowances for some of the details such as the literal seven days, which could be interpreted as ‘eons’ or ‘days in god’s time’ which is not necessarily the same as our time. You could believe in the general scientific framework and you could simultaneously believe that the Bible was quite literally true as well, but you had to do some careful work and verbal dancing to explain the biblical story so that the apparent conflicts were resolved. My first instinct was to accept this strategy as a way to resolve a number of issues that troubled me, but gradually it lost its persuasive power and I came to see it as intellectually dishonest, an unwillingness to face reality.
As my studies progressed at Richmond, what puzzled and disturbed me most was that my struggle with faith was instigated by faculty in the religion department, who seemed unaware of the mental havoc they were creating in me and presumably in others. I could not reconcile their critical approach to the Bible (which I thought had some pretty significant implications for traditional religious faith) with their fairly traditional theology, which seemed to me at least on the surface to be pretty similar in its broad outlines to what I had grown up with. There appeared to be a radical disconnect between their theology and their pragmatic approach to the world of reason and science that I could not comprehend.
The faculty apparently had reconciled their theology with their critical approach to the Bible in some way that was not clear to me. From my perspective it seemed that they did not draw the obvious conclusions that there were irreconcilable differences between the way they interpreted the Bible and their quite traditional theological views. As faculty explained it, the Bible was still ‘God’s word’ to man despite the messy way various documents had been assembled through oral traditions to form the written documents which developed through the centuries into the form that we have today.
The faculty had explained that the Bible was to be understood not so much as the “words of God" in a literal sense as it was a book where the Word of God became present and spoke to us through its pages when we listened carefully and expectantly and were open to the still small voice within us that whispered to the prayerful soul. To put this in a different way, they seemed to be saying that the Bible was not the Word or the words of God so much as it was the place where the Word of God could speak through those words to us. That made the Bible a very human book, but a vehicle that could be used by God.
This made some sense to me, but it still raised the issue of how we sort out the many conflicting claims made by those who profess to have heard that Word when it is apparent that all those claims cannot be true. Then how do we authenticate the genuine Word that comes from God from the self-delusion of what we want to believe or hear? After all some people who hear voices are lunatics.
I was a member of the Baptist Student Union (BSU) through my years at Richmond. It was a club whose purpose was both social and service. The BSU held social events, conducted a daily “devotional” service about 15 minutes in length each afternoon at 5 p.m. led by one of its members, and performed charitable service at the four Baptist “missions” in Richmond, which were very much community centers for black children run by white Baptists. They did social work, ran after school activities, provided counseling, and operated boys and girls clubs. I wasn’t much interested in this sort of thing, but I felt it was a duty and so I volunteered one afternoon a week during my sophomore year.
I worked my way into the leadership of the BSU, and managed a particularly important coup. I had no car at that time (the summer preceding my junior year), so I finagled the responsibility of caring for the BSU’s 1955 Chevrolet station wagon, a gift from the Virginia Baptist Association. That meant washing it weekly, getting its oil changed periodically, and checking it out to those who had a need for it to go to the various downtown missions or evangelistic crusades around the state that BSU sponsored or participated in with others at the request of a local church. When the trip was far from campus, which was not infrequent, the BSU members were put up in the homes of members of a local church. One benefit of being responsible for the care of the station wagon was that I got to keep the station wagon over the summer so I had a vehicle to use for my summer job.
I had already concluded by the end of my first year at Richmond that I was not interested in or cut out to be a parish minister. I considered briefly a possible career as a youth minister, religious camp director, or other non-pastoral career. But by my sophomore year I determined that my interest as academic and I wanted to teach, and the only serious place to do that was in a university, so it was clear that I needed a Ph.D. in religion.
Graduate school requirements for a Ph. D. in any of the places I considered -- Yale, Princeton, and the University of Chicago among others -- required a solid background in at least two ancient languages, so I took the basic two-year courses in Latin and Greek and then added German, which was necessary in order to do graduate work in theology or philosophy, as much of the original work in theology and in biblical studies at that time was in German. My undergraduate major in philosophy and religion required courses in ancient history, biblical studies and philosophy, and that proved to be a heavy academic load.
I wanted a good head start and solid preparation to make graduate study easier. I took all available courses in the religion department. Some were easier than others, by which I mean easier on my religious sensibilities and acquired prejudices about what must be believed by a Christian. The ‘wisdom literature’ genre of Proverbs, Psalms and Ecclesiastes was easier to manage without too much troublesome conflict with my sense of reality and possibility; however the early old testament books were filled with stories and descriptions of improbable events that were in conflict with what we knew or thought we knew about time, history and our universe.
When pushed on the “historicity” of particular stories and events, I sensed some “evasive” answers from various members of the faculty, with such suggestions as the probable difference between god’s time and our time, and apparent conflicts caused by partial rather than full revelation that created apparent rather than real conflict with what we otherwise knew or thought we knew. The escape was to quote Paul – “Now we see through a darkened glass but in eternity all these apparent discrepancies and contradictions will be resolved.”
There were other responses, too glib and superficial to be very helpful, but said just the same with sincerity and a straight-face: a day with god was as a million years; there were some things we just had to accept on faith; there are many ways of “knowing” and religious knowledge was a ‘different kind’ of knowing but not less important than other kinds of knowledge; one implication of revelation was the peace that comes to us when we accept through faith that all truth is essentially god’s truth and that there can be no real conflict between the truth of god, the truth of the Christian faith, and the truth of the world as we know it or think we know it because god is ultimate truth; we are in the hands of God and it is presumptuous of us to claim that we finite beings would ever be able to contain within ourselves enough knowledge or wisdom to resolve all the apparent conflicts; the greater our humility in the face of god’s truth the happier we will be because we will have the present certainty that we will ultimately know the truth and the ultimate truth that we will know in the fullness of time will give us the confidence that will make us free in our present.
I found this way of reasoning very curious and not very convincing. The “circularity” of the reasoning made no sense to me.
Late in the spring of my first year at Richmond I was at a very low point, the foundation of my religious “faith” having been badly shaken. I had not yet found any way that Christian faith could be interpreted for me in a way that did not seriously violate my sense of intellectual integrity and my desperate concern to find meaning and truth. Having found nothing solid that I could hold onto and having nothing to lose, I arranged appointments with Reuben Alley, editor of the Virginia Baptist monthly magazine, whom I knew by reputation to be wise and more ‘liberal’ in his interpretation of religion, and with Phil Hart, university chaplain and a professor of religion whose doctorate was from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, a fact which impressed me a great deal.
Each of them in his own different style counseled the same general advice, first to be patient, that what I was experiencing as a crisis of faith was not unusual, that the journey into religious knowledge is in part self-knowledge and it can be a very bumpy road with lots of detours, but that eventually I may find the journey ultimately worth taking, and second, go north, the point being that if I wanted to get anywhere in teaching at a university in the south, I needed an undergraduate degree from the south to make me initially acceptable (e.g. Richmond) and not an outsider, but I must have a graduate degree from a northern theological or graduate school to give serious academic credibility among faculty colleagues, who generally mistrusted the academic rigorousness and preparation of those who remained in the south.
Reuben Alley and Phil Hart were right in their advice, both as to the long and sometimes tortuous religious pilgrimage that lay ahead that could be ultimately rewarding, as well as in their suggestion that I ‘go north’ for graduate theological education, and while I did not appreciate either piece of advice for quite some years, nevertheless I followed the path that they suggested to me.
Graduate theological education at Colgate Rochester Divinity School was another mental and emotional shock. I arrived there in the fall of 1959, surprised at how cold it was in Rochester in mid-September. Fall had arrived early, the days were considerably shorter than they were in Virginia, the leaves were rapidly losing their fall color and were already dropping from the trees in great heaps on the sidewalks, and the final annoyance, I discovered I was allergic to whatever was in the fall air and that added to the discomfort of being in a very unfamiliar and disturbing environment.
The first year of graduate education at Colgate Rochester was the theological equivalent of an intellectual and religious boot camp. First year theological studies seemed designed to destroy the naive religious and theological simplicity of the thoughts, ideas and values which most of us had brought with us to the campus. The religious shock troops included James Alvin Sanders, Professor of Old Testament; Harmon Holcomb, Professor of Philosophy of Religion; William H. Hamilton, Professor of Theology; and Jim Ashburn, whose title I do not recall but whose field was personality theory and psychological counseling.
I mention members of the faculty by name because they made quite an impression on me and, looking back on those years with the distance of time, I am both amazed and appreciative of the fact that I studied under some of the greatest minds in their respective fields in that generation. How all of them were assembled at one graduate school at the same time was either remarkably fortuitous or the brilliant coup of the president of the seminary at that time, a cigar-smoking and highly successful business type who stayed out of the classroom. However they were assembled, these key faculty were clearly the intellectual stars in the field of religion in the late 50’s and early 60’s.
An assignment in the first semester course in biblical studies under Dr. James Alvin Sanders, an old testament historian and expert who was involved in the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and was a prolific writer on Old Testament studies, was typical. The assignment was to read the books of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, etc.) and several other books with a stack of note cards at hand and to write on separate cards brief comments on inconsistencies, troublesome problems or historical observations that we encountered when we read passages with Sunday School familiarity but which we read for the first time critically and carefully.
It soon became obvious there were many problematic passages: the day the sun stood still so that a battle could be completed in daylight, the seven days of the creation story starting with the watery abyss, an obvious second creation story that differed in content from the first, the serpent that confronted Adam and talked to him, the walls of Jericho falling when the trumpets of the Israelites sounded, Jonah swallowed by a great fish (not a whale) and delivered to his preaching assignment, to name a few. Reading the Old Testament in this “critical” way prepared us for understanding the conclusions that biblical scholars (Catholic, Protestant and Jewish) had reached in the past hundred years of linguistic and historic study of the oldest available manuscripts of the Old Testament and the related archaeological evidence.
Without getting into the very complex details of this scientific approach to the study of the Bible (which is the way we have learned to approach all historical and literary questions) and its particular conclusions, it was apparent that a literal reading of the Old Testament as if it were a continuous descriptive history without understanding the background, the context and the culture of the time in which various passages were written was simply not possible for us today.
The unstated but obvious educational strategy of graduate theological education was to knock down the intellectual underpinnings, the naive assumptions, the simplistic theological concepts, the various religious prejudices, the inconsistencies in thinking and the conflicting values of those of us who came to our theological education with a variety of preparatory experiences; and then, having succeeded in at least disturbing the foundations, beginning the long process of helping us build a faith that was ours rather than one that was handed to us and accepted uncritically.
Put another way, the object was to see if it was possible to develop a religious faith that could withstand the various intellectual challenges of the 20th Century or, failing that, lead us to another career option. They were pretty clear about that message and strategy. It was not comfortable. Some of us had more discomfort with this process than others.
Given my background, it was particularly difficult on me. It forced hard choices as to what theological baggage I must throw out and what pieces I would carry with me and perhaps continue to struggle with. At times it was emotionally unsettling. At times I was alone in the darkness of the black night of the soul, struggling through to the dawn beyond and hoping with the dawn that the light would break through. Sometimes it did. Often it did not.
The object of this struggle, so far as I was concerned at least, was to figure out what was essential in Christian faith and what was not, and to see if the pieces I was left with at the end of this phase of the struggle for faith were enough to feel comfortable that I was still within the boundaries of what could reasonably be called Christian faith. Assuming that Christian faith comes to us from a previous generation in the language, the style, and the wrappings of that generation, can we separate out the essence that is true for us and for all generations and then frame it in the particular language and style of our generation in a way that makes some sense to our contemporaries.
It was rigorous, demanding, intellectually stimulating work. There were several simultaneous movements in Christian theological circles during this time. One of them, and the most exciting and interesting to me personally, was a sustained dialogue between religion and academia, an intellectual conversation between theology and philosophy of religion on the one hand, and other academic disciplines both in the ‘hard’ sciences such as physics and biology and the ‘soft’ sciences such as history and psychology, with philosophy serving as the mediator. Religion had gained new life and respect in the halls of academia.
Serious Christian thought had moved out of the churches (where it was not welcome) and was engaged in serious dialogue with the “world” of literature, drama, the arts, the sciences, world religions, and the philosophy of literature. It was an exciting time. Particularly from the perspective of a student who had serious doubts about the relevance of Christian faith to the broader world, it was encouraging that religion was being taken seriously in the academy as a legitimate field of learning that could contribute to the general exchange of knowledge that was the currency of the university.
Christian thinkers were highly successful in demonstrating that what was essential in contemporary religious thought was compatible with the world of thought of the academy. Religion had acquired “respectability” as a valid subject of serious discourse.
I think it was during this period when Christian engagement with the intellectual world of the universities was at its height that I concluded reluctantly that Christianity of the churches had reached an institutional dead end and to all intents and purposes serious Christian thought and dialogue had moved from the Church into the academy where without suffocating it could maintain its vitality, its essential core, its integrity, its power to communicate a vision, and ultimately to compel us with a viable religious option for contemporary man.
It struck me that the primary reason that the Church has become irrelevant for so many is that it has backed away from seriously confronting the implications of the world of the 21st Century. It has retreated into a safe and comfortable isolation from the implications of contemporary thought for religious faith. The lessons of theological education were being ignored by the graduates of theological schools and the Church’s professional clergy have retreated deeper into a schizophrenic religious world in which what is said and implied on Sunday morning not only is disconnected from the lessons and conclusions of their theological education, but has virtually no connection with the real world that we live in during the rest of the week. The professional clergy are unwilling to say out loud to their congregation: “of course we do not believe that, that idea arose in a different time when people had a different world view, and of course we do not believe it happened that way, but that is not essential to Christian belief, what is important is that….”
The essential implication of the “protestant principle” (a term taken from the writings of the theologian Paul Tillich, who developed this novel but clearly implied extension of the teachings of Martin Luther and John Calvin) is that religious faith wherever and whenever it occurs results from a highly personal and individual struggle for meaning as we try to make sense of our lives and our world and to define ourselves in terms of Christian values and ultimate commitments.
To put this idea in theological language, the struggle for faith is directly between each person and god (whatever we mean by god); it is not “mediated” by religious authorities or by a church or tradition or by a priest, although church, tradition and priest may be helpful guides and sign-posts in the journey for faith. But finally it is a journey that each individual must take for himself. We must each travel the lonely and difficult path into the desert in the struggle for faith. For some, perhaps those who are especially lucky, faith comes easily, without struggle or pain, without doubt or anxiety, as something given and accepted and not questioned, without having first to go through the dark night of the soul.
Christian faith, if it is anything that ultimately matters, is a way of looking at the world and of finding in the Christian story the key to the meaning of life, or at least of our particular life. It involves both a way of looking at life and a way of living our life. It involves a commitment to what is ultimately real and important. It is not believing a set of facts or assenting to particular propositions. It cannot be taught in Sunday school by persons who do not understand or think seriously about life and meaning. Christianity is not about mingling mythology with history and teaching bad science on Sunday so that it can be unlearned on Monday.
The search for Christian faith is a pilgrimage, one of the tasks on the road to mature adulthood, a journey that no one can take for us.
That implies that Christian faith is not for children and it should not be taught to children. Why? The view of Christianity commonly held in the church, something we will call “Sunday School religion,” trivializes Christianity by confusing story with history, contradicts some of our fundamental understandings about our world, and asks us to believe what is unbelievable.
To put it bluntly, what is taught in Sunday School is typically on the same order as the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy, but it is said with a straight face to children who are much past the age where these stories are believable as history, fact or event. What is taught in our churches is perceived not so much as wrong as irrelevant, and at the age of understanding and independence children leave the church perhaps never to return, or perhaps returning as adults after a crisis or when a different sort of understanding or religious need compels their return.
The idea that taking Christianity seriously requires not taking much of it literally is something that clergy can say from the pulpit or within the church only in some circumstances and with great caution. That does not give me much hope that we can do very much to counter the silliness and irrelevance of what passes for Christian belief among regular church-attending Christians in the United States.
This was the issue I faced quite directly when my formal theological education ended at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, and my practical theological education began in a small parish some distance away from Rochester, in the village of Gaines, New York.
<home>
