‘Humanness’ is the common bond

Dr Val Webb – a microbiologist who morphed into a theologian – spoke in Brisbane in March on the provocative topic ‘Does God create Religion or Religion create God?’ Her subject addressed some of the basic questions facing emergent Christianity in the early 21st Century, a movement within worldwide Christianity which is increasingly called ‘progressive’ in Australia.
Here is an edited text of her address.

Where is something about me that dislikes “yes/no” questions. It is a blessing I finished my studies before multiple choice became standard…When I was doing theological studies, we were constantly presented with conflicting theories by different theologians from which we were supposed to choose one over the other, but I always saw something in both arguments, perhaps because I realised even then that whatever was said was human imagining within a particular time and place… Let me say at the beginning, I use the three letters G-O-D to indicate the Sacred, however we imagine it, with no specific theological baggage.That allows me to talk beyond religious boxes…

Few of us have the luxury (or misfortune) of approaching religion with a blank slate and thus it is hard to define a moment when God first engaged humanity or we first created God. Most of us have been raised in a society steeped in religious ideas and a culture that confirmed those “truths”. Even if our family was not religious, these values and morals shaped our slice of the world, such that we absorbed them with our mother’s milk…

My youthful theology was shaped in Queensland by the school Crusader movement, Billy Graham and the University Evangelical Union of the ‘sixties.The Student Christian Movement was also alive and well, absorbed in Bishop Robinson’s book Honest to God, whose heresy the Evangelical Union was determined to combat.

In my brand of Christianity, spiritual experiences were signs of a good Christian and their absence questioned whether you were a Christian at all. Conversation focused on answers to prayer, miraculous events, or what God had “laid on your heart.”You kept quiet or did a little embellishing if you didn’t have any about which to talk… I have spent my life in conversation with my religious past, including a return to university and a PhD in theology, and I now find myself helping others think through brands of dogmatic Christianity that stifle their reason and spirit… Since religion is part of our heritage at birth, it is hard to assess whether God first engaged us or humans created God. Freud said religion is a learned mechanism to control basic energy and release tension and frustration, a product of people’s helplessness, but could Freud prove there was not some encouragement from behind the veil? Marx declared religion to be “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions … the opium of the people,”1 yet could Marx demonstrate such hope was always illusionary and there was no Object of that happiness some claimed to encounter?

Does God create Religion or
religion create God?

Religion historian E O James thought religion gave people something to hold on to in life’s uncertainties, especially death, because eternal rewards were painted as better than life, yet could James prove there is nothing beyond death or nothing supporting us in time of need?

“While [the human being] has dispelled many of the demonic ghosts of ignorance,” philosopher Sam Keen says,“he has at the same time fallen prey to the pretention of omniscience, to the foolish pride of believing that he can eliminate the mystery of being.”2

How we resolve this question is inevitably a faith statement.We cannot prove there is Something More, nor can we prove there is nothing.American physicist Lawrence Krauss, who does not hold a God-idea himself, says: “While nothing in biology, chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy, or cosmology has ever provided direct evidence of purpose in nature, science can never unambiguously prove that there is no such purpose.As Carl Sagan said in another context, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”3…

(H)ow can we demonstrate conclusively to anyone else something that we personally experience or don’t experience?…

We progressives are an interesting mix.We meet together because we share a common desire to find an authentic religious shape for living.

Many have challenged traditional Christian doctrines and want to explore beyond these. Some come from outside formal religious traditions, interested in exploring spirituality free of dogma. Some are happy to jettison all God talk
– and wish others would hurry up and do the same – yet still want to talk about living life with a capital L. Some find this as a refuge after leaving the church, an interim recovery space until they move beyond religion altogether. Some have lived a lifelong lie, wanting there to be a God and wondering why God has never shown the Divine Face in any convincing way, despite their pleading. Others experience a Presence in themselves and the world, but reject traditional explanations domesticating this experience. Others remain active in churches, cherishing community and social outreach while struggling with outdated theology in hymns and liturgy, hoping always to influence their church to progressive thinking.

Others are lucky enough to be in affirming progressive churches.What holds us together as progressives beyond what some see us as, people who wish to dismantle everything?
The Religious Experience Research Centre in England has carried out research around the question,“Have you ever been aware of or been influenced by a presence or a power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?” In its Nottingham survey, sixty-two per cent of people recorded such an experience at least once or twice in their life.4
In a 2005 survey in America’s Newsweek magazine, eighty per cent called themselves spiritual rather than religious.

Despite the flurry of books denying any Deity and labeling experiential claims delusional, progressive British theologian John Hick argues for an inbuilt human capacity for awareness of the Transcendent, given the millions who, over centuries and different contexts, have claimed such awareness. How many seriously mystical people do we need, Hick asks, both inside and outside religion, in order to take notice and not dismiss everything as delusional? 5

How many mystics do we need
before we take notice?

In Christian history, individualistic faith or personal experience has not been the norm. God’s covenant was with a Hebrew clan, mediated through leaders and prophets – “I will take you as my people, and I will be your God” (Ex. 6: 7). One such prophet was Jesus, whom some accepted as a Messiah or “anointed one,” a term applied to anyone called by God for a mission.
After Jesus’ death, the promised Comforter Spirit engaged the community, guiding them “into all the truth” (John 16: 13).

Paul did not focus on his personal spiritual journey, but his message to Jews and non-Jews.

The Bible is not an anthology of the religious journeys of individual saints, but a story of an ancient people’s corporate engagement with the Sacred.

Once Christianity was part of the Roman Empire, God was mediated exclusively through the institutional Church, with the Pope as Christ’s earthly representative and the Holy Spirit domesticated and operational only within the Church – outside the Church there was no salvation.The Church created the rules by which God could access humanity, and also became the mediator of people’s contact with God through priesthood, prayers and sacraments.

When the mystics challenged this church control of the Spirit, claiming individual unmediated God-experiences, they were marginalised and suspect and women mystics, given their supposedly irrational nature, were placed under male confessors.

All Christians must have a
working theology

The reformers also challenged the Church’s exclusive mediation of God, and moved authority to the Scriptures that people could read for themselves, guided by the Spirit. Martin Luther translated the Latin Vulgate into everyday German and William Tyndale published the New Testament in English, but Tyndale and his books were burned – perish the thought of lay people reading in their own language!

In practice however, since many could not read, authority simply shifted from Church to preacher. Anabaptist reform went further, declaring that the Spirit engaged the individual soul directly, not only through the church and those ordained for office.

The Quakers taught that everyone could have a direct relationship with God, their inward Light.

The Enlightenment allowed human reason as a way to “know” God for ourselves, along with scripture and tradition, and Wesley added experience, having felt his own heart “strangely warmed”.
This fourfold approach to engaging God – scripture, tradition, reason and experience – gave validity to those who sought God themselves or claimed God had engaged them.The Enlightenment also paved the way for biblical criticism, exposing the Bible as a human book with contradictions and cultural accretions, rather than Divine dictation.This opened the floodgates for all sorts of challenges to traditional beliefs, now that it was acceptable for anyone to critique the sacred texts.

In the early Twentieth Century, theologian Karl Barth temporarily doused this freedom of thought, declaring God to be known only through Christ as recorded in Scripture, but his colleagues Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich continued the rebellion, leading to Bishop Robinson and the ‘Death of God’ scholars of the ‘sixties who argued that our God-descriptions were outdated and needed to die so new ways of thinking could engage a contemporary world.

This heritage now allows us to use individual reason and experience to address God-questions, recognising that church, scripture and tradition are ancient human products always in need of reform and critique.Theologian Sallie McFague names us all theologians:“All Christians must have a working theology, one that can actually function in their personal, professional, and public lives … there is nothing special about theology
– every Christian has one.The question is,how good, appropriate and functional it is … We need a theology that ‘begins in experience and ends with a conversion to a new way of being in the world’.”6

We must decide, from our experiences, whether Something engages us or are we simply listening to our echo returning to us. We need to decide what is initiated by Something More or whether we have invented God – and how we have imagined God anyway. Faith is fi rsthand experience while beliefs are second-hand – someone else’s God-experiences cemented into doctrines by which we are told to live.

The question did God create religion or religion create God also depends on what we mean by religion. There are many defi nitions – binding the sacred to the profane, belief in spiritual beings, consciousness of the infi nite, fi nding what is highest and deepest in our experience, an uneasiness about the human condition and its solution, a house of meaning built on the edge of despair, symbolic forms relating us to the ultimate, stories to live by and belief systems uniting us in a moral community.

Paul Tillich called religion “the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifi es all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of life.”7 Ultimate concern can be transcendent or immanent, a Being or a mysterious No-thing (Nothing). It can be personal or beyond personality, all-powerful or persuasive.

‘Religion’ is therefore a very slippery object, even before we consider its varieties and particularities. Religion scholar Huston Smith lists several elements of religion: —

• authorities who specialise to help others;
• rituals to help people act together;
• speculation about its source and goal;
• traditions that bind the faithful;
• usually a concept of Divinity;
• a consciousness of mystery beyond mundane human existence.8

These elements are also religion’s problems. Each can be abused, dragging it from its initial inspiration into static institutionalisation and humanly constricted rules shaped by culture and those in power. —

• authority can shrink to personal or corporate power with secrets held from laity;
• rituals can reduce to empty shells of offerings and chants;
• speculation about the cosmos and human condition can become obscure, irrelevant or outdated;
• the Divine can be trapped in unhelpful human descriptions;
• mystery can descend into magic.9 Fresh challenges are needed to jump-start these elements back into progressive movement. Even if a group begins with fluid relationships under a charismatic leader, structures develop, especially after the leader’s death, to keep the original ideas in play, and these will constantly be adapted according to evolving worldviews and
• scholarship, regardless of how “original” its “truth” claims to be…

Christianity dismissed God to
an elsewhere heaven

(I)t is impossible to recover the original form of any ancient religion and see it through its founder’s eyes. Our Fourth Century creeds were not there from the beginning and say nothing of Jesus’ life and teachings apart from noting his birth and death – they are already a dramatic progression from original events, forged in battles, even to death, amongst bishops, political intrigue, imperial interference and deep-seated theological splits – like any church council today!

Finding the original Jesus is equally difficult since the Gospels were written up to eighty years after Jesus’ death by different communities who
shaped their versions of his legacy; and there is serious debate as to which Jesus sayings actually came from his lips.

Beliefs that later became central, such as the Virgin Birth, are not even mentioned in the earliest writings – those of Paul and the Gospel of Mark – and the earliest Gospel fragment we have is a chapter from a Second Century copy of John
– we have no original texts.

While Christianity claims the Holy Spirit as guide against error, our host of denominations today demonstrate a certain difficulty with this argument.
While a founder’s revelations may be the impetus for a group to gather – God creating religion – how the group structures itself to engage this Divine are human creations within which that Divine is corralled to act…

We cannot talk about whether God created religion or religion created God without acknowledging that this is not only a Christian question, since many people claim to have encountered this Divine and formed religious traditions around It.

We can’t simply make statements about all religion as delusion, using a few examples from an outdated variety of Christianity or a media-created view of Islam…

We are actually at a good place today.The new imagining of the Sacred within the world, rather than an intervening external God, has allowed us to speak across religions in our global village, since most religions share this image of the Divine infilling everything, even though Christianity dismissed God to an elsewhere heaven, which we are working on recovering.

We are finding that which we thought superior and unique in our religion is in many religions,often in forms more attractive and evocative than our own.

“All religions have caught visions of a transformed society,” theologian Ursula King says,“Hindus call it dharmaraj, the reign of righteousness: Christians the basileia or [Reign] of God; Muslims speak of ummah as the community of all believers and the Quran sees this community encompassing all humans. Spiritual needs are basic to humans.”10

What we can share across religions is our humanness, the desire to be the best human we can be – fully human.
In Norman Habel’s new book An inconvenient text: is a green reading of the Bible possible? he begs us to “get real” and recognise who we really are. “It is time,”he says,“[that]we read [the Bible] as Earth beings in solidarity with Earth, not as God-like beings who happen to be sojourners on Earth,”11 …
We have been hoodwinked for centuries into believing that our earthly existence is purely a test for heaven.We have seen the soul as separate from the body, falling into the Greek philosophical trap of a pre-existing soul entering earth for a short stay in a foreign land and returning to its true home in the skies, making us separate from and superior to the rest of nature.

If God is beyond conceptualisation,
is God there?

God is preached as reached only by our removal from this sinful earth, ignoring biblical imagery such as Jesus saying “I have come that you may have abundant life [here].” It skews reality and downgrades the world and all its interconnected richness…

While Jesus was the human face of Divine Love at one moment in history, the Divine was not absent from the world before or after. Seeing God only through Jesus is not plausible if we imagine the Divine infusing everything.We cannot say this God within the world is only in us and all other experiences of God are false.We can’t even argue that God only acts for those who “have faith” or say the right religious words if nothing in the universe is separate from the Sacred.

Even talking about our “spiritual” life or “spiritual” journey is problematic – all of life is spiritual if we believe in a Divine Presence infilling the universe.

Diana Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard and a United Methodist layperson says,“Uniqueness, to me, does not mean that the “Jesus story is the only story of God’s dealings with humanity, nor the only true and complete story. The language of ‘only’ is the language of faith, not of statistics.”12

When we focus on our common humanness and our common human desire to seek the Divine, rather than doctrines claimed to be eternal as the only way to God, we see differences as the variety that comes with the common search from different cultures, histories and experiences. This is the theme of my book that will come out at the end of this year – Stepping out with the Sacred: human attempts to engage the Divine.This does not gloss over differences, but focuses instead, not on superficial commonalities of doctrines but our common humanness…
Faith in what we call ultimate concern comes down to our own experience – or not – of the Divine, helped by the other legs of scripture, tradition and reason.We may give different weight to each leg, yet all come into play. Our personal struggle to interpret our God-ideas and experiences, or lack of them, becomes “religion” or our consciousness of the Sacred, our explanations against despair.

As we shape our “theology” or talk about God in our time and place, we “create” God in the sense that we choose always inadequate metaphors to talk about the Unknowable…

Since all God language is necessarily metaphorical, we need all the images and concepts we can get to speak of that beyond conceptualisation.

But here lies another problem. If God is beyond conceptualisation, is God there? What if we have invented God? What if descriptions of Presence and Ground of Being are simply interim steps before taking the final plunge?

If we have experienced Something engaging us, metaphors help us express that experience, but if we have not had such experiences, could this mean there is nothing to experience? Or, perhaps do we not need experiences at all? Can we have faith in Something simply because it make more logical sense than nothing, or because we need Something in our frightening world?
Many of us have experienced great relief in moving beyond dogmas that previously and uncomfortably bound us. It was scary at first, leaving the safe fold of group certainty, but once beyond this, it is unthinkable to go back.

How can we encourage others
to take this leap?

Gretta Vosper’s book With or Without God: why the way we live is more important than what we believe
issues a challenge that progressives must take seriously. Given our experiences, how can we encourage others to take this leap.Vosper says it is our responsibility to anticipate as many of the questions and challenges our progressive message will present to others and act to mitigate these negative effects, to lessen the burden of change and make the new terrain more habitable.We need to honour what has gone before, even as we show its inadequacies.

13…
As for whether God created religion or religion created God, rather than struggling with what we cannot know, we can live in the mystery, the cosmic dance that includes everything, even the Unknowable.We can listen to all the Voices of the Universe – nature, science, Hinduism, literature, Buddhism, indigenous peoples, art, music, silence
– and bask in the wonder of being in the whole, rather than hung up on separating out the little drop that is us, or what is God, from the ocean…

We can see the world as sacred, with or without a God-concept, not in tired religious
terms but as a wondrous living whole of which we are part.
We can be filled with awe through science, the wilderness, someone’s sacred story, the eyes of a child and by experiencing a Presence.These are not either/or options, although we have long made them so. Sir Lloyd Geering describes this as a “new form of mysticism,” living deeply in the present world in all its splendour, tragedy and messiness.

Faith is not about having answers. Even if we got them all catalogued, they would change before we filed the last one…We don’t find faith
– we live it. If we insist on defining unchanging truth, we have to choose between certainty and agnosticism or atheism, rather than flowing along the evolving continuum between the two.

Paul did not claim certainty – “For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part ….” (1 Corinthians 13: 9) Certainty cannot accept grey, believing God created everything in black or white.The beauty of grey is that it is the only area where movement and change can happen and, if you add a little light to grey, you get silver.

I’ll close with Matthew Fox,“A lifestyle is an art form. It brings life and wonder, joy and hope to persons otherwise condemned to superficial living. Our times call for the creation of lifestyles of spiritual substance.”14

Dr Val Webb is a native of Brisbane and her career spans microbiology, business, public relations, writing, art and theology. She completed her PhD in Theology at Luther Seminary in Rochester, Minnesota in 1988. Her new book, Stepping out with the Sacred: human Attempts to engage the Divine, will be published later this year.
14 Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, quoted in Lucinda Vardey, ed., God in all Worlds: an anthology of contemporary spiritual writing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995), 508

---

1 K. Marx,1976. Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Collected Works,
v. 3. New York). Reference from Wikipedia.
2 Sam Keen, Apology for Wonder, (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1969), 130. The original quote said homo faber rather than “human being”. 3 Lawrence Krause, Does the Universe have a Purpose? Online article
4 D. Hay. Religious Experience Today: studying the facts. (London: Mowbray, 1990), quoted in John R Hinnells ed., Penguin Dictionary of Religions, (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 396
5 John Hick, The New Frontier of Religion and Science: Religious Experience, Neuroscience and the Transcendent, (Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 206
6 Sally McFague, Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril (Minneapolis: Fortress
7 Brennan R Hill, Paul Knitter & William Madges, Faith, Religion and Theology: a contemporary introduction
8 Huston Smith, The Religions of Man, (New York: Harper & Row, 1958, 1965), 101.
9 Ibid 104
10 Ursula King, The Search for Spirituality: our global quest for a spiritual life (New York: BlueBridge, 2008) 41h
11 Norman Habel, An Inconvenient Text: Is a Green Reading of the Bible Possible? (Adelaide: Australian Theological Forum Press, 2009), 58
12 Diana L. Eck, Encountering God: a spiritual journey from Bozeman to Benares (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 89
13 Vosper, 185-6).