Things Progressive Christians Rarely Say: Your God Does Not Exist

I’m participating in a few discussion threads on various blogs of progressive Christians at the moment. As is often the case, evangelical / fundamentalist Christians arrive and try to make it clear that they know the one true God and everyone else is wrong. Discussions can be amusing but rarely very useful, since theists really seem to have no arguments beyond “No, I’m right!” or (for the slightly more self-aware) “You can’t be sure I’m wrong!”

But it is interesting how progressive Christians respond. The progressive Christian involved have previously said that they are not theists. They believe in a ‘ground of all being’ or a panentheist God of ultimate concern. But when a commenter attempts to define God,

“I believe in the God of the Bible: who created humans in his image, who came and lived among his people first in the tabernacle, then in flesh as Jesus, who died and rose back to earthly life, then ascended to heaven.”

they seem very reluctant to say

“That God doesn’t exist.”

rather preferring to build a bridge

“You can’t be sure God is like that.”

And even then there seems to be a hesitation to say

“God isn’t like that, God is…”

It appears that the desire to retain a connection between progressive Christianity and the wider Christian world is stronger than the desire to counter bad theology. Which strikes me as odd.

It is all a matter of subtleties, and I’m sure I could be accused of reading too much into this. The progressives don’t make a secret of what they believe, and they don’t make a secret of opposing fundamentalism. I’ve heard it said several times

“I don’t believe in the God that Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in, either.”

I just find it odd that they feel the need to retain some connection to the words. An assumption that they are referring to the same thing when they talk about “God”, but just differ in the qualities they assign to it. Which seems to me to be a bizarre assumption.

[NB: Quotes above are paraphrases of several discussions.]

Did God Sign Our DNA?

Welcome to the several hundred extra blog visitors who’ve arrived here over the last couple of days.

It seems the influx is motivated by a (sadly false) report that Harvard researches announced they found a message from God in our DNA. The report was an Onion-style satire and purely false.

But my post on my own discovery of a message from God in our DNA is showing up high on Google searches. It has been linked to from several forums. And, unlike the Harvard article, the results I claim in my article are quite genuine. I didn’t not make it up, as anyone can easily check.

At some point I’ll explain why we have that message in our DNA, for those who can’t immediately see. But let’s see how far this little storm blows first.

The Problem with Western Education

For fifty years we’ve known that there are serious problems in the Western education system. It does very well for a select few, but fails so many. Countless initiatives and government interventions have attempted to remedy this.

But all of them have failed to turn education around.

Because all of them have fundamentally treated the problems in education as a supply problem. We must attract and retain better teachers, improve teaching, disseminate best practice, improve monitoring and assessment, set targets, improve curricula, upgrade classroom resources, provide extra support for weaker students, improve school facilities. The list goes on and on.

But I suspect that education doesn’t have a supply problem, and never has.

It has a demand problem.

Someone who wants to be able to do something or to know something, will suck in that knowledge or skill at an incredible rate.

The reason it is tough to teach, and teachers so often fail is because they are shovelling truck loads of education at unmotivated ‘learners’ and hoping that at least some of it will stick to them.

Who’s fault is that: apathetic students, uninspiring teachers, or the assembly line model of education?

I don’t know, and I offer no solutions. But it might be worth at least admitting that we’re spending vast amounts of time, money and anxiety solving the wrong problem!

The Death Spiral: Businesses and Churches

A Death Spiral is a sequence of destructive choices that collectively lead to certain disaster, but are each the best choice available at that time. In other words, once you’re on the death spiral, you’ll either ride it to the end, or else you’ll make a break for it. But making a break for it is most likely to bring a more rapid end (with a small chance of saving the situation).

Death Spiral is a term that came into business-speak originally to refer to a spiral of debt, where more debt is needed to service the previous debt, and so on, until the company is bankrupt. But if the company had not taken on more debt, it would have risked having to miss orders, miss salary payments, default on its loans, and spoil its reputation: so the best option at each point in time was to take on more debt. And hope.

Hope is the key feature of the death spiral. As a business owner, you see where things are going. But the choice is to severely damage what you have, or to keep on hoping. Hoping that there’ll be a sudden influx of customers, hoping that productivity will suddenly soar. You can’t afford to invest in those things to make them happen, so all that is left is hope.

Many mainline churches are stuck in their own death spiral, clinging on to hope. The church is shrinking, those people who remain are being pressured (overtly or implicitly) for more money, more of their time, their responsibilities are growing, the minister (if the church even has one) finds their time is getting more stretched, even as their salary shrinks. Meanwhile a very small handful of churches are growing, are glitzy and attractive, full of great worship and enthusiastic children’s work. Growing mostly by sucking people out of the surrounding churches, particularly those people who are impatient to see something happen, leaving behind those who prefer to be, rather than do.

But death spiral churches can’t just change direction. That would alienate those already in the congregation, disrupt important relationships and damage the community. And the church owes those stalwarts continuity and support. They have been loyal, and their giving keeps the church running, even as there are fewer and fewer of them. No, radical action is unfair, as well as dangerous. If many of them left, before new folks came, the end would come much faster, and with more certainty.

Better to hope. Hope for a new influx of people, hope for a wave of enthusiasm, hope for fresh ideas, hope that God sends help.

Stephen Lingwood, the Unitarian minister and blogger, posts every year on the numbers of Unitarians in Britain. The numbers shrink, churches close, others struggle with no minister, or prospect for growth. Some grow, most don’t. It is a pattern repeated across different denominations. It is easy to focus on the politically brash and big churches and ministers, the mega-churches, and the tv-stations. But most churches aren’t like that, and most are doing poorly.

If you are in a death spiral, what do you do? What’s the right answer?

There isn’t one. Breaking out of the spiral isn’t the right thing to do. At any point it is a bad choice. In a business it might mean putting people out of work, in a church it might mean alienating people from their community. Sometimes the right thing to do is to ride the spiral down, to live in hope, and when the time comes, face the end with dignity.

Some businesses and churches try new things, but that’s often not a good solution. A friend of mine was involved with a business in a death spiral, they set up a completely unrelated business on the side. The new business grew, and the old one was allowed to fizzle out. This was fine for their management team and shareholders, but not for their highly skilled staff nor the companies in their supply chain.

Some churches are doing similar things, running parallel congregations, different expressions of church. A church in my town growing up did this: it started a new all-singing service alongside its traditional one, and gradually over a couple of years, the traditional one continued to decline, until it was stopped all together. The old church initially celebrated the influx of new people, but when it became clear they were not going to invigorate the congregation, but replace it, things got nasty. The minster left, a new replacement was hired, one with even less reason to sustain what had gone before. A successful new project can accelerate the death spiral in the old one. While the management/minister and a few others can make the transition, most will suffer the same fate in either case.

There is no right answer. But it is a miserable process. I reflect on the business ventures I’ve started that have failed, and there is nothing quite so soul destroying and knowing where things are going, but being powerless to avoid it. And I can’t help but feel sorry for those I know who’s congregations are going the same way. Particularly as, in many cases, the churches who are struggling this way are those that I think are positive forces for community and support.

[This is an extended and bloggified version of a conversation I had today with an online friend who is a former Methodist minister.]

Well Done RI

Very happy to see my old stomping ground of Rhode Island has become the 10th state to legalize same-sex marriage. Congratulations Rhode Islanders!

Also very thrilled to see my former boss, now ABCORI (American Baptist Churches of Rhode Island) bigwig, among the crowd celebrating on the steps of the state house. And great to see at least a dozen of the people I knew and worked with in ABCORI voicing their excitement too.

Its easy to frame anti-gay bigotry as a problem caused by Christianity. The reality, as usual, is more complex. I proudly stand together with my Christian friends and former colleagues on this issue.

On Granfalloons

I’ve had a secret hobby since I was six. I didn’t know it was a thing, or that it had a name, until this morning. I’m a compulsive creator of granfalloons. A granfalloonist, if you like. Or at least, a compulsive creator of imagined granfalloons.

What’s a granfalloon? It’s a good job you asked me now, and not four hours ago!

A granfalloon is an organization that exists only to be an organization. An organization who’s members are distinguished by being members of the organization, where the organization primarily exists to define who are members and who are not. Where the primary qualification for being a member is your desire to be a member (plus payment of a nominal fee).

The organization may have a name, or a mission statement, or an induction course, that declares some purpose. Often a noble and powerful purpose. But this is just rhetoric.

I remember when I was around six or seven, being really fascinated with the idea of being in a secret society. Being a spy. Or something. Anything. Since then, at many points in my life I’ve amused myself by inventing granfalloons. Initially these shadowy organizations keeping the world safe, that nobody knew of. More recently the tendency has sprung into more ‘mature’ topics. Chatting to my wife this morning (who recognized the tendency in me immediately), she reminded me of “The Gourmand Society” that was a fun little fantasy which grew out of a game I wrote, and continued to entertain me for a couple of years (and, even now, I’m remembering it again, and thinking “where did I put the glossy brochure I made for it?”). I’ve created games built around granfalloons, and written stories about them. I’ve never believed these, never done much about them. I perhaps recruited some friends for some of the early ones, though I may have only thought about doing that. But it is certainly something that has been a big part of my imaginative life. Which is great, because now it has a name!

The name comes from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, where it refers to a group of co-religionists, who believe they are distinguished by sharing some part of God’s purpose, but who’s association is basically meaningless. The analogy with many Christian groups was intended.

It reminded me of the thinking I did around mega-churches (one of the most popular posts on this blog, still). Often mega-church pastors, at some point in their rise, set up an organization that they are in charge of. Often the organization only exists so that other pastors can be members of it. The organization often seeks to speak on some issue, or co-ordinate some response, or resource something or other. It presents itself as being a group of churches or pastors who share some part of what God is doing or wants to do. But none of the members need do anything, just be affiliated. Ultimately the association exists to credential its members. It is a granfalloon.

Similarly today I was looking at the huge juggernaut of pseudo-science and New Age self-help courses, where individuals attend courses to become certified in some modality, then more courses to become master practitioners, then trainers, whereupon they can set up courses to certify others, and so on. A self-propagating granfalloon based on some science-babble, excellent marketing, and a critical mass.

Most interestingly, from this morning’s reading, I’ve discovered the work of Benedict Anderson, who proposed (using different terminology) that a Nation is essentially a granfalloon. The idea that a resident of Rhode Island has some intrinsic connection with a person in Seattle, but less of a connection with another in Vancouver, for example. Or that there is some greater inherent moral responsibility to provide social security for the starving child in London, but not the starving child in Burkina Faso. Or that it is obvious the Indian citizen should vote in Indian elections, but should have no say over American elections. A nation is a granfalloon.

I can see the point, but here the fuzzy boundaries of the idea threaten to make it so indistinct as to be useless. Does it apply to every social group? Is it a meaningless category? I don’t know, I’m only two hours into thinking about it.

But, at the very least it gives me something to call what I’ve been doing since I was six. Although, to be a true granfalloonist, I suppose I need to get serious, and take my creations out into the world.

My wife went out about half an hour ago, saying ‘I expect to find a website for “The Granfalloon Society” built by the time I come back!’

The Cross As Biographical Detail

I was rereading this previous post about what Paul knew of Jesus’s life. And it occurred to me, I’d missed a significant feature of Paul’s writing. Paul consistently and insistently makes clear that Jesus was crucified.

We’re used to reading ‘cross’ and ‘crucifixion’ symbolically, as abstract ideas, and Paul uses it that way too. But would that have been its rhetorical impact on the early Jesus movement? I doubt it. It would have been as visceral as ‘lethal injection’ or ‘electric chair’, and as odd and gruesome too. But I also think that such a specific reference to the method of execution should be seen as biographical too. Jesus didn’t just die – he was electrocuted to death on an electric chair.

Put like that, it is harder to read as an abstract feature of a mythological Jesus. I find it very hard to read Paul as believing in an entirely celestial Jesus. It sounds biographical.

So I decided to put this change of words into the relevant NT verses (tr. based on NRSV):

1 Cor 1:17,18 — For Christ did not send me to baptise but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the Electric Chair of Christ might not be emptied of its power. For the message about the Electric Chair is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

1 Cor 1:24 — But we proclaim Christ Electrocuted, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.

1 Cor 2:2 — For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him Electrocuted.

1 Cor 2:8 — None of the rulers of this age understood this: for if they had, they would not have put the Lord of Glory in the Electric Chair.

Gal 3:1 — You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly exhibited as executed by Electric Chair.

Gal 5:11 — Why am I still being persecuted, if I am still preaching circumcision? In that case, the offense of the Electric Chair has been removed.

Gal 6:12,14 — It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that try to compel you to be circumcised—only that they may not be persecuted for the Electric Chair of Christ. May I never boast of anything except the Electric Chair of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been electrocuted to me, and I to the world.

Phil 2:6-8 — [Christ Jesus] who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death in an Electric Chair.

Phil 3:18 — For many live as enemies of the Electric Chair of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears.

Is it helpful to put these passages in these terms? Do you agree that they are too specific to be seen as anything other than biographical: claims about an earthly death of an earthly man?