3.4 Faith Journey: Evangelical, Agnostic, Liberal, Postmodern
Overview: My personal involvement in several kinds of Christianity over the years helps me understand and communicate their varied ways of relating faith to politics. I grew up in a conservative mainline church; was involved in a conservative evangelical parachurch movement as a youth; dropped out of Christianity and became an agnostic in college; discovered modern liberal theology, became a committed Wesleyan and joined the United Methodist Church in graduate school; and have been growing into postmodern centrist liberalism ever since. In order to give others a sense of this richly varied experience and how who I am now is a synergistic combination of these influences, for some time I’ve described myself to others as a Postmodern, Wesleyan, Evangelical Liberal.
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By the time I came into my family, when my father was 40 and my mother 37, they had a “I’ll go my way, you go yours” agreement about religion. My mother, along with her parents, belonged to an Evangelical United Brethern church. (This relatively small and fairly conservative American Methodist denomination would later merge with the larger and more liberal Methodist denomination to form the United Methodist Church in 1968). My father had had some bad experiences with organized religion and wanted nothing to do with it. His involvement with both the Masonic Order and the Optimist organization functioned as a “faith” for him (precisely in the sense I’m using it on this website--as his foundation of ultimate meaning and values). This “mixed faith marriage,” if you will, early on allowed me to have a less exclusivist view than the brands of conservative Christianity in which I was participating. The belief that God would send my dad to hell just because he wasn’t a Christian made me quite angry. To me, he was a lot closer to what God wants us humans to be than the majority of Christians I knew. |
As a young child I attended church with my mother and grandparents. However, as I got older and was given the freedom not to go, I gradually went less and less. It had too much of an otherworldly focus on the necessity of believing in the divinity of Jesus and being good so that you would go to heaven after you die. Also the this-worldly focus it did have was largely confined to supporting missionaries to convert Africans to Christianity rather than on justice closer to home.
In high school I came across the national evangelical parachurch organization Young Life. Through it, I had my first personal spiritual experience with the gracious love of God in Christ and a supportive community of people my own age who saw that it’s sharing God’s love with others in our ordinary daily lives that makes this life meaningful. I still value, and am formed by, these experiential, communal and transformative dimensions of religious faith that “touched and transformed me” during those years. This part of evangelical Christianity is still very much a part of my faith identity today. However, by the end of high school, I was also disenchanted with this form of Christianity. I found it to be too exclusivist, dogmatic and privatistic (characteristics that I would later come to identify as too conservative for me).
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So my first experiences with the Christian faith were two different kinds of conservative Christianity, both of which I eventually mostly rejected. During my undergraduate college years, since I knew of no other possible kinds of Christianity, I considered myself an agnostic. I was publicly very critical of those aspects of Christianity I had come to reject, even seeking out debates with the local college-age evangelical parachurch movement Campus Crusade for Christ.
While in graduate school studying philosophy I got involved with an experimental Methodist/Disciples of Christ church in Wichita whose pastors were influenced by the Ecumenical Institute, a liberal parachurch organization. Through it I developed an interest in contemporary liberal theology and philosophy with its very different understanding of faith and its place in public life (including politics).
While in graduate school studying philosophy I got involved with an experimental Methodist/Disciples of Christ church in Wichita whose pastors were influenced by the Ecumenical Institute, a liberal parachurch organization. Through it I developed an interest in contemporary liberal theology and philosophy with its very different understanding of faith and its place in public life (including politics).
In the Religious Studies program at S.M.U. I was influenced most by neo-orthodox theology and Wesleyan studies. In the early years of that graduate program I was participating in a fairly radically liberal Ecumenical Institute cadre. However, my thesis study work on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology lead me to drop out of it, because I found its strategies for pushing the Christian church toward an emphasis on social justice too far to the left for me. To this day Bonhoeffer remains a powerful influence on my understanding of what makes for a healthy relationship between faith and politics--one that is suspicious of movements either on the far right or far left, which demand non-pluralist, dogmatic conformity from their members. |
My first encounter with (what I later learned to call) “postmodernism” came while I was at S.M.U., when Langdon Gilkey (right) came as a guest lecturer. He was one of the first theologians to see that the Death of God movement in the late 1960s was part of a major paradigm shift in Western intellectual life, which meant that Christian theology would also have to be done in radically new ways. It would become apparent as time went on that the more than three-hundred-year-long modern period was ending, and a new postmodern period was being born. |
After graduate school, in the late 1970s and 1980s, I found several postmodern mentors, who helped me begin to negotiate this new intellectual world. The chief among them were Gilkey, David Tracy, and Hans Kung; I also was influenced by the socially prophetic mysticism of Thomas Merton and Matthew Fox. It was during this time that I became a Reconciling Pastor working for the full acceptance and participation of gay persons in the UMC, which unfortunately still holds that “homosexual practice is incompatible with Christian teaching.”
In the 1990s, through much individual study and many classes, workshops and seminars, I came to much more definite postmodern and centrist philosophical and theological positions. It was then that I began to identify myself as a postmodern, Wesleyan, evangelical liberal--a deeply committed Christian, not only respectful of other faiths, but seeing personal contact with their adherents (especially Judaism and Islam) as essential to growing in my own faith. |
The philosopher Paul Ricoeur, theologians Roger Haight and Del Brown, historical Jesus scholars John Dominic Crossan (top right with his wife Sarah) and Marcus Borg (bottom right with his wife Marianne), New Testament scholar Sandra Schneiders and history of religion scholar Karen Armstrong were the most important influences on me during this period. They all helped me see how Jesus' life and teaching reveal and empower us to live God's kind of life in this life (a life focused on God’s unbounded, compassionate love and distributive/restorative (not retributive) justice. Two short mission trips to Kenya in the early 1990s helped me understand how the global south is moving beyond the cultural traditions of Western colonialism. |
I became very concerned for the safety of American Muslims following 9/11, and in the immediate aftermath participated in a solidarity encircling of the Denver Mosque by hundreds of Christians and Jews and humanists. I hope to continue to develop my relationship with my new-found Muslim brothers and sisters in the Gulen Turkish Muslim movement to help ensure the 21st century “Clash of Civilizations” that some have predicted becomes rather “A Dialogue of Civilizations.”
Since the picture (right) was taken at Boulder First U.M.C on our last Sunday before retirement, Claire and I have begun to discover what surprising adventures God has in store for us now in our faith journeys, individually and as a couple. Whatever they will be, we have faith that God will be with us--empowering, forgiving and renewing us--as we learn what He/She calls us to do for our part in helping “heal the world.” |
For many years, the painting (left) has symbolized for me, as a committed Christian, the transforming presence of God in Christ. Its aesthetic elements (more than the quoted words from Matthew--not my favorite gospel) speak to me: the rich blue and gold colors; the face of the risen Jesus, strong and confident; the arms held out in a combined crucified and embracing posture (also yoked to God’s will); the hands still bearing the marks of his execution by those who abuse power and wealth, a martyr to God’s causes of love and justice; the circles in the center of his body (to me, representing that he is the decisive revelation of the heart of God); and the dove superimposed on the circles descending to bring God in Christ into this world.
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(See the next page for a little information about the history of my politics.)
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