How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God

 

Part III: The Journey into Exile

 

Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota

When I left home for Concordia College, in Moorhead, Minnesota--an ELCA Lutheran school--two things happened almost immediately. I was no longer held close and safe in the bosom of my home congregation nor the Bible camping community. Secondly, the world was now wide open for whatever I wanted to study, and I felt the freedom to bring forth fully the struggles I was having with the belief structure in which I had been raised. One of the first issues I took on was the relationship of God to the suffering and grief I had experienced. 

 

If, indeed, God was all-powerful and all-knowing, then God surely had the ability to keep my parents from dying. I had prayed fervently for them to be healed, but it didn’t happen. Maybe I didn’t pray in the right way. Maybe my faith wasn’t strong enough. Maybe God was judging me for this, and that’s why my prayers were not answered the way I wanted them to be. 

 

I began to drift away from God. Either I wasn’t a good enough Christian, or God didn’t care enough about me to save my parents from death. Either way, I no longer felt close to God. I didn’t feel I could count on God. I entered college thinking I wanted to be a pastor, but that no longer felt like a path I wanted to pursue. 

 

I was like the Biblical person, Job. He had been a faithful follower of God, but God had turned on him (or so he thought), taking from him everyone and everything he loved, leaving him in pain and suffering. Like Job, I began to question whether God really was a God of love, a God who would be there for me no matter what happened in my life.  Like Job, I was ready to throw out God rather than throw out my theology. Like Job, the only way I could feel close to God was to begin to question my theology and my assumptions about who God was and how God was related to me and the world. Job does this by challenging God to explain who God really is, and, when God speaks to him out of a whirlwind, Job realizes his theology had it wrong. He had assumed that if he was a faithful follower of God he would not suffer. Now he begins to understand that suffering is a part of life for all of us and God doesn’t guarantee that we will not suffer, but God does promise to be with us in the suffering. 

 

Well, I hadn’t studied the book of Job when I entered college, and I decided to take another track. I would major in Philosophy to try to understand how the great thinkers of the ages understood God, and I also majored in World Religions, focusing on how the other great religions of the world understood God. Both approaches were extremely helpful, but they also led me to begin to see the relativity of some of my Christian understandings. Of course, to a pious Christian this might seem heretical, but it gave me the courage to begin to question my childhood theology, and whether it was the best way to conceive of God and the world.

 

Dr. Paul Sponheim

Marcus Borg did the same kind of questioning at Concordia. And he and I were, in part, both saved by the same man, Dr. Paul Sponheim: Marcus as a student at Concordia, and me later when Dr. Sponheim began to teach at Luther Seminary in St. Paul. Marcus writes about his first course from Dr. Sponheim:

 

The course covered all the big questions: God, the nature of reality, human nature, evil, atonement, ethics, the relationship between Christianity and other religions. It exposed me to the diversity of answers provided by the intellectual giants of the tradition, ancient and modern. . . The experience was fascinating and liberating. Its effect on me was that the sacred cows of inherited religious belief began to fall in a way that legitimated their demise. But it didn’t help me to believe. Rather, it provided a framework within which I could take my perplexity seriously.

 

As college ended, the images of Christianity and of Jesus that I had received as a child were no longer persuasive or compelling. My childhood understanding of Christianity had collapsed, but nothing had replaced it.  [Again, 8]

My own experience was similar. While the issue that consumed me most was the relationship of God to human suffering, there were other issues as well: the literal interpretation of scripture (regardless of the genre of the writing); the presenting of the faith as primarily a cosmic drama focused on the  issue of human sin, with the primary purpose of Jesus being to die to forgive that sin, thereby neglecting the historical Jesus' teachings about "the way" to be God's faithful people in the world;  emphasizing the afterlife at the expense of this life; the participation of the Christian church--supported by what I saw as “bad theology"--in so much violence both throughout the centuries and in the present world; the racism and sexism present in the theology of the church as well as in the practice of the Christian community. Related to this was the exclusivity and judgmentalism I detected in so many places as compared to the amazing welcome, compassion and inclusion I observed in the life of the historical Jesus. [See Convictions, 9-12]

The two people who shepherded me as I reflected on my faith at Concordia were the two men who guided me in what would become my two majors, Philosophy, with Dr. Tom Christiansen, and World Religions, with Dr. Larry Alderink. Philosophy gave me the tools to think critically and logically about what I did and did not believe, and World Religions not only furnished me with unique and new religious insights but also a basis of comparison as I began to think more critically about what I believed as a Christian.

 

I will discuss these insights in later posts, but for now I want to turn to the key theological issue that confronted me at that time: the relationship of God to human suffering.

 

When my parents died, I accepted as truth what I had been taught: that God controls everything that happens in life, and therefore, as painful as it might be, my parents’ deaths were “God’s Will.” This seemed to work for a while, but, as I began in college to look at other ways of seeing God’s relationship to the world, I found myself feeling less and less close to God. I quit going to worship, I seldom prayed, and, although I resisted admitting this at first, I began to feel angry at God. 

 

This became one of the most difficult and painful times in my spiritual journey. I had loved God so much, and felt so loved by God, but now that began to change. It was clear I could not feel close to the God of supernatural theism (defined at the end of the last post). Does that mean I reject God entirely, or do I search for another understanding of God?

 

The spiritual journey, with all its twists and turns, does not result--as we say in financial analysis--in a V-shaped recovery, where you head steeply down and then immediately begin an upward ascent. No, first there is the “valley of the shadow of death,” the “forty days and nights in the wilderness,” or, perhaps, most profoundly, a period of Exile, as when the ancient Babylonians conquered Israel and sent her people far away from home to the land of Babylon, where they were separated from all that they loved and held dear. In the words of Borg, 

 

As a life of being separated from that to which one belongs, exile is often marked by grief, as in one of the psalms of exile: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.”

 

In our own lives, the experience of exile or estrangement or alienation can be felt as a flatness, a loss of connection with a center of vitality and meaning, when one day becomes very much like another and nothing has much zest. We yearn for something that we perhaps only vaguely remember. Life in exile thus has a profound existential meaning. It is a living away from Zion, the place where God is present. [Again, 126]

Of course, what one longs for in Exile is a Return, a return home. That seldom happens overnight. As I wrote in the first post of this blog series, the spiritual journey is a long and, at times, dangerous quest. Borg states clearly the task that lay before me:

 

The task of theology is not primarily to construct an intellectually satisfying set of correct beliefs. Its task is more modest. Part of its purpose is negative: to undermine beliefs that get in the way of taking Christianity seriously. Part of its purpose is positive: to construct a persuasive and compelling vision of the Christian life. But being Christian isn’t primarily about having a correct theology by getting our beliefs right. It is about a deepening relationship with God as known especially in Jesus. [Convictions, 50]

 

In exile I longed for that relationship. I wanted to return. But return to what and to whom? It was time to throw out some of the theology of my upbringing and begin the task of building a new understanding of God and a new vision for myself and the world. 

 

In my final year of college, with my Philosophy and World Religion courses behind me, I again took a couple of courses in Christian theology. That was the beginning of my return from exile, and while I still felt far from home in many ways, I made the decision to pursue these studies further, and I headed off to seminary at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago to do just that.