How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God!

 

Part XII: “Be Here Now”:**  There is No Past, No Future. 

Only the Present

 

“Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time — past and future — the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.” ― Eckhart Tolle

 

"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift, which is why we call it the present" — Alice Morse Earle.

 

"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment" — Buddha.

 

“Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.” [Jesus, Mark 6:34]

 

The spiritual journey never lacks for surprises, both painful and joyful. Some of those surprises occur over decades. This has been the case for me, and one of the most profound insights planted its seed in me in college, popped up from time to time over the years, and has become especially meaningful for me in the last few years. And that is how we view time, and where we put our focus when it comes to time. 

 

Mark Twain once reportedly stated: "I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened," which was his reminder to focus on the present rather than wasting psychic worry on things that probably will never occur. 

 

Most of us do not know how to live in the present. Instead, we often feel remorse and guilt about the past. We feel depressed about a future we want but we think will never happen. We spend endless hours worried about all kinds of things that, in theory, could happen, but likely never will.

 

It was in college, as I studied the religions of the world, with a special focus on spirituality and mysticism, that I learned from both Christianity and other religions an approach and process which attempts to leave past and future behind and leads one to, in today’s parlance, “mindfulness,” which is a profound focus on what is “happening” in and around you in the present moment. Miriam Webster defines mindfulness as “the practice of purposely focusing attention on the present moment—thoughts, emotions, and sensations—with a non-judgmental, accepting attitude. It is a mental state that encourages awareness rather than automatic reactions to daily life, reducing stress and increasing emotional regulation.”

 

So, what is it I encountered long years ago when I was in college that has arisen in retirement to give me direction and hope? Normally the process of changing one’s way of thinking or perspective on a particular area of theology is a lengthy, slow-moving process. However, there are occasional times when we encounter something so new and unexpected that this process is accelerated. That happened to me in the early days of 1971, in the second semester of my junior year at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota.  

 

In college, I had decided to major in philosophy and in my freshman year we considered time from a philosophic point of view. Then, in my second year, 1969, Dr. Larry Alderink from the University of Chicago Divinity School joined the religion department at Concordia to teach World Religions. I jumped at this opportunity to learn about global religions that I knew very little about, such as Islam, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Judaism. I quickly realized that so much of what I thought I knew about these religions was nothing but caricature. 

 

As I was learning about the teachings and practice of these various religions, I was, of course, at the same time, analyzing these new insights as they related to the Christian theology that I carried with me at the time. And that included comparing certain areas of Christian theology with the teachings and revelations of these various ancient religions I was now encountering. 

 

I found myself especially fascinated and intrigued by a particular area of spirituality known as “mysticism.”  Miriam Webster defines Mysticism as “the belief in, and practice of, achieving direct, personal communion or union with ultimate reality, divinity, or spiritual truth, often through contemplation, intuition, or altered states of consciousness. It emphasizes direct experience over dogma, focusing on inward transformation and ineffable knowledge.” Here the emphasis is not on past or future, but on the present. 

 

At that point my only experiences of such mysticism were certain inspiring moments in prayer or worship, but I was not at all familiar with the spiritual disciplines of meditation and contemplation. This changed quickly as Dr. Alderink began pointing me to certain books, all in early in 1971. First came the powerful work by German theologian Rudolf Otto, Mysticism East and West, in which he compares the Hindu philosopher Shankara and the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, arguing that despite different cultural frameworks, both represent a strikingly similar "speculative mysticism" focused on union with a transcendent, non-rational divine reality. I was fascinated by the way mysticism moved beyond doctrine and belief to the experienced presence of God and the wholeness of the entire universe. 

 

Next in 1971 came another book from Dr. Alderink, this one also by another German, a poet and novelist named Herman Hesse.  In his seminal novel, Siddhartha, Hesse shares the story of a young Hindu in India in his life-long search for enlightenment. His final revelations come as he lives with a ferryman on a river, where he meditates every day. Eventually he realizes a difference between the spirituality and culture of the West compared with the East. If western scientists want to study water, they take a bucket of water out of the river and begin to analyze it. The problem is, in a bucket it is no longer “river.” It ceases to move. Siddhartha then realizes from this a profound truth of life: If we look at life, and try to dissect piece by piece what life is, we are no longer actually living life. We are now in an abstraction about life. Just as you can only know the river by throwing oneself into it and floating with it downstream, so one can only know the truth and depths of life by throwing oneself into it with all of its joys and sorrows, ups and downs, truths and illusions. There is no way to “protect ourselves” from the pain and suffering of lived life. Part of our spiritual journey will be, as it was for St. John of the Cross, “the dark night of the soul” when we feel alone and all seems lost. 

 

As Siddhartha nears death as an old man, he reflects on what he has learned:

 

There is one thought I have had: that is, in every truth the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into . . . . illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. . . . . But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. . . . Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real. Time is not real. I have realized this repeatedly. And if time is not real, then the dividing line that seems to lie between the world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion. 

 

With this background explained, Siddhartha then shares his understanding of calling:

 

It seems to me that love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.

 [Hesse, Siddhartha, pp. 115,119.]

 

Next came a scholar recommended by Dr. Alderink who significantly altered my understanding of life. This was Dr. Alan Watts, a British-born philosopher and theologian who taught in the US the last 20 years of his life. I read several of his books as he, like Otto and Hesse, worked to bridge the gap between western and eastern spirituality. The book that changed my perspective radically was The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, written in 1951, the year after I was born.

 

Google summarizes this book succinctly: “The Wisdom of Insecurity is a classic book that argues the root of human anxiety is the futile pursuit of security in an inherently impermanent world, drawing on Eastern philosophy to suggest that true fulfillment comes from embracing the present moment and accepting uncertainty, by letting go of the need to control the future and instead living fully in the "now," so that one can find genuine peace and spiritual insight.”

 

Watts explains how all of this fits together:

 

This is why modern civilization is in almost every respect a vicious circle. It is insatiably hungry because its way of life condemns it to perpetual frustration. The root of the frustration is that we live for the future, and the future is an abstraction, a rational inference from experience, which exists only in the brain. The “primary consciousness,” the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more than what is at this moment . . . . .

 

[Because] the future is still not here, and cannot become a part of our experienced reality until it is present . . . , it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what they have, and are forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes and assurances. [Watts, Insecurity, pp. 60-61]

 

Watts ends his book by explaining what happens when we are able to let the past and future go and focus on the present: “Free from clutching at themselves, the hands can handle; free form looking after themselves, the eyes can see; free from trying to understand itself, thought can think. In such feeling, seeing, and thinking life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. It is finished.” [Ibid. 152]

 

**The title of a book by Ram Dass.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God

 

Part XI: Biblical, Critical Methods

 

 

Do you get to believe what you want to believe? Yes, in a way. No one can tell you what you have to believe. As long as you keep it to yourself, yes, I suppose you could say, you get to believe whatever you want to believe. As long as you keep silent. 

 

However, once you open your mouth, or pick up a pen or hit the “send” button, that freedom no longer applies. You have now entered the public sphere which raises immediately the issue of ethics: what is right and what is wrong, which is, in turn, based on what is true or not true. After all, we certainly do not want to mislead someone else because our beliefs are based on falsehoods. 

 

Now a lot of people, including many of our present leaders, could care less about this issue. But if you consider yourself to be a spiritual or religious person, you no longer have a choice. Spiritual persons always take responsibility for their actions, because spiritual persons are attempting to reach beyond simple selfishness to an inclusive view of the world that includes the will of God and the safety and affirmation of all people and all creation. Yes, spiritual people do care about the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. They are all a part of our spiritual quest to live, as American poet Mary Oliver put it, the “one wild and precious life” into which God calls us. 

 

However, this quest runs head-first and head-long into the fact that from the moment of birth we are picking up all kinds of ideas and beliefs, many of which, if we are reflective, are neither true nor right. As religious people we may “believe” that whatever we believe must be true, or, we think, we wouldn’t believe it. I’m sorry to rain on your parade. Such “cozy religion” may sound wonderful, but it does not exist. Millions of people have gone to their graves confidently believing many things that are not true or healthy, and many of those things are destructive to others and to creation.

 

Because of this dynamic, in every parish I served (all ten of them) I stressed and offered what I term “serious Bible study.” I distinguish this kind of study from what I term “devotional” use of the Bible, whereby one reads for inspiration and hopefully direction and insight. However, that latter part often does not occur unless we move to this serious Bible study. 

 

Progressive Christians (including ELCA Lutherans, United Methodist, Presbyterians, United Church of Christ, and many others) do not believe that God “dictated” the Bible to scribes in such a way that whatever the Bible says can be taken literally as fact, as fundamentalists maintain.  Actually, that understanding is viewed as a heresy, as explained by German theologian Paul Tillich in what he coined the “Protestant Principle.”

 

Tillich begins with the dialectical nature of reality, comparing the unconditional to the conditional, the divine to the human, the infinite to the finite, the immortal to the mortal, faith to reason. Now, in traditional theology there is a strong emphasis on working to make sure that one does not profane the divine. Take the Ten Commandments for example. God’s name is holy, and we should not take it in vain. The sabbath day is holy, and we should not neglect nor misuse it. God’s truth is universal and absolute, and it should not be treated as if it were earthly and temporal and changeable.

     

What Tillich states in the Protestant Principle is that just as one should not profane the holy, one should also not elevate that which is finite and cultural to the realm of the sacred. This goes all the way back to the Protestant Reformation and theologians like Martin Luther, who rebelled against certain teachings of the popes of the time that they felt were not God’s eternal will. The one that bothered Luther the most was the admonition to church members to pay money for indulgences, which were pieces of paper from the church that said your sins were forgiven. What bothered him further was that the money from these indulgences was being used to build St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

 

Take the role of women. What if the treatment of women in the Bible is not God’s will, but is a reflection of the culture of the time, and it would be a mistake to elevate that view to be a part of God’s absolute truth?

 

How about slavery? The Bible clearly accepts that practice as a part of reality. Does that mean that God’s will for the world is that some people should be able to own other people? Or is slavery part of a misguided human culture that we should resist at all costs, including in the name of God? 

 

In order to develop a theology and spirituality  that is based on truth we begin with an understanding that the Bible cannot always be taken literally in the search for those truths.  We have to move into the area of what we call “hermeneutics” in theology, which is the process of “interpreting” the meaning of texts for today. 

 

Now, in an ideal world, when folks gather for the kind of serious Bible study I am talking about they would “wipe clean” the slate of their beliefs, and start building those beliefs from the ground up, based on the truths we find in Scripture. However, the modern world has taught us that none of us is as objective as we think we are because we carry all kinds of unconscious or pre-conscious ideas that do not shake out easily. 

 

So, in our search for truth, the first thing we need to try to do is to wipe the slate as clean as possible, while accepting that certain beliefs will always be coming to mind even though we try to put them on the back burner for now.  We call this the attempt to “suspend our present beliefs” as we search for deeper truths. 

 

This brings me to another way in which my theology has changed, beginning in college. At Concordia College in Moorhead, MN, all students had to take a required course  on how to interpret Scripture, in which we were taught Biblical critical methods, which are “scholarly, analytical tools—primarily historical and literary—used to investigate the origins, composition, and meaning of biblical texts, aiming to understand what authors intended rather than just subjective interpretation.” [Wikipedia] I took it the first fall of college. At the time, I had no idea how important what I was learning would be. But the skills learned and later honed were used every day both in parish ministry and my own personal view of life. This process of interpreting the scriptures, called Exegesis, would be central to every sermon I preached, every class I taught, every retreat I led, and the thousands of hours spent in clergy Bible study groups and in classes of parishioners as we studied the Scriptures together. 

 

So, what are these methods and what is their purpose? The first is Textual Criticism--based on having studied both Greek and Hebrew (the languages in which the Bible was written)--in which we try to determine what the text said in its original context. There are many events in the Bible which are written about by differing authors (especially in the Gospels) that have what we call “variants” in which the same story is told differently. The first task, then, is to try to determine as best we can the original text. 

 

Next comes Source Criticism. What are the sources the author used to write his text. For example, scholars believe Mark was the first Gospel written, and Luke and Matthew both had access to it in their Gospels. However, Luke and Matthew also each have their own material as well as a source called Q which contains many of the “sayings” of Jesus. 

 

Then there is Form Criticism which attempts to identify the genre of the text. Is it poetry, a parable, a prayer, prose, a song etc. Each of these types of literature are interpreted differently. 

 

One of my favorites is Redaction Criticism, which analyzes how the author organized and changed earlier material to get their message across. For example, scholars believe Matthew wrote primarily to try to convince the Jews that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, whereas Luke wrote to convince Gentiles that they, too, had a place in the Jesus Movement. 

 

These are just some of the tools of Biblical criticism, but the ones described point to the fact that you do not become an effective theologian or Biblical interpreter by taking one course or joining a church or by reading one of the thousands of theological books that contain shoddy Biblical interpretation and thereby bad theology.

The spiritual journey never ends. This creation is ever living and changing and those of us who believe in a living God will spend our entire lives in dialogue with this God and other spiritual people as we attempt to discern what God is doing now and what God is calling us to do next. This spiritual journey is demeaned when we try to take shortcuts to truth or when we assume the profound spiritual leaders of our time do not know what they are talking about. However, if we are willing to listen and learn, the kingdom of God opens before us. Simply pick up a book by Merton, Nouwen, Ghandi, Tutu, Pope Francis or Pope Leo, or, our new ELCA Presiding Bishop, Yehiel Curry,   who wrote in his Easter Message:

The journey to the empty tomb didn’t begin on the cross of Good Friday but in a manger decades earlier. Jesus was born with a purpose: to reveal God’s love, demonstrate grace, and call us into a life of justice, mercy and compassion. It was a long journey, a ministry that spread across the hills of Judea, well beyond his birthplace in Bethlehem and his home in Nazareth. And along the way, he showed us what it means to be children of God.