An interesting night last week. If I remember right, I can’t remember what we discussed. So no recap, just the sheets:
Topics:
1. ‘The meal table is the birthplace of culture.’
How are we shaped by our eating practices?
2. “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
What do you think?
3. “There are no facts. Only interpretations.”
Discuss objectivity vs subjectivity.
4. “Inerrantist dogma is as much a human construction as the biblical criticism that inerrantists deride.”
5. Why does beer go through your system so fast?
6. Is there any divinely-infused meaning to human existence, or is it all just senseless?
Backside:
Local thoughts on the rapture (these are actual quotes):
“Hold on to what is going to be raptured out of here and forget the rest.”
“Forget your stupid careers and businesses.”
“Forget about how much gas is gonna cost. That isn’t the kind of thing we need to worry about.”
“We just need to get by until we can get out.”
“I’m not saying you should stockpile, but I think every Christian should have at least two or three weeks worth of food in their homes.”
“Take all your money out of the bank and go on a vacation.”
“There is no rapture.” (OK, this last one was me).
Old Jewish story:
A traveler arrived in a village in the middle of winter to find an old man shivering in the cold outside the synagogue. “What are you doing here?” asked the traveler.
“I’m waiting for the coming of the messiah,”
“That must be an important job,” said the traveler. “The community must pay you a lot of money.”
“No, not at all. They just let me sit here on this bench.
Once in a while someone gives me a little food.”
“That must be hard. But even if they don’t pay you, they
must honor you for doing this important work.”
“No, not at all, they think I’m crazy.”
“I don’t understand. They don’t pay you, they don’t
respect you. You sit in the cold, shivering and hungry
What kind of job is this?”
Stages of Faith: Human Development and the Quest for Meaning James Fowler, Ph.D. is a developmental psychologist, a United Methodist layperson, and Director of the Center for Faith Development at Emory University. He is the premiere pioneer of the study of Faith development, and his book Stages of Faith (1981) is a ground-breaking classic. Fowler identifies six stages through which pilgrims of faith invariably travel. Below are summaries of the stages drawn from various sources as well as the book itself. Read it through and see what you think.
Steps on the journey
The first stage:
Intuitive-Projective faith
This first stage usually occurs between the ages of three and seven, and is characterized by the psyche’s unprotected exposure to the Unconscious. Imagination runs wild in this stage, uninhibited by logic. It is the first step in self-awareness and when one absorbs one’s culture’s strong taboos. The advantages of this stage are the birth of imagination and the growing ability to grasp and unify one’s perception of reality. This age perceives the world through lens of imagination and intuition unrestrained by logic e.g., lives in a magical world in which anything is possible.
The second stage: Mythic-Literal faith
Symbol and ritual begin to be integrated by the child. These symbols, however, are one-dimensional. Only literal interpretations of myth and symbol are possible. Here the child develops a way of dealing with the world and making meaning that now criticizes and evaluates the previous stage of imagination and fantasy. The gift of this stage is narrative. The child now can really form and re-tell powerful stories that grasp his or her experiences of meaning. There is a quality of literalness about this. The child is not yet ready to step outside the stories and reflect upon their meanings. The child takes symbols and myths at pretty much face value, though they may touch or move him or her at a deeper level. Here one sees the world as a story–concrete, literal, narrative family of ritual and myth e.g., “In the beginning, God created the . . .”
The third stage: Synthetic-Conventional faith
The majority of the population finds its permanent home in this stage. Usually arising in adolescence, it is a stage characterized by conformity, where one finds one’s identity by aligning oneself with a certain perspective, and lives directly through this perception with little opportunity to reflect on it critically. One has an ideology at this point, but may not be aware that one has it. Religious concepts are “tacitly” held – the person is not fully conscious of having chosen to believe something. Thus the name “Synthetic” – beliefs are not the result of any type of analytical thought. Any attempts to reason with a person in this stage about his beliefs, any suggestion of demythologizing his beliefs is seen as a threat. Those who differ in opinion are seen as “the Other,” as different “kinds” of people. Authority derives from the top down, and is invested with power by majority opinion. Dangers in this stage include the internalization of symbolic systems (power, “goodness” “badness”) to such a degree that objective evaluation is impossible. Furthermore, while one can at this stage enter into an intimate relationship with the divine, This stage develops in the teenager to early adulthood or beyond, sees the world through the lens of the peer community e.g., unconsciously “catches” faith, values, and way of thinking from peer group or subculture. Tends not to question the accepted ways of thinking e.g., “if the Bible says . . . it must be true” or “if my church says . . . then it’s the Truth.” At this stage it is difficult dealing calmly and rationally with issues that touches on one’s identity.
One of the hallmarks of this stage is that it tends to compose its images of God as extensions of interpersonal relationships. God is often experienced as Friend, Companion, and and Personal Reality, in relationship to which I’m known deeply and valued. I think the true religious hunger of adolescence is to have a God who knows me and values me deeply, and can be a kind of guarantor of my identity and worth in a world where I’m struggling to find who I can be. At any of the stages from two on you can find adults who are best described by these stages. Stage Three, thus, can be an adult stage. We do find many persons, in churches and out, who are best described by faith that essentially took form when they were adolescents. The name “conventional” means that most people in this stage see themselves as believing what “everybody else” believes and would be reluctant to stop believing it because of the need they feel to stay connected with their group. It turns out that most of the people in traditional churches are at this stage. And in fact, Fowler comes right out and states that religious institutions “work best” if the majority of their congregation is in Stage 3. (Now THAT explains a lot of the preaching we hear that sounds destined to discourage people from questioning! To properly assure their continuance, churches apparently need people to remain in Stage 3. )
When a person cognitively realizes that there are contradictions between some of his authority sources and is ready to actually reflect realistically on them, he or she begins to be ready to move to the fourth stage.
The fourth stage: Individuative-Reflective
This is primarily a stage of angst and struggle, in which one must face difficult questions regarding identity and belief. It is ideal that a person reach this stage by their mid-twenties, but as has already been discussed, it is evident that many adults never reach it. If it happens in the thirties or forties or even later, it is much harder for the person to adapt. At this time, the personality gradually detaches from the defining group from which it formerly drew its identity. The person is aware of him or herself as an individual and must–perhaps for the first time–take personal responsibility for his/her beliefs and feelings. This is a stage of de-mythologizing, where what was once unquestioned is now subjected to critical scrutiny. Stage four is heavily existential, where nothing is certain but one’s own existence, and disillusionment reigns. This stage is not a comfortable place to be and, although it can last for a long time, those who stay in it do so in danger of becoming bitter, suspicious characters who trust nothing and no one. But most, after entering this stage, sense that not only is the world far more complex than his or her stage three mentality would allow for, it is still more complex and numinous than the agnostic rationality of stage four allows.
Meanings in stories become separate from the symbols themselves, so the stories are demythologized. (In losing the literal meaning of the religious symbols, people can lose ALL meaning of the symbol and that is how you wind up with so many atheists and agnostics at this stage.) This process can result in grief and guilt in some cases, and can take several years to work through. But in the place of the literal symbol, the person gains the ability to make comparisons and whatever meanings they retain are explicitly held (and thus more authentic in that they are personal.)
The strengths of this stage lie in the capacity for critical reflection (and the willingness to face truths that may cause distancing from comfortable thought patterns and thus pain.) But a weakness of this stage is that the person may put excess confidence in the rational, conscious mind, thus ignoring unconscious and spiritual forces that become more prominent in the next stage.
Stage five: Conjunctive faith
Here one moves from stage four’s rationalism to the acknowledgement of paradox and transcendence. It is in this stage that, in Washburnian terminology, one chooses regression in the service of transcendence. One develops a “second naivete” in which symbolic power is reunited with conceptual meanings. It was Barth’s and Ricoeur’s common conviction that theological interpretation of the Bible ought to lead us beyond a critical preoccupation with the text to a fresh encounter with the divine reality to which the text bears witness. In this stage a person grasps the reality behind the symbols of his or her inherited systems, and is also drawn to an acknowledging of the symbols of other’s systems. People in this stage are willing to engage in dialog with those of other faiths in the belief that they might learn something that will allow them to correct their own truths. To get to this point, it is critical that the person has moved through the demythologizing phase of stage four. This stage makes room for mystery and the unconscious, and is fascinated by it while at the same time apprehensive of its power. It sees the power behind the metaphors while simultaneously acknowledging their relativity.
In stage five, the world is re-sacrilized, literally brimming with vision. It is also imbued with a new sense of justice that goes beyond justice defined by one’s own culture and people. Because one has begun to see “the bigger picture,” the walls culture and tradition have built between ourselves and others begins to erode, and one can work through one’s cultural and psychological baggage. Stage Five is a period when one is alive to paradox, and, though it is not easy to live on the cusp of paradox, one understands that truth has many dimensions which have to be held together in paradoxical tension. It is an overwhelming, ecstatic stage in which one is radically opened to possibility and wonder. One becomes committed to a form of justice that extends to those outside the confines of tribe, class, religious community or nation. With this very inclusive worldview, people at Stage 5 are in an excellent position to make important contributions to society.
Stage six: Universalizing faith
The final stage is reached only by the very, very few. Examples Fowler names are Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mother Teresa. In a sense we can describe this stage as one in which persons begin radically to live as though what Christians and Jews call the “kingdom of God” were already a fact. These people experience a shift from the self as the center of experience. Now their center becomes a participation in God or ultimate reality. There’s a reversal of figure and ground. They’re at home with a commonwealth of being. We experience these people on the one hand as being more lucid and simple than we are, and on the other hand as intensely liberating people, sometimes even subversive in their liberating qualities. Persons described by stage six typically exhibit qualities that shake our usual criteria of normalcy. Their heedlessness to self-preservation and the vividness of their taste and feel for transcendent moral and religious actuality give their actions and words an extraordinary and often unpredictable quality. In their devotion to universalizing compassion they may offend our parochial perceptions of justice.
So… a good night at the pub last Thursday. So intense it took me a week to attempt to relive it. A nice group – some friends from in town, some friends from out of town, some other friends…
The topics, shorthand, were setup as follows: man vs. wild, soul vs. body, and interpretation vs. facts.
First topic: Like animals – we eat, sleep, defecate, and have sex. How are we different?
Interesting question. Everyone at the table finally admitted to participating in all the above activities. Wait, was I not supposed to share that?
“We are animals. Does anyone here think we’re not animals?” Steve had to know.
Silence. Crickets.
The non-animals among us refused to speak up. Guilty as charged. Apparently our initial dichotomy – ‘man vs. wild’ should be rephrased to: ‘man is wild’?
Brian noted the law recently passed in Florida which forbade sex with animals.
“Apparently it’s now illegal to have sex in Florida,” he quipped.
Clever.
Yet.
There are differences, aren’t there? You wouldn’t imagine a group of hyenas gathered around a table having existential ponderings. You don’t see chimpanzees inventing smartphones. You don’t see parakeets writing novels. So there are some differences. What are they?
Rational thought? The ability to step outside ourselves? The awareness of our own mortality? The ability to have empathy? The presence of a soul? The need to dispose of our defecation?
Well, we couldn’t let that one alone. Somehow we stumbled on the topic of privacy when it comes to going to the bathroom.
Courtesy flush?
“I can’t stand it when stalls don’t have doors.”
“Don’t you hate it when that guy just has to keep talking to you at the urinal? You know that guy.”
“One time, I was in a stall in a large bathroom near the beach, and I just started making loud painful groaning sounds. It was hilarious.”
Wait, what?
Speaking of, what do you make of the following:
“[T]he immediate appearance of the Inner is formless $h*t. The small child who gives his sh-t as a present is in a way giving the immediate equivalent of his Inner Self. Freud’s well-known identification of excrement as the primordial form of gift, of an innermost object that the small child gives to its parents, is thus not as naive as it may appear: the often-overlooked point is that this piece of myself offered to the Other radically oscillates between the Sublime and – not the Ridiculous, but, precisely – the excremental. This is the reason why, for Lacan, one of the features which distinguishes man from animals is that, with humans, the disposal of sh-t becomes a problem: not because it has a bad smell, but because it came out from our innermost selves. We are ashamed of sh-t because, in it, we expose/externalize our innermost intimacy. Animals do not have a problem with it because they do not have an “interior” like humans.”
Leave to Zizek to get all psychoanalytic about poop.
Yet perhaps he’s on to something.
In any case, isn’t there a Game 7 tonight? Spoiler: the Wings came up just short. Oh that’s right, that was a week ago.
We did spend some time on the idea of the soul. Is that a differentiating factor? Do all dogs go to heaven?
We started talking about the idea of the Christian hope in a new heavens and a new earth. I wondered, “So, what about dogs? I mean, I assume on the new earth there will be animals. Will they be the ‘same’ animals? I mean, will my dog Oscar that we had when I was a kid be there? Or will there just be some ‘stock’ golden labs who are like Oscar but aren’t actually Oscar?”
Compelling question. Unfortunately no one had a definitive answer.
“Much of the afterlife is simply speculation,” noted Kristen (not to be confused with Kirsten).
Agreed.
Somehow we stumbled on to the idea of biblical inspiration, and how to deal with some of the difficult texts in the Old Testament.
“When the Bible has God say, ‘Kill every man, woman, and child,’ is that really God saying that, or just the people saying God said that? Maybe they just slaughtered a group of people, and now they are attributing their actions to God’s commands to them, which sort of takes the responsibility off of them for what they’ve just done. History is written by the winners, so perhaps they’re just putting their spin on it. Or God did actually say it, and if so, what does that mean about God?”
“Well, maybe it’s neither of those – maybe it’s something else. History is often written by the winners – but the Bible seems an exception. Israel was not a great nation or empire, even at its peak, compared to Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and so on. Perhaps God is telling them these things, but he has a reason for it, and it’s reflective of the time, the culture, and how things worked then. If God was easy to explain, would he still be God?”
“Wait, is this the topic?”
“Who cares – this stuff is interesting!”
Indeed.
So we decided that we are all animals, but animals who care, and that makes us special. We also decided that some things, like difficult texts in the Bible, are a bit of a mystery, and we can have some flexibility in our understanding of them, and should allow our ideas of inspiration to have room for different readings and approaches to the text. Actually there were no group decisions.
A must read?
But on the note about challenging texts in the Bible, I came across a book recently that I’m intrigued by: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It). It’s written by Thom Stark and published by Wipf and Stock. (Hey – sounds like they publish quality books…)
Here are a few endorsements:
I learned so much from this book that I can strongly encourage anyone who is seeking to move from simplistic proof-texting to a comprehensive understanding of the Bible to read this book carefully.
–Tony Campolo
author of Red Letter Christians
Christians can ignore the facts that Stark brings into the light of day only if they want to be wrong.
–Dale C. Allison, Jr.
author of Constructing Jesus
This is must reading for Christians who have agonized over their own private doubts about Scripture and for others who have given up hope that evangelical Christians can practice intelligent, moral interpretation of the Bible.
–Neil Elliott
author of Liberating Paul
[W]ith the help of this book, we may discover that the Bible when we read it in all its diversity and vulnerability does bring healing words to those who keep listening.
–Ted Grimsrud
author of Embodying the Way of Jesus
Stark’s book effectively demonstrates how the Bible, in practice, is the most dangerous enemy of fundamentalists.
–James F. McGrath
author of The Only True God
The Human Faces of God is one of the most challenging and well-argued cases against the doctrine of biblical inerrancy I have ever read.
–Greg A. Boyd
author of The Myth of a Christian Nation
Stark provides a model for theology that is committed to hearing the voice of the victims of history, especially the victims of our own religious traditions.
–Michael J. Iafrate
PhD Candidate, Toronto School of Theology
This book is the most powerful antidote to fundamentalism that I’ve ever read.
–Frank Schaeffer
author of Crazy for God
Wow. Maybe I’ll read it. I downloaded the first chapter free on my Kindle. I’ll check it out and let you know if it’s as good as everyone says.
Here’s a summary:
Does accepting the doctrine of biblical inspiration necessitate belief in biblical inerrancy? The Bible has always functioned authoritatively in the life of the church, but what exactly should that mean? Must it mean the Bible is without error in all historical details and ethical teachings? What should thoughtful Christians do with texts that propose God is pleased by human sacrifice or that God commanded Israel to commit acts of genocide? What about texts that contain historical errors or predictions that have gone unfulfilled long beyond their expiration dates?
In The Human Faces of God, Thom Stark moves beyond notions of inerrancy in order to confront such problematic texts and open up a conversation about new ways they can be used in service of the church and its moral witness today. Readers looking for an academically informed yet accessible discussion of the Bible’s thorniest texts will find a thought-provoking and indispensable resource in The Human Faces of God.
From a reader on Amazon.com:
This is the book I have been waiting for my whole adult life. Like Stark, I was raised to understand the Bible as the inerrant word of God, “dropped from heaven”. I have been a Christian my whole life, yet I have increasing become uncomfortable with some of the difficult texts in the Bible and their implications on my faith and personal understanding of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. This has been compounded by the fact that I now have young children and am reading the Bible with them, struggling with how to present stories such as the Passover, wishing I could somehow skip over them. Stark addresses the difficult issues with precision, intellect, and devotion, never turning his back on Christianity. For me, the chains are off. Ironically, I can now read the Bible with more commitment. I don’t wish to skip over the difficult texts, I can address them again. My faith has been rekindled. Thank you, Thom Stark.
Good stuff! I think I’m getting a copy for Half the Sky, the Watershed Community Library. But I’m not here to sell books… (at least not yet.) 🙂
TRAVERSE CITY – A high-energy night at the pub, highlighted by good conversation about the death of Osama bin Laden, an excellent selection of beers, and monkeys on the loose – all covered extensively by the paparazzi, who got wind of our topic. Also, the world is ending in 2036.
The evening began with a send off for Rebecca, who left early to catch a flight to Madrid. A week after recovering from her big thirtieth birthday party, she was ready to leave the country. So she bid us all sayonara, lugging her suitcase from the Warehouse district all the way to S. Airport Road.
After recently being blacklisted by the Record-Eagle, we were pleasantly surprised to find they still like us, and we welcomed in Jan-Michael Stump, photographer extraordinaire, who captured the highlight of the evening as first-time guest Sharon Moller explained to her husband Pete and the rest of us her own response to the news of bin Laden’s death. She echoed sentiments carried by many of us, that she was relieved in a way, but a bit troubled by the gratuitous celebrations carried out in the immediate aftermath.
A captive audience
Steve noted that he *would* celebrate if his death meant we could finally wrap up our ‘war on terror’, and realize that having a war against terror is a bit of a ridiculous concept. There was agreement around the table that that would indeed be a good thing.
Others fear that the killing of bin Laden would create more reprisals and backlash than it would actually accomplish any sort of diminishing of terrorism. Does fighting violence with violence really work? The Dalai Lama noted his own sadness at the event, though he said he understood why it happened. He wondered whether killing one man would bring more peace, or just new opportunities for more to step in and fill the void.
It was also asked whether or not this would turn bin Laden into some sort of martyr. Would he now become even more of a hero in death than he was in life for those who followed him?
What meteor?
The second major topic of the night was this: If the human race is wiped out, what will be the reason?
Keith D. felt it would be some sort of pandemic – a medical/disease scenario like a virus of some sort that would wipe us all out. Some felt it would be self-inflicted, such as a nuclear reality, or a longer-term environmental disaster making the planet unsustainable for human life. Brian with an ‘i’ was back and he felt it would be something like a comet or asteroid that would cause a dinosaur-like extinction, and that in fact there may be one already on its way. This caused us all to get another round. I couldn’t find anything on the one Brian mentioned – Xerxes, but did find a story on one named Apophis after the Egyptian god of death and destruction (how comforting!).
Here’s what I found: “There is a large asteroid, made entirely of iron, currently speeding toward earth. Discovered in 2004, it’s called “Apophis,” after the Greek-Egyptian god of death and destruction. And the asteroid named after a god of death will be the largest and closest thing to come near Earth than any other object in recorded history. It will come so close, in fact, that it will actually be closer to the ground than orbiting communications satellites. It will be seeable with the naked eye as a point of intense light burning across the sky.
When will it pass near Earth? April 13, 2029. A Friday.
But that’s not even the scariest part.
Scientists are nearly certain that the asteroid won’t hit when it swings by in 2029. But there’s a possibility that, if Earth’s gravity affects the asteroid’s path enough, it will swing back around the Sun and strike the Earth on April 13, 2036.
So, if Apophis does hit Earth in 2036, where, exactly, will it hit?”
Good question – you’ll have to link to the article to read the rest, though it did note that an impact could ‘start a massive fire that would burn millions of acres, spilling tons of ash and debris into the air and plunging the Northern Hemisphere into darkness’. Also comforting.
monkey see...
The final topic of the night was a doozy – ‘Can God make a breakfast so big he can’t eat it?’ No one jumped on it, so we left the pub with visions of extra large omelets, king-size pancakes, and, to quote Obi Wan, feeling “a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.”
