But where I grew up in central Illinois – not the “Bible belt,” but a bit too close to it. Christianity was mostly very fundamentalist in its understanding of the Bible there. Isaac Asimov tells a great story in his autobiography In Joy Still Felt about being at a convention with Avram Davidson, a very orthodox Jew. Asimov relates that during a discussion in which Davidson was “stressing his orthodoxy just a bit too hard” for Asimov’s comfort, Davidson asked Asimov’s stand on religion. Asimov answered
“I’m an atheist.”
“Yes,” said Avram, without batting an eye, “but what kind of atheist? A Baptist atheist, a Hindu atheist? A Seventh-day Adventist atheist?”
I got the idea. “A Jewish atheist,” I said “which means I have to fight the irrational elements in Judaism particularly.” (In Joy Still Felt, pp. 174-175.)
When I became an atheist during junior high I think it was largely to “fight the irrational elements” in the fundamentalist Christianity that surrounded me. Creationism. Biblical inerrancy. Things of that nature.
I recently read Gordon Kaufman’s In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology and I think it is a heroic attempt at constructing a form of Christianity that might work for someone like me. It doesn’t require any major compromise with a modern viewpoint in life and seems to retain the ultimate concerns of Christianity that I was (and still am) attracted by. He starts out by noting that “God” is a symbol that has been so powerful and important in human affairs that it seems a shame to give it up. It has connotations that are so significant that no other symbol can quite live up to in western culture. What if it is not the symbol that is the problem for “non-believers” in the modern world but only the reification of that symbol? What can you do with “God” and Christianity if you do away with the reification of God and Christ?
Central to Kaufman’s construction is the description of the human as a “biohistorical” being. I found the idea very attractive and useful. Basically he wants to eliminate the problem of deconstructing human beings down to just matter and the information found in DNA. He notes that it is clear that humans are much more than that. We are living beings who have found ways to create cultures based on historical understandings. It is the combination of the physical with this culture that creates the type of “being” that we are. The point is that history and culture don’t just influence us – it has a part in the creation of what we are. Without culture and the historical framework we live in, even something as central as the concept of the self or “I” would not exist, he says. The history we live as a part of defines who and what we are at a very fundamental level: hence we are “biohistorical” beings.
With that in mind he goes on to construct concept of God, Christ and Holy Spirit that are compatible with that modern understanding of the human and the world around us. It would be way too much to go into detail on his construction (read the book for that) but here is a summary of the result.
“God” in this construction is the serendipitous creativity of the universe which brings everything into being in a evolution which (with respect to we biohistorical human beings) seems directional. He doesn’t envision God as a out of time and space superbeing who directs the universe to create us, but simply notes that in some sense the universe has created something here. At one time there were no humans, and so no one to create art, music, etc. At some point humans emerged from the universe and developed in time and history towards a point where we could create the Mona Lisa, Highway 61 Revisited, and the theory of Relativity, for instance. There was nothing but energy and matter in the universe at one time and somehow over billions of years of evolution of the matter and energy there is art, music, science, and history. In some sense this is obviously a creative act by the universe, if a serendipitous one. It may seem to be unduly specific to reference earth bound creativity of the last few hundred years in a discussion of a universe 15 billion years old and huge beyond imagining, but the whole idea of constructing a religion is to help orient the lives of we humans – so emphasis on our little corner of the world seems justifiable.
The Holy Spirit is constructed as that which sustains our being – whatever it is that grounds existence and manages to keep everything going. This spirit requires a certain faith to believe it is going to keep on keeping on and that everything isn’t going to go Poof! and be gone when we turn around. It can be thought of as the ground of our being, our foundation.
As Kaufman notes these concepts of God and Holy Spirit are very abstract and are perhaps too esoteric to inspire followers in a concrete way. This is why the concept of Christ is so necessary. The symbol “Christ” to Kaufman goes beyond the person of Jesus to include the community that surrounds Jesus and strives towards a more humane future – symbolized by the idea of the coming “Kingdom of God.” It is an evolving process, though, the Christ exemplifying that evolution towards the Kingdom not a completed act. The Christ, in this conception, can inspire us towards the more humane by the emphasis on love, faith, and hope. The Christ represents the directional creativity of God (the universe’s serendipitous creativity) exemplified in the human (biohistorical) being and in that way is worthy of veneration, even worship. We must take a leap of faith, Kaufman notes, to hope that this directionality will indeed lead to a more humane loving society rather than a monstrous one taking advantage of the power of modern technology to simply cause more suffering. But that leap of faith is one well worth taking if it serves to orient us in the right direction and surely looking at history there is some justifiable cause to believe that it can.
So he constructs a version of Trinitarian Christianity without anything in it that I particularly object to. I have simplified what he has done considerably, obviously. I highly recommend the book to anyone who, like me, simply cannot bring him or herself to believe in physical resurrections, six-day creations, virgin births and such, but is still drawn to the ancient message of that mystery beyond all of us and is searching for an expression of it that can inspire and still be believed.
