Faith in an HIstorical Context

In our Adult Sunday School class we continue to talk about the story of our faith in an historical context. Hopefully not in some dry fact based way that we may have learned history in high school, but looking at the spirituality of our fore fathers and mothers. How did they relate to God? How did they understand prayer? What was the source for their faith? We have passed the Reformation and Enlightenment now – two movements that greatly influenced how we see the world. Through the Reformation we inherited the belief that the primary source for our life and faith is the Bible. In most of Protestant Christianity this remains the case. At the extreme end you have “Bible Believing” churches. But even in our own Discipline of the four sources of faith in our Methodist Quadrilateral scripture is identified as “primary.” But in the lives of people today that may be changing.

In the first chapter of their book If Grace is True Philip Gulley and James Mulholland essentially say that it is experience that is primary. They are Quakers and since Quakers have always believed in the Inner Light of God within each person this may not be such a revolutionary idea to them, but to Baptists, Presbyterians and especially those Bible Believing churches it is somewhere between a curious idea and an anathema. I think that logically it is hard not to see experience as foundational. Once one acknowledges that the Bible was written by living people both gifted and flawed; that what they wrote was filtered through their experience then doesn’t experience precede the Bible almost by necessity? When I calmly observe myself I have to say that I experience even before I feel or think – feelings emerge out of experiences and thoughts give shape to experiences, much more than the words I now type which are one step further from my experience. If we begin to acknowledge this what could it mean for our life in the Church?

I think we would begin to see the Bible differently. Neither as an historical account nor as a rule book for life but as the story of our faith – the story of the relationship of God with the people of God. We would understand that the Bible is an expression of the experiences of people who come before us written down in narrative, poetry, prose, sayings and song – through the tools that they had to express those experiences and the feelings and thoughts that emerged from those feelings. Bible study would be less about what the meaning is, and more about how we enter into the story. We would also be telling more of our own stories of life and faith in the Church. Never in an individualistic fashion as if we could be extracted from our context and all of our relations but in and through that context and relations. In one of our Wednesday class sessions we were talking about seeing our “selves” in a more fluid way, not as a ball that remains the same traveling through time bumping into other like balls, but as an ever changing web or experiences and relationships. We cannot talk about our story outside of our relations and hopefully not outside the stories both of the Bible and the history of the faith – call it biblical relativity theory.

In a sermon a few weeks back I shared about Harvey Cox’ new book, The Future of Faith in which he claims that we are in the middle of a paradigm shift. He sees three stages in the story of Christianity: the first was the Age of Faith when a feeling of awe and wonder and trust was what defined spirituality. Then with the advent of Constantine and Christianity as the religion of the Empire there came the Age of Belief: Religion was focused on accepting proposals about Jesus and God – that is, the Creeds. Now, he says we are entering the Age of Spirit where we concentrate on spiritual experience, story and again, trust. How would our life in the church be different if we considered this – and we concentrated less on considering what we believe and more one how we experience God?

Marcus Borg, who recently passed away, wrote a final book, Convictions: How I Learned What Matters Most, and one of those things that matter most is religious experience. This coming from a very intellectual person, he describes his spiritual experience and says of them: “these episodes of sheer wonder, radical amazement, radiant luminosity, often evoke the exclamation, “Oh my God!” So it has been for me. And for me that exclamation expresses truth. It is the central conviction that has shaped my Christian journey ever since. God is real, “the more” in whom we live and move and have our being.” Amen to that. P.Jim