by Bruce Bawer
The materialism of American life, and the closing off of American lives to a large extent from the realities of death and illness, make it difficult for many Americans to relate to the idea of the kingdom of heaven in a mystical sense, or for that matter to experience their lives in a mystical way; we are so overwhelmed by possessions, by the daily news headlines, by E-mail and phone messages and our scores of TV stations, that to distance ourselves from all this horizontal experience and connect with the vertical plane—and then to live out the truths of our vertical experience in our daily lives—can be an immense challenge. So it is that for many Americans who call themselves Christians, religion is not at all a matter of spiritual experience, of seeking to live out God's radical love, but rather of adhering to certain laws and pledging assent to certain doctrines. In this business-centered culture, religion is widely seen as a matter of quid pro quo dealmaking: We give God ourselves, and he gives us salvation.
Yet beneath the spirituality-killing surface of contemporary American culture lies a deep, unfulfilled hunger for genuine spiritual experience. Too often, alas, Americans who jettison traditional religion fill its place with shallow means of seeking connection to the Ultimate— astrology, est, Scientology, the palm reader down the block, the Psychic Friends Network. When it comes down to it, most of these things are, like legalistic Christianity, about the first-person singular: What's my fortune? What's best for me? Where will I go after death? One test of true spiritual experience is that it lifts one above petty solipsism and enhances one's sense of connection to, affection for, and responsibility toward others. Yet as much of the history of the Church of Love has shown, it is not enough to focus a church's mission on selfless rhetoric and socially responsible outreach programs; at the core of the church's communal life must be a genuine spiritual vitality—a sense of one's connection to the God of the universe and to the entirety of humankind that is so powerful that one experiences God's love for oneself even as one transcends self-concern.
While the Church of Love has much to learn, indeed, from the examples of Jefferson, Rauschenbusch, and Fosdick, what is sometimes insufficiently apparent in the examples of all of these men is an emphasis on spiritual experience. From the teachings of Jesus, Jefferson distilled a personal ethic for himself and other men of privilege; Rauschenbusch distilled a social program by which to help the poor; and Fosdick distilled a life philosophy for college-educated men of the middle class. It is plain that Rauschenbusch and Fosdick—if not Jefferson—were deeply spiritual men, but all too often they failed to emphasize sufficiently the spiritual foundation of their messages of love and service. Sometimes, to people desperately in search of the vertical, these men could seem too horizontal, too indifferent to life's mystical dimension. The same may be said of such immensely popular twentieth-century ministers as Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller, who, while preaching (usually) a God of love and not of law, focused less on spiritual growth than on materialistic success, and on a distinctively American—and horizontal—"prosperity gospel" that too often appealed not to people's altruism but to their selfishness. At its worst, this prosperity gospel devolved into Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's wholesale endorsement of gross materialism. One of the lessons of such ministerial careers is that in order to motivate people to act selflessly on the horizontal plane, churches need to do the best job they can to bring those people into meaningful contact with the vertical plane, and not simply feed them messages that God wants them to be rich.
Example after example demonstrates that if the Church of Love is to bloom in the new millennium, it will do so through a renewed emphasis on spiritual experience as the necessary heart of Christian community life. In The Empty Church, his legalistic jeremiad against the "liberal" mainline church, Thomas C. Reeves grudgingly acknowledges that All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, despite its extremely "liberal" and gay-friendly stance, draws huge numbers of people because it takes seriously its obligation to provide spiritually meaningful worship services. The equally nonlegalistic Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle is said to attract upward of fifteen hundred people, most of them reportedly between eighteen and twenty-five and with little or no formal religious background, to its traditional Compline services. It is the failure of many nonlegalistic churches to respond seriously to people's hunger for such worship that has caused many Americans to reject those churches' politicized atmospheres in favor of legalistic churches that at least purport to concern themselves with things transcendent.
More and more nonlegalistic churches do appear to be recognizing the need for them to focus more seriously on the spiritual dimension. In a December 1996 New York Times article, Gustav Niebuhr noted that even the Unitarians—members of that ultrarationalistic, noncreedal fellowship that Thomas Jefferson saw as the future of American religion, and which now has about 200,000 members in the United States—have changed their tune. The Unitarian-Universalist Association has not dropped its social conscience, its inclusiveness, its respect for the individual and the intellect; but what it has done is to turn sharply away from its often unspiritual—and sometimes even antispiritual—past. Unitarian congregations, wrote Niebuhr, "are increasingly exploring ritual, forms of prayer and meditation, candle-lighting and music, drawn from Western, East Asian, American Indian and other religious sources."
In George Orwell's 1949 novel 1984, set in a dark totalitarian future, the protagonist's ultimate capitulation to the political authorities is illustrated by his willingness to assent to the statement that two plus two equals five. If one thinks of mathematics as a metaphor for religion, this is what the mathematics of legalistic Christianity amounts to—the simple Orwellian arithmetic of two plus two equals five. To be a legalist, in other words, is to embrace as true a proposition or set of propositions that plainly and directly contradict the facts of observable reality, even though one does not admit the contradiction to others and tries not to admit it even to oneself. By contrast, the mathematics of, say, mainstream Anglican belief can be said to involve the theological equivalent of imaginary numbers. Imaginary numbers, which represent something that is absolutely real but that cannot be explained in terms of the world of three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension in which we live, become necessary when one seeks to find the square root of a number below zero. The square root of—4, for example, is 2i, with the letter i indicating that this is not the "real" number 2 but the "imaginary" number 2. "Imaginary" does not mean that the number exists only in the imagination; it means that the number designates something that cannot be described or understood in the terms of this material world and the nature of which the human mind must strive imaginatively to apprehend. Imaginary numbers are very real indeed in the sense that they "work" mathematically: One can carry out a mathematical operation that takes one through steps involving imaginary numbers and find one's way back to a "real" solution, the correctness of which can be verified by practical experience. Such, too, is the realm of the spiritual.
In the 1920s, when Fosdick was fighting the fundamentalist wars, making Christianity and science cohere seemed to many (Einstein notwithstanding) to mean being obliged to make religion conform to the strictures of Newton's rational, mechanistic, determinate universe. Today, however, quantum physics and chaos theory are helping us to see that while a mechanistic, determinate view of the universe may seem consistent with most phenomena at the level of human experience, the reality of activity at the subatomic and cosmic levels is something else again. We have learned things that at first blush appear to make no sense—that something can be at once a wave and a particle; that some infinities are greater than others; that neither space nor time is as straightforward and objective a phenomenon as people used to think; and that the closed four-dimensional system that we call the universe may well be only an infinitesimal part of a vast creation of many dimensions and universes, each of them "splitting" at every moment into an infinitude of parallel universes in which are represented every possible outcome of every subatomic ev
ent of the previous moment. Einstein taught us that matter can be converted into energy; now we know that time can turn into space, space into time. To contemplate such facts is to contemplate spiritual mystery; it is, as the title of a book by the Australian physicist Paul Davies suggests, to seek to grasp the mind of God.
Many legalistic Christians—to the extent that they are aware at all of the theories and discoveries of modern physics—view them, along with evolution, as threats to established belief. Some nonlegalistic Christians, too, see modern science as a threat: Though they accept its discoveries, they regard the gradual expansion of the sphere of scientific knowledge as diminishing, bit by bit, the sphere of mystery over which religion presides, and as placing religion thereby in a defensive position, forced continually to reformulate its postulates in order to conform with established truth. Yet science should properly be seen not as something to be adjusted to defensively but as an aid, an ally, a means of inquiry that can help us to discern the whole truth of God. Indeed, there is something about many of the new scientific insights that makes them feel quite consistent with the notion of spiritual experience. A universe more complicated than one can imagine fits with a God who is greater than we can imagine. It might even be said that science's new insights make room for the miraculous—not for virgin births and weeping Madonna paintings, to be sure, but for certain genuine instances of deja vu and other violations of time's apparent one-way street, as well as for sundry apparent experiences of the numinous. If many contemporary works of theology—especially legalistic theology—can make the whole idea of God feel like a quaint, anachronistic self-delusion, many works of modern physics seem almost to be pointing to and insisting upon the reality of God and of what we call spiritual experience, even if they never employ words like God and spirit. Such works, indeed, can at times recall the works of Christian mystics, who in their struggle to characterize the nature of mystical experience and of the realm beyond the immediate and tangible often speak a language that has its affinities to the language of modern physics.
In a June 1996 New Yorker piece about a memorial service for former Time magazine editor Richard M. Clurman, the writer Christopher Buckley quotes a comment made at the service by his father, the conservative columnist William F. Buckley. "It came to me last Thursday," said the elder Buckley, "when the news [of Clurman's death] reached me just after midnight, that I have always subconsciously looked out for the total Christian, and when I found him he turned out to be a nonpracticing Jew." This comment was especially striking since it was made by a staunchly traditionalist Roman Catholic whose writings make clear his devotion to some of his church's most rigorous, exclusionary dogmas. Implicit in the elder Buckley's remarks about Clurman is a deep insight to which one wishes Buckley would devote some serious reflection. What Buckley perceived in reflecting on the life of his friend, presumably, was that being a Christian, in the deepest sense, is a matter not of theology but of love.
Indeed, the church needs desperately to grapple with the fact that when we insist on faith statements as the core of the faith, we assault not only truth but virtue. Decades ago, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that "no Christian church has a right to preach to a so-called secular age without a contrite recognition of the shortcomings of historic Christianity which tempted the modern age to disavow its Christian faith." While secularism, Niebuhr noted, can be "the expression of man's sinful self-sufficiency," it can also be "a reaction to profanity"—to the profanity, that is, of some Christian faith statements. For some people "are atheists because of a higher implicit theism than that professed by believers. They reject God because His name has been taken in vain, and they are unable to distinguish between His holiness and its profanation." In other words, they rebel, both intellectually and morally, against what legalistic faiths have made of God, "both in the realm of truth and in the realm of the good, in both culture and ethics."
Paul Tillich pointed in the proper direction when he wrote that "if we want to speak in truth without foolish, wishful thinking, we should speak about the eternal that is neither timelessness [n]or endless time. The mystery of the future is answered in the eternal of which we may speak in images taken from time. But if we forget that the images are images, we fall into absurdities and self-deceptions. There is not time after time, but there is eternity above time." Religion, Tillich insisted in his contribution to a 1950 Partisan Review symposium on "Religion and the Intellectuals,"
is not a collection of theoretical statements of a questionable or absurd or superstitious character. Such a religion could not be accepted by any intellectual who is not willing to sacrifice his intellectual honesty. Some of them make this sacrifice and surrender their intellectual autonomy to Ecclesiastical or Biblical authorities. But their turn to religion is still an expression of their despair, not a victory over it. Others are waiting for a religious answer which does not destroy reason but points to the depth of reason; which does not teach the supernatural, but points to the mystery in the ground of the natural, which denies that God is a being and speaks of Him as the ground and depth of being and meaning, which knows about the significance of symbols in myth and cult, but resists the distortion of symbols into statements of knowledge which necessarily conflict with scientific knowledge.
Such an understanding of faith statements remains beyond the grasp of too many Americans today. A typical contemporary comment appeared in a 1996 Newsweek article that claimed that if the theologians of the controversial Jesus Seminar were correct in denying the historical veracity of the virgin birth and other biblical events, then every tenet of traditional Christianity would go "out the window," including the Resurrection. Such a statement could be made only by someone with a legalistic understanding of the nature of Christian belief-—someone who doesn't recognize that every religious statement is a metaphor, a stab in the dark, an attempt to express ;in human words something that lies beyond human understanding or expression. To choose a religion is to choose a set of metaphors that comport best with the promptings of one's own instincts and conscience and that seems to point most truly, virtuously, and beautifully to the "depth of reason."
The point that Christianity is essentially about the person of Jesus and not about doctrine has been made forcefully by Hans Kung, perhaps the most distinguished theologian of our time, in his recent book Christianity: Essence, History, and Future. This work of theological history distinguishes between the "abiding substance" of Christianity, which Kung locates in the person of Jesus, and its "shifting paradigm," which he identifies with religious institutions, dogma, and law, which change from age to age. "The distinctive Christian feature," writes Kung, "is christological. It is not a doctrine of Christ to be speculated on, not a dogma of Christ which one 'must believe,' but.. .Jesus Christ whom one must follow." What, he asks, "is the decisive factor for Christian action, for Christian ethics? What is the criterion of the Christian, the distinguishing mark of the Christian in practice . . . ? The answer is: Jesus as the normative concrete person."
Kiing's point about the absolute importance of Jesus and the relative unimportance of doctrine has been made forcefully over the generations. As George M. Marsden has noted, Augustus H. Strong, a president of Rochester Seminary in Rauschenbusch's time, believed that "truth was not doctrinal or propositional, but rather 'the truth is a personal Being, and that Christ Himself is the Truth.'" Strong complained of the church in his time that its view of truth "was too abstract and literal"; yet he also expressed legitimate concern about "the liberal drift away from supernaturalism in Christianity," the tendency to turn Christ into "a merely ethical teacher." Fosdick's fundamentalist critics accused him of doing precisely this, complaining that he encouraged young people to approach Christianity as an intellectual construct and not as a matter of spirit and grace. On the contrary, Fosdick's whole point was to encourage young people to look beyond the outmoded intellectual formulations of earlier generations to the enduring and spiritually enlivening truths inherent in the person of Jesus
Christ, and to seek modern terms in which to convey their profound experience of those truths. That is an experience, he emphasized, that no mere doctrine should be permitted to hinder.
Indeed, one may safely make the following observations about religious doctrine: The more elaborate a set of doctrines, the more likely it is to be wrong to some degree; the more elaborate a set of doctrines, the greater the number of people who will find it impossible to believe; the more elaborate a set of doctrines, the more likely it is to be an esoteric academic exercise and not an expression of living belief. What is religious doctrine, after all, but a set of metaphorical statements? What does it mean to say that Jesus was the Son of God, a part of the Trinity along with God the Father and the Holy Spirit? What does it mean to say that these are three Persons but one God? Certainly Jesus was not the son of God in any biological sense; and when we speak of God as three persons we do not mean Homo sapiens. To discuss God in such terms is to apply metaphorically to the deity words that are ordinarily used to describe human natures and relationships. The idea is to find some way of imagining the unimaginable by characterizing it in human terms. That Jesus is the son of God and that God has three persons are among the faith statements to which many Christian communions require their members to subscribe. Yet for a Christian to use some other set of metaphorical formulations to speak of God is not necessarily to deny Christianity.