1 24 12 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/b1cee27816d030d545979716cd359eba.pdf 44920d2b4ecf6764736091c8e6e231b5 PDF Text Text From Orthodoxy to Freedom Free Spirit, A publication of Fountain Street Church, Fall, 2001, p.17 Richard A. Rhem When we could no longer with integrity affirm the faith understanding of our religious community, we were faced with a critical decision: either we must leave or we must engage in a process of thought, study, and revision in order to bring our religious understanding to new expression. When I could no longer honestly preach the orthodox and evangelical faith in which I had been nurtured and educated and which, in my first four years in the ministry, I had proclaimed as the pastor of my Spring Lake congregation, I chose the latter course. After graduating from seminary in 1960, I came to the ministry armed with “the authoritative Word of God.” The Bible, inspired by the Holy Spirit, was inerrant and infallible. The preacher's authority lay in the faithful exposition of the biblical text. Even though serious biblical criticism had been around since the late eighteenth century, my denomination did not deal seriously with it. But, after seven years of pastoral experience and preaching, the last three in New Jersey, I found my authoritarian foundation crumbling. As I became aware of a critical approach to scripture, it was no longer possible for me simply to assert, “The Bible says...” I had to begin again. I needed a new foundation if I were to continue in a preaching ministry. A European pilgrimage that lasted for four years was not simply a quest for an academic degree, but an existential quest for a religious faith I could believe in with intellectual integrity and preach with authenticity. My search and research were intensive - and the quest continues, but of this I became convinced - there is no authoritarian claim that can ground authentic religious experience, whether the claim be grounded in tradition, church or scripture. The witness to religious experience - in my case, the witness of the preacher – is precisely that: it is witness. Traditional religious communities have a “founding story” or event that is the source of their traditions; for example, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is the founding story of Christianity. One may believe the founding story is a revelation of the Sacred, but its expression is human; it cannot be otherwise. The founding story can only be told by means of human language and thought forms. The stories, creeds and confessional statements are human imaginative constructs and they are most often separated from the revelatory moment by a long time. Orthodoxy or “right thinking” is not achieved immediately. In the case © Grand Valley State University �From Orthodoxy to Freedom Richard A. Rhem Page 2 of Christian orthodoxy, it took centuries before the Church settled questions of who Jesus was, how he was related to God, and how God was to be understood. But this long process is soon forgotten. A human imaginative construct in the form of a statement in a creed becomes absolutized - the final word, the only true expression of a given religion. Orthodox “truth” is thus established, defended, and used as a weapon to outlaw those who fail to adhere to the established line. The creeds and symbols of the religion become “fundamentals” to be externally accepted and endlessly repeated. When a religious faith reaches the orthodox and fundamentalist stage, it lives on by authoritarian claim. Free inquiry is no longer welcome; one may think only within prescribed limits. Ongoing human experience, historical development and scientific discovery are resisted because new knowledge threatens a creed frozen in time and established institutional order. The effect is deadening. When all of this became clear to me, I still remained within my faith community, but I challenged the accepted orthodox formulations at several points. When called upon to recant and thereby to deny my best insight and understanding, I refused and was declared to be beyond the limits of my faith community's orthodoxy. I was fortunate; the congregation I had served for over a quarter century voted by strong majority to move with me into institutional independence where the spirit of freedom prevails and free inquiry is encouraged. We are continuing to seek to create a community of love and grace and compassion, a community of open mind and warm heart. In the early 90s, we expressed our vision thus: Christ Community is an alternative to church as usual. We live together in the awe of worship, in the Presence of the Mystery of God Whose inclusive grace moves us to embrace all with unconditional love and gracious acceptance, irrespective of race, gender, economic status, age or sexual orientation, loving the world as God loves it, following the way of Jesus, sensitive to the winds of the Spirit, seeking to discern the Word of God in the biblical tradition, the movement of God in the context of our culture. And the story goes on... © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From Orthodoxy to Freedom Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Free Spirit Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001-10-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Kll-01_RA-4-20011001 Description An account of the resource Article created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on October 1, 2001 entitled "From Orthodoxy to Freedom", it appeared in Free Spirit, Fountain Street Church, Fall, 2001, p.17. Tags: Fundamentalism, Critical Thinking, Inclusive, Nature of Religion, Community of Faith. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Community of Faith Critical Thinking Fundamentalism Inclusive Nature of Religion https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/9fcb672c2206f72e669f708fc360b7b5.pdf f02dd605cad1091807c6efa842f0b960 PDF Text Text You Can Never Go Home From the series: Good News Then and Now Scripture: Jeremiah 23:23-32; Hebrews 4:12-13; John 1:1-5; 10-14 Richard A. Rhem Christ Community Church Spring Lake, Michigan October 10, 1999 Transcription of the spoken word One of the great greetings that is addressed by angelic visitors or messengers to human beings in critical situations in the biblical story from time to time is, “Fear not.” I would like this morning to say to you as a congregation on a pilgrimage of faith, in an explosive and wonderful and fascinating world, “Fear not. Be not afraid.” It’s a wonderful endeavor to traverse 2000 years of Christian history and to find that through those centuries there have been periods of vitality and life, and there have been periods of dryness and desert existence. There have been times when it would seem that the flame of faith would flicker and die. And then there have been surprising moments when the word of God sounded, some voice was found, some happening caused once again a new freedom and joy and confidence to mark the people of God. A study of the history of the Church builds one’s confidence, not in the infallibility of the Church or the infallibility of the Bible or the total accuracy and absolute truthfulness of the Christian dogmatic structure, but rather, that God goes with the Church; the Spirit of God now and again breathes new life into the Church. There are periods of dryness, but there are periods of renewal, and finally our confidence is in God and therefore, my word to you is, “Fear not,” as we continue our pilgrimage of understanding that faith that has been our heritage and that is our hope. I said last week that the Reformation of the 16th century, that critical event out of which the Protestant movement emerged, was actually a family fight. It was an intramural exercise. To be sure, the upshot of it was the rending of the body of Christ, unfortunately. To be sure, there was a fresh experience of the grace of God, the Gospel was freed, the scriptures came to new life, but it was still a family affair. There wasn’t any significant tampering with the core Christian dogmatic understanding, the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed confessed by Catholic and Protestant alike. As a matter of fact, the Reformation emerging in the Protestant movement caused to happen what Luther had hoped would happen in the first place and that was a counter-Reformation in the Catholic Church, after which there wasn’t really any reason for the two to remain apart, but fortunately,   ©  Grand  Valley  State  University �You Can Never Go Home Richard A. Rhem Page 2   after 450 or so years, we did begin to talk to each other again and we’re on better relations now. But that intramural, inter-family conflict of the 16th century was hardly a crisis at all compared with the crisis of modernity, the modern period when we began to use our critical faculties, our reason, to ask questions about the reality of which we are a part. It had two dimensions, as I have been stressing these last weeks. There is the rise of the natural sciences through the exercise of the scientific method, inductive reasoning, observation, investigation, experimentation, actually looking at what is there, testing, experimenting, drawing conclusions, hypotheses, building models. The tremendous success of the natural sciences is the verification of the usefulness and legitimacy of that method of investigation. But the 17th century scientific revolution that continued apace was marked in the 18th century by the Enlightenment, that Age of Reason with which this nation was born, the Age of Reason which saw the autonomy of the human person coming from under the authoritarian claim of Church or Bible, the monarchies, the political arrangements, the throwing off of all authoritarian structures and the human being standing in his or her own light, guided by the light of human reason. That critical rationality continued to ferment until the whole of European culture and this nation, as well, the West, was marked by historical thinking, historical consciousness. Thought was now given to the origin of institutions and to dogmatic structures - how were they put together? The Bible - how did we get this canon? Who wrote what to whom, for what reason, what motivation, when, etc. Critical thinking issued in a sense of history, the historical method being just the common sense method in which we all operate in every other aspect of our lives, and that method came to expression in a thinker such as Ernst Troeltsch at the beginning of the 20th century. The end of the 19th century brought about the obvious conclusion that all of history is relative, that all of history is development, that history is process, that all of us who are a part of the historical process have no vantage point from which to climb in order to view it all and see it as God sees it, but rather, we’re all caught up in it. Ernst Troeltsch did not deny an absolute, but he did deny the possibility of any historical person or institution having a grasp of the absolute, for what we learned was that we all have but a relative glimpse of that absolute, and that our context, our time and our place in history shape the lens through which we view reality. Therefore, in the last decades of the 19th century, there arose the History of Religions School, the first scientific endeavor in the West to come to understand the nature of religion and to, with exposure to the other great world traditions, see that Christianity was not alone, but rather there were other great traditions that had deep spiritual authenticity and, therefore, it was impossible anymore to speak of the exclusivity of the Christian faith or the absoluteness of the Christian faith over against all other faiths. These were the problems, the issues with which Troeltsch wrestled. © Grand Valley State University �You Can Never Go Home Richard A. Rhem Page 3   The nineteenth century had been a century of intense theological conversation, debate, discussion, controversy, and European culture had blossomed into the magnificent thing that it was, literally, culturally, its music, its art, its theological investigations, its great universities. And then, of course, as the 20th century dawned, the first decade of this century brought the First World War. It was as though European culture had come under judgment, that it was tired, and there was a brilliant student who had the finest of European education, a young Swiss ordained pastor called to a little village in Switzerland; his name was Karl Barth, whom we know in retrospect. If you want to take the great leaps of theological minds you jump from St. Paul to St. Augustine to John Calvin to Karl Barth, the most influential, powerful theologian of the 20th century. He came to this little village church as a young ordinand, stood in the pulpit and, as he describes it himself, he had nothing to preach. With all of the brilliance of his education and of his mind and of his culture, of his heritage, he stood before the people with an open Bible and then had no message. He probably was reflective of that generation, that century that is described by A. N. Wilson in a recent book, God’s Funeral - the lost faith, the tiredness of the 19th century in its struggle to believe in the face of modernity. And then Karl Barth began to study, to wrestle, to pray. He had a friend in another village; they began to converse and communicate together, they struggled together with trying to have an understanding of this Christian faith, trying to find a voice into which to bring it to fresh expression. After ten years of that, he published in 1919 the Epistle to the Romans, which was like a bombshell on the European scene. Barth affirmed the godness of God. Barth affirmed the reality of revelation, that God speaks, that God speaks, that there is a word of God in the midst of the human situation. With great daring, with great power, with great joy and freedom, Barth turned the theological world upside down. He flew square in the face of modernity. Whereas Schleiermacher attempted to root religion in the human being and find a new authority, whereas Troeltsch recognized the historicity of Christian faith and its relativity, Barth just plain proclaimed the word of God in the midst of history, full of judgment, condemning all that was human, and then taking it all back with the gracious embrace of God. It was a message of the word of God. Barth is the one who formulated that rather neat understanding of the threefold word of God - the word in flesh, the word incarnate, John 1:14, “The word became flesh and dwelt among us.” And he said the word written, the Hebrew Scriptures were a word of anticipation, and the New Testament documents were a word of recollection, but it all centered in the word made flesh. There was revelation. There was the incarnation of God in the humanity of Jesus Christ, the word written, anticipating, recollecting, and then the word written becoming the occasion for this moment, the word preached. Barth made a very presumptuous, arrogant claim that the preached word is as much the word of God as the word written, as the word in flesh, that the word in © Grand Valley State University �You Can Never Go Home Richard A. Rhem Page 4   flesh pointed to by the word written continues to be pointed to by the word preached. Revelation continues to happen now and again, here and there, who knows when. When the breath of the Spirit blows, the word of the preacher becomes for this one or that one the very word of God. That was Barth. It must have been a lot like Jeremiah who understood the word of God as a hammer that breaks the rock and as a fire that consumes the chaff, an understanding of the word such as the writer to the Hebrews who said the word of God is sharper than a two-edged sword dividing the bone and marrow, discerning the very thoughts and intents of the human heart. The word of God. Who knows when it will sound? Who knows where it will strike? The fact is that God speaks and with daring and boldness and joy and freedom and power. Barth announced the infinite, eternal Creator of all has invaded our space and speaks, still judging and gracing. When I went to Europe in 1967 at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands, Karl Barth was within a year of his death. I wish I had hopped a train to go down and at least try to touch the hem of his garment. But my professor Berkhof was a good friend and colleague of Barth, so I got about as close as I could without having been there. And in 1968 (I still have the newspaper clipping with his picture and eulogy from the Leiden Daily), Karl Barth died. I went to a memorial service at Leiden where a professor of the theological faculty said, whatever future theology transpires, the theologian will never be able to go over Barth or under Barth or around Barth, but will have to go through Barth. In other words, before you can speak a word theologically, you had better understand the wrestling and the struggling of this giant who was used of God in such a powerful way. By the time I got to Europe, the students of Karl Barth were filling the chairs of theology in the prestigious universities of the continent, and the students of Barth were beginning to turn back to the questions that Barth had simply obliterated. The students of Barth who were now the professors of the universities were beginning to ask again the questions with which Ernst Troeltsch had wrestled because those questions were not invented, they were not a temporary incidental kind of thing, they were the questions that had arisen out of the modern, critical mentality, the critical rationality that was marking everything else in the whole world - those questions for a generation could be silenced by the wonderful, powerful, humorous, humane, brilliant voice of Barth. But his students had to revisit Troeltsch and Schleiermacher and go back again and face the questions of modernity, because if you don’t have the power, the daring, and the brilliance of a Barth simply to overpower, then you have to engage in dialogue and conversation and before long you have to deal again with the questions that are really the questions. So, when I got there, one of the first books I had to read was entitled The New Hermeneutic. I went to Berkhof after reading it for my appointment and he said, “How did it go,” and I said, “I have never read anything so difficult in © Grand Valley State University �You Can Never Go Home Richard A. Rhem Page 5   all my life.” The students of Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, a New Testament scholar, the students were now forming a movement that was called The New Quest of the Historical Jesus, and that new quest continues to this day. We’ve had John Dominic Crossan here, we’ve had Marcus Borg here, because the questions of modernity are the questions that all of us have to face, because our world, this fascinating world of which we are a part, is so other than the world in which our faith structures came to expression. They need a new voice; they need a translation. I went back to Europe, as you may remember, in 1994 when my old professor in his 80th year was celebrated at the University. He was in a nursing home at the time and I got a chance to spend an hour and a half with him at what I knew would be my last personal encounter. He was telling me about his younger days when Karl Barth was the coming rage in Europe. He told me about his professor who heard that Berkhof was coming under the influence of Barth and he took Berkhof aside and warned him about Barth, and Henk Berkhof laughed a bit and said, “I didn’t like that very much.” I said to him, “Henk, as I see you here now, I see you looking more to Barth than I remember.” He said, “Ja, maybe so.” I said, “You know, I feel so close to you and yet, I feel like we’re in a really tight circle together, but you’re looking one way and I’m looking the other.” He said, “Say that again.” I said, “Well, I see you looking back and I have to be honest, I’m looking this way.” He said, “That’s good. That’s right. You must always go beyond your teacher.” That’s a blessed teacher to have who encourages that. Hans Küng, in his Theology for the Third Millennium, concludes with a discussion of Karl Barth. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Barth. Barth wrote the introduction to his dissertation. Küng admired Barth very greatly and he wrote, “But, if he could do it over again, Karl Barth would begin all over again. This time he would do it on a historically, critically shaped foundation, different from that which he did in the early part of the century, because, you see, history moves and times are different and the context is different.” But, he had enough confidence in a Karl Barth to believe that if he could do it over again, he wouldn’t do it the same way because he wouldn’t be doing it in the same context, against the same fronts. He would have another word to say. © Grand Valley State University �You Can Never Go Home Richard A. Rhem Page 6   Someone gave me a copy this week of Forbes Magazine’s big issue No. 4. The theme of this one is “Convergence.” There is a multitude of literary, scientific, religious, all kinds of leading lights who write a page or six, but the theme of it all is Convergence, how everything is coming together and that the Internet on which we are only in the opening stages will continue to transform our reality into a global neighborhood such as even those who began to talk about globalization couldn’t have conceived. Edward O. Wilson, from Harvard, the biologist Nobel Prize winner, great scholar, writes one or two pages in which he suggests that everything finally will fold into biology and he says, as far as he’s concerned, even philosophy and religion will be explained eventually in terms of neuro-connections in the brain, brain science, and so forth. I read that stuff and I think, thank God I can read it without being afraid. I hear the angels’ words, “Fear not,” because if my religious experience is the consequence of some chemical reactions in my brain, then I would guess that it is consequence of some creative process of billions of years that has brought us to this point of conscious and self-transcendence, consciousness of the other, and then the question of the Other, and the Mystery of our existence. I refuse to live in any kind of denial of any kind of knowledge that is available anywhere and in any discipline. If I have to have my religion while closing my eyes or stopping my ears, that’s when I’ll give it up. But I don’t believe I have to give it up because one time, in the doldrums and the decadence of early twentieth-century European culture, there was one raised up whose voice rocked the earth with the declaration that God speaks, and that the word of God is a hammer that breaks the rock and the fire that consumes the chaff, that is sharper than a two-edged sword to discern the thoughts and intents of the human heart. Revelation isn’t over. The future - who can predict the fascinating development, the unfolding of this drama of which we are a part? Aren’t you glad you’re alive - to see it, to witness it, to participate in it? We can do it all with freedom and with joy, with confidence, always hearing the word of our Lord, “Be not afraid. Be not afraid.” Once, of course, your eyes are opened, you can never go home. Küng concludes his book, Theology for the Third Millennium, by saying we can’t go back to Augustine or Aquinas or Calvin or Schleiermacher or Barth. It’s always forward. References: Karl Barth. Epistle to the Romans. Oxford University Press, 1968. Hans Küng. Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View. Anchor, reprint edition, 19900. © Grand Valley State University � https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7201c2f83f5a74cbe1c5a3f139a015c3.mp3 daef7b059640c7eb558e5b56e1ef4772 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Pentecost XXI Series Good News Then and Now Scripture Text Jeremiah 23:23-32, Hebrews 4:12-13, John 1:1-5, 10-14 Location The location of the interview Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI References Karl Barth. Epistle to the Romans, 1968 Hans K Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-19991010 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999-10-10 Title A name given to the resource You Can Never Go Home Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 application/pdf Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on October 10, 1999 entitled "You Can Never Go Home", as part of the series "Good News Then and Now", on the occasion of Pentecost XXI, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Jeremiah 23:23-32, Hebrews 4:12-13, John 1:1-5, 10-14. Church Critical Thinking Modernity Revelation https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/f5e9e7e81d9540b9cb3d7f45b34cbe4f.pdf c163693eaa6d4e74bfa4e331b9a3bb73 PDF Text Text Where Do I Stand When the Foundation Gives Way? From the series: Good News Then and Now Jeremiah 7:4; Luke 20:2 Richard A. Rhem Christ Community Church Spring Lake, Michigan August 29, 1999 Transcription of the spoken sermon We are on a 2000-year journey, a 2000-year survey of the history of Christian doctrine, or as it is called, the history of dogma, and we are looking at the history of doctrinal development because I want to demonstrate to you that, if we are about the re-imagining of the faith for our day, we are only doing what has always been done, not always voluntarily, but out of necessity, the need to continue to reinterpret the event of God in Jesus Christ in every new age and historical context in order that it might make sense, in order that it might be meaningful, in order that it might be transformative. We noted three weeks ago that the formation of Christian doctrine arose out of that first great crisis of the Christian Church, the Jesus movement poised for the imminent return of Jesus as the Lord of Glory to judge the earth, which didn’t happen. And that early Church, confident that the end of the age was so near, had never contemplated having to live in history. What did the event of Jesus Christ mean, if history was ongoing? What did it mean, then, to be a Christian, a follower of Jesus in a world that obviously wasn’t ending? Out of that initial crisis came the formation of the early Catholic tradition, which did not come about easily. To read those stories of the post-Apostolic Church is to read of tremendous conflict, tremendous division, great tensions, outstanding leaders on respective sides of issues trying to hammer out what in the world God had done in this Jesus. The Church eventually regularized itself. It took some centuries, and finally it established what it believed about what God had done in Jesus: thus, the appearance of orthodoxy, that is, proper belief, correct belief. And also, the possibility of heresy, for now there was a line set down, there were boundaries drawn, and those who were outside of the pale were marked as heretical to the established, accepted faith of the Church. That early Church, we noted a couple of weeks ago, began to take on some stature and it was greatly enhanced when the Emperor Constantine converted and when a successor established Christianity as the religion of the empire. The establishment of Christianity, which I was taught was a great providential act of © Grand Valley State University   �When the Foundation Gives Way Richard A. Rhem Page 2   God, might well have been the point at which the Church began to lose its soul because, with its establishment, now having the power of the throne behind it, it grew not only in its faith understanding, but in power, and with power came eventual degeneration and decay and corruption (you learned about that last week), an institution that became so insensitive to the needs of people that it could no longer deal with the human experience of one like Martin Luther, whose experience was the catalyst for the shattering of the institution and the emergence of the Protestant tradition. Now we have three major Church families. In 1054, Eastern Orthodoxy and the Roman Catholic Latin tradition came apart; the Pope excommunicated the Patriarch, the Patriarch returned the favor, and from that point on, 1054, the 11thcentury, the Christian Church, which until that time had been one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, became Eastern and Western. Now in the 16th century, with the shattering of the Western Church and the emergence of Protestantism, there was born a third major family and we have it to this day, three major groupings, Protestantism having continued to splinter until we could sing the song, "It’s a Many-Splintered Thing." But, while there were differences between those three bodies, they maintained the core that was arrived at in those early centuries, the doctrine of the Trinity, the two natures of Jesus Christ, truly God, truly human, and much else they shared. But, there were differences, as well, and good reason for division, of course. But, there was one thing in which Orthodoxy, the Roman Catholic Church and Protestantism were totally agreed, and that was that they were institutions with absolute authority. If you ask an Orthodox Patriarch, he would say the authority is in the ongoing tradition of the Church. If you would ask the Pope in Rome, he would say the authority is in the teaching office of the Church which he embodies. If you would ask John Calvin or Martin Luther, they would have said the authority lies in the written word of God. Whether it was tradition or Church or Bible, the whole Christian Church in the 16th century was a Church that was marked by authoritarian claim, the claim that the content of its faith was the consequence of a supernatural revelation from heaven, and what the Church taught was to be accepted on the basis of authority, believed, and obeyed, not questioned. You did not need to think; you only needed to understand what was already given, what was proclaimed, what was declared, the dogmatic foundation of the Church. Then the modern era dawned. Whenever one does a periodization of history, there will be fuzzy boundaries and some disagreement, but I think that we can say without too much fear of refutation that the modern era of which we are still a part, although people talk about the post-modern phase we’re in, nonetheless, we are modern people and the modern era began about 1650, the middle point of the 17th century to the present, and the modern period was marked by the throwing off of all forms of authoritarian claim and the insistence on the empirical observation and investigation of all truth claims. While that modern movement © Grand Valley State University �When the Foundation Gives Way Richard A. Rhem Page 3   began with the advent of the natural sciences, and Francis Bacon formulated the scientific method in the early stages, those scientific investigations did not seem to challenge Church doctrine, but what happened immediately was a new way of thinking, a new way of knowing, and the movement from the medieval world to the modern world represents a seismic shift in human history and human culture. Modernity, of which we are a part, is marked by critical thinking. We don’t take statements, dogmatic statements or claims just because they are uttered on the basis of some authority, be it tradition or Church or Bible. We investigate; we experiment; we think critically about the question, and this is so much a part of us that we don’t even think about it. It is that which marks the whole modern period and it marks you and me in all the rest of our lives, except not always in our religious experience. But that seismic shift in culture, in the way of knowing and what could be known, marked the beginning of a serious challenge to the Christian tradition. Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher of great fame, demolished the proofs for the existence of God, the philosophical proofs for the existence of God. His purpose was positive; he was not anti-religious, but he wanted to show that that way of thinking, thinking then that we had proved God’s existence, was a dead end. He said, “I have destroyed knowledge in order to make room for faith.” There was a young preacher in Berlin at that time who read Kant, imbibed Kant, and recognized that the nub of the problem for the Christian tradition, now that the modern age had dawned, was the question of authority. Friedrich Schleiermacher was a brilliant, witty, socially desirable kind of an individual who was assigned to be the preacher in a great hospital in Berlin, and was invited into the social circles of that great city. He was a preacher, he was a Christian, he was brilliant (sounds like an oxymoron, but in this case, that was true), and the cultured, educated, sophisticated society of Berlin invited him to be a part of their circles. They enjoyed him, and he ran with them very well. But he was a Christian, he was a preacher, and on his 29th birthday they surprised him with a party and they gave him a challenge and said, "Write an account of how you can still be religious, Christian, a preacher." He accepted the challenge and at the age of 31 published what is now a classic, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers. He knew his friends. He knew what they thought of him; he knew they thought religion was passé, and he took the challenge right to them. He began in the first speech, of which there are five, by saying to them, "Look, relax. I’m not going to quote the Bible; I’m not going to quote the Church; I’m not going to quote the tradition. I am going to speak to you as a human being; I am going to speak out of my experience, and what I am going to say to you is rooted in my own being, in my own experience." Then he took off, and in so doing, what Schleiermacher did was to turn the whole tradition of the Christian Church 180 degrees for, up until that time, until the modern era, and even at his time and even to the present, the Church, by and large across the board, has operated on the basis of authoritarian claims, some divine revelation that has come out of heaven embodied in a tradition, in a Church, in a book. © Grand Valley State University �When the Foundation Gives Way Richard A. Rhem Page 4   Schleiermacher gave all of that up, stood, as it were, naked before his friends, and claimed his faith and his religion as the authentic and deepest expression of his humanity. Schleiermacher recognized that Kant had blocked the road to dogmatic speculation and therefore if one was going to be religious after Kant, the ground of that religious experience would have to rest in the believing individual. And in very brilliant and sophisticated fashion, he argued for the rooting of religion in the human subject. His claim was that to be human is to have the feeling of absolute dependence. We didn’t create ourselves; we can’t sustain ourselves; we are totally dependent, totally dependent on some gracious ground that has given us life and supports and keeps us, and it was Schleiermacher’s contention that, in those moments when that sense of dependence comes into focus, one knows oneself to be in communion with God. God is that foundation, that infinite mystery that upholds all, the origin and foundation of all that is and, in the moments of our human dependency, almost mystical moments of awareness, one knows oneself dependent which, Schleiermacher says, is to know oneself to be in communion with God. That synopsis hardly does justice to what Schleiermacher did in a very profound fashion, but what he had done was radical, for he had moved from an authoritarian claim for religious truth to a personal testimony to its reality in his own experience. He is called the Father of Modern Theology because, in that significant shift, he made the whole game new, and he paved the way for the theological development of the last 200 years. You can cite all of the great names of the theologians who have spoken and written and you will find traces of Schleiermacher; he was the initiator. Of course, there was a counter to him; he was rejected by many. There was a reaction, a conservative reaction and an orthodox, confessional Church reaction against him, but nonetheless, he had sounded a new note and he had put his finger on the problem of modernity, an era in which we, as naturally as breathing, think, use our heads, use common sense, and he said that goes not only when you are sending a rocket to the moon or structuring a community education program, but that goes, as well, when you are seeking the communion of God. He would have agreed with the statement we used here a few weeks ago, that the heart cannot finally find true what the mind finds false. I find it fascinating, as I in my 64th year visit Schleiermacher seriously, that no one ever told me that the long and tortuous pilgrimage that has been my own to try to be a true believer with my mind engaged, was engaged and set forth powerfully and eloquently 200 years ago. There has been in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the Roman Catholic tradition, and the Protestant tradition, and all of its forms, mainline and fundamental (this is my contention now), there has been a continuing within a medieval mind set never yet facing the acids of modernity. I do not think the institutional Church as a whole has ever come to terms with the modern era marked by critical thinking, even though it was done beautifully 200 years ago. © Grand Valley State University �When the Foundation Gives Way Richard A. Rhem Page 5   Why didn’t Schleiermacher carry the day totally across the board? A question well worth contemplating. I really don’t know, but I know this matter of authority is absolutely critical and it’s not a new issue. The Hebrew prophets spoke a word from God, a word that possessed them. Jeremiah stood up on the Temple steps and said, "The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, you repeat this like a chant. You think your safety and security lies here. Let me tell you, God doesn’t need this institution. God doesn’t need your religious ritual. Go to Shiloh and see its ruins. See what I did there, and I’ll do it to your temple, too, because of a lack of authenticity in your religious life." Jesus was in the line of the prophets, and when he was engaged with the leaders of the religion of his day, they began to cross-examine him. They were lying in wait to catch him in everything he said. He cried out against the sterile formalism of that institutional religion and he became a very threatening voice in the midst of Jerusalem, coming finally to that last prophetic action when he cleansed the temple and that triggered the religious authorities to come and say just that, "By what authority do you do this?" And Jesus said, "Well, tell me about John the Baptist. What was his authority?" They didn’t dare answer because if they said from heaven, he would have said, "Why didn’t you follow him? Why didn’t you believe?" And if they said it’s a human authority, they would have been stoned by the people because John the Baptist also had a voice that had authenticity that resonated with people’s experience, that spoke to them where they were and they believed that he was a prophet of God. If you read through the Gospels, you find more than one reference where Jesus is spoken of as having the people spellbound because he spoke as one who had authority and not as the scribes and the Pharisees. Of course, it’s not an easy question; it’s not an easy problem, my friend. If you have an institutional church and you are responsible for the institution, then you can’t let any crackerjack come rolling through who has a vision. Or, at least, you have to discern whether or not this voice is a voice that rings with authenticity, or whether it’s just some fanatic. The question of authority is a critical question. How do you know? I submit to you that the problem of authority was dealt with in the only way it can be dealt with in a healthy fashion by Schleiermacher 200 years ago, whose authority, he said, rested in his own religious experience. Anything other than that will tend to sterility and rigidity and will end up killing the prophets. Schleiermacher is a marvelous figure, one of a small handful of truly great spirits in 2000 years and, as he spoke to his friends, the cultured despisers of religion, he laid his heart bare, and he said to them "You’ve rejected something, but what you have rejected is not the real thing. The real thing is that which makes you human; the real thing is that which gives depth, dimension to life; the real thing is that which unifies your experience and creates meaning; the real thing is the verve and the center and the joy of life. Without religion, you are simply an animal with reason." And he also believed in preaching; he was a great preacher, © Grand Valley State University �When the Foundation Gives Way Richard A. Rhem Page 6   a loved preacher, and he filled the Church in Berlin. He said to his people, "My preaching is simply my testimony, and that testimony triggers in others who desire a like kind of experience, and there is formed a community," and that very positive sense of his Christian experience and the shared experience of the community for which he was the preacher was so dynamic and so powerful in his day, and when at the age of 66 he died of a lung infection, there was weeping throughout the city; 20,000 to 30,000 people lined the streets as his coffin was moved through the streets, and they wept from every window and every balcony because this man had spoken to them, not of some hollow religious experience, but something that touched them in the depths of their being, enabling them, in a modern age marked by critical thinking, yet to find experience of that intimate and mysterious ground of all being, full of grace, which for Schleiermacher and the Christian church was embodied in Jesus. Why? Why have we not been able in 200 years to do as he did? Why, out of fear and reaction, do we trundle back into fundamentalism and absolute claims, when if we would only trust our experience, we would know the touch of grace of the living God and live with hope and joy? References: Friedrich Schleiermacher. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers, 1797. © Grand Valley State University � https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/2c686ac5433457c1ac38324b75975dd7.mp3 44884c4ec4abf724bc282b6c589769d3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Pentecost XV Series Good News Then and Now Scripture Text Jeremiah 7:4, Luke 20:2 Location The location of the interview Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI References Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers, 1797. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-19990829 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999-08-29 Title A name given to the resource Where Do I Stand When the Foundation Gives Way? Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 application/pdf Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on August 29, 1999 entitled "Where Do I Stand When the Foundation Gives Way?", as part of the series "Good News Then and Now", on the occasion of Pentecost XV, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Jeremiah 7:4, Luke 20:2. Authority Critical Thinking History of Christian Dogma Modernity https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a282073125ad06716d898081fd9342b9.pdf c9ef93ce3a4d2744c467cac32b437074 PDF Text Text The Heart Cannot Rest Where the Mind Cannot Follow From the series: Moving On To Maturity Text: Isaiah 44:18; Ephesians 4:13; Matthew 5:48 Richard A. Rhem Christ Community Church Spring Lake, Michigan Pentecost VIII, July 11, 1999 Transcription of the spoken sermon As the children leave the sanctuary, the words of the old Spiritual come to me, "Give me that old time religion; give me that old time religion; it was good enough for my mother; it was good enough for my sister; it was good enough for my brother, and it's good enough for me." Well, we've all sung it and I think we can understand and feel some of the emotion that is behind that old Spiritual, but I will say this morning quite clearly and straightforwardly that the old time religion isn't good enough for me. It's not really that it's not good enough for me; it's just simply that it no longer works for me. The old time religion can no longer resonate with my knowledge and my human experience, that manner in which it sought to express the reality of the living God and the embrace of God, of the cosmic reality of which we are a part. It no longer tracks with what I understand about myself, about the world, about history, about God. And so, the old time religion comes up short in my experience and I want to speak about that this morning as I begin a new series of messages on "Moving On to Maturity." Moving on to maturity, or growing up as people of faith. I have experienced a freedom to address these issues in the last year and a half, which is a freedom that I didn't know that I didn't have before. When people ask me, "How are you doing," I say, "Just great," and they say, "Really, how are you doing?" And if they really want to know, then I use the phrase which many of you have heard me say, "I have a freedom that I didn't know I didn't have." That's quite a remarkable experience, because I had always felt free in my thinking and in my preaching, and you as a congregation had always encouraged and affirmed that freedom to probe and to wrestle and to question and to wonder. But I now recognize, in retrospect, that I was not totally free because I was always trying to express my best understanding and insights within a certain box, within a certain confessional home. There were certain parameters against which I was always testing my struggle to understand, and, of course, that's not all bad. In fact, such freedom as I have now in this independent status in which we find ourselves has perils that go along with it. There is a real danger in the non-accountability of my © Grand Valley State University   �The Heart Cannot Rest … Richard A. Rhem Page 2   present situation. I am aware of that and you need to be aware of that, too. There is the voice of an old professor always ringing in my mind who used to say, "Beware of the perils of independency." I have always affirmed the importance of ecclesiastical connection, but I must say to you, for the time being at least, I am savoring the freedom and enjoying it very much. I got a visit from my computer son from Florida who got me the computer against any indication that I would ever be able to use it. It has sat moribund on my desk for a couple of years. But, since he was just here, once again he forced me to learn how to read my mail and, thinking that perhaps having just learned it anew, I probably ought to practice it a couple of times, last night in order to avoid working on the sermon, I punched the computer on and I read my mail, and I had this long letter from Pilgrim out east in Maine, a Congregational minister who said that you are a marvelous community of people, and he said, "For a year and a half now I've been taking your sermons off the Internet and while I don't agree with everything, they're always stimulating and provocative," and he went on to affirm us and then he went on to say, "And why I am now contacting you is that we were a congregation who forty years ago as a Congregational Church didn't go into the union with the Reformed, German Reformed Church to form the United Church of Christ." And he says the Congregational churches that didn't go into that merger formed an alliance called the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, and he said, "From what I sense on the Internet about Christ Community, it's a place where you could feel at home. It has great diversity of theological opinion, and the reason we didn't go into the merger was because we value congregational autonomy." Well, it's a very nice letter and I will respond to him. I will say to him, "Thank you very much, and it sounds as though you have the best offer going. But now, in the springtime of my senility, sliding toward summer, I am having the time of my life, and I have no right to determine the future of this congregation forever, but just for a little while I want to be free." Now, that's a kind of freedom that I didn't know that I didn't have, and I acknowledge its perils and its dangers because a person in my position can lead a people astray, can abuse, can exploit, and without a system of accountability, where might one go? The only thing that causes me not to worry too much about this congregation is the fact that nobody's going to lead you blindfolded anywhere. I wish you could all know all the stories of the people that joined this faith community today. You are people who are here very intentionally and very deliberately precisely because you want to think and wrestle and struggle and come to your own religious experience, your own Christian experience, and you have thrown off that mantle of authoritarianism that has marked the Church traditionally. You, I believe, are mature and maturing people, and I think it's time for us to move on to maturity altogether, and in doing that very deliberately and very self-consciously, moving on. © Grand Valley State University �The Heart Cannot Rest … Richard A. Rhem Page 3   The title of this first sermon in the series indicates what I want to say and that is that the heart cannot rest where the mind cannot follow. The heart in terms of the whole being, our whole being, our intuitive sense of what is and what is true and what is real - that heart cannot dwell or rest where the mind cannot follow. I put the title in quite a long time ago and I was remembering the statement that I read in a book a lot longer time ago and I thought I was quoting the statement correctly. Last night I pulled the old book off the shelf and paged through to see if I could find that statement again. I found it and I found out I had misquoted it. The statement really is, "The heart cannot finally find true what the mind finds false." That's a better statement; that's sharper and that says precisely what I want to say to you this morning as we think about moving on to maturity. The heart, the being, our total being cannot finally find true what our minds find false. And that's the problem with religion. It's the problem of the Church. It's the problem of every religious institution and every world religion. It is endemic to the religious experience, that tension between what the heart finds true and what the mind knows. The mind deals with the stuff of everyday reality and there has been an explosion of knowledge and a cumulative human learning by this time in the cosmic journey. It is just fantastic and it continues to float all over the place. And the mind takes all that in, but then, also plays it off against the faith structure, the creedal condition, the confessional statements, and there is conflict. And what I want to say to you this morning as an expression of the freedom that I am sensing is that I delight to address these things, not in some manner in which I would imply that I have grasped all the facets of truth or that I sort of have a handle on this thing, but this morning I want to say to you that I will never preach to you what my heart cannot finally find true. And my heart will not be able, finally, to find true what my mind finds false. Now, it's taken me 39 years to say that. All of the past time trying always to translate that Gospel message within certain parameters and then suddenly to come to this giddy experience of saying, "What do I really believe?" and daring to share it, hoping to encourage you, maybe even inspire you, stimulate you, to be provocative in your own experience, but not as an authority. Ah, you say, "You're an authority figure and you can't get away from it." I refuse the office. I'm a pilgrim with you. I will not be your authority. I'm going to think with you; I'm going to share with you the best insights I have, but you can listen and you can filter and I hope that you will be stimulated in your own pilgrimage to move from secondhand religion to firsthand experience. That's the problem with religion, of course. It begins with an explosion, with a fire. Someone has a vision. God knocks someone off their horse, prostrate on the ground, a burning bush, whatever it may be. A word made flesh, and that explosion, that fire, that flame engulfs and sweeps, but eventually the initial fire begins to dampen, to be banked, to die down, and then those who have been caught in the explosion begin to wonder what in the world happened, and the © Grand Valley State University �The Heart Cannot Rest … Richard A. Rhem Page 4   experience, then, begins to be distilled for certain truths that can be stated rationally, reasonably. So now, we have an experience that cannot really be communicated, but, having to be communicated, having to be told, shared, and so we do the best we can to distill what we can from the explosion and say this and that and so forth. There is a real tension in the beginning, differing opinions, alternative systems. There's a conflict going on, but eventually, some party or some person gets the upper hand and the truth is defined. That's what we call orthodoxy. You know what orthodoxy is. Well, you know what orthodontists do? They straighten your teeth. You know what orthopedic surgeons do? They realign a cracked bone. You know what an orthodox preacher does? He keeps you thinking right. Ortho - straight or correct. Doxa - from dokein, to think. The orthodox church is a church in which people are nurtured, trained, schooled and controlled to think right. Orthodoxy has the truth defined rationally. This explosion, this experience that burst forth gets domesticated to a creedal statement, a confessional statement, and there is a right way to believe or to think. That is orthodoxy, and it is the inevitable movement of every religious movement. It is the necessity of every institutionalization of a religious movement and, to the extent that the distilled truth of the experience is clear and concise, to that extent it can be passed along and it will be successful and it will build a community of people, followers, and it will be a means for many for the stimulus of fresh experience. But, it will be the case with many, many more that it will simply be the second-hand creed that one received, that one inherited that was passed along to one and which one passes along. The problem with orthodoxy is the problem with secondhand religious experience that shuts off the possibility of continuing thought and growth and new adventure. Oh, there have been instances of movement. For example, the Genesis stories. If you have an Old King James Bible around, look in the column between the columns and you will see there 4004 B.C.. Bishop Usher, an English Bishop, went back and added up all the years of all the genealogies and he concluded that creation had to be 4004 B.C. And it was really a matter of creedal conviction for generations, and when Darwin came along in the 19th century and the whole evolutionary hypothesis was set forth, there was this intense struggle between science and religion. In fact, orthodoxy has had a tremendous problem in the whole modern period in the last four to five hundred years because orthodoxy is a rational statement of what is. It's no longer simply the experience, the fire, that which is deeper than the rational. It is a rational statement of what is. Now you have the whole advent of the natural sciences whose principle of verification is able to determine what is, empirically through experimentation. Religion and science have been in conflict and science will win every time as long as you are dealing on the rational basis, as long as you are dealing on propositional truths, claiming what is, what is reality, what is the human person, what has happened in history, etc., etc. © Grand Valley State University �The Heart Cannot Rest … Richard A. Rhem Page 5   The Church has made some progress because we have come to see the symbolic nature of those Genesis creation stories, and the roof hasn't caved in. Yet, here in 1999, there's a whole fundamentalist Christian movement that would have Creationism taught in the public schools. It seems impossible that that discussion could still be going on, but it is. In terms of the apocalypticism of the New Testament in several of its expressions, expecting the soon return of Jesus Christ - well, we've had to make adjustments to that because nothing has happened. But, here we are on the threshold of the third millennium and there are those who are still talking about the second coming of Christ in terms of this millennial turn. So, we are able to continue, to perpetuate anachronistic understandings and outmoded manners of faith to a remarkable degree in a world that is as open as ours where there is as much information around. This has been the ongoing problem of the orthodox Church, the orthodox expression of any religion. Correct thinking. But the world doesn't stop; history doesn't stop; human experience continues to go on and there is an accumulation of knowledge and experience, which finally has to shatter that little box of faith that has been given to us. And when that happens, one either leaves and drops out, and that's happened en masse, or one shuts off the mind, or one says, as I am saying to you this morning, my heart cannot dwell and affirm as true that which my mind finds to be false. But, if my experience, if the reality to which my whole being is drawn, in which it is grounded, embraced, if that total experience transcends my rational understanding, then I have to try to find a new way to say reasonably, understandably what that deeper experience is. That's my hope for all of us - that we will move on to maturity, that we will come to a deeper expression of our faith in order that we need not jettison that deep religious experience of the grace of God, nor live with our heads in the sand, failing to acknowledge that the old paradigms and stories are simply shot out of the water with everything that is coming to light in what we know about our world, about our history, about our person. Maturity, moving on with fresh experience and fresh faith expression - that's the goal. There is precedent for doing this. Jesus said, "It has been said, but I say unto you ...," and he called the people in the culminating point to that portion of the Sermon on the Mount where he calls for the loving even of enemies, saying, "Be ye therefore perfect..." a terrible translation filled with all the moralism that has been oppressive throughout all the centuries, "Be ye therefore perfect, as God is perfect?" No, that's not it. Telios is the Greek word. Be therefore mature, be ye therefore complete, as God is mature. Jesus is talking about a new being - a kingdom person in that Sermon on the Mount. He comes to this culminating point and says, "Be inclusive, not exclusive. No more tribalism, no more drawing circles around my little people, no more over-againstness, no more 'us and them.' For God's sake, love your enemies, as God loves all, for the rain falls on the just © Grand Valley State University �The Heart Cannot Rest … Richard A. Rhem Page 6   and the unjust and the sun shines on the good and the evil because there are no good and evil, just and unjust, but all human beings in various states of disarray who are embraced by the eternal God who created us." Jesus says love your enemies, embrace, be inclusive. Paul uses the same word, Telios. Jesus says be like God, be complete, be mature. Paul says in the 13th verse of Ephesians 4, "Come to maturity." Grow up. No more children blown about by every wind of doctrine. Grow up! Think! Because the passion of Paul, the vision of Paul came to expression in that third chapter, the 14th verse following where he says, "I pray for you that you be rooted and grounded in love, that you'll come to know the length and the breadth and the height and the depth of the love of God, that you will come to know all the fullness of God. That's what I want for you." He recognizes that it is a process, but he says, "Move on to maturity; be mature in Christ Jesus." I don't know, but I wonder how long – even with the institutional structures and the momentum that they create and the power they possess and the control they have over many – many people can go on. Can the heart find truth where the mind finds falsehood? Do we not have to enter this world of ours and open our eyes and take it all in and then know that, beneath it all, above it all, and beyond it all is the eternal God whose grace is an experience of the heart far beyond a set of rational propositions? If I were to put it in sum this morning, I would say, on the basis of what Jesus says, and what Paul says in our text – "Be open-minded." “It has been said, I say to you ...” – to make that transition you have to have an open mind. Don't tell me it was Jesus, the son of God and therefore, it doesn't apply to the rest of us. Jesus, with all of the limitations of his humanity, had the courage to give expression to something new. "It has been said, I say unto you ..." Be of broad and liberal spirit, embrace, do not exclude, love your enemies, be done with tight tribalism, narrow ethnicism, destructive nationalism. Stop drawing lines unless the circle embraces the whole human family. And, trust deeply. Trust deeply. Let it wash through your mind and over your heart that you are rooted and grounded in love, that love is the ultimate reality. The French thinker, Pascal, said it better than I can say it. "If one subjects everything to reason, our religion will lose its mystery. If one offends the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous. There are two equally dangerous extremes - to shut reason out and to let nothing else in." Let us go on to maturity. No more studied ambiguity; no more word games; just plain-speaking, because the deepest truth of this place, for better or for worse, because it is the deepest truth of this preacher is that the heart cannot finally find true what the mind finds false. © Grand Valley State University � https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/efa3f6cd9f7580faa58c1ffe4278378d.mp3 2140889e936e676e5c7e71bde19602d8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Pentecost VIII Series Moving On To Maturity Scripture Text Isaish 44:18: Ephesians 4:13, Matthew 5:48 Location The location of the interview Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-19990711 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999-07-11 Title A name given to the resource The Heart Cannot Rest Where the Mind Cannot Follow Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 application/pdf Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on July 11, 1999 entitled "The Heart Cannot Rest Where the Mind Cannot Follow", as part of the series "Moving On To Maturity", on the occasion of Pentecost VIII, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Isaish 44:18: Ephesians 4:13, Matthew 5:48. Critical Thinking Inclusive Grace Orthodoxy https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/bdfd6929f469b9879237b6dec7866225.pdf 268c849bddaf0a8f91cdde2291f53b3c PDF Text Text Do I Need Religion? From the series: Can I Honestly Believe? Text: Psalm 8:1; Psalm 42:2; Acts 17:22 Richard A. Rhem Christ Community Church Spring Lake, Michigan July 12, 1998 Transcription of the spoken sermon I announced a summer series in a recent Courier entitled With Heart and Mind United. I cited a sermon from 1984 with that theme. In that sermon, I pointed back to my return to this congregation in 1971 when we determined to be a congregation marked by intellectual integrity and evangelical passion. We have been on such an adventure of faith now for over twenty-seven years. When I determined the series theme for this summer, it was not a case of conscious recycling; rather, it was a determination to do once again what we have been engaged in over all these years - to understand the faith we profess and live, to bring our experience of God, of the sacred, the Holy, into connection with the whole reality of our human experience. Working over that theme, I have named the series Can I Honestly Believe? By that I mean, can I as a person at the end of the twentieth century, aware of the universe of which I am a part, still believe in God as Source, Guide, and Goal of all that is, to paraphrase St. Paul? Faith, religious awe, worship and devotional practices arise from our depths, not from rational analysis; we will never by exercise of our reason be able fully to explain the human experiences of the Mystery we call God. In a 1917 classic study of religion, Rudolf Otto wrote on the idea of the Holy, the description of the experience of the Holy or a God as the ganz andere, the wholly Other, that mystery beyond that breaks through to us but, breaking through to us, making us unalterably aware of the reality in the presence, remains the hidden one, the hidden mystery. The religious experience, Otto describes very, very wonderfully when he says, it is ... the feeling that remains where the concept fails. It is an experience that transcends the possibility of conceptualizing it, articulating it, putting it into idea form. But, put it into idea form, we will. We seem to have to do that. We will try to understand. The understanding is never the same as the experience in itself, but © Grand Valley State University   �Do I Need Religion? Richard A. Rhem Page 2   being human as we are, rational creatures, reflective, self-conscious, we will inevitably think about and seek to bring to expression at least in some symbolic form that which will point beyond itself to the experience that has broken in upon us. That seems to be the universal human experience, and that is the origin of religion. Religion has at least these three basic components: There is that which is believed, or the doctrine. There is the mode of worship, devotion, practice, the ritual, the liturgy, which seeks to be an expression, an action that gives expression to the idea. And then, there is the drawing out of the implications of the experience for daily living, or ethics. So, doctrine or theology, cult or worship, ethics or morality - that’s the nature of human religion. I have said this before a number of times, but I’m going to say it again until you wake up in the middle of the night and repeat it to yourself - religion is a human, creative construction. Religions don’t fall out of heaven full-blown. We make them up. Not arbitrarily or capriciously, but we make them up in response to the in-breaking of the sacred or the Holy or God, the experience that is still there when the concept fails, but the experience that drives us to seek to articulate the nature of it. We construct our human religion in response to the in-breaking of the mystery that is God. Therefore, and this is critical, the knowledge of the world, the universe, the human being and society, in a word – the worldview, because it provides the framework of human religion and will from time to time move beyond an earlier understanding, will leave the religious structure, imagery and symbol with a framework that no longer makes sense. For a time the religious community will do a translation - the three-storied universe heaven earth hell is translated into modern cosmology with meanings spiritualized. But, at some point, a symbol system breaks down and it no longer speaks, it can no longer point beyond itself to the Ultimate. Then one must decide - either to chuck religion as nonsense, or to recognize that an outmoded structure does not spell the death of God. Edward O. Wilson, in his recently published book, Consilience, talks about his experience as a good Southern Baptist lad who went through the evangelical experience of conversion and all the rest, but having a curious mind from the © Grand Valley State University �Do I Need Religion? Richard A. Rhem Page 3   beginning, eventually went off to school where he says, "I chose to doubt." Then, in his distinguished career as a biologist who recognized the place of religion in people’s lives, he recognized the importance of religion in giving orientation, in giving meaning, significance to life, and so forth. But he also recognized that he was one person who could not continue to understand reality as continually being unfolded in our presence before the pursuit of the natural scientist and still somehow or other believe that there was a literal anchoring of conceptuality back 2000 or 3000 years. He refused to believe that the final revelation of God was put in stone by an agricultural culture 2000 years ago at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. He experienced cognitive dissonance. Wilson raises the interesting question whether science, the examination and exploration of reality, may not be a continuation of "Holy Writ," only on better tested ground. He suggests the data of scientific investigation may play the role that once revelation played in religion - satisfying the religious hunger to know one’s place in the universe. So far, the theory of everything has eluded even the great intellects of an Einstein and a Hawking. And if one day the unity of knowledge becomes a reality, even then one will have to choose whether or not behind it is still the Mystery that manifests itself, yet remains hidden. The questions we will be asking this summer are questions that arise because our religious system, its imagery, symbol and conceptuality derives from another time, based on an outmoded worldview. Therefore, in Wilson’s terms, there is widespread cognitive dissonance. Many have simply given up religious faith. Some of us struggle to bring religious experience into meaningful conversation with our present knowledge of the world. That is my challenge for this summer season. But, the question arises: Do I need it? - Not if my religious practice was only a way to please a God Who might condemn me to eternal punishment. - Not if I practice religious devotion just to cover the bases, just in case ... I read last night again The Grand Inquisitor, by Dostoevsky. Chilling, chilling! Jesus appears in Seville, Spain, during the time of the Inquisition. They had just burned 100 heretics at the stake and Jesus appears before a crowd of people and the Cardinal, the church ecclesiast, sees him, has him thrown into jail, then goes to speak with him, and tells him how the freedom of which Jesus spoke and for which he gave his life cannot be handled by the people. The people need authority. They live by miracle, mystery, and authority. Let them submit. Let them be slaves, simply obedient, unthinking. Give them bread. That’s what the © Grand Valley State University �Do I Need Religion? Richard A. Rhem Page 4   masses need, not the freedom of spirit of which Jesus spoke and incarnated. And then the Cardinal says, after Jesus refuses to respond, but only arises and plants a kiss on the wizened old face, the Cardinal says, "Get out! Get out and never return!" Well, we don’t need a lot more of that religion, even though there’s a lot of it alive and well on Planet Earth. But, do we need it? No. No, not absolutely. But, I think that there’s a loss without it. There’s a loss to our humanity and a loss to world community. The scripture lessons were read to indicate different experiences of God. I’m used to watching the sunset. It’s been magnificent, but Friday morning I had to take Nancy to the airport early and I caught a sunrise. Huge, flaming globe just over the horizon. I said, "My goodness, it comes up like it goes down!" I’m not a morning person, but the sunset or the moon, the stars say, "O Lord, our Lord, how magnificent is your name in all of the earth. When I consider the stars, the moon, the wonder of it all, I say how small am I." The sense of humility and smallness before the vastness, the wonder of the world. But, I am a little less than God! How can I give expression to that in a secular fashion? What if I can’t sing? What if I have no song, no songwriter, and no one to whom to sing? Or, in life’s anxieties and depression, the hunger for God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. Or, like Isaiah, to come someday and to have the place filled with smoke and to hear the rumbling and to be encountered by the mystery, the fascinating and terrorizing mystery and to feel one’s own guilt and uncleanness and unworthiness, and then to hear the word, "You’re cleansed. Your sin is forgiven." And to be commissioned to significant living and service. You don’t need religion. But I believe that to fail seriously to engage, to practice, to be observant is a very great loss and leads to a truncated human experience and a distortion of all that we’re intended to be. Paul said to the Athenians, "You’re really religious. There’s an idol to an unknown God just in case you missed one." I don’t need that kind of religion. But, yesterday I had the privilege of being invited to the Bar Mitzvah of the son, David, of Rabbi Alan and Anna Alpert, and in that Jewish community again, on Bar Mitzvah day, which is high celebration, I felt the warmth, I felt the solidity of family and of community. I regret that I wasn’t born Jewish because it’s not like being born a Christian where you have to keep worrying about becoming one, where you have to get converted, you have to keep wondering if you’re in or out. A Jew is just a Jew! Can’t do anything about it. So, they celebrate, and those who are observant, who are serious, celebrate it in wonderful warmth of community. And there’s something more there than just good friends and family ties. It is in the presence of a Mystery that here and there, now and again, has broken in upon us, creating awe, wonder, gratitude, drawing forth worship, enhancing our humanity and nudging us toward the things that make for peace. You don’t really need it, but you’ll miss a lot if you don’t have it. © Grand Valley State University �Do I Need Religion? Richard A. Rhem Page 5   APPENDIX . . . I found it a wonderful feeling not just to taste the unification metaphysics but also to be released from the confinement of fundamentalist religion. I had been raised a Southern Baptist, laid backward under the water on the sturdy arm of a pastor, been born again. I knew the healing power of redemption. Faith, hope, and charity were in my bones, and with millions of others I knew that my savior Jesus Christ would grant me eternal life. More pious than the average teenager, I read the Bible cover to cover, twice. But now at college, steroid-driven into moods of adolescent rebellion, I chose to doubt. I found it hard to accept that our deepest beliefs were set in stone by agricultural societies of the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago. I suffered cognitive dissonance between the cheerfully reported genocidal wars of these people and Christian civilization in 1940s Alabama. It seemed to me that the Book of Revelation might be black magic hallucinated by an ancient primitive. And I thought, surely a loving personal God, if He is paying attention, will not abandon those who reject the literal interpretation of the biblical cosmology. It is only fair to award points for intellectual courage. Better damned with Plato and Bacon, Shelly said, than go to heaven with Paley and Malthus. But most of all, Baptist theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God? Might the pastors of my childhood, good and loving men though they were, be mistaken? It was all too much, and freedom was ever so sweet. I drifted away from the church, not definitively agnostic or atheistic, just Baptist no more. Still, I had no desire to purge religious feelings. They were bred in me; they suffused the wellsprings of my creative life. I also retained a small measure of common sense. To wit, people must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here. Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end. If so, then in that sense science is religion liberated and writ large. Such, I believe, is the source of the Ionian Enchantment: Preferring a search for objective reality over revelation is another way of satisfying religious hunger. It is an endeavor almost as old as civilization and intertwined with traditional religion, but it follows a very different course — a stoic’s creed, an acquired taste, a guidebook to adventure plotted across rough terrain. It aims to save the spirit, not by surrender but by liberation of the human mind. Its central tenet, as Einstein knew, is the © Grand Valley State University �Do I Need Religion? Richard A. Rhem Page 6   unification of knowledge. When we have unified enough certain knowledge, we will understand who we are and why we are here. If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable. The ancient Greeks expressed the idea in a myth of vaulting ambition. Daedalus escapes from Crete with his son Icarus on wings he has fashioned from feathers and wax. Ignoring the warnings of his father, Icarus flies toward the sun, whereupon his wings come apart and he falls into the sea. That is the end of Icarus in the myth. But we are left to wonder: Was he just a foolish boy? Did he pay the price for hubris, for pride in sight of the gods? I like to think that, on the contrary, his daring represents a saving human grace. And so the great astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar could pay tribute to the spirit of his mentor, Sir Arthur Eddington, by saying: Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings. Edward O. Wilson. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Vintage, first edition, 1999. © Grand Valley State University � https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c556fae286f8b082232fe1d616637d9f.mp3 45bf0dbd3358e49fbf9b439bb93e4aaf Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Pentecost VI Series Can I Honestly Believe? Scripture Text Psalm 8:1, Psalm 42:2, Acts 17:22 Location The location of the interview Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI References Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, 1999 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-19980712 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998-07-12 Title A name given to the resource Do I Need Religion? Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 application/pdf Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on July 12, 1998 entitled "Do I Need Religion?", as part of the series "Can I Honestly Believe?", on the occasion of Pentecost VI, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Psalm 8:1, Psalm 42:2, Acts 17:22. Critical Thinking Nature of Religion Religious Quest https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/6d849180ee042e274227ca09da5896cc.pdf e4ad402279d58bd9cd5f11d405cd1975 PDF Text Text Re-Imagining the Faith: A Theological Pilgrimage Richard A. Rhem Page 1 Re-imagining the Faith: A Theological Pilgrimage Richard A. Rhem Introductory Reflections for the Articles Page December 12, 2012 At my retirement in 2004, Christ Community Church was exceedingly gracious in so many ways, one of which was to collect a number of my sermons and publish them under the title Re-Imagining the Faith. I could not have named it as well; it succinctly expressed the story of my thirty-seven years as pastor of that congregation. It was at the First Reformed Church of Spring Lake, Michigan, that I was ordained to the Christian ministry on June 30, 1960. From 1960, just out of seminary, to 1964 I served that Spring Lake congregation. During those four years I was in no way seeking to re-imagine the Christian faith; in fact, I would have been threatened by the thought. My understanding of Christian faith was orthodox, evangelical in the Reformed tradition as conveyed by the Dutch Reformed Church rooted in the Netherlands and brought to this country in the nineteenth century emigration from the Netherlands. It was, however, in those four years through pastoral experience that my orthodoxy was being tested. That whole story is critical to my theological pilgrimage, but I won’t go into it here, except to say that a move to a very conservative, evangelical Reformed congregation in New Jersey [in 1964] only accentuated my struggle, which was really about the view and authority of Scripture. I left New Jersey for the Netherlands to pursue post-graduate studies. I was indeed fortunate to be received and accepted by Professor Dr. Hendrikus Berkhof, Professor of Dogmatics at Leiden University. As I was leaving his study after my first appointment with him in the early Spring of 1967, I saw a piece of paper pinned on a drape, on which was written: Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of Thee, And Thou, O Lord, art more than they. In those lines by Alfred Lord Tennyson I knew I had found my teacher and my task. My little system had had its day; I longed to find the Sacred Mystery toward whom my little system, now broken, had pointed. Though I had earned a Master of Divinity and a Master of Theology following my BA from Hope College, I was about to embark for the first time in my life on an intellectual and spiritual quest with an open mind and heart – seeking truth wherever it might lead me. For the first time in my life I began with questions rather than answers to be proven and confirmed. It was a liberating moment; finally I was ready to learn. © Grand Valley State University �Re-Imagining the Faith: A Theological Pilgrimage Richard A. Rhem Page 2 Lest I be misunderstood, my failure to gain an education, to learn, was not the fault of the institutions from which I attained degrees, nor the teachers who taught me. To be sure, a denominational seminary has not the task to lead students to new visions of the faith but rather to teach the faith system, the confessional foundation of the church that supports it and governs it. That being said, I must confess the problem was mine. All my energy and intellectual gifts were committed to learning and then teaching evangelical Reformed faith. The last word had been spoken; now it was my calling to proclaim and teach it. And I was deadly serious about it. But no longer. After my little system began to break in those seven years of pastoral ministry, I knew I had to begin again to see if indeed I could come to new insight and understanding that would enable me still to be a Christian minister with a message in which I could passionately believe and proclaim. The fact that at my retirement a book of my sermons was published with the title ReImagining the Faith is the finest tribute I could receive, witnessing to the journey that began in the late 60’s under the guidance of Professor Berkhof and that continued all the years after my return to the Spring Lake congregation in 1971. Through all those years I was about re-imagining the faith and, even in retirement, the journey continues. As I look back over my ministry that continued in Spring Lake following my four-year European sojourn, I realize that what I essentially gained was an ability to think theologically, to think critically. No longer was there a set confessional system of theological propositions to be explained and defended. I was full of wondering, of questioning, of questing for a deeper understanding of biblical faith in the context of contemporary culture. My new posture found expression in preaching and teaching but it was with the birth of the journal Perspectives, a Journal of Reformed Thought in 1986 that I began to articulate that new posture on central theological/biblical themes. My first article was on the theology of Robert Schuller as I will describe below. But from then on I addressed some critical themes that reflected my own groping for a new understanding of biblical faith. As I was working on the thread of those pieces I received a note from Professor Dr. Hendrik Hart who had begun reading the articles I had given him. In response to questions he raised, I gave some background about my experience in the RCA. Our correspondence I include here: Email from Hendrik Hart, November 20, 2012: ... I’m reading Dick’s articles in Perspectives. I was entirely unprepared for them because Dick keeps saying that he was a latecomer in moving beyond conservatism. But the first piece, from 1987, digs into the God-Jesus-male cluster with a vengeance. And so it is with most of the pieces. They are radical in choice of topic, position and approach. They © Grand Valley State University �Re-Imagining the Faith: A Theological Pilgrimage Richard A. Rhem Page 3 are not mealy-mouthed either. The language is clear, direct, and hard-hitting. I would have thought that, early in the game, the pastoral side might emerge, knowing how upset conservatives might be. Not so. So where’s the conservatism? The only evidence for Dick’s pleading a late start in getting beyond conservatism is that the style of argument has not been touched by the then rising postmodern spirit. But that took time for all of us. OK, if I’m near the mark with this, how would you characterize where you were in 1987, Dick? What readings or experiences would have spawned those articles and how did you expect they would be perceived? By your congregation, by your classis, by Perspectives readers? I am curious because, if I go by my own memories, I think there was a mixture of urgency and naiveté. In 1983 I wrote “Must I Believe in God as Father?” in The Banner. It was a soapbox piece and the editor and I had previously discussed at length how this should be done. I think I wrote very carefully, so I was fully unprepared for the storm of invective that broke over me, as well as for the complete silence of supporters. Only now (right now!) does it occur to me that the problem may well not have been the piece as such (it was about praying to God as Mother), but the heading. Why did I not see that 30 years ago? So, if you can, tell us something about why you may have written things possibly unaware of how they would be perceived or of how you would endanger yourself. Did you know you were taking risks? Reply from Richard Rhem: Henk, great to hear from you and I am pleased you are reading the articles. It so happens that I have spent over a week gathering my writings over the years of my ministry post Netherlands. (I have a few more for you, especially two pieces that appeared in The Reformed Review, Western Seminary’s journal. In 1972 I gave a lecture at Western which was published in The Reformed Review – “A Theological Conception of Reality as History – Some Aspects of the Thinking of Wolfhart Pannenberg.” Then in 1986 I wrote in a [tribute] for Gene Osterhaven – “Theological Method: The Search for a New Paradigm in a Pluralistic Age” – which dealt with Küng’s paradigm change in connection with Tracy and referring to Gadamer, etc. Those three pieces were received quite well. Then the RCA founded Perspectives. I just found the first editorial by Rev. Dr. James Van Hoeven – first editor and major figure behind the project. (That he was brother-inlaw to Ed Mulder, General Secretary, got the Journal underway.) Jim wanted me on the board of editors and immediately asked that I write about Schuller’s new reformation. I had been inspired by Bob Schuller upon my return from the Netherlands - my leadership people felt, having been out of the country for four years, I needed such exposure. It worked. Within four months of beginning again in Spring Lake, the First Reformed Church became Christ Community and a second service in the morning was added (and eventually a third). About 28 of our people attended Schuller’s Institute for Successful Church Leadership. But Bob Schuller was under fire for his book New Reformation and being too easy on sin!! Therefore Jim Van Hoeven thought I should do an article on Schuller. It was quite well received. You ask about whether I wrote with awareness of reaction from the church. I’m sure I was naive but, according to Jim’s first editorial, this new journal’s purpose was to “engage issues that reformed Christians meet in personal, ecclesiastical, and societal life.” It also aimed to be in conversations that “help shape the identity and mission of the Reformed Church in America.” © Grand Valley State University �Re-Imagining the Faith: A Theological Pilgrimage Richard A. Rhem Page 4 Jim continues, “If in the process, Perspectives can enable a community of scholars to be formed – women and men from within the church who bridge race, region, and discipline, who enjoy the give and take of thoughtful discourse, and who do not mind if their Sundays sometimes get pretty rough [an allusion to a Mark Twain quote with which he opened] – this enterprise will have fulfilled its expectations.” The editorial moves to a quote from Robert Bly: “Certainty lives on either side of the border, but truth lives on the border.” Jim continues, “The editors of Perspectives will push themselves and the church toward that border, theologically. This means, on the one hand, Perspectives will affirm and deepen the richness of the Reformed tradition. Tradition tells us who we are, gives us a definition, a point from which to set our course, and reminds us ‘we belong...to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ.’ And yet truth lives on the border. The danger of too much tradition is that it turns a good thing into idolatry. The church’s faith and life must always be creative. …holding to the tradition, being creative, living on the border is part of what it means to be Reformed, according to the Word of God.” That was January, 1986, the first issue. Perspectives was initially sent free of charge to ministers, members of boards and agencies, elders on request. It was to engage the leadership of the RCA in creative conversation. I really believed that, naive as I was... It is coincidental that you raise the questions my writings raised as your brother Peter has asked me to write an overview of the thread that runs through my articles to introduce them on a Web site of an archive of my work. I have begun writing after sorting through piles of files. That piece will answer some of your questions, but let me respond to your questions regarding my being a late bloomer. Throughout my education I was trying to reinforce the faith structure of my childhood. I never challenged or raised a question. Yet, beneath my sturdy dogmatism, there was an insecurity: I wondered if the faith/church would survive – not because it wasn’t God’s truth but because the darkness arrayed against the light was formidable. A pastoral experience in Spring Lake showed me that an inerrant, infallible Bible wasn’t enough. During my last year there, the Covenant Life curriculum from the RCA/Presbyterians came out. I taught the foundation papers in Spring Lake and then introduced the curriculum to the New Jersey congregation. It created an uproar from a few who felt it was weak on Scripture [long story]. For me – finally owning my own questions – it was very helpful. I knew I would have to spend years bringing that congregation around or make good on my desire to go to the Netherlands for postgrad work. Berkhof accepted me and proved a great mentor and friend. Thus began my first real education because finally I was open to the quest. But, Henk, I was 32! Four years in Leiden and my return to Spring Lake where I began to preach out of the reservoir of the Leiden years. This I knew: the orthodox view of Scripture was the bottleneck. I felt a real freedom to explore in that marvelous community. I taught Berkhof’s Christian Faith, Küng’s On Being a Christian and Does God Exist? Coming from a serious study of Pannenberg, I was ready for Küng whom I came to appreciate deeply. I mentioned my writings/lectures in The Reformed Review in 1972 and 1986. These were about the theological method. But, as I wrote earlier, it was Perspectives that gave me the occasion to address issues before the church. Yes, I was naive, but I was also totally free in bringing to expression © Grand Valley State University �Re-Imagining the Faith: A Theological Pilgrimage Richard A. Rhem Page 5 what I had been thinking about. Now I was 51, Henk: no youngster, but just finding my voice. I was blessed with a congregation that allowed me to “think out loud”. That was my preaching style and it was a safe and honest place. Thus when Perspectives came along I expressed myself quite honestly. The “Habit of God’s Heart” piece I knew was treading on dangerous terrain, but I tried to be careful, wondering but also being honest about my hope that God’s grace was universal. As time moved on I got the assignments that were controversial because I was a pastor in a safe place. I think there was only one other pastor on the board of Perspectives. The rest were professors at colleges or the seminaries and were reluctant to take on the themes I tackled. So, my conservatism in the traditional form ended when I left for Leiden in 1967. From there I had to begin again. I consumed book after book. Berkhof would say, “You must begin to write,” but I said, “I just found six more footnotes leading to a dozen more books!” Trying to answer your questions: by 1987 I had been engaged in serious theological reading/thinking for 20 years. Perspectives gave me the opportunity to bring to expression all I had been thinking/teaching/preaching about. I felt safe and confident and thus put myself on the line. Perspectives was not the Church Herald, read by RCA lay folk. The Banner was something else. You wrote in a very much more conservative context to a well-informed readership in the bastion of Calvinist orthodoxy. As for “the silence of supporters,” I know that well. When my Grace article appeared, I was teaching homiletics at Western. A colleague also on the board of editors, present and participating in the discussion about the theme, in favor of my writing...but when the storm rose, in a faculty meeting asked, “Why did you feel you had to write that piece?” He also, I’m told, said if I had changed six words there would have been no problem. I must say, Henk, it never occurred to me that I would get into trouble. My congregation was solidly supportive and I had fine collegial relationships with the RCA leadership and I honestly felt I was being a positive influence for good in the RCA. In the end it was not RCA leadership but young, threatened pastors in the Muskegon Classis that spelled my demise in the RCA. It is all quite a story. And now to return to the thread of my articles. My second Perspectives piece was entitled “Karl Barth: Preaching and Theological Renewal.” I set forth Barth’s own experience of preaching and the high regard he had for the preaching moment – very inspiring. But then, in a series of articles, I addressed contemporary issues in the Church and my own deepening grasp of those issues. February 1987, pp. 4-6: “An Accident of the Incarnation.” The issue was the male domination of the church. I argued that the maleness of the Incarnation was an “accident,” not of the essence of God’s revelation in human flesh. In the January 1988 issue, I wrote a piece, “Purgatory Revisited.” Hans Küng at the University of Michigan in the Fall of 1983 lectured on questions surrounding death, © Grand Valley State University �Re-Imagining the Faith: A Theological Pilgrimage Richard A. Rhem Page 6 heaven, hell and the future, subsequently published under the title Eternal Life. Küng got me to thinking. I suspect it was a beginning step toward the hope of universal grace. In the September 1988, issue I brought to full expression my hope and growing conviction that God’s grace would finally bring all God’s children home. The piece, entitled “The Habits of God’s Heart”, elicited major responses from RCA ministers and the public readership – positive and negative, the latter predominant. In the April 1991, issue I became even bolder. I wrote of my growing conviction that my faith community, the community of Reformed faith issuing from Calvin’s Geneva by way of the Netherlands had never come to terms with the Enlightenment - the place of critical rationality and historical consciousness in the understanding of the Christian credal tradition as espoused by the Reformed community in this country. It was Hendrikus Berkhof’s Two Hundred Years of Theology that made me aware that the community of which I was a part “was not even engaged in the struggle.” The article was entitled “Sleeping Through a Revolution.” As one can well imagine, I got some serious response, including from my beloved theology professor, Dr. Eugene Osterhaven – who treated me gently however. Someone challenged me on biblical grounds, on my use of Scripture. That drove me on to my next piece, “The Book That Binds Us” in the December 1992, issue. My bold contention was that the Bible is being misused. It is being asked to function in a way it can no longer be expected to function, a way it was never intended to function. In the March 1993, issue I returned to the theme of “An Accident of the Incarnation” with a focus on God language. I wrote in collaboration with my colleague, Colette Volkema De Nooyer, who did the major work. In the May 1995 issue, I “completed” as it were the thread I was weaving with an article “Interreligious Dialogue – What is Required of Us?” I had recognized long since that the orthodox understanding of Jesus’ death as atonement blocked openness to the other in interfaith discussion. In this piece I gave that full expression. The article concluded: My intention is not to advocate Hick or Ogden or any other thinker who is addressing the matter of interreligious dialogue. Rather, I wish to point to the necessity of honestly drawing out the consequences of the recognition that human grasp of the truth develops, evolves, and needs ongoing assessment and adjustment – and sometimes conceptions need to be rejected. By use of historical imagination, the originating experience that gave rise to a theological formulation needs to be recovered in order to express the same reality differently, in order to make the experience available in a totally different cultural context. Rather than seeing this as a burden, a cause for fear and defensiveness, it should be seen as an exciting challenge. Is not such a pursuit of the truth to love God with mind as well as heart? And is not the recognition that every biblical and theological expression is marked by the human and historical limitations that adhere to all human thought the © Grand Valley State University �Re-Imagining the Faith: A Theological Pilgrimage Richard A. Rhem Page 7 reason there is need for continual reformation? To be Reformed is not to be in possession of a set of timeless and eternal truths but, rather, to refuse to absolutize any human arrangement or formulation. It is not to be saddled with a set of truths that were once new, innovative, and destabilizing of the established order of the sixteenth century, or the first century. It is an approach, a spirit, a posture that is open to new knowledge, fresh insight, and cumulative human experience within historical development. The church has managed to spend the century in a state of schizophrenia, pursuing research in the academy and sharing the results in the lecture hall, while the liturgy, prayers, hymns, and sermons have given little evidence of the honest engagement with insights of the modern period. My mentor, Hendrikus Berkhof, claimed the only heresy was to make the gospel boring. I would add another – the heresy of orthodoxy, the evidence of a failure of nerve and lack of trust in the living God. It is the heresy of an inordinate lust for certitude that seeks premature closure, the shutting down of the quest for truth and growth of knowledge in the magnificent and mysterious cosmos by the creatures whom the Creator calls to consciousness and embraces in a Grace that pervades the unfolding cosmic process. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Series Introduction to Articles Page in Web Archive Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RA-4-20121212 Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Title A name given to the resource Re-imagining the Faith: A Theological Pilgrimage Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource eng Description An account of the resource Introduction to the Articles created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) entitled "Re-imagining the Faith: A Theological Pilgrimage", as part of the series "Introduction to Articles Page in Web Archive". Tags: Spiritual Quest, Reformed Theology, Authority of Scripture, Critical Thinking, Universal Grace, Orthodoxy, Nature of Religion, Sacred Mystery. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012-12-12 Authority of Scripture Critical Thinking Nature of Religion Orthodoxy Reformed Theology Sacred Mystery Spiritual Quest Universal Grace https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/9b1e3b6bf92dc4352d3a2c9168d15c49.pdf 126f2cdbdc0934a36a55a28aec8fcf98 PDF Text Text Jesus Article by Richard A. Rhem Minister of Preaching and Theological Inquiry Christ Community Church Spring Lake, Michigan Published in Free Spirit A Quarterly Publication of Fountain Street Church Grand Rapids, Michigan May 1999 In a recent study, The Human Christ, Charlotte Allen writes, In 1909, the Modernist Catholic theologian George Tyrrell complained that the liberal German biblical scholars of his day had reconstructed a historical Jesus who was no more than "The reflection of a liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well." In other words, the liberal searchers had found a liberal Jesus. The same can be said of the Jesus-searchers of every era: The deists found a deist, the Romantics a Romantic, the existentialists an existentialist, and the liberationists a Jesus of class struggle. Supposedly equipped with the latest critical and historical tools, the "scientific" quest for the historical Jesus has nearly always devolved into theology, ideology, and even autobiography. (P. 5) This has been widely recognized as being the case and I readily acknowledge it to be operative in my own reflection on the identity, life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. This criticism has been met head on by a contemporary Jesus scholar recognized for both the breadth of his research into Christian origins, cross-cultural studies, and carefully articulated methodology. John Dominic Crossan, in his The Birth of Christianity (1998), cites a poem, "For Once, Then, Something," by Robert Frost, Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture , Me myself in the summer heaven, godlike, Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs. Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, © Grand Valley State University   �Jesus Richard A. Rhem Page 2   Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths - and then I lost it. Crossan comments, There is an oft-repeated and rather cheap gibe that historical Jesus researchers are simply looking down a deep well and seeing their own reflections from below. I call it cheap for three reasons. First, those who use it against others seldom apply it to themselves. Second, it is almost impossible to imagine a reconstruction that could not be dismissed by the assertion of that gibe. Your Jesus is an apocalyptic: You are bemused by the approaching millennium,... What could anyone ever say that would not fall under that ban? Third, those who repeat that taunt so readily must never have looked down a deep well or heeded Emily Dickinson's warning (3.970, no. 1400): What mystery pervades a well!... But nature is stranger yet; The ones that cite her most Have never passed her haunted house, Nor simplified her ghost. Crossan continues, Imagine two alternative and opposite modes of historical reconstruction, one an impossible delusion, the other a possible illusion. The possible illusion is narcissism. You think you are seeing the past or the other when all you see is your own reflected present. You see only what was there before you began. You imprint your own present on the past and call it history. Narcissism sees its own face, and, ignoring the water that shows it up, falls in love with itself. It is the first of the twin images in Frost's poem. It is when, …the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture Me myself in the summer heaven, godlike, Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs. The impossible delusion is positivism. It imagines that you can know the past without any interference from your own personal and social situation as answer. You can see, as it were, without your own eye being involved. You can discern the past once and for all forever and see it pure and uncontaminated by that discernment. Positivism is the delusion that we can see the water without our own face being mirrored in it. It thinks we can see the surface without simultaneously seeing our own eyes. It is the © Grand Valley State University �Jesus Richard A. Rhem Page 3   second of the twin images in Frost's poem. It is when, even if only once, uncertainly, possibly, and vaguely, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths - and then I lost it. But, I would ask, if the poet's face is white, how did it see "through the picture" of itself “a something white” that was also "beyond the picture"? Maybe what it saw was its own face so strangely different that it did not recognize it. That introduces a third image not given but provoked by Frost's second image. There is, therefore, a third alternative, and I'll call it interactivism, which is, incidentally, the way I understand post-modernism. The past and present must interact with one another, each changing and challenging the other, and the ideal is an absolutely fair and equal reaction between one another. Back to the well: You cannot see the surface without simultaneously seeing, disturbing, and distorting your own face; you cannot see your own face without simultaneously seeing, disturbing, and distorting the surface. It is the third image begging to be recognized behind the two overt ones in Frost's poem. What the poet saw was his own face so strangely different that he did not recognize it as such. It was., indeed "something white" and "something more of the depths." But it was not "beyond the picture" or even "through the picture." It was the picture itself changed utterly. That is the dialectic of interactivism and, as distinct from either narcissism or positivism, it is both possible and necessary. (Pp. 40f.) After illustrating his claim, Crossan writes, Historical reconstruction is always interactive of present and past. Even our best theories and methods are still our best ones. They are all dated and doomed not just when they are wrong but even (and especially) when they are right. They need, when anything important is involved, to be done over and over again. That does not make history worthless. We ourselves are also dated and doomed, but that does not make life worthless. (P. 45) Crossan does not speak of "search" or "quest" of Christian origins. That he sees as positivistic. Rather, he attempts a reconstruction and that, he says, must be done over and over again in different times and different places by different groups and different communities. I cite Crossan and Allen to acknowledge that "my Jesus" is not "The Jesus" of history. That Jesus cannot be definitively recovered. Allen's comment about the well has been the easy way to write off the quest. Crossan knows the danger but I © Grand Valley State University �Jesus Richard A. Rhem Page 4   think has, through careful method, eliminated some of the naiveté of earlier efforts. Even before the critique of mentors Duncan and Lester, I was aware that I was replicating the 19th-century liberal Jesus in some respects, but I was also aware that I had to move through that stage. It is not quite accurate, however, to identify the Jesus I have been attempting to reconstruct with that "Jesus, meek and mild." Several issues are involved in my movement from the classical Christological creedal affirmations to Jesus as a human being as the incarnation or embodiment of God or Spirit. I have been working at dismantling the creedal Christ for some time. (Theological reflection is really my focus rather than historical research or even biblical research.) But to dismantle the Christological formulae leaves me with an historical figure and the need to give some content to this figure. Another piece of the traditional orthodox understanding that I have for some years now moved away from is the idea of Jesus' death as atoning, making salvation possible and available. If Jesus did not come into the world to die for human sin, that is, if he is not a salvific figure, what came to expression in his life and teaching and why was he executed? Here is where the work of Crossan and Borg has been helpful to me. By recognizing the Jewishness of Jesus, putting him in his historical context through reconstruction of first-century Judaism under Roman domination and crosscultural studies, there emerges a picture of Jesus as social prophet in the Hebrew tradition who, through non-violent protest, stands against the structural injustice and systemic evil of his society in the name of the God of Israel who is marked by the demand for justice and compassion. This is not the highly moral and gentle Jesus of the 19th century. This one dies the way he dies because he lived the way he lived. I will not go on to argue this, but I think it can be given good biblical support as well as being consistent with our best sense of his social/economic/political context. Why bother so strenuously with Jesus? It is claimed the idea, the meaning of the whole historical/legendary/mythological phenomenon could simply be "thought," conceived by one who contemplated the whole human-divine relationship. Perhaps so. It is claimed Newton's whole grand mechanical model of the universe was a product not of empirical experimentation but of pure thought. But, as a matter of fact, the whole Christian tradition (including its Jewish womb) emerged in history. The "story" is rooted in history and the liturgical and ritual practice represent history as shaped by the early (biblical) interpretations. And story and ritual are critical for creating community -meaning is conveyed in the © Grand Valley State University �Jesus Richard A. Rhem Page 5   telling and action. As Whitehead claimed, it takes centuries to form such tradition. Thus, it seems to me that it is valuable to re-tell the old story and through serious research I think we can uncover that which provides the data by which to reconstruct this historical person who can credibly be offered as an embodiment of the love, grace, compassion and justice of God. The canonical Jesus, however, is no longer believable to one for whom biblical authority in the sense of authoritarian claim is no longer valid. We know the Jesus of the Gospels is the post-Easter Jesus of the early communities. The Christological titles ascribed to him post-Easter are ascriptions of faith arising out of the experience of those early believers. This is where biblical criticism becomes crucial. To be sure, determining which words and deeds go back to Jesus and which are "history metaphorized" by the biblical writers is an inexact science and total agreement will never be achieved. And it is also true that here one's presuppositions - maybe one's intuition - will operate in the selection process. But the moment one decides that the biblical text is not the word of God given by whatever process to the writer, but rather, a human book reflecting the religious experience or revelatory encounter of the writer, one cannot avoid such a discriminating approach to the text. The reconstruction will be the result of the engagement with the text, interaction with the text and the best one can do is be aware of one's pre-understanding and endeavor as honestly as possible to hear the text. Now, in regard to the concatenation of texts gathered by Lester, I obviously hear the voice of the early communities. There is sharp debate as to whether Jesus held the apocalyptic view. I think he moved away from John the Baptist because he did not share that view. If he did think of himself as returning in clouds of heaven soon, of course he was simply wrong - as was Paul! In any case, I would argue that the Jesus of my reconstruction is not a candidate for Rotary. I have explained above why I do not simply shake loose of Jesus - he roots our story, concretizes the image of God. But, I think the Spirit has been embodied in others whose lives shine with revelatory luminosity. And further, I believe that which came to intense expression in him is the truth for all of us - if we have eyes to see it, and seeing it is salvation here and now, knowing the miracle, wonder and glory of being alive, and that's not bad for one without Christology, an authoritative scripture, doctrine of atonement, or ecclesiastical credential! References: Charlotte Allen. The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus. FreePress, 1998. © Grand Valley State University �Jesus Richard A. Rhem Page 6   John Dominic Crossan. The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus. HarperOne, 1999. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. References Charlotte Allen, The Human Christ, 1998, John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, 1999 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RA-4-19990501 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999-05-01 Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Title A name given to the resource Jesus Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Free Spirit Journal Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource eng Description An account of the resource Article created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on May 1, 1999 entitled "Jesus", it appeared in Free Spirit, Fountain Street Church. Tags: Historical Jesus, Reimagining the Faith, Critical Thinking, Postmodern, Justice. Scripture references: Charlotte Allen, The Human Christ, 1998, John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, 1999. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Critical Thinking Historical Jesus Justice PostModern Reimagining the Faith https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/bd409e4b0ac831607e1014339fba5651.pdf 3aa0fa32066e21470ff6490fadc3df92 PDF Text Text The Book That Binds Us Article by Richard A. Rhem Minister of Preaching and Theological Inquiry Christ Community Church Spring Lake, Michigan Published in Perspectives A Journal of Reformed Thought December 1992, pp. 12-17 The Bible is the book that binds conservative Reformed orthodoxy, binds not in the sense of holding us together but, rather, in the sense of shackling us, immobilizing us as we attempt to address the Word of God—the Word of judgment and grace—to our contemporary situation, to present human experience. The 1992 Synod of the Christian Reformed Church, in its anguishing debate and failure to move forward on the question of women in office, is only the most recent instance of our inability to bring the scriptural witness into fruitful dialogue with present human experience and the knowledge and insight available to us from the various disciplines of human research. The Bible is being misused. It is being asked to function in a way it can no longer be expected to function, a way it was never intended to function. Until there is a radical revisioning of our understanding of the place of Scripture in shaping our faith and forming our practice, the church will be deadlocked, at an impasse, firing salvos of accusation and recrimination from opposing camps while the body bleeds and languishes. It is painful to read the account of the Christian Reformed drama as it has taken shape over the past two years since the Synod of 1990. A similar drama was played out in the past in the Reformed Church in America, which now has opened its offices to women but continues to be a house divided, living in a coexistence filled with dis-ease. Advocates of both positions in the Christian Reformed Church cite Scripture and claim to be faithful to its authority. But a great gulf separates the two sides, and it is difficult to imagine them reaching agreement. Cultural…climate of opinion does work its ferment on the staunchest of orthodoxies, and time is on the side of those who seek to open the offices to women. That will come. But the Christian Reformed Church will be much like the RCA at present—of two minds on the issue. The church will live with a pragmatic © Grand Valley State University   �The Book That Binds Us Richard A. Rhem Page 2   accommodation but without a unified, joyful vision of truth, of justice, energized by fresh insight and understanding. In this journal April 1991,I wrote, In theology old paradigms keep their adherents even when theological development has left them behind. But they can do so only by some form of authoritarian claim. In the case of Reformed orthodoxy, the authoritarian claim of the Bible has held theological movement hostage, hindering meaningful dialogue with the sciences and philosophy. We are theologically stuck, and we will not become unstuck until we learn to value Scripture as authority, but break loose from its authoritarian use. In that same article I referred to a statement of Hendrikus Berkhof in his Two Hundred Years of Theology that Herman Bavinck turned away from dogmatic theology in his later years, sensing that the modern period needed a much more vigorous renewal of theology than he was able to produce. And I raised the question whether he might not have recognized that his own objective principle of knowledge—the Scriptures—blocked him from fruitful engagement with the rapidly expanding horizons of knowledge in the modern period. I stated again that the orthodox Reformed view of Scripture and its hermeneutic make it impossible either to engage the cultural assumptions that are the legacy of the Enlightenment or to be in dialogue with the probings of the present, postmodern period. The current dilemma of the Christian Reformed Church confirms my contention. The question of women's ordination cannot be solved by appeal to Scripture alone. What must be recognized is that the Bible is not a book of propositional truths, timeless and eternal, covering the full spectrum of cosmic reality, to be applied objectively to questions of faith and practice. Rather, it must always be heard as a cumulative witness of those encountered by the God of Creation who came in judgment and grace to Israel and in the humanity of Jesus. The canon of Scripture includes that witness spanning centuries, but the canon has been closed for subsequent centuries to the present while the human story has continued on with dramatic development and amazing breakthroughs in the understanding of the cosmos, of historical development, and of the human person. In the present debate in the Christian Reformed Church we can see the failure on both sides to acknowledge the legitimate place of contemporary experience in the discussion of women's ordination. Each side is claiming biblical authority for its position. Obviously, something is wrong, and what is wrong is the view, shared by the opposing sides, of how the Bible functions in such a discussion in relation to present experience. It is my contention that the failure to engage contemporary experience stems from a failure to recognize the function of a living tradition of faith. © Grand Valley State University �The Book That Binds Us Richard A. Rhem Page 3   Let me say clearly, I stand unreservedly with those who advocate opening all ecclesiastical offices to women. They can mount a biblical case for their position. But their opponents can mount an equally strong argument against women's ordination if it is assumed that the Bible must provide the answer for or against that ordination. It is clear that what is at issue is not women as women in office, their giftedness, leadership capacity, or spirituality. The issue is the Bible, how it functions in the life of the church, where its authority lies. Until the church wrestles with the authority of Scripture in determining the shape of its faith and the form of its practice, it will not be able to make progress on any theological front or come to consensus on any doctrinal debate. The apparent issue being debated will never be the real issue; lying behind it will always lurk the question, “But what does this do to the authority of the Bible?” In Reformed orthodoxy, the Bible carries not only authority; it is used with authoritarian coerciveness and uncritical literalness that brings every new discussion to an impasse whether the question be the ordination of women, the status of homosexual or lesbian persons, of creation versus evolution, of ethical issues such as abortion, genetic engineering, or euthanasia. In Bondage to the Bible The Bible is the book that binds us. In our academic, theological institutions we acknowledge that the Bible is not a scientific text, not a chronicle of history in the modern sense of historiography, that it comes to expression through human persons with all the limitations that entails. But we have never been honest with the church about the implications of our recognition of the nature of the Bible. Somehow the critical study of Scripture, the results of two hundred years of intensive study of its formation and its contents, has never trickled down to the people. We have continued living in the paradigm of Protestant orthodoxy deriving from the Protestant scholasticism of the seventeenth century. By that time both the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches had battened down the hatches and set themselves against the emergence of Renaissance humanism, which came to full flower in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Rightfully, the church resisted the drive for human autonomy and the enthronement of human reason, but it fought fire with fire; the theological enterprise took on a strongly rationalistic character and attempted in intellectual formulation to ground certainty, buttressed by an authoritarian church (Roman Catholic) or an authoritarian Scripture (Protestant). The historical-critical study of Scripture created a crisis for the churches of the Reformation, and a battle ensued that our churches have yet to settle. It is incredible, in light of what is widely recognized about the nature of the © Grand Valley State University �The Book That Binds Us Richard A. Rhem Page 4   Scriptures, that there should be such a prevalence of literalism in our understanding of the Bible. In his Dynamics of Faith, Tillich distinguishes two stages of literalism. The first is the “natural stage” before making a clear distinction between the symbolic and the factual; it consists “in the inability to separate the creations of symbolic imagination from the facts which can be verified through observation and experiment.” This represents the first naiveté, and such literalism creates no problem for the mediation of meaning. But when the symbol system is broken or seriously undercut in the continuing growth of knowledge and understanding, to continue to assert literal correspondence between symbol and fact is to fall into a “reactive literalism.” Literalism in this second stage is “aware of the questions but represses them, half consciously, half unconsciously.” This path is chosen by “people who prefer the repression of their questions to the uncertainty which appears with the breaking of the myth.” Reactive literalism cramps the figurative language of the Bible into the narrow framework of interpretation appropriate only to the literal usage of modern science. The desire is for certainty, but not, as Barth says, the certainty of faith that is given and given again, but the certainty of human control. Identifying the Bible with revelation, elevating the doctrine of inspiration so that the written word is inerrant and the truth infallible represents a “lust for certitude.” That phrase comes from Charles Davis. In his Temptations of Religion he discusses the social construction of all human knowledge, which excludes the possibility of “a revelation insofar as that implies an a priori claim to absoluteness and universality.” He contends, Revelation in that sense is given as an absolute in the order of knowledge; it is regarded as a set of unquestionable data, from which all opinions may be evaluated. It represents an attempt to limit criticism, to put a stop to the endless questioning of human thinking by establishing an a-critical point, a point not subject to criticism because beyond criticism. (18) To reject revelation in that sense is not, he claims, to exclude God's manifestation in our midst in word and event. It is, however, to exclude an a priori absoluteness and universality as violating human intelligence and freedom. Davis quotes Peter Berger: The theologian is consequently deprived of the psychologically liberating possibility of either radical commitment or radical negation. What he is left with, I think, is the necessity for a step-by-step re-evaluation of the traditional affirmations in terms of his own cognitive criteria (which need not necessarily be those of a putative “modern consciousness”). Is this or that in the tradition true? Or is it false? I don't think that there are shortcut answers to such questions, neither by means of “leaps of faith” nor by the methods of any secular discipline. (The Sacred Canopy, 187) © Grand Valley State University �The Book That Binds Us Richard A. Rhem Page 5   Davis recognizes how fearful such a recognition of the social construction of our reality is. To become conscious of the extent to which our “knowledge” and “values” are social fictions is “to look into the abyss, the void, surrounding human life in every direction.” Such honest recognition is very rare in the church; rather, theologians and preachers reinforce reactive literalism, feeding the lust for certitude. But should there not be an honest facing of what is widely recognized in our postmodern world—that human knowledge is socially constructed and symbolically expressed? When we do so, we are faced with an alternative. According to Davis, We can respond to the nothingness by a nihilism that interprets it as chaos, as meaninglessness, as the ultimate absurdity making everything absurd. Or we can respond to the void as positive nothingness, as mystery. That is the religious response. Faith in the last analysis is a basic trust in reality, an openness to mystery, a being drawn toward the abyss in selfforgetfulness and awe and love. Faith acknowledges the relativities of finite human existence without the nihilistic denial that these do, however gropingly, lead us toward absolute meaning and value. (21) The Bipolar Reality of Scripture And Present Experience The Bible contains the words of those in Israel and in the event of Jesus Christ who were encountered by God in judgment and grace, who witnessed to the Word of gracious salvation more or less adequately in their stammering words and historically conditioned understanding. But God is not dead. God still encounters us. God's Spirit still illumines the human understanding, not only in reference to the biblical witness but in the larger landscape of human experience. In the ongoing life of the church we must take seriously not only the Bible but also authentic contemporary experiences of being human in this world. We are people rooted in history, creatures of the cosmos, whose secrets scientists are probing, bringing to light fascinating findings. What of our knowledge of history and the awesome development of human knowledge in the respective disciplines of science? Because it lies outside the Bible's primary focus and purpose, is it therefore of no account in shaping our faith and forming our practice? Is it reasonable to assume that we can engage critical questions of ultimate human concern and determine crucial action and behavior as a human family living together on Spaceship Earth by reference alone to the Bible? It is precisely the theologian's task to coordinate the bipolar reality of Scripture and present human experience. Theology performs a hermeneutical function; its task is to interpret the biblical tradition in the present context of the church's life—an ongoing process that is never finished, always provisional, necessarily open-ended. All interpretation is a mediation of past and present within the history of a faith tradition. And the present is a moving target. Breaking the Impasse: Scripture and Tradition © Grand Valley State University �The Book That Binds Us Richard A. Rhem Page 6   How can the church move forward with theological discussion that will illumine contemporary human experience and shape the faith and practice of God's people in the image of Jesus Christ? What connects the canonical biblical witness to the present? What forms the bridge between the revelatory events in Israel's history and in Jesus Christ—to which the biblical story witnesses—and our present experience of being human in this world? We need a new understanding of the place of the living tradition of faith as lived out in the community of faith. We must recognize the elements at play here: the revelatory events, the witness to those events in the biblical canon, the church as the community constituted by that witness and the place of ongoing witness, and the whole spectrum of human knowledge and cumulative historical experience that continues to grow and develop. As I engage anxious folk in our churches who fear faith is being diluted and biblical Christianity is being jeopardized, I get the impression they assume that there was a time of pristine revelation infallibly recorded in the writings of the New Testament and that apostolic truth was rather quickly overlaid with church tradition that distorted that truth. Then, it is claimed, in the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the apostolic Christian faith was recovered and brought to expression in its original clarity in the creeds and confessions of the church, reformed according to the Word of God. That is a delusion, a colossal distortion of the way of the gospel in the church over nearly two thousand years. Yet it is still cavalierly asserted for popular consumption. A more accurate portrayal of the situation must recognize the interpretation of the revelatory events in Israel and in Jesus Christ by the witnesses to those revelatory events; that interpretation was instrumental in constituting a faith community. That faith community (Israel and the church) was formed out of the witness to revelation and, in its ongoing life, that community reinterpreted its understanding of the original revelatory events and continued to translate its faith understanding in ever new historical circumstances. We can trace the process already in the canonical Scriptures. For example, Israel's faith is reinterpreted by the prophetic word in terms of Israel's ongoing historical experience. Development can also be seen within the New Testament in Christological understanding. The primitive Christology of Acts is not at all the full-blown incarnational Christology of the fourth gospel. With the setting of the limits of the canon, such reinterpretation and development did not cease. We distinguish the biblical witness from the postcanonical tradition, but it was a historical decision of the church that determined the breakpoint. And the lines are blurred. Common agreement as to the canonical books was not reached until around a.d. 400. © Grand Valley State University �The Book That Binds Us Richard A. Rhem Page 7   The problem of the canon reopened at the time of the Reformation. The Protestant churches excluded the Apocrypha, a whole series of Old Testament writings that had been recognized as canonical for over a thousand years. Luther, in his September Bible of 1552, openly separated Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation from the other New Testament writings, thereby constituting a dual canon. Erasmus questioned the authenticity and authority of Hebrews, James, Jude, and 2 and 3 John. Zwingli thought Revelation should be rejected, and Calvin's expositions cover every book except Revelation. In the introduction to his commentaries it is clear, according to Barth, that he had doubts not only about the books mentioned by Luther, but also concerning 2 Peter and 2 and 3 John. The history of the canon indicates a shifting and a questioning that denies the possibility of a claim of absolute certainty regarding its limits. But even within the present Protestant canon we can see the process of translation and reinterpretation of the faith traditions, as stated above, and that process has never ceased. The preaching of the church is the bridgehead where the biblical text comes to contemporary expression. The heart of the preaching task is the hermeneutical moment when the words of the text that witness to the Word that once sounded find fresh expression in the hope that through the preacher's stammering words the Word might again be heard—that the living God might speak here and now. Every historical formulation is provisional; to absolutize an interpretation at any point on the historical continuum is idolatry. The historically conditioned interpretations of the Christian faith through the centuries vary in the degree to which they express a faithful interpretation of the originating revelatory events in Israel and in Jesus Christ, in the degree to which the original revelatory luminousness shines through. Sometimes there is clarity, sometimes distortion. There is action and reaction; the pendulum swings. In the nineteenth century the climate of opinion dominated by Newtonian physics and historicism smothered the witness to the newness and freedom of God's engagement with our world. Against a truncated, liberal faith expression, Barth boldly proclaimed the “Wholly Other,” the God who shatters “our little systems.” In the wake of the renewal of the church and the rediscovery of God's liberating grace in the sixteenth century, Reformed orthodoxy fell into the sterility and rigidity of Scholasticism. It absolutized its interpretation of the faith as though it were a statement of timeless and eternal truth unalloyed with the cultural assumptions of its day. Reformed orthodoxy failed to recognize that this interpretation was forged out of the crisis created by the ascendancy of rationalism as the Enlightenment was coming to flower, and so it declared the autonomy of the human person and human reason as the measure of truth. © Grand Valley State University �The Book That Binds Us Richard A. Rhem Page 8   What we must recognize is the constant interplay of the biblical witness and contemporary interpretation and the fact that we are part of a faith community that is living out of and carrying forward a living faith tradition. We have an anchor in the past; the church has demarcated certain writings as canonical. Present interpretation of the Christian faith and shaping of Christian practice will always involve serious listening to the biblical witness. But the present determination of faith and practice will not treat the intervening centuries between biblical times and our own as a vacuum. The history of the transmission of the faith will also be mined for wisdom, insight, and guidance. But neither do we live in a vacuum. Our contemporary expression of the faith and the shaping of our practice will finally have to be our truth. Finally, our witness and life must be authentically our own, our voice bringing to expression the living tradition. Jaroslav Pelikan differentiates that sense of the living tradition from traditionalism. Tradition, he says, is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. If we would move forward in our understanding of all reality before the face of God, we must come to a new appreciation of the living tradition of biblical faith as a dynamic movement. Hendrikus Berkhof acknowledges that as a rule Protestant dogmatics has no separate chapter on tradition. But this disregard of the concept of tradition cannot be maintained, he argues. In Christian Faith he writes, Revelation means that God enters the field of history to bring about an encounter with men which transcends human history, and which therefore goes far beyond the temporal spatial bounds of the original field of revelation. The encounters which took place at that time were means and suited for leading to further encounter in other times and places. Hence the revelation of Christ in the New Testament, in spite of, or rather because of its definitive nature, is not the end but calls forth as its sequel the coming and the work of the Spirit. The Spirit proceeds from Christ to continue and interpret his saving work world-wide. This coming of the Spirit is a new redemptive act, of the same importance as the coming of Christ of which he is the complement and counterpart. It is one continuous revelational event. Fixation without interpretive transmission petrifies the faith…. Berkhof contends that if the concern of revelation is the continuing encounter between God and humankind, then tradition is theologically of the same importance as Scripture. The redemptive work of God must be “handed over,” faithful to the fixated form (Scripture) but verbalized such that it becomes intelligible in other times and places. © Grand Valley State University �The Book That Binds Us Richard A. Rhem Page 9   The current impasse in the conservative Reformed churches is the result of fixation with the biblical writings and a failure born of fear to find fresh expression for contemporary faith. Sola Scriptura. That was the clarion call, the battle cry of the reformers. Faith will be shaped, practice formed by reference to Scripture alone. The claim can be easily understood given the historical context, and the return to Scripture as the authoritative witness to revelation proved fruitful in the life of the church. But there was a loss as well: it was the sense of tradition as the living, ongoing, mediating, and interpreting expression of biblical faith as it is confessed and lived in the community of faith, the church. Tradition. In Fiddler on the Roof Tevye booms out the word claiming that life is as precarious as a fiddler making music on a perilously steep roof and that balance is maintained by tradition. According supremacy to tradition over Scripture in the Roman Catholic Church allowed it to drift from testing its faith and practice by the Word of God and to lose the clear sound of the gospel. Tradition and Scripture were a dual source of authority, but tradition had the ascendancy. The recovery of the authority of Scripture to exercise its critical function was a great contribution of the Reformation. But such movements as the Reformation are reactionary; often there is such a strong reaction to the status quo being attacked that the pendulum swings too far. How does the cumulative, growing experience of humankind become incorporated into faith's vision and practice? The witness of prophets and apostles continues to be heard in the pages of the Bible. But what of the ongoing encounter of God's Spirit with the church as it moves through history confronted by new questions, immersed in circumstances beyond that of the biblical world? It is in the living tradition of the faith community that new experience and fresh discoveries are brought into dialogue with the biblical witness. The tradition, like a fiery river of lava, moves with the current of history, a stream continuous with the erupting volcano, yet ever moving through new landscapes. This function of tradition was brought home sharply to me by the New Testament scholar Krister Stendahl, who joined Rabbi David Hartman in an all-day, JewishChristian dialogue on the theme “Faithful Interpretation.” Stendahl spoke of tradition as an instrument of continuity and change. Continuity was obvious to me; tradition connects backward to the past. But is tradition an instrument of change? Indeed, he argued. By means of the tradition we enter the new and negotiate the future. Stendahl spoke warmly and charmingly of a visit to Swedish relatives in Minnesota. There he experienced life as he remembered it in Sweden when he was a child and visited his grandparents. In Minnesota the Swedish tradition is frozen, as is true in most immigrant ethnic communities. If you want to see a piece of Sweden past, he said, visit Minnesota, for there the tradition has become a museum piece. But Stendahl has recently returned to the United States after © Grand Valley State University �The Book That Binds Us Richard A. Rhem Page10   serving for a time in Stockholm as Bishop of the Swedish Lutheran Church. If you want to experience the living tradition of the Swedish people, you must go to Sweden where the dynamic tradition is continuing to evolve, he pointed out. Stendahl offered a vivid image: a boa constrictor periodically wriggles out of its skin, leaving the skin behind, an empty shell. He pictured a biologist taking the skin, measuring it, analyzing it, and then having it stuffed and mounted—a museum piece. Someone exclaims, “There's a snake!” But, says Stendahl, that's not the snake. The snake has wriggled out and away and is still living—in new skin—still making history. The living tradition of Christian faith is the contemporary reinterpretation of the biblical witness in light of the cumulative historical experience of the church and the growing store of human knowledge. In Words Around the Table, Gail Ramshaw writes, Tradition is not like an obsolete edition of the encyclopedia, full of half facts, and old prejudices. Tradition is not like a 1948 etiquette book that lists the activities and even the fabrics forbidden a widow in deep mourning: All we can do is grimace and ignore it. The tradition of the church lives. We can read medieval books being discussed, we can unearth attitudes that were subsequently buried, we can make tradition different tomorrow than it was yesterday or today. Where “tradition” repeats tired slogans out of context, when “tradition” yells louder and louder to drown out queries, it becomes a sarcophagus that the dying church deserves. But when tradition is the history of the movement of the Spirit, darting here, hiding there, migrating halfway around the world, it can serve as one expression of God's Truth. As much as any contemporary theologian, David Tracy has addressed the question of the faithful interpretation of the Christian tradition to make it accessible to a serious and reasonable public. As I have been contending, he sees systematic theology's task to interpret, mediate, and translate the meaning and truth of the continuing living tradition in dialogue with the biblical witness in light of present human experience. Where this is not the case, the notion of authority shifts from a truth disclosed to mind and heart to an external norm for the obedient will. Then theologians can no longer interpret and translate the tradition but “only repeat the shop-worn conclusions of the tradition.” Eventually, the central, classical symbols and doctrines of the tradition become mere “fundamentals” to be externally accepted and endlessly repeated. (Analogical Imagination, 99) In an earlier work, Blessed Rage for Order, Tracy calls for a revisioning of the Christian tradition. He explains: © Grand Valley State University �The Book That Binds Us Richard A. Rhem Page11   [T]he revisionist theologian is committed to what seems clearly to be the central task of contemporary Christian theology: the dramatic confrontation, the mutual illuminations and corrections, the possible basic reconciliations between the principal values, cognitive claims, and existential faiths of both a reinterpreted post-modern consciousness and a reinterpreted Christianity. (32) The revisionist theologian is not motivated by the desire for relevance, Tracy argues. Rather, The reality of the situation is both more simple and more basic: when all is said and done, one finds that he can authentically abandon neither his faith in the modern experiment, nor his faith in the God of Jesus Christ. (4) The church lives in a creative tension because it lives in a bipolar reality of Bible and present experience, an ancient faith and the undeniable reality of the modern experiment. We need a new understanding of the Bible and a new appreciation of tradition if we would be faithful to the Word and present to our world. In An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, John Henry Newman describes the church, tradition, the cosmos itself after the manner of an organism. Their development is seen as an organic process. This view was in contrast to a fundamentalistic view that regards revelation and tradition as a fixed, unchanging body of truths and rejects all change and pluralism. Newman was able to accommodate ongoing human experience in his organic view of tradition. In What Is Living, What is Dead in Christianity Today? Charles Davis comments on Newman's view: The result was a concept of tradition as cumulative experience, subject therefore to change whether as development or as decline, which distinguished [him] as conservative, from reactionaries, who did not acknowledge history and development. In a religious context the conservatives... were those who saw tradition as a dynamic process rather than as a static deposit. (33) This is not enough for Davis to meet the situation we face today. He calls for a more radical revisioning of faith, raising the question, Are we not in a situation that cannot be met by an orderly development of traditional categories; but which demands something radically new? (34) One may lean more to Newman's view of a growing organic process or to Davis's with his call for radical revisioning, but the option not open to an honest facing of the present crisis of the church is a conception of the Bible, theological © Grand Valley State University �The Book That Binds Us Richard A. Rhem Page12   formulation, and Christian practice as fixed, into which contemporary human experience and present human knowledge on all fronts must be crammed. In a recent issue of Context, Martin Marty lifts a quotation from Newman from Ian Ker's Newman on Being a Christian. Marty writes, “With development and change in mind—over against a static picture of God, the human, faith, and doctrine—we read: It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soul. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary.... It remains perhaps for a time quiescent; it tries, as it were, its limbs, and proves the ground under it, and feels its way. From time to time it makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and fall around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often. References: © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RA-4-19921201 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992-12-01 Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Title A name given to the resource The Book That Binds Us Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource eng Description An account of the resource Article created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on December 1, 1992 entitled "The Book That Binds Us", it appeared in Perspectives, pp. 12-17. Tags: Authority of Scripture, Experience, Faith Tradition, Critical Thinking, Faith, Mystery. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Authority of Scripture Critical Thinking Experience Faith Faith Tradition Mystery https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5535d0e49e772aa0cf075ba97f52330e.mp3 28ed9e3c06bb372c303a28da568d63f7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Midweek Lent Series I Choose to Believe Scripture Text Psalm 139, Matthew 5:43-48 Location The location of the interview Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20040317 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004-03-17 Title A name given to the resource About the Bible Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on March 17, 2004 entitled "About the Bible", as part of the series "I Choose to Believe", on the occasion of Midweek Lent, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Psalm 139, Matthew 5:43-48. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Critical Thinking Scripture https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/dc35bd2dad1d50bcd97d74fce79cd9b3.mp3 b894fd7f6586dd05b576240465ef03f1 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/58576bf55689509de0f96a8d4bc3ca33.pdf f5b4e87aaaec8924aad3d60eda211d74 PDF Text Text The Presence of God: Intelligence and Attention Pentecost XIII I Kings 19:1-14 Richard A. Rhem Christ Community Church Spring Lake, Michigan August 26, 2001 Transcription of the spoken sermon Gary Eberle, in The Geography of Nowhere, commenting on the passing of the age of faith, uses a marvelous poem by Philip Larkin, an English poet. Eberle comments, In "Church Going," Larkin imagines that someday Christian churches will fall into disuse and ruin as had Stonehenge and the Acropolis. Perhaps scholars will come with their notepads, or the superstitious will come at night to perform half-remembered magic. He sees the old church becoming: A shape less recognisable each week, A purpose more obscure. I wonder who Will be the last, the very last, to seek This place for what it was... And yet, he notes one thing about this place will not pass away - the inner spiritual need and hunger of the beings who built it in the first place. A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blest air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete. Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious. And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in. If only that so many dead lie round. Sometimes it happens as it happened to Elijah. It's no accident that chapter 19 follows chapter 18 and the story of Israel's history recorded in I Kings. Chapter 18 is that story of the duel between Elijah, the prophet of Yahweh, and the prophets © Grand Valley State University �Presence of God: Intelligence and Attention Richard A. Rhem Page 2 of Baal, introduced by Queen Jezebel, the foreign royalty who had brought another worship and cult into the very heart of Israel. Do you remember that story of the prophets of Baal in a contest with Elijah? They pray for their gods to consume the sacrifice and the heavens are brass and there is no response. Then, Elijah, as the sacrifice is drowned in water, calls upon the name of the God of Israel, and fire consumes the sacrifice. What a mountaintop experience, literally. As is often the case after such spiritual exhilaration, there set in upon Elijah a deep depression, for he was struggling in a very difficult time in the life of Israel. It was not an easy time to be a prophet of God, and he fled to Mount Horeb or Sinai, the mountain of Moses and the encounter of God with Israel in the Exodus experience. God is not altogether sympathetic with this prophet. He says, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" And Elijah pours out his self-pity as though he and he alone is left faithful to God. And then, God says, "Stand in the mouth of the cave," after which Elijah experiences dramatic effects in nature, an earthquake, wind and fire. But, God is not in any of these dramatic displays, but rather, in the sound of sheer silence. Richard Elliott Friedman, commenting on that passage, notes that that is the point of transition in Israel's experience of God. That experience is the last time it is recorded, "And God said ..." Early on in the scripture story of Israel, God is speaking all the time and acting all the time, but now the sound of sheer silence is a signal that theophany is over and, along with that, is increasing responsibility on the part of humanity to carry on the story. There was a shift, and the writers who put the story together were obviously signaling that shift and that juxtaposition of Carmel and Sinai and silence. The scriptures signal those cultural shifts in the understanding of God and of reality and of all things that pertain to our human experience, and we know those cultural shifts, as well. In our own Christian tradition, there was a move in those early centuries from classical Greek and Roman culture to a culture that, over a few centuries, became totally shaped by the Christian vision, finding its apex in that high Medieval period, only to be shifted in the Renaissance to a focus from heaven to earth. And after the detour of the 16th century Reformation, there was the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment and the whole Modern period, and that Modern period, of which we are the heirs, saw the rise of secularism and, to large extent, the questioning of God and the undercutting of that faith tradition which had built cathedrals. Gary Eberle, speaking about our own present Post-Modem situation, points to the cathedral as the symbol of the Modern period, and, as a matter of fact, how the cathedrals of Europe particularly have become more tourist stations than places of worship. Those of you who have gone on tour with me know that they are always ABC tours, "another bloody cathedral." So, I have been guilty of turning them into tourist places, but not simply tourist places, for we have often stopped and © Grand Valley State University �Presence of God: Intelligence and Attention Richard A. Rhem Page 3 worshiped in those holy places. Nancy will never forgive me for one Sunday when the two of us were alone in Rome and we spent five hours in St. Peter's, if you can believe it. It is not as though that holy space does not continue to speak, but there is no question that the cathedral is a monument to the faith of an earlier age and, in modernity, the faith that built the cathedrals has been seriously challenged and in many ways undercut. For the thing that marks the modern age is the rise of critical thinking and the rejection of all forms of authoritarianism, whether it be the authoritarian claim of the Church as institution, or of the tradition as in Eastern Orthodoxy, or of the Bible, as in Protestantism. The thing that marked modernity was that rise of critical thinking, the scientific method, the empirical method of investigation, no longer taking some word from prelate or scriptures or tradition as authoritative, but rather going out and looking at the world, experimenting, probing, investigating, accepting nothing on some authoritative word, but with critical rationality evaluating the evidence. That is what has marked modernity. In large measure, the Modern movement has been a movement very, very seriously weakening the Christian Church. I sat a couple of weeks ago with the New Testament professor that I studied under in Leiden back in the 60s. He was in the area and called, and I picked him up and we shared a breakfast together, and we talked about the European situation today. For example, in England just 6% of the people go to worship in that land that has these magnificent cathedrals and this grand Anglican tradition. We talked about the Netherlands where he still lives and where I had so many wonderful experiences. I looked across the table and I said to him, "How long can it last?" He said, "Jesus came, in my understanding, not to build the church, but to proclaim the kingdom." I like that, because what he was saying is what the poet Larkin is saying, that institutions, forms and structures may flourish and flounder. They may rise and pass away. But, somehow or other, there is that within the depths of the human being that will seek out a place like this, a serious place, on serious ground, because no matter how secular, no matter how lacking in any kind of observance, there will now and again, here and there, rise up that which will surprise that hunger and that yearning for the presence of God, for that which is sacred and holy, for that dimension that always accompanies our ordinary human experience, suggesting something more, not a supernatural being "out there" that runs the universe. I came across the other day a sermon of a year ago when, out in front of our house, a child was drowned in the waves of Lake Michigan, and I remember preaching that Sunday on the pitiless universe. God does not interrupt the rip tide or the raging surf, and God plays no favorites. That understanding of God, if we would be honest, has been undercut by everything that we know, thanks to the natural sciences and the investigation of all of those respective disciplines of © Grand Valley State University �Presence of God: Intelligence and Attention Richard A. Rhem Page 4 human learning. But, does that mean, because that image of God that has marked our tradition in the past, does that mean, then, that God is dead? Richard Elliott Friedman, who comments on the Isaiah experience in his book, The Hidden Face of God, uses Nietzsche as the prophetic voice of the modern, Nietzsche who said, "God is dead." Nietzsche said it with not any sense of triumphalism. Nietzsche said it in anguish because he said, "God is dead and we have killed God." The modern with all of the wonder and all of the amazement, and all of the fruitfulness that has come to us, to the exercise of critical rationality and the empirical method - all of the wonders of mathematical formulas that have tied our earth into a network of communication creating the possibility of a global community - all of that, all of that without the sense of the presence of God becomes empty and hollow and now and again, here and there, we will be surprised by a hunger because we have been created with a God-shaped hole in our soul. And so, we have entered into a period of time which is called the Post-Modem period. The Post-Modem period into which we have entered and the periodization of cultural shifts is very untidy, but basically this 20th century has come to see the limitations of human rationality. And so, when medievalism broke apart and authoritarianism was undercut, we entered into the Modern period, and there was a sharp break. When modernity comes to understand its limits, we have called it Post-Modernity, which means it is after the modern. It is not a rejection of the modern, for we had better never reject all of the fruitfulness that has come from critical thinking, from critical rationality, from the use of intelligence, from the mind that probes and investigates. We cannot go back to some authoritarian claim that hears voices from heaven. The exercise of critical intelligence is a continuing and ongoing dimension of the Post-Modem period. But, Post-Modernism has come to be a time in which it is more and more being recognized that intelligence, thinking which we value so highly here, is not enough. Intelligence and attention, or I could call it awareness. Or, I could call it simply an openness to that which is beyond the limits of our minds to grapple and grasp, an openness to that which is sacred and holy and which permeates the whole of reality so that I would speak of God not as some supernatural being "out there," beyond creation, intervening and tinkering and arranging here and there, arbitrarily and capriciously, but rather the God of whom I would speak naturally as the Soul of the universe, as the creative Spirit that now and again rises into our conscious attention or awareness, taking the time consciously and intentionally to open our lives to that dimension that cannot finally be captured in a syllogism or a mathematical formula or a test-tube, to that dimension that demands a poem or a painting, a sunset or a starry heaven, a gathering with friends in a common search for the touch of God of which Peter spoke earlier, brushed with angels' wings, washed by grace. How? © Grand Valley State University �Presence of God: Intelligence and Attention Richard A. Rhem Page 5 Who can tell? When? Who could predict? But awareness that, as I live my ordinary days, what I can see and touch and handle is permeated with something that is always beyond my grasp, that alwayspresent to the soul that seeks and searches and is open, the presence of God. Not in spite of my mind, my intelligence, my probing, my serious thinking, but, when all of that is done, an attention to a reality that once was so beautifully expressed in the stone of a cathedral, but continues here and now to be expressed in a variety of ways. Mies van derRohe, one of the great architects of the 20th century, who with Frank Lloyd Wright and a couple of others, were the pioneers of the clean lines and objectivity and efficiency of architectural form, was asked shortly before he died, "If you could build what you have never been able to build, what would you build?" (I should note here that post-modernism came to expression first in architecture.) This leading modem architect of form and structure that has marked the city and the skyscraper, this one said shortly before he died, "If I could build what I have never been able to build, I would build a cathedral." Indeed. References: Richard Elliott Friedman. The Hidden Face of God. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995. “Church Going,” by Philip Larkin, in The Geography of Nowhere: Finding Oneself in the Postmodern World. Sheed and Ward, 1995. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Pentecost XIII Scripture Text I Kings 19:1-14 Location The location of the interview Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI References Richard Elliott Friedman. The Hidden Face of God. HarperCollins Publishers, 1995. "Church Going," by Philip Larkin, in The Geography of Nowhere: Finding Oneself in the Postmodern World. Sheed and Ward, 1995. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20010826 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001-08-26 Title A name given to the resource The Presence of God: Intelligence and Attention Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 application/pdf Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on August 26, 2001 entitled "The Presence of God: Intelligence and Attention", on the occasion of Pentecost XIII, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: I Kings 19:1-14. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Critical Thinking Open Mind PostModern Sacred Dimension of reality https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/6860515fc67169272a5c339b7ab8aa85.pdf 0036cd5c6b0a7a441e19a5d847982bd3 PDF Text Text Seeing is Believing Text: Kings 6:17; John 14:9 Richard A. Rhem Christ Community Church Spring Lake, Michigan Epiphany II, January 16, 1994 Transcription of the spoken sermon “...O Lord, open his eyes and let him see.”    Kings  6:17   “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”    John  14:9     Popular folk wisdom says, "Seeing is believing." Is that your creed? Is that your philosophy? Well, I dare say it is. It's really the way all of us operate, almost inevitably. "Seeing is Believing." In other words, prove it to me, demonstrate it to me, give me verification. They say all of us operate that way because we are all the children of western civilization, of western culture. We are at the end of a couple of centuries of scientific investigation and research in which the scientific method has been perfected. It has yielded tremendous success, and given us understanding. It has given us insight into unraveling the technological mysteries of the universe. We are simply people, who through the very lens with which we see reality, live and act and breathe and think as empiricists (a school of philosophy named empiricism). Empiricism is simply a philosophy that says that knowledge, truth, is derived only from sensory experience - what I can touch, what I can taste, what I can hear, what I can see. Sensory experience is the access to truth and to knowledge. Everything that is not reducible to sensory experience is simply questionable. We are children of a philosophy that has trickled down to the average person and has become now our shared common wisdom. That is the way we operate. I don't want to deprecate that. Observe all the wonders of the modem world that we enjoy. Look at the technological advances. Look at how life has been transformed through the application of empirical research and that philosophy: "Seeing is Believing." There are those who observe the human scene who have said that we are at a hinge point in the human story. We are at the end of that modern age, which is characterized by the Enlightenment, by the Age of Reason. We are also at the end of this age characterized by the scientific method, and by all of the technological breakthroughs that we have witnessed in the last couple of centuries. We have entered a Post Modem Age. The signs of that are the spiritual questing, the evidence of the emptiness of soul and the yearning of the heart for something © Grand Valley State University   �Seeing is Believing Richard A. Rhem Page 2   more. The shadow side of the modem age, so splendid in its achievement, was the implication that truth and reality were measured by the human mind, and that human reason and human rationality decided the limits of what was true - and what was real. The great philosopher, the father of modem development of philosophy, Emanuel Kant, has a book entitled Religion Within the Limits of Human Reason. You cannot have religion within the limits of human reason. We know that now. We have come up empty and are hungry. Our souls are starved and whenever that happens there is a reaction. So we have New Age spirituality as it is called. Part of it is very serious, part of it bizarre. These are indications that there are people who are grasping at straws, groping for something beyond, something that breaks the paradigm of the human rational, verifiable reality. Two popular news magazines, Time Magazine and Newsweek Magazine, December 27,1993, both featured stories on angels. They featured stories about not only the historical and biblical conception of angels, but also how angels appear in Judaism and Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. People are searching, and in both articles there are moving accounts of human encounters with angels. One article relates angelical healing. Another article simply relates how the appearance of one's guardian angel removed the fear of death, which still followed two days later. And there were stories of people encountering a light that sent heat, an energy, through their body that transformed them and gave them peace. People are hungry. In our present contemporary scene we see "angel" stores opening for business. Publishers Weekly reported five hundred million copies of books on angels sold in the recent past, and that five out of ten are on the Best Seller List. We now see, not only angel stores, but angel newsletters, angel clubs, angel seminars, etc. Perhaps you remember John Westerhoff, who was here two years ago on the first Sunday in Lent. John, a Christian educator and scholar, was interviewed by authors the of the Time article. They asked him, "Why do some people see angels, and some people don't?" He said, "It takes faith to perceive an angel. If you don't believe, you won't see." You may say, "Hey, John, you just turned that whole thing on its head! But it isn't "Seeing is Believing". Maybe there is a whole dimension of reality where believing is seeing. That, of course, is the connection with this season of the year, this Epiphany season. An expert on angels will be here during the next hour at the Perspectives Class. I'm not an expert on angels, but we see here a marvelous contemporary instance of how there has been a shift in human consciousness. We are beginning to see that the demand to see in order to believe is shipwrecked when it comes to our longing for an encounter with God. We are beginning to see experiences of transience, that sense of something or someone beyond us who touches us in grace. Not "seeing is believing," but "believing is seeing." Epiphany is the season © Grand Valley State University �Seeing is Believing Richard A. Rhem Page 3   of revelation. It is the season of the lifting of the curtain; the unveiling of manifestation, if only for a moment. Epiphany is the lighting up of the landscape of the mind in that moment in which one is transformed by the revelation; the revelation that we need eyes to see - Epiphany Eyes. Have you ever seen picture puzzles of lines and dots all over a page that look like somebody's doodle pad until you studied it long enough, or got it just at the right angle, when suddenly there is a human face or a tree, or a dog, or something else? There is a pattern there. It means something to you. You looked at it before and you saw nothing but lines and dots, and suddenly you look at it and you see an artistic pattern, a configuration of meaning. The difference is not in the page, the difference was in the perception. Epiphany Eyes enable you to see, - really see what is there. This season of the year we celebrate "The Word became flesh." This Word in flesh, whom we believe is Jesus, this One is the Light of the world. This One is the Light that enlightens. In the face of Jesus we see into the heart of God. But, for that to be so, we must know that in some cases "believing is seeing." Wasn't that an interesting Old Testament story? Did you remember it? The one about Elisha? Elisha, the prophet, was in trouble with the King of Syria because he continued to send intelligence reports to the King of Israel. He constantly kept the King of Israel out of the hands of the King of Syria, until the King of Syria wanted to do something about it. He sent his troops to apprehend Elisha. When Elisha's servant got up in the morning and saw the mountains surrounded with the enemy troops, he said, "My master, alas, what shall we do?" Elisha said, "Relax. Those who are for us are more than those who are against us." Then he prayed that marvelous Epiphany prayer. "O Lord, open thy servant’s eyes that he may see." The servant's eyes were opened and he saw the mountains ringed with chariots of fire. As in all of that Old Testament historical writing you have the historical core, richly embroidered with legendary material. What that story was saying was at the core of Israel's faith. This story makes clear that decisions are not made in Damascus or Babylon or in Persia, not even in Jerusalem. On that grand stage of world history there is an invisible player. Finally there are angels and spiritual powers, and there is a will of God and a purpose that is at work. Elisha was simply giving testimony to his conviction that the ultimate power does not lie in the hands of a Clinton or a Yeltsin, in Moscow or in Washington. In the corridors of power there is still an invisible presence of one who transcends all. There were chariots of fire surrounding God's people. What a beautiful image. This is what Jesus was explicating to Philip. Philip needed the Epiphany prayer. Philip just didn't get it. Philip was only the stooge for the rest of the disciples. If you read the Gospel of Mark, you will find that those disciples never got it. It is hard to find a bunch more dull than the disciples, particularly if you are reading Mark's account. They never got it. Philip says, "Oh, that would be nice, just show us the Father and we will be satisfied." Jesus said, "You just don't get it. I have been with you all this time and you still don't get it. If you have seen me, you've seen the Father." © Grand Valley State University �Seeing is Believing Richard A. Rhem Page 4   Reflecting on that, I was reminded of the distant past at Hope College while studying philosophy with G. Ivan Dykstra. For those of you Hope College lore, old D. Ivan used to pace up and down, giving these marvelous philosophical lectures. Once in a course on Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher/theologian, we were reading a little book called Philosophical Fragments, which talked about "disciples at second hand." Do you know what disciples at second hand are? You might say, "They are folks like you and me." Disciples at first hand would be Peter and James and John, who could reach out and touch Jesus, ate with him, walked with him. They told us about it. We hear about it. We are disciples at second hand. Right? Wrong. Wrong. Dead wrong. Kierkegaard said that the disciples that rubbed shoulders with him were disciples at second hand. They had no advantage over you and me. Read the Gospels and you will see he was right. You didn't bump into Jesus and say, "Oh, my God." There are all kinds of people who bumped into Jesus and saw nothing. The two who walked all the way to Emmaus brought Jesus into their house, and it was not until the breaking of bread that their eyes were opened and they saw him. In other words, it was a gift. It was the insight of faith. It was grace. "You've been with me so long, and you still don't know. You haven't seen. You don't understand. You just don't get it." Kierkegaard said, "You could have walked all day and not seen anything." The disciples present were disciples at second hand until the disciple had an Epiphany experience, which is as available to you and me today as it was to them then. What happened to them then must happen to us today, and what happens to us today had to happen to them then. It is not seeing that is believing, but it is believing that is seeing. It is the opening of the eyes, the mystery that is always there, but which we cannot perceive except we be graced with the eyes to see. I am a child of my culture. I am a child of this age. I operate in the whole rest of my life where "Seeing is Believing." Suddenly I come to this juncture, and verification won't do it, proofs are not available, and I have to acknowledge that it is believing that gives sight. I have bought that philosophy all my life. I hate that about the Gospel. I would love to be able to take somebody by the nap of the neck and rub his nose in it. I'd like to be able to prove it, to demonstrate it, to verify it. I would like the facts! This is so dangerous. How can I distinguish my responsible faith and my commitment from some lollygagging person out in la-la land and some fantastic imagery? I can't. How can I prove my faith? I can't. And I resist that. Believing is the only channel open to that dimension of reality that transcends the space and time world for which we are so well fitted. You can't verify it, and if you are waiting to see it in order to believe it, you'll come to grief. If today you believe it because somebody has proven it to you, you are in for trouble. I deal with this subject because it is Epiphany, but also because in popular culture today it is being dealt with. I told you about the Time Magazine and Newsweek articles on angels. I have here the book, The Five Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, © Grand Valley State University �Seeing is Believing Richard A. Rhem Page 5   John and the Gospel of Thomas), which comes out of The Jesus Seminar. If you were in my Wednesday night classes you would know I had a big book by John Dominic Crossan, the Catholic scholar. Crossan has done research into the historical Jesus. I also told you that books are coming off the press a mile a minute on this subject. In this New Quest for the Historical Jesus, Crossan tried to get through all the tradition and all the church baggage, to get down to the historical core. The Jesus Seminar, of which Crossan was a part, attempted to do the same. It began back in 1985, with scholars and clergy taking a second look at the sayings of Jesus. Finally they have published this translation of the Gospel in four colors. If they are certain Jesus said it, it is written in red; if they think Jesus said it, it is written in pink. If they think he didn't say it, it is written in grey, and if they know he didn't say it, it is written in black. (Laughter) The passage I read this morning, that beautiful passage from John 14, (just in case you wondered) is in black. I show you this book because I say to you, if your faith rests upon the results of historical criticism, you're in deep trouble. If you only believe because someone has been able to prove it to you, you are in trouble. It seems as though when the methods of historical research are honed, the skills and competence increase, scholars learn from the errors of previous quests and they get down to the bare bones facts. I was studying peacefully in my loft when Nancy, my wife, came to me and plopped this magazine down on my desk and said, "What do you think of that?" The article, “Jesus Plain and Simple,” talks about three currently published books. In one book John Dominic Crossan takes the huge thick book of research, which I just showed you, and reduces it to a more popular, albeit revolutionary, biography of Jesus. Nancy said, "In these couple of pages in Time (“Jesus Plain and Simple”), you have a stripped down variety of Jesus. I don't like it." This reminded me of another love of my life, my granddaughter, Stephanie. Some of you were here on Christmas Eve, when I told you how Stephanie came to her mother, Lynn, and said, "Tell me the truth, Mommy. Is Santa Claus real?" Now that's a moment when you can't just say, "Oh sure, Honey." This was a little girl at the edge of awakening, saying "Mommy, tell me the truth." So her mother told her. Stephie got angry. She said, "Well, I'm going to believe it anyway!" Later that night after Nancy had thrown the magazine on my desk she said to me, 'That stuff doesn't bother you at all, does it?" I said, "No, it doesn't bother me at all. I have known for a long time that my faith cannot rest on the uncertain consequences of historical research. I do not see in order to believe. But I believe, and then I see." I deal with this issue because it seems to me that I am accountable to you. You ought to be able to look to me to talk about these things with you. The Five Gospels has attracted quite a bit of press lately. I have here articles from The Milwaukee Journal, The Detroit Free Press, and The Grand Rapids Press. I could do as three pastors did in The Detroit Free Press and say that the Jesus © Grand Valley State University �Seeing is Believing Richard A. Rhem Page 6   Seminar scholars are enemies of God, they are undercutting religion, but I won't. They may be right. They may be wrong. But the Jesus Seminar scholars are responsible and they are serious, and they are carrying out their research and their gift and offering it to God and to us. By and large I believe that is the case. Or I could just sidestep the subject and hope it goes away, but some of you said to me at the door last week, "Did you read Time Magazine? Help!" What I choose to do is use this as an occasion to say to you, "Put your faith where it belongs. Recognize it as the gift of God, the God who graces you with a spirit, who illumines you when you sing, 'Open our eyes Lord. We would see Jesus.'" I share this with you because it becomes a marvelous occasion in which to say to you, "Don't seek proof and verification. We have done that too long. We have spoken about the revelation of God as though somehow or other that happened way back there. Then it was inspired and spoken, and now we have this revelation. We don't have a revelation. There isn't a revelation, there is only a God who reveals, here and now and continuously. This book (the Bible) is the consequence of Epiphany experiences, when those who rubbed elbows with Jesus and saw nothing had their eyes opened to see everything, and were able to witness, as the gospel writer John witnessed Jesus - as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. This book is the consequence of those who had an Epiphany experience, and it was written down and told in order that it might become the occasion for you and me to have an Epiphany moment now. My faith rests not in the verifiable proof of historical research. It is the consequence of the illumination of my heart and mind through the Spirit of God in this present moment. That is where it rests. The scholars can continue to look at the foundations of the faith, and rightly they should, because we claim that the revelation has occurred in the midst of human history and in the arena of historical reality and, therefore, we will always have that with us. Responsible people ought always to be checking those things out. But when all is said and done, it is finally gift, grace, unveiling, here and now. Why do some see and others not see? I don't know. But I do know that there is a sure promise in the Word of God, "If with all your heart you truly seek me, you will also surely find me." And once I have been found, in the moment of finding I will know a rest that will enable me to be un-settled. I can be un-settled without losing ultimate trust and faith in the work that continues to go on because I know finally it is not only seeing - that it is believing. Believing has its own eyes to see a purpose and meaning that can give us the courage we need to seek God's way in our present moment. "Oh Lord, open thy servants’ eyes that they may see." © Grand Valley State University � https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/475b858a9601822da2ffd68eb21a0732.mp3 5368ef60a183733fe224279b5b3d8f09 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Epiphany II Scripture Text II Kings 6:17, John 14:9 Location The location of the interview Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-19940116 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994-01-16 Title A name given to the resource Seeing is Believing Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 application/pdf Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on January 16, 1994 entitled "Seeing is Believing", on the occasion of Epiphany II, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: II Kings 6:17, John 14:9. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Critical Thinking Epiphany Grace Historical Jesus Spiritual Dimension Spiritual Quest https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/028dcb90bdff0763492017c604873082.mp3 53cd3c93f81ea9c60954fecc51ec2954 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e161fca48ae425b625c8065c9f2f2ce3.pdf 2df8cb18b1fdd2fe40de619d65c885a1 PDF Text Text Freedom’s Stumbling Blocks: Uncritical Traditionalism From the Lenten sermon series: Freedom: Costly and Conflicted Text: Mark 3:21, 32; Luke 7:19 Richard A. Rhem Christ Community Church Spring Lake, Michigan Lent IV, March 5, 1989 Transcription of the prepared text Jesus reveals God; in his face we see into the heart of God. But Jesus is a double revelation; he is also the model of a fully human being. Jesus is the human person according to which we are being shaped by the Spirit of God. Jesus thus reveals who God is and what as human persons we are called to be. In our Lenten reflections this year we are focusing on a central facet of Jesus’ person, the magnificent freedom with which he lived. He knew who he was and what God was calling him to do. As we saw in the first message in this series, Jesus had a sense of identity and vision. He was a truly free person. Jesus modeled out that freedom. Jesus calls us to grow into that freedom by the liberating power of God. Not freedom understood as autonomy; rather, freedom to live out of our own authentic being, freedom for God, freedom for others. Such freedom is not won without great cost; it is not won without conflict. Sometimes the stumbling blocks to authentic human freedom stem from those closest to us; sometimes from the very relationship and association we might suppose would seek to enable that freedom. Jesus encountered stumbling blocks to freedom – as uncritical traditionalism that was no longer open to the movement of God’s Spirit that creates freedom and calls persons to the transforming newness of the Kingdom. Jesus lived out of his own centered being – out of his sense of who he was and his vision for the ministry to which God was calling him. That sense of identity and vision came only after his own personal struggle. The Gospel writers make it very clear that Jesus’ ministry flowed out of his call and empowering by God’s Spirit experienced in connection with his baptism. The Gospels then record the wilderness temptations – a portrayal of Jesus’ personal wrestling who he was and what shape his ministry would take. We saw him last week as Luke portrayed him, inaugurating his ministry in his hometown using the text from Isaiah: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me; he has sent me to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners © Grand Valley State University   �Freedom’s Stumbling Blocks: Uncritical Traditionalism Richard A. Rhem Page 2   and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. What at first seemed to be a successful sermon for this hometown boy turned out to be a near disaster when the home town folds realized that Jesus’ vision of a radical grace that reached far beyond the bounds of the Jewish people threatened their supposed special coziness with God. Jesus was undeterred. He carried on a ministry of healing and liberation. His teaching was full of grace and his deeds were gracious deeds restoring persons to health and wholeness. He announced the Good News of the Kingdom and offered forgiveness to all. The Galilean ministry caused quite a stir. The word was out: a great prophet was present. God’s care was being manifest for God’s people. That is what Luke reports in the verse preceding our lesson. It would seem that Jesus was well on his way. He had a great future. Wouldn’t everyone rejoice and celebrate such an obviously God-graced person? Well, we already know the answer to that question – no, everybody would not celebrate that gracious, liberating ministry. The ordinary folk rejoiced, praised God, and experienced the freeing words and deeds of Jesus. But it was soon clear that Jesus would be strongly opposed by various groups. How would he react? How would he respond? Would he be able to maintain the vision, living out of that center rooted in God’s call and empowering? In a word – would Jesus live out his freedom or would he be detoured by the stumbling blocks cast in his way? We have already noted in the first message of the series that John the Baptist was troubled by the reports of Jesus’ ministry. He sent two of his disciples to Jesus to ask, Are you the one who is to come or are we to expect some other? That must have been a tough question for Jesus. John had baptized Jesus. John had pointed to him as the mighty one who had been promised. The Fourth Gospel tells of an earlier Judean ministry of Jesus at the Jordan near where John’s ministry was carried out. It is reasonable to assume that John had been a model for Jesus and had impressed a model of ministry on Jesus – a model taken from the prophet Malachi: Look, I am sending my messenger who will clear a path before me. Suddenly the Lord whom you seek will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant. …Who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand firm when he appears? He is like a refiner’s fire….Malachi 3: 1-2 John was a serious preacher of righteousness who pronounced the judgment of God on the evil and darkness and unrighteousness of the world. John longed for © Grand Valley State University �Freedom’s Stumbling Blocks: Uncritical Traditionalism Richard A. Rhem Page 3   God to call history to a halt, to vindicate the righteous and damn the wicked. John hoped Jesus would bring the fire of God’s judgment on the earth. Instead, he heard of Jesus’ healings and grace. His question arose from the confusion he experienced when the program of God’s Kingdom did not fit his expectations. Jesus affirmed John. John was a true prophet of God and an honest preacher of righteousness. But John failed to sense the marvelous inbreaking of God’s grace because he was so certain that he knew what God’s next move must be. Jesus demonstrated his freedom in his response to John. He did not argue or debate. He respectfully announced, “Go tell John what you have seen and heard.” There was no breaking of relationship – at least on Jesus’ part. He distinguished his own ministry from John’s, his own understanding of what God was doing from John’s expectations. But he affirmed John. He honored John. Jesus demonstrated real strength. He remained true to his vision, to the shape of ministry he discovered – not in Malachi as John had suggested, but in Isaiah. I don’t suppose that was easy. If John were his mentor; if John, the elder prophet of God, was recognized by Jesus as a faithful servant of God, it must have been difficult to follow a line quite at odds with John’s viewpoint. Jesus demonstrated freedom and maturity – the ability to be his own person, to differentiate himself from his mentor but to maintain relationship. That was not easy, especially because of the high esteem in which he held John. I wonder if Jesus’ response caused John to review his conception of the tradition critically. I hope so. Otherwise he robbed himself of the very great comfort and joy he might have experienced. The lesson from Mark’s Gospel tells of the negative response of Jesus’ own religious leaders and his own family. Here too the rejection comes after Mark has recounted the powerful ministry of Jesus, healing, exorcising the demonic, and announcing forgiveness freely to all. The religious leaders representing the established religion of Israel decided he was demon-possessed. They claimed his power was of the evil one. Jesus refuted their accusation and warned them of the peril of refusing to acknowledge the power of God at work in his healing ministry of grace. Here he stands against the traditionalism of the Jewish religion. We need not demonstrate how he shattered the accepted practices and understandings of his day. He manifested a freedom from the bondage of religious customs, rituals and rules that had become a heavy burden binding the human spirit. His response to the religious establishment is not moderate and affirming as is the case of John. The religious leaders angered Jesus – not because they opposed © Grand Valley State University �Freedom’s Stumbling Blocks: Uncritical Traditionalism Richard A. Rhem Page 4   him, per se, but because he knew they had distorted the intention of God as revealed in the Scriptures and had bound the human spirit, crushed the soul of the people, making religion a burden to be borne rather than a power to liberate. Jesus had courage. It did not take the establishment log to sense that Jesus was a real threat to their institutions, their positions of power and prestige, their religious customs by which they controlled the people. And it certainly did not take Jesus long to recognize that he was in a serious conflict that could well end in his death. I wonder if he ever considered giving it up and going back to the family business. I wonder if the anger he felt, which manifested itself when, for example, he routed the money changers out of the Temple, sometimes alternated with honest fear, a sense of despair at the entrenched blindness of his own religious leaders. That he struggled to the very end we are told. Yet it would seem that he did not look back nor did he question the vision, his sense of identity and his sense of mission. It takes a deeply grounded freedom to set oneself over against one’s own tradition. Over the years most of you have come to Christ Community from somewhere. You have joined because you believed in the vision, the tone quality of grace, the ambience of freedom. But, for all who have come, there are folk who have been similarly drawn but, in the final analysis, could not break out of a deeply rooted tradition – even when they sensed something seriously distorted or missing. The promise to conform, to accommodate, to compromise with is very powerful indeed. Jesus took on his whole significant national, cultural, religious world and broke free of its uncritical traditionalism. I think it may have been more difficult to distance himself from John than from the Temple crowd. But I suspect that most difficult of all was the differentiation of himself from his own family. In Mark 3:21 we read that his family, hearing the reports of his ministry, “set out to take charge of him; for people were saying that he was out of his mind.” That is the NEB translation. The RSV has “his friends” but the NEB is correct here and we can see that if we go to verse 31: Then his mother and his brothers arrived, and remaining outside sent in a message asking him to come out to them. Do you get the picture? Do you sense the kind of pressure this must have put on Jesus? I suppose we will all feel this scene in terms of our own family relationships but, even for those whose families are quite “laid back,” it must be obvious that this was the crucial test of freedom. And if you happen to be fortunate enough to be part of a tight-knit family and extended family, can’t you sense a knotting in your stomach? © Grand Valley State University �Freedom’s Stumbling Blocks: Uncritical Traditionalism Richard A. Rhem Page 5   Stop to think about it: the whole mission of Jesus might have been derailed by a well-meaning mother. Can’t you just hear Mary saying to her other boys, “We’re just going to go over there and bring that boy home. He’s making a fool of himself and embarrassing the family.” The word in Greek to describe what they were saying about Jesus means “beside oneself,” “to stand outside of,” to be “eccentric”– that is, to be “off center” or as the word is translated “out of his mind.” And the word used to describe their intention means literally they set out to seize him. Mary was serious! She wanted her boy home! We read that he was told his mother and brothers were outside wanting to see him and his response was Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? His eyes sweeping the room, he must have gestured as he replied, Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother, my sister, my mother. To be able so to respond in that situation evidenced a freedom few of us will ever attain. Put yourself into the situation. Sit where May was sitting. What thoughts and feelings must have pulsated within her being! What do you suppose she said to her other sons? What would you have said? We have all been children growing up and outgrowing our parental home and many of us have been parents experiencing our children outgrow our oversight. It is not easy. It is often fraught with tension, not seldom laced with pain. Had you been Mary, would you have been able to let go, commit to God, return home without your son? Love, honor, respect: these are things required of a son or daughter. But finally every son and daughter must fine their own center of being, envision their own truth and respond to the call of God that comes to them. That is where we see again the freedom of Jesus. He differentiated himself from his family but never broke with the family, never broke relationship. In the Atlantic, September 1988, there is an extended essay introducing the family system theory, which, unlike psychoanalysis, sees human beings as persons in a situation of interlocking relationships rather than as autonomous psychological entities. The article is entitled “Chronic Anxiety and Defining a Self”– a title which speaks volumes and gives a clue to what is set forth, namely, that a failure adequately to differentiate oneself from the network of relationship given one in the family structure results in chronic anxiety. An unhealthy emotionality in family relationships results in chronic anxiety where the self is not well defined. The rebel, on the other hand, is a highly reactive person whose © Grand Valley State University �Freedom’s Stumbling Blocks: Uncritical Traditionalism Richard A. Rhem Page 6   self is also inadequately developed. He operates in opposition to parents and others. Jesus did not argue with John’s disciples as he responded to John’s question. Jesus confronted the distortion of the truth of God as he encountered it in the religious leadership of his day because of the damage it did not the people who should have been helped and healed. Over against his family he simply did not respond at the point of their total misunderstanding. Reason would not have worked anyway. Mary was afraid and defensive for her son over against the word being spread and she was embarrassed. I am happy one word of Jesus from the cross was an expression of care for his mother. It shows he never cut himself off from his family. But neither did he deny his own truth and vision simply to pacify them when they were caught in a traditionalism that blocked their coming into the spaciousness of God’s new movement. Isn’t it good to know that Mary was part of the post-Easter community praying for the Spirit and James, Jesus’ brother, became spiritual head of the Jerusalem church? Of course, James remained a rather conservative law/righteousness person. Yet it was he who was able to provide the compromise at the Jerusalem Council recorded in Acts 15 that bridged the gulf separating Paul and the Gentile mission and the strongly Jewish Christian contingent centered in Jerusalem. Jesus is a model of magnificent freedom He lived it out and in his life we can see the beauty of an authentic life lived out of its own identity and vision – out of its own center and truth. The secret lay in Jesus’ rootedness in God. Being rooted in God Jesus was free over against every form of human bondage. In the words of the hymn writer, Make me a captive, Lord; Then I shall be free. Only when one is free, in possession of one’s life because that life is anchored in God, does one have a life to give away. This is what concerns me about so much religious posture. So much of the religious establishment in all forms of religion bind people, imprison, weigh down, manipulate and thusly control. There is so much “group think” encouraged by religious leadership. Jesus established his being and vision over against the powerful pull of traditionalism and Jesus calls us to freedom as well. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Lent IV Series Freedom: Costly and Conflicted Scripture Text Mark 3:21, 32, Luke 7: 19 Location The location of the interview Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-19890305 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989-03-05 Title A name given to the resource Freedom's Stumbling Blocks: Uncritical Traditionalism Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 application/pdf Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on March 5, 1989 entitled "Freedom's Stumbling Blocks: Uncritical Traditionalism", as part of the series "Freedom: Costly and Conflicted", on the occasion of Lent IV, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Mark 3:21, 32, Luke 7: 19. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Critical Thinking Grace Historical Jesus Inclusive Lent Way of Jesus