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Present to the Presence
Living with Awareness of God in Whom We Trust
Psalm 16: 5-11; Romans 8: 31, 35-39
Richard A. Rhem
Lakeshore Interfaith Institute and Community, Mother’s Trust
Ganges, Michigan
July 29, 2012
Prepared text of Talk
I am really not being morbid but, of late, when I am trying to determine what to
speak about when fulfilling an assignment such as this, I think about what some
professors are invited to do: to deliver a lecture they would deliver if they had but
one last opportunity. What would one want to say if he or she knew all their
learning, all their wisdom and insight, knowledge and passion were to be packed
into their final lecture?
That is really a great challenge: if this were your last time to address a group of
students, what would you say to them? The concept was inspired by the “Last
Lecture” delivered at Carnegie Mellon University by Dr. Randy Pausch on
September 18, 2007. He had terminal pancreatic cancer – a fact known at the
time that he spoke. His lecture was entitled “Really Achieving Your Childhood
Dreams.” He died on July 25, 2008.
So what would I want to say if I had one last time to bring to expression my
deepest truth? I’ve entitled my presentation “Present to the Presence: Living
With the Awareness of God in Whom We Trust.” As part of the process of coming
to that decision I traveled back over my faith journey, trying to identify those
critical moments that have shaped me and brought me to where I find myself at
this advanced stage of my journey. And there is no question but I must point to
the loving nurture of my childhood, the nurture received from deeply committed
Christian parents. There was implanted in me an unquestioned trust in the good
and gracious God of Christian faith. Growing up, there was never a question,
never a doubt. At my ordination I received a letter from my father telling me
when I was in my mother’s womb he dedicated me to God’s service should I turn
out to be a boy. (Women’s ordination wasn’t even in the picture at that time.) Of
course, that was not a surprise to me for he would often speak of his prayer that I
would go into the ministry. Yet I did not know of the moment when he first
brought it to expression on his knees.
In a sense I never chose my vocation; it seemed as natural as breathing that I
would pursue that course. I never questioned nor resisted. Thus, graduating from
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Richard A. Rhem
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seminary in 1960, I assumed my first pastorate at the First Reformed Church of
Spring Lake, Michigan. I came to that wonderful congregation with my
childhood faith and piety. Having gone through twenty years of education
including the four at college and three at seminary, my childhood faith remained
intact; I really had not been educated but remained with the faith and piety I
imbibed with my mother’s milk. I began my ministry with an unexamined faith
understanding, believing not only that it was true but that it was absolute truth. I
was not only very conservative in my Reformed and evangelical faith, I was
militantly so.
In retrospect I realize that that militancy was the consequence of a deep
insecurity. I was defensive but without being really aware of it. A statement put
out by the Theological Commission of the Reformed Church on the authority of
Scripture stated the Bible was “infallible in what it intended to teach.” I
considered that statement was intended to allow that Scripture might be in error
in things that were not what it “intended to teach” regarding our salvation. I
objected; I insisted that the Bible was inerrant and infallible, period!
That is not really important except to indicate where I was as I began my ministry
– very conservative and threatened by any challenge to my fervently held
orthodox Reformed faith.
That is the setting for detailing the long journey that brings me to where I am at
present – very comfortable giving expression to my faith understanding in this
fine interfaith community.
I suspect the long unwinding of that exclusive, absolutist faith was triggered by
what may seem a rather trivial occurrence. One of my young people made her
Christian confession of faith. The next summer she went away to work with a
friend whose mother was a Mormon. She returned to tell me she was going to
become a Mormon. I was heartbroken. I gave her Scripture texts. She came back
with texts from the Book of Mormon. It was then that I realized if all I had was a
text against another text, I was deadlocked. (I shudder to think of my ignorance.)
About this time the Reformed Church came out with a new curriculum in
conjunction with the Presbyterian Church – The Covenant Life Curriculum. The
curriculum was introduced with Foundation Papers. I began to study them,
especially regarding the view of Scripture. For the first time I began to open up to
a larger view. I taught the opening adult course at Spring Lake and then moved to
a congregation in New Jersey that was very conservative. When I brought in that
curriculum there, there was resistance. The resistance made me dig deeper. I
began to see the closed orthodoxy, from which I stemmed, from the other side.
After a brief three-year pastorate there it was time to go back to school. I left for
post-graduate study in the Netherlands.
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Richard A. Rhem
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Without going into the details, I made an appointment with Professor Hendrikus
Berkhof at the University of Leiden. His study was in his home and I met him
there. A most inviting and cordial person. I was impressed though not yet
committed to Leiden. But as I arose to leave I noticed a mimeographed paper
penned to the drape that separated his study from the rest of his house. I went to
read what was written; what was written changed my life. The lines were those of
Alfred Lord Tennyson:
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.
I remember the moment vividly. I had found my professor!
For those who have been with me for some time, this is a familiar account but I
must, in this retrospective, underline it here because I was at a critical point in
my life and ministry. My “little system” had hit a wall. My whole “system” was
based on the absolute authority of the Bible as the God-breathed, inerrant,
infallible truth. I was devoid of any sense of how the critical studies of Scripture
had revealed it as a very human product that was a witness to revelation – that is,
the report of an experience of unveiling, not the unveiling itself.
As mentioned above, my first hint of a critical view of Scripture came in the
Foundation Papers of the Covenant Life Curriculum. The first assignment from
my new mentor, Professor Berkhof, also my professor of Dogmatics, was to read
Karl Barth. I went to my set of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Vol. I, Part 2 –
The Doctrine of the Word of God, and 45 years later I could turn to the page
heavily underlined that struck me as I first encountered it:
If we take Luther and Calvin together, we can say that the way to that
universal and moving view of inspiration which answers to the majesty of
God, and as we find it in Scripture itself, was again opened up by the
Reformation. The Reformers’ doctrine of inspiration is an honouring of
God, and of the free grace of God. The statement that the Bible is the Word
of God is on this view no limitation, but an unfolding of the perception of
the sovereignty in which the Word of God condescended to become flesh
for us in Jesus Christ, and a human word in the witness of the prophets
and apostles as witnesses to His incarnation. On their lips and
understanding this is the true statement concerning the Bible which is
always indispensable to the Church.
But the post-Reformation period first of all failed really to take the newly
opened road to the meaning and understanding of the statement. And
then it obviously took a different and mistaken way: mistaken, because it
destroyed the mystery of this statement, because it necessarily resulted in
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Richard A. Rhem
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a denial of the sovereignty of the Word of God and therefore of the Word
of God itself. In this connection we cannot pay too much attention to a
remarkable parallelism: the development of the original Reformed
Protestantism into the newer Protestantism which began in the so-called
orthodoxy and became visible about 1700 was admittedly characterised by
a gradual growth of uncertainty in the knowledge of the sin and
justification of man and the judgment and grace of God.
This uncertainty, as it concerned the question of revelation, was followed
first by a quiet, then by an increasingly open and direct inflow of natural
theology. To this development there corresponded, curiously enough, a
stiffening in the understanding of the inspiration of the Bible which also
began quietly but then developed no less definitely. The strictly
supranaturalistic character of the statements which were the outcome of
this stiffening tends to create an optical illusion. We first think that we are
faced by a contradiction when we see orthodoxy becoming laxer and laxer
in relation to natural theology and in secret to the doctrine of grace, but
stricter and stricter in relation to the doctrine of the inspiration of the
Bible. In reality the two belong intimately together.
The gradually extending new understanding of biblical inspiration was
simply one way and, in view of its highly supranaturalistic character,
perhaps the most important way in which the great process of
secularisation on which post-Reformation protestantism entered was
carried through. This new understanding of biblical inspiration meant
simply that the statement that the Bible is the Word of God was now
transformed (following the doubtful tendencies we have already met in the
Early Church) from a statement about the free grace of God into a
statement about the nature of the Bible as exposed to human inquiry
brought under human control.
The Bible as the Word of God surreptitiously became a part of natural
knowledge of God, i.e., of that knowledge of God which man can have
without the free grace of God, by his own power, and with direct insight
and assurance. That the highly supranaturalistic form in which this step
was made was only a form used because no better was available is proved
by the haste with which it was abandoned almost as soon as it was
adopted.
It was followed by the enlightenment and the ensuing “historical”
investigation and treatment of the Bible, i.e., the character of the Bible as
the Word of God was now transformed into that of a highly relevant
historical record. And this merely revealed what high orthodoxy had really
sought and attained under this apparently supranaturalistic form: the
understanding and use of the Bible as an instrument separated from the
free grace of God and put into the hands of man. If it should be our aim
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Richard A. Rhem
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today to go back to the better understanding of the Bible which we find in
the Reformers and above all in the Bible itself, then it is not a question of
renewing the doctrine of inspiration of high orthodoxy in opposition to the
Enlightenment and the development which followed it. Rather, we must
carefully and consistently avoid the mistake of that orthodoxy – which is
all the more dangerous because its supranaturalistic trend can make it
appear advantageous. It is only at this root that the evil which broke out
later can really be tackled. (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. I.1,p. 522f)
Barth’s essential insight was that revelation must be a present experience as the
Holy Spirit takes what once was revealed and recorded in Scripture so that it
becomes, by God’s grace, a present revelation by the same Holy Spirit that
inspired prophets and apostles. God’s revelation is not to be contained between
the covers of a book that one can slip in one’s pocket, as it were, carrying around
the Word of God. Revelation happened; revelation happens; but it is always a
contemporary event by the grace of God’s Spirit.
I was fascinated by Barth’s historical analysis that revealed how, as reason’s
dominance evolved as the Enlightenment emerged, exalting human rationality,
challenging the Bible as the supernaturally inspired Word of God, the orthodox
Protestant church increasingly affirmed the Bible as inerrant and infallible. As
reason rose in ascendancy, Barth claimed, rather than trusting the Bible as the
product of God’s revelation which, by the grace of God, would become ever anew
revelation by the same grace of God, the post Reformation Scholastics now set up
the Bible as itself the depository of revelation, utilizing the same human reason
that Enlightenment thinkers were using to discredit the Bible.
I found that movement fascinating and very enlightening. I understood Barth
saying the whole approach to “saving” the Bible from its Enlightenment critics by
means of counter-reasoned argument was doomed to failure. Now the Bible was
in human hands; rather than seeing it as a record of revelations past that may by
God’s grace be again a place of revelation, orthodoxy attempted to prove the Bible
itself was the revelation – a futile endeavor.
I became a convinced Barthian at that point, no longer afraid that turning over
the next stone might bring to light some data that would undercut biblical
authority. The authority did not reside in “the book” which was a fallible human
witness to revelatory experience of the respective writers. With that a huge
burden was lifted from my shoulders. Now I had room to think, to question, to
wonder. With the wise and gracious guidance of my mentor, Hendrikus Berkhof,
I plunged into my study with a voracious hunger. I would read and read, one
volume leading to five more and from time to time would call my Professor for an
appointment to discuss my progress. Eventually, after a couple years, he would
say, “Mr. Rhem, now you must begin to write.” But the next volume lead me to
investigate more footnotes and delve further into the bibliography. I was so
“hungry” and I could not stop pushing out the frontiers of my evolving grasp of
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Richard A. Rhem
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the historical development of Christian dogma from the Apostolic Age through
the early church fathers and the creedal formation that continues to mark
Christian dogma.
Since Dogmatics was not considered a science in the Netherlands’ university
system, Professor Berkhof, though my advisor, could not be the professor of the
major study of my program, he being a “Church Professor,” appointed by the
Netherlands Reformed Church. He advised a second minor in New Testament,
and The History of Dogma as my major. What wise counsel; the history of the
development of Christian Dogmatics was precisely what I needed – what I loved.
I traced the historical development from the early centuries through the
Reformation. It was an exciting time of discovery. After three years I took my
testamens – oral exams with each of my three professors in Dogmatics, New
Testament and History of Dogma. Having passed those three exams I was ready
for the oral exam before the whole faculty for the Doctorandus Degree, which I
was granted in April, 1969.
Next – deciding on a subject for my doctoral dissertation and the writing of it. I
decided to write on the place of history in the theology of Karl Barth and Wolfhart
Pannenberg, a young German theologian who was of a school of scholars who
were the students of the twentieth-century giants, Barth and Rudolf Bultmann,
both of whom in their respective fields had no place for “revelation in history.”
For Bultmann, the only “footprint” of revelation in history was the “dass,” the
“that” of Jesus – he was an historical person but we can recover no reliable data
of his life except that he “was.” For Barth, revelation came “vertically from
above;” it was always an event. The only footprint of God’s revelation in history
was the thirty-three years of Jesus’ historical existence bracketed by two miracles
– the Virgin Birth at the beginning and the Resurrection at the end.
The next generation was not satisfied with that conception of revelation that
disallowed historical enquiry into the life of Jesus as well as the Old and New
Testament history. That debate was the focus of my research and I became
intensely interested in the development of historical thinking which emerged in
the nineteenth century. But I soon learned that the real watershed that divided
theological development from the Apostolic Age to the present was the
Enlightenment. My sense was one had to go through the Enlightenment if the
ancient faith was to be adhered to in the present.
After having chapter one of my dissertation approved, I returned home but I had
none. I had spent the last six months alone in the Netherlands, my former wife
having left in the summer of 1970. A broken marriage finally came apart and I
returned in December of 1970 to see my children, thinking I would return to the
Netherlands to finish the dissertation and receive the Doctor of Theology degree
which I saw as necessary because I thought my pastoral ministry was finished
since divorce was certain and, at that time, I had no hope of receiving a call from
a congregation. But I was wrong.
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Richard A. Rhem
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My first congregation, in what I still can only understand as an act of very great
grace, invited me to return to be their pastor, knowing that divorce would follow
shortly. Returning to Leiden, I packed my books and few belongings and on
March 1, 1971, began again to be the pastor of the First Reformed Church of
Spring Lake.
Again, graciously, I was encouraged to continue to work on my dissertation. But
the congregation began to grow and I was fully engaged. I did keep in touch with
Professor Berkhof, letting him know what was happening. One day I received a
letter from him in which he wrote,
Mr. Rhem, I no longer expect you to return to complete your doctoral
work. Theology is for the service of the church. God has called you to a
more important work.
Such a professor! Such grace! Such sensitivity! It is no wonder in subsequent
years we, with our spouses, traveled together and twice they were our house
guests. But that is another story. The above transitions me to Spring Lake where,
three months after beginning again, we re-named ourselves Christ Community
Church.
Though now a full-time pastor, I could not cease being fascinated by the
theological history through which I had traversed. In my preaching I sought to
interlace my best understanding of the biblical text but in the present context of
our history. Adult Education, however, provided opportunity to share my
growing understanding of the Christian faith.
In 1974 the Catholic theologian Hans Küng published a book in German entitled
Christ Sein, which was translated into English in 1976 under the title On Being a
Christian. I found it a marvelous statement of Christian faith in light of all I had
learned about the historical development that brought us to the present and I
used it with groups of lay folk. In 1978 Küng published Existiert Gott?, an English
translation appearing the same year under the title Does God Exist? That book
too I consumed and used in an adult education class. For me, it was as though my
whole European study was condensed in one 800-plus page volume.
It was here that I faced the Enlightenment head-on as it related to the Christian
faith. Küng drew together for me in concise form the crisis of modern atheism
that arose in the wake of the Enlightenment. In a section entitled “The Challenge
of Atheism,” Küng’s sub-sections are:
I. God – a projection of man? Ludwig Feuerbach
II. God – a consolation serving vested interests? Karl Marx
III.God – an infantile illusion? Sigmund Freud.
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The next major division Küng entitles “Nihilism – Consequence of Atheism,”
dealing with Friedrich Nietzsche.
In scholarly fashion with great clarity he sets forth the kernel of the thought of
these thinkers. He then offers a critique acknowledging where the thrust of their
thought raised valid issues Christian theology must deal with.
Küng opens this section, “The Challenge of Atheism,” by setting the stage for his
development which follows:
Socrates was condemned to death as atheos, as “godless.” But he had by no
means rejected any kind of God; he had rejected, like many other educated
Greeks, only the customary veneration of the gods of the Greek polis.
Atheism properly so-called does not deny merely a plurality of gods or
merely a particular way of worshiping God or even simply a personal,
”theistic” God. It denies any God and any divine reality, whether
understood mythologically, theologically or philosophically. In both
antiquity and the Middle Ages, there were very few who upheld atheism in
this sense: a total view of reality assuming that it is possible to do without
any God at all.
It was only with the radicalized French Enlightenment – in the aftermath
of secularization and the Church’s compromising of belief in God by its
struggle against both modern science and modern democracy – that
atheism, as we saw, became more widespread at first among the educated
classes. The new defenders of atheism in the nineteenth century felt,
however, that they were far above this “common atheism.” In fact, it was
only with Feuerbach and Marx and later – supported by atheistic natural
scientists – with Nietzsche and Freud that atheism became a
Weltanschauung, threatening belief in God and Christianity at their roots,
penetrating all classes of the population and finally reaching global
dimensions beyond the frontiers of Europe. (p. 189)
The font of this modern (nineteenth century) atheism Küng finds in Ludwig
Feuerbach (1804-1872). Of course, Hegelian philosophy had set the stage but in
Feuerbach modern atheism found its architect. Küng contends that,
With Feuerbach, the tremendous danger to belief in God and Christianity
presented by Hegel’s identification of finite and infinite consciousness, of
man and God, becomes apparent. (p. 199)
What happens to God? Küng explains:
And God? What follows, from all this, for the notion of God? The essential
presupposition is that “the consciousness of the infinite is nothing else
than the consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness.” That is: “In
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the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object
the infinity of his own nature.” This, then, is how the notion of God
emerges, and it seems entirely understandable. Man sets up his human
nature out of himself, he sees it as something existing outside himself and
separated from himself; he projects it, then, as an autonomous figure – so
to speak – in heaven, calls it God and worships it. In a word, the notion of
God is nothing but a projection of man: “The absolute to man is his own
nature.”
The knowledge of God, then, is a gigantic floodlight. God appears as a
projected, hypostatized reflection of man, behind which nothing exists in
reality. The divine is the universally human projected into the hereafter.
What are the attributes of the divine nature: love, wisdom, justice...? In
reality, these are the attributes of man, of the human species. Homo
homini Deus est, man is God for man: here lies the whole mystery of
religion.
This becomes particularly clear with the personal (“theistic”) God of
Christianity, independent and existing outside man. This God is nothing
other than the specific notion of man, given independent existence, the
personified nature of man. Man “contemplates his nature as external to
himself”; God is the manifest interior of man, his expressed, “relinquished
self.” The Attributes of God are really the attributes of the objectified
nature of man. It is not, as in the Bible, that God created man in his own
image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image. God as a
ghostly Opposite, existing outside man, stimulated by man himself. Man a
great projector, God the great projection. Just test it...and it disappears.
God is intellectual being, spirit. In this very way, God appears as a pure
projection of human understanding...” (p. 200f)
From Feuerbach’s God as Projection idea one can see how that was used by Karl
Marx claiming God, thus projected, serves the vested interests of the powerful.
From Feuerbach, Freud claimed God to be an infantile illusion. Küng explains
Freud’s claim regarding the source of religion.
What is the source of religion?
First of all we must look at the historical background. For Freud, the
question of the origin of the various religions was quite obviously
psychological in character. For Christian and Jewish theologians, for
centuries it had been a dogmatic question: the pagan religions were
distortions, degenerations of the original, pure, revealed religion (with a
primordial revelation), as a result of man’s sin as described in the Bible.
But, for the rationalist “enlighteners” of the eighteenth century also –
David Hume in England, Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot in France,
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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Germany – it was a dogmatic question: the
various religions were distortions and degenerations of the originally pure
religion of reason, with its clear belief in God, freedom and immortality –
distortions brought about by priestly inventions and popular customs. It
was only with the rise of a science of religion, in the nineteenth century
that the question of the origin of religion became a historical, philological,
ethnological, psychological question. Even in classical Greece, of course,
there had been an interest in the history of religions; but a science of
religion as a specific field of study has existed only from the nineteenth
century onward. In this field, primitive religion itself became a problem.
(p. 175f)
Freud’s answer to the question of the source of religion? Küng summarizes thus:
Religion, then, arose out of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of
mankind. Religion is wishful thinking, illusion. “Illusion” means that
religion is not a deliberate lie in the moral sense or – and Freud stresses
this – error in the epistemological sense; nor is it necessarily illusory in the
sense of being unrealistic or contradicting reality. Illusion – and this is
typical – is motivated by the need of wish fulfillment: it is a product
therefore of sensual-instinctual life and needs for its deciphering the
decoding technique of applied psychology. (p. 284)
And where did the projection idea of Feuerbach and the various ways projection
was utilized by Marx and Freud lead? Küng leads us to the conclusion found in
the brilliant Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) – that is to Nihilism. In his parable
of the “madman” his atheism comes to expression. There a keen-sighted prophet
“who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours” proclaimed the death of God.
“Whither is God,” cried the ‘madman’... “I will tell you. We have killed him – you
and I. All of us are his murderers.”
Küng gives us Nietzche’s understanding of the nihilism which he embraced. Küng
writes that Nietzsche used the term nihilism initially with little discrimination,
but in his unpublished work he reflected on all aspects of it.
“What does nihilism mean?” asks Nietzsche here, and his answer now
runs: “That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking:
‘why?’ finds no answer.” In another fragment, he expresses it more
precisely: “Radical nihilism is the conviction of an absolute untenability of
existence when it comes to the highest values one recognizes; plus the
realization that we lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself of
things that might be ‘divine’ or morality incarnate.” It can be said – and
this, too, will be explained in the following pages – that, according to
Nietzsche, nihilism means the conviction of the nullity, of the internal
contradiction, futility and worthlessness of reality.
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Nietzsche sees this nihilism as coming in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries: “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe
what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of
nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at
work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny
announces itself everywhere; for the music of the future all ears are cocked
even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been
moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing
from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that
wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.”
Indeed, it must be said: “Nihilism stands at the door,” and we can only
ask: “Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?”
Thus Küng charts the nadir of modern atheism. But he does not leave us there.
Rather he begins to build his case for a “yes” to reality beginning with an
alternative to the emptiness of nihilism – fundamental trust. From there he
affirms a “yes to God – alternative to atheism.” Then “yes to the Christian God” –
finally, “The God of Jesus Christ.”
Küng builds carefully, taking into account all that has been considered in the
claims of modern atheism but offering an alternative based in trust.
In my own continuing wrestle with the issues raised in the post-Enlightenment
modern atheism, I struggled to find a reasonable faith. In my study of the new
quest for the historical Jesus I found John Knox particularly helpful in his The
Humanity and Divinity of Christ. Writing about the humanity of Christ he makes
a statement that defined my own quest for understanding Jesus.
There are two conditions under which a significant symbol loses (or,
perhaps better, is shown to have lost) its vitality and power. One of these is
when our hearts no longer need it, when all we want to say or need to say
(or to have said to us) can be said without it. The other is when our minds,
failing to discern in it the coherency of truth, are forced to reject it. For our
hearts cannot finally find true what our minds find false. If they could, we
should be hopelessly divided and any firm grasp of reality would be
impossible. What we mean by ‘the heart’ in this connection is not
something alien or counter to the mind, but is the mind itself quickened
and extended. The wisdom the heart has found, if it be wisdom and not
fantasy, is the same wisdom the mind all the while has been feeling after, if
haply it might find it. It is a wisdom which, far from bypassing the
understanding, enters through the doors of it, fills and stretches the space
of it, and only then breaks through and soars above it. (p. 107)
That was for me a critically important insight. Yet I was aware that my faith from
childhood, which through all the intellectual struggles of my quest for an
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understanding, was deeper and more expansive than my mind, my rational
faculties, could explain or justify before the bar of reason.
Only recently was I given a copy of a chapter from the book Walking the
Tightrope of Faith. The chapter’s author is Hendrik Hart, a
philosopher/theologian who has done much work in post-modern thought.
Without doing justice to the careful development of his contention in this
chapter, let me simply offer a few lines from Professor Hart:
Trust in a spiritually powerful orientation to the existential issues in the
face of the boundary conditions of existence is historically not a matter of
concepts, propositions, and arguments, but of stories, rituals, prayers, and
hymns. (p. 198)
Hart is in dialogue with Kai Nielsen as he writes that for which I have been
seeking.
Closely connected to Nielsen’s insistence that faith-as-trust is logically
dependent on propositional belief is his pervasive complaint about
religion’s lack of rational coherence (37, 39, 41, 43, 111). One problem with
this complaint is that it does not do justice to those Christians who try to
nourish faith as a non-intellectual(istic) life-guiding trust, as a form of
spirituality. In faith thus developed, rational coherence is not necessarily a
relevant concern, the way it is in forms of theology developed to counter
the Enlightenment by modelling theology on rational philosophy (38-39).
I think Nielsen misses the point when he continually charges that in order
to be properly religious these Christians must conform to notions of
religion especially developed in Enlightenment-influenced theology. (p.
199)
“Enlightenment-influenced theology” – that was the story of my long journey.
Finally I come to realize what Hendrik Hart claims defines my ongoing quest
while living with fundamental trust. This is the understanding I have been
seeking.
We all need to trust some orientation to the ultimate questions of life. But
“answers” to these questions point in a direction that transcends rational
comprehension. These “answers,” that is, point to mysteries, told in myths.
If we trust traditions which “tell” what people have experienced when they
trusted the life-direction to which the “answers” in the myths point, these
traditions provide guidance, especially if we decide to trust the narratives
enough to live by them. It is not necessary here to insist on traditional
language. If the faithful of some religion are to be in communication again
with contemporary naturalists or atheists on equal footing, we can at least
temporarily suspend talk about God, or even about some “transcendent
revealed,” and for the time being talk only about trust making visible
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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something that comes from beyond the boundaries of our understanding
and is related to the boundary issues of existence. To derive hope from a
resurrection narrative is not the same thing as insisting on the filmable
factuality of a resuscitated corpse walking out of a grave. If our hope
depends on the scientific modernization of an ancient faith-language, then
hope undermines the nurture of trust.
It is possible to “claim” the “truth” of such a resurrection narrative. But
that is done, not in the logical space of reasons, or by delivering
technologically enhanced evidence, but by actually living the life of hope
the narrative inspires, by practically making manifest in action that such a
life reveals truth or lights up our path. (p. 216)
Finally, after that lengthy excursus I am ready to deliver “My Last Lecture.” There
are many places within Scripture to which I might turn but let me select just two
– a Psalm and a paragraph from Paul’s Letter to the Romans.
Psalm 16 is one of my favorites. Beginning with verse 5, the Psalmist expresses a
sense of deep wellbeing.
The boundary lines have fallen to me in pleasant places;
I have a goodly heritage.
He is full of gratitude for his human situation – referring to Israel’s coming into
the land of Israel when the tribes divided the land by casting lots. The Psalmist is
pleased with his human situation. But his wellbeing is rooted in something
deeper.
I keep the Lord always before me;
because he is at my right hand
I shall not be moved.
In the Hebrew “before me” is literally “before my face.” That being so he is
steadfast whatever human experience brings him.
His heart is glad;
His soul rejoices.
So confident is he that he cannot conceive of being given up to Sheol – the realm
of the dead. One commentator writes,
It can be read as the general prayer of the faithful who, without any
doctrine of resurrection or eternal life to explain just how, nonetheless
trust the Lord to keep them with such total confidence that they cannot
imagine a future apart from life in God’s presence. (James L. Mays,
Interpretation: Psalms, p. 88)
© Grand Valley State University
�Present to the Presence
Richard A. Rhem
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Again the Psalmist exclaims,
You show me the path of life.
In Your presence there is fullness of joy;
in Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
Were we to read this poem in the original Hebrew we would see a beautiful
juxtaposition. In verse 8, as noted above, “before me” is literally “before my face.”
In verse 11, “in Your presence” is literally “before Your face.”
God before my face;
I before God’s face.
Further, God at my right hand keeps me secure. At God’s right hand are pleasures
forevermore.
The Psalmist lived with a vivid sense of God’s presence. That awareness kept him
steady in all the vicissitudes of life. That sense of trust was so strong even the fear
of death, of loss, was transcended. He lived with fullness of joy. He was present to
the presence of God.
We find the same confidence in St. Paul in the wake of his vision of the crucified
Christ who was resurrected – living beyond death’s boundary.
If God be for us, who can be against us?
Who will separate us from the love of Christ?
Then he lists a series of negative human experiences – No, he affirms, in all life’s
trials we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.
Listing again all possible threats to us he finally declares nothing will separate us
from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Present to the Presence, living in total trust, the Apostle knew a peace which he
says in another context is beyond all human understanding.
With those two eloquent expressions of trust bringing confidence, joy and deep
assurance that
All will be well;
all will be well;
all manner of things will be well.
Thus I would keynote my last lecture. I feel deeply blessed to have had the
exceptionally rich experience of plumbing the depths of the human record of the
quest for God, for the deep probing of our human condition at life’s boundary
© Grand Valley State University
�Present to the Presence
Richard A. Rhem
Page15
situations. I have followed rational inquiry to the depths of nihilism and known
there was something more. And at the end of my serious quest, what rational
inquiry could not deliver, I find in trusting where I cannot know, and “know” all
is well.
Was the long journey of intellectual quest worth it if, in reality, I end where I first
began? Indeed, for I’ve seen it for the first time! Oliver Wendell Holmes said it
well:
I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would
give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
© Grand Valley State University
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/d7d2ab3e9fe95a1c6e0451b55ae7da1c.m4v
775e7bea34fbe35091a2e1c11080f2eb
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
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Kaufman Interfaith Institute
Rights
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Language
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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
Lakeshore Interfaith Center
Gathering
Scripture Text
Psalm 16:5-11, Romans 8:31, 35-39
Location
The location of the interview
Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges
References
Karl Barth. Church Dogmatics, Vol. I, 1932.
Hendrik Hart. Walking the Tightrope of Faith: Philosophical Conversations About Reason and Religion, 1999.
John Knox. The Humanity and Divinity of Christ, 1967.
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-0-20120729
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2012-07-29
Title
A name given to the resource
Present to the Presence - Living with Awareness of God in Whom We Trust
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. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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
Moving Image
Text
Description
An account of the resource
A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on July 29, 2012 entitled "Present to the Presence - Living with Awareness of God in Whom We Trust", on the occasion of Lakeshore Interfaith Center Gathering, at Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges. Scripture references: Psalm 16:5-11, Romans 8:31, 35-39.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/x-m4v
application/pdf
Historical View of the Bible
Presence of God
Trust