1 24 9 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/afd3b40b4aecfe3e3eb959246fc447f7.pdf 4bdbfa03d5b19d3667f982afeaad4e64 PDF Text Text Sleeping Through a Revolution 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 April 1991, pp. 8-14 Reformed theology in America, the roots of which lie in the Netherlands, has managed to sleep through the revolution of the modern world and survive. Through strong ethnic identity, internal growth, and a militant mind that maintained an adversarial attitude over against modern culture, a Reformed community of Dutch origin still exists. But the defensive posture that has largely characterized it has prevented it from translating the richness of its sixteenthcentury legacy of Reformation theology into a proclamation of the gospel to engage modern thought. I was struck by this fact as I read Hendrikus Berkhof’s Two Hundred Years of Theology. Berkhof wrote this work after retiring from the dogmatics chair at the University of Leiden. He calls it a personal journey because he wrote to satisfy his own curiosity about the philosophical and theological developments since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The engagement of the gospel and modern thought has been the passion of Berkhof’s own endeavor as a Christian thinker. He traces the efforts of those theologians who sought to build a bridge between the gospel and modern culture, a culture dominated by the assumptions of the Enlightenment: the autonomy of the human person, human rationality as the measure of truth, the historical conditionedness of all truth, and the epistemological dualism of subject-object, of knowledge and faith. Berkhof’s conclusions at the end of his survey are sober. Was the effort successful? He answers in the negative: “Secularized culture manifested polite indifference if not outright intolerance.” Nevertheless, the struggle was necessary and its consequences significant. What struck me as I followed the story of the past two hundred years – the world of modern culture in the wake of the Enlightenment – was that the community of which I am a part was not even engaged in the struggle. As I reflected on my own theological education, I realized I was thoroughly schooled in theological development through the Reformation, but understood very little of the revolution in cultural understanding effected by the Enlightenment, especially © Grand Valley State University   �Sleeping Through a Revolution Richard A. Rhem Page 2   the understanding of the human process of knowing and the rise of historical thinking. In an attempt to understand why there has been so little engagement with the thought and cultural assumptions of the modern world in my own tradition, I turned to the study of paradigm shifts in the history of dogma, a study spearheaded by Hans Küng. Küng traced theological development with major epochal shifts over two thousand years. He, along with David Tracy, gathered an international Ecumenical Symposium at Tubingen in 1983 to discuss “A New Paradigm of Theology.” Papers delivered at the symposium are published in the volume Paradigm Change in Theology. At the symposium, Küng charted the epochal shifts in theology to test his scheme of periodization. Beginning with the primitive Christian apocalyptic paradigm, the historical progression moves through the ancient church Hellenistic, the medieval Roman Catholic, the Reformation Protestant with its two consequent paradigms of counterreformation – Roman Catholic and Protestant Orthodox paradigms – the modern Enlightenment paradigm, and on to the present contemporary ecumenical paradigm. Küng came on the idea of paradigm shifts in Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which Kuhn portrayed scientific development as occurring, not as had been commonly assumed, in smooth cumulative progress, but rather in leaps triggered by paradigm shifts, the displacement of one model of understanding by another. Küng applied Kuhn’s discovery to theological development and found points of significant shift there as well. Paradigm as Kuhn defined it and as Küng utilizes it means “an entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community.” Küng’s periodization marks off those points in the movement of history where a major shift in understanding took place, a shift from one constellation of beliefs to another – a change in the explanation model through which Christian faith was interpreted. The points of shift can be debated and the flow of history cannot be rigidly sectioned off. Nevertheless, the periodization Küng has suggested has been widely received. Küng developed his study of paradigm shifts further in Theology for the Third Millennium. There he pointed out the interesting difference between paradigm shifts in the natural sciences and in theology. In science, as data pile up that cannot be explained within the existing paradigm, pressure builds to find a new paradigm. When the new paradigm becomes available, one that succeeds in explaining a broader range of data, it replaces the old paradigm, which becomes obsolete. But this is not the case with paradigm shifts in theology. The same process operates: new understanding of the knowing process and of the nature of human knowledge, new data – for example, data acquired through the rise of the historical-critical method of biblical study, new philosophical insights, scientific © Grand Valley State University �Sleeping Through a Revolution Richard A. Rhem Page 3   knowledge – eventuate in a major shift in understanding of the Christian tradition. A new paradigm comes into being. But in contrast to the process in the natural sciences, the old paradigm does not become obsolete; it continues to be the paradigm within which certain Christian communities understand Christian faith and existence. Thus, the two thousand years of theological development traced by Küng, reveal eight major paradigms. But the fascinating fact is that all eight paradigms continue to claim the loyalty of significant communities. All eight continue to exert their influence down to the present. This insight enabled me to discover how Reformed theology, with roots in the Netherlands, has been able to remain largely unscathed by the world of modern thought. It has continued to live within the paradigm of Reformed orthodoxy that took shape in the Reformed scholasticism of the seventeenth century, insulated from the acids of modernity. A form of the gospel thus has been preserved, but at a great price. The failure to engage the modern world under the cultural assumptions of the Enlightenment has led to a kind of ghetto existence and a failure to bring the rich legacy of Reformation theology to new expression. An historically conditioned theological confessional position has been frozen in time, absolutized, and perpetuated largely intact over generations, largely untouched by ongoing cultural, philosophical, and scientific assumptions. Theologically we are stuck, and the best and the brightest know it. Reformed orthodoxy has slept through the revolution of human understanding and knowledge created by the Enlightenment, never to this day having come to terms with the autonomy of the human person, the throwing off of all forms of authoritarianism, and the rise of historical thinking. These cultural assumptions are now being challenged. Many observers believe we are living at an epochal hinge point in history, experiencing the emergence of the postmodern age. But we will not be able to move directly from a seventeenth-century paradigm to the postmodern world without going through the baptism of the Enlightenment. While its assumptions are losing their self-evident status, what will not be lost is the value of critical rationality, and what will not be tolerated is any return to authoritarian claims, be they of church, of tradition, or of Bible. 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 order to give that contention foundation, I will review in brief the philosophical and theological movement of the past two and a half centuries, indicating how philosophical, especially epistemological, analysis has impacted © Grand Valley State University �Sleeping Through a Revolution Richard A. Rhem Page 4   theological formulation in the broader Christian tradition. Under the domination of Enlightenment assumptions, that development has reached an impasse. I will then discuss new possibilities for theological breakthrough opened by the emerging postmodern paradigm. Finally, with reference to one of the great Dutch Reformed theologians, Herman Bavinck, I will suggest what is necessary if our tradition is to come to new and fruitful expression. The Copernican-Galilean controversy out of which modern culture arose was a severe challenge to the medieval synthesis of theology and Aristotelian science achieved by Thomas Aquinas. A challenge to the Aristotelian cosmology and natural philosophy was a challenge to theological orthodoxy, both to Catholic and to Reformation orthodoxy. In that opening battle between the church and natural science, science won its independence from the intellectual and theological authority of the church. The early representatives of philosophical and scientific endeavor lived in two houses: the house of human rationality in which they plied their scientific skills, and the house of faith, in which they remained faithful to the church and its theological authority, understood as based beyond human reason in revelation. This was true of Descartes, considered the father of modern philosophy. He remained in the church, but understood his critical thinking as belonging to the natural realm – a purely human activity. It was Descartes who set the thinking subject over against the object to be thought, the world of material reality. He argued for the certainty of knowledge that could be arrived at by the mind observing the universe, which was understood as a vast machine. This subjectobject split became determinative for modern thought in science, philosophy, and theology. The mechanistic character of the natural world became the premise on which Newton described the natural laws by which the universe operated. The solid success of the natural sciences, in their effort to understand and control nature, seemed to verify Descartes’ model of human knowing and Newton’s model of the physical universe. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century cannot be explained or understood without reference to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and his critical analysis of how human knowledge is attained. His Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is broadly acknowledged as the foundational work of German philosophy. In his Two Hundred Years of Theology, Hendrikus Berkhof contends that this work of Kant’s must be valued “as a radical new beginning for evangelical theology,” and that in the wake of its appearance, orthodox scholasticism, rationalism, and supernaturalism found that, at a single stroke, the road forward had been blocked. In addition, the appearance of Kant’s Critique meant... the birth of the new theology, or rather: The modern way of posing questions, and modern methodology, in theology. (pp. 1 ff) © Grand Valley State University �Sleeping Through a Revolution Richard A. Rhem Page 5   Although Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason destroyed the traditional proofs for the existence of God, thereby striking terror in the hearts of conservative theologians, it is Berkhof’s conviction that Kant’s purpose was positive in intent. Kant himself wrote, “I therefore had to abolish knowledge in order to make room for belief.” For Kant, faith and knowledge were separate but complementary and both were necessary. Here again we see the split of faith and reason which Aquinas synthesized when the overwhelming influence of Aristotelian thought in the West forced an accommodation with revelation in the thirteenth century. It is the same split mentioned above in regard to Descartes and Newton. In Kant, however, we have an acute analysis of the human knowing process brought about by the growing autonomy of human reason, which was throwing off all authoritarian structures, whether ecclesiastical (the church) or revelational (the Bible). Kant was a child of the Enlightenment. Preeminent philosopher though he was, he nevertheless maintained an intense theological and religious interest. Berkhof believes that it was “Kant’s purpose to save religion as well as the Enlightenment: in this double objective... lay his deepest passion as a thinker” (p. 5). Dividing the realm of knowledge into two fundamentally separate domains, he posited the world of phenomena and the world of the noumena. The former was accessible to unaided human reason. The empirical knowledge gained by the knowing subject was not a direct mirror of the natural world but the product of the interaction of the knowing mind and the data of the senses. For the noumenal world, the things in themselves – for example, the universe as a causal whole, the human self as free agent, and God – no empirical verification was possible. Yet, for practical reasons, Kant argued, faith in them was absolutely necessary. This assertion was made in Kant’s second work, The Critique of Practical Reason. This fundamental dualism has shaped and determined modern culture; it is the inheritance of the Enlightenment, whose center is the autonomous human person. This dualism has been regarded as axiomatic – the climate of opinion that has dominated the modern period. It is on this background that the whole enterprise of modern theology must be understood, at least the theology that attempted to bridge the gulf between the gospel and modern culture, the theology of classic nineteenth-century liberalism, to use Küng’s schematization of epochal paradigms. This is evident in the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, regarded as the father of modern theology. If Kant successfully blocked the road to the knowledge of God through rational inquiry, through metaphysical speculation, then what road remains open and on what basis can knowledge of God be grounded? Appeal to authority (of church, tradition, or Bible) was no longer compelling. Where, then, could one turn except to the interior life of the individual – to “the feeling of absolute dependence,” an experience that Schleiermacher maintained was common to all humankind at some time or other. This was not to claim, as did © Grand Valley State University �Sleeping Through a Revolution Richard A. Rhem Page 6   Feuerbach and others later in the whole development of modern atheism, that religion, or specifically Christianity, arose from the feeling of dependence of the human person. No. Rather, the feeling of absolute dependence was the human precondition for it. Schleiermacher was pointing to the place into which revelation enters. The ongoing development of modern theology was filtered through Kant philosophically and Schleiermacher theologically, whether a theologian followed them or rejected them. They determined the shape of the playing field and the rules of the game. We can see this in the theology of Albrecht Ritschl, whose influence came to flower in the 1870s. Ritschl was the first German theologian to recognize the intellectual shift from idealism to realism under the impact of such thinkers as Feuerbach, Comte, Marx, and Engels; the significant achievements of science, technology, and industry; the alienation of the working class; and the impact of Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1863). The cultural mood in Germany turned more and more to the world of experience and to the natural laws governing it. Ritschl concluded in such a cultural milieu that the knowledge of God could be realized only in the act of faith – faith directed toward the saving activity of Christ. Religious knowledge, he claimed, consists in value judgments, a term for which he is best known and most misunderstood. Berkhof explains: He intends to maintain the uniqueness of the Christian faith as a way of access to the “conception of God” through trust in Jesus Christ – apart from any ground other than that given in the unity of revelation and faith. (p. 121) Wilhelm Herrmann developed the intention of Ritschl’s theology. He was convinced, as was Ritschl, that the highest of religion and morality was united in the figure of Jesus. Again following Ritschl under the impact of Kant’s epistemology, faith and knowledge were held distinct. The authority of Scripture, dogma, or creed had to do with knowledge, not faith. He wrote, They cannot bring about a saving personal encounter; they appeal to our thinking only as law. Religion is a totally independent world, though closely bound up with morality, because it relates us to divine revelation and must be the answer to the misery of our moral condition. Herrmann was deeply concerned about the philosophical base of his theology. For him, Kant loomed large, “whose mighty thoughts emerge increasingly in almost all domains of human learning as the select governor of all true research.” He valued Kant’s analysis of the knowing process positively “because in every connection he has placed the value of faith, its independence from science, in the clearest light.” In his analysis of Herrmann’s theology, Berkhof offers an © Grand Valley State University �Sleeping Through a Revolution Richard A. Rhem Page 7   illuminating image by which to understand Herrmann over against the rising tide of historical consciousness and historical thinking. When I read Herrmann what emerges in my mind is the image of a rock in the midst of a rising flood. In Ritschl the rock of moral autonomy still had a broad surface. Now, however, with the waves of the flood rising higher and higher, it became much narrower. The parts that are closer to the sea – like corporeality, psychological deveopment, history, social relationships, and the authority of Scripture and Christian tradition – have already been inundated. Herrmann now withdrew to the narrow center, to individual (though conceived as interpersonal) inwardness where the individual is in communion with God through “the inner life of Jesus.” With a splendid sort of consistency, he devoted his intellectual powers to the defense of the peak of this rock. (Two Hundred Years of Theology, p. 146) The rise of the historical-critical method of biblical research led Herrmann to realize that the certainty of faith could not rest on the probable results of historical criticism. Faith does take shape in history, but its basis is above history and beyond the reach of historical research. Is it possible to posit a basis for faith above history invulnerable to the acids of historical criticism? Ernst Troeltsch, a student of Ritschl, did not think so. He rejected the possibility of grounding faith in inner experience, thereby finding an absolute ground in history. Troeltsch, too, recognized that the deterministichistorical mode of thinking was inundating the gospel, but he did not believe, contrary to Herrmann, that there was yet a ridge of the rock above the flood. Troeltsch saw no alternative but to plunge into the stream of historicism with its relativity. Jesus could not be lifted out of the stream of history. Every historical person and phenomenon is subject to historical conditionedness. In Berkhof’s words, history is an ever-moving stream in which the movement of each drop is determined by the mass of water that precedes it, and each drop shares in determining the direction of what follows. That is the fundamental view of “historicism,” another term for determinism applied to historical reality. (p. 150) Historical thinking, which arose in the eighteenth century, is another hallmark of modern thought. It has marked all subsequent modern thought as indelibly as has Kant’s analysis of the knowing process. In Troeltsch the full consequences of historical thinking were drawn; Herrmann’s “inner life of Jesus” was “time conditioned,” thoroughly enmeshed in the stream of history. The struggle to find a basis for faith continued into the twentieth century. The catalyst for a major reversal of the tide of continental theology was Karl Barth. The first edition of Barth’s Romerbrief sent shock waves through the world of © Grand Valley State University �Sleeping Through a Revolution Richard A. Rhem Page 8   academic theology and philosophy. Associated with Barth’s name in the early period was Rudolf Bultmann, who affirmed Barth’s move, seeing in it a shift to an existentialist interpretation of the gospel – a direction soon rejected by Barth. For Bultmann, Barth’s early probings seemed consistent with the effort of their common teacher, Wilhelm Herrmann, to find a basis for faith beyond the relativities of history. For Herrmann and even more radically for Bultmann, there was a basic distrust in historically ascertainable facts as vehicles of revelation. Revelation for Bultmann occurs above history in the “existing” individual who, in the encounter with the claim of the gospel, is called to decision, the decision of faith or unbelief apart from recourse to the investigation of any ground for faith in historical data. Bultmann’s whole program of demythologizing the gospel was an attempt to peel off the husk of historical happening, for which only relative certainty could be gained, and find the kernel of God’s appeal in the Christ event. That Jesus was is all that can be claimed as certain. The “Das” of Jesus is the point at which God’s claim touches historical reality. Barth’s first edition of Romerbrief was a seismic shock, but for Barth it was only an initial probe – he was in transition. The second edition showed Barth not so interested, as was Bultmann, in the existential analysis of the human person addressed by the gospel, but in the God Who addresses the human person. In the preface to the second edition of Romans, he writes: If I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the “infinite qualitative distinction” between time and eternity, and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance: “God is in heaven, and thou art on earth.” The relation between such a God and such a man, and the relation between such a man and such a God is for me the theme of the Bible and the essence of philosophy. Philosophers name this Krisis of human perception the Prime Cause: The Bible beholds at the same cross-roads the figure of Jesus Christ. The second edition of Romans marked Barth’s turn to the interpretation of the Bible, a turn precipitated by his disillusionment with involvement with the social democracy movement, which failed to mobilize resistance to World War I, and the “crisis” created by the need to preach weekly. In his wrestling with Paul’s letter to the Romans, Barth was overwhelmed with the sense of the absolute priority of God revealed in the event of Jesus Christ and the working of Spirit. Barth was on the way, on a new way, and for a time continued to grope and feel his way. For him – as for Bultmann - the thin ridge of the rock on which their teacher Herrmann had grounded faith was flooded. There was no place to stand. God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, effected in the individual by the miracle of the Spirit’s illumination, came “vertically from above.” In the world, in the domain of history, there were no vestiges of perceptibility except, for example, the crater which indicates that a meteor has slammed into the earth. © Grand Valley State University �Sleeping Through a Revolution Richard A. Rhem Page 9   It is clear that even the paradigm shift to the contemporary period demonstrates continuity with the nineteenth century. Barth and Bultmann both radicalized the efforts of Ritschl and Herrmann to ground faith beyond history in order to place faith beyond the attack of historical criticism and the widespread Enlightenment assumption that historical reality can yield only relative certainty. It is further clear that the crucial question that has dogged theological reflection over the past two hundred years is the question forced by the rise of historical consciousness, the question of how absolute truth can be discovered in history’s ongoing movement, how faith can find a certain resting place in the ambiguity of history. The later Barth, the Barth of Church Dogmatics, turned more and more to history, valuing it as the “place” of revelation, in contrast to his early work. However, to the end he never answered what has been perhaps the most serious criticism of his theology, a criticism expressed sharply by his young friend and admirer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who spoke of Barth’s “positivism of revelation,” a “take it or leave it” approach that denied the legitimacy of questioning the grounds of the revelation, of the claims of the gospel’s appeal. In the final analysis, neither Barth nor Bultmann were able to ground the Word in history, within this worldly existence. The attempt to do so is the story of the post-Bultmannians and the postBarthians – students of these giants who felt the pressure of the cultural mood to find within human historical existence the experience that afforded a place for revelation accessible to empirical verification. The development of Christology “from below,” such as one finds in the early writings of Pannenberg and in Küng, are examples of this swing back to the attempt to give historical foundation to the gospel’s claim. In the Netherlands the work of Kuitert, Berkhouwer’s successor, is an attempt to find in history “the footprints of God.” The pendulum swings back and forth. Berkhof concludes that if one starts, as Barth did, with God, it seems impossible to reach real people, and to start “from below” as Kuitert and others have done makes it questionable whether one reaches God. It seems clear that the assumptions of the Enlightenment – the autonomy of the human person, the subject-object split in the process of human knowing, the historical consciousness – have created false alternatives (an approach from below or an approach from above) thereby bringing theological work to an impasse. If Enlightenment assumptions have led to an impasse, are there indications that by moving out from under the dominance of those assumptions, breakthroughs might be possible in a new cultural period? In a volume of essays entitled Postmodern Theology, James B. Miller contends just that. Miller sets forth the variety of forms in which Descartes’ subject-object dualism and Kant’s knowledge-faith dualism have been manifested in modern thought. From a different angle, he points to the impasse noted above: © Grand Valley State University �Sleeping Through a Revolution Richard A. Rhem Page10   The logical positivist movement implicitly accepted this dualism, but denied meaningfulness to the nonempirical, nonscientific side (i.e., the domain of the noumenal.) Reductionists sought to explain religions and religious phenomena in exclusively scientific (or social scientific) terms, thus denying the autonomy (or independent reality) of the religions (i.e., explaining the noumenal in terms of the phenomenal.) In contrast, the existentialist movement, while implicitly accepting the dualism, invested all significant meaning on the side of faith, moral action, and the religious life (i.e., in the noumenal domain. (p. 5) In Miller’s last group, the existentialists, we can see the line of development we have been tracing from Ritschl through Herrmann to Barth, Bultmann, and their successors. Indeed, we can see it already in “the father of modern theology,” Schleiermacher, who sought the ground for theology in the interior life of the individual. Miller himself sets in contrast the two poles represented by Barth with his “positivism of revelation” – the uncritical confidence that the revelatory “word” provides absolute knowledge of God and God’s purpose for the world, and the logical positivists who held that reason and empirical observation were the sole and sufficient sources of absolute knowledge of the world. Thus, Miller observes, the modern worldview or, as it has been named here, the domination of the cultural assumptions of the Enlightenment, continues to form the dominant perspective in Western and Christian culture. He writes: It is found in the popular understanding of science as an impersonal, detached, and objective search for the facts of nature. Its neoorthodox theological manifestation is “normal” Christian theology. The prophetic rhetoric of the theology justifies a program of cultural change through social action. Its existentialist roots encourage contemporary forms of pastoral care and spiritual renewal which turn people away from their intrinsic relation to nature and history and focus them on a kind of atemporal personhood. It offers a revealed (and so, absolute) dogmatics of transcendence for those who would claim for Christianity a right to cultural dominance. (pp. 7f.) Miller sees such dominance slipping away; he senses that we are entering a postmodern world. Developments in biology and physics are pointing the way to a fundamentally new worldview. If the Enlightenment paradigm characterized reality as mechanical and dualistic, the model for the postmodern world, according to Miller, is historical, relational, and personal. He describes what this means for the emerging understanding of the world and how the understanding of the human process of knowing is changing. The world is not simply here; it is evolving. In contemporary biology the world does not embody an eternal essence, but is rather on ongoing process of creating, humans being both the product of and participants in this ongoing process. © Grand Valley State University �Sleeping Through a Revolution Richard A. Rhem Page11   The world is understood “to be relative, indeterminate, and participatory.” Existence is fully relative, meaning nothing exists in and of itself; “To be is to be related,” in contrast to the absolutes of Newton’s time-space categories. Quantum theory in physics has overthrown the “substantial universe;” the world does not have a history, but is history. Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty points to the indeterminacy of the core of reality and this, in turn, points to the core of reality as an unfathomable mystery. Interestingly, there is more awe before mystery in contemporary physics than in much theology. We began this inquiry with Descartes and Kant and their epistemological analysis. The understanding of what it means to know is called in question by these developments in biology and physics. Miller contends, From a postmodern perspective, all knowledge is historically implicated. Nothing is known apart from its cultural setting, and that setting is constitutive of what is known. There are no culturally neutral facts. Knowledge is not so much found as made, or better, it does not grow so much as it is grown. (p. 11, italics his) There is a significant difference between this conception of the historical character of all truth and the historicism of the modern period as represented by Troeltsch, for example. Here the human subject is not caught in an impersonal historical determinism, but is a participant in the unfolding history of the whole of reality. Truth relative to any community of knowers makes all knowledge incomplete. Alfred North Whitehead described the world not in terms of substances, but in terms of events, pointing thereby not to a world of static substantiality, but to a world of dynamic temporality. From Whitehead has developed the inquiries of the school of process theology. Miller considers what new theological insights are offered from such a conception of reality. In regard to creation, the idea of the dualistic relationship between God and world is called into question, as well as the objectifying of the world as a thing. The view of God creating provides the possibility of overcoming cosmological dualism and historical determinism. Anthropology looks different from such a perspective as well. The processes producing the human person are not different from those out of which all else in the universe emerges. Humankind becomes in such a view part of but not the center of the cosmic drama. There are also implications here for Christology. Incarnation might be understood to characterize every moment of the history of the universe with Jesus of Nazareth being the one who articulates the incarnational model in his teaching and the one who in his person is said to demonstrate the © Grand Valley State University �Sleeping Through a Revolution Richard A. Rhem Page12   meaning of that model for human living. In this sense, Jesus’ uniqueness as incarnation is historical but not ontological. (p. 19) With these brief references to Miller’s application of a new understanding of human knowing and human knowledge, we can see the potential fruitfulness of theological inquiry that throws off the dominance of the cultural assumptions of the Enlightenment and allows the fresh breakthroughs in biology and physics to overcome the impasse into which modern thought has led us. The shape in which Christian faith has come to expression in every cultural epoch has borne the marks of the cultural assumptions of each successive epoch. This is no less true of the modern period under Enlightenment assumptions than of Reformation theology under the assumptions of the sixteenth century with its heritage of medieval thinking and Renaissance humanism. The challenge before us is to bring the legacy of sixteenth century Reformation theology to new expression, given the openings provided by the emerging postmodern age. In his Two Hundred Years of Theology, Berkhof provides a chapter on the engagement with modern thought in the Netherlands. What he has to say about Herman Bavinck is especially interesting in regard to this discussion. Bavinck was firmly rooted in the Reformed Church of the Secession led by Abraham Kuyper. Brilliant and highly gifted, he studied at Leiden under Scholten, against the prevailing tradition of his church. He was attracted to ethical theology, an attempt to mediate the gospel and modern thought. Kuyper appealed to him to be clear in his objections to this mediating theology but was never satisfied with Bavinck’s criticism – it was not strong enough. Bavinck remained within the Secession Church and, in time, became Kuyper’s successor at the Free University. He wrote his Gereformeerde Dogmatiek and in the first volume enunciated the theological foundations upon which his work was built. The objective principle of knowledge is primary: the Holy Scriptures. He was viewed, according to Berkhof, as “the faithful theological partisan and alter ego of Kuyper.” Yet Berkhof notes that apart from the second edition of his dogmatics and a onevolume summary, Bavinck produced little in the field of dogmatics during his years at the Free University, and nothing that was new and original. He observes, He [Bavinck] felt increasingly that the modern period needed a much more vigorous renewal of theology than he himself had produced or was able to produce. Particularly the issues arising from the historical-critical interpretation of Scripture needed a very different approach. (p. 113) Berkhof goes on to say that Bavinck’s views on the issues at stake became increasingly relativistic, and, in 1910, he sold a large part of his dogmatics library; during these years his interest turned to issues posed by culture. © Grand Valley State University �Sleeping Through a Revolution Richard A. Rhem Page13   Berkhof writes that after 1900 “Bavinck increasingly felt that his theological direction was leading to a dead end.” Was it only historical-critical research that undermined his earlier certainty? Berkhof asks. Or was it deeper? Did he finally yield to his earlier fascination with ethical theology, recognizing that the issue between it and his Reformed orthodoxy was not really an issue between theocentricity and anthrocentricity, but rather between intellectualism and personalism? Is faith submission to the authority of scripture truths or is it the personal encounter with God through the person of Christ by which we are transformed into personalities? Bavinck opted for the priority of the scripture principle, . . . Hence Bavinck remained more strongly burdened than he wished by the legacy of the Reformed scholasticism of the seventeenth century and gave up intellectual tools he could not well do without in the continuing confrontation with the modern spirit. (p. 114) One cannot help but wonder why Bavinck’s latter years were not more fruitful. Why did he sell most of his dogmatics library? Why did his interest turn to issues in the broader culture? Berkhof does not speculate, but he does tell us that Bavinck felt his theological direction was leading to a dead end. Could it be that he sensed he was stuck? Was he not perhaps blocked from fruitful engagement with modern thought by his own objective principle of knowledge, the holy Scriptures? Indeed, not by Scripture as such, but by Scripture as understood by premodern seventeenth-century Reformed scholasticism, a view still prevalent in present-day Reformed orthodoxy. Scripture itself is the cumulative translation of tradition over several centuries. Where it is not valued as an inspired human witness to encounter with the living God, but rather as a book of absolute truths not only about God but also about science, cosmology, anthropology, and history, how can genuine dialogue with ongoing human intellectual and spiritual development be engaged in? It is impossible. Given Bavinck’s ecclesiastical context, to raise that issue would have been fruitless; it would not have been tolerated. Reformed theology in this country faces the same dilemma. Its doctrine of Scripture has remained immune from the acids of criticism, and an authoritarian use of Scripture continues, making it impossible either to engage the cultural assumptions that remain as a legacy of the Enlightenment, or to capture the attention of an obviously spiritually destitute and groping present generation where the yearning for transcendence is pervasive. Perhaps the insights and breakthroughs in science and the spiritual bankruptcy of the West have created the moment that will compel us to move beyond both the theological impasse traced above and an authoritarian use of Scripture. In his biography of Karl Barth, Eberhard Busch records a conversation of Barth in which he referred to being dubbed orthodox. That was fine with Barth, if it pointed to a willingness “to learn from the Fathers.” © Grand Valley State University �Sleeping Through a Revolution Richard A. Rhem Page14   But he rejected any restriction to the doctrinal position of any teacher, school or confession.... “Confessions” exist for us to go through them (not once but continually), not for us to return to them, take up our abode in them, and conduct our further thinking from their standpoint and in bondage to them. (Karl Barth, p. 375) That is the freedom we must discover in order to enter the contemporary discussion, bringing the richness of Reformed theology into engagement with a postmodern world. References: Hendrikus Berkhof. Two Hundred Years of Theology, report of a personal journey. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989, translation by John Vriend of 200 Jahre Theologie: Ein Reisebericht, 1985) Hans Küng. Paradigm Change in Theology: A Symposium for the Future. David Tracy, editor. Crossroad Publishing Co., 1989. Hans Küng. Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View. Anchor, reprint edition, 1990. James B. Miller. Postmodern Theology: Christian Faith in a Pluralist World. Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2006. © 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 H. Berkhof, 200 Years of Theology, 1989, Hans Küng, Paradigm Change in Theology, 1989, Theology for the 3rd Millennium, 1990, James Miller, Postmodern Theology, 2006 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-4-19910401 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991-04-01 Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Title A name given to the resource Sleeping Through a Revolution 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 April 1, 1991 entitled "Sleeping Through a Revolution", it appeared in Perspectives, April 1991, pp. 8-14. Tags: Reformed Theology, Orthodoxy, Historical Thinking, Faith, Postmodern, Nature of Religious Development. Scripture references: H. Berkhof, 200 Years of Theology, 1989, Hans Küng, Paradigm Change in Theology, 1989, Theology for the 3rd Millennium, 1990, James Miller, Postmodern Theology, 2006. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Faith Historical Thinking Nature of Religious Development Orthodoxy PostModern Reformed Theology https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a43c31c5c10a81787a95d4bdb209c65c.pdf 829061ce4613b83c2d29a96e9e07b1c8 PDF Text Text Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope By David Tracy (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987) Book Review by Richard A. Rhem Minister of Preaching and Theological Inquiry Christ Community Church Spring Lake, Michigan Publication of Review Unknown “At times, interpretations matter. On the whole, such times are times of cultural crisis. The old ways of understanding and practice, even experience itself, no longer seem to work.” (p. 7) We live in such a time, according to David Tracy, a crisis of tradition, culture, and language so that we can no longer simply move forward by means of the usual ways of experiencing, understanding, acting or interpreting. Tracy names our time “post-modern” - a vague and ambiguous expression he admits; yet “there we are,” he avers. This being Tracy’s conviction, he continues to pour his energy into the interpretation of interpretation theory. “A crisis of interpretation within any tradition eventually becomes a demand to interpret this very process of interpretation.” Tracy stands within the crisis of Western culture. “... shaped by the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and the nineteenth-century industrial revolution and explosion of historical consciousness. We late twentiethcentury Westerners find ourselves in a century where human-made mass death has been practiced, where yet another technological revolution is occurring, where global catastrophe or even extinction could occur. We find ourselves unable to proceed as if all that had not happened, is not happening, or could not happen.” (p. 8) In such a time, the question of interpretation itself becomes central. Although the discussion of interpretation theory becomes extremely technical and one runs into the technical jargon in Tracy causing the uninitiated to despair; nevertheless the technical discussion is not simply an academic game without practical relevance or application, for, Tracy contends, © Grand Valley State University   �David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, Book Review by Richard A. Rhem Page 2   “Every time we act, deliberate, judge, understand, or even experience, we are interpreting. To understand at all is to interpret. To act well is to interpret a situation demanding some action and to interpret a correct strategy for that action ... To be human is to act reflectively, to decide deliberately, to understand intelligently, to experience fully. Whether we know it or not, to be human is to be a skilled interpreter.” (p. 9) The theme of the present work is conversation. Tracy offers conversation as a model for all interpretation. He calls it a “game.” The movement in conversation is questioning itself. Neither my present opinions on the question nor the texts’ original response to the question, but the question itself, must control every conversation. A conversation ... is not a confrontation. It is not a debate. It is not an exam. It is questioning itself. It is a willingness to follow the question wherever it may go. It is dialogue. (p. 18) Understanding will move forward only where conversation exists; where one says what one means as accurately as possible; where one listens to and respects what the other (person, text, or event) says however different or other; where one is willing to correct or defend one’s opinion if challenged by a conversation partner, willing to argue if necessary, to confront if necessary, and to change one’s mind if evidence suggests it. Any act of interpretation involves at least three realities: a phenomenon to be interpreted, someone interpreting the phenomenon, and the interaction between the first two realities. Understanding these three realities is the problem of interpretation. Tracy suggests it is best to begin with the phenomenon to be interpreted (a law, an action, a ritual, a symbol, a text, a person, an event). For purposes of his discussion, Tracy suggests the classic texts, “Those texts that bear an excess and permanence of meaning, yet always resist definitive interpretation.” Tracy contends, The classic is important hermeneutically because it represents the best examples of what we seek: an example of both radical stability become permanence and radical instability become excess of meaning through ever-changing receptions. (p. 14) To understand is to interpret and conversation with a classic text is to find oneself caught up in the questions and answers worthy of a free mind. Conversation is thus an exploration of possibilities in the search for truth. One who enters upon such a conversation does so with the understanding that what is other from one’s pre-understanding may be possible. A good interpreter possesses an “analogical imagination” (a concept developed by Tracy in his book by that title) by which the interpreter is able to move from otherness, to possibility, to similarity-in-difference. Persons willing to risk conversation in interpretation are at a disadvantage from those who will not take the risk because © Grand Valley State University �David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, Book Review by Richard A. Rhem Page 3   such a person begins with the possibility they may be wrong. But only such openness can advance understanding in the cultural crisis in which we find ourselves, a crisis which has revealed the poverty of both the Enlightenment and the Romantic Movement which was its reaction. As the Enlightenment unfolded, having freed us from the weight of certain oppressive traditions allowing us to dare to think for ourselves, it became trapped in ever-narrower models of what could count as truth until it retreated into a formal and technical rationality. But we cannot follow the reaction of romanticism thus becoming the latest expressions of the “unhappy consciousness” of the romantic. The “remystification of all reality” is not an option. It cannot be a pretense that the imagined joys of first naiveté can be ours. It cannot be the disparagement of science and the retreat into privacy. (p. 31) How do we move forward? Tracy suggests that two contemporary methods offer hope: historical critical methods and literary critical methods. Both affirm the necessity of method and the necessity of rejecting methologism. Tracy discusses the effects of historical critical and literary critical methods on our understanding of the classics of Western culture so that there is no longer such a thing as an unambiguous tradition - no innocent readings of the classics. And where does that leave us? Tracy contends, The historicity of every text, interpreter, and conversation has been clarified by historical consciousness. Certainty is no more. But relative adequacy for all interpretations remains an ideal worth striving for. (p. 39) Tracy grounds this contention in the third chapter: “Radical Plurality: The Question of Language,” a discussion of the relationships among language, knowledge and reality and an assertion of the results of critical methods – the radical plurality in language, knowledge and reality alike. “‘Reality’ is the one word that should always appear within quotation marks.” That claim of Nabokov, says Tracy, best expresses one major strand of postmodern reflection on language. Both positivism and romanticism held language to be secondary, derivative, coming after the fact of discovery and cognition, peripheral to the real thing. But language analysis has demonstrated its social and historical character. Our understanding comes through particular and public languages and language “shapes” reality - even constitutes reality. The result of this insight has been the dethroning of the autonomous ego from its false pretensions to mastery and certainty. We are inevitably shaped by the history we are born into. We are left with plurality and ambiguity. © Grand Valley State University �David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, Book Review by Richard A. Rhem Page 4   Plurality seems an adequate word to suggest the extraordinary variety that any study of language shows, and any study of the variety of receptions of any classic documents. Ambiguity may be too mild a word to describe the strange mixture of great good and frightening evil that our history reveals. Historical ambiguity means a once seemingly clear historical narrative or progressive Western enlightenment and emancipation has now become a montage of classics and new-speak, of startling beauty and revolting cruelty, of partial emancipation and ever-subtler forms of entrapment. (p. 69F) Neither optimism nor pessimism will prove fruitful in understanding the plurality and ambiguity of our history. Rather resistance, attention and hope must be exercised. Without resignation or cynicism, Tracy advocates conversation as limited, fragile and necessary exercises in reaching relatively adequate knowledge of language and history. In the final chapter, “Resistance and Hope: The Question of Religion,” Tracy declares that the purely autonomous ego has been mortally wounded, yet not erased; rather there appears a more fragile self - open to epiphanies. Postmodern coherence, at best, will be a rough coherence: interrupted, obscure, often confused, self-conscious of its own language use and, above all, aware of the ambiguities of all histories and traditions. (p. 83) Theological interpretation is one way to allow genuine conversation with the religious classics (for example, the Scriptures). A highly tentative, relative adequacy is all that can be hoped for as the same plurality and ambiguity that affects all discourse affects theology. Religions are even more intensely pluralistic and ambiguous than art, morality, philosophy and politics because religions do claim that Ultimate Reality has revealed itself and that there is a way of liberation for any human being. (p. 86) Pluralism is the attitude Tracy fundamentally trusts, but such an affirmation is the beginning, not the end for the interpreter of religion. The great pluralists of religion are those who so affirm plurality that they fundamentally trust it, yet do not shirk their responsibility to develop criteria of assessment for each judgment of relative adequacy. (p. 91) Reductionism is a real temptation in the interpretation of religion. The problem is one of totalization: only this method or this hermeneutic or this critique can interpret what religion really is. © Grand Valley State University �David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, Book Review by Richard A. Rhem Page 5   All methods of reductionism, whether by believers or nonbelievers, are grounded in an unacknowledged confession of their own: the belief that so secure is their present knowledge of truth and possibility that the religious classics can at best be peculiar expressions of more of the same. Anything different, other, alien must clearly be untrue and impossible - that ‘goes without saying.’(p. 100) Thus, declares Tracy, the difference between fundamentalist and secular readings only appear startling; the differences are on the surface, not in fundamental hermeneutical approaches. They are reverse sides of the same coin of certainty, mastery and control. But, writes Tracy, When it is believable, religious faith manifests a sense of the radical mystery of all reality: the mystery we are to ourselves; the mystery of history, nature, and the cosmos; the mystery, above all, of Ultimate Reality. ... When it is active, religious love frees us from the illusion that to be a human being means to become an ego attempting mastery and control of all others. (p. 107) Tracy witnesses to his personal belief in belief. I believe that faith in Ultimate Reality can make all the difference for a life of resistance, hope, and action. I believe in God. It is, I confess, that belief which gives me hope. (p. 110) In a profile of David Tracy in The New York Times Magazine (11-9-86), Tracy is quoted as saying, The religious event described in the First Letter of John asks the question: What is the nature of the ultimate reality? And the answer is: God. And more explicitly, God is love. That is an extraordinary thought, that ultimate reality is love. All of his strenuous attention to interpretation theory is in the service of bringing that truth to expression, not just in the Church, but in the public arena. To follow his argument is not easy; it is rewarding. Tracy is a pioneer venturing into the new situation arising out of the cultural crisis of the present in order that the truth claim of God as it comes to manifestation might be understood and acted upon. © 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 David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, 1987 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-4-19870901 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987-09-01 Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Title A name given to the resource Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope 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 Book Review created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on September 1, 1987 entitled "Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope", on the book Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope, written by David Tracy. Tags: Postmodern, Pluralism, Religion, Mystery, Love at Core of Reality. Scripture references: David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, 1987. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Love at Core of Reality Mystery Pluralism PostModern Religion https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/83facdebde0d21920172dcf9c1cf1dce.pdf 639e568d0ead7885d5858d339b63249d PDF Text Text The Magnificent Vision of Shalom Summer Social Gathering Richard A. Rhem The Spring Lake Country Club Spring Lake, Michigan August 27, 2006 On this, another social gathering, I want to say what a pleasure it has been to be with you on these summer evenings, and to thank you for giving me an opportunity to reflect on my life and ministry from the perspective of my retirement. For the first time in that two-year period, I have been stimulated to think about my journey from the deep Christian formation of my childhood and youth to the unabashed posture of a critical thinking intellectual of open and liberal mind and spirit. That is the identity I would claim for myself. Critical Thinking - We live in a cultural period named Post-Modern which is a designation that means simply "after the Modern," and conveys the fact that we don't really know what to call the present. Post-Modern thinkers criticize the Modern Period - the Enlightenment over-confidence in human rationality to master the Mystery of reality. However, one of my best teachers, Hans Küng, wrote in one of his earlier works that the one mark of modernity that we must never lose is critical rationality, the exercise of human intelligence, of human reason, in the pursuit of the human project. Intellectual -I remember so vividly the Sunday the great New Testament scholar, Bishop Krister Stendahl, preached at Christ Community and spoke at the Perspectives hour. He said, "I am an unabashed intellectual." I loved it and began at that point to own the designation for myself. There are intellectuals and there are intellectuals, and I have no illusions about being in the "Intellectual Big Leagues." Nonetheless, I do value the life of the mind, the world of ideas and the intellectual probing of new frontiers of the human experience. Being a pastor first of all, I did not have the luxury of the scholarly life of reading, reflection and writing. Yet, in the tasks of preaching and teaching, I was always fascinated by the intellectual task of understanding - understanding the biblical story, the theological tradition and their application to ongoing human experience. Of Open and Liberal Mind and Spirit. My last presentation traced my movement to a liberal posture - liberal of mind and spirit. Let me pick up the story there, reminding you that being liberal is not a position, but a posture. It is not a creedal position or even a religious commitment, nor is it a political platform. It has to do with the open mind operating with critical © Grand Valley State University   �The Magnificent Vision of Shalom Richard A. Rhem Page 2   rationality that engages religious/cultural/moral and political issues, seeking understanding in order to forge commitments and action intended for the enhancement of the human situation - ultimately for creating a global community rooted in love, marked by grace - in a word, the realization of the Hebrew prophets' magnificent vision of Shalom - peace as total harmony. The Vision The vision of Shalom - of a new creation - comes to expression in various prophetic writings in the Hebrew tradition. I refer you to two, one from Isaiah, the great 8th century, B.C.E., prophet, in Chapter 11, which begins with the idea of "a shoot" from "the stump of Jesse," and Chapter 65 of Isaiah, a writing from a later prophet during the Exile looking to the Return. We need not debate the conception of God as the sovereign of history, nor the fact that the vision was not realized in the Exile's return and which, in the present violent chaos of the Middle East, seems farther from realization than ever. The vision ends: They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. There was in the human mind and heart over two and a half millennia ago such a vision. I find that most remarkable. It remains a dream in the human breast while our whole understanding of cosmic reality and the action of God in history has been radically transformed. That transformation has come about by the emergence of the scientific breakthroughs through the empirical method, applied by critical reason to the study of the natural world. And that transformation has been fought at every new breakthrough by religious authority and, unfortunately, such fighting still marks much of the religious world. Such opposition is futile and fruitless and has caused much of the intellectual community to write off the religious community as hopelessly benighted. In the epic struggle of science and religion, there have been scholars on the scientific side who have claimed more than their empirical investigations can justify, denying the whole realm of religious mystery and experience. One such is Francis Crick, who, in his The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, writes, The astonishing hypothesis is that "you," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: "You're nothing but a pack of neurons ..." The scientific belief is that our minds - the behavior of our brains - can be explained by the interactions of nerve cells (and other cells) and the molecules associated with them, (p. 3, 7) Crick claims this position stands in contrast with "The religious concept of a soul, and puts science in a head-on contradiction to the religious belief of billions of human beings alive today." © Grand Valley State University �The Magnificent Vision of Shalom Richard A. Rhem Page 3   "A head-on contradiction ..." indeed, and it rages still. But, is that impasse the only possibility? I contend it is not and will attempt to offer an alternative possibility. In doing so, I do not claim to be proposing something new and original, but rather, what many scholars both in science and religion have proposed. The Wonder of the Cosmos The scientific endeavor is never finished, but what we have learned about the natural world takes our breath away. We stand in wonder and awe before the unfolding of the cosmic dance - an unfolding we are told that has been in process for over 13 billion years. And space! Can we begin to comprehend the thought of an expanding universe of billions of light years, of billions of stars and galaxies and, some would claim, parallel universes? Mind-boggling beyond my capacity to take in. At its best, the scientific enterprise continues to probe, recognizing, as the great Einstein claimed, it is probing Mystery, with each new breakthrough bringing forth fresh questions, creating models, carrying on experiments which bring forth more data that, in turn, call for new paradigms. It is a wonder-full drama with no necessity to threaten religious reality, although certainly necessitating adjustment of ancient forms of religious belief. To resist the ongoing march of scientific discovery, as indicated above, is futile and foolish and it robs one of the freedom to revel in amazement at the natural order into which our lives are woven. Rather, in my experience, it is inspiring to take in the natural world to the extent possible and then re-think the possibilities of religious response in light of what is. So, where are we? We have a marvelous vision of Shalom from the ancient prophet, expressed in a worldview and conception of God which the natural sciences and historical consciousness make necessary to revise. Let me attempt to portray the ongoing development of human understanding by reminding you of my own journey which I think many of you have traversed, as well. That journey consists of three stages: The Pre-Critical The Critical The Post-Critical In my first presentation, I told you of my whole academic experience through high school, college and seminary which left me in a pre-critical stage, unable and unwilling to think critically as I held to and taught the biblical story in terms of the ancient biblical worldview. I was defensive of that worldview, took it literally, and was threatened by all knowledge to the contrary. But, alas, finally I could no longer deny that my deeply formed and very rigid understanding of the biblical paradigm could no longer be held with integrity. In the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson, © Grand Valley State University �The Magnificent Vision of Shalom Richard A. Rhem Page 4   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. It must be obvious that being deeply formed in a pre-critical mindset in a world exploding with data that could not be incorporated into that pre-modern understanding of God, nature and history put one in a very uncomfortable position - constantly threatened, always on the defensive and wondering what the next breakthrough in the sciences might reveal. Finally, my "little system" broke and I was ready to open myself to the best of human knowledge and understanding. Intellectual honesty, I realized, was also a spiritual matter. I wanted to know the truth and tell the truth to the extent that was possible for me. Thus, I entered the next phase of my life and ministry - the critical phase - a phase that lasted for me about thirty years, during which I was preaching and teaching, thinking, reading and writing. My move into the critical stage was never marked by a "loss of faith" or a negative spirit over against my Christian faith. During those three decades, I was being a pastor and living out of a deep faith that was undergoing considerable revision, but never overthrown. I lived out the experience that Gary Dorrien, in his Making of the American Liberal Theology, documents. I find his definition of the Liberal movement and his high valuation of it precisely my experience. He defines the Liberal movement thus: In accord with my concept of it as a movement that began in the late eighteenth century, I define liberal theology primarily by its original character as a mediating Christian movement. Liberal Christian theology is a tradition that derives from the late-eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury Protestant attempt to reconceptualize the meaning of traditional Christian teaching in the light of modern knowledge and modern ethical values. It is not revolutionary but reformist in spirit and substance. Fundamentally it is the idea of a genuine Christianity not based on external authority. Liberal theology seeks to reinterpret the symbols of traditional Christianity in a way that creates a progressive religious alternative to atheistic rationalism and to theologies based on external authority. (Vol. I, p. XXIII) It took me a long time to work out the question of biblical authority and I can trace the gradual movement in my understanding. But, the mediating function of the liberal approach was obvious to me, once my infallible, inerrant scripture eroded and my conservative biblical paradigm collapsed. I spent the Fall Term in 1983 at the University of Michigan with Professor Hans Küng, who was deeply engaged at the time in his work on paradigm change in theology. A book of great impact, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), by Thomas S. Kuhn, had, in the words of one commentator, made clear that © Grand Valley State University �The Magnificent Vision of Shalom Richard A. Rhem Page 5   science is not the steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge that is portrayed in the textbooks. Rather, it is a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions ... in each of which, one conceptual world view is replaced by another ... The book was enlarged in a second edition in 1970. Küng charted the course of paradigm shifts in theological development from the earliest centuries much as Kuhn did for the unfolding scientific worldviews in which he showed how, in the scientific revolutions, one worldview is replaced by another. Kuhn documented how the scientist takes the data available and builds a model or a paradigm. Further data comes to light that doesn't fit into the prevailing paradigm and it is resisted, but finally more data is accumulated and the prevailing paradigm is rejected, its data and the new data of discovery are combined into a new paradigm that can accommodate all the data available at that time. Küng documented a similar movement in theological conception except, in the religious community, there were always groups that perpetuated a given paradigm despite the ever-evolving knowledge of the cosmic story and scientific understanding. Out-of-date worldviews are manifold in religious worldviews. But, this is where the Liberal movement comes in - no longer willing or able to deny the explosion of knowledge provided by the natural and social sciences, the liberal Christian thinkers were open to scientific breakthroughs and, with continuing commitment to their Christian faith and experience, sought to distinguish the faith from the worldviews in which it came to expression. Thus, there was revision of much biblical conceptuality and the faith that came to expression in the ancient worldview was set free from the ancient forms in which it was expressed. This was the mediating function of the liberal movement - the use of critical reason to understand the data of scientific discovery and the discernment of Christian faith that was wrapped in now outdated worldviews that had to be abandoned in light of new discovery. This process which marked the Liberal movement and continues to be its finest gift to Christian faith is a process I have gone through, as indicated above, and let me acknowledge it is scary and sometimes painful. One wonders if one's faith will dissolve, leaving one without the source of one's meaning, hope and comfort. And, it can be costly! Hans Küng, in 1983, had just learned that the German Bishop, Joseph Ratzinger, presently Pope, had passed on Rome's decree that the theology courses Küng taught at Tubingen would no longer be credited for those studying for the priesthood. To read Küng's Memoirs is to realize the risk one takes as one seeks to bring one's Christian understanding into accord with one's understanding of the knowledge available in all the disciplines of human learning. Yet, once one sees one's faith as distinct from the conceptual framework in which it first came to expression, and once one opens one's mind to the knowledge of the natural and social sciences, there is no "going home." And so one must move through the Critical stage, testing everything, ruling out no question, claiming no privilege of "the eyes of faith" in one's inquiry. © Grand Valley State University �The Magnificent Vision of Shalom Richard A. Rhem Page 6   The Critical phase is both necessary and dissatisfying for one deeply formed in the conservative biblical paradigm as I was. It is an anxiety-ridden experience; one wonders where one will end up. But I was fortunate in that I had time to read and think and write sermons. And, I took a cadre of folk with me in Wednesday evening classes where we probed the questions and read significant scholarly works. And along the way, there were cumulative experiences. I've already mentioned the semester with Küng. And, in the early 90s, the exposure to the Jewish community, involvement with the Jewish-Christian committee, and the inter-faith experience was very significant for me. Perhaps the most significant endeavor for me was serving on the Board of Editors of Perspectives, a journal of Reformed theology intended to stimulate theological dialogue in the Reformed Church. In the writing of several essays, I began to focus the new understanding I had been gaining in my reading and reflection. In these years 1985-95, I brought into sharp focus the results of my critical inquiry of the previous years post-Europe. I won't trace the development of my thinking here, but simply point out that by the mid-90s, the Muskegon Classis challenged my theological position, determining I was outside the pale of Reformed theology and, with the congregation, I moved out of the RCA to independency. I experienced freedom - a freedom I did not know I did not have while engaging in my critical testing of my theological understanding while still in the ordained ministry of the RCA. Now I was finally free to follow the consequences of years of critical investigation. Declaring our independence in 1996, by 1999 I had moved into a Post-Critical stage. But, before I go there, I must mention that my understanding of the nature and function of religion was changing. This change came about as I got involved in inter-religious dialogue, as well as experiencing firsthand the deeply religious life of one who called himself a Religious Naturalist - Dr. Duncan Littlefair. I saw in him the celebration of the wonder, miracle, joy and glory of life, lived out in a life of worship and the wonder of all creation and the human being. These concrete life experiences were life-changing for me. I wonder if we ever really change, if we are ever transformed in any other way than through encounter and concrete experience. I had to rethink the phenomenon of religion itself, all knowledge to the contrary. One of the significant scholars whose work we studied was Gordon Kaufman, who had recently retired from Harvard. His In Face of Mystery was a great "revelation" for me, especially his claim that religion is a human creative construct. Tracing the development of the human from earliest beginnings, he showed how the religious dimension developed and I found his explanation compelling. I came to understand how religion played a significant role in human development, beginning within clans and tribes as the means to explain the natural phenomena experienced, to seek security and harmony with the Ultimate Mystery, eventuating in 800-600 BCE in the great religious traditions that arose simultaneously in what is called the First Axial Period. Informed by such an understanding, I came to see religious truth, not as a series of creedal propositions containing absolute truth, but as sacred story lived out in © Grand Valley State University �The Magnificent Vision of Shalom Richard A. Rhem Page 7   life-forming fashion through prayer, ritual and moral living. The story was celebrated in music and sacred dance and worship. And, as Karen Armstrong has claimed, at the heart of all the great religions is the call to compassion. Understanding the nature and function of religion thus, I realized exclusivism was a hangover of tribalism and, for me, the theology of religion pointed to pluralism as the only reasonable conclusion. This, too, was freeing; with absolutism and exclusivism removed, I was able to go back to my own story, the biblical story and my Christian faith - no longer needing to defend or convince or argue, but simply search out again its depth and meaning, its wisdom and its teaching as to the meaning of human existence before the Face of the Sacred Mystery we call God. I had entered fully the post-critical stage where I could see the whole grand story and tradition as for the first time - and loving it now, not as the only way, truth and life, but as my way, my truth, my life. No need now to prove anything; rather, I could live fully in the human world, open to the wonder and miracle of the universe, trusting that all Being was grounded in an Ultimate Mystery that was the creative, enlivening source of all that is. An Ultimate Mystery who is lifegiving, as seen in the cosmic drama that has been emerging with life to the point at which the human can trace the process of billions of years and stand in awe of it all, giving voice in praise and adoration. Emergence has become a key concept for me as I survey the whole cosmic drama - the gradual unfolding of the universe issuing, at this point in the process, in creatures such as we are. Emergence I understand as a model I create in place of the ancient Genesis story with its profound mythical story, and I propose emergence because I can hear all the data available from cosmology in its present state and see it as the emerging reality that has come to this point without feeling any threat to my religious being. In other words, I can receive the latest and best knowledge and then think about it religiously in terms of my biblical story. And here I find a fascinating point of connection. In John's Gospel the prologue begins In the beginning was the Word ... In Greek, "word" is logos, a philosophical term that points to the divine intention in Creation. The prologue reminds us of Genesis 1:1, In the beginning God... And then in verse 14, The word became flesh ..., a reference to Jesus as the human incarnation of the Divine Intention. Then in verse 18, an interesting statement, No one has ever seen God, followed by the claim that Jesus, the Word made flesh, has made God known. This, of course, is the Christian understanding of Jesus as the embodiment of God in human being - The Christian understanding of Incarnation. God become Human. Translating that into Emergence conceptuality, I would say that the cosmic process emanating from the Creative Source, the Ultimate Mystery, has evolved to a point where that Infinite Mystery emerged in human form. © Grand Valley State University �The Magnificent Vision of Shalom Richard A. Rhem Page 8   Stating it differently, the Infinite is now revealed in finite form - the human - and the human, in the image of the Infinite, is the emergent form of that Infinite Ground - thus, the deep yearning for God in the human being. This whole idea is given a further and profound development in the First Epistle of John, chapter 4. In verse 7, we are called to love one another because love is from God, and "God is love." Then the phrase from the Gospel, 1:18, is repeated, No one has ever seen God. But, then a significant development of the idea of incarnation is added: If we love one another, God lives in us, and God's love is perfected in us. A few lines later, the same claim is made. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. If we put all this together, we have a theological model which is in harmony with an emerging cosmic drama whose Creative Source, God, is understood as Love and whose presence in the cosmos is experienced in human love, the human being the embodiment of the infinite creative Ground of Being. The cosmos becomes conscious in the human and love is the highest expression of cosmic reality - love that gathers all into harmony, the only possibility for Shalom, the ancient prophets' vision. And where do we see such love lived out? In our biblical story, we see it concretely come to expression in Jesus, in whom the cycle of violence was broken, who counseled, "Love your enemies," and whose non-violent resistance to imperial power and political expediency brought him to the violent death by crucifixion. Jesus, who was true to his own teaching as he died, prayed Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing. Other religious traditions teach and encourage positive human values and contain profound insights, having guided generations in their respective "ways." I need not denigrate another tradition. I need not claim I have fully grasped the deepest insights of the biblical story, nor claim I have embodied the way, the truth and the life as it came to expression in Jesus. But, it is enough for me that that story, that life in which I have been nurtured, which I have preached, challenges, inspires and enables me to realize my full humanity. And I believe that in that “Way, Truth and Life” lies the hope for a human future - the realization of the vision of Shalom. References: Francis Crick. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, 1994. Scribner reprint edition, 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 Summer Social Gathering Location The location of the interview Spring Lake Country Club References Francis Crick. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, 1994. Gary Dorrien. The Making of the American Liberal Theology, Vol. 2, 2003. 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-0-20060827 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006-08-27 Title A name given to the resource The Magnificent Vision of Shalom 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 Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on August 27, 2006 entitled "The Magnificent Vision of Shalom", on the occasion of Summer Social Gathering, at Spring Lake Country Club . Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives God as Love Paradigm Shift PostModern Shalom https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/652a2e0f38138c10e17ff262e8cc0d65.pdf e2e2e005e79611c0d8bf98d299f22f1e PDF Text Text The Making of a Liberal Sunday Evening Social Richard A. Rhem Spring Lake Country Club Spring Lake, Michigan August 6, 2006 Prepared text for talk It is wonderful to see you and to be with you again. I was delighted with the first social gathering – it was electric – hugs and tears and laughter: a great combination! As I indicated then, I was a bit embarrassed that so many came to hear my story, but then realized that was what was advertised so you came anyway. Then Tom Hammond clarified the situation for me when he assured me that the reason this community gathers is not because of the address but rather to meet one another – and I know he was teasing me, but he was also correct. Being together with such a community is a rich experience worth enduring sermons poor and poorer. Some of you have told me you know my story and the first presentation didn’t bring anything new. Let me say I know some of you know my story well, but my decision to go over it again was not to tell it one more time but to tell it for the first time from the place to which I’ve come and the present understanding I have. My story, as all of our stories, is particular but in the particular there lies the universal and it is the universal aspects that interest me – not just for myself, but for all of us. I hope my reflection can be a catalyst for you to reflect on your own story, bringing to awareness where you are and why you are where you are. To live with awareness and intentionality is a great gift – awareness of why we are passionate about some questions, why we react strongly in some situations, why some things simply don’t touch us or move us. The process about which I’m speaking involves increasingly bringing to consciousness that vast underground sea of the unconscious. I’m no expert here but I know that there are depths in us that erupt or seep through, fashioning our attitudes and determining our actions. The more I am aware of how I act and react in any given situation, the more I will live with self-understanding and selfknowledge. Why am I moved, or not, by religious experience; why am I a Christian – a conservative Christian or a liberal Christian; why am I a Republican or Democrat; © Grand Valley State University   �The Making of a Liberal Richard A. Rhem Page 2   why do I feel as I do about Israel, the Middle East – Iraq, Iran, Hamas, Palestinians, and so on… It is with such questions in mind, with such a search, that I go over my story from the present perspective. And I do so for my own understanding but, more importantly here, to trigger a similar process in you, because such a process renders great riches and enhances our lives. The fascinating question for me revolves around the relationship of my early nurture and my educational experience. As I reported last week, high academic achievement throughout my schooling, yet, at age 25, I was not an educated person in terms of critical thinking and critical analysis. What would I have gained from a more open nurturing? Yet, when my system broke, I never felt adrift from God, rudderless, or despondent. When the dogmatic structure imploded, was it the deep nurturing that enabled me to stand amidst the failed system? And how about you? Have you mapped your journey? Not everyone experiences a crisis of faith and identity but I did – a total swing from absolutism to critical rationality and provisionalism. That is where I find myself at this point in my life – knowing my values, beliefs, commitments are choices I make without absolute certainty and without verifiable proofs. I hope in my third presentation to detail some of the fundamental choices I have made and the fundamental trust with which I live. But let me pick up the story where I left off in my first presentation: I have settled in the Netherlands enrolled in the doctoral program at the University of Leiden under the direction of Professor Hendrikus Berkhof. As I have indicated, a recent re-reading of Gary Dorrien’s The Making of American Liberal Theology, Vol. II, brought me to a sharp awareness that I had never studied or been aware of the theological development in this country and yet it was a remarkable tradition. I had, however, studied in depth the liberal development in Europe. That development looks to Friedrich Schleiermacher as the Father of the Liberal Theological movement. The orthodox Christian faith was seriously challenged in the late 18th century. The rise of the natural sciences employing the scientific method of empirical investigation and the rise of historical consciousness in the 19th century were the major challenges to the dogmatic structure of Christian faith, both in its Catholic and Protestant expressions. The culture of the European universities were not at all sympathetic to religion and, specifically, not to Christian faith. Schleiermacher, at age 29 in 1797, wrote On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers, a title that speaks volumes. He was part of the cultural elite but felt © Grand Valley State University �The Making of a Liberal Richard A. Rhem Page 3   totally isolated from his contemporaries. His “Speeches” were his attempt to give expression to his own deepest truth. In the first speech he acknowledges no authority beyond his own thought and experience. Why then, as I am fully conscious that in all I have to say to you I entirely belie my profession, should I not acknowledge it like any other accident? Its prepossessions shall in no way hinder us. Neither in asking nor in answering shall the limits it holds sacred be valid between us. As a man I speak to you of the sacred secrets of mankind according to my views – of what was in me as with youthful enthusiasm I sought the unknown, of what since then I have thought and experienced, of the innermost springs of my being which shall forever remain for me the highest, however I be moved by fear. Nor is it done from any caprice or accident. Rather it is the pure necessity of my nature; it is a divine call; it is that which determines my position in the world and makes me what I am. Wherefore, even if it were neither fitting nor prudent to speak of religion, there is something which compels me and represses with its heavenly power all those small considerations Let me be clear. As I arrived in Leiden at age 32, I was nowhere near the wisdom and insight of Schleiermacher. My foundations were crumbling and my systematic theological scheme was faltering but I was not yet able to diagnose my dilemma. Even so, I begin with Schleiermacher because I now realize that the task he set for himself was precisely what I have been engaged in for over 30 years – for me a long, arduous journey toward freedom – the freedom to wonder, critique and change. It was right here in Spring Lake that this drama took place during the years 1971 to 2004. I remember vividly my return here in 1971. I was not sure I had anything to preach or if I could lead the worship service. I had been in Europe for four years, having preached twice: once in The Hague and once in Antwerp. I chose a dissertation subject that was just breaking with most of the work in German philosophical theology that was heavy indeed but the focus – the question of whether there are traces of God’s action within history that were discernible – was my question. The discussion centered in the resurrection of Jesus – a subject that had not been seriously considered in German theology for over a century. I was full of that discussion and had written the first chapter when I felt it necessary to return to the States to check on my children who had left with their mother on July 1, 1970. My whole domestic situation at the time would take a chapter to portray and was not insignificant to my eventual theological movement but would take me from my purpose in this presentation. In sum, I returned here, not knowing whether I could find my voice to lead the Spring Lake congregation but I did insist, “Give me Jesus and the resurrection and the rest is negotiable.” © Grand Valley State University �The Making of a Liberal Richard A. Rhem Page 4   What Schleiermacher was consciously about as the 18th century closed, I was about also, but without the clarity with which he sought to ground his faith in a new mode and bring Christian faith to fresh expression. In a series, Makers of the Modern Theological Mind, C. W. Christian writes the volume Friedrich Schleiermacher. He sets the historical context for Schleiermacher’s work. The question confronting Schleiermacher and nineteenth-century theology was whether it was any longer possible to restore the vitality of Christian faith and to provide a basis for a vigorous and creative future. The double crisis of scientific empiricism and relativizing historicism seemed to tear away the foundations on which traditional Christianity had stood. Claude Welch has expressed the two absolutely urgent questions which confronted the generation of Schleiermacher; namely, whether theology is any longer possible in the modern world, and, even if it is, whether a Christian theology is possible. Schleiermacher’s work as a theologian can be understood in large measure as a response to these questions. If the rehabilitation of faith and theology was to be more than doctrinaire, several specific demands faced the one who assumed the task. First, he must find a new authority for faith, since the traditional appeal to church authority and Scripture seemed no longer sufficient. Second, he must demonstrate how the work of theology is to be done in the changed, intellectual and cultural atmosphere of the modern world. Finally, he must show what an adequate theology – one which is at the same time truly modern and genuinely Christian – has to say. Thus the theological quest of Schleiermacher is threefold: it is (1) a search for authority, (2) a reconstruction of theological method, and (3) a reformulation of the content of religious faith in general and of the Christian faith in particular. That concise summary of Schleiermacher’s task is possible when one looks in retrospect from the end to the beginning – something I am now attempting for myself. While at the time of my European experience I did not have such clarity, one thing I knew for certain: the authority with which I had based my Christian faith to that point was broken. I knew the view of Scripture that sees it as an inerrant, infallible revelation from God, mediated by the Spirit through human instrumentality, was no longer a tenable article of faith for me. Thus I did know in personal experience that I needed a new authority. It is understandable that those who go through a faith crisis most often come face-toface with the matter of authority. As Gary Dorrien writes in the first volume of his trilogy The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion: The idea of liberal theology is nearly three centuries old. In essence, it is the idea that Christian theology can be genuinely Christian without being based upon external authority. Since the eighteenth century, liberal Christian thinkers have argued that religion should be modern and © Grand Valley State University �The Making of a Liberal Richard A. Rhem Page 5   progressive and that the meaning of Christianity should be interpreted from the standpoint of modern knowledge and experience. For the most part we are born into a faith, whether Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and all the myriad of religious expressions. That is the way it has been in traditional societies. With the advent of modernity in the West, that has broken down, eroded by the rise of critical rationality. The empirical method of the natural sciences and the rise of historical thinking in the 19th century have caused us to question the received tradition handed down. Still, we begin at heart in the religious understanding and posture into which we are born, for the most part. But then, for some of us, questions arise. For Schleiermacher, as the 18th century closed, the whole elite cultural milieu was hostile to religion as a phase in human development that was passing before the triumphant march of human rationality. For me, it was simply questions that I could no longer suppress, spawned by pastoral experience and continuing study and reflection. I began to realize how many pat answers were really learned responses that were not rooted in reason, tried and tested, but simply what the narrow confines of my conservative tradition taught. And the wider my exposure to other traditions and communities, the more it was apparent that the whole structure of faith and practice was arbitrary, constructed at some point in the past, given the mantle of divine authority and passed along as absolute truth. One of the unexpected gifts of my experience in The Netherlands was worshiping at the American Church in The Hague as well as the Dutch Hervormde Kerk. The Hague had about 4000 Americans, many of them southern oil folk who worked the North Sea. Those for whom a church community and worship was important gathered on Sunday, coming from all points on the Protestant spectrum. A good number of Southern Baptists with big red-covered floppy Bibles, High Church Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians and even some Dutch folk wanting to practice their English. For me this was a marvelous introduction to ecumenical Christian community. All the respective forms were used. If an Episcopal baby was to be baptized, the Episcopal liturgy was used, if Presbyterian, the Presbyterian liturgy and practice was followed, and so on. When the Eucharist was celebrated, one could go forward, kneel and receive the sacrament at the rail or wait in the pew for the elements to be passed. The congregation from various backgrounds found community in a foreign land and celebrated their mutual Christian faith by means of their respective traditions. I’ve often reflected on that experience as the seed bed for my return here and our name change from the First Reformed Church to Christ Community Church four months later. Once let loose in such a rich ecumenical experience, I wanted us to become more than a Reformed congregation. In June 1971, we took our first step © Grand Valley State University �The Making of a Liberal Richard A. Rhem Page 6   out of the narrow confines of a particular parochial institutional affiliation, opening up to the whole spectrum of Christian institutional alignments. The point I’m making here is that what for me once was the divinely ordered institutional form and structure, as expressed in the Reformed Church in America, was now understood as one historically conditioned institutional form and structure – relative to its time and place of origin. This all seems so elementary, such recognition seems so obvious to me now, but it was not always so. It was a process of exposure and experience beyond the narrow confines of my early exclusive experience in the Reformed church with its heavy Dutch ethnicity, piety, and doctrinal teaching. But the breaking out of church forms and structures was child’s play compared with the theological struggle that lay ahead of me. It was the engagement with the theological formulation of my Christian faith that brought me to Europe and, again, the question of authority was the first item that needed to be dealt with. Slowly, painfully, I was moving from a Reformed Christian with the mantra “Soli Scriptura” – by Scripture alone – to a liberal posture that approached the Bible critically, understanding it in terms of the historical context in which it arose and recognizing that it was not a book of one unified theme, consistent from Genesis to Revelation, but a vast collection of writings covering centuries of variegated human experience and spiritual insight, wisdom and historical experience. Where does one find authority? Why do I believe this rather than that? How does one arbitrate between conflicting claims of the respective faith traditions? Huge questions! And, reading in The Christian Century the report of the annual synods of the respective denominations, one is aware that these respective bodies have not yet come to consensus on the authority question. As I said above, I was on the way to a liberal posture. Let me attempt to put “liberal” in the context in which I use it. I cannot trace the history of the liberal movement as it issued from Schleiermacher in Europe or as it developed in the American liberal tradition, but I hope I can enable you to see the liberal posture, not as a movement with its own set of religious insights and doctrinal formulations, but rather as a method, a set of mind as one approaches all questions. I find it interesting that in our present religious and political discourse the liberal label is looked on as negative. There is an election Tuesday and the campaign literature that has come to our house finds the candidates touting their conservative credentials; a liberal doesn’t stand a chance in our region. Yet the Oxford Encyclopedia English Dictionary defines “liberal” as “giving freely, generous, not sparing; open-minded, not prejudiced; not literal (of interpretation); for general broadening of the mind, regarding many traditional beliefs as dispensable, invalidated by modern thought, or liable to change.” © Grand Valley State University �The Making of a Liberal Richard A. Rhem Page 7   Sounds pretty good to me. Why would not everyone want to be liberal? Well, perhaps because the liberal movement also became codified with its own set of beliefs; it became liberalism marked by its own creedal formulations. This discussion would lead us astray from my purpose which is to see the liberal approach, not as a well-formulated set of beliefs, but as a method. This was insisted on by one of the Chicago School Theologians, Shailer Matthews (born 1863). He wrote The Faith of Modernism, using the term “modernism” in a positive sense although it was used as a derogatory description of those liberal thinkers who were trying to find an expression of Christian faith in light of modern knowledge. As Dorrien describes Matthew’s work, The mainline churches were trapped in stupid debates over outmoded literal dogmas while the world went to hell…. “There are two social minds at work in our world,” he observed. “The one seeks to reassert the past; the other seeks by new methods to gain efficiency.” The first was a futile reaction against modernity, but the second could not succeed without progressive Christian guidance and support. (Vol. II, p. 205). …The key difference was its scientific character. Matthews argued that modernism was not a new theology or philosophy. It was essentially a method, not a creed…it was “the use of scientific, historical, social method in understanding and applying evangelical Christianity to the needs of living persons.” Modernism had no confessions, it did not vote in conventions, and it did not enforce belief by coercion…Dogmatic Christianity is based on doctrinal conformity through group authority; modern Christianity begins with the religious movement that gave rise to doctrine and interprets the movement through the use of critical methodologies. Modernists are Christians “who accept the result of scientific research as data with which to think religiously.” (Vol. II, p. 206). Dorrien has been most helpful to me in defining liberal theology. In the Introduction to Volume I, he writes, The intellectual giants of nineteenth-century theological liberalism were German theologians and philosophers, but the questions that gave rise to this tradition were not unique to German academics: Is it possible to be a faithful Christian without believing that God willed the annihilation of nearly the entire human race in a great flood, or that God commanded the genocidal extermination of the ancient enemies of Israel, or that God demanded the literal sacrifice of his Son as a substitutionary legal payment for sin? Is it a good or true form of Christianity that teaches the doctrines of double predestination and biblical inerrancy? Can Christianity claim to be religiously true if the bible contains myths and historical errors? Is there a progressive Christian “third way” between the authority-based © Grand Valley State University �The Making of a Liberal Richard A. Rhem Page 8   orthodoxies of traditional Christianity and the spiritless materialism of modern atheism or deism?... The liberal tradition of theology that flowed out of the enlightenment established the methods and laid the enduring conceptual foundations of modern critical theological scholarship by appealing to the authority of critical rationality and religious experience. In accord with my concept of it as a movement that began in the late eighteenth century, I define liberal theology primarily by its original character as a mediating Christian movement. Liberal Christian theology is a tradition that derives from the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury Protestant attempt to reconceptualize the meaning of traditional Christian teaching in the light of modern knowledge and modern ethical values. It is not revolutionary but reformist in spirit and substance. Fundamentally it is the idea of a genuine Christianity not based on external authority. Liberal theology seeks to reinterpret the symbols of traditional Christianity in a way that creates a progressive religious alternative to atheistic rationalism and to theologies based on external authority. Specifically, liberal theology is defined by its openness to the verdicts of modern intellectual inquiry, especially the natural and social sciences; its commitment to the authority of individual reason and experience; its conception of Christianity as an ethical way of life; its favoring of moral concepts of atonement; and its commitment to make Christianity credible and socially relevant to modern people. (Vol. I, pp. xiii-xxii). In the second volume, Dorrien defines liberal theology’s essence. The essential idea of liberal theology is that all claims to truth, in theology as in other disciplines, must be made on the basis of reason and experience, not by appeal to external authority. Christian scripture may be recognized as spiritually authoritative within Christian experience, but its word does not settle or establish truth claims about matters of fact. In the nineteenth century this idea was imagined and developed by a relative handful of American religious thinkers, until 1880’s, when it became a movement… (Vol. II, p. 1). References: Gary Dorrien. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900, Vol. I. John Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Gary Dorrien. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 190-1950, Vol. II. Westminster John Knox Press, 2003. © Grand Valley State University �The Making of a Liberal Richard A. Rhem Page 9   C. W. Christian. Makers of the Modern Theological Mind: Friedrich Schleiermacher. W. Publishing Group, 1979. Friedrich Schleiermacher. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers, 1797. © 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 Summer Social Gathering Location The location of the interview Spring Lake Country Club References C.W. Christian.Makers of the Modern Theological Mind, 1979. Gary Dorrien. The Making of American Liberal Theology, Vols I, II, 2001, 2003. 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-0-20060806 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006-08-06 Title A name given to the resource The Making of a Liberal 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 Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on August 6, 2006 entitled "The Making of a Liberal", on the occasion of Summer Social Gathering, at Spring Lake Country Club . Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives History of Liberalism personal journey PostModern https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7e5639d4dc0828d98ba8d256e7261c0b.mp3 1599aac6f3e77fe5cf41cf530ce136fc https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c5726a1267dde26127011397078ac73e.pdf 368617780d8ff32c1711d5452b16e063 PDF Text Text Religion: Its Use and Abuse Pentecost XVII Scripture: Isaiah 58:1-12; Matthew 25:31-46 Richard A. Rhem Christ Community Church Spring Lake, Michigan September 23, 2001 Transcription of the spoken sermon An area in my own life where there has been a great transformation of understanding has been in the area of religion. I began by worrying that religion might not be around long enough for me to fulfill my career. But then I realized that was just a narrow little idea of religion that I had within severe parochial limits. More and more, I came to see that religion was something that was endemic in the human person, that it is a universal human phenomenon, that it is simply that response that we make with our consciousness to the mystery of our existence, to the fragility of our existence, our vulnerability, the response that we make to the mystery that is our source and our ground. Religion deals with meaning and ultimate questions, and I became aware of the fact that it was a universal phenomena and that it would always be here as long as humans are humans. As I came to realize that, I came to see that the respective religions were really human, imaginative constructs, a founding vision, a ritual and a cult that formed a community, and that the respective religions were really all fingers pointing beyond themselves to that ultimate mystery that is ineffable, incomprehensible, beyond our capacity to analyze or to define. It was a liberating moment for me when I could say my own religion is an authentic response to God or to the sacred or to the holy. For me, the window is Jesus and the way of Jesus is the way of life. But, a little over a year ago, that gracious and gentle scholarly presence of Huston Smith embodied in our midst that kind of breadth of understanding and experience that witnessed to the fact that all of the great religious traditions really were speaking of a presence of that which is holy and of that which is sacred, leading to a particular response of life. In your insert, there is a citation from Huston Smith's book, Beyond the PostModem Mind, in which he speaks of sitting with the Dali Lama and Thomas Merton and a Native American and two or three others of other traditions, all of which he has entered, having experienced exactly the same thing, and then his comment, "How could God possibly (as once I thought, and I suppose as once he thought), how could God possibly have waited for thousands of years to reveal © Grand Valley State University �Religion: Its Use and Abuse Richard A. Rhem Page 2 God's self, leaving generation after generation in hopelessness and darkness, and finally to a little rivulet of humanity reveal the truth? Would that not," he says, "be contrary to the very nature of God, that nature of goodness and mercy that we believe constitutes God's nature?" This is old hat for you, I know, but I am simply reminding you of the way that we have come. We come here to respect the respective religious traditions, and to realize that we also point beyond our particular structures and our particular confessional statements to that one who transcends all of our particular religions, which are simply the structures and the forms by which we give expression to that deep yearning within to be in touch with God, with the holy one, with that which is sacred. As I have come to see the nature of religion more and more in its universality, I also have come to see its power, tremendous power. Religion is one of the most powerful forces on earth, and I began to realize that it was a power for good or for ill, that religion could be used or it could be abused. That is what I want to have you think with me for a few moments about this morning - the use and the abuse of that which is common to us here in a community of faith, our religion and religion in general. Let me begin with the abuse of religion. I am doing this, of course, in light of the present circumstances and that which we have gone through so recently, where religion has played a part and has drawn forth all kinds of commentary from religious leaders. I want to say the first abuse of religion is the use of God as an agent of manipulation and control of people, an idea of God as a God in control who sits in the circle of the heavens and now and again intervenes, zapping this one or that one. I mentioned last week my dismay at the insensitivity and inappropriateness of Jerry Falwell's comments about those who were partially responsible for our tragedy - Civil Libertarians, the feminists, gay and lesbian people, those who are pro-abortion, that God has judged America and that this attack is part of the judgment of God because of our moral decay. Oh, to be sure, in this past week he has apologized, recognizing the inappropriateness of it, but he did say that the secular press and media failed to understand his "theologically nuanced" statement. Well, it is his theologically nuanced statement which I would protest. It is that conception of a God that has died, if we think critically about it at all, that kind of a God is a God that is used by religious leaders and religious institutions to manipulate people, to threaten people, and to control people, because that is a God of control and those religious leaders who have been speaking out recently amaze me at the confidence with which they purport to know the mind of God and what God is doing. If Falwell backed off, James Dobson of "Focus on the Family" did not. He said very clearly without retort, This is God's punishment on this nation for its moral decay, for taking God out of the schools, for forcing children to learn of © Grand Valley State University �Religion: Its Use and Abuse Richard A. Rhem Page 3 homosexuality, for sexual immorality in government," and so forth, on television. The punishment of this nation because of its moral decay. I want you to think for just a moment about what kind of a God that is. That is a God who sits up and contemplates the world and who looks at the United States of America and says, "You know, things have gone just about far enough. I think it's time to zap them." And so, the punishment of the nation because of moral decay. But, if you think about it a little further, couldn't God have targeted the victims a little better? I mean, if God is God, then why do the innocent suffer? If God is God, and allpowerful and manipulative and in control, then couldn't God aim the thunderbolts? Tell that story to the widows and the orphans and the parents who have lost children. Tell that story to those firemen who have lost their comrades. What kind of a God would that be? A capricious monster, if you think about it long enough and critically enough. That God in control, that God has got to go. That God has died, as a matter of fact. In the National Cathedral service last week, there was dear Billy Graham. His presence there would have been enough, just to have been there. I don't know of anyone in the religious field who has achieved such fame and who has earned it with a greater dignity and humility than Billy Graham. I think the world of him. But, in his attempt to speak to this situation, didn't you feel for him? The stumbling and the confusion about how God in control can allow things like this to happen and yet, wanting to say, God is merciful and God is kind and God is good. You see, it just doesn't make sense. You just can't fit it together. Or, those who say there is evil in the world but that is because God created human freedom, but God will bring good out of evil. Well, if God can bring good out of evil, in other words, if God can call the final shot, then wouldn't it be merciful if God could call the shot a bit earlier? Then should we have to go through these tens of hundreds of thousands of years of human suffering and tragedy and darkness in order that eventually some good could come out of evil? Now, it is time we simply call a spade a spade and recognize that that conception of God makes no reasonable sense, and you can claim mystery all you want to, but it is mystery fraught with tragedy and human horror, and really, it won't work, particularly if you are at the end of the suffering as its victim. God in control? You can't have it both ways, friends. Either God has turned human history over to us and put it in our hands so that we possibly might be able to bring good out of evil, but not God "up there" contemplating what to do next. That mean, capricious, and small deity has no place in the Christian Church or community. It is an abuse of religion. Falwell, Robertson, James Dobson - they are not alone. In an article yesterday in the Grand Rapids Press, the President of the Southern Baptist Church was reported to have said that this is Satan's handiwork and that this certainly shows once again that the only hope is to bring people to God through Jesus Christ alone. What has that got to do with it, I wonder? And if, somehow, finally we are © Grand Valley State University �Religion: Its Use and Abuse Richard A. Rhem Page 4 all encouraged to bring our neighbors to the knowledge of the son of God, what has that got to do with it, really? Don't we know that that conception of God creates such horrible problems that we ought, rather, to be ashamed of speaking about that kind of God in control. That is a petty and capricious deity that will no longer work for us who have some knowledge of our world, some understanding of the development of human history, some sense of the nature of the human being in human society. We don't have to call in a savior nor God. This is a human problem; it is our problem, and to use God that way is an abuse of religion. As a corollary to that, to use God to fuel, to use religion to fuel human passion leading to violence, is an abuse of religion. I made the mistake of walking into the bedroom last night while Nancy was watching A & E Biography, bin Laden's story. Perhaps you saw it. A fascinating tale of one who in the varied life experiences finally came to a deep religious commitment which has now spawned all kinds of violence, wanting to drive out the West from those holy lands of Islam, and being the agent to recruit and to propel so many who have nothing to lose into this kind of violent action whose reward is heaven. But, it is not a problem of Islam, for if we go to Orthodox Judaism, there are Rabbis in Jerusalem that were teaching such that a young man one day took a gun to Prime Minister Rabin and there was a Jewish settler who entered the mosque in Hebron and opened fire on Muslims at prayer. And don't we really know, don't Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson know that, while they would separate themselves from violence and they would abhor violence, don't they know that when a religious leader uses a certain rhetoric and a certain tone with a certain passion, that those who receive it uncritically will be fueled into violence? Don't we know that, within our own Protestant Christian Right, there have been those who have been propelled into killing abortion clinic doctors and bombing Planned Parenthood units, and terrible hate crimes? Matthew Shepherd's name comes to mind. Don't we realize, dear friends, that religion is thereby abused when a manipulative and mean God who controls is used to fuel the passions of those who in turn are driven to violence that create the hell on earth that we have experienced so recently? It is an abuse of religion and it is time the word is spoken and that the issue is joined. If that is its abuse, then what is its use? Let me say maybe radically, maybe to your surprise, maybe to your objection, let me say that religion is not to make us right. It is to make us good. Religion is not to make us right. It is to make us good. Read Karen Armstrong's comments in your insert this afternoon where she speaks about mythos and logos, for in her study of fundamentalism, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, she comes back again and again to the fact that what the © Grand Valley State University �Religion: Its Use and Abuse Richard A. Rhem Page 5 fundamentalists do is to make religion a matter of logos rather than mythos. To make it a matter of logos is to make it literally true, historically true in every detail, and in its confessional statements and its dogmas to be literally true, to use human reason and intelligence, to structure an image of God, a conception of God, a conception of religious faith, and to demand that that is true and there is no other truth, that is logos. Logos is our human reason, it is our intelligence. It is what we use if we want to know about the possibility of stem cells. It is what we use if we want to know about the treatment of disease or a heart transplant. It is what we use if we want to know how best to grow our crops on the agricultural scene. Our human logos is how we fly airplanes and study the stars. The logos is how we live. It is the empirical method of investigation. Logos is wonderful; it is a great human gift, but logos is not the source or the determinant of religion. Religions are not in that sense true or false. They are mythos. They have to do with stories that convey meaning, that speak about the values and the meaning of life. Religion is not true or false. Is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony true? Are Van Gogh's Sunflowers true? Is Michelangelo's David true? Of course not But, as human beings with consciousness and intuitive sense and esthetic appreciation, we stand there and know we are in the presence of greatness; it is not a matter of whether it is true or false. That is the wrong question. It is whether or not there is value communicated. And so, our religious experience is not that which is a consequence of rational investigation and the building of dogmas and doctrines and structures. It is the experience, the intuitive sense of that sacredness and that holiness that now and again, here and there, overwhelms us. When we love one another, when there is a creative interchange between human beings, there God is. John says God is love and the one who dwells in love dwells in God and God dwells in that one. Where there is eye-to-eye contact and understanding, where soul meets soul, or when one stands in wonder before the starry heavens or the magnificence of a sunset, where one sees a child, where one hugs a lover, there God is. Religion is not to make us right. I could really get excited and a bit upset about all of the division and all of the exclusion, all of those truth claims and those condemnations of other visions and understandings: what a silly thing it is and what a costly thing it is, and how wrong it is. It has nothing to do with good religion which is to speak to us of meaning, of beauty, of wonder and of love, and that’s why we need this community. That is why we need each other. That is why we need to keep hugging each other and supporting each other and being kind, one to another. Isaiah said, "All you religious, you're so religious, I can't stand you. But God says that's not the fast I want. Be kind. Be compassionate. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give shelter to the homeless." And Jesus who said it's as simple as doing good to the one who crosses your path. That is the use of religion. That is the © Grand Valley State University �Religion: Its Use and Abuse Richard A. Rhem Page 6 purpose of the faith community, to motivate us, inspire us, and move us to be good, to be good for God's sake, and to find comfort that there is, at the core of things, that which is meaningful and good. Henry Nelson Wieman, a great theologian of a former generation, speaking about the idea of God, told the story of his little daughter. When she was little and she would fall down and skin her knee, he would pick her up in his arms. She'd be crying away, and he'd say, "Well, well, well." And he did it time after time, comforting her, soothing her. One day she fell down and skinned her knee and she was crying and he picked her up, but he didn't say anything. She stopped crying immediately and said, "Say, 'Well, well, well.'" Did you feel it? Isn't that what it is? Isn't it that kind of emotional undergirding, isn't it that deep, deep assurance when the bottom falls out and the roof caves in, that there still is that sacred and the holy that comes through to us as to a little child, comforting, "Well, well, well." That is why we say, “ All will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.” Not in the denial of the darkness, but in the face of the sacred that is love experienced as we love one another. References: Karen Armstrong. A History of God. The Random House Publishing Group, 1993. © 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 XVI Scripture Text Isaiah 58:1-12, Matthew 25:31-46 Location The location of the interview Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI References Karen Armstrong. A History of God. Random House Publishing Group, 1993. 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-0-20010923 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001-09-23 Title A name given to the resource Religion: Its Use and Abuse 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 September 23, 2001 entitled "Religion: Its Use and Abuse", on the occasion of Pentecost XVI, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Isaiah 58:1-12, Matthew 25:31-46. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Compassion Nature of Religion PostModern 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/0d82df82783ef72dcde27a39425967bd.mp3 71f3f591546f4c44dd18133e904fdcb1 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/011e839c2c66fe66d3525228da4b78ba.pdf c5a060c69fa9fb26fea4450cd7e2c710 PDF Text Text Where in the World is God? From the series: Spirituality in the Modern World Scripture: Isaiah 6:1-8; John 14:8-20 Text: Isaiah 6:1; John 14:8 Richard A. Rhem Christ Community Church Spring Lake, Michigan February 11, 2001 Transcription of the spoken sermon Some of us were on retreat yesterday and listened to a futurist whose business it is to think about what is coming. He described for us the world of 2010, a world not so far off, and yet a world that, frankly, I can't even begin to comprehend as he speaks about the technological advances that are just over the horizon with artificial intelligence and so forth. I don't know enough to make an intelligent statement about it. It is the kind of a world that is inconceivable and yet, it will be here before we know it. How do you experience God in a world that is developing with emergence that boggles the mind? There is too much to take in. Oh, there are those old images and the old clichés and the platitudes, and I suppose most of us will go to our grave with them. They will be pointers to us, indicators of the reality and the presence of God. And those of us who are in the Church are those who have stayed, but there are multitudes on the outside who have left because their experience and their knowledge of the world made it impossible for them to find the genuine spirituality within the context of ancient symbols and metaphors, stories. And so, it is always a challenge to the Church to think again its faith and, where it can, to revision and re-imagine in order that folk in every emerging age can live with a genuineness of faith, an integrity of human experience, or, as the song says, to "find Jesus in our time." What shape does he take? How does one say God today? How can we experience that presence of the holy and the sacred in the knockabout world of our everyday experience? We live at the far end of the modern period. We live in a time that has been called the post-modern period. The fact that we call it post-modern means that we don't know how to label it, we don't know how to name it, because it is a world that is emerging. Modernity had a very definite character. We speak of the Enlightenment. During that period, the amazing, amazing breakthroughs of the natural sciences, and the success of the natural sciences which have been registered in the technological © Grand Valley State University �Where in the World is God? Richard A. Rhem Page 2 marvels of our day, which a person like me can't even begin to take in when told about them. That dominant scientific outlook has, for many, crowded out the possibility of God. We have lived in an age in which many, particularly in the intellectual establishment of our time, have said that there is nothing but material. The material universe which can be measured and tested and put into a formula. What you can touch is real, and there is reality denied to that which is invisible or spiritual. And so, we have one such as Huston Smith who, with his wonderful credentials, takes on the scientific establishment, and he makes room for God, calling to account those who have ruled out the possibility of Spirit, calling again to the celebration of that spiritual reality. There is room for God in the world, as we noted last week. Huston Smith reaches back to a philosopher born in Britain, but who spent much of his time in this country in the first half of the last century, Alfred North Whitehead, who said there are two great forces in the world, the force of Religion and the force of Science, and these two enterprises each have their respective dogmas and those are simply the crystallization of the best insights that they have formulated in rational propositions. Whitehead pointed out that you can be a dogmatist whether you are a scientist or a religious person. You can deal in obscurantism, denying any light or knowledge from the other side, from either perspective. Huston Smith is calling the scientific establishment in our day to a fresh awareness of the spiritual dimension of life, because, as Whitehead pointed out long ago, that religious experience is also a very real part of being human. We speak of the Sundays after Epiphany. Epiphany means manifestation. Suddenly one "sees" something. And Isaiah had an epiphany, or we might call it a theophany, a manifestation of God. It was in the year that King Uzziah died. Maybe that is a statement like, "It was that November day when John F. Kennedy was shot." Or, "The seventh of December when Pearl Harbor was bombed." I don't know - the year King Uzziah died, was there some political crisis? Was Isaiah a member of the court and was everything suddenly thrown into chaos in that time at the death of the king? It was such a time as that, anyway, that he went into the temple and he said, "I saw the Lord high and lifted up, and the temple was filled with smoke and the pillars shook. I felt myself unworthy and experienced the ministration of angels and heard the voice of God calling me into prophetic ministry." Don't literalize that vision. Being one who was nurtured on that story from childhood, I could see the temple, I could see the smoke and smell the incense. But, that, of course, is to miss the point of it. The point is that there was some kind of a breakthrough in the experience of the prophet in that moment. Suddenly he was overwhelmed with the presence of God. Alfred North Whitehead would say that is experience, that is human experience that has to be taken just as seriously as the substance of some soil that may be analyzed. © Grand Valley State University �Where in the World is God? Richard A. Rhem Page 3 Don't you love Philip's question? "Just show us the father and we'll be satisfied." Have you ever said that? Whether you said it or not, have you thought that? "God, just show me. Would it be so difficult to write in the sky, 'I Am. I exist'? Couldn't you give us some token, some hard evidence?" "Just show us the father and we'll be satisfied," Philip says to Jesus. Jesus says, "How long have you been with me? Still don't get it? If you've seen me, you've seen the father." I suppose that is because Jesus was special, right? I suppose that is because Jesus was the son of God, right? Wrong. What did Jesus mean? I'm not sure Jesus even said that. I'm sure that the author of the Gospel was saying that in the human face, there is God. And in Jesus, the encounter with Jesus, sixty years after, I still remember it, the encounter with Jesus - it was God. Because Jesus was special? I think he was special, special in degree, not other than you are. Special because the luminosity of God shined brighter there, but not because he was other than human. I think what the Gospel writer was trying to say was that we saw God in that human visage, and what the fourth Gospel seems to be saying in that classic statement, "The word became flesh and dwelt among us," is that God is found in the human. Isaiah, in a moment of personal epiphany, is overwhelmed with the presence of God in the solitude of the temple, but John's Gospel suggests that God is found in the human encounter, in the community, in that moment when soul meets soul and there is a melding of two making one, and there, in that relationship of love and grace, one says, "My God!" So, human experience of God is that which has been attested to by the generations. The whole human story is replete with that witness to the reality of the experience of God or the holy or the sacred. If you scratch the veneer of this world as it appears, there is that sense that there is something more, that presence. Here we are. We have emerged. We have emerged in this cosmic process and we didn't make ourselves, and there is something that buoys up this magnificent, awesome reality of which we are a part, and what do you call that? That which shines through now and again, that which becomes apparent here and there, that spiritual reality which suddenly is the vertical presence in a horizontal relationship, what do you call that? God. And so, people like us of the twenty-first century, with all of our toys and all of our gadgets, all of our technology and all of our knowledge of the cosmic reality, still attest to that experience of God. Alfred North Whitehead says you can create a chemical formula in a test tube and have empirically verifiable results, and you have to take that human experience of God seriously, as well. You can't put it in a test tube; you can't measure it. There's no way to verify it. God doesn't write in the sky. And so, it is a faith perception, but it is that spiritual dimension that is in and with and under, that encompasses the totality of our life and our experience. © Grand Valley State University �Where in the World is God? Richard A. Rhem Page 4 Having said that, and wanting to say that clearly, I want to say that from within the Church, it is necessary for us to do some re-imagining and some revisioning of those old faith stories and symbols and metaphors by which all of that has been communicated to us. That is, at least if we would communicate this experience of God beyond the walls of the church. Just think, for example, of the natural world as we know it. We call it cosmology, the cosmos, the totality of things. Think of what we know about it. Fifteen billion years old. At this point I should call forward our resident physicist-astronomer Dr. VanTill, who could tell us about the speed of light and the expanse of the universe and the expanding universe, and the amazing, amazing physical, natural reality of which we, too, are a part. It is awesome. It is mystifying. It causes one to be silent. It can well cause one to worship before the wonder of it all. And then, I think about the Genesis story, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," and all with a click of the finger, all those things happened. And there's Adam and Eve in a garden of perfection, Paradise, and they are tested and they fail the test and so they are alienated from God. We speak about the fall and it is that fall into sin from which they have to be redeemed, and so we have the whole biblical story. That's not the way it was. We really know that. All natural disaster and all the trouble in the world is not the result of the initial sin, the original sin. There were storms, there was chaos, there was terror long before the human person emerged, and we have emerged, creatures of self-consciousness, awareness. Fifteen billion years of this cosmic, whirling mass of energy. Then, there was a moment when a creature emerges who looks at his hand and then looks at another, becomes conscious, self-conscious, aware. That creature has come, emerged out of the chaotic soup, cosmic juice and stardust, and we have just arrived, relatively speaking. We're still trying to find our way. We really need a new story. We really should write a new Genesis today because the writer was giving expression to his understanding of that human situation and God in the light of the cosmic understanding he had, which was so totally other. We would say so primitive and naive. I know what he was trying to do. That Genesis story is profound. Speaking about the torn tension within the human being, that beckoning toward God, that draw from below, portraying the human dilemma, trying to give expression to all that is rotten to the core, and yet that grace that would transform and redeem. That old story is not at all in terms of what we know about cosmic reality and the emergence of the human and the dawning of consciousness and the coming awareness of Spirit. Someone needs to write a new myth, a new story, which would portray God as not over against us, with that terrible gulf between us because of our sin, but would invite us to a growing consciousness and awareness of that spirit that is within us, that embraces us. We are a part of this cosmic reality, we are the cosmos coming to consciousness, we are the cosmic reality now with voice to praise, with consciousness to realize and to become aware. We are the cosmos reflecting on itself, with God, that Spirit © Grand Valley State University �Where in the World is God? Richard A. Rhem Page 5 that is over and around us and within us, God not "out there," some supernatural being beyond the confines of the universe, as it were, clicking a finger and causing it to be, and then occasionally dipping in here and there. No, but God, that creative Spirit that permeates the whole, God who is closer than our breath. I don't know what the Gospel writer meant when he had Jesus say, "I am in you and you in me. I am in the father and the father is in me. I in you, you in me," but at least there is a hint there of something that we are becoming more and more aware of, and that is that God is as close as our breath. The Spirit of God, the Hebrew word Ruach means both breath and spirit and wind, and so, the enlivening within us and that wind that courses over us become the symbols, the signs of that ever-present God who is our life, not some lawgiver and offended judge ready to damn us. What a bad idea. Would the creator of the heavens and the earth, would the creator of this fantastic cosmic reality with all of its wonder, would this God create a creature, a human creature with consciousness and giftedness to damn? Hell, no. Hell, no. Just thinking about what we know, what has come to us through the human endeavor and greater understanding, broadening understanding, to think again - how can I be with God, knowing what I know? How is God with us, knowing what we know? Does that mean that all that stuff in the Bible about sin and corruption has no part? Of course not. Look in your own heart. Read the daily newspaper. We're animals; we're beasts; we're in a life and death struggle to, somehow or other, keep down the pride, throw out the fear, the hostility, the anger, and let the Spirit more and more control us, so we come more and more into an awareness of that wonder of grace and love that is God. It is just a matter of finding a new way to say it so that we could experience it without some of that old baggage. Just one more thought. We live out of our knowledge of the natural world, and our knowledge of our cultural context which today isn't Western Michigan and it isn't the United States of America. It is a global context, and in a global context where we rub shoulders with people from around the world, and we come to see and to appreciate the spiritual quest, the religious devotion, the multiplicity of practice, then obviously I can no longer speak about "our God." I can no longer think in terms of having some corner on the truth which is denied to all of the rest of humankind. Would God reveal God's self to one little people, leaving the rest in darkness? Don't we know in this world that has become as small as a grapefruit, where we rub shoulders with people of various religious practice, and we experience the seriousness of it and the authentic devotion of it, and the longing quest of it - don't we know that all the great religions of the world are hungering for that one taste, thirsting for that one God who is beyond all of our formulations and structures, for all of our religions are the human structures that we have created by means of which we can see through to that which cannot be seen, but which is as close as our breath? © Grand Valley State University �Where in the World is God? Richard A. Rhem Page 6 Ah, where in the world is God? Where in the world is God? God is in the moment of personal epiphany when the sun sets or, as it did this morning, rises so beautifully in the east. The sun is in the forsythia, forced a bit as it is, I suspect. God is in the human encounter when soul meets and there is a transparency. God is in the intuition of the human heart that there is more and that it is good and that we will be sustained, embraced, kept, and that we can rest in that. God is not some other place. God is with us. Thank God. © 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 Epiphany VI Series Spirituality in the Modern World Scripture Text Isaiah 6:1, John 14:8 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-0-20010211 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001-02-11 Title A name given to the resource Where in the World Is God? 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 February 11, 2001 entitled "Where in the World Is God?", as part of the series "Spirituality in the Modern World", on the occasion of Epiphany VI, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Isaiah 6:1, John 14:8. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Immanence PostModern Spiritual Dimension of Reality https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/b2e290447311b841e062fbbe4d6377d1.pdf a61f2b71c11469030337cd1c3a40e095 PDF Text Text Wisdom for Life From a series on the Wisdom Literature Text: Proverbs 8:35-36 Richard A. Rhem Christ Community Church Spring Lake, Michigan Pentecost XIII, August 21, 1994 Transcription of the spoken sermon "For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord. But those who miss me injure themselves; all who hate me love death." I hope it is as much a relief to you as it is to me to be out of the Book of Job (laughter) and into something light—the Book of Proverbs. Proverbs is one of the Wisdom Books. I have seldom preached from the book. I have made various sorties into Proverbs. I would read a few verses here and there, but it seemed it was simply the gathering together of aphorisms and maxims and proverbs from ancient cultures that made a lot of sense, but over which I didn't really care to linger too long. There was no story there . . . I've just never been attracted to it. However, on more serious study, I find that, in neglecting the Wisdom Books in general and Proverbs in specific, I have missed a very rich mine of spiritual direction and guidance. There is a lot of wisdom in this Wisdom book. I have learned that the Wisdom Books offer a strong affirmation of life. In the Wisdom Books we have not simply inconsequential truisms; we have the distillation of generations and centuries of observation of life as it really is. What we have specifically in the Book of Proverbs is the invitation to follow the Way of Wisdom, thus finding true life, and admonition to avoid the path of foolishness, which leads to destruction and to death. Lady Wisdom as it were, (Sophia, the Hebrew word – somewhat akin to logos, the Greek word – that personification of wisdom and order and principle in the whole cosmic order). Lady Wisdom invites us to choose wisely, to live well, in order to find life. As we can only scratch the surface of this book this morning, let me simply give you some of the fundamental assumptions of wisdom. It will not be exhaustive, but I think it will at least be enough to perhaps whet your appetite and give you a modest introduction to the contents of this literature, and specifically this particular book. The first thing that I would reiterate again is that in wisdom literature there is an affirmation of life. The toast with a glass of wine in the Jewish society, "L' Chaim," “To life”, is a hallmark of Jewish culture, of a Jewish perspective on © Grand Valley State University   �Wisdom for Life Richard A. Rhem Page 2   human existence. There is something wonderful in Jewish society—they celebrate life in a marvelous manner. Rabbi Harold Kushner, who has earlier written some books, last year published a book entitled "To Life," which is a marvelous survey of Jewish faith and life and community, in which he points out that that is the hallmark of Jewish existence . . . "to life" . . .the affirmation of life, a strong positive regard for life, a valuing of life. It is definitely a central theme in the wisdom literature. Walter Brueggemann has written a book about the wisdom literature, which he has entitled "In Man We Trust," that is a reflection of this basic premise, that life and the human person are created good. The Book of Proverbs and all of wisdom literature was an attempt to gain knowledge in order to have mastery of life. To have mastery of life here and now means we should enter fully into it. We should wring the best out of it. We should live with joy and with delight, and we should exploit all the possibilities that are ours in a creation that God called into being and said, "It is very good." The Jew says enter all of it fully, enjoy it fully, delight in it before the face of God. Laced through the Book of Proverbs you will read that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom – fear in the sense of reverence and awe, living before the face of God, conscious that one lives before the face of God, but lived with zest, for life is God's gift. We need to hear that, particularly those of us who come as a part of the Christian tradition, both Catholic and Protestant, and particularly the western Latin tradition out of which we have flowed, that is, the Protestant Reformation tradition. In the Latin tradition, the central emphasis was not, as in Eastern Orthodoxy, on resurrection and celebration, but rather on the cross, crucifixion, sin and guilt. We have been nurtured in a rather dim view of the human experiment. We have been given, I believe, a negative perspective on the human person and on human experience. We are the inheritors of a few statements by Paul that have been systematized and absolutized by Augustine and by Luther and Calvin. We are the children of a doctrine of Original Sin. We believe in Total Depravity, and as the psychologist Maslow says, "The human person will generally live up to, or down to, the expectations that are held out for him or her." Our view of human life and the human person has been a rather negative view. We are suspicious of motives, of intentions, and rather negative on the human scene as a whole. And, that's too bad. We've lost something that was intrinsic to the tradition of Israel, and that was a strong affirmation of life, of human life, of human existence. We could well go back and embody some of that positive feeling about life here and now that was their basic assumption, their affirmation of life. I suppose somewhat of a corollary of that is, in the wisdom literature and in Israel's tradition, the human person was viewed as capable and responsible – capable and responsible of making decisions that would lead to life. It was part of the tradition, not only of the priests and the prophets with whom we are familiar, but also of the sages who reflected on life, who observed life carefully and patiently, and who rendered wise counsel as to the path that led to life, a tradition © Grand Valley State University �Wisdom for Life Richard A. Rhem Page 3   that believed the human person was capable of deciding and responsible for those decisions. That doesn't mean that they were naive about human nature, as though the human person was entirely good, but neither would they agree with Augustine and Luther and Calvin that human nature was basically evil. They would rather say that the human person is made up of a little bit of both. In fact I suspect that most of you would agree that we are . . . a little bit of both. We are a mixed bag. There are times when you feel pretty good about something that you did, and aren't there times when you despise yourself? Don't we know about acts every day that are heroic, and don't we know of instances every day in which the human person has been a scoundrel? Isn't there a constant interweaving of both in the experience of all of us? So, in the wisdom literature it was not naiveté that the human person was prone always to choose the right, but the invitation was there and the person was understood as being capable of making choices, and responsible for those choices, and reaping the consequences of those choices be they the right choices or the wrong choices. The invitation was there because the human person was viewed as capable and responsible for deciding. Therefore, there was a responsibility placed on the person. No cheap cop-out, "Well, I'm only human." You are human. Precisely the point. Therefore, stand up and decide, for you have a choice to make, so choose life . . .avoid the path of destruction . . . in the multitude of human decisions that you make every day. Now listen carefully to me, because this is where the rub comes. According to the sages, the writers of the Wisdom literature, the choices are to be made on the basis of the authority of human experience. That means that you can't open up the book and find a text and find the answer to your dilemma. That means that morality or ethical choice cannot be laid on us from beyond ourselves, from another time. That means that there was a consistency between Proverbs and the Book of Job when God in the whirlwind said, "Don't bother me with that stuff. You can figure that out for yourselves. You've got minds. You've got experience. Decide and choose wisely. Order your lives." All the proverbs and maxims and aphorisms are the distillation of the wisdom that comes after years and years of reflection, centuries and generations of reflection, pursuing that ultimate. But there is no authoritarian rule to be laid on us from outside of us. We are called upon to the careful observation, the living of life as it is and the making of decisions accordingly in the midst of the concrete context of our everyday life. "Well," you say, "What about the Ten Commandments, aren't those moral absolutes which can be laid on us eternally?" No! (Pause . . .) Nobody walked out yet? (Laughter) What are the Ten Commandments then? They are universal principles coming out of Israel that have been proven in the test of time. They are reflective of, for example, the Code of Hammurabi, that predated them. They are reflective of Mid-eastern culture and the peoples that surrounded them. They are the best wisdom possible for a fulfilled, successful human life, and the possibility of human community and society in that day, and maybe in ours. But those moral absolutes didn't drop out of heaven. There were no tablets that were penetrated by a divine finger. They were the best wisdom that could be distilled © Grand Valley State University �Wisdom for Life Richard A. Rhem Page 4   out of the ongoing human drama by some of the best possible people who realized they were living with fear and trembling before the face of God. So it is with every decision that we have to make in the living of our lives. You can't go to a book. That's a cop-out. You can't ask a priest. That's a cop-out. You can't ask the Church. That's a cop-out. That's authoritarianism. People like authoritarianism, really, even though in the eighteenth century we threw off all authoritarianisms. The human bud started to flower in the fifteenth century, in the Renaissance. Then the Reformation came along as an aspect of that, but that shut down the blossoming of the human spirit with one more authoritarian mode. Finally in the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason, Enlightenment, the human person said, "No" to the church, "No" to the Bible, "No" to the divine right of kings, "No" to every authority—the emancipation of the human person. Well, pendulums swing too far. The enlightenment for all that it has given us has been found wanting in that to make human rationality the limit of reality is to truncate the Mystery of Life. So now we are in the Post-Modern Age as some would say. But what in a Post-Modern Age we must never do is to go back and put our necks under the yolk of some new authoritarian control. Now, what does this mean for the decisions that face us as a society and as human persons? Well, it means that fundamentalism is a dead end street, whether it be Christian or Jewish or Islamic. In a hinge time in history, when the old ways have been shown to come up short and the new ways are not yet clear, people get very fearful, they get very insecure. In fact it's a good time for the Church, because people who are fearful come to church seeking answers, wanting a priest, wanting someone, some prophet to say it clearly. Make it simple. Make it burn. Answer these quandaries for me. Give me some ground to stand on. The Church is all too happy to beckon those who would come to find in it a crutch in order to avoid having to stand up and be an adult and make mature decisions in this world where it is so ambiguous and hard to decide. But fundamentalism is not the answer. It is simply the reiteration of yesterday's answers to today's questions. You cannot go home. You cannot go back. When it seems that the tide of society is moving back, you can be assured that it is a reactionary movement that will explode in ever greater force one of these days. The Church ought not to be pandering to people's weaknesses. What we need to do is to call people, as the wisdom literature did, as the sages did, to be adult, to be mature, to look at the evidence, to live with observation and discernment, and to make decisions that lead to life. Let me be concrete for just a moment. The Pope says, for example, regarding women in ministry, that he has no right to make a decision, that women cannot be ordained to priesthood because Jesus chose men. That, if the Holy Father will forgive me, is ridiculous. Jesus did not choose any women to be his disciples in that age, in that culture, for it would not have been tolerated. But it would not have been tolerated in that patriarchal age because women were devalued. Women were understood to be second class citizens, less capable, less gifted. Now © Grand Valley State University �Wisdom for Life Richard A. Rhem Page 5   in the movement of culture, if we really believe that women are equal human beings, equally gifted, equally capable, then to perpetuate a decision out of the past that was based on an understanding of women that we no longer hold, to perpetuate that decision to the present when we understand something quite differently, that is fundamentalism. That is blindness. That is oppression. And, that cannot stand the light of day. You see, you can't have it both ways. To say, "I refuse to ordain women to ministry," but equally value them is a contradiction. They weren't ordained back then because they were not equally valued. Had they been equally valued they could have been a part of it. If they are equally able to serve, then they have every right to enter fully into Christian ministry. Well, where else would you like to go? In the last two months in this congregation I have dealt with families in the critical care unit, about Living Wills. If you haven't gotten yours made out, I would suggest you do. We may think the cranky, kinky Kevorkian is out in left field somewhere, but I'll tell you he is dealing with a real life issue. To say that he is wrong, that human life is not at our disposal and that it is something for God to decide is simply to cop out. The moment you inoculate, the moment you are put on a respirator, the moment you give an antibiotic you are playing God, you have taken responsibility. You have entered into the life determining process. You have interrupted a natural course of nature, and you can't stop. You can't stop simply because it is a situation of fear and trembling. You are responsible, and God says, "For God's sake, stand up and be an adult and make a decision." We must be responsible. We must choose the ways that lead to life. We must discern. We must struggle. We must talk together. We must dialogue. It's not clear. It's not simple. It's not black and white. These are decisions that wrench us, but we are humans created in the image of God, called to think . . . and to decide. We could move to the question of human sexuality. Two or three years ago the Presbyterians came out with a report finding that the Church ought to deal with this fundamental issue in our human existence, given what we know today about the human person. The report was defeated by the General Assembly by about 400 to 30, and I said in a sermon at that time that I would have been on the minority side. I think we lost a family that day. But I'll say it again. The Lutherans didn't do any better. They had a report this past year and it never even made it to the Synod there was such an uproar. People don't want to talk about human sexuality because it may tamper with the moral absolutes. That's ridiculous. The moral absolutes arose in a concrete context where people struggled together to find the way of life. To take yesterday's answers and absolutize them for today apart from the concrete situation in which we live is to abdicate our responsibility to be human beings to whom God gave minds and called us to think God's thoughts after God. The Episcopalian head bishop, Browning, said to the House of Bishops that, when they meet in September and present their paper on human sexuality, they should just pass it without debate, because there are just so many things that we don't know about and we are just going to disagree on, so let's not get into a debate. Let's just pass it!" (Laughter) © Grand Valley State University �Wisdom for Life Richard A. Rhem Page 6   Abortion. People willing to kill in order to abort abortion. Convinced that they know God's mind and God's will on that very difficult issue. The wisdom literature would say that God is pro life, because God is pro choice. God would expect us as responsible human beings to find our way in this maze in which there is no simple answer to any one of these issues that I've raised. For if I read the wisdom literature correctly, the one thing I may not do is try to find an answer in a book, or in an institution, or in an authority figure. You and I live before the face of God. We live in fear and trembling before the face of God, believing that there is an order, that there is that which is true and good and beautiful. But we'll never capture it absolutely . . . only tentatively, provisionally, partially. And on the basis of that, we are called to decide and to act. I can't coddle you, friends. This is not a place where you can run for refuge from the tough decisions of the human story. If the Church could only be a place where people, rather than being coddled in their infancy, would be called to maturity . . . to seek wisdom . . . act wisely . . . find life. God will not abandon us in the struggle, but neither will God write simple answers in the sky. It's tough. It takes courage. But in the end that's what it is to live as a human being before the face of God. © Grand Valley State University � https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/8a46365121141dd69beca9bf99d255f3.mp3 c32f8ffe4484f68d2b67ccc28b23e2a6 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 Series Wisdom Literature Scripture Text Proverbs 8: 35-36 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-0-19940821 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994-08-21 Title A name given to the resource Wisdom For Life 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 21, 1994 entitled "Wisdom For Life", as part of the series "Wisdom Literature", on the occasion of Pentecost XIII, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Proverbs 8: 35-36. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Authority of Huma Experience Consciousness Maturity PostModern Wisdom