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The Threat and Promise of One’s Mind Being Changed
From the Summer 1999 Lecture Series
How My Mind Has Changed
Richard A. Rhem
Minister of Preaching and Theological Inquiry
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
July 6, 1999
Transcript of the spoken lecture
I begin with an acknowledgment of feeling some ambiguity about offering four
lectures on how my mind has changed. A haunting, taunting voice in my mind
asks, "Who cares?" "So what?" and "Why is it a matter of note that your mind has
changed?"
Good questions, those. Even as I begin, they remain with me and I feel the need
to address them. Let me be very clear: I do not suspect the world is holding its
breath either for my answers or for the tracing of my mind change. Why engage
in this exercise, then?
I suspect I am doing it first of all for myself. I have traversed a good distance on
the theological spectrum from a very conservative evangelical orthodox position
to a very liberal, open-ended, progressive posture. We all move in our theological
understanding, our faith understanding, even if we never really stop to think
about it, but my move has been more than the natural drift that comes with
living, with experience, with age. My moves have been self-conscious, deliberate,
intentional. They have come in the wake of lifelong, serious study of the faith,
reflection on the faith and endeavor to proclaim and teach the faith in the midst
of the community of faith engaged in the practice of the faith - a worshiping
community intent on living out the implications of the faith in society.
For me, study and reflection have always had the background of the Church, thus
necessitating the translation of academic pursuit into concrete action, and that in
intimate connection, for the end of my study has been the ongoing need to
preach; the sermon has driven the study and reflection, ever and anew
demanding expression - having something to say.
Early in his ministry after the publication of his Epistle to the Romans had
caused such a stir, Karl Barth was asked to speak to a ministers' meeting in his
native Switzerland (Schulpforta, July, 1922) to discuss his theology. He was
somewhat embarrassed to hear the words "my theology" spoken of so seriously not that he was not doing theology- “plain and honest theology.” But, he went on
to discuss "his theology," claiming,
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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"my theology" becomes, when I look at it closely, a single point, and that
not, as one might demand as the least qualification of a true theology, a
standpoint, but rather a mathematical point upon which one cannot stand
- a viewpoint merely.
(Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, p. 97f)
Yet, one must stand somewhere, Barth acknowledged, and thus he went on,
If then I have not only a viewpoint, but something also of a standpoint, it
is simply the familiar standpoint of the man in the pulpit. Before him lies
the Bible full of mystery: and before him are seated his more or less
numerous hearers, also full of mystery - and what indeed is more so?
“What now?” asks the minister. If I could succeed in bringing acutely to
your minds the whole content of that "What now?" I should have won you
not only to my standpoint... but also to my viewpoint, no matter what you
might think of my theology, (p. 104)
Barth raised the question,
Would it not be for theology's own good if it attempted, as I have said, to
be nothing more than this knowledge of the quest and questioning of the
Christian preacher, full of need and promise? (p. 102)
I cannot emphasize too strongly how I thrilled to be introduced to Karl Barth and
to read these words, for they expressed for me everything I believed most
strongly and that to which my life was committed.
The moves of my theological pilgrimage have come, not through academic
endeavor apart from the Church, but very concretely in my passion to have
something significant to say in preaching - and that for the well-being of the
congregation and for the best possible expression of the biblical faith.
Of this purpose for my ministry of preaching, teaching and pastoral care, I have
all along been aware. But, that the result should be the traversing of the
theological spectrum from far right to far left is to me a very great surprise, for I
began as a champion of orthodox Christian tradition and evangelical faith
expression. As I said above, I do this exercise first of all for myself, to review the
way I have come, the better to understand where I am and where I am going.
So to quiet the questions, "Who cares?" "So what? etc., I simply say, "I care; it
matters to me, " and I invite any who are interested in the evolution of my
theological understanding and the emergence of my present faith perspective to
listen in as I tell my story and then to interact with me as the story unfolds.
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Richard A. Rhem
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Still by way of introduction, let me note the passive mood of the title of this series
- "How My Mind Has Changed.” I state the series thus intentionally rather than
How I Changed My Mind, because I want to point to a process of growing
awareness, epiphany-type experience in which truth dawns upon one. To be sure,
this does not happen in a vacuum; I have worked intentionally at seeking
knowledge, at serious investigation, persistent pursuit of understanding through
intensive reading and reflection. Nonetheless, there is a gift quality to new insight
and deeper comprehension.
Furthermore, I did not start out to arrive where I am. No one is more surprised
than I am that I stand at the far left of the theological spectrum, judged beyond
the pale of Reformed confessionalism. My mind has been changed in face of the
knowledge available in the respective disciplines of human inquiry; biblical study
and study of the development of dogma to be sure, but also the findings of the
natural sciences, behavioral and social sciences, history and comparative
religions. Before the veritable explosion of knowledge, my understanding of
religion and, specifically the Christian faith, has changed. In a word, my mind has
been changed.
The journal of liberal Christianity, The Christian Century, on three occasions
asked Karl Barth to write an article on how his mind had changed over the
previous decade. He complied with their request, covering the decades 19281938,1938-1948, and 1948-1958. The journal has continued the practice,
occasionally asking scholars to indicate how their mind had changed. It is from
the series in The Century that I take the idea for these lectures.
I have entitled this first lecture "The Threat and Promise of One's Mind Being
Changed." That title signals what I have experienced in the movement of my
understanding of Christian reality. The experience is threatening because one's
personal faith, one's identity, and in my case, one's professional life is called into
question. But with the ongoing movement over the years there has been great
promise of intellectual freedom and deeper humanity.
Let me begin with the threat - the fear of losing one's faith or salvation. This is
especially critical for one in the Protestant, Reformed tradition where saving faith
has been identified with believing certain things to be true. In the Lutheran
confessional family one speaks of "right doctrine." In the definition of faith in the
Heidelberg Catechism, Q & A 21, the Question is "What is true faith?” The
Answer:
“It is not only a certain knowledge by which I accept as true all that God
has revealed to us in his Word, but also a wholehearted trust which the
Holy Spirit creates in me through the gospel, that, not only to others, but
to me also God has given the forgiveness of sins, everlasting righteousness
and salvation, out of sheer grace solely for the sake of Christ's saving
work.”
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Richard A. Rhem
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One can see here two elements: a certain knowledge of biblical revelation and
wholehearted trust. The second element is often pointed to when the warmly
personal aspect of the Catechism is spoken of. But the first element points to the
content of faith's knowledge and the assent to what is revealed in Scripture has
had heavy emphasis.
In his growing up, "package version of Christian Faith," Marcus Borg defines
faith as he was taught in his Lutheran tradition:
Faith meant strong and correct belief. It meant believing what God wanted us to
believe, as disclosed in the Bible. Faith as strong belief meant that doubt was the
opposite of faith. Faith as correct belief meant believing the right things. For me,
that meant believing as we Lutherans believed.
In a footnote, Borg notes that such an understanding of faith left a lot of people
out. One wasn't sure of Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists - they
were marginal. He can't remember speaking of Episcopalians but certainly
Roman Catholics were out.
I grew up in the Reformed tradition in its most conservative expression and the
definition of the knowledge God revealed in the Scriptures was very definite and
clear. The faith paradigm, I now know, derived from the 17th century, the period
of Protestant scholasticism in which the fresh discovery of the Gospel of the
Grace of God as it erupted in the 16th century was carefully systematized.
More of that in a subsequent lecture. My point here is that, if one has been
nurtured deeply in such a conception of saving faith, one has a whole system of
belief to which one must assent, and to tinker with the respective articles of belief
is to call the whole structure into question - and that can be very threatening
because one risks losing everything, including, of course, one's salvation.
By way of contrast to make this point sharper, one deeply formed in Roman
Catholicism would find challenge to the institution more threatening than
challenge to any particular article of faith, for there exists in the religious
experience of such a person an implicit faith in the Church through which grace is
mediated in the Sacraments. Catholic religious experience is more intuitive, less
intellectual as a belief system.
Thus, one might say that for one nurtured as I was, a challenge to the belief
structure would be comparable to a challenge to the Church for a Catholic
Christian. One doesn't leave the Church easily if one has been deeply formed in
the Catholic tradition.
As I reflect on this, I discover an interesting fact that, while it is a belief system
that must be assented to intellectually, once that assent has been made and one is
deeply formed in a particular belief system, one tends to shut down the
intellectual pursuit of religious truth. One becomes emotionally engaged; correct
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Richard A. Rhem
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belief is no longer an intellectual matter but one in which one's being, one's
identity is involved.
And so my very identity is at stake – who I am, how I perceive myself. To pursue
this further would take us into the psychology of the person, an area in which I
am not schooled to speak. But it is obvious, as one sees the reaction of persons
whose faith structure is challenged, that there is much more going on than an
intellectual discussion of alternative expressions of faith. Again, the greater
seriousness with which one's religious commitment is lived out, the greater the
threat to one’s personhood when a faith structure is called in question. I have
experienced the fear of free fall and the pain that wrenches one when one’s faith
system is called in question and, even more, as a pastor, I have witnessed it over
and over again in my people. My religious faith and life are so centered in the
core of my being that to threaten them is to threaten me.
A mind change is threatening and can be costly to one whose professional life is
in the Church and the field of religion. Here I speak, as well, from personal
experience, both my own struggle and, even more, the struggle I see in colleagues
in ministry. If there is one overriding reason why the Church is the most
conservative of all social institutions and why it continues adherence to faith
structures and social positions out of touch with modern knowledge and human
experience, I would claim it is the threat felt by persons in leadership if they
acknowledge that their mind has changed.
Since these lectures are about how my mind has changed, I will speak first of my
own experience over the past three decades. My four years in the Netherlands at
the University of Leiden under the mentorship of Hendrikus Berkhof were simply
invaluable. I had graduated from seminary with my orthodox conservative
Reformed faith intact. I had sought in my education to buttress the faith of my
childhood nurture. I believed it all. I believed it strongly. I believed it passionately
and I was determined to proclaim it in its conservative evangelical expression. I
was also defensive, although I did not recognize that. I regret that I did not
question more, read more broadly, quest more openly.
Finally, four years of pastoral experience here in Spring Lake forced on me for the
first time questions and wonderings I could not put away. And a new curriculum,
Covenant Life, produced by the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches opened
new directions, which I pursued during my three years in New Jersey. For the
first time in my life, I began to think, desiring to know the truth. My pilgrimage to
Europe and post-graduate study was not a flight from the pastorate, not first of
all to attain a degree; it was an existential quest to test the truth of the Christian
faith as I had learned it.
I am a late bloomer. I was 32 years old when I began my search and I had the
time of my life.
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Richard A. Rhem
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When this congregation invited me to return to be their pastor, I had gone
through a thorough transformation. My personal life in shambles through the
breakup of my marriage, I had come to a core conviction about the Christian faith
and I knew I had one sermon at least to preach. I said, "Give me Jesus and the
resurrection and the rest is negotiable."
I provide this background sketch because it reveals how fortunate I have been in
having the post-graduate experience in Europe after enough time in concrete
ministry to have begun to sense the limitations of my understanding and my
knowledge, and then to have the opportunity to come to a congregation where
there was already an affectional and trusting relationship so that I could begin to
bring the knowledge and insight I had gained into coherent expression. For the
first two decades after my return, I literally preached and I taught out of that
European reservoir of learning. I had a place to preach and teach that allowed my
four years of reading, reflection and writing to come to expression, to be
assimilated and to mature. And, while the responsibilities of an exploding parish
were demanding, I never stopped reading and thinking, the congregation being
my laboratory for the exploration of new knowledge and fresh insight.
The relationship with the congregation was solid and healthy. The growing
insight into the development of the Christian faith shared with the people was
gradual. I was aware of movement in my understanding and I was aware that I
was endeavoring to broaden and deepen the faith knowledge and experience of
the congregation. I was conscious of being on a journey of growing understanding
and I was intentional about bringing the people along. We were all clear that we
were in life, together as a faith community seeking understanding. The ideal of
those early years - an ideal never lost - was the union of intellectual integrity and
evangelical passion.
The next significant happening in my own development occurred in 1985 when I
was invited to become one of the editors of a theological journal founded by the
Reformed Church in America. The Editorial Board of ten met twice yearly for
three days. I was already heavily engaged in denominational work, having at the
time four responsibilities, one of which was the chairing of the Board of
Theological Education that was responsible for the seminaries. But, the
Consistory gave me their blessing and I accepted the invitation and profited
greatly from the discussions in which we determined the themes for the
respective issues. Even more, it now became my responsibility to write and
publish.
The journal, Perspectives, was founded by the Reformed Church for the express
purpose of addressing the leadership of the RCA and beyond with the intention of
stimulating discussion of the pressing issues of Church and society - a hope to
initiate theological awareness and conversation in the Church. There was an
inner core of the Editorial Board that was especially committed to dealing with
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Richard A. Rhem
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what we felt were theological positions that needed to be examined if the Church
was to be a factor in the broader cultural conversation that shapes the future.
I was one of only two pastors on the Editorial Board and I soon learned that I
would be the one to handle the topics that were most likely to meet with
resistance from the conservative part of the Church. Why? Because my pastoral
position was safe. This congregation by that time had had fifteen years of
theological probing in sermon and teaching. This congregation had given me the
freedom to study, to think, to bring to expression new ideas and fresh statement
of the faith. The scholars who made up the rest of the board from RCA colleges
and seminaries had to take into account their position in an institution
accountable to the whole Church and therefore, there were some topics better left
untouched. From the safety of my position in this congregation, I had a freedom
they did not have.
I had occasion to experience first hand why the academic contingent of the board
was cautious. In 1987,I was invited to become the Professor of Preaching at
Western Theological Seminary. I declined a full-time position, not being willing
to give up my pastorate here, but accepted the position halftime. About that same
time I was assigned responsibility by the Editorial Board, in the midst of a full
board discussion, to write a piece on the extent of God's grace. The article,
entitled 'The Habit of God's Heart," appeared in the September 1988 issue, just as
I was about to begin the second year of teaching.
I wrote the article as I have always preached and taught here at Christ
Community. I was cautious in my claim, but it was, nonetheless, evident that I
was sensing a broader sweep of God's saving grace than was the rule in the RCA
and the Reformed Confessional documents. And further, it was clear I hoped that
to be the case.
Having called Hell into question, all hell broke loose in the Church. I could see on
the ashen face of the seminary president that there was trouble afoot. At a faculty
meeting, one of the professors who was on the Editorial Board and who had read
the manuscript before the issue went to print asked, “Why did you feel you had to
raise this issue?” The rest of the faculty, with whom I had good relations and from
whom I received respect, were strangely silent. The Professor of Systematic
Theology said not a word on this burning theological issue. The one who raised
the earlier question had been teaching at the seminary for over two decades and
was known to hold essentially the same position I espoused in the article.
What was going on? Obviously, fear reigned: fear for professional position, fear
for institutional support.
I saw it all very clearly. I said to the President, "I will resign; I have no need to
bring the school into a battle." An Executive Committee meeting was called in
October and I was asked to appear. Surveying the room, I sensed the group was
pretty evenly divided between those who would have supported me and those
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Richard A. Rhem
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who would have demanded retraction or resignation. I offered to complete the
second year and leave.
The following fall I would have been installed in the newly endowed Chair of
Preaching which was the fruition of an idea I initiated while serving on the Board
of Theological Education. But, instead, I simply came home here - again giving
my full time and energy to this congregation.
I relate this experience because through it I learned first hand how threatening it
is in the Church and its institutions to challenge the accepted paradigm of faith
and traditional practice. Once again, I am one of the fortunate ones. I have a
marvelous faith community that has always been totally supportive and has
extended to me the freedom to think, to probe, to challenge and to attempt the
translation of the tradition into new expression.
I did not seek out the seminary position and I did not suffer loss when I left it.
But, I have been in a rather rare position with which not many are blessed.
I think the seminary administration and faculty lost an opportunity to affirm the
critical importance of academic freedom. But, I was not the president, I was not a
faculty member well settled in with no place to go. I think they all might have
better stood together, not in support of me personally, but in support of the
freedom necessary to wrestle with the biblical and confessional tradition. But,
there is a cost involved; they chose not to risk.
My experience convinced me that an academic institution with close ties to the
Church, which looks to the Church for its financial support, will be very slow to
challenge the tradition and to be creative and innovative in the articulation of the
faith. The deck is stacked against change in society's institutional structures. Not
change, but continuity is the goal.
In sum, the Church's academic centers are severely proscribed in the degree to
which they can engage in the kind of theological reflection that potentially issues
in a paradigm shift. One comes not to expect theological renewal from the
Church's academies.
If this is the case with the academic institutions, it is surely even more the case
with the Church's bureaucratic structure. Management with a pinch of
inspiration and some resourcing is all one can expect from denominational
centers. Keeping the machinery in good order and the structures in place is a
difficult task in a denominational institution with a broad spectrum of theological
understanding. I need not belabor the obvious: theological renewal will not
emerge from denominational headquarters. Those who carry out the task of
denominational leadership are vulnerable to criticism from all sides and can lead
only from the middle unless they are willing to risk their professional position.
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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Let me underscore a statement made earlier - the deck is stacked against change
in society's institutional structures. I became so deeply impressed with this
reality.
I will go into the specific changes that I underwent in subsequent lectures but,
when I was called to account for positions I espoused, for example, on the extent
of God's grace, I was criticized for not bringing my doubt about the traditional
salvation paradigm first to the Classis, and, to be sure, this is the way the order of
the Church conceived of the proper process for dealing with a change in one's
biblical/theological understanding. Such a procedure would have eventuated in
no public statement of my belief and I would have been given the option of being
re-convinced of the tradition or being silent about my change of understanding,
or being adjudged - as I was - as beyond the pale of the Reformed confession.
It would have been a fruitless exercise and I knew it. I assumed writing as I was
in a theological journal, founded for the purpose of stimulating theological
discussion, was a new and better way of effecting change in the Church. But, the
old system for all practical purposes guarantees there will be no significant
change in the confessional stance of the institution.
There are those both in the pastorate and in the academic and bureaucratic
structures of the Church who were in essential agreement with me at critical
points but, by their own admission, they dared not stand up and declare publicly
that agreement.
In the case of the seminary, in particular, but it holds true to some extent for the
colleges as well, the strongest financial support often comes from the more
conservative congregations and the institutions are economic prisoners of the
most conservative elements in the Church.
I suspect this has always been the case, but my experience vividly demonstrated
to me that the very leaders whose responsibility it is to move the Church along
with fresh insight and ongoing translation of the faith, as the human story
unfolds and knowledge from the full spectrum of the respective disciplines of
learning explodes, are not free to do so. To do so puts one's career in jeopardy
and the institution at risk. This is the way traditions perpetuate themselves,
preserve their originating vision, and insulate themselves from the threat of
change.
Finally, however, no person or institution can be insulated from change. In
former ages and earlier times some measure of isolation was possible, but in a
world marked by globalization and the information society, it is possible no
longer. We are awash with knowledge of every conceivable subject under the sun
and the Christian tradition must finally persuade of its truth and meaning in the
market place of ideas and alternative religious visions. In a word, in the dizzying
pace of historical development, the Church must change or die.
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Richard A. Rhem
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The problem of deeply grounded, well-established institutional religion is
precisely its clarity and completeness. It is a life map that gives a person, a
community, an orientation in the world. It tells one who one is and how one
should live. It creates a tribe, a community, perhaps a national identity. Life's
questions are answered, confusions ordered and mysteries domesticated - not
totally, but sufficiently to make life bearable, having some sense, meaning and
purpose.
But, the human experience in the cosmic drama is not static, but dynamic - ever
changing, evolving, creating new realities to be negotiated and assimilated.
Unless the conception of reality, the forms and the structures of the institution,
are allowed to change and evolve with human knowledge and experience, the life
map, the structural experience of the tradition will be more and more removed
from real life, religion will be compartmentalized, no longer giving guidance and
insight to live within the emerging human situation, rather becoming more and
more irrelevant, an add-on to life rather than its generating center.
The more I reflected on what I encountered in the hostile and fearful response to
the essay I wrote on the extent of God's grace, the more I recognized how rigidly
and uncritically the biblical/theological paradigm of my heritage was held. I came
to an awareness of the parochial narrowness of my own tradition.
As I think back on my own development, I realize my European study had opened
up to me a whole new vista on Reformed theology simply by experiencing Church
and society in the Netherlands from whence my forbears had come. There the
Reformed faith had moved along with cultural development, whereas my
experience and knowledge of my faith expression had been mediated through an
immigrant mentality and piety- and that makes a world of difference. Dutch
Reformed theology encountered the Enlightenment and was in conversation with
the whole phenomenon of modernity, having to articulate the biblical faith in face
of a wholly new cultural epoch. The immigrant community in this country, on the
other hand, never really engaged the challenge of the modern period.
In 1983, I was given a sabbatical which began in the fall, as I spent Monday and
Tuesday in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan where the Catholic
theologian, Hans Küng, was giving public lectures on Monday evening and
conducting a cross-discipline seminar for a three-hour period on Tuesday
afternoon. The seminar was by invitation only and I was most fortunate to be
invited, along with professors and students from the College of Arts and Sciences,
the Law School, and the Medical School.
Küng had just been disciplined for his bold theological probing by the Vatican.
The courses he taught at the University of Tubingen in Germany were no longer
accredited for those preparing for the priesthood. He had also just, along with
David Tracy of the University of Chicago, 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
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Richard A. Rhem
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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 counter-reformation-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 one 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.
Insight into major paradigmatic shifts in the history of Christian dogmatic
development was critically important for me. My major area of study at Leiden
had been the History of Dogma, but the charting of the points of significant shift
was very helpful to me in surveying the historical development.
Having encountered the strong resistance to my probings of the traditional
theological paradigm of my faith family, I began to realize that we had never
faced the challenge of the modern world. In 1991, I published another piece in
Perspectives entitled "Sleeping Through a Revolution,'' in which I set forth my
growing awareness of the theological impasse of Reformed theology of Dutch
origin in America. I wrote:
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 sixteenth-century legacy of Reformation theology into a
proclamation of the gospel to engage modern thought.
I stated my conclusion in straightforward fashion, contending:
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Richard A. Rhem
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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 post-modern 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.
Understandably, my contention was not received kindly. It was a serious charge
and aroused a good deal of defensiveness and denial. But, I had supported my
claim with a survey of developments on the broader cultural scene and
specifically the philosophical/theological conversations that had marked
continental theology. Recognizing the contemporary critique of Enlightenment
thought, I pointed to developments in post-Modernism that held out possibilities
for a fresh consideration of the 17th century paradigm that was still the ruling faith
understanding. I concluded the essay pointing to the need to develop a new
understanding of scripture, which I understood as the problem, the cause of the
ideological impasse that marked my theological tradition. Of Reformed theology,
I wrote:
... 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
© Grand Valley State University
�Threat & Promise of One’s Mind Being Changed
Richard A. Rhem
Page13
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.”
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 post-modern world.
Having thrown out the challenge, I moved next to an essay on Scripture, "The
Book That Binds Us" (December, 1992). It was here that I had long felt the
problem of theological impasse was located. It was in a new understanding of the
nature and function of scripture in the life of the Church that I discovered the
freedom to think, to deal with the questions and issues that arise in the ongoing
human story. And that freedom is the promise of the new insights that marked
my mind change.
I have lived through the sense of threat when faith formulations are challenged by
new knowledge and ongoing human experience, but I have lived through it,
emerging on the other side of the struggle with a larger vision, realizing that all
along my God was too small. I have come to know a freedom and a joy in the
human experience I had not earlier known. And I have found that the Mystery
that is God, the cosmic reality that has been discovered through the sciences, and
the wonder of being human can only fill one with awe. To live with awareness,
wonder and gratitude is the deepest reverence, the highest devotion. This is what
marks the religious quest in the emerging cosmic reality.
References:
Karl Barth. The Word of God and the Word of Man. Peter Smith Pub. Inc., 1958.
Eberhard Busch. Karl Barth: His life from letters and autobiographical texts.
SCM Press; First Edition edition, 2011.
Hans Küng & David Tracy, editors. Paradigm Change in Theology. T. & T. Clark
Publishers, 2000.
Richard A. Rhem, “The Book That Binds Us,” Perspectives, December 1992.
Richard A. Rhem, “The Habit of God’s Heart,” Perspectives, September 1988.
Richard A. Rhem, “Sleeping Through a Revolution,” Perspectives, April 1991.
© Grand Valley State University
�
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372babea626dbde5de4964bdc5431cc0
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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.
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Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
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Summer Lecture Series: How My Mind Has Changed
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Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI
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Karl Barth. The Word of God and the Word of Man, 1958, Eberhard Busch. Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, 2011, Hans Küng, David Tracy, Eds., Paradigm Change in Theology, 1983, 2000, Friedrich Schleiermacher. On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 1797
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The Threat and Promise of One's Mind Being Changed
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Richard A. Rhem
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eng
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Talk created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on July 6, 1999 entitled "The Threat and Promise of One’s Mind Being Changed", as part of the series "Summer Lecture Series: How My Mind Has Changed", at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Tags: Dogma, Reimagining the Faith, Inclusive Grace. Scripture references: Karl Barth. The Word of God and the Word of Man, 1958, Eberhard Busch. Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, 2011, Hans Küng, David Tracy, Eds., Paradigm Change in Theology, 1983, 2000, Friedrich Schleiermacher. On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 1797.
Dogma
Inclusive Grace
Reimagining the Faith
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/dc9fb5ec87656c25a44f374a24718fea.pdf
5e804818a1b0ad975f077a7946500f15
PDF Text
Text
The Nature and Function of Religion
From the 1999 Summer Lecture Series
How My Mind Has Changed
Richard A. Rhem
Minister of Preaching and Theological Inquiry
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
July 13, 1999
Transcribed from the handwritten document
As I have been brooding over the ways in which my mind has changed over the
course of the last three decades, and especially in the decade of the 90s, I am
aware that there has been a major shift in my understanding of the nature and
function of religion - the subject of this second lecture. When I determined the
four themes to be treated in this series, I was thinking in the broadest of
categories that constitute my present understanding, this lecture being the
broadest, leading then to how I understand the manifestation or revelation of the
Sacred, the Holy, the Mystery we call God which has been articulated and
expressed in the tradition in creedal formula, liturgical forms, progress, rituals
and music, all of which has been institutionalized in ecclesiastical structures.
That is the flow of my thinking as I have attempted to map out how my mind has
changed and thereby to express where I find myself as a Christian, as a religious
person.
But, as I begin to articulate how I understand the nature and function of religion,
I become aware that where I find myself is the consequence of several small steps
taken as a consequence of a growing awareness that was emerging on the basis of
ongoing study, reflection and experience. And that makes me aware that I might
have structured this mind change series quite differently. I might have thought
through the specific doctrinal formulations that came into conflict with my
ongoing experience of being human and of dealing with others in the ambiguity
of their lives, as well as simply living in the world with its social, economic,
political and religious realities. I could then have dealt with those small steps, one
by one, building the cumulative result into a new framework of understanding of
religion and specifically, Christian faith.
Such an approach would take a great deal of reflection, of reconstruction of how a
doctrinal claim of the tradition began to be questioned or how some new insight
that proved compelling conflicted with a traditional doctrinal formulation. What
were the triggers of the smaller changes that eventuated in a wholesale
revisioning of the tradition?
© Grand Valley State University
�The Nature and Function of Religion
Richard A. Rhem
Page 2
Doctrinal systems are just that - systems. We speak thus of systematic theology
that gathers biblical data and doctrinal statements into a coherent whole. One
will usually begin the re-thinking process with specific questions to the tradition
and there is certainly room for some adjustment within a systematic theology, but
eventually, if the process of calling in question and reformulation continues, the
system itself is broken and a revisioning occurs.
I have chosen, for better or worse, to begin with the big picture – how my mind
has changed on the nature and function of religion. But, in setting that revision
forth, I will obviously make reference to those significant points of conflict and
shifts in understanding that eventuated in my present perspective.
The Nature of Religion
The word religion derives from the Latin: religio from refigare, “to bind back;” re
and tigare, “to bind, to bind together.” Among the dictionary’s several
definitions, I find “a state of mind or way of life expressing love for and trust in
God, and one’s will and effort to act according to the will of God ...,” and also,
“any object of conscientious regard and pursuit.”
In his classic study, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
acknowledged a certain arbitrariness in the manner in which he would treat
religion, defining it for his purposes as “The feelings, acts, and experiences of
individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in
relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” Hendrikus Berkhof in his
Christian Faith, described religion as “The relationship to the Absolute,” and
amidst all the diversity of religious expression and content, Berkhof noted that
nearly all religions have three elements: “The element of myth, teaching, or
proclamation; a sacred rite or cult; and rules for moral conduct.” He goes on,
The first concerns the manner in which the Absolute opens up, the second
man’s immediate response, and the third the consequences of such
knowledge and salvation for his everyday life. (p. 8)
Some add a fourth element, Berkhof notes, “That of inner experience, the
mystical component of religion.”
William James was not interested in the established institutional forms and
observances of the respective world religions, but rather, the immediate
experience of the Holy, the Sacred, of God in personal experience. In making this
point he describes, in contrast, the ordinary religious believer who follows the
conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian or
Moslem. Of such a person, he writes,
His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by
tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit.
(Varieties, p. 24)
© Grand Valley State University
�The Nature and Function of Religion
Richard A. Rhem
Page 3
Such conventional observance James calls “second-hand religious life.”
That is a critical distinction which becomes obvious when we think about it, but
still it is seldom recognized; the great world religions are institutionalized and
regularized. There is a teaching, an observance, a way of life and the adherents of
the respective religions receive all of this second-hand. It may or may not become
the means by which and through which one has a first-hand religious experience.
But, it is also obvious that the great religious traditions each had a beginning in
some founding, first-hand experience, which then eventuated in the tradition,
regularized and routinized.
Where does the religious experience arise, an experience that is universally
human? In his study, Enduring Issues in Religion, John Lyden writes,
... human experience seems to contain a religious dimension, however we
may define that dimension. We cannot ignore the human desire to
question our origins and our goals, the meaning and purpose of our
existence, the reason for our lives. We strive for something more, even
when we are unsure what it is. A mystery pervades our existence - a
mystery we can approach through means such as faith, hope and courage.
Some have said that no answer can be found to the mystery, for humans
have created it and no suprahuman or supranatural answer exists. Perhaps
we long for a purpose to our existence, hidden in some other plan of reality
and flinch at the idea that there may be no such transcendent purpose.
But, even if one chooses to see no purpose, one still acknowledges that the
desire to find a purpose is part of human life. For better or worse, we
almost instinctively seek meaning, and this is when we enter the religious
realm. (p. 12f)
Lyden points to what has been perhaps the critical issue regarding the
phenomenon of religion:
Is it the consequence of God, or the Sacred, or the Holy impressing
itself upon the human consciousness, or is it a humanly created,
humanly generated phenomenon having no counterpoint, no
objective reality beyond the human who would then be simply
projecting outward from inward consciousness a Being or Reality of
its own creation?
This question will need to be faced more in depth in the following lectures
when we deal with the idea of revelation or manifestation. I point to it
here, however, because this critical issue was raised by the German
philosopher/theologian Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) who published in
1841 his The Essence of Christianity, in which he claimed religion was the
result of human projection of an infinite, transcendent Being on the screen
of reality. In an introductory essay to the Harper Torchbook edition
(1957), Karl Barth wrote,
© Grand Valley State University
�The Nature and Function of Religion
Richard A. Rhem
Page 4
He [Feuerbach] only wants the honest confession that the alleged
mystery of religion is of man: that man is dreaming when he
imagines that a Something Other, objectively confronting him, is
that ground, that whence, that necessity and that law; is the source
from which his wishes and ideals flow, and is the sea of fulfillment
toward which they tend. Man is dreaming instead of recognizing
that it is his own being, his desire and duty to live as a man, which
he, as a religious man, quite rightly equates with God. (p.xvi)
Barth quotes Feuerbach thus:
In religion man frees himself from the limitations of life; here he throws
off what oppresses, impedes, or adversely affects him; God is man’s selfawareness, emancipated from all actuality; man feels himself free, happy,
blessed only in his religion, because here only does he live in his true
genius, here he celebrates his Sunday.
In the opening chapter, “The Essential Nature of Man,” Feuerbach writes,
Religion, being identical with the distinctive characteristic of man, is then
identical with self-consciousness - with the consciousness which man has
of his nature. But religion, expressed generally, is consciousness of the
infinite, thus it is and can be nothing else than the consciousness which
man has of his own - not finite and limited, but infinite nature. (p. 2)
Under a section entitled “The Essence of Religion Considered Generally,”
Feuerbach claims without qualification,
Consciousness of God is self-consciousness; knowledge of God is selfknowledge. (p. 12)
And further:
Hence the historical progress of religion consists in this: that what by an
earlier religion was regarded as objective, is now recognized as subjective;
that is, what was formerly contemplated and worshiped as God is now
perceived to be something human. (p. 13)
One readily recognizes that these claims will have to be dealt with in the following
lecture theme on revelation, scripture and tradition, but I set Feuerbach’s claims
here in the discussion of the nature and function of religion because we are
focusing on this human phenomenon and no one has pointed as clearly or
described so acutely the human element in religion as Feuerbach. In his Does
God Exist? (1978), Hans Küng gave extensive treatment to Feuerbach from whom
he traced the whole development of modern atheism through Marx, Freud, and
finally the nihilism of Nietzsche. He writes.
© Grand Valley State University
�The Nature and Function of Religion
Richard A. Rhem
Page 5
Even today - it is scarcely necessary to stress the fact - Feuerbach is
anything but passé. From that time onward there has been no form of
atheism that did not draw on Feuerbach’s arguments. Even today, then, we
must ask seriously if Feuerbach’s critique of religion is not really justified.
(p. 204)
Feuerbach’s claim must be taken seriously, but Küng’s critique is certainly valid.
Even if we grant that there is a good deal of projection in the practice of religion
and if we grant that religion is a human phenomenon, that does not establish the
non-existence of God. Küng grants the possibility of Feuerbach’s contention:
For why should it not be possible for our consciousness, knowledge,
aspiration to be oriented to nothing, to a sham and not to a real infinite?
Certainly the intention and infinity of our consciousness is still no proof of
the existence of an infinite reality independent of our consciousness?
(p. 205)
However, Küng continues, though this was Feuerbach’s claim, he never proved it.
The question must in fact remain open. The only conclusion that logically
follows from Feuerbach’s argument is that the orientation of human
consciousness toward an infinite does not provide any evidence of the
existence or non-existence of an infinite reality independent of our
consciousness. (p. 206)
I find it fascinating to trace the course of this question from Feuerbach through
Karl Barth to the present represented in the work of Gordon Kaufman, recently
retired from Harvard.
Barth claimed the roots of Feuerbach can be traced to Friedrich Schleiermacher
(1768-1834), who published in 1799 his famous lectures On Religion- Speeches to
Its Cultured Despisers. In the Forward to a 1994 edition, Jack Forstman wrote of
this work that, in it, Schleiermacher had
…presented an utterly fresh understanding of religion. It was, of course,
not without points of contact in the past, but Schleiermacher’s
presentation stood in bold contrast with the views that were prevalent in
that time (dogmatic orthodoxy, speculative neology, enlightened “natural
religion,” and Pietism). Second, he set forth a view of religion that was in
principle free from reliance on authority. Third, he described religion as
belonging essentially to the human sphere and thus as essentially limited.
Truly religious people are never able to claim that they possess the truth as
such, and in its entirety. Fourth, his approach to religion was descriptive
and analytical... he tried to “display” what actually constitutes religion.
Finally, he tried to show that religion is inevitably social and thus always
has a definite form... (p. ix,f)
© Grand Valley State University
�The Nature and Function of Religion
Richard A. Rhem
Page 6
In the highly educated, highly cultured Berlin society, Schleiermacher was
attempting to make the case for the reality and authenticity of religion and
religious observance. The “climate of opinion” disallowed appeal to an
authoritarian base or dogmatic formulations of the past. His only alternative in
that context was to find a new foundation for religion and he found that new
foundation in human nature itself in the “feeling of absolute dependence.”
The common element in all howsoever diverse expressions of piety, by
which there are conjointly distinguished from all other feelings, or, in
other words, the self-identical essence of piety, is this: The consciousness
of being absolutely dependent, or, which is the same thing, of being in
relation with God.
In attributing religion to the feeling of absolute dependence, Schleiermacher was
rooting religious life in the human subject, although he was in no sense denying
the reality of God. It was God who created the feeling within the human that
pointed him or her to such dependence. In placing the root of religion in the
human, however, Barth claimed Schleiermacher transformed theology into
anthropology. Küng following Barth raised the question:
Was Feuerbach not right to see his philosophy as the end phase of a
Protestant theology that -as he thought- long before his time had become
an anthropology so that he needed only to understand and appropriate its
real intentions? Does not the danger become apparent at this point of a
theology in Schleiermacher’s style which makes the reality of God
dependent on the religious experience and emotional needs of the devout
human subject? But is not the danger also evident of a contemporary
“political theology” which reduces theology to a “critical theory of history”
or of “society”? Is it not clear at this point how close we are to atheism if
we do not distinguish between theological and anthropological
propositions, if we identify man’s interest with God’s, if we one-sidedly
stress God’s nonobjectivity, almost see God as absorbed in our neighbor
and the mystery of being, simply as the mystery of love? (p. 214)
Küng quotes Feuerbach as declaring unambiguously,
My atheism [is] merely the unconscious and actual atheism of modern
humanity and science, made conscious, untwisted and openly declared.
(p. 211)
Karl Barth had respect for Feuerbach, for his passion, his clarity of understanding
what he was doing. Barth saw him and his views as the inevitable end to which
beginning to talk of God by talking about humanity must lead. Barth’s great
reversal of 19th century liberalism, which had been fathered by Schleiermacher
and had developed throughout the 19th century in Continental theology,
especially in Germany, was the total rejection of beginning with the human
© Grand Valley State University
�The Nature and Function of Religion
Richard A. Rhem
Page 7
subject. Barth begins with God, the “Wholly Other” who encounters the human in
the Word, a word of judgment and grace.
I cannot go into this further except to say that Barth’s strong emphasis on God’s
revelation - the word that came “vertically from above” and contradicts humanity
was the needed proclamation in post-World War I Europe as the demonic
National Socialism was on the rise in Germany. Eventually, however, even his
younger admirer and colleague, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, criticized Barth’s theology
as marked by “the positivism of revelation.”
References:
Ludwig Feuerbach. The Essence of Religion. Prometheus Books, 2004.
William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human
Nature. (First published 1902) Create Space Indep. Publishers, 2009.
Hans Küng. Does God Exist?: An Answer for Today. (Originally published 1978)
Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2006.
John Lyden. Enduring Issues in Religion: Opposing Viewpoints. Greenhaven
Press, 1994.
Friedrich Schleiermacher. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.
(originally published 1797); Nabu Press, 2010.
© Grand Valley State University
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/df8c8cc109f896d4156fa63c08482cd4.pdf
da03f1427b93014baedcbb583fe82d24
PDF Text
Text
The Nature and Function of Religion
From the Summer 1999 Lecture Series
How My Mind Has Changed
Richard A. Rhem
Minister of Preaching and Theological Inquiry
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
July 13, 1999
Prepared Text
As I have been brooding over the ways in which my mind has changed over the
course of the last three decades, and especially in the decade of the 90s, I am
aware that there has been a major shift in my understanding of the nature and
function of religion - the subject of this second lecture. When I determined the
four themes to be treated in this series, I was thinking in the broadest of
categories that constitute my present understanding, this lecture being the
broadest, leading then to how I understand the manifestation or revelation of the
Sacred, the Holy, the Mystery we call God which has been articulated and
expressed in the tradition in creedal formula, liturgical forms, progress, rituals
and music, all of which has been institutionalized in ecclesiastical structures.
That is the flow of my thinking as I have attempted to map out how my mind has
changed and thereby to express where I find myself as a Christian, as a religious
person.
But, as I begin to articulate how I understand the nature and function of religion,
I become aware that where I find myself is the consequence of several small steps
taken as a consequence of a growing awareness that was emerging on the basis of
ongoing study, reflection and experience. And that makes me aware that I might
have structured this mind change series quite differently. I might have thought
through the specific doctrinal formulations that came into conflict with my
ongoing experience of being human and of dealing with others in the ambiguity
of their lives, as well as simply living in the world with its social, economic,
political and religious realities. I could then have dealt with those small steps, one
by one, building the cumulative result into a new framework of understanding of
religion and specifically, Christian faith.
Such an approach would take a great deal of reflection, of reconstruction of how a
doctrinal claim of the tradition began to be questioned or how some new insight
that proved compelling conflicted with a traditional doctrinal formulation. What
were the triggers of the smaller changes that eventuated in a wholesale
revisioning of the tradition?
© Grand Valley State University
�The Nature and Function of Religion
Richard A. Rhem
Page 2
Doctrinal systems are just that - systems. We speak thus of systematic theology
that gathers biblical data and doctrinal statements into a coherent whole. One
will usually begin the re-thinking process with specific questions to the tradition
and there is certainly room for some adjustment within a systematic theology, but
eventually, if the process of calling in question and reformulation continues, the
system itself is broken and a revisioning occurs.
I have chosen, for better or worse, to begin with the big picture – how my mind
has changed on the nature and function of religion. But, in setting that revision
forth, I will obviously make reference to those significant points of conflict and
shifts in understanding that eventuated in my present perspective.
The Nature of Religion
The word religion derives from the Latin: religio from refigare, “to bind back;” re
and tigare, “to bind, to bind together.” Among the dictionary’s several
definitions, I find “a state of mind or way of life expressing love for and trust in
God, and one’s will and effort to act according to the will of God ...,” and also,
“any object of conscientious regard and pursuit.”
In his classic study, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
acknowledged a certain arbitrariness in the manner in which he would treat
religion, defining it for his purposes as “The feelings, acts, and experiences of
individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in
relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” Hendrikus Berkhof in his
Christian Faith, described religion as “The relationship to the Absolute,” and
amidst all the diversity of religious expression and content, Berkhof noted that
nearly all religions have three elements: “The element of myth, teaching, or
proclamation; a sacred rite or cult; and rules for moral conduct.” He goes on,
The first concerns the manner in which the Absolute opens up, the second
man’s immediate response, and the third the consequences of such
knowledge and salvation for his everyday life. (p. 8)
Some add a fourth element, Berkhof notes, “That of inner experience, the
mystical component of religion.”
William James was not interested in the established institutional forms and
observances of the respective world religions, but rather, the immediate
experience of the Holy, the Sacred, of God in personal experience. In making this
point he describes, in contrast, the ordinary religious believer who follows the
conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian or
Moslem. Of such a person, he writes,
His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by
tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit.
(Varieties, p. 24)
© Grand Valley State University
�The Nature and Function of Religion
Richard A. Rhem
Page 3
Such conventional observance James calls “second-hand religious life.”
That is a critical distinction which becomes obvious when we think about it, but
still it is seldom recognized; the great world religions are institutionalized and
regularized. There is a teaching, an observance, a way of life and the adherents of
the respective religions receive all of this second-hand. It may or may not become
the means by which and through which one has a first-hand religious experience.
But, it is also obvious that the great religious traditions each had a beginning in
some founding, first-hand experience, which then eventuated in the tradition,
regularized and routinized.
Where does the religious experience arise, an experience that is universally
human? In his study, Enduring Issues in Religion, John Lyden writes,
... human experience seems to contain a religious dimension, however we
may define that dimension. We cannot ignore the human desire to
question our origins and our goals, the meaning and purpose of our
existence, the reason for our lives. We strive for something more, even
when we are unsure what it is. A mystery pervades our existence - a
mystery we can approach through means such as faith, hope and courage.
Some have said that no answer can be found to the mystery, for humans
have created it and no suprahuman or supranatural answer exists. Perhaps
we long for a purpose to our existence, hidden in some other plan of reality
and flinch at the idea that there may be no such transcendent purpose.
But, even if one chooses to see no purpose, one still acknowledges that the
desire to find a purpose is part of human life. For better or worse, we
almost instinctively seek meaning, and this is when we enter the religious
realm. (p. 12f)
Lyden points to what has been perhaps the critical issue regarding the
phenomenon of religion:
Is it the consequence of God, or the Sacred, or the Holy impressing
itself upon the human consciousness, or is it a humanly created,
humanly generated phenomenon having no counterpoint, no
objective reality beyond the human who would then be simply
projecting outward from inward consciousness a Being or Reality of
its own creation?
This question will need to be faced more in depth in the following lectures
when we deal with the idea of revelation or manifestation. I point to it
here, however, because this critical issue was raised by the German
philosopher/theologian Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) who published in
1841 his The Essence of Christianity, in which he claimed religion was the
result of human projection of an infinite, transcendent Being on the screen
of reality. In an introductory essay to the Harper Torchbook edition
(1957), Karl Barth wrote,
© Grand Valley State University
�The Nature and Function of Religion
Richard A. Rhem
Page 4
He [Feuerbach] only wants the honest confession that the alleged
mystery of religion is of man: that man is dreaming when he
imagines that a Something Other, objectively confronting him, is
that ground, that whence, that necessity and that law; is the source
from which his wishes and ideals flow, and is the sea of fulfillment
toward which they tend. Man is dreaming instead of recognizing
that it is his own being, his desire and duty to live as a man, which
he, as a religious man, quite rightly equates with God. (p.xvi)
Barth quotes Feuerbach thus:
In religion man frees himself from the limitations of life; here he throws
off what oppresses, impedes, or adversely affects him; God is man’s selfawareness, emancipated from all actuality; man feels himself free, happy,
blessed only in his religion, because here only does he live in his true
genius, here he celebrates his Sunday.
In the opening chapter, “The Essential Nature of Man,” Feuerbach writes,
Religion, being identical with the distinctive characteristic of man, is then
identical with self-consciousness - with the consciousness which man has
of his nature. But religion, expressed generally, is consciousness of the
infinite, thus it is and can be nothing else than the consciousness which
man has of his own - not finite and limited, but infinite nature. (p. 2)
Under a section entitled “The Essence of Religion Considered Generally,”
Feuerbach claims without qualification,
Consciousness of God is self-consciousness; knowledge of God is selfknowledge. (p. 12)
And further:
Hence the historical progress of religion consists in this: that what by an
earlier religion was regarded as objective, is now recognized as subjective;
that is, what was formerly contemplated and worshiped as God is now
perceived to be something human. (p. 13)
One readily recognizes that these claims will have to be dealt with in the following
lecture theme on revelation, scripture and tradition, but I set Feuerbach’s claims
here in the discussion of the nature and function of religion because we are
focusing on this human phenomenon and no one has pointed as clearly or
described so acutely the human element in religion as Feuerbach. In his Does
God Exist? (1978), Hans Küng gave extensive treatment to Feuerbach from whom
he traced the whole development of modern atheism through Marx, Freud, and
finally the nihilism of Nietzsche. He writes.
© Grand Valley State University
�The Nature and Function of Religion
Richard A. Rhem
Page 5
Even today - it is scarcely necessary to stress the fact - Feuerbach is
anything but passé. From that time onward there has been no form of
atheism that did not draw on Feuerbach’s arguments. Even today, then, we
must ask seriously if Feuerbach’s critique of religion is not really justified.
(p. 204)
Feuerbach’s claim must be taken seriously, but Küng’s critique is certainly valid.
Even if we grant that there is a good deal of projection in the practice of religion
and if we grant that religion is a human phenomenon, that does not establish the
non-existence of God. Küng grants the possibility of Feuerbach’s contention:
For why should it not be possible for our consciousness, knowledge,
aspiration to be oriented to nothing, to a sham and not to a real infinite?
Certainly the intention and infinity of our consciousness is still no proof of
the existence of an infinite reality independent of our consciousness?
(p. 205)
However, Küng continues, though this was Feuerbach’s claim, he never proved it.
The question must in fact remain open. The only conclusion that logically
follows from Feuerbach’s argument is that the orientation of human
consciousness toward an infinite does not provide any evidence of the
existence or non-existence of an infinite reality independent of our
consciousness. (p. 206)
I find it fascinating to trace the course of this question from Feuerbach through
Karl Barth to the present represented in the work of Gordon Kaufman, recently
retired from Harvard.
Barth claimed the roots of Feuerbach can be traced to Friedrich Schleiermacher
(1768-1834), who published in 1799 his famous lectures On Religion- Speeches to
Its Cultured Despisers. In the Forward to a 1994 edition, Jack Forstman wrote of
this work that, in it, Schleiermacher had
…presented an utterly fresh understanding of religion. It was, of course,
not without points of contact in the past, but Schleiermacher’s
presentation stood in bold contrast with the views that were prevalent in
that time (dogmatic orthodoxy, speculative neology, enlightened “natural
religion,” and Pietism). Second, he set forth a view of religion that was in
principle free from reliance on authority. Third, he described religion as
belonging essentially to the human sphere and thus as essentially limited.
Truly religious people are never able to claim that they possess the truth as
such, and in its entirety. Fourth, his approach to religion was descriptive
and analytical... he tried to “display” what actually constitutes religion.
Finally, he tried to show that religion is inevitably social and thus always
has a definite form... (p. ix,f)
© Grand Valley State University
�The Nature and Function of Religion
Richard A. Rhem
Page 6
In the highly educated, highly cultured Berlin society, Schleiermacher was
attempting to make the case for the reality and authenticity of religion and
religious observance. The “climate of opinion” disallowed appeal to an
authoritarian base or dogmatic formulations of the past. His only alternative in
that context was to find a new foundation for religion and he found that new
foundation in human nature itself in the “feeling of absolute dependence.”
The common element in all howsoever diverse expressions of piety, by
which there are conjointly distinguished from all other feelings, or, in
other words, the self-identical essence of piety, is this: The consciousness
of being absolutely dependent, or, which is the same thing, of being in
relation with God.
In attributing religion to the feeling of absolute dependence, Schleiermacher was
rooting religious life in the human subject, although he was in no sense denying
the reality of God. It was God who created the feeling within the human that
pointed him or her to such dependence. In placing the root of religion in the
human, however, Barth claimed Schleiermacher transformed theology into
anthropology. Küng following Barth raised the question:
Was Feuerbach not right to see his philosophy as the end phase of a
Protestant theology that -as he thought- long before his time had become
an anthropology so that he needed only to understand and appropriate its
real intentions? Does not the danger become apparent at this point of a
theology in Schleiermacher’s style which makes the reality of God
dependent on the religious experience and emotional needs of the devout
human subject? But is not the danger also evident of a contemporary
“political theology” which reduces theology to a “critical theory of history”
or of “society”? Is it not clear at this point how close we are to atheism if
we do not distinguish between theological and anthropological
propositions, if we identify man’s interest with God’s, if we one-sidedly
stress God’s nonobjectivity, almost see God as absorbed in our neighbor
and the mystery of being, simply as the mystery of love? (p. 214)
Küng quotes Feuerbach as declaring unambiguously,
My atheism [is] merely the unconscious and actual atheism of modern
humanity and science, made conscious, untwisted and openly declared.
(p. 211)
Karl Barth had respect for Feuerbach, for his passion, his clarity of understanding
what he was doing. Barth saw him and his views as the inevitable end to which
beginning to talk of God by talking about humanity must lead. Barth’s great
reversal of 19th century liberalism, which had been fathered by Schleiermacher
and had developed throughout the 19th century in Continental theology,
especially in Germany, was the total rejection of beginning with the human
© Grand Valley State University
�The Nature and Function of Religion
Richard A. Rhem
Page 7
subject. Barth begins with God, the “Wholly Other” who encounters the human in
the Word, a word of judgment and grace.
I cannot go into this further except to say that Barth’s strong emphasis on God’s
revelation - the word that came “vertically from above” and contradicts humanity
was the needed proclamation in post-World War I Europe as the demonic
National Socialism was on the rise in Germany. Eventually, however, even his
younger admirer and colleague, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, criticized Barth’s theology
as marked by “the positivism of revelation.”
References:
Ludwig Feuerbach. The Essence of Religion. Prometheus Books, 2004.
William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human
Nature. (First published 1902) Create Space Indep. Publishers, 2009.
Hans Küng. Does God Exist?: An Answer for Today. (Originally published 1978)
Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2006.
John Lyden. Enduring Issues in Religion: Opposing Viewpoints. Greenhaven
Press, 1994.
Friedrich Schleiermacher. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.
(originally published 1797); Nabu Press, 2010.
© Grand Valley State University
�
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b5c128296a32aba34019c52cfadcc852
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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.
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Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
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Rhem, Richard A.
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
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Summer Lecture Series: How My Mind Has Changed, #2
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Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI
References
William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, 2009, Ludwig Feuerbach. The Essence of Religion, 2004, Hans Hans Küng. Does God Exist?, 1978,2006, John Lyden. Enduring Issues in Religion,1994
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The Nature and Function of Religion
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Talk created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on July 13, 1999 entitled "The Nature and Function of Religion", as part of the series "Summer Lecture Series: How My Mind Has Changed, #2", at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Tags: Nature of Religion, Reimagining the Faith, Spiritual Quest. Scripture references: William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, 2009, Ludwig Feuerbach. The Essence of Religion, 2004, Hans Hans Küng. Does God Exist?, 1978,2006, John Lyden. Enduring Issues in Religion,1994
Nature of Religion
Reimagining the Faith
Spiritual Quest
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/d0fefc8cea4a1c2b52a7d9c2b3887261.pdf
52fd738b8e0a7d864f0a9c216a51f7ed
PDF Text
Text
Pluralism’s Theological Challenge
Editorial by
Richard A. Rhem
Minister of Preaching and Theological Inquiry
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
Published in
Perspectives
A Journal of Reformed Thought
February 1990
The narrative in Acts of the spread of the gospel has long fascinated me. Peter’s
response to his noontime vision with its command, “Rise, Peter, kill and eat,” was
“No, Lord” (Acts 10). His subsequent experience at the home of Cornelius
confounded some of his most deeply held convictions.
The experience of the Spirit’s baptism on those assembled proved to be
demonstration enough for Peter. Subsequently, in Jerusalem before the apostles
and elders, Peter persisted with the lesson of his experience in spite of its
fundamentally revolutionary character. Relating his encounter with Cornelius, he
concluded rhetorically, “If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us
when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could withstand
God?” (Acts 11:17).
The early church, emerging from the womb of Judaism, had no handy catechism
or systematic theology to which it could refer. The experience of the life, death,
and resurrection of Jesus and the baptism of God’s Spirit fit none of its
categories. These dramatic events had to be assimilated and brought into
relationship with the old covenant, with Abraham and Moses and David, with the
promises of Isaiah and all the prophets. The Scriptures which came to their
minds had to be searched anew because the tradition simply could not
accommodate their new experience.
The theologies of the New Testament are the consequence of the apostles’
wrestling jointly with their experience and with Israel’s faith tradition. The
Christian understanding as it evolved in the early church and as it emerges in the
New Testament is the result of that process of interpreting anew the historic
faith.
The New Testament already reflects the process of translation going on in regard,
for example, to the question of Jesus’ identity. From the eschatological prophet of
© Grand Valley State University
�Pluralism’s Theological Challenge
Editorial by Richard A. Rhem
Page 2
the early chapters of Acts to the incarnational Christology of the Fourth Gospel
there is a whole range of interpretations of who Jesus is, not mutually exclusive,
but rather reflecting the unfathomable richness of this One in whom dwelt the
fullness of God.
The sixteenth century, during which John Calvin wrestled with tradition and
reformed theology and practice according to the Word of God, was a period of
cultural crisis and upheaval. William Bouwsma writes in his study of John Calvin,
“The century was tense, driven, fundamentally incoherent, and riven by insoluble
conflicts that were all the more serious because they were as much within as
between individuals and parties” (p. 4). Bouwsma’s study presents Calvin as a
person very much of his own time with the tensions of society at large to be found
within his own person. And, precisely for that reason, the tradition found new
translation and expression, a retrieval of the tradition’s essential meaning.
Such a translation process is the ongoing task of theology, for theology is not an
external norm demanding obedience but, rather, reflection on the present
experience of God within the context of the cumulative tradition of faith. In The
Analogical Imagination, David Tracy points out that when the notion of
authority shifts from a truth disclosed to the mind and heart to an external norm
for the obedient will, the theological task withers to an exercise of repeating
shopworn conclusions of the tradition. He writes, “Eventually, the central,
classical symbols and doctrines of the tradition become mere ‘fundamentals’ to
be externally accepted and endlessly repeated.” (p. 99)
Then we have not a theology as hermeneutic but rather fundamentalism.
Fundamentalism does not interpret and translate the tradition in dialogue with
the present horizon of human experience, but is reduced to repetition and
reiteration. Such repetition and reiteration eventually hollow because they are
spoken into a vacuum devoid of present, living human experience.
I am convinced that we need to rethink our own theological tradition as radically
as did Peter when confronted with the experience of God’s grace in the home of
the Gentile Cornelius. The dramatic shifts in our cultural situation, the ferment in
the world-become-a-neighborhood, the knowledge of other cultures and faiths,
and the existential experience of persons in whom they are embodied, make it
incumbent upon us to search again our own faith tradition to see if the experience
of our contemporary world may elicit new insights to which we have up to the
present been blinded. Otherwise, increasingly we will have experience for which
we have no theology, and our theology will be the reiteration of an external
ideology unrelated to present experience, lacking passion and compelling appeal.
As heirs of Reformation theology we are being challenged to practice what we
have proudly claimed but poorly lived out—that we are a people re-formed
according to the Word of God and always being re-formed. That is to live with
one’s faith formulations always at risk because one begins with the
© Grand Valley State University
�Pluralism’s Theological Challenge
Editorial by Richard A. Rhem
Page 3
acknowledgement of their only relative adequacy. But in the process one’s faith
experience will deepen with a new sense of freedom and a growing sense of awe
before the mystery of the gracious God whose work of creation and redemption
we have come to know through Jesus Christ our Lord.
© Grand Valley State University
�
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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
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Religion
Interfaith worship
Sermons
Sound Recordings
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Rhem, Richard A.
Source
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
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Kaufman Interfaith Institute
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1981-2014
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References
David Tracy. The Analogical Imagination, 1981.
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Pluralism's Theological Challenge
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Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought
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Richard A. Rhem
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Editorial created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on February 1, 1990 entitled "Pluralism's Theological Challenge", it appeared in Perspectives, Feb. 1990, p. 3. Tags: Pluralism, Inclusive, Reimagining the Faith. Scripture references: David Tracy. The Analogical Imagination, 1981..
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Inclusive
Pluralism
Reimagining the Faith
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98c92710c5b6e9a20a2d4da8b2baa236
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Text
My God…Why?
From the series: The Seven Words From the Cross
Text: Mark 15:34
Richard A. Rhem
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
Lent IV, March 13, 1994
Transcription of the spoken sermon
"My
God,
my
God,
why
have
you
forsaken
me?
Mark
15:34
My God why? The fundamental central question of our human existence. And it is
the fourth word from the cross. Actually, for Mark and Matthew where it is
recorded, it is the only word from the cross. But when we combine the four
gospels, as we are doing during the Lenten season, then tradition has ordered
them in such fashion that it becomes the fourth word. Luke and John decided not
to use this word, although they had the tradition from which it was taken. Were
they somewhat frightened by the cry? Was it too strong? Was the darkness too
great? Would they soften the sharp reality of that cry which pierced the night
noontime? Whatever their reasons, at least from Mark and from Matthew these
words are recorded, "My God, My God, why hath thou forsaken me?"
During this Lenten journey we're taking a special angle on the traditional words
from the cross. We've noted that it's not as though there was a court reporter
down at the base of the cross recording words that came from the lips of Jesus,
but rather that the evangelists selected these particular words and placed them
on Jesus’ lips, in order to give us insight into their own particular understanding
of the meaning of Jesus' death.
These words are simply windows. From the respective evangelists these words
are the windows through which we can see how they understood what was
happening when Jesus died. And so what was Mark telling us by recording this
awful cry, "My God, why?" It is the primal scream that arises involuntarily from
the human heart in the midst of the cauldron of human suffering from time
immemorial. But the cry itself, the phrase, Jesus didn't invent, nor did Mark, for
it's a citation from Psalm 22. Psalm 22 is an anguished cry. It begins with those
words, "My God, My God, why hath thou forsaken me?" There are some who say
that what Mark is doing is reflecting the idea that Jesus was attempting to route
this Psalm. If you would read Psalm 22 to its conclusion, you would find that,
while it begins in deepest darkness and is a cry of human anguish, nonetheless, if
you follow through to the end, the light breaks through. At its conclusion there is
vindication and deliverance and praise to God.
© Grand Valley State University
�My God…Why?
Richard A. Rhem
Page 2
There are interpreters who say that that's what Mark is telling us; but I can't
really accept that because, if that's what Mark is telling us, then those to whom he
wrote would have had to know that he was citing a Psalm, and there is no
indication that that would have been true. Most of Mark's listeners would not
have been well educated in the scripture readings. And his listeners would have
had to know how the Psalm ended, would have to really know the whole Psalm. If
you stop to think about it for a moment, if Mark's telling us that Jesus was
reciting a Psalm that ended in trust and vindication, then what he would be
conveying would be precisely the opposite of what he actually conveys with the
actual words he uses: "My God, My God, why?" That is a cry of dereliction, of
desolation, a shriek of horror, a wail in the darkness. That's what comes through.
That's the picture. No, I don't think it was simply the beginning of a long
recitation, I think it was borrowing the Psalm's opening cry of deepest anguish.
There is another very common, classic, traditional theological interpretation of
the cry as well. Some of you may remember the old communion liturgy that
speaks about Jesus on the cross bearing the wrath of God for us. That on the
cross, when he cried, "My God, My God, why hath thou forsaken me?" he was
forsaken of God that we might never be forsaken. Well, wherever you might go in
scripture in support of that idea, you will have to grant me that it's not in Mark.
That is a theological interpretation laid on the passage. It's not in the passage
itself. No, No, I think what we have here is one crying out a fundamental central
question of our human existence. In the extremity of human suffering, which
knows no explanation, the cry is, "My God, My God, why hath thou forsaken me?"
Mark is picturing for us Jesus in the most profound suffering, crying out at the
silence of heaven as his whole life in ministry is being contradicted. For it was not
simply death against which Jesus was railing but the fact that in his death,
everything for which he had lived seemed to be over. His strong proclamation of
the nearness of God in grace, of the open accessibility of God to all, excluding
none, of the presence of God in his presence at table fellowship, in his touch of
compassion for those who were sick, in his incarnation of that gracious Presence
of God whom he addressed in the intimacy of "Abba," the address that a child
would use for a loving and trusted parent. Such intimacy had characterized his
whole life. Even in the garden, even when three times over he prays, if it be thy
will let this cup pass from me, even there it's "Abba." But not now, not here. Here
it's "Eloi." Here it's God. The intimate communion is broken you see. He is
abandoned. Heaven is silent. He is in utter despair.
And he raises the question. Thank God he raises the question. A primal scream
from the depths. It is an involuntary exclamation. Thank God Mark tells us that
Jesus said, "My God, Why?" because that legitimizes the question you see. That
means that there is human experience for which there is nothing to say but
"Why?" Not an intellectual question looking for an answer, but the cry of a
breaking heart looking for succor: "My God, Why?" That is a valid human
experience. The bible tells us so. Jesus tells us so.
© Grand Valley State University
�My God…Why?
Richard A. Rhem
Page 3
That cry has become more poignant to me this Lent than ever before because my
friend Arie Brouwer died in October. You know Arie Brouwer. He's been in this
congregation. As Executive Secretary of the Reformed Church, he dedicated this
sanctuary in 1978. He preached for us a couple of years ago. He was a classmate
of mine, a colleague in ministry over many years. Moving from The Reformed
Church to The World Council of Churches in Geneva to the National Council of
Churches of Christ in this country, he was a born leader, a significant churchman,
a believing Christian servant of Christ.
In December of 1992, cancer was discovered. In October of 1993 he died. And a
year ago during Lent he preached on the seven words from the cross. He tells a
story in one of his sermons about coming from New York and a hospital
examination after surgery where his son Steven asked, "Dad, you mentioned
living by faith, what does that mean?" And he said, "Well Steve, I've had a love
affair with God all my life, and I'm not going to let cancer come between God and
me." And Steve said, "You and Mom have given your whole lives to the ministry
of the church and to the kingdom of God. This seems like a strange way to repay
you." And then Arie heard himself saying to his son, "Steve, I don't think that God
wants me to have cancer. But I don't think God can do anything about it." And he
said, "I know that that challenges something I've always believed about the
almightiness of God, but I've been so busy with survival issues that I haven't been
able to think about it. But I am going to think about it, and I can hardly wait until
I preach on the fourth word from the cross."
And when he preached that sermon in Glenrock Community Church in New
Jersey just a year ago you could tell that he could hardly wait to get to the sermon
because it had become his own existential quest, his wrestling in the dark in the
midst of cancer, struggling with his question, "My God, My God, why?" He tells
how he picked up the book by Rabbi Kushner. If you were here twelve years ago
during Passion week, holy week, I treated When Bad Things Happen To Good
People. Rabbi Kushner had lost a child and had gone through deep personal
tragedy. Arie found himself coming to the same conclusion that Rabbi Kushner
had come to: God is good. God is full of love but God cannot change this
situation. The almightiness of God. Because Kushner had said, in classic logic, "If
God is almighty, and will not change it, God cannot be good. If God is good and
would change it but cannot, then I have to rethink who God is."
In the midst of his cancer struggle this was the process through which my friend
Arie was also struggling. He went to the Bible. He found out that almightiness is
spoken of God ten times in the New Testament but nine of them appear in the
book of Revelation. And the book of Revelation, as you know, is a book about the
end time, the end of history. It confirmed Arie's conviction, as he wrestled with
his question in a very personal way, that God's love and light will ultimately
triumph, but that in the meantime there is no tinkering with the process of
history. Whether it be God's self-limitations or however you want to explain it.
And as he saw Jesus saying, "Why?" in the darkness, with the heavens sealed, his
© Grand Valley State University
�My God…Why?
Richard A. Rhem
Page 4
own experience was illuminated. And he was convinced that he must change his
understanding of God in order to have God, that Loving Presence, with him in the
darkness.
I almost hesitated to preach on this word having heard my friend speak out of the
anguish of his own dark night. It made me realize how facile is so much pulpit
work. So much prattle. It is one thing to talk about the will of God and about the
mystery of human suffering when one is healthy and all is well. It is another thing
to speak out of the fiery furnace. As I reflected on the experience of my friend, I
recognized the value of a Christian formation and the danger of it, and the
inadequacy of it. Oh, a Christian formation is valuable. When cancer struck and
Arie faced his mortality, he had a tradition to which to turn. He was steeped in it.
He had been taught from a child. He had lived in the faith, in the church, in the
community of God's people. He had a tradition of faith to which to turn, to test, to
plumb. Obviously, we need to tell our children. Obviously we need to nurture our
adolescents, giving them a place to stand, a compass for their lives. Obviously we
all need a reason for the hope that is within us. We need to be able to speak of the
things we believe and the things by which we live and for which we live. There is
value in that.
What a precious gift to be deeply steeped in a strong tradition of faith. But there
is a danger too. The danger is that my understanding of the faith will be, in my
mind, identical with the God to whom it points. The danger of a strong
traditioning in the faith is that I will see my faith understanding as the absolute
truth, rather than a relative grasp of something that is far beyond my grasp. The
danger of a strong Christian tradition is that I will come to a moment, as Arie
came, when I am face to face with an idea, a conception that no longer works.
Then if I have identified my idea of God with God, as though the two were
absolutely identical, then if my idea crashes, my God crashes. If I have failed to
recognize that all of my catechisms and creeds and confessions are stammering,
stumbling, human attempts to express what is beyond expression, to apprehend
what is incomprehensible, if I don't know that my best wisdom and insight is a
partial piece of a larger puzzle, then, when I come into the crunch and it doesn't
work, I will be afraid not simply that my formulation needs reworking, but that
my God is gone.
Arie went through that experience. He told how, throughout all of his ministry
he'd thought about these things, as we all do. And he had tried to rationalize the
problem by making a distinction between the prescriptive will of God and the
permissive will of God. Now it's a neat scheme. The prescriptive will of God says
these are the things God wills, and the permissive will of God is about the things
that God does not will but allows. That can work in some situations. He tells,
however, that shortly before preaching that sermon a year ago he saw Billy
Graham interviewed by David Frost. Arie knew Billy Graham and respected him.
He had crossed paths with him many times. David Frost was pressing Billy
Graham. He said to him, "What do you say to a parent whose child has born
© Grand Valley State University
�My God…Why?
Richard A. Rhem
Page 5
severely handicapped, or what do you say about your own Parkinson's disease?"
And Arie heard Billy Graham give this distinction between the things that God
wills and the things that God allows, adding, "When I see God, I'll have a lot of
questions." With great passion Arie reacted, "Billy it just won't do! If you tell me
you've got good news from God about all kinds of lesser things but when it comes
right down to the center of my existence you have no news, it just won't do. It
won't do for me anymore because it won't do anymore for those who love me."
Fortunately, Arie was one who was open and growing and who could look his
faith formulations in the face and say, "that won't work anymore. I've got to break
through that and move beyond that." Fortunately, he was one who had learned
the truth of the poet who penned these words: "Our little systems have their day,
they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of thee, and thou,
Oh Lord, are more than they." But unless one is open and growing, strong faith
formation can be dangerous when you get in the crunch. The finest gift I could
give you would be if you hear me, if you could learn from me, if you could receive
from me, that you ought to trust God with all your heart, and hold all of your
convictions lightly. But an inherited faith, valuable though it is and dangerous
though it can become, is finally inadequate. If I have only that which has been
given to me, if I have a system of faith, a creedal confessional background,
assumptions untested, simply absorbed, they'll not do it for me in the darkness.
Finally, one must own one's own faith convictions, and that will not come apart
from concrete human experience. If I have a set of truths that I have to impress
upon my experience in order that I may understand my experience, I'm in deep
trouble. It is rather out of an honest living of my experience that I come to reflect
on the tradition that has been given to me and then make it my own through
reformulation and new insight. Secondhand faith will not do it for you in a crisis.
Somebody else's convictions and conclusions will not allow you to float in the
storm.
Finally, I must believe what I really believe. I like Mark's gospel. I'm grateful that
Mark brought Jesus to his last breath with no shout of triumph, no light breaking
through, just simply the awful question, "My God, why?" because that's honest.
That's the way it is all too often, for all too many. But if that's Jesus last word in
Mark's portrayal, it's not God's last word. For following Good Friday dawned
Easter Sunday.
I mentioned Arie’s funeral in December during Advent. He had become
fascinated with Greek Orthodox liturgy and the music of worship of the Eastern
Rite. And the funeral service began with a long prelude of entrance music and
then the service ensued. The point at which we would come to the committal
service, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, there was once again the entrance music. I
thought perhaps it was a mistake until I realized that the first entrance music was
the entrance into the presence of God in worship, and the second entrance music
pointed to the entrance of my brother into light eternal. As the congregation was
© Grand Valley State University
�My God…Why?
Richard A. Rhem
Page 6
acknowledging dust to dust, God was saying, "Good and faithful servant, enter
into the joy of your Lord.” No easy solution this side of the final breath. But there
is light beyond, thank God.
© Grand Valley State University
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/fa6fd6b910172cc5eba98f79eb69613e.mp3
4ab11f0a86c446faf4c7651bd03d01d2
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Richard A. Rhem Collection
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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.
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Religion
Interfaith worship
Sermons
Sound Recordings
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Rhem, Richard A.
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
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Kaufman Interfaith Institute
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1981-2014
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Lent IV
Series
The Seven Last Words of Christ
Scripture Text
Mark 15:34
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Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI
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KII-01_RA-0-19940313
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1994-03-13
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My God, ...Why?
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Richard A. Rhem
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Sermons
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Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/
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eng
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A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on March 13, 1994 entitled "My God, ...Why?", as part of the series "The Seven Last Words of Christ", on the occasion of Lent IV, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Mark 15:34.
Creeds
Lent
Nature of God
Reimagining the Faith
Trust
-
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
�
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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
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
Contributor
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Kaufman Interfaith Institute
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Language
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English
Type
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Sound
Text
Identifier
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KII-01
Coverage
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1981-2014
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audio/mp3
text/pdf
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References
Charlotte Allen, The Human Christ, 1998, John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, 1999
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RA-4-19990501
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1999-05-01
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Text
Title
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Jesus
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The Free Spirit Journal
Creator
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Richard A. Rhem
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
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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
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application/pdf
Critical Thinking
Historical Jesus
Justice
PostModern
Reimagining the Faith