Introduction to My State of Faith, or what Ken has been thinking about lately

Thursday, March 16, 2023

March 11, 2023

I’ve been in a near constant state of gradual spiritual evolution over the last 40 years (since college), development which reached a turning point around 2016. Even though I was more comfortable calling myself “Evangelical adjacent” than Evangelical, Evangelicals were still my people. I went to an Evangelical college, listened to Evangelical music, and grew up in a church that anyone from the outside would have called Evangelical. My discomfort was with the anti-intellectualism and vestigial fundamentalism I saw in too many Evangelical churches, and I was Reformed, definitely not Fundamentalist. Those folks were nuts or at least the unwashed masses.

I thought carefully about my beliefs and nuanced them when I learned they didn’t comport with reality. I was distressed by the growing overlap between my people and the Republican Party—a lot of them thought the Republicans were wishy washy and needed an infusion of real conservatism. I, on the other hand, voted almost exclusively for Democrats, although I remained officially unaffiliated with any political party. I wanted to be a bridge or at least a moderating influence. I believed in compassion and read Tony Campolo and Ron Sider and Shane Claiborne and thought the Emergent church movement was the bees knees—I was a Progressive Evangelical™.

After the 2016 election, I was one of those hoping vainly that 81% of my people really hadn’t voted for Donald Trump or at least that they had done so with their noses firmly plugged. Sadly, I was wrong. While Evangelicalism may have started as an attempt to soften the rough edges of fundamentalism, the fundamentalists had won. Even more, this could no longer be called a movement where faith drove actions—it was clearly a movement where the safety and comfort of the tribe were paramount. What would Jesus do? Carry an AK47 and blow away bad guys. Loving your enemies was for liberals and wimps. I saw the fruit of their faith, and the fruit was rotten.

In the midst of processing the 2016 election, I was learning new paradigms for viewing faith and scripture—a few examples will suffice:

• Penal substitutionary atonement was only one of many views and a late one at that. It also led to a really toxic view of God as The Great Punisher rather than as a loving father or mother, depending on where you looked in scripture. Mother hen works too.
• A view of scripture as inerrant simply couldn’t hold up. In the first place, what did inspiration even mean? I could buy that the holy breath of God’s spirit infused the many writers with wisdom, but dictating the actual words, all the actual words, was implausible. An omniscient God would have done better proofreading.
• Would the God of truth mess with natural law to perform miracles? Yes it might be loving, but it would also mislead us as to the reality of the world, wouldn’t it? Would God give wisdom to a chosen few and let the confused masses go to hell? Or do we need to filter our data to exclude miracles—“well, that’s about a miraculous number of standard deviations from the mean.”
• Discoveries in psychology have led to materialistic explanations for much that we’ve thought of as spiritual experience. These could simply be the physical mechanisms by which a spiritual experience occurs, or it could be that we’ve been over-spiritualizing—indulging our hyperactive agency detectors.¹
• What is God’s nature? What is the meaning of perfection? Are we stuck on ideas of perfection from Plato, 2,300 years old? Any belief that leads to the conclusion that our ideal bodies would be spheres (yup, both Plato and Origen) is suspect to me, and I’m thinking we need to tweak that one a bit.

This is a work in progress, and there is (already) more to come. At the very least it will help me to clarify my somewhat jumbled mass of thoughts, although don’t take that as license to label me as simply confused. Ima fight you on that one—this is about seeing how my thoughts fit together in a unified whole, or as unified as I can manage, not flailing to find the lifeboat of Approved Knowledge some (many) people are so sure of. If there is anything I’ve learned, it’s that we should be careful of saying anything is certain and even more careful of any person who says they are certain of All The Important Truths. I’ve never seen that work out well.