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Born in 1954 in the farm country of the northwestern
United States, I was raised in a religious family as a Roman Catholic. The
Church provided a spiritual world that was unquestionable in my childhood, if
anything more real than the physical world around me, but as I grew older, and
especially after I entered a Catholic university and read more, my relation to
the religion became increasingly called into question, in belief and practice.
One reason was the frequent changes in Catholic
liturgy and ritual that occurred in the wake of the Second Vatican Council of
1963, suggesting to laymen that the Church had no firm standards. To one
another, the clergy spoke about flexibility and liturgical relevance, but to
ordinary Catholics, they seemed to be groping in the dark. God does not change
revelation, nor the needs of the human soul, and there was no new revelation
from heaven. Yet we rang in the changes, week after week, year after year;
adding, subtracting, changing the language from Latin to English, finally
bringing in guitars and folk music. Priests explained and explained as laymen
shook their heads. The search for relevance left large numbers convinced that
there had not been much in the first place.
A second reason was a number of doctrinal
difficulties, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, which no one in the history
of the world, neither priest nor layman, had been able to explain in a
convincing way, and which resolved itself, to the common mind at least, in a
sort of godhead-by-committee, shared between God the Father, who ruled the
world from heaven; His son Jesus Christ, who saved humanity on earth; and the
Holy Ghost, who was pictured as a white dove and appeared to have a
considerably minor role. I remember wanting to make special friends with just
one of them so he could handle my business with the others, and to this end,
would sometimes pray earnestly to this one and sometimes to that; but the other
two were always stubbornly there. I finally decided that God the Father must
be in charge of the other two, and this put the most formidable obstacle in the
way of my Catholicism, the divinity of Christ. Moreover, reflection made it
plain that the nature of man contradicted the nature of God in every
particular, the limitary and finite on the one hand, the absolute and infinite
on the other. That Jesus was God was something I cannot remember having ever
really believed, in childhood or later.
Another point of incredulity was the trading of
the Church in stocks and bonds in the hereafter it called indulgences, the “Do
such and such and so-and-so many years will be remitted from your sentence in
purgatory” that had seemed so false to Martin Luther at the outset of the
Reformation.
I also remember a desire for a sacred scripture,
something on the order of a book that could furnish guidance. A Bible was
given to me one Christmas, a handsome edition, but on attempting to read it, I
found it so rambling and devoid of a coherent thread that it was difficult to
think of a way to base one’s life upon it. Only later did I learn how
Christians solve the difficulty in practice, Protestants by creating sectarian
theologies, each emphasizing the texts of their sect and downplaying the rest;
Catholics by downplaying it all, except the snippets mentioned in their liturgy.
Something seemed lacking in a sacred book that could not be read as an integral
whole.
Moreover, when I went to the university, I found
that the authenticity of the book, especially the New Testament, had come into
considerable doubt as a result of modern hermeneutical studies by Christians
themselves. In a course on contemporary theology, I read the Norman Perrin
translation of The Problem of the Historical Jesus by Joachim Jeremias,
one of the principal New Testament scholars of this century. A textual critic
who was a master of the original languages and had spent long years with the
texts, he had finally agreed with the German theologian Rudolph Bultmann, that
without a doubt, it is true to say that the dream of ever writing a biography
of Jesus is over, meaning that the life of Christ as he actually lived it could
not be reconstructed from the New Testament with any degree of confidence. If
this were accepted from a friend of Christianity and one of its foremost
textual experts, I reasoned, what was left for its enemies to say? And what
then remained of the Bible except to acknowledge that it was a record of truths
mixed with fictions, conjectures projected onto Christ by later followers,
themselves at odds with each other as to who the master had been and what he
had taught. And if theologians like Jeremias could reassure themselves that
somewhere under the layers of later accretions to the New Testament there was
something called the historical Jesus and his message, how could the ordinary
person hope to find it, or know it, should it be found?
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