Why does a website run by the Diocese of Washington post this announcement by an English guy that he's no longer Christian and doesn't take communion? How is this supposed to help us?

Adrian is one of our essayists - we don't censor his thoughts. Hopefully we can start discussions that deepen our faith.

We like to say that the church isn't the buildings, it's the people. But the people are moving out of the buildings and the institution that maintains them. If this is a movement of the Spirit, can the church follow? There are some of us who look to church as an established forum for considering our responsibilities to ourselves and our community, not just as a convenient and comforting social group. Thus we hang around hoping to build on the tradition, although the authority and the teaching that previously sustained it now seem irrelevant. Adrian Worsfold has the learning and experience to help us see where we are and how the institution is failing. Such critics may care passionately about the community while questioning now useless traditions. I had an exchange recently on the Café with Donald Schell on this subject:

Me: After a lifetime of religious involvement, I find myself immersed in a story, never directed by a spirit. But people talk so freely and confidently about knowing "God." I must, along with Don Cupitt and Adrian Worsfold, wonder whether this is a culturally determined interpretation of their experience. Since there is no evidence for religious opinions, only conflicting traditions, I suspect religious people should move on to explore the benefits of meditation and community, and leave the tendentious doctrines behind.

Schell: I was grateful for all the years I was a parish priest to have a handful of declared agnostics, unbelievers and an occasional atheist who participated regularly in congregations I was privileged to serve. "I value and believe in what we are together" proved a useful and in itself graceful voice in the conversation and shared work. Sometimes the most determined skeptics proved the most committed community-builders.

Murdoch Matthew
husband of Gary

Why does a website run by the Diocese of Washington post this announcement by an English guy that he's no longer Christian and doesn't take communion? How is this supposed to help us?

As Adrian has carefully detailed his reasons for leaving our church, it might encourage the more intransigent among us to review our missionary and catechistical methods. If we then discover that we are failing our God and our God's gospel in any way we can allow our discoveries to inform our mission in our own localities, including the Diocese of Washington.

Jonathan Hagger

As an a-theistic (non-theistic) Christian/Episcopalian, I somehow feel that I should comment. Ultimately, however, paths like that which Adrian has taken cannot be walked by another, no matter how much sympathy I feel for many of his views. I can only wish him well on his journey, and I hope that his pilgrimage will be one of fulfillment and meaning.
I have thought a great deal recently about "what does it mean" to be Episcopalian/Anglican in this time of re-examination of our foundational "truths" and the inevitable anti-explorational reactions that this invokes. Somehow, I feel that, while I applaud our moves for "fuller inclusion" of LGBT persons and women, we are missing the mark. What Christianity and TEC/Anglicanism does not need so much is "inclusivity" (and certainly not more "exclusivity") but more "porosity." We need for the church to be more "porous" in terms of its experience of/with the world and creation, the "numinous" and the stories and perspectives of other religious traditions and how we understand and allow that to meaningfully interact with our own traditions and history. I was thinking recently that, in spite of our attempts to formulate positions/doctrines, Jesus in the Gospels often seemed to resist firm definitions. "What is the Kingdom of heaven like?" was answered mostly in parable and metaphor, not in creed/covenant/doctrine. "Covenant" Anglicans need to appreciate the irony of what they are trying to accomplish.
How about a new parable? "The Kingdom of Heaven is like a sponge. When it is taken out of water, it dries out, hardens, breaks and disintegrates. But when it is put into water, it takes up the water and grows and absorbs it. And when you take it out again, it drenches everything around it. "
The Church, I think, needs to be more sponge-like. It needs to absorb the concerns and needs of those that it encounters. It needs to avoid having firm boundaries and borders. It needs to be drenched in the experience of the world as it is, not as we wish it to be and also the possibility of the numinous that we may find/encounter in ways unlike any that we have known before. Scripture needs to be a springboard for experience/thought, not a wall around our minds and lives to fence them in. We need to break the canon open, not fence it in. The church needs to be immersed in the water of the numinous and the world, not out of the water and drying out on a storage shelf. It needs to "leak" the numinous and its reflections and experience back into the surrounding water and world.
At this point, I am more "optimistic" than Adrian that the churches, Anglican and Episcopal and others, can still possibly do this. It will not be easy, but what real thing is ever easy? In the year 2000, the liturgy for the opening of the Holy Door at St. Peter's in Rome was accompanied by a prayer containing a line that still resonates with me: "The Church is on a pilgrimage through time to eternity." Each of us is journeying in this Pilgrimage for such an infinitesimal time with no end in sight. We walk, yes, but wither none of us really can say nor can we say that there is some "end" at which we will arrive. I hope, though, that while we live and walk together or apart, we may find meaning in the journey itself.

Somebody at Adrian Worsfold's website, The Pluralist Speaks, draws attention to an essay, "The Unbelieving Future of Christian Faith" by Peter Laarman. The view is like Worsfold's but the tone is not so sharp:

. . . I will never be comfortable around US Christians who claim to be progressive on various social issues, but who remain doctrinally rigid in respect to faith itself. Experiences teaches me that these folks will almost always refuse to honor evolving human experience or human intelligence, and will sometimes not even honor even basic scientific data, when it comes to sexuality and sexual/gender justice. Behind this, almost always, lurks an “orders of creation” theology that still clings to males ruling the domestic roost with women beneath as mere vessels for procreation. South African writer Breyten Breytenbach, himself a survivor of verkrampte theology, expresses the danger of orthodoxy this way:

When any culture, however rich or ancient, is but a confirmation of prejudices or the conservation and parroting of so-called truths, it is doomed to be exclusive, voracious, totalitarian, ultimately fundamentalist.

. . . Martin Buber in Jerusalem wrote a magnificent short treatise, "Two Types of Faith." In it Buber contrasted the Hebraic concept of emunah —collective adherence and justice-doing commitment — to the Hellenic concept of pistis, the kind of individual ideation that follows conversion. Sixty years later these remain the two basic types of faith; and for my money there’s no question as to which is more inviting.

Murdoch Matthew
spouse of Garydasein

Nontheistic Christian/Episcopalian is a contradiction in terms. Why bother? One might question who God is/what God is like, but a real God is pretty central to what Christianity is all about. Wherever one thinks Jesus might have thought about doctrine, it is pretty clear that he thought that God was real, personal, and gracious.

Furthermore, our particular Christian tradition has always adhered to the historic Creeds. We're a big and roomy tent, but there are beliefs and practices that place one outside the tent. The fact that we don't necessarily see those outside the tent as "the damned," doesn't change this fact. We also welcome seekers to share in our life, but we don't stop being who we are in order to accommodate them. Enculturation is good missionary strategy, but the Church has received an apostolic commission. Creed and doctrine help preserve the Good News from distortion and keep alive the community's subversive anamnesis.

Boundaries? Yes. Barriers? No. We ought to remove every stumbling block, except the Cross, because that is where the true scandal lies.

Why does a website run by the Diocese of Washington post this announcement by an English guy that he's no longer Christian and doesn't take communion? How is this supposed to help us?

I, for one, am grateful that this website publishes Adrian's essay. Why should we shy away from hearing his story? As Jonathan Hagger said up thread, his words should lead us to take an honest look at ourselves to see where we fall short in proclaiming and living the the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Adrian's words on "doublespeak" are spot on, and I am sick to death of the doublespeak. It's way past time that all of us (especially our leaders) begin to speak plainly.

June Butler

Bill, Adrian Worsfold's essay is mainly concerned with how those claiming to symbolize or embody apostolic authority, such as Rowan Williams, have failed to work for social justice, such as equal rights and rites for LGBTs. I see him as zeroing in on how secularism has moved on and developed a more inclusive ethics while church leaders, such as Anglican bishops, sound like Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, who said, "I would prefer not to." Not to what? The preference is not even clearly stated but refers back anaphorically to some ambiguous idea. The focus of Worsfold's criticism is doublespeak, where, on the one hand, LGBTs are said to be "children of God" but are not accorded the same rights and rites as others because of some outdated rhetoric from church history.

Your "subversive anamnesis" fails to address this problem. Yes, you can, like Radical Orthodoxy, claim that liturgy is the be-all and end-all of the universe and embodies a world of equality but most people do not see Anglicanism that way. That has not been their experience. The church has erred by following orthodox formulae.

I don't think it matters whether Worsfold is called a Christian or nonChristian. These are just definitions.

Nontheistic Christianity, as in Jeffrey Shy, is not an oxymoron but is a term I assume he chooses because it most accurately describes his faith. Refusing doublespeak, Shy presents himself in a fresh way.

I see no point in imposing outdated philosophies and theologies on people living today.

You seem more upset with lack of belief in doctrines than you are with the lack of justice work in the church.

Gary Paul Gilbert

"I see no point in imposing outdated philosophies and theologies on people living today."

Then, why do you seek to do so?

"You seem more upset with lack of belief in doctrines than you are with the lack of justice work in the church."

I believe that indifference to doctrine and lack of social justice work go hand in hand.

All the practices of the Church presuppose the reality of God. Without this, we are going through the motions, like some postmodern aesthete playing around with someone else's signifiers. Some forms of postmodern discourse have eviscerated the political left. The Body of Christ is one of the few existing alternatives to the neo-liberal order. It will not prove a viable alternative if we do not insist on the reality of God, to say nothing of the identity of the Messiah.

I actually entertain the hope that Jeffry does not mean what he says. If God is just a name for a big and powerful creature, then we should all deny the existence of God. A healthy dose of via negativa is good for all of us. We should not want any part of the idol that many people, including many Christians, substitute for the Blessed One. But denying the existence of the real God is not an option for Christians, and we shouldn't even have to say this.

Bill, You have failed to prove that doctrine encourages social justice. If anything, it seems to go the other way. The Unitarians are far more liberal than the TEC. And the United Church of Christ, liberal on doctrine, likewise does much more than TEC. Likewise, the American Civil Liberties Union does far more than TEC but works with people of different beliefs and no belief.

Refusing to engage the question of whether a God exists does not necessarily deny that the concept is real.

It is really a question of definition and you, like the Vatican, want to have the power to say who is a Christian. Even if you win, you lose because many people will conclude Christianity is not worth bothering with.

Gary Paul Gilbert

And you have offered no evidence for the contrary assertion. I couldn't care less about being more liberal. What I want is justice, i.e. right relationship with God and neighbor. I am more than willing to collaborate with adherents of other religions and secular movements for liberation. What Christianity provides, among other things, is hope for struggle and the ability not to give into cynicism when it looks like were losing. It also provides a coherent body as a site of resistance and an alternative story to the one that is being imposed upon us.

Bill, Apparently, you believe there are only two narratives out there: the one that is being imposed on "us," whatever that is, whoever "us" is; and Christianity as you interpret it. Sounds like a false dichotomy. I don't need to offer evidence because you are the one making the assertions and selling your own brand of truth. If I were selling anything, it would be irony, which can't be controlled ultimately. In any case, most churches are very much anti-LGBT, though I suppose you would say they are not Christian. And many are simply tolerant, as in "If you must have LGBTs in your church, then you are allowed to develop special rites for them...."

It would seem that for you Christianity, at least as you interpret it, is outside the other discourses of the culture.

Gary Paul Gilbert

Gary,

First, let me say that I find this conversation tiring and probably won't continue it past this point, but I do feel some obligation to engage, especially since I want those who may stumble upon this page to realize that there are progressive voices in the Church that actually are progressive because they believe in God and are Catholic Christians.

You have repeatedly made contestable assertions without evidence and are oblivious to how culture-bound and questionable your own worldview (and, yes, metanarrative) is. I have repeatedly offered arguments. You may not like them and may of course contest the premises. One of my basic premises, which you seem not to share, is that the Holy Scriptures are the Word of God and that read in the context of the community for which they were written in light of the ongoing tradition, provides genuine knowledge of reality. One may dispute this premise and of course, those who adhere to it disagree among themselves about what the Scriptures mean, but I do think that ascribing to it is part of what it means to be a member of the Christian Church, which among other things is a particular, historical community of discourse. I believe that there are sound arguments to show that this practice is at least as well founded as other practices that we take to yield genuine knowledge. I doubt that these arguments would be convincing to you, but that doesn't mean they are unsound. You seem already to have made up your mind.

"It would seem that for you Christianity, at least as you interpret it, is outside the other discourses of the culture."

Not at all. What I would insist on is a strong critical engagement with the narrative of the triumph of the free market as the bringer of progress and freedom. To the extent to which the Church has failed to do this, our witness has been less credible. And yet still the hope of the Kingdom sustains millions of the oppressed in their struggle.

Other communities provide resources for resistance, and I would make common cause with them. Denials of God, metaphysics, realist theories of truth, etc., seem to me to be a way to roll over and play dead while the Beast rages with its fury against the children of God. I am far more interested in dialogue with Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Marxists than with postmodern nihilists. Because the latter have already decided, in advance of dialogue, that the questions I find most interesting are meaningless.

Postmodernism, in various forms, may seem to provide freedom. I think this freedom is illusory and abandons the field of battle to people who do not have the best interests of humanity at heart. It reduces religion to a private option. Religion can of course be oppressive. What we need is humanistic religion that is true to itself and open to the best common aspirations of humanity while still maintaining a critical edge over against a fallen world.

Thank you, Bill, Granted this conversation is going nowhere and not even a fun nowhere as in Heidegger. You paint postmodernism with a broad brush as if it were a coherent unity. The question of the decision in Derrida is much more complicated: on the one hand, one must carefully find out everything that can indeed be found out/known, but, on the other hand, there is an irreducible leap of faith in any decision. For Derrida, it is never clear there is a decision but rather that there must be something which would break with causal chains of necessity, however brief, like chance.

My point here is not to preach Derridean philosophy but rather to say that postmodernism, if there be such a beast, is far more complex and untamed and bears no relation to the pet you have constructed or imagined.

It reminds me of Wittgenstein saying in The Philosophical Investigations that he is a bad tour guide who would show all the side streets rather than the avenues. It is not entirely clear what Wittgenstein meant but many have offered reasonable glosses.

What interests me in postmodernism in particular are the traces of what used to be called religion.

I don't see postmodernism and religion as in conflict with each other.

I do, however, see religion as a private option.

Gary Paul Gilbert

What Christianity provides . . . is an alternative story to the one that is being imposed upon us.

One of my basic premises is that the Holy Scriptures are the Word of God and that read in the context of the community for which they were written in light of the ongoing tradition, provides genuine knowledge of reality. One may dispute this premise and of course, those who adhere to it disagree among themselves.

Bill, you gloss over the fact and the extent to which people who claim authority from the scriptures disagree. One would suppose that the spirit would have led Christians to a more common understanding. The disparity is evidence that we're dealing with interpretations of texts (and traditions) and not with Truth. Your "genuine knowledge of reality" seems to be rather an intuition based on your reading. We exist. As long as we exist, we have opportunities. The rest is stories we tell. Lately, we've learned to base stories that must provide reliable predictions on evidence. Other stories we can continue to tell for entertainment, inspiration, or justification of our place in the community.

We don't live in "a fallen world." We know a great deal about how the present world developed from earlier forms and conditions. The world is as it is, and as it is becoming. Whatever story you try to impose on it.

I want those who may stumble upon this page to realize that there are progressive voices in the Church that actually are progressive because they believe in God and are Catholic Christians.

I hate to dispute with you, because your theological conservatism may help displace charges that TEC has abandoned tradition and orthodoxy -- Look! Here's a prominent voice espousing it all! Unfortunately, your would-be progressive stands on civil rights probably discredit you in the eyes of the Right. (The first thing the right-wing billionaires went after was the National Council of Churches' support of the Civil Rights Movment. They were so successful in demonizing the social gospel that the NCC now avoids all controversial positions.) I'm glad you are progressive, but given the uneven record of catholics and other religionists, your social beliefs probably have several sources.

The Body of Christ is one of the few existing alternatives to the neo-liberal order. It will not prove a viable alternative if we do not insist on the reality of God, to say nothing of the identity of the Messiah. I actually entertain the hope that Jeffry does not mean what he says. . . Denying the existence of the real God is not an option for Christians, and we shouldn't even have to say this.

Gary says he's weighed in again on this topic. I agree that it's getting tedious. Especially at the length I tend to go on at. But I want people who stumble across this site to know that there are people trying to continue the Christian discussion in a world where metaphysics seem irrelevant. I don't think that even you, Bill, can claim that the Church is necessary nowadays.

Murdoch Matthew
husband of Gary

Rather than go on and on, I should just have linked to Don Cupitt. Here he is on Identity:

I have suggested that Christian preoccupation with doctrinal correctness is irrational, being driven chiefly by anxiety about questions of identity. I go on to say that in a time of very rapid change we should not worry so much about identity. As the case of Buddhism shows, the postmodern type of self, Empty and watchfully self-aware, can be religious and can be blessed. The late-modern world is cursed by conflict between different ethno-nationalisms and different faiths; but why not renounce them and live contentedly without identity?

I now maintain that we should entirely give up the idea that there is any religious benefit to be gained from adopting, making our own and sticking to a set of second-hand religious doctrines, formulated by other people long ago. The only really valuable religious convictions, nowadays, are ones that we have worked out for ourselves and tested in our own lives. By that route we may gradually forge a religious identity that is truly our own.

Murdoch Matthew

Let me add that I'm not a disciple of Don Cupitt -- I was groping toward some positions and found he'd got there first. I quote him when he expresses my experience better than I can.

Murdoch