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Turtle Talk #2

[The theological seminary I attended issued a general invitation to its constituents--or at least to a lot of us--to suggest how the education for its students might be improved.  I responded, in light of my own experience, which included finally leaving the church.  I have not yet heard from them, so with the deletion of introductory remarks, and names, here it is:  you might be more interested than they are.]

I am a graduate of PLTS, for six years the pastor of a church, the recipient of a Ph.D. in theology, and an emeritus faculty member of a college of the church.  I am no longer a member of any church, and it is with that experience and conviction that I am responding to your open invitation to say something about how theological education needs to change.  

I concede, without objection, if the suggestion is made that I do not have the right to suggest what a theological education ought to be because I have given up on the enterprise.  I continue, at least temporarily, to comment because the trajectory of my life may be much more typical of the direction of human experience than the church would like to think.  

Long before I began studies and a career in higher education, I found myself objecting to much of what I learned about religion by thinking, “That cannot be so!  The world does not work that way!”  Whether it had to do with being surrounded by a universe of spirits and heavenly and demonic real estate, life after death, miracles, a recent or ancient creation by fiat, or a claim that a good life ought to consist of adherence to a predetermined plan or purpose, I objected that the world does not work that way.  And how does the world work?  We continue to discover that every day.  

That is to say, as Rudolf Bultmann recognized, but could not bring himself to follow to its logical conclusion, most of the language of the Biblical documents, and the church in its theology and community language, is a continued defense of an ancient worldview; a pre-scientific worldview.  When the church, and the schools of the church, explain what the universe is, what human life is, what a good life is, they speak as people spoke several thousand years ago, and defend much of the perspective of those ancient peoples.  

It is not simply the language of a prescientific cosmos that is proposed as the substance of faith:  it is, at the same time, and inherently, a language of gods and demons and resurrections and eternal pleasures and punishments that is proffered as a kind of salvation.  The notion of  a god, or a full stable of gods, is as much the composition of an ancient worldview as is an almost mechanical creation, or a great floating ark of animals and a flood over the whole earth, or a pitched battle at Armageddon between the forces of good and evil.  God is part of the furniture of an ancient worldview.  There is no meaningful distinction between believing that it is possible to cast epileptic demons into a herd of hogs, and admiring god on his throne.  Both are part of the way people used to understand the world.  

While a parish pastor, I used to try to find ways to speak of . . . oh, what it meant to say that god threw Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden and slammed the gate shut behind them, or Jacob wrestling with god or an angel all night at the river Jabbok, or what it meant to say that Jesus rose from the dead, and translate those stories into something true about human life and existence.  I knew those were not stories about a garden, or a contest with god on a riverbank, or about literally rising from death.  They were Turtle Talk—how the earth rests on the back of a great turtle.  They were myths, and the point of such stories is not that once we were created in perfection, or that Jacob—that scoundrel, Jacob—spent all night wrestling with god, but that every Adam and Eve and Jacob recognizes that we limp ever after from wrestling with our own perversities, that we ought to be better, and can be better.  The point is not that Jesus blew the stone from his crypt away, but that what began with him was not over; that it lives on.  

But no matter how delicately one tries to honor the habits and stories and splendor of his or her preferred or accidental religious tradition, no matter how meaningfully the translation is made, no matter how sensible and satisfying the bridge is built from how we used to think to how we now understand the world, someone is certain to ask, “What happened to god?”  Surely we can let purgatory go, and limbo, too!  Maybe there are no magic handkerchiefs to cure leukemia, and maybe eternal punishment is a rotten and even perverse idea, but the kernel of that old way of understanding life and the world—god—must remain!  

So what do we do?  We insist that the world really does work that way!  A big bang?  Maybe.  A cosmos without intention, but with inevitabilities?  Maybe not.  Without god?  Certainly not!  Seminaries are institutions dedicated to preserving the remnants of an old worldview.  Seminaries teach Turtle Talk.  

Is that inevitable?  I think so.  I do not think the institution of the church can escape its own imprisonment in an ancient world.  So long as god is essential, and makes sense, so long as people can be convinced that the world really does work the way our ancestors imagined it, theological education will not change.  It will only concede details, here and there, and find itself talking to itself, as it used to talk.  


I wish it were not so.   

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