No-Man's Land, or Interfaith Homestead Act?

Dear Candy Man,

Another great post. Thank you for continuing to share your thoughts and feelings about religion, both those that currently exist, as well as those that are possibly in the embryonic stage. I definitely feel your sense of isolation as you continue to search beyond the boundaries of your faith system and seek new ways of religious expression and human connection. I have certainly felt this way myself! In fact, a commenter on a recent post could have been writing for me as much as for himself when he stated, "What you or I in our own ways may dream of in terms of communications between faiths will no doubt happen one day. We are perhaps on the bottom of long low angle upward curve to the future. The pathway is cleared. One day it will be a highway."

It can be an exciting notion to feel like I am contributing to the birth of new religious forms and reconciliation among faiths. It can also be cold comfort to think that the world I envision won't come into being until after I'm long gone. I hope that doesn't have to be the case. The prologue to the Herman Hesse novel Damien reads, in part, "I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?" In my case, and I suspect yours too, it is "so very difficult" because the prompting from my inner self is causing me to look beyond familiar religious and cultural systems still celebrated and occupied by family and friends who I love.

I want to briefly respond to some of the comments you made in your recent post, and then expand a bit more on my own point of view regarding traditional religious forms and rites, the scriptural basis upon which these rest, and the post-religious era we appear to be entering (or have already entered) wherein the interfaith encounters we both seek have the greatest possibility to flourish.

Candy Man: Jesus was truly a transformative figure in history. He was a tzaddik, and his lessons were not just for Christians.

Unkosher Jesus: I totally agree with you about Jesus. His lessons were not restricted to Christians or Jews, but are meant for all of humanity. Jesus, in both his spoken word and in his living example, expanded tribal, religious and ethnic boundaries in order for it to be possible for these artificial boundaries to disappear and for a deeper humanity to emerge.

Candy Man: But here's the thing, Doug - Judaism today is not an extension of Pirkei Avot. It's more like an extension of kashrut. Jews today get all carried away in different rituals and holidays and foods, anything that makes them feel more Jewish. But feeding the homeless is not a big part of it (unless that homeless person happens to be a member of the Tribe). I generalize here, but the point is that the values of Pirkei Avot - love, humility, kindness, and equality - haven't really permeated Jewish society. Worse yet, in some cases - such as gay rights - Judaism stands in the way of these values.

Unkosher Jesus: In much the same way, institutional Christianity serves as the biggest obstacle to the Gospel message it purports to preach (and while I am specifically referring to the Catholic Church in my comments here, these are also roughly transferable to most other Christian denominations). The dogmatic insistence that belief in Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Savior of the Human Race according to the teachings and practices of the Church; the insistence upon the absolute authority of the pope, and by extension the bishop of each diocese; the use of Church authority to condemn homosexuality and abortion while promoting ever more traditional forms of worship such as the Rite of the Latin Mass. Each of these instances serve as examples as to how the Church has abandoned the core message of the Gospel-Good News to the Poor and the transformation of the human self through the Love of God-and replaced these with a self-referential position of authority and importance based upon a selective reading of scripture and Canon Law that predates the modern era. As such, Catholics and members of other Christian denominations also share the same preoccupation of maintaining fidelity to the authority of their respective Churches and the forms and rites of their faith, while oftentimes completely missing the point as to why they are called to practice the faith in the first place.

The limitations imposed by religious rules and authority have been described by none other than President-Elect Barack Obama. In a speech he delivered in 2006 on the topic of faith and politics, he identified the very conundrum that arises as a result of the confrontation between the call to strict adherence to religious rules and teachings and living in a pluralistic world.

Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what's possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It's the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God's edicts, regardless of the consequences.

With regard to charting new directions for interfaith encounters and the evolution of religious forms, that's the question most in need of an answer: has God, in fact, spoken, à la Holy Scripture? Are the texts which serve as the foundations of our respective faiths the literal Word of God, wholly authoritative, eternal and irrevocable? The good news (Gospel variety or otherwise) for interfaith movers and shakers is that there is not just growing doubt as to the veracity of any such claim, but a growing body of evidence demonstrating that this is not the case. With regard to the rites and traditional practices of Judaism, Jewish biblical scholar James Kugel posted a blog entry entitled "On Divine Inspiration" which basically undermines certain foundational tenets of Judaism, including:

• The belief that the books of the Torah were divinely-inspired or authored; and
• The belief that the prayers, rituals and teachings of Judaism are inflexibly cast in stone. On the contrary...
  

When you actually consider Judaism as it is, the role of the Torah in it is really not what you say it is. Ultimately, Jews are not Torah-fundamentalists. On the contrary, our whole tradition is based on adding liberally to what the Torah says (despite Deut. 4:2), sometimes reading its words in a way out of keeping with their apparent meaning, and sometimes even distorting or disregarding its words entirely. (My book "The Bible As It Was" contains seven hundred pages of examples of how this all began.) What's more, as everyone knows, much of what makes up the daily fabric of Jewish life has only a tenuous connection, or no connection at all, with what is actually written in the Torah.

The historically evolving nature of Judaism is something that has recently been analyzed by Rabbi Arthur Blecher in his seminal work, The New American Judaism. Nor is Rabbi Blecher alone in his assessment of Judaism and the possibilities for growth and transformation in response to the growing rate of interfaith marriage between Jews and Christians. Rabbi Michael Sternfield is also an advocate of the need for Judaism to affirm interfaith relationships by demonstrating that it has the capacity to respond creatively, positively to this phenomenon.

My contention is that Judaism will not only survive; it will flourish if we learn how to deal with the phenomenon of interfaith marriage more creatively. However, we must not expect the nature of Jewish life to remain the same because it will not. A new Jewish/Christian amalgam has come into existence. It is being created by those born Jewish and those Christians who are married to Jews and who are bringing their own sensitivities and mind-set with them.

Could we say that this is a new religion in the making? I am not sure. What I do know is that there is a new religious community in the making, one that is increasingly diverse, wherein the old boundaries no longer exist. As in the fable of the Emperor's New Clothes, almost all of the Judaism wants to go on pretending that these kind of phenomena do not exist; that reconciling Christianity and Judaism is not possible. If we care to look, we will discover that this is not the case. They absolutely do exist, and we had better open our eyes.

Likewise, Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong has this to say about the authenticity of the accounts of the four canonical Gospels and the words attributed to Jesus therein:

The gospels are written between 70 at the earliest (Mark) and 100 at the latest (John). Yet all four gospels reveal the impact of this Jesus on a variety of people. The Fellows of the Jesus Seminar spent more than a decade going over everything that the four gospels record Jesus as ever having said. When they completed this study, they determined that no more than 16% of the sayings of Jesus are authentic to the man Jesus which, of course, means that some 84% of the sayings attributed to Jesus are not historically accurate. The Seminar did not find a single word attributed to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (John) to be authentic. The Jesus of John's gospel speaks to the concerns of the Christian Church near the end of the first century, not the literal words of a man of history.

Like Rabbis Blecher and Sternfield, Bishop Spong calls upon his own faith tradition to re-examine its teachings and practices in light of what modern biblical scholarship has revealed to be the doubtful nature of specific Church teachings and beliefs about the life and message of Jesus that have stood unchallenged since the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. In his 2000 book, A New Christianity For a New World, he writes:

My responsibility as a Christian in this twenty-first century is to separate the wheat from the chaff of my tradition in order to discover the essence and to grasp the treasure of its ultimate insight into the meaning of God. Then, escaping the limits of my own tradition by breaking out of its boundaries at its very depths, I will be prepared to share its purified treasure with the world.

My hope is that my brothers and sisters who find Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism as their point of entry, based upon their time and place in history, will also explore their pathway into God in a similar manner, until they too can escape the limits of their tradition at its depths and, grasping the essence of their system's religious insights, move on to share that essence with me and all the world. Then each of us, clinging to the truth, the pearl of great price if you will, that we have found in the spiritual wells from which we have drunk, can reach across the once insuperable barriers to share as both givers and receivers in the riches present in all human sacred traditions. A new day will thus be born, and Jesus-who crossed every boundary of tribe, prejudice, gender, and religion-will be honored by those of us who, as his disciples, have transcended the boundaries of even the religious system that was created to honor him.

Spong's theology is an extension of that of Paul Tillich, who described God not as the "author of being"-an entity separate and apart from human existence-but the "ground of all being", the very foundation for all of existence. Perhaps this is what St. Paul was hinting at, inadvertently or otherwise, when he preached, "In Him we live and move and have our being."

In your final passages, you grapple with a question that I too am familiar with: is it possible to reform the current beliefs and forms of practice? Or, in order to achieve the transformational interfaith experience we seek, is it necessary to abandon these and work toward the development of new forms?

I wonder whether Judaism today is simply a flawed structure, based on values that are alien to me. Do you ever feel that way about Christianity? To what extent is it worth trying to reform these old religions? Trying to salvage them? Can we keep the baby but throw out the bathwater? Or should we perhaps simply carve a new path, perhaps throwing our weight behind a post-religious humanism of some kind?

I believe that it is time for the development of new forms. The current iterations of our respective faiths are fairly well-entrenched, and have proved quite resistant to any any attempts at change or reform. As I stated, I feel your loneliness when you state that "it's tough wandering in this no man's land alone." To this I would say, first, you are not alone. I'm out there, too, and I suspect many, many others are as well. Second, perhaps instead of a no-man's land, we might regard the current landscape as unexplored territory that is in need of surveyors and homesteaders. To that end, I am willing to uproot and relocate myself in order to continue to explore and discover, to reconcile faiths, to heal historic rifts, and forge a means to experiencing a deeper humanity. This is obviously a break with traditional forms and those who practice these. However, whoever may oppose or take issue with such a break, I would not count God among them. Shalom.

- Doug L.

FOR FURTHER REFERENCE:

What Do Orthodox Jews Really Believe III, and Why Don't They Speak Up? (Jewish Atheist Blog, November 6, 2007)

The Jesus Seminar (Westar Institute, Santa Rosa, CA)

Network of Spiritual Progressives

The Center for Progressive Christianity

Bonhoeffer's Religionless Spirituality (Experimental Theology Blog, October 10, 2007)

Religionless Christianity: The Bonhoefferian (DietrichBonhoeffer.com, August 2, 2008)

Paul Tillich- The Courage to Be (EscapeFromWatchtower.com)

The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love, by John Shelby Spong (Book Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, SpiritualityandPractice.com)

The Gospel Truth, by Elaine Pagels (New York Times op-ed, April 8, 2006)

The Nag Hammadi Library (The Gnosis Society)

The New Seminary- An Interfaith Seminary (New York, NY)

Our Tribal Ties: Women On Faith Online Chat, moderated by Lisa Miller (WashingtonPost.com OnFaith, December 1, 2008)

Obama's Historic "Call to Renewal" Speech (BeliefNet.com, November 2, 2008)