Over the years in my Heretics
Anonymous groups, one of my favorite discussion starters has been a
juxtaposition of two passages on the same subject by two writers of very
different persuasions, two writers, in fact, who were probably blissfully
unaware of each other's existence. They are Rudolf Bultmann and Oral
Roberts. I want to read them now and to add a third passage, one from
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. I want to set up a dilemma posed between
Bultmann and Roberts and then show a way out marked by the sociologists
Berger and Luckmann. First, from Bultmann's essay, "New Testament and
Mythology":
A
blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply
arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to
reduce faith to a work... Any satisfaction of the demand would be a
forced sacrificium intellectus, and any of us who would make it would
be peculiarly split and untruthful. For we would affirm for our faith or
religion a world picture that our life otherwise denied... We cannot use
electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves
of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the
spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.
Next
from Oral Roberts's biography The Call:
When I was
a young struggling pastor in the mid 1940's, I kept wrestling with a deep
sense of discontent. I felt frustrated and dissatisfied in my work. It seemed
to me that my ministry and the outreach of my church was making no real
difference in the lives of the people of our community... Though I was only in
my late twenties I felt I was dying on the vine. Each week began to be more
and more of a struggle. How could I get up and preach about Jesus making the
lame to walk, the dumb to talk, the deaf to hear, the blind to see, the leper
to be cleansed, and the dead raised to life and then let it all be treated as
something in the past, some thing irrelevant to our life and time? How could I
talk about the Bible being in the NOW? I began to be consumed with a passion
either to have a ministry like Jesus or to get out of the ministry. What good
did it do to tell about events that weren't happening in this world, in
the now?
Finally, from Berger and Luckmann's classic treatment of the sociology of
knowledge, The Social Construction of Reality:
Compared to the reality of everyday life, other realities appear as
finite provinces of meaning, enclaves within the paramount reality
marked by circumscribed meanings and modes of experience. The paramount
reality envelops them on all sides, as it were, and consciousness always
returns to the paramount reality as from an excursion. This is evident
in [the case]... of the reality of dreams or that of theoretical thought
[when one remains oblivious to the passage of time and to exterior
events until one "snaps out of it" or "comes back to planet earth"].
Similar "commutations" take place between the world of everyday life and
the world of play, both the playing of children and, even more sharply,
of adults.
The
theatre provides an excellent illustration of such play ing on the part
of adults. The transition between realities is marked by the rising and
falling of the curtain. As the curtain rises, the spectator is
"transported to another world," with its own meanings and an order that
may or may not have much to do with the order of everyday life. As the
curtain falls, the spectator "returns to reality," that is, to the
paramount reality of everyday life by comparison with which the reality
presented on the stage now appears tenuous and ephemeral, however vivid
the presentation may have been a few moments previously. Aesthetic and
religious experience is rich in producing transitions of this kind,
inasmuch as art and religion are endemic producers of finite provinces
of meaning.
What was the nature of the crisis of faith faced by young Oral Roberts? He
had come to experience in a personal way the inconsistency pointed out by
Bultmann: he saw too clearly the stark disjunction between the world he
talked about on Sunday mornings and the world he and his parishioners
seemed to have no choice but to live in the rest of the week.
In the 60s a
group called the Vogues did a song called "Five O'Clock World." In it the singer
says how bored and aggravated he is in his job every day, day in and day out.
But he can stand it, he can get through it without losing his mind, because he
looks forward to a different world awaiting him when the whistle blows: a five
o'clock world. A finite province of meaning where he can do and say what he
wants to, a mini-zone in which for a few precious hours he can find regeneration
and respite. He cannot cause his two worlds to interpenetrate. He merely endures
the one till he can escape into the other.
Oral Roberts
felt he could no longer live for most of the week in the mundane world waiting
for his "eleven o'clock Sunday morning world." He decided that by hook or by
crook he had to somehow extend the boundaries of sacred time, church time, what
Bultmann calls "the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament," to cover the
rest of the week. So he began a ministry of tent revivals and healings, to drag
the New Testament myth-world kicking and screaming into the secular 20th
century.
Did it work?
It is plain that it did not, that he chose the wrong option. Years later, as
you know, this man was claiming to have seen a Jesus as big as Godzilla
appearing to him, telling him to build a hospital which, after he built it,
proved impossible to fill, a superfluous white elephant. And then he woke up in
the middle of the night, feeling himself throttled by the devil. And
then of
course he heard God's ultimatum to have him rubbed out if he didn't raise a
certain amount of cash by a designated date. He had confused God the Father with
the Godfather.
Like Bishop
Pike, Oral Roberts found himself wandering in a desert of delusion. I want to
explore why that happened, and what he could have done instead. And the reason I
want to do this is that I think it will suggest something quite important about
the nature of faith itself as well as the life of faith.
You and I
may not care a fig for miracles. We may prefer that they stay at a comfortable
distance, in fact. Granted, sometimes we would like to believe in them because
we would like to cheat death or even just make things easy for ourselves, like
Samantha on Bewitched. Miracles are at best a philosophical problem to us. Yet
we face the same problem Oral Roberts did in another form.
Have you
ever had a "mountaintop experience" at a particularly poignant church service or
at a spiritual retreat? You feel you have been present with Jesus atop the Mount
of Transfiguration, and you are hesitant about leaving. And yet you must leave.
You must return, if not to the depth of the valley, if not to Valley of the
Shadow of Death, then at least to the flat, dull, dusty roads of Palestine.
There, you may walk with Jesus himself, but the heat of the midday sun and the
choking dust and the plaguing flies and the length of the road till the next inn
make you forget that you walk with Jesus. You just want to make it to the end
of the day and to rest your weary feet. You have left the zone where, like
Moses, you had to put off your shoes from your feet for you stood on holy
ground. You have fallen, like Paul, from the acme of the Third Heaven where you
heard revelations that words may not utter, and you have returned to terra
firma with its duller hues.
You cherish
the fading embers of that spiritual experience, but you find yourself able at
most to tend them only so that they do not go out entirely. You cannot fan them
into a flame. Every worldly event and encounter that necessarily takes your mind
off spiritual realities threatens again and again to extinguish the flame. You
begin to question the validity, the utility, the very reality of a spiritual
"high" that cannot be carried away with you back down the mountain. Perhaps that
is why Moses could not take his shoes with him into the holy zone: he would
never be able to walk away with what he found there!
I recall
reading an article about the T-groups at Esalen, those totally, bluntly honest
encounter groups in which you laid it on the line with others and opened
yourself up to hear the unvarnished truth from them. Participants testified that
their lives had been changed by these weekend encounters, but they soon found
themselves dissatisfied, since as soon as they returned to their families and
their jobs, they discovered the hard way that others were not prepared to play
the game. They found their total honesty unwelcome and unappreciated. How could
they translate their new experience into the real world without losing their
jobs, alienating their loved ones?
I conclude
that these Esalen grads and Oral Roberts made a fundamental error. They should
never have tried to take their "finite province of meaning" out the door with
them, like a towel lifted from the hotel. It should have told them something
when Elijah and Moses vanished from the Mount of Transfiguration and Jesus
stopped glowing. Then there was nothing to do but go. They had to leave the zone
of spiritual ecstasy where it was. It was like in Shangri-La: you can leave
the sacred Himalayan kingdom, but don't try to take a piece of it with you: it
will decay and die as soon as it crosses the enchanted threshold.
I say it was
a mistake to try to take it with them, and further I say that the inability to
take it with you, to cover the workaday world with the bright sheen of the
Transfiguration, does nothing to invalidate the experience you had while you
were there. Let's see if we can understand the experience you have in church or
on a retreat.
As Berger
and Luckmann observe, the worship service is a finite province of meaning, much
like a play; it is a special "eleven o'clock Sunday morning world." We conjure
it into being when the organist begins playing the prelude, when the lay reader
speaks the Call to Worship. It ends with the benediction and the postlude. And
between that rising and falling of the curtain you and I do and say things we
would never do the rest of the week. When else do you sing out loud with other
people, for example?
Of course
some churches don't sing as much or as loudly and enthusiastically as other
churches. Some even employ a full orchestra, others a rock band. Why the
difference? They are "really getting into it," because some have farther to
get into it than others do! Such churches tend to be a Pentecostal or
Charismatic churches, believing in the supernatural, and that the supernatural
may manifest itself directly in their midst. They are busy at the business of,
as I regard it, believing unbelievable things. They must do a lot of singing to
reach escape velocity and to use emotions to fuel the great leap from the world
of radios, electricity, and computers, to the first-century world of angels,
demons, and miracles. And they expect to be able to take it with them when they
leave for home again. Rather like Oral Roberts, they will go out and some of
them will at least make the occasional attempt to gain divine healing, to speak
in tongues of angels and obtain signs and portents from dreams or from some
infallible book.
We do not
have to work ourselves up so much. We are not intending to leap to another
world. We know that our eleven o'clock world is more like a stage play. In fact
that is precisely what it is. All drama began as miracle play, mystery play.
While the curtain is up, while the Bible is read from, the sermon is preached,
the bread and the cup are served, we too imagine ourselves contemporaries of
Jesus Christ, of Moses and Elijah.
But the
nature of our faith is different. As Bultmann implied, and as Bishop Robinson
used to say, literalists have made faith into a cognitive work, a matter of
managing to believe things that you know and can see are not true in the
"paramount reality," the reality out there. And one cannot do that without
cheating, suppressing the truth. Denying your better judgment with the excuse of
"faith." It is a sacrifice of the intellect, of common sense, or at least of
consistency, since unless you are Khomeini, Koresh, Oral Roberts, or one of
those guys wearing a sandwichboard in the bus terminal, you won't really keep
believing it, living as if it were all literally true, once the eleven o'clock
world is over. Many of us are unwilling to make that sacrifice of the intellect,
to undertake that intellectual schizophrenia.
And yet we,
too, even we, have a kind of faith. Of what kind is it? It is precisely the kind
we have when the lights go down and the curtains open, or when we become
engrossed in a compelling play, novel, poem or film. It is what Coleridge called
"that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic
faith." It is the recognition that you have entered a finite province, a
temporary zone of special meaning. We have agreed to be strung along for a
while, to believe as if, to let a part of ourselves believe. We give ourselves
to become characters in the play we are witnessing, the novel we are reading. We
must if we are to take the plot as seriously as the characters are taking it.
Worship,
liturgy, religion, it seems to me, are essentially dramatic and literary in
nature. Religious life is a matter of reading the great fictions and attending
and joining in the great dramas of the Biblical tradition. And when the lights
come up and you go home, you have learned something, you have been changed. You
have consented to be "taken in" by that which you know quite well to be fiction
and artifice. You have become clay in the hands of the author, the director, to
let them shape you, to manipulate your emotions and thus to galvanize your
conscience or open your eyes to some new realization. Aristotle called it
catharsis: the cleansing of the soul of pity and terror by means of induced
pity and terror. Psychodrama has rediscovered this, and I am saying that
religion should rediscover it, too, or, actually, just wake up to what has
really been going on all the time. Role playing is therapeutic, the entrance to
another realm, a world of regeneration and respite, of catharsis and
inspiration. The best commentary on the doctrine of the atonement is the
Communion service, or better yet, the Passion Play.
Are you an
unbeliever? In my book you are not an unbeliever merely because you do not take
literally the script of the Passion Play. If it engages you and inspires you as
you watch it and become caught up in it, then you have the only relevant kind of
belief.
Did you know
that Shakespeare called his plays "The True History of Henry the Fifth" (or
whatever) because people in his day weren't too clear about the difference
between fiction and everyday reality, between the finite province of meaning and
the larger public reality? They imagined that they had to believe the events of
the play were literally true, or they couldn't allow themselves to be drawn into
them. Otherwise they would have scorned them as lies. We smile at such naive
confusion today. But how long will it be before we recognize and repudiate the
very same confusion in the case of religious belief?
When the
service starts and the Bible is read, are you willing to suspend disbelief in
just the same way you do when you watch a great film or play or read a great
book? No more and no less. If you are willing to do that, and to be changed by
the experience as you might be by great art or fiction, then that is all the
faith you need.
Robert M.
Price