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One Priest’s Wondering Beliefs
Progressive Christianity: A Critical Review of Christian Doctrines
John E. Bowers
One Priest’s Wondering Beliefs
Progressive Christianity: A Critical Review of Christian Doctrines
Copyright © 2016 John E. Bowers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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paperback isbn: 978-1-62032-265-9
hardcover isbn: 978-1-62032-929-0
ebook isbn: 978-1-62032-271-0
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This book is dedicated in memoriam of Dr. Fred Karaffa and of Nancy Burdick who were members of the group but died before this printing. And to the late Sr. Cintra Pemberton who caught me in my spiritual desert and showed me the beginnings of my pilgrimage.
Acknowledgments
First thanks are to my Nancy for her understanding, forbearance, patience, endurance, and copy editting while I wrote these pages; my silence and absence were no fun for her. And then to the Rev. Susan Lehman, my friend across many decades, the first soul I found who could tolerate hearing what I was thinking and was so gracious as to share her own thoughts and help me begin sorting through mine. To Professor Ron Santoni PhD, who encouraged me to write this volume, and hung in thoughout the process; his corrections and skill were crucial for me. And then to Marilyn Boldon who has given not only support, but often acted nearly as an administrative assistant as I have produced initial materials. And finally to the Beyond Orthodoxy group of similarly searching members of St. Luke’s Church in Granville, Ohio among whom I shared, and learned and discovered: Dr. Doug Boldon, M. D., Richard Warren, the Rev. Ed Burdick, Russ Potter, Susan Potter, Jo Helen De Pue, Margo Santoni, Jane Karaffa, Sue Black, Sara Jean Wilhelm, Sarah Schaff and Bob Karaffa (Dr. Santoni and Marilyn Boldon are also in this group). Finally, my thanks to the Rev. Canon James Hanisian, a friend who chatted with me over the last months, fine-lining each chapter, pointing to problems in the text, and giving approval even while disagreeing in some places. And to the Very Rev. Richard Ullman who advised and also confirmed that I am not the only retired priest whose beliefs are wandering. And to the Rev. Barry Cotter who helped shape the final form.
And my thanks to our rector, the Rev. Dr. Stephen Applegate, who puts up with us.
Introduction: How in the world did I get here?
4:47am on a Sunday morning in May, 2007: I awake in the dark hours of this morning from a particularly vivid dream. I’ve been sorting files in my office. It seemed only days before the moment of my retirement, and I was cleaning out, going through boxes and boxes of saved stuff (I’m a packrat of ideas). In one box, two bundles of paper napkins, neatly stacked together and bound up: notes of important things to remember from luncheons and conversations, from ruminations, from studies. But they are old, have not even been looked at for years, and really are not worth examining; they probably were not worth keeping. I tossed them. Ted Blumenstein, several years dead, came walking through the office, marveling at some of the stuff I was throwing away. Pictures, short articles, longer ones, chapters out of books, conversations, all sorts of stuff. Susan Lehman was there too, and other old, unidentified friends. Sometimes they were surprised at what all I kept and what I decided to throw away. In my daytime world I have this habit of making booklets of what I choose to garner and keep. And part of what I was doing in my dream was sorting through old collections and deciding what to keep, what was worth gluing together into a makeshift book to be put on my shelf as a referent.
And that is what these pages are about too, sorting through, and deciding what to keep, what is worth binding into my reference books (a relatively small collection), and what is worthy only of the dustbin.
This book is about where this retired and aging Episcopal priest finds himself wandering spiritually today. When I packed it in over sixteen years ago from being a professional churchman, an advocate of orthodox doctrine, within a few years I found myself wandering, theologically, spiritually, exploring. In my younger years I’d heard of priests who’d lost their faith. Now I was acting like one of those but, oddly enough, I didn’t feel I was losing anything. I was questioning, challenging, looking in different directions. But I wasn’t losing anything. Instead I seemed to be wandering into new places, thinking about things in new ways. My fields had broadened. And I felt I was gaining, growing. But I was also pretty sure my fellow clergy could not appreciate where I was wandering. This was not something I thought they’d want to hear from me. So mostly I kept my mouth shut about these things. I tried to broach the subject at lunch one day with my closest clergy friend, also retired. He remained stoically quiet, listened, but said not a word back. I did not venture the subject again. Nor did he. We let it lay right where it had plopped. But now is the time to raise the subject again.
I must lay out one disclaimer: I expect this volume to be ripped to shreds by theologians, philosophers, and professional churchmen as unscholarly and in many ways inaccurate, perhaps even sloppy thinking. But I’m not writing to them. I’m very clear with myself, and with you, that I am no scholar. You will see in these pages brief flourishes of what appear to be scholarly stuff. They are not. They are the remnants of the preacher’s tools I’d accumulated over thirty years, bits and pieces of scholarly stuff I’d captured and stored away. They are useful pitons, but my work is not that of a scholar, but of a spiritual pilgrim. These pages will probably elicit a fair amount of wrath from fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, maybe even some mainline Christians. I am goring many oxen here. So if these pages anger you, just put the book away, I’m not writing to you either. The audience I am trying to reach is those Christians whose beliefs have started to grow beyond the orthodox hedge, who have begun to wonder and question and disagree, who have begun to think, “Hey, wait a minute . . . ” But who feel alone or unfaithful in doing that.
To give you a context for these chapters I’ll tell you how I got to this spiritual place. I did not set out to come here. It just happened. Naturally. No traumatic precipitant. Just a slow wandering, a searching, a groping for what might make sense where the old sense-making was unraveling. A seeking. Until I found myself here. If there were any goads I would identify two, both on the same day. On December 31, 1998 I retired from thirty-four years of active ministry in the Episcopal Church. At the modest retirement party the suffragan bishop made me a present of a book, Jack Miles’s God: a biography which immediately found a resting place on my bookshelf and stayed there untouched for several years. Retired, I was no longer professionally required to stay within the bounds of conventional orthodox doctrine, and as I listened to preachers, I began to wonder (or, perhaps, wander). Several years later I finally picked Miles’s book off my shelf. His conclusion was a bit startling, but sound. At St.Luke’s Church I offered to teach Miles’ book at the Sunday morning adult sessions. To teach something one must become fairly intimate with it, and I came away from those sessions quite shaken by Miles’ book.
In hindsight, I actually had begun this pilgrim wandering many years before. Not quite a decade before retirement I was stumbling across increasingly frequent references to “Celtic Spirituality” and the “Celtic Christian Church,” and had become curious. A few light books roused my anger that the first 800 Celtic years of my Anglican heritage had been suppressed and withheld from me. I explored, learning that the Western version I’d received as gospel was not the sole evolution of Christianity. Meanwhile my understandings of the Christianity I had been preaching were becoming