One Priest’s Wondering Beliefs. John E. Bowers

To read James’s book had occurred to me a few times previously, but I may have been shied off by an early experience of a flaky parishioner who was into paranormal stuff and engaged in automatic writing; her correspondent was William James. So after I retired I finally picked up Varieties to read. It was not an easy read; it forced me to re-sort some of my theological thinking. In these twenty-four lectures James tackled the psychology of religious experiences. A hundred years later, there is nothing radically striking to us in this work, but reading it set me to the task of organizing anew much of my thinking about religious experiences, the spiritual life, and my own spiritual development, not just from a faith point of view, but from the vantage of early psychology as well. James did not challenge or attack religious belief and experiences, but rather examined them from a nonjudgmental outsider’s vantage (though I think he was a Christian believer himself.) I came away from his lectures with a deeper and clearer understanding that there are two fundamentally different religious orientations. He called the one “healthy-mindedness,” a dedicatedly positive and affirming orientation toward the good. The other he called “the sick soul,” an unshakeable orientation to dwell on the evil aspects. The first sees man and the world as fundamentally good, the other sees man and life as irretrievably bad. This second type of soul is the one inclined toward the conversion experience, understanding that the only available salvific force from unrelenting evil is God; the “healthy-minded” soul is inclined not to conversion, but to grow gradually in his faith. Through James’s eyes I could understand why the two are so irreconcilably different in their makeups and outlooks, and unable even to comprehend or be at peace each other. In passing, James also pointed my attention briefly toward the mystical experience.

      This book alone was not earth-shaking for me. But James’s analysis did set me to re-think and draw some new conclusions from my observations about spirituality and religiosity, and about my own spiritual experiences and yearnings. In essence I suppose it urged me onward in the spiritual pilgrimage which I had already begun after my retirement (that is, when my profession no longer seemed to prohibit my exploring far beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy). This, my first club-hauler.

      At my retirement party Bishop Ken Price had given me my second club-hauler, a book he liked and thought I might find interesting. It was Jack Miles’s God: A Biography.The title alone is jarring, as was intended; how can one presume to write a biography of God? The book had lain on my shelf untouched and outside of my curiosity for several years when for some unfathomable reason I picked it up. I read with fascination. It was definitely inside my ballpark, i.e., it accepts the Hebrew Scriptures unquestioningly. Miles begins by stipulating his premise that the order of the books as presented in the Hebrew (the Masoretic text a.k.a. the Tanach) Scriptures is not mere happenstance (certainly not chronological), but is itself the editor’s statement about God as profoundly theological as the words of the texts themselves. Miles then guides us through each of the books in Masoretic order, focusing solely on the nature of the god therein presented: “What does God say? “What does God do?” and “How is God described?” This approach began to make order for me out of what had formerly been a chaos, God appearing so radically differently in various parts of the Scriptures. I read with interest and fascination. Then a year or so later I volunteered to teach Miles’s book in a short adult series at St.Luke’s Church; that effort forced me to really internalize Miles’s book, not simply read it while nodding yes. I was profoundly shaken. I understood now a pattern in God’s various behaviors, and even more, I very much disliked and disapproved of the God I found there. These Scriptures, which I adore, taught me a god whom I would not choose to worship, adore, or be obedient to.

      I summarize the course, and therein a god very much in flux. We first encounter God in the two creation stories. In the first God is remote, majestic, solitary and absolutely omnipotent; in the second God is little more than a bumbling incompetent, and is vengeful to boot. While I prefer the second, I do not like or trust that God. After the first eleven chapters of Genesis God becomes little more than a family friend to Abraham’s lineage, and a not terribly helpful friend at that. In the second book, Exodus we encounter a quite different, ferociously militant God, brutal and unrelenting in organizing, leading and flogging this people whom God had chosen for himself, but who had not really chosen God for themselves. In the third, Deuteronomy God is at his absolute zenith, militarily competent but a harsh and very demanding lord. But thereafter God appears to be in decline (in my eyes, not Miles’s appraisal) In the four books about the kings God tinkers and complains, [so-and-so] “. . . did evil in the eyes of YHWH” is the drumbeat in these stories. And then in the books of the prophets God seems to have a mental breakdown, alternately and vehemently berating, cajoling and bemoaning (sounds bipolar!) And from that point God seems to diminish and wane through the story, appearing less powerful, less present, and less a part of the story until at last in Esther God is neither present nor even mentioned!

      Now I had to take a deep, deep breath, and begin to ponder. This is not the God I had thought it was. Nor is this an attractive God. Not a god I want. The God of the Christian writings is somewhat more desirable (though not in John’s Revelation). But still not the God I had thought I was worshiping. Gradually my mind and my spirit began to watch my swirl of spiritual notions from a different vantage point. What if the God who is portrayed in our Scriptures is not so much the God but is more the god whom the people need at that moment in their history? That makes some sense of the changing-ness of the God of Hebrew Scriptures, and allows an even different God during the time of early Christian formations. So God, or at least the god we worship, perhaps is relative, a perception shaped by the needs of our era and culture.

      The next club-hauler that came to my hand was Karen Armstrong’s A History of God. Armstrong’s purview is broader yet. She is primarily interested in the God of Scriptures, which takes in Jewish, and Muslim understandings as well as Christian (and she takes some sidelong glances at Buddhism as well), and she looks at the whole scope of writings, not just the Holy Scriptures of each. Her task is to trace how the concept of god changes and evolves through the course of the history of each religion. She presents a breathtaking vista. Tracing the history of each of these three religions in turn, she shows how they develop separately (though not without contact and mutual influence), but in parallel. Their patterns come out similarly. And I began to understand through her eyes that the god we know at any point in history is the god whom we need at that particular point in our history. Obversely, the Holy Scriptures are not so much the story of our relationship with the god as the history of the evolution of our perceptions of God, perceptions founded not so much on observations of the god in action as on what we need from God at that moment in our history. The god who stands behind all that is really not very visible at all in those writings. And what we do get is very much an acculturalized version of the God; for Christians a Trinity, for Jews a YHWH, for Muslims an ’Allah, versions that evolve as the cultures evolve.

A new book came on the scene, Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God and I picked it up. Wright is a journalist, a writer, a cultural evolutionist and a devotee of games theory who is widely read with a prodigious grasp. Wright3 begins by looking at god as witnessed in the most primitive societies we can reconstruct, the hunter-gatherer groups of early humans. And he traces the concept of god through the evolution of societies, and finally to monotheism. He then takes on the Hebrew Scriptures through the eyes of historical criticism which begins to date the several threads of those Scriptures (J, E D and P, et al.) glancing at how the political situation at those dates shapes the separate stories which are then woven together into one as though it were a single text, creating a near-chaotic jumble (e.g., Does Noah invite two of each species into the ark, or seven? Both lines are in the final copy of his story). He looks at the several threads in the early Christian writings and their several emphases. And then he looks at Islam in its two phases of Mohammad’s life. Much of his understanding about how religion evolves is built around his understanding of game theory, of zero-sum games vs. non-zero sum games. And the way he puts it together makes sense to me. In the end Wright allows that his own conclusion is to be, not atheistic, but agnostic. Does he believe in God? Probably not in the traditional sense, he allows; but as one who sees culture as evolving, he thinks he detects in that evolution a moral axis built into the created universe. And if we want to call that “God,” that is as close as he can come to believing.

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