Hi Possibility —
Thanks for the considered response.
... and your discussions with wil in particular have intrigued me.
Ah ... um ... yes ... Wil and I have history.
But what happens when, in doing this, my developing understanding of God and my interpretation of the bible begins to conflict with church doctrine?
The answer to that can only be discerned when one has both church doctrine and your particular understanding.
Being somewhat in the same position myself, whereas in previous times I might have challenged point by point, I find my myself disposed differently these days. Suffice to say I'm sympathetic to your predicament. All I can offer is my own responses to the issues you air.
When I pray for understanding, and it leads me away from what I was taught, do I trust and follow the spiritual guidance I asked for, or do I pull back to the safety of church doctrine and community like-mindedness?
LOL. I'm never quite sure how 'like-minded' the community might be! If pushed, I doubt no two people would give the same responses to basic questions of faith, even those you push beyond the the disctums of the childhood catechism.
Surely, in a Catholic context, the elephant in the congregation has the church's teachings on birth control writ large upon its flanks!
As an individual, I find it hard to accept the church's teaching that I should surrender entirely to its moral guidance, when it demonstrably fails to live up to its own teaching. Moreso when the teaching seems to depend on legalistic technicalities ... But this is a whole other discussion ... and, before anyone jumps to conclusions, I do not agree with contemporary moral values on the matter either, especially when we broaden the discussion to include abortion and the like.
With so many other Christian denominations available, I took a chance and cautiously followed spiritual guidance in search of an absolute truth, but this path then led me to question even the fundamentals of Christian doctrine. When abandoning these fundamentals actually brought more clarity and unity to scripture, rather than less, I was surprised to say the least.
I can't comment. I would say it's in the nature of doubt to proliferate, to reinforce initial doubts until it seems implacable. When it reaches the point of fundamental disgreement, I think we have stepped over a boundary.
Scripture talking of allowing one demon in, and then seven following. Buddhism has a teaching along the same lines. The issue is 'faith' is not a composite thing, or if it is, it's rather like a game of jenga. Slip out one block and then the whole edifice tumbles.
Bart Ehrman is a case in point. Starts off a fundamentalist Christian, starts to question, ends up an agnostic athiest. It seems to me his particular jenga piece was his belief in the inerrancy of Scripture — not a Catholic belief, I grant you — but once he found one error, everything becomes error.
It's a baby and bathwater situation.
Right now I'm exploring the sensation of being cast adrift.
You're not alone in that. That's the constant and often unwelcome companion of the seeker.
I take exception to any implication that I'm no longer Christian, even though I consider myself to be following the teachings and example of Jesus and the bible.
That rather depends on what teachings, exactly.
In the contemporary dialogue, there are two Christs under discussion. One is Christ the man, the champion of the underdog, a moral exemplar among men. The other is Christ the God, Incarnate of the Father, Second Person of the Trinity, the Logos, the Word made flesh.
Regarding the first, the most ardent athiest finds no problem. Indeed any humanist with a sense of altruism would assert the most famous and fundamental Christian maxim: 'Love thy neighbour', but that does not make him/her a Christian, and s/he would and do rigorously defend themselves against that claim by arguing, quite rightly, that the principle is universal — it's there in the most ancient texts, it's there in Egypt about 1500 years before Christ, it's there in Jewish Levitical law. It's there in every time and place.
And subsequently there are many who self-identify with the human Christ in accepting the humanism but dismissing the mystical Christ as superstition, ignorance or what have you, or at best regarding the texts as a metaphorical narrative expressing some kind of psychospiritual symbolism that has itself been shaped according to a single or multiple other-than-doctrinal ideologies.
This Christ seems to me to be 'the Christ of the critical minimum' — 'what's the least I have to assent to and still call myself a Christian?' and, it would seem, not a lot. The Golden Rule would suffice for many.
Christianity perceived as an identity that must be preserved is counter-productive to what Jesus taught, in my opinion.
Well I am sorry, but I cannot agree with that. Were that the case, Christianity would have vanished somewhere in the second century. The New Testament would never have been written, or rather, the canonical books would be buried among so many other books as to render the message as essentially 'whatever you will' and thus, in the end, meaningless.
While it is true that Christ argues vehemently against Pharisaical legalism and a heartless expression of God's Law, and I argue this within the context of my own tradition this pharisaism is still evident — that is a flaw of human nature, not of the tradition as such.
Christ argued, with conviction and indeed vehemance, against those who challenged His identity. It caused the Jews to regard Him as a blasphemer and they sought to stone Him more than once, it was the root of His self-declaration before Pilate and His self-belief and self-identity led to His crucifixion. Indeed, it is summed up in stark and startling fashion by Saul of Tarsus when, whatever happened on the road to Damascus, his interpretation of his epiphany was the phrase 'why does thou persecute me?'
I personally don't think it matters whether or not we believe in the trinity, in the divinity of Jesus or his bodily resurrection - as long as we believe and follow Jesus' example as a human being in an intimate relationship with God as indwelling and omnipresent spirit. This is more the essence of Christianity without boundaries, to me. This is my anchor.
Personally, I rather think it does ... without it we're just talking ethics.
As far as I'm concerned, the rest of it tends to get in the way – it's a whole bunch of boundaries and limitations that prevent humanity from developing an awareness and understanding of our own (frighteningly) colossal potential and responsibility as consciousness in connection with all matter through the eternal, limitless source of all life, power, wisdom and possibility that is 'God'. That's the best way I can describe it in my experience.
It depends on who's 'God' we're talking about. Strip all the God-stuff out of Scripture and what are we left with? Where do we get our ideas of God from? These are the questions I pose to myself. And too often I find it's a God who accommodates Himself to my particular disposition.
God to me is very much God other than myself. A mystery in every sense of the word. When I strip out all the 'boundaries' and 'limitations' defined in doctrine, the particular Christian mystical elements, then it seems to me I'm left with a rather anodyne God that can't be anything more than the projection of my own human ideals, not so much a God as the deification of my hopes and ideals and notions of 'being' and 'consciousness' that, even there, defines God within the context of myself, the God of the best of every human quality, and in the end there is no actual God at all, just idealised man.
