Last month, the BBC ran a story on their website about a Dutch Protestant church
pastor, Reverend Klaas Hendrikse, who had some remarkable things to say (particularly given his position in the church). Here is the full story: Dutch rethink Christianity for a doubtful world.
A couple noteworthy quotations:
“Make the most of life on earth, because it will probably be the only one you get.”. He goes on to say that he has no “talent” for believing in the afterlife. “No, for me our life, our task, is before death.”
“When it happens, it happens down to earth, between you and me, between people, that’s where it can happen. God is not a being at all… it’s a word for experience, or human experience.”
Hendrikse is not alone. Apparently, in his denomination and six others in the Netherlands, as many as one-in-six clergy are either agnostic or atheist. And still they maintain their connections and identity as Christians.
It is not so shocking. Christianity, and religion in general, is not totally consumed with dogmatic belief and supernatural claims. Some atheist opponents of religion would like to speak as if all religious people were crazy, super-fundamentalists, but it’s just not the case. Many come to religion and remain therein, not because they believe in all the fantastical claims, but because the mythology and community provides a meaning-rich foundation for understanding and living their lives.
In any case, Hendrikse (and thinkers like him) are not new or surprising. Many throughout the centuries have tried to cast off the baggage of historical Christian doctrine in favor of a more open, less literal belief system. I, myself, wrestled with notions of a non-being “God” (c.f. The City Sleeps) before finally hanging my hat up and abandoning Christianity altogether. And for every radical non-theistic, non-literalistic thought I had, I found someone else had already written about it. Some forms of religion may resist change; but not all are so rigid.
Traditionalists may scream about how Hendrikse and his ilk are perverting the Gospel and have nothing meaningful to say (because they have abandoned “the Truth” or some equally cliched wording). Indeed, many atheists might agree with the traditionalists, insofar as laying the charge that these Christian reformists are “not really Christian at all.” That, since they do not believe in a literal “man-in-the-sky” God, they should just join the atheist crowd.
But I disagree with both groups. I think a re-imagining of Christianity, beyond the superstition and the doctrine which demands believers shut their eyes to the way the world really is, is long overdue. Two-thousand (plus) year old beliefs, regurgitated yet again for consumption, are not what is needed; nor are these ancient ties going to keep Christianity alive in the future. The faith needs not only to recognize that its tired answers are no longer efficacious, but also that the questions it is asking have expired. New questions and new answers (ones that don’t demand we shut our eyes to reality) are the only things that will carry our religions into the future.
Since I am an atheist, it might seem odd that I would support the efforts of figures like Hendrikse, Spong, and others who seek to recreate Christianity for a (post)modern world. Shouldn’t I rather enjoy seeing the fundamentalists and literalists cling to their sinking ship and drag the whole mess into the abyss? After all, shouldn’t my goal be a world free of religion, even free-thinking religion? To that, I can only say, “I may not believe in God, but neither do I believe that religion, all religion, every religion, is incompatible with a thoughtful, compassionate life.”. I am not religious, but I am also not an evangelist of atheism. I am not egotistical enough to believe that my conclusions are the only conclusions that should exist.
And, indeed, I think too many atheists fail to understand the importance of story, of narrative, of mythology in human life. Story gives us a means of understanding and shaping our lives, and, at least for now, the atheist movement has failed to take seriously the power of story, or the desire for mythology to answer the deeper longings, uncertainties, and insecurities of the human psyche. Story is powerful, meaningful, important; and secularism is somewhat lacking, in my experience, of this sort of life-shaping story.
So, if a group of Christians want to rewrite their central stories to make them more tolerant, more thoughtful, more responsible, and more compatible with modern thought, I see little reason why I should oppose them. Instead, I applaud those with the courage to reshape their religions in positive, life-affirming ways.
Unfound Places 