Reshaping Christianity in the Netherlands

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.

Making Up God

When I was struggling through the last months of my faith, I turned to process theology and more liberal, less literalistic conceptions of God and religion. As I did so, I found myself in a strange intellectual and emotional world where the walls of orthodoxy and tradition seemed to vanish. Indeed, even the “floor” of my Christian faith seemed removed, leaving me in a state of suspension, in which I relied only upon my own experiences and thoughts, and the experiences and thoughts of other disenfranchised “believers” to guide me. At some point, I remarked to my pastor that my endeavors, without the crutch of strict doctrine, left me feeling like I was “making it all up.” I could not cling to the God-images of my tradition because they were (and continue to be) simply incompatible with my intellectual life. They were unbelievable, irrational, unconvincing. And so, with his encouragement, I began to ask myself, “Why shouldn’t I pursue these new images of God, even if their source is my own intuition and deep reflection?”

In the end, I abandoned all notions of God-as-literal-reality. But along the way, I came face to face with a thought that continues to scratch at the periphery of my spiritual life: If religion is created, and God-images are the explanatory projections of other human beings’ experiences of the “something-more” of life, then why are ancient myths treated as more valid than modern ones? Why should the modern skeptic (given that she has sufficient interest in the subject, and that she is dissatisfied with a purely secular ideology) not engage in crafting their own conceptions of what it might mean to say “God?”

I must admit that I am sometimes deeply dissatisfied with the answers that many modern atheists provide to questions of existence, meaning, and fulfillment. Some days, I hate being an atheist because it can be a painful and depressing concept to think that this is all there is–this being a purely biological and evolutionary existence in which there is no intrinsic meaning, no intrinsic hope. Only a brief and difficult journey that ends in nothing more than annihilation. It is a crippling thought, at least for me, to think that all that I am, and all that my loved ones are, will simply cease to be. That my wife Mackenzie, with all her personality and internal beauty and intellectual brilliance, will one day vanish into a sea of nonexistence, with no part of her carrying on into something else. It seems like such an unimaginable waste.

But, as I stand in that moment of emotional and existential uncertainty and consider turning back toward belief, again I am confronted with a problem: as much as I may feel unsatisfied with the outcome of a purely atheistic ideological system, I still cannot return to religion because there is simply too much superstitious and unbelievable baggage that accompanies the world of religious explanation. Heaven and hell, angels and demons, sinners and righteous separated out by an all-seeing, all-knowing God-figure–all of it rests totally beyond the realm of the acceptable for me. To believe again in these things would require a complete abandonment of my intellectual life. And that is something I am unwilling to do.

Perhaps the answer to my existential dilemma lies in the willingness to engage in imaginative rethinking of spiritual explanations. God, for me, is not (and very likely can never be again) a literal being, a personal force, or an internal coach which prompts and directs life toward some noble end. And the afterlife, similarly, cannot be reasonably conceived of as a literal place in which the souls of the dead, despite the total cessation of all processes that made them alive, mingle and carry on. Does this mean that God must mean nothing to me? That the afterlife must be conceived of only as a void? Must it be one or the other–accept wholesale either religion or atheism?

I do not think so. Maybe, if one finds the courage to entertain notions that the transcendence we experience as humans is more than psychological mind-tricks, one can find a sense of satisfaction in these difficult questions of existence. Maybe, if I am willing to “make God up” a bit, to look beyond the apparent and obvious and to welcome the sensation of mystery in the universe, I can find a creative outlet for the haunting sense that there must be something more. That life is not simply a terrifying tragedy which sees us wandering through events trying to find their meaning, developing as interesting and potentially beautiful human beings, only to meet our final and total end in eradication.

I do not think that God, as this figure has traditionally been explained, is the answer to our spiritual longing. I do not think that Heaven is the solution to the tragedy of death. But I am willing to entertain the idea that what is now apparent to us, in this scientific age, is not the ultimate answer. I do not think it is mandatory, given our current knowledge, to conclude that we are nothing but genetic machines. That life leads to death, and that beyond death there is nothing whatsoever.

Bruce Ledewitz posits that the biblical authors looked at their world, at their experiences, and labeled the something-more of life “God.” God was their answer to the questions that haunted them. For them as well as for us, “Maybe God just meant they did not know.”