Mystical Seeker

How does being nice relate to how we resist the powers that oppress us? What would being nice entail? The dominant forces in the Empire, those who deny social justice, and those who oppress, might not consider it very "nice" when we resist them, even nonviolently, even peacefully. Is nonviolence the same as being nice?

We could do worse than have a world full of people following Jesus's ethics. That being said, my own belief is that Jesus's teachings were not just ethical, but also social, political, and theological, and I think that all of those different aspects of his teachings were wrapped up together in the Kingdom of God. To be a follower of Jesus means, in my view, to take seriously all of those teachings. I believe that Jesus preached and lived the inbreaking Kingdom of God by challenging the earthly Kingdom of Rome. It isn't just about being nice. It is about living out God's kingdom on earth. It is about bringing about social justice, it is about challenging religious orthodoxy when it oppresses us, and it is about understanding that loving God means loving one's neighbor and creating a peaceful, just world. My two cents worth, anyway.

Joseph Spong wrote in Why Christianity Must Change or Die that steeples are an architectual expression of reaching heavenward, and so he objects to steeples as representing an outdated world view that placed heaven and God physically above the world in the sky, instead of immanent within the world. I have no idea if this is Michael Durall's objection or not. I was a participant for many years in the Quaker tradition, and I know that the Quaker meetinghouses I visited had no stained glass or organs, and during meetings for worship I generally sat in chairs rather than pews. But those sorts of things were largely a manifestation of Quaker simplicity. If you aren't a Quaker, I really don't see any problem with stained glass or organs. I do think that churches can be ostentatious and grandiose in their design some times, but I also think that art can uplift the soul. As for potlucks, I really don't see why that would cause any problem.

I have to admit that I am not particularly concerned about how conservative Christians would brand me or my denomination if there were a realignment. One major reason why I am sympathetic towards the idea of a realignment is so that I can go my own way in peace without having to justify my presence in a denomination to its conservative elements. Conservatives are going to brand me regardless of whether I am in their denomination or outside it. I would rather that they branded me from another denomination than from within my own. If they aren't a part of my denomination, then I really don't have to listen to them, I don't have to subject myself to their attacks against my right to be in the same denomination as theirs, I don't have to justify my presence in the denomination to them, and, quite frankly, their intolerant attacks against me and those like me just become irrelevant. It makes all the difference in the world to me whether such attacks come from within or from the outside.

I think you make an important point about the importance of not simply replacing one dogma with another. It is inevitable that there will be differences of theological opinion among progressive Christians. The question then remains as to how you bring people together, given those differences, and how you decide which differences matter and which ones don't. I actually happen to agree with Spong thatt here is no physical intervention by God (if that is indeed what he believes). But I do have other differences with Spong's conception of God. Spong rejects what he calls "theism", instead believing in a Tillich-like God who is the Ground of Being. What this means exactly in Spong's case isn't entirely clear to me. He seems to deny being a pantheist, but when push comes to shove he also seems to be denying all conceptions of transcendence in the Divine nature, and he is instead equating God with some truer, deeper reality of the existing world, which sounds an awful lot like what pantheists believe (I remember once having a pantheist telling me that God represents a truer, deeper reality of the world--the analogy he gave was that God is like the ocean, and we are like the waves.) I, on, the other hand, am a panentheist, and not a pantheist, and while I agree with Spong's criticisms of theologies that stress transcendence over immanence (the idea of God "out there" intervening in the world here), I do believe in a God who is both the sum of the world and also something more. I accept transcendence without accepting omnipotence, and Spong seems to be equating the true, which I believe is a fallacy. I'm not sure how much my differences with Spong really matter, since I do agree with much of his criticisms of traditional, orthodoxy Christianity. Ironically, Spong's prayers to an impersonal "Ground of Being" and my prayers to a personal panentheistic God may prove to be similar in practice, since both Spong and I reject the idea of divine intervention. On the other hand, while I agree much more with Borg's theology (Borg has explicitly described himself as a panentheist), Borg does believe in the efficacy of intercessionary prayer (through some sort of mysterious process that doesn't seem to involve God, as far as I can tell), which I do not. So in a theoretical sense, I am closer to Borg than to Spong, but in a practical sense, it appears that I am closer to Spong than I am to Borg. For me, this is a crucial element of my theology; I think that not believing in divine intervention or in the power of prayer to effect change results in a fundamentally different outlook on how one views God, and the religious life, and as such it brings forth a unique spirituality. On the other hand, to me it is also important to believe in a personal God, and that also colors the way my religion unfolds. All of which suggests that I will always remain, to use a term of Spong's, a "believer in exile", unable to really find a church that will exactly work for me.

I have not been a fan of Huston Smith since he started criticizing process theology in some of his writings.

It is worth pointing out that Paul probably didn't write the letter of Ephesians. Although it is not considered as dubious as the pastoral epistles of Titus, 1 Timothy, and 2 Timothy, it is definitely in the "doubtful" category. It is possible that the anti-egalitarian ideas expressed in Ephesias represented a backlash against some of the more egalitarian ideas that were prevalent in earlier Christianity, including what is found in some of Paul's bona fide epistles. It is worth noting that Paul wrote in Romans 16:7 of Junia, a woman, as a highly regarded apostle. Some conservatives have tried to work around that embarassing passage by interpreting it to mean that she was merely known by the apostles. I suppose just goes to show how ingrained sexism can be in certain segments of Christianity.

The difference between scientific paradigms and theological paradigms is that the scientific method isn't used in matters of theology. Theological dogma is not subjected to repeated scientific trials, using empirical methods, and published in peer reviewed journals. Evolution is true to the best of our knowledge because the scientific method discovered it to be true. Furthermore, there is no real debate between bona fide scientists on the validity of evolution; scientific revolutions really take place as a result of the voluntary decision by scientists to accept the new paradigm (a la Thomas Kuhn.) Some other scientific theories, by contrast, really are debated and controversial, and remain so until, and only until, one side voluntarily accepts the other paradigm as valid. Creationists make a false claim about evolutionists "imposing" their beliefs, when in fact there is no such imposition taking place. This isn't the same as what I see having taken place in Christianity. Note that I am distinguishing here between theological dogma and religious studies scholarships, which is or at least can be scientific. So when a scholar estimates the date of the writing of Mark to be 70 AD or so, there is at least some science that lies behind that. That is different from declaring the Trinity to be true. There is no application of the scientific method to the Nicene Creed. Whether or not one thinks that the doctrines of the trilogy make logical sense is one thing, but there isn't any real correlation between that and, for example, evolution. Ultimately, the doctrines of what became "orthodox" Christianity were imposed on Christianity as a whole by one faction. Whether or not the new orthodoxy solved problems depends on who you talked to. But the winning side got to decide what was true and what wasn't.

I think that was very well stated, and it summarizes my own views very closely. What could be more inspirational than to have a human example of someone who pointed the way to the Kingdom of God? If others feel the need to believe in miracle stories, the virgin birth, the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, or in his literal resurrection, then more power to them. But for me and many others, the power of the religion is not in literalizing myths but in the way that Jesus epitomized the religious life as it should be led. By following not just his teachings, but his example, one can see a way to live in communion with God--and taking away his divinity doesn't make his teachings less true or his life less inspirational. It is my belief that the early Christians, including Paul, did not believe in a physical resurrection as a literal historical event, but rather they experienced Jesus post-crucifixion as a visionary and mystical presence (the evolution of how the resurrection was viewed can be traced by moving through the various and contradictory post-resurrection accounts, starting with Paul's bona fide epistles, to Mark, to Matthew, to Luke, and finally to John), and yet they found power and inspiration in his life and death. The construction of various literalizations of the myths around Jesus is not something that many of us in this postmodern world can do anymore. Instead, we are able to find a new kind of faith that moves beyond the old dogmas, dogmas that simply don't make sense to us.

In fact, early Christians disagreed often among themselves about the nature of Jesus and the nature of God. There was no "shared" theology on these issues. On the contrary, the internecine squabbles were quite serious, and they lasted for a long time. Marcionites, Ebionites, Docetists, Gnostics--the list goes on and one. Some believed that Jesus was fully human but not divine. Some believed that Jesus was fully divine but not human. The nature of God was also disputed. You see considerable evidence of these squabbles in the New Testament epistles, which were often written with the intention of promoting a position on various matters, thus indicating that such differences were there from the beginning (for example, 1 John was critical of docetism). Once a victory was declared, the winning side got to declare itself "orthodox" and all the others as heretics, and of course those scriptures that supported their position were eventually included into the canon, while others were not. Two excellent and well-researched resources on this subject are Bart Ehrman's book, "Lost Christianities" and L. Michael White's book "From Jesus to Christianity".

Interesting question. I'm not sure how to answer that myself. For me, some elements of orthodox Christian dogma really do grind against my ears. Having grown up in a fundamentalist church, I feel like I've been there, done that, and I'm tired of feeling like a lone voice against a tide of beliefs that fundamentally run counter to my understanding of the world. Do I expect to be in a community where everyone sees things exactly like I do? Of course not. But it would be nice to at least be in a community where the disagreements that do exist lives within a context of a paradigm that I am comfortable with. I feel like Spong, Borg, and others have gone a long way towards pointing us to a new paradigm that I could accept. I sometimes feel like liberal Christianity is caught between paradigms, unfortunately. To get back to the example of Unitarian Universalism--if you want to be challenged by being exposed to beliefs different than your own, that is probably a good place for that, since it revels in its diversity. Again, to me, it isn't necessarily the idea of exposure different beliefs or practices, so much as it is to be part of a process of free and liberating spirituality, that is open and non-dogmatic, grounded in Christian traditions without adhering slavishly to it or taking its myths (like the virgin birth or resurrection) literally. Some practices hold little appeal for me--my Quaker background, for example, have reinforced my aversion towards rituals like communion or baptism, but I could probably live with them even if they aren't my thing. But it is the literalization of myths that I have the biggest problem with. I want to be part of a religion that is both spiritual and sensible. Mobilizing for social action is a good thing, in my view. By their fruits shall you know them, and those are good fruits. If a community mobilizes for social action, it is doing God's work in some small way, in my view, even without the great spirituality. I think there is room for relgious communities that are about community and social action. I have no problem with such communities. I would just like to be part of something more. I feel a religious thirst that isn't being properly quenched.

I have nothing against the UU denomination per se. It does seem to satisfy what some people are looking for, and for those individuals, I think it's fine that they have found a home. And it is possible that some congregations are more spiritually focused than others are, or even that some are more Christian than others (some research on the UU Christian Fellowship indicates that there are some churches with a Christian focus.) But I personally never been fully satisfied when I've attended UU services. It just doesn't quite meet what I am looking for.

A book on Islam that I would highly recommend is "No god but God" by Reza Aslan.

I believe that it is certainly possible to get people to be challenged and to follow a spiritual path without giving them a dogma that they can't accept. And it isn't simply a case of either following Jesus or having no religion at all; if that were true, the world wouldn't have so many non-Christian religions out there. I can't speak for David, who is now (as I understand it) gone from this forum, but in response to his own quest I offered my own take on it; and what I sought was something that had the spirituality of mainline Christianity (which I see lacking in UU churches) while eschewing the more traditional premodernist dogma and its associated creeds. Far from being a mere academic exercise, my own desire was indeed to pursue a spiritually based religious community, but one grounded in a new paradigm. If I wanted to participate in a more dryly academic response to religious impulses, I could always attend a UU church. I was looking for something different.

Perhaps the next question is why creeds are even necessary. Not all denominations have creeds--for example, Quakers don't (and one of the reasons I was attracted to Quakerism many years ago was the fact that it is a creedless faith.)

I understand your feelings of missing the certainty. After a fundamentalist upbringing, I had a period in my early adulthood of atheism, followed by a desire to rediscover religion starting in my late 20s. I found that I really did miss the certainty, but I also knew that it was impossible to recapture that certainty, which was the hallmark (as I see it) of an immature faith. It put me in a conundrum--I would read religious literature of many faiths (Christianity as well as others), I would attend Unitarian Church services, and I would explore religion in other ways as well. The fact that I could never accept the dogmas often got in the way, unfortunately. Sometimes I would feel myself just touching the Divine without immersing myself into it . I think that this made it worse in a way--sometimes I felt like I got a taste of it without ever getting the full meal. And yet, that being said, the reality is that I do have moments when I do feel connected with God, that sense of awe and so forth, but I think that part of the problem is that I haven't found a religious community that I have really connected with and with which I could share my own theological views and my spirituality, and I actually think that religious community is an important way of nurturing one's connection with God. There are times when I do feel a comforting presence, and there was even one time when I felt like God had posed a question to me one day while I was half-asleep (long story). But there isn't the all-consuming sense that one might have if one is certain of all the answers. Is it possible to feel connected to God even if one has doubts? I think the reason I have been seeking a religious community is out of hope that this is the means through which it is possible. But I haven't yet found a community to suit me.

When I was 16, after having been brought up in a fundamentalist church, I told my parents that I was an atheist. My mother insisted that I go to church with my parents anyway, but during Sunday School I would sneak out and wander around town as my little act of rebellion (my parents never knew, to my knowledge, that I did that). I resented that she didn't respect my ability to make a decision about religion at that age. The irony is that I went to a church that believed that baptism was only to be performed on those old enough to make a decision to commit themselves to Christ--which I did when I was in sixth grade. So how was it that 10 or 11 is old enough to make a decision to be an Christian and become baptised, but 16 isn't old enough to make a decision to be an atheist? I always resented that decision by my mother, and my own road towards rediscovering a non-fundamentalist spirituality only took place many years later. I have no children of my own, but if I did, I would certainly respect their ability to make informed decisions about religion.

Sure. I might even be willing to sit through the occasional music service just for a change of pace.

I have been on vacation and away from a computer for a while, and over that time have had a few chances to mull over some of this discussion and maybe clarify some of my own thoughts on this issue. I agree with the above sentiment that symbols are necessary. Without symbols, without the use of words and myths to convey mystical experiences before the presence of God, then I think you can have no religion--at best, you have a lot of private mystical experiences, but without a way of sharing our experience of God together, there is no religious community. We as finite and limited humans require words and myths and symbols to communicate, however inadequately, to one another our experience with the infinite reality of God. (Even identifying "God" as being part of that mystical experience is in and of itself a way of characterizing the experience--not every mystic might necessarily see God as part of their experience.) We use these intermediate and limited means of conveying the religious experience because those are the tools that we have at our disposal for communicating with one another that we can only inadequately characterize. But I think the key point is that, in the contemporary age, we cannot take seriously any religion that literalizes those myths, symbols, and words. The old creeds that Christians recite ring hollow for many of us. Many of us, for example, cannot believe in the literal truths of myths about a virgin birth or a literal resurrection of Christ. At least I know that I cannot. So what I would seek in a religious community is one that accepts the value of myths and symbols without literalizing them, that is open to pluralistics approaches and that does not claim an exclusive right to any set of myths or symbols. Not everyone need choose the same symbols, if some prefer certain symbols for cultural or other reasons. Thus some may prefer to use Christ-language and Christ-symbols and the Bibles as part of their worship practices, while others may prefer to use other religious traditions, and others still may choose to mix them freely. Some may prefer silence, while others prefer music (I actually have no use for music as part of worship, but I am probably in the minority on that point.) The community joins together in its diversity of worship styles because each of them understands that these are just symbols that they are using to mediate their relationship with God. As long as they don't literalize the symbols, they can join together in a greater community. Because it rejects literalism, that means that it is not a form of syncretism. Even a religion like the Baha'i, which I certainly have a great deal of respect for, essentially, creates its own literalism. Bahai's, as much as they respect other religions, have their own literally interpreted myths about Bahaullah and what they call the manifestations of God. This dogma about specific prophets or religious revelations is something that I reject. The other thing that I would seek in a religious community is one that is grounded in rationalism. It rejects the literal truth of stories of divine miracles because it doesn't believe that God operates that way in the word. Science teaches us much about the way that God works in the world. We know that the world operates according to certain principles, that the universe has expanded from some initial Big Bang billions of years ago, that life evolved on this planet; and this knowledge teaches us something about the nature of God. What it teaches us, exactly, of course, is something that a religious community can collectively try to discover. I think it is clear that what I would seek in a religious community is not the same as what David is looking for. Regarding my views on the use of symbols to describe religious experiences, I found an excellent passage by Marcus Borg in his book "Resurrection: Myth or Reality?": Words are never neutral or obective. Therefore words can never be used as if they themselves were the truth of the experience that one is trying to relate. Words are never the truth. They are only the medium of the truth, the means of communication used by one person to convey to another the experiences that have defined and given meaning to the one speaking. Words become the vehicles by which experiences are shared. Words point to reality; they do not capture reality. So it is that no words employed by anyone at any time can be objective, infallible, inerrant, or strictly literal. To apprehend them as such is to destroy, distort, bind, and violate the content of the experience that those words seek to communicate. These linguistic facts present serious problems and challenges to every institutional religious system in every age. Every religious system has historically built and maintained its authority on the claim that its tradition was different and somehow spoke objectively for a God who was perceived to be both eternal and unchanging. When employed in religious history, this argument has proved to be both powerful and wondrously circular. Its component parts include, first, the claim that the God acknowledged in a particular religious tradition is the only true God, and, thus, that all other gods are false. It asserts, second, that this true God has been made known in a direct way to a particular faith community by divine revelation, the veracity of which can be challenged no more than God can be challenged. Finally, since this religious tradition is portrayed as the sole reciipient of the divine revelation, and since its leadres are the primary interpreters of this God, they alone can relate to the people the truth they have received. The circle is now complete, and these designated religious leaders now make the claim that they speak with the infallible voice of God and that this voice brooks no challenge and will entertain no debate. What I advocate is breaking out of that paradigm that Spong describes above, which specifically means no more claiming that the words capture a literal reality about God. As Spong says in the same book, "Religious traditions are strange combinations of subjective descriptions of actual events plus mythological interpretations of those events. It is only when an actual event enters inot and is carried by a mythological interpretation that the event is finally remembered at all." I agree that we need the myths--but I also agree that we should never at any moment forget that they are myths. The moment we do that, I believe, the religion loses credibility. This is the problem that I have with all existing Christian denominations; they retain their tired old creeds, and recite them as if they are true, and even if many participants no longer believe those creeds, they recite them anyway. On the other hand, I am not attracted to a denomination like Unitarianian Universalism either, where I see the monotheistic and spiritual roots of Christianity dissolved and washed away into a melange of what I view as spiritual blandness (not all UUs would agree with my characterization of their faith, but that is my overall take on it.) I am seeking a niche in between those two religions. I don't know if it is possible to really fill such a niche, or if I am only dreaming.

Maybe I should clarify my point when I talk about how religion should be consistent with a modern rational understanding. The old concept of God was as a patriarchal authority figure, a transcendent presence who was identified by male names, who dispensed favors according to his whims--which is to say that he intervened in the normal operation of the world when he felt like it and answered the occasional intercessionary prayer by using his omnipotent power. This image of God presented a lot of problems even in the pre-modern world, namely because it was hard to reconcile this image of God with the problems of evil and human suffering. The ancient Jewish prophets believed that the possible reason that God allowed or was responsible for much of his people's continual suffering at the hands of neighboring empires was that his people had turned away from God. In the modern world, many Jews simply reject this kind of theology in the face of the Holocaust (consider Rabbi Kushner as an example of a Jew who argues that there is no way to reconcile divine omnipotence with the extremity and order of magnitude of what happened under Hitler.) But even aside from the famous "problem of evil", the modern rational understanding of an ordered world that follows certain rules according to physical laws forced those who believed in divine omnipotence to believe in the "God of the Gaps", who intervened in the world only in those narrow areas of the physical world that we didn't understand. But these gaps have continued to get smaller over time. The God of the Gaps is reduced to not doing much. So what are we left with? The old patriarchal, favor dispensing, male God has butted heads with modern reality. I see fundamentalism as one way of trying to resolve this problem, essentially by shutting down one's mind and excluding rationalism from one's religion. Deism, which has probably long gone out of favor, was at one time a way of conceiving of a stale, irrelevant God that has no place in the modern world. It seems to me that religion needs to move beyond these patriarchal concepts of God. I think it does matter when we come up with a new religious community. But there is the rub--how do we do that without getting too bogged down in theological details that will divide the community? Since not everyone is going to agree necessarily with my own panentheism, but they might still want to participate in a community of religious knowing as you have describe, can we bring people together in a way that allows freedom of thought, joyous religious participation that is liberated from the old creeds and the old paradigm of Christianity, and yet which at the same time offers a home for at least some level of commonality so as not to simply become another breed of Unitarian Universalism? Perhaps it would be good to flesh out what is meant by "religious knowing". The sense of awe and wonder, and the mystical experience of God, are what I think of when you describe this. This is the experiential aspect to religion, as opposed to the theological aspect. How much should theology figure into this at all? Or should we only focus on the experiential to the exclusion of the theological?

It seems to me that religious knowing and empirical or scientific knowledge should complement rather than contradict one another--I think you said this at an earlier point when you commented on people checking their brains at the church door--and to me this needs to be important in developing a basis for a new denomination. By that, I mean to say that science teaches us that the universe is very old, that humans evolved on this planet, and so forth; any religious way of knowing needs to accept this. In fact, it seems to me that one reason for the necessity of a new paradigm in religious thought is that the old paradigm wasn't really consistent with a rational understanding of the world. We live in an ordered world that conforms to certain physical laws. For the last few centuries, religion has had to cope with this understanding of the world, that differed from the way ancient people saw things. All sorts of "isms" cropped up in religious thought, from deism to fundamentalism, as ways of coping with this newer understanding. I chewing over your comments concerning naming being outside of the religious way of knowing. From my point of view, we come up with names as metaphors for a divine reality that we cannot understand fully or completely, at least not in what you would call the other way of knowing. I think of the world's religions as representing a process by which various people came up with ways of "naming" God that seemed appropriate for their time and culture. This is sort of the "blind man and the elephant" phenomenon, except that I think that later cultures and religious communities can build on what the earlier ones developed. So, to me, revelation is continuous, and ways of knowing should not be individual and always building from scratch; rather each successive individual and community is part of a great historical process of trying to understand the Divine. We read Spong or Tillich because we are interested in characterizing, discussing, and applying our human reason to that other way of religious knowing. It sounds like you are saying that we should never put a name on it. I am inclined to see names as okay as long as we understand that the names are inadequate and incomplete. The problem I see with so much of religion, especially creedal or doctrinaire varieties, is that it comes up with the names and then assigns a dogma to them, rather than recognizing their metaphorical and approximate nature. Maybe we are talking about the same thing. I am not sure.

I have to admit that I'm more attracted to the bottom-up approach rather than the top-down approach. I actually like soma's idea of people meeting in homes and developing their worship practices through an emerging process. That being said, I also think that some kind of leadership is probably a necessary step as well, but I think that the authority of the leadership must be vested in the grassroots movement and not self-appointed. If the movement takes off, there will naturally be people with the energy, and perhaps the charisma, to act as leaders, and they would be recognized as such not by any self-appointed authority but by the abilities that they display. I appreciate the reference to the Westar institute. I did not know abou them. I looked at their web page and they have some wonderful archived articles. I also have taken a look at a yahoo group, pomoxian, where there are literally thousands of messages from people interested in progressive christianity and similar ideas. I feel like I have been missing out on some really important and interesting dialogues taking place in and outside of the internet for many years and now I have so much catching up to do. I really like the ideas you express in this paragraph. Defining what is common under a new paradigm is key; if it isn't some recitation of a formula or a creed, then what is it? In particular, like the idea of a common denominator of religious knowing.

Sounds great to me. So how does this new church get built?

I agree totally that there has to be a common vision or structure. A danger I see of trying to bring people together just based on a common theology alone, besides the fact that it would be hard to get 100% agreement on everything, is how would this be defined or enforced? If you start trying to enforce some kind of new creed on people and you become in a sense the very kind of doctrinaire religion that you rejected in the old paradigm. There does have to be a commonality. I think that a service with several parts, or different services with different forms or worship, or different interest groups who might be interested in pursuing alternative forms of worship, are all conceivable. Of course, I am just fantasizing here, imagining a denomination big enough to accomodate these kinds of diversity. Quaker worship, which I love for its contemplative group mysticism, is quiet and reverential. Yet other forms of worship, including some kinds of music, can be celebratory and loud and vigorous and joyful. Both are just different ways of mediating God. Is it possible to accomodate such diversity under the same religious roof, and is it possible to give people that diversity while still accomodating some kind of commonality of purpose or a common "religous knowing" process?

I have drawn a lot of inspiration from Borg and Spong, but, like you, I feel like they have refused to take their views to what I think are their logical conclusion. Their theological ideas are great, but their attachment to traditional Christian churches that use traditional language and traditional creeds just doesn't work for me at all. They want to merge new theological paradigms with modes of expressing them worshipfully that emerged out of the old paradigms. As Jesus said, you can't put new wine into old wineskins. I notice that Matthew Fox, in his latest book, has called for a complete rupture between the old and the new Christianities, but I wonder what he means by this. Last I heard, he was an Episcopalian like Borg and Spong. Borg never calls for that kind of rupture in any case. He seems to talk a lot in his books about bridging the gaps between the followers of the old paradigm and the followers of the new, which I think makes no sense. Exactly! This is what I can't undestand. It is one thing to understand that biblical narratives are metaphorical; it is another thing altogether to recite creeds, which are meant to be literal affirmations of belief and which serve by definition as litmus tests of belief, which one doesn't believe to be literally true! This is one part of Borg's theology that I just can't accept. It's funny, but the musical part of services never did anything for me in worship, which is probably why I was attracted for a period of time to Quaker silent worship. But I would surmise that not everyone is pleased by the same thing. So, that being said, one thing that I would bring out of my Quaker background would not necessarily be the silence (although I think that silence and mystical worship can be part of worship) but the participatory nature of it, where every person can be a minister and where every person can plan or contribute their ideas to the service. My conception of worship services is really, really vague, except that I have this idea that maybe it could somehow be radically democratic, where people can create their worship services as they see fit, where diverse forms of celebrating God and diverse contributions can make up the worship process. What exactly that means in practice, I'm not sure. My background is actually as a "convinced" Quaker (a person who was not born a Quaker but who became one.) I do find unprogrammed meetings to be an interesting and sometimes mystical experience. I do think that the mystical or meditative element of Quaker worship has been a positive experience for me, and I like the simplicity of worship and the lack of reliance on creeds or formal rites. But it has a somewhat insular culture, and it has its own internal divisions and disputes about how traditionally Christian its theology should be. Somehow, at some point, I felt a need to look beyond the Quaker horizons, although I think that some aspects of its methods of worship and its culture and values are things I would like to hold on to.