April 7, 2013 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

Sacred Conversations

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 150
Deuteronomy 6:4–9
John 20:19–31

Christians have always disagreed about what they ought to believe, and both sides in those disagreements have often made a persuasive case. The study of the history of theology teaches that diversity within Christianity is nothing new.

William C. Placher

Following the lectionary cycle of scripture readings for worship, the gospel reading on the Sunday after Easter is always the story of so-called “doubting” Thomas. At a conference I was at yesterday, pastor and scholar Barry Taylor quipped that it only takes a week after the glory of Easter for our questions and doubts about the mystery of the resurrection to set it. After just one week, we need a booster shot of faith. Just seven days past Easter and we need to be reminded that “Blessed are those” (like us) “who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

It was a happy accident several years ago that we moved confirmation to this Sunday after Easter. What a fascinating, and in many ways perfectly appropriate, text for us to consider on Confirmation Sunday. Each year, we ask our confirmands to write a statement of faith. It’s a snapshot of where they are at this point of their faith journey. Like in years past, this year’s contributions are as much statements of doubt and disbelief as they are statements of faith. And this is to be expected. These young adolescents are right in the midst of sorting out what they believe and what is important to them, right at the beginning of figuring out who they are and how they fit in the world.

If we did such things, I suppose we might say that “doubting” Thomas is the patron saint of confirmation, our exemplar of voicing and engaging doubt. Even more, he is our hope that through this process we might experience an encounter with the living Christ.

You see, our confirmands are learning what many of us have discovered: doubt is not the end of faith but is often the beginning of a more robust experience of trusting God. Listen to what one of our students wrote in her statement of faith:

The experiences I have gotten out of confirmation have been great, but when I first came I realized that other kids questioned the Bible and had doubt about God. This is something I never even thought of doing. But this doubt ended up helping me. For example, a few weeks ago someone asked whether or not Jesus was with us. I smiled to myself because I knew what I believed and I believed that he is here with us just in different ways. With every trace of doubt, my faith grew a little more.

That’s a stunning insight. Yet we all need to learn another angle of this truth about doubt and faith: it is not intended to be an individual endeavor.

There was a time, not so long ago, when confirmation within mainline Protestant churches was a primarily dogmatic exercise. Students were expected to memorize and recite creeds and catechisms. These catechisms defined faith by asking questions and providing answers, answers that are scripted and learned by catechumens or confirmands. While there was surely some attention given to the meaning of these faith statements, the primary focus was the transmission of orthodox faith (as understood by a particular faith community) from generation to generation. For hundreds of years, this practice made perfect sense to the church. It was an efficient and effective way to communicate the essential tenets of faith.

Yet for a variety of reasons, this practice has fallen by the wayside in most mainline Protestant churches, especially those that maintain more progressive approaches to theology and Christian practice. The world has changed in significant ways. The triumphant certainty of modernity has been eclipsed by the ambiguity, uncertainty, and humility of postmodernity. Along the way, confirmation became more about inquiry and individual appropriation than the rehearsal of concretized doctrinal statements. It is now more typical that greater emphasis is placed on confirmands developing personal statements of faith than on the recitation of historic communal creeds or catechisms.

This is all well and good, but I fear that we may have inadvertently made a rather serious mistake. I’m not at all sure that picking and choosing based on personal opinion alone is the theological model we want to embrace. Yet this has become the de facto theological model of many American Christians. Cultural critics and theologians have called this “cafeteria religion” (Ingolf U. Dalferth, “I Determine What God Is!: Theology in the Age of "Cafeteria Religion," Theology Today, April 2000, pp. 5–23). Evangelical researcher George Barna describes our culture as a “designer society” in which we customize everything, including religion, to suit our personal preferences (Cathy Lynn Grossman, “More Americans Tailoring Religion to Fit Their Needs,” USATODAY.COM, 13 September 2011). This is nothing new. More than twenty-five years ago, Robert Bellah and his colleagues famously described this kind of individualized religion in an influential book called Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. This hasn’t changed in the last quarter century—in fact, it has only progressed.

A recent popular theology book demonstrates the way in which pick-and-choose theology has become the norm for American Protestants. Ronald J. Allen’s A Faith of Your Own: Naming What You Really Believe, written for an adult audience, very closely resembles our contemporary approach to confirmation. In chapters devoted to core topics of Christian theology, Allen presents a variety of possible understandings from the Bible, Christian history, and contemporary reflection. At the end of the book, he invites readers to write a statement of faith based on the perspectives they find most compelling. One of the suggested methods lays these perspectives out like menu items from which to choose. It is essentially a guidebook for cafeteria Christianity.

My biggest problem with pick-and-choose theology is that it is ultimately an individualistic endeavor that leads to privatized religion. By contrast, the religion(s) of ancient Israel, the Second Temple Judaism(s) of Jesus’ day, and pretty much all forms of pre-Reformation and pre-Enlightenment Christianity placed far greater emphasis on community than individualism. Somehow we must recover the communal nature of our faith.

Yet for progressive mainline Protestants like us, a retreat to dogmatism or any kind of fundamentalism is not an acceptable solution to liberal individualism. Slavish conformity to a rigid orthodoxy is not the only way to be more attentive to the communal nature of our faith. Rather, our challenge is to reconceive our understanding and practice of theology in such a way that transcends picking and choosing without sacrificing our progressive commitments.

Now I want to be clear that theological plurality is not the problem I am concerned about and attempting to address. I don’t find it problematic that multiple theologies exist within the church. Quite to the contrary, I believe that this is and always has been the nature and reality of faith communities.

What I find problematic is the mode of picking and choosing from this theological plurality. Even when couched within a community of faith, this approach is inevitably an individualistic, idiosyncratic, and narcissistic endeavor. It reflects the idolatries of individualism that pervade contemporary American culture.

The truth is, the Bible and our theological traditions are themselves pluralistic through and through. The greatest insight of critical biblical scholarship is the realization that the Bible is not a unified text with a single voice. Rather, the Bible is a collection of writings from a vast variety of authors and contexts, each representing a unique vision of God and God’s interaction with the world. To be sure, there are unifying factors that connect these voices into a single trajectory of religious tradition. And the act of binding these writings together into a canonical collection imposes a certain unity and even narrative continuity to the canon as a whole. But these secondary unities should not obscure the rich plurality of the biblical canon.

The same is true of our theological heritage. In his introduction to historical theology, William Placher notes that the history of theology is “more complicated, more pluralistic” than Christians typically realize. “Christians have always disagreed about what they ought to believe, and both sides in those disagreements often made a persuasive case,” writes Placher. “The study of the history of theology teaches that diversity within Christianity is nothing new” (William C. Placher, A History of Christian Theology: An Introduction, pp. 11–12).

The plurality of the Bible and theological tradition is not a problem to be solved. Rather, it is a rich resource for us to draw from today. Traditional approaches to scripture and theology tend to collapse this plurality into unified systems. A more promising theological model involves bringing the numerous voices of scripture into conversation with each other and with contemporary communities of faith.

The biblical canon and the vast corpus of theological reflection is by nature an unresolved theological conversation. And rather than create our own individual versions of Christianity to stand alongside this dialogue, God is inviting us to join this ongoing, centuries-old conversation. We will, of course, bring to this our own perspectives and commitments, but the key reorientation is to recognize that we are not alone in this endeavor. We are involved in a sacred conversation about God and God’s presence in the world that goes all the way back to the earliest inklings humanity had of the divine. A true conversation is a much different thing than a private and individualistic faith.

The goal of this communal process of conversation is not to come to a single, uniform understanding of truth. Instead, the process itself is the most important part. The very act of engaging each other and our theological traditions is itself the greatest good, not the fight to reach comprehensive conclusions that have evaded humanity for as long as these questions have been asked.

Back to that upper room and Thomas’s questions and doubts about the resurrected Jesus. Among other things, he learned that he is not alone. He is brought into conversation with his fellow disciples, and they accompany him on his quest for answers. Not only that, the living Christ himself shows up to invite Thomas into a deeper engagement than he probably even imagined.

Our confirmands have made the bold and courageous step of entering into this ancient and sacred conversation. They have brought with them their own questions, their own doubts, their own commitments. They have claimed their seat at the conversation table. They have added their unique voices to this ongoing conversation.

Friends, God invites each of us to do the same. May we be as bold as these newest members of our faith community.

Amen.