True Christians Can Change the World: Steps We Must Take to Salvage Christianity from the "Christians" and Build a New World

By Dick Peterson

This book discusses in depth some twelve doctrines that need to be removed from current rituals, hymns, and confessions of faith, giving scriptural references to support the removal. Further, the damage these old doctrines have and are doing to society is presented. According to the author, the dogmas need to be removed so the church that many of us knew as children and growing up can return to be effective in helping solve some of the major crises facing this world: the economy and the great financial difference between the rich and poor, the issue of war as a way to solve world problems, and environmental issues facing the planet.
For people who see Christianity being stolen by the Christian Right (who still consider themselves Christian, who believe in the message of Jesus, and/or who feel a loyalty to the church they remember), this book is crucial reading to taking Christianity back.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 15, 2008
• ISBN: 9781465315441

Book preview

Copyright © 2008 by Dick Peterson.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2008906198

ISBN:     Hardcover     978-1-4363-5698-5

Softcover     978-1-4363-5697-8

ISBN:     ebk     978-1-4653-1544-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

51148

Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Endnotes

INTRODUCTION

The subject of this book has been with me for years. I was brought up in the Christian Church, and my dad, now deceased, was a Methodist minister (now United Methodist). In my second year at Ohio Wesleyan University, I decided to be a minister and, after graduation in 1958, attended the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Not only were my teachers noted national theologians, but also the guest lecturers were internationally famous theologians like Paul Tillich, Carl Barth (his son Marcus Barth was my New Testament teacher), and others of that stature. My third year at Chicago was actually an intern year, which I spent (with my wife Lee) in Eugene, Oregon, under Rev. Bob Burtner, the pastor of Trinity Methodist Church—a most wonderful minister and mentor.

My decision to go into the ministry meant that I took the great theological themes seriously. So the concept of redemption meant, at the very least, redemption from something bad: guilt to something good feeling like no guilt; redemption from a perceived problematic situation to better or perfect solution. Salvation meant being saved from sin and living a good life with no sin. I did come out of my father’s liberal Christian tradition. Further, my schooling at Ohio Wesleyan University and the University of Chicago Divinity School had been in this liberal tradition. So heaven and hell had little meaning to me. Sin certainly mean something; for Methodists at this time, smoking was a sin, drinking was a sin, playing cards (except Rook) was a sin, and certainly sexual thoughts and sex before marriage were sins. Now I was a PK (preacher’s kid), and I broke all of these prior to entering college. Still they cling on, even to the liberal in me. I did not take much stock in the virgin birth business or the miracles of Jesus. But there still had to be something to this whole thing of Christianity. And there had to be some direct connection between humans and God.

After seminary, I served as a minister in churches in Oregon for two years and a church in Colorado Springs for two years. My break from traditional Christianity, as I then understood it, started at this point, almost from the beginning of my ministry, but it took another thirty years for it to be complete. There were a number of steps, and the first significant step was in Willamina, Oregon, when I was taken to my first AA meeting by a member of the church. The AA meetings were in the basement. (At this time, I did not drink at all, for it was a sin.) The member who took me flat out told me that AA was his church, and that without AA, he probably would be dead. For the first time, the term salvation meant something—saved from alcoholism to a happy sobriety. I immediately read The Big Book and saw salvation from a non-Christian perspective except, for me, AA was Christianity without the label.

During the Vietnam War, the church I served was Stratmoor Hills Methodist Church, in a subdivision right next to the Fort Carson Army Base. I was against the war, very vocal, but 90 percent of the members of the church were either military or had jobs that related to the military. The tension was too much, asking the membership to support me while I so opposed what so many believed in—the military and the war. So I decided to quit the professional ministry (like many clergymen did at that time), but I consciously did not give up my ordination as a Methodist minister. In 1966, we moved to Denver; and for the next thirty years, we attended Park Hill United Methodist Church.

Still, I was moving away from the institution called Christianity. We joined an organization called Creative Initiative, and they taught that Jesus was a teacher, not the savior, nor was he the unique son of God. Jesus may have been very unique as a person and a great teacher. But he was not Unique with a capital U. This helped me because I did not accept the miracles including the virgin birth and the resurrection, and some of Jesus’s teachings were awkward for me (like in Matthew 13:37-41, Jesus claims that it is the devil who is sowing the bad seeds in the fields that will need be eventually burned in the furnace of fire when the field is harvested), so this step of taking the divinity out of Jesus felt very comfortable. Still I stayed loyal to the church, despite Creative Initiative, until during one church leadership retreat I was pleading with the lay members of the church to make room, for we did not believe that Jesus was the only son of God. It was interesting the number of church members at this retreat who quietly came up to me, admitting that they felt the same way I did about Jesus. They quietly supported me. Still, when the retreat was over, the mission statement for the church clearly stated that "Jesus was the only Son of God," and this pretty much sealed my fate with the Methodist Church. I emotionally left the church at this time. (I joke that I had been excommunicated from the United Methodist Church. It was not true, except I felt that when my lay friends at Park Hill Methodist Church could not make room for people like me, they were asking me to change or leave, and it was much too late for me to change.)

I now attend Mile Hi Church, which is a Science of Mind church. Both Lee (my wife) and I have become practitioners. In the process of becoming practitioners and moving over to what I liked to believe is a non-Christian church, I have immersed myself in the New Age/New Thought ideas and thoughts and have read extensively about the early Christian Church, about the Old Testament, and the time prior to the OT creation stories (isn’t that interesting, history before creation). What I have come up with is what this book is about.

For this book, I have come up with three basic kinds of Christians. First are the fundamentalist Christians who believe the Bible is the actual word of God; and if this concept is challenged, then the basis of their faith, meaning their faith, is challenged. In this group, I am putting the born-again Protestant Christians and the Roman Catholics. True, the Catholic Church is not particularly concerned with the Bible as the actual word of God, but the pope and the Catholic teachings are held as absolute, and to question one or both of these again is challenging their basic faith.

The second group is the mainline Protestant Christians who want Christianity, and the church, to be back the way it was before the fundamentalists gained such power. This declining group of Christians still goes to church; they still recite the creeds and the traditional beliefs or retell the Old and New Testament stories. Who knows what they actually believe, possibly not even themselves, but they are deeply uneasy with the pull to the Right of their perspective denominations.

Within the third group, what I want to call the cultural/spiritual Christians (and sometimes mystics), there is what I call the metaphysical Christians, the cultural Christians, and/or the new ritualists or progressive Christians. The first subgroup, the metaphysical Christians, are like my wife and I who have moved to a non-Christian church that still celebrates the great Christian holidays one way or another. Also within this subgroup are others who are going to meditation retreats, Buddhists communities, or just studying or listening to some of the famous New Age theologians like Deepak Chopra, Neale Donald Walsch, and many others. The second subgroup of Christians, the cultural Christians, have just quit going to church, any church; but if you ask them if they are Christian, they still claim to be Christian. They celebrate the secular Christmas holiday and may do something special on Easter, recognizing it as a holiday of sorts. The third subgroup, the ones I am calling the new ritualistic or progressive Christians, are usually urban dwellers or families and are returning to one of the relatively few churches that have dropped most of the dogma but push for art, music, rituals, prayer, meditation, and lay leadership. Diana Butler Bass has written extensively about this third subgroup. I will be referring to this group as the new progressive Christians. Some of these persons, though going to a Christian church technically, are uneasy with the tag of Christian.

The next thing is that some of the basic doctrines of the institutional Christian Church are a big part of the problems we all live with in our Western civilization, and until we face up to the destructive nature of many of the doctrines of institutional Christianity, we will all be bound and affected by them whether we like it or not. Further in the last three chapters of this book, I address three crucial social issues that I am convinced must be faced for the actual survival of the planet: the economy, the issue of war, and the environment. In my opinion, it is difficult to truly address these issues with some of the old and damaging theological issues not resolved and removed like, for example, original sin.

There are a number of audiences that I have written this book for and which I hope will take action in regard to this highly politicized fundamentalist Christianity, whether in the form of Protestantism or Roman Catholicism. Let me list the audiences as I see them: (1) the clergy of the mainline Protestant Christian churches who have been educated in the liberal theological schools of this country; (2) the laity of these same mainline Protestant Christian churches (Possibly this might include two groups, first the laity who have stayed loyal to their church and denominations, and second, those laypeople who have left the church but have not joined another); (3) laypeople who have joined some other religious community, which could be Buddhism, a metaphysical church, or just a pagan group but that still has feelings for the teachings of Jesus and what they feel is the essence of Christianity (but feel it has long been forgotten by most within the institutions of the Christian faiths); (4) the metaphysical churches themselves, many of which are thriving on members who have left their old Christian religions (and in many cases Judaism); (5) finally, Christians within the fundamentalist churches and within the Roman Catholic churches, many of whom are deeply spiritual Christians who are distressed by the direction their church is going. As a person who grew up a Methodist, who was ordained a Methodist minister, and who now is a practitioner in a Science of Mind church, I have long thought that spiritual persons within fundamentalist Protestantism or within the Roman Church have much in common with Science of Mind church members.

It is my hope that this book stimulates a serious dialogue among the Christians who still feel loyal to the institutional church and truly want it to be revived, those of us who have left the institutional church for whatever reason, and those conservative Christians—whether born-again or Catholic—who are willing to enter the discussion. I would like to see groups form to look at these issues seriously and creatively. I think it may be more of a lay movement than a movement led by the clergy, for they have their jobs on the line. On the other hand, retired clergymen and theologians can be of great help.

If a group were to follow the order of this book, I suggest it starts where the book starts, discussing—from a personal level—the difference between cultural Christians and fundamental Christians and where they fit. Then it could tackle the twelve beliefs or doctrines discussed in chapters 2, 3, and 4, which I believe have denigrated true Christianity and have damaged society.

Chapter 5 moves on to the issue of authority—where does the authority of what is the correct belief and what is not—come from? Theologians discuss authority a lot; laypeople do not, but it is an absolutely crucial question that each of us need to answer for ourselves. Does authority come from the Bible? the minister? the church doctrine? or one’s own inner intuitive feelings? Then the next two chapters address directly the following questions: Who is a Christian? and How do we salvage Christianity from fundamental Christians who claim many of us are not Christians and are going to eternal damnation?

I suggest that we may find some interesting allies among the Christians that we normally set aside as born-agains and even within the Roman Church; and we need to, whenever possible, include them in the discussion groups. In chapter 8, I give some ideas of beliefs that many of us may be able to agree on. As the discussion progresses, I trust that the references to Old and New Testament writings may be helpful as are my touching on a couple of old heretic groups like the early Gnostics and the Ebionites. I mention these sources because the dialogue/discussion that I am recommending in this book has gone on before us, at times with disastrous consequences.

Finally, the social issues facing this country and the world are so great that as we redefine or clarify who we are as Christians, even cultural Christians, we must also go to work on three enormous projects: economic issues discussed in chapter 9, war and peace in chapter 10, and the environment in chapter 11. If this book starts a dialogue on some or all of these issues, I will regard it as a success. But I believe that without the discussion on the dogmas that need to be removed once and for all, it will be hard to address these important social issues discussed in the last three chapters of the book. As you read the dogmas that need to be eliminated, I think many of you will feel that you, personally, have already removed them from your beliefs, but they still remain in the official doctrines, confessions of faith, hymns, and/or rituals; and it is from these that they must be removed. I may have missed some bad or silly doctrines/dogmas, and they can be added to the removal list. Certainly, there are other great social issues that need be addressed. But I see this book as a beginning, not an ending. Although it may be challenging to open up this dialogue with friends and family, the potential positive impact will make it worth the effort.

CHAPTER I

FUNDAMENTAL CHRISTIANS VS. CULTURAL CHRISTIANS

We as Democrats, as liberal Republicans, as people who want to believe that Christianity must be salvaged from the highly politicized Christian Right really have our work cut out for us. We have a situation wherein not only is the Christian Right moving further Right (versus Left rather than wrong), it is pulling many of the mainline Christian churches with them. The primary missionary movement is by these same political Christian Right churches, sending missionaries around the world, particularly to Asia, South America, and Africa. As I will mention in a later chapter, some of the extreme Christian Right churches on the other continents are even sending missionaries to America and Europe. Then we have the political situation itself in America, which looks like, to some people, the right-wing Christians have all the answers and we on the Left have no answers. And to some degree, they are right. Politically (and possibly even within the Christian Church), we are still living with the Franklin Roosevelt legacy. (I suppose the church part is not from Franklin Roosevelt but from some of the great Protestant theologians like Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and many others who are now all dead.)

As I write this, it is the day after the Bush Inaugural, which was yesterday, January 20, 2005. My thoughts go to the division within Christianity and this election and how this presidency has certainly played into it. There is a group of conservative or born-again Christians and Roman Catholic Christians—all of whom I am labeling fundamental Christians—who feel they are the real Christians and that they seem to want to make America a Christian nation, defined as they like Christianity defined.

As I was having breakfast with my friend Dr. Ken Gerdes this morning, we remarked how, because of certain Christian doctrines, we both have officially or unofficially left the ranks of Christianity. I further think of my friend, Dr. Clarence Snelling, a retired professor from Iliff School of Theology and a United Methodist minister who responded to my question a few years ago: Do you think there will ever be a schism in the Methodist Church where the liberals will break from the conservatives? His answer was clear and quick. Clarence said, No, because the liberals will just leave the United Methodist Church. This saddened me; even though I have long since left the Methodist Church, I still have deep roots within Methodism, and to see it taken over by the conservative wing of the church is very distressing.

I have been interested over the last few years to hear from many persons who have left the institutional church but who still want to call themselves Christian. They either believe in the message of Jesus or feel like they are spiritual (or mystical) or they just have no interest in declaring that they are not Christian, for then the questioner, like me, wants to know what they are, and they are not even interested enough to give the question serious thought. For many years, I was adamant that I was not a Christian, and a great many people took offense at that. That did not bother me except that often all discussion stopped between me and the other person. But after further thought, I realized that I and most Americans (and probably Western Europeans) are cultural Christians. Most of us grew up in a Christian culture, sometimes called a Judeo-Christian culture, and we adhere to some or many Christian themes or myths whether we like it or not. It has been of interest to me that many historians of very ancient history (prior to the creation stories in the Bible) refer to the period as prehistory. Now the explanation is that it is pre-written history, and that may be true. But it is not prehistory. And I am convinced that even though most historians do not give much or any weight to the Genesis creation stories as history, it is interesting that most prehistory refers to the time earlier than about six thousand years ago, the approximate time given to the beginning of the world by conservative Christians from the biblical creation stories. This is just one example of what I call Judeo-Christian culture influencing much of society, even the academic community.

But within the community of Christianity, including all Christian faiths, it seems to me that there is a big divide, which I have called the fundamental Christians vs. the cultural/spiritual Christians. Within each group, there are many different groups, and I will spend time in this chapter on the groups.

FUNDAMENTAL CHRISTIANS

This is the first side of the divide within Christianity. These are the Christians who get their authority from the Christian institution that they belong to. Roman Catholics, for instance, who are institutional Christians, view that the church’s interpretation of the Bible as the correct interpretation and that a Catholic who does not attend mass, go to confession, and basically abide by the basic teachings of the church will not go to heaven. So the Christians who get their religious or spiritual authority from the institution more or less exclusively I am calling institutional Christians. I am also putting into this group the Christians who take the Bible literally, the Bible being their source of religious authority. Many of these folks regard themselves as born-again Christians. I am troubled with giving this group of Christians the exclusive use of born-again, for if that is regarded as the experience of God or Power or Spirit directly in one’s life, then it should not be exclusively for conservative Christians.

This division is awkward, for many of whom I am calling cultural Christians want to believe in Jesus and what he taught. Many certainly like the myths or stories about Jesus. Retired Bishop John Shelby Spong goes to great length to make sense of the resurrection for the modern progressive Christians. Within the biblical scholarship movement called the Jesus Seminars, there is an effort to actually identify the real historical Jesus. This movement is attempting to take their Christian authority from the historical Jesus as they have identified that person. This movement is mostly made of liberal Christian biblical scholars who believe that if we could only find actual statements of the historical Jesus, then that would establish the source of their authority.

MAINLINE PROTESTANTS

The other side of the divide includes the mainline Christian churches and what I have called the spiritual/cultural Christians. First let’s talk about mainline Protestants who still attend church. What I see is that there are a great many people in the mainline Protestant Church who accept their authority from an internal source. To define this further, I am using internal source, the source being a spiritual, mystical, or religious experience that gives meaning to their religious/Christian faith. They themselves are determining that the experience is real, not what some minister, priest, or other church source says. They may or may not read the Bible, but it is their interpretation of their experience(s) that they listen to. They go to church and possibly listen to the sermon, but they take from it what they want and discard the rest. They read the creeds, but they may cover themselves by not saying the words because they often do not believe what the various creeds say. They stay in the church because there are parts of the service and/or the community that gives them meaning. It may be the hymns, it may be the choir, or it may be the friends or relatives in the church. Often a family goes to church for the children. Usually they want the church to survive; they grew up in the church, their parents were or are members of a church, and going to church from time to time is just what people do.