Twilight of the gods and a new dawn for the church

Submission to the Comprehensive Review Task Group, April 3, 2013
Rev. Ian Kellogg, Borderlands Pastoral Charge, Coronach, SK

Cover Letter  — Twilight of the gods: how Darwinism and the end of Christendom could lead to a new dawn for the church

Dear Gary, Lauren, et al, [the members of the United Church of Canada’s Comprehensive Review Task Group, which included Moderator the Right Rev. Gary Paterson, and five others]

I am pleased that the United Church of Canada’s General Council has initiated a Comprehensive Review and that the six of you have agreed to spearhead it. I am writing you to engage in the process.

While there are many aspects to the challenges and opportunities facing our church, in the enclosed submission, I focus on theology. I hope that this meditation on “the death of God” will help those who read it to think about the church’s current context in the broadest possible light.

Blessings on your journey,

Rev. Ian Kellogg, Coronach SK

P.S. I try to express the theology contained in this submission in Sunday sermons, which are accessible at: littlechurchontheprairie.blogspot.com

Preamble: die Götterdämmerung

“Where there’s death, there’s hope.” This doppelgänger of a slogan is one way to summarize the Way of Cross. In this essay, I reflect upon several contemporary aspects of the “death of God,” which I believe have created space for new life for those who follow Jesus on the Way of the Cross.

Both the end of imperial Christendom and the death of the notion of God as Creator — the latter effectively killed by Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection — present challenges to the church. At the same time, these developments have opened up a path on which we could move from anxiety, imperialism, and egotism towards greater faith, hope and love.

Judaism and Christianity were both created following the “death of God.” Judaism was born after the Babylonians burned Jehovah’s earthly home, The Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, to the ground in 587 BCE. During several generations in Babylonian exile, Jewish leaders learned how to worship Jehovah through compiling, reading and interpreting Scripture rather than through sacrifice at the Temple.

Christianity was created after the Romans destroyed Jehovah’s Second Temple in 70 CE. In that year, the anonymous author known to us as Mark wrote the first narrative of the life, ministry and death of Jehovah the King in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who was hailed as a new Christ.

Mark detailed no resurrection appearances of Jesus. However, Jesus the Christ (Jehovah our Saviour, the Messiah/King) was said by Paul to have been resurrected in the hearts of all his followers. Paul wrote, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20).

Mark and Paul showed how kingship could survive the end of any possibility for a renewed monarchy in Israel. Sovereignty now lay in the heart of each worshipper. In the same way, they also showed how the God who is Love could survive both the deaths of Jehovah and of his Greek namesake, Jesus, and in so doing help the faithful rise above their own egos.

Gods are continually being born and killed. At a communal level, thousands of tribal and national deities have appeared down the millennia, and almost all of them have been killed by conquest and genocide. At a personal level, individual gods of ambition, distraction or addiction also seem to be an inevitable feature of the growth of our egos. With grace, these gods also often die, which, though searingly painful, can allow us to find new life within the Spirit of Love.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is that new life arises from the death of God. The crisis affecting all denominations following the end of Christendom and the rise of the age of Darwin is another moment in which the church has an opportunity to die with God and rise to a new life within Christ. May it be so.

Overview: faith, hope and love after Christendom

This essay looks at the twilight of the gods under the headings of Anxiety, Imperialism and Egotism.

For Anxiety, I focus on creationism versus Darwinism. Darwin killed God the Creator, which should have been an occasion for new life for disciples of the Way of the Cross. Unfortunately, our church has not fully internalized the death of God as a Creator/Deity; many in the church continue to talk of the Creator and His Creation.

We should acknowledge there are no longer any reasons to believe in a Creator. Doing so would exchange anxiety about ancient creeds for a solid faith in humanism, the scientific method, and the international academy. It would help us move from Anxiety to Faith; from the Death of God the Creator to a rebirth of the God who is Love.

For Imperialism, I focus on the impending centennial of the First World War (1914-1918). Many thinkers believe it was The Great War that finally broke the back of Christendom. The United Church of Canada (UCC) was partly shielded from this crisis by the fact that the British Empire “won” the war and that church union in 1925 gave us an infusion of energy. But the decline of the UCC and other mainline Protestant churches in most rich Western countries over the last 50 years has brought us in line with the church in the defeated European powers.

I adopt a two-prong focus in the Imperialism section: one is on the poem “In Flanders Fields;” the other is on the Battle of Vimy Ridge of 1917. Can the UCC become a church that campaigns against the use of the poppy at Remembrance Day and against the glorification of the Canadian slaughter of Germans at Vimy Ridge? As unthinkable as such a scenario might appear to many, I believe that becoming such a church would help move us from Imperialism to Hope; from the demise of the era of semi-divine kaisers, czars, and kings to a focus on the resistance of suffering humanity here and around the world.

For Egotism, my focus is on belief in the afterlife. Many funerals give mourners the impression that the individual ego of their loved one has survived his or her death. Not only does this idea strike me as absurd; it also horrifies me since an indefinite existence for the ego could be nothing other than hell, even if the intent was to portray continued existence in a New Jerusalem. To me, the survival of the ego is not gospel. Quite the contrary, it is the worst news one could possibly ever proclaim.

This issue defines a fork in the road. Is the Way of the Cross a spiritual path that leads us beyond egotism and towards a selfless eternity within the Spirit of the God who is Love, or it is the apotheosis of the ego in which one fantasizes about trillions upon gazillions of years in heaven? I choose the former.

To borrow and adapt ideas from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I believe that individual death is cheap grace. The dissolution of one’s ego, with all its strivings, addictions, and pain is guaranteed by the physical destruction of the body/mind of each human individual. This is universal salvation.

Costly grace is the painful but joyous attainment of moments of egolessness this side of the grave. Jesus’ call to take up one’s cross and follow him (Mark 8:34) is a call to enlightenment. It calls us to acknowledge our individual fragility and the inevitability of suffering and death; and on this basis, to be freed from our ego’s preoccupations. Once so liberated, we sometimes find room to rise to a communal and divine life of sacrifice and praise. For me, the Way of the Cross is about moving from egotism to Love.

In the sections below, I expand on this three-fold theological shift. I believe that discussing these shifts would help the UCC during the Comprehensive Review process.

Anxiety versus Faith

In individual lives marked by fragility and mortality and in a society racked by multiple social crises, many of us are beset by fear. The religious path is one on which we try to find a trusting faith despite these fears.

If we do achieve a level of trusting faith, one might then ask if one’s faith is reasonable?

Much of the faith that we exhibit in 2013 is found in the social production of knowledge through the international academy, the scientific method, and the mass media. We accept almost all of our beliefs — from scientific facts like the revolution of the earth around the sun, to historical facts like the dating of the Second World War from 1939 to 1945, to news facts like Stephen Harper being the current Prime Minister in Canada — on faith.

Despite not having the data, experience, or expertise to come up with such beliefs on our own, our faith in them seems reasonable. The social production of knowledge by news agencies, business and political entities, and above all by the international academy deserves the trusting faith we place in it through the practical results this knowledge facilitates.

Wisdom also dictates that we not be naïve in this faith since there are competing agendas in the social production of knowledge. These differing agendas flow from competition between corporations, nations, economic classes, and other social groups. But even when we keep these conflicts in mind, our experience with the practical fruits of science, technology and other socially-created knowledge convinces most of us that our faith is well founded.

Not all current beliefs are founded on naturalism, the scientific method, and the news media. In particular, religions continue to make claims based upon supernaturalism and divine revelation found in ancient texts and traditions. Some random examples of these beliefs follow: that salvation can only be found through the Roman Catholic Church; that God will torment one forever in hell if one fails to subscribe to the right creed; that God as Creator upholds all His creatures via Providence; and so on. But while it may have been reasonable to hold such religious beliefs before the rise of the world market and the scientific method, those reasons no longer exist.

Creationism is a key marker in this regard. Before Darwin, it was reasonable to conclude from the dizzying complexity of the biosphere that a Deity had designed and created life. After Darwin, our faith now dictates that we reject the notion of a Creator. Those that persist in talking of Creation and a Creator despite Darwinism anxiously stand outside of modern faith, I believe.

To say that one’s reading of the Bible, religious tradition, or personal mystical experience leads one to believe in a Creator regardless of Darwinism and other natural sciences has as much credibility to me as saying that one does not believe in the existence of China. It is possible to not believe in the existence of China — after all, China is not mentioned in the Bible, one might never have visited China, and wicked people exist who try to trick us with falsehoods, including, perhaps, ideas about a fictional land called China. However, one cannot disbelieve in China today without being perceived as paranoid by the majority of us who have been grasped by modern faith.

The same situation is true for people who believe in a Creator despite the social consensus that all the phenomena humanity has yet observed or conceived of in the universe are products of natural history unfolding according to physical laws, including the most complex ones: earthly life, consciousness, and sacred human self-consciousness.

When we in United Church recite “We believe in God who has created and is creating” or celebrate “The Season of Creation” we risk being seen as faithless, anxious, and irrelevant. There is no Creator. This fact has been definitively proven. As fellow pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem and the cross, we should welcome this proof. The death of the Creator Deity solves the problem of theodicy and removes an idol. The death of this idol frees us to worship (or assign worth to) Love.

Some argue that eschewing a belief in a Creator Deity makes it impossible to be a Christian. Quite the contrary, I perceive the death of the Creator Deity as another gracious moment in which an Idol has been killed. On the Way of the Cross, such moments are ones in which we are freed to live into the resurrection of the God who is Love.

Love may be a concept that defies easy definition; and it may lack the concreteness of stories of deities who create and act. But it has the advantage of being a viable concept, a worthy goal, and a sacred value for most of us. On the other hand, the Creator has the disadvantage of being demonstrably non-existent and therefore incompatible with a trusting faith. After Darwin, the word God can no longer refer to a Deity who Creates. But after Darwin, Love continues to exist and so Christians can continue to worship, seek and serve.

I advocate that we embrace the faith that we empirically exhibit in our day-to-day lives. This would mean putting the books of the Bible and our religious tradition in their proper place, which is a far less authoritative or central one that is currently the case in many parts of our church.

Paul taught that salvation comes through faith by grace. The faith that most of us live by today is naturalist and not based on the revelation of ancient texts. In my perception, only people without faith believe in religious creeds anymore. Let us in the UCC accept the grace to consciously belong to the former rather than the latter.

Imperialism versus Hope

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— Lt.-Col. John McCrae, Ypres France, 1915

Every November, United Church sanctuaries across Canada are festooned with poppies as we remember our war dead. John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields,” which is the modern source of the symbol of the poppy, is often recited or sung as we collectively remember the pain of war. But I wonder if any of our church services ever denounce the poem as a highly successful piece of war propaganda? I have never experienced such a service. Nor have I ever witnessed a challenge to the symbol of the poppy in church.

To my shame, I dutifully pinned a poppy on my choir gown during six consecutive Novembers from 2002 and 2007 at Kingston Road United Church in Toronto and sang a beautiful musical setting of McCrae’s poem with the choir. While I often turned to my younger brother in the rehearsals for these Remembrance services and whispered to him that we should change the lyrics in the final verse to “Break off our quarrel with the ‘foe:’ to you from failing hands we snuff the torch; be yours to keep it out,” and in so doing transform “In Flanders Fields” into an anti-war and anti-imperialist poem, I never mustered the courage to suggest this to the choir.

World War I was a defining moment for Canada, and the poem by the physician/ soldier John McCrae from Guelph Ontario helps Canadians to remember this history. During the war, nearly 70,000 Canadian troops were killed and 150,000 wounded. It is often argued that this tremendous sacrifice for a country, which at the time had less than eight million people, gave Canadians a new sense of identity.

The slaughter of millions of people in World War I made participants like McCrae want to believe that the sacrifice was for a worthy cause. And while English Canadians embraced the Great War with unbridled enthusiasm — and French Canadians, remembering their status as defeated subjects of the British Empire, did not — it was clear to a handful of pacifists and Marxists then and to almost everyone today that World War I was the very epitome of unworthy causes. It was a brutal imperialist conflict about power and territory, and nothing else.

The German “foe” that McCrae wanted Canadians to kill were not the real foe of the soldiers that his artful poem helped to recruit. The true foes of the Canadian soldiers were, instead, their own King, Prime Minister, Parliament, church leaders and military officers who had led them into this pointless slaughter.

It was only when soldiers in Russia learned this lesson and turned their guns away from the Germans and towards their own officers and the Czar in 1917, and when their German comrades did the same in October/November 1918, rebelling against the German High Command and the Kaiser and killing their own officers instead of Canadian and other Allied soldiers, that the horrifying and useless slaughter of World War I finally came to an end.

Unfortunately, when churches remember war today, they do not use poems, anthems or symbols that extol the courage and insight of the rebellious soldiers who broke off the quarrel with their supposed foe and turned their fire at their own commanders and rulers. Instead, they extol a pro-war poem written by a misguided Canadian officer who happened to die fighting for the “winning” side of the horrifying slaughter that was World War I.

The adulation that “In Flanders Fields” still commands in English-speaking Canada in general and in the Anglo-dominated United Church of Canada in particular is a symptom of the huge challenge facing the UCC today as it seeks to find a mission of justice/love in the intercultural reality of Canada today.

The UCC at its 2006 General Council declared its intention to be transformed into an intercultural church, which I applaud. However, I believe that we will not succeed in this goal until we become clearer about the imperialist nature of the Canadian state and the church’s often unwitting role in supporting Canadian imperialism, especially its hostility towards the national rights of Quebec.

Several impending centennials give the church a chance to repent of its shameful role in promoting the slaughter of WWI: the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the war in 2014; the 100th anniversary of the writing of “In Flanders Fields” in 2015; the 100th anniversary of the “defining moment” for Canada’s identity, the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 2017; and the 100th anniversary of the October/November German Revolution in 2018, which forced the abdication of the Kaiser and the advent of a Socialist Government in Germany that signed the armistice on Nov 11, 1918.

If the United Church were to attack the myth of Vimy Ridge in Canada, I believe that we would garner a lot of media coverage. We could start by denouncing the reproduction of the Vimy Ridge memorial on the back of new Canadian $20 bills. Perhaps church leaders could conduct a ritual burning of $20 bills on Parliament Hill as a way to point out the problem.

Imagine the reaction in Canada if a Euro coin were introduced that portrayed a German war memorial of a battle in which thousands of Canadians were slaughtered? The fact that Canadians are still proud of our slaughter of Germans in World War I illustrates the depth of our sin.

If the UCC attacked the myth of Vimy Ridge, Stephen Harper in turn would attack us with all his might. This would give us a media platform from which to educate about the origins, aims, and consequences of WWI, the church’s shameful role in cheerleading it, and honorable exceptions such as Methodist Minister, J.S. Wordsworth. From there, we could repent of our role in promoting empire, war, and genocide — starting from the foundation of the Roman church in the fourth century until today.

Canada is unique in using the shameful disaster of World War I as a key token of “national” pride. This travesty also exposes the weak underbelly of the origins of the United Church of Canada.

My prayer is that our church will attack the myth of Vimy Ridge and the continued adulation of the imperialist poem “In Flanders Fields” and in doing so move sharply from our imperialist past towards support for the resistance of the oppressed from below. The latter fuels hope for a united human race that would rally against all semi-divine kaisers, czars and kings and their states, including that prison house of Quebec and the First Nations we call Canada.

The imperialist church gave us centuries of war, conquest and genocide. An anti-imperialist church can help us pursue the hope of reconciliation, unity, and peace.

Egotism versus Love

Just what is the gospel of Jesus the Christ? Is it the news that Jesus died for our sins? If so, what does this fact mean? Does it mean that our egos will live forever despite the fact that they develop within mortal bodies?

For me, the good news of the stories of the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth — the new Davidic Anointed Christ of Israel — is that, although the King is dead and God has yet again been murdered, Love is raised to new life. God is Dead. Long live Love!

In life, there is only one certainty: death. It is good news, then, to realize that with death comes the sure hope of salvation: a realm in which there are no more tears and all pain and struggle are behind us.

The even better news proclaimed by Jesus — in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, for instance — is that “death” sometimes occurs this side of the grave. (“This son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found” Luke 15:24.) With such a death comes the possibility of eternal life freed from the preoccupations of our egos this side of the grave. Resurrection is possible in any single moment; life is made up of innumerable moments; and so grace and its eternity are always waiting for us.

Jesus calls us to take up our cross. This is a call not to martyrdom, but to renewed awareness that suffering and death await all human individuals. It is a call to die, and hence a call to live fully in the eternal now.

Jesus/Jehovah makes this to call us through “Mark” and the other anonymous evangelists following the murder of Israel’s God by the Romans in the Year 70.

Is the Christian message that individuals need never die, or is it that in death we find the only real possibility of new life? Is new life in Christ an ego-filled glorification of the individual, or is it the supersession of egotism?

I choose the latter. The ego, inevitable though it is, represents an illusion. Our individuality arises out of 14 billion years of cosmic evolution, 3 billion years of biological evolution, and 50,000 years of cultural evolution. The very language with which the ego builds itself comes to each of us as a gift. Collectively and individually, we are utterly dependent on the cosmos, the biosphere, and each other.

Sometimes in life and worship, we realize the ego’s illusions. These are moments when we enter life in Christ, a life beyond distractions, ambitions and addictions this side of the grave.

This is the gospel as it has grasped me so far. My prayer is that the more and more of us in the church will preach this good news.

Conclusion: twilight of the gods and the dawn of a new church

Darwin killed God the Creator. Unfortunately, many church leaders do not acknowledge this central article of contemporary faith. Today’s American, European and Chinese empires have ditched the church as a key ideological prop. Unfortunately, many church leaders cling to the rotten edifice of empire and sing “O Canada” in our sanctuaries. Many Canadians turn to the church when their loved ones die. Unfortunately, the church often preaches “pie in the sky by and by” instead of costly but real grace.

A church that refuses to internalize Darwinism, to repudiate 1600 years of “Babylonian captivity” to the divine emperors of Rome and its successor empires, and to abandon childhood fantasies of surviving one’s own death is a church that has no legitimate place in the 21st century, in my opinion.

On the other hand, a church that helps its members be faithful in the midst of fearful personal and social conditions, that works for the political unity of struggling humanity, and that helps us rise above egotism through an awareness of our dependence upon the biosphere, the culture, and each other is one that is worth fighting for.

As individuals, as congregations, and as that part of the universal church of Christ called the United Church of Canada, I pray that we will move forward by dying and rising with Christ.

Ian Kellogg, Coronach SK