Not many years ago I began my movement away from what I call a "closed bible" and a "closed faith" towards a spiritual hinterland promising a more open bible and open faith. One that might allow the God I knew "to breathe" again away from the specific theological containers and measured borderlands I had come to place Him in through affiliations to the institutions of my youth. What I strongly felt I needed was a faith that might be "less sure of itself" than what it had now become in its verities and condemnations.
What I didn't see was this same aspect carried through in the corporate religious identities I was associating myself with. In essence, my personal faith identity was not matching up to my corporate faith identity and I sadly knew one or the other must change. By-and-by this discernment became a personal crisis of identity where the God I knew was not the God I was hearing spoken through the voices of a religious America become darkened in its speech and knowledge. One, or both, had to change, and I knew it must first begin with me.Yes. Personal Change. This was the easier route. But it was also the harder route because it required letting go of my former identity in finding a new identity that bore very little similarity to the older religious groups I saw fomenting around me. Faith groups that I was familiar with and had grown old with. Very old. I was in the early stages of my sixth decade of life by now at 53. I was identified with faith groups that were adopting a new form of Christian identity than I felt comfortable with. In many ways we both were changing. Curiously, I had become less certain while the other corporate form had become more certain in ways that changed their view of God and the Bible in more agitated tones than I first remembered of them.
Even still, I was not alone. Though at the time I felt very much alone. Had I considered it, I did have a fellowship of equals measured in the lives of those men and women of the Bible who likewise faced deeply personal crisis of faith interpretation with the religious institutions of their day that they had grown up and identified with. Who were forcibly flung into the unknown away from friends and family, away from the religious dogmas they had grown up with, and away from their homelands and occupations they once had known. As example of this latter, some bible pastors and professors were being removed from their churches or colleges because their positions on human equality and justice were changing.
Essentially my fellowship was becoming affiliated with a broader Christian fellowship than I had first considered. It was not simply mine own woeful burden of a new Christian awareness as I struggled to be released from "the miry pit of clay" which had formed tightly around me that was presently keeping me from divine breath and light. Nay, others had also trod this unceremonious road of sacrilege to feel despised and alone. Like myself, other destitute men and women of God had wandered foreign lands of idols-and-fear searching for a land not of their own making through the dark days that seemed to stretch endlessly onwards without end.For myself, my developing new faith was as much an attitude shift as it was an epistemological crisis. I felt strongly moved towards a faith that might be more doubtful, less certain of itself, and less strict in its personal dogmas of confidence. A faith which had lately become quixotically more religious than when I first remembered it as a youth. A faith which once had carried a certain kind of Jesus figure, or Jesus cross, or missional message, but had strangely morphed away from what those things once meant to me and the church to become something completely alien to itself in these, my later years.
Largely, the Christian affiliations I had once identified with seemed to have changed. And as they changed so did my identity as it became something more foreign to myself than when I had first subscribed to it so many long years ago. It required of me to re-think my identity, the message of my Christian heritage, and even the kind of faith I was holding. To find a continuity with my faith heritage that was less dogmatically orthodox and more spiritually orthodox in an updated sense to the contemporary times of my postmodern society.
A Crisis of Faith
I hadn't planned on doing this as I explained in Part 1. But it was a journey requiring me to move forward in quite an unexpected fashion to my earlier faith identity. An identity that had been formed in my youth and then, as I grew older, had become caught up with the responsibilities of family and job as it trusted to those in religious authority to keep the Christian faith from an apostasy to dogma and dictum.
But these Christian leaders had failed in their congregational duties becoming harsher in their attitudes of Christ and God's sanctifying love. More uncharitable and unforgiving. Belatedly, I now discovered that my faith required a deep updating to the contemporary institutions I had grown up in having trusted them to adopt and accommodate the Christian faith in positive ways to societal trends and academic findings. But apparently senility is as much a problem for long-lived institutions as it can be for older living adults. Even at the age of 53. For myself, I didn't wish to fall into the category of black cynicism and fear which typically marks older age against a more youthful, hopeful faith I was observing in the younger generations of my son and daughter's twenty-something worlds. And yet, a more fearful faith can-and-will fall into this "pit of despair" (as John Bunyan would call it) if it doesn't learn to grow and acclimate itself to its times and seasons of missional opportunity as time will challenge the church to do.And thus began a very difficult personal journey as I wrote and wrote here at Relevancy22 of my despair and testimony to a more hopeful Christian faith. But never a task which I wished to back away from when facing the deep complexity it would require in deconstructing Christianity's present foundations and structures towards a newer promise filled with God-filled grace and presence. Nor was this task one that I could back away from even if I might hesitate because with age had come a sense of settledness to who I was, and a belief in what I must accomplish, in order to get past the "me of yesterday" to the "me of tomorrow." The faith groups I identified with required as much breakage and re-constructing even as mine own head and heart would require. Each pretending their own fantasies in a world they were lumping along with in a way that they really weren't understanding or able to testify to. My more dogmatic faith only made sense to me in the way that I pretended it to be within its delineated confines. But when doing this I had to shut my eyes and close my heart to what I read in the Bible or saw of God in His secular presence to the world I lived in.
Moving Forward
Overall, I don't really have any magic formulas to describe how God moved me through this formative time of searching, burden, betrayal, abandonment, and resurrection. All I knew was that my theology had to change if I were to come into a Christian faith more flexible with the times and more intolerant to the folklore theologies that abounded everywhere around me.
More curiously, the presence of God was exceedingly strong in my life during this time and there was never a silence of His Spirit that I could attest to by God's absence or lack of guidance. No, I felt very burden by the Holy Spirit to climb out of the hole my faith had lately fallen into while re-envisioning what it might become for the generations ahead of me. To reconstruct, or re-envision, its theological and religious orthodoxies where the God of the Bible is more present in this life than far away. Who might breathe into us a more open Bible to people everywhere burdened with the quest for spirituality than an arcane faith of nonsense and disbelief."Yes," I thought, "Everything must change" and nothing can be left unturned that wasn't dissettled before. In many ways it was my third experience of breaking from my hallowed past. The first was when I left my country family, the gentrified farm I grew up on, and the little one-room country school house I had attended, to join a public school system less glamorous than my past. I wasn't concerned about the new subjects I would learn because without attending the public school I wouldn't have been able to learn those newer subjects. But what I actually was experiencing in my transition was a new kind of Christian agnosticism and disbelief that I hadn't experienced in my boyhood years. One that began to drive me to ask the question of why and how and what.
Of course these questions could not be settled right away. It took me some dozen years to re-calculate a more contemporary faith than I had held from the good earth days of my boyhood. My simple, sheltered, almost mystical faith, had become filled with an admixture of Christian and non-Christian thought asking more questions than I could answer. Nor did this go away after high school graduation as I studied the sciences, math, and engineering, having gained a full-ride academic scholarship at a major national university. At the last, the profundity to which I was becoming disturbed caused me to leave university in my junior year to complete my senior year at a bible school over a two year time frame. Afterwards I needed a little time off and found myself teaching out-of-state at a Christian high school for one year before choosing to return to complete a 4-year Master's program in Divinity without ordination. All along I was active in my local churches (GARB Baptist and IFCA Bible), singing, evangelizing, visiting homes, teaching youth, while asking the Lord what next.
Eventually, I settled down, married, took 3 more years of night school towards a partial MBA degree and called it quits on the schooling front. I was laid-off from my financial analyst job at a major Christian publisher and decided to form my own IT consulting firm for the next 27 years where I could explore IT trends and processes, several business entrepreneurships, and generally help small businesses with the then curious world of technology.
During this time I stayed active in my church but stopped reading theology and trying to figure things out because I no longer knew which way to press forward. The best I could do was use what I knew while trusting the Lord to bless the college/career and single adult ministries I was then leading and pastoring at the time. It really wasn't until long years later, once I had left those ministries, that my boyhood years of curiosity and passion began to stir again asking the age-old questions I once was asking.Mostly, I think I had delayed this more fundamental period of investigation because I knew the hard work it would require of me if I should stop and ask disturbing questions of my Christian faith. And, more specifically, how disruptive it might become if a father and a husband started to ask questions which were very-unlike what my wife and children had come to expect of me as a Christian lay minister, "Pauline tent-builder," and family figure. And so, I plodded along until discovering one day I could no longer be content with where I was personally. I began asking questions and then started trying to answer those questions back in the days when I was a promising young student theologian. To then discover that my non-Calvinistic or non-Reformed orthodoxy answers may be disruptive to the my faith tradition I grew up in. My faith dilemma suddenly became a deeply orthodox dilemma so that what I feared would happen, did. Over past several years it would require the wisdom of God to put all back together quite like the Humpty-Dumpty which had fallen off the theological wall. There the pieces lie everywhere about the ground and I, not wanting to reassemble it, into the fashion it once was. No, this assembling would take a deep, more complex rethink of the Christian faith.
Hallowed Ground Fell Away to Discovery
It seemed the epistemological grounds which the Lord had been sowing in my life had lain fallow inside of me until the seeds of my discontent must burst forth lest they became more rigid and inflexible with the passing years of old age as I was now witnessing in my older friends. A new kind of faith now echoed within my once youthful vigor. But one that could finally seek more meaningful direction. I think my work in sales, product marketing, adaptive entrepreneurship, and the rapidly changing industry of technology had taught me how to handle the upheaval of a postmodern society throwing out the past while dealing with the ills of a post-postmodernism full of anarchy, chaos, hate, and division.
A new philosophical direction inhabited me. One I couldn't ask my questions of before but had, with the passage of time, learned to become more able to discern and read among the newer, more promising, trends and directions I was sensing within Christianity. It dawned upon me that the times of silence in my life might not only have been the best answer to epistemic or theologic unknowing, but perhaps the best ontic solution during those times of metaphysical unknowing.
Surely, the process of epistemological tension requires the patience of decades as much as movement, shout, and roar of the society we dwell within as it writhes, twists, and turns. Significantly, I now had the advantage of old age and a contemporary postmodern history of event showing to me the way forward... and the way out! The way forward into a postmodern Christianity more developed than it once had been years earlier. And the way out of a secular Christianity more at odds with itself than it ever was in the past having adopted neo-Calvinistic and non-scared conventions and sanctums into its lapsing evangelicalism.
And so, being part innovator, part creator, part artist, I knew I had to set aside time to think, research, pray, and write of these new developments in my own spiritual world as well as that of the church I hoped to see again. I began with writing unpublished poetry for two-three years from dawn to dusk and eventually this task slowly gave way to a conscious need to write of a more open faith which might rest upon a more open theology. A theology both of my past (the good parts) as well as a theology of the future. In essence, my poetry came to an abrupt stoppage because it wanted a better theological foundation to write upon.
One that might move away from its more linear edges I was now observing within American Christianity. An open faith and theology that might re-embrace God's grace with the good spiritual sense He has given His followers to be gracious in witness and humble in prayer. Less agitated with sin and judgment and more agitated for mercy and forgiveness.
And so, today, I wish to present a new kind of faith. One more rounded to its future faith possibilities and more jagged to its present-tense assembly of itself beheld in fiery Christian pulpits and incharitable (stereotypical) Christian media. One that embraces people with God's love and forgiveness as much as against the calling down of God's holy judgment by self-proclaimed false prophets of our day and age.
I have felt then, as I do now, a holy prophetic calling of God to preach salvation to both the unbeliever as much as to the believer. That the roots and foundations of our dogmatic chains must fall off if we are to behold the light and beauty of the gospel of Jesus as it reclaims this wicked world from the bondages of its miseries and woes. That evil comes in all forms - even that of well-intentioned Christian religion. And that like all sin, must be burned up and thrown on the trash heap of bad theology as readily as any farmer would to save the soils of his land from biological rape and destitution.
My pro-bono calling now is to discover this new homeland where the Christian faith might breathe again in the postmodern airs of disruption and upheaval. And if it can, than I have met my calling and answered my burden long enough to allow others the opportunity to carry forward what I and others had sensed among us was corrupting the great halls of past hallowed orthodoxies. Spiritual reformations which were once bourne by dissembling faith-bearers against their own times and cultures who were agitating for God's calls for truth, love and worship.
Faith-bearers we now know as the great saints of the Christian past though greatly differing in spiritual judgment to the dying churches and dead cults of their day. Who strove for both precept and principle, by letter and by deed, for the grace and mercy of Christ their Lord. Even so do we postmodern reformers by picking up the broken glass shards of theology lying shattered everywhere on the churchy floors around us by reframing new theological windows looking out upon the Creator Redeemer of the universe streaming into our souls the purer airs of blue skies and brighter hues of sun and moon.
Peace be with you, my brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,
R.E. Slater
April 30, 2015
revised May 13, 2015;
September 3, 2020
revised May 13, 2015;
September 3, 2020
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