There are few places as good as seminary to lose one’s faith, or at the least to have it pushed, twisted and forced past any place you had safely stacked out in advance. I had already considered myself a theologically liberal guy and had chosen my seminary carefully – a school with historically left-leaning theological faculty where I was one of three straight men in my class. Regardless, after several years of postmodern theory, queer and feminist theological methodologies as well as one stress-disorder induced by my MA thesis on theopoetics and liberation theologies I was about done with God.

While a student I used to go into the seminary chapel – where I was hired to set up chairs for the community that met there Sunday mornings – at night and have it out with God. This consisted of some yelling, some questioning and some occasional tears. On the whole I resisted the urge to throw the chairs.

One of the joys – and frustrations – of being at seminary with liberal/progressive theologians is that if one does start drifting towards athesism you find some well educated companions on the route. Between process theology and Dr. Sally McFague’s concept of panentheism I could find no way for a God who was slowly slipping away from me and my own growing partial faith to not, somehow, remain inside the Christian story. I was confronted on every side by a progressive ideology that had too much room for me.

Atheism and theism have often been placed in strict opposition to each other in a way which suggests that only two camps can exist. Agnosticism has at times tried to present itself as a middle position but tends to get neglected and rejected by atheists and theists alike and thus people on either end consider it to be cheating.

John Caputo in On Religion and The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event argues that if we view the term God as not a strong force but an idea or poetry that calls us – an idea of passion that sits in the center of the human condition – then there is no line between theism and atheism. This works if we take seriously Caputo’s notion of God not as a being but as a word we use to describe love. This, Caputo insists, relies on a passionate religious awe of life – or a recognition that awe for life is what makes one religious, not creed, doctrine or theology.

Caputo’s ideas here seem, on first blush, to border on a form of agnosticism – a third position in relationship to theism and atheism. This is not true, for in Caputo’s thought world – inspired by Derrida – God is not a being, but is a poetry we speak. God is something we make real through our actions and that people touched by this passion seek to make the impossible possible.

Though he does not name it as such I wonder if Caputo is much more influenced and inspired by an idea akin to David Eagleman’s possibilianism than anything else. Eagleman, a neuroscientist and author of the book Sum, describes his position as:

“Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I’m hoping to define a new position — one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.”

This possibilianism seems to take seriously the idea that humans live, move, breathe and have their being in an expansive, unfolding universe and conduct their human relationships in the midst of complex relationships and social dynamics. Or – life and the universe are messy, no one position can hold all of life neatly. It also takes seriously that our various stories and narratives of the human condition – science on one hand, religion on the other – are not so much as competing narratives but dancing stories that evolve and respond the questions and contexts of their day.

A possibilian position then seeks less to refute religion and more to enhance it as a dynamic, living possibility of human experience. In deed to be a Christian Possibilian is to hold onto the narrative and insights of my wisdom tradition as vital and gifting to the world – but, also, ultimately updateable through insight of philosophy, science and the human condition.

This would require a person to sometimes hold multiple and conflicting points of view and thus to move away from orthodoxy to paradoxology. Paradoxology would be a religious position that insists that religious communities be what they have always been – despite their protests – sites of cultural engagement and locations of ideas that shift, grow and change in relationship with the ground conditions of their context.

Likewise atheists would have to confess that science cannot and will not answer all of life’s problems. It would mean that scientific discoveries would have to be held as sources of religious awe and wonder at the world. And, of course, science would have to be held accountable and judged for its sins – atomic bombs, technologies of genocide etc.

Today I am a post-seminarian. I have a master’s degree in theological studies and I am ordained in the Progressive Christian Alliance with my first academic book on its way out. Where I used to have a space labeled God in my thinking system I am left with something else – a beautiful, mystical, poetic and religious commitment to not-knowing.

If you were to push me I would have to say, honestly, that I am an Atheist who believes in God and a Theist who does not believe. Simone Weil comes to mind: “Of course I am an Atheist and a Christian, I don’t see the conflict. What we call God cannot exist and yet the object of my devotion is not in vain” (paraphrase mine).

All things are possible until they are proven not, at which point new possibilities open up. Belief, theology, spirituality, theology and God become a play/ground of possibilities, each one which poses a question to us about the human condition and human possibilities. Faith becomes less a position on the eternal soul of humanity and more of a comment and conversation on the eternal possibility of the human condition.

Where doubt once ruled it is now embraced, not as an object or block to be overcome but as a condition of humanity that enriches my experience. If all things are possible then my faith and my doubt are not polarities to be navigated but are essential parts of the human condition to be integrated into my being. This way of faith – God without God, a religious awe of life instead of dogma and doctrine – is the great adventure, and I hope I am not alone on the journey.

The Church of Sunday Coffee

If you pushed me I would begrudgingly admit to my Christian faith. In recent months I have found myself to be on a bit of Church break. The communities and energies that have for so long sustained me now seem – tired, run out and out of ideas. While I value deeply the worshipping communities that sustained me for the last few years I find myself in need of something more.

Today, for instance, I am sitting in a coffee shop on Vancouver, BCs Commercial drive. I have a cup of green tea and I am watching the cold, grey post-rainy day through the large windows that look out on an Italian bakery. To my right a group of Italian men are bickering and at the counter a young girl is marveling at the ear spacers of the young woman serving coffee.

For now this is my church. It lacks something in community – unless I learn how to speak Italian and join in with the shouting old men that is. But it has so much more to give that I very eagerly welcome this opportunity for worship. And the sermon is not that good, though I am at a national chain coffee-shop and as such its message is not much different from that of most main-line churches: brand protection and promotion/large national structure to promote and protect.

But the cup of green tea is the best sacrament I’ve had in a long time, minus the long conversation I had yesterday with a friend who lives on the street. Its warm on a cold day and it is refreshing in a way that I need after a long week of work and financial insecurity as my wife and I start our careers.

I like the smell of it, the wisps of steam from the open cup as I breathe deeply before every sip. I like the way it makes me feel calm and at peace and at rest. With global economies going through turbulence and so much trouble, strife and insecurity in the world – not to mention my own insecurities and financial brinks – it’s good to have a day of rest. Its good to sit here with a cup of tea and listen to my own heartbeat for a while and to sing along a bit with John Lennon on the in-store radio.

Church and The Times

Of course the church is not necessarily supposed to be a place of rest, relaxation and calm in the midst of a loud, noisy, violent world. Or, I should say, it is supposed to be that also. In the book To Be A Revolutionary by Padre J. Guadalupe Carney he speaks to the need for middle-class and rich people to have a church that is one of rest and relaxation. This, he says, does not work for the poor and the downtrodden who need churches that speak prophetically to the condition and reality of their lives and demands justice. Whatever rest, relaxation and recharging the church brings for these people is to the end of advocating for justice and preparing the people for that work. We can see this in the historic black church and its commitment to civil rights and the community and in the LGBT church – such as the Metropolitan Community Church – as they continue to be communities of justice both in their embodiment as communities that function in light of the justice they seek and as communities that articulate the justice they want from the world.

This of course begs the question of what the church is supposed to be in the world. When the church becomes a place that mirrors the status quo then we should automatically be alerted to something being afoul in Christ’s church. If Christ formed a community of the lost, downtrodden and cast-aside by the powers of empire then the community itself is an alternative nation – a nation of believers, a nation of the oppressed – that functions in opposition to the ruling power assumptions. Their have always been churches who have gotten this and always been churches that don’t. If the world reduces the power and possibility of women in the world then it is the church that must give them a place to thrive and prophetically advocate for them. If the world reduces the participation of LGBT folks then it is for the church to be a community of diverse voices that declares that none are outside of Gods enterprise.

What I am not speaking of here is a form of Quietism that identifies the world as hostile and in need of abandonment and that the believer should retreat back into their cloistered world. Instead I am saying we identify the world as a place of goodness, beauty and truth but that they have missed the mark on the way to that reality The church then has an obligation to form communities of alternate realities in order to show the world what it can be and what salvation can be. If the world advocates dominator hierarchies and empires the church argues back with communities of mutuality and inclusive participation.

The Church that Is Not Church

In my new book Towards A Theopoetic of The Cross from the Progressive Christian Alliance Press (available on Amazon.com) I advocate for an ethic of church that is always involved in its own self-destruction. The church must always take a position in opposition to the powers-that-be/the ruling ethic of the day. Large communities always default to their own self-preservation, usually by defining whose in and whose out: we put things in categories of gay and straight, male and female, black and white, terrorist and patriot. The church in identifying that the impulse towards empire and exclusion are the spirits of the age must take up an ethic of resistance. But in doing that we must immediately turn around and destroy that new ethic we have just created so as to prevent an act of grace from becoming an act of law.

For instance: when we create a doctrine, theology or policy we must immediately take stock of which that new position excludes. If the church is to be Christ’s body in solidarity with the oppressed then we must always be careful to watch out for our own tendencies towards self-preservation. If we are trying to preserve our community as it is then we are not opening it to the work of Christ that could be. The church is not an institution for itself but a gathering space for people to come and gift the world with an impulse towards justice, relying on the gifts and talents of the assembled people.

As has been pointed out by more than one commentator the Church in North America is dying, and rightfully so. Traditional denominations have become so tied to the ways we have always done things and the status quo power assumptions that we have stopped dreaming of how to be about Gods mission in the world. I know too many priests who lament the end of the 1950’s and the so-called peak of Christendom.

But as the church dies something new will emerge. New communities of people who seek less to be Christians but more to be followers of the way of Jesus in the face of systems that seek to dominate and control human bodies. Church will become communities of resistance, action and justice in ways that draw wider the circle of inclusion. But we will also be a place of destruction, always destroying our assumptions, revealing our limitations and opening spaces for the Spirit to drag us into the future of Gods mission.

Tea Time is Over

I have been hiding behind the Church of Sunday Coffee (well, Green Tea mostly) for way too long. I have sought out quiet and renewal while shunning participation in Gods work in the world. I no longer know if traditional worshipping communities have a place for me, but I know that the work of God goes on. So I may have to begin by working out my own path and listening to the new directions of Spirit as I find my way. Maybe, just maybe, I will find a community that helps people find rest and renewal while preparing them for the hard work of Gods mission.

But I know that I can no longer stay here, hiding behind my teacup. And I can no longer be hesitant in naming myself as a Christian: the church does not work for me, but I am a follower of Jesus and a lover of the way of Jesus. Maybe that’s enough for now, like an Alcoholic taking the first of the 12 steps. Maybe confessing who I am and who I am called to be is the start I need. I will trust in God and Gods mission in the world, and I will see where that leads.