How To Believe

How to Believe: Teachers and Seekers Show the Way to a Modern, Life-Changing Faith by Jon Spayde (New York: Random House, 2008) is a striking book to read after finishing Gretta Vosper’s With Or Without God, since it reflects an almost opposite perspective, that of someone who is attracted to Christianity, as opposed to someone who is trying to mediate its core to those who are repelled by some of its features. The book is a collection of interviews, and here are a few quotes to give you just a taste:

Richard Rohr: “God refuses to let Himself of Herself be thought. God can only be experienced. You can’t think God, you can only be present to God” (p.5).

Kosuke Koyama: “You know, if you were to go up to Jeremiah and ask him what he thought of monotheism, he’d say ‘What? I’ve never heard that word. But Yahweh commands us to care for the widow and the orphan'” (p.14). He also quotes Max Mueller (p.16) as saying that “he who knows only one religion knows none”.

John Shelby Spong: “The theistic God is either impotent, evil, or He doesn’t exist. If God hasn’t got the power to stop the tsunami, then he’s impotent; if He has it and doesn’t, then He’s malevolent. That kind of God doesn’t live very long in the thoughtful minds of people. A lot of what people call prayers to the theistic God are letters to Santa Claus – dear God, I’ve been a good boy…[M]ost people have so identified God with that sort of image that, when they hear you critique the theistic God, they think you are saying there is no God. But theism is a human definition of the holy, and all human definitions can change” (p.41). I also liked Spong’s self-description on p.42: “I understand why people want to hold on to the old conceptions, because I once held them. They finally got cracked open for me in theological seminary, and I became more or less what I am, which is a sort of mystic wandering in the wilderness, convinced of the reality of God, not convinced of any formula that purports to describe what God is. I am always on a journey into the mystery which is bigger than any of the creeds can possibly contain.”

James W. Jones: “[T]he mind can’t carry the weight of your whole life” (p.85). I like Jones’ description of the Christian contemplative tradition, and his suggestion that there ought to be a Bodhisattva vow for Christians.

Leo Lefebure: “One of the saddest results of the current battles between the partisans of the conservative and liberal religion in America, it seems to me, is the loss of a sense of religion as the exploration of mystery – probing a truth so compelling that it must be explored but so vast that it will never be comprehended” (p.133).