I don't think too much about how other people think of me.  Outside my immediate spiritual community, who I expect to hold me to accountability, I am perfectly willing to state, "Here I stand, I can do no other."  What is more, my thoughts and beliefs have been remarkably fluid in the ten years or so since I began following Jesus, so I am not especially afraid of becoming stuck in one place if scripture, community, tradition, experience and the Holy Spirit are guiding me elsewhere.

But recently I have begun thinking about credibility and authority.  Granted that I think of my position as one of challenging insider, rather than authoritative teacher, throwing firecrackers to keep Christians from resting too easily in this or that position.  And having been accused recently of being an atheist in disguise, and of stepping outside orthodoxy in a number of areas, and these by Christians who disagree with one another on perhaps contestable matter, I have begun wondering whether I am perceived of as an insider at all. 

I know that I am more or less orthodox by the major criteria.   I believe in the creeds, certainly. 

I also know that in most areas where views are hotly contested, I am in the minority camp.  Perhaps if you made a cross-section of all those minority views, I'd be discovered to be in a very small company indeed.  (Perhaps many of us would find ourselves in very lonely such squares.)

For example, I am an open theist.  I am also a pacifist.  I am an egalitarian in regard to both family structure and ministry.  All of this is fine and considered orthodox by most Christians, and most of the major plays in my own church home (Church of God, Anderson) espouse the same set of views.  But most Church of God pastors are not comfortable with evolutionary theory, which I more or less take for granted. 

So what do you think?  Am I too far out to be taken seriously by mainstream Christians?  Am I outside the Christian faith altogether? (Even this idea of in or out on the basis of a particular set of beliefs is not something I necessarily believe in.)  How do you think about these matters?

-NDSR

I'm currently auditing a philosophy course on the subject of death.  Roughly the first half of the course is focused on the nature of a person (what is it that dies when we die?  and therefore what does it mean to die?).  This professor does not believe in any kind of transcendent or pre-existent soul, so most of the class so far has been spent looking at every conce  ivable argument for the existence of the soul, and explaining how the argument fails to persuade.

I come into the discussion from a unique perspective.  I am with Prof. Kagan.  I don't believe people have souls.  We are bundles of tissues and nerves and synapses that, when working properly, constitute a person.  When they are no lo  nger working, they constitute a dead person.  There is an abstract and purposive part of human consciousness that could be called the soul, but I don't believe it is self-existent or capable of being abstracted from human physicality.  So when you die, you die. 

Some might think (and certainly Prof. Kagan thinks) that challenging the belief in the soul would be problematic for evangelical Christians, but I don't see any real obstacles.  It is not on the basis of an immortal soul that Christians believe in life after death, but on the basis of the saving activity of God.  There's nothing special about humans that makes us innately immortal.  As Frederick Buechner put it, "We go to our graves as dead as a doornail and are given our lives back again by God just as we were given them by God in the first place."

What do you think?  Do you believe humans have souls?  If so, how is a soul best defined?  Did your soul exist before you were born?  What will happen to your soul after your body dies? 

"Reformation names the disunity in which we currently stand."

So said Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas in a sermon given on Reformation Sunday several years ago.

Reformation Sunday is generally marked as the Sunday before Reformation Day, which falls on October 31st, the date Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg.

Hauerwas opened his sermon by explaining that he does not like to preach on Reformation Sunday, in fact does not like Reformation Sunday as part of the church year in general.  Reformation Sunday should not be a happy day in the church, as it marks a continuing failure.  At the present, no satisfactory reformation has occurred, and what we are left with is disunity: a Catholic church not capable of being catholic. 

But Protestants are far too often accepting or even celebratory of this state of things, seeing the Protestant church not as a protesting, reformation movement within the catholic church, but as an end in itself.  But to the degree that the Protestant church forgets who it is and is content to exist only in its own branches, it is sinning against the unity of the church Christ died for.  The church of all places must be unified, as it is intended to be the first fruits of a coming new creation in which all the walls the divide people have been destroyed (Eph 2:14).

Hauerwas discussed the advantages of a catholic Catholic church.  For example, a catholic Catholic church gives the worshipers the comfort of knowing that wherever they travel, they will be worshiping the same God.  It is not necessarily so in the multitude of Protestant and Protestantish churches that not only have convergent beliefs in a number of matters, but also have no relationship with one another.  According to Hauerwas, "Catholics understand the church’s unity as grounded in a reality more determinative than our good feelings for one another."  We might also add a reality more determinative than your or my unique theological formulations. 

I do not necessarily want to see the Protestants close up shop and return to Papal authority.  Perhaps that makes me too Protestant for most Catholics.  But I also cannot see the Protestant church as solitary and satisfactory in itself.  No doubt many Protestants will disagree.  Standing as I do outside both organisms, I can summarize what I would like to see this way: I would like to see the Catholics become more Anabaptist, the Anabaptists become more Catholic, and the Protestants become more of both. 

What can we do on Reformation Day?  Hauerwas pointed out in his sermon that John Paul II in the last years of his life wrote confessed the Catholic sin of the Reformation.  That is certainly a beginning.  Where is the Protestant capable of confessing Protestant sin for continuing disunity?  (Hauerwas suggests that Protestants cannot do so because they have no capacity to see disunity as sin.) 

But "unity is finally a matter of memory."  Christians must come together as part of the church catholic, and remember the Reformation together, to tell the story of our disunity and the much deeper story of our unity truthfully, so that we can "look forward to being together in union with one another and thus share a common story." 

Hauerwas ends his sermon with an exhortation to prayer. 

"Pray that on Reformation Sunday we may as tax collectors confess our sin and ask God to make us a new people joined together in one mighty prayer that the world may be saved from its divisions."

Will you pray with me?

-NDSR 

Prof. Hauerwas's sermon