Plugging Holes In A Potential Volcanoe

Christianity Confronts its Greatest Challenge

by Michael Morwood

The events in St Mary’s, South Brisbane, can too readily be dismissed as an in-house Roman Catholic dispute culminating in the Archbishop removing a priest he considers to be unfaithful to Roman Catholic teaching and practice.

This dispute is more far-reaching than that. What we see here is not so much the tip of an iceberg but rather the flaring of a volcano. This volcano has enormous size and power. Institutional Christianity would do well to deal with it rather than plug holes.
What does this volcano represent and why does institutional Christianity, all the while proclaiming that “the truth will set you free”, steadfastly and even dishonestly refuse to engage the issues?

The refusal to engage has an uncanny resemblance to the refusal to engage Galileo.
Scientific knowledge clashed with Scripture and belief set in concrete. Far easier to silence (try to plug the volcano erupting) the source of knowledge rather than confront issues that called long cherished beliefs and Church authority into question. It took the Roman Catholic Church centuries to apologise for its treatment of Galileo. And once again, Church authority is digging in the heels and refusing to engage what is staring them in the face.

The fundamental issue today is also scientific. One example is the Hubble Telescope and its pictures that reveal to us a universe we could never have imagined even 25 years ago – a universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. Another example is 20th century knowledge about the age of this planet and how life developed on it.
This scientific “story” not only invites but demands that Christians (and people of all religions) reflect on their understanding of the mystery they call “God” in this context. Christianity traditionally has two streams of thought.

One stream of thought proclaims that God is everywhere as the source and sustainer of all that is. In this thinking everyone and everything is connected in and through this Presence. And, as some great Christian thinkers have told us very clearly, this Presence is beyond our comprehension, our understanding and our human images. This needs to be clearly understood. This is part of traditional Christian thinking. It is basic Christianity. (This understanding of God is Christianity 101. See first Chapter of John.)

The other stream of thought has focused on God as a Deity who thinks, plots, plans, reacts, intervenes and plays favourites. In simple terms, this deity can be referred to as the “elsewhere God” because he denied access to himself and then sent “his Son” (from where?) to earth. (This is the God of the Old Testament.)

Jesus, in the first stream of thought, is the revealer of God-with-us (everyone!) in our living and loving. He opens eyes and minds to the unseen reality in which we are all immersed and have existence. Jesus challenged people to give expression to this Presence in their lives, so that the “reign” of God, characterised by compassion, generosity, forgiveness and love, would be evident among us.

In the second stream of thought, developed in the Christian Scriptures well after Jesus died, Jesus became the unique “way” to the elsewhere deity. He “opened the gates of heaven”; he “saved” us. Or, at least, he “saved” people who believed he was the unique way to God.

It is not surprising that the second stream of thinking about God and Jesus came to dominate the Christian religion. After the break with its mother religion, Judaism, the Christian Church claimed to have unique access to God through Jesus.

As Cicero would ask, “Who gained?”

Clearly institutional Christianity had much to gain by this thinking. It gave the new religion unique identity and authority. It could – and did – claim that only through entrance into this Church and fidelity to its beliefs could anyone have access to God when they died.
The Christian religion, in its creedal statements, locked itself into this story of Jesus gaining access to an elsewhere deity rather than honouring Jesus’ preaching about God-with-us.

And now this religion is facing the biggest shift ever in its history because so many Christians simply no longer give credence to the worldview or the notion of God that underpins traditional, acceptable, orthodox Christian theology. These Christians are not being “unfaithful” to Jesus or the God Jesus preached or a stream of thought that has always been part of Christian thinking. They just want their religion to shift from a no-longer-believable story about or emphasis on a deity who has definite opinions on whether women should be ordained priests or stem cell research or whatever.

They want their religion to honour God’s presence in people the way Jesus did. They want prayer and liturgy to reflect this Presence with them and to be empowered by it rather than constantly reaching out to a listening deity who might or might not hear or answer their prayers. They want their religion to preach what Jesus preached: the accessibility of the Divine Presence to all people who reflect on their love and generosity.

But, in the Roman Catholic Church, Rome and Episcopal authority do not want this to happen. It seems there is intense fear that the Christian religion will collapse and lose its identity; central authority (and power) will be eroded if there is any shift from thinking about Jesus as the unique “way” to an elsewhere God. So there exists this tight control, this constant plugging of holes to stop the volcano erupting. Theologians are silenced to such an extent that there now exists in the Roman Catholic Church what can only be called a climate of acute intellectual dishonesty, driven by Rome and many bishops. Theologians can not say or write what they really think about this enormous shift and its implications for the Christian Creed and Church identity because they will be silenced. Catholic parishes have been under enormous pressure for some years, with a watchdog, reporting mentality rife in some dioceses, not to make changes to rituals, even though the rituals are shot through with notions of and language about an elsewhere deity. (This is to me the saddest aspect of all of the recent theological controversies. It's almost gotten to the point that it's a sin to think outside the box of redemptive atonement theology. Just like it's becoming sinful to be a Democrat.)

Sadly, the expression given to this shift in St Mary’s, South Brisbane, will be plugged. It will be done in the name of fidelity to Church doctrine and practice. The Archbishop may well think he has right on his side as well as absolute power and authority. But that’s what happened with Galileo and the greatest disappointment for anyone with any understanding of the real issues at stake in this dispute is that Church authority are looking at “truth” with blinkers on.

There is another “story” about God and the universe, about Jesus as revealer of that Mystery, about the Church doing faithfully what Jesus did. It’s a wonderful story, faithful to Christian roots and it has the potential to revitalise the Church at all levels. Rome says Catholics are not allowed to tell, preach or celebrate this story in any shape or form. The Archbishop does what Rome tells him to do.

Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church need to be more courageous in facing the world and these times than this.

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Michael Morwood's own history with Cardinal Pell of Australia illustrates the points that he makes in the above article about the silencing of priests and theologians who ask hard questions about the Church's world view. Is it possible to take a theology of atonement developed in the fourth and fifth centuries after Jesus, and make it relevant to twenty first century believers? It may still work in some quarters, but the exodus of laity from the church would seem to say it's past it's sell date. People are looking for a sense of God which is with them, not a God who is out there somewhere in an unavailable zip code.

One of the knocks on St. Mary's was the fact the Fr. Peter Kennedy acknowledged the difficulties he himself had with certain Church teachings. Things like what we meant by the Divinity of Christ, the Virgin birth, certain concepts about the Trinitarian relationship, some of the sexual morality doctrine, and priestly celibacy. It's not that he preached homilies about this, because apparently he didn't, but he did discuss these things outside of formal worship. St. Mary's was a congregation which was given the freedom to think and question, and this led to an expression of worship which took it outside certain aspects of the Catholic tradition. This does not mean St. Mary's didn't express aspects of other parts of the Tradition, other Traditional threads which have been seriously ignored by the Institutional Church, especially since the Council of Trent.

Michael Morwood points this out in his article. There has always been a current in Church thinking which de emphasized the God out there in favor of the God with us and with in us. This is more the God of the monasteries than the God of the institution, and it's certainly not the God of the laity. This 'God with in' is also much more prevalent in the Eastern church than it is in Rome, and this is also the vision of God which is being supported by quantum physics.

The 'God with us and in us' vision actually needs a strong vigorous community to support one's growth in evolving in this God. Jesus Himself made that point in numerous parables. This is not a vision of God which is discovered in a self vacuum. It is a God that is discovered in others, in all others. It is in His reflection in others that we see Him in ourselves. St. Mary's seemed to epitomise how contagious this view of God is for a very disparate flock of people. St. Mary's demonstrated the power of a living God, not a boxed God. It is a shame that room could not be found for this parish in our current Church structure. St. Mary's really does have a message about a viable future for Catholicism. Unfortunately the bigger message is that institutional Roman Catholicism prefers it's past to it's potential future.

In any event the questions aren't going to go away because all the messengers get silenced. For one thing the Church no longer has the power to silence all the messengers because not all the messengers are clerics or theologians. Secondly the Church has run smack dab into the inter net age and can't begin to plug the holes represented by every one's ability to access all the information they want. And finally, but most importantly, human consciousness itself is changing and seeking different answers to age old questions. This is a consciousness seeking union and oneness, not division and otherness. The theology and Church structure of the Jesus of Trent is not going to be able to give credible answers to those seekers.

So St. Mary's may now be officially in exile outside of the Church, but it's message is still alive and still symbolizes real problems for the Roman Catholic Church in a modern secular world. Those problems aren't going to go away just because a bishop or a pope says so or refuses to acknowledge they exist. To maintain that posture is to admit one has no answers. That's not a healthy place from which to teach much that's believable about God.