Historical Theologian, Karen Armstrong at Chautauqua Institution

Greetings readers,

I hope you missed me last week. I was away at the Chautauqua Institution, specifically to hear a series of lectures by Karen Armstrong. She has written about 20 books about various aspects of world religions and is able to put each in historical perspective. She helps us see how many religions have approached the problems of the world in somewhat different ways while affirming that they all bring a remarkably similar core value to the struggle. Her overall topic was “What is Religion?”

For those who are interested, there is a pretty complete summary of each of her five talks in The Chautauquan Daily. They can be found on line at http://www.ciweb.org/Chautauquan%20Daily/2008%20Newspapers/

The summaries are in the issues from June 25 to June 30.

Though I had read several of her books before attending her lectures, I was thrilled to be hearing her live. I was moved by the depth and breadth of her historical, theological, and psychological understanding and by the significance of her work on behalf of the world.

She began by talking about the danger of the relatively recent emphasis on “certainty” in religious belief. Certainty is a direct product of the scientific enlightenment of the last 500 years. Before that, it was rare for theologically astute people to argue about intellectual belief or historical accuracy. The emphasis was always on behavior and commitment. Dr. Armstrong made it clear that in early Christianity, when people who were being baptized made a confession about their beliefs, they were really saying “I make a life changing commitment to God”, rather than “These are the literal beliefs that I proclaim to be true.” Similarly, revelation is a life-changing embodied experience, not a divine recitation of religious facts. The purpose of creation myths, for example, is to teach us something about our relationship to the divine in life, rather than a textbook description of precisely how the world and we humans came into being. Even the “doctrine” of the Trinity is not meant to be a correct description of God, as much as it is a mystery about the various ways that the divine intersects and interpenetrates our existence.

So what? You might ask. Well, we see all the time that the demand for certainty makes it necessary that someone has to be right so the rest must be wrong. The resultant anxiety around the demand for certainty becomes the motivation for fundamentalism and for the physical and emotional violence and destructiveness that always goes with it. In short, the (impossible) quest for certainty makes the world much more dangerous, feeding religious terrorism like nothing else.

A related idea is that when too much religious energy is invested in right believing, then less is available for compassionate action. I’ll go into that idea in greater depth later, but for now, suffice it to say that most of the religions we know in the world came into being in response to chaotic, violent, and destructive cultures. They each bring a version of “The Golden Rule” in a way that transformed those cultures, at least for a while, and at least in part, into more compassion-based cultures. Each of these religions requires what is referred to as kenosis – that is, an emptying of ego – in order to make room for a more compassionate understanding of others.

(From my own research: In Luke 6: 36, we find the words, “Be compassionate as Your God is compassionate.” In Greek the word for compassion is ‘oiktirmones’, and in Hebrew the corresponding word is rahum, a word that is derived from the Hebrew word for womb. Compassion, then, is mother-love, in the sense that the womb is where the space is created (kenosis) within which new life comes into being. And the mother is forever connected to the life that has come into being in her womb.) See Isaiah 49:15

Finally for this installment of the blog, I want to tell you that Karen Armstrong was one of the recipients of a TED Prize in 2008. “The TED Prize was created as a way of taking the inspiration, ideas and resources that are generated at TED and using them to make a difference. Although the winners receive a prize of $100,000 each, that's the least of what they get. The real prize is that they are granted a WISH. A wish to change the world.” (from http://www.ted.com/index.php/pages/view/id/6)

Go to the TED site learn about the organization and to see the specifics of Karen Armstrong’s wish for the world.

I will write at a later time in more detail about how I think Healthy Liberal Christianity is consistent with Dr. Armstrong’s work.

I invite you to comment on what I have written, but even more on what Karen Armstrong is doing on behalf of the world.

Wayne

“Become compassionate as your God is compassionate.” Luke 6:36