Today I stumbled upon another blog of a woman who is chronicling her journey out of religious abuse. I lingered for a while, reading some of her posts…feeling her pain.
There are essentially three types of blogs that I follow. I have found a number of respected Christian scholars, most of whom are professors at one university or another. Of these, I tend to avoid those who are too far extreme either to the left or the right. I also follow a number of seminarians, of who most are working on advanced theology degrees. These advanced students often ask questions that others are afraid to ask.
The last category of bloggers that I like to read are those who have been involved in some sort of cult or “extreme fundamentalism” and are trying to find their way home. Many, but not all, of these spent time in the same cult that I grew up in, Armstrongism.
I read the professors and the academic types because I seek to learn from them. Although I don’t always agree with their conclusions, they delve much deeper into various theological ideas than I will ever find in a Sunday School class. Over the course of the last couple of years, I have weeded down the blogs that I follow to those who approach theology and the Bible with open minds and are willing to ask the same hard questions that I do.
And hard questions I ask.
I think that growing up in a cult will force a person to do one of two things. Either give up on religion completely, or start completely from scratch. I’ve seen a great many who grew up in the cult that I did who did the former, and I was very close to giving up on God my own self. How could I trust anything that any religious leader said when the one that I grew up thinking was “God’s Apostle” turned out to be blatantly wrong on 90% of what he taught?
Fortunately, God never gave up on me, and the day eventually came when I set out to once-and-for-all determine if Christianity’s claims had any validity at all. Through many, many painstaking hours of study and a few heartfelt prayers, I finally determined that the basic claim of Christianity must be true. That is, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, lived, died on the cross, and was resurrected three days later. And that He did it for me.
However, past that basic fact, I have had to prove nearly every tenant of the Christian faith for myself, and that is still an ongoing process.I had to start from scratch.
Just because a bunch of people came up with a creed or two, or a church committee developed a “statement of faith” is simply not good enough for me. Having been burned, and burned badly, by the Worldwide Church of God’s erroneous “statement of faith”, I doubt that I will ever be able to simply say, “Hey, that’s a great creed, I think I’ll go with it!”
So, as I read through the blogs of recovering fundamentalists, quivering daughters, and cult survivors of all sorts, I realize that it is much the same for all of these people. Like me, most of these have lost faith not in God, but in those who tell us who God is. Quite often, the cult survivors that I run across escaped the cults that they were in decades ago, but are still struggling to find a Christian church that they can feel comfortable in and a pastor that they can trust.
For me, it’s been over twenty years since I set foot in an Armstrongite church, but I know that I still haven’t fully recovered. Of course, I spent a good many years of those two decades in no church at all, and it has only been in the last few years that I really started digging into the Bible in earnest to find the message held within. But that too is often a hallmark of cult survivors.
The shell-shock of coming out of a cult often discourages survivors from any sort of church membership at all. And as I pointed out in a post last year, the experience quite often drives cult survivors into a stance of complete disbelief or atheism.
Perhaps the day will come when I read an account of someones journey away from spiritual abuse and it won’t hit that nerve that is still raw. Perhaps one day I will have, to my satisfaction, proven enough of the tenants of the creeds that I can stop asking so many questions. Perhaps one day I will find myself completely healed from having grown up in a cult, and simply call myself Christian, instead of “a-Christian-who-grew-up-in-a-cult-but-who-is-now-just-a-normal-Christian.”
I would be happy to see one of the modern scholars who asks hard questions. The philosophers and theologians of old did ask hard questions, but it seems we are in the era of loaded and rhetorical questions. In a sense they are hard, but they are hard in a sense that Seneca complained about. Trying to find an error in:
‘Mouse is a syllable, and a mouse nibbles cheese; therefore, a syllable nibbles cheese.’
Anyway, it is good to see you searching.
I think that there are many who are asking much harder questions over the course of the last few decades than we have probably seen since the fourth or fifth centuries. For close to fifteen hundred years, if you asked one of “the hard questions” you risked getting burned at the stake. Since the Reformation and then the Enlightenment some Christian theologians have gingerly ventured out to question Christian dogma, but even they risked dis-fellowship and banishment.
Only in the last few decades have respected academic types been able to pose hard questions that go against the grain and still retain the respect of their colleagues. Two who come to mind are the late Clark Pinnock with his support for Open Theism and William Craig Lane with his support for Molinism. I imagine that a half-century ago these two would have been run out of town on a rail.
Of course, the acceptance of new ideas can be a double edged sword. Just as we can move closer to theological “truth” so we can move further away. A good example of those moving away is illustrated in the resurgence of Gnostic ideas, which had for fifteen hundred years been nearly completely squelched.
Checking both Open Theism and Molinism – per wiki – leaves me with the impression that they are fairly speculative, but not drastically diverging from orthodoxy. My own view is that God is outside of time, which makes these philosophical discussions intractable to creatures that are bound to time. It is a bit like shadows trying to describe the objects from which they are cast.
“I imagine that a half-century ago these two would have been run out of town on a rail.”
The modernist experiment was well under way two centuries ago. The Unitarian Harvard Divinity School dates from 1816, while one of the most famous modernist theologians, Henry van Dyke (1852-1933), orchestrated the Presbyterian ejection of conservatives a century ago. If I go to Europe, Voltaire (1694-1778) was kicking around radical ideas together with a large group of others.
Anyway, a key part of philosophy – the love of wisdom – is identifying what is humanly intractable. Certainly what is intractable qualifies as a “hard question”.
Unfortunately, I have yet to read Voltaire or van Dyke. I suppose I will get to them eventually.
I am still not convinced of either Molinism or Open Theism, but both offer up satisfactory answers to theodicy. Either one can find scriptural support, but are largely philosophical arguments in my estimation.
tenants of the creeds
creeds don’t have “tenants”, they have “tenets”.
I certainly fit your description of a recovering fundy–left, lost my faith for two decades, just came gingerly back around but am not taking ANYTHING as given. I even doubted the historicity of Jesus, much less his deity.
Oops, look at the time… gotta run those kiddies to school or I’d write more!
Tenants, Tenets, whatever
.
Like you, I had gotten to the point where I doubted the historicity of Jesus by the time that I started my way back. I never fell all the way into atheism, but I got to thinking of God as a “watchmaker god” who had wound everything up, but wasn’t very interested in the goings on down here on earth,
Amen, Randy.