A COFFEE MOMENT...

MY FAVORITE COFFEE SHOP, would you believe, is called 'Heavenly Cup'.  It is not far from where I used to live, at Gang Mills.  By the way, a ganged mill consists of several saws that, in tandem, cut, shape, and section a log horizontally and vertically, so that what enters as a log emerges as sawn timber.  The name reminds us that the Corning area  once had one of the largest forestry industries in the US. In passing, we could note that 'heavenly' cup refers to a quality and not a place.

The coffee at Heavenly Cup rivals that to be found anywhere.  There, last week, I was in conversation with one of the pastors of a church I occasionally attend...one of the modern versions with a youth band, lots of singing, and expositions a tad longer than those at Christ Church.  He wanted to know how it is that I came to my present view of faith and religion.  It was a clarifying moment; in cafe, veritas.  My mind flew back to that moment when I sacked God the second time.

Of course, I didn't really sack God;  I simply use this as a metaphor for the sudden, final collapse of the dualism implicit in modern Christianity and, for that matter, most western approaches to faith.  If there  is just one reality, the reality we have been attempting to incorporate and make sense of since birth, the physical world of which we are part and which scientific inquiry has been endeavoring to understand for the past two hundred years, then the traditional view of Christianity necessarily collapses.  If there is just one world, one universe, where in this world can the god of faith exist?  This is not to say that this 'god of faith' cannot exist, but not as a real being in some other realm of existence that we call 'heaven'.

We inherit the cosmology of traditional Christianity (Heaven up there somehow above the clouds, man being made of body and soul, Jesus both human and Divine, and so on) from an earlier time, the way the world was seen, conceptualized by the Greeks, Romans, and, to some extent, the Jews.  With two hundred years or so of scientific inquiry into the nature of things behind us, modern thinking about the foundations of faith should be able to do a lot better.

Talking with my friend over a heavenly cup also exemplified for me how a particular view of the Bible can stand in the way of achieving this.  This is the comparatively modern view that these writings are scientifically and historically accurate because divinely inspired.  Taking this view preserves the cosmology of the times of the various authors and disregards the immense amount of biblical scholars of all persuasions done over the last two hundred years on the nature and construction of these writings.

Unfortunately this also preserves the notion that man and nature are separate and that the earth is meant to be under the dominion of man, to be exploited however humans see fit.

Well, this is the story of my journey into faith and I am not asking you to agree with these views.  I am glad that I have lived to a time when a much clearer picture of Jesus has emerged, who he was, what he had to say, and his position in the stream of Jewish thought about the meaning of life.  This is the historical Jesus, not the Jesus of faith as worshiped by many Christians of today, the concept of The Christ I encounter when I attend at worship

But what about 'God'?   What might it mean to "believe in 'God'?"