The Christian Humanist

This is an autobiographical story of a religious pilgrimage from the uncritical certainty of the evangelical tradition in which I was brought up through a long dark night of unsettling doubt and theological confusion in my early adulthood to the place where I stand today, the landscape of which may become clearer in the pages ahead.  It is a place where I stand with some confidence that I have assembled enough of the “theological fragments” that were left to me to be able to construct a Christian faith that makes sense to me both as a framework by which to understand the meaning and significance of life (a religious philosophy) and as a way of living that life (an ethical commitment).

As early as high school I was aware of some inner conflict and uncertainty about what was taught in Sunday School. I was aware that the biblical stories could not be “true” in the sense that they documented literal descriptions of actual events.  I was desperately seeking some theological explanation that would clarify the sense in which we could believe that biblical events were ‘true.’  At the same time I was painfully aware that those Christians around me acted and spoke as if they believed that biblical events were literally true and did not seem troubled by that.  I think some of my very early seriousness about religion was driven by my personal anxiety and confusion about how to understand and explain these events.

The place to begin this story about my struggle with faith is with memories from my childhood that may provide a useful background and frame of reference for understanding the confusion, uncertainty and naivete of my developing religious outlook.   

My father died suddenly in 1939 of pneumonia.  By 1942 my mother had remarried, taken my brother and me out of the orphanage into which she had placed us after my father’s death and moved us to Washington, D.C., where my stepfather had obtained employment with the War Production Board. By 1944 we had moved from the basement apartment that was our first home on Buchanan Street in northwest Washington to a low-rise brick apartment complex in southeast Washington in the district known as Congress Heights.  

The first church I remember is Covenant Baptist Church, a small two-room church located several blocks away from our apartment that was reached by crossing the alley behind our apartment building and walking through a grassy field beyond that sloped unevenly downhill to an unpaved road in “the valley” that could be muddy and impassable after rains.  There was a long way around by road that we took when we were dressed up and the weather was inclement.  The church was small.  A center aisle divided 8 or 10 rows of hard wooden folding chairs.  At the front of the sanctuary was a center pulpit on a raised platform and below it a beat-up honky-tonk piano that was played with gusto during the services.  

At the right side of the raised platform was a door leading into a room beyond.  The minister and his wife lived back there.  I do not know if the meager offering in the Sunday collection plate was their only source of support or whether they had “real” jobs during the week, but I suspect the minister had other employment.  The minister was tall (or so he seemed to me, but I was in elementary school), heavy-set, whiskered, loud and gruff.  His wife was a very obese woman who sat in a large wooden rocker just outside the door to their personal living space, rocking incessantly and fanning herself rapidly with a paper fan stapled to a stick that advertised the local undertaker’s services.  She perspired ferociously.  I never saw her get out of that chair.  She said ‘Amen’ a lot.  So did the congregation.  It was a very expressive group.

I cannot remember why I attended there or how I became involved with that church and I do not remember any other children there.  The minister had asked me to read the scripture lesson from the large Bible on the pulpit during services and he said I did it well and had a talent for it, and so I read regularly each week.  That participation in the service gave me a feeling of importance, which is why I continued to attend there for some time.  I was a member of a Boy Scout troop when I was old enough to join and the troop met at that church.

My mother and step-father did not like the emotional display or the free-flowing and expressive nature of the Pentecostal service and never went to church there with me that I can recall, but they never discouraged me from attending there.  They attended frequently a Presbyterian church that got its start in the Atlantic Theater building about three long blocks away (which did not show movies on Sunday in those days); the Presbyterians eventually built a new facility an additional two or three blocks away from our apartment.  It was more "northern" in style and more like the services my mother and step-father were accustomed to in New England.   I attended there with my mother occasionally usually when my stepfather was out of town but it was very formal and boring and I resisted getting involved.  I did not like the minister.  He was not very friendly.  He talked to my parents and ignored me.

My brother and I eventually attended a Southern Baptist Church on South Capitol Street, diagonally across the street from Congress Heights Elementary School, which I attended during the 5th and 6th grade when attendance boundaries changed.  I think we were first involved with that church through their summer Vacation Bible School, probably having been invited by a friend from school, and we eventually attended the full range of their programs: Sunday school, morning church services, the youth fellowship (Baptist Training Union) and the Sunday evening service.  My parents did not encourage me to attend there, although my mother made it clear that I should attend somewhere.  Regular attendance became a habit and it would not have occurred to me that there was any other option.

I was baptized in that church.  The baptismal pool was a large tank located in an elevated area behind the center pulpit, behind curtains that could be pulled back for the baptismal service.  The service of baptism in a Southern Baptist church required the candidates to put on a white robe in place of street clothes and, one a time when the minister called each name, walk down a few steps into the baptismal pool and wait patiently while the words of the baptismal ceremony were spoken.  The minister covered the celebrant’s nose with a handkerchief he kept in one hand, lowered the baptismal candidate backwards until completely submerged, pronounced the ceremonial words ‘I baptize you now in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,’ then raised the baptized one from the water dripping wet, and the newly cleansed person then climbed out of the baptismal pool up the stairs at the far end of the pool and went into the robing room to get dressed.

From this point I grew up as a Southern Baptist in Virginia.  Southern Baptists in the 1950’s were not quite the right-wing radicals with the hard edge that they are today.  Baptists were and are an independent lot, given to argument and bitter dispute over minor issues that were typically resolved by the minority group departing and creating a new splinter church.  Baptists have no formal creed, or at least say they don’t, although they have many specific articles of faith that can be listed and argued about and used as tests to determine who is doctrinally sound.  There were quite distinctive regional differences in belief and practices throughout Baptists in the South.  

I was a Virginia Baptist.  They were a distinct and self-consciously proud group.   They leaned toward the left of the Southern Baptist spectrum, particularly in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington.  Ministers in Virginia were a bit better educated than Baptists in other southern states, typically graduates of colleges such as Washington and Lee University and the University of Richmond, generally acquiring their graduate theological education at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville or Southeastern Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC, and came to their ministry with a more “classical” education than was the case in the other southern states, where education was not a necessary criterion for ordination into the ministry.  Virginia Baptists were more rational, less emotional, less religiously confrontational than their colleagues in the rest of the south.

Even their church architecture tended to reflect the classical heritage, with most large Virginia Baptist church buildings built after the Civil War designed in Greek Revival style with imposing Doric or Corinthian columns in front, reminding us of Greek temples out of their proper context.  Having learned in Sunday School, right out of the book of Acts, that Greeks were pagans that needed to be converted, I was confused about why Baptists emulated the Greek temples as a place to worship -- but who was I to raise questions about church architecture.   

My mother and stepfather talked about their religion mostly as a factor of their early lives, mother speaking historically about her Sunday School and church participation, but mostly of Christian Endeavor, apparently a program in the northeast churches that provided wholesome programs and activities for the youth of the church.   

My mother said that she met my stepfather at one of the larger regional Christian Endeavor meetings, where he was a regular speaker.  She described him as a wonderful Christian man whom she had married despite the 20-year age difference between them because she had hoped he would be a good influence for my brother and me.  There didn’t seem to be any friendship, warmth, tenderness or intimacy between them, or any show of affection that I ever saw.  There was also no hostility apparent between them. 

In 1950 I was sent off to a church camp located in a small town in Pennsylvania.  An adult “Bible Conference” was associated with the camp and located on adjoining property.  The camp program director (whose name was Joe Cosgrove, and who was a student at Wheaton College, a well-known evangelical college in Illinois) was also the director of radio programs for the Bible Conference, which had a regular Sunday evening live radio broadcast.  The campers walked to the conference grounds for the Sunday evening service. 

For reasons I do not know, maybe because I was an older camper and reasonably compliant, I was asked to be an announcer on the radio show one Sunday evening early in the summer.  I was nervous and frightened but apparently it went well.  The director told me I had the voice and the talent for announcing and he let me serve as announcer for the rest of the month I was at camp.  It was an exhilarating experience. I felt an emotional fervor, warmth and excitement in this group that I had not experienced before and it resonated with me.  I was excited to see how a radio show operated and to be able to work with a radio script, and in its own way this experience was one of many that led me gradually toward a career interest in religion.  

At Falls Church High School, which I attended for my junior and senior years,  I had joined the Bible Club.  At about the same time in my junior year that my family disintegrated (a story too long to get into here), probably through the invitation of someone in the Bible Club, I was introduced to the phenomenon of Youth For Christ, a very dynamic and appealing program for high school age kids that was becoming a significant phenomenon at that time. 

Each Saturday night Youth for Christ held a large and impressive meeting with youth from all over the Northern Virginia area at an auditorium in Alexandria, Virginia.  It was a bit of a drive and I went first with friends who had a car but sometime during my senior year I had acquired my own car with $1000 inherited from a great-uncle, a 1950 Dodge Meadowbrook sedan, and I began driving myself to the YFC meeting, which I attended regularly on Saturday evenings whether or not anyone would go with me.  The music was gospel, first quality, dynamic, with talent brought in for each Saturday show, and the nightly speakers were focused on youth, very persuasive and exciting, and very good at their job.  They were interesting and challenging in a way that my own church was not.  I remember feeling that I wished my church had the same evangelical fervor, emotional involvement, excitement, even joy that I sensed in this group. I had decided to enter the ministry by the time I was a high school senior.   

I had always assumed that I was going to college, although I don’t think anyone told me I should.  Neither my mother nor my father had attended college and there was no tradition of college attendance in my family.  My stepfather claimed to have been a graduate of Yale and of the Sorbonne in Paris, but he had told so many tall tales and lie through the years that I did not believe him. 

I was in the academic track in high school, which we would call today a college prep program, and college was the presumed goal of students in that program. There were three course tracks, academic, which had a focus on traditional academic subjects in preparation for college; business, which involved primarily shorthand and typing for girls and business math and bookkeeping for boys; and trades, which meant blue-collar trades and shop classes of one sort or another.

I had flirted briefly with the idea of a career in aeronautical engineering, since that was a hot new area of study at the time but the math and chemistry requirements specified in the Georgia Tech and University of Maryland catalogs looked formidable and daunting and scared me off.  There was no “college counseling” as such.   Guidance counselors directed students to the college catalog section of the school library.  I spent a lot of time browsing catalogs and looking at requirements to see what I thought I could handle and what I might like to do.  

I considered becoming a physical education teacher or full-time camp director, since I had gone to summer camp every year since I was 13 years old and making a career out of it seemed quite a wonderful life.  Sometime late in my junior year I gave up on those options.   Since I was interested in religion and I was encouraged by my church to consider ministry as a career option, and financial aid was available if I went that route, I decided that I had to consider the ministry.  The minister of my church, the Reverend J Harvey Nichols, pushed me in that direction and promised scholarship money if I went to the University of Richmond, and I did not resist.

I was ‘licensed’ by my local church as a minister in my senior year.  Licensing is a step below ordination, but many Baptist ministers (preachers they were called) were licensed without being ordained.  It was primarily intended as a local church’s acceptance of a young man as a candidate for the ministry, or with older men, an acknowledgement by the church of the call of God to perform ministerial services without formal education and was generally for situations in which “professional” clergy were not available.

Being licensed was a necessary step, an acknowledgement of the congregation that I was qualified in their eyes to serve as a minister and that I had been granted official status as a student minister.  Licensing also qualified me for loan funds from a fund set up for Baptist ministerial students [Later I  that the funds had to be repaid after graduation, but they only gave me $200 so eventually I was able to pay back that amount].

When the Reverend J Harvey Nichols was away on vacation or attending church conferences or conventions I was the regularly-scheduled replacement minister to conduct services on Sunday.  I had no training for this assignment.  There was an assumption that God would put the words in my mouth.  He didn’t, but I observed that Reverend Nichols had notes rather carefully prepared so I followed his example and prepared each sermon as well as I could.  There were morning and evening services on Sunday.

During the summer months the Sunday evening service was outdoors on the athletic field behind the church, the worshipers sitting in their cars with the windows rolled down, in the style of a “drive-in” theater, with the minister conducting the service from a high upstairs window in the rear of the church building.  I had an adequate singing voice in those days and occasionally sung a duet during the evening service when I was not otherwise serving as minister.

During the fall of my senior year I applied for, took a competitive exam, and  eventually won a competitive scholarship to the University of Virginia, a 4-year grant of $6000, which was a lot of money in those days.  I turned it down with considerable reluctance.  My church would only provide financial assistance if I went to the Virginia Baptist affiliated university, the University of Richmond.  

Since I was on my own (and had been since 11th grade) and a bit fearful of not being able to make it without the aid from my church, I turned down the University of Virginia scholarship. It was not just the money. I had some fear about going to a secular institution that potentially could undermine my faith.  I believed, not unlike many others who studied for the ministry in that time, that the purpose of my theological education was to arm me to defend Christianity against the world with its secular views and I thought I would be better armed at a Baptist university. 

In the fall of 1955 I entered Richmond College, the college for male undergraduates at the University of Richmond.  In the first semester I took a course entitled Introduction To The New Testament where I was introduced to analytic and critical study of the Bible.  Literary criticism is a scientific analysis of literary works of the past for inconsistencies in style, language or viewpoint that may suggest multiple authorship or different time or place of origin.  It can elucidate passages that may have originally existed in oral form prior to their written form or examine clues that hint to the time and place where parts of the document came into being or when, where or why a particular biblical book appeared in its final form.

This was shocking stuff, very disturbing to me intellectually and emotionally.  I had not thought much about how the Bible came to be, but this approach was very disturbing and even more troubling was that it was being taught by professors of religion in a Virginia Baptist college.   I was quite upset.  I was in pain.  I prayed.  I cried.  I wanted to leave college, to do what else I did not know and had not considered, but I wanted to run away from a very disturbing, almost traumatic, intellectual and religious challenge to my faith that I was not prepared to deal with.

My religious beliefs at the time could best be described as “evangelical.”   There is a subtle but distinct difference between an ‘evangelical’ and ‘fundamentalist’ that may be more a difference in tone, attitude and style than it is of substantive belief, although there are differences in theology as well. The fundamentalist tends to be less educated, less rational, more expressive and emotional, more separatist, more literalistic, more naive, ‘blue collar’ in background, more out of touch with the world of intellectual thought, more inclined to be combative in religious discussion, less inclined to engage in serious dialogue.  The fundamentalist that has any education beyond high school is likely to be a graduate of a Bible college.

On the other hand the evangelical is more likely to come from a middle class family, better educated, more rational, more conversant with the world of ideas particularly those that impact his religious outlook, more aware of the arguments on both sides of a controversial issue, more likely to face outward and to engage in serious dialogue with non-believers, more interested in defending Christian belief from intellectual challenges (“apologetics”).  He is likely to be a graduate of Wheaton College (IL) or Gordon College (MA), or other church-related liberal arts colleges, and may hold a respectable graduate degree.

I had expected my education at a Baptist college to confirm and strengthen my evangelical beliefs.  I expected to acquire knowledge that would explain some Biblical passages and some elements of Christian belief that were troublesome to me, and that I would be intellectually equipped to defend the faith both to myself and to others.

The foundations of my world view were badly shaken by my early college experience.  My long struggle with faith had begun.  I took many more courses in biblical and religious studies and in philosophy in the next three years at Richmond, partly to meet the requirements for a major in ancient history and biblical studies, but I think a large part of the decision to major in religion was to try to sort out for myself what I could believe and what I could not believe.  I struggled through college and later through three years of graduate theological study trying to make some sense of religious doctrine and to reconcile it with my scientific and pragmatic outlook.

In high school I had been a pretty serious student.  I was aware that there were issues that were debated between ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’ about what we could know and how we could know it, what was ‘true’ in the Bible and what was not, whether or not belief in God made rational sense, whether there actually was a heaven and a hell and where they were, whether all people who did not believe in Jesus would be damned, whether it was possible to reconcile a loving god with evil and suffering in the world.  

By the time I had left high school I had read a lot of articles and short books designed to provide the evangelical Christian with answers to his questions and solutions to these problems of faith.  I considered myself pretty well informed on these issues and quite well-prepared to defend the faith against unbelievers.  I believed that either you accepted scientific concepts of the origins of the universe and the evolution of man over time, or you accepted the biblical story of a world created by God in seven days and a literal heaven and hell.  Since they were in conflict you had to choose between them.

My college professors, even in the religion department, did not see the world in such neat ‘either-or’ categories.  They affirmed that the creation story was “true” but we had to make allowances for some of the details such as the literal seven days, which could be interpreted as ‘eons’ or ‘days in god’s time’ which is not necessarily the same as our time.  You could believe in the general scientific framework and you could simultaneously believe that the Bible was quite literally true as well, but you had to do some careful work and verbal dancing to explain the biblical story so that the apparent conflicts were resolved.  My first instinct was to accept this strategy as a way to resolve a number of issues that troubled me, but gradually it lost its persuasive power and I came to see it as intellectually dishonest, an unwillingness to face reality.

As my studies progressed at Richmond, what puzzled and disturbed me most was that my struggle with faith was instigated by faculty in the religion department, who seemed unaware of the mental havoc they were creating in me and presumably in others.  I could not reconcile their critical approach to the Bible (which I thought had some pretty significant implications for traditional religious faith) with their fairly traditional theology, which seemed to me at least on the surface to be pretty similar in its broad outlines to what I had grown up with.  There appeared to be a radical disconnect between their theology and their pragmatic approach to the world of reason and science that I could not comprehend. 

The faculty apparently had reconciled their theology with their critical approach to the Bible in some way that was not clear to me.  From my perspective it seemed that they did not draw the obvious conclusions that there were irreconcilable differences between the way they interpreted the Bible and their quite traditional theological views.  As faculty explained it, the Bible was still ‘God’s word’ to man despite the messy way various documents had been assembled through oral traditions to form the written documents which developed through the centuries into the form that we have today.  

The faculty had explained that the Bible was to be understood not so much as the “words of God" in a literal sense as it was a book where the Word of God became present and spoke to us through its pages when we listened carefully and expectantly and were open to the still small voice within us that whispered to the prayerful soul.  To put this in a different way, they seemed to be saying that the Bible was not the Word or the words of God so much as it was the place where the Word of God could speak through those words to us.  That made the Bible a very human book, but a vehicle that could be used by God.

This made some sense to me, but it still raised the issue of how we sort out the many conflicting claims made by those who profess to have heard that Word when it is apparent that all those claims cannot be true.  Then how do we authenticate the genuine Word that comes from God from the self-delusion of what we want to believe or hear?  After all some people who hear voices are lunatics. 

I was a member of the Baptist Student Union (BSU) through my years at Richmond.  It was a club whose purpose was both social and service.   The BSU held social events, conducted a daily “devotional” service about 15 minutes in length each afternoon at 5 p.m. led by one of its members, and performed charitable service at the four Baptist “missions” in Richmond, which were very much community centers for black children run by white Baptists.  They did social work, ran after school activities, provided counseling, and operated boys and girls clubs.  I wasn’t much interested in this sort of thing, but I felt it was a duty and so I volunteered one afternoon a week during my sophomore year.

I worked my way into the leadership of the BSU, and managed a particularly important coup.  I had no car at that time (the summer preceding my junior year), so I finagled the responsibility of caring for the BSU’s 1955 Chevrolet station wagon, a gift from the Virginia Baptist Association.  That meant washing it weekly, getting its oil changed periodically, and checking it out to those who had a need for it to go to the various downtown missions or evangelistic crusades around the state that BSU sponsored or participated in with others at the request of a local church.  When the trip was far from campus, which was not infrequent, the BSU members were put up in the homes of members of a local church.  One benefit of being responsible for the care of the station wagon was that I got to keep the station wagon over the summer so I had a vehicle to use for my summer job.

I had already concluded by the end of my first year at Richmond that I was not interested in or cut out to be a parish minister.   I considered briefly a possible career as a youth minister, religious camp director, or other non-pastoral career.   But by my sophomore year I determined that my interest as academic and I wanted to teach, and the only serious place to do that was in a university, so it was clear that I needed a Ph.D. in religion. 

Graduate school requirements for a Ph. D. in any of the places I considered -- Yale, Princeton, and the University of Chicago among others -- required a solid background in at least two ancient languages, so I took the basic two-year courses in Latin and Greek and then added German, which was necessary in order to do graduate work in theology or philosophy, as much of the original work in theology and in biblical studies at that time was in German.  My undergraduate major in philosophy and religion required courses in ancient history, biblical studies and philosophy, and that proved to be a heavy academic load.

I wanted a good head start and solid preparation to make graduate study easier.  I took all available courses in the religion department.  Some were easier than others, by which I mean easier on my religious sensibilities and acquired prejudices about what must be believed by a Christian.  The ‘wisdom literature’  genre of Proverbs, Psalms and Ecclesiastes was easier to manage without too much troublesome conflict with my sense of reality and possibility; however the early old testament books were filled with stories and descriptions of improbable events that were in conflict with what we knew or thought we knew about time, history and our universe.

When pushed on the “historicity” of particular stories and events, I sensed some “evasive” answers from various members of the faculty, with such suggestions as the probable difference between god’s time and our time, and apparent conflicts caused by partial rather than full revelation that created apparent rather than real conflict with what we otherwise knew or thought we knew.  The escape was to quote Paul – “Now we see through a darkened glass but in eternity all these apparent discrepancies and contradictions will be resolved.”

There were other responses, too glib and superficial to be very helpful, but said just the same with sincerity and a straight-face: a day with god was as a million years; there were some things we just had to accept on faith; there are many ways of “knowing” and religious knowledge was a ‘different kind’ of knowing but not less important than other kinds of knowledge; one implication of revelation was the peace that comes to us when we accept through faith that all truth is essentially god’s truth and that there can be no real conflict between the truth of god, the truth of the Christian faith, and the truth of the world as we know it or think we know it because god is ultimate truth; we are in the hands of God and it is presumptuous of us to claim that we finite beings would ever be able to contain within ourselves enough knowledge or wisdom to resolve all the apparent conflicts; the greater our humility in the face of god’s truth the happier we will be because we will have the present certainty that we will ultimately know the truth and the ultimate truth that we will know in the fullness of time will give us the confidence that will make us free in our present.

I found this way of reasoning very curious and not very convincing.  The “circularity” of the reasoning made no sense to me.