Wednesday February 2, 2005
Burdened by tradition
I ran across one of those old illustrations of nuclear fission the other day. You know, the drawing that looks like a blob of frog spawn with a bunch of flies frantically circling it. In nuclear fission, one or two neutrons come zipping out of the core so that they can zap into another bubble of frog spawn and keep the process going.
The fact that those illustrations bear little resemblance to reality doesn\’t matter. Physicists now think those flies and bubbles are more like little packets of electrical energy, and they\’re still trying to figure out the “strong force” that holds them together.
Nevertheless, the illustration helps us understand in an imperfect way the physics of fission.
Emerging paradigm
It also helps me understand what\’s happening in religion today.
Marcus Borg, the author of such bestsellers as Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time and The Heart of Christianity talks about an equally incomprehensible something he calls “the emerging paradigm.”
The old paradigm, he says, was a set of presumptions that have gone pretty much unquestioned for centuries. Believers simply accepted a bunch of theological assertions. That God and Jesus are separate but identical, for example. That every word of the Bible is 100 percent accurate. That Jesus is simultaneously totally divine, yet totally human. That God deliberately sent His Son just so that He could be sacrificed on the cross (capital letters deliberate). That one hideous miscarriage of justice somehow cancelled all the other miscarriages of justice that we humans are guilty of. And so on.
But increasingly, says Borg, people are no longer satisfied with those explanations. Augustine and Acquinas may have explained the mysteries of faith to their own satisfaction for their time and place – but people today no longer find those explanations satisfactory. They want to work out their own understandings.
And so they don\’t fit into the nucleus anymore – that solid mass in the middle. Nor are they content to circle endlessly on the fringes, like a whizzing electron. Rather, they\’re more like the neutron that comes flying out.
And that can feel very lonely.
Gathering energies To receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to [email protected]. E-mail subscribers also get excerpts from correspondence about these columns. Please forward a copy of this column to anyone who might be interested in subscribing.
If you want to order my books, you can call 1-800-663-2775 in Canada, 1-800-328-0200 in the U.S., or order them on-line at the Wood Lake Books website.
For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to [email protected].
It\’s also worth pursuing Richard Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
When I talk with people of that “emerging paradigm,” without exception they feel that they are the only person to whom this re-thinking of beliefs is happening.
No, you\’re not, says Borg. You only think you\’re alone because there\’s no network, no institution, that gathers you together.
Some of the mainline churches come close. My friend Ralph Milton characterizes the United Churches he knows as “refugee churches” – a home for refugees from more dogmatic and less flexible churches.
But almost any institutional church remains trapped in the old paradigm. It cannot simply slough off 20 centuries of tradition. It still drags around a lot of baggage.
So how do we connect all those flying neutrons? I don\’t know.
But I believe that if we ever do find a way, the long-term effects of that spiritual gathering will make nuclear fission look like frog spawn.
=====================================
Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
=====================================
PROMOTION PLUGS