Peter Kennedy 10-11 July 2010
This book ‘The Future of Faith” by Harvey Cox was given to me recently in Melbourne by the Progressive Christian Network. It is a book which I believe can help us to understand what happened to this community and why it happened and what our future might look like. I found it easy to read and indeed compelling. I want to look only at Chapter 1 entitled “ An Age of the Spirit” – “The Sacred in the Secular?”
Cox begins with a question “ What does the future hold for religion and for Christianity in particular?” I believe the clue to a correct answer is clearly evident in todays gospel reading The Good Samaritan.
Cox says that at the beginning of a new millennium three qualities mark the worlds’ spiritual people. The first is the unanticipated resurgence of religion. The second is that fundamentalism is dying. The third and most important quality is that there is a profound change happening in the elemental nature of religiousness.
It is the rediscovery of the spiritual within the secular – as Vatican II proclaimed – the Secular is Sacred. It’s a return to the age of the Spirit that marked the first three centuries of Christianity.
In the last paragraph of his book Cox writes “ The wind of the Spirit is blowing . One indication is the upheaval that is shaking and renewing Christianity. Faith, rather than beliefs, is once again becoming its defining quality, and this reclaims what faith meant during its earliest years.”
Lets take a look at those two words – faith and belief. Many of us may think they mean the same thing. In fact they do not. We can believe something to be true or not true, without it making much difference to our life but we place our faith only in something that is vital for the way we live.
Gretta Vosper clearly spells out the difference in her book “ With or Without God – what we do is more important than we believe “ . The message of todays gospel is the same. It’s the unbeliever who lives faithfully.
Orthodoxy i.e. Right belief marked the 1500 years of the Age of Belief which began with the Emperor of Constantine.
Orthopraxis i.e. Right action is portrayed in todays gospel. To act with compassion is to live with integrity. Orthopraxis not Orthodoxy was the defining element of the first centuries of Christianity – before Constantine.
Cox now argues that a newly global Christianity is flourishing in Latin America, Asia and Africa enlivened by a multiplicity of cultures and yearning for the realisation of God’s reign of Shalom is finding its soul again. All the signs suggest we are poised to enter a new era of the Spirit and that the future will be a future of faith – a return to early Christianity.
It is common enough today to hear someone say that they are a practising Christian but not necessarily a believing one. In August 2007 the New York Times reported that in her collection “ Come Be My Light “ Mother Teresa who died in 1977 confessed that for years she had harboured troubling doubts about the existence of God, even as she worked ceaselessly to relieve the anguish of the sick and dying in Calcutta. Her confession evoked a wave of criticism. Was she a hypocrite? Had she been faking it all along? In the tumble of public comments that followed one was most telling – a student wrote “ Mother Teresa’s life exemplifies the living aspect of faith, something sorely needed in a society where Christian identity is most often defined in terms of what a person believes rather than how he or she lives.
Shouldn’t it be the other way around? “
If Cox is right this community may one day be welcomed back into the fold of a renewed, much less dogmatic and increasingly democratic Christianity.
But don’t hold your breathe!
02/08/2010 at 6:02 pm Permalink
There is an emphasis in the Catholic church and the mass on orthopraxis, but that may not appear as contemporary or interesting a message as it could be, primarily because the interpretation is (though not entirely) on the personal and moral, rather than secular and corporate.
I just don’t see an absolute dichotomy though between liberalism and Catholic ‘fundamentalism’ – absolutely there are conservatives returning to or joining the old St Mary’s, but some liberals too stayed or joined. There’s no black and white entirely – there are many shades of grey – intolerance yes, when faced with difference, but also attempts by many to develop a respect for difference in church involvement, political, cultural backgrounds, in fact, this is something attributable to members who have been part of the community under Peter Kennedy, though also universal. In other words, liberals must learn to live with (though not all) the ‘traditionalists’, as much as ‘traditionalists’ at the old St Mary’s must be confronted by liberals.
Much of Catholic tradition is of real beauty and worth preserving yet, at the same time, we see reform, albeit at a snail’s pace in such a monolithic organisation, or even despair, sometimes justifiably so, at failure to reform. And who hasn’t been part of or worked for any large organisation, corporate, government, where we suffer from a big organisation’s lumbering size, and hierarchical politics?