Special Correspondence

Editor's Note: These readers are responding to the Rev. Wallace Chappell's article on the meaning of salvation in The Progressive Christian Spring I issue.

Thank you for Rev. Wallace Chappell’s article and questions (See “Salvation,” TPC Sping I). I think the article, “Before the Cross” also in the Spring TPC, relates in a way: Do we spend time, hear about and imitate Jesus’ actions before he died or do we assume God did a mighty act and we just have to suffer now and not bother with “healing,” helping or caring for one another in this process we call life?

I am totally in agreement with the author and wonder often as to why aren’t we hearing about Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount more often in our religious services, but instead are given the “stuff it-put up with it-pie in the sky” answer.

Leona Wieland
Sioux Falls, SD

Human desire for survival

In general, I feel much as Rev. Chappell suggests in his article, but as of right now, I have dropped any necessity of believing in eternal life. I am also very clear that the “assurance of eternal life was then, and is now, among the most powerful drawing cards of the Christian Movement” (as Rev. Chappell wrote). However, as I have sometimes sat and tried to “think” about what salvation would be like, I can’t imagine it! If it is a place where all the souls of our ancestors are “living,” it seems very confusing. Particularly when I try to imagine our earliest ancestors, such as Neanderthals, etc! And I also can not imagine just “being” there without some purpose! The other alternative is even worse: that is being alone and conscious of it.

Bishop John Shelby Spong’s latest book, “Eternal Life: A New Vision” (HarperOne San Francisco, 2009), opened some new doors for me, doors which I had seen before, but never dared to open. I have for many years been curious about where the idea of God came from. It had to be some kind of idea that very early humans found was important, or they would not have a created the concept, and therefore the word “God.” It seems that the earliest we can go back in intelligent languages is about 5,000 years, but humans go back much further. Spong seems to suggest that our human understanding of God, really is our human desire for “survival.” Even today, many of our prayers highlight “survival” thoughts. If this is true, then it seems that “salvation” may be just another act of survival. I’m not turned off by the idea that when I die, that may be the end, and if it isn’t the end, then I’ll deal with that when the time comes. I do not know how to plan for something I cannot comprehend: and if I did plan, I’m sure I’d get it wrong.

For me, there is a significant challenge in trying to find ways to make today be a better day than yesterday. My focus lately has been on items that I consider to be major core values that are dragging us downhill. They are (1) violence, and (2) overpopulation. To me these are very real core problems that are holding us all hostage, and will continue to do so for many years!

Albert (Al) C. Bailey 
Apalachin, NY

What about a ‘scientific view?’

I’m afraid the response elicited from me by Rev. Chappell’s reflection in Spring I TPC is not on the topic he requested, that is, whether the healing-wholeness aspect of salvation has been swallowed up into Christian after-life concerns, but on a term he presents in splendid isolation from the rest of his meditation. What does his “scientific view of the universe” have to do with what follows?

I suspect many of the clergy reading TPC Magazine would also claim a scientific view of the universe. Though neither clergy nor scientist, I certainly would. The question I have for Rev. Chappell and other clergy members with a scientific worldview is how do you explain your religious belief “scientifically” without “explaining it away” as the result of a mistake, along the lines of scientific materialists like Pascal Boyer, author of “Religion Explained”( Basic Books, 2002) and Daniel C. Dennett, author of “Breaking The Spell”( Penguin, 2007)?

It is not after-the-fact justification of belief that I ask about, or even individual belief, but Rev. Chappell’s belief as a member of the community of believers that extends back thousands of years, to a beginning that almost surely wasn’t monotheistic. In the spirit that now accepts different contemporary “faiths” as different paths up the same mountain, we ask how our ancestors, the first members of the believer community, came to believe. How did “our” belief start from scratch?

Revelation in the form of supernatural intervention isn’t a science-compatible explanation. On the other hand, if religious belief is attributed to a “natural spirituality,” this merely passes the buck. How far back does that extend? If not all the way back into the animal kingdom, how did it begin? The origin of religious belief presents the serious challenge of respecting the scientific worldview’s autonomy without “reducing” religious belief.
My speculative answer is that faith is primordial, that it is something we share with other animals, except that for them it wasn’t and isn’t religious but “animal”, as in the philosopher George Santayana’s “Scepticism And Animal Faith” (Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2005) and that faith became religious for us when we became smart or articulate enough to sometimes feel “betrayed by life.” The first, most important faith crisis was thus not the modern threat to religious belief but the prehistoric means of acquiring it.

The speculative account thus summarized says nothing about whether religious belief is truth-based or primordial faith justified, both questions being beyond the scope of science.

Coyd Walker 
Scottsbluff, Nebraska