Thoughts on DBH, Confessions of an Irreligious Christian

Faith & Science Conversation
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I appreciated your post a ways up, Vinnie, but one quibble:

Keep in mind that “traducianist” was how his opponents like Julian described him, not Augustine’s own opinion. Augustine refused to take a side on how a newborn’s soul is made, whether from a part of one parent (traducianism) or freshly made by God (creationism). His view of original sin tries to sidestep that issue.

Here’s one place in one of his last works, Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian, where Julian makes the accusation and Augustine responds:

(JULIAN.) According to our custom, then, I was planning to do just this one thing, namely, to free from the interpretations of the traducianists the parts of the law which were subject to insult, by showing that those passages are correct because they are divine.

(AUGUSTINE.) With insulting lips you call traducianists Cyprian, Ambrose, Gregory, and the rest of their companions who admit original sin. But it is not surprising that new heretics give a new name to the Catholics from whom they departed. Others have also done this when they too departed.

(book 1, chapter 6, Roland Teske translation)

So, I think it’s fair to say Augustine wasn’t thrilled with being described that way.

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As I said in another thread, “My problem with DBH is that you (meaning “I”) have to parse every sentence to decipher his meaning. He definitely has no problem demonstrating that he’s the smartest person in the room.”

I thank everyone for their thoughtful replies. My apologies if I don’t get to them all.

My grandmother was an old-time Pentecostal who took me and my sister to “camp meetings” in hopes we would be baptized in the Spirit and speak in tongues (which she regarded as the only evidence of salvation). I remember people popping off in tongues at random times, guys running up and down the aisles and waving their arms and yelling gibberish at the top of their lungs. My sister and I had to stifle our laughter. It was a worship service, but I don’t know if it was an experience of the transcendent the way DBH has in mind.

I tend to be moved more by music than by sermons, which my rational mind wants to pick apart.

Agree but it was the earliest temples, both in the ANE and in Israel. Early and medieval churches tended to have icons and frescoes depicting scenes from the gospels for a mostly illiterate congregation.

Well said, but your ending is wrong. It’s a mercy of God that you aren’t like me. haha. DBH said as much in his essay, “Above all, I have realized that there is not one way of being a Christian, and that Christ plays in ten thousand places.”

Sounds interesting. I like the metaphor, having grown up in the dry Texas Panhandle where the land is weary and nothing grows unless it’s watered.

Yep. I had to laugh at your last sentence. It reminded me of Sturgill Simpson’s anthem to atheism, Turtles All the Way Down.

Yep again. I swam against that tide for years and finally gave up. I haven’t regularly attended church for 15 years, and I have to say I don’t really miss it. Despite all the talk about community, in my last decade of attending I formed no real friendships at church, but I became close friends with several Christians whom I met outside of church.

Similarly, there are many people, especially women, who have been abused by their fathers who cannot relate at all to God as Father, which Jesus calls him.

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I too have an adult son on the autism spectrum. I think this is a good example of why response (read “personal response”) to Jesus is valid but only part of the story.

For such people I find the analogy of words like family and belonging more helpful. My son is truly part of our human family. He belongs, and the relationship has value even if it’s not a “standard” relationship (whatever that means).

We are all unique, and so the way we are “in Christ” will be equally unique.

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My problem is I rationally pick apart music as well as the sermons. Sometimes anyways.

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Hopefully, the church is learning a bit better how to accommodate those who are unable to worship in the usual space. Ours is working to provide a sensory controlled room for those who need it. My daughter at present has to stay home with one child and watch the service on TV where they can turn the volume down and even pause the sermon to discuss a point as it is streamed. And as we are looking at building a new sanctuary space, it is planned to have that sort of space integrated into it.

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Can I ask what “Christian experience and life” are like for you now?

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Or maybe it is our own POV which is on the slab and whose limitations are being analyzed, or should be.

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Pretty much the same as before, except no more Sunday mornings prepping for or attending church, no more early morning men’s Bible studies, no more weeknight small group meetings, no more youth group outings, etc. Church has a way of eating up all your free time. Not to mention your disposable income. I noticed a much different attitude toward me from leadership when I experienced some hard times and a bankruptcy and couldn’t contribute like I used to.

Note: That’s when it started to feel more like a club for dues-paying members than a community. It was a fairly large Evangelical church.

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I am sorry, on both counts (bankuptcy and the shallowness).

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A lightbulb went on in my head when a campus ministry pastor (male in this case) told us this at a Bible study.

There are tons of Jesuses that make sense, or not, to different ones of us. Randal Rauser challenges us to put ourselves in the mind of a 12 year old Jewish girl in Auschwitz whose families were killed by “Christians.” Very well put. Thanks.

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I am sorry to hear about your negative experience.

In a small church community without a strong division between the clergy and the lay, there is always more to do than there are people willing and able to do. That makes it important to learn to say ‘No’ without feeling quilty. In a healthy community, there is also teaching about the healthy limits for activities and preferably, attempts to ensure that nobody is exhausted by their activities in the church. That includes the wellfare of the hired workers (pastors etc) - ensuring that they have kept their holidays and freetime is usually more important than asking what they have done.

Money is a necessary resource in any work and it is natural that churches and missions ask for donations - without tax money, donations are the way to keep the activity ongoing. However, if the giving becomes something you are forced to do, or if the amount given affects how you are treated in the church community, the community is not following the original Apostolic teaching. Giving should be something done voluntarily by those who want to give.
An exception may be a church tax in countries where the main church is so strongly tied with the state that the state collects a church tax for the church from the members of the church. In such systems, the church tax is typically much lower than the ordinary donations of a member in a free church.

I know a pastor who did not even want to know how much people had donated and recommended that approach for others. Other people took care of the accounts and only reported the monthly total sum to the pastors. The identity of the donating persons was kept hidden from everybody except the few persons that took care of the accounts or made the yearly audit. That may be a working solution if there is a fear that donations affect how people are treated. In healthy chuch communities, there should not be a need for that.

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I can understand. I was looking at some studies showing that the higher the education level, the more likely one was to attend church. This is in the face of fundamentalist preachers telling us how colleges are demon infested atheist recruiting grounds. Looking around our small group Sunday School, out of 15 people, all were secular college grads, and 5 had advanced degrees. I really don’t think it the education that determines it, so much as the socio-economics of attending church, particularly larger churches. Only the upper classes can afford the time and money it requires to “fit in.” Even those whose education ended at high school who attend are working as managers or business owners. Joe from the lube changer, or the night stockers at Walmart are notably absent. While I enjoy my church and love the people there, I lament what it represents.

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I remember reading some (Frank Perritti?) novel in my youth - some popular author of the time anyway; and I recall his vivid descriptions of the foul demonic monster living in the bell-tower presiding over some university campus. [Higher] Education = evil seems to be baked into American cultural evangelicalism from some time ago now. And yet it’s not without a messy schizophrenic kind of mix. In our Christian school environment, education is still ostensibly a thing to be prized [even if just to be enlisted as only another apologetic tool at times].

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I thank you and @Randy for the kind words, but that wasn’t the last straw for me. I actually enjoyed that church – fantastic music and an elderly pastor who came out and sat on a stool and talked to you like a friend with something important on his mind. But he retired in the early 2000s and the new guy was all vim and vigor and the preaching took a turn toward political conservatism.

That led to a couple of years of church search, which the (ex-)wife left up to me. I visited until I found one that was promising, which she would visit once and veto. By the time she finally agreed on one, we attended with the kids for less than a year before she became an alcoholic and slept off a hangover every Sunday morning. A few years later my kids were in their late teens, I got tired of answering the question, “Why do we have to go to church when Mom doesn’t?” I gave up the fight. Sorry for TMI.

My best church memories are the small Methodist church that I grew up in. We averaged maybe 100 on Sundays. My dad was an elder, taught adult Sunday school and was elected treasurer every year. (Probably because he was tight-lipped and no one ever knew who gave what.) Sundays were all about church – Sunday school and service, youth group in the afternoon, a service at night where maybe 10-15 people showed up and the pastor came down front and taught like it was a seminar. We were too small for small groups or mid-week services.

True. But one of the churches I found during my “searching” days met in a high school gym. It was great, for a while. Then the gym eventually filled up and the pastor announced their goal of purchasing a property with three office towers already on it at the intersection of two major freeways in Dallas. I looked at my wife and said, “Time to go.” The church was Watermark. It became a megachurch. The founding pastor resigned in disgrace about 5 years ago.

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I still struggle with that.

I can’t imagine it being done any other way!

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A short little video relevant to some of those points, esp at the 1 minute or so mark. Funny but sad, in several ways, including my ambivalence with the comic.

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I like how people think of a church of “100 or so” as being small. I mean, okay, on the megachurch landscape you have a claim I guess. But what adjective does that leave for us? We might have 40 or 50 on an average Sunday morning, sometimes a lot fewer on some summer Sundays if lots of families are traveling! I guess we’re a tiny church. I’m not sure I could deal with big churches anymore. Only if I wanted to disappear and turn all worship over to ‘the professionals’ I guess.

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Independent churches have no rules. There’s no denominational oversight so the pastor can do what he wants. That’s why there are so many spectacular failures like Mark Driscoll, Bill Hybels, etc. Southern Baptist churches have an umbrella organization, but each church is basically independent.

Well, you’re a member of a pretty small denomination, so a small congregation is the norm. 40-50 can be healthy. Even in my 100+ small church growing up, the pastor and music minister were the only paid professionals. The latter was because an elderly lady had bequeathed her estate to pay for a new organ and a trust fund to pay a music minister’s salary. The rest of us were overworked volunteers.

Note: I should add that I worked with many Black detention officers at juvenile detention who were part-time pastors at small churches. They were healthy churches, even if very small.

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And that … is the tell-tale curse that can sometimes have small-church people looking over the fence with occasional envy at their megachurch neighbors. Both a blessing and a curse, any volunteer could say depending on which day you ask them. But overall a blessing I’ll say - in defense of small communities.

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My sense of worship and transcendence have been generated from three sources: 1) nature (not the arts per se); 2) being part of a loving community (including family and friends); and 3) the biblical story, which gives meaning to my life (this comes from my own reading and study of the Bible, but also from times in communal worship where the story is celebrated and I have a profound sense of being rooted in something greater than myself). What all these three sources have in common is that they embody God’s grace and generate gratitude as a response. In all three cases, I can think of times when I have been emotionally overwhelmed and uplifted. (But, of course, this doesn’t always happen.)

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