Coming Unstuck

Progressive and liberal Christians have always chided the so-called "religious right" for their literalism, rightly so, I believe. However, literalism is often a bugaboo for those of us who consider ourselves progressive or liberal. Sometimes it's called "political correctness" (PC), sometimes it's not named, but "there" nevertheless.

Marcus Borg, in one of the units of the video course "Living the Questions" (both series 1 and 2 of the course)--and in other venues--explains how this phenomenon "severely erodes" Christian witness.

His thesis is that modern Western culture is the only culture in history to insist that "truth and verifiability" are required to go together--to our damage. He notes that, when we are very young we view the world with "pre-critical naivete" and take things pretty much as we hear them (stories of the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, the virgin birth narratives of Jesus, etc.). As we grow older we move more or less automatically into the next phase of "critical thinking" where we begin to sort out which stories of our childhood we'll continue to believe and which to dismiss. This is also the stage where questioning and evaluating new information for truth and verifiability sets in.

He notes that this skill can be valuable and adaptive, but also warns that it can also become a ruthless taskmaster and destructive if allowed to develop into cynicism. We do need a means for sorting truth from tale, but need to be careful and set limits for our scepticism.

He argues that we need to be able to bring "post-critical naivete" to bear on some situations and also to be able to disconnect truth and verifiability where we need to. This is because, often, the truth (or truths) of a story do not depend on whether they "really" happened in such-and-such a way, at some specified time and place.

He notes that, though we move automatically from "pre-critical naivete" to "critical thinking," we don't automatically move on to "post-critical naivete." To get there--to get "unstuck" from the rut of "critical thinking"--takes an act of will. But when we do, we can then reevaluate the stories of our youth, and the stories we've acquired over our lifetime, and reappropriate them as true stories--for the value that they have to inspire and motivate and encourage--without getting into divisive and destructive arguments over whether or not they happened as historical events in "just this way."

I've been told many times, "If you're really a progressive, then you can't say those things and you can only say these things this way...." But that comes from getting stuck in critical thinking and robs us of our ability to find the truth in the metaphor. It also makes us quite as literalistic as our friends on the "religious right."

So when we come to doing Christian Education or to participation in the Liturgy, when we find ourselves "mentally editing" our language and our participation as we go--falling silent on certain lines of a hymn, or when we come to certain phrases of the affirmation of faith, or in explaining the meaning of a parable or a miracle--we can end up severely crippling ourselves, not to mention our students.

According to statistics the so-called Boomer and Buster generations have been some of the most "detached" and "critically-thinking" oriented generations in history. Yet we're seeing a massive turn toward (or back to) mysticism and mystery in the next generations (the so-called Gen-X, Gen-Y and "echo boomers") now growing up and maturing. They seek to enjoy and seek out mystery--particularly in religion--and select for what we Boomers have so often dismissed as "outright myth," as "smoke and mirrors," or "smells and bells."

Perhaps it's time for the church to begin again to revisit our Story, to see it again, as Borg suggests, with "post-critical" eyes; to recover the sense of awe and wonder and to "get unstuck" from our "hard-headed" insistence that every thing and every event must be sorted, categorized, and demystified. Jesus said something about becoming "as little children" did he not?