The UK has a history of this within the Anglican Church. Back in the 1960s, the then bishop of Durham, John A.T. Robinson wrote a bestselling book, "Honest to God," which was essentially a popularization of ideas taken from Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and Dietrich Bonehoeffer. That caused quite a stir at the time, and Robinson got into hot water with the Archbishop of Canterbury. In the US at that time, there were some theologians who took this even further with their proclamations, à la Nietzsche, of the "death of God" (Gabriel Vahanian, Paul Van Buren, William Hamilton, and Thomas Altizer). That sort of thing made it to the cover of Time Magazine in 1966. After a while, this stopped attracting too much attention from the mainstream media, but never really went away. In the UK in recent years, the Cambridge University theologian Don Cupitt has attracted attention with his "non-realist" approach to theology, which maintains that theological propositions concerning the existence and nature of God are not to be taken literally. In the US, retired Episcopal bishop John Spong has written a number of popular books that champion a similar viewpoint too.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
---------- Original Message ---------- From: Mike Beggs <mikejbeggs at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola on non-beleiving clergy Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2010 11:41:02 +1000
On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 8:35 PM, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
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> Their study, "Preachers who are not Believers"
I think this is probably pretty common and something that goes a long way back in history. Maybe it’s still scandalous in the US, but the non-believing minister is a pretty old character type and not that shocking to the flock, in certain circles of liberal Protestantism at least.
In New Zealand in the 1960s we had Lloyd Geering, a Presbyterian minister who came out of the closet, saying the resurrection should not be understood literally and rejecting a supernatural god. He was charged with doctrinal error by the church and became a cause celebre within and outside it. He won his case.
Nowadays he has the Kiwi equivalent of a knighthood, and there are functioning churches with ministers who openly subscribe to that kind of theology. Geering always said his ideas were nothing original and common currency among the theologians ministers get their training from (something similar is said by one of the people Dennett and LaScola interview, only they feel they couldn’t say it openly to their flock, or wife).
Then there’s a classic NZ novel, Maurice Gee’s ‘Plumb’, about a similar radical Presbyterian pre-World War I, based on Gee’s grandfather. IIRC the early chapters set in the 1890s show big, well-attended public meetings listening to a visiting British ‘free-thinking’ clergyman.
Mike Beggs
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