The Personal Experience of Discipleship

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost ● September 26, 2021

John B. Cobb Jr. © 2021

You can view the full worship video recording at:

https://youtu.be/gtHPWLpUPjY

Scripture Reading: Mark 1:16-20 & Amos 7:7-15 (NRSV)

The texts of the readings are in the worship bulletin linked here.

I have considered myself a liberal protestant, but I realize that liberal Protestantism is dying and has been for some time. It has lost most of its vitality, and of course also its membership, already. We are closing liberal churches all over the country, and there doesn’t seem to be any real notion of how we might change ourselves in such a way that lots of people would think what we were doing was important enough to take part in. I think it is important to figure out why we are dying and to think about how we might change. I think we are called to give serious attention to this question. At one time feeling a call to break out of orthodoxy and seek to be completely open and honest could generate strong feelings and a commitment that seemed truly important. Our liberal Protestant ancestors felt called to break through the limitations on their freedom. I want to think further about the importance of feeling “called.”

The term liberal almost inherently means openness to whatever seems to be the best information, the best knowledge, the best thinking in the world around us. And I still want to be liberal in that sense. Openness is one of the things to which Jesus’ disciples are called. But sadly, especially in the 20th century, after human beings became included in the natural world, the characteristics that had previously been attributed only to the rest of the world came to be attributed to human beings also. Increasingly, the supposed wisdom, the supposed insight of the supposed leaders of thought have become totally uncongenial to the Christian faith. Human beings understand nature as like the machines they make. When they view human beings as part of nature, they see us also as machine-like. In this modern view, humans have no more responsibility for what they do than do the machines that humans make. 

If we adopt from the most respected thinking in our secular environment the idea that all that we do is completely predetermined, the Bible and the Christian tradition will be meaningless. If we open ourselves uncritically to what is unchristian, even antichristian, and try to adjust to that in our lives, there will be very little good news left. And as we liberal Christians work hard to open ourselves to the most respected thinking in our secular society, I’m afraid there has been very little authentic gospel in what we have been doing and saying in our liberal churches. 

The ethos and the teaching of our universities, to which we have understandably looked as authorities with respect to matters of thought, has become explicitly non-theistic. But it is not only God that is omitted. From the beginning of the modern era, that is the 17th century, science made no use of final causes. “Final causes” just means purposes. Modern people thought that the natural world can be explained completely without any use of the notion of purpose, or aim, or goal. Then, when human beings were introduced into the world explained by science, we were told that our purposes don’t amount to anything either. Values are not important. Everything is finally to be explained mechanistically. If so, maybe God created the machine a long time ago, but what people do now is determined by what they were determined to do then by their participation in the whole created order. That works out on its own. God does not make new decisions as the world changes. God has nothing to do with what happens in the global machine now. Values have no role. Purposes have nothing to do with it. 

Now, obviously, it is not possible to preach a Christian sermon and completely agree with all of that. But so many of us have felt that even if we could not completely adopt scientific determinism, we must avoid giving offense to the modern thinkers who are considered the experts and the most advanced. For example, with respect to God, we very rarely hear, in liberal churches, that God has, actually, done something, that anything is to be truly explained by reference to God. To offer a theistic explanation of an historical event would violate the climate, the standards, the norms of our universities as they represent modern thought, supposedly, at its best. 

But a God who does nothing, who explains nothing, is not very significant, and some liberals seek to keep the term, “God”, alive by explaining that it is only symbolic. It doesn’t have a literal meaning, and we won’t, actually, say anything specific about what God does because that would not be acceptable. These liberal choices have led us not to say anything very distinctively Christian. One reason that we theists are being abandoned by younger generations in massive ways is that we have so little to say that is really good news, in a world that has little good news. In my view, we need to believe that we humans are not alone in seeking human survival, that there is always and everywhere an effort to increase value. That means that life and even human life have been brought into being by a power far greater than that of human beings, with which we can join and by which our efforts to increase the value in the world are supported. 

All of that is to say, I think, there is an alternative for liberals to copying unbelievers. We don’t have to continue in this obedience to a worldview that is hostile to everything Christians believe. We mustn’t simply attack the atheistic/determinist world view. We are beneficiaries of the enormous expansion of information that its advocates have bequeathed to us and the enormous richness universities have added to our cultures. 

I’m using the term “university” a little loosely. Universities vary. But, overall, they are the intellectual ‘establishment.’ There are many think tanks, research institutions, and other kinds of institutions besides universities that have bought into a common world view that we often call “modern”. Its achievements have been enormous. Nevertheless, it does not explain much of Christian experience, such as our responsibility for what we do with our lives and our response to our calling. Viewed in relation to these dimensions of Christian experience, the world view is not adequate to the evidence, and this is becoming increasingly true. 

That means that it might be possible for us to be very loyal and devoted to the evidence without accepting the interpretation of that evidence that is so contrary to our own beliefs. I will give an example of this: For a long time, as we learned more, it seemed that more things we thought, traditionally, needed to be explained by purposes and values could be explained, after all, simply by mechanical causes. So, there was a retreat, a legitimate, needed retreat, by Christians from some of the kinds of affirmations they had been making. 

However, it is very interesting that in the last twenty years the evidence has gone in just the opposite direction. We have found there are many features of this world that happen to be exactly what is needed in order that life be possible. There is no explanation otherwise as to why they are just what they are. It seems to me to be natural to say there is some purpose in the universe. It seems that the universe, or something pervasive of the universe, wants life and has the ability to make adjustments in the nature of things that allow for life to come to be. Now we have not just one thing, where the chances of what happened that made life possible was one in twenty or even less. There is not just one stage at which the developments that made life possible were highly improbable. And the life we now have has progressed through many of these improbabilities. Perhaps there are a dozen such developments in the road to life. If there have been twelve steps in each of which improbable developments had to occur, the statistical likelihood of all this happening strongly indicates that another cause has been at work. More plausible is that purpose has played a role. 

So, the evidence is that there is purpose in the universe, and, of course, that means there is God. But that is against the metaphysics, against the doctrine, against what has become interiorized as the very nature of science. So, some scientists are trying to persuade us all that the explanation is that there are millions of universes. No one had previously ever imagined that the universe is not the entirety. Of course, there might be earlier universes before the big bang. So, the possibility that there have been other universes is very real. but to go from 

Some people regard modern reason as showing that if our life-filled universe had only one chance in a million of coming into being, then we may expect that there are hundreds of thousands of universities, perhaps millions. I’m trying to make one point – the worldview that liberals open themselves to when they open themselves to the leadership thinking of the modern world is not one that fits comfortably with the facts. It has to be stretched and is becoming increasingly fragile. We experience purpose; so, few of us really doubt its existence. Explaining some features of our universe as informed by purpose seems quite reasonable.

Now, there is one modern thinker, at least recent thinker, who was well versed in the science and mathematics of his day. Even though the strong evidence we now have of the unlikelihood of chance and necessity proving a plausible explanation of life, had not yet been found, he thought that there were plenty of reasons to recognize what were once called final causes as playing some role in all events. Alfred North Whitehead thought that all unit events constituted themselves around an “aim”. He saw that the mechanistic world view, which still dominates, is not able to account for evolution. 

There is something in the universe that works for life. We need organic categories of thought rather than mechanistic ones. And he offers us the philosophy we need. So, he enables us to understand that and how the universe is indeed uniquely and remarkably characterized by just what is necessary for life to appear in it. His view of an organic world fits the facts. It is composed of events each of which is purposive by virtue of God’s participation in its self-constitution. 

The continued exclusion of God as an explanatory factor in the universities is not based on evidence. It is a matter of clinging to ideas that once proved very fruitful. There is no reason for the church to share in this clinging. Indeed, this is by no means the only case where Christian tradition is better supported by evidence than the modern worldview. I want to spend what time I have left to talk about something that has been important to me in my understanding of Christian life but ignored by modern thought. That’s what I’m referring to as the call. 

Many years ago, I used the phrase the “call forward.” We have to distinguish a call that is drawing us into the future in a distinctive way from the many, many elements in our experience, moment by moment, which are controlled by or reflective of the past. It is unique – it is often not very strong, but sometimes it is. The call of Amos, for example, must have been very strong for him to respond as he did. We can read about many other calls and responses in the Bible that are dramatic and intense. The term “call” is often used chiefly in relationship to these dramatic instances. But from Whitehead I learn that the way in which God is present in us moment by moment, can also be thought of as a call. 

I like to use the term call forward. I thought I had originated it and was taking some pride in it. I thought everybody experienced the call forward but that it was especially in the theistic traditions, particularly Christianity, that the call forward is understood as God’s call to us. When it is understood that way, and when we act on that understanding, it plays a role in our lives that it doesn’t play in the lives of those who ignore it or do not have a way of understanding it. 

I am also inclined to understand what I think everybody experiences, in terms of my own experience. I knew that this may be misleading or misdirecting, so I was rather pleased when I came across the expression in Zion’s Night, the climactic book and work of Martin Heidegger, considered one of the greatest phenomenologists of the 20th century, who wrote, in German, of ‘der Ruf nach vor .” That means just what “call forward” means in English. We were talking about the same experience. It meant that I was not erroneously reading an element of my personal experience into universal human experience. For me, it seems to be the most pervasive experience of the God of the Bible, the “Abba” of Jesus. 

Heidegger could not explain it as I did because he was an explicit and emphatic atheist. He found that there was a call forward in human life, and he had to deal with the question, where does this call come from? I think he knew that the answer that had been around for a long time was that it came from God. Of course, an atheist cannot explain anything in that way. He came up with the view that we call ourselves forward. Heidegger decided that the call comes from ourselves. 

I do not think that our feeling of being called is well described in that way. This explanation is forced on Heidegger by atheism, not comfortably supported phenomenologically. We can avoid affirming God by attributing to ourselves the role in experience that has led many to speak of the divine. But unless the reasons to deny God are strong, which I do not find to be the case, something Heidegger finds phenomenologically important is evidence of God’s role in experience, not of what we do to ourselves. It is justified as the millions of universes are justified, only by an uncritical commitment to atheism. 

There are other examples of this, but this is the one that I want to pursue. If we understand that there is a call forward and we understand there is reason to see God working in every event in the world aiming toward more intensive life, we can connect these two. We also can find out that God is working in us. God is making us, calling us to be more alive and that has specificity. If that is true, we are all experiencing God in a call that can imperfectly and without certainty be distinguished from all the other factors that enter into our experience moment by moment. This becomes the central, distinctive form of Christian spirituality. This is not an eccentric thing for a theologian to say, but when we ask, when do people pray with most sense of urgency, often it is when they need to make important decisions. And they do have a feeling that it makes a difference to God. God wants the right decision to come out of this. And Christians seek to align with God’s will and purposes for them. That is an important form of spirituality. 

Think of Jesus. There were two times that we were told he was engaged in the work of meditation and prayer very intensively. One of them was right after his baptism by John. He went into the desert and we have vivid accounts of how Satan tempted him. This implied that Jesus had some understanding of what he was called to do, but even understanding what God calls us to do does not guarantee that we will do it.

I don’t think there’s a particular reason to take the notion of Satan especially seriously. But if Satan means temptation, when he discovered that he has really remarkable spiritual powers, the question of how to use them was urgent and demanding. He was very eager to use them as God wanted him to use them. He spent some time alone before he came back into society and began his ministry of preaching and healing. Another time is in Gethsemane. When he felt called to go to Jerusalem, he knew that was very dangerous. John the Baptist was beheaded, and if he went to Jerusalem, it could easily mean his death. He knew that. 

But when he learned that he had been betrayed by one of his known disciples, he prayed, intensively. He was asking God if it was all right to avoid this. Can I avoid this cup? Can I run away? I don’t think it would have been impossible since he knew they were coming to crucify him. He could probably have slipped away, but he found that was not his calling. But it was an intense time of prayer. 

Few of us want to live our lives in such intensity, but we also want to know what it is that God wants of us. Day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment we often do not even think of ourselves as making decisions. When we are making decisions or a lifetime nature, we are more likely to be aware of how they relate to God’s call. At that time, “God” is not just a word about something mysterious that we can’t say anything about. That God is the one by whom we are drawn to what is best moment by moment. Often, in a way, we already know what is best and it is simply a matter of urging into that direction. But often, we don’t know what is best. God often lures us into acting in ways that are beyond our knowledge. 

I said I felt called to produce a new sermon, not to produce the one I’d written out before… I think I was really called by God to do that. I think I felt that I had something more important to say to you in this, the last of my sermons, than sharing my ideas about topics on which of course I have views. They are important topics, but they are not at the very heart of what I understand to be the life of the disciple. I think disciples are those who seek moment by moment, day by day, year by year to find what God wants of them and to shape life around God’s call. 

Some of you may have been living with God in this way for a long time. For some, it is important to take time and really listen day by day. It can become a situation in which we feel God is making use of us beyond our understanding, beyond our rational decisions, and that to be guided and shaped in that way is a true blessing to us and sometimes through us to others. That is a fully developed life of discipleship. 

We must distinguish between God’s call and our “consciences”. Too often conscience is a matter of some kind of internalized moral law or parental teaching. God may, or may not have played a major role in fashioning it. But even if God has not been involved, consciences are important for all of us and often save society from problems even worse than it now experiences. But consciences can be badly shaped. I myself suffer as so many Christians have suffered in the area of sexuality because my conscience was shaped in a way that was not for my own good or for the good of the world. I am not alone in having internalized the view that sexuality is inherently unclean or demeaning. For some Christians “morality” is most centrally sexual restraint. 

There is very little support for this kind of “conscience” in the Bible. Breaking out of this distortion is important so that our sexuality can serve God along with the rest of our lives. We must understand we are not talking about conscience when we seek to respond to God’s call. We are really talking about something distinctive – we are talking about how God relates to us moment by moment and the possibility that we can hear and respond. And that this hearing and responding can become something that is no longer a struggle but is really the heart of our lives. It doesn’t mean that we will not have all kinds of problems – we will still have anxiety, we will still suffer from diseases. We will realistically worry about the future of the church and realistically worry about the future of humanity on this planet. Responding well to the call forward doesn’t resolve any of these problems. But when we experience ourselves as being in God’s hands there is a kind of assurance, a kind of confidence, a kind of peace that passes understanding and gives us context in which we can suffer. We can even sin. We can refuse God’s call at times, but we are still loved. We are still in God’s hands. And we can still be opened, again and again, to being led and directed by God. I hope this may help you find the reality of God as a vivid part of your own life experience and one through which you can grow. 

Amen.