The Trauma of Losing Faith
in All Saints
This discussion was created from comments split from: The boring thread on how we know what we know about what Jesus said and did.
Comments
Oh aye. If it did, we'd know. It would break the surface of reality, like supernatural healing. We'd all know. Scio. Not credo. I was first drawn in to the cult of belief by being remotely led through the Olivet discourse at the age of 15, ripe for it in '69. 'You think Auschwitz and Hiroshima are signposts? You don't know the half of it. But there is wonderful good news'.
I did it myself. No direct human agency was involved.
Yes, but only by my requesting published material.
The truth of how 'we know what we know about what Jesus said and did' for me. It all started for me with 'what Jesus said'. That was the car crash. Or rather non-divine intervention in the car crash of my second decade.
You know it can't be healthy to keep revisiting your trauma, right?
It doesn't seem unreasonable to wonder if the reasons for people losing faith might be related to how they found faith in the first place.
Within Christendom, there has long been a train of thought that a wide range of practices are justified by the end result of getting people into the Kingdom. I'm inclined to think that the people who promote this notion should bear some responsibility for the consequences.
Or, from a wider perspective, do Christians share any responsibility for those people who, having found faith, subsequently lose it?
That cannot possibly be legislated for or against. My parents, peers, school couldn't help. There were no help lines, apart from Samaritans. If I want help now it costs £160 an hour. I don't have that any more.
And so many people are trapped in believing mode that no mere Rogerian rational moral education can be afforded to them. As this site demonstrates. Intelligence, intellect are no defence whatsoever.
Look at @Kof's projected reaction to this conversation. Here be tygers.
I'm not looking for anyone here to believe for me any more, let alone include me, have unconditional positive regard for me, as I fail to give the same, to heal me, counsel me, from a position of belief.
I'm just astounded at how right I am. That the conversation cannot be had with believers in the very main. Some nice exceptions here. There is a remote spiritual director I trust. Or was four years ago.
Doublethink, Admin
In which case, if this be true, I need to watch out ... 😉
But joking aside, I don't think loss of faith is the preserve of any particular religious tradition. It can happen to Catholics as well as evangelicals, to liberal Protestants as well as monks or nuns, to Orthodox, unitarians and all stations between.
I have wondered whether the more brittle and unsupple the faith, the more likelihood that it may snap at some point. But, with Samuel Johnson in a different context, 'let observation with extensive view / Survey mankind from China to Peru' and we see that it's not restricted to more fundamentalist forms of faith.
I can understand @KoF's reaction but equally can see the need for a thread like this, if for no other reason than preventing every other thread aboard the Ship turning into a dialogue about certain Shipmates' loss of faith.
To answer @Pease's question, yes, I think there is a degree of 'collective responsibility', particularly in instances where a 'hard sell' approach has been applied. But it's not the full story.
A good number of people I know have undergone a faith deconstruction or faith shift in more recent years. Some have turned from faith altogether. Others have replaced it with a faith position that looks different, with less certainty, but is more expansive and (dare I say) exciting.
Pathetic isn't it. A minute's 'scholarship' any time from 1969 would have spared me. Of course it wouldn't, because that wasn't the last ditch then, it became so when everything else fell away over five decades.
I got in to belief as a dumb kid. I got out of it as a dumbfounded old man.
What is it about that text that is so difficult for you Martin ?
The presence of a 'pious fraud' was the last straw, or the removed Jenga piece which caused the whole thing to collapse.
I've never quite understood that as it's made clear in the footnotes of many New Testaments that it may be a later addition and wasn't there in the earliest versions.
After all, the existence of apocryphal Gospels or sayings attributed to Christ that didn't make it into the NT canon isn't a deal breaker for most Christian believers of whatever stripe.
So why baulk at John 8? It's not as if any of the mainstream churches can't handle the issues this raises. 'Uh-oh,' says Pope Francis. 'This is a deal breaker. Let's disband.'
I mean no disrespect to Martin but it reminds me of the scene in 'Father Ted' when Fr Dougal asks the Bishop where God came from in the first place. The Bishop is taken aback. It's not an issue he's considered before. In the next scene he's shed his cassock and dressed in hippy style, heading off in a Volswagen camper van to Katmandu with fellow drop-outs to find himself ...
Don't get me wrong. Loss of faith can be traumatic and I'm not minimising that at all.
But a late date for the story of the woman taken in adultery need not undermine the whole thing any more than a late date for the Book of Daniel.
Or that the creation story in Genesis represents an ancient Hebrew attempt to make sense of our origins and to differentiate their monotheistic view of God from the ideas current among surrounding cultures.
That it simply isn't true. It's the most emotionally intelligent story in the Bible, which has many. Jonah comes next to mind. But it towers above them all. It's not just me that finds it so. Even Bart Ehrman does.
My excellent spiritual director completely resonated with all but the 'Despite', which didn't come up! He related how he'd wept when he preached on it.
It's not just that I didn't read the footnotes, of course I did; that it was a late addition. I didn't care, as the Holy Spirit preserved the truth. I always liked the catch all 'by the Spirit'. No further explanation was necessary. It was the final Jenga block removal, the final act of deconstruction that led to unreconstructable demolition, after many lesser acts. Here a little, there a little. I'd been questioning the 'omnis' for a decade and a half. Here. On this site. That led to the realisation that reality lacks nothing, that the ground of being does not have to be and cannot be omniscient. That prophecy is fraud and/or wishful thinking, apophenia read in to the text in Christian hindsight. Because Jesus did. Because the future hasn't happened, is not part of the fantasy infinite eternalist now belief, apparently mandated by the relativity of simultaneity.
Christians buy this as it complements God's omniscience, the alleged prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. Which, in my good will, I don't doubt that he naturally did. In good will himself. In believing it himself.
But He didn't engage in the PA a century before it was recorded in the Gospel of the Hebrews.
Public Address system?
I still don't get it, Martin. Liberal Christians would probably agree with most, if not all, of what you've said about redaction and self-fulfilling prophecy and apophenia (new word on me, thanks) and so on.
That doesn't mean they have abandoned faith altogether.
There is, of course, a sliding scale within liberal theology as there is within more conservative forms. Not all conservative Christians are fundamentalists any more than liberal Christians are all out and out 'unbelievers' or 'heretics' or whatever other pejorative term might be used.
I don't understand how this particular passage in John 8 is a deal breaker. Ok, my own Big T Tradition accepts it as canonical, whilst being aware of the textual issues and the fact that St John Chrysostom doesn't include it in his commentaries.
I don't know enough about that, but then I'm not wedded to notions of scriptural InerrancyTM as commonly held by very conservative Protestant Christians.
I can understand someone moving from a conservative position theologically to a more liberal one on the basis of considerations of this kind but not abandoning the whole kit and caboodle - unless it was in reaction to earlier brittle fundamentalism.
But who am I to say?
It's your choice.
Aye, I should have put (PA) after using the expression.
(a) Good for them. Our wirings for experience vary slightly.
(b) I was a believing liberal Christian. Orthodox, conservative as to what the Bible records and meant to its writers. Fiercely so. The liberalism was despite that.
(c) It's the deal breaker for me as I've been saying for 3 years now, because if it had happened, around 30 AD, it would have been a, the, flat out miracle. A culturally impossible anachronism, let alone by a country carpenter. For me. To me. And I more than suspect for many others. Many others who still buy in to the Third Person of the Holy and Undivided Trinity preserving the truth. Does anyone here think that if it happened, as writ, in John 7:53-8:11, or even in The Gospel of the Hebrews, as noted by Papias (c 110 AD), according to Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History (313-324), that it isn't miraculous? That it doesn't shine, pulse with emotional, Spiritual genius for 30 AD? Like no other account. And it contains no supernatural claims. It stands alone.
(d) I've not been inerrantist for 30 years and more.
(e) I didn't move further from conservative to liberal. I'd already done that. I'd already lost the belief that the Holy Spirit had anything to do with preserving the record supernaturally. Giving only John an eidetic memory for Jesus' long paschal speech.
I didn't lose belief. I didn't lose faith. I lost certainty. I lost knowledge. I read all the material again and again, looking for a shadow of doubt of my doubt, of disbelief. Followed all the links. Subscribed.
And it was sod all due to 'brittle fundamentalism'. There was nothing brittle about my fundamentalism for decades. I was invincibly ignorant. It took strong deconstruction by the former cult leaders, against my will. For years. I couldn't stand postmodernism for a start. I wept on the bog when I lost the tenet of Anglo-Israelism. But I was still a believer. And now I'm not. I'd rather be one. It took nearly 30 years of de-reconstruction. In church today, in my suit, for the AGM, I yearned to be part of the shared... delusion. Even though the desperate, offensive distraction of sin and salvation was in full blast, in the hymns and preaching.
(f) Choice? How does choice come in to it? I have no choice in the matter whatsoever. Who does? How do I choose what to believe without warrant?
I can only speak for myself. I don't see why the PA, to adopt your shorthand, would be any more impossible or miraculous in the time of Christ than it would have been in the 2nd or the 4th century. What happened in the meantime to make it more or less 'likely'?
Whether it was included because 'it's the sort of thing Jesus would have said' or because some kind of tradition existed that he'd done so, I have no idea. There are plenty of sayings attributed to Christ in non-canonical gospels. Christ may have said some of them. He may not have said any of them. We don't know.
I suppose I'm wondering why this particular story is more of a deal breaker than any of the others.
I could envisage liberals wanting to keep it in but reject some of the others, or the miraculous stories etc.
I think I can follow your line of reasoning but it still begs a few questions. Like why that and not this?
There's no comparison with any other story, and the miracle is purely cultural, psychological. No other is. There is no that. A country chippy of 30 AD could not have said and done that, or rather this. It wasn't in Mark from 70 AD, it wasn't in any of the canonical - surviving - gospels for centuries. As a conservative liberal believer, I had no basis to disbelieve the physically impossible miracles.
And no matter how wrong I am in how I came to stop believing, I've stopped. All I want, reasonably, is to know. And I do. Unfortunately it's not the knowledge I want.
They have quite a lot of community groups.
This may, or may not, help:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_the_Hebrews
OK it's not 'true' in some historical sense, but it's true in the sense of making us want to be like that.
Yes there's no god, no heaven, but there is love and mercy we can do here, and be the better for.
The Gospel Lectionary of the Orthodox Church certainly treats it as an insertion. The continuous sequential readings jump from John 7:52 to 8:12. 8:3-11 only appear as an optional reading on September 11th for St Theodora of Alexandria.
It might be possible that it needs to be wrapped in exactly this unlikely manner. Humans are skittery, untrusting creatures - especially of each other - and for good reason. To have some particularly insightful and empathic fellow from Bethlehem to share convincingly to those around him about how much nicer it could be if we were all actually nice to each other is frightfully mundane. Who does he think he is? And what's he selling? But if he's an incarnation of the divine, and you punch of stories about him with some more associated tales of goodness and redemption, well, now, that's something worth considering.
Better than I what I said. Exactly this.
For years I read the Scottish theologian William Barclay who claimed that discovery of the Johannine Comma (another late insertion in John) contributed to his disbelief in the Trinity. I studied with someone who was shaken to discover that an early apostle was a woman named Junia, not a misprint for Junius (Romans 16: 7). Long before Bart Ehrman or Geza Vermes, Adela Yarbro Collins was arguing that Jesus primarily understood himself to be an apocalyptic prophet. Many of my most cherished ideas and beliefs have been wrong or based on misunderstandings. The story is not what I thought it was and yet the narrative renews itself and continues.
All of us endure times of doubt and darkness, sitting in the unknown and living in dread of what might come next. It's inescapable. Sharing my own partial, flawed stories and being heard is how I've found a way to go on.
I left that hanging last night.
Wow!
Thank you everyone.
Message In A Bottle by the Police came to mind.
My faith wobbles all over the place but I just try to stay faithful to a few things.
Please don't comment there.
I would add that hearing others' partial, flawed stories also helps me to go on.
I lost a lot of my beliefs a number of years ago (is losing our beliefs the same as losing faith?) and it was a howlingly dark and lonely place to be in as for quite a long time I couldn't trust the possibilities that could replace them. I'm thinking particularly of issues around heaven and hell, who's in and who's out, and universalism. I took myself away to a retreat centre at fairly regular intervals around that time. Is that something you think might help you @Martin54 ? Not necessarily to convince you of anything but to reach some sort of peace with where you find yourself?
I think we are all aware of that, @Telford.
Martin54's difficulty with it is that it appears to have been interpolated at a later date and so is not authentic. There's more, but that's the gist of it.
I have a humanist friend who recently lost his wife. I know he has been struggling with it. Each time he expresses himself, I just let him know I will sit with him. This weekend, he announced he will be observing Passover. I do not believe he is Jewish, but he gets some comfort in telling the old, old stories. My response to him was still I was sitting with him.
@Martin54, I really do not know any answer to your grief. I will just sit with you and see what happens.
Having people around to *just sit* with us is a priceless gift.
Pits of despair are horrendous - I knew one for a short while, nowhere near as long nor as deep as yours - and I'm so sorry you're dealing with this. I don't believe anything is wasted nor that this life is all there is. I can't begin to imagine how our mourning can be turned to dancing nor how what we sow with tears we will reap with joy and I know it can all sound terribly glib and easy. But just because I can't imagine it, or you can't believe it, doesn't mean it can't be true - perhaps true in some sense that we can't currently comprehend.