God of Surprises
God of Surprises, lent to me by Matt Harrison, this book “is a guide book to the inner journey in which we are all engaged and has much to say to those who have a love/hate relationship with the Church to which they belong or once belonged.” (from the blurb)
Some of the opening themes have a ‘Wild at Heart’ feel to them - although written a lot earlier.
I’m only a short way through it but already there are a few passages that have really struck me.
“Von Hugel takes the three main stages in human development - infancy, adolescence and adulthood - describing the predominant needs and activities which characterize each stage. He shows that religion must take account of and nurture the predominant needs and activities of each stage, and so concludes that religion must include three essential elements, an institutional element corresponding to the needs and activities of infancy, a critical element corresponding to adolescence, and a mystical element corresponding to adulthood. . . . . . Religion must include all three elements, the institutional, the critical and the mystical. There is a constant danger that one element is over emphasized to the exclusion of the other two, or two elements are emphasized to the exclusion of the third, thus stifling the religious development of its members.” (p11)
“The Church must answer this deep human need by evolving hypotheses and theories to show the coherence not only of its own teaching, but the coherence of its teaching with life as we experience it. A Church which concentrates simply on the coherence of its own teaching without relating it to everyday experience is behaving like the paranoid . . . . A Church isolated from our human experience can only survive as long as it can succeed in forbidding its adherents to ask questions and think for themselves. It must lay heavy emphasis on the importance of obedience to religious authority, obedience being understood as unquestioning acceptance of whatever is presented by the teaching authority, and by making it sinful for its members to criticize, or to read or listen to anyone who may propose any contrary teaching.A mark of true Christianity will be its intellectual vigour and its search for meaning in every aspect of life. True Christianity will always be critical, questioning and continually developing in its understanding of God and of human life. The subject matter for religion is every human experience. In Christian understanding, God is immanent, that is, he is present in all things, and creation itself is a sign, and an effective sign, of his presence - a sacrament. That is why there has been such an emphasis on scholarship and learning in the Christian tradition. Faith, as St. Anselm wrote, ’seeks understanding’, for it is the nature of true faith to trust that God is at work in everything and that there is no question which falls outside the scope of religious inquiry.” (p16-7)
I’ve never liked the term ‘Religion’, and would go to lengths to distance myself from the title ‘religious man’, but this book seems to be redefining it for me.