Sea of Faith Christchurch Group

Our first meeting for 2010 is on Friday 12 February. We look back again to the event that prompted the creation of the Sea of Faith network: Don Cupitt’s BBC TV Series “The Sea of Faith” from 1984. This time, we look at episode 5, Religion Shock.

For an outline of the whole series, check out this page.

At our meeting on Friday 20 November, we will look at Einstein’s views on religion. Einstein saw religion as having gone through three major stages. In the first, out of fear people carried out rituals such as sacrifices to appease divine forces that might do them harm. In the second stage, ethical religion, the divine was seen as the source of moral laws. The religion of the future is a religion of awe in the face of a vast, mysterious cosmos that modern science presents to us. “A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.”

For more information, see Einstein’s God, on the Speaking of Faith website.

At this year’s conference, Margaret Mayman reflected on the conference theme from the perspective of what she called progressive Christianity.  Fundamentalist religion has been very successful in claiming that its views and beliefs define what it means to be Christian.  Progressive Christianity aims to raise the profile of another sort of religion: one that does not entail a literal reading of the bible or a refusal to accept evolution. Progressive Christianity is similar to, but distinct from, the liberal Christianity out of which the Sea of Faith emerged.  At our meeting on Friday 30 October, we will look at Margaret’s talk (and any ideas from other conference presentations that members are attracted to). You can find this talk here: http://sof.wellington.net.nz/2009maymanplenary.pdf

At our next meeting, on Friday 9 October, those who were at conference will report back to us. There’s been quite a lot of discussion in Sea of Faith circles recently about the Jesus Seminar and its research into what we can reliably know about the historical Jesus, and a well-publicised book by David Boulton giving an overview of the scholarly study of Jesus. It will be interesting to hear what conference presented on these topics. I’ve just been translating the following passage from Drewermann, which might help to warm you up to the theme:

It is a quite simple fact, the discovery of which has a disastrous effect on theological systems, that the Buddha naturally was not a “Buddhist,” Jesus was not a “Christian” and Mohammed was not a “Mohammedan.”  The “founders” of world religions did not want to “found” a new religion, but to deepen and renew in its origin the existing religiosity. It can indeed no longer be a matter of divinizing the founders of a religion and celebrating them in ritualized patterns of liturgical actions. From now on it will only be a matter of acquiring for oneself the experiences out of which those great role models lived.

At our meeting on 11 September, Bill Wallace, well-known hymnwriter, stimulating thinker and retired Methodist minister, will be talking with us about worship and the new cosmology.

At the last SoF conference, Lloyd Geering talked about the disappearance of God and advocated for insight into the interconnectedness of things. Bill is interested in just that theme, and in the way modern cosmology reveals just how deeply interconnected the universe is. And we humans are not separate islands, but also deeply interconnected. If I understand him rightly, Bill has a hope that worship (something that still goes on on Sunday mornings, but which is often lacking energy and relevance and intellectual integrity) can be transformed into a celebration of the cosmos and our connectedness with it.

My hope is that this will be of interest not only to those concerned about the future of (Christian) worship. Modern cosmology and systems thinking have a lot to say on what it is to be a human being.