Atheists In The Pulpit
By MIKE MANNO
Thanksgiving is a great time of the year. The upcoming holiday season is awaiting and, hopefully, our families, friends, and those we love are filled with the spirit of the season. It’s fitting, then, as we move toward the First Sunday in Advent we first celebrate the Solemnity of Christ the King.
The Solemnity is the last Sunday of the liturgical year and, in its own way, it prepares us for the New Year which will lead us through Advent’s expectation of the Messiah to the Birth of Our Savior on Christmas Day, His life, teaching, death, and Resurrection.
It’s a story as old as the New Testament and has been retold by Christian communities for some two thousand years. It is the sine qua non of Christianity. It is the story upon which we build our beliefs and chart our lives. And, if they are doing their jobs, members of our clergy keep us on track and make sure we see Jesus as the object of our lives.
But what if a pastor preaches well, but doesn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus? What if the minister doesn’t believe in God at all? Only believes in the concept of “god” in a metaphysical way — not as a real spiritual being responsible for our creation — but only as a symbol for goodness and a life of compassion and justice?
That would be a problem. In fact, it is a problem.
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is the pastor of a United Church of Canada (UCC) parish, West Hill United in Toronto. During her services, there is no mention of God nor are there any Bibles, and the only religious symbol is a large steel cross that is hidden behind rainbow streamers. You see, Rev. Vosper is a nonbeliever.
In her early sermons she would speak openly about how she did not believe the Bible contained “the authoritative word of God for all time.” This is something she acknowledges she believed before her own ordination in 1993. Finally, in a 2001 service, she “came out,” as it were, and told her congregation that she was an unbeliever: God did not exist, Jesus did not die for our sins, there was no Resurrection, and all that other poppycock that keeps mankind mellow and attentive to helping neighbor and committed to social justice.
Well, naturally, the UCC had a bit of a problem with that, especially in 2015 when the good reverend wrote an open letter opining that belief in God can motivate evil, in reference to the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris that year.
So, responding to complaints, the Toronto Conference of the UCC investigated Rev. Vosper for being unsuitable for ordained ministry because “she does not believe in God, Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit.” The investigation ended inexplicably in a split verdict and the reverend was allowed to remain in her ministry at West Hills United until the church could hold a heresy trial.
West Hills, being a “progressive” community, stood behind its minister and turned from worship service to community sharing with emphasis on love and compassion, and hymns were rewritten all to fit the theological perspective of Rev. Vosper.
Now you would think that the United Church of Canada, which proclaims on its website that while it has no “particular creed or formulation of doctrine” — although it does recognize the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, and its “member are asked to profess their faith in the triune God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” and “reading and studying the Bible can bring us closer to God” — might have a problem with a minister who doesn’t believe in the church’s core mission.
Well, think again. The church “settled” with Rev. Vosper and allowed her to continue in ministry. The statement said simply: “Toronto conference, Rev. Gretta Vosper, and West Hill United Church have settled all outstanding issues between them. Rev. Gretta Vosper will remain in ordained ministry at West Hill United Church. We acknowledge the faithful work of all of those who have been involved in this process.”
The Right Rev. Richard Bott, head of the denomination, said that he is happy about the resolution.
You may think this is just one minister who is an outlier in the field of Christianity, and one denomination leader who, in seeking a resolution, allowed a few rules to be bent. But it’s not; it’s the vanguard of new wave Christianity: a faith without a god.
In 2014 Christian Today reported that one in fifty Anglican clerics in the United Kingdom don’t believe in God except as a “murky human construct.” In 2006 in a study of clerics in Amsterdam, one in six was an atheist; an Anglican report in 2011 reported that only 90 percent of their clerics believed in God — that means ten percent believed you could enter the ministry as either an atheist or agnostic.
And in a report from Denmark, another pastor, Thorkild Grosboll of Taarbaek, openly declared that he does not believe in a god, in the afterlife, in the Resurrection, in the Virgin Mary, in Jesus, the Second Coming, and just about anything else that defines Christianity. His bishop, Lise-Lotte Rebel, suspended the minister for seven days, after which Rev. Grosboll was reinstated. According to the bishop, the minister just “pushed things too far.”
Afterward, a religious newspaper, Kristelig Dagbladet, reported survey results that showed that only 90 percent of Danish pastors believed that a minister must believe in God, again 10 percent did not.
A search of the Internet will indicate that these are not isolated incidents; they are scattered around the globe, but I cannot find any scientific research on the “why” of this phenomenon. Perhaps some enterprising researcher will do a study and give us some idea why men and women of the cloth turn atheist but still want to stay in ministry. It would be nice to have some solid information, perhaps this will give an idea to some graduate student looking for a thesis topic.
But I do see a pattern in the few stories we have. I don’t know about the clerics who turn atheist and drop out of ministry, but of those who stay it appears that most come from “progressive” theological backgrounds. Now I’m not trying to bash liberals in the ministry — this is not about them. It is about the extreme progressives who are willing to abandon dogma and commandments to pursue a more humanist goal.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. This is from Rev. Gosper’s web page:
“Sometimes, it’s hard to believe we live in the twenty-first century. With technological advancements, global communications networks, the ability to watch the history of stars unfold in real time, and information accessibility continuing to expand, you’d think we’d have evolved beyond tribal fears and the violence associated with them. But we haven’t and all you have to do to convince yourself of that frightening fact is spend a little time in church.
“Not just any church…I mean the fundamentalist church…or synagogue or mosque — anywhere people gather to have archaic ideas and the prejudices trapped within them traded for contemporary knowledge and understanding. [These churches] reinforce a divine hand in the documents that underpin hateful, fundamentalist beliefs.”
Now I’m not a theologian, nor am I a philosopher. I see things and I write about them, and I can see the connection between some events. I wrote last week about how Marxist theory was to attack culture, Western civilization, sexual morals, and tradition to bring about a Marxist — not Christian — utopia, a heaven on earth, if you will. Several weeks ago I also wrote about Bella Dodd and her infiltration of the Catholic Church in order to render it impotent in world affairs.
Eerily, there is a connection here that has one thing in common: The jettison of God and of a divine vision to be replaced by a self-serving humanistic goal of life without the “archaic” beliefs that have served man since the beginning of time.
Or, as Rev. Richard Niebuhr once suggested, they have found a god without wrath, who brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministry of a messiah without a cross.
I guess that this suggests that we should have evolved in our sophistication so that we don’t need the old-time rules or superstitions we once found so instructive, and now are unencumbered by the strictures of personal morality since — not to coin a phrase — we have found god and he is us.
Don’t count on it. Enjoy Advent for what it truly means and rejoice in knowing that there is a real God in whose image we have been created. Nothing else matters.
(You can contact Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com)
