PAT BAILEY’S SPIRITUALITY WITH RELIGION

19 Jan PAT BAILEY’S SPIRITUALITY WITH RELIGION

Editor’s note: In his doctoral dissertation, Pastor Pat Bailey of Telluride’s Christ Presbyterian Church is claiming the need for a re-visioning of the Christian church’s theology and its understanding of mission, the need for a more natural, integrative theology and for an earth-focused, contextual approach to mission. This blog is part of a long-running weekly series.

Pastor Pat Bailey

An attending challenge in the current postmetaphysical context for theology is the difficulty of speaking about salvation.  Bergmann notes that all the theologians he reviews assume that there is an active divine agency at work to bring about positive change, transformation, or liberation in the created order, but that they disagree about how that agency is at work. For Bergmann, Nature can only cooperate with God’s liberative intervention that proceeds from God’s eternity, and unless one wholly differentiates God’s activity from Nature, no theology of salvation (soteriology) is possible. Although Bergmann does not subscribe to a substitutionary atonement theory of salvation, his soteriology is nevertheless held captive to the myth of the Fall and the salvation narrative of history.

An interdwelling perspective on salvation would involve seeking an increase of wholeness for all of Nature. Such an endeavor would be a cocreative process of both Nature and Spirit. The wager of faith, then, is not that God will deliver from Nature, but that Spirit and Nature are cocreating a future and that human persons participate in that cocreation.  The salvation that the cosmos is moving toward is not deliverance from or even deliverance of in the sense of any consummation of history, but it is rather a deliverance to greater possibilities of wholeness within creation. This is not to equate God with evolution, but to recognize evolution as the process within which cocreation occurs. In a sense, then, Bergmann is right in his protest that, in an integrated view of Spirit and Nature, acknowledging God’s presence in creation is sufficient for redemption, and the historical incarnation interpreted as a rescue mission is unnecessary.

An interdwelling perspective inspires an interpretation of the salvation narrative and the mythology of scripture that informs the spiritual journey beyond the mythic stage of consciousness. So, the dogma of tradition might indeed be transformed into a source of insights—into tradition as a substantive gift—for the problems facing the ecological.