Asking: Inquirers in Conversation

Asking

Inquirers in Conversation

Harry T. Cook

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Asking

Inquirers in Conversation

Copyright © 2010 Harry T. Cook & The Society for Humanistic Judaism. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

In honor of the late Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, friend, colleague and encourager, and founder of the Society for Humanistic Judaism

The enterprise of critical thinking and evolving belief founded on the objective data of experience is no vice. Proclamaing I believe, I believe repeatedly until it has succeeded in pounding the intelligence of honest doubt into pious submission is no virtue.

Preface

The purpose of this little book is to stimulate critical thinking in matters of religion and religious thought, both of which are very much a part of the world’s intellectual capital and, in particular, of the Jewish-Christian world in the West.

The invitation to the reader is to start (or join) a conversation that should be taking place among people who want to understand what part Western religions, their histories and their literature have played in the development of Western civilization. The idea, further, is to treat that history and literature as historical and textual scholarship treats any history and literature, rather than as a bazaar of spare parts for the construction and maintenance of abstract philosophical and theological systems to support the apparatus of institutional religions’ authority.

In the preparation of this book I went repeatedly to the store of research and analysis I have amassed over the last forty-nine years from the beginning of graduate school until now—much of it in the history, ideas, and provenance of biblical and extra-biblical texts that form the literary foundation of postexilic Judaism and Christianity.

I have eschewed what later I will call inherited certainties bequeathed to us by the theological system builders. I have taken text and history as I found them and have gone on from there to wherever they have led. I reject the ceremonial insincerity known in Farsi as tagieh, the sacrifice of truth to religious imperatives.

Because it was forged in those disciplines, what follows is probably not for those who want their cherished belief system restored like an antique. It is for those who are ready and willing to check their creeds at the door and enter into conversation with other inquirers. The enterprise of critical thinking and evolving belief founded on the objective data of experience is no vice. Proclaiming I believe, I believe repeatedly until it has succeeded in pounding the intelligence of honest doubt into pious submission is no virtue.

I mention with thanks my revered teachers of English and Latin grammar and literature: Leonard Clayton Bailey, Muriel McFarland Neeland, John R. Young, and Joseph J. Irwin, all of blessed memory; my teachers of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek: Charles Kessler and Helmer Ringgren; and finally, the late George A. Buttrick and Paul B. Hessert who were my graduate school mentors.

This book could not have been published without the help of my long-time friend, Thomas A. Mackey, and the cooperation of the Society for Humanistic Judaism, 28611 West Twelve Mile, Farmington Hills Michigan 48334. David J. Sparrow, another friend of many years, was also generous in his support.

I am grateful to Emily Everett, a most excellent copy editor, for her work on the manuscript, her attention to grammar, syntax, fact, and clarity—as well as her cheery spirit and sense of humor throughout the process.

To live in close confines with someone who thinks he is an author and spends what must seem an inordinate time with his books must be, at the very least, trying and, at the worst, maddening. My wife of thirty years, Susan Marie Chevalier, has never once rolled her eyes in exasperation, has only supported me, advised me, and done a great deal of the editorial work on anything of significance I have ever committed to paper or PC screen. Her second-nature knowledge of how language works, and doesn’t work, has been of invaluable help—but I thank her most of all for her confidence that in the end I could write something worthy of other people’s attention.

Let’s by all means keep the conversation going. E-mail me anytime at revharrytcook@aol.com and let’s talk.

Harry T. Cook

Royal Oak, Michigan

December 31, 2009

About the Society for Humanistic Judaism

The co-copyrighter of this book, the Society for Humanistic Judaism, is much more than its name denotes. It is, by definition, a society of humanists, founded in the 1960s to be the organizing principle of a nontheistic alternative in contemporary Jewish life.

Its reach goes both deeply into Jewish tradition and broadly throughout a culture that has long since abandoned conventional religious beliefs and rituals. Although it may be that some of those beliefs are still held and some of those rituals are still practiced, they are largely held and practiced for their form rather than their content. They may be compared to your great-aunt’s sterling and crystal, i.e., antiques worth keeping around for their historical value but otherwise beyond practical use in these times.

While the Society for Humanistic Judaism is organized to celebrate Jewish identity and culture, it does so in the wider context of a secular humanistic philosophy of life. To be a secular humanist is to embrace as of first importance the welfare of human beings in both the individual and collective sense. A humanist is concerned about his or her fellow human beings in the here and now. Because he is also by nature agnostic about such ideas as god, he tends to locate the rubrics for living in a utilitarian philosophy which emphasizes the greatest good for the greatest number.

A humanist judges the moral worth of an act by its consequences rather than by an extrinsic mandate, as in a divine commandment. Hillel the Elder (110 BCE–10 CE), when asked for the whole of Torah to be summed up in a hurry, said, What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. This is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn. That is consequentialism at its simplest. And any humanist, Jewish or otherwise, would embrace it.

My connection with the Society for Humanistic Judaism began in friendship with its founding rabbi, the late Sherwin T. Wine (1928–2007). Rabbi Wine crafted the original definition of secular humanistic Judaism as the leader of a suburban Detroit congregation in 1963. Today the movement is worldwide.

I was drawn to Rabbi Wine as a colleague by his clear-eyed appreciation of religious agnosticism, i.e, affirming the reality of what is known, pressing to know more but refraining from affirmation of that which is either unknown or unknowable. That kind of empiricism had long been at the root of my research, and of course it applies equally to Judaism and Christianity inasmuch as the latter is an outgrowth of the former and, as such, shares much formative language, literature, and philosophy with it.

For my contribution of a lengthy biographical essay to a 2003 festschrift¹ for Rabbi Wine, I was made a life-member of the society—a distinction I cherish for both sentimental and substantive reasons. It is a special bond in memory and a constant reminder that agnostic, secular humanism is a liberating alternative to the often stultifying existence of conventional religion. My research and writing has flourished in direct proportion to the proximity I enjoyed with Rabbi Wine and with those friends I have come to know in the society.

It is a privilege to share the copyright ownership of this book with the Society for Humanistic Judaism.

H.T.C.

1. Harry T. Cook, Dan Cohn-Sherbok, and Marilyn Rowens, A Life of Courage, The Milan Press (2003).

A Word about Method

Across the years from 1963 to the present and in a variety of learning venues—from a university chapel to a modest suburban parish—I have endeavored to interest people in intellectual exploration of the history and literature of Western religions, and, in particular, the biblical texts common to Judaism and Christianity. Beyond that I have tried to engage the same people in philosophical and theological reflection on those texts, their origins and historical context. That effort has been welcomed and appreciated by small groups of people in each of those venues. Such people demonstrated more than passing interest in learning whatever I could teach and whatever they were equipped to learn.

Plenty of my professional colleagues in ministry dismissed my efforts as information mongering, urging me to tend to the more spiritual aspects of the so-called religious life, whatever those might be. I politely declined to take that advice and persisted in being a teacher and fellow learner with those I served.

Out of the classes I taught and seminars I led came a host of inquiries which begat further inquiries that took on a life of their own as group after group became more intense in their quests to learn and process more. Over the years teaching became the center of what I did as a parish minister. Part of my discipline was to track the inquiries and their follow-up questions against the day I might put them and the responses to them in just such a document as this. In an effort to augment the corpus of questions, I solicited via my online exegetical publications further inquiries. Over four weeks, 238 people responded. To keep this book from growing to unwieldy proportions, I combined questions of a like nature into one. No question was ignored or left undealt with.

In a second section I offer an essay entitled Where Inquiries of My Own Have Taken Me to which I invite response and challenge, as it is my desire to keep this online conversation going. A third section is a sample exegetical essay demonstrating how an agnostic secular humanist deals with biblical texts for the benefit of inquirers and those who must prepare homilies, sermons or lectures using them.

1

Introduction

As I scan the landscape of religious thought at the end of the first decade of the millennium, I find myself to be an outlier, a reluctant a-theist where god is concerned and an agnostic on most other theological matters considered settled by most Christian bodies. I recently retired from congregational work, having rung up forty-two years an ordained minister in good standing of the Episcopal Church—not exactly what you would call an organization of free-thinkers. Moreover, I had been for twenty-one years employed by an Episcopal congregation whose members are unremarkable for their religious sentiments, though one of them did ask my successor if he was the kind of priest who believes in God. I guess I had taught them to take a dim view of inherited certainties.

It is only fair to acknowledge that when my first book (Christianity Beyond Creeds) appeared in 1998, several families left my parish in high dudgeon. The more curious fact is they had heard my sermons, read articles of mine that appeared in the public press, and took courses I had offered over more than a decade. So it must have been the systemization of my research in the book that prompted their anger. I must say their noisy exit left the congregation in a kind of extraordinary state of serenity from which, happily, we had not yet recovered at the time of my retirement. The philosophical and theological inquiries I helped to launch proceeded apace as my other books rolled off the presses and my occasional forays into public commentary continued to bring the curious into our midst.

I was able to say from the pulpit I am an atheist in that I am not a theist and there was scarcely to be seen the blinking of an eye among those in the pews. They got it. What I am certain they did not get and are in wonderment about still is how the church hierarchy so blithely ignored this heretic in its midst. A possible answer to that unspoken question is that the hierarchy is as unsure of the veracity of orthodox beliefs as it is vigorous in its continued promulgation of them. In a semi-playful way I teased my orthodox detractors by daring them to indict me before an ecclesiastical court on charges of heresy—and some of them did try but without success. Had they succeeded, not only would