Notes on the book by Brian McLaren

(see also Fowler's 7 Stages of Faith)

Doubters go through predictable stages as they grieve the loss of a simple, unquestioned faith:
Denial: 
I’m OK! Everything is fine! Praise the Lord!
Anger: 
It’s their fault that I’m having doubts. 
It’s that preacher, or friend, or church, or radio show, or book that’s to blame! 
Depression: 
I've lost my faith so I’m going straight to hell. I’m doomed.
Bargaining:
 Maybe if I go to church more often, or go on that retreat,
 or do that class, or pray more, or read that book,
 or try harder,  the doubts will all go away.
Acceptance:
 OK. Doubts are here. What am I going to do about it?

Doubt as Loneliness

When my companions think as I do, it’s effortless to speak freely and to think creatively. 
But the more out of sync I feel with a group, the more guarded I feel, 
and the harder it is for me to speak or even consider ideas that don’t fit in.
We have three levels of brain, that work together
	The Instinctive  (protecting you from danger)
	 The Inuitive (making secure connection with your “herd”) and 
	  The Intellectual(for thinking critically and creatively).

Some don't think about their faith.  
It is primarily a matter of belonging, or following the herd.
The conceptual/intellectual side of faith is of no real importance.
Doubt involves, primarily, your Intellectual level  - 
but its findings are constantly monitored and criticised by the other two levels.

Whilst the needs of survival usually take precedence, those need are commonly fairly clear.  
However this is not the case in the religious setting, where conformity to the beliefs of others is often paramount 
and sometimes we can not, honestly, agree with the statements of the “gatekeepers”.
These are commonly clergy, trying to preserve unity in their flock,  
but unity can often only be preserved at the expense of honesty -
  by sinking to the lowest common denominator.

Doubt as Crisis

There is the idea that more time in Christian fellowship keeps doubt at bay.
Outward success as a pastor is often measured in money, facilities and attendance
  but at the expense of inward misery (measured in anxiety, hostility and depression).
Loss of a traditional faith pattern can seem to undermine all of life and its meaning.
Loss of personal honesty in one's belief does undermine honesty in other areas.

Something in us wants to belong and be liked by those around us, 
but something in us also wants to be free of the constraints that belonging imposes.
Rather than lose friends and fellowship we tend to trade our integrity for security.
The greatest threat to our moral and spiritual health isn’t questions or doubts 
but rather dishonesty or pretense.

Doubt as a Doorway

We may look forward to spending the rest of our earthly life
safe and secure in a fortress of faith, after which a heavenly mansion would await us.
From the high walls of this fortress, we could look out across the landscape of history and culture
with the bomb-proof confidence we were promised, repelling all attacks of sceptics
and maybe even convincing others to join us by building their own faith fortress
as part of the ever-expanding Christian kingdom.

Faith may seem to be perfecting that biblical fortress,
until some small chink is experienced in the construction,
something that doesn't ring true, or add up as it should,
and one missing brick can bring the whole fortress down.
The immovable clarity that once bolstered our confidence now stirs up stress.
The simple, easy answers that we once took pride in now embarrass us.
The idea of escape from the fortress becomes ever more appealing,
but the price of doing so becomes increasingly apparent
and we may pull back, hesitate, temporise.

We fear to move from the secure fortress of certainty to the road of Jesus.
In Matthew 5:21 Jesus denies the accepted understanding of a text.
"You have heard it said....but I say unto you"
Five times he produces a fresh message, saying:
"I did not come to abolish but to fulfil":
to challenge, expand, develop!

The ancient truths were milestones
pointing us onward, to keep moving, exploring, seeking.
We have turned those milestones into roadblocks.
For some faith is a fortress that we will defend to the death.
For others faith is a prison that they long to leave behind.
For others still it is a springboard into new life.

Doubt is Growth

Part 1
Doubt is the passage way from one stage of faith to another.
The stages are like the rings of a tree, where each ring builds on the one before.

Remember Chapter 2 about the committeein our brains:
At birth, our survival module was already at work, controlling our unconscious, instinctive bodily functions.
About age two, our meaning module becomes active, the part that learns language,
helps us make sense of the world and make independent judgements.
Partially through teaching, we learnt the difference between right and wrong,
between what is acceptable in society and what is not.
This, Stage 2, is the stage of Binary Simplicity, built around the wishes of adult authority.
It is also built on trust in the correctness of the guidance of that authority.
Many people spend their whole lives in this stage, though some, often in their teenage years, rebel.

The Stage 1 supports become seen as constraints as we may move on to the Complexity of Stage 2.
In Stage Two, we learn to think for ourselves and  develop our own goals and the skills to attain them.
In Stage One, we saw life as a war, a matter of survival, but in Stage 2 it becomes a competition.
Learning and studying, thinking for oneself and reaching one's own conclusions are
 part of what it means to be a good Stage Two Christian. It is a good sales market!
Until it all becomes drowned in a deeper doubt!

Doubt as Descent

In Stage 2, we may move between religious establishments seeking a better product.
In the end this can lead to doubting the whole Stage 2 product.
Stage 2 feels shallow and perhaps dishonest.
Often loyalty overcomes disillusion. We go down with the ship.
Leaving Stage 2 is not easy.
We can see that the claims of relgion are not true, but have nowhere to go.
Some drop out; get off the religious bus entirley.
Others move into Stage 3,
desperate for something, anything, beyond dualistic Simplicity and pragmatic Complexity.

In contrast to Stage One people, who are dependent (or even co-dependent) on authority figures,
and in contrast to Stage Two people, who seek success coaches who will help them in their quest.
Stage Three people tend to be counter-dependent.
For them, authority figures must be approached with de facto suspicion.
Stage Three people often feel allergic to the level of confidence implicit in any call to action.
They specialise in critique and deconstruction, analysis and discussion, not goal-setting and action.
Stage Three embraces the idea that every viewpoint is relative to the point from which it is viewed.
To belong to a group wholeheartedly can too easily mean buying into its limited perspectives.
Stage Three people are suspicious, entering any organisation expecting the worst.
If they find community at all, it tends to be among alienated individuals like themselves.
In Stage Three, doubt and its cousins of deconstruction, suspicion and relativism
are not enemies to be kept at bay: they are doorways to insight and liberation.

But what could be better than deeply and honestly seeking truth and justice, insight and understanding,
wherever they may lead.

This is commonly the situation of young graduates leaving theological college,
only to be plunged into the mire of churches filled with aged Stage 1 and Stage 2 congregations,
most of whom come to church for comfort, for confirmation of what they already think,
to hear old familiar hymns and sermons covering old familiar themes
presented with just enough freshness to keep them interesting.

Doubt as Dissent

. In stage 2 we grow in commitment, learning, an skill.
In Stage 3 all has changed. Al that we gained seesm to be loss.
We have, in fact learnt valuablw lessons and they stay with us,
and help to support us in the midst of Perplexity.

Now, in Stage 3, we learn humility.
The horizon of knowledge becomes wider.
We learn to acknowledge how little we know.
We are purged of the arrogance of being right,
and righteousness.

If we admit to stage 3 thinking, the Gatekeepers emerge,
ready to drage us back into the fold of the faithful.
From this we need to gain the courage to differ;
the courage of dissent.

Stage 3 is an attempt to see through false or incomplete morality
to adeeper and more holistic understanding of good and evil, right and wrong.

Being sensitive to nuance is not typically the forte of folks in Perplexity,
whose levels of frustration and reactivity are high.

Doubt as Love

. It’s so sweet to complain, such fun to criticise,
To see the world through penetrating X-ray eyes,
To taste the honey and think of the bee sting.
To see the bad side of everything.
Winter’s too cold. Summer’s too hot.
The things I wish were happening Are not.

It becomes harder and harder to find things that bring happiness

In Luke’s Gospel, at the original eucharistic meal,
Jesus offered a classic Stage Three political deconstruction
of the concepts and deceits of power, leadership, and social status:
‘The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them;
and those in authority over them are called benefactors.
But not so with you; rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest,
and the leader like one who serves.
For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves?
Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.’

But must not clench our fists. Instead open our hands.
Our open hands, open eyes and open heart will prepare the way for new gains,
not just new thoughts, but new ways of thinking.
When I first began developing this four-stage schema, I called this final stage Humility.
Stage Four involved a sense of embarrassment about my earlier arrogance and naivete.
But then it seemed even more arrogant and naive to say one had reached a stage of Humility.
I thought of "Maturity" and "Commitment" and Integruty" and then "Harmony".
So we develop:
dualistic thinking (in Simplicity), pragmatic thinking (in Complexity),
critical thinking (in Perplexity) and non-dual seeing (in Harmony).

There is a kind of dying involved with passing through Perplexity into Harmony.
You might call it a death to ego or pride,
as we relinquish our right to judge,to know and to control.
or a death to privilege, superiority or supremacy,
as we realise that all of us ultimately share in the human condition,
and anyone who claims otherwise is either naive or hypocritical.

Harmony has been described as a second naivete, a second simplicity or innocence,
where instead of seeing through everything, we see into everything,
and at the core, we find not meaninglessness and banality
but profound, inexpressible belovedness and beauty.

In the loving humility of Harmony, we begin to see things
without the obsessive dualistic judgements of Simplicity,
without the compulsive pragmatic analyses of Complexity,
and without the deconstructing suspicions of Perplexity.

Doubt prepares the way for a new kind of faith after (and with) doubt,
a humbled and harmonious faith, a faith that expresses itself in love.

A Human Problem

These four stages (and we might divide them into many more) are cumulative.
Like a ring on a tree, each new stage includes the previous stage as it transcends it.
My friend Phyllis Tickle says that we have a jumble sale each time we move into a new stage.
We sort through ourselves out and put aside things we no longer find helpful (that’s the transcend part)
while carrying forward what we feel we’ll want or need in the future (that’s the include part).
As we’ve seen before, there can be no later stages without the earlier stages,
and we accumulate and carry forward new skills with each new stage.
This can be a spiral of growth, rather than a progression,
finding a new versions of Stage 3 on every cycle.

The most vocal are those firmly committed, the gatekeepers.
They are willing to fight and ie for their religion, but also to kil for it.
Gatekeepers label doubters as heretical, liberal, apostate, dangerous.
Once these people move from religion to the political sphere,
they don’t advance to a blissful secular harmony.
No: we humans just shift the sense of identity we once found
in a passionate Stage One or Stage Two religious faith
into what we might call quasi-secular religions like racism, nationalism, fascism and other -isms.
They provide a new form of meaning, community and purpose,
which is exactly what religions try to provide.

Now more than ever, the promises religion has traditionally made—
a meaningful world, a viable place within it, a community to share it with,
rituals to render ordinary life sacred—are absent from the public sphere.
That space is greedily absorbed by other reactionary movements.
In the absence of religion, we fractious humans will simply unite and divide around other things,
of a considerably less pleasant nature.

Whether in or out of faith communities, we need to help more people mature towards the stage of Harmony.
If we don’t, antagonistic individuals and nations will sooner or later
press the red button and nuclear weapons will fly.
And they will quickly discover that radiation does not discriminate between races.
If we don't, ego-driven individuals will continue to plunder the earth
and rising sea-levels, wildfires ansd hurricanes won't discrimate between black and white lives.
Either we will learn to live together in harmony, or we will die together in misery.

Ee need forward-leaning faith communities to nourish true values and narratives
in the context of a new kind of faith, a faith after doubt,
a faith characterised by humility rather than arrogance,
solidarity with the other rather than exclusion and antagonism,
courage rather than fear, collaboration rather than competition,
and love rather than self-interest.

Revolutionary Love

Faith before doubt: it’s about correct beliefs. Faith after doubt: it’s about revolutionary love.

Revolutionary love is about letting divine love fill me and flow through me,
without discrimination or limit, as an expression of the heart of the lover,
not the merit of the beloved, including the correctness of the beloved’s beliefs.

Beliefs are necessary. They are interesting. They are unavoidable.
But belief, the act of holding a set or system of beliefs, is not the same thing as faith,
even though we often use the words imprecisely and interchangeably.

Belief is the insistence that the truth is what one would wish it to be.
The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it matches his preconceived ideas.
Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.
Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown.
Belief clings, but faith lets go.
Religious people resist doubt
and confuse faith with clinging to certain ideas.
These ideas may be the product of another agenda,
formed, by Gatekeepers, to cajole or control congregations.
Hence the focus on hell for all who sin, and the prevalence of sin itself.
Hence the concept of sex as a sin, to promote shame over natural desires.
We support such concepts, and the control of the gatekeepers in our desire for communal unity,
for we are herd animals, surviving as part of a group, rather than as individuals.

Whether they’re true or not belief agreements help us fractious human beings survive and thrive together.
People who share our beliefs, or at least say they do, have given consent to our group’s leaders.
They have agreed to co-operate with our group’s norms, which makes them inherently safer to be around.
Along the way, religious and political demagogues have learned to manipulate this secret weapon with great skill.
In times of instability and change, many people become especially anxious.
They feel nostalgic for the certainty, clarity and belonging that authoritarian groups provide.
They need somewhere to belong.
In modern times this need not be a church. It can be another form of club or even social media.

Surprisingly, it is in the Bible, usually seen as the prime weapon of religious gatekeepers,
and particularly in the the teaching of Jesus, that we find a freash understanding of faith.
For example, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus doesn’t teach a list of beliefs to be memorised.
Instead, he teaches a way of life that culminates in a call to revolutionary love,
and his parables preach a similar message.
Even Paul states that the whole law is summarised as:
"You shall love your neighbour as yourself" (Gal. 5:14).
The Old Testament has a similar message with its emphasis on compassioante treatment for aliens, widows etc,
and the Quran has the same call for humans to put love first, as do other religions.

A person of faith may be of any religion, or none. for religious affiliation is to a system of belief.

Often, it is only by doubting a religion that expresses itself in beliefs
that we can discover a faith that expresses itself in revolutionary love.

.