Miscommunications and Integrity

(Arthur G Broadhurst, former UCC minister, now living in Palm Coast, Florida.)

It is precisely this difficulty with saying what we mean in a way that is clear, honest and helpful that made it impossible for me to remain in a parish ministry. Parishioners and I spoke a different language, which is to say that the meanings of the words that are most crucial to Christianity are no longer meaningful. Every conversation became an occasion of miscommunication. It became impossible to use words like god, creation, resurrection, and salvation in my conversations with church people without miscommunication, knowing that what I said was misunderstood or was heard in a way different than I intended.

Religious professionals sometimes avoid the problem of miscommunication by ignoring differences in meaning or not calling attention to them, but I was not comfortable with keeping private meanings for these important but troublesome words and could not continue to use them with the knowledge that by using them without reinterpreting them I was giving the impression that I used them in the same sense they were understood (or misunderstood) by lay persons. This raised an issue of integrity for me that I could not get around.

Some of my theological school classmates and ministerial colleagues had less trouble with this issue than I did, thinking it better to adopt the admonition given to physicians as a guiding principle—‘do no harm.’ In this case, the presumed harm was to undermine the religious faith of some parishioners, and therefore (as I concluded anyway) to ignore the implications of their theological education and to carry on with the life of the parish as if their theological education was an interesting but irrelevant side trip in their educational journey.

Unfortunately, perhaps due to a conscience much too sensitive, I was not able to ignore those implications. I believed then and still believe that serious harm has been done to our understanding of Christian faith by ignoring the intellectual challenges to Christianity posed by modern secular culture. By failing to deal with the challenge of modernity in a constructive manner and by failing to translate the meaning of Christian faith into the language and culture of our secular world, we have diminished its value and relevancy to many thoughtful people in our generation and that has been a considerable disservice to the integrity and viability of Christianity.

Our failure to reinterpret Christianity as it was received from an earlier generation into language that was understandable and relevant to our modern world left us with an archaic and irrelevant Christianity that could easily be ignored. The practical effects of failing to deal with the related questions of meaning and relevancy worked to diminish the appeal and the intellectual vigor of Christianity. The brightest minds of our generation increasingly began to feel that Christianity is not so much wrong as irrelevant because it reflects a world view that is incomprehensible to the 21st Century.

One obvious effect of the failure to reinterpret Christianity for the modern world can be seen in the precipitous decline of mainline protestant denominations since the 1960s and in the related but counterintuitive rapid growth and influence of the evangelical and fundamentalist churches throughout the 1980s and 1990s not just in the United States but also in the developing nations of the world.

Fundamentalism thrives as an escapist reaction to the intellectual challenge of modernity by providing simplistic but emotionally satisfying answers to difficult theological, existential and human questions. It gained its foothold through the decline of the classical and humanistic liberal arts education which in turn results from the failure of public education, and it flourishes through an incomprehensible intellectual schizophrenia in which the 19th Century theological world view of fundamentalism is held by those who live in our modern scientific world, apparently oblivious of the logical inconsistency of these conflicting outlooks.

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