A self-proclaimed atheist can continue to serve as a local pastor of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, and will not be disciplined for his controversial position on how to describe God.
A special assembly of Zierikzee, a regional church body tasked with investigating the theological statements of Pastor Klaas Hendrikse, said on Feb. 3 that its work is completed.
The decision to allow Hendrikse to continue working as a pastor followed the advice of a panel that said the pastor’s views “are not of sufficient weight to damage the foundations of the church.”
“The ideas of Hendrikse are theologically not new, and are in keeping with the liberal tradition that is an integral part of our church,” the special panel concluded.
Welcome to the Church of the Holy Why Bother.
Does anyone else think it ridiculous that any church that professes belief in God would for even a second consider keeping such a person as one of its clergy?
We are talking about the Episcopal Church of Holland, aren’t we?
Only in Anglicanism…this is one of those helpful moments when they let the mask slip…what is show is how the inteligensi have taken over to produce an engineered church run by leftish postmodern atheists in order to bring religion in line with secular thinking
fortunately statistics poverty that such churches die because Jesus has no place in them
What. A. Joke.
This is a stench in the nostrils of God and He will not be mocked. What sheer ignorance. The people should just stay home like they do here in TEC.
We have Bp. Spong who professes to be beyond theism which sounds like atheism to me.
Someone from the revisionist side of the fence please explain to me why an avowed atheist should be a “pastor” in a Christian church? God save us from such pastors.
The Christian tradition has been quite consistent for a very, very long time that God does not exist as a being alongside other beings. As the only necessary being, the only place where existence and essence are one, God is Being, Pure Act without any unrealized potential. God is not a contingent person or thing in the process of becoming, like everything else. Worshiping anything that exists–as we know existence–is idolatry.
That teaching comes from folks like Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, not John Spong. Apparently, Pastor Hendrikse could have expressed himself more clearly, but he isn’t responsible for how newspaper headline writers choose to describe his teaching. The Dutch Reformed Church isn’t exactly a bulwark of liberalism, but it found Pr. Hendrikse’s teaching within the bounds of orthodoxy.
I think it is sad that many of the defenders of “orthodoxy” lack the charity to interpret an ambiguous statement in an orthodox sense. It is even sadder that the quality of theological education these days is such that many Christians cannot recognize even an unambiguously orthodox statement about the nature of God. About the only major group which considers itself Christian that does not affirm the distinction between “God as being” and “God as a being” is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The Mormons believe that there is no qualitative difference between God (who once was as we are) and humanity (which will one day be as God now is). That is not Anglican or Reformed teaching, no matter how much simpler our theology would be if we regarded God as simply a bigger and more powerful version of ourselves.
Dale, thank you for your response. How do you translate “believing in a God that does not exist” in an orthodox sense?
The Bible is rather harsh towards those who believed in Baal, clearly “a god that does not exist.” It is equally harsh towards syncretistic groups like the Samaritans, who said they worshiped the LORD, but described God in terms more akin to Baal or Zeus. The worship of such a god, who exists (if at all) quantitatively as far more powerful than we are but qualitatively as an existent being like ourselves, would also be “believing in a God that does not exist,” even if we chose to identify that god with the God of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, and Jacob.
Saying that you do not believe in [b]that[/b] “existing” God could be called atheism (remember that the early Christians were called precisely that). There are powerful beings in Scripture that exist in the same sense as human beings do (or the pagan gods are alleged to do), but the Bible calls those beings “angels,” “demons,” “principalities,” and “powers.” An “atheism” that refuses faith in or worship to such beings is entirely orthodox. So is an “atheism” that insists on an infinite qualitative difference between God and any merely existing being.
The term “existence” has a history, particularly in Europe, where it is associated with Existentialism. In that system, “existence precedes essence,” and the personal, subjective aspects of human free will trump any notions of “what is” in an objective sense. To exist is to be an autonomous actor alongside other actors on the human stage, which is certainly not true of the orthodox God. For most Christian thinking, the relationship runs in the opposite direction, with “what is” in an ultimate sense—specifically “He who is”–as the source of all dependent existence. In God alone, essence and existence are one and the same. So, it is not unorthodox to refuse to name God as existing in the same way as those of us who are (at best) in the process of becoming what we potentially are in essence.
Since I don’t read Dutch, I don’t know exactly what Pastor Hendrikse actually teaches, but a refusal to say that God exists as a powerful being who intervenes in human affairs from outside or above them is not inherently unorthodox. All this reminds me of the furor when the movie based on Philip Pullman’s [i]The Golden Compass[/i] came out. Pullman obviously regards himself as an atheist and intended to “kill God” in the third book of the [i]His Dark Materials[/i] trilogy, but the “God” that he kills bears no resemblance to the God that orthodox Christians worship. Killing off a parody of God is the very opposite of blasphemy, however blasphemous Pullman may have intended to be. Embracing an atheism that refuses worship to a god that is not God (if that is what Pr. Hendrikse teaches) is not incompatible with true faith in the God Who Is beyond our existence.
#10 Dale Rye says:
In fact, although Pullman seems to be unaware of it, his “God” figure — an angel who usurped the throne of heaven — is a much closer analog to Satan in conventional Christianity than it is to God. You can read the series as taking place in an alternate reality in which God, for unknowable reasons, allowed Satan’s rebellion to succeed.
Could you give me some examples of who considers this orthodox, Dale?
but a refusal to say that God exists as a powerful being who intervenes in human affairs from outside or above them is not inherently unorthodox.
[blockquote] The ideas of Hendrikse are theologically not new, and are in keeping with the liberal tradition that is an integral part of our church[/blockquote]
The “liberal tradition” is a huge leech that they are too scared to pull off because it might hurt. Pretty soon the leech will be as big as the host (or the host will be as small as the leech) and both will die.
Is it any wonder Islam is the future of Europe.
Re #12: St. Thomas Aquinas is probably the most explicit in regarding God as both transcendent (existing entirely independently of all creation) and immanent (acting at every moment as the effective cause of all creation). The one thing God is not is a being that can exist within creation (except, of course, through the Incarnation of the Word). If God existed outside or above creation, creation would collapse since it has only a contingent existence that depends on God’s continual presence and sustaining providence. See discussion at http://www.aquinasonline.com/Topics/godtalk.html
If I had more time, I could find similar arguments in most of the other great Christian theologians, who distinguish very sharply between the sort of existence shared by all things that exist and the being of God. God simply does not exist in the same way that everything else exists, so it is not atheistic to deny God’s existence in that sense.
Dale, I have no argument with the assertion that God transcends earthly existence. Does that mean He does not exist? Is eartlhly existence the only form of existence? And how does God’s transcendance and immanence limit his intervention in this world? The whole story of the Bible is about God’s intervention, especially his ultimate intervention. Did Aquinas deny that reality?
Here is a quote from the pastor’s book:
“The non-existence of God is for me not an obstacle but a precondition to believing in God. I am an atheist believer,” Hendrikse states in the book. “God is for me not a being, but a word for what can happen between people. Someone says to you, for example, ‘I will not abandon you’ and then makes those words come true. It would be perfectly alright to call that [relationship] God.”
Taken from here – http://www.eni.ch/featured/article.php?id=2624
The same, or not the same. Let the reader decide …
Hendrikse:
[blockquote]Hendrikse rejects the idea of God’s existence but embraces the language of religion, using the word God to refer to relationships between human beings. “God is for me not a being, but a word for what can happen between people,†Hendrikse writes. “Someone says to you, for example, ‘I will not abandon you’ and then makes those words come true. It would be perfectly alright to call that [relationship] God.†From “[url=http://online.worldmag.com/tag/klaas-hendrikse/]Atheist Believer[/url]”[/blockquote]
Aquinas:
[blockquote]‘Existence’ denotes a certain actuality: for a thing is not said to ‘be’ for what it is potentially, but for what it is actually. But everything to which there attaches an actuality, existing as something different from it, stands to the same as potentiality to actuality. If then the divine essence is something else than its own existence, it follows that essence and existence in God stand to one another as potentiality and actuality. But it has been shown that in God there is nothing of potentiality (Chap. XVI), but that He is pure actuality. Therefore God’s essence is not anything else but His existence. From “[url=http://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/gentiles.iv.xx.html]That in God Existence and Essence is the same[/url]”[/blockquote]
Thank you, John A.
I am grateful to Dale Rye for guiding us toward a deeper thinking about the nature of God than we usually stumble into in this kind of exchange.
A charitable reading of Hendrikse is that he’s fastidiously avoiding univocal predication of being, or perhaps striving to find relational, concrete language to communicate the qualitative difference between creaturely and divine existence. However, it’s hard to be charitable when actual atheists like Spong use verbiage similar to Hendrikse’s in order to dissemble views they are know are unacceptable to the church.
It’s not asking too much to expect clergy to make their yes yes and their no no in everyday language, as Jesus expected. Granted that equivocation and analogy are essential to language and communication; and strictly speaking Jesus relied on both to get his point across. However, clergy should utilize all the resources of language and thought to reveal, not greater conceptual and linguistic difficulties, but the spiritual difficulty of accepting and applying the word of God in one’s life.
It just chaps my hiney when theologians get all fancy.
NoVa Scout, I second your thanks to Dale.
Pastor Hendrikse is a minister in “The Protestant Church of the Netherlands,” which is the product of a merger three years ago of the “Hervormed Kerk” (the old, formerly-established Dutch Calvinist Church), the “Gereformeerd Kerk” (a 19th-Century conservative Calvinist split from the former which has itself gone thoroughly liberal in the 20th century) and the Dutch Lutheran Church — it is a thoroughly liberal body, with no confessional standards, only “historical documents,” and which has formally accepted same-sex “marriage.” (There is also in The Netherlands a strong, and highly confliced, Catholic Church in the Netherlands; a small, and also liberal, Mennonite Church, a small, and now very liberal [having embraced SS and WO] Old Catholic Church — the original [begun 1724] Old Catholic Church — and the ultra-liberal “Arminian Brotherhood,” the product of the original Calvinist/Arminian conflict in the 1610s and 20s, which is effectively a Unitarian body with no doctrinal standards whatsoever, and which refused to join the “Protestant Church of the Netherlands” merger because it regarded that body as “too conservative.”)