My Letter to Mary Frances: A Christian Dilemma
Don M. Hartsough, May 29. 2005
A legitimate question for UUs, “Am I a Christian or not a Christian?”
· Possible because of our non-doctrinal principals
· Especially for come-outers from Mainline Christian traditions
· The options seem to be: Christian, other-than-Christian, Atheist/Agnostic, or nothing-in-particular
How do we know someone is a Christian? (The Criteria Question)
· Born into a Christian family (everyone assumes you are Christian)
· Self-identification as a Christian
· Joining a Christian church that requires profession of Christian doctrine
· Belief in basic tenants of a Christian religion, e.g., resurrection, divinity of Jesus, trinity
When I joined the Unitarian Fellowship in West Lafayette, IN, this question was only in the back of my mind. It became more apparent to me when my cousin, Mary Frances Owen, became alarmed at some of my stories about our fellowship, and pressed the issue.
Who is Mary Frances Owen?
· Family history: Col. David Dudley came to Seville, Ohio, in 1831, married, had a family; first wife died. He married a widow who was younger and had three more children; my ancestors are from that second family. Two of his sons married two Crawford sisters. My mother and MF’s mother were first children of those two couples.
· Mary Frances is my double second cousin; close extended family.
· Childhood friend and playmate
· Restricted social life in high school / Christian Missionary Alliance Church
· Wheaton College in Illinois/ single until middle age (married fellow student widower whose dying wife suggested the match)
· Missionary to Papua New Guinea (later Irian Jaya); gave written language and translated the New Testament
My letter to Mary Frances
My Letter to Mary Frances: A Christian Dilemma
Unitarian Universalists may choose to be Christians, or not. For some of us this is a thorny, very personal, issue. My cousin, who is a conservative Christian and, at one time, was a missionary in Indonesia, prompted soul searching on my part and exposed my dilemma. My 1987 letter to her was my personal answer to the question, “Am I a Christian?”
1809 Sheridan Rd.
West Lafayette, IN 47906
February 1, 1987
Dear Mary Frances,
I suspect you will be surprised to hear from me again after so long an absence – I’ll explain why after a bit, but it’s a long explanation, so, to more important things first.
We were sorry to hear of your mother’s passing, although we knew she was not in real good health, so it was not a total shock. She was special to me because she was part of all those cousins who grew up together in Ohio and then had our generation of second cousins who could also grow up together in Ohio….It was so good that you were here for her funeral. I know my mother was enriched from seeing you.
Also, many congratulations on your upcoming marriage to Dick Byrne…Do you remember the needling you got from Aunt Eva about getting married? You had just graduated from Wheaton College and we were all visiting at Aunt Eva’s. When your mother commented about your distinguished career at Wheaton, Eva said to you, “Well that’s wonderful, now when are you getting married?” How priceless if you could have said, “Well, Auntie Eva, it will be in June, 1987 – over thirty years from now – and not a day before!”
A lot has happened here since I last wrote, which was either late ’83 or early ’84. My father died (as you know), Dalyte went to work full time, the kids all grew up, went to college and are off on their own, and on and on.
None of which is a good reason for not writing, of course.
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The reason I haven’t written is that I wanted to give you an honest and complete answer to a question you asked in a couple of your letters. In one way or another, you asked me, “Why don’t you accept Christ into your life?”
Coming from you, I couldn’t simply ignore that question, as I might from someone I liked less and did not respect so much. I can turn the dial on the TV preacher, but when my childhood companion – who knows me and where I come from – asks, I simply couldn’t turn aside.
I wanted to sit right down and bat out my answer to you, but I couldn’t. I may have even tried to write, but the truth is I didn’t have a good answer. Your letters have been sitting there in a drawer with my “to do” papers – the ones I look at every couple of weeks – and they have been bugging me for an answer just as often. What happened is that your question hooked another question that has been on my mind ever since I became a Unitarian. That is, “Am I a Christian?” So, while it may appear that I have been ignoring you for the past couple of years, the contrary is really true…
You may have assumed that since I became a Unitarian, the answer to the question, “Am I a Christian?” would be an automatic “No” because that is what a lot of people think. Not so, as being a Unitarian does not decide that for you, you have to make that decision yourself.
I think your letters proved to me that I was in a dilemma. I did not accept Christianity as it was taught to me in the Presbyterian Church, yet I was also not ready to renounce my religious past. I thought maybe if I tried write out my dilemma in this long letter, I might get a better understanding of what’s going on in my muddled brain! I have felt like I was in a “theological limbo” and I’d like to get out of it.
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The best I can come up with right now is that it depends on what you mean by “Christian”. If I come up with one definition, the answer is “yes” but if I define it another way, the answer is “no”. One day when I was mulling this over, I realized that I couldn’t not be a Christian, even if I wanted to – the Christian religion is part of me. I spent a lot of time when I was little with Grandpa Dowd, one of the most cherished times of my life down on the farm. You remember how devoted both he and my grandmother were to the Presbyterian Church, and also how they lived their religion out in their relationships with everyone. Their farm was the family mecca; people got their spirits lifted just by spending a day there. I became active in Presbyterian youth programs and joined the church when I was 12. When I was in high school, I had a small part in an Easter pageant in a downtown Akron theater and found the experience pleasant and exciting. I went to a summer camp sponsored by the Ohio Presbytery and generally enjoyed the advantages of being a young Christian. So, those experiences are a part of me and I value them. The two major bonuses of my Christian upbringing I haven’t even mentioned: going to Wooster and meeting Dalyte at the Presbyterian Church of Vallejo.
What I am trying to say is that even though I left the Presbyterian Church, that doesn’t negate the growth I achieved through my own religious past. If I look at just the social and intellectual environment I grew up in, then I’m a Christian, because that’s what surrounded me. It was also, for the most part, not unpleasant. I discovered this when Dalyte and I participated in a program conducted by our minister, Rev. Libbie Stoddard, called the Haunting Church. A small group of us performed exercises that rekindled memories of our religious past. Dalyte and I were surprised to find our
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recollections rather on the positive side, in contract to those of most others, which were sometimes disturbing and painful. (To be truthful, though, I must admit that it wasn’t all sunlight and roses; my family and the Presbyterians could be pretty guilt-inducing, especially on some topics, like sexual feelings and behavior.)
At this point, you may be asking where the “no” part of my answer comes from. I think the first inkling of doubt about Christian doctrine actually happened in my Granddad’s barn. One day when I was about nine or ten we were doing chores – he was milking the Holsteins and I was waiting to carry a full pail to the milk house – he somehow steered the conversation around to what it meant to be a Christian. He said only Christians could go to heaven, that you had to be saved. I remember asking him about a man from India, maybe a very good man, but one who was not a Christian. He said no, that man could not go to heaven, and that was why Christians had to go out and save other people. Now, maybe I didn’t say anything, but that bit of Calvinist theology stuck in my craw and it still does.
That invalidates this man’s religion and his life, and I guess I don’t believe in a world that has only one true path to goodness.
In other words, I think that your beliefs and your faith are good for you, that mine are good for me, and the man from India has his own that are good for him. It’s not which set of beliefs that is important, but how well we live up to them and how we carry out our lives with others. That was my implicit belief in the barn, and it still is today.
My college roommate, a real good friend and also a Presbyterian minister, would no doubt say to me, “But you could believe what you just said, and still be a Christian.” That’s true, at least in some denominations.
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The real, critical question is whether one believes in the divinity of Jesus. At least that’s the message I got at Wooster from theologians and scholars, far more knowledgeable than I. This is really a troublesome question for me. I know that I don not believe in the divinity of Jesus to the exclusion of the divinity of other great religious figures. And I do not doubt that Jesus lived, and was a person of towering influence in the history of Western Civilization. I have no trouble adhering to many of his teachings, especially those laying down ethical principles for the ways we should treat our fellow human beings.
At this point, Mary Frances, I hope you are still with me, because it is helping to put my thoughts on paper. One reason the question of the divinity of Jesus is troublesome for me is that I have to weigh what I know about being divine against what I know about how people think, how beliefs begin, and the psychological needs that are met by religions. It’s pretty obvious to me I know more a lot more about the psychology of thinking and believing than I know about divinity. So, this tilts my thinking and my conclusions away from the divinity explanation of Jesus, and toward him as a cultural figure. What I am struggling to say here is that I don’t need for Jesus to be anything more than an extraordinary – indeed, extremely extraordinary – human being to have made the great impact he has on human history. I hope you understand that I mean no disrespect for Christian beliefs or people, but for me, a divinity belief is not necessary.
Please notice that I do not question the existence of some spiritual force, higher power, or supreme being in our universe. I believe that there is something beyond our present understanding, that gives coherence and meaning to our lives and our world. I do not think of this as a person,
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however, but as a real, essential part of our beings. Like your faith in God, this is my act of faith. I have faith in the potential of ourselves as expressions of this spiritual force. What I want you to be aware of is that my not being a conventional Christian does not make me an atheist.
What you have that I do not have is something you mentioned in one of your last letters. You have a personal relationship with Christ, one pretty much based on your strong religious convictions. My beliefs are more abstract, more “intellectual” (not that that is necessarily a plus!). Just as I hope and trust that your faith in the personal relationship you have with Christ sustains you, I would hope that I am sustained by faith in the ultimate potential for human beings and the universe. In my way of thinking, you and I can co-exist beautifully, so long as we respect the validity of the faith of the other for the other.
One way that you and I are similar is that we have tried to carry out in our daily lives what we believe. In case I neglected to say this before, let me say here that I have great respect for what all you have done in Irian Jaya. The translation project must have taken tremendous self-discipline and dedication. To have translated a major Western work and a set of ethical principals into a written form of language for a people who did not have a written language is truly remarkable. There may be many people who would be fascinated by what you did for the Ndugas, so why not write a book about it?
Well, this has been an unusually “deep” letter but you have only yourself to blame – you and your provocative questions! Really, I hope you receive it in the spirit with which it was intended; it has been a very good thing for me.
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There is just one more idea I would like to comment on, and it was prompted by your comments on the bottom of your March, 1984 letter to us. You said, “I can say with the Apostle Paul, ‘To me, to live in Christ and to die is gain.’” That made me think of my own version of the doctrine of immortality. (I assume that is what Paul was referring to, that to die means to live forever with Christ.) This is another place where I’m likely to see the world differently than most Christians. I don’t know about life after death, I don’t spend much time thinking about it. What I do know is that what people do here in their lives can have a profound influence on others, and those others can have an effect on others, and so on. That is my version of immortality and I have faith in it because I have seen it happen. I know it is true. I can look at the great influence certain people had on me – Grandpa Dowd, Howard Cahoon, some teachers – these people are immortal because whatever I pass on to other people reflects what they gave to me. My version of life after death doesn’t negate other philosophies of immortality, including a Christian one. I guess mine is just more tangible and immediate for me.
I started out by saying I thought you were asking me to consider accepting Christ in my life. I have really thought about that request and what it means to me. In fact, I have mulled it over for a couple of years! At this time I do not believe in Jesus Christ the way you do, so I guess I have answered my own “troublesome” question. In the way that Christians determine who is and who is not a believer, I am not a Christian. However, I have also said that my Christian upbringing is a part of me, and a part that I do not regret or devalue in any way. Since I am a product of my own experience, and especially experiences that I value, in that sense I am very
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much a Christian.
I sincerely hope that my being so candid (and also long winded) will not cause a barrier to come between us, because I value our friendship. I would look forward to your equally candid reactions. In terms of what we do day in and day out, I suspect we are much the same. It reminds me of the debates among psychotherapists with very different theoretical backgrounds – they argue wildly about why their viewpoint is right and the others are wrong, but when it comes to treating the patient, they all pretty much do the same thing!
Let me end on a more personal note. Dalyte and I are doing fine, looking forward to a brief Florida vacation. John is working in Southern California and he’s found a soccer league to play in. Denise will teach next year at Bowling Green State, and Neal is in grad school in Tucson. They were all here for Christmas. It was really a fine time. Looking forward to seeing you in June…
Love,
Don