One of the continuing problems in thinking theologically is that we - all of us, believers and non-believers alike - tend to confuse the transcendent with the supernatural. That statement may not make a whole lot of sense to you, but since I think it is a major stumbling block for religious liberals in particular, let's see what I can do with it. The dictionary definitions of transcendent and supernatural are not as clear in differentiating between them as I would like, and perhaps my own differentiation is more a matter of intuition than objectivity. Nevertheless, that it is an important difference to the search for the truth and the growth of the spirit, I am more and more convinced.
There is an old story about a man who lived in a place where an approaching flood was inevitable. The civil defense was alerted and came by to convince him to evacuate. He refused, saying that the Lord would take care of him. The floodwaters rose, and as the streets filled, rescuers in pirogues gathered up as many of the remaining citizens as they could find. When they rowed to his door, he again refused to leave saying that he would put his trust in the Lord to save him. The waters continued to rise and covered his house. As he stood on the roof a helicopter came by to pick him up, but for the third time he trusted in God and refused to go. Contrary to his expectations the water did not go down but rose further, and at last he began to pray desperately, fearing that God had indeed deserted him. God responded, however, saying, "Look! What do you want from me? I gave you three chances!" Now that man's god was strictly supernatural. If he didn't pass a miracle, he was unrecognizable to the poor fool. The point of the story is not, of course, that god is unnatural, merely that the more subtle evidences of tran-scendence, and the everyday opportunities to participate in them, should be recognized as being as divine as any miracle. The courage and compassion of those who were attempting to rescue the foolish man were transcendent. He, however, was holding out for the supernatural.
There is a great deal of interest in the supernatural these days. It is a part of what is called "new age," the part that makes those of us who tend not to believe in it, seeing not only a lack of proof but even a lack of evidence for it, tend to dismiss new age ideas without much investigation. Generally speaking I wouldn't suggest otherwise, for those ideas which are not new age at all, but rather old ideas which have been shown by objective investigation to be without foundation. After all it is not necessary to keep on proving the same thing over and over. Some new age ideas may, in fact, be quite useful, but all of them need to be subjected to the same critical examination as any other, and many of them have already received it. One of the important new age ideas that need examination is uncritical acceptance and tolerance of everyone's honestly held beliefs. To reject the supernatural ones out of hand is seen to be closed-minded at best, bigoted at worst, even though years of responsible investigation has proved such beliefs to have no basis in fact, and long years of experience have shown the hollowness of a theology based on heavenly visitation and miracles. I am talking about such things as witch's spells and guardian angels, but those are simply the most recently fashionable of the things that are frequently believed without any but anecdotal evidence. Even our religious movement, although it contravenes our whole history and tradition, has, in its commitment to freedom and tolerance, putting that ahead of its older commitment to the responsibility that is required in a free search for truth, been infected with the modern fascination with supernaturalism. We have accepted those who believe in casting spells and the power of crystals, and instead of reminding them of the value and tradition of critical thinking in our movement, we have refused to confront them either with evidence or doubt. The consequence of this move away from what has defined our religious movement in the past is that we are often no longer perceived by outsiders as the bastion of intellectual and spiritual integrity in matters of religion, but rather the church of whatever turns you on. My old church - Community Church in New Orleans - was, until I protested, listed as a source of alternative religion in a paper which focused on such things as astrology, crystals, and prophecies, and the lead editorial of the one that I read had as its topic the primacy of anecdote as a road to belief rather than scientific proof. It was when I saw the name of the church listed that I realized why I had been getting so many telephone calls asking whether it was a "metaphysical" church.
I must admit that when I would get such a call, I would not be terribly helpful. I would ask them whether by metaphysical they meant that aspect of philosophy which deals with the nature of ultimate reality, and if so that that was certainly a portion of our concern as a religious institution. I knew perfectly well that that was not what they meant at all, but for some reason such calls always tended to turn me into a mischief-maker. I am happy to say that I have received no such calls in Naples, but that it is happening with any of our churches anywhere, I think is a problem.
Even more worrisome to me was a request I received to involve the church in sponsoring a large conference with nationally known speakers on the subject of spiritual healing. In fact, I do believe that there is evidence that the mind, the emotional state and the spirit play a role in bodily healing, a new age idea I feel has real merit, but I turned them down despite the publicity that might have been gained from such a partnership. I turned them down because I think that the teaching of spiritual healing encourages the belief in the supernatural - that the very people who would laugh at the man for refusing the pirogue and the helicopter might refuse useful medical care in the belief that spiritual healing will save them, when it very likely won't. There are many religions throughout the history of humankind, which have taught it, and none who have proven its worth as a medical technique. That is, sometimes it seems to work and sometimes it doesn't, and there hasn't been any way to figure out when it will and when it won't, but the believers in the supernatural will nevertheless put their faith in its supernatural ability to cure. When serious researchers discover why it seems to work sometimes, they will be able to replicate its results, and it will not be supernatural at all, but natural. Until that time, however, I think it is more likely to do harm than good to encourage people to trust to its efficacy in the name of spirituality.
The real problem is that we jumble the supernatural, the spiritual and the transcendent into a single area of our lives and think that they must all be part of the same thing. The supernatural includes things like ghosts and special powers and sorcery. What is now science often deals with what was once magic. The supernatural, when it is understood, is no longer supernatural but natural, but just as often is simply stories and wishes and hopes acted upon as if they were reality. A god that will snatch you up out of a flood is a supernatural god, and from anything I've ever seen or heard to the contrary simply doesn't happen. There are, of course, the stories current about guardian angels, but all I can think of when I hear of such miraculous guardians and rescuers is the many times when innocents were not saved from disaster. What would qualify one person for a guardian angel and exclude another? Such partial benefactors, should they exist, would certainly be supernatural, but they would be neither spiritual nor transcendent. The supernatural contravenes or suspends the laws of nature. Should it exist at all, which I confess to doubting, it may be exciting, amusing, powerful, scary or useful, but it can say very little about the life of the spirit. The existence of ghosts or angels or witchcraft or objects of power cannot have real significance in relation to meaning and transcendence. However immaterial they might be, their significance can only be a material one. They make us healthier or luckier or richer, they tell us what will happen to us in the future or save us from drowning, but they do nothing to make our lives meaningful. They can do nothing to infuse our lives and the world around us with the holy.
It seems to me, then, that to think of the holy in terms of the supernatural, to think of God as a supernatural being, is to block ourselves from our real search, and for that matter leads many to define themselves as atheists, who, when God is taken out of the realm of the supernatural and understood as, instead, a name that we call the transcendent, are the most spiritual of people.
I've never quite understood the eagerness to believe in the supernatural and to give it religious status. One time I was preaching at the Gulf Coast Fellowship in Mississippi when as I was leaving a man asked me what I thought of UFOs and near-death experiences. When I responded that I thought that they were interesting topics worthy of investigation but having nothing to do with religion and therefore not something I felt obliged to comment on, he was shocked. Of course they were religious, he said, but since they are questions of fact rather than value, I'm not sure why they should be. Perhaps it's an extra gene or a stronger chemical or a double jump in a synapse in the brain. I have felt the feelings, had the experiences - of deja vu, of mystical visions, of regression to former lives - but after the sense of overpowering truth, I have stepped back and asked myself critical questions about those feelings and experiences. What triggered them, where did they come from, what was their importance, if any, and how could what I learned from them be made consonant with my ordinary experience. The most common reaction I have seen from others in the parapsychological investigation groups I have been part of is the eagerness to believe, the dismissal of questions of proof or even of truth and the feeling that such things are somehow of divine provenance, that they create meaning somehow just by their seemingly supernatural connection.
Not too long ago Beacon Press reissued the Jefferson Bible. It is Thomas Jefferson's version of the New Testament which he wrote to remove what he considered to be the supernatural accretions which interfered with a true religious sensibility. The most important thing he did was to omit the stories of miracles. He felt that such stories, rather than bolstering faith, got in its way. Certainly I would consider them irrelevant to it. Whether or not magic exists, whether someone can subvert the laws of nature, says nothing, it seems to me, as it seemed to Jefferson, about what religious faith should be about. Its focus should be, not on the supernatural, but on transcendence - an unsupernatural God.
Transcendence is not separate from the reality that we experience daily. It does not go against natural law, change bad luck to good, get you a van if you pray for it, rescue you from floods. It is not sometimes there and sometimes not there. It is the essence of life's meaning. It is not a person or a thing or a place. It is rather our experience of life as more than existence and survival, as containing the qualities of beauty and love and justice, of goodness and dignity, of appreciation and joy, of faith and service. It is worth more than all the luck and riches and health in the world, and to serve that God is the true purpose and meaning of life.
Although I don't believe in it, I don't entirely rule out the possibility of the supernatural. I am, within the limits of possibility of knowing, certain that miracles aren't going to happen, that holding my mouth right won't win the lottery for me, and that invoking some magical power will not protect me from accident or disease. Nevertheless, should someone prove to me that such things are real it would not affect my religious faith nor totally upset my world-view. Those things seem to me to be essentially irrelevant, and to allow them to become a part of the life that we call religious is to lessen the religiousness of it. Jefferson was right about that aspect of miracle stories. They do indeed get in the way of faith in the unsupernatural God, the only one that can really matter. Such a God is worshipped not with bowing down in fear and trembling, not with words of ingratiation or manipulation, but with rejoicing in beauty and the creation of it. Such a god is worshipped in acts of love and in the pursuit of justice. Meeting the vicissitudes of life with courage and humor and the sufferings of others with compassion is the worship of the unsupernatural God. Each choice of the good, each step taken in the search for truth, is an act of worship. The life of faith is one in which we partake of, participate in and create the transcendent. Let us never allow either rejection or embrace of the supernatural to get in the way of that faith.