On his 99th Birthday Lloyd Geering gave this following sermon:

My religious thinking began when I was sent to Sunday School from the age of five. But even in my Sunday School days I never went to church, for in those days the Sunday School was a separate institution meeting at 2 pm on Sunday. And when I returned to New Zealand from Australia at the age of twelve, I had no further connection with any Christian organization during my adolescence, since my parents had long ceased to attend church.

It was during my second year at university that a series of events occurred that resulted in a swift and major change in my life. At the invitation of a student friend from school days, I began to attend the Presbyterian church he went to, and to follow him, even more enthusiastically, into the activities of the Student Christian Movement.

In that one year – 1937 – my whole style of life completely changed. In a matter of only three or four weeks, I soon found myself going every Sunday to senior Bible class at 10 am, attending the 11 am morning service where I sang in the choir, teaching Sunday School in the afternoon and later attending the evening service at 6.30 pm. My thinking was changing at such a fast rate that, after attending a Mission to the University conducted by the SCM, I was becoming convinced by the end of that year that I was being called to enter the ministry. When I confided this to an older brother he said, “Don’t waste your life! – the churches will all be closed in thirty years’ time!”. These many decades later I realise his judgment was by no means wholly false, yet I have never felt I wasted my life. Indeed, it led me to a very rich one.

During my three years of theological training at Knox College, I regarded myself as such a novice in the life of the church that I accepted rather uncritically all that I was taught. Fortunately, however, my teachers had all embraced the liberal theology and the modern understanding of the Bible that emerged during the late 19th and early 20th century. They showed us how to study the Bible as a collection of historical documents, by using the new tools of historical and literary criticism. Indeed, it was to counter this liberalism that fundamentalism arose in reaction but only from 1920 onwards.

I became a very enthusiastic student of the Bible, particularly of the Old Testament. I also developed a strong interest in Church History, being taught by a young refugee from Nazi Germany, who showed us how Christian thinking is an ever-changing and evolving process, rather than a set of unchangeable doctrines.

On the other hand, I found Systematic Theology quite dull and unexciting. The one useful thing I learned from John Dickie, my elderly professor from Aberdeen, was the nature of theology. He taught us that the task of theology is not to expound the unchangeable dogmas revealed by God, as it had been regarded up to the time of Schleiermacher in the early 19th century. Dickie, following Schleiermacher, regarded theology as the intellectual exercise by which Christians ‘think through their experience and relate it to all other knowledge’. That is what I have tried to do ever since. I was among the last of John Dickie’s students and imbibed that liberal approach. Strangely enough the theology taught at Knox College for the next twenty years reverted to the more traditional form of dogmatic theology. It was called Neo-orthodoxy and was led by the Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, a man whom Dickie warned us against.

So that is how I was shaped by the liberal theology that was current in the early 20th century. As a parish minister I never once preached that Christ’s death on the cross achieved our salvation. I regarded that sort of orthodoxy as quite outmoded. Rather, my sermons expounded Christianity as a way of life that is based on the moral teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

It was not until I became a theological teacher in 1955 that my thinking began to develop further, after reading the books of some German theologians, such as Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann. They led me on from the liberal theology of my student days to the more radical approach, represented by Bishop John Robinson in his Honest to God, of 1963.
Bultmann showed me how the story of Jesus in the New Testament is expressed in the framework of mythical thinking that was current in the ancient world but which is no longer operating today. So to discover the truth of the Christian message for today’s non-mythical world it needs to be, as he said, ‘demythologised‘, lifted out of mythical setting and re-interpreted in a way that is meaningful for today’s secular world.

This is why, in 1966, I wrote an article that tried to explain to readers how to understand the resurrection of Jesus in today’s world, where the mythical stories of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus into heaven can no longer be taken at face value. You all know what happened as a result.

When I moved to the Chair of Religious Studies at Victoria University in 1971 I had to read even more widely and I eventually became involved with the activities of the Jesus Seminar in California.

As a result of this longish spiritual pilgrimage my thinking changed quite significantly from what it was when I first embraced the Christian faith as a young and immature adult. My subsequent books illustrate this in much more detail than it is possible for me to sketch here. Moreover, I found that the writing of books can change one’s mind just as much as reading the books of others.

Take for example, my last book, From the Big Bang to God. The geologist associated with Te Papa, invited me to give a short talk on Religion and Science at his monthly coffee and discussion group. I attempted, perhaps foolishly, to tell the whole story of evolution in fifteen minutes. I was trying to make clear that, rather than God making the universe, it was the process of evolution, by eventually bringing forth humans and language, that created such concepts as God.

Later, while I was turning this short talk into a book, I came to realize something that had not occurred to me before, even though it is immediately obvious when one thinks about it. The story of the evolution of the universe is our human story and could not be told until we humans had created a language in which to tell it. We usually do not realize how much human life as we know it depends on language. This is why the ancients assumed that language had been there from the beginning of time. The Bible begins by describing how God created the world by the use of language. God said, “Let there be light!” and there was light! Even the Fourth Gospel starts, “In the beginning was the Word”. In one sense it was language that enables us to create or formulate the world we feel we live in.

My discovery about the priority of language made me realize that we humans do live in two worlds. But they are not the material world and the spiritual worlds our forefathers assumed they lived in. Rather they are the physical world and the world of human thought.

We enter the physical world when we are born, but we do not enter the human thought world until we learn to speak, from say the age of two. The human thought-world which we then enter becomes the lens through which we see and understand the physical world. This is why people of different cultures live in slightly different thought-worlds and see the same physical world rather differently. This is why the religious quest for meaning and personal fulfillment has taken different forms in different cultures. Further, no one of them, such as Christianity, can claim to be the only true one and judge the others to be false.

This is a brief account of how I have come to change my thinking and am continuing to do so. I shall now illustrate this by referring briefly to three basic examples.

The first has to do with God. Even from the time I embraced the Christian faith, I had no clear idea of what the word God meant. For me God was simply part of the total package of Christian ideas. It named the mystery of life that could not be grasped by the human mind.

More recently I have come to realize that God does not name a reality in the cosmos at all. It is a humanly created idea in the human thought-world – a word by which we have tried to make sense of the physical world we live in.

This idea of God has a long history, which the remarkable scholar and ex-nun, Karen Armstrong has written up as “The History of God”. God is an idea that has played an extremely important centering role in our evolving culture. God became the ultimate point of reference. It was the idea of God as creator of the universe that led to the rise of modern science, as mediaeval theologians tried to discover what they called ‘the ways of God’ by conducting experiments. It was they who laid the foundations of today’s empirical science.

But also associated with this idea of God were the values of love, compassion, honesty and truth. These make such moral demands of us that they transcend us. And though the idea of God had its beginning in our mythological past it remains, therefore, a useful symbol for our highest values. Even the New Testament asserts. “God is love”.

The second area of change is how I understand Jesus of Nazareth. He is not for me to be worshipped as the divine Son of God, for that sort of language belongs to the world of ancient mythology. What the work of the Jesus Seminar has shown me is that Jesus was not even a prophet after the Old Testament model, but a wise man, a sage, walking in the footsteps of Ecclesiastes before him. These scholars have attempted to uncover what they call “the voice-prints and foot-prints” of Jesus, before he was transformed into the divine Christ-figure by the creative imagination of his first-century followers, and chiefly Paul who never met him. The original Jesus did not talk much about himself at all and not even about God. Rather he talked about the Kingdom of God, describing this in parables, such the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. He used this term to describe his vision of how people should live with each other in loving relationships of reciprocal goodwill.

The third area of change has been in the acceptance of our mortality. We humans are finite, earthly beings, just like all the planetary creatures. We are given one life to live and there is no future existence beyond the grave in some heavenly spiritual realm. This is why the average funeral service has changed so markedly during the 20th century. In 1900 it was the ritual by which we celebrated the departure of the deceased from this world to a better life in the next world. But by 2000 the ritual has increasingly become the celebration of a life that has come to end – a ritual in which we recall with gratitude what the deceased person has achieved and meant to us.

Yes, my thinking has changed markedly since the time I first embraced the Christian faith as an immature youth. But at no time have I ever thought it necessary, or even desirable, to reject Christianity, as some atheists delight in doing. On the contrary I remain very grateful to the Christian tradition. From the prophets and apostles of old, and particularly from that remarkable but elusive figure of Jesus of Nazareth, I have learned a lot about how to live life to the full. I believe today’s secular and humanistic world owes it origin to the Christendom out of which it emerged. And if humankind is to flourish in the future, it needs to acknowledge these spiritual roots and continually learn from them. And that is what we are doing when we meet as a church!

About the Author
Lloyd Geering (D.D., University of Otago, New Zealand) is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. A public figure of considerable renown in New Zealand, he is in constant demand as a lecturer and as a commentator on religion and related matters on both television and radio. He is the author of many books including Reimagining God: The Faith Journey of a Modern Heretic, Such Is Life! A Close Encounter with Ecclesiastes (2010), Coming Back to Earth: From Gods, to God, to Gaia (2009), and Christianity without God (2002). In 2001, he was honored as Principal Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. In 2007, he received New Zealand s highest honor, the Order of New Zealand.