Wrestling with God: The Story of My Life 

by Lloyd Geering

 

To New Zealanders Prof Lloyd Geering is our equivalent of Britain's Bishop Robinson or America's Bishop John Spong. He represents the very best of modern scholarship; rigorous, factual, logical, engaging and generous to his opponents. While orthodox in Christian practice he is far from orthodox in belief. For Lloyd there is little room or need for the supernatural, a personal God or prayer.

 

 In 1967 when he was Professor of Old Testament and Principal of the Presbyterian College he was tried by the Presbyterian Church for heresy. After much controversy the Assembly “declared that no doctrinal error had been established, dismissed the charges and declared the case closed”.  Not long afterwards Prof Geering became the foundational Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University. His heresy trial was a national event. A national event like no other church focused event since that was to have wide and long lasting ramifications.

 

Now in his late eighties he has set down the story of his life and the progression of his theological thinking.  He says “I am my life story, as yet still open-ended and unfinished . . .thus to find out who I am, I must recall the story of my life as clearly and honestly as I can.” This he does with humility and candor. I thoroughly appreciated reading his story as told by him.

 

When his previous text was published (Christianity Without God -2002) I was a respondent at a day seminar in which the thesis of the text was presented. Then and now I find there is much Lloyd says that I wholeheartedly agree with and much I see and experience differently. More importantly I respect his expression of Christian living, integrity and scholarship. I equally deplore the way he has been vilified by many so called ‘Christians'.  Personally I find Lloyd's expression of an orthopraxis of Christian life more engaging and ‘Christ-like' than the faith expressed by many of his orthodox opponents. Such responses have only done harm to the legitimacy and public place of Christian faith within New Zealand.

 

I find myself agreeing with much of his theology and approach and yet disagreeing with his understanding of ‘God' as merely a human construct. 

 

As Colin Brown, previously Professor of Religious Studies at Canterbury University and a contemporary of Lloyds, says in his own review of Lloyd's autobiography – “Where belief is concerned, it appears that Geering did not move from a carefully articulated, orthodox belief in God to his present position. His adoption of Christianity during his student days had more to do with the warmth of Christian fellowship which he found, especially in the Student Christian Movement, the ethical challenge of the teaching of Jesus, and his desire to give meaning and purpose to his life. “Insofar as I thought about God at all, ‘he' was simply part of a total package.¹”

 

So this is not an account of someone whose faith moves from a more orthodox conservative position towards a more liberal perspective. Through-out his life Geering seems content to leave ‘God as unknowable'. Although, like many, a period of grief² (after the death of his first wife – Nancy) led him to a hope in eternity. This he describes as founded on the then very popular book by Frank Morrison – ‘Who Moved the Stone?' Later he realized that although the argument of the book was convincing Morrison had based his argument on the ‘historicity of the gospel' accounts. Accounts Geering did not see as ‘historical' in content. A perspective which encapsulates his theology. Not surprisingly there is no mention of a personal sense of God or religious experiences.

 

There is an old Jewish saying that an hour a day of religious reading is an hour of prayer. If this be true Prof Geering's life is certainly steeped in prayer as his breadth and depth of scholarship verify. However, if prayer is understood as reflection, meditation, silence before, and communication with, God, then Prof Geering's life story is left bereft. Nowhere is this secondary understanding of prayer discussed or illustrated. For him luck and chance have replaced prayer and an active God:

“In this exercise of recalling the past, I have been struck by the frequency with which I was led to significant turning points or major achievements by chance events. Chance plays a dominant role in the life of every person, just as it has in the evolution of the planet – on a far grander scale! That is why we so often speak of ‘fortune' and ‘misfortune', ‘good luck' and ‘bad luck'. As I observed at the beginning of this book, one's genes and one's mother culture are the two ‘given's' out of which personal identity begins to evolve. We are largely the product of these, together with our successive responses to the many chance and intentional events we encounter from birth onwards. [then with typical good humour he adds] Why, I might never have become a writer had it not been for my critics! (p248)”

 

At this foundational point I do not agree with Prof. Geering. From this foundational disagreement our respective understandings of life and faith, theological constructs and sense of hope for our own [and the world's] present existence and future differ. And differ markedly. Yet there remain many areas where I find myself strongly agreeing with him.  Two stand out:

 

The church and culture.

In the early 1970's Lloyd wrote an article for a newspaper saying:

“there is a widening gap between the diminishing churches and the increasingly secular community. . the church has come to live a ghetto existence within her own confined circles, with her own form of Yiddish, a churchy language which is quite meaningful to many of those who have been trained

in it but deadly dull and increasingly meaningless to each successive generation of the world outside.

We in the church would do well to heed the dictum of Coleridge, ‘He who loves Christianity more than truth, will soon come to love his own denomination more than Christianity and he will end up loving himself most of all.”

 

Graciousness and honesty in debate

There are many vigorous theological debates swirling today. Perhaps the most vigorous is over the inclusion of people in same-sex relationships. Here Prof. Geering's perspective and approach has much to teach us. He honestly pursued the truth at all cost. He listened carefully to his critics and those who accused him of heresy. He tried to reply to people's letters and questions openly and with concern for the person. But most importantly he was gracious and acknowledged the place of other perspectives than his own.

 

There remains much to learn from Lloyd's theology and writing, his understanding of the church and especially his graciousness when under attack and commitment to the pursuit of truth.

Alan Jamieson

 

1 Review by Colin Brown in The Anglican Taonga; Advent 2006.  No.23 p50-51

2 There has been much grief in Lloyd's life. His journey through these very sad times is an engaging and moving aspect of his biography. “His firstborn child was stillborn, his first wife, Nancy, died soon after the birth of their second child, a grandson died in a cot death and Elaine, his second wife, died on the verge of celebrations for 50 years of marriage”( Review by Colin Brown in The Anglican Taonga; Advent 2006. No. 23 p50)