Book Review: Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World: A Spiritual Revolution. 2015.
I have been a fan and an avid student of Diana Butler Bass
since the days when her popular book, Christianity for the Rest of Us
traveled through my church circles with enthusiastic popularity. But now she
has left me behind. I do not know for sure where she went. But she left the
church. I am church! My abiding spiritual life, blessed by a deep and personal
relationship with Jesus Christ, is fully alive in and through the institutional
church. I am committed to fighting for the vitality, the effectiveness and the
vibrant future of the institutional church. The church embodies my
spiritual life. But now, in my reading of her new book Grounded, Diana
Butler Bass has abandoned me and the institutional church. She has moved, as a
result of her “third conversion”, to some strange place that is, I guess, more
aligned with Karen Armstrong’s Charter of Compassion than it is with my stodgy
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
She writes in her Conclusion this paragraph that for me
lacks the nuance and sophistication that I found in her works. I find this to
be a remarkably simplistic summary of things:
“The old God, the one
believed in, preached and celebrated, and served in conventional religious institutions,
is fading from view. And a new God, one of intimate longing and infinite love, experienced and proclaimed by seers and prophets through the ages, has risen just over the
horizon. It is a new spiritual day.”
I read here her dismissal of the “conventional religious
institutions” like the one I am committed to and serve in. This Great Emergence
we are living through is certainly NOT going to happen like this. Our
Reformation will not be an instantaneous on-off switch from an old God to a new
God. There will be fits and starts, there will death and life, there will be
success and failure, there will be new and old all mixed up together, and there
are institutions doing fresh, creative, bold new things. Good bye, Diana Butler
Bass. I am sorry you have abandoned our team, and walked out of our
conventional institutions to live into some ethereal “earthy spirituality.” As
for me and mine: We are church!
