My stories: 1. Teenage trauma, and why I became a theologian

I’m responding to encouragement to share more of my story. I begin with a traumatic event in my teens. I reflect on how this eventually led me to become a theologian and always, as a theologian, a pastor.

I grew up in a country town where almost all the people were very poor, children of industrial workers, many of them migrants from war-ravaged Europe, and almost all of us living in rented government housing. We were really poor, but mostly we didn’t know it.

Our family went to the Baptist church, where we went to Sunday School, youth group, two services on Sunday: as much as anything else, it was our social life.

When I was a young teenager a new pastor came, who was rigidly fundamentalist. He told us all the things we should not do, if we wanted to be Christians. We would not say, ‘Gee’, because that was short for ‘Jesus’; or ‘Hec’  because that was short for ‘hell’. And girls were no longer to wear slacks or shorts, because this was men’s clothing, and in the Bible  (he told us)  it says women are not to wear men’s clothing.
And in a dozen other ways he laid down the law: the Old Testament law, according to him!

Almost all the senior youth left the church. The rest of us who remained learned all about sin—Especially about secret sins lurking in our lives. I remember how often that phrase was used, ‘secret sins’.

In a number of sermons the pastor used a story about a person who owned a fountain pen, an ink pen. The man (always a man) loved this pen, but one day he discovered that it had begun to leak. The man decided he could no longer use his pen. It dirtied his hands. This story was told to warn us that if we did not keep ourselves holy, God could no longer use us and would have to put us aside. Later I came to realise that this was all based on a guilt-laden vision of God as a prosecuting judge.

At exactly this time, (I was 14 years old and very much under the influence of this man’s teaching) my older brother John had left the church. They said he was ‘back-sliding’, religious jargon of the time. John was 20 years old when he died in a shooting accident. A bullet went into his brain, and he died within a few hours.

It was a terrible outrage, shock, an awful time. My parents were devastated. We all were. We had nothing to hold onto, except this idea, which someone said to us: that ‘all things work together for good, for those that love God’: from Romans 8. 28 – believing that somehow God is in this, with us, doing good.

Doing good?  I felt nothing but blind rage and bitter depression.

And in behind all that was the question about Johnny himself: what had happened to him? Was he the dirty, leaking fountain pen, whom God had disposed of …?
Is this what God is like, as people sometimes say: ‘God took him’?
Why did God ‘take’ my brother?

There are lots of other parts of this story, which I won’t go into here, except to say that with this chapter of my life, the whole story of that guilt-ridden, law-driven, crushing, negative, life-denying view of God and humanity, which kept me apart from others because they weren’t Christians, because they weren’t Baptists, began to unravel.

The people who were kind to me, and helpful, and real, were almost to a person not from my church, and most not from any church.

But something in me made me want to find out what God is really like.

We did eventually get a new pastor, and in another post I will tell a story about how the Bible began to open up to me, in new ways, because of his help.

I began to think that in fact there are different ways of seeing God, and I really wanted to work out which made sense. Here is one part of how that developed—after years of deep emotional struggle and confusion.

Five years later, when I was the same age as when my brother had died, I had some more death to deal with.

A mate of mine at uni had suicided, and I found him dead, and that was really rugged.
Then, the Australian army called me up, to go and shoot people in Vietnam.
I knew that I could not and would not ever do that.

My life was in deep moral, political and spiritual crisis. For me, this was real: it was my life, my body that was to go and join the war machine, go and kill total strangers—and at that time, we weren’t even allowed to vote. We could be drafted into the army, but we couldn’t vote. I remember reading that Bertrand Russell had said, ‘There will be was as long as there are young men willing to give their bodies to fight those wars.’

While I was wrestling with all that, and very involved in the anti-war movement, I was studying philosophy and in particular philosophy of religion.

My life was gripped by the sense of God with me. But the question was: what kind of God is this God?

I had this sense of the reality of God, but  I knew, also, that the churches I belonged to just never seemed to touch on the real things that affect people. It seemed to me, and many young people, that they were always on about questions people were not asking, but not dealing with the questions people were asking.
On the other hand, my studies in philosophy were not enough. I could deal with purely theoretical issues: timeless truths, existing in the eternal realm of the gods, as Plato claimed: but there never seemed to be a way to anchor this to the ground, to life, to now.

In the midst of that incredible turmoil of my life, with more than a little depression, I found the philosopher-theologian Paul Tillich. (He was born in 1886, died 1965).
Tillich had been a chaplain in the German army, in the First World War, where he suffered greatly, and his health and his life basically collapsed.
Tillich had also been one who resisted Hitler. He was sacked for resisting the Nazis. But he had gone to America and survived.

Tillich had been both a theologian and a philosopher. He said, at a dinner on one of the times he retired that his whole life and work had been devoted to showing the unity between two things which people think are separate, religion and culture, faith and science, or politics, bible and philosophy. These things, he said, eternally belong together, but we keep pushing them apart.

His theology, which I began reading then, saved my life, especially that wonderful book The Courage to Be.
This way of doing theology has one fundamental conviction, which rang true to my teenage intuition: if there is a God, that God is big enough to engage everything, to relate to and embrace all reality: we don’t have to push people out, or deny aspects of our lives, to protect God or defend God’s truth.

God is and must be in all, through all, and as Tillich put it, the ground of all that is.
So from Tillich I derived this insight that theology must be about discovering the God meaning of all that is,  and showing how the classic stories of our faith relate to all that is happening, all that is—not as a judge, but as the life-giving, sustaining, and accepting presence. He called it being-itself, or the ground of our being.

In other words, what he wanted to do was challenge the idea of religion as a separate part of our lives, as if this separate part of life is where God is, while other parts are in some way anti-God, or not ‘spiritual’.
For Tillich, God is ‘the ground of all being’: God is the life of all that that is, the reason that everything is, God is the being of all things, in all things – and the job of faith and the work of theology is to see how God is, in all things, and to relate to that.
So if we think that some things are religious and some things are not, we have already missed the point.

My life’s work as a theologian has been to respond to this invitation: to engage in a conversation with the possibility of a God who is in all reality, all experience, all our stories.