Pistism: the Achilles Heal of Liberal Christianity
Pistism.
At the liberal, Protestant church I used to work at in Philadelphia, our pastor was fond of reciting either the Nicene or Apostle’s Creed from week to week. This, she said, was part of the church’s liturgy and was essential for what the church does. And that was all well and good - until I probed deeply enough to discover that the Creed she recited stood without a referent. It was a recitation, an incantation - of itself! Suffice it to say that when our pastor decided to play a tape of Marcus Borg declaring that the “empty tomb is irrelevant to Christian faith” in a class for new members, I was pretty sure that our rehearsal of the second article on Sunday morning was not what I intended.
And yet she continued to refer to her parishioners as “faithful people” who “believed.” But believed in who? Trusted in what? As I walked downtown with a good friend, he coined a term for this strange, self-reflexive belief in belief: pistism.
The cause for this pististic disease was a lack of transcendental metaphysics, without which it doesn’t seem possible to believe in much at all - except ourselves. Belief in belief is the Achilles Heal of liberal Protestant Christianity, which permits madmen to get away with murder.