Highlights

Congregationalist polity can (though not necessarily) serve to encourage both liberal and conservative communities to see themselves as the still centre of religious authority and so, without reference to wider contexts, able completely to shape their communities according their own current personal prejudices (beliefs). The trouble with this polity is that it has a tendency to develop in rather sectarian ways - indeed the history of Protestantism shows an endless proliferation of conventicles and sects with each group becoming increasingly and dangerously self-referential as it closes down its boundaries.

Not surprisingly non-Congregationalist traditions readily point to this fault and use it to justify their commitment to some kind of institutional authority (Presbyterian, Episcopal or whatever).

Now I accept that this aspect of Congregational polity is deeply problematic and am fairly convinced that some kind of shared "underlying" authority is required to check its tendency to drift towards sectarianism and self-referentialism and so maintain a sense of responsibility and accountability to wider meshworks of belonging

For a long while I chased what now increasingly seems to me to be the red herring hinted at above namely, that of trying to create (rebuild?) some kind of institutional form of liberal Christianity.

But I now feel that even a very liberal religious institution would be, in the end, just another version of every other kind of institutional Christianity.

if we wish effectively to challenge the increasing illiberalism of our age and to the "toughen" up liberal religion as a whole (including liberal Christianity as a subset of this) without going down the institutional route we have to find another model which, whilst allowing us to keep our local congregational independence (with all its distinct local flavours), also provides all of us with the right kind of "authority" that will keep our local communities from becoming closed and painfully self-referential and prejudiced

"God" might indeed be thought of as telling us, or at least offering us clear indications of, how to behave in the world but I do this by tying the word inseparably - a la Spinoza - to Nature. What I'm offering up here is a wholly naturalised, non-personal and non-theistic understanding of divinity.

I think it is possible to show this to be a genuinely religious middle way lying between Theism and Atheism. In doing this I am hopeful that it might become possible to articulate a conception of divinity that is capable of becoming increasingly free from individual human perspectives but without, at the same time, articulating a concept of "God" that ignores and diminishes the importance (to us) of limited human perspectives.

Here I come to the idea I have been kicking around for a while which is to suggest that it might be helpful for local liberal religious communities to start thinking of themselves, not in terms of being churches, but as gardens daily shaped and maintained by the local community on their particular bend of the river and which are designed continually to draw each person in the garden out of ourselves and into conversation and a goodly life both with others and reality as a whole (not as they would merely like others and reality to be but as they are actually encountered).

The genuine member of a Garden Academy cannot only be loyal to their particular garden come what may (as one needs to to be if one is a genuine member of this or that institutional church) but only loyal to God-or-Nature which allows their own particular local garden (and, indeed all gardens) to exist in the first place. It is to be loyal to "something" shared (though it is not one thing amongst other things but reality itself) that in "its" self-expression is radically diverse ("it" allows, as we know, an infinite variety of gardens to flourish). Incidentally, the early twentieth century philosopher Josiah Royce expressed something of this in his philosophy of loyalty (the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philsophy article on Royce includes a section on this should you be interested).

Now, the best gardeners, although they seek to create a local ordering of God-or-Nature in their gardens, do not attempt at the same time seek to dominate Her but seek only to allow the garden to reveal to themselves and others aspects of reality that might otherwise be obscured to us when we encounter Her in "the wild." In other words, although no two gardens are alike and consequently reveal much about the personal likes and dislikes (prejudices) of the gardeners involved (this is, of course, a form of Congregationalism) no successful garden/er can pretend to truly be in control of the basic "material" of their project - whether we are talking about, soil, quality of seed, sun or rain - ultimately, if you follow Spinoza, all this "material" is, of course, understood to be but various modes of God-or-Nature. It is vitally important in this account to realise that this "material" (God-or-Nature) is not personal and so cannot be understood to judge anyone or any action morally, however, it can "judge" in the sense that when any gardener consistently goes against the grain by doing stupid things then their project will fail and will be shown to be "wrong." To reiterate, 'wrong', not in a judgemental moral sense, but simply because it is revealed that this particular gardener shows that they neither know how the "material" works nor understands the limitations of their own tools and the true and limited extent of their own capacities for local ordering.

Deleuze's book "Spinoza - Practical Philosophy

To be a successful gardener helping to create a thriving good local Garden Academy one must develop a profound understanding and acceptance of the fact that one's own local (Congregational) ordering of God-or-Nature is, of necessity, only possible because because of a complex commingling within ever wider contexts (ranging from one's local neighbourhood and continuing up to God-or-Nature).

Now, it seems to me that such a Spinozistic understanding of God-or-Nature provides local liberal communities with a genuinely shared liberal conception of authority (a wholly naturalised one of course) which is simply not amenable to persuasion or coercion by humankind ("it" is after all the world as she is and not as we would will it). It is a conception of "God" that requires us to work with it - collaboratively. One beautiful model representing how we work with God-or-Nature is in the shaping of a good garden. But, remember, no individual garden can ever be truly self-contained and self-referential - it is always a commingled entity and, though discrete in its own way it is not, of necessity, disconnected from its wider environment(s).

I think a community becomes an institution when it starts to define itself self-referentially and begins to loose sight of its necessary commingling with the whole of reality - God-or-Nature.

When you come face to face with Nature-or-God this is all one can do it is just that as human beings we can find ways to live and work with this reality and to do it joyously and creatively. Doing this together in a beautiful "Garden" (both earthy ones and those of the spirit) seems like rather an attractive idea to me. Perhaps even more attractive than going to church

Yes I have read the Tao Te Ching - indeed it accompanies me where ever I go. My favourite translation is by Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo

early Christians eventually "evolved structure and organisation i.e. church." However, I'm not sure that Jesus was simply "the 'ideas' man." For me he did the hard, not the easy bit, which was to live in the world in a direct dialogical relationship with God-or-Nature - as a genuine 'son of God'. It seems more accurate to say that it was his followers who took the easy path and mistakenly institutionalised both him (as the Christ) and his teaching (making Christianity).

We now have, unlike original Christianity, a complete cast of bishops, deans, and pastors; educated clergy, degree and all, talented, gifted, humanly well-meaning. They all preach with tremendous confidence - doing it well, very well, stupendously well, tolerably well, or badly - but not one of them lives in character with the Christianity of the New Testament. This grand cast of characters accomplishes one thing: it gives rise to a false impression that because we have such a complete cast we must of course have Christianity, too. (Kierkegaard’s Attack Upon “Christendom” 1854-1855, trans., with introduction, Walter Lowrie. Princeton University Press, 1944 pp. 29-35).

Necessary, too, are times of solitude and withdrawal from community into the dark of the soil - in such places new life awaits and bides its time - the right time. In caring for a garden that one is always brought into direct contact with this reality. As the Stoic Seneca said (in his fifth letter to Lucilius) "Our motto, as everyone knows, is to live in conformity with nature." I'm simply no longer convinced that church-type institutional structures are particularly good at this because they are concerned with defending an institutional idea of reality (and an idea of the Good) rather than the reality that is the experienced world.

In the midst of a storm one is simply brought face to face with an aspect of the reality of life and as there is sunshine so must there be the storm. Learning from the experience of the storm AND the sunny weather together allows one to understand Life more fully. Alone neither is at all meaningful.

I think he offers the western mind a way back into understanding the world as a divine unity but without turning it into what you describe as a "wishy, washy, quasi theistic belief?" However, Spinoza's Deus-sive-Natura is the most unromantic and clear expression of Divinity that western philosophy has ever produced and one which, additionally, doesn't run counter to the discoveries that are continuing to be made in the natural sciences. Neither does it pull its punches over the real travails life brings all creatures but simply offers a rational way of learning both to accept them as a necessary part of existence and so, as part of God-or-Nature. In this calm, rational and utterly unromantic approach to life one can see him standing firmly in the line of the great Stoics, Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.

_....the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that here is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one’s affection outward toward this one God, rather than inward on one’s self, or on humanity, or on human imagination and abstractions - the world of spirits.

I think that it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him. We are not important to him, but he to us.

I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one’s own life and environment beautiful, so far as one’s power reaches. This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him_

(Robinson Jeffers: A Letter to Sister Mary James Power, October 1, 1934 cited in The Wild God of the World, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 189).

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References

Brown, Andrew James. “Garden Congregationalism.” Caute, 7 Aug. 2008, https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2008/08/garden-congregationalism.html.