NONAUTHORITARIAN CHRISTIANITY?

At a certain point in my life (perhaps my mid twenties) I realized that if I was to be religious, I could no longer base my faith on any form of authoritarianism. Not because I was a rebel, but because authoritarianism just doesn't work.

By "authoritarianism" I mean any truth claim that is argued by appeal to some unimpeachable authority. In religious terms this would today generally be sacred writings, regarded as having been inspired by God and thus infallible; or it might be the utterances of a prophet or leader held to be on intimate terms with the divine.

Leaving aside the intricate complexities of translation and interpretation of holy texts, one may still legitimately ask of them, "How do we know they are true?" The answer "Because they are divinely inspired" only begs the question "How do we know that?" To which the only possible answers are "tradition" and "faith", none of which are in any way self-authenticating or otherwise persuasive answers.

Why, one might ask, do I trust doctors? Not because of their aura of authority, I would respond. Quite the contrary - it is because they always have to prove themselves. The certificate I see hanging on the wall of my doctor's office is evidence to me that they have been proven. They have spent several years attending medical school, and have met stringent standards necessary to establish their worthiness to practice medicine. These schools, these standards, are also not automatically authoritative but represent centuries of accumulated, and continually tested and challenged, knowledge. I can't myself accumulate all the knowledge necessary to judge my doctor's diagnoses, but I can learn enough so that, say, if my doctor were to tell me, "You suffer from an excess of choler" I'd regard him or her as a quack.

It is very well not to base my faith on authority; but I also decided that I could not base it on supernatural experiences. These are out-of-the-ordinary experiences that are generally presented as evidence for a non-material reality lying beyond the physical world or the world of the senses. These could include mystical experiences, visions, auditions, near-death experiences, recollection of past lives through hypnotic regression, precognition, or significant coincidences (synchronicities). It isn't that I didn't believe that any of these things happen; but a) \most of them don't happen to me, and thus constitute hearsay; b) many purported instances are likely fraudulent or the result of self-deceit; c) they might be subject to scientific (i.e. materialistic) explanations; and d) they just don't seem to mean anything. So a bird flew through my grandparents' house, an omen of my grandfather's death; so over thirty years later another bird flew through my parents' apartment, just two months before my father's death. That's eerie, and ominous, and depressing; but it's not what is typically meant by religion.

Where did that leave me? No sacred texts, no mysterious occurences requiring supernatural explanation - what else is there? Only reflection, I decided.