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Author Hal Banks - searcher, teacher, heretic
Last updated on Wednesday, January 01, 2003
When you’re a heretic you set about teaching others to be heretics also. That’s the story behind the two books written by Hal Banks. His first, Introduction to Psychic Studies (now out of print), was not at all what the rank and file would expect a Presbyterian (USA) Minister to write. But his classes that used his book as a text were well-attended by church people and non-church people as well. It has also been used as a text at colleges in Canada, South Carolina and California.
Hal Banks. Photo by Phyllis Eileen Banks. “Today’s heresy is tomorrow’s dogma,” Banks frequently states. His mission is to get people to think for themselves, not to swallow everything they are taught. Question, question, question he firmly exhorts. Too frequently people take what is handed them theologically and never question it. Not so in his classes.
His mentor, the late Leslie D. Weatherhead, pastor of City Temple Church, London, England, suggests you put those questions “in a little mental box awaiting further light.” He firmly believes that when you study and search further the light will come to you.
His second book Death: A Preface (A Continuing Journey) has just been reprinted by iuniverse.com. He intends this book to be a message of hope, to take away the fear of death. Its theme is: It is impossible to die; there is no death; each of us has eternity to fulfill our destinies. It provides an antidote to the fundamentalist theology of hell-fire, damnation and a mythical devil.
Death - A Preface by Hal Banks “The best is yet to be as we struggle in this kindergarten of the soul,” he says. “But the ultimate decision to believe or not is entirely in the reader’s hands.”
His own questions about his faith are what led him to write these books. With a Doctorate in Sacred Theology (S.T.D.) after his Master of Divinity from Boston University School of Theology and one also from San Francisco Theological University, he still could not reconcile the theology of the sheep and the goats. From his beginning search in 1965 to the present, he now accepts universalism, the premise that all people are “saved.”
You can imagine what furor that statement provoked. His weekly column, "Between the Cross and the Crossroads," that appeared on the editorial page of the Anchorage Daily News, was so controversial that pastors of the more conservative churches asked him to stop writing. He was upsetting their parishioners. Not so his own Presbyterian church who relished the title of “satan’s church” not because of that identity but because it was making people think. It let the community know that the church he was serving was open to all beliefs. Though he has been retired for several years, that church is now known as More Light Church, a revealing designation.
Hal N. Banks now lives with his wife Eileen in St. Petersburg, Florida. He continues to do research trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.
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