Eyre Lines

Elgin Hushbeck has responded to my recent post in the comments to his original article; this is my reply.

Elgin,

Sorry it wasn’t still fresh in your mind – I confess it took me nearly a month from first putting down some reaction to actually posting it; various other things kept intervening and it nearly didn’t get posted at all – but I didn’t want to waste the work…

Let me start with where we agree. As you note at the end, we agree that there is a problem when organisations get too big, and this goes for both companies and governments. It also goes for Labour Unions, which I think are a good thing unless they become too large and powerful (i.e. significantly more powerful than the organisations they are negotiating with). We definitely agree that a government in the pocket of large companies is an extremely bad thing, and that we have moved towards that over the last 50 years.

We also agree that a bargain between individuals is an extremely good way of establishing an equitable result, as long as the parties have a fair level playing field, i.e. neither has any duress applied to it to close the deal, neither is unable to walk away if a deal cannot be struck, and both parties are in full possession of all the facts (there may be more caveats on further reflection).

We also agree, I think, that when purely financial considerations drive an organisation, that organisation becomes toxic. I have had quite a bit of experience of organisations driven by cost accountants and MBA’s of the Harvard school (happily mostly from the outside), and they are every bit as nasty as I’ve described.

However, I don’t see the problems of short-termism and intolerable pressure to keep on producing more for less as flowing purely from the payment of performance bonuses, as you do; I think the root problem lies with a stock market which can respond within milliseconds to any perceived opportunity or risk, and where you have a market which works to a timescale of milliseconds, you are likely to be forced to think short term.  Performance-based incentives for CEO’s just makes things that bit worse. The system itself forces the actions of individuals; even if managers wish to be long-sighted, the demands of finance make them short-sighted.

That is, however, just an intensification of a tendency already inherent in the idea of a market in shares in large limited companies. Ambrose Bierce (one of your better American sceptics) said that the limited liability company was the greatest instrument of fraud ever invented by humanity; I would add that it is the second greatest instrument for dissociating an organisation from its ownership (the greatest being a representative democracy with a strong party system).

We also agree that attempts to create pure socialist societies have been, to a large extent, failures; we agree that they come up against the problem that people are not all paragons of civic virtue, and some of them will game the system, some of them will grab and hold power. However, you do not concede that moving closer to the idyllic concept of socialism would produce a society far better than the ones we live in, while you do maintain that moving closer to your idyllic concept of capitalism would do this.

This is where we completely part company. I don’t think that moving too far in either direction would be a good thing, and in particular I am absolutely convinced that removal of all restraints on capitalism would make things far worse.

The thing is, we have seen societies which have been substantially less regulated by government than either of ours now is, and indeed have seen some where there was absolutely minimal regulation. What results is the development of larger and larger organisations, the concentration of wealth (and power) in fewer and fewer hands (both of which Karl Marx observed would occur), the cartels and price-fixing which Adam Smith warned were a feature, as I quoted:  “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” , and the increase of influence of corporations over government, which both of us have observed and deprecate. It is the system itself which tends to monopoly and cartel, and not any particular failing of individuals beyond normal human nature.

Incidentally, the replacement of small shopkeepers by chains here has nothing to do with government regulation (which is far lighter on small businesses) and everything to do with economies of scale and cartels involving the chains and suppliers, i.e. the negative effects of an imbalance of power.

Yes, such societies can indeed “produce wealth” – indeed, it is the whole objective of their economic systems (and frequently of their governments as well). Without redistributive taxation and strong curbs on the power of corporations, however, in the absence of a labour shortage this wealth largely stays in the hands of a very few people and is of no benefit to the wider population. Both of our societies were far less regulated in the days of our respective industrial revolutions, and both saw the absolute degradation of labour and the rise of super-rich individuals until governments started to limit the power of the industrial concerns and provide for the mass of the population both by providing a safety net, by restricting the ability of the employers to make use of their disproportionate bargaining power and by legislating as to the conditions in which they were asked to work. Both produced appalling living and labour conditions for the workers, frequently worse than those they had had before moving to work in cities. I for one do not want us to go back to the systems of the early 19^th century.

We definitely agree that monopolies are in principle a bad thing; where we disagree is that I see the likelihood of monopolies growing as regulation decreases, and you see competition as being a sufficient mechanism to stop that happening and even think that deregulation assists competition. While we agree that government-sponsored and protected private monopolies are a bad thing, we are not agreed, I suspect,  that there are no areas in which a government monopoly is beneficial.

I have in mind there that there are going to be natural monopolies in some areas – it is, for instance, inconceivable that it would be sensible for me to have two entirely different sets of wires connecting my house to two different electricity producers – and in those cases, if private companies are supplying my electricity, they need to be extremely strongly regulated. In fact, we now have here a rather artificial “market” in which a number of middlemen companies contract with individuals on the one hand and with electricity generators on the other, and “compete” with each other (which would never have happened without government intervention – without that, there would have been local monopolies and possibly a national one). I am unconvinced that this system actually delivers any benefits over and above the previous government-owned and run electricity monopoly. Rail transport is another area in which I am not convinced the current privatised system works as well as the former British Rail, which had to be formed when the previous private railway companies became insolvent and incapable of providing a reasonable service. The theory behind both these moves was hugely convincing, but the outcome has been fairly bad.

And, of course, I have not come across any advocates of privatising the defence of the country – though it could be argued that the USA has experimented with this with several private military contractors. I do not envy you that piece of privatisation!

This is a position I could well have reached (and in fact did) without years of reading the scriptures, and in particular the synoptic gospels, and within them the injunctions of Jesus to his followers. It is not too dissimilar from your own – that market forces are the basic way in which human commerce is best organised, and government should intervene primarily to ensure that competition is fair, though I think far more needs to be done by government than you do to ensure that fairness.

However, I see a different set of injunctions from Jesus. In particular I see a clear identification of the pursuit of wealth as evil; “you cannot serve God and money” (Matt. 6:24), which is underlined by Paul “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim. 6:10). Jesus enjoins those who would follow him to sell all they have and give it to the poor (Matt. 19:21) or at least half of it (Luke 19:8-9) and asks followers to abandon their small businesses in order to follow him (Matt. 4:18-22).

Now you think that socialism taken to its extreme doesn’t work, I think that capitalism taken to its extreme doesn’t work (and largely agree with you as to socialism); I think both of us would have substantial problems thinking that following Jesus’ economic injunctions would work. If we did follow them, we would probably end up as itinerant beggars – but that is, I am wholly clear, what following Jesus demands when taken to its extreme. I can’t do it myself, and setting aside all arguments that it isn’t practical, that I have responsibilities I’d be abandoning and the like as self-serving excuses, at the root I am too scared to do it and lack the faith to trust that God would see that I was all right if I did.

So Jesus is suggesting that money is an alternative to God, i.e. a demon, and Paul is reinforcing that; Jesus then suggests that we renounce Satan in renouncing wealth and its pursuit (to paraphrase him).

Pope Francis put it this way in a recent address:- “Friends: the devil is a con artist. He makes promises after promise, but he never delivers. He’ll never really do anything he says. He doesn’t make good on his promises. He makes you want things which he can’t give, whether you get them or not. He makes you put your hopes in things which will never make you happy. … He is a con artist because he tells us that we have to abandon our friends, and never to stand by anyone. Everything is based on appearances. He makes you think that your worth depends on how much you possess.”

This all leads me to the position that free market capitalism, at least in the form it’s developed to, is an inherently satanic system. However, it’s the one we’re stuck with; the alternatives are perhaps theoretically attractive but can actually be worse in practice – it’s much like the Churchilian comment about democracy, which he said was a bad system, but better than all the others which had been tried.

I could, however, also point to a set of injunctions of Jesus which militate against putting faith in governments (or nation states); these too are at least potentially satanic. What I advocate is not to let either have free rein, but to balance the one with the other and in the process always have in mind that both are flawed, both are man-made, both are fallen.

It’s been mentioned to me a few times (mostly by my conservative counterpart on GCP, Elgin Hushbeck) that conservatives are more generous than liberals. This is a claim I haven’t investigated previously, but it is definitely one which is apparently backed up by research in the USA.

On closer examination, however, I find that the situation might not be quite as the headlines taken off that and similar pieces of research claim. An article in Huffington Post, for instance, brings out the facts that one such study merely looks at tax deductible contributions, and rightly enquires whether this is a sound basis for assessing charitable giving; in particular it notes the fact that payments to churches are all considered charitable, and raises one issue involving the Knights of Columbus which casts doubt on the charitable nature of payments to churches.

In fact I’d be inclined to go much further than the article. What churches spend on evangelism, on the upkeep of buildings, on the teaching of religion, on the presentation of worship services and for the most part on personnel is not the kind of charity which liberals typically have in mind (which is payments to or for the benefit of the poor, the homeless, the sick, the disabled and those generally cast out of society). Most churches I know do not actually spend a very high percentage of their income on such objectives. I would therefore be inclined to disallow as “charitable” maybe 70-90 percent of giving to churches. In point of fact, I split my own giving, which currently goes about 30% to the church, 40% to charities for those target groups and 30% to education (which doesn’t necessarily satisfy my criterion). Although I do give rather more than 10% of my disposable income, the church doesn’t get a tithe of it.

A study reported in the Washington Post raises another problem with the research which is commonly used; it is based on a test of social conservatism rather than political conservatism. When purely political stance is taken into account, the study they quote reveals that political conservatives and political liberals give about the same amounts, but of course not necessarily for the same purposes; it is then arguable that the political liberals’ contributions are higher, as part of the political conservatives’ giving is for church purposes rather than strictly charity. Again, I note that while I’m politically liberal, I’m socially significantly more conservative in the way I act myself – I don’t, for instance, like the ease with which divorces are available, and I frown on people bringing children into the world without considering how they will be supported and brought up (not that I’d want to prevent other people doing these things, merely that I think they shouldn’t).

I don’t know of any comparable studies done in the UK. I fancy that the statistics might be somewhat different, as of our main churches, the Methodists have traditionally had a close relationship with the Trade Union and Cooperative movements (and thus with the Labour party), a very significant number of Catholics are left-leaning (locally to me they have provided several longstanding Labour councillors) and even in the Anglican church, which used to be called “the Tory Party at prayer”, I know a lot of left-leaning people, particularly clergy. Even if, as seems likely, churchgoers here give more than non-churchgoers, I suspect that the US assumption of churchgoers being politically conservative may not hold good, or at least not as good as it does in the States.

I therefore arrive at the conclusion that no, political conservatives are not more generous than political liberals. I wouldn’t want to argue that they were less generous, though…

Elgin Hushbeck has written an impassioned piece in favour of capitalism. I quote him at length:-

“One of the common criticisms of those on the left, particular the religious left, is that capitalism is an evil system because it treats individuals as commodities of momentary worth, rather than as people made in the image of God.  This is really just a self-serving definition that tells us more about the person making the claim than about capitalism itself.

One reason for this is that at its core capitalism is based on a mutual giving among individuals that is, at least ideally, freely chosen.  There is nothing in this that demands greed or exploitation.  Granted we live in a fallen world where people are not always driven by the highest motives, but this is a problem with all systems, from sports to science, movies to teaching, the private sector, government, and yes, even socialism. It is hardly limited to capitalism.  People are people, regardless of where they are.

and

There is nothing inherent in capitalism that makes men greedy or teaches them to exploit others, in fact if anything it is the opposite for capitalism simply seeks an exchange that is best for both sides, where what is best is determined by each individual.  Since it is based on mutual consent, it encourages people to be concerned with the needs of others, which I believe is one of the reasons those supporting capitalism are on average more charitable than those supporting socialism.”

Now, as Elgin is my opposite number from the Global Christian Perspectives webcasts (currently in hiatus pending new technology and a new format), and by “opposite” I mean in politics, theological stance and country (the UK and the USA being opposites at least from the point of view of the Atlantic), and he is therefore well aware of my take on capitalism; I still recall the expression on his face when I called free market capitalism “the System of Satan” (which I later elaborated on in a post of the same name). I have written other posts in a similar vein – “Depression, the System of Satan and the Devil’s Evangelism”, “Freedom with or without Property” and “What price Free Trade”.

Do I feel just a teeny bit targeted by that “This is really just a self-serving definition that tells us more about the person making the claim than about capitalism itself.” ? Well, even if Elgin hasn’t read all those four posts of mine (and I’m not going to recapitulate them here – you can click through and read or reread them to see that I do have some very good reasons for thinking the way I do), I think it isn’t unreasonable to think I am, if not THE target, then part of the target. Mind you, it does seem possible that this is just turnaround, and he felt himself targeted as one of the “Devil’s Evangelists”. That would be fair enough, I suppose.

What, then, does it “tell you about me”? It seems to me that in writing it, Elgin meant to imply that my view of capitalists is an overly negative one (after all, he goes on to paint a picture of capitalists as benefactors of all…). What it should tell you is, I think, expanded upon in the four blog posts I link to, but Elgin hasn’t dealt with the contents of those, so I suspect he hasn’t read them. They would also tell him that I’ve reached my position largely due to reading and rereading the synoptic gospels.

But yes, it does tell you that I don’t regard capitalists as generally beneficial to humanity as a whole. For that I have good reason.

It tells you, perhaps,  that I read a bit of economics occasionally, in which people are either units of consumption, units of production or “wealth creators” (i.e. profit takers). Elgin himself is fond of saying that taxation is bad, because it holds back “wealth creation”.

It tells you that I’ve encountered (and advised) large companies governed by cost accountants, balance sheets and share prices, I’ve encountered (and advised) individuals ground down to unsustainable wages and then continually pressured to make more and work harder and faster for no extra benefit to them than that they keep their jobs while the capitalists they work for grow rich, and others thrown on the scrapheap of society as unemployable and therefore worthless, and somehow also morally reprehensible.

It tells you that I’ve seen societies in which the size of your bank balance is the main indication of your worth as a human being (and on both sides of the Atlantic that is increasingly true). It also, perhaps tells you that I spent a significant part of my life enslaved by the fear of loss of financial security and the need to make more (as I deal with in the second post above) and have only with substantial pain learned that that is a way to exist, but not a way to live.

But actually, if you read on in the piece I’ve quoted, it tells you not about me in myself, but about me not being a writer who confuses capitalism with a market economy – perhaps particularly a “free market economy”. Capitalism is about the ownership of the means of production by individuals, which in and of itself seems innocuous enough; you can have a capitalist economy with very restricted trade, as indeed we used to in the UK when mercantilism was the dominant economic model (and, for what it’s worth, I think the free market version of capitalism is significantly superior to the mercantilist version).

As with the rest of Elgin’s piece, however, he describes (in descibing a free market rather than a capitalist economy) an idyllic world in which everyone bargains freely for everything they want or need with others who merely wish to make a reasonable return for their labour, and if he actually lives in a world which generally operates like that, he is incredibly lucky and privileged.

Actually, in order for the bulk of his transactions to resemble the picture he paints, he must be truly privileged and have a significant disposable income as well. Those who are “scraping by” or who are dependent on low-paid employment in order to exist will not recognise that picture, wherever they live.

No society I have encountered actually operates that way. In small towns in the UK, some businesses certainly used to operate like that when I was growing up (though by and large not in cities), but not any more – that type of business owner has mostly been driven out of business by large companies, and those who survive, survive on the margins. Most typically this change is seen in the case of small retailers who have almost all fallen to the supermarkets and chain stores, which, of course, operate purely for profit; these may try to make their customers happy, but this is at the expense of their producers and their workers (and in the celebrated cases of Wall-Mart and others like them, the expense of the taxpayer who subsidises the workers’ poverty wages). Both their producers and their employees scrape along without any of the supposed benefits of a “free market”, the first because there is now nowhere else to sell to, the second because if they raise any objection they can be fired and instantly replaced by one of the millions of jobless.

His idyllic scene, of course, only works if we ignore the fact that (as he concedes)  “we live in a fallen world where people are not always driven by the highest motives”. Better, I think, that we assume that people are not driven that way and be agreeably surprised if things turn out otherwise – but please, let us not make a virtue out of greed and exploitation. Elgin writes of an idealised (I’m tempted to say “fantasy”) capitalism, suggesting that greed and exploitation are not at the root of a free market capitalist economy, but this is not what conventional economic theory says; he claims “capitalism simply seeks an exchange that is best for both sides, where what is best is determined by each individual”. However. the form capitalism has actually developed to (which is probably properly described as “financialised capitalism”), does not remotely “seek an exchange that is best for both sides”, it attempts to extract the maximum price for the least possible overheads (and the wages of employees and the quality of raw materials are both overheads). Anything else hurts the bottom line, and impedes “wealth creation”.

This is traditional economic theory, which holds that the market is at its most efficient when individuals act rationally to maximize their own self-interest without regard to the effects on anyone else. In other words, it demands exactly “greed and exploitation”, and rewards both with bonuses for CEO’s and managers. This capitalism indeed does not “care what motivates a transaction” (as Elgin says later), but it also does not “care whether it is freely entered into by both sides” contrary to what he suggests – indeed, it prefers monopolies, particularly in goods which are necessities, and in labour relations it prefers that the option is “take what we offer or starve”. For example, our young people are increasingly forced to take “zero hours contracts” where they are at the beck and call of the employer, but the employer has no obligations to them.

It is unfortunately the case that in a free market businesses grow inexorably towards monopolies (or at least cartels) and as Adam Smith wrote “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The result is that the ideal of the free market is distorted by the players in the market, until it stops being free, and until it takes at least partial control of government, as this article shows. The “wealth” (i.e. ownership) becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands until a very few people hold almost all the ownership and power – and money, and therefore worth as human beings.

It is also resolutely short term, because it is forced to be that way by the financial system which sees only the last balance sheet and profit and loss statement, and will take profits where it can, as there are always other bigger short term profits to be made than building for long term stability of a company. Whatever type of motivation people may have personally, finance-driven capitalism substitutes the law of the bottom line.

Elgin is, of course, right that at the root of much of this is the insurance companies, pension schemes and banks on which we normal human beings rely – and so very few of us are not in the end complicit in this system. Short term means that you do not want your employees to be loyal, just to work harder (they can always be replaced), you do not care about the environment (far too long term!), you do not care about quality as long as you can get people to buy (what, after all, are marketing and advertising for?). The fact that we are complicit, however, does not mean that the system is good…

Finally, he contrasts capitalism with socialism, which he states needs a strong central government, and suggests that as government restricts autonomy, this is axiomatically a bad thing.

Now, bearing in mind that markets (as we have seen) tend to produce monopolies, and monopolies are bad even from the point of view of the most ardent free-marketeer, and that capitalism tends to produce a smaller and smaller percentage of individuals with a larger and larger percentage of wealth/ownership, which itself distorts the market (a free bargain for something requires that you have disposable income sufficient to buy, which is increasingly not the case for a large proportion of society, and mere disparity in power to purchase negates any sense of free bargain), there is clearly a need for something to mitigate these effects (and the other negative effects I’ve mentioned above, including perhaps most strongly the short term perspective of everything), and as businesses and the markets are not going to deliver that, government must; that is to say the people acting as a whole by their representatives and employees must take a stand to prevent the domination of everything by a few corporations. Many of those corporations are now multi-national and have  wealth and power well in excess of that of some countries, so government must be at least that strong.

However, Elgin has a point with which I do agree. Just as corporations tend to get bigger, so does government, and the larger something is, the more remote it is from its ultimate owners even in a system of representative democracy. Just as by the time I have followed through the investment of my pension through multiple companies, my voice cannot be heard, so by the time my democratic vote has been filtered through a party system, a lobbying system and the necessary apparatus of civil servants my voice also cannot be heard (though it is there somewhat easier, as I can at least find where to meet my immediate representatives in person).

In addition, the financial power of big business, big finance and the very wealthy allows them to influence government in a way the ordinary individual cannot match, even in combination, just as it creates automatic distortion in markets. Elgin and myself are agreed that this is a bad thing, but he appears to consider that capitalism, left to itself, will produce a beneficial effect and that anything else is transferring power to government and is therefore axiomatically a bad thing. I consider that capitalism and government both are at least somewhat broken; capitalism needs restraining, but so does government – and we have, in theory at least, the means to restrain government via the ballot box.

I am thus very slighly hopeful, seeing the collapse of both our UK main political parties in infighting, that we may see a political restructuring here which may, just possibly, restore a small amount of control to the individual voter. Maybe in the course of that, the messages that bigger is not always better and that local issues should be dealt with by the people who live there may strike home. Perhaps, just perhaps, we could see the possibility that all of big business, big finance and big government might have their wings clipped.

It’s a small hope, but I need to nurture it.

 

There are at the moment a set of posts on Patheos about the intersection (or not) of faith and reason. Many of them merit a read.

One of those which most connects with me is from Barry Harvey, who (to my mind rightly) points out that:- “When we talk about faith in relation to reason we naturally focus on its cognitive aspect, but this isn’t its only or most significant dimension. As Augustine noted, to believe in God is ultimately to love, delight in, and draw near to God, and to become a member of the body of Christ. The cognitive aspect does contribute to this understanding of faith, for we can only love, delight in, and draw near to that which we know. At the same time, however, we can never reduce faith to a set of abstract beliefs to which someone gives mental assent.”

I’ve complained about the identification of faith with intellectual assent to a set of propositions before. That is belief, in one sense of the word, but it doesn’t amount to faith, which (as Harvey and Augustine point out) is a matter of personal relationship with God. If I say, for instance, that I have faith in my wife, this is not saying that I accept a set of propositions about her. It is to say that I love and trust her.

And, of course, love is an emotion. For the record, I don’t think it can be a “second hand emotion”, referring to the song my title is drawn from; you can’t love someone second hand. In this respect, I tend to think that the evangelicals (who I normally don’t see eye to eye on on very much) are right in stressing the need for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. As they consider that Jesus Christ is the accessible aspect of God, this does not raise my theological hackles very much at all, though I might prefer to stipulate that what is required is a personal relationship with God. How someone conceives of God is, to me, much less important.

How, I ask, can you love someone you’ve never met? I don’t think that can truly be described as “love” – it sounds more like stalking to me – and yes, I think a lot of theologians past and present have been theological stalkers.

Is it rational, then? Well, frankly, of the set of options Patheos give, I would plump for “arational”. Love does not really have anything to do with rationality – it may be rational, it may be irrational, but that is supremely not the point.

So what I’m actually saying is “What’s reason got to do with it?”

“God’s healing power is mediated through prayer and Prozac, chanting and chemotherapy, meditation and medication, and hospitality and hospices.” (Bruce Epperley)

On 3rd June, the funeral of an old friend brought together a few friends who had known him and me since our university days, horrifyingly 40 years ago now, for an occasion which was partly sad, partly joyful (as he was possessed of a powerful sense of humour which ignored the bounds of taste and propriety, and a lot of stories about him were exchanged) and partly stimulating. In discussion afterwards, although I don’t remember any of shoes, sealing wax or cabbages being mentioned, pretty much any other topic you might think about was – and one was founded on Rob’s very wide set of interests, which had brought together people from many different spheres of life, some for the first time.

This was also a feature of our university life, as the group I traveled there with included people who had been part of the Physics, English and Geography departments, and probably the largest group there was musicians – Rob had been an enthusiastic and eclectic lover and performer of music. In conversation with Rob’s son Ruaridh, it seemed that these days, students tend to stick with people from the same department and frequently the same course. In our day, there were a lot of interlocking friendship groups which linked through Rob, through myself and through others of our group, or rather set of groups, due to our extensive ranges of interests (in which Rob and myself coincided in a fair few areas). I think it’s a pity that university doesn’t seem to produce that kind of varied friendship network these days. Mind you, this might well be because we seem to be pushing children to look to a future career in their choice of subjects earlier, and thinking of university degrees as vocational rather than as discursively educative.

Circles of friendship led to thoughts of loops, and recalled a post I wrote a while back about (inter alia) Douglas Hofstadter’s idea of “Strange Loops” ; Hofstadter was talking of feedback loops within our consciousnesses, and posited that these could well amount to working models (albeit simplified ones) of people we knew well – and I think few of us will not recognise the sensation of “someone else’s voice” (generally a loved one) telling us something. Rob was certainly very much alive in memory on Friday, and will be for many years to come. I may, indeed, have been channeling Rob when we came out of the chapel; someone asked “which way is the Links Hotel?” and I answered “left”. “How do you know?” they asked. “Because if it was to the right it would be the Rechts Hotel”…

And, having found myself talking theory of language and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on the way home, it was natural to keep thinking “loopy” thoughts. I don’t like the strong version of Sapir-Whorf, which seems to me to be self-evidently wrong; if you can’t formulate a thought without language, I can see no way in which you can start the process of developing a language. However, iteration would allow the use of rather vague words, and repeated use and development (in a kind of feedback loop) would make them more specific. I find that use of words is hugely facilitated by keeping them at least a little fuzzy in the definition anyhow!

Iterative procedures might well apply equally to concepts. Consider for a moment Niels Bohr’s model of the atom, which is actually still taught (because it’s clear and not excessively wrong), which was closer than the previous, but not as complete as the quantum mechanical model which followed soon afterwards. To quote the article “So why has the Bohr atom stayed around? “It gives us a good place to start the conversation about the composition of the atom,” says high school chemistry teacher Dr. Jason Dyke.” The replacement theory, which surrounds the nucleus of the atom with probability density clouds looking rather like inflatable cushions, still incorporates the basic concept that the nucleus is central and the electrons are dispersed around it.

Is this “the truth” of the situation? Well, if an iteration is involved, you start with a guess, feed it into an equation which you develop for the purpose and from  that generate a better guess. I can remember being overwhelmed by the beauty and simplicity of this process back in my teens, when I was introduced to the standard first example, finding a square root. You divide the number you’re trying to find the root of by the guess, average that result with your guess, and that produces your second guess. It converges fairly quickly on the value you want, to any desired accuracy – but it never quite gets to an absolute answer (you can test this by applying the process to a number you already know has a whole number square root, such as 4…).

If, as I suspect, this kind of process applies to all our thinking (and Hofstadter is right that our consciousnesses are the result of a set of feedback loops), it is never going to be possible for us to say that any model we have of a physical process is “the truth”, though we might well suspect that we are extremely close to it. I couldn’t therefore ever quite be a philosophical realist, at least not a scientific realist.

One product of this is the strong tendency in science for progress to take place largely by “fine tuning” some aspect of a Theory which has already proved itself by explaining most of the available data and by successfully predicting data which we didn’t have when the theory was formulated. As an example, every advance in the broad biological scheme which is the Theory of Evolution since Darwin has been a tweak, even such major changes as punctuated equilibrium and the “inheritance of acquired characteristics” through epigenetics.

But, of course, this all depends on the iterative procedure being convergent, i.e. the feedback loop damps rather than amplifies slight variations. A positive feedback loop is divergent, and is responsible for the scream as a microphone is brought too close to a speaker, thus amplifying any extremely slight sound round and round until the pained humans responsible turn it off or move the microphone away. There are also iterative functions which produce chaotic results, one of which is the Mandelbrot set. Are we looking at convergent iterations at any point? Only the results can show – if they start becoming more and more extreme,

How do we therefore know that the process we are using to refine our concepts is convergent, rather than divergent or chaotic?

With reference to the question of God, Richard Beck recently posted something apropos. Can we use a positive feedback model to characterise our developing concepts of God, and is God therefore a feature of our universe which can be, if not completely accurately, at least approximately described in full? Obviously, Beck reacts against this, as would probably anyone who feels strongly that God is beyond our comprehension in more than the technical way I describe above, that he is a mystery and must remain that way. The emotional part of me certainly feels that way, and the rational part might be inclined to go along with that; certainly that-which-is-God as experienced in peak mystical moments is something well beyond the ability of my reason to understand in full.

But my reason is not happy about anything being in principle immune to examination and clarification. What is more, hosts of present and past theologians have spent much time and ink in trying to establish what God is like, and therefore what God might do.

And, unless you are a Deist, who consigns God to something very akin to another force of nature, albeit one whose operation is more removed from our experience than science can examine (such as the “blind watchmaker” version of the uncaused cause of all), there must be some aspect of God which is capable of being examined, analysed and at least to some extent predicted. If none of these are possible, God cannot have any effect whatsoever in the universe as we now experience it; any effect is accessible to reason (even if reason cannot make complete sense of it…).

If this is the case (and I think it must be) then an iterative procedure should be capable of moving steadily closer to the reality of that-which-is-God, even if it can never capture that exactly, or capture the fullness of God (though I am minded of Col. 2:9, which says “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form… “). One might reasonably hope that the more recent the theology or philosophy, the closer to something reliable it may come. That is, unless the procedure is divergent, in which case the later models may diverge more and more from the original (which would perhaps be the position of the Biblical fundamentalist).

I suggest, however, that we do not really see either of these features when we press ahead with newer and more sophisticted theologies and philosophies; what we see is, in theology, an oscillation between the poles of immanence and transcendence (and theologies which privilege either at the expense of the other are hugely incompatible), and in philosophy an oscillation between singular (and incompatible) ontologies (such as materialism or panpsychism) with occasional forays into dualism (such as Cartesian dualism) .

This argues to me that we might be looking at a third type of iterative procedure, the oscillating iteration. In this kind of iteration, values converge not on one point but on two, and nothing will persuade them to “split the difference”; a point halfway between the two poles is more wrong than either of the poles is. I will grant that in mathematics the type of limit you get, convergent, divergent, wandering or oscillating, is very dependent on the way in which you set up the system, which might mean that we merely need to rethink our entire basis of thinking itself and we will have a singular end point. However, it may also mean (and for the time being, I think, does mean) that we are stuck with a dual reality, transcendent and immanent, matter and mind.

And we have to live with there being at least two equally “right” answers to everything…

(OK, the title gives it away – this may be just a loopy idea!).

Peter Enns blogged recently about the task of Biblical Scholars, which he identifies as trying to find the best narrative which explains all of the evidence (in this case the narratives of the Bible), and I warmed to that – after all, this is what I do as a scientist (originally a Physics degree, now doing some occasional part time research in Chemistry) and is part of what I did as a lawyer when doing court work, particularly in criminal defence. He particularly likened his work to putting together a jigsaw, where perhaps 200 or so pieces are there out of a 1000 piece jigsaw, with some pieces which do not obviously seem to go together.

The thought which immediately sprang to mind was “But what if there are pieces from more than one jigsaw there?” That is something which has in fact happened to me a number of times, usually when there are just a few pieces which have strayed from another puzzle into this one, but occasionally when two or more puzzles have become completely mixed.

What, say, if the pieces were of a three-dimensional jigsaw, but we were interpreting them as only pieces of a two dimensional puzzle? What if they were indeed two dimensional representations of the same thing, but from a number of completely different directions?

Again, what if they were an attempt to combine several images into one, which would not make much sense as a two dimensional graphic unless you realised what was being attempted, as in Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude descending a staircase”, which looks to combine several viewpoints in space and in time.

Has this, I wondered, happened with the Bible? Of course, the standard conservative hermaneutic demands that the whole text, Old and New testaments, is all divinely inspired and is telling a single consistent story. Though most will say that they don’t hold to a theory of divine dictation, that is effectively what they end up with. This looks to me very much like deciding from the beginning that there is only one picture here. John Wesley, for instance, said that we must not “fragmentise” our study of scripture. “When a verse seems contrary to the overarching biblical message, we must look at the verse in question macrocosmically rather than microcosmically”. Was he right?

Slightly less conservative scholars will readily concede that the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) are composed of a mosaic of texts composed at different times by different people with different agendas and which therefore reveal significantly different viewpoints. The documentary hypothesis, for instance, sees four major strains of thinking, and indeed several different conceptions of God. However, most scholars take the view that, underlying this, there is actually only one God at work throughout this collection of texts. Where there are different concepts of God (the Jahvist and Elohist traditions, for instance) they are just different views of one YHVH/Elohim deity.

There are, of course, a lot of themes in the Hebrew Scriptures. The dominant one is probably the redemption of Israel from slavery and return to the promised land, but there is also a strong narrative of prophetic challenge to kingly authority, God -v- mundane rulers, an increasing insistence on monotheism to the exclusion of “other gods” (OK, conservatives will try to tell me that the scriptures are monotheistic from the start, but that is not borne out by the text), and there’s a narrative of sin (usually collective sin) and how to make ones self right with God again. There are others, but these are probably the principal ones.

On to the New Testament, and the vast majority of scholars (and particularly those who are primarily theologians rather than biblical historians) are looking for a single narrative of the purpose of Jesus; many if not most will then refer this back to the Hebrew Scriptures and principally use them as a foundation for their NT work, seeing the themes of the NT prefigured in them. Most will acknowledge that the Fourth Gospel has a viewpoint radically different from the three synoptic gospels and that Paul and the author of James have significantly different stresses, but there is still a strong theological urge to find the same message in each strand, an underlying theory of what it was (or is) that Jesus did for us.

But what if there is more than one thing which Jesus did, more than one way in which he was significant which is of importance, and those things are not obviously connected except in the person of Jesus?

Some while ago I wrote a post titled “God: WTF?”, in which I suggested that the only appropriate response to peak mystical experience was something like “WTF?”; it is just too overwhelming and multi-faceted to make it susceptible to description (and the best attempts are wildly poetic rather than coldly analytic). The more I read of the New Testament writers, the more I think that they were struggling with the question “Jesus: WTF?”. At the most basic level, they knew he had lived, taught, healed, gathered a following, died and had then become alive again to some of his followers in some sense, and they knew that he was important. That is to say “IMPORTANT!”. Some of them experienced him as being present to them in, so far as I can understand it, much the same way as that in which I think of God as being present to me in peak mystical events – Paul and John, at least, are identified by F.C. Happold as “Christ-mystics”, and I agree; quite some number started to include him as a figure of worship.

It was not, however, sufficient to say “come and follow Jesus; this is what he said we should do”; they had to make sense of what they experienced about him. Starting with Paul, all the NT writers wrote using the vocabulary of talking about God which they had available, which was mostly the Hebrew Scriptures – and they mined every area of those in which they thought they could find an analogy to Jesus or a new way of considering his importance.

He needed to be like Moses, so he was saving his followers from some form of slavery, variously the Devil, or Sin, or the Romans. He needed to be like Elijah, so he was prophetic and worked miracles (a very similar set of miracles). He had died voluntarily at the hands of the occupying power, faithful to the last, like the Maccabean martyrs, so his death was an atonement, and was a substitution (the Maccabean martyrs arguably saved many others from death by their actions, and in dying they could be thought to suffer the death or failure to remain faithful – which in Judaism is often regarded as much the same thing – which may otherwise have come upon many Israelites).

He needed to be kingly, as being the Messiah, so naturally acquired titles similar to those of Caesar (for instance, Son of God), and he needed to be more universal than even Caesar, so gentiles and Jews both had to be included. He also needed to be priestly, so the author of Hebrews reinterpreted him as ascending to make an ultimate sacrifice (of himself) in the imagined heavenly Temple. As a sacrifice, he needed to recall the passover, so he was the passover lamb, but he also needed to recall the Feast of Atonement, so he was the Yom Kippur goat – or, actually, he was both of the Yom Kippur goats, the one which was ritually sacrificed and the one which bears all the sins of the people and is driven out of the assembly.

Out of all these different perspectives, theologians starting with Paul have tried to construct a coherent single message. As one might have predicted of an attempt (inter alia) to make Jesus simultaneously into one lamb and two goats, sacrificed for two different reasons on two different occasions (and surviving in the case of one goat), the result either forces pieces of the picture into a scheme they don’t fit into, or ends up as initially confusing as Duchamp’s nude, or both.

And yet, and yet… look at the statement I highlighted in yellow above. I am clearly there putting forward a theory of Jesus, even though it’s a severely stripped down one (there are a lot of pieces I have left out…). We are, I think, inevitably going to do this, and the most I can ultimately ask is that we exercise a little humility and accept that there may be other ways of fitting the pieces together, other pictures which can be reached.

Back to the Hebrew Scriptures and the concept of God. The Hebrew Scriptures conceived of God in a lot of ways, and strict monotheism wasn’t the start point. There’s strong evidence that YHVH started off as a purely national god of the Israelites (consider all the references to “other gods”) and became a conflation of YHVH and Elohim, YHVH being a god of wrath and war, Elohim being much more of a creator and sustainer. The writers moved on to thinking of God as supreme among other gods (henotheism), and finally to God as the only deity – “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one”.

They didn’t, however, conceive of God in the same way as the Greek philosophers, for whom God was much more like an abstract principle. Some of this way of thinking crept in to the NT writers, particularly John, whose first chapter (so far as I can see) lifts a huge amount of thinking from Philo of Alexandria’s attempt to synthesise Greek philosophy with the Hebrew Scriptures (look in particular at Philo’s conception of “Logos”, otherwise “Word”). For the Hebrews, God was very much a personal God (and a national one, as Israel were the “chosen people”), for the Greeks the ultimate God was far beyond personality (the philosophers had largely dispensed with the very personal pantheon of Greece a long time previously to Aristotle, to whom I link – note that this kind of thinking looks a lot like the later thinking of Christian theologians).

Are these different concepts actually just different views of the same [   ] (to avoid any label at all)? Well, this is not a dead issue, as witness the suggestions recently that the God of Islam is not the same God as the God of the Bible. Judaism, of course, moved steadily in the direction of categorising other gods as false, and eventually demonic. So, largely, did Christianity, save that in Western Christianity a very large number of saints seem to resemble remarkably local and tribal gods.

In this area, I have taken the view that yes, there is One God (my peak mystical experience does not admit of its source being other than all-encompassing) and that this is the foundation of all mystical experiences in multiple religious traditions, for which insight and argument I am indebted to F.C. Happold. I am therefore committed to there being a single underlying reality, and thus in some way, the different ways in which mystics of varying religious traditions have talked of God must in some way be different images of the same God, however difficult this is to understand.

I gave up the concept of syncretism (trying to meld together a set of different viewpoints) many years ago – the result tended to look too much like Duchamp’s painting, confusing and inadequate at best unless and until you got the trick of looking at it, and not really representing any single viewpoint adequately. I am, however, increasingly coming to the view that Christianity in and of itself is already trying to meld viewpoints which are not so much inconsistent as just looking at things from totally different standpoints (and that Judaism before it was also trying to do that, with slightly fewer viewpoints).

So, to theologians, I suggest that for any problem, no matter how complex, there is a simple, understandable solution.

And it’s wrong.

I was going to post something immediately I heard the news about Orlando, but thought “No, wait and see, don’t shoot from the hip, it’s usually a bad idea”. And, indeed, I’ve seen a lot of posts and TV interviews where people have been proving me correct.

Orlando is a tragedy. With so many killed and injured, there will be hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who are closely affected by the loss of a loved one or friend, or their serious injury, and my heart goes out to them (as do my prayers).

It is particularly a tragedy because it was caused by one human being. And yes, he no doubt had a family and friends who are also traumatised, probably in part by a feeling of guilt that they did not see it coming and do something to prevent it (all I’m actually aware of at the point of writing is his ex-wife, who is trying to find reasons in his history with her which would make sense of this action – and, so far as I can see, failing).

I can understand people’s distaste for the fact that it has immediately become political. But that was always going to happen, and no doubt that was in part the intention of the shooter. The article I link to rather effectively goes through the set of responses which one might expect, in part because they have happened so many times before. They somewhat reflect the seven stages of grief, no doubt deliberately. What is not there, however, is a practical suggestion as to what might be done to make events like this less common in future. Another way in which this is a tragedy is that these mass shootings happen so frequently. The same author in fact provides a suggestion here. I’ll come back to that…

We were, however, always going to ask ourselves “What caused this, and how can we avoid it happening again?”, and that is inevitably political. Despite the attempts of some media to divert attention to the shooter’s espousal of ISIS, the first answer to that has to be homophobia. Hate of homosexuals. If you’re not acting out of homophobia, you don’t target a gay night club; if you’re following ISIS’s normal script of the horrendous decadence of the West, any old nightclub would have done. Or an university… we should not forget that 50 dead is not exceptional by some standards.

It is possible that fundamentalist religious beliefs were a secondary cause; after all, the shooter was Muslim and did announce his adherence to ISIS. However, there is precious little sign that he was an observant Muslim or that he had any contact with radical Islam other than from reading stuff online. That said, fundamentalist Christian beliefs fuel homophobia even better than do fundamentalist Islamic beliefs, and do so far more prominently in the States. If any blame is to be cast on Islam, it probably needs to be equally allocated to Christianity. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” is frankly bullshit; if you hate something which is a fundamental aspect of someone’s character (as is sexual orientation) you’re hating the person; the two things are not separable.

The fact that this guy was able to go out and equip himself with guns (and in particular a semi-automatic rifle) despite being on a watch list for potential terrorism and having a history of matrimonial violence is absolutely a cause, and probably a primary cause rather than a secondary one. The possession of semi-automatic weapons makes it possible to kill a lot of people very quickly (as in fact happened); yes, I accept that the unavailability of guns would not have guaranteed this did not happen (he could have bought ingredients and built bombs instead), but he could not go out and buy ready-made anti-personnel bombs. Or at least, I don’t think he could have, even in the States. That would have required patience, planning and some expertise, and while he could have found instructions on the internet, each piece of planning and construction required gives another chance for someone to think better of a course of action. This is something which I completely fail to understand that America has not fixed, although some reasons for that may come out later. The UK and Australia have both reacted to mass shootings with stringent gun control, and neither have had any mass shootings for quite some time…

The thing is, there was an immediate interest in finding that this guy was another Islamic radical terrorist, and then some suggestion that he might have been gay himself. Why? I suggest because either of these would shift blame to a group who could be attacked; so would suggestions that he was mentally ill (frankly, for someone to do that, he would have to be mentally ill in some sense, but the vast majority of the mentally ill are no more dangerous to those around them than the average ostensibly well-balanced person). It would shift blame to an “other”. It would not require any consideration that the average man or woman in the street is in some way responsible for this. If he was, for instance, in fact homosexual, if you’re not LGBT, you could say “Oh, it’s a problem within the LGBT community, it’s not MY problem”. You would, of course, be wrong – the problems of the LGBT community are mostly caused by the attitudes of the non-LGBT community, especially the self-hating which this would argue.

As soon as you identify the problem as being an “other”, there are calls to attack that other. That is where I see a massively widespread malaise in American society, exemplified by the products of its entertainment industry; the solution to a problem is to go and shoot the person or persons responsible. In this thinking, the solution to gun violence is more guns – “It wouldn’t have happened if there had been a good guy with a gun in there” is often the refrain. Well, in fact, there was a “good guy with a gun” in there this time, and he wasn’t able to stop it, and that has been the case in quite a few previous mass shootings.

It seems to me that unless you have a society which doesn’t think that the immediate answer to violence is more violence, there is little or no hope of any change. As Erin Walthen says, “A nation so filled with hate should not be this well armed”; however, this is a nation which is already very well armed and which has the Second Amendment and the bizarre decision in DC. -v- Heller to cope with. 

It is also, however, a nation in which a very sizeable proportion of the population want to see themselves as “a good guy with a gun”, if only to protect themselves and their families. I think there are among them a very significant number who see a gun as a penis substitute, but that is perhaps too controversial. However, that brings me back to Jim Wright’s Stonekettle Station post; it may be almost practically correct that the only thing which stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, but that is not the whole story – the only thing (aside from fear of the consequences and the occasional act of heroic nonviolent resistance) which stops a bad guy with a gun is a very highly trained, well practiced, responsible and well balanced guy with a gun (and even that sometimes isn’t enough). So limit the ownership of guns to people who are all of those things, and accepting that people will stray from this, make the consequences sufficiently severe to deter as many as possible. And, in conscience, ban automatic and semi-automatic guns completely except for the military (particularly those which can have a bump stock attached…). There is no justification for these in hunting, and they multiply killing capacity immensely.

There, however, I think the States (and Jim) have a problem. America already locks people up for a very long time and in great numbers compared with other developed nations, and from everything I have seen in prisons which are extremely unpleasant environments. If you’re going to get life in a US jail anyhow (and sentences of as little as ten years may well look like life to some people, and not necessarily just those of advanced years) then a bit more for having a gun, or a lot more for killing someone with it, doesn’t work very well as a deterrent. Also, “suicide by cop” begins to look remarkably attractive when the alternative is US jail for a very long time. There are many other reasons for penal and sentencing reform in the States, but this is definitely one.

What I would like, however, is to convince American Christians that Christianity is in it’s very essence a nonviolent religion, and that a good Christian should not be owning or carrying a gun for personal protection, and should at the very least think twice and three times before joining any service such as the police or military which requires you to carry a weapon. In this, I fancy the Quakers and the Mennonites are the ones who have probably got things right in their scriptural interpretations. America is, by the standards of the UK, overwhelmingly Christian. That would be a good start, even if the peculiar attachment of Americans to the right to bear arms affects the rest of their society. You can do this even without amending the constitution again (or even re-interpreting it more sensibly…)

If you’re American, please take this seriously. It’s hard for the rest of us to watch you killing yourselves.

A few days ago, I saw a post from Benjamin Corey and duly “liked” it on Facebook. It was advocating that we see Jesus as essentially nonviolent, and that we follow his example.

Now, I find that there is pushback. To quote that article, “It’s easy for a privileged person to to think that Jesus was a pacifist. It’s even easier, I would presume, to say that “it’s a central commitment to nonviolent enemy love as a non-negotiable qualification of the Christian identity…””. 

The author, Andy Gill, goes on to say “Ben’s perspective could be stemming from what’s called a “Eurocentric Hermeneutic.” He’s, seemingly, picking and choosing which scriptures stand out the most while simultaneously using an understanding and interpretation of the text (i.e. scripture) that best suits his opinion (to be fair, we all do this to a large extent).”, and then quotes Revelation and various Old Testament passages to indicate that violence is indeed scripturally sanctioned and approved in some cases.

I think I can dispose of the Old Testament quotations rather easily by pointing out that Jesus redefined what we should be doing in Matthew 5:21-48 (and particularly vv. 21-24, 38-41 and 43-46). I really don’t think that leaves us any wriggle room in which to take violent action, or indeed to harbour violent thoughts. Prior to the Sermon on the Mount, perhaps there was room for violent action, but Jesus removed it there.

In respect of Revelation, the imagery is indeed violent (but then, Paul makes use of military imagery in Ephesians when he is talking about spiritual warfare, and this definitely does not involve real swords and armour), but I note “Now out of His mouth goes a sharp sword, that with it He should strike the nations.” If there is violence there, it is of language, not physical; just like Paul, the author is using a figure of physical combat to indicate spiritual struggle.

Gill also says “I want to make it clear and known that although I’m not against the idea of pacifism we must embrace a Christian realism as opposed to a progressive idealism.”.

I really don’t think that “Christian” and “realism” can be linked this way. Yes, I accept that complete nonviolence is somewhere between slightly daft and batshit crazy, and probably the more so for the nation as opposed to the individual. Jesus’ economic prescription, to sell all you have and give it to the poor, is no less loopy as a concept. These are not realistic instructions, they are idealistic. Paul also says that the gospel is “a scandal to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks”. And, indeed, it seems from the tenor of his article that Gill finds nonviolence both scandalous and foolish.

But it is the gospel.

Now look, I am definitely a realist; I’m also a pragmatist, but I don’t try to suggest that Christianity should be pragmatic. I also haven’t given away all my possessions, nor do I think that it is practical for not merely myself but my whole society to be nonviolent – but in taking that attitude, I am being a not-very-good Christian, I am not being a “realist Christian” or a “Pragmatic Christian”. I hope that someday I might be able to get my realist, pragmatist side (SR Chris, or the Scientific Rationalist side of me) to take the leap and actually follow Jesus wholeheartedly, but there is a distinct element of Augustine’s “Lord, make me chaste – but not yet” about that.

It does, at least, give me something to confess every Sunday.

No, Christianity is not realistic. But as Maya Angelou said “I’m always amazed when people walk up to me and say, ‘I’m a Christian.’ I go, ‘Already?'””. We are, in trying to be Christian, aiming at a target which is unattainable, to be “perfect, as our father in Heaven is perfect”. We should not dilute that by thinking that half measures can ever be sufficient.

Allan Bevere has recently written a number of posts in the lead up to Trinity Sunday, one of which I feel the need to focus on. Allan has often been a valued colleague on Global Christian Perspectives (currently undergoing a hiatus while we rethink the format), and I generally find myself agreeing with much of what he says, which always has a strong devotional and scriptural basis. Not all, however!

Here, based on his longer appraisal of a work by Nicholas Lash he talks about Christian Theism, and distinguishes it from Trinitarianism. The first thing I note is that he is talking about Theism as a synonym for what we commonly call Deism these days (with authority from Voltaire who, it seems, coined the usage he talks about). However, I find that it was rather earlier used by Ralph Cudworth, whose definition was “strictly and properly called Theists, who affirm, that a perfectly conscious understanding being, or mind, existing of itself from eternity, was the cause of all other things” (from Wikipedia). Cudworth’s usage is, I think, somewhat closer to the way the term is used these days, which includes Monotheism, Polytheism, Pantheism, Panentheism and Deism (among others) as specific instances of the broader term “Theism”, though modern usage does not include the requirement that God be “first cause”.

His first point is this:- “Theism starts with the assumption that there is a “central core” of beliefs about God that makes Christians, Jews and Muslims all theists. The differing beliefs about God are further additions to one’s theistic faith. These further beliefs are where Christians, Jews and Muslims no longer agree. Lash maintains, however, that any belief about God cannot be divided into any kind of “central core” without perverting fundamental Christian, Jewish and Muslim belief about God. Thus a theistic account of God is unacceptable.”

I immediately disagree with this statement. Leaving aside Muslims (who believe in a revelation subsequent to the New Testament), it cannot be that the God of Christianity is different from the God of Judaism; that would be to say that the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures (without which the New Testament is arguably unintelligible and definitely shorn of most of its content) are irrelevant and, indeed, to suggest that they refer to a God different from the Christian God. That is the position of Marcion and of the Gnostics, both of whom were anathematised as heretics.

Indeed, the Apostles’ creed which Lash makes the subject of his book starts “I believe in God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth” (the common alternative, the Nicene creed, starts similarly but states “I believe in one God…”). Everything after that is quite clearly “a further addition to ones theistic faith”. Jews and Muslims both would, I think, find no problem in either formulation up to that point. Thus, I would suggest, the most one could say is that the theistic account of God is inadequate.

He continues “The God of theism is abstract. Without the doctrine of the Trinity (“as it is employed in defining, determining or shaping Christian life, prayer, action and suffering”) “spirit” is an “empty word.” It becomes an abstraction situated in the’ ‘broad framework of Cartesian contractions.” “. In the longer response, he comments that Theism is the “God of the philosophers” – and indeed, I am inclined to agree that Deism (not Theism – neither Judaism nor Islam would consider themselves Deist religions) is very much the God of the philosophers. He also, however, states “Yet Lash maintains that the doctrine of God’s incomprehensibility requires us to confess God as mystery at the outset. “

The suggestion that without a doctrine, “spirit is an empty word” is just ridiculous to me; spirit is experienced, so it cannot be an empty word; it designates a real phenomenon. We might well not fully understand it, but that would be entirely consistent with the incomprehensibility of God. In fact, Trinitarianism is itself a doctrine of the philosophers, or at least of the product of Greek philosophy with the experiential truths that God is to Jesus (and to the ancient Hebrews, and to us) Father, and that Jesus incarnated the Word of God (which was God) and that God acts in the world through the Holy Spirit from the beginning and the necessity to continue to pronounce monotheism in the words of the Shema. “God is one”. Two of those three are common ground between Christianity, Judaism and, in fact, Islam. The sticking point between Christianity and either of the others is that neither sees Jesus as incarnating God.

And, indeed, there is no statement of Trinitarianism in our scripture, merely some passages where an ardent trinitarian can discern all three elements (most notably Matt. 28:19, which does not say that all three are God, let alone prescribe any particular relationships between them). Trinitarianism took some significant time to arrive, and it arrived through early theologians steeped in Greek philosophy trying to make sense of the fact that God was one and yet all three statements in the preceding paragraph were correct. If you adopt the philosophical positions of Platonism or Aristotelianism, you may well want to try to jump through the same hoops as did Theophilus of Antioch (the first to use the term in the late second century), Augustine (who developed the concept considerably) or Acquinas (whose “Summa Theologica” is the basis for subsequent Trinitarianism in Catholicism and Anglicanism). Personally I do not, as I do not adopt either Plato’s nor Aristotle’s concepts of how the world works, and neither Augustine nor Acquinas makes sense to me philosophically.

There are many instances of scripture where what are regarded as “Trinitarian heresies” such as subordinationism (an example from John) are made clear and because the doctrine has ended up being impossible to expound to normal people, principally due to modalism being declared a heresy. If I am asked to subscribe to a doctrine, I really do not want it to contradict scripture, nor do I want it to be functionally useless.

There is, however, one really good thing in Lash’s account, which I have already mentioned – the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God. The end point of Trinitarian discussion in the Orthodox Church was the Cappadocian fathers, one of whom suggested that in the end the Trinity was not comprehensible, was a “holy mystery”.

I gently suggest that it would have been perfectly adequate to say “it’s a holy mystery” after stating that the Father is God, Jesus is God and the Holy Spirit is God, and without all the philosophical paraphernalia which has tried to clarify the situation and has ended up back in bafflement. We’d still be Trinitarian, but without all the fuss…

And, in passing, I really do not like the suggestion that the other great religions are idolatrous. If we accept that God is incomprehensible to us, we are in no position to say that any of the others is wrong – and that way lies a total failure to love our neighbours as ourselves – yes, and even our enemies.