Eyre Lines

Jacob M. Wright writes on facebook:- “Someone asked me again why Christ died, since I reject the idea that Christ died to satisfy Gods wrathful demand of justice. As if an ancient torture device devised in the deranged sadomasochistic minds of barbaric Romans is Gods perfect ideal of justice. Here is my answer:

Christ died as the “second Adam” to undo the fall, to take into himself the brokenness of all humanity, in the loving power of his Father, and thus defeat sin, death, and the devil, resurrecting with the new creation.”

He goes on to say “Second, this drama was to expose victimization and scapegoating and end the dehumanization of the principalities and powers, making a public spectacle of them”, “Christ also died to reveal the self-giving, cosuffering nature of God which casts out fear, and casts down the accuser” and “Christ is a sacrifice in that God sacrifices himself to make peace with us, offers us his body and blood. Not the other way around where we offer a sacrifice to God to appease him and offer him the body and blood. “

I’ve answered the question “Why did Jesus die”, asked in the first session of every Alpha course the same way every time I’ve been present, which I think makes around a dozen times, and my answer is considered contoversial. Jesus died, I say, because he pissed off the Romans (the occupying power – think of the Germans in France in the early 1940s) and to a far lesser extent because he also pissed off the religious authorities. It would also be true to say that Jesus died because he was human, and all human beings die sooner or later. Incidentally, no, I do not think that human beings die only because of sin – I’ve written about this previously.

Everything else we say about why Jesus died stems from a need to find meaning in what was, in essence, a death like many others. Yes, it was very violent, but so were many thousands of other deaths under the Roman occupation. Yes, it was before time (“The Last Temptation of Christ” portrays a might-have-been scenario where Jesus marries, has children and lives to a ripe old age, and was similarly horribly contoversial when it came out).

In and of itself, however, it had only what meaning we place on it – OK, arguably it had what meaning God placed on it, but I am extremely sceptical that anyone ever knew God’s mind on the subject, if “mind” is an appropriate word – and I include in “anyone” particularly the four evangelists and Paul.

But it was the death of someone in whom a significant number of people had invested a huge amount of hope and in whom they had found meaning.

Turning for a moment to historical Jesus scholarship, it has very often been commented (including by Harnack and Schweizer) that people looking for the historical Jesus tend to find something much like themselves – liberals find a liberal Jesus, conservatives find a conservative Jesus. This is extended to particular scholars – Crossan finds a “Mediterranean Jewish Peasant”, a social reformer; Borg finds a mystic; Aslan finds a zealot; others find a cynic philosopher or a pure religious reformer uninterested in politics. Personally I’m entirely confident that Borg is right, and that Jesus was indeed a mystic, but that doesn’t preclude him being a social and a religious reformer, though it does probably make it a little unlikely that he was an enthusiast for the extremely violent zealots. If Jesus was human (and Christians generally accept that he was, whatever else he may also have been) he was probably complicated, because humans are complicated. Of course, my saying that Jesus was both mystic and social and religions reformer is, I suppose, to say that Jesus resembles an idealised version of me…

The thing is, this tendency to see Jesus as many things is not a new phenomenon. The early church were remarkable in preserving four entirely different viewpoints on Jesus in the Gospels and a fifth in Paul (well, at least a fifth, but possibly also a sixth and seventh). Granted, they may not have had much choice, as there is evidence that different communities preferred different gospels. Mark is radical (both religiously and socially, per John Vincent “Radical Jesus”), sees Jesus as a paradoxical kingly messiah, and is conventionally thought to be targetted at Roman citizens. Matthew is clearly targetting Jews, sees Jesus as a prophet/messiah and is aiming largely at religious reform. Luke is probably targetting Greeks (although this term could include a lot of Romans – the eastern Mediterranean tended to see most people who spoke Greek as “Graeci”), and is particularly socially radical (see, for instance, the Magnificat). John is mystical (the writer is clearly a Christ-mystic, experiencing what he identifies as Jesus in the way in which I experience what I identify as God) and at the very least sees Jesus as a mystic who is divinised.

Paul – well, it is difficult to ascribe a single clear viewpoint to Paul, but he would probably agree with John in viewing Jesus as divinised, though in Paul’s case not from the moment of creation (as in John 1) but from the resurrection (Romans 1:4). Some of Paul’s words seem to display that he was himself a mystic (like John, a Christ-mystic), some come from other modes of thinking. If we attempt to view all the epistles attributed to him as genuinely his work, we also see someone conflicted about the position of Jews, of women and of slaves.

And about what exactly is the importance of Jesus and his death and resurrection. Paul writes that this is reconciliation with God in Romans 5:10; ransom in 1 Timothy 2:6; substitution (for sin) in 2 Corinthians 5:21; an example of righteousness in Romans 5:18; self-sacrifice in Ephesians 5:2; redemption by blood in Ephesians 1:7 and, if you believe Paul wrote Hebrews (which I don’t), an atoning blood sacrifice (9:22), though one in which Jesus was himself the officiating priest (and so the one doing the sacrificing) (9:11).

[OK, I have friends who will say that Penal Substitutionary Atonement takes into account all those passages and fits them perfectly. I don’t agree that it does – just try reading through them a few times and see if the concepts do actually fit together, but in any event I shy away from PSA because of the libel on the character of God which it represents – there, I agree wholly with Jacob’s words quoted earlier.]

And, of course, possibly the most quoted piece of them all, Romans 3:25-26 “whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus”.

Read that very carefully. God is putting forward a propitiation by his own blood (i.e. that of Jesus) to demonstrate his own righteousness. Not to save us from death, not to save us from sin, not to ransom us from the Devil, not to perform some peculiar sacrifice of himself to himself, not to assuage his own wrath, but to show that he is righteous. “As if”, I hear you think “we had any doubt that God was righteous…”. Well, obviously Paul thought that we had the wrong idea about God, presumably in this case that he was arbitrary and sometimes forgave and sometimes didn’t, in an inconsistent and unpredictable way. After all, didn’t the books of Job and Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Scriptures wrestle with just this problem (and come to no satisfactory conclusion?

Let me belabour the point. We, humanity (or at least some sizeable subset of us) had made a meaning out of what we experienced (just as the NT writers were doing about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus), and Paul was saying that this interpretation of Jesus’ death corrected that meaning. He was making a counter-meaning. OK, we could also read that as God ordaining the death of his Son on the cross to correct a human misconception, but most people will find that at least vaguely scandalous as regards the character of God (as do I).

That means, of course, that there was no vast cosmic change in God’s relationship to humanity as a result of Jesus’ death (which I expect some people will find equally scandalous). Paul was extracting from the events a meaning which corrected an error about God which itself was part of a human meaning-making enterprise. Paul’s statement of this was “an event” in the parlance of post-modernity.

In point of fact, being a panentheist, the conventional atonement theories make no sense to me, but this reading emphatically does; my own view can be found at the end of this post, which is mostly a reaction to Clark Pinnock. It is, of course, another piece of human making of meaning…

At the point of writing, there is an Open and Relational Theology reading group ongoing, under the guidance of Tripp Fuller of Homebrewed Christianity and Tom Oord, author (inter alia) of “The Uncontrolling Love of God” (a book which I heartily recommend). In week 1, we are engaging with a couple of essays by Clark Pinnock; “Evangelical Theology After Darwin” from “Creation Made Free: Open Theology Engaging Science” and “Constrained by Love: Divine Self-Restraint According to Open Theism” from the Journal of the NAPBR.

The group is a “pay what you want” group, so is well within anyone’s grasp!

It was on listening to Tripp and Tom discussing these articles when I realised most forcibly that Pinnock comes from an Evangelical background, and his work here represents a significant movement away from his original stance, which seems to have been fairly much the inerrantist, biblical-literalist position I’m used to from those claiming the “Evangelical” label.  I give him credit; he moved a long way from that position. However, he’d have to have moved at least as far again to get to where I find myself.

I am, for the most part, a scientific materialist. I have a degree in Physics, and I do occasional part-time work in experimental Chemistry with a small Industrial Chemistry R&D company. I am therefore definitely a methodological naturalist, in that I expect to find (given enough time and application) a naturalistic explanation for everything. Tacked (perhaps uncomfortably) on to that is a contemplative mystic; I had a peak mystical experience aged 14, and have spent a large amount of time since then seeking repeat mystical experiences. As a result of that, I am a panentheist; I hold that everything that is, is God, but that everything that is does not exhaust that-which-is-God (if it did, that would be pantheism – I’m not adamant that pantheism is defective, but have a strong sense of “something more”). There is considerable affinity between panentheism and Open and Relational theology, but my overall stance is that Open and Relational theology does not go nearly far enough – even in the case of Tom Oord, who is a pan-experientialist, I regard O&R as “panentheism lite”.

Pinnock is, happily, confident that the Theory of Evolution is broadly correct, and correctly determines that any doctrine of God has to be reconsidered in that light. He considers, for instance, that Creation is still happening, with which I would unhesitatingly agree. He also rejects the picture of God as having to tinker with aspects of creation to “get it to go in the right direction”, which to me suggests clinging to the idea of a designer, but admitting the incompetence of the design. I find his description at the end of his first section “These three items create the evolutionary process: lawfulness, contingency, and deep time, which are themselves unexplained. The fundamental character of reality seems to be relational with entities being inter-related at all levels” very satisfactory, albeit he goes on to introduce Trinitarian concepts which I have reservations about.

I also like his comment “Although we would like to know how God is involved, we cannot pin God down to the details. If we could, God would just another force in the world”. We can, of course, work out many of the forces at work, and evolutionary biologists continue to make great strides in that respect. However, I worry about “Evolution is compatible with a kenotic model of providence, in which God decides to self-limit for the sake of love”. I like the concept of kenosis (although not as much as I like another theological concept to apply), but here, Pinnock is suggesting that God could intervene at any point to change the way things are, but refrains purely out of love for beings within creation and the desire to allow them free will. I don’t think that is a tenable position, if we are to preserve the concept of God as being characterised above all else by love; I will unhesitatingly act against my loved ones’ freedom of will if by so doing I can avoid them suffering major pain (although I may not act if the pain is minor). I think a loving God who preserved any kind of interventionary power at all would intervene in a massive number of situations despite the fact that that would reduce people’s freedom a little, and in any case I have a very strong suspicion that free will is an illusion, and thus not something which is worth preserving at the cost of any suffering beyond the trivial.

While I worry when Pinnock “cannot rule out a demonic dimension”, which gives me pictures of people obsessed with being the focus of a spiritual warfare which has no reality beyond their own minds (and which can give rise to all sorts of mental illness), and I tend to regard a too-easy invocation of demonic forces as a cop-out in a quest for a viable theodicy, I also cannot rule out the idea that there can be more-than-human but less-than-divine forces at work in the world. I have only to contemplate (for instance) the concept of “Britain” or “the Church” or “Democracy” or “The Free Market”, and I instantly accept that there are such forces – and most of them can be regarded as at least somewhat demonic (in this I follow Walter Wink’s thinking in his “Powers” trilogy). However, I suspect Pinnock was really thinking of supernatural powers, and none of those I accept as existing are supernatural in any real sense. I would dearly love there to be actual supernatural powers, to be honest – I’m a sucker for fantasy novels, and love reading about imagined worlds which work on different principles to the ones we see, but having spent a lot of time searching for real supernatural events, have come to the conclusion that there aren’t any. He does, to be fair, dismiss creation-in-an-instant as a magic trick, unworthy of being regarded as something serious when compared with the vast scope of evolution, but I think there’s still more than a hint of disembodied “spiritual” forces going on there.

On my first reading, it was when Pinnock got to Original Sin that I thought “He’s done something similar to installing a new operating system, and is now checking to see which of his programs will still run under it, and what upgrades he needs to make to them” (a simile I attribute to Tripp Fuller, talking of adopting a Process perspective). He’s not a million miles from my own thinking (which has also tended towards a “what doctrines can I still manage, given my panentheism?”), which I outline in this blog post.

He continues in this line when he talks of Christian Hope in the last section of the “Evolution” article. At this point, however, I think he surrenders to a lingering hope that God will at some time abrogate all of this “Open and Relational” stuff and intervene decisively (possibly in a “second coming” beloved of evangelicals), in finding a teleology in evolution. I don’t see any sign of a teleology myself, and if there is to be movement toward a Kingdom of Heaven on earth, I’m quite confident that it will need to be on the basis of Teresa de Ávila’s famous statement that “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.” I think he needed a program upgrade there, because I don’t think a grand plan survives adopting open and relational principles.

Moving on to the second essay, Pinnock amplifies the thinking he sketched in the first. He doubles down on the idea that God restrains himself from acting, and that this is voluntary. He regards this as kenotic. Frankly, I do not think that mere restraint qualifies as kenotic; real kenosis would be to irrevocably give away the power to act, and my position would definitely be that God can’t (as the title of Tom Ooord’s recent book states). He is, in my eyes, desperate to clink on to divine omnipotence, whereas I’m very much with Charles Hartshorne in his short book “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes”. The chief “omnis” which Harsthorne demolishes in that book are omnipotence and omniscience, but there are swipes at others as well. Personally, the only “omni” I take to be valid is omnipresence, because I’m a mystic, and (like most mystics, if not all) that’s what I experience God as being. Inasmuch as scripture would seem to justify other claims to infinity of some characteristic, I’m strongly of the opinion that this is something between the excusable human tendency when faces with something inconceivably large to regard it as infinite (even the universe is not unequivocally infinite) and the equally human tendency to “big up” someone whom you hold in high regard.

The first area which Pinnock picks on as an area of “restraint” is in Creation. He is clinging here to the concept that God must be creator in the normal sense of the term. Granted, in the first essay he has already dismissed the idea that this was an instantaneous “magic trick” (or even one stretching over six days), and he accepts a 14.5 billion year approximate age of the universe, but he has failed to appreciate the findings of cosmology. You cannot talk of a “creator” for the “big bang”. If the maths is correct (and there is absolutely no reason to think that it is flawed in any serious way), the point of the “big bang” represents a limit to time and space as well as matter. There was no “before” to the big bang. There was no “elsewhere” either, but “before” is the crucial factor – the concept of creating something demands that that something not exist and then exist, which is a time-dependent concept. “Creator” is thus an incoherent concept, like talking about the colour of silence, or a square circle. So, incidentally, is the idea that God is in some way “outside” the universe (no “elsewhere”). Trust me on this, I’ve done the maths in the course of a Physics degree. I balk at Pinnock’s “God created cosmic time”, slightly later in the essay.

My only slight reservation there is the feature of mystical experience which has been described as “the timeless moment”. In peak mystical experiences, it is typical for the subjective perception of time to be severely altered, and I would be tempted to say that those were a glimpse into atemporality. If they are, there may be a way in which God is in some way atemporal – it’s just that we have no conceptual apparatus capable of thinking about atemporality. However, I tentatively hypothesise that this might be experience of a timelike dimension normally inaccessible to us (as there is subjective time but no, very little or far too much duration in the “normal” time dimension).

I am, however, broadly in agreement when Pinnock characterises God as being essentially loving. Whether I would go as far as “omnibenevolence” is less certain. That is the position of Tom Oord in “The Uncontrolling Love of God”, and I significantly prefer Tom’s approach to that of Pinnock, while leaving some reservations in my mind.

I’m far more aligned with Pinnock, however, when he stresses that God “inhabits space like a kind of body” (though, of course, not so much with his idea that God created space – see above). Other Open and Relational thinkers talk of God withdrawing so as to provide a space for creation, and my mystical experience negates any possibility that that could be the case for me.

“Kenosis of omniscience” seems to me again a clinging to the name “omniscience” while abandoning any real sense in which it could be true. I completely agree that the future is not yet knowable (otherwise there would be absolute mechanical predestination, which is wholly at odds with an universe which, so far as modern physics is concerned, is all movement and interaction and has no fixed things at all, at least at its most fundamental level). I’m not at all certain (despite psalm 139) that God knows, as such, everything that there is to know at the moment, either – one has merely to consider the Schroedinger’s Cat thought experiment to imagine a situation in which God could not possibly know which state the cat was in, as then there would be no wave-function any more. I could, perhaps, envisage that God is capable of knowing anything to which he turns his attention (as it is all within the body of God…) without actually having his attention on all things at once.

While I appreciate Pinnock’s pointing out that “creation ex nihilo” is not actually supported by the wording of Genesis 1, I don’t think I can go as far as him in positing countervailing spiritual forces independent of and preceding creation. This seems to me an attempt to retain a concept of Satan and/or demons along standard lines. There does seem to me some traction to regarding God as creating order out of chaos (certainly, life appears fundamentally anti-entropic), but then again, a balance between order and chaos seems necessary for life and, in particular, novelty, so I am reluctant to identify God purely with order.

It is when Pinnock reaches Incarnation that I perhaps agree with him and diverge from him most. To me, the radical omnipresence of God makes the idea of the universe as “God’s body” a very congenial one, and I don’t stop at kenosis to conceive of this. After all, kenosis as first expressed in Philippians was an incidence of incarnation rather than a feature in and of itself, and a concept of “original incarnation” seems to me entirely reasonable, not, as Pinnock suggests, as an individual human but as all creation. I add to that that God becoming incarnate in the universe as a whole entails not that he refrain from using power, but that, to a great if not complete extent, that power is permanently divested and inheres in creation. It remains the power of God, it is just delegated to and exercised exclusively by creation.

On that basis, I do not see a need for independent spiritual entities having nothing to do with God in the first place, as does Pinnock; delegation of power to individuals (and, of course, to inanimate matter) is sufficient, particularly as emergent properties lead to “powers and principalities” such as nations and the church (as Walter Wink suggests).

Of course, this being the case, God suffers with all parts of creation because all suffering is perforce God’s suffering. Where Pinnock does not go but I do is in considering this as God crucified from the beginning on and in creation. As Jesus refers to in Matthew 25:31-46, “as you did to the least of these, you did to me”; God is not crucified once in approximately 30 CE, he is crucified in the whole of history, past and to come.

Where Pinnock concludes with the hope of all coming together in an all-encompassing theosis driven by teleology, mine concludes with the absolute necessity of our minimising suffering wherever and to whatever life form it may occur. We may not be able to prevent Christ being crucified continually, but we can abstain from knocking in any more nails.

I don’t come from a church which has a particular “down” on smokers, but I do note that some do, particularly in the States. I’m a smoker; I don’t regard it as a commendable thing – certainly it damages me physically, and I have COPD as a result, and would very much like to be relieved of the compulsion to keep on smoking (I’ll freely admit to being an addict in that respect) but I’ve never really regarded it as “a sin”, i.e. something scripturally forbidden.

I noted in a Patheos article today the statement “What about the command to treat your body as a temple, Christian smokers?” (the article was largely about Christians singling out homosexuality to be the “sin” they condemn, to the exclusion of all the sins which are more unequivocally prohibited in scripture, a position with which I entirely agree), and my immediate thought was “How do they work that one out?”.

Most temples I’ve come across burn incense – indeed, most churches do, if you include the Catholics (by far the majority Christian denomination) and the Orthodox. Can I regard myself as burning incense, perhaps? Add to that the fact that “the Temple” in our scriptures is a place where animal sacrifices including very many burned offerings were made, and I think of the complex hydrocarbons given off by the burning of meat, and anything I inhale when smoking rather pales into insignificance…

That said, I don’t think those who regard smoking as a sin and guilt those Christians who do smoke as doing a particularly bad thing – it would definitely be a good thing if no-one took up smoking in the first place (or at least, smoking tobacco), and I rather reluctantly approve the climate which has grown up in my country which makes smokers into social pariahs, despite being one of those pariahs myself, and would that they focus more on smoking than they do on homosexuality!

But I don’t think it can legitimately be put forward as something Biblically condemned…

I recently followed a link to a TED talk by a native American, which deals largely with the question of land ownership. It is very much worth viewing, particularly for anyone from North America, Australia or New Zealand. One issue about it which wasn’t made much of in the talk was that the Native American concept of ownership (inasmuch as it’s a concept of ownership at all) is of communal ownership – the tribe is owner, individuals aren’t, whereas the immigrant/European/Enlightenment concept is of individual land ownership, with (perhaps) a concession to communality in federally owned land, which seems to be against the fudamental principles of the American right. Clearly, it’s somewhat easier to talk of very long term land ownership when it’s a people rather than a succession of individuals who are “owners”. I use inverted commas there, because I think the concept of ownership with respect to land is a vexed one. Some Native American thinking might be along the lines of those friends I mention in the linked post who feel more that their property owns them rather than that they own the property – they are custodians or trustees of the land rather than owners who can do with it what they will, but even then it is a communal custodianship. The early Hebrew conception seems to have been similar – at Jubilee, land had to be returned to the tribe (one of the 12) to whom it was originally allotted; it is less clear that it had to be returned to an individual or individuals within that tribe. Yes, the strict wording talks of the individual there, but the year of Jubilee was only once every 50 years, while life expectancy was more like 30 or 40 years, so it was definitely not aimed at individuals, at best family groups.

I do not live in any of the areas settled by Europeans against the interests of indigenous populations; the last time Yorkshire was settled against the interests of the indigenous population was in 1066 onwards, with the Norman conquest. In point of fact, the house in which I now live can be traced back to around 1815, at which point it seems to have been built by the then Lord of the Manor, the Earl of Londesborough, a member of the Darcy family. There’s a significant probability that at some time before that, the Darcys appropriated it from local peasants under one of the Inclosure Acts, but that would have been a legal action, though not one I would regard as wholly ethical (a point to which I’ll return). There’s a very high probability that the Darcys or their (legal) predecessors acquired the Manor from the Crown at the time of the conquest. The Crown will have acquired it by conquest, as shortly after the conquest, the North rose up against the Norman invaders and was very harshly dealt with, but Selby and Brayton don’t appear in the Domesday Book, so there’s no record of that.

And, sometime before that, the Saxon (or Anglian) owners will have acquired the land by conquest from British people (probably the Parisi), who probably owned the land in common, much as the native Americans used to. The Saxon or Anglian owners may have owned it in common themselves, but land ownership under the Saxons did become more individual. It may have passed through the hands of some Vikings from the Kingdom of Yorvik (modern York) and at various times seems to have formed part of the British Kingdom of Elmet and the Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria. Each took the land by conquest.

The point I make here is that even in a country with settled land occupation for over 1000 years, somewhere in the past of any piece of land is likely to have been an occasion when it was taken by force from someone else. There are, however, no British, Saxon or Anglian tribes with an existing identity and a history going back to those times to claim the land back from me.

Of course, at the time they lost what eventually became my house, it was a small corner of a field or wood, and worth very little; now it has a substantial house on it, and is served by roads, gas, electricity, mains drainage and telephone lines. The mains drainage and gas supply were laid at the expense of my family, and the house would have been a ruin by now were it not for a substantial amount of money we’ve spent on it. Actually, the house would almost certainly not exist – 10 years ago, we explored the possibility of selling it, as we were at the time in a horrible financial situation, and the only offers were from developers who wanted to tear it down. As of today, it’s definitely worth more with the house as it now is.

So we can claim that we’ve improved the land (and that its value has been improved by other factors which my family can’t lay claim to, such as good roads, other infrastructure, the growth of the town giving it a desirable location, the fact that this area is zoned for residential use and the general land shortage in the UK). I say “claim” because, if you want to use it as, say, agricultural land, the value is negative – it would cost more to demolish the house and return the plot to usable agricultural land than the resulting land would be worth (I was once put off buying a very characterful but derelict house by a surveyor on the basis that the demolition costs would be more than the site value…). This is important, because claims that land has been improved are often raised as a reason why previous owners who have been dispossessed should have been dispossessed.

That said, I think there is some merit in the idea that land has been occupied and used. For a house or flat up to a small farm, it seems reasonable to me that the person who (or whose family) has actually been using and occupying the land for many years has a claim to it. Certainly that agrees with the instinctive reaction of people who have been doing that, that “this is my land”. People seem to vary in how long they need to live somewhere before it becomes “theirs” – some people I know who move from flat to flat on a regular basis get no such sense, but then again some move into a property and immediately feel it to be “home”. There is, however, a problem with this which goes back to and beyond Biblical times, the conflict between the farmer and the herdsman (Cain and Abel, or the pastoralist Israelites versus the agricultural Canaanites) and which forms part of the plot of many Westerns (the cowboy is in conflict with the farmer who doesn’t want herds of cows driven over his crops). The cowboys, the Native Americans and all hunter-gatherer cultures have the disadvantage of needing wide open unenclosed spaces which tend to appear empty and unclaimed to the farmer.

I mentioned the Inclosure Acts earlier. These days, a landlord would frequently not be able to appropriate land to their own use, and certainly couldn’t do that with land which had been in common use for a long time (though the law as it stands doesn’t envisage creation of any new commons), but government entities can expropriate fairly easily, giving compensation (in the UK, Compulsory Purchase, in the US Eminent Domain). In a sense, that does (generally extremely briefly) return land to common ownership. We don’t, however, look kindly on people taking land without adequate compensation, whether it be governments or private landlords redeveloping a site. The Inclosure Acts were no exception as far as land specifically allocated to individuals was concerned, but didn’t compensate for loss of commons or the use of “waste” (but occupied) land at all adequately – and, sitting in the 21st century, I think that was wrong. At the very least, generous compensation should be given to people who are actually occupying and using land – and that’s another place where I think Compulsory Purchase and Eminent Domain fall down.

They also, to my mind, fall down when used to assemble land and put it in the hands of another private individual or corporation. Libertarians are typically incensed by any use of those powers, but I can envisage them being justified where there is an overpowering public good being served – for instance the construction of a new transport link. Where the end result is another supermarket or commercial development, however, I am less happy. Typically, this is government using its powers in the service of the economically strong at the expense of the economically weak.

The Inclosure Acts were, however, generally thought of as being a progressive move at the time. They enabled agriculture to be conducted on a much larger scale, with the removal of the mediaeval strip fields, and contributed to a massive gain in agricultural productivity. But they destroyed a more communal way of growing food, and contributed to the end of village life as it had previously been, and no serious thought was given to repairing either of those damages. Nonetheless, they were not considered to be major breaches of general principles by the majority of people.

Indeed, at the time they occurred, none of the transfers of ownership by conquest which I outlined will have been generally thought of as breaches of general principle. The right of conquest was a well-established principle at least until the Nuremberg trials and possibly until the UN resolved against it as late as 1974 (I was actually rather suprised to find that it was so late – that does mean, among other things, that the German offensives of 1939 onwards could not unreasonably have been thought of as legitimate conquest until Nuremberg decided otherwise retrospectively, though only really for Europe).

So where does that leave me? I instinctively sympathise with the speaker in the TED talk from my 21st century, post UN resolution perspective, but the expropriations he talks of were carried out before the world decided that “right of conquest” was outdated and conquest should no longer be condoned (with the caveat that native lands are still, to some extent, being expropriated in the States and elsewhere, just on a much smaller scale and using, for instance, Eminent Domain). However, most of the former Native American land has been in the hands of others for well over 100 years now, longer than the memory of anyone now living stretches. I would also instinctively sympathise with anyone who had in good faith bought land which was formerly Native American and had occupied and used it as their own for many years, possibly even for a short period. There has to be some kind of balance to be established. Certainly I have major misgivings about retrospective laws (there is something deeply wrong about declaring something to be the case when none of those involved at the time thought it was, most notably where something is made a crime after the event).

Indeed, perhaps we should consider that rights in land are extinguished after some period of time has passed without effective action having been taken to enforce them, even where there was such a disparity in power that no effective action could ever be taken. I’d certainly tend to take that view were any Parisii, Romans, Angles, Vikings or Saxons to come along and suggest either that I should return the land to them or pay them compensation for having been dispossessed of it; my claim ultimately rests on the Norman conquest in 1066 onwards (specifically the campaign to subdue the North in 1069), and I’m inclined to think that nearly 1000 years should be sufficient. There are, in any case, no surviving nations of any of those, assuming that the Italians, Danes, Norwegians and Germans don’t claim for their former colonists! (The Parisii vanished without trace into the general population, and indeed actually so did all the other actual colonists, even though their home countries can be thought of as surviving in a sense, and given that my ancestors have been in this general area for the last 750 years at least, I probably share the genetics of all of them).

In the case of personal claims, English law does prescribe a limitation period; 12 years. If you’ve taken no action to try to recover land within that period, you can’t sue later (though there’s an exception while you’re “under a disability”, such as being insane or too young). Indeed, if you’ve been in exclusive possession for 12 years, you can actually claim title. It’s more difficult to claim in either direction when rights over land are involved, as they tend to be only occasionally exercised – 20 years in the case of a claim to a right of way, for instance (it’s far more difficult to extinguish a right of way once granted). That, of course, assumes the existence of a court (and a higher authority) to enforce rights, and it’s worth mentioning that in the case of losing land by limitation, it’s specifically a court application which counts – going onto the land and trying to take it back by force doesn’t… Personally I incline to thinking that the 12 year period is a bit short, but possibly there’s a nod there towards the “use” concept of ownership – if you aren’t using it, you arguably can’t really be said to own it. Opinions vary, and I’ve heard people argue that loss of land should be something you can recover as long as those dispossessed are still alive, including any who were under age at the time of the dispossession. Rarely, however, have I heard people argue that personal claims should extend to future generations.

Of course, with the kind of situations the TED talk deals with, there was no higher authority available, no court to ask for redress.

In addition, there’s the issue of a different conception of ownership when an individual and a group (for instance a tribe or nation) are involved. Almost nobody, I think, would suggest that a nation should lose land merely because it had been occupied for 12 years by someone else. At least, not in the 21st century.

But that leads to the question of “How long?”. I’ve suggested that 1000 years is too long (although Israel might be regarded as a counter-example). Is 100 years too short? Certainly, many Native Americans (and indigenous peoples of other colonised lands) think it is. I wonder if there’s a “right” perspective. Some balance between the rights of a dispossessed people and those who have (arguably entirely innocently) been actually in occupation of the land for quite a few years? Should such rights steadily reduce over the years, or should they continue unabated where the dispossessed have no means of asserting them? I don’t know. But I do know that land law could get very interesting were such rights to be recognised!

I’ve recently been pointed to an article in The Atlantic “The Market as God”. This is an extremely good analysis, supporting my contention that financialised free market capitalism is the System of Satan.

Having extolled the article, there are a number of points where I think it oversteps the mark. The first of these is in the statement “Since the argument from design no longer proves its existence, it is fast becoming a postmodern deity—believed in despite the evidence.” Strictly speaking, I think this has to refer to a supernatural theist deity; the trajectory of thought since the dawn of the enlightenment has left no room for a God who created the universe and then needs to tinker with it every so often to keep it on track, like the owner of what is generally called a “classic car” these days (to avoid calling someone’s pride and joy an “outdated money pit”); sometimes such owners seem to spend more time with their heads under the bonnet than actually enjoying the ride.

There is no clear evidence for an interventionary God, just as there is no clear evidence for the picture of the Market drawn by “classical” economics. There is, in fact, significant evidence against both.

Perhps, however, the author is thinking of the postmodern view of God as an “event” (as outlined, for instance, in Badiou’s “St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism” or Zizek’s “The Puppet and the Dwarf”), as something which, once declared (without foundation) has massive effects. While postmodern thinkers might beat about the bush on this point, I think they are getting at something like the Dawkins “meme” idea, that a belief propagates and governs behaviour quite independently of any correspondence with reality. In that respect, money and value would both definitely qualify as meme/event concepts (and as supernatural, existing in the mind but not in reality). God, however, is more like that-which-is-God, in that despite our demonstrating that the supernatural theist concept of God is dead and explaining away a lot of the effects of belief via, for instance, psychology or, with the postmoderns, claiming that God is an Event, there is nevertheless something there. So too it is, I think, with the market. There are countless transactions between humans and their institutions which create between them a force which can be studied (and process thinking would not consider the market too lacking in materiality to be properly nonexistent), but the market is plainly not as economists generally have wished to paint it. The article does show that very clearly.

The next assertion I take issue with is “In particular, the econologians’ rhetoric resembles what is sometimes called “process theology,” a relatively contemporary trend influenced by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. In this school although God wills to possess the classic attributes, He does not yet possess them in full, but is definitely moving in that direction.” While I do not claim to be a process theologian (far less a process philosopher), it seems clear to me that this does not remotely do justice to process theology; all the practitioners of which with whom I am familiar would balk at the idea that God-as-process was moving towards several of the “omnis”, notably omnipotence and omniscience, and would be appalled at the idea that God was moving towards immutability or impassibility. OK, they would be happy that God was omnibenevolent and most would be comfortable with omnipresence, even if they were not outright panentheists…

With those caveats, I think Cox does an excellent job of outlining a theology of Satan. He concludes by saying “There is, however, one contradiction between the religion of The Market and the traditional religions that seems to be insurmountable. All of the traditional religions teach that human beings are finite creatures and that there are limits to any earthly enterprise. A Japanese Zen master once said to his disciples as he was dying, “I have learned only one thing in life: how much is enough.” He would find no niche in the chapel of The Market, for whom the First Commandment is “There is never enough.” Like the proverbial shark that stops moving, The Market that stops expanding dies. That could happen. If it does, then Nietzsche will have been right after all. He will just have had the wrong God in mind.”

Actually, there are significant other conflicts with any other religion I can think of, and I have gone to some lengths in other posts to outline how the System of Satan is contrary to Christianity (or, at least, to the Way of Jesus, which is what Christianity should be striving towards). Most of all, I think the conflict lies in the totalising nature of both. Jesus comments, in Matt. 10:29 “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.” It is not just sparrows which the Market puts a price on. It puts a price on you and me, not only in “how much do you earn?” but in “is it worth the price of the medication to extend your life by a year”, on what an injury to us is worth, on whether we are “productive members of society”, and it has the temerity to suggest that action to reduce the impact of climate change is “too expensive” where allowing climate change to continue unchecked will at the least destroy almost all current cultures in the world (including, in all probability, the Market itself) and may prejudice the continuation of humanity as a species.

In the preceding verse (28), Jesus says “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Instead, fear the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” I could restate that as saying that by substituting for Maslow’s peak value of self-actualisation, The Market tells us that we can never have enough money, and that money is all we need. The Market is thus killing our spirits, our souls, and if any evidence is needed, we can look at the epidemic of addiction which is sweeping through the developed world. As Peter Rollins remarks of addiction, it isn’t a problem, it’s a solution to a problem (albeit a bad solution), it’s a means of escaping from a world which the Market has made unfit for habitation by humans. “Do not adjust your brain, there is a fault in reality” is a catchphrase which counters that particular escape. Instead, let’s abandon the whole idea that the Market governs everything, and find our value elsewhere.

I was recently tagged on facebook by someone quoting me as “The radical theologian, Chris Eyre”, which pleased me more than was reasonable. Yes, I try to do theology, notably what is called “constructive theology”, which means, to me at least, not the analysis and categorisation of systematic theology, but branching out into new expressions of theology, and sometimes entirely new concepts. I do this largely from a panentheistic root understanding, and in conscience I do it at all largely because there isn’t a great deal of theology written from this precise perspective. Yes, there’s “Open and Relational” theology (Tom Oord is an example of that who is currently making waves with his popular book “God Can’t”), and there’s “Process Theology”, of which John Cobb and Bruce Epperly are prominent examples, but neither of those is specifically panentheist.

The thing is, I don’t have academic credentials in theology, and regard my writing as “baby steps” in the discipline. Indeed, they may never be more than that, because I prefer to carry on doing constructive work, as much as I’m able, rather than going through years worth of academic programmes which will teach me about theologies which aren’t tailored to the panentheist. Also, I probably don’t have enough years of productive life left in me to spend 10 or more of them in an academic setting.

But what kind of theologian am I? I would tend to say that I was a Liberal Theologian, given the description in this blog post. Though I don’t particularly see myself as following Schleiermacher, who I’ve never actually read, I definitely start (as he does) from “deep inner experiential awareness”. We all, I think, prioritise one side of the Wesleyan quadrilateral, and I start with my experience (which is mostly non-negotiable*), pay massive attention to scripture (which I regard as an account of the experience of those in my tradition who are accepted as authoritative over the whole tradition), significant attention to tradition (which I regard as the experience of other members of the tradition in bulk over the years) and, in looking at all these, use reason. My problem with that label is that a lot of constructive liberal theologians pay much less regard to scripture and tradition than I do (which is a feature picked on regularly by conservatives!)

A lot of theologians who I read with significant fellow-feeling are described as “progressive”. So, am I a Progressive Theologian? There are some similarities, in that those with that label tend to work more closely with scripture and tradition than do those labelled “liberal”. But “progressive” turns out to be a label which says that you’re a former Evangelical (which, to my mind, is why they have more time for scripture and tradition), and I am not now, nor have I ever been, an Evangelical. OK, I’ve spent time in the pews at a couple of churches which brand themselves as “Evangelical”, but I was always somewhat semi-detached from them, and was typically labelled as their token Liberal.

Radical, though, is a word I really like to describe what I try to do theologically. “Radical” means “going to the root of” something, and I have a lot of sympathy with the project of stripping away layers of interpretation and looking as closely as I can at the root of all theology, namely experience. “Radical” also has the connotation of going in new and completely unexpected directions, and I certainly try to do that, as much as anything on the basis that in a field in which the base experience is a numinous one, thus extremely difficult to be precise about, having a few additional stories about it can only be a good thing.

Yet, when I look at theologians who are commonly called “radical”, I come across names like Peter Rollins, Thomas J.J. Altizer and Kester Brewin, all of whom are in the Altizer tradition of being “death of God” theologians. I worry that “radical” implies that I base myself in some way on “death of God”, and possibly as well on existential concerns – Kierkegaard and Bonhoefer tend to figure large in radical theology. I am not really a “death of God” theologian – for one thing, I can’t stand Nietzsche, who coined the concept (OK, he had a few very good lines, but on the whole I dislike the way his thinking went). Yes, I can take on board “death of God” meaning the fact that old conceptions of God as am interventionary supernatural force in the world are dead, but not the ontological or psychological meanings which Peter Rollins is in the process of expounding in a new series of lectures on “death of God” theology going on at the moment (Note, these are patron-only lectures, but a few dollars for a month or two does get you a lot of Pete’s previous work…)

I’m more familiar with Pete’s work than that of other radical theologians, but note that Pete is very concerned with the existential questions of fear of death and fear of nothingness or absence of meaning. I don’t fear death (although I have a healthy fear of many of the means of getting there – I don’t like pain very much), and fear of nothingness doesn’t make sense to me, nor does the question which exercises philosophers of “why is there something rather than nothing”. My suspicion is that if I were ever have going to have developed such concerns, my peak mystical experience aged 14 put paid to that possibility. For me, peak mystical experiences remove fear of death (which becomes merely a rearrangement in the All) and concern about nothingness (the experience tends to produce a paradoxical “everything and nothing at the same time” sensation, which you get used to – and in any event, gives you an absolute assurance of the existence of the All). What much of Pete’s work seeks to do is to rid you of the wish to avoid death and nothingness, whereas to me mystical experience gives you exactly the solution to those problems; I can’t help regarding his approach as a little like Origen’s solution to having sexual desire which he didn’t think he should indulge – he famously castrated himself in an appallingly literal following of Matthew 19:12.

Personally, I think Origen’s action (which, to be fair, may be apocryphal) is ridiculous. Perhaps Pete’s removal of concern might be more sensible – after all, it does appear that only a small minority of people historically have been able to have peak mystical experiences, though the incidence of people reporting such experience has shot up in recent years, making me hopeful that in fact everyone might be a mystic in the future – but I still consider it extreme.

Most other theologians called “radical” are in something like the same mould; they are in the Altizer tradition.

And yet, I really like the concept of “radical”, both in the fact that it indicates one is trying to “go to the root” of things. I am, I suppose, always trying to look behind the descriptions of experience of God to “that which is God”, and that definitely counts in my book as “radical”, and in the process I also tend to try to look at things afresh and independently of the tradition of interpretation, which leads me to writing things which people view as “radical” in the other sense, of being something “outside the box”.

Perhaps the one “radical” theologian who does not seem to me to be so much a “death of God” thinker is John Caputo, whose thinking in and following “The Weakness of God” is very much to my liking – it ignores conventional concepts and strikes out in a new direction. Thomas Jay Oord, whose writing has generally been considerably more conventional in most senses, has recently written “God can’t”, which has the same kind of radical tinge to it (let’s face it, all of us were probably brought up with a concept of God which was above all else omnipotent)… perhaps he may start being referred to as “radical”, at which point I will feel that I comfortably fit within the description.

* When I say the experience is non-negotiable, I do not necessarily include what I can identify as the interpretation of the experience. How much of it is interpretation has shifted a little over the years, particularly as the uninterpreted experience is very difficult to talk about. Such experiences as I have had were definitely experiences, were definitely mystical experiences, using the thinking of Happold, James and Underhill to verify that fact, and in the case of several of them were as far as can be established not the result of any physical or mental stressors, mental abnormality, drugs or any other environmental cause.

Henry Neufeld, who is the CEO of Energion Publications, for which I’m Editor in Chief, has put up a video on the subject of “Salvation by Correct Theology”. My own often-stated view is that, in the debate between salvation by works and salvation by faith, the option of “salvation by correct intellectual conception” is never mentioned. Indeed, I think it’s a non-starter, given Jesus’ suggestion that we need to be as “little children” (who are incapable of forming complex intellectual conceptions) and many instances, including the thief on the cross,  where there is no evidence of much in the way of theology.

And yet, I’ve just listened to an episode of the “Patheological” podcast (which I recommend, particularly the series which ends with this episode, which talks a lot of depression) in which the guest, Scott Curry, uses Job 42:7 to suggest that what you think about God is of supreme importance, and noted a facebook post in the Liturgists group which quotes an unnamed source as saying:-
“Peter Harrison in the acknowledgements in his Cambridge University Press book “The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science” quotes a University of Queensland faculty friend Ed Conrad that the bible does not describe a world but creates a world.
What a helpful statement.
THAT is why bad theology is so horrific and good theology is so important.
Our reading of the bible and what we do with it through our theological thinking creates either a world of beauty, holy love, and wonder at what it means to be human, loving our neighbours inhabiting this astounding planet.
OR
we can create a world full of ugliness, avarice, finding ways to accuse and exclude those with whom we do not agree rather than in and through loving hospitality speaking the truth
or to put it another way – this is why serious, informed, educated reading of Scripture is important.
Reading of Scripture, if it is without learning and wisdom, can lead to terrible theology with appalling consequences.”

It hasn’t escaped my notice, too, that when Henry and myself inveigh against salvation by correct theology or salvation by correct intellectual conception, we are saying that the correct theology, the correct intellectual conception is not “salvation by correct theology or correct intellectual conception”, so, to the philosophically minded, we are possibly destroying our own premise just by stating it. I have little patience with this kind of philosophical argument, which sets up a self-referential, absolute, statement in order to destroy the premise – if nothing else, you can escape from the loop by commenting that a statement about statements is of a higher order than a mere statement, and cannot legitimately be included in the lower-order case. (I say this despite being very keen on Godel’s incompleteness theorem, which uses just such a self-referential structure in order to “prove” its point – I think the conclusion there is correct, even if the argument is faulty!). I would also point out that using this kind of argument, even if everything in fact is relative, this argument apparently disproves what is then the fact that everything is relative; there has to be something wrong with the method of argumentation! (I point to the fact that every word in your dictionary is defined by other words, i.e. is relative to other words).

Both Curry and Conrad, however, have a point. In the case of Job, I might suggest that the take-away is that the use of theology in order to make people feel bad is a bad idea; Job’s friends spend much of the narrative attempting to say that his misfortunes are ultimately all his own fault, and the picture of God they end up putting forward is one of a vindictive judge. The fact that the whole book of Job suggests that God’s motive is not vindictive but is actually to prove a point to Satan (at this point a minion of God, tasked with putting forward counter-narratives), which is in no way actually a better picture of God, is by the by.

That is echoed in the piece from facebook – our conceptions of God matter inasmuch as they can reassure us or destabilise us, make us community-minded or defensively individualistic, compassionate or accusing, inclusive or builders of walls. I think Henry would agree with me that, in the face of a God whose chief characteristic has to be love (and who is sometimes identified with love), it does actually matter what our conceptions are. For my part, however, I feel I need to re-stress that our intellectual conception, our theology, can never be regarded as wholly true (“now we see through a glass darkly”), at least not if we are talking of what-it-is-to-be-God.

This leads me on to another line of thinking. I am not sure in what sense Conrad means “the bible does not describe a world but creates a world”. It may be that the underlying thought is that scripture (and thus theology) is in some way performative – stating something makes it the case, as when a person with appropriate authority declares two people married. This could be regarded, in postmodern terminology, as “an event”. He may mean that the stories in the Bible and our theologies exist in what I call “concept space”; the issue of the extent to which they are true (given that I am strongly sceptical of our ability to state anything which is true in an absolute sense) is secondary to how they fit together and what they do, i.e. the effect they have on humanity. With fiction, for instance, it is pointless asking whether the story is true or not, the issue is whether it conveys something to which I relate, from which I can obtain a truth.

Things in concept-space can, of course, propagate as what Richard Dawkins has dubbed a “meme”. As Dawkins notes, memes can be extremely damaging (or extremely beneficial, though he tends to focus on the damage they can cause). Followers of Jung, however, go futher than this and posit the idea of a “collective unconscious” in which such concepts exist; it seems inevitable that Jungians believe in one or both of a form of telepathy and the inheritance of concept-structures. This, of course, raises the issue of concepts which we create “coming back to haunt us”; Voltaire famously remarked “In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.” When we consider memes or the collective unconscious, the image we create of God has an existence independent of any individual, and if we create for ourselves an image of a vengeful, capricious, unfeeling and unmerciful God, we are, perhaps, creating that as a reality rather than just a concept, at least in some sense.

That God-concept is, in my mind, Satanic, and not in the sense of ha-satan of the book of Job, but in the picture which developed later, not of an aspect of God which acts as accuser, as tester of concepts, but as the adversary of God, a spiritual power in its own right, the inheritor of the “equal-and-opposite-to-God force of evil in the world” concept of Ahriman in Zoroastrianism, opposed to the God-figure of Ahura Mazda. We should not give it our thoughts to feed on…

And, in respect of the Satan of the Intertestamentals and the New Testament, which I blame on the percolation of Zoroastrian ideas into Judaism (possibly aided by the Babylonian captivity), my watchword is “If Satan existed, it would be necessary to disbelieve in him”.

We are not saved by intellectual conceptions, but we can be horribly damaged by them.

A comment on a facebook thread got me thinking. The commentator said that she had been approached in the street by a total stranger, who asked “Are you a Christian?”. In her case, she instinctively answered “no” before starting to dwell on how many times she’d been told she would be damned to hell for denying Jesus, which she commented was equivalent to not being a Christian – and that gave her an answer.

It’s a while since anyone has done that to me. I think the last time it happened, I said “It depends what you mean by ‘Christian'”. A discussion followed…

I think, though, that my reply would now have to be “Wrong question” and, if they followed up with the alternative “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Saviour?” to repeat “Wrong question”.

The right question is “Do you follow Jesus?”, to which my answer is “Yes”, or more accurately “Yes, but not very well”. “Christian” generally carries the subtext of “are you an evangelical?” and so exactly the same as “have you accepted Jesus…?”, but it’s hugely problematic. (I’ve heard people say several times in response to the question “what were you before you became a Christian?” that they were Anglican, or Catholic, or Methodist…) Do I want to identify myself with a movement which wants to deny women and homosexuals (plus, plus) equal rights and inclusion? No. Do I want to identify myself with a movement which seems to make a habit of excusing pedophilia in its leaders? No. Do I want to identify myself with a movement which currently seems to give Donald Trump unquestioning support? No. Do I want to identify myself with a movement which believes that the only sensible issue on which to cast their vote is abortion, and that the entire recorded sayings of Jesus can be ignored in favour of that one issue? No. Do I wish to identify myself with a movement which considers care for the environment irrelevant because God is about to destroy everything anyhow? Absolutely not. Do I wish to identify myself with a movement which considers that most of humanity is both irretrievably depraved, no matter what they actually do, but is also destined for an eternity of conscious torment? Hell, no.

I’m not very happy with the movement which tends to self-identify as just “Christian” as it is at the moment. However, even when I was casting around for a faith community 50 years ago, which was before the first four of those became hot topics, I didn’t want to identify myself with the historical persecution of Jews (and any group of other Christians who had a slightly different conception of Jesus or God than did the mainstream), I didn’t want to identify myself with forced conversions and the dismissal of native peoples all over the world as not being worthy of consideration as “they were not Christians”, I didn’t want to identify myself with massacres, pogroms, witch burnings, the crusades (particularly the Fourth and Albigensian) and the attitude which would kill or main people over whether there should be another “i” in the word “homoousion”.

How about “accepting Jesus as my personal Lord and saviour?”. Well, all Jesus seems to have asked is that we follow him. That might, I suppose, mean accepting him as Lord – certainly, I’m happy to identify him as more “Lord” than anyone carrying that title (or a higher one, or indeed any title) these days. “Saviour” is a different matter. I have never thought that the biblical witness requires us to believe a particular account of Jesus’ significance, granted that (for instance) John and Paul are both confident that Jesus saved them, and extend that to humanity generally, though I could with some effort say that Jesus has saved me and may well save me again – I just wouldn’t mean by that what most Christians mean by it. It is sufficient for me that Jesus said “follow me” and that I attempt to do that. His disciples weren’t all that good at following him either, which gives me significant comfort!

And, of course, the formula is so identified with evangelical (meaning fundamentalist) Christianity that I would fight shy of it anyhow.

The trouble is, even though I hear the question as something like “are you a pedophile?” or, in England these days “are you a credulous fool?”, I cannot do what the writer of the facebook comment did and say “No”. With considerable reluctance, I have to accept that I am somewhere in the general mass of what has historically been called “Christianity”, even if that does not mean to me what someone asking me the question means by it. But then, I have to accept that I’m British, too, and that comes with a historical baggage which makes it an admission rather than a boast to a large proportion of the world population.

On James McGrath’s “Religion Prof” podcast is an interview with Douglas Estes, which talks of the intersection of technology with Christian belief (my link is to the second part).

Estes is more conservative than McGrath, and definitely far more conservative than I am. He talks, when discussing Revelation, of interpreting scripture in many ways, including metaphorical and symbolic, but when it comes to resurrection and the “New Jerusalem” plumps for a literal answer. This leads to the conclusion that, as on this view we will have new material bodies and will be living in the New Jerusalem which is located on earth (albeit, one assumes, a remade earth), we will also have technology. Including smart phones and roombas…

I find that a ludicrous image. I grant that if you accept Estes’ presuppositions, it’s a logical consequence of this view of the resurrection, and it’s a fascinating play with concepts – but to me, it means that at least one of the ideas on which the logic is based is wrong, and I strongly suspect that taking the passage literally is the best candidate. It’s a kind of reductio ad absurdum – the absurdity of the conclusion means that the premises of the argument are false.

Even before hearing this podcast, I was quite confident that the scripture (Revelation 21:9–27) was a visionary experience, and thus will have involved a substantial usage of symbols from the mind of the person who experienced it. As is probably appropriate, given Prof. McGrath’s interest in the intersection of Christianity and science fiction, it is best regarded as a vision of utopia. Estes’ vision of utopia, were he to construct one today, would probably include smart phones and roombas. Personally, I can’t construct a vision of utopia in which I can have any real belief  – not only am I confident that, as technology advances, the concept will change radically, but I am also extremely sceptical that any embodiment which might occur would be in a body which is anything remotely like the one I currently occupy (or, probably more accurately, a body which I am). Indeed, I recoil at trying to constuct any vision of utopia – too often, if you push the conception far enough, our utopias turn out to be dystopias…

It is fairly probable that the visionary in question was Jewish, and will therefore have been working with Jewish conceptions of what is possible – and the Jewish mind of the time (unlike the Greek) regarded non-material entities as needing to be embodied (Walter Wink gives an extended argument for this in “Naming the Powers”). Any conception of post-mortem existence will thus have had to be in a physical form, and the writer will not have had available to him various forms of technology in which we can now envisage the essence of “that which is us” being preserved, such as those who expect in due course that we will upload ourselves into the cloud. A similar line of thinking leads to the Jewish insistence that the particular is important, indeed often more important than the general, resulting in the Talmudic statement “He who saves one person, saves the world”.

In my own rather simplistic philosophical stance, I am inclined to something much like the Jewish position – for me, there is “stuff” and there is “pattern”. We don’t have access, ultimately to the “stuff”, although at a higher level we can distinguish between (for instance) a chair made of metal and one made of wood – there is no chair there absent the metal or the wood, but neither material is essential to there being a chair. If there is, post-mortem, something which can legitimately be called “me”, it will need to be the “me-pattern” expressed in some kind of stuff. At the moment, the “me pattern” is a biological entity, whereas if one day I could be uploaded to the cloud, the “me pattern” would need to be expressed in patterns of electrons. Personally, I question whether that would capture enough pattern to be regarded properly as “me”, but I could be surprised.

The concept of a set of patterns of humans resident in some way in a distributed sense over a lot of computers is, of course, a concept which I in the 21st century can just about get my head round, but would be totally inconceivable to a first century Jew. And similarly, what (if anything) awaits me post mortem is very likely to be as inconceivable to me now as the cloud (or, for that matter, a roomba) was to John of Patmos. But the scriptural picture we have which is supposed to represent that is in 1st century concepts… update it at your peril!

There has been some discussion in a group I belong to on facebook about this video from Tim Minchin, including quite a bit of suggestion that Minchin was being arrogant and bullying.

Oh dear. Let me preface this by saying that I’d dearly like divine healing to work, and I do pray for it on occasion. But I don’t believe it does, at least not in the simplistic sense which Minchin’s Sam was clearly suggesting. Even trying the conventional “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief”.

I have seen a few apparent cures myself (all for relatively minor ailments), but *massively* more cases of no cure at all. Notably, perhaps, none for anyone in my family or who I care about deeply.

There are, of course, all the factors Minchin mentions which can skew reports of cures, but above and beyond that, in order to say “God caused this to happen” we would need to see something at least approaching correlation, and we don’t. The results of attempts by scientists to demonstrate a statistically significant correlation are, to say the least, disappointing.

At best, one might say that perhaps, just perhaps, God might work *with* some other factor or factors, and without that (or them), nothing will happen. That is probably not, so far as I can see, the level of belief of the person cured or of those praying – I’ve seen too many cases of rock-solid belief producing nothing, and a few of at best lukewarm belief apparently producing a cure to accept that – and I don’t like that explanation for practical purposes, because it tends to end up with blaming the victim. (I will mention that a reasonably positive outlook of the sufferer does seem to have some effect in recuperation rates and perhaps on illnesses with a track record of remission, to be fair).

There is, of course, the possibility that what is needed is one or more human beings with a healing talent (possibly in combination). Some of my friends, mostly in the past, have been entirely convinced that this occurs (and some of those haven’t believed that prayer is of any assistance, but still report some positive results – or, of course, pray to “the wrong God”). I can’t say I’m convinced by that either, but if there is to be an effect at all, and if God is remotely reliable, some combination of people seems the only possible route.

Otherwise, if cures *are* the result of divine intervention, God is totally capricious and arbitrary. This is not what I understand God to be, but it may be that that is what is effectively being said. Were that to be the case, I would have to re-examine Gnosticism, and probably conclude that the interventionary God was the demiurge and so a created usurper of God’s position.

Back to Mr. Minchin. Yes, he comes over as somewhat arrogant, I suspect because “Sam” is not one incident but many – but what of “Sam”? He expects Minchin to be convinced of the existence of God on the basis of one hearsay report, assuming, possibly (and if so with little regard to knowledge of him), that Minchin is too polite to suggest that he may be mistaken or worse. And extremely ill-informed and/or gullible.

I’ve had a number of “Sams” talk to me in similar terms, and have some difficulty not giving them a piece of my mind, and I actually believe in God (for some value of the term, not including a supernatural theist one). What I actually do is concentrate on the positive; it’s great that X has been cured, let’s thank God for that (not sarcastically, like Minchin, but genuinely). And move on.

Back in my atheist days, I’d probably have been a LOT ruder than Minchin… but that was before a mystical experience left me with a compassion overload and over 50 years to mellow a bit.