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Inspiration, transmission and expectation

In my last post, I expressed some frustration with concepts of inspiration in scripture from the point of view of whether human language and concept structures could actually do justice to the content of the inspiration, and I want to develop that a little further.

Language is essentially a communication. There is a speaker or author and there is a listener or reader. What the recipient receives is not necessarily what the utterer has in mind (assuming, for a moment, that the utterer has anything remotely clear in mind, which is dubious taking the tack of my last post). In spoken English, trivial examples might be the joke exchange between two old ladies on a train:- “Is this Wembley?” No, it’s Thursday.” “So am I, let’s have a cup of tea”, or the apocryphal communication from the Western Front “Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance” becoming after many stages of passing via multiple mouths, brains and ears, “Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance”.

Monty Python satirises this in terms of the recording of the spoken word in the gospels in the “blessed are the cheesemakers” heard at the back of the crowd. This can be used to demonstrate one feature of hearing (or reading), that you tend to hear or read what you expect. “Blessed are the peacemakers” is not something you’d expect a Jewish resistance leader to say, so it becomes something else, if you think of Jesus as a Jewish resistance leader. In any case where you hear or read something very similar to something you already know, it tends to become what you already know (something I need to watch extremely carefully when proofreading) – take the widespread “Paris in the the spring” written in a triangle so the two “the”s are on different lines.

On the other hand, something which does actually strike home and is remembered particularly forcefully is when you do hear and register something which is novel and out of character. That, I think, is why we have the Sermon on the Mount rather than “blessed are the cheesemakers”.

I had to contend with this phenomenon a lot as a lawyer, dealing with eyewitness evidence. Eyewitness evidence of any reasonably complex situation was never straightforward; one person was adamant they had seen one thing, another had seen something completely different – and years of experience unpicking the stories led me to conclude that in general no-one was lying, they were faithfully recounting their memories. There was no getting behind the fact that that was how they had experienced what quite often was clearly not the case (from hard evidence such as CCTV or tire tracks). I made something of a speciality of weaving together the set of disparate stories and coming up with a plausible reason why each person had experienced what their testimony related, despite the fact being as I proposed, not as they proposed.

There is a clear application of these principles in the “quest for the historical Jesus”, although far more along the lines of the current “social memory” theorists than the formal rules of the Jesus Seminar.

Of course, in the case of people steeped in scripture (certainly in the cases of the gospel writers and, I think, Paul, the Septuagint Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures), there is a set of templates of expectation into which you can fit experience. Matthew, for instance, sees the story of Jesus overwhelmingly through the eyes of previous scripture, but all of the NT writers do to some extent – and they use different scriptures and different interpretations, making the task of a systematic theologian extremely difficult. Just as one example, I have been in the process of working through a set of scriptural supports for various atonement theories; I find that Paul’s use of the word “atonement” uses the template of the Maccabean martyrs in 4 Macc. 17:12-22. The writer of Hebrews, on the other hand, wishes to see Jesus’ death both as a replacement for the Levitical sin offering sacrifices and as the scapegoat of Leviticus 8; 1 Peter 2:24 picks up the second meaning. Those two concepts are somewhat inconsistent, as the sin offerings are slaughtered and burned (in part eaten), the scapegoat is driven out. They are fine as ways of looking at something, less fine if you try to extract from them a single deep meaning – at least, a single deep meaning which preserves more than a bare outline of what the originals actually are.

This fitting of experience into templates of expectation seems to me particularly strong when I look to compare my own mystical experience with the spiritual experience of, for instance, friends in the church whose trajectory has been via the template of evangelical conversion. I think that this is cognate experience, at least, if not necessarily identical – but it is very difficult to be sure. They know in advance the terms which are applicable, such as “filled with the Holy Spirit” and “slain in the Spirit”, and it has proved nearly impossible to get them to describe what their experience has been without that terminology, in non-religiously charged and non-specialist language. I can sympathise; it was extremely difficult for me to develop a description which actually conveyed something of the experience without using words and concepts previously laid down for me by others, and if I do describe it that way, it seems at the same time pedestrian and self-contradictory (how, for instance, can the sense of self at the same time expand towards the universal and be reduced to near-nonexistence?).

What we experience, in other words, tends to be what we expect to experience, or at least what we have language and concept structures for. I wouldn’t go quite as far as saying that our language and concept structures create our experiences, but they definitely modify them and constrain them. Where we have an experience which really doesn’t fit with our existing concept structures and language, we will tend to torture those concept structures and language until they are a better fit (as, I would argue, the New Testament writers were doing, and it may be that this fuels the torturing of language which I find typical of modern philosophers – that is to say most philosophers later than the 18th century).

Even then, I think it isn’t necessarily a good “fit”.

However, what would I expect if a God as reasonably commonly conceived looked to communicate directly with a human being, which is the basis of the concept of inspiration – at least, the scriptural form of it? I fancy I would expect two snippets from scripture to have “got is right”: Isaiah 55:8 ““For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD” and 1 Cor. 13:12 “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

I would expect some recipients to go mad, or babble incoherently (speaking in tongues?). I would expect some to keep to themselves what, in any attempt to express it, seemed totally inadequate. I would expect some to try to coin new language to express what they had experienced (which we see to an extent in, for instance, Paul coming up with neologisms). I would expect some to launch into a paradoxical and extremely allegorical rehashing of motifs in existing scripture (which I think we see in Revelation). I would expect some to twist meanings in existing scripture to produce new forms (which I think we see all over the Bible, not restricted to the NT, and in a lot of Rabbinic midrash, and which finds meanings in existing wordings which the original authors would not have dreamed existed). I would expect those with poetic gifts to speak or write metaphor, allegory and myth. Finally, I would expect some to write or speak in a way wholly incomprehensible to those around them (which might not be the same thing as babbling incoherently).

I would not expect anyone to come up with insights which were far removed from anything for which they had existing language or concept structures; their minds would just not contain the building blocks to construct these – though the poets would be likely to do best at this, talking around the insight rather than attempting to tackle it directly. Moreover, if anyone actually did overcome their internal constraints in a radical and sustained way, I would not expect their words to be remembered, or if written copied and circulated; you need readers and listeners who understand at least something of the contents as well as writers and speakers in order for communication to happen.

Some years ago, an internet acquaintance suggested to me that I took too pessimistic a view of God’s ability to communicate exactly what he wanted to communicate; I did not think God was sufficiently powerful to do this. This is not the case – what I think is that he took far too optimistic a view of man’s ability to understand what God communicates.

It may well be that God has been communicating everything we may ever need to know about life, the universe and everything, and that we have not yet got to the stage of being able to understand it. We may never get there, but we can, I think, build steadily on the shoulders of those who have had a stab at it previously.

In fact, central to peak mystical experiences (including mine) is the feeling that, for a moment, you do understand everything – and as soon as the moment passes, you don’t. Maybe that’s a correct feeling?

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Inspiration and language

I am regularly frustrated by people saying that scripture is inspired (which I have no real problem in accepting, with some modest reservations) and then going on to say that it must therefore be literally true, or “inerrant” or something of that kind, or that we can consider the written results to be something approaching divine dictation.

I have a certain amount of experience of inspiration, both of the variety experienced by mystics and in some other fields. I have, for instance, felt musical inspiration (rarely), artistic inspiration (more often, but little of late), and once or twice comedic or performance inspiration. All of these seem to me to have a certain amount of similarity, but the greatest, to me at least, is the mystical.

It can, indeed, at times feel as if an intelligence entirely distinct from you is just using you to channel things which you could not remotely have said or done by yourself. In the case of the mystical experience, it very definitely feels as though an intelligence distinct from yourself is to a great extent in control of the situation. I do, however, question whether that feeling is actually correct. For instance, I am well used to engaging my subconscious, often by leaving some question for my subconscious to deal with without actually consciously thinking about it for a few minutes, an hour or two, overnight or, sometimes, for a few days, and then to have a well-developed answer pop into my consciousness without the slightest indication that anything has been happening in relation to that question in the meantime. I’m pretty confident that my subconscious is a lot cleverer than my conscious!

I cannot, therefore, guarantee to myself that any of these occurrences have been more than just engaging the subconscious entirely in parallel with the conscious for a change, with the two working together towards the same end (a fairly unusual occurrence, and one which just did not happen at all for most of the period 1996-2013 for me, probably closely connected with my clinical depression over that period).

The one which is problematic here, though, is the mystical experience, the experience which feels as if it were direct unmeditated contact with God (and that’s my best answer as to what it actually is!). In this, it is somewhere between horribly difficult and totally impossible to give anything remotely like a coherent, logical, detailed account of what has happened, or of the information which has been conveyed (and there is definitely an information content). This applies whether or not the trick of calling for the subconscious to work it’s magic behind closed doors in the backroom of my mind, too. Oh, it is perfectly coherent and understandable at the time – but less so afterwards, when I stop and try to piece together an account. I’ve sat down and written about these experiences lots of times, and every time I’m left thinking “well, that’s partly right, but it doesn’t remotely do justice to it, and actually gives something of the wrong impression”. I’ve read a lot of writings by various mystics (and some poets, philosophers, theologians or scientists) which have a lot of the right feeling about them, which seem to be saying the right thing – but in part only, and then giving an at least somewhat misleading impression. At best, some writing may catch exactly one aspect of the experience, while missing other aspects completely.

Here, I think, is my difficulty with those who put forward scripture as being not only inspired, but also as being readily understood. My experience of actual communication from God, assuming this is what the mystical experience is, is that it is just not susceptible to being written of in a way which is both readily understood and entirely correct. I rather suspect that the human brain is incapable of grasping the fullness of the experience except while it is going on (and is therefore augmented, as it seems to me), and (which may well be the major reason for that first suspicion) that human language and concept structures are inadequate to express it in more than a “through a glass, darkly” manner.

But then, why would I expect the human brain to be able to grasp this, or that human language and concepts would be adequate to contain it?

Perhaps the most successful attempt to do this use paradox; Taoism, Zen Buddhism, Sufism and the Eastern Orthodox tradition of mystical theology are notable for this, for example. At least these traditions tend to avoid the simple making of a direct statement which is at least in part wrong, as they immediately offer an opposite or radically different parallel statement as also being correct.

I fancy I am seeing something of the same attempt made in the chain of philosophers from Kant (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger e al) who tend to invent new language and concepts in order to attempt to do justice to that which is; I am on the whole unconvinced that they are successful. This continues in (for instance) Derrida and Caputo, who play with language and twist it into new ways of expressing things. Perhaps they are successful, if only I could see well enough through the word-games, but I fancy they are battling against something which will forever escape any full and accurate expression.

If that something is God, it seems to me entirely appropriate that it should forever escape full and accurate expression. How, after all, can the partial encompass the whole?

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Purgatory, Nietzsche and Groundhog Day

Inasmuch as my various mystical experiences have given me any really clear picture, perhaps the clearest has been one of judgment. I saw judgment as, in reunion with God, becoming conscious (in a timeless moment) of all I had done in my life to that point from both sides, that is to say from my own part and from that of those with whom I had interacted. Needless to say, this was not a comfortable experience. It might have been an intolerable one had it not been for the simultaneous assurance of love and forgiveness, which might be called “salvation”, I suppose. The implication might be that this is an eternal consciousness, as it is God’s consciousness of me.

It links in well, I think, with Richard Beck’s concepts of purgatory. Prof Beck is an universalist, working from the point of view of theories about God and a close reading of scripture. I go along with all he says, but have also had this vision of that universal reconciliation; the only small caveat I have had is that I think for some few people the pain of the kind of vision I sketched out above, extended to a timeless eternity, might be too hard to contemplate, to bear, to accept. For them, perhaps eternal separation or annihilation may be the only answer. The Theologia Germanica says “Nothing burns in Hell save self-will; therefore it has been said ‘put of your self-will and there will be no Hell’ “. For some, there may not be anything but self-will left. This, incidentally, works well with twelve-step, in which “self will is at the root of all our defects of character”.

I’ve been listening over the last few days to a set of lectures by the late Rick Roderick, to which I was pointed by an article from 2009 on Homebrewed Christianity. One of these dealt with the “Eternal Recurrence”, which Nietzsche saw, I think, as an encouragement to reinvent yourself really well. The idea is that you are fated to relive your life, endlessly repeating it, exactly the same as you live this one.

If I needed a nastier concept than an eternal consciousness of my failings, this is it. Perhaps Nietzsche was describing a consciousness similar to mine, perhaps he had a glimpse further than I have had. I hope not, that we are not in fact fated to an eternal Groundhog Day, but without the slim possibility of breaking out of the cycle which the film offers.

I don’t think so; the ecstasy of union is probably enough to outweigh anything, and I think this picture requires a greater sense of self, of self-will than is possible. Self-will does, after all, burn…

In passing, is it just me, or could Rick Roderick be Slavoj Zizek’s long lost twin, brought up in West Texas?

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Dawkins and Downs

I saw the first facebook mention of Richard Dawkins’ recent comment about it being (potentially) immoral not to abort a Downs Syndrome foetus and winced. For a very bright guy, occasionally Dawkins shows all the mental acumen of the average flea.

Firstly, a Twitter message is clearly entirely inadequate to do justice to the moral implications of the situation. I’m not sure the several additional messages and articles which have appeared following that tweet are adequate either, but a tweet is just blatantly a stupid way of doing this.

Secondly, within his own rationale (of reducing suffering), he was unable to arrive at the conclusion he did on the basis of the information available. He didn’t know enough about the circumstances.

Thirdly, he seems to have ignored the testimony of very many parents of Downs Syndrome children and of those who know Downs Syndrome people, which should have led him to question his blanket assumption that they were likely to suffer. In fact, on the evidence I have (which is also inadequate), it seems to me that a majority of Downs Syndrome children lead very happy, if tragically short, lives.

However, a principal reason why I winced was that I anticipated the storm of comment likely to emerge from conservative Christian voices. I needed only to wait for Sunday, and a sermon in which this was mentioned. This thing was, the preacher added that in a way he respected Dawkins for following his atheism to it’s rational conclusion, whereas so many atheists didn’t. His assumption, of course (shared by the vast majority of his congregation) was that any Christian would know that this was just wrong. Not necessarily wrong because of any consideration of the life quality of a Downs Syndrome person, but because abortion is just wrong in every case. Wrong because it is forbidden to kill another human being, and because a foetus is another human being.

It is not clear to me that the general course of Christianity historically has held this, far less the previous course of Judaism. It is correct to say that from a very early stage, Christianity generally has frowned on all forms of preventing new life arising from sexual relations, but the rationale for this has not historically been avoidance of killing, but the transmission of human life as a primary purpose of the sacrament of marriage. The focus was, therefore, on banning contraception until the mid 20th century. This is not, I think, now the majority position within Christianity, although it is still the declared position of the Catholic Church. Abortion, of course, was a somewhat aggravated case of contraception from the point of view of the Church.

I do not think, given the current overpopulation of the planet, that Christianity should be advocating for unlimited increase of humanity any more.

As the tenor of thinking in society generally shifted in favour of planned parenthood, abortion became the touchstone, but in conservative protestant churches on the alternative ground that it was the killing of another human being. This required a shift of thinking, as prior to then, a foetus had only generally been regarded (as were sperm) as a potential human being. Indeed, if you go back to (say) the Middle Ages, it is uncertain whether the church generally regarded under age children as being fully human beings; various states had “lesser crimes” of infanticide for small children, for instance, and children still lack many of the same rights or privileges attaching to adults more or less everywhere. An abortion, in other words, was wrong, but a far lesser wrong than was murder.

It has thus become an entirely tenable position within modern Liberal Christianity that, in certain circumstances, abortion is permissible; indeed, a major factor in decision making should be the alleviation of suffering (just as Dawkins proposed) both of the anticipated child, if born, and of the mother.

As it happens, as a result of my panentheism, I do think that abortion is always a wrong, as it results in the death of a living organism. I do, however, see a spectrum rather than a somewhat arbitrary fixed line, so it is also a wrong to kill a sperm (but a far lesser wrong), and it becomes progressively more wrong as a foetus progresses towards birth. But then, I also see it as a wrong to kill any living thing (a wrong which I commit on occasion, including euthanising pets who are in extreme pain and swatting insects, and which is extremely frequently committed on my behalf, bearing in mind that I eat meat – though vegetables are also alive…). I am not convinced that we draw the line between permissible and absolutely wrong in the right place. Indeed, I am not completely sure that a line should be drawn on one side of which is an absolute.

Of course, in point of fact, most laws in ostensibly Christian countries allow (and have allowed since the earliest Christian country) the killing of even adult human beings in some cases; self defence or the prevention of serious harm to others, for instance, war (which I massively disapprove of, though I’m not necessarily a pacifist – yet) or, in some places, as a punishment for offenders (which I might countenance only on the basis that it’s a better option than life in some prisons, and then as an option offered to the prisoner). There are even a few prominent Christian voices supporting voluntary euthanasia in some extreme cases, to reduce suffering (using, so far as I can see, the same “social hedonism” utilitarian argument which Dawkins was using). In Christianity, therefore, the killing of even another human being is at most a wrong which can be outweighed by a greater wrong.

Why not in the case of abortion? It clearly cannot be because killing is always an absolute wrong, because that is not what Christianity has historically held or what conservative Christianity holds now. Is it, perhaps, because it involves the killing of “an innocent”? How can it be, given that conventional Christianity has the concept of “original sin”, and there are therefore arguably no innocents anyhow?

The answer, I think, does not lie in logical argument. In fact, it lies in an emotional revulsion to using logical argument in the case of the taking of human life. I feel this myself (for any readers who wish to take exception to my argument, rest assured that I can echo Peter Rollins and say that I may offend them, but hey, I offend myself as well). I don’t think this is something for which we can find an answer in logic (although we may well find it in evolutionary biology). I have never killed another human being myself, but having at times spent significant amounts of time with soldiers (courtesy of being a Civil Defence Scientific Advisor) I know both that they more or less unanimously attest that there is something viscerally different about killing another human, something with a deep emotional impact which surprised some of them, and that meeting people for the first time, one of the questions everyone wants to ask (although some are hesitant to do so) is “have you ever killed someone?”.

Dawkins, in other words, was going to places which we are typically both fascinated by and repulsed by, and seemed unmoved by that. That isn’t the hallmark of an atheist, it’s the hallmark of someone who is intellectually brave. There have been plenty of intellectually brave Christian thinkers, and sometimes their logical excursions produce stomach-churning results too (and I’m thinking of Calvin’s predestination here).

Or maybe the intellectually foolish. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between brave and foolish.

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Have you understood nothing?

There is an article in New Scientist by a couple of eminent professors, one of Hebrew Bible and one of New Testament, dealing with a variety of leaders of Christian groups who ascribe the Ebola epidemic to a divine punishment.

I have absolutely no time for people who do this, and still less for people who do it and then fail to render assistance to those who are suffering because “it is God’s will”. I agree with everything the writers say, in fact.

But I am surprised that neither of them marshals specific arguments from the traditions they teach. Where, for instance, is the reference to the book of Job (by either of them) in which, inter alia, Job is afflicted with a number of diseases through absolutely no fault of his own, and his “friends” who suggest that this is divine punishment for him secretly having been a bad lad are roundly criticised by God? Where is the reference by Candida Moss to John 9:3, in which Jesus says “neither this man nor his parents sinned” in response to his disciples asking why a man had been born blind?

I rather suspect the authors of the Fourth Gospel of having minimised the acerbity of Jesus’ comment here; this was, after all, someone who consorted with all the kinds of people whom the ilk of leaders who make these remarks regard as “undeserving”, i.e. with agents of a foreign invader, members of despised religions, extorters of taxes, prostitutes and other sinners, and who healed profligately and in circumstances distinctly frowned on by the religious authorities of the day. He was quite commonly acerbic with those religious leaders, and (particularly in Mark) not terribly polite to his disciples when they failed to understand things (Peter being told “get thee behind me, Satan” springs to mind).

I can easily insert words which the Jesus of my understanding may have said and which have been left out here, such as “have you understood NOTHING?”

And that is pretty much my response to any leader describing himself as Christian who makes such crass remarks.

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What difference did Jesus make, after all?

Enthused by Mark Sandlin, who is running a series of posts about how he finds it difficult to live with a variety of Christian doctrines (which you may translate as “about ways in which he is a heretic”, and some of his commentators do), I feel like tackling a point which has been exercising my mind for a while.

You could word it as “was Jesus unique?”, but that doesn’t get to the heart of it. The heart of it, it seems to me, is the thought that, without Jesus, no-one could be “saved” (Jn. 3:16-18, 14:6 and several other verses). The subtext of that is that by being born, living, dying on the cross and being resurrected, Jesus changed the possibility of relationship between man and God in a fundamental way. Putting it much more directly, in Jesus, God made it possible for himself to save people (whether from Satan, sin, death, Hell or some other suboptimal result), whereas without him, God could not do that.

I seem to find this idea underneath the thinking of quite a lot of otherwise fairly progressive, even postmodern Christians who I read. Jesus has to be doing something that no-one else could do. Well, isn’t that the message of the two passages from John above? John 3:18 reads, after all, “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” Some of these have apart from this belief-sets which are very congenial to me, but still insist on this point. Among other things, it seems to me that this makes interfaith dialogue extremely difficult.

It seems to me that this species of uniqueness cannot be the case.

Firstly, if (which I do not personally accept, but which most of those with this mindset do) God is omnipotent, it is self-evident that God could save people however and whenever he wanted, and as a general rule has done exactly that, according to scripture more generally. It makes a mockery of the repeated divine statements that he will save Israel, for instance, if he actually condemns them for not having accepted Jesus (in many cases, because they died before Jesus was even born), e.g. Is. 43:1-13. It contradicts, I think, Paul’s argument in Romans 4:1-8, which not only suggests that at least Abraham has “saved” status without reliance on Jesus, but also refers to David’s words in Ps. 32:1, which do not make sense unless God is indeed counting righteous, and therefore saving, the undeserving, some centuries before Christ.

Secondly if (which I definitely believe) God is omnibenevolent, it seems to me inconceivable that he would leave it so late to institute this system of salvation, likewise restrict it to people who needed to do something. If you accept “sola gratia”, John’s passages seem doubly difficult to accept when taken in the usual reading.

Thirdly, though (and for me this is the clincher from an objective point of view), this mindset requires that you think that God got things wrong when setting out various schemes of salvation earlier than the New Testament. I grant that Paul’s argument in Rom. 1-8 does seem to indicate this on the normal reading (not so much so on the New Perspective” readings), but this is to me a prominent reason for thinking that the normal, Martin Luther reading is flawed.

I admit that I do not understand a divine perspective which requires belief (which quite a lot of people of my acquaintance are entirely unable to have) in order to save someone, entirely independently of what they do, who they are and how they behave.

There is a fourth reason, which weighs heaviest with me, however, which is that as I have a personal experience of God as radically omnipresent, as in everyone and everything, the concept of cutting off any person for any reason whatsoever is not something which I can contemplate God doing, even if s/he could (and I do not think s/he could without going against his/her nature). This has to stem from creation itself (see some of my earlier posts) and cannot, therefore, change due to a single historical event.

What clearly can change, and did, is the thinking of what is now cumulatively a very large number of people, and is arguably still a very substantial proportion of the population of the earth (larger still if you consider that Islam venerates Jesus as the prophet Isa). The story of Jesus changed the thinking of a group of early Christians in eastern Anatolia who produced the writers of the Fourth Gospel, including at least one Christ-mystic, for instance, and who could not contemplate being in the relationship they now saw themselves in with God save for the life, death and resurrection of Christ. It changed the thinking of a first century Pharisee who had an ecstatic experience on the Damascus road making him a Christ-mystic and who changed his name to Paul. It has changed the thinking of billions of people in the various Christian and Christian-derived churches and religious bodies over the last two millennia.

And, of course, it has changed me. Jesus is unique to me, as he has been unique to those billions. I can’t say that Jesus figured in my initial ecstatic mystical experience, nor in the several I have had since; as far as I can conceive, these have been unmediated experiences of the One God, which makes me a God-mystic. He has figured in a number of other experiences I have had resulting from Ignatian directed prayer, but those have been as a result of definite effort on my part to think in the Ignatian mould; although these too could be described as “mystical”, they have not been so powerful or so transformative.

However, when it comes to how I should act, there, Jesus is most definitely the boss, the exemplar. He is also, to me, the ideal of someone who was a God-mystic.

But I don’t think his life, his death or his post-mortem appearances made any difference to who God saved. What it did was make a difference to whether a very many people knew themselves to be saved, knew themselves to be beloved of God.

 

 

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Hancock, Superman and Israel

This may be just another piece of fun. Then again…

I got to thinking recently about a few things put together: the film “Hancock”, Larry Niven’s short story “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” and Israeli excuses for civilian casualties in Gaza.

“Hancock” features a drunk, depressed superhero who overdoes even the simplest attempts to use his powers, particularly in the beginning of the film. “Man of Steel…” discusses the immense problems faced by Superman in having sex with Lois Lane. Israel, of course, says that it is extremely difficult to avoid civilian casualties when trying to kill terrorists who are moving among a civilian population – dodging the issue that they are using weapons built to cause major damage in an area rather than more surgical means (or, indeed, just not trying to kill anyone where there are a load of civilians around). The first two are comedies, the third is the antithesis of comedy.

In all these cases, the issue is of someone who possesses immense power, but is unable to moderate it or apply it in a minutely controlled manner in order to prevent damage which is not desirable.

However, there was a fourth thing in my mind at the time (and actually, it was the first thing which I was thinking about), that being the issues I have with omnipotence, and why, if God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, the world is still full of things happening like – well – Gaza. The usual argument (with which I tend to agree) is that you can’t have all three of these at the same time, and if anything has to give it’s not omnibenevolence, i.e. God’s love for everyone (and everything). I’m usually fairly happy to dispense with omnipotence and omniscience.

But here’s the thought – maybe God does have the kind of omnipotent power which can speak an universe into existence (as is one interpretation of Genesis 1). Maybe he can even manage the rather greater fine tuning needed to stop the rotation of the earth while simultaneously temporarily cancelling the inertia of the earth and everything on it, and then reversing the process, as in Joshua 10, where the sun stands still in the sky at the siege of Jericho (in a literalist interpretation), or the (by those standards) additional delicacy of touch of parting the Red Sea – but that’s as fine as it gets. Maybe, if he tried to (for instance) create me a parking space in response to prayer, the best he could manage would be a whirlwind which would destroy the supermarket I was planning to visit, killing most of those in it as well as shifting a few cars?

Perhaps this is just a ridiculous suggestion. If it is, though, it’s probably because omnipotence is a ridiculous concept.

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God feels for you…

A lot of theologians these days are talking about an interpretation of God which does not see him as a kind of superhero (as I criticised recently). John Caputo talks of the “weakness of God”, Peter Rollins talks of abandoning the concept of the “big other” and suggests that the message is that we are all broken, not that God will fix it, process theologians such as John Cobb talk of a relational God who involves himself with humanity but does not control.

It’s nice to feel one is not alone!

Now, I am a man. I suffer from the age-old problem that when you come to a man with a problem, he will either tell you how he thinks you can fix it or he’ll offer to fix it himself – and this does not improve communication with women, who, when they bring a problem to you most often want you to sympathise with them, to enter into their pain, to be present for them. It’s taken me a lot of years of marriage to get this idea into my thick skull, and I still not infrequently revert to type and start suggesting solutions to my wife, which proves not to be what she was looking for.

This breed of theologians, however, are now talking of a theology of the cross in which God is seen as entering into the suffering of the world, demonstrating that he is not in fact the unmoved mover, the unfeeling omnipotent one moving human pieces around for some cosmic purpose (in much traditional theology, the purpose being to become able to forgive humanity). It’s the kind of image which I talk about in connection with Matt. 25:31-46, in which I see God as being damaged when we cause or allow damage to any other human being – “What you did not do for them, you did not do for me”.

This is very much the kind of response to problems which women, rather than men, tend to gravitate to.

So, it occurs to me that there is a fault in what I’ve written so far – when I’ve mentioned God, I’ve used the term “he”. In relationships, it looks very much as if God is more female than male – so I should perhaps have been using the term “she”. “Verily, God is our mother” as Julian of Norwich (a woman) wrote some 500 years ago.

God is with us in all of our pain and suffering, and she feels for us in this; she does not come and offer us a “quick fix” or offer to fix it for us (at least, on the whole).

Theologians having been mostly men, it is maybe not too surprising that it’s taken the best part of 2000 years for them to start thinking of God in terms which are more female than male, as something other than a big man in the sky. In quite a lot of cases, they still can’t bring themselves to think that way.

I feel their pain, just as God does in her infinite wisdom…

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A different Kingdom

I’ve just read “May (the end of) your Kingdom come”, a blogpost from early 2012 from Bo Sanders at Homebrewed.

Interesting (and there are some interesting comments as well).

Now, I’m very keen on the Kingdom as a motif. I think it represents the absolute centre of Jesus’ message – it’s probably the individual most-used term in Jesus’ teachings in the Synoptic Gospels. I’ve written before about my own mystical take on part of what Jesus might have been getting at. I don’t remotely think that post deals with the whole ramifications of what can be gleaned from the Kingdom statements; one major aspect which is missed there, for instance, is the countercultural, subversive aspect, setting up the Kingdom of God (or Heaven) in opposition to the Empire of Caesar, an aspect which melds very well with the Girardian concept of atonement as breaking with the pattern of redemptive violence, which I think is a very valuable addition to the historical list of atonement theories.

But I worry about Bo’s thinking. It isn’t at all what “kingdom” has historically conjured up for me, and I really don’t like the concept that it might bring in thinking of God’s reign as being imperial and oppressive, as he suggests. This would be doing what his partner at Homebrewed, Tripp Fuller once described in a podcast (mid 2012) as “Caesar’s editors got hold of the Jesus story and they rendered unto God the things which were Caesar’s, namely omnipotence, empire by coercion, cross building and totalitarian ideologies”. This is not the picture I have at all, even though I’ve come across people wanting to translate “Kingdom of God” as “God’s Imperial Rule”, at which I shudder.

Thinking about it, though, it seems to me that a particular view of kings and kingdoms is part of the American myth of origins: the revolution occurred “in order to get away from the tyrannical reign of the Kings of England”, in particular George III. This part of the myth is particularly mythic, as by this point in English history it was no longer possible for a king to rule tyrannically (that had been settled by the English Civil war and the later “Glorious Revolution”); the actions complained of were very much those of parliament and the prime ministers of the day, but the picture of “the King” does seem to stick, and there are plenty of examples of absolute monarchs in history to draw upon. Parliament was, of course, elected – but not by a franchise which included the colonists, thus the cry of “no taxation without representation”.

I, however, grew up in the United Kingdom (note the word “Kingdom” here) and have lived my whole life in a kingdom in which the monarch is symbolic rather than having any real power, let alone any absolute power; Queen Elizabeth II models a monarch as servant representative of the people, and such influence as she exerts is persuasive rather than coercive. This is very much the model on which the surviving European monarchies are based as well, so it isn’t particularly unrepresentative. That said, monarchies outside Europe (and I’m thinking mostly of the Middle East) still tend to the repressive and coercive. Britain isn’t a perfect example of what a Christ-like kingdom should be (we’d have to do something radical about parliament and the bureaucracy to achieve that), but it’s queen is to my mind a good example of what a Christ-like ruler should be.

So I’m fairly comfortable with “kingdom” terminology, particularly as (as is mentioned in the comments to Bo’s post) virtually every English translation uses the term. I find problems with pretty much every possible alternative as well, so I’ll stick with the word. But I may take a little time to explain for my US readers that what I mean is nothing like the picture they have of the kingdom of George III!

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Doing without Superman

On my more snarky days, I’m prone to saying that God does not wear his knickers outside his tights, by which I mean that any concept of God which I can come up with which is vaguely realistic (i.e. does not conflict with my experience and knowledge of the experience of others) is not a kind of Superman, a god-like person with abilities beyond the normal ones who rushes in to save people. But I don’t think God is a superhero, nor anything like a superhero.

This is a pity, because I’m a sucker for fantasy literature. I particularly like tales of superheroes, people with paranormal powers, but I’m also into morality fantasy where somehow or other, through some magical power or godly intervention, the seeming underdog comes out on top over the forces of evil and oppression. I also like fantasy which develops some kind of system of magic which, in the fantasy world portrayed, actually works. I would very much like to think that we live in a world where the underdog will always triumph, and where in the darkest hour the hero (or deity) intervenes to save me.

The trouble is, nothing I have ever experienced inclines me to believe that that is the way the world actually works. Granted, I have seen some strange things and heard some stranger tales from people who I would very much like to think were not the subjects of wishful thinking and some of the common cognitive biases, but frankly the naturalistic explanation always seems to be the most probable.

At least, it does when talking about any physical effects. When talking about events within the consciousness of individuals, things are rather different. There, I have huge personal reason to believe that some power, presence, entity or – well – something exists which is benevolent towards everyone and everything, extremely powerful (at least in transforming individual consciousness), omnipresent in the radical sense that everything which is, is within this something, not subject to time in the normal way and is capable of delivering to me more information than my mind is capable of absorbing. It seems to me that this something does intervene in the lives of some people (at a minimum, me, as that’s all I have personal experience of, but looking at the testimony of others, not by any means just me), and that it intervenes on occasion (but fairly rarely) without their willing it or wanting it. Mostly, people who describe experiences like some of those I have had call this something “God”, so unless talking with major league sceptics (in which case I tend to use the figure [   ], for a box which can contain a three letter label, which label might be “GOD”, but doesn’t have to be) I go with the flow.

The last paragraph contains most of the elements of what it is that is [   ] of which I am reasonably confident. You can add to that, however, the observation that transforming contact with [   ] does not seem to me something which can be reliably worked towards, let alone obtained via some formula along the lines of “do these things, and then this happens”. In addition, it is necessary to surrender to the experience in order for it to “get off the ground”, to stop analysing it as it happens, to lay aside all preconceptions and formulae. While I did for a significant time arrive at the position where that contact was pretty much “available on demand”, what was actually available on demand was the stilling of the conscious mind and the surrender of the will in radical acceptance. This gave conditions in which it seemed to me that it was highly probable (at least) that contact would be felt. I’m working on getting back to that at the moment.

Now, this may be a “supernatural” aspect. I don’t think of it that way, but it’s a possibility. Other than that, however, I’m afraid I can’t bring myself to trust that anything supernatural will ever occur (which doesn’t stop me hoping from time to time). This has sometimes proved to be a difficulty with people with whom I’ve been in dialogue about scripture, who often can’t initially see that it can mean anything to me. However, where I can continue beyond this point (setting it on one side “for the moment”) I’ve usually found that it isn’t actually the supernatural occurrence in a bible story which those I’m talking to find important; what they find important is the spiritual subtext, the nonliteral meaning (or meanings) which can be extracted – and we can then talk about those sensibly, and not uncommonly agree. This has in the past enabled me to conduct productive bible study sessions in which I have agreed interpretations with complete Biblical literalist inerrantists, to their considerable surprise.

And yet, we still end up coming back to the sticking point that they think something supernatural actually happened, and I don’t, and they don’t want to let go of insisting that something supernatural happened and that I really need to believe that it did. On occasion, a particularly well-natured dialogue partner of this stance has allowed me to conduct an extremely respectful cross-examination of them, ending up with a motive. That motive, it turns out, is always that if nothing supernatural happened then, then nothing supernatural is going to happen now either – and they want to be able to continue to believe in that.

They want to believe that superman may come and save them, in other words. Words far too snarky for me to ever use to their faces, but that’s the crux of it. Not only that, but they commonly see me not being able to believe it as somehow diminishing the possibility that it might. This is even more of a pity than it is that I actually can’t bring myself to believe it, as I am comfortable with the situation and they aren’t.

You may realise that what I have been doing here is to propose something akin to an “operational definition” of the belief in Biblical miracles, i.e. how does the occurrence or non-occurence of a single supernatural event 2000 years ago affect what we do (and what can therefore be observed and quantified) today, proposing that in fact it doesn’t – and indeed, within that framework, it is difficult to see how it would. However, unless you are a cessationist (and I have no idea how a cessationist would react here), the occurrence of a supernatural event then makes it more possible to think that there might be a supernatural event now.

This is even more pronounced when it comes to the resurrection. Now, I also can’t bring myself to believe in a physical resurrection of the “reanimation” kind (which is what my more conservative brethren want me to believe in). Granted, they will concede that there was not a straightforward reanimation (which, of course, is slightly indicated by an empty tomb) but insist that the actual physical remains were transformed into something different, something which actually could enter closed rooms other than through the door, appear and disappear at will and be in widely separated places at virtually the same time, all of which I see as pointing at apparition rather than anything they would admit as being resurrection. Of all possible explanations of the gospel accounts, treating them for a moment as absolutely accurate, written immediately after the event eyewitness testimony (which they aren’t, of course), I consider apparition to be the most likely, granted that there then has to be some undocumented reason why the tomb was empty, again taking that as accurate eyewitness testimony.

Again, taken as a single historical miracle, I suggest that it is not possible to see any difference in what we actually do based on belief in on the one hand a reanimation-style resurrection and on the other an apparition-style resurrection. However, in practice I get even more pushback on this point than I do on the issue of miracles generally. The following gentle process of cross-examination reveals that to accept that it is viable for me that the accounts were as apparitions reduces people’s confidence that they will themselves eventually be resurrected in a body. Or, indeed, survive death at all.

It seems that personal survival, to some of them, equates to inhabiting a physical body. This is a very old concept, as much of first century Judaism lacked the concept of soul separable from the body, and it also has a strong resonance with modern concepts in biology in which the self, the consciousness is an epiphenomenon or emergent property of the body (or, more specifically, the central nervous system, in particular the brain). That said, there is current talk about the possibility of mapping and storing the personality and memories and “downloading” them into another form, which smacks more of the concept of a soul.

What body, though? I’m currently 60, and due to normal wear and tear plus some rather bad treatment I’ve given my body over the years, I am not in the best possible health. If I had to be resurrected in a body, frankly I’d prefer the one I had at (say) 25 to the one I’m likely to have when I die. However, I’d settle for my brain being pretty much as it is now – I wouldn’t want to ditch the last 35 years worth of memories, for instance, even though 15 years or more of them were ones I wouldn’t have wished on myself had I foreseen them. But what if the brain has deteriorated by the time I die?

Conservative friends would say that this would be a perfected body. Would it then be a perfected mind as well? (If the epiphenomenon or emergent property concepts are correct, it would have to be). If it were a “perfected” mind, would it then genuinely be “my” mind? I have memories of my Twelve Step sponsor scoffing when I worried that when at Steps 4 to 7 I took inventory of my defects of character and asked God to remove these, if that indeed happened there would be no character left. “What’s to lose?” he asked, grinning.

To me, these are really idle musings. An element of certain of my mystical experiences leaves me with a degree of confidence that the brief flashes of consciousness of union with God are a pale shadow of what is likely to happen at my death, and thoughts of a physical body or the continuation of a truly individual consciousness after that point are irrelevant. I find it difficult to see how an individual consciousness could actually survive full union, to be honest. If it did, anything thereafter would be a disappointment. On this point, however, my trust in a benevolent God is absolute – whatever happens will be right and good – and beyond my capacity at the moment to do anything more than muse idly about. There are more important things by far, such as discerning God’s will for me in the here and now and carrying that out.

Whatever it is that God, or [   ] actually is…