Eyre Lines

In “The Idolatry of God” and in some of his other work, the philosopher-theologian Peter Rollins makes use of Jacques Lacan’s concept of the “mirror stage” in child development to indicate that at a very early stage of our development (between 6 and 18 months) we first become aware of a distinction between ourselves and the “other”, that this represents the inception of the sense of self. In two recent posts,  “The Fall and Rise of Original Sin” and “Falling further”, I developed a reading of Genesis 2 & 3 which saw Original Sin as being in substance the self-centredness and self-seeking which stems inevitably from the development of this sense of self, which agrees well with Rollins conception. Quoting from the Alcoholics Anonymous book “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions”, “The chief activator of our defects has been self-centered fear—primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded.” What AA describes as “character defects” I think we can reasonably call “original sin”.

I’m currently reading Richard Beck’s latest book, “The Slavery of Death”, which I picked up after writing the previous posts. Beck, interestingly, starts with a reading of Genesis 2 & 3 from the perspective of the Orthodox Church which sees death as originating in this story (which I don’t) but then equates the fear of death with original sin, and as the effective power of the devil; he goes on to develop this concept. He quotes the Orthodox theologian John Romanides’ “Ancestral Sin” in saying “Any perceived threat automatically triggers fear and uneasiness. Fear doers not allow a man to be perfected in love… Being under the sway of death and not having real and correct faith in God, man is anxious over everything and is ruled by selfish bodily and psychological motives and, thus, he is unable to love unselfishly and freely. He loves and has faith according to what he percieves to be to his own advantage… Thus, he is deprived of his original destiny and is off the mark spiritually. In biblical language, these failures and deviations are called sins. The fountain of man’s personal sin is the power of death that is in the hands of the devil and in man’s own willing submission to him.”

I note, however, that death is the ultimate threat to the self, so with the reservation that I think the sense of self and fear for loss of any part of what is regarded as “the self” is more fundamental even than the fear of death (and gives rise to it) I can follow on with Becks other arguments. I’m certainly with him in not considering that it is necessary to posit a personal embodiment of sin and evil in order to call this self-centred sin diabolical, something of the devil; personally I do not find the concept of an anthropomorphic personification of evil to be useful, but others may do so.

Beck goes on to discuss the conception of evil in the world developed by William Stringfellow and Walter Wink (inter alia) as being the Powers and Authorities; all groupings, ideologies and systems in the world are identifiable as the physical expressions (at the least) of what can be regarded as spiritual powers, and pursues the concept that inasmuch as we give our allegiance to such human structures, whether these be employers, political parties or ideologies, football clubs, governments or even churches we are giving our allegiance to effectively diabolical powers which are, in effect, giving ourselves over to the power of death (as all such structures will end, i.e. die, and also their demands are inimical to us living our own lives for ourselves and our loved ones, and so these allegiances become a partial death.

At this point I need to recap on one of the fundamental aspects of the mystical experience through which I inevitably see existence, that of the disintegration of the boundary between self and other, between self and God. This has a number of results – firstly, I am unable to see others as in any real sense separate from me, and thus the mechanism which Rollins posits of the fundamental drive being to exert control of the other ceases to have real effect, insofar as I remain in contact with the mystical experience. That which is me, the self, can and does expand to include all those around me, or all people of my town, my area or my country, or all of humanity, or all living things, or all that exists inclusive of such part of that-which-is-God which is not immanent in all of those more restricted categories.

Seeing this from the point of view put forward by Rollins/Lacan, this viewpoint relieves me of the need to seek some external object which will give satisfaction, which will make whole the lack seen in the self when considered in relationship with the Other; there is, in truth, no “Other” (or, formulated differently, there is no “self” to put in opposition to the Other. Rollins points out that the loss, the lack felt in the inception of the sense of self, is illusory in that before the inception of the sense of self, there was no self to have anything taken away from; from my point of view the lack is illusory because the boundary itself is ultimately illusory.

Seen from the point of view of Beck’s writing, I am similarly relieved of the fear of death (and this should not be taken to indicate that I am not extremely scared of most of the ways of becoming dead, as I am not a great fan of physical pain, nor to indicate that all of my subconscious mechanisms share this view – this is “SR” speaking here with unconditional assent from “GF” but lesser support from “EC”, and none from mechanisms such as the “reptile mind”). Nor is it something I can claim as an achievement – the initial experience was either given or thrust on me out of the blue, though I have expended energy on repeating and building on it.

Beck does caution in these words:- “In summary, timor mortis is a fact of life and a regular feature of the Christian experience. The fear of death is always with us, moment by moment and day by day, and its absence would signal an indifference that could be, by turns, pathological, triumphalistic, or a spurning of the gift of life. The fearlessness we should seek is not an emotional blankness in the face of death. Such a blankness would be unable to make a distinction between life and death, and thus would be an act of ingratitude to God for the gift and goodness of life. Rather, the fearlessness we are speaking of involves an overcoming rather than a numbness, a refusal to let death be a motive force in our decision making and identity formation.” Having gone through a period of several years of severe clinical depression, I can testify to what it is like for this to turn to a pathological indifference; a year ago, I really had no way of making a judgment between life and death from any of my own resources, and am here now largely because I considered that I owed it to people who cared for me. It is not like that now, but it is also not a conscious overcoming. It is not triumphalistic (what do I find to triumph in in that this particular part of the All does not fear death?) and since the depression lifted, I am all too ready to give thanks for the gift of life.

One of the ways in which this lack of fear can make sense to me is touched on by Beck; in his formulation (which owes much to Ernest Becker) our fear of death is alleviated by making some contribution to the power or authority of our choice, as that contribution is seen as persisting for the life of that power or authority which we (wrongly) think of as immortal; Beck talks of the “hero system” in which achievements within some human system are valued and extolled, and give a sense of self-worth which placates death anxiety. Granted, Becker (and thus Beck) see this as a way of alleviating anxiety about death while I see it as alleviating anxiety about the wider context of diminishment of the sense of self, in particular linked to the desire to control the “other”.

For me, I view this more as a limited way of moving towards the mystical erasure of the boundary between self and other; inasmuch as we identify with some organisation, it becomes to an extent a part of the self, and that part may well survive the death or the individual. Of course, it may not survive the individual, and hence we suffer a major loss of identity in, for instance, the closure of our employer’s business (or our losing our job with it), the end of a marriage, the fall of a state (or radical change in it) or the disgrace of an ideology, for instance in the fall of communism as seen as a viable way of structuring society. It seems to me that people (in the main unconsciously) actually do perform this transfer of self-identity ; I am enabled by the mystical consciousness (again, insofar as I remain in close touch with it) to move my concept of self to such structures temporarily, but only fleetingly, as more extensive identifications (or less extensive ones) are always available.

One of Beck’s major themes is our reaction to the “other”, and he elsewhere builds on (for instance) Rene Girard’s concepts of mimetic violence and scapegoating and on the concepts of holiness and purity (in “Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality and Mortality”). In “The Slavery of Death”, he devotes some time to outlining how the neurotic desire to protect the system in which we trust to alleviate our fear of death (in his formulation) or in which we invest a major part of our sense of self (in mine) leads to rivalry, exclusion and conformity and even violence. This has echoes in some of Rollins’ work as well, where he looks to destabilise excessive reliance on our favoured structures; “Insurrection” and “The Fidelity of Betrayal” are along those lines, as are his “transformance art” occasions.

Beck goes on to talk about various techniques for improving what he calls an “eccentric” sense of self, “eccentric” in that it is not focused within the individual, drawing substantially from St. Thérèse de Lisieux. In the main, I see these as “act as if” methods. Modern psychology is confident from much experimentation that “act as if” works, and that as you act so will you eventually come to believe. As an aside, I feel that this rather punctures the Apostle Paul’s strictures against works righteousness; certainly feeling smug about works is a negative thing, but actually acting in the way you would wish to have flow from your inner convictions does clearly operate to produce those inner convictions. On this I’m with James; faith without works is dead.

Finally, Beck goes on to talk about what he describes as “the slavery of God”, in which a conception of God becomes part of a death-avoiding concept of self-valuation, and is then protected at all costs. Beck rightly identifies this as a form of idolatry. So, of course, does Rollins in “The Idolatry of God”, seeing the idolatrous “God” as being the “big other” which can fill the void resulting from our sense of primal loss. Both writers suggest ways in which this can be avoided, Beck’s being less dramatic and contraversial, and probably therefore more practical. I commend both books, and frankly suggest that if you’ve read either “The Slavery of Death” or “The Idolatry of God, you should go on to read the other as well.

I would also go on to strongly recommend the development of a mystical consciousness, which tends to resolve both problems, except for one thing – my own experience is of being given this, and I’m uncertain to what extent the various practices which various mystics over the ages have recommended can function to create a mystical consciousness where none existed previously. Beck’s practical suggestions and Rollins’ radical ones may, however, go some way towards this – and so do meditation and contemplation.

Enough of writing about it, I need to go and act!

The church I attend most regularly at the moment is quite keen on personal testimonies. I rather like that.

However, quite a few of these relate to giving while trusting in God to provide for our needs, i.e. giving when we don’t actually have enough to safeguard our own future. Again, in principle I have no problem with that, aside the fact that I see a significant chance of throwing people onto charity where they might not have needed that, and I tend to see charity as better directed to those who have no hope of providing for themselves from their own means than those who have themselves given wastefully, given the state of the world as it actually is.

The issue I do have, however, is that consistently these stories end with the giver receiving out of the blue sufficient for their needs. Again, I am delighted that they have been provided for. I might like to hear more testimony from people who haven’t “got it together”, as in twelve step, which I think is a template which people should want to qualify for. Granted there are now twelve step programs catering for so many things that it takes a really well-adjusted person to avoid qualifying for at least one of them! I might like to see something like twelve-step openness tried in a church setting, however.

However, there is another problem, in that the impression is given (and sometimes underlined by preaching what seems to me close to a “prosperity gospel” that those who give profligately will inevitably receive sufficient for their needs. If you give a lot, the message is, you can be confident that you will be provided for. There is some scriptural support for this concept, too.

Much as I might wish this to be the case in reality, it isn’t in line with my experience, either following my own actions or those of others. Nor, to my mind, should it be a hard and fast rule; that message removes the possibility of truly sacrificial giving, as giving is then done in the expectation of return. At that point it becomes not a gift but a transaction.

It is argued, of course, that faith demands that we should trust the divine promise that we will be taken care of and should not think to store up things in anticipation of times of dearth. Matt. 6:25-34 is one example, though there are others. Faith also, arguably, demands that we should do as Jesus advises the rich young man in (inter alia) Matt. 19:16-22, and sell all that we have and give it to the poor, but I do see very few people actually doing this within Christianity. I certainly haven’t done it myself, and part of my thinking chalks this up as one of the ways in which I am a bad Christian, or not-quite-yet a Christian. Granted, six years ago I was worth a negative amount, but I hadn’t got there by giving things away except in a very inventive interpretation.

Another part of my thinking reports that the evidence of history is that the very early Church actually did practice these principles, and this very probably resulted in the need for Paul to go round taking a subscription for the support of the Jerusalem Church. A reasonable guess from general economic principles suggests that they were doing this, taking their possessions, selling them and giving away the proceeds (or, to some extent, holding them in common), and that they had run out of people prepared to do this in support of their community and had fallen on hard times. A few people or a small community can get away with this in a world which doesn’t operate that way, a large group can’t.

I see this principle operating as well in one conception of the crucifixion, that which is principally drawn from the Fourth Gospel. In the synoptics, Jesus is seen as agonising over his future in the Garden of Gethsemane (“let this cup pass from me”) and as experiencing complete abandonment on the cross (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”). In the Fourth Gospel, however, it is all seen as being part of the divine plan, and Jesus is completely aware of this and approaches his impending death with complete equanimity. Then, of course, on the third day he rises and a little later ascends in glory. What we have is a very temporary death, not a full blown extinction of the self.

To my mind, the Fourth Gospel somewhat torpedoes the concept that the cross can function as a valid sacrifice to the extent which is clearly desired by many atonement theories. In the synoptics, at least Jesus is seen as agonised by the prospect, and although there are hints that a resurrection is anticipated, this agony indicates to me that Jesus sees this as a hope rather than as a certainty. This is removed in the Fourth Gospel; there, Jesus knows throughout that his death will be very temporary and suffers no agonies of mind or spirit (as opposed to agonies of body).

I would contrast the situation in W.B. Yeats’ verse drama “The Countess Cathleen”, in which the Countess sells her soul to the Devil in order to save her tenants from starvation and to redeem their souls from him, having previously been sold by them. As this act is altruistic, the Countess is redeemed anyhow on her death. While the actual result there is also that she is not lost, she thinks she will be. Not so Jesus for the authors of the Fourth Gospel; he has no doubt of his resurrection and ascent. Of course, Yeats is there referencing a ransom theory of atonement in which Jesus ransoms humanity from the Devil, but cannot be held by him (this was one of the two early theories of atonement). I liken this to God buying humanity back with a dud cheque (three days to clear…) but will probably get flak for this. It is, incidentally, partly because it looks like God using a dud cheque that I don’t resonate with that theory.

This, however, doesn’t seem to me to work as well for the satisfaction theory (God is owed a debt in consequence of humanity’s sin, only a sacrifice of the magnitude of Jesus’ death will suffice, God accepts that as payment) because it’s not a lasting death. Granted, it can be argued that the death of God the Son, even if temporary, is of incalculable value, but that still doesn’t seem to me adequate. It works even less well for the penal substitution theory (God exacts the death penalty for sin on one life of incalculable value instead of myriad low value lives) if it’s temporary, but I suppose could be regarded as a real death and then a restoration.

I still think that a real sacrifice needs to entail a real loss, not just a temporary one.

So I return to sacrificial giving. Of course, I don’t in theory consider this a bad thing (“in theory” because I’m not very good at actually doing it), and there are two preeminent reasons for this. Firstly, it clears the decks for single minded trust in God and love of humanity, removing the obstructions of clinging to existing possessions and trying to get more. It represents, perhaps, a self-chosen equivalent of the twelve step “rock bottom”, from which there is no way but up and no valid action but trust in others. My own “rock bottom” involved loss of rather more than just economic self-sufficiency, but giving away all you have is likely to make those around you doubt your sanity and will probably damage your social standing as well, so there are other “benefits”.

The other is that it affirms that the Kingdom of God is already here. I may be somewhat unusual among liberal theologians in that I take Jesus’ pronouncement that the Kingdom was already present among his followers (Luke 17:21 is one of several relevant texts) as being accurate. I don’t think he was talking about some apocalypse to come, I think he was talking of an apocalypse within some of those who followed him, a personal transformation, a metanoia. I see the analogies of the Kingdom with the mustard seed (Matt. 13:31) and with leaven (Matt. 13:33) as indicating that this new way of living, which involved love of neighbour as yourself, and sometimes to the exclusion of yourself in sacrificial giving, even to following his path to the cross, had already started inasmuch as it was practiced (I also see the Kingdom statements as indicating another new form of consciousness, that of the mystical entering into the Kingdom; the two seem to me to go hand in hand).

Of course, as I indicated earlier in this post, significant numbers of the early church seem to have practiced this and to have ended up in a parlous economic position, needing to be “bailed out” by Paul’s collections. I don’t know whether, had the movement continued to grow apace and fill the earth with this practice, whether that could have been sustained economically; it hasn’t been tried in any sizeable society, and in smaller ones has consistently got into difficulty. In practice, I’ve regarded this as “counsel of excellence” and tried to balance it with the need to stay able to meet my obligations to my family and to society (and in the past my employees), and worked on the basis that I would keep only enough for myself and the rest could be given away; that has chiefly been my time as I was in a position to use my time to work for justice and equity for individuals and for the community.

And I still wonder whether my not taking the extra step was due to pragmatism or to fear.

I’ve had some push back to my last post, “The fall and rise of Original Sin”, and want to engage with that. My friend is offended because he sees me as saying that God is a liar. I’m sad that what I’ve written has had that effect – unlike Peter Rollins (who I’ve read a bit of over the last 24 hours and to whom I’ll be coming back) I don’t aim to offend (and certainly not to the extent, as he has said, of offending myself as well!).

Giving offence is, then, not what I intended to do. At the most, I might be saying that on one interpretation of Genesis 2&3, the author of Genesis (I do not, of course, consider that biblical authors are transmitting God’s dictation in what they write!) is saying that God is a liar, on the basis that he states in Gen. 2:17 that God says  “but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die”, but that the actual punishment (if indeed it should be regarded as punishment) is expulsion from the Garden, a life of toil rather than of plenty and painful childbirth for Eve and her descendants. Indeed, if we take the genealogies in Genesis 4&5 on face value, Adam survives for a lifespan of 930 years, which does not look like instant death (and as I indicated, the Hebrew of Gen. 2:17 has a connotation of an immediate consequence and is sometimes translated as “in that day you will die”).

It is not uncommonly argued that death was in fact a part of the punishment, in which case interpreters are forced to argue that “in that day” refers not to a day but to something like an age; this is also one way of interpreting the seven days of creation earlier in Genesis to avoid an insistence on a literal seven day creation, so tends to be an easy step to take at that point. However, as I also remarked, the fact that in Gen. 3:22 ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.’ means that it is really not legitimate to claim that actually Adam and Eve were immortal from the start, and only became mortal as a result of God’s punishment.

Another argument I hear about this is that this is analogous to God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac which is subsequently overturned; God is being merciful. This is, I think, a better argument than “well, God lied”, but still means that the serpent was being truthful in predicting that death would not actually be the consequence. There is, however, no wording indicating a change of mind, so this seems a stretch.

I did, of course, give another potential interpretation as an aside – that God was not so much lying as indulging in parental hyperbole (exaggeration). In fact, I think that within the logic of the story, this is probably what the author had in mind; I doubt he intended to portray God as mendacious, but suspect he thought that parental hyperbole was not “lying” but merely use of colourful language.

This seems to me to illustrate a profound difference between the way I approach biblical texts and the way my friend does; I try to read the texts as naturally as possible, and if they seem to be portraying something I take exception to, I note that but do not expend much effort on trying to explain it away. This is, of course, very different from approaching them with a developed conception of theology which then does not permit the author to have been saying something which may, on first reading, seem bizarre, or offensive, or contrary to the character of God as I understand that to be.

Interestingly, one strand of Jewish thought (though a minority opinion) holds that when God pronounces the whole of creation, after the creation of man on the sixth day to be “very good” (after merely pronouncing the results of the first to fifth days as “good”), given that man is seen to be sinful, this must mean that “very good” in fact means pretty much the exact opposite. This is, to my mind, an example of the imposition of a developed conception on the text, here holding that because creation including humanity is obviously not “very good” and yet God is apparently saying that it is, he must mean something other than the natural meaning of the words. Judaism does not see the Fall in the same way as Christianity, nor does it have a concept of original sin, as otherwise the Fall can be taken as terminating the state of “very good”, perhaps.

Where I do import ideas from scriptures which are outside a passage (or at least the individual book involved or the set of books written by the same author), it is generally limited to ideas which appear in previous scripture. Thus, when interpreting New Testament writers, I assume that they are working on the basis of the developed theology of Judaism as it was at the time. With Genesis 1-3, however, there is no prior Jewish scripture, so I do not find myself able to assume that the ideas of any form of Judaism are imported, and certainly not the idea that God is incapable of saying something which is not seen to be exactly as things turn out to be. I do, of course, take into account Mesapotamian creation myths in assessing Genesis 1-2, and note the similarities and differences, though these do not really impact on this discussion.

So, what I do not feel able to do is to decide that God cannot be seen to say anything which is other than exactly factually correct and thus decide that in fact, somehow, death “in that day” was one of the results of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and “in that day” needs to be reinterpreted accordingly; I just follow the evidence of the text.

Of course, it may be that the text says something offensive, something contrary to my view of who (or what) God is. Many parts of the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles fall into that category, and I cite as an example 1 Sam. 15:2-3 .

The link is to a discussion, which includes the following comment:- “Why would God have the Israelites exterminate an entire group of people, women and children included?
This is honestly a very difficult issue. We do not fully understand why God would command such a thing, but at the same time we trust God that He is just – and recognize that we are incapable of fully understanding a sovereign, infinite, and eternal God. As we look at difficult issues such as this one, we have to remember that God’s ways are higher than our ways and His thoughts are higher than our thoughts.” This is an example of retrojecting our assumptions about God into a text, or in this case a set of texts. The base assumption is that the God who commands mercy not sacrifice and that we should love our neighbour as ourself in later scripture cannot be seen to be ordering genocide.

Of course, this assumes a few things itself. It assumes, for instance, that the authors of these books have correctly understood an inspiration, that they have not embroidered that inspiration with their own preconceptions, that that inspiration is from God, and that the character of God is unchanging.

I’ve been looking at a friend’s analysis of the Fall, and considering how different his conclusions (which are the conventional ones) are from my own.

The story is contained in Genesis 2-3. The relevant parts are (it seems to me), taking these from Bible Gateway NIV:-

2 ⁸ Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. ⁹ The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground – trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. …..
¹⁵ The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. ¹⁶ And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; ¹⁷ but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.’

3 Now the snake was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say, “You must not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ ² The woman said to the snake, ‘We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, ³ but God did say, “You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.”’ ⁴ ‘You will not certainly die,’ the snake said to the woman. ⁵ ‘For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ ⁶ When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. ⁷ Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realised that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. ⁸ Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. ⁹ But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’ ¹⁰ He answered, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’ ¹¹ And he said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?’ ¹² The man said, ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’ ¹³ Then the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The snake deceived me, and I ate.’ ¹⁴ So the Lord God said to the snake, ‘Because you have done this,‘Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. ¹⁵ And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.’ ¹⁶ To the woman he said, ‘I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labour you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.’ ¹⁷ To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, “You must not eat from it,” ‘Cursed is the ground because of you;through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. ¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. ¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are  and to dust you will return.’ ²⁰ Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living. ²¹ The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. ²² And the Lord God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.’ ²³ So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. ²⁴ After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

Now I look at this passage as a lawyer, and the first thing I note is that by implication, until Adam and Eve have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they must not have knowledge of good and evil. Two things follow; firstly they cannot be thought of as understanding that to act contrary to God’s command is evil, as they have no knowledge of good and evil; secondly, they fall into the category of people who in systems based on English Common Law do not have criminal responsibility. This encompasses children, the severely mentally challenged and the severely mentally ill, and in English law none of these can be held responsible for their actions.

I think the category of “children” works best here. Clearly, both are represented as “new creations”, and the story moves directly from their creation in Gen. 2:5 and 22 to the “Fall”.

So, I ask myself, how, when our rather imperfect legal systems recognise that it is unconscionable to bring the weight of the criminal law to bear on children who are under the age of criminal responsibility, can God be considered to be acting reasonably in exacting a stringent penalty (even if this is not, in fact, death) for a transgression? Even more so, how can it be considered just for this to be imposed not only on those responsible but also on countless generations of their descendants, who have not (at this point) contravened any directive? I note, for instance, that the same God says through his prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 18) that the sins of the fathers are not held against the sons or future generations, and it is clearly the case that a transgression by a parent whether before or after conception is not inherited by the offspring; genetics is not, after all, Lamarckian but Darwinian.

Even more, having lived with dogs for many years, taking them as not really having adequate knowledge of good and evil, I am extremely conscious of the fact that if you forbid them something, given enough time they will eventually do it. Actually, it seems to me that the same goes for children, and very frequently adults. The only way to prevent a behaviour which is not desired is to associate it with bad results via appropriate punishment on many occasions, or to avoid the behaviour completely. A God with even reasonable foresight (far less than the omniscience which is traditionally ascribed, though this seems problematic given that God apparently cannot find them in the garden) would have known that sooner or later Adam and Eve were going to eat the fruit – and the obvious course would have been not to have the trees of the knowledge of good and evil and of eternal life in the garden (and so within reach) in the first place.

Thus, at the least, if I were to take the traditional understanding of the passage (at least Augustine’s understanding), I would want to argue entrapment as well as lack of criminal responsibility. As Omar Khayyam put it “Oh, Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin beset the road I was to wander in, Thou wilt not with predestin’d evil round enmesh me, and impute my fall to Sin?” And I would expect a just and merciful God not to impose a draconian penalty, and certainly not expulsion from their rather cushy life in the garden or painful childbirth for billions of women, rather to use moderate punishment as a teaching opportunity.

There clearly has to be a meaning to this other than the standard “they disobeyed and therefore they and all of mankind must be punished forever”, and I’ll come back to that a little later. Judaism, interestingly, never developed a concept of original sin, and doesn’t regard the Fall in the same way as has been the case in Western Christianity since Augustine.

Let’s now look at what God says and what the serpent (who probably should not be identified with Satan; certainly Judaism does not make that identification) says.

God is placed as saying:- ¹⁷ but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.’

But, of course, in fact they do not die (and it is a fair translation of the original to put “in the day when you eat it you will certainly die”); they are instead banished from a life of ease and condemned to hard labour (pun intended). God is not telling the strict truth here, according to the writer.

The serpent says:- ⁴ ‘You will not certainly die,’ the snake said to the woman. ⁵ ‘For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’

And, in fact, the snake is telling the truth. This is confirmed by God:- ²² And the Lord God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.’ As an aside, this rather negates the traditional statement that death came into the world at this point; death was already implicit unless the fruit of the tree of life were eaten, which it was not.

The poor snake comes out of this really badly; a severe penalty for telling the truth (“giving the game away”, you might say), assuming for a moment that this is a serpentine equivalent of the Darwin fish (the one with legs) and his legs are stripped from him – and also, it would seem, the power of speech.

I clearly know that God’s dictum can be regarded as parental overstatement in order to keep the children safe “If you keep doing that, I’ll rip your arm off and beat you to death with the soggy end”. I’m well aware of arguments that a command overrides any consideration of knowledge of good and evil (and I reject those; laws are, after all, commands, and the principle of lack of criminal responsibility should hold). I don’t hold that no punishment of children is justifiable either – understanding of good and evil is, to a significant extent, imparted by parental punishment. But this is a draconian punishment and not one which is calculated to teach. In fact, it’s the way it is, according to the text, because God fears Adam and Eve becoming immortal as well, and not for any reason of education.

So I look for some other explanation, and find it in something which actually IS inheritable. At some point in the evolution of humanity, there will have been a beginning of self-consciousness, the “sense of self”. I actually think you can see the start of such a consciousness in some primates, and possibly in other species, but not developed to the extent that it is in adult humans (though I could be surprised by, for instance, dolphins…). In the absence of such a sense of self, there is no embarrassment about nakedness, for instance (I think it extremely telling that this is mentioned); there is also, and crucially, no possibility of self-assessment, of any true sense of guilt or shame due to ones past actions.

Is this truly describable as a “fall”? Not really. Prior to development of self consciousness, instincts rule, and instincts are generally amoral; nature unmodified by something like human consciousness has a tendency to be “red in tooth and claw”, though there are identifiable mechanisms which produce some cooperative and even apparently altruistic behaviour in some species. Self-awareness can, indeed, be regarded as a “step up”, allowing for a sense of morality. What Paul says of “the Law” in Romans 5:12-20 and 7:7-20 – “sin is not counted where there is no law” (Rom. 5:13b being the crux of this argument) – is particularly true where there is no ability to reflect on ones deeds with a self-critical stance.

However, the sense of self also allows for self-centredness, selfishness and self-seeking fear, all of which are less than admirable. Arguably, inasmuch as one is self-centred, one is unable to be God-centred, one is unable to love either God or ones fellow human beings and so cannot abide by the Great Commandments, and this is reasonably equated with sin.  Certainly this gives rise to feelings of guilt and shame. In this sense, therefore, sin did enter into humanity with the advent of self-consciousness, colourfully portrayed in Genesis as resulting from eating a fruit but in fact the result of evolution, and it was inheritable, as the genes which produced this mental change will have been heritable.

At the end of this meditation, therefore, we have a form of original sin, due to not so much a fall as a change in humanity, with good and bad aspects. And, of course, definitely not the cause of death entering into the world, nor something meriting punishment in and of itself.

It is, of course, true to say that the basis of penal substitutionary atonement is removed by this reading of Genesis. I don’t consider that a significant loss to theology, though!

Frank Herbert wrote, in “Dune”, “Fear is the mind killer”, and went on to put forward the view of his sisterhood of manipulators, the Bene Gesserit, that if you were unable to control your fear, you were animal rather than human. The hero, Paul Atreides, undergoes a test in which it appears to him that his hand is being burned away (it isn’t) and he passes the test by not withdrawing his hand to save it. This marks him as being “human”. Or (if you know the story) more scared of his mother than he is of becoming one-handed…

I think I rank as sub-human at the moment, as my anxiety disorder has been re-triggered recently by someone talking about (and wanting me to remember and give evidence about) a part of my past which I would wish were, in Twelve Step terminology, something I did not regret and did not wish to shut the door on. I had thought I had reached that point, but it seems not.

“Sub-human” is, however, perfectly OK in the parlance of modern psychologists, who like to talk about the “reptilian brain” which deals with the most basic urges, the “fight, flight or freeze” responses to perceived threats. I’m dealing with reptilian brain here, then, and not even with the cuddly furry animal “paleaomammalian complex” which deals with food, sex and family, which the Bene Gesserit would probably still think was subhuman. It would seem that I’ve adapted rather badly in the past to a series of traumatic experiences, and the result was post traumatic stress disorder; most of the symptoms associated with that seem now to have diminished to the merely slightly annoying with the passage of time and a lot of hard work, but an elevated level of anxiety seems recalcitrant.

Depression was part of the package as well, but I’ve previously written about how that unaccountably vanished overnight between 25th and 26th May last year, and it hasn’t returned. Would that the anxiety had done likewise!

Until this trigger, I’ve got by by dint of regarding my condition as being analogous to having an adrenaline allergy; I seem to overreact to anything even very slightly startling, as if it were many times more scary than it actually should be. Unfortunately, this includes things which I know 20 or so years ago I would have regarded as “exciting” or “energising”. I take care to limit exposure to anything “exciting”, therefore, and always have an exit strategy should something unforeseen get the adrenaline running. I’ve also trained the system to default to “freeze” rather than a random selection out of fight, flight or freeze, which tends to result in less embarrassment, although it also has meant that when something was thrown at me I sat there and let it bounce off rather than ducking or flinching – and yes, I am very cautious when crossing the road.

The trouble is, the mere mention of a particular individual from my past and his actions seems to have thrown me into a more or less 24/7 freeze this last week, and I don’t like it. Needless to say, he, his actions and my responses figured large in my Steps 4-7 (list of defects, sharing them, offering them to God to remove or not as he thought fit) and in my Steps 8 and 9 (list of persons I had harmed, including myself, and amends to them). Mind you, on reflection, I have not made any amends to him (if indeed any are warranted), as any contact with him by me would inevitably harm others, and I’m not sure how I can make amends to myself for allowing him the ability to mess up my life and those of my loved ones, save for avoiding any possibility of the same thing happening again.

As I’m talking about reptilian brain, I’m reminded of the story of the scorpion and the frog; the scorpion (who can’t swim) asks the frog to carry him over a river. The frog initially declines, as he says “But you’re a scorpion, you’ll sting me to death”. The scorpion responds that if he does, then he will drown as the frog will be unable to carry him, and seeing the logic, the frog agrees. Halfway across the stream, the scorpion stings the frog. As he is dying and dropping the scorpion into the water to drown, the frog says “But why? Now you’ll drown!”. The scorpion replies “I’m a scorpion, it’s my nature”. And, in conscience, I knew this man was a scorpion, and I thought he wouldn’t sting me. Just as the frog followed the logical path and determined that the scorpion would rationally not sting him, so I determined that this person wouldn’t (on this point) deceive me if he were rational. Of course, he wasn’t that rational.

Harking back to my “About” page, this is an issue on which Emotional Chris (EC) and Scientific Rationalist Chris (SR) are at odds. EC had a gut feeling that something was not quite right at the time (as indeed he felt about anything which involved this individual), but SR couldn’t see what was wrong and eventually caved in to pressure. So, of course, EC blames SR for messing up. Again, I was dealing with this guy from the start because he had a hard luck story which engaged EC’s sympathy but left SR shaking his head, so SR blames EC for that, and then again for having a “sod it” moment at the point of making the final “yes/no” decision and not waiting for mature reflection, or rather even more mature reflection, as SR had already done quite a lot of reflecting.

It can be reasonably said that EC and SR both have inflated ideas of the other’s capacities. SR was not allowed to make mistakes (in conscience, I was actually “not allowed to make mistakes”, as anything less than perfection was professional negligence) and EC was not allowed to have impulses and act on them, at least not unless they proved to be beneficial. Putting the two together, it was certainly unacceptable for both reason and instinct to fail – and both SR and EC agree on that. They shouldn’t; in large part the events happened that way because EC and SR already didn’t trust each other.

There has, to be fair, been an advance in the course of the last year; in 2004-2013, frankly, SR and EC each wanted to kill the other, but that has waned as I’ve worked through the situation again and again, and they work reasonably well together now and there’s a fair amount of trust. Do they really forgive each other, though? I could answer “yes” most of the time, but when I’m forced to try hard to recall details of an event from this earlier period, I fear the answer is “no”.

One temptation would be to do a fresh step 4/5 concentrating on scorpion guy, and probably a fresh 8/9. I’m not sure my reptilian brain will let me, though – a lot of the last fortnight has been spent with the “freeze” reaction engaged. At least it isn’t “fight” or “flight”…

In the first post in this series, I talked about how classical philosophical ideas didn’t cope well with modern science, and suggested that the same might hold with theology. In the second, I talked a bit about Process Theology and why I’d avoided it to date. In the third, I outlined some concepts in classical theology and three problems which that gives rise to.

The fourth problem rests in the mind (or spirit) versus body dualism of Greek thought. The thinking of the Hebrew Scriptures was not, by and large, influenced by this concept; Jewish thought did not see the spirit as being something which temporarily inhabited a material body, but saw people as material beings which were made alive by the divine spark, the breath of God, but only vivified by that, not “inhabited by” a separate spirit. Greek thought, and that of some of the very late Hebrew Scriptures, the Intertestamentals and the New Testament, did see the essence of the person as being something separable from the body. Isa. 26:19, Dan 12:2 and Hos. 6:2 are examples of this Jewish thinking.

[As an aside, I am reasonably convinced that the insistence in certain of the resurrection accounts that the resurrected Christ was tangible was a concession to this Jewish belief that a person was inherently material, and that there could be no resurrection without a body. Paul’s early account of resurrection appearances, which is the earliest, is fairly clear that he is not talking about a revivification of a dead body, but of an appearance, possibly but not definitely cloaked in a tangible form; I suspect that this was not acceptable to non-Hellenised Jews and there was therefore a need for something more like the conventional view of resurrection. It may be, however, that the expectations of certain of the disciples that there could not be an appearance of the resurrected Christ without his original body gave rise to the subjective experience of real substance. ]

This combines with an individualism which was not the dominant theme of the Hebrew Scriptures; these dominantly regard salvation as relating to a people rather than to individuals, and individual behaviour as being important to preserve ones place within an already to-be-saved people of Israel. This is a concept labelled by scholars in the “New Perspective on Paul” as “covenantal nomism” (these scholars include E.P. Sanders, James Dunn and N.T. Wright).

Of course, in terms of modern science, the concept of a separable spirit or soul is now generally regarded as untenable; although mind (or spirit) is given importance as a concept, it is as  an epiphenomenon of  consciousness, which is itself an epiphenomenon of life. That is to say that mind, spirit or soul arise from the fact that we have brains capable of conscious thought, and brains capable of conscious thought arise from the fact that we are fairly complex living beings. Granted, science fiction has frequently played with the concept of conscious thought in machines or other forms which would not be regarded as “living” by most, but to date in order for there to be conscious thought, it has been found to be necessary for there to be a brain. Similarly, it is extremely probable (by extension) that in order for there to be a mind, spirit or soul, there must be conscious thought. Mind (or spirit, or soul) is not separable from the material body.

In other words, I am suggesting here that in this respect first century Jewish thinking was more conducive to modern scientific and philosophical ideas than was first century Greek thinking, resting on the Greek philosophical tradition which continued in the West unchallenged until at least the early stages of the Enlightenment.

This is, of course, not to say that there cannot be some survival of mind or spirit; using the analogy of computer software and hardware, a computer program and its associated stored memory can be separated from the hardware on which it runs (and can run on other hardware), but it is not functional in the absence of the hardware. In much the same way, it seems extremely probable that mind or spirit cannot function in the absence of a material matrix, but could conceivably continue in a form of existence given some storage medium, and similarly could be “resurrected” into a new matrix.

This mind-body dualism links with two other potential problems, the first of which is that the unseen, immaterial, “spiritual” is seen as “higher” and more perfect than the material, and so what really matters is not the whole person or the material body but only the spirit, and secondly that the spiritual (and God) is seen as being of infinite duration, so the infinity of time to come after death matters far more than does our current life. The result is a focus on survival after death to the exclusion of living today. Of course, if my analogy of the computer program has any validity, an infinity of storage on a floppy disk is probably not preferable to actual functioning…

This leads me neatly to the fifth problem, which is that as the immaterial, mental and spiritual is seen as higher, better and more perfect than the material, it is also seen as more fundamental, more real. In other words, the immaterial creates the material, usually in a rather poor imitation of the immaterial ideal. Plato’s “cave” image is one way of putting this: the world as we see it is a series of distorted images of what is more real, more perfect and more fundamental but which we cannot see directly.

I am not here attacking Idealist philosophies generally; for a start, some idealist philosophies lend themselves to panentheism, and I experience God in a way which is for me massively best described by panentheism. There is no problem in terms of science in the concept that our concepts can only approximate to the reality beyond “the cave”, indeed this is very much the way philosophy of science tends to see things, and the state of modern physics tends to underline this in that there appears to be a substrate of reality which is irretrievably uncertain, where Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and chaos theory reign.

The problem comes when this couples itself with revealed religion and we think that our concepts are “higher, better, more real, more fundamental and more perfect” than what is actually experienced, because that is what has been revealed to us. I have to be very careful with this aspect myself, as the bones of panentheism represent to me something “revealed” directly to me, and there is an inevitable temptation to say that that is what must be so irrespective of any material evidence to the contrary. It would, of course, be a mistake for me, and it is a mistake for theology generally. Whatever else can be said about revelation, it has passed through at least one individual human consciousness before reaching us, and that must give the basis for error. Paul recognised this in 1 Cor. 13:12: “Now we see through a glass, darkly…”

Process recognises that things change, that things are interdependent, and as such is antagonistic to concepts such as perfection but very conducive to the idea of “better approximations” which develop with time.

Number 6 is giving me difficulties, so there may be a delay!

Yesterday was the ten month anniversary of me waking up not depressed after over six years of serious clinical depression and 11 years before that sliding gently downward. I am still not depressed, and it’s worth noting that I am wonderfully grateful.

I should note this more, if for no other reason that there’s a strong positive correlation between feeling grateful and feeling happy. I find I rather like feeling happy, having had six and a half years of not only not feeling happy but having forgotten what it was like to feel happy and being unable to recall occasions when I had been (serious depression ruins emotional memory as well, and can prevent recall of other circumstances where there’s been a strong positive emotion involved). Not being depressed does not equate to “happy”, of course; I can still manage low moods, but nothing like the crippling depths of two-and-a-bit years ago.

So I’m particularly grateful for The Gregory Brothers major-to-minor version of Pharrell’s “Happy” which I listened to this morning. It’s remarkable that such an upbeat song can be made into music to slit wrists by by dint of changing the key from major to minor and slowing it down, but the result wonderfully captures the feeling of (say) a year and a half ago when I heard (for instance) the Twelve-Step “Just for Today” lines which read “Just for today I will be happy; most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be”.

I couldn’t do it. The harder I tried, the more I concentrated on “being happy” the more miserable it made me. And those “just for today” lines (which run along the same lines as quite a few well-intentioned “snap out of it” comments) made it feel worse, as it was clearly all my fault. I mustn’t want to be happy, I must be doing it to myself in some perverse self-flagellating way.

Not so, of course; depression is an illness from which I suffered, and I was the victim, not the perpetrator.

It’s nice to see that now.

There still seems to be a reluctance among Christians to consider the gospels as being myth. There was a certain amount of scandal following the publication of John Dominic Crossan’s “The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus became Fiction about Jesus” a little while ago. The thesis of the book (which is fascinating, and which I strongly recommend without necessarily endorsing its contents) is that Jesus told parables, and then the gospel writers told what are in effect extended parables about Jesus through the medium of apparent biographies.

I don’t see that this should be a problem, myself. Myth is story, and conveys a message independently of whether it is factually correct or not (just as do parables or jokes). I’m reminded of the meta-joke “A Rabbi, a Priest and a Pastor walk into a bar; the barman says ‘This is a joke, isn’t it?’ “ which I think was coined by Neil Gaiman. It is funny whether or not it ever happened; the parables convey important and true messages even if the actual events didn’t happen. So why do we ask more of the gospels?

Well, because they look like biography, obviously. They may very well be biography – I tend to the position of historical-critical scholarship myself, which tends to the conclusion that there is a core of factual material but that it is submerged in a mass of non-historical additions, but would be quite happy if, perchance, all of the material which is not actually mutually contradictory between the four accounts were factually correct. However, in talking with other Christians, if we can get beyond that point, almost all of the lessons learned from reading these accounts are “spiritual”, by which I mean not evident in material form.

They are equally capable of carrying that spiritual meaning whether they are “true” or “false” – and so I prefer to use the term “myth”.

“Myth” does not mean “falsehood”, despite everything you may hear from the “new atheists” such as Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris. It means something which is independent of, which is above truth and falsehood. There can be no untrue myths, merely myths to which we relate well and myths to which we do not relate well. It is a story we tell about the world which carries a message…

Terry Pratchett is a master story-teller, chiefly in the field of fantasy. His “Diskworld” books have sold many millions, and appear on best seller lists immediately they are published – and some of them are about science and philosophy (the “Science of Diskworld” series). Actually, rather more of them are actually about science and philosophy than that; those themes run through almost all the books which involve any of the wizards of Unseen University, but it is made explicit in the “Science of…” set. They also tell some very true stories about such things as economics, media, politics, sociology and literary criticism… but I digress.

Personally, I think Pratchett is undervalued as a post-modern philosopher. Yes, honestly.

One of the things which he suggests (and which I take on board unreservedly) is that science consists of a “set of stories we tell about the world which carry a message” as well. They are not however quite the same thing as myth.

Austin Roberts wrote a post a few years ago, “What is Truth”, which engaged some postmodern thinking about the limits of what we can legitimately say is “truth”. In it he has a set of criteria (about 2/3 of the way through the article). Science uses noncontradiction and adequacy to the facts a lot, and in particular (as the stories science tells are supposed to relate to events in the external world rather than in what I might describe as “concept-space”) it predicts what will happen in circumstances we maybe haven’t seen so far. If the prediction is then seen in those circumstances, the adequacy to the facts of the “story” is improved, if it isn’t then the adequacy to the facts of the story is damaged, sometimes to the extent that the story has to be discarded (which can never happen with myth).

We’ve just seen an example of looking at circumstances not previously seen in the results of a set of scientists in Antarctica working with very sophisticated telescopes. The result (assuming that it’s confirmed by other scientists) is that one “story” about how the universe behaved just after the Big Bang will be scrapped, and several variants on another will be scrapped as well. We will have more confidence in the remaining story (which will still have a few variations possible, and no doubt will acquire more variations). What we are never going to be able to say is that this has one-to-one correspondence with the “external world”, which we regard as “reality”.

So why are these scientific stories different from the stories we tell as myths? That’s because the myths deal with human behaviour and feelings and what happens in our own concept-spaces, our internal worlds. If we relate to a myth, it becomes part of our concept-space quite irrespective of whether it actually relates to something evident in material form. Human behaviour and feelings are massively influenced by what happens in our own concept spaces, and myths therefore have huge power – and they don’t have to be “true” (and they don’t have to be “false” either) in order to do that.

Some of my readers are going to be feeling somewhat upset at this point. They’re likely to say that I’m attacking theology and its attendant doctrines as being nothing more than fiction. That isn’t the case at all – what I’m saying is that the practical importance of scripture is as story, as something which, if we relate to it and incorporate it into our concept spaces, has a transformative effect on us; the practical importance is not that it tells us the truth about the world, and particularly not that it tells us the truth about the material world.

In much the same way, the practical importance of scientific stories is that they enable us to predict what will happen in the material world better, and to find ways of manipulating it to our advantage, it isn’t that they tell us the truth about the world, and particularly not that they tell us the truth about the spiritual world.

This is fairly close to producing the result proposed by Stephen Jay Gould, of “non-overlapping magisteria”. Not quite, however. Richard Dawkins has criticised the concept on the basis (broadly put) that religion couldn’t keep itself out of science, as it claimed complete control by its own nature; I’d put it differently, that anything which deals with the way you organise your concept space inevitably has the likelihood of affecting that part of our concept space which deals with the external world (only the likelihood, as many people are able to erect internal divisions between different ways of looking at things, particularly if they incorporate the concept of non-overlapping magisteria into their concept space).

It has also been criticised on the basis that science excludes the supernatural, and inasmuch as the supernatural affects the material world, so science is going to exclude religion. This is fair to some extent, although I would point out that religion traditionally regards supernatural effects in the material world as miracles, and miracles as being by their nature rare; the overlap shouldn’t therefore be very large, and therefore the conflict also shouldn’t be very large.

I arrived at this way of thinking to a considerable extent due to discussing the Bible (on The Religion Forum) over the last 15 years or so with Christians who were substantially more conservative than me. I will grant you it isn’t difficult to find Christians who are more conservative than me, although I actually score higher for postmodern or emergent Christianity than I do for liberal Christianity in a recent questionnaire. I found consistently that if we were able to get beyond matters such as whether scripture was inerrant and non-contradictory between passages or not, and whether scripture was historical or not, we could focus on the “spiritual meaning” of passages and have constructive discussions in which we didn’t disagree to a radical extent and often could find a meeting of minds.

There is a significant other consequence of this viewpoint for me, and that’s the way in which I see interfaith dialogues. I’ve read with interest books such as Brian McLaren’s “Why did Jesus, Moses, Mohammed and the Buddha Cross the Road: Christian Identity in a Multifaith World”, and note with pleasure moves towards positions which allow interfaith dialogue without issues of “my faith is better than your faith”, but have tended to find that they all (as McLaren does) try to preserve a sense of why actually Christianity IS better than [insert the name of a faith of choice]. I don’t think I need to do that in the slightest. Christianity is best for me, as I have assimilated a great deal of specifically Christian thinking into my concept space, and far more (and on a deeper level) than I have of any other faith system. It’s perfectly possible for a panentheist mystic to operate within a Christian paradigm, as many examples of Christian mystics have had at least a broadly similar set of “stories” in the relevant bit of their concept spaces, and it’s increasingly respectable to do so, as (for instance) Marcus Borg has testified to panentheist mystic thinking recently.

I very much like the metaphor of multiple roads leading to the top of the mountain (many paths, one summit), but this has taken something of a knock recently, for instance in Stephen Prothero’s “God is not One”, which sets out from the point of view of comparative religion to demonstrate that eight major world religions are irreducibly unique. I’ll ignore his suggestion that techniques differ between religions, as although this is correct, I know so many people who combine techniques from two or more religions that I can consider this non-foundational.

Austin Roberts, commenting on Prothero, writes “As Prothero points out, the religions do not share a finish line but they do share a starting point: “Where they begin is with this simple observation: something is wrong with the world.” But after this point of contact, the religions diverge sharply when they attempt to diagnose the problem and prescribe a solution. For Christians, sin is the problem while salvation from sin is the solution. For Buddhists, suffering is the problem while liberation from suffering (nirvana) is the goal. For Muslims, self-sufficiency is the problem and the solution is submission and paradise”.

Actually, I think the way of looking at religions as incorporating a set of stories into your concept space allows us to recognise and respect what Prothero is expressing while still maintaining the unity of the finish line (God). Of course, mixing elements of one story with another produces a confused and contradictory result (I could argue that that already happens within Christianity between different scriptures, as I don’t think Christianity can be boiled down to sin and salvation). I include within “story” concepts such as sin, salvation, suffering, nirvana, self-sufficiency and paradise, each of which is in its own way a story, and note that each religion actually has a family of stories which work more or less well with each other and, by and large, less well with stories out of other religions.

However, to me they are stories told about the same underlying relationship. Rather than the metaphor of different roads up a mountain, I prefer the story of the blind men investigating an elephant. One feels a tusk, and says “It’s like a spear”, one feels a leg, and says “It’s like a tree”, one feels the trunk, and says “It’s like a snake”, one feels the tail, and says “It’s like a rope”. All are telling a reasonable story about their experience of the elephant, and none has the complete picture.

One last thing. I talk often about mystical experience, and how this is foundational to me. Where does this fit in the distinction between story about the external world and story about the internal world? The answer is, I don’t know, but I suspect it’s based on a phenomenon in the external world, albeit probably confined to my own skull; there have been events in my neurophysiology which have given rise to my perceptions. If you like, the original peak experience was a “new hardware detected” event rather than a “software upgrades are available for download” event.

I now need to go away and think about whether the need to install a “driver” on connecting new hardware fits into this scheme or not. Any answers?

In a number of previous posts, I’ve used the term “disindividuation”, which seems to have produced some confusion in readers. I always contrast this with “deindividuation”, which is a reasonably well known but contentious social-psychological phenomenon in the psychology of groups, and particularly mobs.

In deindividuation, the identity of the individual becomes subsumed by the identity of a group, and the group is then treated as having its own consciousness. It leads to the dissolving of inhibitions and concern for the self, the only concern being the group.

There is a distinct linkage with disindividuation, for which I cannot find a link to a satisfactory internet article. Disindividuation similarly involves a weakening (sometimes near to the point of disappearance) of the sense of self in relation to the other, but the “other” in this case is commonly a much wider category than a group or mob, and is commonly identified by the one experiencing disindividuation as “God”. It is a common feature of peak mystical experiences, but has also been stimulated by researchers interfering with electrical activity in the brain in experimental circumstances, who have identified brain areas involved.

It is by far the most peculiar aspect of my own peak mystical experiences, which have not uncommonly involved a paradoxical sense that the self has at the same time been extinguished, and that it has expanded to include all that is, and possibly more than that. It can fluctuate, with the sense of self including anything from a small nugget within the body, through the body to the body and its immediate surroundings, the immediate neighbourhood, the world and the cosmos. The most persistent identifications (probably because they are limit situations) are with nothingness and with the All which is not less than the cosmos and which is God.

Meister Eckhart wrote “Thou shalt know him without image, without semblance and without means. – ‘But for me to know God thus, with nothing between, I must be all but he, he all but me.’ – I say, God must be very I, very God, so consummately one that this he and this I are one is, in this is-ness working one work eternally; but so long as this he and this I. to wit God and the soul, are not one single here, one single now, the I cannot work with nor be one with that he.” (Sermon XCIX, from Happold, “Mysticism”). I think this captures some of the sense of the disindividuation which I am talking about.

One consequence is that from the point of my first peak experience, I have been unable to see anyone else as being entirely “other” to me, and indeed I had some early problems with an excess of empathy, in which the feelings of other people (which I was noticing to an extent previously inconceivable) tended to overwhelm me. I didn’t have difficulty “loving my neighbour as myself”, I had difficulty not being slave to every strongly felt wish around me to the occasional serious detriment of my narrower self-interest; my narrow self-interest was at times difficult to identify as my focus, my sense of self was so often wider than that. Another consequence, of course, was an inability to see humanity as in any absolute sense more valuable than, say, the animal kingdom, life generally or the cosmos at large; a concern for ecology is mandated as a small subset of this.

I had to develop some barriers against this lack of individuation overwhelming me in order to function sensibly in the world, in fact. It is all very well “dying to self”, but this opens up a confusion of competing influences unless one has the luxury of being able to settle into a life of more or less solitary contemplation and focus entirely on the All (God) and relationship with that All.

In a blog post about the theology of Paul Tillich, Austin Roberts writes:- “Tillich defines the “Protestant principle” as the rejection of anything finite as appropriate objects of ultimate concern. Furthermore, faith is not merely a cognitive activity because it involves the whole person. Faith is directed toward the unconditional but also grounded in something concrete: “Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The content matters infinitely for the life of the believer, but it does not matter for the formal definition of faith.” Faith as ultimate concern about the unconditional is distorted and idolatrous if one is ultimately concerned about something conditioned and finite.
Faith as ultimate concern involves total surrender of the self to either that which is truly ultimate or something less than ultimate (e.g., a nation, career, money, etc.) and the expectation of fulfillment through it.”

In terms of Tillich’s theology, therefore, the experience, repeated several times in greater or lesser extent (and the attendant disindividuation), produced a shift in the “focus of ultimate concern” for me. Nothing less could really be that ultimate focus for me, though the focus itself is paradoxical, being (in a way) at the same time nothingness and the All – and everything in between. I don’t know whether I would characterise focus on something less than the All as being “idolatrous”, but it is certainly an inappropriate direction for any ultimate concern. The mystical experience has in my experience a self-verifying character; it demands that alteration in focus in verifying that the perception is true.

I also don’t know that I would label it “not merely a cognitive activity”; while yes, it involves the consciousness of the whole person as a part of the All and not by any means a predominant part of the All, this is still a conscious (and unconscious) orientation, a feature of neuropsychology and as such inescapably cognitive. However this ultimate concern either amounts to, engenders, or includes as a constitutive part love and trust. As love and trust are overwhelmingly emotional issues, it is dominantly affective rather than cognitive, and so perhaps deserves to be regarded as more than merely cognitive, at least in the narrowest sense of “cognitive”.

Another aspect lies in the words “rejects anything finite”. The concept of an infinite and transcendent God leads, philosophically, to the problem of “ontological separation”; God is so different and so separated from man that there is no way of crossing the divide short of divine intervention, leading (for instance) Karl Barth to talk of humans as being “utterly incapable of discovering the infinite God in whom they place their faith as Christians”. The experience of disindividuation is one of radical immanence; the All, that which is God, is not and cannot be separated from the self; there can be no problem of ontological separation as all that is is part of the substance of that which is God.

[I don’t myself think that the problem of ontological separation is a real problem; to me it is analagous to Zeno’s tortoise paradox, resting on a misconception about infinities, and therefore a feature of philosophy and mathematics rather than of reality.]

That said, my own experience was that I needed an intervention of dramatic proportions in order to move from where I was to something like where I am now. I grant that it took me many years of practice to recapitulate that experience sufficiently that it became (in a much watered down form) fairly readily accessible via an effort of my own, but the initial experience was unmerited, un-worked for and might have led me to believe that an ontological separation had been crossed from the other side were it not for the contents of the experience. If at any point I should seem to be boasting about lack of self-centredness or wider concern, the reader should understand that this was at least initially given, and due to no merit or work of my own.

It is, I think, worth pointing out two other facets of the mystical experience which may or may not be linked in some way to disindividuation. One is that the experience is self-verifying; it comes with an inbuilt conviction that it is true perception, that this is the way things actually are. This is pertinent to my linking of it to faith above; it is massively convicting, and while I have aimed all my resources of scepticism and rationality at it and still from time to time entertain the idea that it results from a peculiarity of brain chemistry and is not provably more than that, at the end of the day I cannot do other than have faith. It is not, to me, an issue of “belief”; I believe or disbelieve things on the basis of evidence and probabilities, it is a matter of hard self-verifying evidence, of fact.

Secondly, the experience as I’ve known it is of timelessness. It is not merely physical boundaries which become meaningless, but also temporal ones. Aldous Huxley wrote of the “timeless moment”; I think of it as entering, however briefly, into atemporality. Past and future are both in some way “now”, and “now” is all that there is. God is frequently conceived of as eternal, which is normally thought of as having no temporal beginning or end, existing for an infinite amount of time. I have reservations about infinities being real at the best of times, but the concept of God as being not, as some put it “outside of time” but independent of although involved with time resonates well with me.

Sadly, unless I am in the course of having a peak mystical experience, thinking about time too deeply is inclined to scramble my brain. I recall the quote ” I know what time is, but when I think about it, I don’t” (which my memory tells me was Augustine); that pretty much sums it up.

This probably has a lot to do with my impatience with boundaries, in which I include doctrinal statements. That which is God may not, for me, be infinite in several ways in which conventional theology wishes (such as power and knowledge) but is unbounded in most (if perhaps not all) aspects – and in particular is not bounded by a gulf of separation between God and man. That just doesn’t make sense to me.

I have a few friends who often talk of “Christ’s work upon the cross”. This, frankly, jars with me.

Let’s face it, what happened to Jesus on the cross was that he died, fairly slowly (but not as slowly as might have been expected from the method of execution, by some reports) and extremely painfully. Everyone agrees on “extremely painfully”. I don’t talk about my late father’s “work” on a bed in York District Hospital, I talk about his death. Death is something which happens to us, not something we “do” (unless we commit suicide, perhaps), although the Fourth Gospel goes some way towards portraying Jesus as a willing participant. Even then, it isn’t really portrayed as “work”, more as something necessary to which Jesus submits with good grace.

The interpretation as “work” comes partly from other parts of the Fourth Gospel but mostly from Paul. Paul clearly saw Jesus’ death as effecting a massive change in the relationship of God with man;  what exactly the nature of that change was is the subject of various atonement theories, about which I’ve written before – Paul is not necessarily completely clear as to what he believed in terms of systematic theology, so there’s been plenty of room for theologians to construct different interpretations over the years. Paul’s gospel was “Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2); he was not nearly so forthcoming about Jesus’ lifetime ministry, which leads some scholars to believe that he knew relatively little about what Jesus had actually said (and others to conclude that Paul merely thought the death, and presumably resurrection, to be more important).

The writer of the Fourth Gospel saw Jesus as effecting a massive change in that relationship as well, but saw that change as being from Jesus’ birth; “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Granted, he also considered it vital that Jesus be “lifted up” (John 3:14).

The writers of the synoptics are far more concerned with Jesus’ lifetime ministry, about which they write extensively, and less so about his death; Matthew and Luke are also concerned about the resurrection, about which Mark hardly writes at all (the best versions of Mark end with the empty tomb).

So, do I think that Jesus effected a massive change in God’s relationship with man?

Most of the atonement theories rest on the premise that at the point of Jesus life, death and resurrection, God’s plan for humanity was broken and needed a radical divine intervention to restore it to proper functioning. There was obvious scriptural precedent for this, not least in the story of Noah’s flood, in which humanity had become so depraved that the only solution was to wipe them out and start again, but preserving the family of Noah as the seeds of a new beginning (and, of course, a rather minimal breeding stock of wildlife).

This, of course, rests on the idea that Judaism was incapable of being the vehicle for man’s proper relationship with God. Paul goes into some detail in both Romans and Galatians as to how this might be the case (with the proviso that Judaism is not completely without merit – Rom. 11:1-11). I find this deeply problematic, given that God appeared to go into very considerable detail as to how Israel (at least) should interact with God in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, with a large number of additional insights from the Prophets. Did he really get things so wrong? Is this the action of an all-powerful, all-knowing and benevolent God, to lay down detailed instructions for his people to follow knowing that they were actually completely ineffective?

I think not. We have, I think, to read Paul differently – and in recent years, the New Perspective on Paul has been doing just this, through (for instance) E.P. Sanders, James Dunn, Douglas Campbell and most recently N.T. Wright. In particular, we should note that Paul was extending the conception of relationship with God from just Israel to the world in general. and in the process explaining why conversion to Judaism was not actually a prerequisite (I would add “rather than explaining why Judaism was deficient”). It’s interesting to note that in Judaism the Rabbis conducted the same exercise, creating by exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures the “Noachide Laws”. (Noah gets a second mention!). Would that these had been available to Paul, but my best dating of the concept is early to mid second century.

So, Judaism wasn’t broken, it just needed universality. But was creation broken; was there a need for a reconciliation with God through an atoning sacrifice? Well, if you remember my “And God saw that it was good” posts last year, you’ll know that I don’t interpret Genesis in terms of a fall from a perfect state (which needed rectifying) at all. No original sin, no overriding need to fix that.

And yet, in the course of his rather convoluted reasoning in Romans, Paul maybe has a clue to a different understanding, and one where there was a need for a radical divine intervention. Paul wrote in Romans 3:24-26 “they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.” Note the wording in the middle and at the end there: “He did this to show his righteousness”, and “it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous”. For the purposes of this exercise, let’s forget the references to atonement and justification for a moment and concentrate on why Paul saw this as happening: it was to demonstrate God’s righteousness. Not to make it possible for mankind to be acceptable to God, but to make it possible for God to be acceptable to man.

There was a fault, but it wasn’t a fault in God’s creation or in God’s covenant with Israel, it was in mankind’s perceptions of God. They needed to be extended. In particular, for Paul, Gentiles needed to feel they could be accepted by the Hebrew God (who was the only God) without the need to enter into the Covenant; that they could be justified in his sight, and that he was and would be just towards them.

The writer of the Fourth Gospel had another point of view. He wasn’t talking about a feeling of justification, he was talking about a mystical participation in the phenomenon of the resurrected Christ (which was the Word, which was God), a participation which would cause a complete change in the individual. He considered that all that was needed was complete faith – and by that I am confident he meant a complete surrender to God-in-Christ, an identification way beyond what would be entailed in viewing Christ/Jesus as an exemplar, a teacher, a leader. A complete giving of the self in love and trust for the living God-in-Christ who was the mystical experience of the writer. John Spong has recently written persuasively of this view of the Fourth Gospel in “The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic”.

In fact, Paul also writes in this mode when he talks of us being in Christ and Christ being in us (Eph. 2:10 inter alia). It is a mystical understanding of the relationship of man with God (in Christ), as one would expect from someone who also talks of being caught up into the third heaven (2 Cor. 12:2).

So, are we looking at the beginning of a mystical understanding of God (God-in-Christ in this case) as a major development in the history of the relationship of God with men? Probably not this either; there are at least hints at mystical understandings of God (albeit not God-in-Christ, though sometimes God-in-Wisdom or God-in-Logos) scattered through the Hebrew scriptures, with concentrations in the Psalms, Proverbs and some of the Prophets.

The New Testament writers, however, are more unified in the concept that “in Jesus, in Christ, God had done something remarkable and different” than in any other non-concrete thing. Am I saying that no, actually he had not, this was merely another point on a continuum? It might appear so. There was a continuum of moral and practical teaching from Pharisaic Judaism into the Synoptics and Paul, there was a continuum of mystical conception from the Psalms and Prophets, the Wisdom tradition and Philo into Paul and the Fourth Gospel. There is also in the Synoptics and Thomas what I consider conclusive evidence that Jesus was himself a God-mystic, and there were God-mystics before him and have been God-mystics since, both in Judaism and Christianity and in many other world religions.

However, I share with some of the New Testament writers the conviction that Jesus was particularly the paradigmatic God-mystic, and that the Christ-mysticism of Paul and the Fourth Gospel takes that to a new level. In this, God was indeed doing something new, albeit not as dramatically new as might have seemed the case. I confess here that this view is coloured by my personal devotion to the figure of Jesus; just as do the New Testament writers, I love and trust the Jesus they talk of and the Christ which they make of him, and I am not able to be objective about this.

There is one more thing, however, and that is that with the brief ministry of Jesus and the explosion of followers after his death, world history changed radically. Only Mohammed might come close as an individual so pivotal in change, whether in the history of ideas or the history of nations. It may be that the depth of belief of the followers was the thing which precipitated this; what they felt, that Jesus was pivotal, they proceeded to impose on world history as a fact.

But I still don’t consider it was the cross which is central to that. The life, teaching, death, resurrection and continuing presence in the lives of millions cannot be separated. His work was his life and legacy more than it was the brief event of his passion and death.