Eyre Lines

The topic du jour today in the blogosphere seems to be Hell. This blog post covers most of my feelings on the subject, but I’ve also recently read an analysis which goes through the Biblical references distinguishing between Sheol, Tartarus, Hades and Gehenna (which I can’t now remember the location of) and laments them all being translated as “Hell”, whereas they are radically different places.

Mark 9:44-8 bears some of the responsibility; “where their worm never dies and the fire is never quenched” seems fairly terrible until you appreciate that it refers to the rubbish dump of Ger Hinnom (“Gehenna”)  just outside the city walls of Jerusalem, and specifically to a place where bodies were sometimes dumped. It’s an ignominious resting place for your mortal remains, but not, Biblically, a place of torture. The worms and the fire were regarded as eternal (though I gather the place is remarkably free of rubbish, corpse-worms and fire these days), not the fact of being cast there – after all, the worms and fires would do their job fairly rapidly, and you’d be dead anyhow. Not so wonderful in a culture where there was a belief in resurrection as something closer to physical resuscitation, of course.

As I most definitely don’t expect anything remotely like a physical resuscitation, what happens to my body after it’s stopped maintaining consciousness is a topic of supreme irrelevance to me…

However, all of these treatments, correct as they are in saying that this concept of Hell is severely lacking (by which, in my polite English way, I mean just plain wrong and damaging to boot), do not address one of the standard arguments, that of the holiness of God. In this argument, God cannot permit anything sinful and unholy to join with him in heaven because of his nature as holy and perfect, because however loving and just he may be, it would be contrary to his nature to allow this. This does not have the difficulty of postulating a power greater than God, nor does it attack his omnibenevolence, his mercy, in the same drastic way.

Granted, annihilation would be more merciful than would be an eternity of punishment, and actually annihilation fits far better with the majority of the Biblical texts than does an eternity of suffering. But actually, I do not anticipate complete annihilation, and I do not anticipate it on the basis of my mystical peak experiences of union (or near-union) with the divine.

A component of this is the feeling of being a little like a moth drawn to a candle, which if it flies a little too close will be burned to dust – but what is in danger of extinction is those aspects of the self which are not in complete conformity with God’s will, with God’s mercy and yes, with God’s holiness. I think of this as the “refiner’s fire” of Malachi 3:2 (NLT) “But who will be able to endure it when he comes? Who will be able to stand and face him when he appears? For he will be like a blazing fire that refines metal, or like a strong soap that bleaches clothes.”

I am entirely willing to be refined, or bleached, in the fullness of time – indeed, I am trying so to live life that the minimum amount needs to be refined or bleached away. I am, in the words of Step 5 (of the Twelve Steps), entirely ready to have God remove all my defects of character. It may hurt – it is entirely likely to, as some of my defects of character are things I am very attached to, but I look forward to it and pray for it (which is Step 6…).

I agree there is no Hell as it has been popularly conceived, but the Catholic concept of purgatory? That’s a different matter.

(For those who aren’t aware of it, the title refers to “From Hell and Hull and Halifax, good Lord deliver us”. There’s nowt wrong wi’ Hull or Halifax…)

Following on from the last post, I found this piece from Christian Piatt today.
“What if I’m not sure what I believe” is the question he talks about, and I’m entirely happy with the direction he goes in, of remaining open to new ideas, new ways of looking at theology. The snag is that in a very large slice of Christianity, being undecided about something is being lukewarm (perish the thought that Paul would disapprove of me!), and being undecided about many things is being a doubter – and as I was informed in an Alpha talk recently, doubt is a principal weapon of Satan.

The thing is, I am fundamentally a scientific rationalist, and so a very large amount of the concepts I work with are working hypotheses rather than things I “believe in” in the sense that churches tend to mean the word. I’m used to juggling a number of possible working hypotheses, and I’m used to situations like wave-particle duality in Physics where there are two mutually inconsistent ways of looking at something each of which “works” in certain circumstances but neither of which “works” in all.

I also have a fair number of years practicing law behind me, and am horribly familiar with the perils of being certain of a situation before all of the evidence has been examined, or in spite of some of the evidence which doesn’t quite fit the desired answer. Law, of course, always ends up with someone delivering a verdict. That’s an imposed certainty rather than an actual one, in most cases. Some years ago I considered a sample of cases of people who had been convicted of offences, and came to the conclusion that rather more than 25% of convictions were actually wrong – granted, most were convictions for the wrong offence, or convictions of someone who had committed this kind of crime on other occasions but was actually not guilty on this occasion.

Some years ago I read a terrible book called “Evidence which Demands a Verdict” by one Josh McDowell. This is a work of Christian apologetics, and where it promises to advance evidence, actually is a one-sided making of a case. The only way you’d be likely to get the verdict the writer wanted in a real adversarial tribunal would for there to be no argument against, whether based on the faulty or unreliable evidence, faulty reasoning or ignoring contradictory evidence, and for the Judge to be no lawyer. With any reasonably competent opposition, I think the only verdict which could actually be reasonably delivered would be “not proven”.

But why demand a verdict at all? Generally speaking, you only demand a verdict when you want certainty about something, and if it’s a shaky certainty because the evidence is not conclusive, you’re losing something by forcing the point. It frankly makes little difference to me whether about 90% of the creed in my church is correct or not, and my church is fairly light on the amount of theological assertion which is actually demanded openly (though there’s a stack of other stuff which is understood). I’m not going to love God more or less, love my neighbour more or less or follow Jesus more or less because of most of these statements, not least the labyrinthine complexities of trinitarian understandings. Or whether there was a virgin birth, or a physical resurrection.

Largely, therefore, my answer is that if I’m not sure what I believe, I’m avoiding false certainties, I’m trying to achieve some humility about my own viewpoints.

I wonder if Josh has read “The Cloud of Unknowing”? It could be that with belief, less is more.

I’ve just read a rather good article (the first of a series) on accommodating science and religion. I look forward to more articles. This serious treatment resonates with me, as those who know me or my writing will know that I am a scientific rationalist for most purposes, but with a mystical streak.

In conscience, accomodating science and religion does not seem such of a problem in the UK (as opposed to in the States). By and large, here I find that those who are religious (or spiritual) consider that science and religion deal with different material and talk of different ways of understanding, and consider that these are complementary. I think that way to a great extent myself; the material world is evidence, and the evidence of the material world is wonderfully explained by scientific method. Not at the moment perfectly explained, but better explained than was the case (say) 50 years ago, and it was better explained 50 years ago than it was 100 years ago, and so on, at least back to 1600 or so.

I have no time for logical positivism, however (“Anything that can be known is known by logical and empirical methods. Anything else is nonsense.” quoting from the article). Nor am I quite a logical empiricist (“knowledge is gained through scientific measures, and any claim to know must either be of that kind or something that could be revised scientifically.” – ibid), though when talking of the material world, I come very close to that position. You couldn’t remotely accuse me of being among the religious who “accommodate” science as a result of lack of faith or the pressure of social norms, were you attacking me from the conservative Christian point of view (as some have found out in the past) though you could if attacking me from the other direction more justifiably accuse my God-concept as being a “God of the gaps”, i.e. the operation of God in my understanding has to fit within those areas not currently explained by science. Of course, the implication of a “God of the gaps” is that science proceeds to close gaps at a remarkable rate, and my atheist friends point to the trend and tell me that soon there will be no gaps for my God to fit into.

I can’t see that as a possibility, though, and that is because my faith is also based on evidence, albeit evidence which is (as far as I can tell) entirely internal to me and therefore of no value for convincing anyone else. I have had experiences which, to me, were experiences of God. Those experiences are to me hard fact. I’ll come back to them shortly. Firstly, one or two thoughts about what science can actually tell us.

The article quotes Isaac Asimov saying “… when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.” (Asimov, 1989).

I actually take issue with Asimov saying “they were wrong”. This is why:

If I am going to draw a map of my home town, I will do it on a flat piece of paper. For the purposes of drawing a map of the town, it is flat (and those of you who know my home town will particularly agree – it’s in an area where a rise from 5 feet above sea level to 10 feet above sea level is called a “hill”). That, however, breaks down very slightly if I’m going to draw a map of my country, though as my country is quite small by world standards, even then there isn’t much distortion. If I were drawing a map of the United States, however, I would have to take the curvature of the earth into account.

And for almost all map-drawing purposes, considering the earth as a sphere is perfectly adequate (there is some flattening around the poles, but those areas are of so little use to us that the distortions aren’t of much significance).

What I’d prefer to say is that when people thought the earth was flat, they were right within the scale they were thinking of, and when they thought it was spherical the same thing applied. The demonstration of this is that we still use flat maps, we still use spherical globes. They are useful as long as you don’t try to use them in conditions in which their accuracy breaks down.

The article does point this out:- “Now explanations are better or worse if they are more or less accurate in their predictions than alternatives. So Newton was better than Aristotle, and Einstein is better than Newton. Some day we may have an even better theory than Einstein’s, but we cannot deny that we do more now using Einstein than we did with either Newton or Aristotle”.

There’s another progression of the same type here, but with an important difference. We do still use Newton’s equations of motion in smallish scale calculations; using Einstein’s equations complicates things, just as trying to use a globe to navigate around your hometown complicates things, but by and large we don’t use the Aristotle-Ptolemy system for computing the movement of celestial bodies. Why? Because it’s more complicated than using Newton’s equations. (Aristotle and Ptolemy only had the concept of circular motion in the heavens, and didn’t have the concept of a square law force acting on objects rather than a fixed length link; the result was a plethora of circles around points on other circles; the result pretty much did the job it was intended to for early astronomers, but brought in huge numbers of additional circular motions. The equations are simpler for a circle than for an ellipse, but the sheer number of circles needed renders Ptolemaic spheres less useful than Newtonian ellipses – and they can’t explain parabolic motion such as comets at all). In fact, Ptolemaic astronomy was slightly inaccurate as well – it produced an error of about ten days in somewhat over a millennium of observations – but it was close enough for most purposes.

Explanations are therefore better or worse also if they are more or less simple in their execution and if they require less or more unseen entities (in the case of Ptolemy, assumed crystal spheres) to explain them (the rule against multipying unseen entities is commonly called “Occam’s Razor” after William of Occam).

I’ve got to that point in conversation with conservative Christian friends in the past, and they’ve then said “Well, doesn’t the suggestion that “God did it” involve less unseen entities than most of the scientific theories you can quote and mean that it is more simple in its execution?”. Well, yes – but it has relatively little explanatory power and no predictive power at all unless you are able to define that-which-is-God to such an extent that he will be completely consistent in his actions, and I’d tentatively suggest that this will result in a God who is indistinguishable from a scientific theory. I have friends who explain evolution in this way: “Evolution is how God did it”. Those who consider God as “being itself” (Rowan Williams has been known to say something along those lines) or as “the ground of all being” (popular in Catholic circles, and associated with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) are going down this or a very similar route it seems to me.

So we need predictive and/or explanatory power, no conflict with evidence, simplicity and as few unseen entities as possible.

The “being itself” or “ground of all being” theologies (or philosophies) have some major advantages. It is probably impossible for them to conflict with the evidence of the material world, as they do not really speak of the material world – that is left to science (some very well known scientists have favoured a similar view). They are philosophically rather satisfying, and they include a transcendent aspect which is markedly lacking in scientific materialism per se. However, they lack predictive power as they stand. They do not really tell us anything about how the universe works.

They also, from my perspective, fail to explain all of the evidence, as they do not give any real insight into the mystical experience, the direct unmediated experience of God, which I take as a piece of evidence, as I mentioned above. They do have a transcendent aspect, which is singularly lacking in scientific materialism, and which is well harmonised with immanence of a sort, but it is a vastly impersonal immanence. The mystical experience is in my experience a vastly personal one, and I don’t find this reflected in “ground of all being” or “being itself” theologies, nor in the extremes of the God-of-absence of, for instance, Peter Rollins.

I need something which at least explains the mystical experience as I have experienced it, which accounts for the evidence (albeit entirely personal) I have. Scientific materialism by itself fails to do this. As I’ve written before, my first impulse when hit with an extremely powerful first mystical experience (which I hadn’t been looking for) was to enquire whether there was something wrong with my mental processes. However, I hadn’t taken drugs or fasted, wasn’t sleep-deprived or oxygen deprived and my doctor at the time assured me there was no evidence of (for instance) schizophrenia or temporal lobe epilepsy. My late friend George Ashley (a psychologist and atheist) went through all the evidence I could put forward and could come up with nothing better than “it was a brain-fart”. He forgave me for thinking that that wasn’t an adequate explanation for me, though it might have been for him – and one reason for my thinking that it wasn’t was the fact that I found I could encourage (if not guarantee) further similar experience by a set of mental exercises. (These became fined down to contemplative prayer and meditation, which I found most effective).

He was, however, correct in saying that it was ultimately all due to neurons in my brain firing in particular ways. Of course it was – everything without exception which I experience can be reduced to neurons in my brain firing in particular ways, and some fairly recent research has given insight into disindividuation and deindividuation, the first of which is definitely a feature of mystical experience, and pinpointed what actual brain activities are associated with this kind of perception. It can even be artificially stimulated, it seems (though this is hardly news to me, as I knew beforehand that certain drugs, fasting, sleep deprivation and oxygen deprivation could contribute massively to the probability of this kind of experience).

[Incidentally, I have no link for disindividuation, but use this to indicate a separation of the sense of self from the individual perspective; where deindividuation transfers that to the group, disindividuation expands it to the universe (plus?) and/or removes or suppresses it completely.]

But then, other brain functions can be artificially stimulated and produce sensation or cognitive results of a more everyday kind. To George, this meant that the experience could just be written off as having no material correspondence, and therefore being a species of delusion. To me, this is just not an adequate explanation. Hovering on the edge of it has enabled me (for instance) to pass exams, produce some pretty fair artwork (many of my posts have one of my paintings at the top), have useful insights into problems, on a couple of occasions superperform at music and the like; the fuller experience is massively invigorating and calming – and includes a substantial self-verification, or in other words the feeling that this is true. If the edge of it produces insights and performance which are demonstrably right, and produces a lesser degree of self-verification, I  cannot reasonably ignore the self-verification of the whole experience.

And the cognitive aspect of that experience tells me that God is radically omnipresent and yet is in something like a personal relationship with me (and always was, whether I realised that or not). Fully transcendent and fully immanent at the same time. No theology or philosophy which does not accommodate this experience as being in some way real can be satisfactory to me.

My problem is that nothing I have experienced indicates conclusively that any direct effect of God on the material world in detail ever happens. It indicates that direct effects in individual consciousnesses happen, and any material effects are secondary, but not direct effects. Certainly I have lots of testimony I’ve heard as to bizarre coincidences, and I’ve experienced a few myself, but once I’ve applied caveats against cognitive biases, I’m left with nothing conclusive. Except that personal, internal experience, and its occasional effects on my ability to do things (or, very occasionally, to perceive things).

So the elephant in the room here is that as I’m interpreting material phenomena through science, I don’t expect anything “supernatural” to happen. I do expect to be occasionally surprised at the discovery of some new feature of reality which can in principle be explored by the methods of science, and that might just be something which is currently labelled “supernatural”. But it won’t be truly supernatural.

I also don’t expect to come across any “spiritual entities” except within the psychologies of individuals or groups beyond the personal mystical experience of the divine, and the divine is one and not truly multiple; that’s what the experience tells me. Adonai echad, the Lord is one; there isn’t room in my experience for another. That said, I’ve read Walter Wink on the “Powers”, and can see realised “fallen” entities in the power structures of today. But not malevolent supernatural beings floating around and picking on people, or even benevolent ones.

I definitely don’t expect to witness any miracles in the sense of something which contravenes the established laws of nature. I find the whole thing, working as it appears to in accordance with laws of nature (including some which have not yet been discovered) to be miraculous enough, and that’s an everyday miracle, if “everyday” and “miracle” can be combined in one thought. Any miracle which does contravene the laws of nature I cannot completely rule out, but it would be vanishingly unlikely. Or, you might say, “miraculous”.

I do however consider it extremely sound psychology to consider all that occurs as God’s miraculous gift to me and to others, even when it seems extremely hard to work out how that can be the case. There is a well-proven link between gratitude and happiness, and even if it hadn’t been well-proven in psychology, I would have noted it as a result of my depression, during which the ability to feel happy and the ability to feel gratitude both deserted me, and on termination of which both arrived back simultaneously. That isn’t actually why I thank God for the blessings showered on me – that’s a natural outflowing of my love for and trust in a God who I experience, but it would be scientifically unreasonable for me to neglect a proven psychological effect.

I’m hoping that at this point I’ve included enough outside explanation to avoid the responses “But Chris, if you don’t really believe in the supernatural, how can you believe in God?” or “But Chris, this God of yours has no real effect, and so is nothing more than an imaginary friend, surely?”. I’m tempted to answer that I don’t need to “believe” in God, as I experience God as fact. A year ago, nearing the end of a six and a half year severe depression, I had not experienced God at all since the depression had deepened in 2006 and did need to believe, but I believed on the basis of past experience, past data, past fact.

I have to grant, though, that my basically scientific outlook means that a lot of the language of the Bible needs to be reinterpreted in order for me to engage with it, as on a naive reading it does deal with the supernatural, with divine intervention contravening the laws of nature, with gods and angels and powers, principalities, demons and a Devil. Walter Wink (and William Stringfellow and John Howard Yoder) have done that reinterpretation for me in respect of the powers, principalities, demons and Devil, at least for the most part; I am not sure I can currently point at any one writer who has done the same exercise in respect of God, though. The “ground of all being” and “Being itself” authors have, I think, a part of the picture, but not all.

The scientific-rationalist outlook also requires me to be continually sceptical about the absolute accuracy of my understandings, and to continue to test these, refine them and occasionally replace them. This is not necessarily a popular outlook among believers, where “doubt” is often considered a weakness. So this is inevitably a continuing process; what I think about these things in a week may differ.

Keep reading!

 

 

 

 

 

 

At “By Common Consent”, there is a review of John Dominic Crossan’s “The Power of Parable: How fiction by Jesus became fiction about Jesus”.

This interests me particularly for two reasons, firstly because BCC is a Mormon site, and I don’t get to look at Mormon sites very often. The more important reason, though, is that I read this book last year and would unhesitatingly recommend it as a radical new look at the Gospels.

I go along with most of what that review says; I love the direction of thinking Crossan is pursuing, but do not think he supports his hypotheses sufficiently rigorously for me to say “Yes, this is the way it was”.

But Crossan tells a wonderfully engaging and convincing story about how and why the Gospels were written, and one which is well worth considering as a possible way of reading them, and a new way which gives an additional and sometimes surprising set of insights. At the least, it can be regarded as a parable of its own (about writing parables about a teller of parables one of which is perhaps itself about parables – which is even more “meta” than the comment which starts the review).

I’m not sure I want to try to suggest what kind of parable it is, though. In a way, it’s a challenge parable, the “marginalised person” here being parables themselves. In a way it’s a riddle parable, because the stories themselves become significant of something other than what they first appear to be. I don’t at the moment see any indication of example parable there, but wouldn’t be surprised if someone were to correct me.

One thing Crossan does do here, however, is use the texts we know well to tell us some stories about the early development of Christianity and its transformation from being a Jewish sect to being a religion crossing divides of ethnicity, and to underline a particular understanding of Jesus. It’s an understanding of Jesus which resonates extremely well with me, and I like the book fine for that. It is, however, too limited an understanding of Jesus to reflect all that I consider Jesus to be to us now, even if (as I rather suspect) it may reflect a very substantial part of what Jesus was during his lifetime ministry.

Larry Behrendt, who blogs at Jewish Christian Intersections, has a set of recent posts about Pharisees. Pharisees are given an incredibly bad press in the Gospels, being probably the individual group most often identified as being opponents of Jesus in discussions (the others being Sadducees, Scribes and, in the Fourth Gospel, “Jews”). Larry’s plea is that we stop using the terms “Pharisee” and “Pharisaical” as terms of abuse, as they paint a very inaccurate and incomplete picture of the real historical group called “Pharisees” and the term has become synonymous with “Jew”, and is therefore a form of stealth antisemitism.

I think he makes a very good argument indeed, particularly in his analysis of the German Biblical scholars who have definitely in the past used the term “Pharisee” as just a placeholder for “Jew” to conceal what is really just antisemitism. I’ve commented a bit on his last post (and some of this post is lifted from that), and one of the additions I picked up on was the result of discussion with a former forum sparring partner, Bob Dick, whose attitude was that as he knew that Rabbinic Judaism was the lineal successor of Pharisaism, if I used the term “Pharisaical”, he was going to read that as just “Jewish” and as antisemitic whatever I actually intended.

We have tended to have difficulty regarding Jesus as having been Jewish in the past, though this seems to have largely been unlearned. Actually, though, as (inter alia) Daniel Boyarin points out in “Border Lines”, Christianity is also a lineal successor to Pharisaism, and if you try to categorise Jesus within the Judaism of the time, you end up deciding that Jesus was a Pharisee himself. He was clearly blue collar, scripture based rather than Temple based, in opposition to the Temple authorities (signified by the Scribes and Sadducees) and in many of his recorded statements following the great Pharisaic teachers of the time, Hillel or Shammai – almost always Hillel, it has to be said. If there was a public argument about scripture with others in that period (other than in the Temple), it was virtually guaranteed to be between Pharisees, as they were the group who considered public argument about scriptural interpretation to be desirable and who were “out among the people” rather than clustered around the Temple or (in the case of the Essenes) removed from general society.

In relation to the term “Pharisee”, I have a copy of the full version of the Oxford Dictionary, which (inter alia) gives earliest word-uses in English with examples; I thought I recalled an usage in some early 19th century book I’d read, and checked. I find that “Pharisee” is first used as a term of abuse in the early 1800s, rather earlier than would argue that our attitude here has been influenced by the great German biblical scholars of the late 19th and 20th centuries. We haven’t, in other words, just copied the Germans here.

Frankly, I half expected to find an usage in Shakespeare, but it appears he managed to avoid that (although “The Merchant of Venice” is a problem in and of itself).

That, of course, points up another piece of the problem – England used to be a profoundly anti-Semitic country as well, it just started moving beyond that rather earlier than most of continental Europe (with the notable exception of Holland, which was well ahead of us). We have stacks of writings, fictional and non-fictional, from those days which require an educated eye if those reading them are not to take in antisemitism by the “drip” method.

Of course, those writings tend to be non-PC in terms of gender equality as well as race and religion (individually and collectively), and we do, I think, these days, manage to instil enough consciousness of that to lead the majority of educated readers, at least, to be very aware that they’re reading something written from what is now an outdated and reprehensible viewpoint.

The snag is that relatively few are going to be aware that “Pharisee” is an anti-semitic usage (20 years ago, I wasn’t aware of this myself). We’re a fairly secular society these days here, and a significant majority of educated readers are not going to have put any effort into studying the Bible. Those who *have* stand an unfortunately high chance of being part of an evangelical church (those being the only churches which are not contracting here), and my experience of evangelical churches is that they push a very negative view of Judaism as a religion. I have yet to hear an evangelical preacher here who does not consider that Judaism was at the time of Jesus a dysfunctional religion. I probably shouldn’t restrict that to evangelical preachers, either – there are precious few mainline preachers I’ve heard advancing any contrary viewpoint either, although they have a greater chance of being silent on the issue.

One of the major planks of this understanding is very much that the Judaism of Jesus’ time is seen as a religion of works righteousness. Humanity is seen as fundamentally incapable of measuring up to such a system (interpreted as requiring absolute adherence), the system is seen as leading either to radical insecurity about one’s status vis a vis God or to complacent hypocrisy, and Christianity is then put forward as a way out of this impasse.

Of course, I see this as a fundamentally wrong assessment of Second Temple Judaism, and so does the (modern and academically fairly dominant) chain of scholarship known as “The New Perspective on Paul”. Unfortunately sending the average churchgoer off to read (for instance) E.P. Sanders, James Dunn or Douglas Campbell is impractical, as their books are very substantial tomes and they’re often regarded as “too liberal”. N.T. Wright’s “Paul and the Faithfulness of God” is huge, too; Wright might just be acceptably not-quite-liberal enough, but two large volumes is going to put most people off thoroughly, in price if not in the investment of time needed to read it! I suppose in 20 or 30 years time this might have trickled into the majority of Christian thinking in this country, but not yet… I wrote about this at more length recently.

So, should I use “Pharisee” or “Pharisaic” in the way I used to, denoting a particular rather hypocritical “my works are better than your works” kind of Christian? I think not. Firstly, it’s hugely tarnished by association with some Nazi or neo-Nazi German theologians with whom I wouldn’t want to be associated. Secondly, it is likely to look like anti-Judaism (even if not antisemitism) to anyone Jewish. Thirdly, by using it I am in fact criticising Jesus, and lastly in using it I am implicitly supporting a view of Christian origins and salvation with which I disagree strongly.

Into Room 101 it goes, therefore…

 

 

 

In discussion last night I heard again what I’ve heard many times before. I can’t guarantee to use the exact wording (and so much for the ability of eyewitnesses to recount exact wording 40 or 70 years after the event!) but in general terms the statement ran:-

“The Jews had the Law, but the Law didn’t work, so God sent Jesus to deliver the New Covenant.”

This is a depressingly familiar line of thinking typical of post-Luther Pauline scholarship in the West; the proof text for it is the extended discussion in Romans 1-11, but in particular Romans 2:9-18, 5:20, 8:3, 11:7 and 13-25. Happily, scholarship during the last 50 years has taken a new turn, interpreting Paul very differently. I quote from E.P. Sanders “Paul and Palestinian Judaism”:-

“It has been a common view among Christian scholars that there is such an incongruence in Judaism generally and in Rabbinic Judaism in particular. God, it has been said, became very remote in the period after the return from Babylon. He was no longer spoken of familiarly, but only by circumlocutions; and angels were necessary as intermediaries. Yet Judaism possessed no means of access to the remote God save obedience to the Torah, which is manifestly insufficient and inadequate. This situation led to a religion of anxiety on the one hand (could one do enough works to earn favour with the distant God?) and smug self-reliance on the other hand (some could).

This estimate of Jewish religious experience – anxiety coupled with arrogant self-righteousness – rests on three theories about Jewish theology, all wrong. They are the view that a man must do more good deeds than he commits transgressions, that God is viewed as inaccessible, and that the individual felt himself to be lost, having no access to the remote God.” (my emboldening). Sanders is at that point well on the way to showing that there is no justification at all for taking that view of Judaism.

Sanders’ book, published in 1975, was the first major book to express what has become known as “The New Perspective on Paul”. Other major names taking this kind of view are James Dunn, Douglas Campbell and, most recently, N.T. Wright. Douglas Campbell’s “The Deliverance of God: an Apocalyptic Re-reading of Justification in Paul” takes Paul’s relevant statements, mainly in Romans but also in Galatians and elsewhere and where Sanders has exposed a problem (that if we are to read Paul in this way, Paul has got his Judaism very seriously wrong), Campbell sets out to re-read Paul, finding that this viewpoint is not, in fact, justified from Pauline scripture in any event. Sanders (and those following him) comes to the conclusion that individual salvation in Second Temple Judaism was by something called “covenantal nomism”, which, briefly, is the view that all members of Israel (i.e. Jews) are saved by that status, and that adherence to the Law is an appropriate response to that salvation, and potentially at least required in order for someone to retain that status (a viewpoint not in fact dissimilar from that of reformed theology). Campbell finds that justification in Paul is by participatory atonement, in which the believer participates in Christ’s atoning sacrifice by participating in his death and resurrection, in the process “dying to sin”, and in the process finds that Paul’s strictures about the inadequacy of the Law to save are in fact a rhetorical device presenting the views of a competing teacher whose viewpoint Paul then proceeds to ridicule.

I am very pleased to have found these lines of argument, which I find convincing enough (at the least) to cast serious doubt upon the previous reformed orthodoxy, as it serves to restore Paul in my view away from “someone who corrupted the message of Jesus” (which would have been my stance a few years ago) to that of an inspired writer.

Among other things, it avoids the hugely problematic question of how it could be that God would deliver to the Jews a system which didn’t work, and leave them with nothing better for a period of at least 500 years and potentially well over 1500. In the classical Theist concept, that just doesn’t work; a God who would do this would not be both omniscient and omnibenevolent, i.e. he would either be surprised it didn’t work or uncaring of the fate of many members of his chosen people (or, perhaps, both, as 1500 years is a rather long time for something not to work and not be “mended”).

I will grant that this just might work in a “process theology” framework, where God is not omniscient and develops in response to man’s own development, but even then the scale and duration of lack of knowledge seriously stretches my ability to understand how that might be the case.

It had to be, therefore, that this conception was untrue, and until reading Sanders and Campbell fairly recently, I unfairly laid the blame for this misconception on Paul. In fact, it appears, the main culprits were Luther and Calvin.

In point of fact, as I currently read the scriptures, I think the point of view of covenantal nomism is only somewhat justified, as it seems to me that the question of individual sin and salvation is thoroughly and adequately dealt with by Ezekiel 18. Ezekiel appears to date from 592 BC (something over 600 years before Paul). However, this passage is somewhat foreshadowed in earlier material, parts of Isaiah, Proverbs and Psalms, so that would represent the latest date at which this concept came into Judaism. All that there matters is the orientation of the individual (whether toward God and his commandments or away from those) at any particular point in time. Repent and turn to God, says Ezekiel, and you will live; this can readily be amplified to indicate that repentance requires that amends be made and, of course, that where the Law demands certain ritual observances, that these be done.

Earlier than this, is the same charge against God for not having created and made known an adequate mechanism for individual salvation justifiable? On the whole, I think not. I am sticking my neck out considerably here, but I do not think that the earliest parts of the biblical witness speak to individual salvation at all, but to collective salvation, that is to say preservation and increase of the whole people, and I suspect that anxiety about individual rather than collective salvation is the product of a later stage in the unfolding response of the people towards God. When the issue first becomes a problem in human consciousness (perhaps around the time of David), solutions begin to arrive via writers of what is now scripture, culminating (to my mind) in Ezekiel.

I am somewhat embarrassed that it has taken me so long to come to this conclusion, but in my defence say that it is very difficult to overcome the preconceptions instilled by several centuries of focus on the individual following the Enlightenment – just as it was very difficult (and therefore demanded a mammoth and extremely detailed analysis) for Douglas Campbell to overcome the preconceptions instilled by several centuries of reformed theology.

Paul, it now seems to me, was speaking only to the issue of how to integrate non-Jewish followers of Jesus with Jewish ones without establishing a hierarchy in which the non-Jewish followers were “second class citizens”, and doing this to counter another teacher who was preaching the necessity of full conversion to Judaism. He was also doing this from a thoroughly Jewish perspective, as Alan Segal’s “Paul, the Convert” and Daniel Boyarin’s “A Radical Jew” have underlined for me.

It wasn’t, in other words, a “new dispensation” as some think, and the comment last night assumes, more a small step in a widening of the scope of a message which was already well in place.

An issue came up in a recent Alpha session, that on “When and how should I read the Bible”, regarding fulfillment of prophecy by Jesus. In fact it came up twice, once in casual conversation and once in the group discussion. A friend gave me a copy of a brief article suggesting that Jesus fulfilled many prophecies and that the odds against this were astronomical, asking if I agreed with this – and, of course, I didn’t; then someone in the group pointed to Psalm 22 and the close similarity with the crucifixion account in Matthew.

It is fairly easy to find sites which list dozens of prophecies ostensibly “fulfilled” by Jesus. Here’s one such which deals only with messianic prophecies. It is slightly less easy, but still trivial, to find sites giving the Jewish attitude to fulfillment of messianic prophecy. Here’s Aish.com on the topic.

I’m inclined to agree with Aish.com that it’s all very well to have fulfilled some messianic prophecies (quite a few people have fulfilled significant numbers of these, including the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who at least according to his followers managed a better overall total than did Jesus), but in order to claim the status of the one and only messiah, you need to fulfil all of them. It is, of course, standard in Christianity to say that the unfulfilled prophecies will be fulfilled at the second coming, but this does not convince, just as the suggestion of many Chabad Lubavitch supporters 20 years ago that the late Rabbi would return to fulfill the remainder does not convince. Now, I happen to think that both Judaism and Christianity have gone up a wrong path in determining that there should be one and only one messiah, as I wrote about here some time ago. However, there we are; we do not have a full set of fulfilled messianic prophecies for anyone who has so far lived, including Jesus.

The reference to Psalm 22 is not, however, a reference to a specifically messianic prophecy; Psalm 22 is not generally regarded in Judaism as prophetic or as messianic. There are, of course, also lists of prophecies more generally which are said to have been fulfilled; here’s a list of 351. The list of correspondences between Psalm 22 and Matthew and John’s accounts of the crucifixion is fairly extensive in its own right; consider verses 16 to 18, for instance (the link I use there is to a parallel literal translation of the Hebrew Masoretic text which includes links for the derivation of each word, and I find this very helpful in “going behind” English translations).

However, there are also a lot of features in Psalm 22 which are not recapitulated; there are no bulls besetting him like ravening lions, for instance, no swords, no dogs, and it is clear from the passage that the author survives rather than dies. This points up something which I always find when looking at claims that prophecy has been fulfilled where the “prophecy” has been gleaned from a non-prophetic passage; you can find snippets of Hebrew scripture to echo almost any circumstance you might wish to, but in the wider context the parallel breaks down.

But, you might say, in those three verses, at least, the parallels are fairly numerous and close.  Abandoned by friends and surrounded by enemies, bones disjointed (probable in a crucifixion), hands and feet pierced, casting lots for garments… and this in a context in which Matthew describes Jesus as quoting the first verse of the Psalm (“Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani” – Matt. 27:46).

Well, not so much so. The Psalms were the worship songs of Judaism (and still are), and Jesus and those who wrote about him could be expected to know them rather well. Aside from casting lots for garments, all those components of vv. 16-18 I quoted would refer to any crucifixion, and anyone crucified would be likely to think that God had abandoned them (if they had any belief in divine providence for them, at least), so at least if Jesus were able to speak having been crucified (which is rather dubious) this would be a natural verse to come to mind. If you’re a churchgoer, it’s likely that you’ve found yourself framing events in your own life in the words of worship songs or hymns, if you’re not, in popular music you know well.

The casting of lots for garments, however, is not in Matthew, but in the far later account of John. Now I tend to think that casting lots for Jesus’ garments is unlikely if you attempt to harmonise the gospel accounts, as by this point he doesn’t have any garments to speak of. However, if you’re a Jewish writer of the day and you hear that soldiers at the scene were playing dice (i.e. casting lots), you are going to think of Psalm 22, and assume that division of garments is involved.

And, indeed, this kind of mechanism is what the vast majority of historical-critical scholars see in the Gospels; the writer knows his scripture and fills in details from the library of scriptural references he has in his head. This may even have happened in the minds of actual eyewitnesses (though the overwhelming probability is that none of the gospel writers was an eyewitness). Our brains fill in detail we didn’t actually see from what we expect to have seen. Having had a career in which I needed to assess and test eyewitness accounts in court on a regular basis, I am only too familiar with this mechanism.

The same historical-critical scholars see a great deal more of this in the gospel accounts, and the result is that they discount most sections of the accounts which appear or are said to fulfill prophecy on the basis that it is to them probably eyewitness or interpreter bias in favour of what they expect to have happened, even if it didn’t actually happen, particularly those which the biblical author explicitly states are fulfillment of prophecy.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that events didn’t happen exactly as the gospel-writers say they did, and they happened to fit neatly to various scriptural passages which the writers knew – indeed, there is such a range of potential passages that there were bound to be some which could be brought to mind. What it does mean is that in terms of historical proof, apparent fulfillment of scripture is worthless.

The talk was, of course, about reading the Bible, and this post also has something to say about “how”, and the choice of a version (of which there are huge numbers in English).

There is a translation issue revolving around “they have pierced my hands and feet” in Psalm 22:16/17 because the primary meaning of the word “ariy” is “lion”; “kaariy” can be translated as “like a lion” rather than as deriving from the word “karah” meaning to dig, plot, bore or open and being “they have pierced”. That is why my link is to an etymological parallel translation.

You will find “they have pierced” in most Christian bibles, and indeed in many Jewish translations into English, but a substantial amount of Jewish scholarship prefers “they bite like a lion my hands and feet”, which does not map to crucifixion well. There’s some further discussion of this in a Wikipedia entry.

There are, in other words, times when our translations will not deliver us a complete picture, and where any translation is going to arrive at a decision as to how to translate something on the basis of their theological preconceptions; the Christian sees scriptural fulfillment, the Jew sees nothing of the sort. There is no way of knowing which is correct, and there is therefore good reason not to rely too strongly on any one translation.

Finally, my friend who passed me the article on fulfilled scripture saw divine providence in the fact that he had brought this hoping to ask me about it on an evening when the talk should have been about prayer, but had been changed at the last minute to being about the Bible due to a miscommunication between organiser and speaker. I wonder whether he would see the same divine providence in the coincidence that the passage brought up as evidence of scriptural fulfillment in the talk was, unbeknownst to the person who mentioned it, one which rests on a seriously dubious piece of translation?

I suspect not!

There’s a story I’ve heard a few times now, most recently ten days ago, about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a former policeman called Van de Broek. It’s a popular story for sermons and talks, it seems. It’s a very uplifting story about an unnamed woman forgiving the policeman for the murder of her son and husband and wishing to treat him as a replacement son.

I want to make two points here.

The first is that the story probably never happened as it’s been reported to me. I rather suspected that it might not be, as some of the details didn’t fit well with what I knew of the Commission. Here’s an analysis: frankly, I come to the same conclusion as the writer. Neither of us thinks its factual truth matters. It may not be a factually accurate story, but it is in its own way a true story about how Christian forgiveness to the extent of loving one’s enemy should happen. I know of a few other factually correct stories of victims who have bridged that gap and befriended their oppressors, in any case, including one woman whose husband was beaten to death senselessly, and who forgave and visited those responsible in prison.

In discussion after hearing it most recently, people were asking themselves if they could bring themselves to do what the anonymous woman did in the story. Some didn’t think they could, or would even want to, some hoped that they would if they were ever in that kind of position.

I hope I would myself, because I possibly couldn’t afford not to. As you may have gathered if you’ve read earlier posts in this blog, I’m a member of a twelve step fellowship. Several steps of the twelve are very relevant; 4, making a searching and fearless moral inventory; 5, admitting to yourself, God and another human being the exact nature of your wrongs; 6, becoming ready to have God remove your defects of character; 7, humbly asking him to do so, 8, making a list of all persons you have harmed and becoming willing to make amends to them all and 9, making amends except when to do so would injure them or others.

The “searching and fearless moral inventory” in step 4 is commonly done as a list of resentments which you have accumulated over the years, in column form; who against, what the circumstances were and (crucially) what your part in it was. These then later usually feed directly into the making of the list for step 8. The objective is to recognise all resentments (including against yourself – to which I am especially prone), to admit them publicly and to make good the damage caused; at step 9 it is normal to ask the wronged person how you can put right your wrong.

This is, of course, very much similar to what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was doing in South Africa, a sort of national twelve-step programme. Both are examples of restorative justice. What both realise is that an un-dealt with resentment is poisonous to the person who holds the resentment. For an alcoholic or addict, keeping hold of resentments long term is near to being a guarantee of relapse; I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t do those who are free from addictions any good either.

As I sit here at the moment, I have a clean slate as far as resentments are concerned. I work on this on a continuing basis (through step 10 – continuing to take personal inventory and when wrong promptly admitting it – and, which is not explicit in the wording of the step, trying to restore things to the state they would have been in had I not done something wrong). Could I cope with the resentment which would be produced if someone did to me something similar to what was, in the story, done to this woman? I don’t know, but I would try as hard as I possibly could to admit the resentment, to deal with it and to let it go. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay”: it is not my part to pursue vengeance, I can and must leave that to God.

Of course, the story seems to go a step further, to an act of positive love towards the enemy. This may seem a step too far. It’s marginally further than I’ve been able to go with one or two people who have wronged me in the past, but they are not around me any more (and I do not at the moment harbour any resentments toward them). If they were here with me now, I think it might be necessary to go that step further and act in a positively loving way toward them, as otherwise their mere presence might lead to the resentments of the past being renewed.

For me, this would be not saintly but wise. I cannot afford to have people from my past taking over my thoughts and ruining my present. I need to be free of them, and, one day at a time, today I am.

University of South Carolina have a magazine “Religion Dispatches” in which is an interesting article. It looks at “nones” in America, i.e. those who give “none” as an answer in questionnaires under “religion”. If it’s anecdotal conclusions are correct, the “social gospel”, i.e. the sayings of Jesus relating to how we should act and in particular how we should treat other human beings have a huge following outside Christianity.

I think, although I can quote no statistics for the conclusion, that the same applies in the UK, where a significantly greater proportion of the population are either “nones” or if pushed will answer “C of E” despite having visited an actual church at most a handful of times since they left school other than for weddings and funerals. We may not be as overtly “Christian” in our declarations as our cousins over the pond, but the social gospel is, I think, very deeply embedded in our society quite irrespective of religious practice or belief. This is not to say that we are particularly good at following the social gospel (and I happen to think we have become rather less good at following it over the course of the last 30 years), but that we accept it as being a laudable model to aspire to. Indeed, it may be that as overt religiosity has declined, the social gospel has leached out into society as a whole in a way which is no longer very dependent on professed Christians spreading the gospel.

Against this background, I am remembering the Alpha talk from Wednesday evening. Two things particularly stood out to me; the first was the speaker saying that Jesus spent a large proportion of his time talking about himself.

Well, if all you read is the Fourth Gospel, that is entirely correct. However, if you read the synoptics (the other three gospels), the picture is rather different – Jesus spends very little time talking about himself, and in Mark actually repeatedly asks his disciples not to talk about who or what he is. The major themes of the synoptics are the social gospel and the advent of the Kingdom (whether of God or of Heaven) on earth, in which the social gospel is actually followed. Where Jesus talks of himself, it is either referring to his forthcoming death (and resurrection) or of his judging at a point in the future.

It is interesting in that context to read Matthew 25:31-46. “When the Son of Man comes in his glory”, it does not seem that those who can put the best construction on his statements about himself are chosen, or those who believe that certain statements about his nature, purpose or relationship to God; it is those who actually practice the social gospel who are placed with the sheep on his right hand. Matt. 7:21 is relevant as well, and possibly John 14:15 so as to involve the Fourth Gospel at least somewhat.

The other thing which stood out was the emphasis on Lewis’ trilemma, the “either-or” trio created by C.S. Lewis in his recreational occupation of apologist. As a reminder, what Lewis wrote was:-

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.” (quote from Wikipedia; link above).

I am sure that most Christian apologists who use this (and it is in every edition of the Alpha manual to date) think that this is a slam-dunk argument that forces anyone who has a high opinion of Jesus (which, as we see above, is a very large proportion of the “none” population) to accept that he is Son of God and is God. I can testify from picking up the pieces after this tactic has been used previously on many occasions that this is not the case. A few do accept this, and I have no interest in giving them more complex arguments, but in my experience more don’t and in an increasingly scientific-rationalist world, often can’t.

The more inquiring and those who have been trained in logic will, of course, enquire whether the trilemma is valid, and find that it is not. Some of this I covered last year in “Will the real Jesus please stand up”, but in broad terms, the excluded options are (1) Jesus didn’t actually say these things (2) he said them, or something like them, but they didn’t mean what Lewis takes them to mean (3) he was a prophet speaking on behalf of God or (4) he was a panentheist mystic (which may amount to much the same thing as “prophet”), talking from a point of view of a personal sense of unity with God. Unfortunately, most of those who I have tried to help after the trilemma was fired at them have not been logicians or had sufficient tenacity and curiosity to arrive there.

Happily, only a few have said to themselves “OK, being God is excluded*, so he was mad or diabolical, and therefore I will avoid following any of his teachings in future”. “A few” is, of course, far too many, but I can count them on the fingers of one hand.

By far the most common reaction is “OK, God is excluded, being the Devil is excluded* and my opinion of Jesus is that he was clearly a great moral teacher who I look up to (and so not mad), so the trilemma is rubbish and therefore everything the person who put the trilemma to me is saying is rubbish and I will not listen to any of this stuff any more”.  Some of them are by then walking away so fast that I can’t catch up with them and persuade them that it isn’t that simple and that there actually is merit in sticking around to hear more…

[* “Being God is excluded, being the Devil is excluded” may need unpacking; for a human being to “be God” in most people’s concept sets requires a whole load of inventive theology which is not in evidence at the point where the trilemma is wheeled out, so this option is likely to be dismissed out of hand. For the Devil to be similarly constrained has similar problems, but the negative to this is usually that the hearer has far too high a view of Jesus to admit this as a possibility.]

But actually, if we look back at Matthew 25, this may not be quite so dispiriting as it seems – as long as they hold Jesus as a great moral exemplar, the chances are fairly reasonable that they may go on and do some things which will find them on the side of the sheep. They will, of course, miss all of the benefits to them of living as part of a community of followers of Jesus, and will probably not follow him as closely or in as dedicated a way, but they may well still follow him.

Perhaps we are in sight of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “religionless Christianity”? Richard Beck blogged some more about this on Friday after a series in 2010.

However, I think this misses encouraging one aspect of following Jesus, which is the experiential, sometimes mystical, always relational link with Jesus as a living force in the world. You do not have to be part of a community of belivers to experience Jesus in this way, but it is definitively easier. It is possible to do this without going down the route of the Fourth Gospel with all its implicit theological complexity, recognising that we are in relationship to Jesus also being in relationship to God in a particular way without the support of a group of others, but it is easier to walk in company than alone.

Lewis’ trilemma can, and in my experience is quite likely to, damage the possibility of someone walking in company in the future. So this is my plea to Alpha speakers everywhere – ditch the trilemma! It may well be a powerful weapon, but it’s likely to backfire…

 

 

In a comment on facebook to James McGrath’s post “How do you know that?”, Carl Beck Sachs writes:-

“In response to that, Lydie, I would say that people who don’t have a capacity for mystical experience are, to use Rorty’s delightful phrase, “religiously unmusical” (as he was, and as I am sometimes, depending on what else is going on in my life). Certainly there’s nothing wrong about being religiously unmusical — just as there’s nothing wrong with being unmusical. And I’d be the first to defend one’s right to be religiously unmusical!

Part of the point I’m making here is that, from the perspective of a religious liberal, there’s nothing more to being a non-theist or atheist other than being religiously unmusical. There’s no other thing going on besides that — nothing at all.”

I like this language. At 13, I might well have described myself as “religiously unmusical”; however, I then had an “out of the blue” experience of immense power, which was the best thing I had ever experienced (it probably still is). My first thought was that I must have had some neurological event which might be dangerous, or that I was exhibiting an early sign of some psychological or psychiatric disorder, but reference to my doctor removed that possibility. My next course of action was to find ways of repeating the experience, to which I devoted a lot of time and effort over the next ten years or so; I found that certain practices drawn from all sorts of traditions seemed to incline me in the direction of repetition (and in hindsight, this will have been massively assisted by emotional recall).

I talked long and hard about the experience with others once I found that it was not necessarily evidence of mental instability, looking for commonality, at least once I had found a language of expression, or rather several languages, as different religious and spiritual traditions (I found) talked of similar experience in very different ways, and I found some people who had not had a similar experience but wished they had (I found more by far who were uninterested in such experience both inside and outside religion). I wanted others to have similar experience, and shared some of the techniques I had found.

The trouble is, I found that many of those who tried these techniques did not have peak spiritual experiences – in fact most did not. In particular I found people who had been following a Christian praxis for very many years and who seemed immune to whatever techniques I offered, including one who was very dear to me. I am coming to the conclusion that she was and is “religiously unmusical”, and that saddens me. In fact, while I don’t any more think that peak spiritual experiences like mine are vastly rare, I would be inclined to think that well over half the population is “religiously unmusical”.

I am helping with another Alpha course at the moment. Alpha, while it may appear to be an attempt to convince intellectually, isn’t that; it is aimed at producing a form of peak spiritual experience – and that’s why I’m where I am, trying to spread “the experience” in the only readily accessible programme within mainstream Christianity I know of which does that. There is at least one person on this course who I am coming to suspect of being “religiously unmusical”, and I’m going to be cringing again at parts of the course which indicate that everyone who prays will have their prayer answered, because in this particular case, I doubt it will be. Perhaps I lack faith, but against that I have a lot of experience with others with whom I’ve previously “stormed heaven” with absolutely no result.

There have, in fact, been a couple of sermons recently in which testimony as to answered prayer has been put forward, and that is wonderful – for those for whom it has been answered. My experience is different; if my prayers are in fact answered, they are answered after a very long time indeed. Frequently what I in fact asked for is not what eventually transpires as an “answer” to my initial prayer. For example, I spent six and a half years praying for release from severe depression and generalised anxiety; the depression has gone, but the anxiety remains – but I can cope with it now. It is not usually crippling.

And yet – six and a half years? There is no way in which I can tell someone who is not massively predisposed to believe in answered prayer that this is, in fact, an answer to prayer. I can say that I have learned other things as a (God-given?) result of having my positive emotions excised for that period of time – for example, the immense value of emotional recall for lifting mood, and also the value of gratitude even in the face of very bleak situations; neither of these was available to me during that period. I can, therefore, interpret this as an useful lesson in life (and have, in a previous post). Again, though, this is supremely unlikely to carry weight with anyone who does not already believe that everything happens for a purpose, and that God is the purposer.

So, if the opportunity arises, what am I now to tell the suspected religiously unmusical? “If you plug away at it, something will happen, but it might take a year, five years or ten. and it may be completely different from what you ask for”?

No, I suspect that the best I can say is that I was like that and something happened out of the blue, so there is hope, it can take a very long time, and that some people are clearly born without the ability, so there is no need to feel failure if nothing happens at all.