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Strength in weakness

I am extremely indebted to my friend Pastor Tom Sims for giving me a link a little while ago to Rick Warren making suggestions about leading and preaching from weakness.

When I saw that, I had already started to write from a degree of weakness, but my immediate impression was “Wow, I have SUCH a lot of weaknesses I can use”. And so it is proving, as I take the gift of the cessation of depression and try to wring every possible moment of understanding and inspiration and use and service out of it which my poor abused body can cope with (yes, body, I am taking slightly better care of you now, OK?).

There will be more, but the most major part of it is not likely to be seeing the light of day, or rather the internet, for a while yet. I have a lot of years of increasing paralysis of my ability to feel God and to communicate this, culminating in near total inability for the last eight years. That’s a lot of weakness to investigate. I am going to be taking some time to arrive at a narrative for all that.

Particularly as about four days worth of writing disappeared in a recent hard drive failure. No matter, I can write it again, and the result will probably be better for a little maturing.

Rick Warren is not a pastor whose blogging I would normally read (due to a slight contrast in – well – almost everything), so Tom’s part in this was crucial.

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Alpha, Omega, postcript on paradigm change

What I think Alpha wants is to establish a personal relationship with God. OK, it actually wants to establish a personal relationship with Jesus, but as for most Alpha organisers the terms are effectively synonymous, that may not matter.

I wouldn’t be so keen on Alpha if I hadn’t seen it producing such personal relationships, not always but reasonably frequently (incidentally, I think it’s a mistake saying that “if you do this and believe that, then you WILL receive the Holy Spirit” whatever scripture says, because I’ve seen too many cases where it appears that the steps have been assiduously followed and nothing has been felt. Explanations that there is some barrier which could be sin are unhelpful to say the least).

I wouldn’t be so keen on Alpha if I had any “if you do this and believe that then you WILL receive the Holy Spirit” myself either, or even “you are fairly likely to receive the Holy Spirit”, but I haven’t.

I’m working on trust here, though, because I’m well aware of two ways a paradigm change can be produced which do not in my humble opinion produce what is wanted, and the transition in each of these from what is produced to what is wanted is never easy and frequently seems impossible.

The first of these relies on a form of deindividuation; it is common in smallish groups and can produce something remarkably similar in some respects to my own experience (which was determinedly solitary). It can feel for other group members like a movement of the Holy Spirit, and may be such. The trouble is, it makes the person experiencing the paradigm change dependent on the group which initiated it rather than on God/Jesus. This is very fragile should there be any possibility of not feeling accepted by the group in the future, which in my experience usually comes from some disagreement on doctrine which makes them suddenly an “outsider”, though there can be many others including just personal relationships.

The second of these relies on charismatic personal suasion (not persuasion). Again, this can produce something similar. I know this, I’ve (per)suaded people this way myself in the past. It can feel like the Holy Spirit working through you, and that may very well be the case. The trouble with this is that it makes the person experiencing the paradigm change dependent on the (per)suader individually, which is even more dangerous than the first for the reason given and is also dangerous for the (per)suader, as it plays to several base instincts we all share.

I am not ruling out the possibility that the success of Alpha is actually due to one or both of these factors. If that is the case, I just make a note that progress thereafter absolutely must include non-communal spiritual practice and the forswearing of any future “non-inclusion” of the new believer until at least they have detached themselves from dependence on group or individual.

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Alpha; not the Omega but possibly a Gamma….

Alpha finished, officially, on Wednesday evening, and it remains to work out what I’ve learned from this. What I’ve actually GOT out of it is a whole set of new friends who share the same geekish interest as me (namely religion, spirituality, biblical history, studying scripture and all the stuff which surrounds that) and who are equally excited by exchanging ideas; they’re missional and full of fire, and that’s exactly what I was looking for. It may also have contributed (and probably did) to the abrupt ending of my marathon and severe depression 13 days ago.

It probably actually did that through the expected channel, which is that eventually the love and fellowship of the helpers combines with other factors to produce a moment of spiritual uplift and movement within the guests. Not, for me, when it’s expected, which is on the Spirit weekend (last weekend) as by the time I got to that I’d already been flying for a week. I went on two Alphas before this recognising that Alpha could sometimes do this, and hoping for a boost to my own conscious contact with God as a result (I was already well on the downward slope into depression when I went to the first, and hoped for a lifeline).

But that isn’t why I went this time; I went to help, and judging by the amount of extra input various people are wanting from me at the moment, I seem to have “done exactly what it said on the tin” and a bit more besides (looking back at my “Alpha, Beta test” post), and so did it. Unfortunately, for me this was despite the content for the most part rather than because of it.

I’ve resurrected this comment from someone attending a previous Alpha I went on; I didn’t get anything quite this pointed this time, but this sums a lot of it up:-

“Their whole attitude was ‘Why don’t you believe, you poor sick deluded person’ and ‘If you don’t believe by the end of this you’re going to hell and we can’t help you. This is your last chance’ “. She said she felt welcomed and well-fed but terminally embarrassed.

Other comments I’ve got from Alpha attenders (and I’m not going to say which comes from which Alpha course; some of these are from people attending courses in other towns and cities):-

“They all seem ‘holier than thou’ and ‘we’ve got it, you haven’t’. They’re all in on this joke, and I can’t seem to get it. Smug bastards. You’re a smug bastard too!”

“I’ve been a Christian for 40 years. I know all this stuff, and it doesn’t work for me any more – I want new answers, not the old stuff. And they say they’re Christians but used to be like me. So I’m not a Christian? I’m out of here!”

“They’re praying for me. That’s intrusive”.

“I hate the music. They’re trying to get me to join in and sing things I don’t believe in. Oh, it’s heartfelt and some of it’s actually not bad, but I feel excluded”

“I believe there’s a God, or at least something huge and difficult to understand, which I want to get closer to, and I believe that Jesus was a great inspirational leader and I try to follow what he told us to do. But they’re telling me I can’t believe that, I have to believe he was God squeezed into a human package or that he was a madman or a liar. And I can’t do that.”

“The first four talks were a load of complete rubbish. Most of their facts were wrong and I could drive a lorry through the holes in their reasoning. I didn’t go to any more. They’re obviously basing the whole thing on lies”

Of the set, the first and the last two are possibly the most damning for Alpha as it stands.

I don’t think this can be solved by praying harder for the Holy Spirit to come and transform people; this is good, indeed this should always happen, but if by that time someone is so thoroughly alienated by the process, they are far less likely to be able to receive the Spirit even if it comes knocking. Most people’s first experience is actually a small, fairly fragile thing and needs nurturing gently before it can burst into flame; mine was nothing remotely like small or fragile, but the vast majority of people I’ve shared experience with (and there have been a lot) do not have such an experience at any time during their lives.

Jesus did not allow his sheep to be snatched from the Father’s hand (Joh. 10:27-29); we might at least aspire to the same.

My first and most urgent suggestion is that we ditch Penal Substitutionary Atonement and it’s nice, simple, “convict of sin, believe Jesus was God, believe he died for our sins, pray to follow him, receive the Spirit, bang, it’s done” formula. Unfortunately, that wrecks the whole thesis of Alpha and the trajectory of the talks. What we want is acknowledgement of God, in some conception which works for people at the moment, following Jesus, in some conception which works for people at the moment and a radical act of reorientation toward God-through-Jesus, accompanied by a personal experience of God-through-Jesus. Me, I’m not even bothered if it’s God-through-Jesus, God-through-the-Holy-Spirit or just “wow, dad, you’re really there/here!”. I suggest that if you have that, you have at least a beginning Christian and we can present a few more developed theologies later for inspection.

In the course of this, we need to ditch Lewis’ trilemma. It turns off too many people who might otherwise stick there to the end – I’ve even heard people say that as Jesus was plainly not God, because that’s impossible, the message they got was that the man they’d been following was obviously a madman, therefore all the people saying these things were madmen. And “I’m out of here” followed… Incarnation is a very subtle and advanced piece of theology, and in my eyes entirely unsuitable for presentation to a beginner. After all, the early church spent the first three hundred years or more arguing about how this could be the case and having schisms, anathmatisations, riots and even wars about the idea. Let’s avoid having any of these within the Alpha rooms, no?

Alternative Alpha

Let’s avoid claiming that the gospels are eyewitness accounts. Some of us may think so, but there’s such strong modern biblical scholarship to indicate a large redactive, non-eyewitness content and a date later than most of the apostles had already died for even the earliest written form that we have any access to that we are going to get bogged down in another long and subtle argument.

Let’s not use leaps of inference from the early documents at all, in fact. What we can demonstrate clearly enough to satisfy all but the most sceptical modern scholarship is that Jesus lived, taught, inspired and gained a respectable following, died by crucifixion at the hands of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate and that within 10-30 years had a following large enough to be thought by the Romans to be a source of civil unrest as far afield as Rome itself. In the process we can set up the historical context of 1st century Palestine with some both politically and in terms of religion. We can end by pointing out that this apparently insignificant Galilean itinerant preacher produced a movement which is alive and well 2000 years later and is worldwide. (talk 1)

We can then look at the evidence and show what his followers thought about Jesus, and for this we can use Paul and the gospel writers without even having to look at historical-critical scholarship. We can show why they found him inspirational; maybe then we can start looking at some pictures they had of what the reason for the crucifixion actually was (and, no, we don’t mention PSA even then; it took over 1000 years to develop even something vaguely like that atonement theory and another 300 to articulate it in something like modern form). I think it would be good to admit that there were actually several different kerygmas used in the gospels and in Paul, in fact. (talks 2&3)

We can then look at what Jesus actually taught, using historical-critical scholarship to extract the undisputed teachings, i.e. those which liberal and conservative alike ascribe to Jesus. My very strong suggestion is that we hang this round the Kingdom statements. (talk 4)

Then we can look at the mystical/spiritual elements in Paul, John and Acts (and I’d like us to link back to the Kingdom statements here, which are to me clearly mystical). We will end up with the Spirit and the formulae used (no, not just the PSA one!). This is probably a good time for several personal testimonies, making sure they are “this is my experience” rather than “this is what you must believe”. Variation would be good here. (talks 5,6&7)

Then we can look at how churches can be organised, introducing small-group churches, home churches, internet communities and lay networks as alternatives to the institutional church, presenting a lot of possibilities for getting involved. This should definitely point out social programmes which can be included as part of a developing spirituality (talk 8)

Finally, we can get together and decide what groups want to do next, individually and collectively. This could be an add-on to talk 8, or be talk 9.

Adjusted Alpha

I don’t think this is as promising a possibility, but it would also be possible to take the existing material, improve the way we react to people, making sure all helpers are well trained not to do any of the things mentioned above which alienate people and to include in at least the early talks two viewpoints, one of which should be a stripped down “liberal” one.

It would probably then be best to split each course into two streams, giving guests the option of going “conservative” or “liberal/radical/progressive”. Maybe these could even be on split nights, so someone could actually attend both.

They might well come together again at some point, probably the Spirit weekend.

I propose this rather cautiously, as I think I know who is going to be asked to do the liberal/radical/progressive side if this course is followed.

Living the Questions

It would be worth exploring Living the Questions as a Progressive Christian alternative to Alpha which, from what I’ve seen, does not have many of the drawbacks I’ve identified above. However, I know too little about it at the moment to be able to assess whether it would be a viable alternative, an add-on or a follow-up (it would certainly do the last of those).

Journey

Journey is a Radical Christian programme of spiritual development originated by Rev. Dr. John Vincent. I have not actually been through a Journey experience (albeit I have been on a journey of my own for 45 years now) but have talked at length with John Vincent about it and read the literature, and I think it has great promise as a follow-up to Alpha. However, I am sceptical that it could be an alternative.

———————-

The question is always “What do we do next”, and we’re going to be meeting elsewhere on Wednesday evenings for a bit to talk more informally; out of this I hope something will arise. What I’d like to see from a future Alpha is the ability to move more or less straight on to a Living the Questions or a Journey.

 

 

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Direction finding – reply

Dear XXXX,

I received a private communication from you yesterday in which you said that you were bothered about the last line of my “Direction finding with Jesus” post in the light of what I said in “A Letter to my Reader”. You were worried that despite me addressing myself to you as if you were of any religion or none, because I said in “Direction finding” that I pointed to Jesus, you thought the whole idea was to convert you to Christianity by stealth.

Don’t worry, that isn’t the case. Remember that I said at the top that that was a recycled sermon? Well, everyone I was talking to there was a Christian, so I wasn’t bothered about (say) the odd Jew among that audience.

I happen to think that you have to be a really tough nut if you can’t be comfortable with the extremely stripped down concepts I have as to what you actually need in order to be a Christian – these are Faith in God (or at least the desire to get there) and acceptance of a similarly stripped-down Jesus as exemplar. You also need to want to develop your spiritual experience so that you can feel more connection with whatever it is that I call God, but you can call what you like – it’s only a label on a box.

However, as you say you really can’t do that, don’t worry. I’m better at Jesus stuff than I am at anything else, but I can also point you at quite a few other faith systems which might fit you better – Buddhism and Taoism are the most stripped down I know of, for instance. I know quite a lot about some other faiths as well, and either by joining for a while or by close discussion with those who practice them, I can relate my experience to them as well. If you want to write back, I suggest you take the SelectSmart Belief System Selector test, and let me know your results. If you score high for something, chances are that it’s worth looking at. Though I only score 68% for liberal-to-mainline Christianity (though 100% for Liberal Quaker) on my most recent test, so you can get by with something in the mid range fairly OK.

If none of these fit, I will be very surprised. However, it may be that you either need to be a solitary practicioner of spiritual practices (which I can help with as I’ve spent most of my life being one) or that you need to found your own faith. OK, I once nearly did that at the request of a group of people, but the only person in my head who thought that was a good idea was bighead SR (scientific rationalist Chris) and he got outvoted. I don’t recommend it, therefore, but I can probably still give tips.

Keep reading! You never know, you might find something in here even if you disagree with 99% of what I say. This is about my experience and my way of getting my internal GF functioning well; you’re a different person, and different things will probably work for you.

Happy seeking!

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Faith and belief; the vital difference

In “Lord, I believe”, I wrote:-

I have also written about the difference between faith and belief. Faith is love and trust. I love my wife, I trust my wife with my life, let alone my possessions; I love and trust her abolutely. But I do not believe absolutely – I could trust her, and my possessions or my life would not be safe, in fact – but I trust anyhow, I love anyhow. I believe that I am taking a calculated risk.*

The asterisk was added when I realised the terrible mistake I had made. Then I added:-

 * I would like to apologise unreservedly to my wife for writing that; she has read it, and cannot separate faith from belief in her mind, and therefore I have hurt her, and I would do anything not to have done that. But once said, it cannot be unsaid. I will write more separately about this, as I realise that people may still not grasp this important distinction.

I clearly need to try harder. Much harder.

So here it is. Faith is trust. It does not have anything essential to do with belief, though almost always people do not have faith in something they do not also believe. In the wider sense of “Faith in God”, it also means love – which is why I chose the example of my greatest and most abiding love apart from God, my own, my precious Nel, my other self, for whom I would willingly die, to draw a parallel from, but in a narrower sense, I do not always have to love as well as have faith in something.

How I feel about her is very movingly set out by Paul in his letter to the Ephesians, 5:25-33:- 25 gHusbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and hgave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by ithe washing of water jwith the word, 27 so kthat he might present the church to himself in splendor, lwithout spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.1 28 In the same way mhusbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because nwe are members of his body. 31 o“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and pthe two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. (ESV -source).

We are one. One body, one spirit, but not one mind.

Let me put it this way; if Nel were to say “Chris, jump under that train”, there is a chance that this might happen, because if she wants this it is clearly in the best interests of Chris/Nel as one body, one spirit. It’s a smallish chance, because SR (scientific rationalist Chris) would argue that this is a disproportionate and unreasonably absolute response, and would probably win (and EC did at least suggest this to the committee in my head, as Chris has hurt Nel and cannot put it right, and therefore death is the least he can do to make amends…). That is love and trust, and they are absolute, because they come mainly from EC (Emotional Chris), and EC is a creature of absolutes, black and white, all or nothing. They also come from GF, the bit of Chris which does connection with God and/or is God and confuses the heck out of SR.

Belief is different. SR is the one who does belief. Belief is a matter of weighing probabilities and assessing what course of action is most likely to be correct, what answer is most likely to be correct. SR is, after all, a scientific rationalist. He works on hypotheses; maybe things are like THIS. If so, how do we produce some more evidence that this is likely to be the case. We do an experiment; if it confirms the hypothesis, it becomes more probable that the hypothesis is correct; if it doesn’t, the hypothesis is junked and another one tried.

That is the overriding principle, though just one negative confirmation does not always produce the junking of an hypothesis if the hypothesis had previously a lot of confirming experiments and evidence and the hypothesis has worked to produce some results which are novel; perhaps the experiment was flawed or the result was an anomaly.

If an hypothesis has an overwhelming amount of confirmation from supporting experiments and data, and has produced a lot of new ideas which have also been confirmed that way, it may become a Theory in the scientific understanding of that. A Theory is much more than an hypothesis. Theories only tend to get adjusted subtly, because they WORK. However, just occasionally a Theory will show so much conflict with new data that it goes into crisis; it’s the only explanation we have, but it’s obviously not working in a significant number of cases. Usually, what happens then is a leap of imagination which produces a new hypothesis which explains all the stuff the old theory did and also the anomalous evidence; once tested enough, this can become a new Theory.

Generally when that happens, you find that the old Theory (which still works in the range of cases which were known before the anomalous results started appearing) proves to be a “special situation” in the new theory. Mostly, Theories break down in situations near some limiting condition. An example of this is Newton’s laws of motion versus Einsteinian relativity – the Theories of Special and General Relativity are broader and “more true” than Newtonian physics, but we still use Newtonian physics for calculations where it applies because the maths is easier. Newton still works well unless there’s very strong gravity, you’re talking about a very very small or very large scale or you’re talking about speeds close to the speed of light.

Notice, however, that this can NEVER PRODUCE AN ABSOLUTE TRUTH. Any Theory can be disproved by enough counterexamples. These are beliefs, and any belief can be wrong; the scientific rationalist must always accept that he can never have certainty about a Theory, a belief.

And, to use a different example, I board an airliner for a flight to Italy. I do not actually believe absolutely that the airliner will not crash, I do not believe absolutely that the pilot is competent. But I have faith that I will get to Italy that way. Faith always involves a leap beyond what it is possible to believe, in our scientific materialist world.

And that is a poor, weak kind of faith beside the faith I have in Nel, which is analagous to the faith I have in God. This is not just faith, it is faith and love, which is FAITH. It is absolute. It trusts beyond reason, beyond life, beyond comprehension.

The first commandment is this: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37). I try, and for the moment SR is outvoted.

And no, SR doesn’t really understand it.

It would seem that I love Nel the same way. Paul would, I think, understand.

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Alpha generally

I haven’t blogged about the last few sessions, as the information is still sinking in. However, session 6 was considered as covered in the week 5 Bible Study talk, sessions 7,8 & 9 were shoehorned into an intense 4 hour period on Saturday last. As I was flying high enough on the Spirit (or a large dose of GF, if you’ve read “About”) to be a danger to civil aviation before I even walked into session 7, anything detailed will need more time, if indeed I am able to achieve rational analysis. My notes however indicate that in the discussion of Pentecost, the phenomenon of deindividuation needs to be considered as a contributory factor, as it does indeed in the one to one prayer session after session 9 and that sundry promises of the Spirit coming to every Christian do not in my experience, if true, seem to produce results which are actually sensible to a sizeable number, including lifelong and very devout Christians. I am not convinced that the statement “every Christian has the Spirit but not every Christian is filled with the Spirit” really answers this one adequately.

Apart from that, viewed as a sometimes figurative description of spiritual experience of this type rather than as a description of supernatural realities, these three talks seemed to me unexceptionable; they were very ably presented by a husband and wife “tag team” which actually made the presentation much more digestible.

I do not think that an afternoon is sufficient for these three talks. If a day is not achievable, could not an afternoon stretching into the evening have been considered?

As of tonight, we have had sessions 11 and 13 in one rather over-long talk, which as sessions 12 and 14 are to be “missed”, brings the course to a close. I have other comments, which are likely to be subsumed into a general overview and critique later, but did receive in answer to “Do you think that incompetent evangelism can be more damaging than none” or words to that effect, “Yes” with some further explanation.

I then proposed what I really think should be standard, namely that you should share how you came to believe something rather than trying to argue people into believing it. Ideally, you should also say what believing in it has done for you in the past and does for you today. That, I mentioned, tends to be difficult for people to take offence at, which is a major danger with the schoolmaster-like approach, and you can’t be as “in your face” in the process, which is always a plus for getting heard rather than ignored or attacked.

The discussion afterward largely went into what we had learned and where we intended to go. And at this point, I intend to go to bed…

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Lord, I believe…

…help thou my unbelief.

That’s how St. Augustine put it.

Around 24 hours ago, while I was asleep and my computer was supposed to be backing up, it crashed. This meant that the backup failed and also that the previous backup was corrupted. My hard drive has turned into a terabyte of paperweight, it seems. Is this disaster, calling for a wailing and a gnashing of teeth? It would have two weeks ago…

But no.

I talk of Scientific Rationalist Chris (SR) and Emotional Chris (EC) often, and sometimes they talk to each other openly in places where no-one else is listening, like this blog (do not worry, I know these are only a story I tell myself about how thing work, because it makes sense of it for me – actually, things are much more complex than that and all the bits of Chris I identify are one person, with SR EC and something else I call GF all inhabiting and sharing one set of brain cells and one identity).

SR was worried and pointed out that a lot of the great creative flurry over the last 10 days had been lost, but EC is now happy and doesn’t want to feel sad or angry or frustrated if he doesn’t have to. So we said “Feh, we can write it again”, trusting that GF, which prompted that activity, could do it again if necessary – and in any event, someone more skilled than us could probably get the information off the doorstop. It wasn’t worth getting hot and bothered about.

And this was a teaching moment. I talk of a reductionist concept of what GF is which satisfies SR in some of my writings; in this conception GF is nothing more than a part of Chris, and just as much resident in Chris’ brain. This keeps SR happy; it is a sufficient reason for SR and he can believe it strongly (though not have faith in it – it is only a model, an hypothesis). But EC is not satisfied by that, to him GF is more than that, MASSIVELY more than that, because he FEELS that. So EC tells us we must believe panentheism, which is the way of thinking of  the box [   ], or GOD, which agrees with this feeling.

SR protests that we have no evidence of anything more; EC retorts that we do not have any evidence of not-more – and SR agrees, and can believe as well, though less strongly. Maybe if he can find a way of testing that hypothesis, he’ll insist on it, but he can’t yet. And we are happy.

I have also written about the difference between faith and belief. Faith is love and trust. I love my wife, I trust my wife with my life, let alone my possessions; I love and trust her abolutely. But I do not believe absolutely – I could trust her, and my possessions or my life would not be safe, in fact – but I trust anyhow, I love anyhow. I believe that I am taking a calculated risk.*

And here we are. I have just had ten days of incredible writing productivity less than half of which has appeared here and the other public places I write, and I can be happy trusting that GF will, through EC, inspire SR to do it again, only better. Before this, I was writing all the time, fearing that the depression would return and that the creativity, without GF, would wither, and I wouldn’t remember enough of it unless I wrote it. I was not trusting GF, not trusting God, at least not fully. So my faith was weak.

Lord, I have faith, help thou my lack of faith.

Through the dark days of the depression I have for most of the time had behind my chair near my desk the poster “Footsteps in the sand”. I could not see how this was really relevant, because, of course, GF had deserted me, us. According to SR. at least. We hadn’t felt GF for over 6 years, after all – it had been our footsteps, waiting for GF to return. We had not had faith.

And yet EC had liked the poster and we put it up to please him. And that, to us, looking back, proves that GF was there all the time. Chris is still here, the footsteps continue, but Chris walks with God (or GF, if you like) now and there are two pairs again. But we have faith that actually, GF was always there – Chris, the whole Chris, including SR, EC and GF could not see, because SR had locked up EC, and with him GF. We had made ourselves blind.

God did not leave us. God wil never leave us. My faith is strengthened.

Lord, I have faith, help thou my lack of faith.

We believe, in some measure. We believe strongly in GF, in the God within us, the God which Buddhism recognises well; we believe less strongly in the panentheist conception of God, but we believe nonetheless

And we believe it, too. Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief…

 

* I would like to apologise unreservedly to my wife for writing that; she has read it, and cannot separate faith from belief in her mind, and therefore I have hurt her, and I would do anything not to have done that. But once said, it cannot be unsaid. I will write more separately about this, as I realise that people may still not grasp this important distinction.

 

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Apologising for prejudice

An apology to Brian McLaren, Rob Bell and others

I have only very recently started reading things written by these two and quite a few other writers who, these days, are often labelled “Progressive Christians”.  I wish I had read them some years earlier, although in conscience, as I have only just emerged from a very long term clinical depression, I am not sure what I would have been able to do with the information.

The last time I thought of these names, they were labelled “Emergent”, and I looked at what “Emergent” seemed to mean – and it was clearly based in American Evangelical (and therefore probably Charismatic and probably Fundamentalist) Christianity. The writing I did find seemed to me heavily tinged with those tendencies.

There was no way I could have found real identity with the Evangelical-Charismatic-Fundamentalist tendency from the States. Yes, I have found pleasure and some occasional insight from debating with them over the years on The Religion Forum, and in trying to encourage some form of civilised exchanges between them and the members of other denominations and tendencies in Christianity and those of other religions and none (especially those of no religion!).

However, those exchanges have frequently been punctuated by cries of “heresy”, “false doctrine” “false prophet”, “agent of Satan” and on one occasion “Antichrist” (which I confess I initially read as “AntiChris”). I got used to these things online, and they are really water off a ducks back these days.

However I did not think these attitudes were likely to ensure me a warm welcome in the flesh, and had some experience of much less than warm physical welcome (involving shouting and fists) from Evangelicals in this country, admittedly nondenominational Evangelicals. Happily there are not such large numbers of those here that they cannot be easily avoided, and my heart goes out to those who are not in that position.

You may ask “Why were you ever putting yourself in that position, Chris?” Well, the answer is found in a phrase I first read recently from Brian McLaren, though he does not claim credit – he said that the choice in Christianity had been between “reason on ice and ignorance on fire”. Clearly he is equating Evangelical/Charismatic/Fundamentalist as ignorance, and mainline to liberal churches as on ice, i.e. with no “get up and go”, no spirit (possibly in either sense), no real commitment.

I could easily agree with ignorance in right-wing Christianity (for the most part – there are exceptions to every rule!).  If I cease for a moment to restrain myse lf:-

I find their doctrines ill-founded and frequently positively psychologically damaging, their exegetics  and hermaneutics lamentable and their grasp of biblical history non-existent,

I find their grasp of the nature of physical reality seriously flawed, their practices cult-like, their understanding of what Jesus actually taught minimal (and, at that, sidelined), their relationships with other churches let alone other religions hostile, their attitude to the disadvantaged, the different and any sexual orientation other than heterosexual and any gender other than male to be counter-scriptural and their politics the antithesis of everything Jesus stood for.

I believe that they are actively hastening the end of the world as we know it in at least two ways, faster than the rest of us would be likely to do it unaided

If I were at all interested in looking for modern application in John of Patmos’ symbol-laden and theologically confused outpourings, I would identify their churches as Babylon and their leaders as – well, exactly the way I’ve been described by them.

It’s a pity, because some of them are lovely people when shorn of their beliefs or, at least, when not acting on them.

But I don’t do that because Jesus told me not to. I acknowledge that I need to be extraordiarily careful about being prejudiced against them. I try my best to welcome them not only as fellow human beings, but also as brothers and (less often) sisters in Christ, and then try to use a little scripture – well, a lot really – for instruction reproof and correction. Training in righteousness may have to come later, Rome wasn’t built in a day. I try to love them as I love myself, in fact.

[For the last seventeen years that hasn’t been saying much, actually, as I didn’t love myself. At all.

Latterly I couldn’t actually feel love or any other positive emotion except very dimly, and with the exception of a low level generalised compassion which never entirely left me; eventually I couldn’t even be bothered to hate myself, which did at least make me a bit safer. No matter, for seventeen years I’ve been interpreting “Love your neighbour as yourself” as “treat others as you’d have liked them to treat you before you stopped caring and/or started hating yourself”. If you my reader is a bit depressed, imagine what it was like before that, if seriously depressed, ask what Jesus would do. Having emerged from the depression, I can actually love them.]

So I hope you can excuse me for treating anything smacking of this with a little caution, because I can’t. I was prejudiced, which is something I abhor in others.

However, they are definitely on fire in many cases. I need that. Here’s the reason.

Firstly, if nothing else, I am a social gospel man, and want to be involved somewhere which actually has the people and energy to outreach this way. I may even be verging on being a John Vincent style Radical.

My theology takes me to somewhere around the John Shelby Spong or even Don Cupitt area, but that doesn’t fit the bill for me because in going that far left they leave behind all which has any supernatural tinge, talks of prophecy of the future or deals in metaphysics, really. And I need that, because in there, if you don’t take it literally at all, are the parts which speak to me as a practising contemplative and mystic. Most of the more liberal end of analysis of scripture has the same problem.

(Of course, if you take it literally you end up with doctrine, about which I expect to be blogging shortly).

When I wasn’t looking, interesting things have started happening in a move from evangelical through emerging to something called Progressive Christianity. Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Tony Jones, Diana Butler Bass, Christian Piatt, Eric Elnes, James McGrath and Bruce Epperly are all identified as Progressive. (It was Bruce Epperly who suggested some names and got me looking… thanks, Bruce, and I’ll be gentle on the pre-reading of your next book!)

These guys are talking my language again, or, at least, they’re close enough to me in attitude that I can have productive relationships. I might even have found a single label which describes me without me having to have a “but…” inserted. Sadly, there seem to me none in my vicinity, but at the point of writing, I’m hopeful that I’ve actually found my home.

So, I admit prejudice, and it has damaged me, as such things often do, and I will try to do better in future.

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Direction finding with Jesus

Here’s another recycled sermon:-

Once, there was an intrepid explorer pushing into the wilds of what is now Alberta, who had found a native guide. He was trying to map the area and was asking the native names of things; pointing at a mountain, he said “what is that called”, and the mountain is now Mt. Tadwagogol.

Of course, the “native” was in fact a French-speaking halfcaste trapper, as the French had been into the interior long before any Englishmen; of course, the French can speak English but on the whole the English know no French.

And so, to the French-speaker, that mountain is now called “Yourfingeryoufool”.

I could now say, like the African storyteller, “I don’t know if it happened this way, but I know this story is true”.

Actually, I do know that it didn’t happen that way, because I made up this version of a story which is told about mountains in many lands, and I suspect all of them are apocryphal, or in other words they didn’t actually happen like that. But they tell us a truth or two. The guy who knows more languages can baffle the one who doesn’t, perhaps?

Or more, never trust a translator. If you can, learn the language in use somewhere and you’ll go wrong a lot less often. In the Bible, nothing was written in English. All we have is translations. All we have is translators to produce the translations, and translators (as we’ve seen above) sometimes have their own agenda. Often, they don’t even realise they HAVE an agenda, because they just know it’s right to translate in THIS way and don’t ask themselves why they know this, what is it makes them sure – and nine times out of ten, it’s because they already have a theory of what it is that the word is likely to mean.

Such as a mountain, rather than a finger.

Or a very scary Last Judgment with the possibility of getting things wrong without realising it, rather than a corrective exaggeration encouraging people to obey the Second Great Commandment when Jesus says (Matthew 25:40) “Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me”.

However, there are excellent Bibles, printed and online, which have the literal translations of each word made available to you (I say “translations” rather than “translation” because a huge number of words do not translate with direct equivalence – consider “In the beginning was the Word”, which in one French translation is “Au commencement etait le verbe” and in another “le parole” giving a sense in the first of action, in the second of speaking, where our English word is a static one. I’d have translated “the Word” into French as “le Mot”, which no French Bible uses, or at least I would if I weren’t more interested in what the original said, which was “Logos” in koine Greek. And THAT is completely different again – but that’s another topic

The story shows us also that you should never mistake whatever it is that points the way for the thing which it’s pointing to. Indeed, that you should never mistake the man doing the pointing for the thing pointed at, or some part of him at least. You don’t drive up to a signpost saying “Paris” with an arrow on it and say “Right, now we’ve reached Paris”. Because that would be stupid, wouldn’t it?

And yet we sing songs in Church worshipping Jesus. No matter that the fellow we’re actually supposed to be following said on numerous occasions “not me but the Father” (in much the same way as John the Baptist is said to have said “not me but the one to come”). We have only one instance of Jesus’ words on how to pray, and that’s in Luke 11:1 (and Matthew 6:12): “One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples'” . What follows is the Lord’s Prayer. You all know it. It’s a prayer to God, not to Jesus, and that’s how he, the man himself, the person we are actually supposed to be following the teachings of, actually told us to pray.

In Mark 10:18 Jesus says “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone”; that is echoed in Matthew 19:17. In John 14:28 he says “My Father is greater than I”. Even Paul manages to keep the two distinct in his mind; in Coll. 3:1 Jesus is seated on the right hand of God, 1 Cor. 11:3 “the head of Christ is God”.

There are a few problematic passages in John which have produced the concept of Jesus as God (and although it’s outside the scope of this, I have reasons for thinking that is not an unreasonable thing to say), but in all the cases I’ve mentioned so far Jesus is less than God or not God at all, really; he cries “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani” ( “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me”) in Mark 15:34 which Matthew also reports in 27:46.

Many of the others can be more easily explained as God being revealed through Jesus than by Jesus being God.

The big one, though, to my mind, is John 14:6, which we all know “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no one comes to the Father but by me”.

The topology of going through God to reach God is a bit too much for me at the moment. No, I think he was rather explicitly saying “Look, this way” (or “that mountain”).

Now, what is a “way”? It’s a path, a road, a direction. Now assuming that we’ve got over our literalist tendencies today, I’m sure we’d prefer not to take home the image of walking on TOP of Jesus to get to God, so perhaps we could settle on “direction”?

Jesus is the direction to God from where we are. We don’t stop there, any more than we stop at the signpost saying “Paris”. We walk there in fellowship in a church.

And the church is the body of Christ. Paul says (1 Cor. 12:27) “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (I have always suspected that, as a body part, I am the ingrowing toenail…)

I point to to Jesus, and Jesus points you to God, to a way to God, to a journey which all of us can take, walking together, side by side, but with Jesus our guide.

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A letter to my reader

Hello, thanks for reading something I’ve written, and I hope you’ve read “Witness, share, apology” as well.

Yes, I hope there’ll be more than one of you, but at the moment it’s just you and me, OK?

Now, I don’t know who you are, whether you have any faith or no faith or even if you aren’t sure which.

I don’t know if you’re some kind of twelve-stepper or not, or if you have any of the various compulsive behaviours (including addiction), psychological peculiarities or other defects of character which I may share about, whether they have their own Twelve Step programme or not.

I don’t know if you’re a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Bah’ai, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Sikh, a Jain, a Taoist, a Wiccan, a Pagan, a “Scientific Pagan, a Druid, a Shaman, a Practical Kabbalist, a Ritual Magician, a “Born Again Agnostic” or….. well, just because you’re not mentioned doesn’t mean I don’t mean you, and if you give me a nudge I’ll try to include you in the next version of this. As it is there, I have friends who describe themselves as each of these, and I’m pretty confident that they’ll read this sooner or later.

By “Christian” I mean you have faith in God – or at least want to – and try to follow Jesus as best you can, whatever conception you may have of what “God” means, what “Jesus” means, what “faith” means or what “follow” means. In other words, whatever “flavour” of Christianity you belong to – and if you’re a Seventh Day Adventist or a Latter Day Saint and think you’ve been missed out, I count you in Christian. I count me as Christian too, if you push me hard enough.

I don’t care about these labels. I think I mean that as an absolute statement, but if it turns out to be wrong, I am trying to move towards it as an ideal.

If you’re human, I mean to include you. I’d include anyone who wasn’t human as well, but I don’t think they’ll be reading this. You get the picture…

There is only one thing I really want to change your thinking about, and it is this. Please consider moving towards thinking of your fellow human beings more as I try to. They are all “us”, none of them are “them”.

Otherwise, don’t panic. I am not trying to convert you. On the “Art of Dharma” site, there is this quotation:-

To a man who asked to become a Buddhist, the Dalai Lama replied, “Please don’t. Stay in your own religion, and meditate.”  Further , he has stated, “It is better to stick with the wisdom traditions of one’s own land than to run from them pursuing in exotica what was under your nose all the time.”

I take his view, for the most part. If you have a belief structure and it’s working for you, use the maxim “If it ain’t bust, don’t fix it”. If you have no beliefs and it’s working for you (i.e. you’re a true agnostic, to my mind, though you may call yourself an atheist and that’s OK with me), use the same maxim. It’s possible there may still be something in what I write which is helpful to you, and I hope there is, but I’m not really writing for you. Sorry!

But if you have some beliefs and they’re not working well for you, I may have more to say (or not – I can only tell you how it is for me, and it’s up to you and, I suppose, chance whether you can find anything in my writing). Again, if you have a belief structure, I’d prefer you to be more comfortable with what you know rather than to shift wholesale; I may still have experience which is helpful. If you don’t have a belief structure, but feel a need for one, I may be talking about the one for you. Or not.  It is going to need to feel right and to help you develop faith, by which I mean love and trust, in whatever you can comfortably conceive “that thing which I tend to call God” to be.

I have a special note for you if you’re an atheist or an agnostic. I started the journey I’m on as an evangelical atheist, that’s to say I believed strongly that God didn’t exist, that the mere concept of God was pernicious and damaging and that I should try to convince everyone else of that. I then spent a significant amount of time as an agnostic, not knowing but still seeking.

And in some ways it would be fair still to regard me as an atheist (and some of my fellow Christians do); it would certainly be fair to regard me as an agnostic still, as I don’t know that any of what I believe is true, I just take positions on the balance of evidence or because they are useful to me and I can relate to them (though I have no option about faith; love and trust doesn’t get argued away easily) and there are still a fair number of the stories Christianity tells which I don’t relate to well, or sometimes at all. I know where you’re coming from. I’m on a journey, moving in a direction, and my beliefs have had to change along the way and will probably change further (though, granted, the changes recently have tended to be fairly subtle).

Please don’t get me wrong; I am very happy indeed with the belief structures I have and I think it would be really cool if you liked them too and tried them for size. For me, Christianity has the best, the most varied, the most useful stories – but to a great extent that’s because I grew up with these stories and know them better than I know other people’s. You’re not me.

I think everyone would be better off with a faith, and that their faith should be strong (as long as it doesn’t damage others or get in peoples’ faces or tell them what to do), and that some of what I’ve learned over some 45 years might help you with that. But I can’t tell you you’d be better off with more faith, as such, just that I’m convinced I am (and yes, it could easily be argued that I’m not from reading things I write about my experience; I try to signpost the points where I think there are dangers and what they are, though).

Finally, before you go further reading my witness, my share, my apologia, please be careful of one possibility. I have had people individually and sometimes collectively wanting to follow me, for me to be their leader.

Do not even think of doing this.

·         Firstly, you can’t get where I am by proxy, only by doing some things and having some experiences. You are not me, your experiences will be different, you can’t borrow mine, only find things in them which speak to your experiences and situation.

·         Secondly, I do not want to be put in the position of telling people what to do, it will embarrass me, and, within my belief structure, you should not be following me anyhow, you should be following in the direction I point. I want people to walk beside me, not behind me.

·         Lastly, I don’t want to be put in the position of having to say “no”, because that would pain me, but I would have to say no anyhow.