Eyre Lines

A little while ago, I noted in connection with the statement “Jesus is Lord” not only that it states by implication that Caesar (or your king, president, prime minister or party leader) is not Lord, but also that the very making of the statement instantiates (to at least an extent) what it proclaims. Government is always to a great extent by consent; it takes a fairly modest proportion of a population to deny a government actively to make it incapable of governing, even where that government is very repressive and totalitarian. A ruler is a ruler, to a huge extent, because you and others think he or she is a ruler.

It is a performative speech act, in the same way as “I now declare you man and wife” actually makes a couple man and wife. I grant that in order to make a ruler, you need a large number of such performative speech acts, but the principle holds good in general – and in any event, the statement “Jesus is Lord” creates an allegiance within you. In this way, one can easily see how the Kingdom of God, in which Jesus is Lord, is an “already but not yet” situation; it is already the case in those who proclaim it, but not yet in that the whole body of humanity has not yet proclaimed it.

Writing this on Palm Sunday (I note that it’s very unlikely I’ll finish writing it on the same day), I can readily understand the Roman reaction to crowds of people loudly proclaiming Jesus as he rode through Jerusalem. The very action of proclaiming him was a rebellion against Caesar. I note in passing that those who these days worry about Muslims having a “dual allegiance” are probably correct – in my country, Catholics were accused of that from the time when Henry VIII split from the Catholic church until really very recently, with considerable justification as, for many years, Catholic nations were being encouraged to invade us and re-establish “the true faith”, and following our Civil War the same attitude was taken for some time towards many nonconformists, as a considerable impetus for the rather short lived “Commonwealth” was found in some of the more ardent strands of Protestantism, for example the Diggers and the Levellers. (Americans may note that the Pilgrim Fathers were from one such sect, though they were no longer being persecuted by the time the Mayflower set sail). The Romans were reacting very much as do those who worry about Muslims (or, indeed, Jews) in the States, or the British governments from the 1500s towards Catholics.

However, to my mind, members of any religion should have an allegiance first to God, and only thereafter to the nation, or, in the case of non-theistic religions, to the way, the Tao, the principles. That holds particularly good for Christianity, which has a weakness for turning itself into or selling out to empire, starting with the Constantinian turn and going on to the imperial papacy of the Middle Ages, the smug self-satisfaction of the European empires of the 16^th to 19^th centuries (whether it be the Spanish, the French, the Dutch or the English, all took with them their missionaries and considered themselves to be “enlightening the heathen”), or the casual arrogance of American Exceptionalism which just knows that God is a proprietary feature of the American Way and can imagine that a lying, cheating, adulterous narcissist is God’s chosen instrument to lead the “free world”.

It is probably worth pointing out that those same 16^th century Diggers and Levellers were prominent examples of the concept that allegiance to God trumped allegiance to country, and that this mindset was very much a feature of the post-Civil War concept of the country, in a secularised form in which the rule of law and the will of the representatives of the people were sovereign over the notional leaders of the country (whether monarchs or prime ministers). Their lineal successors are now our Socialists and Social Democrats.

All of this is very well, but I’m also writing this nearing the end of Peter Rollins’ “Atheism for Lent” course, which I’m doing for the third time. Some of the writers we’ve been contemplating would see what I’ve written above not as a matter of according power to an entity (whether Caesar or God) which actually exists absent such proclamations, but as actually constituting that entity. In that vein of thinking, if Muslims talk of “Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate”, they are looking to constitute the meme of Allah as being merciful and compassionate. Some Theologian friends of mine will cheerfully talk of theology as being an “imaginative construction”, which is at most a hair’s breadth from this way of thinking; some Magician friends will say that it is something slightly more than an imaginative construction, but it is still actually creating the entity of God.

We can agree, I think, that what we mean by “God” is not less than an imaginative construction; it should be abundantly clear that even in a completely atheistic world, our talk of God creates a God-concept and so a force which operates in our concept-space independently of whether it corresponds to something in the real world. Let’s face it, our talk of money creates such a force, and money these days does not have any real existence – no-one considers that billionaires are such because they have in their possession more than a billion pound coins, for instance (nor are those pound coins really “worth” a pound each, other than because we believe them to be).

The Magicians think that they are creating something akin to archetypes in the collective unconscious, and that those archetypes can have real physical effects. In calling God “merciful and compassionate”, we are therefore actually making God merciful and compassionate, in calling God all powerful we are making him or her all powerful, and in calling God loving we are creating a loving God. I have sufficient suspicion that there may be a grain of truth in this way of thinking that I really do not like language like “sinners in the hands of an angry God” or of consignment to everlasting torment for the unfaithful, just in case by so describing God we are making a God who is actually like that – we are certainly creating a psychological force within some of us which can be very inimical to us, and can cause untold grief.

But what if, in reality, there IS a God, and what we say about God is potentially true, potentially false? Yes, we have the nasty and insidious thought that we may be blaspheming by describing God as wrathful if, in fact, God is endlessly loving (or vice versa).

In addition, however, I think of the image of the Eastern potentate from which we derive a concept of God as sovereign. Yes, you extol his power and might, and that helps to make him powerful and mighty. But you also extol his compassion and mercy in the hope that that might persuade him to be compassionate and merciful (or even loving) in circumstances where he is anything but those things.

It is with those thoughts rattling around in my head that I was looking through some of the Psalms recently, and thinking that we may be doing just that; we may have a weak God whom we are calling powerful, we may have an ignorant God whom we are calling all-knowing, a heartless God whom we are calling compassionate, a legalistic God whom we are calling merciful and an unfeeling God whom we are calling loving. Perhaps the terms we use most of God are exactly those qualities God actually lacks? I could also worry about faithfulness, constancy, justice and, perhaps above all, the possibility that we are dealing with a wholly unpredictable God, one who does “play dice” (as Einstein famously suggested God did not), not just on a subatomic level but in all respects…

And perhaps, just perhaps, if we redouble our efforts to call God those things which we would want God to be, we may get a God like that…