Eyre Lines

As keeps happening with me, a couple of things have come together to give me an idea which I’d like to pursue. Firstly, I’ve recently finished reading E.P. Sanders’ “Paul and Palestinian Judaism” after too long a time (interrupted, I admit, by reading about a dozen other books), and secondly I’ve been listening to some podcasts at “Partially Examined Life”, which involves a set of former philosophy grad students talking about philosophy, including a set on Taoism and Buddhism (clearly looking at them as philosophy rather than religion).

Sanders was the first major writer of the “New Perspective on Paul” trend of Pauline interpretation. He devotes the majority of the book to demolishing completely the suggestion that Second Temple Judaism (the Judaism of New Testament times) was a religion of works-based righteousness; it is clear from his exhaustive reading of all the contemporary Jewish sources that almost no-one within Judaism thought that way. In fact, Judaism was at the time a religion of what Sanders calls “covenantal nomism” in which Jews are righteous by virtue of the covenant with Abraham (which Paul rightly pointed out was a gratuitous promise prior to Abraham undertaking any requirements, i.e. by grace). The Jews of the time, Sanders argues, obeyed the Law in order to stay faithfully within that covenant, if looked at on an individual basis.

I am not myself convinced that Sanders has the whole “feeling” of Second Temple Judaism wrapped up in that concept; I also see faithfulness to the Law as being the practical aspect of faith in God, which could be summed up as “if you love me, you will obey my commandments” (ascribed to Jesus in John 14:15), and as being a part of faithfulness to the group, striving for the day when the group as a whole could be called righteous. Judaism prior to that period had been, to my eyes, far more a communal than an individual religion, where what mattered was that the nation survive and prosper rather than adherence to an individualistic formula for salvation; it was the nation rather than the individual whose salvation was looked for. However, the point of what it was not is well established.

This, of course, gives a problem in the conventional reading of Paul, particularly Romans and Galatians, and particularly since Luther and Calvin reinterpreted Paul (and to some extent Jesus) in the 16th century. I learned in Sunday School (and I’m sure many others did as well) that Judaism operated on the basis of following the Law and thus pursuing salvation by works. Sanders shows that that is an entirely untenable viewpoint; it then becomes necessary to reinterpret Paul (largely in Romans and Galatians) to find what his attitude to “the Law” and salvation actually was. Sanders starts to do this, but I think the culmination of this effort is contained in Douglas Campbell’s “The Deliverance of God”.

What immediately interests me (further discussion of this “New Perspective on Paul” will have to wait, insofar as I haven’t written about it already) is that Sanders argues very persuasively that Paul was working back from his knowledge of salvation in Christ to what the problem was that this solved, rather than working out a systematic theology.

I think this is an important understanding which Sanders doesn’t really explore enough, merely noting it on his way to his rereading.

I add to that the conclusion that Paul was a mystic. F.C. Happold, in “Mysticism, a study and anthology” identified Paul and John as being mystics, and as Happold was so influential on me, in showing me that what I had become was a mystic (and not “slightly unhinged”), I accepted that, though with a note of caution as neither was really writing in a way which resonated well with my own experience – and I’ll come back to that.

It’s probably worth noting that in the light of recent work on the Fourth Gospel, I think “one of the multiple authors of the Fourth Gospel” rather than “John” would be a better way of wording that. John Shelby Spong has recently written about the Fourth Gospel from this standpoint in “The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic”, which I liked, although I don’t think it completely investigated the identification.

Paul and John were not the only Christian mystics with whom I initially failed to connect particularly well – St. Teresa de Avila, St. Bernard and St. John of the Cross are other examples. However, I connected really well with both the anonymous author of the Theologia Germanica and with Meister Eckhart. To my embarrassment, it took me a long time (decades) before a penny dropped in my thinking – what Paul, John, Teresa et al were doing was writing about what was actually at its root cognate experience, except that they were taking as an experience thought of as being of Christ what I was taking as an experience thought of as being of God and they were thus importing a set of Christ-related concepts. They were Christ-mystics (Happold had labelled them that, but I hadn’t been able to work through the concept structures), and I was (at least originally) a God-mystic, as were the author of the Theologia Germanica and Eckhart. So, I thought, was the Jesus of the Oxyrhyncus sayings, parts of the Gospel of Thomas. I’ve since found readings of many other sayings of Jesus from the canonical gospels (notably the “Kingdom” sayings) can be interpreted in the same way, as the statements of a God-mystic.

I pause here to note that some of my readers may be concerned about me identifying Jesus as a God-mystic, thinking that this is inappropriate as a description of God incarnate. However, assuming Jesus also to have been wholly man (as the creeds insist), what other way of identification of how Jesus-as-man would think and speak to which we could relate would be possible? (I am forced to a panentheist position by my own experience, and therefore see God as incarnate in the whole material universe; Jesus-as-God is thus not a difficult idea for me, but may be for others).

Returning to Paul, what we find is a participatory eschatology and soteriology which can be summed up in a few passages. “My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Gal 2:20 NLT); “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Eph. 2:10 NIV) and “So, my dear brothers and sisters, this is the point: You died to the power of the law when you died with Christ. And now you are united with the one who was raised from the dead. As a result, we can produce a harvest of good deeds for God.“ (Rom. 7:4 NLT). Paul has had a Christ-mystical experience which has changed everything for him; he considers his past adherence to the Law as worthless in the light of his new understanding through an experienced unity with God-in-Christ: “Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ“ (Phil. 3:8 NLT).

I’m not surprised. Peak mystical experiences can do that, producing a paradigm change which changes everything about ones previous life and values, particularly if they are “out of the blue” rather than something worked for over a long period. I know this, having had one; a few others testify to something like the same thing. However, I have to ask myself whether the perspective on ones past life is in fact correct; yes, things are completely different from this side of the paradigm change, but were things before it actually “worthless”, as Paul puts it? I suspect not. Yes, they are incomparably better from this side of the line, but unless you have a means of moving someone through that paradigm change, telling them how much better things are from here and how worthless things are for them where they are is not only not useful, it’s potentially abusive. Someone who, for instance, is reasonably content in their relationship with God through a non-mystical religious praxis is likely merely to be convinced that that praxis is of no value without actually arriving at the changed viewpoint, the changed relationship with God, the changed experience of God necessary for this new way of looking at things. There needs to be a cataclysmic change first.

I spent many years after my initial experience looking first for ways in which I could repeat it, and then for ways in which someone else could have the same experience. I frankly didn’t see any way in which religious practice was worthwhile unless it did generate the same kind of paradigm change as I’d experienced, so was desperate to find how to induce it. I failed to find anything which was remotely reliable, though there does seem to be some evidence that many years of prayer, mediation and “acting as if” may be capable of producing at least a cognate state. I’ve come to suspect that Paul was in this position, and was proposing an “act as if” strategy.

It seems to me that this may well have worked for a significant number, no doubt initially carried along by Paul’s charisma and force of delivery, but I also suspect it was assisted by a form of ecstatic religion as a phenomenon. I say “suspect” because it appears that this is something I’m immune to, perhaps on the basis that if you’ve travelled from (say) Leeds to London on the A1, you can’t then immediately travel from Leeds to London on the East Coast (Railway) Main Line – you’d have to find your way back to Leeds first. If you should slip back, you’ll be slipping back along part of the A1, and can’t readily return via part of the East Coast Main Line without a cross-country trip (and, of course, finding a station…).

My experience indicates to me as well that there are significant numbers of people (very possibly a large majority) who are also unlikely to get caught up in ecstatic religion and do not have one of what I’ve come to think of as very rare initial “out of the blue” peak mystical experiences. I ask myself whether, for them, who may well be on another route (perhaps Ermine Street, the old Roman Road via Lincoln) altogether, it is sensible singing the virtues of either the A1 or the train.

I’ve therefore moved beyond saying “you need a peak mystical experience” to just saying “this is the way that I know”. I wonder whether Paul moved in the same way. Reading his epistles, I’m inclined to think not; they read to me as if he is imposing his route as being the only one available, and in this I think he may have been making a mistake. Sanders sees Second Temple Judaism as having not been deficient in the way Paul has historically been taken to have been, but Paul is still saying that being in Christ is a better, an immeasurably superior, way. Nothing I have seen about current day Judaism or in Sanders or other’s works on Second Temple Judaism convinces me that Judaism is not entirely capable, when practised assiduously, of making the journey to the same destination as Paul reached – just by another route.

This, I think, applies just as much (perhaps more) to the Fourth Gospel, which I also identify, as did Happold, as being at least in part the product of a Christ-mystic. I have in mind particularly statements attributed by the writer to Jesus such as John 14:6 “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”. (NIV). If, as I suspect, the author meant to say that only by being a Christ-mystic could one have any personal knowledge of God, while I can understand how this would have seemed right, I think it was a mistake. The inspiration (or at least one view of it) behind John 14:2 “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” (NIV) seems to me far more correct. 

John Cobb, in “Christ in a Pluralistic Age”, spends some time trying to assess whether Buddhism’s insights are compatible with those of Christianity. Buddhism is a religion with a considerable stress on mysticism, though not, of course, Christ-mysticism, and I would identify Gautama as a mystic, very probably a God-mystic, using the terminology I used earlier. Cobb comes to the conclusion that each tradition has something which the other lacks in it’s conceptions, and that something like a synthesis is actually possible. Put in a nutshell, you might say that Buddhism is too denying of real existence while Christianity is too accepting of it, according to Cobb. Gautama stresses personal experience, and the freeing of the individual from dependence on the other when seen as “other”, and this is indeed a facet of the mystical experience. However, in my own experience it is not the whole. Jesus, in my current conception, stresses finding the other as not actually “other” (including, for example, women, tax collectors, the hated oppressor, the hated heretic, the ritually unclean, the diseased, the morally dubious and even the gentile). It is a more engaged form of working out of the mystical experience, whereas Buddhism tends to stress non-engagement except in the case of the boddhisatva who leaves behind the non-engagement which he has in his grasp in order to help others. Buddhism, in other words, lets go the world in order to be able to reengage with it, the way of Jesus engages as fully as possible with it and, it seems to me, becomes able to let go of it in the process.

I am distinctly seeing a picture here of spiritual leaders who know a path because they have trodden it themselves, and then propose it as “the way”; in Paul’s and “John’s” cases, they say it is the only way; I fancy that Jesus and Gautama both said it was a practical way, but not necessarily that it was the only one. Yes, I am seeing myself in this, in the years during which I couldn’t understand any route other than the peak ecstatic mystical experience. Maybe I’m projecting myself onto these past leaders; then again, maybe that enables me to see something in them which might not otherwise be apparent. It’s obvious to me that Paul and John would think that everyone should have an experience like theirs, and that nothing less would do.

And then you have the Taoist tradition. In that, there is a huge stress on attachment to a single spiritual master, and (which, I think, transfers into Zen Buddhism) that master divines the way in which an individual can come to a paradigm change and displays that to them, often in a non-verbal way. Granted, for the most part the system bears far more resemblance to Buddhism than to non-monastic Western traditions (and in the case of Zen, is a form of Buddhism). It seems to me, however, that this understanding that each student may have a different way of reaching a paradigm change (enlightenment, a mystical experience, faith, conversion, or whatever term you may wish to use) is a very valuable one. Even then, the focus is on a sudden, dramatic change in consciousness, and my observation over the years is that actually most believers don’t have a sudden dramatic change, they inch gradually towards a new consciousness and then find that actually they’ve had it for some time, without being able to pinpoint their Damascus Road or their Bo tree.

But the sudden dramatic change in consciousness is definitely worth pursuing!