Eyre Lines

I’ve been confident for quite a while that where the scriptures says “have faith” it doesn’t just (or even primarily) mean intellectual belief, and that where the original is translated “believe” that actually, “have faith” would be a better translation. I read it as something like “love and trust”. It was a pity, therefore, that much of last night’s talk effectively said to me “believe these things”, principally being that God exists, that Jesus was (and is) God, that scripture is entirely reliable and unambiguous and that the primary purpose of Jesus was to die and so save us from sin.

Aside from possible quibbles that “exists” is not the best terminology, I have no difficulty accepting the first. I only manage not to disagree with the second as a result of being a panentheist, which is not the understanding of “was God” which the speaker and other helpers have. And there we parted company.

I’ve blogged previously about my attitude to “This is the word of…”. Most of the New Testament I consider the product of a faith community which developed after Jesus’ death. I accept it as acccurate in portraying the understandings of the actual writers at the times when they wrote, granted that much if not all of it has been adjusted at least once by someone with a subsequent understanding, according to significant numbers of experts in textual criticism. I am not at the moment at all confident that Jesus himself would have recognised or approved of all of it. Sadly, of the many possible texts the speaker could have used, he chose Revelation 3:20 “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me”.

Now, I am not a big fan of Revelation. Neither, I understand, was Martin Luther, but like him, I accept that it’s become part of the canon and I need to deal with it. How I deal with it is mostly to quote early Church fathers, who said that it was highly symbolic and that the key to the symbolism had been lost. I think there are huge dangers in trying to interpret it against that background, to say the least.

In this case, however, I think I can deal with it as it stands, but bearing in mind that rather than “the word of God” it is the testimony of the writer to his experience. It may well have been the author’s experience, but it has not been mine. Firstly, I got where I am by a different route, so I can’t speak from personal experience. However, observing others who have been very earnestly seeking a faith, including in a previous Alpha course,  it does not seem to me that all of those who have heard what has been said about Jesus, apparently with open minds, have actually had the experience of an encounter with Jesus, the Holy Spirit or God as a result. Some have been going to various churches for many years (so this is not a complaint about the content of Alpha). It has long been a source of pain to me that this happens.

So the message I got, which was that all one needed to do having got this far was to be open rather than closed minded, seemed to me to be just plain wrong. Various explanations suggest themselves to me, the simplest of which is that the writer did not have the same experience as I do and had never met someone in that position. I doubt it. He could, like many I have heard, have blamed the person who was afflicted for not opening their mind sufficiently. While I cannot be certain what has been in the minds of anyone other than myself, it really has not seemed to me that this has been the case with those who just “don’t get it” after (sometimes) many years of church, and that feels to me like blaming the victim.

An old ex-Jesuit friend of mine would say that if the gospel has not been adequately presented to someone, they cannot be fixed with knowledge, or in other words that the most likely explanation would be that to date, no-one has succeeded in telling them in such a way as to connect with them, and that as a result they have not “heard his voice”. I’m unsure about this. In a few cases, I have tried every permutation of telling and retelling, including stripping down the message well beyond even the point which I was at the time comfortable with, and taking them to hear others with different approaches, and the result has still been no transforming personal experience for them.

I have no other answers at the moment, save perhaps that the response may not be immediate. If so, in at least a couple of cases it would have to have been either deathbed or post-mortem.

I talked a bit about substitutionary atonement last week, so I won’t go into that here.

As it happened, the discussion afterwards didn’t really get into these areas. I was happy to endorse that a personal relationship with God is important and that such a relationship has transforming power. I don’t agree with some atheist friends that this represents a form of brainwashing (which scares them). There was some talk about whether God provokes in us love or fear; the consensus was firmly in favour of love. I mentioned psalm 111:10 “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, but that went nowhere (I am inclined to think that “fear” there would be better translated as “awe”, myself) I do not think that a form of Stockholm Syndrome is an appropriate basis for love of God, or any other relationship!

Just musing a little, I wonder where I’d have gone had I actually had intellectual acceptance of at least some of the basics 0f Christianity at the time of my teenage experience? Would I have found things easier thereafter, and (for instance) not taken some 30 years to feel able to self-identify as Christian? I can’t know, but I’d like to think so – and it’s very much on that basis that I think Alpha can be valuable even just as “here are some reasons for giving intellectual assent”, bad as I think many of those reasons are, and much as I think intellectual assent to things which are other than Jesus would actually have agreed with is being asked for.