Eyre Lines

In a number of previous posts, I’ve used the term “disindividuation”, which seems to have produced some confusion in readers. I always contrast this with “deindividuation”, which is a reasonably well known but contentious social-psychological phenomenon in the psychology of groups, and particularly mobs.

In deindividuation, the identity of the individual becomes subsumed by the identity of a group, and the group is then treated as having its own consciousness. It leads to the dissolving of inhibitions and concern for the self, the only concern being the group.

There is a distinct linkage with disindividuation, for which I cannot find a link to a satisfactory internet article. Disindividuation similarly involves a weakening (sometimes near to the point of disappearance) of the sense of self in relation to the other, but the “other” in this case is commonly a much wider category than a group or mob, and is commonly identified by the one experiencing disindividuation as “God”. It is a common feature of peak mystical experiences, but has also been stimulated by researchers interfering with electrical activity in the brain in experimental circumstances, who have identified brain areas involved.

It is by far the most peculiar aspect of my own peak mystical experiences, which have not uncommonly involved a paradoxical sense that the self has at the same time been extinguished, and that it has expanded to include all that is, and possibly more than that. It can fluctuate, with the sense of self including anything from a small nugget within the body, through the body to the body and its immediate surroundings, the immediate neighbourhood, the world and the cosmos. The most persistent identifications (probably because they are limit situations) are with nothingness and with the All which is not less than the cosmos and which is God.

Meister Eckhart wrote “Thou shalt know him without image, without semblance and without means. – ‘But for me to know God thus, with nothing between, I must be all but he, he all but me.’ – I say, God must be very I, very God, so consummately one that this he and this I are one is, in this is-ness working one work eternally; but so long as this he and this I. to wit God and the soul, are not one single here, one single now, the I cannot work with nor be one with that he.” (Sermon XCIX, from Happold, “Mysticism”). I think this captures some of the sense of the disindividuation which I am talking about.

One consequence is that from the point of my first peak experience, I have been unable to see anyone else as being entirely “other” to me, and indeed I had some early problems with an excess of empathy, in which the feelings of other people (which I was noticing to an extent previously inconceivable) tended to overwhelm me. I didn’t have difficulty “loving my neighbour as myself”, I had difficulty not being slave to every strongly felt wish around me to the occasional serious detriment of my narrower self-interest; my narrow self-interest was at times difficult to identify as my focus, my sense of self was so often wider than that. Another consequence, of course, was an inability to see humanity as in any absolute sense more valuable than, say, the animal kingdom, life generally or the cosmos at large; a concern for ecology is mandated as a small subset of this.

I had to develop some barriers against this lack of individuation overwhelming me in order to function sensibly in the world, in fact. It is all very well “dying to self”, but this opens up a confusion of competing influences unless one has the luxury of being able to settle into a life of more or less solitary contemplation and focus entirely on the All (God) and relationship with that All.

In a blog post about the theology of Paul Tillich, Austin Roberts writes:- “Tillich defines the “Protestant principle” as the rejection of anything finite as appropriate objects of ultimate concern. Furthermore, faith is not merely a cognitive activity because it involves the whole person. Faith is directed toward the unconditional but also grounded in something concrete: “Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The content matters infinitely for the life of the believer, but it does not matter for the formal definition of faith.” Faith as ultimate concern about the unconditional is distorted and idolatrous if one is ultimately concerned about something conditioned and finite.
Faith as ultimate concern involves total surrender of the self to either that which is truly ultimate or something less than ultimate (e.g., a nation, career, money, etc.) and the expectation of fulfillment through it.”

In terms of Tillich’s theology, therefore, the experience, repeated several times in greater or lesser extent (and the attendant disindividuation), produced a shift in the “focus of ultimate concern” for me. Nothing less could really be that ultimate focus for me, though the focus itself is paradoxical, being (in a way) at the same time nothingness and the All – and everything in between. I don’t know whether I would characterise focus on something less than the All as being “idolatrous”, but it is certainly an inappropriate direction for any ultimate concern. The mystical experience has in my experience a self-verifying character; it demands that alteration in focus in verifying that the perception is true.

I also don’t know that I would label it “not merely a cognitive activity”; while yes, it involves the consciousness of the whole person as a part of the All and not by any means a predominant part of the All, this is still a conscious (and unconscious) orientation, a feature of neuropsychology and as such inescapably cognitive. However this ultimate concern either amounts to, engenders, or includes as a constitutive part love and trust. As love and trust are overwhelmingly emotional issues, it is dominantly affective rather than cognitive, and so perhaps deserves to be regarded as more than merely cognitive, at least in the narrowest sense of “cognitive”.

Another aspect lies in the words “rejects anything finite”. The concept of an infinite and transcendent God leads, philosophically, to the problem of “ontological separation”; God is so different and so separated from man that there is no way of crossing the divide short of divine intervention, leading (for instance) Karl Barth to talk of humans as being “utterly incapable of discovering the infinite God in whom they place their faith as Christians”. The experience of disindividuation is one of radical immanence; the All, that which is God, is not and cannot be separated from the self; there can be no problem of ontological separation as all that is is part of the substance of that which is God.

[I don’t myself think that the problem of ontological separation is a real problem; to me it is analagous to Zeno’s tortoise paradox, resting on a misconception about infinities, and therefore a feature of philosophy and mathematics rather than of reality.]

That said, my own experience was that I needed an intervention of dramatic proportions in order to move from where I was to something like where I am now. I grant that it took me many years of practice to recapitulate that experience sufficiently that it became (in a much watered down form) fairly readily accessible via an effort of my own, but the initial experience was unmerited, un-worked for and might have led me to believe that an ontological separation had been crossed from the other side were it not for the contents of the experience. If at any point I should seem to be boasting about lack of self-centredness or wider concern, the reader should understand that this was at least initially given, and due to no merit or work of my own.

It is, I think, worth pointing out two other facets of the mystical experience which may or may not be linked in some way to disindividuation. One is that the experience is self-verifying; it comes with an inbuilt conviction that it is true perception, that this is the way things actually are. This is pertinent to my linking of it to faith above; it is massively convicting, and while I have aimed all my resources of scepticism and rationality at it and still from time to time entertain the idea that it results from a peculiarity of brain chemistry and is not provably more than that, at the end of the day I cannot do other than have faith. It is not, to me, an issue of “belief”; I believe or disbelieve things on the basis of evidence and probabilities, it is a matter of hard self-verifying evidence, of fact.

Secondly, the experience as I’ve known it is of timelessness. It is not merely physical boundaries which become meaningless, but also temporal ones. Aldous Huxley wrote of the “timeless moment”; I think of it as entering, however briefly, into atemporality. Past and future are both in some way “now”, and “now” is all that there is. God is frequently conceived of as eternal, which is normally thought of as having no temporal beginning or end, existing for an infinite amount of time. I have reservations about infinities being real at the best of times, but the concept of God as being not, as some put it “outside of time” but independent of although involved with time resonates well with me.

Sadly, unless I am in the course of having a peak mystical experience, thinking about time too deeply is inclined to scramble my brain. I recall the quote ” I know what time is, but when I think about it, I don’t” (which my memory tells me was Augustine); that pretty much sums it up.

This probably has a lot to do with my impatience with boundaries, in which I include doctrinal statements. That which is God may not, for me, be infinite in several ways in which conventional theology wishes (such as power and knowledge) but is unbounded in most (if perhaps not all) aspects – and in particular is not bounded by a gulf of separation between God and man. That just doesn’t make sense to me.

 

 

I have a few friends who often talk of “Christ’s work upon the cross”. This, frankly, jars with me.

Let’s face it, what happened to Jesus on the cross was that he died, fairly slowly (but not as slowly as might have been expected from the method of execution, by some reports) and extremely painfully. Everyone agrees on “extremely painfully”. I don’t talk about my late father’s “work” on a bed in York District Hospital, I talk about his death. Death is something which happens to us, not something we “do” (unless we commit suicide, perhaps), although the Fourth Gospel goes some way towards portraying Jesus as a willing participant. Even then, it isn’t really portrayed as “work”, more as something necessary to which Jesus submits with good grace.

The interpretation as “work” comes partly from other parts of the Fourth Gospel but mostly from Paul. Paul clearly saw Jesus’ death as effecting a massive change in the relationship of God with man;  what exactly the nature of that change was is the subject of various atonement theories, about which I’ve written before – Paul is not necessarily completely clear as to what he believed in terms of systematic theology, so there’s been plenty of room for theologians to construct different interpretations over the years. Paul’s gospel was “Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2); he was not nearly so forthcoming about Jesus’ lifetime ministry, which leads some scholars to believe that he knew relatively little about what Jesus had actually said (and others to conclude that Paul merely thought the death, and presumably resurrection, to be more important).

The writer of the Fourth Gospel saw Jesus as effecting a massive change in that relationship as well, but saw that change as being from Jesus’ birth; “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Granted, he also considered it vital that Jesus be “lifted up” (John 3:14).

The writers of the synoptics are far more concerned with Jesus’ lifetime ministry, about which they write extensively, and less so about his death; Matthew and Luke are also concerned about the resurrection, about which Mark hardly writes at all (the best versions of Mark end with the empty tomb).

So, do I think that Jesus effected a massive change in God’s relationship with man?

Most of the atonement theories rest on the premise that at the point of Jesus life, death and resurrection, God’s plan for humanity was broken and needed a radical divine intervention to restore it to proper functioning. There was obvious scriptural precedent for this, not least in the story of Noah’s flood, in which humanity had become so depraved that the only solution was to wipe them out and start again, but preserving the family of Noah as the seeds of a new beginning (and, of course, a rather minimal breeding stock of wildlife).

This, of course, rests on the idea that Judaism was incapable of being the vehicle for man’s proper relationship with God. Paul goes into some detail in both Romans and Galatians as to how this might be the case (with the proviso that Judaism is not completely without merit – Rom. 11:1-11). I find this deeply problematic, given that God appeared to go into very considerable detail as to how Israel (at least) should interact with God in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, with a large number of additional insights from the Prophets. Did he really get things so wrong? Is this the action of an all-powerful, all-knowing and benevolent God, to lay down detailed instructions for his people to follow knowing that they were actually completely ineffective?

I think not. We have, I think, to read Paul differently – and in recent years, the New Perspective on Paul has been doing just this, through (for instance) E.P. Sanders, James Dunn, Douglas Campbell and most recently N.T. Wright. In particular, we should note that Paul was extending the conception of relationship with God from just Israel to the world in general. and in the process explaining why conversion to Judaism was not actually a prerequisite (I would add “rather than explaining why Judaism was deficient”). It’s interesting to note that in Judaism the Rabbis conducted the same exercise, creating by exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures the “Noachide Laws”. (Noah gets a second mention!). Would that these had been available to Paul, but my best dating of the concept is early to mid second century.

So, Judaism wasn’t broken, it just needed universality. But was creation broken; was there a need for a reconciliation with God through an atoning sacrifice? Well, if you remember my “And God saw that it was good” posts last year, you’ll know that I don’t interpret Genesis in terms of a fall from a perfect state (which needed rectifying) at all. No original sin, no overriding need to fix that.

And yet, in the course of his rather convoluted reasoning in Romans, Paul maybe has a clue to a different understanding, and one where there was a need for a radical divine intervention. Paul wrote in Romans 3:24-26 “they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.” Note the wording in the middle and at the end there: “He did this to show his righteousness”, and “it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous”. For the purposes of this exercise, let’s forget the references to atonement and justification for a moment and concentrate on why Paul saw this as happening: it was to demonstrate God’s righteousness. Not to make it possible for mankind to be acceptable to God, but to make it possible for God to be acceptable to man.

There was a fault, but it wasn’t a fault in God’s creation or in God’s covenant with Israel, it was in mankind’s perceptions of God. They needed to be extended. In particular, for Paul, Gentiles needed to feel they could be accepted by the Hebrew God (who was the only God) without the need to enter into the Covenant; that they could be justified in his sight, and that he was and would be just towards them.

The writer of the Fourth Gospel had another point of view. He wasn’t talking about a feeling of justification, he was talking about a mystical participation in the phenomenon of the resurrected Christ (which was the Word, which was God), a participation which would cause a complete change in the individual. He considered that all that was needed was complete faith – and by that I am confident he meant a complete surrender to God-in-Christ, an identification way beyond what would be entailed in viewing Christ/Jesus as an exemplar, a teacher, a leader. A complete giving of the self in love and trust for the living God-in-Christ who was the mystical experience of the writer. John Spong has recently written persuasively of this view of the Fourth Gospel in “The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic”.

In fact, Paul also writes in this mode when he talks of us being in Christ and Christ being in us (Eph. 2:10 inter alia). It is a mystical understanding of the relationship of man with God (in Christ), as one would expect from someone who also talks of being caught up into the third heaven (2 Cor. 12:2).

So, are we looking at the beginning of a mystical understanding of God (God-in-Christ in this case) as a major development in the history of the relationship of God with men? Probably not this either; there are at least hints at mystical understandings of God (albeit not God-in-Christ, though sometimes God-in-Wisdom or God-in-Logos) scattered through the Hebrew scriptures, with concentrations in the Psalms, Proverbs and some of the Prophets.

The New Testament writers, however, are more unified in the concept that “in Jesus, in Christ, God had done something remarkable and different” than in any other non-concrete thing. Am I saying that no, actually he had not, this was merely another point on a continuum? It might appear so. There was a continuum of moral and practical teaching from Pharisaic Judaism into the Synoptics and Paul, there was a continuum of mystical conception from the Psalms and Prophets, the Wisdom tradition and Philo into Paul and the Fourth Gospel. There is also in the Synoptics and Thomas what I consider conclusive evidence that Jesus was himself a God-mystic, and there were God-mystics before him and have been God-mystics since, both in Judaism and Christianity and in many other world religions.

However, I share with some of the New Testament writers the conviction that Jesus was particularly the paradigmatic God-mystic, and that the Christ-mysticism of Paul and the Fourth Gospel takes that to a new level. In this, God was indeed doing something new, albeit not as dramatically new as might have seemed the case. I confess here that this view is coloured by my personal devotion to the figure of Jesus; just as do the New Testament writers, I love and trust the Jesus they talk of and the Christ which they make of him, and I am not able to be objective about this.

There is one more thing, however, and that is that with the brief ministry of Jesus and the explosion of followers after his death, world history changed radically. Only Mohammed might come close as an individual so pivotal in change, whether in the history of ideas or the history of nations. It may be that the depth of belief of the followers was the thing which precipitated this; what they felt, that Jesus was pivotal, they proceeded to impose on world history as a fact.

But I still don’t consider it was the cross which is central to that. The life, teaching, death, resurrection and continuing presence in the lives of millions cannot be separated. His work was his life and legacy more than it was the brief event of his passion and death.

 

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…)

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.

I am not a great fan of modern worship songs, as a genre. The vast majority of those I hear and sing in the services I attend most regularly fall short on wording, music or both. The wording tends to be extremely short of theological (or, indeed, other) content, repeated too often, and what theology there is tends to be just substitutionary atonement – and I am no fan of substitutionary atonement as regular readers of this blog may gather. Sometimes the music makes up for this, but more often there is really not much tune, with a range of maybe five notes. Happily, the band at this church is extremely good and so my cringe factor isn’t totally over-stimulated.

Sunday last saw me singing along to a song by Chris Tomlin, with the recurring lines “Our God is greater, our God is stronger, God you are higher than any other”, which had considerable verve (and for once didn’t really play the PSA note much). But it got me thinking “greater, stronger and higher in relation to what or who?” (as well as noting that the song definitively refers to Jesus, starting “water you turned into wine; opened the eyes of the blind” and that the extreme stress on Jesus-as-God makes me think “docetism” immediately…)

Not, I think, anything mundane – that would be a little like singing that the universe is greater than a grain of sand (which only evades utter banality if you can see a universe IN a grain of sand). I think this has to refer to other gods, and that is something of a departure from monotheism.

It isn’t, of course, without very solid biblical foundation. The early Jewish concept of God seems to have been as a tribal deity among other tribal deities, but one who was increasingly regarded as supreme above other gods – the clearest reference would be Psalm 82:1, “God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment”  (there is dispute about whether the word “gods” is justified, but as the Hebrew word used is “elohim”, which is one of the standard words for the god of the Hebrew bible, I don’t think other translations are justified). The Hebrew scriptures move from polytheism to monotheism, with at least hints that the god referred to as Elohim or YHVH is initially the chief among gods (including in the commandment “thou shalt have no other gods before me”), and Psalm 82 seems to work from a henotheistic point of view – I link to an article on Hebrew henotheism.

I have in the past tended to go along with the idea mentioned in that article, that religion tends to progress from polytheism through henotheism to monotheism – “theistic evolution”, but as the article points out, this is not inevitably how religions develop.

Now, I cannot myself reconcile my experience of God with anything short of radical monotheism, which has tended to drive me in the direction of thinking that theistic evolution is a progressive movement, and that this is how things really are, and henotheism and polytheism are lesser concepts. But I am now seeing this as a potentially arrogant stance. I am also a deeply convinced religious pluralist, or in other words I do not think it reasonable to privilege my own religion over other religions, or my own god-concept over other god-concepts without some good argument. Granted, this stems largely from my conviction that there is, there can be, only one God, and all religions express their worshippers’ experience of that one God – and if there in fact can be more than one God, then perhaps they are worshiping an entirely different god? By the normal standards of Christianity or the developed later Judaism, this would then be a false god, and other religions would be false religions.

I may have touched on an answer in my “Idolatry and Eisegesis” post. A god-concept is not a god, it is a manner of conceiving of deity, and that post argues against treating any god-concept as the actuality of that-which-is-God (amongst other things). The apophatic theology of the Eastern Orthodox church goes in that direction as well; so does the well known Taoist maxim “the Tao which can be spoken is not the true Tao”. The problem is then one of mistaking the concept for the reality; we can experience the reality, but as soon as we start to try to tie that down to a set of words and concepts, we are effectively building ourselves a graven image.

It is therefore a mistake for me to try to take Psalm 82 and translate it into a properly monotheistic god-concept in order to understand it (or to sing Chris Tomlin’s song and do the same); I need to cultivate the flexibility to work with the god-concept which is conveyed there, even if this grates with my own experience of the divine.

And with that thought, I hope within the next day or two to start on what will probably be a series of posts about panentheism, process theology and open theism, a set of loosely linked alternative god-concepts.