Eyre Lines

Dan Wilkinson has a post about Biblical Truth today. I like it. However, I need to nitpick one of the statements he quotes from The Scripture project:

“3. Faithful interpretation of Scripture requires an engagement with the entire narrative: the New Testament cannot be rightly understood apart from the Old, nor can the Old be rightly understood apart from the New.”

The first of these is patently true; the NT quotes passages and concepts from the OT so profusely that it cannot remotely stand alone. However, we should remember that the OT arrived in stages; at one time the Torah (the first five books) was all there was, for instance; later there was the Torah plus some of the writings and prophets; by the time of the New Testament there was the whole of the now canonical OT plus apocrypha and even a few works which didn’t even make it into the apocrypha. The NT writers then built on previous NT writers for something over 100 years.

It is disrespectful of Judaism to say that “the Old cannot be rightly understood apart from the New”, quite apart from the fact that at most stages before the first century not all of the Hebrew Scriptures were available, and it is problematic to argue that there was an incomplete and inadequate revelation for those who didn’t have the benefit of (say) Ezekiel, as they lived before he was born. Or, of course, that there was an incomplete and inadequate revelation just prior to the writing of the Revelation.

Better, I think, to consider that at each point, there was a set of scriptures adequate to the times. Additionally, to recognise that the NT, in part, depends on works which are not themselves canonical, such as Sirach and Jubilees.

This does raise problems itself as am interpretational technique, but less, I think, than considering that earlier scripture is incoherent without later scripture.

“Jesus Benyosef” asks an interesting question in his somewhat tongue in cheek Facebook page:-

“In your knowing of God, what is the authority on which you rely? A religious organization? A set of sacred texts? Individual religious experiences (yours or someone else’s)? Logical proofs? Comparative mythology?” and clarifies “By “authority,” I mean What is your reason for thinking that your knowing of God is faithful to who/what God is. What makes you think you are right? It is possible for your authority to be your own experience of discussing, reasoning, sensing, etc.”

I work, I suppose, from the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” of Scripture, Tradition, Experience and Reason. However, where Wesley suggested that the four should be kept in balance, I can’t really do that. Experience, for me, has to be paramount. I wouldn’t be reading and writing about religion and spirituality if it were not for my own experience, initially when I was 15, and then sporadically repeated, mostly with far less intensity. One of the comments to the post from Beth Eustis  talks of God having to hit her with a sledgehammer to get her to pay attention, and that resonates with my initial experience; since then it has been further experience and the memory of past experiences which has sustained me.

If I were talking of a vehicle, therefore, it wouldn’t be like most cars with four wheels each bearing a more or less equal load; experience would be bearing the bulk of the weight and providing the propulsion.

Secondly, though, I can’t work without reason. I am either constructed or have been brought up such that I have a positive compulsion to make rational sense of everything. If something doesn’t make sense to me, I find it hugely difficult to accept it. I could probably allocate to reason the function of the wheels which give the vehicle direction, so at this point I’m looking at something like a penny-farthing bicycle with the small wheel providing the direction rather than the large one.

A lot of “challenges” in life, however, have taught me that possibly my biggest personality defect is intellectual arrogance and that just because I don’t understand something doesn’t actually mean that it doesn’t work.

So to scripture and tradition; in truth, I regard scripture as being a bit of tradition crystallised at a point in the past, so I’ll add to that the authority of a living leader, teacher or just fellow traveller. These each give me another view of the elephant (taking the old story of the blind men and the elephant mentioned in the comments by Nan Cogley Kuhlman) and can therefore point up how another’s experience, different from mine, gives a different picture which needs to be explained or how my reasoning may have been inadequate. They help keep me at least loosely in contact with other people’s thinking. I can’t, however, just go along with any other person’s views and reasoning and forget my own experience or try to bludgeon it into fitting with someone else’s account, if for no other reason that the initial experience was so powerful and so convicting. And, of course, the intellectual arrogance I mentioned…

At this point I have something like a penny-farthing steered from the small wheel and with stabiliser wheels on each side. It isn’t very like Wesley’s quadrilateral, but at least it isn’t “sola scriptura”, which I don’t emotionally understand. How you can privilege someone else’s experience over your own rather baffles me, particularly when it’s not backed by (for instance) the charisma of a living leader or teacher. I can, however, understand someone for whom reason provides support and propulsion as well as direction; if there’s no relevant experience (which I find anecdotally is the case for many) the experience of others seems to me difficult to rely on.

I can anticipate the response that scripture is backed by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and that’s fine – but it’s then a form of personal experience again.

Is this faithful to who or what God is? I don’t know. I only have available to me my experience, reason and the experience of others reported to me or interacted with. It’s as faithful as I can manage with the resources I have. Now I see through a glass darkly…

The recent death of Nelson Mandela has prompted a flood of postings. Many of these are just adulatory, many of those are from people who, 40 years ago, wouldn’t have had any time for Mandela at all.

Some put another slant on things. As this piece by Mark Steel comments, Mandela was originally a terrorist (aka freedom fighter – the terms are usually interchangeable depending only on whether you approve of them) and we would not be remembering his massive achievements in forgiveness and non-violent action had the movement he was a leader of and a symbol for not succeeded. Mr. Steel thinks this would not have happened without an armed struggle, which Mandela originally supported (and was thus not entirely unreasonably imprisoned); I note that the success came when non-violent routes became predominant and prefer to recall the post-Robben Island Mandela’s attitude as having avoided a bloodbath, which was what I had personally expected for some years. However, as Gandhi (the most famous exponent of non-violent protest) noted, non-violence can only be properly practiced by those who have proved themselves capable of violent action and have resolved to renounce it, it is not a route for the cowardly. Mandela was therefore authentic in his non-violence. His greatness lies in him having continued to follow non-violence and reconciliation once he achieved power.

Some have noted, accurately, that Mandela was cordially detested by many conservatives (and that goes for UK conservatives as well as US ones) because of his stance against a number of well-recognised favorite conservative policies (such as the wars in Iran) and his links with the USSR as the main bankrollers of the ANC and with the South African Communist party as major allies. Cosying up with Castro also cannot have won him many American conservative friends, nor can an enthusiasm for such communist concepts as the eradication of poverty, racial equality, anti-imperialism and labour unions.

The greatest among those, I suspect, was the communist and USSR links. The world I grew up in was dominated by the fear of the USSR and communism, and in conservative circles that was absolute. In the UK, while the fear of the Russian military rolling west over Europe (and not stopping at the Channel) was strong in the majority, there was not quite the same level of visceral revulsion for communism which seems to have gripped the USA from the 50s onwards, it seems to me.

Possibly this was in part due to the British Communist party splitting in the 50s, possibly it was due to the fact that the Communist party here never really got enough support to challenge Labour for the left wing of British politics. Ironically, although in the States very few Democrats could legitimately have been described as closet communists, in Britain a lot of communists found themselves able to join the Labour party, and in my teens there were many Labour MPs who were communists (and even more who visited the “workers’ paradise” of the USSR and came back with glowing reports. Labour was preserved from outright takeover by the fact that it had a much broader base, and owed much to the cooperative movement and to the nonconformist (i.e. anything but Anglican) churches, which were not communist. The sterotype of “You’re Welsh, so you’re Methodist and vote Labour” had enough statistics behind it to not be completely laughable, for instance. However, the States had McCarthy and we didn’t, and we had what was not unreasonably seen by the right in our country as a USSR-loving mass movement, and the States didn’t.

The root problem there was the presence of an ideology which was supra-national and which looked to it’s establishment as the ruling ideology, coupled with the presence of a centre outside the country. The fear was that allegiance was to a foreign power before it was to the country itself, and that was not too unreasonable given the attachment of the British Communist party to all things USSR and Stalin, though that took a major knock after the Russian tanks rolled into Hungary in 1956 to suppress a popular mass movement.

I’m reminded there of another facet of my childhood, which was a certain reserve about Catholics, which was coupled in the more right wing with a suggestion that Catholics were governed by the Pope, not by the government of the country. This was a view much pressed by Ian Paisley, the Northern Irish Unionist. Historically, of course, the feeling against Catholics was very deep rooted, and went back to the situation after Henry VIII declared the English church independent of Rome in 1533 (and himself the head of it, as the monarch in England has been almost all the time since then). The Pope of the day naturally took exception to this, and save for a period under Mary (a Catholic) there remained a real threat of invasion by one or more of the continental Catholic powers at the behest of the Pope for well over 100 years; one result was active persecution, of Catholics under almost all the monarchs except Mary and of Protestants under Mary, for 200 years. Perhaps the last gasp of the active form was the Gordon Riots of 1780. Catholics remained debarred from many things until much later (largely 1829), however, and are still debarred from the monarchy today (which survival will probably last until the Anglican church is disestablished and is no longer the established religion).

The Northern Ireland troubles, of course, cast a shadow well into my adult life, and led to part of the anti-Catholic feeling; here again was an ideological group operating within the country and owing allegiance to a foreign power, in this case the Republic of Ireland. In truth, it was anti-Irish Catholic feeling, but many could not distinguish between Irish Catholics (who were the majority of Catholics in most English Churches) and Catholics more generally. Even so it was misplaced, as not all Irish Catholics were in favour of an united Ireland (some of them had the good sense to realise that incorporating territory with a majority population of Ulster Protestant Unionists was a recipe for disaster!).

I can, therefore, understand the problems for someone attached to their own nation state (i.e. a “patriot”) in accepting someone whose ideological stance involves adherence to a supra-national organisation as being truly “one of them”, particularly if that ideology is closely linked with one or more foreign states, and even more so if those states have credible military force. I can understand this reaction, for instance, to Islam. Though, in conscience, I don’t consider the military force of Islamic states (even combined) to be a really serious threat to the UK, far less the USA. There’s terrorism, of course, but even 9/11 was, in conscience, a pinprick compared with the might of the USA (or the USA’s or our reaction to it).

A word about terrorism. It’s scary, not knowing if you’re going to suddenly be a civilian target where you’ve thought you were safe. However, there’s been a present terrorist threat here since I was about 10, and I’ve consistently been in far more danger crossing the road than I have of being blown up by a terrorist. You can get used to a certain level of unpredictable threat, and I would argue that getting used to it would have been a better solution than moving ourselves several steps toward being a police state. Indeed, I’m slightly amused to consider that I attend (inter alia) the church where Guy Fawkes was baptised in 1570. He, of course, became a very early (and Catholic) home grown terrorist, and a part of the threat perception which skewed English attitudes to Catholics for the next two hundred years.

I do hope we can get over our current panic quicker than that…

However, continuing my historical musings, I go further back and can understand the feelings of Roman Emperors faced with the early Christians, who denied the god-like authority of Caesar (i.e. the Roman state) in favour of allegiance to Christ the King. The early Christians weren’t, of course, the first; the Jews had already been treading that path for years and the first Christians (who initially weren’t certain they weren’t Jews of a new variety, and neither were the Jews of the day) merely learned from them. The Jews had honed their skills in this direction under the Seleucids, and indeed the Maccabees for a while achieved independence, Judas Maccabeus being a sort of Nelson Mandela of his day.

And yes, I can understand the Seleucid’s feelings as well. All these examples are of a group of people who answer the call of a different drum, who are dedicated to an ideology at odds with the nation state in question. What I condemn is, of course, the methods, whether of the oppressor states or of terrorists/freedom fighters, particularly where they involve targeting civilians.

The early Christians did remarkably well during the period of Roman persecution, which lasted from the mid first century until 312, when Constantine the Great decided to espouse Christianity as a result, it is said, of a vision. In that, they were probably still following the example of their Jewish precursors. Within a few years, Christianity had not just ceased to be persecuted, but became the national religion of the Roman state. Judaism did not have that kind of safety anywhere for nearly 2000 years.

And, entirely unlike Nelson Mandela and the ANC, but very like Mary I of England and (to a lesser extent) her immediate protestant successors in the other direction, immediately started to persecute pagans and the less orthodox members of its own community.

Mandela was no saint, he was a reformed terrorist, but he was a great man, because he renounced violence and revenge. The early Christian Church fathers? No Mandelas there, mores’ the pity.

Richard Beck wrote recently about complementarianism (I link to a post; for a fuller view, follow the link from there to the previous post). Complementarianism is, briefly, the concept that men and women have different skill sets which should be recognised in the roles they play, and most importantly that women are not well equipped to be church leaders (or, indeed, leaders at all).

Beck takes issue with this stance, as indeed do I – but that isn’t the focus of this post. What Beck sees is a doctrine of ontological ineptitude; ontological meaning that it is “of the nature of” and ineptitude meaning “not fitted for” – so the idea is that women are by nature not fitted for leadership of churches (or families, come to that, which seems to me not to recognise the situation in about 80% of the marriages of friends of mine!).

Now, it goes without saying that there are some things which men are on average more “ontologically” suited to than are women. Heavy manual work is an example. However, I have an example in my own family history of an exception to this; Bessie Eyre (nee Green), who in the mid 19th century found herself a single mother due to her husband Job’s death in a mining accident, and took a job as a miller’s assistant at the appropriately named Newmillerdam. There, she was hefting bags of corn and flour around day in day out, and the story goes that when a local man made “improper advances” to her, she threw him the width of the turnpike road at Newmillerdam. A turnpike road would be wide by the standards of the day – 20 feet or more.

She was clearly an exception to the general rule that women are weaker than men (and sadly, I haven’t inherited the right genes from her and I may be an example of a man who is physically weaker than possibly the majority of women; at least that was the case when I was in junior school).

This is clearly a case where, as with almost all abilities, they are distributed in a population according to a normal distribution, a “bell curve”. I fell toward the bottom of the male “strength” bell curve, Bessie fell near the top of the “female” Bell curve. Granted, Bessie had honed her abilities through the work she did (and I probably ended up somewhat stronger than the average woman by the same route); nurture has a place along with ontology, i.e. nature. The result will still be a bell curve, but you can move yourself around in it (and most people do).

While I don’t necessarily think that women are on average less suited for leadership than men, if they were, it would be a bell curve distribution. As, I suppose, is the ability to multitask.

I occasionally deprecate myself as being incapable of multitasking “because I’m a man”. Now, I don’t actually think I am incapable, just that most of the women I’m close to are better at that than me (and similarly I tend to be better at single-minded focus than them, as in I’m better at that than the majority of them – and the exceptions know who they are!). I suppose, though, that I’m claiming there my own form of ontological incapacity. I’m claiming it on the basis of a widespread claim that men can’t multitask. And that’s as wrong as the suggestion that women can’t do heavy manual labour or lead a church.

There seem to be quite a few “men can’t…” statements buzzing around these days, in fact. I shared one recently – the Three Wise Women. Apparently we can’t cook either, or have colour sense, or generally organise a drinking session in a brewery. All those would be news to my wife, but hey, I’m ontologically incapable of doing those these days, it seems. I take these as payback for something over 2000 years of women being accused of ontological incapacity (and men only claiming it in order to get out of the housework), but they’re wrong too. Granted, I can sometimes feel slightly aggrieved that political correctness allows this to be said of men, but not that any similar thing is still said of women. Except, of course, among complementarians…

That is, of course, where a source of huge controversy arose around the publication a few years ago of the book “The Bell Curve”. I was once asked by some very bright people to read the book and develop an argument as to why it was wrong. I duly did that, and reported that I couldn’t fault the research sufficiently to say that. I could pick some holes, yes, and point out that the measurements were on a narrow skill set which didn’t really translate to general competence to run your life (and indeed, among the group some of whom asked this of me were some who had hugely failed to translate “very bright” into anything remotely resembling success in life as the world would see it), but the basic thesis was correct; the statistics were sound.

The fault there, as with complementarianism, as with “men can’t multitask” is in not making a nuanced, more accurate assessment that whatever group or groups a person falls into, they have their own abilities and should never be judged on what the standard preconceptions are of the centre of the bell curve for that particular population. They may lie anywhere along that particular bell curve, and in most respects, the bell curves for groups overlap for most of their length. I’m an outlier at the top of some bell curves, at the bottom of others and boringly average on the rest. Until you know me better, you won’t know which.

In fact, it seems to me that having worked out that everyone is not the same, those who put store by assessing ability by label are immediately saying that yes, everyone IS the same, just within the group they’re labelled as belonging to rather than humanity as a whole. If only they’d take the next step, of realising that everyone is different, and assessing them as that.

As well as being, at root, all the same, i.e. human.

I’m somewhat behind with feedback from Alpha, hence dealing with something about four weeks late in my last post. This, therefore, represents something of an improvement, coming as it does only from a week ago as of Wednesday (as I type this bit, it’s Thursday 28th, but the post probably won’t be finished today).

That Alpha talk was “How can we resist evil” and this time, rather than focusing on a personalised force of evil, the focus was on theodicy, i.e. how come evil is permitted to exist. This flowed through into the formal discussion and then into a more informal one I had later while clearing up.

How is it, given that God is thought to be omnipotent and omniscient, but also omnibenevolent, that evil exists? The old choice is between power and goodness; if God has the power to stop evil and does not, then he cannot be good, if he is good and evil is not stopped, then he does not have the power. As the talk noted, this is a problem which has been around since the days of Epicurus. A God who is not omnipotent is, arguably, no God, a God who is not omnibenevolent is, arguably, indistinguishable from a demon.

There are a number of solutions to this logical problem which present themselves immediately.

1. God is not, in fact, omnipotent and/or omniscient. This subdivides:-
1a. God is in fact weak, the thesis of John Caputo’s “The Weakness of God”
1b. God is balanced by a power of evil to which all evil can be ascribed; this has the weakness of either failing to solve the problem (“why does God not defeat the power of evil immediately?”) or positing a dualism in which there is no guarantee of the victory of good; Manicheanism followed that path, but Christianity ostensibly doesn’t, except perhaps for gnostic Christianity, which is officially heresy since the third century.

2. God is not, in fact, omnibenevolent. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods. They kill us for their sport.” (Shakespeare, King Lear, Gloucester).

3. God is omnipotent, but reward and/or punishment is delayed e.g. until a post-mortem reconciliation at which point God’s benevolence can be proved. God ensures fair results without actually preventing evil outcomes, in other words. This does not fully answer the issue of why evil outcomes are not just prevented without invoking one of the other possibilities.

4. Evil is in some way deserved or, at least, repaid. This should perhaps be conjoined with #3.
4a. All evils are actually deserved or will be redressed as a result of actions which have occurred outside our timeframe; the obvious example is reincarnation and karma (this is similar to 3, except that the balancing is both before and after the event).
4b. Evils are deserved, but not necessarily on the basis of actions by the one who experiences the evil; original sin, for instance, can be used to justify any evil occurring to mankind as long as no concept of proportionality of punishment is involved.

5. A greater good is being served than the evil which is permitted to exist; this subdivides:-
5a. Good and evil are two sides of the same coin; one cannot exist without the other and good (and variety) are sufficiently good to justify the existence of balancing evil. This is by and large foundational in Taoism, in which existence is a greater good than either good or evil.
5b. Evil stems from the wrongful exercise of freewill, which is so great a good that it justifies the existence of the evil results. (In order to explain evil which is not caused by humans, this concept needs the concept of free willed spiritual powers).
5c. Evil is part of a teaching technique, and is not fundamental; “what does not kill you makes you stronger” and is therefore ultimately “good”.
5d. Evil is not a thing in and of itself, it is merely the absence of good.

6. Evil is not a thing in and of itself (other than as dealt with by 5d), so the syllogism fails; this can be subdivided:-
6a. Evil is illusory (commonly coupled with “as is good”). This is, by and large, the Buddhist solution.
6b. Evil and good are both relativistic rather than absolute terms, and it makes no sense to talk of evil or good except in relation to some person or thing. What is good for one is commonly evil for another, and it becomes entirely possible that “everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds” (Voltaire; “Candide”), thus giving this some characteristics of a #5 solution.

7. For completeness: “This question is above my pay grade; I can cope with a quantity of cognitive dissonance, and any answer is beyond my ability to deduce.” The book of Ecclesiastes seems to adopt this stance, and possibly also the book of Job, although other conclusions are sometimes reached about a moral in Job.

Many writers combine two or more of these to make up a rather less obviously spartan rationale.

At the discussion last week, there was significant input from someone who found a solution in karma and rebirth. I gather there are Christians who manage to splice belief in reincarnation into their thinking, although I’m not familiar with anyone who does this successfully. It seems to offer a sufficient solution, though, for those for whom it makes sense.

I linked above to the Wikipedia article on the problem of evil. Suffice it to say that none of the answers there quite satisfy me, although Alvin Plantinga’s attribution of the whole problem to the existence of free will which is taken as a greater good than any evil which might arise from it, coupled with positing a “mighty nonhuman spirit” (of a malevolent nature) to deal with events of “natural evil” such as typhoons (1b plus 5b) maybe goes some way toward a solution, but is of itself unsatisfactory. Why does God not eliminate this spirit, or (if that would prejudice the spirit’s free will) circumscribe the spirit rigidly? What exactly is it about free will which makes it a great enough good to warrant all the evil I observe? Indeed, is free will really possible, or at least possible to the extent which would make it a great good? Also, it must be taken that, as ultimate creator, this is all (including free will and the existence of the nonhuman spirit) God’s doing.

There’s some scriptural support for the view that God creates evil as well as good in any event in Isaiah 45:7: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things” (KJV – other translations attempt to avoid the word “evil”, probably for theological reasons, but whatever term is used fails to avoid the general point). The writer of the “God of Evolution” blog has just made the same argument from Romans 8. There’s a long potential list, probably starting with the book of Job.

I was quite taken by a few lines in a comment by Susan Frederick to Richard Beck’s blog (blogging about weakness and warfare):- “At one point in my own spiritual journey, when considering a sermon I’d heard for the millionth time that “Jesus hung on the cross when it should have been me,” I felt the Holy Spirit present a contrasting thought. “No, the right person was on that cross. God hung there in Jesus because all the suffering in the world ultimately was his responsibility as creator.” It was a strange thought. One I’ve never heard articulated by any preacher or theologian anywhere. But it touched my heart in a powerful way.” In fact, the same concept was articulated by Jack Miles in “Christ, a Crisis in the Life of God”, which I strongly recommend along with “God, a Biography” to which it is a companion.

Susan’s comment, in fact, links to a parting reference made by our speaker that Wednesday to Matthew 25:31-46 (a favorite passage of mine because of its implications); where he went with it was with that which was important being what action we took to relive the suffering because “it could be Christ we were helping”.  He saw Christ as suffering in every suffering person. This issue is then not “what is God doing to stop this?” but “what are we doing to stop this”. In a very major sense I agree with our speaker; it is far more important to combat evil than it is to work out why it happens, at least on the proviso that resistance be nonviolent, as otherwise there’s a risk of creating more evil than is combated. However, I get more from this passage; see later.

In his (warmly recommended) series, Beck is seeking a solution in a combination of “Weakness of God” following John Caputo some way down the path he treads and bringing in a Plantinga-like acceptance of spiritual adversaries (working from Greg Boyd’s “God at War”), rightly commenting that in order to sustain any “Spiritual Warfare” concept, you need a weaker God than the omnipotent and omniscient God of classical theology. Although I incline to say that Charles Hartshorne has demonstrated in “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes” that both omnipotence and omniscience are philosophically unsustainable if I’m looking for a quick and dirty exit from a theodicy discussion, I don’t actually see that as an adequate answer. Much as I admire Caputo’s linguistic gymnastics in “The Weakness of God”, I’m not able to buy into that theology myself, not merely because of the raft of scripture confirming God as extremely powerful but because of my own experience, which is inconsistent with a weak God. Accepting Hartshorne’s strictures about the impossibility of true omnipotence and omniscience does not mean that God is not mind-blowingly powerful and mind-blowingly knowing, after all.

The trouble is, for those of us of an inquiring and philosophical turn of mind, the philosophical problem will not go away, and could lead to us failing to act. I go in another direction.

Harking back to “Rather different Answers in Genesis”, I see creation as God creating from himself, thus everything that is is of the substance of and is God (albeit in a very partial way). In the process, he gives away some of his power, that resident in that portion of his creation. This is, of course, a panentheist viewpoint (if I held that God had poured out the whole of his self into creation, it would be a pantheist one, but I cannot escape the experience that tells me that there is more). It is not, however, the panentheism of (for instance) Jurgen Moltman which talks of a withdrawing of God to provide the space in which other things can be, though that can produce somewhat similar results.

This is, in essence, a solution of type 5; a greater good is served. That greater good is not, however, just free will, it is individual existence. Even the inanimate is of and is God, and is permitted existence without (in all probability) having any shred of self-will which could be free, so are “lower” forms of life in which free will is an even more dubious concept than it is in humanity. There is thus no real problem with the criticisms of the concept of free will, for instance from the psychological angle.

There are, of course, both elements of many of the type 5 solutions and elements of other solutions wrapped up in that concept. In particular, it is very compatible with type 6 (evil is not a thing in and of itself) solutions and type 1 (God is not all-powerful) solutions; though there is less necessity to posit other spiritual forces in order to make it work, conceptualising the actions of groups or other strictly speaking nonsentient parts of creation as animated by spirits in the way of Walter Wink, William Stringfellow and John Howard Yoder does meld very neatly with it.

Lest this be thought to be too much a type 2 answer, i.e. God is unfeeling, let me point out that in this concept-space although everything is done by God, everything is also done to God. Elie Wiesel wrote “Behind me, I heard the same man asking: “For God’s sake, where is God?” And from within me, I heard a voice answer: “Where He is? This is where–hanging here from this gallows…”. And that is where Matt. 25 takes me. “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? ³⁹ When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ “.

I take very little literally, but that, I take literally. It is not just that the stranger, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick or the prisoner might be Christ in disguise, it is that they are all God, undisguised.

We suffer, any one of us suffers, any part of creation suffers: God suffers.

A few weeks ago I found myself trying to multitask in the kitchen at the Alpha course I’m helping with, loading and unloading a commercial dishwasher while trying to explain to another helper why I really don’t buy into PSA (Penal Substitutionary Atonement) as an atonement theory. Now I’m a man, and multitasking is therefore not something I’m good at, so I wasn’t giving the theology as much attention as I should have, nor was I able to recall the exact wording of Hebrews with my hands full of plates. In fact, I haven’t yet given Hebrews sufficient detailed attention, as I’ve tended to think that it speaks specifically to Jewish Christians, among whom I do not number.

James quoted Hebrews to me, but in a very general way – under the Levitical system of sacrifices “without blood there is no forgiveness”, and I suggested that if that were what the writer was saying, then the writer was wrong in terms of the Levitical system, because not all sin offerings involved animal sacrifice – it was perfectly possible to sacrifice grain (Lev. 2:1-16; 6:14-18; 7:9-10; 10:12-13). There the conversation ended, because for him it was not viable to suggest that any part of scripture was mistaken.
Sorry, James. I do try not to argue outside the hermaneutical assumptions of those I’m talking to, but on this occasion I wasn’t giving you my full attention.In fact, the relevant passage is Hebrews 9:22, which reads “Indeed, under the Law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (NIV). The word “almost” is crucial, particularly as in the Greek it probably governs the whole sentence, including “there is no forgiveness of sins”. A better translation might be “One might almost [say that] under the Law everything is purified by blood and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (some translations do render it this way).What the writer of Hebrews is therefore saying here is not that there was no possible alternative to a blood sacrifice in order that sins should be forgiven, but that a blood sacrifice was very clearly a valid way in which sins could be forgiven under the Levitical system.

There were others, though. Fire (Lev. 13:52,55; 16:27; Num. 31:23; Water (Exod. 19:30; Lev. 15:5; 16:26,28; 22:6; Num. 31:24); Incense (Num. 16:46-48); Intercession (Exod. 32:30-32) and Prayer (of confession and contrition) (Ps. 32 and 51). By the time Hebrews was written, confession, contrition and making amends was already becoming the primary model for sins being forgiven.

Indeed, the Temple sacrificial system was not the primary system for Jews in the diaspora. Granted, the fact that it was there, and was observing the high holy days (in particular the feast of the Atonement, to which a lot of reference is made in Hebrews) was comforting both in a vicarious way, by dealing with atonement in respect of unknown sins and as a hope of eventual attendance there. But it wasn’t the centre of their day to day religious practice; that was the home and secondarily the synagogue or hall of learning. Judaism had found an accomodation for working without a Temple during the long Babylonian exile and during the period of return before the Temple was rebuilt, and it wasn’t any more absolutely vital.

What I arrive at is the conclusion (with which I think the author of Hebrews would agree) that there really was no absolute necessity for sins to be forgiven via a blood sacrifice to end all blood sacrifices. This is good, as I would have extreme difficulty in respecting a deity who did demand this as the one and only way of being forgiven. This is one of the many reasons why I do not like PSA as a theory of the principal importance of Christ; it demands that I see God as something I know he is not.

On the other hand, it was probably high time that blood sacrifices were ended as a means of seeking forgiveness for sins (and for other purposes), and seeing Jesus’ death in that way was a viable image for one part of the complex argument of Hebrews. It had been high time when Psalm 40:6 and Hosea 6:6 were written. Or Amos 5:21-24.

Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream. Forget sacrifices, unless they are of yourself in imitation of Christ.

Continuing the theme of divine intervention (or the lack of it) from the last two posts, in which I am jamming on a theme of “God saw that it was good”, I suppose I should advance somewhat beyond Genesis 1-3.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been working through Douglas Campbell’s “The Deliverance of God” . It’s a source of some embarrassment to me that I haven’t finished it yet, but in my defence I should point out that Campbell quotes extensively in Greek without transliteration or translation, and significant parts of his argument rest on fine points of Koiné Greek grammar. When I started, I couldn’t even reliably transliterate Greek text! That has changed, but much of my reading has been progressing with a parallel text Greek and English translation open on my laptop. It’s going to take a few more weeks yet, even though I’m into the closing stages of his argument.

I should mention that when Campbell uses the term “Deliverance of God”, he means deliverance effected by God, not God being delivered from something.

Campbell subtitles his massive (1200 plus pages) book “An apocalyptic rereading of Justification in Paul”. To summarise, Campbell attacks the accepted understanding of Romans, and in particular Romans 1-8. A brief overview is here, Richard Beck’s 12 part blog is here. Neither of them gets to the end!

The alternative reading of Romans which Campbell proposes is that Paul’s gospel is participatory and liberative and not, as is commonly put forward, a scathing critique of Judaism coupled with “salvation by faith only”, that faith being commonly understood as accepting Jesus as… and at that point, what you accept him as is debated.

I’ve engaged a little with Romans previously, in which I chiefly focused on Rom. 3:25b-26 “This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies him who has faith in Jesus” as the NIV translates it. Campbell would not translate it that way, having a different concept of Paul’s thrust in the whole section. I previously noted that, far from concentrating on our righteousness, and saying that we were, though faith, deemed to be righteous, Paul is saying that it is God who is in need of being shown to be righteous; Campbell allows me to advance the idea that “he himself” still refers to God, and that the balance of the passage should read “is righteous and is justified by the faithfulness of Jesus”. Thus the passage would be “This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins; it was to prove at the present time that God is righteous and is justified by the faithfulness of Jesus”.

This agrees well with Beck’s version of Rom. 22: “But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all who believe.”

God is not therefore in this passage, in the “event” which is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, delivering us. He is delivering himself from our misconceptions.

But Campbell would also argue that Paul is saying that by participating in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, we have a route to God; in this God is also delivering us. This fits extremely well with Paul’s “Christ in us, us in Christ” language elsewhere in his writings.

Campbell’s rereading is itself an attempt to deliver us from misconceptions, which he spends the early chapters of his book outlining in detail as problems with the conventional reading. What he then proposes as a solution is radical; significant parts of the text of Romans become his reciting of (and lampooning of) the arguments of another preacher, one whose gospel Paul disapproves of, and who he thinks either is in Rome or may shortly be there. Campbell sees Romans 1-8 in particular as an ongoing exchange between Paul speaking with his own voice and Paul’s voicing of a version of his opponent’s teaching.

This gets me to the nub of a really major problem I have always had with Romans, the apparent denigration of “the Law” throughout Romans 2-8. To read this using the “orthodox” reading of Paul is to view the Torah, the law of Judaism, as a snare and a delusion, to be overcome by faith in Christ and left behind. My problem is this: if we are to accept that the Torah is God-given as “the Law”, if we then turn round and say that it is ineffective as anything other than a “stumbling block”, we are either saying that God has tricked his chosen people by advancing it or that God failed to realise that no-one could actually follow it (as Paul appears in the standard reading to allege in Rom. 3:9-20).

[In passing, I would say that Rom. 3:9-20 should not be read as indicating that it is not possible for an individual to follow all of the 613 mitzvot (commandments) of the Torah. Apart from anything else, this is patently untrue, as almost any committed adherent of Judaism will be happy to assure us. What has not been practically possible is that ALL Jews follow all of the commandments; this is a statement about a nation, not a statement about individuals. Judaism, incidentally, would agree with this interpretation today; there is a hope that at some time in the future, all Jews will be observant.]

On the standard reading of Romans, I am left with three options; either the Hebrew Scriptures were a fraud or product of non-Godly inspiration (a Gnostic, Marcionite interpretation), or God was a trickster, or God was frankly not very far-sighted, let alone not omniscient, and made a mistake in giving Israel the Torah. None of these is acceptable, and this is another example of my arguments from “and God saw that it was good”.

Ascribing those parts of Romans 2-8 which seem to give this impression to Paul’s lampooning of his rival preachers teaching is a very attractive alternative!

I am not keen on supersessionism in any form, however, and I do not think that Campbell, or Beck interpreting Campbell, manages to avoid this. I take it that in giving the Law, God proposed an adequate way of approaching him, albeit for Judaism only. If it were not adequate (which is at the root of all supersessionist concepts), we would again be faced with the trichotomy of false revelation, trick or failure of foresight. It’s for this reason that I assume in interpreting New Testament Scripture that it doesn’t generally seek to set aside the Hebrew Scriptures, but to build on them and extend them (notably, to non-Jews without the need for prior conversion to Judaism, which need for conversion Campbell thinks is the essence of Paul’s adversary’s gospel). If it does set anything aside, it is either (as circumcision and dietary law) something which his audience were not obligated to, not being Jewish, or it is something which was situational and not of eternal validity (which Christianity generally holds to be the case for, for instance, the whole sacrificial and ritual system of Leviticus and Deuteronomy and a substantial amount of other law, for instance not mixing fibres in cloth or crops within a field).

This is, for me, a general principle. I do not hold (I cannot hold, in the light of my personal experience) that Christianity is the only valid path to God. All major religions, I have found, have their own way of expressing the root experience of God which is commonly described by the term “mysticism” and with which I am familiar. This clearly includes Judaism, quite independently of the absurdity of regarding the system in which Jesus himself operated and on which all the New Testament writers based their own writings as being inadequate. If Paul were genuinely being completely supersessionist, I would be forced to say that in that, he was in error.

However, I don’t actually think he was, at least not in this instance. I note the words in Rom. 3:1 “Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way…” and despite where Paul then proceeds to take the passage, I think he may have meant that bit in respect of himself. He does, after all, boast elsewhere of being an observant Jew, indeed a Pharisee, a student of Gamaliel. Equally clearly, he thought that for him, at least, Christ was the answer rather than just his Judaism.

Not based on Campbell (at least not obviously), another radical treatment of Paul has been written by Daniel Boyarin in “A Radical Jew”. In that, Boyarin takes Galatians as offering the “primary” statement of Paul’s theology and interprets much of the remainder in the light of that (quoting Dunn rather a lot). It’s a different route to reinterpreting Paul, but one which is broadly compatible with Campbell’s. It also is at some pains to try to avoid any suggestion that Paul is being supersessionist, and, I think, succeeds reasonably on the first level reading of the text.

[I thoroughly recommend reading Boyarin in this book and also in “Border Lines”, which deals with the progressive separation of Christianity and Judaism. I have to admit that when reading him, I have occasionally thought of the “Goodness Gracious Me” sketches with the character deciding that lots of things – well, pretty much everything we might regard as “English” (or anything else) is, in fact, Indian. Here’s a clip where he decides the Queen is Indian; elsewhere the same is said of Superman. In Boyarin’s case, he’s deciding that everything in Christianity is, in fact, Jewish. While I think he goes a little too far, I think this is a good corrective to those of us who are tempted not to read the New Testament as the product of Jewish writers writing about a Jewish Jesus; he shows very well how New Testament ideas flowed naturally out of Judaism, taking one path from there, and how modern Judaism flowed equally naturally taking a slightly different path.]

However, Boyarin eventually arrives at the verdict that Paul was, in fact, being supersessionist not in discarding Jewish Law, but in eliminating any difference between Jews and non-Jews; in Christ “There is neither Jew nor Greek” (Gal. 3:28). Paul was not in Boyarin’s eyes being supersessionist in any other way. Boyarin’s complaint was that the “chosenness” of Jews was effectively demolished by Paul’s inclusivity, and with that I cannot argue.

And if you’ve been reading between the lines, you’ll have noticed that I may have earlier been advancing something like a variant of Paul: “in Christ” there is neither Christian nor non-Christian.

Does that shock?

It probably should, bearing in mind the exclusivity found so often in Christianity, generally based on a few passages in the Fourth Gospel. It probably doesn’t shock so much as Paul’s “neither Jew nor Greek” might to Jews, as the elimination of their chosen status and of their distinctiveness in following the Torah is in Jewish eyes tantamount to elimination of Jews – in other words a form of genocide.

At least I’m not proposing genocide!

I’ve a bit of a weakness for superheroes, and it seems to me that I’m pretty average that way. I loved “Heroes” (which most unfortunately lost it’s way and got cancelled after four series to the intense distress of many fans), quite like “Alphas”, liked the sideways take of “Misfits” and am partial to the odd Marvel or DC comics film, which keep coming out on a regular basis.

And, as far as I’m concerned, God isn’t anything like that. As I’ve written before, God doesn’t wear his knickers outside his tights. I like the idea that God might intervene supernaturally to rescue his favoured people (possibly even me) just fine, (though see below) but I would be astonished if that were ever to happen, or if it actually happened at any time in history. Including in the Bible…

I was listening to a guest at Alpha this week explaining his reactions, in this case to the “Why and how should I read the Bible” talk, and feeling that there’s still a very large gap between some well-respected liberal Christian writers and the “feel” of the average church. He was explaining seeing the texts as allegorical and metaphorical, including the miracles described (which he sees as purely plot devices), and I was so with him – and he was clearly seeing this as a reason why he could not be “part of” the church. It isn’t part of the Alpha course for helpers to provide answers in the discussions, so I stayed quiet. But I don’t see this as a valid reason for not being part of the church myself. I used to – for rather a long time I used to, in fact, but I’ve read John Shelby Spong and John Dominic Crossan and Robert Funk and Marcus Borg and many others who are entirely comfortable with a demythologised (and sometimes remythologised) Bible as still being a text to take seriously, though not literally. They seem to manage, so I should be able to – and I think, so should he.

I’ve also spent years debating religion on The Religion Forum (which used to be far more active than it has been lately) and found that once you get beyond “he worked a miracle so you must take him seriously” (I already take him very seriously indeed, so let’s move on), all the meaning which is extracted from miracles is of the metaphorical or allegorical kind. What is the meaning of taking five loaves and two fishes and feeding 5,000, after all? (This, incidentally, impresses me the more having been involved in the feeding of 50-80 for five Wednesday evenings now!). It isn’t limited to “well, this guy could multiply food in a marvellous way 2000 years ago”. No, it speaks to a culture of sharing, it speaks to God being sufficient for all and not exclusive to a few, it speaks to overcoming cultural barriers and fear of the “unclean”, and I could go on for quite a while. And none of this is dependent on how five loaves and two fishes became sufficient.

The “big one” is, of course, the Resurrection. I’ve written about this recently more than once. How can you be a Christian and not believe in a bodily, physical resurrection, you might ask. And I’d reply that firstly the evidence of the gospels is, on the whole, against a bodily resuscitation (which is more like what is being talked of) and secondly that Paul appears not to have believed in one, though he did believe in resurrection (and how!). But it was a spiritual resurrection. And that is not something for which you expect or need suspensions of natural law as you do for most miracles. Everything else works perfectly well whether or not you accept that the dead body lodged in the tomb revived at some point and started walking through walls and travelling substantial distances without passing through the intervening space. And similarly everything else about the New Testament works perfectly well whether or not you believe that Jesus (or God) was working a few magic tricks. OK, real magic rather than just illusion, but tricks nonetheless.

Incidentally, I except the healing miracles in general from this scepticism. Medical miracles do happen from time to time, and I do not think we have begun to understand the extent to which the mind can, on occasion, make the body do things which are impossible in normal circumstances.

It isn’t just a matter of sticking to a hard scientific dogma here, either. If I consider that Jesus worked miracles, I can see no particular reason why I can say that the noted Jewish rabbis of around the same time, Honi the Circle Drawer and Eliezar did not work miracles as well. Or a host of later Islamic notables, or earlier Buddhist or Taoist sages. Or, indeed, that the stories of Nero Redivivus are not true, or that the emperors Augustus (of Rome) and Alexander (of Macedon) were not miraculously conceived. Christianity has absolutely no monopoly on the miraculous, and the miracles do not advance us by being factual rather than allegorical. I may even be in difficulty accepting that Elvis has not been resurrected…

However, there’s more than that. I may not think of God the Creator in the same way as the Biblical literalist, but the God who can speak an universe into being (according to John 1 and, possibly, Genesis 1), who is omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient is not going to need to tinker with His creation with magic tricks. I will grant you that the only one of those “omnis” which I think it anything like correct is omnipresence (I can’t get away from that, it’s how I experience God), but I do think that the general impression is correct even if the reductio ad absurdum implicit in “omni” is not. God does not need to tinker with his creation, because he made it and, according to Genesis, he saw that it was good. Very good, in fact. And if it is good by God’s standards, that is beyond my pay scale to criticise.

And yet, apparently, the God who, according to Paul, is apparent in every part of creation such that we are without excuse in not accepting him (Rom. 1:19-20) is thought to need to suspend natural law in a few cases in order to demonstrate that Jesus is special?

No, I’m afraid I don’t see that.

What I do see is a God who is beyond and above that. Even though I’m a sucker for magic tricks and superheroes.

And that has some more consequences which I’ll look at in a further post.

Last Sunday was Remembrance Sunday; Monday (the 11th of the 11th) being Remembrance Day proper. For friends who aren’t from the UK, firstly this commemorates the armistice signed at Compiégne which took effect at 11 o’clock on the 11th of November 1918 and effectively brought World War I to an end, and is the commemoration of those who have given their lives in the service of the country in war. During the weeks leading up to it, imitation poppies are worn, bought by a donation to the Royal British Legion, a charity for servicemen and their families, which recall the poppies which grew in profusion throughout the fields of Flanders where the greatest fighting of the Western Front took place. In the States, this is “Veterans Day”, with some of the same connotations. There’s a rather good blog post about the difference here.

11/11 18 was the end of the “Great War”, called at the time “the war to end all wars”.

Would that that title had been correct.

It is, however, the war which has had the greatest impression on me, due to two things. In 1968 at the age of 14 I went on an exchange holiday to Northern France, exchanging with a young French lad of my age. When he came over here, we took him to see some local sights and also up to Edinburgh, talking about the “auld alliance” between Scotland and France prior to the complex arrangement whereby Scots monarchs acquired the English throne for a while and, by and large, the English acquired Scotland. When I went over there, a large proportion of what I saw was the WWI battlefields and the cemeteries associated with them. And the rows of white headstones seemed to go on for ever… I walked for quite a while in one of them, looking at the names and not infrequently lack of names on them. It was, for me, an intense experience.

It was also clear, looking at the ground within a local wood where Hervé liked to cycle (pre BMX but pretending it was moto-cross), that the ground was still scarred 50 years later with the relics of trenches and bomb craters all over the area; it went on for miles and miles. The sheer scale of devastation struck me really forcibly, and I began reading about the history of the period. It was the first war in which slaughter was truly made into an industrial process, and, for the most part, was largely futile as neither side could break out of the trench systems for some three years, just pushing forward and back in an ebb and flow of constant carnage.

The year after that, Selby Abbey had its 900th anniversary, and the town had a festival (in which my parents were prominent organisers). One event was a reunion at the British Legion club in town of a lot of First World War ex-servicemen (that year also being the 50th anniversary of the formal termination of hostilities, which was in 1919). I went along, and was privileged to hear some of the old soldiers actually talking about what it had been like to fight. Some of them were survivors of the Bradford Pals. This was the 16th and 18th batallions of the West Yorkshire regiment. On July 1st 1916, 2000 of the Pals emerged from their trenches to attack on the Somme in the morning; by lunchtime 1,770 of them were killed or wounded. As they were raised from local areas, this meant that something like three quarters of the young men of these areas would never return. Whole streets had lost an entire generation. Part of this I learned from listening to them talk, part I had to research. Some of them, however, were willing to open up a bit, something which my father (who served in the RAF in World War II) was never really willing to do. Several of them had been about the age I was then when they lied about their ages in order to enlist at 16 rather than 18, because it was their patriotic duty, so I could engage with the person they had been a little, and feel all the more for the late adolescence they had never had.

I never felt the same about the Second World War as about the first, anyhow. The second was against a foe who I could reasonably consider sufficiently dangerous and evil to require all possible efforts to be made to wipe them out; not so the first. The German rulers of WWI were not particularly evil and frankly were not even particularly dangerous to England (though they were to France); we entered that war because of our involvement in one of two networks of alliances which had been built up to provide a balance in Europe, which network melted down as a result of an assassination in Sarajevo. We had no particular interests in the conflict between Austria and its Balkan nationalist separatists, but Russia did, and it was allied with France, and so were we and Italy, and Germany was allied with Austria and Turkey, and suddenly the fragile balance of European alliances fell apart. Or alternatively, it can be regarded allegorically as a bar fight...

Once that happened, Germany invaded France, and after a short period of “war of movement” bogged down in trench warfare which lasted over three years and stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss border through Belgium and northern France. It wasn’t the first taste of trench warfare with machine guns which the world had seen (and previous experiments should have convinced everyone concerned that this was a very nasty way to kill off a very large number of soldiers) but it was the biggest by far. For three years, England, France, Belgium and Germany poured their young people into a country-wide industrial mincing machine and received back the shreds of a generation. The generals didn’t know what else to do, hoping above all reason for a “breakthrough”, which was not going to come until some improvements in technology allowed that and the German economy was faltering seriously in continuing to provide an endless supply of munitions. Italy and Austria were busy doing the same in the Alps between their two countries as well, and for a brief period we threw the young of New Zealand and Australia against prepared Turkish positions at Gallipoli to similar effect.

So when we get to that time of year when almost everyone on the street is wearing a poppy, this is what I remember. The sheer waste of millions of young lives. We remember the armistice of 1918 rather than the peace treaty (Versailles, 1919) which finally ended the war because at the time veterans objected to any celebration of victory, and I am in complete agreement with them. As the blog post I linked to above indicates, for the most part we remember in a low-key and dignified way, pace some people who feel that the whole thing has now been co-opted by politicians and media into something more akin to a celebration of more recent wars. We remember loss, not victory.

And it can be argued that Versailles was not really a victory, because the peace treaty was perhaps the worst which has ever been negotiated. Its scheme of reparations against Germany did much to ensure the collapse of the German economy in the 1920s and 30s and produce immense resentment in Germany which gave the background in which Hitler could rise to power, such that in a very real sense World War II was just the “second half” of World War I. The associated treaties were as bad; the botched settlement in the Balkans can be argued to have been partly responsible for the various more recent Balkan conflicts including Bosnia and Kosovo, and the settlement in the Middle East out of the collapsed Ottoman Empire (Turkey) bears considerable responsibility for conflict in (for example) Palestine, Syria and Iraq, which is still an unfinished story.

It wasn’t the war to end all wars; in a sense it hasn’t actually completely ended yet itself, as the repercussions rumble on. I suppose that if you regard the second World War as merely a continuation, it may have ended all wars within Europe, as most of the countries involved are now part of the European Union (the original motivation of which was to stop this happening again) and are fairly unlikely to go to war with each other again, and that is no mean feat considering the previous history of the continent. But it was an appalling and abhorrent waste of a generation from several countries, many of whom went to battle filled with patriotic zeal. That is also large in my remembering when I wear a poppy, and during the rest of the year when I consider that wars are still occurring, and wasting the potential of young lives and the hopes of generations, and that patriotic zeal is often part of the picture. Eric Bogle wrote about this, and his words “It all happened again, and again and again and again and again” ring in my ears.

There has been a Christian concept of “just war” since theologians became aware that Christianity was becoming the religion of the then premier world power and they felt a need to curry favour with the secular power and circumvent the ethos of non-violence which had previously characterised Christianity (to my mind, in complete consistency with the gospel). World War I was not one of them on any reading of the theory. World War II, however, just might have been – unless you see it as a continuation of World War I, in which case it was preventable and should have been prevented not by “appeasing Hitler” but by not getting into the position, through war, where Hitler could rise to power. Almost none of the subsequent wars have been “just” in the Christian sense, but that isn’t something we seem to reflect on much these days.

But the poppies in particular urge us to reflect on World War I, and that should be sufficient to convict us that war is a very great evil indeed. And that it is still the eleventh hour, almost too late for us to stop, and “study war no more”  – but not quite.

Every so often when I mention to one of my friends who is not religious that I’m going to church, they say “Say one for me”.

And, of course, I do, though I have serious reservations about any form of petitionary prayer which is not aimed squarely at receiving some form of enhanced consciousness for myself – for instance “Come, Holy Spirit” or “Please Lord, help me understand this!”.

The thing is, it seems to me they’re asking me to have a personal relationship with God on their behalf, to function, if you like, as a kind of priest. To intercede, to use my connection on their behalf, to capitalise on my (seriously faulty) piety to make up for their own lack of it.

Which would be absolutely fine in my eyes if I thought there was the slightest chance that it would work. But I don’t. A personal relationship means that there should be no need for an intervening third party (well, not most of the time, at any rate – I have some history of acting as an advocate and as a mediator, and don’t underestimate the value of those roles, but they apply only when there’s a serious problem which needs to be resolved, and it’s generally essential that the person I represent be present…)

It’s like asking someone else to do your Steps for you in a Twelve Step programme. You can help and encourage someone do them themselves, you can explain them, you can help dispel intellectual barriers to doing them, but you can’t actually do them for someone.

The first times this happened to me were when I was between 19 and 22, and having worked hard for a few years following my initial “zap” experience, had developed a spiritual practice which seemed to encourage and facilitate frequent further experience of the presence of God and had developed a set of ideas as to how and why this worked. Animated by the kind of spirit which led to this blog post, I was happy to share my conclusions with anyone who was interested in listening, while exploring all possible avenues as to how to improve my praxis and my understandings.

The snag is, people kept expecting that I could somehow transfer my experience directly to them, that by hanging on my every word and by regarding me as a leader, somehow it would mean that they would have the same experience, without having had the same original experience or having done the hard work of developing the praxis. I could communicate the understandings just fine (although I was less successful in persuading people that these were provisional and interim understandings and that I was still working on improving them), but I could not pass on the consciousness of the presence of God except occasionally (erratically) and for very limited periods of time. I could tell them what my praxis was and had been (as by then I had refined it to something very streamlined and minimalist), but as I knew it was building on an initial peak spiritual experience for which I had not worked in the slightest and for which I could propose no explanation (other than “grace” or “just one of those things”), I wasn’t confident that following the praxis would deliver them the same quality of experience (and by and large, my scepticism on that point seemed justified).

I found I was being referred to by some as “the Guru of Castle” (“Castle” being the nickname for my college), and I didn’t want to be a guru. Not, at any rate, unless I could reliably induce a “zap” experience in someone, and probably not even then, as my understandings were so provisional. They also didn’t fit neatly into any one faith tradition at the time (some may argue that they still don’t 40 years later!), so becoming a functioning part of one of those was not an option; I’d have had to form my own variant faith, and I was entirely confident that I lacked the ability and assurance to do that. Besides that, God was definitely not calling me to do that! What I seemed called to do was to launch out into the “normal” world, with employment, house, mortgage, wife, family and, in some way, combine that with personal spirituality.

[In case you’re wondering, my thinking at the time included elements of Christianity, Sufism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Paganism and Kabbalah. That may not be an exhaustive list!]

It seems to me, though, that there’s a very widespread wish among people for others to be holy (or spiritual, or learned, or committed, or observant) on their behalf. I don’t particularly feel that, but neither do I feel that it’s my calling to do that for anyone else – well, perhaps apart from “learned” in a small way, doing the intellectual heavy lifting and helping provide some intellectual answers occasionally.

So that brings me to my thinking about priests and other clergy. In this, I am definitely Protestant; I think the “priesthood of all believers” concept is vital. I don’t, in other words, think that having someone else act as intercessor for you is a valid concept except, perhaps, for a few special occasions. Thus, for instance, much as I may currently feel that Pope Francis is a person I could cheerfully follow, I couldn’t be Catholic, as he’s only the second pope during my lifetime who might fill that role. I’m not even really comfortable with the situation in the Anglican church, where only ordained clergy can perform the sacraments (though that’s something I swallow in favour of what has to be the broadest Church in existence). I don’t value the existence of monastic orders as, somehow, giving me vicarious sanctity if I support them, for instance.

Of course, what I do value is a system which allows some people to specialise in theory and to provide newer and alternative understandings (and praxes), and also people who have perfected a praxis and can teach it to others. Someone who can act as an example of praxis is clearly desirable. I also value the possibility of, for a period, joining an intentional community which has a strong praxis and devotes it’s time to this; somewhere to go on retreat. This is how I see the main functions of clergy, including monastics.

So, what do I think about “say one for me”? I recall Psalm 139:-
O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
    you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down,
    and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
    O Lord, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before,
    and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
    it is so high that I cannot attain it.
Where can I go from your spirit?
    Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
    if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
    and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
    and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
    and the light around me become night’,
even the darkness is not dark to you;
    the night is as bright as the day,
    for darkness is as light to you.

If someone says to me “say one for me”, they have already said one for themselves. God is with them and knows their thoughts, even if they have no consciousness of that themselves.

And I’ll put in a word or two for them as well.