Eyre Lines

A little while ago, I wrote a question for consideration by a trio of pastor authors, namely “Can a charismatic, evangelical. mission-based church find a home for a post-modernist theologian/mystic?” which Henry picked up (see http://energion.net/2013/01/transforming-mainline-congregations/) . I obviously had myself in mind. Now, there is an Anglican church which fits that description in a city a mere 15 miles from here, and I’ve in the past gone by invitation of a friend to a few evening talks/discussions there. At the last of these, I was somewhat taken aback to be invited extremely warmly to take part in their next Alpha course, on the basis of being, effectively, devil’s advocate.

I’ve been to one-and-a-bit Alpha courses in the past, about 10 years ago. I was encouraged not to finish the second of these, but to go on to a follow-up group and eventually join for a while a cell group at the church which did this particular Alpha. A few months later, I was asked not to attend further cell group meetings, on the basis of an incident where in one I attended I failed to conceal my unease about the pastor talking of the need for what was essentially doctrinal lock-step. The pastor noted this and asked why. I said I’d prefer not to go into that, but he pushed and pushed, and I therefore gave my reasons, first briefly and then with justification. Now, it seems that one young member of that group heard my reasons, and was severely shaken in his faith; the pastor did not want that happening again. Actually, neither did I. That is a large part of the reason why I was so reluctant to speak openly and at length. I don’t want something like that to happen again.

I did deliver several fairly strong “health warnings” to the organiser of this year’s Alpha. Not in the slightest deterred by this, I got a formal invitation last week, and to my surprise, was invited as either guest or “helper”. After some soul-searching, I went along to their training session for helpers and leaders on Wednesday.

I didn’t find this quite so alienating an experience as I’d expected. Yes, a few songs were sung, none of which I knew. There are fairly few pieces of devotional music written after about, say, 1930 which I actually like. There was a short session of extempore prayer. No one went on at too great length, however, nor were they too loud, nor expressing wishes I would have found jarring, so nothing got in the way of my own “being quiet with God”. There was a “name game” introduction, in which I dubbed myself “Cantankerous Chris” (which almost everyone could remember!). There was instruction about the way in which exchanges after the talk should be moderated, which was not exactly new territory but sound, and a few role plays of how not to do it, which were great fun. As I said to the organiser, I will need to guard against one of my tendencies, which is to be the guy who takes over the discussion. The temptation to go into cross-examination mode is definitely still there!

I did get a few minutes to leaf through the new glossy course manual, which is new in format, but appeared largely unchanged from the one I have on my bookshelf. I can probably manage to disagree with every fact and argument presented, so should have no difficulty in presenting counter-opinions. The style is not supposed to be a real discussion, however, more a round up of views and reactions. I wonder in the circumstance how much use I am actually going to be.

If you read my previous post, “Childish Thoughts”, you will appreciate that my own position is based entirely on transformative personal experience; without that I would probably still be an atheist, though I might have mellowed into not being an evangelical one. I went to my first Alpha course knowing that the objective was to produce personal transformative experiences for those attending. My own base experience, and those which have followed it, are not reliably replicable. I have never been able to say to someone “Do these things, and you will have an experience like mine”. I have been able to say that if you have had a first experience like mine, doing some things is likely to improve massively your chances of having another like it, but not that this will produce a first experience. Alpha does produce first experiences, not with complete reliability but with sufficient regularity to convince me that it does work, at least for those with a reasonably suitable psychology and background.

My own experience was, to use a phrase I probably over-use, “better than sex, drugs and rock & roll”, and I would be delighted if everyone could have one like it. Granted, Alpha produces experiences which are interpreted differently from mine – how can that be avoided, as what that interpretation should be is a very major content of the course. However, I know of significant numbers of people who have arrived at faith via something like Alpha and, through sufficient study and praxis, then come to the conclusion that something far closer to my own interpretations has to be the way for them. I cite Marcus Borg as one easily readable example.

In an ideal world, maybe I could pick up one or two people who would otherwise drop out of Alpha without any transformative experience and persuade them that there is value in this even though the theoretical framework on which it is based is flawed.

(In fact, I think the Alpha interpretation is largely downright wrong; even if you were to accept that all the gospels are reliable near-contemporaneous eyewitness accounts instead of products of a faith community largely from later generations and that Paul and those writing as Paul were not doing ad-hoc theologising but were inspired to the extent of writing nothing inaccurate, the interpretations of scripture used to produce the Alpha theoretical framework leave a lot to be desired, and some of them took over one and a half millenia to be extracted from the base scripture).

In this ideal world, maybe they could stick with the course to the end and have their own transformative experience as a result, with or without Alpha’s stock interpretations. At this point, I’m not sure how this could be achieved, even if the constraints of the course allowed me to try.

What I do not want is to suggest to anyone that my interpretations are in any way the only right way to give yourself an interpretational structure into which to fit such experience. I had to do a lot of intellectual “heavy lifting” to get where I am, and anticipate there may be plenty more to be done. Heavy lifting is not for everyone, and if I were to give the impression that it is necessary to do this in order to “be right”, or worse, in order to have transformative experience, this would be at best non-constructive and at worst damaging. Equivalent, if you like, to a suggestion that you need to understand quantized free electron theory and lattice dynamics in order to use a computer rather than call it “George” and regard it as an odd kind of human. If you then gave up using a computer, it would be a bad thing. What I do think is that for someone with a basically scientific-materialist mindset and a critical, analytical approach, the Alpha interpretations are very unlikely to work, but something like mine might.

We will see. Unless I am disinvited, I will be going along on Wednesday evenings for the next few weeks. I think it will be good discipline for me to blog about it in the process.

This is the title of a book by Marcus Borg, published 2003. I can strongly recommend it.

I’ve been doing some reading to provide background for some more extended writing I have in contemplation, around the topic of panentheism and Christianity, and caught a reference to this book, which had slid past my consciousness ten years ago. Now, I’ve thought for quite some time that Prof. Borg was what I’ve previously described as a “closet panentheist”, in that parts of some of his previous books strongly hinted to me that he had arrived at a broadly panentheist conception of God. I was interested to see if he went further in “The Heart of Christianity”.

If he was in the closet, in this book he has come out; he’s loud and proud, as you might put it. He goes a lot further. He puts forward a way of viewing scriptures and traditions within “the emerging paradigm” which really demands a panentheist stance, and then goes on to explore specific issues; being “born again” and the Spirit generally; the Kingdom; “Thin Places”; Sin and salvation; praxis; and finally Christianity in a pluralist world. He does it very well, as you’d expect from a biblical scholar of his experience and credentials and a best-selling communicator.

2003 was a bit late for this book to have saved me a lot of thinking, even had I read it fresh from the presses, but I’d have loved to read it in, say, 1993, and had it been in existence and I’d read it in 1973 (or, even better, 1968) my whole spiritual adulthood would probably have been very different. Since 1968 I’ve laboured under the difficulty that my panentheist stance, about which I really have no option, is not “standard Christianity”; here is a well-respected scholar arguing that not only is it a viable and valid way of moving forward with Christianity in a postmodern and pluralist world, but also to some extent respectable in terms of pre-modern thought (say, before around 1500). I grant you, I’ve yet to come across a church anything like local to me in which this kind of approach has reached more than (at most) the leadership, but armed with this book 45 years ago, who knows what might have happened?

I might have liked to see more about what I see as a panentheist thread running through Christianity, or at least it’s mystics, from the earliest days. Prof. Borg does touch on that, but only extremely lightly.

He arrives at his position from a direction entirely different from my own. Prof. Borg has, so far as I can see, been a Lutheran from childhood, and has been thoroughly within the church throughout, arriving eventually at a panentheist conception which re-invigorates and makes sense of his Christianity for the future. I started out as an atheist with an experience which I could only sensibly interpret as panentheist, and then spent many years trying to find out how to fit that into an available faith community (it was only in the late 1990s that two online friends persuaded me that I was, in fact, legitimately a Christian, albeit of a rather unusual flavour). It is interesting to see that Prof. Borg arrives at many of the same ways of looking at things as do I, for instance concepts of sin and salvation; exclusivity; the Kingdom. Neither are they just the same in outline; often he chooses the same passages and analogies as do I. Maybe this further validates the stance?

A few months ago I posted that I seemed to be emotionally a five-point Calvinist, and how this irritated me.  A few years ago I wrote the following (over-inspired by the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s rap Othello):-

“Bro, let me tell you ’bout a concept called TULIP/big in the South where they like mint julep/totally bad is the way that we’re created/only by election is /the way that it’s fated/Jesus came for some but not for others/God gives grace to some of the brothers/Once you’re elected escape their ain’t/’cause you’ll persevere like all of the Saints”

otherwise “The Calvin Rap”, which I gather pretty accurately describes the five points under the acronym “TULIP”; Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, Persistence of the saints.

I also wrote the “Anti-Calvin Rap” in reply to myself:-

“God messed it up in his first creation/Gave a way to save themselves to Israel’s nation/”Follow my commandments” was his prescription/”Even if you sin, I’ll save” was the prediction/Are you serious that God can’t hack it?/Gives commandments that aren’t a good packet?/Jesus came to save us all as John well said/”Believe in what he said to us; you won’t be dead”/Gave new commandments that we could use/”Love me, your fellow men you don’t abuse”/We have the choice as to whether we do it/If we do we will reap the fru-it/Falling away a question poses/’Cause in that case your life ain’t ROSES”

ROSES is a reference to a competing concept, standing for Redeemed on condition of faith, Open to all, Separated by sin, Elect to good works, Sealed by the Spirit. “Elect to good works” means you are chosen by God to do certain things; if you don’t, you are still “saved” but subject to discipline.

There’s a spirited defence of ROSES against TULIP by Jeffrey A at http://community.compuserve.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=7&nav=display&webtag=ws-religion&tid=155430, which I won’t repeat here. As it happens, I’m not so sure about ROSES either, but it’s theoretically better than TULIP!

Now, as my history records, I got “zapped” in my mid-teens entirely out of the blue. I had really done nothing to deserve it, nor to make it more likely that such would happen. I was, frankly, a pretty miserable specimen of humanity before this, wholly self-centred, manipulative and – well – very teenager-like. Intrinsic to the experience was first a conviction of how bad I had previously been, but also a conviction that I was forgiven. I have no problem with “total depravity”!

I was powerless to resist the experience at the time (surprising, as my reluctance to “let go” has since been the bane of my existence in following a path of meditation and contemplation), so “irresistible” chimes. So does “unconditional”, as I was not fulfilling any conditions which I can think of at that time. I have never since felt that things could be (in the deepest sense) any way other than as in that experience, and have sought to repeat the experience and to act in accordance with the paradigm change it produced in me, so “persistence” probably works, though I’m uneasy about the word “saints”. That’s four points…

I suppose, in a sense, so does “limited”, as I have met very few people who have had a similar experience of such intensity. I don’t understand why I should have been favoured above others (particularly far more deserving candidates). Very many people seem to get by with relatively very weak experiences of consciousness of God, or indeed just on hope.

But… the consciousness of God which I experienced then and since is not consistent with an arbitrary selection of some and rejection of others; the inevitable result of 5 point Calvinism, it seems to me, is that you’re either saved or damned without any question of worth, without any consideration of what you have done or will do in the future, without even any requirement to try. That does not sound like the God I know, whose policy on acceptance or rejection seems to me far better summed up in Ezekiel 18, to which I was referring in the second rap.

I’ve also met a lot of people who have at some point had all the signs of having had at least a loosely similar experience to my own, and have then lost their adherence to their new paradigm. The usual answer I hear from the 5 point Calvinist is that they were merely imitating those who are actually saved, but it overwhelmingly seems to me that you can, in fact, fall away from at the very least the consciousness of being irrevocably in God’s love and protection, and certainly from keeping commandments and manifesting the fruits of the Spirit. People do. Sometimes they return. Often they don’t.  I don’t see persistence there, nor unconditional election, nor irresistible grace. Particularly not the last of these, as I have met a very few people who have testified to an experience very similar to mine and of at least near that force, but who have dismissed it as “just one of those things” or, as one friend charmingly puts it “a brain fart”. In conscience, I suppose it might have gone that way with me too – I didn’t at the time accept the existence of a God, and my first thoughts were to seek medical help. Had my doctor not assured me that there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with my brain function or mental processes at all (including TLE, which was my best guess), I suppose I might have just dismissed it, and not gone on to act on it.

I think I’ll stick with my head on this, whatever feels emotionally correct.

I attend an Anglican Church, and the words “this is the Word of the Lord” float past me following any reading from the Bible apart from the gospels, in which case the formula is “this is the Gospel of Christ”. But in what way can this conceivably be true for me, a panentheist? This question arises from a private response to my two previous posts.

Well, I assuredly do not think that a separate and personified God dictated the words to the various writers of sections of the Bible, nor do I think that inspiration from whatever source is guaranteed to be rendered by any writer in a form which is correct, sufficient and complete.

That is, except insofar as any words, just as any actions whatsoever, emanate from a part of the whole which is God. Although that could possibly be an adequate piece of mental gymnastics for someone, I need more than that.

I hear the words, and would sometimes really like to substitute (for instance) “this is the word of Paul”, or “this is the word of an unknown psalmist”. In an extreme case, I might want to say “this is the word traditionally ascribed to Moses but actually of an unknown redactor of around the third century BC working on material of the Yahwist source“. I am reasonably convinced by the Biblical scholars who have reached such conclusions; I’m certainly in no position to argue against them, except perhaps in some details of method which don’t impact on the general conclusion.

But I do actually have more than that. For most purposes, I treat scripture as something of fundamental authority in a way in which I assuredly don’t treat (say) the words of the editorial writers of “The Times”, which of course also qualifies to me as words emanating from a part of the whole which is God. If I swallow really hard, I equally have to include the words in “Hello”magazine, thus indicating the limits of usefulness of systematic theology.

This emanates from tradition. In the Wesleyan quadrilateral of scripture, tradition, reason and experience, the fact that the Bible as we know it is scripture is a matter of tradition. Various works which might well have been in the Bible, such as the Epistle to the Laodiceans, the Didache or the Gospel of Thomas don’t appear in current versions; Luther questioned whether Hebrews and Revelation should actually be part of the Bible, but eventually bowed to the pressure of tradition.

A sizeable amount of the impact of that tradition, to me, is the fact that I was brought up with scripture. It was the tradition of my family, the tradition of my early schools, the tradition of what was then a sizeable proportion of the population where I grew up. It is a part of my thinking at a very deep level (which the contents of “Hello” are definitely not!). (A level, indeed, sufficiently deep that I have some suspicions that at some emotional level I may be verging on being a five point Calvinist – but I’m working on that; I don’t find it a particularly healthy emotional stance). In the sense that it forms that imbedded tradition, therefore, I consider “this is the Word of the Lord” to be accurate.

What I do not do is consider this in any absolute sense. I don’t really do absolutes, as witness part of my “Childish Thoughts” post; I consider taking things to extremes to be the best way of causing any system of thinking to break down. It is, however, the bedrock on which the praxis of most of my spiritual life is based, including making the response “thanks be to God” after the declaration in the service. It really isn’t helpful to be thinking “well, actually it’s the word of someone traditionally thought to be Paul but actually writing some years after his death in the context of a theology which had developed somewhat beyond Paul’s actual position”. So I try not to do that any more.

Roger Olson blogs “What’s wrong with Panentheism” at Patheos.

He starts with saying that it’s the “kiss of death” to admit to it if you want to teach at an evangelical college, which I might be inclined to think was therefore the most important point.

It does seem to me that exclusion from teaching at an evangelical institution is no justification at all for a theological position being “wrong”; to some, it might be a strong reccomendation!

But then, I don’t subscribe in the slightest to the concept that the be all and end all is conformity with all aspects of received dogma; the be all and end all to me is conformity with my and others experience of God. Does this concept allow me to talk about my experience more easily, to be better understood by others when I do so, and does it give me the ability to expand on that experience and draw conclusions for my future actions and future interpretations of experience? If so, it’s an useful concept. Note, not “right” in opposition to “wrong” but “useful” in opposition to “not useful”. Panentheism in it’s broadest form does that for me.

In contrast, Olson criticises panentheism for denying “creatio ex nihilo”. I struggle to understand how the concept of creatio ex nihilo is spiritually useful to anyone, including evangelical theologians, quite apart from being confident that it’s a derived concept rather than one directly supported by scripture (at least, by Old Testament scripture). It’s useful to physicists, and more specifically cosmologists, in a sense, though the modified sense in which it is currently useful to them is not very like the classical theological concept any more. Whether or not there actually was a creatio ex nihilo, it was a very long time ago, and unless you’re interested in explaining the distribution of matter in the universe, background radiation in space and/or the way in which gravitation and other fundamental forces interact, I can’t see the relevance.

To give him his due, he does distinguish types of panentheist thinking, rightly identifying a few passages which resonate well with panentheists, and his attack is on certain derived philosophical positions, and not on the concept more generally. However, the tenor of his writing seems to me along the lines of the argument “some Muslims are suicide bombers, which is a bad thing: therefore Islam is a bad thing”

It isn’t necessarily part of my particular panentheist stance that “God is dependent on the world”. He might be, he might not be; I’m not clear how the concept is useful. I’ve concluded that the concepts that God is immutable and impassible are wrong in any absolute sense, but this isn’t central to my understanding. I find process theology and open theology useful in stressing that God is changed by his interaction with humanity; a relationship with something which doesn’t and can’t change is a relationship I can’t understand.

But Olson criticises this for denying grace. I don’t see that. Even in the case where certain philosophers have suggested that God is dependent on there being an universe, he is not dependent on there being THIS universe. Except in the sense that, this universe being in existence, he is dependent on it. I do not see how that creates difficulties with grace. We would not exist as we are had we not developed with God being the God he is, and God would not be the God he is had he not been in interaction with us. If that last seems dubious, we may consider that scripture amply attests that God is faithful to his covenants and faithful to his people. I think that this rather negates the idea proposed by Olson that God freely chooses to include the world in his life; if he ceased to do so he would not be faithful to his covenants or to his people. We could say that he freely chose this, perhaps, but having chosen, he is faithful.

But then, Olson is a theologian, and believes that what is needed is “a biblically and theologically sound doctrine”. I disagree. What is needed is a continuing relationship with God, for a Christian mediated by Jesus Christ. We are saved by grace, by faith, possibly even by works, but not by having an intellectually watertight concept of God.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9)

By the age of 10, I was to all intents and purposes an evangelical atheist in the Richard Dawkins mould. I had been attending Sunday School for some years at this point, as befitted the son of a Methodist Lay Preacher, and was a precocious brat. None of the stories I learned in Sunday School were anything more than stories to me; it was becoming clear that the world just didn’t work in the way depicted.

Not only that, but the set of doctrines about God’s nature and abilities didn’t seem to me to be logically consistent. It was clear to the 10 year old me that this was all a fiction, somewhat inferior to the adult SF and fantasy which I’d recently shifted to after exhausting the children’s section of the local library, and the thought of basing my whole life on a fiction was ridiculous, and more than that, repugnant. Not only that, but clearly it was my mission in life to save other people from that fate by convincing them that this was all complete rubbish. How much of a tribulation this was to my poor father, he never admitted to me, but Sunday School and myself parted company around that time to our mutual relief.

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways”, as Paul put it in 1 Cor. 13:11. Aged 14, I had a life-changing experience which demanded that I find some framework in which to set it. By that time, however, I was well down the route which later took me to a degree in Physics (Theoretical option), and it was impossible for me to abandon the vast structure of science which I was in the process of discovering, and which was so powerful a tool for explaining and predicting what happened around me. Indeed, my first thought to explain my experience was something medical. That, however, failed; there were no environmental factors which could have triggered such an event, I had not ingested anything which could remotely have been mind-altering, I was not hungry or sleep-deprived and I was not suffering from any of the various medical or psychological maladies which might have produced radically altered perception. Somehow a “brain fart” (as an atheist friend has subsequently described it as his best explanation) was not remotely adequate.

What was more adequate, however, was the words of various people labelled “Mystics” by F.C. Happold, whose seminal work “Mysticism” I happened on shortly afterwards. From various faith backgrounds or none, the words these people had used to describe their own experiences resonated with me to some degree. These were at least an approach to being able to talk sensibly about my experience. However, the writers were operating within a variety of different and often completely incompatible faith structures; how could they all be correct?

My early view was that there was a kernel of truth within a sizeable amount of untruth in each of these cases. I was, however, still thinking somewhat childishly. Some years of learning, debate, discussion and adoption of various personal practices (“Praxes”) for a time convinced me that while a “cafeteria” approach worked as far as praxes were concerned, they didn’t work as far as conceptual structures ( you may read “belief structures”) were concerned. All the religions which had produced the frameworks which mystics used to talk about their experience were conceptually adequate, and sufficiently self-consistent to satisfy the writers. You could work within any of them, but could not take bits of several without a major effort of harmonisation or reinterpretation.  I found I lacked the ability, or the patience, or the arrogance, required to achieve that – perhaps all of them.

Many religions, including Christianity, are to some extent syncretic. Usually the work of effecting the syncretism is spread over many people and many years, though a few are very largely the work of one outstanding individual. I decided I was not that individual, despite at one time having a small group of people who treated me as a sort of guru, and clearly wanted me to expound some new scheme of understanding in detail.

I also learned that a particular praxis works better for not having major conceptual misgivings about the structure, the faith, which gave rise to it. What started as an effort of suspension of disbelief became something more than that, an ability to see several different and mutually incompatible concept structures as each having a form of truth. This was less bizarre as a concept than it may seem; I already had to accomodate the idea that light was both a particle and a wave, for instance, and any attempt I saw at harmonising the two incompatible concepts seemed to me to fall short. I was comfortable with matter being largely empty space, despite the fact that for most practical purposes outside laboratories treating it as that is a major error.

I also became familiar with the fact that scientific ideas can change radically with the advent of some new piece of evidence; however, in every case a previous theory which had adequately explained the facts would still explain those facts. Usually, this was because the old theory became a “special case” of the new one, but Ptolemaic spheres would still let you compute the positions of planets (for the most part), despite the fact that their theory is now demonstrably not the case. In the case of Ptolemaic spheres, there is a much less complicated mathematics, so they aren’t actually used any more, but Newtonian mathematics in it’s turn was displaced by Einsteinian relativity, but for many situations is still used, as relativistic maths makes computation far more difficult but makes an imperceptible difference to the result (granted, you need to know when that is not going to be the case!).

So where does this leave me with Christianity? I need an explanatory structure for my experience; to dismiss it as “just one of those things” and move on with a purely scientific-rationalist point of view seems to me cowardly. I could have adopted Buddhism as a primary conceptual structure, or Hinduism, or Taoism; all of those are somewhat more amenable from the point of view of the essentially panentheistic base understanding which I am forced to by my experience. One of the most evocative writings of a mystic I have encountered was written by Baba Kuhi of Shiraz, a Sufi (and therefore Islamic): “In the market, in the cloister – only God I saw. In the valley and on the mountain – only God I saw” ending with “I passed away into nothingness, I vanished, and lo, I was the All-living – only God I saw”.

However, several years of Sunday School left me with a base knowledge of Christian scripture to which I have since added, I have lived and worked all my life in places where various denominations of Christianity were the main and sometimes the only choice of having a group of believers (and I feel an emotional need for such a group) and finally my upbringing by Methodist parents has implanted at a very deep level indeed a lot of values which sit easier with Christianity than with any other concept structure. I do not believe that any other basic structure is more “correct” than that of any widespread religion I might choose as a result of my studies. Thus, as evidenced by the quotations above, I operate within Christianity, in a broad sense of the word.

However, I am impatient of claims that Christianity (or any particular group within it) has a monopoly on truth, or even on the best available language of description of mystical (or spiritual) experience. I’m equally impatient of dyed in the wool scientific rationalists, who seem to me to think the same (save that they have no satisfactory language of description of mystical experience at all). “His thoughts are not our thoughts, his ways are not our ways”, whether “his thoughts” refers to a God concept or to a theoretical description of mechanisms underlying our environment and experience of that, and whether “his ways” refers to the actions of an intervening deity or to the things which actually happen in the world and in our experience of it.

It seems to me that Godel has sufficiently demonstrated that any consistent system cannot be complete, and that it’s axioms cannot be proved from within any system. I grant that he deals with mathematically computable systems, and we may be talking of something more extensive than that. I think the extension is justifiable. This will apply to a theology (which ideally is a self-consistent logical system) as well as to science itself. Science typically falls down when you look closely at limit conditions (such as the instant of the”Big Bang” or the smallest extent of matter or space), theologies fall down most readily when you look at their limit conditions, such as concepts of omnipotence or omniscience, which Charles Hartshorne has written so persuasively of, particularly in “Omnipotence and other theological mistakes”.

Thus, while I am encouraged by developments in Christian thinking such as process theology, open theism or creation spirituality, (in particular as they are more congenial to panentheism than classical theology) I cannot think that any of them is complete, or that it can ever be perfectly satisfactory. Just as occasionally one needs to think of light as photons and sometimes as a waveform, sometimes the idea of God as, essentially, a good and loving person with massive power, massive knowledge and massive longevity is actually more useful than is that of the All of which we are all part and in which all that is, was or will be is included. With the Eastern Orthodox theologians who arrived at “apophatic theology” (in which you proceed by denying concepts rather than by affirming them) and with the Cappadocian Fathers who determined that the Trinity was ultimately a “holy mystery” in that it was not susceptible to futher logical enquiry, I end with something better stated in Taoism than anywhere else I know; “The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao”. The God who can be described is not the true God. The Universe which can be described is not the true Universe. His thoughts are not our thoughts.

And yet, the effort of description is not useless – nothing like useless, in my eyes. In the vast scheme of things, I am probably still speaking like a child, reasoning like a child, even though it is perhaps somewhat less childish than my 10 year old thinking. However, Matthew reports Jesus as saying “Truly I say unto you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3). Appreciating that a way of thinking is still childish, inadequate, even in some ways “wrong” should not prevent me from seeing it’s value.

I was reminded today of a statement I’ve heard a few times in various ways. The first time I heard it was in the context of a church which is outside the “traditional” set of churches in our area; a lady talked about “becoming a Christian” and I asked what she’d been before that, expecting “non-believer”, “agnostic” or even “atheist”, or just possibly some other religion entirely, and was told “Anglican” (for an American audience, read “Episcopalian”). Other members of that church were, it seems, previously Catholic, Methodist, United Reformed or (in one case) Baptist, but I didn’t find one who had previously self-identified as anything other than a member of one or other Christian denomination. Note the use of the word “Christian” in that. Exploring further, I found that most of the members of that church did not think that Anglicans, Catholics or, indeed, any other denomination except possibly Baptist were actually Christians.

I had clearly fallen into Humpty Dumpty’s world, in which words mean what you want them to mean, I thought. Now, I really do not like the feeling that everything someone has said to you might possibly have meant something completely different. I’m used to words having multiple meanings; these are well-recognised and the intended meaning can almost always be gleaned from the context. I’m also not insensitive to the fact that even within a single meaning of a word, there is often a value-range. One person’s “soon” does not mean the same as another’s, as a very simple example. However, here the word “Christian” was being used in a sense which denied it to something in excess of 90% of Christianity as I then knew it.

Now, I understand how the usage has come about. This particular church is not affiliated with any of the large denominations, and it’s perfectly reasonable to say that it’s members are Christians. All of those to whom I spoke had come to this church as a result of a conversion experience; they were not previously what they now were, in terms of their faith. People do change denominations as a result of conversion experiences, for example Newman.  No confusion arises from a conversion from Anglican to Catholic or vice versa. But it does from a conversion from Anglican to “Christian”, which denies the Christianity of the whole Anglican communion. That, I submit, is a libel.

Indeed, it’s palpably ridiculous in this case, as the church in question makes great use of the “Alpha Course”, which was created by members of Holy Trinity Church, Brompton. That was, the last time I looked, an Anglican church. The lady in question had come to this church as a result of an Alpha course. She had a conversion experience, which she labelled as having been “born again”. Clearly the Anglican church which she’d previously attended had not delivered to her a “born again” experience. It’s members did not commonly describe themselves as “born again”.

However, I happened to know that several members of the congregation from which she’d come, including the then vicar, would admit to having their own conversion experiences and would accept the label “born again” if they were pushed to. However, they didn’t consider that to be an useful label; to them the useful label was “Anglican”, as it described the church they attended and the praxis they followed, in distinction from, say, the local Catholic church and it’s slightly different praxis.

In fact, I think she was wrong to just use the label “Christian”. She should have used the term “born-again Christian”: she was Anglican, and then she became “born again” and moved to another church.

There’s a further libel implicit in her usage; she is not just dismissing Anglicans generally as “not Christian”, but the larger group of those who practice one or other form of Christianity but who have not yet had the peak emotional experience which is described as being “born again”. There are other ways of acquiring a deep and abiding faith which lack the immediacy and drama of the “born again” experience, and there are probably more people of that description in Christianity than there are of the dramatic experience variety.

In suggesting that she is now a “born-again Christian”, I am swallowing somewhat, as I actually think that term is used misleadingly where it describes not just someone who has, in the Christian tradition, had a peak emotional conversion experience, but also someone who is fundamentalist, literalist and evangelical. As I mentioned, I was aware of a number of people in the church she’d left who had had an experience which I couldn’t distinguish from hers, but who wouldn’t normally use the term. By and large this was because they were not literalists. While they might similarly admit in private to being “evangelical” in that they accepted the Great Commission, or to being “fundamentalists” in that they believed themselves to be based firmly on the teachings of Jesus and the earliest practices of the Church. However, I fight a losing battle there; all three terms have been so successfully appropriated by groups who are literalist that they aren’t really available to those of us who aren’t without potentially causing confusion.

Please, though, can I argue against the appropriation of “Christian” in the same way? Let us please agree that “Christian” describes Anglicans, Catholics, Methodists, Orthodox and indeed everyone who follows the teachings of Jesus Christ in any denomination or lack of one, and which describes literalists, relativists, process theologians, creation spirituality theologians, liberation theologians and even, dare I say it, those who have a subsequent prophet and Christian atheists?