Eyre Lines

Joel Watts writes in “Unsettled Christianity” linking to some sources talking about Historical Jesus research (or as one would have it, speculation). I feel moved to write a bit about this, given (if nothing else) that I have been throwing posts to and fro on The Religion Forum over the last few weeks with a couple of Jewish friends, one of whom remains convinced that Jesus was a fictional character made up by “the Church Fathers”, in which I’m pretty sure he means more Paul and the four Evangelists than those we tend to call “Church Fathers”. I don’t link to that discussion, as I don’t think it sheds much light; it can be found in the “Interfaith” section under “The Genesis of God…” thread.

Like the anonymous Irish Atheist of the second link, I don’t find it reasonably feasible that there was not a genuine historical individual called Jesus, so the complete mythicism of the first link seems bizarre to me. And yet, is it?

I do notice in practice that most Christians of the more conservative and/or more evangelical bent seem fixated virtually entirely on “the Christ of Faith” (as opposed to “the Jesus of History”). Yes, if you consider the major impact of the Christian message (that is, hopefully, to say the message of Jesus) to be that a god-man came into existence and died nastily {and was resurrected, though that is not necessarily as important} to produce a metaphysical change in the universe ( i.e. in God’s attitude to humanity) which benefited those who could induce themselves to believe certain things about him.  

I don’t. Somewhat naively, perhaps, I think that the major impact of the resurrection was to validate the lifetime words of Jesus, which in turn I see as centred on the announcement of the Kingdom of God as being a present and growing reality at that time, into which he invited his followers. I see the Kingdom of God as being, in part, a vibrant personal relationship with God verging on unity with him/her/it/other. I can understand that; it is something I have experienced, off and on, for most of my adult life.

Resurrection? Well yes. I am admittedly far closer to the Irish Atheist than the majority of the Christians around me – no, let me rephrase that, than any of the Christians around me. I don’t really do supernatural (with some provisos, which do not affect this argument). However, going back to the acknowledgement that there HAD to be a Jesus in order that within 20 years or so of his death there would be a rapidly growing group of followers who had penetrated half way across the Roman world in numbers, there also, to me, HAD to be something radically different about their experience shortly after their leader’s maximally painful and degrading death at the hands of the then world superpower from, say, the several previous and later Jewish resistance leaders whose followers disintegrated immediately after their deaths, insofar as they themselves survived their leader.

I read the various accounts in the gospels, and note that if you attempt to harmonise them, you do not get a physical resurrection in the body which was buried; as Paul says at an early stage, you get a Jesus resurrected in a radically different form. One which can walk through walls and very nearly bilocate. I grant you that there are stories of eating (could be illusion) and touching (I’ve personally experienced a tactile hallucination of Jesus) and that several people have seen the same thing at the same time (I’ve witnessed group hallucinations, even if I were unaware of the tendency of groups to provoke false memory in each other), but they don’t shake my conclusion that the primary location of these events was in the minds of followers. OK, there may have been some actual physical component, I suppose (as a scientist I can never say something thought scientifically impossible could absolutely NOT happen), but I don’t need that in order to explain the accounts, and the accounts are more than ample to explain why the cult spread.

For completeness, the accounts said there was an empty tomb. The number of possible naturalistic explanations for this are legion, and not all of them involve an agent who would then have been delighted to produce the remains.

So, I have an experienced, if not a photographable, resurrection as a very probable historical fact.

Clearly, I don’t have any miracles as very probable historical facts, as massive scientific improbability makes them – well – miraculous. No, this doesn’t incline me to think that they may actually have happened exactly as reported, it merely inclines me to believe that the writers has the same attitude to reporting supernatural events as most previous “historians” in the Greek speaking world had had, namely that they were quite likely explanations anyhow and that if a person were important, they were absolutely guaranteed.

Is this remotely important to me? No. I am not likely to be convinced by a miracle I actually witness, let alone one reported by someone living in a far more credulous age. I am likely to look for a naturalistic explanation and, if one does not come to hand, put it in the category of “strange events to be investigated later if at all” (i.e. “anomalous experimental results”). In any event, the concept of a God who is obliged to transgress the remarkably wonderful systems of nature which he may possibly have had some hand in creating in order to put right something which was probably not broken in the first place and which could have been far more simply put right by the transgressing of a lot less natural principles is not one which I can reconcile with my own experience of God.

However, we need to go back to what I said almost at the beginning: it is important to me, it is always going to be important to me, to know what the message actually was which Jesus brought with him, expounded in person, and in order to extract that from the writings of his followers, who were far more concerned about what Jesus meant to them and to the world as a whole than they were with what he actually said, I need Historical Jesus study.

I do approach Historical Jesus study cautiously, even though I am looking to use the skills of the experts in this field to give me a set of giant shoulders on which to climb in order, hopefully, to see a little further. Many of the scholars in this field discount things which I might not discount; notably, few, very few, are identifiable as practising contemplative mystics, and they therefore discount things as inauthentic which I look and say “Yes, that’s a figurative description of what this or that aspect of the mystical state is like”, or is a consequence of such thinking.

Given that I indicated earlier that I was well acquainted with a state of quasi-unity with God, why am I bothered about this? Can’t I just use that state in order to gain my own more direct knowledge? Well, no. Firstly, I am not much (if at all) in control of what happens when in such a state, including what information I may receive. Secondly, the picture I have formed of Jesus over the years from those writings which I am reasonably confident DO reflect his lifetime teachings indicate to me someone who was massively better acquainted with that state then me, and whose information would therefore be hugely better.

And lastly, I know personally of no way to ensure that those around me have a similar experience to my own, which I would wish on all of my friends (should they wish it for themselves) and, yes, all of my enemies, irrespective of whether they might wish it for themselves (they deserve the total comprehension of personal wrongdoing which tends to come with it, even if not the associated comprehension of forgiveness…). I believe there are clues and possibly more than clues as to this in Jesus’ statements. But then, I believe there are clues and possibly more than clues as to this in the statements of some of his followers; I just don’t regard them as equally reliable with those of Jesus.  I do think that following what Jesus suggested at least improves everyone’s chances – and even if it doesn’t improve a particular individual’s position, it produces a better world through their actions.

That, too, is God’s Kingdom, and no deferred gratification is needed for a small advance of it day by day.

Always interested in new perspectives, and noting he had written “Jesus and the eyewitnesses”, I listened to a talk given by Dr. Bauckham entitled “The Four Gospels and other Gospels: is our canon right?”. I was disappointed, and probably will not be reading his book.

The generality of what he had to say was entirely reasonable in relation to the plethora of Infancy Gospels, post-resurrection appearance accounts and the like which are now known to us, but with one important exception, the Gospel of Thomas. He was, to be fair, able to point out that there was argument as to whether the Gospel of Thomas was in fact Gnostic, a label he used for the remainder (and he admitted he used the term loosely; I cannot argue with that).

I was waiting for him to say at each point he made “but this does not, of course, apply to the Gospel of Thomas”, but he only came close to that on one occasion. On two other occasions the point he was making might possibly have applied to the Gospel of Thomas, but would have required further argument before I felt it reasonable to apply it (that it was not narrative and therefore did not include a wealth of detail about the Palestinian circumstances of the time is true, but not as far as I am aware a reason given by the Church Fathers for non-inclusion of a work; and that it did not present a view of Jesus entirely consistent with that of the four canonical Gospels, which I would argue but which has some measure of validity).

As a result, he ended up dismissing what I consider to be possibly the least redacted early source for Jesus’ actual words, by association with other works, under a number of headings which it plainly does not fall within. I hope that this was sloppy scholarship and/or presentation rather than deliberate evasion of the issues surrounding Thomas. It would have been trivial to note at the beginning that the scope of his talk did not extend to Thomas and that it was therefore a separate issue; more reasonably, he should have addressed Thomas entirely separately and at length.

Two other points in his talk were, to me, dubious in the extreme. Firstly, he considers all the canonical Gospels to date from the period within living memory of the events and, therefore, to have been written with access to the eyewitness accounts of apostles. Now, I have written elsewhere about the testimony of Papias as quoted by Eusebius which, to me, makes it impossible that the narrative Matthew and Mark were written in this period (and if narrative Mark was not, neither was Luke). Textual criticism, to me, makes it beyond reasonable argument that all four canonical Gospels were multiply redacted; this of itself renders this timing and association dubious. The manifold errors of geography in the synoptics (a point he uses against some of the Gnostic writings) make it very unlikely that they were written by people with first hand knowledge of the Holy Land or by people who had access to eyewitnesses. Lastly, they appear to have been written in Pauline influenced churches, which would mean that access to the majority of the immediate disciples and particularly apostles would be extremely limited (those adhering to the Jerusalem church), Peter being a possible exception.

The second point I take issue with is his comment that historians of the period were careful to rest their accounts on eyewitness evidence if they themselves were not eyewitnesses. This attitude was, it is true, becoming counsel of excellence in the Roman world (although Roman historians of the times were not necessarily particularly good at following it and were sometimes abysmally bad at checking the veracity of statements they had heard) but had not by any manner of means been the case in Greek “historical” writing to that date – and we are talking about the Greek-speaking rather than the Latin-speaking world here. Frankly, what I would expect from a Greek writer of this period is uncritical fabulation as much as actual reporting of fact.

I will grant that Josephus, who like the majority of the gospel writers was a Hellenised Jew, displays a much higher standard, but he was not writing as an adherent of a religion. For an indication of the historical accuracy of Jewish writings of adherents of the period, we need only look at the tales recorded rather later in the Mishna, which cannot by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as careful history (that tendency was still largely unchanged five centuries later with the assembly of the Talmud).

As I say, I was disappointed. I am open to argument that this was an aberration on his part, or persuasion that despite this, I should actually read something of his (which, it is fair to say, might be better argued).

Some more thoughts about “beyond Alpha”

This follows on from “not the Omega” and the Alpha postscript.

I referenced deindividuation and personal suasion as two factors which I thought may be at work in Alpha; that should not be taken to indicate that I do not think the Holy Spirit works through Alpha, just that those are factors to be taken into account and may, indeed, be among the methods which the Holy Spirit uses to produce the result of personal experience.

The acknowledgement that these factors do exist does, I think, mean that a programme should be in place to follow on from Alpha and work on the basis of any personal experience to produce an individual centred on God through Jesus aided by the Spirit (rather than the dangers of centring on the group or on the individual who prayed with them when they experienced the Spirit).

In fact, though, I think some follow on is essential in any event. There are parts of Alpha which deal to some extent with this, primarily Session 13 “What about the Church”, but to some extent in Session 14 “How can I make the most of the rest of my life” and even Session 11 “Why and how should I tell others”.  I could argue that Session 5 “Why and how should I read the Bible” and Session 4 “Why and how do I pray” also have a role to play, as they are the two sections dealing with personal as opposed to communal practice. Nothing in the course at present seems to me to bring all these threads together. Perhaps that should really be the job of Session 14.

At that point, I suppose much depends on what groups and programmes the church running the Alpha course has to offer (or could refer people to, if we’re feeling ecumenical!). Just worship services is not, I submit, going to be enough. I’ve seen Alpha courses follow on with a “First Steps” programme of introduction to Bible Study and then morph the resulting groups into cell groups, which seems an option.  

In any event, I think substantial consideration should be given to continuing the discussion groups created during Alpha as something approaching cell groups, if not actually as cell groups. This would, I think, capitalise on any group-centring or individual-centring which may have occurred; it will then take work in the cell group to delink those centrings. If persistence is too low to make a sensible sized cell group out of a discussion group, they could be combined or, possibly, tacked on to an existing group.

In any event, though, I’d want to see a stress on developing an individual spiritual programme, a personal praxis, in order to refocus on a personal relationship with God rather than one mediated by the group or another individual and, of course, because that is desirable. Either a portion of each cell group meeting could be devoted to discussing how individual praxis was developing (and talking through any issues which arose) or every third or fourth meeting could focus on this entirely; I suggest the first of these, as otherwise people might decide to skip the relevant sessions.

The “Journey” approach of Rev. Dr. John Vincent might well provide a good template for such follow-on groups, though it is possible they may go in unanticipated directions. So might the Emmaus Course material (probably concentrating on the “Growth” sections).

It occurs to me, though, that it would be possible to capitalise further on any individual centrings which arise by taking a leaf out of the book of 12 Step programmes, and encouraging a system of “sponsoring”. In this model, anyone who wished to follow on from Alpha would be encouraged to form a link with one of the helpers, who would then be responsible for supporting them, taking them through something akin to the 12 Steps and encouraging and assisting them into attendance at core services and membership of other groups within the church, including, of course, some form of service (an important concept within 12 Step and one which any missional, social gospel or radical church would be encouraging in any event.  I hope any church would be doing this, actually).

Clearly, in the light of my reservations earlier in this post and in the “postscript” post I link to above, one of the primary objectives of a sponsor would be to get the individual to develop their own praxis. I think it would also be worth considering that this “sponsorship” should be time-limited, both to encourage de-centring and to reassure individuals that this sponsoring was not a lifetime commitment, although I note that for many forms of personal praxis it is very desirable to have a Spiritual Director on a permanent basis. Perhaps, therefore, there should be an objective eventually to hand over to one of a group of people specialising in spiritual direction within the church?

It does seem to me that the assumption of the Alpha course is that a “one size fits all” personal transformation will be the result; a kind of standardised “born again” major transformational, paradigm changing experience. Most of the people I’ve met who are involved with Alpha are able to testify to such an experience, after all, so why should they assume anyone would be different? However I think from my own observations that many people are different; for one reason or another they are not susceptible to having such an abrupt paradigm change.

I anticipate, therefore, that there will be significant numbers who feel something as a result of going through Alpha, but nothing which they can identify as “born again”. I would like to think that their needs are being met; there may have been the start of an awakening which, if carefully nurtured, could blossom into something much greater. My suggestions above are designed to add an element of care for them.

Above all, I do not want to see people leave Alpha having not had an experience they could call “born again” feeling that they are failures, that they are excluded or, at the worst, that they are damned. I will therefore add one last element – everyone who leaves an Alpha course should have the opportunity of a one-to-one meeting to glean from them what their experience has actually been like, where they are now, to counsel them as to ways forward and to assure them of a continued welcome and support if they are still seeking. I say “opportunity”; I would prefer this to be a default, which someone could opt out of if they felt very strongly, but would otherwise be the norm.

Lastly, anyone with experience in sales will realise that these suggestions will also help in establishing persistence and in giving feedback to improve future Alpha courses. It may be impious to regard Alpha as a sales exercise, but it’s realistic. Granted, what is being “sold” is arguably a free gift (or, according to some theologies, a benefit already paid for), but what else is evangelism than sales?

I read at Experimental Theology in a comment from Ragamuffin Me:-

“How can Jesus be the “eternally begotten” Son”

My answer would be “In the same way as he is the eternally dying Son”.

In a recent post I wrote “In the first century, Christ was crucified by men who sinned at the behest of other men who sinned; today he is crucified again every time harm is done to any human being anywhere. We, humanity, crucified him by, not for, our sin, and we are still doing it every minute of every hour of every day.”

Paul writes strongly of “Christ in us”, for example Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the Life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith of the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me.”, and of “us in Christ”, for example 2 Cor. 5:17-21 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

I dismiss the obvious suggestion that Paul is only speaking to Christians here, and that anyone not a Christian cannot be thought of as being “in Christ” or of having “Christ in” them. It is only in this way that I think that Matthew 25, vv 31-40  “Then the King will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me’. Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?’ And the King will answer them ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me’ ” can make sense. Only if Christ can already be found in any of these people can he speak in this way.

Where I differ from Paul’s conception, therefore, is that I think our death and rebirth in Christ is a process of realisation, an internal, psychological process, the identity being there in the first place. We can therefore ourselves be eternally begotten and eternally dying with Christ in a constant process of self-realisation, of self-correction, of self-perfection.

 

(This post follows on from “No Gnosis” and covers some of the same ground, hopefully not too repetitively)

I bought Elaine Pagels’ “Beyond Belief: the Secret Gospel of Thomas” primarily because I wanted to see her arguments for the Fourth Gospel being to a considerable extent a reaction to the Gospel of Thomas; there is some interesting insight there; a convincing argument was made for John being a reaction to Thomas, which brings up the probability that Thomas is actually earlier than John, promoting its status to something far more in line with Jesus Seminar thinking than with more conservative views. It also included a spotlight on the idea that the experiential basis of the two authors is very similar, but John is very strong on the concept that all experience of God is through Christ, while Thomas considers direct experience of God to be the aiming point; John then uses typical gospel-writers’ licence to cast Thomas in a bad light wherever possible.  Using my own terminology, this is the typical conflict between the Christ-mystic (John) and the God-mystic (Thomas).  

It does sadden me that there has been so much historical conflict, but I can well understand it; I spent quite some time being antipathetic towards the Christ-mystic governed theology of the mainstream Christianity I was brought up in, and to Paul, who I fixed on at an early stage as being primarily responsible (along with John). I didn’t much like Trinitarian theology either; as a God-mystic, my sense of a fully immanent and entirely unitary God was so strong that I did not want to support what I considered a dilution of monotheism.

However, it is just that Trinitarian theology which allows for meeting of mind between the God-mystic and the Christ-mystic (and I assume for this purpose that what both are experiencing is in fact the same root experience, modified in its description through the thinking and particularly the belief-structures of the individual mystic).

There is to my eye little functional difference between mainstream Christian theology’s view of the nature and activity of Christ from that of the nature and activity of God, save perhaps for the insistence that such of God’s nature and activity as we are able to experience or witness is to a nearly exclusive extent Christ, insofar as it is not the Holy Spirit (and possibly the ascribing of events of natural evil {i.e. evil events which do not flow from man’s doing} to God rather than to Jesus).  Conservative theology is, perhaps, identical to mainstream on this point, but the results in practice in conservative evangelical churches seem to be a focus completely on Jesus/Christ where more mainstream churches would insist on focus on God. It thus follows that mainstream-to-conservative theology and practice would see the God-mystic’s actual experience as being experience of Jesus, were the God-mystic not to insist on using God-terminology rather than Jesus-terminology.

I cannot see that a mere difference of descriptive language where it is clear that the essence of what is being talked about is the same should be sufficient to fuel an 18 century long antipathy, dating this from the time of Irenaeus, and frequently attended by cries of “heresy” and more dangerous actions based on that charge.

It is, in fact, Irenaeus who is the hero or anti-hero of Pagel’s book, rather than Thomas. I found her picture of him and his stuggles with a very early Christian community under persecution, a community fractured and still with no really clear single identity, to be surprisingly endearing, and certainly conveying an understanding of the motivations behind his Five Volume “Against Heresies”. To understand all is to forgive all, or so it is said, and I may have moved some little way towards forgiveness of a man I see as the first main mover in the heresy-persecuting strain of Christianity which resulted in the destruction of so many ancient texts which would have been invaluable to historians and the lack of which moved the centre of the developing Christianity away from the experiential to the doctrinal, a trend which is perhaps now beginning to be corrected. Most seriously this antipathy towards supposed heretics caused many millions of deaths of “heretics” over the ensuing 18 centuries.

I’m moved a little way only; it is still difficult for me to feel empathy for someone who will advocate killing people for having what he considers an erroneous intellectual definition of a technical theological term.

The thing which most strikes me from Pagels’ account of Irenaeus is the difficulties he faced bringing together a coherent group where various elements seemed bent on going in widely different directions. Of course, what resulted was his condemnation of two things which have since become very major threads of Christianity; firstly the reinterpreting of scripture by individuals or small groups to produce views divergent from his orthodoxy (or rather proto-orthodoxy, as orthodoxy had not yet been defined), thus undermining any sense of coherence of the movement; secondly an insistence among the “Gnostics” of the importance of personal experience and it’s primacy.

Of course, the first has since the 16^th century been the result of the principle of “sola scriptura” which is the watchword of the Protestant Churches, and which has contributed to their fragmentation into thousands of different denominations; the second results in the charismatic movement which to some extent crosses the other bounds of denomination and theological complexion, and not infrequently leads to variant theological concepts.

There was another thread which Irenaeus disliked intensely, that being the very Gnostic idea that (to put it trivially) spirit was good, the world was bad. His arch-enemy in this was probably Valentinus; for Valentinus the world of matter was a mistake, and to be escaped from, initially via Gnosis giving consciousness of the spirit within and then on death to be fully freed from the taint of the material. For Irenaeus, as for most proto-orthodox Christians, the world was created by God and was good; the problem was with mankind, not with the entire creation.

Again here, the more conservative churches seem to me to be preaching that the one important thing is salvation, that what matters is the state of one’s immortal soul, to the effective exclusion of what is done here and now. This is a position focussed on what happens after death, not on what we do in this life; in other words the Gnostic’s “escape from this world” theology.

So far as eschatology, “end times”, was concerned, Irenaeus held to the view of a thousand year reign on earth, a reign of God on earth over a perfected humanity; the Gnostics on the other hand looked to an end to the tainted earth and its possible eventual reconstruction. They had no proper attachment, in other words, to what was done here and now; no engagement in the church which Irenaeus looked to promote and extend.

It is curious that the conservative-evangelical tendency these days seems to be a focus on “end times” very different from this proto-orthodox (later to become orthodox) position; no kingdom of God on this earth is really looked for (even if there is an advent of the end times, the faithful will be caught up in the “rapture” to heaven) Rather salvation is described which gives an afterlife in heaven (rather than hell), a heaven removed from the earth except when the earth has been destroyed and remade. This is, of course, the position of John Darby and those who have followed him (and the Scofield Reference Bible which was based on his speculations).

Irenaeus would have hated Conservative Christians, particularly Rapture-believing Conservative Christians, and more particularly Charismatic Rapture-believing Conservative Christians. Even more so if they also had the bad grace to be members of any group separate from the Catholic Church.

Which is curious, considering that Conservative Evangelical Premillenial Charismatics commonly allege that they are “fundamentalist” in going back to the principles and beliefs of the early Church, in which Irenaeus is the effective father of orthodox creedal doctrine, the original heresy-hunter.

Somehow, I find the idea of a cage fight between Irenaeus and a modern Fundamentalist a particularly heart-warming concept.

However, Irenaeus would also have hated anyone who espoused the idea that personal experience was vital, so not only my friends the charismatics, the “born again” would be targeted, but also the mystics, and that includes me. Also, in all probability, Saints Athanasius, Gregory of Thessalonica, Maximus the Confessor, Basil, Gregory Palamas, Simeon the New Theologian, Gregory of Sinai, Isaac the Syrian, John of the Ladder, Augustine, Francis, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas a Kempis, Teresa de Avila and John of the Cross, just to name a selection of those actually sainted among Christian mystics since Irenaeus’ time.

His reasons for hating those espousing personal experience included, of course, the fact that this gives a new source of inspiration potentially at odds with the organised “one church”. This is true.  All those I mentioned in my catalogue of Saints managed to keep their expressions of their inspirations sufficiently within the bounds of doctrine for the time being not to be declared dangerous heretics – in St. Athanasius’ case not to remain so declared -though in some cases, notably that of St. Francis, I find it difficult to work out how; many others have just about managed the same but have had their works sidelined (for instance the writer of the Theologica Germanica and Meister Eckhart), but others again have been anathematised. I regret all those sidelined or anathematised whose thoughts we have lost. A little more flexibility of doctrine, a little more willingness to contemplate either change or at least a re-examination of past theology, and that need not have been so.

However, there is another aspect of Irenaeus’ criticism which I have to take more seriously, this being that privileging personal peak spiritual experiences produces a division in the church, a two-speed Christianity.

I’ve been very conscious of this for myself, as there frankly aren’t very many contemplative mystics in Christianity, or at least not very many who are prepared to be open about their spiritual vision. For a long time I found it extremely difficult to understand why anyone who had not had a peak spiritual experience would actually bother with or gain much from Christianity, and since reading excerpts from the Oxyrhyncus sayings when I was 15 I’ve been convinced that Jesus was actually pointing at personal experiential (i.e. mystical) faith as the goal of his followers (I’ve since come to think he was pointing at other things as well, but am still confident my 15 year old thinking was right).

It has certainly been difficult learning to talk with Christians who have not had similar experience, particularly as, unlike all the other contemplative mystics I’ve encountered within Christianity, I didn’t have a background as a practising Christian at the time of my experience, so I lacked personal experience of being where others seem to be. I’ve hoped to find similar experiential focus among the “born again”, but been hampered by the fact that until very recently all those who would testify to me of a “born again” peak experience were also wedded to a very conservative theology which I can’t cope with (quite apart from not considering it justified by scripture).  All my efforts in that direction to date have yielded a situation where I have an experience which non-peak-experience Christians haven’t shared; they may wish (and often do) fervently to share it, but I cannot tell them how to achieve that.  There is a gap, and it’s a damaging gap.

Equally, there’s a damaging gap between the “born again” and those long term Christians who haven’t had the same experience, so far as they can tell, and frequently can’t adopt the same route to get there as the “born again” testify to.  I can understand Irenaeus’ concerns here, but his route of denying expression to the mystic or the born again (if different) does not work for me.

This gap of experience is something I am looking to work on. That may, I think, be as simple as learning to find a weaker form of the same root experience in those who don’t think they have it and help fan it into flame, but in that case I am still in need of better techniques. It may just mean strong advocacy of personal spiritual practices alongside any more public devotion, though I have major difficulty in promoting a strong personal spiritual praxis to those who have no “feeling” for what may be gained.

Then again, it may be that the “born again” experience is actually accessible even to those who seem immune, given some adjustments in presentation.

This is something I am praying for a solution to.

What follows is a copy of an exchange between myself and Henry Neufeld (proprietor of Energion Publications, inter alia) in The Religion Forum. My original questions are paraphrased from “Living the Questions” and, I believe, emanate from John Dominic Crossan; these are in turquoise; Henry’s responses are in Magenta.

H>> Because I’m editing a book titled Philosophy for Believers, and the chapter I’m working on is titled “Aristotle’s Akrasia and Self-Deception” I figured that due to akrasia I would act against my better judgment and answer your questions.

1. What is the character of your God (when you think about God, what are you imagining)?

H>> Like you, I regard God as largely unknowable. If I’m tense about the definition of “knowledge” I would have to say “unknowable.” That which cannot be demonstrated cannot be properly said to be known.

I like to remember that “know” and “understand” are close to “comprehend”, which has a secondary meaning of “include”, and that underlines to us that both know and understand ultimately require us to observe from a larger framework that the thing being described (for example to compare and contrast). And there is no such framework…

H>> But more than this, I would take two different routes to imagining God. The first is more philosophical. It is to call God “the ground of all being.” This is the conviction, perhaps, that the sensible universe isn’t up to self existence, so there must be something else. I do not regard this as a proof or demonstration. It is quite possible to attribute the self-existence I attribute to God as ground of all being to the sensible universe as well. I’m not entirely sure that the difference between those two approaches actually matters. In addition, calling this the ground of all being does not necessarily lead to the Christian God or any other kind of defined God.

Which could merely be the principle I expressed previously being applied to the universe 😉 In describing “universe” we require an hypothetical framework larger than the universe, in which the universe is just one element. For the mathematical physicist, therefore, God could be a necessary but not necessarily real concept.

I’m currently playing with a possible description of God as “the ground of all meaningfulness” myself.

H>> The other way I think about God is through the view of spiritual experience. Here, of course, I cannot demonstrate that what I experience results from an external cause of any kind. Nonetheless I have my experience. I relate my experience to yours, and I view this experience through the tradition in which I was brought up, which I abandoned and then reappropriated. It’s language works for me. And yes, I treat Christian Scripture as the collected experience of God  by the people within that tradition.

As do I. Yes, the language works fairly well for those who are fluent in it (and better if they do not mistake the terms in it for scientific ones <g>). We are able better to communicate, to share this type of experience through the use of such language (including concept-structures) and, I think, to ascertain that there is essentially one experience which is shared, rather than different experiences which can be successfully contrasted and categorised. Further, this may enable us more fully to appreciate our own experiences by being better able to describe them to ourselves.

2. What is the content of your faith (what do you believe in – merely to say you have faith is not sufficient, as Al-Quaeda have faith…)?

H>> The content of my faith is, in fact, the God that I experience. I express this in Christian language. I know that I have the experience, but I cannot demonstrate this. The number of doctrines I believe about God is very small, because I am constantly noticing that there are others who disagree with me on many, many details, who also experience God. While they differ with me on many things, I can recognize (or believe) that we are talking about one thing in different words. One of the most profoundly spiritual people I ever met was a Muslim Imam. I spent time studying with him and was tremendously impressed. We were able to connect on many points. The single most profound extended spiritual experience of my life came from studying a commentary on Leviticus written by a conservative Rabbi, Jacob Milgrom.

Do I come to believe additional things based on this experience? Certainly I do. There is a certain non-rational realm of my existence and thinking. I am frequently told by atheist or agnostic friends that I am a very reasonable person, but that I have failed to go all the way, that my rationality breaks down at a certain point. They are indeed correct. Well, I’m not always that reasonable, but I do go beyond what is rationally demonstrable.

You may enjoy my recent blogpost on the Heresy of all Doctrines <g> Here, I agree with you pretty much completely; I can share experience with people of many different faith traditions and see them to be in essence one, but do need either to adopt the language and concept structure of one of us or to negotiate a common language and concept structure (and commonly the language of “scientific rationalist” is not a very conducive means of expression <g>).

Personally, I’m not convinced that I have in fact failed to go all the way; I’m confident that the language of “scientific rationalist” is not an adequately communicative, complete and clear way of describing the whole of my experience (or that of others), and the languages of mathematics and symbolic logic are subsets of that and less adequate, although more powerful in their allocated fields. I have, at least, gone as far as the current limitations of my language, concept structures and intellect allow. I think, subject to correction.

3. What is the function of your church (for which read any religious or spiritual organised group)? (What are you coming together for? “Worship” is not an adequate answer)

H>> Community in all its aspects. More specifically, for me the church is the vehicle through which I can serve. In choosing a church I will be looking for a community impact and how I can be a part of that. This is witnessing, in my view.

The commandments being to love God and to love your neighbour, both can be practiced by yourself, but both are in many ways more productively practiced in common with others (helping your neighbour clearly gains in all sorts of ways from being done communally).

Loving God, understanding and appreciating God, comes more readily from witnessing to and sharing with others, and through discussion, debate and the refining of concepts. To me, at least.

4. What is the purpose of your worship (or other spiritual practice)? (How does God want to be worshipped? Is prayer important, and why?)

H>> The purpose of worship, as in a worship service, in my view, is the connection with God. In other words, I want to experience God’s presence and get the encouragement and strength that gives me. In prayer, I am doing this apart from the broader community, but the purpose of prayer is communion with God, not getting God to do some things that I decide God ought to do.

Nonetheless, I don’t like the structure of the question, because I believe that for one connected with God, all right action and all seeking is worship. So I worship by thinking, I worship by sharing, I worship by writing, and I worship by serving in any way. The worship service in which I seek the experience of God is really a minor part of what I would call worship. My personal time of prayer is also a minor part. It is when I am no longer on my knees that I truly enter into the worship God intends.

I agree with you about prayer, though for me prayer is also about better knowing myself in the context of my relationship with God.

I particularly like you talking of worshipping by doing things which might not normally be regarded as worship; insofar as it is done conscious of a desire to do what is pleasing to God, what is not worship?

H>> Those are my imaginings. If I expressed them in a totally Christian context, you would hear much more Christian vocabulary. That’s our shared experience and symbolism. Here I try to distill the essence.

I did post it in Interfaith <g>

Sometimes, though, I think the use of Christian vocabulary conceals rather than elucidates; we use words without really considering what they mean.

I wonder how many of us have paused to consider that we might be Gnostics?

Many people have never heard of Gnosticism; some have come across the description “The Gnostic Gospels” to describe the documents found at Nag Hammadi in 1945; not translated into English until 1975, they have become famous mostly for having the first complete text of the Gospel of Thomas. Others have come across reference to the second century bishop Irenaeus who inveighed against Gnosticism and whose works are now the best source for the contents of many lost “Gnostic” books. Some recall that Simon Magus (mentioned in Acts 8:9-24) was called a Gnostic by Irenaeus and Justin Martyr; others recall that the Albigensians or Cathars who were wiped out by the Albigensian Crusade of 1208-1321 were Christian Gnostics.

So what is Gnosticism?

The roots of Gnosticism seem to lie in Neoplatonic philosophy, in Zoroastrian dualism and in Merkabah mysticism. It is difficult to describe Gnosticism completely accurately, as there have over the last two thousand years and more been many “Gnostic” groups, the traditions of which have varied; some argue that all of these are merely offshoots of a much older secret tradition.

However, classically, Gnosticism had first the characteristic that salvation (or personal fulfilment) comes from esoteric or intuitive knowledge; secret teachings and/or personal revelations. Commonly the esoteric aspect involved the reading of works of scripture using a key to symbolism which unlocked a completely different meaning from that gleaned from a straightforward reading. These concepts are commonly linked to the words “Logos” and “Sophia”. This also led to a tendency to reject central authority in favour of individual understandings.

Secondly it was normally dualist, and postulated a remote “true deity” from which came emanations; a more proximate emanation from that deity, the demiurge, was commonly regarded as the actual creator and was commonly regarded as evil, sometimes identified with the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, sometimes with the Devil or Satan.

Thirdly, Gnostics were either seriously ascetic or completely self-indulgent; in either case this flowed from a contempt for the irredeemably flawed material world; for them the unseen higher world of spirit was pure and true, the material world was debased and valueless.

Fourthly, Gnostics had a huge tendency to produce extremely variant readings of passages of scripture, sometimes diametrically opposed to the overt reading. This was particularly irritating to the early Church, because Gnostics could nod and agree to things which they actually interpreted completely differently from the expected way. Much as Conservative and Historical-Critical Bible scholars end up with completely different readings…

The works of the New Testament may well already display Gnostic thinking. In particular, Mark refers to keeping teachings secret and to additional secret teachings, the Fourth Gospel starts with a completely emanationist prologue and continues with a theology drawn from Philo of Alexandria with an emphasis on Logos and Sophia. Paul certainly talks of levels of understanding, outer and inner knowledge, and talks of Christ living in him, which plays to concepts of gnosis.

Irenaeus wrote the first major Christian attack on Gnosticism, commonly called “Adversus Haereses”, otherwise “On the detection and overthrow of the so-called Gnosis” in around 180. There have been multiple attacks by the Church since then on people identified as Gnostics – the Valentinians, the Bogomils and the Albigensians are obvious candidates. Most of these have involved major persecution.

Now I have a degree of sympathy for the Gnostics over the ages, not least because the Church has tended to anathematise, kill and massacre them while the alleged Gnostics have normally merely tried to spread their beliefs. Their characterisation of the God of the Hebrew Scriptures as the evil demiurge is entirely understandable to me; a vengeful and capricious tyrant with no native mercy unless persuaded by prophets of his chosen people is an entirely justifiable natural reading of much of those scriptures, and it seems to me that some relic of that spreads to the Reformed image of a God unable to exercise mercy without the bloody and painful sacrifice (possibly self-sacrifice) of his son and then condemning to eternal torment all those who for whatever reason are unwilling or unable to accept that this is what the true nature of God is.

It is wholly unsurprising to me that this image gives rise to Satanist Gnosticism which sees this God, the God of Christian fundamentalists, as evil incarnate, and the adversary, haSatan or Lucifer the light-bringer, as the true lord to be followed and revered. I understand them, but I cannot be one of them, as I think this image is completely flawed. However, were the fundamentalists to convince me that their vision were true, I would have to be a Satanist. I would have to join the opposition to this tyrannical monster.

However, who now is the Gnostic? It seems to me that all of the Protestant denominations have a Gnostic flavour, as all espouse the individual’s relationship with God, i.e. personal relationship (scripture alone, interpreted by the individual) rather than central authority. Further, the evangelical and Pentecostal strains now prominent emphasise personal experience, which goes further down this path.

None say that scripture is sufficient without external guidance – yes, I know we Protestants supposedly hold to “sola scriptura”, but every Protestant I talk with refers to interpretational authorities against what I consider a natural reading; this is an esoteric knowledge. So it’s Gnostic. Catholics rely on the Pope, who relies on theologians, which is also esoteric knowledge. So it’s Gnostic.

The reinterpretation of the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures as a mere source of prophecy of Christ is, let’s face it, completely Gnostic – Judaism doesn’t interpret it that way. You need the esoteric key to do that…

The dismissal of the whole of the covenantal relationship with Israel evidenced by the Hebrew Scriptures as, effectively, a failed experiment plays to the image of the God of Judaism as a demiurge. OK, it also makes out God to be a lot less than omniscient and omnipotent – rather a bungler, in fact. But then, so does the doctrine of “original sin”, so denigration of the deity is apparently de rigeur in modern conservative Christianity. He seems reduced to something less than God – oh, yes, a demiurge.

Are we, therefore, all Gnostic now?  Well no, I don’t think so. I think historical-critical scholarship makes clear the developing understanding of God in scripture, I think historical-mythological scholarship gives us a better way of interpreting scripture, I think there is no substitute for personal experience of God through the presence of Christ in us, through the coming of the Holy Spirit upon us. I think we cannot have anyone else’s experience; you cannot have mine, I cannot have yours. Neither of us can have Pope Francis’.  Or Luther’s, or Calvin’s*.  Or, indeed, that of Jesus.

I think all of us can learn from each others’ experiences as we can translate those into human concepts, into human words. But those words are not the experience, our relationship with God is just that, unmediated (except perhaps in the beginning), direct and transforming.

Let us be transformed together.

In conversation with an atheist friend last night, I found him taking something of the same position as an old internet forum adversary has been taking recently, only much more politely. He wondered how I could possibly be a Christian, the adversary is given to loudly proclaiming that I’m not a Christian (and, commonly, that I’m a dangerous subversive serving “another God”, by which I anticipate that as he’s at least a token monotheist, he must mean the Devil).

So there we have it. If atheist and somewhat strange fundamentalists both think I’m not a Christian, I’m probably getting something right…

I suppose the first thing to say is that I don’t believe in any doctrinal statement as an absolute at all. As per my “The Heresy of all Doctrines” post, I think it necessary not to believe in any of them absolutely, even if as a scientific rationalist (at least in one of my internal personae) I also have to believe that they are all theories and are therefore falsifiable.

I do not have a similar problem with an emotional commitment of love and trust in God, for which the historical word is “Faith”. Nor do I have that problem with Jesus, insofar as he is still a viable object of love distinguishable from God. I can, therefore, comfortably declare my devotion to and following of the way of Jesus insofar as I can, and my faith in God, my love of and trust in God. I can also declare a pervading consciousness of the presence of God, sometimes massively heightened in which case I can use the words “filled with the Holy Spirit” comfortably.

But I don’t believe in a physical resurrection on the third day (technically I remain open to conviction, but it’s vanishingly unlikely I could be persuaded, particularly as I have myself in the past felt a tangible apparition). I don’t need to; Jesus returned and continues to be with his followers in every way which matters to me without the need for something I can only see as “zombie Jesus” shambling around and walking through walls for an indeterminate period after death.

I don’t believe in an afterlife in the sense that either of my friend or my adversary think of it either. We’ll come back to that.

I don’t believe in a literal heaven and hell after death either, though I hold out the possibility of something analogous to hell in certain cases.

I don’t believe that there will at some point in the future be a “Last Judgment” at which a great separation will occur between the “saved” and the “damned” according to sin, nor that there will be a literal destruction of heaven and earth and a rebuilding of them.

I don’t believe in original sin or, indeed, that sin is a fault in God’s creation (which I remind my readers Genesis 1:31 has God pronouncing to be “very good”, a chapter and a half before the issue of sin first arrives, but when it is clearly latent and will arise).  

What I do believe in connection with those last four is this. There is in me something which is God; there is also in me something which is self-centred and therefore inimical to union with God. That part of me is an inevitable consequence of my having self-consciousness and therefore free will, and this is how I view the parable of the garden in Genesis 3, as a story of the start of self-consciousness in mankind, and it’s unfortunate side-effects.

I have experienced union with God, at least in a partial way, and long to be one with God again; this means that I wish to remove those desires and tendencies I have which are inimical to that union, which is what I regard as “sin” (more mundane sins flow from that; in the sense that there is “original sin”, that is what it is.) Jesus shows me a way to this, to a significant extent through his “Kingdom” statements – and these also show me that this union with God can be sought for here and now and, above all, communally and for the world as a whole, not restricted to humanity as a whole.

I also experience this union with God, this partial entry into the Kingdom as being an entrance into atemporality (rather than eternity); I therefore experience God as being in part atemporal, this being the state of his continuing Kingdom.

Of course, the self-centred part of me can have no place in God’s Kingdom whether on earth or elsewhere. At this point I note the author of the Theologia Germanica writing “Nothing burneth in Hell save self-will. Therefore it hath been said ‘put off thine own will, and there will be no hell’” (from F.C. Happold, “Mysticism” p.297).

Now, I have had experiences in the past which have forcibly diminished, if not completely removed, elements of my self-will, and some of these it would not be unreasonable to describe as “hell on earth”. They haven’t been forever, as in the worm never dying and the flame never being quenched (Mk. 9:48) but it has sometimes seemed that way.

Having recently stopped being severely clinically depressed overnight, I can also attest to a remarkable feeling of resurrection within myself; one day I was dead to emotion, which might as well have been dead; the next I was as if reborn with heightened emotions, heightened insight into my life, restored consciousness of the presence of God and hope. I also identify that as a deliverance from slavery and a return from exile, and can look to the rebirth, deliverance and return of others and, in time, the world.

As to what happens on death, therefore, I can envisage that sufficient attachment to one’s self-will could at that point lead to something akin to hell; as entry into the Kingdom is entry into atemporality, it could be in some sense eternal. What I expect and long for, however, is reunion with God in that atemporality, with all self-will destroyed.

Which leads me to say that I do not see resurrection in my own body (whether or not “perfected” in some way) or survival as something which can reasonably be called “Chris” as a possibility. I therefore have some difficulty in “looking to the resurrection of the dead” as I seem to find myself saying regularly, except in a way so metaphorical as to be unviable.

It follows also that I cannot see the crucifixion as being in any sense whatever a payment to Satan (ransom), a sacrifice bringing back honour to God (satisfaction) or a substitutionary death and agony substituting for one which is due to us (PSA). But I can see it as exemplary in many, many ways, and I can see Jesus dying for our sins in the sense that his death and subsequent events bring to us knowledge of his Way which we now follow, as Jesus dying through or because of our sins in that individual and collective human sin killed him and as Jesus dying with us in sympathy with the human condition.

Now, not only am I confident that all of these views represent authentically Christian ones, I also consider them more thoroughly grounded in scripture than others, and most particularly more thoroughly grounded than the metanarrative which has God create something perfect which is then ruined by one man and one woman’s disobedience, requiring eventually the incarnation of God in human form who dies horribly as a sacrifice to himself to set things right, but only for those of us who believe that to be the case, others being consigned to everlasting torment; then at some time in the future the elect will be restored to a newly created world free from these problems, the old one and everything in it having been destroyed.

So yes, I consider myself a Christian. I also consider the vast majority of Christian doctrine to be in error to at least some extent, and I acknowledge that I would probably not have been accepted as a Christian by most people claiming that title between, say, about 200 CE and now. But I am not yet a very good Christian, and I don’t expect them to be either.

Arguably, there’s only been one Christian, and, as Friedrich Nietzsche, said, he died on the cross. Though Nietzsche erred; Jesus was not actually a Christian, he was a Jew.

We are not perfect, but in Wesley’s terms, we are going on to perfection.

 

Love the title? Well, when we talk about God, we are going to be saying things which are apparently contradictory, so why not start with what may be an oxymoron, may be a form of koan, may be a juxtaposition of thesis and antithesis requiring a synthesis. Or something else.

Of course, the definition of a heresy is something which contradicts doctrine in some way. Wikipedia has it as something “strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs”, but if you look at lists of early heresies from a Christian point of view, you will find that all of them are at variance with one or other doctrine, usually those surrounding the nature of Christ or the nature of the Trinity. More recent accusations of heresy will be found to be at similar variance with the statement of faith of a particular denomination or with what a neo-conservative group or individual determines is traditional belief or practice; these do not always get as far as being a formal statement of faith of a group, particularly where this is an attempt to find a common ground of universal exclusion for Christianity as a whole.

I am regularly accused of being a heretic. There is therefore a strong probability that comments will come in saying that I am just excusing myself; far from it. I would be disappointed if I were not being called a heretic, because then I would be doing something wrong; I would be complicit in excluding diverse ways of looking at something which in practice transcends any individual way of looking at things.

How can any doctrine actually be a heresy except in relation to some other doctrine? Well, of course, it can’t; what I am proposing above is itself a form of suggested doctrine, and I carefully included “all” in the title to ensure that at first glance it would be self-referring and therefore apparently self-contradictory.

[If this troubles you too much, think of it as a “metadoctrine”, i.e. a doctrine about doctrines, which is a different category and therefore not self-referring (most logical paradoxes turn out to be category errors). To me, the self-referring set is to pure maths and logic as the divide by zero error is to algebra. ]

Why might I think that doctrines should be regarded as heresy? Well, let’s start by looking at a set of Scriptural passages . Let’s start with Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 13:12: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then shall I understand fully, even as I have been fully understood”.

A doctrine is something which is seen as absolute; not a guideline, but a firm division. If we follow Paul, however, there can be no firm divisions in what we see now; we are seeing in a mirror, dimly (or in a glass, darkly) with the suggestion both that we are talking of an ancient mirror which was always a distorting surface to some extent and that we are talking of a “Plato’s cave” where all we can see is flickering shadows cast on a wall by the things which are the true reality. This is not the stuff of which to make any hard and fast rules, far less something of which you can shout “heresy” and prepare the bonfire and the stake (or, these days, exclude the “heretic” from among you).

Doctrines, in effect, become laws; laws as to how we are permitted to think, perhaps, but certainly laws as to what we are permitted to say (do I hear “heresy” again?). Paul has interesting things to say about laws; in Romans 3:21 he says “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it”; in Romans 7:6 “But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit”; in 1 Cor. 15:56 “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law”; in Gal. 3:10 “For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse, for it is written “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law, and do them”. For Paul, faith eclipses law completely, and faith is effectively subordinate to love; Paul cannot define love adequately, though in 1 Cor. 13 he writes an impassioned description. He follows in this Jeremiah 31:33 “ “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,” declares the LORD. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” Paul considers that the law is superseded, and that the emotion of the heart, the relationship with God as expressed through Christ by the Holy Spirit, negates it.

So where is heresy to Paul? Heresy is a breach of this new law, which we have assiduously constructed to replace the old one which he conceptually tore down.

Jesus himself, in proposing the Great Commandments in Matthew 22:37-40 says that love, of God and of your neighbour, is the one foundation of law and prophets alike. Paul says we can forget all but that foundation.

Let’s also wheel out the old Protestant principle of “sola scriptura”, i.e. “scripture alone”. This is very commonly combined with “rationally interpreted”, and is not infrequently coupled with quotation of Rev. 22:18-19 and Deut. 4:2, though more commonly the former, as the latter probably rules out all of the Bible except the Torah or Pentateuch. I think this general idea can be backed up by the fact that Jesus says “Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (Mk. 10:14, Mt. 18:3). Children are not going to be capable of leaps of intellectual reasoning, so “rationally interpreted” should not, to my mind, mean the extraction of doctrine from multiple sources, attempted harmonisation of several passages or the establishment of overarching metanarratives; a simple reading should be sufficient. Doctrines are universally extracted by these means. What children are definitely capable of and known for is simple, uncomplicated emotional attachment; love and trust, and that for a person rather than for an idea or a formula. Anything beyond that detracts, as Jesus indicates – the children shall be first in the Kingdom.

Many doctrines which give rise to the loudest shouts relate to the nature of God, Jesus or the Trinity. I dealt with idolatry as regarding conceptions of God and not just solid images of God in my previous post “Bible Study 103/ Idolatry and eisegesis”; to me, concepts about God are a form of idolatry in the first place and so definitely heresy, but unavoidable if we are to talk about God at all. In the case of the Trinity, it seems to me that any attempt to put the Trinitarian concept into words other than the creeds is near-certain to fall into one of the many declared heresies. Why do we not go a step further and say that the creedal version is itself a heresy? Would not “Shema ha’Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad be as far as we should go? Judaism certainly thinks so.

I’d like to add into the issue of doctrine that of metanarrative, the extraction of a story-arc for the whole, particularly when that story-arc is then used as a straightjacket for the text.  Metanarratives are the delight of literary critics everywhere, and where extracted do sometimes cast the story (or stories) in a new light, but it’s only ever one new light; there can always be others, and they’re all valid, all adding to the meaning of the original text. Where metanarrative is used to confine or twist the meaning of the text, we should stop doing it; where it’s presented as being effectively the whole story, it becomes a heresy.  

My pet example of this is the metanarrative of Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA), though atonement theories generally are prone to the same fault. It’s also doctrine for most Protestants; where it isn’t doctrine (remaining Protestants, Catholic and some Orthodox) there’s a slightly more open metanarrative doctrine which has most of the same flaws but leaves another atonement theory open.

PSA reads the Bible as effectively starting with Adam and Eve and original sin; the garden of Eden is not interpreted as in the world, but as being heaven. There is then a creation marred by sin (and implicitly irredeemable) and the whole objective is to deal with this sin. The covenant with the Jews fails to do this despite repeated application of prophets, so Christ is sent to die on the cross to pay once and for all the debt occasioned by all this sin; this pays the debt such that we can go on to heaven after death. Eventually the irredeemable material world will be wiped out and made anew and we can all then come back. All we have to do to get that afterlife is to believe that Christ did this.

I keep coming back to the problems with PSA; as bad scriptural interpretation; as psychologically damaging; as projecting a God-concept which, if true, would make most reasonable adults want to have nothing to do with God; and as I concentrate on here, as diverting our attention from a whole lot which is going on in Scripture which does not fit this story arc.

In this conception, the only points in the long story of covenantal Judaism which occupies over three quarters of the Bible were to establish original sin and mess up repeatedly, ending up a figure of pity at best, of derision or downright hatred for most of Christianity’s history and to have a few scattered verses made to point prophetically to the coming event of Christ.

In this conception, the only point in Jesus’ lifetime teachings was to convince followers that he was personally the megasacrifice which would put right everything which was wrong and give people an exit visa so they could get out of this mess. The rest, including a lot of teaching as to how we were to treat each other (and particularly how to treat people who were not like us or even, shock horror, were our enemies), is really incidental; if we are to think about it at all, it will naturally follow from believing a few simple things about Jesus.

Sometimes it actually does. Very often it doesn’t.

Another thing. If you follow PSA, you have to have a concept of God as authoritarian to the exclusion of merciful and loving; it is difficult if not impossible to square the son-sacrificing figure who does so because he can’t exercise the mercy which has been dinned into us through the Hebrew Scriptures as being as important a characteristic as is justice (which, in any case, implies “mercy” in Hebrew usage) or a figure to fear (which actually implies that you should be in awe rather than that you should be terrified).

You also need to stick with the concept of the Transcendent God, utterly separated from us and remote, to the exclusion of the all-pervading Immanent God of, say Psalm 139:7-10, or the Lukan version of Paul in Acts 17:28 as “he in whom we live and breathe and have our being”. Teilhard de Chardin was accused of being a heretic for his “Ground of all being” thinking.

You also need to consider the world as intrinsically worthless, only to be escaped by death (or, if you insist, rapture) and to be demolished and rebuilt, after which we can return, with no conception of working to bring into being the Kingdom of God on earth as Christ proclaimed was already happening.

Any idea of universal salvation is heretical too, as you have to wriggle round reports of Jesus’ statements that he had come to save everyone, no exceptions (I paraphrase from a few scriptures there).

It is hardly surprising, with this background of thinking, that Christianity as a whole is widely seen as aggressive, dangerous, unfriendly, authoritarian, corrupt, hypocritical, bigoted, chauvinist, unfeeling, inhospitable and even diabolical. Something which, in Christopher Hitchens’ words, poisons everything.

And yet I see cries of “heresy” and “He’s a false Christian” “he proclaims a false Gospel” and worse levelled against people trying to steer Christianity away from this pernicious metanarrative, this pernicious doctrine. I see pickets outside the door where some are due to speak. I fail utterly to see patience and kindness in those comments and those pickets, I do see jealousy, boastfulness, arrogance, rudeness, insistence on one way, irritability and resentment. If I required nothing else to see that the heresy-callers are wrong, it would be that they display no love. They are clashing cymbals.

You can tell me what scripture says, but as soon as we start to interpret it, that isn’t scripture any more, that’s opinion.  We may differ about what scripture is, but your opinion, even if it’s that of your church as a whole and backed by a host of theologians, is not even scripture. It may be tradition – most doctrines are. Traditions change. Traditions need to, or they die.

Can I really call all of these doctrines and metanarratives heresies? After all, I may be falling into a lack of love myself.

Well, I think I can if they are held up as being THE ONLY way in which Scripture can be interpreted, THE ONLY way to think of God, THE ONLY way to think of Jesus. Doctrines may not be “wrong” in themselves as long as the theology and logic which goes into their extraction from scripture is sound, but they are inevitably wrong as soon as someone says “that is the truth and anything else is heresy”.  The only heretics are the heresy-hunters.

In my continuing meditations on the awfulness which is Lewis’ trilemma, some more thoughts have come to me. To remind you, C.S. Lewis wrote:-

“I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.”

I’m with other people criticising the trilemma for failing to consider other options; the obvious ones are listed at the end of the Wikipedia article as Legend and Guru. “Legend” is, I think, dealt with by the consideration that much of what we see in the New Testament is not actually people reporting what happened, it’s them reporting how they saw Jesus, how they related to Jesus, and by the time they wrote Jesus had become something much greater than just a man. I prefer not to use “Guru”, but “Mystic” will do nicely; none of the wording ascribed to Jesus by the Fourth Gospel (which is what Lewis is concentrating on) is at odds with what could be said by a panentheistic God-mystic.

However, Lewis is also being obstructive in saying, in effect, “You cannot regard Jesus as a great moral teacher”. I know stacks of people who are quite convinced that Jesus WAS a great moral teacher, but who listen to something like that and say “Well, if you’re saying that, clearly for you he wasn’t, so I’m out of here”. Twenty five years ago, I doubt I’d have stayed around to listen to anything more on exactly that basis. Those who use Lewis’ trilemma are, to be honest, inclined to sideline Jesus’ moral teachings anyhow – yes, they acknowledge that they’re there, but they’re not THE BIG THING about Jesus. They’re not what GETS YOU SAVED.

But actually Jesus WAS a great moral teacher, whatever else you think he may have been. That has a wider spread of agreement than anything else about what Jesus was – not only Christians but also their offshoots Latter Day Saints, Muslims, Baha’is and a whole load of people in entirely separate religions agree this. And Lewis wanted to tell them they couldn’t think that way? What a bozo!

Moving on, though, I see a set of historical-critical scholars trying to extract a picture of what the real, lifetime Jesus was. There are two big camps of these; those who think Jesus was a social and religious subversive revolutionary spreading a message of resistance to Rome, the breaking down of political and religious power structures, radical redistribution of wealth, non-violent action, reform of the basis of Judaism (away from the Temple-sacrifice based structure to something radically rabbinic, away from focus on details of purity related praxis towards inclusionary praxis), reform of the individual’s own world-view and the institution of radical communitarian values. And as far as I can see, they’re right.

Then there are those who see Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher prophesying the end of power structures as they then were and the coming of the Kingdom of God, the restoration of Israel and the dawn of a new age of personal enlightenment and communal concern with a restored Israel leading the way. And I think they’re right too…

But though there is some overlap, each of them wants to say “Jesus was THIS” impliedly to the exclusion of the other.

None of them I have yet read seem to give adequate weight to Jesus as God-mystic, Jesus who knew intimately a new relationship with God on a personal basis, a completely different conception of how he and we stood in relationship to a God who was immanent – no, that’s not enough stress, a God who was IMMANENT! God around us, beside us, above us, behind us, within us, in our history and in our future, all pervading, (according to Psalm 139:7-10), he who in whom we lived and breathed and had our being (according to Paul via Luke in Acts 17:28). This is, incidentally, where I think the great deficiency of the “apocalyptic preacher” school of thought lies; he was not proclaiming something in the future, he was proclaiming an apocalyptic event which had already happened, was happening and would continue to happen.

I don’t want “Either…or” I want “Both…and”

And then you get Paul and “John”, who were Christ-mystics, and the synoptic evangelists who were talking of another Jesus, a Jesus who was still present with them and in them, who had not died because they were experiencing him day by day (OK, I think they were experiencing God-in-them and mislabelling it, but let’s not be too picky here!).  Paul’s and John’s experience will have made them concentrate on sin and forgiveness from personal transformation through ecstatic experience, because that’s what they will have experienced themselves (I know, I had such a transformative experience without having any of their theological or symbolic structure to hang it on, and that’s still how I experienced it).

And I don’t want “Either…or” I want “Both…and”

Jesus WAS a great moral teacher AND a rabbi wanting to reform Judaism and call people to repentance AND a social and political subversive revolutionary AND a teacher of personal transformation through ecstatic experience AND a panentheist God-mystic  AND… well, as a panentheist God-mystic myself I have no problem at all with son of God or God incarnate. AND he was an example of self-sacrifice for others AND his death and post-mortem appearance and presence reconciled his people to God AND he shows us that sacrifice to God is no longer necessary in the ritualistic sense AND following him can lift our burden of guilt, shame and, yes, sin AND by following him we can come to God and be transformed ourselves AND in following him society will be transformed AND all this can happen, is happening, here and now and we do not need to wait until we’re dead.

AND we don’t need to try to harmonise all these into a single coherent narrative, because he overspills the bounds of anything narrow you can construct, and that doesn’t do him justice.

Lewis said we could not follow the small picture because there was a larger one, completely missing the fact that there was a larger one still.

So I probably missed some things. I suggest you go and find them – I’m still looking myself.