Eyre Lines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, I’m afraid I don’t see that.

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

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

I was expecting a flow of new posts as I started in with helping on the new Alpha course at the Belfrey, and various ideas again came up which I did not have time to explore or which it would not be helpful to mention in the discussion groups.

To date, that hasn’t happened, and this is largely because I’ve not been getting to the groups – indeed, the first week I didn’t get to the talk either! What proved to be most needed was helping to set up, to prepare and serve food, to wash up and to clear away.

OK, I know I can probably be most useful in discussions, and equally I know that some people are disappointed that I’m not there to give “different” slants on the topics; these activities play to my personal strengths and preferences. But this wasn’t nearly as necessary as making sure that tables and chairs were there and looked reasonably inviting, that people got fed and that everything returned to normal afterwards.

So that’s what I’ve been doing, mostly. OK, I did try discussing the range of atonement theories while trying to stack a dishwasher on Wednesday, but that wasn’t a wholehearted success. I can chew gum and walk, but this was a little more taxing than that!

I don’t consider it particularly self-sacrificing, just as what God is happening to call me to do on this occasion – and doing that is not a sacrifice, it’s a joy (or as my Jewish friends would put it, a mitzvah). Linking to my previous post and my slight regret at not having a set of rules that I could just perform and rest easy in having observed, this is an occasion where I can, indeed, say I have (a very little piece of) perfect obedience. I am grateful for this, as (since my depression vanished on 26th May this year) I can both feel God’s call to do it in the first place and feel a sense of satisfaction at something done adequately well. The contrast with six and a half years of no sense of direction and no sense of anything adequately done is very strong, and from this side of 26th May, very much appreciated!

I can also think that just as in Twelve Step, one day at a time eventually mounts up to years and (hopefully) a lifetime, so I can add more small pieces of obedience to make a larger whole, a life.

I recall John Milton’s words in “On His Blindness”, written in response to Miltons own failing eyesight:-

“When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he returning chide,

“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”

I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need

Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed

And post o’er land and ocean without rest:

They also serve who only stand and wait.”

At Tamed Cynic, Jason Michaeli is talking about Reza Aslan, Karl Barth and the Search for Spock,   and in particular about the Resurrection. He has a flair for titles!

Jason inveighs against historical Jesus scholars who arrive at one-dimensional pictures of Jesus, and I’ve criticised this previously. He then goes on to argue against modernism as a mindset and to talk of resurrection.

I’m shortly to start with a new Alpha course, and there’s a strong chance that I’ll again be asked “Chris, do you believe in the resurrection?” This time, it would be nice to come up with a reasonably clear answer, even if it does turn out rather long.

I think the first thing to say is that I have to agree that something radical happened to at least some of Jesus’ followers, and happened very shortly after the crucifixion. The earliest document we have is Paul, writing in 1 Cor. 15. This dates from 20-25 years after the crucifixion, but refers to Paul’s vision and him receiving the tradition about Jesus’ death and resurrection earlier; scholar tend to place this hearing of the tradition between 4 and 7 years after the actual date. Evidence from Suetonius is that the cult of Christ had spread to Rome by about 49 (19 years after the crucifixion) and was causing disturbance in the Jewish population there.

So, this was a very early understanding indeed.

Jason is right to focus on the sheer unlikelihood that Jesus’ followers would, very shortly after his death, be saying that he had been resurrected and be worshipping him as God unless there was some very strong basis for this. Even taking a very sceptical view of the evidence of the Gospels, I think we have to accept the accounts of a set of scared disciples scattering, disspirited after the crucifixion (and to some extent earlier, after Jesus’ arrest) as being an “admission against interest”, quite apart from being what happened after the failures of other more or less contemporary Jewish popular leaders who were for a time hailed as “Messiah”. The transition from that attitude to going out and boldly proclaiming Jesus’ resurrection and other elements of his message demands a really major convicting event. But what was it?

It is incredibly difficult to advance a physical resurrection in a modern, largely scientific-rationalist society. Jason may criticise scholars for being wedded to a modernistic world view, but that is the understanding of the world in which we live; it is impossible to forget it, and it works to explain and predict better than does any previous world-view. So much so, for instance, that one commentator has suggested that despite the colossal unlikelihood of Jesus’ body being removed from the tomb by space aliens, that is still more likely than a physical resurrection.

In the interests of clarity, though I might spend some time agonising over the choice, given a decision between little green men and a physical resurrection, I think I might thinly come down against a “beam me up, Scotty” answer. But only by a hair. On a good day, with the wind behind me…

The fact that Jews and Gentiles of that period experienced reality as, in part, magical and as driven by supernatural forces does not mean that that was the reality. Are we to argue that the magical view of reality should be reinstated, despite abundant demonstrations that apparently supernatural events are explicable either by natural mechanisms or by trickery? In order to argue that the way people of the time saw reality did in fact dictate the nature of that reality, you would have to conclude that a belief in magic makes magic work, and there is copious evidence that in no case does this actually operate in the world of today. There is, of course, no good reason to believe that there has been a shift in the nature of reality between 30 CE and 2013 CE such that supernatural forces worked then but do not work now (and in fact it would not date to 30 CE but to later, if we consider the reports of Peter raising Tabitha and Paul raising Eutychus to be correct). The dispensationalists may say that, but the only rationale I can see for them doing so is to explain why miracles happened then, but don’t appear to happen now. Far simpler to decide there has been no change, and look for another explanation.

The biblical reports of supernatural miracles may, it must be said, have actually been miracles (a negative cannot be proved and a miracle is by definition exceptionally unlikely), but there are feasible explanations for how the perceptions which led to most of them may have arisen within a scientific-rationalist word-view, and so those are preferred; assuming that they were in fact rationally explainable by those mechanisms, the people of the time would still have interpreted them as supernatural events. There is therefore no good justification for concluding that the witnesses were correct in ascribing the category of “miracle” to them.

There is equally, of course, every justification for concluding that the witnesses’ understandings of the events affected the way they then thought and acted. Had they thought that this was an “existential experience”, would they have acted as they did? Well, not if that expression is to be interpreted as dismissively as Jason seems to think it should be, but I think he horribly underestimates the impact of peak spiritual experience. Having had a number of peak spiritual experiences myself, I can attest that they can carry huge conviction even if the person experiencing them is intellectually completely confident that nothing supernatural is in fact happening, and that it is (probably) an event restricted to the neurological processes of the individual; how much more convincing would it be if they did not have those rationalist concerns. We are told, for instance, that Paul (who definitely did not see a corporeal appearance according to him) was transformed by it, and there is no good reason to doubt that. Indeed, Paul goes to some trouble in 1 Cor. 15 to say that the resurrection body is not a corporeal body (shortly after the passage which many rely on that “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain”).

Among biblical miracles, however, the resurrection of Jesus is the big one. Any of the others can be rationally explained without significant damage to the course of events which we can reconstruct using historical method apart from this one (even the parting of the Red Sea).

Something happened.

I would agree with Jason that the option of the disciples making up the stories is farfetched. Not only were they dispirited, but it is impossible to see how they could have lied sufficiently convincingly to persuade substantial numbers (even in a much more credulous age) and it strains credulity that they would have seized on resurrection as the claim.

However, I disagree with Jason in saying: “Not only did they not have a belief structure in place to posit something like one man’s (a failed Messiah no less) resurrection from the dead, that they would in their lifetimes start to worship this Jesus as God (with sophisticated, high theology) violates the most basic foundation of their faith: the first commandment.” Firstly, if there is any truth at all in the accounts of Lazarus, the Widow’s son and Jairus, the disciples already knew (or thought they knew) that resurrection was possible.

Secondly, there was no need to worship as God someone who was resurrected (there is no trace that this happened in the case of Lazarus, for instance), and there is strong evidence in the synoptic gospel accounts that in fact Jesus was not worshipped as God universally among the earliest followers. This did not, therefore, flow directly from the understood “fact” of resurrection, but from other causes.

Thirdly, this did not contravene the first commandment. It did, however, contravene the shema “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one”, which was by this time standard to Judaism. It is therefore necessary to explain how it was that a significant number of Jesus’ followers did indeed start worshipping Jesus as God, even though this does not flow necessarily from resurrection or non-resurrection. I think myself that this is adequately explained by considering the intertestamental literature in which the vision of two thrones in Daniel 7 was developed and which had given rise to a current of understanding that the messiah (son of man) would be enthroned beside God the Father. Once you identified Jesus as messiah, the possibility of at least quasi-divinity was established. [Note – since writing this, Daniel Kirk has published “A Man Attested by God”, which is a scholarly demonstration that the synoptic gospels’ view of Jesus was as an exalted human being.]

In attempting to assess what actually happened, I look at the accounts and, in fact, find them apparently contradictory as to what form this resurrection actually took. There is the empty tomb, a meeting during which the risen Jesus appeared to eat and, of course, the celebrated episode with Thomas touching Jesus’ wounds. All of these would seem to indicate a physical resuscitation. Then again, on a number of occasions people who knew him well failed to recognise him (Mary Magdalene in the garden in the Fourth Gospel) even after significant periods talking to him (for instance on the Emmaus road), he seems to have appeared to different people in widely separated places at more or less the same time, and (as in the Thomas episode) he seems to have been able to materialise and dematerialise at will. None of these are consistent with a physical resuscitation. The appearances to Mary and on the Emmaus road, indeed, seem to me to be instances of seeing Jesus in another person, which leads me to think of Paul’s description of the Church as the “body of Christ” and repeated use of “Christ in us” or “us in Christ”, not to mention what happens if you take a rather literal view of Matthew 25:31-46, which I have been known to, not least in musing on crucifixion (what if we are actually crucifying Christ again every time we do or allow some injury to another human being?).

So, if you are to attempt to harmonise the accounts through a resurrection, it has to be something beyond a resuscitation of a corpse or seeming corpse. The mortal remains would have had to be able to dematerialise and rematerialise or to teleport in order to appear suddenly in the upper room and to appear within a short period in Jerusalem and Galilee, as an attempted harmonisation would have us believe. Indeed, Paul is confident that the appearances he reports in 1 Cor. 15:3-8 are of the same nature, and in 1 Cor. 15:35-57 makes a strong statement that they are not corporeal. There is a reasonably in depth analysis of the appearances and argument in support of non-corporeal appearances as After Death Communications (ADCs) by Ken Vincent entitled “Resurrection Appearances of Jesus as After-Death Communication”, which I think demonstrates non-corporeality as the “best fit” for the evidence.

I can add to that my own anecdotal evidence. I have in fact on two occasions myself experienced a tangible apparition (without any drugs or other factors which might produce hallucination), one of them being of Jesus. (Incidentally, this is why I advise against Ignatian visualisatory prayer unless a spiritual director is available – the impact of such an occurrence is very strong). I have also been present when a group of people “saw” something which I knew not to be there (not Jesus!). I didn’t see it myself, not being particularly vulnerable to deindividuation, and would ascribe the event largely to deindividuation and contagious euphoria. I do not therefore have difficulty in crediting that all the reports of post-resurrection appearances could have been non-corporeal.

That still leaves me with a problem, however, and that is the empty tomb. It is correct to say that Paul does not mention an empty tomb, and he is the earliest witness; neither do the early kerygmas in Acts. I have no real trouble in considering that later accounts may have embellished in order to “concretise” the events (after all, there was a considerable slice of First Century Judaism which did not accept any body/spirit dualism and for whom the only resurrection would have had to be physical). John Dominic Crossan is firmly of the opinion that the body of a crucified man would not have been released to relatives or friends for burial, but would have been cast out with the rubbish, possibly in the valley of Ge Hinnom (i.e. Gehenna) which was the city rubbish dump and that that was what most probably happened; the stories of the tomb generally being a later decoration.

But what was it which sparked the first visions of the resurrected Christ? Could it have been anything other than the shock of a tomb being empty where it was expected to be occupied? Did Joseph of Arimathea and, perhaps, Nicodemus actually persuade the Romans to abandon normal practice and release the body to them? Without the known absence of a body, I would have expected any post-death appearances to be visions of Jesus enthroned beside the Father. Did they prepare a tomb and then fail to obtain permission and place the body in it? Was it removed by some other party?

We cannot, I think, do more than speculate. On balance, I think there has to have been an empty tomb, but that this does not explain the post-resurrection appearances, which were almost certainly not appearances of the reanimated, revivified corpse of Jesus (pace Thomas). However, I think this will have been sufficient to prompt experiences of the risen Christ, and those experiences could readily have had sufficient force to prompt the disciples to break free of their despondency, to have major transformative experiences and go on to spread the good news of Jesus throughout the then known world. We can, in any event, be confident that that is what happened to the disciples, and that is what they did.

Whatever the actual mechanics, that is enough miracle for me.

I am, in any event, not unduly worried about the form the resurrection actually took, as I have experienced Jesus (non-physically) myself as a living person.

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?

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.

How can we have faith (A3)

(This post is partly based on Faith, not Belief (Alpha week 3) posted earlier, so excuse duplication)

From this point, I’d prefer not to keep harping on about what scripture is, so far as I’m concerned. However, I view most of the New Testament as the product of a faith community which developed after Jesus’ death; this is a point of view which few historians are likely to argue with.

I accept it as acccurate in portraying the understandings of the actual writers at the times when they wrote, granted that much if not all of it has been adjusted at least once by someone with a subsequent understanding, according to significant numbers of experts in textual criticism. I am not at the moment at all confident that Jesus himself would have recognised or approved of all of it. This is perhaps less commonly accepted by historians, but would still be a comfortable majority consensus.

Some of the sayings of Jesus in the gospels are accepted even by very sceptical historical-critical scholars as being authentically Jesus. None of these deal with issues such as “who he was” or “what his purpose with” or “what is going to happen in the future”. It is possible from them, however, to get a picture of an historically viable picture of Jesus the man.

What I am hearing from the Alpha programme is “believe these things”, or in other words “give your intellectual assent to these things”, those principally being that God exists, that Jesus was (and is) God, that scripture is entirely reliable and unambiguous and that the primary purpose of Jesus was to die and so save us from sin.

Aside from possible quibbles that “exists” is not the best terminology, I have no difficulty accepting the first. However, I only manage not to disagree with the second as a result of being a panentheist, which is not the understanding of “was God” which the speaker and other helpers have, or if I take it as an entirely non-literal metaphor. I have (as I mentioned) major problems with saying that scripture is entirely reliable, and have to say that it is seriously ambiguous, as you would expect from the personal faith statements of a lot of different writers. You’d expect that from a set of eyewitnesses, in fact!

Sadly, of many possible texts the Alpha writers could have used, they chose Revelation 3:20 “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me”.

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

I will, therefore, just say that this was how the author saw things. For him, it was no doubt true; if however, it is taken as saying that all one needs to do having got this far is to be open rather than closed minded, to accept intellectually as set of interpretations of scripture and that that is “opening the door”, it seems to me to be just plain wrong. In too many cases I have seen it has seemed to me that people have had all the intellectual acceptance you could wish for and have not received any sign of a transformative experience, and it feels to me like blaming the victim.

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

I surmise that the response may not be immediate. If so, in at least a couple of cases I have known it would have to have been either deathbed or post-mortem. I have no problem with that, and I don’t know of any scripture which does. But I don’t have any relevant experience or testimony to bring to this.

I’m afraid that to see “The Work of Jesus” at the top of a section based on Jesus’ death and the interpretations placed on it later annoys me. If Jesus is, as John saw him, the Word of God, then his “work” was primarily the transmission of his lifetime statements about how we should be in relationship to God and to each other. In the previous talk I gave my thoughts on atonement theories; to reduce “the work of Jesus” to something which God could have achieved with the burning of a small bag of grain with due formality and in the right place (had he required any sacrifice which, from Ezekiel and Hosea, he didn’t) is, to me, shocking. However, I would invite everyone to consider what they understand of the lifetime Jesus (rather than the cosmic Christ); is this a person you could commit to emotionally, as you might commit emotionally to God?

I think that the statement “we must not only trust our feelings…but instead rely on God’s promises” is at the same time a sensible corrective and deeply dangerous; a sensible corrective because yes, emotions are hard to separate between those emanating from ourselves and those emanating from God working in us (however you conceive that). Scripture taken as the testimony of those who have gone before us and have written of pitfalls which are often encountered is valuable to correct this, but at this stage we are not talking about the later walk of faith, we are talking about an initial emotional commitment.

It is dangerous, however, because it takes us back to intellectual belief in a particular conception of what it is that scripture says. I do not think that emotional commitment at all logically flows from intellectual assent; the most intellectual assent can do is remove a possible obstacle to emotional commitment; this is from my experience of talking with others. I know that emotional commitment leads to some degree of intellectual assent both from my own experience and that of others.

I’ve been confident for quite a while that where the scriptures says “have faith” it doesn’t just (or even primarily) mean intellectual belief, and that where scripture is translated “believe” that actually, “have faith” would often be a better translation. I read Faith as meaning something like “love and trust”, in other words an emotional commitment rather than an intellectual assent. Very many of us, if not all, make such an emotional commitment to another person at some point during their lives; I have such commitment in the case of my wife. I don’t, however, claim to understand her completely or even to believe any particular thing about her in an absolute sense; I love her, and if I were to find out that something about her was not as I had thought, that would not change my love or commitment (it hasn’t in the past, though occasionally I have been taken aback). It might if what I loved was not her but a mental idealisation of her which I had constructed and which proved later to be false, but that is not how I love her.

So, were she Jesus, or God, I would not be depending on “scripture”, i.e. something someone else wrote about her, to provoke me to love. I loved her because I experienced her presence and felt love returned. In fact, I didn’t come to love her like I came to love God, in a peak emotional experience which happened very quickly (this may be what “love at first sight” is), I came to love her by small steps over a period of time, a process of progressive opening of myself to her which, happily, she reciprocated.

So what I’m going to say is this: you need not look for a quick fix coming to faith, solving all problems in a single amazing moment as the only way forward (mine was amazing, but it hardly solved all problems). You do not need to assent to very many intellectual conceptions at all, though it can be easier if you at least retain an open mind about some of them. You merely need, using the language from Revelation earlier on, to open the door a little crack, not to rip it off its hinges. Then you listen, mostly with your feelings, for the response. It may not be immediate. Later, you can try opening the door more and more; my experience is that the more you can open to a loving relationship, the stronger and deeper it gets.

Try for the mustard seed of Matthew 17:20 rather than moving the mountain unaided.

Why did Jesus die

(This is a first draft of suggestions for a second-view talk to accompany Alpha talk 2)

Why did Jesus die? Perhaps it would be too simple to say “Because he was fully human, and human beings die”. I could go on to say “Because he was perceived as a danger by the Roman imperialist conquerors, and what they did with revolutionaries in those days was to crucify them, to give them the most ignominious, painful and publically humiliating death they could both to deter others from doing the same and to belittle their importance and dishearten their supporters”.  Both of those are, of course, true.

I do not, in fact, think that he died because the Jewish nation as a whole asked Pilate to do this, nor that even a substantial number of Jews did this, though it may have been that some Jewish collaborators in authority under the Romans also wanted his death and agitated for this with the Romans. He did, after all, threaten their positions as well by being a subversive spiritual leader with some most unpopular views about whether Jewish Law should take precedence over the Great Commandment “Love thy neighbour as thyself” (Mark 12:31, Matt. 22:37, Luke 10:27, Rom. 13:9, Gal. 5:14, Jas. 2:8). Recall that I see the gospel writers as reflecting a changing and developing idea of who Jesus was and why he died, and this is a matter of finding meaning in his life and death, not following his actual words. We may find that meaning, but that does not mean that it is a reality on some supernatural level.

If a crowd did, indeed, ask for Barabbas rather than for him, (and recall that “Bar Abbas” means “son of the Father”), it was probably one seeded by agitators by Pilate, who was known for doing this, and eventually disciplined in Rome for being too harsh in his governorship. We can I think therefore discount Luke’s story of Pilate washing his hands, even if we do not realise that Luke was expressing a pro-Roman view out of keeping with the earlier gospels. John, of course, repeats this, but John is frankly anti-semitic in his tone throughout; one can surmise that not only was he not Jewish himself, but was from a background which made him anti-Jewish – John Dominic Crossan suggests that he was in fact a Samaritan convert, which would also explain the favourable treatment of Samaritans in the Fourth Gospel.

My friend has put forward in a fairly simple form the argument for an understanding of the effect of Jesus’ death which is known as “penal substitutionary atonement” or PSA. This was not in fact the understanding of the early church, much of which believed in the “ransom theory”, that Jesus’ death ransomed humanity from the power of the Devil into which it had fallen due to sin, payment being made to the Devil. Another prominent early concept was “Christus Victor”, drawn largely from the Fourth Gospel, which saw Jesus as having vanquished the power of the Devil through sin by his death and resurrection.  The third early concept, which was better stated around the turn of the twelfth century was the “exemplary atonement” or “moral influence” theory, which said that the example of Christ in leading an exemplary life and being faithful even to death on the cross was an example to humanity to move towards moral change.

Earlier in the 11^th century, however, Anselm had voiced the “satisfaction theory”, which argued, in the words of Wikipedia, that only a human being can make recompense for human sin against God, but this being impossible for any human being, such recompense could only be made by God. This is only possible for Jesus Christ, the Son, who is both God and man. The atonement is brought about by Christ’s death, which is of infinite value. This was then developed in the Reformed tradition (principally by John Calvin) into PSA, adding the element that Christ suffered the punishment for all sins.

It is important to say that all five of these theories have been espoused by very able theologians in the Christian Churches over the years; none is predominant in Catholicism and the Eastern churches (principally the Orthodox) do not espouse PSA at all. However, you may wish to follow where any of them have gone before.

It is also worth mentioning that none of them gives adequate weight to the picture presented by the Epistle to the Hebrews of Jesus ascending to heaven and as high priest offering his own blood spilled as a once-and-forever sacrifice to end the need for the Temple sacrificial system, an attractive concept to Jews who had in 70 AD seen their Temple completely destroyed by the Romans during a revolt lasting some 7 years, and thus felt the lack of that system. However, the writer of Hebrews was somewhat off the mark in that the Temple did not just accept blood sacrifices (there were also grain sacrifices) and though sin offerings were one part of these, there were also sacrifices for praise, thanks, gratitude and to correct ritual impurity.

Personally I cannot live with the theological assumptions of PSA though I am very happy with the exemplary atonement theory. I am unhappy with the concept that God requires of us to follow a set of rules which it is patently impossible for us to do (at least, according to Paul in Rom. 3:10) and that He cannot bend from that. Although I acknowledge the concept of sin as a separation from God, and agree that it is a problem, mere matters of conduct are not, to me, what is being talked of.

It is correct that for those who are at a personal rock bottom due to addiction, depression or otherwise and have lost their sense of worth completely, PSA offers an attractive psychological answer. On the other hand, it is perilous to approach someone who is not desperate and does not feel much sense of sin and attempt to convince them that they are wretched and depraved; it is also cruel if you manage to convince them of that but it proves that they can’t take the leap of faith required. In Mark 2:17, after all, Jesus says “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners”.

I am also prone to point out that if you read Ezekiel 18:21-23, repeated at 27-28 just in case the message didn’t get through the first time, you find “If a wicked man turns away from all the sins which he has committed and keeps all my statutes and does what is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die. None of the transgressions which he has committed shall be remembered against him; for the righteousness which he has committed he shall live. Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord God, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live” This is a formula entirely separate from the sacrificial system, and in my view does away with the need for any separate process for dealing with sin.

In Hosea 6:6 we read “For I deserve steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” which is echoed in Matthew 9:13 from the lips of Jesus and again in Matthew 12:7. The word “love” can be as well translated as “mercy” in those passages, and the word “burnt offerings” as “sacrifices”.

I find it odd, therefore, that the satisfaction and PSA pictures consider that a God who enjoins his people in the 8^th century and then the 6^th century BC that repentance, turning to God and living righteously are sufficient to wipe out sin and that he requires mercy, not sacrifice, cannot forgive human sin without the sacrifice of his own son, or, in a way, himself (the picture looks somewhat better if it indeed himself who he sacrifices, but this would be a heresy called “patripassianism”).

We may, however, get a further clue if we look closely at the words of Paul’s theologising in Romans 3. I will concentrate on one phrase in Romans 3:25-26 “whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies him who has faith in Jesus”.

Note, it does not make us righteous, it proves to us that God is righteous where humanity might think that he is not. He himself still does not require anything from us other than that we repent and turn to God, but we may require from him a demonstration of his justice and goodness, and that was achieved by sending his son and in a fashion himself to die as badly as it was possible for humans to die; in this way he shared our anguish, our pain, our death.

An exemplary atonement, healing one aspect of our separation from God, our sin.

There is more. I’m a mystic; it was through a mystical peak experience that I first started the journey which has resulted in me writing this (had I not had it, I’d probably still be the evangelical atheist I previously was, and several other less-than-ideal things as well). As a result I have a deep and compelling consciousness of the omnipresence of God, the immanence of God. Yes, I also have a consciousness of his transcendence, but the consciousness of immanence and omnipresence is stronger. As a result, I find the following consideration to be gripping; you may be able to reach the same conclusion otherwise.

In Matthew 25, vv 31-46 there is a long passage including “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’ “ (34-40). I remember that his brethren were precisely the outcasts of society, that your neighbour was whoever you came into contact with irrespective of race, colour, gender or, yes, religion (recall the Syrophonecian woman (Mark 7:25-30) or the Samaritans? (Luke 10;33, 17;16, John 8:48). Friend or enemy, all neighbours, all brethren. They are all men, and what we do to them we do to Christ. I take this very seriously indeed.

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.

This too is exemplary.

Who is Jesus (Alpha 1)

What follows is a first draft of what I might add to the first of the Alpha course talks, were we to present a progressive/liberal/radical view alongside the conservative/traditional one. It isn’t yet footnoted.

———————-

My friend and myself differ vastly on a lot of things. He/she is telling you about a narrative, a story, which can be extracted from the great work of world literature we call “The Bible” which makes sense to him/her and which had brought him/her to a personal relationship with God. By “God” I mean something which may or may not be completely different from the picture you’ve formed over the years to date. If you have misgivings about this, I’d encourage you to set them on one side for later.

I am also going to be telling you a story, or a set of stories, which can be extracted from the same book, and which make sense to me. Our story arcs are very different in places and very similar in others.

Both of them end up with the two of us each attesting to our own personal relationship with God and following of Jesus Christ, and we gain a meaning for our lives and a transformation of those lives from this relationship; we are one in Christ, even if some of our thoughts about why that might be differ. We are therefore one in fellowship with each other, and would like to be able to welcome you into fellowship with us, even if you are as different from both of us as we are from each other.

Let me set a scene, and I’ll do this according to the majority view of historical scholarship. Historical scholarship is critical of ancient documents and looks for outside confirmation, particularly where there is likely to be a motive behind writing something. It discounts any mention of supernatural events on the basis that these almost certainly do not happen these days and there is evidence in ancient times that people saw reality in a magical way and told stories involving magic in order to convey meaning, even about historical people who were alive at the time.

There is indeed extremely strong evidence that between about 4 BC and about 30 AD there lived in Palestine a Jewish man called “Yeshua”, or “Joshua” or, in Greek, Iesos, in Latin Jesus.  At this time the Jews were a conquered people living under the then Roman Empire; for a while in the last two centuries BC they had been independent, but before that had been subject to other empires, most recently the Seleucid Empire, which was Greek-speaking, one of the fragments into which the huge Greek empire of Alexander the Great had fallen on his death. Much, much earlier, they had been independent  (as what became two kingdoms, Israel and Judah) after carving out a nation among the Canaanite (read “Palestinian”) people; they had developed their own religion, which unlike those around them worshipped one God only; they were His chosen people, favoured by him.

In the interim, they had been displaced from their homeland almost totally once, by the Babylonian Empire, and spread around neighbouring countries, so there were Jewish communities all over the Eastern Mediterranean and in Mesapotamia. Many had been assimilated into the cultures they lived in, but the remainder had developed an understanding of their relationship with God which set them apart from others and kept them pure, “holy” by a large set of religious rules. There were 613 basic rules, of which we know 10 as the “Ten Commandments”. These were “The Law” for the Jews.

The Jewish historian Josephus gives us information about the preceding years; there had been many small resistance movements led by people many of whom were hailed by their followers as “Messiah”, which for the Jews meant someone who would deliver them from foreign oppression, bring the scattered people back together in Israel and usher in world peace under which Jews would be the favoured nation again and looked up to to lead others in worship of the One God. Several of these had been put down with extreme violence by the Romans, and the followers had dispersed, disappointed that their Messiah had not come.

Then came Jesus. The best reconstruction of him by historians from among the stories told about him is that he was, as Lewis puts it, a great moral teacher; he was a healer, a teacher and a charismatic leader who gathered a following around him of devoted adherents who, naturally, hailed him as “Messiah” and expected him to restore Israel.

Then disaster struck again, as it had to so many similar Jewish folk leaders previously; the Roman governor Pontius Pilate arrested him and executed him by crucifixion, a barbarous method of punishment used by the Romans for those most despised by them, the lowest criminals and enemies of the state.

But then something truly amazing happened; instead of dispersing and, perhaps, plotting and waiting for the next leader to come along, some of his followers experienced his continuing presence with them in some way (there are many opinions as to what actually happened, and for my purposes it is not important which of them is actually fact). A body of oral stories started circulating. A man we know as Paul, who had never met him, had an experience of his presence, converted and began to spread word of him in what is now modern Syria, Turkey and Greece. And by thirty years after his death (at the most, it could have been somewhat earlier) he had enough followers as far away as Rome itself for Roman writers to write about disturbances caused by “Jews who followed Chrestus”. His followers kept growing, too, and today there are over 2.2 billion people who, in one way or another, follow him.

At this point historians part company with the story my friend tells. The earliest Christian writer was Paul . From internal evidence, scholars believe that the next writing was the gospel of Mark, some of which may have been written down sometime around 70 AD, possibly a little earlier, probably a little later. Then came Matthew (perhaps 10 years later in its original form) and Luke (later yet) and finally John. None of them are thought by mainstream historical-critical scholars to have been written by the apostles with whose names they are connected in Christian tradition, none of them were written early enough to have been written by eyewitnesses, all of them wrote in Greek, not in the Hebrew or Aramaic which you would expect from Jesus’ actual close followers if they were able to write, which is dubious. In fact, there is a quotation by Papias, bishop of Hieraconpolis in Asia Minor, quoted by the later church historian Eusebius, indicating that Papias, who was probably writing within 10 years of 100 CE, knew of the gospels of Mark and Matthew, but those he knew were not what we now see, which is narrative gospels; Mark was a set of notes of sermons said to have been delivered by Peter, Matthew was a set of sayings written in Aramaic, so not a narrative. If a bishop who is thought to have known Polycarp well and to have heard the apostle John preach did not know of the current form of either of these, it is overwhelmingly likely that the current form dates from later than he was writing (it is of course a small chance that it existed but he wasn’t aware of it). The current form may well be significantly later, possibly well into the second century.

While my friend is right in saying there are far more fragments of early copies of the New Testament scriptures than of any other ancient writings, I must point out that the earliest of these we have dates from about 130 AD, 100 years after Jesus’ death, and there is plenty of room there for accounts to have developed. I must also point out that there are more variations in wording throughout those fragments than there are words in the new Testament; granted, the vast majority are insignificant to the overall sense of the books in there, but some are important. I also need to point out that from about 300 AD to about 1500 AD, Christian scripture was considered the most important writing in existence in the Western World and was preserved when other things were not, and that there were periods during that time when differing accounts were rooted out and destroyed based on what was the common understanding of the time – we thus lost many if not most of the Gnostic scriptures criticised by Eusebius and Irenaeus in the early days of the church. Even if scholars had not identified from textual analysis layers of rewriting in almost all of the New Testament, I would have been sceptical that what we now saw had not been substantially modified as Christian understandings developed – in fact, I am grateful that so much of the historical development can still be seen in what has survived for the historical scholars to get their teeth into – there have been at least two attempts, by Marcion and by Tatian, both in the second century, to simplify what we have; Marcion by discarding most of the books, Tatian by harmonising the four gospels into the “Diatesseron”. Had either succeded, we would not now have the wealth of material we actually do have.

Mark’s understanding was of a non-violent social revolutionary who was there to subvert Roman domination and rule. Matthew’s concept was of someone who had come to reform Judaism from the inside and institute a new and higher Law, that of compassion for all people, which took priority to but did not replace the Law of Moses. Luke’s understanding was of someone who had come to spread the word of the God of Judaism beyond the bounds of Judaism to gentiles as well as Jews. And John’s vision was a mystical one, of an all-conquering manifestation of God himself among us.

Much of what they all wrote was fiction from the point of view of the historical-critical scholar. There is previous fiction about, say, Alexander the Great, which ascribes to him a virgin birth and sonship to a god, and about Apollonius of Tyana, a famous healer, to whom many miracles are ascribed. Historians do not think these things actually happened either, but note that they were said because, in that culture, great men could do supernatural things and had supernatural origins.but they worked from an oral tradition and incorporated reports of sayings which we can be fairly confident Jesus actually said; the remainder was, in the way of storytelling in the ancient world, a mixture of fact and fiction designed to put forward their conception of the importance of Jesus Christ, whom they followed and adored. It was their witness. Whether fact or fiction, they believed it to be true, as it was for them.

Most of the quotations my friend has used, you will note, come from John, who had the highest concept of Jesus of any of the five writers (including Paul) I have mentioned. Apart from in John, note that none of the higher claims, such as Messiah or Son of God were actually put in the mouth of Jesus; it was what his followers were reported to have said about him. All of the gospel writers certainly thought that Jesus spoke for God (I would not disagree with that), which explains some of the quotations.

Those from John? Well, from my personal point of view, a mystic who felt completely at one with God and able to speak for Him could have said any of these things (and a very few mystics have) and not be either a liar, a charlatan or a madman. I am personally convinced from the prologue to the Fourth Gospel that the writer was himself a mystic, as was Philo of Alexandria, the Hellenised Jewish philosopher on whose thoughts about “Logos” or “The Word” the Fourth Gospel is to my mind clearly based. The writer could have said them himself, I do not doubt; I could say them. Neither of us WOULD say them, however, because people would not understand, and I think Jesus would have taken the same view – and, if he had not, people would not have understood and his life would have been cut short significantly earlier as a result! I therefore think that John was putting into Jesus’ mouth things which he knew to be true about what Jesus was. I don’t disagree with that.

So, what I am convinced is a fiction about Jesus (in that he didn’t actually say what John ascribes to him) is also a very deep TRUTH about Jesus. Fiction can be true.

I therefore have little time for Lewis’ attempt to bully us into accepting his false trichotomy of God, madman of devil; at the least you have to add “legend” and I would also add “mystic”. But I agree with Lewis that we cannot just dismiss Jesus as a great moral teacher. He was that, and a Jewish peasant of 1^st century Palestine who died an ignominious and painful death and should have been quickly forgotten about.

But he was not. Within a very few years (perhaps not quite as little as three days) he had overcome that death and burst out from literal fact into mythic legend, which can never die, spreading word of him to the corners of the then known world (to the Mediterranean peoples) and to the vast majority of the people in it, and thereafter to the rest of the globe and to many many other peoples. The man became transformed into legend, into God. He lives in his billions of followers, if in no other way.

That, I suggest, is an authentic miracle, and one with which science and history find it very difficult to disagree.

What I think Alpha wants is to establish a personal relationship with God. OK, it actually wants to establish a personal relationship with Jesus, but as for most Alpha organisers the terms are effectively synonymous, that may not matter.

I wouldn’t be so keen on Alpha if I hadn’t seen it producing such personal relationships, not always but reasonably frequently (incidentally, I think it’s a mistake saying that “if you do this and believe that, then you WILL receive the Holy Spirit” whatever scripture says, because I’ve seen too many cases where it appears that the steps have been assiduously followed and nothing has been felt. Explanations that there is some barrier which could be sin are unhelpful to say the least).

I wouldn’t be so keen on Alpha if I had any “if you do this and believe that then you WILL receive the Holy Spirit” myself either, or even “you are fairly likely to receive the Holy Spirit”, but I haven’t.

I’m working on trust here, though, because I’m well aware of two ways a paradigm change can be produced which do not in my humble opinion produce what is wanted, and the transition in each of these from what is produced to what is wanted is never easy and frequently seems impossible.

The first of these relies on a form of deindividuation; it is common in smallish groups and can produce something remarkably similar in some respects to my own experience (which was determinedly solitary). It can feel for other group members like a movement of the Holy Spirit, and may be such. The trouble is, it makes the person experiencing the paradigm change dependent on the group which initiated it rather than on God/Jesus. This is very fragile should there be any possibility of not feeling accepted by the group in the future, which in my experience usually comes from some disagreement on doctrine which makes them suddenly an “outsider”, though there can be many others including just personal relationships.

The second of these relies on charismatic personal suasion (not persuasion). Again, this can produce something similar. I know this, I’ve (per)suaded people this way myself in the past. It can feel like the Holy Spirit working through you, and that may very well be the case. The trouble with this is that it makes the person experiencing the paradigm change dependent on the (per)suader individually, which is even more dangerous than the first for the reason given and is also dangerous for the (per)suader, as it plays to several base instincts we all share.

I am not ruling out the possibility that the success of Alpha is actually due to one or both of these factors. If that is the case, I just make a note that progress thereafter absolutely must include non-communal spiritual practice and the forswearing of any future “non-inclusion” of the new believer until at least they have detached themselves from dependence on group or individual.