Eyre Lines

I’ve now listened to the introductory talk to Homebrewed Christianity’s new High Gravity class “Paul, Rupture, Revelation, Revolution” (£20 well spent, to my mind!) a couple of times and watched the live stream of the session on Jacob Taubes “The Political Theology of Paul”.

And I’m feeling oppressed, as Tripp Fuller suggests Daniel Kirk (author of “Jesus I have loved, but Paul?”) might be doing in the introductory talk. Actually, I’m feeling oppressed by Tripp as well as by Daniel, courtesy of some remarks about liberals and progressives and a lampoon of Borg and Crossan (hey, I’m a liberal, I’m going to like them!), and by Taubes due to remarks he makes about liberals. Tripp is hugely engaging when he goes off on one of this enthusiastic excurses, but I can’t go all the way with him. Assuming, that is, that he is not just playing a part (as I know he is well able to do). He may just be being jocular or provocative, or indulging an ongoing contest with Pete, but the repetition makes it difficult for me to treat it as just jocular. Perhaps, however, he is establishing a thesis to set against the antithesis of Pete, Taubes, Badiou and Zizek?

The thing is, I’m targeted by the term “liberal”. I really have little option about being identified as a theological liberal, progressive in at least some senses, with a radical edge (happily, no-one said anything nasty about radicals). The thing is, this is because I interpret scripture in a way typically seen as “liberal” and, to be fair, that’s the best description of my political stance in the UK as well, although it wouldn’t do in the States, where I’d probably be regarded as alarmingly leftist.

I don’t, for instance, consider that a physical resurrection is a remotely likely occurrence, not only on the grounds that biology and physics militate against anything like that happening (I’m methodologically if not quite ontologically naturalistic) but also on the basis that, wearing my hat as a retired lawyer and treating the gospel accounts as eyewitness, the conclusion I arrive at is that what they report experiencing is overwhelmingly likely to have been a set of apparitions. It’s possible that some of those may have been tangible apparitions, but I’ve experienced a tangible apparition (of Jesus) myself in circumstances in which I’m pretty confident there was no material body present – apart from my own. Daniel and Tripp both talked as if belief in this is really important. The best I can deliver in response is to say that I can’t absolutely exclude the possibility that their view is correct, but I consider it very unlikely – hardly a basis for “faith”!

I don’t see this kind of belief as important. I ask myself what it would mean to me for some random person to resurrect in circumstances in which the reports were incontrovertible, and whether there would be any difference between that meaning to me and the one resulting from my acceptance that there were apparitions. The answer is, basically “no”. I understand by resurrection a concept which is wider than any reanimation and which can apply to things other than people – although to them as well. After all, I’ve been resurrected in a sense myself (I spent some years severely clinically depressed, and when that lifted, I definitely felt “returned from the dead”). Similarly it makes no difference to me whether other physical miracles actually happened or whether that is just how the people of the day experienced them subjectively and incorporated them into their thinking. As Pete says, these are “radically subjective experiences”.

That is, in fact, not the limit of my theological liberalism. While, as a result of personal experience (of the peak unitive mystical variety) I tend to think that that-which-is-God is real (and immanent, and something akin to panentheist even if this is not quite an adequate description), I can similarly entertain the idea that the only place in which God is actually ever present is in the concept-space of my mind and those of others. (Possibly, it is only in the concept-spaces of thinking entities that anything which can reasonably be regarded as non-material actually exists, granted that what is material is in terms of current science not nearly so material as it appears – materiality is just another illusion, albeit one which we would be foolish to act against.) I am not even confident that regarding God as a “person” represents the ultimate truth of the matter, but I find that God can be and is sometimes experienced as a person.

I do not need God to be in Godself anything more than that. Similarly, for my devotion to Jesus to be operative, I do not need him to have worked any miracles, risen from the dead or have done anything more than have prophesied against the power structures of his day and laid down some principles which I can aspire to as an ideal but never meet`. As I demonstrated in some years of arguing Christianity against a set of very vocal atheists, this means that I can often talk to atheists without the need to argue any claim which is impossible for them to accept.

Granted, I have a permanent problem talking with anyone with a confirmed supernatural theist viewpoint, which probably includes Daniel, may include Tripp and definitely includes Paul. The nearest I can come to accepting this is to avoid actual dogmatism that that-which-is-God is not as they conceive Godself to be. Even if the resultant expectation that miracles will happen on a daily basis if you just believe strongly enough that they will is, to me,  in fact false, I can acknowledge that there are some provable advantages in adopting that mindset – though I do find that difficult to adopt with any deep conviction. My hope there is a long way short of confidence in things unseen.

I am, however, entirely on board with both Tripp’s and Peter Rollins’ attitude that it is pointless just to play with concepts and come to some compromises with the structures of the day (and I mention that in my experience, conservative and evangelical churches are just as guilty of this as are “liberal” or “progressive” ones). To my mind, both Jesus and Paul (who I admit I have not yet loved, although he grows on me) laid down some very radical principles on which they expected followers of Jesus/Christ to operate, and which are entirely inconsistent with the current wisdom of the world and its power structures, just as they were at the time they were teaching. I am as a result someone whose aims and priorities are politically and economically wholly out of line with those of my times, and this is what might allow me to lay claim to the title “radical” – unlike the portrait of liberals painted by Tripp and Taubes, I accept that I am called on to follow, and to act as nearly as possible in accordance with those radical principles. I may not be very good at it, but am not deceived by the economic and political orthodoxies.

Intellectual acceptance, in my book, is nothing like what is meant in the scriptures by “faith”, and it is insufficient to found anything. What is needed is action – it is implausible to claim that you actually believe something unless your actions speak to that, unless the ideas inhabiting your conscious concept space and which you voice actually produce your actions, unless the transcendent collapses into the immanent, much as a probability density collapses into something observable in quantum physics. Daniel refers to this from 2 Corinthians, in which Paul talks of observing actions not words.

But where does that leave us with our three authors? Taubes was Jewish, and quoted with some approval Nietzsche’s flaming criticism of Jesus; Badiou and Zizek are both atheists, and indeed Badiou adverts in his introduction to the fact that he just does not believe in the major facts which Paul very clearly did believe and which allowed Paul to challenge the structures and thinking of the day, and later has an excursus arguing that Paul was antagonistic to arguing from actual evidence in a logical way. Pete mentions the fascination of the atheists with the fact that Paul clearly “really believed” – how on earth can they appropriate any of Paul’s thinking without some similar belief of their own? Much is made in the introductory talk and discussion of Paul’s insistence that faith in/of Christ is the key to all of his thinking, the key to any breaking of the assumptions of Jewish exceptionalism on the one hand and Roman Imperialism on the other. How do the atheists attempt some form of faith? Come to that, how do I attempt it, given that what I can state I believe beyond reasonable doubt is massively short of what Daniel, or (apparently) Tripp, or Paul, or Jesus believed?

Are we looking here at justification not by faith in Christ, but along with some of the new Perspective on Paul writers, justification by the faithfulness of Christ (which can then be appropriated by following Him without, perhaps, the need to possess that faith yourself)?

To be entirely honest, Taubes book and what I have to date read of Badiou’s both give me the appearance of playing with concepts, of appropriating some ideas and structures from Paul and subverting them to their own agendas, reading them in the light of a much different basic narrative, much as Taubes (quoting Nietzsche) complains Christian authors did reading the whole Hebrew scriptures as prefiguring Christ, down to any mention of a wooden object (and some non-wooden ones) being taken as a reference to the cross. But then, from some standpoint what I have written about my own approaches above may seem to some to be a similar exercise – I am indeed accommodating how I think about these concepts to an overriding approach of naturalism, even if not to an acceptance of power structures and market economics.

That said, as Taubes points out, neither Jesus nor Paul was entirely innocent in reinterpreting the Hebrew scriptures against what anyone else in the time would have regarded as their meaning.

Perhaps Pete Rollins is on track, when he says that what he is interested in is not what Paul believed, but what he was doing in what he believed (to paraphrase). I can regard something as a narrative which it is open for me to live into irrespective of whether the narrative is factually based; “I do not know if it happened this way, but I know this story is true”.  Badiou, indeed, talks of truth revealed in a rupture, possibly acknowledging that he accepts a truth being revealed here, athough Badiou’s concept of “truth” is nonstandard, and I am not convinced I have yet grasped it. But then, Badiou flatly describes the resurrection as a lie.

Is it, perhaps, the case that whereas Tripp criticises people in churches who talk of faith in Christ but act as worshippers of Mammon (and I heartily agree), we are here looking at people who talk atheist but act like followers of Christ? After all, I know quite a few atheists who act Catholic!

So, 4 million on the streets in France today. Charlie Hebdo’s 1 million issue will sell out. Absolute stacks of people thus end up supporting a paper which most of them  (well, apart from around 50,000) rightly wouldn’t have had any time for a few days ago.

14 years ago, Al Queda managed to hit the USA on a nerve by attacking the World Trade Centre. I could argue that there followed a major over-reaction which served the interests of Al Quaeda in polarising the world, and bringing all-out conflict closer. Osama was probably delighted beyond measure.

France’s nerve is her intellectuals, her edgy satirists, and they’ve been attacked now. OK, so I’m a cynic, but I fancy the reaction so far may please the terrorist puppet-masters in Syria (or Yemen, or wherever) thoroughly. Please let it stop at a mass demonstration and a sellout mega-issue of this rag, and not escalate further.

That is my final prayer for today. Peace. Salaam. Shalom. Paix. Ca suffit, hein?

I’ve been tinkering with this post for a couple of months, thinking that it was going to go somewhere a little different from where this cut-down version ends. However, in the light of the “Charlie Hebdo” massacre, it seems to me that I need to post it, as in part it goes to what I see the root of why events like that occur.

I don’t much like the content of Charlie Hebdo. I don’t find the comedy of abuse funny these days, and they set their stall out to abuse people, and the more people were made visibly uncomfortable by that, the more Charb and Cabu used to skewer them. While the paper is something of an equal opportunity abuser, it’s racist, sexist and frequently – almost always – obscene, and I wouldn’t have bought a copy. However, it is not reasonable to muzzle them just because they abuse people, systems or religions, and totally unacceptable for them to be killed for doing it.

I continue this thinking after my previous writing.

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In a previous post I made a point of the confession “Jesus is Lord”. It does seem to me in the age of democracy that we tend to miss some of the implications of this confession, that a Lord (or King, Emperor, Caesar) is representative of the whole group of his followers (subjects, vassals) individually and collectively. What is done by or to the Lord is done by or to the entirety of his followers in a way which, while strictly speaking figurative, is treated as effectively literal.

This can be seen in nooks and crannies of our system here, as I live in a monarchy. Where in the States the title of a criminal case will be “People –v- X”, in England it is “Regina-v- X”, i.e. the Queen against X. As an example, many years ago, I was present in a court, prosecuting a case of noise nuisance, when the defendant pulled a knife and threatened the judge. This was technically in law an offence of treason. The judge was a direct representative of the Queen (in the secondary kingly function of arbiter of the law) and a threat against him was thus equivalent to a threat against the Queen herself; further, as the Queen represents the nation, it was a threat against the People as a whole. (I would mention that rather than acting in any way heroically, I hid underneath the advocates table until the man had been disarmed.)

It is, I think, also seen in the concept of blasphemy. As Christianity seems to have become more relaxed about this in recent times, let me use the example of the Danish cartoons lampooning Mohammed. In the same way as with my knife-wielding defendant, an insult against the Prophet (who is, in Islam, a direct representative of God) is equally an insult against all of God’s followers, namely every Muslim – and that on a personal basis, although actually more serious than would be a mere personal insult.

Of course, in a much more prosaic way, this can also be seen in the actions of a football supporter who comes away from a match in which his team has been successful saying “we won”. The supporter has, in truth, done little if anything to contribute to the win, but feels uplifted and strengthened by the actions of the team members who have actually played and won.

In 1 Cor. 15, Paul sees Jesus as “the second Adam” and as such representing not merely the people of Israel, but humanity as a whole, by analogy to Adam’s earlier representative status for humanity as a whole (I do not, of course, view Adam as an historical character but merely as representative of humanity as a whole, whereas I do view Jesus as historical; this is a view which is controversial with some). I would argue strongly that the sayings attributed to Jesus in the latter part of Matt. 25 (31-46) are also seeing Jesus as representative and as being represented, in that case by any individual human being. What you do to (or for) the least of these, you do to (or for) Jesus.

Jesus’ faithfulness unto death is then seen by Paul in Romans and Galatians as justifying the whole of mankind. Although Paul does not directly mention the Maccabean martyrs (see Macc. 2 and 4), his use of the term atonement must, I think, raise that parallel; in the apocryphal Maccabees 2 and the extra-canonical Maccabees 4, the faithfulness of the Maccabean martyrs in resisting the demands of the Hellenic overlords to do acts contrary to their religious beliefs (and thus being put to death) is seen as an “atoning sacrifice”, by which all Jews may benefit.

Similarly, in Paul, Jesus’ atoning sacrifice “rights” humanity with God. Arguably, within this logic, no particular act of any individual is required in order to benefit from this representative self-sacrifice, however, action may well be required in order to remain within the group identified as followers of Jesus (such as confessing that Jesus is Lord), just as the Maccabean martyrs’ self sacrifice was not seen as benefiting heretics by later rabbis.

It is probably worth stressing here that the representative atonement of the Maccabees was taken as effective communally, rather than individually; it was atonement in that case for the nation of Israel. It may therefore be necessary for the whole of the nation (and not just each person taken as an individual) to abide in “right relationship” with the nation as a whole, interpreted as faithfulness to the Law in the case of Israel; this is effectively the “covenantal nomism” of the New Perspective on Paul, in which the covenant is freely given by God prior to the giving of instructions for living (and in the case of Abraham, for marking himself and his dependents as being committed to God via circumcision). In order then to remain in good stead within the body of people (in this case Israel, or the descendants of Abraham) and so to benefit from the covenant, the Law has to be followed. Absent particular acts of ‘atoning’ heroism such as that of the Maccabees (which is in fact the only example I can clearly identify as a representative act which confers a benefit), the prophetic history of Israel demonstrates that it is a communal faithfulness which is looked for rather than any individual following of the Law. Whether it is then truly justifiable to take any atoning sacrifice as having individual effect in the absence of communal faithfulness would seem a moot point.

However, looking at the passage above from Matt. 25, I would argue that the better way to view any representative connection is as operating individually AND collectively, as Jesus there clearly sees it as operating individually. Elsewhere, he clearly sees the actions of certain individuals as having the opposite effect, as in the speech against the Pharisees in Matt. 23:1-39 followed by the prediction of the destruction of the Temple in Matt. 24:1-2 which ends that speech. While in the historical Hebrew scriptures it is in general the actions of leaders which are held against Israel, here it is the actions of individuals, albeit a group of individuals.

Perhaps, however, the passage in Matt. 25 should be regarded as representative of whether the individuals in question were acting in accordance with the “new covenant” (Heb. 8:7-13, referencing Jer. 31:31-34), and thereby gaining benefit from identification with Jesus? Matt. 7:21-23 would be a supporting text here.

How about the opposite effect, which I mentioned above? Well, the mechanism of taking communal and personal pride (and, arguably, such concepts as justification and sanctification) from the positive achievements of our leader is well matched by the mechanism of being diminished, embarrassed and made to feel guilt or shame at their negative actions. We require our leaders to be perfect in every respect, otherwise their “feet of clay” rebound on us. The Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament) are full of examples where the iniquity of a few rebounds on the many; the sin of Achan in Joshua 7:1-26, David’s census in 2 Sam 24 and the fate of sympathizers with (and the family of) Korah in Num 16:1-17:13 are examples, but the whole history contained in Joshua, Samuel, Kings and Chronicles is a litany of collective responsibility of Israel for its leaders, and the collective responsibility of neighbouring peoples (such as the Amalekites and Edomites) for actions taken either by their leaders or small groups from among them.

It can hardly be thought, for instance, that the attempted gang rape of Genesis 19:4-5 actually involved the whole male population, which is what the text indicates (what, for instance, of those under the age of puberty?) or that it was a matter of national policy, but Sodom and Gomorrah were said as a result to be destroyed – and not merely the male population but “all the people”. The text clearly indicates that the whole people were involved because, in the concept of collective responsibility, they all were, whether they lifted a finger or not.

This is not merely an historical tendency. Very many among us are currently inclined to ascribe to the whole religion of Islam the actions of relatively few hot-headed fundamentalists (relatively few, at least, in comparison to the billion Muslims currently alive). We feel shame when someone we regard as one of “our” group of any kind is shown to have done something heinous (though a very common reaction is to distance ourselves from them, even if we can avoid an attempt to minimize or excuse their actions). I am, for instance, embarrassed when some lawyer (or politician) is shown to conform to the stereotype of a lying, grasping, conscienceless individual, and for many years was reluctant to accept the label “Christian”, being aware of a long history of persecution by Christians (and often by entire Christian churches) of groups such as the Jews or native peoples in the Americas or Africa. I am still struck with a sense of collective shame when Christians persecute homosexuals or fail to accord equality to women.

There are in the Old Testament a number of hair-raising stories about dealing with the transgressions of others which might, in the thinking of the OT, affect me – and this article deals with a couple of them. In that thinking, it is not merely the impossibility of perfection in loving God and loving your neighbour as yourself (in a proactive way) which is problematic, it’s also the actions of every other person who is a member of a group with which you identify.

Clearly, it is not merely the actions of our leaders which can cause us shame or guilt, and in times past (for some, not so much past) would found a feeling that God would rightly punish us for the sins of our co-religionists, countrymen or relatives. “Thus says the Lord: Behold, I am against you, and will draw forth my sword out of its sheath, and will cut off from you both righteous and wicked” (Ez. 21:3). The prophet goes on in the next chapter to predict a wholesale destruction of Israel, based on the transgressions of some.

And yet, three chapters earlier, Ezekiel issues a lengthy statement that denies collective responsibility for parents and children alike, and for any past transgressions, dependent only on repentance (Ez. 18 in total, though the nub of it can be seen in the first verses). Is there, perhaps, a conflict here, within the sayings of one prophet?

Clearly there is. But then, there is a tension between our feelings of elation when our representatives do something good (winning a match, ruling wisely, doing something heroic) and when they or others who are “one of us” do something bad (losing badly, ruling disastrously, acting in a bigoted, xenophobic, racist or sexist manner). Where is the balance, or, indeed, is there a balance?

For me, this does not throw up the difficulty of potential inconsistency in the actions of God. I do not see God as judgmental and severe, but as loving and accepting. This is definitely a “new testament” attitude (though the NT is not univocal in proclaiming a non-judgmental God), but also appears in places among the Hebrew prophets, as in Ezekiel 18, Hosea 6:6 and several other places.

If the tension is not within God, then is it within us? I would suggest that it is; whatever the reality of the thinking of God (and there I pray in aid Isaiah 55:8 – his thoughts are not our thoughts – or at the least “it’s above my pay grade”) as I said, it is a psychological, experiential reality for us. It’s the way we’re made, the way we’ve evolved. We do bask in the glory of our leaders (or cringe at their feet of clay) and we do feel embarrassed at the actions of others in whatever group we identify with, or uplifted when one of them risks life and limb to pull a child from a burning building.

Comdemnation thus comes to all of us through our association with (for some Christian examples) the Fourth Crusade or the antics of Westborough Baptist Church picketing military funerals in the USA, but exaltation equally comes through our association with (for example) Pope Francis or in a non-religious way from the local to me unknowns, part of “my” community, who recently rushed to a burning house to save some children from the flames instead of safely keeping their distance. Which of these prevails is at least in part a function of our psychology.

But our psychology can be changed.

It is, of course, possible to reduce the scope of those we identify with until it is a very small and very controlled circle. “I didn’t vote for him”, or “they’re foreigners, what can you expect?” or “he can’t be a true Christian” are all moves in that direction. Perhaps the ultimate end of this move is the rampant individualism seen in (for instance) Margaret Thatcher, Niezsche and Ayn Rand, for whom links to others are weaknesses rather than something to be acknowledged and even treasured.

However, if we are to regard Christ as the head of the body of which we form part (Col. 1:18), he is our representative, and as the second Adam, the representative of all humanity. We cannot escape being members of the group of all Christians, and even the group of all humanity (with the collective responsibility that entails) and remain followers of Christ. In my case, having a mystical, panentheistic consciousness, it is in any event impossible for me so to wall myself off from others in order not to be embarrassed by their actions. Any boundaries are not real, and cannot be maintained for long. As John Donne wrote: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

The question has to be how much weight we place on which action, the negative and the positive alike. Before I get to Paul, let’s look at the template he must have been referring to in his talk of atonement, that of the Maccabean martyrs. Seven brothers, their mother and their teacher are in this story (from 2 and 4 Maccabees) killed by the Seleucid Greek imperial rulers for refusing to adopt elements of Greek religion; their self-sacrificial martyrdom is there seen as atoning for the whole of Israel. Clearly, a self-sacrifice which result in death is experienced as having a massive effect compared with the transgressions of individual members of Israel, sufficient to cover over (the original impact of the term translated “atonement”) a plethora of failings and evil-doings.

Thus, when Paul is talking of Jesus’ death on the cross as an atoning sacrifice, he is drawing on the same level of atoning efficacy, but increased. The Maccabean martyrs are ordinary Israelites, whereas Paul sees Jesus at the least as the principal agent of God (and presumably as the kingly messiah as well). The self sacrifice of a particularly exalted leader has an impact beyond that of even 9 common people, and while I do not think that Paul actually thought of Jesus as one member of the trinity (this was a theological development which, to my mind, postdated even the Fourth Gospel, though perhaps not some of the pseudo-Pauline epistles), Paul saw it as efficacious for all people in all ages. How much more so when in terms of later theology it was (and is) seen as God sacrificing himself. Not so much “God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son…” but more “he sent himself to be crucified”.

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Now in the news we have 10 journalists, including Charb and Cabu, and three policemen who died. We have at least four terrorists, three of whom are now dead. We have a number of dead hostages with no apparent connection with Charlie or the police, though they were shopping in a Jewish supermarket…

We have the opportunity of feeling identification with any or all of these. Vast numbers of people have instantly fixed on the journalists, with the tag “Je suis Charlie” – after all, they are the most obvious martyrs. As I am, like them, a white male straight middle class European intellectual, they’re the obvious choice for me and a whole load of my liberal-minded friends.

An increasing number of those are, however, realising that in identifying with Charlie Hebdo, they are also identifying with abuse, racism, sexism and a host of other politically incorrect attitudes. After all, that is what Charlie Hebdo stands for – as its masthead occasionally says, irresponsible journalism. Thus we have a number of “Je suis Ahmed” tags, referring to the Muslim policeman who died protecting Charlie Hebdo despite the fact that it attacked his religion and ethnicity on a weekly basis in the most offensive terms.

He’s clearly a martyr who is untarnished, at least until the press dig into his background, assuming they bother. He’s also a Muslim, so we can show that we’re not racially or ethnically biased. My mind turns to the insistence in the New Testament that Jesus was spotless, without sin, despite the fact that I can identify a number of episodes in which criticism could be levelled – violence in the cleansing of the Temple, for instance, even if we do not believe the polemic attributed to him in the Fourth Gospel against “the Jews” and which has founded 2000 years of antisemitic atrocities is authentically his.

I am, however, a panentheist. I am forced to identify with all the players in the tragedy which has unfolded over France in the last few days, including the terrorists. Matt. 25:40 compels me to think even of them as being representative of Jesus, my lord and representative, even if my base panentheistic experience of existence didn’t. I think the piece on representation above gives some clues as to one place from which their actions have arisen – the Prophet represents them, and Charlie has been merciless with the Prophet over some considerable time.

And they too thought that they were being martyrs. Not a martyrdom I am particularly happy to accept, but with John Donne, I am involved with humanity and cannot avoid it. They also no doubt saw themselves as being at war with the West.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis tous ces gens. Je suis un être humain.

 

I’ve just read “May (the end of) your Kingdom come”, a blogpost from early 2012 from Bo Sanders at Homebrewed.

Interesting (and there are some interesting comments as well).

Now, I’m very keen on the Kingdom as a motif. I think it represents the absolute centre of Jesus’ message – it’s probably the individual most-used term in Jesus’ teachings in the Synoptic Gospels. I’ve written before about my own mystical take on part of what Jesus might have been getting at. I don’t remotely think that post deals with the whole ramifications of what can be gleaned from the Kingdom statements; one major aspect which is missed there, for instance, is the countercultural, subversive aspect, setting up the Kingdom of God (or Heaven) in opposition to the Empire of Caesar, an aspect which melds very well with the Girardian concept of atonement as breaking with the pattern of redemptive violence, which I think is a very valuable addition to the historical list of atonement theories.

But I worry about Bo’s thinking. It isn’t at all what “kingdom” has historically conjured up for me, and I really don’t like the concept that it might bring in thinking of God’s reign as being imperial and oppressive, as he suggests. This would be doing what his partner at Homebrewed, Tripp Fuller once described in a podcast (mid 2012) as “Caesar’s editors got hold of the Jesus story and they rendered unto God the things which were Caesar’s, namely omnipotence, empire by coercion, cross building and totalitarian ideologies”. This is not the picture I have at all, even though I’ve come across people wanting to translate “Kingdom of God” as “God’s Imperial Rule”, at which I shudder.

Thinking about it, though, it seems to me that a particular view of kings and kingdoms is part of the American myth of origins: the revolution occurred “in order to get away from the tyrannical reign of the Kings of England”, in particular George III. This part of the myth is particularly mythic, as by this point in English history it was no longer possible for a king to rule tyrannically (that had been settled by the English Civil war and the later “Glorious Revolution”); the actions complained of were very much those of parliament and the prime ministers of the day, but the picture of “the King” does seem to stick, and there are plenty of examples of absolute monarchs in history to draw upon. Parliament was, of course, elected – but not by a franchise which included the colonists, thus the cry of “no taxation without representation”.

I, however, grew up in the United Kingdom (note the word “Kingdom” here) and have lived my whole life in a kingdom in which the monarch is symbolic rather than having any real power, let alone any absolute power; Queen Elizabeth II models a monarch as servant representative of the people, and such influence as she exerts is persuasive rather than coercive. This is very much the model on which the surviving European monarchies are based as well, so it isn’t particularly unrepresentative. That said, monarchies outside Europe (and I’m thinking mostly of the Middle East) still tend to the repressive and coercive. Britain isn’t a perfect example of what a Christ-like kingdom should be (we’d have to do something radical about parliament and the bureaucracy to achieve that), but it’s queen is to my mind a good example of what a Christ-like ruler should be.

So I’m fairly comfortable with “kingdom” terminology, particularly as (as is mentioned in the comments to Bo’s post) virtually every English translation uses the term. I find problems with pretty much every possible alternative as well, so I’ll stick with the word. But I may take a little time to explain for my US readers that what I mean is nothing like the picture they have of the kingdom of George III!

In 1534, Henry VIII of England famously separated the English church from Rome.  As I learned this originally, there were two main reasons: firstly, he wanted an annulment of his marriage (in order to remarry and hopefully have a suitable heir) in circumstances where the Pope wouldn’t allow him one, and secondly he saw the money and land the church held and thought it would be better in his hands than those of the church. Neither of these is, in and of itself, a particularly laudable objective, though the dissolution of the monasteries was significantly more justifiable than might meet the eye, as very many of them suffered from the same kind of faults as Martin Luther had earlier complained of in the Catholic church in Germany. There was, however, another important reason, which was that England was becoming increasingly oriented towards the ideas of the Reformation. Without that, Henry would doubtless not have felt able to take this step, nor would he have been likely to succeed.

The result was, of course, the Anglican Church. Britain has since that time had an “established church”, a national church, but one which as a result of missionary and colonial activities is now a lot more than just a national church, although in England it is still exactly that, and Elizabeth II is its titular head.

That said, it is necessary for some of my readers to underline the fact that this was not a takeover of the nation by a religion (i.e. a theocracy), it was a takeover of the national religion by the government. It’s not quite an unique occurrence – Hitler, for instance, effectively took over the German churches as a national protestant church (which they already de facto were), although in fairness Hitler didn’t declare himself the head of his new national church, so Henry is as far as I’m aware unique in that respect, at least in the last thousand years or so.

The Nazi takeover resulted in a fair amount of opposition – the Confessing Church, of which Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a prominent member, is an example. The same was not immediately the case in England, for a number of reasons. Firstly, England was fairly insular with respect to continental Europe by this time, and the Pope’s refusal was (in part rightly) seen as being for reasons of international politics – he wanted to keep the Holy Roman Emperor happy. Secondly, reformation ideas were growing in strength in England, largely at this point within the church, and separation from Rome was not seen as all that bad an idea. Thirdly, Henry very sensibly kept the outward appearance of things virtually exactly the same, so the impact on “the man in the pew” was minimal.

I should here stress that in effect every nation in Europe at the time had a national church. In France and the south of Europe this was the Catholic Church, in northern Europe it was one of the Protestant churches (largely Lutheran, some Calvinist) which were by and large specifically national churches. There was no thought in Henry’s mind of detaching the state from religion, in this case specifically Christian religion. There was, however, plenty of thought of detaching himself from the awkward position of having a national church of whom the head was a foreigner, and a foreigner with a state of his own (the Papal States in Italy) and with interests which were distinctly different from those of England. In theory, therefore, the Pope could command the Catholic faithful not to obey the government of England (i.e. at the time largely Henry, as parliament did not then as yet have much effective power) and be obeyed. In fact, the Pope did just that, and was by and large not obeyed.

The situation changed under Henry’s successors. Henry was succeded by his son Edward, who was significantly influenced by advisors who were impressed by Luther and Calvin, and there started to be major changes which “the man in the pew” could see. Duffy’s “The Stripping of the Altars” is a magnificent, if somewhat lengthy and slightly Catholic-biased account of this process. Now there started to be serious unrest, with significant support from Catholic interests outside England, of course at the instigation of the Pope. There started to be significant persecution of those who opposed these changes.

Edward was succeded by Mary, who was Catholic, and sought to return the English Church to obedience to Rome. Now there was unrest in the opposite direction, and significantly more persecution. Mary married Philip of Spain, the premier Catholic monarch, and there was substantial resulting interference in England by foreign Catholic interests. Her sister Elizabeth I succeeded her, and reversed the process. One result was an attempted invasion by Spain at the instigation of the Pope (the Spanish Armada), foiled in part by English seapower and in part by the weather.

The common factor between all these monarchs was, of course, that supporters of whichever was for the time being not the national religion were seen not just as followers of a different faith, but insurrectionists and traitors in the pay of a foreign power (the foreign power in the case of Mary being the German protestant princes). Under Elizabeth, the Act of Uniformity was passed in 1558, imposing significant penalties for non-attendance at Church of England services; the general direction taken by Elizabeth was to have the Church of England steer a middle path between the Catholics and the more liturgically minded Anglicans and the Lutheran, Calvinist and Anabaptist influenced individuals and groups who wanted to have a far more puritan aspect (as had to some extent been seeming the likely movement under Edward). This was felt oppressive by the puritans, some of whom left for the liberal state of the Netherlands. Of course, as history shows, Holland was far too permissive for their taste, resulting in the voyage of the Pilgrim Fathers and the foundation of the Plymouth colony.

It is, of course, ironic when set against the common myth of foundation of the USA that they were fleeing not repression in England, but a liberal state in the Netherlands, and that they did it with the aid of a land grant from England (which stipulated that they do not make their dissenting type of religion that of the colony, which they of course proceeded to do). In addition, although they were not exactly “persona grata” religiously (full toleration of nonconformists would only happen in 1828), the extent of actual persecution was minimal by the time they crossed the Atlantic, although the penalties for non-attendance at church were not formally relaxed until 1662.

James I (formerly James VI of Scotland) followed without too much disturbance, but he was succeeded by his son Charles I, who was a distinct Catholic sympathiser if not actually Catholic (he had married a Catholic). That is not the only reason why the English Civil War broke out, but it is a more serious contributing factor than is commonly accepted, as most histories concentrate on Charles’ fights with parliament and the issue of who was paramount, king or parliament. Among the factors leading to Charles’ attitude was the concept of “divine right of kings”, which had grown up in the Catholic monarchies, which were very autocratic compared with the parliamentary monarchy even pre-Civil War. A Catholic monarch, it seemed, was absolute.

The result was the Interregnum, which lasted for 11 years from 1649, mostly in the form of the Commonwealth (not to be confused with the current British Commonwealth of Nations). During this period, religious radicals had significant sway, the Church was forced into an even more radical mould than during the reign of Edward, and among other things public music and dancing was forbidden and the theatres closed for a time, following the puritan ethos. On the whole, England wasn’t much in favour of this, and on the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the church was reestablished as well, in pretty much its former configuration.

Over subsequent years, the Church of England became increasingly a broad tent, much as Elizabeth had envisaged, under the requirement to be a church for the nation, the nation being disparate. Nonconformists became progressively less disadvantaged until they were largely the equals of Anglicans; it took rather longer for the animus against Catholics to subside (after all, the Armada had attempted invasion, and a Catholic plot had attempted to blow up parliament and the king). As late as 1780, there were riots in London at the concept of relieving some of the constraints on Catholics, and even in 1829 (the Catholic Emancipation Act) not every restriction vanished – it would take until the closing years of the century for that to be the case. Even then, for me, growing up in a Nonconformist household, there was some suspicion of Catholics even in the 1950s and 60s.

Let me underline a few salient points from this piece of religious history of England. First, whatever else the monarchs (or parliament) did, there had to be a state religion, and that had to be some species of Christianity. This was the case everywhere in Europe, and had been from about the sixth century (earlier in the areas which formed part of the Roman Empire). It was the case even in the religiously very liberal Holland of the 16th century onward. This was a relic from the days of Constantine, who adopted Christianity as the religion of Empire. England was perhaps unusual in that it had a monarch at the head of its church, who would hire and fire bishops (thus avoiding the more or less perennial conflicts between rulers and their national churches which bedeviled a large amount of Europe through the first 1500 years or so after Christianity took root). However, from a dispassionate point of view, this was fairly close to what Constantine had effected. The former non-violent and radical church of the oppressed and marginalised became the church of empire and domination, developed a theory of “just war” and had its symbol, the cross, carried in front of armies from Constantine onwards. Some of those armies had the specific purpose of attacking other religions or other branches of Christianity – this happened in England during the Civil War and on a few occasions after that, but the nadir was no doubt the Crusades, with special mention for the Fourth Crusade (which ended up sacking Constantinople, the centre of the Orthodox Church) and the Albigensian Crusade, which more or less wiped out the Cathars, considered an heretical sect, and with them the tolerant and vibrant culture of Southern France (Languedoc). However, all of the crusades had the overt intention of killing Muslims, and if a few Jews were killed as well on the way (as they usually were), that was by no means contrary to the objectives.

Secondly, as soon as you have a state church, other religions or sects become a threat not just to the religion but also to the state, as thousands of Catholics and Protestants in an England which swung between the two over 100 years or so could testify (or in Northern Europe more generally during the wars of religion). They become not just heretics of unbelievers, they become traitors.

The chief sufferers from this in Europe throughout the fifth to the twentieth century were however the Jews. Although this culminated in the Shoah (or Holocaust) in Nazi controlled Europe between 1939 and 1945, persecution of the Jews was endemic throughout Europe during the whole period. Judaism was, of course, a religion without a home after the Romans sacked the Temple in 70 CE (and particularly so after they banned Jews from Judaea after the Second Jewish rising of 135 CE), but it had been under foreign domination for most of its history even in Palestine, whether Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek or Roman. Indeed, during the “Babylonian captivity” it subsisted principally in the large proportion of inhabitants of Judah forcibly transported to Babylonia.

Now, I must stress that in my analysis following, I do not in the slightest condone the treatment of the Jews by any of these imperial powers, especially by Christianity. While the Shoah was carried out by a government which was not particularly Christian (arguably it was anti-religious and merely used religion as a tool towards a purely political end), it was the culmination of sixteen centuries of persecution of Jews by Christians within nations which had some form of Christianity as their national religion. Without that history of persecution, it would probably not have occurred. In addition, the vast majority of those actually carrying out the orders were at least nominally Christians.

That said, the way in which Judaism survived as a religion (and the Jews as a people) was to preserve and accentuate their difference from the nations into which they were scattered (or earlier in which they were imprisoned, or which had included them in their empires). It has been a remarkable achievement, against forces of assimilation (sometimes forced assimilation) and coercion, frequently involving massacres, of which the Shoah was merely the largest and near to the last.

This strategy, however, brought on itself the inevitability of Jews being easily distinguishable as “different” from the people around them, and those who are different have long been targets for others. As we have seen above, being of a different religion where there is a national religion brings with it the additional charge of treason, and so it was in the growing nationalism of Europe over that period. That said, it was a charge leveled also by the Romans.

Early Christianity was similarly persecuted by the Romans on exactly the same basis, that they were traitors; they did not admit Caesar as being Lord (as they confessed “Jesus is Lord”). They trod there the same path as had the Jews under the Seleucid Greeks and under the Romans, and initially the Romans found difficulty telling the difference. However, as we know, Christianity flourished and spread despite the persecution and eventually became the religion of Empire – at which point it promptly became the persecutor.

It is deeply unfortunate that Christianity had in its scriptures from the beginning relics of the initial struggles between Christianity as a sect of Judaism and the remainder of Judaism, resulting in, for instance, the “blood libel” in Matthew and the persistent use of “judaeoi” in the Fourth Gospel. It is also unfortunate that it has in the scriptures adopted from Judaism, notably Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges and Chronicles, the history of the relation of the Israelites (and Judaeans) with people of other religions. Seeing themselves as inheritors of the tradition of Israel, very many of the Christian persecutors have laid into those they regard as heretical, or Jews, or members of other religions with a cry of “smite the Amalekites”.  Sadly, Israel carries within its scripture a history of persecution when Judaism (or at least its forerunner) was a national religion of an independent state.

Now, of course, Israel is once again a nation state with Judaism as its religion, and sadly exhibits much of the same attitude as did their predecessors and their Christian successors; the Palestinians, whether Muslim or Christian, will bear witness to that. But then, Islam, after some promising beginnings giving a somewhat protected status to its predecessor “religions of the book”, now appears to take the same line everywhere where it is the state religion; in relation to its own successors (the Sufis and the Baha’i religion) it has always been the persecutor. Further afield, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism are by no mean innocent either.

My conclusion is that history has proved that national religions are so prone to oppression and atrocity, not to mention the other sins of being in a position of power, that it would be best if none were ever in that position. Although it does seem to me that the Church of England may have reached a position of toleration (after persecuting Catholics and Dissenters for many years) where it is no longer a real threat to dissenting voices, possibly in part due to its control by political forces through Parliament, even there I have misgivings. Should Charles ever actually become King, I note with favour that he intends to style himself “Defender of Faiths” rather than the traditional “Defender of the Faith” (a title given to Henry VIII by the Pope before their disagreement).

What of the history of Judaism, of Huguenots in France, Hussites in Germany, Catholics in England, all vigorously persecuted in part for being potential traitors, among other things? I have to say that I consider them entirely justified in their refusal to conform, but that in a very small measure their persecutors were correct. They had a loyalty greater than loyalty to the state in which they lived could ever be, and that is dangerous to any nation state.

For me, God is king, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland must take second place.

But I refuse to kill or oppress in the name of either of them, because Jesus is Lord.

There’s a very good post at Kelsos (otherwise adversus apologetica) which I’ve just read.

The writer is not a fan of apologetics (and neither am I), but in this case interestingly accepts that miracles can and do happen, analyses the crucifixion and resurrection account with that assumption, and still comes to the conclusion that it can’t have happened as described. Miracles, of course, are unlikely in the extreme; we do not have any really reliably documented miracle to persuade us otherwise, pace the Catholic saint-making apparatus, nor indeed any conclusive evidence of any supernatural occurrence. I include here the medical “miracles” which are so popular in apologetic anecdote; none of them really bears scrutiny in a field in which spontaneous cures for many ailments do actually happen without any suggestion of supernatural intervention.

A major feature of the article is that the account in Matt. 27:51-54 (link NIV from Bible Gateway) would have attracted comment from Roman sources which we actually still have (unkind people have referred to this as “Matthew’s zombie apocalypse”, which is funny enough for me to repeat despite the possible offence).

Another mainstay of the argument is that there is actually far better and more believable evidence for witchcraft in Salem in the late 17th century. There, there is a plethora of sworn statements in court as to the activities of the alleged witches, and no evidence against other than the presupposition that supernatural events do not happen. Very few people these days would, however, accept that the “Salem witches” were actually that, and possessed of supernatural powers, including (I think) the vast majority of Christians.

I hadn’t considered Salem in that way before, and it makes sense as a far more recent (and far better documented) example. My own major stumbling block has always been the miracle claims of other religions. I do try very hard not to allow my presumption against supernatural causes to drift to a dogmatic “there are no miracles and never have been” stance. However, using very much the technique of Matthew Fergusson in that blog, if I suspend disbelief in miracle claims in the New Testament I also have to suspend disbelief in miracle claims in, for instance, the Iliad and Oddysey, in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, even in the Epic of Gilgamesh. I have to consider that it’s likely that Nero was raised from the dead, and probably Elvis as well. I also need to take account of miraculous births of, say, Alexander the Great and many other legendary and even historical figures.

So, with a small but niggling regret, I have to interpret the Bible as if all or almost all of the accounts of miracles and supernatural events are literary decoration rather than hard fact. This doesn’t usually give me a problem, except when talking with fellow Christians who take a different view – and mostly, the fact or non-fact of miracles in the Bible isn’t actually significant to the metaphor or allegory in the passage, and I can move past historicity and concentrate on what the story really tells us, which is in the metaphor, the allegory, the parable.

But there are two problems. Firstly, I quite commonly find myself talking with people who report healing “miracles”. I think of these very much as does Aric Clark in a “Two Friars and a Fool” post. I don’t think they’re actually miracles. But I don’t really want to come out and say that; I’m happy for them that healing has occurred, and I don’t want to shake trust in God. Granted, I think trust in God should be leavened with a reading of Job and Ecclesiastes; while God can be trusted, he can’t necessarily be trusted to do what you want or expect, or what is most comfortable or comforting for you.

The other aspect is in considering the impact of Christ in the world. I find it extremely difficult to think of his birth, life, teaching, death and resurrection (the last of which I interpret largely non-supernaturally) as being a case of God doing something which changes the world radically (for instance, making it possible, perhaps for the first time, for all people to be resurrected after death). I have no problem in thinking of it as changing the thinking of mankind radically, which I think it provably has and continues to do.

But there are those who say that if Christ didn’t actually die in order that I might be saved from something (whereas had he not existed, I wouldn’t have had this possibility), then he died for nothing. Now I don’t remotely believe that to be the case, but it seems that for them, they can see no possible reasoning beyond the PSA which they have been indoctrinated in. If they were to accept any merit at all in my thinking, it seems, they would lose all faith.

I don’t want that to happen. I want them to continue to follow Jesus as their lord, to love God and to love their fellow men as themselves. And if the only way in which they can continue to do that is to believe in miracles and PSA (repugnant as I find PSA), I will walk gently away. I may even apologise – not for saying what I think is true, but for saying it to them at what was the wrong time.

If, for some reason, they find they are having difficulty with the concepts in the future, I can offer other ways of thinking. But I don’t want to offer solutions where there’s no perception of a problem. That, it seems to me, is too much like trying to evangelise by first convincing someone – who was previously comfortable in their alternative belief (whatever it was) or lack of one – that they’re a vicious sinner destined for Hell.

Where I do think miracles occur (although it’s maybe a stretch to call them miracles) is within human consciousnesses. I see many cases of cures of addiction and lives transformed in and (less frequently) outside twelve step. And twelve step requires a “God of your understanding” in order to work. It doesn’t matter (experience has proven) what that understanding actually is. Sometimes it’s a conventional protestant PSA one (which is particularly attractive to addicts, who need no convincing that they’re hopeless sinners), often it involves believing in miracles.

So, my more conventional friends, you don’t have to think the way I do about Christianity in order to be my brothers and sisters in faith. But if you’re having problems with conventional readings (or are merely interested in how someone else thinks), I’m here. And may your God go with you, as Dave Allen used to say.

There still seems to be a reluctance among Christians to consider the gospels as being myth. There was a certain amount of scandal following the publication of John Dominic Crossan’s “The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus became Fiction about Jesus” a little while ago. The thesis of the book (which is fascinating, and which I strongly recommend without necessarily endorsing its contents) is that Jesus told parables, and then the gospel writers told what are in effect extended parables about Jesus through the medium of apparent biographies.

I don’t see that this should be a problem, myself. Myth is story, and conveys a message independently of whether it is factually correct or not (just as do parables or jokes). I’m reminded of the meta-joke “A Rabbi, a Priest and a Pastor walk into a bar; the barman says ‘This is a joke, isn’t it?’ “ which I think was coined by Neil Gaiman. It is funny whether or not it ever happened; the parables convey important and true messages even if the actual events didn’t happen. So why do we ask more of the gospels?

Well, because they look like biography, obviously. They may very well be biography – I tend to the position of historical-critical scholarship myself, which tends to the conclusion that there is a core of factual material but that it is submerged in a mass of non-historical additions, but would be quite happy if, perchance, all of the material which is not actually mutually contradictory between the four accounts were factually correct. However, in talking with other Christians, if we can get beyond that point, almost all of the lessons learned from reading these accounts are “spiritual”, by which I mean not evident in material form.

They are equally capable of carrying that spiritual meaning whether they are “true” or “false” – and so I prefer to use the term “myth”.

“Myth” does not mean “falsehood”, despite everything you may hear from the “new atheists” such as Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris. It means something which is independent of, which is above truth and falsehood. There can be no untrue myths, merely myths to which we relate well and myths to which we do not relate well. It is a story we tell about the world which carries a message…

Terry Pratchett is a master story-teller, chiefly in the field of fantasy. His “Diskworld” books have sold many millions, and appear on best seller lists immediately they are published – and some of them are about science and philosophy (the “Science of Diskworld” series). Actually, rather more of them are actually about science and philosophy than that; those themes run through almost all the books which involve any of the wizards of Unseen University, but it is made explicit in the “Science of…” set. They also tell some very true stories about such things as economics, media, politics, sociology and literary criticism… but I digress.

Personally, I think Pratchett is undervalued as a post-modern philosopher. Yes, honestly.

One of the things which he suggests (and which I take on board unreservedly) is that science consists of a “set of stories we tell about the world which carry a message” as well. They are not however quite the same thing as myth.

Austin Roberts wrote a post a few years ago, “What is Truth”, which engaged some postmodern thinking about the limits of what we can legitimately say is “truth”. In it he has a set of criteria (about 2/3 of the way through the article). Science uses noncontradiction and adequacy to the facts a lot, and in particular (as the stories science tells are supposed to relate to events in the external world rather than in what I might describe as “concept-space”) it predicts what will happen in circumstances we maybe haven’t seen so far. If the prediction is then seen in those circumstances, the adequacy to the facts of the “story” is improved, if it isn’t then the adequacy to the facts of the story is damaged, sometimes to the extent that the story has to be discarded (which can never happen with myth).

We’ve just seen an example of looking at circumstances not previously seen in the results of a set of scientists in Antarctica working with very sophisticated telescopes. The result (assuming that it’s confirmed by other scientists) is that one “story” about how the universe behaved just after the Big Bang will be scrapped, and several variants on another will be scrapped as well. We will have more confidence in the remaining story (which will still have a few variations possible, and no doubt will acquire more variations). What we are never going to be able to say is that this has one-to-one correspondence with the “external world”, which we regard as “reality”.

So why are these scientific stories different from the stories we tell as myths? That’s because the myths deal with human behaviour and feelings and what happens in our own concept-spaces, our internal worlds. If we relate to a myth, it becomes part of our concept-space quite irrespective of whether it actually relates to something evident in material form. Human behaviour and feelings are massively influenced by what happens in our own concept spaces, and myths therefore have huge power – and they don’t have to be “true” (and they don’t have to be “false” either) in order to do that.

Some of my readers are going to be feeling somewhat upset at this point. They’re likely to say that I’m attacking theology and its attendant doctrines as being nothing more than fiction. That isn’t the case at all – what I’m saying is that the practical importance of scripture is as story, as something which, if we relate to it and incorporate it into our concept spaces, has a transformative effect on us; the practical importance is not that it tells us the truth about the world, and particularly not that it tells us the truth about the material world.

In much the same way, the practical importance of scientific stories is that they enable us to predict what will happen in the material world better, and to find ways of manipulating it to our advantage, it isn’t that they tell us the truth about the world, and particularly not that they tell us the truth about the spiritual world.

This is fairly close to producing the result proposed by Stephen Jay Gould, of “non-overlapping magisteria”. Not quite, however. Richard Dawkins has criticised the concept on the basis (broadly put) that religion couldn’t keep itself out of science, as it claimed complete control by its own nature; I’d put it differently, that anything which deals with the way you organise your concept space inevitably has the likelihood of affecting that part of our concept space which deals with the external world (only the likelihood, as many people are able to erect internal divisions between different ways of looking at things, particularly if they incorporate the concept of non-overlapping magisteria into their concept space).

It has also been criticised on the basis that science excludes the supernatural, and inasmuch as the supernatural affects the material world, so science is going to exclude religion. This is fair to some extent, although I would point out that religion traditionally regards supernatural effects in the material world as miracles, and miracles as being by their nature rare; the overlap shouldn’t therefore be very large, and therefore the conflict also shouldn’t be very large.

I arrived at this way of thinking to a considerable extent due to discussing the Bible (on The Religion Forum) over the last 15 years or so with Christians who were substantially more conservative than me. I will grant you it isn’t difficult to find Christians who are more conservative than me, although I actually score higher for postmodern or emergent Christianity than I do for liberal Christianity in a recent questionnaire. I found consistently that if we were able to get beyond matters such as whether scripture was inerrant and non-contradictory between passages or not, and whether scripture was historical or not, we could focus on the “spiritual meaning” of passages and have constructive discussions in which we didn’t disagree to a radical extent and often could find a meeting of minds.

There is a significant other consequence of this viewpoint for me, and that’s the way in which I see interfaith dialogues. I’ve read with interest books such as Brian McLaren’s “Why did Jesus, Moses, Mohammed and the Buddha Cross the Road: Christian Identity in a Multifaith World”, and note with pleasure moves towards positions which allow interfaith dialogue without issues of “my faith is better than your faith”, but have tended to find that they all (as McLaren does) try to preserve a sense of why actually Christianity IS better than [insert the name of a faith of choice]. I don’t think I need to do that in the slightest. Christianity is best for me, as I have assimilated a great deal of specifically Christian thinking into my concept space, and far more (and on a deeper level) than I have of any other faith system. It’s perfectly possible for a panentheist mystic to operate within a Christian paradigm, as many examples of Christian mystics have had at least a broadly similar set of “stories” in the relevant bit of their concept spaces, and it’s increasingly respectable to do so, as (for instance) Marcus Borg has testified to panentheist mystic thinking recently.

I very much like the metaphor of multiple roads leading to the top of the mountain (many paths, one summit), but this has taken something of a knock recently, for instance in Stephen Prothero’s “God is not One”, which sets out from the point of view of comparative religion to demonstrate that eight major world religions are irreducibly unique. I’ll ignore his suggestion that techniques differ between religions, as although this is correct, I know so many people who combine techniques from two or more religions that I can consider this non-foundational.

Austin Roberts, commenting on Prothero, writes “As Prothero points out, the religions do not share a finish line but they do share a starting point: “Where they begin is with this simple observation: something is wrong with the world.” But after this point of contact, the religions diverge sharply when they attempt to diagnose the problem and prescribe a solution. For Christians, sin is the problem while salvation from sin is the solution. For Buddhists, suffering is the problem while liberation from suffering (nirvana) is the goal. For Muslims, self-sufficiency is the problem and the solution is submission and paradise”.

Actually, I think the way of looking at religions as incorporating a set of stories into your concept space allows us to recognise and respect what Prothero is expressing while still maintaining the unity of the finish line (God). Of course, mixing elements of one story with another produces a confused and contradictory result (I could argue that that already happens within Christianity between different scriptures, as I don’t think Christianity can be boiled down to sin and salvation). I include within “story” concepts such as sin, salvation, suffering, nirvana, self-sufficiency and paradise, each of which is in its own way a story, and note that each religion actually has a family of stories which work more or less well with each other and, by and large, less well with stories out of other religions.

However, to me they are stories told about the same underlying relationship. Rather than the metaphor of different roads up a mountain, I prefer the story of the blind men investigating an elephant. One feels a tusk, and says “It’s like a spear”, one feels a leg, and says “It’s like a tree”, one feels the trunk, and says “It’s like a snake”, one feels the tail, and says “It’s like a rope”. All are telling a reasonable story about their experience of the elephant, and none has the complete picture.

One last thing. I talk often about mystical experience, and how this is foundational to me. Where does this fit in the distinction between story about the external world and story about the internal world? The answer is, I don’t know, but I suspect it’s based on a phenomenon in the external world, albeit probably confined to my own skull; there have been events in my neurophysiology which have given rise to my perceptions. If you like, the original peak experience was a “new hardware detected” event rather than a “software upgrades are available for download” event.

I now need to go away and think about whether the need to install a “driver” on connecting new hardware fits into this scheme or not. Any answers?

Larry Behrendt, who blogs at Jewish Christian Intersections, has a set of recent posts about Pharisees. Pharisees are given an incredibly bad press in the Gospels, being probably the individual group most often identified as being opponents of Jesus in discussions (the others being Sadducees, Scribes and, in the Fourth Gospel, “Jews”). Larry’s plea is that we stop using the terms “Pharisee” and “Pharisaical” as terms of abuse, as they paint a very inaccurate and incomplete picture of the real historical group called “Pharisees” and the term has become synonymous with “Jew”, and is therefore a form of stealth antisemitism.

I think he makes a very good argument indeed, particularly in his analysis of the German Biblical scholars who have definitely in the past used the term “Pharisee” as just a placeholder for “Jew” to conceal what is really just antisemitism. I’ve commented a bit on his last post (and some of this post is lifted from that), and one of the additions I picked up on was the result of discussion with a former forum sparring partner, Bob Dick, whose attitude was that as he knew that Rabbinic Judaism was the lineal successor of Pharisaism, if I used the term “Pharisaical”, he was going to read that as just “Jewish” and as antisemitic whatever I actually intended.

We have tended to have difficulty regarding Jesus as having been Jewish in the past, though this seems to have largely been unlearned. Actually, though, as (inter alia) Daniel Boyarin points out in “Border Lines”, Christianity is also a lineal successor to Pharisaism, and if you try to categorise Jesus within the Judaism of the time, you end up deciding that Jesus was a Pharisee himself. He was clearly blue collar, scripture based rather than Temple based, in opposition to the Temple authorities (signified by the Scribes and Sadducees) and in many of his recorded statements following the great Pharisaic teachers of the time, Hillel or Shammai – almost always Hillel, it has to be said. If there was a public argument about scripture with others in that period (other than in the Temple), it was virtually guaranteed to be between Pharisees, as they were the group who considered public argument about scriptural interpretation to be desirable and who were “out among the people” rather than clustered around the Temple or (in the case of the Essenes) removed from general society.

In relation to the term “Pharisee”, I have a copy of the full version of the Oxford Dictionary, which (inter alia) gives earliest word-uses in English with examples; I thought I recalled an usage in some early 19th century book I’d read, and checked. I find that “Pharisee” is first used as a term of abuse in the early 1800s, rather earlier than would argue that our attitude here has been influenced by the great German biblical scholars of the late 19th and 20th centuries. We haven’t, in other words, just copied the Germans here.

Frankly, I half expected to find an usage in Shakespeare, but it appears he managed to avoid that (although “The Merchant of Venice” is a problem in and of itself).

That, of course, points up another piece of the problem – England used to be a profoundly anti-Semitic country as well, it just started moving beyond that rather earlier than most of continental Europe (with the notable exception of Holland, which was well ahead of us). We have stacks of writings, fictional and non-fictional, from those days which require an educated eye if those reading them are not to take in antisemitism by the “drip” method.

Of course, those writings tend to be non-PC in terms of gender equality as well as race and religion (individually and collectively), and we do, I think, these days, manage to instil enough consciousness of that to lead the majority of educated readers, at least, to be very aware that they’re reading something written from what is now an outdated and reprehensible viewpoint.

The snag is that relatively few are going to be aware that “Pharisee” is an anti-semitic usage (20 years ago, I wasn’t aware of this myself). We’re a fairly secular society these days here, and a significant majority of educated readers are not going to have put any effort into studying the Bible. Those who *have* stand an unfortunately high chance of being part of an evangelical church (those being the only churches which are not contracting here), and my experience of evangelical churches is that they push a very negative view of Judaism as a religion. I have yet to hear an evangelical preacher here who does not consider that Judaism was at the time of Jesus a dysfunctional religion. I probably shouldn’t restrict that to evangelical preachers, either – there are precious few mainline preachers I’ve heard advancing any contrary viewpoint either, although they have a greater chance of being silent on the issue.

One of the major planks of this understanding is very much that the Judaism of Jesus’ time is seen as a religion of works righteousness. Humanity is seen as fundamentally incapable of measuring up to such a system (interpreted as requiring absolute adherence), the system is seen as leading either to radical insecurity about one’s status vis a vis God or to complacent hypocrisy, and Christianity is then put forward as a way out of this impasse.

Of course, I see this as a fundamentally wrong assessment of Second Temple Judaism, and so does the (modern and academically fairly dominant) chain of scholarship known as “The New Perspective on Paul”. Unfortunately sending the average churchgoer off to read (for instance) E.P. Sanders, James Dunn or Douglas Campbell is impractical, as their books are very substantial tomes and they’re often regarded as “too liberal”. N.T. Wright’s “Paul and the Faithfulness of God” is huge, too; Wright might just be acceptably not-quite-liberal enough, but two large volumes is going to put most people off thoroughly, in price if not in the investment of time needed to read it! I suppose in 20 or 30 years time this might have trickled into the majority of Christian thinking in this country, but not yet… I wrote about this at more length recently.

So, should I use “Pharisee” or “Pharisaic” in the way I used to, denoting a particular rather hypocritical “my works are better than your works” kind of Christian? I think not. Firstly, it’s hugely tarnished by association with some Nazi or neo-Nazi German theologians with whom I wouldn’t want to be associated. Secondly, it is likely to look like anti-Judaism (even if not antisemitism) to anyone Jewish. Thirdly, by using it I am in fact criticising Jesus, and lastly in using it I am implicitly supporting a view of Christian origins and salvation with which I disagree strongly.

Into Room 101 it goes, therefore…

 

 

 

In discussion last night I heard again what I’ve heard many times before. I can’t guarantee to use the exact wording (and so much for the ability of eyewitnesses to recount exact wording 40 or 70 years after the event!) but in general terms the statement ran:-

“The Jews had the Law, but the Law didn’t work, so God sent Jesus to deliver the New Covenant.”

This is a depressingly familiar line of thinking typical of post-Luther Pauline scholarship in the West; the proof text for it is the extended discussion in Romans 1-11, but in particular Romans 2:9-18, 5:20, 8:3, 11:7 and 13-25. Happily, scholarship during the last 50 years has taken a new turn, interpreting Paul very differently. I quote from E.P. Sanders “Paul and Palestinian Judaism”:-

“It has been a common view among Christian scholars that there is such an incongruence in Judaism generally and in Rabbinic Judaism in particular. God, it has been said, became very remote in the period after the return from Babylon. He was no longer spoken of familiarly, but only by circumlocutions; and angels were necessary as intermediaries. Yet Judaism possessed no means of access to the remote God save obedience to the Torah, which is manifestly insufficient and inadequate. This situation led to a religion of anxiety on the one hand (could one do enough works to earn favour with the distant God?) and smug self-reliance on the other hand (some could).

This estimate of Jewish religious experience – anxiety coupled with arrogant self-righteousness – rests on three theories about Jewish theology, all wrong. They are the view that a man must do more good deeds than he commits transgressions, that God is viewed as inaccessible, and that the individual felt himself to be lost, having no access to the remote God.” (my emboldening). Sanders is at that point well on the way to showing that there is no justification at all for taking that view of Judaism.

Sanders’ book, published in 1975, was the first major book to express what has become known as “The New Perspective on Paul”. Other major names taking this kind of view are James Dunn, Douglas Campbell and, most recently, N.T. Wright. Douglas Campbell’s “The Deliverance of God: an Apocalyptic Re-reading of Justification in Paul” takes Paul’s relevant statements, mainly in Romans but also in Galatians and elsewhere and where Sanders has exposed a problem (that if we are to read Paul in this way, Paul has got his Judaism very seriously wrong), Campbell sets out to re-read Paul, finding that this viewpoint is not, in fact, justified from Pauline scripture in any event. Sanders (and those following him) comes to the conclusion that individual salvation in Second Temple Judaism was by something called “covenantal nomism”, which, briefly, is the view that all members of Israel (i.e. Jews) are saved by that status, and that adherence to the Law is an appropriate response to that salvation, and potentially at least required in order for someone to retain that status (a viewpoint not in fact dissimilar from that of reformed theology). Campbell finds that justification in Paul is by participatory atonement, in which the believer participates in Christ’s atoning sacrifice by participating in his death and resurrection, in the process “dying to sin”, and in the process finds that Paul’s strictures about the inadequacy of the Law to save are in fact a rhetorical device presenting the views of a competing teacher whose viewpoint Paul then proceeds to ridicule.

I am very pleased to have found these lines of argument, which I find convincing enough (at the least) to cast serious doubt upon the previous reformed orthodoxy, as it serves to restore Paul in my view away from “someone who corrupted the message of Jesus” (which would have been my stance a few years ago) to that of an inspired writer.

Among other things, it avoids the hugely problematic question of how it could be that God would deliver to the Jews a system which didn’t work, and leave them with nothing better for a period of at least 500 years and potentially well over 1500. In the classical Theist concept, that just doesn’t work; a God who would do this would not be both omniscient and omnibenevolent, i.e. he would either be surprised it didn’t work or uncaring of the fate of many members of his chosen people (or, perhaps, both, as 1500 years is a rather long time for something not to work and not be “mended”).

I will grant that this just might work in a “process theology” framework, where God is not omniscient and develops in response to man’s own development, but even then the scale and duration of lack of knowledge seriously stretches my ability to understand how that might be the case.

It had to be, therefore, that this conception was untrue, and until reading Sanders and Campbell fairly recently, I unfairly laid the blame for this misconception on Paul. In fact, it appears, the main culprits were Luther and Calvin.

In point of fact, as I currently read the scriptures, I think the point of view of covenantal nomism is only somewhat justified, as it seems to me that the question of individual sin and salvation is thoroughly and adequately dealt with by Ezekiel 18. Ezekiel appears to date from 592 BC (something over 600 years before Paul). However, this passage is somewhat foreshadowed in earlier material, parts of Isaiah, Proverbs and Psalms, so that would represent the latest date at which this concept came into Judaism. All that there matters is the orientation of the individual (whether toward God and his commandments or away from those) at any particular point in time. Repent and turn to God, says Ezekiel, and you will live; this can readily be amplified to indicate that repentance requires that amends be made and, of course, that where the Law demands certain ritual observances, that these be done.

Earlier than this, is the same charge against God for not having created and made known an adequate mechanism for individual salvation justifiable? On the whole, I think not. I am sticking my neck out considerably here, but I do not think that the earliest parts of the biblical witness speak to individual salvation at all, but to collective salvation, that is to say preservation and increase of the whole people, and I suspect that anxiety about individual rather than collective salvation is the product of a later stage in the unfolding response of the people towards God. When the issue first becomes a problem in human consciousness (perhaps around the time of David), solutions begin to arrive via writers of what is now scripture, culminating (to my mind) in Ezekiel.

I am somewhat embarrassed that it has taken me so long to come to this conclusion, but in my defence say that it is very difficult to overcome the preconceptions instilled by several centuries of focus on the individual following the Enlightenment – just as it was very difficult (and therefore demanded a mammoth and extremely detailed analysis) for Douglas Campbell to overcome the preconceptions instilled by several centuries of reformed theology.

Paul, it now seems to me, was speaking only to the issue of how to integrate non-Jewish followers of Jesus with Jewish ones without establishing a hierarchy in which the non-Jewish followers were “second class citizens”, and doing this to counter another teacher who was preaching the necessity of full conversion to Judaism. He was also doing this from a thoroughly Jewish perspective, as Alan Segal’s “Paul, the Convert” and Daniel Boyarin’s “A Radical Jew” have underlined for me.

It wasn’t, in other words, a “new dispensation” as some think, and the comment last night assumes, more a small step in a widening of the scope of a message which was already well in place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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