Eyre Lines

On Friday 22nd January, one of the topics covered in the Global Christian Perspectives webcast, was one which the Energion Discussion Network had asked Elgin Hushbeck (my usual sparring partner on GCP) and myself to write contrary blog posts. Elgin’s appeared on the 18^th, and mine on the 19^th (neither is still online, but the master-post is here). What follows is an expanded version of my blogpost of the 19^th, expanded in the light of the fact that neither Elgin nor myself had seen the other’s post when we wrote our own.

The question asked is “Does Capitalism best express Christian economic values?” which I interpret as meaning free market capitalism, rather than (for instance) the nascent Chinese authoritarian-capitalist model.

So, what passages in scripture best enable us to see what Christian economic values might be? One might start with the account of the early Jerusalem church in Acts 2:44-45 “And all who believed were together and had all things in common, and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need”.

Having all things in common would be an expression of the second part of the Great Commandment from Mat. 22:36-40 “You shall love your neighbour as yourself. Selling their possessions and distributing them to all would seem to flow from the parable of the rich young man in (inter alia) Mark 10:17-31 “And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me””. He went on to say “Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God!  It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Also, of course, according to Luke’s version of the Beatitudes (Luke 6:20-26) “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”

Many reading this will immediately think that this had to be a short term situation, perhaps having regard to the expectation of Jesus’ imminent return and the institution of the Kingdom of God on earth, and some will think of Paul’s collection for the Jerusalem church referred to in 1 Cor. 16, 2 Cor. 8 and Rom. 15 and suspect that the Jerusalem church had effectively beggared themselves. Those who think this way should buy and read Roman Montero’s excellent book “All Things In Common”, which supports the idea that Christian communities were doing this for at least two centuries. I am, however, mindful that Jesus also said (Matt 6:25-34) “Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?” and “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

If there is a major fault I can see in the Jerusalem church attitude, it is that the evidence is that it shared equally only between its own members. Montero’s book indicates that this was not a complete picture, and that those outside the nascent church were also assisted. Implementing the principle of “love your neighbour as yourself” has guidance as to who your neighbour is in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), in which it is clear that your neighbour includes those of another religion and race, and traditional enemies. These days, it should probably be the parable of the Good ISIS insurgent. Help should have been for the whole community, and not just the group of followers of Christ.

But, I hear said, this is just totally impractical, it cannot work. G.K. Chesterton however said “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” There have been some decent attempts (generally shorn of explicitly Christian content, for instance the anarchist communal enterprises during the Spanish Civil War), but never a widespread trial. I should underline that a statist controlled economy (which is often seen as the only alternative to unbridled free market capitalism) is not what I think is the nearest to a system Jesus might have approved of. However, something like the Jerusalem church might well be a halfway house to a truly Christian economics.

Let’s turn to free market capitalism. At first sight, a free market looks a wonderful idea. You produce something which someone wants, and you agree a price with them. If someone else sells cheaper than you do, you have to lower your price to compete with them, and without any conscious decision making other than everyone getting the “best buy” and, on the other hand, selling at the “best price”, prices are kept low and competitive.

This is very much the basis on which Elgin suggests that a free market is a magnificent system for ensuring things such as efficiency and cost-effectiveness. To a significant extent, he is right in that. He contrasts the free marketwith a centralised system fixing prices, a “command economy”, and rightly remarks that all experiments with command economies (chiefly in communist states) have been unmitigated failures. However, command economies are not the only alternative to an unregulated free market, as witness the fact that in a recent poll of the ten best countries for doing business, all of them were social democracies rather than fully free market states (and neither the UK nor the USA were on that list).

There are two major problems with free markets from a Christian perspective. The first is in the motivation it assumes on the part of both buyer and seller – the buyer is looking to pay as little as possible for as much as possible, the seller to sell as little as possible for as much as possible. Both are assumed to be working entirely out of self-interest. Self-interest is not a Christian value; it ignores the command to love your neighbour as yourself. It can be argued that it is realistic to assume the worst of humanity, and even Christians (given that most Christian denominations hold that mankind is in a fallen condition), but it is not something we can hold up as an ideal situation, as it rests, fundamentally, on greed. However, adopting more Christian principles of exchange might not completely destroy the ability of free markets to regulate prices (and supply) without central control.

The second is that it fails to work in practice except in very limited circumstances. What we actually see in unregulated economies (and in a lot of somewhat regulated ones) is developing monopolies (even on a very small scale you get those – there just is not room for two competing providers of some goods or services in my town, for instance) and, where there isn’t quite a monopoly, a cartel, agreeing not to compete on price. As time goes by without a cartel, one supplier becomes dominant because they can sell a little cheaper (or with a cartel the cartel becomes dominant), and then economies of scale kick in and they become cheaper yet, and you have another monopoly (which is then protected from someone else entering the market by selling at a loss until the new entrant fails, at which point the losses are recouped by raising the price). Adam Smith, who is cited ad nauseam by neoliberal economists, also wrote “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

On the back of monopolies comes an ever greater concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands (on the basis of a recent study, looking purely at moveable wealth, half the world’s wealth is currently in the hands of 62 people). As Adam Smith also pointed out (and I link to an article by David Brin discussing this at length), great disparities in wealth destroy the freedom of markets, via the huge disparities of purchasing power they produce.

As a secondary effect, the freedom of the market is compromised severely when less and less people actually have the money (or power) to enter into it, resulting in the removal of the mass decision making which makes the free market work, concentrating the power to make decisions in a very few hands. The result is close to a command economy, with all the abysmal track record that brings. As Brin remarks, in exchange for price setting by 10,000 civil servants, we get price setting by 5,000 golf buddies – and I add to what Brin says, that the man in the street has at least in theory the ability to elect politicians who will do something about the 10,000 civil servants, whereas the golf buddies are not removable except by people with immense wealth who can buy controlling interests in the companies they operate.

Free markets are thus demonstrated to be fundamentally unstable; they will eventually cease to be free unless they (or their effects) are regulated.

Another problem kicks in when talking about markets in, for instance, stocks and shares. What governs those prices is more what people think is going to happen to the price in the future than a dispassionate view of how well the underlying company is doing, so they are prone to boom and bust cycles, particularly since automated trading systems started to react to changes in the market more rapidly than human traders ever could.

Turning from markets to capitalism proper, except on a very small scale (without economies of scale), it is not a matter of a single person producing something. Elgin is correct to say that capitalism has produced a higher standard of living for masses of people, and the main mechanism is mass production, which demands major investment of equipment to work; this has been provided by mechanisms such as the joint stock company and by the banking system, which together give you capitalism.

I need to pause here to say that I have misgivings about both the joint stock company and the banking system as being in accordance with Christian principles.

The joint stock company allows people to risk only their initial investment through the principle of limited liability; the worst they can fear is the loss of their share value. What that actually does, however, is enable companies to fail to meet their obligations to others, either debts owed or liabilities for damage caused, by just declaring the company insolvent and winding it up. This enables people to support companies which will defraud or cause damage to people without fearing the full consequences.

The banking system lends money at interest, fundamentally. That is something which, for very many years, Christians believed was forbidden by scripture, basing this on Deuteronomy 23:19 “Thou shalt not lend upon interest to thy brother: interest of money, interest of victuals, interest of any thing that is lent upon interest”, first prohibiting it at the First Council of Nicea (325). This was the sin of usury (for over a millennium Christians left that practice to Jews, who used the parallel provision permitting interest to be charged to foreigners in Deut. 23:20). I am not convinced that our move away from condemning usury is warranted.

Beyond that, capitalism is a matter of an employer (usually a company) with multiple employees, it is a matter of needing capital from somewhere in order to set up the business; both separate the work of production from the sale of the product. But, I hear, workers contract freely to work for the capitalist, and there is again a free market. The fact that the employer or the provider of capital makes most of the money, and not those who actually produce, is fair because it is a free market.

This is just not the case. A free market demands that both seller and buyer are free from overwhelming need to contract at whatever price the other demands. Except in circumstances of labour shortages (which rarely arise except in the case of people with specialist skills and which the mass production through automation on which the modern capitalist economy depends constantly strives to reduce or eliminate), the employer can employ anyone while the worker typically fears starvation and the gutter and is compelled to accept what the employer is willing to give. This is good free market capitalist economics; it reduces the cost of production for the employer and increases the profit margin.

It is not, however, remotely Christian. The employer is not only failing to love the employee as himself, but is taking advantage of rather than benefiting the poor (for instance by giving them all his money…). In a truly Christian economy, the fear of starvation and the gutter would not be there, because the rich would be queuing up to give the poor money.

Indeed, free market capitalist economics value people only as units of production or units of consumption. The less you pay in wages the better, the more they pay for what they buy (and the more they buy) the better. A Christian economics would value them as people and, I suggest, value them the more if they are poor (hungy,  thirsty or unclothed), a stranger, sick or imprisoned (Matt. 25:31-46). Capitalist economics, in other words, values only money. If you work for a capitalist enterprise, you are likely to be sacked for giving anything away or for selling it at a lower price than the employers demand; you are forever going to be pushed to produce more at a lower cost and sell more at a higher price. To make more money.  As Gordon Gecko says in “Wall Street”, “Greed is good”.

There lies the problem. Paul said “The love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim. 6:10) and Jesus said “You cannot serve God and money” (Luke 16:13). The word used for money there is “Mammon”, which Christian theology has traditionally seen as a false god or prince of hell (Gregory of Nyssa, Cyprian and Jerome certainly thought this way; Gregory equated Mammon with Beelzebub).

All this for something which you cannot eat or drink, which you cannot wear, and which has only the value we permit ourselves to be deceived into giving it unless and until it is converted into something real. If you consider that money has real value, think of inflation, and particularly hyper-inflation which has affected some economies in the past. The pound (or dollar) in your pocket is really only worth to you what someone is prepared to give you in exchange for it, and that can vary wildly (if, for instance, someone just doesn’t want to sell you something, or work for what you offer, or just isn’t interested in having more money) or, in hyperinflation, collapse completely. Money, and therefore wealth, is a fiction, given value only by the belief of those who have faith in it. That’ to my mind, sounds very much like a minimalist definition of a god… or, at least, a false god.

In addition, if you consider Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, while the lowest level (physiological) can be attended to fairly readily with money in normal circumstances, safety requires more than just money, and having more money does not correlate well (some would argue “at all”) with attaining any of  the higher needs of humanity (“Money can’t buy you love”), though we are deceived into thinking that money gives us security and others are deceived into esteeming us more for “having” more of it.

Indeed, while with most commodities we can readily see that, at best, “enough is as good as a feast”, and consumption of many things in excess can actually be bad for you, having reduced everything to money, i.e. wealth, we have produced a system in which you can never clearly see that you have too much.  In the quest to sell more (and produce more) we have developed marketing and advertising, the chief effects of which have gone beyond the initial aim of letting the buyer know what was available to inducing people to buy what they don’t need, and to pay more for it not because it is intrinsically better, but because it is seen as trendy, or high status.

It is also the case that in every free market capitalist system (and the more so the more nearly that approaches the ideal), the principle of “trickle down economics” (otherwise expressed as “a rising tide lifts all boats”) which benefits the poor because it benefits everyone, does not work unless there is a labour shortage. Marx got a lot of things wrong, in my eyes, but the one thing he got right was that free market capitalism concentrates wealth (and so power and the ability to choose what one does with life) in fewer and fewer hands. “Thus says the LORD:  For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals – they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth and push the afflicted out of the way. “ (Amos 2:6-7)

So, capitalism gives us a system which results in us valuing each other by the amount of this Satanic fiction we consider each of us to have and concentrating that in fewer and fewer hands. We live in fear of not having it (which is a primary reason why we do not try a truly Christian economics) and are compelled into getting more of it, and letting others have as little of it as possible.

I therefore think that I was entirely justified in a recent Global Christian Perspectives webcast in calling Market Capitalism the “system of Satan”. It is the opposite of a Christian economic system. I am not the only theologian to have noted this, as an article in The Atlantic demonstrates.

The trouble is, just as Jesus observed when he said “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” (Mark 12:17), we are stuck with this system. I am myself too consumed with the fear of destitution to go as far as I think I should towards a truly Christian view of economics, and can only chip away at the edges (by, for instance, not buying from companies which I know oppress workers particularly badly, and by paying more than I need to where a seller is plainly poor, as well as the normal charitable imperatives for which there is no justification in Market Capitalism, as well as by seeking to elect politicians who will curb the excesses of the system). The fact that we are stuck with it, absent a level of popular faith I can’t muster in myself, however, should not blind us to its “Satanic” character and the fact that we should aim at something better, or at least at using government (the people acting as a whole) to regulate and moderate its influence.

Free Market Capitalism is not a matter of “best expressing Christian values”, it’s a matter of turning the opposite of Christian values into a belief system which becomes the whole basis for society.

My Small Group has been doing the Jeff Lucas series “Elijah, Prophet at a Loss”, and I got to lead the last session recently.

First, a few words about the series. On the whole, it’s pretty reasonably constructed and at least intended to leave those leading sessions fairly little to do. It takes a standard evangelical approach to scripture, but there is material on which you can base excursions beyond that. There are four sessions, and each then has five days worth of short readings and bible passages, plus a prayer. Jeff writes rather good short prayers. I do worry that having five readings after the last actual session doesn’t allow a neat conclusion, though (especially given the tendency of groups to “do their homework” if at all, the day before the next session…).

However, the series only deals with Elijah’s earlier career, and ends with an episode where he becomes completely dis-spirited, so the last session material deals with depression, stress and burnout. In fact, I added some material at the end of the session to underline a more upbeat trajectory from Elijah’s later story and his reputation in Judaism and as referred to in Mark 8:27-8 (inter alia).

The “icebreaker” question for the session involves drawing a picture representing your worst fear. I elected to just ask people to share, suspecting rightly that the group would balk at drawing, but even that was, it proved, asking for more disclosure than many were happy with.

And, of course, I was completely targeted (I’m assured, and I believe, that knowledge of my history was not in anyone’s minds when allocating that session to me, which makes it one of those coincidences which either reality or a hyperactive pattern recognition tends to interpret as a guiding hand). I’m the only member of the group who has suffered a major clinical depression (or debilitating stress, or burnout), so I had a story to share, and I’m a twelve stepper, so I’m not unused to sharing my story.

Now, whether Elijah, in the story, was actually suffering a major clinical depression or merely a depressive episode is uncertain. It was, in the account, fairly short, but did involve a loss of hope and a wish to die (I spent six and a half years telling myself “Just for today, I will not kill myself” and hope, as a positive emotion, was entirely beyond my comprehension at the time). Jeff Lucas has clearly not suffered even as serious a depression as Elijah, and while he tried hard to understand, he could really have done to listen to testimony from someone who has actually been there, like this TED talk from Andrew Solomon. Even better, he could have given a section of the video over to someone who had first hand knowledge. At least he didn’t suggest that some trivial prayer would inevitably cure depression, which I have heard far too many times, but I didn’t feel he communicated the potential severity of the condition, and neither did the group. However, there was, I think, good discussion. I was very glad that I’d prepared a more upbeat ending, though!

My greatest fear, as I explained to the group for the icebreaker, was that my depression might return. It’s not something I dwell on, but in low moments I do wonder if that might be happening, as my slide downwards was not something I really noticed at the time. That, of course, highlights the difference between low mood and depression; I can still have distinctly down times and not be remotely in the same place as clinical depression. Incidentally, I have found that a touch of prayer and meditation is good medicine for low mood!

As came to me in the course of our discussion about fears, however, is the fact that pre-depression (and all the stuff which contributed to it), my greatest fear was of being broke and jobless; eventually the depression resulted in me being both, and that fear has now been more or less eliminated. There’s a good chance that that’s actually because “the worst happened and I survived it”. Circumstances combined to put me in a place I couldn’t see a way to achieving by myself, as I couldn’t then and still can’t bring myself to follow the example suggested to the rich young man by Jesus. I had to have that done for me. That is, of course, a positive I can take from the experience – and rather than accept several years of “ruined time”, I want to find as much positive as I can in it!

I can link this with Elijah’s story at the point we looked at (1 Kings 19); Elijah flees, afraid of death at the hands of Jezebel, but then ends up disspirited and praying for death. Perhaps this was his equivalent of giving up his fear?

From where I stand now, this fear of economic catastrophe led to me being overly concerned for years with making money, latterly trying to make enough to be able to retire and not have to worry about money again in the future. If you look at an operational definition of my position, I was behaving as if money was my main objective in life, rather than spiritual progress or practical care for others, and if you behave as if something is your ultimate objective, you are worshiping it in fact even if not in theory. As the love of money is the root of all evil, and you cannot serve God and Mammon, although I was still trying to give practical care to others as well, in accordance with the social gospel, I can point to that period and say that I was operationally “worshiping strange Gods”, i.e. Mammon, as money frequently came first. I have described free market capitalism as the system of Satan, and I was thoroughly caught up in it. Certainly my spiritual praxis declined almost to nothing over the years against the background of this need to make money; I was by and large not stopping to seek moments of prayer and meditation, to become closer to God.

I can now ask myself if this idolatry of money was, in fact, a major contributing feature of the depression in the first place. However, there’s more. Although at the time our national social security system was not yet broken to the extent that makes unemployment and lack of capital a real demon, I felt that I had to achieve this by my own efforts; I was fiercely self-reliant and did not want to ask for or receive help from anyone else. This in itself was a turning from God; we are repeatedly told to rely on God for our basic needs (and not ourselves), including in the sentence “Give us this day our daily bread”. I was praying that frequently, but I was not really thinking of its full implications, nor those of “give no thought to tomorrow”.

As a last point, the fact that I was always conscious of not yet having enough money, fearing the lack of enough money to buy the basics of existence (Maslow’s lowest two levels at least, and possibly the third as well), made me a slave to work, and a more or less willing slave at that. In my case it was based on a lie I told myself, that I needed not only to have enough for today, but enough for the rest of my life. It wasn’t that I felt that I needed a lot of new stuff all the time, what I wanted was not just to have enough today, but enough forever. However, I look at advertising, which is generally calculated to make you feel that you need stuff you in fact don’t, and consider that it is trying to make us all slaves to money. We are encouraged to have more and more, newer and newer. And we don’t need it – in fact, the perception of that need is bad for us. You might describe it as the Devil’s evangelism.

Finally my thoughts have to turn to those people who don’t even have enough to fulfill the bottom two levels of Maslow’s pyramid, these days in a climate of “austerity” which seems to hit the poorest the most an increasing number, frequently people who actually work very hard, just at jobs which don’t pay enough for even basic requirements of life. They are not free, they are slaves. They have no option but to take such jobs (and, if they can get them, second jobs which give them some small hope of getting as far as Maslow’s third and fourth levels, but never the highest level), no option but to work extremely hard for nothing but a bare minimum.

I can say from my own experience that when you are enslaved this way, it is incredibly difficult to turn your attention to the top two levels proposed by Maslow. It’s very arguable that faith and spirituality are actually in the top level. It’s difficult to turn your attention to the third level, love and belonging, and one would hope that those are available through a church community.

I dream of a society in which Maslow’s two bottom levels are met for every one of us by our community, working as a whole (and that implies that we use the mechanism we have for operating our community, namely the State and lower levels of government). We are not too poor as a country to provide for everyone air, water, food,  and shelter (level 1) and personal and financial security, health care and care in the event of accidents (level 2), and to provide it as of right, provided by those of us fortunate enough to be able to make surplus money, and provided by us as an absolute obligation of living in a community which has some aspiration to be considered civilised, let alone one which is moving towards being the Kingdom of God on earth.

Let us, therefore, demand that government give up the system of Satan, and stop listening to the Devil’s evangelists.

Bo Sanders has provocatively titled a post “There is no Kingdom of God”. A man after my own heart – I like provocative titles. Watch the video – it’s only 8 minutes, and he makes a lot of really good points, not all of which I repeat here.

The problem he sees is that the term doesn’t translate “basilea tou Theou” well for a modern audience (and I might suggest particularly one in the States, which is a Republic).

The thing is, the use of the term, which literally means something more like “Empire of God” or “Imperial rule of God” was a direct subversion of the term “basilea tou Romes”, i.e. the Empire of Rome. The basilea tou Theou was completely unlike the Roman Empire, of course, and the identical formulation there was designed to accentuate the difference.

At the time of the earliest English translations, “Kingdom of God” was, I think, actually a fairly good translation, because at the time England was a Kingdom with a King who had some imperial pretensions and was very nearly an absolute monarch, as the Roman Emperors were; the counterpoint still worked and had some subversive power. It doesn’t work in England nearly as well these days, as the monarchy has become a nearly powerless constitutional monarchy and the fount of power is Parliament, and it works even less well in the United States, where citizens don’t even live under a nominal monarchy or empire.

Granted, it could well be argued that the USA is a functional Empire, with places ruled but without a say in government and a number of “client states” which are nominally independent but in effect operate as instructed by America.The trouble is, most of the population probably don’t believe that to be the case.

I have seen and heard people using other terms, and “commonwealth” is not uncommon – the trouble is, most of these fail to give the subversive element as they themselves have unhelpful baggage (in the case of “commonwealth” it is specifically the historic use of the term for democracies, and a democracy, I would argue, is significantly closer to a system of organising ourselves which Jesus might not want to subvert). Of those which Bo mentions, “Government” is possibly my favorite, particularly as “Government” already has a fair amount of negative baggage associated, as “basilea” did in the first century.

What about the hyphenated terms? Sadly, I don’t like “kin-dom” as it sounds rather twee, although it is clever; “un-kingdom” and “anti-empire” seem to me too direct, lacking the subversive element which was present in the original use of the common term for the Roman oppression, the sense of direct opposition “An Empire but totally unlike the existing Empire”. However, any of these might do – certainly if an unfamiliar term is used, it will alert us to the fact that “Kingdom” needs a bit more understanding.

I might, for instance, suggest once in a while slipping in “the Anarchy of God” for the shock effect – it lacks the sense of subversion, but certainly wakes one up to the fact that Jesus’ basilea is not a top down autocracy. I think he might have quite liked Peter Kropotkin’s ideas about how (not to) organise a state!

On the whole, though, I rather favour trying out “Nation of God”. There’s an awful lot to subvert in our concepts of nation these days;for the nation to which we belong to include axiomatically all people (“no Jew nor Greek…”, the hated Samaritan and the traditional enemy Syrophonecian) is, I think, jarring enough to gain some really good traction, at least until we become over-used to it. It certainly puts a new light on our reluctance to welcome refugees… It also echoes the situation of the Israelites as the People of God, so bursting out of all previously traditional markers for who is in and who is out, as was necessary to include the Gentiles, is doubly accentuated.

Also, and I think particularly in the States, it’s the principal thing to which loyalty is regularly claimed over and above loyalty to God. We regularly discuss whether we can trust a politician whose principal loyalty is to his or her concept of God, possibly to the exclusion of loyalty to our hugely restricted view of nation. Early Christians regularly suffered martyrdom for exactly this reason – they refused to worship Caesar, which was seen as being traitorous.

What price do we pay for our oaths of allegiance, our oaths on taking office?

There is a nice piece at Unfundamentalist Christians about hell as “eternal conscious torment”. I agree with it, but I don’t think it goes far enough.

The idea of Hell (assuming that Hell is not a mere rhetorical device, or even, perhaps, a metaphor for what an eternity separated from God might feel like – which is something which I might, perhaps, contemplate to be a viable possibility if, firstly, our consciousness, once created, cannot under any circumstances ever be destroyed and, secondly, if God has renounced any coercion to force a change of mind on us, and allows us freely to elect not to turn to Him and, thirdly, if there is any possibility that, given eternity, any consciousness would not so turn) is one which has been orthodox in Christianity for most of its history.

Incidentally, I do not think that the first and third of the provisoes above are correct, although I am reasonably confident that the second is at least largely correct. I say “reasonably confident” and “largely correct” on the basis that my personal history indicates that God will occasionally give the consciousness of even the most recalcitrant (i.e. the 14 years old evangelical atheist Chris) a good kicking to persuade it differently, but does not appear to have got round to doing the same to (for example) Richard Dawkins.

Let’s leave reformed theology on one side for a moment – given its insistence that God determines absolutely who is going to be saved and who damned without any reference to character, circumstances or effort, and therefore just creates humans destined for Hell – and concentrate on the rest of Christianity.

St. Thomas Aquinas wrote: “In order that nothing may be wanting to the felicity of the blessed spirits in heaven, a perfect view is granted to them of the tortures of the damned.“ This, at least, is frequently quoted; I cannot as yet find an accurate reference to it in the Summa, however. Thomas was, no doubt, thinking of the parable of Dives and Lazarus, which, taken literally and aside the real point of the parable (which is that some cannot be convinced by whatever evidence you  can conceive of), indicates that the saved in Heaven can see the damned in Hell. 

And that would make Heaven into eternal conscious torment for anyone who had lived their life trying to follow Jesus’ second Great Commandment, that you love your neighbour as yourself. He even went on to point out in the version recorded by Luke, using the parable of the Good Samaritan, that “neighbour” meant anyone, even your traditional enemy. Maybe not physical torment, but certainly mental.

I wonder how St. Thomas could have managed to ignore this absolutely basic tenet of his faith. Could he, I ask, have been basically a sociopath, setting out the rules by which things worked and pointing out that by following these, you would end up in a good place, irrespective of any human feeling (which sociopaths do not experience)? In the system described by him, indeed, success would go to the rational sociopaths – and that makes it look like a system of corporatist free market capitalism to me rather than the radically inclusionary kingdom of God preached by Jesus – and I have been known to describe corporatist free market capitalism as a Satanic system.

Could it have been that Thomas’ famed rationality had taken over to the point at which mere human feeling was far from him? If so, this is not the spirituality of Christianity, it is the spirituality of the Eastern traditions in which freedom from attachment is the highest aspiration, and freedom from attachment does, of course, mean an end to compassion. I will grant that the mystical ways of the East do have a tendency to produce this withdrawal from humanity in service of uninterrupted ecstatic contemplation of union with God. That has, in a way, been dangled before me as a possibility; I do not consider it one to be aspired to unless the rest of humanity can join me there, and that is a long way off, but perhaps Thomas was a mystic and was seduced by that promise himself. I don’t know. I prefer not to think of one of the greatest theologians of all time as a potential sociopath, or even someone prepared in the final instance to abandon his fellow men to agony, but that seems to be where the evidence leads.

Also, of course, the God whose fulness dwelt in Jesus, of whom Jesus was the most perfect expression, could not, would not, set up a system in which those favoured by him could be those who would look upon even the most evil of their fellows and relish their torment endlessly, without any hope of either annihilation or and eventual purgation and return to Him. If that is indeed the system which has been set up, the one responsible for it must be Satan rather than God, and I want nothing to do with him or his works.

I was reading an article by Andrew Robinson about Thomas Aquinas seen through the eyes of modern Continental philosophy, and came across this statement:-

“The difficulty is that humans can’t have direct sensory access to God, or see from God’s point of view. How, then, is it possible to make claims like “God is good” or “God is wise”?”

It struck me immediately that this argues a transcendent-only God, not surprisingly as this is overwhelmingly the “God of the philosophers”, including Aquinas. The article goes on to say:-

“So why is this interesting for radical thought? Of course, this question is still important for Christian anarchists, liberation theologians, Jewish and Muslim anarchists, who are radicals and also monotheists. At first, this discussion might not seem very relevant to people with a secular disposition (atheists, humanists etc), or to pantheists, but it is also relevant to the question of how to talk about other kinds of things we don’t understand very well or cannot access directly. In contemporary poststructuralism, notably in the work of Derrida, Levinas and Spivak, the question of the unknowability of God is closely connected to the unknowability of earthly others.”

Note the exclusion of pantheists. I’m a panentheist, which is the uncomfortable position between the pantheist who sees in immanence-only terms and the transcendentalist who sees only God-as-wholly other. I suspect that Mr. Robinson has rightly seen that the pantheist (and panentheist) would say that they experience some things (notably God) apparently unmediated; I would certainly say that of some of my spiritual experiences if not all. However, the point is good – one cannot float around in a mystic haze all the time, as that tends to lead to bumping into lamp posts and dying of hunger…

In one of those coincidences which enliven the life of faith so much, we were talking about transcendence -v- immanence last Thursday night at our small group. The occasion was discussion of the second meditation from Jane Williams in book 5 session 2 of the Pilgrim Course (audio available online) in which she says:-

“If God were not Trinity, how could we know about God? We could learn about God through the creation but that means that knowledge of God would only come to us through what is not God. Alternatively, our knowledge of God could, somehow, be imposed directly by God, bypassing human cooperation. But the Trinitarian God is able to hold together transcendence and immanence because this God is already outpouring and returning relationship, in God’s very being”.

I wasn’t the only person for whom this made little or no sense. Knowledge of God always comes to us through what is not God, just as knowledge of everything comes through sense-impressions which are never the things-in-themselves. Arguably there is an exception if there is some form of direct revelation. But, of course, we assume direct revelation in the concept of the inspiration of scripture and pray for it ourselves when we ask for God’s wisdom and guidance.

We do not feel drawn to say that everything we come to know in the outside world is therefore Trinity, because otherwise we could not know it – my computer, for instance, is obviously much more than three, being possessed by Legion (it let me down printing yesterday and has crashed once during the writing of this post so far, so please forgive the anthropomorphic vitriol…). No, in fact it’s for these purposes one, albeit an unity composed of very many parts.

It seems to me that Ms. Williams fails to take account adequately of the experience of the immanence of God, whereas in a sense Mr. Robinson does at least mention an avenue in that direction (the pantheist). Is this surprising? I don’t think so – in discussion, some indicated that they didn’t really relate to the immanent God at all, and I think most related better to the transcendent God. In a less committed and less Charismatic-leaning group, I would have expected most if not all not to relate to the immanence of God at all.

This is not a new experience for me; I have regularly found myself talking with transcendence-only people over the years, and have not infrequently come over as an immanence-only person myself (For many years I used, irritatingly, to say that I didn’t need to believe in God because I experienced God). It is, of course, possible for philosophers to deduce the existence of a God (Aquinas is famous for it!), although I have never been very convinced of their lines of reasoning. The thing is, they always seem to end up with a transcendent God; the immanent God is, it seems, only accessible to direct experience.

Direct experience can also tell us that God is transcendent – but that is as far as experience can go, because transcendence is, I think, intrinsically impossible for the human consciousness to grasp. Human consciousness can become open to transcendence, but if my own experience is anything to go by, such occasions are fleeting because the mind recoils before the immensity of that which it cannot contain.

Immanence, however, is a different matter. Immanence collapses the transcendent into the real, the material (insofar as these are actually knowable, considering the general problem outlined above, they are far more readily knowable than the transcendent). It is, I think, what Jesus does in the Great Commandments; love of God has no practical form (there’s worship, but it’s hard to see that that is any benefit to God when conceived of as purely transcendent) but love of neighbour is how we can express that love in a practical way. It is, again arguably, what God does in Jesus; the incarnation shows God via the person, life and sayings of a real person, which allows Whitehead to say “God has to be at least as nice as Jesus”.

Of course, there is at root a philosophical problem, that of how the transcendent can be known at all. A more conventional approach to this in Christianity than Ms. Williams appears to be pursuing is to take Jesus/Christ (and I use the / to advert to the man/god duality of Christ which is orthodox Christianity) as the one and only possible mediator, being the intersection of the transcendent-only (in this conception) God with the immanent-only (in this conception) humanity. This agrees, for instance, with John 1:18, Col. 1:15 and in a different sense with the general argument of Hebrews, where Christ becomes in heaven a priestly figure of mediation. I will come back to this. I don’t actually think Ms. Williams is correct in saying that you need a concept of trinity in order to express this; incarnation by itself, it seems to me, does the job more clearly.

In a further coincidence later (much later, i.e. 2 in the morning) I found myself involved in an online exposition and some discussion through a Homebrewed Christianity course of Frank Tupper’s essay “The Self-Limitation of God”. (You may need to subscribe in order actually to read it, unfortunately). As you might gather from the title, Tupper puts forward a concept of God as creator having limited himself in order to allow human freedom and, indeed, the freedom of the rest of creation. Tupper is trying to address two problems there, the first being of theodicy (or, how an omnipotent and omniscient God can allow evil and suffering), the second being the manifest lack of interventionary action of God in the world as we observe it. This is in principle attractive to me, as someone who has major difficulty with supernatural interventions of any kind, being methodologically if not philosophically a naturalist (i.e. I expect to find natural answers to anything which I observe).

However, Tupper also wishes to be dogmatic about Jesus being “the definitive self-revelation of God”, and thus thinks that he needs Jesus to be  unique as a demonstration of this, i.e. the incarnation is a one-off event (which is close to the orthodox viewpoint of bridging the transdent-immanent gap). This has to be supernatural in Tupper’s framework, as it is an intrusion of God into the area of God’s previous self-limitation.

I agree with Tupper that God has to be limited, and self-limitation has to be the answer to preserving God’s axiomatic ultimacy and unity (any alternative would argue dualism, i.e. a real and preexistent contrary, therefore evil, force), but as I outline in “Rather different answers in Genesis”,  I see the creation as being a near-complete self-investment of God in creation, such that it would be contrary to God’s creative purpose to exert supernatural power on material things which God has formed out of his own essence (granted, Genesis only says “in his likeness”, though the word used could be interpreted as “substance”). This amply explains how God is immanent – all that is, is God, or at least is a part of that-which-is-God. My use of “near complete” rather than “complete” indicates that I am a panentheist rather than a pantheist; my experience tells me there is radically more of God than is invested in the material world (or cosmos). I see immanence and transcendence, in other words.

Or, at least, I see the inadequacy of my ability to grasp the fullness of that-which-is-God. Despite the temptation, I cannot state from this that anything about God is actually infinite, as I am (as finite) axiomatically unable to grasp fully anything which is infinite. I have, indeed, played with the idea that all infinities are no more than mathematical constructs, without any referent in reality. Unfortunately, the concept is so useful in Mathematics that the formulation of a new Mathematics (and therefore a new Physics) avoiding the concept seems impossible… at least so far.

I am unconvinced that any of the Biblical writers can say more than this, for the same reason. As a result, I do not actually need a conception like Tupper’s to argue that omnipotence and omniscience (at least in the sense of knowledge of future as well as past events) are likely to be flawed concepts; the limitation of those receiving inspiration on the subject means that even if those were truly characteristics of God, it would be beyond their ability to state. Omnipresence (which Tupper wishes to retain) is a different matter, as it merely requires that God be everywhere there is a somewhere to be.

That said, my quibbles about infinite attributes do not answer the problem of theodicy, which Tupper’s concept, and my own (of effectively universal incarnation, kenosis and self-investment), both do, at least to some extent. I set these against the alternative kenotic concept used by Hans Urs von Balthasar, who says:- “It was essential that Christ, in his Incarnation, should bring the fullness of heaven to earth . . . . Otherwise the contemplation of God would only have been possible in the forms of negative apophatic mysticism, which seeks to encounter God beyond all that is of the world, as the Wholly Other, who can be neither conceived, nor beheld, nor comprehended. Such a view, inevitably, does a great injustice to the world and our fellow creatures”. (Balthasar, “Prayer”, 1986). Balthasar (in common with quite a few other modern conservative theologians) solves the problem of theodicy by positing a self-withdrawal of God in order to allow room for creation to have free will, but this is at the expense of immanence, as clearly God’s ongoing immanence offers an immediate (and non-apophatic) route to contemplation of God, in accordance, indeed, with Psalm 19:1.

There can only be radical immanence, it seems to me, if the kenosis of God in creation is accompanied by near-complete self-investment, just as we see in the incarnation in Jesus a self-investment. For me, therefore, the uniqueness of the incarnation is not in the fact that in Jesus God is uniquely present in creation, but in the fact that this was recognised, and recognised both due to the unusual degree in which Jesus was conscious of God’s self-investment in him, to Jesus’ willingness to subordinate his will to that of God as a whole and to the particularity of Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection to his disciples.

Jesus therefore exemplifies the human, being the “second Adam” as Paul sees him in 1. Cor. 15:45; the imitation of Christ is to seek to draw closer to his unique features, and as St. Athanasius put it “God became man in order that man might become God”. Christ is the template, the type and, indeed, “the way, the truth and the life”.

There’s this chap called Kevin DeYoung who blogs on Gospel Coalition, it seems. I hadn’t heard of him before the “40 questions” he asked of “Christians now waving rainbow flags” became one of the most talked about posts in a lot of progressive Christian circles. This is not surprising, because I don’t identify with his flavour of Christianity very well, which I gather he regards as “Evangelical”. However, a lot of those who now self-identify as “progressive” have come from the “Evangelical” camp and still retain roots and connections there, and I read quite a lot of them, and agree with quite a lot of what they say, and find their faith journeys to be particularly interesting. And, in a spirit of complete disclosure, my main church at present, although denominationally Anglican, would identify itself as “Evangelical” as well, as would the majority of the congregation there (I think).

So I’m probably not his target audience – indeed, he’d probably dismiss me as “Liberal”. However, the post did engage the interest of a lot of people I tend to see eye to eye with, and I wondered if my answers would differ radically from theirs, many of which have been linked by James McGrath. I quote the main bulk of the original text below in blue. My replies are in white.

If you consider yourself a Bible-believing Christian, a follower of Jesus whose chief aim is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, there are important questions I hope you will consider before picking up your flag and cheering on the sexual revolution. These questions aren’t meant to be snarky or merely rhetorical. They are sincere, if pointed, questions that I hope will cause my brothers and sisters with the new rainbow themed avatars to slow down and think about the flag you’re flying.

Well, I can reasonably identify with the description in the first two lines, though there may prove to be some argument as to what “Bible-believing” means – particularly when it’s capitalised. Usually any use of the term, and particularly when it has capitals, means that it demands a sadly literalist view of scripture and the use of a particular set of lenses through which it has to be read, lenses which were invented many years after the scriptures were written, and some as recently as the late 19^th century. I take the Bible extremely seriously; far too seriously to read it that way. From the point of view of most Evangelicals, that puts me in the category of “bible-burning liberal”, which is amusing, as actually I generally want to ignore less of the Old Testament than they do, and not infrequently less of the Gospels as well. I contend that I fit as well into “bible-believing” as the majority of those who would use the term of themselves.

I don’t do a lot of flag-waving, personally, and the recent Supreme Court decision doesn’t have any effect on me or on anyone I’m close to, as none of my gay friends live in the States, but I am heartened by the fact that it’s occurred. The similar but earlier change in the law here has allowed some friends to give legal status to what has been a de facto position for years, and I’m glad for them, and so glad for those in the States for whom that has now become possible. So I may be a rather half-hearted flag-waver in his eyes.

However, I beg leave to question Mr. DeYoung’s description of his questions. I spent enough years moderating on a religion discussion forum to recognise loaded questions designed to be unanswerable, or unanswerable without giving away something the author would consider a victory. Had these questions been raised on that forum, I would have been having some serious words with the writer about encouraging discussion rather than argument.

But I am a sucker for considering my position and answering questions about my faith, and have an historical weakness for a spot of proof-texting which I’m attempting to recover from with only partial success, so:-

1. How long have you believed that gay marriage is something to be celebrated?

I have to admit that it wasn’t until about my mid-20s, (i.e. nearly 40 years ago) when I was asked to try to replicate as nearly as possible the legal position, had they been married, of a committed gay couple. What I could do was not straightforward, and there was a lot I couldn’t achieve, because the UK was quite a few years off civil partnerships at the time.

2. What Bible verses led you to change your mind?

None in particular, though I could point to the trajectory of scripture from the regulation of an iron age tribe through towards an universal religion prioritising inclusion of the underprivileged and excluded. But then, it wasn’t really a matter of changing my mind – I’d have thought the same way earlier, except (to my embarrassment now) it had never really crossed my mind, and it should have, because I had friends who were gay, and had even spent some serious time discussing the position of the gay Christian with one of them.

Though Jesus’ injunctions to love our neighbour as ourselves, love one another as he loved us and the like would spring to mind. I don’t see that sexual love is necessarily excluded from the generally loving nature one is supposed to have, though I do think there are excellent reasons for restricting eros to one person, while relationships with others can make do with various other flavours of love.

3. How would you make a positive case from Scripture that sexual activity between two persons of the same sex is a blessing to be celebrated?

The same way I’d make a positive case from Scripture that sexual activity between two people of opposite sexes is a blessing to be celebrated, i.e. probably the Song of Solomon. Though, in conscience, I’ve never felt the need to use Scripture to make either case. Loving mutual commitments are a different matter, but that isn’t the question asked.

4. What verses would you use to show that a marriage between two persons of the same sex can adequately depict Christ and the church?

You have to be joking, yes? Christ was (is?) male, I’m a man, and I’m part of the church (as, so far as I know, was Paul). It’s already conceived as a same-sex union.

I will confess that the way in which Teresa de Avila wrote about her relationship with Christ is one which I find personally exclusive, as an heterosexual male – maybe a male of a different sexual formation might find that easier?

In fact, of course, Paul was not thinking of the sexual aspect of love when he wrote in these terms, but of the complementarity of married couples; it seems to me that such complementarity is largely independent of sex. Aspects like mutual dependence and inseparability would also figure, I think. Neither, I think, was Teresa actually thinking of explicit sexuality, but her use of charged imagery does make it very difficult not to see her as talking of a sexual relationship.

5. Do you think Jesus would have been okay with homosexual behavior between consenting adults in a committed relationship?

I’m pretty confident he would have been, if he’d had any examples to consider, yes.

6. If so, why did he reassert the Genesis definition of marriage as being one man and one woman?

Because he was asked to speak about divorce, which presumed a marriage, which in those days could only be between a man and a woman (and he was issuing a rebuke to the asymmetric and unfair divorce provisions of the day). Reference to Gen. 2:24 is rather problematic here; firstly, the immediate previous verses indicate that their cleaving together is because they’re actually the same species rather than particularly opposite genders (previously offered mates were animals), secondly, Eve is presented as a kind of clone, which is going to have to come within prohibitions against incest these days. In addition, enquiring minds might want to know in what way leaving father and mother was relevant to Adam and Eve…

7. When Jesus spoke against porneia what sins do you think he was forbidding?

Probably heterosexual promiscuity beyond a single adultery (which is dealt with using a different term earlier in the passage in Matthew 5).

8. If some homosexual behavior is acceptable, how do you understand the sinful “exchange” Paul highlights in Romans 1?

Until really quite recently, I’d have taken that as actually condemning the actions he mentions as such in passing (and naively accepting that that did mean homosexuality in all its forms), and I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago lamenting the fact that I actually agonised about this with a gay Christian friend many years ago without coming to a better answer than the one I then gave, namely that Paul was a man, not in any manner God (and therefore massively less reliable than Jesus), and (if you credit him with all the epistles which bear his name) wrote some stuff which is morally reprehensible, e.g. that slaves should obey their masters and women should be silent and not teach, but admitted on one occasion that occasionally he wrote stuff which came from him and which was not divinely inspired. However, I have now read Douglas Campbell’s “The Deliverance of God” and find that a better reading is to ascribe all of this section of Romans to a view Paul puts forward as being that of his opponents, which he then proceeds to use to lambast people for being at least as bad as this caricature. Clearly Paul’s account of a position opposing his should not be taken as binding!

An Anabaptist correspondent of mine used to be keen on suggesting that if you broke any commandment (such as, for instance, failing to give all your money to the poor) you were equivalent to an homosexual prostitute. He was, of course, using these passages as a basis, and both he and Paul were appealing to the base prejudices of their audiences.

9. Do you believe that passages like 1 Corinthians 6:9 and Revelation 21:8 teach that sexual immorality can keep you out of heaven?

I think any manner of worldly preoccupations can keep you out of heaven, and that the most dangerous of those (at least according to Jesus) is the pursuit of money, though abuse of power comes in a close second. A preoccupation with sex is certainly among the lesser ones.

10. What sexual sins do you think they were referring to?

I’m not wholly certain, apart from a strong suspicion (from the use of “malakoi”) that Paul disapproved of effeminacy, and (from the construction of “arsenokotai”) that he wasn’t keen on anal intercourse (which would give quite a number of heterosexual couples a problem), but better scholars of the period and language than me raise a good argument that he may have meant abuse of young men by old ones and male prostitution.

11. As you think about the long history of the church and the near universal disapproval of same-sex sexual activity, what do you think you understand about the Bible that Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Luther failed to grasp?

I don’t actually see much Church disapproval of same-sex activity as distinct from sexual activity generally (which a lot of the Church has disapproved of for much of its existence) until the late 19^th century. Most writers during that period, including those, said very little if anything about the issue, and none of those that I’m aware of said anything about committed same-sex relationships.

However, the question indicates that the writer misses the overarching trajectory of scripture; Jesus was unworried about modifying (for instance) the rules of divorce or the exclusion of Canaanites and Samaritans from fellowship with Jews, Paul was unworried about modifying the rules regarding the major Jewish distinctives of circumcision and dietary particularity, both being modified in the direction of greater inclusion of those thought of at the time as “beyond the pale”. Augustine was keen to accommodate parts of his tradition to Roman rule (which would have had both Jesus and Paul in fits), including the very retrograde step of a theory of Just War. Aquinas accommodated his theology to Plato and Aristotle, which I also think was a retrograde step; Luther and Calvin rejected the previous 1000 years of Church authorities’ interpretations of the Bible en masse, retaining only what they thought they could justify directly from scripture, and in the process accommodating to an increasingly individualist strain in Northern Europe; some of their innovations were in line with the trajectory set by Jesus and the early Paul, following the Prophets, some were not.

You present me with a set of examples none of whom thought previous authority was sacrosanct and all of whom paid attention to the society in which they lived; why should I not follow their example, and of course those of Jesus and Paul?

12. What arguments would you use to explain to Christians in Africa, Asia, and South America that their understanding of homosexuality is biblically incorrect and your new understanding of homosexuality is not culturally conditioned?

I think I might start by pointing out to them that every understanding of sexuality, including the Biblical one(s), theirs and mine is culturally conditioned. I, for instance, have a culturally conditioned revulsion towards the marrying off of girls of a very tender age (sometimes as young as 12), and towards the forced marriage of girls of any age on the say-so of their fathers. Those are, of course, things which were regularly approved in the Bible. So was slavery; so was genocide (consider the Amalekites and Canaanites, for instance).

13. Do you think Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were motivated by personal animus and bigotry when they, for almost all of their lives, defined marriage as a covenant relationship between one man and one woman?

I have absolutely no idea (not my circus, not my monkeys) but in any event particularly applaud their move towards celebrating a wider conception of marriage if, in fact, it represents repentance of previous animus and bigotry. I might point out, however, that the question assumes that anyone who might approve of marriage equality would also support these people; both of them are far too right of centre for my social-democratic taste!

14. Do you think children do best with a mother and a father?

Not as such. I think children do best with more than one loving parent and even better with a more extended family – I think “It takes a village to raise a child” is a very wise statement which ought to be Biblical, but isn’t. They do better with only one parent than with two opposite sex parents in a state of constant conflict, though.

It seems possible, however, that you are actually asking whether children benefit from having the kind of attributes modeled to them which are commonly thought of as “masculine” and “feminine”, in which case I would say “yes – but masculine attributes are not the exclusive preserve of genetic males nor feminine ones the exclusive preserve of genetic females”. I also consider that gender stereotyping is bad for children.

15. If not, what research would you point to in support of that conclusion?

30 years experience as a family lawyer is not enough?

16. If yes, does the church or the state have any role to play in promoting or privileging the arrangement that puts children with a mom and a dad?

I am not at all confident that it was a good idea for the church to start attempting to regulate marriage, which it did not do for its first thousand years (it didn’t solemnise them in church either for even longer). I’m very happy that churches will bless and confirm at least some marriages, however.

The state does have an interest in the welfare, education and happiness of all its citizens and in particular its children (which are its future) and so will naturally wish to privilege relationships which promote that at minimal cost to the taxpayer.

17. Does the end and purpose of marriage point to something more than an adult’s emotional and sexual fulfillment?

Very often, yes, but not necessarily (as otherwise what becomes of the infertile or sterile).

18. How would you define marriage?

By whatever happen to be the ruling laws or custom and practice of the day in the country which I’m considering. As the Biblical writers did, in fact.

19. Do you think close family members should be allowed to get married?

Probably not, and in saying that I am aware that I am going completely against Biblical precedent, which favoured (for example) marrying cousins (Abraham) or the brother of a deceased spouse (Ruth). Exactly how close is a matter of argument, but unions capable of producing children need to consider genetic issues, and any sexual relationships between close relatives have a strong possibility of involving unacceptable imbalances of power.

20. Should marriage be limited to only two people?

Quite clearly the Biblical writers, at least those in the Old Testament, did not think so (consider David and Solomon, both of whom are held up as shining lights of followers of God). As a matter of legal practicality, I do think the state has a potential interest in prohibiting multiple marriages, as regulating property and children issues in the event of marriage breakdown becomes unreasonably complicated; also most such marriages in practice involve unacceptable imbalances of power. Of course, if polygamy is allowed, polyandry should also be allowed, as should intermediate conditions.

In addition, extending the range to seriously multiple marriages offers much scope for tax avoidance.

21. On what basis, if any, would you prevent consenting adults of any relation and of any number from getting married?

See above.

22. Should there be an age requirement in this country for obtaining a marriage license?

Probably, on purely pragmatic grounds, though as a matter of principle I would prefer a test of mental capacity and the absence of duress (including from family members), but there I need to point out that duress from family members would appear to have been the Biblical norm as the society of the time was patriarchal.

23. Does equality entail that anyone wanting to be married should be able to have any meaningful relationship defined as marriage?

See above. However, the State will legislate according to what it sees as the most appropriately restricted range of relationships to which it will afford tax and other privileges.

24. If not, why not?

See above.

25. Should your brothers and sisters in Christ who disagree with homosexual practice be allowed to exercise their religious beliefs without fear of punishment, retribution, or coercion?

Of course. Though I might suggest that they try reading Romans 1-8 along the lines suggested by Douglas Campbell.

26. Will you speak up for your fellow Christians when their jobs, their accreditation, their reputation, and their freedoms are threatened because of this issue?

Probably not, because their jobs, accreditations and freedoms, at least in the UK, will not be legally threatened as a direct result (I cannot speak for their reputations), and if they have chosen an occupation which demands that one abide by the law of the land and they refuse to perform part of that job, they should not expect me to speak out if they lose their job or accreditation as a result; they should be prepared to suffer some penalty if they do not follow Paul’s injunction in Romans 13:1-7. I will, however, be happy to state publically and regularly that I respect their convictions on the issue and that they should not automatically be regarded as homophobes and bigots.

27. Will you speak out against shaming and bullying of all kinds, whether against gays and lesbians or against Evangelicals and Catholics?

I will certainly speak out against shaming and bullying of gays and lesbians, as they are persecuted minorities (they are still to some extent persecuted even in my own country, which has not rid itself of a large homophobic contingent, and will always be in the minority according to my understanding of population genetics).

I will also speak out against the shaming or bullying of any Christian for being a Christian, even if that includes disapproval of homosexuality. However, I will not support any Christian in shaming or bullying others, and I reserve the right to criticise them for it. If they feel that to be shaming or bullying, “judge not, lest you be judged” springs to mind.

28. Since the evangelical church has often failed to take unbiblical divorces and other sexual sins seriously, what steps will you take to ensure that gay marriages are healthy and accord with Scriptural principles?

I am really not interested in policing anyone’s marriages (or morals) other than my own. I am always happy to explain why I consider some sexual (and marriage) practices to be damaging if people enquire.

29. Should gay couples in open relationships be subject to church discipline?

I have grave misgivings about churches policing individual morality at all.

30. Is it a sin for LGBT persons to engage in sexual activity outside of marriage?

Not as such, provided no person is harmed and full and mature consent exists (exactly as I would say for heterosexual persons); in saying this, I am aware that Biblical precedent supports the rape of female captives and the forced marriage of young women, neither of which I think should be permitted. It is, moreover, extremely easy to sin in connection with sexual practices (as in all situations where heightened emotions occur) and care should therefore be taken. Promiscuous sexual activity whether heterosexual or homosexual is almost always damaging to everyone concerned and should be avoided. The least potentially damaging situation other than celibacy (which, as Paul says, is not a viable option for most) is long term monogamy, in my experience, and I therefore encourage it as an ideal.

31. What will open and affirming churches do to speak prophetically against divorce, fornication, pornography, and adultery wherever they are found?

Not being in a situation of leadership in one, or in any danger of becoming such a leader, this is not really my problem. I do, however, consider that there are very many far more damaging things about which churches should speak prophetically.

32. If “love wins,” how would you define love?

I might well start with 1 Cor. 13:1-13. But frankly, I would just suggest you go out and experience it; if you need it defining, you should involve yourself more with humanity.

33. What verses would you use to establish that definition?

See above. But, frankly, although I could also give any number of dictionary definitions (including the six types of love in koine Greek), poetry would be better – so move on from 1 Cor. to the Song of Solomon, perhaps.

34. How should obedience to God’s commands shape our understanding of love?

Haven’t you got that the wrong way round? The Great Commandments both enjoin love, the first for God and the second for our fellow men; that should shape our understanding of any other commands.

35. Do you believe it is possible to love someone and disagree with important decisions they make?

Look, I’ve been married for over 35 years and am happy still to be in that state. What do YOU think?

36. If supporting gay marriage is a change for you, has anything else changed in your understanding of faith?

My earliest understandings of God and Jesus showed me that the divine approves love in general, without restriction; if my attitude has changed, it has been to realise that perhaps some of the Biblical writers who I thought were condemning homosexuality were not actually condemning it in all its aspects, and that therefore I could have a little more confidence in their writings.

I have been wrestling with faith for nearly 50 years now, and my understanding changes in small ways fairly often – but when I say that, I suspect I mean something different than you do. I do not mean by “faith” a set of rules for conducting my life. I mean love for and trust in God.

37. As an evangelical, how has your support for gay marriage helped you become more passionate about traditional evangelical distinctives like a focus on being born again, the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ on the cross, the total trustworthiness of the Bible, and the urgent need to evangelize the lost?

Ah well, that’s where we really part company in a big way. I am evangelical only in that I accept and seek to follow the Great Commission and to bring people where possible to a conscious relationship with God and to seek to develop that relationship. I do not consider the instant conversion “born again” experience to be the only or even the principal way to get there. I have never felt any affinity with substitutionary theories of atonement and consider that exemplary, participatory and anti-violent concepts are far the most important ones we can see in Jesus’ willing self-sacrifice, and I don’t expect to start feeling affinity with substitutionary concepts now.

As far as the trustworthiness of the Bible is concerned, the more I study it the more I consider it trustworthy as an account of the spiritual experience at the time of the writers. However they cannot be regarded as writing reliable science or history or, indeed, anything other than their spiritual (and therefore interior) experience. The more I study the history and customs of the times they lived in and the languages and philosophies they used to think, the more I feel some kinship with them. However, I do not live in that time, do not have that cultural background, do not speak their languages and emphatically do not subscribe to their philosophies; I am therefore likely to express myself differently from them on many occasions and on many subjects, always honouring their contributions and seeking to make use of their perspectives so far as is possible in order to illuminate my own experience of God.

38. What open and affirming churches would you point to where people are being converted to orthodox Christianity, sinners are being warned of judgment and called to repentance, and missionaries are being sent out to plant churches among unreached peoples?

I do not know of any church near me which entirely accurately fits my ideal of what a church should be (and, along the same lines as Groucho Marx, if it existed it probably wouldn’t want me to join). I would mention, however, that I see no Evangelical churches which convert people to what I would describe as orthodox Christianity, as they all teach concepts which have no place in the orthodoxy of (say) the second century. I also see very little warning of sinners and calls to repentance in relation to other sins, such as arrogance, gluttony and lack of care for the needy, per Ezekiel 16:49 (which I point out describes the “Sin of Sodom”, in the process radically reinterpreting earlier scripture…). My current church comes as close as can be expected.

39. Do you hope to be more committed to the church, more committed to Christ, and more committed to the Scriptures in the years ahead?

Yes.

40. When Paul at the end of Romans 1 rebukes “those who practice such things” and those who “give approval to those who practice them,” what sins do you think he has in mind?

Oh, we’re back there, are we? Again following Douglas Campbell, I think he is chiefly encouraging his audience to look at the beam in their own eyes and to shut up about the motes in the eyes of other people. But you have to read a few more chapters than just Romans 1 to get the picture…

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, I think.

 

This all makes me wonder at the conception of God which Mr. DeYoung must have. My own conception of God drawn from the life and sayings of Jesus is that God’s attention is far more directed to issues of charity and attention to economic and social justice than it is to what his followers’ sexual activities might be. This, I can use as a basis for sharing the gospel.

A picture of a God whose current principal preoccupation is the sexual habits of a minority who have been born with minority sexual orientations is one which I cannot use as that basis; it’s a picture which, frankly, people laugh at. In all honesty, I resent Mr. DeYoung and those of his understanding being so loud about it; it gives me an immediate obstacle to evangelism before I can start talking of the love of God exemplified by Jesus.

In small group last week, we were looking at Matthew 14:22-33, which is the story of Jesus walking across the rough waters of the Sea of Galilee to the apostles in their boat, Peter asking Jesus to call him to walk on water, and Peter’s limited success. Limited in that while it initially worked, Peter became frightened and began to sink, and needed rescuing.

I commented that I had difficulty with this passage, as I could not put myself into Peter’s position. Asked why, I said I didn’t believe in the supernatural. There was a silence, and then someone said “But, you’re a Christian?” Others chipped in, and the moment passed, but I felt I hadn’t dealt with this well; in addition, I notice that we’re going to be looking specifically at the question of belief and faith next week. I think it worth clarifying the position.

Accurately, I don’t believe in physical miracles, that is to say of the “walking on water” or “water into wine” variety. Healings and exorcisms are a different matter; I have seen cures through faith, and have talked to other people’s demons as well as my own (and you should read that very metaphorically!). Communications with God are also very much another matter, including tangible apparitions. I don’t think anything physical is actually happening in these; what is happening is changes in people’s consciousnesses and the results of that, so far as I’m concerned.

Against that, I don’t actually disbelieve miracle stories as such. As miracles are, by definition, exceptionally unlikely events, I would not expect the normal rules of how things work necessarily to apply to them if they did happen, and so the presumption that everything always works along naturalistic lines would be too strong – it definitely works along naturalistic lines almost always, but the absolute statement is one which I would think it foolish to make.  I might like to be able to believe in miracles the way many of those in my faith community do, but I can’t. The nearest I can get is suspension of disbelief, an acceptance that maybe, just maybe, things will not be the way every ounce of my rational thinking says it will be.

Thus, in Peter’s position, if I stepped out of the boat I would with huge confidence expect to sink.

But that isn’t the only reason why I couldn’t put myself in Peter’s position. As someone else noted in the group, there was no obvious reason for Peter to walk on water. From Peter’s point of view, he was putting himself in danger in order that God could save him miraculously, and in Matthew 4:1-17 we have seen Jesus tempted. Note particularly verses 5-7, where Jesus is invited to endanger himself and trust in a miracle, and responds that you should not put the Lord to the test. Peter is going completely against this principle. I’ve spent years training myself not to do that, after a certain youthful enthusiasm many years ago – though that never went quite as far as one of those preaching the previous Sunday on the subject, who did actually try to walk on water…

That said, I have occasionally hoped for a miracle without any belief that one would occur, but only when every other avenue was closed to me, and only a miracle would suffice. On a very few occasions, things have, to my amazement, worked out – not always in any way which I might have asked for, but worked out nonetheless. I can’t, however, say that any of those required a physical miracle, though they have certainly required psychological ones more than once.

The thing I’ve increasingly come to recognise as I’ve studied scripture over the years is that the real message of the miraculous stories is not in the fact that a miracle has occurred, it’s something else, a deeper message which can be found (and sometimes more than one). I don’t need to believe in the occurrence of the miracle to see the deeper message. In this case it’s that one should have absolute trust in Jesus; once Peter’s trust faltered, he was in trouble.

For me, indeed, miracles which just show that Jesus (or Peter, or Paul) was something really special don’t do the job they were supposed to. Rowan Atkinson has an extremely funny satire on this attitude on You Tube. I hope readers will see this not as lampooning Jesus, but as lampooning the attitude of some, at least, of his followers. I’ve done enough studying to know that a large number of famous people of the first century and before (and a few after that) had miracle stories attached to them; the New Testament is not unique or even particularly unusual in attributing miracles to its leading characters, and (for instance) Alexander the Great, Hippocrates and Augustus Caesar have such stories, as do quite a few rabbis of the first to fourth centuries, such as Eliezer and Honi the Circle Drawer. If I accept miracles in the New Testament, I have no way of rejecting them in (for instance) the Talmud, or the Koran. Those in the Gospels, at least, do have messages beyond just “this was a very important man whom you should pay attention to” – and I don’t need miracle stories to pay attention to Jesus.

Indeed, going back to the story, if I were in that boat on the sea of Galilee and rather than asking to walk out to Jesus, Jesus asked me to step out of the boat, I would probably do that. I would expect to sink, but hope not to – and in any event trust that what he asked me to do was the right thing. Even if I drowned.

I say “probably”. I am only too conscious of the fact that I have other allegiances as well as to God and Jesus which, at least to date, I have not been willing to set aside and follow the Great Commandments to the letter, or the injunction to the rich young man. (I don’t qualify as rich by the standards of my immediate society, but by world standards there’s no doubt of it). My other allegiances are to my wife and family, and unlike the disciples, I balk at leaving them in order to follow Jesus.

But, to date, all I have is scriptural statements. If I were to have a personal message? I don’t know. I’d certainly argue, taking my cue from plenty of Biblical figures from Abraham onwards, but might obey nonetheless.

So, may be I can put myself in Peter’s shoes (at least when they were dry) after all. I feel the statement “Oh ye of little faith” could be directed squarely at me. As I’ve blogged before, maybe that makes me merely an aspiring Christian, or a not-very-good Christian. But I think, for some value of “Christian”, that’s what I am.

A couple of weeks ago, my church had a sermon and a small group session revolving round humility. I have a problem with humility (and no, that isn’t the set up for a joke like “When you’re this near perfect, it’s hard to be humble” or “Humility is my greatest virtue”). I have a particular problem being humble about things I have faith in.

It seems to me that the church generally has a lot of difficulty with this too. My link is to an article which criticises fundamentalists for too rigid an attitude and for being unwilling to consider even for a moment that they are wrong, but liberals and progressives are also guilty of this – the “Malleus Progressivorum” series on Unsettled Christianity starts with a complaint that progressives in that church aren’t prepared to consider other points of view, and much as I dislike the current move by eight “Biblical” churches in Fountain Hills to criticise the one church in town which is progressive, a close reading of the background does show that a conservative, literalist viewpoint is one which would probably feel excluded at the Fountains UMC.

And I write that despite wanting to say “And the UMC are absolutely right there, and the eight conservative churches should be excoriated”. Because liberal and progressive are so much closer to my own beliefs than is any form of biblical literalism. More “my tribe”.

My ultimate reason for wanting to criticise, though, is the thesis they are putting forward that progressive Christianity is wrong, something which you cannot espouse and still be a Christian (with “saved” and “not destined for the everlasting bonfire” close behind in the case of the conservatives). I try very hard to consider that there can be other ways of thinking about things – in fact, my last blog post considered a theological point of view which my experience tells me forcibly is wrong (namely that God might be depressed); it’s a thought experiment, suspending disbelief for a while in order to explore a set of concepts.

Note here that while I said “faith” to start off with, I’m now using the term “belief”. That’s important. To me, faith is largely an emotional commitment (involving, for example, love and trust) which has relatively little to do with logical argument; belief is something which I arrive at by considering things rationally and deciding what, on balance, I think is most likely to be the position. I try to hold my beliefs lightly (hence thought experiments involving another set of beliefs) and, as I’m a scientist by training, my root position is that any belief I have can be challenged by contrary evidence, and that what I believe for the time being should be whatever is, on my rational estimation, the most likely concept to coincide with what a situation really is. This is, of course, why I have difficulty with any belief system which starts out by saying that I need to believe in supernatural events.

That said, an insistence that I believe in the supernatural is merely an insult to my rationality, and does not affect my faith. I can, for the sake of argument, adopt the position that supernatural events may occasionally occur – and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest that someone else feels that, for them, it is essential that they do. I am interested in why they may feel that way, and open to thinking, at least for a while, as if that position were correct. I like to think that, were I to be provided with some very good reasons for doing so, I might change my mind about the absence of supernatural factors in the world. In addition, when treated as a way of talking about things rather than a statement of truth, I’m fairly happy to talk supernaturalist – let’s face it, I sometimes talk about my computer as if (in animistic fashion) it had consciousness of its own (a mischievous and malevolent one, on the whole). It may even be that some part of my subconscious actually believes that it has – but, it seems, that doesn’t apply to supernatural causes more generally.

I have not always been so epistemically humble. The 9 year old Chris who had worked out to his satisfaction that there were no supernatural entities and that scripture was on the same level as fables by Hans Christian Andersen (and somewhat less entertaining) was keen to share this indupitable truth with all and sundry, and to persuade them of the true state of affairs. Had he not, at 15, had a peak mystical experience which failed utterly to fit within a scientific-rationalist-materialist-reductionist framework, he might well have gone on to produce an adult in the mould of (say) Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.

That, however, was largely just intellectual arrogance; it went to belief but not really to faith. If there was faith there, it was unfounded faith in my own powers of reasoning.

Then came the “zap” which changed everything, and for those who have not had a peak mystical experience or some other religious experience of similar intensity, these come with a massive quantity of self-verification. Not only do you suddenly see the world in a radically different way, but you are automatically convinced of the rightness of that experience. Incidentally, I include “some other religious experience of similar intensity” not because I have ever experienced such, but because I now hold open the possibility that (for instance) the ecstatic group-based experience may have similar force and validity. I have in the past tried quite hard to find a way to various alternative expressions of peak religious experience, but have failed; I now suspect that this is a function in part of my own psychology (I am seriously introverted and have a tendency to social anxiety) and of the fact that the original experience has created or accentuated extremely well-defined mental pathways which are now my default.

As a result, for many years I was inclined to say, when pushed, that I didn’t need to “believe in” God or “have faith in” God, because I experienced God. I might have said (and probably did on occasion) that in the same way I didn’t need to believe in air, or have faith in it, because I breathed it and knew it to exist. This self-verification tends to extend to parts of my interpretation of the experience, and for many years I would have said that these were equally self-verified by the experience itself. For instance, once I found a description of this type of experience as being of a panentheistic God, it was immediately clear to me with massive force that that was the way God is. When I read passages by (for instance) Baba Kuhi of Shiraz or Meister Eckhart, or from the Oxyrhyncus papyrii (part of the Gospel of Thomas) it was immediately clear to me (with massive force) that they were talking of the same kind of root experience.

There is a potential problem there. Although in my memory the descriptions have referred themselves back to the experience, I can recall that my initial reaction was that while something massively significant and full of meaning had happened, I lacked language to express it. I have to enquire whether, had I found some other descriptive language, whether I would have seized on that instead.

I can therefore now entertain the possibility that some of what I feel  is certain due to these experiences is stretching beyond what was actually self-verified in them, although it certainly feels to me as if it was, and continues to feel that way despite a substantial amount of self-interrogation. You will not, for instance, now find me saying in response to “Why do you think that?” the blunt “Because that’s how God tells me it is”. Apart from anything else, I have found that that is a complete conversation-stopper (which, actually, was one of the attractions – I have in the past shut up more than one doorstep evangelist that way). I might like to hear the same reticence from some who feel that “this is what the Holy Spirit inspires me to say”, which I anticipate may have something of the same force for them. I recognise the look in their eyes, but wonder if they may have stretched beyond what is basic to the experience.

Let’s face it, this was an issue which confronted Paul at an early stage in his ministry. In 1 Thess. 5:19-21 he talks about prophecy, and warns “Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good.” Thus, I will always try to find confirmation elsewhere, in scripture or in the writings of mystics or other thinkers, of anything which arrives with me with this self-verifying force, and in general if I’m trying to convince someone of the reasonableness of my position, it will be by quoting these sources.

But that isn’t necessarily how I reached the conclusion… and there’s the rub. I may be acting humbly but not feeling humble. However, as the only way I know to adjust my feelings is to use the “Act as If” principle, I think this is as good as I can get at the moment. Scientific Rationalist Chris can do humility these days (it was not always so), but Emotional Chris lags behind.

In my last post, I linked to a talk by Catherine Malabou (“Emotional Life in a Neurobiological Age”). I discussed one aspect of her thesis, that political apathy could flow from a communal depressive state, one which was so deep as to prevent all emotion. I have personal experience of such a state, from which I recovered about two years ago. The post went on to argue for a social gospel and for involvement by the church in every way possible, voting and voting for positive action for the needy as well as taking such action  individually and as the body of believers.

It seems to me that there is another interesting avenue of theological speculation which can be pursued here.

I keep seeing articles “pushing back” at progressive ideas in theology at the moment; there is a series ongoing at Unsettled Christianity on this topic (Malleus Progressivorum). One of the items which keeps coming up is the orthodox concept (in the Westminster Confession and in the Catholic catechism) that God is impassible.

By this, the concept of the “unmoved mover” is invoked; impassibility means that God does not experience passions. It is linked to the concepts of immutability (changelessness) and aseity (self-sufficiency). As my link shows, however, the concept is criticized because it presents a God who does not feel anything like as we feel; to quote:- Although some take this to mean that God is “without emotions whether of joy, sorrow, pain or grief”, most interpret this as meaning that God is free from all attitudes “which reflect instability or lack of control.”

The trouble is that in operative terms, for God to have an emotion means that something we (or some other creatures) have done has changed God, and that goes not only to impassibility but also to immutability and aseity. The “most” of this statement are therefore clearly wrong; if you insist upon absolute impassibility, immutability and aseity, you must also insist that God is without emotion.

I note here that Jesus, who was and is God in Trinitarian theology, clearly felt emotions during the incarnation at least (and, I would argue from the scriptural evidence, between resurrection and ascension). Whatever your picture of the historical Jesus, I think it has to include the fact that he was passionate in what he said and did. Can it really be that the “Cosmic Christ” Jesus with whom we are left following the ascension (in conventional thinking) has lost all power to feel emotion, and thus so has the triune God?

I have criticized this aspect of conventional theology before; I cannot see how a God who is unmoved by the actions or condition of humans can be said to be loving, or compassionate, or, indeed, jealous or wrathful. Nor can I see that such a God would be likely to answer prayer, unless operating by a set of rules laid down for Godself (which was the eventual strategy by which I continued to function during some years of a total absence of emotions other than a pervading sense that “everything was wrong” and a persistent hypervigilant anxiety). I place the blame for this conception squarely on the theologian-philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas who drew their ideas more from Plato and Aristotle than from the text of the Bible; I do not think the God concept of the philosophers is the same God-concept as that of the Biblical writers, with the possible exception of the preamble to the Fourth Gospel and some moments in the Epistles.

My base position on this, however, is not drawn from scripture, is that this is not how I experience God; the God of my experience is compassion personified, pained by every pain suffered by any created thing and at least as passionate as was Jesus, who according to Colossians 2:9 (inter alia) was the locus of the indwelling of the fullness of God and according to Colossians 1:15 the “image of the invisible God”.

However, my experience is entirely subjective, and I cannot expect it to be considered authoritative for anyone else; besides, there is always the possibility that this may be a mistaken impression, despite arriving with overwhelming self-certification as true.

Could it be, I ask myself, that God is in fact now impassible, and that this is the result of severe depression? This would, I think, fit with the conclusions of Jack Miles, who (in “God, a Biography”) wrote what I consider the ultimate consideration of the Old Testament as a literary work with God as the hero, finding God’s character to have developed and changed through the text and ultimately withdrawing from personal intervention; the logic behind this could well be that God became depressed – and who could blame God for that, considering the historical wreckage outlined time and time again through the Hebrew Scriptures of what, in the beginning, God had seen as good – or even “very good”?

There has been for some time now a school of theology which proclaims “God is Dead”, following Nietzsche’s statement “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”, though the concept originated with Hegel. I still remember the stir when my local vicar preached, in a service recorded for the BBC, on the topic (something which was one of the factors instrumental in my taking Christianity seriously as a potential language of description of the experience of God). Sadly, this was in the 1960’s and isn’t as far as I can tell accessible online. One of the things which is explained by this kind of thinking is, of course, the relative lack of action in the world of anything which might be called “God” compared with historical records. Peter Rollins, the most recent of this school, is inclined to say that God is “undead”, i.e. is dead but doesn’t yet know it…

There is also a recent book called “God is Unconscious”, which I haven’t yet read (so here’s another review). Only one of the two meanings is “literal” unconsciousness (the other is “having become part of the unconscious”, which resonates with Rollins’ thinking); literal unconsciousness would, however, provide another way of considering the silence of God which Jack Miles ends his book with.

I could, however, propose that God is neither dead nor unconscious, he is merely horribly, deeply depressed, and as such has become unable to display or to feel affect (emotion). Constrained by kenotic self-emptying and respect for the self-determination of God’s creation, there is perhaps nothing God can do beyond, perhaps, a subtle and almost subliminal insistence, as portrayed by Jack Caputo. When combined with a compassion and empathy elevated to God-like intensity, who would not be depressed? This would be another reason for the withdrawn character which Jack Miles finds developing during the course of scripture, at least until the New Testament (though I grant that my own conception of kenosis which I link to above is sufficient without the element of psychoanalysis).

Someone is no doubt going to say “That’s far too anthropomorphic, God cannot be expressed in such human terms”, possibly adding that it’s potentially blasphemous. Well, maybe – that would, after all, argue a God much like the God of the philosophers. But aren’t terms like “jealous” and “wrathful”, even “loving” or “good” also too anthropomorphic? Those are definitely terms used in the Bible, at least in the Hebrew Scriptures which form part of it, to describe God. Perhaps “depressed” is not too unreasonable an addition?

Perhaps, in our prayers, we should be expressing a little compassion towards God, some sympathy in this plight?

And, moved by it, we should do what we can to make creation (including the relationships of humans with each other) again something on which God can look and say “it is very good”.

A chance following of a link from a friend’s facebook feed led to me finding the Jericho Brisance blog, on which is a section labelled “Journey”. The writer, Matt Barsotti, is there chronicling his steady realisation that the scriptural foundations of his conservative Christian belief were untenable, together with the resulting loss of faith, and he does so very well, and very movingly.

I, of course, have moved in exactly the opposite direction, though I’ve ended up with complete agreement with Matt’s sources (just not with his disillusionment). By the age of about 9, I had decided that the entirety of scripture was exactly as believable as stories of Santa Claus or W.E. Johns’ “Biggles” books. In other words, it was complete fiction, possibly enlivened by some reference to actual history (as were some of the early Biggles books). However, at around 15 (it might have been 14, I’m not now sure which side of my birthday it occurred) I had a peak spiritual experience, species mystical, and embarked on a quest to find a way of repeating it and a language in which it could be talked about (and scientific-rationalist-materialist-reductionist just didn’t do the job for the second purpose).

(Incidentally, apologies to those who have read about this bit of my story in other posts; blogposts tend to be read individually, and it needs rehearsing for that reason).

As I shortly afterwards attended a lecture on Mysticism and bought Happold’s book on the subject, much of the search for a language centered round those religions whose mystics formed part of Happold’s anthology, while the search for repetition involved various occult groups as well, plus some “native religions” and their shamanistic practices. I was adequately convinced, before long, that most (if not necessarily all) major religions provided a functional basis in which mystics could find a language of expression, and that all their scriptures without exception needed to be viewed as something other than history. Some, I found, were very keen that their mythos be regarded as fact, others (such as Hinduism) regarded their myths much more lightly, and some (generally the modern pagan revivals) were arriving at the idea that their god-images were constructs.

I spent significant time exploring most of those which were accessible to me (much aided by a period at university where faith traditions which were unrepresented in my somewhat backwoods home town were available) at least far enough to get a decent picture of “how they ticked” from a believer’s perspective, and, of course, how their spiritual practices worked – and I tried the latter. Unsurprisingly, considering my working hypothesis, I found praxes from a wide variety of sources which seemed (in a purely anecdotal sense) to improve the chances of peak spiritual experience.

Now, among Happold’s anthologised writings were a couple from St. John and St. Paul, and a couple from the Oxyrhyncus papyrii (which since Happold wrote the book have proved to be fragments of the Gospel of Thomas). The Oxyrhyncus fragments convinced me that Jesus was a mystic (or at least that the Jesus portrayed in Thomas was a mystic; if in fact he were not, there was a major mystic in the framework whose writings were attributed to Jesus). I had rather more difficulty with the apostles – they were very heavily Christ-focused, and my working hypothesis as to Jesus was that he was a human mystic with a particularly close connection with the divine, whereas both John  and Paul saw a sort of divinised figure only loosely connected with the human Jesus as being that entity with which they had connection. It took me quite a while (and a study of outright Christ-mystics such as Teresa de Avila, John of the Cross, Augustine, Thomas a Kempis) to see them as experiencing what they called Christ as what I had come to call God.

In the meantime, my favoured Christian mystics were pseudo-Dionysus, Meister Eckhart and the writer of the Theologia Germanica, who wrote of God rather than of Christ. After considerable time, however, I arrived at the concession that while I did not think that the Jesus who taught in Palestine in the first century was equivalent to that which the Christ-mystics had experienced, post mortem the way in which Jesus had survived had become so much identified with God that I could treat them as merely using an alternative term for the root of what was effectively the same experience, and at that point St. John  and St. Paul began to open up for me to some extent (an opening up which is continuing – I still have some challenges with both).

Now, reading Matt Barsotti’s account of his slow and painful exit from Christianity, I note that he does seem on occasion to have had experiences which might potentially have given him a basis to develop a strong praxis leading to deeper experience. The trouble is that he was fixed with a whole rationale for faith based on an understanding of what the scriptures are which conflicts with science, archaeology, extra-Biblical texts and historical-critical scholarship, and he found that unsustainable – as he puts it “error in line one”. I have never been in that position, having never had any of this baggage.

Sadly, on at least two occasions (many years ago now) I know that my position has served to propel someone else into a path like Matt’s, ending in a lack of any faith whatsoever – I’ll call them Sue and Steve, though those weren’t their names. I would really prefer not to be the instigator of that kind of pain and loss, particularly if (as proved to happen with Sue and Steve) the result was a collapse of faith without a replacement understanding. My problem is that I do not know of any reliable way in which a peak unitive mystical experience can be forced (merely a set of practices which seem to encourage that assuming that you have already formed the pathways to get there through a prior experience). I can’t, therefore, say “do this and you will have an experience like mine, which will be self-validating”, only “I have found that doing these things tends to improve the frequency of such experiences if you’ve had one to start with” and without that it’s difficult for me to propose with confidence an alternative way to belief.

I ask myself if there is a way to move in the same direction as Matt, but to do so with a safety net of an alternative understanding which is at least reasonably proof against modernity. In my last post, I reviewed a really rather good attempt to provide such an understanding. I suspect that that would not have done for Matt, nor for Sue nor Steve. It is not aimed at a specifically Christian belief, after all, merely at one which sees validity in a sort of theistic belief of huge generality – as one might expect from a twelve-step desire to justify “a God of your understanding”.

Also among my recent reading has been “The Evidence for God” by Prof. Keith Ward. Prof. Ward is an Anglican clergyman and a philosopher and theologian of some note, having enough earned doctorates to satisfy any two or three lesser academics. I wonder, would that have helped? In fact, I don’t think so. Prof. Ward puts forward a very convincing “on balance” argument for the rationality of belief in a personal God, using his philosophical skills to do so (and in an eminently readable fashion), but it stops short of justification of a specifically Christian faith. I move on to “The Predicament of Belief” by Philip Clayton and Steven Knapp, which I have just finished reading.

This is an excellently reasoned and equally accessible book; it passes through some of the philosophical background with rather more speed than does Prof. Ward’s, accepts the major challenges to Christian belief (which it identifies as science, the problem of evil, religious plurality, the state of the historical record (i.e. the principal area which Matt found insuperable) and finally the claim of resurrection. It’s also aimed at preserving what it calls a “minimally personalistic theism” which will allow of acceptance of the most foundational Christian positions without compromising any adherence to science or historical method, particularly when bolstered by personal experience (which any rationalist needs to accept may well be evidence for them, but is not evidence for a disinterested outsider), and to my mind does it very well indeed. It even goes so far as to put up a philosophically sustainable argument for retaining a scientific-rationalist mindset and yet preserve a form of belief in a physical resurrection, should that be thought necessary or desirable. I doubt it would suffice as a tool for evangelism, but that’s not its aim; that is to permit someone with an existing commitment to Christianity to remain within at least the “liberal Christian” fold.

I have to ask, however, whether even this would have been enough to help Matt preserve even a minimal Christian identity (or Bart Ehrman, who is perhaps the best known individual to have trodden this path, and whose books form part of Matt’s path). The problem there is that having once accepted the inadequate and, to my mind, often downright false set of arguments for conventional evangelical Christianity (and I have in mind, for instance, Josh McDowell, Lee Strobel and Nicky Gumbel as major proponents of these), to have them demolished involves a major loss of trust. I’m not sure how you would go about repairing that.

Any reader who has not so far vowed never to read my blog again (unless by chance they’re new to my thinking) is probably not going to be advancing the kind of apologetics I’ve been criticising here, but just in case some doughty soul has managed it, this is a plea to review your apologetics and try to advance the possibility, at least, that the standard evangelical model might, just possibly, not be entirely sustainable for all Christians. Just a possibility that it could be wrong (and that there are nevertheless possibly sustainable ways of maintaining a Christian faith) might be sufficient, sometime in the future, to prevent another departure to atheism or (at best) to the ranks of the “nones”.

Speaking for myself, I tend these days to be careful to avoid raising the objections to McDowell apologetics if there are signs that someone is getting too stressed by the suggestion. I don’t, after all, believe in salvation by correct intellectual conception. In addition, if someone has had any kind of spiritual experience, I strongly suggest that they hold on to that, and remember that you don’t have to understand someone in order to love them.