Eyre Lines

I saw the first facebook mention of Richard Dawkins’ recent comment about it being (potentially) immoral not to abort a Downs Syndrome foetus and winced. For a very bright guy, occasionally Dawkins shows all the mental acumen of the average flea.

Firstly, a Twitter message is clearly entirely inadequate to do justice to the moral implications of the situation. I’m not sure the several additional messages and articles which have appeared following that tweet are adequate either, but a tweet is just blatantly a stupid way of doing this.

Secondly, within his own rationale (of reducing suffering), he was unable to arrive at the conclusion he did on the basis of the information available. He didn’t know enough about the circumstances.

Thirdly, he seems to have ignored the testimony of very many parents of Downs Syndrome children and of those who know Downs Syndrome people, which should have led him to question his blanket assumption that they were likely to suffer. In fact, on the evidence I have (which is also inadequate), it seems to me that a majority of Downs Syndrome children lead very happy, if tragically short, lives.

However, a principal reason why I winced was that I anticipated the storm of comment likely to emerge from conservative Christian voices. I needed only to wait for Sunday, and a sermon in which this was mentioned. This thing was, the preacher added that in a way he respected Dawkins for following his atheism to it’s rational conclusion, whereas so many atheists didn’t. His assumption, of course (shared by the vast majority of his congregation) was that any Christian would know that this was just wrong. Not necessarily wrong because of any consideration of the life quality of a Downs Syndrome person, but because abortion is just wrong in every case. Wrong because it is forbidden to kill another human being, and because a foetus is another human being.

It is not clear to me that the general course of Christianity historically has held this, far less the previous course of Judaism. It is correct to say that from a very early stage, Christianity generally has frowned on all forms of preventing new life arising from sexual relations, but the rationale for this has not historically been avoidance of killing, but the transmission of human life as a primary purpose of the sacrament of marriage. The focus was, therefore, on banning contraception until the mid 20th century. This is not, I think, now the majority position within Christianity, although it is still the declared position of the Catholic Church. Abortion, of course, was a somewhat aggravated case of contraception from the point of view of the Church.

I do not think, given the current overpopulation of the planet, that Christianity should be advocating for unlimited increase of humanity any more.

As the tenor of thinking in society generally shifted in favour of planned parenthood, abortion became the touchstone, but in conservative protestant churches on the alternative ground that it was the killing of another human being. This required a shift of thinking, as prior to then, a foetus had only generally been regarded (as were sperm) as a potential human being. Indeed, if you go back to (say) the Middle Ages, it is uncertain whether the church generally regarded under age children as being fully human beings; various states had “lesser crimes” of infanticide for small children, for instance, and children still lack many of the same rights or privileges attaching to adults more or less everywhere. An abortion, in other words, was wrong, but a far lesser wrong than was murder.

It has thus become an entirely tenable position within modern Liberal Christianity that, in certain circumstances, abortion is permissible; indeed, a major factor in decision making should be the alleviation of suffering (just as Dawkins proposed) both of the anticipated child, if born, and of the mother.

As it happens, as a result of my panentheism, I do think that abortion is always a wrong, as it results in the death of a living organism. I do, however, see a spectrum rather than a somewhat arbitrary fixed line, so it is also a wrong to kill a sperm (but a far lesser wrong), and it becomes progressively more wrong as a foetus progresses towards birth. But then, I also see it as a wrong to kill any living thing (a wrong which I commit on occasion, including euthanising pets who are in extreme pain and swatting insects, and which is extremely frequently committed on my behalf, bearing in mind that I eat meat – though vegetables are also alive…). I am not convinced that we draw the line between permissible and absolutely wrong in the right place. Indeed, I am not completely sure that a line should be drawn on one side of which is an absolute.

Of course, in point of fact, most laws in ostensibly Christian countries allow (and have allowed since the earliest Christian country) the killing of even adult human beings in some cases; self defence or the prevention of serious harm to others, for instance, war (which I massively disapprove of, though I’m not necessarily a pacifist – yet) or, in some places, as a punishment for offenders (which I might countenance only on the basis that it’s a better option than life in some prisons, and then as an option offered to the prisoner). There are even a few prominent Christian voices supporting voluntary euthanasia in some extreme cases, to reduce suffering (using, so far as I can see, the same “social hedonism” utilitarian argument which Dawkins was using). In Christianity, therefore, the killing of even another human being is at most a wrong which can be outweighed by a greater wrong.

Why not in the case of abortion? It clearly cannot be because killing is always an absolute wrong, because that is not what Christianity has historically held or what conservative Christianity holds now. Is it, perhaps, because it involves the killing of “an innocent”? How can it be, given that conventional Christianity has the concept of “original sin”, and there are therefore arguably no innocents anyhow?

The answer, I think, does not lie in logical argument. In fact, it lies in an emotional revulsion to using logical argument in the case of the taking of human life. I feel this myself (for any readers who wish to take exception to my argument, rest assured that I can echo Peter Rollins and say that I may offend them, but hey, I offend myself as well). I don’t think this is something for which we can find an answer in logic (although we may well find it in evolutionary biology). I have never killed another human being myself, but having at times spent significant amounts of time with soldiers (courtesy of being a Civil Defence Scientific Advisor) I know both that they more or less unanimously attest that there is something viscerally different about killing another human, something with a deep emotional impact which surprised some of them, and that meeting people for the first time, one of the questions everyone wants to ask (although some are hesitant to do so) is “have you ever killed someone?”.

Dawkins, in other words, was going to places which we are typically both fascinated by and repulsed by, and seemed unmoved by that. That isn’t the hallmark of an atheist, it’s the hallmark of someone who is intellectually brave. There have been plenty of intellectually brave Christian thinkers, and sometimes their logical excursions produce stomach-churning results too (and I’m thinking of Calvin’s predestination here).

Or maybe the intellectually foolish. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between brave and foolish.

There is an article in New Scientist by a couple of eminent professors, one of Hebrew Bible and one of New Testament, dealing with a variety of leaders of Christian groups who ascribe the Ebola epidemic to a divine punishment.

I have absolutely no time for people who do this, and still less for people who do it and then fail to render assistance to those who are suffering because “it is God’s will”. I agree with everything the writers say, in fact.

But I am surprised that neither of them marshals specific arguments from the traditions they teach. Where, for instance, is the reference to the book of Job (by either of them) in which, inter alia, Job is afflicted with a number of diseases through absolutely no fault of his own, and his “friends” who suggest that this is divine punishment for him secretly having been a bad lad are roundly criticised by God? Where is the reference by Candida Moss to John 9:3, in which Jesus says “neither this man nor his parents sinned” in response to his disciples asking why a man had been born blind?

I rather suspect the authors of the Fourth Gospel of having minimised the acerbity of Jesus’ comment here; this was, after all, someone who consorted with all the kinds of people whom the ilk of leaders who make these remarks regard as “undeserving”, i.e. with agents of a foreign invader, members of despised religions, extorters of taxes, prostitutes and other sinners, and who healed profligately and in circumstances distinctly frowned on by the religious authorities of the day. He was quite commonly acerbic with those religious leaders, and (particularly in Mark) not terribly polite to his disciples when they failed to understand things (Peter being told “get thee behind me, Satan” springs to mind).

I can easily insert words which the Jesus of my understanding may have said and which have been left out here, such as “have you understood NOTHING?”

And that is pretty much my response to any leader describing himself as Christian who makes such crass remarks.

Enthused by Mark Sandlin, who is running a series of posts about how he finds it difficult to live with a variety of Christian doctrines (which you may translate as “about ways in which he is a heretic”, and some of his commentators do), I feel like tackling a point which has been exercising my mind for a while.

You could word it as “was Jesus unique?”, but that doesn’t get to the heart of it. The heart of it, it seems to me, is the thought that, without Jesus, no-one could be “saved” (Jn. 3:16-18, 14:6 and several other verses). The subtext of that is that by being born, living, dying on the cross and being resurrected, Jesus changed the possibility of relationship between man and God in a fundamental way. Putting it much more directly, in Jesus, God made it possible for himself to save people (whether from Satan, sin, death, Hell or some other suboptimal result), whereas without him, God could not do that.

I seem to find this idea underneath the thinking of quite a lot of otherwise fairly progressive, even postmodern Christians who I read. Jesus has to be doing something that no-one else could do. Well, isn’t that the message of the two passages from John above? John 3:18 reads, after all, “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” Some of these have apart from this belief-sets which are very congenial to me, but still insist on this point. Among other things, it seems to me that this makes interfaith dialogue extremely difficult.

It seems to me that this species of uniqueness cannot be the case.

Firstly, if (which I do not personally accept, but which most of those with this mindset do) God is omnipotent, it is self-evident that God could save people however and whenever he wanted, and as a general rule has done exactly that, according to scripture more generally. It makes a mockery of the repeated divine statements that he will save Israel, for instance, if he actually condemns them for not having accepted Jesus (in many cases, because they died before Jesus was even born), e.g. Is. 43:1-13. It contradicts, I think, Paul’s argument in Romans 4:1-8, which not only suggests that at least Abraham has “saved” status without reliance on Jesus, but also refers to David’s words in Ps. 32:1, which do not make sense unless God is indeed counting righteous, and therefore saving, the undeserving, some centuries before Christ.

Secondly if (which I definitely believe) God is omnibenevolent, it seems to me inconceivable that he would leave it so late to institute this system of salvation, likewise restrict it to people who needed to do something. If you accept “sola gratia”, John’s passages seem doubly difficult to accept when taken in the usual reading.

Thirdly, though (and for me this is the clincher from an objective point of view), this mindset requires that you think that God got things wrong when setting out various schemes of salvation earlier than the New Testament. I grant that Paul’s argument in Rom. 1-8 does seem to indicate this on the normal reading (not so much so on the New Perspective” readings), but this is to me a prominent reason for thinking that the normal, Martin Luther reading is flawed.

I admit that I do not understand a divine perspective which requires belief (which quite a lot of people of my acquaintance are entirely unable to have) in order to save someone, entirely independently of what they do, who they are and how they behave.

There is a fourth reason, which weighs heaviest with me, however, which is that as I have a personal experience of God as radically omnipresent, as in everyone and everything, the concept of cutting off any person for any reason whatsoever is not something which I can contemplate God doing, even if s/he could (and I do not think s/he could without going against his/her nature). This has to stem from creation itself (see some of my earlier posts) and cannot, therefore, change due to a single historical event.

What clearly can change, and did, is the thinking of what is now cumulatively a very large number of people, and is arguably still a very substantial proportion of the population of the earth (larger still if you consider that Islam venerates Jesus as the prophet Isa). The story of Jesus changed the thinking of a group of early Christians in eastern Anatolia who produced the writers of the Fourth Gospel, including at least one Christ-mystic, for instance, and who could not contemplate being in the relationship they now saw themselves in with God save for the life, death and resurrection of Christ. It changed the thinking of a first century Pharisee who had an ecstatic experience on the Damascus road making him a Christ-mystic and who changed his name to Paul. It has changed the thinking of billions of people in the various Christian and Christian-derived churches and religious bodies over the last two millennia.

And, of course, it has changed me. Jesus is unique to me, as he has been unique to those billions. I can’t say that Jesus figured in my initial ecstatic mystical experience, nor in the several I have had since; as far as I can conceive, these have been unmediated experiences of the One God, which makes me a God-mystic. He has figured in a number of other experiences I have had resulting from Ignatian directed prayer, but those have been as a result of definite effort on my part to think in the Ignatian mould; although these too could be described as “mystical”, they have not been so powerful or so transformative.

However, when it comes to how I should act, there, Jesus is most definitely the boss, the exemplar. He is also, to me, the ideal of someone who was a God-mystic.

But I don’t think his life, his death or his post-mortem appearances made any difference to who God saved. What it did was make a difference to whether a very many people knew themselves to be saved, knew themselves to be beloved of God.

This may be just another piece of fun. Then again…

I got to thinking recently about a few things put together: the film “Hancock”, Larry Niven’s short story “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” and Israeli excuses for civilian casualties in Gaza.

“Hancock” features a drunk, depressed superhero who overdoes even the simplest attempts to use his powers, particularly in the beginning of the film. “Man of Steel…” discusses the immense problems faced by Superman in having sex with Lois Lane. Israel, of course, says that it is extremely difficult to avoid civilian casualties when trying to kill terrorists who are moving among a civilian population – dodging the issue that they are using weapons built to cause major damage in an area rather than more surgical means (or, indeed, just not trying to kill anyone where there are a load of civilians around). The first two are comedies, the third is the antithesis of comedy.

In all these cases, the issue is of someone who possesses immense power, but is unable to moderate it or apply it in a minutely controlled manner in order to prevent damage which is not desirable.

However, there was a fourth thing in my mind at the time (and actually, it was the first thing which I was thinking about), that being the issues I have with omnipotence, and why, if God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, the world is still full of things happening like – well – Gaza. The usual argument (with which I tend to agree) is that you can’t have all three of these at the same time, and if anything has to give it’s not omnibenevolence, i.e. God’s love for everyone (and everything). I’m usually fairly happy to dispense with omnipotence and omniscience.

But here’s the thought – maybe God does have the kind of omnipotent power which can speak an universe into existence (as is one interpretation of Genesis 1). Maybe he can even manage the rather greater fine tuning needed to stop the rotation of the earth while simultaneously temporarily cancelling the inertia of the earth and everything on it, and then reversing the process, as in Joshua 10, where the sun stands still in the sky at the siege of Jericho (in a literalist interpretation), or the (by those standards) additional delicacy of touch of parting the Red Sea – but that’s as fine as it gets. Maybe, if he tried to (for instance) create me a parking space in response to prayer, the best he could manage would be a whirlwind which would destroy the supermarket I was planning to visit, killing most of those in it as well as shifting a few cars?

Perhaps this is just a ridiculous suggestion. If it is, though, it’s probably because omnipotence is a ridiculous concept.

In the first post in this series, I talked about how classical philosophical ideas didn’t cope well with modern science, and suggested that the same might hold with theology. In the second, I talked a bit about Process Theology and why I’d avoided it to date. In the third, I outlined some concepts in classical theology and three problems which that gives rise to. In the fourth, I explored two less than fortunate consequences of the dualism of classical Greek philosophy; this post deals with more.

To amplify further, classical philosophy dealt, by and large, with metaphysics, that which lay beyond physics. The “physics of the day” was more advanced in many respects than it had any right to be, considering that it had almost no conception of scientific method and was drawn almost entirely from musing on data drawn from everyday experience. I say “more advanced” because it had, for instance, the concept of the “atom”, the a-tomos, the undivisible minute building block of all matter, the concepts of force, power and potential, even, arguably, the concept of the field. These concepts took physics a very long way, indeed up to the point at which Einstein proposed matter-energy equivalence, special and general relativity, quanta and wave-particle duality (and various other scientists were proposing other equally revolutionary breaks with anything which could be sensibly described by the physics of the day).

The classical metaphysics followed the same lines, and used the same concepts as its building blocks.

The snag is that we now have a better understanding of the material world in which concepts such as “essence”, “the material”, even “spirit” do not have anything like the same basis as they did in the classical world (and we need to remember that the thinking of the classical world was effectively the only way to think until at the earliest the nineteenth century, although some philosophers and theologians had been delving beyond that as early as the seventeenth century). Some of them are, in truth, incoherent in the eyes of a Physicist (and I used to be one).

The sixth (and for the moment the last) problem is the failure of classical philosophical ideas to deal with continua and with enmeshed and interdependent phenomena, which are a significant feature of modern physics. This leads, in theology, inter alia to a tendency to create binary opposites; that dealt with in the last post (spirit and matter), heaven and hell, good and evil, God and Satan, sinful and justified (or redeemed, or forgiven), orthodoxy and heresy as some of many instances.

Callid Keefe-Perry puts things this way:- “One of the struggles that I believe we face is that even the language we use to talk about talking about God is marred with the marks of a Hellenization that does not well suit the numinous.  When we postulate that God may be too transcendent, we seem to be articulating a vision of God that is somehow fixed “out there,” something akin a quasi-Platonic Form of Divinity.  Indeed, Plato’s description of the Form of Beauty seems not too far removed from how many talk about God: “It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself” (The Symposium, 211b).  That is, the transcendent Form is so far removed from our world and our experience of the world that the best we can hope to do is experience some lesser reproduction of the thing.  The result of this thinking then, is that the best we can do when attempting to articulate something transcendent is hope to name some flawed copy of the thing we actually sought to speak.  I reject this construction.”

Now, process doesn’t really suffer from this dualism, as it stresses interconnectedness and relationship over hard and fast boundaries. It tends more to see things as centered on some point, but as attenuating from that point and not being really “bounded”, if indeed it sees things as “things” at all – there is more of a tendency to talk of “events” and, of course, “processes”. In addition, at the level of human beings as biological entities, we are, in terms of modern concepts of biology, not discrete entities – we are, for instance, dependent for our functioning on a host of bacteria (as many Yoghurt adverts will tell you); we are not on the level of groups of us truly independent, as most models of social structure will say. As such, process-relational thinking is a far better fit to what we now know about the most basic mechanisms of the universe.

It is also, however, a better fit with scripture. The bulk of scripture is the Hebrew Scriptures, which were by and large not written with a classical Greek philosophical framework. The result is that concepts such as omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, impassibility and even incorporeality, transcendence and simplicity are at best underdetermined by the texts and at worst flatly contradicted by some. Yes, you can find proof texts which state something about God which is along each of these lines, but you can find other texts which cannot be sensibly understood if you attribute to God these characteristics.

The result is that in the writings of, for instance, Bruce Epperley and John Cobb, process theology starts looking very promising as an alternative way of looking at theology to replace the Platonism or Aristotelianism of traditional theology.

Bo Sanders says of Process-Relational theology:- “This is not a simple tweak of the existing system (like Open theology). This is not a program that you just download and install into your already in place operating system. It is not a patch that employ to get rid of the bugs and kinks in the classical program. Relational thought is a different operating system (to use the fun Mac v. Microsoft Windows analogy).” He also remarks:- “When someone looks into Process (or many other schools) and wades into the explanation against substance/matter and its replacement with packets of time/moments/actualities – it is just too much jabber-talkie and vocabulary.”

Here is the real problem: although in the writings of process theologians (as opposed to process philosophers) Process is very attractive, there is a really major shift in how you need to start viewing the universe as a whole, not just how you view theology. I’ve already confessed to a certain degree of blind spot towards philosophy generally, although I also feel a need to be as solidly based as it’s possible for me to be. That said, for upwards of 40 years I’ve looked at the universe at its most basic level as not being composed of “things”, not being best described by a substance/matter kind of description, and I’m happy to carry on with that.

However, I also learn from that background that it isn’t on the whole useful to expand that way of looking at things to a more general context. I may, for instance, know that both myself and the wall next to me are composed of emptiness with some widely spaced vibrations going on (and as a result of mystical experience be entirely confident that the boundary between myself and these things is not a true boundary at all), but that does not mean I can get up and walk through the wall (as direct collision of the vibrations could in theory be avoided). I am sitting on a chair; I do not fall through it, despite it being composed mostly of empty space. It is far more practical for me to regard the wall, the chair and myself as distinct objects occupying discrete amounts of space. A really good comprehensive theology should reflect that, as well as the basic fact of my being a set of vibrations.

However, as the universe is clearly (from physics) a set of vibrations, of events and processes, rather than a set discrete entities (or a single entity), and as at the biological and social levels I am not truly single, separated and discrete, a really good comprehensive theology should reflect that as well. That may not be “process” as such, but it has to be relational.

A lot of theologians these days are talking about an interpretation of God which does not see him as a kind of superhero (as I criticised recently). John Caputo talks of the “weakness of God”, Peter Rollins talks of abandoning the concept of the “big other” and suggests that the message is that we are all broken, not that God will fix it, process theologians such as John Cobb talk of a relational God who involves himself with humanity but does not control.

It’s nice to feel one is not alone!

Now, I am a man. I suffer from the age-old problem that when you come to a man with a problem, he will either tell you how he thinks you can fix it or he’ll offer to fix it himself – and this does not improve communication with women, who, when they bring a problem to you most often want you to sympathise with them, to enter into their pain, to be present for them. It’s taken me a lot of years of marriage to get this idea into my thick skull, and I still not infrequently revert to type and start suggesting solutions to my wife, which proves not to be what she was looking for.

This breed of theologians, however, are now talking of a theology of the cross in which God is seen as entering into the suffering of the world, demonstrating that he is not in fact the unmoved mover, the unfeeling omnipotent one moving human pieces around for some cosmic purpose (in much traditional theology, the purpose being to become able to forgive humanity). It’s the kind of image which I talk about in connection with Matt. 25:31-46, in which I see God as being damaged when we cause or allow damage to any other human being – “What you did not do for them, you did not do for me”.

This is very much the kind of response to problems which women, rather than men, tend to gravitate to.

So, it occurs to me that there is a fault in what I’ve written so far – when I’ve mentioned God, I’ve used the term “he”. In relationships, it looks very much as if God is more female than male – so I should perhaps have been using the term “she”. “Verily, God is our mother” as Julian of Norwich (a woman) wrote some 500 years ago.

God is with us in all of our pain and suffering, and she feels for us in this; she does not come and offer us a “quick fix” or offer to fix it for us (at least, on the whole).

Theologians having been mostly men, it is maybe not too surprising that it’s taken the best part of 2000 years for them to start thinking of God in terms which are more female than male, as something other than a big man in the sky. In quite a lot of cases, they still can’t bring themselves to think that way.

I feel their pain, just as God does in her infinite wisdom…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On my more snarky days, I’m prone to saying that God does not wear his knickers outside his tights, by which I mean that any concept of God which I can come up with which is vaguely realistic (i.e. does not conflict with my experience and knowledge of the experience of others) is not a kind of Superman, a god-like person with abilities beyond the normal ones who rushes in to save people. But I don’t think God is a superhero, nor anything like a superhero.

This is a pity, because I’m a sucker for fantasy literature. I particularly like tales of superheroes, people with paranormal powers, but I’m also into morality fantasy where somehow or other, through some magical power or godly intervention, the seeming underdog comes out on top over the forces of evil and oppression. I also like fantasy which develops some kind of system of magic which, in the fantasy world portrayed, actually works. I would very much like to think that we live in a world where the underdog will always triumph, and where in the darkest hour the hero (or deity) intervenes to save me.

The trouble is, nothing I have ever experienced inclines me to believe that that is the way the world actually works. Granted, I have seen some strange things and heard some stranger tales from people who I would very much like to think were not the subjects of wishful thinking and some of the common cognitive biases, but frankly the naturalistic explanation always seems to be the most probable.

At least, it does when talking about any physical effects. When talking about events within the consciousness of individuals, things are rather different. There, I have huge personal reason to believe that some power, presence, entity or – well – something exists which is benevolent towards everyone and everything, extremely powerful (at least in transforming individual consciousness), omnipresent in the radical sense that everything which is, is within this something, not subject to time in the normal way and is capable of delivering to me more information than my mind is capable of absorbing. It seems to me that this something does intervene in the lives of some people (at a minimum, me, as that’s all I have personal experience of, but looking at the testimony of others, not by any means just me), and that it intervenes on occasion (but fairly rarely) without their willing it or wanting it. Mostly, people who describe experiences like some of those I have had call this something “God”, so unless talking with major league sceptics (in which case I tend to use the figure [   ], for a box which can contain a three letter label, which label might be “GOD”, but doesn’t have to be) I go with the flow.

The last paragraph contains most of the elements of what it is that is [   ] of which I am reasonably confident. You can add to that, however, the observation that transforming contact with [   ] does not seem to me something which can be reliably worked towards, let alone obtained via some formula along the lines of “do these things, and then this happens”. In addition, it is necessary to surrender to the experience in order for it to “get off the ground”, to stop analysing it as it happens, to lay aside all preconceptions and formulae. While I did for a significant time arrive at the position where that contact was pretty much “available on demand”, what was actually available on demand was the stilling of the conscious mind and the surrender of the will in radical acceptance. This gave conditions in which it seemed to me that it was highly probable (at least) that contact would be felt. I’m working on getting back to that at the moment.

Now, this may be a “supernatural” aspect. I don’t think of it that way, but it’s a possibility. Other than that, however, I’m afraid I can’t bring myself to trust that anything supernatural will ever occur (which doesn’t stop me hoping from time to time). This has sometimes proved to be a difficulty with people with whom I’ve been in dialogue about scripture, who often can’t initially see that it can mean anything to me. However, where I can continue beyond this point (setting it on one side “for the moment”) I’ve usually found that it isn’t actually the supernatural occurrence in a bible story which those I’m talking to find important; what they find important is the spiritual subtext, the nonliteral meaning (or meanings) which can be extracted – and we can then talk about those sensibly, and not uncommonly agree. This has in the past enabled me to conduct productive bible study sessions in which I have agreed interpretations with complete Biblical literalist inerrantists, to their considerable surprise.

And yet, we still end up coming back to the sticking point that they think something supernatural actually happened, and I don’t, and they don’t want to let go of insisting that something supernatural happened and that I really need to believe that it did. On occasion, a particularly well-natured dialogue partner of this stance has allowed me to conduct an extremely respectful cross-examination of them, ending up with a motive. That motive, it turns out, is always that if nothing supernatural happened then, then nothing supernatural is going to happen now either – and they want to be able to continue to believe in that.

They want to believe that superman may come and save them, in other words. Words far too snarky for me to ever use to their faces, but that’s the crux of it. Not only that, but they commonly see me not being able to believe it as somehow diminishing the possibility that it might. This is even more of a pity than it is that I actually can’t bring myself to believe it, as I am comfortable with the situation and they aren’t.

You may realise that what I have been doing here is to propose something akin to an “operational definition” of the belief in Biblical miracles, i.e. how does the occurrence or non-occurence of a single supernatural event 2000 years ago affect what we do (and what can therefore be observed and quantified) today, proposing that in fact it doesn’t – and indeed, within that framework, it is difficult to see how it would. However, unless you are a cessationist (and I have no idea how a cessationist would react here), the occurrence of a supernatural event then makes it more possible to think that there might be a supernatural event now.

This is even more pronounced when it comes to the resurrection. Now, I also can’t bring myself to believe in a physical resurrection of the “reanimation” kind (which is what my more conservative brethren want me to believe in). Granted, they will concede that there was not a straightforward reanimation (which, of course, is slightly indicated by an empty tomb) but insist that the actual physical remains were transformed into something different, something which actually could enter closed rooms other than through the door, appear and disappear at will and be in widely separated places at virtually the same time, all of which I see as pointing at apparition rather than anything they would admit as being resurrection. Of all possible explanations of the gospel accounts, treating them for a moment as absolutely accurate, written immediately after the event eyewitness testimony (which they aren’t, of course), I consider apparition to be the most likely, granted that there then has to be some undocumented reason why the tomb was empty, again taking that as accurate eyewitness testimony.

Again, taken as a single historical miracle, I suggest that it is not possible to see any difference in what we actually do based on belief in on the one hand a reanimation-style resurrection and on the other an apparition-style resurrection. However, in practice I get even more pushback on this point than I do on the issue of miracles generally. The following gentle process of cross-examination reveals that to accept that it is viable for me that the accounts were as apparitions reduces people’s confidence that they will themselves eventually be resurrected in a body. Or, indeed, survive death at all.

It seems that personal survival, to some of them, equates to inhabiting a physical body. This is a very old concept, as much of first century Judaism lacked the concept of soul separable from the body, and it also has a strong resonance with modern concepts in biology in which the self, the consciousness is an epiphenomenon or emergent property of the body (or, more specifically, the central nervous system, in particular the brain). That said, there is current talk about the possibility of mapping and storing the personality and memories and “downloading” them into another form, which smacks more of the concept of a soul.

What body, though? I’m currently 60, and due to normal wear and tear plus some rather bad treatment I’ve given my body over the years, I am not in the best possible health. If I had to be resurrected in a body, frankly I’d prefer the one I had at (say) 25 to the one I’m likely to have when I die. However, I’d settle for my brain being pretty much as it is now – I wouldn’t want to ditch the last 35 years worth of memories, for instance, even though 15 years or more of them were ones I wouldn’t have wished on myself had I foreseen them. But what if the brain has deteriorated by the time I die?

Conservative friends would say that this would be a perfected body. Would it then be a perfected mind as well? (If the epiphenomenon or emergent property concepts are correct, it would have to be). If it were a “perfected” mind, would it then genuinely be “my” mind? I have memories of my Twelve Step sponsor scoffing when I worried that when at Steps 4 to 7 I took inventory of my defects of character and asked God to remove these, if that indeed happened there would be no character left. “What’s to lose?” he asked, grinning.

To me, these are really idle musings. An element of certain of my mystical experiences leaves me with a degree of confidence that the brief flashes of consciousness of union with God are a pale shadow of what is likely to happen at my death, and thoughts of a physical body or the continuation of a truly individual consciousness after that point are irrelevant. I find it difficult to see how an individual consciousness could actually survive full union, to be honest. If it did, anything thereafter would be a disappointment. On this point, however, my trust in a benevolent God is absolute – whatever happens will be right and good – and beyond my capacity at the moment to do anything more than muse idly about. There are more important things by far, such as discerning God’s will for me in the here and now and carrying that out.

Whatever it is that God, or [   ] actually is…

I have this massive book by N.T. Wright, but have not yet read it. However, for some friends who have been waiting for me to do so and let them have my thoughts, Larry Hurtado (whose opinion I tend to agree with) has written a review, which is probably going to be enough for some, and sufficient to be going on with until I actually do read it (it’s second in my theology reading pile at the moment).
In the “one instinctively knows when a thing is right” mode, Hurtado says that Wright does not credit the concept of deity plus principal agent tradition as having influenced Paul, and if Wright indeed does not credit this, I think it is a mistake. There are a plethora of “principal agents” in Jewish writing current at the time (mostly intertestamental, but some canonical) including wisdom, memra, logos and Enoch/Metratron, and the “two thrones in heaven” section of Daniel 7:9-14. It is much more easily understood for Jesus to be understood as principal agent and then elevated just slightly higher than the Jewish concept admits than to assume that this was an entirely fresh leap of understanding.

Possibly against this is the idea that Paul gained his major strains of thinking directly from his peak spiritual experience. I am now confident that Paul was a Christ-mystic, in that some of his peak spiritual experience shared many features of some of my own, save that where I ascribed mine tentatively to and experience of God (working on the basis that writers who described the most similarity to my own experience ascribed theirs to God), Paul ascribed his to an experience of Jesus. There could have been an information content.

That said, I am also confident that not only our descriptions of our experiences but also to an extent the experiences themselves are moulded by the language and concept structures which we have internalised at the time when the experiences happened (I draw this from experience with eyewitnesses, noting their subconscious insistence on making a coherent story out of their actual observations, frequently contrary to what was actually probably observed). Paul is very likely to have had an internalised concept of the principal agent of God, and from his own and Luke’s descriptions would seem to have been obsessed with the legacy of Jesus, and his experience may have been moulded, and his language of description would certainly be moulded, by that concept. I, of course, due to my reaction against early attempts to teach me Christianity in the most trivial form, did not have such concepts internalised. I have since had peak experiences involving Jesus, but only after significant work assimilating a concept of him and on creating a Jesus-focus within meditation; their character has been somewhat different from that of the God-mysticism experiences.

There has been an information content to some of my own experiences as well. That said, I do not trust that information content to have been entirely independent of my previous concept-structures.

On the whole, therefore, my working hypothesis is that Paul was influenced in his talking about Christ by (inter alia) the principal divine agent tradition.

Fritz Leiber was an American writer, chiefly of fantasy and SF, probably best known for his “Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser” series. One of his early books (1943) was called “Conjure Wife”. It may not have been his best work, but it’s the one which has kept coming back to me most. It’s still in print today, it seems.

Briefly, the plot involves a young scientific rationalist professor who discovers that his wife is a witch. She has been preparing a load of charms. Our hero manages to persuade her that this is superstitious nonsense, and to remove all the charms from the house and give up this practice.

At that stage, he becomes horribly unlucky (to say the least), and eventually realises that his wife’s charms have been protecting him all this while from the offensive magic of all the other witches around. That’s all of the plot I want to give away…

This came to mind last week when I was thinking about prayer. Now, I’m moving in some circles where lots of people talk as if prayer is an extremely effective force. Granted, most of them don’t actually act that way – in general, they act extremely prudently, but also pray, perhaps following the maxim that you should pray for assistance but also take all steps possible to encourage your desired outcome to happen, and accept any assistance you actually get even if that doesn’t look much like a miracle.

I am not personally particularly convinced that prayer has ever worked for me in a tangible way, and more or less stopped doing petitionary prayers many years ago. OK, there have been occasions when I have asked for something for myself since. Apart from a few occasions when I’ve received a conviction about the next thing to do (as I follow the maxim that I should pray only for knowledge of God’s will for me and the power to carry that out), I can’t say anything I’ve asked for for myself or another has actually happened.

But what if the world is something like the one portrayed by Leiber, but instead of spells and hexes, it operates on petitionary and imprecatory prayers? Maybe there don’t even need to be imprecatory prayers involved, but the side effects of one person’s petitionary prayer may be bad results for another (and reason tells me there’s a substantial probability that this is usually the case, even if I didn’t know stories like “The Monkey’s Paw”)? No-one I know well admits to imprecatory prayer, so I sort of assume the second “maybe” would have to be dominant, or at least I do until Leiber’s paranoid fantasy bites again, making me paranoid about everyone’s motives and honesty! (Just for a moment, OK?).

That’s the snag with paranoid fantasy, it gets directly at the emotional, non-rational bit we all have (mine, I call “EC”, for “Emotional Chris”), and has a tendency to sideline your reason, either for a few moments or, sometimes, for a lot longer.