Eyre Lines

The deaths of the Maccabean Martyrs are described at some length in the book of 2 Maccabees. Antiochus Epiphanus (Epiphanus, a self-given title, meaning something close to “God with us”, and a tyrant who eclipsed anything the Romans were doing as at the early years of the first century) persecuted the Jews very generally, and a lot of martyrs are recorded as being killed for not being prepared to abandon various of the Mosaic commandments, frequently those forbidding contact with pigs. Seven in particular (together with their mother and teacher) are remembered especially. In the somewhat later 4 Maccabees the writer takes things a step further:-

“When he was now burned to his very bones and about to expire, he lifted up his eyes to God and said, “You know, O God, that though I might have saved myself, I am dying in burning torments for the sake of the law. Be merciful to your people, and let our punishment suffice for them. Make my blood their purification, and take my life in exchange for theirs.”  (4 Maccabees 6:26-29)

The tyrant [Antiochus IV] was punished, and the homeland purified—they having become, as it were, a ransom for the sin of our nation. And through the blood of those devout ones and their death as an atoning sacrifice, divine Providence preserved Israel that previously had been mistreated. (4 Maccabees 17:21-22)

Therefore those who gave over their bodies in suffering for the sake of religion were not only admired by mortals, but also were deemed worthy to share in a divine inheritance. Because of them the nation gained peace …” (4 Maccabees 18:3-4)

4 Maccabees dates from either the 1st century BCE or the 1st century CE, probably early. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that the writers of the New Testament knew not only the story (the Maccabean restoration had already given rise to the Jewish feast of Hanukkah) but also this interpretation. It is also the only event recognised within Judaism in which humans are killed and this is considered an atonement.

As a result, when  I read the NT writers and see any mention of “atonement”, my initial assumption is that they are referring to the template of atonement set out in 4 Maccabees. This does not seem to occur to anyone around me, though. The Maccabean martyrs have, it seems, been virtually completely forgotten in the protestant West (they are actually venerated as martyrs in the Orthodox and Catholic churches, particularly the former).

It is, of course, an integral part of the story of Maccabees that following the martyrdoms, things improved immeasurably for the Jewish population. History does seem to indicate that this was mostly due to the revolt of the Maccabees, which eventually forced on Antiochus the grant of some self-rule, which led to the eventual restoration of an independent state. Against this background, it is easy to see how some of Jesus’ followers would have seen him as a new Judas Maccabeus rather than a new Eleazar, and expected a revolt, but the template of Eleazar, the widow and her seven sons was still there.

It seems to me that with this background, there is no real need for other atonement theories. Granted, the text as it is might be some support for an exemplary atonement (Abelard), fits reasonably with Girardian end-of-scapegoat thinking and could readily have a Christus Victor interpretation added. It also contains the words “ransom” and “for the sin of the nation”, and thus is not completely inconsistent with the fairly early “ransom” theory, sharing the problem that it is unspecific who the ransom is paid to – though a naive reading might indicate that it is paid to Antiochus (and one might equally argue that Jesus’s death was “paid to” Caesar). The early proponents of the theory considered the debt due to Satan…

There is no suggestion of Anselm’s concept of assuaging an insult to God’s honour, nor yet of paying to God the (infinite) price of disobedience through sin in a Lutheran penal substitution manner. I note in passing that while the other concepts are somewhat enhanced by a resurrection, satisfaction and penal substitution are if anything undermined – it would seem, naively, that a death which is only temporary is of considerably less worth than a death which is permanent.

There is also no suggestion that God “provided” the Maccabean martyrs to enable him to forgive in circumstances in which he could somehow not otherwise bring himself to display his primary characteristics of love and mercy (markedly failing in the process to display omnipotence). That, I suspect, is entirely the fault of some infelicitous wording by Paul in Romans 3:25: “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood–to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished–“.

I note the variety of translations here. “Set forth”, “purposed”, “preordained”, “publicly displayed”, “proposed”, “presented”. It is clear that the various translators have had some challenges in finding an adequate term for the Greek “proetheto”, which has the literal meaning of “before-placed”. So God placed this event before us as an atonement, did he? That does not, I think, mean that his primary purpose for Jesus’ entire life was that he be a sacrifice, even a willing one. In part, at least, I would think that this is strongly suggested by the fact also relayed to us by Paul that Jesus was divinised on his resurrection, just as in 4 Macc. 18…

If that were not sufficient argument, however, note the words “He did this to demonstrate his righteousness”. The purpose is explicit; God wished to show US that he was righteous, that so great a self-sacrifice could not be left without a corresponding action of God’s, namely acceptance of the atonement (and, I would suggest, resurrection and elevation of Jesus). This, of course, clearly has to be “recieved by faith”, as there is no evidence that God treats the death in this way apart from the apostle’s word and, perhaps, the resurrection (although that could potentially have some other cause).

In my thinking, it also has to be “received by faith” as that is how the psychological mechanism works which permits us to feel better about ourselves when some member of our group acts heroically or when our leader does something commendable (the latter, sadly, being in somewhat short supply these days). The inverse, of course, also operates – I am invariably embarrassed when hearing of the idiocies or bigotries of other Christians, just as the Muslims of my acquaintance are embarrassed by the actions of ISIS.

I do, on occasion, note that Penal Substitutionary Atonement (which seems the only concept of atonement which my church understands, along with most evangelical and conservative Christians in the West) is actually the only one of the atonement theories which has real power to effect that psychological mechanism in a group of people notably including many in recovery from addiction and many with serious criminal records. This is unfortunate; I would, absent that, be suggesting that we wipe all mention of PSA from our theology books, our rituals, our speech and our thinking.

Why? Because, in the inimitable words of Tripp Fuller of Homebrewed Christianity, God is not a dick. The god-concept which is required for either satisfaction or PSA is of an unmerciful, legalistic, self-righteous prig. It bears absolutely no resemblance to the God I experience and worship.

But it does look a lot like Antiochus Epiphanus, who, if we follow through the logic of the “ransom” theory, was functioning as the embodiment of Satan.

Small groups at my church are looking at Acts 2:43-47 over the course of four weeks: ⁴³ Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. ⁴⁴ All who believed were together and had all things in common; ⁴⁵ they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. ⁴⁶ Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home^] and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, ⁴⁷ praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

This passage, it seems to me, holds out a picture of the early church in Jerusalem as the ideal of how we should live as Christians, and indeed the themes for these four weeks are along those lines.

However, it gives me a problem; I do not hold my property or income in common with others (well, apart from my wife and, before they left home, my children). I will grant that the way the passage is being presented, it is not arguing that we should actually be forming a communist group, but that is the way it reads if you take it reasonably literally, and I do not see any reason not to take it literally.

In particular, I note that shortly after this passage is the tale of Ananias and Saphira (Acts 5:1-11), in which Ananias sells a plot of land, but gives only part of the proceeds, with his wife’s knowledge, to the community; both of them are struck dead when confronted by Peter. Now, the immediate response when I raised this argument with a group member who is considerably more conservative and literalistic than I am myself was that the fault of Ananias and Saphira was lying to the community and representing that they had paid in the whole of the proceeds (which is certainly what Peter reproaches them with, but is not apparent from the account of what they actually did), and that we should not take either passage as advocating communistic living, but only considerable generosity.

I could make the same argument myself, and I have, over many years, but it doesn’t seem to me to be more than an excuse for not living fully into the Christian life. Granted, I have a great sympathy with Maya Angelou’s celebrated comment “I’m always amazed when people walk up to me and say, ‘I’m a Christian. “I think, ‘Already? You already got it?’ I’m working at it, which means that I try to be as kind and fair and generous and respectful and courteous to every human being.” This is a place where I fall down, and am likely to keep falling down.

It seems to me entirely in line with Jesus’ teaching as we know it: the story of the rich young man which appears in all the synoptic gospels ends in him going away saddened because he is not going to sell all he possesses and give the proceeds to the poor.

That said, I don’t think my church, or any other church I know of, is actually going to be doing this (and not just the person who downplayed my argument). Indeed, aside from a few notable individuals such as St. Francis, it doesn’t seem to have been the norm except in the very early church – and I strongly suspect the reason is that it isn’t actually viable. After all, we find in Romans 15:25-28 that Paul is taking a subscription to the Jerusalem church, and I can’t help thinking this might be because they ran out of money…

I’ve no taste for being the only person around doing this, quite apart from the fact that as things are, it would land me too on the list of those asking for charity (or, at least, State support as due to my health I couldn’t now expect to be able to support myself by my own labour), nor for being one of a small number who do it, landing them communally in the same position. I do wonder, however, how much that is real pragmatism and how much a frantic wiggling to avoid the consequences of really following Jesus.

Could a communitarian ethos work in a wider sense, I wonder? Just to push the pragmatic view a bit more, however, I can’t find an example of a completely communitarian society of substantial size anywhere. The countries where communism has been tried are object examples of failure (though, to be fair, none of them has actually achieved a truly communitarian society – the vast majority of them look like something between dictatorships and oligarchies). Note that when I say “failure” there, I am not talking of measures of success such as gross national product, national or individual wealth or income; the failures have been in not providing a free society and in not producing a system in which everyone is provided for “according to their needs” and is reasonably content.

I do know of a reasonably substantial number of small groups which have seemed to operate the communitarian principle with some success (not, of course, material or monetary success, but those are not only not relevant to the objective but arguably completely contrary to it), but those seem to rely partly on being small and partly on operating within a larger society which works on a market economy basis, often by accepting social payments, or by having a backer who does not operate by these rules and supports the community from excess income. I do note that the model for the slightly later church seems to have been groups supported by such rich backers, and it seems to have persisted where communitarian living has in general not.

The nearest to examples of success I can find are social democratic countries, in particular the Scandinavian ones, but there seem to me problems there: some have taken steps back from egalitarianism recently and reduced welfare spending on the basis that their welfare states were proving unsupportable (and I suspect globalisation to be the main culprit; it is difficult to maintain a welfare state when in direct competition with capitalist states operating wage slavery systems, and they worked much better before globalisation really took off), and also the populations do not actually seem to be as content as one would hope – the suicide rates, for instance, seem rather high, as do incidences of depression.

There is, however, an aspect I have not yet considered, and this is very much a feature of the story of the rich young man. “Jesus answered, ‘If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me’. When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.” (Matt. 19:21-22). There is a great freedom in letting go of an attachment to worldly possessions and wealth, both of which can easily obsess the mind to the exclusion of any kind of spirituality, and even just enjoying life; I know this not because I’ve ever voluntarily given away all or even most of my possessions, but because circumstances took them away for a time, during which I had an estimated “net worth” which was substantially negative and no reasonable prospect of employment due to illness. Now that I again have a positive net worth, can actually work again to a limited extent and have a modest but adequate pension income, I am, I think, on the right side of a paradigm change with respect to money and possessions.

I grant that giving away everything you have is a draconian way of achieving that freedom, but it may, I think, be the only option for some of us, and I think the rich young man saw that, and knew himself unable to take that step.

Against all this pragmatism, however, is the bare fact that Jesus consistently spoke against money and possessions and in favour of leaving everything and following him. That at least makes it an objective to be aimed towards, even if it’s an unattainable ideal. There is within me an urge to just believe and do, and trust that the outcome will be good, but it remains balanced by a reluctance to take a step when every indication is that it would be a disaster.

With Maya Angelou, the best I can say is that I’m working at it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watching the third episode of the excellent “Wolf Hall” last night, (caution – spoilers below) I was struck by the statement of James Bainham, a barrister and enthusiastic reformer, while cataloging doctrines with which he did not agree, that he found no scriptural justification for the concept of purgatory.

I use “enthusiastic” there with a double meaning: the usual one, and the uncomplimentary meaning understood by Wesley when he described people as “enthusiasts” – too much emotion, too much displayed, and not enough calm reason. Bainham is seen in the episode interrupting a reading of scripture in Latin at as church service by quoting the same text in English from his (banned at the time) copy of Tyndall’s translation. He ends up in jail for the second time in the episode, and is then burned alive.

Ironically, a few years later Thomas Cranmer, seen at this point as supporting Bainham’s arrest, was himself imprisoned and eventually burned for his beliefs, which by then included all those avowed by Bainham. The regime had changed, and Henry VIII’s elder daughter Mary was imprisoning and burning protestants as her father’s and brother’s church had done to Catholics.

I asked myself if I would have had the courage or foolhardiness to do as Bainham did. I not only don’t believe in Purgatory as not being supported by scripture, but I don’t believe in Hell as conventionally portrayed on exactly the same basis. To explain why would take a blog post of its own, but suffice it to say that whatever awaits us after death, everlasting torment is not a possibility I contemplate as being possible.

I do, however, attend a church which is theologically conservative, and I don’t any more keep my mouth firmly sealed about what my views on this and a number of other doctrines on which I’m not exactly orthodox. However, I’m not noisy about it, and certainly wouldn’t interrupt a service. Nonetheless, I keep anticipating a request to go elsewhere, which is as far as I’d expect this church ever to go – a previous church did invite me to leave when under intense pressure I did actually share my views on a point of doctrine.

Then, in one of those coincidences which part of my subconscious wants to tell me is divine action, a link appeared on my facebook feed describing the case of Rev. Carlton Pearson. A pentecostal minister, he found that his study of the Bible came to the same conclusion as mine, that there is no Hell-as-eternal-torment and that everyone, irrespective of beliefs, is saved. (I might mention here that I have some sympathy with the ideas of Jerry Walls as described by Richard Beck, who contemplates a purgatory-like state after death – Richard’s whole series on universal salvation is well worth a read). Rev. Pearson was roundly condemned by the pentecostal and evangelical authorities and lost over 90% of his then large congregation overnight. 500 years ago, I’ve no doubt he’d have been burned too. Of course, they don’t do that these days. Not, at any event, in the first world.

He did, however, lose a lot – and I was heartened to learn that he hadn’t admitted error and returned to the fold, had persevered, and as at the time of that broadcast had a growing congregation again. I have less to lose – I would merely lose some friends and the opportunity to be of service. That, I think, would not be sufficient to make me recant – as Cranmer initially did, though he famously withdrew his recantation on learning that he was not going to be pardoned anyhow.

No, I think I can do no other than state that the concept of a God who would ordain and maintain a place of eternal agony into which you could fall merely for having the wrong intellectual concept is not one which resembles in the slightest the God whom I experience. I think it’s a wrong, damaging and anti-scriptural concept.

But of course, no-one is going to be condemned to flames in this world or the next for thinking otherwise…

Jesus is presented throughout the gospels as a healer, but some of his most controversial healings (such as those in Luke 5:20 and Luke 7:48) involve him stating that someone’s sins are forgiven.

Now, my scientific rationalist head tells me that this is a wonderful way of healing an illness which is psychosomatic. As can be seen in, for instance, John 9:3, the thinking of the day, at least among the religious conservatives, was that any ailment was a divine punishment for some transgression, either of the individual or his forbears. This can be seen at length in the book of Job, where Job’s friends go to great lengths to try to work out how Job absolutely must have deserved all the ills with which he was being showered; of course, in the last portion of the book God is seen very explicitly to tell his friends that they are mistaken. However, Job goes against the grain of much of the Hebrew scriptures (as do Ezekiel 18  and substantial portions of Ecclesiastes, for instance Ecc. 8:14 in which the wicked prosper and the good suffer). It is hardly surprising that some of the conservatives of the day ignored these few scriptures in favour of a philosophy whereby you got only what you deserved.

Thus, if an illness were to some extent psychosomatic, with the sufferer convinced that they were being punished for some sin, being told their sins were forgiven could produce an immediate cure. At least, it could if it were believed. Jesus must have spoken with colossal authority and charisma in order for this to work.

Of course, we have little difficulty in accepting that Jesus must have spoken in just this manner, and can remember that he was said not to have performed healings when he went home to Nazareth (Mark 6:4) – it is always more difficult speaking with authority to people who remember you as a child!

However, this was met with howls of protest from the religious conservatives (labelled Scribes and Pharisees in the gospels, although it would be a mistake to consider that this conservative attitude actually typified the Pharisees of the day, still less those of later times), ostensibly because only God had the power to forgive sins. To my mind, however, the protest stemmed from the privilege of the conservatives, who were well off and respected, and saw their position as justified by their exemplary character. What could be more threatening to them than to be told that their wealth and social position was not justified by relieving the suffering of those on whom they smugly looked down?

And yet, this was a thread running through Jesus’ entire ministry. The first were to be last and the last first, the preferred companions were publicans and sinners, even the occasional prostitute or adultress, who were more worthy of heaven than the overtly religious.

Christian theology has tried repeatedly to get a grip on this principle, and has regularly failed. Conventionally, we are justified through faith alone rather than works (although James reminds us that faith without works is dead), but for the most part this has come to mean that we much have the correct intellectual appreciation of how we are, in fact, smugly justified (i.e. we must adhere to a creed or another statement of faith). And, of course, our works show that for all to appreciate…

Which leads me to contemplating the case of Rob Bell. Rob is a hugely gifted communicator, who became a “star” by founding and growing to mecachurch status the Mars Hill congregation in Grandville, Michigan, being much sought after as a visiting preacher and teacher. His “Covered in the Dust of the Rabbi” talk illustrates this . He could preach a two hour sermon to me any day (as reference to the videos I link to here and below indicates he’s very able at), and I doubt I’d look at my watch once. I pointed a Jewish friend of mine at that talk a while ago, and he responded with “boy, is he charismatic!”. Granted, he is not really a theologian, and as I agreed with my friend, the image he paints in that talk is almost certainly not authentic to the period in which Jesus was teaching, as the system of pupils of Rabbis didn’t really develop in the form he talks of until significantly later, so far as documents can reveal. However, the message of the talk is not in the slightest impaired by the fact that it probably isn’t actually historically accurate.

Incidentally, it’s probably worth pointing out that Rob may well be naturally gifted and turbo-charged by the Holy Spirit, but he also puts a huge amount of work into his craft, as another set of videos shows.

Over the last two or three years, however, Rob has been regularly vilified by the evangelical establishment for whom he was once a shining star. The reason, originally, was his book “Love Wins”, in which he has the temerity to suggest that God might actually be powerful and loving enough to not condemn significant numbers of people to endless torment. (I don’t necessarily recommend the book for reading, as it isn’t theologically rigorous and reads like one of Rob’s talks – it would be better read aloud – but there is an audiobook).

Since then, he’s compounded the felony by suggesting that homosexuality is not, in fact, a sin over and above all other sins (which is a picture I tend to get from many evangelical commentators) but an expression of one person’s love for another which should be at the very least accepted. This too is beyond the pale, as we clearly need a new category of publicans and sinners on whom to look down.

This regular condemnation has recently had a resurgence, as Rob now has a prime-time programme on Oprah’s TV network in the
States. As the link I include indicates, whereas most evangelical preachers would cut off their left arm for such an opportunity in (relatively) mainstream TV, rather than the “preaching to the choir” outlets of the regular televangelists, the fact that it is Rob who is doing this is just unacceptable.

I think I see a parallel here (although Rob would probably be uncomfortable at favourable comparison with Jesus). “Love Wins” is actually saying that everyone’s sins will be forgiven (if, indeed, they aren’t already), and his stance on homosexuality is reminiscent of Jesus’ in relation to (for instance) tax collectors. The religious conservatives are again up in arms when a charismatic and authoritative preacher suggests that God’s grace, God’s forgiveness, extends to everyone, and not just the elect few. In this case the complaints are from the increasingly Calvinistic spokesmen for “evangelistic Christianity” rather than the gospel’s “Scribes and Pharisees”.

The Pharisees, it seems, will always be with us, much like the poor.

Some while ago, I wrote what was originally a sermon and which became a blog post putting forward a mystical interpretation of the concept of the “Kingdom of God”.  That was, let’s face it, the way in which I had arrived at a conception of the Kingdom.

Now I still think that where Paul talked about being “in Christ” or being “filled with the Spirit”, Jesus talked about “entering the Kingdom”. Different ways of talking about it, but essentially the same thing. However, I don’t think that a mystical state which is thrust on some (me, for instance, at least the first time, or, perhaps, Paul) or is attained by a huge investment of contemplation and other practices (me on later occasions, or, say, Meister Eckhart) is remotely all that is contained in this very major concept of the gospels.

Some years ago, when on retreat in the Yorkshire Dales, I took the opportunity of walks in the very scenic countryside to process what I had been learning. I spent a good part of these walks in walking prayer, or walking contemplation, or walking mindfulness – but that isn’t the point here.

One day I was on such a walk, walking down a typical Dales back road flanked by dry-stone walls mingled with hedges and bits of fencing (but always looking like a considerable barrier) when I passed a number of sheep contentedly munching on the grass verge. There were other sheep in the field beyond, but I couldn’t see any way in which the roadside sheep could have scaled or penetrated the wall-hedge-fence combination. I walked on, and about half a mile on found a farmer rounding up some more sheep on the verge there. I greeted him and said that I’d passed some more sheep about half a mile back, enquiring if they were possibly his as well – apparently they were, and he thanked me.

I commented that I couldn’t see how they’d managed to get out of the field and onto the road, and he grinned. He said it all depended on what the sheep thought – he could, on occasion, string a single piece of twine across a field, and none of the sheep would cross it, because, he thought, they didn’t think they could. On the other hand, if they saw some toothsome looking grass on the other side of a wall and thought they could get to it, nothing would stop them. They became ovine Houdinis, and could escape from anything. He reckoned that he stood little chance of working out where they’d done it apart, perhaps, from finding a lot of wool stuck in the hedge, between stones or on barbed wire, and even then it often wasn’t obvious how they’d actually managed to scramble over or through. Sheep, he said, aren’t really built either for climbing or for wiggling through small holes, but they did it anyhow. If they thought they could do it, they could do it, just as if they thought they couldn’t do it, they wouldn’t even try.

I’m inclined to think that humans work in much the same way (and it seems that Jesus, who talked of his “sheep” regularly, may have agreed), and so are the host of self-help guides you can buy – the power of positive thinking is at the root of most of them. Granted, the farmer was exaggerating (it is certainly possible to build a sheep-proof dry stone wall), but then, so are the self-help guides. An exaggeration for effect does not, however, invalidate the basic principle (something which a number of atheist critics of biblical accounts could do well to remember).

It seems from the accounts in Acts and at least one external comment (“How these Christians love each other!”) that the early Christians were living as if the Kingdom was a reality among them, according to the principles which Jesus had set down. Certainly loving one another, from the accounts, but also contributing massively into the common pot available for sustaining all. That “all” was not always restricted to Christians, either; they also loved and supported their non-Christian neighbours. It was perhaps a relatively short-lived experiment; there’s some evidence in Paul taking subscriptions to support Christians in Jerusalem, for instance, that “sell all you have and follow me” can lead to a degree of financial chaos if enough people follow it at the same time. I don’t know, but perhaps Jesus was exaggerating for effect there? Certainly by the time Christianity became the religion of empire under Constantine (and in my opinion sold its birthright for a mess of political power in the process), this was no longer characteristic. However, it’s an idea which keeps cropping up, particularly in Anabaptist strains of Christianity, and there are many smallish pockets of Christians trying something like this experiment around today.

I anticipate criticism on the basis that this is an unrealistic, idealistic way to live; the fact that there is some evidence (from Paul’s subscription) that the Jerusalem Christians had got themselves into a parlous state, and that may well have been as a result of collectively giving away more than would enable them to sustain themselves. I also anticipate criticism on the basis that empires (or modern nation states) are necessary to produce a civil society, and I may be seen as too critical of empire.

Both these criticisms have some merit if you consider the position as an “all or nothing” one. For a few people, I grant, it can be “all or nothing”; most societies can sustain a number of people living without possessions and “taking no thought for tomorrow” (Matt. 6:34), where it would be impractical for all to do so; similarly all societies have their dissidents (and a good thing it is that they do) but a society entirely composed of dissidents would fail. Unless, that is, everyone without exception were doing this, in which case there is at least a hope that it might be feasible – after all, that is Jesus’ vision.

It is not, however, an “all or nothing” situation. It is perfectly possible to live with “one foot in the kingdom of man, one foot in the kingdom of heaven” without following to the letter Jesus’ encouragement in Matt. 19:21. The history of the early church shows very many people who provided the use of their homes, money and sometimes leadership without completely abandoning their occupations or sources of income, and without them it is hard to see how the church would have spread.

Similarly, we can accept that the market economy, empires and kingdoms are for the time being necessary, even perhaps mandated by God according to Paul (Romans 13:1-7) so long as, with Walter Wink, we observe that they are fallen, among the powers and principalities which Paul also rails against (Eph. 6:12). Fallen and in need of redemption, so anything we do to bring them more into harmony with the vision of the Kingdom of God is a missional act.

These criticisms stem to a great extent from the fact that individually we can do very little to influence the market economy and the nation state. Few people have the power to do that, indeed few people who think they have the power to do that are actually right. However, while few people can make a great impact, everyone can make a little impact. We may not be called on to build the whole city of God unaided, but we can all lay a brick.

We can lay more bricks and position them better if we maintain a clear view of the objective, and the certainty that we can achieve it.

Even if it is only one brick at a time.

In the course of some editing work recently, I came across an author who always talks of the “Empire of God” (or of heaven) and seems to think this is the accepted terminology. It isn’t what I’m used to, however – what I’m used to (in the various bibles I’m most familiar with) is “Kingdom of God”. Of course, seeing something which I didn’t quite expect put me on alert, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it seems to me that the biggest single unique idea in Jesus’ words as told to us by the gospels is “the Kingdom of God”. Or, indeed, “the Empire of God”, because the term in the original is “Basilea Theou”, and “basilea” is possibly better translated as “empire” than as “kingdom” – it is, after all, the term used in Greek for the Roman Empire, and the counterpoint in the gospels is between Jesus as Lord in the Kingdom of God and Caesar as Lord in the Roman Empire. However, “king” is translated by the same word, so my set of translations originating in the King James bible, in all of which the term is “kingdom” are not wrong.

I’ve also seen it translated as “Imperial Rule” – and that’s a perfectly good translation as well, as “basilea” does duty for that as well, much like the word “reign” in English. There are, however, very few self-styled empires around these days (though see below), and those aren’t really empires (including Japan); it maybe isn’t therefore as useful a term as “kingdom”, of which there are quite a few more.

However, I’ve recently read a few American commentators who want to translate it as “the Commonwealth of God”, and there I start having problems. Saying that, I recognise that English translations all go back to the KJV and before them to Wycliffe and Tyndall, and were composed in a kingdom; it was the model of government with which the authors were familiar. A fair proportion of English speaking Christians these days do not live in a kingdom; even less of them live in something which is called an empire, though the USA is about as close as we get in the 21st century to Imperial Rome.

I will grant very readily that the earliest Christians were very egalitarian – holding property in common, giving freely and coming as close as I think Christianity has ever got to the ideals of Mark 10:21, Matt. 18:21 and Luke 18:22 (and that makes me recall “anything I say three times is true”…), and possibly even those of Mark 10:35-43. However, “commonwealth” has the baggage of a democratic system of some kind, and “basilea” definitely does not; it is a reign, and a fairly absolute reign at that. “Commonwealth”, to me, therefore detracts from the supremacy of God, the implicit requirement to ask for and follow his instructions (“praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out” from step 11, and “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God” from step 3 for those of you who are 12 steppers).

The Commonwealth of God would be the Kingdom of God from which God was absent.

Shifting from the language of the Gospels to that of Paul, you cannot proclaim (as was the standard declaration for early Christians) “Jesus is Lord” and think of a commonwealth. Commonwealths do not have Lords.

I think this is important, in particular because the statement “Jesus is Lord” was coined at a time when a very major part of that declaration was the implicit claim “Caesar is not Lord”, the rejection of the Empire of Rome – and today, the rejection of the idea that any of us are first British (or American, or Canadian, or Australian, or…) and secondly Christian (we can, however, reasonably do things the other way round, and walk the extra mile with the soldier of the occupying army carrying his stuff…). The call to follow Jesus (Matt. 10:37-39), to turn to God (Ez. 18) is absolute, and while there are two Great Commandments (Matt. 22:36-40) the first is to love God, the second (and lesser) is to love your neighbour.

The commonwealth deals only with the second. It’s good, but not, to my mind, what is meant by “basilea theou”. For that, I’ll stick with “Kingdom of God”.

And Jesus is Lord.

Jason Michaeli at Tamed Cynic has just put up a post entitled “Liberalism’s Dogmatic Wasting Disease: God Does Not Change, God Does Not Suffer, and God Is Not Affected (By You)”.

Quoting David Bentley Hart, he states that God has three particular qualities, saying:-

“Apatheia: the attribute of God, held by the ancients, in which God, as perfect within himself and possessing all possibilities as actualities, is unaffected by objects outside of himself.

Impassible: the ancient doctrine that God, as perfect within himself and possessing all possibilities as actualities, does not suffer due to the actions of another.

Immutable: the ancient belief that God, as eternal and existing outside of creation, does not change.

So then…God does not change- not ever- and God is not changed- by us.”

His target, it seems to me, is not Liberalism as such, but very much all of the Process theologians and to a significant extent followers of Jurgen Moltmann (writer of “The Crucified God” inter alia). Liberalism, after all, merely demands that you do not take scripture as literal when it doesn’t have to be, that you seek to place it in its historical context and genre and that you accept that it is not necessarily the last word, but displays a progression which can still be progressing today; it is not actually necessary that you abandon these three ideas about God. I don’t know if he’s ever read Caputo, but Caputo’s “weak call” God would be so foreign to this concept as to attract even more force of words than appears in that article…

But he has a point that since the second century, Christian theologians have been deeply immersed in Platonic philosophy, and until relatively recently theology was done against that background. He has a considerable tradition behind him.

So, where does that leave those of us to stand who think that God is characterised by love, or who look to a relationship with God?

Well, nowhere. You can’t have apathetic love, and you can’t have a relationship with someone who is totally unaffected by you. You might as well suggest that Alpha Centauri loves you, or that you have a personal relationship with gravity. Or vice versa. Granted, in the case of gravity you are at least affected by it, but it is a vastly impersonal force – and that, I suggest, is what the “ancients” were getting at with their description of these qualities of God. You can see Alpha Centauri (given a decent telescope) which isn’t the case for gravity, which indeed might take that out of the running as a simile, but it is similarly extremely far removed from you. That was another quality of God on which the “ancients” were keen.

Who were these “ancients? The short answer is, Plato and his successors in Greek philosophy. Not, however, Abraham and his successors in Hebrew story; their experience was not of an impassible, distant, apathetic God, though on occasion ( for instance in some of the Psalms) they say things which might be interpreted as impassibility or immutability. However, the Hebrew scriptures also tell us of a God who sometimes changes his mind (on occasion, as with for one example Moses, or another Abraham, as a result of human argument), a God who cares deeply for his people, and a God who in the very early part of Genesis can be surprised by his creation. Also, of course, God is seen throughout the Hebrew scriptures as getting angry at the antics of his people, and if that isn’t “being changed”, I don’t know what is.

Then we have the New Testament, and Jesus (the image of the invisible God) who lives with the disciples, feels for the disciples, is frequently exasperated by them and almost always exasperated by the religiously smug. And who dies, enduring an exceptionally painful death. Not, according to the Philosophers, being affected, suffering or being changed… assuming, that is, that there is anything in the statement in Colossians 1:15.

To be fair, there is a touch of this going on in the Fourth Gospel. I’m pretty confident from comparing that gospel, and in particular the first chapter, with the work of Philo of Alexandria, that the writer was “thinking Greek”, and particularly thinking Greek philosophy. Philo was a Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher and theologian of the first half of the first century, notable for an attempted harmonisation of Platonic philosophy with the Hebrew Scriptures. Judaism of the time may have accepted Philo (he was a noted leader in Alexandria), but subsequently has more or less disavowed him as being the next best thing to Christian – and, indeed, some Church Fathers tried to paint Philo as having been a very early Christian, which he was almost certainly not.  In moving in a different direction from Philo, they were reacting against a Greek (“Hellenising”) influence which Judaism had been feeling for a long time, and which perhaps was best countered in the successful Maccabean revolt which managed to re-establish an independent Israel for a relatively short time just before the birth of Christ. Indeed, it was not until the middle ages when Judaism started playing with Greek philosophy again, in the writings of Moses Maimonedes. Other than the Fourth Gospel, the New Testament writers do not, to my mind, see God as thoroughly the God of the Philosophers, even the pseudo-Pauline writer of Colossians.

Taking scripture generally, therefore, what I see is not a picture of the God of the Philosophers. In fact, that God ends up barely, if at all, distinguishable from the God of the Deists. I don’t think Plato and Scripture can be successfully harmonised (actually, I don’t think Plato can be harmonised with reality, but that’s another story). Rev. Michaeli sees a grandeur in that God; I don’t, I see that God as being reduced to a power of nature.

The God I see in scripture, the God I experience, is not Deist, is not Platonic, is not apathetic, impassible and immutable, he is involved, caring, feeling, loving, responding – in other words, like the Jesus who was his image. To me, in truth, a picture of an apathetic God is a pathetic picture, not so much impassible as impossible.

And no, I can’t come up with something for “immutable” which doesn’t stretch the language too far for comfort. Suggestions warmly appreciated!

Following on from my previous post, I notice James McGrath has linked to a post from Fred Clark today. Fred is talking about Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist seminary, who it seems is frightened about the need for some final authority. Fred quotes Al as saying “Without the Bible as the supreme and final authority in the church, we are left in what can only be described as the debilitating epistemological crisis. Put bluntly, if the Bible is not the very Word of God, bearing his full authority and trustworthiness, we do not know what Christianity is, nor do we know how to live as followers of Christ.”

Perhaps what he really hankers for is a Pope? No, I suppose not, as he’s a protestant, and protestantism went in a different direction in the 15th century. Apparently, though, just putting forward the Bible as authoritative is not enough; Fred chronicles how Al has had to add a number of additional statements as to how you should read it.

I wonder if Al has forgotten John 14:6 (NIV) “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever”? Advocate is sometimes “comforter”, sometimes “helper”. It does rather follow from the direction of my argument in the previous post that it would be desirable to read scripture with the aid of your own inspiration via the Holy Spirit, does it not?

Mind you, this is what broadly happened following the break from the pope in the reformation, and the result is thousands of protestant denominations all of whom read bits of scripture in different ways, so perhaps this wouldn’t give President Mohler quite the confidence he is looking for. Perhaps a vote of all those who have interpreted scripture themselves? Maybe not – something tells me he is not a fan of the Jesus Seminar!

Personally, I’m inclined to say “welcome to the twenty-first century”. Nobody’s epistemology rests on absolutely firm ground any more since a succession of German, French and American philosophers and theologians have cut away the support for anything which might be called “foundational”, just as a succession of physicists have cut away the support for anything really definite, anything really solid in science.  A ” dark night of the certainty embracer” perhaps?

You never know, perhaps he will come to the wisdom of Jack Caputo, saying that God does not exist, he insists; he is a weak call to which we can do no more than say “perhaps”, and “yes, yes”.

And follow the call, with a certain amount of intellectual humility.

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.