Eyre Lines

I came across a suggestion yesterday in a manuscript which was broadly an introduction to progressive Christian thinking which gave me pause. In essence, the author sought to distance himself, as a “progressive” from the term “liberal”. It would seem from what he wrote that “liberal” Christians have more or less thrown away scripture and don’t treat it at all seriously.

I tend to read a lot of blogs which are labelled “progressive”, largely courtesy of Patheos’ Progressive Christian channel. As a result, this suggestion was not new to me; I’ve seen it from quite a few writers who self-identify as “progressive”.
Now, I do tend to accept the label of “liberal” (though see my post “labels and libels”). I remember introducing myself to the curate at my current main resting place, and him saying “Oh yes, you’re the very liberal chap”. I didn’t jump down his throat, although I did wonder from where he thought that “liberal” needed expanding with “very” – at that point I hadn’t put forward any of my more adventurous thinking, of the kind I tend to indulge in when discussing with scientific rationalists, anywhere which would have been likely to get back to him, although I rather expected him to have heard that I regarded scripture as a human product rather than as divine dictation. That said, I doubt anyone in conversation with me or reading what I write would get the impression that I fail to take scripture seriously, or that I throw it away. As Marcus Borg says, I treat scripture seriously but not literally.

He was, perhaps, not far off the mark. I’m probably a little more conservative in some ways than, say, John Shelby Spong. (I owe Spong a debt of gratitude – it was seeing myself as to the traditional side of someone who was actually a bishop in the Anglican communion which encouraged me to think I might find a home there myself). However, I know a lot of people who are comfortable accepting the label “liberal” who are more traditional than I am, so within the limits of labelling, “very liberal” is probably adequate.

I also don’t see churches in which it’s clear that scripture has stopped being treated seriously or in which it is not central, with the exception of Unitarian Universalist churches I’ve visited. I will grant that some of the mainstream churches have some clergy who, in private and with an audience they expect to be sympathetic, will put forward views as liberal as mine, or even as liberal as Spong’s. It isn’t a substantial proportion, though, and is definitely not characteristic of any denomination other than UU who I’ve encountered.

The thing is, I don’t see clear water between the people labeling themselves “progressive” and those labeling themselves “liberal” as far as treatment of scripture, core beliefs or even praxis is concerned – there’s a spectrum, and one “liberal” may be more conservative in what they write than another “progressive”. As far as I can see, there are two major dividing factors, neither of them having anything to do with scriptural interpretation. Firstly, a “progressive” is likely to have previously styled themselves as “evangelical”, “charismatic” or both. Secondly, they’re likely to be American.

Taking the second first, it would seem that things are different in the States. I’m told that there, there actually are congregations which are mainstream Christian and in which scripture is far from central, and far from being taken seriously, and quite a number of clergy. Here, I couldn’t direct you to a congregation which had that character.

However, ex-evangelicals may, I think, feel a particular need to distance themselves from the label “liberal”, particularly if they’re American, where “liberal” seems to have become a term of political abuse. I rather fancy that in evangelical circles, “liberal” is also a term of theological abuse, and it may even be that our esteemed curate meant it that way, as he is an evangelical (as indeed is that church generally). For them to accept the label “liberal” may well mean that they’ve “gone over to the dark side” from the point of view of their former affiliations.

That’s sad. There’s a significant community of self-admitted liberals with whom the progressives have a huge amount in common. It is also a little irritating to me; I see a “progressive” putting forward ideas which are indistinguishable from those which I see from most “liberal” sources, but taking time to take a side-swipe at “liberal Christians” for an attitude which, by and large, they don’t have.

I do, however, also wonder whether Bishop Spong is taken as being representative of the whole of “liberal Christianity”. When reading Spong, I feel that he’s somewhat lost his connection with scripture, though he does talk about it a lot. I don’t actually think that is a true picture of what he believes and feels, it’s just that it’s the impression his books tend to produce. I do, however, position him at the extreme of liberals who are actually still within the Church, and it is a mistake to take extreme examples as representative.

I think it’s also worth mentioning that here, where I find liberal-minded clergy, they’re usually in the mainstream denominations. They do suffer in general from the fact that once they’ve dealt with maintaining an ancient and decrepit building (and frequently congregation) they have little energy left for evangelism or other outreach. Where I see a “progressive” label, I expect outreach and some commitment to evangelism (generally of the “not in your face” variety), and quite probably experiments with new styles of “doing church”. I approve of those – they’re a prominent reason why I’m inhabiting and evangelical church at the moment!

 

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.

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!

The recent death of Nelson Mandela has prompted a flood of postings. Many of these are just adulatory, many of those are from people who, 40 years ago, wouldn’t have had any time for Mandela at all.

Some put another slant on things. As this piece by Mark Steel comments, Mandela was originally a terrorist (aka freedom fighter – the terms are usually interchangeable depending only on whether you approve of them) and we would not be remembering his massive achievements in forgiveness and non-violent action had the movement he was a leader of and a symbol for not succeeded. Mr. Steel thinks this would not have happened without an armed struggle, which Mandela originally supported (and was thus not entirely unreasonably imprisoned); I note that the success came when non-violent routes became predominant and prefer to recall the post-Robben Island Mandela’s attitude as having avoided a bloodbath, which was what I had personally expected for some years. However, as Gandhi (the most famous exponent of non-violent protest) noted, non-violence can only be properly practiced by those who have proved themselves capable of violent action and have resolved to renounce it, it is not a route for the cowardly. Mandela was therefore authentic in his non-violence. His greatness lies in him having continued to follow non-violence and reconciliation once he achieved power.

Some have noted, accurately, that Mandela was cordially detested by many conservatives (and that goes for UK conservatives as well as US ones) because of his stance against a number of well-recognised favorite conservative policies (such as the wars in Iran) and his links with the USSR as the main bankrollers of the ANC and with the South African Communist party as major allies. Cosying up with Castro also cannot have won him many American conservative friends, nor can an enthusiasm for such communist concepts as the eradication of poverty, racial equality, anti-imperialism and labour unions.

The greatest among those, I suspect, was the communist and USSR links. The world I grew up in was dominated by the fear of the USSR and communism, and in conservative circles that was absolute. In the UK, while the fear of the Russian military rolling west over Europe (and not stopping at the Channel) was strong in the majority, there was not quite the same level of visceral revulsion for communism which seems to have gripped the USA from the 50s onwards, it seems to me.

Possibly this was in part due to the British Communist party splitting in the 50s, possibly it was due to the fact that the Communist party here never really got enough support to challenge Labour for the left wing of British politics. Ironically, although in the States very few Democrats could legitimately have been described as closet communists, in Britain a lot of communists found themselves able to join the Labour party, and in my teens there were many Labour MPs who were communists (and even more who visited the “workers’ paradise” of the USSR and came back with glowing reports. Labour was preserved from outright takeover by the fact that it had a much broader base, and owed much to the cooperative movement and to the nonconformist (i.e. anything but Anglican) churches, which were not communist. The sterotype of “You’re Welsh, so you’re Methodist and vote Labour” had enough statistics behind it to not be completely laughable, for instance. However, the States had McCarthy and we didn’t, and we had what was not unreasonably seen by the right in our country as a USSR-loving mass movement, and the States didn’t.

The root problem there was the presence of an ideology which was supra-national and which looked to it’s establishment as the ruling ideology, coupled with the presence of a centre outside the country. The fear was that allegiance was to a foreign power before it was to the country itself, and that was not too unreasonable given the attachment of the British Communist party to all things USSR and Stalin, though that took a major knock after the Russian tanks rolled into Hungary in 1956 to suppress a popular mass movement.

I’m reminded there of another facet of my childhood, which was a certain reserve about Catholics, which was coupled in the more right wing with a suggestion that Catholics were governed by the Pope, not by the government of the country. This was a view much pressed by Ian Paisley, the Northern Irish Unionist. Historically, of course, the feeling against Catholics was very deep rooted, and went back to the situation after Henry VIII declared the English church independent of Rome in 1533 (and himself the head of it, as the monarch in England has been almost all the time since then). The Pope of the day naturally took exception to this, and save for a period under Mary (a Catholic) there remained a real threat of invasion by one or more of the continental Catholic powers at the behest of the Pope for well over 100 years; one result was active persecution, of Catholics under almost all the monarchs except Mary and of Protestants under Mary, for 200 years. Perhaps the last gasp of the active form was the Gordon Riots of 1780. Catholics remained debarred from many things until much later (largely 1829), however, and are still debarred from the monarchy today (which survival will probably last until the Anglican church is disestablished and is no longer the established religion).

The Northern Ireland troubles, of course, cast a shadow well into my adult life, and led to part of the anti-Catholic feeling; here again was an ideological group operating within the country and owing allegiance to a foreign power, in this case the Republic of Ireland. In truth, it was anti-Irish Catholic feeling, but many could not distinguish between Irish Catholics (who were the majority of Catholics in most English Churches) and Catholics more generally. Even so it was misplaced, as not all Irish Catholics were in favour of an united Ireland (some of them had the good sense to realise that incorporating territory with a majority population of Ulster Protestant Unionists was a recipe for disaster!).

I can, therefore, understand the problems for someone attached to their own nation state (i.e. a “patriot”) in accepting someone whose ideological stance involves adherence to a supra-national organisation as being truly “one of them”, particularly if that ideology is closely linked with one or more foreign states, and even more so if those states have credible military force. I can understand this reaction, for instance, to Islam. Though, in conscience, I don’t consider the military force of Islamic states (even combined) to be a really serious threat to the UK, far less the USA. There’s terrorism, of course, but even 9/11 was, in conscience, a pinprick compared with the might of the USA (or the USA’s or our reaction to it).

A word about terrorism. It’s scary, not knowing if you’re going to suddenly be a civilian target where you’ve thought you were safe. However, there’s been a present terrorist threat here since I was about 10, and I’ve consistently been in far more danger crossing the road than I have of being blown up by a terrorist. You can get used to a certain level of unpredictable threat, and I would argue that getting used to it would have been a better solution than moving ourselves several steps toward being a police state. Indeed, I’m slightly amused to consider that I attend (inter alia) the church where Guy Fawkes was baptised in 1570. He, of course, became a very early (and Catholic) home grown terrorist, and a part of the threat perception which skewed English attitudes to Catholics for the next two hundred years.

I do hope we can get over our current panic quicker than that…

However, continuing my historical musings, I go further back and can understand the feelings of Roman Emperors faced with the early Christians, who denied the god-like authority of Caesar (i.e. the Roman state) in favour of allegiance to Christ the King. The early Christians weren’t, of course, the first; the Jews had already been treading that path for years and the first Christians (who initially weren’t certain they weren’t Jews of a new variety, and neither were the Jews of the day) merely learned from them. The Jews had honed their skills in this direction under the Seleucids, and indeed the Maccabees for a while achieved independence, Judas Maccabeus being a sort of Nelson Mandela of his day.

And yes, I can understand the Seleucid’s feelings as well. All these examples are of a group of people who answer the call of a different drum, who are dedicated to an ideology at odds with the nation state in question. What I condemn is, of course, the methods, whether of the oppressor states or of terrorists/freedom fighters, particularly where they involve targeting civilians.

The early Christians did remarkably well during the period of Roman persecution, which lasted from the mid first century until 312, when Constantine the Great decided to espouse Christianity as a result, it is said, of a vision. In that, they were probably still following the example of their Jewish precursors. Within a few years, Christianity had not just ceased to be persecuted, but became the national religion of the Roman state. Judaism did not have that kind of safety anywhere for nearly 2000 years.

And, entirely unlike Nelson Mandela and the ANC, but very like Mary I of England and (to a lesser extent) her immediate protestant successors in the other direction, immediately started to persecute pagans and the less orthodox members of its own community.

Mandela was no saint, he was a reformed terrorist, but he was a great man, because he renounced violence and revenge. The early Christian Church fathers? No Mandelas there, mores’ the pity.