Eyre Lines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30 years experience as a family lawyer is not enough?

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

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

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

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

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

18. How would you define marriage?

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

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

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

20. Should marriage be limited to only two people?

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

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

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

See above.

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

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

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

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

24. If not, why not?

See above.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of a link from a post at Partially Examined Life’s facebook feed, I listened to a talk by Catherine Malabou recently. (“Emotional Life in a Neurobiological Age”) I don’t necessarily recommend listening unless you’re both philosophically inclined and reasonably comfortable with “continental philosophy” to be honest; I’m not really either of those things, but keep plugging away at PEL in the hopes that one day I will be comfortable with the more philosophical end of theology.

There are, however, some very interesting parts of her thesis, particularly for me. She is particularly interested in the phenomenon of loss of affect, i.e. people who develop an inability to feel emotion.  This is well established as a result of brain lesions and of epileptic absences, and she comments further that it can be the result of  PTSD or profound depression.

That is where my interest is piqued, as I have personal experience of being in this state, described by her, in which it may be that the reasoning faculties are completely intact, but the person suffering the condition is entirely unable to make decisions as they are wholly apathetic as to the result. I have been there, done that and, as they say, bought the t-shirt, and in hindsight it may well have been a subconscious self-preservation mechanism which finally tipped me over into it, as before that I was actively suicidal; after the depression (and or PTSD) became that severe, there was no longer any particular reason to prefer death over life (or, of course, vice versa), so I was relatively safe as long as I had a minder to ensure (for instance) that I did get out of the way of oncoming buses.

This may all appear of only historic interest to me on a personal basis, but she goes on to comment on the phenomenon when applied to a body of people in a political milieu; as she says, though I paraphrase, if the people can be persuaded to feel a total lack of ability to alter anything, and in addition develop an apathy towards the situation, then those ruling them have won unbridled power.

Looking back after our hotly debated recent election, it seems to me that this syndrome affected a substantial number of previous Liberal Democrat voters and workers between 2010 and 2015. If they had been anything like left-leaning, the idea of a coalition with the Tories was anathema in the first place, and thus even after being rarities for the LibDems and getting an MP of their party elected, as happened in 52 constituencies in 2010, their perception was that they just got a Conservative government anyhow. Why bother?

OK, granted the coalition did not do some of the nastier things the Conservatives will now push through, and did not cut as hard and as fast as the Tories wanted (which as per my last post would have been at a minimum unnecessary and more probably  have earned a total lack of recovery and calls for even more austerity). The left-leaning LD, however, was never looking for small adjustments in the direction of reduction of the welfare state, but of increases to it, not reduced taxes for the wealthy but substantial increases.  From their point of view, the coalition was a total fail.

Depression, the Church and the Social Gospel

In conscience, I cannot be other than a “left-leaning” Liberal Democrat myself.  I completely fail to see how it is possible to take seriously the agenda laid out in the Sermon on the Mount and in Matthew 25 and not to attempt to ensure that the body of which we are all, perforce, part, namely the United Kingdom, complies with the obligations to support the poor, the sick and the otherwise disadvantaged, to welcome the stranger and, well, just be civilised.

Don’t tell me that “the poor will always be with us” – perhaps they will, but that doesn’t negate the imperative to reduce poverty. Indeed, it seems to me emblematic of the depressive “we can’t make any difference” attitude.

Don’t tell me that this is the responsibility of the churches. Firstly, with single-figure percentages of regular attenders on Sundays and even less who take the absolute instruction to assist the poor seriously, they are in no position to do that. Secondly, they don’t even manage to do that for their own members. There should be no churches where there are regular attenders who are homeless, for instance – no church I know of has a congregation with less spare bedrooms than the number of homeless members. OK, I grant that if that situation were put right, there soon would be churches in that situation as news of their generosity of spirit spread! Here again, the depressive “we can’t fill the need, so why do anything” seems to me to come into play.

Equally, don’t tell me that this is taking from the individual and giving to “the government” as if government was something apart from the people; as we live in a Democracy, the government is not different from the people, it is the joint expression of the community. (If you consider, probably with some justification, that the government doesn’t express the community very well, the remedy is to revise the way in which we govern ourselves, not to stop it fulfilling a communitarian ethos – indeed, if you stop it fulfilling a communitarian ethos, it will become something other than an expression of the community). If you live in a community, or trade in a community, you should contribute to it. You do, of course, have a vote – unless we’re talking of a commercial trading entity, in which case you have persuasive muscle well beyond a mere vote.

Once it is established that you should contribute to it, given that you have a vote, it being a democracy, you will (I hope) vote for provisions which comply with the directions of Matthew 5-6 and Matthew 25 in any event, and if you are a Christian there should be no “I hope” about it. How, I ask, can you at the same time consider that the poor, the sick and the marginalized should be cared for and vote for an administration which does not intend to do this? I would hope that further than that, you would involve yourself actively in the political process, working for parties which would pursue a “Sermon on the Mount” policy. We are not, here, talking of “render unto Caesar” separation from the ruling power, as you are yourself a part of the ruling power.

If you do not do this, whether your psychological state is indeed the depressive, disconnected apathy Catherine Malabou speaks of or just a decision not to be involved, the effect is exactly the same as if you were indeed apathetic, depressive and disconnected. You will be contributing to rule by those who do not adhere to Jesus’ precepts.

The other day, I wanted to check the location of the statement “If you love me, keep my commandments” (it’s John 14:15, BTW). Google is by far easier than my trusty concordance for such questions, and it duly gave me the reference.

What struck me, however, was that once I’d got past the online bible entries, almost all references to this passage were from or referencing Latter Day Saints writing. There were maybe two or three non-LDS entries in 20 plus pages. One from John Piper, but otherwise pretty much nothing from any other branches of Christianity whether Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox, Evangelical, Mainstream or Progressive. (I should note here that I include LDS as Christian, despite their having some additional scripture, which is commonly a dividing issue between religions. I also include Seventh Day Adventist, despite their having, arguably at least, an extra prophet in the form of Ellen White).

Why is this, I wondered? But then a possible answer occurred to me; it is perhaps unpopular in mainstream Christianity because it suggests to many people a form of “works righteousness”. I’d just done some thinking about this as a result of a Bible study of Colossians 2. Now, there isn’t really a clear “no works righteousness” statement there, but there is this:- “²⁰ If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world? Why do you submit to regulations, ²¹ “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch”? ²² All these regulations refer to things that perish with use; they are simply human commands and teachings. ²³ These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.” (from Bible Gateway NRSV). There’s also the more or less obligatory warning against succumbing to suggestions that circumcision or keeping kosher are appropriate for Christians.

This prompted questions for the group such as “What might be the result of trying to base one’s whole relationship with God on rule-keeping…?” and “What convinced you that trying to live up to religious rules couldn’t change you on the inside?”. I stayed quiet, as it was clear to me that my input would not be what the group wanted to hear at this point (not least because I don’t think Paul wrote the epistle).

The trouble is twofold. The first problem is that the clear implication is that Judaism is “basing your whole relationship with God on rule-keeping” and “can’t change you on the inside”, and this is an outdated picture. A chain of scholarship of which E.P. Sanders’ “Jesus and Judaism” is the early high point has shown beyond any doubt that the Judaism of the First Century wasn’t the ineffective obsessive rulekeeping which it’s so often portrayed as in conservative circles, based on Paul’s commentary in Romans 1-8. It wasn’t that in the first century, and it hasn’t been that in any century since, though it must be granted that there are probably individuals and groups within Judaism for which it is actually no more than that.

Sanders and those following him in the “new Perspective on Paul” have, I think, shown very clearly that the basis of Judaism then was “covenantal nomism”. The covenant (land and favoured status) is given to the chosen people as a free gift, and the Law is also given as a gift, to be followed as evidence of and a practical form of gratitude and love for God in return. Granted, widespread failure to follow the Law results in episode after episode of disaster for the people of God recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, but following the Law is not the precondition, it’s the way in which you display that you individually are within the covenant, and in which you contribute to the collective faithfulness which will, it is hoped, bring about the reign of God on earth. The formula is therefore gift given (grace) followed by belief, love and trust, followed by the evidence of that in behaviour.

This is pretty much exactly the model which Christian theology has put forward as the model for Christian belief, extracting this from Paul’s words primarily in Romans and Galatians; receive by grace forgiveness of sin, have faith in Christ, proceed in the path of sanctification by acting out that faith. OK, some say “believe and you will be saved”, putting belief first, with considerable scriptural authority, but it is just possible that Calvin was right, and that the ability to do that is given by grace (and I say that as someone for whom the name “Calvin” is near to swearing…); the logic is that to believe first is an action, and no action can be sufficient in the hard line “faith not works” climate of Reformed theology.

I don’t remotely espouse that; I take Jesus as having confirmed that he came to save everyone. I assume the effort to have been a success. However you get there, though, it remains an act of grace, unmerited and not earned. As does the election of the descendants of Abraham and Jacob as the chosen people…

To deny that is, I think, adding insult to injury following the lamentable history of Christianity’s treatment of the Jews.

On analysis, I come to the conclusion that the only substantive difference between Paul’s position and that of the Judaism of the time is that whereas Judaism asked for faith in God’s promise to Abraham, evidenced by following the covenant given to Moses, Paul asks for faith in God’s promise via Christ Jesus, evidenced by the fruits of the Spirit. Where Paul appears dead set against following kosher rules and circumcision, it isn’t because this is damaging as such, it’s because it shouldn’t be regarded as either something which is necessary or as something which “buys” justification in God’s eyes.

So, why do the LDS like the passage so much? Well, I might suggest that it’s because they also have a large body of rules and regulations which they follow. It’s not uncommon to find fundamentalist and evangelical Christians criticising them also as being a religion of “works justification”. Maybe so, maybe not – let’s look at my second problem with a negative view of actions.

Actions do, of course, proverbially speak louder than words. Paul himself considers that works will naturally flow from accepting Christ, and James suggests, entirely rightly, that “faith without works is dead”. Indeed, it is probably not unreasonable to suggest that whatever you may say you believe, what you actually believe is evidenced by what you do.

There’s more, however. There is now plenty of psychological literature to back up the proposal that acting as if you believe something has a tendency to produce a change in beliefs to match the actions; the “act as if” principle is a major cornerstone of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. In Twelve Step, a common catch phrase is “You’ve got to fake it to make it”, and curiously that does seem to work, not in a guaranteed way, but as at least a strong tendency.

Returning to Judaism, but modern Judaism this time, I find from long discussions with Jewish friends, of whichever flavour (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist) that the long list of things which one is expected to do or not to do in order to be faithfully Jewish are, firstly, looked on very much as expressions of faith (I love God, God commands that I do this, so I do it as an expression of that love – very much in line with John 14:15). They are definitely not looked on as something which has to be performed in order to win favour, whether that be eternal life or something else (forgiveness of sin is not really on the radar there; there is a system within Judaism to deal with that, even absent the Temple and its sacrificial system); they are however, looked on as something which contributes to the communal good and the possible full expression of messianic hopes. Put simply, if you ignore the Law, you’re not excluded from Judaism or from God’s election of you as one of the chosen people, but you’re not a good team player and may be contributing to a losing streak for the team…

There is also substantial anecdotal evidence that actually performing these “mitzvot” (which translates better as “blessings” than as “commandments”) deepens faith in and love of God. You’d expect this, given the “act as if” principle.

So, I conclude, LDS are probably finding the same principle at work, though I’m not aware that they have quite the same view of the “not a good team player” aspect. I’d expect the same to be true of other Christian branches which stress activities (“praxis”), such as Catholics and Orthodox.

The other really popular passage to quote here is, of course, James 2:14-26, from which I quote ^{14 “}What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? ¹⁵ If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, ¹⁶ and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? ¹⁷ So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” (from Bible Gateway NRSV). This is, of course, dear to my heart; love your neighbour is next to loving God and is the greatest practical expression of that. However, observance (praxis) which is directed purely at actions pleasing to God but not clearly having a beneficial effect on one’s neighbour is also a valid form of expressing ones love for and gratitude towards God.

There’s time for both in  my life.

 

I couldn’t resist the title of “In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being” by Clayton & Peacock, not least because it had a title I wanted for my own writing, once I’ve dragooned that into something book shaped, rather than oversized blog posts. “Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World” looked good as well.

It didn’t disappoint, save for a couple of niggles, one of them admittedly a fairly big niggle. It’s a book for the student rather than the general reader, it seems to me, but is at the accessible end of that spectrum. It contains a set of essays by various extremely qualified authors, setting out a variety of views of how panentheism can be combined with a varyingly orthodox Christianity and in some cases with some features of modern science, in particular emergence theory; there are sections from an Eastern Orthodox point of view and from a more Western one, showing that the Orthodox tradition has far less trouble with panentheism than do the Western (Catholic and Protestant) streams of thought. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

My smaller niggle came from the piece by Celia E. Deane-Drummond, linking panentheism to the Wisdom tradition (and in particular the creation account in Proverbs 8:22-31). She rightly links this with the language of the preamble to the Fourth Gospel, equating Wisdom (Sophia) with Word (Logos) but fails to advert to what I consider the glaringly obvious connection between the two in the work of Philo of Alexandria, who so far as I can see made this leap sometime in the first 40 years of the first century, i.e. before any of the texts of the New Testament were written, even taking the earliest fancied dates of conservative scholars. Instead, she quotes a number of scholars who also do not seem to have made this connection. I would love to be able to point to a popular level discussion of Philo’s work, but I do not know of one.

My larger niggle is that nowhere in the book is a link made with mysticism, and indeed Philip Clayton expresses concern in his overview which ends the book that the use of panentheistic concepts should be grounded solidly in the believable rather than being understood as a philosophical flight of fancy (his own words are rather less florid). What he did not say was that panentheistic expressions flow extremely frequently from the particular mode of spiritual experience called “mysticism”. It is, in that context, not surprising that the Orthodox tradition is easier to harmonise with panentheism, as a substantial number of the major Eastern theologians are also identifiably mystics, including both St. Gregory Palamas and St. Maximus the Confessor, both of whom are discussed at length in the book.

Indeed, it is my contention, following Happold, that the mystical experience is of a fundamentally panentheistic nature, even if it does not always result in clearly panentheistic statements from the mystics. On this point, the discussions in “In Whom We Live…” around the issue of harmonising panentheism with the Western tradition are extremely instructive; the West took, early on, a number of theological positions which are fundamentally at odds with a panentheistic experience of God, notably stressing divine omnipotence and omniscience, transcendence at the expense of immanence, divine impassibility (i.e. God is not changed or even moved by occurrences in the world) and a spirit-matter dualism of an extremely strong nature.

All of these flow from a philosophical treatment of the concept of God largely drawn from the pre-Christian Greek philosophers. Now, I do not even think that the God-concept of the philosophers is truly harmonisable with the God described in the Hebrew scriptures, and I have my doubts about the God-concept described in much of the New Testament being truly in line with the God of the philosophers as well. If it is also not harmonisable with the actual experience of God granted by mystical experience, then I suggest that the philosophers have got it wrong, and have produced exactly the philosophical flight of fancy which I referred to earlier.

I appreciate that the mystical experience is a minority one among Christians (I think this is a pity, but the only reasonably tried and tested praxis available within the Christian tradition proper is ascetic contemplation taking rather a lot of time, absent a “bolt from the blue”, and few these days seem disposed to put in the hours and endure the discomfort of doing this – and I can hardly blame them, given that even then a majority seem never to achieve anything like a peak experience). However, it is well documented, and occurs throughout the history of the religion, including in Happold’s view SS. John and Paul and, if the Gospel of Thomas is thought authentic, Jesus himself. Needless to say, I agree with Happold on this.

I have something of a beef with theologians who ignore the characteristics of the mystic’s experience of God (particularly as it can be plausibly ascribed to the three most important voices in the formation of Christianity), but doubly so when those theologians are discussing a concept of God which flows so naturally from it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a perennial problem for some people on entering a twelve-step programme, of which they get a glimpse at step 2 (“Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity”) and which becomes all too apparent at step 3 (“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him”). That problem is when they don’t have a concept of God, usually because they’re an atheist. In fact, it’s so common in UK twelve step that I was plagued in my early days with well-meaning people sharing how they had come to think of, say, the AA group, or “Good Orderly Direction” or just “Good” as being their higher power for the purposes of the steps, assuming that I’d be an atheist too. I got a little tired of having to explain that I had a very well-formed concept of God already, thank you, and that my problem was more that I had lost confidence in ever experiencing God again, not to mention being helped by God (severe depression, it seems, can do that to even a practiced mystic, and I’ve written previously about “dark nights of the soul”).

This was a problem which faced Nancy Abrams on entering a twelve step programme aimed at over-eating. She found an interesting way round, much aided by her long acquaintance with her husband Joel Primack, a prominent astrophysicist and cosmologist, and has written a fascinating book about it: “A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science and the Future of Our Planet”. This caught my eye last week, and on an intuition I bought it.

Amazon thinks it’s directed at “agnostic, spiritual-but-not-religious and scientifically minded” readers; I’d bet she’d want to include outright atheists. Actually, I think it’s worth reading by a whole gamut of people, with the proviso that anyone with conservative or even mainstream views is going to find it’s suggestions alarming, if not downright unacceptable. Liberal, progressive or radical believers shouldn’t have too much difficulty, though.

I’m particularly pleased to have bought it, as Nancy takes the phenomenon of emergence and posits that God may be an emergent property of human minds as a group, which is a thought I’ve entertained myself – I grant that it doesn’t represent the way it seems to me that God is, but I am willing to consider hypotheses which would require that my own experience has delivered a less-than-wholly-accurate picture. Indeed, I assume there’s a high probability that despite the hugely self-confirming nature of the mystical experience, there’s at least a degree of distortion as well as the notoriously fuzzy nature of the experience. She, however, picks up the idea and runs with it, describing various levels of emergence and dwelling for a while on the ant colony, which displays organisation and reasoning beyond the capacity of any individual ant.

She goes on to discuss emergent phenomena among humans, citing the example of “the market” (here meaning that amorphous entity which seems to rule us rather more than do our elected representatives) and “the media”, which seems to have a character beyond just a conglomeration of writers. Then she takes the next step… and I think it’s by no means an unreasonable one.

Then, however, she introduces parameters some of which sit uneasily with my current God-concept, notably the limitation on communication of the speed of light, rendering an emergent entity bigger than (perhaps) planetary scale one which could not “think” within a timescale which would render it capable of communication with humanity. Another is the fact that until the emergence of human consciousness, the matrix for the emergence of such a higher level entity would be missing – and it would certainly be missing in the earlier part of the history of our universe (which the writer’s husband is able to model using computers to an impressive degree of accuracy). That, of course, would mean both that a God-of-the-universe would be improbable-to-impossible and that any concept of a creator-God was completely out of the window, and both of those are at the moment features of my God-concept, and considerably protected by the self-verifying feature of mystical experience. Not necessarily ruled out, however…

She does give what I think is a good account of the implications of accepting such a God-concept, including an account of the efficacy of prayer. That last I will need to re-read, as I am a little uncertain that I agree her mechanisms, but it is at least on the face of it plausible.

I think, therefore, that this book could be very helpful to many sceptical people embarking on twelve-step programmes, or even a few who have been around them for years – at the very least, it provides an option which is rather more concrete than “good orderly direction” and rather less prone to human error than the twelve-step group.

But I have a serious misgiving, and that lies exactly with the examples of higher-order emergence among humans which she puts forward. Neither the media nor the market (still less the “global economy”) seem to me good examples of higher powers for twelve-step or, indeed, more or less anything else (pace those of my acquaintance who look very much as if they worship the market…). The market and the global economy, indeed, seem to me forces which are potentially, even if not actually, extremely inimical to the flourishing of humanity when considered as thinking, feeling, connected, social people rather than as units of economic production and consumption, and I’d certainly characterise them both as less-than-human, if only on grounds of ethics. Crowds, too, inasmuch as through deindividuation they operate as entities in their own right, are definitely subhuman. If there were another entity of the kind Ms. Abrams describes, I would worry that unless it were in fact the God whom I experience (and thus am confident is benevolent and loving), it would be yet another faceless and impersonal power which had the capacity to damage or even exterminate humanity.

To be fair, I also have friends whose conception of Gaia looks a lot like that. Of course, both they and Ms. Abrams consider that we should do much to reverse the extremely negative effect which humanity is currently having on our planet and particularly its biosphere, and I agree completely with them on that front. The thought that the planet as a whole might decide (have decided?) to eliminate humanity as a kind of cancerous growth, however, is still not a pleasant one to contemplate. Even if it is possibly overdue… which may be the best indication that actually it doesn’t exist as such a system.

The problem, to me, with my Gaian friends is that while they see the wholeness and unity of the earth, there is a tendency to see us as alientated from it, as not a part of the whole. This is something I emphatically don’t share, and neither does Ms. Abrams, who ends her book with an impassioned plea to treat the planet as if we, as a species, actually intend to stay here for a while. To this end, she has a number of promises, some very reminiscent of those I am familiar with. Here are a few:-

We will intuitively understand how the future of our descendants depends on the future of their descendants.

We will experience how being human fits smoothly and perfectly into the evolution of a meaningful yet scientifically supported universe.

And, last but not least:-

We will suddenly realise that the emerging God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

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.