Eyre Lines

Alpha finished, officially, on Wednesday evening, and it remains to work out what I’ve learned from this. What I’ve actually GOT out of it is a whole set of new friends who share the same geekish interest as me (namely religion, spirituality, biblical history, studying scripture and all the stuff which surrounds that) and who are equally excited by exchanging ideas; they’re missional and full of fire, and that’s exactly what I was looking for. It may also have contributed (and probably did) to the abrupt ending of my marathon and severe depression 13 days ago.

It probably actually did that through the expected channel, which is that eventually the love and fellowship of the helpers combines with other factors to produce a moment of spiritual uplift and movement within the guests. Not, for me, when it’s expected, which is on the Spirit weekend (last weekend) as by the time I got to that I’d already been flying for a week. I went on two Alphas before this recognising that Alpha could sometimes do this, and hoping for a boost to my own conscious contact with God as a result (I was already well on the downward slope into depression when I went to the first, and hoped for a lifeline).

But that isn’t why I went this time; I went to help, and judging by the amount of extra input various people are wanting from me at the moment, I seem to have “done exactly what it said on the tin” and a bit more besides (looking back at my “Alpha, Beta test” post), and so did it. Unfortunately, for me this was despite the content for the most part rather than because of it.

I’ve resurrected this comment from someone attending a previous Alpha I went on; I didn’t get anything quite this pointed this time, but this sums a lot of it up:-

“Their whole attitude was ‘Why don’t you believe, you poor sick deluded person’ and ‘If you don’t believe by the end of this you’re going to hell and we can’t help you. This is your last chance’ “. She said she felt welcomed and well-fed but terminally embarrassed.

Other comments I’ve got from Alpha attenders (and I’m not going to say which comes from which Alpha course; some of these are from people attending courses in other towns and cities):-

“They all seem ‘holier than thou’ and ‘we’ve got it, you haven’t’. They’re all in on this joke, and I can’t seem to get it. Smug bastards. You’re a smug bastard too!”

“I’ve been a Christian for 40 years. I know all this stuff, and it doesn’t work for me any more – I want new answers, not the old stuff. And they say they’re Christians but used to be like me. So I’m not a Christian? I’m out of here!”

“They’re praying for me. That’s intrusive”.

“I hate the music. They’re trying to get me to join in and sing things I don’t believe in. Oh, it’s heartfelt and some of it’s actually not bad, but I feel excluded”

“I believe there’s a God, or at least something huge and difficult to understand, which I want to get closer to, and I believe that Jesus was a great inspirational leader and I try to follow what he told us to do. But they’re telling me I can’t believe that, I have to believe he was God squeezed into a human package or that he was a madman or a liar. And I can’t do that.”

“The first four talks were a load of complete rubbish. Most of their facts were wrong and I could drive a lorry through the holes in their reasoning. I didn’t go to any more. They’re obviously basing the whole thing on lies”

Of the set, the first and the last two are possibly the most damning for Alpha as it stands.

I don’t think this can be solved by praying harder for the Holy Spirit to come and transform people; this is good, indeed this should always happen, but if by that time someone is so thoroughly alienated by the process, they are far less likely to be able to receive the Spirit even if it comes knocking. Most people’s first experience is actually a small, fairly fragile thing and needs nurturing gently before it can burst into flame; mine was nothing remotely like small or fragile, but the vast majority of people I’ve shared experience with (and there have been a lot) do not have such an experience at any time during their lives.

Jesus did not allow his sheep to be snatched from the Father’s hand (Joh. 10:27-29); we might at least aspire to the same.

My first and most urgent suggestion is that we ditch Penal Substitutionary Atonement and it’s nice, simple, “convict of sin, believe Jesus was God, believe he died for our sins, pray to follow him, receive the Spirit, bang, it’s done” formula. Unfortunately, that wrecks the whole thesis of Alpha and the trajectory of the talks. What we want is acknowledgement of God, in some conception which works for people at the moment, following Jesus, in some conception which works for people at the moment and a radical act of reorientation toward God-through-Jesus, accompanied by a personal experience of God-through-Jesus. Me, I’m not even bothered if it’s God-through-Jesus, God-through-the-Holy-Spirit or just “wow, dad, you’re really there/here!”. I suggest that if you have that, you have at least a beginning Christian and we can present a few more developed theologies later for inspection.

In the course of this, we need to ditch Lewis’ trilemma. It turns off too many people who might otherwise stick there to the end – I’ve even heard people say that as Jesus was plainly not God, because that’s impossible, the message they got was that the man they’d been following was obviously a madman, therefore all the people saying these things were madmen. And “I’m out of here” followed… Incarnation is a very subtle and advanced piece of theology, and in my eyes entirely unsuitable for presentation to a beginner. After all, the early church spent the first three hundred years or more arguing about how this could be the case and having schisms, anathmatisations, riots and even wars about the idea. Let’s avoid having any of these within the Alpha rooms, no?

Alternative Alpha

Let’s avoid claiming that the gospels are eyewitness accounts. Some of us may think so, but there’s such strong modern biblical scholarship to indicate a large redactive, non-eyewitness content and a date later than most of the apostles had already died for even the earliest written form that we have any access to that we are going to get bogged down in another long and subtle argument.

Let’s not use leaps of inference from the early documents at all, in fact. What we can demonstrate clearly enough to satisfy all but the most sceptical modern scholarship is that Jesus lived, taught, inspired and gained a respectable following, died by crucifixion at the hands of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate and that within 10-30 years had a following large enough to be thought by the Romans to be a source of civil unrest as far afield as Rome itself. In the process we can set up the historical context of 1st century Palestine with some both politically and in terms of religion. We can end by pointing out that this apparently insignificant Galilean itinerant preacher produced a movement which is alive and well 2000 years later and is worldwide. (talk 1)

We can then look at the evidence and show what his followers thought about Jesus, and for this we can use Paul and the gospel writers without even having to look at historical-critical scholarship. We can show why they found him inspirational; maybe then we can start looking at some pictures they had of what the reason for the crucifixion actually was (and, no, we don’t mention PSA even then; it took over 1000 years to develop even something vaguely like that atonement theory and another 300 to articulate it in something like modern form). I think it would be good to admit that there were actually several different kerygmas used in the gospels and in Paul, in fact. (talks 2&3)

We can then look at what Jesus actually taught, using historical-critical scholarship to extract the undisputed teachings, i.e. those which liberal and conservative alike ascribe to Jesus. My very strong suggestion is that we hang this round the Kingdom statements. (talk 4)

Then we can look at the mystical/spiritual elements in Paul, John and Acts (and I’d like us to link back to the Kingdom statements here, which are to me clearly mystical). We will end up with the Spirit and the formulae used (no, not just the PSA one!). This is probably a good time for several personal testimonies, making sure they are “this is my experience” rather than “this is what you must believe”. Variation would be good here. (talks 5,6&7)

Then we can look at how churches can be organised, introducing small-group churches, home churches, internet communities and lay networks as alternatives to the institutional church, presenting a lot of possibilities for getting involved. This should definitely point out social programmes which can be included as part of a developing spirituality (talk 8)

Finally, we can get together and decide what groups want to do next, individually and collectively. This could be an add-on to talk 8, or be talk 9.

Adjusted Alpha

I don’t think this is as promising a possibility, but it would also be possible to take the existing material, improve the way we react to people, making sure all helpers are well trained not to do any of the things mentioned above which alienate people and to include in at least the early talks two viewpoints, one of which should be a stripped down “liberal” one.

It would probably then be best to split each course into two streams, giving guests the option of going “conservative” or “liberal/radical/progressive”. Maybe these could even be on split nights, so someone could actually attend both.

They might well come together again at some point, probably the Spirit weekend.

I propose this rather cautiously, as I think I know who is going to be asked to do the liberal/radical/progressive side if this course is followed.

Living the Questions

It would be worth exploring Living the Questions as a Progressive Christian alternative to Alpha which, from what I’ve seen, does not have many of the drawbacks I’ve identified above. However, I know too little about it at the moment to be able to assess whether it would be a viable alternative, an add-on or a follow-up (it would certainly do the last of those).

Journey

Journey is a Radical Christian programme of spiritual development originated by Rev. Dr. John Vincent. I have not actually been through a Journey experience (albeit I have been on a journey of my own for 45 years now) but have talked at length with John Vincent about it and read the literature, and I think it has great promise as a follow-up to Alpha. However, I am sceptical that it could be an alternative.

———————-

The question is always “What do we do next”, and we’re going to be meeting elsewhere on Wednesday evenings for a bit to talk more informally; out of this I hope something will arise. What I’d like to see from a future Alpha is the ability to move more or less straight on to a Living the Questions or a Journey.

 

 

Here’s another recycled sermon:-

Once, there was an intrepid explorer pushing into the wilds of what is now Alberta, who had found a native guide. He was trying to map the area and was asking the native names of things; pointing at a mountain, he said “what is that called”, and the mountain is now Mt. Tadwagogol.

Of course, the “native” was in fact a French-speaking halfcaste trapper, as the French had been into the interior long before any Englishmen; of course, the French can speak English but on the whole the English know no French.

And so, to the French-speaker, that mountain is now called “Yourfingeryoufool”.

I could now say, like the African storyteller, “I don’t know if it happened this way, but I know this story is true”.

Actually, I do know that it didn’t happen that way, because I made up this version of a story which is told about mountains in many lands, and I suspect all of them are apocryphal, or in other words they didn’t actually happen like that. But they tell us a truth or two. The guy who knows more languages can baffle the one who doesn’t, perhaps?

Or more, never trust a translator. If you can, learn the language in use somewhere and you’ll go wrong a lot less often. In the Bible, nothing was written in English. All we have is translations. All we have is translators to produce the translations, and translators (as we’ve seen above) sometimes have their own agenda. Often, they don’t even realise they HAVE an agenda, because they just know it’s right to translate in THIS way and don’t ask themselves why they know this, what is it makes them sure – and nine times out of ten, it’s because they already have a theory of what it is that the word is likely to mean.

Such as a mountain, rather than a finger.

Or a very scary Last Judgment with the possibility of getting things wrong without realising it, rather than a corrective exaggeration encouraging people to obey the Second Great Commandment when Jesus says (Matthew 25:40) “Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me”.

However, there are excellent Bibles, printed and online, which have the literal translations of each word made available to you (I say “translations” rather than “translation” because a huge number of words do not translate with direct equivalence – consider “In the beginning was the Word”, which in one French translation is “Au commencement etait le verbe” and in another “le parole” giving a sense in the first of action, in the second of speaking, where our English word is a static one. I’d have translated “the Word” into French as “le Mot”, which no French Bible uses, or at least I would if I weren’t more interested in what the original said, which was “Logos” in koine Greek. And THAT is completely different again – but that’s another topic

The story shows us also that you should never mistake whatever it is that points the way for the thing which it’s pointing to. Indeed, that you should never mistake the man doing the pointing for the thing pointed at, or some part of him at least. You don’t drive up to a signpost saying “Paris” with an arrow on it and say “Right, now we’ve reached Paris”. Because that would be stupid, wouldn’t it?

And yet we sing songs in Church worshipping Jesus. No matter that the fellow we’re actually supposed to be following said on numerous occasions “not me but the Father” (in much the same way as John the Baptist is said to have said “not me but the one to come”). We have only one instance of Jesus’ words on how to pray, and that’s in Luke 11:1 (and Matthew 6:12): “One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples'” . What follows is the Lord’s Prayer. You all know it. It’s a prayer to God, not to Jesus, and that’s how he, the man himself, the person we are actually supposed to be following the teachings of, actually told us to pray.

In Mark 10:18 Jesus says “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone”; that is echoed in Matthew 19:17. In John 14:28 he says “My Father is greater than I”. Even Paul manages to keep the two distinct in his mind; in Coll. 3:1 Jesus is seated on the right hand of God, 1 Cor. 11:3 “the head of Christ is God”.

There are a few problematic passages in John which have produced the concept of Jesus as God (and although it’s outside the scope of this, I have reasons for thinking that is not an unreasonable thing to say), but in all the cases I’ve mentioned so far Jesus is less than God or not God at all, really; he cries “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani” ( “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me”) in Mark 15:34 which Matthew also reports in 27:46.

Many of the others can be more easily explained as God being revealed through Jesus than by Jesus being God.

The big one, though, to my mind, is John 14:6, which we all know “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no one comes to the Father but by me”.

The topology of going through God to reach God is a bit too much for me at the moment. No, I think he was rather explicitly saying “Look, this way” (or “that mountain”).

Now, what is a “way”? It’s a path, a road, a direction. Now assuming that we’ve got over our literalist tendencies today, I’m sure we’d prefer not to take home the image of walking on TOP of Jesus to get to God, so perhaps we could settle on “direction”?

Jesus is the direction to God from where we are. We don’t stop there, any more than we stop at the signpost saying “Paris”. We walk there in fellowship in a church.

And the church is the body of Christ. Paul says (1 Cor. 12:27) “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (I have always suspected that, as a body part, I am the ingrowing toenail…)

I point to to Jesus, and Jesus points you to God, to a way to God, to a journey which all of us can take, walking together, side by side, but with Jesus our guide.

Idolatry and eisegesis: how we should avoid them but will do them anyhow.

The second of the ten commandments (see Ex. 20:4-6 , Lev. 26:1 and Deut.  5:8-10) prohibits idols: ““You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them…” from Exodus. Now, Christianity doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the succeeding passages of Exodus (Ex. 21-31) or the linked provisions of Lev. 11-26:2, but we seem to have retained “the ten”. At least in theory.

Because, actually, most flavours of Christianity do make images; of Jesus, rather less of God the Father and very occasionally the odd dove. We run a huge risk of directing our worship towards these pictures or statues, both of which I think qualify as “graven images”, rather than towards what lies behind them. In that context, the Eastern Orthodox church attitude to icons unsettles me, as does the Catholic attitude to statues of saints and Mary mother of God.

However, what are we doing when we form concepts of what God actually is? I suggest that we’re making a kind of internal “graven image”, particularly if we think in pictures. Peter Rollins in How (Not) to Speak of God says “[N]aming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.”

Now there are several passages in the Bible which suggest extremely strongly that any concept of God we have is inadequate. I can think of Isa. 55:8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, says the Lord”, the celebrated 1 Cor. 13:12 “For now we see in a glass darkly, but then face to face” and John 1:8 “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (Incidentally, I do not read this passage as contradicting either Isaiah or Paul, but best read in the light of both).

 I’m reminded of the humorous comment “God made man in his image, and ever since that man has been returning the compliment” (I can’t find an attribution). This is mainly considered to target anthropomorphising God, of which examples are thinking of God as a guy with a long white beard sitting on a cloud dispensing judgment on people (the picture I tended to glean from my early Sunday School experience) or as a sort of superhero writ large, with POWERS, dashing around and righting wrongs in response to prayer. I have even more difficulty with a concept of God which can be reduced to a guy who wears his knickers outside his tights than I do with the old bearded chap. Rom. 1:22-23 deals with this “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles”.

But it can be any image of God. Any concept of God. It’s a form of idolatry. The Catholic Encyclopaedia has this to say:- “Now, the human mind, when sufficiently ripe to receive the notion of God, is already stocked with natural imagery in which it clothes the new idea. That the limited mind of man cannot adequately represent, picture, or conceive the infinite perfection of God, is self-evident. If left to his own resources, man will slowly and imperfectly develop the obscure notion of a superior or supreme power on which his well-being depends and whom he can conciliate or offend.” The vast set of quotations at “A Puritan’s Mind” come to the same conclusion – and if Catholicism and Puritanism can agree on something , I may not have to work harder! (I don’t, incidentally, agree with other conclusions in either article; I have a different template of interpretation than theirs).

But then, how can our human minds relate to God at all unless we have some mental concept of Him? I certainly can’t; I acknowledge that most of the time I work with a panentheist concept of God, which is the only concept I can get my head round which reasonably fits my personal, spiritual, emotional experience of God.

I go further. For us to formulate a concept of God, we must limit Him; we must say “he is like this” or “in this situation he will do this” or “his character is this and therefore…”. I think that is a part of what idolatry is pointing at, it is an attempt to set ourselves above God, to be able to control Him (“if we do this then God must do that”). I have to acknowledge that all ( or almost all) of us want certainty – though Rational Chris is able to do without certainty, Emotional Chris can’t be persuaded to let go of it, and the totality of Chris would not be human were this not the case. It seems to me an inbuilt human interest to seek control, and a wish for certainty has to be part of this (having suffered from chronic anxiety for a significant number of years and lived through a period, also of some years, during which virtually no aspect of my future was predictable in any sensible way, I can particularly relate to this).

This should not in any way be taken to indicate that the individual most referred to quality of God in the whole of the Bible, namely God’s love for humanity, both individually and collectively, is in any way limited. The Torah attests to God’s love, particularly for a chosen people. The prophets attest to God’s love for Israel in particular and humanity in general, Ezekiel to his love for humanity individually. The Psalms attest to all three of these frequently. Jesus attests to God’s love, particularly for the individual, in the sayings from the gospels which are undisputedly his (even by the Jesus Seminar), the remaining contents of the gospels which represent the developing experience of the post-resurrection Christ among several communities of Jesus’ followers and Paul attest to God’s love, particularly for the individual and for the body of Jesus’ followers. The strongest individual experience of God consistently throughout has been his love for us. Rob Bell delivers a passionate account and invitation from the heart (not from systematic theology) in “Love Wins”. I would prefer to hear this spoken, acted by him rather than read it, as I’m sure it was conceived, but I have that in my mind’s eye while writing this.

Reconciling that experience with the existence of pain, suffering and evil in the world is a question of Theodicy (why bad things happen in the simplest terms), and I’ll address it elsewhere. Whole books have been written on it, whole libraries worth of books.

Eisegesis

I didn’t just have the word “idolatry” in the title, but also “eisegesis”. This is the practice of interpreting scripture with presuppositions, i.e. expecting it to show you something. It is contrasted with “exegesis”, which to me in the broader sense means allowing scripture to speak to me without expecting any particular thing from it. If you follow that link, I think that “Revealed Exegesis” is poor exegesis, as it presupposes that the text is throughout divinely inspired such as to convey a divine revelation, not just in the individual passages but in the Bible as a whole.

I link this with idolatry because both involve imposing our concepts on something which we need to accept for what it actually is and experience as such without our interference.

In order to be an “equal opportunity offender” I also think some aspects of the work of historical-critical scholars can be criticised in exactly the same way. Taking the work of the Jesus Seminar  (notorious among mainline-to-conservative Christians), as an example, these kinds of methods have been severely criticised by many people. It is quite hard to find a readily available unbiased account of their methodology, and perhaps the best advice is to read Robert M. Price’s and N.T. Wright’s articles, both of which are critical of the Jesus Seminar’s assumptions for entirely valid reasons, at least to themselves. Robert Price is very much the closest of these to what I would regard as a true historical-critical perspective (if you wish to adopt such a technique) and you can see what conclusion he arrives at; Tom Wright is absolutely correct in his comments on the voting procedure and method of translating it into an aggregate colour (Red, pink, grey or black depending on the decreasing degree of certainty with which sayings or actions are assumed to be those of Jesus). The system was irredeemably flawed, as he says. The Wikipedia entry (which I consider reasonably fair and unbiased but extremely incomplete) seems to me to give a reasonably fair account.

Just one point I need to mention. In Tom Wright’s critique, I think he is absolutely correct in saying that in a story-telling culture, which I accept was the case in rural Palestine at the time (though not in towns and cities), stories rather than just aphorisms are transmitted readily. What he doesn’t advert to (and I don’t think he adverts to enough in his other writings) is the fact that those stories get amended seriously in order to give extra flavour, to convey the story-teller’s point of view and to suit a particular audience. He isn’t going to get all that much closer to “authentic Jesus” by taking this into account. But definitely closer.

I have to concede that the eventual 74 scholars who stayed with the project to the end do not include a lot of heavyweight biblical scholars who might have been there, though as Tom Wright admits, the list of members includes some of the most respected biblical scholars in the world. However, reference to Westar’s criteria for membership seems to indicate that anyone with a PhD or equivalent in religious studies or a related field could have been involved, the membership of the seminar started at 150 and there have been some 200 actually involved. Although it has to be said that this would have opened the way for conservative scholars to “pack” the Seminar, the criteria of the Seminar (see the Wikipedia link) could not have been honestly accepted by any significantly conservative scholar. It is therefore not surprising that so many “black” entries appear.

That would not necessarily matter if the criteria were entirely without prejudgment, but Tom Wright is in general correct in criticising those (I don’t agree with a fair number of his points, though). As can be seen from Robert Price’s comments, however, they can also be attacked for prejudgment from the other extreme of interpretation (and Price is far closer to what I would expect from an historian with no religious or non-religious leaning, if anyone fitting that description can be found).

That is the real historical-critical method.

The base problem with that is that it excludes any possibility of there being any supernatural force or occurrence absolutely, including miracles, prophecy and supernatural entities other than God (in which I include angels and demons), which is a presupposition, and as Tom Wright states, tilts the scales of objectivity.

After all, this technique is used widely in studying ancient literature of other cultures, in which that possibility is always excluded. Without the presupposition that the Bible is special, if you accept the supernatural in the Bible, you also have to accept the supernatural in a very large amount of other ancient literature. The result would be fantastically different from the picture of the ancient world which historians have built up. It is frankly not worth making the effort to do this; the result would be so ludicrous as to convince most people very rapidly that the method was, in fact, faulty in taking these things into account.

I am not necessarily saying that we need to abandon this principle. However, if you eliminate accounts which have some supernatural event completely, you ignore the fact that all the evidence is that the people of the time did not think along the same lines that we do, and felt it entirely natural and indeed right to invent stories showing the importance of famous people; these showed their “real character”, you might say. Thus, an account including supernatural elements might (even if there is not in fact some non-supernatural explanation for it having happened which would be interpreted by the people of the time rationally) actually be eyewitness and have substantial truth to it – it just wouldn’t evidence a miracle.

I am also not absolutely ready to abandon the possibility that some supernatural events do occur, purely on the basis that although the overwhelming preponderance of accounts of such events have proved to me personally and to a lot of debunkers of the supernatural to have a naturalistic explanation (sadly, many of the modern ones involving deliberate fraud), there are things which have happened to me and to people whose accounts I really trust for which, to say the least, a naturalistic explanation even if present is very unsatisfactory.

Now, I hope that I’ve shown from the above that I myself try to be as untainted by presuppositions as I possibly can; only that way can I allow the text to speak to me rather than first putting on a set of distorting glasses and then reading. I started this process having a nearly completely scientific-rationalist and historical-critical stance and at a point where all my instincts were to use an atheist presupposition but I had one piece of personal experience which told me that presumption was wrong.

It may come as a surprise to readers, but the vast bulk of my conclusions were then reached from an only very slightly modified (as above) historical-critical stance and through reading the Bible itself in multiple translations, and applying the forensic techniques learned by any lawyer who has spent a reasonable amount of time in court to seek the nearest approach to the truth as possible. I quote other writers extensively when I can, but I tend to do this after having used my own reading technique to arrive at a working hypothesis as to the way in which the text has actually arrived at the wording it has, in order to give my conclusions some scholarly authority and in order, to some extent, to allow me not to worry at the problem further. I admit, I keep coming back to texts now having already a good working hypothesis which has already been confirmed after reading some new interpretation which seems particularly reasonable and “checking my working” as a mathematician would say.

To explain my comments about legal forensic techniques, I used to be good at taking the agreed evidence in a case and seeing how it could be explained such that my client was less guilty than might otherwise have appeared, i.e. a plea in mitigation, or even not guilty at all. I was, of course, doing this with a presupposition, namely that my client actually was in some way innocent, unlikely as it might have seen. In a defended case rather than a plea, I would sequentially argue as an exercise in my mind or with a colleague first for a guilty verdict and then for innocent, so I could do it both ways.

I make the most possible use of that technique that I can when viewing any scripture the meaning of which is debatable, and try to arrive at the result which a reasonable jury would reach given capable presentation of both sides.

I also try to learn as much as can be reasonably known about the ways of life, ways of thinking, philosophies and social structures of the milieu in which scripture was written as I can, though, so I use historical scholarship a lot more than I do scriptural scholarship before actually tackling a passage. The context is very important. Likewise, at some point I may find that my decision making may turn on the interpretation of a word, and so I go to scholars in the language used and seek a variety of possibilities.

So I’m an absolute paragon of virtue, sitting on my pedestal criticising such heavyweight scholars as Tom Wright or (for example) Robert Funk, who is close to Mr. Price’s stance and a heavyweight in Tom Wright’s class, and sneering at their faulty techniques from my total lack of formal qualification in any subject which would get me into Westar as a Fellow, am I?

Bull droppings!  I’m just as guilty as they are in the absolute sense. I wouldn’t have started the exercise of reading scripture seriously like this had I not had a presupposition; this was drawn from my own experience and F.C. Happold’s “Mysticism, a study and an anthology”. The quotations he gives from St. Paul, St. John and the Oxyrhyncus papers spoke directly to my own experience and gave me emotional certainty that all three were basically speaking of the same experience as mine, though expressed in radically different ways. I thus expected to recognise in scripture some instances of mystical experience and, where I did, to be able to say “Whatever else he may have been, the writer (in the case of Paul and John) or the one making the statements (in the case of Oxyrhyncus) has experienced this thing which I’m provisionally calling God and therefore their other statements may well be inspired as well and I should look at them very carefully”.

I also took the attitude which I used to use when cross-examining eyewitnesses (who in my experience are notoriously unreliable but almost always think they are telling the truth), and assume that all the voices seen in scripture were giving a faithful account of their understanding of things (not, of course, the same as the truth) unless I found reason to the contrary. And, as with eyewitnesses, differences in their stories were probably explained by different perspectives, different assumptions, different vocabularies and different thought processes.

I never liked conspiracy theories anyhow. I tend to assume that where there’s a choice of cockup or conspiracy, cockup is massively most likely.

And I used a kind of Lectio Divina almost from the start. As it’s not quite that described by Fr. Luke Dysinger O.S.B or, in fact, the slightly different one taught to me about ten years ago, I’ll explain it.

Taking a passage, I read through it fairly quickly to get the sense of it. I then read it aloud, putting as much “performance” into that as I can manage (if you do this, do it where others won’t be annoyed). I then read it through really slowly, taking time over each word to see if it gives me any feeling about meaning, whether positive, negative or “pardon?”.

In proper Lectio, which I still do occasionally, at that point I should meditate on it longer, pray and contemplate (which for me aren’t really a trinity, more an unity). However, in fact I tend to go and look at other resources. Is it illuminated by surrounding passages? Are there any other scriptural uses of the word which might help me? Is there any commentary on this in the Bible I’m reading (or one of the others I keep around for this reason)? Do any of these give me a new insight? If not, I meditate on it a bit longer and possibly write a note to come back to it later, and then move on to repeat the exercise on the next word which produces some feedback in me. And so on…

This can be an extremely time consuming way of doing things. I find it brings a lot of insight.

And, for me, it makes up somewhat for the fact that I’m not really a scholar in any of the applicable fields (except in the sense of having definitely spent over 10,000 hours working in this way, not that I expect this to impress anyone much), I’m not a working pastor or indeed anything beyond a largely solitary contemplative.

Oh, and I do find that when I later read Marcus Borg’s take on something, I almost always seem to have come up with the same answers, though often for slightly different reasons. My working hypothesis is that he has exactly the same kind of experiences as I do.

So, do you have any presuppositions? Guess what I expect the answer to be. Do you maybe think that you might get a fresh and interesting view of scripture if you didn’t?

Well, that’s very very difficult. I can’t do it. As far as I can see Tom Wright can’t do it either, though he clearly tries. The best I can suggest is to examine how you read scripture and ask yourself very seriously what the process you use is and what you expect to find there. At least then you might be able to pause a moment and say “How much did I prejudge this? and see if you can then get a slightly different perspective.

Alternatively (and a lot easier), make sure you read several views from different stances and try to accept all of them as being as faithful as they can be.

The snag turned out to be, when I got there, that this wasn’t actually talk 6 “How does God guide us” which I’d prepared for, but talk 10, “How can I resist evil”.

After a chat with the guest speaker beforehand (remember, I’m trying to be a constructive pain in the neck here!), he got started. And that gave me problems, because I didn’t want to tear the thing to shreds immediately.

The talk started off by following the standard line of saying “the Devil” is referenced in the Hebrew Scriptures. And he’s not. There is the serpent in Genesis, there’s the morning star/lucifer in Isaiah and there are a few references to “Satan”. The Hebrew “ha-Satan” (meaning “the accuser” or sometimes “the adversary”) has pretty much the function described in Job; he’s an agent of God, there to act as something like counsel for the prosecution, to test faith by temptation. According to Judaism, he’s absolutely nothing like a personalised force of evil and, frankly, where there doesn’t seem to be any need to look at it too closely, I’m very happy to let Judaism claim prior copyright in the Hebrew Scriptures and let Jewish scholars do the interpretation. Call it intellectual laziness or “standing on the shoulders of giants” as you like. Also according to Judaism, the serpent is ha-Satan, as he is performing a somewhat similar function, so not “the Devil”. haSatan is regarded as real, but as a servant of God (hence permission being asked and given in Job).

Lucifer, in Isaiah, is a translation of the Hebrew words which indicate “morning star”, and this passage specifically refers to a king of Babylon. So, also not the Devil. (From this point, if I wasn to indicate the Jewish conception, I will use “haSatan”, otherwise if I use Satan it means the Intertestamental/Christian conception.

Yes, the New Testament concept is more like our current ideas of “The Devil”, and it doesn’t derive from the Hebrew “ha-Satan”, it derives from the intertestamental literature, Hebrew writings from between the Hebrew Scriptures and the time of the new Testament, notably the Book of Wisdom and the Second Book of Enoch. Wisdom is part of the apocrypha, i.e. it appears in the Catholic Bible but not in Protestant Bibles; it was part of the Septuagint (i.e. the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures) but is not part of the TaNaKh (the Judaic Hebrew Scriptures). Enoch is usually regarded as pseudepigrapha (generally a polite term for “fake”) but is accepted as canonical by the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Churches. Both of these are quoted in the New Testament.

There is an immediate problem here for those who are not Catholic or from the two small Orthodox churches mentioned; that is that the concepts which become quoted in the New Testament are themselves not canonical; the church fathers, in other words, thought that they were unreliable.

There is a much bigger problem, though, and that is that one of the probable reasons they are not canonical in most of Christianity or in Judaism is that they are considered to do two things, one being to introduce a tendency to gnosticism, the other being to be heavily tainted by Zoroastrian thinking. Zoroastrian is a dualist religion with equal opposing good and evil Gods (Ahura Mazda and Ahriman or Angra Mainyu). The Zoroastrian concept of Ahriman is quite similar to the concept of the Devil in the New Testament, and I think transmission of this idea is a certainty.

Judaism is an ardently monotheistic religion, and in theory so is Christianity (arguments about the Trinity set on one side here). Zoroastrianism is not.

Some time ago, I wrote “If the Devil existed, it would be necessary to disbelieve in him”. The theological reason for this is that I am a panentheist, and in this conception there is just no room in metaphysics for a second force; I could point out that if we believe in omnipresence (and panentheism is to a great extent an extreme and literal assertion of omniscience) then, if there were an “evil god”, then God would permeate him as well. Also, the presence of an opposing force of real power limits the conventional belief in God’s omnipotence and, in order to function with any actual power at all, his omniscience. God stops being almighty, and whatever you say about God having the final victory, this has to be the case. In any event, I cannot read Isaiah 45:7 “I form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil: I the Lord do all of these things” (KJV) and not consider that there is direct biblical authority for there not being any creator whether of good or evil than God. Yes, you will find the word “ra-ah” in Hebrew translated by all sorts of words other than “evil” in other, later, translations, for instance “woe” in the RSV, but it is impossible to get away from a very strong connotation of evil and still preserve the meaning of the original.

And as has happened earlier in the course, they have to quote C.S. Lewis. Lewis was an amateur theologian only, his academic background lay elsewhere and he was best known as a novelist and poet. How it is that Lewis has become the theologian of choice for Alpha beats me, because I have never encountered a C.S. Lewis quote used in this kind of situation which is not theologically unsound and/or logically false. In this case, Lewis claims there are two mistakes to make, disbelief and unhealthy interest. I agree with him on the second, but not, as you can see above, the first. I’ll deal with this more later.

In the questions at the end of the main discussion, what I then made was the point that a “real Satan” was untrue to the Jewish monotheist tradition from start, and introduced the real risk of a slide into complete dualism. However, I said I agree that if you the New Testament references metaphorically and referring to inner forces, then I find little to argue with. There was quite a bit of agreement.

At the discussion later, reference was made to Paul’s use of the term “God of this age”, also rendered “God of this world”, but I didn’t have an opportunity to address it. This is even more dangerous terminology as it can easily be read to indicate actual dualism, and also to support a gnostic concept of the material world being incurably bad, annd the only good to be reached post-mortem. It’s beyond the scope of what I’m writing here to say more than that gnosticism was thoroughly disliked by the early Church Fathers (this is Irenaeus’ position) and led to the non-inclusion in the canon of the New Testament of the Gnostic Gospels. (There is one of those, the Gospel of Thomas, which I regret not being included, on the grounds that firstly it’s the only pure “sayings” gospel I’ve read, secondly that it contains the one scripture which most persuaded me that Jesus was to be followed, “I am the light that shines over all things. I am everything. From me all came forth, and to me all return. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift a stone, and you will find me there.” (Tho. 77) and thirdly that if it’s gnostic at all, it’s less gnostic than John, on which very much Christian doctrine is based).

I didn’t mention, but will note here that when taken metaphorically, the New Testament references to Satan or cognates encourage a form of exteriorisation of our own baser urges. There can be psychological benefits to this (which I why I agree the metaphorical interpretation is worthwhile) but there are also some significant psychological dangers, particularly in persons with mental illnesses or psychological disorders; I would recommend that this kind of concept is not used by anyone with such a mental health background without the utmost of care.

Firstly, it is an unfortunate fact that the more you stress the reality of something “bad” and stress it’s power, the more attractive you tend to make it. If it’s powerless and/or imaginary, it isn’t attractive. Put very briefly, I can speak from personal experience, as though by around age 9 I was atheistic as far as God was concerned, all things occult fascinated me, and even after I lost any serious interest in those as a possible way of getting power, I remained interested on an academic level until my 20’s. The detail of this must wait for another day, but suffice it to say that I have personal experience of some aspects and have past or current friends who actually practice in various areas.

It is the case that we now live in a scientific-rationalist society, and science has ostensibly left no room for there to be any supernatural element in the church. No miracles, no prophecy, no healing; all are scientifically impossible. (Yes, there are a few studies indicating there may be some minuscule benefit to prayer, but they’re much attacked). This has had, and still gets, a big press, and no, I don’t think that that’s because atheists, science or the press are agents of Satan; it’s because the church has historically got itself an extremely bad name (and parts of it continue to) and it’s therefore a large and popular target. On the other hand, although science has been equally used to debunk every supposed supernatural event from the wide field of the occult, that isn’t so unpopular, and it has the cachet of being “a bit naughty”, and after all, everyone looks at their horoscope in the papers, don’t they?

I’m not saying that guarantees a slide into eventual Satanism (and I remind you that Satanism is firmly based on Paul’s “God of this world” statement), but if someone believes in any kind of “magic”, other kinds become easier to look for.

This Wikipedia article on magic isn’t too inadequate or unbalanced. Neither is this on Wicca or this on Freemasonry. Aside from pointing out that Wicca is a religion rather than specifically an occult practice and that due to Christianity’s past history, there is a saying in Wicca “never more the burning times”, these are mostly harmless, and scare articles in some Christian sources which I’ve actually investigated have always proved to have some non-supernatural explanation but some deplorable human behaviour. Again, that’s a big subject and one I may come back to.

However, some occult practices and those who use and pursue them are extremely capable of messing with people’s heads, so I urge caution. Mind you, that can be said of some branches of Christianity and even, dare I say it, Alpha (which one atheist friend of mine is convinced is a form of brainwashing). Ho hum

In my last post, I mentioned something which happened at the end of discussion on Wednesday evening. I was explaining why I didn’t wholly rely on any translation of the Bible, and used as an example the beginning of the Fourth Gospel, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God”. When I first read that in French, it was from the Jerusalem Bible, which reads “Au commencement etait le Verbe, et le Verbe etait aupres de Dieu, et le Verbe etait Dieu” (sorry for the lack of accents – I don’t know how to get them in WordPress). Although “Verbe” is perfectly well rendered in English by “Word”, at the time I first saw it I’d have expected “Mot”; “Verbe” carries with it at least a hint of being an action word, not a “thing” word. Of course, in the original Greek, the word is “Logos”, which has even more comlexity – and that’s where I stopped.

It proved that someone there was going to be presenting a bible study on the first 18 verses of John the following night  and that this had given them a new dimension to the first verse. I mentioned that there was even more to the original Greek word “Logos”. Having given him a link to the entry on Philo in the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, I wasn’t able on Thursday to do full justice to the concept .

I use the above link not because I think it’s wonderfully written (even overlooking the typo in the date of Philo’s embassy) or because I think it does full justice to the subject, but because it’s the fullest resource I could find on the internet for the whole gamut of Philo’s concept of “Logos”.

“Logos” was in any event a Greek philosophical term with a set of meanings well beyond “Word” or “Verbe”, but I think Philo of Alexandria is the best possible source for a fuller understanding of what it is likely the writer intended by using the word “Logos” in the gospel. Philo was a Jewish philosopher who is known to have been old enough and respected enough to head a Jewish delegation to the Emperor Gaius Caligula in 40 CE, which places him as a contemporary of (or possibly a decade or two older than) Jesus. He seems to have had Greek as his primary language, judging by the fact that he quotes from the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Torah (the first five books of what we call the Old Testament) rather from the original. He wrote prolifically, and whatever the arguments are, I think it very probable that the Greek-speaking writer of the Fourth Gospel knew of Philo’s ideas, even if you don’t look at what Philo’s ideas actually were; he was after all writing in Greek with Greek philosophical concepts about a development from Hebrew scripture, just as Philo had slightly earlier.

Philo had a very complex idea of the meaning of Logos, drawn from his study of the Torah but putting his understandings into a Greek philosophical framework. Assuming that you don’t want to plough through the entry I’ve linked to above, there are twelve categories listed. Among these are Utterance of God, God’s first-born son, the power of creation, the mediator between God and man and God himself. In other words, all of the philosophical structure underlying the Fourth Gospel is laid out in plenty of detail in Philo’s works. On that basis, I don’t think there’s a serious possibility that the author wasn’t steeped in Philo’s ideas.

It is not surprising that some of the early Church Fathers loved him, even to the extent of trying to co-opt him as at least a proto-Christian (though there’s no sign that he even knew of the existence of Jesus). They already had most of the building blocks of trinitarian thinking laid out for them by Philo.

He isn’t recognised as of any importance by Judaism. Those Orthodox or Conservative Jews with whom I’ve talked consider him an aberrant individual outside anything like the mainstream of Judaism.

That’s where I go out on a limb. I think it highly probable that he’s been deliberately minimised over the years in Judaism, and that actually he was representative of a really significant element in the Greek-speaking diaspora Jewish community, which was all around the Eastern Mediterranean, i.e. in all the places Paul later visited. Scholarship seems to indicate that the Fourth Gospel was written in Asia Minor by a fluent Greek-speaker (there’s less agreement about whether or not he was Jewish).

Before 70CE, there were several strains of what is called “Second Temple” Judaism, including Pharisees, Sadducees, Temple priests, Essenes and Zealots but also, I think, including a significant proportion of Jews in the diaspora who spoke and thought in Greek. The link I gave gives two other names of earlier Jews who wrote combining Greek philosophical thinking and Judaism, so I don’t think this was unusual.

I will grant that between 164BCE and 63BCE the Jews had revolted against the Greek imperial power in the region and maintained an independent state, reacting against the Greek (pre-Roman) oppression of Jews and their attempt to assimilate them, and that during that century there had been a major reaction against anything tinged with “Greek” in Palestine. I doubt, however, that this took in the whole of the diaspora – it certainly didn’t include Philo’s background.

In 66-73CE, the Jews revolted again and were put down with maximal force. The Temple was destroyed and all groups other than the Pharisees were thereafter largely wiped out by death or deportation, a process which took until the aftermath of the Bar Kochba revolt in 132-135CE to complete. I think the Jerusalem church was one such casualty.

Without the heart of their religion, the surviving Pharisaic Rabbis were forced to reconsider what Judaism was, and the result seems to me to have been a neo-conservatism in which one often used phrase was “not as the gentiles”. Over the next centuries, anything which smacked of Greek thinking (or Christian thinking) was extirpated.

If, which I am inclined to think, Philo’s kind of thinking was widespread among Greek-speaking diaspora Jews, it goes a long way towards explaining how early Christian concepts might have taken root reasonably easily in Jewish communities in Asia Minor and Greece. Again, my Jewish correspondents seem to think that none of Paul’s ideas (far less John’s, which are regarded as irredeemably antisemitic) could possibly have been accepted by Jews and that Christianity is therefore virtually entirely a Greek phenomenon, just “borrowing” some ideas together with a bad translation of their scriptures (the Septuagint). I don’t now think that’s correct; much more of the conceptual differences (such as God-made-man, man elevated to God or trinity) now seem to me natural developments from a kind of Second Temple Judaism which existed in the Greek-speaking diaspora in the first century.

They’re right from the standpoint of modern Judaism, but not from that of, I think,  a significant part of first century Judaism.And, just to underline my point, modern Judaism doesn’t accept translations of their scriptures as being fully reliable. They have a point!

You don’t need to know all this stuff in order to read John 1, particularly if you have a footnoted Bible which gives additional meanings. But I think you’re missing something.

 

 

I think this Alpha business is good for me. I may not agree with some of the content (a malicious person might say “any of the content”), but to feel moved to two posts in one day…

While thinking further about what I said about Paul in my previous post, I followed a link from a friend’s blog (Henry’s Participatory Bible Study) and found Scott McKnight talking about Pharisees. Excellent. I add that I accept what a Jewish friend once said, which was that all of modern Judaism is basically “the Pharisees” – as Scott points out, the rabbinic tradition is Pharisaic. If we use it as a derogatory term, we are probably being anti-semitic, not having the excuse of actually being Jewish in the first place.

OK, Paul was self-admittedly a Pharisee (which of itself should give us pause when using “Pharisee” in a derogatory way, perhaps). Alan Segal gives an excellent account in “Paul, the Convert”, accepting Paul’s self-description, and on the back of that I see no need for any other hypothesis. Paul’s theologising in Romans (and I referenced chapters 2 to 4 in my previous post) is fundamentally Pharisaic; it is an attempt to use reason and scripture (in this case a lot of Psalms, a little Torah and a snippet of Ezekiel) to justify following Paul’s concept of Jesus without the need to follow the whole Levitical/Deuteronomical Law.

I always had problems with this. I have to remember that Jesus was a Jew, and by all accounts a learned Jew, concerned about the way to follow God’s Law, which puts him squarely in the Pharisaic tradition himself. It seems to me that it has always been true that, in religion, there is a tendency for those who are extremely similar in most things to anathematise their only slightly divergent brethren more than they might people of a completely different faith structure – Emo Phillips wonderfully satirised this in what was voted the best religious joke ever. Were the Pharisees harder on Jesus than he was on them, and was either really justified? I can’t tell, though I do notice that arguments between Jews of different persuasions these days tend to be “vigorous” by my standards, and reading stories of, for instance, the followers of Hillel and Shammai (during one such, the followers of Shammai won, because more of them survived…), I can read the accounts in the synoptics as merely evidencing vigorous debate. Not so much those in the Fourth Gospel, where “the Jews” tends to substitute for “scribes and Pharisees”.  Years ago, I spent some time wondering if, in order more fully to follow Jesus, I should adopt Mosaic Law in it’s 613 commandment entirety.

I still do not discount this completely, but where would I then be? The only group which, as far as I can see, attempts this are the “Messianic Jews”, who are anathematised by most of Judaism (Mr. Phillips must love this…). Most, it seems to me, are not “Jews who have come to follow Jesus”, but gentiles; basically Christians who have gone down this way of thinking. The way Judaism has developed since the time of Jesus means that there can be no sensible crossover. “Not as the gentiles” seems to have been a major principle of the development of Judaism as it now is, and in order to become in any way a part of Judaism, I would need to abandon any adherence to Jesus (or, as you wish, Yeshua ben Yosef, or Yoshke).

There is no community of Messianic Jews anywhere near me, in any event. I don’t think you can sensibly follow this praxis (practice) alone. It demands community; by and large, the Hebrew scriptures speak to the collective rather than the individual, in any event.

The same Jewish friend I mentioned earlier did try to give me something of a “get out” in introducing me to the concept of the Noachide Law. This, I can do, and was already doing. It makes me, he reckoned, a “righteous Gentile”. So, not really in a position fully to understand Jesus, who was not a Gentile at all.

Then again, would I be better placed to understand him if I had been born and brought up Jewish? I have doubts – Jesus was a first century Jew, working within second temple Judaism. Judaism developed very substantially after the first century, not least in reaction to the destruction of the Temple in 70CE and the virtual elimination of Palestine as a centre of Judaism, at least for a time. Jesus may himself have been very like the Pharisees, but I’ve seen argument that he was Essene, a sect which didn’t survive the first century, and even if he was himself uninfluenced by esoteric Judaism (as seen in some of the intertestamental apocrypha) or the Hellenised Alexandrian Judaism of Philo, some of his followers who actually did the writing were definitely not uninfluenced. Paul in particular has to have been familiar with Hellenised Judaism, and even more so the author of the Fourth Gospel.

I think I need to follow Hillel here, and go and study.

Turned up far too early last night. Not only did I allow for rush hour traffic which wasn’t quite there, but the 6.15 for helpers turned out to be 6.15 for 6.30 hoping to get something done by 6.45. Ah well – made myself useful.

I had an initial worry that “helpers” were going to seriously outnumber “guests” looking around approaching 7.30, which was the start time for the delivery of messages – organisation first, then a couple of songs, then the talk. However, plenty of people were there by the time things actually got started, probably slightly better than 1:1 guests to helpers. After the talk, “Who is Jesus”, we split into two groups to talk about it.

It transpired during introductions that none of the guests in my group were non-Christian, nor, indeed, had they any particular misgivings about the talk. I would have liked to take over and work through everything step by step, but didn’t want to monopolise discussion. Ho hum. For anyone wanting to refer to the talk outlines as I blog, by the way, there’s a set of these at http://www.alphausa.org/Groups/1000047416/Talk_Outlines.aspx. This is session 1.

I don’t quibble with Jesus existing as an historical figure, as it happens, though there are quite a few writers who put up a tolerable argument for complete nonexistence. I don’t, however, accept the argument that the New Testament dates from 40-100. OK, none of Paul’s authentic writings can date from much after 60, but I’m only reasonably sure that four of his epistles are actually his, some of the remainder definitely having the feel of mid-to-late second century to me – and Paul is no source at all for anything about the historical Jesus anyhow. For that, you need the gospels.

These are presented as contemporaneous eye-witness accounts. Oh dear! Now, Luke is avowedly not an eyewitness but a collector of stories. Papias, Bishop of Hieraconpolis (as quoted by Eusebius) says that Mark was Peter’s scribe. My own reading of the Fourth Gospel is that the actual writer purported to be taking dictation from the “beloved disciple”, whom the Church fathers decided had to be John.  Neither was therefore themselves an eyewitness. Somewhat more serious, however, is what Papias actually said about the gospels of Mark and Matthew; to paraphrase, Mark wrote down Peter’s sermons in no particular order while Matthew was a collection of sayings in a Hebrew dialect. Now, Papias was writing not earlier than 95, and probably as late as 110 (and as he lived until around then, might have been expected to recall anything he’d written which could mislead as to what the gospels actually looked like). Neither of those descriptions fits what we now see; both are narrative gospels, which does not fit a collection of sermons and absolutely does not fit a collection of sayings, and Matthew shows little signs of being in translation from Aramaic. As a bishop of a reasonably well-connected city, I cannot believe that Papias would not know of a narrative Mark or Matthew if such existed. I cannot therefore date either of these before about 110 at the earliest, i.e. 80 years after the events described. Luke is generally accepted as being derivative of one or both of Mark and Matthew, so is even later.

Most textual critics agree that all the gospels show evidence of multiple layers of redaction, though, so this does not surprise me.  Dating John is more difficult – the earliest fragment dates to about 130, which isn’t proof that the whole thing existed by then, but is indicative. The consensus seems to be that John postdates the three synoptic gospels, but as the synoptics definitely weren’t in their final form in c.110, this may not be correct. It does seem to evidence better knowledge of Palestinian geography, which might argue for earlier.

I do think there must have been earlier writings, now lost (although we might hope for another Nag Hammadi!), but in no way can I say that what we now see is original, eyewitness testimony. It might include some…

I didn’t feel I could advance this whole argument, so relied more on the Jesus Seminar’s conclusions that significant portions of all the gospels were either not Jesus or unlikely to be Jesus. The group leadership attempted to tell me that they were a group of three very liberal scholars, and I corrected the number. Not as much as I should have, for on checking, there were originally 150. I did say that as I recalled, almost none of John was considered even “sounds like Jesus”, let alone “is Jesus”.

I suppose at that point the next bit of the argument, using C.S. Lewis’ celebrated ” would not be a great moral teacher, he would either be insane or he would be the Devil of Hell” trichotomy was going to float by, as I wasn’t confident he said these things (all the important ones being from John). I don’t like the trichotomy anyhow. Leaving out the options of “misreported”, “honestly mistaken” and “speaking as from…”, I don’t actually believe that even in John he is represented as claiming to “be God”. The passages used are 10:30-33, which merely says “from God”, 20:26-29, which is another’s comment and the most famous, 8:58, “Before Abraham was, I am”. That last, to my eyes, almost certainly involves “I AM” being used in the Jewish manner as a reference to God, rather than as a claim of Jesus’ own preexistence; it should therefore read “before Abraham was, God” – and in context, Jesus is shown as claiming that he has knowledge from God, not that he is God. “Son of God” isn’t as much of a claim as might appear, as Hosea 1:10, for instance, applies this term to all of Israel; “messiah” (or “christos”) is probably the strongest, but then, Sabbati Zevi and Menachem Mendel Schneerson are more recent examples that indicate it isn’t unique.

We didn’t get as far as evidence for the resurrection. Ah well, maybe another time.

With this group, I don’t think I need to worry, as I usually do, that quoting facts which can readily be called into question and using arguments which are just plain wrong can give a basis for belief which can too easily be demolished, or can put someone off exploring Christianity where, without the need for a shaky intellectual understanding, they could find spiritual profundity. I do wonder if there’s therefore a point in my continuing. However, the organiser is extremely keen that I keep turning up after hearing some of what I can say, so onward to week 2.

This is the title of a book by Marcus Borg, published 2003. I can strongly recommend it.

I’ve been doing some reading to provide background for some more extended writing I have in contemplation, around the topic of panentheism and Christianity, and caught a reference to this book, which had slid past my consciousness ten years ago. Now, I’ve thought for quite some time that Prof. Borg was what I’ve previously described as a “closet panentheist”, in that parts of some of his previous books strongly hinted to me that he had arrived at a broadly panentheist conception of God. I was interested to see if he went further in “The Heart of Christianity”.

If he was in the closet, in this book he has come out; he’s loud and proud, as you might put it. He goes a lot further. He puts forward a way of viewing scriptures and traditions within “the emerging paradigm” which really demands a panentheist stance, and then goes on to explore specific issues; being “born again” and the Spirit generally; the Kingdom; “Thin Places”; Sin and salvation; praxis; and finally Christianity in a pluralist world. He does it very well, as you’d expect from a biblical scholar of his experience and credentials and a best-selling communicator.

2003 was a bit late for this book to have saved me a lot of thinking, even had I read it fresh from the presses, but I’d have loved to read it in, say, 1993, and had it been in existence and I’d read it in 1973 (or, even better, 1968) my whole spiritual adulthood would probably have been very different. Since 1968 I’ve laboured under the difficulty that my panentheist stance, about which I really have no option, is not “standard Christianity”; here is a well-respected scholar arguing that not only is it a viable and valid way of moving forward with Christianity in a postmodern and pluralist world, but also to some extent respectable in terms of pre-modern thought (say, before around 1500). I grant you, I’ve yet to come across a church anything like local to me in which this kind of approach has reached more than (at most) the leadership, but armed with this book 45 years ago, who knows what might have happened?

I might have liked to see more about what I see as a panentheist thread running through Christianity, or at least it’s mystics, from the earliest days. Prof. Borg does touch on that, but only extremely lightly.

He arrives at his position from a direction entirely different from my own. Prof. Borg has, so far as I can see, been a Lutheran from childhood, and has been thoroughly within the church throughout, arriving eventually at a panentheist conception which re-invigorates and makes sense of his Christianity for the future. I started out as an atheist with an experience which I could only sensibly interpret as panentheist, and then spent many years trying to find out how to fit that into an available faith community (it was only in the late 1990s that two online friends persuaded me that I was, in fact, legitimately a Christian, albeit of a rather unusual flavour). It is interesting to see that Prof. Borg arrives at many of the same ways of looking at things as do I, for instance concepts of sin and salvation; exclusivity; the Kingdom. Neither are they just the same in outline; often he chooses the same passages and analogies as do I. Maybe this further validates the stance?

I attend an Anglican Church, and the words “this is the Word of the Lord” float past me following any reading from the Bible apart from the gospels, in which case the formula is “this is the Gospel of Christ”. But in what way can this conceivably be true for me, a panentheist? This question arises from a private response to my two previous posts.

Well, I assuredly do not think that a separate and personified God dictated the words to the various writers of sections of the Bible, nor do I think that inspiration from whatever source is guaranteed to be rendered by any writer in a form which is correct, sufficient and complete.

That is, except insofar as any words, just as any actions whatsoever, emanate from a part of the whole which is God. Although that could possibly be an adequate piece of mental gymnastics for someone, I need more than that.

I hear the words, and would sometimes really like to substitute (for instance) “this is the word of Paul”, or “this is the word of an unknown psalmist”. In an extreme case, I might want to say “this is the word traditionally ascribed to Moses but actually of an unknown redactor of around the third century BC working on material of the Yahwist source“. I am reasonably convinced by the Biblical scholars who have reached such conclusions; I’m certainly in no position to argue against them, except perhaps in some details of method which don’t impact on the general conclusion.

But I do actually have more than that. For most purposes, I treat scripture as something of fundamental authority in a way in which I assuredly don’t treat (say) the words of the editorial writers of “The Times”, which of course also qualifies to me as words emanating from a part of the whole which is God. If I swallow really hard, I equally have to include the words in “Hello”magazine, thus indicating the limits of usefulness of systematic theology.

This emanates from tradition. In the Wesleyan quadrilateral of scripture, tradition, reason and experience, the fact that the Bible as we know it is scripture is a matter of tradition. Various works which might well have been in the Bible, such as the Epistle to the Laodiceans, the Didache or the Gospel of Thomas don’t appear in current versions; Luther questioned whether Hebrews and Revelation should actually be part of the Bible, but eventually bowed to the pressure of tradition.

A sizeable amount of the impact of that tradition, to me, is the fact that I was brought up with scripture. It was the tradition of my family, the tradition of my early schools, the tradition of what was then a sizeable proportion of the population where I grew up. It is a part of my thinking at a very deep level (which the contents of “Hello” are definitely not!). (A level, indeed, sufficiently deep that I have some suspicions that at some emotional level I may be verging on being a five point Calvinist – but I’m working on that; I don’t find it a particularly healthy emotional stance). In the sense that it forms that imbedded tradition, therefore, I consider “this is the Word of the Lord” to be accurate.

What I do not do is consider this in any absolute sense. I don’t really do absolutes, as witness part of my “Childish Thoughts” post; I consider taking things to extremes to be the best way of causing any system of thinking to break down. It is, however, the bedrock on which the praxis of most of my spiritual life is based, including making the response “thanks be to God” after the declaration in the service. It really isn’t helpful to be thinking “well, actually it’s the word of someone traditionally thought to be Paul but actually writing some years after his death in the context of a theology which had developed somewhat beyond Paul’s actual position”. So I try not to do that any more.

This is a concept under development; I intend to show that there is a valid additional way of looking at the concept of “messiah” and to draw some conclusions from it. It’s intended primarily for a Christian audience at the moment, but attempts not to tread too hard on Jewish toes…

In Hebrew, the word which is translated in English as “messiah” is “moschiach”. This word means “anointed” and is used in quite a few passages of, for instance, items used ritually in Judaism.
In texts in Biblical Hebrew it tends to come without any “the” (maybe it always does, but I’m careful about claims like that, as I don’t read Hebrew to any significant extent!).
Now, in the Hebrew scriptures (in Christianity referred to as the Old Testament), where we’re talking about human beings who are given this label, they are priests or kings (Saul and David spring to mind as both having been labelled so); Cyrus is, if I’m not mistaken, the only non-Jewish person so labelled, in Isaiah 45:1. In addition there are, of course, multiple references to a future “annointed one” in the prophetic writings.
The direction of my thinking on this subject makes me an equal-opportunity offender from the point of view of both Judaism and Christianity. It goes as follows:-
1. Multiple people are described in scripture as “moschiach”, including one non-Jew. Multiple messiahs are therefore scripturally sound as a concept, taken historically.
2. There is no helpful “the” to distinguish whether what is being talked about prophetically is A messiah or THE messiah.
3. The assumption that prophecy using the word “moschiach” refers to one single individual is therefore unfounded in Scripture, taken purely on the face of the words.
4. The tradition of “one messiah” may therefore not be what the prophets intended to indicate. (In fact, I’m aware of a smallish Jewish school of thought which talks of two messiahs, a kingly and a priestly one, and another which talks of a “messiah of the age”)
5. Judaism therefore need never have looked for one person to fulfil all messianic prophecy.
6. Christian identification of Jesus as “the messiah” is therefore based on an error of interpretation. It was open to him, possibly, to have been “a messiah”, and using the example of Cyrus, he didn’t have to be of either a kingly or priestly line for that to be a valid identification. It didn’t, however, have to be exclusive, as he didn’t have to fit all messianic prophecy (and there are a lot of these recognised in Judaism, few of which have so far actually been satisfied). One would do.
7. Reb. Schneerson (former leader of the Chabad Lubavitch group within Judaism and controversially hailed as “moschiach” by many during his lifetime and still by some today) may well also have been correctly identified as “moschiach”, and the same comments apply.
8. I take the view that if the “end times” are actually going to occur in a literal sense, there’s no good reason to believe that that will be any time soon. In terms of fulfilling all messianic prophecy, it seems to me hugely unlikely that a confluence of all these will in fact happen during the lifetime of any one individual, so messianic expectations in both religions are likely to continue unfulfilled. However, they don’t necessarily need to, purely on the basis of the Hebrew Scriptures.
It’s clear to me that there has been a development of a tradition (within pre-second century Judaism) on which both the modern Jewish and the Christian positions are based, but I haven’t yet been shown a logic for this development and would question it if it were shown. I don’t remotely expect either religion to break with this tradition, but I wonder whether freeing up the possibilities a little would not be a good thing…
And on that note, in Christianity we look for the return of Jesus. In part, theologians justify the fact that Jesus emphatically did not satisfy all prophecy referring to a future messiah in the Hebrew Scriptures by suggesting that the remaining prophecies will be satisfied on his return, which is conceived as a once-and-for-all event. Indeed, a return is talked of in the NT eschatological scriptures, and very many people take that as prophetic and literal. While I take note that it might be, on the whole I look for how the eschatological scriptures might be interpreted in terms of the here and now on a spiritual basis.
However, I don’t at this point need to explore this avenue in detail, because I have a number of well-developed principles in Christianity which allow me a view of Jesus as having already returned in some sense (or possibly having never left). The church as the body of Christ, for instance. Jesus being our “head”, i.e. controlling our actions. Aspiring to be Christ-like. Entering into His death and resurrection ourselves. My list is not exhaustive…
This opens the way for me to look for individual Christians or the Church as a whole to fulfil messianic prophecies in advance of any dramatic “second coming”, and thereby to become “moschiach”, “messiah” themselves, in a limited sense individually, but possibly in a more general sense collectively.
The notable unfulfilled prophecies which I have in mind are “a time of world peace” (Isaiah 2:4) and “a time when everyone believes in God” (Isaiah 66:23), these being accessible to everyone as aims. We may be pursuing the second, but I suggest we should maybe not be looking for divine intervention to establish the first. Other notable ones are “gather all the Jews” (Isaiah 11:12), “rebuild the Temple” (Ezekiel 37:27 inter alia) and “a time when all Jews follow God’s commandments” (Ezekiel 37:24); I see the first two as up to Judaism and the nation of Israel to accomplish, though the rest of us should approve. The third, I could interpret as indicating that we should not attempt to persuade Jews to cease following all of the commandments.
There’s also Zechariah 8:23, indicating that the rest of the world will turn to the Jews for spiritual guidance. Now in the person of Jesus, a Jew, I could argue that Christians already do this. However, it may very well be that there’s more to it than that, and that we should re-examine any supercessionist thinking we may have (and the passages which lead us to that) and enquire whether we should not be taking concepts such as, for instance, mitzvah into our own thinking, at the very least. Pace the Council of Jersualem in Acts 15:28-29, while accepting that there is no obligation on us as Christians to follow any of the commandments specific to Israel (and this is echoed within Judaism in the “Noahide” concept), there is also (I suggest) no overriding reason why we could not regard voluntary adherence to some of those as being a valid and worshipful action, and something which could be introduced into our own praxis.