Eyre Lines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve been tinkering with this post for a couple of months, thinking that it was going to go somewhere a little different from where this cut-down version ends. However, in the light of the “Charlie Hebdo” massacre, it seems to me that I need to post it, as in part it goes to what I see the root of why events like that occur.

I don’t much like the content of Charlie Hebdo. I don’t find the comedy of abuse funny these days, and they set their stall out to abuse people, and the more people were made visibly uncomfortable by that, the more Charb and Cabu used to skewer them. While the paper is something of an equal opportunity abuser, it’s racist, sexist and frequently – almost always – obscene, and I wouldn’t have bought a copy. However, it is not reasonable to muzzle them just because they abuse people, systems or religions, and totally unacceptable for them to be killed for doing it.

I continue this thinking after my previous writing.

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In a previous post I made a point of the confession “Jesus is Lord”. It does seem to me in the age of democracy that we tend to miss some of the implications of this confession, that a Lord (or King, Emperor, Caesar) is representative of the whole group of his followers (subjects, vassals) individually and collectively. What is done by or to the Lord is done by or to the entirety of his followers in a way which, while strictly speaking figurative, is treated as effectively literal.

This can be seen in nooks and crannies of our system here, as I live in a monarchy. Where in the States the title of a criminal case will be “People –v- X”, in England it is “Regina-v- X”, i.e. the Queen against X. As an example, many years ago, I was present in a court, prosecuting a case of noise nuisance, when the defendant pulled a knife and threatened the judge. This was technically in law an offence of treason. The judge was a direct representative of the Queen (in the secondary kingly function of arbiter of the law) and a threat against him was thus equivalent to a threat against the Queen herself; further, as the Queen represents the nation, it was a threat against the People as a whole. (I would mention that rather than acting in any way heroically, I hid underneath the advocates table until the man had been disarmed.)

It is, I think, also seen in the concept of blasphemy. As Christianity seems to have become more relaxed about this in recent times, let me use the example of the Danish cartoons lampooning Mohammed. In the same way as with my knife-wielding defendant, an insult against the Prophet (who is, in Islam, a direct representative of God) is equally an insult against all of God’s followers, namely every Muslim – and that on a personal basis, although actually more serious than would be a mere personal insult.

Of course, in a much more prosaic way, this can also be seen in the actions of a football supporter who comes away from a match in which his team has been successful saying “we won”. The supporter has, in truth, done little if anything to contribute to the win, but feels uplifted and strengthened by the actions of the team members who have actually played and won.

In 1 Cor. 15, Paul sees Jesus as “the second Adam” and as such representing not merely the people of Israel, but humanity as a whole, by analogy to Adam’s earlier representative status for humanity as a whole (I do not, of course, view Adam as an historical character but merely as representative of humanity as a whole, whereas I do view Jesus as historical; this is a view which is controversial with some). I would argue strongly that the sayings attributed to Jesus in the latter part of Matt. 25 (31-46) are also seeing Jesus as representative and as being represented, in that case by any individual human being. What you do to (or for) the least of these, you do to (or for) Jesus.

Jesus’ faithfulness unto death is then seen by Paul in Romans and Galatians as justifying the whole of mankind. Although Paul does not directly mention the Maccabean martyrs (see Macc. 2 and 4), his use of the term atonement must, I think, raise that parallel; in the apocryphal Maccabees 2 and the extra-canonical Maccabees 4, the faithfulness of the Maccabean martyrs in resisting the demands of the Hellenic overlords to do acts contrary to their religious beliefs (and thus being put to death) is seen as an “atoning sacrifice”, by which all Jews may benefit.

Similarly, in Paul, Jesus’ atoning sacrifice “rights” humanity with God. Arguably, within this logic, no particular act of any individual is required in order to benefit from this representative self-sacrifice, however, action may well be required in order to remain within the group identified as followers of Jesus (such as confessing that Jesus is Lord), just as the Maccabean martyrs’ self sacrifice was not seen as benefiting heretics by later rabbis.

It is probably worth stressing here that the representative atonement of the Maccabees was taken as effective communally, rather than individually; it was atonement in that case for the nation of Israel. It may therefore be necessary for the whole of the nation (and not just each person taken as an individual) to abide in “right relationship” with the nation as a whole, interpreted as faithfulness to the Law in the case of Israel; this is effectively the “covenantal nomism” of the New Perspective on Paul, in which the covenant is freely given by God prior to the giving of instructions for living (and in the case of Abraham, for marking himself and his dependents as being committed to God via circumcision). In order then to remain in good stead within the body of people (in this case Israel, or the descendants of Abraham) and so to benefit from the covenant, the Law has to be followed. Absent particular acts of ‘atoning’ heroism such as that of the Maccabees (which is in fact the only example I can clearly identify as a representative act which confers a benefit), the prophetic history of Israel demonstrates that it is a communal faithfulness which is looked for rather than any individual following of the Law. Whether it is then truly justifiable to take any atoning sacrifice as having individual effect in the absence of communal faithfulness would seem a moot point.

However, looking at the passage above from Matt. 25, I would argue that the better way to view any representative connection is as operating individually AND collectively, as Jesus there clearly sees it as operating individually. Elsewhere, he clearly sees the actions of certain individuals as having the opposite effect, as in the speech against the Pharisees in Matt. 23:1-39 followed by the prediction of the destruction of the Temple in Matt. 24:1-2 which ends that speech. While in the historical Hebrew scriptures it is in general the actions of leaders which are held against Israel, here it is the actions of individuals, albeit a group of individuals.

Perhaps, however, the passage in Matt. 25 should be regarded as representative of whether the individuals in question were acting in accordance with the “new covenant” (Heb. 8:7-13, referencing Jer. 31:31-34), and thereby gaining benefit from identification with Jesus? Matt. 7:21-23 would be a supporting text here.

How about the opposite effect, which I mentioned above? Well, the mechanism of taking communal and personal pride (and, arguably, such concepts as justification and sanctification) from the positive achievements of our leader is well matched by the mechanism of being diminished, embarrassed and made to feel guilt or shame at their negative actions. We require our leaders to be perfect in every respect, otherwise their “feet of clay” rebound on us. The Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament) are full of examples where the iniquity of a few rebounds on the many; the sin of Achan in Joshua 7:1-26, David’s census in 2 Sam 24 and the fate of sympathizers with (and the family of) Korah in Num 16:1-17:13 are examples, but the whole history contained in Joshua, Samuel, Kings and Chronicles is a litany of collective responsibility of Israel for its leaders, and the collective responsibility of neighbouring peoples (such as the Amalekites and Edomites) for actions taken either by their leaders or small groups from among them.

It can hardly be thought, for instance, that the attempted gang rape of Genesis 19:4-5 actually involved the whole male population, which is what the text indicates (what, for instance, of those under the age of puberty?) or that it was a matter of national policy, but Sodom and Gomorrah were said as a result to be destroyed – and not merely the male population but “all the people”. The text clearly indicates that the whole people were involved because, in the concept of collective responsibility, they all were, whether they lifted a finger or not.

This is not merely an historical tendency. Very many among us are currently inclined to ascribe to the whole religion of Islam the actions of relatively few hot-headed fundamentalists (relatively few, at least, in comparison to the billion Muslims currently alive). We feel shame when someone we regard as one of “our” group of any kind is shown to have done something heinous (though a very common reaction is to distance ourselves from them, even if we can avoid an attempt to minimize or excuse their actions). I am, for instance, embarrassed when some lawyer (or politician) is shown to conform to the stereotype of a lying, grasping, conscienceless individual, and for many years was reluctant to accept the label “Christian”, being aware of a long history of persecution by Christians (and often by entire Christian churches) of groups such as the Jews or native peoples in the Americas or Africa. I am still struck with a sense of collective shame when Christians persecute homosexuals or fail to accord equality to women.

There are in the Old Testament a number of hair-raising stories about dealing with the transgressions of others which might, in the thinking of the OT, affect me – and this article deals with a couple of them. In that thinking, it is not merely the impossibility of perfection in loving God and loving your neighbour as yourself (in a proactive way) which is problematic, it’s also the actions of every other person who is a member of a group with which you identify.

Clearly, it is not merely the actions of our leaders which can cause us shame or guilt, and in times past (for some, not so much past) would found a feeling that God would rightly punish us for the sins of our co-religionists, countrymen or relatives. “Thus says the Lord: Behold, I am against you, and will draw forth my sword out of its sheath, and will cut off from you both righteous and wicked” (Ez. 21:3). The prophet goes on in the next chapter to predict a wholesale destruction of Israel, based on the transgressions of some.

And yet, three chapters earlier, Ezekiel issues a lengthy statement that denies collective responsibility for parents and children alike, and for any past transgressions, dependent only on repentance (Ez. 18 in total, though the nub of it can be seen in the first verses). Is there, perhaps, a conflict here, within the sayings of one prophet?

Clearly there is. But then, there is a tension between our feelings of elation when our representatives do something good (winning a match, ruling wisely, doing something heroic) and when they or others who are “one of us” do something bad (losing badly, ruling disastrously, acting in a bigoted, xenophobic, racist or sexist manner). Where is the balance, or, indeed, is there a balance?

For me, this does not throw up the difficulty of potential inconsistency in the actions of God. I do not see God as judgmental and severe, but as loving and accepting. This is definitely a “new testament” attitude (though the NT is not univocal in proclaiming a non-judgmental God), but also appears in places among the Hebrew prophets, as in Ezekiel 18, Hosea 6:6 and several other places.

If the tension is not within God, then is it within us? I would suggest that it is; whatever the reality of the thinking of God (and there I pray in aid Isaiah 55:8 – his thoughts are not our thoughts – or at the least “it’s above my pay grade”) as I said, it is a psychological, experiential reality for us. It’s the way we’re made, the way we’ve evolved. We do bask in the glory of our leaders (or cringe at their feet of clay) and we do feel embarrassed at the actions of others in whatever group we identify with, or uplifted when one of them risks life and limb to pull a child from a burning building.

Comdemnation thus comes to all of us through our association with (for some Christian examples) the Fourth Crusade or the antics of Westborough Baptist Church picketing military funerals in the USA, but exaltation equally comes through our association with (for example) Pope Francis or in a non-religious way from the local to me unknowns, part of “my” community, who recently rushed to a burning house to save some children from the flames instead of safely keeping their distance. Which of these prevails is at least in part a function of our psychology.

But our psychology can be changed.

It is, of course, possible to reduce the scope of those we identify with until it is a very small and very controlled circle. “I didn’t vote for him”, or “they’re foreigners, what can you expect?” or “he can’t be a true Christian” are all moves in that direction. Perhaps the ultimate end of this move is the rampant individualism seen in (for instance) Margaret Thatcher, Niezsche and Ayn Rand, for whom links to others are weaknesses rather than something to be acknowledged and even treasured.

However, if we are to regard Christ as the head of the body of which we form part (Col. 1:18), he is our representative, and as the second Adam, the representative of all humanity. We cannot escape being members of the group of all Christians, and even the group of all humanity (with the collective responsibility that entails) and remain followers of Christ. In my case, having a mystical, panentheistic consciousness, it is in any event impossible for me so to wall myself off from others in order not to be embarrassed by their actions. Any boundaries are not real, and cannot be maintained for long. As John Donne wrote: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

The question has to be how much weight we place on which action, the negative and the positive alike. Before I get to Paul, let’s look at the template he must have been referring to in his talk of atonement, that of the Maccabean martyrs. Seven brothers, their mother and their teacher are in this story (from 2 and 4 Maccabees) killed by the Seleucid Greek imperial rulers for refusing to adopt elements of Greek religion; their self-sacrificial martyrdom is there seen as atoning for the whole of Israel. Clearly, a self-sacrifice which result in death is experienced as having a massive effect compared with the transgressions of individual members of Israel, sufficient to cover over (the original impact of the term translated “atonement”) a plethora of failings and evil-doings.

Thus, when Paul is talking of Jesus’ death on the cross as an atoning sacrifice, he is drawing on the same level of atoning efficacy, but increased. The Maccabean martyrs are ordinary Israelites, whereas Paul sees Jesus at the least as the principal agent of God (and presumably as the kingly messiah as well). The self sacrifice of a particularly exalted leader has an impact beyond that of even 9 common people, and while I do not think that Paul actually thought of Jesus as one member of the trinity (this was a theological development which, to my mind, postdated even the Fourth Gospel, though perhaps not some of the pseudo-Pauline epistles), Paul saw it as efficacious for all people in all ages. How much more so when in terms of later theology it was (and is) seen as God sacrificing himself. Not so much “God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son…” but more “he sent himself to be crucified”.

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Now in the news we have 10 journalists, including Charb and Cabu, and three policemen who died. We have at least four terrorists, three of whom are now dead. We have a number of dead hostages with no apparent connection with Charlie or the police, though they were shopping in a Jewish supermarket…

We have the opportunity of feeling identification with any or all of these. Vast numbers of people have instantly fixed on the journalists, with the tag “Je suis Charlie” – after all, they are the most obvious martyrs. As I am, like them, a white male straight middle class European intellectual, they’re the obvious choice for me and a whole load of my liberal-minded friends.

An increasing number of those are, however, realising that in identifying with Charlie Hebdo, they are also identifying with abuse, racism, sexism and a host of other politically incorrect attitudes. After all, that is what Charlie Hebdo stands for – as its masthead occasionally says, irresponsible journalism. Thus we have a number of “Je suis Ahmed” tags, referring to the Muslim policeman who died protecting Charlie Hebdo despite the fact that it attacked his religion and ethnicity on a weekly basis in the most offensive terms.

He’s clearly a martyr who is untarnished, at least until the press dig into his background, assuming they bother. He’s also a Muslim, so we can show that we’re not racially or ethnically biased. My mind turns to the insistence in the New Testament that Jesus was spotless, without sin, despite the fact that I can identify a number of episodes in which criticism could be levelled – violence in the cleansing of the Temple, for instance, even if we do not believe the polemic attributed to him in the Fourth Gospel against “the Jews” and which has founded 2000 years of antisemitic atrocities is authentically his.

I am, however, a panentheist. I am forced to identify with all the players in the tragedy which has unfolded over France in the last few days, including the terrorists. Matt. 25:40 compels me to think even of them as being representative of Jesus, my lord and representative, even if my base panentheistic experience of existence didn’t. I think the piece on representation above gives some clues as to one place from which their actions have arisen – the Prophet represents them, and Charlie has been merciless with the Prophet over some considerable time.

And they too thought that they were being martyrs. Not a martyrdom I am particularly happy to accept, but with John Donne, I am involved with humanity and cannot avoid it. They also no doubt saw themselves as being at war with the West.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis tous ces gens. Je suis un être humain.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In my last post, I expressed some frustration with concepts of inspiration in scripture from the point of view of whether human language and concept structures could actually do justice to the content of the inspiration, and I want to develop that a little further.

Language is essentially a communication. There is a speaker or author and there is a listener or reader. What the recipient receives is not necessarily what the utterer has in mind (assuming, for a moment, that the utterer has anything remotely clear in mind, which is dubious taking the tack of my last post). In spoken English, trivial examples might be the joke exchange between two old ladies on a train:- “Is this Wembley?” No, it’s Thursday.” “So am I, let’s have a cup of tea”, or the apocryphal communication from the Western Front “Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance” becoming after many stages of passing via multiple mouths, brains and ears, “Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance”.

Monty Python satirises this in terms of the recording of the spoken word in the gospels in the “blessed are the cheesemakers” heard at the back of the crowd. This can be used to demonstrate one feature of hearing (or reading), that you tend to hear or read what you expect. “Blessed are the peacemakers” is not something you’d expect a Jewish resistance leader to say, so it becomes something else, if you think of Jesus as a Jewish resistance leader. In any case where you hear or read something very similar to something you already know, it tends to become what you already know (something I need to watch extremely carefully when proofreading) – take the widespread “Paris in the the spring” written in a triangle so the two “the”s are on different lines.

On the other hand, something which does actually strike home and is remembered particularly forcefully is when you do hear and register something which is novel and out of character. That, I think, is why we have the Sermon on the Mount rather than “blessed are the cheesemakers”.

I had to contend with this phenomenon a lot as a lawyer, dealing with eyewitness evidence. Eyewitness evidence of any reasonably complex situation was never straightforward; one person was adamant they had seen one thing, another had seen something completely different – and years of experience unpicking the stories led me to conclude that in general no-one was lying, they were faithfully recounting their memories. There was no getting behind the fact that that was how they had experienced what quite often was clearly not the case (from hard evidence such as CCTV or tire tracks). I made something of a speciality of weaving together the set of disparate stories and coming up with a plausible reason why each person had experienced what their testimony related, despite the fact being as I proposed, not as they proposed.

There is a clear application of these principles in the “quest for the historical Jesus”, although far more along the lines of the current “social memory” theorists than the formal rules of the Jesus Seminar.

Of course, in the case of people steeped in scripture (certainly in the cases of the gospel writers and, I think, Paul, the Septuagint Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures), there is a set of templates of expectation into which you can fit experience. Matthew, for instance, sees the story of Jesus overwhelmingly through the eyes of previous scripture, but all of the NT writers do to some extent – and they use different scriptures and different interpretations, making the task of a systematic theologian extremely difficult. Just as one example, I have been in the process of working through a set of scriptural supports for various atonement theories; I find that Paul’s use of the word “atonement” uses the template of the Maccabean martyrs in 4 Macc. 17:12-22. The writer of Hebrews, on the other hand, wishes to see Jesus’ death both as a replacement for the Levitical sin offering sacrifices and as the scapegoat of Leviticus 8; 1 Peter 2:24 picks up the second meaning. Those two concepts are somewhat inconsistent, as the sin offerings are slaughtered and burned (in part eaten), the scapegoat is driven out. They are fine as ways of looking at something, less fine if you try to extract from them a single deep meaning – at least, a single deep meaning which preserves more than a bare outline of what the originals actually are.

This fitting of experience into templates of expectation seems to me particularly strong when I look to compare my own mystical experience with the spiritual experience of, for instance, friends in the church whose trajectory has been via the template of evangelical conversion. I think that this is cognate experience, at least, if not necessarily identical – but it is very difficult to be sure. They know in advance the terms which are applicable, such as “filled with the Holy Spirit” and “slain in the Spirit”, and it has proved nearly impossible to get them to describe what their experience has been without that terminology, in non-religiously charged and non-specialist language. I can sympathise; it was extremely difficult for me to develop a description which actually conveyed something of the experience without using words and concepts previously laid down for me by others, and if I do describe it that way, it seems at the same time pedestrian and self-contradictory (how, for instance, can the sense of self at the same time expand towards the universal and be reduced to near-nonexistence?).

What we experience, in other words, tends to be what we expect to experience, or at least what we have language and concept structures for. I wouldn’t go quite as far as saying that our language and concept structures create our experiences, but they definitely modify them and constrain them. Where we have an experience which really doesn’t fit with our existing concept structures and language, we will tend to torture those concept structures and language until they are a better fit (as, I would argue, the New Testament writers were doing, and it may be that this fuels the torturing of language which I find typical of modern philosophers – that is to say most philosophers later than the 18th century).

Even then, I think it isn’t necessarily a good “fit”.

However, what would I expect if a God as reasonably commonly conceived looked to communicate directly with a human being, which is the basis of the concept of inspiration – at least, the scriptural form of it? I fancy I would expect two snippets from scripture to have “got is right”: Isaiah 55:8 ““For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD” and 1 Cor. 13:12 “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

I would expect some recipients to go mad, or babble incoherently (speaking in tongues?). I would expect some to keep to themselves what, in any attempt to express it, seemed totally inadequate. I would expect some to try to coin new language to express what they had experienced (which we see to an extent in, for instance, Paul coming up with neologisms). I would expect some to launch into a paradoxical and extremely allegorical rehashing of motifs in existing scripture (which I think we see in Revelation). I would expect some to twist meanings in existing scripture to produce new forms (which I think we see all over the Bible, not restricted to the NT, and in a lot of Rabbinic midrash, and which finds meanings in existing wordings which the original authors would not have dreamed existed). I would expect those with poetic gifts to speak or write metaphor, allegory and myth. Finally, I would expect some to write or speak in a way wholly incomprehensible to those around them (which might not be the same thing as babbling incoherently).

I would not expect anyone to come up with insights which were far removed from anything for which they had existing language or concept structures; their minds would just not contain the building blocks to construct these – though the poets would be likely to do best at this, talking around the insight rather than attempting to tackle it directly. Moreover, if anyone actually did overcome their internal constraints in a radical and sustained way, I would not expect their words to be remembered, or if written copied and circulated; you need readers and listeners who understand at least something of the contents as well as writers and speakers in order for communication to happen.

Some years ago, an internet acquaintance suggested to me that I took too pessimistic a view of God’s ability to communicate exactly what he wanted to communicate; I did not think God was sufficiently powerful to do this. This is not the case – what I think is that he took far too optimistic a view of man’s ability to understand what God communicates.

It may well be that God has been communicating everything we may ever need to know about life, the universe and everything, and that we have not yet got to the stage of being able to understand it. We may never get there, but we can, I think, build steadily on the shoulders of those who have had a stab at it previously.

In fact, central to peak mystical experiences (including mine) is the feeling that, for a moment, you do understand everything – and as soon as the moment passes, you don’t. Maybe that’s a correct feeling?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

It’s nice to feel one is not alone!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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