Eyre Lines

On my more snarky days, I’m prone to saying that God does not wear his knickers outside his tights, by which I mean that any concept of God which I can come up with which is vaguely realistic (i.e. does not conflict with my experience and knowledge of the experience of others) is not a kind of Superman, a god-like person with abilities beyond the normal ones who rushes in to save people. But I don’t think God is a superhero, nor anything like a superhero.

This is a pity, because I’m a sucker for fantasy literature. I particularly like tales of superheroes, people with paranormal powers, but I’m also into morality fantasy where somehow or other, through some magical power or godly intervention, the seeming underdog comes out on top over the forces of evil and oppression. I also like fantasy which develops some kind of system of magic which, in the fantasy world portrayed, actually works. I would very much like to think that we live in a world where the underdog will always triumph, and where in the darkest hour the hero (or deity) intervenes to save me.

The trouble is, nothing I have ever experienced inclines me to believe that that is the way the world actually works. Granted, I have seen some strange things and heard some stranger tales from people who I would very much like to think were not the subjects of wishful thinking and some of the common cognitive biases, but frankly the naturalistic explanation always seems to be the most probable.

At least, it does when talking about any physical effects. When talking about events within the consciousness of individuals, things are rather different. There, I have huge personal reason to believe that some power, presence, entity or – well – something exists which is benevolent towards everyone and everything, extremely powerful (at least in transforming individual consciousness), omnipresent in the radical sense that everything which is, is within this something, not subject to time in the normal way and is capable of delivering to me more information than my mind is capable of absorbing. It seems to me that this something does intervene in the lives of some people (at a minimum, me, as that’s all I have personal experience of, but looking at the testimony of others, not by any means just me), and that it intervenes on occasion (but fairly rarely) without their willing it or wanting it. Mostly, people who describe experiences like some of those I have had call this something “God”, so unless talking with major league sceptics (in which case I tend to use the figure [   ], for a box which can contain a three letter label, which label might be “GOD”, but doesn’t have to be) I go with the flow.

The last paragraph contains most of the elements of what it is that is [   ] of which I am reasonably confident. You can add to that, however, the observation that transforming contact with [   ] does not seem to me something which can be reliably worked towards, let alone obtained via some formula along the lines of “do these things, and then this happens”. In addition, it is necessary to surrender to the experience in order for it to “get off the ground”, to stop analysing it as it happens, to lay aside all preconceptions and formulae. While I did for a significant time arrive at the position where that contact was pretty much “available on demand”, what was actually available on demand was the stilling of the conscious mind and the surrender of the will in radical acceptance. This gave conditions in which it seemed to me that it was highly probable (at least) that contact would be felt. I’m working on getting back to that at the moment.

Now, this may be a “supernatural” aspect. I don’t think of it that way, but it’s a possibility. Other than that, however, I’m afraid I can’t bring myself to trust that anything supernatural will ever occur (which doesn’t stop me hoping from time to time). This has sometimes proved to be a difficulty with people with whom I’ve been in dialogue about scripture, who often can’t initially see that it can mean anything to me. However, where I can continue beyond this point (setting it on one side “for the moment”) I’ve usually found that it isn’t actually the supernatural occurrence in a bible story which those I’m talking to find important; what they find important is the spiritual subtext, the nonliteral meaning (or meanings) which can be extracted – and we can then talk about those sensibly, and not uncommonly agree. This has in the past enabled me to conduct productive bible study sessions in which I have agreed interpretations with complete Biblical literalist inerrantists, to their considerable surprise.

And yet, we still end up coming back to the sticking point that they think something supernatural actually happened, and I don’t, and they don’t want to let go of insisting that something supernatural happened and that I really need to believe that it did. On occasion, a particularly well-natured dialogue partner of this stance has allowed me to conduct an extremely respectful cross-examination of them, ending up with a motive. That motive, it turns out, is always that if nothing supernatural happened then, then nothing supernatural is going to happen now either – and they want to be able to continue to believe in that.

They want to believe that superman may come and save them, in other words. Words far too snarky for me to ever use to their faces, but that’s the crux of it. Not only that, but they commonly see me not being able to believe it as somehow diminishing the possibility that it might. This is even more of a pity than it is that I actually can’t bring myself to believe it, as I am comfortable with the situation and they aren’t.

You may realise that what I have been doing here is to propose something akin to an “operational definition” of the belief in Biblical miracles, i.e. how does the occurrence or non-occurence of a single supernatural event 2000 years ago affect what we do (and what can therefore be observed and quantified) today, proposing that in fact it doesn’t – and indeed, within that framework, it is difficult to see how it would. However, unless you are a cessationist (and I have no idea how a cessationist would react here), the occurrence of a supernatural event then makes it more possible to think that there might be a supernatural event now.

This is even more pronounced when it comes to the resurrection. Now, I also can’t bring myself to believe in a physical resurrection of the “reanimation” kind (which is what my more conservative brethren want me to believe in). Granted, they will concede that there was not a straightforward reanimation (which, of course, is slightly indicated by an empty tomb) but insist that the actual physical remains were transformed into something different, something which actually could enter closed rooms other than through the door, appear and disappear at will and be in widely separated places at virtually the same time, all of which I see as pointing at apparition rather than anything they would admit as being resurrection. Of all possible explanations of the gospel accounts, treating them for a moment as absolutely accurate, written immediately after the event eyewitness testimony (which they aren’t, of course), I consider apparition to be the most likely, granted that there then has to be some undocumented reason why the tomb was empty, again taking that as accurate eyewitness testimony.

Again, taken as a single historical miracle, I suggest that it is not possible to see any difference in what we actually do based on belief in on the one hand a reanimation-style resurrection and on the other an apparition-style resurrection. However, in practice I get even more pushback on this point than I do on the issue of miracles generally. The following gentle process of cross-examination reveals that to accept that it is viable for me that the accounts were as apparitions reduces people’s confidence that they will themselves eventually be resurrected in a body. Or, indeed, survive death at all.

It seems that personal survival, to some of them, equates to inhabiting a physical body. This is a very old concept, as much of first century Judaism lacked the concept of soul separable from the body, and it also has a strong resonance with modern concepts in biology in which the self, the consciousness is an epiphenomenon or emergent property of the body (or, more specifically, the central nervous system, in particular the brain). That said, there is current talk about the possibility of mapping and storing the personality and memories and “downloading” them into another form, which smacks more of the concept of a soul.

What body, though? I’m currently 60, and due to normal wear and tear plus some rather bad treatment I’ve given my body over the years, I am not in the best possible health. If I had to be resurrected in a body, frankly I’d prefer the one I had at (say) 25 to the one I’m likely to have when I die. However, I’d settle for my brain being pretty much as it is now – I wouldn’t want to ditch the last 35 years worth of memories, for instance, even though 15 years or more of them were ones I wouldn’t have wished on myself had I foreseen them. But what if the brain has deteriorated by the time I die?

Conservative friends would say that this would be a perfected body. Would it then be a perfected mind as well? (If the epiphenomenon or emergent property concepts are correct, it would have to be). If it were a “perfected” mind, would it then genuinely be “my” mind? I have memories of my Twelve Step sponsor scoffing when I worried that when at Steps 4 to 7 I took inventory of my defects of character and asked God to remove these, if that indeed happened there would be no character left. “What’s to lose?” he asked, grinning.

To me, these are really idle musings. An element of certain of my mystical experiences leaves me with a degree of confidence that the brief flashes of consciousness of union with God are a pale shadow of what is likely to happen at my death, and thoughts of a physical body or the continuation of a truly individual consciousness after that point are irrelevant. I find it difficult to see how an individual consciousness could actually survive full union, to be honest. If it did, anything thereafter would be a disappointment. On this point, however, my trust in a benevolent God is absolute – whatever happens will be right and good – and beyond my capacity at the moment to do anything more than muse idly about. There are more important things by far, such as discerning God’s will for me in the here and now and carrying that out.

Whatever it is that God, or [   ] actually is…

I have this massive book by N.T. Wright, but have not yet read it. However, for some friends who have been waiting for me to do so and let them have my thoughts, Larry Hurtado (whose opinion I tend to agree with) has written a review, which is probably going to be enough for some, and sufficient to be going on with until I actually do read it (it’s second in my theology reading pile at the moment).
In the “one instinctively knows when a thing is right” mode, Hurtado says that Wright does not credit the concept of deity plus principal agent tradition as having influenced Paul, and if Wright indeed does not credit this, I think it is a mistake. There are a plethora of “principal agents” in Jewish writing current at the time (mostly intertestamental, but some canonical) including wisdom, memra, logos and Enoch/Metratron, and the “two thrones in heaven” section of Daniel 7:9-14. It is much more easily understood for Jesus to be understood as principal agent and then elevated just slightly higher than the Jewish concept admits than to assume that this was an entirely fresh leap of understanding.

Possibly against this is the idea that Paul gained his major strains of thinking directly from his peak spiritual experience. I am now confident that Paul was a Christ-mystic, in that some of his peak spiritual experience shared many features of some of my own, save that where I ascribed mine tentatively to and experience of God (working on the basis that writers who described the most similarity to my own experience ascribed theirs to God), Paul ascribed his to an experience of Jesus. There could have been an information content.

That said, I am also confident that not only our descriptions of our experiences but also to an extent the experiences themselves are moulded by the language and concept structures which we have internalised at the time when the experiences happened (I draw this from experience with eyewitnesses, noting their subconscious insistence on making a coherent story out of their actual observations, frequently contrary to what was actually probably observed). Paul is very likely to have had an internalised concept of the principal agent of God, and from his own and Luke’s descriptions would seem to have been obsessed with the legacy of Jesus, and his experience may have been moulded, and his language of description would certainly be moulded, by that concept. I, of course, due to my reaction against early attempts to teach me Christianity in the most trivial form, did not have such concepts internalised. I have since had peak experiences involving Jesus, but only after significant work assimilating a concept of him and on creating a Jesus-focus within meditation; their character has been somewhat different from that of the God-mysticism experiences.

There has been an information content to some of my own experiences as well. That said, I do not trust that information content to have been entirely independent of my previous concept-structures.

On the whole, therefore, my working hypothesis is that Paul was influenced in his talking about Christ by (inter alia) the principal divine agent tradition.

A while ago, there was a bit of an upset in the blogosphere when Tony Jones criticised Marcus Borg for an answer he was pressed to give on whether he accepted a physical resurrection; Marcus answered that he did not – and blogs all over the place erupted for and against the concept. Now, I’ve written before on the question of a physical resurrection, in particular in a series “And God saw that it was good” of which the first is here.

I’ve just revisited one of the responses, out of Homebrewed Christianity, with Tripp Fuller in conversation with Jonnie Russell (scroll down to “Marcus Borg, Tony Jones and the Resurrection, and in the podcast itself you can skip the first 20 minutes) talking about the pros and cons of believing in a physical (rather than a spiritual or metaphorical) resurrection. I have a lot of time for Tripp Fuller – he knows a lot of stuff. A LOT of stuff (and I say this having been introduced around my church on occasion as someone who “knows a lot of stuff” – I know very little compared with Tripp, and am not nearly so adept at juggling competing theologies and philosophies – particularly philosophies).  Incidentally, there are a load of really interesting podcasts available in their Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown and other series, and most of them can be downloaded free.

Now, I very much liked what Tripp had to say about what is essentially an operational view of the Jones versus the Borg view, commenting that absent the theoretical distinction, both of them would affirm that resurrection was fundamental to Christianity and a real and present force. I would affirm that myself. In addition, having accepted that, Jones and Borg would both engage in very much the same actions in the world, as I would myself. Operational definitions in psychology reduce situations to things which can be measured, or in other words what behaviours result from thought processes (rather than what is said about them). The operational definitions of these two viewpoints are therefore pretty much identical. And as Tripp remarked (paraphrasing), every Christian believes in the resurrection, they just believe in differing ways.

They do throw up some differences, however. First is outlined by Jonnie, and it is that there is a need among evangelicals to assert that in Jesus God was doing something new and unique, or in other words that the incarnation was the “fulcrum of history”.

Now, I’m not sure that I think this myself. On the plus side, we can now look back at history and observe that the Jesus event sparked a really major change in world history; history would have been radically different had Christianity not flowed from that event (and it’s worth pointing out that Islam flows in part from the existence of Christianity – the second largest world religion may not have existed or may have been radically different). We can look at the past lives of some billions of Christians which have been changed as a result (and the lives of perhaps similar numbers of non-Christians which have also been changed, not necessarily in a positive way – though those of some Christians have also been negatively impacted). But there are implications which I don’t necessarily go along with.

The main one is that this was an unique intervention by God, a deliberate act of God to change human history in its tracks. As might be gathered from my “no tricks” post which I link to above, I’m sceptical that the God of my understanding would intervene in quite this way, even if no individual miracles were involved. I know that God can and does intervene in individual human lives on occasion (he intervened in mine – there is no way I can see a causal link between anything about me or my environment prior to my first ecstatic experience and that experience absent something entirely non-physical) but this posits an intervention which God knew would have major repercussions, and which (inter alia) will have limited the free will of billions of people since the event.

But I’m even more sceptical that this intervention was unique to Jesus, or even the first time such an intervention had occurred, much less the first and only time. I can. for instance, trace the same kind of mystical consciousness as I see in Jesus in Buddhism, four or more centuries earlier, and in Vedantic Hinduism, probably at least six centuries earlier. I grant that Christianity is unique in its scope and development (although Islam had a more rapid early spread), but in the case of Christianity I can identify at least two and probably four other significant mystics during the first century (Paul and the author or inspiration for the Fourth Gospel definitely, Thomas and tentatively the author of “Matthew”) and one of these was also a seriously charismatic church planter.

That being said, those who follow my blog will know that I see God’s creation of the world (and universe) being the original act of kenosis and incarnation, pouring himself out into creation and thus abrogating the power to control it. In terms of humanity, that becomes particularly strong once humanity gains self-awareness, as I talked about in “The Fall and Rise of Original Sin” and follow up posts. However, it represents an initial act of self-limitation. Seeing things this way results from the fact that the only God-concept which at the moment really makes sense to me given my mystical bent is a panentheistic one, in which God is radically immanent in all things.

I would then argue that even in giving individual existence to (say) the original atoms formed shortly after the “Big Bang”, God limited his power over them; they became independent even if they were incapable of being aware of this, and in effect possess a form of free will, even if it is not “will” at all.

It is therefore unique that in Christ we see in sharp individual focus such an act of kenosis and incarnation, and one which subjects God to the vagaries of human existence. It is a microcosmic expression of the original and far greater subjection of God to creation. I think, though I cannot prove, that Jesus was uniquely aware of his status as part of God’s incarnation. We then see him as resurrected, as of course he has to be (God, with whom Jesus has identity, being incapable of being truly and absolutely dead short of the end of the universe, and probably all universes). In this sense, therefore, he was unique.

It’s also true to say that many people seem to rely on the promise of their own physical resurrection. Personally I don’t see this; I don’t see the eternal preservation of a physical body as necessary, as feasible or even as desirable. I can appreciate that some may feel differently – after all, a significant proportion of Second Temple Judaism did not consider that soul and body were separable; to have one you had to have the other. In addition, if (as may well be the case) consciousness is an emergent property of life, which is an emergent property of matter, those first century Jews may well have had the right idea. They are welcome to think that way, but I cannot, and would prefer not to feel excluded because of that inability. I have, after all, a rather light grasp on the self. The mystical consciousness assures me that I am part of a larger whole which is as immortal as immortal can get, and I think Paul refers to this when he talks of “not I, but Christ in me” living. If I am in Christ and Christ is in me, the “I” of me is not me but Christ, and Christ lives, then I live. I need nothing more than that.

Sadly, after the good things Tripp says earlier in the podcast, he then starts explaining (at about 40 min) why he is no longer a “Borgian”, i.e. follows Marcus Borg’s understanding of the resurrection. The argument runs (paraphrasing) “Jesus is the example of a perfect human life to follow; however Jesus was a poor homeless Jew who got axed by the Romans and didn’t really resurrect – is that what you put forward as ‘perfect’? Is that what we should aspire to?”.

As Jonnie comments “That will preach”. Unfortunately.

Now, in fact, Tripp then comes back from there to the “operational definition” kind of approach, and observes that although the difference in view is what actually drives Marcus’ or Tony’s theology, the practical effects are the same. I have confidence in Tripp – although the guy can preach, and he can preach viewpoints he doesn’t agree with completely with huge persuasiveness (perhaps there’s a great trial lawyer in there who’s missed a vocation, may the Lord be praised), he generally comes back to something with which I am comfortable.

But really, I think we probably should be preaching that you should follow Jesus irrespective of the fact that it may lead to poverty, homelessness and even death. As Paul remarked, a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles. In fact, during the period of Christianity’s greatest expansion (to the early fourth century) following him frequently did lead to poverty, homelessness and death, as Christians were persecuted throughout the Roman Empire. Quite rightly persecuted, as well, from the point of view of the Empire, as “Jesus is Lord” excluded “Caesar is Lord”, and they were attempting to live the Kingdom of God within the Empire of Caesar. I would argue that they were doing that quite successfully. Quite rightly, too, as in fact after some 300 years, Christianity took over the Empire, and empires resist being taken over. (I grant that in some important ways, the Empire then took over Christianity, but that’s for another post!).

I’m not convinced that in today’s world, “take up your cross and follow me” preaches. I’m even less certain it preaches without the fallback of “and then you’ll be physically resurrected later on”.

But perhaps it should.

On Sunday, I congratulated the preacher after the service, and he commented that he enjoyed my facial expressions during his sermons. He singled out two items, firstly any time he mentions Lewis’ trilemma, secondly any time he mentions “the word of God”. Apparently I’m unable to prevent myself wincing. OK, frankly, I don’t try to prevent myself wincing at any mention of Lewis or any occasion when “the word of God” is accompanies by waving a bible in the air, and it was the second of those which had attracted his attention.

In the interests of full disclosure, previous winces during the same sermon included when a graphic appeared behind him in which the word “ressurection” appeared. Yes, that is how it was spelled – and despite the fact that it was correctly spelled “resurrection” further down the same graphic, but sadly in a less prominent position and typography. Clearly, blessed are they who do not proofread as part of their occupation! There were also a few winces associated with the four repetitions of the words “and finally” spread over some ten minutes.

However, my biggest wince was definitely the transition to waving the Bible and proclaiming it as “the word of God”, exacerbated by the fact that this had no sensible connection with the rest of the sermon and therefore engaging my inner editor.

There is a collossal baggage associated with the proclamation that the waved tome is the word of God (and I should probably capitalise “word” in order to show the stress). Mostly, it involves inerrantism (there can be no error of any kind in “the word of God”, quite clearly) and literalism (the term is far too solemn no admit of there being fictional stories, poetics, exaggerations and metaphor in there), but also the concept that you can proof-text, lifting any text out of context and having it function independently of the rest. After all, if the text is perfect, it must be perfect in every particular, no?

Well, no.I reject all of those pieces of baggage.

The text isn’t perfect, for a start. There are a host of textual variations, and while most of them are fairly subtle, some of them make a considerable difference when the words are taken in small doses as being propositional theology. We read in translation, unless we have the facility to read Koine Greek and Hebrew, and translation can make a huge difference. Textual analysis has revealed that most of the contents have been revised, extended, chopped about and thus moved in unknowable directions from whatever the original texts said – and we have no original manuscripts of any biblical text. We read those texts which a combination of popularity within the early Christian community and authoritative decisions by major church figures, often based on spurious claims as to the origin of the texts, has left us – and this has varied between different Christian communities and still does – the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, for instance, has quite a few more books in the New Testament than do we in the Protestant descendants of the Western Church, and the Catholics have the apocrypha, including ten additional books and additions to two others. Which of these is “the word of God”, we may reasonably ask?

No church currently includes the Gospel of Thomas within its scripture, nor the Didache, though both of these are accepted by a massive swathe of biblical scholars as among the earliest texts we have (the Ethiopian Church does have the Didascalia, which incorporates a substantial amount of the Didache, much amended, however). 1 Clement, similarly early, is now only accepted by the Coptic and Ethiopic churches, despite having clearly been canonical in many other places as late as the fifth century. There are many other works which might potentially have been included, but are not, and some of them we now know only by mention in other writers, as no copy of the full texts is now known to exist (though Biblical scholars continue to live in hope!).

In addition, if I stoop to proof-texting for a moment, John 1 does contain a definition of “the Word” (of God): “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God” and “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”. Jesus was and is “the Word of God”, and forgive me for this, but Jesus is not a collection of old books. Jesus is not something you can wave in the air during a sermon.

What at least the gospels in the New Testament are is a written understanding of what Jesus said and did during and shortly after his lifetime; most of the remainder of the New Testament as we know it records the understandings of various followers of Jesus (mostly Paul or attributed to Paul) written sometime after his death. The generality of biblical scholarship does not think that any of these books were written by someone who witnessed the events of Jesus’ life (the attributions to Matthew, Mark and John are traditional, but the probable dating of them and their contents do not admit of them having been written by direct followers, and Luke is admittedly a secondary source; Paul’s authority rests on post-crucifixion ecstatic experience). What they are is therefore in part tradition, in part early rationalising of the impact of Jesus.

That leads me on to the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” of scripture, tradition, reason and experience. A very interesting article by John Cobb discusses this in the context of process theology, and I agree his tentative privileging of experience. Let’s face it, tradition is experience, it’s the accumulated experience of other people, and as such extremely valuable to guide us and let us see where we may be mistaken or on which we can build the better to understand our experience (and, if current psychological thinking is correct, which I strongly believe it is, the better to be able to have experience). As I think I’ve shown, scripture is also tradition, albeit very early tradition (plus some reason), and is thus also experience.

I need here to counteract any impression that in stating the limits of scripture, I am seeking to negate its importance. It is the nearest we can come to the actual teaching of Jesus and our earliest tradition of experience of the risen Christ; the Hebrew scriptures form the basis for the New Testament writings and give a large amount of the context for those (as, incidentally, do at least ten of those books which are not now part of our canon, what we call “scripture”). It is therefore extremely important and very authoritative, just not of ultimate importance or authority (although the social gospel of Jesus comes very close to that status in my thinking).

To quote Cobb:- “The second pole is the Bible. The Christian tradition as a whole judges itself in light of the normative account of its origins. Although it prizes the Hebrew scriptures along with the New Testament, it reads the Bible as a whole in light of Jesus’ message,actions, death, and resurrection and of the early church’s interpretation of this. That there are four different accounts of Jesus blocks the attempt to absolutize any single picture of him. The fact that the epistles interpret the Jesus event diversely inhibits any claim to finality of doctrine about him. Thus there is no fixed reference for the tradition. From the beginning it was multifold and developed through interaction among various communities that sought to live from this event. To be a Christian, therefore, is to live in a fluid context, seeking to be faithful to God as one has come to know the God of Israel in the Christi event, informed by the many achievements of the tradition, but critical of every attempt to treat any of these as fixed or final”

This very much illustrates the resulting attitude. There are no simple pat answers. There is a tradition, but that tradition continues to develop, expand and accommodate new developments in thought and fresh experience; it is not a fixed and inviolate answer to everything, but it is part of the route towards better answers. This is entirely in keeping with my view of science; science does not give us truth, it gives us new approximations to truth which are a little closer to accurately and fully describing what is happening and what is out there. I do not expect theology and bible study to be able to do more than can science – indeed, in a sense, it is itself a scientific process, using much the same rational principles to move forward. Granted, it is perhaps short on the experimental, but I would not expect it to be short on the experiential.

In fact, without the experiential, there is no point in any of this endeavour. I would not be thinking about these subjects and writing about them now had I not had personal experience, personal convicting experience. For me, therefore, experience comes first. I then apply reason, and then call in aid scripture and tradition in order better to understand and explain the experience, and in order better to have future experience. My four legged stool, my quadrilateral, is therefore experience, reason, scripture and tradition.

(The title can be translated “Not only but also”, but refers mostly to doctrines such as “sola scriptura” “sola gratia” and “sola fide”)

I’ve been reading Dale Allison’s “Constructing Jesus” and am struck by the force of his arguments in favour of Jesus as apocalyptic prophet.

Note that I say “struck by the force of his argument” and not “convinced that his argument is entirely correct”, because I see him as over-extending in an attempt to press home this main point. I suppose I have some past expertise in this business of “making an argument” from some 25 years as a lawyer; if this has taught me nothing else, it is that we shouldn’t ever just listen to one counsel arguing for a position, we should also listen to at least one opposing position and then weigh the arguments against each other.

My forte in court was to take the opposition’s case and show how it was almost entirely correct, and yet you should take a view which favoured my client. This was far more effective, I found, than setting up an entirely opposite account of facts and inviting a choice between the two. With the way in which the legal system actually operates, this was far too much like tossing a coin; my way allowed you to accept most of what the opposition said but just to interpret it a little differently, rather than forcing black and white decisions.

This is a technique I think I should commend to Dr. Allison. He starts really well, setting up the idea that you cannot say, for instance, that because Jesus plainly made statements typical of a social reformer, he could not therefore have been an apocalyptic prophet; because he talked a lot about living well in the present reality he could not therefore have expected divine intervention to instantiate the Kingdom of God in apocalyptic fashion. This is clearly right, and has founded criticisms I’ve made in the past of a set of commentators who have seen in Jesus, for instance, a social revolutionary (John Dominic Crossan) or a “spirit person”, in other words a mystic (Marcus Borg) to the exclusion or near exclusion of any other identity. There is a strong suspicion that they see in Jesus what they feel they are in themselves, and in the case of Dr. Borg, he is self-admittedly someone who has had his faith shaped by mystical experience.

Unfortunately, Allison then goes further and moves repeatedly towards the suggestion that “apocalyptic prophet” is the basic identity (adding into it self-designations which go beyond just “apocalyptic prophet”) and that really neither the social revolutionary nor the mystic are really the case; inasmuch as they are there, they are less important than “apocalyptic prophet”, and if anything flow from that base designation.

I think this is a mistake. I think that it is a mistake primarily because I do exactly what I criticise above, and read Jesus as primarily a “spirit person”. This is because I am a “spirit person” myself, and cannot see how, if one has had overwhelming mystical experience, that cannot be basic to whatever you then are. I can do thought experiments and consider the position were I basically an apocalyptic prophet or were I a social revolutionary, and none of the others flow naturally from that self-understanding. However, in the case of a “spirit person”, social revolutionary does flow naturally from the experience, and at least occasional prophetic vision flows as well, at least if the mystical experience is developed and felt reasonably consistently.

In terms of “social revolutionary”, I cannot see how this would not flow automatically from the dissolution of the felt boundary between the self and others. I can see how the depth of compassion engendered could be internalised and not acted upon (as it seems to me is often the case in Buddhism, and is a major reason why I have not pursued Buddhism more than I did in my dim and distant 20s), but I cannot see how the impulse not only to assist others as best you can but also to try to promote the dissolution or reform of systems which operate against the mass of people, particularly the poor, disadvantaged and marginalised would not be there.

Prophecy is perhaps a more difficult area. One thing granted by the constant practice of the mystical consciousness is, in my experience, an improved ability to discern trends and causes (sometimes without realising the fullness of the structure, intuitively). I do not on the whole see prophecy as “foretelling the future”, in the way in which it tends to be portrayed by, for instance, the evangelists looking for predictions of Christ, but in the more modern sense of speaking to the situation as it is and exposing it and its likely outcomes. The Hebrew scriptures have many examples of prophetic words which do not in fact come to pass when people change their ways, none more clear, I think, than the story of Jonah. Jonah is sent to predict destruction to Nineveh, and eventually does – but Nineveh changes its ways and escapes calamity (the book has also several other lessons which may need to be taken to heart by prospective prophets among others).

I’ve felt this in operation; I’ve only actually ever expressed any such prediction in small local matters, as I don’t think a wider scale prophecy would be likely to be heard in this day and age without a full scientific and rationalist work-up, and to date have never felt any compulsion to try to buck this trend. Jesus, however, lived in a different age, one in which prophets might perhaps be heard.

Now, one of the reasons I think liberal scholars are somewhat reluctant to label Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet is that at the least since Schweitzer (building on Reimarus) proposed this label to the exclusion of others, the end of the investigation says that he was a failed apocalyptic prophet, as the predicted apocalypse did not happen – and they take too high a view of Jesus to want that to be the conclusion.

However, thinking about that, and about a recent article I read about predictions made by Science Fiction writers whose predictions had to some extent materialised (the link to which I’ve sadly lost) and about Karl Marx and some of his followers (notably Slavoj Zizek) predicting trends in society, I’m struck by a number of factors.

Firstly, none of these presumably mundane and non-divinely inspired prophets has ever managed to be anything like accurate about timing. Mostly, they predict things far too soon. I sympathise – as a newly coined BSc in Physics some 40 years ago I was predicting commercial fusion within ten years. I gather it’s still being predicted within ten years. As an example, Marx predicted that industrialised society would not tend to level out income and capital, but would intensify the gap between richest and poorest. Pace those who still think that “trickle down” economics actually works, I think we are now seeing exactly that. Marx thought it would take place at least 60 years ago; 20 years ago I would not have agreed that it was actually the case, but we’ve now had more opportunity to study less regulated capitalist systems, and I’d now agree with him – and I think we are likely to see some of his other predictions within at the least my childrens’ lifetimes.

Secondly, they are far more accurate about trends than about specifics.Marx thought that first England and then Russia would be the cradle of his predictions bearing fruit; at the moment it seems most likely to be the USA, but I could put in a long shot of China considering the speed at which China is currently moving. (No, I wouldn’t ask the almighty for a predictive word on the topic; that’s all my own fault!).

I should point out that I don’t think God is omniscient in the conventional understanding of knowing everything which will happen, though I accept that God may be omniscient in knowing all the possibilities of any situation on which God focuses and their probabilities. I therefore don’t think that predicting the future accurately is possible even for God. However, God may (possibly through very bright or very inspired people) be able to predict events a lot better than the average man in the street could; at the least, one might expect God to know all of the factors which were at work, which we rarely can.

Within these parameters, what Jesus is said to have predicted begins to take a more sensible shape, particularly if one bears in mind that in part (and in the mid-term) he expected Judaism generally to adopt his path – and Judaism didn’t do that. I also bear in mind that just as a localised flood appeared a worldwide catastrophe to a small tribe in Mesapotamia, so the destruction of the Temple and the dispersion of the remaining Palestinian Jews qualifies as an apocalyptic disaster. 70CE (the first Jewish revolt) was the end of the world as Second Temple Judaism knew it, and if that wasn’t enough, 135 CE (the second) pretty much completed the job. By the end of 135, there was no Temple, there were no Jews still resident in Judaea and they were banned from returning. The heart had been ripped out of Judaism and the people scattered (again), and the religion could no longer function as it had been doing.

Now, I haven’t yet done the heavy lifting of going through Jesus’ reported statements which could be thought of as apocalyptic one by one and applying these ways of thinking (as Dale Allison has been doing with a more conventional outlook on apocalyptic prediction), but using Allison’s concept of a certain “fuzziness” in social memory as well, I feel reasonably confident that Jesus could reasonably have predicted utter disaster for Judaism and been right; they were “living in the end times”. I also have in mind that if the whole of Judaism had turned to following the non-violence of Jesus over the course of the 20-30 years after his death, there would have been no revolts and very probably no destruction of the Temple or scattering of the Jews. I’m seeing there a salvation which didn’t come to pass because the message wasn’t taken up, just as Jonah saw an apocalypse which didn’t happen because the message was heeded. It was, of course, a collective salvation rather than an individual one, the salvation of a nation, but I think the Hebrew Scriptures tend more to the collective than the individual salvation in any event.

I rather think that much the same result could be obtained by reassessing Paul’s statements, and possibly even those in Revelation.

In fact, though, I think that many of the sayings used to demonstrate that Jesus expected an imminent apocalyptic advent of the Kingdom of God can be better interpreted, via thinking of him as a mystic, as indicating that he viewed the Kingdom as being a present and growing reality, accessible already by some and in the future by many more. Yes, I agree with Allison that saying he was not an apocalyptic prophet is foolish, but I still consider that “mystic” grounds more of his basic nature. And, let’s face it, if we take him as being a person in whom God indwelt constantly in some way, whether the only example of God incarnate or as something slightly less unique than that, that is inevitably going to be the most dominant feature of his thinking, and the mystic (who feels oneness with God) is going to be the type of ordinary human being most similar.

As this has largely been a review of Allison’s book, I should conclude by saying that it’s wonderfully well researched and argued, and in the later chapters I think he makes an excellent case (in passing, as this isn’t his main thrust) for establishing Paul as a source for much of the bones of the passion narrative alongside the gospels; I was also intrigued by his bringing into play of the Didache as an additional early source, as well as Thomas.

In “The Idolatry of God” and in some of his other work, the philosopher-theologian Peter Rollins makes use of Jacques Lacan’s concept of the “mirror stage” in child development to indicate that at a very early stage of our development (between 6 and 18 months) we first become aware of a distinction between ourselves and the “other”, that this represents the inception of the sense of self. In two recent posts,  “The Fall and Rise of Original Sin” and “Falling further”, I developed a reading of Genesis 2 & 3 which saw Original Sin as being in substance the self-centredness and self-seeking which stems inevitably from the development of this sense of self, which agrees well with Rollins conception. Quoting from the Alcoholics Anonymous book “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions”, “The chief activator of our defects has been self-centered fear—primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded.” What AA describes as “character defects” I think we can reasonably call “original sin”.

I’m currently reading Richard Beck’s latest book, “The Slavery of Death”, which I picked up after writing the previous posts. Beck, interestingly, starts with a reading of Genesis 2 & 3 from the perspective of the Orthodox Church which sees death as originating in this story (which I don’t) but then equates the fear of death with original sin, and as the effective power of the devil; he goes on to develop this concept. He quotes the Orthodox theologian John Romanides’ “Ancestral Sin” in saying “Any perceived threat automatically triggers fear and uneasiness. Fear doers not allow a man to be perfected in love… Being under the sway of death and not having real and correct faith in God, man is anxious over everything and is ruled by selfish bodily and psychological motives and, thus, he is unable to love unselfishly and freely. He loves and has faith according to what he percieves to be to his own advantage… Thus, he is deprived of his original destiny and is off the mark spiritually. In biblical language, these failures and deviations are called sins. The fountain of man’s personal sin is the power of death that is in the hands of the devil and in man’s own willing submission to him.”

I note, however, that death is the ultimate threat to the self, so with the reservation that I think the sense of self and fear for loss of any part of what is regarded as “the self” is more fundamental even than the fear of death (and gives rise to it) I can follow on with Becks other arguments. I’m certainly with him in not considering that it is necessary to posit a personal embodiment of sin and evil in order to call this self-centred sin diabolical, something of the devil; personally I do not find the concept of an anthropomorphic personification of evil to be useful, but others may do so.

Beck goes on to discuss the conception of evil in the world developed by William Stringfellow and Walter Wink (inter alia) as being the Powers and Authorities; all groupings, ideologies and systems in the world are identifiable as the physical expressions (at the least) of what can be regarded as spiritual powers, and pursues the concept that inasmuch as we give our allegiance to such human structures, whether these be employers, political parties or ideologies, football clubs, governments or even churches we are giving our allegiance to effectively diabolical powers which are, in effect, giving ourselves over to the power of death (as all such structures will end, i.e. die, and also their demands are inimical to us living our own lives for ourselves and our loved ones, and so these allegiances become a partial death.

At this point I need to recap on one of the fundamental aspects of the mystical experience through which I inevitably see existence, that of the disintegration of the boundary between self and other, between self and God. This has a number of results – firstly, I am unable to see others as in any real sense separate from me, and thus the mechanism which Rollins posits of the fundamental drive being to exert control of the other ceases to have real effect, insofar as I remain in contact with the mystical experience. That which is me, the self, can and does expand to include all those around me, or all people of my town, my area or my country, or all of humanity, or all living things, or all that exists inclusive of such part of that-which-is-God which is not immanent in all of those more restricted categories.

Seeing this from the point of view put forward by Rollins/Lacan, this viewpoint relieves me of the need to seek some external object which will give satisfaction, which will make whole the lack seen in the self when considered in relationship with the Other; there is, in truth, no “Other” (or, formulated differently, there is no “self” to put in opposition to the Other. Rollins points out that the loss, the lack felt in the inception of the sense of self, is illusory in that before the inception of the sense of self, there was no self to have anything taken away from; from my point of view the lack is illusory because the boundary itself is ultimately illusory.

Seen from the point of view of Beck’s writing, I am similarly relieved of the fear of death (and this should not be taken to indicate that I am not extremely scared of most of the ways of becoming dead, as I am not a great fan of physical pain, nor to indicate that all of my subconscious mechanisms share this view – this is “SR” speaking here with unconditional assent from “GF” but lesser support from “EC”, and none from mechanisms such as the “reptile mind”). Nor is it something I can claim as an achievement – the initial experience was either given or thrust on me out of the blue, though I have expended energy on repeating and building on it.

Beck does caution in these words:- “In summary, timor mortis is a fact of life and a regular feature of the Christian experience. The fear of death is always with us, moment by moment and day by day, and its absence would signal an indifference that could be, by turns, pathological, triumphalistic, or a spurning of the gift of life. The fearlessness we should seek is not an emotional blankness in the face of death. Such a blankness would be unable to make a distinction between life and death, and thus would be an act of ingratitude to God for the gift and goodness of life. Rather, the fearlessness we are speaking of involves an overcoming rather than a numbness, a refusal to let death be a motive force in our decision making and identity formation.” Having gone through a period of several years of severe clinical depression, I can testify to what it is like for this to turn to a pathological indifference; a year ago, I really had no way of making a judgment between life and death from any of my own resources, and am here now largely because I considered that I owed it to people who cared for me. It is not like that now, but it is also not a conscious overcoming. It is not triumphalistic (what do I find to triumph in in that this particular part of the All does not fear death?) and since the depression lifted, I am all too ready to give thanks for the gift of life.

One of the ways in which this lack of fear can make sense to me is touched on by Beck; in his formulation (which owes much to Ernest Becker) our fear of death is alleviated by making some contribution to the power or authority of our choice, as that contribution is seen as persisting for the life of that power or authority which we (wrongly) think of as immortal; Beck talks of the “hero system” in which achievements within some human system are valued and extolled, and give a sense of self-worth which placates death anxiety. Granted, Becker (and thus Beck) see this as a way of alleviating anxiety about death while I see it as alleviating anxiety about the wider context of diminishment of the sense of self, in particular linked to the desire to control the “other”.

For me, I view this more as a limited way of moving towards the mystical erasure of the boundary between self and other; inasmuch as we identify with some organisation, it becomes to an extent a part of the self, and that part may well survive the death or the individual. Of course, it may not survive the individual, and hence we suffer a major loss of identity in, for instance, the closure of our employer’s business (or our losing our job with it), the end of a marriage, the fall of a state (or radical change in it) or the disgrace of an ideology, for instance in the fall of communism as seen as a viable way of structuring society. It seems to me that people (in the main unconsciously) actually do perform this transfer of self-identity ; I am enabled by the mystical consciousness (again, insofar as I remain in close touch with it) to move my concept of self to such structures temporarily, but only fleetingly, as more extensive identifications (or less extensive ones) are always available.

One of Beck’s major themes is our reaction to the “other”, and he elsewhere builds on (for instance) Rene Girard’s concepts of mimetic violence and scapegoating and on the concepts of holiness and purity (in “Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality and Mortality”). In “The Slavery of Death”, he devotes some time to outlining how the neurotic desire to protect the system in which we trust to alleviate our fear of death (in his formulation) or in which we invest a major part of our sense of self (in mine) leads to rivalry, exclusion and conformity and even violence. This has echoes in some of Rollins’ work as well, where he looks to destabilise excessive reliance on our favoured structures; “Insurrection” and “The Fidelity of Betrayal” are along those lines, as are his “transformance art” occasions.

Beck goes on to talk about various techniques for improving what he calls an “eccentric” sense of self, “eccentric” in that it is not focused within the individual, drawing substantially from St. Thérèse de Lisieux. In the main, I see these as “act as if” methods. Modern psychology is confident from much experimentation that “act as if” works, and that as you act so will you eventually come to believe. As an aside, I feel that this rather punctures the Apostle Paul’s strictures against works righteousness; certainly feeling smug about works is a negative thing, but actually acting in the way you would wish to have flow from your inner convictions does clearly operate to produce those inner convictions. On this I’m with James; faith without works is dead.

Finally, Beck goes on to talk about what he describes as “the slavery of God”, in which a conception of God becomes part of a death-avoiding concept of self-valuation, and is then protected at all costs. Beck rightly identifies this as a form of idolatry. So, of course, does Rollins in “The Idolatry of God”, seeing the idolatrous “God” as being the “big other” which can fill the void resulting from our sense of primal loss. Both writers suggest ways in which this can be avoided, Beck’s being less dramatic and contraversial, and probably therefore more practical. I commend both books, and frankly suggest that if you’ve read either “The Slavery of Death” or “The Idolatry of God, you should go on to read the other as well.

I would also go on to strongly recommend the development of a mystical consciousness, which tends to resolve both problems, except for one thing – my own experience is of being given this, and I’m uncertain to what extent the various practices which various mystics over the ages have recommended can function to create a mystical consciousness where none existed previously. Beck’s practical suggestions and Rollins’ radical ones may, however, go some way towards this – and so do meditation and contemplation.

Enough of writing about it, I need to go and act!

The church I attend most regularly at the moment is quite keen on personal testimonies. I rather like that.

However, quite a few of these relate to giving while trusting in God to provide for our needs, i.e. giving when we don’t actually have enough to safeguard our own future. Again, in principle I have no problem with that, aside the fact that I see a significant chance of throwing people onto charity where they might not have needed that, and I tend to see charity as better directed to those who have no hope of providing for themselves from their own means than those who have themselves given wastefully, given the state of the world as it actually is.

The issue I do have, however, is that consistently these stories end with the giver receiving out of the blue sufficient for their needs. Again, I am delighted that they have been provided for. I might like to hear more testimony from people who haven’t “got it together”, as in twelve step, which I think is a template which people should want to qualify for. Granted there are now twelve step programs catering for so many things that it takes a really well-adjusted person to avoid qualifying for at least one of them! I might like to see something like twelve-step openness tried in a church setting, however.

However, there is another problem, in that the impression is given (and sometimes underlined by preaching what seems to me close to a “prosperity gospel” that those who give profligately will inevitably receive sufficient for their needs. If you give a lot, the message is, you can be confident that you will be provided for. There is some scriptural support for this concept, too.

Much as I might wish this to be the case in reality, it isn’t in line with my experience, either following my own actions or those of others. Nor, to my mind, should it be a hard and fast rule; that message removes the possibility of truly sacrificial giving, as giving is then done in the expectation of return. At that point it becomes not a gift but a transaction.

It is argued, of course, that faith demands that we should trust the divine promise that we will be taken care of and should not think to store up things in anticipation of times of dearth. Matt. 6:25-34 is one example, though there are others. Faith also, arguably, demands that we should do as Jesus advises the rich young man in (inter alia) Matt. 19:16-22, and sell all that we have and give it to the poor, but I do see very few people actually doing this within Christianity. I certainly haven’t done it myself, and part of my thinking chalks this up as one of the ways in which I am a bad Christian, or not-quite-yet a Christian. Granted, six years ago I was worth a negative amount, but I hadn’t got there by giving things away except in a very inventive interpretation.

Another part of my thinking reports that the evidence of history is that the very early Church actually did practice these principles, and this very probably resulted in the need for Paul to go round taking a subscription for the support of the Jerusalem Church. A reasonable guess from general economic principles suggests that they were doing this, taking their possessions, selling them and giving away the proceeds (or, to some extent, holding them in common), and that they had run out of people prepared to do this in support of their community and had fallen on hard times. A few people or a small community can get away with this in a world which doesn’t operate that way, a large group can’t.

I see this principle operating as well in one conception of the crucifixion, that which is principally drawn from the Fourth Gospel. In the synoptics, Jesus is seen as agonising over his future in the Garden of Gethsemane (“let this cup pass from me”) and as experiencing complete abandonment on the cross (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”). In the Fourth Gospel, however, it is all seen as being part of the divine plan, and Jesus is completely aware of this and approaches his impending death with complete equanimity. Then, of course, on the third day he rises and a little later ascends in glory. What we have is a very temporary death, not a full blown extinction of the self.

To my mind, the Fourth Gospel somewhat torpedoes the concept that the cross can function as a valid sacrifice to the extent which is clearly desired by many atonement theories. In the synoptics, at least Jesus is seen as agonised by the prospect, and although there are hints that a resurrection is anticipated, this agony indicates to me that Jesus sees this as a hope rather than as a certainty. This is removed in the Fourth Gospel; there, Jesus knows throughout that his death will be very temporary and suffers no agonies of mind or spirit (as opposed to agonies of body).

I would contrast the situation in W.B. Yeats’ verse drama “The Countess Cathleen”, in which the Countess sells her soul to the Devil in order to save her tenants from starvation and to redeem their souls from him, having previously been sold by them. As this act is altruistic, the Countess is redeemed anyhow on her death. While the actual result there is also that she is not lost, she thinks she will be. Not so Jesus for the authors of the Fourth Gospel; he has no doubt of his resurrection and ascent. Of course, Yeats is there referencing a ransom theory of atonement in which Jesus ransoms humanity from the Devil, but cannot be held by him (this was one of the two early theories of atonement). I liken this to God buying humanity back with a dud cheque (three days to clear…) but will probably get flak for this. It is, incidentally, partly because it looks like God using a dud cheque that I don’t resonate with that theory.

This, however, doesn’t seem to me to work as well for the satisfaction theory (God is owed a debt in consequence of humanity’s sin, only a sacrifice of the magnitude of Jesus’ death will suffice, God accepts that as payment) because it’s not a lasting death. Granted, it can be argued that the death of God the Son, even if temporary, is of incalculable value, but that still doesn’t seem to me adequate. It works even less well for the penal substitution theory (God exacts the death penalty for sin on one life of incalculable value instead of myriad low value lives) if it’s temporary, but I suppose could be regarded as a real death and then a restoration.

I still think that a real sacrifice needs to entail a real loss, not just a temporary one.

So I return to sacrificial giving. Of course, I don’t in theory consider this a bad thing (“in theory” because I’m not very good at actually doing it), and there are two preeminent reasons for this. Firstly, it clears the decks for single minded trust in God and love of humanity, removing the obstructions of clinging to existing possessions and trying to get more. It represents, perhaps, a self-chosen equivalent of the twelve step “rock bottom”, from which there is no way but up and no valid action but trust in others. My own “rock bottom” involved loss of rather more than just economic self-sufficiency, but giving away all you have is likely to make those around you doubt your sanity and will probably damage your social standing as well, so there are other “benefits”.

The other is that it affirms that the Kingdom of God is already here. I may be somewhat unusual among liberal theologians in that I take Jesus’ pronouncement that the Kingdom was already present among his followers (Luke 17:21 is one of several relevant texts) as being accurate. I don’t think he was talking about some apocalypse to come, I think he was talking of an apocalypse within some of those who followed him, a personal transformation, a metanoia. I see the analogies of the Kingdom with the mustard seed (Matt. 13:31) and with leaven (Matt. 13:33) as indicating that this new way of living, which involved love of neighbour as yourself, and sometimes to the exclusion of yourself in sacrificial giving, even to following his path to the cross, had already started inasmuch as it was practiced (I also see the Kingdom statements as indicating another new form of consciousness, that of the mystical entering into the Kingdom; the two seem to me to go hand in hand).

Of course, as I indicated earlier in this post, significant numbers of the early church seem to have practiced this and to have ended up in a parlous economic position, needing to be “bailed out” by Paul’s collections. I don’t know whether, had the movement continued to grow apace and fill the earth with this practice, whether that could have been sustained economically; it hasn’t been tried in any sizeable society, and in smaller ones has consistently got into difficulty. In practice, I’ve regarded this as “counsel of excellence” and tried to balance it with the need to stay able to meet my obligations to my family and to society (and in the past my employees), and worked on the basis that I would keep only enough for myself and the rest could be given away; that has chiefly been my time as I was in a position to use my time to work for justice and equity for individuals and for the community.

And I still wonder whether my not taking the extra step was due to pragmatism or to fear.

I’ve had some push back to my last post, “The fall and rise of Original Sin”, and want to engage with that. My friend is offended because he sees me as saying that God is a liar. I’m sad that what I’ve written has had that effect – unlike Peter Rollins (who I’ve read a bit of over the last 24 hours and to whom I’ll be coming back) I don’t aim to offend (and certainly not to the extent, as he has said, of offending myself as well!).

Giving offence is, then, not what I intended to do. At the most, I might be saying that on one interpretation of Genesis 2&3, the author of Genesis (I do not, of course, consider that biblical authors are transmitting God’s dictation in what they write!) is saying that God is a liar, on the basis that he states in Gen. 2:17 that God says  “but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die”, but that the actual punishment (if indeed it should be regarded as punishment) is expulsion from the Garden, a life of toil rather than of plenty and painful childbirth for Eve and her descendants. Indeed, if we take the genealogies in Genesis 4&5 on face value, Adam survives for a lifespan of 930 years, which does not look like instant death (and as I indicated, the Hebrew of Gen. 2:17 has a connotation of an immediate consequence and is sometimes translated as “in that day you will die”).

It is not uncommonly argued that death was in fact a part of the punishment, in which case interpreters are forced to argue that “in that day” refers not to a day but to something like an age; this is also one way of interpreting the seven days of creation earlier in Genesis to avoid an insistence on a literal seven day creation, so tends to be an easy step to take at that point. However, as I also remarked, the fact that in Gen. 3:22 ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.’ means that it is really not legitimate to claim that actually Adam and Eve were immortal from the start, and only became mortal as a result of God’s punishment.

Another argument I hear about this is that this is analogous to God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac which is subsequently overturned; God is being merciful. This is, I think, a better argument than “well, God lied”, but still means that the serpent was being truthful in predicting that death would not actually be the consequence. There is, however, no wording indicating a change of mind, so this seems a stretch.

I did, of course, give another potential interpretation as an aside – that God was not so much lying as indulging in parental hyperbole (exaggeration). In fact, I think that within the logic of the story, this is probably what the author had in mind; I doubt he intended to portray God as mendacious, but suspect he thought that parental hyperbole was not “lying” but merely use of colourful language.

This seems to me to illustrate a profound difference between the way I approach biblical texts and the way my friend does; I try to read the texts as naturally as possible, and if they seem to be portraying something I take exception to, I note that but do not expend much effort on trying to explain it away. This is, of course, very different from approaching them with a developed conception of theology which then does not permit the author to have been saying something which may, on first reading, seem bizarre, or offensive, or contrary to the character of God as I understand that to be.

Interestingly, one strand of Jewish thought (though a minority opinion) holds that when God pronounces the whole of creation, after the creation of man on the sixth day to be “very good” (after merely pronouncing the results of the first to fifth days as “good”), given that man is seen to be sinful, this must mean that “very good” in fact means pretty much the exact opposite. This is, to my mind, an example of the imposition of a developed conception on the text, here holding that because creation including humanity is obviously not “very good” and yet God is apparently saying that it is, he must mean something other than the natural meaning of the words. Judaism does not see the Fall in the same way as Christianity, nor does it have a concept of original sin, as otherwise the Fall can be taken as terminating the state of “very good”, perhaps.

Where I do import ideas from scriptures which are outside a passage (or at least the individual book involved or the set of books written by the same author), it is generally limited to ideas which appear in previous scripture. Thus, when interpreting New Testament writers, I assume that they are working on the basis of the developed theology of Judaism as it was at the time. With Genesis 1-3, however, there is no prior Jewish scripture, so I do not find myself able to assume that the ideas of any form of Judaism are imported, and certainly not the idea that God is incapable of saying something which is not seen to be exactly as things turn out to be. I do, of course, take into account Mesapotamian creation myths in assessing Genesis 1-2, and note the similarities and differences, though these do not really impact on this discussion.

So, what I do not feel able to do is to decide that God cannot be seen to say anything which is other than exactly factually correct and thus decide that in fact, somehow, death “in that day” was one of the results of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and “in that day” needs to be reinterpreted accordingly; I just follow the evidence of the text.

Of course, it may be that the text says something offensive, something contrary to my view of who (or what) God is. Many parts of the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles fall into that category, and I cite as an example 1 Sam. 15:2-3 .

The link is to a discussion, which includes the following comment:- “Why would God have the Israelites exterminate an entire group of people, women and children included?
This is honestly a very difficult issue. We do not fully understand why God would command such a thing, but at the same time we trust God that He is just – and recognize that we are incapable of fully understanding a sovereign, infinite, and eternal God. As we look at difficult issues such as this one, we have to remember that God’s ways are higher than our ways and His thoughts are higher than our thoughts.” This is an example of retrojecting our assumptions about God into a text, or in this case a set of texts. The base assumption is that the God who commands mercy not sacrifice and that we should love our neighbour as ourself in later scripture cannot be seen to be ordering genocide.

Of course, this assumes a few things itself. It assumes, for instance, that the authors of these books have correctly understood an inspiration, that they have not embroidered that inspiration with their own preconceptions, that that inspiration is from God, and that the character of God is unchanging.

I’ve been looking at a friend’s analysis of the Fall, and considering how different his conclusions (which are the conventional ones) are from my own.

The story is contained in Genesis 2-3. The relevant parts are (it seems to me), taking these from Bible Gateway NIV:-

2 ⁸ Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. ⁹ The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground – trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. …..
¹⁵ The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. ¹⁶ And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; ¹⁷ but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.’

3 Now the snake was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say, “You must not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ ² The woman said to the snake, ‘We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, ³ but God did say, “You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.”’ ⁴ ‘You will not certainly die,’ the snake said to the woman. ⁵ ‘For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ ⁶ When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. ⁷ Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realised that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. ⁸ Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. ⁹ But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’ ¹⁰ He answered, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’ ¹¹ And he said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?’ ¹² The man said, ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’ ¹³ Then the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The snake deceived me, and I ate.’ ¹⁴ So the Lord God said to the snake, ‘Because you have done this,‘Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. ¹⁵ And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.’ ¹⁶ To the woman he said, ‘I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labour you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.’ ¹⁷ To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, “You must not eat from it,” ‘Cursed is the ground because of you;through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. ¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. ¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are  and to dust you will return.’ ²⁰ Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living. ²¹ The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. ²² And the Lord God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.’ ²³ So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. ²⁴ After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

Now I look at this passage as a lawyer, and the first thing I note is that by implication, until Adam and Eve have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they must not have knowledge of good and evil. Two things follow; firstly they cannot be thought of as understanding that to act contrary to God’s command is evil, as they have no knowledge of good and evil; secondly, they fall into the category of people who in systems based on English Common Law do not have criminal responsibility. This encompasses children, the severely mentally challenged and the severely mentally ill, and in English law none of these can be held responsible for their actions.

I think the category of “children” works best here. Clearly, both are represented as “new creations”, and the story moves directly from their creation in Gen. 2:5 and 22 to the “Fall”.

So, I ask myself, how, when our rather imperfect legal systems recognise that it is unconscionable to bring the weight of the criminal law to bear on children who are under the age of criminal responsibility, can God be considered to be acting reasonably in exacting a stringent penalty (even if this is not, in fact, death) for a transgression? Even more so, how can it be considered just for this to be imposed not only on those responsible but also on countless generations of their descendants, who have not (at this point) contravened any directive? I note, for instance, that the same God says through his prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 18) that the sins of the fathers are not held against the sons or future generations, and it is clearly the case that a transgression by a parent whether before or after conception is not inherited by the offspring; genetics is not, after all, Lamarckian but Darwinian.

Even more, having lived with dogs for many years, taking them as not really having adequate knowledge of good and evil, I am extremely conscious of the fact that if you forbid them something, given enough time they will eventually do it. Actually, it seems to me that the same goes for children, and very frequently adults. The only way to prevent a behaviour which is not desired is to associate it with bad results via appropriate punishment on many occasions, or to avoid the behaviour completely. A God with even reasonable foresight (far less than the omniscience which is traditionally ascribed, though this seems problematic given that God apparently cannot find them in the garden) would have known that sooner or later Adam and Eve were going to eat the fruit – and the obvious course would have been not to have the trees of the knowledge of good and evil and of eternal life in the garden (and so within reach) in the first place.

Thus, at the least, if I were to take the traditional understanding of the passage (at least Augustine’s understanding), I would want to argue entrapment as well as lack of criminal responsibility. As Omar Khayyam put it “Oh, Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin beset the road I was to wander in, Thou wilt not with predestin’d evil round enmesh me, and impute my fall to Sin?” And I would expect a just and merciful God not to impose a draconian penalty, and certainly not expulsion from their rather cushy life in the garden or painful childbirth for billions of women, rather to use moderate punishment as a teaching opportunity.

There clearly has to be a meaning to this other than the standard “they disobeyed and therefore they and all of mankind must be punished forever”, and I’ll come back to that a little later. Judaism, interestingly, never developed a concept of original sin, and doesn’t regard the Fall in the same way as has been the case in Western Christianity since Augustine.

Let’s now look at what God says and what the serpent (who probably should not be identified with Satan; certainly Judaism does not make that identification) says.

God is placed as saying:- ¹⁷ but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.’

But, of course, in fact they do not die (and it is a fair translation of the original to put “in the day when you eat it you will certainly die”); they are instead banished from a life of ease and condemned to hard labour (pun intended). God is not telling the strict truth here, according to the writer.

The serpent says:- ⁴ ‘You will not certainly die,’ the snake said to the woman. ⁵ ‘For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’

And, in fact, the snake is telling the truth. This is confirmed by God:- ²² And the Lord God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.’ As an aside, this rather negates the traditional statement that death came into the world at this point; death was already implicit unless the fruit of the tree of life were eaten, which it was not.

The poor snake comes out of this really badly; a severe penalty for telling the truth (“giving the game away”, you might say), assuming for a moment that this is a serpentine equivalent of the Darwin fish (the one with legs) and his legs are stripped from him – and also, it would seem, the power of speech.

I clearly know that God’s dictum can be regarded as parental overstatement in order to keep the children safe “If you keep doing that, I’ll rip your arm off and beat you to death with the soggy end”. I’m well aware of arguments that a command overrides any consideration of knowledge of good and evil (and I reject those; laws are, after all, commands, and the principle of lack of criminal responsibility should hold). I don’t hold that no punishment of children is justifiable either – understanding of good and evil is, to a significant extent, imparted by parental punishment. But this is a draconian punishment and not one which is calculated to teach. In fact, it’s the way it is, according to the text, because God fears Adam and Eve becoming immortal as well, and not for any reason of education.

So I look for some other explanation, and find it in something which actually IS inheritable. At some point in the evolution of humanity, there will have been a beginning of self-consciousness, the “sense of self”. I actually think you can see the start of such a consciousness in some primates, and possibly in other species, but not developed to the extent that it is in adult humans (though I could be surprised by, for instance, dolphins…). In the absence of such a sense of self, there is no embarrassment about nakedness, for instance (I think it extremely telling that this is mentioned); there is also, and crucially, no possibility of self-assessment, of any true sense of guilt or shame due to ones past actions.

Is this truly describable as a “fall”? Not really. Prior to development of self consciousness, instincts rule, and instincts are generally amoral; nature unmodified by something like human consciousness has a tendency to be “red in tooth and claw”, though there are identifiable mechanisms which produce some cooperative and even apparently altruistic behaviour in some species. Self-awareness can, indeed, be regarded as a “step up”, allowing for a sense of morality. What Paul says of “the Law” in Romans 5:12-20 and 7:7-20 – “sin is not counted where there is no law” (Rom. 5:13b being the crux of this argument) – is particularly true where there is no ability to reflect on ones deeds with a self-critical stance.

However, the sense of self also allows for self-centredness, selfishness and self-seeking fear, all of which are less than admirable. Arguably, inasmuch as one is self-centred, one is unable to be God-centred, one is unable to love either God or ones fellow human beings and so cannot abide by the Great Commandments, and this is reasonably equated with sin.  Certainly this gives rise to feelings of guilt and shame. In this sense, therefore, sin did enter into humanity with the advent of self-consciousness, colourfully portrayed in Genesis as resulting from eating a fruit but in fact the result of evolution, and it was inheritable, as the genes which produced this mental change will have been heritable.

At the end of this meditation, therefore, we have a form of original sin, due to not so much a fall as a change in humanity, with good and bad aspects. And, of course, definitely not the cause of death entering into the world, nor something meriting punishment in and of itself.

It is, of course, true to say that the basis of penal substitutionary atonement is removed by this reading of Genesis. I don’t consider that a significant loss to theology, though!

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.

The fourth problem rests in the mind (or spirit) versus body dualism of Greek thought. The thinking of the Hebrew Scriptures was not, by and large, influenced by this concept; Jewish thought did not see the spirit as being something which temporarily inhabited a material body, but saw people as material beings which were made alive by the divine spark, the breath of God, but only vivified by that, not “inhabited by” a separate spirit. Greek thought, and that of some of the very late Hebrew Scriptures, the Intertestamentals and the New Testament, did see the essence of the person as being something separable from the body. Isa. 26:19, Dan 12:2 and Hos. 6:2 are examples of this Jewish thinking.

[As an aside, I am reasonably convinced that the insistence in certain of the resurrection accounts that the resurrected Christ was tangible was a concession to this Jewish belief that a person was inherently material, and that there could be no resurrection without a body. Paul’s early account of resurrection appearances, which is the earliest, is fairly clear that he is not talking about a revivification of a dead body, but of an appearance, possibly but not definitely cloaked in a tangible form; I suspect that this was not acceptable to non-Hellenised Jews and there was therefore a need for something more like the conventional view of resurrection. It may be, however, that the expectations of certain of the disciples that there could not be an appearance of the resurrected Christ without his original body gave rise to the subjective experience of real substance. ]

This combines with an individualism which was not the dominant theme of the Hebrew Scriptures; these dominantly regard salvation as relating to a people rather than to individuals, and individual behaviour as being important to preserve ones place within an already to-be-saved people of Israel. This is a concept labelled by scholars in the “New Perspective on Paul” as “covenantal nomism” (these scholars include E.P. Sanders, James Dunn and N.T. Wright).

Of course, in terms of modern science, the concept of a separable spirit or soul is now generally regarded as untenable; although mind (or spirit) is given importance as a concept, it is as  an epiphenomenon of  consciousness, which is itself an epiphenomenon of life. That is to say that mind, spirit or soul arise from the fact that we have brains capable of conscious thought, and brains capable of conscious thought arise from the fact that we are fairly complex living beings. Granted, science fiction has frequently played with the concept of conscious thought in machines or other forms which would not be regarded as “living” by most, but to date in order for there to be conscious thought, it has been found to be necessary for there to be a brain. Similarly, it is extremely probable (by extension) that in order for there to be a mind, spirit or soul, there must be conscious thought. Mind (or spirit, or soul) is not separable from the material body.

In other words, I am suggesting here that in this respect first century Jewish thinking was more conducive to modern scientific and philosophical ideas than was first century Greek thinking, resting on the Greek philosophical tradition which continued in the West unchallenged until at least the early stages of the Enlightenment.

This is, of course, not to say that there cannot be some survival of mind or spirit; using the analogy of computer software and hardware, a computer program and its associated stored memory can be separated from the hardware on which it runs (and can run on other hardware), but it is not functional in the absence of the hardware. In much the same way, it seems extremely probable that mind or spirit cannot function in the absence of a material matrix, but could conceivably continue in a form of existence given some storage medium, and similarly could be “resurrected” into a new matrix.

This mind-body dualism links with two other potential problems, the first of which is that the unseen, immaterial, “spiritual” is seen as “higher” and more perfect than the material, and so what really matters is not the whole person or the material body but only the spirit, and secondly that the spiritual (and God) is seen as being of infinite duration, so the infinity of time to come after death matters far more than does our current life. The result is a focus on survival after death to the exclusion of living today. Of course, if my analogy of the computer program has any validity, an infinity of storage on a floppy disk is probably not preferable to actual functioning…

This leads me neatly to the fifth problem, which is that as the immaterial, mental and spiritual is seen as higher, better and more perfect than the material, it is also seen as more fundamental, more real. In other words, the immaterial creates the material, usually in a rather poor imitation of the immaterial ideal. Plato’s “cave” image is one way of putting this: the world as we see it is a series of distorted images of what is more real, more perfect and more fundamental but which we cannot see directly.

I am not here attacking Idealist philosophies generally; for a start, some idealist philosophies lend themselves to panentheism, and I experience God in a way which is for me massively best described by panentheism. There is no problem in terms of science in the concept that our concepts can only approximate to the reality beyond “the cave”, indeed this is very much the way philosophy of science tends to see things, and the state of modern physics tends to underline this in that there appears to be a substrate of reality which is irretrievably uncertain, where Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and chaos theory reign.

The problem comes when this couples itself with revealed religion and we think that our concepts are “higher, better, more real, more fundamental and more perfect” than what is actually experienced, because that is what has been revealed to us. I have to be very careful with this aspect myself, as the bones of panentheism represent to me something “revealed” directly to me, and there is an inevitable temptation to say that that is what must be so irrespective of any material evidence to the contrary. It would, of course, be a mistake for me, and it is a mistake for theology generally. Whatever else can be said about revelation, it has passed through at least one individual human consciousness before reaching us, and that must give the basis for error. Paul recognised this in 1 Cor. 13:12: “Now we see through a glass, darkly…”

Process recognises that things change, that things are interdependent, and as such is antagonistic to concepts such as perfection but very conducive to the idea of “better approximations” which develop with time.

Number 6 is giving me difficulties, so there may be a delay!