Eyre Lines

In a group on Thursday, we looked at the parable of the Prodigal Son. Now, I’d sat through the sermon on this twice on Sunday (I was sticking around to sell Alpha launch tickets) and I’ve heard sermons on it at least twice this year previously, so when the group leader turned to me and asked “What new inspiration do you get from this, Chris?” my first response was to say that my new inspirations were all played out for this year, please ask me again in twelve months or so.

However, what I did was blurt out an actual new thought which had come to me. The Prodigal is one of the parables where it’s a natural thing to look at it from the point of view of each of the characters, father and two sons. I like looking at stories from the point of view of the different characters, and in some cases it can throw up a really interesting line of thought. What had come to me was “What about the viewpoint of the fatted calf?”

There was hilarity. There was dumfounded silence. There was “Oh well, it’s Chris, trust him…”

However, there’s much more to that with me than just a joke. I posted recently about some aspects of the “zap” experience and the new viewpoint this gave, how the boundaries of “self” dissolved and everything was in some way “me” (and even more to everything was God). I found in the weeks and months following the experience that I was having difficulty maintaining a view of animals as being different, unconnected, something other, something not to be concerned about. Hey, I’m English, and that came really naturally to me anyhow – we’re inclined to value our neighbours pets more than we do our neighbour, after all. I now had, however, a really good reason for taking this bond, this sameness and in a way this identity really seriously.

Obviously there is a difference. I cannot see the fatted calf, for instance, dwelling on the transitory nature of all things and finding comfort in something like “The rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt. 5:45) or the hope of heaven or resurrection. I can envisage something more like “Good grub, good grub, good grub, terror, pain, end” being about the sum of the calf’s reactions. But even if you don’t share my disindividuated viewpoint, the fatted calf is also one of God’s creatures, and an omnipresent God is present in the calf just as he/she/it is in you or me.

I went through a fairly extreme period of soul searching at that point. Should I be eating meat, and therefore complicit in the pain and killing of one of God’s creatures? I learned a little of Jainism around this time, and some very observant Jains go so far as sweeping the path in front of them lest they inadvertently step on an insect and kill it. Even an insect is, after all, one of God’s creatures as well.

This is already at the point where living in the real world becomes just about impossible, but I’m fond of “reductio ad absurdum” and kept up the thinking. What about bacteria? They’re also living creatures, and I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t had courses of antibiotics at one point of another, or if I didn’t kill off a few bugs before I started preparing food. I supposed I could lean on sentience as the governing factor, but it seemed to me that this was a continuum and that I’d eventually have to draw an arbitrary line without any justification other than practicality. Then there were vegetables, also living… and eventually there were rocks. In which God was also manifest.

I eventually arrived at the idea that, in order to exist, I must perforce do things which were (from the point of view of some part of existence) evil. A new conception of “original sin” perhaps, which didn’t need to get as far as Genesis 2 and 3. Countless decisions I make rest on thinking of myself as separate rather than as part, and this in and of itself is “separation from God”, which is one definition of sin. The end of self is the end of sin.

But then, I thought, there is the idea of the world and everything in it as God’s creation, and God rather consistently saying that it was good in Genesis 1. Indeed, that is something which was also forcefully imprinted on me in the initial “zap”. And so somehow, the fact of my being here, forced to sin against God’s creation (which I see as God’s very self) in order to exist, is also, somehow, good. It is, it would seem, good that I exist, just as it is good that everything else exists – and were I the fatted calf, that would be enough. Most of the fatted calf’s story is, after all “good grub”, and the terror, pain and end is a mere speck in its lifetime.

I am aided in being able to take the view of the whole rather than the part rather easily, and from the view of the whole, the existence or non-existence of a part, the pain or joy of a part is of relatively small import, being in any event fleeting in terms of the atemporality of God. Ups and downs are two sides of a coin, you cannot have just “up”; without pain, there is no goodness in lack of pain, without death there is no goodness in life, in existence.

This is, therefore, as it should be (it is “good”), but could it be better, could it be perfect? If it could be perfect, would not an omnipotent God make it so? Now, I am not a fan of omnipotence as a divine characteristic, and Charles Hartshorne has usefully written in “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes” a philosophical argument indicating that it cannot actually be so. John Caputo, in “The Weakness of God” has written a fine rethinking of Christianity in terms of God as an essentially weak force. However, I don’t think I need to go as far as that; the easiest critique of omnipotence is to ask if God can make something which he cannot move (or destroy, or take some other action against), and this exposes the fact that omnipotence cannot really be “omni”; there always have to be boundaries. At the most, we could say that God could do anything which it was possible to do; is it therefore the case that in creating (which I am obliged to see, due to my “all things are God, all things are within God” experience, as a creation out of God’s own substance), God has limited the scope of what he is able to do, whether by actual limitation or limitation of will?

I end up seeing the creation as the original act of kenosis, of self-emptying, thinking of the words of Phil. 2:6-7 “⁶ who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, ⁷ but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant,being born in the likeness of men.” (ESV from Bible Gateway); thus the kenosis attributed to Jesus is a symbol of the greater kenosis of God. In that act of pouring himself out into existence, which I interpret as God becoming creation (thus, perhaps, “Original Incarnation”), God has thus potentially created the best existence which could then be created, given the individuality, the separateness of its constituent elements (that is not to say that this existence is the best existence there could ever be in the future, though; the elements within creation develop and evolve, and I do not think that is a zero-sum game even had Jesus not pointed to the Kingdom of God on earth as a present and growing actuality).

Returning to the fatted calf, it does not, as far as we know, have the capacity to do much more than “live in the moment”; it will not be asking questions like those I am asking. The mental apparatus to weigh courses of action and decide which is good and which is evil are, with the fatted calf, instinctual, not subject to conscious control.

I therefore arrive at the story of Genesis 2-3 and the “Fall”; I don’t see this as an actual Fall, that having taken place at the point of creation and being only a descent (or ascent) from unity into individuality. It does, however, involve the eating of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge, specifically knowledge of good and evil.

At Tamed Cynic, Jason Michaeli is talking about Reza Aslan, Karl Barth and the Search for Spock,   and in particular about the Resurrection. He has a flair for titles!

Jason inveighs against historical Jesus scholars who arrive at one-dimensional pictures of Jesus, and I’ve criticised this previously. He then goes on to argue against modernism as a mindset and to talk of resurrection.

I’m shortly to start with a new Alpha course, and there’s a strong chance that I’ll again be asked “Chris, do you believe in the resurrection?” This time, it would be nice to come up with a reasonably clear answer, even if it does turn out rather long.

I think the first thing to say is that I have to agree that something radical happened to at least some of Jesus’ followers, and happened very shortly after the crucifixion. The earliest document we have is Paul, writing in 1 Cor. 15. This dates from 20-25 years after the crucifixion, but refers to Paul’s vision and him receiving the tradition about Jesus’ death and resurrection earlier; scholar tend to place this hearing of the tradition between 4 and 7 years after the actual date. Evidence from Suetonius is that the cult of Christ had spread to Rome by about 49 (19 years after the crucifixion) and was causing disturbance in the Jewish population there.

So, this was a very early understanding indeed.

Jason is right to focus on the sheer unlikelihood that Jesus’ followers would, very shortly after his death, be saying that he had been resurrected and be worshipping him as God unless there was some very strong basis for this. Even taking a very sceptical view of the evidence of the Gospels, I think we have to accept the accounts of a set of scared disciples scattering, disspirited after the crucifixion (and to some extent earlier, after Jesus’ arrest) as being an “admission against interest”, quite apart from being what happened after the failures of other more or less contemporary Jewish popular leaders who were for a time hailed as “Messiah”. The transition from that attitude to going out and boldly proclaiming Jesus’ resurrection and other elements of his message demands a really major convicting event. But what was it?

It is incredibly difficult to advance a physical resurrection in a modern, largely scientific-rationalist society. Jason may criticise scholars for being wedded to a modernistic world view, but that is the understanding of the world in which we live; it is impossible to forget it, and it works to explain and predict better than does any previous world-view. So much so, for instance, that one commentator has suggested that despite the colossal unlikelihood of Jesus’ body being removed from the tomb by space aliens, that is still more likely than a physical resurrection.

In the interests of clarity, though I might spend some time agonising over the choice, given a decision between little green men and a physical resurrection, I think I might thinly come down against a “beam me up, Scotty” answer. But only by a hair. On a good day, with the wind behind me…

The fact that Jews and Gentiles of that period experienced reality as, in part, magical and as driven by supernatural forces does not mean that that was the reality. Are we to argue that the magical view of reality should be reinstated, despite abundant demonstrations that apparently supernatural events are explicable either by natural mechanisms or by trickery? In order to argue that the way people of the time saw reality did in fact dictate the nature of that reality, you would have to conclude that a belief in magic makes magic work, and there is copious evidence that in no case does this actually operate in the world of today. There is, of course, no good reason to believe that there has been a shift in the nature of reality between 30 CE and 2013 CE such that supernatural forces worked then but do not work now (and in fact it would not date to 30 CE but to later, if we consider the reports of Peter raising Tabitha and Paul raising Eutychus to be correct). The dispensationalists may say that, but the only rationale I can see for them doing so is to explain why miracles happened then, but don’t appear to happen now. Far simpler to decide there has been no change, and look for another explanation.

The biblical reports of supernatural miracles may, it must be said, have actually been miracles (a negative cannot be proved and a miracle is by definition exceptionally unlikely), but there are feasible explanations for how the perceptions which led to most of them may have arisen within a scientific-rationalist word-view, and so those are preferred; assuming that they were in fact rationally explainable by those mechanisms, the people of the time would still have interpreted them as supernatural events. There is therefore no good justification for concluding that the witnesses were correct in ascribing the category of “miracle” to them.

There is equally, of course, every justification for concluding that the witnesses’ understandings of the events affected the way they then thought and acted. Had they thought that this was an “existential experience”, would they have acted as they did? Well, not if that expression is to be interpreted as dismissively as Jason seems to think it should be, but I think he horribly underestimates the impact of peak spiritual experience. Having had a number of peak spiritual experiences myself, I can attest that they can carry huge conviction even if the person experiencing them is intellectually completely confident that nothing supernatural is in fact happening, and that it is (probably) an event restricted to the neurological processes of the individual; how much more convincing would it be if they did not have those rationalist concerns. We are told, for instance, that Paul (who definitely did not see a corporeal appearance according to him) was transformed by it, and there is no good reason to doubt that. Indeed, Paul goes to some trouble in 1 Cor. 15 to say that the resurrection body is not a corporeal body (shortly after the passage which many rely on that “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain”).

Among biblical miracles, however, the resurrection of Jesus is the big one. Any of the others can be rationally explained without significant damage to the course of events which we can reconstruct using historical method apart from this one (even the parting of the Red Sea).

Something happened.

I would agree with Jason that the option of the disciples making up the stories is farfetched. Not only were they dispirited, but it is impossible to see how they could have lied sufficiently convincingly to persuade substantial numbers (even in a much more credulous age) and it strains credulity that they would have seized on resurrection as the claim.

However, I disagree with Jason in saying: “Not only did they not have a belief structure in place to posit something like one man’s (a failed Messiah no less) resurrection from the dead, that they would in their lifetimes start to worship this Jesus as God (with sophisticated, high theology) violates the most basic foundation of their faith: the first commandment.” Firstly, if there is any truth at all in the accounts of Lazarus, the Widow’s son and Jairus, the disciples already knew (or thought they knew) that resurrection was possible.

Secondly, there was no need to worship as God someone who was resurrected (there is no trace that this happened in the case of Lazarus, for instance), and there is strong evidence in the synoptic gospel accounts that in fact Jesus was not worshipped as God universally among the earliest followers. This did not, therefore, flow directly from the understood “fact” of resurrection, but from other causes.

Thirdly, this did not contravene the first commandment. It did, however, contravene the shema “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one”, which was by this time standard to Judaism. It is therefore necessary to explain how it was that a significant number of Jesus’ followers did indeed start worshipping Jesus as God, even though this does not flow necessarily from resurrection or non-resurrection. I think myself that this is adequately explained by considering the intertestamental literature in which the vision of two thrones in Daniel 7 was developed and which had given rise to a current of understanding that the messiah (son of man) would be enthroned beside God the Father. Once you identified Jesus as messiah, the possibility of at least quasi-divinity was established. [Note – since writing this, Daniel Kirk has published “A Man Attested by God”, which is a scholarly demonstration that the synoptic gospels’ view of Jesus was as an exalted human being.]

In attempting to assess what actually happened, I look at the accounts and, in fact, find them apparently contradictory as to what form this resurrection actually took. There is the empty tomb, a meeting during which the risen Jesus appeared to eat and, of course, the celebrated episode with Thomas touching Jesus’ wounds. All of these would seem to indicate a physical resuscitation. Then again, on a number of occasions people who knew him well failed to recognise him (Mary Magdalene in the garden in the Fourth Gospel) even after significant periods talking to him (for instance on the Emmaus road), he seems to have appeared to different people in widely separated places at more or less the same time, and (as in the Thomas episode) he seems to have been able to materialise and dematerialise at will. None of these are consistent with a physical resuscitation. The appearances to Mary and on the Emmaus road, indeed, seem to me to be instances of seeing Jesus in another person, which leads me to think of Paul’s description of the Church as the “body of Christ” and repeated use of “Christ in us” or “us in Christ”, not to mention what happens if you take a rather literal view of Matthew 25:31-46, which I have been known to, not least in musing on crucifixion (what if we are actually crucifying Christ again every time we do or allow some injury to another human being?).

So, if you are to attempt to harmonise the accounts through a resurrection, it has to be something beyond a resuscitation of a corpse or seeming corpse. The mortal remains would have had to be able to dematerialise and rematerialise or to teleport in order to appear suddenly in the upper room and to appear within a short period in Jerusalem and Galilee, as an attempted harmonisation would have us believe. Indeed, Paul is confident that the appearances he reports in 1 Cor. 15:3-8 are of the same nature, and in 1 Cor. 15:35-57 makes a strong statement that they are not corporeal. There is a reasonably in depth analysis of the appearances and argument in support of non-corporeal appearances as After Death Communications (ADCs) by Ken Vincent entitled “Resurrection Appearances of Jesus as After-Death Communication”, which I think demonstrates non-corporeality as the “best fit” for the evidence.

I can add to that my own anecdotal evidence. I have in fact on two occasions myself experienced a tangible apparition (without any drugs or other factors which might produce hallucination), one of them being of Jesus. (Incidentally, this is why I advise against Ignatian visualisatory prayer unless a spiritual director is available – the impact of such an occurrence is very strong). I have also been present when a group of people “saw” something which I knew not to be there (not Jesus!). I didn’t see it myself, not being particularly vulnerable to deindividuation, and would ascribe the event largely to deindividuation and contagious euphoria. I do not therefore have difficulty in crediting that all the reports of post-resurrection appearances could have been non-corporeal.

That still leaves me with a problem, however, and that is the empty tomb. It is correct to say that Paul does not mention an empty tomb, and he is the earliest witness; neither do the early kerygmas in Acts. I have no real trouble in considering that later accounts may have embellished in order to “concretise” the events (after all, there was a considerable slice of First Century Judaism which did not accept any body/spirit dualism and for whom the only resurrection would have had to be physical). John Dominic Crossan is firmly of the opinion that the body of a crucified man would not have been released to relatives or friends for burial, but would have been cast out with the rubbish, possibly in the valley of Ge Hinnom (i.e. Gehenna) which was the city rubbish dump and that that was what most probably happened; the stories of the tomb generally being a later decoration.

But what was it which sparked the first visions of the resurrected Christ? Could it have been anything other than the shock of a tomb being empty where it was expected to be occupied? Did Joseph of Arimathea and, perhaps, Nicodemus actually persuade the Romans to abandon normal practice and release the body to them? Without the known absence of a body, I would have expected any post-death appearances to be visions of Jesus enthroned beside the Father. Did they prepare a tomb and then fail to obtain permission and place the body in it? Was it removed by some other party?

We cannot, I think, do more than speculate. On balance, I think there has to have been an empty tomb, but that this does not explain the post-resurrection appearances, which were almost certainly not appearances of the reanimated, revivified corpse of Jesus (pace Thomas). However, I think this will have been sufficient to prompt experiences of the risen Christ, and those experiences could readily have had sufficient force to prompt the disciples to break free of their despondency, to have major transformative experiences and go on to spread the good news of Jesus throughout the then known world. We can, in any event, be confident that that is what happened to the disciples, and that is what they did.

Whatever the actual mechanics, that is enough miracle for me.

I am, in any event, not unduly worried about the form the resurrection actually took, as I have experienced Jesus (non-physically) myself as a living person.

Over at Jewish-Christian Intersections, Larry Behrendt has started a series on Problem Texts, and I’ve been spending some time exchanging comments with him. The second of these deals with Deuteronomy 20:16-17, which reads:-

¹⁶ However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. ¹⁷ Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. (NIV from Bible Gateway).

It seems to me that this reveals a vitally important issue to deal with for both Judaism and Christianity (and also for Islam, which also shares a degree of allegiance to the Hebrew Scriptures). As I touch on below, this is just one of a host of injunctions to violence in the earlier books of the Bible, and not just violence but extreme, genocidal violence in total war. We have here what all the religions of the book regard as inspired scripture in which God is portrayed not merely as accepting, but as approving and instructing xenophobia, genocide and wars of annihilation. Historically in Christianity, the words “smite the Amalekites” have occurred far too many times in wars (and sometimes not even in wars) to justify extreme, exterminating violence; violence without compassion or remorse.

There are, I know, groups within all of the religions of the book nowadays who accept these passages literally and are prepared to act on them, just so long as they can identify another group as Amalekites or Hittites (or, as we see later, home grown idolaters).

I think Larry sensibly chooses Deuteronomy 20, as it is part of the Torah (for Christians, the Pentateuch), which is arguably in both cases the most foundational group of texts in scripture. Not only is this scripture, therefore, but it is the earliest and (at least in Judaism) most revered part of scripture. It is also not quite as extreme as the injunctions regarding the Amalekites (Deut. 25:17-19) which, as they provide three of the 613 Jewish commandments or mitzvot, are of another level of difficulty.

It is, I believe, supremely necessary to find ways of dealing with these texts, and unless we wish to regress several thousand years, not by following those groups which regard them as evidencing revelation for the nations of today, and not merely regarding them as obsolete (or, as Anthony LeDonne comments in a reply to Larry, lead us to a Marcionite rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures). They are scripture, they are capable of great damage, and they must be addressed fully.

Larry writes:- “If I adopt an historical perspective, I can easily dismiss this text – it’s not historically likely that the Israelites conquered Canaan in the way the Bible describes. But if this conquest never happened, why does the Old Testament remember God’s war instructions in this way? And worse, what kind of God would order the wholesale murder of conquered men, women and children? What happened to the God who was willing to spare Sodom if there were ten righteous people living there? Were there not ten righteous people among all of the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites?”

My immediate response was “So, what we have in Deut. 20:16-17 is a situation where the Israelites have appreciated that they have a relationship with God and that God is good in respect of them; they haven’t yet grasped that God is the God of the Canaanites as well or that the good of the Canaanites is something to be taken into account. They have a partial revelation (otherwise, why bother with prophets/rabbinic schools/yeshivas or prophets/Jesus/Paul/theologians?).

The problem with this way of presenting it is that some will say that even at the earliest stage, the whole revelation is already there. This is possibly implicit in Torah-only thinking, it’s certainly implicit in some conservative Christian explanation. As a result of that, there’s a danger of being caught up by the Myth of Redemptive Violence (http://www2.goshen.edu/~joanna…).” I was there quoting an article by Walter Wink, author of the “Powers” trilogy, which I highly recommend.

I am, of course, advancing an idea of progressive revelation; I amplify that later by saying:-

“… Religious traditions undergo continuous development… If I follow Isa. 55:8 and 1 Cor. 13:12, I can argue from scripture both that it is entirely right that they do so and that there will always be more work to do (thus securing the theologians’ future employment). I don’t merely think of this in terms of “progressive revelation” in the sense that God grants revelation in bits and pieces as he considers humanity to be capable of receiving it (although I do think that that tends to be the effect); I also consider either that the revelation may be in effect constant but (1) mediated to such an extent by the recipient’s capacity to understand (whether by virtue of language, philosophy, societal imprinting or otherwise) that nothing more than what we now see was capable of being transmitted, (2) that there may have been much fuller expressions of revelation, but that the fact that the society of the time was incapable of understanding or appreciating them meant that they were ignored or deliberately adjusted by third parties, or (3) that the recipient received what he could, thought “I can’t possibly say all of this” and deliberately moderated it to what he judged the audience could receive.

I don’t know how you would tell which of those had been the case with a particular writing. I suspect that no.2b or no.3 might display some characteristics in writing fluency if the passages hadn’t been redacted afterwards, but I’m not equipped to judge that kind of thing.

Incidentally, no.2a represents a kind of “natural selection of inspired writing”, which I think could be a powerful concept, and nos. 2&3 illustrate ways in which you could explain (the passage from Ephesians 5 discussed previously); complete gender equality was an unattainable objective in the circumstances of the time.

However, following the above lines of thinking, I do note that Deut. 20:10-15 displays a technique which would probably have been regarded pre-5th century BCE as fairly morally advanced, namely always to offer surrender to a city and content ones self with forced labour thereafter; sadly this was not extended to the immediately neighbouring “usual suspects”, 16-17 being an exception to that rule. I could definitely see this as still a case of God moving the Israelites as far as it was possible to move them in the moral climate of the time”.

In one of those coincidences which part of me dismisses as such and another part suspects of being divine providence, a sermon I heard yesterday drew on 2 Chronicles 14:1-13 and 16:1-12 in order to illustrate the importance of and benefits of reliance on God as helper. However, if you read through the missing portion, you find a charming tale of ethnic cleansing and religious intolerance in pursuit of a Judah free from the presence, worship or worshippers of idols. Personally, I would never want to preach from texts with this kind of context without addressing the disconnect between the morality displayed there and that which is taken as advanced in the society in which I live.

(There is also a series on violence in scripture starting at Patheos today, and a recent book on the subject. A surfeit of coincidences?)

I do think that the Myth of Redemptive Violence is very active in the historical parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, and it also figures greatly in the various New Testament apocalyptic passages, notably Revelation but including the apocalypses in Mark 13, Matthew 24-25 and to an extent Luke 21:7-28. However, I think that in the passages from Deuteronomy and Chronicles there are also another two factors which are operative.

The first of these is that “bit players are expendable” – as Terry Pratchett comments, when the cry “Guards, guards” goes up, you know that a set of people are going to arrive and be killed or, at the least, neutralised. The story does not expect that we should have any identification with the guards. I have some difficulty reading the book of Job, for instance, which is a good example of this. I have no doubt that the writer did not remotely expect the reader to be agonised by the massive injustice wreaked upon Job’s children with the sole intent of teaching Job a lesson, but my focus goes to them immediately. They are, however, bit players, and to an extent the idol-worshippers of 2 Chronicles and the Hittites and others of Deuteronomy are bit players; we are not expected, I think, to consider their positions; it is the internal situation of Judah and Israel which matter.

The other factor is the sheer tribal egocentricity and xenophobia of the tale (which feeds into what I indicated above). The Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, and the worshippers of idols are “other”, to be feared and shunned and utterly destroyed. Orson Scott Card writes in “Ender’s Game” and “Speaker for the Dead” (extended with lesser effect through “Xenocide” and “Children of the Mind” a splendid dissection of the moralities surrounding his invented categories in which the “other” can be placed. There is Utlanning (a member of the same species from another place), Framling (same species but from another planet), Raman (a different species with which communication is possible) and Varelse, a different species with which communication is impossible (there is also Djur, which lack the capacity for thought and self-awareness).

It is always the case in Card’s universe that the Ultanning or the Framling is definitely “one of us”; the Raman may be attacked, but their position needs to be considered and accommodation with them is possible, but the Varelse needs to be exterminated, as there is no possibility of accommodation. The first two books hinge on the initial categorisation of an insectoid species as Varelse, the realisation that they are in fact Raman, and the resulting moral situation and then the extension to something (a virus, in fact) which appears to be Djur, even more requiring extermination.

In Deuteronomy 20, earlier on rules are set down for warfare with other nations which are, arguably, morally advanced for the time; they are treated as Raman (much on a par with the Levitical instructions for relationships with domestic animals – another species which can be communicated with), and “one of us” clearly doesn’t extend quite as far as that yet. However, the specific exceptions are those given in vv. 16-17, which are treated as Varelse, requiring to be exterminated – and they are by and large the closest nations to the historic Israelites, countering what would be the normal assumption that the named nations would be Framling to the Raman previously considered, in other words to be treated better, as being more “one of us”. But they are not; they are to be largely exterminated.

The assumption I make here is that in the historical actuality (which as Larry links to was probably not that the Israelites entered Canaan with a divine mandate to take it over, but a situation where they coexisted uneasily with neighbours from a very early stage) relationships had become based on a series of revenge attacks, probably initially based in Mimetic Rivalry, the various nations competing for resources, land, population and status, and the resulting vendetta appearing impossible to resolve; there was too much “bad blood”. It’s also possible that a result of the mimetic rivalry was to “scapegoat” neighbouring nations.

We should not here forget the more extreme case case than the Hittites et al., namely that of the Amalekites as mentioned above (Deut. 25:17-19, Judges 6, 7, 10, 15, 20, 27, 30; 2 Samuel 1, 8; 1 Chronicles 4) where the failure of Saul to eliminate every last one of them was grounds for his losing his mandate as King, and there remain three commands among the 613 relating to them, one of which is still to eliminate every Amalekite descendant. This is a clear vendetta situation.

The opposition in a vendetta situation becomes, effectively, Varelse; they cannot be made peace with, accommodated or accepted not because they cannot be communicated with, but because their attitude prevents any understanding; they will not listen. I think that we have the textual relics here of a set of vendettas with immediately neighbouring nations.

Once the other is Varelse, of course, they are not regarded as human. Morality ceases to enter into the equation, as the non-human is not entitled to moral consideration; the wasp stings and you swat it, wasps sting you regularly and you destroy the nest.

When you get to 2 Chronicles 15, however, you are seeing something slightly different; the idol worshippers are definitely either “us” or at worst Utlanning. Where do we get the extermination reaction? I think the answer is seen in the fact that they follow a different religious meme, and one which is seen as contagious. They are therefore harbouring something analogous to a virus, which on Card’s scale is Djur. The only answer to a virus is elimination. In Card’s imaginary universe in “Speaker” and “Xenocide”, it is the unfortunate fact that the virus is housed in a planetary population; it still must be eliminated because of the degree of threat, and so the population will be “collateral damage”. In Chronicles, the idolatrous religious meme is housed in the idolaters, with the same result.

I have to ask myself here what level of divine inspiration would be necessary to overcome a societal identification of a nation or group as Varelse or Djur, and the answer I arrive at is “cataclysmic”. If the recipient could indeed make any sense of a divine instruction to treat Djur or Varelse as “one of us”, the instruction would either fall on completely deaf ears or would be modified by the recipient to something less incomprehensible – for instance, a shift in regard of former “Varelse”, incomprehensible foreigners who might have been exterminated, to the more beneficial status of Raman/Framling, having a status somewhere between a beast of burden or slave and a foreign resident in the society. This occurs in Deut. 20:10.

Of course, all religions can look to later scriptures to modify what they see here; the period of the Prophets in Judah and Israel led by stages to very considerable modifications of the earlier calls to violence to establish and make strong the “people of God”; the start of one such can be seen in 2 Chronicles 16:1-12, where potentially non-violent reliance on God’s aid is placed above paying another neighbouring state to act against the perceived enemy (in this case Israel); that trend continues. By the beginning of the first century CE, Jesus’ injunctions against violence (which are too numerous to address here) were not a massive stretch from the position of Judaism generally, although I would maintain that they were radical in their effect. However, we need to justify why we take the later scripture over the earlier (and Larry has mentioned that in Judaism this becomes particularly difficult).

Some schools of thought in Christianity would appeal to the concept of “dispensations”, ascribing these passages to the dispensation of Law, and stating that this is superseded by the dispensation of Christ, of Grace or of the Church. This will at some point in the future be superseded again by the Millenial, Kingdom or Zion dispensation. I have problems with this concept for a number of reasons. First, it does nothing to answer the issue as to why God’s commandments to us in one age are different from those in another age, if they were valid in the earlier one. Secondly, it involves supersession of Judaism; while this is a different argument, I find it impossible to extract from Jesus’ words as reported by the gospel writers the concept that this thoroughly Jewish preacher and teacher (and that is not intended to be an exhaustive description) intended to do away with the system of Law in which he operated rather than to reform and amplify it. Lastly, it is normally connected with an understanding of the last (or penultimate) dispensation of the Kingdom as involving an apocalyptic and extremely violent change affecting the entire earth (as one interpretation of Revelation would argue), which I see as being so tainted with the Myth of Redemptive Violence rejected by Jesus as to be worthy of wholesale rejection.

I thus return to the concept of progressive revelation in a less quantised manner, as proceeding steadily through multiple prophets (in which I would include Jesus, Paul and, reluctantly, the author of the Fourth Gospel) and continuing, albeit in a more subdued way, through multiple subsequent theologians or, on the Jewish side, Rabbis.

I do however need to address the issue as to whether this progressive revelation has in all cases resulted in moral advance, rather than moral retreat. In fact I do not think this is the case; the previous “problem passage” discussed was Ephesians 5:22-24 (which advocates subjection of women to their husbands). My considered opinion of that passage is that it constitutes a retreat from the more advanced sentiment of Galatians 3:28 “[In Christ] there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. In the same way while I regard Augustine as being inspired to make an advance in respect of some things (such as the requirement not to read scripture literally when that results in conflict with the evidence of creation), I consider that his doctrine of original sin was retrogressive, fixing Genesis 2-3 with an over-literal interpretation.

So, why do I feel such confidence that in this respect the advance must be in the direction of reducing human violence and renouncing revenge? In the first place this is what the Spirit tells me is the case. However, that is my own personal experience and cannot be more than minimally persuasive to others. Secondly, however, it is part of a broad arc of movement throughout the Hebrew scriptures which progressively reduces occasions when violence is to be permitted or endorsed, just as the arc of equality of humankind moves from the tentative steps of recognising some rights of slaves and foreigners in the Law through Gal. 3:28 to, I hope, the realisation that tribes, races and nations are all as naught against the requirement to love our neighbour as ourself.

And we do not do that by violence, still less war, still less total war and genocide. Scripture points away from these things in stages, but leaves us in these passages with a reminder of where we have come from. This, perhaps, is the wisdom of the redactors of the Hebrew Scriptures; that they retain the reminder.

Peter Enns recently posted a link to Joan Osborne singing “What if God was one of us”, commenting “Not a bad sermon, actually”.

Well, a little light on exposition, perhaps, but definitely up there with the points to ponder.

“If God had a name, what would it be, and would you call it to his face if you were faced with him and all his glory?”

The thing is, in Christianity, God was “one of us”, at least in the limited time frame of the first third of the millennium in Galilee and Judaea. In my panentheist vision, and taking Matt. 25:31-46 rather more literally than is normally the case, God still is “one of us” (and all of us), and you might call him Fred, or Jill, or Mary, or Bob. Or in the circumstances of the passage from Matthew, not call him anything to his face, not see his glory, as he would be a ragged-clothed beggar sitting in a shop doorway, a half-glimpsed hospital patient alone and groaning gently in a ward hurried past, a despairing face looking out from a barred window in a police van, a bloated-stomached African glimpsed on television, an addict shooting up in the park or your neighbour, normally surly and uncommunicative, who you haven’t noticed you haven’t seen for a few days as the unsolicited mail piles up behind his letter box.

But this isn’t going to be my normal guilt trip about not noticing the risen Lord in need of my help or company, or passing by swiftly with my head averted.

“And what would you ask him if you had just one question?” might at that point be “How can I live without pouring myself out to you in the form of all these people, and still making no significant difference to the ocean of need out there?”. But I can hear his reply already – “start with one or two”.

“What if God was one of us, just a slob like one of us, just a stranger on the bus trying to make his way home?”.

Wait – what have I just heard? “Just a slob?” You were pushing it with the beggar, the criminal and the addict, Chris, but that’s just insulting to the Lamb of God, the Prince of Peace, the Saviour of Mankind, the Name above all other Names, God incarnate. In all his glory… Isn’t that just a little (cough) blasphemous, Chris?

Well, it seems to me that the peasant craftsman from Galilee who wandered the countryside preaching the kingdom without food for today (unless it was given in charity or gleaned from the fields) let alone tomorrow, who sat down in fellowship with prostitutes, recovering mental patients, lepers and even the 1^st century equivalent of bankers would not have thought that. He preached time and again against wealth, against domination structures of all kinds whether they be the occupying Roman Empire, the rich and corrupt Temple hierarchy, the sanctimonious religious purists or even (Luke 12:53, Matt. 19:29, Mark 10:29) the family.

The earliest followers understood this. They practiced radical community, sharing everything with each other and the poor (Acts 4:32-37) and healed and comforted among the lowest of society, the outcasts from society, just as had Jesus. But then came theology, and a string of titles, and Jesus the Christ became kinglike (except more so) where he had cast scorn on kings, became emperor-like (except more so) where he had cast scorn on empires and God-like where he had repudiated any thought of equality with God (Phil. 2:7); he was teacher where he taught his disciples not to call themselves teacher, Prophet, Messiah and King where he had renounced the offers of these statuses in his temptation in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1-11, Luke 4:1-13).

I think this is a case of title-inflation, of “my Jesus is bigger than your emperor (or high priest, or resistance leader, or…)”, and I think that it’s to some extent a mistake. God having bridged the gap, we open it up wider and wider with our thinking and our terminology until it’s too wide to cross or reach over, too wide for a relationship. We end up close to being docetists, docetism being a heresy which held that Jesus only seemed to be human, while being divine. And we replace an unreachable God with an unreachable Christ. Our Jesus is not greater than your emperor in the sense of being more emperor-like, he’s greater in the sense of being totally different from an emperor, a herald of the Kingdom of God on earth, a champion of those who are poor, afflicted, outcast. He triumphs through sacrifice of self, not through force, not by overawing but by showing the emptiness of mere power.

Let’s face it, if we are to think of Jesus as human, we have to think of someone who pissed, shat, had aches and pains and all the accompanying lowly features of human existence. I’ll go further here; in an attempt to justify Jesus as having been a perfect sacrificial offering after his death, the idea grew up that he was perfect, that he could not sin, that he must have been physically imposing and beautiful (though linking him to Isa. 53:1-3 should have been a clue there). I don’t think that can be correct; I think that we cannot think of him as human without also considering that he could be angry, lustful, proud, self-centered, arrogant, xenophobic and occasionally a male chauvinist (both of the last two of which seem in evidence in the tale of the Syrophonecian woman in Mark 7:25-30).

I do not think it is possible to be both human and perfect. If Jesus was perfect, taking into account his extended words about “thought-crimes” in Matt. 5:21-30, he could not even think of sinning, and if he could not think of it, not only could he not have been tempted (and resisted temptation), but he could not have understood those who are. He could not be “one of us”, and so God could not be “one of us”, and so relate to us; be such that we can have a relationship with him.

I know something like this from personal experience. I was very good at maths as a child; it was all obvious and easy to me through my teens. And I couldn’t teach it to anyone else, because I couldn’t understand how it was not obvious and easy to them; I couldn’t empathise with them, and any explanation I gave went straight over their heads. It didn’t stay that way, by the way; at second year university level maths stopped being easy and obvious ( almost catastrophically for my degree, which had to change slightly), and I suddenly found some comprehension of how it was possible to have difficulty. That made it possible to coach my mother when she took a course which required some maths a few years later.

How much more must the failure of comprehension be for someone who is perfect, who is not really “one of us”?

But, of course, God can be, and is, through Jesus then and in the panentheist conception now. And so in seeing his glory in the stranger on the bus and the beggar in the doorway and responding to the calls for help, one or two at a time, failing to fill the whole need, we can know that it is sufficient that we try to be a little more perfect than we are, rather than perfect all at once.

I’ll be paying more attention to a few of society’s untouchables again next week.

Some while ago, Richard Beck was discussing Dale Martin’s Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation, mainly as it related to how we interpret scripture (i.e. hermaneutics).

After dismissing (rightly) appeals to “the Bible says” and (perhaps less rightly) pure historical-critical “this is what the author intended to say”, he arrives at this statement, as an overriding principle to be applied to scriptural interpretation:-

“Martin takes his cue from Augustine: “Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understand the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all.” (Christian Doctrine 1.35.40)

Martin’s analysis of Augustine is clear (p. 49): “By this light, any interpretation of Scripture that hurts people, oppresses people, or destroys people cannot be the right interpretation, no matter how traditional, historical, or exegetically respectable…[I]n the end, all appeals, whether to the Bible or anything else, must submit to the test of love. To people who say this is too simplistic, I say, far from it. There are no easy answers. ‘Love’ will not work as a foundation for ethics in a prescriptive or predictable fashion either–as can be seen by all the injustices, imperialisms, and violence committed in the name of love. But rather than expecting an answer to come from a particular method of reading the Bible, we at least push the discussion to where it ought to be: into the realm of debates about Christian love, rather than into either fundamentalism of modernist historicism. We ask the question that must be asked, ‘What is the loving thing to do?'” “

I find this immediately attractive; interpreting all scripture in terms of the two Great Commandments (Matt. 37-38, Lev. 19:18, Mark 12:31, Luke 10:27) to love God and love your neighbour is, for me, correct insofar as application is concerned, as these are the most fundamental principles expounded by Jesus. However, I immediately need to think of the counterexample.

If I start trying to interpret, for instance, the book of Joshua assuming that love of neighbour is an absolute priority in interpretation, I am going to have to twist the text beyond breaking point; in common with much of the “historical” account in the Hebrew Scriptures, there is no way I can see Joshua as evidencing love of neighbour, and his acts are clearly stated to have been approved by God. This is an extreme example, but there are less difficult examples, for instance in New Testament scripture where injunctions to cast out fellow believers thought to be advocating a “non-approved” interpretation of scripture are, to me, impossible to understand in a context of love of neighbour. Casting out is not the loving thing to do. It is the practical thing to do.

I have to come to the conclusion that in writing these passages, the authors were not focusing on love of neighbour as an overriding priority, they had other priorities. At that point, according to Martin’s maxim above, I either have to reject the scripture or do such serious damage to its natural meaning as effectively to destroy it. I am not happy to do that. Love it or hate it, we have the canonical bible as our scripture, and we need to deal with that fact.

So, while in terms of application, I agree completely with this method of interpretation, it cannot really be a hermaneutic, an overriding technique of scriptural interpretation. For that, more subtlety is needed, and a lot more effort.

Historical-critical analysis will yield a reasonable assessment of the intention of the author (that is, where it doesn’t yield two or more reasonable assessments between which we will need to choose). From that point, in my opinion we will need an understanding of scripture as a developing understanding of man’s relationship with God. In other words, we need to treat these documents as evidence in a history of thought.

In the case of the Hebrew Scriptures, it is possible to chart a developing understanding in many dimensions; conception of God (from tribal deity to henotheistic chief deity to monotheistic deity, and if the Intertestamentals are taken into account, to chief deity of a lopsided dualism); conception of the basis of relationship from communal and tribal to individual and tribal to individual and universal, and in terms of morality from narrowly laid down rules to a more open overriding ethics, from right behaviour within the tribe to right behaviour as regards mankind more generally, and from patriarchal, hierarchical structure towards something more egalitarian. Although I would argue that most of these movements are not complete by the time of Jesus, the direction was already clear.

In the case of the New Testament, however, there seems to me a less attractive movement, that from idealistic egalitarianism and subversion of authority structures towards a pragmatic view of how to manage a developing movement and not to diverge too radically from prevailing norms of society. Thus the role of women and of slaves is reduced and constrained and a hierarchy is developed.

In both cases, I propose that we consider the scriptures in the light of their position in developing norms of society, consider that, in the light of those, the movement towards love of neighbour as an overriding theme can be seen, and extend the direction of movement as far as we can given the constraints of our current society, always hoping to push the boundary just that little bit further.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eisegesis

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the real historical-critical method.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As it happened, a lot of the discussion on Wednesday revolved round a feature of “How should I read the Bible” which I hadn’t considered. There were two people in our discussion group who had serious difficulty with reading, one who thinks more in pictures than words, and one who goes beyond that – she didn’t manage to read a whole book until she was 32, and spoke of needing a whole range of sensory input to grasp something.

I don’t have difficulty reading text. I could read before I went to school at 5, courtesy of demanding of my mother to learn about this fascinating stuff and showing that I could recognise some simple words before anyone had thought to teach me letters (my mother still likes to talk of her shock when, from a pram, I pointed at a sign and said “dat says ‘Esso’ “). The local primary school headmaster was consulted, and said I was obviously ready and suggested a set of books which my mother then used to teach me. By the time I was 11, I was reading not only my own three library books a week, but also the additional six my parents borrowed, whatever they were. I used to read after going to bed, usually by getting on the other side of the bedroom curtains and using the light from a nearby street light, once my parents wised up and made sure I couldn’t steal a torch so as to read under the bedcovers. I used to have nearly photographic memory for text (nothing like the case any more). I am probably addicted to reading; if there is nothing else to read at the breakfast table, I will read and reread the backs of cereal packets.

If you don’t have a problem yourself, you tend not to think that others may have it. Mea culpa! However, as in what follows, although I am myself primarily a text-based learner and student, there are other ways of study which I find helpful, and I can therefore learn from other’s experience and hope to give something from my own which may help them.

There was discussion around making up a set of images to accompany favorite texts (a scrapbook of these was shown) and using Childrens’ or other illustrated Bibles, and audio books.

However, this led to me having (and sharing with her) an insight from my own experience. If I’m studying a passage seriously, and particularly if I’m using “lectio divina”, I make a point of reading it aloud at least once, with feeling, which gives you both audio and a feeling of “ownership”. I’ve acted in quite a few scripturally based amateur drama productions, which gives you another dimension or two (expression and movement). On one occasion, however, in auditions for a part in the York Mystery Plays a few years ago, we were asked to improvise around a scene (actually, the crucifixion, as it was the Butchers’ play). Having to think ones self into the character of one of the participants as well as all the rest gave an entirely new slant for all of us. I hope this will prove to have been some help.

I suppose that ends up as a sort of externalised version of Ignatian Visualisatory prayer, combined with a kind of Bible Study group. That is, of course, as well as being a form of prayer, a seriously productive way of studying the Bible!

Groups are another wonderfully productive way of reading and studying the Bible for me. I tend to be fizzing with more ideas than I could express in the time provided after one – and that brings me to an aside. My memory used to be very good, and I didn’t tend to note down thoughts and intuitions as they came to me; now it isn’t nearly so good, but I’ve not developed the good habit of keeping a notebook in which to write these down as they come to me. Not only does that make sure I won’t forget them, or forget that I’ve got that memory somewhere if I looked for it (a slightly different thing) but it also reinforces the thought. When studying seriously, writing things down helps me a lot. So I should do more of it, and maybe others will find this useful as well.

Why am I fizzing with ideas? Well, other people have different thoughts and intuitions from my own, however deeply I may be studying by myself. If I’m talking about scripture or religion more generally, I tend to get more out of it talking with people who don’t think like I do. This is in one way easy, because apart from online, I’ve never come across a community of people who do think like I do. In another way, though, it’s difficult, because the very fact that I don’t think the same way as those study groups which have historically been available to me means either that I can’t share many of the thoughts or intuitions I am actually getting or that I run the risk that someone is going to have part of their thinking radically challenged.

This has in the past resulted in me being asked to leave a Bible study group, and on occasion to accusations that I’m guided by evil spirits, am a mouthpiece of Satan or even that I’m the Antichrist (a promotion I really don’t deserve). While I don’t much like this (English understatement here), more seriously it’s led in the past on a number of occasions to someone losing their faith, and I absolutely don’t want to do that, however much I may think that “an unexamined faith is not worth having” (James Luther Adams) and that ultimately faith, as opposed to belief, cannot be shaken by a challenge to belief. Faith is an emotional commitment of love and trust in God, and as such is properly immune to challenge from reason. However, it seems to me that that emotional commitment can often follow from and almost always is nurtured by a belief structure, so it is not usually a good thing to damage that structure before the emotional commitment has arisen. It may be that the love and trust was not directed at God but at a belief structure, for instance.

I would hope in the future to get round this with a group which basically accepts the twelve step approach that each can share their “experience, strength and hope” in a supportive environment where each accepts that all they can themselves share is their own “experience, strength and hope”; it may differ from mine (and I hope it does!), but everyone seeks similarities not differences and hopes that something they say will be of use to others and that something others say may be of help to them. After all, I have managed to study scripture in the past with people of other religions and none without there ending up being “more heat than light”. It isn’t easy, but it’s possible.

(to be continued)

The title of the talk is “Why and how should I read the Bible”, mostly focussing on “why”. I have a host of answers for that, but none of them is that “It’s the Word of God” (quoting Matt. 4:4 “It is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word which comes from the mouth of God”) and is “God-breathed”, quoting 2 Tim. 3:16-17. Rendering vv. 15-17 (RSV), we see “and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness”.

First Matthew. Even Orthodox Judaism does not think that the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures “come from the mouth of God”, though they have a fairly high concept of inspiration.

Then the letter to Timothy. Assuming it to be genuinely written by Paul, it is talking of sacred writings which his hearers have been acquainted with from childhood, and therefore definitively the Hebrew Scriptures, not any part of the New Testament (of which Paul was the earliest writer). Christians in general do not use large swathes of the Hebrew Scriptures for reproof, correction or training in righteousness, not least the bulk of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

A defence is to quote Matthew 5:17. I’ll quote vv 17-19 here: “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”The argument then goes that Jesus “fulfilled” them and that “all was accomplished” by dying and rising again.

Frankly, I don’t think that argument works. It frankly reads more naturally as all being accomplished BY heaven and earth passing away, and that Jesus’ “fulfilment” rested in his generally scandalous proposals that societal outcasts such as women, the disabled, heretics (Samaritans) and even Romans should be consorted with in table fellowship., and that the spirit of the law (in the two Great Commandments, Matt. 22:37-40) should override the letter.

Yes, I am not ignoring Paul’s ad-hoc theologising in Romans. Frankly, for gentiles I do not think it was in any way necessary – not being Jewish, I have no need to consider the laws of Moses. I agree with the Rabbinic chain of reasoning which results in the Noahide Commandments, though not personally feeling a need to follow the principle of “building a fence around the Torah”, I don’t necessary follow the full expansion. I don’t personally see that I need any relaxation or setting aside of those. I did share in a previous post that I have seriously contemplated whether, in order to imitate Jesus more closely, I should act as if I were Jewish (without obligation, of course), but have so far dismissed that. It seems clear to me that Paul was avoiding there being a “two tier” Christianity, with those of Jewish origin being unable to be in full fellowship with those of Gentile origin unless the Gentiles also followed Mosaic Law.

I grant that had the Jewish Christians taken fully to heart Jesus’ scrictures about the validity of the purity provisions, for instance (Matt. 15:11) they might have been able to get round this. Paul may not have had any knowledge of these sayings of Jesus, of course, as Matthew hadn’t yet been written (and so far as I can see, wouldn’t be for about another 40 years). But then, Paul doesn’t actually display very much knowledge at all of Jesus’ lifetime sayings.

Thank goodness we only had “The Message” translation quoted in the pre-meeting, as this renders “Scriptures” in 2 Tim 3:15 as “Word of God”. Even so, really the whole presentation was predicated on the whole Bible being “the Word of God”.

It is hugely clear to me that this is not a tenable position. No form of inerrancy can be sensibly defended against discrepancies (which abound), the fact that no original manuscripts exist, the textual evidence of several layers of rewriting (by different people) in most if not all of the New Testament, and the clear evidence of development in the various writer’s conceptions of very many things through the long history of assembly of the set of books which now comprise the Bible, both within the particular books (textual criticism) and of the whole (formation of the canon).

I hope that no-one reading my blog will, however, be inclined to say “If you don’t take the whole of it as inerrant, you pick and choose what bits you like” (an excluded middle argument with which I have no patience) or that I don’t take scripture seriously – very seriously. To my mind, I “pick and choose” less than do those who mine the text for a set of proof texts which support a position they’ve arrived at. I assess everything I read there critically and prayerfully, trying to see how the inspiration of the various writers was moulded by their language, their preconceptions, world-view and philosophy (and that of their audience) and arrive at what they were really trying to tell those reading them. Where I am in any doubt at all, I refer to experts, and I don’t limit myself to experts of one particular denomination of inclination, liberal or conservative. And I assess the contributions of the experts critically and prayerfully as well.

I am not wonderfully happy that some texts were included in the canon and that others were excluded, but accept that it is the tradition of some 1700 years that these are the scriptures, at least for the Western Churches (with a few additions for Catholics). However, I see no reason why I am precluded from reading the excluded ones and taking them in much the same way as I take the canonical texts (having regard, of course, to the reasons given for their not being included). So far as the others are concerned, there are still many passages which I have not studied in full depth as yet, and yes, I have problems with some of them. I am not, for instance, entirely happy that I want to regard injunctions to exterminate every last Amalekite as being “inspired”, as just one example (particularly the contents of 1 Sam. 28:18). At least, if they are inspired, I have to consider the possibility that the inspiration was very seriously warped by the characters of the (faillible) humans involved in and transmitting the story!

Which leads me neatly back to 2 Tim. 15-17, which I read primarily as Paul’s caution against taking what anyone, however much inspired (or “filled with the spirit”) they may be without comparing it with what those before have written from their own inspirations, and reproving or correcting accordingly. He is talking about the Hebrew Scriptures there, as well, so we really have to view the New Testament through the lens of the Old, which as Paul says, all the New Testament writers took as their authoritative scripture.

Needless to say, I only had the opportunity to hint at bits of these lines of reasoning in the discussion last night and in a number of individual conversations afterwards.

There is one point more, though, which I did not get to talk about, for shortness of time. Nicky Gumbel’s guide for starting Bible readers was promoted. I hate it, not least because, assuming a theological agenda, it picks and chooses those bits of scripture which support that agenda to the exclusion of others. I would still hate it, even if the theological agenda were one with which I did not disagree thoroughly.

If I am granted the strength, I will continue this tomorrow or Saturday…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

“Why did Jesus die” was the title for this week’s talk and discussion. I knew I was going to have problems!

Arriving only marginally less horribly early than last time, I tried to make myself useful, and after setting out the library again (seems to be my main job) ended up on the door. Well, it is better to be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord than to dwell in the tents of iniquity, or so says psalm 84. As I now know that Ben is reading this blog, I suspect he may have kept me away from the sacred song and extempore prayer out of charity!

I was pleased to find that the speaker didn’t follow the outline in the course manual at all closely. As a result, the result was significantly less unadulterated PSA (penal substitutionary atonement) than I’d feared, but at the end of the day, that was still the main content. I always like the suggestion that, had the event been more modern, we might be going around with small silver electric chairs on a chain round our necks now, which caused some merriment.

Happily, in the discussion, I was able to stress the “sin is separation from God” argument, and move things slightly away from the “list of transgressions to be answered” model; self-centredness is clearly inimical to union with God. Have we “sinned”? Yes, if we have not loved God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind and our neighbour as ourself. Much as one attender might have wanted to talk about drink, drugs and promiscuous sex, which I’d have wanted to avoid anyhow as one of our number was actually fairly drunk, it felt like safer ground.

The group didn’t want to explore further my reference to Ezekiel 18, in which firstly the sins of the fathers (presumably including Adam and Eve) are not visited on the children, and secondly it is made very clear that you’re exactly as good as your last action (and probably thought, as well); repent, turn to God, and you are OK. It is, of course, thus clearly established some hundreds of years earlier that there is a serious flaw in the development of the argument from Paul’s ad hoc theologising in Romans 3:23-25 to PSA.

With this group, I’m trying to avoid any suggestion that anything in the New Testament should not be read as if it’s an instruction manual, but rather as the product of members of a faith group trying to make sense of  their experience as it was at the time. I did make an attempt to introduce this way of thinking by raising the issue of the massive disappointment which must have afflicted Jesus’ followers, who expected their Messiah to usher in the supremacy of Israel and world peace, living for a positively patriarchal span and acknowledged as leader, whereas in fact he’d been executed particularly nastily as a common criminal by the hated Romans. Sadly, the author of the Fourth Gospel has already sold his message of a Jesus who really didn’t need to do this and could have extricated himself at any time far too well to this group.

No-one bit at my mention that there were at least four atonement concepts I was aware of either. Penal substitutionary is, to my mind, inferior to Exemplary and Christus Victor, though not a lot worse than Ransom, which I have to remember was the dominant concept for nearly two thirds of the history of the Western Church. Ah well.

I’m still at a loss to understand how PSA has twisted what Paul actually wrote in Romans backwards. Verses 24-26 read “whom God put forwards as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies him who has faith in Jesus”. It is not to make mankind righteous, but to prove a point about God, i.e. that God’s mercy does not represent a lapse of standards; the expiation is of God, not of us.

I recall also that this comes after Paul has spent a chapter and a half finding reasons why the law of Moses is not applicable to followers of Jesus. It’s clear that his main target is circumcision, which he doesn’t want to be thought necessary for Christians. Reading between the lines of Acts, it seems fairly clear that the then dominant Jerusalem Church considered that Jesus was a Jew and that his followers should therefore be Jews too, in the sense of following Mosaic Law, the sticking points being circumcision and dietary issues. (As an aside, I’m pretty confident that the passage Mark 7:20-23 referred to in the Alpha manual  is a part of this conflict, and that Jesus probably didn’t intend it to be a suspension of dietary constraints, assuming he actually said it as quoted). He therefore finds an outside reason, within what is by now central to the movement, namely that Jesus died but is in some way still active – and in the next chapter also refers it to Abraham, “justified” by faith, although clearly there not in Jesus.

The speaker had said that the most important thing about Jesus was his death. I disagree. We started in week 1 with Lewis’ ” if he were just a great moral teacher” argument. What seems all to likely to be forgotten is that in the complex thing which is what we have since made of Jesus, the thing about him which can be most widely agreed is that he was just that, a great teacher. Less people agree that he was also a variety of other things, such as Jewish Messiah, son of God, God incarnate, a person of the Trinity who can in some fashion communicate with us directly today – or a substitute for a burned offering which was no longer necessary after Hosea 6:6, or a quite ridiculous putting right of a theological problem in the mind of Paul, or later  a different one in that of (perhaps) Anselm or (definitely) John Calvin, neither of which would have been a problem if they’d believed Ezekiel 18. Frankly, I think that to say this demeans Jesus. They also, to my mind, demean God. How His mercy could possibly be regarded as a fault, I fail to understand; how it could be regarded as good, let alone as a principle ruling God that he should exact maximal punishment even from someone who has repented and turned to Him, and that for any slightest transgression including thinking of transgressing, beats me. Let alone (as a friend puts it) the divine child abuse of torturing and killing His son to correct something he could readily just have announced – but hey, didn’t he already do that in Ezekiel 18?

Words occasionally fail me…