Eyre Lines

Cattle die, kinsmen die, the self dies likewise; I know one thing that never dies: the repute of each of the dead.

(Havamal, Words of the Highest, Old Norse poem; alternatively translated "word-fame lives forever")

I’ve recently finished reading “I am a Strange Loop” by the appallingly brilliant Douglas Hofstadter (Author of “Godel, Escher, Bach”). I can unheistatingly recommend either, though SL is a far easier read than GEB, for which a background in pure maths and/or formal logic is distinctly helpful, though not completely essential. However, GEB has been listed among the top 10 philosophical books of the late 20th century, and it combines philosophy, logic, number theory, music, art and humour in an unique way. I’d vote it among the top 10 thought provoking books I’ve ever read.

In SL, Hofstadter develops further an idea in GEB, namely that of the “strange loop”, arguing that consciousness and the “self” derive from self-referential loops (or systems of loops) in the brain. Setting on one side any consideration of the self as a soul or similar immaterial entity (which Hofstadter does not believe in, being an atheist and friend of Daniel Dennett, one of the “four horsemen” of the New Atheism), I find his argument fairly compelling.

One of the applications of this concept he develops in the book is the idea that we form within our own set of “strange loops” pictures of the sets of “strange loops” of those close to us (and, although he does not go into this, I would assume people who are known to us fairly well but more remotely, i.e. those who are famous, or whose writings survive them). He thus argues, taking the case of his late wife, who died far too young in her 40s, that on death our “strange loops” continue within the minds of others, albeit in a somewhat attenuated and potentially distorted form. Having lived with her for 20 years or so, he now finds, decades after her death, that he can still “channel” his wife.

Again, I find this fits nicely with my own experience. I channel my wife quite a bit of the time, but also my mother, who is still alive, and my father, who died 13 years ago. Hofstadter’s idea is that the “self” which is a “strange loop” continues in an increasingly attenuated form until all memories of it (and some of them will potentially be second-hand, third-hand or even more remote) have been forgotten. However, he omits to consider that his magnum opus, Godel, Escher, Bach, into which he has poured a fair bit of the workings of his particularly strange loop, is probably going to stay in print long after the ripples of his circle of acquaintance have died away.

Word-fame lives forever, or at least a very long time indeed compared with the fragile body of an individual. Courtesy of video, there will probably be people in 100 years who “move like Jagger”, and courtesy of GEB there will be people who “think like Hofstadter”.

This is one of a few work-rounds for a problem which arises from adopting an Aristotelean rather than a Platonic conception of how things are. Plato had a world of “ideals” which had real existence quite independently of their manifestation in the world (which he considered was always somewhat debased), and this has carried over into Christianity as, inter alia, a concept that souls are a higher level of being than bodies, and we would frankly be better off as immaterial souls. This did not work for Aristotle, who considered that qualities of things only existed insofar as they were embodied; it followed from this that the mind and the consciousness could not survive the death of the body. This was developed by Avveroes, who saw a major problem there for the concept of survival after death, and was a subject of concern for Spinoza, who developed a very idiosyncratic version of survival in which you survived because of the continued existence of the ideas which you had had within God. The more your ideas conformed to those within God, the more you survived. I’m skeptical that many people have found that idea a source of much comfort, but I could be wrong…

Now, I parted company with Plato a very long time ago (in my teens), thinking that the concept of “ideals” as having independent existence was both unnecessary to explain what I experienced and also gave rise to a set of philosophical conflicts which, to me, strongly indicated that there was a fault in the original concept. Granted, one facet of my “zap” experience has been an absolute conviction of some form of personal survival, but the specifics have been sadly lacking. The Aristotelean conception, though (which I think likely to be correct) only supports post-mortem survival if the pattern of one’s consciousness (mind, soul, spirit or whatever) is preserved in some material matrix. I have in the past tended to accept the “zap” based intuition that this is within that-which-is-God, which is similar to Spinoza’s model but allows for (for instance) affections and other feelings.

Hofstadter, however, give another way in which to some extent this could be the case. Indeed, a way in which it seems it very probably IS the case, thought not necessarily exclusively of some other mechanism.

Of course, when I listed some people whose consciousnesses I channeled, I left out one – Jesus. I work on the WWJD (what would Jesus do) principle as much as I can, and this means that I have within my own complex of strange loops a set representing Jesus.

Whose word-fame very probably will live forever…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I came across a suggestion yesterday in a manuscript which was broadly an introduction to progressive Christian thinking which gave me pause. In essence, the author sought to distance himself, as a “progressive” from the term “liberal”. It would seem from what he wrote that “liberal” Christians have more or less thrown away scripture and don’t treat it at all seriously.

I tend to read a lot of blogs which are labelled “progressive”, largely courtesy of Patheos’ Progressive Christian channel. As a result, this suggestion was not new to me; I’ve seen it from quite a few writers who self-identify as “progressive”.
Now, I do tend to accept the label of “liberal” (though see my post “labels and libels”). I remember introducing myself to the curate at my current main resting place, and him saying “Oh yes, you’re the very liberal chap”. I didn’t jump down his throat, although I did wonder from where he thought that “liberal” needed expanding with “very” – at that point I hadn’t put forward any of my more adventurous thinking, of the kind I tend to indulge in when discussing with scientific rationalists, anywhere which would have been likely to get back to him, although I rather expected him to have heard that I regarded scripture as a human product rather than as divine dictation. That said, I doubt anyone in conversation with me or reading what I write would get the impression that I fail to take scripture seriously, or that I throw it away. As Marcus Borg says, I treat scripture seriously but not literally.

He was, perhaps, not far off the mark. I’m probably a little more conservative in some ways than, say, John Shelby Spong. (I owe Spong a debt of gratitude – it was seeing myself as to the traditional side of someone who was actually a bishop in the Anglican communion which encouraged me to think I might find a home there myself). However, I know a lot of people who are comfortable accepting the label “liberal” who are more traditional than I am, so within the limits of labelling, “very liberal” is probably adequate.

I also don’t see churches in which it’s clear that scripture has stopped being treated seriously or in which it is not central, with the exception of Unitarian Universalist churches I’ve visited. I will grant that some of the mainstream churches have some clergy who, in private and with an audience they expect to be sympathetic, will put forward views as liberal as mine, or even as liberal as Spong’s. It isn’t a substantial proportion, though, and is definitely not characteristic of any denomination other than UU who I’ve encountered.

The thing is, I don’t see clear water between the people labeling themselves “progressive” and those labeling themselves “liberal” as far as treatment of scripture, core beliefs or even praxis is concerned – there’s a spectrum, and one “liberal” may be more conservative in what they write than another “progressive”. As far as I can see, there are two major dividing factors, neither of them having anything to do with scriptural interpretation. Firstly, a “progressive” is likely to have previously styled themselves as “evangelical”, “charismatic” or both. Secondly, they’re likely to be American.

Taking the second first, it would seem that things are different in the States. I’m told that there, there actually are congregations which are mainstream Christian and in which scripture is far from central, and far from being taken seriously, and quite a number of clergy. Here, I couldn’t direct you to a congregation which had that character.

However, ex-evangelicals may, I think, feel a particular need to distance themselves from the label “liberal”, particularly if they’re American, where “liberal” seems to have become a term of political abuse. I rather fancy that in evangelical circles, “liberal” is also a term of theological abuse, and it may even be that our esteemed curate meant it that way, as he is an evangelical (as indeed is that church generally). For them to accept the label “liberal” may well mean that they’ve “gone over to the dark side” from the point of view of their former affiliations.

That’s sad. There’s a significant community of self-admitted liberals with whom the progressives have a huge amount in common. It is also a little irritating to me; I see a “progressive” putting forward ideas which are indistinguishable from those which I see from most “liberal” sources, but taking time to take a side-swipe at “liberal Christians” for an attitude which, by and large, they don’t have.

I do, however, also wonder whether Bishop Spong is taken as being representative of the whole of “liberal Christianity”. When reading Spong, I feel that he’s somewhat lost his connection with scripture, though he does talk about it a lot. I don’t actually think that is a true picture of what he believes and feels, it’s just that it’s the impression his books tend to produce. I do, however, position him at the extreme of liberals who are actually still within the Church, and it is a mistake to take extreme examples as representative.

I think it’s also worth mentioning that here, where I find liberal-minded clergy, they’re usually in the mainstream denominations. They do suffer in general from the fact that once they’ve dealt with maintaining an ancient and decrepit building (and frequently congregation) they have little energy left for evangelism or other outreach. Where I see a “progressive” label, I expect outreach and some commitment to evangelism (generally of the “not in your face” variety), and quite probably experiments with new styles of “doing church”. I approve of those – they’re a prominent reason why I’m inhabiting and evangelical church at the moment!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inasmuch as my various mystical experiences have given me any really clear picture, perhaps the clearest has been one of judgment. I saw judgment as, in reunion with God, becoming conscious (in a timeless moment) of all I had done in my life to that point from both sides, that is to say from my own part and from that of those with whom I had interacted. Needless to say, this was not a comfortable experience. It might have been an intolerable one had it not been for the simultaneous assurance of love and forgiveness, which might be called “salvation”, I suppose. The implication might be that this is an eternal consciousness, as it is God’s consciousness of me.

It links in well, I think, with Richard Beck’s concepts of purgatory. Prof Beck is an universalist, working from the point of view of theories about God and a close reading of scripture. I go along with all he says, but have also had this vision of that universal reconciliation; the only small caveat I have had is that I think for some few people the pain of the kind of vision I sketched out above, extended to a timeless eternity, might be too hard to contemplate, to bear, to accept. For them, perhaps eternal separation or annihilation may be the only answer. The Theologia Germanica says “Nothing burns in Hell save self-will; therefore it has been said ‘put of your self-will and there will be no Hell’ “. For some, there may not be anything but self-will left. This, incidentally, works well with twelve-step, in which “self will is at the root of all our defects of character”.

I’ve been listening over the last few days to a set of lectures by the late Rick Roderick, to which I was pointed by an article from 2009 on Homebrewed Christianity. One of these dealt with the “Eternal Recurrence”, which Nietzsche saw, I think, as an encouragement to reinvent yourself really well. The idea is that you are fated to relive your life, endlessly repeating it, exactly the same as you live this one.

If I needed a nastier concept than an eternal consciousness of my failings, this is it. Perhaps Nietzsche was describing a consciousness similar to mine, perhaps he had a glimpse further than I have had. I hope not, that we are not in fact fated to an eternal Groundhog Day, but without the slim possibility of breaking out of the cycle which the film offers.

I don’t think so; the ecstasy of union is probably enough to outweigh anything, and I think this picture requires a greater sense of self, of self-will than is possible. Self-will does, after all, burn…

In passing, is it just me, or could Rick Roderick be Slavoj Zizek’s long lost twin, brought up in West Texas?

There is an article in New Scientist by a couple of eminent professors, one of Hebrew Bible and one of New Testament, dealing with a variety of leaders of Christian groups who ascribe the Ebola epidemic to a divine punishment.

I have absolutely no time for people who do this, and still less for people who do it and then fail to render assistance to those who are suffering because “it is God’s will”. I agree with everything the writers say, in fact.

But I am surprised that neither of them marshals specific arguments from the traditions they teach. Where, for instance, is the reference to the book of Job (by either of them) in which, inter alia, Job is afflicted with a number of diseases through absolutely no fault of his own, and his “friends” who suggest that this is divine punishment for him secretly having been a bad lad are roundly criticised by God? Where is the reference by Candida Moss to John 9:3, in which Jesus says “neither this man nor his parents sinned” in response to his disciples asking why a man had been born blind?

I rather suspect the authors of the Fourth Gospel of having minimised the acerbity of Jesus’ comment here; this was, after all, someone who consorted with all the kinds of people whom the ilk of leaders who make these remarks regard as “undeserving”, i.e. with agents of a foreign invader, members of despised religions, extorters of taxes, prostitutes and other sinners, and who healed profligately and in circumstances distinctly frowned on by the religious authorities of the day. He was quite commonly acerbic with those religious leaders, and (particularly in Mark) not terribly polite to his disciples when they failed to understand things (Peter being told “get thee behind me, Satan” springs to mind).

I can easily insert words which the Jesus of my understanding may have said and which have been left out here, such as “have you understood NOTHING?”

And that is pretty much my response to any leader describing himself as Christian who makes such crass remarks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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