Eyre Lines

Continuing the theme of divine intervention (or the lack of it) from the last two posts, in which I am jamming on a theme of “God saw that it was good”, I suppose I should advance somewhat beyond Genesis 1-3.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been working through Douglas Campbell’s “The Deliverance of God” . It’s a source of some embarrassment to me that I haven’t finished it yet, but in my defence I should point out that Campbell quotes extensively in Greek without transliteration or translation, and significant parts of his argument rest on fine points of Koiné Greek grammar. When I started, I couldn’t even reliably transliterate Greek text! That has changed, but much of my reading has been progressing with a parallel text Greek and English translation open on my laptop. It’s going to take a few more weeks yet, even though I’m into the closing stages of his argument.

I should mention that when Campbell uses the term “Deliverance of God”, he means deliverance effected by God, not God being delivered from something.

Campbell subtitles his massive (1200 plus pages) book “An apocalyptic rereading of Justification in Paul”. To summarise, Campbell attacks the accepted understanding of Romans, and in particular Romans 1-8. A brief overview is here, Richard Beck’s 12 part blog is here. Neither of them gets to the end!

The alternative reading of Romans which Campbell proposes is that Paul’s gospel is participatory and liberative and not, as is commonly put forward, a scathing critique of Judaism coupled with “salvation by faith only”, that faith being commonly understood as accepting Jesus as… and at that point, what you accept him as is debated.

I’ve engaged a little with Romans previously, in which I chiefly focused on Rom. 3:25b-26 “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” as the NIV translates it. Campbell would not translate it that way, having a different concept of Paul’s thrust in the whole section. I previously noted that, far from concentrating on our righteousness, and saying that we were, though faith, deemed to be righteous, Paul is saying that it is God who is in need of being shown to be righteous; Campbell allows me to advance the idea that “he himself” still refers to God, and that the balance of the passage should read “is righteous and is justified by the faithfulness of Jesus”. Thus the passage would be “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 God is righteous and is justified by the faithfulness of Jesus”.

This agrees well with Beck’s version of Rom. 22: “But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all who believe.”

God is not therefore in this passage, in the “event” which is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, delivering us. He is delivering himself from our misconceptions.

But Campbell would also argue that Paul is saying that by participating in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, we have a route to God; in this God is also delivering us. This fits extremely well with Paul’s “Christ in us, us in Christ” language elsewhere in his writings.

Campbell’s rereading is itself an attempt to deliver us from misconceptions, which he spends the early chapters of his book outlining in detail as problems with the conventional reading. What he then proposes as a solution is radical; significant parts of the text of Romans become his reciting of (and lampooning of) the arguments of another preacher, one whose gospel Paul disapproves of, and who he thinks either is in Rome or may shortly be there. Campbell sees Romans 1-8 in particular as an ongoing exchange between Paul speaking with his own voice and Paul’s voicing of a version of his opponent’s teaching.

This gets me to the nub of a really major problem I have always had with Romans, the apparent denigration of “the Law” throughout Romans 2-8. To read this using the “orthodox” reading of Paul is to view the Torah, the law of Judaism, as a snare and a delusion, to be overcome by faith in Christ and left behind. My problem is this: if we are to accept that the Torah is God-given as “the Law”, if we then turn round and say that it is ineffective as anything other than a “stumbling block”, we are either saying that God has tricked his chosen people by advancing it or that God failed to realise that no-one could actually follow it (as Paul appears in the standard reading to allege in Rom. 3:9-20).

[In passing, I would say that Rom. 3:9-20 should not be read as indicating that it is not possible for an individual to follow all of the 613 mitzvot (commandments) of the Torah. Apart from anything else, this is patently untrue, as almost any committed adherent of Judaism will be happy to assure us. What has not been practically possible is that ALL Jews follow all of the commandments; this is a statement about a nation, not a statement about individuals. Judaism, incidentally, would agree with this interpretation today; there is a hope that at some time in the future, all Jews will be observant.]

On the standard reading of Romans, I am left with three options; either the Hebrew Scriptures were a fraud or product of non-Godly inspiration (a Gnostic, Marcionite interpretation), or God was a trickster, or God was frankly not very far-sighted, let alone not omniscient, and made a mistake in giving Israel the Torah. None of these is acceptable, and this is another example of my arguments from “and God saw that it was good”.

Ascribing those parts of Romans 2-8 which seem to give this impression to Paul’s lampooning of his rival preachers teaching is a very attractive alternative!

I am not keen on supersessionism in any form, however, and I do not think that Campbell, or Beck interpreting Campbell, manages to avoid this. I take it that in giving the Law, God proposed an adequate way of approaching him, albeit for Judaism only. If it were not adequate (which is at the root of all supersessionist concepts), we would again be faced with the trichotomy of false revelation, trick or failure of foresight. It’s for this reason that I assume in interpreting New Testament Scripture that it doesn’t generally seek to set aside the Hebrew Scriptures, but to build on them and extend them (notably, to non-Jews without the need for prior conversion to Judaism, which need for conversion Campbell thinks is the essence of Paul’s adversary’s gospel). If it does set anything aside, it is either (as circumcision and dietary law) something which his audience were not obligated to, not being Jewish, or it is something which was situational and not of eternal validity (which Christianity generally holds to be the case for, for instance, the whole sacrificial and ritual system of Leviticus and Deuteronomy and a substantial amount of other law, for instance not mixing fibres in cloth or crops within a field).

This is, for me, a general principle. I do not hold (I cannot hold, in the light of my personal experience) that Christianity is the only valid path to God. All major religions, I have found, have their own way of expressing the root experience of God which is commonly described by the term “mysticism” and with which I am familiar. This clearly includes Judaism, quite independently of the absurdity of regarding the system in which Jesus himself operated and on which all the New Testament writers based their own writings as being inadequate. If Paul were genuinely being completely supersessionist, I would be forced to say that in that, he was in error.

However, I don’t actually think he was, at least not in this instance. I note the words in Rom. 3:1 “Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way…” and despite where Paul then proceeds to take the passage, I think he may have meant that bit in respect of himself. He does, after all, boast elsewhere of being an observant Jew, indeed a Pharisee, a student of Gamaliel. Equally clearly, he thought that for him, at least, Christ was the answer rather than just his Judaism.

Not based on Campbell (at least not obviously), another radical treatment of Paul has been written by Daniel Boyarin in “A Radical Jew”. In that, Boyarin takes Galatians as offering the “primary” statement of Paul’s theology and interprets much of the remainder in the light of that (quoting Dunn rather a lot). It’s a different route to reinterpreting Paul, but one which is broadly compatible with Campbell’s. It also is at some pains to try to avoid any suggestion that Paul is being supersessionist, and, I think, succeeds reasonably on the first level reading of the text.

[I thoroughly recommend reading Boyarin in this book and also in “Border Lines”, which deals with the progressive separation of Christianity and Judaism. I have to admit that when reading him, I have occasionally thought of the “Goodness Gracious Me” sketches with the character deciding that lots of things – well, pretty much everything we might regard as “English” (or anything else) is, in fact, Indian. Here’s a clip where he decides the Queen is Indian; elsewhere the same is said of Superman. In Boyarin’s case, he’s deciding that everything in Christianity is, in fact, Jewish. While I think he goes a little too far, I think this is a good corrective to those of us who are tempted not to read the New Testament as the product of Jewish writers writing about a Jewish Jesus; he shows very well how New Testament ideas flowed naturally out of Judaism, taking one path from there, and how modern Judaism flowed equally naturally taking a slightly different path.]

However, Boyarin eventually arrives at the verdict that Paul was, in fact, being supersessionist not in discarding Jewish Law, but in eliminating any difference between Jews and non-Jews; in Christ “There is neither Jew nor Greek” (Gal. 3:28). Paul was not in Boyarin’s eyes being supersessionist in any other way. Boyarin’s complaint was that the “chosenness” of Jews was effectively demolished by Paul’s inclusivity, and with that I cannot argue.

And if you’ve been reading between the lines, you’ll have noticed that I may have earlier been advancing something like a variant of Paul: “in Christ” there is neither Christian nor non-Christian.

Does that shock?

It probably should, bearing in mind the exclusivity found so often in Christianity, generally based on a few passages in the Fourth Gospel. It probably doesn’t shock so much as Paul’s “neither Jew nor Greek” might to Jews, as the elimination of their chosen status and of their distinctiveness in following the Torah is in Jewish eyes tantamount to elimination of Jews – in other words a form of genocide.

At least I’m not proposing genocide!

Every so often when I mention to one of my friends who is not religious that I’m going to church, they say “Say one for me”.

And, of course, I do, though I have serious reservations about any form of petitionary prayer which is not aimed squarely at receiving some form of enhanced consciousness for myself – for instance “Come, Holy Spirit” or “Please Lord, help me understand this!”.

The thing is, it seems to me they’re asking me to have a personal relationship with God on their behalf, to function, if you like, as a kind of priest. To intercede, to use my connection on their behalf, to capitalise on my (seriously faulty) piety to make up for their own lack of it.

Which would be absolutely fine in my eyes if I thought there was the slightest chance that it would work. But I don’t. A personal relationship means that there should be no need for an intervening third party (well, not most of the time, at any rate – I have some history of acting as an advocate and as a mediator, and don’t underestimate the value of those roles, but they apply only when there’s a serious problem which needs to be resolved, and it’s generally essential that the person I represent be present…)

It’s like asking someone else to do your Steps for you in a Twelve Step programme. You can help and encourage someone do them themselves, you can explain them, you can help dispel intellectual barriers to doing them, but you can’t actually do them for someone.

The first times this happened to me were when I was between 19 and 22, and having worked hard for a few years following my initial “zap” experience, had developed a spiritual practice which seemed to encourage and facilitate frequent further experience of the presence of God and had developed a set of ideas as to how and why this worked. Animated by the kind of spirit which led to this blog post, I was happy to share my conclusions with anyone who was interested in listening, while exploring all possible avenues as to how to improve my praxis and my understandings.

The snag is, people kept expecting that I could somehow transfer my experience directly to them, that by hanging on my every word and by regarding me as a leader, somehow it would mean that they would have the same experience, without having had the same original experience or having done the hard work of developing the praxis. I could communicate the understandings just fine (although I was less successful in persuading people that these were provisional and interim understandings and that I was still working on improving them), but I could not pass on the consciousness of the presence of God except occasionally (erratically) and for very limited periods of time. I could tell them what my praxis was and had been (as by then I had refined it to something very streamlined and minimalist), but as I knew it was building on an initial peak spiritual experience for which I had not worked in the slightest and for which I could propose no explanation (other than “grace” or “just one of those things”), I wasn’t confident that following the praxis would deliver them the same quality of experience (and by and large, my scepticism on that point seemed justified).

I found I was being referred to by some as “the Guru of Castle” (“Castle” being the nickname for my college), and I didn’t want to be a guru. Not, at any rate, unless I could reliably induce a “zap” experience in someone, and probably not even then, as my understandings were so provisional. They also didn’t fit neatly into any one faith tradition at the time (some may argue that they still don’t 40 years later!), so becoming a functioning part of one of those was not an option; I’d have had to form my own variant faith, and I was entirely confident that I lacked the ability and assurance to do that. Besides that, God was definitely not calling me to do that! What I seemed called to do was to launch out into the “normal” world, with employment, house, mortgage, wife, family and, in some way, combine that with personal spirituality.

[In case you’re wondering, my thinking at the time included elements of Christianity, Sufism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Paganism and Kabbalah. That may not be an exhaustive list!]

It seems to me, though, that there’s a very widespread wish among people for others to be holy (or spiritual, or learned, or committed, or observant) on their behalf. I don’t particularly feel that, but neither do I feel that it’s my calling to do that for anyone else – well, perhaps apart from “learned” in a small way, doing the intellectual heavy lifting and helping provide some intellectual answers occasionally.

So that brings me to my thinking about priests and other clergy. In this, I am definitely Protestant; I think the “priesthood of all believers” concept is vital. I don’t, in other words, think that having someone else act as intercessor for you is a valid concept except, perhaps, for a few special occasions. Thus, for instance, much as I may currently feel that Pope Francis is a person I could cheerfully follow, I couldn’t be Catholic, as he’s only the second pope during my lifetime who might fill that role. I’m not even really comfortable with the situation in the Anglican church, where only ordained clergy can perform the sacraments (though that’s something I swallow in favour of what has to be the broadest Church in existence). I don’t value the existence of monastic orders as, somehow, giving me vicarious sanctity if I support them, for instance.

Of course, what I do value is a system which allows some people to specialise in theory and to provide newer and alternative understandings (and praxes), and also people who have perfected a praxis and can teach it to others. Someone who can act as an example of praxis is clearly desirable. I also value the possibility of, for a period, joining an intentional community which has a strong praxis and devotes it’s time to this; somewhere to go on retreat. This is how I see the main functions of clergy, including monastics.

So, what do I think about “say one for me”? I recall Psalm 139:-
O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
    you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down,
    and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
    O Lord, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before,
    and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
    it is so high that I cannot attain it.
Where can I go from your spirit?
    Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
    if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
    and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
    and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
    and the light around me become night’,
even the darkness is not dark to you;
    the night is as bright as the day,
    for darkness is as light to you.

If someone says to me “say one for me”, they have already said one for themselves. God is with them and knows their thoughts, even if they have no consciousness of that themselves.

And I’ll put in a word or two for them as well.

 

 

There has been some discussion in the blogosphere recently about good and evil (James McGrath’s facebook feed has more of it), generally along the lines of whether God can be regarded as entirely good, and if good can exist without evil, and if so whether there must perforce be an “evil” deity (I would assume “Satan”) and whether therefore this evil deity must necessarily be equal to as well as opposite to a good God. In the process there has been mention of Taoism, and how it regards “good” as being attained from a balancing of yin and yang, positive and negative aspects. Those positive and negative aspects are sometimes confused with “good and evil”. There is also discussion as to whether this Taoist viewpoint can possibly coexist with Christianity.

So far as Taoism is concerned, I don’t think the fact that Taoism is a religion means automatically that Christians need to reject the yin-yang concept; Taoism is also a philosophy (the religious aspects are not fundamental to the philosophy), and Christianity should, I think, be able to adapt itself to being seen in the light of more than one overarching philosophy (though I’m inclined to think that the adaptation to scientific-rationalist materialism is fraught with problems resolvable only via some species of post-modernism).

I am naturally tempted to quote Isaiah 45:7 “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (KJV – most other translations avoid “evil” but still have much of the same sense, and the Hebrew definitely has in part the sense of “evil” as well as “calamity” or “disaster”), and to point out that the “satan” of the Hebrew Scriptures is determinedly an agent of God, most notably in Job. I am inclined to think that the Satan of the New Testament represents an element of dualist thinking creeping into Judaism (via the intertestamentals, notably Sirach, Jubilees, Wisdom and overwhelmingly Enoch).

I don’t relate well to dualism. My own experience (the “zap”) pretty much precludes there being more than one deity or deity-like entity in existence (using “existence” in a very loose way indeed). The Jewish tradition which developed into Christianity became possibly the most ardently monotheist religious tradition of any (and no, I don’t think this is particularly dented in theory by trinitarianism, however much the practice may start looking like tritheism). I am therefore predisposed to see the dualist tendency of the intertestamentals as being an aberration which we could do to move beyond, rather than as an innovation to be adopted and incorporated. My recent post about fatted calves indicates pretty well how I am obliged to see the relationship of God with creation.

As such, the Taoist concept of balancing positive and negative to produce a “good” result (which nonetheless may not be “good” from the perspective of some part of it) has some attractions. It goes beyond the concept of thesis-antithesis-synthesis with which I am very comfortable (and which is a sound corrective to “either-of” thinking), and gives the possibility of thinking of things as inevitably both-one-and-the-other, rather than as eliding the opposites and thus losing any benefit of making a distinction in the first place. It also resonates well with the Isaiah 45 quotation.

However, I am inclined to think that there is a basic error in the whole “good -v- evil” dichotomy, and that is in using the terms without a referent. I start with evil; I cannot conceive of absolute evil, for many reasons including that it would be instantly self-destructive. If I can’t do that, it becomes difficult to think of absolute good.

Indeed, when I settle down to think of what “good” or “evil” is, I inevitably end up asking myself “relative to who or what?” The vast majority of things which occur can be seen to be “good” in relation to something while being “bad” in relation to something else, even without invoking any general principle of good relative to A must be bad relative to not A (which does not invariably work, as sometimes cooperative strategies function well). Indeed, I have yet to see some “good” effect on anything or anyone which I cannot see as “bad” in relation to something or someone else. There are, of course, quite independent of religion, concepts of morality and ethics which prefer the good of the many to the good of the one as being logically superior (though taking this to extremes results in extremely painful decisions which most people would balk at). However, I end up finding it very difficult to accept that any absolute good or absolute bad (or evil) can be said to exist, at least not in the real world.

It is, of course, clear that an absolute morality can be constructed by appealing to something independent of material reality. Certain philosophies (for example political philosophies) will do, for instance, and probably all religions will do. The first depend on some abstract principles which are “above” any effects on humans (or any lower form of existence), the second on God; that which is good in relation to God is an absolute good, as God (at least a monotheistic God) is absolute where everything else is relative. However, then to say “God is good” becomes a redundancy; of course God is good to God (and conversely, referring back to an earlier argument, Satan must be evil to Satan, and therefore cease to be). It seems to me that we have in the Hebrew scriptures at least a near approach to this position, which (to adjust a well known phrase) is basically “God commands it, I do it, that settles it”.

Despite Paul’s apparent attitude in Romans 3:10-18 (in which “all have sinned” and the Law is held up as impossible to follow adequately), in Phil. 3:6 he says he is “as to righteousness under the law, blameless”, and this rather confirms the position of some observant Jews of my acquaintance, who do not find strict adherence to all of the 613 mitzvot difficult (let alone impossible) even as massively extended by generations of rabbis “placing a fence around the Torah” and extending their scope to as not to come even vaguely close to actually contavening one of those. They don’t actually say “God commands it, I do it, that settles it”, but this is close to their position.

I can see the attraction of that; a detailed code rather smaller than the list of laws of most developed nations (which one is also expected to follow perfectly by the civil authorities!) which is all that God requires of you as a condition of being righteous, i.e. “good”. But I am not Jewish, I was not brought up Jewish, I am through and through a Jesus-follower with the sermon on the mount (Matt. 5-7 cf Lk. 6:12-49) prominent in my consciousness as a standard – and that asks that we be “perfect, as our father in heaven is perfect”, that we not even bear anger towards our fellow men (or call them “fool”), that omissions are as worthy of blame as commissions. And that, as was pointed out in the second Alpha talk last night, is impossible for everyone.

I therefore don’t have the “God commands it, I do it, that settles it” position, just a “God commands it through Jesus in his lifetime teachings, I get as close as I can to doing it, nothing is settled by it”. The talk (as I’ve adverted to previously) presented a straight PSA answer to why I should nonetheless feel secure; I can’t swallow PSA myself, and will be adverting to the reasons shortly (I hope, should I ever finish writing the relevant post series). In point of fact, I experience God (and Jesus), I love and trust God (and Jesus) and that is sufficient. Sure, I can never feel smug about being perfect and never will do, but that’s OK with me – and actually, for all their theoretical reliance on Torah observance, my Jewish friends tend also to feel they can always do more and better.

But really, this only tells me (or my Jewish friends) what I should do and not do, it does not give me any overarching concept of good and evil. As I outlined recently, my very existence is from the point of view of some organisms or entities a bad thing, a sin, an evil – and yet from the Godly point of view in Genesis 1, it is at least in principle good. My experience forces me to see God in everything, everything in God, and “everything” includes bad things, even evil things, includes “natural evil” in the form of natural disasters and accidents. Is this a Taoist yin and yang position after all? It certainly arrives at much the same position. Beyond that, I can really see no alternative to complete relativism.

My own balance is found in trying to tread lightly on the world (rather than any insects), in trying to treat my fellow humans as I would treat Jesus (mindful of Matt. 25) and in attempting to remember always that the earth and all that is in it is sacred, holy, in God, and to be treasured and taken care of.

Following my post about resurrection recently, I notice that another blogger who I generally find much fellow feeling with, Tony Jones, has written “Dear Marcus Borg; please reconsider the Resurrection”.

Now, I am, I think, singing from the same hymn sheet as Marcus Borg here. I see no problem if Christians believe that the resurrection was fully physical, involving the corpse of the deceased Jesus being in some way revivified and changed into something which could walk through walls and not be recognised by friends and which flitted between Jerusalem and Galilee with inhuman speed, but was nonetheless still “the physical body”. However, I personally think it extremely unlikely that this is what happened. I don’t think it’s the best fit for the scriptures we have, assuming them all to be entirely faithful records by eyewitnesses; a revivified corpse does not fit several of the accounts.

In fact, however, I don’t think any but Paul’s is an eyewitness account, and the experience he described wasn’t, by his admission, one of viewing a revivified corpse. I suspect, though cannot demonstrate, that the later accounts, building on oral tradition, may have been struggling with a particular current of Jewish thinking of the time which did not accept any spirit-body dichotomy and would therefore have considered that any resurrection would have to be fully physical, and the accounts may have adjusted what they understood to underline what they thought they knew must have been the case.

I am by no means the only person I know who thinks this way, though I may well be the only one among my face to face acquaintance who does and who self-identifies as a believing Christian.

And that is the problem here. I cannot stand before most of my friends and say “you have to believe in a physical resurrection, otherwise you cannot be a Christian” and get anything other than “fine, I’m therefore not going to listen to any other arguments you may have, any testimony you may give”. Tony Jones asking Marcus Borg to reconsider is, essentially telling him not to hold out the prospect to people that you can be a Christian without actually believing in a physical resurrection. The trouble is, from my point of view, it’s perfectly possible, and moreover it doesn’t place a potential stumbling block in the way of someone who may be edging towards faith.

In line with David Henson’s response to the Jones-Borg conversation, I don’t think there is an argument here worth pursuing, either. Whatever the actual historical fact, Christians everywhere experience the resurrected Jesus on a day to day basis; there really need be no more confirmation than that. As he says “So I do not believe the resurrection because it literally happened long ago. I believe the resurrection because it happens. It has happened to Christians for 2,000 years, and it has happened to me.”

In fact this is reminiscent of a lot of discussions I have had with Christians more conservative than me in the past; the fact that I work on the whole without any belief in miraculous events often troubles them hugely, but when it comes down to the matter of what we actually learn from scriptures which contain apparent supernatural events and apply that to our lives here and now, the difference often disappears. Take, for instance, the loaves and fishes. Did it happen or not? I think, on balance, if something happened it wasn’t supernatural, my conservative friends think there was a supernatural multiplication of material objects. What difference does it make to the message we derive from the story? None.

So I’m not disposed to say “you must believe it didn’t happen”, because that makes no difference in the here and now.

Both Jason Michaeli and Tony Jones (and some others less well known) have otherwise shown plenty of evidence of being more open about biblical interpretation than their recent reactions would indicate. I have to ask, therefore, what it is about the resurrection (as opposed, for instance, to inerrancy, the role of women in the church, treatment of sexual variance or the dreaded PSA) which makes it such a sticking point? Why is it that when this particular topic comes up, suddenly some attitudes seem to take a lurch to the right and something approaching the evangelical right’s condemnations of “liberals” seems to be on the horizon?

As a generality, if someone, against type, suddenly expresses a very strong opinion on a nonessential matter, I will usually look to see why that opinion matters to them more than would appear on the surface. Usually, such a strong reaction comes from some kind of fear, though occasionally just from anger. Generally in cases of doctrines, the fear is that some part of their own belief structure will be undermined. But how can this be when Marcus Borg, or David Henson, or John Spong (to name a very few) are not saying that belief in a supernatural explanation is wrong, just that they themselves adopt a somewhat less overtly supernatural explanation?

I have to wonder whether it’s a case of needing at least one instance of “having to believe an impossible thing” for faith to be so labelled. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 22-24: “For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (Bible Hub NIV) after all. Personally, that’s not how I see faith as the Biblical writers described it; what I see them talking of is more like unswerving personal commitment, faithfulness rather than faith.

If suddenly a slippery slope can be seen at the end of which is a perfectly rational faith which requires no “foolishness”, perhaps there is fear that they will end up there, and somehow their beliefs have to be based on a grossly supernatural theology? Perhaps the people saying this have such theological weight that people think they cannot argue against them and must follow? (This worry has never affected me personally, but intellectual arrogance is a character fault that I am working on… possibly I should work harder.)

Perhaps, too, there is some degree of resentment – it could be that supernatural belief of some kind has been difficult for them to accept themselves, but they have managed to do it – and now see a respected figure apparently managing to do without it?

I don’t know. What I do know is that I regret any moves to “circle the wagons” and establish fixed boundaries beyond which people must be thought of as “not Christians” or “heretics” or “false teachers” and so excluded from “us” and made “other”.  I see Jesus, and Paul (at least in the undisputed letters) establishing a trajectory of inclusion. OK, I don’t think Jesus got quite as far towards complete inclusion of gentiles and women as liberation or feminist theologians might like to see, I don’t think Paul got as far towards complete inclusion of women and slaves as feminist theologians and 18th and 19th century abolitionists might like (or have liked) to see, but I think they moved in a clear direction from where they started, and 2000 years later we should have continued moving in the direction they indicated faster and further than we have.

I don’t think, for instance, that we have remotely managed to take on board even the distance Jesus moved towards the inclusion of the sick, the disabled, the indigent, the poor and the criminal. To exclude from our own ranks for variant readings and understandings of our common scripture is very much a step, or rather a leap, in the wrong direction.

And I will again pray for understanding of how it is that Pat Robertson and myself can be considered as members of the same religion. But I have (just for today) faith that we are.

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.

The training evening for the next Alpha was last night; it starts in earnest next Thursday, so the volume of posts will probably increase as I get more ideas from the discussions and want to work through them here. I’m in the process of reading Douglas Campbell’s “The Deliverance of God” at the moment, so when the video of Nicky Gumbel describing the Alpha process was shown, I immediately noted that he (and Alpha) cleaves to the standard evangelical model of conversion.

And this is based very heavily on the theory of Justification, which is what Campbell’s book focuses on – it’s subtitled “An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul”. At just over 1200 pages, it’s going to keep me out of trouble for a while yet. I don’t intend to review what I’ve read of it to date, but Richard Beck has done a series on it recently. What I have read, however, mounts a very detailed and convincing assault on the concept of Justification generally and salvation via the “Justified through faith” route specifically (Romans 1-4 being the most significant text here).

Let me outline this paradigm. Mankind are all sinners. God cannot accept sin, and therefore sin in any measure whatsoever deserves death and/or hell. They have through two potential routes, “natural theology” (i.e. the obvious testimony of creation) or Mosaic Law, a conviction of this, but no way out of it; Paul specifies that the Law is inadequate to save anybody. Jesus’ death on the cross provides, via faith in Christ, justification by grace to all. The logic is inescapable; all are guilty, all are condemned but faith in Christ produces deemed justification and therefore saves. The standard model of conversion involves this; pray the “sinners prayer”, receive (be born again in) the Holy Spirit and faith, be saved.

It is worth mentioning that the 12 Step formula, admitting powerlessness over something and our lives having become unmanageable, becoming convinced that there existed a higher power which was capable of releiving us from this position and making a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to the care of that higher power mirrors extremely well the evangelical standard model. And that works; I’ve seen it work in many people. The spiritual experience doesn’t always occur at any of those points (Steps 1-3), it can occur later. Some of them have gone on to find their relationship with their higher power in Christianity. OK, some have found that by another route, but they aren’t the subject of this post!

Justification theory is not quite entirely PSA (Penal Substitutionary Atonement) in its full exposition, but is a major foundational part of that theory. I don’t intend to deal with the detail of my theoretical reaction to PSA in this post; I have another post (or possibly series) under construction at the moment in which I intend to do that. Here, I intend to talk about practice.

Now, if you’ve read my previous post, you may realise that I didn’t arrive at faith via this route. I didn’t have anything remotely like a conception of irretrievable, unforgiveable sin and of a stern judgmental God who could only accept perfection. I didn’t believe any god of any sort existed, for a start, and forgiveness appeared to be reasonably readily obtained (sometimes with a bit of pain and time) in every situation I’d come across. I just got a whole package which included an extremely lively consciousness of past sin and at the same time a consciousness of forgiveness and a compulsion to try very hard not to do any of that stuff again, all in one “zap”.

In fact, to my more or less complete consternation, the model of salvation which best fits me is Calvinist (about which I wrote a while ago). Full Calvinism doesn’t start with a conviction of sin and praying the sinners’ prayer (or something like it), it starts with divine intervention in changing you, and only after that do you get on to bits like considering past sins.

So, we have Nicky Gumbel and Alpha doing conversions one way, (with, apparently, very considerable success – I have multiple friends who have arrived at belief via Alpha or something very like it) and Calvin describing another way of getting converted of which I seem to have personal experience. The two are just not the same. Conviction of sin followed by a choice to give your life to Jesus demands a free will choice, and Calvin says that the totally depraved non-Christian (the “T” of “TULIP”) cannot make, has not the capacity to make, that decision.

Do we see a pattern emerging here? The Evangelistic paradigm is, basically, Luther on Justification, and Luther and Calvin are not all that far apart. The distinction may, therefore, be rather subtle.

So, let me add to that. Actually, only a few people who arrive at faith via Alpha have been able to say to me with conviction that they were, in fact, convicted of otherwise irredeemable sin and then made the decision. Most, it turns out, have been somewhat convinced by the talks, but much more influenced by one or more very powerful testimonies and the fact that they feel love and friendship from the people round them and want to be part of that. But in the process, they have arrived at something very like the spiritual experience testified to by people who have gone the Lutheran/Evangelical route or the Calvinist route. Significant numbers of them have then worked at it, much as twelve steppers work at the twelve steps, and maintained their “conscious contact with God”. Some have at a later time lost this again.

This, I should point out, doesn’t really conform very well to anyone’s theoretical soteriology.

Then again, there are those I know who have just made a decision that this is where they want to be and have started working at it, without any particular crushing consciousness of sin or appreciation that there is only one way out of this into God’s favour. Many of these are people who were just brought up to believe in the system and have never challenged it. And some of them do arrive at a conscious contact with God, sometimes in a blinding flash (or zap) after they have been working at it for months, years or sometimes decades, sometimes very gently and imperceptibly. (It’s worth mentioning, however, that many who tread this route never seem to attain this state, at least not in any form strong enough for them to testify to).

And this is, essentially, works-based soteriology of the kind which Luther and Calvin both considered theoretically impossible. It ought to work; the psychological establishment has long understood “act as if” techniques, and so have the twelve step fellowships. Eastern Orthodoxy, the Western Monastic tradition and observant Judaism are examples in practice, whatever their theory may be.

It may actually be that I have an element of this operational in my own experience, because a couple of years before my original zap, I started to try to improve myself. 20/20 hindsight reveals that what I actually did about this bore a significant resemblance to steps 1, 4-5, a God-free 6 and 8-10, starting with an appreciation of powerlessness and a searching moral inventory. It took the zap to insert the God-related steps, though. The motive had, of course, nothing to do with anything spiritual; it was a purely pragmatic approach to improving my ability to function in society, but it does seem possible that it could have had an unanticipated result!

I anticipate that some might say that actually there has to be only one way, and these might try to find the elements of their chosen one solution in the lives of others who did not seem at first appraisal to have fitted their template. I think they stretch to attempt this, and also have a tendency to reject the experience of some who, to a more objective eye, might well display all the characteristics of a “saved” person, notably Paul’s “fruits of the spirit” (Gal. 5:22-23) and attest to their own conviction of being “saved” (or otherwise justified, or “right with God”).

I was at one time guilty of this; I knew how it had happened with me, and assumed that this was the only way it could happen and be authentic. I could see the result in the writings of mystics (at least in places), so I assumed that the way to go was the way they had described (my own “out of the blue” was no help to anyone). Most of them used seclusion, privation and sometimes sensory deprivation, so 20 year old Chris would have said everyone had to do that, if, that was, they wanted to experience something like the zap; I had used bits and pieces of the praxis of some of the great mystics myself to try to re-experience the zap, and had duly had some recapitulations (though generally not with anything like the original force). It therefore seemed experimentally verified.

So, could it be that those originating these concepts of salvation had found a way themselves, and thought that it perforce had to be the only way? Not entirely – Paul’s writings spawned the standard Lutheran/Evangelical model, and Paul himself clearly had a “bolt from the blue” conversion which doesn’t fit the model. I could, however, empathise with a Paul who was asked “how do I get an experience like yours” thinking “well, I suppose it could go like this…”.

So, it seems to me that there are a number of ways in which faith is, in fact, arrived at. Surely any theory of salvation should take all of those into account? None I’ve yet come across do that, though. You could tack a set of them together and say “well, all of these seem to work”, but their mechanisms are theoretically incompatible to a large extent.

I wonder, however, whether that matters. Faith, as opposed to belief, is first and foremost an emotional thing, a commitment of trust and obedience. Emotions do not have to be held on rational grounds (the conflicts I talk of between SR (scientific rationalist Chris) and EC (emotional Chris) bear witness to this, even if no psychological studies convince. Often, there seems no rationality in emotions at all. If, therefore, we talk of something which is largely or partly emotional, is it surprising that it appears to arise from a set of mechanisms which are contradictory? Augustine, after all, once wrote “credo quia absurdum” (“I believe because it’s impossible”).

Me, I don’t understand why the teenaged Chris suddenly had a zap, a peak spiritual experience. I don’t need a theory, though, I have the experience.

But a theory would be nice…

This morning I listened again to the curate reading from John (3:16) “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”.

I’m in the process, among other things, of catching up with Richard Beck’s outstanding “Experimental Theology” blog, which I discovered about three months ago. I’ve made it from the beginning up to mid 2011 so far, and one of the recurring themes is Universalism. Prof. Beck is an Universalist. He makes a very good case for Universalism, as you can see if you follow that link (and others with that tag – there are quite a few of them!). As a psychologist, he has also written about death anxiety being at the root of a great deal of Christian theology.

In conscience, I’m not really best targeted by the passage from John, as I have no fear of death at all. I have a very healthy fear of many of the means of getting from here to there, mind you! The reason lies partly in the content and nature of my original peak spiritual experience (which I’ll call the “zap”), but also in the thought that my consciousness goes offline every night (well, nearly every night now I’ve got reduced insomnia) and until I wake up, I could well die and never know about it. My late Uncle John passed away like that many years ago; fell asleep reading his morning newspaper and just never woke up. I’ve always thought that you couldn’t design a better way of leaving life, whether or not there is something beyond that.

There were, however, a few aspects of the zap which are pertinent. One was the dissolving of the boundary between “self” and “other”, a complete oneness with everything, animate and inanimate, near and far, human and divine. The sufi Baba Kuhi of Shiraz wrote about this kind of experience, saying “In the market, in the cloister, only God I saw; in the valley and on the mountain, only God I saw”. Meister Eckhart said “Thou shalt know him without image, without semblance and without means. – ‘But for me to know God thus, with nothing between, I must be all but he, he all but me’. – I say, God must be very I, I very God, so consummately one that this he and this I are one is, in this isness working one work eternally…” All things were God, in which I “lived and breathed and had my being” as someone else said, well before Teilhard de Chardin suggested the “Milieu Divin” ground of all being concept.

That boundary has never really returned in fullness (it was previously absolute); one effect of this was to become significantly empathic (the pre-zap Chris was NOT noted for empathy) which is a somewhat mixed blessing – yes, I can be far more responsive to the needs of others, but also I tend to soak up emotions from others and become too affected by them (which means that in order to function at all, I often have to wall off my emotions, which has a distinct downside). Another, though, is to see the Chris inhabiting this particular structure of bone and flesh as nothing like the whole extent of that-which-is-Chris; if this bit dies, the whole of that-which-is-Chris doesn’t (though I grant the continuity of consciousness is likely to be somewhat lacking!).

It is, incidentally, very difficult to have this kind of consciousness and not “love your neighbour as yourself”, or regard your neighbour as Jesus, aka God in disguise as is set out in Matthew 25:31-45 ending “Truly I say to you, as you did it not to the least of these, you did it not to me”. For they ARE you. And, indeed, they are more than you.

I may go away (indeed, I expect to) but God endures, and therefore I endure. Another aspect of the zap is the strong desire to conform myself to God, to become a part of God which is more in tune with the rest, less of a discordant note. I see echoes of that in the concept of the Church as the body of Christ, in which I occasionally say that I am the ingrowing toenail. I have aspirations to be less irritating than that! My best template for that is Jesus, who I inescapably regard as having had this consciousness (only more so, probably more so than anyone else who has lived); I seek to cultivate Christ-in-me, and as I do so that-which-is-Chris will diminish. I doubt the process will be anything like complete during my life!

An important aspect of the zap was the feeling that, if I could just let myself go a little more, the ecstasy of union with God could be complete – but that my “self” would in the process be extinguished; there would be nothing but God. The image of a moth in a candle flame came to me, but as an image of intense joy. The first time, that scared me, and as a result I pulled back, but I have pulled back less on subsequent occasions and think that I may soon be able to let go completely, if another zap of that intensity is granted me (I practice the presence of God as best I can, but it seems to me that the more intense zaps are given, not worked for). Baba Kuhi ends by saying “But when I looked with God’s eyes – only God I saw. I passed away into nothingness, I vanished, and lo, I was the All-living – only God I saw”. Eckhart writes “But he manifests as different and the soul is destined to know things as they are and conceive things as they are when, seized thereof, she plunges into the bottomless well of the divine nature and becomes so one with God that she herself would say that she is God” but also, speaking of the soul, “Wherefore God has left her one little point from which to get back to herself and find herself as creature. For it is of the very essence of the soul that she is powerless to plumb the depths of her creator”. Perhaps he is right, and the process will always stop just short of complete extinguishment of the self. But perhaps not, and that is an ecstatic end.

On one occasion several years ago, I was in serious fear of death, as someone far more physically powerful than me was pounding me. Yes, it hurt – but thinking I might die, a strange peace came over me as I looked forward to the ecstatic reunion with God which death would provide. Maybe that might reduce my fear of physical pain? Probably not, as generally I’m not expecting to die from it. As it happened, the disconnect of me smiling seraphically while this guy hit me was sufficient to make him stop and ask why I was doing it – I said “it’s only pain” and he walked away, confused.

I expect, therefore, that at my death, that which is other-than-God will be destroyed, that which is God will remain, cannot but remain. The Theologia Germanica says “Nothing burns in Hell save self-will, therefore it has been said ‘put off thy self-will and there will be no Hell’ “. I intend that there should be as little that is not God as possible at that time, but expect that the remainder will burn, be burned away, indeed. This is very akin to Dr. Beck’s concept of Hell as a purification prior to universal salvation.

So, am I an Universalist? I’m attracted by Dr. Beck’s thinking, and certainly I expect everyone regardless of their beliefs and actions to arrive at the same point. However, I am not so confident that all will survive the refiner’s fire of Hell (be it ever so brief). I have met people in whom any spark of the divine seems exceptionally weak; I can envisage that rather than submit to the fire of cleansing, a few may be able to elect to resist, and that they may remain in that condition forever, or even that in a very few, the spark of the divine may have been extinguished completely during their lifetime, and there remains nothing but self. Some of those I have met, for instance, have been sociopaths. I am not particularly optimistic for them.

And so I think I have to accept the Arminian view of salvation, which acknowledges God’s wish that we all be saved and our freedom to choose, but effectively denies that in this salvation God is omnipotent.

There is one final aspect of the zap which has a bearing, and that is that it appears to give a glimpse into eternity. That eternity is not, as most seem to think, a very VERY unimaginably long time, it is atemporal. The zap is a “timeless moment”, in which all that is and has been is as one (possibly all that will be as well, although I cannot confirm). As such, all that you have been and done and are during your life is present, and this can be an extremely painful situation, alleviated only by the knowledge of God’s love and acceptance (of the essence of you, not of your actions). Perhaps it is possible not to repent in a powerful zap, I don’t know; I certainly couldn’t have withstood it’s force.

In this atemporality, my life just represents a set of boundaries; once I did not exist, as I had not been born, in the future I will not exist (in one sense, at least) as I will be dead. All that is between those remains, atemporal, eternal. In this, there can be no annihilation, no unmaking of what has been. I have to an extent had one foot in this atemporality much of the last 45 years, as my cultivation of conscious contact with God, the practising of the Presence of God, has developed. Beside that, temporal limits appear irrelevant.

Timor mortis non conturbat me.

 

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.

Here’s a copy of a forum post to an old debating partner who expressed some doubt about the “spiritual” power and principalities having a material referent.

From Richard Beck’s “Experimental Theology” blog, here’s a quote from John Howard Yoder:-

Yoder describing Paul’s theology of the Powers:

[The powers are] religious structures (especially the religious undergirdings of stable ancient and primitive societies), intellectual structures (‘ologies and ‘isms), moral structures (codes and customs), political structures (the tyrant, the market, the school, the courts, race and nation). The totality is overwhelmingly broad. Nonetheless, even here with careful analysis we observe that it can be said of a these “structures” what the Apostle was saying concerning the powers:

(a) All these structures can be conceived of in their general essence as parts of a good creation. There could not be society or history, there could not be Man without the existence above him of religious, intellectual, moral and social structures. We cannot live without them. These structures are not and never have been a mere sum total of the individuals composing them. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. And this “more” is an invisible Power, even though we many not be used to speaking of it in personal or angelic terms.

(b) But these structures fail to serve man as they should. They do not enable him to live a genuinely free, human, loving life. They have absolutized themselves and they demand from the individual and society an unconditional loyalty. They harm and enslave man. We cannot live with them. Looking at the human situation from within, it is not possible to conceive how man once unconditionally subjected to these Powers can ever again become free.

(c) Man is lost in the world, in it structures, and in the current of its development. But nonetheless it is in this world that man has been preserved, that he has been able to be himself and thereby to await the redeeming work of God. His lostness and his survival are inseparable, both dependent upon the Powers.

Beck goes on to state that salvation then involves the redemption not merely of mankind, but of the Powers, i.e. the restoration of our structures of religion, intellect, morals and politics to serve mankind rather than be machines which are served by people (which is very much my experience of them).

Earlier in this series of posts, he also quoted Walter Wink saying (paraphrased) that modern man has extreme difficulty relating to “spiritual” Powers, disembodied spirits of some kind; Yoder says much the same thing, as does Karl Barth. As a result, we discount passages talking of “spiritual powers” as having no referent in the modern world.

You probably don’t do this, but a very substantial slice of my psychology is scientific rationalist, and I am definitely one of those who has almost insuperable difficulty thinking of “purely spiritual” powers as having any reality. Without this kind of thinking, the nearest I can come is to acknowledge that the belief in spiritual powers has an effect in human psychology for those who believe in them.

At that point, however, I note that my own experience has been that those who do have such a psychological effect have universally had a very negative effect, often verging on or crossing the line into paranoia about evil spiritual forces constantly assailing them. I do not think this is healthy, and have, for instance, been known to say “If the Devil existed, it would still be necessary to disbelieve in him”. However, the thinking of Barth, Yoder and Wink seems to me to give me some purchase on what might, after all, not be a completely useless or even poisonous way of thinking.

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.