Eyre Lines

I’ve had much the same kind of question asked of me a few times recently. In essence, it’s “Chris, you don’t believe in the supernatural, so how can you be a Christian?”

This tends to come up which someone puts to me that, in order to be a Christian, I have to believe that some supernatural event either took place or will take place (usually the first). It is, I’m sorry to say, completely beyond me to say honestly that I believe that any supernatural event actually happened. That said, I also can’t say honestly that I believe that any supernatural event didn’t or couldn’t happen. I am, strictly speaking, agnostic on the subject, though I have a powerful tendency against seeing supernatural causes for things.

This is because I am methodologically naturalistic. That’s a mouthful, but what it means is that where anything happens, I look for naturalistic explanations, explanations which rest on the operation of established scientific principles. Almost every Christian I know tends strongly to do the same; OK, I did hear a preacher recently who claimed to have tried to walk on water, buoyed up by God’s power (he failed, on his account), but very few people of my acquaintance would try this with even a remote expectation of success. Most think that the popular story of the man caught in a flood quite reasonably justifies methodological naturalism even if you believe that God just might intervene (and I agree).

Where I perhaps start parting company with some more conservative Christians is that where I cannot find a plausible naturalistic explanation for some event, I assume that there actually is some naturalistic explanation, it’s just that either I’m not clever enough to figure it out or there is some feature of reality which science hasn’t yet found an explanation for, but might in principle. The figures aren’t as much with me there as in the previous case, but I think probably a majority of the Christians I know take pretty much that view except when considering miracles in the Bible. They would, for instance, take exactly the same view as I do when considering an account drawn from Judaism other than in the Bible (say the story of the Oven of Akhnai), but still hold that Jesus actually multiplied the loaves and fishes.

Then  there’s the case of events for which there’s definitely a naturalistic explanation, but which seem to people to be coincidental beyond the bounds of expectation. There, a majority of the Christians I know tend to talk of God guiding events, and I reserve my position, because I know too much about human tendencies to detect patterns in the random (hyperactive agency detection) and other cognitive biases. I notice, for instance, that the same people who detect the hand of God where something good happens to them very often don’t detect the hand of God where something bad happens, though some I know tend to identify those as the work of Satan.

Actually, the concept that God is not an agent in the world is a lot more respectable than many of my questioners might think. Formal scholastic Catholic thinking, for instance, as well as being keen on Aquinas’ for proofs of (the existence of) God, also decided that “exist” was the wrong concept to use of God, as it argued that God was a part of creation rather than the creator. I happen to disagree with Aquinas’ five proofs and the Catholic insistence on God’s complete otherness, but they do represent theological orthodoxy on the point. How miracles could actually happen on this basis rather escapes me, however, as a completely separate God would seem to have no mechanism to effect miracles!

Going back to the question of naturalistic phenomena for which science does not as yet have a viable explanation, I’m open to possibilities. Indeed, back in my youth I spent a lot of time exploring such concepts as astrology, astral projection, telepathy and telekinesis – I was, after all, 15 in the year when the musical “Hair” proclaimed the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and the New Age movement was becoming popular, and having just had a peak mystical experience which scientific naturalism didn’t have any good description or explanation of. I was, however, looking for evidence that the phenomena occurred, and trying to develop naturalistic concepts of how they did (if they did).

The snag is, I ended up with the conclusion that none of these things actually works, at least not in any remotely reliable manner. Not, at any event, in any place other than the consciousness of the person who is trying to do things; there, some New Age concepts can definitely have profound effects. I say this with one caveat; there is, I think, a small possibility that some of these may operate if and only if all the people involved fervently believe that they will (this would mean that they would probably not operate if any sceptical observer were involved). I think this unlikely, given that an “all believer” audience will be prone to detect what they expect irrespective of whether it has in fact happened, but I cannot rule out the possibility.

That said, I have personally experienced what I interpret as God breaking down the resistance of a very sceptical individual with no belief in any such thing as the supernatural, let alone God, and providing a set of insights; this was what happened in my first peak mystical experience. I have also experienced (due to a large amount of experimentation in my younger days) the apparent fact that certain techniques can improve the likelihood of such peak experiences happening, including certain forms of prayer and meditation (which I recommend); so can things such as sleep deprivation and temporary anoxia, and certain drugs (which I do not recommend).

Was this a “supernatural” occurrence? I don’t know. I have gone over the circumstances of my first such experience in detail with doctors, psychologists and several ardent sceptics, and we cannot identify a cause from within any of those science has identified a mechanism for. I had done nothing to facilitate such an experience and didn’t desire one, having no conception that that was a possibility. No drugs were involved, I was neither sleep-deprived, anoxic or stressed and electromagnetic stimulation was easily ruled out. I was not epileptic or schizotypal (or any of the other potential neuropsychological candidates). That leaves us with either an as yet unidentified physical (or neurological) cause or supernatural intervention.

In passing, I can’t really do more experimentation, as all repetitions of the experience have followed a lot of work conditioning my mind and practising prayer and meditation, so might well result from that rather than from whatever the cause of the original experience was. I can say, however, that I have not found it possible to “force” a full-bodied repetition – those are few and far between and seem to be “out of the blue” as well. I think the evidence is that certain practices improve the likelihood, however, and therefore recommend prayer and meditation without any note of caution (and anything else with considerable caution).

Of course, if God is conceived of as fundamentally supernatural, it was clearly a supernatural experience. However, one feature of what was an extremely self-verifying experience was that God was radically immanent, i.e. all things were at the least permeated by God to the very smallest and very largest scales, and probably all things could be regarded as being part of God as all fixed boundaries appeared capable (at least) of dissolution; I was a part of this, and all other things were also parts of it. If that is a true insight, then God is in any event able in principle to act through everything that is, including (of course) the material, if one assumes that there is anything which is not material in and of itself.

I therefore, on balance, think that there was some mechanism the details of which are not clear to me (though one of my atheist friends said it must have been a “brain fart”). It is, of course, possible that this mechanism was God (whether supernatural or immanent) deciding to do this. Another facet of the experience was that God had at least some aspects of what I understand as being a person.

I think it reasonable to point out that most people who believe in a supernatural God also believe that God acts in rational ways, and develop theologies which, probably non-accidentally, have an objective of being able to predict what God will do in any particular circumstance. This, it seems to me, is almost imperceptibly different from me seeking to establish by what mechanism this occurred. We are all, in one sense, trying to psychoanalyse God. There are plenty of scriptures to indicate both that one shouldn’t do that and that it won’t work, including Isaiah 55:8, the whole of Ecclesiastes and the last portion of Job.

These, indeed, illustrate my problem; I do not know how anyone else can experience something akin to my peak experiences (and I would dearly like more people, and preferably all people, to be able to – these have been by far the best experiences of my life), and if this all does indicate a God who is acting as an agent and can break into the minds of humans at will, why does this not happen more often?

This does, however, leave me with the conclusion that God acts in the world, in all probability, only by influencing the minds of His creatures.

 

There is a nice piece at Unfundamentalist Christians about hell as “eternal conscious torment”. I agree with it, but I don’t think it goes far enough.

The idea of Hell (assuming that Hell is not a mere rhetorical device, or even, perhaps, a metaphor for what an eternity separated from God might feel like – which is something which I might, perhaps, contemplate to be a viable possibility if, firstly, our consciousness, once created, cannot under any circumstances ever be destroyed and, secondly, if God has renounced any coercion to force a change of mind on us, and allows us freely to elect not to turn to Him and, thirdly, if there is any possibility that, given eternity, any consciousness would not so turn) is one which has been orthodox in Christianity for most of its history.

Incidentally, I do not think that the first and third of the provisoes above are correct, although I am reasonably confident that the second is at least largely correct. I say “reasonably confident” and “largely correct” on the basis that my personal history indicates that God will occasionally give the consciousness of even the most recalcitrant (i.e. the 14 years old evangelical atheist Chris) a good kicking to persuade it differently, but does not appear to have got round to doing the same to (for example) Richard Dawkins.

Let’s leave reformed theology on one side for a moment – given its insistence that God determines absolutely who is going to be saved and who damned without any reference to character, circumstances or effort, and therefore just creates humans destined for Hell – and concentrate on the rest of Christianity.

St. Thomas Aquinas wrote: “In order that nothing may be wanting to the felicity of the blessed spirits in heaven, a perfect view is granted to them of the tortures of the damned.“ This, at least, is frequently quoted; I cannot as yet find an accurate reference to it in the Summa, however. Thomas was, no doubt, thinking of the parable of Dives and Lazarus, which, taken literally and aside the real point of the parable (which is that some cannot be convinced by whatever evidence you  can conceive of), indicates that the saved in Heaven can see the damned in Hell. 

And that would make Heaven into eternal conscious torment for anyone who had lived their life trying to follow Jesus’ second Great Commandment, that you love your neighbour as yourself. He even went on to point out in the version recorded by Luke, using the parable of the Good Samaritan, that “neighbour” meant anyone, even your traditional enemy. Maybe not physical torment, but certainly mental.

I wonder how St. Thomas could have managed to ignore this absolutely basic tenet of his faith. Could he, I ask, have been basically a sociopath, setting out the rules by which things worked and pointing out that by following these, you would end up in a good place, irrespective of any human feeling (which sociopaths do not experience)? In the system described by him, indeed, success would go to the rational sociopaths – and that makes it look like a system of corporatist free market capitalism to me rather than the radically inclusionary kingdom of God preached by Jesus – and I have been known to describe corporatist free market capitalism as a Satanic system.

Could it have been that Thomas’ famed rationality had taken over to the point at which mere human feeling was far from him? If so, this is not the spirituality of Christianity, it is the spirituality of the Eastern traditions in which freedom from attachment is the highest aspiration, and freedom from attachment does, of course, mean an end to compassion. I will grant that the mystical ways of the East do have a tendency to produce this withdrawal from humanity in service of uninterrupted ecstatic contemplation of union with God. That has, in a way, been dangled before me as a possibility; I do not consider it one to be aspired to unless the rest of humanity can join me there, and that is a long way off, but perhaps Thomas was a mystic and was seduced by that promise himself. I don’t know. I prefer not to think of one of the greatest theologians of all time as a potential sociopath, or even someone prepared in the final instance to abandon his fellow men to agony, but that seems to be where the evidence leads.

Also, of course, the God whose fulness dwelt in Jesus, of whom Jesus was the most perfect expression, could not, would not, set up a system in which those favoured by him could be those who would look upon even the most evil of their fellows and relish their torment endlessly, without any hope of either annihilation or and eventual purgation and return to Him. If that is indeed the system which has been set up, the one responsible for it must be Satan rather than God, and I want nothing to do with him or his works.

The inimitable Robert Sapolsky, in his younger days, gave a lecture on the biological underpinnings of religiosity. It’s fascinating for many reasons, but watch it at your peril, as it may seem to explain away your own spiritual experience in terms of neurobiology. Thus I feel impelled to comment immediately that just because neurobiology finds that certain psychological conditions which are commonly understood as abnormal tend to produce experiences which have typically been understood as spiritual does not necessarily invalidate them. This kind of argument is, indeed, one of those which Richard Beck seeks to correct in his book “The Authenticity of Faith”, which I strongly recommend to anyone who has a problem with this, or indeed with the outlooks of any of the “Masters of Suspicion”, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. All three of them had explanations of religion, which reduced it to something which could be regarded as an aberration; Beck shows, I think, that although all three might have some measure of truth in their views, they do not offer an adequate explanation of faith. Sapolsky brings the Freudian critique up to date…

One of the fascinating aspects is Sapolsky’s presentation of the case study of a young monk called Luder, who exhibits all of the symptoms of a fairly crippling degree of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He then remarks that this monk is more commonly known as Martin Luther. He does not, however, go on to comment much about Luther’s contributions to theology; however, it becomes immediately clear to any student of post-Luther theology that his concepts of personal inability to avoid sinning and of the natural state of man as being “incurvatus in se” (obsessively self-analysing) are exactly symptoms of OCD. Inability to avoid sinning links directly to the typical OCD conviction that one can never manage to wash enough to be thoroughly clean; I saw this at close quarters in my late mother-in-law, whose OCD was not particularly severe, but who would feel obliged to wash her hands ten or fifteen times where most of us would wash once, and in the process actually scrubbed off skin from time to time.

Now, I do not suffer from OCD. I have also not tended to find any real difficulty in following sets of rules, particularly given the fact that I don’t suffer from an obsessive tendency to reinspect what I’ve been doing and find it not good enough; OK, yes, I have some measure of that, but trained myself many years ago not to obsess about it, as that way leads to never getting anything done (I’ve blogged before about the perils of taking “Be perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect” literally…). I also haven’t since childhood suffered from a compulsion to test the boundaries of rules and regard something forbidden as therefore irresistibly attractive; I acquired a really rather strong impulse control by the time I was in my early teens, as did probably the majority of my acquaintances.

So when Luther, and Calvin on the back of his thinking, suggest that we cannot ever by our own efforts live in a way acceptable to God, I fail to understand them. Sapolsky has here opened my eyes to the fact that this line of thinking may well be just the result of a personal psychological quirk of Luther’s, which these days would be labelled as a personality disorder. I might suspect, although I have no clear evidence of it, that Calvin was afflicted to some extent by the same problem.

However, what about Paul? Luther based his thinking on Paul’s tortured reflections that he could not do good, even where he wished to; he would still find himself doing something bad. Now, there’s no real evidence that Paul suffered from OCD either, although I have always wondered what Paul’s thorn in the flesh might have been. There, Sapolsky’s lecture offers a couple of other possibilities – Paul’s account of his conversion experience could well have been an episode of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, or could have been a vision associated with a Schizotypal Personality Disorder. We can’t know for certain, but the mere fact that most adults I know don’t have significant problems in obeying sets of rules makes me think that Paul’s thinking was not what we’d now describe as normal (and no Orthodox Jews I know have problems following all of the 613 commandments which Judaism finds in the Torah, in contradistinction from Paul – indeed, they applaud the efforts of the Rabbis to make these even more restrictive).

I think it’s well worth bringing in another theological giant here, in the form of St. Augustine. Reading his “Confessions”, I could very readily find someone suffering from sex addiction (“Lord, make me chaste, but not yet”), in addition to a distinct tendency to the Obsessive Compulsive. I ask myself if the whole history of the Church’s doctrine of original sin and it’s attitude to women has been based on one or more personality disorders suffered by it’s greatest theologian between Paul and Luther.

“Hold on a moment”, I might hear the reader ask, “haven’t you started with a caveat that just because an abnormal condition may have produced an experience doesn’t invalidate that experience, so why are you now saying that there’s a problem where abnormal conditions seem to have produced particular theologies?”. An understandable comment, so I need to distinguish between two different types of result we are seeing here. In the case of the “nobody can do good” and “everyone is obsessed with sex to the exclusion of any spiritual life” positions, these theologians are creating an anthropology out of their own experience; they are assuming that everyone is like they are, and that just isn’t the case.

In the case of visions which may be the product of TLE or Schizotypalism, there is no assumption that everyone else has the same visions, it is the content of the vision which the seer puts forward as containing a truth. That, incidentally, is seer as “the person who sees”, without any connotation of the content of the vision being validated, though typically visions in both cases have a strong component of self-validation to them.

As, indeed, do mystical experiences, and I would not be self-identifying as a panentheistic mystic Christian and writing this blog if I hadn’t had a set of self-validating mystical experiences. This leads to the obvious question “Were these the product of TLE or Schizotypalism?”. That is a question I asked myself shortly after the first such experience I had, which was an extremely rude shock for someone who was at the time a scientific-materialist evangelical atheist very much in the Dawkins mould (although this occurred before Dawkins had written anything much more than, perhaps, an undergraduate paper or two).

It was not TLE, as confirmed by my then doctor, to whom I expressed some worries (that visit also eliminated any environmental factors including drugs, exhaustion, pain and hypoxia as possible contributors – it was fairly thorough!). I was also not then suffering from any diagnosable Schizotypalism, nor have I since been diagnosed as such.

That said, I have scored fairly highly on Schizotypal in a self-test of “What personality disorder do you suffer from?” a little over 15 years ago, though in fairness it has proved in hindsight that I was at the time suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Chronic Depression and Chronic Anxiety, and possibly as a result of those (which the test didn’t disclose) I also tested fairly highly on every other personality disorder the test dealt with, with the exception of narcissism (on which I tested very low indeed). I do sort of fit Sapolsky’s criteria of loose associations (I love wordplay and odd associations) and social withdrawal (this may just be being an introvert) but I really don’t do metamagical thinking. I don’t tend to believe in strange things (in fact, some would argue that I don’t tend to believe in anything much at all, and I’d have some sympathy with that); out of Sapolsky’s selection of metamagical traits, OK, I like SF and fantasy, though I don’t take it immensely seriously, I don’t have much time for any New Age stuff and I don’t believe in UFOs, though I hold onto a gentle wish that telepathy worked (It would make some other theories I toy with much easier to deal with!) but finally, and most stridently, I really do not tend to concrete interpretations (i.e. fundamentalism) at all. So OK, I may be just a little bit of a shaman, but not really very much of one by Sapolsky’s set of signs.

Not, at least, if you look at the integral Chris. If I split myself down into the SR (scientific rationalist) and EC (emotional Chris) bits (see my “About” page), EC would be a lot more along the lines Sapolsky paints as schizotypal. EC does tend to black and white thinking, for instance, and has a lot more time for “strange things” than SR – my generally agnostic position on these represents a compromise between SR and EC. There is the distinct possibility that I have shoehorned into my brain a borderline schizotypal and a more or less passionless rationalist, who have worked out a modus vivendi. In passing, had I not had several years of extreme depression and anxiety, I would probably never have self-examined (or perhaps been able to self-examine) sufficiently to realise this – another instance of finding, in retrospect, some reason why those years were not entirely “ruined time”.

The question I eventually asked myself, both in the beginning and after that realisation, was “does it really matter?”. Karen Armstrong has written at some length about her own experiences in “Through the Narrow Gate” and “The Spiral Staircase”; she suffered from TLE, which gave her some extremely strong unitive mystical experiences similar in many ways to my own, but which she has continued to base her faith on. I do likewise. I can still entertain the possibility that my peak spiritual experiences may be the product of abnormal psychology (they certainly seem to be the products of unusual psychology, because relatively few people seem to have such powerful experiences of this kind), but they nonetheless  carried with them this colossal self-verification, somewhere within which is faith.

I entertain the possibility that the following analogy might hold good; I have a friend who, when he was younger and his eyesight better, could see the convergence of the Balmer series of the Hydrogen spectrum. This lies just outside the normal visible range, in the ultraviolet (those with normal vision can see the lines becoming progressively closer, but not the point where they merge and stop). His eyes were, clearly, abnormal – but this meant that he could see something real which was denied to the rest of us. On the other hand, a reader could well dismiss anything I report about spiritual experiences in the kind of terms an old atheist friend (a psychology professor) did after interrogating me to find what the trigger for the experience was, and finding nothing; he said it was a “brain fart”. Bless him!

Going back to the anthropological assumptions of Paul, Augustine and Luther, it is unfortunate that these have given us between them (with some assistance from a couple of mediaeval theologians) the penal substitutionary theory of atonement, which is very dominant in Protestant thinking and has significant traction in Catholic; a significant number of Christians I know would say that this IS the story of salvation, and that that IS the gospel. I reject both suggestions on a number of grounds, but the one I present here is that the whole theory assumes an incorrect picture of human anthropology. By and large, we are quite capable of following a set of rules; this is, I think, a considerable consolation to many conservative Christians, who seem to have reduced following Jesus back to following a set of rules.

What we are not capable of, of course, is loving our neighbour as ourselves (which, in the spirit of affirmative action, really means loving our neighbours rather more than ourselves); we are not capable of doing that after our conversion experiences any more than we were before them, though we may well come a lot closer – and some of us manage to come very close indeed, as witness the “Little Way” of Therese of Lisieux. Incidentally, a brief look at her biography strongly suggests that she also suffered from OCD in some measure.

Some of us, I reluctantly conceded, may also not be capable of having, say, an intense peak unitive mystical experience; it may be that that is reserved for those with TLE or Schizotypalism in some measure. Some may not be capable of the kind of conversion experience which seems, in evangelical circles, to be thought of as the one and only way to become a Christian. I have certainly known quite a few people who would have loved to have such a conversion experience, and who put themselves in a position to have one as nearly as they could time after time, only to be disappointed, and I rather suspect that those who have first had a peak unitive experience are among them. Does it invalidate their experiences if some of us cannot share those?

I would hope that we do not think so; I would hope that instead, we can listen to the testimony of those who have had experiences we cannot share ourselves, and can take from that as much as we are able to. That’ of course, includes those eminent theologians who have been suffering from OCD or some other psychological “disorder”.

I have, however, pointed out one thing in previous criticisms of Penal Substitutionary Atonement, and that is that there are some people, commonly people who have had particularly awful life experience, for whom no other concept of salvation seems to have any traction. I cannot find any comfort, any salvation, any link to God in this theology – but there are those for whom it is the only theology which can bring those things.

For them, I say, this is a valid way for you. Do not ask that it be a valid way for me. For me, mystical unitive experience is the valid way; I do not demand that it be the only way for you.

 

I was reading an article by Andrew Robinson about Thomas Aquinas seen through the eyes of modern Continental philosophy, and came across this statement:-

“The difficulty is that humans can’t have direct sensory access to God, or see from God’s point of view. How, then, is it possible to make claims like “God is good” or “God is wise”?”

It struck me immediately that this argues a transcendent-only God, not surprisingly as this is overwhelmingly the “God of the philosophers”, including Aquinas. The article goes on to say:-

“So why is this interesting for radical thought? Of course, this question is still important for Christian anarchists, liberation theologians, Jewish and Muslim anarchists, who are radicals and also monotheists. At first, this discussion might not seem very relevant to people with a secular disposition (atheists, humanists etc), or to pantheists, but it is also relevant to the question of how to talk about other kinds of things we don’t understand very well or cannot access directly. In contemporary poststructuralism, notably in the work of Derrida, Levinas and Spivak, the question of the unknowability of God is closely connected to the unknowability of earthly others.”

Note the exclusion of pantheists. I’m a panentheist, which is the uncomfortable position between the pantheist who sees in immanence-only terms and the transcendentalist who sees only God-as-wholly other. I suspect that Mr. Robinson has rightly seen that the pantheist (and panentheist) would say that they experience some things (notably God) apparently unmediated; I would certainly say that of some of my spiritual experiences if not all. However, the point is good – one cannot float around in a mystic haze all the time, as that tends to lead to bumping into lamp posts and dying of hunger…

In one of those coincidences which enliven the life of faith so much, we were talking about transcendence -v- immanence last Thursday night at our small group. The occasion was discussion of the second meditation from Jane Williams in book 5 session 2 of the Pilgrim Course (audio available online) in which she says:-

“If God were not Trinity, how could we know about God? We could learn about God through the creation but that means that knowledge of God would only come to us through what is not God. Alternatively, our knowledge of God could, somehow, be imposed directly by God, bypassing human cooperation. But the Trinitarian God is able to hold together transcendence and immanence because this God is already outpouring and returning relationship, in God’s very being”.

I wasn’t the only person for whom this made little or no sense. Knowledge of God always comes to us through what is not God, just as knowledge of everything comes through sense-impressions which are never the things-in-themselves. Arguably there is an exception if there is some form of direct revelation. But, of course, we assume direct revelation in the concept of the inspiration of scripture and pray for it ourselves when we ask for God’s wisdom and guidance.

We do not feel drawn to say that everything we come to know in the outside world is therefore Trinity, because otherwise we could not know it – my computer, for instance, is obviously much more than three, being possessed by Legion (it let me down printing yesterday and has crashed once during the writing of this post so far, so please forgive the anthropomorphic vitriol…). No, in fact it’s for these purposes one, albeit an unity composed of very many parts.

It seems to me that Ms. Williams fails to take account adequately of the experience of the immanence of God, whereas in a sense Mr. Robinson does at least mention an avenue in that direction (the pantheist). Is this surprising? I don’t think so – in discussion, some indicated that they didn’t really relate to the immanent God at all, and I think most related better to the transcendent God. In a less committed and less Charismatic-leaning group, I would have expected most if not all not to relate to the immanence of God at all.

This is not a new experience for me; I have regularly found myself talking with transcendence-only people over the years, and have not infrequently come over as an immanence-only person myself (For many years I used, irritatingly, to say that I didn’t need to believe in God because I experienced God). It is, of course, possible for philosophers to deduce the existence of a God (Aquinas is famous for it!), although I have never been very convinced of their lines of reasoning. The thing is, they always seem to end up with a transcendent God; the immanent God is, it seems, only accessible to direct experience.

Direct experience can also tell us that God is transcendent – but that is as far as experience can go, because transcendence is, I think, intrinsically impossible for the human consciousness to grasp. Human consciousness can become open to transcendence, but if my own experience is anything to go by, such occasions are fleeting because the mind recoils before the immensity of that which it cannot contain.

Immanence, however, is a different matter. Immanence collapses the transcendent into the real, the material (insofar as these are actually knowable, considering the general problem outlined above, they are far more readily knowable than the transcendent). It is, I think, what Jesus does in the Great Commandments; love of God has no practical form (there’s worship, but it’s hard to see that that is any benefit to God when conceived of as purely transcendent) but love of neighbour is how we can express that love in a practical way. It is, again arguably, what God does in Jesus; the incarnation shows God via the person, life and sayings of a real person, which allows Whitehead to say “God has to be at least as nice as Jesus”.

Of course, there is at root a philosophical problem, that of how the transcendent can be known at all. A more conventional approach to this in Christianity than Ms. Williams appears to be pursuing is to take Jesus/Christ (and I use the / to advert to the man/god duality of Christ which is orthodox Christianity) as the one and only possible mediator, being the intersection of the transcendent-only (in this conception) God with the immanent-only (in this conception) humanity. This agrees, for instance, with John 1:18, Col. 1:15 and in a different sense with the general argument of Hebrews, where Christ becomes in heaven a priestly figure of mediation. I will come back to this. I don’t actually think Ms. Williams is correct in saying that you need a concept of trinity in order to express this; incarnation by itself, it seems to me, does the job more clearly.

In a further coincidence later (much later, i.e. 2 in the morning) I found myself involved in an online exposition and some discussion through a Homebrewed Christianity course of Frank Tupper’s essay “The Self-Limitation of God”. (You may need to subscribe in order actually to read it, unfortunately). As you might gather from the title, Tupper puts forward a concept of God as creator having limited himself in order to allow human freedom and, indeed, the freedom of the rest of creation. Tupper is trying to address two problems there, the first being of theodicy (or, how an omnipotent and omniscient God can allow evil and suffering), the second being the manifest lack of interventionary action of God in the world as we observe it. This is in principle attractive to me, as someone who has major difficulty with supernatural interventions of any kind, being methodologically if not philosophically a naturalist (i.e. I expect to find natural answers to anything which I observe).

However, Tupper also wishes to be dogmatic about Jesus being “the definitive self-revelation of God”, and thus thinks that he needs Jesus to be  unique as a demonstration of this, i.e. the incarnation is a one-off event (which is close to the orthodox viewpoint of bridging the transdent-immanent gap). This has to be supernatural in Tupper’s framework, as it is an intrusion of God into the area of God’s previous self-limitation.

I agree with Tupper that God has to be limited, and self-limitation has to be the answer to preserving God’s axiomatic ultimacy and unity (any alternative would argue dualism, i.e. a real and preexistent contrary, therefore evil, force), but as I outline in “Rather different answers in Genesis”,  I see the creation as being a near-complete self-investment of God in creation, such that it would be contrary to God’s creative purpose to exert supernatural power on material things which God has formed out of his own essence (granted, Genesis only says “in his likeness”, though the word used could be interpreted as “substance”). This amply explains how God is immanent – all that is, is God, or at least is a part of that-which-is-God. My use of “near complete” rather than “complete” indicates that I am a panentheist rather than a pantheist; my experience tells me there is radically more of God than is invested in the material world (or cosmos). I see immanence and transcendence, in other words.

Or, at least, I see the inadequacy of my ability to grasp the fullness of that-which-is-God. Despite the temptation, I cannot state from this that anything about God is actually infinite, as I am (as finite) axiomatically unable to grasp fully anything which is infinite. I have, indeed, played with the idea that all infinities are no more than mathematical constructs, without any referent in reality. Unfortunately, the concept is so useful in Mathematics that the formulation of a new Mathematics (and therefore a new Physics) avoiding the concept seems impossible… at least so far.

I am unconvinced that any of the Biblical writers can say more than this, for the same reason. As a result, I do not actually need a conception like Tupper’s to argue that omnipotence and omniscience (at least in the sense of knowledge of future as well as past events) are likely to be flawed concepts; the limitation of those receiving inspiration on the subject means that even if those were truly characteristics of God, it would be beyond their ability to state. Omnipresence (which Tupper wishes to retain) is a different matter, as it merely requires that God be everywhere there is a somewhere to be.

That said, my quibbles about infinite attributes do not answer the problem of theodicy, which Tupper’s concept, and my own (of effectively universal incarnation, kenosis and self-investment), both do, at least to some extent. I set these against the alternative kenotic concept used by Hans Urs von Balthasar, who says:- “It was essential that Christ, in his Incarnation, should bring the fullness of heaven to earth . . . . Otherwise the contemplation of God would only have been possible in the forms of negative apophatic mysticism, which seeks to encounter God beyond all that is of the world, as the Wholly Other, who can be neither conceived, nor beheld, nor comprehended. Such a view, inevitably, does a great injustice to the world and our fellow creatures”. (Balthasar, “Prayer”, 1986). Balthasar (in common with quite a few other modern conservative theologians) solves the problem of theodicy by positing a self-withdrawal of God in order to allow room for creation to have free will, but this is at the expense of immanence, as clearly God’s ongoing immanence offers an immediate (and non-apophatic) route to contemplation of God, in accordance, indeed, with Psalm 19:1.

There can only be radical immanence, it seems to me, if the kenosis of God in creation is accompanied by near-complete self-investment, just as we see in the incarnation in Jesus a self-investment. For me, therefore, the uniqueness of the incarnation is not in the fact that in Jesus God is uniquely present in creation, but in the fact that this was recognised, and recognised both due to the unusual degree in which Jesus was conscious of God’s self-investment in him, to Jesus’ willingness to subordinate his will to that of God as a whole and to the particularity of Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection to his disciples.

Jesus therefore exemplifies the human, being the “second Adam” as Paul sees him in 1. Cor. 15:45; the imitation of Christ is to seek to draw closer to his unique features, and as St. Athanasius put it “God became man in order that man might become God”. Christ is the template, the type and, indeed, “the way, the truth and the life”.

A couple of weeks ago, my church had a sermon and a small group session revolving round humility. I have a problem with humility (and no, that isn’t the set up for a joke like “When you’re this near perfect, it’s hard to be humble” or “Humility is my greatest virtue”). I have a particular problem being humble about things I have faith in.

It seems to me that the church generally has a lot of difficulty with this too. My link is to an article which criticises fundamentalists for too rigid an attitude and for being unwilling to consider even for a moment that they are wrong, but liberals and progressives are also guilty of this – the “Malleus Progressivorum” series on Unsettled Christianity starts with a complaint that progressives in that church aren’t prepared to consider other points of view, and much as I dislike the current move by eight “Biblical” churches in Fountain Hills to criticise the one church in town which is progressive, a close reading of the background does show that a conservative, literalist viewpoint is one which would probably feel excluded at the Fountains UMC.

And I write that despite wanting to say “And the UMC are absolutely right there, and the eight conservative churches should be excoriated”. Because liberal and progressive are so much closer to my own beliefs than is any form of biblical literalism. More “my tribe”.

My ultimate reason for wanting to criticise, though, is the thesis they are putting forward that progressive Christianity is wrong, something which you cannot espouse and still be a Christian (with “saved” and “not destined for the everlasting bonfire” close behind in the case of the conservatives). I try very hard to consider that there can be other ways of thinking about things – in fact, my last blog post considered a theological point of view which my experience tells me forcibly is wrong (namely that God might be depressed); it’s a thought experiment, suspending disbelief for a while in order to explore a set of concepts.

Note here that while I said “faith” to start off with, I’m now using the term “belief”. That’s important. To me, faith is largely an emotional commitment (involving, for example, love and trust) which has relatively little to do with logical argument; belief is something which I arrive at by considering things rationally and deciding what, on balance, I think is most likely to be the position. I try to hold my beliefs lightly (hence thought experiments involving another set of beliefs) and, as I’m a scientist by training, my root position is that any belief I have can be challenged by contrary evidence, and that what I believe for the time being should be whatever is, on my rational estimation, the most likely concept to coincide with what a situation really is. This is, of course, why I have difficulty with any belief system which starts out by saying that I need to believe in supernatural events.

That said, an insistence that I believe in the supernatural is merely an insult to my rationality, and does not affect my faith. I can, for the sake of argument, adopt the position that supernatural events may occasionally occur – and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest that someone else feels that, for them, it is essential that they do. I am interested in why they may feel that way, and open to thinking, at least for a while, as if that position were correct. I like to think that, were I to be provided with some very good reasons for doing so, I might change my mind about the absence of supernatural factors in the world. In addition, when treated as a way of talking about things rather than a statement of truth, I’m fairly happy to talk supernaturalist – let’s face it, I sometimes talk about my computer as if (in animistic fashion) it had consciousness of its own (a mischievous and malevolent one, on the whole). It may even be that some part of my subconscious actually believes that it has – but, it seems, that doesn’t apply to supernatural causes more generally.

I have not always been so epistemically humble. The 9 year old Chris who had worked out to his satisfaction that there were no supernatural entities and that scripture was on the same level as fables by Hans Christian Andersen (and somewhat less entertaining) was keen to share this indupitable truth with all and sundry, and to persuade them of the true state of affairs. Had he not, at 15, had a peak mystical experience which failed utterly to fit within a scientific-rationalist-materialist-reductionist framework, he might well have gone on to produce an adult in the mould of (say) Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.

That, however, was largely just intellectual arrogance; it went to belief but not really to faith. If there was faith there, it was unfounded faith in my own powers of reasoning.

Then came the “zap” which changed everything, and for those who have not had a peak mystical experience or some other religious experience of similar intensity, these come with a massive quantity of self-verification. Not only do you suddenly see the world in a radically different way, but you are automatically convinced of the rightness of that experience. Incidentally, I include “some other religious experience of similar intensity” not because I have ever experienced such, but because I now hold open the possibility that (for instance) the ecstatic group-based experience may have similar force and validity. I have in the past tried quite hard to find a way to various alternative expressions of peak religious experience, but have failed; I now suspect that this is a function in part of my own psychology (I am seriously introverted and have a tendency to social anxiety) and of the fact that the original experience has created or accentuated extremely well-defined mental pathways which are now my default.

As a result, for many years I was inclined to say, when pushed, that I didn’t need to “believe in” God or “have faith in” God, because I experienced God. I might have said (and probably did on occasion) that in the same way I didn’t need to believe in air, or have faith in it, because I breathed it and knew it to exist. This self-verification tends to extend to parts of my interpretation of the experience, and for many years I would have said that these were equally self-verified by the experience itself. For instance, once I found a description of this type of experience as being of a panentheistic God, it was immediately clear to me with massive force that that was the way God is. When I read passages by (for instance) Baba Kuhi of Shiraz or Meister Eckhart, or from the Oxyrhyncus papyrii (part of the Gospel of Thomas) it was immediately clear to me (with massive force) that they were talking of the same kind of root experience.

There is a potential problem there. Although in my memory the descriptions have referred themselves back to the experience, I can recall that my initial reaction was that while something massively significant and full of meaning had happened, I lacked language to express it. I have to enquire whether, had I found some other descriptive language, whether I would have seized on that instead.

I can therefore now entertain the possibility that some of what I feel  is certain due to these experiences is stretching beyond what was actually self-verified in them, although it certainly feels to me as if it was, and continues to feel that way despite a substantial amount of self-interrogation. You will not, for instance, now find me saying in response to “Why do you think that?” the blunt “Because that’s how God tells me it is”. Apart from anything else, I have found that that is a complete conversation-stopper (which, actually, was one of the attractions – I have in the past shut up more than one doorstep evangelist that way). I might like to hear the same reticence from some who feel that “this is what the Holy Spirit inspires me to say”, which I anticipate may have something of the same force for them. I recognise the look in their eyes, but wonder if they may have stretched beyond what is basic to the experience.

Let’s face it, this was an issue which confronted Paul at an early stage in his ministry. In 1 Thess. 5:19-21 he talks about prophecy, and warns “Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good.” Thus, I will always try to find confirmation elsewhere, in scripture or in the writings of mystics or other thinkers, of anything which arrives with me with this self-verifying force, and in general if I’m trying to convince someone of the reasonableness of my position, it will be by quoting these sources.

But that isn’t necessarily how I reached the conclusion… and there’s the rub. I may be acting humbly but not feeling humble. However, as the only way I know to adjust my feelings is to use the “Act as If” principle, I think this is as good as I can get at the moment. Scientific Rationalist Chris can do humility these days (it was not always so), but Emotional Chris lags behind.

I couldn’t resist the title of “In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being” by Clayton & Peacock, not least because it had a title I wanted for my own writing, once I’ve dragooned that into something book shaped, rather than oversized blog posts. “Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World” looked good as well.

It didn’t disappoint, save for a couple of niggles, one of them admittedly a fairly big niggle. It’s a book for the student rather than the general reader, it seems to me, but is at the accessible end of that spectrum. It contains a set of essays by various extremely qualified authors, setting out a variety of views of how panentheism can be combined with a varyingly orthodox Christianity and in some cases with some features of modern science, in particular emergence theory; there are sections from an Eastern Orthodox point of view and from a more Western one, showing that the Orthodox tradition has far less trouble with panentheism than do the Western (Catholic and Protestant) streams of thought. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

My smaller niggle came from the piece by Celia E. Deane-Drummond, linking panentheism to the Wisdom tradition (and in particular the creation account in Proverbs 8:22-31). She rightly links this with the language of the preamble to the Fourth Gospel, equating Wisdom (Sophia) with Word (Logos) but fails to advert to what I consider the glaringly obvious connection between the two in the work of Philo of Alexandria, who so far as I can see made this leap sometime in the first 40 years of the first century, i.e. before any of the texts of the New Testament were written, even taking the earliest fancied dates of conservative scholars. Instead, she quotes a number of scholars who also do not seem to have made this connection. I would love to be able to point to a popular level discussion of Philo’s work, but I do not know of one.

My larger niggle is that nowhere in the book is a link made with mysticism, and indeed Philip Clayton expresses concern in his overview which ends the book that the use of panentheistic concepts should be grounded solidly in the believable rather than being understood as a philosophical flight of fancy (his own words are rather less florid). What he did not say was that panentheistic expressions flow extremely frequently from the particular mode of spiritual experience called “mysticism”. It is, in that context, not surprising that the Orthodox tradition is easier to harmonise with panentheism, as a substantial number of the major Eastern theologians are also identifiably mystics, including both St. Gregory Palamas and St. Maximus the Confessor, both of whom are discussed at length in the book.

Indeed, it is my contention, following Happold, that the mystical experience is of a fundamentally panentheistic nature, even if it does not always result in clearly panentheistic statements from the mystics. On this point, the discussions in “In Whom We Live…” around the issue of harmonising panentheism with the Western tradition are extremely instructive; the West took, early on, a number of theological positions which are fundamentally at odds with a panentheistic experience of God, notably stressing divine omnipotence and omniscience, transcendence at the expense of immanence, divine impassibility (i.e. God is not changed or even moved by occurrences in the world) and a spirit-matter dualism of an extremely strong nature.

All of these flow from a philosophical treatment of the concept of God largely drawn from the pre-Christian Greek philosophers. Now, I do not even think that the God-concept of the philosophers is truly harmonisable with the God described in the Hebrew scriptures, and I have my doubts about the God-concept described in much of the New Testament being truly in line with the God of the philosophers as well. If it is also not harmonisable with the actual experience of God granted by mystical experience, then I suggest that the philosophers have got it wrong, and have produced exactly the philosophical flight of fancy which I referred to earlier.

I appreciate that the mystical experience is a minority one among Christians (I think this is a pity, but the only reasonably tried and tested praxis available within the Christian tradition proper is ascetic contemplation taking rather a lot of time, absent a “bolt from the blue”, and few these days seem disposed to put in the hours and endure the discomfort of doing this – and I can hardly blame them, given that even then a majority seem never to achieve anything like a peak experience). However, it is well documented, and occurs throughout the history of the religion, including in Happold’s view SS. John and Paul and, if the Gospel of Thomas is thought authentic, Jesus himself. Needless to say, I agree with Happold on this.

I have something of a beef with theologians who ignore the characteristics of the mystic’s experience of God (particularly as it can be plausibly ascribed to the three most important voices in the formation of Christianity), but doubly so when those theologians are discussing a concept of God which flows so naturally from it.

In my last post about Homebrewed’s Paul course, I complained a bit about feeling targeted by remarks about liberals and progressives. Another session, and I’m not feeling less targeted – and it’s going to get worse as we move onto Badiou’s snarky remarks about Pascal’s mysticism. Let’s face it, I’m a mystic as well. I do note that F.C. Happold identifies Paul as a mystic, with the assumption that mysticism founded Paul’s career, so sidelining that aspect may be a mistake.

Time for some pushback, I think. I started this book (Paul, the Foundation of Universalism) with some expectations – Badiou is, after all, a French public intellectual. What I therefore expected was an Atheist Marxist who tried hard to come up with some provocative remarks, dressed in a stack of obscure language  – and Badiou manages to be boringly conformist to this stereotype despite being somewhat dismissive of postmodern situatedness. His “provocative remark” is to centre his fantasy on a theme of Paul on the Resurrection, which is clearly an entirely unacceptable idea to an Atheist Marxist, particularly a French one (as Atheism is pretty close to being the state religion of France – they haven’t got over elevating reason to the status of goddess in 1792, a fairly short lived experiment but one which has coloured all French republics since then).

Sadly, Badiou goes to some lengths to stress that it’s an unacceptable idea, even a “lie”. Paul, however, almost certainly believed implicitly in the resurrection (I reference the first talk), and I do not hear from Badiou any clever argument like Pete Rollins’ in “The Divine Magician” (where it is crucial that the thing wished for does not in fact exist) nor “I know that it didn’t happen like this, but I know this story is true” to adjust the standard opening of some native storytellers.

I say “fantasy on a theme of Paul” as in truth it bears as much resemblance to an analysis of what Paul actually said as do the Christian theologians who Niezsche’s complained about in Taubes book, finding the cross in every mention of wood in the Hebrew Scriptures.

For one thing, Badiou concentrates on the resurrection. However, what is clearly for Paul a “scandal to the Jews and a foolishness to the Greeks” is actually the crucifixion, not the resurrection (see 1 Cor. 1:23). In fact, although to Badiou’s atheist eyes the resurrection is the stumbling block, to the eyes of Jews and Greeks (or Romans) a resurrection or revivification wasn’t an impossibility. Both traditions could accommodate such an event, and in theological developments over the next century or so, arguments were put forward which bent Jewish and Greek presuppositions minimally if at all.

What was an impossibility was a messiah who was crucified rather than leading the Jews to reestablishment of their nation in glory, or a son of God (like Caesar) who was put to death as an insurrectionary rather than elevated to rule the known world. It was absolutely scandalous that Jesus should die an ignominious death and not reign forever. Perhaps even more so that God would not intervene and save him, which has the potential still to be a scandal for about 90% of the Christians I know. God either does not care, does not wish to or cannot intervene? Not a popular sentiment in churches I’m acquainted with.

So, of course, his followers put that right by demoting the crucifixion to a temporary blip and (after some time) positing that he would return to do all the things which were expected of a Jewish Messiah or a Roman Caesar. If there hadn’t been a resurrection, it would have been necessary for his followers to invent one.

Oh, wait… the overwhelming probability is that they did – or, at least, that’s what I’d expect to hear from a psychoanalyst. Granted, the psychoanalyst might not go so far as Badiou and describe it as a “lie”, just as hallucinations brought on by cognitive dissonance reduction and wish fulfillment, perhaps with a side order of deindividuation. (I should maybe point out for my more conservative readers that just because we can identify psychological mechanisms which could well have produced resurrection experiences doesn’t actually mean there wasn’t more to them than that.)

Badiou does, of course, mention Pauls main other shockingly transgressive set of statements, but the French Marxist Atheist is not shocked by the dissolution of Jewish exceptionalism (by rendering circumcision and dietary laws irrelevant), abolition of patriarchal attitudes to gender or the denial of the master-slave relationship, which would have been truly shocking to Jew and Greek alike whereas resurrection, which Badiou is shocked by, would maybe have raised an eyebrow or two. It was, indeed, sufficiently transgressive that the pseudo-Pauline epistles and the Fourth Gospel (in particular) did their utmost to undo Paul’s good work, to deny the event.

Similarly, the French Marxist Atheist finds nothing particularly startling to mention  in Jesus’ proclamation of God’s preference for the poor, women, children, lawbreakers, the irreligious and other contemptible people, even so far as religious opponents (the Samaritans) and outright enemies (including Romans). This, however, still has the power to shock. (In the USA not by any means least when couched as “affirmative action”.) Autre pays, autre moeurs, as they say.

I wonder, would Paul, today, say “In Christ there is no theist and no atheist”? Would Jesus say “Blessed are those who do not believe in anything”?

Que M. Badiou soit beni.

 

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

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

I continue this thinking after my previous writing.

———————————————-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But our psychology can be changed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

I am regularly frustrated by people saying that scripture is inspired (which I have no real problem in accepting, with some modest reservations) and then going on to say that it must therefore be literally true, or “inerrant” or something of that kind, or that we can consider the written results to be something approaching divine dictation.

I have a certain amount of experience of inspiration, both of the variety experienced by mystics and in some other fields. I have, for instance, felt musical inspiration (rarely), artistic inspiration (more often, but little of late), and once or twice comedic or performance inspiration. All of these seem to me to have a certain amount of similarity, but the greatest, to me at least, is the mystical.

It can, indeed, at times feel as if an intelligence entirely distinct from you is just using you to channel things which you could not remotely have said or done by yourself. In the case of the mystical experience, it very definitely feels as though an intelligence distinct from yourself is to a great extent in control of the situation. I do, however, question whether that feeling is actually correct. For instance, I am well used to engaging my subconscious, often by leaving some question for my subconscious to deal with without actually consciously thinking about it for a few minutes, an hour or two, overnight or, sometimes, for a few days, and then to have a well-developed answer pop into my consciousness without the slightest indication that anything has been happening in relation to that question in the meantime. I’m pretty confident that my subconscious is a lot cleverer than my conscious!

I cannot, therefore, guarantee to myself that any of these occurrences have been more than just engaging the subconscious entirely in parallel with the conscious for a change, with the two working together towards the same end (a fairly unusual occurrence, and one which just did not happen at all for most of the period 1996-2013 for me, probably closely connected with my clinical depression over that period).

The one which is problematic here, though, is the mystical experience, the experience which feels as if it were direct unmeditated contact with God (and that’s my best answer as to what it actually is!). In this, it is somewhere between horribly difficult and totally impossible to give anything remotely like a coherent, logical, detailed account of what has happened, or of the information which has been conveyed (and there is definitely an information content). This applies whether or not the trick of calling for the subconscious to work it’s magic behind closed doors in the backroom of my mind, too. Oh, it is perfectly coherent and understandable at the time – but less so afterwards, when I stop and try to piece together an account. I’ve sat down and written about these experiences lots of times, and every time I’m left thinking “well, that’s partly right, but it doesn’t remotely do justice to it, and actually gives something of the wrong impression”. I’ve read a lot of writings by various mystics (and some poets, philosophers, theologians or scientists) which have a lot of the right feeling about them, which seem to be saying the right thing – but in part only, and then giving an at least somewhat misleading impression. At best, some writing may catch exactly one aspect of the experience, while missing other aspects completely.

Here, I think, is my difficulty with those who put forward scripture as being not only inspired, but also as being readily understood. My experience of actual communication from God, assuming this is what the mystical experience is, is that it is just not susceptible to being written of in a way which is both readily understood and entirely correct. I rather suspect that the human brain is incapable of grasping the fullness of the experience except while it is going on (and is therefore augmented, as it seems to me), and (which may well be the major reason for that first suspicion) that human language and concept structures are inadequate to express it in more than a “through a glass, darkly” manner.

But then, why would I expect the human brain to be able to grasp this, or that human language and concepts would be adequate to contain it?

Perhaps the most successful attempt to do this use paradox; Taoism, Zen Buddhism, Sufism and the Eastern Orthodox tradition of mystical theology are notable for this, for example. At least these traditions tend to avoid the simple making of a direct statement which is at least in part wrong, as they immediately offer an opposite or radically different parallel statement as also being correct.

I fancy I am seeing something of the same attempt made in the chain of philosophers from Kant (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger e al) who tend to invent new language and concepts in order to attempt to do justice to that which is; I am on the whole unconvinced that they are successful. This continues in (for instance) Derrida and Caputo, who play with language and twist it into new ways of expressing things. Perhaps they are successful, if only I could see well enough through the word-games, but I fancy they are battling against something which will forever escape any full and accurate expression.

If that something is God, it seems to me entirely appropriate that it should forever escape full and accurate expression. How, after all, can the partial encompass the whole?