Eyre Lines

There’s a story I’ve heard a few times now, most recently ten days ago, about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a former policeman called Van de Broek. It’s a popular story for sermons and talks, it seems. It’s a very uplifting story about an unnamed woman forgiving the policeman for the murder of her son and husband and wishing to treat him as a replacement son.

I want to make two points here.

The first is that the story probably never happened as it’s been reported to me. I rather suspected that it might not be, as some of the details didn’t fit well with what I knew of the Commission. Here’s an analysis: frankly, I come to the same conclusion as the writer. Neither of us thinks its factual truth matters. It may not be a factually accurate story, but it is in its own way a true story about how Christian forgiveness to the extent of loving one’s enemy should happen. I know of a few other factually correct stories of victims who have bridged that gap and befriended their oppressors, in any case, including one woman whose husband was beaten to death senselessly, and who forgave and visited those responsible in prison.

In discussion after hearing it most recently, people were asking themselves if they could bring themselves to do what the anonymous woman did in the story. Some didn’t think they could, or would even want to, some hoped that they would if they were ever in that kind of position.

I hope I would myself, because I possibly couldn’t afford not to. As you may have gathered if you’ve read earlier posts in this blog, I’m a member of a twelve step fellowship. Several steps of the twelve are very relevant; 4, making a searching and fearless moral inventory; 5, admitting to yourself, God and another human being the exact nature of your wrongs; 6, becoming ready to have God remove your defects of character; 7, humbly asking him to do so, 8, making a list of all persons you have harmed and becoming willing to make amends to them all and 9, making amends except when to do so would injure them or others.

The “searching and fearless moral inventory” in step 4 is commonly done as a list of resentments which you have accumulated over the years, in column form; who against, what the circumstances were and (crucially) what your part in it was. These then later usually feed directly into the making of the list for step 8. The objective is to recognise all resentments (including against yourself – to which I am especially prone), to admit them publicly and to make good the damage caused; at step 9 it is normal to ask the wronged person how you can put right your wrong.

This is, of course, very much similar to what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was doing in South Africa, a sort of national twelve-step programme. Both are examples of restorative justice. What both realise is that an un-dealt with resentment is poisonous to the person who holds the resentment. For an alcoholic or addict, keeping hold of resentments long term is near to being a guarantee of relapse; I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t do those who are free from addictions any good either.

As I sit here at the moment, I have a clean slate as far as resentments are concerned. I work on this on a continuing basis (through step 10 – continuing to take personal inventory and when wrong promptly admitting it – and, which is not explicit in the wording of the step, trying to restore things to the state they would have been in had I not done something wrong). Could I cope with the resentment which would be produced if someone did to me something similar to what was, in the story, done to this woman? I don’t know, but I would try as hard as I possibly could to admit the resentment, to deal with it and to let it go. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay”: it is not my part to pursue vengeance, I can and must leave that to God.

Of course, the story seems to go a step further, to an act of positive love towards the enemy. This may seem a step too far. It’s marginally further than I’ve been able to go with one or two people who have wronged me in the past, but they are not around me any more (and I do not at the moment harbour any resentments toward them). If they were here with me now, I think it might be necessary to go that step further and act in a positively loving way toward them, as otherwise their mere presence might lead to the resentments of the past being renewed.

For me, this would be not saintly but wise. I cannot afford to have people from my past taking over my thoughts and ruining my present. I need to be free of them, and, one day at a time, today I am.

University of South Carolina have a magazine “Religion Dispatches” in which is an interesting article. It looks at “nones” in America, i.e. those who give “none” as an answer in questionnaires under “religion”. If it’s anecdotal conclusions are correct, the “social gospel”, i.e. the sayings of Jesus relating to how we should act and in particular how we should treat other human beings have a huge following outside Christianity.

I think, although I can quote no statistics for the conclusion, that the same applies in the UK, where a significantly greater proportion of the population are either “nones” or if pushed will answer “C of E” despite having visited an actual church at most a handful of times since they left school other than for weddings and funerals. We may not be as overtly “Christian” in our declarations as our cousins over the pond, but the social gospel is, I think, very deeply embedded in our society quite irrespective of religious practice or belief. This is not to say that we are particularly good at following the social gospel (and I happen to think we have become rather less good at following it over the course of the last 30 years), but that we accept it as being a laudable model to aspire to. Indeed, it may be that as overt religiosity has declined, the social gospel has leached out into society as a whole in a way which is no longer very dependent on professed Christians spreading the gospel.

Against this background, I am remembering the Alpha talk from Wednesday evening. Two things particularly stood out to me; the first was the speaker saying that Jesus spent a large proportion of his time talking about himself.

Well, if all you read is the Fourth Gospel, that is entirely correct. However, if you read the synoptics (the other three gospels), the picture is rather different – Jesus spends very little time talking about himself, and in Mark actually repeatedly asks his disciples not to talk about who or what he is. The major themes of the synoptics are the social gospel and the advent of the Kingdom (whether of God or of Heaven) on earth, in which the social gospel is actually followed. Where Jesus talks of himself, it is either referring to his forthcoming death (and resurrection) or of his judging at a point in the future.

It is interesting in that context to read Matthew 25:31-46. “When the Son of Man comes in his glory”, it does not seem that those who can put the best construction on his statements about himself are chosen, or those who believe that certain statements about his nature, purpose or relationship to God; it is those who actually practice the social gospel who are placed with the sheep on his right hand. Matt. 7:21 is relevant as well, and possibly John 14:15 so as to involve the Fourth Gospel at least somewhat.

The other thing which stood out was the emphasis on Lewis’ trilemma, the “either-or” trio created by C.S. Lewis in his recreational occupation of apologist. As a reminder, what Lewis wrote was:-

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.” (quote from Wikipedia; link above).

I am sure that most Christian apologists who use this (and it is in every edition of the Alpha manual to date) think that this is a slam-dunk argument that forces anyone who has a high opinion of Jesus (which, as we see above, is a very large proportion of the “none” population) to accept that he is Son of God and is God. I can testify from picking up the pieces after this tactic has been used previously on many occasions that this is not the case. A few do accept this, and I have no interest in giving them more complex arguments, but in my experience more don’t and in an increasingly scientific-rationalist world, often can’t.

The more inquiring and those who have been trained in logic will, of course, enquire whether the trilemma is valid, and find that it is not. Some of this I covered last year in “Will the real Jesus please stand up”, but in broad terms, the excluded options are (1) Jesus didn’t actually say these things (2) he said them, or something like them, but they didn’t mean what Lewis takes them to mean (3) he was a prophet speaking on behalf of God or (4) he was a panentheist mystic (which may amount to much the same thing as “prophet”), talking from a point of view of a personal sense of unity with God. Unfortunately, most of those who I have tried to help after the trilemma was fired at them have not been logicians or had sufficient tenacity and curiosity to arrive there.

Happily, only a few have said to themselves “OK, being God is excluded*, so he was mad or diabolical, and therefore I will avoid following any of his teachings in future”. “A few” is, of course, far too many, but I can count them on the fingers of one hand.

By far the most common reaction is “OK, God is excluded, being the Devil is excluded* and my opinion of Jesus is that he was clearly a great moral teacher who I look up to (and so not mad), so the trilemma is rubbish and therefore everything the person who put the trilemma to me is saying is rubbish and I will not listen to any of this stuff any more”.  Some of them are by then walking away so fast that I can’t catch up with them and persuade them that it isn’t that simple and that there actually is merit in sticking around to hear more…

[* “Being God is excluded, being the Devil is excluded” may need unpacking; for a human being to “be God” in most people’s concept sets requires a whole load of inventive theology which is not in evidence at the point where the trilemma is wheeled out, so this option is likely to be dismissed out of hand. For the Devil to be similarly constrained has similar problems, but the negative to this is usually that the hearer has far too high a view of Jesus to admit this as a possibility.]

But actually, if we look back at Matthew 25, this may not be quite so dispiriting as it seems – as long as they hold Jesus as a great moral exemplar, the chances are fairly reasonable that they may go on and do some things which will find them on the side of the sheep. They will, of course, miss all of the benefits to them of living as part of a community of followers of Jesus, and will probably not follow him as closely or in as dedicated a way, but they may well still follow him.

Perhaps we are in sight of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “religionless Christianity”? Richard Beck blogged some more about this on Friday after a series in 2010.

However, I think this misses encouraging one aspect of following Jesus, which is the experiential, sometimes mystical, always relational link with Jesus as a living force in the world. You do not have to be part of a community of belivers to experience Jesus in this way, but it is definitively easier. It is possible to do this without going down the route of the Fourth Gospel with all its implicit theological complexity, recognising that we are in relationship to Jesus also being in relationship to God in a particular way without the support of a group of others, but it is easier to walk in company than alone.

Lewis’ trilemma can, and in my experience is quite likely to, damage the possibility of someone walking in company in the future. So this is my plea to Alpha speakers everywhere – ditch the trilemma! It may well be a powerful weapon, but it’s likely to backfire…

 

 

In a comment on facebook to James McGrath’s post “How do you know that?”, Carl Beck Sachs writes:-

“In response to that, Lydie, I would say that people who don’t have a capacity for mystical experience are, to use Rorty’s delightful phrase, “religiously unmusical” (as he was, and as I am sometimes, depending on what else is going on in my life). Certainly there’s nothing wrong about being religiously unmusical — just as there’s nothing wrong with being unmusical. And I’d be the first to defend one’s right to be religiously unmusical!

Part of the point I’m making here is that, from the perspective of a religious liberal, there’s nothing more to being a non-theist or atheist other than being religiously unmusical. There’s no other thing going on besides that — nothing at all.”

I like this language. At 13, I might well have described myself as “religiously unmusical”; however, I then had an “out of the blue” experience of immense power, which was the best thing I had ever experienced (it probably still is). My first thought was that I must have had some neurological event which might be dangerous, or that I was exhibiting an early sign of some psychological or psychiatric disorder, but reference to my doctor removed that possibility. My next course of action was to find ways of repeating the experience, to which I devoted a lot of time and effort over the next ten years or so; I found that certain practices drawn from all sorts of traditions seemed to incline me in the direction of repetition (and in hindsight, this will have been massively assisted by emotional recall).

I talked long and hard about the experience with others once I found that it was not necessarily evidence of mental instability, looking for commonality, at least once I had found a language of expression, or rather several languages, as different religious and spiritual traditions (I found) talked of similar experience in very different ways, and I found some people who had not had a similar experience but wished they had (I found more by far who were uninterested in such experience both inside and outside religion). I wanted others to have similar experience, and shared some of the techniques I had found.

The trouble is, I found that many of those who tried these techniques did not have peak spiritual experiences – in fact most did not. In particular I found people who had been following a Christian praxis for very many years and who seemed immune to whatever techniques I offered, including one who was very dear to me. I am coming to the conclusion that she was and is “religiously unmusical”, and that saddens me. In fact, while I don’t any more think that peak spiritual experiences like mine are vastly rare, I would be inclined to think that well over half the population is “religiously unmusical”.

I am helping with another Alpha course at the moment. Alpha, while it may appear to be an attempt to convince intellectually, isn’t that; it is aimed at producing a form of peak spiritual experience – and that’s why I’m where I am, trying to spread “the experience” in the only readily accessible programme within mainstream Christianity I know of which does that. There is at least one person on this course who I am coming to suspect of being “religiously unmusical”, and I’m going to be cringing again at parts of the course which indicate that everyone who prays will have their prayer answered, because in this particular case, I doubt it will be. Perhaps I lack faith, but against that I have a lot of experience with others with whom I’ve previously “stormed heaven” with absolutely no result.

There have, in fact, been a couple of sermons recently in which testimony as to answered prayer has been put forward, and that is wonderful – for those for whom it has been answered. My experience is different; if my prayers are in fact answered, they are answered after a very long time indeed. Frequently what I in fact asked for is not what eventually transpires as an “answer” to my initial prayer. For example, I spent six and a half years praying for release from severe depression and generalised anxiety; the depression has gone, but the anxiety remains – but I can cope with it now. It is not usually crippling.

And yet – six and a half years? There is no way in which I can tell someone who is not massively predisposed to believe in answered prayer that this is, in fact, an answer to prayer. I can say that I have learned other things as a (God-given?) result of having my positive emotions excised for that period of time – for example, the immense value of emotional recall for lifting mood, and also the value of gratitude even in the face of very bleak situations; neither of these was available to me during that period. I can, therefore, interpret this as an useful lesson in life (and have, in a previous post). Again, though, this is supremely unlikely to carry weight with anyone who does not already believe that everything happens for a purpose, and that God is the purposer.

So, if the opportunity arises, what am I now to tell the suspected religiously unmusical? “If you plug away at it, something will happen, but it might take a year, five years or ten. and it may be completely different from what you ask for”?

No, I suspect that the best I can say is that I was like that and something happened out of the blue, so there is hope, it can take a very long time, and that some people are clearly born without the ability, so there is no need to feel failure if nothing happens at all.

I am not a great fan of modern worship songs, as a genre. The vast majority of those I hear and sing in the services I attend most regularly fall short on wording, music or both. The wording tends to be extremely short of theological (or, indeed, other) content, repeated too often, and what theology there is tends to be just substitutionary atonement – and I am no fan of substitutionary atonement as regular readers of this blog may gather. Sometimes the music makes up for this, but more often there is really not much tune, with a range of maybe five notes. Happily, the band at this church is extremely good and so my cringe factor isn’t totally over-stimulated.

Sunday last saw me singing along to a song by Chris Tomlin, with the recurring lines “Our God is greater, our God is stronger, God you are higher than any other”, which had considerable verve (and for once didn’t really play the PSA note much). But it got me thinking “greater, stronger and higher in relation to what or who?” (as well as noting that the song definitively refers to Jesus, starting “water you turned into wine; opened the eyes of the blind” and that the extreme stress on Jesus-as-God makes me think “docetism” immediately…)

Not, I think, anything mundane – that would be a little like singing that the universe is greater than a grain of sand (which only evades utter banality if you can see a universe IN a grain of sand). I think this has to refer to other gods, and that is something of a departure from monotheism.

It isn’t, of course, without very solid biblical foundation. The early Jewish concept of God seems to have been as a tribal deity among other tribal deities, but one who was increasingly regarded as supreme above other gods – the clearest reference would be Psalm 82:1, “God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment”  (there is dispute about whether the word “gods” is justified, but as the Hebrew word used is “elohim”, which is one of the standard words for the god of the Hebrew bible, I don’t think other translations are justified). The Hebrew scriptures move from polytheism to monotheism, with at least hints that the god referred to as Elohim or YHVH is initially the chief among gods (including in the commandment “thou shalt have no other gods before me”), and Psalm 82 seems to work from a henotheistic point of view – I link to an article on Hebrew henotheism.

I have in the past tended to go along with the idea mentioned in that article, that religion tends to progress from polytheism through henotheism to monotheism – “theistic evolution”, but as the article points out, this is not inevitably how religions develop.

Now, I cannot myself reconcile my experience of God with anything short of radical monotheism, which has tended to drive me in the direction of thinking that theistic evolution is a progressive movement, and that this is how things really are, and henotheism and polytheism are lesser concepts. But I am now seeing this as a potentially arrogant stance. I am also a deeply convinced religious pluralist, or in other words I do not think it reasonable to privilege my own religion over other religions, or my own god-concept over other god-concepts without some good argument. Granted, this stems largely from my conviction that there is, there can be, only one God, and all religions express their worshippers’ experience of that one God – and if there in fact can be more than one God, then perhaps they are worshiping an entirely different god? By the normal standards of Christianity or the developed later Judaism, this would then be a false god, and other religions would be false religions.

I may have touched on an answer in my “Idolatry and Eisegesis” post. A god-concept is not a god, it is a manner of conceiving of deity, and that post argues against treating any god-concept as the actuality of that-which-is-God (amongst other things). The apophatic theology of the Eastern Orthodox church goes in that direction as well; so does the well known Taoist maxim “the Tao which can be spoken is not the true Tao”. The problem is then one of mistaking the concept for the reality; we can experience the reality, but as soon as we start to try to tie that down to a set of words and concepts, we are effectively building ourselves a graven image.

It is therefore a mistake for me to try to take Psalm 82 and translate it into a properly monotheistic god-concept in order to understand it (or to sing Chris Tomlin’s song and do the same); I need to cultivate the flexibility to work with the god-concept which is conveyed there, even if this grates with my own experience of the divine.

And with that thought, I hope within the next day or two to start on what will probably be a series of posts about panentheism, process theology and open theism, a set of loosely linked alternative god-concepts.

Dan Wilkinson has a post about Biblical Truth today. I like it. However, I need to nitpick one of the statements he quotes from The Scripture project:

“3. Faithful interpretation of Scripture requires an engagement with the entire narrative: the New Testament cannot be rightly understood apart from the Old, nor can the Old be rightly understood apart from the New.”

The first of these is patently true; the NT quotes passages and concepts from the OT so profusely that it cannot remotely stand alone. However, we should remember that the OT arrived in stages; at one time the Torah (the first five books) was all there was, for instance; later there was the Torah plus some of the writings and prophets; by the time of the New Testament there was the whole of the now canonical OT plus apocrypha and even a few works which didn’t even make it into the apocrypha. The NT writers then built on previous NT writers for something over 100 years.

It is disrespectful of Judaism to say that “the Old cannot be rightly understood apart from the New”, quite apart from the fact that at most stages before the first century not all of the Hebrew Scriptures were available, and it is problematic to argue that there was an incomplete and inadequate revelation for those who didn’t have the benefit of (say) Ezekiel, as they lived before he was born. Or, of course, that there was an incomplete and inadequate revelation just prior to the writing of the Revelation.

Better, I think, to consider that at each point, there was a set of scriptures adequate to the times. Additionally, to recognise that the NT, in part, depends on works which are not themselves canonical, such as Sirach and Jubilees.

This does raise problems itself as am interpretational technique, but less, I think, than considering that earlier scripture is incoherent without later scripture.

“Jesus Benyosef” asks an interesting question in his somewhat tongue in cheek Facebook page:-

“In your knowing of God, what is the authority on which you rely? A religious organization? A set of sacred texts? Individual religious experiences (yours or someone else’s)? Logical proofs? Comparative mythology?” and clarifies “By “authority,” I mean What is your reason for thinking that your knowing of God is faithful to who/what God is. What makes you think you are right? It is possible for your authority to be your own experience of discussing, reasoning, sensing, etc.”

I work, I suppose, from the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” of Scripture, Tradition, Experience and Reason. However, where Wesley suggested that the four should be kept in balance, I can’t really do that. Experience, for me, has to be paramount. I wouldn’t be reading and writing about religion and spirituality if it were not for my own experience, initially when I was 15, and then sporadically repeated, mostly with far less intensity. One of the comments to the post from Beth Eustis  talks of God having to hit her with a sledgehammer to get her to pay attention, and that resonates with my initial experience; since then it has been further experience and the memory of past experiences which has sustained me.

If I were talking of a vehicle, therefore, it wouldn’t be like most cars with four wheels each bearing a more or less equal load; experience would be bearing the bulk of the weight and providing the propulsion.

Secondly, though, I can’t work without reason. I am either constructed or have been brought up such that I have a positive compulsion to make rational sense of everything. If something doesn’t make sense to me, I find it hugely difficult to accept it. I could probably allocate to reason the function of the wheels which give the vehicle direction, so at this point I’m looking at something like a penny-farthing bicycle with the small wheel providing the direction rather than the large one.

A lot of “challenges” in life, however, have taught me that possibly my biggest personality defect is intellectual arrogance and that just because I don’t understand something doesn’t actually mean that it doesn’t work.

So to scripture and tradition; in truth, I regard scripture as being a bit of tradition crystallised at a point in the past, so I’ll add to that the authority of a living leader, teacher or just fellow traveller. These each give me another view of the elephant (taking the old story of the blind men and the elephant mentioned in the comments by Nan Cogley Kuhlman) and can therefore point up how another’s experience, different from mine, gives a different picture which needs to be explained or how my reasoning may have been inadequate. They help keep me at least loosely in contact with other people’s thinking. I can’t, however, just go along with any other person’s views and reasoning and forget my own experience or try to bludgeon it into fitting with someone else’s account, if for no other reason that the initial experience was so powerful and so convicting. And, of course, the intellectual arrogance I mentioned…

At this point I have something like a penny-farthing steered from the small wheel and with stabiliser wheels on each side. It isn’t very like Wesley’s quadrilateral, but at least it isn’t “sola scriptura”, which I don’t emotionally understand. How you can privilege someone else’s experience over your own rather baffles me, particularly when it’s not backed by (for instance) the charisma of a living leader or teacher. I can, however, understand someone for whom reason provides support and propulsion as well as direction; if there’s no relevant experience (which I find anecdotally is the case for many) the experience of others seems to me difficult to rely on.

I can anticipate the response that scripture is backed by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and that’s fine – but it’s then a form of personal experience again.

Is this faithful to who or what God is? I don’t know. I only have available to me my experience, reason and the experience of others reported to me or interacted with. It’s as faithful as I can manage with the resources I have. Now I see through a glass darkly…

The recent death of Nelson Mandela has prompted a flood of postings. Many of these are just adulatory, many of those are from people who, 40 years ago, wouldn’t have had any time for Mandela at all.

Some put another slant on things. As this piece by Mark Steel comments, Mandela was originally a terrorist (aka freedom fighter – the terms are usually interchangeable depending only on whether you approve of them) and we would not be remembering his massive achievements in forgiveness and non-violent action had the movement he was a leader of and a symbol for not succeeded. Mr. Steel thinks this would not have happened without an armed struggle, which Mandela originally supported (and was thus not entirely unreasonably imprisoned); I note that the success came when non-violent routes became predominant and prefer to recall the post-Robben Island Mandela’s attitude as having avoided a bloodbath, which was what I had personally expected for some years. However, as Gandhi (the most famous exponent of non-violent protest) noted, non-violence can only be properly practiced by those who have proved themselves capable of violent action and have resolved to renounce it, it is not a route for the cowardly. Mandela was therefore authentic in his non-violence. His greatness lies in him having continued to follow non-violence and reconciliation once he achieved power.

Some have noted, accurately, that Mandela was cordially detested by many conservatives (and that goes for UK conservatives as well as US ones) because of his stance against a number of well-recognised favorite conservative policies (such as the wars in Iran) and his links with the USSR as the main bankrollers of the ANC and with the South African Communist party as major allies. Cosying up with Castro also cannot have won him many American conservative friends, nor can an enthusiasm for such communist concepts as the eradication of poverty, racial equality, anti-imperialism and labour unions.

The greatest among those, I suspect, was the communist and USSR links. The world I grew up in was dominated by the fear of the USSR and communism, and in conservative circles that was absolute. In the UK, while the fear of the Russian military rolling west over Europe (and not stopping at the Channel) was strong in the majority, there was not quite the same level of visceral revulsion for communism which seems to have gripped the USA from the 50s onwards, it seems to me.

Possibly this was in part due to the British Communist party splitting in the 50s, possibly it was due to the fact that the Communist party here never really got enough support to challenge Labour for the left wing of British politics. Ironically, although in the States very few Democrats could legitimately have been described as closet communists, in Britain a lot of communists found themselves able to join the Labour party, and in my teens there were many Labour MPs who were communists (and even more who visited the “workers’ paradise” of the USSR and came back with glowing reports. Labour was preserved from outright takeover by the fact that it had a much broader base, and owed much to the cooperative movement and to the nonconformist (i.e. anything but Anglican) churches, which were not communist. The sterotype of “You’re Welsh, so you’re Methodist and vote Labour” had enough statistics behind it to not be completely laughable, for instance. However, the States had McCarthy and we didn’t, and we had what was not unreasonably seen by the right in our country as a USSR-loving mass movement, and the States didn’t.

The root problem there was the presence of an ideology which was supra-national and which looked to it’s establishment as the ruling ideology, coupled with the presence of a centre outside the country. The fear was that allegiance was to a foreign power before it was to the country itself, and that was not too unreasonable given the attachment of the British Communist party to all things USSR and Stalin, though that took a major knock after the Russian tanks rolled into Hungary in 1956 to suppress a popular mass movement.

I’m reminded there of another facet of my childhood, which was a certain reserve about Catholics, which was coupled in the more right wing with a suggestion that Catholics were governed by the Pope, not by the government of the country. This was a view much pressed by Ian Paisley, the Northern Irish Unionist. Historically, of course, the feeling against Catholics was very deep rooted, and went back to the situation after Henry VIII declared the English church independent of Rome in 1533 (and himself the head of it, as the monarch in England has been almost all the time since then). The Pope of the day naturally took exception to this, and save for a period under Mary (a Catholic) there remained a real threat of invasion by one or more of the continental Catholic powers at the behest of the Pope for well over 100 years; one result was active persecution, of Catholics under almost all the monarchs except Mary and of Protestants under Mary, for 200 years. Perhaps the last gasp of the active form was the Gordon Riots of 1780. Catholics remained debarred from many things until much later (largely 1829), however, and are still debarred from the monarchy today (which survival will probably last until the Anglican church is disestablished and is no longer the established religion).

The Northern Ireland troubles, of course, cast a shadow well into my adult life, and led to part of the anti-Catholic feeling; here again was an ideological group operating within the country and owing allegiance to a foreign power, in this case the Republic of Ireland. In truth, it was anti-Irish Catholic feeling, but many could not distinguish between Irish Catholics (who were the majority of Catholics in most English Churches) and Catholics more generally. Even so it was misplaced, as not all Irish Catholics were in favour of an united Ireland (some of them had the good sense to realise that incorporating territory with a majority population of Ulster Protestant Unionists was a recipe for disaster!).

I can, therefore, understand the problems for someone attached to their own nation state (i.e. a “patriot”) in accepting someone whose ideological stance involves adherence to a supra-national organisation as being truly “one of them”, particularly if that ideology is closely linked with one or more foreign states, and even more so if those states have credible military force. I can understand this reaction, for instance, to Islam. Though, in conscience, I don’t consider the military force of Islamic states (even combined) to be a really serious threat to the UK, far less the USA. There’s terrorism, of course, but even 9/11 was, in conscience, a pinprick compared with the might of the USA (or the USA’s or our reaction to it).

A word about terrorism. It’s scary, not knowing if you’re going to suddenly be a civilian target where you’ve thought you were safe. However, there’s been a present terrorist threat here since I was about 10, and I’ve consistently been in far more danger crossing the road than I have of being blown up by a terrorist. You can get used to a certain level of unpredictable threat, and I would argue that getting used to it would have been a better solution than moving ourselves several steps toward being a police state. Indeed, I’m slightly amused to consider that I attend (inter alia) the church where Guy Fawkes was baptised in 1570. He, of course, became a very early (and Catholic) home grown terrorist, and a part of the threat perception which skewed English attitudes to Catholics for the next two hundred years.

I do hope we can get over our current panic quicker than that…

However, continuing my historical musings, I go further back and can understand the feelings of Roman Emperors faced with the early Christians, who denied the god-like authority of Caesar (i.e. the Roman state) in favour of allegiance to Christ the King. The early Christians weren’t, of course, the first; the Jews had already been treading that path for years and the first Christians (who initially weren’t certain they weren’t Jews of a new variety, and neither were the Jews of the day) merely learned from them. The Jews had honed their skills in this direction under the Seleucids, and indeed the Maccabees for a while achieved independence, Judas Maccabeus being a sort of Nelson Mandela of his day.

And yes, I can understand the Seleucid’s feelings as well. All these examples are of a group of people who answer the call of a different drum, who are dedicated to an ideology at odds with the nation state in question. What I condemn is, of course, the methods, whether of the oppressor states or of terrorists/freedom fighters, particularly where they involve targeting civilians.

The early Christians did remarkably well during the period of Roman persecution, which lasted from the mid first century until 312, when Constantine the Great decided to espouse Christianity as a result, it is said, of a vision. In that, they were probably still following the example of their Jewish precursors. Within a few years, Christianity had not just ceased to be persecuted, but became the national religion of the Roman state. Judaism did not have that kind of safety anywhere for nearly 2000 years.

And, entirely unlike Nelson Mandela and the ANC, but very like Mary I of England and (to a lesser extent) her immediate protestant successors in the other direction, immediately started to persecute pagans and the less orthodox members of its own community.

Mandela was no saint, he was a reformed terrorist, but he was a great man, because he renounced violence and revenge. The early Christian Church fathers? No Mandelas there, mores’ the pity.

Richard Beck wrote recently about complementarianism (I link to a post; for a fuller view, follow the link from there to the previous post). Complementarianism is, briefly, the concept that men and women have different skill sets which should be recognised in the roles they play, and most importantly that women are not well equipped to be church leaders (or, indeed, leaders at all).

Beck takes issue with this stance, as indeed do I – but that isn’t the focus of this post. What Beck sees is a doctrine of ontological ineptitude; ontological meaning that it is “of the nature of” and ineptitude meaning “not fitted for” – so the idea is that women are by nature not fitted for leadership of churches (or families, come to that, which seems to me not to recognise the situation in about 80% of the marriages of friends of mine!).

Now, it goes without saying that there are some things which men are on average more “ontologically” suited to than are women. Heavy manual work is an example. However, I have an example in my own family history of an exception to this; Bessie Eyre (nee Green), who in the mid 19th century found herself a single mother due to her husband Job’s death in a mining accident, and took a job as a miller’s assistant at the appropriately named Newmillerdam. There, she was hefting bags of corn and flour around day in day out, and the story goes that when a local man made “improper advances” to her, she threw him the width of the turnpike road at Newmillerdam. A turnpike road would be wide by the standards of the day – 20 feet or more.

She was clearly an exception to the general rule that women are weaker than men (and sadly, I haven’t inherited the right genes from her and I may be an example of a man who is physically weaker than possibly the majority of women; at least that was the case when I was in junior school).

This is clearly a case where, as with almost all abilities, they are distributed in a population according to a normal distribution, a “bell curve”. I fell toward the bottom of the male “strength” bell curve, Bessie fell near the top of the “female” Bell curve. Granted, Bessie had honed her abilities through the work she did (and I probably ended up somewhat stronger than the average woman by the same route); nurture has a place along with ontology, i.e. nature. The result will still be a bell curve, but you can move yourself around in it (and most people do).

While I don’t necessarily think that women are on average less suited for leadership than men, if they were, it would be a bell curve distribution. As, I suppose, is the ability to multitask.

I occasionally deprecate myself as being incapable of multitasking “because I’m a man”. Now, I don’t actually think I am incapable, just that most of the women I’m close to are better at that than me (and similarly I tend to be better at single-minded focus than them, as in I’m better at that than the majority of them – and the exceptions know who they are!). I suppose, though, that I’m claiming there my own form of ontological incapacity. I’m claiming it on the basis of a widespread claim that men can’t multitask. And that’s as wrong as the suggestion that women can’t do heavy manual labour or lead a church.

There seem to be quite a few “men can’t…” statements buzzing around these days, in fact. I shared one recently – the Three Wise Women. Apparently we can’t cook either, or have colour sense, or generally organise a drinking session in a brewery. All those would be news to my wife, but hey, I’m ontologically incapable of doing those these days, it seems. I take these as payback for something over 2000 years of women being accused of ontological incapacity (and men only claiming it in order to get out of the housework), but they’re wrong too. Granted, I can sometimes feel slightly aggrieved that political correctness allows this to be said of men, but not that any similar thing is still said of women. Except, of course, among complementarians…

That is, of course, where a source of huge controversy arose around the publication a few years ago of the book “The Bell Curve”. I was once asked by some very bright people to read the book and develop an argument as to why it was wrong. I duly did that, and reported that I couldn’t fault the research sufficiently to say that. I could pick some holes, yes, and point out that the measurements were on a narrow skill set which didn’t really translate to general competence to run your life (and indeed, among the group some of whom asked this of me were some who had hugely failed to translate “very bright” into anything remotely resembling success in life as the world would see it), but the basic thesis was correct; the statistics were sound.

The fault there, as with complementarianism, as with “men can’t multitask” is in not making a nuanced, more accurate assessment that whatever group or groups a person falls into, they have their own abilities and should never be judged on what the standard preconceptions are of the centre of the bell curve for that particular population. They may lie anywhere along that particular bell curve, and in most respects, the bell curves for groups overlap for most of their length. I’m an outlier at the top of some bell curves, at the bottom of others and boringly average on the rest. Until you know me better, you won’t know which.

In fact, it seems to me that having worked out that everyone is not the same, those who put store by assessing ability by label are immediately saying that yes, everyone IS the same, just within the group they’re labelled as belonging to rather than humanity as a whole. If only they’d take the next step, of realising that everyone is different, and assessing them as that.

As well as being, at root, all the same, i.e. human.

I’m somewhat behind with feedback from Alpha, hence dealing with something about four weeks late in my last post. This, therefore, represents something of an improvement, coming as it does only from a week ago as of Wednesday (as I type this bit, it’s Thursday 28th, but the post probably won’t be finished today).

That Alpha talk was “How can we resist evil” and this time, rather than focusing on a personalised force of evil, the focus was on theodicy, i.e. how come evil is permitted to exist. This flowed through into the formal discussion and then into a more informal one I had later while clearing up.

How is it, given that God is thought to be omnipotent and omniscient, but also omnibenevolent, that evil exists? The old choice is between power and goodness; if God has the power to stop evil and does not, then he cannot be good, if he is good and evil is not stopped, then he does not have the power. As the talk noted, this is a problem which has been around since the days of Epicurus. A God who is not omnipotent is, arguably, no God, a God who is not omnibenevolent is, arguably, indistinguishable from a demon.

There are a number of solutions to this logical problem which present themselves immediately.

1. God is not, in fact, omnipotent and/or omniscient. This subdivides:-
1a. God is in fact weak, the thesis of John Caputo’s “The Weakness of God”
1b. God is balanced by a power of evil to which all evil can be ascribed; this has the weakness of either failing to solve the problem (“why does God not defeat the power of evil immediately?”) or positing a dualism in which there is no guarantee of the victory of good; Manicheanism followed that path, but Christianity ostensibly doesn’t, except perhaps for gnostic Christianity, which is officially heresy since the third century.

2. God is not, in fact, omnibenevolent. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods. They kill us for their sport.” (Shakespeare, King Lear, Gloucester).

3. God is omnipotent, but reward and/or punishment is delayed e.g. until a post-mortem reconciliation at which point God’s benevolence can be proved. God ensures fair results without actually preventing evil outcomes, in other words. This does not fully answer the issue of why evil outcomes are not just prevented without invoking one of the other possibilities.

4. Evil is in some way deserved or, at least, repaid. This should perhaps be conjoined with #3.
4a. All evils are actually deserved or will be redressed as a result of actions which have occurred outside our timeframe; the obvious example is reincarnation and karma (this is similar to 3, except that the balancing is both before and after the event).
4b. Evils are deserved, but not necessarily on the basis of actions by the one who experiences the evil; original sin, for instance, can be used to justify any evil occurring to mankind as long as no concept of proportionality of punishment is involved.

5. A greater good is being served than the evil which is permitted to exist; this subdivides:-
5a. Good and evil are two sides of the same coin; one cannot exist without the other and good (and variety) are sufficiently good to justify the existence of balancing evil. This is by and large foundational in Taoism, in which existence is a greater good than either good or evil.
5b. Evil stems from the wrongful exercise of freewill, which is so great a good that it justifies the existence of the evil results. (In order to explain evil which is not caused by humans, this concept needs the concept of free willed spiritual powers).
5c. Evil is part of a teaching technique, and is not fundamental; “what does not kill you makes you stronger” and is therefore ultimately “good”.
5d. Evil is not a thing in and of itself, it is merely the absence of good.

6. Evil is not a thing in and of itself (other than as dealt with by 5d), so the syllogism fails; this can be subdivided:-
6a. Evil is illusory (commonly coupled with “as is good”). This is, by and large, the Buddhist solution.
6b. Evil and good are both relativistic rather than absolute terms, and it makes no sense to talk of evil or good except in relation to some person or thing. What is good for one is commonly evil for another, and it becomes entirely possible that “everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds” (Voltaire; “Candide”), thus giving this some characteristics of a #5 solution.

7. For completeness: “This question is above my pay grade; I can cope with a quantity of cognitive dissonance, and any answer is beyond my ability to deduce.” The book of Ecclesiastes seems to adopt this stance, and possibly also the book of Job, although other conclusions are sometimes reached about a moral in Job.

Many writers combine two or more of these to make up a rather less obviously spartan rationale.

At the discussion last week, there was significant input from someone who found a solution in karma and rebirth. I gather there are Christians who manage to splice belief in reincarnation into their thinking, although I’m not familiar with anyone who does this successfully. It seems to offer a sufficient solution, though, for those for whom it makes sense.

I linked above to the Wikipedia article on the problem of evil. Suffice it to say that none of the answers there quite satisfy me, although Alvin Plantinga’s attribution of the whole problem to the existence of free will which is taken as a greater good than any evil which might arise from it, coupled with positing a “mighty nonhuman spirit” (of a malevolent nature) to deal with events of “natural evil” such as typhoons (1b plus 5b) maybe goes some way toward a solution, but is of itself unsatisfactory. Why does God not eliminate this spirit, or (if that would prejudice the spirit’s free will) circumscribe the spirit rigidly? What exactly is it about free will which makes it a great enough good to warrant all the evil I observe? Indeed, is free will really possible, or at least possible to the extent which would make it a great good? Also, it must be taken that, as ultimate creator, this is all (including free will and the existence of the nonhuman spirit) God’s doing.

There’s some scriptural support for the view that God creates evil as well as good in any event in Isaiah 45:7: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things” (KJV – other translations attempt to avoid the word “evil”, probably for theological reasons, but whatever term is used fails to avoid the general point). The writer of the “God of Evolution” blog has just made the same argument from Romans 8. There’s a long potential list, probably starting with the book of Job.

I was quite taken by a few lines in a comment by Susan Frederick to Richard Beck’s blog (blogging about weakness and warfare):- “At one point in my own spiritual journey, when considering a sermon I’d heard for the millionth time that “Jesus hung on the cross when it should have been me,” I felt the Holy Spirit present a contrasting thought. “No, the right person was on that cross. God hung there in Jesus because all the suffering in the world ultimately was his responsibility as creator.” It was a strange thought. One I’ve never heard articulated by any preacher or theologian anywhere. But it touched my heart in a powerful way.” In fact, the same concept was articulated by Jack Miles in “Christ, a Crisis in the Life of God”, which I strongly recommend along with “God, a Biography” to which it is a companion.

Susan’s comment, in fact, links to a parting reference made by our speaker that Wednesday to Matthew 25:31-46 (a favorite passage of mine because of its implications); where he went with it was with that which was important being what action we took to relive the suffering because “it could be Christ we were helping”.  He saw Christ as suffering in every suffering person. This issue is then not “what is God doing to stop this?” but “what are we doing to stop this”. In a very major sense I agree with our speaker; it is far more important to combat evil than it is to work out why it happens, at least on the proviso that resistance be nonviolent, as otherwise there’s a risk of creating more evil than is combated. However, I get more from this passage; see later.

In his (warmly recommended) series, Beck is seeking a solution in a combination of “Weakness of God” following John Caputo some way down the path he treads and bringing in a Plantinga-like acceptance of spiritual adversaries (working from Greg Boyd’s “God at War”), rightly commenting that in order to sustain any “Spiritual Warfare” concept, you need a weaker God than the omnipotent and omniscient God of classical theology. Although I incline to say that Charles Hartshorne has demonstrated in “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes” that both omnipotence and omniscience are philosophically unsustainable if I’m looking for a quick and dirty exit from a theodicy discussion, I don’t actually see that as an adequate answer. Much as I admire Caputo’s linguistic gymnastics in “The Weakness of God”, I’m not able to buy into that theology myself, not merely because of the raft of scripture confirming God as extremely powerful but because of my own experience, which is inconsistent with a weak God. Accepting Hartshorne’s strictures about the impossibility of true omnipotence and omniscience does not mean that God is not mind-blowingly powerful and mind-blowingly knowing, after all.

The trouble is, for those of us of an inquiring and philosophical turn of mind, the philosophical problem will not go away, and could lead to us failing to act. I go in another direction.

Harking back to “Rather different Answers in Genesis”, I see creation as God creating from himself, thus everything that is is of the substance of and is God (albeit in a very partial way). In the process, he gives away some of his power, that resident in that portion of his creation. This is, of course, a panentheist viewpoint (if I held that God had poured out the whole of his self into creation, it would be a pantheist one, but I cannot escape the experience that tells me that there is more). It is not, however, the panentheism of (for instance) Jurgen Moltman which talks of a withdrawing of God to provide the space in which other things can be, though that can produce somewhat similar results.

This is, in essence, a solution of type 5; a greater good is served. That greater good is not, however, just free will, it is individual existence. Even the inanimate is of and is God, and is permitted existence without (in all probability) having any shred of self-will which could be free, so are “lower” forms of life in which free will is an even more dubious concept than it is in humanity. There is thus no real problem with the criticisms of the concept of free will, for instance from the psychological angle.

There are, of course, both elements of many of the type 5 solutions and elements of other solutions wrapped up in that concept. In particular, it is very compatible with type 6 (evil is not a thing in and of itself) solutions and type 1 (God is not all-powerful) solutions; though there is less necessity to posit other spiritual forces in order to make it work, conceptualising the actions of groups or other strictly speaking nonsentient parts of creation as animated by spirits in the way of Walter Wink, William Stringfellow and John Howard Yoder does meld very neatly with it.

Lest this be thought to be too much a type 2 answer, i.e. God is unfeeling, let me point out that in this concept-space although everything is done by God, everything is also done to God. Elie Wiesel wrote “Behind me, I heard the same man asking: “For God’s sake, where is God?” And from within me, I heard a voice answer: “Where He is? This is where–hanging here from this gallows…”. And that is where Matt. 25 takes me. “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? ³⁹ When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ “.

I take very little literally, but that, I take literally. It is not just that the stranger, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick or the prisoner might be Christ in disguise, it is that they are all God, undisguised.

We suffer, any one of us suffers, any part of creation suffers: God suffers.

A few weeks ago I found myself trying to multitask in the kitchen at the Alpha course I’m helping with, loading and unloading a commercial dishwasher while trying to explain to another helper why I really don’t buy into PSA (Penal Substitutionary Atonement) as an atonement theory. Now I’m a man, and multitasking is therefore not something I’m good at, so I wasn’t giving the theology as much attention as I should have, nor was I able to recall the exact wording of Hebrews with my hands full of plates. In fact, I haven’t yet given Hebrews sufficient detailed attention, as I’ve tended to think that it speaks specifically to Jewish Christians, among whom I do not number.

James quoted Hebrews to me, but in a very general way – under the Levitical system of sacrifices “without blood there is no forgiveness”, and I suggested that if that were what the writer was saying, then the writer was wrong in terms of the Levitical system, because not all sin offerings involved animal sacrifice – it was perfectly possible to sacrifice grain (Lev. 2:1-16; 6:14-18; 7:9-10; 10:12-13). There the conversation ended, because for him it was not viable to suggest that any part of scripture was mistaken.
Sorry, James. I do try not to argue outside the hermaneutical assumptions of those I’m talking to, but on this occasion I wasn’t giving you my full attention.In fact, the relevant passage is Hebrews 9:22, which reads “Indeed, under the Law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (NIV). The word “almost” is crucial, particularly as in the Greek it probably governs the whole sentence, including “there is no forgiveness of sins”. A better translation might be “One might almost [say that] under the Law everything is purified by blood and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (some translations do render it this way).What the writer of Hebrews is therefore saying here is not that there was no possible alternative to a blood sacrifice in order that sins should be forgiven, but that a blood sacrifice was very clearly a valid way in which sins could be forgiven under the Levitical system.

There were others, though. Fire (Lev. 13:52,55; 16:27; Num. 31:23; Water (Exod. 19:30; Lev. 15:5; 16:26,28; 22:6; Num. 31:24); Incense (Num. 16:46-48); Intercession (Exod. 32:30-32) and Prayer (of confession and contrition) (Ps. 32 and 51). By the time Hebrews was written, confession, contrition and making amends was already becoming the primary model for sins being forgiven.

Indeed, the Temple sacrificial system was not the primary system for Jews in the diaspora. Granted, the fact that it was there, and was observing the high holy days (in particular the feast of the Atonement, to which a lot of reference is made in Hebrews) was comforting both in a vicarious way, by dealing with atonement in respect of unknown sins and as a hope of eventual attendance there. But it wasn’t the centre of their day to day religious practice; that was the home and secondarily the synagogue or hall of learning. Judaism had found an accomodation for working without a Temple during the long Babylonian exile and during the period of return before the Temple was rebuilt, and it wasn’t any more absolutely vital.

What I arrive at is the conclusion (with which I think the author of Hebrews would agree) that there really was no absolute necessity for sins to be forgiven via a blood sacrifice to end all blood sacrifices. This is good, as I would have extreme difficulty in respecting a deity who did demand this as the one and only way of being forgiven. This is one of the many reasons why I do not like PSA as a theory of the principal importance of Christ; it demands that I see God as something I know he is not.

On the other hand, it was probably high time that blood sacrifices were ended as a means of seeking forgiveness for sins (and for other purposes), and seeing Jesus’ death in that way was a viable image for one part of the complex argument of Hebrews. It had been high time when Psalm 40:6 and Hosea 6:6 were written. Or Amos 5:21-24.

Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream. Forget sacrifices, unless they are of yourself in imitation of Christ.