Eyre Lines

Anyone who has read around my blog generally (and I’m becoming aware that there is actually quite a lot of it) will appreciate that the reason I’m where I am, a panentheist contemplative mystic with a largely scientific-rationalist thought process trying to settle down into something like a normative form of Christianity, is because I found at an early stage F.C. Happold’s book “Mysticism, a Study and Anthology”. I was persuaded by that of a number of things:-
Firstly, I had somehow become a mystic (rather than some other explanation, such as “completely mad”);
Secondly, principally via the quotations from the Oxyrhyncus papyri (out of the Gospel of Thomas), Jesus was a panentheist mystic;
Thirdly, saints Paul and John were mystics of some description;
Fourthly, there was a long chain of respected mystics within Christianity, many of whom I could identify as panentheist in their experience even if restrained from anything like a full statement of panentheism in their words;
Fifthly that a wide variety of other religions around the world had also produced numbers of panentheist mystics, many of whom had felt able to express their experiences in more overtly panentheistic terms than the Christian and proto-Christian writers.

I later found that I could identify passages which sounded very strongly to me as if they were based on a panentheist mystical appreciation of the world in other gospels, notably in Matthew.

I wrote in “Mythicism and the Christ of Faith” “I have a clear conception of what he was (as an historical figure) in that he has to have been a God-mystic, as I am a God-mystic. I wish him to be the archetypal God-mystic on whom I can base myself…”. In other words, in reading the gospels, Thomas and to some extent Paul, I am looking for a template of a Historical Jesus who is a panentheist God-mystic. I can also look for the Christ of faith through, for example, St. John and St. Paul, but principally I am going to relate to that of Jesus which is most similar to my peculiarity (and I acknowledge that there do not seem to be vast numbers of panentheist mystics in Christianity, and even less who actually write from a panentheist perspective).

However, I read Historical Jesus study and am struck by exactly the conclusion which John Dominic Crossan came to in “The Historical Jesus”; that many of those seeking to find the Jesus of history “do autobiography and call it biography”, i.e. they find the Jesus who resembles them, which is the Jesus they want to find. Knowingly or unknowingly, when setting criteria for the authenticity or otherwise of sayings of Jesus, they set criteria which will privilege the view which, mirabile dictum, they then proceed to find is the authentic Jesus. I would put it as “seeking Jesus, they find a mirror”. Crossan found “a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant” from the subtitle of that book; I am not suggesting that Crossan is Mediterranean, Jewish or a Peasant, but I am suggesting that his preconceptions have led him to a substantially demythologised Jesus stripped of a lot of features which appear in the gospels, and that those include a distinct affiliation with the more marginal classes of society, a non-privileged background and, in all probability, feelings against imperial rule, all of which I suspect could well apply to himself.

So, am I doing exactly the same as all the eminent scholars who have preceded or paralleled my scholarly very non-eminent efforts? It does have to be an ever-present danger. It used to be the case that I could comfortably say “and if, on analysis, the author of these sayings were not Jesus, then there was in the process of redaction of the work a writer who was a panentheist mystic of great stature, and I do not need that to have been ‘Jesus’”. However, that is not so much the case now. I am considerably more invested in the community of believers or Christianity than I used to be, and I have also started finding substantial devotional value in the Christ of faith (about which more later). As the Christ of faith rests, in Christian tradition, almost entirely on the Historical Jesus, a separating between Jesus/Christ and the panentheist mystic or mystics in the equation would be less than optimal.

I do not, however, see the Historical Jesus (whether this be authentic or a construction of his followers’ memories) as a fairly one-dimensional “panentheist God-mystic” and nothing else. I am myself, after all, not merely a panentheist God-mystic. I don’t have a problem with him also being other things. Possibly, however, he was not all of the things which scholars have found him to be. After all, my base approach with most things theological is to champion both “both-and” and “neither-nor” explanations simultaneously. If anyone spots me talking like a postmodernist, however, I give you leave to call me on it in the strongest terms!

Actually, this thinking is basically forensic; I look at competing witness statements and attempt to assess what truth they may all be talking about, similarly with advocates; by and large, witnesses think that they are telling the truth and advocates think they are advancing the same (although in the second case, ethically all they need is not to advance what they know to be a lie). I can therefore sift through the products of great scholarship and form a reasoned opinion without, on the whole, having to have anything remotely like the scholarly learning and abilities which they have developed. Nor do I need to allege any conspiracies, cover-ups or deliberate fabrications.

So what are these pictures of Jesus? There is a fairly good list at Early Christian Writings, some of which I will quote, with the names of scholars who espouse these as given there:-

Jesus the Hellenistic Hero Gregory Riley Jesus the Revolutionary Robert Eisenman Jesus the Wisdom Sage John Dominic Crossan Robert Funk Burton Mack Stephen J. Patterson

Jesus the Man of the Spirit Marcus Borg Stevan Davies Geza Vermes Jesus the Prophet of Social Change Richard Horsley Hyam Maccoby Gerd Theissen Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet Bart Ehrman Paula Fredriksen Gerd Lüdemann John P. Meier E. P. Sanders

I have deliberately omitted from this list those who chiefly see the Christ of faith, including the mythicists; I do not discount them, but they are talking of a Jesus founded, in my view, entirely in interpretation and not in factual personality (so far as it might be possible to do that), and I am not dealing with that Jesus here. I do deal with that Jesus devotionally, but have no problem acknowledging that Jesus as a human construct.

I have no problem at all in Jesus having been a Hellenistic hero-martyr, a wisdom sage or a prophet of social change as well as the “man of the spirit” which is the nearest any of these categories come to what I really think Jesus was, at the most vital level. Perhaps I would not arrive at these in exactly the same way as the authors listed, and I think that in almost every case they are too protective of their own viewpoint against others and go somewhat too far in stressing their preferred image, but the general direction of their thinking does not raise my panentheist mystical hackles.

Although not listed as a separate cagegory, numbers of these would also categorise Jesus as an observant Jew (granted with some slightly radical ideas), a Pharisee and a man more of the people than of the elite, and particularly attracted to the marginalised, the “lost of the house of Israel”. Again, I have no problem with these descriptions.

None, however, list “Messiah” or “Prophet” as possibilities, principally, I think, because both are thought to include supernatural elements and those are anathema to historical enquiry. I will be revisiting those later.

I do have problems with Eisenman’s “Revolutionary” Jesus, though I think that in fact even Eisenman might agree that his evidence comes primarily from Jesus’ brother James, who possibly was an active revolutionary. This picture does not fit well with the Wisdom Sage, Man of the Spirit or Social Prophet identities (individually or collectively), for a start. It requires too much material which stresses non-violent action and pacifism to be explained away or excluded (as does, for instance, Reza Aslan in “Zealot: the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth”). In addition, I can go to my template for a mystic and enquire whether active, aggressive revolution is consistent with this.

The most overwhelming feature of mystical experience as I see it described elsewhere and as I experience it myself is the removal of the perception of barriers between the self and the other, such that the self becomes one with “the all” (and with every individual part of it). It is nearly, but not quite, impossible to avoid equation of “the all” with God and make of this a theosis, with the proviso that “that which the self is one with” is experienced as immeasurably greater than the sum of “all that is” in any materialistic sense (thus becoming panentheism rather than panethism).

I stress that this is something which is vividly experienced, not something which is arrived at as a neat philosophical way of looking at things. For the mystic, it is subjectively not belief, it is fact; this is the way things are. It is also the case that the rest of the material world is going to be experienced vividly without boundaries; the other is in a very real way a part of you yourself.

This is a phenomenon known sometimes as disindividuation, the complete collapse of the boundaries of the self; it is not to be confused with the phenomenon of deindividuation, which although it has some similarities to disindividuation, involves merely groups of people, and prompts such things as “herd mentality”. Deindividuation seems always to be linked with the surrender of the self to the group; disindividuation may involve the surrender of the self to the All, but may also involve the sense of the All as within (and therefore in a sense subordinate to) the self. Most commonly, both are experienced either simultaneously or cycling so rapidly as to be nearly indistinguishable from simultaneity. The presence (and non-significance) of the boundaries of the self can also be felt simultaneously. Mysticism is not for those with difficulties accepting cognitive dissonance!

It follows that the mystic will feel immense empathy with and compassion towards the world generally and fellow human beings more specifically when in the mystical state; my own experience and that I learn from others indicates that this empathy tends to persist long beyond the peak experience itself. This will, I think, inevitably colour (if not dominate) the thinking and actions of the mystic.

Thus a “social revolutionary” who feels for, wishes to ameliorate the lot of and preferentially associates with the dispossessed, the marginalised, the social outcasts and the politically powerless is to be expected of a mystic; he is, after all, at one with all of them, and not (so far as he is concerned) in a metaphorical way. So too do we expect a scorn for the expoiters, the dominators and those who show little or no mercy or fellow feeling. It is, however, unlikely that he will propose violence as a general course, as he will also be at one with the exploiters and dominators while regretting their actions.

It would not, however, be inconsistent for him to carry out some limited act of violence (provided the end was sufficiently good) or similarly to anticipate a degree of violence in setting right some injustice; I cannot therefore completely rule out that Jesus might on occasion have contemplated an actual uprising, I can just doubt that he would have advocated it.

It will be completely consistent for him to consider his own life as disposable in pursuit of a higher end – after all, his consciousness of self extends far beyond the limits of his physical frame, and “his” survival is no longer completely dependent on the survival of the particular fleshly vessel in which his consciousness is centred. Thus the “hero martyr” image becomes more believable.

However, the empathy and compassion which he will feel will also be attributed by him to the All with which he is at one (and will be confirmed by his continuing experience). It is therefore somewhat unlikely that he will have visions of Godly intervention to provoke catastrophe. The mindset of “this is wrong, but God will act to correct it” is somewhat inimical to the mystical experience as I know it; the mindset of “this is wrong, but God will move to encourage people to learn from it and eventually be changed” is closer to the likely attitude. I therefore have strong doubts that Jesus was actually an apocalyptic prophet as this is normally understood.

Empathy and compassion will be joined with at least an occasional ability to be hypersensitive to very small signals. He is therefore likely to gain a reputation of being able to know peoples’ thoughts. This will also assist in, for instance, the diagnosis of psychological or medical problems. Not only perception will be affected, but also subconscious reasoning will be massively heightened, which may also assist diagnoses. A reputation as a healer is therefore to be expected, irrespective of any grossly supernatural effect.

The heightening of subconscious reasoning (in speed as well as accuracy), coupled with the knowledge element of the experience in and of itself, is, I think, bound to result in “wisdom” statements and statements which are not initially readily understood by those around him. I should point out that my attribution of enhanced reasoning to the mystical condition is very largely based on my own experience (and to some extent that of others) and not on any scientific study (I’m not aware of any). It would, however, seem to have analogies to athletes talking about “being in the zone”, archers talking about “being one with the arrow and or the target” and similar phenomena which do appear to have some scientific backing.

The same feature is also likely to improve the ability instinctively to predict the outcome of chains of events now in existence. At this point, I would like to revisit the issue of “Apocalyptic Prophet”. I admit that I start here with a bias; I do not think that the future is predictable in the long term, even by God. I do however think that prophets generally tend to consider the trends observable in their current societies and extrapolate as to what is likely to happen if nothing is done to change direction. This will be particularly marked if they are also mystics and therefore possess, sporadically, the ability to harness better the whole of their thinking processes and not just the conscious part. I think that, given this assumption and from what we know of the situation in the Palestine of around 30 CE, we can accept that it did not actually require supernatural power to realise that the political situation was grossly unstable, even without another movement of messianic expectations.

Given the known characteristics of Roman governors of the time, and in particular Pontius Pilate, who was eventually recalled (inter alia) on the grounds of excessive brutality, it seems to me that unrest leading to a Roman overreaction was predictable, and with a little additional foresight, that the destruction of the Temple was to be anticipated. There was, after all, precedent for that destruction; the first Temple had been destroyed by oppressive occupiers. Following from that, a major crisis in Judaism could also be anticipated. I think this is, in the terms of Judean Jews of the time, sufficiently apocalyptic to satisfy a suggestion of “Apocalyptic Prophet”.

Whether the details of any sayings by Jesus on this subject were anything like those we now see reported in the Gospels is, to my mind, less certain. Memories are reinforced by conformity to expectations and, indeed, are adjusted the better to conform to these. The expectation in significant sections of Second Temple Judaism was of a Messiah, and a substantial proportion of that expected divine intervention to establish the messiah. Much of it (probably overlapping other divisions) anticipated a kingly Messiah of the line of David who would restore the monarchy and usher in a golden age.

Assuming Jesus to have prophetically predicted such an apocalyptic (in the more mundane sense) event, I would expect the panentheist Mystic who felt all life to be a part of him, and whose pains and deaths he would suffer in sympathy, to want to avoid being the catalyst for the event himself. It does not surprise me therefore to see that in Mark and to a lesser extent Matthew, Jesus is found to instruct the disciples repeatedly not to speak of his wonder-working to outsiders. He would not, I think, have wanted to be viewed as “the Messiah” given the expectations of very many listeners unless he felt that he had extremely thoroughly transmitted the message that his “Kingdom of God” or “Kingdom of Heaven” was not an earthly empire, but a spiritual awakening which would spread through the people and which had already commenced. I write in “Kingdom Thinking” of what I consider (using my assumptions as to Jesus’ nature as a mystic) to be his message of the Kingdom.

I think he managed to transmit both the message that an overturning of the current order was imminent (in which he was entirely correct) and that the Kingdom of God was on hand, among his followers, experienceable by some of them at least in this lifetime and that it would spread. In this he was also correct; the timescale, however, was not the 40 years to the destruction of the Temple, and the Kingdom has still not come to its full fruition. May it come soon.

In sum, therefore, my own preconception about “what Jesus was” seems to me to fit a large amount of what scholars have extracted as their preferred pictures. In fact, it actually fits a fair amount of material which is normally attributed to some viewpoint of Jesus’ followers (probably the writers of the gospels), which does not therefore need to be too assiduously minimised. I may not be correct; I am not a scholar of the original texts. However, if I am correct, this is an understanding of Jesus which is, to say the least, underplayed by most scholars. I think if bears closer investigation by someone with more credentials than me.

I’ve blogged previously about my interpretational technique ( part of Idolatry and Eisegesis), but to refresh memory, I’ve preferred to form opinions about Biblical passages before reading much (or sometimes any) scholarship about them, using legal forensic technique and substantial prayer to illuminate them. After doing so, I’ll look at what others have said, and sometimes completely modify my thinking (back to the drawing board), sometimes tweak my thinking a bit, sometimes find confirmation from a different angle. I like confirmations from a different angle; it seems to me a form (albeit a weak form) of multiple attestation.

One area where I have been very dependent on scholarship which I can’t readily check for myself is in historical-critical scholarship which shows levels of redaction, extracts possible lost sources and, above all, sets things in a historical perspective. A lot of this has fallen in relatively recent years under the label “The Quest for the Historical Jesus”. In the post I linked to above, I did criticise rather gently one of the criteria for authenticity used by the Jesus Seminar, the poster children for “Historical Jesus” for some years until fairly recently. Nonetheless I read avidly, for instance, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, and am inclined to agree with them far more readily than I do with more conservative scholars such as N.T. Wright, though N.T. Wright is himself no foreigner to historical-critical methods.

I’ve recently been reading more in the area of Historical Jesus, with some writers whose scholarship puts some of my thinking into question, namely writers who argue that nothing we can do in the field of scholarship can actually give confidence as to the words of Jesus. Such things as mnemonic studies indicate that even the very earliest testimonies (none of which we, of course, have) will have adjusted wordings, so accuracy at the remove of an entire generation seems almost impossible.

I have, of course, previously been at pains to separate the Historical Jesus from the Christ of Faith, with a dividing line at the Crucifixion. Insofar as I wish to follow Jesus, I feel I need to follow the Jesus who walked and talked among men 2000 years ago; the Christ of Faith is a creation of post-death (and post-resurrection) thinking (and experiencing) about what Jesus meant to his followers, and does not really give them practical instructions as to how to live as he did.

I have a clear conception of what he was (as an historical figure) in that he has to have been a God-mystic, as I am a God-mystic. I wish him to be the archetypal God-mystic on whom I can base myself; beyond that, other aspects of his meaning and importance to his followers are, to me, mythic elements. There is no real argument about myth, about story – it either works for you or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t work for you, you find another myth, another story which does (or amend the one you have slightly). As a result I argue minimally with my fellow-believers when it comes to looking at what we tend to refer to as the “spiritual interpretation” of a passage – I might suggest that there is more than one spiritual interpretation, and we can then talk about which we prefer and why, and which means most to us at this point. Call it eisegesis, call it application, I’m not unduly bothered.

But some of this recent scholarship (and I’m thinking here of, inter alia, “Jesus, Criteria and the Demise of Authenticity”)  is making it impossible for me to perform this separation of historical Jesus and faith-created Christ; it would seem that even the earliest level of oral tradition or lost writing is already just “Christ of faith” as far as some of the writers in that book (and others) are concerned, and their arguments are beginning to look extremely convincing.

Having just spent some weeks arguing elsewhere with a Jewish mythicist, I have no time for the assertion that Jesus was nothing but a mythical figure. I agree with Bart Ehrmann that there is really no tenable argument that Jesus did not exist.  (My interlocutor there is a mythicist in relation to Jesus, but not in relation to anything within Judaism, in which he accepts the full orthodox position as a matter of faith – which he is prepared to concede is an act of faith, but not available for historical argument. It is history because he believes it to be so, and not for any other reason. If that seems to you a lopsided position, well, it seemed so to me as well.)

I am, however, a retired lawyer. I’m used to eyewitnesses, and to saying “there’s nothing quite so unreliable as an eyewitness”, which is only slightly exaggerating my experience. What is actually less reliable than one eyewitness is a group of eyewitnesses who have got together and agreed what actually happened, though that’s actually not what I meant by “only slightly”. At least with a set of somewhat conflicting accounts you have a reasonable change of putting them together and using forensic skills to reconstruct what probably did happen. I’ve never, therefore, been too wedded to the concept that any of the accounts we have, even if written down more or less contemporaneously, can actually be regarded as completely accurate. Yes, I know that it makes a significant difference if the policeman made a note as he was seeing or hearing something or if he went back to the police station to write it up (when it becomes far less reliable).

On the other hand, I have read plenty of accounts of people in oral cultures having far better memories for the actual words of sometimes quite extended speeches than anyone I’ve ever met could hope to achieve, and we are talking about an oral culture in 1^st century Palestine. Add to that the fact that the group of disciples are very likely to have been “hanging on every word” and to have discussed that shortly afterwards. Perhaps in those circumstances the phenomenon of the colluding eyewitnesses getting things even more wrong than any single recollection might have been reversed, and they might have been self-correcting?

As a result of these scholars in mnemonic studies, however, I am now thinking that I may be in the position of having no discernible fact about Jesus left from which I can start to reconstruct him, aside that he was Jewish, lived in the first 30 years of the first millennium, was a teacher, preacher and reputed healer and wonder-worker, probably from Galilee, and that he was executed by the Romans under Pontius Pilate in about 30 CE, probably by crucifixion. This is really little better than Jesus having not existed at all, so far as extracting what he actually said is concerned (an argument made by some in the mythicist camp which is, effectively, mythicism lite – but which seems quite likely to become a future scholarly mainstream).

We thus have just the “Christ of faith”, whether it be a very early, partly-formed impression or a later and better formed faith. Except, we don’t just have that, and we can’t just have that. I can’t because it is important to me that there be a real person who once lived to be followed (as otherwise I have no indication that the path I seek to follow is in the slightest practicable), Christianity generally cannot because, like Judaism, it is a historical religion; it bases itself in events which have actually happened in history, as Ernst Kasemann argued. Those events are beginning to become indistinguishable from myth, and the cherished beliefs of 2000 years are thus undermined.

I suppose that, to me, it shouldn’t matter too much. At root, I regard all of what we talk about when we talk about God (thank you, Rob Bell!) as being ways of talking about something which inherently defies human description, so I consider it firstly as all being basically myth (by which I mean stories which illustrate truths in a non-literal manner) and secondly as all being at least in some measure wrong.

But it does matter. I gave one reason above, namely of my need for a real exemplar, not an imagined one. There is another, and that is that I try the best I can to function within a Christian church. I find that it is all very well being a contemplative mystic, but I also grow in understanding through interchange with others This argues that I need a community of fellow believers, so what this development in scholarship does to my fellow Christians it does to some extent to me. This is particularly true as I am highly likely to be the “go to” man to explain it and try to apologise it out of existence to a significant number, even if I do not find myself actually teaching about it (and the bit of my consciousnes which I call “GF” assures me that that’s a potential outcome as God seems to be moving me in that direction at the moment). That would lead me to the problem of not being able to teach what I can’t bring myself to believe other than as a “possibility of thinking”.

It is not likely to be much consolation to them to hear me say that I ultimately regard nothing in anyone’s statement of faith as saying anything accurately about objective reality (see my comment about myths earlier in this piece). Nor are they going to want to hear me say that this impacts very little at all on any statements in scripture when regarded as valid statements in the history of thought, so long as they can be placed reasonably on a timeline and in a milieu (i.e. Sitz im leben, for those who are into technical terms).

Perhaps, however, we might move down the road which it seems was travelled by my Jewish mythicist interlocutor. It seems that he can at the same time perfectly well accept that, for instance, the stories of Rabbi Eleazer are fiction (probably from the 2^nd or 3^rd century) and yet that they are absolutely true occurrences of the 1^st century, that the Oral Torah was developed over many centuries and yet that it was given by Moses at Mt. Sinai. There is historical fact, and there is traditional belief, and you can (apparently) hold the two without tension and actually assert traditional belief as superior to history.

I doubt it, though. I think the degree of cognitive dissonance which that requires you to accept is just too great. In addition, it seems to me, and it’s going to seem to a lot of my listeners, far too close to asserting a six-day creation (happily for me, there are few six-day creationists in my church and a general feeling against them) and therefore far too close to rubbishing science. Granted, having started my further education as a physicist, I suppose I could explain again how you know what a particle is, you know what a wave is, yes, the two are very different, but light is both. At the same time… No, I haven’t had much joy with that one so far.

Maybe, though, there’s another way via tradition, and that’s just to teach that the Jesus we know is the creation of the memories and of the living experience of Christ in the lives of his followers and that this is sufficient fact for us. I could say that this way of thinking about the world has worked well for many years and, actually, continues to work very well as long as you don’t ask it to be historical or scientific. And that the only demonstration you need of that is in your experience and that of your friends here and now. How does what happened 2000 years ago really matter when you have current experience of the Holy Spirit and of the Living Christ? Granted, there was a historical Jesus and what he said and did was clearly extraordinary and has, in one or another way, led to the situation we are in now. However, that Jesus is now gone and we live in and we experience only the now, which includes experience of the living Christ.

Open your hearts, and give your brains a rest, I may say.

I may even get away with it…

(to the tune of Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding out for a Hero”:-

Where have all the good men gone
Why don’t you help me, Lord?
Where’s the angel of revenge
With mighty flaming sword?
Isn’t there a rider pale upon a whitened steed?
Late at night I toss and I turn and I dream
of what I need

Chorus:-

I need a rapture
I’m holding out for a rapture ’til the end of my days
‘Cause I don’t want to work
For the Kingdom on earth
Or to fellowship with all the gays
I need a rapture
I’m holding out for a rapture ’til the end of my life
As I can’t get no ease
With no liberals here
And I want to leave them to the strife

Somewhere after midnight
In my wildest fantasy
Somewhere just beyond my reach
There’s someone reaching down for me
Corpses rising out of tombs and trumpets blaring loud
Lifting up into the air and feeling mighty proud

[Chorus]

Now with the rate with which my Humvee burns gas
Soon there will be none left at all
Seasons are changing with all my exhaust
Always fall

We can’t have any peace in Iraq
Nor Syria or Israel
Armageddon must happen
It can not fail

[Chorus]

I need a rapture. I’m holding out for a rapture ’til the end of my life.

Joel Watts writes in “Unsettled Christianity” linking to some sources talking about Historical Jesus research (or as one would have it, speculation). I feel moved to write a bit about this, given (if nothing else) that I have been throwing posts to and fro on The Religion Forum over the last few weeks with a couple of Jewish friends, one of whom remains convinced that Jesus was a fictional character made up by “the Church Fathers”, in which I’m pretty sure he means more Paul and the four Evangelists than those we tend to call “Church Fathers”. I don’t link to that discussion, as I don’t think it sheds much light; it can be found in the “Interfaith” section under “The Genesis of God…” thread.

Like the anonymous Irish Atheist of the second link, I don’t find it reasonably feasible that there was not a genuine historical individual called Jesus, so the complete mythicism of the first link seems bizarre to me. And yet, is it?

I do notice in practice that most Christians of the more conservative and/or more evangelical bent seem fixated virtually entirely on “the Christ of Faith” (as opposed to “the Jesus of History”). Yes, if you consider the major impact of the Christian message (that is, hopefully, to say the message of Jesus) to be that a god-man came into existence and died nastily {and was resurrected, though that is not necessarily as important} to produce a metaphysical change in the universe ( i.e. in God’s attitude to humanity) which benefited those who could induce themselves to believe certain things about him.  

I don’t. Somewhat naively, perhaps, I think that the major impact of the resurrection was to validate the lifetime words of Jesus, which in turn I see as centred on the announcement of the Kingdom of God as being a present and growing reality at that time, into which he invited his followers. I see the Kingdom of God as being, in part, a vibrant personal relationship with God verging on unity with him/her/it/other. I can understand that; it is something I have experienced, off and on, for most of my adult life.

Resurrection? Well yes. I am admittedly far closer to the Irish Atheist than the majority of the Christians around me – no, let me rephrase that, than any of the Christians around me. I don’t really do supernatural (with some provisos, which do not affect this argument). However, going back to the acknowledgement that there HAD to be a Jesus in order that within 20 years or so of his death there would be a rapidly growing group of followers who had penetrated half way across the Roman world in numbers, there also, to me, HAD to be something radically different about their experience shortly after their leader’s maximally painful and degrading death at the hands of the then world superpower from, say, the several previous and later Jewish resistance leaders whose followers disintegrated immediately after their deaths, insofar as they themselves survived their leader.

I read the various accounts in the gospels, and note that if you attempt to harmonise them, you do not get a physical resurrection in the body which was buried; as Paul says at an early stage, you get a Jesus resurrected in a radically different form. One which can walk through walls and very nearly bilocate. I grant you that there are stories of eating (could be illusion) and touching (I’ve personally experienced a tactile hallucination of Jesus) and that several people have seen the same thing at the same time (I’ve witnessed group hallucinations, even if I were unaware of the tendency of groups to provoke false memory in each other), but they don’t shake my conclusion that the primary location of these events was in the minds of followers. OK, there may have been some actual physical component, I suppose (as a scientist I can never say something thought scientifically impossible could absolutely NOT happen), but I don’t need that in order to explain the accounts, and the accounts are more than ample to explain why the cult spread.

For completeness, the accounts said there was an empty tomb. The number of possible naturalistic explanations for this are legion, and not all of them involve an agent who would then have been delighted to produce the remains.

So, I have an experienced, if not a photographable, resurrection as a very probable historical fact.

Clearly, I don’t have any miracles as very probable historical facts, as massive scientific improbability makes them – well – miraculous. No, this doesn’t incline me to think that they may actually have happened exactly as reported, it merely inclines me to believe that the writers has the same attitude to reporting supernatural events as most previous “historians” in the Greek speaking world had had, namely that they were quite likely explanations anyhow and that if a person were important, they were absolutely guaranteed.

Is this remotely important to me? No. I am not likely to be convinced by a miracle I actually witness, let alone one reported by someone living in a far more credulous age. I am likely to look for a naturalistic explanation and, if one does not come to hand, put it in the category of “strange events to be investigated later if at all” (i.e. “anomalous experimental results”). In any event, the concept of a God who is obliged to transgress the remarkably wonderful systems of nature which he may possibly have had some hand in creating in order to put right something which was probably not broken in the first place and which could have been far more simply put right by the transgressing of a lot less natural principles is not one which I can reconcile with my own experience of God.

However, we need to go back to what I said almost at the beginning: it is important to me, it is always going to be important to me, to know what the message actually was which Jesus brought with him, expounded in person, and in order to extract that from the writings of his followers, who were far more concerned about what Jesus meant to them and to the world as a whole than they were with what he actually said, I need Historical Jesus study.

I do approach Historical Jesus study cautiously, even though I am looking to use the skills of the experts in this field to give me a set of giant shoulders on which to climb in order, hopefully, to see a little further. Many of the scholars in this field discount things which I might not discount; notably, few, very few, are identifiable as practising contemplative mystics, and they therefore discount things as inauthentic which I look and say “Yes, that’s a figurative description of what this or that aspect of the mystical state is like”, or is a consequence of such thinking.

Given that I indicated earlier that I was well acquainted with a state of quasi-unity with God, why am I bothered about this? Can’t I just use that state in order to gain my own more direct knowledge? Well, no. Firstly, I am not much (if at all) in control of what happens when in such a state, including what information I may receive. Secondly, the picture I have formed of Jesus over the years from those writings which I am reasonably confident DO reflect his lifetime teachings indicate to me someone who was massively better acquainted with that state then me, and whose information would therefore be hugely better.

And lastly, I know personally of no way to ensure that those around me have a similar experience to my own, which I would wish on all of my friends (should they wish it for themselves) and, yes, all of my enemies, irrespective of whether they might wish it for themselves (they deserve the total comprehension of personal wrongdoing which tends to come with it, even if not the associated comprehension of forgiveness…). I believe there are clues and possibly more than clues as to this in Jesus’ statements. But then, I believe there are clues and possibly more than clues as to this in the statements of some of his followers; I just don’t regard them as equally reliable with those of Jesus.  I do think that following what Jesus suggested at least improves everyone’s chances – and even if it doesn’t improve a particular individual’s position, it produces a better world through their actions.

That, too, is God’s Kingdom, and no deferred gratification is needed for a small advance of it day by day.

Always interested in new perspectives, and noting he had written “Jesus and the eyewitnesses”, I listened to a talk given by Dr. Bauckham entitled “The Four Gospels and other Gospels: is our canon right?”. I was disappointed, and probably will not be reading his book.

The generality of what he had to say was entirely reasonable in relation to the plethora of Infancy Gospels, post-resurrection appearance accounts and the like which are now known to us, but with one important exception, the Gospel of Thomas. He was, to be fair, able to point out that there was argument as to whether the Gospel of Thomas was in fact Gnostic, a label he used for the remainder (and he admitted he used the term loosely; I cannot argue with that).

I was waiting for him to say at each point he made “but this does not, of course, apply to the Gospel of Thomas”, but he only came close to that on one occasion. On two other occasions the point he was making might possibly have applied to the Gospel of Thomas, but would have required further argument before I felt it reasonable to apply it (that it was not narrative and therefore did not include a wealth of detail about the Palestinian circumstances of the time is true, but not as far as I am aware a reason given by the Church Fathers for non-inclusion of a work; and that it did not present a view of Jesus entirely consistent with that of the four canonical Gospels, which I would argue but which has some measure of validity).

As a result, he ended up dismissing what I consider to be possibly the least redacted early source for Jesus’ actual words, by association with other works, under a number of headings which it plainly does not fall within. I hope that this was sloppy scholarship and/or presentation rather than deliberate evasion of the issues surrounding Thomas. It would have been trivial to note at the beginning that the scope of his talk did not extend to Thomas and that it was therefore a separate issue; more reasonably, he should have addressed Thomas entirely separately and at length.

Two other points in his talk were, to me, dubious in the extreme. Firstly, he considers all the canonical Gospels to date from the period within living memory of the events and, therefore, to have been written with access to the eyewitness accounts of apostles. Now, I have written elsewhere about the testimony of Papias as quoted by Eusebius which, to me, makes it impossible that the narrative Matthew and Mark were written in this period (and if narrative Mark was not, neither was Luke). Textual criticism, to me, makes it beyond reasonable argument that all four canonical Gospels were multiply redacted; this of itself renders this timing and association dubious. The manifold errors of geography in the synoptics (a point he uses against some of the Gnostic writings) make it very unlikely that they were written by people with first hand knowledge of the Holy Land or by people who had access to eyewitnesses. Lastly, they appear to have been written in Pauline influenced churches, which would mean that access to the majority of the immediate disciples and particularly apostles would be extremely limited (those adhering to the Jerusalem church), Peter being a possible exception.

The second point I take issue with is his comment that historians of the period were careful to rest their accounts on eyewitness evidence if they themselves were not eyewitnesses. This attitude was, it is true, becoming counsel of excellence in the Roman world (although Roman historians of the times were not necessarily particularly good at following it and were sometimes abysmally bad at checking the veracity of statements they had heard) but had not by any manner of means been the case in Greek “historical” writing to that date – and we are talking about the Greek-speaking rather than the Latin-speaking world here. Frankly, what I would expect from a Greek writer of this period is uncritical fabulation as much as actual reporting of fact.

I will grant that Josephus, who like the majority of the gospel writers was a Hellenised Jew, displays a much higher standard, but he was not writing as an adherent of a religion. For an indication of the historical accuracy of Jewish writings of adherents of the period, we need only look at the tales recorded rather later in the Mishna, which cannot by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as careful history (that tendency was still largely unchanged five centuries later with the assembly of the Talmud).

As I say, I was disappointed. I am open to argument that this was an aberration on his part, or persuasion that despite this, I should actually read something of his (which, it is fair to say, might be better argued).

Some more thoughts about “beyond Alpha”

This follows on from “not the Omega” and the Alpha postscript.

I referenced deindividuation and personal suasion as two factors which I thought may be at work in Alpha; that should not be taken to indicate that I do not think the Holy Spirit works through Alpha, just that those are factors to be taken into account and may, indeed, be among the methods which the Holy Spirit uses to produce the result of personal experience.

The acknowledgement that these factors do exist does, I think, mean that a programme should be in place to follow on from Alpha and work on the basis of any personal experience to produce an individual centred on God through Jesus aided by the Spirit (rather than the dangers of centring on the group or on the individual who prayed with them when they experienced the Spirit).

In fact, though, I think some follow on is essential in any event. There are parts of Alpha which deal to some extent with this, primarily Session 13 “What about the Church”, but to some extent in Session 14 “How can I make the most of the rest of my life” and even Session 11 “Why and how should I tell others”.  I could argue that Session 5 “Why and how should I read the Bible” and Session 4 “Why and how do I pray” also have a role to play, as they are the two sections dealing with personal as opposed to communal practice. Nothing in the course at present seems to me to bring all these threads together. Perhaps that should really be the job of Session 14.

At that point, I suppose much depends on what groups and programmes the church running the Alpha course has to offer (or could refer people to, if we’re feeling ecumenical!). Just worship services is not, I submit, going to be enough. I’ve seen Alpha courses follow on with a “First Steps” programme of introduction to Bible Study and then morph the resulting groups into cell groups, which seems an option.  

In any event, I think substantial consideration should be given to continuing the discussion groups created during Alpha as something approaching cell groups, if not actually as cell groups. This would, I think, capitalise on any group-centring or individual-centring which may have occurred; it will then take work in the cell group to delink those centrings. If persistence is too low to make a sensible sized cell group out of a discussion group, they could be combined or, possibly, tacked on to an existing group.

In any event, though, I’d want to see a stress on developing an individual spiritual programme, a personal praxis, in order to refocus on a personal relationship with God rather than one mediated by the group or another individual and, of course, because that is desirable. Either a portion of each cell group meeting could be devoted to discussing how individual praxis was developing (and talking through any issues which arose) or every third or fourth meeting could focus on this entirely; I suggest the first of these, as otherwise people might decide to skip the relevant sessions.

The “Journey” approach of Rev. Dr. John Vincent might well provide a good template for such follow-on groups, though it is possible they may go in unanticipated directions. So might the Emmaus Course material (probably concentrating on the “Growth” sections).

It occurs to me, though, that it would be possible to capitalise further on any individual centrings which arise by taking a leaf out of the book of 12 Step programmes, and encouraging a system of “sponsoring”. In this model, anyone who wished to follow on from Alpha would be encouraged to form a link with one of the helpers, who would then be responsible for supporting them, taking them through something akin to the 12 Steps and encouraging and assisting them into attendance at core services and membership of other groups within the church, including, of course, some form of service (an important concept within 12 Step and one which any missional, social gospel or radical church would be encouraging in any event.  I hope any church would be doing this, actually).

Clearly, in the light of my reservations earlier in this post and in the “postscript” post I link to above, one of the primary objectives of a sponsor would be to get the individual to develop their own praxis. I think it would also be worth considering that this “sponsorship” should be time-limited, both to encourage de-centring and to reassure individuals that this sponsoring was not a lifetime commitment, although I note that for many forms of personal praxis it is very desirable to have a Spiritual Director on a permanent basis. Perhaps, therefore, there should be an objective eventually to hand over to one of a group of people specialising in spiritual direction within the church?

It does seem to me that the assumption of the Alpha course is that a “one size fits all” personal transformation will be the result; a kind of standardised “born again” major transformational, paradigm changing experience. Most of the people I’ve met who are involved with Alpha are able to testify to such an experience, after all, so why should they assume anyone would be different? However I think from my own observations that many people are different; for one reason or another they are not susceptible to having such an abrupt paradigm change.

I anticipate, therefore, that there will be significant numbers who feel something as a result of going through Alpha, but nothing which they can identify as “born again”. I would like to think that their needs are being met; there may have been the start of an awakening which, if carefully nurtured, could blossom into something much greater. My suggestions above are designed to add an element of care for them.

Above all, I do not want to see people leave Alpha having not had an experience they could call “born again” feeling that they are failures, that they are excluded or, at the worst, that they are damned. I will therefore add one last element – everyone who leaves an Alpha course should have the opportunity of a one-to-one meeting to glean from them what their experience has actually been like, where they are now, to counsel them as to ways forward and to assure them of a continued welcome and support if they are still seeking. I say “opportunity”; I would prefer this to be a default, which someone could opt out of if they felt very strongly, but would otherwise be the norm.

Lastly, anyone with experience in sales will realise that these suggestions will also help in establishing persistence and in giving feedback to improve future Alpha courses. It may be impious to regard Alpha as a sales exercise, but it’s realistic. Granted, what is being “sold” is arguably a free gift (or, according to some theologies, a benefit already paid for), but what else is evangelism than sales?

I read at Experimental Theology in a comment from Ragamuffin Me:-

“How can Jesus be the “eternally begotten” Son”

My answer would be “In the same way as he is the eternally dying Son”.

In a recent post I wrote “In the first century, Christ was crucified by men who sinned at the behest of other men who sinned; today he is crucified again every time harm is done to any human being anywhere. We, humanity, crucified him by, not for, our sin, and we are still doing it every minute of every hour of every day.”

Paul writes strongly of “Christ in us”, for example Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the Life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith of the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me.”, and of “us in Christ”, for example 2 Cor. 5:17-21 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

I dismiss the obvious suggestion that Paul is only speaking to Christians here, and that anyone not a Christian cannot be thought of as being “in Christ” or of having “Christ in” them. It is only in this way that I think that Matthew 25, vv 31-40  “Then the King will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me’. Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?’ And the King will answer them ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me’ ” can make sense. Only if Christ can already be found in any of these people can he speak in this way.

Where I differ from Paul’s conception, therefore, is that I think our death and rebirth in Christ is a process of realisation, an internal, psychological process, the identity being there in the first place. We can therefore ourselves be eternally begotten and eternally dying with Christ in a constant process of self-realisation, of self-correction, of self-perfection.

 

(This post follows on from “No Gnosis” and covers some of the same ground, hopefully not too repetitively)

I bought Elaine Pagels’ “Beyond Belief: the Secret Gospel of Thomas” primarily because I wanted to see her arguments for the Fourth Gospel being to a considerable extent a reaction to the Gospel of Thomas; there is some interesting insight there; a convincing argument was made for John being a reaction to Thomas, which brings up the probability that Thomas is actually earlier than John, promoting its status to something far more in line with Jesus Seminar thinking than with more conservative views. It also included a spotlight on the idea that the experiential basis of the two authors is very similar, but John is very strong on the concept that all experience of God is through Christ, while Thomas considers direct experience of God to be the aiming point; John then uses typical gospel-writers’ licence to cast Thomas in a bad light wherever possible.  Using my own terminology, this is the typical conflict between the Christ-mystic (John) and the God-mystic (Thomas).  

It does sadden me that there has been so much historical conflict, but I can well understand it; I spent quite some time being antipathetic towards the Christ-mystic governed theology of the mainstream Christianity I was brought up in, and to Paul, who I fixed on at an early stage as being primarily responsible (along with John). I didn’t much like Trinitarian theology either; as a God-mystic, my sense of a fully immanent and entirely unitary God was so strong that I did not want to support what I considered a dilution of monotheism.

However, it is just that Trinitarian theology which allows for meeting of mind between the God-mystic and the Christ-mystic (and I assume for this purpose that what both are experiencing is in fact the same root experience, modified in its description through the thinking and particularly the belief-structures of the individual mystic).

There is to my eye little functional difference between mainstream Christian theology’s view of the nature and activity of Christ from that of the nature and activity of God, save perhaps for the insistence that such of God’s nature and activity as we are able to experience or witness is to a nearly exclusive extent Christ, insofar as it is not the Holy Spirit (and possibly the ascribing of events of natural evil {i.e. evil events which do not flow from man’s doing} to God rather than to Jesus).  Conservative theology is, perhaps, identical to mainstream on this point, but the results in practice in conservative evangelical churches seem to be a focus completely on Jesus/Christ where more mainstream churches would insist on focus on God. It thus follows that mainstream-to-conservative theology and practice would see the God-mystic’s actual experience as being experience of Jesus, were the God-mystic not to insist on using God-terminology rather than Jesus-terminology.

I cannot see that a mere difference of descriptive language where it is clear that the essence of what is being talked about is the same should be sufficient to fuel an 18 century long antipathy, dating this from the time of Irenaeus, and frequently attended by cries of “heresy” and more dangerous actions based on that charge.

It is, in fact, Irenaeus who is the hero or anti-hero of Pagel’s book, rather than Thomas. I found her picture of him and his stuggles with a very early Christian community under persecution, a community fractured and still with no really clear single identity, to be surprisingly endearing, and certainly conveying an understanding of the motivations behind his Five Volume “Against Heresies”. To understand all is to forgive all, or so it is said, and I may have moved some little way towards forgiveness of a man I see as the first main mover in the heresy-persecuting strain of Christianity which resulted in the destruction of so many ancient texts which would have been invaluable to historians and the lack of which moved the centre of the developing Christianity away from the experiential to the doctrinal, a trend which is perhaps now beginning to be corrected. Most seriously this antipathy towards supposed heretics caused many millions of deaths of “heretics” over the ensuing 18 centuries.

I’m moved a little way only; it is still difficult for me to feel empathy for someone who will advocate killing people for having what he considers an erroneous intellectual definition of a technical theological term.

The thing which most strikes me from Pagels’ account of Irenaeus is the difficulties he faced bringing together a coherent group where various elements seemed bent on going in widely different directions. Of course, what resulted was his condemnation of two things which have since become very major threads of Christianity; firstly the reinterpreting of scripture by individuals or small groups to produce views divergent from his orthodoxy (or rather proto-orthodoxy, as orthodoxy had not yet been defined), thus undermining any sense of coherence of the movement; secondly an insistence among the “Gnostics” of the importance of personal experience and it’s primacy.

Of course, the first has since the 16^th century been the result of the principle of “sola scriptura” which is the watchword of the Protestant Churches, and which has contributed to their fragmentation into thousands of different denominations; the second results in the charismatic movement which to some extent crosses the other bounds of denomination and theological complexion, and not infrequently leads to variant theological concepts.

There was another thread which Irenaeus disliked intensely, that being the very Gnostic idea that (to put it trivially) spirit was good, the world was bad. His arch-enemy in this was probably Valentinus; for Valentinus the world of matter was a mistake, and to be escaped from, initially via Gnosis giving consciousness of the spirit within and then on death to be fully freed from the taint of the material. For Irenaeus, as for most proto-orthodox Christians, the world was created by God and was good; the problem was with mankind, not with the entire creation.

Again here, the more conservative churches seem to me to be preaching that the one important thing is salvation, that what matters is the state of one’s immortal soul, to the effective exclusion of what is done here and now. This is a position focussed on what happens after death, not on what we do in this life; in other words the Gnostic’s “escape from this world” theology.

So far as eschatology, “end times”, was concerned, Irenaeus held to the view of a thousand year reign on earth, a reign of God on earth over a perfected humanity; the Gnostics on the other hand looked to an end to the tainted earth and its possible eventual reconstruction. They had no proper attachment, in other words, to what was done here and now; no engagement in the church which Irenaeus looked to promote and extend.

It is curious that the conservative-evangelical tendency these days seems to be a focus on “end times” very different from this proto-orthodox (later to become orthodox) position; no kingdom of God on this earth is really looked for (even if there is an advent of the end times, the faithful will be caught up in the “rapture” to heaven) Rather salvation is described which gives an afterlife in heaven (rather than hell), a heaven removed from the earth except when the earth has been destroyed and remade. This is, of course, the position of John Darby and those who have followed him (and the Scofield Reference Bible which was based on his speculations).

Irenaeus would have hated Conservative Christians, particularly Rapture-believing Conservative Christians, and more particularly Charismatic Rapture-believing Conservative Christians. Even more so if they also had the bad grace to be members of any group separate from the Catholic Church.

Which is curious, considering that Conservative Evangelical Premillenial Charismatics commonly allege that they are “fundamentalist” in going back to the principles and beliefs of the early Church, in which Irenaeus is the effective father of orthodox creedal doctrine, the original heresy-hunter.

Somehow, I find the idea of a cage fight between Irenaeus and a modern Fundamentalist a particularly heart-warming concept.

However, Irenaeus would also have hated anyone who espoused the idea that personal experience was vital, so not only my friends the charismatics, the “born again” would be targeted, but also the mystics, and that includes me. Also, in all probability, Saints Athanasius, Gregory of Thessalonica, Maximus the Confessor, Basil, Gregory Palamas, Simeon the New Theologian, Gregory of Sinai, Isaac the Syrian, John of the Ladder, Augustine, Francis, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas a Kempis, Teresa de Avila and John of the Cross, just to name a selection of those actually sainted among Christian mystics since Irenaeus’ time.

His reasons for hating those espousing personal experience included, of course, the fact that this gives a new source of inspiration potentially at odds with the organised “one church”. This is true.  All those I mentioned in my catalogue of Saints managed to keep their expressions of their inspirations sufficiently within the bounds of doctrine for the time being not to be declared dangerous heretics – in St. Athanasius’ case not to remain so declared -though in some cases, notably that of St. Francis, I find it difficult to work out how; many others have just about managed the same but have had their works sidelined (for instance the writer of the Theologica Germanica and Meister Eckhart), but others again have been anathematised. I regret all those sidelined or anathematised whose thoughts we have lost. A little more flexibility of doctrine, a little more willingness to contemplate either change or at least a re-examination of past theology, and that need not have been so.

However, there is another aspect of Irenaeus’ criticism which I have to take more seriously, this being that privileging personal peak spiritual experiences produces a division in the church, a two-speed Christianity.

I’ve been very conscious of this for myself, as there frankly aren’t very many contemplative mystics in Christianity, or at least not very many who are prepared to be open about their spiritual vision. For a long time I found it extremely difficult to understand why anyone who had not had a peak spiritual experience would actually bother with or gain much from Christianity, and since reading excerpts from the Oxyrhyncus sayings when I was 15 I’ve been convinced that Jesus was actually pointing at personal experiential (i.e. mystical) faith as the goal of his followers (I’ve since come to think he was pointing at other things as well, but am still confident my 15 year old thinking was right).

It has certainly been difficult learning to talk with Christians who have not had similar experience, particularly as, unlike all the other contemplative mystics I’ve encountered within Christianity, I didn’t have a background as a practising Christian at the time of my experience, so I lacked personal experience of being where others seem to be. I’ve hoped to find similar experiential focus among the “born again”, but been hampered by the fact that until very recently all those who would testify to me of a “born again” peak experience were also wedded to a very conservative theology which I can’t cope with (quite apart from not considering it justified by scripture).  All my efforts in that direction to date have yielded a situation where I have an experience which non-peak-experience Christians haven’t shared; they may wish (and often do) fervently to share it, but I cannot tell them how to achieve that.  There is a gap, and it’s a damaging gap.

Equally, there’s a damaging gap between the “born again” and those long term Christians who haven’t had the same experience, so far as they can tell, and frequently can’t adopt the same route to get there as the “born again” testify to.  I can understand Irenaeus’ concerns here, but his route of denying expression to the mystic or the born again (if different) does not work for me.

This gap of experience is something I am looking to work on. That may, I think, be as simple as learning to find a weaker form of the same root experience in those who don’t think they have it and help fan it into flame, but in that case I am still in need of better techniques. It may just mean strong advocacy of personal spiritual practices alongside any more public devotion, though I have major difficulty in promoting a strong personal spiritual praxis to those who have no “feeling” for what may be gained.

Then again, it may be that the “born again” experience is actually accessible even to those who seem immune, given some adjustments in presentation.

This is something I am praying for a solution to.

What follows is a copy of an exchange between myself and Henry Neufeld (proprietor of Energion Publications, inter alia) in The Religion Forum. My original questions are paraphrased from “Living the Questions” and, I believe, emanate from John Dominic Crossan; these are in turquoise; Henry’s responses are in Magenta.

H>> Because I’m editing a book titled Philosophy for Believers, and the chapter I’m working on is titled “Aristotle’s Akrasia and Self-Deception” I figured that due to akrasia I would act against my better judgment and answer your questions.

1. What is the character of your God (when you think about God, what are you imagining)?

H>> Like you, I regard God as largely unknowable. If I’m tense about the definition of “knowledge” I would have to say “unknowable.” That which cannot be demonstrated cannot be properly said to be known.

I like to remember that “know” and “understand” are close to “comprehend”, which has a secondary meaning of “include”, and that underlines to us that both know and understand ultimately require us to observe from a larger framework that the thing being described (for example to compare and contrast). And there is no such framework…

H>> But more than this, I would take two different routes to imagining God. The first is more philosophical. It is to call God “the ground of all being.” This is the conviction, perhaps, that the sensible universe isn’t up to self existence, so there must be something else. I do not regard this as a proof or demonstration. It is quite possible to attribute the self-existence I attribute to God as ground of all being to the sensible universe as well. I’m not entirely sure that the difference between those two approaches actually matters. In addition, calling this the ground of all being does not necessarily lead to the Christian God or any other kind of defined God.

Which could merely be the principle I expressed previously being applied to the universe 😉 In describing “universe” we require an hypothetical framework larger than the universe, in which the universe is just one element. For the mathematical physicist, therefore, God could be a necessary but not necessarily real concept.

I’m currently playing with a possible description of God as “the ground of all meaningfulness” myself.

H>> The other way I think about God is through the view of spiritual experience. Here, of course, I cannot demonstrate that what I experience results from an external cause of any kind. Nonetheless I have my experience. I relate my experience to yours, and I view this experience through the tradition in which I was brought up, which I abandoned and then reappropriated. It’s language works for me. And yes, I treat Christian Scripture as the collected experience of God  by the people within that tradition.

As do I. Yes, the language works fairly well for those who are fluent in it (and better if they do not mistake the terms in it for scientific ones <g>). We are able better to communicate, to share this type of experience through the use of such language (including concept-structures) and, I think, to ascertain that there is essentially one experience which is shared, rather than different experiences which can be successfully contrasted and categorised. Further, this may enable us more fully to appreciate our own experiences by being better able to describe them to ourselves.

2. What is the content of your faith (what do you believe in – merely to say you have faith is not sufficient, as Al-Quaeda have faith…)?

H>> The content of my faith is, in fact, the God that I experience. I express this in Christian language. I know that I have the experience, but I cannot demonstrate this. The number of doctrines I believe about God is very small, because I am constantly noticing that there are others who disagree with me on many, many details, who also experience God. While they differ with me on many things, I can recognize (or believe) that we are talking about one thing in different words. One of the most profoundly spiritual people I ever met was a Muslim Imam. I spent time studying with him and was tremendously impressed. We were able to connect on many points. The single most profound extended spiritual experience of my life came from studying a commentary on Leviticus written by a conservative Rabbi, Jacob Milgrom.

Do I come to believe additional things based on this experience? Certainly I do. There is a certain non-rational realm of my existence and thinking. I am frequently told by atheist or agnostic friends that I am a very reasonable person, but that I have failed to go all the way, that my rationality breaks down at a certain point. They are indeed correct. Well, I’m not always that reasonable, but I do go beyond what is rationally demonstrable.

You may enjoy my recent blogpost on the Heresy of all Doctrines <g> Here, I agree with you pretty much completely; I can share experience with people of many different faith traditions and see them to be in essence one, but do need either to adopt the language and concept structure of one of us or to negotiate a common language and concept structure (and commonly the language of “scientific rationalist” is not a very conducive means of expression <g>).

Personally, I’m not convinced that I have in fact failed to go all the way; I’m confident that the language of “scientific rationalist” is not an adequately communicative, complete and clear way of describing the whole of my experience (or that of others), and the languages of mathematics and symbolic logic are subsets of that and less adequate, although more powerful in their allocated fields. I have, at least, gone as far as the current limitations of my language, concept structures and intellect allow. I think, subject to correction.

3. What is the function of your church (for which read any religious or spiritual organised group)? (What are you coming together for? “Worship” is not an adequate answer)

H>> Community in all its aspects. More specifically, for me the church is the vehicle through which I can serve. In choosing a church I will be looking for a community impact and how I can be a part of that. This is witnessing, in my view.

The commandments being to love God and to love your neighbour, both can be practiced by yourself, but both are in many ways more productively practiced in common with others (helping your neighbour clearly gains in all sorts of ways from being done communally).

Loving God, understanding and appreciating God, comes more readily from witnessing to and sharing with others, and through discussion, debate and the refining of concepts. To me, at least.

4. What is the purpose of your worship (or other spiritual practice)? (How does God want to be worshipped? Is prayer important, and why?)

H>> The purpose of worship, as in a worship service, in my view, is the connection with God. In other words, I want to experience God’s presence and get the encouragement and strength that gives me. In prayer, I am doing this apart from the broader community, but the purpose of prayer is communion with God, not getting God to do some things that I decide God ought to do.

Nonetheless, I don’t like the structure of the question, because I believe that for one connected with God, all right action and all seeking is worship. So I worship by thinking, I worship by sharing, I worship by writing, and I worship by serving in any way. The worship service in which I seek the experience of God is really a minor part of what I would call worship. My personal time of prayer is also a minor part. It is when I am no longer on my knees that I truly enter into the worship God intends.

I agree with you about prayer, though for me prayer is also about better knowing myself in the context of my relationship with God.

I particularly like you talking of worshipping by doing things which might not normally be regarded as worship; insofar as it is done conscious of a desire to do what is pleasing to God, what is not worship?

H>> Those are my imaginings. If I expressed them in a totally Christian context, you would hear much more Christian vocabulary. That’s our shared experience and symbolism. Here I try to distill the essence.

I did post it in Interfaith <g>

Sometimes, though, I think the use of Christian vocabulary conceals rather than elucidates; we use words without really considering what they mean.

I wonder how many of us have paused to consider that we might be Gnostics?

Many people have never heard of Gnosticism; some have come across the description “The Gnostic Gospels” to describe the documents found at Nag Hammadi in 1945; not translated into English until 1975, they have become famous mostly for having the first complete text of the Gospel of Thomas. Others have come across reference to the second century bishop Irenaeus who inveighed against Gnosticism and whose works are now the best source for the contents of many lost “Gnostic” books. Some recall that Simon Magus (mentioned in Acts 8:9-24) was called a Gnostic by Irenaeus and Justin Martyr; others recall that the Albigensians or Cathars who were wiped out by the Albigensian Crusade of 1208-1321 were Christian Gnostics.

So what is Gnosticism?

The roots of Gnosticism seem to lie in Neoplatonic philosophy, in Zoroastrian dualism and in Merkabah mysticism. It is difficult to describe Gnosticism completely accurately, as there have over the last two thousand years and more been many “Gnostic” groups, the traditions of which have varied; some argue that all of these are merely offshoots of a much older secret tradition.

However, classically, Gnosticism had first the characteristic that salvation (or personal fulfilment) comes from esoteric or intuitive knowledge; secret teachings and/or personal revelations. Commonly the esoteric aspect involved the reading of works of scripture using a key to symbolism which unlocked a completely different meaning from that gleaned from a straightforward reading. These concepts are commonly linked to the words “Logos” and “Sophia”. This also led to a tendency to reject central authority in favour of individual understandings.

Secondly it was normally dualist, and postulated a remote “true deity” from which came emanations; a more proximate emanation from that deity, the demiurge, was commonly regarded as the actual creator and was commonly regarded as evil, sometimes identified with the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, sometimes with the Devil or Satan.

Thirdly, Gnostics were either seriously ascetic or completely self-indulgent; in either case this flowed from a contempt for the irredeemably flawed material world; for them the unseen higher world of spirit was pure and true, the material world was debased and valueless.

Fourthly, Gnostics had a huge tendency to produce extremely variant readings of passages of scripture, sometimes diametrically opposed to the overt reading. This was particularly irritating to the early Church, because Gnostics could nod and agree to things which they actually interpreted completely differently from the expected way. Much as Conservative and Historical-Critical Bible scholars end up with completely different readings…

The works of the New Testament may well already display Gnostic thinking. In particular, Mark refers to keeping teachings secret and to additional secret teachings, the Fourth Gospel starts with a completely emanationist prologue and continues with a theology drawn from Philo of Alexandria with an emphasis on Logos and Sophia. Paul certainly talks of levels of understanding, outer and inner knowledge, and talks of Christ living in him, which plays to concepts of gnosis.

Irenaeus wrote the first major Christian attack on Gnosticism, commonly called “Adversus Haereses”, otherwise “On the detection and overthrow of the so-called Gnosis” in around 180. There have been multiple attacks by the Church since then on people identified as Gnostics – the Valentinians, the Bogomils and the Albigensians are obvious candidates. Most of these have involved major persecution.

Now I have a degree of sympathy for the Gnostics over the ages, not least because the Church has tended to anathematise, kill and massacre them while the alleged Gnostics have normally merely tried to spread their beliefs. Their characterisation of the God of the Hebrew Scriptures as the evil demiurge is entirely understandable to me; a vengeful and capricious tyrant with no native mercy unless persuaded by prophets of his chosen people is an entirely justifiable natural reading of much of those scriptures, and it seems to me that some relic of that spreads to the Reformed image of a God unable to exercise mercy without the bloody and painful sacrifice (possibly self-sacrifice) of his son and then condemning to eternal torment all those who for whatever reason are unwilling or unable to accept that this is what the true nature of God is.

It is wholly unsurprising to me that this image gives rise to Satanist Gnosticism which sees this God, the God of Christian fundamentalists, as evil incarnate, and the adversary, haSatan or Lucifer the light-bringer, as the true lord to be followed and revered. I understand them, but I cannot be one of them, as I think this image is completely flawed. However, were the fundamentalists to convince me that their vision were true, I would have to be a Satanist. I would have to join the opposition to this tyrannical monster.

However, who now is the Gnostic? It seems to me that all of the Protestant denominations have a Gnostic flavour, as all espouse the individual’s relationship with God, i.e. personal relationship (scripture alone, interpreted by the individual) rather than central authority. Further, the evangelical and Pentecostal strains now prominent emphasise personal experience, which goes further down this path.

None say that scripture is sufficient without external guidance – yes, I know we Protestants supposedly hold to “sola scriptura”, but every Protestant I talk with refers to interpretational authorities against what I consider a natural reading; this is an esoteric knowledge. So it’s Gnostic. Catholics rely on the Pope, who relies on theologians, which is also esoteric knowledge. So it’s Gnostic.

The reinterpretation of the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures as a mere source of prophecy of Christ is, let’s face it, completely Gnostic – Judaism doesn’t interpret it that way. You need the esoteric key to do that…

The dismissal of the whole of the covenantal relationship with Israel evidenced by the Hebrew Scriptures as, effectively, a failed experiment plays to the image of the God of Judaism as a demiurge. OK, it also makes out God to be a lot less than omniscient and omnipotent – rather a bungler, in fact. But then, so does the doctrine of “original sin”, so denigration of the deity is apparently de rigeur in modern conservative Christianity. He seems reduced to something less than God – oh, yes, a demiurge.

Are we, therefore, all Gnostic now?  Well no, I don’t think so. I think historical-critical scholarship makes clear the developing understanding of God in scripture, I think historical-mythological scholarship gives us a better way of interpreting scripture, I think there is no substitute for personal experience of God through the presence of Christ in us, through the coming of the Holy Spirit upon us. I think we cannot have anyone else’s experience; you cannot have mine, I cannot have yours. Neither of us can have Pope Francis’.  Or Luther’s, or Calvin’s*.  Or, indeed, that of Jesus.

I think all of us can learn from each others’ experiences as we can translate those into human concepts, into human words. But those words are not the experience, our relationship with God is just that, unmediated (except perhaps in the beginning), direct and transforming.

Let us be transformed together.