So What?

Passiontide 45: Mark

Immediately he made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd.  After saying farewell to them, he went up on the mountain to pray.  When evening came, the boat was out on the lake, and he was alone on the land.  When he saw that they were straining at the oars against an adverse wind, he came towards them early in the morning walking on the lake.  He intended to pass them by.  But when they saw him walking on the lake, they thought it was a ghost and cried out; for they all saw him and were terrified.  But immediately he spoke to them and said, 'Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.'  Then he got into the boat with them and the wind ceased.  And they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.  (From: Mark 6:45 - 52, NRSV)

Back in the nineteen eighties I had my one and only article for The Guardian's Saturday Face to Faith column published.  At the time the editor was Walter Schwartz.  It was my interpretation of this story; one of the most powerful stories in the most powerful of the Gospels.  Mark's Gospel shows us the relationship between Jesus and the disciples as tense and confrontational.  It comes to a head in this story and all I can say here is, walking on water is the least remarkable thing about this story.

One question: why is the miracle of the loaves so important to understand this story?  Note how this story links with the Matthew selection in this series .  Jesus there refuses to make bread from stones but later, makes bread from bread.  He refuses to use miracles to control people, but when confronted by people wishing to make him king he feeds them in order to avoid the obligation they wish to press upon him.  Consequently, he is able to walk on water.  Easy.  Hmmm ...

Passiontide 44: Matthew

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.  He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished.  The tempter came and said to him, 'If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.'  But he answered, 'It is written, "One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God."'  Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, 'If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, "He will command his angels concerning you", and "On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone."'  Jesus said to him, 'Again it is written, "Do not put the Lord your God to the test."'  Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour; and he said to him, 'All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.'  Jesus said to him, 'Away with you Satan! for it is written, "Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him."'  Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited upon him.  (From: Matthew 4:1-11, NRSV)

This passage was the subject of my Masters dissertation in Applied Theology, during the 1990s.  The theme of the work was Social Auditing and I found the claim that these temptations are unique to Jesus as somewhat misleading.  These are temptations for managers as much as they are for Messiahs. 

The devil is trying to tie Jesus to the standards of Scripture.  He presents each option to Jesus; they are indeed what all reasonable people would expect of a Messiah.  Jesus rejects them all, using scripture in his own way.  He departs from the wilderness with no plans and no powers, just open to where God might lead and willing to deal with whatever happens.

Lent 41: Timothy Ashworth

'Keeping aligned' is a concept that captures well the sense that this prophetic word does provide guidance but without any coercive force.  Actions flow naturally from it.  As we have seen, Paul does not say, if you live by the Spirit these are the things that you ought to do, these are the ways that you ought to behave, but rather, live by the Spirit and these are the ways that you definitely will behave.  Life in the Spirit leads to such behaviours as naturally as trees bear fruit.  For Paul, being guided, - 'keeping aligned' - by faith, by the spirit, by the cross is to experience a life of freedom, without needing to follow any external direction.  Living by the law is, in contrast, a form of enslavement.  (From: Paul's Necessary Sin  : The Experience of Liberation, page 56)

This book was a present from a friend who, a few years ago, attended a conference led by Timothy Ashworth, at Woodbrooke, the Quaker College in Birmingham, where Ashworth lectures.  Ashworth, with other authors such as Crossan , seeks to return to the 6 authentic letters of Paul and re-examine his writings in the light of modern scholarship.  This is a technical book but full of exciting insights.

We need to take time to understand what Ashworth is saying.  Usually, we think we have two options: license, to which the churches provide an alternative, morality.  These are not opposites; license and morality come from the same source.  They are both used by imperialists to control people.  Our consumer society is an example of the former.  The most familiar Christian morality has its origins, according to Crossan, in imperial Rome.  Christianity offers an alternative, although you wouldn't know it to hear the claptrap about Christian values.

Lent 30: Karen Armstrong

Even though the Greeks found his interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve far too literal, Augustine was no diehard biblical literalist.  He took science very seriously and his 'principle of accommodation' would dominate biblical interpretation in the West until well into the early modern period.  God had, as it were, adapted revelation to the cultural norms of the people who had first received it.  One of the psalms for example, clearly reflects the ancient view, long outmoded by Augustine's time, that there was a body of water above the earth that caused rainfall.  It would be absurd to interpret this text literally.  God had simply accommodated the truths of revelation to the science of the day so that the people of Israel could understand it; today, a text like this must be interpreted differently.  Whenever the literal meaning of scripture clashed with reliable scientific information, Augustine insisted, the interpreter must respect the integrity of science or he would bring scripture into disrepute.  And there must be no unseemly quarreling about the Bible.  People who engaged in acrimonious discussion of religious truth were simply in love with their own opinions and had forgotten the cardinal teaching of the Bible, which was the love of God and neighbour.  The exegete must not leave a text until he could make it 'establish the reign of charity', and if a literal understanding of any biblical passage seemed to teach hatred, the text must be interpreted allegorically and forced to preach love.  (From: The Case for God , page 122.)

I have admired Armstrong's writing for a long time and this book, published last year, does not disappoint.  She introduced the idea of mythos and logos in her earlier book, The Battle for God .  Logos is broadly what we would understand scientific thought to be.  Mythos is the parallel truths found in religious experience.  Fundamentalists and atheists both tend to confuse the two.  The Case for God develops this theme in more detail.

This paragraph interrupts a discussion of Augustine's idea of original sin.  It shows Augustine, with most exegetes from the three main monotheistic faiths, understands scripture must be interpreted afresh in every age.  Those who claim it has a plain meaning are not aware they are interpreting the text as much as everyone else.  This dishonesty falsifies faith and is used as an excuse to persecute minorities by labeling them as sinners.

Lent 20: Psalm 139

If I say, 'Surely the darkness shall cover me,

and the light around me become night',

even the darkness is not dark to you;

the night is as bright as the day,

for darkness is as light to you.

(New Revised Standard Version, vv 11, 12)

This psalm was one identified on the first Dark Holy Ground  course in Cleveland County during the 1980s.  Here long term unemployed and people in employment met to contemplate their experiences.  A big revelation was when they found the writers of the psalms were experiencing the same as unemployed people on Cleveland's housing estates.  In this psalm, one of their favourites, they observed the psalmist is saying it is still night!

It is the dark places where creativity happens.  Why do we have negative associations for darkness?  The seed germinates in the dark.  The embryo develops in the dark.  Our hearts beat without any light at all.  Spiritually, dark places can lead us to encounters with God.  Sometimes we are able to say our darkest times are the best things that happen to us.  They are no less dark for that.

Lent 16: John Dominic Crossan

We put on our front cover an artist's creative restoration of that frescoed point-counterpoint from the Cave of St Thecla and St Paul.  Paul is in the centre under full spotlight, just as the church's post-Pauline tradition has always placed him.  Thecla is of equal height, with open eyes intact and up-raised hand untouched, but she is on the very edge of the cover.  She is half on and half off.  But here are our questions.  Is Thecla still departing or now returning?  Does a search for Paul push female leadership, authority, and apostolicity off to the side and finally off that cover, or does a search for Paul bring Thecla, women, and equality back steadily and inevitably into the light until female and male stand together side by side in the full light of the centre?  (In Search of Paul , page xiv)

The original frescoes are to be found in the Grotto of St Paul at Ephesus.  Thecla's eyes and raised hand have been obliterated, deliberately.  Crossan and Reed argue that the seven books all scholars agree were written by Paul, reveal to us a radical Paul in contrast to the other, conservative and reactionary, Pauls in the New Testament.  I first read this in 2005 and have over the last five years preached on each chapter in turn.  This book and another featured later have opened up Paul's theology for me. 

Ironically, the church has obliterated Paul almost as effectively as it has obliterated Thecla.  We need to hear what radical Paul was saying and so undo not only centuries of marginalisation of women but also centuries of violent distortion of the Christian faith.  As always we should pray to be able to read Paul with fresh eyes and understand what he was saying.

 

Idolatry 19: Why Atheists are Not Very Good at Atheism

In my last post , I referred to a passage from Philippians.  Here it is in full:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

And being found in  human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death

- even death on a cross.  (NRSV, Phil 2:5-8)

The Greek verb, translated as 'emptied' in the third line, kenosis is usually understood as self emptying.  We can see in this very early hymn the clarity with which people saw the incarnation.  It is an emptying of all power, and at each stage, more power is lost.

The question Christians should be posing to atheists is not whether they should believe God exists, but whether they are serious about the non-existence of God.

Christian mystics know that to find God, we have to lose God.  To rigorously discard every idol, every illusion we have about God, is extremely difficult.  Atheists seem to have an image of God based upon certain fundamentalist traditions.  This parallels very much the unnoticed assent we all make to consumerism by our supposed unbelief in Father Christmas.  Our denials count for nothing but self-deception unless we change the way we live to one not controlled by the ideology of consumerism.  So, if you have an idolatrous image of God, it matters little whether you believe in it or not. 

This false image of God, colours atheists' statements, so their attacks on liberal Christians sound very similar to fundamentalist attacks on liberal Christians.  Indeed, the first target of fundamentalists is always their co-religionists.  Their false God dominates their perceptions as much as it dominates the perceptions of atheists.  The issue is not about belief in God, it is about false images of God.

I do not count myself as a liberal theologian.  The problem is any Christian who is not fundamentalist is counted as liberal by both fundamentalists and atheists.  Neither will listen, both are convinced they are right and there is nothing further to be said on the matter.

It is not about picking a new image of God to not believe in.  It is about rejecting all images of God.  But to do this requires the path of the mystics.  Real atheism is a Christian activity.  It is not a matter for arrogance, it is hard work to genuinely not know God.  I will explain this further in my next post.

Idolatry 15: Scripture

This is the first of three posts exploring how Christians substitute false gods for God.  I should emphasise from the outset that I will not be covering every instance of this kind of spiritual sleight of hand.  Neither am I asserting all Christians believe these things. 

I should add that many of these beliefs are normal for Christians to hold during their faith journey.  For many Christians, extreme beliefs held at one stage mellow as experience leads them into deeper reflection on the beliefs they hold to be absolute.  It is a common experience over a lifetime of faith, to return to certain beliefs in new ways, as faith develops.

Some Christians make an idol out of Scripture, by claiming it is inerrant.  There are many ways of reading and interpreting scripture and some are better than others.  Inerrant beliefs are not the only way to interpret scripture, they are one way amongst many.  The problem is those who believe their interpretations are inerrant, believe they are the only way of understanding scripture.  They will speak of the plain meaning of scripture and find it hard to believe what seems plain to them might not be at all plain to others.  Of course, the belief that scripture has  plain meaning, itself needs examination.

Karen Armstrong in her recent book, The Case for God , makes a distinction between logos and mythos.  The former are those beliefs, like science, which can be derived from observation of the world.  Mythos is revealed beliefs.  These are derived from the interpretation of scripture.  To confuse the two is an error in logical typing.  Fundamentalism treats scripture as logos and believes it is true in the way scientific observations are true.  In Christian history, this approach to interpretation is unique to fundamentalism and began during the last century.  Atheists also treat scripture as logos and deny the reality of mythos. 

So, what is scripture about?  It is a witness by many people to their experience of God.  That's all it is.  However, there is more to add.  It is worth looking at Walter Wink's trilogy of books  about the powers.  What follows is derived from his work.

Scripture may appear to be about all manner of things spiritual and we easily forget the witnesses to God were writing about things both real and spiritual.  Usually we have no problem agreeing about the reality of the everyday material world.  There is also a spiritual world and it is equally real.  Some witnesses write in terms of angels and demons.  These stand for the more difficult reality the witness describes.

That reality is human institutions.  At the time of the New Testament, people believed every institution, eg a nation or a church, had an angel.  When the institution ceases to exist, so does its angel.  What they meant was interactions between people can take on a life of their own.  These interactions might be relatively healthy or relatively unhealthy.  Broadly, a demon is an angel that is unhealthy.  These institutions then exert real influences over us, and mostly we are not aware of them. 

Sometimes people talk of institutional sin, and some are quick to deny it exists or to play down its influence.  Actually, there is no other type of sin, our behaviour is influenced at all times by institutions.  We read scripture and pray to help us see these influences and find actions we can take to be free of them.

Idols are the images we make of these real institutional powers.  So, we depict consumerism as Father Christmas , for example.  These idols are seductive because they lead us to something we perceive to be real.  However, they also lead us to false conciousness of these things.  The role of faith is to help us to become aware of our idols and to substitute healthier images for them.

Idolatry 4: The Classic Idol

Next I turn to one of several Old Testament descriptions of idols.  At the time it might have seemed legitimate to mock those who worship idols.  But how much was down to rivalries between Israel and other nations, rather than a concern for a right relationship with God.  Remember the concern was always for the nation rather than individuals.  Did marking nations as idolatrous justify war with them?  Or did it explain why they invaded Israel?

Our God is in the heavens; he does whatever he pleases. 

Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands.

They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see.

They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell.

They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; they make no sound in their throats.

Those who make them are like them; so are all who trust in them.  (Psalm 115:3-8; NRSV)

This is about physical idols; idols you can see and touch.  It is customary these days to say all manner of abstract things can be idols, such as money or celebrity.  I will explore this view later. 

The mockery is based on the question, why worship something that is not alive?  It exists alright but it is dead matter.  It has no capabilities whatsoever (unlike the God of Israel).  We need to pay attention to this because we need to be careful we don't project our own fears onto the writers and first readers of these texts.  This passage shows they are capable of distinguishing between what is real and what is not.  They make a real distinction between what is capable of many things and what is capable of nothing.

Atheists might wish to argue that the God is verse 3 is also an idol, a figment of the imagination.  They might be right and I will explore this view in a later post.  But the point is this passage does not allow such a simplistic dismissal of their ability to discern between what is real and what is not real. 

If they are able to see that material idols are not real, why assume they cannot discern that their God although not material might also not be real?  Why should they believe that material idols are false but that an imaginary God (as some atheists would have it) is true?  Why couldn't they see they are both idols? 

There are only two possible explanations.  Either this is an attack on people of other faiths, rubbishing their gods, or they had genuinely perceived something about the nature of reality.

Perhaps the last verse is a clue to what they perceived.  They make a distinction between those who worship idols and so are like them, unable to do anything of their own volition, and those who worship God and so somehow share in God's freedom.  (Compare the last verse with the first.)

At this stage, I will not take this any further except to note that before we jump to conclusions we should heed their warning about what happens to those who worship false gods.  As a further warning, this video shows what happens when you mess with idols.

 

Idolatry 3: The Second Commandment

The ten commandments might be the obvious place to start.  As the Shema  is similar to the first commandment, this time we will look at the second. 

In my post what sin is not I make the point these commandments are not laws to be obeyed but a sign of friendship between humanity and God.  (I believe this point was made by the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, although I do not have a reference.)  It is not unreasonable, where friendship is involved, to expect the friends to know each other.  The point of the second commandment is to resist the temptation to muddy the water by creating images of God, which are not in fact God.  We're not talking about other gods here (they're dealt with under the first commandment 'you shall have no other gods before me').  Here we are talking of images of God, not miscellaneous gods.

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.  You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.  (NRSV Exodus 20:4-6)

What I see here is a warning to Israel about the risks attendant upon making an image of God.  The point is this image is not God.  To worship it in the mistaken belief that it is God will lead to error.  Images of God are effectively other gods.  The problem is we will add to any image our own prejudices, hunger for security, projected fantasies.  We might as well hang up a mirror and worship the reflection.

The second part might not seem particularly friendly but take a close look.  Iniquity is punished only for a few generations but love is rewarded effectively forever.  We have to remember these texts were written not by individualists (as most of us are today) but by a people.  They are reminded that if a few go wrong, all will suffer the consequences.  We see this later in the Old Testament stories of the exile, for example.

Some Christian traditions leave it here.  They do not accept any image of God in their place of worship, or perhaps only the plain empty cross.

Other traditions use images in three dimensions, notably but not only Catholicism, and two dimensional icons, mainly in Orthodox churches (or stained glass windows).  The argument goes that this is permissable because of the doctrine of the incarnation.  God who cannot be depicted in an image became human and so we now have an image.  Furthermore, I would add that if anyone can find something in the image of the crucified Christ that encourages them to further acts of egotism, they must be leading strangely confused lives.  Through that image we are reminded of exactly who we are.