Christianity-lite

Not long ago I opined that the clergy, in the Church of England at least, were no longer preaching any doctrinal material likely to be uncongenial for average churchgoers.  Now an editorial in the Guardian this week says much the same thing:

“The people in the pews have always been heretics with only the vaguest notion of what official doctrines are, and still less of an allegiance to them. The difference is now that they are outside the pews, even if they still hold the same vague convictions about a life spirit or a benevolent purpose to the universe.  These theological or metaphysical convictions are connected with more firmly held values: contemporary humanists, just like the Christians of previous generations, believe in reason, fairness, freedom and decency. But they no longer have a set of religious stories and rituals with which to justify these beliefs, and charge them with emotion.”

The same point is made at book length in Don Cupitt’s After God (1998), to invoke just one of a number of theologians who have published in this field.

 

 

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God’s diversity

Thirty or forty years ago, I recall, there was much anguished talk in the Church of England about Christian unity – or lack of it – and the perceived need for determined ecumenicalism to tackle the problem with ‘solutions’; much more so than nowadays. Thank God.

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Unbelievable

Like many other innocents abroad, I have often blundered into local religious rites or appurtenances that I knew nothing about and could not decode.  Why do worshippers in  Thai temples pray with those little sticks in their hands?  When is it permissible to sit down during an Ethiopian Coptic eucharist?  Why do some Calvinist churches have a sort of fenced paddock as part of their furniture?  Whom can I ask about any of this?  How would I feel when it was all explained to me?  What reaction should I cultivate? How do I show respect?

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Their name liveth for evermore

One of life’s greatest pleasures must surely be watching one’s first grandchild grow up.  Day by day, he shows beguiling signs of physical and mental development.  The fact that he can now do or say this or that new action or verbalisation is continually fascinating.  Most of all, I think, how wonderful it is to see the individual appear, in all his uniqueness and emerging personality.  There can never be anything quite like him, even a sibling; a new human being commanding our attention and respect.

For the individual to lay claim to this singleness, it is not at all necessary for him or her to be rich or famous in worldly terms.  All that he has to do is exist.  No matter who he is, I remember reading once, he will leave his footprints in the clay we all walk on, and they will be inextinguishable.  The universe knows who he is; who each one of us is.

As so often happens, the Bible gets there before us.  “And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them… [but] their name liveth for evermore” (Ecclesiasticus 44: 9,14).  The conviction that each one of us is known to the universe – that we can never live or die in secret – is the impulse propelling the perception that faith being essentially a human work of art tends to favour those parts of faith which acknowledge this intermingling of humanity and the rest of creation in particular ways, and celebrate it.  More than Judaism’s communitarianism of the people (Genesis 28:3) and Islam’s emphasis on the ummah, the collective, Christianity is attentive to the ever-shifting, often painful  balance between humankind and “God”.  The whole New Testament is a meditation, in various styles and different emphases, on this aspect of humanism, entranced by the concept of “God” appearing to us as an individual.

Our grandson can believe what he likes, of course, but I hope that over the years he will always be willing and able to exercise and celebrate his individualism, meshing with ours. We love him for it.  Day by day that interaction grows like a plant.

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God and humanity

Religion explains.  That is its function.  All the great belief systems have their own responses – explanations for the perplexed – to humanity’s great eternal questions, developed and embellished over centuries of exposition.

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Christianity’s USP

All the great religions emphasise this or that feature of the human predicament.  Each claims to be better than the others in being able to respond to the relevant questions we might have about our plight.  Not only positively: whatever each faith system most condemns thereby confirms what this unique selling point, or USP, really is in each case.

To me, an ordinary ‘man in the pew’ looking at all three of the Peoples of the Book, there seem to be many examples of this.  Judaism for example, in its essence is all about the Law.  It is the medium through which the contract with God is continuously validated, celebrated and complied with.  Islam, as its very name proclaims, is all about ‘submission’ to the One.  And Christianity?  At its core, this third member of the Abrahamic family is focused on the individual, and her/his relationship with God, with others and with oneself.

Positive affirmations of each of these emphases throng the scriptures.  “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Write these words down, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel” (Exodus 34:27) or “The law of their God is in their hearts; their feet do not slip.” (Psalm 37:31)  According to the Holy Qur’an, “The true religion with God is Islam… So if they dispute with thee, say ‘I have surrended my will to God…'” (Sura 3:19)  “This was the true light that enlightens every person by his coming into the world” (John 1:19).  This can only be a selection of all the texts available.

The relevant negatives work to reinforce all these first principles.  Judaism’s scriptures set out a range of historical facts, exclamations and meditations upon the Law, and the perils of transgressing it, in an arc stretching from Exodus to Job.  For Islam, the world is an arena of constant struggle against non-believers who do not submit to God: “As for those who disbelieve in God’s signs, for them awaits a terrible chastisement; God is All-mighty, Vengeful. (Sura 3:4).

To err is human

For Christians, it is the same, but worse.  We want to be blessed, but we also want to continue being human.  That doesn’t always work.

A key negative text must be John 8:1-11 where a mob is assembling to stone a woman to death, but whose individuals’ lynching spasms are highlighted and then stopped by Jesus’ invocation of individual responsibility over against the fatal human impulse to surrender it in favour of the collective.
Here, I think, is located the essential difference between Christianity and its sibling faiths.  In meditating on the essential – and essentially difficult – requirement to relate to “God”, Judaism uses a contractual model of promises and reciprocal responsibilities summed up by the divine statement “But this command I gave them: ‘Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people. And walk in all the way that I command you… ” (Jeremiah 7:23).  Islam opts for submission, an extremity of obedience, conformity and trust.

Christianity is at once the most outré and the most insinuating of this range of I-Thou possibilities.  It is also the most demanding.  We Christians continuallycry out for divine recognition and ultimate acceptance of that core component of our relationship with all that is, seen and unseen: our consciousness of our own humanity, different in each case, each person, but in the end a shared predicament.

In seeking closer union with “God”, we nevertheless insist on preserving and restating our human condition as individuals even as we relate – always imperfectly – to the divine.

The genius of our founder St Paul was to perceive that Jesus came into our world, not as a prophet sent from “God” but as an archetype of the divine; at the same time, being so essentially human over against “God” that execution as a criminal comes to be seen as a tragic inevitability. God joined us, and we killed God.

The message of the Cross

This is the message of the cross.   We cannot avoid seeing it as an extreme enactment of our propensity as humans to screw things up, as it were.  The Death on the Cross is the ultimate demonstration of the cental charge against humans; that we don’t stop ourselves torturing and killing each other even when we come to see that we are thereby torturing and killing ourselves and, by the same token, “God” who inheres in us and whom we thus continuously betray.

This fatal tendency the church labels as “sin”.  The only way out of it is through grace, freely given, and the Cross and Passion are the signs of this, present in our world even while we make it hell.   Christianity’s uniqueness and special message is that we should accept that, rather than ‘finalising’ some sort of deal with “God”, contractual or submissive,  this psychodrama has to play out every day of our lives, and in anything we do.

It is as if there is an ever-present mismatch, an abraisiveness, between how we strive to relate to the divine and our insistence on being human.  We insist, because we want the human condition to be sanctified despite the hell, the sin, the betrayal of the God-given best in us.

Every time we say mass,  we are pounding on God’s gates as it were and shouting about how much we need this.  It is a state of permanent tension. “Love ” is the word we use to describe the possibility of getting out from under this.  And this is what Christianity  is all about.

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Fundamentalists’ fears

Durer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Let fundamentalists believe what they want.  They must allow the rest of us to exercise our rights, too, and not be adversely affected by their convictions which, it looks evident, are mainly based on fear.

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God and the great questions 2

Throughout human history believers have looked to “God” to answer life’s great questions but also aware of the paradox that “God” does not “exist.” Christianity makes the boldest claim: that “God” became a human, but remains divine.  The mysteries and further questions persist.

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Anglican diversity

Worshipping in a strange church on Christmas night could have been a good experience or a bad one.  It is certainly a lesson in diversity and a good way to examine oneself, and critically: what sort of Christian, let alone Anglican, am I?

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The deepest levels

Rereading Objections to Christian belief (1963) turns up treasure after treasure. This salient text was put together by four great old men, each of whom I was honoured to meet a few years later.  Their demolition job on outdated assumptions, lazy thinking and fundamentalist wrong-headedness is as relevant today as it was fifty years ago.  Here is Alec Vidler at his most generous:

“… whether a man decides to become or to remain a Christian believer may also be settled by what I would call his participation in the Christian mystery as a present reality: by what he finds, or by what finds him, in the shared experience of the community of believers – it may be in the eucharistic sacrament or in the Friends’ meeting house: by whether or not he is convinced that there is something there which, despite all his puzzlements, holds him and speaks to the deepest levels of his being.”  (p76)

That is as good an account of divine unknowability as anything I know besides John ch1.

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