Choosing the book you intend to immerse yourself in over the next week or fortnight, whatever your doubts about the location, the weather, the food or the agreeableness of your companions, can be one of the best moments of the summer holiday. A new book, particularly one from an author who has always previously brought you pleasure, is often an excellent insurance policy, as no doubt many readers are aware.
Imagine my pleasure and surprise, then, to find at the bookstall, immediately prior to my departure, a new paperback by David Lodge, one of my favourite authors: a novel called "Paradise News". My mind immediately went back to those novels of his which I had previously enjoyed: such old favourites as "Ginger, You're Barmy" - that evocative tale of a National Service many of us endured in our formative years - or "How Far Can You Go?", a superb tale of the traditional Catholic Church in the permissive sixties, or "Small World", where academia meets the contrasting world of industry.
In the event, the weather was fine, our companions were agreeable and the food and wine were excellent. The book merely added to the pleasure.
Why then is this worth the notice of SoF members?
I believe David Lodge is worth reading as a "theological" writer. As an academic, his interest in language and story-telling should particularly commend him to those of us who have been influenced by Don Cupitt. Apart from his novels, his monographs include "Language of Fiction", "The Novelist at the Crossroads", "The Modes of Modern Writing", "Working with Structuralism" and "Modern Criticism and Theory".
None of these is explicitly theological and he makes no claims to being a theologian. But while reading "Paradise News" I turned down the edges of several pages from which I have copied below, as they give some of the flavour of the theological or post-theological or humanist beliefs which he puts into the mouths of his characters.
On returning home, however, I quickly glanced at my copy of "How Far Can You Go?", written at the very beginning of the reign of Pope John Paul II, in order to compare it with the comments of the central character in "Paradise News", written nearer the end of the same gentleman's period of office. Of course the comments of one character in one work of fiction do not necessarily bear any relationship to the comments of another character in another book by the same author; nor need either in any way reflect the opinions of the writer. But there does seem to be a consistency, if not a development in the views of these two characters, both of them Catholic priests who left the priesthood. It could be argued that they are one and the same character, seen at different stages of Lodge's perception of him.
First, then, from "How Far Can You Go?": "Austin Brierley found that things had changed a lot since his seminary days, especially in the field of biblical commentary. When he was a student, the methods of modern demythologising historical scholarship had been regarded as permissible only in application to the Old Testament. The New Testment was taught as an historically reliable text, directly inspired by God and endorsed as such by the infallible authority of the Church. It came as something of a shock to discover that views mentioned formerly only to be dismissed as the irresponsible speculations of German Protestants and Anglican divines, who could hardly be considered seriously as Christians at all, were now accepted as commonplace by many Catholic scholars in the field.
The infancy stories about Jesus for instance were almost certainly legendary, it seemed, late accretions to the earliest and most reliable accounts of Jesus' life in Mark. The baby in the stable at Bethlehem, the angels and the shepherds, the star in the sky and the three kings, the massacre of the Innocents by Herod, the flight into Egypt - all fiction. Not meaningless, the books and articles and lectures hastened to add, for these fictions symbolized profound truths about the Christian faith; but certainly not factual, like the events one read about in the newspapers, or for that matter in Livy and Tacitus. And the Virgin Birth itself then - was that a fiction? Well, opinion differed, but there were certainly many authorities who did not see that the literal physical virginity of Mary (which was nowhere mentioned in Mark, Paul and John, was an essential part of the Gospel message. If this was accepted, then the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption also ceased to signify, they became dead letters, not worth arguing about. What was important was the figure of Jesus, the adult Jesus himself. But here too a remarkable amount of sceptical sifting appeared to have taken place. The story of his baptism by John the Baptist was probably historical, but hardly the temptation in the desert, a narrative with obvious folktale characteristics deriving from the Jewish Babylonian exile, like the more spectacular miracle stories, the walking on the water and the draught of fishes. And the Resurrection...? Well even here the most adventurous demythologisers hesitated (it was another kind of "How Far Could You Go?") but a few were certainly prepared to say that the Resurrection story was a symbolization of the faith found by the disciples through Jesus' death, that death itself was not to be feared, that death was not the end. That was the essential meaning of the Resurrection, not the literal reanimation of Jesus' corpse, an idea that could not possibly be as meaningful to an intelligent Christian of the twentieth century as it was to the inhabitants of a pre-scientific world." What then of "Paradise News"? "All of the radical demythologising theology that I had spent most of my life resisting, suddenly seemed self-evidently true. Christian orthodoxy was a mixture of myth and metaphysics that made no kind of sense in the modern, post-Enlightenment world except when understood historically and interpreted metaphorically. Jesus, insofar as we could disentangle his real identity from the Midrash of the early Gospel writers, was clearly a remarkable man, with uniquely valuable (but enigmatic, very enigmatic) wisdom to impart, infinitely more interesting than comparable apocalyptic zealots who were characteristic of that period of Jewish history; and the story of his Crucifixion (though not historically verifiable) was moving and inspiring. But the supernatural machinery of the story - the idea that he was God, `sent' by himself as Father from heaven to earth, born of a virgin, that he rose from the dead and returned to heaven, from whence he would return on the last day to judge the living and the dead, etc., well, that too had its grandeur and symbolic force as a narrative, but it was no more credible than most of the other myths and legends about divinities that proliferated in the Mediterranean and Middle East at the same time. "So there I was, an atheist priest, or at least an agnostic one. And I didn't dare to tell anyone. I went back to the radical Anglican theologians, John Robinson, Maurice Wiles, Don Cupitt and Co., whom I used to deride in my 'Introduction to Theology' lectures, and reread them with more respect. In their work I found a kind of justification for carrying on as a priest. Cupitt, for instance, talked about 'people who arc quietly agnostic or sceptical about Christian supernatural doctrines, while nevertheless continuing to practise the Christian religion to striking effect'. I thought I would be one of those people. Cupitt, who was less than quiet about his own scepticism, and had been publicly denounced as an atheist priest, particularly fascinated me as, in a series of books, he grimly sawed away at the branch he was sitting on, until'there was nothing left between him and thin air except a Kierkegaardian 'religious requirement': `There is as far as we are concerned no God but the religious requirement, the choice of it, the acceptance of its demands, and the liberating self-transcendence it brings about in us'. I used to amuse the students at Ethel's by turning that sort of language into a Creed: `I believe in the religious requirement...' Now even Cupitt seemed to me to presume a lot. Where was this liberating self-transcendence? I felt lonely, hollow, unfulfilled." And again, a little later: "The question facing the theologian today is, therefore, what can be salvaged from the eschatological wreckage? "Traditional Christianity was essentially teleological and apocalyptic. It presented both individual and collective human life as a linear plot moving towards an End, followed by timelessness: death, judgement, hell and heaven. This life was a preparation for eternal life, which alone gave this life meaning. To the question, 'Why did God make you?' the Catechism answered, 'God made me to know him, love him and serve him in this world, and be happy with him for ever in the next'. But the concepts and images of this next world which have come down to us in Christian teaching no longer have any credibility for thoughtful educated men and women. The very idea of an afterlife for individual human beings has been regarded with scepticism and embarrassment - or silently ignored - by nearly every major twentieth century theologian. Bultmann, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Tillich for example, even the Jesuit Karl Rahner, all dismissed traditional notions of personal survival after death. For Bultmann, the concept of `translation to a heavenly world of light, in which the self is destined to receive a heavenly vesture, a spritual body' was 'not merely incomprehensible by any rational process' but 'totally meaningless'.
Rahner said in an interview, 'with death it's all over.
Life is past and it won't come again'. In print he was more circumspect, arguing that the soul would survive, but in a non-personal `pancosmic' state: 'the soul, by surrendering its bodily structure in death, becomes open towards the universe and, in some way, a co-determining factor of the universe precisely in the latter's character as the ground of the personal life of other spiritual corporate beings'. This, however, is mere metaphysical doodling. It expresses a preference for a decently abstract concept of the afterlife over a crudely anthropomorphic one, but it is not an afterlife that anyone would eagerly look forward to, or be martyred for. "Of course, there are still many Christians who believe fervently, even fanatically, in an anthropomorphic afterlife, and there are many more who would like to believe in it. Nor is there any shortage of Christian pastors eager to encourage them, some sincerely, some, like the TV evangelists of America, with more dubious motives. Fundamentalism has flourished precisely on the eschatological scepticism of responsible theology, so that the most active and popular forms of Christianity today are also those which are the most intellectually impoverished. "Modern theology therefore finds itself in a classic double bind: on the one hand the idea of a personal God responsible for creating a world with so much evil and suffering in it logically requires the idea of an afterlife in which these things are rectified and compensated for; on the other hand, traditional concepts of the afterlife no longer command intelligent belief, and new ones, like Rahner's do not capture the popular imagination - indeed, they are incomprehensible to ordinary lay people. It is not surprising that the focus of modern theology has turned more and more upon the transformation of this life, whether in the form of Bonhoeffer's `religionless Christianity', or Tillich's Christian existentialism, or various types of Liberation Theology. "But if you purge Christianity of the promise of eternal life (and, let us be honest, the threat of eternal punishment) which traditionally underpinned it, are you left with anything which is distinguishable from secular humanism? One answer is to turn that question around and ask what secular humanism has got that isn't derived from Christianity. "There is a passage in Matthew, Chapter 25, which seems particularly relevant here. Matthew is the most explicitly apocalyptic of the synoptic gospels, and this section of it is sometimes referred to by scholars as the Sermon on the End. It concludes with the well-known description of the Second Coming and the Last Judgement:
When the Son of Man comes in glory, escorted by all the angels, then he will take his seat on the throne of glory. All the nations will be assembled before him and he will separate men one from another as the shepherd separates sheep from goats. He will place the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left. "Pure myth. But on what grounds does Christ the King separate the sheep from the goats? Not as you might expect, fervency of religious faith, or orthodoxy of religious doctrine...
Then the King will say to those on his right hand, "Come, you whom my Father has blessed, take for your heritage the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food; thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you made me welcome; naked and you clothed me; sick and you visited me; in prison and you came to see me". Then the virtuous will say to him in reply, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you; or thirsty and gave you drink? When did we see you a stranger and make you welcome; naked and clothed you; sick or in prison and go to see you?" And the King will answer, "I tell you solemnly, insofar as you did this to the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me". "The virtuous seemed quite surprised to be saved, or to saved for this reason, doing good in an unselfish but pragmatic and essentially this-worldly sort of way. It's as if Jesus left this essentially humanist message knowing that one day all the supernatural mythology in which it was wrapped would have to be discarded."
Jim Davies is Director of Learning Resources at Newham Community College in East London.