Julian of Norwich and Don Cupitt... It inspired me with a sense of confidence and hope." Continued on page 17 JESUS AND THE GRAND INQUISITOR Don Cupitt This is an edited version of an address to the 1992 SoF Conference Remember the encounter between Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov? Jesus was notoriously indifferent to doctrine, rank, social structure and forward planning.
He calls people away from everything in which they would normally seek security, and asks them instead to risk everything and live responsively from moment to moment in a quite extraordinary degree of freedom. That is why the Grand Inquisitor attacks him so sharply, for calling people to a lifestyle way beyond what most of humankind can cope with.
Most people don't want that much freedom. They want to be led. They want security, they want objectivity, and they want religious reassurance delivered to them in regular doses through welldefined channels. They don't want pure freedom, they want commodified Grace. In short, they want organized religion, and that is precisely what the Grand Inquisitor has given them: an objective God, a visible hierarchy of religious power and authority, a great magical sacramental machine, and convincing assurances of salvation in exchange for submission.
The Grand Inquisitor's case is overwhelming.
Humanity, reason and the Church seem united in proving that Jesus is in a minority of one. He is shown to be a subversive dreamer, hopelessly but dangerously utopian. What has he to say for himself? No more this time than he had last time. So the Inquisitor condemns him again.
If Jesus will not speak for himself, what might a friend find to say on his behalf? Nothing really - except that he did unexpectedly reappear, and was very unwelcome. Jesus represents what psychoanalysis calls "the return of the repressed". Very quietly, he is somehow just there, a very small, niggling, unspoken doubt in the mind of the Church. He represents, perhaps, a wrong turn taken, a missed opportunity; and the Grand Inquisitor fully understands the situation. Like Nietzsche, he suspects that Christianity did not begin with the death of Christ, but ended. As Nietzsche puts it, the Gospel died on the Cross: Jesus was the first and last Christian. The Church prudently decided that it would be best to defuse the subversiveness of Jesus by normalising him. It built around him such a massively ornate mausoleum that he was soon eclipsed by it.
Something of Jesus' original gospel can still be heard in, for example, the Sermon on the 'Mount.
But it is incongruous, out of keeping with the developed sacramental power-structure of the Church. Eventually Jesus became a lingering anomaly in his own Church.
The Grand Inquisitor admits that this is what has happened but fiercely defends it. Jesus' own religion was too high and too hard. In front of it the Church has very wisely put instead what we call the Catholic and Apostolic Faith, a colourful, mediated and objectified sort of religion, much better adapted to history and human nature. It is a workable, survivable system, whereas Jesus' religion was not.
Behind its proclamation that he is alive, the Church's real purpose is to ensure that Jesus stays safely buried and out of harm's way - and it has succeeded, triumphantly.
However, as every modern reader notices, the Grand Inquisitor's long speech undermines itself. Jesus is silent and powerless: why does the Grand Inquisitor need to be scoring such an overwhelming victory over him? What is the Grand Inquisitor fighting against? Answer, of course, an undercurrent of self-doubt that runs beneath the surface of his own argument. The Inquisitor sounds as if he knows himself to be a damned soul. Jesus doesn't have to speak. The very completeness and forcefulness of the Grand Inquisitor's denunciation of him also, and as it were on the underside, makes Jesus' case back against the Inquisitor, so that at the end of the Grand Inquisitor's speech there is no more to be said. We fully understand both sides of the argument.
Now let us bring this great text a little closer to our present situation. "Realism" in religion means objectivity, certainty and guaranteed Grace along proper channels. "Non-realism" in religion means giving up all that. It means giving up all objectivity and security and instead living ex tempore, in an unprotected, naked and immediate religious respon- `Humanity, reason and the Church seem united in proving that Jesus is in a minority of one' JESUS AND THE GRAND INQUISITOR Don Cupitt This is an edited version of an address to the 1992 SoF Conference Remember the encounter between Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov? Jesus was notoriously indifferent to doctrine, rank, social structure and forward planning.
He calls people away from everything in which they would normally seek security, and asks them instead to risk everything and live responsively from moment to moment in a quite extraordinary degree of freedom. That is why the Grand Inquisitor attacks him so sharply, for calling people to a lifestyle way beyond what most of humankind can cope with.
Most people don't want that much freedom. They want to be led. They want security, they want objectivity, and they want religious reassurance delivered to them in regular doses through welldefined channels. They don't want pure freedom, they want commodified Grace. In short, they want organized religion, and that is precisely what the Grand Inquisitor has given them: an objective God, a visible hierarchy of religious power and authority, a great magical sacramental machine, and convincing assurances of salvation in exchange for submission.
The Grand Inquisitor's case is overwhelming.
Humanity, reason and the Church seem united in proving that Jesus is in a minority of one. He is shown to be a subversive dreamer, hopelessly but dangerously utopian. What has he to say for himself? No more this time than he had last time. So the Inquisitor condemns him again.
If Jesus will not speak for himself, what might a friend find to say on his behalf? Nothing really - except that he did unexpectedly reappear, and was very unwelcome. Jesus represents what psychoanalysis calls "the return of the repressed". Very quietly, he is somehow just there, a very small, niggling, unspoken doubt in the mind of the Church. He represents, perhaps, a wrong turn taken, a missed opportunity; and the Grand Inquisitor fully understands the situation. Like Nietzsche, he suspects that Christianity did not begin with the death of Christ, but ended. As Nietzsche puts it, the Gospel died on the Cross: Jesus was the first and last Christian. The Church prudently decided that it would be best to defuse the subversiveness of Jesus by normalising him. It built around him such a massively ornate mausoleum that he was soon eclipsed by it.
Something of Jesus' original gospel can still be heard in, for example, the Sermon on the 'Mount.
But it is incongruous, out of keeping with the developed sacramental power-structure of the Church. Eventually Jesus became a lingering anomaly in his own Church.
The Grand Inquisitor admits that this is what has happened but fiercely defends it. Jesus' own religion was too high and too hard. In front of it the Church has very wisely put instead what we call the Catholic and Apostolic Faith, a colourful, mediated and objectified sort of religion, much better adapted to history and human nature. It is a workable, survivable system, whereas Jesus' religion was not.
Behind its proclamation that he is alive, the Church's real purpose is to ensure that Jesus stays safely buried and out of harm's way - and it has succeeded, triumphantly.
However, as every modern reader notices, the Grand Inquisitor's long speech undermines itself. Jesus is silent and powerless: why does the Grand Inquisitor need to be scoring such an overwhelming victory over him? What is the Grand Inquisitor fighting against? Answer, of course, an undercurrent of self-doubt that runs beneath the surface of his own argument. The Inquisitor sounds as if he knows himself to be a damned soul. Jesus doesn't have to speak. The very completeness and forcefulness of the Grand Inquisitor's denunciation of him also, and as it were on the underside, makes Jesus' case back against the Inquisitor, so that at the end of the Grand Inquisitor's speech there is no more to be said. We fully understand both sides of the argument.
Now let us bring this great text a little closer to our present situation. "Realism" in religion means objectivity, certainty and guaranteed Grace along proper channels. "Non-realism" in religion means giving up all that. It means giving up all objectivity and security and instead living ex tempore, in an unprotected, naked and immediate religious respon- `Humanity, reason and the Church seem united in proving that Jesus is in a minority of one' sivencss to life and what it brings to us from moment to moment. We improvise existence. We accept our own and everyone else's transience and temporality so unreservedly that in each moment we synthesize life and death, gain and loss. We abandon the usual frantic unavailing rearguard action against time and loss. In a single indivisible openness and self-giving, we let go without regret what is passing away and embrace with joy whatever comes.
If we can learn to become so completely given to life that we unify the opposites, life and death, in the passing moment, then in Jesus' vocabulary we are in the Kingdom of God and have eternal life. In Mahayana Buddhist terms, we are Enlightened and have entered Nirvana. But this state is completely non-doctrinal. In it you are not discontented, and you therefore don't need doctrinal beliefs to reassure you that somehow, somewhere else, things are better than they are here. So the highest truth of religion is found in the attainment of a way of life that makes realistic belief, authority and organized religion entirely redundant. They simply vanish.
All of which helps to make it a little clearer why Jesus has nothing to say, why the Grand Inquisitor has all the power and everything to say - and why the Grand Inquisitor nevertheless regards Jesus as such a serious threat. And it has all kept coming to my mind this past year as I have repeatedly been reminded of the continuing power of established orthodoxies, ways of thinking and vested interests.
During this period Sea of Faith has had some small success. We have attracted some public notice and our membership has grown. We have learnt that we have some allies. But we have also been reminded that realism still sits in the seats of power, commands majority support, and defends itself vigorously in the belief that reason and tradition are on its side. Several times this year people have said to me: "Look, people want an objective God, the Bible as God's Word, physical miracles, objective Grace in the sacraments, genuine religious experiences to confirm faith, and life after death.
What have you to offer in place of all that? Even granted that you can make out some sort of case for your non-realism, it asks far too much of people.
Tell me honestly, do you really think your prospectus can ever be delivered?" The second threshold at which Sea of Faith stands [the first was the formation of the Network in 1989] is the realization that we have now come to questions like that, and they are tough questions. We have to ask whether our project is feasible. Do people actually want, and will they ever want, the free, unsupported and unconsoled kind of religious life that active non-realism describes? And if in some sense the demand for a change of heart and a change of life is perennial in religion, how can we at this time of day find new ways of making the old cliches interesting again?
These are not questions to which we have no answers. On the contrary, to my visitors I reply, "Your argument that people want an objectified religious system suggests that you think that, once established, it will have to be permanent, because people will never be willing to give it up. Instead of working to liberate people from itself, it will become an addiction; and indeed that is the story of the Church so far. But in the New Testament the whole apparatus of organized religion starts off as no more than a temporary arrangement for maintaining order in the community. Soon, when Jesus returns, it is to be succeeded by a state of pure religious freedom. In the Kingdom of God there will be no Temple any more; people will live straight from the heart. There won't be any need for objective controls any longer. "On your premisses, if Jesus were to appear in Rome and say to the old men in the Vatican, `Thankyou for minding the shop all these years, but now I'm back and your task is finished. You can shut the whole thing down, leave your posts and follow me' - if he were to say that, then they would reject him in the same way and for the same reason as the Grand Inquisitor did. That is, they would retort to Jesus that the developed ecclesiastical faith is stronger and better adapted to human nature and to history than his original gospel of the Kingdom.
Like the Grand Inquisitor, they would in effect be conceding that the ecclesiastical system which began sivencss to life and what it brings to us from moment to moment. We improvise existence. We accept our own and everyone else's transience and temporality so unreservedly that in each moment we synthesize life and death, gain and loss. We abandon the usual frantic unavailing rearguard action against time and loss. In a single indivisible openness and self-giving, we let go without regret what is passing away and embrace with joy whatever comes.
If we can learn to become so completely given to life that we unify the opposites, life and death, in the passing moment, then in Jesus' vocabulary we are in the Kingdom of God and have eternal life. In Mahayana Buddhist terms, we are Enlightened and have entered Nirvana. But this state is completely non-doctrinal. In it you are not discontented, and you therefore don't need doctrinal beliefs to reassure you that somehow, somewhere else, things are better than they are here. So the highest truth of religion is found in the attainment of a way of life that makes realistic belief, authority and organized religion entirely redundant. They simply vanish.
All of which helps to make it a little clearer why Jesus has nothing to say, why the Grand Inquisitor has all the power and everything to say - and why the Grand Inquisitor nevertheless regards Jesus as such a serious threat. And it has all kept coming to my mind this past year as I have repeatedly been reminded of the continuing power of established orthodoxies, ways of thinking and vested interests.
During this period Sea of Faith has had some small success. We have attracted some public notice and our membership has grown. We have learnt that we have some allies. But we have also been reminded that realism still sits in the seats of power, commands majority support, and defends itself vigorously in the belief that reason and tradition are on its side. Several times this year people have said to me: "Look, people want an objective God, the Bible as God's Word, physical miracles, objective Grace in the sacraments, genuine religious experiences to confirm faith, and life after death.
What have you to offer in place of all that? Even granted that you can make out some sort of case for your non-realism, it asks far too much of people.
Tell me honestly, do you really think your prospectus can ever be delivered?" The second threshold at which Sea of Faith stands [the first was the formation of the Network in 1989] is the realization that we have now come to questions like that, and they are tough questions. We have to ask whether our project is feasible. Do people actually want, and will they ever want, the free, unsupported and unconsoled kind of religious life that active non-realism describes? And if in some sense the demand for a change of heart and a change of life is perennial in religion, how can we at this time of day find new ways of making the old cliches interesting again?
These are not questions to which we have no answers. On the contrary, to my visitors I reply, "Your argument that people want an objectified religious system suggests that you think that, once established, it will have to be permanent, because people will never be willing to give it up. Instead of working to liberate people from itself, it will become an addiction; and indeed that is the story of the Church so far. But in the New Testament the whole apparatus of organized religion starts off as no more than a temporary arrangement for maintaining order in the community. Soon, when Jesus returns, it is to be succeeded by a state of pure religious freedom. In the Kingdom of God there will be no Temple any more; people will live straight from the heart. There won't be any need for objective controls any longer. "On your premisses, if Jesus were to appear in Rome and say to the old men in the Vatican, `Thankyou for minding the shop all these years, but now I'm back and your task is finished. You can shut the whole thing down, leave your posts and follow me' - if he were to say that, then they would reject him in the same way and for the same reason as the Grand Inquisitor did. That is, they would retort to Jesus that the developed ecclesiastical faith is stronger and better adapted to human nature and to history than his original gospel of the Kingdom.
Like the Grand Inquisitor, they would in effect be conceding that the ecclesiastical system which began as a means has now become an end in itself - and like him, therefore, they would surely be stuck with a somewhat self-defeating argument. They are trying to defend a True Church that is knowingly untrue to Jesus." And there's a further point. The Grand Inquisitor's case depends on his assumption that there really is a market for the sort of realistic doctrinal beliefs and the system of religious authority that he represents.
But is there? Surely it is collapsing very fast indeed, not just in Europe, but around the world.
Some new figure have just come in from Germany, where Der Spiegel (June 15 1992) has published the results of a survey of religious belief in which a number of of doctrinal questions first asked in 1967 were repeated a generation later. They showed heavy falls in the number of people assenting to most traditional Christian doctrinal beliefs. For example: "Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary", down from 36 to 22 per cent; "There is a Hell", down from 34 to 24 per cent; "Jesus is God's Son", down from 42 to 29 per cent. The Germans are a conservative people. For about two and a half centuries they had the most vigorous traditions in the world in theology, philosophy and music. After the horrors of 1933-1945 they had the strongest imaginable motives for returning to Christian faith and to the things of the spirit. But the churches, though supported by taxation, are still declining.
It needs to be said, then, to the Grand Inquisitor that his type of organized religion, with its realistic supernatural beliefs, its power-structure, its sacraments and its sanctions, is now very rapidly vanishing from the world. As it has declined, the focus of religious interest has shifted towards something much closer to active non-realism. People are developing and exploring "alternative" cults, visions of the world and lifestyles. The spirit in which they develop their Green religion, Goddess religion, new styles of meditation and so forth is unmistakeably non-realist. From the 1960s onwards there has been a certain return of the historical Jesus both in theology and in popular movements, and the influence of the Buddha has grown steadily throughout the West. Even the itinerant way of life associated with Jesus and the Buddha has returned.
Today we have our own New Age travellers, with their field gatherings and their harassment by officialdom, just as in the Gospels.
Amongst younger people, then, the Grand Inqisitor's type of religion is dead. What people are drawn to is the very thing that the Inquisitor condemned: a utopian, visionary religion of the imagination, a religion of life that enables people to say Yes to the sensuous world of time and change in the here and now. A religion that enables people to become as creatively absorbed in life as artists are in their work.
There is a certain parallel between today's situation and that prevailing at the time of the Reformation.
Like the Reformers, we feel a need to reconnect with the beginnings of our tradition; but we need to go back a little further than they did. The post-dogmatic future of religion will need to look to its long neglected pre-dogmatic past. The mainline Reformers went back only to Paul, and they therefore did not abolish but merely refurbished the Church's doctrine-system and structures of authority.
They were not radical enough. We will look back rather to Jesus, and even to the remote prehistorical past of religion as we try to reconnect our way of `OK, SoF, we hear what you say: now DELIVER!' life with natural cycles, with art and with myth.
If we take our cue from the institutional churches to which many of us still belong and which many of us still work for, then we may be given the impression that our point of view is that of a small and much disapproved-of minority. We may feel a little on the defensive. But if we look beyond the churches to our generation and its needs, then we are mainstream, and much of what we have to say is obvious to everyone. These people are saying to us, "Yes, yes, we accept all that. Now deliver!" So the second threshold is a dual challenge. The less important challenge is simply to stand up to the inevitable backlash against us from the old religious establishment, and not to feel unduly threatened by it. The more important challenge is to go beyond saying what is needed and issuing prospectuses, and start actually delivering the goods. That means experiment: experiments with language, experiments with worship and meditation, and experiments in life. It means inventing new religious forms.
In what I have been saying I have made much of an analogy which you may think very questionable. I have suggested that non-realist faith is to realist faith pretty much as the original message of Jesus is to the developed ecclesiastical faith of late Christianity.
The implication that Jesus was a pioneer of non-realism may seem to some people offensive and as a means has now become an end in itself - and like him, therefore, they would surely be stuck with a somewhat self-defeating argument. They are trying to defend a True Church that is knowingly untrue to Jesus." And there's a further point. The Grand Inquisitor's case depends on his assumption that there really is a market for the sort of realistic doctrinal beliefs and the system of religious authority that he represents.
But is there? Surely it is collapsing very fast indeed, not just in Europe, but around the world.
Some new figure have just come in from Germany, where Der Spiegel (June 15 1992) has published the results of a survey of religious belief in which a number of of doctrinal questions first asked in 1967 were repeated a generation later. They showed heavy falls in the number of people assenting to most traditional Christian doctrinal beliefs. For example: "Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary", down from 36 to 22 per cent; "There is a Hell", down from 34 to 24 per cent; "Jesus is God's Son", down from 42 to 29 per cent. The Germans are a conservative people. For about two and a half centuries they had the most vigorous traditions in the world in theology, philosophy and music. After the horrors of 1933-1945 they had the strongest imaginable motives for returning to Christian faith and to the things of the spirit. But the churches, though supported by taxation, are still declining.
It needs to be said, then, to the Grand Inquisitor that his type of organized religion, with its realistic supernatural beliefs, its power-structure, its sacraments and its sanctions, is now very rapidly vanishing from the world. As it has declined, the focus of religious interest has shifted towards something much closer to active non-realism. People are developing and exploring "alternative" cults, visions of the world and lifestyles. The spirit in which they develop their Green religion, Goddess religion, new styles of meditation and so forth is unmistakeably non-realist. From the 1960s onwards there has been a certain return of the historical Jesus both in theology and in popular movements, and the influence of the Buddha has grown steadily throughout the West. Even the itinerant way of life associated with Jesus and the Buddha has returned.
Today we have our own New Age travellers, with their field gatherings and their harassment by officialdom, just as in the Gospels.
Amongst younger people, then, the Grand Inqisitor's type of religion is dead. What people are drawn to is the very thing that the Inquisitor condemned: a utopian, visionary religion of the imagination, a religion of life that enables people to say Yes to the sensuous world of time and change in the here and now. A religion that enables people to become as creatively absorbed in life as artists are in their work.
There is a certain parallel between today's situation and that prevailing at the time of the Reformation.
Like the Reformers, we feel a need to reconnect with the beginnings of our tradition; but we need to go back a little further than they did. The post-dogmatic future of religion will need to look to its long neglected pre-dogmatic past. The mainline Reformers went back only to Paul, and they therefore did not abolish but merely refurbished the Church's doctrine-system and structures of authority.
They were not radical enough. We will look back rather to Jesus, and even to the remote prehistorical past of religion as we try to reconnect our way of `OK, SoF, we hear what you say: now DELIVER!' life with natural cycles, with art and with myth.
If we take our cue from the institutional churches to which many of us still belong and which many of us still work for, then we may be given the impression that our point of view is that of a small and much disapproved-of minority. We may feel a little on the defensive. But if we look beyond the churches to our generation and its needs, then we are mainstream, and much of what we have to say is obvious to everyone. These people are saying to us, "Yes, yes, we accept all that. Now deliver!" So the second threshold is a dual challenge. The less important challenge is simply to stand up to the inevitable backlash against us from the old religious establishment, and not to feel unduly threatened by it. The more important challenge is to go beyond saying what is needed and issuing prospectuses, and start actually delivering the goods. That means experiment: experiments with language, experiments with worship and meditation, and experiments in life. It means inventing new religious forms.
In what I have been saying I have made much of an analogy which you may think very questionable. I have suggested that non-realist faith is to realist faith pretty much as the original message of Jesus is to the developed ecclesiastical faith of late Christianity.
The implication that Jesus was a pioneer of non-realism may seem to some people offensive and dubious. They will object that, if we know anything about him, he was surely an orthodox Jew who must at least have held a realistic belief in God and a number of theological beliefs about God's action in the world? Surely he believed at least in God's Providence, in prayer, in God's early action to inaugurate the Kingdom, and in Judgement?
These are very complex issues, but I need to make just a few points about how a modern non-realist can read the traditions about Jesus' teaching that are preserved in the first three Gospels.
The traditions include the sayings about the Kingdom of God, the parables, the teachings assembled in the Sermon on the Mount and other discourses, and a large number of other occasional pronouncements. All these materials have been pretty heavily worked over, and they contain many obscurities and difficulties. But a few generalizations are worth making.
First, Jesus is not a doctrinal teacher. He aims to provoke religious insight and a change of life by using complex rhetorical forms.
Second, his talk of God is often, and indeed usually, very veiled. It is hidden behind his chosen rhetorical form. When he tells a parable, when he says "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted", and when he says "The first shall be last and the last shall be first", he does not expressly mention or describe God at all. He is very reticent indeed about God. He may be read as teaching spiritual wisdom, or as using religious language in order to work directly on the hearer, in a way that does not need to be spelled out theologically at all?
Third, Jesus' God is certainly not the God who is used to legitimate worldly structures of power and religious authority. Jesus was a critic of the Temple, and notoriously no great respecter of authority.
Fourth, nor was Jesus' God the God of Holy Tradition. Jesus was extremely free in his handling of tradition, and even ready rather drastically to rephrase the Hebrew Bible itself.
Fifth, Jesus is portrayed as sitting rather lightly to organized religion. He simply turns up, rather opportunistically; he looks like an occasional conformist.
Sixth, if the God of Jesus is not easily to be equated with the God of the social order, or of the moral order, or of Tradition, or even of organized religion, what then was the God of Jesus like? He seems to be attitudinal. He is linked with the heart, that is, `Jesus uses the word God to call us to become new people in a new world' with attitudes of expectation, trust in life, love and forgiveness. God is associated with inner bliss, with personal wholeness and with a true, full-hearted and spontaneous self-giving and self-expression in one's manner of being and living. Thus a non-realist reading of Jesus sees him as using the word "God" not in order to refer to a Being out-there, but in order to call us to become new people in a new world.
Most religious thought starts from a perception of human life as being in some way troubled. If you say: "We're in a bad fix, so bad that we need outside help" - then you are moving towards ideas of a supernatural deliverance and realistic credal belief. But if you say: "We're in a bad fix, so bad that we must change completely, and learn to see our world and our lives in a new way" - then you are moving in a non-realist direction. On the first view, God is an objective Being, about whom metaphysical beliefs are held. On the second view, God is more like a manner of speaking that changes the self and opens up a new way of living.
In later Christianity, belief came first. You had to hold the right doctrinal beliefs, and you had to hold them as a member with others of the right church. In Jesus's teaching, however, neither doctrinal belief nor church membership has that sort of priority.
What he puts first is the way a person's life is oriented; and he uses language not descriptively, but in order to challenge and question the way my life and yours are presently going.
I would not dream of claiming that Jesus was in our sense a non-realist. That would be anachronistic. But I believe it can be claimed that a non-realist reading of the way Jesus used religious language is perfectly plausible. And in general, our position vis-a-vis the tradition is as good as anyone else's - if it matters.
More importantly, if we are to cross the second threshold that I have been discussing, if we are to articulate non-realistic faith in a modern idiom, then we should learn something about the ways in which the great teachers of the past used language. Perhaps Jesus can't tell us what to say any more, but he and others like him can help show us how to speak. dubious. They will object that, if we know anything about him, he was surely an orthodox Jew who must at least have held a realistic belief in God and a number of theological beliefs about God's action in the world? Surely he believed at least in God's Providence, in prayer, in God's early action to inaugurate the Kingdom, and in Judgement?
These are very complex issues, but I need to make just a few points about how a modern non-realist can read the traditions about Jesus' teaching that are preserved in the first three Gospels.
The traditions include the sayings about the Kingdom of God, the parables, the teachings assembled in the Sermon on the Mount and other discourses, and a large number of other occasional pronouncements. All these materials have been pretty heavily worked over, and they contain many obscurities and difficulties. But a few generalizations are worth making.
First, Jesus is not a doctrinal teacher. He aims to provoke religious insight and a change of life by using complex rhetorical forms.
Second, his talk of God is often, and indeed usually, very veiled. It is hidden behind his chosen rhetorical form. When he tells a parable, when he says "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted", and when he says "The first shall be last and the last shall be first", he does not expressly mention or describe God at all. He is very reticent indeed about God. He may be read as teaching spiritual wisdom, or as using religious language in order to work directly on the hearer, in a way that does not need to be spelled out theologically at all?
Third, Jesus' God is certainly not the God who is used to legitimate worldly structures of power and religious authority. Jesus was a critic of the Temple, and notoriously no great respecter of authority.
Fourth, nor was Jesus' God the God of Holy Tradition. Jesus was extremely free in his handling of tradition, and even ready rather drastically to rephrase the Hebrew Bible itself.
Fifth, Jesus is portrayed as sitting rather lightly to organized religion. He simply turns up, rather opportunistically; he looks like an occasional conformist.
Sixth, if the God of Jesus is not easily to be equated with the God of the social order, or of the moral order, or of Tradition, or even of organized religion, what then was the God of Jesus like? He seems to be attitudinal. He is linked with the heart, that is, `Jesus uses the word God to call us to become new people in a new world' with attitudes of expectation, trust in life, love and forgiveness. God is associated with inner bliss, with personal wholeness and with a true, full-hearted and spontaneous self-giving and self-expression in one's manner of being and living. Thus a non-realist reading of Jesus sees him as using the word "God" not in order to refer to a Being out-there, but in order to call us to become new people in a new world.
Most religious thought starts from a perception of human life as being in some way troubled. If you say: "We're in a bad fix, so bad that we need outside help" - then you are moving towards ideas of a supernatural deliverance and realistic credal belief. But if you say: "We're in a bad fix, so bad that we must change completely, and learn to see our world and our lives in a new way" - then you are moving in a non-realist direction. On the first view, God is an objective Being, about whom metaphysical beliefs are held. On the second view, God is more like a manner of speaking that changes the self and opens up a new way of living.
In later Christianity, belief came first. You had to hold the right doctrinal beliefs, and you had to hold them as a member with others of the right church. In Jesus's teaching, however, neither doctrinal belief nor church membership has that sort of priority.
What he puts first is the way a person's life is oriented; and he uses language not descriptively, but in order to challenge and question the way my life and yours are presently going.
I would not dream of claiming that Jesus was in our sense a non-realist. That would be anachronistic. But I believe it can be claimed that a non-realist reading of the way Jesus used religious language is perfectly plausible. And in general, our position vis-a-vis the tradition is as good as anyone else's - if it matters.
More importantly, if we are to cross the second threshold that I have been discussing, if we are to articulate non-realistic faith in a modern idiom, then we should learn something about the ways in which the great teachers of the past used language. Perhaps Jesus can't tell us what to say any more, but he and others like him can help show us how to speak.
This is an edited version of an address to the 1992 SoF Conference.