James Green There was no Fall. There is only the struggle to be.
For millennia we have tried to find that which we call happiness, fulfilment. For ages before we became self-conscious we learnt by trial and error how to develop. Whilst some became trapped in their specialised element of water or air, on land at least some began to think more than react and so over time to develop skills to master their environment. Yet as far as we have come, we still find ourselves at war with our kin, still imprisoned by the very skills which demand more and more to satisfy our pursuit of happiness.
The very planet is endangered by our fecklessness and our survival threatened. This is no Fall. We cannot blame some past ancestor(s) for this. This is no deliberate transgression of some arbitrary Law the consequences of which require our salvation by another. This is our ignorance and our underdeveloped humanness. If the promise of our thus far achieved humanity is to be realised we need to admit that the state of affairs is of our own creating and that it is we who must improve it.
But how ? We must stop looking for scapegoats. Stop being so ready to find someone onto whom we can transfer the blame. Stop looking backwards to some mythical Golden Age. It never was. Stop looking to some time in the future when there will be an intervention from 'on high' to put right or bring to immediate completion all we think to be wrong. It won't happen. There is only now and us. If a 'kingdom of God' is to be built then we are to build it. At least as much of it as lies within our provenance. But how to begin ?
There would seem to be little to be achieved by looking for a 'meaningful religious experience' if that means looking for some source of knowledge that is not contained in the day to day experience of us all.
Someone once said, "I know the joy of a fish in the river through my own joy walking along the river".
That would seem to me to constitute religious experience' and is meaningful.
How ready Jesus was to remove the burden of guilt that lay upon many who were brought to him. Guilt that was the direct result of their being considered blameworthy by the 'righteous' and which, ignoring the complexity of their wonderful humanness, would punish them because it threatened their idea of what constituted their salvation. How often Jesus refused to act as judge even in what were obvious cases of 'moral transgression'. A judge has to do justice and that, founded upon Law, is as human a matter as anything can be. It is not judgement that we need, it is compassion and that is where I think we need to be radical. It has become a term of abuse to refer to someone as a 'bleeding heart' but without sentimentalising the term it is that sort of compassion we need SPRING 1991 PAGE 13 SEA OF FAITH MAGAZINE to emphasise.
In a recent TV interview an eminent R.C. bishop was asked what precisely was the 'evangel' of the Decade of Evangelism. He said quite a lot but not what the 'evangel' was - at least not in terms that made sense to me nor, I suspect, to many more who were less informed than I. Do I really want to have my reason insulted by being told that my sins are forgiven because God has accepted the human sacrifice of Jesus as a propitiation so that, as the natural phenomenon of death is a consequence of my ancestors disobeying an arbitrary command of God, the unnatural phenomenon of physical resurrection will be mine as well. Yet, is this not what constitutes the 'Good News' ? I think the Decade of Evangelism is doomed unless we change not only the singers but the song !
The Green movement has begun to recall us to an awareness that we are part of the whole planet and that damage to any of it's parts is self-inflicted injury.
This integrity of all things is something that many 'primitive' peoples have long known and by which they have lived. Indeed it was something that the West once knew and in the 18th Century turned into a god. Coleridge in his "Hymn before Sun-rise in the Vale of Chamouni" writes : "0 dread and silent mount ! I gazed upon thee till thou, still present to the bodily sense, dids't vanish from my thought : entranced in prayer I worshipped the Invisible alone." and Wordsworth was similarly religious, "I now affirm of Nature and of Truth / That their divinity / Revolts offended at the ways of men." I think it not to be either likely or desirous that we should imitate this kind of pantheism. But we might do worse than pay attention to the idea that Teilhard de Chardin put forward that we are "evolution become conscious of itself" and in a peculiar union with the whole of the planet, indeed of the Cosmos.
The arrogance born of ignorance that in 1494 prompted Spain and Portugal to think that they could divide the world into two with the Treaty of Tordesillas, seems to linger yet in some western minds - though not quite in the same geographic terms. The missionary zeal which seems to me to lie behind much of the (still) traditional dogma of man's salvation and inherent in the thinking behind the Decade of Evangelism, contains something of the same arrogance. Of course we can speak of Allah and of the God of the Jews as being the same God as ours really, but when it comes to the crunch of meeting Jews and Muslims on the same and equal religious footing as ourselves we begin to feel insecure and close ranks.
I think that much of the so-called Christian Unity is in fact a closing of ranks against the incursion of the 'world' or of 'material values' into what is believed to be the domain of religion. The dichotomy continues still as Plato dictates. The idea that one race of people are 'Chosen' or that one race possesses the Truth has been, is now and is likely to be for a long time yet the cause of cruelties that ought to have died with our antediluvian ancestors. The recent war in the Gulf, whatever its cause, has patently demonstrated the way in which we can euphemise cruelties of the most appalling kind, not that we needed this war to tell us that.
Reading again and again the passage from Mark xv.35, the cry of Jesus as he died, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken (shamed) me ?", I am more than ever persuaded that this is much more than a cry of triumph - as those who would say it is a quote from Psalm 22 - rather a cry of desolation indeed. It was, I submit, the consequence of the 'self-emptying' of which Paul speaks to the Philippians. This puts me in the ranks of the kenotic heretics. The God of the Jews whom Jesus had worshipped and trusted was indeed incarnated and could not do anything about the situation in which Jesus was irrevocably fixed.
God was on the cross. Either that or we go back to being Jews with a 'Jesus ethos'.
For me at least the Good News is that mankind is the church, the community through which all its members are engaged in working out the salvation of Man irrespective of their religious allegiance or none. I remember how many years ago as a young priest I was castigated in a diocesan gathering for daring to say that I believed that in the hospital across the road God's work was being done just as much by the heathen or the Pakistani people as by anyone else, Christian or otherwise. In a gathering of social workers with handicapped people I was told (and I hear it yet so often) that the Christian social worker brought something extra to her work, more than the non-believer though I could not get an answer as to what this was in fact, nor have I yet got an answer.
The Good News is also to me the knowledge that I can question the morality of the causes of social evils and not just man a soup kitchen and, insofar as in me lies, attempt to move the goalposts that have far too long decided who shall win and who shall lose. I do not even have to look to the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury for any more of a lead than to any other man or woman.
All the intercessions for peace and justice that have been made recently failed to stop the Gulf War, as did the possession of atomic weapons. To whom were these addressed ? All the cries for more effective national health care, better education facilities etc, all the prayers for the sick and suffering seem sadly lost in the face of the millions of pounds that go into war and the industries that it supports. We must come to a better religion than this and the Good News is that we can make it.
JAMES GREEN is a retired Anglican parish priest in York.