ANSWER YES OR NO Stephen Mitchell I was once accused of what would politely be described as indulging in theological masturbation. Given the context of an HIV/AIDS Support-group dinner, with vintage wine on the table and safe sex on the agenda, the remark was perhaps less offensive than it appeared. But my neighbour at the dinner table was clearly angered as I attempted to explain the position of a theological non-realist.
Either you believe there is a God or you don't. Either you're an atheist or a theist - theologically celibate or enjoying a satisfying relationship with God. Anything in between is fantasy and self-gratification.
For many people within and without the churches and other circles of faith, questions of belief centre on such polarisations. Is God fact or fiction? Are the scriptures the authoritative Word of God or myth? Is church teaching eternal truth or dogma? Surely faith is nothing if it isn't the Reality, Truth and Meaning of life.
Yet from this approach springs the fundamentalism, apathetic indifference and fragmentation which characterise the religious scene today. The strategy of non-realism, collapsing these dualisms, even turning common sense on its head, is a truly religious strategy attempting to encourage a more common and creative involvement in faith.
When Protestants at the time of the Reformation took their stance on the authority of the Bible, they needed to know what the scriptures said. The door was open for the coming of biblical criticism. But far from laying down solid foundations on which to build the authoritative teaching of the church, scholarship produced the shifting sands of interpretation and a deep uncertainty as to how to handle the texts.
So the non-realist, adopting a strategy to reinstate scripture, makes the move from historical criticism to narrative theology, from history to story. The non-realist says that faith's stories cease to function if stripped down in an attempt to discover an original meaning. Parables and religious myths are the soils in which any number of interpretive blooms can flourish. Meanings are planted and cultivated, they bear fruit, they wither and decay. And these grounds of faith need times to lie fallow, times to be ploughed over.
But it is said that faith is truth, that creeds and religious doctrines are not stories but eternal truths, facts of faith, propositions believed to be true. Yet theologians have constantly devised strategies to show that faith is a very different sort of enterprise. So it was said that God was like nothing on earth. God was not a thing, or an individual, or a being, or a fact. God was not a being but Beingness itself. And to confess belief in God was not to express certainty that such an individual, objective being existed but to pledge oneself to a path of salvation.
The philosophical categories they used are no longer ours and the strategy has therefore ceased to work. So the non-realist, adopting a different strategy to turn faith towards the business of bearing fruit, says that facts take their place like characters in a novel. Stories find their significance in relation to other stories. And the stories of faith take their place in the collection. Creeds and doctrines are a part of those stories, branches that for a while provide the inspiration, imagination and energy to bear fruit. Sometimes they need pruning, sometimes they must be sawn off and burnt.
But still faith is said to express the deepest reality, that we are not imprisoned in a library, that the stories refer to a reality outside and that truth comes from its correspondence to that beyond. So too it is said that the world's faiths point beyond themselves to the mystery of the reality of God.
Faith has always needed a strategy to reverse its inclination to flee from this world to a world beyond and evade the ethical and political responsibility of creating heaven on earth. So the non-realist says that reality is the stories. Our knowledge, our experience, is a cross-referenced world of stories. God, indeed, is found in the scriptures - the character in the stories of God. We create ourselves in the stories of our lives and to become the authors of our lives is to discover the authority of faith.
This involves common tasks and faith communities are the forum where this creative work can go on. But, as the remarks of my companion at dinner indicate, all this is something to be thought in private. Like clergy raising questions in the pulpit or challenging orthodoxy, none of this is thought to be appropriate in public. If you have to indulge in this sort of exercise to get satisfaction in faith, then don't do it in public.
Yet how can we create any common commitment to peace and justice or hope for new world orders unless we have a common, creative approach to meaning, truth and reality?
Non-realism, putting everything within the free but bounded, all-pervasive world of language, collapsing the polarisations of fact and fiction, story and history, imagination and reality, also redefines the public and the private, the individual and the social. And that too is a truly and much needed religious strategy to counter the privatisation and anti-social trends of much of today's religion. Non-realists will speak out, even at the risk of abusive comments. This is no secret, "shameful" masturbation but an open acknowledgement of an honest relationship with the inheritance of faith.
Stephen Mitchell is Rector of Holy Trinity Church, Barrow-upon-Soar, Loughborough, and Honorary Treasurer of the Sea of Faith Network.