Mark Dyer asks whether there is a place in the SOF Network for those who oppose fundamentalism but do not abandon supernatural claims.
Forgive my adaptation of the subject of the SOF 29th Annual Conference; but I read the article on Death and Resurrection by Dinah Livingstone in the Easter Sofia as I had just completed my first reading of the late and wonderful Geza Vermes’ book, The Resurrection (Penguin 2008). I have to confess to being one of Jack Spong’s Believers in Exile: a 63-year-old, self-respecting, gay, Jesus-follower, who has not attended any church for the past forty years.
This ‘outsider’ status has meant I have had ‘to work at bringing about (my) own salvation’ (Tom Wright’s translation), by which I mean, make sense of my faith in a way which does not do insult to my God-given brain, through reading, and enjoying occasional episodes of koinonia with fellow Christians. Costa coffee and cakes have been my Eucharist!
What has long concerned me about my faith is the discrepancy between what I learned during the Seventies, whilst at university, and what is promulgated from the pulpit: particularly at times such as the Great Christian Feasts. Surely the clergy have undertaken the same theological studies as I have; and yet their religion often remains unreconstructed, and ill-suited to the needs of our ‘post-modern’ world. Indeed, at Christmas and Easter, it seems to be the case that fundamentalism reigns!
However, I am also concerned by what I perceive to be the contradictory ethos of SOF. On the one hand it, surely, seeks to liberate us from fundamentalism, and the creedal beliefs of any religion: and yet there seem to be dangerous signs of a ‘SOF-approved’ form of spirituality. For example, in the April 2016 edition of Portholes (132), there is an item on one of the founder-members, David Paterson, in which he is described as publicising ‘his personal SOF-sympathetic theology’. Paterson is, then, quoted as saying, ‘Religions are needed but have to stop (my emphasis) supernatural claims’, before continuing to tell us how we (must?) interpret the biblical stories; as ‘imaginative and inspirational’. Was that the purpose of their authors? I wonder. A further quotation from Paterson’s article in the Loughborough Echo (16.03.2016) is almost creedal: ‘There is no Creator, no almighty, supernatural power, just people marvelling at the wonder of it all, and wanting to fill life with love, joy and peace.’ Is that a fact: especially in the Middle-East?
Portholes Editor, Penny Mawdsley, then asks: ‘Why don’t more of us take up the challenge and send something similar to our local papers?’ I have regularly commented on religion in my local papers (Somerset County Gazette and Wellington Weekly News) for the past couple of decades: usually to correct a fundamentalist pontificating ‘Churchian’, who is taking the existence of God for granted, and as sufficient basis to enable her/him to write a prescription for our behaviour; or to condemn a sinner, such as me. However, one thing I have realised is that one is able to write almost any amount of rubbish, provided one has the letters REV in front of one’s name!
I am a follower of Jesus; and yet I find such narratives as his parthenogenesis (arguably not found in Scripture), and the baptism of infants (not found in Scripture), unnecessary and irrelevant. Now, I think I have even reached the stage where I feel the Resurrection may fit into the same categories: insofar as treating it as an historical event is concerned.
As Vermes points out, the monotheistic Jew Jesus’s entire focus was on the coming kingdom of God. God is absolutely central to his own adoration and teaching: not his own person. Even the great christological title, ‘Son of God’ is placed on the lips of Jesus only once in the Synoptics (Mt 11:25-7; Lk 10:21-2); and Vermes interprets these as reflecting the high christology of John’s Gospel, and as possibly part of a later hymn, which found its way into Matthew. If the title were genuinely typical of Matthew’s theology, surely it would appear more frequently.
The development of Jesus’ divine status was a lengthy process; thoroughly and succinctly traced by Vermes in his later book, Christian Beginnings: from Nazareth to Nicaea, AD 30-325, Penguin 2012). The matter was only ‘settled’ at Nicaea in 325: and, yet, how many Christians today are aware of the length of this process, or the names of the many dramatis personae involved in it? How many ask themselves what the early Christians believed of Jesus for the first three hundred years following his death? How many continue to believe, of the infant Jesus, that, ‘all knowledge and all power and all dominion were invested in that baby boy’ (A.N. Wilson, Jesus, 1992)?
Then we come to the Resurrection, and the Atonement: probably the greatest stumbling blocks for us today: and this is where Dinah’s article is illuminating. Jesus of Nazareth, in the perfection of his humanity, as recorded in the Synoptics, surely revealed the Divine. That is not to say that a perfect human being would be divine: but that our Creator (there, I’ve written it!) might perfect our humanity, and dwell among us. The only problem is that we, who never learn, would repeat the exercise and judicially murder that perfect human being again. Therein, I feel, lies the concept of ‘atonement’: the realisation (revealed through the life of Jesus) that we are incapable of fulfilling Dinah’s ambition:
It [the Christ Epic] is another version – vision – of what Jesus himself preached, the reign of God coming on Earth. But as there is no supernatural being to bring it about we have to keep on trying to do it ourselves. (Sofia, 119, p 14)
This is a hopeless task, even given an evolutionary time-scale. It omits a small characteristic of humanity, recognised by generations of our religious forebears: our ‘nature’. Here we need to be realistic, and engaged. We may consider ourselves ‘civilised’; but a glance around the world today serves to demonstrate that man’s inhumanity to man is as vicious and cruel as it ever was. Power, status and wealth remain the principal driving factors in the lives of many of us and, once achieved, we do not readily relinquish any of them.
Contrast our behaviour with that of the One who lived only two thousand years ago. The difference – and the impossibility of the task of our becoming more like him – reveals our need for forgiveness and grace.
And that is before we scrutinise that other major problem for religion: the classical ‘problem of evil’. And here we do not mean the wish of Islam to inflict a compulsory form of belief on our planet through cruelty, or ‘our’ retaliation through indiscriminate bombings. It is in the type of situation identified by Stanley Hauerwas, the death of a little girl from leukaemia, that we identify the real problem. John Hick tried to side-step the issue, by saying that the problem only applied to those holding to a Deistic form of theology, a God who is held to be almighty and omnipotent, rather than the Suffering Servant version we find in Jesus of Nazareth. This is too neat; and still leaves the problem. The problem also remains for those holding to an approved SOF-sympathetic theology.
One of the factors that Vermes identifies as being characteristic of Jesus of Nazareth in every Gospel is in his ability to heal. Having been a nurse (in haematology), I became very interested in the perceived transition in ‘western’ medicine, from the ‘art’ of healing, to the ‘science’ of the cure of death. And here, I have found the writings of Jürgen Moltmann to be especially illuminating. In his Gifford Lectures of 1984-5, Moltmann wrote:
But if we understand health as the strength to be human, then we make being human more important that the state of being healthy. Health is not the meaning of human life. On the contrary, a person has to prove the meaning he has found in his own life in conditions of health and sickness. Only what can stand up to both health and sickness, and ultimately to living and dying, can count as a valid definition of what it means to be human. (p 273)
This is why I (as a new-comer) am concerned about how I perceive the SOF Network Christianity. It needs to be practical and attractive if it is to be true to the version of Judaism practised by Jesus. But SOF seems incredibly intellectual and rather nebulous; and I have to ask whether in this perceived intellectualism lies a clue as to why its numbers are static.
I do not feel that the only option for a Christian, in the face of what we have discovered about the scale of the cosmos, time, and evolution, (to say nothing of basic particles!) is to turn to the Gospel of Richard Dawkins. Indeed, for me, the unimaginable scale (and what that says about the utter unimportance of Earth), has the opposite effect that same awareness had for Blaise Pascal. For the unimaginable scale, coupled with the constant of human nature, only serves to enhance the absolute miracle I take Judeo-Christian Heilsgeschichte to be. Does that mean I ought not to belong to the SOF Network?
Mark Dyer is a retired haematology nurse from Somerset.