Mark Dyer responds to the Conference talks on this subject.
Historicity and mystery
Historicity and mystery: these were two areas which leapt out at me, when reading the three wonderful articles by Paul Virtle, Iain Robertson, and John Pearson, in issue 141 of Sofia. It was Paul who drew my attention to historicity, because of his interest in the demythologising process, to which the Christian scriptures were subjected under Rudolph Bultmann and others, during the twentieth century. In 1977 a book was published entitled The Myth of God Incarnate, edited by John Hick. At the time it caused a furore within the Church, even though it was merely summarising and clarifying the end-point of more than a century-and-a-half of biblical scholarship. Contributors included some of different distinction. They pointed out that, during the nineteenth century, the church had been compelled to make two major adjustments in the light of advances in human knowledge:
- It had accepted that man is part of nature, and has evolved along with other forms of life on Earth.
- It had accepted (as Baruch Spinoza) that the books of the Bible were written by a variety of human beings, in a diversity of styles and circumstances; such that they cannot be accorded a special divine authority as ‘the word of God’. They are words about ‘God’. They are the words of human beings.
It is, perhaps the second of these adjustments which continues to trouble the Church to this very day. On the one hand, there are those who take hold to the earlier liberalist interpretations; whilst on the other, are those who take a variety of views across those of different areas, past and present (both Tanakh and New Testament) varying degrees of divine ‘revelatory’ or ‘inspiratory’ elements.
The up-shot of the vast amount of Christological and secular scholarship which has taken place over the last century is that we know Jesus of Nazareth was an historical figure; but that to form a portrait of him (as Rembrandt chose to do in his portrait) requires taking that knowledge in hand to be in accord with what the very earliest followers of Jesus thought, is no easy task. And this involves treating their testimonies seriously.
Michael Goulder’s Criteria
In his contribution to The Myth of God Incarnate, Michael Goulder proposed a list of three ‘hard’ and three ‘softer’ criteria, which need to be applied to the New Testament if we wish to use them to understand how his first followers thought of the young Jewish Rabbi, who sought to teach and interpret the faith of his forefathers, anew for his contemporaries.
Hard Criteria:
- Coherence: It is no use interpreting Jesus as a Zealot, and then finding no traces of his Zealotry. Mark may tell us things about Jesus which Luke and Matthew omit, or colour.
- Accidental Information: Detection (criminal and historical) is based on this criterion. For example, in explaining to the Corinthians that Jesus rose from the dead, Paul tells his readers, ‘He appeared to Cephas’, informing us that such a person existed.
- Material divulged to the church’s embarrassment: Mark may tell us things about Jesus which Luke and Matthew omit, or colour.
Softer Criteria:
- Material which Paul claims was handed on to him. Since Paul was converted in the middle of the 1st AD, perhaps thirty years after the crucifixion, what he was taught is not likely to have been distorted.
- Aramaic Hebrew words: Matthew (Luke also) translates these: they cannot have been created by the large Greek-speaking churches, and must have been remembered from Jesus himself.
- Very widespread tradition: For example, that Jesus of Nazareth was a teacher of love; which is evidenced in the Gospels and the Epistles.
When these criteria are employed, we may use our scriptures to build a ‘portrait’ of Jesus: something which even Albert Schweitzer (himself querying Paul Virtle?) felt was impossible after the destruction he perceived to have been wrought during the 19th and 20th Centuries.
My purpose in going into such detail about how the specifically Christian scriptures may be used is, as Paul Virtle says:
For me Jesus is an historical person: but above all is one hundred percent a man. I hesitate saying this, but he is in reality, fundamentally no different from me. So part of my thoughts about Jesus involve that he, like Rembrandt chose to do in his portrait, is to say nothing about the humanity of Jesus rather than his divinity.
I think this is where I feel the church made the enormous mistake of stressing the ‘Christ’ (Messianic) aspect of that young Jew. It was not the Messiah (let alone the great Christos Pantokrator) to be found looming down from cathedral and basilica spaces that initially attracted ordinary men and women to follow, and to listen to him: but a young, charismatic Rabbi, who reinterpreted the faith of his forefathers, away from the collective ‘covenant’ relationship between Israel and Yahweh.
However, the consequence of this line of thinking is that it can lead us into the error of preaching a ‘gospel of niceness’. Indeed, both Paul Virtle and John Pearson (along with a great many members of SOF – to say nothing of bishops of the Church of England) – say as much.
Paul Virtle claims, ‘the teachings of Jesus are what we must hold on to in developing ideas of compassion, forgiveness and love’. John states, ‘I suggest that if the churches and their good works are to survive, then the word God could be phased out and, ideally, phased out altogether, rather than, apologetically, dressed up in some acceptable form.’ The problem is that these ‘nice’ aspects of Jesus’ teaching (compassion, forgiveness, love and peace) do not do justice to the entirety of his teaching; but that would need an entire section on eschatology!
Where John Pearson is especially strong is his emphasis on the ‘fruits’ of belief. The Gospels are littered with such wisdom. Since we cannot claim a ‘God of Fruit’, if we do not love, and help, our neighbour in need, and what our neighbour is, may even include the Samaritan ‘stranger’.
Now to the future of the Sea of Faith Network. For all our talk of ‘openness’ to new religious ideas, we are remarkably ‘credal’ when it comes to contentious modern issues. John Pearson exemplifies this, when he writes:
I am more than happy to try and persuade students and young people to engage with the less fortunate in society (the poor, the homeless and so on) – happy to speak for the community work being done by some local churches and the need for support and growth in this area – happy to encourage others to do their bit, as I try to myself, to combat the threat of climate change – happy to support the need for inclusivity in a world increasingly alive to LGBTQ and racial minorities.
These are hotly debated areas: a homosexual man, myself, and having shared almost forty years with a wonderful male partner, I am especially concerned with the emphasis on ‘gender’ which is being used by trans activists, as a ‘test-of-faith’. I am homosexual because I have always preferred to enjoy the bodies of other males, not females who ‘identify’ as male.
What is worse, is that – as I write – people around the world are being forced to surrender their freedom and are being told what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’ by sources far more dubious than Jesus of Nazareth, and we are being placed in the new ‘religion’ of scientism, whose authority is vested in ‘scientists’ and ‘experts’. But neither scientists nor experts have any greater claim to authority on ‘the human condition’, than philosophy or religion do. The SOF Network needs to resist following this trend.
Mark Dyer is a retired nurse and teacher who lives in Somerset.