Sea of Faith and Christianity: Easter, incarnation, prayer

Easter

Three days after Jesus was crucified, the grieving disciples, Mary Magdalene first, saw him alive and spoke to him. He was not like someone who had been through a physical trauma and survived; he had special powers. For example, he could ‘vanish out of their sight’. It was a vision convincing them that God had vindicated him.

Even if we do not believe that a supernatural God raises people from the dead, in one sense Jesus is clearly still alive or we would not still be talking about him two thousand years later. His spirit lives on and is active in many people’s minds and therefore in the world.

As a good man and innocent victim of violent powers, Jesus stands for all the other victims. Liberation theology sees the poor and oppressed as the ‘crucified people’ and their struggle for a better life as a struggle to rise again. This resurrection will save the world, because a just and kinder world will be better for everybody, the oppressors as well as the oppressed.

Easter, whose name derives from Eastre goddess of Spring, celebrates the return of life, the victory of life over death, the conviction that (though each individual dies) life and love are stronger than death.

Incarnation

This Christian doctrine lies within a wide spectrum which includes at the one end the concept of animism — the Divine is in everything and everything is Divine — and at the other, concepts of revealed books, in which the spirit is made not flesh but word. Christianity seems to span quite a wide range of that spectrum.

In the fourth Gospel, the concept of incarnation rests first on the personification of “The Word” with antecedents in the Hebrew Wisdom literature’s personification of the Logos. The writer identifies the man Jesus with this personifying of the divine. At this stage in the development of Christian thought there’s a lot in common with the Hindu concept of the Avatar, and some Indian Christians are redeveloping this. However, Catholic Christianity did not go that way but developed the doctrine of the Trinity instead, “taking the manhood of the Christ into the Godhead”.

Incarnation in the wider sense is still a valuable insight — seeing the divine in the physical and mundane. It is powerfully consistent with Sea of Faith’s understanding of religion as a human creation. In becoming man, God destroys the barrier between heaven and earth. The veil of the temple is torn in two.

Prayer

Adoration, Confession, Intercession…

Do these have to be addressed to a realist God?

Here are some brief excerpts from an article by Anne Ashworth, a Sea of Faith member. Click here to read the full article.

Adoration

“What we celebrate is nothing other than ourselves as whole beings”. “What else is humankind than the very spirit of earth, or life’s coming to know itself in its eternal being and in its ever-changing process of becoming?”Schleiermacher

We celebrate also the oneness of the cosmos and the beauty of earth. Quantum physics, creation spirituality and ecofeminism have powerful insights to add to that nowadays. Our capacity for awe and wonder has been stretched to fresh horizons.

Confession

“In prayer I am checking out my life with my ideal observer.” How about that? Cupitt calls it The Eye of God. The medievals called it the Examen. We cast a cool objective eye over ourselves, deplore ourselves, laugh at ourselves, understand and forgive ourselves. We don’t need a God or priest to forgive us. And if we seriously mean business — a requirement for all religious confession — we rise better people.

Intercession

“Prayer is talking to ourselves”. We are in fact taking “prayer” seriously if this is a mode whereby we can get in touch with those deeper parts of our psyche which are normally overlaid and hidden from us. Often the old Christian teaching was that we must be in part the answer to our own petitions, that we dare not make requests unless we are prepared to be “used” in the subsequent action needed. Moreover, ordinands and lay preachers were taught that intercessory prayer was largely a consciousness-raising exercise for the congregation, as for instance in the case of prayer for peace. So even in our most devoutly theist days, we all subconsciously knew that prayer was talking to ourselves. How, though, knowing this consciously, can we continue the exercise…?