The Faith of a Quaker Humanist by David Boulton “Quaker humanism and Christian non-realism have succeeded in overcoming the orthodox opposition between God and Man. There is no longer any antithesis between theism and humanism” — Don Cupitt, Universalist £2.30 from Quaker Universalist Group, 7 Barewell Close, St Marychurch, Torquay, Devon TQI 4PB Jude Bullock (in this edited version of a talk to the London Sea of Faith one-day conference on November |) tells postmodern Christians and faith communities...
It’s time to Reclaim our ymbols ot so long ago, resulting from Ne= of the more interesting exchanges between Don Cupitt and Bishop John Spong at the Sea of Faith conference, we had the “sliver of reality’ debate. The debate centred on whether or not there was some kind of “other” or “beyond” to our language. I concluded that the debate is irrelevant.
I think that most of us consider that religion is a thoroughly human construction. The language of religion, the symbols of religion, the beliefs of religion, the scriptures of religion, have all been created by the “word”, and in our neck of the universe we are the only beings who can speak. Nothing has dropped from another realm of existence and spoken to us. These are things that we have developed as time has gone on.
Nevertheless they can give to our lives coherence, meaning and a motive for living with passion. It is hardly surprising that our forebears were keen to validate religion by giving it the stamp of ultimate authority. What better validation than Truth with a capital T?
But if faith mattered so much to us that we needed to argue that it was a gift from the creator, why should it matter any less now when an objective “When people arrive at a position that can be described as Sea of Faith-ish there is a tendency, understandably, to assume that everything connected with religion is passé.” Creator finds himself in difficulties? It is my contention that religious faith, far from mattering less in this postmodern world, matters more. It seems to me that religious faith is one of the few activities that we have created that actually celebrates the human. I speak from the Christian perspective: there is nowhere else I would be comfortable speaking from. The Christian faith in the Catholic tradition has shaped me spiritually, ethically and in every other aspect of living. So apologies to people who have not been shaped by this tradition, or if they have, would rather they had not been.
Christianity has a distinct advantage in the world faith traditions, which explains why perhaps the Sea of Faith developed in this tradition first, and also why Buddhist thought has made so many welcome inroads into western culture. It is because Christianity’s starting point is a human person, Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the community found God. Christianity is incarnational.
To explore the Divine in the Christian tradition has been a journey into the human. For us God is radically immanent. The Transcendent, the God over and above us, which is presumably what the sliver of reality debate was all about, is best consigned to Wittgenstein’s “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent”, unknown and unknowable. Not terribly relevant for religious faith, which after all has at its basis a human person and, by implication, humanity.
The symbols of religion explore and celebrate the human, where we have got to in our collective and individual journeys. They reflect to us our dignity, they reflect the wonder of it all, of existence, of life. They point to our own undiscovered country, the infinity that is our endless creativity. The problem has been the assumption that the symbols of faith have a transcendent point of reference. This cannot be the case. If faith has at its origin the human, then their referent is the human. What else could it be?
The problem has been a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water. When people arrive at a position that can be described as Sea of Faith-ish there is a tendency understandably, to assume that everything connected with religion is passé and belonging to a bygone age, referring to a supernatural that we can no longer go along with.
The end result of that, in my view, is the aridity of hard-line secular humanism spending its time not in celebrating the human but in attacking one particular misconception of religion.
Iconoclasm was an early movement directed to preserving the absolute holiness or otherness of God. It failed because it missed the point. The icons and religious symbols were not, and are not about the unknowable, they were and are about us. It seems most odd that those who have lost any belief in the supernatural are so keen to dispense with the most human part of religion. Its art, its symbols, its liturgy, all testaments to the creative genius of the human family, testaments to our alltoo-human spirituality. My title is “reclaiming our symbols”. The first act of reclamation is from the modern iconoclasts who, like their predecessors, have simply missed the point. The second is from those who think that, for a religious symbol to work, it has to refer to some great beyond.
As a Catholic I have deep affection for liturgy. It is probably just me but I never felt at home with just readings, sermons and singing. I belonged to the free church for all of sixth months and, absolutely no disrespect intended towards those of that tradition, it just seemed to me to lack drama. In the first instance that is what liturgy is; good drama, and like all good drama it should tell us something about ourselves. The word itself derives from the Greek meaning the “work of the people.” All religious traditions have developed liturgy, even the Quaker silence is liturgical in its form. If liturgy were merely concerned with communicating with a God “out there”, then it is rather difficult to see how the various strands of Buddhism managed to evolve such a rich liturgical, and scriptural tradition without one. “Where is the beauty? Where is the passion for being here? None of this gives us a reason to live. | need a reason to go on, a reason that is only partially satisfied by the thirst for knowledge.” The Christian tradition has at its heart a story. A story that is re-enacted liturgically throughout the year in a formal way, so that the story becomes a present reality in the life of the community. The meaning of this story is wonderfully mobile. It changes from generation to generation. This is because the story is a myth, and myths are powerful stories, they can speak from generation to generation and mean something quite different in each, without ever having to change a word of the original narrative. It is because of this particular myth’s fluid capacity that most of us are here. The story has no need of change, why should it? It never ceases to astonish me that both religion’s defenders and opponents all fall into the same trap of assuming that the story has a fixed and unchanging meaning. That lurking underneath it all is a “fact”. A fact that can either be accepted or rejected. The evidence of history would suggest otherwise. It was, after all, the same scriptures that were used to justify slavery as were used to abolish it.
The same scriptures that are used by the five hundred or so different Christian groupings, all claiming allegiance to the supposed true version.
There is no fixed meaning there. Its meaning is up to us.
That story has been understood in different cosmologies, different ways of understanding our universe. It has been conceived of as referring to another ideal world, with an illustrious inhabitant (thank you Plato). A world that in our cosmology no longer exists or is particularly needed (goodnight Plato and sweet dreams). Religions do not create cosmologies, they insert themselves into the prevailing cosmology of the time. Nor are they necessarily wedded to any particular cosmology. The job of religion is not to answer the “how” type questions. It is to address meaningful living in a world that is explained to us through other means, mainly science and philosophy. To the best of my knowledge no one in the Gospels is presented as asking Jesus how the world came about. It is because of this that the relationship of religion and theology to art is so strong.
Art too is about expressing meaning and fluidity. Expressing the where we have got to rather than the way things supposedly are.
Religious faith has suffered considerably from the so called “age of facts”.
We are taught that the only things that matter are those things that are considered empirically certain, that can be validated by our immediate experience, or pop out at the end of the scientific method. It is the technological age, the age of the human mastery over the very forces we once thought were gods. It is also the age of human arrogance. We are the masters now, we are taught to think that we can and do understand how it all works, how it all came about.
We can shape it to our collective will.
Maybe we can. But all this knowledge, as any good non-realist will tell you, is itself no more than a language picture, unverifiable beyond language.
Where is the beauty? .Where is the passion for being here? None of this gives us a reason to live. I need a reason to go on, a reason that is only partially satisfied by the thirst for knowledge. A reason that has to do with the passion for life. A reason that can leave behind the past without the slightest regret and face the future with hope. A reason that tells me, even if this was my last day alive, that this day alone has been worth it. The problem is that the place we used to look for those reasons has been hijacked by those who are wedded to facts. That place, for me at least, lies in religious faith. I want to challenge those who think that religion is about facts, because that is the way that leads to nihilistic atheism, or far worse to the fundamentalism of the kind that bedevils our world. Religion is about life, not a life to come except in the very natural sense, but this life, this day and how I get through it in a state that is more than just existing.
The important philosophical work has surely all been done. It is no longer reasonable to think, in an unqualified manner, of a Being “out there”. So what? This does not help me get through the day. It is no longer reasonable to think in terms of a meta-narrative, a universally true way of looking at things. Again, so what? Siddhata Gotama, the Buddha, came to that conclusion in the sixth century. I still find no passion in deconstruction alone. It has worked and worked well, we know that the supernatural is over, it is now the stuff of novels. Metaphysics, after centuries of terminal blanket cancer, has finally expired, leaving its rotting corpse gathering dust on philosophy library shelves. Let it rot.
Again I ask, where is the passion, the reason for living? Knocking down, while absolutely necesssary, does not provide us with a commitment to life.
I am now weary of the arguments against traditional realism, theological and otherwise. They have moved the intellectual furniture around considerably. The sofa of certainty has been chucked out, possibly for good.
But it does not address the basic question that religion has always explored, namely, why live? This question and its exploration is the baby. The bath water is metaphysical realism, one should not be confused with the other.
It was Bishop Spong of the thin sliver of reality fame, who said something along these lines: “A traditionalist is a living person with a dead faith, the tradition is the living faith of dead people, to which the living must write our chapter”. So here goes. Let us get one thing absolutely clear from the outset. Religious faith celebrates an all too human story, it is not about historical data, and to treat it as such would be to impoverish it. Why should this story have had such an impact? Answer: because it expressed and does express the deepest hopes and fears of humanity. Writ large, the lot of every thinking human person can be found in that story. Catapulted into existence as we are and stuck with trying to find meaning in life.
Iam a Christian, one who finds himself and creates himself in the story of Christ. The enactment of this story has taken and does take many forms. The one I am most at home with is the Mass, the service of communion. The “The creed is like singing ‘You'll never walk alone’ at a football match. In fact it is untrue: there is no other way of walking. The effect of such communal utterances and singing is that they bind people together and express common cause and purpose.” Mass has undergone numerous changes throughout history. In fact a reasonable definition of a Catholic traditionalist is one who prefers one change over others, for no other reason than personal preference, usually tied in with good old Latin sentiment.
The liturgical menu of the last two thousand years is quite vast: some things have no relevance any more, other aspects do. We tend not to find the need to meet in catacombs. The criteria for good liturgy is that which works, that which provides meaning for those who participate.
I find it difficult to believe that the words of liturgy are in any way descriptive of anything. Rather they express both the story and the impact that the story has on the lives of the community. One common misconception is that religious language is literal. I would have to say that the misconception is as much made by those who have no time for religion as by those infected by fundamentalism. To the best of my knowledge, nobody seriously believes that Jesus sits up there on the right hand of God the Father, no matter what they believe about God. The fact that we repeat those words every Sunday is neither here nor there, the meaning of the words like all liturgical language is symbolic, metaphoric and expressive.
The creed works by binding the community together, not by uttering eternally true propositions. The creed is like singing “You'll never walk alone” at a football match. In fact it is untrue: there is no other way of walking. The effect of such communal utterances and singing is that they bind people together and express common cause and purpose.
When people get the hang of religious language being expressive and non-descriptive, faith can make sense again. We know that religious faith is through and through a human creation, and is none the poorer for that.
It seems to me that the task now at hand is no longer to deconstruct but to construct and re-create. To rethink faith in our postmodern world. To let the symbols, liturgy and art that nourished those who went before us, nourish us but in a way that is truly our own. I see Sea of Faith not as ending religion but as invigorating it, having the courage to say something has to change because our world has changed.
The Symbols of the Christian tradition speak to me, by reflecting what I am, my place in the world, my value and all that I can be. They do not need any further validation, no ultimate stamp of approval, no foundation in another world. They inspire me to a way of life, that gives to existence passion and meaning. The symbols of the other great world faith traditions do exactly the same within those faith communities. Religious symbolism is not some superstitious hang-over from a bygone age but a radical means of recreating ourselves with love and passion for each other and for life itself. Religious faith in the postmodern world can provide existential meaning in our daily lives without superstition. Faith does not require a God “out there” in order to work, it does not require a list of supposedly true propositions that we must sign our names to at the bottom.
Faith does require a commitment to life, and to the love of our common human family in all its richness and diversity. Faith does require the willingness to explore what it is to be human, even when that is shrouded in darkness and discomfort. Faith does require a_ whole-hearted search for value and meaning in existence. It was Wittgenstein who said in his diaries from the first world war, “The meaning of life, of the world, is God”.
As with so many of the other things he said, he was absolutely right.
Jude Bullock has now left the Catholic Priesthood and is working on a new book.