In his autobiography, the great Anglican controversialist Harry Williams said that ‘one of the important functions of religion is to give people something to do with their lunacy’. It was a point well made, but he might also have added that it’s what they do with their questions as well. And not only their questions, but the very temptation to ask questions. Not to keep those questions bubbling away, of course, but somewhere safe to store them undisturbed, so they can get on with their lives.
It was another Anglican controversialist, Richard Holloway, who began one of his semiautobiographical books with an aphorism from the pre-revolutionary Russian writer Vasilii Rozanov: ‘All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance’. But he might also have added that
there’s sadly no sign of such reflective silence happening any time soon. Because in addition to giving them somewhere to put their questions out of harm’s way, religion also often gives people a sense of overweening certainty, which they frequently feel called upon to express. Bishops are especially proficient at this, partly because it’s in their job description; but mainly because anyone prone to questions is unlikely to be identified as bishop-material in the first place.
At the beginning of the Tractatus Wittgenstein seems to echo this, when he wrote: ‘What can be said at all can be said clearly’. But he immediately qualified that by adding: ‘Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent’. In other words, there’s stuff that can be said, and stuff that can’t. With the subtext being
that religion is concerned with the stuff that can’t be said. The problem comes, of course, when (as often happens) religion tries and fails to say things that should really be left unsaid.
Rowan Williams was well aware of the problems of religious language: ‘We utter paradoxes, not to mystify or avoid problems, but precisely to stop ourselves making things easy by pretending that some awkward or odd feature of our perception isn’t really there. We speak in paradoxes because we have to speak in a way
that keeps a question alive’ (Open to Judgement p119). But as his well-publicised disagreements with Don Cupitt showed, the (then) archbishop was (hardly surprisingly) unable (or unwilling) to keep those questions alive indefinitely.
If religion is seen as (or is allowed to become) a place where the ultimate questions of human existence are honoured, and where people are encouraged to reflect and explore in the deepest way they can, the bible might come to be seen as a repository of wisdom in a way that is currently impossible for anyone who takes
critical thinking seriously, and who looks with bemusement (and maybe revulsion) at the claims of the literalists – and (particularly) their bizarre eschatological Kingdom theology.
The central theme of Jesus’ message (and therefore the focus of many of his parables), was the coming of the Kingdom of God (the Kingdom of Heaven). Sometimes it was said to have already arrived (and was actually within the disciples), sometimes it was said to be just round the corner. But however it was understood, there was unanimity that the Kingdom was inextricably linked to the person and activity of
Jesus, with its arrival (whenever that might be) meaning eternal salvation for those who accepted him, and eternal punishment for those who didn’t.
On the surface it was a satisfyingly clear and binary view, at least for those who saw themselves on the right side of things. But the apparent non-arrival of the Kingdom, either during the lifetime of Jesus or soon after his death, meant either that it had actually already come (although all the evidence suggested otherwise); or that it was still expected. If the latter, was it imminent, or was there going to be a long wait, maybe lasting for many generations?
It’s a debate that’s been going on for nearly 2000 years, and like a tiresome family car journey, the question ‘are we nearly there yet?’ is always being asked by those eagerly anticipating the Rapture, whose delay must be a source of ongoing puzzlement and disappointment to its devotees. The nature of the Kingdom, when
God will establish his rule on earth, is a matter of ongoing debate, but always involves the defeat of
Satan (and an associated end of evil), and the arrival of peace and justice. How any of this might come about is also a matter of debate, with those taking their inspiration from the Book of Revelation seeing it as inevitably involving some sort of bloody cataclysm, perhaps given a helping hand by a massive conflagration in the Middle East.
‘Pancras and Kentish Town repose among her golden pillars high…’ William Blake, Jerusalem,
his vison of London transformed into a kind and fair society
Maybe this is how things will turn out? But maybe it isn’t. And most reasonable people (whether religious or not) haven’t the slightest inclination to take any such nightmarish eschatological scenario seriously. It’s obviously not possible (especially in these days of the internet, with its ability to put before us all manner of unhinged conspiracy theories and evidence-free claims) to take on board any and every bizarre idea that we come across, so we have to discriminate. We have to choose. We can’t leave them all just hanging on as ‘possibilities awaiting further evidence’. Life’s too short for that, so (maybe somewhat arbitrarily) we discard most of them.
All the time we’re making ‘leaps of faith’, all the time we’re deciding to go down one road rather than another, to use Kierkegaard’s analogy. And because the only kind of religion that most people come across is the sort involving weird ideas and beliefs – not surprisingly, people with even vaguely functioning critical faculties tend to want nothing to do with any of it. And that’s an enormous pity, because it is perfectly possible to take religion seriously if looked at in a different kind of way (I wanted to say ‘in the right kind of way’, but maybe that’s too personal, too pejorative, too arrogant). The point is that even though the Kingdom hasn’t fully arrived (and maybe never will, in practical terms), it is possible to make sense of the idea in a way that doesn’t insult people’s intelligence, or stretch their sense of credulity to breaking point.
It’s exactly 80 years since John Wisdom, then professor of philosophy at Cambridge, read his paper ‘Gods’, to a meeting of the Aristotelian Society in London. Its idea of the Elusive Gardener was developed, six years later, by Antony Flew as part of a famous discussion of ‘Theology and Falsification’, with its well-known observation that ‘a fine brash hypothesis may be killed by inches, the death by a thousand qualifications’. Which is a charge that might be levelled at us, as we look for ways of making sense of religion that don’t depend on the metaphysical foundations that pretty well everyone else says are necessary. In his paper, Wisdom (in his role of sceptic) asks (despairingly): ‘Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?’
In other words, how does a non-realist god, with all the qualifications hedged around it – differ from no god at all? How does what we in the SOF Network understand by Salvation, or Resurrection, or Kingdom of God, or Heaven, or any of the key words in the Christian lexicon, differ from figments of our creative imagination? We can’t bring forward in evidence anything to convince those (whether sympathetic to religion or not) who find our position untenable, to show that we’re not just using those words in a kind of private-language sense. Which means our whole religious edifice seems worryingly close to Alice in Wonderland’s Humpty Dumpty: ‘When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
Can we do that? Is it just weasel words to say that we’re ‘developing’ and ‘extending’ the meaning of religious language? Does it all come down to what Humpty Dumpty adds when he says: ‘The question is which is to be master – that’s all’. Are we bound to be bound by established usage? Or is it simply dishonest and disingenuous to go on using the same words, but meaning something entirely different? Or is all this the linguistic equivalent of the shift in art from representational to abstract? Most people are fairly relaxed about pictures that aren’t masquerading as painted versions of photos, but are instead attempting something different. So maybe words don’t always have to correspond to readily identifiable bits of reality?
How the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus developed into the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate. But there’s no doubt that his earlier emphasis on the ‘naming’ function of words was replaced (or at least extended) by their roles within particular ‘forms of life’. It was something he’d hinted at earlier with his insistence ‘whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent’. Which means that words sometimes get in the way of understanding, by making us (and others) think we’ve got more of a handle on reality than we actually have (or indeed can ever have).
So maybe it’s not so much a case of wilfully and shamelessly changing the meaning of religious words to suit ourselves, but of realising that they’re a different kind of linguistic entity altogether from the way they’re usually considered. And instead of them pointing to particular religious ‘objects’, they’re taking us on a journey. The Kingdom of God can thus be understood, not as a purported event in time and/or space, but as a way of expressing how the world would look if God was on the throne rather than Julius Caesar or Donald Trump. Maybe the sort of world that might be worth living in, and dying for. Not something to be endlessly speculated about, but something to be worked for on a daily basis. The ‘world to come’ can be seen as the world as it might be, rather than something to be experienced (or understood) only after death.
Maybe, as Robert Browning put it, God really is ‘in his heaven’, despite things being very far from ‘all right with the world’. Maybe the End will come, the faithful will be Raptured, and the rest of us will be condemned. But those of us who find such a prospect, not just deeply unappealing but entirely unpersuasive, have to live our lives on a completely different basis. Don Cupitt sees Kingdom Religion as an expression of Solar Ethics, and as ‘a way of committing oneself completely and unreservedly to life’ (Radical Theology, p118).
Many find the idea of God’s Kingdom offensive, on both chauvinistic and democratic grounds. Various alternatives have been suggested, such as God’s ‘imperial rule’ or ‘imperial realm’, and if they help anyone, they’re welcome to put things that way. But the elephant in many people’s corner is the very idea of a God (up there, out there) having some sort of dominion over things. So maybe that elephant needs to be deconstructed.
John Dominic Crossan speaks about the ‘Kingdom of Nuisances and Nobodies’ as a way of challenging our most basic ideas about the way in which society should be ordered. He quotes an unnamed Sicilian peasant woman speaking to an Italian journalist during an 1893 peasant uprising: ‘We want everybody to work, as we work. There should no longer be either rich or poor. All should have bread for themselves and for their children. We should all be equal. I have five small children and only one little room, where we have to eat and sleep and do everything, while so many lords have ten or twelve rooms, entire palaces…’ (Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography p 74).
The ideal of people loving and caring for one another does not require a belief in a metaphysical god. But for many people it requires a great deal more, namely a sense of us all being in this together. There will be those who find the idea of an external god a lot easier to cope with, than the idea of loving their neighbour. Which is why our picture of the Kingdom very much depends on our picture of God. And maybe vice versa as well.