Christian Alternative (Winchester 2017). Pbk. 328 pages. £17.99.
When I shared my personal ‘creed’ with the East Shropshire Progressive Christian Network recently, I suggested that religious ideas and beliefs should be taken seriously, but not inhaled! Robert M Ellis, like me the son of a Baptist minister, says something similar, if in almost 300 pages of complex argument and sometimes challenging prose. This is an erudite, well-researched and deeply thoughtful book, but it is not an easy read.
His basic argument is that ‘beliefs’ are over-confident statements about the unknowable and therefore to be avoided. ‘Faith’ is a way of being; ‘a term for the more embodied and emotive aspect of belief’, not signing up to a list of required convictions, all of which are entirely human creations. So, for example, once we claim that we ‘know’ anything about a God, it is no longer God that we are talking about but our own conception of ‘Him’. Agnosticism, which he is seeking to reclaim as an authentic intellectual and philosophical position, is the only possible response.
The ‘Middle Way’ which he is exploring here, (as in his previous books), owes much to the Buddha, Jung and the two halves of our brains; one demanding order and certainty; the other much more comfortable with an uncertain creativity. In religious terms, it is also, for Ellis, the only possible path between conviction and atheism, neither of which he says is sustainable. All we can say in response to the big questions about life is ‘I don’t know’. And that’s fine.
Appropriately it is the middle part of the book about Jesus which, in my view, matters most for its potential usefulness. Here Ellis seeks to demonstrate that Jesus followed this middle way in his life, death and particularly his teaching. Jesus acknowledges the contribution of both absolutism (left brain) and openness (right brain) in order to achieve the ‘integration’ that we need. There is much that is stimulating and (to me at least) original here.
But his admitted lack of interest in the historical accuracy of the gospel records worries me. He treats them all as giving us the same insight into what Jesus actually said, (even John) while recognising, if rather in passing, that we only have them mediated through later views of the Christ. I am not entirely convinced that such a solid case about what Jesus said can be built on such flimsy foundations.
The key issue is: ‘What difference does this approach make?’ I would agree that ‘literal’ statements of belief are at one end of the spectrum where ‘God’ is treated as if he were an obvious fact or what ‘the Bible says’ is taken as the final authority. Both are intellectually (and morally and psychologically) impossible. I am not so sure, however, that there is much distinction between agnosticism and atheism at the other end. All our ideas about a God are simile and metaphor, couched in human language and experience. That does not make them worthless, perhaps quite the reverse, but, for me, it is not equally possible that a God may or may not exist.
Ellis is quite right that ‘revelation’ simply raises human claims to the divine and is not to be trusted. (He calls the whole concept ‘idolatrous, disrespectful and sinful’). A ‘middle way’ certainly requires that religions, like all human understandings, are never assumed to be somehow ‘given’ from elsewhere. They are ‘useful’ (as St Paul may have written in 2 Timothy 3:16) but dangerous if given too much emphasis in deciding how to live. I seem to be back to not inhaling!
There is much to think about here. But Ellis may be trying just a bit too hard to make a case for something new. In effect, is he just saying that we need both truths we can believe in and a restless curious imagination in exploring the only way there is: living our shared humanity? Perhaps that is enough.
Ben Whitney is a former social worker and Baptist minister who now provides training for schools on attendance and absence. ben-whitney.org.uk/humanist-spirituality