Sophia, s0 good is year I had the pleasure of attending my first Sea of Faith conference, where one issue seemed more persistent than most: how can the Network be taken forward? Should it for example develop more into a campaigning organisation with better defined political views? Should it lobby in support of specific causes? Or should it remain essentially a Network promoting discussion on theological issues?
In debating this I was forced to take a step back and try and place the Sea of Faith in context. Clearly the Network can be viewed as part of a sub-culture that exists alongside mainstream Christian orthodoxy which, in both the historic and contemporary church, has given voice to a persistent and judicious mix of dissent, heresy and mystical and narrative expression. In particular, however, I found myself specifically drawn to the apparent similarities between Biblical “wisdom literature” and the Sea of Faith and, in broader view, the similarities between the relationship of “wisdom literature” to the tradition of cult and temple and the relationship of the Sea of Faith to the church. “Wisdom literature” is a distinctive form of writing found in both the Old and New Testaments. It endeavours to engage with the world and make sense of it in ways other than by subscribing to the dominant views and methods propagated by the cult, temple and prophets. The term is used specifically to designate the writings in Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, although elements of writing which characterise these books are found throughout the Bible. It can be seen as a way in which mankind asked questions about life and God - questions, perhaps, that were not permitted or needed by the main cultic tradition which, by its nature, would have much preferred collective agreement to collective enquiry.
To this end “wisdom” did not make claims for recognition on the basis of the tradition of election and cult but, rather, it claimed its truth to be grounded in the nature of the world. “Does not the Sea of Faith Network essentially fulfil the same role as Wisdom in forming a bridge between the church and the spiritually disinherited?” Wisdom, as Sophia, was personified and given the female form, an idea that ultimately caused problems for the patriarchal monotheistic hierarchy that couldn’t tolerate her as pre-existent with Yahweh. Discussion about Wisdom therefore tended to be poeticised rather than theologised. “Wisdom literature” gained particular significance during the exilic period and the Diaspora. The dominant Cult-TempleProphet tradition had been built largely upon the notion of Israel as a regnal geographical entity. Diaspora Judaism, however, was not a Judaism of one nation, for Jews became citizens of many nations and Wisdom, which claimed cosmological, not geographical/historical authority, developed as a bridge between the original institutions and the new reality of exile.
The parallels, then, seem interesting. “Wisdom literature” and the Sea of Faith can both be viewed as counter-cultures within the Biblical/Christian tradition. Both claim that their authority, in so far as they claim any, derives from human experience of the way the world is, not the way the cultic tradition requires it to be seen. Both are more questioning of God than the credal cultic tradition and both experience despair at the remoteness, even the absence, of God.
The similarities can also be extended between the role and function of Wisdom in the Jewish diaspora and the role and function of Sea of Faith in the modern Christian experience which, I would argue, is equivalent to an intellectual diaspora.
The relentless forward movement of science has made classical Christian cosmology and the world-views that rested upon it untenable. The modern secular experience is seemingly devoid of God. Postmodernism has fractured social and individual understandings that allowed aspects or notions of reality to be viewed as certainties or absolutes. In this post-Christian intellectual exile, how can Christianity speak of God? Does not the Sea of Faith Network essentially fulfil the same role as Wisdom in forming a bridge between the church and the spiritually disinherited, voicing the common experience of the West and promoting dialogue between the church and its now “exiled” secular community?
So, to return to the original question, “how can the Network be taken forward?”, if one identifies the Sea of Faith with the Wisdom tradition what might its future function be? I would argue two possibilities, neither of which is exclusive. The first is that, just as Wisdom was incorporated into the canon and then effectively poeticised, so also may the Sea of Faith develop into a more mainstream Christian poetic. A poetic that, at one and the same time, is both an expression of collective Christian angst in a world that increasingly disallows its inhabitants the emotional and intellectual comfort of faith in the certainty of God, and, ironically, a celebration of the freedom that such understanding brings. This, of course, is very much in keeping with the Sea of Faith’s commitment to seeking value in the lived human narrative.
The second is to act as a subversive element re-fashioning Christianity’s historical-prophetic identity into a more universal-wisdom centred one. As Don Cupitt among others has repeatedly demonstrated, the contrapuntal tradition in Christian theology develops new orthodoxy out of former radicalism. Perhaps, ironically, the future of the Sea of Faith Network is as an organisation expressing the new orthodoxy of Christian faith, a faith itself re-fashioned by the triumph of narrative over dogma.
Trevor Greenfield is an associate lecturer and postgraduate researcher at University College Chichester REVIEWS Edited by Alison Webster e-mail willweb@easynet.co.uk A ral ; 4 ; . ate. ¢ v ry one 71 17 y g ¥; mart geLy ¢ ompasstone £ 1 ought fe? ead MARY WARN OcK “Lucia, this book. wal < = O coal all O — QO Oo & a ©) cl [a D HOLLO W AY RICHAR Keep God out of Right and Wrong!