140 – Descent

Reading the current Sofia’s article, Imagine…Christian Atheism has resulted in this letter regarding my own journey. In my 8th decade I have progressed (!) through the traditional CofE upbringing: 1963’s Honest to God debate; Don Cupitt’s various books illustrating the steps of his journey; attending a number of the early SOF Annual Conferences in Leicester. The last conference I attended was the one that Dr Anthony Freeman spoke at, following the then discussions on his belief. I ran a workshop then on Tai Chi which he attended and I later following his progress as an editor on The Journal of Consciousness Studies.

I studied and continued with studies on philosophy and consciousness studies and have now reached the stage when I am, to some degree, happy with my position on the idea of God. The evolution of human consciousness has resulted in great complexity with the mind as an emergent property. Further, the idea of God as a natural concept. This, I believe, is an awful responsibility with the power to change lives.

Bob Smith, Shefford, Bedfordshire

The magazine as usual distracted me from everything else. Martin Spence comments on the ‘unskilled or drowsy copyist’ and the errors introduced. The copyist may actually go further and deliberately add to the text in the light of his later knowledge. Conspicuous examples are the last two verses of Matthew’s gospel (28:18-20), the first verse of Mark’s gospel (1:1) and the addendum at the end of it (16:9-20). I suspect that there are many more. At the end of his article on debt, Edward Nickell writes about ‘a sense of primordial gratitude, and the obligations it generates’. Gratitude does not generate any obligation: it stands on its own feet and is not a contractual relation. A person may be inspired by gratitude to acts of generosity but is not bound to do so as a matter of duty. I was also very interested to learn more about Bobbie Stephens-Wright as she was chair of my group at several conferences.

Michael Hell, Birmingham

Please do pass on my thanks to Edward Nickell; Graeber’s History of Debt has been on my ever-growing to-read list for years, and I’ve now listened to the BBC audio version, which I hadn’t realised was available.

Patti Whaley, Faversham

Much like Richard Dawkins (of whom John Pearson is ‘an ardent disciple’), in his article on ‘Christian Atheism’ (Sofia 139) John Pearson conjures an ‘Aunt Sally’ concept of God, which both then seek to dismantle. He writes: ‘There is no scientific justification whatsoever for any external/supernatural creator. There never was and there never will be.’ Does John seriously think that all human propositions require ‘scientific justification’? Of Jesus of Nazareth, John says, ‘So, for me and many others, I suspect, it feels sufficient to greatly admire Jesus for his care for humanity; his teachings as to how we should treat the poor, the outcast and so on; and to take him, as best we can, as our prime role model, for a life well lived.’ Such a view would be in accord with the ‘demythologising’ process envisaged by many scholars, and it may well enable us to recover the ‘influential rabbi’ or ‘great teacher’ who appeals to John Pearson. But this view has been dealt a blow by scholars such as Jürgen Moltmann and Richard Bauckham; to name but two.

Does the vision of Jesus which is provided by John Pearson do justice to the depiction provided by the primitive believers, through Mark? In his short book on Mark, Rowan Williams describes the very first verse of the Gospel as announcing that, ‘this was a book about “regime change”.’ Right from the outset of his mission the concerns of Jesus are about God and his Kingdom. Of course, we will go on to learn a lot more about that kingdom, through act and parable. Nevertheless, Mark depicts a God who acts through human agency: in exactly the way John Pearson envisages. When John cites Colin Lyas’ defence of the coherence of Christian Atheism in claiming that they ‘are united in the belief that any satisfactory answer to these problems must be an answer that will make life tolerable in this world’, does he imagine this view is not shared among theists? Despite the adversity any mature human being is required to accept as part of what it is to be human, theists have been found throughout history, ‘trying to make life tolerable in this world’. I doubt most well-thinking people today are ‘content to accept the world as it is’: indeed, some wish to make the world even worse than it is. Thank goodness John appears to put Jesus of Nazareth in the first category!

Mark Dyer, Wiveliscombe, Somerset

I really enjoyed Issue 139. Thank you. My own modest efforts to promote a ‘Christian Humanism’ can be found at www.ben-whitney.org.uk. It’s not always easy to maintain such a dialogue. Trying to be a bridge usually means you get walked over from both sides! I have found a home in the Progressive Christianity Network, www.pcnbritain.org.uk, which I would commend to others on a similar journey.

I was also particularly struck by Dominic Kirkham’s review of Abidan Paul Shah’s book on New Testament Textual Criticism. (When did such obviously biased work ever become sufficient for a doctoral thesis?) I have recently had two salutary conversations. The first was with a Christian friend who was gobsmacked to hear that the gospels were not written until after Paul’s letters, that Paul knew little or nothing about Jesus’ life and teaching and (despite Shah’s claims) we have no ‘original’ NT manuscripts, only later variants and translations. He asked why no-one told him this. The second was with a colleague who said he had once walked to the station with the Archbishop of Canterbury after he had preached an Epiphany sermon. He asked the archbishop whether he really believed the story of the Magi as historical fact. ‘Of course’, he replied. This is not just a suspension of disbelief but a wholesale denial of reality. Not upsetting the faithful seems to have become the standard line. Their ignorance is presumed to be bliss, when of course it is actually leading to oblivion.

Ben Whitney, Wolverhampton

On the back of Sofia 139 was a picture of ‘the west front of Westminster Abbey with memorial statues of ten modern martyrs who struggled for humanity’. Of these ten, I already knew of some well-known ones such as Martin Luther King and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but many of the others I had never heard of and was intrigued by, so I did a bit of research. The results were very mixed. All of these people were Christians who died because of their beliefs for some reason, and some of these did so in a very inspiring way that indeed showed their commitment to humanity as a whole.

Apart from Martin Luther King and his impact on the struggle for civil rights in the US, the stories of Maximilian Kolbe and Janani Luwum were new ones that were similarly inspiring: both resisted tyranny (the Nazis or Idi Amin) with deep humanity. However, I discovered that many of the others simply seemed to be people who had been killed because they were attached to Christian beliefs that were in conflict with those who ruled in their context, and were otherwise not particularly notable for their positive impact on others in any other respect.

Manche Masemola, for instance, was a teenager who was killed by her parents for seeking conversion to Christianity in defiance of them. Of course, all these killings took place in a context of intolerance, and I would condemn them morally in the strongest terms, but were these martyrs rightly described as ‘struggling for humanity’? One could argue that the archetype of God or Christ that inspired them also serves as one of Humanity, but actually the conflicts that they died in as martyrs seem to be much more due to the absoluteness with which both sides insisted on beliefs that were inaccessible to experience and thus impossible to resolve. In many ways, the celebration of martyrs seems to me to exacerbate conflict by encouraging people to hold onto absolute beliefs no matter what. Should the back cover of Sofia really be celebrating such people?

Robert Ellis, Malvern

Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, preached a sermon in his cathedral denouncing the repression in El Salvador. He was shot dead at Mass on the following day, 24th March 1980. – Ed.

I greatly enjoyed the review of Julian Baggini’s The Godless Gospel, especially for its echoes of two 18th century thinkers from this side of the pond. In his autobiography Benjamin Franklin expresses the intent to ‘explain and enforce this doctrine: that vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but forbidden because they are hurtful, the nature of man alone considered; that it was therefore everyone’s interest to be virtuous who wished to be happy even in this world…’ And because Thomas Jefferson considered Jesus to be mankind’s greatest moral teacher, he took up scissors and paste to produce The Jefferson Bible – a combination of the canonical gospel accounts free of any supernatural elements that would offend the intelligent views of any reasonable person. And this while in the White House! He also expressed the opinion that within a hundred years the rapid spread of universal education would result in all Christians becoming Unitarians. Ah, the irrepressible optimism of idealists!

Tom Hall, Foster, RI, USA