Contents
Articles
- Utopian Dreams and the Republic of Heaven, David Boulton
- Postemotional Society, Joanne Pearson
- How We Speak of God, Dorothee Sölle
- Bluffer's Guide to Post-Colonial Theologies
Reviews
- Realism and Christian Faith: God, Grammar and Meaning, Stephen Mitchell
- Inventing God, Andy Kemp
- The Calling of a Cuckoo: Not Quite an Autobiography, Ronald Pearse
Obituaries
- In Memory of Dorothee Sölle, Annette Angharad Strauch
Regulars and Occasionals
- Radical Theology Series: Liberalism and the Quest for Jesus, Trevor Greenfield
Editorial
Justice Tarrot card XI — from www.mindbodysoul.com Religion & Social Justice It is a general observation that faith should direct how we live, with theology informing ethics and social justice. Even non-religious people find hypocrisy in those who say they love God but hate their neighbour.
For the conservative believer, religious writings and traditions inform issues of the day, issues such as sexuality, abortion, euthanasia, and even international debt. Conservative religious beliefs not only inform individuals in their own moral choices, but hold clear and—where they are considered to be ‘revealed’—timeless distinctions between right and wrong. Convinced of the universality of such values, they attempt to persuade others to share them. Conservative belief therefore gives a social vision and leads to social action, such as campaigning against international debt and nuclear weapons. Clear moral principles can be appealing in a world where it seems that anything goes, and conservative religion, even fundamentalism, can therefore be attractive.
But in liberal and radical theology there emerges a vision that contemporary social attitudes to ethics need also to inform theology. Such Our appropriation of religious ideas must not be politically naive God who could at one time command genocide (Joshua) but who failed to act at Auschwitz.
Awareness of the destructiveness of colonialism that saw other people and the world’s goods as exploitable gives rise to contemporary postcolonial and environmental ethics, inviting and challenging us to revisit our attitudes and lifestyle.
This awareness leads liberal and radical theologies to reflect again on the relationship of the church to the state and how ideas of God have informed our attitudes. In Judaism and Christianity, such responses include post-holocaust theologies, and feminist and post-colonial theologies (as in.the ‘Bluffer’s Guide’, p.14 in this edition). These theologies can question the clarity of principles that are inherited from religion, and recognise in them historical attitudes that are no longer desirable.
However, where liberal theologians usually retain a sense of the challenge of scripture and tradition to the world, radical theology, at its extreme, views religious ideas simply as reflections of changing cultures, projections of human ideals.
There are therefore pressing questions for those in the network who hold religions to be cultural discourses and wholly human creations. It may be necessary to oppose the violent authority of "God’s Truth", but how is this to be done without supporting theologies have been informed by the experiences of exclusion, exploitation, violence and destruction.
The experiences of women and homosexuals, and the slavery or genocide of other races and religions have led to a liberal ethic of social inclusion and toleration. These experiences question the religious systems and rational structures of Western thinking that have held to some truths to the exclusion of others. Also questioned is the theological idea of a a post-modern attitude in which anything goes and where all values are supposedly personal and relative? That attitude may seem inclusive, but it can offer no social vision, no challenge to prevailing political attitudes, and so in it lies a ‘conservativism by default’ (Terry Eagleton).
If theologies reflect cultures, how can we ensure that our theologies don’t reflect the worst of contemporary values and even become vehicles of deeply corrupt cultures, such as Nazism in the sof 60 June 2003 past, or globalised "free" trade today?
How do we avoid reflecting the values of a market economy, in which money is the ultimate value, or worship the god to whom shopping arcades are erected and before whose multinationals the nations must bow?
If our gods are human creations, mental projections that express and reflect our values, how can we be sure we are not creating a diabolical tyrant—in our own image?
It may be that the wisdom of stories, myths, and sagas of cultures and faiths throughout history have something to say about human nature, aspirations, loving compassion and social ideas that enable us to question the ethics of the world in which we live. Do these myths contain images and ideas that do not simply reflect an old culture, but enable past wisdom to challenge contemporary habits of thinking and living? Can they point to an horizon where truth should be looked for? But, if they do hold this wisdom, we need to find a way to read those myths in order to appropriate it.
Otherwise, we may read the Norse and Icelandic myths like Wagner did, as a vehicle for anti-Semitism and the idea of a master race, and the gods of German Romanticism as Heidegger did, in support of the German ‘Spirit’ (Geist) and National Socialist culture.
Our appropriation of religious ideas must not be politically naive.
If theology is not simply to reflect society, if theology can enable us to evaluate our society, then the dialogue between theologies and social ethics needs to be a critical one. But that critical approach cannot simply be a reflection of the ethics of an age. It needs to be founded on a suspicious analysis of power and interest, as the continental philosophers since Nietzsche have observed. Power and interest have functioned in every age.
This is why continental philosophy can inform the radical theologian and why the struggle to comprehend such philosophers is both necessary and rewarding. It leads to our reading scripture and tradition with a hermeneutic of suspicion, which is an ethical method of interpretation.
A question worth asking of sof 60 June 2003 ourselves is: who benefits from our radical theology?
Writers, publishers and distributors who make their living from it? Just those who have been oppressed by religious traditions and are looking for a way out of them, or for therapy to get over them? Might we be offering a religious vision that is a challenge to the violence of religion: including the mundane violence of the quiet manipulation of those in need of hope and comfort, that lays behind the violence of holy wars and acts of terrorism.
But if radical theology is to be just, it needs to be a politically suspicious theology—suspicious of any vision of a heaven or republic on earth. Otherwise, our republic on earth, however ideal, may well be somebody else’s hell.
Oliver Essame Letters’ Editor SOF Gospel Hill Cottage, Chapel Lane, Whitfield, Brackley NN1I3 5TF e-mail to oliver@essame.clara.net In a recent article, Mysticism and Psychology (SOF 57), Janet Taylor, discussed the view that mystical experiences are a consequence of psychological conditions. In stating that there is more to us than our conscious selves, the article acknowledged the importance of external forces such as experience and environment. At the same time, the idea that mystical revelations could arise from external sources was dismissed as a concept we should have outgrown, a view founded on common sense, but also one which may not be entirely satisfactory when examined in the context of scientific developments over recent years.
Current models of the human psyche are still at a rather mechanistic stage, somewhat similar to physical sciences before the discovery of concepts like relativity and quantum mechanics. If only all objects, quantities and vectors can be defined, then we would know everything about our Newtonian clockwork universe.
This closed model, where consistent rules govern behaviour under all circumstances, appears less comprehensive following the introduction of new scientific ideas such as wave/ particle duality, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, big-bang singularities and variable "Jaws" of physics at different scales and in different parts of the universe. Yet it is still arguable that once the unknown is elucidated, it can be included in the known corpus and the sum total of knowledge correspondingly increases. The new material requires no external mystical intervention as an explanation.
So, are mystical, external sources nothing more than special pleading by individuals unwilling to acknowledge the powers of deductive reason? The answer, if we turn to mathematics, must now be resounding no, although the word mystical isn’t particularly appropriate.
Mathematics is a rigorous, self-consistent framework of rules, with theorems derived from those rules.
Theorems are proved true or false according to the framework, and a triumph of this approach arrived with the publication of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s masterpiece: Principia Mathematica between 1910 and 1913. External influences, beyond the boundaries of the system, were unnecessary.
And then in 1931, the mathematician Kurt Godel published a paper called: ‘On Formally Undecidable Propositions’ [Monatshefte ftir Mathematik und Physik, 38 (1931), 173-198]. The paper was a logical bombshell for the mathematical establishment. Gédel had demonstrated that it was possible for a theorem to be proved true and yet not be part of the monolith of formal rules from which mathematics was constructed.
These theorems were fundamental truths that existed outside the system, and worse, could never become part of the system without creating logical inconsistencies.
Gédel showed that no system, however complex, could ever encompass all true theorems. These were not undiscovered truths waiting for incorporation; they were genuinely external, beyond the sum of the parts, and yet part of the whole.
Gédel’s ideas allowed mathematics to transcend the boundaries of its own existence, and by implication other scientific disciplines cannot remain untouched by these developments.
Already fields such as particle physics and astronomy are yielding revolutionary new descriptions of our universe. And genetics has to come to terms with the realisation that DNA’s liner code is expressed at many more complex levels than simple information theory and the biochemistry of proteins and bases can describe.
With the realisation that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, it may only be a matter of time before a relatively young subject like psychology also embraces concepts beyond the boundaries of a closed system as well. Gédel’s approach does not prove or disprove the existence of a God, Plato’s universals, angels, demons or any other supernatural agent; it only demonstrates that a system cannot contain all true information relevant to itself; a valuable lesson for any field of knowledge. Not so much: I am therefore I think, more a case of: I think therefore I am.
— Dr Rob Walker, London
Dr Rob Walker 38 Trinity Court Grays Inn Road London WC1X 8JZ Michael Morton (Flotsam and Jetsam, SOF 59) highlights the puzzles in the Gospel accounts of the trial and execution of Jesus and he is right to draw attention to the anti-Semitic strands in the narrative (especially apparent in Matthew and John). However, there are other interesting tines of enquiry.
The Gospels give us three largely unrelated versions of the story (with Matthew's mainly an embroidered elaboration of Mark). Only Mark includes a recognisably Jewish trial and his account is complicated by the narrative being artificially compressed into twenty-four hours, probably to satisfy some liturgical purpose. It is consequently forced to accommodate the legal irregularity of a trial by night.
What is often overlooked is that Mark's trial story ends with Jesus being acquitted after due process and that it is only then that the presumably political decision is taken to use his messianic claim (not an offence in Jewish law or part of the proceedings so far) as grounds to bring him before the occupying power. Different but equally fascinating issues arise in the other accounts.
Whatever the historical basis of any of this, these narratives still provide an intriguing set of case studies for anyone with an interest in the interplay of law, religion and politics.
— Stephen Williams, Birmingham
Stephen Williams 157 Russell Road Moseley Birmingham B13 8RR Sof 60 june 2003 The Churches Advertising Networks Easter Poster Campaign, 1999 In ‘Facing Dying’, in the May issue (SOF 59), Further to your request in the Doctrinal Diversity Alan Naylor-Smith writes very movingly of the Special Edition (SoF58), I would refer to that chap fears which rise up in the mind, when faced with Jesus of Nazareth, who in Matthew 15 declares, "You the possibility of imminent death: "When death make God's laws null and void out of respect for . comes it really is the end. At that moment we cease tradition. Isaiah was right when he said 'these to be. We lose consciousness and are no more. The people pay me lip-service, but their heart is far from question then is how I feel about this momentous me: their worship is in vain. They teach as doctrine event - momentous, that is, for me!" the commandments of men!"" He goes on to write of the fear of death itself, Perhaps we should make him an honorary life the fear of non-existence, and the fear of member of the SoF? meaninglessness in one's personal life.
— Tim Burkett, Frome, Somerset