78 – I Am. Am I?

Author: Dinah Livingstone. Published July 2006 in issue 78 of Sofia.

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Contents

Articles
Reviews
Poetry
Regulars and Occasionals

Editorial

This issue opens with an article by Stephen Mitchell about God’s existence, in which he attacks what he regards as the weasel word ‘non-theism’. In the second article,Anthony Freeman asks in what way humans can say ‘I am’. He gives a brief history of the self and summarises the state of the question today with its dispute between ‘bundlers’ and ‘egoists’. He first gave this as a talk in March to the London SoF Conference ‘Is There a Me?’ Thus the issue title ‘IAM.

AM I?’ refers both to God and to human beings (and, of course, the two are related; human beings would not speak of a God whose name is ‘IAM’ unless they had reflected on what it means to say ‘IAM’.) Scholars have questioned what the divine name means. The Jerusalem Bible note says that it is ‘clearly part of the Hebrew verb “to be” in an archaic form.’ It could be ‘I am’ or ‘I will be’, or even causative: ‘I cause to be’, that is, ‘I create’.

Stephen Mitchell’s article questions David Boulton’s book The Trouble with God and Lloyd Geering’s Christianity without God. As he says, Boulton uses the word ‘non-theism’ to mean that God does not exist independently of human beings, and this is what is commonly called ‘atheist’. Like others in SoF, Boulton thinks that God is a human creation. Mitchell goes on to say, ‘Whatever David is talking about, it is not the god Christians call God.

Their God is from everlasting to everlasting, unbegotten and uncreated.’ Undeniably, this has been the orthodox Christian view, which Boulton and many other Sofers do not share.

But when Mitchell expands on the Christian view of God, his description of ‘traditional, orthodox Christian theology’, seems to include only half of it.

Pascal wrote of his ‘night of fire’ on November 23rd 1654: ‘The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars... The God of Jesus Christ.’ Mitchell seems to prefer the ‘God of philosophers and scholars’. ‘God,’ he says ‘is beingness itself, existence itself, reality itself, life itself.’ I remembered the scene when Paul preached to the men of Athens in the Areopagus, saying that the ‘unknown god’, whose shrine he had seen on the way, was in fact the ‘God of Jesus Christ’ (Acts 17:23ff.). I imagined Mitchell as one of those men of Athens saying, ‘I think I’ll stick with the unknown god, thanks; it feels safer somehow.’ Surely – beginning with Paul’s speech in the heart of Athens – the theological work of the first centuries which forged Christian orthodoxy, was to unite the Greek ‘god of philosophers’ with the God of Jesus Christ, whom Jesus usually addressed as ‘Father’.

Mitchell says some have accused him of trimming ‘as an Anglican vicar striving to save my stipend and keep in with my bishop’. This accusation will not stand. In its half and halfness, Mitchell’s article has easily enough to spell trouble for himself if he had the misfortune to meet a basher bishop.

For Mitchell, as for most Sofers, the Bible stories are ‘simply stories’. ‘We agreed that the characters in the stories (including the character of God) had changed, but we agreed that they were characters in a story.’ This is what he sees as the positive side of ‘non-realism’, an approach to ‘texts’ which gave us a common language with other religious radicals and academic disciplines. (On the top deck of the 24 you could hear a post-modernist mutter: ‘A bus ticket is a text.’) Mitchell picks his way through the quagmire of debates about ‘non-realism’, pointing out how slippery and squelchy the term proved to be, and what confusion it caused. As Ruth Scott says in her article on Conflict in this issue: ‘It is extraordinary how people can use the same term and mean something utterly different by it.’ Then we find that fascinatingly, although Mitchell thinks that the God in the Bible stories is not real in the ordinary sense of not real, i.e. he is a The title of this issue is ‘I AM.AM I?’ When God speaks to Moses from the Burning Bush and Moses asks his name,‘I AM’ is what God calls himself (Ex. 3:14). editorial character in a story, a fiction, we made him up, this is not true of Mitchell’s ‘God of philosophers and scholars’. When he says that ‘God is beingness itself, existence itself, reality itself, life itself’, this clearly smacks of ‘a philosophy that had its roots in Platonism.’ He ontologises abstractions (or personifies them if he is thinking of God as conscious and personal, which he does not make clear). His list of abstract nouns – ideas – exist as God. So for Mitchell, the God of the Bible is fiction, a human creation, but the God of philosophers and scholars is not.

Others will hold that both Gods are fictions. Here I think it helps to consider those abstract nouns as verbs (and perhaps a Somerset dialect is more helpful for the first in the list). Beings be; existing things exist; living things live. I was thinking about phrases we use for weather: ‘It is raining’, ‘it is thundering’. If we ask ‘what does “it” mean: who or what is raining or thundering?’, an earlier culture might reply: ‘God is raining, God is thundering’. (Incidentally Chac, the Mayan Rain God, was a benevolent, welcome figure, whereas although we now need it so badly, in England we tend to think of rain as a kind of grumbling.) But for most speakers of modern English the ‘it’ in the phrase ‘it is raining’ does not mean anything much. In fact we tend to omit it and say ‘ ’sraining’. If anything, rain is raining, i.e. rain is what it does. Being is what beings do. If we don’t want to say ‘God is raining’, ‘God is thundering’, why should we want to say ‘God is being’? ‘Beingness’, ‘Existence’, ‘Life’ are abstractions; we certainly can’t meet them walking down the street. When we personify (or ontologise) these abstractions, we are again making up stories, this time using poetic tropes like personification, metaphor and allegory. At the beginning of his ‘Mask of Anarchy’, Shelley does meet a personified abstraction, ‘Murder’, walking down the street. In using personification and allegory Shelley points out in the poem’s first verse that these are ‘the visions of poesy’:

I met Murder on the way – He had a mask like Castlereagh – Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven blood-hounds followed him.

Likewise, we can personify or ontologise abstractions and call them God. We can have a God who is Being, a God who is Life, a God who is Love (there is no particular reason why these should all be the same God – in some religions they are not.) We can also have a God who is War, a God who is Death...

These Gods are creations of the human poetic genius, fictions, ways of exploring ourselves and our world. Their poetic force derives from the fact that human beings on Earth really do exist, live, love, fight, die. Poetry is one of humanity’s defining features. Divine fictions are not supernatural; they are human with a long history and contain valuable insights, wisdom perhaps.

At the end of his article on the human self, Freeman considers the current debates between ‘bundlers’ who think an enduring self is an illusion because we are just a ‘bundle of sensations’, and ‘egoists’ who ‘do believe there exists an enduring self, or ego, of some kind’. The name God calls himself in the story of the Burning Bush is I AM. If humans create gods in our own image in order to explore ourselves, perhaps creating a god called I AM is a moment of historical self-awareness when the human being says I AM and claims an enduring self. Even if we drop the supernatural, it seems a pity to give up that hard-won insight about ourselves. Elsewhere (not in the current article), Freeman speaks of consciousness as an ‘emerging property’ and then of ‘God’ as an ‘emerging property’ in human consciousness, both individual and collective consciousness. If we construe the Burning Bush ‘archaic form of the Hebrew verb “to be” as future tense, God’s name is ‘ I will be’.

Mitchell ends his article with a plea: ‘The SoF network’s statement of intent leaves open the question of God. While some in the network may wish to close it, I believe the network’s future lies in leaving it open.’ While it will be clear from the above that Sofia editor’s position is that all gods are creations of the human imagination and poetic genius, I nevertheless agree with Mitchell that SoF and the pages of Sofia should be open to all intrepid explorers who are willing to engage in robust debate. However, when SoF explores religion, it must be religion for better or worse. In such a dangerous world we must be prepared to say sometimes: ‘I think that belief is silly or I think that belief is harmful.’ As many who believe that God exists and many who don’t would agree, the criterion is not killing, not wounding, not torturing, not starving, not stunting, not brain-washing, not destroying our habitat: the criterion is humanity.

Sofia Letters Editor Ken Smith, Bridleways, Haling Grove, South Croydon CR2 6DQ revkevin19@hotmail.co.uk Theism and Nontheism in SoF David Boulton (Letters, Sofia 77) concludes, ‘And if the word ‘nontheism’ grates, what better alternative can readers propose?’ My preference would be for the word ‘naturalism’ or, failing that, the more clumsy term ‘non-supernaturalism’. There is an additional problem with the words ‘theism’ and ‘nontheism’. A distinction needs to be made between theistic and nontheistic gods. Theistic gods are those with whom a personal relationship can be forged, be it by the individual person or by a group. The rest of the gods, the impersonal gods, are the nontheistic gods.

Note that by adopting this distinction, Stephen Mitchell’s objections to the word ‘nontheism’ (Letters, Sofia 76) can be side-stepped: ‘...it produces contradictory ideas such as ‘the nontheists’ radical reenvisioning of God’ and the affirmation of deification ‘in a non-theistic context’.

Firstly, to comment on Stephen’s former objection, a theistic God can be seen as the amalgamation of a number of nontheistic gods. This union can, however, be dissolved. Secondly, to answer Stephen’s more interesting latter objection, if we were to deify an area of our ultimate concern, say the planet Earth, by envisioning it as Mother Earth and naming her as ‘Gaia’, we would then have deified the planet in a ‘non-theistic context’.

— David Miller, Melbourne, Australia

David Miller Melbourne, Australia I very much share David Boulton’s quandary of how exactly Softies describe themselves.

Like him, I do not think of myself as an atheist or humanist – though perhaps that is what we are. The trouble with a word like ‘nontheism’ is that one immediately puts oneself on the back foot, trying to articulate a description against what one is not, as opposed to what one believes. The word that I now find most comfortable with is ‘posttheist’. Though, of course, these days everything is ‘post’ something so it’s not really very original. But it does have its merits. At a recent work review my manager noted my erratic CV – which moved from monastery cloister to parochial priest to building company administrator. She asked if I was now an atheist; I promptly replied, No, I was a post-theist. As she didn’t have a clue what that was it opened the door to an interesting exploration. And, for me at least, that’s what life and the SoF is all about.

— Dominic Kirkham, Manchester

Yours, Dominic Kirkham. 94 Clarendon Road, Manchester M34 5SE Perhaps I am getting old but I find myself getting increasingly tired of ‘ologies’ and ‘isms.’ If the young could tell me that they too are moving on beyond labels I would feel much better. The boys at the school where for many years I was teacher, pastor, and chaplain (guardian of St Martin’s torn cloak), often confessed themselves confused as to whether their much loved chaplain was in fact an atheist. But when the question was asked and after the ensuing, always fascinating discussion, they left my company both less confused and more enlightened – or was it vice versa?

I recently took the funeral of a lovely man whose family described him as an ‘ex-Methodist.’ In my tribute on behalf his family, with inspiration and ‘nerve’ I praised him for this and suggested that being ‘ex’ was a very good thing and that we could take him as a model for someone who is never content simply to be where they are, but always moving on to being more fully human. Whilst we have important insights to contribute to the global debate, SoF needs to be aware of the danger of labelling ourselves too precisely, however safe that might make us personally feel.

— Ken Smith, Croydon

Ken Smith (Portholes Editor) Croydon letters Gaia Earth Goddess Outward The Sea of Faith Network could be more determined to take its ideas into difficult and possibly dangerous places. In particular I name three – the mass of non-church believers, the fundamentalist corners of orthodox religion and the cause of environmental sustainability.

To the non-church believers because it is fruitful territory in which to find those who although having no place to go nevertheless see religion as important.

To fundamentalism, because God as a human creation will act as a counter to dogmatic belief and a powerful antidote to the conflict which such belief generates. To environmentalism because our emphasis that this earth is all we have will give strength to its message.

Environmentalism fits easily with a non-supernatural view of religion and concern for the planet after we have left it.

These activities will also be of benefit to the Network. It will encourage SoF to move away from the largely academic analysis of faith and life and immerse itself in everyday affairs. Interaction with these groups will require us to rethink our place, purpose and attitude towards these causes in particular and hence the world in general. Finally it will assist the process of recruitment.

I am under no illusion of the challenge which the above presents. It will take us out of our largely ‘armchair’ attitude to the world and its problems, but with the cost of attempting to sow SoF ideas where they may not be welcome. We would face powerful vested interests together with the reluctance of many to abandon the comforts of supernatural religion.

Nevertheless, I believe the present state of world affairs and the importance of what we have to say require this step to be taken.

— John Gamlin