Contents
Articles
- The Spyglass, David S. Lee
- What does it mean if one says 'I believe in God'?, Eric Whittaker
- Part of a Pilgrimage, Anne Ashworth
- Don Cupitt and Everyday Speech, David Wemyss
- SOF Sermon, Stephen Mitchell
- Red Letter Days: 10th November (birthday): Martin Luther, Mary Lloyd
- Red Letter Days: 17th December: Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Mary Lloyd
- Radio Rockall: Seeing Islam
- Plenty of Spirit, Cicely Herbert
Reviews
- Antipodean Angles 1: Such is Life, David Paterson
- Antipodean Angles 2: I Met God in Bermuda, Tony Windross
- Economics: The New Economics, Denis Gildea
- Poetry: Poppy in a Storm-struck Field, Kathleen McPhilemy
Poetry
- Underground Poem, Victor Zamora
- The Arrival of the Orchestra, Gustavo Pereira
- Waiting, Steve Regis
Regulars and Occasionals
- SOF Sift: My Ebb Tide, David Hatton
Editorial
In a recent interview with the BBC Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, said that he was ‘very anxious’ about the Government’s Spending Review and the benefit cuts that will be imposed on the poorest in our society. ‘Quite often,’ he said, ‘that can make people start feeling vulnerable – even more vulnerable as time goes on – and that’s the kind of unfairness I feel.’ He had ‘a lot of worries’ because ‘people are often [on benefits], not because they are wicked, stupid or lazy, but because their circumstances are against them, they’ve failed to break through into something. To drive that spiral deeper – as I say – does seem a great problem.’ With gentle irony he said he was not convinced that all sections of society are making an equal contribution: ‘I am not completely convinced about that, I must say. Because with the stories we have of continuing large bonuses of the very wealthy, it’s not the sort of thing that convinces people that’s something they can all sign up to.’ The Government’s ideologically driven attack on those who are out of work is even more brutal because it is accompanied by the loss of so many jobs, so that there just will not be jobs to be had.
The cap on housing benefit means that thousands will lose their homes in high-rent areas like central London, when the lack of social housing is a direct result of previous Conservative governments’ policy, and there is no plan whatever now to put a cap on rents, or to acknowledge that these high payments do not go to the families in need of housing but to landlords. At the same time we have a cabinet of millionaires and their recent Spending Review has made no serious attempt to tax the rich, curb bankers’ bonuses or collect huge sums in unpaid taxes from wealthy tax dodgers.
Jesus said: ‘Whatever you did to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.’ He said he had come to bring ‘good news to the poor.’ The Government’s Spending Review certainly is not good news to the poor. Jesus also preached the Golden Rule: ‘Do as you would be done by.’ The basis of that Golden Rule is imagination, the ability to see ourselves in another’s place. Blake said:
Can I see another’s woe And not be in sorrow too?
And Mary Wollstonecraft wrote to her lover, Gilbert Imlay: ‘Imagination is the true fire stolen from heaven that renders men social by expanding their hearts.’ SOF regards God (and all gods) as the product of the human imagination too. In this issue of Sofia we have an article by David S. Lee reflecting on some Old Testament themes from that point of view. And an article by Eric Whittaker compares the usefulness of imagining God to the usefulness in mathematics of the imaginary number ‘i’, which, he says, is very useful. We also have the first extract from Part of a Pilgrimage, a Journal kept by long-time SOF member Anne Ashworth following her long spiritual odyssey.
This is the Christmas issue of Sofia in a midwinter that will be very bleak for some. The Christmas message is ‘God is human’. God has ‘come down to Earth from heaven.’ Jesus offers a God who is Love, is Kindness, so that: Love rules!
Kindness rules! That is to say, they should. Not only that. In the Christian story, Jesus the newborn baby is God. When Paul speaks of Jesus as Christ he says that in him: ‘We are one body because we all share the same bread.’ But of course in the world today we humans very patently do not all share the same bread. That is a vision of what should happen. And today the only place to find Christ’s body on Earth – to find God – is in one another.
As we know, the early church fathers fought for hundreds of years over how Jesus could be both God and human. The great Athanasius, defender of the term homousios – ‘one in being’ or ‘consubstantial’ – had to escape at night by boat pursued by angry Arians. Finally at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 they came up with the statement:
God is Human The Christmas message is God come down to Earth from heaven. editorial Sea of Faith Network 7th London Open Conference THE LUST FOR CERTAINTY The dangers of certainty and the importance of doubt (or is there too much of both?) Speakers:
Kenan Malik ‘God, Science and the Quest for Moral Certainty’ David Boulton ‘The Death of God and the Triumph of Uncertainty’ Julian Baggini ‘As Much Precision as the Subject Allows’ Saturday 26 March 2011 10.30 am – 5.00pm St John’s Church, Waterloo Road London, SE1 8TY For application form contact:
John Seargeant, 61 Fordington Road, Highgate, London N6 4TH Email: jseargeant@tiscali.co.uk Or download from: www.sofn.org.uk we should confess our Lord Jesus Christ to be one and the same Son, the same perfect in deity, and the same perfect in humanity, true God and true man, the same of a rational soul and body, one in being with the Father in deity, the same one in being with us in humanity, like us in all things except sin; begotten from the Father before the ages in deity, and in latter days, the same, for us and for our salvation, from the Virgin Mary mother of God in humanity: one and the same only-begotten Christ Son Lord...
Jesus Christ is not only one in being – homousios – with the Father as God, wholly God, but also one in being – homousios – with us in humanity, wholly human. If you listen to that statement out loud as a kind of poem, what you hear repeated thunderously is the same, the same, the same. It sounds even more thunderous in Greek ton auton ton auton, ton auton and in Latin eundem, eundem, eundem. There is something scandalous here. What I hear the thunder saying is:
God is human, God and human are the same, the same the same. Jesus Christ is one person with two natures.
Mary is called ‘mother of God’ because you are not the mother of a ‘nature’ but of a person, and because the fully human and fully divine Christ is one person, in what is technically called the ‘sharing of properties’ (communicatio idomatum), whatever can be said about the man Jesus can be said of God, so we can say God was born, God suffered, God died on the cross… The most orthodox christology, in which Christ is wholly divine and wholly human, leads to the most humanist outcome: God and human are the same. God is human.
William Blake calls Jesus ‘the Lord, the universal humanity’ and the heart of the Christian message is that humanity has the potential to become like the God we have imagined, at least partly, in knowledge and creative power, in goodness, in love. Though of course Athanasius, the great defender of the homousios, did not think God was imaginary, he wrote: ‘God became human so that we might become God’.
If we imagine God as love, as kindness, the only ones who can love or can be kind to one another and create a fair society are ourselves. Meanwhile, merry Christmas to all. The possibilities the story suggests are well worth celebrating.
SCM: helping students ask the big questions find out how you can support us at movement. org.uk/friends SCM, 308F The Big Peg, 120 Vyse Street, Birmingham B18 6ND I shall pass this way but once… I’m sure many people will have already responded to Dominic Kirkham to say that his quotation in the September Sofia is by Marcus Aurelius. My primary school teacher wrote these words in my autograph book when I was leaving, aged 11, (in 1952 !). Maybe her ideas were in advance of her time. I too am frequently ‘visited’ by this sentiment.
Best wishes Mary C. d’Ath, Worthing Further thoughts on the ‘broken body’ I have much enjoyed reading Dinah’s book. As an introduction to the nature of poetry I think the first section could hardly be bettered, the phrase ‘poetic trope’ is exact and useful. The examples given are all apposite and chosen with economy and skill and the references leave nothing to be desired. I shall read this part again and again, and recommend it heartily.
Altogether, I think the book is elegantly and tersely written, and, as a partially-sighted person, I found the type very welcome.
I want to leave ‘Mother and Father’ for further consideration, passing on to what Dinah calls The Grand Narrative. There are other narratives. One of my favourites is from the south-East. I found it in an old tome by Mircea Eliade called From Primitives to Zen. It goes like this:
Once upon a time a young man gathered and split a coconut.
Inside he found a tiny girl. He took the child back to his hut, where she rapidly grew and became a beautiful young women.
She had what we call charisma, becoming popular and much loved. She was chosen to be the gift-giver at a festival. But some people were jealous and conspired to murder her. The people were very sad. They cut her body into parts and buried these in different parts of the ground. From these grew the principal food plants of the tribe. But the goddess was angry. She ordered that Hainuwele’s arms should be made into a gate. Before the murder the people were on easy terms with the spirits but now they could only approach the divine beings though the gate.
That is an aetiological myth, i.e. it is an attempt to account for origins: that of murder (cf. Cain and Abel), and of horticulture amongst hunter-gatherers, and of priestcraft and religious authority.
I am no lover of priestcraft, but I do find the ‘poetic trope’ of Hainuwele’s arms most pathetic and beautiful. A book called The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony deals with a similar theme. The wedding feast of those two personages in Greek myth was the last time the people were on easy terms with the gods, who had sat down with the rest.
So we have another ‘broken body’. I want to discuss that theme. I do find Dinah’s redaction of the theme persuasive but there is more to be said. It seems to be part of ‘fallen (?) human nature that some, on occasion, have a problem with what is whole, discrete, and therefore perhaps felt as withholding, enigmatic, other, and disturbing. It isn’t only people. I read somewhere that in the days before Whitefriars glass became the fashion, people used to pile it up under car boot stalls and throw stones at it. Breaking and smashing can be such fun. When it takes the form of ‘Ripperism’ I think the perpetrator is ‘saying’: ‘How dare you keep your secrets from me, who do you think you are?’ Then this becomes institutionalised, ritualised and some religious narratives afford sanction . Put this together with the fact that people get satisfaction – on occasion – from the pain and humiliation of others, from the exercise of power and the frisson of permitting oneself to go to extremes, and you have torture and ritual killing. Executions must be done by due process and are therefore ritualistic (recall the unease of the hasty disposal of the Ceaucescus) but much pleasure can be had from the design and form of these ceremonies. Anyone who has witnessed a class of clean twelve-year-old lower middle class schoolgirls tormenting a weak teacher will never have inordinate faith in human nature.
We know that mutilation can have erotic appeal – remember the film Crash. Once in our chapel (we liked to be fair to all sects) I saw an elderly Salvation Army ‘lassie’ give her testimony. She mimed washing her arms up to the shoulders in the blood of Christ.
She was an innocent abroad. I imagine that the young man giving the (very good) sermon knew that she was ‘getting off’ on the thing. I recall a headmistress I worked for: ‘I can’t stand these cannibal hymns.’ Christianity has been called a ‘composting culture’ because it takes evil and re-processes it to make good – thus our Grand Narrative. But might some quietist sage call it a bit of an abomination? Discuss.
Anna Sutcliffe, Leeds Sofia welcomes comment and debate.
— Mary C. d'Ath, Worthing
Please send your letters to:
— Anna Sutcliffe, Leeds