God and the dualist imagination part 3: Us & God

Having already stated that evangelical thinking uses a dualistic lens to create a divide between ‘us’ and ‘others’; I now want to consider the other way that dualism has infected the way evangelicals think, namely the ‘othering’ of God.

Not only are people ‘other’ to ‘us’, but so is ‘God’.

Language of transcendence is often used to speak of the Divine, I use it quite frequently myself. But while it can be helpful in talking about aspects of the nature of God, when God becomes solely transcendent as in the ‘Theist’ or ‘Supernatural Theist’ way of thinking, we have a problem.

When God is entirely transcendent, there seem to be places where he or she is not present, essentially places where God does not exist. These places may be in people, in the hearts and minds of those who we feel are evil or wrong; physical locations; or objects.

For some this is manifest in power relationships – God cannot be present in ‘their’ building, instead it is a haunt for ‘demons’ – their building may of course variously be: Mosque, temple, house of ill repute, anyone else’s church…

Often what lies at the heart of that is straightforwardly a power struggle, but underlying it, I want to suggest, is this kind of thinking about God.

Indeed I believe this lies at the heart of the problems with the way we conceive of all types of others. It can allow us to see ‘others’ as more distant from God than we are; just as it also allows us to conceive of certain places as ‘god forsaken’ or ‘god less’.

On a global/geo political scale of course, it allows us to consign our planet to environmental catastrophe by believing that God is transcendent from his/her creation. By living in this thinking we can justify not only environmental damage on an extraordinary scale, but also be ambivalent about the death and destruction of massive amounts of people.

On a local scale, and one that is very obvious in any kind of missional role, it allows us to abandon sections of society to sink or swim as church bails out and heads for a nicer place to live.

Tomorrow I will explain how this thinking has made me move into a new way of understanding God altogether. New for me that is.

Previous posts are here: 1, 2.

God and the dualist imagination part 2: Jesus & dualism

In post 1 of this series, I said that I believe dualism is inherent in the way that evangelical Christians have come to conceive of ‘others’ – those of different belief systems or lifestyles to the standards deemed ‘acceptable’ by the prevailing evangelical thinking.

I want to go to say that I believe this to be a deeply flawed approach, and one which seems contrary to the way of approaching otherness modelled by Jesus.

Jesus approach to those of other faiths, other lifestyles and other social classes is profoundly open and egalitarian. The gospels include stories of an encounter with non-Jewish astrologers and times spent with tax collectors, prostitutes, beggars and centurions.

He was a friend of sinners, and was condemned as a glutton and a drunkard for the way that he ate and supped with others as though he were part of their community. Jesus does not model a dualistic way of living, nor does he model a dualistic model of ministry – his encounters with those other to his own way of life are gentle, peaceful and respectful.

Various people have critiqued dualistic thinking, Julian of Norwich noted that ‘The fullness of Joy is to behold God in everything’; and Bede Griffiths advocated an approach which drew on the teachings of both Thomas Aquinas and Sankara – in believing that in God there is “no division, or ‘composition’ of any kind. He is ‘without duality’.” (Griffiths, Return to the Centre, 1978, 24)

When considering the otherness of different faith traditions, the former chief rabbi, Jonathan Sachs expresses similar views in ‘The Dignity of difference’ where he talks of religion as being “the translation of God into a particular language and thus into the life of a group, a nation, a community of faith.” (Sachs, The Dignity of Difference, 2002, 55)

Read more tomorrow in Part 3.

God and the dualist imagination part 1: Us & Others

I presented a paper at a conference recently, where I outed myself as a ‘recovering dualist’.

By this I meant that I find it very hard not to think about God with a classic dualist point of view – you know that idea of God as a person out there somewhere, with a Santa type ‘naughty and nice’ pair of lists? Yeah that. I find it a bit hard not to think like that.

I am by background an evangelical, and although I haven’t used that term to describe myself for some time, it has played an important part in forming the way I think about things.

So in a short series of blog posts, I want to look at the issue of dualism as a way of thinking about God.

My first point then, is that I believe underlying the evangelical understanding of God and ‘others’ is a deep seated dualism.

I suggested that this dualism leads to a colonial attitude towards the way the evangelical church approaches ‘others’. While I recognise that there are significant exceptions to this generalisation, it’s useful as a starting point.

My belief is that the majority of evangelicals operate in a kind of Platonic conception of the world as Ideal and Real. There is a separation for instance between concepts such as ‘science and faith’, ‘Christian and secular’, ‘heaven and earth’ and of course, ‘saved and unsaved’. According to this well ingrained way of thinking, all earthly things are intrinsically inferior to the unseen spiritual.

So there is, for instance, a very dualistic way of distinguishing between the evangelical/Christian ‘us’, (saved, sanctified, believers); and ‘them’ – (the unsaved, those of other faiths, the sinners). This dichotomy of salvation has traditionally been part of a sovereignty paradigm. The threat of exclusion from the company of the sanctified, puts ‘us’ in to a position of power, of declaring the orthodoxy.

This runs, however, contrary to the gospel idea of giving up power, as modeled by Jesus in the Kenotic cross ‘event’, and to what Roger Mitchell has described as ‘Kenarchy’ – the emptying out of power on the behalf of others. (Mitchell, The Fall of the Church, 2013)

A dualistic mind-set is conveniently easy: with a clear us and them divide, ‘we’ know who ‘we’ are, and where ‘we’ are. It’s also very much a warfare mentality which not only appropriates violent imagery for the way it approaches discussion of the issues, but also posits the idea of opposing sides in a battle, ranged against one another. ‘Powers of darkness’ almost equal to, and diametrically opposed to ‘powers of good’ – God and Satan juxtaposed against one another as opposing commanders, and this played out on earth between people of faith and the heathen.

It may be easy, it may even be ‘encouraging’ at times of difficulty, but I believe it is deeply problematic.

Read more tomorrow in Part 2.

Belief and the believed

“If you believe,” he shouted to them, “clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.”

In JM Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan’ the fairy Tinkerbell was saved from death by belief, specifically, belief in fairies. Barrie uses the motif of mythology, specifically mythical creatures, to suggest that in some cases, belief actually CAUSES existence.

But is that true of things other than fairies? I want to suggest that it is.

Where this starts is with ideas – because it is ideas that rule our imagination. But an idea has no power until it is believed.

And like Tinkerbell, who needed lots of belief to make her well again, the more belief there is, the more power an idea has.

Let’s take money as an example. Money is only really an idea, we are long past the time when money actually meant something, if it ever really did. What gives money its power is not what it is actually worth, but what we believe it is worth. If we all stopped believing that money had worth, it would actually be worthless.

We could talk similarly about government, government has power because we believe it has power, and crucially some of us who believe that have decided to learn how to shoot people who don’t believe it.

Belief you see, must be protected, because the consequences of loss of belief are dire indeed.

This has implications for an awful lot of things – in Terry Pratchett’s ‘Small Gods’ we see a clear explanation of this issue, the god who is the main character of the book has suffered a great loss of belief, and as a result has shrunk away to almost total powerlessness.

Pratchett is actually very good on this stuff, he goes over much of the same kind of material in ‘Hogfather’ too, which also makes a good Christmas movie if you are interested.

So when it comes to it, we need to recognise that while it would appear that the power lies with the believed, actually it lies with the believer, and if unbelief could be manifested on a large enough scale, the power of the believed could be broken altogether.

This is based of course on the relativistic idea that ideas don’t exist objectively. That is something which I am not going to go into now, as it is an idea that I personally half believe (I think some things are objectively real, and others aren’t).

But of course on a deeper level you could question the entirety of existence in this way, do we actually exist in an objective sense, or is this all just an idea that we believe strongly enough to make it real?

Personally I’m not so concerned about that, but I am deeply interested in the idea that ideas which hold power over us can lose their power once they lose their belief, as it demonstrates our collective ability to make genuine and complex changes in the world around us, by making simple changes in what we believe.

The need for silence

“If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence.

“Since God cannot be imagined, anything our imagination tells us about Him is ultimately a lie and therefore we cannot know Him as He really is unless we pass beyond everything that can be imagined and enter into an obscurity without images and without the likeness of any living thing.”

Thomas Merton; Seeds of Contemplation (Burns and Oates, 1957) p 44.

Endo’s Silence, and the problem of the impossible question

Whenever one has a discussion about an issue like pacifism with somebody who doesnt share the same convictions, there usually comes a point when an impossible question is posed. In that case, the question is usually something like: ‘What would you do if your family were being horribly slaughtered, and you could only stop it by shooting the assailant dead?’

The question is intended to demonstrate the futility of the pacifist position, the basic faulty thinking that lies behind a pacifist response.

But of course, just because there is an obvious thing that one probably would do – doesnt mean that it would be morally ‘right’.

In his incredible novel ‘Silence’ the Japanese writer Shusako Endo tells the story of a Christian missionary in Japan a few hundred years ago. This was a time when the Japanese were extremely antithetical towards this foreign religion, and there was a great deal of persecution of both missionaries and converts.

Part of the plot revolves around the question of whether the main character should deny Christ, in order to save others from torture. The already suffering peasants are put through terrible pain, because the priest won’t ‘step on the fumie’ or apostasise.

So one could ask a committed Christian, who is sure of his or her faith – ‘but what if your family were being tortured and killed, and you could stop them by blaspheming and renouncing Christ? What would you do then.

This impossible question is perhaps a sister to that asked of pacifists – and demonstrates (perhaps) the futility of a faith position.

What they really demonstrate though are the impossibilities of asking such questions. Endo’s ‘Silence’s is a fantastic book for anyone interested in pursuing such thinking, and meditating on the silence of God amidst pain and hardship. But do consider the pointlessness of such questioning if you are ever challenging a pacifist – what might be thought ‘necessary’ or ‘the only choice’ is not necessarily the right one.

Mother God?

I wrote a couple of leaflets for the Mind Body Spirit fayre I was at this weekend, one of them was called ‘Mother God?’, and a lot of people picked it up. It’s pretty basic, but it was supposed to be light and easy to read, anyway – here’s the text – crowd sourced revisions and clarifications are welcome. I think the one thing I would add if I were to redraft it today, is some kind of prayer at the end of it.

Mother God?

Christianity, Patriarchy and the Divine Feminine

Because of its language, Christianity can seem to be a rather male dominated affair. Talk of ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’ can make the Christian faith sound very patriarchal. But in fact the only truly male aspect of the Trinity that Christians call God, is the person of Jesus.

God in his or her own right cannot be ascribed a single gender, containing aspects of both the masculine and the feminine. Jesus refers to God as his ‘Father’ – thereby demonstrating his own inheritance of God’s authority, but throughout the Bible God is shown as having feminine qualities, including giving birth and suckling.

So why has the Christian God become seen as masculine? Without doubt culture and power have played a role in the construction of an almost exclusively male portrayal of the divine. For many years the culture of male rule was firmly entrenched in society, and many leaders were loathe to change or upset that, particularly as it might be seen to threaten their own positions.

The names of God in the Bible

The Bible we read today is the product of the hard work of translators who have faithfully worked to provide a text which accurately represents the original words and meanings of documents many centuries old.

But we might reasonably consider that the idea of God as masculine, and the ongoing patriarchal culture which has come down from that interpretation is not a good reflection of either the ancient scriptures, nor even the text we have today. Certainly God is described as ‘Father’ but that is not the only way that deity is described. Jesus called God ‘Abba’ a word which has its closest contemporary meaning in ‘daddy’ but most accurately represents a parental relationship of great intimacy.

Other passages give God an particularly female aspect –  for instance, the name El Shaddai is used for God a number of times in the book of Genesis. El Shaddai has been translated as ‘Almighty God’ but might more accurately be understood as ‘God with breasts’.

On other occasions God is given female qualities, including the ability to give birth.

Deuteronomy 32:18  “You neglected the Rock who begot you, And forgot the God who gave you birth.

Jewish Rabbis used the word ‘Shekinah’ to describe the presence of God, as a hovering manifest being, an image which would later be used by Christians to describe the Holy Spirit. Shekinah is a feminine noun, and has also been used to help describe God in feminine terms.

Patriarchy and power

There is no doubt that it has suited many powerful people for many years to ensure that power remained in male hands. However, even major religious leaders have over years explained God in terms which deny the idea of God as solely masculine.

“God is a Father. More than that, God is a Mother.”

Pope John Paul II

While the language may take many more years to change and adjust, neither essential Christian teaching, nor even many of the major spiritual leaders would ascribe a fully male nature to God.

Many in the protestant church are wary of the idea of the elevation of Mary to God status, and that may have reinforced the use of masculine words for God, but it is becoming more and more widely accepted that to try and confine God into a gender or sex, is impossible.

Gender inequality and the ‘priesthood of all believers’.

There has for many years been a gender imbalance in the ‘hierachy’ of the church. In fact, many believers will accept that there is not, or should not be a hierarchy at all, as Jesus teaching was that ‘the first shall be last, and the last shall be first’ – demonstrating his own humble spirit by consenting to be treated as an outcast and murdered by his opponents.

But despite that, it is still true that for some time, women have been excluded from holding roles of responsibility within the church – or have they?

Certainly some major denominations have stated that only men can serve as priests or bishops, but in reality women have since the earliest days of the faith been operating in positions of power and responsibility within the global church. Certain high profile roles have remained exclusively male, but that is slowly beginning to change, and Christian thought, which is always a widely divergent and slow moving being at the best of times, is ever more accepting of the rightness and necessity of equality between the sexes.

There are certain bible passages which continue to cause discussions and disputes between opposing groups within the Christian faith, but there are many others which demonstrate very clearly that Jesus came to set us all free. That he considered all of us as equal, and that, as one Biblical writer put it: There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

Polycarp – God is not an airbag.

Yesterday was the saints day of a very ancient character, well he would be very ancient if he were still alive, but he isn’t – alive that is.

Anyway, his name was Polycarp, which is a good name isnt it. Better than many other saints names I cant help thinking, even if it does contain a slightly unfortunate anagram within it.

Why do I mention Polycarp?

He is just a superb figure. In the first place he was one of the very early Christians, only second generation, having been a disciple of John the Apostle – the favoured Apostle of the Celtic church.

Secondly, he was clearly a man of straightforward opinions, apparently when asked by the leader of the Marcionite sect to recognise him – he replied ‘I recognise you, yes, I recognise the son of Satan.’ Which is fairly straight talking as straight talking goes.

But despite his forthright views, he wasnt one particularly to cause divisions, although in later years the disagreement between eastern and western tradtions about liturgy, tonsure and perhaps most importantly the religious calendar would cause great strife, Polycarp who obviously followed the John/eastern tradition managed to get along just fine with the Bishop of Rome, who insisted his church follow the western/Catholic dates.

Polycarp was eventually martyred, aged in his eighties, when he was burned at the stake and stabbed.The accounts of his death tell that the flames did not harm him rather they made him glow, so instead the soldiers stabbed him to death. While God may be credited with saving him from the flames, he didnt save him from the knife.

He is a good example of how Christians cannot always expect to be saved from suffering and hardship, for any of us being stabbed to death while stood in the middle of a fire is not a terribly pleasant way to go, and Polycarp bore it with remarkable dignity, and stoicism for want of a better word.

I think he reminds us that we cannot expect to go through life with no suffering, we cannot expect to live and die in luxury and happiness just because we follow Jesus, rather we should perhaps expect the opposite.

Bad stuff happens to good people, God doesnt always rescue us from hardship, he is not an airbag. Yeah, I said it, God is not an airbag. My new motto.

Thanks for your example Polycarp, here’s to all those who are suffering today, may you know peace just as Polycarp did.

Read more about the old boy here.

If you can’t be with the one you love, then love the one you’re with

Or the strange fascination God’s people have with the world they’re in.

Stephen Stills was a great songwriter, and there’s no doubt ‘Love the one you’re with’ is a catchy song, which accounts for the fact that it’s been covered by gazillions of artists since Stills released it in the early 1970s.

But for me I find the amoral nature of the lyric fairly nauseating:

And if you can’t be with the one you love
Love the one you’re with
Love the one you’re with
Turn your heartache right into joy
She’s a girl, you’re a boy,
Get it together make it nice
Ain’t gonna need anymore advice.

It’s just more of that crappy hedonism that was and is preached by the kings of cool and which has proven to be oh so great for all of us.

But my problem with this notion goes further than a bit of a grumble about a pop song, after all many of my favourite tunes have morally ambiguous lyrics if I’m honest.

My real gripe is that this very sentiment is being played out each day by people who claim to follow Jesus, and from time to time, more often perhaps than I’d like to admit, by me too.

Somehow because of the nature of God, being all invisible and difficult to focus upon, and the very hyper-reality of the world we live in, we choose to forsake the apparently absent one we (say we) love, and instead have an affair, or at least a fling, with the one we’re with.

Perhaps it’s as Stills says:

…you’re down and confused
And you don’t remember who you’re talkin’ to
Concentration slip away…

…There’s a girl right next to you
And she’s just waiting for something you do.

There’s a real need for us to remember who we are talking to, to remind ourselves of the reality of our situation. Not to be so distracted by our surroundings that we forsake the one we love, for the one we’re with.

How can that be done? There’s a real question of discipline here, which again I’ll be the first to say I have not got a good enough hold of. But perhaps there was a good reason that the Jews and the early Christians chose to pray seven times a day, perhaps the Muslims have a point in their ritual daily observances!

Perhaps we have lost something by rejecting the Sabbath and letting the ways of the world in to our day of rest and ritual observance. Perhaps our choice to forsake the telling and retelling of stories of God and his people in preference to weak sermons and flashy multimedia presentations has had unforeseen consequences.

Perhaps we’ve mucked up by abandoning fasting as a regular part of our life, and allowing our every desire to be sated in a whirlwind of consumer culture. Maybe our unwillingness to take on the challenge of meditation in a world where information flies around at the speed of light is a bigger loss than we thought, as it has the potential to connect us to the unknown and unseen and remove us from the realm of the immediate.

Maybe the monastics really do have something to teach us in all this… I guess you know I think they do.

I suppose this is a mournful call for a return to spiritual discipline, in the knowledge that we walk only by grace any how, but in the sincere hope that with a renewed focus on the reality of the closeness of God, comes a greater faithfulness to him.