Me, you and everybody

When did outrage become a form of entertainment? The companies that govern our online worlds know that posts and videos that anger us are more likely to be viewed and shared than those that bring us joy. This is not a new phenomenon - I remember a producer for 'shock jock' Howard Stern explaining in the 1980s that people that said they hated Stern listened to him for longer than people who said they loved him. The desire to define and police our community boundaries is deep in our collective psyche, and sharing outrage reaffirms our collective bonds.

It's no surprise to me that Christian websites trade in outrage articles, nor that I click on them (sometimes) even when I could write the article myself, purely on the basis of the headline. One such article was outraged that a luminous model of the world, titled Gaia, was being exhibited in a cathedral. Gaia is the name of the goddess who created the earth in Greek mythology, as well as the name of a pseudo-scientific hypothesis that the world is a single living organism that will ultimately destroy anything that threatens its wellbeing (i.e. us). There's so much in there to upset a certain kind of Christian* that I completely understand the editorial decision to populate the universe with more anger. However, for me it raises the question of where the boundary between 'us' and 'them' lies. For the author of the article, 'us' means a certain kind of Christian, with certain kinds of beliefs and behaviours. 'Them' is everyone - and everything - else.

A very 'straight' and 'literal' reading of the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, which share some common sources, describes a younger Jesus who would completely identify with that sentiment. His ministry was to the people that YHWH loved: the Jews and only the Jews. Nonetheless, over time, Jesus comes to realise that God loves people who aren't Jews, and by the end of Matthew's gospel he is instructing his disciples to include people from every ethnic group in the world (28:19). There are key moments in which Jesus appears to be learning and growing in his understanding of God's love, something which many Christians find hard to understand, despite Luke specifically saying that Jesus 'grew in wisdom' (2:52).

My fifth and final characteristic of mature faith is the most contentious and complex. Just a couple of days ago I was talking with a fellow student of discipleship about whether or not it is really two different characteristics that should be separated out, but she assured me that they belong together. Let me explain.

The biggest church in North America is Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. It meets in a former sports arena and its lead pastors are Joel and Victoria Osteen. A few years ago Victoria preached this message:

I just want to encourage every one of us to realise when we obey God, we're not doing it for God - I mean, that's one way to look at it - we're doing it for ourselves, because God takes pleasure when we're happy. So I want you to know this morning: just do good for your own self. Do good because God wants you to be happy. When you come to church, when you worship Him, you're not doing it for God, really. You're doing it for yourself, because that's what makes God happy.

Guess what? The internet went into meltdown with outrage-entertainment. I was outraged! Now, after several years of thinking about this, what I feel is more nuanced. I had a dramatic conversion as a teenager, and the gospel as I experienced it in that moment was all about me. I had fallen from God's standards, Jesus came to save me, even if I was the only person in the world Jesus would still have died for me. It's an individualistic, narcissistic gospel, perfect for a 15-year-old, and it's not wrong. It's just incredibly - incredibly - immature for me as a 54-year-old man who has been a Christian for nearly 40 years still to be clinging to such a self-centred worldview. 

The problem I have with the Osteens and all their 'prosperity gospel' peers is the sheer smallness of their gospel. 'God wants you to be happy and the way God wants you to be happy is for you to have all the stuff you want.' Really? Again, a 'straight' and 'literal' reading of the gospels will find a frequently recurring message: the one who wants to save their life must lose it. Prosperity preachers want to bypass the whole 'dying to self' bit and get straight to the resurrection. Or at least they want to get to the mall.

What does dying to self (and rising with Christ) look like? If Jesus is our role model for a full life, it appears not to be a negation of the self, a self-hatred, but rather an expansion of love to include all things. When we are 'in Christ' (Paul's favourite description of Christians), we are no longer at the centre of the universe, but instead connected to a vast network of relationships. (In these days, I think it's vital that we accept that this network includes all things, although I accept that the biblical justification for this is thin on the ground.) My point is that as Jesus grew in wisdom, his 'us and them' boundaries just kept getting wider and wider. When that happens, it becomes harder and harder to see yourself as the centre of the universe. Cosmology teaches us the same lesson as Jesus: we are teeny tiny parts of an awesome whole, and everything is interconnected, interdependent.

I have been doing some 'research' (googling) on the history of an idea that is now so prevalent that it feels like it has biblical precedent (it doesn't). The idea is this: when Jesus instructs us to love others as we love ourselves, this is in reality a command for us to love ourselves first. How can we love others like we love ourselves unless we love ourselves first? The Staple Singers expressed a parallel thought in the classic song 'Respect Yourself': 'Respect yourself/If you don't respect yourself/Ain't nobody gonna give a good cahoot.' Yet the song is actually much more nuanced than it seems:

If you disrespect anybody that you run into,

How in the world do you think anybody's s'posed to respect you?

If you don't give a damn about the man with the Bible in his hand,

Just get out the way and let the gentleman do his thang.

You the kind of gentleman that want everything your way;

Take the sheet of your face, boy, it's a brand new day.

I have a feeling that the 'love yourself first, only then can you love others' message emerged in the 1970s and 80s, around the same time as the prosperity gospel.

If loving ourselves means closing in the boundary of our care to include just ourselves and our nearest and dearest, we will never understand God-love at all. It's only as we extend the boundary of our care that we realise the inherent value of each and every person, each and every thing. Then we can understand our own value as part of this wonderful creation that we inhabit.

This is a complex yet beautful dance - it's in dethroning the self and including all things within our love that we learn about our own worth and lovableness. When we move ourselves away from the centre of our universe we open ourselves to the opportunity to live in community with people who are trying the same thing.

Only loving our closest family and friends is not bad or wrong, it's where we all start. In fact, as babies, it's just us, and then mother emerges out of the fog as the first foundational relationship. We know that if this attachment is not made, we will struggle to extend our boundary beyond our self our whole lives. The psychotherapist and neurotheologian Jim Wilder describes maturity as the person you could be today, given all your yesterdays. It is different for every single person. For some of us, we are working with God to include our parent or spouse in our circle of care. For others, it might be caring for those who live in our street. For others still, non-human persons. This isn't about reaching a goal or crossing a line, but rather who we are becoming.

How does this dethroning of the self (yet still loving the self in an honest way) relate to a realisation of our interdependence with all things? I don't know. But I don't see how they can be separated into two different characteristics - they are a beautiful two-step of growth in love.

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*Other gods? Check. The sacred feminine? Check. Humans not the centre of the universe? Check. Eco-warriors? Check. The list goes on...

Image: Gaia at Wakefield Cathedral © Copyright Stephen Craven 

Journey Inward, Journey Outward

The last week has been an object lesson in my fourth characteristic of Christian maturity. Because I have four (yes, four, it's ridiculous) chronic health conditions, I am classed as clinically vulnerable to Covid-19. One of those conditions was caused by a genetic inheritence which I have passed on to at least one of my children, although advances in medicine meant that it was diagnosed very early in their life and corrected through surgery. Another has been caused by my own choices and then exacerbated by other circumstances. Another was quite possibly triggered by a period of intense stress. And then another just arrived like the icing on the cake. I mention all this not because I'm inviting either empathy or disapproval, but because it highlights the undoubted link between the body and the rest of life. And I have Covid-19 so my body has been talking to me a lot week; in fact, it's been hard to hear anything else.

I don't mean to suggest that the link between the body and our minds, upbringing and lifestyle is simple; quite the contrary. As someone who is part of the chronic fatigue universe, I can tell you that nothing rankles quite as much as a Facebook friend offering a simple solution, whether that be daily mindfulness or a kale enema. Sorry Facebook friend, I don't like kale, wherever you're putting it! Saying that there is a link between what is happening in the mind and what is happening in the body is not the same as showing direct causation either way. How does stress affect the way our immune system works? How does debilitating illness affect our mental health? We have some pointers, but no answers.

So it is with the inner life and the outer, public life. Jesus says, 'The mouth speaks what the heart is full of,' (Matthew 12:34, Luke 6:45) as if to point out the inevitability of the link: what is really going on inside is going to come out one way or another. Yet I have found that in Christians, there are at least two ways in which we sometimes work to disconnect the inner and outer lives.

One way of trying to break the link between the inner life and outer life is an approach to faith still being worked out as the New Testament is being written. This approach (in its extreme form it's called antinomianism) says that if we are right with God our behaviour doesn't really matter that much. For some Christians that might mean that we prioritise getting the right doctrine. For others it might be about having the right political beliefs. Ot perhaps even that we have a soul that is being saved so it doesn't really matter what we do with our body. There is a sense that being right (on the inside) is more important than living right. Whatever faith is, it's not something that necessarily has a lot to do with how you actually live.

The letter of James dismisses this view quite comprehensively. Early in his letter, James says it's impossible for a Christian to say either, 'I'm an activist, I leave the faith stuff to others,' or, 'I'm a believer, that's all that matters.' James says both positions are untenable: 'You get to see my faith by my actions' (Jas 2:18), the implication being that the two are inextricably linked.

James says that our lives will tell the truth about what we are like on the inside. If we really believe and trust in the way of Jesus, that will have a noticeable effect on the way we live. If we are just giving rational assent to a set of beliefs, maybe less so. The key is this: our lives will teach us what we really believe too, not just those that are watching.

The other way that Christians can suffer from purposefully trying to disconnect their interior and exterior lives is when they find themselves in a situation in which they have to carry on performing the public activities of faith when that faith is crumbling - or completely absent - on the inside. This is a common problem in believing communities of all kinds, but Jesus has a particular problem with performative faith. (Maybe he would have called out some virtue signalling in our culture, but not for the reason the right does today: I think he would want people to go further, to be more radical, to do more than post to social media.)

The insult that Jesus uses most (Yes, Jesus insulted people) is hypocrite: the person whose behaviour is not the (whole) truth of who they really are. At first look, this sounds like terrible news for the Christian hiding their brokenness and doubt - great, I get condemnation for being a hypocrite on top of everything! Yet when Jesus talks about the kind of person we should be, he offer us genuine good news through honesty. It's not the person who is perfect inside and out that Jesus promotes to us as a role model of authenticity, but rather the person who comes to God wretched and broken, in need of love and forgiveness. 'Everyone who exalts themselves with be humbled, and the one who humbles themselves will be exalted.' (Luke 18:9-14)

I love this; I'm so grateful. Jesus loves the real us, being real. He would rather I come to God in all my mess than pretend to be OK. As communities of faith we need to honour people's confession of questioning, sin and brokenness as part of genuine maturity and not of backsliding. (Of course these can all be signs of immaturity, but in those cases they are rarely brought before God and God's family.) In my experience, great harm is done to God's people by the requirement that Christians perform happy, successful faith all the time.

A mature faith goes beyond a simple authenticity of the inner life and outer life, although this in itself is a noble life goal. I believe that God calls us each of us to partnership, a partnership with God, others and creation that is universal in the sense of being for all of us, but also unique in being a call to us, in our lives and bodies, in our contexts and with our gifts, abilities, passions and relationships. James Fowler puts it like this, using the word vocation (being called):

Vocation is the response a person makes with their total self to the address of God and the to calling to partnership. The shaping of vocation as a total response of the self to the address of God involves the orchestration of our leisure, our relationships, our work, our private life, our public life, and the resources we steward, so as to put it all at the disposal of God's purposes in the services of God and neighbour.

(from Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian)

The Christian community that I know that has most embodied this miracles of living authentically, investing deeply in the secret life of the inner person and the life of world-changing praxis, is Church of the Saviour in Washington DC. One of the church's seminal books is called Journey Inward, Journey Outward by Elizabeth O'Connor. It always brings to mind the strangeness of the labyrinth, that one must go right to the centre before coming out the way you came in. I hate walks like that! Yet the labyrinth teaches you that after you spend time in the inner place, the journey out is like looking at the same place from a completely different angle: everything is changed if you care to look! Read it at your own peril.

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Photo of Grace Cathedral labyrinth by Wally Gobertz on Flickr

All You Need

I come to write this blog post after reading an article in the New Statesman about the decline of 'The West'. The article suggests that before China or the Middle East, we will see this decline most pertinently in the Balkans, as Russia's proxy Serbia stokes the fires of ethno-nationalism and the EU does nothing.

'Doing nothing' means not sending an army. On the scale of international relations, having a big stick is still the first move. I wonder how things seem on a cosmic scale? My guess is that our petty border disputes are laughable: we have a habitable planet - what are the chances of that? - and we expend our energies killing it and each other. From a cosmic scale, eradicating humans seems like an excellent idea. Yet it is the testimony of the book of Genesis that God has promised not to do this. Could that be because God is love? God's response to our self-destructive estrangement from God, from each other and from the planet is ... for Jesus to die for us. And according to Paul this death is the ultimate demonstration of God's love (Romans 5:9).

On the human scale, love makes slightly more sense, although not always. In another of his letters, to the believers in Corinth, Paul extols love not only as the ultimate quality of God, but also the ultimate quality of humanity. His hymn to love is in the middle of a lengthy debate about worship (so we can only assume that the church's arguments about worship are not as novel as we might think), but it is worth noting the things that Paul explicitly says are worthless without love:

Spiritual experience
Prophetic insight
Knowledge and wisdom
Miraculous faith
Sacrificial living
Martyrdom

At different times and in different places, these things have all been lauded as the most important thing. In my charismatic-evangelical heritage, I have seen prophets, preachers, theologians and miracle-workers given a free pass despite hateful behaviour, because their greatness supposedly covered their lack of love. Paul says nope.

'This is how people will know that you are my disciples: if you love one another.' (John 13:35)

I must admit that one of the motivations for my current study has been the bad behaviour of people who have attended church all their life. I recognise that trauma can misshape a person and that some forms of neurodiversity can make one less aware of one's impact on the world, but seriously, I am lost for words at the way that some Christians behave.

We have sidelined 1 Corinthians 13 to the realm of romantic love and turned the fruit of the spirit in Galatians 5 into a children's song. It's very handy if you want to avoid becoming more like Jesus.

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

That is something to live towards. When our spiritual ancestors speak about the imitation of Christ, this is surely at the heart of it.

I have written and then deleted a long paragraph about how certain politicians popular with many Christians don't seem to be living up to this image of a mature human. You don't need to read it. What is needed is for us to live towards a notion of Christlikeness based on the witness to Jesus throughout the New Testament. That's my third characteristic, and it's a really simple one.

I'm aware that some of my readers might encounter a more 'muscular' interpretation of Jesus than the one offered by the gospels. That interpretation relies heavily on the image of Jesus returning to earth like Captain Marvel and laying waste to all his enemies. In this view, Jesus was a badass all along, and the whole loving people and dying for them was ... some kind of bait and switch? Honestly, I don't get it.

Anyway, when I read about the Balkans and I thought of true heroism I thought not of a soldier but of an unknown Chinese protestor in Tianmen Square. The superhero Jesus types probably think he was a loser, but I doubt they would ever have the courage to do what he did. Love is so much more than being nice. After all, it's what God is.

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Image credit: Homage to the Unknown Rebel by Francesco Mariani on Flickr

Dangerous Minds

 

Some statistics seem to come out of nowhere, but then when you think about them they just make sense. For example, people who have lived in many different places were much more likely to vote to remain in the EU than people who had lived in one area their whole lives. Theresa May's famous Conservative Party Conference speech in which she attacked 'citizens of nowhere' may have been a bit of dogwhistle politics, but it encapsulated a real difference in how life is lived.

Similarly, it might initially surprise you to know that a strong predictor of violence is black and white thinking. There are obvious examples: a couple of weeks ago a church leader who had been sacked for bullying made a bold claim that everything in the Bible is black and white. This example might lead us to see violence associated with particular belief systems and hope to convert people to our more liberal worldview. However, every worldview is susceptible to black and white thinking. The scientist and atheist campaigner Richard Dawkins once described a British Airways employee sacked for wearing a cross as having 'The stupidest face', a patently false statement that betrays the demonising of the other which is a hallmark of black and white thinking.

The opposite of black and white thinking isn't a particular 'enlightened' philosophy, it's a different way of thinking. Academics have coined the phrase 'integrative complexity' to describe the ability to understand that one's views exist in a vast panoply of believing. Not just understanding though, but the ability to still hold one's views and not be overwhelmed by the vastness of the pluralism we inhabit.

As a youth minister I was very keen to make what we did in church as 'worldly' as possible, because I feared that a cosseted young person would get to university and have a faith crisis caused by the shock of reality. Either they would drop their faith as irrelevant or hide in the ghetto of the Christian Union. At 18, it's very difficult to live in the tension of having personal convictions while accepting their contingency, but it's possible. Integrative complexity can apparently be learned. A few years ago Cafe Theologique ran a joint event with Cafe Psychologique in which we invited Dr Sara Savage to present on these ideas. You can find out more about her work at https://icthinking.org/about. 

Why would I take up the lion's share of my post telling you about integrative complexity? My answer is this: I think it goes a long way towards describing what I think mature believing looks like, which is the second of my five markers of maturity. In Ephesians 4:14, Paul doesn't list the correct doctrines that a mature believer should have, but he does say that they should be resistant to changing their mind on a whim, or according to fashion. I don't want to push my argument too far, but the image of a person holding firm to what they believe while the storm is raging around them is one that makes sense to me. Eugene Petersen called it A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, in the book of that name. Not that we refuse to change our minds (I've changed mine plenty), but that we find a way to commit to what we believe, while at the same time acknowledging that 'we know in part and prophesy in part' (1Cor 13:9). According to Sara Savage, this kind of humble yet serious faith makes the best kind of peacemakers.

In my PhD I'm going to work really hard to avoid a kind of schema in which Stage A is inevitably followed by Stage B and so on, because life is clearly not that simple. HOWEVER, it is clear that young faith often has a black and white quality about it. The moment of decision feels like crossing a line, and that leads to a person defining everyone by which side of the line they are on.

To be blunt, this is why most suicide bombers are young and/or new converts. Sometimes I see older Christians getting quite wistfully nostalgic for the passion and certainty of their younger believing selves. I understand the allure of that time, but know that God calls you to maturity, in which certainty and uncertainty live together. One thing that the life and ministry of Jesus teaches us is that we are always wrong about where the lines are, if there are any at all.

Even as I write that last sentence, I realise that it sounds like a recipe for apathy: 'We can't really know anything, so why bother? Why get het up about anything?' I hope that those reading this that know me, know that I do indeed get het up about a bunch of stuff. Again, while resisting the temptation to turn life into a simple progression towards enlightenment, I want to assure you that there are cool new winds on the other side of the doldrums of disillusionment. Who said growing up would be easy?

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Image by mohamed_hassan on Pixabay

'There are more things in heaven and earth...'

 '...Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'

Thus states Hamlet, who has seen the ghost of his father telling him secrets about his uncle's murderous affair with his mother. We don't know whether the Elizabethan audience of the play would have taken the ghostly appearance at face value, as a bit of 'supernatural' dramatic license, or as a projection of Hamlet's mental anguish. But it stands today as a small act of resistance to the dominant worldview of science, in which even consciousness is a strange and accidental byproduct of cold and purposeless physical, chemical and bioogical processes.

Scientists of all kinds who adhere to this materialist worldview struggle to explain the evolutionary purpose of faith. It's clear that they have little to no understanding of spirituality when they suggest that religion is just a hangover of a child's need to obey its parents (Dawkins) or early humans' attempts to explain how things came to be (Wolpert). At least neuroscientists take seriously human experience of something beyond themselves. It's possible to induce spiritual experiences by stimulating certain parts of the brain, but that doesn't explain what induces them normally. Spirituality is a regular human experience, with around 75% of British people willing to answer the question, 'Have you ever been aware of or influenced by a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?' in the affirmative. It won't surprise you to know that Richard Dawkins, when subjected to the stimulation of the 'Koren Helmet', didn't feel very much.

The fact that the majority of us sense the presence of something beyond what science can describe doesn't mean that there is anything there, but it is a pointer. For me, personally, I would be hard pushed to commit my life to a set of ideas, however beautiful, that described a reality that is purely speculative and hypothetical, with no chance of verifying its existence, even subjectively. Beyond that, the Christian claim is not just that there are other dimensions, but that there are entities from these other dimensions that are constantly influencing life as we know it. When put like that, it sounds like a weird new age conspiracy theory, which means that I certainly could do with some sense that what I belief corresponds to reality.

A mature Christian spirituality, by my definition, would give attention to this reality. I don't think this is the same as the 'falling in love' feeling of the newly converted, but I think it should probably feel like love in its more mature forms. Amazingly, Protestants don't really have a strong tradition of being able to articulate this, and Roman Catholics tend to domesticate it with religious movements. The Orthodox Church is the only major Christian tradition to honour the contribution of mystics as equal to that of theologians.

The fact that the majority of us sense the presence of something beyond what science can describe doesn't mean that there is anything there, but it is a pointer. For me, personally, I would be hard pushed to commit my life to a set of ideas, however beautiful, that described a reality that is purely speculative and hypothetical, with no chance of verifying its existence, even subjectively. Beyond that, the Christian claim is not just that there are other dimensions, but that there are entities from these other dimensions that are constantly influencing life as we know it. When put like that, it sounds like a weird new age conspiracy theory, which means that I certainly could do with some sense that what I belief corresponds to reality.

A mature Christian spirituality, by my definition, would give attention to this reality. I don't think this is the same as the 'falling in love' feeling of the newly converted, but I think it should probably feel like love in its more mature forms. Amazingly, Protestants don't really have a strong tradition of being able to articulate this, and Roman Catholics tend to domesticate it with religious movements. The Orthodox Church is the only major Christian tradition to honour the contribution of mystics as equal to that of theologians.
It's in my personality to never commit completely to any particular theory, but I like Christian Schwarz's scheme of 9 different types of spirituality (seen in the image at the start of this blog). Not because I think there are 9 different types of spirituality, but because he suggests that whatever our natural approach to God, that is just a start. If we are to grow in our spirituality then it can't just be about getting better and better at singing worship songs or studying the Bible or going on silent retreats; rather we need to learn how to approach God from angles that are not so comfortable. In that, I feel like a beginner.

I don't want to describe spiritual maturity as a set of practices, because those practices vary so much. So I think I'm left saying that I think there are two key elements: one is sense of oneness with God, and perhaps others and creation, and the other is that attention to the spiritual aspect of life is not limited to religious activities, but becomes 'The Sacrament of the Present Moment. Thinking again about Richard Dawkins, I wonder if spiritual awareness is analagous to musicality: there is a bell curve of natural ability, but everyone can improve with practice.

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Will we meet in the middle?

 Dear Reader, it is wonderful that you are still here! I thought that my philosophical meanderings would have put you off by now. Today, I want to get a little bit more practical...

If you are old enough to remember the excavation of the channel tunnel, you probably entertained the same fantasy as me: after years and years of tunneling, the French and English engineers finally meet ... only to discover that they are a metre or so off from each other.

In retrospect, a metre is nothing, but during the construction my mind returned again and again to the hilarity of this situation. In my current project, I am setting myself up for the same kind of embarrassment.

At one side of my tunnel, I am searching for a starting point in the realm of philosophy: how do we define a human ... being? If you've read my earlier stuff, you'll know that I would prefer to call us human becomings. Over the next six weeks I'm going to be undertaking a course on process theology called 'Rebirthing God' (cue eye rolls) and a course on Kierkegaard called 'Getting Lost and Finding Faith' (eyes now rolled a full 360 degrees). So I'm going to keep quiet on that side of the tunnel while I work out what I think.

In the meantime, what about the other side of the tunnel? The truth is, I already know what I think a healthy, mature (Christian) person looks like. I might not have the words to articulate it, but deep down I just know. My study is changing my articulation of what I know, but it's not changing my basic intuition. 

Let me explain. Yesterday I listened to the latest In Our Time on Radio 4, about the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, and then spent the day reading up on her. I have read many of her novels, and had a copy of 'The Sovereignty of Good' to hand, so that was handy! From that I took her ideas of 'the fat, relentless ego' being the ultimate enemy of love, with its constant fantasising. Also, her appropriation of the Buddhist idea of unselfing as she combines it with the Christian idea of ascesis, to describe the hard work of taking the ego off the throne. In Murdoch's world, it is the platonic ideal of 'The Good' that should be put on the throne, whereas for me, you just need to remove one letter... Finally, Murdoch suggests that once we have unseated the ego the act of love is that of paying attention to the world as it really is, i.e. love comes from a transformation of the inner person before it is worked out in life - there is much more to love than loving acts.

That's four different ideas in a day. I suspect that my description of maturity is - to mix my metaphors terribly - going to end up looking like Howl's Moving Castle, a Heath-Robinsonesque creation in constant danger of falling over or falling apart. Perhaps it will be unrecognisable to me. However, at the start of this process it remains quite small and stable, and - to return to the previous metaphor - I feel childishly confident that I can reach from here to the philosophical side of the tunnel with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

What do I mean by maturity? I've been working through Christian words and how they fit with what I'm working on. In my mind maturity is what Discipleship forms in us so that we can participate in Mission. I'm using the word Discipleship to describe all the things we do that might bring about maturity. It's the Bible Studies and Sunday Services and Spiritual Directors and Liturgies and Ministry Times etc - Christians disagree about the relative importance of these different elements of Discipleship, but I hope that they disagree less about what a mature Christian should look like.

Mission is the word that I would use to describe our participation in the life of God in the world, and I would expect a mature Christian to be participating in Mission in a way that is in harmony with who they are and what they believe. So, I wouldn't expect a mature Christian to always be more busy than an immature one. Rather, I would expect them to 'only do what [they] see Abba doing.' (John 5:19) Again, Christians disagree hugely about what Mission should look like (Is it just evangelism? Maybe some social action? What about politics, or work - are they part of Mission?), but I hope they disagree less about the kind of person that God can participate with in Mission.

My plan over the next five weeks is to describe five elements of maturity that I think every Christian should be growing into/towards. My writing will be personal, pastoral and practical. (As I say, the tunnel from the theory side is just beginning and will take may years to construst.) They are:

1) Spirituality 

2) Faith/Belief/Allegiance that is both honest and committed

3) Christlike character

4) Integrity of life

5) Decentring of the self and love for others and creation

I hope you have lots of questions! As I say, I'm going to be articulating things that come from deep inside me and haven't always been clearly expressed before, so I hope that you will help me find the words. The ultimate aim is to find a way of talking about this that a 12-year-old could understand, so all questions and comments are likely to be helpful. If your question is, 'What do you mean by...?' please wait a week or two, because hopefully I will answer you.

My question to you at this point is, what's missing in this person that I'm describing? (Remember that I'm not trying to describe what they do, but who they are.)

Thanks in advance!

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Howl's Moving Castle by D Tailor, photo by John C Bullas from Flickr used under creative commons licence

Intermission 1 - Calvin Schrag

This week I've been reading some of the work of Calvin Schrag, one of the leading US proponents of 'Continental' (mainly existential and postmodern) philosophy. His work is dense and complicated and technical but he has been necessary in helping me explore the idea that I might synthesise the existential thinking of Heidegger and Tillich with the process theology of Whitehead and Cobb.

He is 93 years old. A few years ago he was asked to sum up the learning of his life and whether any of it makes a difference to the way we live (the question was posed in a more philosophical way, but I think this is what they were getting at). Here are his final words: '...we all do well to heed the call of the ancient prophets of Israel, and especially Micah's consummate admonition to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with one's God. Striving for justice, kindness, mercy, and humility pretty much consolidates matters when one adds up that which counts "existentially and personally."'

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You are who you are?

Last week I had the pleasure of accompanying my eldest daughter to see Les Miserables in The West End. I am not a big musicals fan so I can't really comment on it as a work of art. My primary interest is in it as a work of philosophy and theology. And there is so much in there!

I should confess that Victor Hugo's novel, on which the musical is based, was the second novel I read as an adult, after many years of not reading novels at all. Early teens: 2000AD and Action comics. Then nothing. It upsets Anna that I only completed two of my four set texts for O Level English Literature. All that is by way of saying that when I read Les Miserables as a 20-year-old, while house-sitting in Karachi, it had a huge impact on me. I didn't know enough about French history to understand the political elements of the book, but for me the central struggle encapsulated for me the struggle for the soul of Christianity.

It's believed that the two main characters, Valjean and Javert, are both based on one man, Eugène François Vidocq, a former criminal who was involved in setting up one of the first detective agencies in France. Vidocq had apparently broken his parole so was technically on the run his whole life, even while he was establishing what became the police. Vidocq was still alive when Les Miserables was published, and his only objection to the portrayal of the legalistic Javert was that he, Vidocq, had never arrested anyone for stealing bread (the reason Valjean is imprisoned in the early part of the book).

It's over 30 years since I read the novel, but what has stayed with me all this time (and what I bring to the musical) is a sense that Hugo believed that there was a good form of Christianity out there somewhere, one based on love and mercy rather than law and puishment. The novel starts with around 50 pages of description of the life of a Bishop, a Bishop so humble and caring that - sorry, Bishops - one can only imagine that he was read at the time as a sarcastic commentary on the church heirarchy. This Bishop intervenes miraculously in the recently released Valjean's life, such that Valjean breaks his parole and moves to a different part of France in order to start a new life. There he becomes a successful businessman and politician, with a reputation for kindness.

But Valjean has broken his parole, which means that the implacable Javert must hunt him down and put him back in the labour camp. In my reading, Javert represents the totally immovable justice of God, such that there is nothing Valjean can do to escape his punishment. It doesn't matter what good he does in this life, because he has broken the law by skipping his parole he is deserving of punishment. 

Valjean, meanwhile, has become as saintly as his episcopal benefactor. The reader can't believe that such a good person should spend the rest of their life in prison, yet of course the church at the time taught that each of us must be subject to punishment, either in a temporary purgatory, or forever in hell.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, mainly because in my hearing, the musical production, while brimming with theology (both the main characters believe they are following God, while both the evil and downtrodden characters all comment on God's absence) the question about whether Valjean should be punished has been turned from a theological one to a philosophical one.

Javert is not (just) portrayed as a believer in the absolute authority of the law, but in the philosophy known as essentialism. At least twice he comments that Valjean is a criminal, and always will be. This isn't just a comment on his legal status, but on his essence. Who he is has been defined by God, or fate, and can't be changed. When we say 'Women do this, black people do that...' we are being sexist and racist respectively, but we are part of a long philosophical tradition in which it was believed that people, along with all other things, had essential characteristics that could never change. You are what you are. In that light, the terrifying verse from All Things Bright and Beautiful makes perfect sense:

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate;

God made them, high or lowly,

And ordered their estate.

God sets everything in its right place and we are fools to try to change any of it. The tragic student-led rebellion that overshadows the second half of the book might even be considered a confirmation of that belief.

That rebellion takes place in Paris in the early 19th century, where a century later a philosophical revolution shook the world. Existentialism says you aren't any thing in particular, you just are. End of story. There is no particular meaning to you or your life - any meaning has to be made by you and the choices you make. And even then, most of us won't make much of our lives anyway. “Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards," said Jean-Paul Sartre in a lecture in 1946. "If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing”.

If that sounds incredibly hope-less, it did to me too, when I first read about it at university. Existentialist theologians recast God as the 'Ground of Being', a kind of divine guarantor of existence, but it was a fairly paltry god compared to the one who made every thing and determined its place in the universe. But not even Sartre, one of the early thinkers of existentialism, was really as hopeless as all that. He once wrote, “As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.”

Ah. Becoming.

Les Miserables, written decades before Sartre was born, is concerned with who Jean Valjean has become and is becoming. Valjean is neither a thing determined for all time - a criminal - but nor is he without form or purpose, seeking to discover his identity in his choices as if those choices have neither rhyme nor reason until they are made.

Jean Valjean is a partner with God in an emerging world.

The theologian N T Wright describes the Bible as like the first four acts of an unfinished five act play, plus a (let's face it, very sketchy) outline of how the play will end. We are the actors, called on to improvise the fifth act, ensuring continuity with what has come before, but open to new and amazing plot twists. The analogy falls down a little, because actually the playwright-director is there in the theatre, smiling and saying, 'No, this play is unfinished on purpose, we're going to write this together.'

I don't think my view of  dynamic actors in a story that is developing in partnership with God is either essentialist or existentialist. It's not strictly teleological either, because the telos to which we're being drawn is changing and growing as we are. It's not purely process-based, because in some way that I can't define (yet?) the unknown future is speaking to us nonetheless, calling us into a prophetic life. I'll be coming back to how an unknown future might speak to us in the present at a later date.

I find all this pretty exciting. I realise that this might be my temperament, that I am just well disposed to seeing myself as part of an emerging stoty, whereas others lean more towards wanting the world to be clear and easily defined, and others reject any kind of overarching purpose. I'm happy to be critiqued, but please be gentle - my brain is flexing muscles that haven't been used for a while, so I'm bound to be a bit wobbly.

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Down the Rabbit Hole

 

Hey, thanks for visiting. I appreciate it. I'm not someone who enjoys pursuing knowledge for its own sake, I get the most pleasure from sharing what I've learned, in the hope that it will help you see the world differently. Plus, I'm an external processor so it's my habit to share half-baked ideas with anyone who might help me improve the recipe. 

This is the third of my reflections and I haven't really explained what I'm trying to do. Part of that is because five weeks into my sabbatical I've already realised I can't do what I set out to do. And part is because of a quirk of my personality - I like to go down the rabbit hole.

By that I mean that I am like that kid who always asks why. In my church life, I have a tendency to believe that if we can get the foundations right, the details (y'know, like what we actually do) will sort themselves out. If you are a more pragmatically minded person, I'm a bit of a pain in the ass. I will certainly never tell you what to do, but rather point you in the direction of learning that I think will enable you to work it out for yourself. I might object if you do the right thing for the wrong reason. A reflection on an event might suddenly include references to Kierkegaard. To everyone I've ever line managed: I apologise.

And I owe you an apology too, dear Reader. Because of all of the above, this post will be a bit longer than the other two. I'm not just in the rabbit hole, I'm heading for the bottom.

The reason I'm studying is because I want to prove that, all other things being equal, more relational forms of community (specifically church) are more likely to result in transformation than more event/attendance forms of community. For me, transformation is personal (being about the character and life of the individual), communal (being about our immediate relationships with family, friends, neighbours, colleagues) and social/global (being about neighbourhoods, towns, cities, nations, ecologies). 

Assuming that you believe that the Christian faith should result in transformation (not all Christians do), my argument is important because the institutional churches of the UK are haemorraging both cash and people and looking for ways to ensure their survival. At the moment, most denominational bureaucracies are leaning towards investment in large congregations (which have a higher proportion of event/attendance members and a lower proportion of committed/relational members). For many reasons, some of which will play out in this blog over the next several years, I don't think we will find the future of the church through this approach. (If you want to go down that particular rabbit hole, I wrote an article a few years ago which expresses my nascent views here.)

It was my intention to take an off-the-shelf measure of transformation and use it to compare how different kinds of churches affect the lives (and environments, and communities) of their members. Essentially, I wanted to find out whether churches really do 'make a difference'. Imagine if, alongside attendance and financial income, we could measure whether people are growing or declining in their discipleship? (I realise that some of you are feeling sick at the very thought of this. My argument in favour is this: at the moment, denominations measure income, attendance and/or membership. Wouldn't it be an improvement if they could measure 'impact' as well, however you might define that?)

Anyway, it turns out that there is no off-the-shelf test that I can use. The off-the-shelf tests I've found (over 50 and counting) are either designed by non-religious psychologists who want to impose their own definitions of mature spirituality (basically: privatised and harmless), or are equally biased from a Christian perspective. A survey from an evangelical church that 'proves' that the answer to every faith development question is to read more of the Bible? Pardon me if I am a little suspicious...

And I found out that none of these frameworks addresses my question about transformation, concerning themselves primarily with the 'inner life' of belief and spirituality. Of course I think that a growing, healthy Christian should have a deep spiritual connection with God and others. Of course I think that a growing, healthy Christian should have worked out what they believe and committed to it in a sustainble way. However, I also think that a growing, healthy Christian should display some signs of their faith outside their own private world.

In short, and I'll come back to these over and over again, I think there are 3 others things we should look for: firstly, a person's character should change and grow and become more like the 'Fruit of the Spirit' mentioned in Galations 5. Secondly, there should be an increasing integrity between what a Christian believes and how they live their lives. Thirdly, there should be a decentering of the self and a greater openness to being part of the networks, ecologies and communities of our environment. All of these go way beyond whether a person prays or believes in the existence of God, which is what most surveys seek to measure.

Not only is there no off-the-shelf measurement tool, there is no satisfactory ideological model of human growth and maturity that I could 'operationalise' into a measurement tool. At this point, I'm already down the rabbit hole. It turns out that the itch I was scratching last week - that our definitions of a person are very static when I want to centre Human Becoming rather than Human Being - is an itch that the world of philosophy is scratching at this very moment in time. And it's in the dialogue between philosophy and science that the really effective scratching is taking place.

Maybe I'll leave that metaphor for now.

Traditional philosophy says you are who you are because of what stays the same. I know I'm the same me as yesterday because of all physical and psychological continuities with that person. Biology replies by saying that 'being the same' is a really bad idea, because the only way for you to stay the same is for you to be dead. Change and growth and transformation are the basis of what makes us who we are, what keeps 'I' alive. I am me precisely because I have changed from who I was yesterday. I'm a collection of processes held together in a similar form to the form I had yesterday. 

Yeah, I know, I'm still working it out. Maybe I'll never work it out.

However, here's the thought I'm playing with. What if Human Becoming is more than just a slogan I've plucked out of the air, what's if it's an accurate description of who we are? That means that change isn't an option. It's not even 'an inevitability', as if it's something that happens to us. It's who we are. That means that our second question of the day (after, 'What's for breakfast?') should be, 'What am I becoming today?' There are many natural and 'external' processes that shape our answer to that question, over which we have limited influence, but somewhere in the midst of it we have agency, guaranteed by the Spirit of God. Instead of asking ourselves if we want to change, we need to acknowledge that we are changing - constantly - and work in partnership with God and our environment to - sorry everyone - be the change we want to see in the world.

As soon as that quote comes to mind, I feel as though I am in cat poster meme land. Nonetheless, it's important to me that if I'm thinking and writing about change, that change goes 'all the way down'. Process ontology asserts this: processes are more fundamental than things. This is something that physicists are trying to explain to us, however haltingly.

So this week I'm reaching the bottom of the rabbit hole, exploring the nature of reality. It's not where I expected to get to when I started thinking about what kinds of church make Christlike people. It only took me five weeks to get here. I have six years to get out. Pray for me.

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

In What Ways Do You Look Like God?

Reading Genesis 1-11 in the 21st century is difficult. It's as hard as reading Revelation, and for the same reason. If I wrote, 'And I saw an Orange Man, coming out of the water, and he devoured the Mexicans, and the socialists, and he destroyed everything in his path,' you would have some idea of what I was talking about. But in 2,000 years' time, how would people take it? Perhaps they would start a new religion waiting for The Orange Man.

Both the early, 'mythical'* chapters of Genesis and the later, 'mythical'* chapters of Revelation use ideas and images (nowadays some people would use the word 'tropes') that were common currency when they were written. Comparing the creation stories of Genesis 1-3 with other creation stories that were written around the same time can yield incredibly exciting and fruitful revelations. By finding out how the Israelites' stories are different from their neighbours', we can see what they were trying to say that distinguished them from all the other national religions of the time. (For a great little book exploring these ideas, click here.)

In the 1970s a statue of King Adad-It'i was found in Syria. Written on his cloak was an inscription in Aramaic that uses the phrase, 'This is an image (selem) and likeness (damut) of [the king]', the exact same wording used in Genesis 1:26 when God says that humans are God's image and likeness. Wowsers. Here's my take (thanks initially to Crispin Fletcher-Louis): we humans are like statues of YHWH, we are YHWH's idols! It's not that God bans idols - physical representations of God in creation -because God hates them, it's that WE are the idols and God doesn't want any distractions!

I love this idea, but this week I've pushed it on another step.

Let's face it, if God never changes, what's wrong with a regular statue? In fact, wouldn't a solid, unchanging statue be a better representation of a solid, unchanging god? Why bother making living, growing beings that change over time to be your image and likeness, unless you, too, are a living, growing being that changes over time?

Why is this important to someone who is trying to develop a model of human maturity?

Well, firstly, because our dominant model of the Abba of Jesus was imported from Greek philosophy. According to Plato, God isn't worth much unless God is perfect in every way, and that includes being completely unchanging. If God could change, so the argument goes, either God's former state or new, changed state must be less than perfect. This doctrine of immutability prevents God from ever feeling anything (because that would be a change in God), from ever learning anything, from ever changing a plan or a decision.

It should be clear that this Greek, philosophical God is not very much like the passionate, loving, involved and, yes, changeable God of the Bible. Yet the doctrine of God's immutability sits behind a lot of other Christian doctrines. It may make logical sense, but it doesn't make sense of why God's supreme revelation is a learning, growing, feeling, changing person called Jesus of Nazareth. And it doesn't make sense of why God would choose us to be their image and likeness. (You can find out more about this perspective here.)

Secondly, this static view of God can often bleed over into a static view of Christian faith. Either you are or you aren't a Christian. Whether it's baptism, confirmation, 'praying the prayer' or something else, we have created static (and boundaried, and policed) definitions of faith and church and belonging. Perhaps it is in becoming that we are most godlike, not being (and certainly not doing). We, like God, are an unfinished story. Our past (in)forms us and our future calls us, but here in this moment we have the option to choose becoming or unbecoming.

A lot of the motivation for my study has been a dissatisfaction with two things:

(a) Measures of church 'success' that focus on raw numbers and take no account of whether being part of a particular church is transformative of the individual, the church itself or the local community

(b) Meeting people in (and out of) churches who have been Christians for many years but are still really, um, un-Christlike.**

So if becoming is baked into the being of God and humans, surely we need to think about what it is that we are becoming? That takes us back to last week's post on telos, and me on the road to discovery...

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*By mythical, I don't mean to say that these passages don't have any factual/historical content, only that the truth they're communicating is more symbolic and not primarily factual/historical.

**This is not an academic measure! As I have got older, I have come to appreciate the biblical idea of the fruit of the Spirit - that if we are giving way to the Spirit of God, then slowly but surely our character will change. 

Image by Wayne Pitard - https://vici.org/image.php?id=14085, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94522226

God Just Wants Me to be Happy!

Every now and then I'm going to share a bit that I'm thinking from my reading. Hopefully over time you will see the pieces fit together.

The Shorter Westminster Catechism, a founding document of English Calvinism, starts in a really interesting place. You might expect a Christian movement's core teaching to start with its doctrine of God or something about Jesus, but no. It starts with us.

'What is the chief end of man?'

'Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.'

Wow. Enjoyment is our chief aim (OK, along with glorifying God)!

You wouldn't think that Calvinists would provide the theological underpinning for the 20th century's turn towards pleasure and self-fulfilment.

Yeah,

But

Nah.

In traditional philosophy there are two kinds of pleasure: hedonistic and eudaimonic. It's telling that you've probably only heard of one of those words.

Yesterday my neghbour helped me build a garden structure using his vastly superior (to mine) DIY skills. I learnt today that he did a six-month carpentry and furniture-making course, so I don't feel too bad. What felt like an uphill struggle for me turned into a relatively quick and pleasurable experience as Chris did something he was good at. Eudaimonic pleasure is the pleasure gained from fulfilling our purpose, whether that be the short-term purpose of building a pergola or the longer term purpose of being a carpenter. Or the even longer-term purpose of being caught up in God and God's purposes.

The catechism starts by asking a question about our 'telos', which means our purpose, our reason for being. Or maybe just our reason for getting out of bed.

When Jesus delivered one of his most terrifying sayings, 'Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect' (Matt 5:48), the word which gets translated as perfect is actually 'teleios', which elsewhere in the New Testament is translated as 'mature'. Perhaps a better translation would be, 'Live towards your purpose, just as God lives towards God's purpose.' (Maybe the Aramaic 'Abba' describes God's telos as well as God's identity?)

This helps me understand a lot of things, including the kind of joy being alluded to in the catechism. To find one's place in the universe, the gift one has to give and the pleasure one can give God by giving it, goes beyond mere hedonistic pleasure. It provides a much deeper context to the word joy, which can sometimes come across as 'Being really happy whatever the circumstances.'

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