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What does it feel like, to love God?
At times In baffled anger I have raged. More times Though, I have ignored, or doubted. And yet, Sometimes Inexplicably, I am drawn. Is there a love unrequited To which I must, this time, respond?
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God's presence is in the absence,
The shaped emptiness that shows Where He and She, was. Leaving us, alone? To ponder the gap. Trying to patch it With theology, Cover it with rites, or asserting that, fundamentally, there's no gap at all. Waiting for those times we are sure enough That our humanness can fill it, Shaped into the space God has left. There can be little doubt that as an ideology neo-liberalism is dead. It survives because it is believed that there is no political alternative to it that isn't even worse.
No political alternative. With the recent impotence of the political Left in the West, it has been the Churches that have provided the only alternative vision. God has been left as the only source of value that is not wholly compromised by neo-liberalism's relentless reduction of all life to the status of commodity, and the Churches left as the only organised radical opposition. So how do the forces of neo-liberalism react? Is there any connexion between the relentless reductionism of neo-liberalism and the relentless reductionism of militant atheism. Perhaps not intentionally, and indeed some of those most hostile to religion regard themselves as politically Left wing, but they are fulfilling a crucial role for neo-liberalism by undermining the religious concepts that are challenging the dominance of materialist commodification. Their replacement of universal and authoritative 'values' with provisional, variable, transitory and consumer-based 'choices' fits neatly with the rule of the market and the supremacy of capital. In yesterday's Times (13 December), there was an interesting piece titled 'Father, I have sinned - I'm an atheist' by Tim Lott. In this Mr Lott, an atheist, explains why he attends his local Anglican church (and is made welcome). It is a little ironic that today a Unitarian blog ('Throw yourself like seed' by Rev. Pakula) repeats the line that it is Unitarian churches where atheists are welcome and implies that they aren't anywhere else. It also repeats the line, damaging to the Unitarian cause (I suppose it's meant to amuse), that Unitarians are really atheists.
Obviously Mr Lott has an intelligent and tolerant priest for which he is grateful. However, he doesn't address the rather crucial issue of whether there would be a church for him to be made welcome in at all if it did ditch God and simply expoused an indefinite spiritual humanism. I suspect not. Looking through my files I came across the following passage, cut 'n' pasted from goodness knows where or when. I thought it worth reproducing here...
'I observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles which come into many biographies, as if almost essential to the formation of the hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any man has an advantage...who is born, as I was, into a family where the religion is simple and rational; who is trained in the theory of such a religion, so that he never knows, for an hour, what these religious or irreligious struggles are. I always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful to him for the world he placed me in. I always liked to tell him so, and was always glad to receive his suggestions to me. I can remember perfectly that when I was coming to manhood, the half-philosophical novels of the time had a deal to say about the young men and maidens who were facing the ‘problem of life’. I had no idea whatever what the problem of life was. To live with all my might seemed to me easy; to learn where there was so much to learn seemed pleasant and almost of course; to lend a hand, if one had a chance, natural; and if one did this, why, he enjoyed life because he could not help it, and without proving to himself that he ought to enjoy it. A child who is early taught that he is God’s child, that he may live and move and have his being in God, and that he has, therefore, infinite strength at hand for the conquering of any difficulty, will take life more easily, and probably will make more of it, than one who is told that he is born the child of wrath and wholly incapable of good'. Rev. Dr. Edward Everett Hale The front page of the Times of 2 September 2010 reported that in his latest book The Grand Design Stephen Hawking has decreed God is not required for the existence of the universe; that the unaided laws of physics will do just fine. Of course, one’s first reaction was that the standard of reporting of scientific and religious matters is so poor now, even in broadsheets, that the newspaper story may bear little relation to what Professor Hawking said. In this case, however, Professor Hawking is hawking a book and the Times was serialising it, so there is some interest in journalistic accuracy.
The next day had the replies from the Archbishop of Canterbury, scientist -theologians, the Chief Rabbi and so on. They mounted a robust defence of theism. They were aided by Professor Hawking’s hubristic (I would say foolish, but it probably helped sales of the book) dismissal of philosophy as dead which called into question his judgement about any area of knowledge outside of his particular field of physics. Reaction to the mistitled The Grand Design have not all been kind, as here for example. This silly (I use the word deliberately) dismissal of another mode of enquiry after knowledge reminded me, of course, of the ubiquitous Richard Dawkins. And sure enough up he popped in the Times as the archpriest of dogmatic atheism. Once again he showed that he regards scientific questions - I leave aside what that actually means - as the only ones worth asking, dismissing more open-ended ones as ‘silly’. This form of arrogance represents a curious failure of intelligence on the part of a very clever man. It renders his attacks on religious faith as predictable and harmless, and (I'm writing as an ex-atheist) he is now surely more damaging to the cause of atheism. All this obscured the fact that notwithstanding the robust defence I mention above, advances in scientific understanding of the universe do indeed pose a challenge to traditional theism. Not because they disprove God - they do not and cannot - but because they take a creator God out of the equation. Yet while theism retains a creator by removing God from any place where there might be any conflict with scientific theory, this means that whatever role is left for God offends the principle of Ockham's Razor. So while it might be true to state, as God's defenders do in the TImes, that there is no necessary conflict between science and theism, is this because all meaningful ground has been conceded? I recently happened across a review of a conservative evangelical book. The title etc don't matter; you can read the same sort of thing in many places. The topic of the book was along the lines of what you need to be if you want to be considered a Christian and it was evidently written so that the 'kids on the street' will get get it. But that doesn't hide the profoundly unchristian faith behind it. It prompted me to get this off my chest.
I had a Sunday School teacher (Winchester Methodists, Waltham Forest) who told his class that he wasn't going to marry his girlfriend until she became a Christian because otherwise they wouldn't be together after death (she'd be in Hell). I was then a fairly pious sort of adolescent and although I don't remember being immediately horrified, I think it acted as a slowly accelerating conveyor-belt propelling me out of association with that sort of conservative evangelical Christianity. In fact I ended up a fairly militant atheist. And I would maintain still that atheism is a more healthy attitude to have. Paul said love was greater than faith (or hope) but what matters in that sort of evangelical world is Belief. The criterion upon which you will, or will not, be saved is whether you believe, not whether you've tried to love. Does this matter? Yes. After you've waded through the gluey adjectives that so many conservative evangelicals use - 'amazing', 'awesome', 'wonderful' - it's not the good news of God's love for the world that is offered, except as filtered through a warped blood-sacrifice. No, the God who offers love is replaced with a God who needs belief. It is a weak, inadequate, tetchy God. A God sullenly sitting by his scales and dropping the weights of the sin he has made for us into the balance against us. A God who actually doesn't like us very much but has been prevailed upon by His Son to let us into His house rather than wipe us out. If God is love, this means that the love we experience in our human relationships must be but a dim reflection (I think Paul used an appposite metaphor here) of that divine love. The self-forgetting, the self-sacrifice, the forgiveness, the understanding (not to mention the sense of humour) that we show to those we love must be as nothing to that emanating from God. Yet these people put forward a theology that on examination places God's standard of love significantly below that which we should expect of any parent. A God of love doesn't get terribly offended and strike us off the invitation list if ignored or even if we don't believe in Him. Such a God wouldn't expect us to grovel in supplication, or to be singing endless hymns of praise and staring in rapt adoration. If we ignore God the loss, in terms of this life and the fulfilment that the experience of the divine can bring to it, is surely ours. God is going to get over it. No, a God of love is a God of relationship and it is is how we engaged with others that will be the criterion by which we are called to account. I ought to have found Honest to God on my wavelength. I sympathise hugely with what Bishop Robinson was trying to do and why he thought it had to be done. But I came away dissatisfied and unconvinced. His portrayal of Jesus was one factor certainly, see my previous post, but it was more than that.
I think it is because he was seeking new ways in which to argue for the relevance of the Christianity of church doctrine, rather than going back to the scriptures from which it claims to come and from which it derives its meaning. He was surely right to understand ideas about God as metaphors. He noted how 'up there' idea of God in the Bible was superseded by the 'out there' idea of God in nineteenth and earlier twentieth century theology. He, in turn, wanted to replace that with a new metaphor based on depth. The first problem here is that this removes Christianity another step away from the Bible. The less the Christianity of the theologians connects to the language of the Bible, the more abstract and unreal it becomes. So the Christianity of 'depth' which Robinson advocates, impressive though it might be, comes across as an intellectual construct of dissatisfied theologians. It is interesting how the blunt message of God given in Jeremiah 22.15-16, which Robinson quotes with approval, contrasts with the abstractions all around it. The second problem is that the 'up there' metaphor for God is by no means the only one found in the Bible. In fact there are many. It is thus misleading to present the Bible as if is is offering only one (obviously antiquated) paradigm. If, as is surely correct, all talk about God has to be understood metaphorically, surely it is more satisfactory to work with those metaphors you have, rather than inventing new ones even further removed from the source from they ultimately originate and to which they must relate than the 'out there' idea of God that Robinson, rightly, wanted to dispose of. |
What's hereA quick look at the 'blogosphere' shows that the nature of the medium means it is all too easy for a 'blog' to convey the impression that its compiler is, at best, self-indulgent and verbose, and at worst, a narcissistic bore. Religious blogs are by no means immune from this. Archives
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