Author Archives: Elizaphanian

About Elizaphanian

Rector of West Mersea

I believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God, the Incarnate Word

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This is a response to the Celtic Chimp’s question. In one sense the title of the post is the answer (ie ‘yes’!) but a little more can be said – not least because I spent 40 minutes the other night explaining much of this. It ties in with the point about religious grammar as well (‘what do you mean…?’)

First off, I’m pretty sure that what I mean by saying that I believe Jesus is the Son of God is not what St Peter meant when he replied to Jesus’ question. There are two principal roots for ‘Son of God’ language that I can see:
– the first is a description of the King of Israel, sometimes the whole people of Israel itself – it’s another way of talking about the Messiah;
– the other I take from Margaret Barker’s work on the Temple, and it comes from the description of the High Priest on his descent from the Holy of Holies, when he takes on the persona of God in order to cleanse the people from their sin.

These two things are clearly the major roots for why Jesus ended up being called ‘The Son of God’, yet it is equally clear that this language evolved rather rapidly in response to the resurrection and the meaning of the words changed to something more substantial, ending up with what we have in the creeds (of one being with the Father, begotten not made, light from light etc etc)

For me, the most meaningful declaration is the one I have appended to the title of this post – Jesus is the word incarnate. The link of Jesus to the royal line, and his being King of Israel (which underlies the genealogies and much else in the NT) I find mostly irrelevant. The Temple motif I find more interesting but primarily in an academic and theological sense – it makes no difference to how I live.

The confession that Jesus is the incarnate word is different. The ‘word’ – ie the logos – I see as the point, the purpose, the intent, the nature, the structure of creation. Jesus is that point, purpose etc in human form. He shows us what it is. The universe was made so that Jesus (and his brothers and sisters) could come into existence. Nothing in the universe exists without that potential being present. That intent and purpose cannot finally be separated from the one doing the intending and purposing, so it makes sense (to me!) to call Jesus God, and yet to distinguish the Son from the Father (and also why I think it makes sense to say – now – that we only come to the father through the Son) within the theological grammar of the Trinity.

So I would say: Jesus is the embodiment of God, he exemplifies humanity and the meaning of it, he makes a claim upon us to which we are required to respond (even if that response does not involve calling him ‘Lord’). I don’t think Jesus is very worried about the language that we use – he is very worried about whether we are selfish egotists or whether we empty ourselves out in service and love to our neighbour.

I believe that Jesus is 100% human and 100% divine.

And I want to be like him; I want to conform my life to the pattern of his life, which means conforming my life to the eternal pattern and purpose laid down by the creator, to be holy, to bear fruit, to be his son, his brother, his friend.

Is that enough of an answer Gary?

Reasonable Atheism (14b): Religious grammar continued

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At the risk of making this even murkier than it seems to be already, a few thoughts to expand what I said in the earlier post.

Think of different languages. Think of the different words for ‘cow’. Clearly there are connotations to the word for cow in Sanskrit and Urdu that aren’t present in English or Welsh. However, there is enough in common for the term to be more or less translatable.

You could say that the words for cow across the different languages share a family resemblance. There may not be any one item which is the exact ‘essence of cow’ which all the words for cow correspond to, but there is enough correspondence for people of different languages to understand each other, and recognise what is being referred to, in just the same way that different members of a family might more or less resemble each other, without there being any one specific feature which they all have in common.

My argument is that there is something similar going on with religious frameworks. There may not be any one essential thing which all religions have in common (in fact, I’m pretty certain there isn’t) and there are all sorts of ways in which religions differ – to the extent that even using the word ‘religion’ is suspect – but there are family resemblances across the different religions which mean that they more or less resemble each other.

Much of that resembling comes in terms of what could be called ‘the practice of holiness’, ie cultivating certain attitudes and virtues like forgiveness. Again there may not be one specific element which is ‘the essence of forgiveness’ but, as I see it, there is enough correspondence in behaviour across the different faiths (and even no faiths) for this to become a meaningful analogy.

Now the way in which these different behaviours are described (or justified) across the different cultures may be very diverse, but if the underlying behaviour is sufficiently similar then I believe we are justified in saying ‘these are the same sorts of behaviour’. My point is that when this happens the different religious perspectives do not in reality contradict each other, however diverse the explanations may be. (I would say they each correspond to the will of God – but that’s an example of what is at issue.)

Ponder for a moment what it would be for this not to be true. It would mean that there is no common humanity across different cultures, no way in which, for example, one person could communicate their hunger to someone from a different society. Making motions towards an open mouth, rubbing the stomach and so on – are we saying that human beings are so shaped by their culture and language that no communication is possible?

Perhaps this is true. My wife is a translator, and certainly some things, some concepts, are untranslatable (I’m sure the word logos is one). Yet I would place this into a spectrum of understanding, whereby some things are more or less clearly common to human nature, and other things are more or less untranslatably a product of specific circumstance. This is why the word schadenfreude is used in English – in order to preserve a more specific meaning (and of course, that word may well by now have developed different overtones and connotations to what it had in its original linguistic home.)

The point I would want to drive home is that differences in spoken or written language do not necessarily make for a substantial difference in belief. They may, they may not. The key is the practice or form of life within which the words are embedded, and which give the words any meaning that they possess. I have no interest in saying that Christianity, Islam, Buddhism etc are all the same (they’re not). I do want to say that there are family resemblances, areas of correspondence and compatibility, and that what might seem at first sight to be a contradiction ain’t necessarily so.

I return to that Wittgenstein quotation I make much use of:
“Actually I should like to say that … the words you utter or what you think as you utter them are not what matters, so much as the difference they make at various points in your life. How do I know that two people mean the same when each says he believes in God? And just the same goes for belief in the Trinity. A theology which insists on the use of certain particular words and phrases, and outlaws others, does not make anything clearer (Karl Barth). It gesticulates with words, as one might say, because it wants to say something and does not know how to express it. Practice gives the words their sense.”

Reasonable Atheism (14): A point about religious grammar

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It is sometimes argued that because religious beliefs and experiences contradict each other, they can’t all be true. Whilst I’m sceptical that religions are ‘basically all the same’ I also believe that this criticism isn’t as strong as proponents believe.

Let’s take these four theses for our purposes of comparison:
a) Jesus Christ is the Son of God;
b) Muhammed is the final prophet;
c) the Buddha teaches the noble truth;
d) the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the source of all goodness.

Now on the face of it, it is impossible to reconcile these four theses. At most only one can be true. Yet this is only the case if these theses are certain sorts of claims, principally, that the theses are factual claims about states of affairs in the world. It is as if there is a spiritual equivalent of the periodic table, and the claim in each of the four theses is that a particular entity occupies position #1. The other entities, however wonderful, cannot occupy that position, they have to occupy other numbers. As the Highlander tagline had it, ‘there can be only one’.

To take the religious language in this way, however, is in my view to fundamentally mistake the grammar of religious language. Accepting this way of understanding religious language is, in fact, a hallmark of what I call the humourless perspective (both atheist and theist).

Wittgenstein said (PI § 43) “For a large class of cases – though not for all – in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” In other words, to understand what each of those four theses means – and therefore whether there is a contradiction involved – we need to look at what is actually being done with the words.

Now it is perfectly possible to imagine a Buddhist, a Muslim and a Christian whose lives closely resemble each other in certain particular respects, for instance that in response to suffering a wrong (being cheated in a business transaction) they each choose to forgive. Each one explains their behaviour in terms of their religious commitments: the Christian says that forgiveness is of God, the Muslim says he must follow Allah the compassionate and merciful, the Buddhist says something about the importance of cultivating boundless compassion to all creatures.

The point being that in this case, the meaning of the language is identical across the different religious beliefs. There is no more contradiction involved than there is when a Frenchman uses the word ‘vache’ where an Englishman would use the word ‘cow’. Although the surface grammar of the statements appear contradictory, the depth grammar is the same.

Should we find someone who was a genuine worshipper of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who, as a result of their spiritual disciplines and learning, ends up behaving in the same way (practising forgiveness) then we can say that their language means the same thing. We can even say the same thing about an atheist, or about someone who said nothing more about their behaviour than ‘this seemed the right way to behave’. In each of these cases it is the behaviour which is fundamental and which gives meaning to the language used to describe it.

Which means that contradictions between religions come at the level of behaviour, not of speech.

For it is also easy to imagine Christians, Muslims and Buddhists who use the same language as their brothers and sisters in the faiths, but whose behaviour is markedly different. In response to being cheated in business, each one may respond with violence of thought and action, or resort to legal and judicial processes and so on. In this instance it becomes clear that there is certainly a contradiction between the beliefs of the first group and of the second – but the contradiction isn’t a logical one (which person belongs in position #1 of the spiritual periodic table), the contradiction is one of behaviour.

One can push this a little further and say: the holy in each faith recognise each other and resemble each other. To use Jesus’ language “Not everyone who calls me ‘Lord’ shall enter the Kingdom… but those who do the will of my father who is in heaven.”

The fundamental claim of faith is that there is a right way to live, independent of our own choices. There are some disagreements across the faiths about what that right way is, but the disagreements should not be assessed at the surface level of grammar, but at the depth level of forms of life. Once that is done, and greater clarity is obtained about the claims of each faith, we can more easily see where the real contradictions obtain. Then, and only then, the conversation can become interesting and important.