Author Archives: Elizaphanian

About Elizaphanian

Rector of West Mersea

Inclusively fanatical (August Synchroblog)

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This is a bit late. Click ‘full post’ for text.

Tim asked the very cogent question: what’s the difference between fanaticism and radical unconditional commitment? I think this gives a good way in to a brief discussion of inclusivity and exclusivity with respect to Christian faith.

My answer to Tim is: it is all about where your attention rests. In other words, radical unconditional commitment is all about – in the healthy sense – loving God with all of your self: heart, strength, mind and soul. I think the difference with fanaticism is that fanaticism has stopped paying attention to God and has become embedded in the rivalrous process of competition with another human being, or group of human beings. Instead of the wondrous awareness of the presence of God – with consequent humble attention and awe, drawing us onward into the deeper enjoyment of the Truth (who is Personal not Propositional) there is the agon, the painful contest for supremacy. Instead of the emptying out and taking on the form of a servant, there is the dominance of the will and the urge to mastery. Which is of course rooted in fear and spiritual imbalance.

So what does it mean to claim the truth for a particular position? Which is a different way of saying – who is included, and who is excluded? One of the things I’ve pondered recently was the story of the American priest who claimed to also be a Muslim. Clearly the particular truth of that situation can’t be gleaned from a long distance away (and I note with interest that her Bishop has intervened) but it raises issues of principle. Is it possible to be a Christian and a Muslim at the same time?

It might help if I outline my own answer to the ‘problem of other faiths’. I’ll do this through some summary statements (which I’m not going to argue for here – pressure of time and all that):
– I believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except through him;
– I don’t believe that this is a matter of the words that we say; it is a matter of the shape of life that we act out (Mt 7.21) (and this doesn’t undermine the priority of grace, but that’s a whole other argument);
– that shape of life is incarnate in Christ; that is, he shows us what it means to be human and what we are called to be like (he embodies the standard of judgement);
– I believe it is possible for people using different language to live out that life. In other words, given that all things are created through Christ, I believe that Christ is present throughout the world, and that people of other faiths can exhibit the Christ-life;
– what I mean by the Christ-life is pretty much what St Paul describes: “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another.”

I agree with Rowan Williams (not a surprise): “While we cannot accept Islam as the final revelation, it is nonetheless possible that God has given great gifts to individual Muslims and that through their devotion, we may yet learn something of what obedience to God looks like.” I think it is perfectly possible for a Muslim or a Buddhist – or an atheist! – to display the fruits of the Spirit and to ‘do the will of the Father’. The difference, I would argue, is that we acknowledge Christ; in other words, what is implicit elsewhere is explicit in Christianity.

Is this exclusive? Classically, the discussion about other faiths leads to three possible positions: exclusive (my truth is the only truth); inclusive (my truth includes other truths); or pluralist (the different truths are equivalent). What I’m arguing for falls pretty clearly into the middle option. I don’t have much time for pluralism (or syncretism) simply because I think there are real and concrete differences between the faiths on some things. But I want to round off these remarks by saying something more about the exclusive position – for it is the exclusive position which is fanatical, in the bad sense with which this discussion began.

To my mind there is all the difference in the world between:
– claiming the truth, pursuing the truth, and admitting ‘I could be wrong but this is where I’m walking’
and
– this is the truth and if you don’t agree then you’re wicked, evil and have smelly breath as well.

The difference is that the former recognises the inescapable logic of radical commitment to something (which is what pluralism avoids, or cannot see), yet remains open to insights from outside its own sphere of expertise; the latter is closed and has lost sight of what is most important – in believing that it has captured “the Truth” for its own exclusive possession it has in that very act lost touch with it.

This is the trap into which I fell when discussing the atonement last week. I don’t recant from what I said, but the tone was all wrong – I had been dislodged from my spiritual centre and was starting to mud-wrestle. In particular, I was tempted to remove post #3 – but I’m now minded to leave it up as an honest record of my state of mind at the time. One conclusion I’ve reached is that, principally because of my spending quite a lot of time researching evangelicalism (with the desire to build common ground and unity) I’m quite a long way out of my comfort zone spiritually. Going to the monastery yesterday was a real infusion of light and peace and oxygen. I need to remember that when I become aware of the warning signs.

Anyhow, there will be more on that in due course, no doubt.

In the meantime, I’m going to finally pick up on Sally’s tag about three apologies. There are three things for which I’d want to apologise as a [Western] Christian:

– embracing imperial culture under Constantine;
– embracing a scientific attitude in the Middle Ages, thereby distorting communion and the faith and initiating every mistake that then followed; and
– all the ways in which Christianity fed the Holocaust, which I see as the fruition of the foregoing, but the evil is so large it deserves a specific repentance.

How can Christianity claim it has sole access to the truth when it has a record like that?

Other synchroblogs this month:

David Fisher asks Why are we exclusive?
Steve Hayes is blogging his thoughts “Christianity inclusive or exclusive?
It’s a family affair comes Jenelle D’Alessandro
John Smulo will be adding his thoughts
Cobus van Wyngaard is contemplating Inclusivity within claims of heresy

Erin Word shares some thoughts on The Politics of love
As does Julie Clawson
Mike Bursell asks the question Inclusive or exclusive: you mean there’s a choice?”
And Sally shares her thoughts here

And while we’re on the subject, have a read of this.

Fanaticism

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I was privileged to spend some time today in a nearby Orthodox monastery, which did my soul the power of good, on all sorts of levels. The above is a photo that I took in their refectory (one of their refectories!) I plan to go back before too long. I was very struck by a quotation in an icon of St Nicodemus about humility, which I now can’t find, but I found this instead, which will serve:

Fanaticism can appear on two levels, individual and collective. On an individual level, fanaticism is bold in sick minds and psychologies. It stems from personal pride, lust for power over others. It says ‘I am right’, and therefore cuts itself off from all others in sectarian self-righteousness. It uses its supposed exclusive truth as an axe to grind, as a stick with which to beat others. It loves laws, behind which it can conceal its own insecurities. In saying that he alone is right, the fanatic is automatically wrong. The Saints never said that they were right. The signs of absence of fanaticism are peace, humility and love – not saying that one is right. Fanaticism and intolerance stem in fact from a weak faith, insecurity, and often affect neophytes, recent converts. True religion does not admit of fanaticism.

(found here, my emphasis)

TBTE20070811

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This might seem paradoxical, but I suspect part of my drive in digging into PSA is a desire to find common ground with evangelicals. It’s one aspect of how and where I’ve grown in my understanding of the faith over the last few years because in person (and I accept that this may not come across on the blog!) I do seek consensus and common ground. I just find PSA virtually impossible to swallow. So it becomes like a pebble in the shoe – I just won’t get comfortable until I know what to do with it.

A different image: I feel like I am emerging out from underneath a heavy rock as I get stuck in to understanding evangelicalism. I still carry some wounds from early exposure to bad theology (bad evangelical theology). The trouble is, I see PSA as part of the rock and I still have to do some heavy lifting to get the rock off my back.

If PSA isn’t part of the rock then that is a good thing. But clearly – as at least Tim has realised 😉 – some of the issues at stake in all this aren’t simply about PSA! Ho hum. This blog – and my life – are works in progress.

Or: it’s not enough to be right, I have to be loving. I have become precisely that which I was criticising; I am mirroring the spirituality.

I am cursing the darkness when what I actually need to get on with is lighting candles.

TBTM20070811

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Sometimes the search for the truth can become overbearing and oppressive, both internally and externally. A sign that the sense of proportion has been lost, and idolatry has been entered into.

Which is a way of saying I might change the direction that I was going in with my PSA posts…

A bit too much PSA

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For today – too much PSA. Maybe a bit more tomorrow. In the meantime, two youtube video clips of tracks from the new Martyn Joseph album. He’s coming to Colchester soon!!! Yeah!

For I am God, not man (IV)

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An interlude, giving a few more ‘big picture’ points.


What most drives me in my rejection of PSA is the pastoral consequences of the doctrine. That is, the insistence on PSA as ‘the heart of the gospel’ seems to me to elevate divine wrath and punishment, and therefore the notion of justice and rule following, above the elements of gracious forgiveness within the gospel – and this has very damaging consequences in the life of the faithful. This isn’t just an abstract thing for me – a not insignificant part of my ministry is precisely picking up the pieces of souls that have been smashed by this insistence. The healing is difficult, and takes a long time, and both those parts testify to the depth of the damage done

I don’t have a problem with an acceptance of PSA which sees PSA as a minor element of the gospel, as one image – one METAPHOR – with which to ponder the mystery of salvation. That seems to me to accord moderately well with the importance given to it in Scripture and Church History. In this understanding it is essentially adiaphora – it is something on which Christians may disagree, whilst being united by the much more crucial doctrines (creation, incarnation, resurrection, redemption, trinity…).

The problem to my mind is when that single image is raised up and reified as the defining theory for understanding the work of Christ. When the wider testimony of Christianity and Scripture is conformed and constricted around a metaphysics built upon that image. Hence my remark that penal substitution is what happens when you take a metaphor and turn it into a metaphysics. I had two people in mind influencing that statement – James Alison, who criticises PSA precisely because it is a theory and not something that of itself changes lives, and Wittgenstein, with his criticisms of metaphysics more generally. Sometimes the whole weight is in the picture.

It is rather ironic that PFOT begins with a Foreword from John Piper saying precisely the opposite to this – but for the same reasons. That is, John Piper also sees this as a pastoral issue, and he references Jesus’ criticisms of the Pharisees as an example of how importantly we can take this issue. Piper goes on to say “…if God did not punish Jesus in my place, I am not saved from my greatest peril, the wrath of God.”

That is precisely what I object to, and which I see as a distortion of Christian faith. It is an attitude which has raised up God’s wrath into the determining feature of reality and existence.

To sum up my position:
– I would accept that there are some comparatively minor passages in Scripture which can be construed as referring to something like PSA; however
– I believe that Scripture has many more full and explicit passages which undermine PSA and give a much more healthy and liberating understanding of God and his most gracious favour;
– I believe that PSA is virtually unknown in the early church, and hardly more known for the first thousand years of Christian history;
– I believe that Anselm paved the way for PSA, but that Calvin was the first theologian to give it something like its modern form and place weight on it; more crucially I think Charles Hodge is the thinker with most influence on the way that it is presently portrayed;
– I think the doctrine is intimately tied together with a Modernist understanding of faith; it is a very good example of a ‘doctrine of men’; and I think that as we progressively move away from a Modernist culture so too will PSA lapse first into irrelevance and then it will be forgotten;
– I believe that PSA is a factional and party issue; that is, it is virtually unknown in orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism; it is not actively central in mainstream Protestantism; it is principally pursued by those who are already committed to a Calvinistic perspective on Christianity. It has become a shibboleth separating one Christian from another, and that, in itself, is one of the things most wrong with it.