Is Christianity Simply About God Entering the Uterus of a Jewish Virgin?
Category Archives: theology
The curse of the Law
This is a comment I left here, in argument with Rhology, which I wanted to preserve.
Is ‘the curse of the Law’ just about the Mosaic Law, or is it about all possible Laws anywhere? In other words, when God promises that in the New Covenant people will no longer tell each other ‘follow the Law’ because they will have the law written in their own hearts, is this describing a potentially universal spiritual truth (we won’t need to rely on external Laws to guide us because we will have awakened consciences) or is it simply that the Law of Moses will have been ‘programmed in’ to all members of the Covenant?
I’m quite certain it is the former – in other words, Jesus awakens our consciences and gives us room to grow into the fullness of truth (I have some things to tell you that you cannot bear to hear now). This awakening comes from being set free from the fear of having to conform to this external code – because we all fall short of the glory of God and therefore any written code can end up (through the workings of guilt) depriving us of the freedom which is God’s intention for us. More than this, Jesus several times gives the disciples authority to make their own decisions about sin – in other words we have the authority to decide what is a sin and what is not a sin.
It seems to me that, through being literalistic about what St Paul says, you miss the crucial spiritual teaching he is putting across. In other words, you have made “The Bible” into a new Law – Old Testament theology in New Testament clothes – and if St Paul were alive today I’m sure he would be talking about ‘the curse of the Bible’, were it not for the fact that most people don’t use the Bible in this way. Because of this, you can’t help but keep exposing your underlying fear of human sinfulness, including your own. The whole point of Christ’s dying and rising again is to set us free from this process. We don’t have to be afraid of our own sin any more, and consequently, we don’t have to worry about whether our interpretations of Scripture are corrupted by our own sinfulness – of course they will be, and it doesn’t matter. We’re either going to be relying on our own judgements (and our own judgements INCLUDE deciding that Scripture is ‘inerrant’ in whatever denominational way you want to understand that) or else we are going to be relying on the Spirit to guide us and the wounds of Christ to hide us.
The Bible is a perfect Bible
Another little spat about inerrancy going on in the blogosphere, which I’ve got caught up with here (well, it was my day off – and it’s relevant to my Learning Supper talk this coming Sunday night).
I just wanted to share a more positive thought: the Bible is perfect for what it is.
The reason why I dislike language of ‘inerrancy’ is because it brings in the idea that scientific truth is the highest standard of truth (and this is clear if you explore the origin of the fundamentalist movement in the United States – they wanted the ‘most scientific’ form of authority).
For me, because I see other forms of knowledge as being more important, most especially personal knowledge, it is not a problem to the overall authority of the Bible to say that it errs on matters of scientific fact (eg Jesus saying that the mustard seed is the smallest of all possible seeds).
This requires discrimination as to genre, and the avoidance of turning mythological material into scientific material (eg Genesis 1-11).
It also means that the divergent voices in the Scriptures, running all the way through the Biblical accounts, is a facet of the perfection of the Bible, not a flaw. It is perfect because it contains contradictions, because that is what God wanted it to be.
In other words, I think that the Bible is an inspired and authoritative collection of Scriptures, which perfectly accomplishes what God wants it to accomplish. I just disagree that this means that it is inerrant in the fundamentalist sense.
Obligatory Wittgenstein quote: “God has four people recount the life of his incarnate Son, in each case differently and with inconsistencies. Is this not just in order that the literal word is not taken too seriously, and that the spirit may be given its due? In other words a mediocre account is to be preferred…”
The Bible is a finger pointing at the moon. It points perfectly to the moon. The problem comes when people insist on making the finger into the moon: they search the Scriptures for eternal life, but they don’t find the one in whom that eternal life rests.
Alleluia
And we are raised with Him,
Death is dead,
love has won,
Christ has conquered.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
How should Christians respond to Peak Oil?
I’ve written a pamphlet on the how Christians should respond to Peak Oil, and it has been published by the Diocese of Worcester: it can be downloaded as a .pdf file here. If you’ve read my other stuff on Peak Oil it won’t contain much that is new (some new analogies perhaps) but if you’re new to it then it’s the best place to begin.
I have some spare printed copies if there is anyone on Mersea who wants one.
TBTM20090401
Did Darwin kill God?
Haven’t seen it yet, but it would seem to make the same arguments that I’ve been making (along with others!) for some time. UK viewers only, unfortunately.
As for me, I’m approaching, though not yet attaining, normality.
Idolatry and Abortion
I’ve been pondering that case in Brazil where the RC church has excommunicated a nine-year old girl, her family and doctors, for having an abortion, yet has not excommunicated the person who did the evil deed itself. I think this is a good example of idolatry, and I want to unpack why as it may help to explain what I mean by idolatry (and also, for atheists, what I mean when I say that God is not a member of a set – an explanation which, whilst technically correct, ends up misleading, so I might abandon it.)
In Scriptural terms, we are called to love God with all our mind, soul, heart and strength – in other words, we must put God above all other things, we are not allowed to compromise with God.
This means that nothing else can be given the authority or perfection which belongs to God alone – not Scripture, not religious custom, not ethical principle. Nothing which can be described in human language is beyond being relativised by the fundamental command that we are to have no other gods but the one God. Furthermore we are to know this God, and the nature of this God, in order to carry out his will faithfully (that’s what Scripture is about).
Using slightly more philosophical language, the teaching is that God is the only Absolute – and nothing else is allowed to become an absolute, for if it does, it usurps the place of God and becomes an idol.
In this instance, the principle of ‘no abortion ever’ has been made into an Absolute, and the suffering which will ensue on the child, the child’s family, the doctors involved, and any future situations where a child dies from being prevented from having an abortion – this suffering is the consequence of idolatry. The teaching has been made into a rigid rule that is required to apply in any and all circumstances, no matter what the specifics of the situation. Morality and judgement become a technique rather than something involving the application of human feeling – and the absence of human feeling is one of the key signs that idolatry is present, for it is only human feeling, empathy and compassion, that can lead us rightly to God; it is these things which allow us to know what his ‘way’ actually is.
Note that calling this idolatry does NOT mean that the abortion is morally right in any ‘pure’ sense. What the idolatry in this case involves is an abandonment of the messiness of human life, the recognition that, in our fallen world, there are no morally pure, morally righteous alternatives. There are only choices between evils. Idolatry means that, in order to avoid one evil, a different evil is committed – and the idolatry blinds the idol-worshipper to the nature of that different evil.
In this case the lesser evil is the abortion – calling it a lesser evil acknowledges that it is still an evil – and the choice to never share in that evil has consequences that are a greater evil.
This is the sort of situation that I think Jesus had in mind with the story of the Good Samaritan. People are following religious precepts – they think that they are doing the right thing – yet their hearts have been hardened against compassion, and so they fail to do the Father’s will. Consequently, those who have chosen this idolatrous path are liable to damnation for it.
6 Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;
7 for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care. Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the desert,
9 where your fathers tested and tried me, though they had seen what I did.
10 For forty years I was angry with that generation; I said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they have not known my ways.”
11 So I declared on oath in my anger, “They shall never enter my rest.”
(from Psalm 95)
40FP(8): John 6.66-68
I’ll return to John 6 later in the sequence – possibly more than once – but we had these this morning, and I’m slipping behind due to pressure of work! (I hope to return to Stark tomorrow as well)
66 From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
67 You do not want to leave too, do you? Jesus asked the Twelve.
68 Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.
Why is this a favourite passage?
Verse 66: I find this an incredibly poignant verse. People who had been following Jesus, who had seen the signs he has performed, now abandon the way because the teaching had become too hard to absorb – the teaching about the Eucharist (on which more another time, but see here).
Verse 67: more poignancy, and here it is essential that we hold on to the humanity of Jesus, rather than simply reading it as a divine challenge, otherwise the implicit loneliness is lost (the loneliness will come, but not yet).
Verse 68: those who remain, who have accepted the teaching and entered into the life, recognise Jesus for who he is and what he conveys. This is one of several basic Christian confessions in Scripture, but in my view, one of the best.
A possibly profane and heretical analogy
I was musing about names, and whether there could be salvation by any other name than Jesus – and an image came to mind.
I’ve been wanting to talk about Jesus as ‘way, truth and life’ in a fundamental sense, but wanting to sit lightly to the name itself (given my interpretation of the Mt 7 passage).
So I was thinking about doors – that Jesus is the door frame, the space through which we can come.
And I was thinking about the sign on the door not mattering very much – can be different according to who you are.
And then I thought about public lavatories, with their different signs – appropriate to our own natures – but equivalent destinations.
‘Come to me all you who labour and are heavy burdened, and I shall give you rest…”
Spiritual Gifts (/Supernatural)
Something I’ve just written for the parish magazine.
‘Earnestly desire the higher gifts’ (1 Cor 12.31)
I have been asked by several people recently about the nature of spiritual or supernatural gifts: what are they and how should we understand them? Well, St Paul devotes a very long sequence in his first letter to the Corinthians to this topic (chapters 12-14) and I would heartily recommend studying those chapters to get some good sense about what these gifts are and how important – or unimportant – they are. What I would like to do briefly here is say something about the ‘supernatural’, which might help to clear things up.
When we talk about the ‘supernatural’ today, we tend to think either of poltergeists and vampires, or else of some sort of special power like Superman’s X-ray vision. We think that there is a natural world which we are familiar with, and then there is a supernatural world which goes beyond this. Supernatural gifts in particular are seen as forms of power, especially the ability to do or achieve something physical like lifting an amazingly heavy weight. This is not the way that the early church understood ‘the supernatural’.
In the early church, the division wasn’t between the natural and the supernatural, but between the natural and the graced – that is, between what was human and humanly comprehensible, and what was the subject of divine activity. This was not a matter of power so much as it was about morality. The early church took it for granted that we were sinful, we were corrupted by original sin, and so we are incapable of being virtuous or good by our own activity. However, the action of divine grace can work within us and enable us to become better people and thereby do good work. This is the understanding that lies behind much of the language of the Book of Common Prayer, especially in the 39 Articles.
The difference might be envisaged by comparing Superman – a character who can achieve all sorts of physically impossible feats, like flying and lifting trains with one hand – and St Francis of Assisi, who overcame the patterns of his upbringing in order to serve the poor. Superman is ‘supernatural’ in a modern sense, but it is St Francis who is supernatural in the earlier and more Scriptural sense. His ‘nature’ was surpassed, and his life of virtue was therefore supernatural.
This is what St Paul emphasises through the famous chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians, which we will be studying in the house groups throughout Lent. The most important gift is love, and this is a spiritual gift, this is a supernatural gift. Consider how hard it is to forgive someone who has deeply hurt us – it is not something that we can achieve through our own power. Yet it is possible – it is a gift from God when it can happen, and all the thanks belong to him when it does.
So when St Paul writes, introducing that chapter 13, ‘earnestly desire the higher gifts’ this is what he is talking about. There are all sorts of strange and exotic phenomena in our lives, some are spiritually important, some are not, but the most important gifts are those of love, most especially what he elsewhere calls the ‘fruits of the Spirit’: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These are the most important, the most worthy, and the most supernatural of the gifts that God can bestow on us. Let us pursue these gifts, and pray for these gifts, and share these gifts in our community.