Category Archives: theology

Johannine inerrancy

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I really shouldn’t fire off a post like that just before going off on holiday 🙂

This, in slightly more formal terms, is my argument. It’s a train of thought, it hasn’t had all the wrinkles removed, I might conceivably change my mind…. and so on. Click ‘full post’ for text.

1. There is a major difference in the presentation of Jesus from the synoptics to John. Specifically the character of Jesus exhibited through the great ‘I am’ monologues is difficult to tie together with the character presented in the other three gospels. It is not academically exceptional to treat the synoptics as providing a more solid historical framework.

2. I’m happy to accept that much (not all) of the material presented as coming out of the mouth of Jesus in John’s gospel was not originally spoken by Jesus of Nazareth.

3. I see these monologues as divinely inspired. That is, I see them as teaching eternal truths about Jesus’ identity. I see them as revelation. I believe, for example, that it is true that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.

4. I would therefore be happy to talk about the inerrancy of John’s gospel. What I would mean by this is that John’s gospel contains no errors concerning the nature of the living Word. It is a finger which truly points to the moon.

5. I would distinguish this form of inerrancy from a form which emphasises an inerrancy of ‘fact’. I see the concept of ‘fact’, used in this context, as at best misleading, at worst idolatrous. This concept of fact – by which is meant something like empirically verifiable data – was developed as a consequence of the scientific revolution. I don’t see those ‘facts’ as the most important material for guidance in our life; rather I see them as trivial.

6. Some background thoughts: the people alive at the time of Jesus did not fully understand who he was. It is possible that Jesus himself, prior to the resurrection, did not fully understand every aspect of who he was (part of his being fully human perhaps). John’s gospel is a fulfilment of the other three; it draws out more fully the implications of the other three; you could say that the other three – indeed the entire rest of the Bible – is pregnant with John, and John’s gospel is the baby. Except I’d rather say that Jesus is the baby, and John’s gospel is the inerrant witness to that baby.

7. Any language about inerrancy – treated positively – is a conservative position. Yet #2 above is anathema to more conservative understandings of John’s gospel. I want to argue (have argued elsewhere) that to defend the status of John’s gospel in terms of ‘fact’ (= enlightenment epistemology) is to falsely elevate that epistemology above the much more important spiritual truths which John’s gospel inerrantly conveys. The inerrancy does not consist in the gospel being factually robust but in truly pointing to the living Word.

8. “But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

Reasonable Atheism (15): Western atheism as a Protestant sub-culture (1)

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This theme will have a few parts to it. Here I just want to sketch out the logical/historical link between Protestantism and the abandonment of Christianity.

The essential claim of Christianity is the incarnation – that Jesus is 100% human and 100% divine. One of the consequences of that claim is that the material world, the flesh, can be a vessel for the sacred, that it can communicate the transcendent, that it can be a means of grace.

This is the foundation for a sacramental theology, ie that through the water used in baptism, through the bread and wine of communion, God actively engages with the faithful and works to their healing – here the signs and symbols employed mediate God’s grace.

Consequently the historically orthodox churches have all emphasised the centrality of sacramental worship – baptism as the rite of entry into the church, communion as the central act of worship renewing and sustaining the church. This pattern is common across the vast majority of Christianity in time and space: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran etc. However, it is a pattern that broke down after the Reformation in some Protestant churches, and which became culturally influential.

In England, for example, the downplaying of the altar, and the raising up of the pulpit to a position of great prominence, can be tracked architecturally. Whereas the historic faith had been sacramentally centred, the post-Reformation church reduced the sacraments to simple signs – and beyond that, they were signs that were optional for faith. The essence of Christianity became “faith”, as in being “justified by faith” – and this became reduced to a matter of right belief. If you believe that Jesus Christ is your personal saviour then you have a saving faith.

So, in a great many Protestant churches today, what is most central to Christian worship is right teaching. You have to have the right attitude to the Bible, and the teachers of the Bible have to teach the right thing. Those are the essential elements for ensuring salvation.

However, note what has been lost in this transition. Where the sacraments have become optional or redundant, and teaching takes its place, you no longer need Jesus to have been God incarnate. He just needs to have been a good teacher. Where salvation is a matter of right belief, then Jesus’ prime purpose is to teach that right belief (despite the fact that Jesus never uses the phrase “justified by faith”).

So in the countries dominated by Western Protestantism, where the sacraments were downplayed or ignored, the idea that Jesus was simply a good teacher was implicitly first taught within the churches themselves. Of course, a major corollary of this trajectory of Protestantism was that church itself eventually becomes redundant. For if salvation flows from right belief, and right belief is a matter of rightly understanding the Bible and what it teaches – then that is something that can be obtained by private reading, private study of the Bible. Which becomes: “you don’t have to go to church to be a Christian”, a refrain still commonly heard on English streets when talking to the vicar.

At this point – when the church is redundant, when Jesus is simply a good teacher – the mental effort required to move to rejecting Jesus as a principal teacher is not very far.

This brings us on to questions of God, which I’ll cover in another post.

Nobody sane doubts the existence of Jesus

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Good article here:

Outside this triangle of sceptics, accommodators and apologists there is another group of men and women who number in the thousands, whose works fill the academic libraries and journals of the world and yet whose views are rarely considered in popular discussion of this topic. I am talking about professional biblical historians: not professors of theology in religious institutions but university historians specialising in the language, literature and culture of the biblical period. Be they Christian, Jewish or agnostic, such scholars shun both overreaching scepticism and theological dogma. They approach the Gospels not as zealous fabrications or divine scripture but as texts comparable with any other from the period. All texts have blind spots and points to prove. If historians waited until they found a source with no angle, they would have nothing left to work with (ancient or modern). The goal is not to discover an agenda-less source but to analyse every source in light of its discernible commitment. This is how scholars read every ancient text, including the New Testament. They do not privilege the Gospels, but nor do they come to them with prejudice. Christians may be unsettled by this objective historical analysis of their sacred texts but there is no comfort here for the dogmatic sceptic either. For while mainstream scholars disagree on many things about the life of Jesus, there is a very strong consensus that the basic narrative of the Gospels is historically sound.

Take the question of Jesus’ existence. Dawkins may have his reservations; so might Onfray and Hitchens. But no one who is actually doing ancient history does. I contacted three eminent ancient history professors this week and asked if they knew of any professional historian who argued that Jesus never lived. They did not. Professor Graeme Clarke of the Australian National University was happy to go on the record as saying: “Frankly, I know of no ancient historian or biblical historian who would have a twinge of doubt about the existence of a Jesus Christ – the documentary evidence is simply overwhelming.” Dawkins inadvertently proves the point. In The God Delusion his sole example of a serious historical case against the existence of Jesus is that of “Professor G.A. Wells of the University of London”. Dawkins does not mention that George Wells is a professor of German language, not history.

That Jesus lived cannot be disputed…

Now the resurrection… that’s a different question – and the subject of my Easter morning sermon!

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 (13): Look at it as a miracle

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I originally posted this in June of 2006, but it’s worth bringing back up and putting into this sequence. There is more to be said, but this is a reasonable start.
~~~

(Something I wrote in 1995; I’m prompted to put it in from reading this and this)

‘The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle… For imagine whatever fact you may, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of the term’ (Wittgenstein)

The “violation concept”
I suspect that if you asked the proverbial ‘man in the street’ what a miracle was you would end up with an account which referred to laws of nature being transgressed. Rather like the way the hand in the National Lottery adverts reaches in to the world to change the course of a person’s life, so miracles are understood as the intervention of a divine actor into a system, transgressing the laws by which that system operates.

This sort of conception owes a lot to David Hume. He defined a miracle as

“a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity or by the interposition of some invisible agent”.

This can be described as the violation concept of miracle as it stresses two things: a system of natural laws which the world follows, and an intervention by God which violates those laws. This understanding of miracle has been exposed to severe criticism, in the first place by Hume himself.

Hume’s scepticism
Hume’s criticism of this conception is quite subtle, and very powerful. He does not deny that such events can occur, rather, what he says is that no reasonable person can believe that such an event has occurred. It is always more reasonable to believe that a person is mistaken than to believe that the laws of nature have been broken. Hume takes it as a fundamental principle that a reasonable person will always proportion his or her belief to the evidence available (he gets this from John Locke) and the evidence for there being natural laws is extremely strong, attested to by common experience and controlled experiments. In contrast the evidence for miracles is very poor.

Once we accept that we should apportion our belief according to the evidence, why should we believe in anything miraculous? We are never going to be in a position where it would be reasonable to believe that a miracle had occurred, one which was ‘attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves; of such undoubted integrity, as to place them beyond all suspicion of any design to deceive others; of such credit and reputation in the eyes of mankind as to have a great deal to lose in the case of their being detected in any falsehood; and at the same time attesting facts, performed in such a public manner, and in so celebrated a part of the world, as to render the detection unavoidable.’

There are four main elements to Hume’s critique:

  • Testimony: no miracle is attested to by enough people of sufficient education and integrity to make us believe them;
  • Gullibility: we know that people are prone to look for `signs and wonders’, and that they enjoy stories of marvellous events (and are prone to embellish them);
  • Ignorance: most stories of miracles come from `barbarous’ cultures who do not know better;
  • Incoherence: if miracles truly established anything then there would be some coherence to what they seem to show. Instead the different miracles from different religions effectively cancel each other out.

There is actually a fifth point which can be added to this sceptical charge sheet. This is that, if presented with the evidence for a supposedly miraculous event, why should we look for a supernatural explanation? Wouldn’t we now simply try and understand what had gone on, possibly by trying to reproduce the events leading up to the supposed ‘miracle’, trying to understand what has gone on – in essence trying to tie it in to our understanding of the world? The most amazing of events would only be seen as a miracle if that is the way a person’s preconceptions lead.

The moral case against the violation concept
Hume’s sceptical arguments are quite powerful, but they essentially come from outside a religious framework. I think that a more devastating critique of the violation concept comes from Maurice Wiles in his book God’s Action In The World. In essence Wiles says that, if you accept the violation concept of miracles (and therefore of God’s action) then the God that is responsible for such action becomes monstrous. Such a God chooses to perform some relatively interesting but trivial tricks (eg let Jesus turn water into wine) but turns a blind eye to situations that horrify us such as Hiroshima or Auschwitz.

There are corollary problems for human action if the violation concept is accepted. If we act in a world with stable natural laws then we can plan our actions with some degree of certainty as to their probable outcome and effect. However, if we have a God who intervenes to change things from their expected course then an element of arbitrariness is introduced which trivialises our actions. In addition, unless we can have a degree of surety about the results of our actions then we cannot be responsible for them – if the world was such that a God could intervene every so often to change the course of events then God assumes that much greater a degree of responsibility for what happens in the world.

There is also an issue about divine consistency involved here, ie how consistent is a God who sets up the universe to operate according to certain laws, only for those laws to cease to hold at times and places that are religiously convenient for a particular grouping of people on a small planet on the edge of an average galaxy in a small corner of the universe?

The idea of a miracle as a violation of natural laws is only one way of understanding the nature of a miracle. I would say that it is in fact quite a modern conception – Hume has a lot to answer for. It presupposes a stable and ordered environment within which God can act – essentially a Deist framework, whereby the creation is a vast machine which only has to be started off and then left to its own devices. An alternative way of looking at miracles, (which I would also contend has a rather more substantial Biblical basis) is to think of miracles as a sign, and not involving any breach of natural law. Rather than a miracle being a particularly interesting event, to describe something as a miracle is to talk of a way of perceiving that event.

In the climactic scene of the film ‘Pulp Fiction’ there is a discussion of the nature of miracles. The characters played by John Travolta and Samuel Jackson are hit men for a particularly nasty LA mobster. They have recently carried out a ‘hit’ which almost went wrong – one person had hidden away while his friends were being killed, and he then attacks Travolta and Jackson. The person shot six bullets at them, all of which missed. In the circumstances – the gunman was not very far away, it was a powerful handgun &c – Travolta and Jackson should have been killed. In fact, every bullet misses, the gunman runs out of ammunition and our two ‘heroes’ then kill him instead.


What is interesting about this episode is the discussion in a cafe which follows. The shooting incident has affected them in different ways: the Jackson character sees the episode as miraculous – it provokes him to examine his life, and he says that, because God has spared his life it must be for some purpose; he then resolves to give up his life as a hit man and reform his character. For Travolta, however, they were simply lucky – the event was simply unexpected, but doesn’t make him think of anything religious, he does not see this as proof of divine intervention. The important point is that nor does the Jackson character. The fact that the event could have a perfectly ‘normal’ explanation is irrelevant – what was important is that it has provoked a change of view in the Jackson character, which now leads him to describe the event as a miracle.

A change in perception
As discussed above, there are severe problems with a violation concept of miracles. They are impossible to prove and even if proven, they cannot be the foundation of a religion – cannot prove a particular doctrine, or be necessary for religious doctrine (which gives a clue as to the nature of a religious doctrine). Furthermore, this notion of the miraculous emasculates human freedom and shows God as both bizarre (couldn’t God do a better job?) and immoral (why did the heavens not darken over Auschwitz?)

These problems stem from the modernist background against which this conception of a miracle was formulated. A miracle is essentially something that provokes a sense of awe and awareness of the divine. It develops a religious understanding of the world. The crucial point about a miracle is that it changes the aspect under which reality is viewed. This involves perceiving something in a different way – it is not a question of new facts being available, which change the way that other facts are seen. Rather it is that the same set of facts are seen in a different way. To use a different vocabulary, changing the aspect is the same as a paradigm shift.

Miracles involve the same process: an insight is gained which changes the way that things are viewed. In the Pulp Fiction example, Jackson and Travolta don’t disagree about the events, they disagree about how to interpret them. A miracle happens when an event strikes you in such a way that you see the event in a religious light – a revelation. It is something that provokes an awareness of the divine at work in creation. It does not mean that a divine figure has decided to intervene at just that point in time, in reaction to our choices. This is why no wonders can be performed if the observers have no faith, or no propensity for faith – see for example Mt 13.58. A determinedly sceptical mind will never be able to see a miracle, they will always search for explanations that cohere with their sceptical outlook – just as the saint sees God in all things, so a sceptic sees the absence of God in all things!

This can be taken even further. Wittgenstein at one point discusses a priest who fakes a miracle, using red ink to show stigmata in a statue of Christ. He says ‘You are a cheat, but nevertheless the Deity uses you. Red ink in a sense, but not red ink in a sense.’ The sense in which it is not red ink is where the perception of it has religious significance. What distinguishes a miracle from the merely strange, improbable or monstrous is the question of religious significance, and that depends upon the entire outlook of the person viewing the event. This is why miracles cannot be produced on demand, and why they cannot be the foundation of a faith – the faith must come first.

To say of something that it is a miracle is not to say anything factual about it, it is to provoke a particular way of seeing it. A student once asked the Buddha, ‘How did you perceive the world before you were enlightened?’ The Buddha answered, ‘Before I was enlightened, when I looked at a mountain all I saw was a mountain, when I looked at a tree all I saw was a tree, when I looked at a stream all I saw was a stream’. ‘Ah!’ said the student, ‘Now that you are enlightened, what can you see now?’ The Buddha answered, ‘Now that I am enlightened, when I look at a mountain all I see is a mountain, when I look at a tree all I see is a tree, when I look at a stream all I see is a stream’.

“Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

Reasonable Atheism (11): Of Theisms Humourless and Sophisticated

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This is a brief one, and more ‘for the record’ than anything else.

The aspect-blindness that I am in the process of criticising as ‘humourless’ when it appears in an atheistic perspective is not at all a logically necessary part of atheism – it also appears in a great deal of apparently theistic argument too. Most especially in North American Protestantism.

I have no desire to defend a humourless theism. As I see it the arguments between atheists and (some) theists is best characterised by what is shared between the two perspectives, that being the sense that the Bible is best understood literally and ‘all-or-nothing’, that facts are the most important forms of knowledge, and that science is the royal road to establishing such facts. (It might seem paradoxical to say that theists give such a high role to science, but historically it is indisputable, and it is the source of the venom and antagonism displayed towards Darwinism – an idol is being dethroned).

I’ve written a lot about this elsewhere. See in particular Why I hate fundamentalism.

All comments gratefully received

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I’ve just received this e-mail, which I plan to reply to probably tomorrow, and I already have a good idea how I’m going to reply to it (it’s from somebody that I’ve met in real-life as opposed to over the internet!) but I’d be interested to know how other theologians/clerics would reply.

I wonder if I can ask you about something which is puzzling me, and which I cannot ask the average Christian. I do not expect the average Christian to have read Leviticus 25, but I assume that one does not become a vicar without reading the complete Bible.

While browsing your site I found “3rd November – shibboleth #1 – “But the Bible says…” “. Were Leviticus 25 verses 20 and 21 amongst those discussed.

I find these verses very interesting. It is the only place I can think of where God makes a clear promise that something verifiable will happen at a regular time, i.e. every 7 years the crops in Israel will yield “the fruits of 3 years”. It is also the only promise which is not dependant on the behaviour or belief of people. God promises the bumper harvest so that the following year the Israelites will be able to keep the commandment to let the land lie fallow.

God clearly does not keep this promise. Charitable appeals are made to support the farmers who do keep the Shmitta year, and the Rabbis and Israeli Supreme court jump through hoops to keep most Israelis from obeying the restrictions in Leviticus 25. I have asked several people who claim that the restrictions should be observed if they can give any figures to show how harvests vary over the years. They have all been silent.

Christianity requires that one has faith that God will keep His promises. How do you and other thinking Christians cope with the fact that there is a clear promise which it is easy to prove God does not keep? (I don’t trust anyone who does not keep promises.)

Reasonable atheism (8): the fundamental theological rule

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“The way you use the word ‘God’ does not show whom you mean but rather what you mean.” (Wittgenstein)

The most important element of monotheistic religions is the prohibition on idolatry. Idolatry is the raising up of some created facet of the world (so either an object, an ideology or a value) and giving it the importance that should be reserved for the creator alone. It is about getting our priorities wrong. Terrible consequences always follow from idolatry.

There are a number of ways in which to discern if idolatry is taking place. The most straightforward comes when actually using the language of God. For the rule is: the living God cannot be the member of any set. If you are attributing something to God which can also be attributed to another object or value, and you are not prepared to entertain any negations or qualifications to that attribution, then you are engaged in idolatry.

So, for example, we can take the claim that ‘God exists’. This makes God a member of the set of ‘existent things’. Thus it is a theological mistake. God is not a member of the set of ‘existent things’. It would therefore be strictly accurate to say that God does not exist.

Or take the set of ‘good things’. God is not a member of the set of ‘good things’. It would therefore be strictly accurate to say that God is not good.

And so on.

This undoubtedly will sound like ‘cobblers’ to the humourless atheist – but that is, I argue, because they have a restricted understanding of what it means for language to ‘make sense’. Theologians do different things with language. But I’ll say more about that, particularly the nature of analogical language, in due course. For now I just want to emphasise this basic rule of theological grammar: all idolatries are prohibited. God can never be the member of a set.

One defining feature of humourless atheism is that it depends upon the violation of this rule.

Sound doctrines are all useless

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This is from my earlier book – and I realise that there’s rather a lot of material there which has never been posted. Reading something that Scott has written has prompted me to post it. It’s quite long but, if I might be so bold, I think it’s worth reading!


‘I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life)’
Wittgenstein, 1946

In much of what I have written so far I have explained the way in which certain Christian doctrines have come to be held, and the way in which the rite of the Eucharist has come to be understood. However, the most important part of Christianity is not the doctrine, or the rite, but the life lived as a result. That is the subject of this chapter.

In many ways, Jesus inherited the criticisms of Jewish practice that were first articulated by the prophets. One of their principal objections related to the way in which certain cultic practices were allowed to override the claims of justice. Consider the prophet Amos, who is generally considered to be the oldest of the prophets who have their utterances preserved in a separate book. He was active c. 750BC during the reign of Jeroboam II, at the end of a fairly long period of peace and prosperity. The prophet himself might be considered to be fairly well off as he is described as being a shepherd and a dresser of sycamore trees, and therefore a property owner. The people were quite ostentatiously ‘religious’ in that they paid their tithes, made elaborate sacrifices and so on, and yet there was a significant degree of corruption and social injustice. According to Amos:

‘Thus says the Lord: for three transgressions and for four I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes – they that trample the head of the needy into the dust of the earth and turn aside the way of the humiliated; a man and his father go in to the same maiden, so that my holy name is profaned; they lay themselves down beside every altar upon garments taken in pledge; and in the house of their God they drink the wine of those who have been fined’ (Amos 2.6-8)

Amos’ concern is with the humble and the needy, who are being excluded from the community and exploited by the wealthy. As a consequence of this injustice Amos proclaims the imminent judgment of God:

‘Hear this word, you cows of Bashan, who are in the mountain of Samaria, who oppress the needy, who crush the poor, who say to their husbands ‘bring that we may drink!’ The Lord God has sworn by his Holiness that, behold, the days are coming upon you, when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks. And you shall go out through the breaches, every one straight before her; and you shall be cast forth into Harmon, says the Lord.’ (Amos 4.1-3)

A key aspect of Amos’ criticism relates to the sanctuary of Bethel, which under Jeroboam II was being built up as a rival to the temple in Jerusalem. The priests there were being employed in the service of the king and at one point they drive Amos away from the sanctuary (Amos 7.13). As such this place was the centre of the ‘cultic’ aspects of worship, which Amos denounces: ‘Come to Bethel and transgress’. It is this criticism of the cult in all its aspects which is so unprecedented:

‘I hate, I despise your pilgrimages, and I cannot feel your solemn assemblies. When you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, nothing pleases me, from the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I turn away my eyes. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I cannot listen.’ (Amos 5.21-23)

This message is echoed in many parts of the New Testament, and is at the heart of the criticism of the Pharisees and Sadducees offered there. For example:

‘And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’ You leave the commandment of God, and hold fast the tradition of men”.’

‘When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.’

And most clearly of all:

‘When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left. Then the King will say to those at his right hand, “Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?” And then the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” Then he will say to those at his left hand, “Depart from me you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sickand in prison and you did not visit me.” Then they too will answer, “Lord, when did we see the hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.” And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.’

As Jesus puts it on another occasion, ‘Not everyone who says to me “Lord, Lord” will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of my father who is in heaven.’

The point of these references is to indicate that Christianity is not a matter of believing certain propositions to be true, still less is it a matter of being a member of a particular institution. All the language used is there to explain a picture, a way of understanding life and the world. To claim that Jesus Christ is the Son of God is to say something about the way life should be lived. That claim, as a form of words, is irrelevant. If ‘Jesus Christ is a neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie’ had the same result in terms of the way life was lived then it would have equal doctrinal merit.

Christianity is about a way of living life, so that the life is lived in imitation of Christ, acting in accordance with his Spirit. In essence, it means that the faithful person lives their life in a way that has love at the centre, firstly a love for God, and secondly love for the neighbour. The first is crucial, for it is the relationship with God that constitutes the faith which Paul describes as necessary for salvation. To have that relationship with God is to perceive that the most fundamental feature of the universe is that it was created by a God of love, whose nature is revealed in the life of Jesus. ‘Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God and he who loves is born of God and knows God.’ Much of the early Christian writing was concerned with spelling out what this primacy of love meant in practice. For example, Paul writes in Galatians:

‘The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control’;

and in Colossians,

‘Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience, forebearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also forgive’;

and most famously of all, in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes:

‘If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love,I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all that I have, and if I deliver my body that I may be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, endures all things.’

These are all examples of Christian virtues, but of course, these words, these descriptions do not amount to much on their own – they require a life to be lived out in order to demonstrate their nature. Our culture suffers from the illusion, ultimately derived from Platonism, that the way to God is through the intellectual path. If we could only understand correctly, then we might be saved. Christianity is opposed to this, for ultimately that aspect of Platonism is idolatrous – it is the search for a truth which can be held with certainty in our own human sphere.

The Body of Christ is made up of all those who act in a way concordant with the Spirit of Christ, ie who exercise and demonstrate these virtues. It is by actions that faith is borne forth. As Paul writes,

‘For he will render to every man according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury…It is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law unto themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts…’

In this way, Christianity is very much a product of the Hebrew faith from which it sprang. In the opening chapter I argued for three elements in the Hebrew faith: anti-idolatry, relationship, and praxis. Those three elements are retained within Christianity, although the understanding of God is now lensed through the life of Jesus and not through the Law as delivered to Moses. As such, Christianity is a dynamic religion – it requires active moral judgement each day.

As Christianity developed this aspect was at the forefront. If you read the Church fathers their concerns are with this shaping of a life. The Church exists to serve the world by demonstrating this understanding of God – by acting in a righteous manner and showing the nature of love. Of course, if this is what the Church is about, how come we have ended up in such a mess?