Fear

Once upon a time, there was a time where I had a friend.

And my friend did something which caused everyone I knew to shun and despise him.

It wasn’t a particularly bad thing, wasn’t something immoral. He didn’t steal money from orphans or defraud stockholders. He didn’t hate, or murder.

But no one would talk to him.

I was his friend and I should have stuck by him. So what if no one talked to him. I should have talked to him.

But I did not.

I was scared.

If I talked to him, everyone would shun and despise me.

So I turned my back on him when he called out my name.

To my friend: I am sorry.

Mark 14:66-72 “And he broke down and wept.”

The Emerging Silence

I’ve been trying to read up about the Emerging Church. I still don’t really know what it is, but I’m getting more and more of a feeling that they are trying to break from fundamentalism without breaking from fundamentalists. That is, they don’t want to say “We don’t believe in X”; but instead say “Now, X isn’t the question. Let’s focus on loving each other and writing blogs and such”. Case in point:

Brian McLaren on whether he is a universalist:

I find it hard to choose any of these options because I don’t like how this question is framed, because it seems to assume that the primary focus or benefit of the gospel is saving individuals from hell after death. As I read the gospels, the focus of Jesus’ message was not on getting your soul into heaven after death, but rather it focused on the kingdom of God, which is about God’s will being done on earth as in heaven in history, in this life. For Jesus then, the gospel is good news not just for a few individuals beyond history, but it is good news for all creation in history, and beyond. I plan to grapple with this subject in more depth.

Well, yes, this is true. The Kingdom is here and now; but surely it is also eternal/outside/divine.

This way of deflecting contraversial questions by saying that the questioner is asking the wrong question (and here’s my answer to another question) is a good way to get out of tight spots. Politicians use it all the time.

But the end result is that you are silent on that issue; and that will be noticed. Where I am silence will be read as consent – if you don’t deny the existence of hell then you will be assumed to believe in it.

So are the Emergents merely fundamentalists with good PR, who don’t want to admit up front that they believe that God will eternally torture those he hates because it will scare the punters? Or are they liberals who don’t want to admit up front that they don’t believe in a God of torture because they will be locked out of the large US Christian media organisations and pastors will remove their books from the church library?

I’m sure that McLaren would tell me that I’m asking the wrong question.

My religion has no name

On the Ship, someone, defining theological ‘liberalism’, said “I could not subscribe to the underlying concepts of liberalism – the autonomy of the subject and the innate goodness of humankind”.

Well, I guess that rules me out, then, since I don’t believe in the innate goodness of humankind (anymore than I believe in the total depravity of humankind).

The word ‘liberal’ is one of so many meanings that it’s pretty useless as an indicator of religious belief. It confuses theology with politics (and can’t even get that right – a Liberal Party voter in Australia is a conservative, while a liberal in the US would vote for the Democrats). It has serious baggage, as the quote above shows (q.v. ‘Christian’). Someone self identifying as liberal Christian may believe that Mary was a Virgin Mother and vote Green, or deny that the resurrection was a physical event and vote Tory.

It never was a word worth fighting for anyway.

I’ll argue with those who would restrict the word “Christian” because excluding someone from that label carries implications both as to their salvation and standing with God, and also implications as to what God is like, and what Jesus was like; and it’s important to me that we get that stuff right.

But ‘liberal’? Who cares.

As far as I can see the term mainly exists so that people can lump me, you, Jack Spong, and the kitchen sink in one category, then accuse us of being indecisive and not being able to articulate clearly what we believe.

Any obvious replacements? Spongites and Borgophiles at the Centre for Progressive Christianity have laid dibbs on the word “Progressive”. Urg. It’s got all the defects of ‘liberal’ and then some – it even more strongly identifies itself with left-wing politics, as well as the failed Victorian belief in Inevitable Progress Without Setbacks that got beaten up and then shot on the Somme.

So what then?

Forgetting our past

One failure of liberal Christianity is that in looking for the future it often forgets the past; even its own past. Although I would reject the imposition of a Roman Catholic style Tradition, to which I must assent or leave, it is surely equally unwise to forego the advice of those who went before us and tried to answer the same questions we ask.

Our problems aren’t that new; and if we are to have better answers to them then those who have gone before we should first understand what their answers were. Case in point – in 1922 Harry Emerson Fosdick preached a sermon in the First Presbyterian Church in New York called Shall the Fundamentalists win?.

1922.

Tell me if you think we have resolved this issue yet:

A great mass of new knowledge has come into man’s possession: new knowledge about the physical universe, its origin, its forces, its laws; new knowledge about human history and in particular about the ways in which the ancient peoples used to think in matters of religion and the methods by which they phrased and explained their spiritual experiences; and new knowledge, also, about other religions and the strangely similar ways in which men’s faiths and religious practices have developed everywhere.

Now, there are multitudes of reverent Christians who have been unable to keep this new knowledge in one compartment of their minds and the Christian faith in another. They have been sure that all truth comes from the one God and is his revelation. Not, therefore, from irreverence or caprice or destructive zeal, but for the sake of intellectual and spiritual integrity, that they might really love the Lord their God not only with all their heart and soul and strength, but with all their mind, they have been trying to see this new knowledge in terms of the Christian faith and to see the Christian faith in terms of this new knowledge. Doubtless they have made many mistakes. Doubtless there have been among them reckless radicals gifted with intellectual ingenuity but lacking spiritual depth. Yet the enterprise itself seems to them indispensable to the Christian church. The new knowledge and the old faith cannot be left antagonistic or even disparate, as though a man on Saturday could use one set of regulative ideas for his life and on Sunday could change gear to another altogether. We must be able to think our modern life clear through in Christian terms, and to do that we also must be able to think our Christian life clear through in modern terms.

Have you ever seen a moderate Goth?

I was discussing the decline of moderate Christianity of the sort my parents’ generation believed in the other day with an atheist friend of mine. We were talking about how young Christians increasingly see themselves as members of a subculture – or ‘countercultural’ as the lingo goes. Where I live Christianity has become a statement that you are different from the people around you – that, thanks be to God, you are not like other men.

My friend said “well of course if Christianity sees itself as a subculture it will become more extreme. After all, have you ever seen a moderate Goth?”.

Box of Delights

A thread on Ship of Fools on children’s television reminded me of the wonderful BBC series Box of Delights, based on John Masefield’s novel. The novel is one of those products of the human imagination that are often derided as being mere meaningless fantasy; but when I read it as a child it was something closer to religion – a sense that there is an Outside; something Deeper. I knew it wasn’t true; that it was fiction; but within the fiction was joy and awe and fear (incidently, it is only through works of fiction like these that my modernist worldview can approach an understanding of the feelings of modern day pagans).

I found a quote from an interview with another great writer for children and adults, Alan Garner:

‘The Box of Delights’, subtitled ‘or When the Wolves were Running’, was the first novel I read where the children bearing the role of protagonist were engaged in a modern England (1932) and were caught up involuntarily in a battle outside Time between two archetypal figures, not Good and Evil but Evil and Not-Good, who interacted with the world of Now and another dimension, drawing on English myth and medieval alchemy and mysticism. The children were seen as tools to be used and disposed of in the battle. John Masefield showed children what others would not allow: that adults could be dangerous (two of the worst were dressed as clergymen; another was a female teacher); that bullies did not always run when confronted; that death was likely at any age; that terror was real and could be creative and constructive (which horror can’t be); and that happy endings were not automatic. In this last instance, the text of the novel shows interference, or capitulation. The end, as Masefield wrote it, has the inevitable and positive resolution of a symphony. Then there is tacked on a clumsy paragraph, where the main child protagonist wakes up in the railway carriage where the story begins, and it has all been a dream. Oh no it has not. I was seven years old when I first read it, and I KNEW. I don’t have the facts, but the received literary opinion is that the publisher got cold feet and insisted on the addition. Others, more interestingly, say that it was Masefield’s wife who added the paragraph. But I knew it was no dream and that everything in it was possible — indeed, likely.