The title of this blog is clearly not true. It is deliberately provocative. God is not a revisionist nor a traditionalist nor a fundamentalist as much as God is not a progressive or a modernist or a radical. God is not a thing, an object, an attitude, a stance.
Revisionist is the word chosen to describe someone like me by those whose identify as traditional, orthodox, Bible-believing fundamentalists. A revisionist is someone who revises the ontological essence of God, God as ultimate being, ultimate fact, that is found in the Bible and has been unerringly revealed and known in the traditional, orthodox teachings of the Christian Church. Proof texts are used to demonstrate the unchanging essence of God’s Word. To describe me as a revisionist is to condemn me as a person who has erred and strayed from the plain truth of God’s Word found in the Bible and in the person and teaching, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Yes, I’m a revisionist, a twentieth century, honest to God, unapologetic revisionist, and I have come to realise in the course of a week in which it was revealed to me that I had had a heart attack without knowing it, that God is also, ontologically, in essence, a revisionist. Reading Adrian Thatcher’s Vile Bodies has reinforced my awareness and conviction. I’m in really good company after all! Revision is integral to the nature of that which we name God.
God the revisionist
Revising things is what God is doing all the time, since the ‘beginning of creation’ and in the unfolding drama of evolution. Evolution is God’s process of developing more and more complex matter and forms of life by a slow, constant process of revision. All of life is about an evolutionary process of revision. Jesus’ life, teaching and practice was process of revising the teachings and practices of the Hebrew faith into which he was born. From alpha to omega, from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is a revisionist collection of books.
There were and are and always have been multiple varieties of faith and beliefs about God, Jesus, the Bible, Christian life and teaching. The ideas and theology of those labelled revisionist today are not just radically different from those labelled orthodox and conservative. My ideas are radically different from the thoughts I held forty and fifty and sixty years ago; my ideas are radically different from many in my peer group, from many progressives, and from other campaigners for equality and justice.
There were and are and always have been multiple varieties of faith, belief and theology in the Church, multiple variations of ideas about the God and Jesus we believe in and how we believe in God and Jesus, from the literalist, fundamentalist, Bible as the inerrant Word of God revisionists to God as a being, an entity existing somewhere revisionists to God as a presence guiding creation and evolution revisionists to God in our personal experience, God of our bodies and breath, our awareness and consciousness, felt and known within in the sensations of our bodies and emotions revisionists to the content to live with mystery and uncertainty of life revisionists.
The Hebrew Bible is a gathered, edited collection of documents showing how the Hebrew people repeatedly evolved and revised their awareness of and understanding of God. ‘Mark’ edited together in a revisionist way oral narratives and the remembered experiences of the followers of Jesus. Matthew and Luke with the help of Q further revised, re-ordered and reconfigured their material according to their own preferences and prejudices. John later created the most revisionary account of Jesus’ life and teachings. The book of Acts, Paul’s letters, the other letters and Revelation continued the revisionary process, and so did the varieties of Christian groups and congregations. The evolution of Christian dogma, doctrine and tradition continues as a never ending process. It is easy to plot the essentially revisionist process that results in today’s fragmented church in which allegiance to a particular denomination or subset of beliefs and practices is normative.
Revisionists might be named today’s fundamentalists because revision through evolution is fundamental to the process of life and Christian faith. It is the anti-religionists who today have lost the path of faith and are erring and straying in their ways. The not-revisionists are today’s dangerous dinosaurs.
Do you believe in God?
Revisionist is a term of denigration recently-adopted by self-styled orthodox believers, but the revisions they are hostile to have been evolving, not over the last three decades or the last century or since the Reformation or the era of heresies but for the whole of Christian history and the entirety of human evolution. The apparently major revisions of Christian theology, ethics, thinking and teaching and the reappraisal of Jesus, his life, practice and teaching and recorded in the New Testament are a further evolutionary development of the process of revision that is continuous element of the cosmos.
The Church of England has reached or is reaching another critical moment in its revisionary progress. It was highlighted for me at the recent separate meetings between conservative and progressive groups and the Archbishop of Canterbury and others at Lambeth Palace. Archbishop Justin was understandably angry (me not knowing that he had been under attack by ‘traditionalists’ in the morning) when I asked him:
“What kind of God do we, do you, does the Church of England believe in?
“Do you want to grant equal status to versions of Christianity, theology, teaching and practice that enshrine prejudice, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and racism?
“Can biblical fundamentalism and the theologies built on this that justify and support prejudice and abuse be recognised as orthodox, traditional versions of authentic Christianity in the twenty-first century?”
The question Archbishop Justin seems to have heard me ask was “do you believe in God?” Caught between what he’d been challenged with in the morning by conservative anti-revisionist groups and what he heard in the afternoon from revisionist progressive groups he reacted defensively, understandably self-protective. The conflict between and the intensity of personal feelings and emotions about our core beliefs was and is too great.
What is believable today?
What is believable in the Christian scheme of things has changed, but reactionary forces in Christianity (as elsewhere in human society) are moving or attempting to move the Church in a direction resistant to evolution and transformation and backwards into beliefs that reinforce prejudice, discrimination, abuse and, above all, ideas about God, human life, the Bible and faith that are unhealthy and damaging to human well-being.
Christian teaching that a characteristic of a particular group of people, their gender, sexuality, colour, age, ability, mobility or anything else is inherently wrong and contrary to God’s teaching is to stigmatise them, labelling them as inferior members of the kingdom of God. Christian prejudice and discrimination imprints on individuals and on the Church corporately damaging, unhealthy ideas of the self, of God, and of Christian fundamentals.
My lifetime-evolving revisionist understanding of the essence of Christian faith and teaching prioritises John’s statement that Jesus came that we might have life, life in all its fulness. Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life.” I do not believe that “no one comes to the Father except through me.” It is a dangerous phrase that legitimises Christian prejudice and judgement. Revisionist teaching rooted in the wisdom of John’s Gospel and Paul’s teaching leads me to define God succinctly as unconditional, infinite, intimate love.
A new lens, a revisionist Christian lens, rooted in the evolution of theology, psychotherapy, the life sciences, contemplative spirituality, responsive to contemporary crises and lived experience, a nedw lens is needed to process the upheavals of the past two or three decades: 9/11, Brexit, Trump, the Covid pandemic, the Climate crisis, Ukraine, Gaza, abuse in the Church, prejudice in Christianity, Britain’s failing social security systems.
Prejudice, abuse, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, are not and can never be Christian fundamentals. Life in all its fulness and God’s unconditional, infinite, intimate love have become fundamentals for me – revisionist fundamentals – for the formation of a healthy personal spirituality and faith and for the evolution of a non-abusive Church. They underpin all progressive movements towards justice, equality and full inclusion, the contemporary foundations of a movement rooted in God who is ontologically, in essence, a revisionist. Revision is integral to the nature of that which we name God.