This is the third in a series of blogs exploring ideas that will form the contents of Changing Attitude England’s ‘Life in all its fulness’ event on 2nd March 2024 at St Andrew’s Short Street, Waterloo.
The Orthodox God of the Bible
I read the Bible in private, I hear passages from the Bible read in church, I hear expository sermons preached about the Bible and how the Bible tells us about God and Jesus. And part of me understands that I am hearing information about the Bible and God and Jesus that have unquestionable authority; that the Bible is the Word of God, Jesus is the Son of God and God is the ultimate, pre-existent being, creator of the universe. And another part of me instantly converts this authoritative understanding into a mystical, poetic, non-realist awareness of God.
Intuitive God
I know that orthodox, traditional Christian theology teaches that God does not ‘exist’. I know this intuitively. I know this when I meditate. But I still feel a bit guilty, because I know that a self-proclaimed ‘orthodox. traditional, Bible-believing, conservative evangelical, ‘seeing’ my thoughts, would pounce on me – seeing that I am also a gay man who has been sexually active. My faith cannot be trusted because I don’t believe in an orthodox way. And round in circles I go, because I know the God of conservative evangelicals isn’t necessarily the God of traditional Christian orthodoxy, let alone the God of my intuition.
If you have read the two previous blogs in this series, you will know that Adrian Thatcher’s book Vile Bodies gives me the confidence to understand that a great deal of what conservatives believe about God and the Bible isn’t orthodox or even Christian, based as their theology is on a deeply prejudiced, abusive, phobic God (who doesn’t exist) but who, in His (sic) non-existence, still holds huge authority and power over the Church.
Neither the God of ultimately abusive power and prejudice not the God of unconditional love ultimately ‘exist’. Both are human constructs and we humans become attached to one or the other for various reasons – Church authority says this is what God is like, or this is what our intuition tells us. But my intuition then tends to have to battle against what I was taught to believe by external authorities – those who run the ‘system’, the magisterium.
God according to Harry Williams - authority for a non-abusive God
Fifty years ago I found Harry Williams in Heffers bookshop in Cambridge. In Harry’s books I found wisdom and truth, honesty and humanity, integrity and playfulness, that reinforced my courage to believe and the freedom to trust my own intuition. Among others. Harry gave me courage to believe disbelievingly.
Harry’s God of the 1960s and 70s was probably a bit more orthodox than mine. He wrote “We can think and speak of God, who by definition is absolute, eternal and unchanging, only in terms which are relative and ephemeral and highly conditioned by the society and culture in which we live.”
The Guardian’s obituary described Harry as “a member of the radical 1960s school of Cambridge theologians and author of Some Day I'll Find You (1982), an autobiography of astonishing honesty about his homosexuality and church membership.” In The True Wilderness (1965), Tensions: Necessary Conflicts in Life and Love (1976), Becoming What I Am (1977) and other books of sermons, “he detailed his painful experiences, through a long course of psychoanalysis, following a breakdown related to his homosexuality. Growth became possible for him as he recognised how much of his own and church-based religion was a flight from the development of a person's true self, which substituted for the true God whose love had created him, the distorted image of a sadistic persecutor.”
Finding seamless Identity in God
In Tensions: Necessary Conflicts in Life and Love (1976) Harry writes:
“One doctrine says that God is other than myself. Indeed He can be described as Wholly Other. The other doctrine says that God is the ground of all things. He is the Reality present in all things. Hence, He is the Ground of what I myself am. My own true identity is God’s identity. I am lived by God. God is inviting me to discover Him no longer as another alongside me but as my own deepest and truest self. There is within me a me which is both greater than me and at the same time authentically myself. The more I discover within me the greater than me the more I discover that the greater than me is authentically me. We discover that our true selves are not fixed isolated entities but are one with God’s relationship to all creation. We find ourselves caught up in God’s continuous creative act as part of that act. To be truly ourselves is to be lived by God. For as our true selves we are God’s outgoing self-givingness. We are his love.”
Being frightened of love and life in all its fulness
From Becoming What I Am (1977):
“Our sophistication is in the last resort an ‘adult’ defensive measure. It is a protection against absolute love because we are somewhere very frightened of love. For absolute love, God’s love, love and life in all its fullness, makes us fully ourselves, instead of the half people we generally are. And to become fully yourself is a terrible risk. It would commit you to God knows what and lead you to God knows where. So we miss the glorious liberty of the children of God. We remain half dead, too afraid to know what life is. And become hooked on some compensatory activity.”
Alienated from our true selves
And also from Becoming What I Am (1977):
“We are all of us in some degree or other alienated from our truest selves. My truest self is the place within me where that we name as and experience as God dwells, the place where when we go down deep into ourselves we find the core, the essence of being, that seamless presence we name as ‘God’.”
“So far as we gradually become more aware of and trusting of our deep, inner, experiential core, of the divine presence within us, finding this to be our truest self, the more confidently we will live in our world of relationships and the more easily we will accept and value the more superficial or vulnerable aspects of ourself with less difficulty and pain.”
Over half a century later, Harry Williams’ sermons and books still provide one of the best most healthy, inspirational guides to Christian faith in a world transformed by new knowledge. Our scientific knowledge evolves, our knowledge of what it is to be human evolves, and our knowledge of God needs to evolve, but doesn’t. If anything we are being dragged backwards into a more infantile, immature stage of belief. It is very unhealthy for our humanity and for an evolving faith in God’s unconditional love.
Being a gay priest
The Wikipedia entry about Harry says that
“Williams was homosexual and was one of the first Anglican priests to come out. He had a number of casual sexual relationships with men, as well as at least two long-term same-sex relationships. While a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Williams fell in love with a male colleague and could not mentally process that his religion considered this to be a grave sin. It was also at this time that he concluded from his studies of the New Testament that very little could be known about the historical Jesus. This personal and religious crisis caused a breakdown and he avoided church for 18 months. He could only return to his career and faith with the help of a non-religious therapist.”
There are many in today’s Church of England, I suspect, who think that we know a lot about the historical Jesus because it’s all there in the Bible and the Bible is a historical document and therefore a reliable history. So much for progress in Christianity over the last six decades. There are also people, righteous leaders, in today’s Church of England, who are likely to pounce on this Wikipedia entry as evidence of the decadence of homosexuals and our inability to conform to Christian teaching about sex and where sexually activity belongs according to God. These righteous leaders, advocating so-called ‘conversion’ therapy, half a century after Harry found salvation with a secular therapist, still drive LGBTQIA+ people into emotional and spiritual crises leading to despair, breakdown and suicide.
There are other people who think the Church of England has no wisdom in its attitude to gay men and lesbians, to intimacy and mutuality in love, and to the normality of same-sex relationships and equal marriage. This vast majority have nothing to do with the Church.
And there are some Christian LGBTQIA+ people (hopefully many), who following Harry, with or without the benefit of therapy, allow themselves the pleasure of sexual intimacy. Some, but by no means all, are in a civil partnership or marriage. Soon, soon, oh God, I hope all of us will be freed from the curse of the prurient, homophobic, transphobic brigade of anti-sex warriors.