What kind of God revealed in the Bible do I/we believe in in the twenty-first century?
What kind of God do I/we understand Jesus to have experienced?
You might not expect these to be open questions for me after a lifetime of Christian life and experience. Surely the answers are to be found in the Bible and in the teachings, dogmas, doctrines and liturgies of the Church.
For me they have become more and more open questions as I have continued to interrogate the ‘orthodoxies’ that I have lived with throughout my life, orthodoxies that I was questioning from the age of eleven. They are open questions after 2,000 years of Christian history because human and Christian history and experience is never static but is always evolving. Christian history tends to be accepted as a history of continuous theological development that has always been congruent with the essence of Jesus’ life and teaching and the teachings found in the books of the Hebrew and Christian Testaments, but this is clearly not true. Disputes about basic teachings leading to conflicts and schisms, multiple denominations and independent churches have been characteristic of the Christian Church from its earliest days. The teachings of the Church and its understanding of God and Jesus have always been evolving.
If I raise questions about the essence of Jesus’ teaching as I did in my last blog, I open myself to be challenged - to defend myself from the accusation that I am forming a version of Jesus and his teaching in my own image. My response is that we are all forming a version of Jesus and that’s what was being done in the earliest period of Christian history following his death. They are questions explored by Christian leaders, teachers, writers and theologians in the course of history and throughout the period of my life; but they are not questions being adequately explored by the Church of England today in the various forums where conversations take place - The Church Times, Thinking Anglicans, blogs, online groups and networks, let alone on General Synod or in the House of Bishops or on PCC Agendas or the multiple other institutions of the Church.
Those two questions “What kind of God revealed in the Bible do we believe in in the twenty-first century and what kind of God do we understand Jesus to have experienced?” have been raised for me on the last two Sunday mornings when I have again worshipped at St James’s Piccadilly. They were raised two Sunday’s ago, Trinity 6, by the Epistle from Colossians 2.
“For in Christ the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fulness in him, who is the head and ruler of every authority.”
“God made you alive, together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands.”
Colossians might not have been written by Paul, but let’s take it that what we have here is Paul in one of his most enthusiastic and visionary moods expressing with passion his own experiences, insights, intuitions and revelations, and doing so fearlessly, knowing the transformational effect they have.
London Trans+ Pride
The day before this passage was read I had joined members of the congregation as they prepared banners, placards and cakes to demonstrate support and care for the trans community. The number of marchers was estimated at 10,000 and the intensity of emotion, energy and anger and the volume of drumming and call and response cries was overwhelming. Sadly, for me, the energy and anger of the trans marchers about the hostility they have been subjected to in recent months was not acknowledged in the worship and sermon the following day. I had experienced more Christ-like energy and passion as I watched the marchers pass by for three hours on the Saturday than I did in church on Sunday morning.
A Revolutionary Study
This contrast between the passionate, energised Christian vision expressed by Saint Paul, by the energy and anger of the Pride marchers on Saturday and by the failure of the church on Sunday morning to rise to the challenge of both was emphasised by a recent, very positive book review in The Observer written by Archbishop Rowan Williams. He was reviewing Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples by Frances Young. At the end of his review, Rowan writes:
“. . . we cannot return to any kind of “native faith” untouched by Christian culture. Are we then faced with a religious future in which we have to find our way around a market of customised mythologies with no pretence at offering a comprehensive social vision? Is this even possible when literacy about traditional faith is so minimal? Has Europe engineered itself out of anything resembling a religious sensibility? Or does this history remind us that new imaginative syntheses persist in arising?
“People rediscover resources, recombine in new kinds of communal practices and reinhabit traditional practices, though with a different sensibility.”
Rowan’s judgment on the poverty of contemporary Christian faith surprised me, even though I share it – a market of customised mythologies with no comprehensive social vision and a minimal literacy. As I have continued to visit a variety of churches in London, this has been my experience, even in those where my expectations have been high. Congregations (and leaders) are not “rediscovering resources” and “imaginative syntheses” do not seem to be arising.
My experience of disappointment was repeated last Sunday, Trinity 7. The sermon focused on “the list” in Colossians: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, greed, anger, wrath, malice, slander and abusive language and in Luke’s Gospel, on the greed of contemporary culture, especially in the extremes of wealth and poverty manifest in the area surrounding St James. I yearned for a focus on . . .
“. . . seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.”
. . . and on learning how to live a life that is “rich toward God” because all worship needs to begin with an affirmation and celebration of God’s unconditional, infinite, intimate love in creation, a love with which we are infused and inspired. And indeed the first hymn celebrated such love:
“I come with joy, a child of God,
forgiven, love and free
the life of Jesus to recall,
in love laid down for me.
I come with Christians far and near
to find, as all are fed,
the new community of love,
in Christ’s communion bread.”
A Global. Cosmic Vision
My questions:
What kind of God revealed in the Bible do I believe in in the twenty-first century?
What kind of God do I understand Jesus to have experienced?
. . . haunt me every day when I settle to meditate in the presence of and infused by God’s unconditional, infinite, intimate love – haunted by my intuitive inner awareness, by my reading about and processing the dramas of today’s news of life and death in the world in which I live and move and have my being.
The questions about God and Jesus are global, cosmic questions, raised by the deteriorating condition of our planet, affected and infected by human occupation and activity; by climate crisis and species extinction, poverty, famine, conflict, war and death, abuse and prejudice, refugees and mass migrations, human anxieties and fears, insecurity, ignorance, lies and defensiveness.
As I meditate I am conscious of the scale of the universe and the unfathomable mysteries to me of space/time. I contemplate the inadequacy and poverty of our human spirituality, faith and imagination compared with the radical teachings and practice of Jesus about humanity and humane values and relationships, of our human capacity to live transformed and transforming lives infused with love and Paul’s visionary imagination of the scale of divine activity and presence in creation and in all life on earth. And what do we end up with? Happy clappy worship, the Anglican equivalent of Orson Wells’ cuckoo clock.
We are now living into a regressive historical period. I have been fortunate to have lived through an expansive, creative period. The regressive mode is affecting the energy of life in every part of our lives including faith and church. I endeavour to live into the energy of the unconditional love of God, the quality of being more fully yourself, fully human and fully divine, creative, holy, sacred, living into life in all its fulness, living with an awareness of inner soul and spirit, awareness of Jesus transfigured and transfiguring all our insecurities and anxieties, prejudices and taboos and temptations to abuse. We can learn to deal with anxiety, opening to deep faith and trust, more confident presence and generosity in relationships and human interaction, living with a vision of creative hope and freedom, the freedom to live life in all its fulness.
I search for worship and Christian community where ritual and prayer, teaching and language provide the resources to enable us to become more fully alive.