1962
In 1962 when I reached the age of 17 I had been baptised (at 3 months) and confirmed (aged 12), introduced to Tractarian London churches by my grandfather and the new liturgical movement by the curate at my church in South London.
I knew in 1962 at the age of 17 that I didn’t believe that things in the Bible that were accepted as literal truth by the Church were literally true. They were unbelievable. But something else was believable – the friendship of peers and adults at church, the wisdom and depth of the parish priest who left when I was 13, boys in the choir and scouts who attracted me, and my performance as a server at Parish Communion.
It was a great relief when in 1963 Honest to God was published. I was able to continue to enjoy the side-benefits of parish life without having to worry about my lack of faith in creedal statements about God, virgin birth, resurrection, ascension and life in heaven.
2022
Sixty years later, I am far more disturbed by the disjunction between my faith and the belief system in today’s Church of England. The Church seems to have internalised almost nothing of the freedom and energy released in the sixties and seventies as theologians and congregations explored contemporary ways of faith experience.
I’ve travelled to London three times this year and on each occasion I’ve visited Church House Bookshop, still there after all these years, anchoring the corner of Church House at the junction of Great Smith Street and Little Smith Street. I went to find out whether anything was being published today evolving from the breakthrough of truth and authenticity of faith represented by Honest to God. I did not go in search of authors such as Jack Spong, Marcus Borg or Don Cupitt. I have them already. I wondered if I’d find books displayed on the tables at the entrance, books describing the practice of radical theology in today’s Church. I didn’t go expecting my search to be rewarded.
Three books
On each visit I bought a book. Goodbye to God: Searching for a Human Spirituality by Chris Scott was the first. It wasn’t displayed on the tables. Chris says he was surprised the shop stocked it. Chris – you took a quantity of the book to the shop when it was published in 2015. The second was The Godless Gospel: Was Jesus a Great Moral Teacher? by Julian Baggini. These two books develop the trajectory of wisdom, vision and truth I first found in Honest to God. The third was Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times by Jonathan Sacks. Sacks’ book was displayed in the front window. All three books have proved to be really valuable, underpinning my confidence as I describe my own faith as an activist priest campaigning not only for LGBTQIA+ equality in the Church of England but for a healthy, non-abusive, visionary Christianity rooted in unconditional love – and a radical new Christian inclusion.
On Friday a newly-published book by Chris Scott arrived: The Jesus myth: a psychologist’s viewpoint. Chris is, like me, an Anglican priest and psychotherapist. Chris has written, in 67 pages, a succinct, clear, honest, practical version of the book I had tried to write myself over a period of years (and about 400 pages).
Myth
Chris suggests that we need to make a paradigm shift from the twentieth and twenty-first century belief that truth consists in scientifically provable facts to mythical truth, stories that are about human experience that help us understand and interpret ourselves and our world. Myths are stories that express the truths of human nature and life, exploring the deepest questions within ourselves. Jesus created a life and a myth that freed people from the restrictive and dominant forces of religion, a myth of liberation and love. Living the Jesus myth is what Christianity ought to be about, a people living the dream of God, fully human relationships of love and goodness, setting people free from guilt and neurotic baggage.
Mystery
What we call God will always be and must always be, mystery. “Any religion that limits God to specific beliefs, creeds, doctrines and dogmas is doing a psychological service to its adherents, but is reducing the infinite to manageable and safe proportions.” Jung says what is ordinarily called “religion” is a substitute for immediate experience, replacing it with organised dogma and ritual. Dogmatic religion is a safe container for fragile souls, insulating the believer from actually having to encounter his or her own unconscious depths.
Gospel truth
Much of the Gospel narratives should be understood as mythically true, not historically or literally true. It is not for us to believe in the nativity story, to take one example, but to live it, to bring to birth love in our lives, spread it, foster it, and give it away. Hidden deep, sometimes very deep, in formalised Christianity, is a message that is about living life to the full and loving a lot. The Church can be very dysfunctional at times and wedded to doctrines and teachings that should have been discarded or reinterpreted decades ago (Chris Scott suggests asking the LGBTQIA+ community about this). Not all the things in the Bible or the doctrines of the Church are literally true but within the story – the myth – there lies deepest truth about humankind, our search for truth, for meaning, and for love.
Archetype
Chris Scott says “to believe in Jesus Christ as an historical and supernatural figure prevents the believer from actually having to discover his or her own Christ archetype and live it in the world.” Dogmatic, orthodox Christianity keeps us in the dark and prevents us from living the Christ archetype. Christ the archetype is the archetype of being human, a person deeply in tune with him or herself. This Christ archetype is built in to the human psyche and is constantly searching for expression in the world, to be the Christ, to live the Jesus life, rather than believe in it. Living it is risky and most settle for following a religion. Jesus’ teaching and life showed the archetype in himself and awoke it in others and that influence continues today. In Jesus the Christ archetype flourished, the archetype of a human being fully alive, a model of what we have it in ourselves to be, living life in all its fullness.
Our Fear
My psychotherapy training highlighted my fear of being powerful beyond measure. Churches fear their truth and power will be diluted or destroyed if we Christian adherents let go of literal interpretations of the Christ myth and own it for ourselves. Chris Scott believes that the churches have all but destroyed the truth by their insistence on maintaining dogmatic formulations of belief rather than encouraging real openness to and encounter with the divine. Churches emphasise orthodoxy (right belief) rather than orthopraxis (right living). To create the freedom for us to live with the energy of the divine, the Church will have to let go of medieval theories of atonement, original sin, and crude interpretations of the Bible. This is what the bishops of the Church of England are terrified of doing, as the Living in Love and Faith process reveals.
God
Chris Scott says whatever words or images we use will be inadequate and provisional because that which we choose to call God must, by definition, be beyond our human grasp. Honest to God used depth and ground of being language. Scott borrows from Star Wars and uses the idea of the Force. The Force holds together the whole universe, it penetrates all things and all creatures; it is the Life Force which sustains all things and which can be served for good or ill. In the movie Obi Wan Kenobi says “it’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, and penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together.” The God of religious texts is also a human creation, a reflection of the period of history and social environment of the writers, and its authors point to an experienced reality which is always, in its fullness, beyond our grasp. Scott quotes John Powell SJ. “The essential message of unconditional love is one of liberation: You can be whoever you are, express all your thoughts and feelings with absolute confidence. You will not be punished for your openness and honesty. I will not reject you! I am committed to your growth and happiness. I will always love you (From Unconditional Love). This human experience of overwhelming love can sometimes seem to utterly possess us. Conditional love says: “I will love you if…”. Implicitly this is often to do with some kind of compliance. This is what the Church and the bishops continue to offer LGBTQIA+ people. Knowing God (as we do) is not something that can be described or explained. One has to experience loving and being loved to truly know it from the inside. Many, many LGBTQIA+ people experience love and know it from the inside, in those experiences of beyondness and otherness, or in total and absolute intimacy. Belief is a matter of cognitive acquiescence; God is a matter of experience.
Being a Christian
Karl Rahner SJ, Catholic theologian, came up with the concept of the Supernatural Existential – the influence or “pull” of God on every human being. We are doing God when we act with compassion and love towards other people and all creation. Being a Christian is identified with the way a person lives their life rather than by subscribing to a set of beliefs; actively responding to Love awakens the Christ Archetype in those who align their individual myth with the Jesus myth. The job of the Church as an institution is to enable the Christ Archetype to grow and develop in every human life so that we as individual Christians may foster that archetype for ourselves and for others.
At the conclusion of his book Chris Scott writes:
“The Church today should be a place where there is no oppression. No pressure to conform to certain sets of beliefs but rather, a place where beliefs and doubts can be expressed openly in an attitude of exploration and genuine care for one another. There is a huge hunger in the human soul to be Real (Chris references The Velveteen Rabbit by Marjory Williams). The essential message in the Jesus myth is one of love, an open love that enables us to both be ourselves and discover more of ourselves, those parts we have kept under wraps for fear that other people would reject us “if they knew what I was really like”.
“What we need to flourish is unconditional love and acceptance. We need to be told that we are okay, and that if we do not feel okay now there are ways towards healing the painful memories of only conditional love, and discovering a worth within ourselves we never knew we had.”
It goes without saying that I highly recommend Chris Scott’s book The Jesus Myth. You can buy it from Church House Bookshop.
To pursue a vision of the Church where LGBTQIA+ people will be welcomed and loved unconditionally you might like to join Changing Attitude England on Facebook. Our vision and campaign continue to develop and expand.