My thesis is that in recent years because of the exposure of abusive behaviours in the Church and the publication of books investigating and describing this behaviour, in particular Bleeding for Jesus by Andrew Graystone and more recently Vile Bodies by Adrian Thatcher, I at least now understand my need to distinguish between Christian theologies that result in abusive, un-Christlike behaviour and teaching and Christian theologies that encourage more healthy Christ-like behaviour and teaching.
Judged a gnostic
I have been accused in comments about my previous blog, Abusive unhealthy traditional Christianity theology and practice, of being a contemporary prophet of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, wanting to announce a new Gospel and a new religion. Well, maybe I am a Gnostic – others will be my judge. But I want to begin this blog about healthy Christianity by referring to a book that I stumbled across last year and that has a huge impact on me. The book is God in Fragments (1985) by Jacques Pohier, a Dominican priest who taught for many years at La Saulchoir near Paris. In 1979 he was banned by the Vatican from preaching, celebrating the eucharist and teaching because of a book he published two years earlier: Quand je dis Dieu, When I say God (it hasn’t been translated into English, unlike God in Fragments).
Pohier’s book has been a huge resource in helping me flesh out my vision of Christianity, drawing on the Gospel accounts of Jesus, his life, teaching and ministry, as providing the foundations for a healthy, inspirational, creative, enriching and transformational movement that underpins the life and teachings of the Christian churches. The foundations and inspiration for a healthy model of the Church are found in Jesus. The ingredients for an unhealthy church as well as a healthy church are found in what the early Christians and subsequent Christians in every century have done with Jesus and his teachings – and will always do.
The unconditionally loving Father
The next paragraphs are drawn entirely from Pohier’s theology described in detail in God in Fragments.
Jesus depicts God in many parables as a forgiving and caring Father. The parable of the prodigal son who leaves home having persuaded his father to give him his share of the inheritance and then squanders it on riotous living reveals Jesus’ awareness of God’s attitude to and relationship with us. We are trusted with whatever is rightfully ours. We have the freedom to live responsibly or irresponsibly. We are given the freedom to make a total, selfish mess of our lives. When we do, we may feel shame and imagine that we will be judged and rejected. But wherever we are, from a distance the father is aware, open, unconditionally loving, who seeing us on the way back, runs headlong to meet us, embracing us with open arms and laying on a lavish feast.
The story of the prodigal son images the religious life very differently from how it is seen within the world of conventional wisdom. It is an experiential life of “exile into a far country” and a journey of return – not a life of duty, requirements and rewards. Jesus experienced God’s love and presence as unconditional and immediate. It is not easy for us to become aware of God’s unconditionality, let alone release ourselves from the unhealthy teachings of orthodox, traditional Christianity. It can’t have been easy for the disciples and followers of Jesus to release themselves from their traditional Jewish teachings or from the cultural norms they internalised.
Jesus saw forgiveness as a gift, not a system of economic exchange. That undermines the classical, orthodox terms in which the death of Jesus was interpreted as “atonement”, a debt paid to the Father for our sins. The father doesn’t set conditions on his dissolute son’s return to the house; he doesn’t require a ritual of purification. He doesn’t even feel a need to forgive him; he has always loved him unconditionally and always seeks his deepest happiness. He restores his dignity as a son and invites him to enjoy the rich feast of life. The passages in the synoptics that speak of a last judgement with eternal consequences are largely the products of Matthew’s re-writing of texts, Matthew’s failure to understand the truth of Jesus’ teaching that God’s loving is unconditional.
One of Jesus’ core gifts was his courage and confidence in reformulating awareness of the nature of God, of what God is “like”. Jesus communicated his experience of God in ways that transform, potentially, every human being’s experience of God. His teaching encouraged people to trust in their experience, to see the divine presence in creation, to trust in life, in themselves, in their relationships and in their community. Jesus knew that putting people in touch with their own experience would open them up to the reality of God’s unconditional love.
Jesus hardly ever cites the Hebrew Scriptures to support his message. He never quotes the teachers who came before him. He radically revised the teaching and practice of his inheritance. He belonged to no school and fitted into no particular existing tradition. He is said to have taught with authority, a natural authority that came from deep inner confidence and trust in his experience. That gave him a charismatic power that he used with great care and love to melt people’s hearts and minds. His teaching had a subversive edge that challenged the contemporary conventional religion from which his own radically distinctive awareness evolved. He had a confidently independent heart and mind and his own perspective on the nature of what it is to be fully, deeply human, freed from false, negative constructs of human teaching. He was a spirit person, a subversive sage and a social prophet who invited his followers and hearers into a transforming relationship with the same Spirit he knew deeply within himself. He formed an open community, partly by invitation and partly through chance encounter, whose social vision was shaped by the core values of compassion and unconditional love.
Pohier’s theology confirms my understanding of Jesus and what God is about that is partly intuitive and partly the product of life in the sixties to nineties in the diocese of Southwark and partly the result of Honest to God and a myriad other theologians and wisdom people and partly a result of the experience of friends and colleagues whose very being carried and carry divine energies.
Christian Fundamentals in the Twenty-first Century
The Christian vision has been evolving for two thousand years. It is an evolution from the previous five thousand years of the Hebrew journey of faith and from the previous thousands of years of human social and cultural evolution.
Christian fundamentals were from the start written by human beings and are always evolving, being rewritten and adapted, including what some understand to be their Christian fundamentals. This is the story of creation and evolution told in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian New Testament books and in the theologies evolving from the life and teaching and crucifixion of Jesus and of his surviving followers in their witness to what happened next – resurrection.
Our task always, but especially challenging now, is to better understand and engage actively with the back stories of history and evolution and especially the period of history through which each of us has lived and is living – the story today as we are immersed in it and witnessing it – from which perspective it can be much more difficult to see and interpret what is going on.
Christianity always must – any movement pursuing love, justice, truth, life in all fullness must - involve us in and demand from us, through processes of self-examination and re-examination of the past, an exploration and examination of our own assumptions, prejudices, and visions.
A Changing Attitude vision of a healthy church community
Changing Attitude England has a Christian vision of a church that is freed from prejudice and abuse, that nurtures healthy relationships, that is spiritual, humane, nourishing, enriching and Christ-like, whatever a person’s colour, gender, sexuality, politics, religion, etc. There is no resurrection life in prejudice and abuse. There is no new resurrection life in the suppression of justice and equality for every human being,
We would like to see the Church communicating and practicing the essence of life in all its fullness in a universe, a world, an evolving culture that is home to a multitude of fragile species including our own increasingly vulnerable, insecure selves. We dream of a world where people are becoming more confident and courageous about living a fully human life.
We imagine a world free from the tyranny of a dehumanising God who authorises abuse, prejudice, discrimination and violence, an authoritarian, judging God who requires us to worship and praise ‘Him’ as the supreme creator and author of all things rather than the essence of love, goodness and truth, a seamless essence woven through all creation and within the soul of every human being, the heart of all life. We wish to be members of a community immersed in the essence of the good, the beautiful, the truthful, the creative, the transcendent, affirming all that we are and at our best are capable of - human and humane.
We wish to be part of a community that recognises intuitively and experientially that human beings live with otherness and mystery as the deepest reality of life. We are a mystery to ourselves, living with the complex mystery of other people and the deep mysteries of Love, Goodness and Truth. These are essential elements of the heights and depths of reality.
Corporately we are learning to see, understand and interpret how every dimension of creation - human life on planet Earth, the Universe, the process of evolution, our faith systems, our mystical and spiritual and visionary energies are in essence seamless and holistic, integral, as fundamental to our health and well-being as structural, political, economic and scientific paths.
I am more committed to a healthy church today than I have been at any time in my life. I am committed to the evolution of a church that is freeing itself from teachings that are abusive, prejudiced, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic and racist. I am committed to a church that is aware of and focused on identifying with the seamless unity of creator and created, the mystical and the prosaic, the sacred and the profane, in life on earth and our life in the universe, in overcoming the dualistic projection of God as other, as an entity distanced from us and creation rather than God as fully present within all creation and within our human ‘being’.
Unconditional, intimate, infinite love
The Christian church is a community that claims to be the bringer of good news based on Jesus’ great command:
To love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength and love your neighbour as yourself (Luke 10.27).
This foundational command is the litmus test of authentic faith. Failing to live by this command undermines anything else we attempt to do. If faith becomes less than Jesus’ radical, transformative, all-inclusive love, all that remains is white noise in a hollow echo chamber. Self-love is a precondition of the love of neighbours as the second ‘great commandment’ of Jesus requires. Any theology that encourages self-hatred , shame and guilt is abusive because it saps the ability to self-affirm and diminishes the requirements to love God and neighbour. It locates sin in the body’s desires instead of in the wider structures that shape and inform sinful individuals. This fundamental of love should be what the Church is all about, what the Church invites people to experience, what it proclaims as the way God heals and restores us.
How do we change the process, the foundations of practice and teaching?
Religions involve universal claims about truth and life. They usually have formal or informal hierarchies to which deference is due. They create their own worlds. They enter people’s bloodstreams and become assumptions about reality. The more intense and immersive this process is for any individual, the more they are in danger of abusive teachings and practices. Faith can touch every aspect of people’s lives, engaging deep convictions and emotions. It can give rise to a distinctive sense of identity far more powerful, both for good or for evil, than is often appreciated.
How, then, do we weave an education, a spirituality, into Christian teaching and theology and church life at the local, parish level, that introduces people, creates in people, an awareness of God and Jesus and the seamless spiritual essence in creation that is rooted in unconditional love and the Golden Rule? How do we change the culture; the roots of the culture?
A healthy Church of England culture
What I do not see the Church of England institution doing at the moment, the House and College of Bishops, the Archbishops’ Council, General Synod, the Church House and Lambeth Palace secretariats doing, is stepping back and asking basic questions such as:
What does the content of Jesus’ life and teaching imply, prior to his death and the development by his human followers following the event they came to describe as his resurrection, for the essence of contemporary Christian teaching and practice?
What are the essential ingredients of Jesus’ life, teaching and practice that we need to embody and weave into the life, faith, wisdom and awareness of the twenty-first century Church?
Does the essence of Jesus’ life practice teach us that abuse, prejudice, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism and discrimination have no place in our teaching and church life?
Integral to Changing Attitude England’s campaign to overcome discrimination and prejudice as fundamental to achieving justice for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex people in the Church of England is a movement to change the culture of the Church. The culture of prejudice and abuse isn’t going to change unless the culture of the Church changes. This requires a commitment by the levers of the institution listed above to start asking the questions and examining the traditional, orthodox, Christian basics on which the abusive culture is built.
Life in all its fullness
Changing Attitude England is hosting an event open to everyone yearning to explore what life in all its fulness and a healthy, contemporary, evolutionary Christian vision, theology and practice looks like in reality. We look forward to welcoming you. The maximum number will be 60 and there will be opportunities to engage in smaller groups as well as combining our wisdom and vision in plenary sessions.
St Andrews Church, London, SE1 8LJ
Sat 2nd March 2024 10:00AM
A gathering for progressive, inclusive, catholic, evangelical, contemplative, holistic, hopeful, maybe-Christians seeking transformation and justice within God’s unconditional, infinite, intimate love
Resourced by Revd Dr Tina Beardsley, Revd Colin Coward, Rev David Page, Revd Dr John Seymour, Professor Helen King and Revd Robert Thompson
For more details and to book tickets for the event, please visit Life in all its fulness