This is the fifth blog in the series preparing for Changing Attitude England’s ‘Life in all its fullness’ event on 2nd March 2024 at St Andrew’s Short Street, Waterloo.
This blog is likely to even more seriously disturb some of the people posting comments about the two previous blogs on Thinking Anglicans, people who assume their version of Christianity, in stark contrast to mine, is correct in every respect, carrying the authority of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Christian tradition, Scripture, reason and the approval of two centuries of the magisterium.
They think my understanding of Christianity is:
A fundamental distortion of the Gospel by a contemporary prophet of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism.
A false account of the high view of Scripture which is a feature of orthodoxy.
A new Gospel and a new religion.
Extraordinarily dangerous, pointing people away from the God of the Bible.
Using the Anglican “three legged stool” idea as a device to sniff out fundamentalists who are otherwise known as orthodox believers.
Their Christian faith believes:
The Cross solves our fundamental objective problem - our rebellion against God and his holiness.
The real problem is the anger of God. There is no bigger or more fundamental problem. It is an indivisible aspect of God’s character.
Every one of us is unrighteous.
Jesus talked about hell repeatedly, speaking of it as the place which is the destiny of the many not the few.
The refrain that runs through the Old Testament is God’s concern for His own name.
Gnostics assert that God can be understood through knowledge of creation.
Christianity is revelation from outside creation
The Bible is the authoritative explanation of the God who has revealed Himself through His Son.
There is no other means to know God.
Not knowing God is a terrible outcome.
I conclude from broad experience of Christians in local churches that these comments critical of my position are very unrepresentative of the belief of the majority of the members of the Church of England. My superficially researched suspicion is that the majority of Church of England Anglicans think the rather nice Golden Rule encapsulates the essence of Jesus’ teaching, relying on Luke 6.31 “Treat others as you would like them to treat you”, ignoring the preceding and following verses and the rest of the Kingdom message. The Golden Rule does not encapsulate the spirit and teaching of Jesus – and nor do the comments on TA, posted by people who are not really “thinking Anglicans”.
Seamless tunic
Let me head off now in an apparently entirely different direction. The Bible is a very curious book. The more I read the Bible the more curious – and potent – it becomes. For example, I’m very familiar with the crucifixion narratives in each of the Gospels. All four gospels recount that at the crucifixion the soldiers had the temerity to crouch at the foot of the cross sharing out Jesus’ clothes by casting lots to decide what each should have.
“When the soldiers had crucified Jesus they took his clothes and, leaving aside the tunic, divided them into four parts, one for each soldier. The tunic was seamless, woven in one piece throughout; so they said to one another, ‘We must not tear this; let us toss for it.’ Thus the text of scripture came true: ‘They shared my garments among them, and cast lots for my clothing.’” John 19:23, 24 REB
I hadn’t noticed until late in life that John edits the Synoptics’ description, telling us that there were four soldiers who shared out Jesus’ clothes, casting lots (only John says there were four). And it is John alone who adds the detail of the seamless tunic (or undergarment) woven in one piece to his narrative, Researching further, I discovered that this is the only place in the Bible, both the Christian and Hebrew testaments, where the word seamless appears.
Bishop Stephen Verney in Water into Wine (p.188) comments on the detail of the tunic using his own translation: “The soldiers took his clothes and divided them into four parts, one part for each soldier, and also the tunic. Was the tunic seamless woven throughout [anothen] from above.” The soldiers say, “Let us not tear this tunic.” The Greek word used for tear is schisomen. Let there be no schism in this tunic. Verney says John describes the throwing of lots for the seamless tunic in such a detailed way because it is the symbol of what God is revealing and doing. Jesus, in John’s understanding, is saying, “In the new order there shall be no schism, but you shall be one and you shall love one another and be woven together from above.” This is the reality, says Verney, to which Jesus now gives birth. Mmmmm . . .
Where did John’s image of a seamless undergarment that the soldiers threw lots for so as not to tear it come from? It would seem to be his creation, his consciousness of the profound implications of Jesus’ teaching. The future is not to be a world of schism in which things are torn apart but a world of seamless unity – not the world of his followers alone but the whole world, the cosmos. John’s vision is of all creation as a unity, reflecting ideas woven throughout his gospel and particularly in the High Priestly Prayer and his metaphor of Jesus as the vine. John weaves an image of the seamless unity between Jesus and the Father and his followers. John’s gospel was the last to be written, around 100CE, and John may also be reflecting on the disagreements he observes between the many independent Christian communities that were already following diverse paths.
In the second century the Fathers of the early Church saw the seamless robe as symbol of the unity of the Church reflecting John’s metaphor of the vine and the branches but the idea of a seamless, schism-free church is an ideal. Distinctive Christian communities with differences of language, emphasis, theology, liturgy and practice were emerging from the very beginning (even in Paul’s churches, carefully idealised by Luke). The Acts of the Apostles tells the story of just one part of the spread of the new Christian communities from Jerusalem, to North Africa, Ethiopia and Persia as well as the churches of the Jewish diaspora in Turkey, Greece and Rome.
The seamless robe is a beautiful, romantic symbol of the ideal of a common heart, mind and faith in Jesus desired by John. Did Jesus imagine this ideal? Did Jesus foresee what would happen following his death? A seamless unity was and is the dream of those who follow Jesus. But it isn’t and never has been the reality. Christian churches, movements and denominations have often seen themselves as being in competition with one another – even at war for control of territory or ideology; the Eastern Church versus the Western Church, Catholic versus Protestant, Christian versus Muslim, Christian versus heathen or non-believer or atheist. When it comes to the Christian ideal of seamless loving presence as a characteristic of Jesus and his followers, Churches have a very bad record. Christians remain all too addicted to the distinctive characteristics of their denomination or the tribal sub-sets of their denomination, or to ‘their’ local church and ‘the way we do things’ and the ‘authenticity of our particular beliefs and practices’. As a gay man who has lived through seventy decades of failure in the Church of England to come to terms with homosexuality – and no end in sight – I am very sceptical of and cynical about any particular claims to Gospel truth or reliance on scripture, tradition and reason to be more accurate representations of the mind of God as communicated by the Holy Spirit and manifest in Jesus, the Son of God, than the many voices claiming that their voice is the ultimate, authentic, divine truth.
Fast forward to the twentieth century - a New Paradigm
Early in the twentieth century new developments in the fields of science and human consciousness marked the beginning of a period of human history and evolution in which our understanding of ourselves, our planet and the universe in which we live has been and continues to be dramatically transformed. Forty years ago Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics, 1992) said that we needed a new paradigm to describe this radically changed world, a new vision of reality and a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions and values.
The new paradigm has developed a holistic world view, seeing the world as a seamless, integrated whole rather than a dissociated collection of parts. Our ecological world view recognises the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the embeddedness of individuals and societies in the cyclical processes of nature. The ecological paradigm is rooted in a perception of reality that goes beyond the scientific framework to an awareness of the oneness of all life, the interdependence of its multiple manifestations, and its cycles of change and transformation. Ultimately, said Capra, such deep ecological awareness is spiritual awareness. The human spirit is understood as a mode of consciousness in which the individual can feel connected to the cosmos as a whole.
I have come to understand that my life is being lived in the context of a paradigm shift of dramatic significance, a truly radical change in our fundamental understanding of life, the universe, and faith. I believe it to be a revolution not only in the way we conceive the basic scientific, conceptual and religious underpinnings of human life on planet earth within the known universe. We are undergoing a scientific, cultural, religious, spiritual, global and cosmic conceptual revolution, an evolutionary development, a manifestation of the seamless tunic woven throughout [anothen] from above by Jesus for which the four soldiers threw dice.
In the beginning
The members of the early churches continued to separate out the divine and sacred from the secular world, God and Jesus from human life, unable and unwilling as they were and we still are to recognise all creation, all life, the whole of evolution and history, as a seamless unity, our humanity and our bodies an undivided and indivisible unity integral to the world we inhabit.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1)
“In the beginning the Word already was. The Word was in God’s presence, and what the God was, Word was. He was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be; without him no created thing came into being.” (John 1)
The opening verses of Genesis and John communicate the most profound truths about the seamless unity of creation. They do not describe scientific truth. This is the language of myth and poetry, language that has to be used to describe the unimaginable depths of truth experienced by human beings since our primitive ancestors began to develop a religious consciousness.
The God named in the book of Genesis and in John’s gospel is understood to be integral to the process of creation and evolution, there from the beginning, 13.7 billion years ago according to the best contemporary scientific theories and estimates. ‘God’ is there despite nothing being conscious of God’s presence. Nothing could be conscious of God’s presence until the species Homo sapiens first developed consciousness and then self-awareness in the period from 200,000 to 40,000 years ago. The thought of God as understood by the major monotheistic religions, a divine creative being, didn’t evolve until some 12,000 to 5,000 years ago. The God in whom we invest ultimate creative ability, moral values and prime emotional qualities such as love and compassion, ‘existed’ in an un-exalted, un-worshipped mode for all but 12,000 or so years of the 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang. According to Christians, God didn’t decide to make a radical intervention in the lives of human beings on planet earth until just over 2,020 years ago.
How do we, in our spiritual imagination, conceptualise God within what we now know about (or scientists and mathematicians theorise about) space-time and the origins of the universe – the timescale of the universe and the spatial scale of the universe in which we live and in which we construct and live our faith? Is this all Gnostic thinking, a corruption of Christianity? I don’t care, to be honest.
Christians believe that God is the creator of all that is. God has brought matter and life into being. However, Christians are divided as to how God did this. Those who believe the Bible is a true account of God at work in creation believe in the Genesis account of creation in six days in a comparatively recent epoch. They believe the whole universe came into being in one go. Others believe in the idea of the Big Bang and the process of evolution. The effect of this division among Christians between those who believe in the Bible as the unchallengeable, literal word of God and those accept the evidence of scientific research and theory as giving the best understanding of how the universe came into being divides the Christian community and affects non-Christian thinking about the church and Christianity. The Church is not seamlessly woven together garment. It is divided not only in relation to ideas about creation but in thinking about human identity, gender and sexuality where there are also dramatically different, opposed positions. These polarised ideas affect the way we think about God, or even whether we are able to think about God at all. They affect thinking inside the church. They reinforce the dominance of tribal identity culture thinking in the church. I see this affecting almost every dimension of church life at the moment.