This is the third, belated blog about Adrian Thatcher’s recently published book Ending Abusive Theologies.
In the first blog, Ending Abusive Theologies – Beginning Again with Love I outlined the most significant elements of Adrian’s unmasking of abusive theologies and the bad or toxic doctrines he identifies..
In the second blog, Divine Violence and Abuse, Adrian describes in detail the problem of divine violence in the Bible. His premise is that the violence of the biblical God “is frankly sickening and has become a major obstacle to belief today. Christians deal with the problem mainly by a strategy of avoidance and evasion.”
In part three of the book: Revelling in Mystery – Towards a Post-Abusive Theology, Adrian begins with Transformations and goes on to explore the Mystery of Being, the Mystery of Life, the Mystery of Spirit and the Mystery of God.
Transformations
Adrian argues that a transformation in Christian thinking about God is needed, giving greater priority to Jesus and less priority to the Bible and tradition. The character of the biblical God that required blood sacrifice is eliminated by Jesus. Our understanding of God’s character is transformed. A new beginning has been made with regards to what counts as ‘God’. The logic of God-language has changed and a transfiguration in our understanding of God has occurred.
Jesus is part of the answer to what happened to the embodied God of the Hebrew Bible. God’s body is located in Jesus and that body is translocational. The Cross of Christ represents an end to any thinking about God that requires appeasement of God’s disapproval by means of sacrifice. It requires the elimination of the abusive God of the Hebrews who required blood sacrifices. Hebrews 1.3 insists the subject of God-language is forever changed. The New Testament insists on the transformation of what is to be understood as ‘God’. God-language begins with Jesus and builds on Jesus. After Jesus, the concept of God can never be the same.
What happened to God’s body?
According to traditional Christianity God’s body is now relocated in Jesus Christ. The body of Christ is multidimensional and translocational. God is the name for the divine mystery at the heart of all things.
Paul Tillich says God does not ‘exist’. God is the creative source of everything that exists. There is no way to describe God – no way of reducing the infinite to the finite or the definite. God’s body began to disappear after the destruction of the temple in the sixth century BCE. God’s corporeality becomes increasingly, gigantically cosmic. God was increasingly cast as an unseen presence.
The mysterious body of Jesus
Petitions in worship presuppose that God is normatively absent and must be invoked to show up or ‘come down’. God is thought to be a strange and mysterious Spirit who is never really at home in this world – despite belief in the incarnation.
Human bodies at the time of Jesus were not self-defining entities. The human body was of a piece with its environment. The self was a precarious, temporary state of being constituted by forces surrounding and pervading the body. The body is perceived as a continuum of cosmic movement.
The body of Christ is mixed mode and multiform, and corporeal in all its forms but Western Enlightenment thought became dominated by an individualism that wreaks havoc on Western individuals today. It takes enormous effort to comprehend its influence and to think differently. Nowadays social media indicate that we are radically porous to external influences of good and ill.
‘The hidden nature of being’ is an intimation of the divine presence in matter. There s a turning away from an undifferentiated Bible that supplies proof texts and ancient gruesome theories and a turning towards a non-violent God discerned in the life of Jesus. There is a relocation of the divine body in the diverse corporeal forms of the body of Christ.
Panentheism and the Mystery of Being
We leave behind the abusive God and embrace a finer and more satisfying vision of the real. A big step on the road to holiness is the letting go of certainty, and the realisation that there is more to God than words can ever say. Yet this unknowability seems at odds with the claim that God is intimately present to creation to the point of embodiment within it. Panentheism helps understand this apparent dichotomy. It may be seen as a culmination of biblical thought, a development that does not come to an end when the biblical canon closes.
There is a long tradition of theology that speaks of God as ‘being itself’, infinite being sustaining and participating in finite beings. Paul Tillich uses the metaphors ‘ground of being’, ‘power of being’, depth of being’. Despite this, sixty years on the metaphysical person without a body remains entrenched in worship and popular religious thought and devotion. Panentheism can mitigate the stark dualisms that characterise Christian thought, in particular, the dualisms between spirit and body, transcendence and immanence, divine and human, apophatic and cataphatic. There is no place where God is not.
The Mystery of Life
Adrian introduces two ideas from recent philosophy – distributed agency and vibrant matter. - expanding the whole framework for thinking about God and the sacredness of life. Distributed agency refers to the idea that agency – the capacity to act or exert power – is not located in a single individual or entity but instead is spread across a network of human and non-human actors. Distributed agency highlights how action emerges through interactions within systems. It is lively and self-organising. God is the name for the depth and mystery at the heart of things, where immanence and transcendence coincide.
Meshwork
Thatcher draws on Norman Wirzba’s book This Sacred Life (2021). He says it offers a compelling vision of the sacredness and creatureliness of life. The ‘meshwork’ of life is the material manifestation of a divine energy that gives and nurtures and encourages diverse life without every being exhausted or fully contained. Human life is a ‘participation in an unfathomably vast microbial world’ in which the single human body ‘is one vast ecosystem’.
New animism
New animism emphasises personhood, relationality and agency, framing animism as a mode of living and relating, not just a set of beliefs. Agency and relationality are not confined to human beings.
New feminist materialism
The emphasis in new feminist materialism is on materiality that goes all the way down to ‘quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning’, criticising anthropocentrism and binary thinking. The idea of the meshwork encompassing all that is opens up the domain of the sacred, re-instating the sacredness of the world, of all creation, and a sense of divine embodiment.
John Drane argues that four spatial movements are required: ‘moving East’: the way forward will be ancient and Eastern; ‘moving sideways’: learning from the environmentally friendly lifestyles of indigenous peoples; ‘going back’: to Celtic, creation-centred spirituality; ‘going within’: a psychological turn to the self and inner meanings.
Thatcher disapproves of spiritualities that concentrate on self-knowledge, self-promotion and preoccupation with the body and body image. They become evasive, a distraction from the loving entanglement with others that comprises a more ‘genuine’ spirituality. How sad it is that in much of Protestantism, the animation of the Spirit in creation was lost, and transferred instead to a book, albeit the Bible. If only Protestants had found and retained the inhabitation of the Spirit in the human and the natural worlds instead of constraining her to the inspiration of Scripture and the life of individuals in the Church, both Church and world would have been very different.
The revelation of love
We arrive at Adrian’s final chapter, The Mystery of God: God is Love.
Adrian says the story he has outlined so far shows that It is possible and necessary to speak of God in a different way, as Love - love without qualification, exception or restraint. The first Christians made it possible by seeing the life of Jesus as the life of God among them and so interpreted it as both divine and as love. By attending to Jesus’ various ministries of feeding, healing, forgiving, and reconciling others, Christians believed they encountered in embodied form the eternal power that has been circulating through all creation from the beginning. These stories demonstrate both the character of the divine life that creates and sustains the world, and how the incarnation of divine life is lived in the here and now.
The feast of love
Adrian says the themes he has explored earlier enable us to frame the celebration of the Eucharist as a Love Feast. He goes on to describe some of the symbolic elements of eucharistic practice. The Eucharist anticipates the arrival of the kingdom of God. It revives hope. Everyone is equal in their need. God’s gracious bounty is limitless. Blessing is abundant, like the ‘abundant life’ (John 10.10) that Jesus came to give. There is a direct relationship between the disciples and Jesus. The relationship is grounded in the daily business of eating and drinking.
The recipients are aware they are the body of Christ in another of its forms. What matter is more vibrant than consecrated bread and wine, thinking of it as already mysteriously alive, having hidden direction and depths. Matter is alive, In the sharing and reception of the bread and wine, everything material is included, brokenness and vulnerability. Adrian quotes Rowan Williams: “The Eucharist demonstrates that material reality can become charged with Jesus’ life, be a sign of life, of triumph over the death of exclusion and isolation.”
This is not what I experience in most of the churches where I’ve worshipped over the past year, including Southwark cathedral. There have been times and places in the past where worship has been charged with presence and mystery but the chemistry of the Christian church, whatever denomination or tradition, has changed. The Christian church is subjected to the decaying, decadent decline I witness everywhere today. Meshwork and distributive agency don’t inspire.
Mystery within
Six pages from the end, Adrian writes that contemplation of the mystery of being itself grounds faith in the wonder that there is a world at all, the life-giving, life-nourishing, life-directing mystery. Matter is mysterious, Life is mysterious. Being human is mysterious. The origin of everything is mysterious. The Lord chose to reach our intimate depths through a fragment of matter. He comes not from above but from within. In the Eucharist, fullness is already achieved. It is the living centre of the universe, the overflowing core of love and of inexhaustible life, an act of cosmic love.
Adrian says he has tried to show how radical credal Christianity is. To declare Jesus as Lord and God is to commit to an astounding change in what is now understood as divine. John 1 should convince Christians that the self-communication of God is first personal rather than propositional, a human being, not a book.
The defensiveness of the churches against the rise of science and of biblical criticism, leading to a neglect of other sources of revelation (including tradition, reason, experience, conscience, and wisdom), has led to bad theology and to the excesses of fundamentalism and evangelicalism.
The New Testament writers regarded the Hebrew Bible as problematic. Only our ingrained habitual attitudes prompt us to think of the books of the Bible as of equal value or as all equally inspired. The Pauline churches had come to a version of faith that required them to be obedient to Scripture instead of to Christ. This faith required them to observe the law of Moses instead of allowing Christ and the Spirit to live through them. This is what abusive theologies and the missionaries of abusive faith do.
There was an extraordinary intimacy between Jesus and his followers at the Last Supper. This intimacy has such power and directness that it does not need to be mediated by anything else, especially not by Scripture and the sacrificial practices it enjoins and much eucharistic theology.
Beginning again with Jesus allows us legitimately to refashion our image of God, not in our image, but in the image of Jesus.
My Commentary
I have struggled to write this third blog. Adrian ends by inviting us to join in the long prayer of Pope Francis (found at the end of Laudato si’). We have arrived at a post-abusive theology and a post-abusive use of the Bible in the last chapters and ended with a version of the Catholic faith that does not endorse violence of any kind, whether in God, in the Church, in human relationships, or in the war-torn world. He hopes that at least some readers will have joined him at a similar destination. Well, I have and I haven’t! Adrian hasn’t quite got there for me. This is not surprising. He is deconstructing the most basic fundamentals of Christian teaching and preaching as contemporary Christianity still understands them and expresses them in liturgy every Sunday and in the teaching documents produced by the House of Bishops.
The relationship between human constructs about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the degree to which they are currently understood to be orthodox is in dramatic contrast to the 1960s new orthodoxy to which I was introduced, partly by my own intuition, and partly by virtue of having been confirmed at a church in the South Bank Religion of the Diocese of Southwark. The gulf between my theological and biblical understanding of Jesus and God and today’s understanding is not named as problematic by Adrian but it is a thread running unawares through the whole book. Or at least, it’s a thread that runs through the whole of my life and thinking and theology. When there is a difference between what my intuition tells me and what the Church tells me the Bible or God says, then I go with my intuition and keep quiet about what it’s telling me, especially if I think going public will get me into trouble.
I think almost everything the Church is doing now in relation to sexuality and gender and God is driven by what Adrian would name as abusive theology. I experience contemporary liturgies and worship as failing to connect my human experience and contemplative spirituality and practice with my interpretation of divine otherness. Seamless is the word that best conveys the dimensions of my faith.