So this house of God, is it any more than a piece of poetry, a fancy way of talking about ordinary matters, a mystification?

Certainly it’s a way of speaking, derived from the Bible, where it refers to the theological idea that God can dwell in places and people; and that people before and after death can dwell in God. So it depends on a language already established which speaks of God as part of the experience of human beings. So language of God’s house is a metaphor based on the more fundamental metaphor of God. But do I intend it as a description of biblical language or as a description of human experience?

Both.

I have referred to the richness and variety of the biblical “house of God” language elsewhere, for example in emmock.com oikos; and emmock.com bible blog 289; which the reader can access.

If I want to use it as a description of human experience, I should explain first of all what I mean by the person as a dwelling place of God. Jesus told a brilliant story about an evil spirit who has been expelled from his human dwelling place, but later returns to find it clean and tidy and vacant. He goes and gets his mates and they take up residence. This story pictures the human being as a house which has room for more than the self, and can therefore be tenanted by destructive powers, or by God’s nourishing spirit. No house is void for long. As Dylan sang, “it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve someone.”

This fits a modern view of the self, which sees it as an identity only defined in relation to other identities both personal and societal, and as something always being negociated between new experience and memory. But often the indwelling spirit of God is then pictured as a disembodied gloop that somehow comes to take up space within the person, or as a psychological influence which has a superhuman origen. Neither of these appeals to me as they are both magical and I don’t believe in magic.

Instead I would ask the reader to take seriously Paul’s quotation from an anonymous poet, “In God we live and move and have our being” and imagine that this space within Godself, from which God has withdrawn so that the universe can exist, is analogous to a mother’s womb, from which she is absent, alhough it is sustained by her life. If the child in the womb could be fully conscious of its existence, it would  realise that its developing self was continuously nourished and enabled by another life, in symbiosis with which it can reach perfection and be born. The faith that God’s spirit dwells in us, is our awakening to our true environment as nurturing and to ourselves as a developing perfection.

Our willingness to be a house for God is also the knowledge that God is a house for us. God’s house is a place where God’s children are born, like God’s child Jesus, whose birth happens through crucifixion and resurrection. For being born as a child of God is not some mystic spirituality but a representation of God’s life in the face of all the worldly powers; suffering is inevitable, but the child of God hopes that the life is invincible. The conflict and the suffering are signs that God’s house(hold) is a worldly fact and not a pipedream; the hope of invincible life is the conviction that the bouse is an eschatological reality, already present under the constraints of evil, but not yet the place where God wipes all tears from her children’s eyes. This fulfillment can only be apprehended by faith, which is the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11)

The universe is in God, as in a womb, held and nourished by God’s life but not interfered with, not prodded in the direction God wants, but created with all the means necessary to be born as God’s child. The non-human universe will, according to St Paul, share the glorious freedom of God’s children. The story of evolution of which we know only a few isolated chapters, is the story of the birth of God’s child. In order for this development to take place God has granted utter freedom to the universe down to the smallest particle, as our science has realised. This birth is desired by God but the perfected universe is no more known in advance by God than a mother has full knowledge of the child to which she gives birth.

The birth and its perfection are intended by God, but not as if by an engineer with a blueprint. Each new develoment of the universe is an emergent property which issues from the interdependence of all its elements, like the stages of growth of a human being. The development is always more than the sum of its parts and cannot be fully predicted in advance, but it  does not come about by magic or by supernatural guidance. When I say that the house of God is an escahatological reality, I mean that those fruitful emergent properties I see in people and communities are for me tokens of the emergence of the universe as God’s child.

In understanding what is a fruitful development I am guided by my trust in the Jesus of the Gospels as the wisest teacher and best example of fruitful living I have encountered. There is nothing religious or mystical about his teaching or life story; he dealt always creatively with the most recalcitrant powers of social and personal life without ever losing the passionate sanity which is the distiguishing mark of his character. He lived out the ethics of God’s household, refusing to depart from them even when threatened with death, a death through which there emerged the community of faith called the church or assembly of Jesus, which proclaims that he too, has emerged from evil and death, to inhabit the household of God in the world and to prepare their dwelling places in the everlasting household.

When the church looked back on his life and death in Palestine, it portrayed it as an eschatological event, as an emergent reality which would not be subsumed in the final emergence of God’s household, but only confirmed. That’s why their Gospels tell the story of Jesus as if in his actions God’s household has arrived in its fullness. Each act of kindness or healing is a transformation, each confrontation with  evil a victory, until the last confrontation, which in a wordly perspective is a defeat. The fact that even Jesus’ victorious risen body bears the scars of defeat, is a recognition that the household of God and Jesus the first child of God, are still part of a conflicted history. The reader of the Gospels has to read back the wounds of Jesus into the stories they tell.

The Bible has many ways of presenting the household of God as an eschatological reality, amongst which the Letter to Hebrews is one of the best. It defines faith with the phrase quoted above, “the substance or things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” and goes on present Abraham and his family as the great exemplars of this quality. Abraham becomes a traveller with no fixed abode, because God commands him to journey; he and Sarah are childless yet they trust in the promise that from them will come descendants, “as many as the stars in heaven for multitude or as the sand which is on the sea shore, innumerable.” They and people like them, who journey away from one dimensional life are said to be “strangers and sojourners on the earth,” and to be in search of a “city with firm foundations”. We are told that God is “not ashamed to be called their God for he has prepared for them a city.” This city or house of God is the true dwelling of people who have faith and do deeds of which “the world is not worthy.”

The author gives an eloquent account of those who trust in the eschatological promise and become the emergent reality of God’s house.

An old story tells that Sandy, a young farmer was pestered by his mother to go and hear the famous preacher Dr. Spurgeon. At last, to save himself further annoyance, he went.  On his return, she said, eagerly, “Well, Sandy, what was the theme of Dr. Spurgeon’s sermon?”

Sandy answered briefly, “He spoke about sin.”

”Indeed,” the mother noted, “But what had he to say about it?”

”Well,” said Sandy, “He was agin (against) it.”

Sometimes it may be important to define your viewpoint by saying what you’re against.

Over my last few blogs I’ve been trying to define the meaning of “God’s House” in my theology, while introducing three disciplines derived from the idea of a house (Greek: oikos): ecumenism, economy and ecology. God’s house welcomes the whole oik-umene, the inhabited world and all its people; it has its own distinctive oiko-nomy, its household management which uses the gifts amd meets the needs of all; and it promotes an oiko-logical ( the universe as God’s household of life) understanding and practice. I’ve written about how this way of thinking about God can enhance human life.

But now I want to state clearly what it’s against.

Because it is ecumenical, it is opposed to both sectarianism  and cynicism.

Our world is awash with information through the variety of available media which carry the images, messages and opinions of millions of people. It is almost impossible to distinguish fact from fiction, art from advertising, news from fake news. One response to this confusion is to magnify our own certainties, especially our group certainties, and refuse to pay attention to anyone and anything that seems to challenge them. The terrorist group Islamic State has done this with considerable success, as did neo-liberal economists, at least until the banking crisis; Christian fundamentalists continue to do it in many parts of the world. In the face of contradictory evidence and the vast rubbish tip of global opinion they assert their utter assurance that only what they believe is true. Not all sectarian groups are terrorists but few have much concern for people they regard as enemies. Clearly this strategy regards “God’s House” as exclusive rather than inclusive, consisting only of people like us. ( “I used to think, sister Agnes, that thee and me were the only saved souls in this village, but now I’m not so sure about thee”)

Even people who are aware of the dangers of sectarian thought can fall into its trap. Richard Dawkins is eloquent in praise of the scientific testing of all evidence, yet betrays a woeful igorance of the religious beliefs he often denounces. He represents a kind of scientism which insists that only its kind of thinking can be true. I deprecate the aggressive certainty that leads to denunciatory demonstrations outside abortion clinics, but also the thoughtless certainty of those who think that a “woman’s right over her own body” justifies the horrifying numbers of abortions. Both groups suffer from sectarian thinking.

Sectarian thinking includes many forms of prejudice: I don’t need to give this person the time of day, s/he’s not one of us, he’s catholic, or black, or Muslim, or gay, or old, or a woman, bitch, slut or frigid. The globalisation which means my exposure to the whole world and its people, so that my personal and local identity is questioned, can intensify my sectarianism as I retreat into the bolthole where I’m still comfortable.

The film Dr. Strangelove hilariously depicted the sectarian thought processes of people who brought about nuclear war. We have seen the evils of Daesh and the Lord’s Resistance Army. We know the capacity of our social media to transmit the warped certainties of any group throughout the world. Against all such sects, the image of the world as the one house of God, where people will accept their fellow beings as family, listen to their brothers and sisters while making up their own minds, respect opinions while valuing facts, use persuasion while sometimes being persuaded, desire truth while knowing it is never separate from love, has a quiet appeal.

Globalisation and its media can trigger a very different response: I can meet all the others in the world, their customs, beliefs and actions, with a suspicion which denies any serious validity to what they are, think and do- not because I’m sure I’m right, but because in a world of competing idiots and idiocies the only wise person is the one who can see through their pretensions to the futility of existence.

This cynicism has a more noble history than sectarianism. As expressed by Diogenes the Greek or Ecclesiastes the Jew it can bite into all forms of thoughtless commitment- “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” ( Ecclesisates 1). They have  a passionate  suspicion of all high-flown people and thinking, a peasant wisdom insisting that there is nothing new under the sun except perhaps the kinds of human folly invented to disguise that reality.

The pervasive cynicsm of modern globalised culture is less noble, more a retreat from all passionate engagement into a fashionable acceptance that life is probably meaningless but money makes it fun. It is an attitude that perches, dances, slouches or snoozes on the surface of life. The difference between serious and superficial cynicism was sharply characterised in a cunning passage by Jonathan Swift:

“In the proportion that credulity is a more peaceful possession of the mind than curiosity, so far preferable is that wisdom which converses about the surface to that pretended philosophy which enters into the depths of things and then comes gravely back with informations and discoveries, that in the inside they are good for nothing. The two senses to which all objects first address themselves are the sight and the touch; these never examine farther than the colour, the shape, the size, and whatever other qualities dwell or are drawn by art upon the outward of bodies; and then comes reason officiously, with tools for cutting, and opening, and mangling, and piercing, offering to demonstrate that they are not of the same consistence quite through. Now I take all this to be the last degree of perverting Nature, one of whose eternal laws it is to put her best furniture forward. And therefore, in order to save the charges of all such expensive anatomy for the time to come, I do here think fit to inform the reader that in such conclusions as these reason is certainly in the right; and that in most corporeal beings which have fallen under my cognisance, the outside hath been infinitely preferable to the in, whereof I have been further convinced from some late experiments. Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse. Yesterday I ordered the carcass of a beau to be stripped in my presence, when we were all amazed to find so many unsuspected faults under one suit of clothes. Then I laid open his brain, his heart, and his spleen, but I plainly perceived at every operation that the farther we proceeded, we found the defects increase upon us, in number and bulk; from all which I justly formed this conclusion to myself, that whatever philosopher or projector can find out an art to sodder and patch up the flaws and imperfections of Nature, will deserve much better of mankind and teach us a more useful science than that so much in present esteem, of widening and exposing them (like him who held anatomy to be the ultimate end of physic). And he whose fortunes and dispositions have placed him in a convenient station to enjoy the fruits of this noble art, he that can with Epicurus content his ideas with the films and images that fly off upon his senses from the superfices of things, such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature, leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up. This is the sublime and refined point of felicity called the possession of being well-deceived, the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.”

Notice how Swift emphasises the cruelty of genuine cynicism to push his readers towards approving a pleasant fashionable scepticism which he then cruelly redefines as the “possession of being well-deceived, the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.” Yes, that’s a bullseye hit, Jonathan! For the person who resists moral commitment lives in a world where many people are very committed to greed, injustice, lies, cruelty and violence, which may alter his/her life for the worse. You may think life is without meaning, but you want it to be comfortable. It’s a philosophy that has suited the liberal bureaucracy which has governed much of the US and Europe for 30, 40 years. Decent people, we say; fools among knaves, says Jonathan Swift.

The appeal of Donald Trump is that he rejects this fashionable scepticism, and admits the savage nature of reality. Yes, baby this is how it is! Men grab women by the pussy, most whites hate blacks, most straights are scornful of queers, most of us don’t care about our grandchildren, give us a cheap energy now no matter what it does to the climate, most of us think our country should be great and screw the rest.

To people who’ve become used to a diet of superficial blandness which denies the value of passionate commitment to any cause or truth, Trump offers the tasty option of prejudice, dollops of it, and makes it sound like true blood and guts. No wonder liberally minded people despair, seeing that the worse he speaks and acts, the more popular he becomes. People who are struggling to get an adequate life want something better than liberal niceties, and respond to something that seems to match the savagery of their own feelings. As many have noted, the Brexit campaign in the UK had Trump-like qualities and appealed to the same need.

As opposed to prejudice, ecumenical truth is broad; as opposed to cynicism, it is deep.

If a truth is to be understood across the oikumene, it must be capable of translation into the languages of all peoples. For this reason it cannot include elements that have meaning only in one place or time or culture. This is not a superficial broadening of the truth: even cherished local elements have to be left behind. St Paul knew how painful it would be for Jewish Christains to leave behind the Torah which had been the centre of their lives; but he demanded they let it go because it could only be a burden on the lives of gentile followers of Jesus; and because it had condemned Jesus to death. The ecumenical imperative went hand in hand with a revelation of the sectarian nature of his Jewish tradition; like all sectarian faiths it was a killer, and had to be left behind.

But if a truth is worth communicating across the inhabited world, it must also be deep in the sense of dealing with matters fundamental to humanity. Of course there may be messages about manners, customs, beliefs, world views, but an ecumenical message is about matters of life and death. Only a message of such importance can demand a hearing across cultures and natiional interests. When the Christian gospel was preached to the Saxon King Edwin, he asked his counsellor how to respond. According to Bede the counsellor replied:

The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed. 

The counsellor recognised an ecumenical truth because of its depth: it spoke of matters fundamental to humanity. As opposed to all cynicism the discourse of the house of God dares to address fundamental issues of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, life and death. It makes no apology for disrupting a comfortable scepticism about such matters but insists that there are real choices for persons and societies to make. Above all it refuses to confine all reality within the one dimension of socio-economic powers, but insists on a transcendent dimension of morality and truth which is just as much part of our humanity as navel fluff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the more dubious pleasures of public transport is overhearing other peoples’ conversations whether these are in the vehicle or on the phone. Travellers can be divided into three groups: those who want you to hear; those who speak so loudly you can’t help hearing; and those who want to be private whom you have to overhear with great concentration.

The young woman talking to the older woman in the next seat on the bus had a loud voice. I gathered that she was travelling from Edinburgh to Aberdeen with her baby, to take refuge in her parent’s house because her benefits had been reduced and even with the use of food banks she could no longer afford to pay rent. Yes, her man had left her when she told him she was pregnant. She’d been away from home for five years and wasn’t sure she would get on with her parents.

The man on the phone wanted to be heard, as he contacted his subordinates in Tokyo, Berlin, London and Los Angeles, issuing instructions with great warmth and enthusiasm. He was, he told them, on his way to visit his daughter in Ireland but would be in the States next week to finalise some business. Finally he spoke with a friend offering to share an executive facility with him at the Chelsea- Man U game at the weekend. Life was obviously good for him.

The economy, the household management, of God’s house, would prevent the existence of these extremes where one has manifestly too much and the other too little for a fruitful life. I have written that the principle, “from each according to ability; to each according to need” expresses well the provision of creative work and a living wage for all, as suggested by the image of everyone living as one family in one household of God. The life and teaching of Jesus emphasise the inclusiveness of God’s house – neither the sick nor the foreigner is excluded- as well as the practical love that family members should have for each other. Of course, the world will refuse this mutual generosity, dismissing it as unrealistic, but those whom the world excludes as unimportant are those with whom the Lord especially identifies ( “if you have not done it for them …. you have not done it for me”).

Work is important because it is an outlet for the creativity of family members as well as a way of feeding mouths. The parable of the “talents” suggests that creative development of the household and its resources rather than mere maintenance is required; while the parable of the workers in the vineyard points to the provision of a living wage for everybody. The notion of “rewards” is not excluded from this household but rather redefined: those who give up possession for the sake of the household will find themselves more than recompensed by the abundant shared life of the family.

There is no downgrading of material things – “your heavenly father knows you have need of them”- but there is an emphasis on modesty, contentment and gratitude as elements of the family lifestyle. The splendour of wildflowers is preferred to the extravagance of Solomon. The habitual anxiety imposed by competitive economies is absent from this household where the welfare of everyone is precious and the wealth provided by the Father ( that is, the wealth of the world) is seen as sufficient for the needs of all.

This economy extends its influence by generosity. A capitalist economy may provide a new business with an advance of capital; this economy provides an advance of honour, recognising that those who have lived by wrong standards may be trapped in their sense of social and self – condemnation. God’s household offers an advance of honour to those who want to turn from wrong ways. They are immediately accepted and valued. The story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19 is an illustration of this. There is no hatred of those who refuse to be part of the household or to live by its customs, which in turn means that its economy spends nothing on armies, weapons or spies. It steadily desires the good of its enemies, not their destruction.

Although it is an economy of modest demand it is not an economy of scarcity: the Father has made ample provision in the creation of the world. If we learn how to share fairly there will be no scarcity. We do not need to deprive others in order to provide for ourselves. No, except here we have to admit that this economy exists nowhere in its fullness, but only in conflict with other economies in the world: here and in many places it co-exists with liberal capitalism; in China with state capitalism; in Cuba with socialism; in Scandinavia with welfare capitalism; in many parts of the world, with peasant agriculture. There is no separate enclave where the house of God economy prevails. At best, it is visible in the ways by which its adherents deny the legitimacy of the worldly ecomomy in which they live and find effective strategies to soften its cruelties and challenge its injustice.

It was visible within the imperial economy of Palestine in Jesus’ time, in the life of his community of disciples, and in his smaller and larger gospel meals: his appearance as a guest at the tables of social outcasts, and his hosting of meals, like  the so-called last supper and the large gatherings of thousands. The sign of his own food economy is that he takes, blesses, breaks and shares, because that is also what he does with his own life. In that sense his food economy takes place under the signs of his suffering, death and resurrection. His opposition to the economy of the world is real and costly. This is also true of every attempt to introduce the economy of God’s household into the world. It always arouses opposition and brings suffering because it is always unpopular with the powers that be. This shows that God’s house (and its economy) is neither a fairy tale nor a pipe dream, but rather an eschatalogical reality which is present in the world now only under the sign of contradiction (the cross of Jesus) as the promise of God’s ultimate purpose in creation.

The secular ecomomy in which I grew up in Glasgow was that of the welfare state, where taxes were much higher than now, welfare provision more humane, public ownership of the major elements of the economy more extensive. It was in my view as near as a secular economy has come to the economy of God’s house. It had come about through the long labour of trades unions and other representatives of the working class; through the intellectual tradition of marxism as modified by socialist and liberal economists; through the organisation of the Labour Party; and through the sense of social cohesion fostered by the war against fascism.

The Church of Scotland was not untouched by this huge change in the life of society – its own inclusion of the working people it had long neglected dates from this time – butit had no consistent understanding of the vital connection between its gospel and the economy, and therefore no consistent support for the post-war reforms. So when Margaret Thatcher began to destroy so much of what had been achieved, the church offered only feeble opposition, not least because its theology of God’s house had no clear view of what its household management entailed. It had an opportunity to become a real church of the poor by sharing their struggles while communicating the good news of Jesus, but it failed to take it.

I was a minister in Aberdeen at that time, and although I expressed outrage at what the government was doing to the poor, and even led the local church in practical action to relieve poverty, it is significant that what we did  was for the poor rather than with them, charity rather than justice. We were committed enough but our theology lacked the content that would have guided us more fruitfully.

 

The newspapers report today on the discovery of a new species of orangutan named pongo tapanuliensis after the highland region of Sumatra where it lives. There are only 800 of these creatures, which means that it it goes immediately on the list of endangered species. The discovery increases the number of great apes to 8: the chimpanzee, the bonobo, the two species of gorilla, the now three species of orangutan and ….homo sapiens. US.

The classification of humans as a species of ape, clashes with the cultural assumptions of many civilisations, including our own, and with the religious tradition of Christianity, derived from the Bible, which draws a sharp distinction between humanity and the other creatures of God. Human beings were made in the image of God, as images of the god- kings of ancient empires were erected to represent their rule over a territory.  In the name of God they were commanded to fill the earth and have “dominion” over it. Modern critics of religion see this as a characteristic piece of human arrogance enshrined in religious tradition. They forget that the whole book of Genesis shows how God came to regard exactly this special creation as a mistake, and how he tried to rectify it. The classic arrogance of human beings is depicted as their eating of the fruit of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” This phrase in Hebrew is all inclusive, as if it said, “from A to Z”- it means the knowledge of everything.

Genesis shrewdly sees the human desire for the power of knowledge as a fundamental human flaw, which is nevertheless linked to human creativity and progress.  Far from being an being an uncritical assertion of human specialness, the Genesis tradition is a sorrowful critique of human folly. Given the latter, it’s not surprising that the true meaning of Genesis was neglected in favour of the separateness of humans from other living beings, culminating in the depiction of the podgy lump of Adam as God’s greatest creation on the Sistene Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo. More wisely, the Roman Catholic poet, Alexander Pope expressed the appalling paradox of humanity in his couplet:

” Great lord of all, in endless error hurled;

the glory, jest and riddle of the world!”

However conscious it was of human evil, the classic European tradition never departed from asserting a radical discontinuity between humanity and other living things. Even its scientific tradition has tended to glorify homo sapiens as the discoverer of truth, the only inhabitatant of earth capable of venturing beyond it. In sharp distinction from that, the modern discipline of ecology sees human beings as part of the ecosystem of the planet and its biosphere, and perhaps as the only creatures capable of destroying it.

Ecology is the study of the universe as a house of life, all of whose tenants are intricately linked to one another and to the planet, which in turn is intricately linked to the universe and its processes. Ignorance of these intricate connections, combined with the ability to step outside them, at least for periods of time, is what makes humanity so dangerous to everyone else in the house, who are limited by their own DNA to their own biological niches, unless impelled to change by some mutation.

Of course, mutation has constantly taken place under the pressure what Darwin called, “natural selection”; indeed, his revolutionary theory made humanity itself the result of natural selection.  The development of a great variety of post-Darwinian views of humanity makes it possible to see human beings as no more “final” in the process of evolution than the dinosaurs who dominated the earth and are gone. If human beings in their arrogant folly destroy their environment, the story of the earth will continue, as will the story of life, here or elsewhere.

There are consequences in this way of thinking for those, like me, who share its depiction of humanity as part of nature, but share also the Christian tradition of faith; the two seem incompatible. My own solution is to admit the shortcomings of Christian theology of life and to import ecological thinking into a revised theology that honours the intention of the Genesis writer while correcting his/her view of humanity as a unique creation of God. Indeed I would also want to correct the view that creation is in the past; as St Paul knew, God continues creating until all God’s children are born and set free. And God creates human beings as part of the life of the universe -which may be much more extensive than we yet know – that is, as tenants of the house of life, who must understand and respect the house rules, if they and other creatures are to flourish. The most important of these is:

never imagine that your welfare can be separated from the welfare of the whole house of life

from which we can deduce:

never imagine that you are more important than any other form of life

Another is:

you are part of the evolution of life

from we can deduce:

your body (meaning your physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual equipment)  contains wisdom learned by your species over millions of years of development- be conscious of it

I began this series of reflections by asking why my church had declined so significantly in my lifetime. One part of my answer is that it was insufficiently aware of its role as a tenant of God’s house of life,  to exemplify the house virtues of ecumenism, ecology and economy. In this blog, which focuses on ecology, I am suggesting that because of an inadequate theology of creation, which in turn led to a  inadequate understanding of human beings on earth, the church failed to express an ecological worship or announce an ecological gospel. The current sucess of  Blue Planet 2 as the UK’s most watched TV programme shows that ecological material is ideal for provoking wonder; and that persuading human beings to receive ecological wisdom as good news for them and their great grandchildren is an urgent necessity.

The church failed to see what David Attenburgh has clearly seen and transmitted in the same culture, through the same period of time. This has been due to its obsessions with forms of worship and evangelism to the exclusion of content. We thought our theological content was eternal and required no revision, forgetting that God speaks in the present and the future as well as the past, as if we had no doctrine of the Holy Spirit. We also neglected the ecological wisdom that in times of rapid change, species that fail to adapt will die.

Meanwhile, a big hello to my brothers and sisters in Christ, the tapanulas, who will need all the nelp they can get to survive in a world dominated by the most dangerous species of great ape.

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In my last blog I gave some information about what I mean by a “house of God” and the critical disciplines derived from it – ecumenism, economy and ecology, words whose first element comes from the Greek for house, “oikos.” I want to be clear that although the notion of God’s house is metaphorical, pointing to something I believe about the God of Jesus, the derived disciplines are patterns of human thought and behaviour in this world, which are open to use or question by anyone.

I would like to illustrate the virtue of ecumenism more precisely by referring to a report in the Scottish news today, about Christian responses to the stated intention of the Scottish Government to make illegal the smacking of children. There has been opposition from a body calling itself “The Christian Institute” which claims that the Bible is the inerrant guide to right behaviour and is in favour of the physical chastisement of children.

Now it is true that a few bible texts assume that errring children should be chastised, and that the book of Proverbs explicitly advises it:

Proverbs 23:13
Do not hold back discipline from the child, Although you strike him with the rod, he will not die.

Proverbs 23:14
You shall strike him with the rod and rescue his soul from the house of the dead.

Although this advice is clear enough some believers will question whether it ought to  stand in the light of the example and teaching of Jesus, who especially loved children and made them exemplars of the way to receive God’s rule. This is not a question which has occurred to the Christian Institute, whose fundamentalism isolates biblical texts from each other, and even more from any outside source of criticism. From that standpoint the Institute has denounced the recognition of homosexual people as having equal rights as citizens and has defended the right of believers to discriminate against them.

The virtue of ecumenism is relevant here, because it encourages believers to see their good news about God’s love as intended for all the world, for all communities of human beings; and therefore to distinguish its core message from its cultural accompaniments, rather than retreating into a sectarian insistence on the absolute truth of each item in its own cherished tradition. The classic biblical instances are the quarrel between Jesus and Pharisees over the interpretation of Sabbath legislation, and between St Paul and Jewish Christians on the issue of male circumcision. These show the importance of ecumenical practice which insists that the Sabbath law must be interpreted to include the healing of sick people and foreigners; and the sign of belonging to God’s people designed to include Gentiles. Both Jesus and Paul drew on other biblical material to controvert a narrow sectarian view of God’s will, but also more controversally claimed to act by the Spirit rather than the mere letter of the law.

In the matter of smacking children, the Institute will have some degree of popular support, some of it from brutal people who say smacking never did them any harm, but some of it from good and loving parents who have used  light smacks for the swift correction of dangerous behaviour by children. For sure, there is scope for a debate on such matters, but it is not helped by a sectarian insistence that all the right answers are in one holy book. Those who so insist are not really debating because they are sure they only know the truth.

The criterion of ecumenicity is not a recipe for relativism but rather a way of discriminating within a tradition what is essential from what is permissable, and both from what is mistaken. Immanuel Kant advised that only a principle upon which you hoped everyone might act could be a moral imperative. The ecumenical criterion advises that only those items of tradition with which everyone might engage creatively are part of the essential core of Christian faith.

There is a good story which illustrates this balance:

In the so-called dark ages, after the destruction of the western empire, churches in more remote areas developed their own traditions without much control from any centre. This was true in Ireland where the Celtic Churches followed their own customs of worship, community and even their own calendar of festivals. Now it happened that Pope Gregory felt a responsibility for these churches and sent one of his best bishops on a pastoral journey to meet them and teach them true Roman custom if necessary.

One day, alighting from his ship on the west coast of Ireland, the bishop came across three ancient hermits, who greeted him warmly. He asked them what they did, and was pleased to learn that they divided their time between prayer and the care of the poor people of the countryside. “That is good my brothers,” he said, “but how do you pray?”

” We kneel down, and we say to God, ‘We are three, you are three, holy is your name’,” he was told.

The bishop was shocked at such ignorance of correct doctrine. “From now on you must never say that, but the Our Father,which I will teach you.”

The old men were all apologies and happy to learn the new prayer from the bishop.

Later that day, after dark, when the bishop had retired to his cabin in his boat, he was urgently summoned on deck by sailors who pointed to a great light approaching the boat from the shore. Gradually the bishop was aware of three holy presences walking on the water towards the boat.  Finally he recognised the three hermits, who were calling to him, “Brother bishop, brother bishop!”

”What is it?” he asked in aamazement as they stood in the sea.

”We can get to Lead us not into temptation, but we’ve forgotten the rest.  Tell us again how to pray!”

”Return to your land, my holy brothers,” the bishop replied, “and when you pray, say,’ We are three, you are three, holy is your name’”

That was a true ecumenical answer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In my last blog I introduced three concepts as critical, noting that I had derived them from my bible study: ecumenism, ecology and economy, all of which are derived from the Greek word oikos = a house.

Ecumenism means thought and practice based on residence of the “oikumene”, the whole inhabited world.

Ecology means knowledge of the universe as the home of life

Economy means the household management of the the wealth of a community

My use of these terms rests on an understanding of “House of God” as one of the keys to understanding the bible. Some time ago I wrote more extensively about this topic, and readers can find my thoughts at: emmock.com oikos

Here I will simply remind the reader with knowledge of the Bible that from the book of Genesis to the book of The Revelation the presence of God in human houses (think of Abraham and “Behold I stand at the door and knock” ) and of human beings in God’s house (think of Jacob at Bethel, Solomon in the Temple, and the believers in heaven whose tears are wiped away by God), are central to the great stories of faith. There is a double meaning involved which is expressed in a pun in the story of Nathan and King David, who wanted to build a temple for God in Jerusalem. Nathan tells him that he will not build a house for God, but that if his descendants keep the true faith, God will build him a house, that is a dynasty, which will rule Israel. Nathan suggests that what God desires is not a house but a household, not a holy temple but a holy people.

This ambiguity, this fruitful quarrel between holy place and holy people, is expressed in many books of the bible. Jeremiah warns against those who think the “temple of the Lord” will keep the people safe in spite of their failure to be holy, while Isaiah sees the temple as the place of unity where jews and gentiles will worship God together. Jesus told his followers that God’s kingdom would dwell amongst them, but also demanded that Temple should be a house of prayer for all nations. The emphasis on household protects believers from imagining that being in a holy place is all that matters, while the temple as an image of the universe protects believers from imagining that the household of faith is all that matters to God.

The ecumenism of God’s house tells us that the truth of God’s love belongs to all creatures. It is never the property of one group, or race, or church. Although it is made known in Jesus it will never be fully expressed until the kingdoms of the world have become the kingdom of the Lord.

The economy of God’s house tells us that God’s gifts belong equally to all creatures. It is well expressed in the marxist slogan, “from each according to ability; to each according to need.” As opposed to marxism  and capitalism it does not advocate unlimited growth, which it sees as idolatry, but prays, “give US today OUR daily bread.”

The ecology of God’s house tells us that life belongs equally to all creatures. With our brother creatures we share life in this universe, learning to respect its natural systems as indicators of God’s wisdom. Killing our brothers and sisters for profit, convenience, sport, or pleasure is always  wrong; and even in necessity we should be careful to minimise it. Our attitude should be, “Let all things their creator bless/ and worship God in humbleness.”

A house of God is a part of God’s life which God has set aside as space for creatures: in God we live and move and have our being. God has limited Godself, withdrawing so that the creation may have freedom, absent from the house only in the sense that a mother is absent from her womb, which is separate from her will but nourished by her life. The purpose of God’s house is that God’s children may be born there. This birth is different from their natural birth; it is a completion of their natural birth which requires their full consent and cooperation. It is what St. Paul meant, when he wrote that the universe groans as if in the pains of labour awaiting the birth of God’s children. Jesus himself voluntarily submitted to this birth through the labour of his cross.

The church is a part of the universe in which its identity as God’s house  is recognised, lived and celebrated. The ecumenical, economic and ecological practices which I have outlined are a means of affirming that identity. It will always do so partially and imperfectly because the perfection of God’s house (hold) lies beyond the horizon of history, although even now it impinges on our history and tells us to wake up. A story from Mark’s gospel shows how this happened through Jesus, as he dealt with the traditional sexual taboos of his time:

 

Mark’s Gospel 5:22-43

Then came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Ja’irus by name; and seeing him, he fell at his feet,
23: and besought him, saying, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.”
24: And he went with him. And a great crowd followed him and thronged about him.
25: And there was a woman who had had a flow of blood for twelve years,
26: and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse.
27: She had heard the reports about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment.
28: For she said, “If I touch even his garments, I shall be made well.”
29: And immediately the haemorrhage ceased; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.
30: And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone forth from him, immediately turned about in the crowd, and said, “Who touched my garments?”
31: And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, `Who touched me?’”
32: And he looked around to see who had done it.
33: But the woman, knowing what had been done to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down before him, and told him the whole truth.
34: And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
35: While he was still speaking, there came from the ruler’s house some who said, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?”
36: But ignoring what they said, Jesus said to the ruler of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.”
37: And he allowed no one to follow him except Peter and James and John the brother of James.
38: When they came to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, he saw a tumult, and people weeping and wailing loudly.
39: And when he had entered, he said to them, “Why do you make a tumult and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.”
40: And they laughed at him. But he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was.
41: Taking her by the hand he said to her, “Tal’itha cu’mi”; which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise.”
42: And immediately the girl got up and walked (she was twelve years of age), and they were immediately overcome with amazement.
43: And he strictly charged them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

In the masterly storytelling of Mark the healing of a sick woman is nested in the story of the healing of a twelve year-old girl. Jesus is asked to come to Jairus’ house. It is noted that he is a synagogue official. On his way, in the midst of a crowd drawn to Jesus as the dwelling of God, a woman suffering from continuous bleeding who has found no help from doctors, touches his cloak. She, from within the socially constructed house of uncleanness, breaks through the taboo and knocks at God’s door. Jesus, the one in whom God dwells, reaches out across the taboo of purity, to invite her in.

But now messengers arrive to say that the girl has died. Perhaps Jesus’ delay in healing the sick woman has allowed this to happen but Jesus asks the father to trust him. When they arrive, the house has become a house of death: ritual wailing and other women’s ministrations to the dead have begun. The young Jewess, daughter of Zion, is in the power of the “strong man.” Religious rules isolated the dead as sources of pollution. As Jesus prepares to break into this “closed house” he is mocked for his cavalier attitude to death, “She’s only sleeping,” he says. Jesus goes to the girl, takes her hand, and says in Aramaic, “Talitha Cumi!” which means something like, “Time to get up, my wee dove.” She gets up, and walks. Her age, the age of transition from girlhood to womanhood is noted at the end of the story. A true understanding of this story, as of all the stories in Mark’s gospel is only given to the second- time reader who knows of Jesus own death and resurrection. From that perspective the story of Jesus walking into the house of death to bring life has added meaning, and the beautiful Aramaic injunction to the girl, can be heard as the eschatological call by the one in whom God dwells, for a new awakening of women, of society, of the world: it’s time to get up.

 

 

 

This blog continues my reflections on the church of Scotland and the sexual revolution of the late 20th century in this country.

I should be honest about my own place in the story which I have been telling. I along with most of my friends, just missed the revolution.  By reason of class and age I was part of the last generation to live by the old standards. At least mainly. I would be unjust if I let it be supposed that the church gave me only some unhelpful sexual morality. In fact, the church had been for me a warm and encouraging community in which many adults gave time and creativity to its varied organisations for children and young people. Its Youth Fellowship gave me the opportunity to mix with young men and women and an experience of responsibility for others. The preaching of the church offered me the gospel of God’s forgiveness of my sins, which I received as a precious truth. Like many of my generation, I stuck with the church because it had been good to me.

For my younger contemporaries however, especially those who rejected traditional sexual ethics and contributed to the the changing culture of the 60’s and 70’s, the church was identified with the the past, and with the voice of condemnation. Sadly, the church was good at offering guidance to young people but bad at listening to them. This disabled its occasional attempts, through special youth projects and the like, to understand even its own young people, far less the majority who had no experience of the church. My judgement is that most churches abandoned young people to cope with the huge changes that were taking place in social and interpersonal mores, which issued in the establishment of pre- and extra- marital partnerships as a way of sharing life as well as sex.

Had the churches been willing to listen to young people, they could have provided stable and affectionate support for the adventures of the young. They could have encouraged parents to understand their own children and to give their partnerships a measure of material help. They could have offered the Jesus of the Gospels as someone who only ever condemned self-righteousness, while challenging people to live a tough love. They could have diagnosed the genuine evil of the commercialisation of sex by the market, especially by the expanding youth market and its attendant media. They could have protected young women from fleeing the imposition of marraige and family only to become disposable objects for liberated males. They could have invented special blessings and rites of passage to accompany  key moments in a new timetable of maturity.  In other words, the churches could have played a creative role in social change but chose rather to defend a culture which, although it had Christian elements, was fashioned by a particular class (middle)at a particular time, (postwar Britain) under a particular economy (welfare capitalism).

There are doubtless many ways of analysing this failure. I will use three critical categories which I have developed through my biblical studies: ecumenism, economy and ecology, which all contain the Greek word oikos = house.

ECUMENISM means the practice of acting according to your membership of the OIKUMENE, the inhabited world, and is the opposite of sectarian, which means acting according to your membership of your own group. The first Christians, through St Paul, recognised that faith in Jesus was ecumenical; it could not be limited to Jesus’ fellow Jews, nor defined by Jewish custom and history. This was revolutionary in its time and remains so even in a world where “globalism” is a cliche designed to hide the sectarian interests of the most powerful people on earth. The word ecumenical has been highjacked by the movement for unity amongst churches, but it is much broader than that, encouraging people to see that what they take for granted in their place and time (like circumcision amongst Jewish men) may be utterly meaningless to people in other times and places ( like the first century gentiles visited by St. Paul)

Ecumenical thought is especially aware of the geography and history of the inhabited world, knowing that these often determine beliefs and customs, including one’s own. This does not dissolve its own convictions but increases awareness of their limitations and encourages their further development. Ecumenical custom values contact with people round the world, and obeys the ancient command to welcome strangers. In an era menaced  by sectarian identities it acts on the basis that we all come from this planet. (So far)

I would argue that the church of my childhood was insufficiently ecumenical, imagining that its sexual ethics and its family structures were right for all times and all places, which prevented it, for example, from understanding those of its own Bible. There is nothing in that Bible which limits the number of wives a man may have. Jesus forbade divorce but he did not forbid a man to marry more than one woman. More generally it failed to see the patriarchal nature of its own traditions and the inequality they excused, making it unsympathetic to the arguments of female liberation.

Instead it slid towards a sectarian mode of existence which was insufficiently critical of its own history and of the world in which it ministered, while holding fiercely to its traditions.  This incipient sectarianism disabled its ministry towards young people in a time of rapid social change. Its house was not open to its own children.

ECOMOMY means household management in Greek and has been expanded to mean the management of a national or international budget, including goods amd services,  taxes and pensions. Churches, as well as citizens, live within particular economies, which determine the opportunities open to their citizens, through inherited wealth, paid employment or state benefits. Within the capitalism of western Europe the division of the population into landowners, business and professional people, wage labourers and the unemployed has come into being and continues today. That structure permits individual success and failure but also determines that there shall always be the rich, the adequately remunerated, the poor and the destitute.

The old church aystem of parishes meant that all sorts and conditions of people belonged to the one local church, but the Scottish Disruption of 1843, which brought the Free Church into existence, although evangelically inspired, led to the establishment of many new congregations and the virtual abandonment of the old parishes. In 1929 when the free and established churches reunited, many parishes included only a single class of citizens and  congregations were less aware than previously of the relationship between wealth and family values.

As for example: the relative license in sexual matters granted to the sons of substantial landowners was balanced by strict control over marriage, since that affected the future of the family’s property. The late marriages of the professional classes made possible the lengthy education necessary for their children’s success. As there was no place in the economic system for homosexual people, the moral system also denied their value. The meagre income of many working families put such a continuous pressure on the mother and father, that the marriages  were frequently put at risk.

The church was unaware of these relationships, seeing moral judgements along with their theological underpinnings as separate from practical matters like money, food, clothes or work. In the case of young people it was ignorant of how commercial interests encouraged the developing youth culture to be competetive, for example in sexual attractiveness, in order to generate profits and expand their markets. A church that was more aware of the economy might have helped young people to distinguish between what they wanted and what they were being sold. A church that  had exposed the economic roots of its patriarchal values would have been well-placed to challenge the exploitation of young women endemic in the new sexual culture of All You Need Is Love.

The wise management of a house requires a critical knowledge of the wider economy.

ECOLOGY is a term invented in the 19th century to designate the study of the universe as a home for life. It is concerned with the natural systems that produce, sustain and enhance living beings. It is especially concerned with ecosytems, that is, with the interrelationships of living beings with each other and with the material processes of the planet.

Sex is one of the strategies developed by living beings on earth to secure the survival of species by determining an unpredictable mixture of genetic material in every newborn. The sexual activity of human beings was evolved through the sexual activity of  mammals, birds, fish and even insects. Any genuine understanding of human sexuality must interpret it as the genetically coded result of millions of years of evolution, which has as its primary purpose, the survival of the species.

The fact of self-consciousness in human beings means that sexual activity is not simply instinctual but mediated by human understanding and relationship. It is however, in a way which greatly disturbed St. Augustine, not completely under the control of the human will. An ecological understanding of human sexuality will see it as a meeting place of nature and nurture, of instinct and personality, of compulsion and choice, of mating and love.

Jesus’ understanding of sexuality is thoroughly ecological: “In the beginning God made them male and female….therefore a man shall leave his family and cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.” Human beings share the division of other creatures into male and female. The human male is under compulsion to unite sexually with a woman, and the one flesh of the sexually united couple is blessed by God.

The moral teachings of my church about sex, at the beginning of the 1960’s, were untouched by any ecological wisdom. Instinct, for example, was seen as merely animalistic and therefore bad; there was no appreciation of our animal heritage, or of the wisdom of the species laid down in our genes and the working of our bodies. The sexual discourse of the church emphasised the control of the human will rather than any art by which sex might enhance our capacity to be truly human. Unlike Hinduism (The Kamasutra) or Islam (The Perfumed Garden) Christianity produced no classics on the art of sexual love. Its recognition of the the frailty of human existence and the permanence of salvation led it to neglect the place of humanity in the web of created life.

Along with its younger members the church might have produced a more graceful sexual ethic which valued pleasure and fun but retained a commitment to tenderness and faithfulness between partners as elements of the “one flesh” which Jesus valued. Its failure to do so was due to its lack of ecological understanding. The house of God includes the created world and its processes.

I was a young minister of the church I am criticising and must acknowldege my own share in its failure. Although I was already aware of some of the above, I  failed to make a disciplined analysis of the problem, or to develop, along with others perhaps, a model of the kind of teaching and nurture which was lacking. It is out of a sense of missed opportunity that I offer this analysis now, with a view to offering further crtiques and proposals for the church’s future, based on the three categories I have used in this blog.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some kind readers have said these words to me at times, indicating that while they liked what I had written well enough, they weren’t sure I could cope with anything that demanded more stamina. I could argue that in my other blog, emmock.com, I have commented on several complete books of the Bible, sometimes translating them as well, but that doesn’t prove I could carry a sustained argument on a big subject. All of which is just a preface to announcing my decision to tackle the question of why, over the course of my lifetime, institutional Christianity in Scotland has declined continuously so that on any Sunday, less than 10% of the population will actually be in church. A slightly larger percentage will state their intention of going to church, but some of them won’t make it. This is the sort of statistic which leads my own denomination to ask how it can survive, and  Secularist Society to demand that all religious faiths are separated from the state and its institutions.

Where has the church gone wrong?

One response is to argue that such decline is evident at other times in history, and that the church may be blameless and helpless in the face of cultural movements it cannot control. If I describe those movements as typical of liberal democracies with advanced capitalist economies, you may think it unlikely that any church could do much to control or even influence them. But churches are part of the changing society, and 60 years back, when I was a teenager, a much larger part than now. It is reasonable therefore to consider whether they have, by their own action or inaction, contributed to their own decline.

I am going to confine my analysis to the Church of Scotland of which I have been a member since childhood, and to the years since I left school, namely from 1960 to  the present day. I do not think I need to write a chapter reminding you of all the societal changes in Britain in that period; they are many and profound. But in any review of these changes, I cannot find any in which churches were leaders or more than a very few in which they were a major influence. You might think that such a significant section of society might have at least one or two beneficial changes to its credit, but I can find none. Not one of the main moral, political, economic, artistic, technological or scientific or even spiritual changes in British society over these years has been led by the churches.

That seems to me an important judgement that deserves analysis, but given the huge number of changes and their complexity any extensive analysis across the board would be well beyond my capacity. On the other hand, an examination of just one area of significant change might be possible and illuminating. I’m going to focus on the changes in sexual attitudes and behaviour in Scotland since 1960. I’ll list those I consider most important:

1. Effective contraception and the availability of abortion have made it possible for heterosexual people to have sex without making babies.

2. It is accepted that teenagers are sexual beings and will probably have sex during their achool years.

3.  It is accepted that a large proportion of young people will form significant but temporary sexual partnerships outside of marriage.

4. The sexualisation of large areas of social life – music, fashion, news, social media- some of it extreme by any standards is taken for granted.

5. All forms of consensual sex are legal for people over sixteen, and most sexual orientations are recognised as of equal worth, in spite of lingering prejudice.

6. The revolution in the status of women can be overstated, but the degree of equality achieved would astonish my parents’ generation.

7. In 1960 about 5% of births were outside marriage, at present almost 50%.

8. Over the period, the divorce rate first increased, peaked, and has been falling for the past few years, due to cohabitation making marriage more of a personal choice than a required status

With regard to most of these, my church has played a reactive rather than a fully participative or leading role. It has rightly seen that some of these changes are far from beneficial, but even its opposition has been largely ineffective. The one exception to this criticism is instructive. In 1968 The Church of Scotland agreed to the ordination of women as ministers in full equality with their male counterparts. Although many professions had for years admitted women to positions of authority, and one or two churches, notably the Methodists, had already accepted women ministers, this was a bold decision by my church, placing it alongside progressive groups in Scottish society which were promoting the equality of women.  The results have been overwhelmingly beneficial, transforming parishes with new practices and the fellowship of clergy from a smelly male club into something much healthier. Three women have been elected as Moderators of our General Assembly, representing the Church for their year of office. The public face of the church has been a rebuke to all who want to deny the equality of women, especially those Christian denominations who offer spurious biblical arguments in favour of male superiority.

Contrast that example of leadership with the church’s attitude to the revolution in the sexual attitudes and behaviour of teenagers and young adults. Affluence, pop culture, contraception, along with the far from altruistic encouragement of  market forces, accompanied a gradual but very definite rejection by young people of the conventional morality about pre-marital sex. This had frequently been two-faced: boys and young men might sow their wild oats,  but girls and young women should remain virgins until marriage, because that’s what men wanted. Nobody asked which females were to be the receptacles of the wild oats, or how, in the face of such sowing, a sufficient supply of virgins could be maintained.

The church generally avoided the topic – never in all my years in the (Christian) Boys Brigade was the topic discussed, unless the shinyness of one’s leather belt and the blancoing of one’s haversack were some kind of symbolic indicators. Public teaching by the church always pointed to marriage as the right context for sex, and recommended chastity outside it. Homosexual activity was condemned as unnatural and harmful. God had designed the sexual apparatus of male and female for use in marriage alone and any other use was not in his plan. Except…. it was kind of admitted…..somewhat shamefully…. that “occasional masturbation” might take place. Occasional! Millions of acts of masturbation helped the males through years of restraint, into the sexual license of marriage. What the girls did is unknown to me.

Of course, young men and women did get together. My working class friends seemed to find enthusiastic young women without much trouble, and because they were wage- earners from age 14, were able to marry in their late teens, whereas middle class young people were not expected to marry until their mid-twenties or later leading to a variety of sexual strategies which fell short of “going the full way.”

The economics of liberal capitalism demanded the postponement of marriage until mature adulthood; the church demanded chastity outside marriage, and the young people caught in this trap rebelled. Pop music and so-called youth culture, along with the gurus of liberation, advocated sex as a pleasurable experience without any moral strings attached. From year to year the church deplored the evidence of “increased promiscuity”, the sexual content of books, magazines and films, the easy availability of contraception, not to mention the “animalistic posturing”of pop idols, all to little avail. Meanwhile it left at least one generation of young people to find its own way towards better sexual attitudes and relationships. Small wonder if in that endeavour many young people made serious mistakes which hurt themselves and others, were frequently led into unwise behaviour by the idiot pronouncements of their favourite entertainers, and, hampered by persisting inequalites, women were disadvantaged and abused; but great credit to them all that out of this chaos there emerged the new form of cohabitation called partnership, in which men and women, men and men, women and women, committed themselves for longer or shorter periods of time to share dwellings, love, sex and the fortunes of life. There are no formal rules for partnerships, but rather a broad expectation that partners are equal, and will treat each other with respect, honesty and affection.  There are of course exploitative partnerships as there are marriages, but the social usefulness of this new relationship cannot be denied. It was invented by young people,  while the institutions of society which might have helped them, parents, educators and churches stood on the sidelines and carped.

It’s not surprising that younger people deserted a church which had deserted them, while standing in judgement on their creativity.

(more to follow)

 

 

 

This famous expression of Robert Burns in his satirical address to King George 3rd in the year 1778, means in English that “facts are lads that won’t be moved,” which remains true even when we know that facts don’t meet us ready made but have to be constructed. E= MC2 may be a fact about the universe but it took Einstein a bit of labour to find it. Human beings do not live by facts alone but we should all be ready to live with facts even if they contradict our cherished myths or opinions. Mr Trump is convinced for no good reason that Iran is a very wicked country, possibly because it harbours a desire for influence in the world similar to that of the USA, but he would do well to look carefully at the facts, as befits a man who is always complaining about fake news.

My weekend dose of science from the Spanish newspaper El Pais brings me a story which shows the relationship between myth and facts very clearly.

For many centuries people have puzzled over the great stone statues which stand in numbers on Easter Island, in which the heads are at least half of the whole artifact, so much so that some travellers described them as simply heads or faces. After more than a century of research archeologists describe them as images of ancestors, believed to hold ‘mana’ or sacred power, to protect their living descendants, and perhaps the island itself. They were constructed continuously over a period of 250 years between 1250 and 1500 CE, and this competitive cult – the size of your ancestor’s image was important- may have exhausted the resources of the culture that produced them.

But who were the islanders? And how had these human beings reached such remote pacific islands? Some historians considered the statues to have links with Amerindian culture, Aztecs, Mayans,  maybe, but their critics pointed out that with the very primitive water transport available the huge distance would be uncrossable. Cue Thor Heyerdahl whose Kon-Tiki raft with its crew sailed from Peru to Polynesia across 5000 miles of ocean, proving to Heyerdahl’s satisfaction the possibility that the  islands were settled by immigrants from South America. He liked  myths of jouneying, believing also that some  Caribbean islands had been settled from West Africa

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Scientists have just finished testing DNA from five Easter islanders, three whom.ived after European/ American contact with the islanders and two from before. The three showed some elements common to Amerindian DNA and the two showed none, but instead some common elements with the so-called Denisovans, a human group contemporaneous with Neanderthals, which can be traced in the populations of the Asian mainland. It seems the original Easter Islanders came from Asia.

After many years of speculation, mythology and argument, one scientific discovery is enough to establish the fact. Before the DNA sequencing technique was available the issue was open to argument. Now a fact is established and further understanding of Easter Island history has to start with it. The rigour, beauty and value of scientific investigation are made evident by this story.

There are many Christians who believe that Jesus earthly corpse was raised from the grave by God’s power leaving the empty grave behind. If so, the DNA of the risen and exalted Jesus ought to match up with that of other first century Jewish corpses. It might seem blasphemous to ask the Son of God for a blood sample, but if it could be arranged it would help settle matters of theological debate. Of course the same believers may point out with some justification that Jesus’ DNA was already odd, as it derived from his mother and the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, there is also a argument that Jewish racial identity, as asserted in the  Bible is itself a myth, which could be examined by DNA evidence

from the past and the present. It is possible that instead of issuing from the loins of Abraham, Jews are a congregation of many races, pressed into racial purity by their own propaganda and the prejudice of others.

The power of science to establish facts amd settle arguments is disturbing to those who love the myths which can be tested by its procedures.

I would argue, as indeed Jesus himself did, and his first followers, that the “DNA” shared by his true brothers and sisters is not physical but spiritual, based on a commitment to the justice and goodness of God, and proven in voluntary poverty, sorrow at evil, generosity, peace-making, mercy, purity of heart and readiness to suffer for justice. These characteristics are also matters of fact, which establish a believer’s likeness to Jesus, and demonstrate his contemporary aliveness in a way that goes beyond all mythology.

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It’s some time since I gave my readers any information about my blog’s mascot, Desperate Dan, whose statue strides across the city centre of Dundee accompanied by his dog called Dawg. It is the most populat piece of public art in the city, with locals and visitors. Somehow it works as a symbol of Dundee and its people.

He was in invented in 1938 in the Dandy, the famous comic published by D C Thomson, who still flourish today. Desperate Dan (DD) was originally a wild western desperado, but over time evolved into the giant muscleman who used his strength to help others, especially children. His most famous habit is his addiction to cow pies, enormous meaty dishes with the horns sticking out of the pastry. A succession of gifted artists drew the cartoons, whose bright colours and bold forms delighted generations of children. Even today, years after the sad death of the Dandy, DD Annuals and paraphenalia sell well, especially at Christmas, and a huge DD mural decorates the gable wall of the Thomson building.

What’s the appeal? Well, unlike DD, Dundonians male and female, are neither tall nor  large and may relish the thought that a huge, strong and genial giant is looking after their welfare: in the face of officialdom, the Law, Nazi Germany, employers, the Church and bullies everywhere, Desperate Dan was on their side, and would, however clumsily, help them win the battle. The clumsiness was important; Dan was a superhero with the human quality of messing up, which especially endeared him to his admirers. He wasn’t like Superman who never made a mistake, which allowed children and adults to identify with him. There were attempts over the years to broaden his appeal, by giving him a family – I think I remember an Aunt Aggy, and maybe a Squaw, yes, honest, a native american, but these soon vanished as they only detracted from the lasting appeal of the Big Man.

The process of developing a popular superhero has been called, by people with too much time on their hands, as “mythopoeic enhancement” which adds to the hero’s profile elements from the history and character of the readers, so that he/she becomes their hero. The Greeks, who were addicted to warfare and wisdom, could identify with Homer’s heroes, the angry warrior Akhilles and the wily wiseman Odysseus. As in the case of these heroes, popular response to the early stories of DD contributed to the further development of the character.

Nobody should think that the technical accomplishment used by a comic book artist, who is required to invent and present episode upon episode, is trivial. Some of the greatest artists like Michelangelo have used their techniques to great advantage, as he did on the Sistene Chapel ceiling. But the enhancement of the myth by elements of character and ability which come from its audience’s experience demands an equal if less recognised skill. People may show reverence or awe before some reprentations of heroes; DD has always been able to count on the affection of his admirers.

So where does that leave Jesus, the other hero of my blog, which I called xtremejesus because the UK Government classified as extreme anything that contradicted  British values or denied our national narrative, such as the Jesus of the Gospels? Isn’t he too an invented figure, mythopoeically enhanced? Isn’t he the work of  skilled artists, who also had the ability to incorporate into their story fundamental experiences and convictions of the people for whom they wrote, using material from the tales told and retold in their communities. Yes, he is, but unlike DD who has no particular time and place, no history, no identification, Jesus is presented as living in Galilee and Judaea in the time of named emperors, kings and officials, having an ordinary trade, that of carpenter/ builder, belonging to an identifiable family, and entering recorded history as a result of his challenge to named religious leaders and a named official of the Roman Empire. The earliest evidence about him comes in the letters of St Paul written less than 20 years after his death. Unlike superheroes, Jesus died, which is a reasonable indication of real humanity. So Jesus was a historical person, about whom we know at least some facts.

But surely I’m not suggesting that the Gospels with their angels, demons, miracle cures and walking on the water, are factual accounts of their hero? No, I’m not; the Gospels include much invention and mythopoeic enhancement. The usual critical interpretation of what the gospel stories are doing is that they are turning Jesus into a superhero by giving him abilities which are supernatural. If we take the story of Jesus stilling the storm in Mark, we are inclined to agree: Jesus is described as stopping a storm at sea by his command. And it looks as if the author does want his audience to think of Jesus’ supernatural power, for he finshes his story with the question, “ who is this that even the wind and sea obey him?

If we want a fuller understanding of what’s going in this story we have to look at the Jewish consciousness of the sea, displayed in their  Bible. The sea is the image of pre-creation chaos in Genesis 1 and of the return of chaos in the story of the flood. The Psalms and the book of Job praise God for controlling the turbulence of the great deep. The chaotic potential of the sea was part of the thought and experience of every Jew. It was particularly linked to evil and death. So when Mark tells his audience that the boat with Jesus and his disciples is crossing the sea of Galilee, the audience pictures a journey through chaos to safety, which is of course an image of the journey of faith. When the storm strikes the boat, Jesus is asleep, apparently uncaring, as indeed he might seem to be to disciples facing personal danger or persecution. This mysterious sleep of Jesus mimes the fact of his death – this Jesus who commands the ship of faith, appears dead when chaos strikes. But when he awakens, demonstrating his risen life, he can issue the command to the elements of chaos, “Peace, be still” because he speaks in the power of God. The result, in nature and in the minds of his disciples is a “great calm.”

In this case the mythopoeic enhancement uses imagery from the Jewish culture, with which however people of all cultures can identify, to address the experience of abandonment common to all humanity. Just when terror strikes, when the diagnosis is bad, when the baby is stillborn, when the car crashes, when the holiday is interrupted by a hurricane, when the mortgage cannot be paid, just then the hero, the saviour, appears to be asleep or dead or not to care if we drown, Then we, the audience are told two things: one, he’s in the boat with us, sharing the danger, we are not on our own; two, when he responds to our fear, as he will, he can speak a word from beyond us, a creative word which calls the chaos to order.

The story is if you like a dream sequence depicting Jesus the crucified and risen Lord who is with his people in the fragile ship of faith. A simple moment from the history of Jesus, crossing a lake in a boat with his disciples, becomes a story about the One who was dead and is alive for evermore. Often miracle stories are pieces of magical realism that depict a fact about the relationship of Jesus and his followers, rather than about the life of Jesus in Palestine.

Even when the gospel story is apparently ordinary history, as for example, the trial of Jesus, the magical realism is still present – just listen to that cock crowing three times! We can interpret the enhancement of the history of Jesus as a subtle way of communicating the human meaning of his life and death and rising. And besides, they’re good stories.

Desperate Dan is a product of my culture, Jesus is the producer of my faith. Two good men.