Thich Nhat Hanh, known to his community in France as Thay, is an 88 year old Buddhist monk who has been an inspiration to me, since in the middle of the Vietnam war he went to the USA to make known the suffering of the Vietnamese people and to encourage peace. He met Martin Luther King and became his spiritual brother. In his later life he founded the Plum Village Community in France, where he has taught the truths of Buddhism from a Zen perspective. He is known throughout the world. Recently he suffered a severe stroke from which he is gradually recovering.

For me, although his personal example of humility, courage and integrity  goes beyond all his other teaching, his exploration of what he calls “interbeing” has helped my understanding of the Christian doctrine of the “communion or partnership of the Holy Spirit.” (see my previous two blogs on this site)

Thay teaches that what we consider as our personal identity is “empty” – meaning that when we come try to determine its content – is it our body, our brain, our personality, our social position-  ?  we realise that it is none of these and cannot be all of them. What we are cannot be defined and is not fixed. We do not end at our finger tips: the molecules of our skin are contiguous and continuous with the molecules of the space in which we move or the molecules of the hand of the person we are greeting. Conventionally of course we see ourselves and other as discrete beings, and this convention is not harmful unless we take it too seriously, as  for example when we think we can damage others and our fellow creatures without damaging ourselves. For Thay, nothing that exists has self- identity: the world is empty – of substantial selves, empty and marvellous. He means that we are not fixed, static, separate entities, but rather changeable, mobile, communal entities in a world of relationships. If we try to hang on to our individual identity and see everything from the perspective of our individual interests, we perpetuating an illusion and causing suffering to ourselves and others. By means of disciplined meditation we need to waken up to the shared life which is available to us NOW, in this present moment, as we walk along the street or sit at our desk or care for our cattle. This dimension of awareness he calls “interbeing” because in it we realise the life we share with all the elements of the universe. He sees this awakening to life, this enlightenment, as the aim of the Buddha’s teaching – and of Jesus’ teaching too!

It doesn’t sound much like Jesus, does it?  But perhaps if we call to mind Jesus’ teaching about the self:

the one who tries to save his self will lose it

unless a seed falls into the ground and dies it cannot bear fruit

deny self and take up your cross and follow me

not to mention his words on interbeing:

Abide in me and I will abide in you

– we may be able to see a point of contact.

I consider that there are real similarities between what Thay calls interbeing and what the Christian tradition calls the communion of the Holy Spirit. The Buddhist teaching works if you like, downwards, by denying the individual self to reach a world of relationships, whereas the Christian teaching works upwards, accepting the individual self but linking it to a world of relationships. The Buddhist teaching makes the individual self unreal; the Christian teaching insists that the communal identity, experienced in the assemblies of Jesus, is the true fulfilment of the individual. Both reject the conventional view of individual identity in ways that can seem alarming and painful. For the Buddhist interbeing is truth, for the Christian it is God’s Spirit; for the Buddhist it is the sangha: for the Christian, the church; for the Buddhist it involves an acceptance of personal death; for the Christian it is a rebellion against death and the hope of eternal life; the Christian teaching is more theological, the Buddhist more ecological. For both however, communion, interbeing, as opposed to the individual ego and all its desires, is a saving reality.

In the Plum Village this teaching and its accompanying disciplines are an every day matter. In many Christian churches the communion of the Holy Spirit has been relegated to special occasions or to the prayer meeting. A comparison with the assemblies of Jesus depicted in the Acts of the Apostles, in which the Spirit is a constant companion, shows what some contemporary churches have lost and what attracts people to Pentecostal fellowships. As I do not find Pentecostalism either honest or attractive I hope for a renewal of spiritual practice in my own church. The Buddhist teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh about interbeing suggests some ways forward.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week I am on holiday with my family in Oban on the West coast of Scotland. I suppose over the years I have been on more holidays here than I can easily remember, as a result of which it is populated for me not only with indigenous Obanites but also with dear people who shared these holidays with me, some at a distance, some gone from this earth.

From my window I can look out over Oban bay towards the island of Mull, with its mountains, which are a little misty this morning but showing glimpses of their snowy summits lit by the sun. The sea is calm, light grey in colour; the Calmac ferry with its red funnel crosses my line of vision heading north and west to the islands. All is well. God lives here.

For me this is God’s own country because it’s my own country. I grew up in the west of Scotland, in Glasgow, from where as a child and a teenager I explored the west coast on bicycle and bus. For that reason I could tell I was in the west even if I was blindfolded, from the scent of the air and its softness on the skin. I am used to its mild, wet, climate. And its characteristic landscapes of water and mountain; its intimate glens and creeks, its acid soils with surprising patches of green and small wildflowers, are for me both familiar and heart-breaking. This is the earth I will leave reluctantly when I die.

All of this comes about because I have been moulded by this ecosystem and am therefore better adapted to it than to any other. If this has happened in my short lifetime, what is it like for the common gull that sits on the roof of the house across the road? Here is a creature which has evolved over millions of years to survive in this ecosystem, and has particularly adapted to the presence of human beings and their trash. What, I wonder, does the gull sense when it moves around this town? Does it feel pleasure in familiar sensations, does it have its own memories, its own God?  I shall never know because it cannot articulate its thoughts to me, but I know that I share much of its DNA, and some of the useful inventions of evolution, like eyes and gut and brain. I may imagine my brain is superior, but perhaps it pities the limited mobility which forces me to go through the whole pantomime of taking a boat to Mull, which it can reach in a few flicks of its wings.

Just as I cannot imagine that my own adaptation to the west of Scotland ecosystem is irrelevant to the purposes of the creator of ecosystems, no more can I imagine that the adaptation of the gull is irrelevant. Life is not a single project, however much human beings wish to imagine that all ecosystems are simply made for them. If,as Nikos Kazantsakis thought, ( see my last blog on this site)  the great cry of the creator pushes humanity to evolve beyond the constraints of biological life, we should not judge that all other forms of life are merely discardable stages on this quest. From the microbes that inhabit our gut, to the gull, which in one swoop now crosses the streets to the waterfront, we are partners in the one project of life on this planet, and may have other partners we have yet to meet from other planets. It is mere arrogance that allows human beings to define evolution by its supposed end point, namely ourselves. The spirit of creation, which has inspired evolution is not competition but communion. And we only know its life-giving energies when we see ourselves as part of a communion with all our fellow creatures, of all life, yes, even of the forms of life which are extinct: a partnership of all the living and all the dead.

This conviction requires more precise definition and more ample illustration which it will receive in subsequent blogs.

 

 

Blowing through heaven and earth, and in our hearts and the heart of every living thing, is a gigantic breath-a great Cry-which we call God. Plant life wished to continue its motionless sleep next to stagnant waters, but the Cry leaped up within it and violently shook its roots: “Away, let go of the earth, walk!” Had the tree been able to think and judge, it would have cried, “I don’t want to. What are you urglng me to do-You are demanding the impossible. But the Cry, without pity, kept shaking its roots and shout- ing, “Away, let go of the earth, walk!”

It shouted in this way for thousands of eons; and lo! as a result of desire and struggle, life escaped the motionless tree and was liberated.

Animals appeared-worms-making themselves at home in water and mud. “We’re just fine here,” they said. “We have peace and security; we’re not budging!”

But the terrible Cry hammered itself pitilessly into their loins. “Leave the mud, stand up, give birth to your betters ! “

“We don’t want to! We can’t!”

“You can’t, but I can. Stand up!”

And lo! after thousands of eons, man emerged, trembling on his still unsolid legs.

The human being is a centaur; his equine hoofs are planted in the ground, but his body from breast to head is worked on and tormented by the merciless Cry. He has been fighting, again for thousands of eons, to draw himself, like a sword, out of his animalistic scabbard. He is also fighting-this is his new struggle-to draw himself out of his human scabbard. Man calls in despair, “Where can I go? I have reached the pinnacle, beyond is the abyss.” And the Cry answers, “I am beyond. Stand up!” 

I promised to write about the Holy Spirit, yet here I’ ve quoted from the work of Nikos Kazantsakis a passage which is in many respects not Christian at all. But it is a magnificent piece of writing nonetheless and has one great virtue: it links the divine spirit with evolution. The theory of evolution is always developing and cannot be regarded as simply the truth about life on Earth, but it is supported by millions of bits of evidence, from Darwin’s Galapagos finches to more recent data on the evolution of antibiotic-immune bacteria. Any doctrine of the divine spirit which ignores its relationship to evolution is simply failing to engage with reality.

Even in modern times theologians have ducked this issue, not only because there’s nothing in the bible about it, but even more because the process of evolution seems so accidental: this or that change took place in the environment favouring the development of this mutation and the extinction of all members of the species that lacked it, not to mention events in which millions of species were exterminated by catastrophe. It doesn’t sound like the orderly creation pictured in Genesis chapter 1. But then, the present and predicted course of global warming doesn’t sound much like Genesis 1 either. Any doctrine of the spirit which has no relation to evolution will also have no relation to our current ecological crisis.

Kazantsakis’ imagination is bold enough to take on the issue of evolution. Indeed he interprets evolutionary development as the process by which the divine spirit creates a true humanity, perhaps even a super- humanity. God’s spirit ruthlessly draws humanity further and further away from the primal soup. At first sight this seems to offer nothing to Christian thinking, as it accepts the cruelties of the process as justified by its purpose and exempts the ‘cry’ itself from bearing any of the pain of its creatures. But it has clear virtues:

1. It comes to terms with the processes of evolution and thereby makes links with the sciences and with the facts of life in the world. Yes, it gives a very anthropocentric theory of evolution, but at least it dares to deal with it.
2. It recovers for the divine spirit something of the ruthlessness evident in the biblical picture which Christian theology has downplayed. The still small voice that speaks to Elijah does not as in the hymn bring calm but sends him off to arrange a series of assassinations.( 1 Kings 19)  The spirit that animates the prophets threatens wrath and disaster. The vast vision of the book of the Revelation depicts earthly and cosmic disaster. And gentle Jesus? He’s the one who tells his disciples that they have to hate their parents, that it’s better to maim themselves than be led into sin, and that many catastrophes will precede God’s Rule and only those who endure to the end will be saved. These are not texts that were ever memorised in Sunday School. Without doubt however there is real ruthlessness about the Jesus of the Gospels, which perhaps only the sterner forms of Calvinism have preserved. “Ah but Jeannie,” said Elizabeth to her sister who was denouncing her neighbour for whistling on the Sabbath, “Even the Lord himself broke the Sabbath rules.” “He did so,” replied Jeannie, “And I dinna think the better of him for it.”
3. While I disagree with Kazantsakis about nature and goal of the Spirit’s persistence, I welcome the rigour he brings to the character of the Spirit, which has been travestied by ecstatic babbling with fake cures of fake illnesses on the one hand, and the moribund sweet calm of English evensong spirituality on the other. The Early Greek Theologians insisted that the Spirit is an “eschatological gift” using a Greek word meaning “the end”. The Spirit directs human beings towards what they are meant to become at the end of God’s creation. And if the Spirit commands it also enables this development, and of course it needs the consent of the person; but it is as impatient with excuses and contemptuous of evasion as Jesus was. Forgiveness is offered for the sake of the person we shall become not the person we have been. Nothing is more obvious in Luke’s account of the first assemblies of Jesus in the book of The Acts, than the savage decisiveness of a church led by the Spirit. Those who fail to move are left behind or in the case of Ananias and Saphira, wiped out. The Spirit is not to be trifled with. As they say in my home city of a hardman, ” He disnae miss.”

I have left unanswered the question of the spirit’s true relationship to evolution. I will return to this after I have looked at the biblical language about the communion or partnership of the Spirit in my next blog on this site.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OK, I’ve been writing a basic theology for he last few blogs and I now have to answer the question, “So what difference does this make to practical matters, and why?”

Let’s take the issue of abortion laws, as this has been raised by the possibility that the  Scottish Government might be able to make a new law for Scotland only. This has encouraged some American -style fundamentalist groups to begin agitating in an aggressive “pro-life” manner, for a law that would forbid all but a very few abortions. Even rape victims would not be guaranteed terminations. It’s worth having a look at the way this issue is handled in America.

The Pro-life view is based on an argument that classes the foetus as a person and the ending of its life as if not murder then certainly a breach of the commandment not to kill. They argue that the thousands of terminations carried out every year are an affront to God the creator and to the Christian conscience.

This zeal for life is not carried over into other spheres of life by the American groups who put forward such views. They tend to be equally aggressive in favour of the possession of weapons, guns in the case of individuals and nukes in the case of the US and its allies. They have no interest in state services for the poor and destitute, are opposed to immigration, and back a violent foreign policy to make America great. Violence by citizens on each other, and by the state on its enemies is apparently no affront to the creator.

Those who are called pro- choice in America argue that a woman is in charge of her own body and must be allowed to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy. The law should simply uphold her right to choose. These thoughtful people are appalled by gun killings, nuclear weapons, needless deaths of migrants and attacks on abortion clinics. But not by thousands of dead foetuses a year, anymore than they would be by the removal of thousands of tumours.

I find that surprising, when it’s clear that all but a tiny proportion of these could have been prevented by a moment’s thought. Even if we don’t think of the foetus as a person, most people don’t view it as equivalent to a malignant growth. Many doctors and nurses involved in terminations feel that this procedure is alien to the desire to cherish life which brought them into the medical profession.

So, in America there’s a fundamental conflict between a bunch of killers who want to save foetuses and a bunch of saviours who want to kill them. I know that’s crude but it serves to point up the contradictions.

In Scotland, where the annual number of terminations is around 12000, the Christian opposition to abortion is more nuanced because fundamentalist religion here is not on the whole contaminated by right-wing politics. Nevertheless, here too we find that people who are otherwise opposed to killing, defend the present law, or want it to be liberalised, so that abortion becomes even more a matter of choice.

My experience of the world has led me to belong to a tradition in which people have imagined that the universe and all its living creatures owe their existence to a Goodness that is not of the world or the universe, but is lovingly involved in all aspects of its existence, including the processes of conception and birth, “persuading” them towards perfection. This tradition does not claim that all life is sacred as it is, but rather that it is sacred for what it shall be. My life is sacred not for what I am, which is a mixture of lots of ugliness with small bits of beauty, but for what God wants to make of me.

The natural processes of life are not perfect; the story we call evolution is far from complete and contains disasters as well as successes, but my tradition is convinced that one day it will be perfected, and that human beings are asked to play a role in its perfecting. But they are not in charge;  they are asked to receive the whole universe and their own lives as a gift from God and to live responsibly with all God’s creatures.

This way of thinking is the greatest invention of human beings and I believe it points towards the truth of God.

From the perspective of this tradition I see the frequent use of abortion as part of a human mistake that imagines we are masters of life; that we know best, and even when we have made a mistake, like getting pregnant when we don’t want to be, we can sort it by a scientific fix. It’s the same mistake that led us to use pesticides that destroyed wild life, to make a hole in the ozone layer with CFC’s, and to set the world warming with carbon emissions. Of course we can sort all these things by some technical fix. We are in charge of this show!

The problem is arrogance.

I am not suggesting that every woman who wants a termination is arrogant, and I know that she didn’t get pregnant all on her own. I am suggesting that the system which has been developed in The UK to deal with this particular problem of human fertility is arrogant,in that it treats potential life as simply disposable; and also counter-productive, in that it encourages people to make the mistake it seeks to correct. Given all the means of contraception available how come 12000 of these modern, sexually educated men and women are making this mistake every year?

The practical legislator will want to reply that I may very well be right in this criticism, but wrong if I think that severe limits on abortion are the answer. For unwanted pregnancy does occur and has always occurred and we should know that the only beneficiaries of limited access to abortion will be illegal abortion agencies that will of course flourish. I will also be asked what benefit there is in forcing women to bring unwanted children into the world, when we know that unloved children live very miserable lives. Moreover, I will be pushed rightly by feminist critics to justify any diminution of a woman’s rights over her own body.

I have no answer to these criticisms, which provide clear reasons for maintaining the law in something like its present form. The state, for reasons of public and private good, should maintain its provision, and there should be no moral stigma on seeking a termination.

I am nevertheless opposed to there being 12000 abortions in Scotland every year. The routine treatment of potential life as mere tissue shows no reverence for the gift of life and no respect for what the foetus can become in the creator’s goodness, with human cooperation. It is also evidence of a lack of love in the man, whose sperm has helped make this foetus, for the woman who carries it. In some instances the woman herself may have been denied full personhood and self-respect.

One of the devices of the capitalism under which we live is to turn living things -say factory farmed pigs- into mere commodities. The present practice of NHS abortion is almost a classic model of this device. A foetus becomes something you either want or do not want to possess and anything that is surplus to requirements can be easily recycled.

I am not standing in judgement on the women who seek abortions. I am saying that from the point of view of my Christian tradition, the abortion statistics reveal something wrong in our current social morality, above all the continuing inequality of women and men.

For these reasons, I support the current abortion law or something like it, against its Christian attackers; but I do not support the sexual and social injustices, or the personal decisions,that make it necessary. Sometimes the way between competing death squads is a very narrow path indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

This cartoon is from a series called Jesus And Mo, which you can find under that title online. It’s a challenge to Christians as well as Moslems.

There is an archetypal Scots story about the visitor from England who meets an elderly female resident as he takes a walk on a beautiful summers evening by the banks of Loch Lomond.

“Good evening, gorgeous weather,” he greets her.

“Aye, aye,” she says shaking her head, “We’ll pay for this…”

(Many, including a famous Scots poet, have claimed this story as their own, but I found it in a Scots Magazine of 1856)

It’s a tale which highlights the national conviction that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and that suffering is an inevitable part of life. This truth applies as much to Jesus as to the rest of us. I’ve emphasised his creativity in my last blog on this site, but in this blog I want to look at his suffering.

Of course we can immediately think of his arrest, trial and death, but it’s important also to see that suffering is inseparable from living in this world. We learn by doing things that are painful; we are subject to hunger, cold, heat, and illness; we suffer when we do not get what we desire; when our plans fail; when our friends let us down. We are always subject to the malice of others, and we may live under the sway of brutal imperial powers, as Jesus did.

Our capacity to accept suffering without losing creativity and courage is crucial to our humanity. If we accept it too readily, we become passive and fearful; if we refuse to accept it at all, we become ruthless in our determination to protect ourselves. Jesus  welcomed it as part of the human lot, as something shared with brothers and sisters, and also as a particular risk of all who challenged the ruling powers of their day, as he did. He called this, “taking up one’s cross,” in reference to the brutal execution process reserved by the Roman Empire for rebels, foreigners and slaves. Some scholars think that Jesus never mentioned the cross, and that after his death on a cross, his followers put this phrase on his lips. I think Jesus was perfectly able to see where his ministry might end and to shoulder his fate with a certain gaiety.

He did not glorify suffering as if it were a good thing, rather he saw it a) as solidarity with the sick, the poor, the disadvantaged and the disgraced, to whom he wanted to bring the goodness of God; and b) as an enemy to be battled and not avoided. Disciples were told to expect opposition from their nearest and dearest, lack of worldly goods and security, loss of reputation amongst fellow citizens, legal persecution, imprisonment and death.

Jesus saw a fundamental link between creativity and suffering. “The one who preserves his life will lose it; but the one who loses his life for my sake, will save it.” He also said, “A seed cannot bear fruit unless it falls into the ground and dies.” In solidarity with all who suffered Jesus accepted suffering; in solidarity with the God whose goodness he announced, he battled against it. That is why the Christian tradition has called him both lamb of God and lion of Judah.

It is this engagement with suffering which gives Jesus’ creative spirit its characteristic humour and sobriety. The man with the log in his eye, the disciple who needs to cut off his hand because it’s causing him to sin, the daft fellow who  builds a house with no foundations, the Jews who will neither play at weddings or funerals, (Luke 7:32), these are all depicted with the humorous sympathy of a man who understands human suffering. His sober estimation of the temptations of his revolutionary movement is also clear. He tells his eager disciples who have tunes of glory in their heads that a small child is greatest in God’s kingdom, and that his personal future is failure, trial and death.

With all that in view, I want to say that Jesus invents God as much by his suffering as by his creativity; and that, if we are true to Jesus, we must take seriously his image of God as suffering creator and creative sufferer, more seriously than most of Christian thinking has done. But when we accept this image and make it the basis of our faith, then Jesus will smile and tell us it’s a good image, but that God himself is “so much more.”

I want to preface this blog by dealing with a fundamental objection levelled by a number of readers at my first principle of theology, that all gods are invented by human beings.

The critics point out that from the perspective of the Judaeo- Christian tradition, I’ve simply got it all the wrong way round, as all human beings are invented by God, and all knowledge of God is revealed by God to human minds.

Yes, yes, I agree that’s the God and the humanity portrayed in the Bible; and that the faith that we are the creation of God from whom all life flows, is a true faith. But who made the Bible portrait of God and who created the concept of life as received from God’s hand?

People did, people like you and me, leaving the marks of their time, place, culture and above all of their human imaginations,  all over their image of the creator God. I am not suggesting that the creator god does not exist, or that he/she does not reveal his/her self to humanity, but I am pointing out that human knowledge of God comes from the exploratory fictions of human experience and imagination and is mediated by human worship, storytelling and writing, in the context of human community.

I don’t think this issue is merely an intellectual game. It is a matter of human survival in the face of religious fundamentalisms that pretend  believers have no choice but to obey their crazed deities who tell them to assault abortion doctors or to cut the heads off infidels. These are all people who have invented gods that suit their own bloodthirsty hatreds but are prevented by bad faith from admitting it. This bad faith however exists in all forms of religion that deny responsibility for their gods. The God who can be truly worshipped is one towards whom our inventions point, but who is always beyond all inventions. Worshipping this one, trusting this one, will from time to time lead to new inventions or modifications of what has been invented in the past. If religion is not to be the death of humanity we have to take full responsibility for what we believe and challenge adherents of other religions to do the same.

I can easily move from that argument to writing about Jesus, because of course, the thing about him that most horrified the religious leaders of his time, was that he went about re-inventing God. For them God had revealed himself in the Torah and the Writings and the Prophets, and the essence of true faith was to learn this revelation and to obey its prescriptions for holy living. All the true stories of God had been told; all the genuine commandments of God had been given; all the permitted means of worship had been prescribed. There was room for interpretation but not for invention because none of their tradition had been invented; it had been given, revealed, signed, sealed and delivered by God and therefore could be altered in any way; nothing could be taken away, nothing added.

You can almost sympathise with these leaders when they were confronted by a man who not only disobeyed the cherished commandments and rejected hallowed custom, but also was constantly telling new and blasphemous stories about God. Even worse he cheerfully accepted personal responsibility for his innovations, claiming that as God’s child he had authority to act on behalf of God. Where would this end, they must have asked, for if everyone began to take responsibility for their God, there wouldn’t be much point in religious leaders.

I am not exaggerating. Because of our own tradition of faith, which emphasises the authoritative revelation we have received, we fail to notice the revolutionary creativity of Jesus in his words and actions.

Take his impatience with the traditional concept of sin, which was fundamental to the power of the Temple and its priests. People would offend the holy God by their ritual impurities and moral failings, and would find forgiveness through the sacrificial rites of the Day of Atonement. Sin was serious business that required the skilled intervention of the priesthood. Jesus on the other hand saw sin and its attendant rituals as a prison in which people were locked or locked themselves, cutting them off from God and their neighbour. He used forgiveness as a key to this door, so that sinners could come out and get on with what God wanted them to do. The forgiveness is not an end in itself, but a means of getting people out of jail to start living. This involved inventing a God who was less concerned with transgression than with the welfare of his human children.

Or take his parables which constantly overturn the traditional pieties about God. I’ve have already written in this series of blogs about parable of the parable of the so-called prodigal son, which really ought to be called the parable of the foolish father or daft dad, in which God is offensively portrayed as fond, permissive and unable to control his own emotions for the sake of both of his sons. Then there’s the story of the great feast which features a rich man who plans a great banquet to which he invites all his rich friends,  and is so miffed when they find other things to do, that he  fills his house with the poor, the blind the crippled and the lame. How can this be the anything to do with God’s victory banquet to which the faithful expected to be invited? And how can this grumpy and impulsive host be a decent image of God?

Jesus, and the faith – community that followed him, were continually inventing and re-inventing God in ways which did justice to their experience of the world and of the one who is beyond all worlds.

It was only when the Jesus communities became an established religion, that invention became suspect and indeed evil, because of course the power of a priesthood always rests on its possession of divine truth.  A tradition which has been received from God and is therefore unalterable, puts God in the pocket of its main keepers, who will use it to justify their cruelties.

A recovery of the Jesus who reconstructed God and God’s House, Jesus the Builder, you might say, would be a benefit to Christian believers, to believers of other faith traditions and to a world in which religious certainty has become lethal.

 

 

 

i started off this series of blogs by proposing a fairly scandalous statement as the first  principle of all theology, namely:

ALL GODS ARE INVENTED BY HUMAN BEINGS

But I went on to argue that a human invention should not necessarily be thought of as unreal. Scientists have invented our modern picture of the universe, but we think of the picture as ‘real’ or at any rate as pointing towards reality. My knowledge of history tends to suggest that the present day scientific picture will look fairly primitive in a thousand years time, but I am happy to see it as a reasonable approximation, which is at least pointing in the right direction.

Then I asked what evidence existed to back up the human invention of a creator God. In my last blog I took the human mind with its extraordinary capacities as an indication that the evolutionary process that produced it flows from a source which is itself intelligent.

My second piece of evidence is human goodness. Simone Weil pointed to the almost ineradicable human conviction that we ought to be treated well. We may forget that our neighbours should be treated well, but even hard-hearted people are often convinced that they should be treated well. This faith in goodness, she says, is our link with God. The source of goodness is God, and the link with that source constitutes humanity. If we lose that link because of our own brutality or the brutality of others, we are no longer human.

I was reminded of this last week when I listened a report on radio of what had happened in the city of Leeds during the recent floods, when many families were made homeless. People of all races and religions came together to resource a communal kitchen which provided hot meals for all affected by the floods, while also being an unofficial centre for other forms of help. The woman in charge of the kitchen told reporters that she had been in tears much of the time, not out of grief, but out of astonishment at the communal outpouring of love. Where had it all come from, she wondered.

it is often the case, that when human hearts are opened to the need of other human beings, or of our planet and its creatures, the goodness done is felt to have been a gift received as much as an ideal achieved. People speak of being a channel for a goodness which has come from beyond themselves.

Of course this is not any sort of proof of God, but it is evidence that goodness is not fully understood in terms of evolutionary biology, and that belief in God as a source of goodness is not wholly without a basis. It may be that when we are open to goodness, we are linked with the relentless persuasion of God who wants our help in perfecting his creation. Only when that has happened will God be able to look at his creation and see, in the words of Genesis, “that it is very good.”

I want to emphasise that my arguments from the existence of the human mind and from human goodness are not to be taken as ‘proofs of God’s existence’ but rather as evidence that when I believe in God I am not doing something completely irrational, as Richard Dawkins has argued. Of course my way of thinking about faith has implications for the way I think about Jesus, which will be the subject of my next blog on this site.

I’ve just been having fun on the Hubble website, which allowed me to journey to a black hole in the Andromeda Galaxy and even to fall into it. As I understand it, black holes are  objects of such great density that their own gravity makes it impossible for anything, including light to escape from them. This means that unless they have captured some light emitting body, they  cannot be seen on the visible spectrum although they show up on the X-ray and radio spectrums. Many astronomers think that there is a massive black hole at the centre of all galaxies.

Out sciences have obviously not fully understood these objects as yet, but they have made observations, invented the concept of a black hole and will continue to investigate, and perhaps improve, or even radically change their concept, as time goes on. That’s the way science works.

It is also the way my sort of religion works. I do not live in a different world from scientists; I live in the same world, with the same information about it as scientists. Indeed I am reasonably diligent in keeping up to date with the tiny proportion of scientific discovery that can be understood by the non- specialist. It’s just that I am part of a tradition that has invented different concepts from those of the scientists, but which is as prepared to have them tested out as they are.

The first set of facts to which this tradition attends, is the set of facts about human life. While accepting the basic story of evolutionary process described by Darwin and his successors, my tradition of thought is not wholly satisfied with this theory, because it does not give sufficient attention to the emergent phenomenon of human intelligence. While accepting that all life has some sort of intelligence, the creative capacity of human intelligence seems to me and my tradition to be discontinuous with even the greatest animal intelligences, and its effect on the earth and even the galaxy to be different in kind as well as quantity. The terrifying potential of such an intelligent creature for the preservation or destruction of life and its environment suggests that its existence should be the subject of deeper reflection than has been given by the sciences. One of the foundational theories of my tradition, the book of Genesis,  suggests that the extraordinary qualities of the human animal, are due to its being “created” in his/her image by a source of life and intelligence who is also the source of the universe. The need for the creator of humanity to be also the creator of the universe, is that it’s clear from all the sciences that the process by which human beings are created is the natural history of the universe and of our planet. We are made of star stuff and our DNA is fairly similar to that of the fruit flies. 

No, I am not suggesting that a creator interfered with the evolutionary process to make it do what he wanted. Indeed all the evidence suggests that the elements of the universe resist control, that the smallest particles of matter are are fundamentally unpredictable. I am suggesting that it is precisely the unpredictable and indeterminate nature of evolution which has produced human intelligence, and that it is precisely the creator’s absence of control and his/her involvement in the pain, loss, and extinctions in the universe, that constitute his/ her deity. God is not effortless power, but an unrelenting drive for perfection which has to work from the inside of matter, life, history and understanding rather than from outside. As these cannot be controlled, they must be persuaded to move towards perfection, which requires God to share the agonies of the process.

This is not my individual theory. This is what the foundational story in the book called Genesis, says.

From the start God “lets be”, allowing some order to come out of chaos, but including elements of chaos, the waters and the darkness, to be part of what is created. Certainly human beings are “let be” in the image of the creator, but this proves to be more of a problem than a success, as the unruly humans cannot be controlled by commands, threats, or punishments and God has to follow the logic of creation by getting down and dirty on the earth, to persuade even one human family to follow his way to perfection.

This story is almost as scandalous a representation of God as that of Jesus of Nazareth who characterised God as a crazy parent so soft on his kids that he gives them the means to waste and destroy his good gifts in riotous living; and when they come whingeing home meets them with soft-hearted indulgence. Would God put up with such humiliations if not because he/she wants to persuade his creatures towards perfection.

So that’s the God invented by the Judaeo- Christian tradition, as a response to living in the same world as scientists. Scientists have some evidence that their inventions, their descriptions and laws correspond to reality. Is there any evidence that the invention of this very strange God corresponds to reality?

Well, as I suggested above, I think that the emergence of the human mind from the process of evolution is possible because the divine mind is embedded in the countless complexities of that process. So there you have it, my first piece of evidence that my tradition’s theory of God points to reality is, the human mind!

But it’s by no means my only evidence, so tune in  for another great instalment in two days time, when I move from black holes to warm hearts.