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.

In my last blog I declared that the first principle of all theology must be:

ALL GODS ARE THE CREATION OF HUMAN BEINGS

But I went on to claim that true theologians trust that their inadequate creations capture enough of the truth to point towards one who is beyond all worlds, who can’t be grasped by human thought.

Let me expand a little on that argument. I grew up in a Christian household and church community, through which I was given access to a tradition that included ancient stories, moral prescriptions, prayers and evangelical discourses, including the stories of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. These were transmitted to me by people who had adopted this tradition as their own and who tried to live according to its vision of life, through worship, prayer, bible study and practical goodness. Like all the generations of believers before them, they had adopted the creative imagination of the first believers, while adding their own creative interpretations of it, out of their own lived experience. They found it intellectually, aesthetically and morally satisfying to imagine God in this way, trusting that in ways beyond their understanding the goodness of the one beyond all worlds became a resource for their own living. They may or may not have believed in what are popularly called miracles, but this fundamental miracle, whereby the eternal goodness was transmitted through their human lives, without any supernatural magic, was central to their faith.

Keen eyed readers will have noticed that there is a lack of definition in my use of the word “goodness.” The Christian tradition defines goodness by identifying it with the character of God, which is revealed through a long process of development, culminating in one sentence in a letter of the first century CE, “God is love.” ( First Letter of John, chapter 4). Of course that ultimate simplicity contains many varied commands, illustrative stories and wise sayings, but all of these are to be interpreted in the light of the one simple truth of God’s love.

The fact that interpretation is required and that it involves the human experience of love, gives scope for the creative development of the tradition over time. My own conviction about the moral equality of heterosexual and homosexual relationships, which dates from long before this was the dominant view in society, was due to my own experience of love and my own understanding of homosexual love in people who were my friends. From that time I mentally excised from the tradition the ancient injunctions that told me otherwise.

But isn’t that a process of picking and choosing? Yes, it is. That’s what adults do. They don’t simply accept everything they are told, even by holy traditions they otherwise revere. But if the traditions need changing, why accept them in the first place? Because they are vast depositories of human wisdom, built up over time, that give access to a goodness which is beyond them. The very fact that they can and should be re-interpreted, as Christians say, ‘in the light of God’s spirit’ is evidence that they do give that access.

All of this means that as a believer  I am an active participant in the tradition to which I have chosen to belong. I must use all my intellect, imagination, and moral conscience in understanding, interpreting, criticising and altering this tradition. I cannot avoid my moral responsibility by saying, with Martin Luther, that my conscience is in chains to the word of God, for it is through my conscience that I first of all recognise any word as a word of God. If it is not a word of love it is not a word of my God. Can I justify that fundamental principle? No, I cannot. It grasps me by its majesty and rigor, and I wholeheartedly believe it to be true, but I know that it cannot be sustained by argument. It is the wisdom that I have chosen because somehow it first of all chose me and has been creating me.

There, I have used the word which represents my understanding of my own and other religious traditions: they are collections of human wisdom, which point beyond themselves. I can understand why sensible people might dismiss the claim that they point beyond themselves, or deny that there is anything to point to, but I cannot see why any agnosticism or atheism should mean that people neglect such vast stores of human imagination, moral perception and wisdom.

Does all this leave me, as fundamentalist believers might ask, unsure of my own salvation? Well, yes, in a sense it does. If there is no God or God is not love, I will not be saved. But if there is, perhaps I shall. Somehow, all my life I have found people who were sure of their own salvation, whether Jesus – lovers or Jihadis, profoundly unattractive.

According to the Gospels Jesus, like many other Jewish people, used “shalom” meaning peace, goodness, good day, as his greeting. It can be used simply as a conventional hello, or with more profound meaning. In John’s gospel, when Jesus says to his disciples that he gives and leaves them his peace, he notes that his gift is not to be mistaken for something worldly, as if it was mere good fortune. John places these words in the context of Jesus’ imminent suffering and death. Clearly most human beings would welcome a peace which has been tested but not destroyed by suffering.

Jesus’suffering was not simply the expectation of death. I don’t fancy death too much but I have known some splendid human beings, some of them quite irreligious who faced their dying with courage, indeed, even with humour. But Jesus was tortured and deliberately degraded. Could his kind of peace cope even with that? This year I have often mentioned David Haines, the refugee camp volunteer tortured and killed by Daesh. He managed to retain his dignity. Perhaps part of the peace shown by Jesus and by David Haines, came from knowing that the ending of their lives was in tune with their sacrificial living.

But it’s possible that Jesus came to doubt his life’ s commitment to God’s justice. Maybe his questioning howl on the cross  expressed the feeling that it had all been for nothing.

That’s a true killer. When you are forced to ask if your main reason for living has not fallen to bits;  that something you have worked for, loved, lived with, grieved over, may be null and void. My sense is that Jesus experienced this and overcame it. The writer of the book of Revelation, conscious of the persecution which might afflict his flock, used the word overcome, or conquer, to characterise the strenuous shalom that would see them through such suffering.

“Split all ends up, they shan’t crack/ and death shall have no dominion.” (Dylan Thomas)

“In the teeth of life we seem to die; but God says no. In the teeth of death we live!” ( Martin Luther)

If there  is such a peace, then we should not imagine it as a feeling, not even as an inner conviction that cannot be extinguished. No, it is the capacity to endure the unendurable, annihilating nothingness, as if it were the love of God.  I do not mean that God wills the suffering or excuses the evil that causes it, but rather that God’s love respects the autonomy of his creatures as long as they live on earth, and does not intervene, no, not by force or miraculous messages in the mind. But when God receives his creatures in death, then he wipes away all tears and welcomes them into a peace that is beyond their understanding.

So of course, the words spoken by Jesus in the gospels are always the words of the Risen Lord. The peace which Jesus promises comes from beyond all worlds. But I can only receive it as I walk with Him in this world, where even the greatest trust is far from certainty.

In imagine all this sounds a bit somber; far from the cheery sign off message appropriate to the last day of 2015. In fact, I’m not gloomy, I am speaking of a fighting faith. God’s peace to all my readers! Confusion to your enemies!  And bugger Bognor! (The reply of George V on his death bed to someone who tried to avoid the issue by hoping that soon he might be well enough to holiday in Bognor. It is also my reply to all pious attempts to make life seem easier that it is.)

The writer Brian Aldiss either invented or quoted from somewhere the adage that “civilisation is the distance between Man and his own shit,” which he thought mistaken and proceeded to construct a novel that illustrated a radically different possibility. I am reminded of this argument every time I see a report on my local beach at Monifieth, where the water is frequently “polluted with faecal material” in spite of the recently installed Great Outflow which is intended to take it all elsewhere, possibly Germany. 

My excuse for this unsavoury opening paragraph is the increasing evidence that humanity has a maybe fatal difficulty with the waste products of all its activities, especially those which create carbon dioxide of course, but also with nuclear and chemical waste from agriculture, not to mention the plastic particles which already clog most of our oceans. A measure of how serious the difficulty is can be seen in the self-congratulatory tone of the decisions of the recent Paris Conference which agreed more stringent hopes for limiting poisonous wastes without agreeing a single binding commitment.

In spite of the romantic view that all this is due to modern civilisation which has destroyed the wisdom of our more remote forebears,  I guess that from the start Homo Sapiens has been a tad careless about the natural world. The greatest destruction of the Caledonian forest we are now told, took place in prehistoric times, when it was cleared to create land for farming. There’s no doubt however, that the ruthless consumption of natural resources and deposition of waste products in earth and air and water, by private and state- owned industries in the last 100 years, is of a different order from anything that went before. Currently the most profitable and polluting industries try to persuade us that the environmental crisis is not as bad as some fear, and that as long as they can continue to pollute, they will try to provide a fix.

In truth I am not competent to write about these issues, and certainly do not have clean hands: I still drive a car powered by a pollutant (diesel) and would still consider using a plane to get to Europe.

The thing is I understand the human impulse to forget the mess we leave behind us, only too well. I can remember as a young man hiding the vast collection of glass milk bottles I had accumulated in the attic of my flat, only to be found out by a colleague who had taken over the flat and found my bottles when he tried to use the attic to hide something else. It may be the memory of such acts of shame that has turned me into a furious recycler, ever ready to remove rubbish from my house to the council tip.

More seriously I know that I have sometimes moved  jobs when the problems I’d created seemed beyond me and could be safely abandoned for someone else to sort out. I know people  who do the same thing with relationships. The attraction of being clean, of being able to make a new start, is very powerful when we begin to smell the mess we’ve made. Perhaps that’s why we have invented the phrases, “clean sheet, clean start.” The impulse to move on quickly may owe something to an animal fear of being tracked down by our spoor, but its human form is nearly always irresponsible. We hope something can be abandoned while knowing that nothing disappears, and that all actions have consequences.

But doesn’t the Christian Gospel, with its offer of forgiveness through Jesus, encourage just this mindset, that we can leave the mess behind us and be saved? Well, yes, sometimes it may have been misunderstood to mean just that; but in fact the forgiveness that Jesus offered released people from social condemnation and self- loathing to deal with what they had been, while reaching towards what they could be. The story of the corrupt collaborator and tax collector Zacchaeus, is of a man who is freed by Jesus’ advance of trust (forgiveness) to restore the money he has extorted from his victims. (Luke 19). In fact Jesus was always dealing with the mess that others had left behind. The diseased outcasts, for example who had been judged as suffering for their sins by the rigidly righteous; or the prostitutes, whom men had used and forgotten.

I like the gospel word “redemption” which originally referred to the buying back of captives or of slaves. It is used as a metaphor for the liberation Jesus brings. It is not a matter of “at one bound he was free”; there is a price to be paid. People who are in a mess have to be empowered to tidy it up or make reparation to others. Often they have been unable to do so, but somehow Jesus helps them do so by transferring some of his credit to them. Jesus loses some of his public honour  in order to give honour to Zacchaeus, who in turn deals with the mess he’s made. 

Indeed we could say, that in Jesus, God takes responsibilty for the mess he’s made by inventing human beings and permitting their evils. In Jesus, God shows that he will avoid no suffering to clean things up, that he tolerates no pollution at all, but fights it to his last breath, and invites human beings to share his passion.

So, yes, the ending of a year brings time for urgent reflection on the messes I make, so that I can help to clean them up. And , oh yes, which Council department do I contact about the state of my local sea water?