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.

 

 

 

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.