The Paradox of Belief

There is an old joke about a sceptical husband who came home and said to his more pious wife, “That parson of yours is a hypocrite”.

“What makes you say that?” asked his wife.

“Well, you know he’s always going on about how lovely it will be when we die and go to heaven. I saw him crossing the street in town this morning, and a fast car suddenly came round the corner. Judging by the way he ran, I’d say he’s in no particular hurry to get there!”

A more recent story comes from Peter Rollins in a talk he gave at Greenbelt this year. He was listening to a preacher who was a firm believer in divine healing. He eloquently insisted that if only we believe we can be healed of anything. Then, at the end of the service, one of the congregation had an accident and appeared to have broken a bone. The preacher’s first reaction was to say “We must get him to the hospital”!

We all know that even the strongest believers temper their beliefs with common sense. In spite of all the positive things we say at funerals, we all go to the doctor when we are ill and even centenarians hope to get better.

Some Christians claim to believe that anyone who is not a born again believer will go to hell to suffer for eternity. But many of them have unbelieving loved ones who have died. Believing what they do, how can they sleep at night? I once heard of a fundamentalist Christian woman who was found preaching in the street in the early hours of the morning calling on her neighbours to repent. Her husband, who had the same beliefs as she did, immediately called a doctor and got her admitted to a mental hospital. It seemed to me at the time that what she was doing was not mad at all but perfectly logical in the light of the beliefs she held. After all, if your unbelieving neighbour could die at any moment and go straight to hell, there is no time to lose. If a building is on fire you don’t wait for an appropriate moment to raise the alarm!

This paradox applies to many aspects of religious belief. On Remembrance Sunday congregations heartily sing:

                “Sufficient is thine arm alone,
                And our defence is sure.”

But many of those singing are in army uniform, and only a small minority of Christians are pacifists.

We preach the message of Jesus that we do not need to accumulate possessions because God will look after us from day to day, but how many of us turn down a chance to have some savings in the bank or to join a pension scheme? We believe Jesus was right when he said “It is more blessed to give than to receive”, but how many of us take even a slight risk of impoverishing ourselves by giving to those in greater need?

There have been in history only a few people who have really, literally believed the Christian message. Some have been outstanding saints like Francis of Assisi, but most of the others have been dangerous fanatics, willing to torture and kill people “for the good of their soul”.

What does it really mean to believe? Are all our “beliefs” dishonest and hypocritical? Or are they aspects of some deeper truth that common sense feels after but cannot explain?

New Creation or Old Rules?

I have just finished reading Tom Wright's Simply Christian. I already knew his theology was a bit more conservative than mine, but as he is a very popular author I thought I would see for myself.

His approach is very contemporary, in that he begins with the human sense of God. The first part of the book is entitled 'Echoes of a Voice', and it talks about how we get hints of God through the universal sense of justice, the way in which spirituality springs up everywhere, the beauty of the world, and the centrality of relationships. So far so good.

Where I really part company with him is in his views on sexual morality. Having said lots of inspiring things about awakening and new birth into the freedom of the new creation etc., when he comes to the final chapter - the practicalities of Christian living - he falls back on the traditional rules. He contrasts a truly Christian perspective with the idea that we all have the absolute right to seek our own pleasure and self-fulfilment. Of course we can all agree that, in sexual relationships as in everything else, selfishness spoils everything. But the conclusion Wright draws is completely dogmatic.

He says (p198) that, in contrast to the Greco-Roman culture of the time, the Jews and the early Christians "insisted that sexual activity was to be restricted to the marriage of a  man and a woman. The rest of the world, then as now, thought they were mad. The difference, alas, is that today half the church seems to think so too."

He grounds his view theologically by talking of the vision of the Kingdom as "the  marriage feast of the Lamb" and so on, and says: "Marital fidelity echoes and anticipates God's fidelity to the whole creation. Other kinds of sexual activity symbolize and embody the distortions and corruptions of the present world."

I think this is a gross over-simplification, and a slander on all those people who live truly unselfish lives and express Christ-like love in relationships that do not conform to this "norm". Wright himself talks about "new creation", Surely the essence of new creation is that it is new, not the restoration of something supposedly laid down from the beginning. As I see it, one of the main themes of the Bible is that God is constantly leading us on into new discoveries. His very name can mean "I will be who I will be".      

Away With the Manger?

There are some things that often seem more sacred than God. One of these is the ‘children’s favourite’ Christmas carol.  Just as I sang it seventy years ago, and probably my parents sang it nearly a hundred years ago, still today Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without little children singing ‘Away in a manger’ to the delight of their admiring parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts.

Lovely, if you don’t stop and think of the words. But if you do, are we sure we want our children to be singing this kind of thing?

The first line is obscure. Where is this ‘away’ in a manger? The point of the Christmas message is that God has come close to us, so why give the impression that it happened far away? And what’s a ‘manger’ anyway? I suppose most of us know that it is a feeding trough for cattle, but even when I was a child the word didn’t belong in everyday language. To most people, ‘manger’ is just a special name for whatever it was the baby Jesus lay in. And what does ‘no crib for a bed’ mean? Even I as a child had no idea what that meant. What we call it is a cradle or a cot. A ‘crib’ is something you use to cheat in an exam!

Then there’s this ‘look down from the sky’ business. Do we really want children to think that Jesus is up there among the stars and the planets? Even worse, do we want them to think that only up in heaven will they be able to live with Jesus, and even then only if they are ‘fit’ to live with him?

But the worst bit is in the second verse: ‘but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes’. What an unnatural baby! I suppose the lesson of this is supposed to be that Jesus, being perfect, never cried because crying is wrong and good children must always be like Jesus and never cry. What sadistic Victorian thought that up?

Perhaps the day will come when parents and teachers will suddenly wake up and realise what an awful song this is to teach to children. In the meantime, we can only hope that the children of today and tomorrow have no idea of what it all means anyway!

Born of the Virgin Mary...

One of my favourite carols has the verse:
Angels and archangels
may have gathered there,
cherubim and seraphim
thronged the air,
but his mother Mary
in her maiden bliss
worshipped the Beloved
with a kiss.

There was a glory, a mystery, about the birth of Jesus - the Creator of the universe in a little baby. The poet Studdert Kennedy uses the striking phrase 'the five little fingers of God'. Paintings portray angels gathered around the stable. Of course they were invisible, or visible only to the imagination, but that humble stable (or wherever it was) shone with the glory of God.

Yet isn't this true of every birth? I have never had the experience myself, but to hold your own new-born child in your arms, especially in the company of the one you love, must be the nearest human beings get to heavenly bliss. Surely the magic of the Christmas story is that it says something significant and wonderful about the birth of a child - any child.

I believe that Jesus was the Son of God in the sense that in him human nature was most completely in tune with the nature of God. In that sense Jesus is 'His only Son, our Lord', but what it really says to me is that God is like Jesus - loving, giving, vulnerable and in the end indestructible because whatever happens love keeps bouncing back.

'In her maiden bliss': I don't believe in the Virgin Birth as a fact. It is the kind of myth that often in the ancient world attached itself to significant people. But birth itself, any birth, is a miracle. And I like to think of Mary, whether married or not, as a young innocent girl knowing for the first time the fearful joy of bringing a new life into the world from her own body.

God came into the world through the womb of Mary, yes. But God constantly comes into the world, not only when a child is born but whenever a human being is attuned to the loving nature of God. God can be born in you and me, men or women, young or old, and the loving, healing, challenging Christ walks the earth again.

... And in Jesus Christ

I suppose the one thing that really defines a Christian is ‘someone whose world view is centred on Jesus’.

Many would like to define it more narrowly: a Christian believes that Jesus is the Son of God; a Christian believes in the Holy Trinity; a Christian believes that Christ died for our sins and physically rose from the dead; a Christian is someone who has had a definite, describable experience of being born again; and so on.

But all these things are controversial. There are Christians who believe in them, Christians who don’t believe in them, and Christians who interpret them in such an unorthodox way that it is hard to say whether they believe in them or not.

Probably the only thing we can say with any confidence is that if you call yourself a ‘Christian’ at all it is because your faith and your view of the world are centred in the person we know as Jesus Christ. There are of course people who have little interest in religion and only call themselves Christians because they are not Muslims or Hindus, but even they assume that their faith ought to be centred in Jesus.

But who is Jesus? There are arguments as to whether we can know much, or even anything, about him at all. The Gospels contradict each other, and scholars argue as to how much of the material in them is eye-witness history and how much is legend, how many of the sayings of Jesus were really said by him and how many were made up by his followers. The ‘Jesus Seminar’ claims to have fairly accurate knowledge, but many are not so sure. Some people even claim that the Christian message was never meant to be taken literally, and Jesus of Nazareth never actually existed at all.

Many people worry about this. How can I follow Jesus if I don’t know what he actually said and did? How can I preach the message of Jesus if I don’t know exactly what he taught?

I find myself getting more and more relaxed about questions like this. The Bible, supplemented and modified by two thousand years of Christian tradition, tells us a story. Many people down through the ages have been excited and inspired by this story. Some have responded to some parts of it, others to other parts. Many different pictures of Jesus have emerged. Whatever you say about Jesus, someone will disagree, but no-one can actually prove that their picture of Jesus is the right one.

My picture of Jesus is of one who had the courage to love unconditionally and to make love the heart of everything. He saw through all the messy complexities and hypocrisies of religion and stuck to the one central principle of love. This made him a social and religious radical, and it was for this that he was condemned by the authorities and executed.

Some orthodox believers will say this is too simplistic, that there are essential doctrines I must believe about Jesus. Some historians will say Jesus wasn’t really quite how I imagine him. But this is the part of the story that excites and inspires me, and it is a big enough challenge for me to live by. What if this great idea of unconditional love as the meaning of everything is not what Jesus of Nazareth actually preached? Well, if it inspires and moves me, does it matter where it came from? And if it makes me a better human being (if only slightly), what does it matter whether I am labelled a ‘Christian’ or not?

Maker of Heaven and Earth

Sitting in our local park the other day, I found myself more than usually moved by the beauty of the river. It is a typical Welsh river, slightly black from natural peat (not, as in the old days, from coal waste), flowing swiftly and smoothly and bubbling over the rocks as if it is glad to be what it is. Here, I thought, is God. I felt I wasn’t contemplating nature and thinking about the God who created it: I was contemplating God. Not a God who made the world a long time ago, but a God who is here in this river now, alive and moving, creating the world anew every moment and rejoicing in it.

As I sat there, a little family of ducks appeared round the bend of the river. Here too was God, expressed in all the countless forms of life, each with its own beauty and its place in the world that has evolved through aeons of time that boggle the mind. Here is the living God.

I don’t find it very inspiring to think of God ‘designing’ this world, as in the hymn that says:

‘Jesus is Lord, creation’s voice proclaims it,

For by by his power each tree and flower was planned and made.’

For a start, that is a rather literal understanding of the idea that Jesus is the incarnation of the Word through which ‘all things were made’. But I find it just as difficult to think of God ‘planning and making’ like a designer with a drawing board. In fact, how much of the universe is ‘planned’ at all? Its development seems to be haphazard: the formation of galaxies, stars and planets; the evolution of life by chance mutations and the survival of the fittest; and the whole mixed-up story of the human race, not to mention each of our individual lives; it all seems to me to be a mixture of the random and the ordered, of untidiness and beauty. Scientists are now saying that there is chaos everywhere, and yet there are patterns even in the chaos. The universe, even if not completely random, is open-ended. The end has not been fixed from the beginning, even assuming that there is an end and a beginning.

To me, to worship God as ‘Maker of heaven and earth’ is not a matter of believing a doctrine. It is a matter of being overwhelmed by the wonder and the mystery of it all: not of thinking about God as a separate being who created the world, but just rejoicing in the world. I love the title of Richard Dawkins’s latest book, even though if it’s anything like The God Delusion I’m sure I wouldn’t agree with its content. The Magic of Reality – that’s what I believe in!

Do I Believe in God?

Do I believe in a Person sitting up in the sky? No, I don't. I don't think Christians are supposed to believe in that anyway. According to traditional Christian belief, God is a Trinity: God above, God among us, and God within us, all One.

Do I believe in Someone who made everything that is and still makes everything happen? I'm not sure. Sometimes I think, and pray, as if this were the case: as if there were a God I could talk to and ask for things, a God who knows what's going on in my life and could arrange things at my request, though He knows better than I what really needs to happen. But this kind of thinking stumbles against the uncomfortable fact that this God is supposed to love everybody and yet makes life so hard for some people that it's difficult to believe he loves them at all. If God answers the prayers of people in danger and miraculously saves their lives, what about all those who are not saved?

Do I believe in God? For want of a better word, yes. I respond to the infinite mystery and wonder of the universe. I can't agree with scientists like Richard Dawkins who think that one day we will understand the universe completely and know that there is no God. The cutting edge of contemporary science is already showing this up for the simplistic fundamentalism that it is. It is simply poor science. The fact that I am conscious, a person, in a world where there are other conscious beings, and where even 'inanimate' matter seems to respond to consciousness - in fact, the very fact that anything exists at all - is a miracle.

But I don't just believe in God with my head. My whole being responds to the divinity that is everywhere and in everything. The beauty of the earth brings tears to my eyes. The vast variety of living things delights and fascinates me. I can't stop myself believing that love is the most important thing in the world. And whatever happens, I feel somehow safe in the universe - illogical perhaps, but I find that the more I believe this the more it proves to be true. I don't know that there is a God, but I think I can say I know God.

I have just read the third chapter of Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat, Pray, Love. She says almost exactly what I believe about God, and says it beautifully. Well worth reading!