An Uninteresting Horse Race

I suppose it's almost expected for a blog like this to comment on the Archbishop of Canterbury horse race. But what I'm hoping is different, that when this one retires we can largely forget about the next one.

I have been interested in Rowan Williams because of his turnaround ethically and his deceptive theology. The narrative theology he promotes is one about stories, and not about history, but he treats it at a level of detail that suggests it is history, and indeed when put in a corner, as by Simon Mayo (of all people), he has made claims that the birth narratives are historical - I think he said, "I think so, yes," to these narratives as history. But elsewhere he said that the virgin birth that he used to regard as unimportant he came to regard as more important - whatever that means. It's all a sophisticated level of double-speak, and the deception it involves needs cracking open.

And his whole time as Archbishop has been to put the Church first and people second - the Covenant being his principle policy that, fortunately, was taken from him. He allowed the worst elements to call the shots, again the low point being around 2007.

Frankly we've got better material from the Chief Rabbi about the interface between religion (again as guiding stories) and the work of secular science and the influence of other faiths and philosophies. For someone of orthodox Jewry, he really has been interesting. He has been curtailed a little by fellow rabbis. Rowan Williams has also been generous regarding the texts of other faiths but this never equated with his lack of breadth in his own Church and Communion (often deliberately mistaken as a Church).

So I don't care whether the capitalist in Durham wins (who can run an organisation) or a safe pair of hands or whatever. It matters little. Well, not unless this continuing recession and unmoved debt in an unbalanced world economy leads politicians towards pessimism, nationalism and war, and then we might have to wake up some potentially ethical leaders if indeed they are ethical leaders.

Other than that I'll be less interested in the next one than I have been in the disaster that has been this one.

Theology as Discredited

Despite my interest, I think it has to be concluded that theology is now an utterly bogus academic discipline.

It is probably the only one where the answer comes before the question, in having to maintain continuity with a given tradition.

Probably, because some Marxist sociology had a tendency to live within itself, and use its own writings to conclude a point that seemed to ignore the wider world and rougher experienced reality. I remember back in 1979 to 1981 doing some Marxist sociology and writing my essays from the perspective of Friedrich Hayek. So I could and did employ liberal ideology and the department could not (and did not) mark me down on the basis of ideological preference (this form of liberalism didn't last long). A similar situation took place in 1996 to 1998 when I was then Unitarian and I did a contemporary theology course and wrote all I did from a religious humanist perspective. My reattempt at Anglicanism took place from 2004 to 2009 as a sort of postmodern Christianity, which meant delving in levels of double-speak. It didn't work in the end. The university is not a seminary, so it has to accept all stances as positions, and it is why so many theology departments became departments of religious studies.

All academic studies have traditions and a language of operation. You have to get into that language to do the work. But they all have self-critical methods which means there can be paradigm shifts, even if there are defensive professors. Yet a paradigm shift regarding theology could mean a change of orthodoxy, and that would never do. There are increasingly theologians of gnostic texts, but they don't seem to be regarded or regard themselves as theologians, and are often content to apply severe historical methods to their work whilst regarding the source as important. OK, so do some theologians apply such methods, but they are as if on a roundabout of prior commitment and never come off it.

So theologians become experts not just in a language of discourse, but in double-speak, partly because some of them are also serving a church community.

So many people in churches still believe that Jesus was 'sent' by God, and that his divinity was present as a new born baby after his parents had had a long walk south. He did perform miracles because he was God 'in situ', and then of course there was the big one where he died, got up and walked out of the tomb (though he may have been down and up in an invisible lift regarding a visit to hell) and then he walked around meeting the disciples and vanishing again, with an additional power of walking through walls, until he decided to leave them for good upwards and join God to then send a third divinity to direct the religious traffic.

Theologians might realise there is a lot of twaddle in that account, but they are obliged to maintain at least its outward appearance. This double-talk brings lack of credulity.

Recently an evangelical friend has been blogging about the depths present in a Timothy text that tells women to keep quiet and to be saved through having babies. The depths involved are that women should in fact be as talkative and teaching as men and will be saved through faith. For an evangelical, plain reading of scripture is to be preferred until of course it doesn't suit. Then double talk begins. The liberal simply does it earlier.

One has to declare when the use of words is poetic. They are to enhance feeling, to be artisitic in building up the three dimensional nature of being human and being human towards the other. I sing all sorts of nonsense in this pursuit, and will tell so (and why to do it - metaphors of ideals and potentials). It may be that the words are such that here too is double talk, but then we must pen some more and other words, allowing for the ground-in expressive, something that just is let be. The rope is cut and there is no 'objective' way back, nor any intellectual basis of limitation to one tradition set of texts instead of many. The evangelical keeps answering "no" to the lines of the hymn Jerusalem, but she or he is obviously an idiot to even bother, but the liberal tries to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Rather it is just a song of an ideal, grounded in some metaphors about smoking factories and rolling green hills at home - pictures of England made divine.

At one time theology was upheld by a general Christian culture. But now even church people with those ideas above about baby Jesus onward do go home and expect the weather to be an anonymous chaotic force and all of life's events to be fairly random and purposeless. Even the church person lives in a double world. Most folks beyond the churches understand science as enquiry, and are not bothered by distant religious texts and traditions - they no longer went to Sunday School to have their early minds confused.

A recent hymn I transcribed from the Iona Community has a statement of the presence and movement of God, but it is a hymn that fails as soon as it succeeds. It is great in its imagery of presence, care, support, good things and bad, but it cannot be taken literally. It just says 'take much in' with your spacial metaphors of what raises the human vision.


Theology really is a branch of anthropology. It could be rescued as an analysis of metaphors that give meaning towards ethical direction. Religious studies is also highly anthropological - it is what some people believe, some structures believe. Performing circular arguments like 'Radical Orthodoxy' have no place in universities because they are retreats into a small self-justifying world of the seminary. Similarly the evangelical world is its own enclave of reality that avoids the reality of the everyday (until the reality switch is pressed on). Clergypeople praise God for the spare parking place but theologians really don't want to be so naive.

It's Still the Core Even if it's Disagreed With...

Now someone has discovered a fragment of a Gnostic gospel that says Jesus had a wife. The dating is in the 300s with the language as Egyptian Coptic. To be his wife means also that she is good enough to be his disciple. As April DeConick points out, the Gospel of Philip also states Jesus had a wife. None of this is historical information, but rather represents the community's view of whether the representative of God would have had a sexual union in an eternal coupling. The historical debate has been whether a rabbi would ever be unmarried, in other words that your average, standard rabbi would be married. But there is no historical necessity for this either. So then the question is what Mary Magdalene represents: is she the cook and bottle washer, his girlfriend, a connection to some money to keep the band of brothers going? Well, no one has a clue. As April DeConick says, there is not the information to say he was or he was not married. We get the notion that he was one of the chaps organising the drinks at a big wedding, theologised to tell us what the Kingdom of God would be like. It might be his own wedding, but just as likely not. Would a chap who was believing he might have to suffer to nudge God into bringing in the final hours get himself married?

Bizarrely on the same day as I'm expressing my religious humanism, I'm stuck in a Facebook battle defending the centrality of the proto-orthodox stream with, I think, a Liberal Catholic. I can see that my first response was potentially misleading, but I am confident that the Roman Empire picked up what was the main stream of Christianity that had grown (in opposition) within the main empire whereas something different had developed outside it but still agreed with Nicea - and went off east. Here is the debate:

Jane Harper The underlying message of the apocryphal NT material is that there was no single dogmatic Christianity until Constantine made it the state religion and put muscle behind it... There was money and power attached to it at that time and so the in-group began drawing boundaries around itself to keep the goodies in.

Adrian Worsfold There was a pre-Roman empire proto-orthodoxy, the main channel for Rome to select and reinforce; to see a different Christianity you would have to go outside the Roman Empire and the Nicea but no further form that went from Persia and Afghanistan off to China, but it also died in China and the missionaries planted the Roman stream. Plus, Protestant religion is the Roman version revised

Jane Harper Adrian W., I'm afraid NT scholarship in the last 20-25 years doesn't agree with you. Within the Empire there were many kinds of Christianity next to proto-orthodoxy, in places like Syria and Egypt and Asia Minor.

Adrian Worsfold There's all sorts of Christianity around and about, but there was a main strand and it is represented by the three synoptic gospels. Thomas is a bit strange in its positive historical potential for some sayings. John might have not made it into the canon, but did because although the Gnostic is in there it is resisted. Ones that came later tended to be the other streams. The Jewish Christian faith was essentially lost. But the better, more 'historical' gospels, are the synoptics, and they formed with John the canon. Thus there was a proto-orthodox stream; after all, 1 Thesellonians came first of all and all these Mark onward gospels were Paul affected. And that was proto-orthodox too.

Jane Harper I'm sorry Adrian W., once again your views do not concur with mainstream NT scholarship, which finds no evidence of even proto-orthodoxy until the 4th century.

Adrian Worsfold Mainstream New Testament scholarship? So someone like Larry Hurtado, in Edinburgh, who points to rapid binitarian views, even amongst Jewish Christians, never mind Gentiles, is not advancing a view of proto-orthodoxy? Of course he is - he is saying that there is a stream, that is focused in the synoptics, and in what history is possible, that produced the central stream that became orthodox. This is not just a 'history written by winners' but the history that bends Jesus into a figure of salvation himself. This is not an issue of whether this strand is 'correct' because it is as myth-making as the rest, but whether it is the core and how early it is, nor does it dismiss the existence of other Christianities. The Gnostic stream was always more than Christian, and had its own existence that absorbed the Christian. But the first stream was Pauline, affecting the gospels, and why John was accepted rather than rejected. So what is the 'mainstream NT scholarship' that I am missing?

Adrian Worsfold If you take April DeConick, who writes on Gnostic materials, and says you cannot tell whether Jesus is married or not from the synoptics, she also will accept that these synoptics are the first core gospels - one probably from Rome (Mark) in rough Greek, one more of a Church (Matthew), one Gentile (Luke) and these are core - they are not trinitarian and could have been unitarian or arian compatible, John forcing arian or plus, but they do contain an 'economic' salvation view that makes the Trinity possible. But despite all that, they are the main gospels picked up by the central tradition. I cannot see what the argument is otherwise.

No doubt this debate will roll on, but if you take the books in order, the earliest gospels after the Pauline letters, which have his influence, are those of the main tradition, so despite the variety elsewhere, this was the one the main tradition picked up. Of course the Church reads the material its way, but nevertheless it is also bound by the material. It's not as if Christianity became Gnostic and then suddenly scholars are saying hang on there is earlier material about which we can do some secondary historical sifting. The earlier material about which there can be secondary historical sifting is the main tradition material!

Still, they are as mythological as the rest and we have a different world view now - our guiding narratives are utterly different about cause and effect in the world. Meanwhile I see that my debating opposite fancies having a cartoon with a female superhero that evangelicals would understand but I've said mine would be too sexy and vicious.

I rather fancy the idea myself of Yesha the superheroine cooking fish for 5000 in her frying pan.

On Lay Anglicana

So an expression of my beliefs I have given to Lay Anglicana. These, of course, can be expanded upon here or elsewhere and no doubt will be at some stage.

CV Higher Criticism

I have been asked to provide an opening article on personal beliefs at Lay Anglicana. So I have and will make a link there when it appears. I wrote it out longhand on paper at first and there are very few changes. Lay Anglicana was interesting recently with its Canterbury runners and riders but of course it is somewhat internal to the institution if with a general moderately liberal voice.

I've been quite busy. One is with the music, but it was put to one side to produce a presentation for a job interview - I'd teach adults to produce CVs.

Anyone like me who's done the jobseekers' treadmill will know that this is an area without progression and just means repetition. Have you made a CV? Yes. When? Last time I was at one of these.

Now I hate learning by Powerpoint, and may approach is to reverse it. The resource contains more than I will say, not less. Teachers lean on bullet points and students copy them down and surprisingly no one learns the reason for anything. So my approach to CVs adds in a bit of biblical criticism. See if you, reader, can spot it.

A Sermon from a Novel

I'm writing a novel, slowly and haphazardly. I won't describe the scenario here, but its central character is a female curate who has arrived at believing absolutely nothing about Christianity given her background (her husband was supposed to be ordained, he wasn't accepted, she threw her hand in and was; she's always been liberal). She still wants to be ordained, though home life is in doubt. More or less everyone is involved in deception of one sort or another. The novel might be summarised as "philosophical filth" but every so often there needs to be the philosophical bit.

The central character, Linda, is called on to give a sermon at very short notice. The training vicar is generous, giving her some days to think it over, instead of an hour, but asks that she leaves no evidence of notes, script or cue cards. Obviously he wants to impress the bishop as much as she might. So I've taken the text for the present and made a sermon for my unbeliever...

The moment of the sermon came, during which time Keith was returning home.
"I pray my words are acceptable. Amen. I've been asked to take this sermon at very short notice," she said. "So I am reflecting on a reading from John's Gospel that offers a number of challenges on the face of it. Jesus is saying, apparently, if you eat his flesh and blood you live forever, as it comes from heaven, whereas in previous eating you died. The location is Capernaum, which I think is significant, and the teaching is complex, difficult, and Jesus wonders about this, even if it offends. The spirit gives life, he says, and the material doesn't. And there's a strange reversal of the usual no one get's to the father except through him moment as now we have no one gets to Jesus except via the Father. The disciples wobble but have no one else to associate with who is the holy one.
"I don't think this is Jesus talking at the time in a thoroughly Jewish context. It is John's gospel at its Gnostic strain, it going off in that direction and resisting too. So the material is rejected, and though these people are eating a material Eucharist, it comes from heaven, rather as ours is blessed. A clue I think is Capernaum, which is home territory and where Jesus's message is least accepted amongs those who thinks he's a it off his trolley for a local lad. And the spiritual Jesus is approached through the Father, the Father being God and of the Spirit.
"So what do we take from this, assuming I am about right on this, and it's open to challenge? Oh, er, it follows on from the feeding of the five thousand, which is itself a eucharistic reference given as a miracle. That's a stumbling block for many on its own. I suppose the point is that understanding this is complex, and even more complex when the Gnostic is resisted. You are bound to wonder what's the point and is it too difficult and difficulty is another block to belief. Well it might be, and that is the wobble, but the argument is there's nowhere else to go. You have to tackle the difficult part. On the other hand, you can just eat and drink the spiritual food, and that is not too difficult. The praxis, the doing, is open to everyone. But it is worth tackling the difficult stuff because that is about understanding and we ought to try. Amen."
Afterwards, her training vicar said, "Actually, that was quite interesting. I've never heard it put quite like that before. But I wonder, again, if it isn't a little too neutral. We'll see."
"What will we see?" Linda asked.
"The future, I think," said Colin.

Fantastic New Poster

First look at this poster. Don't worry. It shits as well but said to its mum, in remarkable fully-formed Aramaic, "Don't worry mum, I'll change my own nappy."

Yes: the ridiculousness of Christian dogma gives rise to one of the cheesiest, most ridiculous campaigns ever considered. Jesus the dolly.

Jesus says, "Tell me mum, I was born in Capernaum," but she replied, "Yes, but according to them, you came out in Bethlehem."