I want to suggest that we need to unravel the knitting of Christian, even Judaeo-Christian religion, if not to find truth, at least to be honest about what we claim to believe, to recognise that much, so called, religious belief amounts more to bounded faith statements than often we want to admit. This is nothing new but perhaps I want to go further than most.
Protestants have long relied on the foundations of Revelation, Scripture, Tradition and Reason in order to elaborate the structures of faith, of belief. Just how resistant are these to close examination? I would argue that they are not as strong as many would want to assert. In fact they are very weak indeed.
Let me begin with revelation. This is at once the easiest and most difficult to challenge. Revelation is totally dependent on the experience and interpretation of the person claiming to have received it. Consistently religious orthodoxy has canonised some accounts of revelation and anathematised others. This is helpful for those who want to set boundaries to belief but it is hardly likely to lead to truthful interpretation or honesty. It is as fallacious as the arguments used to justify some of the extremes of the early surrealist movement in the field of art. The argument went something like this. If it is possible to directly access the sub-conscious, one might suggest, say, by going into a trance-like state and then to communicate this through the media of visual art, literature or music then what is produced might reach depths of truth than that achieved in a more cognitive way. New realities and truths might be tapped into. This was what André Breton described as ‘psychic automatism in its pure state’.[1]
I suspect, as with all art movements, there was sincerity in this exploration at the start. One might relate it legitimately to the processes that Brueggemann has alluded to in terms of prophetic imagination.[2] It is undoubtedly possible to discover new solutions to problems by, what we might call, lateral thinking, but the clue is in the word thinking. For someone like Salvador Dali I do not think it disingenuous to suggest that some of his lateral thinking had a distinctly pecuniary intent. What I doubt is the original suggestion that it is possible to tap into the subconscious and communicate what we find, neat, as it were, undiluted by conscious organisation of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason is a pure impossibility.[3] Between the neural connections in which the thought is generated and the communication of the thought, in whatever medium, there is a process of communication in which the purity of the material is sullied, translated. It cannot be otherwise.
Now if we apply this to revelation we need to admit that aside from any later attempt to canonise or authorise a particular revelation there must be an admission to the degree to which such revelation is subject to human thought, interpretation and distortion even if we want to accept that such revelation found its origin outside the recipient. What I am saying is the revelation is a profoundly unreliable conduit for something that we might want to claim as an eternal truth.
Moving to Scripture we find ourselves one step down the ladder from the source of revelation at best. At worst we have either an amalgam of revelation and conscious human construct, or simply human construct.
All of this might be seeming to say that there is nothing metaphysical beyond our own human experience and all religious belief is ‘made up’. The council is out on that as we have no real way of knowing. All we can do is to trust our own intellectual examination of what is presented to us or that of the mothers and fathers of faith who have come before us, that is our tradition. Arguably this tradition is the most unreliable link in the chain which is why some protestants have ridden so light to it. The problem with revelation, scripture and tradition is that all are not as free from contention as we might want them to be, and all can be used, unconsciously or dishonestly, as means of control. At its simplest this can be seen in atonement theory. If it is assumed that all humanity is separate from God and that that is not good then power is given to those who have the knowledge to reconcile us to God. And with such gnosis, knowledge, power, comes the ability to control. Unless you do this or believe that you will not be reconciled. And even if that doesn’t matter much in this life, look out for the life to come. QED! At our most honest we have turned metaphors intended to explain belief into truths to be believed.
I am agnostic about life out of life. I am happy with David Goodbourn’s assertion that ‘To be human is to exist in time, to have a narrative, to live in a world of consequences’.[4]
So where does that place us? We return to Reason. Reason should lead us to evaluate Revelation, Scripture and Tradition, and this is what I have been seeking to do.
[1] Breton, A., Manifeste du Surréalism (1924) quoted by Gomperts, W., in What are you looking at: 150 years of Modern Art, Penguin/Viking, London, 2012, p245.
[2] Brueggemann, W., The Prophetic Imagination, Second Edition, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2001, passim.
[3] Pratt, A.E., unpublished note 20th February 1971.
[4] Goodbourn.
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