Theology – Page 7 – hymnsandbooks

Toward Ascension

The 9th May, 2024 is Ascension Day. That takes my memory back to school days going to, what would now be seen as, a very old-fashioned boys grammar school. On this day we were marched in the morning to a local church for a service. Other than having a morning off from lessons, I remember little of this and grasped nothing of its significance. It makes me wonder what we make of this today, if anything.

Easter was early this year. Then it was over. What then? Actually, in terms of the church calendar, it’s not over until Ascension. So what do we do in these weeks?

Over recent Sundays we have been recounting stories of resurrection. Outside the world moves toward the next commercial opportunity for retailers and hospitality. As to Ascension, what’s that? Good question.

Let’s take it literally from the point of view of the disciples. They had witnessed crucifixion. Then Jesus was back with them. Forgiveness was given, peace proffered. Back to normal. Remember when the lockdown of Covid was lifted. Back to normal, yes. But I’ve recently had another vaccination. Not all is ‘normal’. We have adjusted. I think the disciples experienced a similar rhythm. Jesus death left them orphaned. But Jesus was back. Then this ascension took him away again – ‘Handed over to orphaned, comforted, now comfort less…lost, bereft, as now he leaves them, homeless, friendless, scarred, unblessed’…as a hymn puts it. The gospel according to Matthew says, ‘and some doubted’.

Once beyond this moment what was the new normal for them? Perhaps it can teach us something. Firstly, they had to recognise that Jesus really was dead, not there. Gradually the way beyond this realisation was that the old normal was not coming back. They had to think and act for themselves. This was not just trusting for life after death, but for living life before death.

Without the Ascension they would never have reached this point. Realising this they needed a real new normal. This involved repentance for real. A total and complete change of mind. Following Covid the so called ‘new normal’ drifted back to business as usual. If we have grasped the intention of Ascension there are choices to be made, a new mindset to be adopted and a new life to be lived for real, no drifting back. That new life, for the disciples, began to express the very spirit of Jesus.

So this time coming up to Ascension what are we going to do? A time for reflection? What real new normal do we need to embody that we, you and I, might see Christ in others and they might see Christ in us – that same Spirit of Jesus?

Buzzard; Copyright Andrew Pratt 2024

Revelation, Scripture, Tradition, Reason – some thoughts

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 20^th February 1971.

[4] Goodbourn.

Good Friday reflection

Reflection

This event is almost inconceivable for me. You see, I do not believe in a vindictive God who sacrifices his Son. I do trust, through faith, in the incarnation – God being human. Hands that flung stars into space to cruel nails surrendered. A baby in a manger, ‘the Word made flesh’. But if this is our starting point then it is God who hung on a cross on that first ‘good Friday’. I cannot cope with some vast plan of salvation that requires this carnage. What I can understand is a God of love, from whose love we can never be separated (Romans 8, 38)

So where does that leave us? For me Jesus embodies God’s love in totality. Ultimate, complete and utter love has to be totally selfless and this is what I see in Jesus. It is the sort of love that challenges all hypocrisy, injustice and indignity to which we are exposed and which we still experience. But there is a problem here. The moment we start to love those whom others do not, or cannot, love we become a threat to them. We either have to acknowledge that love and ally ourselves with it, ignore it, or oppose it. We are inherently selfish. Humanly we seek our own preservation. That is a biological imperative. So when Jesus challenged the powers, those around him by challenging their economy – the overturning of the tables of the money-changers, the emphasis on the importance of the widow’s tiny monetary gift, pausing to heal a woman, deemed unclean, who pressed on him in the crowd, when he had been called to heal the daughter of a leader of the synagogue – in all these ways it felt as if he was a threat to the culture and religion, the very economy of the people. This threat was to their very being. And how they behaved was no different from how we, in similar situations, behave. They behaved, literally, naturally.

And Jesus response was the only possible response of complete and utter, unconditional, all-inclusive love: that is forgiveness – ‘forgive them for they (literally) know not what they do’!

And the cross becomes wondrous, not as some great theological bargain, or the culmination of a cosmic plan of sacrifice, but in the revelation of the nature of total love that we are called to emulate.

And the world is shrouded in darkness, inevitably for in darkness we cannot see, if God is dead this really is the end. And this is why theologians, then and now, you and I, seek to explain away this horror. Yet Jurgen Moltmann, some years ago in a book which still deserves to be read, The Crucified God, sees the cross to be the test of all that deserves to be called Christian, rather than the resurrection, for here we see God’s utter love and willingness to be vulnerable, as we are vulnerable, even unto death in order to be one with us. And the scandal and uniqueness is that gods are not meant to die, wondrous God, wondrous love indeed!

What can we sing in a distorted world? – Written for ArtServe and originally published in the Methodist Recorder (March 2024)

What can we sing in a distorted world?

Language and music are taut and strained. How can we compress into a phrase a modern pieta, or a father cradling body parts?

What can we sing?

We stand in the rubble of a distorted world where dust never settles, light filters through, flickering, faulted. Shadows lengthen.

Creation is cloaked by human action, or indifference.

And, again, what can we sing?

Perhaps we should be silent?

It has been said that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. And we turn up on Sunday morning to offer praise and thanksgiving or, expecting a still, small voice, a gentle stroll beside still waters. Have we forgotten? Perhaps. Or are we too young? Since October the seventh our slumbering memories have been re-awakened. And what do we sing? At times like these I wonder at the inability of our Christian churches to lament. Its absence in these times should shock.

I turn to two Psalms, one communal; one individual.

Psalm 137

By the rivers of Babylon—

there we sat down and there we wept

when we remembered Zion.

The nearest we get to these words, a reprise of Boney M singing ‘By the rivers of Babylon’. Notice they never use verses 8 and 9:

Happy shall they be who pay you back

what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take your little ones

and dash them against the rock!

Like a hybrid car shifting gear they move to something more comfortable: May the words of my lips and the meditation of my heart…’ They want something deemed ‘acceptable’.

Think of the horror of war, images that can’t be broadcast for what they portray. What would we feel? Might we not want vengeance? This Psalm says that such emotions are legitimate, human. How can we admit this in our churches? We need to know that we are still held by God when we have witnessed acts of deepest hatred and want to hit back, to wreak havoc.

But a warning. The Psalmist grasps this yet it can never be a justification for repeating the horror, simplistically, ‘because the Bible tells us so’. An ‘eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ should be consigned to the past.

Psalm 22

‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’.

This is personal, now. The cry we hear from the cross, from the lips of Jesus, words of a Psalm uttered in desperation in the throes of death: words just for Good Friday? They are strong enough for a hymn writer to pen: ‘the Father turns His face away’. And sometimes it feels like that. Yet God does not turn away, will not leave us in distress. Nevertheless, we may still feel the reality of personal desolation. If the Psalmist felt this emotion, and Jesus expressed it, then it is common to humanity and not to be condemned. It is cry of wretchedness though not a matter of doubt, rather of supreme faith. That is the foundation lament, a certainty of the presence of God with us in spite of all, even in persecution or impending death. We only complain when our expectations are not met – a train is late, food has gone mouldy, a friend lets us down. In faith we have expectations of God, God with us, always, in every circumstance or situation. Yet sometimes we feel desolate, abandoned, as though God has gone away. And then we too can lament, we can groan from the depths of our being. And at such times we utter the deepest, most sincere prayer we may ever voice, ‘God help me!’ This is no blasphemy, but a heartfelt, visceral cry of need undergirded by a subconscious sense that when all else is absent, there is a name on whom we can call.

So what music, what language, can we borrow, can we use? Perhaps Gorecki’s Third Symphony? Or a hymn like this? – ‘When loneliness oppresses me’ from Hymns of Hope and Healing/Unravelling the Mysteries sung, maybe, to KINGSFOLD?

1	When loneliness oppresses me; 
	when darkness fills my soul; 
	when grief and weeping overwhelm 
	and none can make me whole; 
	in angry fear I call to you.
	When will you hear my cry? 
	This heavy burden on my heart 
	must lift, or else I die.
	
2	When close companions melt away, 
	afflictions have no end, 
	I cry for help to empty air, 
	darkness my only friend. 
	O God, why have you left me here? 
	When will my troubles cease? 
	If you refuse to hear my prayer, 
	how will I find release?

Hymn - Marjorie Dobson
© Copyright 2012 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, www.stainer.co.uk. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Countering extremism – living with difference (previously on Facebook)

When you relate so closely to another that you feel their pain, and that pain can only be assuaged when your pain has gone, this is true compassion. That is why Jesus touched the leper, why the Samaritan crossed over. To be human, to love, we do not need to believe in God or to assent to a moral code. We ‘simply’ need to recognise and embody our common humanity with all others. This is the essence of love manifested in the idea of incarnation and can never be imposed on others and is not a condition for us to be loved.