Category Archives: Liberal Christianity

In medias res …

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I have been thinking for some time about what is left when religion is simply holus-bolus denied, and the place where religion used to be is left empty. For some people, of course, this is no problem, whether because their religious indoctrination as children was not particularly deep or lasting, or because they have enough richness in their lives already, so that they don’t miss what is missing when religion simply disappears. Yet the premise underlying this, that religion is simply empty and without function is, on the face of it, very unlikely. After all, religions have, in one way or another, dominated peoples lives since the year dot; it would seem passing strange if the result of its demise did not leave some emptiness behind. Not, as is so often supposed, a “god-shaped hole,” for that is a religious apologist’s way of accounting for what is missing, but certainly a cultural void which was once filled with religious myth, belief and ritual. One of the most important things to notice is that, if religion is, as we must suppose, in some sense, an organic development of human society — and there are very few societies that have no tinge of religion at all — then it was, inevitably, performing a social and personal function for those immersed in it.

I say this, not because I have some insistent nostalgia leading me back again and again to those years (which, in truth comprise most of my life) when I was a “believer” of some sorts, and practiced religion as a priest in the church. First of all, looking back, it is hard to say when I was a person of faith, and exactly what it means that I might have been. When I ask myself what I believed for all those years I am hard put to it to state clearly what those beliefs might have been. Towards the end, of course, as I was in the process of “talking myself out of a job” — as some regarded what I was doing — I do not think I could have put my “faith”, such as it was, in clear verbal terms. And that is true, I suspect, of most so-called “believers”.  Atheists sometimes say, with a certain amount of Schadenfreude, that atheists tend to know more about the Bible and about Christian belief than many Christians do, and that, of course, is not much of a surprise. After all, Christians are living their faith, which has much more to do, as is often pointed out, with living within the interstices of a myth, than it is expressing belief in propositions.

The fact that the story, for Christians, as well as Muslims, Hindus, and so forth, is more important than specific, stateable beliefs, probably tells us much more about religious faith than nonbelievers are ready to acknowledge, since atheists have a vested interest in characterising religious faith as a matter of believing things that are not true. Certainly, in the orthodox services of the church, and, in particular, the Eucharist (Mass), statements of belief are included, much like the national anthem used to be sung before the showing of films in movie theatres, but one only begins to notice the beliefs expressed by the words when one is in the process of questioning the value of faith itself. Until then it is simply a matter of expressing one’s commitment to a way of life defined in terms of myth and story, and to the community in which that myth contributes the skeletal form of one’s own life’s narrative. Those who keep emphasising, as I often do, the propositional content of religious belief, tend to steer clear of the less determinate role that such expressions of faith play in shaping a life.

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Getting Things Into Perspective

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At the moment I am engaged in such a whirlwind of reading and pondering that I have scant time to put my opinions out into the public eye. Indeed, I feel unprepared to do so, or to argue for positions that I hold only very tentatively. Yet, it seems to me, some of the things I am thinking about are very important, and need to be considered seriously. I am thinking at the moment, in particular, about what is often called scientism, the view that scientific knowledge, and scientific ways of knowing are all-encompassing and exhaustive of the entire scope of human knowledge. Often used in this connexion is the term that I have just used – ”ways of knowing” – and the scientistic position is frequently expressed in terms that suggest that there is only one “way of knowing” and that science is that “way.”

I have, to start with, to say that I do not find this language useful, for it either includes too much or too little. For instance, when I suggest that there are other ways of knowing, and use history as an example, it is commonly objected that historical knowledge is, in the requisite sense, scientific, since it depends upon evidence, and may even make predictions as to what we will find in the public record or in archaeological digs. For several reasons this does not seem satisfactory to me, since it is clear that our historical understanding of events changes over time. Gibbon’s history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example, with its wealth of often reliable detail, is also quite clearly a product of its time. No one, while they might use and even confirm much of the factual material that is contained in Gibbon’s volumes, would write a history of the fall of Rome in quite the way that Gibbon does, with his particular social and political emphases. Histories of the First World War often, according to Hew Strachan’s The First World War, by failing to take into consideration the time and circumstances in which the Great War took place, also fail to understand why, at the time, this was considered to be, not an absurd and monstrous waste of life, but of the first importance for the future of civilisation; and he points out the paradox that results from this assessment of the Great War’s meaninglessness:

This is of course the biggest paradox in our understanding of the war. On the one hand it was an unnecessary war fought in a manner that defied common sense, but on the other it was the war that shaped the world in which we live. [xvii]

It is important to note that whether we look at the world in one way rather than another does not obviously depend on the factual evidence that can be brought to bear on the question of the correct interpretation or understanding of the events in question.

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Being in the Hot Seat: Mehdi Hassan and Richard Dawkins

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It must really have stung when Dawkins ask Mehdi Hassan whether he really believed that Muhammad rode to heaven on a winged horse, because he apparently does believe it. We’ll begin with that particular exchange in Hasan’s Al Jazeera interview of Richard Dawkins. If you watch the whole interview, note Hasan’s belligerent interviewing style, and how, after being challenged, he became, if anything, even more aggressive than he had already been.

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Hasan’s defensiveness shows clearly how much the imputation stung. How is it possible, Dawkins asks, incredulously, for someone to believe such a fanciful story in the 21st century? And yet Hasan comes back quickly with his unqualified , “Yes, I believe.” It’s a bit like Thomas (in the account in John’s gospel) meeting the risen Jesus, and saying, “Lord, I believe.” Yet Thomas goes on to say, “Help my unbelief.” But there is not even the shade of  a question in Hasan’s response. He believes, full stop! (It is notable, though, that he does not mention splitting the moon, a miracle that does not offer the option, sometimes taken, that it was an optical illusion. In Pickthall’s translation of Sura 52: The Moon, verses 1-2, this reads: “1. The hour drew nigh, and the moon was rent in twain. 2. And if they behold a portent they turn away and say: Prolonged illusion.” Apparently there were some rational people around at the time! )

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Definitely the Conclusion of the Liberal Christian Theist Series

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Under my last post in this series (which I thought I had ended!) The Philosophical Primate made this comment:Gorilla

Eric, I am… puzzled. Specifically, by this:

The short answer to the question, of course, is that there is. No one can reasonably deny it. There are liberal Christian theists. There are even liberal Christian atheists, though most of them do not put it quite so bluntly.

What is puzzling is that you spend most of the rest of this post talking about those Christian atheists — for, as you note, that is the only possible honest description of Freeman, Cuppitt, Spong, et al — without ever returning to support the claim that there is a liberal Christian theism. Given your prior posts on this subject, there seems to be an intrinsic problem of inconsistency between being genuinely liberal in one’s theology/theism and maintaining any sort of commitment to the scriptures as God’s Word. Frankly, I took that line of argument to be a quite reasonable basis for denying that there can be genuinely liberal Christian theism, because to be both Christian and theistic must at minimum require treating the Christian holy text *as* holy, with all the illiberal implications thereof — those implications being what makes Spong’s “sins of scripture” sinful in his estimation. Indeed, the only Christian theist you discuss in this post, C.H. Dodd, seems to be striving for theological liberalism but failing, because he cannot escape that traditional view of scriptures as being the authoritative “Word of God.” I fear perhaps that, desiring not to go on too long, you left out something important you’d intended to say.

So, is there a liberal Christian theism? I say yes, but then I have to qualify my yes. I was going to write this as a comment in response to our furry philosopher, but it seemed more appropriate to bring it up front and face it a bit more publicly.

Let’s start with Dodd, because I do not think that he fails to be a theological liberal. What I think happens in Dodd’s case is that he takes Christianity as being inherently liberal. The conclusions that he comes to in the course of his book on the authority of the Bible are liberal ones, not liberal so far as the idea of the inspiration and authority of the Bible goes, perhaps, but liberal insofar as the message of the Bible, as he understands it, turns out to lead to a religion with liberal values, broadly speaking. He takes the critical-historical conclusions about the Bible seriously, and then, within the parameters set by the “higher criticism,” endeavours to locate a liberal message of love and toleration, and finds it. You may say, if you like, that he is reading this message into the text, and that is true. But that is true of everyone who reads a text as a sacred text having authority. Christian doctrine cannot be read in the biblical text. It may have seemed natural to the first Christians to think of Jesus as divine, given what is said in the gospels, but at no point in the gospels is there a clear statement that Jesus is the Son of God. In fact, in Mark, Jesus goes to some trouble to stress that he is the Son of Man. So, if you want to take Jesus as the Son of God, or to understand God as Three Persons in One God, you have to do a lot of creative reading. Thus, reading a liberal message in the Bible is not all that hard, if you single out, for particular notice, certain developmental themes that run through the Bible as a whole, but I will let you read Dodd if you want to find out how he does it. Spong does essentially the same thing, though it is hard to think that Spong remains a theist, whilst Dodd certainly was.

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Is there a liberal Christian theism? Conclusion

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Don Cupitt Atheist PriestThe short answer to the question, of course, is that there is. No one can reasonably deny it. There are liberal Christian theists. There are even liberal Christian atheists, though most of them do not put it quite so bluntly. For example, Don Cupitt, and the Sea of Faith movement in England, New Zealand and Australia, speak in terms of a “non-realist” theology. That is, the theological words used by Sea of Faith members are a bit like mathematical symbols. They do not have a referring function; that is, they do not denote anything real. They are words that are used in a traditional cultural narrative which carry along with them historical associations with a time when the words were really thought to refer to actual beings “out there” in reality, but are now seen as cultural symbols used as organising principles of a way of life. And that way of life can be as rich as the old, realist Christianity of the past. The only difference is that the language is no longer taken to be about anything other than the cultural activities in which it is embedded.

This, of course, does not convince everyone, and the position is not widely adopted. For instance, Anthony Freeman, an Anglican priest, and member of the Sea of Faith movement in England, published, in 1993, a book entitled God in Us. He was then a priest in the Diocese of Chichester, was even involved in the training of clergy, and was promptly cashiered by his bishop, Eric Kemp. (There is a BBC account of Freeman’s travails here.) It is worthwhile quoting a few words from Freeman’s book here to give you the flavour of non-realist “theology”:

I return finally to the questions with which we began: ‘Do you believe in God? Are you not an atheist?’ The answer is, ‘Yes, I do believe in God, and one of the things I believe about God is that he does not exist.’ This is not just my being clever. A very important point is being made. Our view of religion as a human creation — let us call it Christian humanism — still stands firmly in the Christian tradition, and sees itself as a legitimate heir to the New Testament. We still find value in the Christian vocabulary, including the word God, and in the Christian stories, especially those of Jesus. A secular humanist, an atheist, has no place for such things. That does not mean that for us it is simply, ‘business as usual’. If we are to take seriously the non-supernatural form of Christianity which I am commending, then the emphasis of religion shifts from heaven to earth, from the next world to this one, and from dogma to spirituality and ethics. But religion still has an important place in human life. [28-29]

This puts the idea of a non-realist Christianity in a nutshell. You may think that it is not very surprising that Freeman’s bishop should have given him his pink slip, but as you think this, you might also wonder what people are going to do with the rich cultural heritage that the religions bequeath to their contemporary followers. Or, perhaps, most important, what are they going to do without it?

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Is there a liberal Christian theism? II

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I am going to cruise straight on, even though some very good questions (and answers!) were provided in the comment stream of “Is there a liberal Christian theism? I.” I do not want to look closely at those questions and answers here, for in a sense they anticipate and pre-empt many things that I want to say now (as I supposed, when I let the first instalment go without this conclusion, they might).

I want to begin, then, with the oft-quoted passage from Augustine’s commentary on Genesis, part of which I uploaded and linked in my first instalment of this post on liberal Christian theism. The importance of Augustine for my purposes (and for the purposes of those who wish to deny that scripture is to be read literally) is simply that, in his commentary, Augustine suggests that, where the facts are known to be otherwise than they are depicted in scripture, it must be that scripture was intended to be read symbolically or figuratively. Thus, it is suggested, even those who first accepted the authority of the Bible were aware that it does not aim at the truth of science, but at religious or theological truth, and the Bible’s errors of fact are not justly held against the Bible as a source of religious enlightenment and truth.

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Is there a liberal Christian theism? I

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It has been suggested that there may be problem at the heart of the new atheist project. If so, then it needs to be addressed. We can put the problem in this way. Now, please note, I do not say that it is a problem, but that it may be one. I want to look more closely at it, in order to say whether, first, it is a problem, and then, second, if it is, whether it has been adequately dealt with. There are a number of atheists who believe that this is a problem, and that those who dismiss it are being superficial and unnecessarily dismissive of religion. While atheism is not just a negative dismissal of theism, it is at least that in part. However, if its status as a rational dismissal of theism is to stand, it must respond to theism’s efforts to present itself as rational and able to take on board the kinds of criticism that are often made of the theistic world-view. Quite aside from the question of the existence of God, which is not going to be settled to anyone’s satisfaction within the lives of anyone living today or tomorrow, there are other questions as to the acceptability of faith, and those who dismiss religious faith must have an answer, in addition to scepticism about the existence of God, why more liberal approaches to religious belief are unacceptable to nonbelievers who persist in opposing even liberal religion, and have shown themselves reluctant to join even with the exponents of liberal religion in attempting to bring about justice and peace in our societies and in the world.

Aside from arguments pertaining to the existence of a god or gods, amongst the strongest arguments against theism are those pertaining to the use of scriptures by most theistic religions, that is, the belief in and use of texts considered to be holy and revelational of the nature and purposes of the god or gods believed in by the religion concerned. This is also the area in which liberal Christianity has made the most effort to be contemporary and open to change, so it is an important test area for the question of whether there is a genuinely liberal Christian theism. We are all familiar with the fairly intemperate putdowns of the idea of sacred writings which are believed to contain (in some form or other) the very words of a god. They have been dismissed off-handedly as bronze-age scribblings, the camp-fire maunderings of Middle Eastern goat-herders, and various other dismissively derogatory things, none of which, even if true, would necessarily show that the works do not contain the words of a god. It is a simple informal fallacy to suggest that the origin of a propositional claim is in itself sufficient to defeat it. In any event, the writings of, say, the Jewish Tanach were probably none of them written by goat-herders (notwithstanding the fact that David is depicted therein as a shepherd of the tribe of Benjamin); and, besides, the most primitive parts of the Tanach were probably written during the transition from the bronze age to the early iron age, the later parts originating entirely in the later iron age and extending into the historical period. So it will really not do, however rhetorically clever it is thought to be, to dismiss the writings as flawed because early, or flawed because originating in a period of rudimentary technology.

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Higgs lambastes Dawkins but does not make himself clear

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In the Guardian this morning there is a report of an interview given by Peter Higgs (of Higgs’ Boson fame) to a Spanish Newspaper, El Mundo. In it he takes Dawkins to task and calls him an embarrassment to science, saying (without apparent justification) that religion and science are compatible. Higgs seems to think that Dawkins’ strictures against religion and religious believers apply only to fundamentalist religion, and that Dawkins himself is something of a fundamentalist, and, as such, an embarrassment to science. Indeed, the title of the piece is “Peter Higgs criticises Richard Dawkins over anti-religious ‘fundamentalism’.” Though not a believer himself — a fact which he puts down to his upbringing — he thinks that lots of physicists are religious believers, and, he says, so long as you are a convinced but not a dogmatic believer, religion and science are perfectly compatible.

Let’s put what seems to be the heart of the matter here so that we can consider Higgs’ position more thoroughly. He puts it this way:

The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that’s not the same thing as saying they’re incompatible. It’s just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.

But that doesn’t end the whole thing. Anybody who is a convinced but not a dogmatic believer can continue to hold his belief. It means I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past.

Now, I’m not quite sure that I get the point of what he is saying. If, in fact, the traditional reasons for belief going back millennia are “rather undermined” by science, what does it mean to say that being a convinced but not dogmatic believer is still perfectly compatible with science? Higgs is coming to this discussion rather late in the day. This was frequently said about five years ago, but people seem to have come to the recognition, despite Higgs’ lateness on the scene, that (i) Dawkins is not a fundamentalist, since you have to have a prescribed text in order to be so, and (ii) there is no very clear distinction between what Higgs is calling “convinced” versus “dogmatic” believers. One would like to say, “You either believe or you don’t.” There aren’t any very convincing half-way measures when it comes to faith, and Higgs certainly hasn’t explained very clearly what he intends by drawing this distinction between conviction and dogma.

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Response to Scott McKenna on Christianity and Assisted Dying

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First of all, let me say how appreciative I am that the Rev’d Scott McKenna responded to my post, Is there a Christian case for assisted dying? In that post I took Scott’s arguments in his address to a conference at the Royal Society of Scotland, in Edinburgh, as a foil for the things that I wanted to say, and he has responded in detail. I have taken the liberty of linking a pdf version of that address here. I copy his response — a comment in the comment stream of the earlier post — here:

Eric, thank you for your comment on assisted dying.   I read it with real interest.   Let me respond with five brief points.   1)  As you know, suicide is not condemned in the Hebrew or Christian Bible.   Samson committed ‘suicide’ and is held up as a giant of the faith in the New Testament Book of Hebrews.   Samson pushed over the pillars in order to kill the Philistine kings and himself; he wanted to end his own suffering.   He is nowhere condemned.   2)  I enjoyed reading about  St Augustine and his handling of the sixth commandment.   Context is everything:  Augustine was responding to the situation in which Christians were volunteering for martyrdom (in order to enter the Kingdom sooner).   The saint wished to stop this and, through his handling of the sixth commandment, made it an offence to take one’s own life.    Augustine’s commentary is not concerned with the ending of human life for a terminally ill patient.   3)  For me, sanctity of life does not necessarily equate with inviolability.   My argument is that God has given us moral responsibility.   We cannot ever say that God desires intolerable suffering of us and, in ending our life in such circumstances, we, as co-creators with God, are exercising compassion and God-given choice.   There are no ‘disastrous consequences’:  God is bigger than that.  It is precisely because God is compassionate that we have nothing to fear.    We have real moral choice:  we are not ‘sheep’.   4)   I do support the choice for ending human life in circumstances other than terminal illness.   I think of Tony Nicklinson and another recent UK case of a 23 year old paralysed from the neck down.   Again, for me, the issue here is the theological model.   God is not to be conceived of as sovereign, distant, detached and unloving.   It seems to me an act of the deepest faith to end one’s life, to honourably escape intolerable suffering, and let oneself go into the hands of God.   God knows intolerable suffering from the inside:  I cannot imagine that God would be anything other than merciful to one whose physical, emotional, mental and spiritual suffering was unbearable.   5)   Part of the churches’ problem at the present time is that, in many areas, the theology has not caught up with life.   This has been the case throughout history and, in the Bible, there are numerous examples of theology being forced to take a leap forward.   As in all disciplines, a theory or accepted practice exists until it breaks under the pressure of new knowledge or insight, so too in theology.   Eric, thank you for your hugely interesting blog!!

What follows is an expanded version of my response to this comment. I asked him if I might call him Scott, and then took the liberty of doing so. And then I continued:

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Dear Christians … or why Francis Spufford’s letter to atheists simply won’t do

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I find it difficult to understand why the New Humanist bothered to publish, and not altogether clear why Francis Spufford decided to write, his letter to atheists. Not only does it seem altogether to miss the point of non-belief, it doesn’t really account very well for the purpose or substance of religious belief either. So, when he begins with the following teasing, chastising sentence –

Allow me to annoy you with the prospect of mutual respect between believers and atheists.

– he succeeds both in annoying and misrepresenting the relationship that now exists between us. He forgets a very important fact: that most non-believers started out as believers, and ended up as non-believers for all sorts of reasons, but amongst them are reasons referring to the harm which religious belief now does on a massive scale. The question of respect is therefore not one that can be settled with a few anodyne phrases, or tactless efforts at being ironic or funny.

Nor, it seems to me, does Spufford do religion any favours by misrepresenting the way that most religious believers hold their faith. Indeed, he tries so hard to make it seem as though religious believers don’t really believe, that their having beliefs that can and are regularly cashed in in terms of social and political policies is made to seem like something entirely extraneous to the project of religious belief, that he looks more than slightly dishonest into the bargain.

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