The Many Faces of Christianism -- Part 2: Imaginaries and other buzz words

 The Many Faces of Christianism -- Part 2 -- continued from Part 1.

The first thing that struck me when I began to read The Many Faces of Christianism was the use of the word imaginaries. It appeared in the first paragraph, and about seven times in the first chapter (more if you include footnotes, none of which explained it).

Here is one of the sections in which the word appears in context:

In all of this, the bulwarks of present-day anti-liberalism, such as the notions of Holy Rus’ or the Russian World, nationalist and populist movements in Europe, as well as the Make America Great Again-campaign feature major political imaginaries: they assert a timeless connection between certain territories, certain people, and cultural or civilizational exceptionalism. All of these build on a connection of these political imaginaries with (selected aspects) of religious tradition.

One might conclude, therefore, that "imaginaries" are things that assert timeless connections between certain territories and people on the one hand, and cultural and civilizational exceptionalism on the other -- but it's still a rather nebulous concept.

I recalled, however that I had seen the term used a couple of years earlier in a book I had been editing. It popped up in Chapter 12, and I was unable to edit the sentences in which it appeared, because I had no idea what they meant. I asked the author, and suggested that he include a definition of it and a couple of other terms (like "hybridity") somewhere in the first chapter so that readers who encountered them later in the book could see what he was talking about.

He said the term had been suggested to him by a mutual friend and former colleague of mine in the Missiology Department at the University of South Africa (Unisa), Klippies Kritzinger, so I asked him what the term meant. I thought I had made a note of his reply, but I had mislaid it. I did a web search, which said it has something to do with the square root of -1. It took me some time to find Klippies Kritzinger's reply, and when I eventually did find it, it said:

I used the term 'imaginary' more or less in the sense that the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor does. He coined the term 'social imaginary', which is not the same as a theory. I use the term ecclesial imaginaries, which I first called the 'functional ecclesiologies' by which members view and experience the church. These are imaginaries such as: church as stokvel (you don't get buried from church building if you are owing on your 'dues'; church as theatre (it is mainly about entertainment: vibrant music and motivational speeches); church as school (mainly about teaching and learning); church as business (minister as CEO, flashy marketing and huge building); and so on... The wonderful biblical images of Body of Christ, people of God, group of disciples, bride of Christ, and so on are perhaps affirmed intellectually, but the actual praxis (theory-practice-theory-practice) is driven by these imaginaries. And I told Stephan that many URCSA members and students do church in these ways, which I find problematic and disappointing. I hope this helps a bit....

That did help in the case of the book I was editing two years ago, but it doesn't help much in the case of this book, which has "imaginaries" scattered throughout, but they seem to mean something other than popular erroneous conceptions of the Church. 

It does, however, seems to have become the Western theological buzzword of the 2020s, as "relevant" was in the 1960s, "contextual" in the 1970s, and "holistic" in the 1980s. It's one of those words that lots of people seem to use, but no one is quite sure what it means. 

Since retiring, however, I seem to have got out of touch with most Western theology, and I realised that I'd kept in touch with most of it while I was working through gossip in the Unisa cafeteria and editing theology study guides, but, since losing access to the Unisa library ten years ago, I've been pretty much out of touch with it. 

But reading The Many Faces of Christianism I begin to suspect that many Western theologians are as out of touch with Orthodox theology as I am with Western theology and view it mainly through Western Protestant/secular/political spectacles, and perhaps even primarily through the spectacles of the CIA.

In trying to get a handle on "imaginaries" I also asked on an English usage internet forum, some of whose members had access to more resources than I do, and it appears that it is not in the Oxford English Dictionary, but suggested it may have been imported from French, and was possibly connected with the French philosopher Lacan. And yes, that seems a promising path to follow, except that  I learn that, like Lacan's other contributions to psychoanalytic theory, it was subject to a continual reformulation throughout his work. It appears to mean an image external to oneself, like a child observing its reflection in a mirror. I'll have to think about that some more, and see if there are any clues further on in the book.

Holy Rus' is mentioned as one of the "imaginaries", but if an "imaginary" in the Lacanian sense, bears the relation of the image of a child in a mirror to the child itself (as Kritzinger's distorted ecclesiologies in relation to the Body of Christ suggest), then surely in a serious work of theology they should also be discussing the child, rather than just the imaginary? But the authors of this book, in effect, live in the world through the looking glass.

There are other terms that pop up without clear definitions, for example "anti-liberalism"  in the passage quoted above, and "liberal democracy" elsewhere. My initial impression (which may change when I've read more, though I doubt it) is that for the editors and most of the authors, "liberal democracy" is characteristic of the countries of Western Europe and North America, and "anti-liberalism" characteristic of Christian Nationalists. I'm sure that the second part of that is right, but I'm not sure of the first part. Britain's terrorism laws, for example, which treat opposition to genocide as terrorism, are far more draconian than South Africa's 1967 Terrorism Act, passed at the height of its Christian Nationalism phase.

Continued in Part 3. 

 

 

Father Seraphim Rose and 20th-Century Orthodoxy

Father Seraphim Rose

The decision of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) to consider the late Father Seraphim Rose as a candidate for canonisation as a saint has sparked off a great deal of controversy online, with some saying what a great saint he was, and some saying that such a great sinner could never be a saint.

I don't want to join that argument; it's not for me to decide, and I know I won't be called upon to make that kind of judgement. But as a missiologist and church historian it think it could be interesting to reflect on his place in mission and church history.

Before the 1960s Orthodoxy was little known among English-speaking people. Orthodox people living in countries where English was widely spoken might build churches, but the services were usually in Greek, Russian, Bulgarian or other non-English languages. After the Russian Revolution some Russian refugees lived in exile in Western Europe and through the ecumenical contacts they made began to make Orthodoxy better-known to a select few in Western denominations, often in academic circles.

One of these exiles was Nicolas Zernov, who influenced an Anglican student, Timothy Ware, who became Orthodox in 1954, and eventually succeeded his mentor as Spalding Professor of Eastern Orthodox Theology at Oxford University. Zernov had already been instrumental in founding the Fellowship of St Alban & St Sergius, which encouraged ecumenical contact between Orthodox and Anglicans.

In the early 1960s both Zernov and Ware wrote books on the Orthodox Christian faith in English. Ware's book The Orthodox Church has been reprinted several times as has Zernov's The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century. Timothy Ware became a monk, taking the monastic name of Kallistos, and later served as a bishop. Through his writings he influenced a growing number of English-speaking people, both in Britain itself and in the Commonwealth.

On the other side of the world, in California, USA, Eugene Rose, who was brought up as a Methodist, later became an atheist and then a student of Chinese religions, became interested in Orthodoxy. His spiritual father was Bishop John (Maximovich) of San Francisco (now better known as St John of Shanghai and San Francisco), who was, like Nicolas Zernov, an exile from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Eugene Rose became Orthodox, and felt called to the monastic life, and with a friend, Gleb Podmoshensky, formed a monastery in Northern California, where Rose, when tonsured, took the monastic name of Seraphim, after St Seraphim of Sarov. There they began publishing a magazine, The Orthodox Word, and also translated and published several Orthodox books in English.

To these two sources of Orthodox literature in English may be added a third. Another group of Russian exiles had set up an Orthodox seminary in Paris for training clergy, mainly for the Russian diaspora. Some of them crossed the Atlantic and set up St Vladimir's Seminary in New York, and St Vladimir's Seminary Press also began publish Orthodox works in English.

From these three, and other sources, flowed an increasing volume of Orthodox literature in English.

In 1966 I went to England to study theology at the University of Durham as an Anglican. Some of the staff and fellow students at St Chad's College were interested in Orthodoxy to some extent, and in 1968 I went on a two week course on Orthodox theology for non-Orthodox theological students, sponsored by the World Council of Churches. It consisted of a week of lectures at Bossey in Switzerland, and Holy Week and Pascha at St Sergius Institute in Paris.

In July 1968 I returned to South Africa, having passed the Diploma in Theology course at Durham, and spent a term at St Paul's College, Grahamstown, where all the other students were busy preparing for their final exams, while I was free to read whatever I liked, and discovered some Orthodox books in the library, including one by Fr Alexander Schmemann of St Vladimir's in New York, called The World as Sacrament, later published in an expanded versions as For the Life of the World. It impressed me a great deal and seemed to provide the answer to some of the biggest problems I found with Western theology. At that stage I hoped that the Anglican Church would grow closer to Orthodoxy, and when, some years later I found that it wasn't, but was actually moving further away, I became Orthodox. The point of this personal excursus is that my movement to Orthodoxy was shaped mostly by the Paris/New York stream, rather than the California and Oxford streams.

It was when our family became Orthodox in 1987 that we were part of a move to start an Orthodox mission society, the Society of St Nicholas of Japan, that I became aware of Father Seraphim Rose. Among the activities of the Society of St Nicholas, was the selling of Orthodox books, mostly in English. We also appealed for literature to give away free and some people sent us back issues of The Orthodox Word. Some asked for his books, which we ordered. We also had some copies of his biography, Not of this World, one copy of which was damaged, so we could not sell it, and I kept it and read it, and was interested to discover that he was in San Francisco at about the time the Beat Generation authors were active there.

From the biography I gathered that Fr Seraphim Rose was critical of the St Vladimir's school that produced Orthodox literature in English in New York. The criticisms weren't very specific, There were some things that he wrote in his books that I was critical of too -- I'll return to those later. But the main point here is that during the 1960s there was a greatly increased production of Orthodox literature in English from three main sources -- Oxford, England; New York, USA; and California, USA,

It seems that the time was ripe for it.

And the timing seems remarkably exact. Bishop Kallistos Ware and Father Seraphim Rose were contemporaries, born within a month of each other in 1934.

What is more, those who were major influences at the time they were becoming Orthodox, Bishop John of San Francisco and Nicolas Zernov, were also close contemporaries, born within two years of each other. Both were exiles from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and both, in their journeys into exile, arrived in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1921, and studied there between 1921 and 1925. Both were part of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, and so must have known each other during that time.

These three streams of Orthodox literature in English had different emphases, which may have had the effect of appealing to a range of different temperaments. The result was, in most English-speaking countries, an increased interest in Orthodoxy, and a growing use of English in Orthodox services.

The "Oxford stream", if I may call it that, appealed especially to academic and ecumenical circles. Zernov began with ecumenical outreach, forming the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius to make contact with Anglicans.

The St Vladimir's/New York stream was mainly concerned earlier immigrant groups who had come from Orthodox countries in Europe and Asia to the USA before the Bolshevik revolution, which had cut off financial support from Moscow, and so was concerned with becoming an American Orthodox Church. The children and grandchildren of the original immigrants were becoming increasingly English speaking. It was concerned to provide clergy for parishes, and was therefore more focused on parish ministry. It was also to some extent academic and ecumenical.

Father Seraphim Rose, once he had become Orthodox, wanted to be a monk, and, with a friend, started a monastery, and so the vision of Orthodoxy that he promoted was largely monastic.

At the risk of over-simplification, then, one could say that the Oxford stream was academic, the New York stream was parochial, and the California stream monastic.

Father Seraphim Rose, or Eugene Rose, as he then was, had a vision of being a missionary, and, with the blessing of Bishop John of San Francisco, formed a missionary brotherhood of St Herman of Alaska with his friend Gleb Podmoshensky and a couple of others. The first thing they did was to open an Orthodox Bookshop. They were offered space on the cathedral premises, but they preferred to have it on a public street nearby. It became a kind of Orthodox information centre. One family that came to them, the Andersons, had been Roman Catholics, and involved with the Catholic Worker movement of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day, and they became Orthodox.

Their next project was to start a magazine, The Orthodox Word, and Bishop John chose the title. The aim was to provide English-speaking people sources of the Orthodox Faith, which they did, mainly from monastic sources, interspersed with notes and other articles they themselves wrote.

After the death of Bishop John they felt the call not merely to read about the monastic life, but to live it, so they bought a piece of lonely isolated land near the small village of Platina in northern California, and moved themselves and their printing press to it. A few years later they were tonsured as monks, and Eugene Rose became Seraphim, and he was later ordained as a priest. Fifteen years after moving to Platina, in 1982, Father Seraphim died. By then thousands of people had been influenced by him, either personally, or through publications of the St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood.

After Father Seraphim's death things tended to fall apart, and some of the pieces fell into dubious places. I will not say much about that here, as there is information on it from other sources. The main point here is that Father Seraphim Rose was influential in spreading Orthodoxy among English-speaking people at a time when few of them knew much about it.

Much of the material came from traditional Orthodox sources, and so passed on some important aspects of Orthodox tradition. I have been one of its beneficiaries, and so have several other people I have known.

But there is another side to it as well.

Before he became Orthodox, Eugene Rose came under the influence of several other schools of thought, both religious and secular. Among other things he studied Eastern Religions at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Among his teachers were Alan Watts, a renegade Anglican priest who had become a Zen Buddhist, and Gi-ming Shien, a teacher of Chinese philosophy. He also became particularly interested in the writings of René Guénon, a French philosopher. As his biographer puts it, "For Eugene, he became... a single vantage point from which he could view the myriad fruits of man's immorial search for meaning." And Father Seraphim later wrote, "Guénon was the chief influence on the formation of my own intelectual outlook."

René Guénon (1886-1951) was a French philosopher who developed an ideology of Traditionalism as an antidote to modernity. He was antimodern, and believed that traditional forms of religion, any religion, were better than non-traditional forms. Eventually be became a Muslim.

Orthodoxy regards Holy Tradition as very important, so when Eugene Rose discovered Orthodox Christianity, it appealed to him because it seemed to be the most traditional form of Christianity. But there is a difference between tradition and Traditionalism.

In the modern age, conservatives tend to value tradition, and seek to balance the notion of progress with the value of what has been inherited from the past. Conservatives like to change things slowly and carefully. But to the right of conservatives are Reactionaries, who want to restore the past, the status quo ante, whether that past was real or imagined. Such people are not merely traditional, they are traditionalist. They value tradition for its own sake, and develop traditionalism into an ideology.

Traditions can be good or bad. The English word "tradition" comes from the Latin traditio, meaning to hand over, to deliver. The New Testament Greek word is paradosis. Whether traditions are good or bad depends on what is handed over, to whom, and why. It is good to hand over, or pass on, the gospel of Christ to those who have not heard it. St Paul urges the Thessalonian Christians to "stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle" (2 Thess 2:15).

But handing over Jesus to be crucified was not a good tradition. A person who hands over their country to an enemy is called a "traitor", which also comes from the Latin traditio. During times of persecution Christians who handed over holy things to the police were called traditores.

So "tradition" is not good per se, it is good when something good is handed over to the right people for a good purpose. For the Orthodox, not all tradition is holy tradition. Some traditions are distinctly unholy.

But for traditionalists tradition is something good in itself, and can easily become an idol, and traditionalism becomes an ideology and a form of idolatry.

Other traditionalist philosophers have followed Guénon. Among them are Julius Evola (1890-1974) of Italy and Alexandr Dugin of Russia.

Evola advocated that "differentiated individuals" following the left-hand path use dark violent sexual powers against the modern world. For Evola, these "virile heroes" are both generous and cruel, possess the ability to rule, and commit "Dionysian" acts that might be seen as conventionally immoral. For Evola, the left-hand path embraces violence as a means of transgression (Wikipedia).

Dugin valued the esoteric forms of religion rather than the exoteric. In his youth be belonged to the Yuzhinsky circle, which was part of the Soviet "occult underground" an esoteric counterculture preoccupied with reading and experimenting with Western esoteric and occult literature in conjunction with Eastern religious texts.

Dugin declared that "Traditionalism is not a history of religions, not a philosophy, not a structural sociological analysis. It is more of an ideology or meta-ideology that is totalitarian to a considerable extent and places rather harsh demands before those who accept and profess it".

Father Seraphim Rose did good work in publishing and distributing the works of Orthodox monastic fathers, but in his own writings we should perhaps be careful to see what sort of spectacles he is looking through. It is better to look at traditionalism through Orthodox spectacles than to look at Orthodoxy through traditionalist spectacles.

Generation Z and Religion

The maps on this page, though from different sources, seem to be based on the same data, showing the religious affiliations of Generation Z in Europe.

Two things struck me about them immediately:

First, that while the current map shows that secularism prevails in Western Europe, Eastern Europe is predominantly Christian. I suspect that a similar map produced 40 years ago would have shown precisely the reverse: the East would have been secular, the West Christian. Back then people in the West regarded people in the East as “godless commies”; now, it seems, the people in the West are godless capitalists.

Secondly, it has often been said by some of the more militant atheist embracers of secularism that religion has been the main cause of wars throughout history, and that if religion were abolished, wars would cease. Yet among the counties marked on the map as secularist are those that are most supportive of the current genocide being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, especially Germany, France and the UK, and whenever there seems to be the possibility of peace in the Russia-Ukraine War, those same countries are the ones most rigidly opposed to peace, and urge Ukraine to fight on.

There are also some things of deeper significance, among which are what Samuel Huntington got wrong.

I thought Samuel Huntington's book, The Clash of Civilizations, got a lot of things right about the post-Cold War world -- that the "three-worlds" model would be exchanged for a "nine civilizations" one. But he made the mistake of thinking that Western Civilization was fundamentally Christian. As this map shows, Secularism is the established religion of the West. It doesn't matter whether you are called atheist, agnostic, or "none", it's secularism all the way down.

What do I mean by "secularism"?

Going back not 40 years, but 60 years, Western Christian theologians were concerned about the secular meaning of the gospel. There was even a book with that title -- see here. An American theologian, Harvey Cox, wrote The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective in which he explained the important distinction between "secularization" and "secularism".

"Secular" means pertaining to this age, and Christian theology makes a distinction between "this age" and "the age to come", between what is temporal and what is eternal. Civil government, for example, is concerned with the things of this age, not with the age to come, so we speak of "secular governments".  An English monarch once ordered clergy of the Church of England to keep registers of baptisms, marriage and burials, because he wanted statisstics of citizens. Now it is good that the church should keep records of its members, but its purposes are differen It is related to the concept of separation of cht from those of the state, so in 1837 the English government began secular registration of births, marriages and deaths, for its own secular purposes. This process is called secularization. It is related to the concept of the separation of Church and State, and Harvey Cox in his book explains why he thinks it is a good thing. 

Secularism, on the  other hand, is something else. It is an ideology in which people believe that there is only this age, and no age to come. And of secularism, Harvey Cox (1965:21) says:

While secularization finds its roots in the biblical faith itself and is to some extent an authentic outcome of the impact of biblical faith on Western history, this is not the case with secularism. Like any other ism, it menaces the openness and freedom secularization has produced; it must therefore be watched carefully to prevent its becoming the ideology of a new establishment. It must be especially checked where it pretends not to be a world-view but nonetheless seeks to impose its ideology through the organs of the state.

The word "atheist" means "godless", and, in demographic terms, "none" also means "godless". If there is a difference, the main difference that one can find in English is that atheists are self-consciously godless; "nones" are equally godless, just less self-consciously so. Secularism describes the worldview of both. 

Forty years ago the equivalent of Generation Z would be the age-cohort born between 1957 and 1972,  and it was probably these that Samuel Huntington had in mind when he wrote The Clash of Civilizations. He wrote before any of the current Generation Z were even born, and so probably did not foresee the secularization of the worldview of Western Europe.

I don't think, however, that that change invalidates the main thrust of Huntington's thesis: that after the end of the Cold War conflict would not be so much between ideological blocs wedded to capitalism or communism as between civilizations clustered around a common religion. If you don't regard atheism or secularism as fitting the definition of a "religion" you can substitute "worldview" if you like.

To see the change, you can regard the area coloured yellow in the map on the left as Huntington's conception of Western Civilization, while that coloured grey on the map was the bit he didn't foresee,

Huntington believed that conflicts within civilizations would tent to remain local, while those between different civilizations would tend to become wider. 

And the question arises: how do the changes reflected in these maps affect present conflicts, and how might they lead to future conflicts? And how do these changes affect our understanding of the world we live in?

I have discussed Generation Z and religion before, and especially how some of those members of Generation Z who are turning to God also seem to be attracted to right-wing politics. If you are interested you can find more on that here.  

 

Phil Rickman, Charles Williams, and Powers of Evil

Phil Rickman, the British author, died on 29 October 2024 and the Phil Rickman Appreciation Group on Facebook suggested that people read his novel December during the month of December as a kind of memorial tribute to him.

I started rereading it. I first read it about 3 years ago, and found it a rather difficult read -- see my review here. This time I read it more slowly. It is a complex book, five parts with a Prologue and an Epilogue. Don't skip the Prologue! If you are reading it for the first or second time, I recommend re-reading the Prologue at the beginning of each part.

I first came across Phil Rickman when I was browsing in a bookshop in 1999. The title of a book, Crybbe intrigued me, so I took it off the shelf and read the blurb, which made him sound like a cross between Charles Williams and Stephen King, so I bought the book, and was not disappointed. 

I went on to read most of his novels, all the ones I could find, anyway. Somehow they didn't all seem to make their way into bookshops, or else they were sold out quickly. December was published only a month after Crybbe, but it was 20 years before I found it, in a secondhand book shop.

At one level, this is a ghost story. Charles Williams wrote one ghost story, All Hallows Eve, told from the point of view of one of the ghosts. December is told from several points of view, with so many switches that it is sometimes bewildering, but never from the point of view of the ghosts.

In this story five rock musicians have a contract to produce a record in a ruined abbey in south Wales. Four of the musicians are thought to be psychic, and the producers think that this, combined with the setting, should produce an interesting album that will sell well. The story begins with one of the musicians, Dave Reilly, being spooked by the sudden appearance of thirteen tallow candles in the studio and running out to take refuge under a tree. There he has a vision of dying outside a large building, and later the news comes over the radio that John Lennon was killed at that exact time, and he is haunted by the ghost of John Lennon. Three of the other members of the group are also haunted, each in different ways, and the group splits up. 

Fourteen years later they are called back together to complete production of the album, which had been abandoned, and they somewhat reluctantly agree. One of the members, Tom Storey, is approached through his wife's business partner, Martin Broadbank, who organises a dinner party for them to meet.  Broadbank's housekeeper cum concubine, Meryl, who is a spiritualist, and has a vision of most of the people at the dinner party suffering a violent death.

Later in the story Meryl finds herself in the company of Tom Storey, and tries to find out more about his psychic experiences, which, as a spiritualist, she sees as glamorous and exciting. But as events develop she comes to realise that she is out of her depth. She looks at herself in a mirror and

In the glass she sees not the old smouldering allure in the mysterious dark-eyed one who looks beyond the horizon, but plain perplexed apprehension in the unpainted eyes of an ordinary middle-aged woman.

And she longs to be back with Martin, for whom the only unknown forces are market forces. With whom she can safely be a believer in Other Spheres, a confidante of ghosts, and it doesn't matter because she's the only one, an exotic eccentric in a world of businessmen and socialites.

Meryl has been bound up with her perception of "unknown forces" as weird, mysterious, exotic and spooky, and perceives things like market forces as safe and ordinary and part of everyday life. Yet in the story the market forces are perhaps the most unsafe of all. It is market forces that are driving businessmen like Max Goff and Sile Copesake who in this story represent the money behind the music.

Also central to the story is the death of John Lennon, shot to death in New York City on 8 December 1980. But in December 2024, when so many Phil Rickman fans are reading his novel December, another businessman is shot in New York city. Some of this seems to have an uncanny application to Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, alleged to have been shot by Luigi Mangione. As Max Goff and Sile Copesake are to music in December, so was Brian Thompson to health care in everyday life. And Max Goff also makes an appearance in Crybbe.

Phil Rickman hints at a theological point here. Meryl looks for the unknown spiritual forces in all the wrong places, when all along they are right under her nose, the market forces driving the behaviour of the guests at her dinner party.

Another theological point is evident in the case of Brian Thompson. Attacking the flesh and blood representative of spiritual forces is ineffective. Brian Thompson  was replaced in his office the very next day. As St Paul says:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic forces of wickedness in the heavenlies (Eph 6:10-12).

And he says elsewhere that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal. Flesh and blood oligarchs can be replaced. The real enemy is the spiritual power of the ideologies that drive them.

C.S. Lewis on Christian Nationalism

Christian Nationalism seems to be making a come-back.

Christian Nationalism was the philosophical underpinning for the apartheid ideology of the National Party that ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994. During that period Christian Nationalism was dominant and all-pervasive. Student teachers at universities were taught that they had to teach subjects like Geology in a "Christian National way". All children in schools were to be taught to be nationalist in their thinking, and nationalism was defined as "love of one's own".

But what is "one's own"?

Many Christian groups in South Africa at that time questioned the Christian Nationalist ideology, and some explicitly and outright rejected it. Christian Nationalism grew out of an attempt to give a Christian flavour to a romantic secular nationalism that had grown up in Europe, especially Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. For more on that, see my article on Nationalism, Violence and Reconciliation.

Now Christian Nationalism seems to be making a come-back in certain circles in North America,  in Russia, and in some other places. Many Christians find this disturbing. Those of us who were involved in the struggle against apartheid from the 1950s to the 1980s are aware that Christian Nationalism was not merely a heresy, it was a pseudo-gospel, a false offer of salvation by race, not grace.

It was not merely South Africans who were aware of that, however. C.S. Lewis (1898–1963), a professor of English literature, author, and Christian apologist, was also acutely aware of the dangers of nationalism, and two of the villains of his fiction, Professor Weston of his space trilogy, and the dwarf Nikabrik in his children's book Prince Caspian exemplify the dangers.

Devin Brown, in his book Inside Prince Caspian, makes this clear in the following passage:

The only virtue remaining in Nikabrik at the time of his death was a concern -- it would be hard to call it a love -- for his own kind. Nikabrik allowed this virtue to expand until it became the greatest virtue, erasing all others. In this way he became like another of Lewis's villains: Professor Weston from the space trilogy. Near the end of Out of the Silent Planet, the great Oyarsa, or ruler, of Mars has a long conversation with Weston, trying to understand the reasoning behind the scientist's depraved actions. The Oyarsa maintains that there are laws that all sentient beings know, "pity and straight dealing and shame and the like". He points out that Weston is willing to break all of these laws except "the love of kindred," which he notes "is not one of the greatest laws." As this law became the only law and principle for both Weston and Nikabrik, it became bent and distorted and, in the end, led to evil, not good.

The "love of kindred" that Lewis talks about there is the "love of one's own" that the Afrikaner nationalists of South Africa's National Party gave as the definition of nationalism. And "own kind" was a nationalist mantra. It was the rationale for apartheid. People must live among their "own kind". They must go to school and church with their "own kind". They could only play games and sports with their "own kind". There were government departments and legislative bodies arranged according to "own affairs". And there were laws against "improper interference" in affairs that might concern everyone, and were not regarded by the government as "own affairs".

The "own kinds" were defined by law: White, Black, Coloured and Asian. And those took precedence over everything else. Christians could not see their fellow Christians as their "own kind". Own-kindedness was determined not by faith, but by race. So, under "Christian" nationalism, Christians were expected to sell their heavenly birthright for the pottage of this sinful world (cf Genesis 25:29-34). 

For those who may be concerned about the viral spread of Christian Nationalism in the 2020s, therefore, there are remedies. Perhaps you can inoculate your children against the virus of Christian Nationalism by reading C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories to them, and noting the lessons to be learned from the failings of Nikabrik.

When they get older and become interested in "Young Adult" stories, encourage them to read Out of the Silent Planet and note the failings of Professor Weston.

And don't forget the words of Balthazar Johannes Vorster (1915-1983), who became South African Minister of Justice in 1961 (when he turned South Africa into a police state), Prime Minister in 1966, State President in 1978. But back in 1942 he said (when his country was at war with Germany, Italy and Japan):

We stand for Christian Nationalism, which is an ally of National Socialism. You can call the anti-democratic system dictatorship if you like. In Italy it is called Fascism, in Germany National Socialism, and in South Africa, Christian Nationalism.

Gaslighting God

God's Monsters: Vengeful Spirits, Deadly Angels, Hybrid Creatures, and Divine Hitmen of the Bible by Esther J. Hamori
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A rather disappointing book.

That's a personal opinion, of course. I was disappointed mainly because I didn't find what I was looking for, and the author doesn't have any obligation to the reader to provide what they are looking for. But I was also disappointed because what the book did provide, it provided in a very tendentious and rather misleading way.

What was I hoping to find?

I write, and enjoy reading, fantasy books that include various kinds of creatures that could fall under a general heading of "God's monsters" -- angels, demons, dragons and the like. I was hoping to get more insight into their character and activity.

The main aim of the book appears to have been to show that in the Bible God is a malevolent, capricious and extremely violent tyrant, and that the "heavenly host" are nothing more than a bunch of violent thugs employed as enforcers. Anything that doesn't fit this picture is either left out altogether, or twisted until it can be made to fit.

There are occasional useful insights, but they are suffocated by the overarching need to show the malevolent wickedness of God.

One of these useful insights was that Isaiah went to sleep in church one Sabbath, and dreamed about the seraphim. There was a seraph in the temple, which he was probably looking at just before he had his dream. It was called Nechushtan, and was made of brass. It was said to have been made by Moses and when the people of Israel were attacked by a lot of poisonous snakes (seraphim in Hebrew) in the desert, Moses held up the brass seraph and they were healed (Numbers 21:6-9). So this brass seraph quite possibly triggered Isaiah's vision in the temple (Isaiah 6).

But the point Hamori emphasises here is that the cruel and sadistic seraph, servant of a crueller and more sadistic god, deliberately and with malice aforethought literally goes and burns Isaiah's mouth with a burning coal. I thought this was taking literalism too far.

Next come the cherubim.

I think the first mention of a cherub in the Bible is the one that barred the entrance to the garden after Adam and Eve were expelled. Author Esther J. Hamori (correctly in my view) makes the point that cherubim are found all over the ancient Near East as guardians of holy places, but the problem is with what went before the expulsion. The story is twisted into something like its opposite. God deliberately tricks Adam and Eve by lying to them, and the snake tries to help them.

In the moments leading up to God’s deployment of the monstrous guard, he lies to his human creation, promises them a painful future, and gaslights them. No wonder they hide from him behind the trees. After this, stationing monsters at the door looks less like a new security feature warranted by the people’s actions, and more like the next threatening move of a controlling figure whose m.o. now includes bringing in thugs to do his dirty work.

When God stations his hybrid guardian monsters at the gateway to Eden, it’s the culmination of a story of divine danger. The garden of Eden, where the deity strolls among the trees as the human beings hide behind them, contains more danger than the world outside. Even in Eden, there is no Paradise.

 If, however, one takes Occam's Razor to Hamori's interpretation, one can find a simpler explanation. God says Adam and Eve can eat the fruit of any tree in the garden, except that of one tree. They eat the fruit of that tree. Taking what it is not given is theft, and when the thief sees the rightful owner of the stolen goods coming the natural reaction is to hide, not because the owner is inherently dangerous but because of what one has done.

 And the Christian metanarrative (yes, I know postmoderns don't like metanarratives) is that this theft and abuse of hospitality breaks the relationship between man (male and female, should anyone quibble) and God, and, whatever else it is, the cherub at the gate represents the inhuman face of God, which is the result of the broken relationship and how God appears to man after the break, until, in Jesus Christ, God appears again with a human face to restore the relationship.

Hamori says that in this story God gaslights the first humans, but I think in this book Hamori gaslights God.

And the further one reads in the book the more obviously and relentlessly does the author press this Orwellian twist -- freedom is slavery and slavery is freedom, the oppressor is the victim and the victim is the oppressor. 

This becomes more obvious in dealing with the King of Babylon in Isaiah chapter 14. The obvious meaning is that in death the oppressor comes down to the level of those he oppressed -- he has no power in the grave. His victims can say, where is all your power now, with which you oppressed people? But Hamori presents God as the oppressor and the King of Babylon as the victim of oppression by creepy shades roused by God to gloat over his fate. Elsewhere Hamori talks of "monsterising" people we don't like, but here she monsterises the oppressed and presents their oppressor as the victim.

I would, however, be interested in discussing this book with others who have read it, and looking at it especially in terms of all the things that Hamori leaves out.

For example, Hamori must know, but fails to mention in the book, that Christians often interpret the fall of the King of Babylon typologically, as analogous to a fall of Satan. So much so that one of the epithets of the king of Babylon, Lucifer (in the Latin Vulgate) has been taken by some to be the personal name of the satan.

In discussing the book of Job Hamori points out, correctly, that "satan" is not a name but a job description, but then rather disingenuously claims that "Finally, the word becomes a name: Adversary, or Satan. Even then, he’s not the same as the Satan of the New Testament, who’s also called the devil (and a few other choice names). In the Hebrew Bible there’s no devil or hell. None. Zip. Devil-free territory."

Elsewhere Hamori claims that nowhere in the Bible is the satan called an angel. yet the Septuagint version of Job 2:1 says that the angels of the Lord came to stand before the Lord and the devil was among them. "Devil" (Greek diavolos) is the Greek translation of the Hebrew satan, and, like "satan", means adversary or accuser.

In the scene in Zechariah 3, where the high priest Joshua is on trial, Hamori emphasises the injustice done by God to the satan, rebuking the prosecutor for simply doing his job, thus obscuring the main point, which is that God's mercy trumps his justice. And this is clearly because it contradicts Hamori's main point, hammered in just about every paragraph in the book, that God is not merciful, but malevolent, vindictive, cruel and sadistic.

For what it's worth, a Christian metanarrative here is that the satan, who is indeed the prosecutor in the heavenly court, like many human prosecutors, takes his job too seriously. For him the overarching goal is the conviction rate; it is better that the innocent should suffer than that the guilty should escape. He regards the judge as too soft on sinners, and thinks he could do a better job, so aims to take over the judge's job. But he comes short with Jesus, who is found guilty in the magistrate's court (under Caiaphas), and likewise in the high court (under Pilate, even though Pilate has his doubts, he is not prepared to give Jesus the benefit of the doubt), but in the court of ultimate appeal Jesus, the high priest Joshua ("Jesus" is the Greek form of the Hebrew Joshua) is vindicated because the filthy clothes he is wearing are not his but ours -- he put them on at his baptism in the Jordan -- and the ultimate court of appeal not only reverses the verdict of guilty, but it reverses the sentence as well, the sentence of death, and Jesus rises from the dead. Satan not only loses his case, he loses his job and is tossed out of court by Michael, who has become the bouncer (Rev 12:7-12), and there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, for their accuser (satan, devil) has been fired.

Hamori's account is more interesting for what she leaves out than for what she includes, and the excluded bits tend to show that throughout the book she is gaslighting God.

 

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Coming to faith through Dawkins

Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: 12 Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity by Denis Alexander
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought this was a very good book and well worth reading.

A couple of weeks ago I was at the book launch where Denis Alexander, one of the editors, introduced it by interviewing three of the authors, and the following morning I heard him speak on genetic determinism, which happens to be his academic field. Dr Alexander, and the authors, made the book sound interesting, and so it was.

What bothers me a bit about writing a review, no matter how much I enjoyed the book, is that it is in effect a collection of twelve reviews of a book that I haven't read, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Note: Though this piece is based on a review I wrote on GoodReads, it goes beyond the review in being more wide-ranging, and also more personal

The God Delusion is a polemic against religion in general and Christianity in particular, and in this book all twelve authors describe how reading it had the opposite of the intended effect on them.

Obviously not all readers will find Dawkins's book counterproductive, and indeed for some of these authors it initially wasn't; but in all of them it ultimately produced the opposite effect to what the author intended. Many of these authors were looking for something to confirm or reinforce their atheism, but instead The God Delusion had the opposite effect and made them doubt it.

Several of the authors had also read, and been similarly influenced by others of the so-called New Atheists, notably Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. I haven't read any of their books either. The nearest I got was picking up The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris in a book shop one day, and glancing through it. I was curious to read what he had to say on the topic, but I didn't want to spend any money on it, so thought I'd wait till I could find someone who had a copy of the book and was willing to lend it to me. From my skimming through it I couldn't see anything new about the "new" atheism though; it all looked very much like the "old" atheism I'd learned about as a first-year university student through the arguments and the tracts handed out by members of the university Rationalist Society led by the redoubtable Dr Eddie Roux. These arguments and tracts were more rational, more logical, and more coherent than a lot of the stuff put out by the "New Atheists" and their followers seems to be.

Some of the contributors to Coming to Faith through Dawkins are working in the same or related academic fields as Richard Dawkins, and admire his work as an evolutionary biologist, and say how disappointed they were when they read The God Delusion, which fell far below the standard of his scientific works. Celebrity in one discipline does not necessarily make one an expert in another, unrelated, field. For more on that, see here.

Though I haven't read any of the works of the "New Atheists", I have encountered some of their disciples and fans online. I usually try to avoid being drawn into arguments with them, as most of them tend to be more dogmatic than their heroes, and their logic tends to be even more simplistic, so that the arguments go round in circles. They love to recite the creed of valid and invalid arguments, often just before asking question-begging questions or setting up a straw man, so one thing I learned from this book was that even the models they base themselves on do that.

One of the best examples of that came from a colleague at work who was an agnostic, and tried to join an online group for discussing atheism, agnosticism and so on. But he was blackballed because he had a heretical view of the nature of God. It turned out that in order to join the group one had to not believe in the god that Sam Harris didn't believe in, having exactly the same nature and characteristics. No other god would do. 

One reason I haven't read any of the works of the New Atheists is that I'm not much interested in the question of the "existence" of God. I have never been convinced by any of the arguments for the existence of God, and I suspect that most Christians are unaware of them, much less convinced by them. Some parts of Coming to Faith through Dawkins mentioned the Cosmological Argument and a couple of others. I'd have to look them up to find what they are, so I just skimmed through those parts of the book. 

That is also another of the reasons I try not to get involved in arguments with soap-box atheists online or in person. The arguments wouldn't convince me, so why would they convince them? The only times I do comment are when the atheist asks a question-begging question, or demonstrates some other logical flaws.

One such question, however, I did relay to Dr Denis Alexander when he spoke on genetic determinism, because it seemed to be right in his field. Someone who bills himself as a talented sceptic asked on Twitter (alias X) "What is the biological cause of the fear of death?"

I took his question at face value, and answered: "Natural Selection. Those who do not fear death do not survive long enough to reproduce."

He didn't comment, but I suspect that that was not the kind of answer he was looking for. There may have been a hidden sub-text; there usually is a hidden sub-text to such questions.

And most questions asked by soap-box atheists seem to start in the wrong place and with questionable assumptions, like "What evidence do you have for the existence of God?" (I learned from Coming to Faith Through Dawkins that the demand for "evidence" is a prominent characteristic of the New Atheists).

Any response is likely to be met with "The onus is on you to provide evidence." But who determined the onus? The onus-putters. The question belongs to Humpty Dumpty; it's really "Who is to be master? That's all."

The authors of Coming to Faith through Dawkins come from many different Christian traditions, and many different academic fields. They come from five different countries (three of them are South Africans -- the ones who were at the book launch). Some of the contributions appealed to me more than others, but because of the variety anyone who has any interest in questions of science and faith, or related questions, should find this book interesting.








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Gods of Power - allegedly

Gods of Power by Philip M. Steyne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is quite extraordinary. The author presents a kind of Platonic ideal of animism, as he sees it, and then criticises it from the point of view of "biblical Christianity". As I read it I kept reminding myself of the saying, "To the person whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so, for this author, everything looks like animism.

There is page after page about what "animist man" believes and does, because that is that the author tells us "animist man" believes and does. One page of vague generalisations follows another, often quite contradictory. "Animist man" we are told feels powerless in a universe where everything is controlled by powerful spirits, but with the right rites "animist man" can control and manipulate these spirits and become omnipotent. So the picture emerges of "animist man" as simultaneously powerless and omnipotent.

The main problem with such an approach is that "animism" appears as a purely external construct. The ubiquitous "animist man" is never asked for his opinion of what his beliefs and practices are, and there aren't even any empirical examples. The "Gods of Power" of the title is an abstraction, because none of the gods referred to is named or described.

"Animism" is a term used by anthropologist Edward Tyler (1832-1917) to describe and explain the beliefs of some people, who were not raised in the culture of Western modernity, that non-human life forms, such as animals and plants, and even objects regarded as inanimate by Western man, such as rocks, mountains and rivers, had their own personality or soul. Since it is an attempt to interpret one kind of culture in terms of another, such attempted interpretations often tell us as much or more about the interpreting culture than about the one ostensibly being interpreted. 

Steyne, however, tells us nothing of this, but instead asserts, "Animism's chief presupposition is the sovereignty of man." This is almost diametrically opposed to Tyler's point, which was that animism's chief presupposition is that humanity is merely one life-form among many, and that other life forms have their own purposes which might not necessarily coincide with human ones.

There are lots of references and the book has a fairly comprehensive bibliography; one would only have hoped that the author had made better use of it.

I said at the beginning that this was an extraordinary book. Most of it is extraordinarily bad, in that one will learn very little about animism or a Christian evaluation of it from its sweeping over-generalisations, and even less about gods of power. The first 14 chapters range from mediocre to very bad. Chapter 15 is somewhat better, but of questionable relevance. The final chapter, however, is quite extraordinarily good, and contains some excellent missiological advice, whether one is evangelising animists or not.

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Well, that's my review though why anyone should now be interested in a review of a 30-year-old book I'm not sure. But for anyone interested (and if you've read this far you might be), here are some more personal thoughts on and inspired by the book. 

I spotted this book on the library shelf and took it out because I was attracted by the title, Gods of Power. I was attracted by the title because I'm exploring a theme, or a trope, in a novel I'm writing. Yes, I am a missiologist, and that no doubt influences my fiction writing when it touches upon missiological topics, as in this case.

The theme that I'm writing about in my novel is what happens to gods of people when they lose their power? Neil Gaiman wrote on a similar theme in his American Gods, about what happens to gods when their worshippers are transported to a new environment. My theme is somewhat different, though -- it's more what happens to the gods of vanished empires who have lost their worshippers. Will they go searching for new sources of power in other lands?

Unlike Steyne, I don't think all such deities are "animist", or that they were worshipped by "animist man". Several religions in the ancient Near East had notions of divine kingship, where a god personified the power of the state, and was linked to the king. Regarding rocks, mountains and rivers as personalities, or at least as occupied by spirits, is animist, but seeing abstract entities, like the state, in the same way, it seems to me, falls outside the definition of animism. So Steyne's labelling them all as animist, without giving any specific instances, was of little use to me. So his book didn't suit my purpose, but does that mean that my reaction to it is just sour grapes? I don't think so. I think that if he had stuck to the generally accepted understanding of animism and based it more on empirical evidence of actual animist beliefs and practices to justify his description and labelling, it would have been a better an more useful book generally.

And in the mean time I'm still looking for stories of gods who have lost their power because no one worships them any more.

Woke, wokeness and wokeism

Over the last few years the words "woke", "wokeness" and "wokeism" have become thoroughly skunked. When people use them, one is never sure what they mean by them without further definition.

One can get a vague approximation of meaning if you know that those using the words think they signify something that they approve of, or something that they disapprove of, but even then it is often pretty vague.

I'm going to stick my neck out, and say how I understand them, and try to find out how many people have a similar understanding, in the hope of clarifying the meaning, at least among people that I talk to.

Woke, as I understand it, means being aware of social injustice.

In my youth, an equivalent term was "with it", though it applied to a much wider range of things than social injustice. To be "with it" meant that you were aware of what was happening in a particular field of human activity. It could, for example, be jazz music and musicians. You were with it if you knew and appreciated the music and knew who the musicians were that people were talking about.

Woke means much the same thing, but in the narrower field of social justice. To be woke means to be aware of the kinds of injustice that are endemic and sysyemic in a particular society. There's also an interesting shibboleth here -- people who are not woke, and disapprove of wokeness, usually do not know the difference between the meanings of "systemic" and "systematic" and often confuse them, and think that people who are talking about one are talking about the other.

Wokeness is the state of being woke, it is the awareness of social injustice.

Wokeism, in my understanding, is something different. People who are wokeist are those who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. They tend to major on minors, as some people say. They largely ignore the big issues, and focus attention on more trivial ones, and often use big words like "intersectionality" as an excuse for claiming that the smaller issues are just as important as the big ones.

A recent example of this kind of wokeism is the bowdlerisation of Roald Dahl's children's books by the publishers Puffin books. Perhaps the publishers were trying to be woke, but if so, they failed miserably, and were thoroughly dishonest as well, in that they misrepresented Roald Dahl.

In one book Dahl makes the point that reading books can make people aware of different countries and cultures. Kipling, for example, can take a child to India. The Puffin editors substituted Jane Austen. This censorship seems to have been automated on ebook readers like Kindle. This kind of censorship is not "woke", it's the opposite of woke; but it might be wokeism.

And then there is the matter of being anti-woke.

On 20 February 2022 Roman Pope Francis tweeted on Twitter:

#SocialJustice demands that we fight against the causes of poverty: inequality and the lack of labour, land, and lodging; against those who deny social and labour rights; and against the culture that leads to taking away the dignity of others.
Pope Francis (@Pontifex) February 20, 2023

Now that's pretty woke. It is, in fact, the essence of wokeness. But anti-woke crusader and pop psychologist Jordan Peterson responded with:

There is nothing Christian about #SocialJustice . Redemptive salvation is a matter of the individual soul. https://t.co/cKFt3umiAl
Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) March 2, 2023

As one Orthodox deacon (not me!) commented, it's a good thing this pope bloke has Jordan Peterson to tell him what Christianity is. The first sentence in Peterson's tweet is simply a lie. On the contrary, there is nothing Christian about depriving people of social and labour rights. The second sentence is a partial truth, taken out of context. Though being woke does not make one a Christian, to be anti-woke is to be anti-Christian.

Deconstruction, and some weird stuff I'd never heard of

One of the weirder experiences I've had online is to come across a bunch of people discussing something I've never heard of, and they all seem to know about it, and assume that everyone else knows about it, and so see no need to explain it because they are unable to conceive of anyone not having heard about it.

I came across such a thing today -- some people were talking about deconstruction. Well, I have heard of deconstruction -- I've been hearing about it for the last 30 years or so. But these people were talking about it in a way that made no sense to me..It was sparked off by this tweet on Twitter:

Is "deconstruction" primarily a protestant experience, an evangelical experience, an American experience? I'm not suggesting there are no catholic/Anglican/Episcopal/Mainline/non-English-speaking people deconstructing, I'm just wondering if it is more the former?

It puzzled me because as far as I knew Jacques Derrida, the originator of deconstruction, was not American, but French and as far as I know he wasn't Protestant or Evangelical, and what did it matter anyway? Were there different denominational ways of doing deconstruction? I didn't think so. 

I've even written a journal article doing a bit of deconstruction: Sundkler deconstructed: Bethesda AICs and syncretism. Now I'm an Orthodox Christian and the text I was deconstructing was written by a Lutheran bishop, so perhaps that suggests that there might be different denominational varieties of deconstruction, but I didn't realise that that was so significant. 

But then the people twittering about deconstruction start talking about Fowler's stages 3 & 4. Fowler? I've heard of, and have a copy of Fowler's Modern English Eusage, but I don't recall him talking about deconstruction. I reread the article on deconstruction in The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, but it's all Derrida, Derridqa, Derrida. I've seen Derrida and heard him speak, but Fowler? As Tom Lehrer says, "this I know from nothing."

Now if this was all in some field remote from my interests, it would not bother me. But they are talking about theology and liturgy and stuff like that. I have four degrees and a diploma in theology, it's my field! So how come I've never heard of it before today? And the people who are talking about it seem to assume that it is so well known as not to need any explanation -- just refer to Fowler Stages 3 & 4? I follow people on Twitter who mention theology among their interests, I participate on online discussions relating to theology. But this is entirely new to me. 

Now this has happened before. 

Some years earlier, when I started this blog, I did a search on bloggers' interests to see how many mentioned missiology, which happens to be my field. I found that about half the people who were interested in missiology were also interested in "emerging church", which I had never heard of. Search  engines were no help -- everything they took me to simply assumed that everyone who read them already knew what the "emerging church" was. Well, if you've never heard of the emerging church either, don't let it bother you -- it submerged again a few years later, leaving barely a ripple on the surface to show where it had been, but at the time it was quite big. 

But it was the same phenomenon: a bunch of people talking to each other online about something that they simply assumed everyone knew about, and thought needed no explanation. Better score, better deal.

Academic versus spiritual knowledge

Someone asked on Twitter

Academic Bible readers, how do you separate the head knowledge from feeding the spiritual, contemplative side of your faith?

My short answer was that I try not to separate them, but to integrate them, but it deserves a longer answer, which is not possible in the 240 or so characters allowed by Twitter, because it's not really as simple as that. 

Academic theology tends to be book knowledge, learned from reading a lot. But Evagrius of Pontus said that a theologian is one who prays, and one who prays is a theologian.

In the Orthodox Church there is book learning, certainly, but you cannot really learn about Orthodoxy from books, or from searching stuff on the Internet, because the core of Orthodox theology is enacted theology. Yes, people wrote theological books, but the people who wrote the books also participated in the Divine Liturgy. They followed the rhythim of the liturgical day, week and year. They fasted and prayed, and that shaped the books they wrote and the way they wrote them.

Western theologians often fail to understand this, and tend to get things very wrong when writing about Orthodox theology. For an example of this, see here: Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today (Book Review).

So trying to separate the academic head knowledge from the spiritual and devotional knowledge of the heart can be a dangerous and limiting thing. The very title of the book was misleading, "constants in context", because in the Orthodox case the context is Orthodox liturgy and worship, so in that particular book the Orthodox constants were taken out of context.

Theology can also be anecdotal, or, as the academic theologians like to say, narrative. So here is an anecdote or narrative from my own experience. 

As an undergraduate in the 1960s I studied theology at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, and our lecturer for both New Testament II and Doctrine II was Vic Bredenkamp, who was also a Methodist minister. He was teaching on Ephesians 6about St Paul's reference to "principalities and powers", and what he said blew my mind. 

My conception of "principalities" was places like Monaco and Andorra, and  "powers" were the USA and USSR (in the 1960s the Cold War was at its height). So I asked Vic Bredenkamp about this, and he pointed out that St Paul was referring to these principalities and powers (rulers and authorities) in the heavenlies. 

He referred me to a book, Principalities and Powers by G.B. Caird, which explained the context of St Paul's teaching on the topic. The context was the institution of divine kingship, and the Roman religion of emperor worship. The Romans did not worship the flesh and blood emperor, but they worshipped his genius. The emperor's authority (exousia) was a spiritual power in the heavenlies. 

The point here is mythical and symbolic. When a traffic cop holds up his hand on a busy highway, he can stop a 26-wheeler truck. It is not his flesh and  blood that stops the lorry -- if he tried that, it would squash him flat. It is his exousia, his authority, that stops the truck. If he were not wearing the uniform that symbolises his exousia, and were naked, or wearing pyjamas, the truck would not stop. It his his exousia, symbolised by the uniform, that stops the the truck.

The "powers", like the USA and the USSR, had their angels, their archons, in the heavenlies. Nations had "national spirits" (archons) in the heavenlies (cf Daniel 10:12-17), as did most earthly power structures. The "prince (archon) of the king of Persia" was analogous to the "genius of Caesar". This made clear to me the meaning of some other Bible texts, like Deuteronomy 32:8-9, and Psalm 81/82. YHWH, the "great king above all gods", speaks to the assembled gods and tells them they have messed up, and the psalmist prays "Arise O God, judge the earth, for to thee belong all nations" -- a prayer that Jesus answered in John 12:31-32.

But this is all experienced in the context of Orthodox worship on Holy Saturday, when the vestments  etc are changed from Lenten purple to Paschal white, and during the singing of Psalm 81/82 the priest bursts from the holy doors scattering bay leaves while shouting "Arise O God, judge the earth, for to thee belong all nations" and the congregations sings the refrain and the reader chants the rest of the psalm, and everyone bangs on the floor or the benches or anything that will make a noise, symbolising the earthquake.

Vic Bredenkamp's dry academic lecture opened my eyes to that, and also to the demonic nature of the contemporary government policy of apartheid, which, in the words of Psalm 81/82, failed to give justice to the weak and needy, or deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

Many years after I had graduated, I saw Vic Bredenkamp again, and thanked him for opening the holy scriptures to me, and was greatly disappointed to realise that he didn't get it. He wittered on about "ripe scholarship" and it became clear to me that for him, what's said in the classroom stays in the classroom, and had nothing to do with the world outside, or spiritual and devotional life. What he had said in his class all those years ago was to remain locked up in the academic ivory tower. 

I close with another tweet:

Electric man has no bodily being. He is literally dis-carnate. But a discarnate world, like the one we now live in, is a tremendous menace to an incarnate Church, and its theologians haven’t even deemed it worthwhile to examine the fact (Marshall McLuhan, 1977).

Biblical Literalism

Someone posted the following diagram on Twitter, with a note that it was the Bible's description of the universe: 

That struck me as being the ultimate in Biblical literalism. 

The problem with taking metaphors too literally is that you fail to see the wood for the trees, and miss what is actually being said. And there is also the danger of reading into a text a lot of things that are not being said.

In my youth there we often used other metaphors for the world (cosmos) we live in. One was "Spaceship Earth". I wonder whether, in about three millennia's time, someone will produce a drawing of whatever their current conception of a spaceship is, and say, in all seriousness, that that is how the ancients of the 20th century pictured the earth?

Another metaphor that I have often used in sermons, is based on a song by the Beatles that was popular about the same time as the "Spaceship Earth" one. I din't know if the Beatles themselves conceived it that way, but I used it in sermons describing the world in the time of Noah: We all live in a Yellow Submarine. Combine the metaphors and you get a submarine capable of travelling in outer space, which, of course, is what the Polaris missiles of those days did. 

The point of those metaphors, of course, is that both submarines and spaceships have limited resources and a confined space in which to preserve the life of the occupants. And in the days of Noah, men were filling the earth with violence .in a confined space. Do that in a submarine, and sooner or later an armour-piercing projectile will make a hole in the hull and the waters above the roof and below the floor will come flooding in. Not windows in the firmament, but bullet holes in the hull. The effect is the same. It lets in the water. But it's a metaphor. 

If anyone has a problem with biblical literalism, and wants to go beyond it to see the big picture, I recommend reading a book by Anglican bishop John Davies, called Seven Days to Freedom, which gives a better understanding of the creation story in Genesis chapter 1.

King Arthur, Arthurian literature and the Holy Grail

King Arthur In Legend And History by Richard Barber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the second book on Arthurian literature I've read in the last month, and since I read them so close together, I can't help comparing them. The first one was King Arthur: the True Story, and you can see my review here.

This book is the earlier one (first published in 1961) and in my opinion the better one, though it gets a lower rating on GoodReads, perhaps because of the limitations of the 5-star rating system. In a 10-star system I would give King Arthur in Legend and History 7 stars, and King Arthur: the True Story only 6.

The books start at opposite ends of the story, and work in different directions.

King Arthur in Legend and History starts with what is known of the historical Arthur, and then follows the development of the legend in literature. King Arthur: the True Story starts with the developed legend, and works back towards the history. That is because its main purpose is to present its candidate for the true historical Arthur, and so, apart from a general survey of the literature at the beginning, its main argument is directed to that end.

Richard Barber, on the other hand, shows how scanty historical sources led to the growth of a rich literary legend. On the whole, I liked his book and his approach better. He also deals much more thoroughly with the later Arthurian literature, which is of little interest to anyone looking for clues to the historical Arthur. He also gives quite a bit of space to one of my favourite authors, Charles Williams, though he concentrates on his poetry, and not on his prose narratives.

Barber compares most of the major Arthurian writers, and compares the way in which they presented the stories and the characters, and also how people in different periods tended to present them differently.

I'm almost more interested in the history of the literary treatment of the legend than I am in the legend itself. For one thing, King Arthur himself seems to play very little part in the stories. Other than at the beginning, where he becomes king, and the end, with his rather enigmatic end, he seems to do little except announce that he will fast until one of his knights has an adventure and comes back to tell him about it. And the rest is the story of the adventure of this or that knight -- adventures that often seem to involve murder or adultery or both. 

One of the things I find most interesting, though, is the story of the Holy Grail, or Graal. This was introduced to the Arthurian story by Crétiene de Troyes about 1190, though he does not describe it in detail. Within ten to fifteen years (about 1200-1210) Robert de Boron had expanded this narrative, and the Graal had become the cup used by Christ at the last supper. brought to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea and taken to Avalon by Bron the Rich Fisher.

 

I don't think that it is mere coincidence that this was the very period in which the word "transubstantiation" was introduced into Western theology to explain the transformation of the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. It was in 1215 that the Lateran Council declared that the doctrine of Transubstantiation was essential to the faith. For more details on this see Eucharistic theology and witchcraft.

Though Barber discusses Charles Williams's  Arthurian poetry, he does not mention his novel on the Graal, War in Heaven, which also introduces the figure of Prester John. It is a kind of 20th-century version of a Grail Quest, with the Duke of North Ridings playing the part of a questing knight, with his Roman Catholic Eucharistic theology, and the Anglican Archdeacon of Fardles having a somewhat more mystically real eucharistic theology. 

Now perhaps there is somewhere, mouldering on a forgotten shelf  in some university library, someone's doctoral thesis on the parallels between the development of Western Eucharistic Theology in the late 12th and early 13th centuries and the development in the legend of the Grail in Arthurian literature during the same period, and if so, I'd like to read it. But if there isn't one, I would love to see someone working on one, and someone suggesting that to potential students as a possible topic.

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Christianity and Trumpism

I've never before had a guest post on any of my blogs, but today I've made an exception for the following post by David Smith, a retired South African academic and Anglican layman.

The last few years have seen the growth of the Trumpist cult, which some have claimed to be Christian, or at least as something that Christians are not merely justified in supporting, but even obliged to support. But Christian leaders, perhaps fearing the division that might be caused, have said very little about this, and given very little guidance to their flocks. David Smith's plea for such guidance deserves to be heard.

‘What’s on your mind?’ And what disturbs your heart? A concern that has been pursuing me in the past months, but particularly in the last few weeks, is the question of how followers of Christ can be as deeply divided as they are along political lines, without top-level opposition emerging among churches. That at least is my observation, the perspective of a lay-person.

I am not sure how it is connected, but let me start with the rank ‘prosperity gospel’ of various new churches (Bushiri’s can stand for many of them, right down to its ‘enlightened’ self-understanding). There seems to have been from the established churches a decrying of this phenomenon without any strong moves to contain it. Perhaps it would have flourished as it has, whether or not it was effectively anathematised. But the profiles of its leaders – people like Bushiri and T B Joshua, for example, and a host of US-based ‘pastors’ who work chiefly through television and online means – strongly suggest personality cults: not just influence and ‘leadership’, but charisma and grip.

Now, strange as it may seem to extend this rough model to a figure far outside the ‘pastorate’, there appears to be a personality cult among Christians that has taken hold around Donald John Trump that needs to be examined and – if the political lessons of the Book of Revelation are anything to go by – resolutely opposed.

I arrived at this conclusion when I was confronted on social media with the utterances, not of a vociferous right-wing American booster, but of a local young woman, a former student in my university department and someone with whom I had worked in preparation of advanced exams. She seemed at the time like a well-adjusted person and her appointment upon graduation as a school teacher seemed like a natural progression. So I was taken aback, a fortnight ago, to read her mouthing the ‘voting fraud’ agenda that Trump has been promoting, and in very uncompromising terms.

When one of her friends expressed shock at her ‘hurrah’ stance for this unbeatable force, and pointed out that, as the person and Christian she knew, she should surely find ‘reprehensible’ the notions and energies radiating from Trump’s career, she blithely came up with the old line that, while his personal values might be unattractive, the policies he was propounding were fine. In this exchange, she was egged on by her brother, both of them looking to God to vindicate the instrument of his purpose, etc. Only re-election would suffice to fulfil the divine plan. It was no comfort to me to discover soon after that a one-time acquaintance (also a teacher) who has since moved to New Zealand, shared these exact opinions.

I have been assured that there are other South Africans of this persuasion, and that they are not all church-goers. (They are, so far as I know, all white.) But a personality cult maybe cuts across lines like believers vs. agnostics. And it is the Christian support for this man that repulses me. I admit that that goes back a long way, indeed, to the time before he was elected in 2016, so it is nothing new. But it was new to me to realise that it had a foothold in this country, where the president’s policies surely have (at most) tangential relevance. The personality cult diagnosis has become a cliché among the commentators who are critical of Trump, the White House, the GOP, and those Protestant evangelicals and Catholics who have been rallying to his cause. That doesn’t make the diagnosis less ominous, when one thinks of the modern national leaders who historically have been considered to rule by this special power: Stalin and Hitler in Europe, Haile Selassie (the object of a relatively benign messianic cult), Idi Amin and Mobutu Seseseko in Africa, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, and Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos (could you call them a couple cult?) in Asia, Che Guevara (a guerrilla leader) and Evita Peron in S America (both divinized by the Left, and by impoverished populations). Narendra Modi appears to have the same degree of hold across India at present. So the list continues...

How are we, members of a politically restrained church, to relate to this? Have the churches that reject this subjugation of believers to personified movements been vocal enough in distancing themselves from this phenomenon? Or is it a temptation to be drawn too deeply into these confrontations, even if it is by way of resisting? When does the time come when the lines of rejection have to be clearly and institutionally drawn? Or is the idea of taking a stand an illusion, the sort of thing that people who feel impotent before this strange darkness try to draw strength from? 

David Smith 

I've shared some of my own thoughts on this in the past -- here, for example Notes from underground: Why Trump lost Christian voters in 2020, but I think it is something that Christians should be talking about more.