I'm not writing sermons at the moment so this post is a kind of substitute. I have the privilege of a wonderful cycle ride to work through the lanes of Hampshire and West Sussex. Time to collect my thoughts. The autumn colours have been glorious this year and I have rejoiced in them. I know that what I'm supposed to do is express the belief that this beauty is a pale reflection of God's glory. But somehow that doesn't cut it for me. It seems to me that what I am seeing really is the glory, complete with all the death and decay that makes autumn so beautiful. Not just a reflection, but the real deal, here and now.
Does this make me a nature-worshipper? I don't think so, unless I am pedantic with the often quoted meaning of worship - recognizing the worth of something or someone. It's possible that it makes me a panentheist - seeing God in everything.
What I am increasingly having problems with is subscribing to an elaborate system of beliefs, a construct, a set of rules. I don't mean rules for right living, but rules in the conservative Christian sense of a mechanism of sin, repentance, salvation. I am a man of (some) faith and try to be a disciple of Jesus, but I am finding it less necessary and even less possible to believe specific stuff.
The things I have been invited to believe during my Christian life fit into two categories: (a) beliefs that are expressed in a language that is borrowed from normal life but which is "overloaded" (computer programming jargon) with a spiritual meaning and (b) beliefs in things that we can never know one way or the other.
Examples of (a) - borrowed language - are phrases like "Jesus is the Son of God", "we are redeemed", "Jesus is alive", "God speaks to us". All these ideas are pictures borrowed from universally understood reality. Some people feel the existence of a spiritual dimension quite acutely. For such people, I imagine it might be possible or even quite natural to project the meanings of "son", "redeemed", "alive", speaks" and so on over into that spiritual plane and to make sense of them. But I have never really experienced or understood a division between secular and sacred, between temporal and spiritual, so such projections are quite meaningless to me. As poetic images, they give us language and ideas to help us talk about God, but that is a long way from a belief system.
Examples of (b) - things we can never know for sure - are concepts of an after-life and of God the Creator. I have always had difficulty with the first of these. Frankly, I don't think that believing in a personal life after death would make me a better person. But the concept of the Creator has been helpful. It brings a sense of stewardship, that the world is loaned to us on trust. And I have never had a problem with reconciling such a belief with the scientific model of evolution, the overwhelming evidence that evolution provides the most reasonable framework for understanding life on this planet. So one belief is helpful to me at the moment, the other is not. And this is clearly a personal matter. For some people, belief in life after death might make a huge positive difference to how they live. And, on the other side, there are many with a great sense of stewardship and care for the environment who do not believe in a Creator at all. Which begs the question for me: what matters more - what you believe, or how you live? Put so starkly, the answer seems obvious, but a big slice of organized religion seems to disagree.
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I've copied Ben's comment from the Greetings post to this one, where I think it belongs
ReplyDeleteBen said...
Hi Mike,
do you think there's a connection between your thoughts on nature and those on language? Perhaps nature (and the natural sense of human language) need to have a sense of autonomy from God? I think this is something that has been downplayed by the platonic influence on Christian thinking - your first paragraph sounds like you're reacting against a platonic view of nature as a mere shadow of true transcendent reality, something quite alien from the earthy traditions of the Hebrew Bible. I think Ockham is good on this because he allows nature to be properly understood in its own particularity without reference to God. Hence he ditched the medieval 'universals' as anything but mental concepts. Likewise, Ockham allows language to be fully meaningful in its own particular uses. We don't need to look to God to know what 'goodness' is for example. But I think he is too negative about the ability of human language to refer meaningfully to God. I think Karl Barth is right to say that the only reason we can use human language to refer to God is that God uses it of himself. In Jesus, God has spoken in ordinary language of himself - a wonderful affirmation of our language. Because of this affirmation, God can be known by anyone who uses such ordinary language - not just the intellectuals or mystics who might seek to escape ordinary language. I think because of this we need to accept that our language will be open to polysemy - but isn't it anyway? I'm sure we all understand particular words differently.
Hope you don't mind my interest.
Ben
Thank you Ben for your very helpful comments (copied to this thread under my name). I had never thought of that connection between nature and language before.
ReplyDeleteI understand Karl Barth's point but do not fully agree with it. Jesus the Word is a tremendously powerful concept, but does the Incarnation immediately give us permission to give new meanings to all those words? In a narrower sense we can, of course, talk (without any need for polysemy) about Jesus the man knowing that in doing so we are talking about God.
I have a bigger problem with understanding nature "without reference to God". To me this is going in the wrong direction - it seems to widen the sacred-secular divide. I am struggling to find a way of saying that I see God in nature without saying on the one hand that nature is God and on the other hand that nature is only a pale reflection of God. In this respect I am closer to Dawkins than I might usually admit, in his celebration of nature in all its wonderful complexity and his impression that many people's view of God is simply too narrow (I would say "pinched") to do it justice.
One thing that I've learnt over the years is that belief doesn't have to be absolute. I can be 100% sure of something, or 0% sure, but I can also be as it were 75% sure - i.e. I am reasonably convinced about something but there is still room for doubt in my mind. This changed my approach to Christianity quite a lot, & made me much more comfortable with my own set of beliefs. It also helps me accommodate to people with differing views.
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